#Rumblr

[unblissfulawareness]

Rumblr profiles

[weaver-of-slate]

“I felt it. Specifically in my left shoulder- The Sacred Spiral. By bumping a structure to your side, you can hunt your targets down from above.”

-shoeless, "What Is the hardest skill in VR?"

The Spiral Path

[dividedsingularity]

it's the Rumblerrr

[albi-bumblebee]

i feel like very few gadje actually understand any more than like very surface level knowledge about gypsies. and a lot of gadje are also very prone to putting us in boxes(either all rom are white/white pasing and don’t experience oppression based on their ethnicity, or all rom are visually brown and can never benefit from white privilege, all/no gypsies are actually fortune tellers, etc) that just doesn’t reflect reality in a meaningful way. like i’m glad they’re trying but also maybe they should read more into romani studies or something before they talk about us online lol. or perhaps just try to exercise a bit of nuance

[brinaarcadia]

THE PINK PEARL

[justhaningon]

Don´t start something if you won't finish it.

To all fanfic- writers. Don't start something that you won't finish.

Fanfiction is a wonderful way to tell stories that are close to our hearts. It gives us the freedom to let characters live on, write alternative endings or create completely new adventures. But there is an unspoken responsibility that every author has: If you start a story, you should try to finish it.

All too often, readers find that a promising fanfiction is simply cancelled. What remains are unresolved storylines, unresolved conflicts - and disappointed readers. These people have invested time and emotion in your story. They root for the characters, speculate about the next chapters and hope for a worthy conclusion. If you just stop, you leave them hanging in the air.

Of course, life can get in the way. Writer's block, lack of time or changing interests are understandable reasons why a story might stall. But when you start a fanfiction, be aware: you're not just creating for yourself, but also for a community that is looking forward to it.

This doesn't mean that you should feel compelled to write something that you no longer enjoy. But perhaps you can create a rough plan, write your story in stages or at least write a short final chapter if you realise you can't go on. That way you at least give your readers some kind of closure and don't leave them in limbo. And sorry but I can't understand how you can leave 4 or more stories open. Maybe you should finish one before you start something new and leave several stories open. It shows chaos, get your shit together!

[therumpus]

The Mini Interview with Tajja Isen

By Allison Armijo

Tajja Isen and I were in the same eleventh grade English class. Just a few years apart. And in different countries–her, in Canada, me, in the US. But like many with an upbringing not dissimilar to the suburban worlds created by Raymond Carver, we both were aspiring writers who wanted to write like the ‘tiny white people,’ as Isen dubs them, that lived–and sometimes continue to live–in our heads. 

Isen is a voice actor, writer, and the former editor-in-chief of Catapult magazine. Her work approaches this boundary between the physical and the linguistic–our actions and our words–with curiosity, that which makes space for the seemingly contradictory state of living and growing in a world with language and its debt, or the space between our values and actions. 

Isen’s 2022 debut collection, Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service (Atria, 2024), looks at how the language of social justice activism has evolved over time: change without guarantee of progress, revision without redress (also known as ‘lip service’). Each essay combines research with cultural criticism and personal experience, asking questions about where the boundaries between the personal and political lie, and how the language used to navigate those spaces disproportionately affects people of color. By interrogating her own experiences within various American and Canadian institutions, Isen explores what happens when language becomes transactional, and how lip service diffuses this very necessary tension. 

With the upcoming release of the paperback edition of Some of My Best Friends, I was delighted to chat with Isen over email about what it means to have a changing relationship to language, the importance of surprise (and self-love) in the writing process, and much more. 

***

The Rumpus: The book opens with two epigraphs, one by W.E.B. Du Bois and another by Lana Del Rey, the first of which comes from The Souls of Black Folk, and the second from Instagram. Both approach the tokened: “I’m not racist, some of my best friends are Black,” in a different way. Do you think W.E.B. Du Bois would be a fan of the modes of activism through social media?

Tajja Issen: The book is extremely interested in how the language of social justice has changed over time, for better and worse. With these epigraphs, I wanted to highlight the opposite idea: How little things have changed. When I was reading The Souls of Black Folk, I was both disturbed and amused at how contemporary that particular moment of tokenization felt. [...] But I also don’t want to make sweeping generalizations about social media activism being bad or simplistic, especially now—I’m thinking of the way Palestinians have used it to document the ongoing genocide and asked us to bear witness and amplify the calls for a ceasefire, or the power of social platforms as tools of organizing in protest of those abuses. If somebody sat Du Bois down to explain that capacity to him, I bet he would be a fan.

Rumpus: How do you see language as a structure of resistance to bridge confession and storytelling? Were you resistant to any particular forms of framing or storytelling?

Isen: That’s a great question. Related to my hesitance to get personal in the book, I was resistant to a framing that writers of color often get cornered into, whether by their own impulses or, more commonly, by market pressures: to describe their identities as though racialized pain is the axis on which they spin. This is a story the publishing industry is very comfortable with and one that I wasn’t interested in telling. (Drama ensued!) But, to your question, that’s the whole point of language as a structure of resistance—to disrupt the comfortable, anesthetic modes of narrative and argument.

Rumpus: You mention in “Tiny White People” how when you were younger, you imitated popular white authors that “find ways to talk about race without really talking about it.” How do you see your own relationship to language developing over time?

Isen: When it comes to my approach to writing, I try to stay in a permanent state of surprise. Surprise is the goal and the dream state. With that essay in particular, the version of it I wrote for the book is very different from the version that was originally published in Electric Literature in 2017. By the time I sat down to update that essay for the book, I realized none of the original version was reusable. My thinking had changed too much. My politics had changed too much. “I need to feel seen” is the type of soundbite that’s super accessible and conforms to the mainstream version of racial discourse that is easy to market. It was more important to me to remain faithful to these confrontations with my own mind, however personally jarring or corporately inconvenient (lol), than to rehash what a predominantly white readership is already comfortable hearing.

Rumpus: What forms does revision take in your work? Do you see it as more of an emotional or technical endeavor?

Isen: I love the idea of a writer who can distinguish between the emotional and technical aspects of revision, but I’ve got to admit I’m just not that writer. A piece, a page, a book transforms many times before I stop evaluating it. If I had to boil my revision process down, I’m always subjecting the work to two questions. The other day, I described it to my husband as akin to knocking on a wall to find a stud: First knock—Is it true? Second knock—Is it interesting? I keep knocking, keep asking those two questions, until the quality of sound that echoes back to me meets my standards. 

Rumpus: I love the way you physically map tactics of white femininity: innocent and deviant on the Y axis, tough and wounded along the X axis. You give various examples of the ways white femininity often evades racial consciousness out of a lack of obligation to acknowledge it. How, if at all, do you see aesthetics as an inherently political approach to conflict and compromise in predominantly white spaces?

Isen: I love that you frame aesthetics as “inherently political,” which they are, and which I think is easy for a lot of people to forget. We see the aesthetic-political split play out pretty literally in which artists get asked what questions—who gets asked about representation and identity versus who gets asked about craft choices. I’m far from the first to point this out. It was important to me, in that essay in particular, to stake out that territory and to remind the reader that aesthetics, especially in work by white (female) artists, can be a convenient way to make politics seem invisible. 

Rumpus: In your last essay, “Dead or Canadian,” you mention Lee Edelman’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” I loved what you said about the song “[getting] its rocks off knowing that [you] overheard its pleasure.” This returns to ideas of spectacle and voyeurism in tokenized forms of representation that you explore throughout, but also introduces the idea of self-love in the personal address. Thinking about the relationship between language and the self, do you see self-love as a product of fluency–i.e., recognizing the ins and outs of lip service across fields and disciplines–or a rejection of it? 

Isen: That’s an interesting distinction and not one I’d considered before. I guess, for me, I come into clearer focus for myself when I can name and isolate the forces that shape, constitute, and frustrate me. And that’s also what I hope the book gives to its readers: the aha moment where it names a dynamic or pattern that they’ve registered—this kind of insidious, comic creep of meaningless language—but haven’t necessarily found the words for. Articulating something long-felt but unexpressed is, I think, the best thing that writing can do. I like the notion that it might be a form of love, both for oneself and for others. 

***

Allison Armijo is a creative writing student in Boston, MA.

[thanos-the-dad-titan]

Ok, what the fuck. Why is Tumblr unfollowing tags I followed? Now I gotta go back and refollow a lot of my faves.

@staff you got some explaining to do...

[bawsixteen]

Updating WhatsApp, Tumblr, Instagram is ugly as fuckkk arghhghhjj

[noctarcanum]

Pookies had a great start this season!

[just-your-average-author]

PHIL CALLED DAN KINDA SEXY THIS IS NOT A DRILL

[kim-deadja]

can the entirety of kimcom members get on tumblr plz

[francoisl-artblog]

Flat colored Commission for ApplelightLimited on deviantart.

I didn't knew there was a Bandicoot shaped cookies item in Crash Team Rumble. It's probably because I haven't played it yet. Is the game any good ?

Anyway, Debbie sure knew about these, it seems.

Crash Bandicoot materials (c) Activision, Toys for Bob

Fan character (c) AppleLightLimited

Artwork made by me

[handbasket-to-helen]

[amplexadversary]

This post is broken broken, and I can't edit the tags, so I'm giving it the screenshot treatment.

[tacodemuerte]

reposting these here too bc why not! plus a BONUS! currently into jurassic express..like i wonder how they all slept i assume they shared one rOOM