The Noah Guy

Noah [he/they] autistic rat man

[sweatermuppet]

closing statement from an article about being intersex & the possible connection of gender expression and sexuality in intersex individuals, published in The Gay Liberator, 1970s

[redstonedust]

the whole "insulting someone based on their appearance is bad because it could indirectly hurt people you like who share that feature" is a good start for unlearning body shaming but i do think we need to go further and remind people that even if there was some physical trait that was magically 10000% exclusive to conservatives and creeps and nobody else ever had it, we still shouldnt be insulting them based on that. because the problem with them is not their appearance its their ideology and actions. by insulting their appearance you arent just indirectly insulting others who look like that, youre literally not making the correct point. stay on topic ya know.

[redstonedust]

also to be clear bc some people have mentioned it, theres already aspects of peoples appearance that are 10000% exclusive to a specific ideology (a tattoo of a fascist symbol, for example) but i really dont think you can count that as insulting someone based on their appearance because the appearance isn't the problem. idc if the tattoo looks good or bad i care that this person is broadcasting their fascist views to the world. i hope the difference is obvious,

[kurulover]

I hate that when you’re stressed enough your body just starts falling apart. I think it should realize you’re already stressed and don’t need that and start functioning better actually

[kurulover]

[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.

[syn4k]

"lock in" is probably one of the most important phrases to enter the public lexicon in the 2020s

[joyflameball]

[sanguine-scales]

i think something a lot of people don't get is that years of mocking your child, even in jest, does in fact tend to get under their skin

[sanguine-scales]

a decade or two of even light verbal harassment is very much accentuated when it's an authority figure you are in every meaningful way subservient to

[rosefinchie]

how it all feels lately

[koobiie]

shoutout to everyone who wants to infodump but cant string together coherent thoughts to form sentences and instead just look at you like this

[mooned-knights]

is anyone else annoyed that "ai" encompasses both chatgpt and tools we train to do repetitive tedious work for us. and by the ripple effect of articles like "scientists develop ai to detect cancer early" that make people argue for the merit of chatgpt or become anti-medicine. and by the general state of the world and society

[deadblog293898210398]

*sees henis gay*

[unyieldingsilence]

‎

[damiodoes]

Img transcript: screenshot of tags: first has an empty block, second says “he/him penis call that henis,” third says “. I’m sorry I don’t know why i said that” END

can anyone else hear a really funny but regretful joke on the wind? Sounded like it was said right behind me. Weird

[elliespectacular]

wanna hang out [remembers it's rude to put expectations on people] it's cool if not [remembers people like to know they're wanted] but I'd really like it if you did [remembers selfishness is bad] we can do whatever you want though [remembers that handing someone a blank canvas isn't as effective as providing a suggestion to bounce ideas off of] like sucking each others fingers for example

[burgerdotcom]

reblogs were off

[wuggen]

Everyone say thank you sanitation workers we owe you our lives sanitation workers

[fairycosmos]

you literally have to unironically listen to some shit like party rock anthem so you don’t kill yourself

[babitzy]

feeling doikayt in this chili’s tonight

[fairycosmos]

the issue with growing up in the 2000s and 2010s was like there was this really big push toward "accepting your weirdness" overall but they meant like idk wearing mismatched socks or something not being tangibly beyond the norm in any way shape or form

[klapollo]

We watched toy story 2 today and they say suicide prominently in the first act. So whenever someone says "unalive," they are operating at a sub-toy story level of vocabulary maturity

[klapollo]