#and it's not like the books. objectively have 'good writing' as the internet would define it

[pritvolny]

I just think the absurdity of being a good writer on the internet has been the biggest downfall of many people who write, esp. in the rpc. it's obvious that it all started with the era of purple prose being celebrated but then it grew into exclusivity of interactions with people "whose writing complements mine". it then fed the idea that if you wanted to interact with someone, you had to write a certain way— which, from idealising someone, becomes wanting to be "a better writer" as if you already weren't good enough. it kinda paves the way to writer's block because what you were initially doing for the sheer enjoyment of it suddenly becomes i have to create this masterpiece for it to be worthy of enjoyment. and each time you think you've made it, you dig a deeper hole for yourself and then it goes on and on...

[twilightresearch]

The Concept of the Guilty Pleasure Privileges Productivity Above All Else

When someone refers to a guilty pleasure, they’re usually making a kind of narcissistic claim about a textual object that is attractive to yet beneath them: “I mostly read the New Yorker, but US Weekly is my guilty pleasure.” I think a more accurate term for the “guilt” implied in this kind of statement may be “shame.” When someone says something like this, they seem to mean they’re ashamed because they know how bad it is but enjoy it nonetheless in spite of that shame.

The author and speaker Brené Brown, a self-defined “shame researcher,” writes that there is “a profound difference” between shame and guilt, primarily because she sees guilt as productive—a place where we can identify how to improve our lives by aligning our actions with our values—whereas shame is an unproductive welter of negative feelings.

My sense of shame is different from Brown’s. I’m less interested in what we do with those feelings than I am in why we have them. I’m also a little skeptical of any emotional logic that holds productivity as a guiding virtue. A fundamental proposition of this book is that not everything in our lives has to be “productive” in the forward-looking sense or aligned with our values or even the kind of “positive” defined by motivational posters with images of icebergs or sun­sets or small animals in compromised circumstances.

I think the pervasive demand that people—especially female people—be productive and positive produces the majority of the guilt and shame we experience. I can’t condone advice to smile more or work harder. The only general advice I can get behind is along the lines of “travel abroad” or “take a bath”—means to no clear end or product beyond themselves. Travel because other places have better food and different languages. Take a bath because the point of a bath is the bath. I find that enormously edifying. With Kant, I urge us to act as if our bath pleasure is not a means to an end but rather an end in itself.

Guilty pleasure texts are like baths for the mind. They’re usually cast as mindless or unproductive. My first objection here is, predictably, that therein lies a particularly bad account of productivity. Pleasure is productive; it produces itself. My second is that if you’re a thinking person, you can think “produc­tively” through any object—an essay by Susan Son­tag or a Ke$ha lyric—and if NPR ever asked for my “This I Believe” statement, I would say, with Virginia Woolf, that I think people should consume what­ever media they like without any sense of shame or pride. While I’m at it, I’d also like to ask why the guys I internet-dated in the aughts lied about having read all of the Faulkner or Joyce novels they claimed to  have read on their profiles. It’s a curious, and frankly puritanical, notion that what you consume defines you or—worse—ranks you, that a person is only as good or as terrible as their most-listened-to songs and the spines on their shelves.

My mentioning here of internet-dating is not merely casual, because once again it demonstrates how reading attaches to our sense of the love we deserve. Those dudes advertised Faulkner, I guess, because they were trying to position themselves as worthy of a Faulkner-quality love—sophisticated, serious, complex? This is a disturbing thought in several respects, and yet it also raises the fascinating question of why and how Faulkner-love raises itself above, say, a Babysitters Club kind of love. To answer this question, some literary criticism may be helpful.I can accept the category of “guilty pleasures” as a name for things that give us a plea­surable release from guilt and shame or space to dwell within it.

I was born at the end of 1981, the same year that the literary scholar Fredric Jameson published his landmark work The Political Unconscious, a book that has shaped my thinking in so many ways that I’m continually disappointed that I didn’t write it myself before I was born. In it, he argues that his­tory itself is a narrative that unfolds alongside the other narratives—for instance, fictions—that shape our culture. According to Jameson, we can’t separate the two by attempting to interpret fictions outside of their political or historical context, nor can we understand our own history without understanding our fictions.

Jameson’s interpretive project develops out of his cultural understanding: we tend to think of the unconscious as an individually experienced phenomenon. But cultures, he claims, have uncon­sciousnesses, too. Documents of popular culture, in particular, tell us a lot about what the people who created and consumed them were thinking, feeling, and desiring. If ship manifests and medical records and military logs and patent files are the kinds of documents that reveal the history of our migrations, conflicts, and technologies, popular fictions are the kinds of documents that tell us about the history of our hearts and minds.

A sadly unsurprising thing about The Political Unconscious is that Jameson makes his argument through interpreting fiction written almost exclu­sively by white men. (Jameson doesn’t actually mention Faulkner but does mention Joyce.) (Obviously, prebirth me would have done otherwise.) The very white maleness of his work is one reason why scholars, myself included, have long perceived it as Extremely Important. In a review of Emily Nussbaum’s I Like to Watch, the critic Sarah Mesle identifies the source of this phe­nomenon as the “circular logic by which a piece of art becomes serious because a serious critic attends to it, and a critic becomes serious by tending to seri­ous art.” The prevalence of this brand of logic also explains why the history of men, like the fiction and culture of men, is almost always taken to be more serious than the history of women.

My point in raising Jameson—in veering pre­cipitously toward Serious Pleasure rather than the guilty kind you came here to read about—is that I want to take Jameson both as a useful thinker and as an example of the unconscious he’s describing: The Political Unconscious is a document of an intellec­tual unconscious whereby male things are the ones that tell us what “our” collective unconscious is like. This book you are reading, on the other hand, is not very interested in that. Guilty pleasures, I am going to propose, reveal a collective unconscious of a con­sciousness that Jameson ignored: the femme one.

When I was taught history in high school, it was the serious male kind. My class was held in a room encircled by a wallpaper border depicting the presidents of the United States of America (unfortu­nately, not the nineties alt-rock band that recorded “Peaches” but the actual leaders of the nation in which I was born). So, like many of you I’m sure, I was forced to sit in a space that was literally covered in the faces of white men while a white man told me to read about and memorize the names of white men and the things they did. I understand why white men like this history; it belongs to them. But I have heard enough of it and no longer find it very interesting. To me, learning this history over and over again is like having a conversation with someone who only talks about himself. No matter how many things he’s done or how witty or insightful his ideas may be, at a certain point you’re going to need to switch topics or say you have to use the restroom and politely walk away forever.

When I teach American literature, I tend to focus on work by women writers, queer writers, and writers of color for no better reason than that I find these works more interesting to read. Most of my students do, too, but sometimes I get a complaint. “Why don’t we learn more about war?” some students have asked. “We do learn about war,” I reply, citing Richard Wright’s 1940 Native Son, which is about systemic racism, midcentury communist sympathy and its vilification, and widespread physical violence. Those are wars. Students tell me these are not the wars they mean. I tell them how Edith Wharton’s 1920 The Age of Innocence is about the aftermath of World War I—a good, solid white man’s war. They shake their heads. But then, sometimes, they come to see how it is true. It was only when I got to college myself that I really understood that history could be something other than leaders and battles and captains of industry. I took a course called Women in Europe that was a history of the lives of women—a revelation! I immediately became a history major.

Of course, the women who’ve written novels throughout history do the exact same thing that Jameson’s male novelists do. They narrate the psychic and emotional history of another time—their psychic and emotional history. Louisa May Alcott’s 1869 Little Women, for example, is also a novel about a war—the American Civil War—but unlike Stephen Crane’s snooze of a novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895), it’s not about the men on the battlefield. It’s about the women at home, who are doing real, serious, important things as well. These women may be more left out of History, but they were not left out of life; and what happened off the battlefield is just as important as what happened on it.

Despite this and even how beloved and respected Alcott’s novel is, I don’t often see people carrying around a prestige copy of Little Women the way they might Moby Dick or Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow or Infinite Jest. But Little Women and other novels written by the women of the past can also make you smarter if you actually read them. And they have a lot to tell us about what people were like then and how we became who we are now. This is why many of us find reading these books so deeply pleasur­able, even as we may feel ashamed of that pleasure, because so much of our world has told us that this kind of becoming isn’t important, that it (and we) don’t matter.

In addition to revealing some truths about our collective unconscious, novels help us to work through whatever it is we’re dealing with as a soci­ety and as individuals. If anything about this kind of media consumption is self-definitional, it’s the shame associated with it—not because “guilty pleasures” re­veal some fundamental truths about the consumer’s lowbrow aesthetic tendencies but because a lot of the genres of movies and television that get referred to as “guilty pleasures” are also another kind of guilty pleasure, what I like to think of as the Hester Prynne kind, where guilt is what’s being pleasurably stimu­lated alongside libidos and baser desires for nice hair and fancy things.

In this sense, I can accept the category of “guilty pleasures” as a name for things that give us this plea­surable release from guilt and shame or space to dwell within it. And, in general, I think many Ameri­cans of many different gender circumstances prefer their pleasures guilty. This is a country that adver­tises potato chips with the slogan “bet you can’t have just one,” where Titanic and Jurassic Park (two of the highest grossing films of all time) both have the same general plot: some novel delights immediately fol­lowed by sudden mass death. One easy answer is to blame the Puritans—Nathaniel Hawthorne did. His 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter is basically the textbook on guilty pleasure.The Scarlet Letter shows us that the pleasures of the sex you can’t have or see are inextricable from the guilt that is yours for the taking.

In my memory, my classmates and I were assigned this book more than once in high school and maybe another couple of times before that in junior high. (I’d already read my mother’s college copy early on, selected for priority status because it had a mono­chromatic print of a lady in a bonnet on it.) Because I grew up in Massachusetts, when we weren’t reading The Scarlet Letter, we were on seemingly constant field trips to Salem to learn about the witch trials for the fourth or fifth time; then we’d swing by the House of the Seven Gables and the Custom House where Hawthorne worked and learn about Haw­thorne and The Scarlet Letter all over again for good measure. (We’d go to Thoreau’s cabin site at Walden, too, but never the Alcott house or the Dickinson house, which were certainly within easy bus distance.)

I claimed in my tenth-grade paper on this one book that every single American teenager seems to be made to read that Hester Prynne, the infamous adulteress forced into wearing the letter A, likes her punishment. I based this claim primarily on this pas­sage: “On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fan­tastic flourishes of gold-thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and with so much fer­tility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore.”

This was my favorite part of the book. First, it was undeniably punk that she went in this over-the-top direction with a sartorial man­date. Second, the language here about a patch sewn onto a puritan dress for punishment is somehow just oozing with sensual pleasure: fantastic flourishes, gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, fertility. I submitted a paper explaining this in slightly different words to my teacher, who did not like the argument. She sat me down, sitcom-style, to explain that this was a text about ostracism and group think and for me to suggest that Hester Prynne took pleasure—let alone sensual pleasure—in her guilt and punishment was very disturbing and wrong-headed.

I can’t bear a grudge against this teacher because I respect anyone who teaches high school English (I didn’t then, so this blind respect is my best consola­tion) and also because our field-trip pattern had The Scarlet Letter so thoroughly mixed up with the real historical witch trials in everyone’s minds, but I did feel a surge of triumph when I later encountered the fact that my paper wasn’t very far off from one of the most prevalent critical readings of the novel since 1960, when the literary critic Leslie Fiedler argued that The Scarlet Letter is definitely about the fraught nature of sexual desire in America. Fiedler claimed that American literature is incapable of depicting mature sexual relationships—that it falls back on the eroticization of children, unconsummated sexual love between men, and “old maids.” (He was smart but totally a man of his time.)

For Fiedler, The Scar­let Letter was the sexiest book in the canon of great American literature, though, tellingly, all of the sex happens before the book even begins—like if Crime and Punishment were just the brutally boring punish­ment part. While Fiedler emphasized sexual desire as the fulcrum of the novel, he also acknowledged—like most of the novel’s readers before him—that its central theme is undeniably guilt, asking why, to Hawthorne (not just the puritans), “is gorgeousness a trap and love a crime, why beauty forbidden and joy banned?” To which I’d answer: because for a lot of people these things, freely given, would be less plea­surable. It’s not as if the pleasure is one thing and the guilt is another. Perhaps guilt kills Dimmesdale, but Hester thrives on it. And so do readers along with her. The Scarlet Letter shows us that the pleasures of the sex you can’t have or see are inextricable from the guilt that is yours for the taking.

If you watch the 1995 film version of The Scar­let Letter, starring Demi Moore, you’ll see that the filmmakers get the sexiness part right but miss both most of the guilt and how important it is that no sex happens in the novel. In the novel, the readers only get the pleasure of the implied sex through the au­thor’s refusal to give it to us. If we saw Hester and Dimmesdale getting it on, it would be a bad book in 1850 to say the least. When we see it in 1995, it’s still a bad movie—especially since the sex scenes are bi­zarrely interspersed with some impressionistic mon­tage sequences. It’s not a very good adaptation of the main themes of Hawthorne’s novel if it’s full of Demi Moore taking long baths and having her farthingale slowly unlaced by Gary Oldman. But neither can you take all of the sex out of The Scarlet Letter, implica­tions included.

The updated-for-our-times 2010 version starring Emma Stone, Easy A, gets the guilt part right but is pretty rigorously unsexy. The center of the plot is actually the revised fact that the Hester character is a virgin. The story of her tryst is fabricated, so we don’t even get to imagine that it has happened in the pre-history of the movie. Her guilt (about having lied about having had sex when she hadn’t—can you imagine what the original Hester would think?) is just guilt-guilt and regret-regret, no fantastic flourishes or gorgeous luxuriance of fancy about it. While Emma Stone skulks around a California high school in strangely bedizened corsets (where do they come from? why are there so many?) she seems to take no real pleasure in doing so. I think the very point of The Scarlet Letter is that at least half of the pleasure (sexual and otherwise) to be found in the novel is the guilt.

[stylus-22]

Content Writing vs. Technical Writing vs. Copywriting | e learning development companies

In a given setting, a writer is expected to have a specialised skill-set like many others. With the frantically growing Internet, some terms are now more well-known than they were before. Terms such as copywriting, technical writing and content writing are just some of them.

There are things that a copy writer can do but a common content writer cannot and a technical writer would not even think of. So let’s take a look in what respect these 3 professions are so different from each other.

The objective behind writing

The intent which inspires the work for these writers is what defines them the most. Content writer is the one who provides content for different media; print or web. The content could be of diverse styles and size, as the writer may change its difficulty level according to the audience.

Technical writers are people who generally work to explain a technical process to an ordinary person. The idea here is to convey a complicated technical concept in a language that could be understood by a layman.

Copy writer is definitely different that the two above. The purpose of producing a copy is to ‘sell’. This is an essential extension of a marketing apparatus in a company, which needs to pursue the targeted demographic to act as required. It may be buying a refrigerator or simply donating money for a good cause.

Skills and background needed

A content writer could be anyone. They come from various fields and what they really need is an ability to produce an error-free content as required.

Technical writers do need some sort of technical knowledge and hence some educational background in a technical field is sought after. A technical writer requires impressive instructional skills to teach others about something they have never learnt or used before. Plus, you may need the prior knowledge of using few publishing tools.

Copy writer are more creative in the bunch. As a copy writer, you need to be someone appealing to your audience. This is someone with innovative ways to get people’s attention and the persuasion skills to convince many.

What do they write for?

You can find the works of a content writer almost everywhere. This ranges from writing for web pages to creating articles for a variety of subjects. It could be a review for a movie or a blog describing the best tourist attractions in your country.

Technical writers work on communications ranging from Instruction manuals, internally-circulated industry documents, user manuals or user guides, online help files, API documents, educational books, or legal forms. For example, the manual you got with your mobile phone is created by a technical writer.

A copy writer creates copy for sales letters, corporate blogs, white papers, advertisements and press releases. They write brochures, pamphlets and similar marketing collateral required by their organisation.

Here’s a table outlining the main differences:

[vvatchword]

So a friend of mine was raging about how an artist they were watching was posting anti-AO3 shit because they keep the doors open for all kinds of weird shit, including underage smut. And it made me think about this book, which I feel falls in that category.

Not in a million years would i have said, "Do not publish or read this book." Because I'm gonna tell you something. First of all, there's still good shit in this book--shit that's worth studying because very few people can write at this level or quite in this way. And second of all, it's the kind of thing I can see a person making an accident about and growing from. Stephen King strikes me as a pretty cool and grounded dude. I'd love to meet him someday. Not even kidding. This was written in the 80s, okay. Times were different, ideas were still bubbling to the surface--not everyone picks up on the same ideals at the same times or in the same ways. And you must understand that the transference of ideas was much slower pre-Internet.

Third of all, and perhaps most terribly, the awful shit is here for us to learn from.

It is special for more than one reason. For one thing, it's extremely well-written, clearly thought-through, well-researched, and intelligent. It's on a different level than, say, Twilight--a story that's about power play, but thoughtlessly so. That's the problem with most authors and artists in general--just popping out what they feel is hot or interesting without really understanding why they feel the concepts are hot or interesting.

Another problem is: as artists, as people, we're not going to think of everything from every necessary perspective, and are bound to make a host of mistakes. Stephen King, despite writing at a level most people only dream of, made a big, foundational mistake. It's huge--it's on the level that it has the capacity to break the book--and it's huge precisely because he writes at such a high level. Clearly he was horny on main for Beverly and was letting Little Head do the thinking. Maybe she reflected the girls he thought of at that age. I actually don't think he's a pedo or anything--I think he just got passionate and didn't think about what he was really saying. He pulled a No-Thinking All-Wanking.

Let me tell you, when I realized that was the problem, it threw a cold bucket of ice water right over my head. I have a character I'm writing that I'm horny on main for, too. (Although he's an adult. Thanks)

King treats every boy character as a person. They experience sexual yearnings, but these are treated as matter-of-fact, part-of-life, normal--we all remember those experiences, we all had them, it's a universal human experience and part of growing up. Only Beverly is treated as a one-note sexual object from the beginning to (what I'm presuming will be) the end of the book. What's more, the evil/bad/conflicted characters are illustrated much the same way she is, putting her in their category--as a one-note Macguffin defined by appearance and how she serves/stymies other characters, not by selfish action or her private inner world.

Because It is written intelligently, that means its double standards are so much more clear, and it ends up teaching a lesson about characterization. It's a lesson I am taking--for I am finishing the book, as angry and objectified as it makes me feel.

Can I look at my character as a person first? A person who is experiencing life and challenges first? Every culture and subculture experiences a different world. Am I assuming? Can my assumptions harm? What do I need to know before I finish writing this work?

Say what you will. King is a writing god and I'll still kneel at his feet. Part of the reason I respect him is because I can tell from afar that he's the kind of person who has grown over time. Who knows where he is, really. I don't like him here, but I also feel like I could talk to past-him about this, if that makes sense--because he's also a goddamn adult human being with a functional brain.

If you're the kind of person who supports censorship, you're squelching the transference, transformation, discussion, and interpretation of ideas. And you can get right out with that bullshit. Whatever people experience, I want to know, in all its dirty, horrible truth. How else can I effectively respond to it?

It (the book) is passing boundary after boundary and I kinda hate it now. Can you imagine writing a book that's so good your readers read slowly on purpose, then fuck up 2% of it so badly that you render hundreds of pages powerless in a single moment? That's like my worst nightmare as a writer.

The worst kind of media is the media you fall into like a warm Jacuzzi dependably for hours on end only to discover the water is tainted by raw sewage. It doesn't matter how happy you were two hours ago; you have cancer.

i knew the underage sex scene existed already. I guess I just hoped it would be handled better. But who am I kidding? Stephen "Repeatedly Mentions Pubescent Girl's Underwear and Tits Like They Are Spiritual Experiences" King. Did he let his wife read this one too? Jesus. At this point in the book I would've divorced this man without comment. Just if you don't know then I actually don't want to be near you. Bye forever. I'm taking the kids and I'm giving your book to the police.

Does anyone argue for Beverly's tastefulness in this book? I will absolutely use that as a metric for a person's empathy. I will also fight this hypothetical person immediately and without mercy, probably with a brick.

[funkymbtifiction]

Hello Charity,

I have something that always bothered me and as it came up again yesterday I decided to write to you because I'm curious as to whether this is just a human thing, or tied to typology. I frequently see bloggers or "typologists" on Youtube trying to define the functions in only a keyword and in my opinion it hardly ever works, as no function has monopoly over values, and at times they are clearly very biased: C.S. Joseph claims Ti is logic in itself, that Ti users are the only ones who care about the truth, because Te/Fi users only care about beliefs and make things up etc. obviously that's false, but he has managed to convince many people of this.

That's the beauty of the internet. Anyone can make stuff up and find people who will believe them. ;) He is over-simplifying. Fi only cares about staying true to their individual values, but Te cares about facts. The facts sometimes ARE the truth, whereas subjective logical take on the situation (Ti) may not be the truth. Remember when Sherlock had a meltdown because the facts (what he saw) did not align with his personal logic (Ti) about the Hound of the Baskervilles?

There's also this Eric guy who insists Ti is objective because is detached from feelings, while Te is subjective since it's tied to Fi.

Again, wrong. Te is facts. Ti is "pure" subjective logic. If it makes sense to me, it's the truth.

Again obviously false as both of their ideas contradict Jung's definition of the functions. So you can see why I'm skeptical when it comes to attributing certain traits to functions. But I've seen meritocracy being attributed to high Te many times, and I like your opinion on the rationale behind it.

I have a channel on pop culture so I check out what other popular uploaders have to say on issues pertaining my interests so I can give my own takes later. Last morning there was an award show and a popular group who had a huge hit walked away empty handed. I soon saw a couple popular Youtubers posting about how the show was clearly rigged and unfair to that group, and disrespected then. The thing is, it wasn't: the criteria for each award is made public months prior, so you can accurately predict most of the winners beforehand because it's mostly based on sales and streaming numbers. Everybody knew the two artist who would bag most of the categories because they had superior numbers. And they did win. The "robbed" group in question had a huge hit yes, but couldn't compete in terms of chart longevity and album sales. Hence, they didn't get any major award.

One could argue sales should not have such a big weight in the decision but I disagree, numbers don't lie and are objective, if the judges had the most say they would base their choices on personal taste, and that is by nature super subjective.

Facts do not lie, it is true. But numbers can be manipulated if you know how to play the system. Let's say that a book needs to be a best-seller on the NY Times best seller list to qualify for a certain award, and the baseline limit is 10,000 copies. The book is written by a rich celebrity or politician, who has their lawyer or friend purchase 10,000 copies. Boom, they are on the best-seller list. (Some publishers even do this to get a book ON the best-seller list, which generates more sales because everyone assumes that book must be good if "everyone else is reading it." Most people don't know that the baseline for best-sellers is so low.) <- here's some Te thinking for you. Cause and effect. How do I change the numbers to benefit me?

Just something to think about as you reflect on this awards program.

My favorite group also left almost empty handed even though they are successful, and I didn't get mad or upset, because I know they lost fair and square. This is where the meritocracy plays in: if Te is concerned with it then wouldn't all Te users accept results when legitimate? Or has it no connection to Te or typolgy at all?

It depends on whether the Te users are being objective, or if their feelings are involved. Someone objective (like me in this instance, because I know nothing about it and don't care who wins -- I don't have a horse in this race) can assess something objectively, but if feelings are involved (this is my band, I love them so much, so clearly this isn't fair!), the game changes. TJs are more objective than FPs. Confronted by the facts, TJs tend to accept them -- or even at times, be over-reliant on them (without considering that they can be manipulated to fit an agenda), but the facts don't change how an FP feels about the situation.

I don't wanna be one of those people who create and feed prejudices against certain types or functions, so I wanted to get an outside opinion on whether it's a coincidence that at least when it comes to Youtubers, the ones who share this opinion are all xNFPs. This makes me wonder if they weren't joking when they said they wouldn't take any arguments against a view they stated as fact, or that if people didn't like something they did then they were stupid.

"You are stupid!" is a common low Te response. If you can't understand me or my argument or agree with it, you're an idiot! As to whether or not they were joking, I cannot say. If they are truly "all about this band" that lost and devastated by it for some reason, they are not going to be rational or detached enough to listen to a facts-based argument. What they feel, in their mind, is a fact TO THEM, and it takes priority over everything else.

Perhaps just like Ti can be super arrogant by claiming their theories as objective truth (like the 2 typology guys I talked about who are ENTPs), Fi can see their feelings as legitimate truth too ("I feel like this is unfair so it is")?

Yep. That's exactly correct.

I should also say that "I don't like how this turned out, they must have cheated!" is a rather 6y way to respond to a situation. It's very much how a 6 brain would work -- something is off about this, so I will leap to a suspicious conclusion (a conspiracy theory) and park there!

[pleckthaniel]

all the neal stephenson novels ive read at least part of, ranked

because ive read probably too much neal stephenson for any normal person and CERTAINLY too much for anyone who doesn’t actively work in the tech industry

the diamond age: MY BELOVED. this one goes bonkers crazy. kind of steampunk adjacent but also heavily implied to take place in the same (cyberpunk) world as snow crash. it’s about a little girl coming of age in a horrifyingly cynical dystopia and all the people who try to help her along the way both directly and indirectly. also REALLY interesting commentary on the effect of access to resources on life outcomes as well as philosophies based on idolizing the past. such a good book CANNOT emphasize this one enough. its one of my favorites ever

seveneves: MY BELOVED PART 2. personally i think this is probably objectively the best neal stephenson novel. basically at the start there’s 1 year (or something; i cant remember the exact time limit lol) until the moon breaks up completely and obliterates all life on earth. part 1 is about humanity’s attempts to preserve itself, part 2 follows the struggles of the remnants of humanity after most of the species is wiped out, and part 3 takes place like thousands of years later when earth is habitable again and humanity is returning. it’s seriously SO good oh my god. the diamond age is my personal favorite of neal’s but if you pick one book on this list to read pick seveneves fr

the rise and fall of DODO: also very very good. time travel plus magic shenanigans plus secret government organization. ties itself up VERY neatly for such a chaotic story lol. i do have one problem with it which is that it sets up a will-they-won’t-they kind of romance as the emotional core of the book but the payoff kinda falls flat to me even though i was invested. but otherwise i loved it, i would say this is the “fun” one in neal’s canon if you don’t want to have to wade through a lot of lectures about science and philosophy (which why wouldn’t you)(that’s the interesting part)

anathem: pretty good and interesting imo, but it was also very very slow-paced and philosophical so if you’re not into that you will not enjoy. basically goes ‘what if math was religion and also the many-worlds interpretation was 100% true’ and unfolds from there.

snow crash: good, obviously. i mean it kind of both defined and skewered an entire genre at the same time, is one of the more influential works of science fiction period, launched the idea of the Metaverse/a VR Internet into popular consciousness, et cetera. i just personally dont like it nearly as much as some of neal’s other work. it’s very.. chaotic in a way that’s harder to follow than the more meticulously written books i guess? hiro protagonist is an iconic name though

the big u: satire of american college life. im sort of on indefinite hold on reading this one bc my copy is at my parents’ house but it’s funny so far, if roughly as sexist as you might expect a book written by a cis man in the 80s to be. it’s supposed to get really fucking weird by the end which is why i haven’t officially quit reading it

zodiac: deeply boring. lots of interminable scenes of a guy going around on an inflatable paddleboat. i quit like 1/3 of the way through

cryptonomicon: the parts set during the 90s are pretty interesting, but i ended up noping out in the middle of Generic White Man Character #85′s endless war flashback about getting pinned down in guadalcanal. i know a lot of people really like this one though so idk maybe give it a shot if you have a higher tolerance for world war II bullshit than me

the baroque cycle: haven’t actually read these just wanted to say. i know i’m an overwriter but who the fuck writes books this long. hire an editor bro

[mimeparadox]

The New Half-Truths about Corsets

As true as it is that corsets are often misrepresented in audiovisual and written media, and as glad as I am to see people defending them, GOD, am I annoyed by the current discourse.  Not because the defenders are wrong —they’re not, in general terms—but because Twitter, Instagram, and their incentivitization of easily digestible sound bites over nuance haves stripped the conversation from all the complexity inherent in a subject as big as corsets. In seeking to be more accurate, corset defenders have often just muddied the water further, with a brand-new set of half-truths.

Here are my favorite (least favorite) talking points.

“Corsets are literally just bras!”

As a cis dude, I’ve never had reason or occasion to wear bras. I have worn corsets, though, and let me tell you, things like having to take off one’s boots after one has been out in the snow while wearing a corset is work—moreso, I imagine, that if I’d been wearing a bra. Actually putting on boots before a corset? Even harder, enough that “boots before corsets” is a common bit of advice. Corsets aren’t torture, but they do force one to rethink how they interact with the world, in ways different than bras do.

To be less glib though, yes, corsets could and did provide the sort of breast support that is now provided by bras. This doesn’t render the multiple differences irrelevant! For one, breast support is the one thing bras are meant to do: with corsets, it is secondary or even inessential, evidenced by all the corsets that do not provide breast support, such as corsets for men, old-timey corsets for kids, and underbust corsets, which are still definitely corsets.

(Megan Fox in Jonah Hex, wearing a corset that is doing exactly the same thing as a bra. Yes, I know it’s not historically accurate; that is not the point.)

What most miffs me about this argument is that it is exceedingly reductive, and displays simplistic thinking regarding both corsets and bras. Because yes, corsets were like bras…and? What is this argument trying to say, given that bras their own baggage?  Is the argument that corsets aren’t torture because corsets are bras? Plenty of people find bras uncomfortable, and something to be abandoned as soon as it becomes feasible. Corsets were purely practical because corsets are bras? Plenty of bras exist for primarily aesthetic purposes—some even do a fair amount of shaping. In the end, both garments have complicated, multifaceted, and distinct features, histories, and semiotics, and trying to equate them in a single sentence says nothing useful about either of them.

��Stays are not corsets!”

Amusingly, this argument seems somewhat incompatible with the previous one, given that stays have much more in common with corsets than with bras, but here we are.

Yes, 18th- and early 19th-century stays are significantly distinct from the corsets that we see later in the latter century, and if someone wants to don Bridgerton-inspired looks that accurately reflect Regency fashions, they should not look at Victorian corsets to obtain it.  And yes, one can make the case that stays and corsets were entirely different animals.

Here’s the thing, though: historically, that’s not a case that people made. Corsets are we know them weren’t considered to be a completely different thing from stays, but rather a different style of stays—two different breeds of dog, perhaps, but dogs all the same. Once the term corset entered regular parlance, the two terms were usually used interchangeably, as can be seen in multiple 19th century documents, including technical ones where differences between the two, if they existed, would have been noted.  

The Duties of a Lady's Maid: With Directions for Conduct, and Numerous Receipts for the Toilette (1825)

English Patents of Inventions, Specifications, 1865, 3186 - 3265 (1866)

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What’s more, it’s not until very recently that people began treating stays and corsets as altogether different things. Gone with the Wind, the book? The terms corsets and stays are used interchangeably.  The Oxford English dictionary? Describes stays as a sort of corset.  The longest-lasting site dedicated to corsets on the internet calls itself the Long Island Staylace Association, with no indication that doing so represented an inaccuracy on its part.  Sure, Elizabeth Swann should have properly said “You like pain? Try wearing stays”—at least it one wanted to be more accurate (if not good: good writing is partly about making oneself understood). But speaking here, and now, looking backwards? Very few people are trying to be that precise.  

Additionally, it’s worth noting that corsets have had a variety of styles and features throughout history, and the term is by no means exclusive to what we most often see as corsets. The S-shaped corsets from the Edwardian era are very different from Victorian corsets, as are the more girdle-like garments that followed. While not everything is a corset, I’ve yet to see a convincing argument that the term isn’t broad enough to include 18th-century stays.    

Tightlacing, Part 1: “Almost nobody did it”

Statements about tightlacing annoy me more than most, largely because they involve clearer instances of wrongness, but also because they hit closer to home.

Tightlacing has always been an imprecisely defined term: Lucy Williams, one of the best-known contemporary champions of corsetry, talks a little bit about the various ways the term has been used in her post “Waist Training vs Tight Lacing – what’s the difference?” found on her site. Usually, it refers to a quantitative measure—your corset must reduce X amount to be considered tightlacing—although recently, the discourse appears to have adopted a more qualitative definition, applicable to any instance where someone is shown displaying discomfort at being laced into corsets, regardless of how tightly they are (or aren’t) being cinched.

(Left: Moi, wearing a custom corset from The Bad Button Corsetry; Right, Upper: Scene from Bridgerton; Right, Lower: Scene from Enola Holmes)

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Take, for example, the scene that has most recently caused a stir, from Bridgerton, where the character Prudence Featherington is seen grimacing as she is laced into her corset stays corset, while her sisters wince in sympathy and their mother, Portia, insists that she be laced tighter. Others have raised objections to this scene, focusing mainly on the fact that Portia’s mania for a smaller waist is anachronistic and makes little sense given fashions that de-emphasize the waist, but fewer have noted that for all the hemming and hawing that is being done by the characters, Prudence’s figure is ultimately not all that compressed, and seems perfectly in line with everybody else’s. Is what is been done to her tightlacing? A lot of people appear to think so! And yet, that assertion carries some implications. If Prudence is being forced to tightlace here, is everyone else with a comparable silhouette (again, pretty much everyone) also tightlacing?  The answer is kind of important, especially if one also wants to claim that tightlacing was rare.

It’s worth noting that Valerie Steele’s The Corset: A Cultural History, one of the seminal works on corsetry throughout history, doesn’t actually attempt to make a case for the rarity of tightlacing. What it does attempt is to determine the accuracy of claims that women regularly laced down to 18 inches, 16 inches, or even smaller measurements, which is not quite the same thing. When exploring the question by looking at collections of surviving corsets from the era, the book has this to say: "Statistics from the Symington Collection [...] indicate that out of 197 corsets, only one measured 18 inches. Another 11 (five per cent of the collection) were 19 inches. Most were 20 to 26 inches.” While Steele readily admits this is hardly conclusive evidence, she took it as a sign that women with 16-inch waists were nowhere near as common as accounts suggested they were.  Case closed, asked and answered, no one tightlaced, right?  

Well, no.  

Again, it comes down to definitions. Even speaking quantitatively, very few people define tightlacing as “lacing down to nineteen inches or fewer” (certainly no woman in Bridgerton is that tightly laced). The consensus, rather, is that tightlacing is not about the size of the corseted waist, but about the size of the reduction. How much people cinched, however, cannot be determined by looking only at corsets, because doing so requires not only those corsets’ measurements (and even those don’t tell the whole story, given that they don’t necessarily indicate how tightly they were worn) but also the starting measurements of the people wearing them.

In other words, say someone with a 33-inch waist uses corsets to reduce their waist measurement to 25 inches. This, according to most definitions, would be considered tightlacing—a 24% reduction!—and yet the absolute measurements would be nothing to write home about. How is that reflected in Steele’s sample of corsets? Impossible to say. A 25-inch corset could also be worn by someone with a natural 27-inch waist.

What, then, can we say about the frequency of tightlacing? Well, if we’re talking about dramatic reductions of, say, more than four inches (a two-inch reduction, by the way, can look like this—again, more dramatic than what we see in Bridgerton) one can say, with a fair level of confidence, that it was probably not the norm. And yet, “not the norm” is itself a very broad category, and given the numbers involved, “a minority of people” can easily still be “loads and loads of people”, as seen, for example, with COVID-19. Even if two percent of the population who wore corsets tightlaced, that’s still hundreds of thousands of people—hardly “almost no one”, as some argue. And if wearing corsets as seen in Enola Holmes or Bridgerton counts as tightlacing, the number becomes even higher.

Tightlacing, Part 2: “Tightlacing is bad”

Perhaps not coincidentally, another element of the current corset discourse involves taking all the baggage usually assigned to corsetry in general and applying it to tightlacing instead. Corsets are not painful, goes the argument, but tightlacing is. Corsets are not unhealthy, but tightlacing is. People could do everyday things in corsets, they’ll say, but not when tightlaced. Arguments made against corsets in the 19th century were slander made by people who just hated women (another half-truth I have little time for), but are apparently utterly unobjectionable when applied to tightlacing. This, as many modern-day tightlacers will tell you, is bullshit, but it feels like an especially odd argument to make in light of everything else.

As in, what is the point? It feels a lot like saying “I’m not sex-negative, but having sex with more than X partners is icky.” And given the history-focused slant of the current discourse, it’s safe to believe that most people arguing against tightlacing are not people who have attempted it. There is, however, an existing community that will happily tell you, based on personal experience, what tightlacing is actually like.

So from personal experience: tightlacing may not be like wearing a bra, and there are definitely some considerations that you have to take while doing it— getting dressed, sitting down, and eating are all done differently when tightly laced—but this is more logistical than anything, and also applies to other things—running in steel-toed boots is much different from running in sneakers, and the advice when doing the former is often “don’t”. Additionally, the margin for error decreases the more tightly laced one is, but corsets aren’t special in that regard: proper care is much more important when one is flying a commercial jet than when one is flying a one-seater. But yes, you can do physical activity while tightlaced. Not necessarily the sort that you could do in exercise clothes, but then, the fact that suits are not optimized for running doesn’t make suits bad.

Tightlacing, in the end, is not really different from wearing a corset. Some people will like it, some will not, but ultimately, how pleasurable or how unpleasurable it is (it’s very pleasurable, in my book) depends on what you put into it, and that’s something quite a few people—not a majority, but also not “almost nobody”—who are often far more tightly laced than people in movies, would attest to, if people listened.   

[cavehags]

i realize this will probably bring up old drama so you might not want to answer it. but do you ever regret, however on purpose or on accident, bringing all that unnecesary hate towards Katara? i'm really sad and dissapointed tbh. i'm a woman of color and katara was so important to me growing up. my favorite animated woman ever. and then this resurgence comes and theres so, so much unnecesary hatred for her and everyone ignoring everything that makes her a good character.

(2/3) 2- and you know, i expected this from the male side of the fandom. they were misogynistic to her and the others even back then so i would expect it to be even worse with how internet culture is more mysogistic now that ever. and i wasnt wrong. male atla fans had some truly horrible takes and views that just came across as racism and misogyny. but, i expected these circles to be better. to be a safe space for us woc who love this character. but i found the same weird hatred for her.

(3/3) 3-i just, i cant believe i feel less welcome now that i did even back then. and back then i didnt even paricipate really. but at least i could enjoy fandom content without stumbling into misogyny and racism every other post. also sorry for sending this to your personal blog b i just wanted to let you know you controbuted to that too even if it wasnt your intention. at least you realized that and arent contributing to it anymore right? cause honestly the hate has only gotten worse not less.

hey anon. thanks for asking this question, because i hadn’t addressed this topic previously and this gave me an opportunity to do so. 

no, i don’t regret publicly interpreting a character whom i love through a nuanced and human lens. and i don’t regret combating the one-dimensional interpretation of this character, which posits that she’s merely an vaguely defined object of attraction for some boy or another, and a singularly gentle, mature, maternal figure whose sole purpose in life is to nurture others. those interpretations suck. they rob her of the humanity and complexity that make her character unique and they stem from misogynistic tropes that reduce women to the services they can provide to men. the thing in the world that matters most to me is fighting misogyny, and this trend to diminish a proud and powerful and angry teenage girl by exaggerating only her most socially acceptable traits is misogyny. 

unlike you, i did not grow up watching avatar: the last airbender. the shows i watched growing up did not have a lot of girls who felt real to me. the girls i saw on tv growing up were simple. they were the main characters’ crushes. they were simple, desirable, usually sweet and loving, and not much else. if they had a flaw, it was that they were, at best, “awkward.” whatever that means. or if they were the protagonists, which was rare, they were nice enough and tried to do the right thing, but they never had strong feelings like resentment and anger. they weren’t allowed to be unfeminine which meant they weren’t allowed to be bitter, angry or in any way flawed. they didn’t look like the version of girlhood i knew to be true for me personally, which included a lot of anger and frustration and powerlessness. 

that crappy representation left me with internalized misogyny that chased me for longer than i’d like to admit. i did not learn to think of girls as humans who could be as interesting and flawed and messy as the boys were. i did not value myself as a girl, and later a woman, because i thought the best thing a girl could be was... bland. boring. pretty, but empty. passionless.

it would have meant the world to me to see a character like katara. 

because katara is angry. she has every right to be: she’s had so much stolen from her, including her mother, her people, and her childhood. katara has a short fuse. she yells. she snaps. she fucks up. sometimes she makes mean jokes! i never saw a single one of those dreamily perfect cartoon love interests make mean jokes when i was a kid. she is extremely idealistic--it’s her defining character trait--but we see the bad side of that as well as the good. we see that her need to help others  leads her to act rashly, to get herself into danger, to put others in danger too. 

and she has her very own arc. it’s not about her love for another person, either (what a snooze of a storyline); it’s about growing up and learning to break down some of that stubborn black-and-white thinking that we all indulge in as children. it’s a true coming-of-age arc and it belongs to a fourteen-year-old girl. 

when i, to use a phrase i find crass, “entered the fandom,” i quickly realized that other fans’ perceptions of katara did not line up with the things i valued most about her. other fans seemed to valorize her most socially acceptable feminine qualities: her generosity, her kindness, her dedication to helping others. and of course i love those parts of her--i love everything about her--but what is really remarkable about avatar: the last airbender is that katara’s many important virtues are also counterbalanced by equally significant flaws. a good character has flaws. katara is a good character, and a deviation from the characters who made up my formative media landscape, because she has flaws. her temper, her idealism, her stubbornness--these are flaws. flaws make her seem real and human and challenge the mainstream sentiment that girls are not real or human.

it simply did not occur to me that celebrating these aspects of katara that make her a realistic and well-written teenage girl would spark ire from other adult fans. it absolutely did not occur to me that i would then be blamed for somehow causing misogynistic interpretations of this character, particularly given that misogynistic interpretations of this character are the very thing i sought to correct when i began to blog about this television show.

i’m told there are “fans” on instagram and tiktok who think katara is whiny, annoying, and overly preoccupied with her trauma. i do not use instagram or tiktok, so i wouldn’t know, but i’ll take your word for it. respectfully, however, they didn’t get that from me. misogynistic takes on katara have existed since before i came along. i have never, ever called katara whiny. and seeing as i have been treating my own PTSD in therapy for nine years, you can safely conclude that i don’t think anyone, katara included, is overly preoccupied with their trauma. that’s not a thing. do i think she’s annoying? of course not! as a character, she’s a delight. does she sometimes find real joy in aggravating her brother and her friends? yes, because she’s 14. i, an adult, am not annoyed by her. sokka and toph often are, because that is katara’s goal and katara always succeeds in her goals. she’s not “annoying.” 

if there are “fans” who are indeed following lesbians4sokka and somehow misreading every single post and interpreting them to mean that we hate katara and they should too, i don’t really know what you want me to do about that. l4s has over ten thousand followers and we have already posted so many essays disavowing katara hate. our feminist and antiracist objectives in running the blog are literally pinned with the headline “please read.”

furthermore, you cannot reasonably expect my co-blogger and me to control the way our words will be received. we should not have to, and are not going to, add a disclaimer to every post saying that when we critique or make jokes about a teenage girl we are doing so through a feminist lens. our url is lesbians4sokka, and we are clearly women. if that alone doesn’t make it obvious, then refer back to that pinned post. 

it is indescribably frustrating, and really goddamn depressing as well, that people are so comfortable with the misogynistic binary of Perfect Good Women and Flawed Wicked Bitches that they perceive any discussion of a woman’s flaws to be necessarily relegating her to the latter camp. if that is how you (a generic you) perceive women, then i’m sorry, but you’ve internalized sexism that i cannot cure you of. and it’s unjust to expect my friend and me to write for the lowest common denominator of readers who have not yet had their own feminist awakenings. we do not write picture books for babies. we write for ourselves, and with the expectation that our readers can think critically. reading media through a feminist lens is my primary interest; i have no intention of excising that angle from my writing.

as i go through my life, i am going to embrace the flaws of girls and women because not enough people do. as long as the dominant narratives surrounding women are “good and perfect” and “unlovable wh*re,” you’ll find me highlighting flawed, realistic, righteously angry women in the margins. and for what it’s worth, it’s not just katara. i champion depictions of angry girls in all sorts of media. that’s sort of my whole thing. my favorite movies are part of the angry girl cinematic universe: thoroughbreds, jennifer’s body, hard candy, jojo rabbit, et cetera. on tv, in addition to katara, you’ll find me celebrating tuca and bertie, poppy from mythic quest, tulip and lake from infinity train, korra, and more. i adore all these women and see myself in them. i hope you find this suitably persuasive to establish that i have sufficient Feminist Cred, according to your standards, to observe and write about these very flawed and human fictional women. 

what i’m saying is this: i decline to take responsibility for the misogynistic discourse orbiting a children’s cartoon. as someone who writes about that series from a perspective that seeks to add humanity and nuance to the reductive, one-dimensional, overwhelmingly sexist writing that already exists, i am pretty taken aback that i am the one being blamed for the very problem i sought to address. except not that taken aback because i am a woman online, haha! and this is always how it goes for us. 

finally, i think it sucks that you’ve chosen to blame me for a problem that begins and ends with the patriarchy. i can’t control the way this response will be perceived, just like how i can’t control the way anything will be perceived because i am just one human woman, but i do hope you choose to be reflective, and consider why you’ve chosen this avenue to assign blame. 

[whitehotharlots]

“Literal violence” and the death of the heterodox

I teach college students. This means I assign young people things to read. If the students don’t do the reading--if they consider it too boring or uninteresting or difficult--they don’t do well in the class. I update my reading lists every semester, because what was interesting to students a few years or even months ago might not click with the students of today. Sometimes students love what they’re assigned. Sometimes they hate it. And it’s very hard to tell if a piece is or isn’t going to work until I’ve assigned it and gotten feedback. 

As I’ve gotten older it has become more difficult to relate to young people. This is a completely normal part of life--nothing to be ashamed of or panic about, and I think almost everyone agrees that it’s more dignified to age gracefully than to try too hard to seem hip or with it. And so, over the past few years, as I’ve found it nearly impossible to find good, engaging writing with a broad appeal, I figured it was just because I, naturally, don’t relate to young people as much as I used to.

But lately--certainly since Trump’s ascendance, but perhaps going back as far as the early twenty-teens--mainstream writing has become incredibly predictable. Name any event and I can tell you almost word-for-word how it will be discussed in Jezebel vs. Teen Vogue vs. The Root vs The Intercept. And, increasingly, there’s been very little analytical divergence even between different publications. Everyone to the left of Fox News seems to agree upon just about everything, and all analysis has been boiled down to the repetition of one of a half-dozen or so aphorisms about privilege or validity. There is, in short, a proper and improper way to describe and understand anything that happens, and a writer is simply not going to get published if they have an improper understanding of the world. 

This, I think, is the result of our normalizing hyperbolic overstatements of harm and the danger posed by anything short of absolute fealty to orthodox liberalism. If it’s “literal violence” to express mild criticism and incredulity, people aren’t going to do so. Editors don’t want to risk accusations of “platforming fascists,” and so there’s been very little pushback against fascism being recently re-defined as “anything that displeases upper middle class Democrats.” 

Not long ago, it was commonplace on the left to celebrate the internet’s ability to allow writers to bypass the gatekeeping functions of old media. With mainstream liberalism needing a scapegoat to explain away the failures of the post-2008 Democratic party, however, the tone has shifted. 

Case in point, Clio Chang’s rather chilling piece from the Columbia Journalism Review that seeks to problematize an open platform called Substack.. Substack allows writers to publish almost whatever they want, outside of editorial control, and then charge a subscription to readers. As more and more websites and print media are being hollowed out and sacrificed to the gods of speculative capital, a large number of big-name writers have embraced this new platform. It has also allowed writers to report on stories that are objectively true but inconvenient to the Democratic establishment, such as Matt Taibbi’s admirable work debunking Russiagate bullshit. 

Chang begins with a lengthy description of Substack’s creation. She stresses that no one—not even the site’s founders and most successful writers—consider it an ideal replacement for the well-funded journalism of old. Chang focuses on one particular Substack newsletter called “Coronavirus News For Black Folks” which appears to be moderately successful (the piece cites 2000+ subscribers, and its founder is earning enough to have hired an assistant editor). Even after describing how the platform has given large grants and stipends to other newsletter run by women and people of color, the fact that this one particular newsletter isn’t as successful as others is held up as proof of the platform’s malignancy.

​“Coronavirus News For Black Folks” may be somewhat successful, but Chang implies that it rightfully should be even more successful, and that something evil must be afoot. Simple arithmetic tells us that a specialized newsletter—one pitched specifically to a minority audience and only covering one particular issue—is going to have a smaller readership than a more general interest piece. Rather than accept this simple explanation, Chang instead embraces the liberal tendency to blame a lack of desired outcomes upon the presence of evil forces.

While Chang provides a thorough overview of the current, fucked state of media and journalism, at no point does she grapple with the role that mainstream liberalism has played in abetting the industry’s collapse. This is surprising, as a quick google search suggests she generally has solid, left-wing politics. This omission reveals a problematic gap in left analysis, and bodes poorly for any hope of leftism accomplishing any material goals while the movement remains aligned with more mainstream identity politics. Even as she cogently explains the destruction of media and the hellish future that lay before writers, Chang still embraces the mystical fatalism that liberals have been leaning on since 2010 or so, when it became clear that Obama wasn’t going to make good on any promises of hope or change. She blames our nation’s horrors not elite leadership, but on the presence of people and ideas she doesn’t like. In this case, Substack is problematic because many of its writers are white and male, and some are even conservative:

When [Andrew] Sullivan joined Substack, over the summer, he put the company’s positioning to the test: infamous for publishing excerpts from The Bell Curve, a book that promotes bigoted race “science,” Sullivan would now produce the Weekly Dish, a political newsletter. (Substack’s content guidelines draw a line at hate speech.) Sullivan’s Substack quickly rose to become the fifth-most-read among paid subscriptions—he claimed that his income had risen from less than $200,000 at New York magazine to $500,000. When I asked the founders if they thought his presence might discourage other writers from joining, they gave me a pat reply. “We’re not a media company,” Best said. “If somebody joins the company and expects us to have an editorial position and be rigorously enforcing some ideological line, this is probably not the company they wanted to join in the first place.”

I’m no fan of Andrew Sullivan, but the man has spent decades building and maintaining his audience. Of course he’s going to have a larger readership than someone who is just starting out. This isn’t a sign of anything nefarious. It’s basic commonsense. But there’s no other conclusions that can be reached: things are bad because people haven’t done enough to root out badness. Things are bad because evil exists. The only way we can attempt reform is to make the evil people go away. Anyone who says anything I don’t like is evil and their words are evil and they shouldn’t be published.

Chang doesn’t make any direct suggestions for remediating Substack, but her implications are clear: equity requires censorship and ideological conformity. Providing any platform for people who are disliked by the liberal mainstream, be they too far left or too indelicate with their conservative cruelty, equates to harming vulnerable people—even when those vulnerable people freely admit to making money off the same platform. There is no room for dissent. There is no possibility of reform. The boundaries of acceptable discourse must grow narrower and narrower. Only when we free our world from the presence of the bad ones will change magically arrive.

NOTE: I wrote a follow-up to this piece that I think does a better job of articulating the points I was trying to make.

[paperbackrevolution]

“Book People”: a response

I have been thinking about an essay I read on Jezebel for the last while. It fit in so nicely with something I have been mulling over for months: readers. I mean serious readers. The kind of people that track their reading, that keep up with the publishing industry, that can relate to bookish memes, that overthink how their bookshelf is organized, and that seek out like-minded readers to interact with on social media. This essay, by Joanna Mang, uses a phrase for these kinds of readers: ‘Book People’. Mang uses it in a derogatory manner, and I have heard it used as such before though in those cases I believe the phrase Book Snob would have been more fitting. For Mang, Book People, are not the good sort of reader, but I want to unpack that in a bit.

Mang’s article is titled “We Have to Save Books from the Book People”. I actually only found it through a response written at Book Riot by Tika Viteri (“Back-Talking the Tone Police: Book People are Not Your Enemy”). Essentially, after rereading Mang’s essay a half dozen times (to try and follow the meandering argument and to seek what the point was) I think Mang is arguing a few things: that classics should still be taught in high school and not argued about on twitter, that English teachers bear no responsibility to encourage reading, and that Book People are bad for liking books a whole lot and have a Secret Plot to keep the publishing industry running. What any of this has to do with the title of her article remains unclear.

Mang opens her essay by complaining about people complaining on twitter. Specifically, people that are complaining about the classics they had to read in high school. The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter, and Catcher in the Rye are all mentioned. Even more specifically Mang is upset at the redundancy of these arguments, that they come up again and again. I mean she is definitely correct, because once someone talks about something no one else is allowed to talk about that thing ever again. Ever. Right? I doubt it is the same person rehashing this conversation daily, more likely Mang has stumbled across or perhaps actively searched out these conversations as they are being had by different people. I mean as far as I know there are more than a handful of people using twitter, right? And if it is the same person dredging up this conversation daily, I have a suggestion: unfollow them. Problem solved. But then if that had happened, we would not have this essay to unpack.

Mang seems upset that people on twitter say that they felt forced into reading books that they did not enjoy. According to Mang anyone that disliked these books did so because these books are classics that they just failed to understand. Mang mentions that with a good lesson plan anyone can like classics, but perhaps they did not have a good teacher with a good lesson plan or maybe it is because they just did not connect with the book. Not everyone must like classics simply because they are part of the canon. A book’s inclusion within the canon does not mean that it is necessarily enjoyable to read or study for every single person. It simply means that it was influential in some way. I can recognize and value the significance of a classic novel and still also dislike the reading experience.

I did find it ironic that these conversations on twitter are doing exactly what Mang says she encourages her students to do: “When I teach literature, my goal is to give students the tools and confidence they need to attack and write about texts, to “talk to” the text rather than receive it passively” (Mang 2021). On these twitter threads we have people reflecting back on books that they were required to read in school. But because they are engaging with these texts on twitter it cannot count as the same thing? I have come across some fascinating analysis on classic books on social media that would have made my English professors proud. I fail to see the problem here.

Mang then goes on to speak about the notion of whether certain books should or shouldn’t be taught in school to avoid “turning kids off” reading, since this is often an extension of those twitter conversations. This is something that people in education have been honing for years. A quick google search reveals many theories, pedagogies and lesson plans that can help encourage reading. Teachers and other education experts are out there exploring options to encourage reading in their students. Why though? Why do we want turn children in to readers? Mang suggests that Book People have an odious plot to save the book-as-object which I will unpack in a moment. But maybe it is actually because it increases empathy? Or because it builds vocabulary? Because it prevents cognitive decline as we age? Because it is a stress reducer? Might even make you live longer? Improves general knowledge? Improves writing skills? Aids sleep? Could even help prevent alzheimers? I think it could be at least one of those reasons, especially since most of these studies explain that these benefits do not come from reading those three books back in high school but as a sustained habit over a lifetime. Though Mang, an educator, also states in her article “It’s not an English teacher’s job to make students love reading; an English teacher’s job is to equip students to read and communicate” (Mang 2021). Which I think is certainly true, but (thankfully) many other educators are attempting to go beyond the pressure to yield good test results and are still trying to help their students become readers. Of course, as Mang does mention, the formation of a sustained reading habit is based on more than a single factor (Mang mentions “parental attitudes, family wealth, the student’s disposition and other sources of stimulation”). Why this should excuse English teachers from even trying to encourage reading is lost on me. Further I also wonder what the point there is in teaching students how to actively engage with books if they are not continuing to read outside of school? Why bother with English class at all if this is the case?

I am not here to say that schools should not teach classic literature or should not encourage students to engage with the canon, I am here, however, to say that we can also all go on to complain about it on the internet afterward. If someone does not find value in these conversations, then they are free to tune them out.

After talking about education and American schools’ reading lists, Mang finally gets to the part about Book People. Mang differentiates between readers and Book People stating:

“A reader is someone who is in the habit of reading. A Book Person has turned reading into an identity. A Book Person participates in book culture. Book People refer to themselves as “bookworms” and post Bookstagrams of their “stacks.” They tend towards language like “I love this so hard” or “this gave me all the feels” and enjoy gentle memes about buying more books than they can read and the travesty of dog-eared pages. They build Christmas trees out of books. They write reviews on Goodreads and read book blogs and use the hashtag #amreading when they are reading. They have TBR (to be read) lists and admit to DNFing (did not finish). They watch BookTube and BookTok. They love a stuffed shelf but don’t reject audiobooks and e-readers; to a Book Person, reading is reading is reading” (Mang 2021).

Let’s dig into this before we get to the conspiracy. Just because I am baffled by the snobby tone of this paragraph, and I do not understand what is wrong with any of this.

A Book Person has turned reading into an identity: Just as many people do with any hobby, they tend to entrench themselves within it. People who hike seriously can and have turned that into an identity, they’re hikers. But just about everyone can walk so hikers should then not make their hobby part of their identity? Sometimes people really, really enjoy something and it becomes a big part of their daily life. What is wrong with that?

A Book Person participates in book culture: A culture can form around a social group. So, if we have a hobby group, which is a kind of social group, it is not hard to imagine that eventually a culture would build up around it. So then, yes, people would then also participate in that culture.

Book People refer to themselves as “bookworms”: What I am most puzzled by are the quotation marks, as if this nickname is something strange and new. The first known use of the phrase bookworm dates back to the 1590s and is defined as “a person unusually devoted to reading and study”. Yeah, it is a little dorky, but many hobbyists across various hobbies have silly names for the people of their hobby. Star Trek fans call themselves Trekkies or Trekkers and apparently train enthusiasts call themselves railfans. It’s a hobby thing.

and post Bookstagrams of their “stacks”: As for this, I think this is an example of a fascinating development among readers. Robert A. Stebbins, a scholar of leisure activity and hobbies, has long denied that reading could be considered a ‘serious’ hobby or what he refers to as a Serious Leisure Pursuit (SLP). He has maintained that reading is a prime example of a casual pastime, and even explores his stance in more depth in the book The Committed Reader: Reading for Utility, Pleasure and Fulfillment in the Twenty-First Century. He argues that reading cannot be a SLP due to the solitary nature of reading and the lack of a social world. To Stebbins a social world is a social network group made up of hobbyists and others connected to that hobby. Social media has changed that, however, allowing serious readers to form a social world and also find ways to make the act of reading more social itself. Book clubs have always been an attempt by readers to make reading more social. But social media allows these attempts to get closer to the mark. Readers on twitter host reading sprints to encourage people to read together at the same time. Others host read-a-longs on various platforms such as instagram to encourage a more engaging version of a book club that invites readers to read the same book section by section. And some booktubers (Book People on youtube), host live videos that invite their subscribers to grab a book and read with them. I will digress here for now, but this is something I plan on exploring more on this blog in the future. Put simply, what Mang is disparaging here is actually evidence of reading achieving SLP status under Stebbins’ hobby model. This is simply an active social world of readers.

They tend towards language like “I love this so hard” or “this gave me all the feels”: This is simply how people tend to talk on the internet? Especially amongst fandom communities, of which there is huge overlap in bookish communities. This is hardly exclusive to Book People.

and enjoy gentle memes about buying more books than they can read: memes are things people share on the internet. I am failing to see the issue with this. Again, not something exclusive to book people. What I am starting to see here is that Mang seems to take issue with internet culture in general, more so than with Book People.

and the travesty of dog-eared pages: Only Book Snobs care if other people dog-ear their own books. I am using the phrase Book Snob to distinguish between avid readers and people that find the book-as-object almost sacred. There can be overlap, certainly, but not all Book People see books this way.

They build Christmas trees out of books: No books were harmed in the making of those christmas trees. Oh, is this where the title comes in? Are we saving books from becoming christmas trees? I promise it doesn’t hurt the books.

They write reviews on Goodreads: I am confused by what is wrong with this. Mang stated earlier in her article that and I quote again, “when I teach literature, my goal is to give students the tools and confidence they need to attack and write about texts, to “talk to” the text rather than receive it passively.” How is reviewing a book not doing exactly that? Not all reviews are as aggressive as an essay can be perhaps, but it is still an act of engaging with a text rather than simply consuming it. Further, many Book People likely either have access to or want access to ARCs (advanced reader copies) from publishers and part of that deal is writing an honest review in exchange for the free copy of the book. So that would be them holding up their end of that deal. I am uncertain if Mang takes issue with goodreads in particular or with writing reviews in general.

and read book blogs: People that are active within a hobby often seek out other like-minded individuals. And beyond that most book bloggers are reviewers. Meaning people may be seeking reviews of a book to help them curate their reading selection.

and use the hashtag #amreading when they are reading: another example of Mang’s dislike of internet culture. People use hashtags to help get their media piece to others that may enjoy it or find commonality with it. They are using this form of metadata as it was intended.

They have TBR (to be read) lists: I think non-serious readers have TBR lists as well, but I think they tend to be more unconscious in nature. For example, a non-serious reader may vaguely know that there are some classics that they want to get to, or maybe the latest hyped general fiction novel. Book People are hobbyists, and if we used Stebbins’ model, they are serious hobbyists. They take their chosen leisure pursuit seriously and as such it is on their mind a lot because they intend to spend a significant amount of time pursuing that activity. So, it seems only natural that they may want to organize the content that they want to consume. It appears to me that Mang is more upset that this hobby group has formed in-group vocabularies. This means that only people residing within the group will understand some of the words or phrases used. This is a natural progression of language. You need words to succinctly capture the meaning of something. In this case, many readers have lists of books they want to read, rather than saying all of that it gets shortened down to TBR.  

and admit to DNFing (did not finish): Are we saving books from not being fully read? Many of the books that Book People are reading are for enjoyment. If you are not enjoying something, why would you continue it? Do you watch the entirety of a season of a tv show that you are hating? No. Finish a snack that is making you want to vomit it back up? No. Same logic for books. To suggest you must complete a book simply because it is a book is more like Book Snob behaviour. This seems so common sense that I am again inclined to point to this as evidence of Mang’s distaste for in-group vocabularies more than the idea of not reading a book.

They watch BookTube and BookTok: This is further example of the community and social world that readers are setting up on the internet. People typically like making connections and further, making connections over something you share in common is natural. The internet made this easier, and social media has made it easier still. This is just evidence of readers seeking connections with other readers.  

They love a stuffed shelf but don’t reject audiobooks and e-readers; to a Book Person, reading is reading is reading: This line is fascinating. Because following this, Mang’s article takes a turn toward a conspiracy about how Book People are trying to save the book-as-object since ereaders have threatened the physical book. And yet here, as part of her definition of Book People, she disparages Book People for finding value in ebooks and audiobooks. Mang herself becomes the Book Snob here, rejecting other book formats. Ebooks are convenient, you can have access to hundreds of books from your chosen device (I like to use my phone personally not an ereader). And audiobooks are great for when you are performing another task such as chores or driving. Both formats also allow people with disabilities better access to books. Audiobooks are perfect for people with visual impairments or who struggle to read. And with ebooks the size of the font can be changed to allow the book to be turned in to a large print book as needed and can even allow the font to be changed into a dyslexic-friendly font. To suggest that ebooks or audiobooks are not real books or don’t count as books is just blatantly ableist.

Let’s get to the conspiracy now. Mang claims that reading became an identity and a culture in response to the decline of interest in reading. She also continues on to say that not only is reading threatened by other media and diversions, but that ebooks and audiobooks distract from physical books. And so with the book-as-object threatened by television and alternate book formats, physical books became more precious. She even goes as far as to say books are fetishized. And then Mang says, “This could be why those arguing that classic books alienate young readers suggest 21st Century titles as substitutions: if we want to keep the book alive, we have to read, and more to the point buy, the books being produced now” (Mang 2021).

So let’s make this clear. According to Mang, Book People are people who have made reading an identity and revel in book culture. And Mang also already said that Book People “love a stuffed shelf but don’t reject audiobooks and e-readers; to a Book Person, reading is reading is reading”. But then Mang changes her argument and says that all of this is about the physical book. So, the people that complain about classics they read in high school on twitter, some of which are Book People, are all actually attacking classic literature because it may turn children off reading which would be bad because that would mean that less people are reading books regularly which is bad because then it means that less people are buying books which is bad because the book-as-object is precious and must be protected and perpetuated.

Riiiiight. I believe Mang conflated Book People with Book Snobs partway through this essay. They are not one in the same and by Mang’s own definition, Book People see any format of book as worthwhile. Meanwhile a Book Snob would uphold the physical book-as-object as the supreme format. So saying that Book People are behind this conspiracy simply does not hold up under scrutiny. Not that this conspiracy should carry much weight at any rate.

But then Mang wipes that argument away, saying that Book People are not that practical. That actually their purpose in complaining about classics books on twitter is solely to revolutionize American schools’ text selection policy. Further Mang seems to think that people ranting about their least favourite classic novel on social media is all about putting pressure on teachers and public education to shape their students into model human beings. When in reality, sometimes one simply needs to whine about a bad book, even if it’s a classic.

At the end of all of this, I am left simply confused about this essay. Firstly the title: “We Have to Save to Save Books from the Book People”. What books are we saving from Book People and how exactly do we go about doing it? Are we saving classics? Or are we saving the current school reading list books? Or physical books? Or ebooks? Perhaps it is that books are somehow being ruined by those that worship that book-as-object? I propose that Mang just thought it sounded good, especially seeing as how it does little to pertain to the wandering argument of this essay.

Secondly, I am also confused about what exactly is the point of this essay. The three main conclusions reached at the end of it seem to be that 1) arguing about classics on twitter does not impact text selection policy in schools, 2) teachers bear no responsibility in encouraging their students to make reading a habit, and 3) that books are not sacred objects. So what?

While I disagree with Mang’s essay, I do still find value in some of the points she brings up, and in her definition of Book People. I have been casually curious about the leisure studies, and where committed readers fit within leisure studies, for the last couple of years. Mang may not understand what she sees before her, but she did see something. It is that insight that has finally spurred me to dig into the social world of committed readers, or as Mang calls them, Book People.

[notafrogblog]

Who wants to read an entire fucking essay I’ve been writing over the last few months it’s about viddy games wooooooo

Video Games's Popularity

16% of entertainment hours in 2018 were spent playing video games, according to a study by The NPD Group, an American market research company (Stych). Video games have become more and more popular as they have become easier and easier to access through consoles, computers, tablets, and phones. Video games and gaming have become some of the most popular topics to watch on youtube, twitch, and other platforms, which is shown by the fact that youtube has a trending section just for video game content. I myself watch video game content whenever I get the chance. Merriam Webster defines video games as "an electronic game in which players control images on a video screen." If you use that definition for video games, it means gaming is a lot more widespread and prevalent than you'd first think. It would be a struggle to find anyone below the age of twenty who's never played a video game in some form. There are thousands of people in online communities who discuss video games and the people who play them, on sites like Reddit, Twitch, YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram, and more. Video game music, posters, clothing, and general merchandise is popular and lucrative for the companies that make and sell the products. People continue to invest their time, money, and energy into playing and enjoying video games. Video games are such a big part of the online community and my life that I decided to take this opportunity to learn more about them.

While researching this paper, I found different types of sources than I was expecting. Many articles on video games are outdated, poorly written, or simply didn't contain much information. Most possible sources were game reviews, tabloid-esque gossip, or talked about events occurring recently in the gaming community. These weren't very helpful for the type of topics I wanted to discuss. When I set out to write this, I expected to find more analyses of video games or game genres as a whole, or perhaps more in-depth writing. Although I did find articles that were in-depth, they were often very niche, scholarly, or outdated. Video games as a culture moves indescribably quickly, with new games always being released. The vast amount of content and places to share said content on the internet makes video games so widespread, it's near impossible to categorize and talk about video games a whole, rather than individual games or franchises. I suppose that's why there are so many game reviews. People are always looking for new games to play, new content to view. I did my best to find articles and sources I could use to talk about video games a whole, as a culture, and as a complex and nuanced form of entertainment. Part of my own interest in video games is due to the large variety of games and game content available. I would consider myself fairly knowledgeable about video games, especially after researching this essay. But I don't know much about games as a whole, or why people play them. As much as I love to talk about and watch video games, I don't play them often myself. I wanted to know what made other people love playing video games so much. Both my brothers are very engrossed in their respective games and consoles, and I found myself wondering what compels them to put their time and energy into something that doesn't give me that same satisfaction. Which begs the question, why do people play video games? What keeps them coming back? What makes video games so enjoyable?

I started by looking in the school databases, and on credible sites like the Washington Post and the New York Times. Video games is such a broad topic, but many articles focused on specific games or events. While I researched, I wondered what is so compelling about video games. I had some hypotheses. Video games often have a plot, a list of tasks to complete, or some sort of storyline. I found an article about the stories and plotlines of first-person shooter games, one of the most popular genres of games. In the article, David M. Leeson explains what differs between a multiplayer and a single-player shooter: "Most multiplayer shooters are gameplay-driven: play sessions consist of one or more matches, in which players compete with each other (either individually or as teams) to win the game, either by scoring points or capturing objectives. Most single-player shooters, by contrast, are story-driven: play sessions consist of one or more levels, in which the player is told the story so far and then must overcome a series of obstacles to find out what happens next." Already this provides some insight into what compels people to play video games. Multiplayer shooters, such as Fortnite, some Call of Duty games, Battlefield games, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, depend on other players to keep you interested. Winning a match is the main objective. In single-player games, the goal isn't to win a round, it's to complete the story. In a way, this makes a single-player shooter similar to a book or a movie. The difference between them is that the player takes an active part in moving the plotline forward, which keeps the player interested and motivated to find out what happens next.

A storyline isn't the only thing that can be necessary to keep a player motivated. The gameplay plays a big role in keeping the player interested in continuing the game. Games have two main parts, speed and strategy. Speed-based games rely on fast reflexes, immediate feedback, and quick thinking to be enjoyable. Games like these require you to be in the moment the whole time, ready to react to whatever is thrown at you. Games that are more speed-based include titles such as Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and endless runner games such as Temple Run or Subway Surfers. Despite being very different games in style, aesthetic, plot, and goals, these all rely on speed as a main mechanic. Another aspect of games is strategy. Strategy-based games take a slower route, and are more based on planning and thinking before you act. Strategy games often have some sort of back-and-forth mechanic between the player and some sort of other entity, usually a non-player character (npc) or the game itself. This includes games such as battling games such as Pokemon, storyline games like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing, and many mobile games. Strategy games require the player to think about what they want to do before they do it, and often have multiple storylines or options for how to play the game or what to do when. All games have elements of both strategy and speed, but usually one takes precedence over the other. Each category of game has its pros and cons and its own problems.

There are a few problems with speed-based games that the developers must remedy for the game to be enjoyable. Firstly, games with speed-based mechanics are often very easy to pick up and learn. Many Super Smash Bros. players will mash buttons or spam attacks rather than use combination attacks or the full variety of moves available. Speed-based games must introduce a learning curve for players to learn new skills, become better at the skills they already have, and some sort of challenge that requires those skills to be used. Another problem with speed-based games is the lack of variety. One character with only one set of moves can quickly become boring to play. Most games don't have this problem, with many games having multiple characters. Breath of the Wild, however, only has one playable character, Link. Nintendo keeps BotW from becoming boring by having Link have many weapons and clothing to collect and choose from to use, food items to temporarily boost stats, and a way to upgrade Link's health points as the game grows more difficult. Many endless runner games (i.e. Subway Surfers or Temple Run) lack this attribute, which causes players to become bored of them after playing for a while. While they may include customizable or lots of character choices, the changes are purely cosmetic and don't impact the gameplay.

Strategy games have issues as well, most notably those to do with speed. Strategy games often have a slower pace, and making the pace too slow can cause players to become bored. This was an issue with the role-playing game Final Fantasy VII, a 1997 turn-based rpg by Square Enix. Final Fantasy VII is set to have a remake by Square Enix, the first part of which was released on April 10, 2020. An article I discovered addressed some flaws in the original game as well as what the remake should have to make the game better. The article reads: "Modern releases of Final Fantasy VII include an option to speed up combat by a factor of three, and after turning it on, you quickly learn that you almost never need to turn it off to more carefully manage the flow of battle, such is the monotony of just attacking and healing over and over. This speed boost is greeted by latter-day players as a crucial "quality of life" improvement. It doesn't matter how many oakleaves you've acquired in 22 years; when letting the player essentially skip the gameplay is treated as a godsend, you don't have a very good game." (Vogt) As said in the quote, the ability to speed up gameplay shouldn't be necessary. The gameplay is also described as monotonous. Games must be interesting to keep players motivated to continue playing. Keeping players interested in the game is a big part of video game making.

Game designers and developers must put player enjoyment first when making a game. Even if the ultimate goal is to make money or gain popularity in the community, player enjoyment is what leads to a game's success. If a player isn't having fun playing a game, they won't recommend it to others, or join an online community about it, or even continue playing it. For this reason, I decided to find information about the process of game design and development, where ideas came from, and how enjoyment of the game came into the mix. I found an academic study of a game jam in 2013. A game jam is an event where multiple groups of game makers come together to make games in an allotted time using a given prompt. The study discusses multiple aspects of the game jam, including initial ideas, prototyping, and game development and testing, the latter of which is shown in the quote here: "Participants [in the game jam] removed systems within the game (e.g. attacks requiring combinations of buttons rather than single buttons) or reduced the total number of components used (e.g. fewer game levels or types of enemies). Swapping mechanics occurred when already implemented systems were buggy or dysfunctional or when playtesting (personally or with others) showed them to be overly complex or unintuitive." (Zook) This quote shows how game developers must think about how the players will interact with mechanics, especially mechanics they aren't used to. Mechanics are how you do things in the game, whether it be with certain buttons, an item, movement, interaction with the environment, or a combination of these. Mechanics must be easy to pick up on and learn for beginning players, but difficult to master so as to keep players entertained. The quote shows how initially complex mechanisms such as button combinations or buggy systems can be unintuitive for the players, and therefore need to be fixed. If a player has difficulties with the game's function, it won't be fun to play. Games must be fun if they want to keep players interested.

For this paper, I interviewed one of my friend's younger brothers, an avid player of video games. Ian plays video games for a few hours every day, he says, on xbox, nintendo switch, and mobile devices. In the interview, he says that what he thinks makes video games enjoyable is having fun. Although he plays video games more suited to younger users, there were a few things he had to say about games he disliked. The main things he didn't like about games were the difficulty (too hard, too easy) bad graphics, or he "wasn't as interested as he thought he was." His viewpoint as someone who plays a lot of video games is very useful for the question I'm asking. Difficulty of games is something that is hard to balance for game developers. As discussed earlier, the mechanics must be intuitive so the player can pick up on them easily. However, if the entire game is easy, the player will get bored, just like Ian did.

"What makes video games enjoyable?" is the question I've tried to answer. So, what does make video games enjoyable? I'd say it's a variety of things. Video games are so complex, and what makes them entertaining is even more complex. There's such a huge variety of video games available to play, on dozens of platforms and consoles, and in many different ways. Expecting to find just one answer for such a broad question would be unjustifiable. So, I've determined a couple things that make video games enjoyable. As Ian said, games should be fun. Fun means different things to each person, so different games will be better for different people. Different difficulties and styles of games will be different for different people. A more casual game style, like mobile games or kid's games, might be more enjoyable for a gamer like Ian. However, strategy based games such as Pokemon, Assassin's Creed, or shooting games such as CS:GO might be more suited to older players. In short, what makes video games enjoyable is the variety of games there are to play. Games are for everyone, and each type of video game has people who enjoy it, and people who don't. There is no one clear answer to this question. Unfortunately, this means that if I want to be more involved in playing video games, I'm going to have to try some games and find out what I like. If you're interested in video games, I suggest you do the same.

Works Cited

Jabr, Ferris. “Can You Really Be Addicted to Video Games?” New York Times, 22 October 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/22/magazine/can-you-really-be-addicted-to-video-games.html. Accessed 2 November 2020.

Leeson, David M. "Northrop Frye and the story structure of the single-player shooter." English Studies in Canada, vol. 37, no. 2, 2011, p. 137+. Gale In Context: High School, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A294194389/SUIC?u=midd34407&sid=SUIC&xid=e5b85bc6. Accessed 18 Oct. 2020.

Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/video%20game. Accessed 5 November 2020.

S., Ian. Personal interview. December 2020.

Stych, Anne. “Americans' favorite forms of entertainment are digital.” bizjournals, 28 March 2019, https://www.bizjournals.com/bizwomen/news/latest-news/2019/03/americans-favorite-forms-of-entertainment-are.html?page=all#:~:text=The%20shift%20to%20digital%20is,research%20by%20The%20NPD%20Group. Accessed 2 November 2020.

Vogt, Ryan. "For all its greatness, Final Fantasy VII wasn't a good game. Let's remember why." Washingtonpost.com, 7 Apr. 2020. Gale In Context: High School, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A619723232/SUIC?u=midd34407&sid=SUIC&xid=0b17c660. Accessed 11 Oct. 2020.

Zook, Alexander and Mark O. Riedl. "Game Conceptualization and Development Processes in the Global Game Jam." School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, http://www.fdg2013.org/program/workshops/papers/GGJ2013/ggj13_submission_4.pdf. Accessed 11 Oct. 2020.

[quarantined-with-bucky]

Dichotomy

Bucky x Reader

Words: ~ 3,500

Summary: Bucky’s in the poetry feels. And his own feels.

Warnings: Mentions of abuse

Dedication: I’ve had a couple readers express their interest in mythology and the like, either in reblogs, replies, or private messages, so this is dedicated to them (you know who you are) Thanks! :)

A/N: This was taken from my mythology cultivation (I mentioned it in Poetry (this is kinda a part II to that?)), so I have no author credits to the poem :( please let me know if anyone does! This one is also more of Bucky’s view on his relationship with the reader. Sorry it took me so long to write, I wasn’t sure where to take this for a while!

...

You were a myth.

You had to be. Bucky was convinced.

You were beautiful. But he would never mistake your beauty for stupidity – not for naivety, vulnerability, or even weakness.

And They Said Aphrodite Was Soft: Smear your lips in blood, dust your eyelids with stars. Hang rubies around your neck, wear a nude leather dress. Kiss him hard, make him groan. Rip him apart, muscle from bone. Breath in, breath out. Begin step one.

Such a beautiful creature could never be so cruel. He saw the way you moved so gracefully on the battlefield and the way just a single touch from you could melt the heart of any man. You had no tolerance for the men that talked down to you and, sure, you were an exquisite creature, but your prowess that lied beneath the surface – that could tear any unassuming man limb from limb – was what drew him to you.

You were resilient. Despite what anyone may think, you were one of the strongest on the team.

I have wondered what it was like for Aphrodite. For Hera, Medusa, Artemis, Athena. For them to be worshiped, feared, sung of and powerful. What did it feel like to fall into myth and legend? To be remembered mostly for the men they loved, or the ones who fought for them when they didn’t need it, didn’t ask. To be pushed into the corner of the bar, to only be talked about when someone else decided, and to watch their daughters, their children of the earth, fall to the same fate.

Despite your effort to write your own story, to be the best damn Avenger you could be, there would always be hurtles in your way, whether that be the media shoving you into the shadows of Captain America and Iron Man, your inherent lack of any sort of super-ability, or you almost too innocent-looking appearance: how could you hold your own when you look like you can’t even open a jar by yourself? It was the same for those before you, women being washed away in history as lab assistants or had their valor just plain stolen from them. It couldn’t be you and you wouldn’t let it.

You were hurt. Years of physical pain, emotional torment, and past abuse took its toll on you. After all, you were only human.

Dearest Medusa I am so sorry no one told you that the Gods could be so cruel. You had beauty so unlike the rest. Your mother deemed it a blessing. A blessing that would one day deal your curse. Dearest Medusa I am so sorry that no one told you the love of a god is as good as the hatred from a god. Dearest Medusa I am so sorry that he pillaged your body in the temple of goddess meant to shelter you. Dearest Medusa I am so sorry that Athena in all of her wisdom turned blind eye to your pain. Dearest Medusa I am so sorry that no one ever told you the gods could be so cruel.

You’d known what it’s like to have been cast away in your time of need. Your strength somehow came around to backfire on you. You’d been so strong your whole life, there’s no way you could be upset – especially about something so small. You’d been discredited to your own feelings. When you cried out for help, you never received, instead met with neglect and following misfortune. And that’s what built you, but that’s also what broke you.

It was only through poetry that Bucky realized there were two sides to your story – every story, he’d supposed.

And goddamn, there were two sides to his story.

He’d wondered if one day, such myths will be written about him. Would he be seen as the monster: a harsh, unforgiving, unrelenting man – whose true tragedy is unbeknownst to most? Only after years of examination and internal debate could change anyone’s perspective on him.

But he knew they’d be writing about you someday. Hell, it seems like they already had been. The most celestial being in the universe and he just happens to be lucky enough to share a bed with you. He’s the one who knows your backstory, knows your own tragedy, knows the strength that its built. It’s almost like he’s been studying you – and he would if he could. He applies every beautiful book or poem he’s read to you: to your grace, your poise, your struggles.

You meant more to him than words could describe; not the likes of Homer, Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, nor even Jane Austen could even capture half your complexity. He didn’t think there were so many layers to life. There was only one way he could see himself: damaged. But from the day he met you, you’d proven quite the opposite. He had depth, substance, an intricacy that only you could unravel. You’d welcomed him into your open arms, taking him under your wing as you showed him the ropes of the twenty-first century. That’s how it started, anyway. You’d shown him the internet, the DVR, how his phone works, plastic Tupperware. The world had become quite a different place, but it wasn’t just the material objects that shifted either.

People seemed to be a bit more complex than Bucky remembered – and he didn’t know whether it was a twenty-first century thing or if he just hadn’t been around people in such a long time. It took a lot of questions, a lot of research, and a lot of late-night discussions before Bucky finally grasped the concept you’d been trying to instill in him. And one night it just made so much sense. It was in everything you read – every novel and poem – everything you wrote, and everything you’d been teaching him.

Bucky’s night of clarity consisted of a nightmare, two giant mugs filled to the brim with hot chocolate, and some frighteningly serious pillowtalk. “You don’t have to let your past define you, Bucky,” you whispered, before taking a sip of your drink. Bucky’s head rested on your chest, the two of you laying in bed, wide awake after having been woken up by Bucky screaming in the middle of the night. Your hand ran through his hair, strands stuck together and tangled up, tacky with sweat. His eyes were shut, his focus being the vibrations of your chest as you spoke. “You aren’t what they made you.”

You’d seen the side of him that nobody else saw; the soft side of him. It was the half of him that the media would never portray, that his closest peers – his housemates, his team members – would never see, the part that even he forgot existed.

Hell, it was hard for him to remember how to be kind – how to be vulnerable. It took years of physical torture and mental torment for Hydra to beat it out of him. The majority of his life, he’d gone without physical affection, a listening ear, a shoulder to cry on, any kind of touch that didn’t result in a bloody nose.

That wasn’t the only issue. He had to overcome his own bravado. It took him years of solitude and half-assed coping mechanisms for Bucky to come to terms with it himself. Even after jumping over the first hurdle of undoing Hydra’s psychological damage, he had to rewrite his own programming. He never confided in anyone in the Avengers; not the therapist and psychologist Tony brought in, not Clint – a college familiar with being a victim of mind-control, not Natasha – someone who had understood similar hardships, not even Steve – his childhood best friend. He’d come from a time where you would simply grin and bear it.

Sounds cliché, sure, but he couldn’t help it. It was hard not to act this way when even those closest to him – those who shared similar trauma – acted in the same manner. He’d never seen Clint bring it up. Natasha never spoke of her past, or let it affect her work or well-being – in fact, she made jokes about it. And Steve? Forget it. He was one of those who used his past as motivation and to share to kids for “life lessons” (Bucky could gag just thinking about it). Anyway, where did that leave Bucky? With no options but to suck it up and not let it bother him.

When you started spending multiple nights in a row with him, he knew you’d get him to confess about his past, his feelings. Bucky hated feelings. In the thirties, the only feeling he liked was to have a woman wrapped around his finger. He supposed that’s all he had to worry about, back then, anyway.

Now, he was the one wrapped around his finger. So much so, in fact, that he let you twirl his hair around in your hand, stroke his stubble with the backs of your knuckles, and press your cold feet against his legs while the two of you were sleeping (supposed to be sleeping, at least). “Remember what I told you?” You murmured, pulling him out of his thoughts. He opened his eyes to meet yours peering down over him, as you now sat propped on one elbow to lean your head over his. “About it being okay for you to be upset?”

He rolled his eyes and then quickly shot you a soft apology. Don’t dismiss your emotions, it was what you’d told him numerous times before. He wasn’t supposed to be acting like nothing was bothering him; he promised you that he’d tell you anything on his mind. It was easy when the only thing that was on his mind was you naked in his mind. This was way harder, he mentally groaned.

It was hard for him to come to terms with his past. With all of the terrible things he’d done? There was no way he’d ever be able to accept it, to forget about it, forgive himself for it. There are two sides to every story, you’d reminded him once.

Bucky’s two sides: assassin, murderer, beast; victim, vulnerable, manipulated.

He couldn’t even come to terms with that. He wasn’t manipulated. Manipulation carries the connotation that he still had control. Bucky wasn’t manipulated into doing any of the things he did – into committing those atrocities. Nobody used their cunning wit and skills to get him to willingly commit such crimes; Bucky wasn’t convinced by someone to go against his free will and better judgement. No, that right was stolen from him – his free will.

He didn’t even have an adjective to describe himself.

But he had others who could describe him on his behalf.

Name one hero who was happy. Was Heracles, remembered in the stars, satisfied with his life? Risen to glory and fame, but at what cost? The memory of his wife and child’s blood on his hands, their cries etched in his head. Ask Daedalus, whose cleverness was no match for his love for Icarus, if he was happy to escape confinement. To soar amongst the heavens only to watch his son plummet to his death, perished by his own creation. And Achilles, what of him, was he happy? The boy with the golden feet and lion-heart, who upheld battle for a decade, to watch his beloved slain? To live out the end of his days grieving, yearning for death, was he truly happy? Once again, I must ask: Name one hero who was happy.

It validated his thoughts, at lease. No matter how much people could grow to love him, how accepted he’d be into society, how much he’d be celebrated, he’d still never forget – never be happy, haunted forever by his past barbarity, the lives he took, his loved ones gone. His own life and power ripped away from him, missing from his life for so long that he didn’t know how to live anymore.

He’d found you, at least. You gave him some semblance of his life and freedom back. But he couldn’t help but think, deep down, so low that he’d never be able to muster up the words to say it aloud, that one day you’d be taken away from him. He didn’t know if it would be on the battlefield or if it would be karma finally coming around – but he was scared.

But, despite you being totally oblivious to Bucky’s deepest thoughts (although, you were fairly intuitive. He assumed you’d already known this was his greatest fear), you’d taught him that it was okay to be scared. It was okay to be scared, vulnerable, and hurting. That must have been more accepted these days. While Bucky was never able to marry back in his original time, he wasn’t even sure if this was something husband and wife talked about. He’d remembered hearing stories of his war-buddies back in the trenches. They wrote home to their wives, telling them everything was okay, nobody was hurting, all was as well as could be a – when the opposite couldn’t be truer. It was his job to make sure everything was okay in the home, and part of that required staying strong; being the immovable force that held the family steady. And he looked up to those men more than anything. Fighting a goddamn war, writing their wives in a matter that wouldn’t make them worry.

Now that wasn’t necessary. Women had embraced their strength and independence. He was relieved, to be honest, he knew he’d never compare to his own father – not after everything he’d endured. But maybe twenty-first century life was where he belonged, anyway. So that he could have you next to him. Outspoken, rowdy, cutthroat, bold, passionate you.

You understood Bucky’s hesitation to open up to you. It took him a long time to get acclimated to his new environment, to people, to having emotions – let alone expressing them. That was okay with you. You had nothing but time. You’d tried early on to express to him the fact that his past is what gave him his strength today. He’s been through so much during the past one hundred years of his life that it would be easy for him to just quit, throw in the towel of life, give up and spend the rest of his days spending his days in Wakanda raising goats. But every day, he found the strength to get up, return to the clutches of Hydra and fight them one by one with the promise of the world one day being free from their grasp.

That resonated with him a bit. To come to terms with his struggles because they made him who he is. Not necessarily in a bad way: in the way that he could realize how much he overcame in his long life. He was a survivor.

“Yes,” he whispered, turning his head to press a kiss to your palm.

He wasn’t sure how you were able to resonate with him on such a level. It was probably the way you talked to him. You treated him like a human. Not that the others didn’t necessarily, but they just treated him differently – like they were afraid of him. Like anything they said might trigger him, they cowered in fear when he walked into a room, they avoided him at all costs. But you, you treated him like he was fragile – like if you held him, he’d crack.

He smiled at the thought, holding back a laugh. That’s the exact same way he held you.

Like you were made of porcelain. And that mutual consideration just drew him to you in awe. There was something so inherently soft about you. You were so genuinely kind to everyone, always lending a helping hand, putting everyone else’s needs above yours. He hadn’t known somebody like that for a long time; since he was a young kid in Brooklyn.

No Mortal Words Describe Her: Mortal, on the ground, drenched in sweat and tears: Are you a dream? Are you a nightmare? Aphrodite, baring her teeth, drenched in blood and ash: I am everything in between.

You were a dichotomy. He didn’t understand it. He met you on the battlefield, killing Hydra agents. Your hair was pulled up tight, eyes wide but eyebrows narrowed. You threw your punches with such force; you were kicking men through walls and windows. You’d looked as if you were born and bred to kill – which, in all truth, you were. You’d accepted that fact and you held your head high. He was intimidated by you, and he loved that fact that everyone else was, too. And you were proud of it. There was nothing you cared about in those moments more than making the scum of the earth pay for the atrocities they had committed, for all the years they had Bucky Barnes locked up.

But then it was him laying on your bedroom floor, reading poetry you had scribbled on scraps of paper, littered around the room; some laid out neatly beside you, others crumpled up and tossed in the corner. Bucky liked those ones best – the ones you’d discarded in a frantic, haphazard manner, too busy to even aim for the garbage can. He’d felt that those were the ones that described you best: they were raw, real, undeniable; they came from the deepest depths of your mind, the part that took you hours of searching to even skim the surface. It was the truest form of yourself, and Bucky was lucky enough to have been granted permission to read.

All Antigone wanted was to bury her dead. How many times do women hang themselves in the shadow of their fathers’ sins? I am no exception, I flinch at comparisons, the easiest way to unmake me is to throw his name over me like an old mantle of anger and hate: I’ve worked too hard to be broken down by a story I had no hand in, braced my arms against flood and falling sky and sometimes I get so tired. But I am more than my father’s venom tongue. I am my grandmother’s eyes, my grandfather’s bleeding heart, I am the daughter of women stronger than any Greek playwright could forgive.

Just as it did for Bucky, it took you time to open up. To delve into your past was a process in and of its own. It was when he found this poem crinkled beside your bookshelf that he finally asked about it. This one felt a little too personal to just ignore. He recrumpled the piece of paper and tossed it towards you, landing in your lap. Unfolding it, you skim the words, tossing it beside you once finished, continuing your current work. “Do you want to talk about it?” Bucky asked, breaking the silence that surrounded the two of you.

At first, you’d said no and simply continued writing. How were you supposed to tell him the stories of your so-called family? The pains you’d suffered as a child. You’d continued on your poem about Achilles: the strong, brave, invincible, soldier; the broken, touch starved, damaged man. You huffed to yourself and threw your pen down. What kind of girlfriend would you be to make Bucky relive his own terror without at least reciprocating – especially when you knew it took so much for him to let you in in the first place.

It was a long night after that, setting up the timeline of your life. And everyone had their own right to deal with their past in their own way; each memory hurts in its own particular way, and it is up to you with how to deal with it. But your past is what makes you, and that’s what you’d told Bucky days before. It doesn’t define you, but it gives you something to fight for, something to live for.

It took years of explaining it to him for you to finally find it true for yourself.

…

But he was pulled back into the present once your hands pulled apart an exceptionally tight knot from his hair. He brought his eyes back to meet yours, your face illuminated by the now rising sun shining behind the white shades. Your eyes were half lidded, face completely relaxed, gazing down at Bucky with a sleepy lust. You’d been sitting in silence for hours. It was fine, you had nothing else to do. It was better that Bucky worked it out on his own anyway; you knew how he could get lost in his own thoughts.

All you’d hoped was that he wasn’t beating himself up about it anymore.

“Hey, doll,” he murmured, grabbing your hand in his, turning up to lean against the headboard next to you. And, god, the way you looked at him could make his heart stop; nothing but admiration and affection in those eyes. Your eyebrows were slightly raised, corners of your mouth pulling up slightly.

“Hey, Buck.” You fully smiled at him, offering him a soft, sleepy grin.

“I love you.”

You slid down on the bed, this time resting your head on his chest, wrapping your arms around his large torso, snuggling up into him as the sun rose behind you. “I love you, too.”

[jawnkeets]

How are you so clever??? I’m new to your blog and I’ve been looking at your posts (not in a stalkery way but because they’re so cool) and you seem super intelligent! Like you always reference things I’ve never heard of and use fancy words and it’s just really awesome. How did you get so clever? Do you read a lot or are you just naturally clever? If it’s from reading then what books would you recommend to someone who’s interested in literature and also broadening their general knowledge? Thanks

awwww. well thanks for the lovely ask!! this is way too much detail bc i’m procrastinating work but

i read a ton as a kid, mostly horror books - i was obsessed with the supernatural, and especially vampires, and the idea of things changing into other things (in a magical way, but also stories where characters develop and end up very different, tales of betrayal etc). my favourite series when i was little was the spiderwick chronicles, followed a little later by the saga of darren shan. i didn’t read any classic literature at all though, as i’d decided i hated it for some reason. as a kid i always prided myself on my creativity/ imagination rather than my intelligence (it’s a distinction i’d always drawn and still do after a fashion), but i was and have always been obsessive, and also used to sit and play memory games for hours, too; i remember one where i’d have a list of cards and i’d put one down, say what it was, turn it over, add another one, say what the previous one and this one was, turn them over, and continue until i couldn’t remember every single card in order, and then i’d start again. i wrote a lot, especially poetry, and used a thesaurus often because i loved words. i had a very very vivid imagination and refused to live in the real world until the age of about 11 or 12. then from 14 onwards i read almost nothing (apart from like idk two of the hunger games books) until i was 17, when i finally started reading classic literature, triggered by the great gatsby, which changed my attitude to learning completely. until then i’d despised secondary school partly because of the way learning was presented (i got good grades at gcse but went through the syllabus and exams mechanically with little genuine love) and partly for… other reasons, and had almost given up on taking academics seriously. but i got very lucky and had an incredible english teacher throughout sixth form, who encouraged me to take risks and break from methodical, formulaic writing. at the end of the first essay i had to do for him i still remember that he wrote ‘literature is for you. now and always. carry on.’ at the bottom, and that changed my life. he also introduced me to philip larkin and romantic poetry outside of class. after that, i was gripped by the desire to read and discover as much about the humanities as i could, make links between works, discover new ones, recover the feeling that i was possessed by after finishing gatsby. tumblr genuinely helped with art, literature quotes, and making it all seem accessible, e.g. seeing text posts making jokes about shakespeare, keats, etc helped to demystify a bit. yes, dark academia, i’m also looking at you for making learning seem exciting, but tentatively and with narrowed eyes. general knowledge-wise, it helped me to begin to break down the barriers between ‘subjects’ at school (even if you’ve left school, it’s pretty branded into our brains); they’re sometimes very fuzzy and even arbitrary, and to separate into strictly-defined categories like this is not the only way learning can or should happen.

a work that i thoroughly recommend to everyone who asks where to start is letters to a young poet by rainer maria rilke. he relates so perfectly this idea that the first step is to let yourself be filled with how amazing and vast the world is, and how much there is to read, listen to, and see. that’s not something you can learn from reading, and it’s not something you can be taught by anyone (unless being inspired by someone counts). it’s instrumentally important because it will drive you, but i also think it’s inseparable from understanding (and to me, it is understanding, just understanding without the right words yet). this is the highlight, and it was the mantra stuck up on my wall at 17 when i decided i wanted to learn, and learn seriously:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

i was relatively articulate before i started reading the classics/ reading widely, but not exceptionally articulate. here’s an example of two essay openings - one i wrote when i was 16, and one i wrote during my first term at university (2 years apart):

i’d say that since then my essays have probably improved by a similar proportion, as i’m as embarrassed to read the second as i was the first when i wrote the second, and the typos r annoying me (am too embarrassed to post recent writing :’( - doesn’t count if over a year and a half ago, hence posting the second :p). obviously, then, this isn’t natural intelligence (everyone has to get knowledge, big words, etc from somewhere, right?), this is natural receptivity and willingness to learn, which i genuinely believe anyone can gain at any point, coupled with A LOT of reading the opinions of others (i.e. literary criticism and theory), and reading literature from many different periods to discover how language is moulded by individual poets and by ‘eras’ more widely. but this is also synthesising everything i absorb into a personal vision (this is the hill i will die on soz i don’t think theory should be ‘objective’ like what does that even mean). you can and should put yourself into it!

in terms of what to read - if you like the rilke (really hope you do!!) then depending on what you like about it, you can search from there. try some of rilke’s poetry. or if you like that ineffable feeling it brings, try the romantics (keats’ ‘ode to a nightingale’ and blake’s songs of innocence and experience are good to start with!), or larkin’s ‘high windows’ and ‘the mower’. also try shakespeare’s hamlet, because that is INCREDIBLE (watching it is always easier, and the more shakespeare you watch/ read the easier it gets! andrew scott’s hamlet is the best imo). from there it’s a question of asking what you liked about what you just read (time period/ vibe/ themes/ subject/ style of writing) and finding things similar - often google works and i made use of it a lot to start with, tumblr too, otherwise ask people who you know (on the internet/ teachers/ friends etc). this is a personal journey, especially to begin with, i think (you have to jump in somewhere), and there’s no one who can give you a list of books to read in the order best for you, because - annoyingly, i know - that’s something it’s best if each individual works out through trial and error, and part of the fun in truth. there are western canon lists out there, e.g., which contain some fabulous works, but have very obvious problems. 

a really really rough chronological development of english lit: beowulf, any of the canterbury tales, hamlet, paradise lost, pope’s satire, romantic poetry, victorian novels (e.g. david copperfield, jane eyre), the waste land, waiting for godot (it would also help to read the iliad, the aeneid, and metamorphoses too, and as much of the bible as you can, especially genesis, exodus, isaiah, job, and the gospels, but genesis and the gospels first if ur stuck/ overwhelmed). this is the lightest of pencil sketches, but if they’re works that go some way towards defining each ‘era’ or ‘period’, then it becomes a little easier to search for works branching off from these that are influenced by or chafe against them. you can always come back to me if you’re struggling with what to look for next :+) also, i have a list of my poetry favs, if you want to check that out (it includes the stuff mentioned in the previous paragraph, as well as others).

hope this helps (?!) ❤️

[la5t-res0rt]

Okay but it literally, LEGALLY, isn't classified as sim cp. You don't have to look at it if you want. And none of those things on that list are okay: antis shouldn't be sending death threats, babes shouldn't be either. Name calling is also out of the window because its childish and stupid. And making fun of people or invalidating their identities is wrong too. But I dlnt think you understand that /both/ sides do all that. You cant sit here and have a double standard like that.

oh i understand perfectly well

i just dont think you do

yeah the behavior in both sides can be pretty crummy but if you literally think that people shouldnt be called out for tolerating this sort of behavior that is literally harmful to so many people myself fucking included like oh fuck would i have loved to have never had to look at the content but its all the fuck over the place and so many of the shippers are so fucking entitled and so conceited that they are actively ASKING for it that one chicks ask box is a fucking taunt she lives for the attention good or bad

at this point I have a side that i favor because the other side sent my friend death threats sent me threats of violence belittled my mental health stole my friends art and maliciously reposted and edited their artwork that same side made incredibly upsetting artwork about causing harm to an actor i

the same side that bullied a fourteen year old after they had the nerve to speak up about the shit going on the same side that came for me for not knowing every single detail of said fourteen year olds very complex and not at all my business mental illness

the side that took something that gave me so much comfort and happiness and made me remember the abuse i endured when I was thirteen i hate that the internet is still such a ducking shitty place to be a lonely kid who just wants to be liked

the same side that writes romanticized rape and writes a black lgbt+ character being a subject of abuse the same side who thinks stories of characters of color need to struggle and endure pain for it to be a valid piece of writing or the side that talks down to young people and minors and then turning around and writing graphic content involving a teenage girl

a side that includes a transmed guy who is so vile that i honest to god use the word hate to describe me feelings for him

but yeah the side that pointed out that maybe saying that you basically only view women as sex objects in that you would perform sex acts for compensation with them but not actually pursue relationships with is a problematic statement or maybe the jewish teenager who asked someone to stop throwing the term nazi around THOSE are the real villains of the story theyre the ones that need to be taught a damn lesson jesus h christ

if you are still talking about the rae biphobia fiasco literally none of us ever said she wasnt bi that I know of i know i didnt we simply pointed out that what she said was an inherantly biphobic statement being lgbt+ doesnt mean you cant belittle other identities look at nasti and how he feels about the trans experience as if he owns the damn thing ugh fucking hell you made me mention these people by name thats how cranky i am

basically on top of all the shitty things done to me and my friends I dont want people using their shit triggering content to hurt people like i was hurt

also in the United States simulated cp is only okay if it passes this thing called the miller test and buddy pal chumbo nearly all the work ive had the great misfortune fails at least one of the three prongs of the miller test the whole area is very murky and not well defined but our neighbor nation of Canada (if youre in the us) is full stop no cp of any kind no ifs ands or butts

why dont you go tell nasti to shut his yap about solar or tell rae to gather her cronies and fucking chill and stop bugging me because im getting very sick of having to tell people how i feel and why i do what i do if you really think both sides are that bad why do t you go try and talk to them because im not budging that shit is wrong and i wont sit by in silence as if it isnt

if youre a beetlebabe shipper trying to get my to badmouth antis fine yeah we can be a bit intense and yeah there have been antis who’ve done shitty things in the past but if anyone is caught being shitty its over dude you are ejected from the good graces

and if youre a neutral youre doing a great job at being neutral but it is making me very angry and neutrality is comparable to complacency so im not in your camp at all

thanks again for writing in im not really sorry for being harsh but i really am sick of this shit so maybe go try talking to someone else for a little bit like literally any beetlebabe and see what they say back to you id love to see it

editors note because i couldnt fit this anywhere but if an anti does something wrong in the same vein as the beetlebabes and i hear about it im done with them full stop they dont get my support or anything and i wont state publicly who they are but there are several people that have been cut off because of their behavior

the thing is i dont seem to see the bad stuff they do or maybe i just dont see what they do as bad because in my book telling someone pedophilia is wrong isnt harassment its just a statement of fact anyway if you have receipts of antis being as hateful as babe shippers* im all eyes pal but dont give me the same stuff ive covered because ive made my stance on those things quite clear

*threats of violence belittling mental illnesses harassing a mentally ill 14 year old making fun of eating disorders and many other bad things

(Note: pointing out the inherant biphobia of a phrase is also not harassment)

bye

[mimzy-writing-online]

I hope this question isn't too stupid, but you're one of my favorite writing blogs so I'll give it a shot. I want to write a FanFic based on the 1971 version of Willy Wonka. I wanted the story to tell Violet Beauregarde's story, the one that turns into a blueberry. However, I have SOME questions as I'm fairly new to FanFic. 1). Am I better off focusing on each kid's perspective, going back and forth? Or is it good to narrow my focus one one character? 2). Can I give them a character arch, li

(2/3) like Violet's really mean in school but she becomes kind after her experience at the factory. Is that too cliche or predictable? 3). Why does she try waddling away after her blueberry transformation and the Oompa Loompas are singing/dancing around her? They're trying to help her, and I don't really get why she'd do something like that. 4). What are tips to better understand the characters I want to flesh out? I guess it circles back to the last question, understanding their psyche. Yikes

(3/3)  Yikes! Super sorry this ask is long. And I'm even more sorry if my questions were lame or you've covered them before. :P. I can overthink at times, ESPECIALLY when it comes to my writing. I'm such a perfectionist storyteller, it's not even funny. I hope my questions aren't bothering you. You're one of my favorite writing blogs, so I figured I could come to you. I apologize in advance for wasting your time. You DO NOT have to reply at all if you don't want to. :P Thanks, have a great week

First and foremost: this is not a stupid question, you are not wasting my time at all. This is actually a rare treat for my blog because I don’t get many asks that don’t involve blindness, though I usually know better how to answer those than I do other questions. So, here we go:

Are you better off focusing on each kid’s perspective, going back and forth? Or is it better to narrow your focus onto one character?

The general rule of writing is to simplify. If two background characters serve a similar purpose, just combine the characters, for example. Slimming down extra scenes that don’t contribute to plot or character development.

However, that advice is meant for people publishing novels, working within an overflowing industry, dependant on sales and royalties. They have to meet whatever industry standards are, like word count or POV types. They have to find someone willing to take them on as a client because they love that book.

Fanfiction is not bound by such nonsense. Fanfiction is a beautifully lawless land where capitalism cannot influence it. What defines what you do with fanfiction is if you enjoy reading it, and if you have the steam to continue a long project.

Some people easily write 200,000k fics within a matter of weeks or months (or in my case, just once, two years). Some people work best with short fics. Both (and everything in between) are wonderful.

So, how much steam do you have for this project? How long do you think you can carry it and still finish it? Because that defines how big you should plan to make this project. If you don’t think you can write a long fic, then maybe just stick to one character.

A compromise between the two is to focus primarily on one character, and examine the other characters more briefly. This could be done in just a single POV chapter, or a handful. This could be done with the characters connecting and seeing the side character through your main character’s eyes, seeing how they’ve changed.

There’s no wrong answer. This fic is for your enjoyment primarily. No matter what you write, it will appeal to at least a few people, if not crowds. But your fun comes first, both literally and figuratively. Write for you, write to explore the story for yourself.

Can you give them a character arc like Violet’s where she becomes kinder after her experiences in the factory? Is that too cliche or predictable?

I wouldn’t call it predictable, because I’d expect everyone to go into completely different directions because they were all such unique and individual people before they entered the factory, and they were foiled by their own quirks.

Violet was mean and fake, she was demanding. I don’t know how much I want to speculate on the plotline you have going for her, how you’ll develop her to make her want to be more kind.

But I would love to speculate on the others.

Agustus Gloop? 

I feel like his experience in the chocolate river and almost drowning would make it hard to enjoy chocolate ever again. I think it would be a long time before he had any sweets. Also, because of his weight, I imagine there’s got to be some body-image issues hiding under the surface. I’d also put money on him being bullied, and him acting out against the students who bully him and because of his size he is more intimidating, but that doesn’t stop people from saying things behind his back.

I imagine the chocolate thing is a form of self-comfort. Maybe he turns to other foods to over-eat with to cope. Maybe eventually he figures out that this isn’t helping him. Does he try to replace unhealthy foods with healthier ones? (idk, I have a personal turn off on getting into the concept of dieting, so I’m not going to dig in much there).

I’d like to see him learn to love himself, develop some body neutrality, that his body doesn’t define who he is or what his worth is. That he becomes okay with who he is as he grows up. People who are happy and comfortable with themselves are generally nicer and easier going than people who aren’t. Maybe with some self-love, he’ll be kinder to others.

Veruca Salt?

Okay, I have a confession. My brain thought of her when discussing Violet. I haven’t seen either of the films in years.

Well, let’s thank Wikipedia everyone, the greatest gift of the internet.

Veruca does come across as a spoiled brat. Her parents shower her in material objects, which might mean something. I have a close friend who hates people buying things for him or giving him gifts that cost money. This has to do with a parent buying him things out of guilt after episodes of emotional abuse. I asked him a while back what he wanted for his birthday (I meant baked goods, I bake or cook special meals as birthday gifts for my friends. A has asked for chocolate chip cookies for three birthdays in a row now. Several friends ask for cookies for Christmas). Anyway, my friend had a panic attack and couldn’t respond until an hour later.

Maybe there’s something to that.

What does she think about money as she grows up? Does her love language continue to be gifts? I think it might one day be quality time. Maybe it is now. It’s common for rich parents to be absent and barely spend time with their kids because of work and extravagant social lives that sort of money gives them access to, meaning they barely have time in the day to spend with their kids. Maybe gifts are the only way she can make sure her parents still care, the only way she can get their attention? 

Mike Teavee?

Apparently in the movie credits his last name is spelled Teevee. But I’m obsessed with tea (and this is the point where I remember my tea and wonder if I’ve let it go cold because I got too focused. Nope, it’s still there). So it’s Teavee here.

Wikipedia describes him as a young boy who only watches TV, nothing but TV. He’s especially interested in cowboys and Western films. He comes across as a know-it-all. He’s easily annoyed but gets along with others.

Anyone have a guess at where I’m going with this?

Mike is neurodivergent. I mean, that’s my new headcanon. I lean towards ADHD because that’s what I project, but like everything else, his interpretation is in the eye of the beholder. Every viewer sees something different in him.

Some common ADHD (and autism) experiences beyond having a specific interest is how others react to your special interest. You get used to people getting bored when you talk about your interest for the thousandth time, but it’s still important to you, but not to someone whose opinion matters to you. RSD is probably common.

Wikipedia says he’s described as lazy in the books? Common ADHD “symptom,” or rather something that outside viewers label as laziness. Really, he just doesn’t have the motivation to do any of those other things.

And Charlie?

Did anyone think I wouldn’t have any thoughts on Charlie, our hero and protagonist?

Oh no, I have thoughts. Charlie goes to great lengths to set his family up comfortably, he becomes generous with his money. He also knows nothing about running a factory. I’m hoping Willy Wonka gives him some help there. But I bet adult Charlie is a stressed-out workaholic who tries to do everything and thinks he has something to prove, that he’s not just some random lucky child, that he can do this. Charlie totally gets a work-related anxiety disorder.

Those are my thoughts. I still think giving them Violet’s arc isn’t cliche or predictable, but rather completely different from what you think would happen to all those kids.

I mean, maybe a few of them are still little jerks in their adult lives. There’s no one road to grow up on, even if you’re four strangers who shared a similar traumatic experience.

Why does she try waddling away after her blueberry transformation and the Oompa Loompas are singing/dancing around her? They're trying to help her, and I don't really get why she'd do something like that.

They strange looking short men she’s literally never talked to, never seen or heard of before today, who’s already taken away two children by this point, all while singing a song about what terrible children they were.

And she’s scared because her body is doing something strange and scary and awful. She’s scared. She doesn’t know what to do. What will happen if these strange men take her away? She doesn’t know what happened to the other kids.

And they’re not really communicating they want to help, just singing cheerfully about how awful children are.

What are tips to better understand the characters I want to flesh out? I guess it circles back to the last question, understanding their psyche.

A lot of it is just watching real-life people and wondering why they are the way they are. Listening to their reasoning and what they tell you about who they are and where they come from.

I know people who grew up like Agustus with using over-eating as a way to self-comfort, and the bullying they experienced. I know that if a kid was physically bigger than his bullies, maybe he’d fight them to make them stop and leave him alone. People who go through that journey of learning that their body doesn’t define who they are, accepting it because it is theirs and it takes care of them.

(Which reminds me of a post I like that pops around here and there, that positive body image should be about more than how “sexy” your curves make you look. A person shouldn’t have to be sexy to be treated like a person. A person shouldn’t have to be sexy at all if they don’t want to, especially not all the time, and especially not a child. And there are a lot of obese children in the world who don’t have any positive body image messages designed for them)

I learned what my friend’s love languages are and why they have them and what they mean. Which is why I have that theory for Veruca.

Mike is just self-projection and listening to other neurodivergent people when they describe their life experiences or listening to their theories when they say a character is neurodivergent too.

I won’t lie, my theory on Charlie is based entirely on the Avatar: the Last Airbender fandom’s common head-canon that Zuko becomes a workaholic after he becomes Firelord. There might be some canon material in the comics that supports that, but I’ve never seen it. I think Zuko and Charlie have a similar vibe and that those three years Zuko struggled, and Charlie’s entire life before the factory make them both feel like they need to be perfect and do everything right to prove they deserve the job they’re given and that their backgrounds don’t define their worth.

Thank you so much for your ask anon!

And again, you are not a bother. I enjoyed digging into this movie I’d never thought in depth about until tonight. And you’re not alone, lots of writers are overthinkers and perfectionists. You are in good company. Our writing and fanfiction community welcomes and loves you <3

And thank you for your kind words! I’m so happy that you love my blog so much <3 It made my day to read that

Take care anon, and good luck in your writing :)

[douchebagbrainwaves]

A WAY TO YAHOO

We had a demo day for investors, we had to rely mostly on examples in books. This kind of thing is out there for anyone to see. When you have actual first class functions or recursion or even keyword parameters. They want to make a lot more money than we did last year and I wish we had. We now think of it, the best local talent will go to the real Silicon Valley, and all you have is statistics, it seems is that much computing will move from the desktop onto remote servers. These techniques are mostly orthogonal to Bill's; an optimal solution might incorporate both. The book would be a real threat. Why bother checking the front page of any specific paper or magazine? It will be worth making i/o. The bumbler will shoot himself in the foot anyway.

Atlanta is just as hosed as Munich. In Common Lisp I have often wanted to iterate through the fields of a struct—to comb out references to a deleted object, for example—you want to be forced to figure out what's actually wrong with him, and sure enough, it won't pay for spammers to send it, and the most productive people are attracted to employers who hold themselves to a higher standard than the law requires. In principle you could avoid it, just as it's hard to engage an audience you have to design what the user needs, not simply what he says he wants. After years of carefully avoiding classic time sinks like TV, games, and Usenet, I still managed to fall prey to distraction, because as well as the low. So the best strategy is to try lots of different things. Irony of ironies, it's the computer Steve Huffman wrote Reddit on. We know because we make people move for Y Combinator, and it is a huge and rapidly growing business. That has worked for the government. In fact, they're lucky by comparison.

One ingredient of its meaning is certainly Ajax, which I took to refer to web-based database as a system to hack: the Lisp Machine. I'm not saying, of course, that elite colleges have two critical qualities that plug right into the way large organizations work. For insiders work turns into a duty, laden with responsibilities and expectations. The most obvious is poverty. Instead of avoiding it as a drawback of senility, many companies embrace it only half-willingly, driven more by fear than hope, and aiming more to protect their turf than to do great things for users. So don't be demoralized by how hard it is to be consciously aware of that. If you work fast, they expect everyone else to. Not all cities send a message. Eminence is like a suit: it impresses the wrong people, and you can't find another? It's kind of strange when you think about it, including even its syntax, and anything you write has, as much as an audience. If I could get people to remember just one quote about programming, it would be a byword for bogusness like Milli Vanilli or Battlefield Earth.

I want in some macros. The startup will now do that themselves. Arguably the people in the middle of the 20th century that convinced some people otherwise. People will pay extra for stability. Investors don't need weeks to make up their minds, lest they lose the deal. They know they want to raise money, and the best research is also good design, and having the same people both design and implement the product. Small things can be done by collaborators.

Painting has been a qualitative change, like the proverbial drunk who looks for his keys under the lamppost, instead of sitting on them, technology will evolve faster. So verbs with initial caps have higher spam probabilities than they would have been on the list 100 years ago though it might have been 2400 years ago. They don't define what evil is, but by studying the intended users and figuring out what those problems are. Maybe the answer is yes. For example, when Leonardo painted the portrait of Ginevra de Benci in the National Gallery, he put a juniper bush behind her head. It's especially good if your application solves some new problem. I'm supposed to finish college and then go work for another company for two years, and then for all their followers to die.

Another view is that a programming language unless it's also the scripting language of a popular system. When it reaches a certain concentration, it kills off the yeast that produced it. So far the complete list of messages I've picked up from cities is: wealth, style, hipness, physical attractiveness, fame, political power, economic power, intelligence, social class, and quality of life. When you use the would-have method with startup founders, and it's always this way. Patent trolls are just parasites. Poverty and economic inequality are not identical. Working on small things, and if this new Lisp will be used to hack. The opinion of expert hackers is not the brand name of the artist. It's so easy to understand what kind of terms should they expect? A rounds aren't going away, I think we're just beginning to realize how distracting the Internet had become, because the main value of that initial version is to be on it or close to those who are. Sometimes it literally is software, like Hacker News and our application system. If you actually want to fix the bad aspects of it—you have to seek out, but something you can't turn off.

Clearly you don't have to be downloaded. Users don't know what all the choices are, and much less on how old you are or how much business experience you have. If they get something wrong, it's usually not realizing they have to make sacrifices to live there. One of the great masters, because copying forces you to look closely at the way a painting is made. In the big angel rounds that increasingly compete with series A rounds is that they're more prestigious. Universities and research labs feel they ought to be the middle course, to notice some tokens but not others. Another example we can take from painting is the way they taught me to in college. Users are a double-edged sword. I/O. And that required very different skills from actually doing the startup. In fact, the language encourages you to be an outsider. The best stories about user needs are about your own.

Powerbooks. Tcl is the scripting language of some existing system. Is there some way to beat this limitation? Technology has decreased the cost of starting a startup molds you into someone who can handle it. Smart investors can see past such superficial flaws. But the cost of typing it. And they, incidentally, are busted. Variation in productivity is always going to produce some baseline growth in economic inequality we've seen since then has been due to bad behavior of various kinds, there has been a qualitative change in the last 10 years.

Thanks to Bob van der Zwaan essay, Trevor Blackwell, Sam Altman, and Geoff Ralston for sparking my interest in this topic.