dontblinkeatchocolate

[dontblinkeatchocolate]

I like how the homestuck pilot stuff is just giving everyone a rude awakening that a lot of indie creators know each other and respect each others work and that your individual cringe does not exist in a vacuum. And that at the end of the day you’re all clowns.

[dontblinkeatchocolate]

tbh i think the funniest phenomena that's been happening in the last couple years is "youtuber, having gone too deep into the research hole, has been made an investigative journalist against their will"

[dontblinkeatchocolate]

Had my suspicions but I have finally confirmed it this morning: The rival Pokémon Go team I have been beefing with, whose gym's total annihilation I have incorporated into my morning routine, is actually a group of local elementary school students

[dontblinkeatchocolate]

i love the phrase "sex pervert" like. as opposed to what? abstinence pervert?

[dontblinkeatchocolate]

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.

[dontblinkeatchocolate]

Me, after finishing Gideon the Ninth: "wow that was so good, I can't wait to start Harrow the Ninth :)"

Harrow the Ninth:

[dontblinkeatchocolate]

fibercrafts are SO maddening cuz wdym I have to go to work tomorrow, I'm like a third of a way through making a whole ass fucking cape, don't you think I should be allowed to focus on what matters (my fucking cape)

[dontblinkeatchocolate]

Die temu ad die

[dontblinkeatchocolate]

There's a bunch of adhd advice out there that's like "people with adhd tend to work better under deadlines due to the anxiety so here are ways to artificially induce a stress response in order to get you to get work done" and it's like well what if I don't want to be stressed out all the time in order to function

[dontblinkeatchocolate]

not sure how much longer ill be able to handle things costing money

[dontblinkeatchocolate]

[dontblinkeatchocolate]

I don't know very much about myself but one thing I'm sure of is that I cannot be trusted to use a nail gun responsibly.

[dontblinkeatchocolate]

[dontblinkeatchocolate]

[dontblinkeatchocolate]

based on that post i saw

[dontblinkeatchocolate]

one of the things i really like about how brennan dms is that he is categorically incapable of punishing kindness. every time one of his players does some crazy ass shit out of the goodness of their hearts, he adjusts the universe to accommodate that kindness. this obviously creates very touching scenes (see: emily and the junkmother, the bad kids getting jawbone a job as a guidance counselor, every interaction they have with baba yaga including pib stealing from her, etc.) but also it means that he lets ally invent a silkworm civilization that's evolved to the bronze age and produces chain link patterned silk shirts just to cheer emily up. bronze age silkworms. for emily.

[dontblinkeatchocolate]

By far the funniest thing about the Brennan Leaving Dropout bit is that Brennan HAS left a relatively well established if niche creative job to take on an even more niche risky endeavor and it's when he stopped writing Strong Female Protagonist to focus full time on Dimension 20.