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On Friendship.

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that new a24 iraq movie looks so disgusting. can 9/11 3 happen to hollywood next time (i am thinking it can happen just a few minutes after 9/11 2)

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The strongest guy in the Magnus Archives is that one guy who was so obsessed with his dog that he just walked right out of the Spiral because it was her dinnertime

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Most humans suck so I appreciate the ones I connect with

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Shit man, this wizard war is fucked. I just saw a guy clap his hands together and say "the ten hells" or some similar shit, and every one around him turned inside out, had their tibia explode and then disappeared. The camera didn't even go onto him, that's how common shit like this is. My ass is casting frostbite and level 2 poison. I think I just heard "power word:scrunch" two groups over. I gotta get the fuck outta here.

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i know an engineer-type dude who said fiction bored him, because fiction is mostly-formulaic and tropey, and you can generally guess what’s gonna happen next, and yada yada

so his solution for this problem was… to solely read serial web novels in languages that (1) he did not speak, and (2) for which there was no actual translation, fan or otherwise

apparently, the combined forces of “trying to figure out WTF is going on via the power of Google Translate" + “cultural differences in storytelling conventions” + “the inherent randomness of where the hell amateur authors are gonna take their plots”—those all mashed up to make stories that were unpredictable enough to keep him guessing all the time

then he described to me this totally batshit-sounding Hungarian story he’d been obsessively reading once a week for years

and god i think about him all the time.  like.  that is the most wild way to process fiction that i have ever heard of, but also, i’ve gotta admire the sheer chaos energy of it

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I hate it when actors talk about an animal they had to work with on set and it’s obvious they were not patient with the animal at all. You especially see this with non cat people who had to work with cats and are like “Working with that cat was the bane of my existence, never on cue, scratched me once, always seemed afraid of me.” Like yeah, she’s a cat. She could probably sense you hated her. It’s hard enough to be an animal in the entertainment industry without some guy being a dick to you. Are you that uncharitable with human costars (and particularly child actors) or do you just hate animals?

Conversely, it’s so heartwarming when an actor speaks positively about an animal they worked with and/or there are behind the scenes stories of the crew genuinely trying to make the animal comfortable and giving them grace.

One of my favorite examples of this is Mad Max 2 (1981) which was made on a budget of $4.5 million AUD (about $13.5 USD in today’s money). They ended up casting a dog from the pound that was scheduled to be put down and by all accounts the dog was a nightmare to work with. But most of the cast and crew loved him. The dog’s name was Dog so his character’s name was also Dog. He was difficult to train but super food motivated so they kept writing dog food into scenes for him. He kept freaking out on set and they couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Eventually they realized part of the reason he kept acting out was because he was terrified of the sound of cars and motorcycles so they had special doggy earplugs made. His character was supposed to be aggressive but real Dog was very affectionate and could not be made to behave aggressively so they had to use selective editing to make him seem more menacing. When filming was done multiple crew members wanted to adopt him because he was such a good bad boy. He was adopted by one of the stuntwomen and got to live out the rest of his life doing actual blue heeler things. That was his only film role.

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truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.

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nothing could prepare you for the opening of the second paragraph (source)

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rb with your most common recurring theme in your nightmares. mine is pregnancy

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good god.

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Please don’t pirate books at least while the author is alive. I’ll make an exception for actual billionaires and wildly expensive textbooks you cannot afford yet need to complete your studies. I can’t make an exception for assholes, because we’re all considered assholes by someone.  I don’t know how many people realise how many writers who created successful, beloved stories and characters still die poor while other people get rich off the same work. I don’t think people realise that in the UK the current average yearly earnings for an author has nosedived over the last fifteen years to £10,500. That obviously is forcing people to quit writing. It increasingly means writing is a job for people who’ve inherited money or have wealthy spouses who can support them. I don’t know if people realise that in general, writers are poor and getting poorer. I’m sorry, but if you think widespread sense of entitlement to free books has nothing to do with that … you’re just wrong. 

I say I don’t think people realise - the truth is I hope they don’t, because the alternative is that they don’t care. That’s certainly the impression I’ve got from Twitter, where a truly horrifying number of people are arguing that copyright on  all books should expire after thirty years, and you should be able to acquire books for  free after that. This … would not just mean that everyone gets free books. It would mean if you write a book at 30, not only do you lose any royalties from it at 60, but Disney can take it, make a franchise out of it, Scrooge McDuck it up in a pool of money while you starve because writers don’t get workplace pensions.

Some threads on the unintended (?) consequences of this. I can’t go over it all again. John Brownlow NK Jemisin Michael Marshall Smith Me Marina Lostetter Kari Dru and others William Gibson and others

There are plenty of others. It’s not that this actual idea will actually happen, but I do think it reinforces the idea that it’s not only okay, but sometimes actually virtuous to search for ways to enjoy writers’ work without paying for it. Like it’s somehow a step towards a better world. Not just at the reader end, to be fair, at the employer end too. And I do see a lot of people here too who are all about supporting workers unless the workers are writers in which case fuck’em. 

Like. If you want to radically change society in such a way that mass-media conglomerates don’t exist and so can’t exploit us and we’re supported to make art in some other way than fine. But can you start the revolution with actual rich people please, not ask us to live right now, in the society we’ve got, without the money we need to survive it. Finally, a plea: I really, really, do not want to debate this. This whole thing genuinely makes me feel tense and shaky and sick. If you’ve got to disagree - unfollow me, block me, vagueblog somewhere I can’t see it. The Twitter version of this already has me feeling like I’ve been kicked in the gut. I didn’t want to write this post. I just felt I wasn’t going to have any peace until I did.

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Gonna b honest. A lot of hot ppl go to art museums. I’m one of them