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The Fool

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hey guys watch this: my heart immediately stops and my body crumples to the ground whereupon a brief moment passes before my corpse explodes into a hideous mess of blood and gore

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Mauve Stinger (Pelagia noctiluca), family Pelagiidae, found in temperate seas around the world

Venomous. (stings are painful, but not considered medically serious)

photograph by @jellyfish_science

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Apple, Facebook, and Google are all sitting on a vast cache of dick pics that are tied to unique personal identities. Could they be field-testing their AI even now? Could their autonomous drones identify a person from a few frames of dick flash alone?

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I enjoy the Two Cakes Philosophy and I believe it deserves its place enshrined in fandom culture.

Forgive me for the extended metaphor but I also want to simultaneously celebrate what I’m calling Bakery Display Case Philosophy. You know when you walk into a bakery and the display case is full of beautiful treats? And there’s a variety of different colors, textures, and flavors to discover? And that’s so deeply exciting?

You might say to yourself, “No one is going to want to read this pairing. No one is going to want to want a character study of that character. No one wants genfic in this fandom, only shipfic.”

And you might use that to discourage yourself from writing a certain fic.

Fandoms, like bakeries, need cakes and cookies and éclairs and cream puffs and shortbread and brownies and pies and tarts and petit fours and turnovers and cinnamon rolls and madeleines and meringues—and so many other things—to survive.

Write your dark chocolate pistachio croissant fic. Your fandom needs it actually.

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how much interest, if any, do you have in writing tragedies?

i've been getting caught up on Thresholder lately after taking a long break, so this question is prompted by reaching the book three epilogue. a pattern i've noticed is a certain optimism to how Thresholder's ends books. they're hopeful, if tempered by reality and nuance. thinking about it gave me this amusing mental image just picturing this... improbable streak of Things Getting Better across the multiverse

honestly, that sense of positivity is part of why i'm having as much fun as i am getting caught up on this story; i like that it doesn't bum me out or hurt me

still, Worth the Candle ended quite well, and Dark Wizard of Donkerk too, though i guess Metropolitan Man is admittedly a bit of an exception. i'm a fake fan, so i can't speak to much beyond that

most stories end well, so this isn't unusual, but i'm still curious: have you written any tragedies in your published & unpublished corpus? will you? i know there's some creators who think long form stories owe it to the audience and their investment not to shit on that with complete tragedy. do you put any stock in that?

I think first there's an important distinction between camps of tragedies that I want to draw first.

Note: unmarked ending spoilers follow

First, there's a tragedy that comes from within, where the protagonist sows the seeds of their own destruction. The Greeks called this hamartia, the character flaw or the mistake, the thing that the suffering springs from. There are a couple other "classic" elements of this, the fall from grace, the recognition of this foible or folly, etc. This is my jam. I wish that modern culture had more of it. The last two big examples I can think of are Walter White and Ned Stark, and I think neither of them really fit. Part of that is just that longform tragedy is harder to do, and less focused with a larger cast of characters. Still, I think there's a lot to love about the classic structure: the fatal flaw, the fall, the recognition, the catastrophe. (I'm trying to fit some other characters in this mold, especially from recent movies, and I guess Tár is another example of a tragic character from a movie I really enjoyed. Wolf of Wall Street might be another, but I agree with the common line of criticism here, which is that it was a lot more interested in reveling in the opulence and chaos than in the downfall. Very possible there are some obvious ones that I'm forgetting here. Oh, also The Substance, which I saw recently and didn't care for, but a more classic tragedy wouldn't have the inciting incident.)

I have never consciously attempted a classic tragedy, but I might some day, probably for a shorter, more focused piece. I think "start high, move low" make a lot more sense for it, and one of the things that a lot of modern takes on the classic tragedy do is "start low, move high, move low", which gives a lot less time for the tragic arc to appear in full, and robs the piece of some of its clarity.

The second camp of what people mean when they say "tragedy" is just "a story with a bad ending". I tend to not like these very much. I think it's culturally important for there to be a few examples of them floating around in the canon, and as a metaphor for climate change (or climate change feelings) I think it's ... eh, fine. I recently watched The Dead Don't Die and it's clear they were going for something like that, and I hated the movie but respected certain elements of its narrative decisions. I think it generally makes for a dreadful story, and is interesting only in a postmodern sense, and to keep people on their toes, and to combat anti-narrative thinking. A story that ends with everyone dying from circumstances that were outside their control is definitely not for me, because it just feels really pointless. Sometimes pointlessness is the point ... but I can't take too much of that.

I would be extremely hesitant to write a story with a bad ending where shit just doesn't end up working out for our protagonist, like he was just not strong enough, not fast enough, not skilled enough, not lucky enough, etc. It is true that in life sometimes you run up against those things, it's just not what I tend to be into fiction for. I don't tend to like deliberately sour endings.

Maybe this is just because I've seen them done badly and with no sterling purpose to them. "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown" is iconic for a reason, it's the punchline for all the setup, it's what the entire movie has been about. Same for "He loved Big Brother.", it's just ... so good? Such an encapsulation of everything that's come before? So I think it's fine to do that if that's what you've been driving at with a clear purpose, or a purpose that becomes clear only at the end. Difficult line to walk though.

Personally, I like my endings nuanced and optimistic and with costs and change and stuff. Let's say 70% sweet, 20% bitter, 10% sour. I'd also like to piss off some subset of people because there are many different valid readings and different viewpoints can have different ideas about them.

No proper tragedies of either kind in my published body of work, at least that I can immediately think of. Actually, on reflection, maybe Contratto, a vampire novella I wrote a while back fits, though I think intelligent people could disagree on how "down" that ending is. I have a 95% finished novel that has an ambiguously bad ending, but it'll never see the light of day (mostly due to being early, unpolished work that I currently think is unsalvageable). Among upcoming stuff, where "upcoming" is very ambiguous ... one or two with more "downbeat" endings, I would say. But again, I think "total catastrophe and ruin" is both not to my tastes, and hard to pull off in a way that makes it work.

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CONTROL DEVIL TAYLOR

oh the atrocities she’d commit

@eternalfarnham 👀

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Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone! ⭐

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August

Wildflowers hug him while he admires the clouds. Butterflies bring news from the fields, and the wind whispers what will happen tomorrow. Take his hand and he will be able to bring you back to the memories of that best summer.

Commission reference of character August for Monty_supermacy .

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dragon outside rolling around in the snow and making a snow angel with their wings i think

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Mel ✨

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They made him eat Crayola branded crayons at the ripe age of 8 years old

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doctors HATE this 1 simple trick ...

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Hohoiho tge dragon… (kinkjou….)

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'this property says it has nine acres but those neighbours look pretty clo-'

oh.

ohhhhhhhhh no

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Christmas commission for a client!

Really happy with the background!