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hi 👋 just wanted to say i love your steddie fic “better by you, better than me”. it’s amazing the way you’ve incorporated eddie into everything from the beginning! i was wondering if the story is done or if you’re ever going to continue with a season 4 rewrite?

hi, thank you so much! the story is very much not done, and indeed we will be seeing a new update this sunday (april 28th).... get excited.

#asks #my fic #better by you

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Hi. I am binding some fics for my personal collection and wanted to know if it's okay for me to do one of yours?

oh yeah absolutely! obviously no commercial use but personal use is fine <33 flattered you enjoyed my work enough to do that!

#asks #my fic

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the way he stands

#true detective #q

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#words #q

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Hero Detectives Stop Killers, Save Girl.

#true detective #rust's shirt is SO gross <3 #i know he smells so bad <3 #q

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#anti tswift #q

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Arizona

courtneylwilson

#photography #q

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why do u hate t swift?

no offence, just wondering why r u so opinionated against her

none taken! i've been waiting for an opportunity to collect my thoughts on her and her brand and i thank you for providing me with one. bear with me, because this is going to be rather long under a read more.

to quote the post you're no doubt referring to here, i don't hate her. rather, i take issue with the culture that surrounds her, and i think the cult status she's been assigned by fans as an 'artistic genius' is reductive and in fact damaging to the culture as a whole.

she's the ultimate culmination of an anti-intellectual consumerist culture: she's unfathomably wealthy and uses that money to take 20 minute flights on her private jet and has earned that money by the grace of some truly strange, cultish fan behaviour that lives in denial that her work is shallow at best and downright conservative and culturally vacant at worst.

i can say this: she writes bland, decent-sounding music and i truly have enjoyed some of her songs as background music in the past. but the problem is this weird mutual delusion that she writes anything better than that! she doesn't! i really don't understand what you're all listening to. am i losing my mind here. 'touch me while your bros play grand theft auto' 'sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby' 'i'd say the 1830s but without all the racists' hello?? this last is a prime example, betraying staidly liberal if not softly conservative viewpoints. see also: her romanticisation of frontier ideology ('i forget how the West was won', from but daddy i love him; 'when they found a better planet, only the gentle survived', from i hate it here; the colonial fantasy of the wildest dreams music video).

so let's unpack some of her motifs.

take the lyric 'you wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised me' from who's afraid of little old me?. now, i get it, this is kind of a fun line. but the problem is that the fans for some reason perceive this kind of thing as a great line, which it isn't, if only because of the context in which it was written. she's not engaging with anything meaningful here. i guess you could bring it together with her song mad woman in the interest of formulating some dialogue about her intersection with mad studies/anti psychiatry.... which would be interesting! in that it's a recurring theme in her lyricism to address the perception of female hysteria and herself feeling/being seen as mad. but where this rubs me up the wrong way is that she's writing herself into this position of oppression in which her fans have located her (take the whole rereleasing thing — admirable aim, wanting to own your own music, but let's be clear here, it's mostly about money. you aren't contributing to women's human rights by buying a new album that sounds exactly the same as the old one and thereby putting more money in the pocket of one of the celebrity world's biggest environmental polluters) and that just Does Not Work with who she actually is. no doubt she's drawing from her own personal experiences with the hysteria metaphors but there's no getting away from the fact that she's one of the most privileged women in the world. it's very difficult to take her work seriously when she draws on motifs of structural, societally-regulated oppression to describe her own personal heartbreak. she's not writing about mental illness, she's writing about how a breakup was like mental illness. the racism is a metaphor, actually.

and it's not like this is the worst crime in the world. writing in general is entirely about comparing things to other things. but i take issue with the fact that her fans are lauding her as a lyrical genius, the best songwriter of the century, a groundbreaking artist, when her songs are all so personally involved and derivative. great literature uses intertextuality to look outwards. meanwhile tswift is out here calling matty healy dylan thomas. like idk it's blatant to me that her career is engineered towards a pretty singular goal: making as much money as possible, and maintaining a monopoly over the music industry in service of that goal. and i mean i guess girlboss? #winning? because it's working. she's selling out stadiums and breaking records and everyone is talking about her.

but when this is the end goal of your career trajectory, it's inevitable that you're going to make middle-of-the-road, generally relatable music. and i have nothing against that sort of music, really i don't, as much as i read the postmodernists and joke about being a pick-me. but i do find it concerning that mass-market material is being taken for revolutionary, transgressive art.

forgive me if i get theoretical here. but writers like brett easton ellis saturate their work with brand names and other cultural signifiers to express the decay of meaning in an ironic, consumerist world, where product and image subsume all. tswift writes 'you smokеd, then ate seven bars of chocolate/we declared charlie puth should be a bigger artist' and it doesn't express anything, it is that loss of meaning. it is image and sound and stadium lights. the genius page for this song decodes these lines in terms of their cultural referents: 'Matty Healy is known for smoking. The 1975 has a song called “Chocolate” and “bars” could be referring to that track as lines in a song.' tswift has made herself and her personal life the product. she isn't writing about anything other than herself, but that's fine, because it's relatable anyway, because we all know who she is and why she's heartbroken this time. her celebrity inhabits us: we do not need to see ourselves in her because she is all around us, within us. her references are signifiers only for themselves. she has no interest in examining meta-textually the implications of her art in the wider cultural landscape, only writing about her own life — which is fine when you're a fun pop singer.

but her fans have been positioning her as something more meaningful than that. and, consequently, she's leaning into this positioning — take the title of her album, the tortured poets department. it's clearly a reference to dead poets' society: she fancies herself a whitman or a byron or a blake. as another poster on here identified, however, it comes across strangely bureaucratic. department, not society. like someone's sitting in an office cubicle analysing algorithms and trends so they can advise this 'tortured poet' on how best to capture public obsession this time. and she’s aware of this bureaucracy: she leans into it, in fact, in the ‘summary poem’ that goes alongside the album. she addresses the album as a 'hearing', a 'debrief', a report of her findings of her own losses. but then it's also described as a trial — 'my plea here today of temporary insanity'. once again, she's invoking metaphors of madness and positioning herself as the vulnerable party in a system of authority. the tortured poets department, then, is not a colloquium, consortium, or otherwise friendly meeting of similarly tortured like minds. it is not a support group — it is a judicial, penal body.

and tswift is not tearing this body down. as the penultimate line of the poem goes, 'all’s fair in love and poetry' — not love and war, as the john lyly proverb goes. she's not here to fight for anything. 'poetry''s extra syllables change the rhythm of the line and throw it off balance, jarring the reader. perhaps this is deliberate, calling attention to it, to her own deliberate choice to set herself out as a poet, an artist, not just a pop singer. but it rather heavy-handedly serves to emphasise the whole problem here. her constant invocation of Poetry — capital P — once again serves as signifier that erases the resonance of the signified. if she tells us it's poetry enough times, surely that means people will take it as such. it doesn't matter what it's actually saying.

she sets herself out as the 'chairman' of the tortured poets department, right after marking it out as an authoritative institution from whom she pleads for a merciful sentence. this is the institution that will send her to the 'asylum' on her insanity plea — an institution she herself has founded. her oppressive cage is a cage of her own making, the hall of mirrors that is her own celebrity. and this is meaty stuff — for an essay on the cult of celebrity with anti-psychiatry, poststructuralist, post-postmodern references. throw in some foucault for good measure.

but i earnestly do not believe that she is doing any of this deliberately. her work does not stand up to sustained radical analysis because it is not designed to be radical — it coopts the aesthetics of literary movements in the drive towards profit. she has become a parody of what her fans and her marketing team claim her to be, which is a lyrical genius and an artistic savant. the tswift brand has made her into an idol of late capitalism, a vapid collection of literary symbols with no referent and nothing behind them but an atmosphere-poisoning private jet.

tldr: i wouldn't care if swifties could just be normal about her but instead they decided to deify her so now we can't have nice things

#anti tswift #analysis #haven't written anything longform in a while thank you for the opportunity anon

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TRUE DETECTIVE. HANGDOG. rust/marty, E, 22k

“You think with your dick,” Rust says, when Marty’s got him pinned back against the lockers. “You wanna fuck me same as you wanna beat the shit out of me, just to see if you can.”

#true detective #this is one of my FAVOURITES #q

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cant believe they gave this woman enough money to ruin the environment for singing vapid shit of this caliber for over a decade. have some shame man. get a grip. what the hell are any of you even doing

#anti tswift #q

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Obsessed obsessed obsessed with "better by you, better than me" it's so good I just binged it all in like a week. Such a cool idea but such an undertaking and the story you've told is so captivating. Love a good slow burn and this one hits.

No pressure of course but just know you've got someone patiently waiting/hoping for an update :)

thank you so much!! so thrilled you've been enjoying it. i will indeed be updating it — on april 28th, in fact, so get ready for a new chapter then. updates will hopefully be weekly from then on. i'm so excited to share this final volume and i hope you enjoy it!

#better by you #asks

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You’re a Lord Huron fan???

i AM i am absolutely obsessed with them. current faves are drops in the lake, the world ender, and meet me in the woods. and i'm seeing them play support for hozier in july which is going to change my life i know it already

i just love their folky sound and they're criminally underrated past the night we met. i Will be titling more of my fics after their songs in the future

i take it this means you're a fan too??

#asks

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Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: True Detective (TV 2014) Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Rustin "Rust" Cohle/Martin "Marty" Hart Characters: Rustin "Rust" Cohle, Martin "Marty" Hart Additional Tags: Missing Scene, Episode: s01e05 The Secret Fate of All Life (True Detective), Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Marty's Control Issues, Rust's Everything Issues, Internalized Homophobia, First Kiss Series: Part 2 of hunger and haunt Summary:

In the glow of the lighter, watching it dissolve in the pit of the spoon, Rust’s profile is put together like something handsome drawn only from memory, the connective tissue slightly off, lines configuring without anything soft or warm in it. Marty wants to touch that cheekbone. Hit it, maybe. Find out if it’s really as unyielding as it looks.

— the night after Ledoux, Marty and Rust each seek out a different sort of release.

#true detective #rustmarty #my fic #rust cohle #marty hart

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go here and let me know what your short term top artists from spotify (within the last 4 weeks) are in the tags!

#hozier #lord huron #the handsome family #men i trust #q

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just stumbled upon ground to break while looking for my nightly bedtime story and holy fuck it rocked my shit by god I don't think I'll be going to sleep anytime soon. the way you write. makes me want to eat those two old bitches like they're twix chocolate bars

i ALSO want to eat those two old bitches like they're twixes so you're in good company. so pleased you enjoyed it it was such a fun one to write — i loooove outsider perspective but audrey isn't just an outsider, she's got such a delicious weight to her as a foil to both marty and rust (i may or may not have a parallels gifset in the works...) which makes her impressions of them so loaded. the whole idea came to me fully-formed while i was trying to sleep one night and then i typed it out and it was 11.5k. the power of rustmarty truly

#asks #my fic #true detective

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various theatres across Texas and Arkansas, photographed by John Margolies for his Roadside America collection.

#photography #q

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ANNA TORV as HELEN NORVILLE — THE NEWSREADER 2.02 People Like You And Me

#the newsreader #character of all time #q