i think we need to stop focusing on telling little girls they need to be “empowered” & instead teach them about chaotic mirth, hijinks, & becoming complete rascals
I’ve been spinning like a chicken on a spit ever since I heard about the whole ‘AI generated story places in renowned Commonwealth Writing Prize’ scandal and now has come the time to regale you with my Opinions™️ about the matter, because it’s hit on some thoughts I’ve had for a while re: how I approach writing, both fanfic and original fiction… and thoughts I’ve had as a reader. long read, strap in.
tldr scandal speedrun: story by Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir just won the Caribbean regional prize at the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize ie one of the biggest short fiction awards in the world (almost 8000 entries this year) and was subsequently published on Granta's website, as all regional winners are. readers start flagging that something is off, and it quickly becomes clear that the story is almost certainly AI generated, and obviously the press and wank started up, media coverage, and my all time favourite part: Granta editor Sigrid Rausing uploads the story into an AI to ask if an AI wrote it and then puts out a statement that pretty much says ‘probably, but guess we’ll never know!’ (SORRY THIS PART IS SOOOO FUCKING FUNNY TO ME LMFAO 😭)
much of the earlyish discourse has focused on the AI detection question, what does this mean for literary prizes going forward, how do we verify human authorship. some responses have been very good/interesting (the Africa is a Country piece especially). what I want to yap about is what the judges' response to this story tells us about how postcolonial writing is read by the institutions that gatekeep it and readers who dismiss it (and this puts it perfectly with Arundhati Roy as an example), what the judging panel’s language reveals when read as a critical object in itself, and why the failure mode here is so damaging. tldr: the story is dogshit and so clearly AI generated you can even see the AI’s ‘thought’ process, but the mainstream reactions are slagging off the wrong thing, and for reasons that have little to do with AI.
it has been actually infuriating to watch a significant chunk of the online reaction use this nonsense piece of writing as a launching pad for a much broader dismissal. someone posts the bench-men sentence or the sunrise-over-a-sink sentence as evidence of AI, and then in the replies someone else will say some shit like "well this is just what postcolonial writing is like" or "I've read prize-winning stuff that reads exactly like this". and suddenly we're not talking about Jamir Nazir anymore, we're talking about whether this entire mode of writing, postcolonial literary fiction, global south prose ‘in general’, varied and distinct language plays associated with everyone from Roy to Walcott to Kincaid, as somehow inherently gaudy, unmoored, purple, a performance of profundity that collapses under scrutiny. sheer vim against styles of writing unfairly and lazily judged as ‘florid’ and ‘overwrought’, ie people calling for the clinical manicuring of prose through a lens of anti-AI progressivism.
and this rage has very little to do with AI or this AI generated story, and a lot more to do with the epistemology of reading across cultural difference:
what assumptions are you making when you encounter prose that doesn't do what you're used to, and how do you distinguish between:
this is doing something I don't have the framework to follow/yet
and
this is doing nothing
the uncomfortable answer is that a lot of people, at levels high above the average reader mind you, being prize judges and all, don't make that distinction. they experience the unfamiliarity and name it as failure, as excess, as incoherence, as the literary equivalent of noise, without asking whether the problem is in the text or in the reading, or they fall prey to a manifestation of ‘trim the fat culture’ (good post on this).
this is not an accusation of bad faith reading necessarily; it is just what happens when you read without the relevant context and without the intellectual curiosity to notice that you're missing something and attempt to find it. telling, however, is how quickly that experience of unfamiliarity, in this particular case, became a generalisation. not "I find this story's specific metaphors incoherent" but "I find this kind of writing incoherent", as if “this kind of writing” is a stable category and not just something this AI slapped together. a sliding from the fraudulent to the traditional that happens with striking confidence, and one which you do not see applied with the same ease to, say, Western European modernism, where the response to difficulty tends toward "I need to read more Woolf to understand Woolf" rather than "yucky stinky Woolf is AI-slop”.
anyway. here is my favourite sentence from the shitty AI story:
"she had the kind of walking that made benches become men."
and like it’s my all time favourite sentence ever because like. what does it mean. what is it doing. why is it there. what decision was made in its construction and to what end? and I just could not come to a conclusion because the real answer is that no actual decision was made, because decision-making requires an engagement with the writing, requires a reasoning for the sentence to exist in the way it does, and this exists across all literary prose styles, from the sparsest to the lushest. the bench-men sentence is difficult to interpret, but not in a ‘this is difficult to interpret which makes the reward of interpretation sweeter’ way, it is difficult to interpret in a ‘there is nothing under this sentence’ way, and that is made very clear when even the slightest interpretative pressure is laid on the story.
anyway, turns out the judges of one of the world’s biggest literary competitions did not apply that pressure. caribbean regional judge Sharma Taylor described Nazir's language as "sublime — precise yet richly evocative — conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy" and like man this isn’t to dunk on Taylor personally but i think that sentence, in being a diagnostic object, is in itself a diagnostic object as to the whole scandal here: it’s evaluative language that doesn’t touch the text itself, a string of compliments whose terms don’t require a unique object. "precise yet richly evocative" is a sentence that could describe anyone from Chekhov to MT Vasudevan Nair.
what it cannot do is tell you what is precise about Nazir's objectively vague, dreary sentences, or where exactly economy manifests in a story that opens with three subordinate images somehow being unable to create even half an image. the judges either didn't notice or didn't give a fuck, and imo the honest interpretation there is that the evaluation was matching the text against a prior model of what this kind of writing is supposed to feel like, rather than what it actually does.
the main vulnerability of this kind of matching-against-model judging criteria is that it can only flag deviation from the expected shape, not absence within it. a story that inhabits the expected form, even hollowly, passes muster. a story that does something actually unexpected might fail on those same grounds, whether or not it's extraordinary. the AI machine got through to the prize list not because it fooled sophisticated readers into thinking they were reading a great work of literature, but because the reading operation in use did not require that experience of reading great literature to complete successfully. you just needed the vague shape, and the machines are good at making vague shapes.
what shape?
seemingly lyrical, lush, image-dense, located in rural poverty or landscape-as-metaphysical-weight, threaded with folk memory and unresolved grief, incantatory, myth-grabbing, rum shops, zinc rooftops, zinc-hair. what the AI has done is precisely what it is built to do: grab tiny scraps and fragments from actual prize-winning postcolonial stories and shoved them all together into an amorphous, senseless mass, knowing what it is supposed to do but not knowing how to do it. and so to me the most astounding/horrifying aspect of this scandal is how the judges who one can safely assume, based on their credentials, are very familiar with ‘world literature’, proved unable to tell the difference between a form inhabited and a form vacated.
and I really don’t like bringing up my literary/academic credentials (derogatory) etc etc on here anymore, because it at times positions me in an uncritical way I don’t intend or enjoy and I spent my early months in fandom realising just how very uncomfortable I was with the image I inadvertently curated as a result of coming straight from that sort of literary-academic space. so to put it very basically: I have spent my academic career broadly specialising in the very style and period of postcolonial literature that this AI story is attempting (badly) to emulate. my focus has always been south asia but i have also worked extensively with caribbean lit especially early on, and i’ve been taught/examined by some very well known caribbean writers and literary scholars, etc etc. ie i’m just trying to say that this post isn’t just me talking about a vague grievance with literary cultures but something i’ve been neck deep in for 10+ years now, ie i do know my shit and am not just knee jerk wanking, even though frankly i don’t think i should have to explain my background because way too many people are being way too confident with the ‘i have been writing for THREE BILLION years and they gave ARUNDHATI ROY THAT BITCH the booker prize’ atm…
anyway the reason I’m so brainrotted about this is because this exact literary-cultural problem was one of the things that led me to structure my longfic, Prayers to Broken Stone, in the way I did. the fic itself is totally irrelevant here so you’re not missing anything if you haven’t read it or are unfamiliar with the Silmarillion, I’m just referring to how the first quarter of that fic deliberately contains every single postcolonial miserycore cliché that appeals to a literary-prize, Western Anglophone, and diasporic audience’s ideas of what ‘Global South’ world-literatures should look like (and ngl I feel like I probably went too hard on this because so far I know at least 5 ppl familiar with the genre who justifiably almost dropped the fic before the mic drop because of the beginning being Like That… sorry guys. i will probably do it again 😭).
anyway after that, and very abruptly, the story takes a hard pivot to what it actually is, which is not an apolitical portrait of India, not diasporic literature about the Indian subcontinent, not even an Indian novel about Kozhikode, but a Kozhikodan novel about India, down to the style: my writing in general tends to lean on carnivaleque and incongruous tonal whiplashes between ‘lowbrow’ humour, abject tragedy and direct critical fourth-wallfucking commentary, but that whiplash is turned all the way up to 100 in Prayers and the humour especially is taken to borderline slapstick levels, and that style is evocative of Kozhikodan literary cultures (see—writings of Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, who is mentioned in the story in that Comrade Maedhros lies claims they are great buddies lmao), only that most writing from the region is in Malayalam, etc.
the reason i mention the fic here is that objectively speaking, those first few chapters, the ‘series of clichés’ ones, are the ‘clearest’ part of the story when it came to writing it. those chapters were written to directly evoke the vague shape of ‘prizewinning postcolonial giants’ of South Asian literature, both the brilliant and incisive writers and the floggers of diaspora-gaze miserycore, providing a series of aesthetic signals to those texts: the joint-family ‘madhouse’, the separated twins, the daddy-issues-as-father-of-the-nation-issues, the family-as-country, the dried rivers, the symbolic heirloom bangle, the utopian pre-imperial regional historiography, the diasporic returnee, the rotting house, the familial disconnect. Roy, Rushdie, Mistry, Lahiri, Desai, Seth, Ghosh, rinse and repeat.
do I personally enjoy every single one of these authors? no, I would probably cagefight two of them at least. what I am saying though, is that that their writing isn’t some kind of incomprehensible mess that nobody aside from their little tiny id-group can understand, not amorphous or vague or too overwrought to comprehend. their prose, all differing styles, can be rich, lush, playful, meandering, yes. but they are not unclear: they’re so clear that the positionality of the authors, their class and caste backgrounds, their educational and migratory trajectories, are often painfully evident (hence the cagefighting). the reason i used those aspects in my fic to signal towards a particular kind of globally lauded postcolonial literature is because those signals are clear, not confusing.
ie it is not a case of ‘global south’ writers being incomprehensible, it is a case of readers walking into a garden with a few flowers they haven’t seen before and immediately going ‘damn, look at this jungle. can’t navigate it but i’m sure it’s great, ok bye’ then turning the fuck around and writing the travelogue anyway. which is to say, applying a colonial reading practice to postcolonial writing.
and there’s a similar, though differently approached, aspect in globally renowned caribbean anglophone writing: a history of deliberate formal difficulty. where the difficulty isn’t some ambient mystery or marker of ‘serious’ literature but a formal consequence of a model of storytelling. eg. Selvon's Creole narration in The Lonely Londoners was a decision with costs+purposes about what it would mean for Moses Aloetta's interiority to be rendered in standard English versus in a voice that had not been, at the time, admitted to the Anglophone literary canon, rather than being the inevitable default of a Caribbean writer. Harris's dissolving frames in Palace of the Peacock are not difficult because Harris was apathetic to comprehensibility but because the Guyanese historical consciousness the novel examines does not easily resolve into stable subjectivity.
form is so often part of the argument across literature, across the English canon itself, and normally in literary criticism, ‘difficulty’ is approached epistemologically alongside aesthetically. this is common knowledge yet the first part is something that appears to be hard to grasp for people reading and commentating on ‘world literature’.
what is this form doing that another form cannot?
you can answer that question for Harris and Selvon and Ghosh and Roy and man, I think he’s so fucking annoying sometimes, but you can even do it for Rushdie. you cannot do it for "coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all". and this impossibility has nothing to do with foreignness or excessiveness but because the question, when applied to this AI generated piece of writing, has no answer.
and like… what does that tell us about what the judges were evaluating? imo it tells us they were at least in part evaluating surface-level compliance. compliance with recognisable genre conventions and an expected register, and so with the right signals of “authenticity”. and in the case of ‘Global South literature’, these conventions include an emphasis on the rural, the embodied, the rooted, the mythical.
an AI is very good at compliance because compliance is, quite literally, what AI does: every LLM is trained on the corpus of what has been rewarded before and thus it reproduces the patterns of that reward. if the judges were themselves rewarding compliance with a known type, then of course the AI passed with flying colours, because they were, in effect, running the same operation as the LLM model: matching input against a predetermined template instead of engaging with the work itself.
not to use my favourite cliché, but this specific scandal having played out in the way it did pretty much evidences how these two things, the upper echelons of the global literary prize circuit judging panels and generative AI, are less ‘warring factions’ and more ‘two frat bros fisting each other while saying no homo bro’, ie comorbid counterparts.
and so imo the question that should haunt every future Commonwealth Prize shortlist is not "did an AI write this?" but "what model of literary value are we using to judge Anglophone literature?”, and “why the fuck are we doing that???”
bc if your aesthetic criteria are vague enough that a sentence like "the grove isn't a ledger; it's a mouth — it closes only when it's satisfied" reads as "vivid, lush imagery" delivered with "quiet authority," then your judging criteria is less criteria and more vibes. you are literally just playing a high-stakes vibes-based game of Pin the Tail on the Mango whilst wilfully ignoring how vibes are precisely what AI large language models are the best at faking.
anyway, like I said in my intro, this scandal is already sliding into a secondary discourse in which ‘Oriental™️ opacity/incomprehensibility’ is being treated as the general category, of which this AI-generated confusion is just the most recent instance. you can watch it happening in real time, unbearably prolonged: people who rightly found the Nazir story incoherent, reaching way too easily for other examples of postcolonial prose they also apparently found incoherent or “purple”, prose that is, in fact, doing things they just didn't know how to follow. the AI story has handed a lazy, sneering and dismissive reading practice the veneer of clinical diagnosis.
that is the horribly ironic thing here. reader after reader, openly admitting to doing the exact same lazy, apathetic reading of postcolonial literature as the literary prize judges they are (rightly) criticizing have done with this AI story, have been doing for human-writing from the global south for all this time. “ewww this is what that writing looks like when a machine does it" (correct) is sliding so so so easily into "ewww this is what that writing looks like" (not correct). dog after dog, chasing tail after tail.
and that slide, from a machine having ‘successfully’ impersonated prize-winning prose, to a panel of judges who clearly weren't really reading, to the genre itself being defined as imitable machinery, is imo the most damaging thing to come out of this whole affair, and the people most hurt by it are the writers who have fuck all to do with Jamir Nazir, who is clearly just a chancer who fucked around and found out.
because somewhere in those 8000 entries, there is a writer, possibly many writers, who solved their riddle, who knew what every sentence was doing, who had made the thousand small decisions that constitute a story, and whose difficulty (if their story was difficult: difficulty is subjective and not a default, as we have established) could easily be accounted for. that writer did not win, because the judges were not looking for them. and now, in the aftermath, the interrogation of the incident continues to refuse to ask the questions that would have found them.
I first thought it would be blowing smoke up my own ass to finish this post with a quote from my own story. and then I remembered that this is my circus and you are all my monkeys, so I will indeed be ending with a (spoiler-free, context-unnecessary) quote from the final chapter of Prayers, from one of the fic’s multiple fourth-wall breaches, this one explicitly addressing both the character of Maedhros, a gay Muslim man in postcolonial India, as well as the attritional impact of global Anglophone prize cultures on ‘national literatures’, explaining the structure of the story and touching on the reading-practice I talk about in this post, this cold, dismissive flattening based on the reader’s refusal to comprehend the unfamiliar. Emphasis obviously made just for this excerpt:
Humanity has tried many times, with fanfare and floodlights, to hold the great white shark within glass walls. When a young female was placed in the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco, its keepers marvelled for a day, two days, then watched as she rammed herself against the tank walls, snout bloodied and refusing food until her body yielded to exhaustion. In San Diego, one was found dead within two weeks. More recently, in a public aquarium, a six-foot juvenile circling its tank like a condemned spirit, colliding with the corners until its skin peeled raw, was released after months only to die on the way back to the sea. Each attempt ended the same: a slow unravelling, a remarkable animal’s vast strength curdling inward, its shimmering blue-mapped body drifting in a pale echo of the life denied to them.
I do not deny they are vicious creatures. But it is not viciousness that makes it impossible for them to survive in the aquarium. The old fables and new films, the man-eater, the blood-frothed wave, the lurking fin, have all mistaken the matter entirely. The thing that kills the great white shark in captivity is the billowing cage: the narrowing circle of water, no current to guide their gills, the confiscation of the horizon. In captivity they turned to self-excoriation, scraping themselves to ribbons on the glass, starving in protest, dragging their bodies into stillness. As if potential had been so thoroughly written into their marrow that the denial of it was a kind of murder. What we mistake for noble resilience is in fact the beginning of a long derangement. A creature built to know the endless universe, driven into madness by the closing-in of incomprehensible walls.
And so we, in our hunger for marvels, have reduced an oceanic immensity to an ornament, a sole symbolic bangle on a slender wrist, a riddle turned spectacle. In that act of enclosure, the essential vastness of the creature is stripped away, its thousand-mile wanderings and salt-scored pilgrimages compressed into a parody of itself in a ghost story projected on glass.
What is offered to the crowd is no shark but the space where a shark once was: a wonder gutted and repackaged, its enforced silence masquerading as our unspoken understanding even as a scream writhes in every bubble.
As we behold the captive great white shark, Arwen, we do naught but applaud its absence in our lives, gild the blade which vanquished its truth, and heave a sigh of relief for the barrier between ourselves and the beast. We build shrines to the wonders we swallow whole. We raise gardens tomorrow from the cities we raze today.
But perhaps there is light on the horizon for humanity. Perhaps one day, we will learn how to keep the great white shark in a cage. And in turn, maybe it will learn how to rasp itself down for the onlooker and pace circles into borrowed water, each turn narrower, each wall closer than the last. What is witnessed is not the beast but its mutilation, a spectre stripped of horizon and turned inward on itself, a hollow spectacle mistaken for a radiant life.
The tank allows for neither possibility nor invention, and so the tale of the great white shark contracts into a pattern of bruises, the persistence of a body against limits it was never meant to know. The water becomes a neverending sentence, telling the story of a ruin that can only end in its own undoing. I wanted to be a writer, Arwen. I have always wanted to be a writer. You know that. You have always known that. And yet anything I ever write will only ever be an un-writing of the things other people have already written of me. Even my letters to you.
It is amazing, now that I think of it, what desperation can do to a story.
was going to further explain how in the cons ive been to over the last few years theres been a dramatic increase in yuri (both ship art and art of actual yuri manga characters and even original w/w comics from artists) and it is excellent to see us progress towards more of a balance between yuri and yaoi but tbh the phrase yuri cambrian explosion just made me think like what if an anomalocaris and an opabinia were girlfriend
its genuinely fascinating the things ai does and does not get wrong visually. it successfully makes the coil on the safety pins, but you cant seem to open either of them. the paperclips are each split into two nonfunctional bits of metal. i dont see why the 1950 bic cristal has a logo 'etched' on it but the 2025 version does not (and also the logo is a bit fucked on its own). looks like it got the vibe of bobby pins though.
also just for the love of the game (and personal curiosity): here is what i can find on when these objects were invented, what they looked like, and what they looked like at the past time listed in this image (if it is different)! with the occasional bonus of when they get to their modern form
the safety pin
there is some interesting stuff about pins comparable to the modern safety pin throughout history (here is a 1964 article about ancient fibulae titled 'ancient safety pins' ), but walter hunt is credited with the invention of the modern safety pin in 1849 with this patent filed in the us. the distinguishing features he describes being "the construction of a pin made of one piece of wire or metal combining with a spring, and a clasp or catch, in which catch, the point of said spring is forced and by its own spring securely retained."
(first image from the patent, second image is a visual representation of it from wikimedia, cropped to the example that i think is the closest to the intent of said patent.)
so not quite yet a match to modern day!
judging from my patent perusing it looks like metal covers for the pointed end came around relatively quickly. i can't find an explicit patent on them so my timeframe is just "between 1849 and 1877". (given that i found a patent filed by WA butler where he wasn't arguing that the shield concept in and of itself was novel, just the design thereof, from 4/10/1877).
i found a patent from 1878 where the metal shield is pretty much in the shape as we know it today:
(there are others that are getting there functionally, but this one has the little folded over bits we know so well).
we were pretty much there by the 20th century. a more interesting visual/confirmed brand is clinton safety pins from that era. this antique clinton safety pins box is an example of what i am talking about:
(images are better quality in the link, there are other comparable ads that they put out about it as well as other antique boxes you can find the old auction listings for). i didn't manage to dig up their specific patents but i did try. but even if they didn't make them, it looks like someone was!
the museum of everyday life has a page for "a visual history of the safety pin" which isnt quite as granular about the construction i am talking about, but has some interesting jumping off points.
paperclips
i am going to point to the office museum's history of the paperclip for if you want to learn more about the paperclip without buying one of the books people have written about it. most things online seem to be citing or match them. please assume everything i am saying is pretty much from there unless stated otherwise (because again. so many people cite them)
we actually got the ovular paperclip pretty early, but the paperclip patented in 1967 by samuel fay was actually a shaped something like a fish or a tipi depending on how dedicated to the triangle the company making it was while making it. here is a side-by-side look at that style of clip (right) by a 'standard' paperclip (left)
(picture from 'pins to paperclips' by carolyn wasser, which talks about different fastenings she was dealing with while working at her archival internship.)
again, per the office museum, the paperclip we know so well is the 'gem' paperclip, which started being sold in the early 1890s. (image below also theirs).
so i wonder if the ai recorded 'triangular' in the descriptors of the fay paperclip and got that pointed version? but at any rate, not correct.
bobby pins
bobby pins are a bit of a fun adventure in the sense that i can't definitively nail down an inventor or original year for them. they are most commonly attributed (in the sources i am finding) to luis marcus in the nebulous time frame of 'after ww1', but he did not patent them that i can find. that story seems to be the most reputable but it's a pretty low bar; this mentalfloss piece is damn near the only article that links anything when talking about other people's claims (looking at you reader's digest).
but since i am more worried about the timeline: by and large, immediately post ww1 to 1920s seems to be consistent for when, with the rise of bobs, bobbing "bobby" pins gained prominence (in the usa at least).
i see contentions that the kirbigrips of the uk were invented earlier and seemed to have been comparable enough to become synonymous over there. now i did find three hairpin related patents (1904, 1905, 1926) from kirby beard & co but i dont have a ton of information from google patents, i do not speak french, and i dont think the UK patent search lists expired patents and/or patents this old, so i do not have any visuals to confirm anything. so we will look at a picture of vintage kirbigrips and then move on to other bobby pin shenanigans. okay? okay.
(this is just from an art print site, which i think is from this stock photo. there is a similar image of almost identical packaging a lower quality on this page which made me more willing to use it.)
but at any rate, first obvious bobby pin patent i can find is this one from 1924, which notably does not contain the now ubiquitous one-bumpy-and-one-smooth side (example figures below on the the left). the first patent that i can actual find is this one filed in 1926 by s. goldberg (below on the right).
mr goldberg has quite a storied life, which i will leave for your reading pleasure/general citation, but his hump brand bobby pins from the second patent were pretty close to our modern equivalents.
both of the above images are from this ebay listing, since i can ballpark it to 1920s-30s since most visuals for hold bob bobby pins are gayla brand, which is the same company just the brand hold bob pins were sold under in the 1940s. (goldberg's widow renamed the company (and her family) gaylord in the 1940s and gayla was under that umbrella)
the only missing link as it were is the fact that it took until the 1940/50s to add the rubber tips that the ai seems to be implying and which are now very common. the patent for that was filed in 1948 and was being mass-produced by the early 1950s.
bic cristal ballpoint pens
the image is brand name, so i'm going brand name, but the ballpoint pen does predate bic so keep that in mind. bic's cristal pens have been pretty consistent since their debut in 1950. it's a whole brand thing. they simply will not shut up about it. and because it's a brand thing (especially compared to the ubiquity of the other objects) it's a bit harder to uncover manufacturing details given talking about flaws can go against the narrative they've built. last year was their 75th anniversary so i wouldn't be surprised if, in part, that was the cause of this image. (all of those links love these pens so much. its all just advertising.)
i think the broad strokes of the visual are the same, so the extra blue plastic at the bottom of the '1950' version is probably just randomly generated. my biggest conjecture from the images ive seen is that the hole in the lid was likely smaller or nonexistent (the lids appear too pointed for the hole in the modern pen). otherwise, the main thing seems to be is that the placement of the etchings varying over time. just for fun, here are some ads from the 50s and an example from the 1956 catalog.
ads are from the already linked 75th anniversary page and the cropped example from the catalog is from their ''our story'' book-length advertisement. that thing is over 100 pages.
in conclusion: i hope you like patents! i looked through them so you don't have to. unless you want to. some of those safety pins got pretty crazy. they're just making fucking shapes in wire in those early days.
Does anyone have the fucking tiktok video of the overly enthusiastic rich bearded guy showing off his new hiking shoes in his Mansion and the Woods, but then another dude duets with it to make it look like he's escaping from being held prisoner please please
A couple of years ago I was tidying a rarely-tidied storage space, and found this painting that I bought long pre-transition (and then hid away, and eventually forgot about), because I had been captivated by the beauty of it, and wished dearly that it could be me, and settled for "in another life", and now, it's basically me (if I put my hair up):
...even down to the small boobs and big hands and that dress, and this is what I thought I could never be
also frankly i'm sick of this chibnall revisionism just because rtd2 is ass. "chibnall era was always so good and you guys were haters" no. no it wasn't and it still isn't.
even if rtd2 is worse than the chibnall era (i'm not sure i agree with this, at least not yet) that doesn't make the chibnall era good. 13 is still extremely out of character. the "fam" is still made up of cardboard cutouts of people. chibnall still introduced dhawan master, supposedly placed him after missy in the timeline, and undid a 3 season long character arc for the master in one fell swoop. the politics in chibnall's era were still dogshit. two writers can be bad at writing at the same time. two different creative teams can fumble the bag on doctor who.
there isn't one "villain" of doctor who. i know it would be easy if there was. but there isn't.
it's been a while since chibnall's era but you chibnall fans need to understand that even if you personally enjoyed it, it was still shit. the pro amazon episode and revealing the master's race to the nazis scene and "actually graham trying to comfort you about your cancer makes me feel kind of weird so fuck you" scene all still happened. this is out of character writing. that's not the doctor.
i think it's kind of funny that the rbs on this post are full of people explaining why they think rtd2 was worse or chibnall was worse. when my entire point was that they are both bad.
you need to listen to rap and hiphop you need to listen to jazz you need to listen to blues and country and bluegrass or else you will be inflicted with something most foul of the soul
Is a mixed variety of genres What you mean, or does it have to be specifically Those ones?
I don't like rap because it gives me audio fatigue (brain can't process everything and I get nauseous)
Cannot identify hip hop against any other "Pop" genre.
Jazz... it's alright, but I don't seek it out
I like the blues harmonica riff. I like music inspired by the blues. I do not like the blues themselves.
I genuinely do not know the difference between rock and country other than misogyny. As far as i'm concerned, metal music is just screechy country.
I have never heard of bluegrass. I'll try it but I make no promises about consistently listening
Video game OSTs are so prevalent that they inspired, like fifteen percent of the music I listen to.
If it is about genre diversity, i listen to whatever genre AJR is, indie rock/country idk, dubstep, extratone, what i've been referring to as bubblegum pop, and a number of different sounds that I don't know what they're called.
ellievsbear
snowghoul
gummygunk
areudirty
germansingergirl
vaporwave
