aberrantangels | A man of wealth and taste

[Edited 10:01 to include the links I meant to paste in before it went out, and to give the correct text in the description of Marcus.]

Screwtape's outlook is like a photographic negative; his whites are our blacks and whatever he welcomes we ought to dread.
— C.S. Lewis, preface (written 1962, unpublished until 1982) to "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" (1959)

I've noticed that

Marcus and

Nicole both have a dash of that aspect of Screwtape about them, albeit in different ways. The Nickerhoffer's current "Self-Justification of the Day" series is very much in the mold of the letters, it seems to me.

I know that as Marcus' writer (a task which now takes up a lot of the portion of my brain that used to be devoted to

Rufus S. Desmond), I get good results by writing as the opposite of myself. (For instance, I mentioned that Marcus' view of

hardartist is, in certain ways, a deliberate inversion of my own.) Basically, I think of the most despicable, twisted and carcinogenic reaction anyone could have to a given situation, coat it with what Nicole called "that curious mixture of Impudite charm and utter lack of social grace", add pepper and Songs to taste. Serves at least two dozen fellow players.