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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.

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Also it's interesting how a village in the Alps is taken as this cozy ideal. Like tell me you've never actually been to the Alps outside of ski resorts. Small-town Austria is not a place where POC or visibly queer/trans people or that sort of thing can be cozy (not to say big cities like Vienna aren't hella racist too, but at least you can find community there and the elected officials aren't openly Nazis). Don't ask the villagers what they think about refugees or Jews or Roma or what their grandparents did in WW2. People have committed hate crimes and even bombings because they couldn't stand the idea of the government giving even token recognition to the Slovenian minority (who have lived in parts of Austria since long before German speakers arrived). You can practically set your watch by how often a politician gets caught making a Hitler salute or that sort of thing. The idea of the Alpine countryside as an idyll was promoted from the 50s onward not only for tourism purposes but as part of the construction of an Austrian national identity to distance themselves from Nazi Germany (while still allowing the vast majority of Nazis to avoid any accountability). I don't really know much about politics and social issues in Switzerland, Italy, etc but I suspect it's not that much better there.

Tldr: "It's all white supremacy?" "Always has been"

it's kinda difficult to talk about "cozy games" because that's an aesthetic and not a genre so its very broad, is it cozy to de clutter an apartment or go on a hike, is it cozy to be action packed or melodramatic or blithely unconfrontational, etc. but I think it's accurate to say that coziness is one of many shorthands that have been developed as an attempt to opt out of ideology, be about nothing. of course with a game made to evoke comfort comes a proclamation of what the author's society considers comfy

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My casino has new top-of-the-line technology to stop heists: a montage detector. If those bastards want to break in and steal my money, they’re doing it as part of one, long take

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I wish they could invent a medical device that temporarily transfers your symptoms and pain to the doctor treating you and it worked like a shock collar. “I think light exercise would-.” and then bam they’re rolling around the floor clutching their stomach in agony and dry heaving.

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I feel like it’s not been talked about that Israel set up a fake aid distribution organization in Gaza that they’ve been using to lure Palestinians into massacres for weeks now. They killed over 30 people just today!

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myths about sinking britain

“there is no historical precedent for sinking britain!” doggerland, which connected britain to the european mainland, was submerged by water in 6500BC. there is precedent for sinking britain.

“it is unfeasible to sink britain!” britain is strategically located to allow many nations to co-operate in its sinking

“sinking britain would raise sea levels!” the netherlands already has dams

“sinking britain would cause more problems geopolitically than it would solve!” we simply won’t know this until we sink britain

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keeping houseless people in thoughts during heat wave

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“Women don’t have rights in Iran, they are homophobic in Iran!”

A black woman’s dying body was used to incubate a fetus because the state said so and the Supreme Court, regurgitating debunked talking points, ruled that trans kids could be denied gender affirming care that is proven to save lives. Does that justify a foreign power bombing New Jersey indiscriminately? Like some of y’all don’t give a fuck about LGBTQ Iranians or women in that country because I never saw a people get free through just having their shit blown up

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hey it's ok we can have a prolonged cutthroat duel while we argue over each other's worldviews and send increasingly homoerotic death threats

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Cisgenders should stop grooming neurotypicals into being cis

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I could happily go the rest of my life without seeing another post about how orgasms aren't the point of sex. It's true enough but women don't have to be told our pleasure doesn't matter, we already figured that out via the constant societal messaging that tells us our pleasures and desires are at best frivolous if not dangerous

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anyway you should always remember that all those foreigners you see dying on the news are just as real people as you are who have just as much interiority as you do. there is nothing about you that makes you more important and it is by pure chance that you are not in their position. in fact, this holds for all of history. every person, no matter the horror of the fate that befell them, had just as much interiority as you do. i feel like some people haven't fully internalized this.

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It'd be really cool if you could expand your idea of trans fem bodies to include more than 3% body fat

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isn't it crazy that a woman being gender nonconforming literally just requires her to exist in her own body without making any changes whatsoever. why does the fact that i don't wear makeup and i don't shave and i don't wear a bra have to be some political act. why can't i just fucking exist

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Denazification worked so well in Austria that the largest party in parliament today was founded by literal SS officers (and the only reason the Hitler fanboys aren't in the Chancellor's office right now is that they couldn't work out a deal with the Dollfuss fanboys) and you can practically set your watch by how often a politician gets recorded making a Hitler salute or the police catch some guy with a basement full of guns and Nazi memorabilia. And this isn't a new thing (see Kurt Waldheim).

Denazification was completed, let’s be honest. The idea that it wasn’t is insane communist cope

this comedian in 1973 (German Ricky Gervais?) going through a little call and response routine with the crowd and he wraps it up with a quick "sieg!" and the crowd cheerfully goes "heil! ...oh," and it's a little awkward isn't it? "so many old comrades here" he jokes, but yeah.

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Thomas Bernhard, Austria’s own Nestbeschmutzer, in his memoir Gathering Evidence

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“laughter is the best medicine” WRONG. hormone replacement therapy.