ghostlyhabato

[ghostlyhabato]

[ghostlyhabato]

I could never own a parrot. They are splendid and delightful joyful creatures but I could not match their fucking whimsy. If I woke up at 4:45 am on a tuesday to the sound of some gleeful feather-cloaked varmint doing aerial somersaults all over the house while singing the world's most high-pitched whistle nightcore one-man a capella cover of Funkytown, I'd eat it.

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I know the tumblr users don't like rap music discourse was months ago but I just remembered, the craziest part of the fact that the userbase on here seems to be allergic to rap is that it used to be the exact opposite. Back in like 2010-2014 there were a bunch of rappers active on here and tumblr was seen as a legitimate way to build an audience for up and coming rappers. Odd Future was on here, A$AP was on here. There were rappers that were considered "tumblrcore". Cloud Rap was a trendy sound for a few years and people attributed its popularity in part to tumblr. Like not only did tumblr users used to listen to rap, they were fucking tastemakers for a little while (for better or for worse). The current state of things only really happened post dashcon when the site started bleeding users and the only people left on here were hardcore fandom posters who for some reason all listen to the same five Mother Mother adjacent bands. The hipsters took the fucking rap music in the divorce.

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Light Through Memory, 2023. Self published. Best experienced on desktop or ipad ! (basically a larger screen for viewing spreads)

historical fiction ! pre-telescope astronomy! that was a brand new genre for me haha. so many liberties taken here haha...haha....

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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 keep seeing these "statement begins" hoodies advertised on tiktok and I just wanna make sure, RQ hasn't licensed merch rights to anyone correct?

[THESE ARE MY PERSONAL VIEWS AND I AM NOT SPEAKING ON BEHALF OF ANY COMPANY FOR WHOM I HAVE WORKED]

Right, I'm not on TikTok and I'm not looking this up, but I get a lot of asks similar to this so I'll try to unpack it a bit. The short answer is: Don't Tell Me About This Shit. As a rule of thumb if an unlicenced product is visible enough to be bothering you, you can assume whoever owns the appropriate copyright has seen it and is taking what action they can.

Speaking more generally. Creative Commons (which we released TMA under) says you can do whatever you like with the podcast, the universe and the characters as long as you don't make any money from it. That's pretty simple, pretty clear. And to be honest, I've worked with a lot of companies and the attitude is almost always the same, even when it's not explicitly CC. Its only when money gets involving that things get complicated.

Obviously no-one actually wants to punish small fan artists taking commissions or the like, but here's the thing: legally you have to enforce your copyright or you can straight up lose it. And given the era of ripped-off and AI-generated slop we exist in, that means if a company is aware of copyright infringement, they have to take action.

Now, basically no company in the creative space actually has the resources or manpower to be actively hunting down everyone selling a few dozen keychains with a weird princess or a good cow printed on them, so if something gets big enough that it organically crosses their path, it's probably big enough that does genuinely need to get slapped down.

But the thing is, if I'm made aware of any of this stuff, I gotta tell 'em. So do not fucking tell me. Do not ask me if it's ok to sell your cool unlicenced merch. Do not ask me to promote or endorse it(!) If you give me a fun little present at a signing, do not tell me you're also selling it. And if you're someone who's done one of these things already: No You Fucking Didn't.

So yeah, it's very much a situation where everyone's hands are tied, so just be chill and trust that if someone is properly taking the piss, the company involved will spot it and take the appropriate action.

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WHAT THE HELL IS THAT!

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people I still want to stab over a decade later:

Creative Writing Professor at a former college: Welcome to creative writing! By the way, you will not write fantasy, ghost stories, pranormal, or science fiction in this class, as this is a creative writing course.”

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surpriiise! that fox nerd I kept drawing? is actually that goose nerd

so yes! Alibi Miohn-Rouls is none other than the assumed dead-by-large-explosion Delta! this reveal literally took a year to get around to. A whole year. I sat on this secret for a year and nobody realized I’m so proud and also amazed that it flew under the radar for that long XD it also is going to inevitably lead to hilarious scenes with Isaspella who still doesn’t know he’s alive… in fact only Sunny and one other person knows in the canon! So that’s wild.

Deltasong Danger is an anagram of Gladstone Gander for those wondering and it’s perfect because it is. the most extra name I ever heard

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wanted to get Delta to look a little less like Gladstone and then this sweet Prince outfit dropped on my dash and you know I’d gonna steal that look

…I really did just take one look at this goose and commit to making him even more foppish huh

EDIT bc it took all of 10 seconds for this to land in my inbox:

YEAH. YEP.

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*does five minutes of work* ok now i deserve a three week break. No consequences please 👍

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A commission of Deltasong Danger for my buddy @modmad​!!!

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Press [F1] for help!

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Disgust has absolutely no ethical weight. If you are basing your ethical positions on the emotion of disgust you should stop, it is entirely unjustified and leads to a huge amount of harm.

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housewives were not banging out spirk fanfiction in the 60s for you to be AI generating your fic

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gradient mapping to turn clothes into skin