her blurb and life are a work in progress

I like monuments, museums, cancelled TV shows, and zeitgeist. I made Arrested Westeros + internet explorers club

[voxceleste]

I'm not mad, just disappointed.

There is a likeability crisis in much contemporary queer sff. Authors are unwilling to make their characters look bad, and it compromises the integrity of the story. I don’t think this is the result of individual authors’ incompetence. The state of the publishing industry and the social media ecosystem around genre fiction has refigured the reader as, primarily, a customer, and the customer is always right. If Yamamoto had written a highly entertaining and optimistic crime novel with a cast of highly flawed marginalized people who the reader is expected to root for even as they hurt each other, themselves, and the people around them—if they took seriously the premise of the story they did in fact write—it may have been more difficult to market. It may have received more negative Goodreads reviews from the kind of people who don’t like Wuthering Heights because it’s just a bunch of terrible people treating each other terribly. But oh my god. Who cares. Those people can go read a book that isn’t about people who steal things for a living and send each other to jail.

i wrote 3,100 words about makana yamamoto's hammajang luck, friends at the table's twilight mirage, heat (1995), suspension of emotional disbelief, and the state of queer genre fiction. cheers. (cc @burins)

[burins]

you need to read this (all of it, but the conclusion really hits the nail on the head with not just queer sff but so much of contemporary fiction from books to comics to TV.)

[thedevilsrain]

jon snow: im a bastard. everyone hates me. i want to die. and im 14

tyrion for some fucking reason:

[willowycreatures]

the way i didn't remember this at all that i had to open the books only to see that ghost was as gagged as i am right now

[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

[huariqueje]

Full Moon , Backstreet ,Provincetown MA - John Dowd , 2020,

American , b. 1960 -

Oil on linen , 20 x 24 in.

[boatcats]

Bringing my classmate the first two Hornblower DVDs to watch. And it's either gonna cheer him up or backfire. But I'm committed now.

[boatcats]

"His name is Hornblower?"

[sanguinarysanguinity]

The reaction people have been having since the beginning!

“My name is Hornblower” he quavered at length. “What an infernal piece of bad luck for you” said a second man at the table, with a complete absence of sympathy.

-- C.S. Forester, Mr Midshipman Hornblower

[hummeline]

[fallhound]

Speaking of geoguessr, here's the funniest things I ever saw ingame

[pezpenser205]

(source)

god youre so true rn

[ltwilliammowett]

Die Mimik der Tethys (The Expressions of Tethys) is a high sea buoy (last was in Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin, 2024), that is suspended in space and moves synchronously to another buoy in the Atlantic Ocean near Nantes. Continuously transmitting motion data via satellite to its relocated double, the information guides eight electric motors and cable winches, which precisely reproduce the buoy's movement in the ocean. The buoy functions as a hypnotising machine that inevitably leads to the idea of waves lapping around inside the exhibition space, creating an ocean in the minds of people.

Video source

Idea sent by @macfanatic, thanks for it <3

[departmentofinteriors]

not furniture but love this 1930s radiator with bread warming addition

[grecoromanyaoi]

person who only knows 5 art pieces, seeing any visual depiction: getting a lot of 'the fallen angel' by alexandre cabanel vibes from this...

[3liza]

where were all you conclave bitches when Young Pope was on tv.

[hummeline]

Please I need you all to watch The Young Pope, at one point he just says:

[depsidase]

[isabellaofparma]

historical inaccuracies in period dramas are okay as long as i like them

[isabellaofparma]

they are, however, punishable by death if i don’t

[amthsts-remade-deactivated20191]

follow me for more great posts other people made

[butchbetty]

this is a cinematic masterpiece

[hummeline]

This is the greatest show of all time

[autoneurotic]

i could fix him (the piece of media i just consumed that was poorly executed but had a good premise)

[ohevoyev]

[mercuryfountain-deactivated2024]

"While writing this book, I got an email from someone asking me to introduce them to women who worked as caretakers for gay men who died of AIDS. I said that I could introduce them to women who were influential leaders, but that my data in the ACT UP Oral History Project showed that there was no difference in numbers between women who cared for dying friends and men who cared for dying friends, that this work in ACT UP was not gendered. And she wrote me back: 'Thank you. Can you refer me to someone who might know some women who cared for gay men during AIDS?'"

-Sarah Schulman, Let The Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP, 1987-1993, 2021

[hummeline]

This book is truly one that resonated so much with me, three-quarters oral history and one quarter activist guide. It is truly a must read