#cultivating your online experience

[tea-cat-arts]

Shen Yuan getting transported into pidw isn't "the system punishing him for being a lazy internet hater," but instead representative of "step 1 of the creative process: getting so mad at something you decide to go write your own fucking book" in this essay I will

[ofswordsandpens]

actually I do love getting comments on my criticisms of the pjo show that are like "it feels like you're just nitpicking" cause its like yeah I sure am!! welcome to the blog!!!

[seagreenstardust]

Even people who hate bkdk can’t stop talking about it

[lotus-pear]

i wish all people who use others' art as a means for financial profit a very fucking kill yourself. i mean it.

[thepromiscuousfinger]

We are Pro Don't Like? Then Mind Yo Fucking Business! in this house.

[hero-dualies-3]

I have a general dislike for you. Not a strong one but there are some serious problems. I'm not going to block you but I will cease interaction.

HELLO???

[malhare-archive]

You ever have those interests that you seldom talk about or interact with the fandom? Anyway I want my Welcome Home mutuals to know that Barnaby is my favorite :3

[widogasted]

im sorry are we making the concept of whumpfic problematic now??where is my fucking go nuts show nuts website. GUYS.

[enthesea]

idk i think that just bc someones blog is public that doesnt mean youre entitled to follow it. especially if its just another random person on the internet. if they say "dont follow me if i dont know you" i think the proper response is oh okay! i wont follow you then.

what u dont do is make a vague post whining about "what is follow culture coming too; is this what we're doing now????; why is their blog even public then 🙄"

what does it matter to you. youre literally two strangers on the internet. if you hate it so much just block them and move the fuck on!!!

[strawbebemilk]

Was just having a conversation with my friends the other day about how difficult it is to be a fan of things nowadays and actually avoid spoilers and so in preparation I blocked/muted literally every jjk tag I could think of across sites and somehow I still immediately open tiktok to spoilers (which is not too surprising as tiktok has literally the WORST filtering system I've seen, like even tumblr has their shit together better than that). But anyway it just kinda makes me sad that it's almost impossible to be online now and actually enjoy things at your own pace? It makes me think of when Netflix drops whole seasons and suddenly it's a race to binge everything so you don't get spoiled and I do think it's actively killing our enjoyment of things. Obviously this case is a lil different, the leaks still come out on a weekly basis but I think there's really something to be said about reading a finished product rather than seeing 25 blurry images of the same panel with iffy translations

[ofswordsandpens]

a little piece of advice that if you're genuinely enjoying the show and don't really want to see criticism of it, you, in fact, do not have to read nor respond to a post wherein the very first sentence states "my most critical opinions on the pjo show so far"

[the-force-awakens]

mm you know I think maybe the second you start belittling other people over their differing opinions than you, is the time someone needs to log out and go take a nappy, y'know?

[pa-pa-plasma]

hey buddy do you think the Wild West was a safe place to live or did you just not read my tags that are literally right there

No, kids should not have unsupervised acess to the internet.   Yes, I got that and it was the best thing that ever happened to me.    Its a paradox.

[mortalityplays]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

[slowlyfoggydestiny]

Soo it happen again huh

[lightboundhellhound]

when the blog you love has you blocked