Cosimo Galluzzi
art blog(derogatory)
No title available
Acquired Stardust
cherry valley forever
pixel skylines
Jules of Nature
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
No title available
Origami Around
wallacepolsom
oozey mess
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
No title available
AnasAbdin
will byers stan first human second
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
noise dept.
izzy's playlists!
Monterey Bay Aquarium
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Germany
seen from Australia
seen from United States
seen from Japan
seen from Canada
seen from United States
seen from Philippines
seen from Germany
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Ireland
seen from Chile
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Ireland
seen from Japan
seen from United States
seen from Germany
@recordcrash
Keep forgetting to crosspost my essays here, but here's a new one totally out of the blue! Out of the limb-numbing, horizon-smearing white? Whatever it's Fargo!
Brutal murders in the snowed-under wasteland of the American Midwest! Girl power!
I think this is my favourite video ever because "Emperor Palpatine Surgical Reconstruction Centre" makes me laugh till I hurl every fucking time
I do think it’s interesting how the novel Dracula is meant to be a modern setting from its perspective. It’s very much that genre of story about an ancient fantasy archetype finding itself in a modern setting, complete with the rules-lawyering that often comes with modern parodies (that isn’t to say the stories of Olde didn’t have fun with loopholes either though).
Except Dracula is a story that plays itself straight. The vampire himself is not stupid. He’s possibly the oldest vampire of all which means he upgraded from animal instinct and mindless echoes of past memories to someone who’s regained his critical thinking skills. The story begins because he’s already adapted to how the modern world works now by hiring a solicitor who understands modern laws.
He knows now that he doesn’t have to march into London with an army like he used to; He can just buy property and the laws of London are forced to respect that. Similarly he’s already experimented in and discovered loopholes to vampire rules and limitations; Vampires are bound by the permission of owners so he simply uses his solicitor to buy and own a bunch of properties. If he needs to be invited in, Dracula hypnotizes someone to let him in.
Vampires need to return to their grave every dusk/dawn (whichever comes sooner), which causes their coffin to act as an anchor that limits how far from it they can travel? Dracula simply rations the earth of his grave into fifty coffins and spreads them across London so his range becomes exponentially larger.
All of these things make the story almost come across as a deconstruction and it might just be! It’s just that Dracula the novel became such a trendsetter that people nowadays see it as playing things fully straight. It almost feels as if the novel is written with the idea that readers have a basic understanding of vampires and their rules, so part of the thrill comes in the revelation of how the titular vampire is working around these rules. Likewise I’ve heard it used to be a trope in English literature for a traveler to visit some foreign land with a monster and escape by going home. But here the foreign aspect of the story is just the first (and final) arc; The monster’s plan hinges on coming to the UK itself!
So yeah. Dracula isn’t stupid and he reflects the idea that people of the past had just as common sense as the rest of us, they just had access to less/inaccurate knowledge and things worked differently back then. Dracula would be like… That bit of someone showing a medieval peasant a meme as they comprehend it perfectly and aren’t even wowed by the Doritos. If Dracula was set in the 21st century he’d probably understand social media well enough to become an influencer if he wanted to, though the issue of being invisible in cameras wouldn’t help.
Dracula is full of details that put it in what was at the time an incredibly modern time frame, which only isn't obvious to readers now because it's been more than a hundred years. A few off the top of my head:
Jonathan brings photographs of the properties to show to Dracula that he took with a Kodak portable camera.
Seward keeps an audio journal via phonograph recording.
Seward being a psychiatrist- the idea that you could actually try to talk to and understand a "lunatic" in order to help them get better instead of just throwing away the key was a depressingly novel concept in medicine at the time. Freud's Studies on Hysteria only came out two years before Dracula, for instance.
Blood transfusions. It's easy to make jokes about how Dracula was written before people knew about blood types and that's why Lucy gets transfusions from so many people with no problem, but because blood types wouldn't be discovered until 3 years after it was published, blood transfusion was still an extremely experimental and risky treatment that many doctors would hesitate to even consider, because sometimes when it was performed the patient would instantly die and no one knew why.
Mina's joke about "the New Woman"- anxieties about gender and feminism in Dracula are the kind of thing whole theses have been written about, but there's an obvious irony to this comment because Mina kind of is the New Woman. In contrast to Lucy, Mina is a highly-educated woman with a real actual job, and she works to hone those practical job skills because she plans to be an active participant in Jonathan's work.
When Van Helsing decks Lucy's room out with garlic flowers, he telegrams to Holland for overnight shipping across the Channel from a friend who owns a greenhouse, because garlic flowers are a good 3 months or so out of season at the time the chapter is set.
Jonathan literally makes a comment in Chapter 3 about the surreal contrasting modernity of sitting at an antique desk in an ancient castle and frantically scribbling steganographic shorthand in his notebook.
Sivad's Question
Where I am, it is Monday always.
When a newcomer arrives, they are greeted by Sivad. Sivad is the ruler of this place, which has no name but many call Mondays. It is always Monday in Mondays.
Sivad has told me that Mondays is not infinite, but it is large enough that I no longer see purpose in making the distinction. It is a plain of small green hills which continue on in each direction longer than anyone has ever traveled. Sivad claims that four impassable perpendicular walls lie at the ends, which connect at the corners to create the massive square of land in which we reside. I often ask him if anyone has ever reached the walls, and no one ever has. I have also asked to know in miles the distance it spans, and he will not answer. He does not often respond to questions with numerical answers: the number of people in Mondays, the amount of towers spanning all of this place, the eons that have passed since my death, these are mysteries.
The hills are repetitive: grass, people, towers. There is nothing else. Grass is everywhere, it grows back as soon as it is pulled, most people remain in towers. I am a continual traveler, which is uncommon but not rare enough to draw interest. The majority remain in the same tower or group of towers for centuries or millennia at a time. I have rarely stayed in one for longer than a month.
There is night and day, but no sun. Light slowly and inexplicably ebbs and flows from the clear sky. Days last exactly nine hundred hours. I have counted this and heard it corroborated by thousands of others who have done the same. There are no stars at night, and then it is only possible to travel by the glow of the towers.
The towers are arranged in a uniform grid. They are similar, but each has differences in construction, some more than others. They are all concrete, tall and unpainted, between forty and one hundred and forty stories tall. Each floor on each tower except for the first floor and the roof has thirty rooms. Twenty-nine of the rooms are undecorated identical bedrooms and the last is a library which is normally the room closest to the building's staircase. The arrangement of any floor's library is unique, but every library in every tower has the same content: several thousand copies of the same indestructible book. The book is unchanged at every tower. It is over twenty-two hundred pages long, bound in orange leather. It has no title or author inscribed on the front or side, but four thick black stripes run horizontally across the surface.
If one runs in any cardinal direction from a tower at a fast pace, they will reach another in about four hours. No matter where someone is standing, if it is day, it is always possible to spot exactly one tower. This shouldn't be possible, as taller entities can normally be seen from farther distances than smaller ones, but it is natural in Mondays. As soon as a traveler crosses the halfway point between two towers, the one that is farther away will vanish from sight even if it is being seen by someone walking backwards. I have conducted this experiment on countless occasions. I stand still and push my head forward and back at an invisible border, watching a tower reappear and disappear with each movement. It is impossible to see two at once from the same location. If two people with towers behind them stand at the opposite side of a border and face each other, neither will be able to see a tower, but if they each turn around they will notice what the other could not.
I came to Mondays in my early thirties. I died young. My husband had picked up baking as a hobby during quarantine, and I stole a taste of raw cookie dough, which killed me.
There is an area of towers in the center of Mondays, a twenty by twenty square where newcomers arrive. Immediately after death, they always wake up in a bedroom, alone, in one of those four hundred center towers. Sivad greets them as they wake and offers to answer the questions they may have. I should say that he greeted them. Sivad has told me that no one new will ever come to Mondays again. Humanity has died out, and everyone has either been sent here or elsewhere.
Everyone sees Sivad differently. I see him as a flat humanoid shadow moving through the walls and floor, except for his hands, which stick out from the wall and are made from moving sand, the fingers of which snap repeatedly whenever he answers a question. I have heard descriptions of him as a man made of grass, a living gold statue, a talking hat, a perpetually bleeding horse, a small sun, a collection of colored pyramids, a suitcase with teeth, and a lizard which vomits glowing images of numbers whenever it speaks.
I once met a woman who said that her Sivad was Jon. I am certain she was lying.
My first question when I came was where. Sivad does not call it Mondays, this is only the name that those who stay at the center have agreed on, which has spread through slow osmosis over time. He told me that we are in a place where it is always Monday, and I asked for him to explain further, to provide me with reason, and he did.
Measurements are not a human construct. They are implanted inside us by the Kings, who Sivad will not elaborate on beyond the cold statement that it was they who overthrew and consumed the Creator. Some measurements used by humans obey the desires the Kings have given us, and some rebel against these natural instincts.
Sivad calls it obedience or rebellion, but he has never dictated either to be positive or negative. The words are only explaining if we are living in accordance with the Kings' measurement systems. Metric is obedience, imperial is rebellion. Denary numeral systems are obedience, all others are rebellion. The Gregorian calendar, or any calendar with a repeating seven day structure, is also obedience. Monday is the human name we give the second day of the obedient week.
Only time of death determines where we go. It is not a punishment or a reward, only how it is. Each day delivers everyone to a separate afterlife where obliteration is impossible, and from each of these seven afterlives it is possible to escape to a final destination which is said to be a shared eternal paradise, free of suffering. This paradise is not us ceasing to exist, it is a place, I asked. No one who is there would ever want to leave.
There were never children in Mondays. Those who die before the age of sixteen are sent immediately to the shared paradise.
Five of the seven afterlives have been collapsed, as everyone inside them has escaped to the shared paradise. No one has ever escaped from Mondays, and no one has ever escaped from another day, although Sivad will not tell me which one it is.
Naturally I asked Sivad how I might escape. Everyone in Mondays can only escape together. There is a question which Sivad provides us. It is a binary question with a correct solution and we can only answer yes or no.
Whenever we are alone in a bedroom or a library with a closed door, we can summon Sivad by calling for him. It does not matter if someone has summoned him elsewhere. If we are not alone he will not come, and if we are speaking and someone opens the door he will leave until we call him again under the correct conditions. Whenever we call Sivad we can change our answer, and he will remember it until we change it again. We begin with no declared answer, but once we answer for the first time we cannot go back to being undecided, only switch between yes or no. We can change it as many times as we wish. We can also summon him to answer questions for us, many of which he does answer, many of which he does not.
In order for us to leave, we would need to all, everyone who is in Mondays, what is likely about one-seventh of all humans who have ever lived, need to at the same time have registered the same answer to Sivad's question, and this answer would need to be correct. If we all provided the same incorrect answer, our memories would be erased and we would be sent to random towers throughout Mondays. This has not happened before.
I asked what the question was. Sivad told me.
"On the 30th of May, 1990, did Jon Arbuckle drink dog semen?"
The first time I heard this question, I asked him to repeat it. This is all he will do. He is the most strict about questions which attempt to clarify his question, which is a terrible problem for us. We cannot ask for definitions or clarifications, so he would not tell me who Jon Arbuckle was.
When I realized my attempts at clarifying the question weren't going to work, I moved on.
The next questions I had for Sivad was about myself, and he answered. Our minds and bodies are changed when we arrive in Mondays. We cannot die again, we cannot be hurt or experience pain, we cannot eat or drink, we cannot make waste, we cannot sexually pleasure ourselves or others. My penis now has as much sensation as my toes and nothing can motivate it to rise. My prostate, once a trusted smile provider, now grants me only indifference. We can sleep, but we do not have any physical need. We never physically tire, even with severe exertion. It is impossible to lose or gain weight, but it is only cosmetic. Everyone is as strong and fast as everyone else. We can run for years without needing to stop. Our memories are improved, and we have an immeasurably greater, but finite and imperfect, ability to retain information. I can remember everyone I have spoken to since I have come here and all the conversations I have had in enough detail to recreate them perfectly in my head.
We do not and cannot speak any language from Earth. I once knew English and some Portuguese, and I cannot remember how to speak either. The language on Mondays sounds similar to German, I am told, but it involves frequent purring, which we are all innately capable of. Strangely, it often takes newcomers minutes or hours to first notice the switch.
We cannot touch others. If two people attempt to shake hands, they will phase through each other as if they are ghosts. It is possible to interact with another through objects, but not harm someone. If someone were to throw a book at my head, it would connect, but there would be no pain or injury even if they had dropped it on me from the roof of a tower. It takes us several minutes, but we can travel through walls of the towers and most objects, so it is not possible to be trapped.
After I learned this I decided that I would leave the tower and seek help, reasoning that others who had been there longer would be more knowledgeable than I and that I could call for Sivad again later. I left my bedroom and ran into a woman immediately in the staircase. I told her I was new, and that I didn't understand the question, and she brought me to the floor's library. There was a small crowd gathered reading and chatting, and she ordered that everyone be quiet. She explained to them that I was new, then she thrust one of the books into my hands and had me read silently. They all watched me. I noticed many of them smiling.
The only book inside every library is a complete collection of every nationally syndicated Garfield comic strip published daily from 1978 to 2038, one month short of sixty years. They were ordered by publishing date, and there were on average ten comics on each page. When I read it for the first time, I discovered that Garfield's owner was named Jon Arbuckle. Garfield was not a significant factor in my life prior to my death. I had read less than ten of the strips and had never purposely sought them out beforehand. I once as a child won a keychain with Odie's face on it for a subpar performance in my school's spelling bee, which I lost and had not missed.
I read enough random strips to grasp Garfield conceptually. Jon Arbuckle was a lonely young cartoonist who lived with his dog Odie and his obese tabby, Garfield. It is not always Monday in the world of Garfield, but time does not seem to pass. No one ages, the status quo is rarely harmed. Their dimension is encased by a bubble of slow, invisible lasagna which weakens the damage time would otherwise inflict.
The punchlines came as I read, universal truths which I was made to recognize. Jon was lonely. Garfield was lazy. Jon was geeky. Garfield loves lasagna. Jon, despite his best efforts, was not skilled when it came to attracting women. Garfield was a poor mice catcher. Jon's optimism was rarely awarded. Garfield bullied Odie. Garfield bullied Nermal, a small kitten who annoyed him. Garfield bullied Jon. The universe often punished Garfield for his cruelty, laziness, and pessimism.
It did not take me long to find the strip for the 30th of May, 1990. It had three panels, as do most Garfield strips.
In it, I saw Jon, Garfield, and a female veterinarian I would later learn was Liz. For more than twenty-five years of the comic's publication, Jon attempted to unsuccessfully seduct Garfield's veterinarian, a sardonic woman who most often displayed apathy and occasionally open contempt towards him. In 2006, they began dating, although the apathy remained. In 2032, they wed.
Garfield was the ring bearer. He ate it. Garfield is fat.
They were not dating on the 30th of May, 1990. In that day's comic, Jon had taken Garfield to her office for a physical examination. Liz and Jon are standing, and Garfield is watching them from the examination table.
In the first panel, Jon notices an unidentified cup of liquid on the same examination table Garfield is sitting on. He looks satisfied with himself. He imitates Liz and declares in her voice that the cup is filled with coffee, which she has left for him. He thanks his crude emulation of her and reaches for it. Liz appears shocked, and most readers before reaching the second panel understand that something is wrong. It does not create the expectation that what Jon is drinking is what he believes it to be.
The cup is blue and opaque. The reader cannot see the color of the liquid inside it. One recurring point of debate is whether the cup is a mug or not. The cup appears to resemble, in thickness, a mug more than a disposable or plastic cup, but the reader cannot see any handle in any of the three panels, and Jon does not pick it up by the handle when he drinks it in the second panel. It is theorized by some that the cup is a mug and that it is always positioned in a way where the handle is hidden from the reader's perspective. I disagree with this idea, but I am of the opinion that it doesn't matter. The mug theory is only important to the rare individuals who seriously contend that Jon is drinking coffee, and these people are hated by almost all others in Mondays.
In the second panel, Jon raises the cup to his lips and drinks, his eyes closed. He is still smiling, and we understand that he has not tasted it yet. Garfield is apathetic, but Liz's face has changed. She is herself again, sarcastic and unsympathetic for what Jon's hubris has brought him to do. She congratulates him, but does not say for what.
In the third panel, our earlier suspicions are confirmed. Jon was not drinking coffee, as evidenced by his face which is wrinkled in disgust. He may vomit. Liz smiles cruelly and tells Jon that he is going to give birth to a fine, healthy litter of puppies.
Garfield hears this and his eyes widen. He exclaims that he hates puppies. With this remark, the strip is over.
The first occasion I saw these three panels, in the library in front of the crowd, I read it almost ten times and then dropped the book on the floor. I had accepted my death, it had not been difficult. This was harder for me to come to terms with, that my salvation would depend on my understanding of whether or not Jon Arbuckle had consumed dog semen.
I looked at the ones who had been watching me. I said nothing but hoped for reassurance, and they laughed at me, the hopelessness obvious on my face.
They weren't trying to hurt me. It was funny, and they had all gone through it themselves. I had died early in human history. People had only been in Mondays for at most several hundred thousand years, when the first Homo Sapiens died. People were more friendly then, as a whole.
Most of the crowd ignored me after that, but a small group including the woman who greeted me sat down with me and explained the known history of Mondays and the basic arguments of Sivad's question.
People arrived in Mondays long before Garfield was created, I discovered. The first ones discovered they could read despite having died before the creation of the written word. This is not because Mondays is separated or disconnected from time in our universe. The comic strips were transported from the future to the past so that the first arrivals at Mondays could begin to think about the question, although they were not allowed to answer until there was a population exceeding five hundred million.
The first problem the question creates is that we cannot know what it is truly asking. We do not know what it means when it is asking whether Jon Arbuckle has consumed dog semen. Presumably Jon Arbuckle is fictional, and does not exist. When we want to know if he has done something, what are we appealing to? Is it asking what the artist of the comic believed Jon Arbuckle was drinking, or what Sivad thought he was drinking, or what the Kings thought he was drinking, or what the majority of people who have read it thought he was drinking? Or is it that Jon Arbuckle's dog semen consumption is an objective universal truth or falsehood? Or is it that Jon Arbuckle does exist in a physical reality we cannot visit but that comics allow us to view, and that in that reality there was something liquid in the cup he was drinking, which was or was not dog semen?
Whatever the question leads us to conclude, we only have two answers.
The first is yes, it is dog semen. Yes explains why Jon is disgusted and why Liz would connect it with a hypothetical canine pregnancy experienced by Jon. Yes is appealing because it is intuitive and seems to connect with the original intentions of the comic the best. Yes Men often are more focused on the conditions around the comic instead of the comic itself. They think about who the comic may have been intended for and how people tend to interpret it contextually. They primarily rely on a perspective that takes our own world into account and focuses chiefly on how the comic suits it.
There are actually some outside conditions that would suggest no, but Yes Men ignore them or have invented counterarguments, some of which I think are excellent. The largest of the outside conditions against them is the word of the author. Some people have reported that while on Earth they read about an interview with the creator of Garfield discussing the strip we are tasked with analyzing, and this rumor which by now is impossible to prove or disprove is accepted as fact across Mondays. When asked, he supposedly stated that he did not intend for the drink to be seen as dog semen. He grew up on a farm, and he said that pregnant cows would be given special formulated supplements to improve the health of them and their calves. When drawing the comic, he said that he assumed a similar formula might exist for pregnant dogs, and that it is this formula that Jon is drinking.
The Yes Men have multiple responses to the word of the author. The first is that he is lying. Garfield is a highly commercialized family-friendly comic which intentionally avoids politics and inflammatory controversy as much as it can, and the artist clearly has a strong financial motivation to refuse to acknowledge that the deuteragonist of his story swallowed a warm cup of dog semen.
Another answer is that the word of the author is unimportant to the question, and that the art itself informs us of the truth we choose to accept, not the artist's attached statements, especially ones made decades after the fact. It is or isn't dog semen, but this is not up to the artist to decide.
One last response, which I do not care for, is that the artist's opinion can be ignored because he is incorrect about the existence of a supplement formula given to healthy dogs. I do not know whether it is real or not and I do not care. I have spoken to many experts and many others have claimed to speak to experts and have heard it said with absolute authority that it does or doesn't exist. I do not think it concerns us and I refuse to carry on conversations about the scientific accuracy of this detail. When I meet people who are concerned with this issue I immediately leave them and move on to the next tower.
The other real world factor which goes against the Yes Men is that, Garfield being the safe and commercialized property that it is, it would not make sense for the author to have written a comic that intentionally implies that a character has downed a shot of dog semen. This is often challenged with other examples of Garfield comics that go against the trend and show us that even Garfield can break the rules. There exists a small series of comics in October of 1989, less than a year before the strip Sivad has asked us about, where Garfield awakens to find himself living in an existential nightmare, where Jon and Odie have abandoned him in an empty house and he is starving to death. Instead of accepting his situation, he denies it, imagining that Jon and Odie are still with him and living happily with his delusions. There are several other strips with minor sexual references, although there are none that can be charitably read to imply that Jon Arbuckle, Garfield's human owner, regularly drinks dog semen.
No Men are generally more focused on the comic itself, and our natural reaction is an afterthought. We may think initially that Jon is drinking dog semen, but logic makes it clear that this cannot be true. Most No Men subscribe to the dog pregnancy supplement formula theory, but not all. Some believe that it is a harmless drink that Liz had concocted to taste like dog semen in order to prank Jon, some think it is something entirely fantastical and futuristic, and others contend that it is actually coffee. The only common explanation more disliked than coffee is dog urine. I share this dislike.
The No Men ask questions. Why would Liz keep out an unmarked, unprotected cup of dog semen on her examination table during Garfield's checkup? Whether it is going to be used for eventual insemination or for testing there must be some refrigerated storage facility for dog semen at the clinic for her to use. She does not appear to be incompetent at her profession.
The Yes Men mostly answer to this that the same question applies to a formula for dog pregnancy, or any other proposed liquid that can be connected to Jon's theoretical dog pregnancy. Why does it make any more sense for dog pregnancy supplement formula to have been left on the table in place of dog semen?
The No Men are not bothered by the answers the Yes Men give them. There are always more questions.
How would Jon not notice that it was dog semen before drinking? Shouldn't the smell or feeling of the cup have alerted him that he was not bringing coffee to his mouth? Even if she is not fond of him, how could Liz act so horribly smug after seeing Jon drink dog semen? Why does Liz, a trained animal expert, suggest that Jon, a human male, would become pregnant after drinking dog semen? If she is only kidding, isn't her joke nonsensical?
The Yes Men are not bothered by the questions the No Men give them. There are always more answers.
Jon did not notice because he was not paying attention. His eyes were closed and he was focused on impressing Liz, not the dog semen he was drinking. Liz hates Jon more than we realize and put out the dog semen intentionally because she knew he would drink it without thinking. Maybe he has come into her clinic and stolen her coffee in the past, perhaps from the same cup, which she poured the dog semen into in order to trick him. Liz's joke is nonsensical, but only because she is shocked that her plan has worked.
These answers are always different in small ways, and they can travel back and forth endlessly, creating abstract hypotheticals too complicated and ridiculous for anyone to actually view as a correct solution. These are argued anyway as a game which both sides enjoy.
This game can be fun. Many of the proposed solutions are delightful. One of my favorite scenarios has Jon and Liz portrayed as bad actors. Liz is a saboteur who has put out the dog semen intentionally to deceive Jon, and Jon is a secretive pervert who is aware of her trick but who also happens to love drinking dog semen, and he pretends to be a fool who thinks it is coffee as an excuse, so he can drink the dog semen. They are both liars and each of them has won. It's almost romantic. Past and future comics are used to bolster these fantasies with loose evidence, which no one actually thinks is connected but everyone involved pretends to.
I also enjoy the schemes which appeal to science fiction or magic. I once encountered a trio of No Men on the roof of an otherwise abandoned tower who theorized that Liz was a scientist who had created a solution which would permanently alter a person's sense of taste to make all liquid taste like dog semen, and that she had added the solution to what was otherwise an ordinary coffee. This is the rare variety of coffee theory I enjoy. Another No Man I met suggested to me that Liz had actually engineered a way in which she could make Jon pregnant with dog spawn and that her remark at the end was completely serious.
These are only games, and while I once enjoyed them, time has worn at the novelty. Our existence is mundane and torturous, and I long for paradise or even true death, though I know we will never make it there. Our test is impossible. We are too spread apart and have no way of coordinating our answers, and there is great disagreement among us. With eons behind us and our original universe having descended into the final stages of heat death, I still encounter optimists. They are never itinerants. Being a traveler, it is possible that I meet fewer travelers than those who remain in one or a few towers for long periods, but never, never have I met another who told me that they thought we could do it. We can't. Anyone who travels knows we can't.
I only stayed in the center towers, which are emptier than most newcomers expected, for several million years, which is when all of humanity died and Sivad told us there would be no more newcomers. I left and went north, and I continued north until I decided to go west, and then I went south again, and I have gone south since.
I have seen everything.
There are towers with lone individuals spouting out nonsense. Pretenders. They are not crazy. It is not possible for us to go completely insane in Mondays, Sivad changes our minds so that we cannot. We cannot help but remain sane. Many refuse to accept this and pretend to be insane in hopes that they someday will be. I used to pity Pretenders, but I do not anymore. It is meditation, and I may decide to join them one day. It may be the closest I will ever come to peace.
There are the organized communities filled with Yes Men or No Men or both, towers with between hundreds of optimists, who argue with each other with the serious attitude that once they can agree they will be able to convince others and finally free us. Often these communities will be divided and floors devoted to different purposes. They will have a floor for serious intellectual debate on the dog semen comic and on how to convince others of their view, another for the fun game scenarios, more for casual socialization, and often a floor or floors for discussing other questions presented by Garfield which may help to answer Sivad's question. It is often debated whether or not Garfield can be understood by Jon on these floors.
I once liked these communities and I admire them, but they sadden me. I wish I could express to them how vast it is and how hopeless their efforts are. We will never find everyone, we will never coordinate, we will never agree. If they traveled more they would know. I am sure I have seen so little compared of Mondays, but it was enough to make me understand. I both want them to understand and want them not to, since I do not want to disturb their innocence. When I visit these communities, I now only visit the floors where the games are played and people relax.
These communities are easily destroyed. One motivated enemy can destroy everything. There are travelers who go around, both alone and with others, who look for these communities and enter them and scream whenever people in the most active floors try to speak. We cannot touch each other or trap each other, so these people cannot be punished or forced to leave. The Screamers will not be reasoned with. As they never tire, they can scream as long as they need to without end, and the community cannot leave to escape since they will be followed. Discussion ends and members leave slowly, and the community ultimately falls apart. The Screamers almost never lose. They will only stop screaming when people part ways.
Sometimes individual Yes Men or No Men travel and seek out towers where they share the minority opinion, viewing themselves as messengers for the truth. These people fascinate me. When they do manage to convert a tower, which is rare, they immediately leave. They are unhappy anywhere where people agree with them. I always ask them if they think we can do it when I meet them, and they say no.
There are towers with smaller communities which do not argue about Garfield anymore and have accepted what is our fate. Sometimes these communities spend most of their time sleeping, sometimes they stay awake and spend time together, trying to entertain each other as they burn through eternity. I agree with these towers and have fallen in love with the people in them, but I never stay. When I become comfortable with a tower, I soon start feeling like there is somewhere else I should be instead.
There was one tower with only ten people like this, and I stayed there for several million years, which I have never done at any other single tower. They were lovely people led by a psychologist who had died at old age from a terrible degenerative illness. She was healthy in Mondays but still had the appearance and body of an extremely sickly woman. I have never met anyone as compassionate and caring in my life or death.
After I was there for about three thousand years, a group of sixty Screamers came and entered the tower. Screamers love dramatic power disparities, both when they are in the minority and when they are not. They saw us eleven as easy pickings. I did not think we could beat the Screamers and I was still not attached to the group, but I resolved not to leave until the first of the original ten had, not wanting them to think less of me.
It took over one million years, but the Screamers all eventually left, which I have never seen happen anywhere else. I have come to the conclusion that smaller towers without dog semen debate are best suited to dealing with the Screamers. The members of the traditional communities are there to achieve a goal, and when the Screamers come and attempt to prevent that, they eventually decide that it will be easier to fulfill the same goal somewhere else. The only goal of the ten was each other. There was nowhere else to go, no reason to leave.
I stayed with the ten but eventually left and continued north. I avoided friends or traveling companions for a long time, but I made an exception for an old mostly bald man named Thomas, who was living together with a large tower community of Pretenders but was not one himself. In life, he had written about politics. I liked speaking to him because he would take anything as seriously as anything else, except for Garfield. He loathed Garfield. He would rant for hours about anything and I would listen to him. He liked talking and I liked listening to his talking.
He spoke about the Kings sometimes, who Sivad tells us devoured the Creator. He would call them fools and rant about how they were wrong to have disturbed the universal hierarchy. This always made me laugh, because he would admit that he didn't know anything about the Kings or the Creators. He just hated anyone who broke up any hierarchy.
He did not feel real to me. I would talk to others we would meet during our journey, and they would rarely acknowledge that he was beside me. Everything he did and said felt meaningful to me. We spent hundreds of billions of years together and I thought we would be together forever, but as we were leaving a tower he stopped me and said that we would only spend one more year together. I asked him why and he told me that he had said everything to me that he wanted to.
One short year later, he left me. He went east and I didn't follow him, as he requested. He said he was going to go exploring. I never saw him again.
I have been alone since, other than my brief visits inside of towers. I have seen the rise of the Cult of Lyman in the area of Mondays I have traveled through, who believe that Lyman is the Creator that the Kings replaced, and that he will return to save us. I have met a group of redeemed Screamers who try to convince other Screamers to change their ways, and a different group who were convinced that if every book were destroyed, we would be freed. I am still baffled by the amount I meet that are hopeful. I was asked today by an optimist at a debate tower why I think, with eternity on our side, that we cannot do it.
I told him this. I think maybe the Pretenders could be convinced to stop pretending and the Screamers convinced to stop screaming. I think perhaps with organization, I do not know how, but perhaps all the Yes Men and the No Men might agree to give in and submit to one side. It is unlikely, but it is possible. I think it might be doable to convince all the hopeless not to be hopeless and to try, to deconvert the cults, to stop playing games, to make progress. But with all that still we cannot do it, and I know why.
There is one tower I visited soon after Thomas left me, while I was going west. It was a small tower of forty floors, and there were seven people there who never left the second floor library. They sat and read Garfield together, but did not debate it. I asked them why they would read it if not to find the solution to the Sivad's question, and they replied without looking up from their books that they all just happened to enjoy Garfield. They would occasionally smile as they read, soft puffs of air gliding down from their noses.
I wanted to know if they were optimists, so I asked them if they would tell me what they thought about Mondays.
They did.
Kill Yourself Cave
There’s this very large and populous but somewhat insignificant island far to the north where they don’t let you kill yourself, unless you go to Kill Yourself Cave. It can be very annoying, if you want to kill yourself. They try to make it annoying on purpose.
It’s a well-established thing on the island. They really, really don’t like when people kill themselves — why, well, that’s their own business, but they’ve got their own history and their own reasons for feeling as strongly about this as they do — so a long time ago they invested a ton of resources into summoning a deity that would protect all their citizens from self-harm, forever. (Like forty people had to sacrifice themselves to the deity in order to get it to agree to the deal, which some people found a little self-defeating at the time, but it seems to have paid for itself in the long run.)
Now, well, it’s impossible to kill yourself. If you try to jump off a cliffside, right before you hit the ground, you’ll gently float the rest of the way down. Try and swallow poison, it’ll turn to water as soon as it hits your tongue. Ropes snap, guns misfire, knives instantly rust and vanish into dust before they can pierce your veins. It’s powerful stuff, this magic. They picked a good deity.
Not to say it doesn’t have its problems! The magic only works if you actually do want to intentionally kill yourself, unfortunately. So about once every twenty years or so some kid accidentally does kill themselves while trying to kill themselves without actually killing themselves, just to see the magic in action, and it’s always a tragedy but still, most everyone agrees it’s way better than the way it used to be.
It’s much more comforting for the parents at the funeral when they can say, yes, it’s sad that our little idiot isn’t with us anymore, but at least we know they wanted to be.
But the people of the island did have to carve out an exception, as per the deity’s wishes, so they went ahead and set up Kill Yourself Cave.
It’s not as simple as just going to the cave, and even getting there isn’t easy. That does probably prevent some of it, or so they say. You can prevent people from doing a lot of bad or crazy things just by making it a big enough pain in ass, and the trip to Kill Yourself Cave is a big schlep.
But a lot of people do want to kill themselves. It’s not a terrible place to live, the island, but it has more than its fair share of problems and of people with problems, including you, and one day you decided you’d had enough of it all and finally go to make the journey.
For three weeks, you journey by carriage, and then horseback, and then by the trail, through the cold snow and sloping mountains. More than a few times, somebody asks you where you’re headed, and you tell them earnestly that you’re going to Kill Yourself Cave to kill yourself.
A couple of people your age or younger frown, but close to everybody else just laughs and wishes you luck. They figure they don’t need to waste any time trying to convince you otherwise; after all, almost nobody ever actually makes to the end of Kill Yourself Cave. Everybody knows that.
Once you get there, you find out that there’s a long line — they only let one person in the cave every two hours, as to stagger them — and so you’re given a ticket and a green badge, which is affixed to your forehead, held there by a blue paste you are told will never dissolve until you will to. You’re told that you may not take the badge off even once throughout the process, and that it will prevent you from lying. All of the cave’s staff, men and women wearing green vestments and holding silver clipboards, are wearing similar badges, which they explain do the same thing.
As you wait — about six days, you’re told, though many people change their minds before it’s their turn, so you should expect about four — you are interviewed by the cave staff. At this point, no effort is made to convince you of anything, and you are only asked simple questions: your name, age, hometown, and, only once, if you want to kill yourself. Everyone speaks very sweetly to you, even the stern-looking man asking this question. If there’s any judgement on their end, you can’t detect it.
After you reaffirm that you do, you are asked to say that you do not, even if you know it isn’t the case. You try, but no sound leaves your mouth; as promised, the badge works, and you cannot tell a lie, and neither can they.
The staff explains the rules, even though you already know them. (Everyone on the island knows them.) In Kill Yourself Cave, there are 999 sequential rooms that must be endured, and only if you reach the final room and still desire and have the will to kill yourself, will you be allowed to.
As you wait, you are provided with ample food and drink; it’s nothing special, though every meal is better than any meal you’ve made for yourself in quite a long time.
After two days, you are allowed to enter Kill Yourself Cave.
Very few people are ever allowed to visit or leave the island, owing to complex socio-historical-magical reasons that have surprisingly little to do with the island’s anti-killing-yourself policies. (Had you been able, you and other aspiring dead people surely would have simply swam out to sea and let yourself be pulled down by the waves). A magical boundary surrounding your home only allows for anyone to enter or leave the island if the king specifically allows for it; aside from a small amount of otherwise unobtainable trade goods, and the occasional diplomat, nothing makes it in or out.
The island’s king has made an exception, however, for those wishing to help the poor souls, like yourself, who are tempted to enter Kill Yourself Cave. Kill Yourself Cave has quite an international reputation, you see, and it attracts many people who don’t want to kill themselves, but who, as much as your fellow citizens, don’t wish you to kill yourself either.
So that’s what is in each of the 999 rooms in Kill Yourself Cave: someone in the world, perhaps someone from your rotten little hamlet or trillions upon trillions of miles away — your world is so, so very large, but let’s not get into that here, you have no more interest in the world or it’s treasures or its expanses, that’s why you journeyed this far — has, they believe, an argument or an offer or a solution or a hopeful word or two, that they think might stop you from killing yourself. They all sit in their rooms, perhaps with a book, perhaps with nothing but the anticipation of saving a life, and wait for you to meet them. Most have applied and waited years for the opportunity to be in the cave.
If you can get past all of their words — honest words, because they are required to wear the green badges too — than you can get to the Kill Yourself Room and kill yourself.
It does happen, let me be clear. How common exactly, it’s difficult to say; no surveys have ever been taken, no data collected. It certainly isn’t most of them.
In the first room, one of the staff members, an older woman wearing the green vestments, asks you very kindly if you would please consider not killing yourself.
“I have,” you say. “But I see no reasonable alternative.”
“Might I ask why you want to kill yourself?”
“I have many problems,” you say. You tell her of your dead spouse, and of your failing business prospects, and of your poverty, and of your deep, deep unhappiness, and of the many, many other myriad of material and interpersonal problems you have so long endured.
She offers real, concrete, good-sounding solutions to many of them, some obvious, some slightly less obvious, a few quite novel. You listen to this for some time before leaving. Before you are allowed to proceed to the next room, the door asks you if you still want to kill yourself, and you affirm that you do. It opens.
In the next 99 rooms, 99 different people, judging from their clothes and appearances who have clearly traveled from very far off lands, all ask you if you would like to talk to them about your problems. They are a diverse set, you imagine, selected in the hopes that you might see someone in them reminding you of a friend, a former lover, a parent, a sibling, a teacher.
You can see it in a few of them, and you earnestly give more than a few the chance to talk. They say many of the types of things you’d imagine they say. They offer sympathy and encouragement and implorations to be brave, fierce, hopeful. They say the most meaningful and most trite things you have ever heard. They tell you stories of their sons and daughters and peers and parents who did not live in a country with a Kill Yourself Cave, whom they missed very much. You assume, given the badges and tears in their eyes, that they are being earnest, and you apologize every time you continue forward unmoved.
Sometimes by these types you are guilted, or shamed, or called a sinner or a coward or an idiot or an ingrate. One man points out that there are many in the world who would like nothing else to be saved from their impending fates, as you are now being given the opportunity to do; you consider asking him why he is not instead trying to save those people, but you think better of it and move on.
In the 101st room, a beautiful woman offers to have sex with you. She’ll only do it, she says, if you promise not to kill yourself; a promise you would be unable to make unless you meant it.
In the 102nd room, a beautiful man does the same.
In the 103rd room, both of them reappear to make you the same offer, except simultaneously — though they quickly explain they are the twins of the pair in the last rooms. As you ignore them and walk through the next door, they implore you to take note: things, as you’ve just seen, can always get better.
They certainly can, or at least they want to make you believe it.
For the next eighty or so rooms, you are offered almost every type of sexual fantasy imaginable, some of which seem so unappealing you can barely construe them as being to anyone’s taste. In the 123rd room, a hairy man offers to let you lick every square inch of his body every day for the next decade; in the next, a dragon offers to let you sniff its feet. The twins — actually triplets, they inform you — show up yet again in the 161rd room, this time offering to let you watch in the corner as they have sex with each other and mock you the entire time.
In the 199th room, a man offers to be your slave for life; in the 200th, an entire harem throws themselves at your feet. In the 201st, a goblin asks if you would like her to sit on your face every time you go to sleep.
The chef in the 223rd room, a grandmaster by some culinary schema you’ve never heard of, lets you sample his finest cuts of meat, and offers to be your cook for life, or, if you so prefer, to teach you how to cook as well as he can. He claims that he can teach anyone, regardless of your current skill.
Other offers of apprenticeships and educations follow: professors and wizards and subject-matter experts and carpenters and beekeepers and soldiers and fighters of all stripes offer to teach you all you wish to know from all that they know, for however long you wish.
In the 324th room, a man offers you a creature called a dog, which he says will love you almost unconditionally. In the next, you are offered a creature called a cat, which might love you occasionally, given the right circumstances and a lot of luck. In the next, you are offered a snail, which, you are told, feels no love at all.
In the 419th room, a large man threatens you, and says that if you try to pass him, he will strike you once. When you do, he keeps his word; it hurts immensely, but you continue nonetheless.
In the 484th room, a witch promises to change your body to whatever form you like.
In the 499th room, a warlock offers you vials that can excess all depression and negative feelings from you with his magic vials. (You have tried them before.)
In the 516th room, an extremely funny and kind man offers to be your friend.
In the 517th room, a different extremely funny and kind man offers to be your rival.
In the 560th room, a banker offers you incomprehensible wealth.
In the 590th room, a famous artist, one of the most famous in the world, offers to paint you and only you every day for the rest of your life, which he says will guarantee you fame and adoration for as long as you live.
In the 658th through 695th rooms, thirty-seven people in a row attempt slightly different variations of the same reverse psychology trick on you. It gets very annoying very fast.
In the 719th room, a wizard says he can banish any thought, compulsion, fear, or unwanted feeling from your soul forever.
In the 830th room, a different wizard from the same clan offers to erase any, or all, or your memories.
In the 843rd room, a woman asks if you would like to marry her and raise a family with her. In the rooms to follow, many others, men and women, ask you the same.
In the 877th room, you are offered perfect safety, a magical charm that will make it impossible for anyone to ever harm you against your will.
In the 904th room, a woman offers to pity you.
In the 990th room, you are asked to join a just and noble revolution against a horrible tyrant. You are almost guaranteed to die, they insist, but it will be a true and meaningful end, and if you survive and win you will be awarded lifelong glory.
In the 991th room, you are told about a man named Achon, living in the remote countryside of a foreign nation. He is 66 years old and lives with his extended family; formerly the beloved patriarch of his clan, he has recently fallen ill with a terrible illness that has claimed all his mental faculties but left his body as healthy as a man almost as young as you. If you agree to it, you may take over his body, allowing his soul to pass on, while giving his family another twenty or thirty years with him. You will never lose your facilities as he did, you will never be discovered for who you truly are, and you will be truly loved for the rest of your days.
In the 992nd room, you are offered the position of a powerful judge of a terrible but powerful country, where you may sentence almost anyone you like to death at any time.
In the 993rd room, a small child asks you to adopt it.
In the 994th room, a really annoying guy dares you to take your badge off.
In the 995th room, a servant of the king offers you a ship willing to take you anywhere in the world, five tons of gold, a contingent of loyal followers, and a magical berry that if eaten will make you live for 500 years.
In the 996th room, a man from the Vaundoan mountains claims that he can teach you to excise all desire from yourself and achieve true contentment.
In the 997th room, no one is there.
In the 998th room, there is only a letter on the floor, along with a note explaining that it contains a message of “no special significance” but that the original sender would be very grateful to whomever can pick it up and deliver it for them, as they can no longer do so.
In the 999th floor, another woman in green vestments is waiting for you. This is perhaps the oldest person you have ever seen.
There is no door beyond her: only a deep, deep hole.
“Why do you want to kill yourself?” she asks, exuding wisdom.
“I have many problems,” you say. You tell her of your dead spouse, and of your failing business prospects, and of your poverty, and of your deep, deep unhappiness, and of the many, many other myriad of material and interpersonal problems you have so long endured.
“But have you not had the opportunity in these caves to have solved many of these problems? If all those were fixed, would you still want to kill yourself?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Is there a different problem that you have, then, that if it were fixed, you would want to live?”
“Yes,” you concede, after a short pause. “But I do not think it is possible to fix it.”
“What is the problem?”
You think about it, and consider that if there is a solution, you would truly wish to hear it, even though you have long, long since given up. So you tell her, the old wise woman, your problem: one that haunts not your society, not your kingdom, not your family, but you, only you.
Part of you expects her to accept it easily, that in her years at least one other soul like you must have come before her, made it all the way here, and told her of their plight, but her face does genuinely, or so it seems to you, twist into one of shock. Her eyes widen; not so dramatically, but enough to tell you that she hasn’t met anyone who has ever told her such a thing about themselves before. She has not been surprised in a very long time.
“Do you know how to solve this?”
“Give me one hour,” she whispers. “My judgement is not flawless, but it is excellent, and I may come up with some inventive creation that allows me to see a path forward. Please, wait.”
You give her one hour. You reflect on your life, and on the problem, which long ago you had accepted as intractable. You expect nothing from her. It’s not a solvable issue, your problem. You already know this.
Eventually, she says this:
“I think there is a solution.”
“And that is?”
“I do not know.”
You stand up and begin to walk to the hole.
“I do not know,” she repeats. “But I do believe it is a solvable problem.”
“You say this in every case, I imagine.”
“No,” she says. “I do not. I have let others fall. I have been presented with those who have convinced me that no timely solution exists for their problems. Many have material needs, many social ones, many of a stripe so specific or strange that it requires an offer as creative as the ones we have attempted to provide. But some cannot be sated by anything. But this… I do believe, in your specific case, that you probably have the means to solve it, even if I do not. I understand, given your situation, why it would be difficult to imagine that. But I truly, truly believe that.”
You look at her.
“Should I toil and suffer in this mode of existence, for a solution that may never come? For the tiniest chance of success? You understand that this is pure misery?”
“I think the chance is not necessarily a small one,” she said. “I think, were I to wager, based on the fact that you made it here, based on the nature of your problem, based on the specific advantages and disadvantages it lays on your back, based on all the magics of the world, so vast that we cannot comprehend them, in your specific situation, the chance of your success, over the rest of your life, were you to put all your efforts consistently into fixing it, are not unlikely. I would say that you are just as likely to succeed as to fail, and given that, suicide is the wrong choice.”
This is, sadly, the best sell that anyone has ever made for your continued existence. It’s the best sell that they can, right?
“If you try, it may get better.” That’s all they can say. There are situations where this phrase is patently untrue. This situation is not one of them. You do have a chance.
You spit in the wise woman’s face even though it does not provide you with the slightest bit of satisfaction, and you turn and walk away, and on that particular day you do not kill yourself in Kill Yourself Cave.
The next day, at an inn, you start to plan in earnest in the dead of night, not the masturbatory stuff of ages past but real, real planning, because now that you have acknowledged the serious possibility of success it all marches out of your mind differently, these great plans of yours, and when you consider the scope of the task lying in front of you, of all the work that must be done, you wither and you cry and cry and cry.
But afterwards you continue to plan in your dreams, and there you start to see it, what might be.
robbie told me that people are getting upset that tadc is getting put into theaters and im still kind of having my mind blown by it. i dont get it. i dont get it. just be a little bit patient. i don't even like the show and i still view this as a pretty objective W for indie animation. isnt that what fans of this show should supposedly want????? will having to filter out spoiler tags for two weeks really be so unimaginably bad??? ??? like im truly just perplexed
I think a lot of people are unaware of the two-week exclusivity period enforced by movie theaters. GLITCH Productions released a statement clarifying this, which will hopefully clear the air:
I will say that it isn't as easy as filtering out spoiler tags, given that some people do not tag spoilers [intentionally or otherwise] so it's moreso "avoid any potentially TADC sides of the internet for two weeks." So it's more a case of "is the inevitable spoilering worth an indie animated cartoon getting a theatrical release?" Personally, I'm very happy for GLITCH/the TADC crew and am glad to see indie animation getting recognized on this scale [I'll probably see the finale in theaters myself] but I do think the inevitable spoilering is a sort of sacrifice/necessary evil rather than inconsequential.
i feel like i'm losing it why are we acting like having to quickly scroll past a spoiler for a television show or whatever is some sort of huge ask for people. "the inevitable spoilering is a sort of sacrifice/necessary evil rather than inconsequential" it's the most inconsequential thing in the world. it really truly is. i absolutely understand what motivates people to avoid spoilers for things they like as i'm about as particular regarding that as i can be myself, but like. sometimes the facts of life are such that other people will get to know what happens in a tv show before you're able to.
the fact that the ceo had to put out a statement about this is absolutely absurd. i don't think the people actually making shit should be held hostage by a bunch of fandom people throwing a temper tantrum the second they're not instantly catered to. this is craaaazyyy
i think the simple answer is this is essentially the first fandom for a lot of the fans, and a lot of them are kids and teens, who are, as we all were, a bit silly.
That is ofc 90% of it, but there is the added fact that the current gen, particularly the current gen of "too online nerds", see much less value in movie theatres now. Like I get why the studio is making statements about how "this will change how indie animation is seen by the world" but no it won't, right? Why would it? Movie theatres do not "legitimize" film anymore, they are declining as a cultural force, etc. For more and more people theatres are just an inconvenience and having something locked to the theatre is a pure negative.
They are assuredly being teens about the whole thing - media is a business, your response should be "ah that is their marketing play, okay cool I will see it next month when it hits streaming". But there is a reason they don't see it has an equally-exciting thing the way kids seeing movie spinoffs in theatres in the 2000's did.
patron saints of one way trips
the twits is the worst roald dahl adaptation ever made
the 2025 twits netflix movie has all the typical atrocious hallmarks of children's animated streamslop exacerbated by particularly unique terrible choices in basically every aspect you can judge a movie for. it's rancid in all the ways it shouldn't be and not-rancid in the ways that it should (and yeah, given what it's about, a lot of it should be rancid!)
the animation is ass! the design of the twits sucks! there isn't a single funny joke! it adds a bizarre subplot where the twits run for town mayor in what is probably the most obnoxious trump allegory i have ever seen, it has unnecessary annoying orphans with unnecessary annoying orphan backstories, on and on.
all those things are true and obvious, and i could go on, but i'm just describing a 4/10 boring kids movie. but what takes it above for me is how profoundly it misunderstands dahlianism.
artistically, even if done with non-cynical intentions (and i do genuinely actually think that the people who made this movie think they did think they were making something at least good, which is very sad) the twits is in itself a really strange choice for adaptation. the original twits book itself is probably the most mid dahl book, in my opinion. it's probably the default dahl experience, so to speak.
before we go on, let's take a moment to analyze what made dahl such a hit. he famously gave a list of rules about how to make good children's stories. here they are.
these are great (general, not universally applicable) rules, but one of them is much, much, much more important than the others.
can you guess which one?
...
...
...
it's number 4! revenge is sweet.
i've spoken a decent bit to @lurinatftbn (author of the flower that bloomed nowhere!) about the metarules governing how to succeed on royalroad and similar spaces commercially and the biggest key to success is following what she calls the Frustration/Release formula. however, it doesn't just apply to internet slop, and once you understand it you'll see that it's baked into so so so much of the most successful art and non-art, too.
it's the simplest shit in the world and it WORKS. at the start of the story, the main character should be FRUSTRATED. somebody should WRONG them. they should be subjected to unjust (or at least asymmetrical) cruelty, over and over and over. they should be enslaved, mocked, bullied, tortured, demeaned, offended; the people doing it should be stupid, cruel, ugly, dumb, annoying, ideally in a position of significant social/economic power over the protag. think everybody who makes fun of the protag in solo leveling and similar trash shonen anime, think frieza, think elliot and gretchen swartz from breaking bad, or the bullies from worm, or the bullies from carrie, or the bullies from 13 reasons why, or the bullies from pretty much any piece of media that has bullies in it.
and then...
it gets RELEASED! somehow, whether by the introduction of magic powers or providence or a miracle or hard work or superior intelligence or trickery and protag gets revenge. revenge stories trump every single other kind of story, it hacks into our lizard brains so, so well. this is the narrative of trump (at least, as he and his supporters see it), of crusaders, of revolutions, of political parties, of entire nations, republics and dictatorships and and monarchies alike. frustration/release narratives are so strong they literally create empires. (the history of virtually any nation-state is often framed to its citizens as one of frustration/release (either in past, present, or future tense): "those guys were fucking with us, but we won are sure showed them, or we're winning now, finally, after having to deal with those bastards for so long... or we're going to win, and they'll finally get what's coming to them, once we amass enough strength and become great...")
(i don't know how vonnegut missed this one...)
dahl LOVES frustration/release, and he's awesome at it, and one of the only writers who know how to do it well for very very young children. almost all of his books, especially his best-sellers, do this: james and giant peach opens with the protag's abusive aunts being flattened to death; poor danny and his father fuck over the rich asshole threatening their livelihood; matilda GETS the trunchbull; fantastic mr. fox fucks over the farmers; starving hungry charlie bucket survives over the other naughty children in the ritualistic chocolate slaughterhouse and wins the day.
(charlie and the chocolate factory is noted as being something of an aberration in the dahl canon, because it focuses on the suffering of other children instead of mean adults, but this is because:
frustration/release can still function as long as their are frustrators who are suffering following the protagonist's suffering, even if they are not directly responsible for all/most/some of said suffering. is augustus gloop or veruca salt personally responsible for charlie being poor and hungry and sad? no, but they're dicks and they look down on him and they aren't those things, so if they suffer that's good enough to fill the role.
dahl is writing to an audience of children that he knows one day will become parents, and CATCF is a letter to them; all the oompa loompa songs castigate the parents far more than the kids. in all his books, dahl frequently and explicitly implores kids to try and hold onto the feeling of what being a child is like, even as they get older, so that if they ever do have kids of their own they won't be shit parents themselves.
and it's not a surprise that this is the story he's remembered most for!)
the twits are yet another frustration-release tale, and in the twits book, the twits fucking DIE at the end! the twits torture animals and the animals prank the twits so hard they fucking die.
the kids in the movie prank the twits so hard they start dying too! and then as soon as they do they suddenly lose the ability to speak to their new adoptive magic animal parents who they can only talk to because they are empathetic enough to magically understand them (i'm not going to describe the plot any more, who cares) and then they have to go and save the twits from dying from the dreaded shrinks, who have spent the last 20 minutes of the film trying to literally eat them, and then after they do the twits try and eat them.
and the message of the twits 2025 is this: no, children, you are wrong to hate pure evil, even in your dreams, even in the safety of obviously fake and absurdist fiction, even in the fake world, even there you are wrong to dream of a world where you have agency and power and the ability to fuck over the people trying to devour you and win. don't even pretend to be a little bit naughty once in a while, or you are just as cruel as the people TRYING TO EAT YOU. it's like a hillary clinton speechwriter adapted this. fuck off
My local comic store was selling boxes of 100 random indie comics for a tenner each. So I bought one and read every single issue in it. And reviewed all of them.
I bought a box of 100 random indie comics and this is a review of all of them
The box contained books by critical darlings and literally-whos, movie tie-ins and movie pitch-decks, and way, way too many comics about vampires, orcs, CEOs, and the Earth-shaking war between Heaven and Hell. I guess this was just the state of play in the indie comics world, as of... the start of 2024? That's where all this liquidation stock came from. See if any names you like are in there! And pray I'm nice about them!
The Monday Period: Part 1 of 6
Part 1: you are here
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
One of the rat groups I'm in is now being run by bots, and you can really tell this particular brand of AI slop is optimized for dog and cat groups.
Shoutout to Nazgul, the 2yo Czechoslovakian wolfdog who ran onto the cross-country skiing course and across the finish line to the crowd's cheers.
No worries: He's a local pet, he's friendly, he didn't interfere with any athletes' results, and he was returned to his owners. Videos at the link. [X]
Nazgul, YOU are an Olympian!
Average internet user: I like pirating MP3s and sharing memes, so yeah! I guess I do hate intellectual property rights! I guess I do want to see private property abolished!
Average internet user upon creating one (1) copyrightable work: I own the color blue now. I already used blue in my MS Paint JPEG, so if you use the color blue too then you're a thief and you're stealing from me. I'm an independent artist and I am being robbed.
Average internet user upon learning about machine generated images: Paramount Global (formerly Viacom) has every right to put anyone that uses the character Squidward without a licensing agreement into a woodchipper. We can't make exceptions for your child or there would be absolute chaos.
okay so fun fact several months back i was brainstorming a game concept (basically: a pokémon clone, but with sillier types like cheese type or bone type, and battles are more like earthbound style, being up to 4v4 by default. also the creatures are called jankies (singular janky)) and designed a bunch of them together with a friend
our magnum opus is this one
anyway here's a bunch more
