#just yakkin

[casinocircus]

so do the gorillas know theyre backed by silver like was that their choice

[casinocircus]

This kills me because I feel like I keep seeing the same kind of things related to this over and over in writing advice spaces, where there are people who seem to have this idea that there is a "right" and "wrong" way to do everything, and you need to religiously avoid the wrong things at all costs.

Here's my issue with that mindset, I have always thought that in any creative endeavor, there aren't actually "rules" to any of it. There are, instead, tools that one can use to accomplish whatever specific goal they have in mind for creating that thing in particular. It frustrates me that I see this all the time in both writing advice and advice for visual art, that you should NEVER do x y or z, because it's just not good.

There's hardly any explanation as to why these techniques are supposedly bad, and if there is, it's even rarer to see it acknowledged that using those techniques can undermine your efforts to accomplish certain goals with your work in particular if you even have them.

The techniques people have found and named are tools for you to use, that's it! You wouldn't use a can opener to hammer a nail in. It would probably be a pain in the ass! But that's not to say that can openers are useless and you should never use them ever or you're committing a grave sin! If I'm opening a can and you look at me with disgust for reaching for the can opener, I'm going to realize you don't know anything about what I'm trying to do or what the tool I'm using is for. So much of the artistic process is learning what tools you can use and how to use them best! It's not as simple as being told, "Do this, not that." It's so important to learn how to assess for yourself what you're using and why!

Blindly sticking to supposed rules without knowing what they're actually for and why is a deeply insecure place to create from imo, and it's such a shame because it hinders creators in expressing their visions in more ways than they realize.

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.

[lunozapp]

literally just yackkin at the wall here

but how tragic and gutwrenching and heartbreaking would it be if there actually was a good ending to indigo but rambley was slowly dying because how the fuck could a pc/server run that long without maintenance

[drink-tang-gang]

In Tiny Toons Looniversity, Lola Bunny was never intended to be the Acme Looniversity chef at first. According to Ben Siemon, the writer of the episode, “Soufflé Girl Hey”, the show initially planned to have Pepé Le Pew as the chef. This was likely during the development phase and Dave Alverez. They gave him a bio where he now has respect towards women and puts his passion and love towards food instead. He said the idea was turned down because “too much baggage” (probably due to WB’s response of his controversy) and Lola Bunny replaced him. Keep in mind that this was written in 2021 around a time when Space Jam: A New Legacy was huge for the company.

Wow!! Can I please have a link to where you found this info? it'd be really useful! Thanks for letting me know. Reading this, as much as I love Pepe, I think it's better Lola's the chef than him if he was gonna be reintroduced with a (imo, tired) disclaimer. Makes me sad though that Lola's once again not being written in deliberation, it reinforces her whole issue of not rly bein a Tune... just kinda put in stuff n not really considering her character in these decisions (bc well.... she doesn't originally have one. At least, not an authentic one. Looney Tune-y one....)

[coldmilkchoices]

gonna start tagging personal posts as yakkin btw. if u even care

[lurkiestvoid]

*waves from bottom of the pit*

I feel like a lot of the funny people who came here during the reddit exodus have either been banned or just stopped posting and I'm not sure which it is but regardless my dashboard just feels a little sad and empty.

[bitterkarella]

Midnight Pals: Church Ladies

Jessica Leonard: Submitted for the approval of the midnight society, i call this the tale of the church that hates witches Leonard: so this guy's dad was a lawyer but he gave it all up to be a farmer Leonard: and join a church Leonard: this guy just really loves church

Leonard: this farmer guy is all "hey i love tilling the soil, i'm gonna do that" Ursula Vernon: right right, tilling the soil Vernon: i mean, yeah, you gotta til the soil Vernon: real important part of being a farmer Vernon: probably the most important part

Leonard: so they join this church Leonard: but get this Leonard: it turns out this church Leonard: is disrespectful to women Angela Carter: whoa Leonard: i know, right???

Angela Carter: you're telling me this church doesn't respect womens autonomy? Leonard: no! in fact, they're kinda backwards on that issue Carter: wow Carter: well Carter: i would simply NOT go to that church

Leonard: yeah like this church says women can't be in leadership positions Carter: WOW Carter: well Carter: as a strong independent woman Carter: who is also intelligent Carter: i would not be down with that Patricia Highsmith: yeah i dunno i think they got a point

Carter: oh really patricia? is that so Highsmith: i'm just sayin' Highsmith: you know dames Highsmith: always yak yak yakkin' Highsmith: you want some skirt running a church council? Highsmith: she'll get her damn menses all over the tabernacle

Highsmith: look, i'm just sayin' Highsmith: women ain't there to do heavy thinkin' Highsmith: they're there to make casseroles and look pretty Highsmith: mostly look pretty Highsmith: i mean there ain't nothing like a dame am i right? Carter: Highsmith: the boys know what i'm talkin' about Edward Lee: bro Lee: bro Lee: you're being kinda problematic bro Highsmith: i'm just sayin' what we're all thinkin!

Leonard: so the church ladies are all "we love making casseroles for our men" Leonard: "also i haven't cum in 20 years, i should pray on that" Carter: this is like scary accurate church lady dialogue

Leonard: so the reverend is all "hmm our church ladies are getting too mouthy" Leonard: "what if we sent them to a torture farm for a weekend" Leonard: "ya know, just to scare 'em back in line" Leonard: but that's when these church ladies Leonard: stop making casseroles Leonard: and start getting real

Leonard: so the women are all "man, this church sucks! it hates women and its obsessed with witches" Leonard: "we should, like, join a different church"

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Rent control works

This Saturday (May 20), I’ll be at the GAITHERSBURG Book Festival with my novel Red Team Blues; then on May 22, I’m keynoting Public Knowledge’s Emerging Tech conference in DC.

On May 23, I’ll be in TORONTO for a book launch that’s part of WEPFest, a benefit for the West End Phoenix, onstage with Dave Bidini (The Rheostatics), Ron Diebert (Citizen Lab) and the whistleblower Dr Nancy Olivieri.

David Roth memorably described the job of neoliberal economists as finding “new ways to say ‘actually, your boss is right.’” Not just your boss: for decades, economists have formed a bulwark against seemingly obvious responses to the most painful parts of our daily lives, from wages to education to health to shelter:

https://popula.com/2023/04/30/yakkin-about-chatgpt-with-david-roth/

How can we solve the student debt crisis? Well, we could cancel student debt and regulate the price of education, either directly or through free state college.

How can we solve America’s heath-debt crisis? We could cancel health debt and create Medicare For All.

How can we solve America’s homelessness crisis? We could build houses and let homeless people live in them.

How can we solve America’s wage-stagnation crisis? We could raise the minimum wage and/or create a federal jobs guarantee.

How can we solve America’s workplace abuse crisis? We could allow workers to unionize.

How can we solve America’s price-gouging greedflation crisis? With price controls and/or windfall taxes.

How can we solve America’s inequality crisis? We could tax billionaires.

How can we solve America’s monopoly crisis? We could break up monopolies.

How can we solve America’s traffic crisis? We could build public transit.

How can we solve America’s carbon crisis? We can regulate carbon emissions.

These answers make sense to everyone except neoliberal economists and people in their thrall. Rather than doing the thing we want, neoliberal economists insist we must unleash “markets” to solve the problems, by “creating incentives.” That may sound like a recipe for a small state, but in practice, “creating incentives” often involves building huge bureaucracies to “keep the incentives aligned” (that is, to prevent private firms from ripping off public agencies).

This is how we get “solutions” that fail catastrophically, like:

Public Service Loan Forgiveness instead of debt cancellation and free college:

https://studentloansherpa.com/likely-ineligible/

The gig economy instead of unions and minimum wages:

https://www.newswise.com/articles/research-reveals-majority-of-gig-economy-workers-are-earning-below-minimum-wage

Interest rate hikes instead of price caps and windfall taxes:

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/03/1173371788/the-fed-raises-interest-rates-again-in-what-could-be-its-final-attack-on-inflati

Tax breaks for billionaire philanthropists instead of taxing billionaires:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/10/winners-take-all-modern-philanthropy-means-that-giving-some-away-is-more-important-than-how-you-got-it/

Subsidizing Uber instead of building mass transit:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/cities-turn-uber-instead-buses-trains/

Fraud-riddled carbon trading instead of emissions limits:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/27/voluntary-carbon-market/#trust-me

As infuriating as all of this “actually, your boss is right” nonsense is, the most immediate and continuously frustrating aspect of it is the housing crisis, which has engulfed cities all over the world, to the detriment of nearly everyone.

America led the way on screwing up housing. There were two major New Deal/post-war policies that created broad (but imperfect and racially biased) prosperity in America: housing subsidies and labor unions. Of the two, labor unions were the most broadly inclusive, most available across racial and gender lines, and most engaged with civil rights struggles and other progressive causes.

So America declared war on labor unions and told working people that their only path to intergenerational wealth was to buy a home, wait for it to “appreciate,” and sell it on for a profit. This is a disaster. Without unions to provide countervailing force, every part of American life has worsened, with stagnating wages lagging behind skyrocketing expenses for education, health, retirement, and long-term care. For nearly every homeowner, this means that their “most valuable asset” — the roof over their head — must be liquidated to cover debts. Meanwhile, their kids, burdened with six-figure student debt — will have little or nothing left from the sale of the family home with which to cover a downpayment in a hyperinflated market:

https://gen.medium.com/the-rents-too-damned-high-520f958d5ec5

Meanwhile, rent inflation is screaming ahead of other forms of inflation, burdening working people beyond any ability to pay. Giant Wall Street firms have bought up huge swathes of the country’s housing stock, transforming it into overpriced, undermaintained slums that you can be evicted from at the drop of a hat:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

Transforming housing from a human right to an “asset” was always going to end in a failure to build new housing stock and regulate the rental market. It’s reaching a breaking point. “Superstar cities” like New York and San Francisco have long been priced out of the reach of working people, but now they’re becoming unattainable for double-income, childless, college-educated adults in their prime working years:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/15/upshot/migrations-college-super-cities.html

A city that you can’t live in is a failure. A system that can’t provide decent housing is a failure. The “your boss is right, actually” crowd won: we don’t build public housing, we don’t regulate rents, and it suuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks.

Maybe we could try doing things instead of “aligning incentives?”

Like, how about rent control.

God, you can already hear them squealing! “Price controls artificially distort well-functioning markets, resulting in a mismatch between supply and demand and the creation of the dreaded deadweight loss triangle!”

Rent control “causes widespread shortages, leaving would-be renters high and dry while screwing landlords (the road to hell, so says the orthodox economist, is paved with good intentions).”

That’s been the received wisdom for decades, fed to us by Chicago School economists who are so besotted with their own mathematical models that any mismatch between the models’ predictions and the real world is chalked up to errors in the real world, not the models. It’s pure economism: “If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

But, as Mark Paul writes for The American Prospect, rent control works:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2023-05-16-economists-hate-rent-control/

Rent control doesn’t constrain housing supply:

https://dornsife.usc.edu/pere/rent-matters

At least some of the time, rent control expands housing supply:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-9906.2007.00334.x

The real risk of rent control is landlords exploiting badly written laws to kick out tenants and convert their units to condos — that’s not a problem with rent control, it’s a problem with eviction law:

https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/DMQ.pdf

Meanwhile, removing rent control doesn’t trigger the predicted increases in housing supply:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094119006000635

Rent control might create winners (tenants) and losers (landlords), but it certainly doesn’t make everyone worse off — as the neoliberal doctrine insists it must. Instead, tenants who benefit from rent control have extra money in their pockets to spend on groceries, debt service, vacations, and child-care.

Those happier, more prosperous people, in turn, increase the value of their landlords’ properties, by creating happy, prosperous neighborhoods. Rent control means that when people in a neighborhood increase its value, their landlords can’t kick them out and rent to richer people, capturing all the value the old tenants created.

What is life like under rent control? It’s great. You and your family get to stay put until you’re ready to move on, as do your neighbors. Your kids don’t have to change schools and find new friends. Old people aren’t torn away from communities who care for them:

https://ideas.repec.org/a/uwp/landec/v58y1982i1p109-117.html

In Massachusetts, tenants with rent control pay half the rent that their non-rent-controlled neighbors pay:

https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/housing%20market%202014.pdf

Rent control doesn’t just make tenants better off, it makes society better off. Rather than money flowing from a neighborhood to landlords, rent control allows the people in a community to invest it there: opening and patronizing businesses.

Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. As the housing crisis worsens, states are finally bringing back rent control. New York has strengthened rent control for the first time in 40 years:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/12/nyregion/rent-regulation-laws-new-york.html

California has a new statewide rent control law:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/11/business/economy/california-rent-control.html

They’re battling against anti-rent-control state laws pushed by ALEC, the right-wing architects of model legislation banning action on climate change, broadband access, and abortion:

https://www.nmhc.org/research-insight/analysis-and-guidance/rent-control-laws-by-state/

But rent control has broad, democratic support. Strong majorities of likely voters support rent control:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/03/07/metro/new-statewide-poll-shows-strong-support-rent-control/

And there’s a kind of rent control that has near unanimous support: the 30-year fixed mortgage. For the 67% of Americans who live in owner-occupied homes, the existence of the federally-backed (and thus federally subsidized) fixed mortgage means that your monthly shelter costs are fixed for life. What’s more, these costs go down the longer you pay them, as mortgage borrowers refinance when interest rates dip.

We have a two-tier system: if you own a home, then the longer you stay put, the cheaper your “rent” gets. If you rent a home, the longer you stay put, the more expensive your home gets over time.

America needs a shit-ton more housing — regular housing for working people. Mr Market doesn’t want to build it, no matter how many “incentives” we dangle. Maybe it’s time we just did stuff instead of building elaborate Rube Goldberg machines in the hopes of luring the market’s animal sentiments into doing it for us.

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset

[Image ID: A beautifully laid dining room table in a luxury flat. Outside of the windows looms a rotting shanty town with storm-clouds overhead.]

Image: ozz13x (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shanty_Town_Hong_Kong_China_March_2013.jpg

Matt Brown (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dining_room_in_Centre_Point_penthouse.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[rvrend]

" looking out to the congregation, i see many ... tired faces. many of us who'd rather be back in bed, asleep and forgetting about God. so why don't we all just take a day off, relax for once ? kick our feet up, take a nap, laze around. doesn't that sound nice?

" ... NO!!!

" do you think GOD ever takes a day off ? fat chance ! no ... we all haul our sad, pathetic behinds here every sunday for one reason: responsibility. it doesn't matter if you love the Guy, i know there's plenty of things i'd rather be doing than standing here yakkin' to you sad saps ! but we have a responsibility to God to come here every sunday. there's only one place you'll go if you don't go here, and it sure ain't as pretty !

" so whether you come here … " he looks to shapey, " kicking and screaming … so long as it's here, you'll be able to go kicking and screaming right through those pearly gates. amen. "

[trailerparktombombadil]

May 30

I still need to put mulch down in some places and work on my shade garden (it's atrocious as you'll see eventually), but other than that it's nearly sit-back-and-watch-it-grow time.

I'm trying out my mom's 'nice camera' and I wouldn't say I'm great at photography, but nevertheless, here's a photo dump.

My dog, Arwen, and the cat, Minerva/Sparky (1 of 3), enjoyed the rainy day - until Minerva got locked out of the house for a couple hours and preferred the jungle/garden to shelter in rather than under the trailer and got SOAKED. I don't blame her. I want to Honey-I-Shrunk-myself and just retire in my garden. The Russian sage and the amaranths look like they could be forest dwellings in a fantasy world. Ugh I love those amaranths. I do not regret planting them last year, not one tiny bit.

Okay enough yakkin'.

[newtypezaku]

Sis is just yakkin some deculture, as you do

[casinocircus]

I'm a stiff breeze away from custom ordering my own organic fabrics and making my own damn clothes and im not joking

[drink-tang-gang]

do u have any thoughts about tiny toons looniversity?

It was fine! I grew up liking animaniacs more than tiny toons (personally, I thought them the more apt successors to the tunes compared to tiny toons, but that thought blurb is for another day). Whenever I watched tt I was more focused on the lt cameos.

So it’s funny that I had a better time with looniversity than the animaniacs reboot! I definitely enjoyed the slapstick. I also loved the introduction of VERY creative toon lore and had a blast seeing it incorporated into the show. laughter literally as the backbone of the endurance of toon dna? How some toons are drawn with a bounceback deficiency (because not all cartoons are funny?) brilliant.

I still disagree with the babs and buster sibling arrangement. It created cliched problems in the show that the core of their characters had no issues with in the original… such as babs and buster learning to develop themselves outside the tight bond they have?? like in tiny toons, they were a duo through n through (so much they had to remind the audience there was no relation) yet they had no issue doing their own thing with their friends. it’s just a weird problem to create to me, and tiresome for twin archetypes. I joked with some friends that the decision was made so that there’d be room for the inevitable buster/plucky homoerotic rivalry and??? Honest to god dead of ass I was joking but the damn show coined their ship name by like. episode two. 🤣 they blow kisses at each other and then say they hate each other n everything. It’s like they’re trying to be giving baffy but baffy is so much funnier and spicier that I really don’t care for whatever thing they wanna tease in the future (because we all know Jokes is as far as they can legally go) with those two😭

haha, tangent aside I liked looniversity because of the creative location and use of both tunes and tiny toons. I could tell the crew had so much fun with Granny, she stole the spotlight for me whenever she appeared on screen. There’s so much respect and love for the cast in this show, it’s great! Some jokes didn’t land, of course, but they didn’t fall so hard to where it interrupted the flow of the story. More like little hiccups. I wasn’t too hot about some episodes being tweened (different studios for different episodes I suppose?) and the quality of anim imo, suffered. I probably won’t binge the next batch and watch episodes as I feel like watchin em :D

[coldmilkchoices]

is it some sort of unspoken law of the universe that the most active ppl in the groupme are the ones who care the least

[carmelasopranono1defenseattorney]

i really like how much of this episode is dedicated to jun just flirting with this random woman i hope it made the "less yakkin more whackin" people furious