the dream doesn't rescue the maiden

your brain is a haunted house i wish i could sell tickets

[lizclimo]

happy new year

[rubyfunkey]

Gay /pos /hj

which part is the half-joke the gay part or the pos part. my friend hannah wants to know

[rubyfunkey]

hold on anon she has another question

[hannahp0calypse]

[owlbelly]

so. i understand where the sentiment "listening to an audiobook is the same thing as reading the book" is coming from - i mean, yes, the bottom line is you are taking in the same words in what is possibly a more accessible (or maybe just more enjoyable) format for you! and i'm 100% in agreement that "book snobs" who say "no you didn't really read it" if you listened to the audiobook are full of shit. ofc you should engage with stories in whatever way works for you, there is no moral or intellectual superiority to reading words off a page vs. listening to them

but it also is different? an audiobook is a performance. choices a narrator makes about line readings can drastically influence the meaning of the lines. even just different voices, accents, etc. - there are creative choices being made by the person delivering the words to you, and that affects your experience of the story in a different way than if you were making those choices in your own head. it might even change the way you visualize what's going on!

this isn't a bad thing it's just An Actual Thing & i think it's worth talking about. it rubs me the wrong way when people act like accommodations (and for many people audiobooks are an accommodation) always result in a completely identical experience, or even that they should, & if you suggest that people accessing media in different ways are having different experiences it's somehow ableist

anyway on rare occasions i really enjoy audiobooks but mostly they are much less accessible to me than words on a page (i need to be able to reread, flip back and forth, go at my own pace) & i also just really strongly prefer to encounter a text on my own before hearing someone else's performance of it, if possible! again i don't think it's "better" to read a physical book i just think it is a Distinct form of experiencing a story & acting like the two things are entirely the same is sort of doing a disservice to both

[utilitymonstergirl]

Good points, and (in my limited experience) I’ve found that making audio adaptations is a very different experience too - someone came to me with a proposal to do an audio/motion comic version of Replaceable Parts, and it was fascinating to take their direction as I recorded my cameo as the voice of [REDACTED]. Like, I made the source material, but this project is helmed by someone else with their own vision for this medium that I’ve never worked in.

And I’m not sure how much control authors generally have over audiobook adaptations, but it absolutely requires its own skillset and personnel! I resent Hollywood’s idea that different mediums are both in a strict hierarchy and totally interchangeable, but dismantling it will require open discussion of all the decisions that go into an adaptation.

[gostaks]

Incidentally, the difference was less pronounced when audiobooks were primarily being created as a tool for accessibility. When I was a kid, my grandmother would sometimes let me read her audiobooks from the National Library for the Blind.

Unlike modern consumer audiobooks, these were created specifically as an accessibility tool for people who were blind or print disabled - they were often read by volunteers rather than professional voice actors, much less effort went into making them "polished", and there was very minimal acting. This was intentional - my blind relatives were pretty unhappy when the reader added their own emphasis and interpretation. The idea was that audiobooks were intended to be as close to a print equivalent as possible, which included having a faithful (and non-embellished) reproduction of the text.

This is arguably a case of a "reverse curb cut effect". Audiobooks are now much more widely available and affordable, which is great, but in the process they became a slightly less pure accessibility tool.

[jayalaw]

Does emotion and emphasis harm the accessibility? I had no idea

[owlbelly]

y'all i am going to rephrase what i said in the original post for clarity because the point is being wildly missed here: accessibility is not about having exactly the same experience. the idea of a "pure" accessibility tool is baffling to me. the whole. point. of the post. is that different methods of accessing stories ARE DIFFERENT. they are not better or worse or pure or impure!

also it doesn't really matter whether an audiobook is polished or has a trained actor reading it. the difference is inherent to listening to a voice. THIS IS OKAY. it's just a thing!

[jayalaw]

Thank you; I appreciate the clarification. I wasn't sure.

[whatwouldeddiedo]

i will say, the worst thing that happened in fandom was when shipping just became “i ship this bc it’s gonna be real” and not just “i ship this bc i think it’s a fun dynamic to explore idc what the writers are doing that’s not my business”

[spooksier]

passages that make you whisper "oh my god"

[farewell-to-lorien]

Carlee Gomes, from "The Puritanical Eye: Hyper-mediation, Sex on Film, and the Disavowal of Desire"

[amethystsoda]

[amethystsoda]

good work in the tags everyone

[lastvalyrian]

revivaldi

[goldensunset]

they should invent 7 hours between 10pm and midnight

[the-pen-pot]

I would make such good use of them.

[swanmaids]

99% of oathtakers give up just before they fulfill their father’s dying wish 😔✋ DON’T QUIT‼️ KEEP SPIRALLING AND KILLING ‼️✅✊😎

[solarsyrup]

I extend my hand like a mob boss and allow you to kiss my ring but when you lean closer you see it’s one of those glo-in-the-dark spider rings you win at arcades

[solarsyrup]

*godfather voice* you disrespec me… and eat my spooky spida ring, which cost me 50 tickets at funtime arcade and pizzeria… vinny, hit her with da sticky hand

[digitaldiscipline]

Georg, I trusted you. I brought you out of your cave, on this, the day of my daughter’s wedding, and this is how you repay me?

[lakesbian]

DNI lists on this website are fucking insane

[lakesbian]

can we explain to early-twenties autistic lgbt people that they . cant be saying these things. you cant be calling people 'degens' in your dni you cant do that. you cant do that man. can we do a history lesson. you cant do that

[lakesbian]

YOU CANT DO THAT MAN

[lakesbian]

"in defense of using the term degen, it's generally applied to pedophiles" - conservative man who might actually shoot a trans woman if he saw one within 50 meters of his child, and also LGBT tumblr users who do not know things they should know

[barbeauxbot]

The root word of "degenerate" is "gene". It means "decline or deteriorate physically, mentally, or morally". In practice it means a person who diminishes the overall health of the race by virtue of some unacceptable trait. It's a eugenics term. The Nazis looooved it.

A lot of people like to use the smokescreen of pretending as if they're only going to apply it to pedophiles. But then they want to stretch the definition of "pedophile" to mean everybody from people who are actually sexually attracted to prepubescent children, all the way up to all trans people, regardless of what they've actually done in their entire lifetime. It doesn't matter if you mean it that way. They're using you as a trojan horse to normalize the term as well as the thinking.

[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.

[teaandcrowns]

Preserving previous' tags because firelxdykatara also makes excellent additions in them

[damespock]

i’m so glad earth only has one moon, if there were more i’d have to pick a favorite and that sounds too emotionally taxing to even fathom

[snowdropskylark]

​hey so funny thing about this

[sidsky]

Can only accurately reblog this addition until November 25, 2024.

[damespock]

this website LOVES a damn time limit

[tibby]

people love to complain about sex scenes in tv shows and violence in movies when the real danger is scenes that make you feel second hand embarrassment.

[kuroshika]

no, no. these are horrors beyond your comprehension. i understand them, though. i desire them carnally.

[randomgirlyoudontknow]

love is stored in the fictional couple i’ve gotten overly invested in

[puppygirllaika]

not to sound old fashioned or whatever but getting rid of payphones is a mistake, and the only reason we should do it is if we're replacing them with free, public use phones. Having the ability to reach out to others in every place of public congress and transit is an important safety feature and the advent and adoption of smartphones does not negate their utility.

I know i've already lost this battle, so it's somewhat pointless to say, but smartphones die. chargers aren't always there. smartphones break. some people don't have them. Being able to call someone and ask for help, to get in touch with friends and family, without relying on something you yourself own, is a societal good.

Furthermore, expecting everybody to have a single piece of fragile technology on them at all times to the point that critical services are not available without them is truly mind-boggling to me. This goes for things like restaurant menus and transit maps as well. you should be able to navigate the world without a brick made by Apple or Samsung, and if you can't, then something is fundamentally broken. It's one thing for new technology to augment an existing real-world experience, it's another thing to usurp it entirely.

[chaotic-neutral-knitter]

I must not respond to the bad take. Responding to the bad take is the mind-killer. Responding to the bad take is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face the bad take. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the bad take has gone there will be nothing. Only I (and my good takes) will remain.