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MOTAVERSARY WEEK 2 ↳Favorite OTP OT3

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There's this wild thing people keep saying to me when I tell them that I don't use GenAI for anything, at all, where they're like "well you might as well embrace it because it's the future, you gotta get onboard, full steam ahead, or you'll be left behind" and like... if always makes me laugh because the whole selling point of AI is that it's simple enough for morons who don't know how to do anything themselves. I have never encountered a situation where I am unable to do something easily without using AI. It's not even like I'm some hypercompetent or motivated person with boundless energy and time on my hands. I'm just some guy who's willing to occasionally expend slight effort and that's made everything AI is capable of doing 1000% obsolete

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accidentally typed "trench kiss" instead of "french kiss". anyone wanna hold hands and kiss in a muddy hole full of rats as bullets and grenades and artillerary shells fly over our heads?

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there's this horrible school of attempted literary criticism on here that holds that 1. everything in any given author's work is autobiographical, especially if it seems "real" and 2. those themes seeped into the work subconsciously, revealing something about the author that they're either trying to hide or unaware of themself. it drives me up a wall, since it seems to deny the fundamental skills that make people good writers: the empathy to imagine and portray experiences that one hasn't had oneself and the ability to take one's personal emotional experiences or worldview and fold them, consciously, into the unworked clay of a narrative.

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reminder that coming up with some fake little dudes and creating intricate storylines in your head is a completely free and fun way to pass the time and the government can't stop you

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chappell roan could do dancing in the dark and bruce springsteen could do hot to go and they really really should just for me

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I remember meeting a guy at a bar a year or so ago who told me he worked at the international consortium that does the porn parodies of all the top-grossing film releases. He said that the whole Barbenheimer situation presented his combine with some spectacular highs and lows. Because he said that with Barbie, right, the thing about Barbie is that there's already kind of a three-way ideatic, structural parallel between the curated artificiality of Barbie as a children's toy, the curated artificiality of Barbie as a mass market film, and the curated artificiality of pornography as a genre. Add on top of that that Barbie as a film is already feeling this tension, right where it's trying to be about a character graduating from the platonic sexlessness of a children's franchise to the functional-and-frank sexuality of being a living human woman, but it's also being bogged down in the "Everyone-is-beautiful-no-one-is-horny" aesthetic restrictions of any contemporary big-budget mass-market film so the two states end up looking pretty similar, he said. I mean the film itself is very aware of that tension, right, with that joke about how "casting Margot Robbie is the wrong move if you want to make that point," all that jazz. So, all that in mind, Barbie-themed pornography, he said, is in a weird way actually kind of complementary to the extant project, gesturing at unaddressed tensions and ideas, a dark mirror, the shadow self it wants to deny but can't, there's a lot of room to play in the space. He used the adjective "Lynchian" a couple of times, he seemed super stoked, he was talking with his hands. Oppenheimer, on the other hand. Oppenheimer he said presented a problem. Because obviously you can eroticize the detonation of an atomic bomb, we're all probably three mutuals removed from someone on this site who does exactly that, but obviously that's a niche market, and moreover it's a market that has a ton of overlap with high-minded thinkers who treat the historical use of atomic weapons against Japan with the level of gravity that atrocity demands. So they were stuck. They were really stuck. He told me that they'd been pulling their hair out for months trying to square the circle and all they had to show for it was a big whiteboard with the phrase "Grope-nheimer" written on it

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'ao3 needs a like and dislike button'

what you need, my algorithm-rotten minded friend, is a grip

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this is not my beautiful circus..these are not my beautiful monkeys

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Nix and Harry flirting with Shermans

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Wild that folks keep saying beekeepers abuse bees as if bees are not both venomous flying animals and fully unionized

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That’s okay!! Real life does that. 😊

Umm, the arrival at Thorpe Abbotts? Or Nix going back to the party/Dick after Gale goes out to Bucky?

FINALLY CAN ANSWER THIS ASK!

I wrote the epilogue!

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I re-read Proximal Damage, and good god, the "Ladies and gentlemen, Everett fucking Blakely" gets me every time

Jamie just there like "it is inconceivable to me that none of you are as in love with this man as I am" and tbh he's not wrong.

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You can tell a lot about the health of a civilization by their warning signs. Places with a lot of dumb folks will have very broad, very dumb warnings in public. "No feeding the birds." "Stop swimming in this drainage pond." That kind of thing.

Advanced civilizations have very precise signs. They've covered the bases of their regular, run-of-the-mill idiots, and now they're working hard to cover that other end of the bell curve: the talented idiot. When I was in Germany last time, there was a big warning sign that consisted of a 76-letter-long word that means "stop bothering this particular goose, Sven." I don't know who Sven was, but the goose looked pretty calm. It worked.

Now, I have a secret to tell you. You can just make your own signs. There's no law against it, except perhaps "littering," and the municipal sign factory doesn't have very good security. If you show up there past close and put in the door code that you shoulder-surfed off one of the employees returning from lunch a week prior, you have all night to fuck around with their sign-printing machine, making the most official-looking placards you can think of.

Is this wrong? I don't think so. It's a public space, and being able to put up an aluminum sign that says wacky crank shit is your right. For instance, just last week, I banned pickup trucks from parking by the playground. The cops figured out something was going on, because they didn't get any calls for toddlers getting backed over for a couple of days and sent a patrol truck to investigate. Took my sign right down.

What I discovered after that is that nobody keeps records of what signs are supposed to be there. Why would anyone put up a sign for no reason? They cost money, after all. The city is now suing the shit out of that officer for stealing the "no trucks" sign, thanks to an anonymous tipster who called in the theft. Guy wearing a reflective vest came by and put like four more of them up after the lawsuit made the news, just out of spite. I'm not entirely sure if he's actually a city worker; we ran into each other at 3am at the sign factory and just grunted. He was working on some really crazy signs about not feeding a particular swan. Probably German.