Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Product Placement
hello vonnie
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Discoholic 🪩
Andulka
macklin celebrini has autism
almost home
occasionally subtle
if i look back, i am lost
dirt enthusiast
Love Begins
Three Goblin Art
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will byers stan first human second
wallacepolsom
titsay
ojovivo
we're not kids anymore.
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
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@hawthorn-j
Call me Jasper. I write, sometimes; I draw, sometimes, and this is where it'll be for the foreseeable.
Click here for Hard Pressed, the currently in progress steampunk novel
Other writing will be posted in the my writing tag or here on my Ao3
Stuff for Stormshield, my pet sc-fi setting, will be in the stormshield tag.
I've also got a One Page RPG, On The Wild Side, that can be found in the relevant tag
You can find what I'm reading in the Pages I'm Turning tag.
fantasy stories love to begin with the world's most razeable peaceful little farming village having a big grand festival
Break time
Another one down for @2026-book-bingo! I usually don't really go for romance, but it was one of the squares I wanted to get ticked off. Went through a few of the lists on the Fated Mates website, and this one caught my eye. Very hard to get hold of in the UK - apparently never printed for the UK market, and my local library didn't have it in either, but I tracked down this copy for a fiver.
It's really good! I love a setting that gives dragons some true mystique, and the back and forth between Rue and Christoph just makes the book. I'm going to have to find the sequel!
“Tour Guides”
-2026
What's a book written by a woman that changed your life or that you consider a classic? Any genre, any language.
did Scott McCloud transition or
Authors, agents, publishers: every part of the industry is seeing the strain of five years of escalating anti-LGBTQ censorship.
if you'd like to show support, here are some upcoming queer books:
When Life Gives You Corpses is a brilliant YA about a cursed praying mantis who falls for a young witch. Yield Under Great Persuasion is a raunchy, but surprisingly sweet story of two men repairing their relationship. Fabulous Bodies is a horror story about a queer rockstar rising from the dead.
This is Where the Future Bleeds is a fantasy set in a vividly imagined land, where two women (who happen to kiss) are the key to healing the broken sky. You're No Better is a story about a teen struggling in the shadow of his murderous parent. Oil on Canvas is about a woman who finds disturbing paintings in the home of her dead mother.
and then here's a list of 26 queer books by Black authors set to publish this year, and a 10 upcoming books by trans authors. if you want to fight back against queer censorship, use your wallet! or (if that's not an option) you can contact your local library and ask them to stock a copy.
Blood on the Icehouse Wall is a fantasy with a time travelling lesbian witch and her asexual werewolf girlfriend trying to undo their mistakes.
Salts of Mercury is the best book I've read this year and features a non-binary necromancer explaining why they did all that treason.
An Unexpected Attachment is an erotic novella about an android who's just got a penis attachment and wants to try it out for the first time.
Three Men in Orbit is inspired by Three Men in a Boat and tells the story of three men taking an excursion to a space station and then the moon. One of the characters is a trans woman and the author is openly trans.
Does no one realize how racist this assumption can be? Most LLMs are trained heavily on Commonwealth and other standardized English corpora, yet now when people from Commonwealth countries naturally write in polished English, others immediately say it “sounds AI-generated.”
I fear this is the beginning of a really awful trend that will make it even harder for non-white writers to get published.
Got curious, so I went and read it myself. The AI accusation is completely absurd to me. The story is small scale, personal, laden with metaphor, and clearly draws heavily from the writer's cultural history. It's not conventionally told, but the ideas set up in the beginning are woven throughout the narrative nicely - nothing is extraneous, no threads are dropped, and it ends on a thoughtful and somewhat poetic note that explores its core themes. Unless I'm sorely mistaken, this is not kind of writing AI generally produces (at least not without significant human intervention - at which point who cares?)
The idea that it's AI generated because of a couple difficult-to-parse similes (in a piece that employs flowery simile multiple times per paragraph) is so insidious. Oh I'm sorry, this Trinidadian writer's piece exploring the cultural intersections of the Carribean and Indian diasporas on the island wasn't instantly understandable to me, an ignorant anglophone reader - so therefore he must be a fraud? Ridiculous, and in my opinion clearly racist.
first off the bat, "ai detection tools" are certainly worthless vaporware. i am fully agreed on this point. like hagiomoto, i also worry about the weaponization of AI accusations against authors of color, especially ones writing in englishes other than american or british english.
that said, these posts have the absolute wrong end of the stick. first of all, the very first to call this story out were -- understandably, because they were the ones most closely watching the commonwealth prize regional winners -- Black and caribbean writers and poets, like chiemeziem everest udochukwu and previous commonwealth prize winner and fellow trinidadian kevin jared hosain.
secondly, OP (and many, many people in the notes) correctly describes a phenomenon -- the way in which AI writing can resemble styles of writing common in nations that were formerly colonized by the UK -- almost certainly in reference to marcus olang's essay I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me. but this phenomenon has absolutely nothing to do with jamir nazir's piece. the similarities olang' draws between kenyan english and chatgpt are strict structure, the use of specific sayings, and a propensity to use 'wow words' --
The third, and perhaps most important commandment, was that of structure. An essay had to be a perfect edifice. The introduction was the foundation, the body was the walls, and the conclusion was the roof, neatly summarising the moral of the story and, if you were clever, circling back to the introductory proverb to create a satisfying, if predictable, loop. We were taught to build our paragraphs around a strong topic sentence. We were taught the sin of the sentence fragment and the virtue of the compound-complex sentence.
whatever you might think of "the serpent in the grove", i think it is extremely safe to say that this very much does not describe it.
and now i want to get onto the reblog, which really truly bothers me because of the ways it is unintentionally closing ranks around the profoundly racist and imperialist set of pre-approved conceptions of 'postcolonial literature'. because frankly, the serpent in the grove is not thoughtful or complex--it is barely coherent, in very obvious ways. everyone who has written about it has pulled all the same quotes, but here's a few of the nonsense metaphors to illustrate:
A man who had cleared brush like a conscience
Hard living lays itself on a man like wet sacking; it never asks permission
Coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all
She had the kind of walking that made benches become men
(this sort of bluntly failed similie is incredibly characteristic of ai creative writing by the by, far more than any of the elements olang' complains about being accused over, which mostly show up in technical/conversational AI material. @nostalgebraist calls it the "eyeball kick". my favourite exmaple i've seen over the years is “the moon was truly mother-of-pearl, the white of the sea, rubbed smooth by the groins of drowned brides.”)
what it is, however, is essentially an intense pastiche of all the frankly racist tropes of "prestige postcolonial literature". i mean, look at what judge sharma taylor said about it:
Jamir Nazir’s language is sublime—precise yet richly evocative—conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy. Through sharp sensory detail, he renders the Grove as a living presence, where labour, landscape, and memory are intimately entwined. Polished and confident, this is a story with a melodic voice that lingers long after the final line. Jamir Nazir’s prose pulses with a voice of restraint and quiet authority—a beautifully told and assured piece of storytelling.
writing from the global periphery, from the caribbean or africa or south east asia or latin america, is always "rich", it is always "sensory," "lush", it is always "about landscape and memory", it is always "melodic." these are exhausted tropes that have been used to describe basically all literature from ex-colonies for the last 50 years, regardless of what they're actually like
latin american writers and critics like sylvia molloy and jorge volpi have talked about the "choke-chain" of 'magical realism', this titanic sweeping label that gets applied to anything coming out of latin america, something that for a long time sreved as a measuring stick to evaluate Real Prestigious Worthwhile Latin American Literature.
there is a commonality there, and that is that literature from The Third World is meant to be about the Land, about the Peoples, about the Personal Struggles, about the Rich Fantastical Vibrant Melody History Memory--this is a mold that has been imposed first by the european and usamerican literary establishments and from there internalized and adopted in literary scenes around the world. volpi criticizes the picture of latin america that the "magical realism" wants to push onto all latin american ltierature as one of "irrationality [...] a lack of reason".
incomprehensibility--the very reaction in the reblog of "oh, i don't understand this, it must be some Cultural Element i'm not understanding" is treated as a de facto mark of authenticity. it's the mass exoticization of this literature, treating it as some endlessly mysterious Other whose incomprehensiblity gives the white literary world a look into the Mysterious Foreign Mind
and it is genuinely really frustrating after years of authors from the global periphery (and in various diaspora, because this type of ritualized Authenticty Signalling is a huge feature of prestige diaspora literature and the subject of the exact same ongoing fierce internal debate, e.g. this piece or this one) trying to escape these stifling tropes, these exotifying expectations, to have a story that--AI or not (and i don't think the 'not' is very likely)--thoughtlessly and mechanistically repeats them, drowning itself in florid incoherence, get this kind of defense from people who earnestly think they are being anti-racist.
i leave off with a couple of good pieces on the story itself and its reception:
Can we say that between the prize and the story and Jamir Nazir, there is something perverse and disrespectful to other writers, because it
The Granta controversy surrounding a Commonwealth Prize-winning story tells us less about AI than about the enduring metropolitan expectatio
You can tell Eureka is a queer game because it asks people to use different pronouns and they go ballistic.
Duck Amuck | Director: Chuck Jones | Studio: Warner Bros. | USA, 1953
NOT ME YOU SLOP ARTIST
This is a close up? A CLOSE UP YA JERK! A CLOSEUP!
Alright, let’s get this picture started! (The End) NO NOOOOO!
One of the defining moments of animation history.
“Ain’t I a stinker?”
In Babylon 5, didn’t one of the non-humans think Daffy was the god of frustration?
Holy shit, this is nearly 70 years old. This would have been right on the heels of color television being commercially available to the public.
@amayatepes look at this
LMAO
Huh. That’s just a whole ass Daffy Duck cartoon.
Everything about this cartoon is top-notch. The timing, the animation (watch Daffy’s different walks) the art; this is a treasure
“...the rigidity that we face in present times, from relationship to gender, is a modern construct that comes very much from the colonial forces primarily through religion … historically many indigenous cultures left room for much more than the binary.”
-Saul Williams, director of the Rwandan sci-fi musical ‘Neptune Frost’
We had such a wonderful and illuminating watching and talking about the Afro-futurist movie ‘Neptune Frost’, which explores the journey of genderqueer Neptune and coltan miner Matalusa, and their blossoming relationships amongst a Rwandan hacker commune.
If you’re keen to watch more sci-fi, or more African cinema, I’d definitely recommend it!
Check out our podcast on the film to learn more.
The really funny part about these interminable "why does the game's culture of play MATTER if everybody is HAVING FUN" arguments is that they always ultimately boil down to dismissing the fact that being treated as a human Xbox is miserable for the GM by framing the GM as a lone malcontent in an otherwise-harmonious group – yet if the GM in question actually followed the thread of that argument to its logical conclusion and removed themselves, in a culture of play that expects the GM to do all the work, there is no game.
You phrased it so much better than I ever could!
An article on cockatoos in medieval Europe recently appeared in The New Yorker (June 28, 2021). Written by staff writer Rebecca Mead, it…
it’s not virtuous to love a good debunking irrespective of original topic so much but. i do. anyway luckily this article is also super interesting
not to be a joyless hag but I've started seeing genderbent "yuri" shipping Markiplier and Ryan Gosling and I can't help but think of someone I recently I unfollowed for posting that they have an easier time caring about genderbent versions of boy characters than regular fictional women
and I'm also building some connections to that post I made about reading books by Black women (you know the one) and the people who would respond by saying something akin to "joke's on you, I only read fanfic 😜" as if that were some kind of clever loophole and not a demonstration of the exact thing I was talking about
like yes fandom is about fun or whatever but idk man at what point has your desire for no thoughts head empty uncritical consumption left you splashing around in something that's been blended down to an indistinguishable goo for the sake of avoiding anything remotely challenging. with the thing that's "challenging" here being. you know. giving a shit about women and Black people and like frankly anyone but your shippable white men (and honorary Markiplier).
don't make me tap the five year old teen vogue article, etc
All experiences of escapism are not created equally.
NASA just dropped the closest image ever taken of Jupiter
the central conceit of white boy "comedy rap" genres is that they're too racist to recognise that most classic rap is already pretty humorous in many ways, on account of wordplay being fundamental to the form,
and also steeped in pop culture from the very beginning, like the rap scene was already making music about comics and anime and video games you don't need to segregate a new genre for that
