Notes in the Margins of Nightmares

Published author. I post original short fiction/creepypasta, horror analysis, writing advice, and reblogs of things that strike my fancy. INTJ, 5w6

[tlbodine]

T.L. Bodine's Zine Club

Wouldn't it be cool to have something to look forward to in the mail every month?

I thought so, too.

We're living in a world that is increasingly trying to replace human labor, human art, even human thought. And as everything around us becomes more and more inundated with AI slop and algorithmically generated bullshit and sanitized corporatized messaging, I've found myself increasingly interested in creating something real.

So, to that end, I am now offering zines as a Patreon reward.

All zines are written, designed, printed, folded, stuffed into envelopes, and mailed by me.

Contents may include:

Original short fiction

Nonfiction/essays/deep dives

Writing advice and instruction

Interactive elements like journaling prompts

Art, collage, photography, and so forth

Bonus notes, stickers, errata, and other lil bits and bobs I find

Anticipate that they'll be horror-flavored.

I'm still new to zine-making, and I'm looking forward to experimenting with different formats and techniques. I'm looking forward to practicing art and collage and multimedia. I can't guarantee glossy perfection with every issue, but I will always deliver something unique that you won't find in any of my online materials.

Subscribe for $5 on my Patreon. I'll also sell the files so you can print them at home if you'd rather buy them as one-offs.

The first zine will be sent in early July, so subscribe now so you don't miss it :)

[charlesoberonn]

Peter Jackson's Amazing Digital Serkis

*insert Gollum animated with the style of Pomni*

[wovi]

*

simone weil

[wovi]

*

ursula k. leguin

[soundoftheirwings]

Gotta tell you guys something wild in the Chinese fan sphere

So some fanartist drew a “sexy” (read: booby) version of a (cartoon) character who is traditionally very non-sexualised. Fans of the character got mad about it because it’s kind of groundbreaking how that character is written and portrayed and this art totally ignores the entire point of the character. They demanded the art be deleted. In response to that other people said, well what the fanartist did may be distateful but they have every right to draw what they’re into. The two sides fight for days and each starts a harassment campaign and even report their “opponents’” accounts.

So far so typical. But things eventually come to a head and they decide that this will be settled by votes - not through a poll. Through donations to a children’s education charity via each side’s portal. Whoever can get the highest amount of donation wins.

And that is how this charity received over 1 million in donations in three days lol. Oh btw the “freedom of expression” side won by a landslide (960k to 40k)

[tlbodine]

From now on this is how all petty fandom disputes should be settled.

[spoopdeedoop]

petition to bring back saying "huzzah!" when something goes your way and "alas." when it doesn't

[spoopdeedoop]

in hindsight, pitching something that would be deemed a fair bit strange by some standards to a site teeming with already incredibly strange people was a mistake. apologies tumblr users i’d forgotten where i was

[crimeronan]

sometimes i have strong opinions but they're also so inane that halfway through writing a post i'll be like "yeah, this is Absolutely not worth the energy it's taking" and delete everything. but then the opinion is still in my head. and i still want to share it. so within five minutes i go "you know, i bet i can phrase it more succinctly this time" and anyway. you all see where this is going. sometimes i do this four times in a row before i give up on the specific inane opinion and instead write a vague post about the concept of opinions as if that'll satisfy the urge to post the entirety of my inner monologue online. may or may not be relevant to what you're reading right now. and now all our lives have been enriched. you're welcome

[luna-azzurra]

Writers have two modes and they are "i haven't written in three weeks and i am rotting from the inside and everything feels wrong and i don't know who i am anymore" and "i wrote for four hours straight and forgot to eat and it's dark outside and when did that happen and i feel like a god" and there is nothing in between. no chill. no medium setting. just famine or feast and a very confused nervous system.

[batsandboba]

do not start gambling. go outside and locate a bug. now post it on inaturalist. bam. nature's gacha game

[batsandboba]

#id do this if it didnt doxx my location

inat has options for this! for each observation you upload, you can choose to keep the location public, not to disclose location at all, or to obscure it.

i'm a fan of the obscured option bc it shows the general area but not the exact coordinates, which allows for region-specific species ids without doxxing you. according to the inat help page it picks a random point within a 500km radius.

[veliseraptor]

love writing a post and then discarding it immediately. microdosing on having an opinion

[fairycosmos]

person who genuinely hates themselves so much they can barely look anyone in the eye: i must remain humble lest my hideous ego spiral out of control

[hoofpeet]

Must suck ass to be like. a lawyer or something in the pokemon world. They haven't made any cool lawyer pokemon yet

[eternal-fractal]

Ho oh

[dkpsyhog]

I think we have different definitions of ‘lawyer’ but sure

[eternal-fractal]

Why wouldn't ho oh be a lawyer? They're a Phoenix, wright?

[dkpsyhog]

In the kindest way possible, fuck you

[peppermint-3]

me when im in a situation

[rabbiteclair]

auto immune disorders happen when the immune system ignores regulatory factors and begins attacking healthy bodily tissues, due to what scientists refer to as "sheer love of the game"

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Listen we all know NFTs were a grift and all that but it still baffles me that they got past the naming stage. "These are called non fungible tokens" yes most assets are non-fungible actually. Non-fungibility is the default. "Yeah but these are tokens" you do realise that the advantage of 'tokens' is their fungibility, yes? A US dollar is a US dollar. A chuck-e-cheese token is a chuck-e-cheese token. The fungibility is intrinsic to the function. What you've made is not something that it makes any sense to call a token. I know it's just spicy finance crimes but like. Let's put some effort into the PR. As least cryptocurrency got an accurate name. What kind of asset are you pretending to have here. "Non fungible token" pick a fucking side.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#this post made me realise i dont know what fungible means#english is my second language#but im basically fluent#but through all the nft bullshit#i never realised i didn't know the word#prob say something about the general understanding

Something is fungible when it is completely interchangeable with its own kind in a trade or exchange. For example, currency is fungible -- one US dollar can be traded with another US dollar and essentially nothing has happened. The two dollars might be physically different -- most currencies are marked with serial numbers in case they need to be tracked due to theft or counterfeiting or whatever -- but in trade this doesn't matter. The specific dollar you have has no effect on anything -- any dollar is every dollar. Electricity is another fungible asset -- once it's in the system, it makes no difference whether the electricity you're using was developed in a coal plant or a nuclear plant or a solar panel. (Electricity, unlike coins, is physically identical which means you can't even have non-fungible edge cases like collectible coins.)

Houses, or racehorses, or paintings, are non-fungible. You can trade these just like money or electricity, but one house is not equal to every house -- their values will change relative to each other, and which house or horse or painting you have matters. If you want to economically model the value of houses as assets and trade goods, you can't do so in the unit of "house" -- you have to convert it to a fungible currency, like the dollar or the megawatt-hour, first. (You can create an "average house value" and mark the value of every house as a certain percentage above or below it, but this is just currency with extra steps. Now you've invented a fungible token useful only in comparing and trading houses. Hooray.)

Animorphs fans get a +2 to knowing what "fungible" means because KA Applegate used the word wrong once in 1998 and the book was bad enough that we all eventually learned what the word meant from each other making fun of it.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Anchoring value on some sort of fungible token is what differentiates your typical currency-based economic system from a system of barter. When people talk about how we should "give up money and go back to bartering", this is essentially the difference. (Of course, you can barter with money, and people do so all the time, but when people talk about "going back to barter" they usually mean a largely mythical system in which fungible currency is absent.) If you have some sort of fungible token in your society which people can reliably expect demand for, you have a currency, whether de facto or government controlled -- it can be dollars, or gold pieces, or cowrie shells, or mana points, or cups of grain, or space credits, or computer processing cycles; it doesn't matter. If you do not have some sort of fungible token with reliable demand, then you cannot have a large-scale currency and things like taxation and trade agreements become an absolute fucking nightmare. So that's a fun worldbuilding tip if you want to build fun weird societies.

The ease in which your tokens can be produced, preserved, transported, traded or consumed can also have a big effect on the type of society you have -- a society in which credits are produced and backed by the government has extremely different concerns re: the control and verification of their currency than does a society on the Cup Of Grain Standard, where the amount of 'money' in a society fluctuates wildly but is more closely grounded in material prosperity. The necessity of control over production and verification is much higher in the former, but concerns over transport and trade are much higher in the latter. The social and cultural impacts are also very different between the two (it's easier to save gold for retirement than to save wheat for retirement, but easier to cash in wheat in a famine.)

[tlbodine]

The funniest thing to me about NFTs, and the economy in general, is that the experience that best prepared me for understanding the entire concept was playing Neopets.

See, Neopets is a virtual pet game with an in-game economy. Various activities in the game produce virtual items and also virtual currency (Neopoints, or NPs) which you can spend on virtual items. The value of an item may fluctuate based on price and demand, and the value of NPs may fluctuate depending on inflation, but by and large you can create a standard of how much an item is worth based on how many NPs it's been selling for recently -- you can look up what other people are selling the item for and gauge the value that way.

But then there's pet trading.

See, on Neopets, your pets can be moved from one account to another, but they cannot be sold for NPs. Any attempt to trade a pet for currency and/or items is forbidden and will get you banned from the game. But pets *can* be traded for other pets. But not every pet is equally valuable, and there are multiple factors that influence a pet's value: species and color (some are rarer than others) but also its name and, at one time, whether or not it was "converted" or not. Basically Neopets updated its art style and gave users the option to leave their pets in the old style or update it. Because there was a limited pool of unconverted pets, they became desirable and skyrocketed in value.

So if you wanted to get a rare unconverted pet, the only way you could actually do this was to trade up through the tiers with a series of lesser-quality trades until you happened to find someone who had what you wanted and was willing to take what you had.

For example, you might start out with a regular, normal, boring pet, and then train their stats to make them useful for fighting in the battledome. Then you trade your BD pet for a pet with no stats but who has a short, common name (on neopets, names are unique, so 25 years into the game all the good ones are taken). Then you trade your well-named pet for an unconverted pet with a shitty name. Then trade that unconverted pet for a different one, and so on and so forth.

For a while, this was basically the primary activity on the site because the rest of the economy had stagnated and all the games were broken so the entire game became obsessed with assigning arbitrary value to nonfungible images that could then be traded around. All of them were completely worthless in every conceivable measure, but their perceived/assigned value was so high that people would commit literal crimes to steal passwords and hack accounts in order to trade them.

So when NFTs came out, it was like, oh, yeah, that makes perfect sense to me. It's stupid as hell, but I totally get it!

[imviotrash]

"Kill them with kindness" Nah, fuck that, CRICKET BAT 🏏 🏏🏏🏏*SMACK* 🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏*SMACK*🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏*SMACK*🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏*SMACK*🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏*SMACK*🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏*SMACK*🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏

[the-haiku-bot]

“Kill them with kindness”

Nah, fuck that, CRICKET BAT 🏏 🏏🏏🏏*SMACK*

🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏*SMACK*🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏*SMACK*🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏*SMACK*🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏*SMACK*🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏*SMACK*🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏🏏

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[bulbekuggeleh]

This opens up a lot of possibilities for what a haiku can be

[aurin-avenir]

“Creative people have trouble recognising their skills as skills, because eventually they feel like second nature. This stuff really is valuable, if it wasn’t, people wouldn’t be stealing it. Creativity doesn’t feel special or unique until you realise people have to plagiarise it.”

— Hbomberguy on plagiarism.

[tlirsgender]

One of my least favorite autistic experiences is probably putting in conscious effort to learn how to Behave Appropriately (not in the sense of Masking, just interacting with other people in general) and then watching a lot of other people, autistic or otherwise, simply not do that. Like oh we're just doing whatever now? You would have flayed me alive if I acted like that

[tlirsgender]

At the function like oh sorry I didn't realize social skills were optional. Does this mean I can call you a fucking asshole? You're being an asshole rn. Just thought you should know