Another Word for Myth

[argumate]

I keep thinking this! very frustrating

[argumate]

fuck!

[cherwallyx]

[powersimon]

The carrier of carriers. A tribute to Terry Pratchett

[elvenfaur]

Glamour shots of my Vash boots! Photographer is Pedxiing on Instagram!

[mortalityplays]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

[hajohinta]

[viehfutter]

Finally. Normal porn is back on this website.

[notalittleatall]

Ok, so lets say you get dropped into Earth Bet. Cauldron are gone. The Triumvirate are missing. Here is what you do:

1-Meet with Accord. Warn him of his untimely death in new Delhi. Trade this information in exchange for three things: a million dollars, Blastos contact details, and a sample of Flechette’s dna.

2-Find Blasto. Persuade him to work for you for a while in exchange for a colossal amount of money. Move into an abandoned warehouse-Outside of Boston, that’s too much heat. We’re going to Malden, Massachusetts.

3-Begin mass producing Flechette clones. In New York City, Flechette #1 begins to have dreams of a cold, dark laboratory. Irrelevant. The clones will be confused and won’t have proper memories, making them easier to handle. Once you have about 25, begin the next step

4-Attend the next Endbringer fight: Leviathan, of course. Leave Blasto at home, and avoid the front lines yourself. Deploy the Flechette Clone Army and tell them to aim for the base of the tail. Leviathan is injured, but survives and retreats. 10 of the 25 Flechettes have died, plus original Flechette who was killed in a jealous rage by the clones.

5-Now back home, browbeat the remaining members of the Flechette Clone Army for their perceived failure. In your sleep, get murdered by the leading Flechette for sending them into the meat grinder. Blasto is now their slave.

6-The Flechette Clone Army, now an independent and belligerent force, begins to terrorise Malden. Local heroes and villains are torn apart in random conflicts that quickly escalate into lethal violence. They wander around the city like ronin, picking fights for no reason besides boredom and aimless rage at their awful situation. They stick together due to shared trauma and the charismatic leadership of Flechette #9.

7-Blasto scales up production under constant threats by Flechette Clone Army Leadership. Increasing clashes with Protectorate forces lead them to pursue rapid growth. More clones are produced in an increasingly refined process, and are indoctrinated from creation with the nascent values of the Flechette Clone Army. There are now over 100 Flechettes roaming the city and squatting in buildings in several city blocks that they have staked out and cleared of life. Many of the Flechettes are now fucking each other. It could perhaps be more accurately characterised now as a polycule.

8-Next Endbringer battle comes and goes, and the Flechette Clone Polycule stays at home. They have angrily rejected the ideas of both altruism and a higher purpose, and become increasingly nihilistic ideologically. Few of them are happy. They take more ground and kill more heroes. Malden begins official government evacuation

9-Blasto attempts escape using a homunculi he cooked up. Flechettes catch him before he escapes city boundaries, and kill him. Now incapable of reproduction, the Flechette Clone Polycule is a much more limited threat. However due to a tragically poorly timed decision, the city of Malden is then nuked that same day in order to contain the threat. Humanity now has absolutely no hope of killing Scion or any Endbringers.

And that is how you do it!

[libraford]

Advice I gave someone today was: 'do it stupid.'

She wants to learn photography. Do it stupid. Take a million photos. Don't think about why they're not good. Enjoy the process of taking photos.

Pick out tge ones you like the most and figure out why you like them. Is it because the subject is centered? Is it because you caught them doing something cool? Is it because the light made cool shadows?

Do it stupid. If you try to do it smart, youll get stuck. If you think too much you'll never get to doing. Do it stupid.

[etherdiver]

Holy shit

[quill-ting]

This is honestly how I started quilting! I had fabric, I had a knowledge of backstitch, I had a quilting magazine. I asked "how hard can it be?" and now here we are. Just have fun and give it a go!

[memecucker]

[fatfemmefreaquency]

[thulium]

I’m so vanilla I thought OP was a priest.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Forbidden by God to remove his mark of office at the airport

[itsmissing]

design comm for a "mechanical math mage"

[kane-turu]

Saw this on Twitter and I obligatory need to share it

[crazy-pages]

So she actually said that she does not see the appeal in Senshi at all and that the panty shots weren't intended to be horny - she just has a neighbor who looks kind of like him and does laundry in his underwear. Which she finds kind of weird and offputting, and put into his character to be funny.

But that's the thing. She doesn't exaggerate or grotesqueify or alter people's bodies to fit some standard. (Except insofar as she draws different species differently, and those are exquisitely practiced to ensure they have the same diversity of appearances that humans do.) She just presents people exactly as they are, complexities and oddities and all.

It just so happens that when you present people exactly as they are, what you present will be beautiful and alluring to many. Even the things you yourself might find weird and offputting. Honestly I think it's a touching example of how you don't have to see the beauty in everyone for the beauty to be there, simple honesty is enough to let the wonder of people's humanity shine through.

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

#i think we should put this post next to the interview where she said she doesn't want to eat the food in the series cuz she's a picky eater#and file them both under 'you don't know an artist from their work'#and maybe you don't need to!#maybe all you need to know is that ryoko kui is Good At What She Does#idk I don't like the implication that artists (and women especially?) can only create from personal life and feelings#some people have imagination and craft#kind of a tangent but. there you go.

no but you're very correct

[teaboot]

“Why are you scared of dating” I’m not scared of dating, I just haven’t found anyone’s company to be more enjoyable than my own. And also I don’t care

[justlightmeonfire]

I just don't want anyone to steal my very cursed amulet

[teaboot]

Also the amulet

[whimsicalmayhem]

Is that you talking? Or the amulet? Are you SURE a new hand doesn't want to touch the beacon?

[teaboot]

The amulet and I are not currently looking for a third

[liberalsarecool]

Vote for progressives. #DSA #ZohranMamdani

[myrandomstuffpage]

Democrats, are you taking notes? This is how you get shit done.

[filmnoirsbian]

From the bottom of my heart: im not sorry for anything i put on yalls dash, i am my own target audience and i find my taste immaculate but thank u for witnessing 💕

[angry-eevee]

when people defend the “Cis white guy is default” thing like “He’s meant to be an everyman we can all relate to and project on!” kindly remind them the largest ethnic group in the WORLD is Han Chinese and the highest gender percentage fluctuates so if you want an ACTUAL  “default” you want a 40 year old chinese person whose gender changes from year to year.  

[galren]

#give us the middle-aged gender fluid Chinese protagonist that we can all relate to and project on (via @mr-and-mr-pavus)

[computationalcalculator]

[myriad-rainbows]

[image: tumblr tags that say “everything everywhere all at once”. End description.]

[prinnay]

Chanterelle :)

[prokopetz]

Historically, one of the most reliable sources of widespread banditry was rulers ramping up military recruitment for major wars, then cutting their soldiers loose afterwards without pay, leaving a bunch of heavily armed men with military experience floating around broke and homeless.

Knowing this, whenever someone jokingly refers to raccoons as "trash bandits", I get a vivid mental image of, like, a raccoon succession crisis leading to a raccoon civil war, the aftermath of which forced the former soldiers of the losing side (who are all raccoons) to take up the life of the raccoon outlaw.

[prokopetz]

#I've seen the soldier thing in historical Cdramas! #what a bad idea #but also lol (via @fake-married-my-dead-fiance)

The interesting thing about this particular phenomenon in Chinese history is we've got multiple recorded cases of the winner of a civil war going out of their way to make sure the losing side's soldiers got paid; having them all rounded up and executed was politically untenable – in a civil war, the losing side's soldiers are your loyal subjects' friends and neighbours! – so the only real options were either to pay them or to have to deal with an explosion of bandit activity a few years down the road.