#i know nothing about this book

[yourfaveisnowonfire]

Winston from 1984 is now ON FIRE!!!!!!!

Winston Smith (1984) is now on fire! He mustn't do shit now

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[egophiliac]

can't believe that skeleman has turned on us, and Halloween Prom is tomorrow.

(what a top-tier UM...we are about to be just totally obliterated in the absolute silliest way. what possible use could this power have outside of bringing us to the brink of utter holiday disaster.)

[sunny12th]

think I'm gonna start Blood Meridian now

[fictionadventurer]

I love libraries.

I'm browsing the WWI shelves (as you do) and notice a very old book about the war. I glance at the first pages that talk about how one day the war will be over and we'll look at this place and not see any signs of the battlefield.

Then it hits me. And I check the publishing date.

This book was printed before the war's end. Not written. Printed. The physical object was created in 1918, while the war in question was raging and the end was as yet uncertain.

Now I'm standing on the other side of the apocalypse, with this physical link to that era in my hands. I'm living proof that the war did end and life did go on and we can all look at the end of the world as a long-ago memory.

Reading old books is cool enough, connecting our minds and hearts through the ideas of people who lived long ago, but there's something extra profound about holding a copy of the book that comes from the time that it was written. It's a physical link between the past and the present connecting me to those long-ago people. A piece of the past come into the future that gives me the chance to almost take the hand of some long-ago reader, to hold something they could have held, connecting not just mentally but physically to their era, a moment of connection across more than a century.

Excuse me while I go weep.

[red-moon-at-night]

okay the whole vase is great but something about Helen sitting on Aphrodite's lap as she wraps one arm around her shoulder and brushes her leg with her hand, staring into her eyes like that... as she is persuading Helen to go with Paris (while Peitho aka persuasion stands behind them) is so incredibly iconic.

and gay. toxic yuri, if you will.

[doctorsiren]

give this angle another tri

[bugsinshoes]

BOOK OF BILL SPOLIERS UNDER THE CUT

fiddauthor nation i have (tried) to fix your photo.

i actually love them it hurts

[theladysunami]

I listen to a lot of audiobook murder mysteries, which has me thinking:

Shen Yuan transmigrating into a murder mystery… as the killer!

There are a couple of ways the story could go.

First Option: Shen Yuan lets his System know, in no uncertain terms, he will not be murdering anyone.

Its response: [Alternate Plotline Initiated. New Assignment: Designated Red Herring].

Poor Shen Qingqiu finds himself stuck in a whole murder mystery series, and any time anyone is murdered, he somehow ends up being the number one suspect!

The victim? Probably picked a fight with Shen Qingqiu at some point. (Shen Qingqiu tries to avoid such arguments, but it never seems to work!)

The murder weapon? Yeah, Shen Qingqiu is almost guaranteed to have touched it. (Shen Qingqiu is severely tempted to start wearing gloves 24/7.)

The body? Either Shen Qingqiu finds it himself at some inopportune time, and/or it was stashed somewhere “only” he is supposed to have access to. (At some point it's just: Shen Qingqiu opens a door… sees a body… closes the door. “Time to call the cops, yet again.”)

Shen Qingqiu ends up a tad paranoid about the whole thing, setting up cameras outside his house, in his office, in his car, etc. just to (hopefully) stop people from planting evidence any of those places.

If anyone asks about the truly absurd number of (eventually dropped) murder allegations, Shen Qingqiu insists he's cursed. Even with genre blinders on (making the number of convoluted murders in the area seem normal somehow), it's hard for anyone to argue the point.

For Shen Qingqiu's day job (when he's not busy being charged with murder) he works as a professor at a university with a highly regarded Criminology & Criminal Justice program. I'm thinking the original goods was a literature professor, with a strong distaste for cops, who was known for grading anyone in the criminal justice program exceedingly harshly. Naturally one of his students is the protagonist, Luo Binghe.

After his transmigration, professor Shen Qingqiu suddenly becomes a very kind and doting professor with a real passion for literature. This leaves Luo Binghe quickly smitten and makes him a very motivated amateur detective, since he's determined to prove his beloved's innocence as quickly as possible and as often as needed!

Second Option: Shen Yuan takes over after the original goods already committed the murder.

He wakes up with a splitting headache (the victim attempted to defend themselves presumably), looks at his bloody hands… looks at the victim… looks at the weapon… looks at his bloody hands again. “Damn it, Airplane.”

He decides he doesn't want to try and hide a body actually, just to be caught by the protagonist later and charged with a whole slew of things in addition to murder, so he calls the cops himself. He might as well take advantage of the fact he has a concussion and literally doesn't remember a thing. Maybe he can get the charges reduced somewhat and get a lighter sentence.

Of course the first cop that arrives at the scene is Yue Qingyuan, who as the #1 Xiao-Jiu stan gives Shen Qingqiu way too much benefit of the doubt. The most obvious evidence also keeps being erased or damaged by weird as hell coincidences.

Shen Qingqiu knows he certainly isn't responsible for damaging evidence and wonders if the System is working overtime behind the scenes to ensure there actually is a mystery for Luo Binghe to solve. (After all, it wouldn't be much of a story if Shen Qingqiu was already charged and sentenced before Luo Binghe had a chance to even do anything.)

To his complete bewilderment, after a few days leave to recover from the concussion, Shen Qingqiu is actually allowed to return to his university teaching job. He decides to make the best of it, since who knows how long he'll be a free man.

As in the first scenario, a few months later and Luo Binghe is absolutely smitten, not to mention all the other students and faculty that have come to adore him.

As Shen Qingqiu has successfully endeared himself to pretty much anyone and everyone local that could actually charge him or provide eyewitness testimony, not to mention all the shady shit about murder victim Qiu Jianluo the ongoing investigation keeps digging up, the plot stalls for a bit until the state police (aka Huan Hua Palace) are finally called in by Qiu Haitang.

Unfortunately for the ‘HHP’ folks, the protagonist himself is on Shen Qingqiu's side, and Luo Binghe is perfectly happy to muddy the waters by conveniently “losing” evidence, sending them after every single red herring he comes across, and “accidentally” digging up dirt on all the shady dealings going on in their department.

The System keeps trying to motivate Shen Qingqiu to hide evidence, lie, or do literally anything suspicious to progress the plot further, but all its punishment protocols involve sabotaging Shen Qingqiu's coverup attempts (of which he has none) or revealing information to the protagonist (who is complicit by this point) so it's fresh out of luck.

Eventually the System gives up and Shen Qingqiu is congratulated for “getting away with murder!” despite the fact he didn't actually do anything.

“Seriously? Does it even count as getting away with murder when the original goods was the actual murderer? I didn't kill anyone!”

[...]

[wewerebornsextuplets]

i do my lil dancy dance

[space-sheep08]

Actually so tired that people mainly focus on the bdsm when they talk about La Pianiste when we literally have this dynamic right here. Like, that's insane.

What if you were a little girl in her 40's who couldn't grow up because of your mother-wife who made you sleep in her bed and forced you to repress every sexual desires and thoughts of becoming your own person just to keep you close to her ? What if you fought back and yearned for dangerous things out of her reach ? But also, what if you let her because it's all you've ever known and been taught to want ?

[gregrulzok]

Devil's Minion is an interesting title though, isn't it.

I mean one of them is a creature designed and all but required to kill. He could eat animals, technically, but we know that isn't sustainable long term - even Louis, who genuinely tried it, wanted it so bad, couldn't keep the diet up for long. That's just not sustainable for their bodies, not what they were made for.

And the many long centuries of isolation, many long centuries of being unable to go out during the day, to talk to people without raising suspicion - and the changing of times, watching the culture shift and drift away from you without being able to fully follow it... Anyone would be distant from humans, from humanity, it's a shift in the psyche supported from every angle to make you view people as prey rather than equals.

And then the other? Human. A guy. He had relatives, friends, probably. He's more than likely lost people before, knows the grief of death far more intimately than a being designed to take two or three lives in a day ever could.

And yet, night after night, he holds the hunter in his arms. Cuddles up to him, ignores the fact that any warmth in his lover cost another human being their life. He ignores the pain and suffering they went through despite being fully equipped to understand it, ignores the grief and heartache he knows their close ones must be feeling - more than that, he takes pleasure in it! He drinks the blood of the monster, for no reason other than his own pleasure, and he tastes in it the wails and screams and desperation of those that were killed for it, and he's addicted to it. He wants more. He craves it, needs it.

More than THAT, even, he wants nothing more than to be part of it. To have the power to take human lives, to be the same as the alleged devil. Armand had no choice in the matter, not really, and has no choice but to kill - Daniel wants it, more than anything, he's constantly preoccupied with it, begs for it over and over and over.

.

And on the other hand, it's Daniel who gets his wishes granted. Daniel who can point at anything he wants and have it in his possession the next moment. Sure, he has to follow Armand's whims and impulses, teach Armand, follow him everywhere, but at the end of the day Armand is serving Daniel as much as he is himself, if not more.

And it's Armand who has to, through arguments and tears and heartache, defend what he sees as the one boundary he set in the relationship. The one line he has begged Daniel over and over again not to try to cross, Daniel has to test again and again.

He'll do anything for Daniel, anything, except for the one thing that would hurt him most - and its still not enough.

...

Devil's Minion, huh.

[watchingwisteria]

im so sorry i get it now i really do, the gay angels have me shaking screaming crying at all hours of the day and night, they mean everything to me i am literally thinking about them all the time and what it would mean to love someone steadily and silently through eternity, what it would mean to love across the lines of a divine war of supposed good and evil, what it would mean to carve out a space for oneself and ones lover in no man’s land, in the grey and moral ambiguity when you were created to be black and white without blemish. god i love them so much i just

[egophiliac]

he did it! 🐍 and it only took...uhhh...well, there probably could've been less punches, but why hold back!

PUNCHES FOR EVERYONE

[the-gay-prometheus]

Ok wait- on the Flatland note regarding Bill's origin story-

Everyone is out here trying to figure out what exactly makes Bill's eye weird. Like. How can he see into the third dimension while the others can't? What makes it weird other than seeing into the third dimension? Do the others in his dimension have two eyes - but how would that make it so they can't see the third dimension? Do they have no eyes at all (definitely not, cuz apparently they have evil optometrists)?

I'm about to (probably not) blow everyone's freakin minds.

Here's a poster for the Flatland movie:

What do you notice about them? Anything interesting? Perhaps something about their eye(s)?

Their eye(s) are located on one side of their face. They can only see forward, or, if they turn around, backward. And that's because, well, it's the 2nd dimension - there are is only left or right, forward or backward. I repeat - they can only see forward.

Now let's look at our beloved (beloathed, and everything in between) triangle demon:

Notice anything about his eye? Anything different? Anything... Weird? Strange?

It's in the middle of his face. Which poses an interesting issue in a 2nd dimensional world... Sure he can look left and right, but what is his default?

His default, if he is on a two dimensional plane, is to look up. "Up" is not a concept in the second dimension. There is no "up" because "up" implies depth - and depth is 3rd dimension, not 2nd.

He doesn't have any special powers that allow him to see into the 3rd dimension - I mean, obviously he has lots of special powers but... They aren't what inherently allow him to see into the 3rd dimension. It's the placement of his eye. The placement is his "defect," not the eye itself. He sees into the 3rd dimension because he has no choice. His default always was to see something that no one else in his world could see - the sky, the stars, and whatever else lay above.

The reason they tried to chemically blind him was because there was no other way to make it so he couldn't see into the third dimension. They probably thought it was a mercy - the poor kid was stuck with the default of always seeing of something that no one else in his world could ever physically see.

[fictionadventurer]

Maybe Jane Austen's real genius was that, unlike other authors at the time, she didn't have long sections where characters share their backstory. Or rather, when she did it, she set it up like a mystery so we'd want to know the backstory.

Instead of having a character be like, "Here's three chapters about my life," soon after showing up in the novel, she'd sprinkle little clues through the story that make us wonder, "What's Colonel Brandon's deal?" and then closer to the end of the story, Colonel Brandon would tell us what his deal was. We'd wonder "Why does Mr. Darcy do all those horrible things?" and then he'd give an explanation that includes a lot of backstory.

And these infodumps always come in response to significant moments of the story. She'd engage our minds and our emotions and then give us the infodump at a point when we care about the information it contains. Compared to some other authors (even some that came long after) it seems like a significant innovation.