so why not start immediately

[susiephone]

if you want to read more but have trouble finishing things, i really recommend short story collections (ESPECIALLY anthologies by multiple authors) and literary magazines. if one story sucks you can just skip to the next one, and anthologies and magazines will have work by multiple authors so you get a wide variety of styles, and if you find a story you really really like, you can look to see if that author's published anything else.

i'm not as well-versed in literary magazines as i should be (trying to fix that), but here are short story collections i suggest:

lesser known monsters of the 21st century by kim fu (speculative fiction, horror). personal favorite story: "pre-simulation consultation xf007867"

the paper menagerie and other stories by ken liu (speculative fiction). personal favorite story: "the litigation master and the monkey king"

slasher girls and monster boys by various (horror). personal favorite story: "the birds of azalea street"

what we fed to the manticore by talia lakshmi kolluri (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "the hunted, the haunted, the hungry, the tame"

africa risen by various (afrofuturism, speculative fiction). personal favorite story: "a dream of electric mothers"

a small apocalypse by laura chow reeve (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "real bodies"

the secret lives of church ladies by deesha philyaw (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "dear sister"

a phoenix first must burn by various (speculative fiction). personal favorite story: "wherein abigail fields recalls her first death and, subsequently, her best life"

woman hollering creek and other stories by sandra cisneros (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "woman hollering creek"

bliss montage by ling ma (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "yeti lovemaking"

how to love a jamaican by alexia arthurs (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "the ghost of jia yi"

radicalized by cory doctorow (speculative fiction). personal favorite story: "radicalized"

life ceremony by sayaka murata (literary fiction, horror). personal favorite story: "life ceremony"

shit cassandra saw by gwen e. kirby (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "here preached his last"

through the woods by e.m. carroll (horror). personal favorite story: "his face all red"

[azspot]

“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”

— The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech

[santhipoma]

[starjasmines]

did you guys know that imagining something = as good as having it

[eviethekiwi]

it's actually better than having it because you dont have to have it

[starjasmines]

TRUE.

[in-love-with-world]

‧₊˚ 🦌✩ ₊˚ 🏔️ — mentally i am in this quiet corner of nature, listening to the birds singing, talking to the deer, finding peace and tranquility in the rustling of the leaves ✶

[postarcadian]

the thing I love most about how tumblr users use tags is that it’s like what if a social media website had a footnotes system

[zinesbycee]

(nods sagely) (nods basily) (nods rosemarily) (nods saltly) (nods star anisely)

[blackcoffeestudies]

Mutual fascination is always a risky business. Lacan suggests that it is the consequence of an imaginary identification in which the self strives to incorporate the other in an act as aggressive as it is loving. It is never clear who, snake or snake charmer, is mesmerized by whom.

Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A feminist introduction

[barstoolblues]

mozzarella and parmesan is kind of like the age gap yuri of cheese

[carnadelions]

twitter: am i too woke for thinking fat people shouldn't be stoned to death

tumblr: you're calling me racist? how do you think that makes my non-white oc feel?

instagram: if he doesn't look at you the way your boy cat looks at you he's not 🤚 the one 💍

[pencil-line-deactivated20241029]

method actor this method actor that. toshiro mifune played a guy getting shot at by arrows by getting shot at by arrows

and yeah i believe it. ^ this is the face of a guy getting shot at by arrows

[lysenkoite]

[weaselle]

[abz-j-harding]

i can't cope

[runawaymarbles]

thinking over it I think it actually matters less whether Heathcliff was intentionally written as what we'd now consider a person of color--something about which I'm a bit dubious for a few reasons--and more that if you're going to make an adaptation, you need to a) make sure the racial dynamics are understandable to modern audiences and b) keep the contrast with the other characters. It doesn't work to make him a bog-standard white guy with brown hair if the guy he envies so much has the same hair color, much less darker skin, than Heathcliff himself.

Edgar Linton is everything Healthcliff isn't--frail, pale, rich, respectable, married to Cathy--and that's all he can see in Heathcliff and Cathy Jr, and he hates them for it!! He quite literally tortures them because of it. The only child that looks like Cathy is her nephew, who is the only one Heathcliff can tolerate. If Cathy Jr had resembled her mother it would have all played out very differently (which is an entirely separate post)

all of which is to say. i haven't seen the new movie but what on earth is going on there.

[runawaymarbles]

my ideal casting for Heathcliff is someone who is ethnically ambigious to the point that people regularly google "[actor name] race" and get no conclusive answer. Because I think one of the key things is that the (white, statistically improbably blonde) residents of Gimmerton look at him and immediately feel that he's Not One Of Them, but they can't like. Prove it. It's just vibes. It's just his face. Something about it. Hard to say. Probably gonna grow up to be a criminal. One of Those Types. The kind that steals your pheasants.

[alwaysright27]

Heathcliff is Turkish (just kidding)

[runawaymarbles]

thinking over it I think it actually matters less whether Heathcliff was intentionally written as what we'd now consider a person of color--something about which I'm a bit dubious for a few reasons--and more that if you're going to make an adaptation, you need to a) make sure the racial dynamics are understandable to modern audiences and b) keep the contrast with the other characters. It doesn't work to make him a bog-standard white guy with brown hair if the guy he envies so much has the same hair color, much less darker skin, than Heathcliff himself.

Edgar Linton is everything Healthcliff isn't--frail, pale, rich, respectable, married to Cathy--and that's all he can see in Heathcliff and Cathy Jr, and he hates them for it!! He quite literally tortures them because of it. The only child that looks like Cathy is her nephew, who is the only one Heathcliff can tolerate. If Cathy Jr had resembled her mother it would have all played out very differently (which is an entirely separate post)

all of which is to say. i haven't seen the new movie but what on earth is going on there.

[runawaymarbles]

my ideal casting for Heathcliff is someone who is ethnically ambigious to the point that people regularly google "[actor name] race" and get no conclusive answer. Because I think one of the key things is that the (white, statistically improbably blonde) residents of Gimmerton look at him and immediately feel that he's Not One Of Them, but they can't like. Prove it. It's just vibes. It's just his face. Something about it. Hard to say. Probably gonna grow up to be a criminal. One of Those Types. The kind that steals your pheasants.

[alwaysright27]

Heathcliff is Turkish (just kidding)

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

it does still make me insane specifically how many queer people lovingly embrace astrology. I went to a poetry workshop yesterday that was genuinely quite good but also included an option to disclose astrology designations during introductions and so many people broke out some variation of "I'm a [x] sum but I have a [y] placement and it SHOWS" girl no it doesn't. that's meaningless correlation you completely invented the causation

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

I'd say that rejecting biological determinism in favor of space gas determinism isn't the slay the astrology queers think it is but if I'm being completely honest I fear that many members of our community haven't even really rejected biological determinism so much as sprinkled a layer of glitter on it

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

yes that's how confirmation bias works

[within-stars]

People get their panties up in a twist about astrology because they think it’s people shoving themselves into boxes that are not pre-existing.

Most people who like astrology like it because it reflects things about themselves that they relate to that they have difficulty vocalizing themselves. And things like doing a chart reading can allow you to gaze deeply into yourself

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

yes that's how confirmation bias works

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#wait wasn't that also OP?#is this the third such post now?#we shouldn't be pissing on the poor at all#“ok so we should only piss on the poor a little when there's no toilets free”

It's more than three. I've lost count but this is at least the fourth.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

#hi op of the Taylor Swift isn't bisexual there are many bisexual pop girlies post

[supreme-leader-stoat]

OP what wizard did you cut off in traffic to get cursed like this

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

[caffeinatedopossum]

"I'm still kicking" is such a funny way to say "I'm still alive". Like lol. I'm still thrashing. Flailing. Writhing even. The violence remains.

[yamalvr]

i have a personality flaw that always positions me on the side of characters who are hiding everything and refuse to accept help. like do NOT confide in people. confiding in people is the enemy. REAL winners lie and lie and continue lying until they ruin every single thing theyve got going for them & didnt fix a single goddamn thing. keep digging grandpa youre almost there

[glavilio]

disrupting skyspace james turnell / coyote

[tyrian-red]

my erotic fanfiction is more historically accurate than yours. here it claims that shes moaning 'yes,' however classical latin didn't have a word that corresponds to Modern English 'yes,' i.e. an affirmative answer to an interrogative. You could have easily avoided this glaring implausibility by allowing her to moan plus, 'more'—as exemplified in my critically acclaimed fic with an unprecedented number of kudos (eleven). I recommend that you log out of AO3 and return only after acquiring satisfactory knowledge of the subject matter.

[mereologic]

classical latin did in fact have an affirmative answer to an interrogative (sic), it's just not a cognate with modern english "yes" which is Germanic. but you probably recognize its modern descendants, spanish sí, italian sí, etc.

anyway how this is relevant to this post is that when Dido commits suicide in book 4 of the Aeneid she says "sic, sic! iuvat ire sub umbras" or "yes, yes! with joy i pass beneath the shadows" while stabbing herself, the allegory of penetration accompanied by shouts of ecstasy leading unto death being an interpretative exercise best left to the reader.