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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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I’m going to make a new font called Times New Bastard

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Jotun, Oni, Baron & Warlord Predator: Killer of Killers (2025)

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Giant Malaysian Katydid is a species of carnivorous giant katydid. It is one of the largest insects in the world.This is its sound 😮

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I am a huge fan of retiring to my quarters

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fishman, again

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if you're in Europe PLEASE consider signing the Stop Destroying Games initiative. the deadline is July 31st 2025. i've posted about it before; it aims to create legislation for publishers to stop killing the games you pay for and to provide an end-of-life plan for live-service products. thank you!!!

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mens thighs!!!!! in slutty shorts!!!!!!!!!!

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I thought that choosing the trip to South Korea would have been a good option to meet/befriend ppl my age... but I was wrong.

This year will be the year I run my bank account dry bc I bought a cafe, bought a tablet and decided that fuck it i want to do the group trip I saw at a travel agency. Let's live like I'm rich for this year ahdjdjdk

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I tried to look at the recording of the presentation of the trip (struggling bc I don't have fb anymore) and oh my fucking shit. Average age of the other ppl is around 60/70.

Going on a trip to escape the grannies haunting the café and ending up in a trip filled with grannies.

This year will be the year I run my bank account dry bc I bought a cafe, bought a tablet and decided that fuck it i want to do the group trip I saw at a travel agency. Let's live like I'm rich for this year ahdjdjdk

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Tadon

Mini backstory:

That thing he wears is a ‘silencer’, given to him by the bad blood clan leader before he left to go back to being honourbound, the silencer is a type of mask designed to hurt a yautja if they make a sound, he was given it and he cannot take it off without fully damaging whatever is left underneath, those spikes go in and stab him through the mandibles and more coming out bloody once they did its job. When he first got it, within the first few weeks, he had to break the middle piece so he can eat (he is very insecure of what his mouth looks like from the middle piece). He was also given screws on his head for extra for some reason however that is his silencer mainly! He found a way to talk again which is to whisper as quiet as he can, many who speak to him will have to really pay attention to what he is saying. At tomes yeah in spur of the moment or from shock or surprise, he will accidentally activate his silencer. He cannot click much due to the silencer or do much of any vocals yautjas have

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This year will be the year I run my bank account dry bc I bought a cafe, bought a tablet and decided that fuck it i want to do the group trip I saw at a travel agency. Let's live like I'm rich for this year ahdjdjdk

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yeah

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I truly don't get why the common stereotype of tank/healer MMO couples is surly toughguy tank and anxious people-pleaser healer because every time I queue in as a healer I can feel myself physically turning into the devil

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