ScarletStringSaunterer @scarletstringsaunterer - Tumblr Blog

There's a recurring online tendency to aestheticize consensus itself. The imagined future village is full of emotionally compatible people who enjoy communal gardening, conflict resolution circles, acoustic folk music, mutual aid potlucks, and repairing bicycles together at sunset. Which is nice for the people who genuinely enjoy that lifestyle. But plenty of humans are solitary, prickly, obsessive, urban, nocturnal, sensory-seeking, technologically attached, contrarian, novelty-seeking, private, or just plain difficult. Those people do not evaporate after the revolution. They do not get Left Behind while you are Raptured into the Utopia. They become your neighbors.

medievaljournalist

did U seriously just try to pommel strike me

succubusboyfriend

practicing self care less out of self love and more for the sheer logical reasoning of it’d be kinda stupid of me to expect myself to be able to function without proper maintenance

rainformation

formative years? aren’t they all?

absolutejamer

show me a permanent self and i will show you a facade or a corpse

caspercryptid

I feel like not enough people realize that people under enormous strain act really really fucking Weird

darkstalker-elise

yuri concept from the other night.

for all the fake "aphrodisiac" injections in hentai, weed is literally *real*. 1. hotbox a girl till shes incoherent 2. hook her up to a video game with vibrator peripherals 3. take good care of her

mortalityplays

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

lady-of-vitreous-sight

maybe it's boomer of me but it does make me genuinely rather frustrated seeing other trans people misuse the pronouns feature on discord. i get it when you're like in the closet not using it. but putting jokes in that slot is like. it's a feature that's actually good for trans people. really good, even. ive run several trans discord servers over the years and "experimenting with pronouns" is an important first step in like so many journeys. but when it's used for jokes, it gets taken less seriously and becomes less useful. the flow of "check before reference" is broken.

and i don't think your jokes are actually funny! they're identical to transphobic jokes half the time, and just because you're trans doesn't give you a free pass to that!

eroscestlavie

I need to stop replying to “how do you make friends in your 30s?” threads because all my answers boil down to “you have to want to know people instead of have friends” and I don’t think people wanna hear that

gentlyevilvt

the problem with hypnosis porn games made by straight people is that no matter how interesting they make the premise, a few hours in you realize that they genuinely think the hottest thing you could possibly do with hypnosis powers is have penetrative heterosexual sex with somebody who would otherwise not be interested

syn4k

ok note to self i gotta leave the house regularly so that i dont feel like im slowly transforming into an evil fucking shadow clone of myself

syn4k

So as it turns out your sense of self doesnt exist in a vacuum. You gotta actually use it and bounce it off of other people like echolocation to see where you are as a person and shit. So if you dont regularly interact with other people the echoes just get weaker and weaker and before you know it your personality is a blurry fucked up fog clone of its former self. which it sucks because this makes it really hard to interact with people again but yknow

esthermika

my favorite part of submission is the sense of comfort and certainty that comes with loaning your free will to your Betters. From abdicating responsibility of your personhood to someone else, someone with ambition and a goal in mind for you. It makes everything so easy, things they want are rewarded and things they don't want aren't. you don't have to think, just follow, and you'll end up better than you started.

it's comforting knowing that They are in the driver's seat now. becoming a passenger to your own life, and relaxing into the cushions as you're driven far, far away.