Baubles #5
As God is my witness, the first Emmeverse meetup will feature smut tacos
No, not that kind of smut. This kind:
I just learned about this, and I’m excited.
Corn smut, as it’s called in the US, or huitlacoche, as they call it in Mexico, is what happens when a specific fungus gets into an ear of corn at just the right time in its development when the humidity is just perfect for it to take root and create the abomination you see above.
“That’s horrible,” you may be thinking. “Is this a creeping disaster like colony collapse disorder? How do we stop it?”
Do not panic. It is, apparently, delicious. While American corn farmers don’t love it, chefs are trying to open people’s minds about it, even branding it “Mexican truffles”. If you catch it when the galls are still immature, the infected ears are actually worth more than the uninfected ones.
I want to try it. And assuming it’s actually good, I want to help you try it too.
There’s Something About Bluey
If you’ve never watched Bluey because it’s a show for little kids, I understand. I didn’t watch it either until I spent a Saturday babysitting my toddler niece and quickly found it was far less annoying than any of the other shows suggested by my sister-in-law. It really is special. It’s entertaining without screaming at you. It models good family relationships without preaching to you. It’s charmingly Australian.
And it’s not just me. It’s massive. It’s bigger than massive. In the first half of 2025 it was streamed more than anything else. Last year, it accounted for 29% of all viewership on Disney+.
So when I stumbled on Creating Bluey: Tales from the Art Director, I was primed to pay attention. And if you have creative ambitions, I think you should too.
Catriona Drummond was not a hotshot art director when Bluey was dreamed up. She got her art degree in Brisbane. She got an animation award there. She got to go to Cannes. And she still felt miles behind people in the US who got a lot more technical training in animation and were much closer to Hollywood. She spent six months at the University of Utah (and says she cherishes it but I’m not sure what she did there).
Then she went back to Australia, feeling like a loser. She’d tried to work her way into the machine, but it spat her back out. She kept taking small gigs and staying in touch with studios she really wanted to work at, until one day she finally got “that email” from a director whose work she had admired and who had just gotten a green light from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to try something new.
If I hadn’t tried to make the best grad film I possibly could, I wouldn’t have made it into that room at MIAF. If I hadn’t done my research, I wouldn’t have recognised Joe. If I hadn’t kept consistently maintaining that connection, and showing that I was serious about my career; I wouldn’t have been top of mind for him to offer me this role. I did get lucky, but I spent my entire career up until that point putting myself in the right position for that luck to occur. I will concede, I don’t think anyone was expecting that such a visionary storyteller would burst out of Brisbane in boardies and thongs. But though not a lot of people had been keeping an eye on him, I had. Nothing was an accident.
Thank God she didn’t get that big Hollywood gig. Maybe this lesson is dangerous, but I’m going with it anyway. If you really want to do next-level, groundbreaking work, you probably shouldn’t try to follow the obvious path of college → grad school → top employers. Every step in that path is full of kids trying to optimize their odds of making it to the next step. They’re goosing their extracurriculars and hiring consultants for their college applications and going to “networking” events and honestly they’ve probably got more energy to do all that than you do. And when they win at that they get picked up by really big successful companies that are also in optimization mode, trying to figure out how to get a 0.2% higher conversion rate on their paid ad spend.
It’s a machine. And cogs in machines don’t get to invent Bluey.
There are a lot of machines like this. Hollywood. Wall Street. Big law. Big tech. Tenure track academia. They all have a system for hiring new grads and putting them through the mill and then discarding most of them on the other end after the juice is squeezed out. And that system is being worked by millions of kids who have made it their life’s work to master it for all the money and status it can give them. And if it’s money and status you want, that’s the best way to go. But don’t go there thinking you can be creative.
Catriona again:
At that time staying safe and employed trumped any creative need to express myself frankly. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that per se, but I had been so desperate to make it into the US animation industry, I was really pushing down the fact that I would never be truly happy unless I was telling Australian stories. I couldn’t bear to admit that to myself. It meant giving up the dream I had since childhood, my whole world would fall apart. Besides what awaited me if I did decide to truly express myself? At that time, some lonely path, probably semi-unemployed, in or outside the Australian animation industry. Never being part of that prestigious community of artists I worshipped that strived to a high level of skill and craftsmanship. Fuck that!
But as we started working on Bluey, a feeling grew inside of me. Softly and quietly enough that it didn’t bring my whole world crashing down. The work was creatively challenging, the community at the studio Joe created was thick as thieves. We were working on something we all deeply cared about. Things weren’t perfect, I still yearned to be guided by people more skilled than me, as my art skills were at that point were scrappily cobbled together from personal grit and online art courses. But this show was…actually good! I felt creatively fulfilled.
So, the uncomfortable question. What beliefs about yourself are you clinging to so desperately that they’re standing in the way of you doing groundbreaking work?
Catriona is @goodsniff on Substack, and worth your follow.
Serving Cunt Since 1074
So somebody got on /r/reverseharem and requested an “Fmc that serves cvnt”.
I had questions.
“Serves? As in, like, a restaurant?”
“Did you typo, or is ‘cunt’ not allowed here, or is this just the new slang?”
I learned a few things.
First, Tiktok’s profanity rules are training people to self-filter in all the rest of social media too. (See also, “unalived”.) But everyone knows what you mean, so is “cvnt” really less bad than “cunt”? How long until Tiktok bans them both? How long until people from Scunthorpe can’t even say the name of their hometown online?
Second, Reddit has no problem with the word “cunt”. (Neither, I may add, does this website. So all you cunty cunts please cuntinue in your cuntish ways.)
Third, serving cunt does NOT mean selling sex, but just being powerfully and unapologetically feminine. It came from the same black and latino LGTB ball culture that gave us “yas queen”. It got big in 2023 while managing to completely pass me by.
“But Emme,” you’re saying, “what does this have to do with your book?”
I’m so glad you asked. It’s all about the arc of the word’s acceptability. Go back to medieval times and cunt is just a normal word. SO normal, in fact, that numerous English towns had streets named Gropecunt Lane to house their red light districts. The last one was made in 1561.
And then the Puritans ruined it.
In the succeeding centuries, all the Gropecunt Lanes were either renamed entirely (Oxford’s became Magpie Lane) or morphed into Grape Lane or Grape Court. Sometimes they just lost the “cunt” and became Grope Lane, but then even all of those ended up getting renamed to something else.
All of them, that is, but one. The English town with the last remaining “Grope Lane” is none other than the Talbots’ ancestral home, Shrewsbury. Walk up the High Street, take a right at the Costa Coffee, and you’re standing in the spot where Shrewsbury’s least reputable ladies once plied their trade.
Is “serving cunt” going to made the word acceptable enough to bring back all the Gropecunt Lanes?
No.
Is it going to at least take the edge off enough that fewer people will instantly DNF a spicy historical romance the first time they use the word “cunt”?
Maybe.
Have I typed the word “cunt” so many times in this post that I have reached semantic satiation and the word has lost all meaning?
Abso-cunting-lutely.
So many captions, so little time
This unintentionally phallic balloon was spotted at the grocery store just after the Fourth of July. We both did a double take. I took a picture. Then I agonized over the best caption.
For those who want a really explosive climax.
It will fit. Because MAGIC.
So you know how dragon shifters have two dicks? Well…
