frayed-neurons - Tumblr blog

[frayed-neurons]

Hiatus note:

I'm going on hiatus for awhile ya'll. I've got some things to sort out. I'll see you again some rainy day.

[frayed-neurons]

this is VERY late but i’m still archiving it

[frayed-neurons]

Heart attacks symptoms are different for women. I recently learned this. 

[frayed-neurons]

me: why are the pillows always so fucked up

my cat:

[frayed-neurons]

Bakery-Style Banana Caramel Muffins

[frayed-neurons]

[frayed-neurons]

[frayed-neurons]

Maple Pecan Puff Pastry

[frayed-neurons]

One man’s cute coffee shop AU is another man’s restraining order.

[frayed-neurons]

he's very excited about his first night as a jack o lantern

[frayed-neurons]

You're better than you think!

If you ever feel unsure about your talent, re-read something you wrote a long time ago.

With the emotional distance that comes with time, you'll be surprised at how good your work actually is! Remember that feeling when you feel doubt. You're better than you think.

[frayed-neurons]

I used to work for a trade book reviewer where I got payed to review people's books, and one of the rules of that review company is one that I think is just super useful to media analysis as a whole, and that is, we were told never to critique media for what it didn't do but only for what it did.

So, for instance, I couldn't say "this book didn't give its characters strong agency or goals". I instead had to say, "the characters in this book acted in ways that often felt misaligned with their characterization as if they were being pulled by the plot."

I think this is really important because a lot of "critiques" people give, if subverted to address what the book does instead of what it doesn't do, actually read pretty nonsensical. For instance, "none of the characters were unique" becomes "all of the characters read like other characters that exist in other media", which like... okay? That's not really a critique. It's just how fiction works. Or "none of the characters were likeable" becomes "all of the characters, at some point or another, did things that I found disagreeable or annoying" which is literally how every book works?

It also keeps you from holding a book to a standard it never sought to meet. "The world building in this book simply wasn't complex enough" becomes "The world building in this book was very simple", which, yes, good, that can actually be a good thing. Many books aspire to this. It's not actually a negative critique. Or "The stakes weren't very high and the climax didn't really offer any major plot twists or turns" becomes "The stakes were low and and the ending was quite predictable", which, if this is a cute romcom is exactly what I'm looking for.

Not to mention, I think this really helps to deconstruct a lot of the biases we carry into fiction. Characters not having strong agency isn't inherently bad. Characters who react to their surroundings can make a good story, so saying "the characters didn't have enough agency" is kind of weak, but when you flip it to say "the characters acted misaligned from their characterization" we can now see that the *real* problem here isn't that they lacked agency but that this lack of agency is inconsistent with the type of character that they are. a character this strong-willed *should* have more agency even if a weak-willed character might not.

So it's just a really simple way of framing the way I critique books that I think has really helped to show the difference between "this book is bad" and "this book didn't meet my personal preferences", but also, as someone talking about books, I think it helps give other people a clearer idea of what the book actually looks like so they can decide for themselves if it's worth their time.

[frayed-neurons]

Chocolate Fudge Cake

[frayed-neurons]

FEMA is doing an emergency alert test on all TVs, radios, and cell phones on October 4, 2023, at approximately 2:20pm ET.

If you live in the US and you have a phone you need to keep secret for any reason, make sure that it is turned off at this time.

Yes, I'm doing this months in advance, and yes, my blog has very little reach, but I figure better to post about it more than less.

Please reblog and add better tags than mine, I'm bad at tags.

[frayed-neurons]

Endou Yuu versus the cosmic unknown