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[ta-ether]

One of the people I worked with at the sex shop was a lady in her early forties. She had the most deranged sex stories and to be honest I could never tell how much was real.

I think probably all of it was true? But when someone tells you that a man showed up at her door with a sheet cake he wanted her to sit on so he could eat it off her ass it’s fair to be somewhat skeptical.

Aaaanyway. She hooked up a lot and ended up on a casual date with this guy. She was really stoked to be wearing a button up shirt with snaps, so later when they got to his place she could rip the shirt open like in the movies.

Now, it's worth noting she was a bigger gal, and her cleavage could have suffocated a grown man, it was substantial. There was a lot of boob real estate, okay?

So they get back to his place, and she finally gets to have her moment. She rips her shirt open dramatically, displaying the wealth of her cleavage. At first her dates face was excited and delighted. But as his eyes trailed down he began to slowly frown, which I think we can all agree is not what anyone wants when you've just laid yourself bare in a literal fashion.

She looked down to check herself, and there, nestled like a little baby bird in a nest of boob, was a single dorito.

When she told me this story she admitted, "I knew I had a choice. I could get laid, or I could eat the chip."

She ate the chip.

Her date looked repulsed, but she wanted to take one last crack at riding that man, so she did jazz hands and sang in a silly vaudevillian accent, "🎶You should probably put yer meat in me! You should probably put yer meat in me!🎶"

He drove her home shortly afterward, the coward.

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tbh i didnt know you were supposed to be jerking off while you look at porn

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mice are having sex in my walls :(

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it's bad image friday. when i post bad images (i know he doesn't actually say that btw)

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Health, renewal, prosperity

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Evening dress, c. 1910-1915

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what’s funniest about the pacific rim scientists is like. when newt geiszler says he’s a scientist he means an old-timey 1910s entomologist wearing khaki shorts and a comically oversized pair of binoculars traipsing through the jungle capturing endangered species of butterfly and murmuring “egads!! fascinating…..” and scribbling it in his journal. when hermann gottlieb is being a scientist it’s literally the fucking manhattan project. tortured chainsmoking physicist. pawn of a war. repressed homosexual all his life. gets executed for being a communist. And they have to do each other’s peer review

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I think Odysseus is the guy everyone else makes talk to the cops when they show up to bust the party.

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HIGHLY foreboding thrift store omen

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you catch me in my room watching something kinky, but instead of masturbating I'm just watching intently and taking notes like it's a college lecture

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"Nine and Donna would've hated each other" WRONG they would ADORE each other they would be the two cattiest bitches in the book club. Donna would lean over and tell him "honestly sounds like Rassillion was a bit of a cunt" and he snorts so hard he almost regenerates right then and there

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"Blorbo from my shows" no. Blorbo from my BA. Blorbo from my major. Blorbo from my primary source document.

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So, the thing about Don Quixote.

The thing about Don Quixote is that he tilts at windmills - tilts in the archaic sense of ‘charge at with a lance,’ because it’s the story of a guy who read so much chivalric romance that he lost his mind and started larping as a knight-errant. He was, if you’ll pardon the phrasing, chivalrybrained.

The thing about Don Quixote is, sometimes people take it as this story of whimsical and bravely misguided individualism or ‘being yourself’ or whatever, and they’re wrong. If it took place in the modern day, Don Quixote would absolutely be the story of a trust fund kid who blew his inheritance being a gacha whale until his internet got cut off so now he wanders around insisting that people refer to him as ‘Gudako.’

But the real thing about Don Quixote is that it was published in the early 1600s, and the thing about the 1600s is that Europe was one big tire fire. This is because 1600s Europe was still organized around feudalism (or ‘vassalage and manorialism’ if ya nasty), which assumed that land (and the peasants attached to it) were the only source of wealth. And that had worked just fine (well, ‘just fine,’ it was still feudalism) for a long time, because Europe had been a relative backwater with little in the way of urbanization or large-scale trade.

That was no longer true for Europe in the 1600s. The combination of urban development, technological advances, and brutal Spanish colonialism meant that land was no longer the sole source of wealth. Sudden there was a new class of business-savvy, investment-minded upwardly-mobile commoners, and another new class of downwardly-mobile gentry who simply couldn’t compete in this new fast-paced economy. Cervantes saw this process with his own eyes.

One of the symbols of this new age was the windmill, a complicated piece of engineering that was expensive to build but would then produce profits indefinitely - in other words, a windmill was capital.

The thing about Don Quixote is, when he tilts at windmills, he has correctly identified his nemesis.

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We don’t talk about Leia killing Jabba enough. Her grandmother and father were born into slavery. Her blood was that of the desert sand and the shackles of bondage. Leia was never more a Skywalker than the day she strangled her slave master with the very chains he used to bind her. The daughter of Anakin Skywalker was the one who killed Tatooine’s most notorious slaver, and I find that really beautiful.

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After reading the manuscript, my friends and editors suggested I abbreviate the first hundred pages, which they found very difficult and demanding. Without thinking twice, I refused, because, as I insisted, if somebody wanted to enter the abbey and live there for seven days, he had to accept the abbey’s own pace. If he could not, he would never manage to read the whole book. Therefore those first hundred pages are like a penance or an initiation, and if someone does not like them, so much the worse for him. He can stay at the foot of the hill.

Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains - you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise, you stop right away. Some novels breathe like gazelles, others like whales or elephants. Harmony lies not in the length of the breath but in its regularity. And if, at a certain point (but this should not occur too often), the breathing breaks off and a chapter (or a sequence) ends before the breath is completely drawn, this irregularity can play an important role in the economy of the story; it can mark a turning point, a surprise development.

Rhythm, pace, penitence… . For whom? For me? No, certainly not. For the reader. While you write, you are thinking of a reader, as the painter, while he paints, is thinking of the viewer who will look at the picture. After making a brush stroke, he takes two or three steps back and studies the effect - he looks at the picture, that is, the way the viewer will admire it, in proper lighting, when it is hanging on a wall.

What does it mean, to imagine a reader able to overcome the penitential obstacle of the first hundred pages? It means, precisely, writing a hundred pages for the purpose of constructing a reader suitable for what comes afterward.

HOW I WROTE ‘THE NAME OF THE ROSE’ by Umberto Eco