#its a very interesting distillation of idea:

[sanstropfremir]

people have obviously spoken at length about OnlyOneOf's MVs, mostly stuff from Libido onwards, but i'm curious your thoughts on their earlier material and the themes/references they were exploring and making. Like i was watching Savanna recently and it's so interesting the use of computer glitch effects and being seen through other lenses, that they were already exploring that "artificiality" of the entire performance (like they do in skinz) even at that stage.

i feel like i definitely talked about angel at one point but who fucking knows anymore, i sure don't. i actually think that libido and the be series are building off of the blocks made in their earlier mvs. i love how strong and literal the techno-religiousity of angel savanna sage etc, it's that literalness that establishes that this group is taking on the challenge of trying to deconstruct the highest concepts of what an idol is, and how that concept interacts with the world around it. the advantage of spectacular imagery is that it allows you to manifest your metaphors physically. techno imagery especially, like how the techno orientalism of cyberpunk is a manifestation of the west's fear of asia's rising economic power in the 80s. so by spelling out these religious and idolatrious ponderings in glitches and visual effects, it lays the bricks of intent for this alt idol group that pays off in mvs like libido and skinz where we might have lost the visual depictions of being seen through other lenses, but the voyeurism is stronger than ever.

#its a very interesting distillation of idea: #sci fi is a speculative genre by nature so it allows for these grand visions and questions to be made manifest large #but then there's a narrowing down to a handful of tigher ideas that have a more focussed point #in this instance specifically going from the quite literal idol = religion ? to voyeurism and expectation and perception of image #so i dont think their 'loss of aesthetic' was a loss really #but more of an 'we arent asking questions about what an idol is anymore. we know and we will use it against you' #onlyoneof w #text #answers #i know people didnt like the dopamine mv but that was the purest of vodka. literally just hot guy calvin klein ad #the rotating sparkly torsos really got me like damn they really said 'is this all you care about? hm?' #and calling it dopamine too that was the cherry on top. mwah chefs kiss you did it you boiled being an idol down to its bare essentials

[rendy-a]

If your interested i would like to request a self aware au where the player instead of possesses Ramshackle instead of Yuu

My first thought is that I don’t understand this request.  Possess the actual building of Ramshackle?  Then I thought it might actually be funny if the Player were stuck in the building Encanto-style.  Feel free to drop in a new request if this isn’t what you were looking for.  Until then, enjoy this silly idea.

The Dorm Magical

All the characters in Twisted Wonderland had an innate sense for when they were being observed by the Player.  It was a feeling so sublime that it was the only thing a character craved.  One day, they stopped receiving that feeling as they did lessons, went about the storyline and even engaged in event stories.  These were all the Player’s favorite times to grace them with their notice!  It was deeply disturbing to them (could you have quit playing the game?) until they noticed that feeling again within the walls of Ramshackle Dorm.  Now this unique dorm isn’t just the home to the odd students Grim and Yuu but also the only place left on campus to experience the notice of the Player. 

Nothing matters anymore unless you can do it in Ramshackle or take it to Ramshackle.  Riddle brings every perfect-scored test to casually hold up to the walls, hoping you’ll take notice.  A suspicious number of movies being filmed by the Film Club seem to use old houses as a setting.  If any odd floorboard squeaks or movements of doors happen, all the club members merely clap and declare that the Player is so good at ad-libbing. 

Epel bursts into the lounge of Ramshackle and Grim nearly chokes on a bite of tuna.  “Nya!  What’s the big idea barging in here like that?” he asks between coughs.  Epel holds up a spelldrive trophy enthusiastically, “We won the tournament!”  Yuu smiles at him indulgently, “Great job.”  Epel shoots him a puzzled look as though to say, ‘Why are you talking to me?’  Then he turns about the room, holding the trophy aloft until a beam of sunlight from a window seems to shift and hit the trophy perfectly.  Epel grins as though the Player had personally awarded him that trophy.  “Awe, shucks!” he beams while grinning like a fool.  Then, he suddenly seems to recollect somewhere he needs to be.  “I…I should probably get this trophy back now before Leona notices its missing.  See you later Player!”  He makes awkward eye contact with Grim, “and…I guess Yuu and Grim too…”

It’s not just students, so many classes seem to be held in Ramshackle dorm.  The same students that used to try to sweet talk teachers into holding class outside on sunny days are now suggesting they can concentrate so much better in the quiet Ramshackle dorm.  Staff are surprisingly fast to agree.  There is now a sign-up sheet in the faculty lounge to reserve a Ramshackle day.

“Turn to page 101 in your textbooks.  Today we are covering proper methods of distilling potions,” Crewel begins his lecture.  A hand raises, “Professor, couldn’t we learn this better in Ramshackle?”  Crewel lets out a long-suffering sigh, “There aren’t even potion making facilities in that dorm.”  Another hand raises, “But Trein got to have history there twice this week already.”  Crewel pauses for a moment considering that petty argument.  “Screw it,” he finally replies in an arrogant tone, “Grab your things.  We are moving this class to the kitchen of Ramshackle.”  A cheer erupts from the masses.

Rules had to be made preventing transfer to Ramshackle.  Crowly is very firm on this; if he can’t live there, no one else can either!  The few times in the main story where people stay over are the highlight of those student’s year.

Vil slides his hand gently down the banister of the staircase as he descends and lets out a satisfied sigh.  “Stop stroking my house,” Yuu retorts in an annoyed tone. “For the duration of the VDC training camp, it’s our house,” and continues to lightly run his fingertips along the wallpaper with a dreamy smile.

The guest room is the most coveted invitation on campus.  Students would gladly jump over any number of couches and tables for the honor of being trapped in the corner of the Ramshackle guest room.  Even Riddle is happy to cut class, dress up in his Halloween costume and stand idly by. 

Deep in the corner of the room, Sebek stands on two small squares of open space.  He paces a single step backwards and forwards.  He’s been trapped there for at least an hour, yet he still sounds at the peak of happiness as he exclaims, “THIS DECORATION REMINDS ME OF THE THORN FAIRY HERSELF!  WHAT A MAGNIFICENTLY APPOINTED ROOM!”  The door blows open slightly in a breeze and Sebek preens as though receiving an approving wave from the great Player themselves.  Ah, what a moment to be alive and trapped in a room.

#twst #twisted wonderland #twst wonderland #self aware au

[lakesbian]

it's the moment like 4 of you have been waiting for:

i finally rotated pact creature design in my brain enough to post about it. to all the people who sent me asks wanting to hear my thoughts explaining Why Pact Creatures Are So Good this ones for you.

the core of pact's monster design boils down to one very good fact about pact's worldbuilding: in the world of pact, the universe canonically loves a good story. magic literally runs on themes and ideas. subsequently, strong themes aren't the end result of pact's monster design so much as they are the most fundamental aspect of it--meaningful themes and narratives are such a textually important part of how pact monsters work that one bogeyman outright tries to start a conversation with blake by, upon noticing the birdhouse in his soul (tm), asking if birds are important to him.

what really seals the deal on this being fascinating is that pact monsters aren't invented wholesale--a lot of the book hinges on offering its own explanations for preexisting folklore or urban legend. pact takes a variety of common threads in the way cultural myths & monsters are presented, picks out the conceptions with compelling implications, and distills them into one design so thematically coherent and clarifying that it makes you go "ohhh, why aren't All ghosts/dragons/fae like this? this is Exactly What They're Supposed To Be."

like, we all know that ghosts are dead people, and oftentimes the appearance and/or behavior they're written as having is either implicitly or explicitly based on reenactments of their past life/how they died, and sometimes they're depicted as lucid but more often than not they're depicted more like broken or warped remnants of a person, and sometimes they make things colder/give off Bad Emotional Vibes/etc. those are generally true assertions about how ghosts are often culturally presented.

pact takes that and explicitly declares that ghosts are what happens when something so bad happens that an imprint of the resultant misery is left on the fabric of the universe. some ghosts appear horrifying because their appearance is warped and exaggerated beyond what's realistically possible to match how awful whatever happened to them felt. some ghosts are more lucid because their imprint is more recent, or has been strengthened and fed by human attention instead of left to decay. some ghosts are less lucid because they were forgotten. when ghosts make the atmosphere feel awful to be in, that's because the ghost isn't just the imprint of the person, it's an imprint of the awful thing itself. incredibly interesting! it feels so very much like the absolute heart of what ghost stories are about--about the grief and horror of being impacted by the ever-present echo of something terrible, about something so viscerally wretched happening that reality itself cannot forget it, about the emotionally powerful interactions between someone still-living and the memory of someone already long gone.

(pact also gives an aside that, in very rare scenarios, neutral or arguably even positive occasions which leave a sufficiently strong enough impression can also become ghosts. genuinely fascinating expansion.)

& the thing here is that pact does this for creatures like ghosts that are already richly thematic and iconic, but it Also does it for creatures with less obvious theming. how do dragons work? what's pact's underlying explanation for their position as immortal, powerful, regal, fire-breathing* fantasy monsters?

*&, depending on the media, sometimes ice-breathing or poisonous or whatever else

well, you see, dragons are recursive loops. "dragons are recursive loops" is perhaps one of the Top All Time sentences in the entire book, and the delightful thing is that, in addition to sounding excellent, it makes sense.

that's how they generate and spit out so much of whatever their element is. they're snarls. they're ouroboroses. they're something feeding into itself, self-sustaining for thousands of years, drowning anything which threatens it in torrents of whatever the self-feeding element is--fire, sometimes, but it could be poison, or ice, or whatever else, and that's why you've probably heard of ice dragons in addition to classic fire dragons. Dragons Are Recursive Loops. recursiveness is, after all, a form of immortality.

or, like, fae? we all know that faeries are incomprehensibly old/outright immortal Tricky Little Bitches who like to manipulate people while posing in an inhumanly/horrifically beautiful fashion and going "teehee." pact takes that to a fantastically surreal level of extreme artifice, one that's almost grotesque in its dreamlike nature--they have all lived for so very long that, to them, boredom is worse than death, and so they have complicated social games spanning centuries, and speak in the most practiced of misleading wordplay, and perfectly curate their forests so that even the smallest pebble is an intentionally-chosen setpiece for their play. they graduated from handjobs a couple dozens of millennia ago--now they're more into erotic-poetic descriptions of full-body degloving. you will not notice when a faerie steals and replaces your child, because you are very young and stupid compared to them, and playing-pretend at being your child is only the briefest of trifles in their unfathomably long lifespan.

the other good bit is that pact explicitly acknowledges that faeries run on what is colloquially deemed Bullshit--the universe likes a good story, and faeries have gotten very good at telling it a moving story. if a faerie tells a good enough story about having a sword that breaks the laws of physics, then that is what their sword will do. and so the way to combat faeries is not to out-bullshit them--because no one is out-bullshitting a being with thousands of years of bullshitting practice--but to say "no, that's fucking stupid and made up" until their implausibly long sword acts like a sword of that size actually should and shatters on the spot.

& all of these writing decisions feel so naturally truthful to what these creatures are Supposed to be--they're really not wholly new takes, they're a presentation of preexisting ideas in a way that gets why those ideas appeal to people and goes full-throttle on all the most thematically rich or otherwise narratively interesting parts. It's Good Writing. I Like It. you could spend an entire essay breaking down the presentation of literally any single one of pact's creatures, it's that compelling in its reflection and organization of Ideas About Creatures.

#pact time #pact textpost #pactblr #<- fuck you we are dragging that into usage #parahumans #<- fuck you random pactpost event you should read it #pact creature design

[2n2n]

lately, I've been thinking about the Red House's abilities, in its heyday granting wishes...

in conjunction with my theory that the 'Well God' which occupied Sumire & Hakubo's village, which then spoke to Tsukasa, which then combined with him, is the very same God whos power is presently being siphoned and split into the Mysteries (and NOW, being returned to its 'original form', the Well God, Tsukasa).... looking at the Mysteries, they of course are known to all govern some critical 'aspect'. We've only had Tsuchigomori lay out a FEW of these, but we can at least think about them, and... beyond that, we can try to distill what it is what they do, and what would happen if you could combine all of those powers.

No. 1 governs 'time' No. 2 governs 'space' No. 3 governs .... 'memories'? is visuals a part of it? 'seeing'? No. 4 governs ... 'fantasy'? 'Imagination'? 'Ideas'? 'creation'? it can create dreamlike imagery, imagine other worlds, imagine something entirely unseen before, unlike the others. No. 5 governs 'records'. It's hard to differentiate this from No. 3! But maybe when we truly attack No. 3 thoroughly, we'll understand better how their aspects differ. No. 6 governs 'life & death' No. 7 is kinda the most mysterious, but he does bring together the final necessary concept of 'wishes', human desire, 'exchange'. What we see of Tsukasa's power (and he is a part of no. 7 too!) is something like 'seeing into the heart', some sort of ability to reach into sentimentality and desire...

If one were to combine all of these... one could imagine a God that can: see your memories, read your records, parse your desires, manipulate space, time, utilize the creation of imagery, fantasy, to visually offer you possibilities, and have power over time, life, & death in order to procure you what you possibly desire, and the power of exchange to execute on the order.

One can then imagine how returning all of those powers back to the 1 being, would result in a wish truly being granted!

What I can't understand even if I stretch this far, is... how did the yorishiro system come to be? Did the old God have a 'battery' and need of a 'charge' (as Hanako had put it-- who we can't trust so early in the manga-- but well, let's consider anything), or is it only the mysteries who need some special means of tying themselves to the power, given that it isn't theirs by nature? Or ... did even the God need a 'charge' in the form of sacrifices, suchas the girls dropped into its caverns, and the animals exchanged by Tsukasa? The mysteries are blackmailed into remaining loyal to their station by their yorishiro... they have no need of sacrifices, to utilize their respective power.

That's interesting, then, if you don't need death to have power, necessarily, in this world. There is something else you can provide that isn't life. <- this kind of makes me wonder if there really is 'another' source of succor; something like ... sentimentality or passion or love or preciousness, which somehow can create connection to God or a blessing. (Then we have to wonder HOW we figured this out...!).... I'm very interested in a fictional world that isn't quite as grim and literal as something like FMA with toukan koukan. I think something orbiting more around shinto as opposed to alchemy though does lend that idea, that enough worship and adoration can imbue with spirituality. I think there is probably a special quality of Tsukasa that has made him what he is now, not merely... arbitrary circumstance. Something sets him apart from the kannagi, maybe something about his heart or love.

It's really something if you can replace a human girl with a pair of scissors. We focus so much on love in the manga, so ... I'm curious what exactly the power of it can do. I wonder if that at all ties in to... Tsukasa himself, why the Well God didn't merely crunch him into dust like the kannagi, but, maintained a bond with him, combined with him.

The bonus thought: if Nene-chan were to be a 'number 8' so to speak, I wonder what she would encompass? She has a kind of 'blessing' ability, a purification....? hmm...

...I would like to softly think of what she is doing with Hanako and Tsukasa as a kind of purification... with her nature, finding the heart of them, able to connect to and draw out the soul inside.

ah, we'll have to wait and see what comes to be.....

#avvy's JSHK

[arcane-ish]

Reading the old creator interview for League!Ekko again made me think.

I totally get Ekkomains who say that if they ever progress Ekko's storyline in a meaningful way, him finding love with a new person and finally getting over his childhood crush would be a very sensible place to take it. I could picture it feeling very meaningful for him to open up to somebody new, heal some of those trauma scars and be healthier etc (and unlike Riven and Yasuo for whom the angst status is deeply tied to their identity as a character, I think it would actually feel very in character for Ekko to be like that).

There is an argument that Ekko being stuck on Powder is representative of him being stuck in the past which is of course extremely thematic and on point for his character (Warwick to Ekko in game: "The one person in Zaun who runs to the past."), but not exactly the healthiest thing.

But reading the statements again:

[Ekko] thinks [Janna] gave up on Zaun, which is something Ekko will never do.

Let me also state that Ekko does not think Zaun is perfect. He knows very well how is city is perceived and why it has the reputation. But he hopes that things will get better one day.

made me think that Ekko's attachment to Jinx makes a lot more sense if you consider that in a way Jinx is the perfect distillation and representation of Zaun (ie wild, brutal, creative, hurt).

Ekko stays in Zaun because he knows that it's not all bad. People like Ajuna (the friend he lost in the comic) live there. He believes in Zaun, and in it's future (although currently in a somewhat childlike and less forward thinking way, he's still a kid, still learning). 

Ekko isn't dumb, he knows Zaun is a rough place, but he owns that. Zaun made him strong, taught him to be resourceful and make big things out little. He's starting to envision a different Zaun, a better Zaun, but he doesn't have the complete picture yet as he is a teenager and still has some growing up to do.

Basically, if you think of Jinx as Zaun and how his entire goal and motivation is tied up in Zaun, then the idea that he both fights her darkest impulses but also won't and can't give up on her makes a lot more sense and is something different than "loser pining after girl who has no interest in him because he thought she was nice to him in childhood and needs help now".

The idea of "he knows that Zaun has bad sides but still believes in its potential" is a lot more appealing than "it's just childish nostalgia".

#arcane #league of legends #ekko #jinx #timebomb #ekko x jinx

[txttletale]

could you elaborate on what you mean by "the ethics of of an antagonistic mode of writing"? the way i understand it is something along the lines of artistic value vs. effect (?) on audience? i mostly just don't understand what it means! chilli + chocolate factory was a fascinating read, but i feel like i can't really wrap my mind around it. i also haven't read hs or any of the epilogues except through hsmtw and even then i didnt get it, so i might be missing common culture. thanks!

yeah i just mean, like--for me, at least, the emotional/thematic nexus of the whole work is chapter six, where an internet commenter has a breakdown about the candy contest which is very obviously also about art and the artist-audience dynamic:

5Gpants: there is never going to be a moment for me when i understand everything on the big marble 5Gpants: but someone can make a little marble for me, and if they put heart and care and thought into it then i get sucked into it 5Gpants: and if they do a really shrapgrinking job, it has an ending and it all comes together in the right way 5Gpants: and when that happens, man 5Gpants: that fucking feeling of just 5Gpants: "I get it. I understand everything." 5Gpants: we never get that feeling anymore 5Gpants: we never ever ever ever get that feeling, and when we do it's bullshit 5Gpants: but i live for that bullshit 5Gpants: those little marbles are few and far between and i love them so much 5Gpants: they make me want to care 5Gpants: they make me care 5Gpants: they even make me start to care about the big marble again 5Gpants: it's religion, almost 5Gpants: not almost 5Gpants: it's religion 5Gpants: so imagine being a person who figures this shit out 5Gpants: and imagine having the power to make those little marbles 5Gpants: and you go and say, you know what 5Gpants: i'm going to make little marbles on purpose 5Gpants: and i'm going to get people to like them 5Gpants: and i'm going to get people to like them a lot 5Gpants: and then i'm going to take the marble, right before that feeling of understanding can come, like right right right before 5Gpants: and i'm going to crush it 5Gpants: i'm going to step on it and toss it out and LAUGH at them in their dumb fucking faces for having the audicity to wanting to LIKE something and KNOW something 5Gpants: to want to figure out an answer 5Gpants: to want to make the world better 5Gpants: to want to feel 5Gpants: to want to stop experiencing that neverending apathy in the face of constant complication and convolution 5Gpants: to want some shred of understanding 5Gpants: it's evil

like obviously the novel continues a long way past that and a lot of the most interesting stuff is in this second half but this chapter (which was titled 'the end'--remember this was uploaded serially!) kind of signposts a lot of the ideas that the fic is throwing about, about how artists and audience interact--raising questions like "do artists 'owe' anyone anything?" and "do stories 'deserve' to end?" which are a lot of the basis on which the fic's broader critique of dahl and children's literature more broadly is built.

like, the stuff with the GAG and its distillation of characters and what that means for a work's moral outlook, what it says about how people view children and things targeted towards them--i think that is a much better exploration of questions around, like, 'what does canon mean for characters' than anything homestuck did because it's grounded in form and an understanding that texts are written intentionally rather than taking the pseudoplatonic 'characters are real and exist independently of their writing' hussian position.

and unlike the totally surface-level pretence of being 'post-canon' or 'non-canon' that the v. much officially licensed and copyrighted homestuck epilogues put on, fudge revelation is in fact a fanfiction! it's a fanfiction that shows an intimate deep familiarity with dahl's work and a deep loathing for it at the same time! it's a fanfiction that repurposes dahl's characters and stories, and puts them to new and interesting and primarily critical purposes as a form of direct and hostile engagement with the original text!

also, mahuika vapes

#ask #fudge revelation

[sad-swagatorius]

Solve et Coagula - Distilling Fear

Solve et coagula. Dissolve and coagulate. While many a laymen are familiar with the alchemical idea of creating something precious from the form of something base or mundane –  transforming lead into gold, for example – they may not know that this concept is integral to the foundations of alchemy itself. To take something and distill it into its purest, most perfect form is the theory behind the Great Work and creation of the Philosopher’s Stone. 

To borrow a metaphor from Tumblr user cryptotheism, if an alchemist wanted to create the perfect cake, they may begin by breaking an existing cake down into its separate parts. The goal would be to find  perfect Flour and Sugar and Eggs, because these perfect ingredients will surely combine to create the perfect Cake. Solve et coagula.

As we have noticed, alchemy will likely play a significant role in the story of The Magnus Protocol. Solve et coagula, I think, provides an explanation for our favorite set of numbers: the DPHW.

For the purpose of this post, I am assuming that the DPHW corresponds to Death, Pain, Helplessness, and Weird on a scale as determined by the “Theory of Fears; or Zur Furchtlehre” post. Even should the exact words be different for categorization (Death vs. Despair) the heart of the matter remains the same. 

In cataloging cases, our doomed protagonists are assigning each incident a DPHW according to the guidebook they’ve been provided. At some point, someone took the time to rate each and every subset of fear on this scale. For example, episode six introduces us to case CAT1RB4824-09022024-12022024, with the DPHW of “Injury (needles) -/- intimidation [999 call]” being giving a rating of 4 in Death, 8 in Pain, 2 in Helplessness, and 4 in Weird. Our good friend Needles isn’t the most horrible fear around, much to their chagrin, but they do rate highly in Pain. Assuming this is a zero-to-nine scale, they’ve almost reached the top on their first appearance. Congrats, Needles! But other than adding more numbers to an already lengthy case number, what practical purpose does this rating serve?

The purpose, I posit, of identifying the strongest, purest instances of fear’s component parts. 

Nines in a DPHW are not rare according to the Klaus document. However, we’ve yet to see a case with a DPHW containing multiple nines. We also have multiple DPHWs continuing zeros, but never more than once in a case.

There is one case that interests me where the DPHW (TSHU at the time) was 1191. Most other data about it is gone, but alone it is unique. Whatever happened here, someone felt very helpless. You could even call this case an example of pure Helplessness… almost. 

It’s possible that the O.I.A.R. is searching for and flagging cases that exhibit the perfect, distilled components of fear. Then, once all have been identified, the logical next step is to combine them. Coagulate them. Creating pure, unadulterated Fear. A Philosopher's Stone of Terror, able to spawn and create more Fear as it so pleases, or at the whim of whoever holds it. 

Is the O.I.A.R. trying to create Fear or respond before someone else can? Who’s to say. I’ll just be very interested to see by what process Fear is distilled.

Note: I’m at this moment unsure how the Tria Prima fit into this equation (Salt/Body, Sulfur/Soul, Mercury/Mind). Perhaps the distillation is also impacted by them, and noted in the CAT#. God knows how the R fits into this.

#tmagp #tmagp theory #the magnus protocol #tmagp spoilers #brought to you by Not An Alchemist But I Live With One

[steampunkforever]

A particular neurosis of mine is the belief in the ability to achieve the platonic ideal of something, often at the expense of creating something more interesting. Even when it's pastiche, I wholeheartedly believe in pursuing the Capital-R-Romantic essence of something, a detail probably very visible in my art.

Whatever is deeply wrong with me goes back a long time, past my tears at scars from a scrape (not the scrape itself) because I had marked my previously perfect 2-3 year old body permanently, even past my consternation in finding that people are not demarcated from their surroundings by thick black lines in the picture books. This sense of a singular "right way" for things to be is embedded deep past memory, but a distinct landmark in my neurosis is the 1983 horror film "Strange Invaders."

This film shaped me. Think of a 1950s UFO horror film. Unless you're a real freak you probably only know two or three at most, and they've likely amalgamated into a larger idea of what a 1950s UFO horror film should be. Strange Invaders is that distillation, an 80s 50s nostalgia film that serves as the Romantic ideal of a 50s UFO movie, just created in the 80s.

Strange Invaders fixated me as a child. The film terrified me yet fascinated me. Until recent days my only memory of the fiilm came from watching it sitting on my living room floor, and the vision of forbidding aliens deflating the skins of captured humans was all I had of the film, and though I couldn't remember the title the movie stuck with me almost as strongly as that of watching the aliens tear off the flesh of their human skinsuits and march menacingly towards the camera.

After finally finding a copy of the film online I can confidently say that this is the platonic ideal of a UFO horror movie for me, crystallized in nostalgia, perfectly executed pastiche. The creature effects are hoaky and goopy, the matte paintings are exquisite, and the film has not lost its hold on me in the least.

Go watch Strange Invaders if you can find it.

#filmposting #film #horror #strange invaders #strange invaders 1983

[mr-entj]

Hi Mr. ENTJ. As a guy who's always in meetings solving problems, how do you develop mental stamina to stay "on it" all day? Do you have advice on how to do it even without a passionate interest in the topic or problem you're trying to brainstorm with other people? Thank you for your time!

I do it through a few ways:

I'm extremely protective of my time both in and out of work: I actively cut and reduce as many meetings as possible. Meetings are stamina vampires and motivation killers, they're only used for discussions that require rapid back and forth exchanges of ideas or debates when teams can't agree on something and need to drive alignment. All other communications like status updates, one-off questions, newsletters, data readouts, etc. should be through Slack or e-mails.

I don't attend meetings where:

I have no perspective/opinion/expertise to share with the group to solve a problem.

The outcome of the decision has no impact on me, my team, my product.

I can find the same information somewhere else (an internal document, email, message, etc.).

The fewer meetings, the more mental stamina saved.

2. I write more than I talk. I'm big on clear documentation because it allows for organization of thoughts, the addition of visuals (graphs, charts, wireframes) for clarity of perspective, and the creation of a paper trail for future reference. In my role as a Product Manager, that's typically a 1-pager or PRD draft to summarize the problem statement, add supporting data, and outline risks and/or recommendations. I send this out before we meet so people can react to it and add their ideas/questions/concerns so that once we meet we already have 75% of the discussion done before the meeting.

If I don't have a 1-pager, then at the bare minimum, I always have a few bullet points outlining the questions to answer from the meeting. Never show up at a meeting or brainstorming session without anything prepared beforehand.

The shorter the meetings, the more mental stamina saved.

3. I leverage frameworks and solutions from comparable cases. Don't reinvent the wheel-- find solutions to similar problems, distill them into frameworks, and start from there. It'll cut down on the pre-discussions, discussions, re-discussions, and back and forth if we start 10 miles ahead of the starting line. A lot of time existing solutions aren't perfect fits, but they can be adapted to fix similar problems.

The less redundant work, the more mental stamina saved.

4. I lean on the expertise of the people around me. The one constant in my career is that I avoid working with stupid people. Period. Everywhere I've worked, I've optimized for being around very intelligent people and I've aimed for companies that have extremely high hiring bars. Break the problem into smaller pieces and distribute them to people whose skills are best matched. You shouldn't be in a room brainstorming the solution to all the problems-- only the ones you're best equipped to solve. There's that saying: "many hands make light work." Loop in other experts so it expedites the process.

The lower the intellectual burden, the more mental stamina saved.

5. I follow the impact. Don't just focus on the uninteresting topic/problem, trace its impact to the very end and see with your own eyes the fruits of your labor. I remember back when I was in global strategy being assigned to a process improvement project in Asia. I flew out to Singapore to optimize some processes which was a mind-numbingly boring exercise of designing process flows, launching internal tools, and training agents. However, the impact of the work was that people who were affected by dangerous situations during their international travels were able to be quickly rescued and made financially whole again. Reviewing charts and graphs isn't fun, but I would've lost sight of its importance if I didn't follow the impact.

The higher the personal fulfillment, the more mental stamina saved.

... And sometimes there is no meaningful impact to the work that you're doing, in which case, optimize for speed and efficiency to get it done as quickly and as painlessly as possible (see #1-4 above). If you find yourself repeatedly working on problems you have no interest in or flat out hate-- you need to find another place to work or an entirely different career.

#meetings #work #career #careers #job #motivation #stamina #mental stamina #brainstorming #teamwork #faq

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 25/11/2023

waterwraith pokos

Season 6 Featured on: Transmission Archive ~ The SiIvaGunner All​-​Star Nuclear Winter Festival Collection

Ripped by Sponge Lord

Requested by Anonymous ● Mild NSFW Warning

Man, I'm just...picking the BEST and most popular rips of all time to showcase recently, huh? As described above, waterwraith pokos was an anonymous submission, of a rip that I've earnestly never once heard of - using a joke that was completely foreign to me. There was something truly eerie about it all, and led me down a very...fascinating rabbithole.

I've reminisced several times on how nostalgic the earlier years of SiIvaGunner was, and that was in large part due to just how mysterious it all seemed. Nobody had any clue about how the lore would develop, how the backroom would develop the channel's core set of jokes, and a lot of the minor memes like Bowflex, Eggnog and Nathaniel Welchert didn't even have any internet history behind them: they were full-on inside jokes that the team turned into memes on the channel. There's a lot of fascinating stuff to be found in browsing the SiIva wiki and tabbing from rip to rip, with so many people contributing so many obscure ideas to the table, many of which hardly stuck. For instance, Jiko Music noted earlier this year with Trail on Powdery Snow Halation that they were attempting to make Close Your Eyes from the game G-Senjou no Maou a running joke during earlier parts of the channel, but decided to stop after it wasn't really going anywhere. Basically, its sometimes just as interesting to remember the efforts that didn't amount to much just as much as the ones that get celebrated and remembered regularly by the channel.

All that is to say, that I'd never once heard of the audio source "Foreskin Quarters" before investigating waterwraith pokos. To my understanding, its effectively just another one of the internet's many widely-spread grossout videos, this one involving a British man, his genitalia, and a handful of quarters. Yet what seems to have made this video in particular stick with the small handful of rippers using it is the very, peculiar audio - the man's humming, the sounds of quarters hitting a metallic surface, and his enthusiastic "Jackpot!" exclamation near the video's end. This audio, paired with the already unnerving sound of Submerged Castle, and the faint knowledge of what the video's contents are...it creates a rather unsettling image, yknow? I've never been able to see "Foreskin Quarters" in its original form, yet just the atmosphere the rip sets is enough to get the mind churning.

SiIva's rips, as much as they can make me laugh, swell up in emotion, engross me, and so much more...have an innate ability to grab my interest down the strangest of rabbit holes. Its a distillation of all parts of internet history - including its absolute most bizarre points. And while waterwraith pokos ain't going into any of my playlists, I don't think I'll ever be able to forget it.

Jackpot!

#todays siivagunner #season 6 #siivagunner #siiva #Sponge Lord #Youtube #Bandcamp #pikmin #pikmin 2 #pikmin music #pikmin memes

[gay-robot]

okay so very rambling thoughts on undertale yellow and about clover specifically under the readmore, spoilers for all the routes

so theres a few main points about clover that color my perception of them

they repeatedly take/eat things that either arent food or are very dubious food, even by monster standards- martlet at one point comments on them grabbing food at a weird time

at one point the narration mentions that the sight of a cramped room gives them uncomfortable memories

flowey mentions that in all of the resets before the game where he watched clover, without his intervention they ALWAYS stay with toriel, every time.

so like. clover clearly hasnt had a good home life prior to the game.

and i feel like this feeds into this concept of, like. Justice™️ yk. they come down intentionally to find the other fallen children which is already like, painful amounts of self-negation/self-harm, but like this framing of it combined with what they do in a pacifist route gives me this impression that they desperately need to feel like theyre helping yk, and to me it feels like this idea has been distilled into them by their upbringing- a kid that self sacrifices to the degree of climbing mt ebott in the hopes of finding missing children, or to the degree of giving up their life in some endings, obviously does not have a healthy amount of self-worth. no matter which extreme they go for its still framed in this idea of doing something that is Just™️ in their view- BUT they're easily convinced that something is the correct choice, whether thats giving up their own life to benefit monsterkind after seeing whats happened to them as injustice, or whether its going on a rampage to "right the wrong" of the children disappearing and the fact that this initial motivation of theirs to find the children is so quickly defused by being shown genuine love and care from toriel. its only when, in previous timelines, flowey manipulates them into keeping their distance from her that they even leave the ruins and continue this idea of revenge, and even then as we see in the pacifist route they cant help but latch onto people who show them kindness. like the fact that theyre so easily defused puts them on the same level as the rest of the monsters who dont really even WANT to fight you, their only motivation being this generational trauma

like they are fundamentally a child. they have immense power in the form of the yellow justice soul but theyre a KID and so theyre easily pointed in new directions/outlets for that sense of "justice". you could even argue that them staying with toriel is learning to accept that justice is being done to them. and whats especially interesting about this is how their yellow soul powers manifest- like, for instance, the point on the no mercy route where they GAIN LV WITHOUT KILLING, something we've previously never seen. they realize that theyre face to face with someone who was immediately responsible for the death of a fallen child, and THAT causes them to immediately shoot up something like seven levels- because theyre powered by this idea of justice, or at this point closer to blind revenge. they dont have determination, they can only access the power of a human soul when its through this lens of righting a perceived wrong or getting revenge. on a pacifist route they ONLY enter the yellow soul shoot-em-up mode when their friends are blasted with an attack right next to them.

[onebluebookworm]

Ranking Books I Read in 2023: Top 5

5. House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski

This book is incredibly intimidating, but I'm begging you - if you want a unique horror experience that will change you forever, read this. It's phenomenal. Even Johnny's portions, which I got incredibly fed up with for a while, actually managed to do a 180 and be effective and scary. Seriously, horror fans, if you've been putting it off, read it this year.

4. Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror - W. Scott Poole

As previously stated, there are few scholars on the genre of horror who are better than W. Scott Poole. And this is one of his best, focusing on an important period in history that I honestly don't think gets talked about all that much. It's a very interesting piece that not only talks about horror fiction, but art, poetry, and even music created by people who were affected by the war and its aftermath. It's an amazingly informative read.

3. The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman's Extraordinary Life in Death, Decay, and Disaster - Sarah Krasnostein

What I thought was going to be a leering look into the lives of people who clean hording situation for a living turned out to be one of the most emotional and moving books I read all year. This really gets at the heart of not only the people who get into those situations, but the lives of the people who help them, through the life story of one very extraordinary person who lived an amazing life.

2. The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer

If Cotillion had fluff fun and hijinks after a rather stuffy opening, Sophy absolutely hits the floor running and does stop. Sophy rivals some of my favorite Jane Austen heroines in just how fun, smart, and likable she is. This is a great de-stress read, and I recommend it to any Heyer fan, regency romance fan, or just someone who needs something to make them smile

And 1. Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession With the Hideous and the Haunting - W. Scott Poole

This Poole book takes the ideas of Dark Carnivals and distills them to the much more precise idea of the American history of horror. A lot less heavy-handed than Dark Carnivals, but also incredibly well-researched and perfectly willing to skewer American attitudes regarding that hideous and haunting stuff we can't get enough of. W. Scott Poole's best, in my opinion.

#ranking books 2023 #house of leaves #mark z. danielewski #wasteland #w. scott poole #the trauma cleaner #sarah krasnostein #the grand sophy #georgette heyer #monsters in america

[0x7b]

Omegle has been shut down.

Posting here for posterity. Retrieved directly from omegle.com on Nov 8 2023

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” — C.S. Lewis

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” — Douglas Adams

Dear strangers,

From the moment I discovered the Internet at a young age, it has been a magical place to me. Growing up in a small town, relatively isolated from the larger world, it was a revelation how much more there was to discover – how many interesting people and ideas the world had to offer.

As a young teenager, I couldn’t just waltz onto a college campus and tell a student: “Let’s debate moral philosophy!” I couldn’t walk up to a professor and say: “Tell me something interesting about microeconomics!” But online, I was able to meet those people, and have those conversations. I was also an avid Wikipedia editor; I contributed to open source software projects; and I often helped answer computer programming questions posed by people many years older than me.

In short, the Internet opened the door to a much larger, more diverse, and more vibrant world than I would have otherwise been able to experience; and enabled me to be an active participant in, and contributor to, that world. All of this helped me to learn, and to grow into a more well-rounded person.

Moreover, as a survivor of childhood rape, I was acutely aware that any time I interacted with someone in the physical world, I was risking my physical body. The Internet gave me a refuge from that fear. I was under no illusion that only good people used the Internet; but I knew that, if I said “no” to someone online, they couldn’t physically reach through the screen and hold a weapon to my head, or worse. I saw the miles of copper wires and fiber-optic cables between me and other people as a kind of shield – one that empowered me to be less isolated than my trauma and fear would have otherwise allowed.

I launched Omegle when I was 18 years old, and still living with my parents. It was meant to build on the things I loved about the Internet, while introducing a form of social spontaneity that I felt didn’t exist elsewhere. If the Internet is a manifestation of the “global village”, Omegle was meant to be a way of strolling down a street in that village, striking up conversations with the people you ran into along the way.

The premise was rather straightforward: when you used Omegle, it would randomly place you in a chat with someone else. These chats could be as long or as short as you chose. If you didn’t want to talk to a particular person, for whatever reason, you could simply end the chat and – if desired – move onto another chat with someone else. It was the idea of “meeting new people” distilled down to almost its platonic ideal.

Building on what I saw as the intrinsic safety benefits of the Internet, users were anonymous to each other by default. This made chats more self-contained, and made it less likely that a malicious person would be able to track someone else down off-site after their chat ended.

I didn’t really know what to expect when I launched Omegle. Would anyone even care about some Web site that an 18 year old kid made in his bedroom in his parents’ house in Vermont, with no marketing budget? But it became popular almost instantly after launch, and grew organically from there, reaching millions of daily users. I believe this had something to do with meeting new people being a basic human need, and with Omegle being among the best ways to fulfill that need. As the saying goes: “If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.”

Over the years, people have used Omegle to explore foreign cultures; to get advice about their lives from impartial third parties; and to help alleviate feelings of loneliness and isolation. I’ve even heard stories of soulmates meeting on Omegle, and getting married. Those are only some of the highlights.

Unfortunately, there are also lowlights. Virtually every tool can be used for good or for evil, and that is especially true of communication tools, due to their innate flexibility. The telephone can be used to wish your grandmother “happy birthday”, but it can also be used to call in a bomb threat. There can be no honest accounting of Omegle without acknowledging that some people misused it, including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes.

I believe in a responsibility to be a “good Samaritan”, and to implement reasonable measures to fight crime and other misuse. That is exactly what Omegle did. In addition to the basic safety feature of anonymity, there was a great deal of moderation behind the scenes, including state-of-the-art AI operating in concert with a wonderful team of human moderators. Omegle punched above its weight in content moderation, and I’m proud of what we accomplished.

Omegle’s moderation even had a positive impact beyond the site. Omegle worked with law enforcement agencies, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, to help put evildoers in prison where they belong. There are “people” rotting behind bars right now thanks in part to evidence that Omegle proactively collected against them, and tipped the authorities off to.

All that said, the fight against crime isn’t one that can ever truly be won. It’s a never-ending battle that must be fought and re-fought every day; and even if you do the very best job it is possible for you to do, you may make a sizable dent, but you won’t “win” in any absolute sense of that word. That’s heartbreaking, but it’s also a basic lesson of criminology, and one that I think the vast majority of people understand on some level. Even superheroes, the fictional characters that our culture imbues with special powers as a form of wish fulfillment in the fight against crime, don’t succeed at eliminating crime altogether.

In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more ornery. Maybe that has something to do with the pandemic, or with political disagreements. Whatever the reason, people have become faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other’s shared humanity. One aspect of this has been a constant barrage of attacks on communication services, Omegle included, based on the behavior of a malicious subset of users.

To an extent, it is reasonable to question the policies and practices of any place where crime has occurred. I have always welcomed constructive feedback; and indeed, Omegle implemented a number of improvements based on such feedback over the years. However, the recent attacks have felt anything but constructive. The only way to please these people is to stop offering the service. Sometimes they say so, explicitly and avowedly; other times, it can be inferred from their act of setting standards that are not humanly achievable. Either way, the net result is the same.

Omegle is the direct target of these attacks, but their ultimate victim is you: all of you out there who have used, or would have used, Omegle to improve your lives, and the lives of others. When they say Omegle shouldn’t exist, they are really saying that you shouldn’t be allowed to use it; that you shouldn’t be allowed to meet random new people online. That idea is anathema to the ideals I cherish – specifically, to the bedrock principle of a free society that, when restrictions are imposed to prevent crime, the burden of those restrictions must not be targeted at innocent victims or potential victims of crime.

Consider the idea that society ought to force women to dress modestly in order to prevent rape. One counter-argument is that rapists don’t really target women based on their clothing; but a more powerful counter-argument is that, irrespective of what rapists do, women’s rights should remain intact. If society robs women of their rights to bodily autonomy and self-expression based on the actions of rapists – even if it does so with the best intentions in the world – then society is practically doing the work of rapists for them.

Fear can be a valuable tool, guiding us away from danger. However, fear can also be a mental cage that keeps us from all of the things that make life worth living. Individuals and families must be allowed to strike the right balance for themselves, based on their own unique circumstances and needs. A world of mandatory fear is a world ruled by fear – a dark place indeed.

I’ve done my best to weather the attacks, with the interests of Omegle’s users – and the broader principle – in mind. If something as simple as meeting random new people is forbidden, what’s next? That is far and away removed from anything that could be considered a reasonable compromise of the principle I outlined. Analogies are a limited tool, but a physical-world analogy might be shutting down Central Park because crime occurs there – or perhaps more provocatively, destroying the universe because it contains evil. A healthy, free society cannot endure when we are collectively afraid of each other to this extent.

Unfortunately, what is right doesn’t always prevail. As much as I wish circumstances were different, the stress and expense of this fight – coupled with the existing stress and expense of operating Omegle, and fighting its misuse – are simply too much. Operating Omegle is no longer sustainable, financially nor psychologically. Frankly, I don’t want to have a heart attack in my 30s.

The battle for Omegle has been lost, but the war against the Internet rages on. Virtually every online communication service has been subject to the same kinds of attack as Omegle; and while some of them are much larger companies with much greater resources, they all have their breaking point somewhere. I worry that, unless the tide turns soon, the Internet I fell in love with may cease to exist, and in its place, we will have something closer to a souped-up version of TV – focused largely on passive consumption, with much less opportunity for active participation and genuine human connection. If that sounds like a bad idea to you, please consider donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that fights for your rights online.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you to everyone who used Omegle for positive purposes, and to everyone who contributed to the site’s success in any way. I’m so sorry I couldn’t keep fighting for you.

Sincerely, Leif K-Brooks Founder, Omegle.com LLC

#omegle #rip

[otdderamin]

How Spoiler Alert and Bros Challenge Romance Movie Norms

Spoilers for Spoiler Alert (2022) and Bros (2022)

Thinking about how the romanticized cultural narrative we have about love is that two people meet, some spark connects them, and once they have the courage to let themselves be together, everything is just good forever.

And obviously that's bullshit or there wouldn't be so many breakups and divorces. But we rarely write stories about those. We want our stories to live in the limerence of new relationships where anything seems possible before the complexity of reality sets in.

The audience for allocishet normative media has very strict and often formulaic expectations for romance films. Guy meets girl, they fall in love, all obstacles are overcome through the power of love, and they live happily ever after. That audience really only supports that story.

Queer media comes from a vastly different and more complex tradition of romance. There is almost always a backdrop of the world trying to intervene. Even Big Eden (2000) in all its softness had this. There's a much greater love of messy relationships. There are no guarantees.

Bros flouted the heteronormative love story formula by being about two guys with commitment issues who often project their fears on each other and are sometimes even right. Bobby and Aaron have ideas about what they need to prove in life to show they're fulfilled & can't see past that.

It's a complicated journey to figuring out if they even want to be together. If all the baggage they're carrying can fit with them. And the end, parodying Hallmark endings, is simply an attempt, and not an answer. No pressure that it has to last forever.

Spoiler Alert is about a 13 year relationship that was an audience know from the begging will end in loss. The first act is short. They find each other, they connect, sometimes it's weird and awkward but they know very quickly they want to be together.

It's the middle that makes it profound. Where we flash forward and see the relationship after more than a decade. The complacency, the repeated mistakes, the hurt they've caused each other. Wondering if things have run their course.

And then the illness. The realization that they may not get to choose the end. That under the calcification of little built up resentments are all the reasons they still loved each other. Letting go is also no longer getting in your own way.

There was a realness to that. Things weren't just magically fixed. In many ways it's not sentimental. It's built on all the small moments that make you understand that you are alive in three constant presence of someone else because they've overall made your life better.

Both these films are about love without certainty that doesn't have to last forever to mean everything in its time. They are so deeply, inherently queer beyond being about gay men. They're about deeper realities in relationships normativity pushes aside but we need to talk about.

Either one of these films coming out this year would have been a good year in queer cinema. Both together—the spectrum of romcom and sentimental tragedy—are a landmark distillation of the last century of our media culture. I think both will join the canon of must see queer films.

Before I got into queer media, I would have told you I hated romance movies (even when I thought I was allocishet). If always felt forced worth nothing new to say. Turns out it's because allocishet media is culturally invested in saying nothing new about relationships and love.

But queer media inherently is about love that challenges norms. Love that has to be meaningful enough to risk loss for it. Love that's truely freeing instead of conforming to stale expectations. And so the stories we get to tell are far more interesting and real.

#Spoiler Alert #spoiler alert movie #Bros movie #Romance Movies #Queer Media #Queer Film

[docholligay]

Detective Pony

This was my May review, sponsored by @coolerthancats  it tips the scales at more than 3k words and eventually I had to just make (SPOILER) and (SPOILER) what I was doing so that I could finish. I was somewhat apprehensive about picking this up but as it turned out I did in fact have a thing or two to say

Non-spoiler:

You know, for these not-spoiler things, its’ always a little rough to try and distill and get across something in a way that would lead people to either read or not read it. Always. 

That being said, I’m not sure I’ve ever read a thing that is as impossible to define as Detective Pony. Even if I decided to go whole hog and spoil te whole thing, I’m not sure I could make any of it make any more sense in a condensed form. 

Detective Pony is a fanfic of the Pony Pals series, in particular the novel, as you might imagine, Detective Pony. It goes off the rails fairly quickly, and while it begins in an extremely weak toilet humor divergence, it eventually goes in to the nature of creation, the responsibility of the creator, and the what it means to be real. Jumping from chapter one to chapter, say, ten, would be a hell of a kind of whiplash. 

I’m not sure I recommend it wholesale, and I’m not even sure I LIKED it, as a work, but I love a lot of the ideas it plays with, and I do think it was worth reading, at least for me. So, if you haven’t read it, it is, at least, free and very easy to get and if you have any interest in postmodern fiction, you may as well give it a shot. 

SPOILERS BELOW

Before I get into this, I need to say that I was only made aware...I think midway through watching the show of it, that Detective Pony was based on Homestuck. I have never seen nor read nor anything, to do with Homestuck. Except, I suppose, this. So whatever I come to on Detective Pony will be sola scriptura. 

Also before I get into this: Because of the very nature of this story, it’s necessary for me to separate the author within and without the work. So whenever I say “The author” I mean the character/Dirk, and whenever I say “The writer” I mean the human being who committed this story to page. Okay. 

You know what it reminds me of…and I might even like it better, which I am sure will cause someone to remove my literature degree from orbit, is House of Leaves. It has the same sense of unreality, the same type of postmodernist feels, and the use of academic style on conversation to sort of…take the piss out of academic style and conversation. I know House of Leaves is considered a masterwork (And this isn’t me trying to discredit House of Leaves) but I think Detective Pony has a lot of the same markers to it and could be taken as seriously as it, if one really wanted to crack it open. 

And I will say I think this makes it weaker to see as a youtube series than to read. Was this was given to me, I assumed I’d rewatch the youtube series, but I found reading it to not only be easier, but honestly more enjoyable and better expressed the sense of the story and the text falling apart under scrutiny. I watched it first, but I think the better experience is to read it. 

I appreciate the way that it broke down some of the more poetic things, even as a person who enjoys those sort of things. So for example, in chapter three, something that made me laugh out loud, Acorn and Minos are going back and forth about the nature of the Acorn, and in response to a jab about getting eaten by a squirrel, Acorn says that if it chooses, the acorn may sprout through the stomach and--

“No it can’t, that’s not how seeds work. And you know as well as I do that’s not the point. Why are you pretending to be that which you are not?” 

And this is sort of, as I type it out, a perfect summation of so much of the work, and how it threads the needle back and forth, in its best moments, between the serious and the silly, tearing down these metaphorical ways of expressing ideas and then immediately heading back into the larger questions being asked by the work. 

In chapter five, it begins tipping its hand to what eventually will become a main crux of what its talking about--inserting the author in the story, what it means to play God, what we owe creation--and it does it all with a near-throwaway joke, when it decides to separate itself from the frankly annoying jokes about Pam and her alcoholism, and refuses to let her be drinking alcohol out of her thermos, and hot soup instead. I think it ends up determining that we do owe our characters the right to be themselves, and in a way it could almost be taken, though I do not think this is the intention even slightly or remotely, as an argument against fanfic that changes some of the essential nature of the characters, which I am very pro, being as so many things fanfic is written from are, as they say in the old country, fucking stupid. 

References to Dante: The first time I watched this, I literally said out loud: “Is that fucking terza rima?” and it is. It is. IN all of the effort I have ever made in writing my fanfiction, I’m not sure I ever would have thought to reference a work by pattern like that, or maybe I would so long as it wasn’t something so terrifically complicated to work with. Granted, it’s not very long but as a survivor of a CW Poetry class (Doc, you wrote poetry? In that I committed words to paper and was graded for them, sure! It was not QUITE the shitshow nightmare that Playwriting was for me, but BOY was it a struggle) I was still impressed. 

This isn’t the first novel, and it won’t be the last, where an intense amount of ideas and structure will come from the Inferno--it’s one of the most influential works in the Western canon*-- but I love the way it just doesn’t reference it, but it leverages the reference as a weapon against the controlling character, having Anna use her role as Beatrice (and I am not sure I agree that I think Beatrice could do this, but I’m willing enough to hear the argument that it doesn’t bother me at all within the story) to gain control over Minos and Dirk, who I SUPPOSE I’ll call the antagonists of the piece. At least temporarily and in a sense, depending on how we feel about the ending. 

The author:  Man, I love the part in the end of chapter five, where it started off telling some stupid joke about Pam’s alcoholism and then decides not to do that, and goes into this whole idea about what we owe or characters, and what the author is even doing here. The author talks about how when he started, it was intentionally melodramatic and turgid, but now he’s not sure what he’s doing. Now he’s afraid this might be actually a way he’s writing to work through his demons, and that he an no longer tell if he’s sincere or putting things on. I think that this is probably the thing that speaks most to me, as a person obsessed with the idea of the writer as character and what that means for us. So many writers think of themselves as outside the narrative, but when you’re the one moving the action, your worldview can’t help but come into it

And so, that being true, can’t it be that the world in which we live is only a reflection of God’s fucking priorities? Us having been created by him, in his image, if you believe that sort of thing, aren’t our failures and cruelties and failings just his, repackaged? Are we helping God work out his bullshit in the way we work out our bullshit on each other? 

Even in this, the author is both the God of this world and prey to it--in Chapter 8, he references Betancourt and the inevitable outcome of convincing her to destroy Acorn. But just as quickly, he admits that Betancourt is only who he has written her to be, and in this way, he’s referring what could happen to himself as we continue on this deconstruction of this text, while also directly calling out what a very common postmodernist take ON this story would be. 

I’m just gonna call this section “Speaking of fucking Derrida”: So fun fact, I actually fucking hated my lit crit class. I think this may come as somewhat of a surprise given that I literally majored in The Study of Literature, but Lit study is a lot of things! It’s history, it’s technique, it’s analysis, but it is also unfortunately, criticism**. And this isn’t me being one of those whiny ass bitches going “How dare they make me study things that relevant to the field I apparently care about” but I just want to put it out there. 

Anyway whoever the fuck wrote this clearly also has some kind of background in criticism and theory, and while, I am so sorry that happened to you, that’s exactly where the writer gets this whole idea in chapter 7 with speaking as reading, writing and reading as being meaningfully the same, is fucking Derrida!! Derrida has this whole thing about genesis and when I read the bottom of page 51, I flashed back immediately to sitting in that class and losing my mind. And it isn’t just that, there’s references ot Barthes, some pretty in depth conversation about deconstruction of the text, etc. It’s the kind of philosophy, frankly, that I’m just not into. This isn’t a sin (That I am currently both writing and reading) against Detective Pony, per se, but I am right there with Acorn when, in the next line, he goes, “What in the Christ-shitting fuck are you talking about?” which was basically how I experienced 75% of my Lit Crit class, if you follow with, “and is there any reason other than intellectual masturbation?” 

But I mean, seriously, I genuinely need to know what kind of formal education this writer has, because the things and ideas referenced here are very very specific critical ideas, and unless you’re a literature or philosophy major, or just a fucking weirdo, these are not ideas you’re likely to have come into contact with. And I mean, I guess the point is to both take down the absolute elitist level of self-pleasure people get from discussing these ideas that I have very very fucking strong feelings on, but also, at the same time is it not REWARDING those of us who know this inane bullshit? I mean, who among us doesn’t like to feel like a special girl and get their head patted for being ‘in the know’? It’s the whole reason elitism EXISTS. 

And eventually Anna has no choice, before in a sense, destroying him, but to call him on that, to make it clear that all this high-minded language is meant to do is to separate the reader from the actual idea, something that actually bars human connection more than it helps it. And even having this higher-level education, I don’t necessarily disagree. There’s no reason, for example, to use intradiegetic and extradiegetic when you could use in or out of universe, or in or out of narrative, both of which are easily understandable to most English speakers. And there’s for sure no fucking reason to reinvent literary terminology by using the absolutely fuck-stupid words Doylist and Watsonian, which is a bunch of people with no literature education deciding that they do want gatekeeper vocabulary, but also don’t want to open a book long enough to discover these words actually exist. Talk about things that are my fucking killswitch. 

Which makes me think of, and leads me to, my next subject:

Pharmakon: LORD, the whole fucking pharmakon thing ahah. I do get it, I’m not stupid, so when he’s referring to this idea of the poison and the cure, he’s talking about the work itself, but more than that, he’s talking about his own insertion in the work, and the earlier references to sincerity, honesty, and the contract of creation. 

And part of that, which occurred to me as I was watching it but rang even still truer in written form, is this tension between actual intelligence and depth and this faux-depth, you know what I’m talking about, it’s Evangelion, it’s that one guy from your college class. One thing I really enjoyed about this book is that it brings up the question, repeatedly, of “Is this legitimate analysis, or am I talking out my ass?” and then refuses to answer that, I think because the author-as-character doesn’t himself know, and maybe even the writer of the work. Maybe, instead, it’s both. Maybe it is in fact asking us questions about our own lives, or maybe it’s a bunch of fucking references just slapped together, and maybe which it is changes based on the situation or the moment. 

Actually, the weakest parts of the book are when it falls back to the toilet humor, and I will say that until I fucking drop--whenever it gets into “shitting everywhere” or Pawneee being drunk or whatever, I roll my eyes. BUT, but, I wonder if part of what that intensely fucking annoying plot point is doing is reminding us that this is, in some ways, a childish work, both in its literal source material and in the “humor” and “wisdom” of the creator. Not letting us think that just because we’re writing in terza rima and making Derrida jokes that this is, in whole and entire, an ELEVATED work. In being the poison and the cure, it is both high and low literature

There are so many good lines in this, especially about writing

“...he resorts toi weird bullshit in the hope that no one will notice its masking incompetence” Every writer who’s ever done something with odd structure or wording: Sucks teeth. I count myself in that sucking teeth thing--I think most writers have a form of imposter syndrome, I know I often am like “I’m a bad writer and also not good. Anything good I ever wrote was long ago” and that may or may not be true, but I think this messaging hits very close to the heart for a lot of writers who try experimental things. Certainly there are plenty who are up their own ass, but there are also plenty who wonder if they’re covering for lack of skill in the classic way. 

“Why is that text ‘right’? It’s the original one sure, but why does originality have any moral value attached to it?” --me saying ‘my city now’ about all my blorbos. 

Actually, I suppose while we’re on writing, let’s talk about the end of this book, because I think the end of this book really about writing, and about taking the text and committing violence against it to serve your own means. Putting yourself in your writing is sold as a positive, and I don’t think the story is necessarily saying that it is a negative, but I think what it ends up coming down on is that your characters and your text deserve to be more than a way for you to work out your demons and fucking study yourself. That we have total control over the narrative, and so, we can only remove ourselves so much FROM that. Even when we “give up” control, can we really? And what does that make us as both creator and destroyer? 

Anyway, I have a million others things I could talk about or say but tis is already much longer than it was meant to be while still feeling like I have not really reached a conclusion and am also trapped in a labyrinth of my own making. But, unlike Dirk, I can make the choice to leave it without having my narrative literally have to rise up against me, and I have to finish getting the parts in place for a vacation. 

*Later on I am going to speak about how studying a field means that sometimes you have to have a comprehensive knowledge of things you don’t like. I think of this whenever I hear a literature major complaining about having to read the Western canon. Like, you are studying the field over time. We can argue, not incorrectly, that how the canon was formed is annoying, but like…Hemingway was HUGELY influential to modern literature, to bring in an author I do genuinely dislike. You have to have an understanding of how we got here, and because of political, social, and historical realities, that involves reading a lot of dead white men. This why some schools, like the one I attended, allow you to have a concentration, like a minorlet, in some different kinds of Literature, without having a separate degree. Anyway, you should be arguing about reading MORE, and broadening our base as scholars of the craft, rather than replacing SHIT YOU SHOULD KNOW. I am utterly unimpressed and completely understand why it is considered a puff degree every time I talk to an English major who doesn’t understand references to fucking Steinbeck or Bronte or Dostoyevsky. You do, in fact, have to read a lot, including things you do not care for to have a broad understanding and appreciation of how literature is CRAFTED and historically steered. Anyway, read Dante, bitches. 

**THis is not the same as broad analysis, like, for example, what I do in liveblogs or what I’m doing here. I love that shit. It’s also not COMPLAINTS, which unfortunately is what the internet thinks when you say things like “Be critical of your media” when what that really meant was to engage with it meaningfully and thoughtfully, some of which, ironically, is fucking elided over time by the tendency to complain about media in these black and white, right and wrong terms and so we FIND FAULT instead of CRITIQUE anyway all this to say: Criticism, as I am speaking of it here, is the field of how to think about things, and, regrettably, a lot of French fucks masturbating furiously onto paper

#doc reads #I guess???

[bleachbleachbleach]

7/2 - 7/19/2023

It’s been kind of hard to get back into thinking about my WIP? Which is an interesting experience, because yeah, sure, getting back into the idea of writing (what are words? who are these characters even) is usually a challenge, the "rotating this WIP in my brain" part is not. The Rotations have been a part of nearly every day for years, up until I needed to get serious about writing my Train Fanfic. And now it’s been almost three weeks and I’m still… honestly just fixated on my Train Fanfic. Every day, still thinking about it!! Train!

I did have to write something for another fandom a bit ago, which I wasn’t initially excited about. It’s for a challenge I’ve participated in every year since 2010, and have helped mod for a lot of that time. As mod, I basically get assigned whatever prompt set we think will be hard to give to a regular participant. Friends, the prompts were Not Good, LOL, and I’m really a very one-fandom-at-a-time kind of person, so I was like, "but... this is not Bleach... I do not want it right now!" It was actually a fantastic writing experience, though—I loved spending time with my blorbos in that fandom, and the writing went really quickly; I finished in 4 hours what for Bleach would take me 12 hours to 12 weeks, and I certainly can’t complain about that.

I really love how telegraphic you can get with the writing over there, and how that allows you to slash away so much narrative, really pare it down, and let the shorthand stand on its own. I think it works so well there because if you write late enough in the canon the characters have these very rote, old hat experiences they don’t feel the need to narrate in full, and the same goes with their relationship to each other. I’m not saying that can’t be done in Bleach, but I often feel like there’s a degree of novelty to most Bleach experiences where like, some weird shit is going down so even what is routine can’t entirely be so; or they’re doing it in new company, or after some fresh set of circumstances that have changed the terms of engagement in either major or minor ways, or they’re going to have to remember to write a report about it later; and the POV character is often needing to take all these things into account. Which is also enjoyable! And I’m not saying my blorbos in this other fandom are static and never have new experiences lol. I just think they’ve perfected the art of distilling their experiences very efficiently, and/or being comfortable with giving less of a shit. It was fun to write in that space!

I also wrote a bit of a Bleach fic I started last summer, which I’d backburnered because while I’m interested in the character relationship and the general premise, I haven’t yet been able to tell myself why it would need to be a story. And without those answers, it just feels kind of gratuitous in a way that I don’t like. There is more of it now, and there are more ideas with promise, but also more elements that feel gratuitous. I know I’m talking in vague generalities. But it’s kind of like—I don’t want to do this character the disservice of presenting her experiences as smooth and soft and clean when they surely were not; but it also feels like to delve into the parts that are jagged and awful requires a really strong narrative/character payoff. Because otherwise I’m like, well, she deserves to have stories that don’t need to be told. So I still need to figure out what the story is that needs to be told, and why it would need to include these things. I KNOW, THE VAGUE GENERALITIES, B3 WHAT ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT. I am talking about wanting to write a post-Soul Society arc fanfic about Hinamori and Jiroubou, which is surely the natural precipitate of a Soul Society Arc rewatch. It involves a lot of negative interactions with Gotei civil servants and the Gotei healthcare system, and how condor!Tobiume came to be, and a lot of suffering that, while 100% already extant in canon, just makes me feel like… if it’s all to be written out instead of something that happens behind closed doors, then it had better be worth her time.

But what I really want to finish this summer is finish Part 1 of my WIP, not work on this absurd Jiroubou fic!! I have no idea why I was doing that. Rukia has so many things to do in her chapters! Renji has a vending machine to encounter in his! There are alarmingly forthright heart-to-hearts with Akon to be had! Why am I not writing these things, and why have I not written them at any point in the last three weeks!!!!!

#i wrote this so i could convince myself to actually write my wip #self!! go!!!!