letstartdiggingpod - Tumblr blog

[letstartdiggingpod]

"i have the right of way" was a form of protective charm uttered by urban travellers in the early 21st century. They believed this phrase acted as a ward against danger and injury, invoking the divine spirit of 'Traffic Law', one of their primary deities.

[letstartdiggingpod]

ever since I was a little girl I’ve wanted to navigate nested touchscreen menus to control the AC in my car

[letstartdiggingpod]

No one tells you when you get a Big Serious Job™ how many fucking abbreviations you’ll be forced to learn.

[letstartdiggingpod]

there basically isn't a single established action archetype that you can't improve tenfold by making it a girl

[letstartdiggingpod]

New Show is released. New Show is loved by many viewers. New Show is not yet renewed. social media campaigns for renewal of New Show. PSAs to play episodes of New Show on loop in the background to get viewership up for New Show. urgency to binge New Show so they see good views for New Show. pleading and begging and tagging special media accounts to get another season of New Show. New Show is cancelled. social media outcry and petitions to save New Show trend for a week. New Show is not picked up. New Show says cancelled. they start making a New New Show and it all starts the fuck over again. I gotta be honest I'm really fucking tired of this shit

[letstartdiggingpod]

other drivers will see your safe distance from the vehicle in front of you and go "is for me? 🥺" and then proceed to not use their turn signal before swerving into your lane

[letstartdiggingpod]

closure isnt real they made that shit up for tv and movie

[letstartdiggingpod]

if your weird enough with the homies you can break all boundaries of platonic/romantic love and make a third, more evil thing

[letstartdiggingpod]

i fucking hate being an adult with a slowly increasing number of responsibilities its like one day you wake up and youre like aw fuck when was the last time i descaled the coffee machine

[letstartdiggingpod]

survived checking my bank account. i deserve a little treat

[letstartdiggingpod]

(through gritted teeth) so incheresting how you have interpreted this television show we have both seen! you know it's like i always say. the world is full of many people and in my necessarily limited perspective i may only ever understand but a few of them. haha!

[letstartdiggingpod]

my least favourite turn based strategy game is email

[letstartdiggingpod]

the idealized version of my tomorrow self will fix this

[letstartdiggingpod]

guy who hasn't had lunch yet: does the entire world feel doomed to anyone else or is this one just between me and the flaming skull

[letstartdiggingpod]

i just need to reread harrow the ninth. i’m okay i just need to reread harrow the ninth. haha yeah i’ll be fine i just need to reread harrow the ninth. everything’s good i just need to reread harrow ninth. no it’s alright i just need to reread harrow the ninth. yes it’ll be ok i just need to reread harrow the ninth. i just have to reread harrow the ninth

[letstartdiggingpod]

i think makeup can be artistic expression i also think sometimes people are lying about it being about artistic expression and would in fact be a lot happier if they had never been told they had to wear it

[letstartdiggingpod]

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.