#or “I find the whole market to be saturated”

[esteebarnes94]

I never really got the whole complaining about something being made that's already been done a bunch of times. Like, tropes and themes and aesthetics and all that. Because as long as it's being done respectfully and whatnot, what's the problem? Like, yeah, you're under no obligation to like, like, a 1980s-set slasher film or whatever, but I don't get all the mocking and stuff.

[chlo3sevigny]

this is literally the best ep i’ve heard this year

[paris-geller-was-straightwashed]

'that adhd feel of-' 'adhd is not being able to' 'adhd is when you forget-' you're describing executive dysfunction. that's...it's executive dysfunction. like I NEED you to understand this.

I don't think this is purposefully malicious but jesus fucking christ it's no wonder the ~neurodiverse~ community on here can feel super alienating. I'd fucking eat own shoe if any so-called 'neurospicy' (derogatory) blogs can name EVEN ONE other condition then either adhd or autism as part of neurodiversity. ppl think it starts and ends there - and what I find the most infuriating, is that one of the most common symptoms when it comes to diverse brains (aka executive dysfunction) is talked about like it's SOLELY for adhd.

look. I got dyspraxia and ocd - two things considered a part of the neurodiverse umbrella. I also have learning disabilities that have affected my whole school life, and memory issues that I've been explaining to people as to why I've already forgotten their name since I was a kid. YET, ocd is rarely talked about in neurodiverse circles or even considered, and I'll literally pay two bucks to anyone reading this who can tell me what dyspraxia is (who isn't a professional or someone who has it, and if you do have dyspraxia, then I am giving you a cookie and fist bump). yet often, when I see posts passed around talking about issues like poor motivation or time blindness or bad memory, I find a lot to relate to - bc executive dysfunction, in case anyone missed it, affects many, many conditions! you don't even have to be neurodiverse; it's known to affect those with anxiety and depression too! there's so much layover - yet, I will see, inevitably, the post attributed to adhd or possibly asd. frankly, it's both alienating to those with other neurodiverse conditions, and possibly misleading, even if unintentional, to say it's an 'adhd thing.' you guys run the market and it's over-saturated; I'm just asking for adhd/asd to share a piece of it's throne.

to be honest, as what's considered a 'neurodiverse person', I barely find any commonality within the community. yes, as mentioned above, I will relate to common shared symptoms like executive dysfunction, but it's a complete shut-out when we act like those symptoms are only attributed to one condition. frankly with my ocd, I find way more commonality in schizophrenia/paranoia/psychosis communities then in the ND one (I would never act or say I know what it's like to experience those conditions, but I can relate to the fear of some outside force telling you something horrible is going to/will happen), and with dyspraxia, even when we talk about it, it gets so little coverage and recognition it leaves the whole community a bit dry. if anyone gives a shit, then maybe shine the light on us and others kicked to the sides (ppl with learning disabilities, dysgraphia, language disorders, and those with schizophrenia/affective disorders like I mentioned earlier, who are so often vilified by ppl online and on this site). we all struggle with executive dysfunction and a million other layover symptoms, and the nerotypical world is just as hard for us to navigate even if no one is bothering to listen.

I'm rambling at this point. everyone just..do better and actually recognize the 'diversity' in 'neurodiverse.'

[lol-jackles]

You do know that FBBC are still heavily producing and distributing beer, right? Before you start patting yourself on the back that the original brewery/land is being sold, you might want to get clued into the fact that distribution has been expanded to San Antonio and recently to Houston. The company and brand are positioning themselves to expand further. Don't think they will go back to the cute craft brewery, but as you have pointed out, craft breweries are not that profitable. Looks like they are going for a stronger business model.

You go on about the whole YANA thing. I have never understood why a select few in the fandom actually became jealous about a charity? Seems so small minded and petty. Regardless, YANA still exists and continues to do good things.

Yes I know about their distribution, I'm the one who pointed out 5 years ago all those bottling and canning equipment and the end products weren't for the taproom customers but meant for distribution because the Ackles were trying to go big because they want to make actual profit despite originally claiming that they would only sell beer at the brewery (X).

What did you think the $1000 membership package was about?  To get SPN fans to regularly go to FBBC to keep it afloat so they can keep making beer on site and then ship off site. Quite a turnaround when Gino cast dispersion toward SPN fans and said there will be no beer named after a "corny tv show" (X)

According to Gino, they plan to resume producing their own beer again once they find a location in Austin.

After they bought these top on the line brewing equipment and are now selling. That sounds like a "stronger business model" to you?

Surely you don't think the Ackles are going to sell off all the brewery equipment only to turn around and buy new equipment for the alleged 2nd location?  At best they should just open a small scale taproom and put Gino in there as the glorified bar tender.

Do you know people who had their beer made by somebody else?  I have. They have to pay for everything, or make compromises.  There is no in between. A specific yeast strain the contractors don't use?  Then you're going to have to pay for that, and the labor to keep it going, or do it yourself.  Oh wait, they can't because they closed down FBBC.

Breweries don't close because they'll make more money from contract breweries, if that's the case then why open your own brewery in the first place?

Let me break it down using another real life example:

If parents have a couple of kids going to the same college and overlap each other, instead of paying dorm fees or renting an apartment, they would buy a townhouse for their child/ren and rent out rooms to other students, which pays for the mortgage.  Then when the last child graduates, they sell the house for a profit.

See the difference between owning a brewery that doubles as a contract brewery (your house) vs paying everything to a contract brewery (college)?

What's going on is there is a saturation of craft breweries.  It's like in the late 90s when there was a huge surge in openings of comic shops.  Every collector dreamed of running his own place and thought a love for the product was enough to be successful. The market became saturated.  A couple years later, the trend reversed and it seemed another shop was closing every other week. The difference in making it or not largely rested on whether the owner had the skill set to run a business. Foresight. Customer relations. General business principles. And of course, the ones who had adequate funding. The market decided who made it and who didn’t.

That's what is going on in the current beer industry.  The hobbyists who thought they could be successful because they loved brewing but lacked the skill set to run a business are beginning to fall.

LOL nobody is jealous of YANA, people continue to be amused by it because of how badly it was executed and then failed. If YANA still exist and continues to do good thing, it's only because Jared bailed it out after both Misha and Jensen abandoned the public promise as mentioned here and here.

I remember back in my day a craft beer was “hey there’s a beer that’s $3.50 a bottle instead of $2 and it’s way better!”

Nowadays it’s “this craft beer is sourced with water collected from the Himalayas by free range howler monkeys and filtered through the wings of butterflies.  Oh and we can’t bother to be original so it’s an IPA loaded with hops.  $8 please”.

[gothhabiba]

I'm so inspired by the amount of work you put into your food history research! I've learned a lot about the political history of food, and following along with your posts about how the research is going is giving me a whole new appreciation for good proper scholarship. I don't really have anywhere I'm going with this, just that you're appreciated!

thank you so much!! I'm very flattered that people find my food research essays interesting, much less the research notes I write about the writing of those essays, lmao.

of all the projects I've done these past few years, this essay series is for sure one of the ones I'm most proud of. like, when I first started my alleged cooking blog, the tongue-in-cheek title "another vegan cooking blog" was literally how I felt about it--like I was adding noise to a market that was already very saturated--but at this point I feel like I'm consistently doing something that no one else is really doing.

[wenellyb]

You can like or dislike fanfiction, but I don't understand people who come to Tumblr to constantly complain about fanfiction...it's like going to someone's house to call their decoration ugly.

It doesn't matter if it's true or not ...why would you do it?

And the complaints are always weird like: "blablabla why do people think in tropes now?" "Why would you want to know what happens in the story, what's even the point of reading it then?"

You want to know why??? Because that's the whole point of the Romance genre!!! The predictability, the promise that no matter what they go through, in the end, there will be a Happy Ending for the protagonists.

I don't read a lot of fanfics but I do read a lot of books and e-books (as in unfortunately I have to pay for those😂). And you know what a lot of authors use to describe their books? Tropes!

An enemies to lovers story with a slow burn, a fake relationship story, a mariage of convinience, a best friends to lovers story etc... And this is coming from published Books.

Maybe it's because the market is saturated and it's the only way to stand out, maybe it makes it easier for their readers to find specific books, I don't know. But I do know that they use tropes to describe their books.

Why sh*t on fanfiction, fanfic readers, fanfic writers when actual published authors do the same??? What is the point exactly ?

And can someone explain to me what's so wrong about using tropes? What's wrong with looking for stuff to read by searching specific tropes? It makes it easier when you're looking for a specific story you want to read and helps you know what you will like or not. Which is great, especially when you're going to pay for the book.

Maybe you don't have a problem with fanfics but with the Romance industry in general? But then why target fanfics as if they were the problem?

[bestanimatedmovie]

Revenge of the Underrated

50. The Secret of NIMH vs Summer Wars

Vote in the other polls!

Propaganda:

The Secret of NIMH

little garden creatures discover government conspiracies plus a cute little mouse family

This was a dark children’s film made just before the Disney renaissance before the market was over saturated with brightly colored, cheerful, and sanitized children’s fairy tales. The film is based off a book although I do not recall the books title. Unlike most films aimed at children, the protagonist is NOT a child or teenager but instead a single mother of 4. Mrs. Brisbey is a widow field mouse who lives in a cement block in a farm field, winter has just ended and soon the farmer will start blowing his fields. All the field creatures must move. But Mrs. Brisbey’s son, Jonathan, has pneumonia and cannot leave his bed or else he will DIE. Mrs. Brisbey goes on a quest to find a way to save her sick child and the rest of her family. She visits a owl, and OWLS EAT MICE! She is terrified! But she does it anyway because her maternal love for her children is stronger than her fear. The owl tells her to visit the rat colony that live in the farmer’s garden. The rats escaped from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and their leader agrees to help her. But the rats have their own internal politics going on and the leader who wanted to help Mrs. Brisbey is assassinated. The usurper who takes power abandons Mrs. Brisbey and her family and the children almost die!! But before he died, the original leader of the rays gave Mrs. Brisbey a gift, a magic red stone and her maternal love for her children activates the magic and allows her to move her house and save her family.

Forgive me if this did make it into the last bracket, I couldn't believe that it didn't, but what I looked through I couldn't see it. This is a freaking masterpiece. It's also clever, very scary, great character acting, and absolutely visually fantastic.

Don Bluth's greatest movie. Dark, heart-warming, terrifying, has a female protagonist who's allowed to be scared but fights for her children anyway, and Flying Dreams is one of the best songs I've ever heard.

Summer Wars

It’s like that one part of the Digimon Movie with the spider computer virus only it’s the whole thing and it’s actually good. Also furries.

Summer Wars has peak family vacation in the summer chaos vibes it's hilarious and wonderful

[melonelle]

look i get from where people are coming from with "cc creators should be compensated for creating cc" but i don't think that most of you were here in simblr when having a patreon wasn't the norm, back in 2016-2018 it was really fun suddenly finding cc for the game (i'm talking about maxis match mostly) because you could notice they were passion projects, someday you were just lurking on here and then someone spontaneously posted cc and at least for me that just made me want to go in the game to see how it looked on my sims and i always remember the first "big" cc creator that changed to patreon (and i have a bone to pick with him bc how it is that your cc hasn't improved in quality at all since you started earning money for it) and how most of them followed after. i was a patron back then of some of the biggest creators not because i wanted to support them necessarily but rather because early access is a predatory model and i have anxiety issues. but now for years these big cc creators have been doing the bare minimum in terms of their content, they no longer engage with the simblr community as whole except for the time they have to collect their paycheck and with a market so saturated we end up with almost 50 versions of the same piece of cc from different creators. It's capitalism and soulless. greediness killed their creativity.

pd: i'm not criticizing cc creators that make their stuff for free, you are awesome and a breath of fresh air in this community.

[somnambulent-directives]

I like to think that after finding his way into Ingary, Howl would have a bit of trouble embracing the less technologically advanced way of living. In the book, Sophie thinks that his bathroom is strange and luxurious (besides the mess) for the indoor toilet, shower stall, a large bathtub, and several mirrors. It's not a far stretch to imagine Howl being appalled at the lack of adequate food preservation and enchanting a wooden cabinet to act like a mini-fridge. He sneaks a memory foam mattress back from Wales because he can't stand the customary hay and cotton stuffing. He heavily contemplates changing the black door to somewhere closer to a fish and chip shop, even if it's further from his sister's house. Fresh fish and potatoes from the market are fine, but they don't provide the same satisfaction as quick, hot food saturated with grease. Little tastes of home help to ease the secret guilt and pain of leaving everything behind - his friends, his family, and his whole world.

After giving his heart to Calcifer, Howl tells himself that he's done missing home. His little conveniences are now just something he keeps around for vanity and physical comfort. Deep down, though, he knew if that were really true, he wouldn't be soothing the cold, lonely nights with a quiet, shaky rendition of an old rugby song in his heart language.

[tangibletechnomancy]

Saw someone earlier say that the popular millennial/early gen Z reaction to AI tech is very comparable to Gen X-ish's reactions to GMOs, and...I can no longer find that post but I can't help but feel that to be true on a lot of levels.

As stated in that post, both technologies have their very legitimate problems - with GMOs, it's Monsanto being fucking evil and trying to monopolize plants and food, or GMO herbicide resistance being used so that major corporate farms can saturate the land with said herbicides without any short-term financial damage to the companies as if it doesn't harm the environment; with AI, it's any form of automation always appealing to the most abusive of corporate greed - but both ended up whipped into a dogmatic fervor about something completely not only irrelevant but made-up and reactionary ("GMOs are all POISON, nature knows best ALWAYS!" - which led semi-directly to the antivaxx movement btw / "it doesn't matter how different it is from the input taking inspiration from existing works the WRONG way is PLAGIARISM, you're rewarding LAZINESS, and REAL ART vs. FAKE ART is totally an objective distinction that can be made and certainly not at all a fascist talking point, and I want art made by HUMANS, the humans running these programs to express something from their human brains don't count!"), completely ignoring that GMOs have reduced world hunger and given us valuable conservation tools, and AI is giving people - real people, not machines - more expressive capacity, serving as a valuable research tool into what kinds of things people tend to associate, justly or otherwise; and even being used to augment human judgment for things such as reviewing biopsy results, finding cancers that otherwise may have gone unnoticed for months or even years longer. In fact, many opponents will full on deny any of these benefits - "what good does reducing hunger do if we haven't eliminated it completely AND we're feeding people POISON? In fact, why should I even believe that really happened in the first place!? if you wanted laypeople to be able to read these studies you wouldn't have made them so complicated, you CLEARLY have something to hide!" the anti-GMO warrior asks; "I don't believe those people who are so severely disabled that they couldn't draw or write without AI REALLY exist, your meditation on the nature of data doesn't COUNT, I don't care how many hours you spent on that piece you're TOTALLY being lazy, and I refuse to believe anyone who points out that it's not a copy-paste machine because you CLEARLY have an AGENDA to lie" the anti-AI reactionary claims. Both hold to a belief that ignorance is a virtue, and even TRYING to understand the Bad Side is tantamount to shoving orphans into a wood chipper.

But I'd take it a step further and say that AI is serving a similar sociopolitical purpose in that it's drawing a line in the sand and asking progressives at a certain stage in life - mostly from the ages of 25-35 - "are you willing to acknowledge nuance around subjects that are new and scary to you, or are you going to give into that fear and treat ignorance as a virtue because there ARE undeniably bad things about this and therefore EVERY bad thing you can imagine about it must be true?" Both serve as, essentially, an acid test - will you declare that it's IMPOSSIBLE to be reckless with GMOs, that Monsanto DESERVES to have sole control over the world's food supply because ~they've done so much good~, or that all GMOs are EVIL POISON and GOING TO KILL US ALL and they're also TOTALLY the reason we're all FAT now which is THE WORST thing a person can be? Or are you going to acknowledge that Monsanto is fucking evil, but GMOs as a whole are a complex thing that can, indeed, be created and marketed in some pretty evil ways, but also have the potential to save countless lives? Will you declare that AI is True Sentient AI, the cyber-utopia becoming real; that everything ChatGPT says must be true and OpenAI is our best friend, or that REAL art by HUMANS is going to be destroyed forever and anyone who benefits from AI is inherently evil? Or will you acknowledge that AI, while it has its drawbacks in the form of corporate overpromising people and compromising information reliability by doing so, on top of the perennial labor issues that come with automation and other potential abuses, also has the capacity to dramatically improve and even potentially save lives? Will you work to save the good WHILE rejecting the bad, or will you insist it needs to be shoved in either the good box or the bad box - probably the bad box, if you're an adult?

The answer, I feel, says a lot about the ideological trajectory someone has chosen for their adulthood.

[nikethestatue]

Do you think part of the reason for the delay in acotar5 is maybe her having to rewrite the book or large parts of it because she hadn’t originally fully plotted out the cross over concept for the books that would take place after it happened (after sf) and also because she kind of wrote herself into a corner with acosf by focusing to much on character driven storyline’s? My feeling is she was so busy self inserting herself into nestas “recovery” she forgot to make any real significant plot advancement so now needs to do that in acotar5 (and acotar6) +write a convincing fully fleshed out romance? Now she only has 2 actual books to conclude the whole acotar/ic story arcs , incorporate any new storyline’s introduced in the cross over all while also having focus on 1 romantic pairing per book, that’s got to be tough to fit in and I think her record with sf shows she struggles to do that within one book. It seems like it’s either romance or plot for her if she doesn’t have multiple books to tell a story.

On a side note a couple of things I find frustrating in this fandom is that people make blank statements like “she’s a mates author. So elucian and *gwynriel will be her pairings” like an author can’t grow and write new concepts and in a market so saturated with fated mates why do people want the same old same old and why wouldn’t an author like sjm not want to try something a bit different? and the second thing is (and these are the same people who sprout the fated mates author bullshit) when people say things like 3 sisters 3 bothers is so cliche, cheesy or boring like why the fudge are you reading romantasys if troupe based writing isn’t your thing ffs. It’s all just regurgitated bulls*#t from book to book author to author and isn’t that the appeal of this genre?

I definitely think that she needed the crossover to build up some of the ACOTAR story because she dropped the ball in ACOSF and created such minimal plot with only the troves being of any importance that she needed to start working 'backwards' to create a beefier story.

I think it was even a bigger story on HOFAS but I think it did take over and took away from Bryce's story, becoming too much of an ACOTAR story.

While she is kind of mate-obsessed, to the point of it become boring and predictable, I am hoping that with Elain it will be something more unique. 2 mates, 1 true mate and 1 false mate, no mate at all--I don't know. I think many of her more successful couples didn't have the mate thing happening for a long time. Elorcan, Chaol and Yrene, even Feysand, UNTIL they mated (frankly after they mated they became kind of boring), and I think she had a good idea with Quinlar and 'chosen mates' idea, but it failed to execute.

Also, SJM has literally NO DESIRE to write Elucien. LOL

Like you could tell this is not where she is at mentally or otherwise. I also dont thinks he has any interest in devoting a whole book to Lucien of all people. Like I dont think she even likes him. She isnt writing a wholeass Elucien book.

[lynxgriffin]

I know it's a couple years too late for a "paper trail 2" haha but I'd love to hear you give your thoughts on how Chapter 2 changed your perception of the game's story and how you thought it might play out, and if you've had any new ideas in the time since. Paper Trail was a bit light on front and center darkner OCs, has Chapter 2 clarifying there'll be a new cast of Darkners every chapter inspired you to think up some main or secret bosses of your own like it has for a lot of the fandom?

Oh yeah, chapter two definitely changed my perception on a lot of things...how the themes of the game as a whole actually work, how the universe works, my thoughts on Kris and Ralsei as characters and in relation to the player, who the knight is, Deltarune's relationship to Undertale, and more. In some ways they were a complete reversal of how I imagined it in PT! However, I do actually think canon is still going to end in a similar way to PT...just for different reasons (and I expect Toby to execute on the idea 100x better than I did.)

I'm not sure how I would tackle new Darkner OCs...at least right now for chapter three, the market's kinda saturated with people doing their take on Mike, Tenna and others, and I don't know that I have much to add there. At least in the case of those characters, I'd actually rather just find out how they look in canon. And for other worlds, like a potential Dark World in the hospital, I'm still really hoping that there's a Highlights for Children reference like the Highlight Gallery. It's just such a specific (and old) aspect of doctor/dentist offices that I want to show up! As for secret bosses, I'd have to think some more on those! I haven't thought much on them, but I figure if I did spend some time thinking about it, I could work out something interesting.

[bonearenaofmyskull]

Bonjour 💖 I spent my whole day reading your Hannibal metas – truly extraordinary work. I share the same views as you & I completely relate to the sentiment that nowadays, when it comes to meta writing people dilute the relationship too much. It's challenging to find a meta writer who genuinely understands the show and its subtle meanings. If there's anything you'd like to advise new meta writers, what would it be? Also I'd like to know if you have any complaints against the fandom now. Personally, I just want them to be less aggressive with their views because it seems like only one acceptable interpretation is accepted in the fandom.

I'm glad you enjoyed my work and got something out of it!

I have a post here for aspiring meta writers. It's not specific to Hannibal meta per se, but there really isn't much I'd add to or change about it to make it so. Maybe a couple things, that kind of tie into your question about complaints about the fandom currently.

I think if a person's main interest in writing Hannibal meta only really exists because they want to talk about Hannigram, then they can do what they wish, but the fandom doesn't really need them as a meta writer. That market is saturated. And the quality of their meta will suffer as a consequence of that tunnel vision.

The same is true of the opposite: if their interest in writing meta is because they're genuinely sick of hearing about Hannigram, then they've just replaced the problem of tunnel vision with one of macular degeneration. I wouldn't trust either person to drive a meta discussion safely to any reasonable conclusion.

Wrt fandom complaints and the somewhat aggressive gatekeeping that I keep hearing about, it's funny you should ask because I did just get a question in my inbox right after yours (that I'm not sure I'll respond to) that begins, "While I understand you're not a fan of the Hannigram ship...." Smh. We are definitely in the age of the No True Scotsman Hannibal Fandom.

I feel like some guy sitting with a handful of others out in the sunshine being shouted at through a cave opening by a mass of people staring at shadow puppets, declaring that everyone else--and sometimes specifically me--just doesn't see things right.

It's no wonder there's a subgroup of people who have come to Tumblr desperate to find any version of the show that isn't that shadow puppet version. And unfortunate that the only acceptable alternate versions are just as myopic.

All that said, I'm glad to be on Tumblr where the feed is eminently curatable and the tone is generally chill, and there aren't people who have dominated the environment to the exclusion of all other opinions but their own. That may mean some argumentativeness from time to time, but I think that's an acceptable alternative to groupthink.

[fondcrimes]

hii u posted about poetry recently and mentioned the difficulty in finding a good poem, and specifically that you think the issue is pedagogical—i’d be so curious to hear more of your thoughts about where current(?) pedagogy might be insufficient and/or just your thoughts about contemporary poetry more broadly! no worries if you’d prefer not to though! 🫶

helloooo I would love to elaborate abt my post! thanks for asking (apologies if it gets super long though) I'm gonna break my response down into separate parts so I can better explain my perspective

I will preface this by saying I know I'm usually being haterish when I criticize the writing world in general. I understand I won't like everyone's writing and that doesn't take away from the value of a piece, but my somewhat uncharitable POV stems from my ongoing observation of writing trends and marketability (which is why we have colloquialisms like ig poetry, tumblr poetry, booktok etc). writing trends are not inherently shallow or reductive, however, we as both creators and consumers can observe how trying to sell writing produces specific "brands" of writers. the categorization of contemporary writing, to some extent, will always about marketability and branding, and then we know that digestible and palatable writing sells. it sells a whole lot! and that's not inherently bad either because that's entertainment, sometimes you just wanna read some bullshit. additionally, I don't see the value of discouraging people from reading when it's something I'm very passionate about and more people need to be reading anyway. I could talk about this in great length too but my main beef is with the over-saturation of "palatable" writing, writing that is marketed in a specific way that caters to the consumer rather than engaging an audience and provoking our curiosity and wonder. my main beef is that it creates a type of reader/consumer who is stagnant and not intellectually engaged. I think we're all too familiar with the sort of people who are more concerned with the marketable aesthetics of reading/intellectualism rather than actually using their brain *cough* booktok *cough* but the scope is much wider. I would say that neoliberal politics necessitate this mindset/level of literacy in order to function but that's such a loaded statement kgfkgjf anyway moving on~

in order to understand why people like shitty poetry, I have to understand why people like shitty writing and also why shitty writing exists in such great amounts. I kept going back to elementary school, where we made first contact with writing and reading interpretatively. underpaid overworked teachers already have it hard enough, I don't blame them for not being able to spark the joy of reading in every child they encounter. literacy is unbelievably complex and capitalism is like blood in the water. it’s also bad enough that kids are actively learning how to put themselves into like social boxes while their developing skills are placed into boxes of their own like gifted, advanced, remedial, etc. all that shit gets internalized too. when I refer to the "intellectual", I am speaking from the belief that each person has the potential to embody intellect, rather than adhere to a deluded elitist view of gatekeeping intelligence. I want readers to engage their intellectual selves because we're living in a cultural moment where it seems like nobody is using their brains anymore, nobody is thinking critically, and that's bc it's easy to shut your brain off. it dawned on me that if a child could be dissuaded from reading entirely due to bad experiences/treatment, a child could also be dissuaded from building analytical or evaluative skills of what they're reading. there are so many college students who can read but want to use chatgpt to write their essays... so many (voting-aged) adults who can read but consistently make bad-faith interpretations of tweets, articles, books, etc. I won't get into the marxism of it all but it goes back to the capitalist state, we need to be literate enough to work and participate in bureaucracy and get married and raise more workers but that's it, it's okay if our literacy stops there and I would argue politicians actually prefer that. but I'm not saying the alternative isn't difficult though... because it's meant to be!

ok so the pedagogy of it all. poetry is notorious for being kind of inaccessible to the common person for a variety of reasons but I'll focus on the fact that we're conditioned to prioritize convenience or become "lazy" readers. I didn't really know how pervasive this notion was until I was listening to ada limón talk about how people will straight up say they don't like poetry. she was talking about how really has more to do with how it's taught rather than what it is. I also reconsidered my own relationship with poetry as a form. I have the typical writer predisposition: my favorite book growing up was the giving tree, I wrote sad gay poems in high school and obviously I was a teenaged fangirl during the peak tumblr web weaving era. but I didn't think about poetry too deeply until a few years ago (during quarantine-ish) I decided I wanted to start writing seriously again after a series of depressive episodes and found my way back to contemporary poetry. I should say I'm veryyy biased and prefer studying modern poetry but I know a few things about that old greek shit too lol. I read poems I instantly really loved, but some poems even by the same poets fell flat or I straight up disliked, but I didn't know why I had those opinions. so I kind of became really obsessed with studying my favorite poems on my own, going line by line and figuring out the writing techniques and measuring their effectiveness. (I read a lotttt of writing criticism too)

now that I'm thinking about it, it was very adhd of me to obsessively read and reread short-form writing bc sometimes I simply don't have the attention span for a 20k-word creative nonfiction piece unfortunately lolll.... this was noticeably much more fun, esp compared to reading poetry in school elementary/middle/high school (even though I had enjoyed those classes too). as a teenager of the subversive aesthetic age, I still carried the notion that most poetry was about obfuscating meaning, or like purposefully being vague out of pretentiousness and exclusion. like I get why somebody would find poetry annoying, there's plenty of annoying poetry out there even in the literary world. all of this is to say that reciting poems in school or trying to teach poetry to students in absolutes (like this poem means this, this poem means that) is not conducive to comprehending the form/genre. you can’t achieve poetic understanding or connection to a poem through objectivity or removing yourself and your emotions. a poem is not just static, it’s meant to interact quite intimately with a reader. ada limón describes how transformative it can be leave a poem and come back to it. sometimes, the intimacy has more to do with the state of receptiveness than the text itself. poems are constantly concerned with emotional/somatic information whether you’re reading or writing them. I always explain it to myself in relationship terms, which is why it might feel impossible to build that relationship with something that seems doubly foreign

this doesn’t really stop at elementary school students. as you get older and read more poetry, you start to catch on and see that poets within a movement are effectively doing similar things, and I fear a good amount of poets are doing the same BORING or PREDICTABLE thing. (I will be nice and not name names)

it wasn't until I read a lot of poems that I noticed my favorite poems did the exact opposite.

this is one of my favorite poems everrrrr it made me write poetry bc I just wanted to do everything he did. it has also drastically shaped and informed my taste. so I will try to briefly explain how it has influenced my writing:

Let me begin this time knowing the drumming in my dreams is me inheriting the earth, is morning lighting up the rivers.

there have been weeks in my life where this line "inheriting the earth" played in my head over and over again like a mantra. "inherit" is such a loaded word, culturally and politically. I think I had been enamored by the sheer power of it, esp as a black person who has spent the majority of my life feeling unworthy of existing:

a brown child on a beach at dawn straining to see their future.

I had to sit with that feeling and characterize its meaning. for me, "inheriting the earth" immediately looked like a stampede of horses fearlessly galloping across the plains:

Let me run at break-neck speeds toward sceneries of doubt.

I could say a lot more about this poem, but moving on~

some valuable lessons I learned from being inspired by poetry: kill my pride and obliterate my quest for originality. at this point, I've embraced being a copycat:

because in my noble solitude, I have inherited nothing.

Our heads turned alongside the window, chasing a breakneck road.

I read jackson's poem up and down, left to right, tried to solve it like a rubik's cube. I wanted to turn my love for this poem into data points I could use in my own writing, but I kept hitting a wall. I couldn't shake the feeling I was stalling something inevitable, circling the truth embedded in my writing like an eagle stalking its prey. I considered the strain of the futureless brown child:

objects of my brutal childhood fascination

an instinctive deserter at the finale of my girlhood

one day I stumbled upon this article, the pieces suddenly started to come together:

as a society, we do entirely too much about youth and maintaining youth, so much to the point where the cultural obsession is perverse and the child is neglected. I only say this to offer an alternative, wherein we consider the childhood self not as a means to regain lost "purity" and powerlessness, but to take our power back. I love this article so much; I think it perfectly captures why writers are constantly fighting themselves and their words. it's evident one's learned self-consciousness and uncertainty cause someone to over-explain and impede on the poem. this makes it a matter of emotional fidelity and trust, rather than technical skill or knowledge. if poetry is inaccessible, I think it's only because we have become inaccessible to ourselves. this is what I mean when I say a good poem is "distilled", it has more to do with the clarity of the feeling you're trying to evoke or convey. it requires self-knowledge and making space for yourself to maintain emotional fidelity if that's what you want (ofc you can also evoke vagueness or uncertainty through the clarity of the form). I wondered, how can a creative know what they're doing if they don't know themselves? soon I realized at its core, the writer struggling with words was an issue of trust, on some mary oliver wild geese shit. there is a great deal of trust involved when you let yourself wonder. and sorry it's hard for me not to get all writer-brained and idealistic about this subject so please bear with me when I say I have good news, we can always find the way back to ourselves.

I think poetry should be about trusting the self and others, trust that they won't shatter the fragility of you in their closed hand. good poetry is deep intimacy and touchy-feely shit. learning how to write hurts because you’re also learning how to unlearn. it's extremely hard to teach that in a society that is more concerned with making sure you learn how to become wholly alienated from yourself (I've written extensively about how this damages the creative spirit, I'll save you the rant). in the midst of my poetry renaissance, I developed a schema around poetry in my attempts to write poems that were intimate and personal and powerful. I wanted to read stunning poetry, so I approached every poem like its intent was to pierce my heart. ofc that doesn't have to be your approach, but as someone who somewhat struggled with subtext and implicit messaging as a child, I am super into patterns that help me reach meaning. but I could only develop taste or preference through knowing myself and listening to my creative impulses, letting art and words alter my heart and my mind. it's about all that mushy gushy woo woo therapy shit. it had to be about me regifting myself a sort of agency. the resting state of a poet is precarious and sometimes contradictory. I believe in trust but I still feel the urge to over-explain myself or my thoughts for manyyy reasons. sometimes I don't even fight that urge, but the point remains. in order to teach and understand poetry, you have to know yourself (your intentions, your haunts, your beliefs, etc). in order to trust the reader, we have to trust they know themselves, or at least are willing to learn how to do it.

Reader, I should have married you sooner.

[worldsbiggestnerd101]

i will forever be grateful that the mascot horror of my choosing - welcome home - is not a video game or even a show, but is, in fact, an interactive website with many secret elements that hide the horror. look what happened to fnaf, to tadc, hell, even poppy playtime now that chapter 3 isn’t complete and utter sludge. like, can you imagine how much worse the welcome home fandom would be if we also had over saturated content farms to deal with?

i was into tadc for a week or two (hyperfixation go brrrrr) and part of the reason i lost interest was because of the fucking content farms. tadc isn’t just an indie animated show with horror elements now, it’s something content farms milk to hell and back! i’ve found my little siblings watching shitty tadc content farm videos! can you imagine what would’ve happened if welcome home was executed in any other format other than its current website? the characters are perfect in terms of color and designs for content farm exploitation. it would’ve absolutely wrecked welcome home as a whole and it would’ve never taken off in the way it did if it’d been in a game or show or anything other than its website.

i keep going back to tadc but it’s just the perfect example of content-farm-ification. tadc lost relevance after, what, a month? sure, it’ll likely skyrocket back up into tumblr’s trending whenever episode 2 drops, but compare tadc’s 40k tag followers to welcome home’s ever climbing 1.2 million tag followers. the welcome home tag absolutely just blew up and kept blowing up after its initial rise to fame in march 2023, but tadc’s tag is still similar in followers to the number it had back in october. i blame it on the fucking content farms. sure, tadc has millions of views of youtube, but how relevant is it really?

sure, the welcome home fandom is generally regarded as shitty thanks to all the fucking idiots who couldn’t listen to clown’s guidelines on nsfw content for the few months before they created a tag for that specifically and because of all the weird as fuck aus people have created, but at least we’re not that. at least we don’t have content farms like fucking lankybox completely sucking the enjoyment out of our media of choice and over saturating the search results we get when looking up the names of our hyperfixes.

i cannot stress enough how grateful i am that welcome home’s main way of being interacted with is its website. lankybox and all other content farms can’t milk that. what small child would want to watch them aimlessly click around the website and try to find all the secrets? how is that marketable? how can you make putting in letter combinations into the url and clicking on everything pops up something to scream at your camera about? answer: you can’t. that’s what’s so great about it. there is almost no possible way anyone under age, what, ten? would want to watch someone interact with the website and uncover its lore which makes it practically useless to every single content farm out there.

so, yeah. once again, thank you clown for making your funny little puppet show horror project a silly website with its own secrets and codes rather than a video game. thank you for executing mascot horror in such a great way that content farms have simply not found a way to milk it in the almost year since its initial explosion in popularity. don’t forget to wave up high!

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

Alex Horne: How often do you think about food? Ray Peacock: Surprisingly little. Alex Horne: How often do you think about death? Ray Peacock: Surprisingly lots. Alex Horne: And how often do you look at Chortle, the website? Ray Peacock: Every other day, maybe? Alex Horne: Okay, so it’s death, then Chortle, then food. Ray Peacock: Yeah, pretty much. - Alex Horne Breaks the News podcast, quickfire quiz, June 2014

Most relatable Ray Peacock has ever been, and I've heard him be pretty fucking relatable on a lot of topics. But this might do it more than any of them. I have the exact same answers to all three questions. That is the order that those topics enter my day-to-day thoughts. And people are frequently surprised by how much I don't like turning food into a whole big thing to think about a lot. This is why I refuse to listen to Off Menu (for other reasons, I'm going to guess there's a chance I might share that with Ray Peacock as well).

Having said that, listening to this podcast episode reminded me that I used to do Chortle headline roundup posts on this blog, haven't done one of those in a while. And there are some fun ones right now. So here, have some Chortle headlines.

I am surprisingly excited for season 2 of this - surprising given that I found season 1 sort of strangely uneven and disappointing in parts. But it was uneven in a way that had potential. The good bits I liked a lot and the ideas I found intriguing. I'm pleased we get a chance to see if it can find its feet.

I watched this pilot many years ago, and then forgot about it until I saw this headline. It was fucking terrible. It took me a moment to even remember it, I briefly thought Iannucci had suddenly decided to start slagging off Veep. But nope, he's talking about this other weird American thing from far earlier.

I have had cause to think about The Thick of It a bit more in the last couple of years, possibly re-vist the stance I've held unwaveringly since I first saw it in 2009, that it's the greatest television show ever made. It seems more complicated now, as I consider the effects that many political comedy shows I love, including that one, may have had on real-life politics, some effects being not great even if the shows went in with the best intentions. On the other hand, the episode titled Spinners and Losers is an absolute masterpiece of cinematic storytelling, more righteous anger has never been committed to television than Jamie MacDonald being betrayed in the final hours. Veep is also very good. That other American pilot was very bad. This one headline has reminded me of all those things.

I clicked the link to see what the hell a cost-of-living romcom is. It's a couple who break up and can't move out due to a rental contract. Okay. Well good for Lara Ricote, anyway.

I continue to be quite pleased for Joe Lycett that he got a TV vehicle that seems utterly perfect for him, even though I could not get past the first couple of episodes when I tried to watch it myself. Good for him. Hope he wins an award.

Oh good! I'd read that he was better, but there are varying degrees of "better", and I wasn't sure which one he was. If he's traveling around to various towns for Radio 4 again, that suggests he's genuinely better. The "comedian writes a stand-up show about their recent bout of cancer" is surprisingly saturated at the moment, but I hope he gets one in next year anyway.

On the subject of the saturated market, I liked this show far more than I'd expected to, given my general aversion to hearing medical details of anything. A show with that many medical details that I still enjoyed probably deserves at least 4 stars.

I'm going to this! I'm going to this I'm going to this I'm going to this!!! I always enjoy the biannual-ish even called "Chortle publishes the contents of Daniel Kitson's mailing list." Always accompanied by the same picture. Steve Bennett definitely only has one picture of Daniel Kitson.

I used to love that show so much. But on the subject of me having re-evaluated the responsibility of various political comedies, my view on this is now that everyone should just listen to The Bugle's election special instead, get it from people who are not centrist monarchists. Actually, Last Week Tonight did quite a good UK election special this week too. I still believe in political comedy as a concept. I just have higher standards than I used to for what level of apologism and comedy washing I'll overlook in it.

He did that when I was in high school! My dad traveled to the States to see him, I couldn't go because I guess I was a kid and in school, but my dad brought me back a t-shirt that said "Eric Idle Greedy Bastard Tour" on it, that he'd got signed by Eric Idle after the show, and I wore it as a night shirt. Wore it several nights a week for nearly 10 years, until it got peed on by our mice infestation and I had to throw it away.

I watched this and quite enjoyed it! I'm not sure Comedy Blaps have a particularly high rate of getting picked up for a larger series so I don't have my hopes up for more, but I'd definitely watch it if they made this. Surely it's only a matter of time before Amy Gledhill gets some major TV role or other.

A few things going on here. That Canadian article was written by a guy my brother sort of knows, which is more crossover than I'd like there to be between my real life and Chortle (he's also kind of a dick, I wouldn't need to know anything else about him to know that, you can tell by the dig at the Kim's Convenience people as though working in shitty conditions should preclude people from speaking up about those shitty conditions). That Guardian article on political comedy is interesting, contrasting Nish Kumar and Emma Sidi with Matt Forde, I think, in terms of political comedians who can view the political situation as purely material and ones who have something more interesting to say about it. I read that stand-up round table thing, I don't follow American comedy all that much but there were several comedians whose work I know and like in there, and I had to stop reading it because it was making me like them less. Except Edelman, about whom my opinion didn't change because I've never much liked him.