thecurioustale

[thecurioustale]

Be very careful about that bluff, though. The way you deliver it matters a lot. The threat of lawsuit is one of the first recourses of people who are never going to sue in a million years.

Put it toward the end, and underhype it. Say something like "I look forward to resolving this matter ourselves, but am prepared to seek a legal remedy if need be."

Definitely do NOT put your threat of lawsuit at the top of the letter and phrase it along the lines of "I'm gonna sue the shit out of you!"

The people on the other end of this correspondence are sociopaths. They don't take it personally; they just want as much money as possible. You shouldn't take it personally either—or, rather, you should put up that appearance.

I may have ended up going into tech, but getting a pre-law degree and working for attorneys for a few years repeatedly saved me from getting totally ripped off in my early 20s. So many charlatans are only able to get away with their bullshit because they expect you to not know what your rights are or how to create a paper trail.

I once had a landlord try to withhold my entire security deposit after I moved out despite leaving the place in good shape. Just by writing a letter that A) cited the state statute saying a landlord must provide an itemized list with invoices for any repairs they deduct from a tenant’s security deposit, B) bluffed by declaring my intention to file suit if they did not (and cited the same statute again, which says that tenants are entitled to recover DOUBLE what the landlord withheld if they did so in bad faith) , and C) sending it via certified mail with return receipt (so they couldn’t claim not to have received it), they sent me back a check for like 2/3 of what they tried to withhold, plus the itemized list, plus an apology. I spent $2 on postage and half an hour on the letter and got back $300.

Another time, I got into a car accident (in which I was officially found not at fault) where the other person was driving a rental car. Over a year after the fact, I received a letter from some sketchy claims adjuster demanding immediate payment for around $2000 in damages to the other car. Once I stopped panicking, I gathered the info from my old insurance claim and called the adjuster, and some very snippy lady told me the letter was sent in error and I should disregard it. I followed up with her by email restating exactly what she told me on the phone, instructing them to work with my insurance company on any future inquiries about the accident, and threatening to involve my attorney (which I did not have) if they ever directly contacted me about it again. And again, I got an apology and saved myself a crazy amount of money.

If you are getting ripped off (or sense you are about to be), you want to ask yourself two things:

1. Can I indisputably prove that I said/did this? That they said/did this? When?

2. What rights do I have under the law? (For a lot of issues, googling “can X legally do Y��� + your jurisdiction is a good place to start.)

And then, if you’re in the right, bluff. Act like you’re going to sue even if you know you don’t have the time or resources to do it. They don’t know you won’t, and even if they think they’d win, they know that would cost them more in attorney’s fees than just letting this go.

[thecurioustale]

I actually think the current food stamp food item eligibility regime is pretty awesome.

It strictly applies to food, which is a blessing in disguise because it means you don't get the choice of spending your food money on toiletries. I've done that many times in my life, and going hungry is absolutely miserable. With food stamps only being for food, then at least whatever other problems are going on you're not going to go hungry.

It applies to virtually all food, with some exceptions I'll discuss shortly. You definitely want a universalist approach. Turning a welfare program into a moral censure regime is sociopathic. It doesn't matter if people are buying canned tuna or fresh lobster. It's their food stamp money and their choice. The purpose of food aid is not to create an underclass to be the butt of other people's self-righteous hatred. People know for themselves what they want to eat and what groceries they want to get. The current regime also covers food with dual non-food uses, like baking soda and distilled water, rather than excluding them and creating strange, unintuitive holes in the system; and this is also a good thing.

There are only two major food category exclusions: (thermally) hot food, and food served in hospitality (i.e. restaurants). Both of these are surprisingly effective compromises in an extremely fraught minefield of challenges to the program.

Regarding the latter: Restaurants may rightly complain "Why can a cold grocery store sub sandwich be eligible for food stamps but not my cold sub sandwich?" but the answer to that is that "Your sandwich costs between two and ten times more money than the grocery store version, and the program has to balance cost-effectiveness with its objectives of feeding people." But then a restaurant may ask "Then why allow cold sub sandwiches at all? People can just buy the base ingredients and save even more money?" But then the problem is that "prepared food" is actually the vast majority of food items that you're going to find in a grocery store, and if you ruled that out categorically from food stamp eligibility then you'd end up drastically limiting the usefulness of the program, and if you tried to deal with it through a system of individual inclusions and exclusions you'll end up with huge administrative overhead for very little improvement in system efficiency, and everyone whose food items are not allowed is still going to be upset. We also don't want to end up in a regime where something objectively more nutritious and filling, like a sub sandwich prepared on-site, is not eligible, while something straight from the factory with far less nutritional value, like a bag of marshmallows, is. The obvious solution to this is simply to put the decision in the hands of the food aid consumer. Nevertheless, some states (nine, according to Google), do play around on the periphery of this idea, allowing limited use of food stamps at restaurants, often for additionally-burdened populations like the elderly and the disabled. I am not inherently opposed to this, although I do think it is worrying, because you can use up an entire month's worth of food stamps on just a few meals this way, greatly undercutting the value of the program. A similar problem also exists at places like gas stations and other convenience stores, where food prices are typically double or triple what you'll find in a supermarket. There is also the issue of "local" food; for instance, my local farmers' market accepts food stamps, but the food there is restaurant-priced, and the program only offers value due to a spend-matching program that my state has, whereby some amount of food stamps that you use at the farmers market also generate an equal number of "farmers' market coupons" that can only be used specifically on fresh produce items at the market. So, in effect, produce at the farmers' market costs half what it would otherwise, if you're buying it with food stamps. This is the only way I've been able to eat significant amounts of produce from the farmers' market. Given that "eating more produce" is the goal of the benefits-matching program in my state, I would call it a rousing success. But it takes that additional subsidy to work. And the same logic doesn't really apply to restaurants, where an additional subsidy would not go toward a nutrition goal like getting people to eat more produce; it would simply go to the far higher operating costs of running a restaurant compared to a market.

Regarding the former—that is, the exclusion on hot food—this is a clever if imperfect way of imposing fairness on the system so that grocery stores cannot undercut restaurants by operating their own phantom restaurants in-store and selling food that can be purchased through food stamps. Most such food is hot: chicken, pizza, etc. Most restaurant food is also hot (not counting things like soda and ice cream). Some exceptions exist, like cookies, salads, and most sub sandwiches. But it's a remarkably effective singular criterion that ends up drawing a relatively clean line between grocery store food and hospitality food. Grocery stores do still have a little bit of wiggle room to undercut restaurants, especially certain kinds of restaurants, e.g. the previous example about cold sub sandwiches, and they can also take hot food items and chill them, and then they magically become eligible. And we are talking literally the exact same items, like rotisserie chickens, which are sold hot in one part of the store and thus are not eligible for food stamps, and are sold cold in another part of the store and thus are eligible. That's a little bit wonky, but, honestly, I would challenge you to try and draw a better dividing line without abandoning the elegance of using a single criterion and resorting to an impenetrable laundry list of inclusionary and exclusionary criteria. So, on the whole, I rather like the hot foods prohibition, because it protects restaurants without seriously limiting the scope of eligible food items to consumers.

Anyway, I am of the opinion that most if not all public welfare programs should be universal. This includes food stamps. Universal programs are much harder to use as a wedge issue. I think every American should get food stamps. I think everyone should get the full benefit, no partial benefits. And I think the benefit value should be pegged to the cost of living—perhaps with geographical modifiers to account for discrepancies therein. And I think the value of the benefit should be big enough that people can realistically use it to eat a wide and varied diet without going hungry. I think that this baseline should be computed at grocery store prices, however; not convenience store prices. Food desert areas would perhaps have access to a higher cost-of-living modifier. Although this kind of granular specificity does start to cause administrative overhead scope-creep, which the program administration should be mindful of constraining. As for how to pay for food stamps for every American (and that includes American residents, not just citizens), there would be many ways to do it, but my first thought would be a tax on financial instrument transactions, e.g. stock trades. The tax, which I believe is formally known as a financial transaction tax, could be quite microscopic, as trillions of dollars of these instruments are traded on a daily basis, and the financial system has a lot of room for additional friction before we would begin to truly damage the economy by discouraging capital flows. In fact you could probably pay for a vast expansion of the welfare system in this way, and it would be comparatively easier (though certainly easy) to chase down rich people's "fair share" of tax through this means than via the income tax, which the rich are criminally good at evading.

The whole thing about work requirements for welfare aid is ridiculous to me. The nominal purpose is to reduce system fraud and incentivize labor, but it is an arbitrary choice we make to classify "eating without working" as "fraud"; certainly the country has more than enough money for everyone to eat. As for incentivizing labor, that could be better achieved through increasing worker rights and pay. While this would drive inflation relative to where prices are at more (as the pandemic aid programs showed us, given that unemployment payments were one of the key contributors to inflation during that period), the value of the food stamp benefit would always exceed the loss of value due to inflation because of the fact that most people are not living in poverty and because any food stamp benefit value would be far lower than what people actually spend on food in the aggregate. "Essential" food spending is much smaller than "luxury" food spending, and the point here is that the inflationary driver would only be coming from a partial segment of a much bigger market. To create a food inflation spiral with a universal food stamp program you would have to make the food stamp benefit much larger, to the point where existing food prices are no longer strong discriminators in consumer purchasing decisions. So, for example, if the food stamp value were big enough that people could eat ribeye steak every single day, the demand for ribeye steaks would explode and thus the price would explode too. But for something like potatoes this isn't true: Most people already buy all the potatoes they want, and no amount of food stamps would change their demand. So you want a food stamp benefit value that hits a sweet spot where people can afford steak sometimes and potatoes always, but not steak always. This way inflation would be moderate and endurable. Limiting the benefit to food only (as opposed to other consumer goods) would also be extremely valuable in curbing inflation in the wider economy.

[thecurioustale]

Fip is thoughtful rather than dogmatic when it comes to considering her ideas.

Already skimming her blog so that box is checked already! =D

🫵 YOU. STOP WHERE YOU ARE

say something nice about prev!!! find something cool about them!! give their blog a skim!!

compliments are FREE TO GIVE so GIVE THEM OUT. pls. thamnk. (⁠◍⁠•⁠ᴗ⁠•⁠◍⁠)

[thecurioustale]

Not having partner preferences to me is like not having food preferences: I understand that this is how it is for some people, but it is completely alien to my experience of the world.

The food analogy works even better than that: As someone with a very specific type, I have never actually had that person as a partner. I have had to "make do" with people who only partially fit the type. Just like food preferences, in fact. It's quite rare that I'll actually have access to the exact thing I want to eat. But, just as this has not prevented me from enjoying other food, I've never actually had a serious problem with partners who didn't check all my type boxes. So, in practice, having a type doesn't necessarily mean what it implies that it means. Compatibility and type preferences are not strongly related, at least for me.

I do think it's strange that some people have "a type", since I don't think that's something that I really experience myself. I had a friend whose six (?) consecutive girlfriends were all very similar to each other, short nerdy girls with glasses and dark hair. I didn't know where he kept finding them.

And for myself, I think ... that doesn't exist? The spectrum is very broad. It's difficult to conceptualize being locked in on a particular aesthetic or even personality type. I just don't have the tunnel vision necessary for that.

I wonder whether this is one of those things that ends up being a spectrum, if some people are just far on one end of aesthetic preference that dictates their dating life, and other people are on the other, not caring in the slightest.

[thecurioustale]

I don't remember if I've posted about it yet (most of my posts here end up consigned to the purgatory of the Drafts section, regardless of whether they're finished or not), but I've been thinking the US needs a currency redenomination for years. Not only are our coins becoming useless, but the current price regime is in a psychologically-fraught place, sort of like a more general case of the problem of charging $10.03 for something rather than $9.95.

I think people should be respected and taken care of even if they are very stupid. But that is not the same as respecting their stupidity. The American people (as all people, everywhere) deserve a safe place to sleep and 3 meals a day etc. but some of their desires are simply dumb and I'm not gonna pretend they arent

[thecurioustale]

Air. Which, yes, in the old elemental sense they would have known about.

Nearest (macroscopic) solid object to my right is a refrigerator. They would've understood the function of it well enough, as cellars and ice chests do the same thing. The mechanism of it, the refrigeration cycle, probably would've taken a bit of explaining, as would the power source, and the grid that delivered it. But, intuitively, they would've understood "a box that keeps things cold."

Nearest (macroscopic) solid objects to my right regardless of elevation are the floor and the ceiling. They would've understood these things too, and been quite impressed—quite honestly perhaps more so than at the refrigerator—that my floor is a hard one.

I guess technically the hand towel hanging from the fridge is closer than the fridge itself. They would've found that rather familiar, too, albeit in the conceptual guise of a cleaning rag than as a "towel" per se.

These questions usually ask about the right. Much less so the left, and virtually never ahead or behind. Every once in a blue moon you'll get an above or below.

[thecurioustale]

Oh my gosh, yes!! <3

Except, well...humanity being humanity...my fear is that most of these vagabonds would be there to talk about the same dozen books over and over again.

But what if they were there for really esoteric books instead, though? Like old bookbound 1960s USGS reports, or "just the nautical parts" of Twilight for the Gods? Yes!

Bah, even then, it'd still be only one of those for every fifty frustratio faecalis. =/

This is a great idea that ends up not working because of rampant mookery. 😭

I had two missionaries visit me yesterday. Or at least I assume they were missionaries of some kind, they didn't have the distinctive dorky outfits on, but they asked me whether I wanted to chat about the Bible. I told them I was an atheist and they said to have a good day.

I wish people did this for other books. Like if a pair of guys came to my house and said, "hey, we're just seeing whether people want to chat about Jane Eyre", I'd be like, "sure, come on it, it's been a bit since I've read it, do you want me to put on some tea?"

[thecurioustale]

When I was a kid, my biggest and most-used piggybank was a big purple Crayola Crayon Bank. There was a little coin slot in the angled top part, and both the top and bottom parts came off to get to the money inside.

I kept everything in there: All my saved coins and all my saved cash. Pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters; I even had half-dollars and silver dollars. (Mostly Eisenhower dollars, and a few Susan B. Anthonys. In later years I also had Sacagaweas, but I think this was after the days of my Crayola crayon.) I got a dollar a week in allowance and I managed to save up something like $120 in my Crayola Crayon Bank, plus the occasional loose change I would find while out and about in my daily life. Coins were more valuable back in the '90s, as many products were still priced in cents, and I was never at a loss for good options to spend them if I so wished.

I switched to keeping larger amounts of cash in a red lockbox in later years, after my mom proved to be a thief. But the Crayola bank was really cute!

[thecurioustale]

This is something I think about often in regard to my own country's problems. I've been a staunch opponent of gerrymandering for decades and believe it should be illegal, but I've decided that supporting Governor Newsom's counter-gerrymandering proposal is the best course of action in response to Republicans trying to steal House seats in broad daylight.

But it's an extremely dangerous road to go down, and I am keenly aware of that in a way that most people do not seem to be. At some point, the tactics of evil people become so bad in-and-of-themselves that wielding them in defense of a free country becomes antithetical to the principles of a free country. Counter-gerrymandering doesn't rise to that threshold, especially since Newsom is asking for voters' consent rather than the legislature imposing it unilaterally, but my point is that we can only "fight fire with fire" to a limited extent before it becomes ethically necessary to abandon the fascist playbook and instead resort to more ethical methods of coercion and force.

Many of the fascists want to kill us. They believe black people are violent gorillas, trans people are manipulative pedophiles, immigrants are murderers, females are helpless children, non-Christians are Satan spawn, and leftists are terrorists. And they want to kill us. But we cannot go down that same road of dehumanizing them. In congress we might have to strip them of their rights. In war or tyranny we might have to kill them. But we must be extremely careful of deploying methods that reflect and uphold the fascist worldview. The OP refers to these as "war crimes," which is an oversimplification, but the point is a good one.

All of that being said, I do not share the OP's aversion to patriotism. I think patriotism may end up being an extremely valuable tool in defense of the nation one day. We saw some small stirrings of it in the 2024 presidential campaign. I think most people on the left in America are eager to believe in America. It's not just a conservative thing. This is a country that most of us are of. Our country in some way is a reflection and extension of us. We might not voluntarily choose this, nor choose to have these exact people as our countrymates, but this is the land that raised us and taught us. No one wants to hate their home.

you can tell i'm constitutionally allergic to patriotism because when people at a primary school event about José de San Martín quote him as saying that everything is permissible in defence of one's homeland except not defending it* my reaction is 'hey why are we telling kids it's ok to do war crimes' rather than the I assume intended one of 'wow what a stirring statement of love for one's country'

no but seriously why are we telling kids it's ok to do war crimes. are there perhaps any relevant examples in recent argentinian history of people who thought they were acting to defend the country and did things that someone else might have said 'hey that's not a thing you're supposed to do' that might guide us in how that kind of phrase might be interpreted.

*"En defensa de la patria todo es lícito menos dejarla perecer" is I think the original saying, though it was paraphrased as "Cuando la Patria está en peligro todo está permitido, excepto no defenderla"

[thecurioustale]

To get back to the original topic, this has been a gripe of mine for most of my life. This forced, contorted cramming of sometimes-very-interesting ideas into perhaps one of the most intellectually, ethically, and creatively vapid of forms: Violence solves all problems.

It's one of the reasons I like Star Trek: The Motion Picture so much. They don't fire a single phaser in that film. The Klingons shoot some torpedoes to no avail and are laughed out of the room in the first minutes of the movie, and the Enterprise itself only fires a single torpedo, at an unfortunate rock in the ship's way. Star Trek IV also ends without violence, and it's a beautiful ending to a wonderfully quirky film. It's also one of the reasons why TNG is my favorite Star Trek TV series: The Enterprise D is often the biggest fish in the pond, and violence isn't usually the answer—especially in the earlier seasons.

But forget about Star Trek: It's also why After The Hero is called AFTER The Hero. The whole conceit, the idea that started it all, is: "No. We're not doing that this time." We're not forcing a fantastic story premise into "good guy kills bad guy." We're going to lampshade it straight out of town by killing the Hero at the very beginning and making the Villain much less "villainous" in the binary sense. These days, with sympathetic villains and shitbag heroes being the fashion, that's not as radical of a premise as it was in 1999, but I will say that despite these mixing of the hero and villain paints together most modern stories still, in the end, force the villain to be destroyed or at the very least defeated, no matter how "sympathetic" they are. (Notwithstanding sprawling franchises like Star Wars that do a lot of fill-in storytelling where, for instance, you obviously can't kill Darth Vader, so you have to have to settle for killing some of the jerks-in-the-jodhpurs.)

I was just thinking yesterday that Ebert's (and Siskel's) movie reviews often lacked an interesting point, but that I've never forgotten something he said about Star Trek: Nemesis, the worst of all the Star Trek films:

I’ve also had it with the force shield that protects the Enterprise. The power on this thing is always going down. In movie after movie after movie I have to sit through sequences during which the captain is tersely informed that the front shield is down to 60 percent, or the back shield is down to 10 percent, or the side shield is leaking energy, and the captain tersely orders that power be shifted from the back to the sides or all put in the front, or whatever, and I’m thinking, life is too short to sit through 10 movies in which the power is shifted around on these shields. The shields have been losing power for decades now, and here it is the Second Generation of Star Trek, and they still haven’t fixed them. Maybe they should get new batteries.

His point here wasn't about plots being solved through violence, but about the lack of creativity in conveying action. And it's a problem that has only gotten worse with Star Trek since Voyager set the ball rolling. It's cheap filler. It's not interesting at all.

And, ultimately, this is actually connected to the topic of solving problems through violence: It's creatively bankrupt. It's unimaginative. It's trite.

I don't actually disbelieve in violence as a solution to problems. I think it's a valid option on the list of resolution methods. I don't even necessarily disbelieve in ethical binaries, i.e. "villains" who must be opposed and "heroes" who worthily oppose them. I think it's pretty uncommon for these binaries to occur in a relatively pure form, but they absolutely do happen, as the Harris vs. Trump race or the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine attest. Kamala Harris and the country of Ukraine both have a lot of issues, but they were, and are, clearly in the right, and it is ethically effortless to take their side against the alternative. And, in Ukraine's case, the validation of violence as a tactic is grimly and sternly obvious.

It's just the whole mushy infantilization of conflict that bothers me. It bothers me that fiction has in many ways become so much more mature in my lifetime, and in other ways so much more immature. There's something almost psychopathic about it, the devaluation of fictional life. It bothers me when villains just casually kill their own minions and allies without any compunction at all. That isn't how real life works! Even if a person individually has no compunctions, power structures don't remain stable if you betray literally everyone who supports you. And it bothers me when the Earth is ruined and humanity has to leave but no words are spent grieving the millions of other species in our world. The ethical degeneracy of that framing is outright repulsive to me! And it bothers me when endless ranks of evil minions are killed on the hero's way to the big bad with little or no remorse, and, if the "kill the villain" trope is then subverted with an "I'll spare your life because I don't believe in your ways" stereotype, that actually makes it even worse because you just killed everyone else to get to this point, and you're only sparing the actual worst person. And it bothers me when villain's motives are so sympathetic that they actually become correct, but then they end up being forced into the villain role anyway and all their works are destroyed and probably they themselves are destroyed too. Somehow our storytelling seems to be infatuated with taking the form of nursery rhymes with cartoonish stakes and caricature outcomes (except without any of the artfulness or inventiveness of those old rhymes).

I lost interest in this stuff a long time ago. I don't tend to enjoy reading or watching works that do this. And I intrinsically avoid it in my own work, even in the uncommon instances where "villains" do exist in clear opposition to what is right, or the more-common but still-infrequent instances where violence ends up being the solution to a problem. I have to speak carefully, because a lot of deserving people do get killed in my works, but I will say that most such instances are firmly in the "worldbuilding" category and less so the "plot" category, reflecting actions that people would reasonably take even in a world where life is not so suspiciously devalued.

What I fear it ultimately comes down to is that this is not merely an impoverished moment for us culturally. I fear that this is simply how most human beings think, and the popularization of media in the past century has merely brought these crude and primitive notions ever forward into the front and center of the stage. I fear that this is why so many people are against food stamps and healthcare and minority rights and legal accountability for criminals. I fear that "superhero movies" is who we really are as a species. The more "literary" mass media of the midcentury may have, like so much else about the midcentury, simply have been an aberrant golden age, existing at the conflux of the adoption of new technologies that, for a moment at least, were gleaming and full of promise.

All right; there are no clouds outside, so I suppose I should stop ranting.

Ebert's review of Edward Scissorhands:

Successful satire has to have a place to stand, and a target to aim at. The entire world of “Edward Scissorhands” is satire, and so Edward inhabits it, rather than taking aim at it. Even if he lived in a more hospitable world, however, it is hard to tell what satirical comment Edward would have to make, because the movie makes an abrupt switch in his character about two-thirds of the way through. Until then he’s been a gentle, goofy soul, a quixotic outsider. Then Burton and his writer, Caroline Thompson, go on autopilot and paste in a standard Hollywood ending.

You know what that is. The hero and the villain meet, there is a deadly confrontation, and no prizes for guessing who wins.

Except in pure action films, situations used to be solved by dialogue and plot developments. No more. Now someone is killed, and that’s the solution, and the movie is over. In “Edward Scissorhands,” the villain is a neighborhood lout named Jim (Anthony Michael Hall), who doesn’t like guys with scissors for hands, and picks on Edward until finally there is a trumped-up fight to the finish up at the castle.

This conclusion is so lame it’s disheartening. Surely anyone clever enough to dream up Edward Scissorhands should be swift enough to think of a payoff that involves our imagination.

been thinking this a lot with regard to the last 20 or so years of sff novels. Over and over it feels like a very different kind of story was just abandoned partway through, which is disappointing when that's the story that has kept me reading for hundreds of pages

[thecurioustale]

This Saria is incredible! The whole picture is great but wow they really captured the essence of the future Forest Sage.

Day 24: Kokiri

Sapling duty is taken very seriously in Kokiri Forest!

[thecurioustale]

James Dobson was one of the worst Americans to ever live. He was instrumental in the radicalization of the American right and the emergence of Christian Dominionism. While he was hardly the most vile person on an individual level, his outsize reach makes his influence far more horrific.

He's lucky that his religion is false and there's no Hell for him to end up in. Few have worked harder in life to earn it.

Ding-Dong the asshole's dead, which old asshole?!

rest in piss you hateful fuck!

[thecurioustale]

This is also a benefit of ongoing series over time, and of storytelling cycles where the same characters are used over and over again in different stories (like with Robin Hood, King Arthur, and The Legend of Zelda). The benefit extends beyond characters and can include places, cultures, and themes, and with cycles it can even include actual plots.

It's a wonderful milestone even for the original author of a work. The canvas is no longer blank: The stage is set; the orchestra is playing. Regardless of whether or not one enjoys the labor of establishing characters and circumstances from the blank state, not having to do that subsequently frees up an enormous amount of story space for other things.

You're absolutely right at how deliciously this knock-on effect can flesh out and complicate characters. Even the most one-dimensional character can blossom into a full palette of colors simply by virtue of having that character do something else from what they were doing before.

Failure to do this is one of the most important contributors to Small World Syndrome, where original creators or fan creators instead end up crystallizing their characters and circumstances into whatever has already been established, and then just retelling that over and over again. On the other hand, of course, any expansion or redirection of a character or story premise is a risk that will inevitably put some existing fans off by no longer including, or perhaps outright disavowing, elements they had enjoyed.

One thing that I have noticed tends to set original creators apart from fan creators is that original creators often crave to move on from what they have already done. If they remain in the same fictional world with a subsequent work, they'll want to take it in a new direction or add a new concept. More often they'll simply want to move on to an entirely new world. And for fan creators it's the other way around: They usually want to relive or embellish the old moments, and flesh out things that were there to begin with but never got "enough" attention, or which were headcanonically there but not actually in canon. (These two things together entail most fanshipping.)

I've often wondered at this, myself, because, in my own storytelling, I definitely do not want to trap my characters and worlds from growing and expanding, but I am not at all averse to taking the best of both worlds between inward and outward expansion, and I kind of like the idea of using formulaic frameworks occasionally, in a deliberate way. With Galaxy Federal in particular I imagine having a good number of "episodic" style stories that carry over previous characters and settings. And a large part of that is to benefit from all the existing work of establishing those elements, and a "fannish" desire to expand upon them and continue defining them. To me, a lot of storytelling potential is often wasted when a work is singular and done and never revisited. Only by revisiting what already exists can greater depth be unlocked. Back to the Future II is an example of this, but closer to my heart is the absolutely amazing character arc conclusion that Q was given in Season 2 of Star Trek: Picard. This emotional depth and thematic triumph could not have been accomplished without the TV show thirty years prior getting up to shenanigans between these two characters. Because another thing about revisiting characters and worlds in subsequent works is that, between the creation of these works and their originals, time has passed in the real world and we fans have gotten older, and our feelings about the old works have taken on the tinge of memories and nostalgia. I am surprised that more creators don't seek this out, eventually.

Though, perhaps not that surprised, given how badly these efforts often turn out. Sometimes you just can't recapture the old magic, and, of course, you can never recapture lightning in a bottle, in those rare instances where a story manages to achieve it once.

One of the things that I like about fanfic is that it allows a lot of liberties in terms of what you're doing as a writer. There are a lot of rules you can ignore!

For example, one of the starter pack rules for writing is that when you introduce a character, you should 1) describe them and 2) give them a characterizing moment. Let us know right off the bat who this character is and why we should care about them. But in fanfic, you can just skip this entirely: the audience is generally people who are familiar with the source material, and they don't need a description, they know what these people look like, and they also don't need a strong characterizing moment, because they know this character.

And because you get the existing characterization for "free" maybe you end up not having to work so hard on it. Obviously the characters still need to be "in character" unless you're trotting down your own path, but you can skate by a little easier with everything that's been established: you have the weight of canon backing you up.

The thing that interests me most about this is that even if you're taking the character on a trip in some other direction away from what their canon characterization is "about", you can wind up creating a deeper character without even having to do anything. And part of that is because one way to create deep characters is to give a one-dimensional character a second dimension.

Here's my toy example: let's say we have Cheryl, who is a studious bookworm in whatever canon she's from, where she mostly serves as exposition fairy, and we have Thornton, a hot-blooded werewolf that she shares exactly one canonical scene with. Our intrepid fanfic writer wants these two to bone, in spite of them having zero canonical interest in each other. And this particular writer just does not really have that much character skill, nor are they interested in exploring these characters all that much: it's mostly about the quick romance played out over a handful of scenes.

In my opinion, the fanfic author is getting a lot of "work" done without having to try at all: we've added dimensionality to the character of Cheryl by having her be drawn to this werewolf guy, and we've added dimensionality to this hot-blooded werewolf by having him be attracted to the bookworm. This is without any work done by the author to do any interrogation whatsoever of these tensions.

Personally, I like my fanfic best when it is doing those interrogations, when the dimensionality is added through careful consideration and is an outgrowth of something that the author was thinking deeply about and wanted to express, especially if it's some part of themselves.

But I think it's neat that with fanfic, you can get there without doing it on purpose.

[thecurioustale]

so, i read dorley

louis ck once said something to the effect that you cant go around throwing words like "amazing" or "incredible" or "the best ever" because then you are going to run out of words and when something actually incredible comes your way you wont be able to descrive it without cheapening it.

i am gulty as charged, i have used those words too lackadaisically in the past, and now i dont know if i can do justice to this work. i will point you to my tag the sisters of dorley where you can read beat by beat my thoughts on this story. in here i will not bore you with words like "amazing" or "spectacular" or "transcendental. i will simply try to put together all the thoughts this story made me think and all the emotions it made me feel and hopefully that will do a much better job at conveying the value this story has for me.

ill start saying that the first two books are by far the stronger. you can probably read this entire story up until the point a character called bethany shows up, much like you can probably just read homestuck up until cascade, and that can probably work as a self contained story. the arcs of steph and aaron would come to a satisfying end and that can be it. i say this because afterwards the story is no longer about that, is about other things. things that were frankly much less interesting to read for me.

i will also say this story ended up being much less... disturbing than i imagined. i was expecting a lot more psychological torture here to be honest. the impression i got from the descriptions i heard when this got recomended to me was that this was going to be something more like this

and less like, uh, this

you know i was expecting this story to end with something akin to "but it was fine, it was perfectly fine, she had won the war against herself, she loved big brother aunt bea"

my point is i was expecting a story about a trans woman actually regretting the lengths she had to go in order to transition, i was expecting actual psychological torture here. i was expecting some mild ammount of cohertion. but then it turns out that the first time steph complains she gets all the priviledges and permissions and concessions in the world with a perfumed apology card on top of a felt cushion. aunt bea is just doling out third and fourth and five hundredth chances no matter how much the hysterical girls under her care keep fucking up, to the point that even mary poppins comes across as more sinister and threatning than she does. every time there is conflict it can just be talked out after like 15 minutes of mild freaking out. everything keeps working out just fine in the end and everyone is happy and healthy and wholesome 100 big chungus.

and i get the impulse, i cannot harp too hard on graves for this because in some senses is what i would do. because you cannot help but fall in love with your characters and your world, and the allure and the seduction of the concept is so strong that you REALLY want to make it work goddamit. cant we for once have a story here the bad guys win, where the wrong lesson is learned, where the dark twisted, fucked up inner impulses are embraced and it actually gets to work out and the cops dont have to come at the end so that the ghost of frederic wertham doesnt haunt us? you want to see a story where dorley actually does work out. i said in the past that one thing i love about tamsyn muir is that she is not a cop, she will show you horrible terrible abusive situations and people but instead of shaking her head to let you know she doesnt aprove of this she indulges in it, she wallows in it, she rolls on it like a pig on its mud. and that is just the way i like it. and in some sense this is what this story is aiming to do except at a certain point it gave up on making anything in this story actually toxic or abusive or deplorable. and so a lot of the flavor gets kind of lost.

***

but, frankly i dont want to dwell too much on the shortcomings of this story, once more, you can go to my tags for that. i much rather focus on the transcendental, soul scorching, psychonoxious experience that it was to read those first two books.

just to give you an idea of the impact this story had on me. i think its fair to say this story made me even more trans. it made do actual changes in my personal life, i started waxing my legs because of this story, i did my hair pretty because of this story, i stopped following certain youtubers because of this story, im probably a bit more of a feminist because of it and it made me dislike quite a bit more my younger anti-woke self. and most important of all, i am going to get my shit together and get FFS because of this story. so yeah, quite an impact.

***

i think the crown jewel that this story presents is the simple concept of "yes, i was tortured and abused in a basement for a year, yes they forced me to go through hrt and surgeries, yes i was forced to become a girl, no, i wasn't secretly trans, no this is not what i would have chosen for myself... but im a woman now, i see myself as a woman, and i like it and i dont want to go back, no im not brainwashed, im so not brainwashed that i can even make jokes about it"

i have complained on ocassion that this story is repetitive but if there is one thing im perfectly ok with this story relitigating over and over and over again is this. this idea gets trotted around and exposed and explored and interrogated and turned on its head so many times and every time its a delight. its the food that never makes you feel stuffed, there are no diminishing returns, not hedonic treadmill at work here, i could see it a hundred times and another hundred times more and i wouldnt get tired of it and thankful neither does this story.

there is something so terribly delicious about the idea of "i was subjected to this against my will, now i embrace it, now its trivial" i love arcs that are about embracing corruption. i love that this story gives us characters like christine and valerie and mia and yasmin who very emphatically say "we are not trans women, we are something different".

i already spoke in a previous post about how specifically forcefem speaks to me because in some level that is how transitioning felt to me. there is a part of my psyche that desperatly needs to believe that i, on some level, did not chose this. that this was something that was forced on me because if it was just a choice i made on my own then am i really a woman? if i just randomly decided i wanted this then it feels like im just a boy who randomly decided to call himself a woman, and such a person would never deserve to be considered one.

see what i did there? this sounds like a really raw and vulnerable moment where i expressed, off the top of my head, off the cuff, my own most profound inner insecurities, but really, i took a second look at it and i realized that i just quoted, almost word for word, a whole ass paragraph from these books. therein lies the magic of this story. it shows you your uglier sides in a way that you cannot help but love them.

***

circling back to the reiteration and repetition this book does: when i was a teenager i read a book called "the paris enigma" by pablo de santis. it was about 12 gentlemen detectives from all across who got together for the paris world fair of 1889 when a murder in their midst takes place. one comment that it was made about that book is that while it was about a murder mystery, it was also about all murder mysteries. the book takes its time to explore all the different angles that the genre has to offer, all the different executions, all the different tropes and conventions that came through the years.

dorley does much the same with the forcefemme genre. this is not just a story about a transgirl in a forcefem dungeon, is about all the different forms and executions that the genre of forcefem went through across the decades. it explores the concept from every angle, using its almost endless cast to examine all the forms that it can take. it goes from the old boomer stories of men being femminized as a form of control and humilliation to the more modern stories about trans self discovery, and it examines everything in between. it truly leaves no stone unturned. we get to see those who embrace it because they were secretly trans all along to those whose conception of self has to be obliterated before they get to construct something new in its place, to those who have to embrace it as a way to survive extreme violent abuse to those who outright reject it and suffer it all the way until they manage to escape and reverse it. it offers the full gamut. and entire buffet with all the alternative takes you can wish for.

in that sense it is very much like the writings of alexander wales, with his approach of leaving no (interesting) stone unturned. (and also gotta go onto a slight tangent here, it is so incredibly serendipitous that his last story i read right before this one was "this used to be about dungeons" which has an entire gender fuckery arc at the very end)

***

and now, as i anxiously wait for the last chapter of the fourth book to be made public beyond patreon so i can see what is up with the wack ass cliffhanger we left kingfisher at, all i can say is this:

this story changed me, this was one of those before and after moments in my life. mid 2025 will be defined by the act of me having read the sisters of dorley and in the oncoming decades i hope my life to last it will always be a milestone around which to chart my memories. im glad im not going to therapy right now because i would have had to go through the unbearably humilliating experience of telling the doctor how this book i read became an important aspect of my psychology, and how i totally have to descrive the plot to them in excruciating detail for them to get a better understanding of me.

9/10

[thecurioustale]

Sometimes I watch video clip compilations for fun, and one that really sticks with me over time is a short clip of a mom and dad sending their daughter off to college. The mom is recording the dad, who is hugging the daughter goodbye, and then she runs off all excited to start her new life. Once she leaves, the genuine smile on the dad's face fades out as realization sets in, and he looks so deflated, obviously missing her very much.

You rarely have a way of knowing for sure when these things are staged or not. People are good actors and they are good liars. And, when there's a phone involved that's recording the action, just about any situation can look suspicious if you scrutinize it hard enough. But I like to think that one was real.

And I'd like to thin that several of the clips in the above compilation are real too, because they just seem so darn genuine, and moreover they attest to something that our society, our pop culture, and even our progressive counterculture is often silent about: Males—"men," if you will—are entirely capable of love and affection and of showing these emotions openly, and in fact it isn't uncommon at all. Males are human beings too, and all the stories we tell about supposed masculine stoicism, or about male abuses against females and against each other, tend to unfortunately cause us to lose sight of that most basic truth.

I don't usually get super hyped up about these video memes that go around, but "the moment your partner notices you're there" makes me happy because that is a real thing, and that moment of recognition can say a lot about a person, or at least about the nature and quality of their relationship. Just like those few seconds we saw of the dad seeing his daughter off to college speak of an entire lifetime, so too do these moments of recognition allude to, and exhibit, some of the strongest bonds that humans can build. Clips like these are a reminder of why relationships (can) work and why they even exist outside of being cynically opportunistic tools of socioeconomic security.

And they're also just a pleasure to watch.

[thecurioustale]

[thecurioustale]

A lot of these things obviously still happen today, but I do kinda wish there were more Generation X action here on Tumblr. Maybe there is and I'm just not insinuated to those circles yet.

It's fascinating how I remember my youth as having the image quality of film photographs. I think part of that is that I grew up in the desert were everything was dusty and brown, and that warmth is more reminiscent of film photography than of digital photography.

We really ought to increase the glass bottle / aluminum can deposit refund! 😅 Aluminum in particular is a real electricity hog to smelt; it's wonderful to recycle existing supplies.

✌️ 😎