On Clarity

Ex Contraditione Quodlibet

[novelconcepts]

Hey, man, c'mere. Listen. Get in real close, this is important.

You're gonna make stuff again. You're gonna make stuff you're proud of. You're gonna make stuff you're excited to share. You're going to feel that overwhelming drive to create, not just the frantic I want to want to you're stuck in now. You're going to have awesome ideas, and you're going to make them into reality. You're going to create again. You're still an artist. You're still a writer. You're still home to the same passion you had before. You'll find it again. It's not gone. It's just resting. Let it rest. You're going to make stuff again. I promise.

[alphacrone]

i don't really want to weight in on the "using big words in your writing is ableist" discourse happening on tiktok because i'm like 90% certain it's an anti-intellectual psyop to stir up drama in online circles to promote the use of ai to summarize literally everything and thus feeding the LLMs and lowering the populace's mistrust of such tools but i also have to say: dictionaries and thesauruses are the most accessible they've ever been. if you use an e-reader of any kind you can look up a word without leaving the page. there's a plethora of online dictionaries and if you just type a word + "meaning" into google it'll usually give you a definition. we used to have pocket dictionaries we used when reading in class. i have two on my shelf right now that i used in high school. stop letting the fascists purposefully misuse anti-ableism rhetoric to trick you into never thinking again.

[postarcadian]

re: the "is fanfic serious writing" controversy I ended up deleting the post I reblogged earlier because I think ultimately there's levels of nuance that OP's post doesn't really address and it's not worth adding tags to convey my view until it's more-or-less a different post. the tl;dr is that I think framing questions of literary aesthetics, etc around a model of fandom leads to an extremely myopic view of fiction and too often results in the flattening view that gives you "the Divine Comedy is fanfiction" and "the Aeneid is fanfiction" and other insufferable takes, and I get that again this is the fanfiction enjoyers website but trying to wrestle with questions of literary aesthetics on here and seeing it reblogged with the tag "fandom wank" feels like we've lost the plot.

but also obviously everything is shades of intertextuality and the idea of fandom and fanfiction is itself rooted in modern notions of intellectual property which don't really apply if you go more than a few centuries into the past. I don't think it's the dependence on an earlier work that determines whether something is serious literature/not serious literature - my own current poetry project is a set of adaptations from a corpus of ancient poetry! - but I do think that serious literature that does depend heavily on an existing text also has to wrestle with that intertextual relationship on a metatextual level. can fanfiction do that? sure it can - I've read fanfic that does. but I think there's a middle ground between "fanfiction is fundamentally unserious" and "fanfiction is just doing the same thing as Vergil and Dante did".

[luna-azzurra]

A writer's relationship with their own work goes: this is genius, this is garbage, this is genius, this is garbage, i should never have been born, okay actually this line is good

[everybidenjusthavegoodtime]

give a man a guitar and he’ll play for a day, teach a man guitar and today is gonna be the day that they’re gonna throw it back to you

I swear to God I am so tired of this meme. You guys need to leave Wonderwall alone, seriously by now you should’ve somehow realized what you gotta do

[hannah-the-lion-deactivated2023]

my friend asked if i was gonna stop laughing at wonderwall jokes.

i said maybe

[worldheritagepostorganization]

World Heritage Post

[crimeronan]

sometimes i have strong opinions but they're also so inane that halfway through writing a post i'll be like "yeah, this is Absolutely not worth the energy it's taking" and delete everything. but then the opinion is still in my head. and i still want to share it. so within five minutes i go "you know, i bet i can phrase it more succinctly this time" and anyway. you all see where this is going. sometimes i do this four times in a row before i give up on the specific inane opinion and instead write a vague post about the concept of opinions as if that'll satisfy the urge to post the entirety of my inner monologue online. may or may not be relevant to what you're reading right now. and now all our lives have been enriched. you're welcome

[hppjmxrgosg]

all you new fandom members need to QUIET DOWN oh my god you're going to get us KILLED. we're happy to have you but if you keep talking about BULLSHIT like PUBLISHING fanfic for MONEY, Anne Rice is going to come back from the dead to KILL US. looking at YOU, maurauders fans, heated rivalry fans, byler fans...out here giving out interviews to news channels SHUT UP. we're going to have to start setting off firecrackers to keep the rent down.

[marisatomay]

I was talking about this with a friend but a really interesting cultural shift over the last ohhhhhh ten years maybe is that many people in fandoms view themselves as stakeholders and not audience members. Because of that, they think that the fandom should be running things, or at least have an acknowledged say in how something is run. And every reminder that they are not in control, no matter how small, bothers them.

[obsidianpegasus]

Basic Fandom Etiquette Everyone Needs to Remember:

Creators do not owe anyone content. Do not ask writers when they will update.

If an author did not ask for [negative] criticism , do not give criticism.

Read the tags carefully before reading a fanfic.

If you ignored the tags and were upset, that is your responsibility, not the creator’s.

Disliking a ship does NOT give you the right to attack people who enjoy it.

Do not tell authors or shippers that their ship is “disgusting,” “wrong,” or “shouldn’t exist.” Shipping fictional characters is not a moral failing.

No one is obligated to justify why they ship two fictional characters.

Headcanons are PERSONAL interpretations, not universal truth.

Dark themes in fiction do not equal real life beliefs or intentions.

Leaving kudos or short positive comments genuinely matters.

Not every fanwork is made for you, and that is okay.

Scrolling past content you dislike is better than engaging negatively

Enjoying a fandom later than others does not make someone less of a fan.

Disliking a fanfic does not entitle you to announce that to its creator. Sending hate comments to authors is NEVER justified, even if you disliked the work.

[likeafieldmouse-deactivated2015]

Luis Camnitzer - The Photograph (1981)

[gastronauticsyd]

The Screenshot (2014)

[fredersen]

The Reblog (2014)

[toratiger-deactivated20211204]

Bahahahaha love this

[processintegrated]

The Unnecessary Comment (2014)

[grumpygreenwitch]

The Revival (2026)

[myfavoritedemons]

Started using the phrase “that’s cilantro to me” to refer to the presence of a story element that completely ruins a piece of media for me, disproportionate to its actual badness.

[myfavoritedemons]

“i can see that lots of people enjoy this dish and i think this dish is objectively well made, but unfortunately it has cilantro in it and i cannot personally enjoy it”

[fus-mar-hoz]

I think the queer microlabel-ist fixation on creating increasingly elaborate flags to the point they could probably be graphed taxonomically, as a niche continuation of the creation of the "standard" pride flags in the last third of the last century is a parallel movement to and perhaps related to the alternate history internet subculture where every imaginary nation* must also get its own flag as the cultural sediment of the complete internalization of the nation-building projects of the last 200 years. I'd even say that both of these extremely niche flag-making activities are motivated by the broadly the same identity-based individualist impulse, and of course generally downstream of the establishment of the flag as one of the indispensable symbols of the nations constructed by the bourgeois ascension of the 19th century, along with the anthem, the capital, the language, and the map. More particularly, the USamerican flag obsession has saturated both of these subcultures, queer microlabel-ism especially; the USamerican individual is built by a series of identities, and each identity merits its own flag.

*I've always found the equivalence made in common speech between "nation" and "country" or "state" to be a small but telling linguistic vice

[fruitfulchaos]

GO BURN CD'S. GO FILL PHYSICAL DISCS. PIRATE EVERYTHING. DOWNLOAD BOOKS, MUSIC, GAMES, SHOWS, FILMS. SAVE SNAPSHOTS ON WAYBACK. FUCK THE MEDIA COMPANIES. STREAMING ISN'T FOREVER. PURCHASE ISN'T OWNERSHIP. FORGE THE OWNERSHIP WITH YOUR OWN HANDS. MAKE MEDIA YOUR BITCH. STAY VIGILANT. I LOVE YOU.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

and what if I told you guys that virtually everyone you ever meet will turn out to be really interesting if you give them a chance

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

some real miserable fucks in the notes I fear

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

I'm not even saying you have to talk to every single person you meet. and you're certainly not going to LIKE all of them. but every person does have a rich interior life and complex feelings and unique worldview. sorry.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

hey man how's it going

sorry for getting self righteous about uuuuh my belief in the innate wonder of human life and connection I guess

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

hey man how's it going

[bunjywunjy]

wow. made it less than three months in

[ooklet]

this is truly one of the most tumblr posts i've ever seen. i know chronically online people exist in all corners of the internet but i feel like this is the only place where someone could say something as uncontroversial as "you will find out that people have personalities when you talk to them" and get responses like "oh so you're making the ABLEIST assertion that i should FORCE MYSELF to push past my SOCIAL ANXIETY to talk to BIGOTS????" amazing work, guys

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

[darlingofdots]

been stewing on an analytical approach to fiction which I call "is this book afraid of me?" and in order to answer this question you determine how hard the book is trying to make sure you don't come after the writer on twitter

[playwrongs]

Tags via @deadpanwalking, editor and ass-kicker extraordinaire

[guerrillatech]

[hekatontarch]

[queertail]

The site is '12ft Ladder' found here:

12ft – Hop any paywall

Show me a 10ft paywall, I’ll show you a 12ft ladder.

[sola-whumping]

Reblogging this on ALL my blogs because holy shit is it useful

[bayouette]

I have a folder called Time is a Flat Circle in which I collect evidence of humanity. Here is most of them.