#(in main article)

[throesofincreasingwonder]

"A story doesn't need a theme in order to be good" I'm only saying this once but a theme isn't some secret coded message an author weaves into a piece so that your English teacher can talk about Death or Family. A theme is a summary of an idea in the work. If the story is "Susan went grocery shopping and saw a weird bird" then it might have themes like 'birds don't belong in grocery stores' or 'nature is interesting and worth paying attention to' or 'small things can be worth hearing about.' Those could be the themes of the work. It doesn't matter if the author intended them or not, because reading is collaborative and the text gets its meaning from the reader (this is what "death of the author" means).

Every work has themes in it, and not just the ones your teachers made you read in high school. Stories that are bad or clearly not intended to have deep messages still have themes. It is inherent in being a story. All stories have themes, even if those themes are shallow, because stories are sentences connected together for the purpose of expressing ideas, and ideas are all that themes are.

[cheekinpermission]

Expectation:

Reality:

Stylish and charismatic is what I was thinking, too

(The quote is taken from a ScreenRant article about the upcoming TWST anime)

[i-swim-best-free-for-the-team]

The new Flowers magazine will come with Banana fish poster!

(Their 40th anniversary wedding)

Link

[francesderwent]

thinking about snarky cultural/theological commentary and. the thing about snark is this: it’s easy, and it’s instant gratification. it’s easy because you’re playing to a likeminded audience. you get the way they think, you know the sort of things they find ridiculous, and so you know what’s going to play well with them. it’s not that hard to come up with a zinger that’s going to earn you applause from your own side. it’s also pretty easy to make another human being who’s not on your side look stupid, because we’re stupid creatures and we all have plenty of exploitable weak spots. it’s preaching to the choir, and it’s preaching meanly to the choir. and then, your snark bears all its fruit right away. you get the glowing feeling of having scored points against the enemy while being patted on the back by your friends for being so brave. if you succeeded in being snarky, you get the rewards of snark that very instant.

on the other hand, seeking to share the truth you possess in a mode in which it could actually be received—that is, says St Thomas, according to the mode of the recipient—that’s hard, and it’s so far from being instantly gratifying that you may never see the fruits of it in this life. not only are you not thinking about your likeminded audience, you’re not even going to trot out the truth simply in the way you understand it and call it your best effort. rather, you have to try to get inside your interlocutor’s frame of mind and understand how the truth you know is going to fulfill their own priorities and longings. you have to understand them so well that you see the truth of their position, even if that truth is buried very very deep, and then see how that truth connects them to the truth you see. you have to be insightful, and compassionate, and so, so patient. you don’t get to score any points, with anybody. your interlocutor might still get annoyed with you and turn around and make you look stupid. but you can’t just say “I’m going to speak the truth and I don’t care who hears and how they take it”—you have to care how they take it, because the truth is relational, it’s given and received, not just spouted into a void. and frankly you have to care how they take it because you have to care about their salvation.

don’t get me wrong, there are times in every person’s life when they will be called to stand up and be counted, to put fumbling words to what they hold most dear even if they can’t make everyone understand. but I don’t know that it’s a virtue to be always focused on being seen saying the truth, with no consideration given to who hears you and what they’ll hear in it—and it’s certainly not a virtue to be always focused on being seen saying the truth in a mean and funny way. “instruct the ignorant” is a spiritual work of mercy. but instruct the ignorant does not mean “instruct the ignorant while making the knowledgeable laugh and/or high five.”

[miyku]

deja vu ive been in this place before

anyway heres bloomberg link

[wereonlydollparts]

Here are some of my 90s Oasis articles. Just a few for now because sadly I don't have an actual scanner at home so I'm sorry for the quality.

[archervale]

Omg screenrant we can finally agree on something

[unsettlingcreature]

my issue with the nanowrimo AI article is not that they won't condemn AI as a whole but rather their refusal to say anything about generative AI, when that's what most of the current conversation centres around. it is incredibly infuriating, to say the least.

furthermore, using marginalised authors as their reasoning allows them to brush off any further criticism as classism, ableism or general discrimination.

[gamora-borealis]

incoming dangender thoughts: the more I read up/watch the stuff dan has said about gender after BIG + reflect on what he said in BIG I'm like. y'all she really has been explicitly trying to tell us his gender IS formless blob (without making it a huge deal in the mainstream public eye), but so many people haven't actually been taking him seriously! like. labels are made up, dan has pretty much said as much before. why do we have to have a specific approved™ term to consider them genderqueer/nonbinary/trans? those are descriptive labels and dan has been using a fun descriptive label they created that he defined for us in BIG, a definition that matches up with those other labels! and dan has said since 2019 that he is comfortable with any pronouns even though he still mainly uses he/him. like, lately dan has been using more she/her and they/them for herself and experimenting with being more femme and/or androgynous in various ways, and what is changing is not even necessarily gender (although maybe who knows), but probably that dan is finally feeling more comfortable with different kinds of gender presentation and pronouns than she typically uses. because low-key gender is kind of a performance and it's scary to switch it up sometimes but dan feels safe doing so especially with their audience and I think that's actually really special 🧡 but moral of the story, dangender has actually been out in the open since 2019 and I wish more people picked up on that!

[weevilsdaily]

sorry to be serious but the fact reputable corporations are able to just fearmonger unchecked is absolutely disgraceful

[th3-bl00d-on-yr-hands-rom3o]

AS OF YESTERDAY STIGMATA IS A SEMI-PROTECTED PAGE ON WIKIPEDIA (you can only edit it if u are an established registered user) BECAUSE PEOPLE KEEP ADDING FRANK IERO TO THE LIST OF NOTEABLE STIGMATICS.

[jadafitch]

Always excited to get an assignment from Down East Magazine. Especially when the assignment is birds!

[moldy-flowers]

I'M WORKING ON IT DONT RUSH ME

[helenvaughans]

[...]To save themselves, the tech-oligarchs must attack the very notion of universality as such—hence their abandonment of liberal universalism for racism, nationalism, masculine domination, etc., because they represent a conspiracy, a shrinking, exclusive interest against a larger one. They are attacking first and foremost the State and the Bureaucracy, the civil servants: everything that Hegel identified in The Philosophy of Right with the universal, general interest of the whole society against the particularity of “bourgeois society,” the chaotic mass of self-interested businessmen. They want the State to appear just as particularistic as they are and destroy its legitimacy. Indeed, they have to attack the system of recognition—meritocratic honors rather than mere wealth and power—and of right—the rule of law and regular administration. They are the “rich rabble” par excellence that thinks “it can buy anything.” Musk’s total idiocy is structural: it goes back to the very origin of the Greek term idiotes, a person who cannot understand the shared political life of the city. These people cannot understand that their wealth and power are not their sovereign creations but the shared product of the wider state and society that supports and sustains them. Cryptocurrency is the perfect embodiment of this structural misrecognition: its advocates say it represents wealth outside of the state and society, but its notional value is wholly determined by its price in fiat money, created and sustained by the state. (It also functions a lot like “race” and “IQ:” as a repository of social value that provides a haven from degradation, but I’ll address that another time.) Here’s the thing: They can only see corruption around them because they are wholly corrupt. [...]

[mousemannation]

this article is about oscar but LOOK!!!!!! MOUSE MAN 🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀

[peekychu]

Flipping through stuff online relating to overlap in autism and plurality, this has to be one of the funniest sentences I’ve ever read. Shoutout to Furry AnimePorn Cosplay headmates 🫡