systlin

[systlin]

mads mikkelsen and robert pattinson need to do a movie together just because the promo interviews would be chaos personified

[systlin]

Are you looking at a subaru brat? Is that the Maloo-like car?

I had a friend who had an 83 Brat, which was a hilarious car.

Terrifying to ride around in those jump seats.

But no, not looking at a Brat, Large Bastard doesn't fit in them.

[systlin]

If i dont [experience pathologically concerning sex act] within the next [arbitrary time period] im going to [federal agency watchphrase]

[systlin]

It really is 2003 again Jesus Tapdancing Christ.

Like, all Republicans did was replace Iraq and gay people with Iran and trans people.

[systlin]

🤎💛

[systlin]

true 2000′s nonsense was finding an amv with a cool song and revisiting the amv for the song instead of actually looking it up

[systlin]

Ah these children who always create problems for poor mothers....

[systlin]

"30 years old isn't old man" what privilege do you live in where your life expectancy is far past 30 years

This post blindsided me so bad I spent a full minute staring at it in shock

[systlin]

Dear, sweet, Littlefoot, do you remember the way to the Great Valley?  I guess so. But why do I have to know if you’re going to be with me? I’ll be with you. Even if you can’t see me. What do you mean I can’t see you? I can always see you.

The Land Before Time(1988) dir. Don Bluth

[systlin]

Arguably the Redwall religion issue is even weirder, because they DO have some religious sorts of practices - giving prayers(ish) of thanks before meals, a concept of an afterlife, soothsaying - it's just all FOLK religion and has nothing to do with the Abbey or the organizational/government structures! Very strange, and I never once thought about it as a child; I was too busy solving riddles and being extremely hungry for all the food described

Much to ponder as adults!

[systlin]

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.

[systlin]

Thoughts on the Wall Street Journal declaring Dubuque, IA "the place to be this summer" and "an unlikely hub of Midwest cool" and encouraging people to visit?

Dubuque is legitimately a neat old town. There's some excellent coffee houses there and the river museum is cool. There's some cool state parks there. I take my dog up there now and then for the hiking trails for a day since it's only like a hour drive.

OTOH, please sweet mother Frigg when I go I would like to be able to fucking park, please don't let every goddamn person in New York show up and be at Paul's Tavern the next time I'm just trying to get a good cheap burger

[systlin]

on the validity of recognizing emotions

[systlin]

'do you think you're superior for not using AI in your work' thank you for asking! yes i do

[systlin]

She's only 5 people she's not even full grown and there's HUNDREDS on there

So the Revenge Peach tree is now about 15-18ish feet tall, and doing very well.

It has begun producing peaches. It's been doing so for several years now. It started like...four years ago. We got 11 whole peaches off of it the first year it fruited, and I was very proud of it for doing such a good job.

The year after that we had probably three dozen or so peaches. Much rejoicing was done. One landed on the grass. My neighbor sulked. I made peach pie and peach ice cream.

Last year, nothing. No peaches to be seen. Sad.

This was, apparently, because the tree was busy growing 2 more feet and saving up effort for this year.

Y'all. Y'all I'm about to be drowning in peaches. There are hundreds. It's been a wet summer and they're all hanging on. If this keeps up I'm going to be up to my eyeballs in peaches. I'm going to be sneaking baskets of them onto porches. My chest freezer is going to be half peaches. I can only make so much pie.

Recipes have been solicited from friends a fruit press has been sourced from my dad for wine but there's SO MANY FUCKING PEACHES ON THAT TREE Y'ALL

[systlin]

See my previous post lmao

The Peachpocalypse Threatens. In a month or so I will vanish under a wave of fruit.

Spite Peach?

I’ll find the post and reblog it.

[systlin]

someone got really mad at me for being pro-pornography so i'd like to be annoying for a little longer:

-there are enormous problems with exploitation in the porn industry that harm and endanger the people within it, and that harm is carried out mostly against women and minorities

-this is Bad

-however the last century of passing laws against pornography hasn't actually helped any of those problems, and what sex workers tend to advocate for is the legitimization of their labor, so that they can then access the same protections and regulations that people in other industries can access

-for instance football players, miners, roofers, and warehouse workers are also exploited and endangered by their professions, have to work long hours, and can end up traumatized and disabled by unregulated and unsafe working conditions. these people are used up and thrown away by powerful bosses they can't individually challenge.

-however because these industries are not de facto illegal to participate in, when these people form unions and demand better working conditions, they can at least fight for their rights.

-sex workers, who engage in heavily stigmatized work that's also often illegal, have little recourse to demand better treatment.

-even if you don't like porn, and especially if you don't like porn, if you care about the women who are exploited in pornography, you need to advocate for the legality of pornography.

-the more illegal the porn industry is, the less safe and fair it is, and people will still be working in it, no matter how illegal it is.

-again: the porn industry should be regulated like any other industry and subject to laws guaranteeing fair compensation for labor, safe working conditions, and legal resources for workers suffering exploitation and abuse.

-once it is legal to do sex work, then women can bring charges against the men who have broken their contracts and abused them.

-and that is why i push back against posts saying that pornography is evil. it is an entertainment product, made by people, to meet an ongoing demand. criminalizing the consumption and production of it may slightly lessen the demand at the incredible cost of endangering everyone involved. and i think that is what's evil.