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longreads · 1 month
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In a new Longreads essay, Arkansas writer Jordan P. Hickey writes about a Palestinian American chef who honors her family's roots and culinary traditions through her pop-up bakery and cooking classes
And while these aren’t the most complex dishes to grace the text thread, they are the most remarkable, the most joyful, because they are the most improbable. They’re celebrated not because they’re beautiful, but because it means the family ate well that day—because they made something out of nothing.
Read Jordan’s essay, “The Expanding Table: Honoring Palestinian Culinary Tradition in Arkansas,” on Longreads.
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atavist · 1 year
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When Lesley Hu wanted to vaccinate her young son, her conspiracy-obsessed ex-husband went to unimaginable lengths to stop her. Issue no. 137 — “Sins of the Father” — is now live at The Atavist.
When Hu discovered that Pierce wasn’t at school, she wondered if O’Loughlin had agreed to the vaccinations only because he was plotting to steal Pierce away before their son could receive them. To Hu it wasn’t improbable—her ex seemed that far gone. Hu and her boyfriend, Jim Baaden, had recently decided to move in together; Hu was planning to tell Pierce the news that evening at dinner. Now Baaden picked Hu up at Pierce’s school, and together the couple sped to O’Loughlin’s home in San Francisco’s posh Marina District, trying not to dwell on worst-case scenarios. When they arrived outside O’Loughlin’s Mediterranean-style apartment building, they noticed that the blinds in the living room, which was on the ground floor of the unit, were drawn but disheveled. For a moment, Baaden recoiled. O’Loughlin was a gun owner. What if he’d barricaded himself and Pierce in the apartment? Baaden imagined O’Loughlin aiming the barrel between the blinds, ready to shoot. Baaden and Hu approached the building’s intercom and buzzed O’Loughlin’s apartment. No one answered. Hu began banging on the door to the building and screaming. She considered breaking in, but Baaden told her to call 911 instead. Hu could not fathom how someone like O’Loughlin—a man of means and privilege—had come to believe outrageous lies. She knew that various misinformation networks and snake-oil salesmen had facilitated her ex’s paranoia and exploited his psychological fragility. But Hu had always stayed focused on what she considered her most important task: raising and protecting Pierce. There would be time in the future to consider, almost endlessly, what happened to O’Loughlin. For now, in a panic, all Hu could do was wonder: Where had he taken their son?
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god if you are looking for some bitchy longform hobby drama tonight please read this article about a man who claimed to be the first unsupported solo person to cross Antarctica without mentioning that he was basically on the polar equivalent of an interstate highway. I really can't attempt to even sum up how many of his claims are disputed by how many people who hate him it's hilarious
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all-pacas · 1 year
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What, exactly, went wrong with How I Met Your Mother?
On January 28th 2023, Neil Patrick Harris reprised his role as Barney Stinson for the spin off show How I Met Your Father. After the episode aired, one of the show’s creators, Isaac Apator, was interviewed by Entertainment Weekly about getting Harris on board:
Hilary [Duff] was so excited to work with Neil. […] They have so much in common — they both were these giant TV stars when they were still in middle school and now they've both fronted the How I Met series.
Hang on. What?
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How I Met Your Mother, or HIMYM, was a sitcom that ran from 2005 to 2013. While it never reached the beloved status, or ratings, of its similar precursor Friends, it was well-liked and respected, receiving decent praise, viewers, the occasional Emmy nominee — especially during its earlier seasons. It had a solid cast with great chemistry, and, with the premise of the show being that the main character, Ted, was retelling the story to his children decades later, HIMYM had the freedom to play around with its narrative, playing with non-linearity, flash backs and flash forwards, and unreliable narration, all while keeping exceptionally strong continuity from season to season. HIMYM had a solid and devoted fanbase, active fandom, and seemed primed to live a comfortable life in syndication after it came to an end in March 2014.
And then the finale aired, and things all fell apart so thoroughly, and so horribly, that it wasn’t until Game of Thrones that any show’s finale came close to betraying expectations and thumbing the eye of the majority of the viewers as HIMYM’s ending did.
The wedding of fan-favorites Barney and Robin, the focal point of much of the show, led immediately to a quick and brushed passed divorce. The friendships of ‘the gang,’ said repeatedly to be that of family and all-important, fall apart, with Robin leaving for decades and Barney quietly vanishing halfway through. The mother, perfectly cast and played by Cristin Milioti, is killed via voice over. Characters are shoved into position, relationships waved away, and in the final moments Ted and Robin, a relationship the viewers were told again and again was both impossible and would never happen… happened. And that’s a wrap.
Backlash was huge. A relatively-thriving fandom died overnight. Complaints were innumerable: The finale ruined the entire show. It came out of nowhere. It made no sense. The series creators admitted to having written it, in part, in the show’s second season, long before many of the show’s pivotal relationships and character arcs; it no longer worked in the show’s ninth. An alternative ending was cobbled together from existing footage and intentionally leaked. Carter Bays and Craig Thomas’s other projects were repeatedly rejected.
The finale had defenders, but was nearly universally panned, with even those who liked the premise finding fault in the execution. It seemed to come out of nowhere, and slap the viewers and fans in the face. It contradicted episodes and seasons before. How could anyone think it was a good idea!?
Where did the show go wrong?
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lacunha · 11 months
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Heather Moni now live on the site. lacuna.one
Now also writing on Substack. Subscribe for free. A paid subscription there gets you full access to all the imagery on lacuna.one.
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brightoakgame · 3 months
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Author's Marginalia - 4
This year is edging closer and closer to ending, and simultaneously toward the beginning of the new. It feels like there has been something lost in Western culture; back when the winters spanned longer, darker, lit with candles or the shadowed flickering of gaslight, so did our stories trend more to shadowed tales and huddling together for warmth. A Christmas Carol is a ghost story not because it is a seasonal outlier: rather, it was shaped from the coal smoke choked skies of Victorian England, caught between the dreadful and furious progress of industry, and the haunted trappings of ancient tradition.
December is a liminal space, neither here nor there, an end that anticipates a beginning. No wonder, then, how easy it is to feel set adrift.
(content warning: grief and depression)
I, too, have occupied a liminal space these last few months, attempting to push through some of the most severe burnout and depression I've experienced in decades. It has been slinking in the corners of my mind since midsummer, sometimes only glimpsed in the periphery of my vision, sometimes flaring out abruptly and swallowing all thought and reason with its ferocious, ever-hungry maw, so that I too become part of that echoing, dark--nothing. Sometimes it feels like I am inhabiting my own world as a ghost: I go to raise my stylus or address my keyboard, and my hand seems to pass through it entirely. I drift from room to room. I converse without any substance. I am a poltergeist that opens the cupboards and doors and goes through the motions, and yet my efforts at normalcy only seem to disturb the other inhabitants of my life. People turn to speak to me: I am not there. My partner complained recently about the bourbon-soaked phantom that wore my skin the night before, expounding on their very genuine desire to be carted off by the fae and eaten. He was unamused: the tipsy phantom had been in deathly earnest. I reminded him patiently that he knew who I was when he married me, and laughed it off.
The fae did not respond to my summons, which I am grateful and sorry for by turns.
December intrigues me more and more as I grow older, because I see December as a month of both storytelling and death in equal measures. I do not place more weight on tragedies than I do on comedies (if anything, I find comedy much more challenging!), but as desperate as I am for connection in art, death and grief are irresistible as mysteries and great unifiers.
Each breath comes with an inhale, and then exhale; every life will at some point encounter death. And grief, in my experience, loves to tell stories--the things that came Before, the things I maybe did not know, the embellishments given to quite ordinary things, crystalline now as past, exquisite and multi-faceted with loving truths and illuminating falsehoods.
I began writing Bright Oak in 2017: a very different time, feels like, though not so long past in the bigger picture. Between then and now, I've known many deaths and Deaths, rebirths and (quite literal) births, losses and gains. Friendships have washed upon my shores and receded again, as friendships seem wont to do, reshaping my perceptions, sometimes gently, sometimes not, and often leaving treasure in their wake. People are at heart truly, painfully lovely animals, I think.
I write because I want to understand better than I do; I write beloved friends and well-intentioned enemies, and they spirit me away to a world beyond, someplace where the water and air carry our meaning further and with more clarity, but with voices never too loud, never too harsh. I can hear them all. I know them better than I know myself; they know me better than I know myself. And they, too, will eventually fall to ebb tide, and wash back out into the vast sea of a world of things I do not properly understand. But I get to treasure them for that little time, and now I wish to share them with others before they go, like a collection of beautiful shells and pearls wrought from all I fear and all I do not understand.
Death visits us all, and so many, many times. I do not have to dig to know that I start the vast majority of my stories with accidents: I can pinpoint the day I felt my childhood ended, with the loss of a dear friend in a car wreck. The end of one chapter, when things were more heedless, but safe; the beginning of another, when things were dangerous, but a little wiser. There have been many, many chapters since. We are each of us anthologies, to a one; our tree rings show the times of plenty and the times of drought, the fires and the trauma, the slow recovery, the growing-over of scars, the knots and flaws and fine-grained beauty.
My favorite cemetery in town is a public park (and I admit, if this doesn't out me as a former goth kid, I don't know what would). One of my very earliest memories in life is of going to a playground with my mother on a bright weekend morning, trying to bring the sky ever closer while playing on the swing set, and making a new friend in the process. They asked if I knew what ghosts were: I did not, and they explained succinctly that ghosts were dead people that now chased living people, and did I want to play ghosts with them, since there were gravestones right over there-- a clear harbinger of ghosts being present?
I did not enjoy the game; I did not like being chased by ghosts in a rough and tumble round of monster tag. My mother, perhaps to calm me, pulled me aside and proceeded to read to me the poetic epitaphs of the last century headstones that bookended the playground, telling me how much she and my grandmother appreciated these final words set in stone: sometimes rote, sometimes religious, sometimes romantic, sometimes cryptic (pun fully intended).
It often recurred as a setting in dreams during my teens and early twenties. It wasn't until far later, when I moved back to my hometown, that I realized that this was a place that existed in reality, and was not merely a mishmash invention of dreams. After all, what cemetery has monkeybars and a swing set?
It's an old burial ground (at least, by Southern California standards); the graves outlasted the people still around to tend them, and sometime in the last century, it fell into extreme disrepair, and eventually was closed off to the public. Further, it was entirely bulldozed over when miscreants regularly gathered there for the purpose of vandalism and unrecorded mayhem, and after some hullabaloo over the matter, a handful of the old gravestones (belonging, of course, to the more prominent of the permanent denizens) were collected and lined up tidily in the corner of the green space, like a forgotten backstop, craggy granite guardians of the nearby playground.
I love this place, filled as it is with towering old trees, screaming children running amok (and quite possibly playing ghost-tag), people laying out obliviously to sunbathe, or picnicking blithely over the many-hundreds of dead some feet below the surface. It is such a poetic space to me, because try as we may to circumscribe death to a remote and out of the way corner, divorced and isolated from all things Life, it strikes me that death is the very foundation of all life as it proceeds. Death is in the day's end, the unfinished arguments, the words left unsaid, the little losses, the griefs we carry that we are not the person we were, and have not become the person we meant to be. Grief is the bittersweet knowledge that once I was one of those shrieking children, and once I sat on the periphery of the park, oblivious and sipping a coffee, and then I learned its story, and now I am able to tell it--and someday, someday I shall likely forget it, and tell it no more.
We are all the fickle authors of our own stories, and we all know the death that comes with the ending of one chapter, the bittersweet grief of letting it go and beginning anew. I dearly hope December treats every one of you with kindness; that the stories you tell, and those which you tell yourselves, bring warmth and comfort. Even ghost stories are not all bad--particularly when we can all huddle together around the bonfire, peeking at the stars as they show between plumes of smoke.
In this time of intense personal darkness, I am looking through the smoke to those stars. I am grateful for those who huddle at my side, imaginary and otherwise. And I look forward to the beginnings which I know to be just there, over the horizon.
B.
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themerlinrewrite · 9 months
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only hot girls write 276 pages of fanfic so they can turn a show into a book
(i'm at 110.7k words and i'm only on the seventh chapter)
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anony-poet · 4 days
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Twelve, Eighteen
TW: This is a longform prose poem with mentions of child abuse and themes of suicidal ideation and extreme dissociation - However, it has a happy ending.
I was twelve years old the first time I grieved my own death.
The first time the last piece was carved out of me And there was nothing left.
The first time I felt nothing when the blows landed on my skin.
I was twelve years old the day I wrote my own eulogy I tore pages out of my notebook and scrawled out an apology I told my friends I loved them I folded the pages three times over and hid them in my desk.
That night I prayed to every god I knew And I cried for the little girl who would never make it to thirteen.
I felt her give in, I felt her light go out And when I woke up the next morning She was gone.
And six years passed In a grey kind of blur I managed to keep my body alive And I fought for moments of light For the tiniest spark of the girl I used to be-
And there were times I thought I felt her Times I was alive again But she always faded away
And for six years I was a ghost.
I was eighteen years old when I cleaned out my old desk Days away from moving to a college dorm I found a few pieces of paper hidden in the back of the clutter They were folded three times over.
I gently unfolded them with shaking fingers And I sat on my bed And I read each page The letters on that paper a sharp knife in an old wound.
For six years I was under water My eyes closed, senses muffled Floating in darkness and the comfort of nothing
I was eighteen years old the first time I came up for air.
I read each word of that little girl's obituary Every sentence a gulp of freezing oxygen into aching lungs
I tore those pages up Set them on fire Sprinkled the ashes in the river
And for a second time, I grieved.
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fledbeast578 · 3 months
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Just finished the event. Overall I have some mixed feelings on it, spoilers obviously
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In terms of positives I really loved how they portrayed Jiang Ziya, and while he's easy to make fun of, I personally felt that his failure within the story was easy to understand within context. Even if we didn't see Daji proper, I liked how they characterized their relationship, and I like the implication that Jiang Ziya loved this evil of humanity enough to try and make their relationship work. I don't know if it was intended or not, but I took the ending scene as a subtle implication that his wife was Daji, and he remade the expression based on her last words.
The happy ending was honestly a surprise, although it didn't feel super deserved. I don't hate Koyanskaya, but if we had just killed her and destroyed the reality marble I wouldn't pity the loss of it any more than the other lostbelts, especially when they kept beating in how they were all non sentient. But overall it was a very heartwarming ending, and showed off the best of Jiang Ziya.
In terms of negative, almost everyone except Jiang Ziya is barely a character. Ibuki was literally bimbofied the entire time, which is weird to think about when it's the same author as Heian Kyo (the main interlude where she's literally capable of becoming a beast and is on a similar level to a literal god). The beast part is especially weird to think about because there could be no contribution from Ibuki on how Koyanskaya actually loved humanity.
Dobryna was only barely better. Her dragon was awful and contributed nothing other than being yet another comic relief animal companion. She was fairly generic in the story proper, and her ending didn't really make it better, it felt completely thrown in there to say "Dobryna had a reason to be one of the three total servants with a main story role!"
Mash was fine, Habetrot didn't have a story role.
Koyanskaya I'm a bit mixed on because I don't hate her reveal so much as I think her previous roles in the story didn't lead up to it. On the one hand the reveal she wasn't a Tamamo was out of nowhere... On the other it's not like they were doing anything with it before. It's ultimately just a weird thing for them to do, because it wasn't a good twist or one I absolutely despised
Ivan completely dipping was the funniest and worst part of the singularity, and giving players a total 10sq was not remotely worth it
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grandmotherjay · 3 months
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Hiiiii I dont have a specific question I just want a TED talk on turning the sacred secular 😂 what do you want people to know? Do you have a favorite text for it?
Dear friend —
I don't have much to say; I still need to pin down my methods! I'm too new to speak as any authority.
What I can do in good conscience, though, is show you an example from my first time using The Amber Knife as a sacred text. I chose the PaRDeS method listed in Praying with Jane Eyre, which examines the extended meaning of a text through the direct meaning (Peshat), the allegoric meaning (Remez), the comparative meaning (Derashz), and the esoteric meaning bestowed by inspiration (Sod). For some reason, PwJE switches Remez and Derashz — probably because it makes it easier to open up meaning for those not brought up with this Jewish theory of Biblical reading. The passage I selected my sentence from was chosen randomly. 
Be warned: Here be spoilers. Turn back now if you wish to remain in suspense.
"'By their questions shall ye see the serpent gnawing at their heart...'" — The Subtle Knife, Chapter 6, Philip Pullman, p. 460 (Omnibus Edition)
When I initially chose this quote, reverberating as it did in my mind, I thought I might try to follow the word "serpent." You see, his Dark Materials is a response to Milton's Paradise Lost. The discrepancy in Pullman's use of the word snake (indicating knowledge or a coiled attack) versus serpent (indicating power, seemingly negative in connotation) could have been an exciting road to follow. The sentence is uttered by a dying man cursing his enemy, highlighting the word: serpent. His crowing death-speech declares our hero, Lee Scoresby, an enemy of the Church in the same breath that he references the Sermon on the Mount. Visions abound of duplicity and enemies revealed.
But no, "serpent" was not the initial snare in this quote for me. It was the word "questions."
Direct Meaning
Let me paint the passage more thoroughly for you: Lee Scoresby and his hare-dæmon, Hester, have traveled by dog sled to the North to the Imperial Muscovite Academy's observatory. He is looking to ask after Stan Grumman, who had studied there over the years and is now rumored to be dead. The astronomers, stymied in their studies by an impenetrable fog, are eager to talk. Conversation ranges from his nationality, field of study, and academic connections. While everyone else natters on, the dying man — not yet dead — is observing the conversational turns with open hostility. Scoresby recognizes by his ring that the Church employs this Skraeling to suppress and censor the heretical ideas that these philosophers (natch, scientists) might propose. Emboldened, Scoresby asks the fatal question: Was Grumman studying Dust?
Conversation screeches to a halt, the philosophers waiting for the Church censor to make his answer.
Thus, Scoresby and Skraeling enter into a pas-de-deux that we (the audience) recognize as full of half-truths and obfuscations. With neither side giving ground, Scoresby decides to take his leave.
Moments into his journey down the mountainside, the Skraeling's dæmon, an owl, attacks Hester and the man himself fires his arrows at Scoresby. Scoresby defends himself, shooting the man in the leg. The Scrawling dies there, crowing about how the Church knows Scoresby is an enemy, blood sinking into the snow: a martyr to his own mind. Hester convinces Scoresby to take the Skraeling's ring, the physical symbol of his connection to the Church, with these words: "…we're renegades. Not by our choice, but by his malice."
Utter chills.
Comparative Meaning
The word "question" is used one hundred and seventeen times across the three books of His Dark Materials. Only eleven of those times are verbs: "questioning," "questioned." Every other instance is a noun, which suggests that this idea of "question" is neither an action nor a state of being: it's something you possess. Foreign language classes light up in the back of my brain. In Romance languages, certain states of being like "hungry," "thirsty," and "tired" are expressed with the auxiliary verb indicating ownership or action instead of being. I understand that to mean that those states are temporary, not endemic to a person — not like the color of their eyes or their natural temperament. Applied here, it feels the same: no matter how possessed of a question you are, it does not subsume you. (This philosophy is mirrored by a quote from Mary Malone in Book 3, The Amber Spyglass: "I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.")
Across the three books, only thirteen (-ish, I was super tired when I counted) instances of the word are used in connection with the antagonists and their allies. Although the Magisterium, the Church corporation that controls the release of philosophical thought according only to its principles, could be expected to be incurious — why would another antagonist, Lord Asriel, who has set himself in opposition to the Church, be similarly devoid of questions in this book?
Questions fall particularly thick and fast when it comes to Dust. (A moment here to loosely sketch the idea of Dust for those unfamiliar: Dust is a sort of elementary particle that both makes up consciousness and is, in and of itself, conscious. It is attracted to and created by acts of creativity, inspiration, and knowledge; thus, it attracts very strongly to adults, being responsible for freezing the shape of the dæmon iirc, but rarely alights on children. The Church considers this proof of The Original Sin. While humans and other creatures can see it and/or communicate with it through means like the I-Ching, the alethiometer, etc., angels are composed of it, including The Authority (God), first of the angels who claimed to create the subsequent ones and head of the Church.) Some of the most "question"-dense sections in these books involve direct communication with or education about Dust. It's consciousness! Doesn't consciousness seek answers?
And that all comes down to this: the plot does not move without a question. None of the uses of this word are idle; they all move the plot forward, uncovering new information and prompting action. There could only be a resolution in this book found by questioning.
Allegoric Meaning
PwJE says that you should take the direct passage and, with the help of the other instances, build a sermon for yourself on the information you've gathered. I have yet to hit this stage — mostly because the group I joined is working sequentially and is still in Book 1.
Esoteric Meaning
Once I come up with an allegoric meaning, I will sit with the sentence — or, more accurately, walk with it as my mantra — and seek the meaning whispered to me by the Divine.
So that's how my first attempt at reading a secular text through a sacred lens went! Hope this breakdown helped.
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thephooka · 1 year
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White Noise chapter 12 end!
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Read it here! | WN on Patreon | @hiveworks
That's a wrap! The epilogue will start in a couple weeks--more details in the page description! Thanks for reading. <3
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longreads · 5 months
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In this new Longreads essay, Megan Marz asks: why does the literary world still hold online writing at arm’s length? 
While it’s become banal to observe that online life is fully enmeshed with the rest of the world, an imaginary curtain separates online writing from the rest of U.S. literature. It’s time to take that curtain down.
People like to say the internet speeds reading up, but a personal blog, read in real time, can slow a story’s pace down to the timescale of life; the thickest book in existence can be read in less calendar time. Not even the author knew when a blog would end, which is what made it feel so alive.
Read Megan Marz’s “Poets in the Machine” on Longreads.
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atavist · 1 year
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A woman, an elephant, and an uncommon love story spanning nearly half a century.
Issue no. 136 — “Sanctuary” by Shannon McCaffrey — is now live at The Atavist.
Here outside the small town of Attapulgus, near quail-hunting plantations and pecan groves, Buckley had built a refuge for elephants. It was the culmination of a nearly lifelong devotion to the world’s largest land animals. But at the moment, Buckley’s refuge lacked any elephants—and one elephant in particular.
There are many kinds of love stories. This one involves a woman and an elephant, and the bond between them spanning nearly 50 years. It involves devotion and betrayal. It also raises difficult questions about the relationship between humans and animals, about control and freedom, about what it means to own another living thing.
The woman in this story is Buckley. The elephant is named Tarra. They met at a tire store in California, and together followed a serpentine path from spectacle to safety: from circus rings to zoo enclosures to a first-of-its-kind sanctuary. But now their bond was being tested. For complex reasons, Buckley had lost custody of Tarra, and just before Michael struck, a jury had deadlocked on whether the two should be reunited. In a few months, the case would go to trial again. If Buckley won, she would bring Tarra home to Attapulgus. If she lost, it was possible she’d never see the elephant again.
The uncertainty was a nightmare. But the fence Buckley built for Tarra had withstood a monstrous storm. This was, she thought, a good omen.
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bcomic-blog · 2 years
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What Is Webcomics?
The obvious answer is “comics on the internet”, but...
Sooooo... like this?
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...No, not like that.
When some comics are distributed via the internet, we call them “digital” comics, but others are “webcomics”. Even if we aren’t sure how to explain the distinction, we can tell the difference!
And this is despite the fact that some of the creators of successful long-running webcomics, like Ryan North and Chris Hastings, have moved very successfully into the world of comic books, and at least one creator of a popular long-running webcomic (Phil Foglio) came from that world, without this ever really blurring that line. So we can conclude that the difference isn’t just in who makes them
Webcomics Is Free
An obvious difference is in the business model. There are comics that fall on the “digital” side of that imaginary line that use a “pay what you choose” type of model, but generally there is some expectation that each member of the audience pay for the content directly
Contrariwise, the usual business model of webcomics is for the content itself to be available free, while the artist is supported by ad revenue, or by selling merch, or by the generosity of fans.
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In many ways, it’s similar to the distinction between movies and television
Webcomics Is Crude
Another common distinction between webcomics and comics that happen to be on the web is an obsession going back to the early roots of the form with using shortcuts to allow a visual story to be told without, in many cases, much in the way of drawing ability. This ranges from pixel sprites, to clip art, to stick figures.
Previously mentioned webcomic superstar, Ryan North, took this tendency to the formalist limit by creating a single page of simplistic pixel art for his Dinosaur Comics and then, for going-on 20 years and 4000 pages, only changing the words every day. Below is my favorite page of Dinosaur Comics, but they’re all the same. Except for having different words.
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(When I was thinking about this tendency of webcomics, it reminded me of a comic I loved back in the early 2000s, that I was going to describe as a “webcomic except in print”. But upon further investigation, I discovered that Get Your War On had been a webcomic all along, just one that happened to also be printed in a few US cities’ leftist newspapers. Below is an early one, probably the first that I saw, and a perfect representation of why it was such a vital outlet for those few of us not caught up in the war fever in those dark Bush years...)
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Even those webcartoonists not trying to avoid drawing don’t necessarily have the patience to actually learn to draw before beginning to publish. Webcomics are well known for sometimes stark evolution in their art, and possibly none moreso than my personal favorite webcomic, El Goonish Shive:
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There are definitely major exceptions to this tendency. Many webcomics are gorgeously, lushly illustrated (even from the beginning.) Below is half of a particularly lovely page of a webcomic ode to transhumanism titled Dresden Codak:
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The thing that ties these disparate works together, from those with art that’s crudely sketched, to cleverly sidestepped, to beautifully fully realized, is each has a singular creative vision. In stark contrast with their big bro the comic books, webcomics are distinguished by relatively little collaboration and practically zero editorial meddling. These are the works of passionate amateurs who (sometimes) gradually found ways to make a livelihood from their passion
Webcomics Is Bite-Sized
But beyond the business side of it, and even the low entry barriers and amateurist zeal, the thing that really sets webcomics apart from the comic books to the point of seeming almost a different medium and linking them more closely to even-older sibling the newspaper comics, is the different pacing and structure caused by being released in tiny, tiny chunks
But that’s enough for now, we can talk about the impact on the form of coming out in bite-size installments.... next time!
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standardquip · 9 months
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Post I'm replying to is here
"Generally speaking, the more hours I devote to [editing] a video, the more I like it and the prouder I am of the results.
I fear that others don't feel the same, though. My second-most popular video on Tumblr is an "older" one of relatively little effort, and I unfortunately can't say that I care much for it myself. It took maybe 20 hours, tops, whereas more recent videos that pushed past the 50-hour mark—and that I'm far more confident in—have garnered maybe half the notes.
[...]
I enjoy edits with lots of clips and effects... but are those kinds of AMVs just "bad"? Or is the way I'm executing them bad? Am I focusing on all the wrong things with my videos?"
- @marshmallowgoop
This is touching on a much larger "issue" in the vidding/editing community than you might realize (although you do seem to recognize it is an issue) but I'm going to try to tackle it in many points.
These are in no particular order.
Your audience doesn't know how long it took to make something.
I know it's hard to come to terms with the fact that sometimes "crappy" things do better than stuff you personally like more, but unfortunately that happens with everyone, all the time. Memes get more traction than well-written anecdotes, headlines get more traction than the actual article, and short vids are often easier to relate to than longer ones with more of a story.
What the internet zeitgeist grabs cannot easily be predicted and is never a judgement of quality. Throw this logic in the garbage, because what goes viral should never have any factor in your self-worth.
Who is your [main] audience for your videos?
If you're making your videos for you, than whatever you like is good. If you like what you end up with, then the video succeeded. If you are making videos to chase audience interaction (which is valid, btw, just not something I personally do), then they need to appeal to a very wide general audience. You'll need to re-assess why the vids aren't getting as much interaction as they used to and adjust your editing style to increase that interaction.
But your past posts don't seem like that's your target. It seems like you make vids for you. So don't think your videos are "bad" because they're not getting likes. They're getting the most important like: Your own.
Of course, it's always nice to be validated by other people. But that's generally not going to happen based on the amount of effort you put into something. It's generally just gonna be with people who vibe with or relate to your content, and if they don't then it won't be shared as much.
Another thing to factor in is where the people who like the stuff you like are located. Maybe your immediate circle is more about conan memes, and you need to go to reddit or something to find the conan romance fans. It could also be timing. Maybe the people who like conan romance aren't online when you post and don't see it. Or maybe it's just luck because the internet and social media are just Like That and totally random. Talk to any artist about trying to play the algorithm to sell more art! 😆
What is the ultimate goal for your videos?
On a per-video basis, you'll generally have a premise for a video.
Things like:
I want to play with new effects
I want to gain as many likes as possible
I want to make an action video
I want to make a character profile that people who have not seen the source video can appreciate
I want to make a good video for a particular song
A "good" video will balance visual entertainment with story, but ultimately, in my experience, it helps to simplify your video down to one goal, and then base all of your following decisions on if those decisions achieve the goal.
As an example, let's say you want to make an action video but your primary interest is the visual effects. This will affect your scene selection, as you should pick scenes that will work better with effects.
Action videos are generally more cohesive when they center around one particular character or duel. If that "plot" were your goal then you'd pick scenes that created a narrative structure aligning with the character or duel's progression.
But since you want to use as much vfx as possible, you may diverge from that cohesiveness by instead injecting a montage of "powering up" scenes with flashy transitions, or maybe you will sidestep the focus on one particular rivalry and include another fight with an unrelated character because that gives more opportunity for better added animation.
This does not make any quality judgements on what is "good" or "bad" when it comes to videos - instead it comes down to whether this particular editing decision advances the ultimate goal of your final video.
Similar to writing, if you're making a persuasive essay, you shouldn't meander onto your own related-but-not-actually-the-topic-of-the-essay rant. The rant might be great, but it's not the purpose of the essay and ultimately just muddies the point you're trying to make (much like this metaphor probably did for my post about video editing, whoops).
"is the way I'm executing [amv effects] bad?"
First of all:
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"Good" or "bad" is so subjective, there is no overseer that can definitely say this is good or bad, because it's art, and art is subjective and on and on. Which I'm sure you know, but it bears repeating anyway.
I have tried to be unbiased for this reply so far, but I have to disclaim before I continue that I come from the "school" of "raw editing" - which is to say, trying to stay away from a bunch of effects - so while I am trying to remain unbiased, what I say next will probably be biased despite my efforts.
Even though there is not a definitive "good" or "bad" in vidding (and if you're hanging out with people who are making blanket judgements like this... don't), we can instead look at art, cinematography, and editing fundamentals for the general "laws".
As fan video editors, we are also essentially our own directors and cinematographers. We can choose which scenes we want to use for certain goals and sometimes even make up our own scenes through compositing.
I made this playlist that is about half fundamentals and half random editing guides. I do still add to it, but it's hard to find videos that aren't bloated (and also related to vidding somehow), so updates are few and far between.
Anyway, of note are:
youtube
youtube
These are both highly valuable as they can help you not only choose which scenes to put together, but how to position them if you're framing your own shots through zooms and motion effects.
I watched all the videos you linked, and I think you are a good editor that makes what you like and that may not appeal to a broad audience.
I'm not a conan fan, but your vids aren't boring. I'm not a heavy vfx editing fan, but your videos don't look like most heavy vfx shorts. You're either making stuff your own (what I assume) or using presets I'm not familiar with.
WARNING I'M GOING TO CRITIQUE SOME OF YOUR VIDS BELOW
(I assumed you might actually want answers to some of those questions; if not, skip this part!)
The school of thought I come from with vidding says that everything should have a purpose. If my goal is to make a plot-driven vid, then what does a particular effect add to the video?
In this video at 0:04, you have this kind of cut in block thing, and I'm wondering what is this for? Why is it there? To me it's distracting and interrupts the flow.
But it could be a callback to Yu-Gi-Oh somehow? Maybe it's to give the video a feel like it needs to buffer load or something?
I'm not familiar with either source mentioned in the description, so I can't say, but as a general audience member, there's just so much stuff happening visually that I have no idea what's supposed to be happening story-wise. Maybe it's a character profile?
I'm sure you could extrapolate effects and decisions for all your other AMVs. But deciding if something works for your video's goal has nearly zero impact on the time it takes to complete.
Meanwhile, I look at this vid, which seems like a standard romance vid and it seems like a good balance between the romance and the effects; I'd only maybe change one or two things. Nearly all the effects work together to advance the story of the romance, so I'm not sure what went "wrong" here (in terms of lack of audience interaction).
END CRITIQUING
Is accessibility a concern?
Many vfx-heavy amvs rely a lot on motion transitions, which can cause motion sickness! I've gotten motion sick from more AMVs than I care to admit LOL.
But even aside from that, there are photosensitive people, and their photosensitivity triggers are far more broad than just flashing lights.
I noticed all your vids have captions and that you participate on ao3, so it seems like you're hanging out with people who also value accessibility.
In this way, by making vfx-heavy videos you are probably limiting your audience to people who are not photosensitive and/or sensitive people willing to "gamble" on a vfx heavy vid.
What you can do to help curb this is by adding content warnings about photosensitive triggers in your videos. On ao3 these are typically called "physical triggers," but 2 years ago I made a whole system called Vidding Photosensitivity Relay (VPR) .
Basically is comes down to describing what visually happens in your video. In most of your videos cases it would be motion transitions, quick cuts, and peripheral text. These relays (I'd hesitate to call them warnings) give people a better idea of what to expect when it comes to the videos they're watching.
With a better informed decision they could know if they can watch the video now, or later in a different setting, or maybe not at all to avoid a days-long migraine or something similar-- I was very surprised just how many people involved in vidding are photosensitive!
So that may be something to look into. You don't have to use VPR as a system, but it at the very least does list potential triggers and examples so you could refer to those.
My somewhat off-topic more of a personal reply here
"But I'm absolutely terrified that I'm only getting worse here—that as I learn more effects and get more comfortable with my program, my work is actually degrading."
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(source)
Maybe you're just losing focus? Did you go through a writing phase where you had a massive vocabulary and started inserting all the "big words" into everything? The usage is technically correct but the message gets muddied due to the readers perception?
Maybe it's that.
I think re-assessing what your personal goals are, and deciding for yourself what you want to prioritize - your likes vs other people's likes (for starters) - will help.
There is also a need to decouple internet interaction from self-worth, which I know is MUCH easier said than done. But there are SO MANY great artists, editors, people in general, who don't get much interaction because the algorithm doesn't prefer them and/or they don't market themselves. That doesn't make them worth any less than the people who make it their priority to market themselves instead of create art.
I hope this whole post doesn't come off as patronizing or anything!
I usually just talk into the void and not get actual direct replies LOL.
Also sorry for taking so long to reply! Hope it helps in some way.
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