diabolicalnerd

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NIKOLA TESLA IS SUPER ADORABLE HE’S JUST WANDERING AROUND AND HIDING UNDER THINGS I’M GONNA SQUEAL

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The fresh prince of Blaire witch project

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#adhd

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Stars on the street

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i was reading wikipedia about threats to gorilla conservation and i am deeply ashamed to admit that the mental image upon reading that a gorilla could step on a landmine made me laugh

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I’m so fond of athena and odysseus conceptually.  like here’s the goddess of wisdom and warfare and craft and art, and here’s her pet liar.  he does tricks.

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#sound recommended

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Customer: A COMBINATION OF OUR NAMES- MALNICK AND POMOTOV DMV: BOMB Verdict: DENIED

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#cuteness

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Karl Gussow - Old Man's Treasure (Das Kätzchen), 1876

#art

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Alright kids, we're at the road stop of this long scrolling journey. Make sure to:

- Stand up and stretch

- Get a drink of water

- Grab something to eat if you're hungry

- Use the bathroom if you need it

- Unclench your jaw

You all done? Alrighty! Let's get back to the scrolling.

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I used to work for a trade book reviewer where I got payed to review people's books, and one of the rules of that review company is one that I think is just super useful to media analysis as a whole, and that is, we were told never to critique media for what it didn't do but only for what it did.

So, for instance, I couldn't say "this book didn't give its characters strong agency or goals". I instead had to say, "the characters in this book acted in ways that often felt misaligned with their characterization as if they were being pulled by the plot."

I think this is really important because a lot of "critiques" people give, if subverted to address what the book does instead of what it doesn't do, actually read pretty nonsensical. For instance, "none of the characters were unique" becomes "all of the characters read like other characters that exist in other media", which like... okay? That's not really a critique. It's just how fiction works. Or "none of the characters were likeable" becomes "all of the characters, at some point or another, did things that I found disagreeable or annoying" which is literally how every book works?

It also keeps you from holding a book to a standard it never sought to meet. "The world building in this book simply wasn't complex enough" becomes "The world building in this book was very simple", which, yes, good, that can actually be a good thing. Many books aspire to this. It's not actually a negative critique. Or "The stakes weren't very high and the climax didn't really offer any major plot twists or turns" becomes "The stakes were low and and the ending was quite predictable", which, if this is a cute romcom is exactly what I'm looking for.

Not to mention, I think this really helps to deconstruct a lot of the biases we carry into fiction. Characters not having strong agency isn't inherently bad. Characters who react to their surroundings can make a good story, so saying "the characters didn't have enough agency" is kind of weak, but when you flip it to say "the characters acted misaligned from their characterization" we can now see that the *real* problem here isn't that they lacked agency but that this lack of agency is inconsistent with the type of character that they are. a character this strong-willed *should* have more agency even if a weak-willed character might not.

So it's just a really simple way of framing the way I critique books that I think has really helped to show the difference between "this book is bad" and "this book didn't meet my personal preferences", but also, as someone talking about books, I think it helps give other people a clearer idea of what the book actually looks like so they can decide for themselves if it's worth their time.

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my favorite personal dragon headcanon is that like birds they also can't see glass, but it just isn't an issue for them

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There are two types of people in the world. People who are alive, and people who are dead. And i intend to make you the third type of person.

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