okay so, first megamorphs since i started my own little hidden book club. 

i haven't had the spoons to code lately, getting back to work after a week off was ROUGH. 

More sepcifically, jorb is stressing me out lately like whoa and all cards on the table i'm probably gonna quit some time next year. 

its bluh. 

my former researcher boss, who is part of the reason i became jaded is trying to get me to work for him again at this not-quite-startup and i'm not sure. 

one thing i like about being a web developer is i get to learn all sorts of sins to both use and lampoon for zampanio and my other sims. 

i take a LOT of inspiration from the things stressing me out. 

at the same time...

p sure my life would be less stressful as a researcher? more free time and more spoons means more personal coding time?

POINT is, p sure this'll be the first commit in this repo in like, a week. 

lets see if memory checks out.

huh, no, i did some minor bug fixes on tuesday. i forgot about them. 

see thats why you shouldn't listen to any gut instincts you have about being useless or whatever. memories lie. 

so i don't think i'm gonna start reading the megamorphs JUST yet. i'm really into another book i'm reading and wanna get to a stopping point.

but every saturday at 10:30 pm an alarm goes off to remind me to get the next book, and i like this little ritual, so here we are, together. 

me in my present, you in some far off or not-so-far-off future. 

maybe you're here cuz you wanna learn about animorphs. 

maybe you're expecting some insight in secrets or puzzles. 

maybe you just consume all content you can find if its hard enough to find it. 

who could say. 

but regardless, you're gonna get weird stream of conscious diatribes as i read a nostalgic book series and we're all just going to call that mission accomplished. 

actually maybe i WILL read just a bit. forgot what i was reading in the other book (A Practical Guide to Evil, its a huge web serial and i've been reading it for like, half a year at this point. i'm a fast reader, but i've learned how to NOT obesses over things, so i have plenty of other things filling my time)

first megamorphs was about visser3's pet and it was so so unmemorable. the DINOSAUR one is way cooler. 

i remember rachel getting loopy and complaining about dates growing on trees and jam vs jelly vs preservers and tobias having a broken wing and it not being able to fixed for some reason. 

i'm probably confusing at least a few diff books cuz if tobias couldn't fix his wing, wouldn't that have been an earlier book? 

still. 

lets find out how it goes. 

together.

starting with marco, okay, good start, he's got the big picture tactical vision so he can set the stage. 

every single time they have a water mission i wonder if THIS time will be the time they find atlantis and its filled with fish people who think dna is something you can only get via blending people up. 

god animorphs is such a weird series. 

probably not tho, if somehow a nuclear sub leads to them going 65 million years in the patches

every single book starts with them "misusing" their powers (by the standards they set for themselves) and its great. its like 50% of the time they're doing weird pranks or harmless rescue missions and the other times are the most harrowing possible war stories. 

i continue to think it funny that every single animorph thinks ax is hot in his human morph. 

apparently the tumblr shipping community can't get over the fact that marco and ax danced at prom in the short lived tv series. 

cassie next. is it going in book order, i wonder? 

no. cassie should be BEFORE marco. 

"Humans may prefer shallow water, but it makes dolphins uneasy."  see this is the kind of shit i'm here for. i love how this series makes me think about alien perspectives

i find it interesting that cassie doesn't even note that ax is a shark. marco can't shut up about it (for obvious reasons) when he's the viewpooint. 

little things like that, you know?

or.... did ax get a dolphin morph? cassie is acting like he has to surface to breathe like the rest of them. 

maybe applegate forgot that he didn't have a dolphin morph.

oh! i missed a line from marcos perspective.  ax has a new morph that cassie helped him get, its the dolphin morph.
gotcha

jake


is it going backwards? no, because rachel would be before jake if it were. 

it bothers my pattern sense that its just unrelated to book order now that i know it

jake, rachel, tobias/ax, marco, cassie

there, from memory

wait shit, i got marco and cassie inverted, was thinking the order they did in this book.

still. progress.

god i lvoe how dumb this is. 

every other time they've gone back in time its been weird ellimist bullshit, or alien weapons malfunctioning in rare but known about ways

this is just

"if you get nuked you go back in time". 

happens to everyone. thems the breaks. 

god and i just realized, since no yeerks were invovled at all, i DO remember what thi splot it. aliens were already on earth. ant aliens? 

i get grizzly bear is what rachel turns to in times of stress. but if *I* wanted to make a dinosaur regret eating me, i'd choose her hork bajir morph. just turn into knives, man.

god its fucked up she's tearing thru a creatures lungs from its stomach until she can get out

okay so they AGREE it doesn't make sense that tobias still has a broken wing when he morphs. 

good to know. 

i remembered right then. 

i wonder if they ever explain it , or if they just wanted a reason for tobias to be helpless while rachel cared for him. 


you know

for shipping purposes

i get why tobias wants to heal. 

i get it. 

but seriously

he should be in morph as much as possible while in DANGEROUS TERRITORY instead of being helpless

~~~~
more reading time
https://at.tumblr.com/thejakeformerlyknownasprince/emmersdrawberry-strawberryoverlord/47e05vdy0iwc

i saw this and it reminded me i hadn't finished yet
you know
one of my favorite things about ax is that he may be a genius by human standards (for SOME reason) but he didn't pay very much attention in class

itd be like if you were expected to know how to disable a combustion engine car on an alien planet and you're just "god i only half undrestand what pistons do we are so boned"

thats right i remember how fucked up rachel got during this. starting to get weird.

now heres the thing. its ridiculously obviously a ploy to have rachel and tobias have some alone time in which they are vulnerable etc etc
i get that

but it IS the most memorable part of this book, even beyond the "holy shit dinosuars" so it clearly worked

there is something deeply ironic that rachels feet are getting this fucked up whiel ax isn't here to parrot elfangors horror at realizing how delicate human feet are

its weird cassie is worried that jake might resent her for taking point on the back to nature stuff.   

my best guess his he's relieved SOMEONE knows what to do. theres too much on his damn shoulders.



oh no.


i have a bad memory about that comet. 


you know, i think my favorite part about reading animorphs now compared to when i was a kid is i can just google anything i don't understand.  

before feathered dinosaurs were wildly known about, rip tobias losing his feathers


and there we see one of the fundamental pressures beteen rachel and tobias. she wants him to be human. needs him to be human. 

is reluctant to admit he isn't, anymore.  it takes her a while to realize trying to snap him out of the morph by telling him he's human won't work. 

this really just is the vore book isn't it. people keep being swallowed alive. 

one strength of the megamorph books is really hammering home how different each perpsective is.  


i find it interesting that cassie thought to eat the trrex and use its skin as shoes.   tobias and rachel used dead raptor skin as a guard against tobias' talons, but apparently didn't think to eat it, because rachel is still starving

cassie really is powerful.

they both have raptor morphs and are "looking for food" and.  al;skjdfa;slkdjfa;lkjdfa;lsjdf

tobias, you're better than this. you literally hunt al lthe time. hunting as a dino shouldn't be that weird.

okay there, rachel gets it

oh, past the half way point

fun fact: spinosauraus was my little brothers favorite as a kid

i love how the aliens tobias and rachel find are nothing less than the animorphs collective worst nightmare. hooray, ants   


"No one asked what he meant because at that point some Mercora showed up with more food. But
I filed away his words. I filed them away in my head and I had the definite feeling I’d be doubleclicking on that file again.
" 

marcos traits are funny, ruthless, and technological. look at him, making a compute reference. 

ah, the 90s


also, can i just say how weird it is to claim that brocolli is 65 million years old and alien? when we know for a fact it was bred a few thousand years ago?

the lack of wikipedia authors had access to in the 90s is just disturbing.

seriously, just how many alien spieces have colonized or otherwise messed with earth?  we've got two right around the ending of the dinosaurs, the pemalites, whatever race hid the time cube or whatever it was called, you've got the skrit na kidnapping humans.

earth is just the hottest piece of ass in the solar system OR every single planet is just lousy with people fucking around with them before they're technologically advanced. 

yeah cassie is right, she never does do the big predator morphs. even in normal combat all she does is wolf.

honestly, you'd think she'd go for an herbivore then, so she doesn't have to taste the violence she does. but i guess her whole thing is she doesn't want to look away from it, either. 

yeah i thought i remembered cassie was the one least able to fight off the trex mind . (morphing is definitely not the same thing as what yeerks do, just trust us /sarcasm)

"Otherwise I might as well be some gang banger, or a Nazi or, or" OKAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I KNEW I WASN'T CRAZY!!!!!!!!!!!!

i used "gang banger" in a sentence at some point in high school and my friends acted like i was talking about porn and LATER yes I learned that had another meaning but i KNEW it didn't just mean that. 

THANK YOU VERY MUCH 

although i recognize the irony that this may in fact be the source of that particular turn of phrase for me

i remember disliking the ending of this one.  

i haven't gotten to it yet, but memory says tobias decides this commet HAS to be the one that killed the dinosaurs. that it can't be one a few million years later, or even a few thousand. 

i know its a bit like a trolley problem, but if i had a choice, if i thought that time was a closed loop.... i wouldn't want to be the one with the blood on my hands. they'll die one way or another, why risk it?

but i guess tobias is thinking that time is... a semi closed loop. mankind evolved because this exact meteor hit, but if we don't do exactly what we did in the previous part of the loop it won't go the same way . 


0/10, inconsistent time mechanic. i mean it does fit the SPACE spiral i do in zampanio, where the loop doesn't control what happens next. 

but they're presenting it as time. gross. 

anyways, lets see if my memory is right. 

okay yeah, the fact that THIS meteor will hit their settlement, wiping out any evidence... yeah fair tobias. 

fair. 

which means its a stable time loop where you still have to make the decision to perpeatuate the loop. 

least favorite kind of time loop.


if you're gonna go for stable, at least make it so NO MATTER what you do it happens. make it so they genuinely tried but the explosion wasn't enough or failed in some other way and then it turns out its all 'okay' in the end because it was fate 

don't make tobias personally-fucking-responsible for ending the dinosaurs and also crab hippies. 

can you imagine a setting where any significant explosion MIGHT send ppl back in time so far they erase their own species. 

god, no wonder the ellimist is running around policing things. 

oh god the afterword

" A note:
<Hi, it’s me, Tobias. After we got back from our adventure in the late Cretaceous, I looked up
some of the dinosaurs we encountered: Tyrannosaurus, Deinonychus, Saltasaurus, Spinosaurus,
Elasmosaurus, Kronosaurus, and Triceratops. All of them were around during the Cretaceous Age.
But paleontologists seem to think some of them, like Spinosaurus, were extinct by the middle
Cretaceous, whereas we were in the late Cretaceous. All I can say is that I was almost eaten by a
supposedly extinct Spinosaurus. So who are you going to believe? Me, or a bunch of scientists with
some old fossils?>"


best way to plug up a plot hole.  

ALSO, the ants DID say the spinosaures were endangered. so. 

fair enough

and there we go, chewed through a megamorph which was 1.5 the size of a normal one

to celebrate i wanna add one more goncharov blorbo

and to make it so im not just making a commit to add in my book Diary