[gay--dog]

man half of my mutuals are named some shit like Snooble at this point im doing some poob as bullshit in my life

[discount--dracula]

wbat the hell you weren't even exaggerating

[aropride]

characterpilled Unfollow

[photo of the character]

i love my this. the charactr

characterpilled Unfollow

charac te r. ... ... . .... #FUUUUCK. THE CHARACTER.

characterpilled Unfollow

DOES ANYBODY EVER THINK ABOUT .THE CHARACTER

characterpilled Unfollow

[1.5k word essay about the character] #but like idk maybe im wrong

characterpilled Unfollow

character i love youso badly.

^dash when someone is possessed by The Character core (this post is positive)

[mammalianmammals]

Northern Hog Badger (Arctonyx albogularis), family Mustelidae, Kaziranga Tiger Reserve, Assam, India

Once considered to be a subspecies of the Greater Hog Badger, A. collaris, which has now been split into 3 species.

photograph by Soumyajit Nandy

[de4dbl0g-deactivated20191110]

Cat protecting the icons of the Holy Virgin in Serbian-Orthodox monastery Lepavina in Sokolovac, Croatia

[offshoreoilrig]

Let's all run outside and start yelling and screaming and see if we can get people to panic. If everyone did this it would make a big difference

[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.

[bonitavista-deactivated20190411]

Gwrych Castle, North Wales

photo via jim

[patronsaintofweepingmothers]

"hugging heart bear valentine's cookie", nadia bakes (2017)

[jareckiworld]

Skaistė Verdingytė — Levitation (oil on canvas, 2024)

[fagcrisis]

HELP MY FRIEND GET ORCHIETECTOMY

Support Luca

Support Luca

if youve been following me, or any other hungarians on this site you may be aware how difficult it is to access transgender healthcare in hungary at the moment. Luca is in quite a bad situation and orchie would improve her quality of life significantly.

Please donate if you can, and share if you cant!

€0 out of €3400 raised

[carolsturka]

how it feels to talk about anything at all

[ymutate]

Quint Buchholz (German Artist, born 1957)

"The Flute Player", 1997.

Watercolor and Acrylic on Paper, 26.5" × 19".

Private Collection.

[fairycosmos]

im picking up your social cue im picking up your social cue im picking up your social cue

[creaturesculptures]

Unicorn Statue - Mirabellgarten, Salzburg [x]

[mayonezli]

Topkapı Palace domes, İstanbul, Türkiye.

[badassdemonsword]

You couldnt come up with a jollier name for a bird if you tried

[minmos]

this thang has one of my favorite ebird descriptions of all time

[evilvillain123456789]

apparently my aggressive and poorly trained dog that is too large for me to physically control is now making fake as fuck stories for reddit gold