warblingandwriting

[warblingandwriting]

ursula k le guin: if confronted directly with the knowledge that society requires suffering to be maintained, would you be capable or willing to abandon the structure and safety for uncertainty, strife, deprivation?

strange and inscrutable people who claim to know how to read: i would simply solve the problem

[warblingandwriting]

Most underrated trope is an immortal falling for an mortal, and the immortal stays at the mortals side, while they get older and older. So at one point there is a 90 year old woman being on a date with guy who looks like 25 but is actually 300 years old.

I don't know a single media who did that.

[warblingandwriting]

digital painting of James Spader looking extremely distressed like he's afraid he will throw up soon...and gorgeous !!!

requested by @lustfulbaronet

[warblingandwriting]

When I was a kid I read a ton of books that were definitely not appropriate for my age. One of two things would happen:

I was too inexperienced to understand what I was reading, and it had no effect on me.

I understood what I was reading, and I leveled up.

[warblingandwriting]

Director's commentary bonus feature that periodically pops up a choice of what to "ask" the director to talk about next, and as it goes along it very gradually becomes apparent that you're playing a visual novel about dating the director implemented entirely via DVD menus.

[warblingandwriting]

Nothing makes me feel like I'm in a novel more than the fact that there is a literally a giant billboard with a frowny face on it advertising mental health services directly outside the window of my new apartment

[warblingandwriting]

What would you guys consider the worst movie you've ever seen? Not something that's fun to make fun of, nothing you ironically enjoyed, I mean just an absolutely miserable moviegoing experience that you paid for, hated every second, and wish you had walked out of and asked for a refund.

For me, no joke, Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted. It did not even feel like a real movie to me. It made me see red! I was SEETHING with anger and annoyance throughout the entire thing, and I cannot for the life of me articulate why. I saw it once in 2012 when I was 15, I remember almost nothing about it now, but it struck a nerve with me like no other movie ever has before or since.

Tell me in the tags, which movie makes you disproportionately angry just thinking about it?

[warblingandwriting]

Israel Rank is a darker telling of the story than its various adaptations, but it is still funny that two of the people on his kill list are Gascoyne Gascoyne and his son, Gascoyne Gascoyne.

[warblingandwriting]

I feel like we NEED to stop viewing the personal blogs of random people as public platforms. It's why we constant posts decrying "Why is nobody talking about this issue?!?" And it's why people on Twitter get flamed for random innocuous tweets. Because these things are posted publicly everyone 'has a platform' everyone 'should be thinking about what they post'. It seems like the days of just having an innocuous personal blog are gone and I think that's bad actually. If you don't like what someone posts, or don't think they pay enough attention to certain issues, unfollow them.

I just get sad seeing the internet turn into a bunch of micro and micro micro 'celebrities' who have eyes on them all the time, with everyone getting criticized, even if they only have like 10 followers. We can chill you know? Your blog can just be for you and your 10 buddies. You don't need to act like you're sending out a press release to the whole world every time you post.

[warblingandwriting]

[Image description Tweet from RachaelAtWork "Star Trek TNG episodes are called like 'Explosion' and the episode is about a big explosion. TOS episodes are called 'What yonder soul doth go hence...a brother??' and are about an omnipotent space frog who makes everyone take their clothes off"] Source

[warblingandwriting]

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.

[warblingandwriting]

Funniest part of Nosferatu (2024) are the characters' name

Thomas Hutter the young sollicitor? Doctor Wilhelm Sievers?? Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz?????

Someone please inform Robert Eggers that Dracula is in the public domain

[warblingandwriting]

Director Dorothy Arzner outside the Cutting Dept/Projection Rooms at Paramount

[warblingandwriting]

⌕ Black Christmas (1974) posters

[warblingandwriting]

Noirtier de Villefort communicating with his granddaughter Valentine protecting her and doting on her best as he can is one of the best things to happen in this novel

[warblingandwriting]

kazuaki horitomo’s tattooed cats.

[warblingandwriting]

I was at a bookstore looking through the art section and I saw a spine that said The Camden Town Nudes which was interesting because this didn’t seem like the bookstore where I would ever find something like that and I wanted to have a casual look but like. This also wasn’t exactly the bookstore where you felt like you could look at naked pictures let alone just suggestive paintings of them, it’s a really small shop as well, so I was like right I’ll just take a quick peek, I’m an art student, I love history, maybe I’ll buy it. I looked both ways and saw the shopkeep had left momentarily and no one was about, so I opened it and found it was an entire book featuring nude Edwardian women all painted by Walter Sickert between 1905-1912 and it was actually quite a revolutionary set of paintings for its time given that it featured very raw depictions of working class nude women in dark London instead of the elegant, white bedsheet clad, Demure middle and upper class women usually depicted.

And of course RIGHT as I flip to this lady’s boobs practically taking up an entire double page spread, every customer in a 5 mile radius appeared from around the corners of the shelf including the shopkeep and immediately regressing to a wet, pathetic Edwardian man from 1908, startled, I dropped the large book which caused a giant SLAP on the floor in this already silent store thus causing all patrons to look down at me scrambling on my knees to close a giant book of Edwardian boobs and let me tell you it would not have been nearly as funny had I not immediately felt like some Edwardian local pervert who just tried to sneak a cheeky peek at the erotic book in the bookstore only to drop it dramatically causing a scene, red up to his ears trying to shove it back on the shelf. Like such a casual and normal thing in modern day but looking at Edwardian women suddenly turned it into this egregious act as I apparently became possessed by the spirit of a moustached man in a bowler hat and morning coat going Good Heavens I mustn’t gaze upon these images in public lest the constable haul me away!