#post from substack

[misangela]

Whittling Away the Socials

This is a crosspost from SubStack. I usually post from here to there, I wanted to try something different. The other day, I logged out of Twitter (“X”), probably for good. I was seeing the exact same posts with different users and slightly different titles – the work of bots, no doubt. It’s bad enough I can’t see anything from anyone I follow, but adding bot posts to a feed that’s already…

[nontrivialproof]

The thing about Taylor Swift. Okay the thing about Taylor Swift that is most contradictory and that I think rightfully drives her haters crazy. Is that she is clearly a smart, strategic, calculated businesswoman. And she’s really good at managing Taylor Swift the brand, at turning this amalgamation of personal lore and celebrity gossip and aesthetics and products into something bigger than the sum of its parts. Into actually like the biggest thing in the world. But. Her business sense just does not seem to extend into her music at all. She seems to actually have very little sense of what people like about her music or what she should release when to penetrate into the public consciousness. And so I get how if you hate her, you look at her music and have to think, how is she so famous? She’s not good at this? So in spite of the obvious good art she’s released and her hard work and her talent it still feels as though her success is something of an accident. I mean, it is insane to look at Folklore and Evermore, the albums that catapulted her to the biggest stage of her career, and think the lesson is that her songs needed to be wordier? But if you look at her post-2020 output that actually seems to be what she took from it. It’s maddening. And this is just one of many reasons to be obsessed with her.

[dailykafka]

- December 25, 1911

- The diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910-1913

[ID: There is universal delight in the literary treatment of petty themes whose scope is not permitted to exceed the capacity of small enthusiasms and which are sustained by their polemical possibilities. End ID]

[holdoncallfailed]

this is so mean and obnoxious but whenever i see stuff like this my first thought is always "i could be so good at a specific genre of social media if i didn't value my own dignity and could just allow myself to submit to terminal corniness"

[lxgentlefolkcomic]

I think Mr Utterson needs a hug today

got to this one a little late bc i've been out of the house all day but here you go:

[thelibrarybat]

For this week's newsletter, I bullied three friends into talking about beige.

[taisorato]

there is nothing i enjoy more than listening to creatives i admire talk about their influences, especially the very silly/old/niche ones

[1introvertedsage]

▪️Locus Dreamers▪️

Life is a dream from which we all must wake before we can dream again.

~Wheel of Time~

[shezamaverick]

Good morning. Davey Havok just made me cry AND laugh out loud before 9:30am.

[loverboydotcom]

last reblog something i have found interesting lately too in my writing is beau and bobby having sexual intimacy without being sexual partners…like, they both know what the other is into, and they talk about it so casually that even when they’re joking about the other persons kinks it normalises the idea of having a kink itself and there’s no shame between them. they tell each other about who they’re sleeping with and there’s nothing tmi and this is rly important because they always had an external pov on the things they were doing in a vulnerable space, esp since they were so young. like it’s so important to have someone you can talk about kink nonsexually with because they might be able to spot a red flag you can’t.

they’ve seen each other at sex clubs, bathhouses, sex parties. they’ve watched porn together. they’ve mutually masturbated. they MIGHT have done things together idk im undecided but it would’ve been because they were both young and inexperienced and wanted to try things for the first time with someone they trust and feel safe with, which the intimacy from that is much more interesting to me than some kind of irresistible desire between the two of them, and whatever they did together did not change their friendship at all or unlock some hidden desire. which i am absolutely not someone who thinks sex will always irrevocably change a friendship + i like this idea of intimacy because it shows how they’re influenced by the sexually liberated culture they grew into adulthood in, and how important it is to hold onto those values as the story gets deeper into the 80s and the crisis. and i like how strong their sense of friendship is that they know their intimacy and also their boundaries that let’s them dip into closeness in ways that makes sense to specifically them. bobby will sit on beaus lap at a party and that’s normal for them. one time beau let himself into bobbys place and he was asleep and then beau fell asleep in bobbys bed too, and bobby jokes that it’s been a while since he woke up to a man in his bed. when they start intentionally sleeping in the same bed + cuddling, bc they know they don’t have a lot of time left together so let themselves be close however they want to be…and then their intimacy develops when beau is taking care of bobby, which i think all caretaking is intimate but quite literally at one point he helps with personal care; he sees him naked which is entirely non sexual but i think everything established above is what makes their dynamic such a safe space for bobby to feel comfortable with needing that care and the person giving it to him. like! it’s a different intimacy but it works together with the very complex intimacy they’ve always had which is why they are able to be there for each other in such deep ways and that’s why their dynamic is so compelling TO ME

idk! intimacy is so fun and complex to play with in writing when you don’t have a bitch with hetero/amatonormative ideas of love and sex shouting in your ear that this isn’t how friends behave !

[fatherblack]

Which is not to say that this has anything to do with my being banned from Tumblr - most likely it was something completely mundane. Maybe I reblogged one too many photosets of men’s asses. More realistically, I was terminated by a bot. There’s been a significant uptick in accidental bannings recently as Tumblr scrambles to deal with the surge of spambots plaguing the site. It’s bots fighting bots, and humans are caught in the middle. It’s crystallized some feelings for me: The Internet as it exists, the primary vehicle for making an income as any kind of artist in the modern day, is utterly and unrelentingly hostile to humans.

Something I found myself writing about the experience of being relentlessly bludgeoned by robots all this past month, ever since publishing my first novel.

[alynnl]

Pros of getting caught up on your substack reading: The excitement that comes with reading something new to you and understanding all the posts in the tag

Cons of getting caught up on your substack reading: Having to wait for the last part of the story that sort of left off on a cliffhanger

[sureuncertainty]

genuinely don’t understand this supposed “twitter is the best platform for artists“ experience y’all are apparently having, bc twitter has always been the platform where i’ve found the LEAST engagement, have had the hardest time connecting with people, and have never been able to build any kind of platform there. not that i’m doing MUCH better on other social medias but i do NOT understand how twitter builds community, maybe it’s bc i’m long winded and rambly and don’t like the character limit but i feel like every aspect of how it works is like. NOT helpful for artists and creatives. like more power to people who have found ways to make it work but i’m just fucking relieved that i don’t have to keep using it and feeling shitty every time i get 0 attention on everything i try to promote there

[jailwithonlyboys]

shout out to emy for suggesting pretty shitty time as the lyric instead of pacific standard time like i love you tegan but that would have sucked lol

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Substack Mastery Book: Chapter 11

Supercharge Your Substack Newsletters with Blogging on WordPress, Medium, or Other Platforms: Here’s What You Need to Know and How to Get Started Right Now I wrote this chapter because I gained significant benefits from blogging, especially within the last 12 months when I started intensifying my efforts on Substack. Until I deliberately blogged my content published on Substack or sent it…