'Shouldn't need a subpoena for this administration'

'I think you should let him hang himself'

'It's in discussion'

Jenner did what the internet has been dying to

'Researched how to strangle someone'

For years, property training has had a reputation problem. Big promises, little delivery, and plenty of disappointed students. Samuel Leeds wanted to change that. His Property Investors Academy costs £12,000 to join, yet hundreds of people across the UK are enrolling each year. The reason is simple. It offers something rarely seen in the education […]

Books Reading the Weird Brain Surgery Without Safewords: Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster (Part 6) A new type of monster has entered the plot… By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on November 12, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Chapters 15-17 of Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster. The book was first published in 2023. Spoilers ahead! Content warnings for sexualized murder, cannibalism, emesis, and extended descriptions of bodily fluids. After firing ten rounds into a monstrously transformed Gregory, Savannah ends up in Greenlawn. Homeland Security interrogates her, but she fakes traumatic memory loss. She spends ten days in quarantine, where she continues testing negative, with no symptoms. Given her exposure to Gregory’s blood, that’s pretty wild, but Greenlawn releases her. Quarantine was less onerous than she expected: A neighbor, Nurse Tesfaye, works at Greenlawn. Tesfaye would visit Savannah, sometimes bringing pudding or juice boxes. Then Em, her boss at the Pink Rose, gives her an extra week off with pay. She’s had to fire the security guard who let Gregory into the brothel, though he insists he never saw him. When Savannah tells coworkers she’s thinking of buying a gun, they’re sympathetic. It’s not that she’s afraid of the infected, though. They won’t touch her. Savannah’s been infected, after all. She’s a Type Five, one of the lucky Chosen who receive their “apocalypse assembly instructions without any headaches at all.” They’re “the slayers of men,” tasked with removing those whose minds aren’t worth Archiving for the old gods. The drawback is that ordinary stimulation no longer makes her orgasm. The advantage is that when she murders someone, she experiences “the kind of white-light, ascending-to-the-heavens ecstasy like the saints used to sing about.” She used to think her family-slaughtering father killed himself because he was a coward. Now she understands that he must have gotten this same pleasure out of killing, and knew that once arrested he’d never feel that supreme joy again. It must’ve been in Dad’s nature to kill. Like father, like daughter. Though humanity will be exterminated in three years, she doesn’t despair. She means to get her ecstasy while she can. * * * In this pursuit of happiness, Savannah hooks up with a Catholic monk named Michael. He sneaks her into his monastery cell. Once there, he turns out to be “a legitimate freak.” He has Savannah “ritualistically defile his religious objects.” Seems like he’s having a “catastrophic rupture of faith,” but it’s not her job to counsel him. Afterwards, she cuts his throat with a straight razor and enjoys her ecstatic reward. As she carefully removes incriminating evidence from the scene, she feels guilty about killing an Archival-quality mind. That was breaking the gods’ rules. Indeed, Michael comes to her in dream, floating Christ-like in a stormy sky. She has transgressed, he says, and she must do penance as the old gods demand by turning her knife to a new task. Savannah must protect “She who is most precious to the future;” she’ll recognize Her as “the worthiest of the worthy,” and “care for Her and mend Her as you would thine own flesh.” * * * When Savannah wakes up, she thinks: “Mending flesh? I need to learn a whole lot more medical stuff.” The idea of squeezing nursing courses into her already full schedule of psychology class, murder, and sex work is daunting. Then she realizes that Archivists have a more direct method of absorbing knowledge. Though not their Type, she instinctively knows she can borrow their techniques. Accordingly, she adds a small circular saw to her “adventure” bag, clips a double-edged dagger to her jeans, and puts a tack in her boot to produce genuine tears of pain. Then she goes to visit Nurse Tesfaye and sobs that Tesfaye’s Greenlawn colleague, Dr. Sallow, coerced her into sex by threatening to say her PVG tests were positive. It’s a big lie, but Savannah guessed right about Tesfaye’s “push button.” Tesfaye invites her in. On her TV, a Dr. Kaz Chats video is paused. Savannah sometimes watches the virologist’s programs about PVG—“interesting stuff.” “You can talk to me,” Tesfaye says. She offers Savannah coffee, but as she moves toward the kitchen, Savannah pulls her dagger and stabs the nurse in the neck. Her trachea cut, Tesfaye can only gasp and stare, her eyes shocked, accusing, hurt. Though distracted by her orgasm, Savannah manages to push Tesfaye to the floor and drink the lifeblood from her “jetting artery.” Memories neither hers nor her victim’s enter her mind. They go back to ancient times, the ancestral memories usually collected by Type 2s. Not what Savannah needs. She vomits up the blood, then saws the top off Tesfaye’s skull, a messy affair. Hoping she won’t have to devour the whole brain, she digs into the neocortex. It’s nasty, like thick snot, but she forces herself to swallow. Now Tesfaye’s own life-memories flood her. Her happy childhood and loving father make Savannah furious that she and her siblings were “cheated.” She always thought happy families a myth. As she keeps gulping down brains, Tesfaye appears either as a vivid hallucination or an actual ghost and castigates her for her “goddamned, dirty, low-down white bullshit.” Savannah is both remorseful and defensive. She’s descended from a long line of selfish people—enslavers, exploiters, codifiers of dishonest justifications into law—raised in the world they created. Besides, an Archivist would’ve gotten Tesfaye eventually, and more torturously. Tesfaye’s unmoved. The only way Savannah can atone is to kill herself so she doesn’t keep murdering. Savannah demurs. Tesfaye fades, leaving her to sort through the stolen memories. To avoid crushing guilt, she’ll keep only those concerned with medical matters, filed like index cards in a box. She’ll also file the address of an ER doctor named Craig, who can further her medical education. Then she runs to Tesfaye’s bathroom to puke up her brains. The Degenerate Dutch: Tesfaye describes Savannah’s convenience-murder as “goddamned, dirty, low-down white bullshit.” She’s not wrong. Savannah did see her as “consumable.” And Tesfaye does, for sure, have “better things to do” than “haunt the mind of a psycho killer who betrayed me on my day off.” Libronomicon: Archivists don’t have to read books to learn new skills. Why shouldn’t a Type 5 with a busy schedule share their shortcuts? Weirdbuilding: The elder gods wait in the darkness between stars, having nothing to do with the affairs of mortals—until they decide the time is “ripe” to turn us into murderers. Madness Takes Its Toll: Savannah fakes traumatic memory loss, and then fakes trauma. That psychology class certainly came in handy. Ruthanna’s Commentary Savannah sure does fall very easily into becoming a mass murderer. Or maybe it just feels that way because she hasn’t gone through a more overt metamorphosis, like Greg or Erin. The old gods have gotten more efficient. And more varied in their methods. Type Fives, just what everyone needed. Okay, so doing inventory: Type 1s are people who get tried and tossed—no special powers, no homicidal missions. Type 2s are blood-drinkers—and, we learn this week, another variety of archivist, gathering ancestral memories for their masters’ delectation. Type 3s are brain-eaters and current-life archivists. Type 4s get “brain infections” and need antipsychotics, higher purpose still unclear. And Type 5s kill people who aren’t of interest to any of the other types. This category has a very important implication: elder gods are the kind of self-centered bro-entities who think “sheeple” are a thing. Who exactly are these oxygen-wasters who not only have no interesting-to-elder-gods experiences, but who have no ancestors with such experiences either? Why do “ancient entities” who “wait impassive in the darkness between the stars” care more about a guy who’s studied at the Vatican than about Random Tinder Hookup? Shouldn’t the horrors of the Christmas rush at the Gap be just as exotically-exciting to them as any international adventure? From their lofty alien heights, shouldn’t the thoughts of a mere mortal genius be indistinguishable from those of a mere mortal fool? Nurse Tesfaye isn’t shy about judging them, or those who serve them. Neither am I. Part of the difference between Erin and Savannah is that Erin at least tried to resist her homicidal urges. Sure, she knew her Type was on record and the snipers were watching, but she also had at least some level of internal preference for not being a murderer, and for keeping her girlfriend alive. Not for stopping her girlfriend from murdering others, mind. We’re working on a very relative scale of judgment, here. But even sensing the apocalypse coming, she had goals for her interactions with other people beyond “get it while I can.” Weirdly, the part that disgusts me the most is Savannah deciding that her father, too, literally got off on his murders. He was abusive and paranoid with no outside intervention required – and there’s no reason to think the outsiders in question were intervening at the time. Savannah herself says that they aren’t responsible for the “cheat” of her loveless childhood. But she finds it comforting, or something, to have it both ways. This reminds me, somehow, of the “anomalous” murderers in Shadow Unit. Their origin is murky, but they have an instinct for serial killing, and have the potential to resist it. There’s something to be said for an internal moral compass, and much to be said for a refusal to let yourself make excuses. I don’t blame Tesfaye for having better things to do, but I wish she were sticking around. I’d like to hear more from her. Anne’s Commentary The continuing adventures of Savannah, as featured in these chapters, put me in mind of the Boulet Brothers Dragula, a TV drag competition that’s spawned several spin-offs. Contestants for the title of Next Drag Supermonster must excel in three categories: Horror, Glamor, and Filth. Not that I doubt Savannah could pull off the Glamor thing (especially if a client paid in advance for the rhinestones and corsets), but we haven’t seen her dressed to the nines yet. The Horror she’s got down, since the old gods Chose her for the Type Five Slayer-of-Men category. As for Filth, which is all about shock, disgust, and revulsion, this Slayer SLAYS. Pre full transformation, Type Two Betty and Type Three Erin try to keep their blood-and-brain glutathons neat. Whereas Savannah creates a pair of truly appalling crime scenes when she offs Michael and Tesfaye. Nor can I suppose she left the Tinder guy’s van in good shape for resale. Savannah’s encounter with the monk Michael is a three-course meal of Filth. For a hefty “appetizer,” she caters to “legitimate freak” Michael’s sacrilegious paraphilias by turning his crucifix, Bible, and rosary into sex toys. For the “main course,” she gets anally pummeled by Michael’s megamouth shark of a penis, mercifully minus the fins, with some more sacrilege in the form of her concurrent recital of the Lord’s Prayer. All that’s missing are a nun’s habit on Savannah and a papal miter on Michael. Or vice versa. “Dessert” is all for Savannah. A quick slash of her straight razor, and she’s having an ascent-to-heaven of an orgasm, always her reward now for murdering humans fit for neither Becoming nor Archiving. Someone has to do the old gods’ vermin extermination for them. Beyond disposing of the most incriminating evidence of fingerprints and “girl goo,” she leaves the gory clean-up for, I guess, the other monks. Tesfaye’s murder ups the Filth factor. Blood jets everywhere from her severed carotid artery, except what Savannah chugs down in imitation of a Type Two Chosen’s method of harvesting the victim’s memories, or rather, the memories of their ancestors. The pageant’s an immersive entertainment for Savannah, but not what she’s there for. She vomits up the blood, on “nice, clean” carpeting, no less, in order to make room for a Type Three’s source of archival material, the “fatty, gelatinous flesh of the brain.” Add shredded scalp and skull bone “sawdust” to the mess in Tesfaye’s living room and the image of Savannah forcing “gooshy neocortex” down her own throat. The ick of the scene is hugely amplified by the fact that Savannah doesn’t find blood or (especially) brains the most delicious things ever, as Type Twos and Threes do. By the time she gets to Tesfaye’s brain, her kill-triggered orgasm’s probably over, and it’s all gag reflex control from there on. Savannah will tell Tesfaye’s understandably irate ghost that her disgusting moral relativism comes from the fact that she’s “selfish,” from a long line of selfish people. Nor does she try to defend her actions when confronted by the fire-wreathed archangel who is the Michael of her dream. One of her Type Five superpowers is that she can instantly differentiate the Chosen and the Archive-worthy humans from the expendables, the prey sanctioned for her by the old gods. Michael and Tesfaye were both Archive-worthy, yet for her own selfish pleasure and convenience, she went ahead and killed them. Can sexual gratification be considered as “justifiable” a need as the hunger of the Twos and Threes? Possibly yes, if one unintended experience of heavenly ecstasy, like Savannah’s after killing Gregory, can create an instant ungovernable addiction. I’m undecided. Tesfaye’s ghost says that what Savannah calls selfish, she would call predatory or “just straight-up evil.” Savannah herself can imagine that she was “born this way,” having inherited her father’s violent nature, which manifested as a certain user-mentality until the Change brought it to full predatory expression. She’s not remorseless even now, and she can’t deal with the guilt of reliving Tesfaye’s memories. Therefore she must get rid of everything that’s not pertinent to her gods-given mission of caring for a precious “She” yet to be disclosed. Once she manages to file away only Tesfaye’s medical knowledge and Tesfaye’s memory of an ER doc’s address (as a future source of medical knowledge), her mood turns to elation, and she can vomit Tesfaye’s icky brains. She uses the toilet this time, but still scores a last Filth point. The girl could be a Monster, all right! Next week, we go all the way to Mars for our horror in Caitlin R. Kiernan’s “Our Lady of Arsia Mons.” You can find it in Dreams From the Witch House.[end-mark] The post Brain Surgery <i>Without</i> Safewords: Lucy Snyder’s <i>Sister, Maiden, Monster</i> (Part 6) appeared first on Reactor.

Will and Adam get into a Last TEAM Standing battle between JLA: Year One and the Original Avengers, plus a Casting Call for a Birds of Prey movie, Hot 10 Comics, Mort of the Month CONTINUE READING... The post WIZARDS The Podcast Guide To Comics | Episode 118.5 appeared first on The Retro Network.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Meta’s WhatsApp platform is set to come under tighter European oversight as regulators prepare to bring its “channels” feature under the European Union’s far-reaching censorship law, the Digital Services Act (DSA), the same framework that already pressures Facebook and Instagram. According to Bloomberg, people familiar with the matter say the European Commission has informed Meta that WhatsApp’s channels are being prepared for designation as a “Very Large Online Platform.” That classification carries extensive responsibilities for content censorship. Although no public date has been announced, the Commission’s notice indicates that WhatsApp will soon face some of the most demanding digital rules in the world. Channels, which allow public updates from news outlets, public figures, and organizations, function more like social media feeds than private chats. WhatsApp reported earlier this year that these channels reached around 46.8 million users in Europe by late 2024, slightly above the DSA’s 45 million-user threshold for stricter oversight. Once a service crosses that line, it must perform regular assessments of how illegal or “harmful” content circulates and develop strategies to limit its spread. Platforms are also required to publish user figures twice a year and risk fines of up to 6 percent of global revenue for failing to comply. The DSA does not apply to private, encrypted communication, so WhatsApp’s core messaging service will remain unaffected. Still, the EU’s decision to expand its regulatory reach into new areas of online conversation has caused concern that these rules could burden companies and discourage open dialogue in the name of safety. The European Commission has remained cautious about providing details, saying only that it “cannot confirm the timeline for a potential future designation.” For Meta, the move adds another chapter to its ongoing disputes with European regulators. Other American tech firms, including Amazon, have already pushed back against being labeled “very large,” arguing that the law unfairly groups diverse services under a single regulatory standard. Tensions between Brussels and Washington could rise again. US President Donald Trump has previously accused the EU of targeting American technology companies through excessive regulation and warned that tariffs could follow if such actions continue. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Brussels Aims at WhatsApp in the Next Round of Speech Control appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

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