[insert creative blog title here]

|| he/it | 20s | Really bad at tagging ||

[kod-lyoko]

[64mpg]

lyrics DO NOT 🙅‍♀️🙅‍♀️❌❌🚫🚫 have to be good 🙂‍↔️🙂‍↔️🙂‍↔️ for the song to be good 👍😎😎😎

[64mpg]

[dragon-in-a-fez]

"you don't know what you have until you lose it" works for things that suck too btw. sometimes you need to experience life without something for a while to realise oh damn that was some bullshit

[antlered-vixen]

I am so tired of short-attention-span, trim-the-fat culture. All writing advice these days is for how to write like Chuck Palahniuk. "Cut 'think', cut 'feel', cut 'wonder' - only action, only pushing forward, show and move and move and move." What if I could emulate this style, and still don't want to? What if I want to write like Henry James, with three paragraphs of introspective musings between each dialogue line? The music advice is, "make it shortform, make it Tik-Tok compatible, make it punchy, hit the refrain as soon as possible." What if I want that 10-minute prog rock piece? What if I want that symphony? What if I want it slow and luxurious and lazy? Movies. Series. Poetry. Bodies. Everything is "trimmed trimmed trimmed trimmed, stripped bare, you have three seconds to win me over, make it airport chic." I don't want to win you over, then, I guess. I want the fat left it. I want the pleasure and the indolence and the indulgence. Fuck this art-advice that's always "your art needs Ozempic."

[pangur-and-grim]

her shape

[dogpuppy]

[scorebug]

[cozy-stardust]

Imagine Grace defined his name as the elegance definition of grace and Rocky spends years thinking how fucking ironic this clumsy leaky space blobs name is.

Until Grace slips out a sentence along the lines of "could you give me a little grace here" and Rocky immediately points out he used a word wrong so Grace has to explain that yeah, grace means elegance but it can also mean mercy sometimes too.

And Rocky has to suddenly reconcile that the clumsy leaky blob that saved his life twice, that almost certainly doomed himself to come back for him, name is Mercy.

[till-dawn-do-us-part]

[redstonedust]

my bugbear of the day is that i think its odd when people say "femme trans man" or "masc trans woman" they automatically assume it means no hrt. nothing stoppin someone from going on estrogen and also being butch. you can be 8 years on testosterone and be camp about it. being gnc is a whole spectrum babey open your eyes.

[kabsey]

Reminder to self: A file folder of outlines and character notes and half-written scenes is the equivalent of an artist’s sketchbook and holds just as much value to the creative process.

If a framed canvas isn’t the only worthwhile expression of visual art, then a fully edited and polished piece of significant length is not the only worthwhile expression of writing.

[animentality]

[ariesrin]

I love characters who would die for each other but will not, under any circumstances, communicate a single honest feeling.

[dogpuppy]

[ashenmind]

zun putting out a game with better language availability than toby fox is pretty funny

[churrochurr0]

Touhou Koumakyou: New Classic - the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil

Deltarune, Undertale

lol lmao

[low-polly]

maybe seeing zun do it will finally convince toby that more than 2 languages exist

[uncontrollablesphere]

[image description: Screenshot of languages supported in Touhou Koumakyou: New Classic - the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil: English, French, Italian, Spanish - Spain, Portuguese - Brazil, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean. End id]

[image description: Screenshot of languages supported in Deltarune: English, Japanese. End id]

[shadow-banned-the-hedgehog]

[mlembug]

"the average income in <X> is <Y> of <currency>" cool, what's the median

[unyielding-pussy]

Average isn't useful here. however, after a little bit of research, apparently the median income in the US is $24,327, which means the reality is actually much worse than this meme makes it seem. yay!

[asteroidtroglodyte]

[wirelessmousegirl]

According to time magazine, median annual rent is $13,896, which means rent alone is 57% Of the median annual income, awesome!

[isuggestrevolution]

i have a suggestion

[arandomquark]

I'm not exactly an economic expert but this is a graph from the US Census Bureau which has median household income at $83k. I do not think the $24k figure is true

[ndnbutch]

personally I am of the opinion that vegans who are like “the way our food system currently works under capitalism on a large scale is exceptionally cruel to all animals including humans and is not sustainable, so I’m doing what I can to make the most ethical choices available to me about what I eat and encourage others to do the same” are generally very reasonable people who I agree with in spades. but vegans who seem to think human beings are not themselves animals who are ultimately also part of the food chain but instead some kind of other paternalistic higher entity that can never engage in ethical and sustainable hunting practices (and especially the fringe I’ve seen who think other carnivorous animal predators are also evil and need to be eliminated) are people I regard as foolish at best if not actively anti-indigenous and racist

[pangur-and-grim]

I've read a few recently published books, and there's this recurring pattern where if anyone does anything bad and interesting, they have to later talk about it in a way that makes it clear that it was a misunderstanding/ justified/ not their fault, so they're still a good person. and if they have a disagreement with another character, they have to therapy talk it out, regardless of their background. it doesn't matter if this is a street urchin with three teeth who just stabbed and kidnapped someone, you will get eloquent sterile therapy speak that will smooth out any possible emotional tension. and everyone asks for permission before they kiss, and waits for a clear enthusiastic yes. again, doesn't matter the character's background or situation, they will ask "can I please kiss you," because if they didn't, that could get all yucky and uncertain, couldn't it? and if a character is from a rich family, they will hate being in a rich family, and hate wealth signifiers, and actually be all for class equality. and everyone is casually queer, without thought being put into how that would mesh with the society that is being described. like yes, this is violent class-based system obsessed with inheritance, but no, it's not actually a problem that the child they've coldly groomed to take on the family mantle is unwilling to beget an heir because of gay. the parents might be terrible, cruel and fascistic, but they're not homophobic! I don't know, it just seems like EVERYTHING that could actually be messy gets sanded and sanded until it's smooth as a shark, but the Fun Violence is allowed to stay, because bloodshed doesn't actually bother anyone or have any consequence apart from your rogue character shrugging and going oops, was that me? the rogue is still a good person though. if you think they're not, just wait for the two solid pages of introspection. and yes they started the book by slitting two throats, but that was fine. they will ask permission before hugging you.

[topazadine]

There are many reasons for this that are braided together, but I'm going to be bold and say it: I think a lot of this has to do with rising illiteracy.

I just read a Fortune article the other day about the fact that some college students can't read a single sentence. One. They cannot parse the meaning of a single sentence. That's terrifying. (Here it is on Yahoo without the paywall, btw.)

The thing is that you do not have to be wholly illiterate to struggle with reading. About half of Americans have low literacy, meaning they read around a sixth grade level or less.

This puts publishers in a terrible position. They need to sell books to an audience that cannot read books made for adults but that doesn't want the simplicity of grade-school books. The books need real adult problems without the nuance, hence the therapy speak and the black-and-white thinking.

Another thing is that cognitive flexibility influences literacy, meaning the reverse is also true; cognitive inflexibility determines lower literacy. Cognitive flexibility is the ability to update your schemas or combine multiple pieces of information without being expressly told to do so. It also impacts whether you can identify the mismatch between what someone says and what they do, which is the gold standard way to avoid therapy speak.

Poor cognitive flexibility means you can't have messy situations, because then the reader doesn't know what to think. Everyone has to be sorted into Good Person and Bad Person, and if the Good Person does something that may seem Bad, then they become a Bad Person unless the text assures us that they are still Good.

You will see many positive Goodreads reviews for these books. I'm not saying every single person with a positive review for a book like that has low literacy, but it's more likely than not. The same thing that drives you insane is what compels other readers who can't handle more complex texts.

Basically what I am saying is that if you want something with nuance, as a reader or a writer, you probably need to seek out selfpub stuff. I know that a lot of selfpub is garbage specifically because of the lower barrier to entry, and a lot of good selfpub stuff is not highly rated because getting reviews takes time and energy.

(I'd like to say my own stuff is good but doesn't have a lot of reviews because that requires active solicitation and I'm busy. I'm competing with millions of authors, both selfpub and tradpub, who have larger budgets. Anyway.)

Still, if you go sifting, ask for recommendations, and follow selfpub authors, you're likely to find more complex work that was not brutalized to fit the lowest common denominator.