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Honestly as someone who has also "fallen off" web fiction in a relative sense this is probably a pretty good list of recommendations to maybe dig into - it absolutely is a particular sphere but it is "our" sphere, so that is a valuable project!

I saw the website Anime Sedai on /a/ the other day. People were using it to share what seasonal anime they watched every year, half bragging, half tracking their own progress.

That gave me an idea. It’s open source, so I’ve made my own, webfic-themed version!

I’m curious how canonical my stats+vibes-based choices actually are, so let me know how your graph looks like—there’s a button at the bottom to export your lists.

Mine looks like this:

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President Trump on Israel and Iran: "We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing."

Based Trump arc incoming, speak truth to power my friend

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I think we can all agree that Pink Diamond would have bombed Iranian Nuclear Sites, and that is yet another reason for her to be canceled.

(Pearl would disagree but go along with it anyway, which makes her our sweet, precious blorbo)

i kind of feel like if you take "don't bomb iran" as an endorsement of the iranian government, you're not intellectually ready to engage in conversations about real-world politics. Go talk about steven's universe instead

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Pet peeve of mine is when people write a sentence that doesn't even come close to being grammatical if you remove a parenthetical

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Guy: It's based on keys, not octaves - so each note in the major key gets a letter.

Me: Ah okay, so A major is A through G?

Guy: Lmao no that has 3 sharps, we are starting at C, keep up man.

guy who invented western musical notation: so we're going 12 tones to an octave, named after letters of the alphabet. me: got it. A to L. inventor guy: that's not what i said

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(Ah Buffy studies, my problematic fav <3) Oh to move beyond the topic this is something I totally agree with - at the same time as these literary changes has also been a, hm, "polishing" of the literary production pipeline. I think this is part of the growing legibility and financialization of literature - people just have far more codified understandings of what a book is "supposed" to look like. Editors demand it, but they often don't have to - writers equally study the craft and learn insights derived from the model.

And these insights are correct in a macro sense - most readers do not in fact "tire" of cliffhanger chapter endings or w/e, not on a relevant enough timeline. But I agree that at an individual level there is a same-ness to it all that can grate for those who do notice. Certainly part of why I look at so much amateur, indie, and older work - people for whom that kind of optimization is irrelevant to their project. I like the mess.

Related to that last post, I think it is a good example of the value of knowing your cultural history - a lot happened in media between the 1980's and today. Starting in the 90's there was a whole movement towards "valorizing the popular" - in music it was called "poptimism", so I will steal that - where there was pushback on the idea that pop media wasn't "real art". You no longer "needed" to engage with auteur art, your favourite movie could be Clueless and that was okay. That probably impacted the appeal of literary fiction!

In the 2000's and the 2010's, Nerd Culture went from shamed niche to culturally ascendant - suddenly it was cool to like video games and play D&D and have your favourite books be Ann Rice novels (LOTR & ASOIAF was so popular them being your favourite was too mainstream). Lots of people started finding video games to be art, SFF novels started dealing with much more diverse concepts, and just way more media was being made in this space that you could lose yourself in it and never need another Penguin Classic in your life. That probably impacted the appeal of literary fiction!

And ofc, the daddy of daddies parent of parents, Le Grand Wokismé, struck in the 2010's, and suddenly all "intelligent" literature for the chattering classes was incredibly political and concerned with identity. Classic literary fiction was re-evaluated; its assumptions of universality (from a typical white cis male-author-lens), its often blasé acceptance of the status quo, its often implicit cultural conservatism, all became things for new literature to push back against. Whole new ecosystems of literary discourse were born, with the old guard under attack by the new, and a lot of people found this to be a time of shifting literary moods. That probably impacted the appeal of literary fiction!

Each of these in isolation would have changed literature - but of course all of them are connected to each other, and there are more shifts besides. I don't know if "literary fiction" is coherent enough as a category, such that given all this change, it "surviving" even makes sense? I get it conceptually, nothing is stopping you from writing Rabbit, Run but, idk, I haven't read it, the rabbit does Twitch stream marathons now or something? But it isn't really shocking that what the market wants doesn't look like that anymore.

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While in the 90's everyone knew that the Soviet white-green decks were underpowered and lack the ability to truly handle the control combos that the US's access to red & blue mana allowed it to splash into its typical aggro set-ups, these days the color spread is a lot more forgiving, with counterplay options in every color and the ability to rainbow off of virtually any deck archetype. At this point you can't even begin to predict what the US-China meta is gonna be, land diversity or no.

The reason the Soviet Union lost the cold war is because Russia only has one or two climates. It's all steppe and boreal forest. America, with its steppes, woodlands, deserts, subtropics etc. was able to overwhelm the Soviets with superior force. This is one of the major reasons the US-China conflict will not be so simple.

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despite idolizing corruption, decadence, and betrayal as traits and aesthetic values, Niketas’s eunuch servant is actually pretty square and extremely loyal… he often asks Niketas if he should have troublesome individuals assassinated, but if he actually went through with it, he would be throwing up with guilt for a week

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Very "me" to be 20% more annoyed by the strategic incompetence of the thing than the thing itself, lol

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You do wonder what he thinks the true priority is for def policy! Not sure he has one!

As you can probably bet, I can envision a world where a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities is "okay" (probably wouldn't love it) - I do get where you are coming from. Very ironically, the Iraq war is a pretty good example of that? The US spent a lot of time "making the case" that Iraq was a clear and present danger. People meme the "Coalition of the Willing" but it was, generally, a coalition of the willing, the UK & Poland and all that on average believed that the Sadaam was developing nuclear weapons and were broadly positive on the idea of stopping that. It was based generally on bullshit, but that was the problem - if it turned out to be true then honestly France & Germany would have had egg on their face. Because a lot of people believed that if that was true, a military operation would have made sense (doesn't mean it *did* make sense ofc).

It might turn out, I am totally open to the idea, that Iran was super close to a nuclear bomb. If that is the case, I can't imagine a worse way of going about this! Hamfistedly disparaging your head of intelligence in public and forcing her to recant testimony? Having Israel openly call for regime change as you do it? Not even bothering to consult with Congress on the entire op? They are flaunting how little of a shit they give.

Which has strategic effects, right? Imagine you are Iran - the US says to you now, "okay, we only bombed you because you were weeks away from developing a nuclear weapon. We fine if you don't do it again". But you know that is bullshit! You know that the Trump admin said the opposite less than a month ago, you know that Israel baited Trump into backing them against his word, you know that Israel is openly debating assassinating the lot of you. What will Trump "believe" tomorrow, right? The execution here is actively negative - it is begging Iran to escalate because of all the uncertainty it is introducing.

I don't think Iran will do that much because they will probably also bet that Trump will get bored and move on, and that if they escalate it will go badly for them. In the end, it is likely gonna be not-that-big-of-a-deal. But I think when you are very actively heightening risk like this, my tolerance runs thin. The strike itself is almost secondary to the political implications.

The annoying part of the upcoming war discourse is that, because - as I do think is very likely - the US just sticks to airstrikes, there is good odds that this generally doesn't amount to "all that much". Iran hates us more, innocent people die, etc, but the world 6 months from now doesn't look very different. And then people will absolutely use that to say "See, we learned the lesson from Bush - just don't deploy US troops and then we can bomb you without experiencing any domestic pushback! Nothing to worry about!"

That is annoying because war is the pandora's box of uncertainty. You don't know that is what is going to happen. You think Iran fully mobilizing its military to conduct mixed-soft-hard operations in quasi friendly neighboring country Iraq to neutralize possible US encroachment is impossible? You think Russia, China, Turkey, etc getting involved to various degrees is impossible? Is Saudi Arabia truly immune to terrorists attacks? Paths like these are legion.

Sometimes those dice might be worth rolling, that happens in life - politics is hard, war is even harder. Let's just say I don't think the Trump administration has even bothered to make the case for that threshold.

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Honestly, this would be pretty based - like Iran lacks counterplay options to these strikes, so you intentionally "let it leak", then you remove the signals once you are doing an op where prior notice would be a significant risk. Won't be the first time such an op is run but if we do it with Domino's orders whoever came up with it deserves a medal for sure.

Okay this is the third time this has worked in the past ~two weeks, can y'all get an in-house pizza provider or something? Intelligence work shouldn't be this easy!

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Okay this is the third time this has worked in the past ~two weeks, can y'all get an in-house pizza provider or something? Intelligence work shouldn't be this easy!

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The annoying part of the upcoming war discourse is that, because - as I do think is very likely - the US just sticks to airstrikes, there is good odds that this generally doesn't amount to "all that much". Iran hates us more, innocent people die, etc, but the world 6 months from now doesn't look very different. And then people will absolutely use that to say "See, we learned the lesson from Bush - just don't deploy US troops and then we can bomb you without experiencing any domestic pushback! Nothing to worry about!"

That is annoying because war is the pandora's box of uncertainty. You don't know that is what is going to happen. You think Iran fully mobilizing its military to conduct mixed-soft-hard operations in quasi friendly neighboring country Iraq to neutralize possible US encroachment is impossible? You think Russia, China, Turkey, etc getting involved to various degrees is impossible? Is Saudi Arabia truly immune to terrorists attacks? Paths like these are legion.

Sometimes those dice might be worth rolling, that happens in life - politics is hard, war is even harder. Let's just say I don't think the Trump administration has even bothered to make the case for that threshold.

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Yeah, like I think the Biden admin was "trapped" in the early days and it is exactly that kind of consensus thing that many miss - all of Europe and many outside would have sold Israel weapons if the US wasn't, and Israel would have done much of what it did regardless - Europe+ hates Hamas and has long supported Israeli security obejctives against them. But by the tail end of the escalating conflict the Biden was clearly being old-man-stubborn about Israeli violence & grandiosity of aims, the domestic politics were giving Israel a free rein, and Trump has turned all of that up to 11 with simultaneously bellicose rherotic and feckless commitments to his own word. There was ofc going to be a war, but the extent of the spiral is something the US had clear agency in.

Centrally-unplanned, the discourser in me wants to make a certain dunk right now, but the prosocial human in me considers that it may be rude. It really depends on how you parse dunks, if they are a sort of "all part of the game" aspect of internet debate club for you, or if they come off as more personal. May I dunk on you (if I can even find the relevant post, it's quite old)?

Haha you can totally dunk on me, assuming it is respectful (as I am sure you would be). Like I might counter-dunk, and if Im not in the mood I may not reply, but that is not a big deal, earned dunks stand on their own.

But I also know what you are gonna say! You don't have to bring it up! I specifically remember debating with you about how the US was "post" its Middle Eastern Adventures phase, and that in the end Russia/China are bigger threats to the international order.

And I will only take a partial L here - I don't think "Israel dragging the US into supporting its own op that it is doing anyway - in defiance of US requests even - as part of wider regional war" is the same thing as the Iraq war or anything, it really isn't. Particularly when you have things like Germany tacitly endorsing Israel doing it! People on the internet struggle hard to grasp how "consensus" being pro-Israel & anti-Iran is; Israel has shed the former recently, but only very recently, and the latter is still strong. The entire point of that debate is how much overagency people assign to the US when regional conflicts are gonna rage regardless.

But I said partial L - it is an L. I was wrong. I thought the Trump administration was going to be really bad, and they have been, on every single axis, so much worse than I was expecting. It is comical how bad they are, just at everything. We are just straight-up gaslighting the CIA's own estimates to justify a muscle flex for clout. All of our institutions are not currently dead or anything, but under a far more sustained assault than they have ever experienced in the modern era. I try not to stress about it, but this time it is truly different.