tommycorriander

[tommycorriander]

Needless to say she is back on her Termites bullshit

[tommycorriander]

[tommycorriander]

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.

[tommycorriander]

Blorbo is appalled by the mere sight of 7up.

[tommycorriander]

name him. name your son

[tommycorriander]

other social media websites im on are like. hawk tuah girl and mr beast are collabing for a festables event. and tumblr is like. here are my top 10 favorite ants

[tommycorriander]

[tommycorriander]

i'll buy the penis and popcorn

[tommycorriander]

[tommycorriander]

It's really strange to me looking at the comments of Patricia Taxxon's Void Stranger video and seeing people just... Miss the point, I suppose? There was one person who said "Oh this game seems fun, except for this bit that you described, which I can avoid thanks to your specific guidance!" And it's like. Okay but you *do* acknowledge that Patty and company had literally no way of knowing that information beforehand. She had no possible way of knowing to avoid this thing because she played the video game blind, the way most people play games.

It's like if when I said I disliked TUNIC someone came out of the woodwork and said "Well see this game seems fun, except for the esoteric meaning of the cross, but now that you've explained it this game seems fun!" Like you're missing the point. The game was not designed for this to be direct knowledge taught to you, had you not seen me talking about it you likely would have had the same experience I did.

I also really don't like people in the comments trying to argue that "oh it's not guessing, it's hypothesis and experimenting!" Which misses the point of what an experiment is. An experiment gives you tangible feedback and knowledge; if I shoot the portal onto a moving surface, the portal moves with it. I push an object into the stationary portal and the force of the moving portal affects the object's trajectory in a way another stationary portal wouldn't. This is experimentation and feedback. Having zero reaction whatsoever wouldn't be an experiment!!! It would be like if every time I tried to fight a boss in Elden Ring with a build that wasn't what the devs had in mind for whatever is considered optimal the boss just stood there and did nothing and I couldn't fight it. And there's nothing telling me that Actually, this boss is weak to Bleed, so you have to equip the Bleed Build, and without doing that you don't get to play the rest of the video game! And I come back with a different build that isn't the Bleed Build, and same as before, the boss stands there and does nothing. All I gain from this is that I did it wrong and it's all trial and error. That isn't puzzle solving! Stop trying to tell Patty and company that it is!! You're literally just Wrong!!!!

[tommycorriander]

compilation of this type of post

[tommycorriander]

help

[tommycorriander]

1 beer could change theworld

but 2 could tear it all down....

[tommycorriander]

how it feels to not be eating a cheese burger

[tommycorriander]

I think part of why being called a "tboy" or "boyliker" or any variation that hits those same notes bothers me so much is because it feels infantilising to me. I'm a man, I like other men, I'd like to not have that reduced to being a "boy". Chafes against me in the same way I've seen women talk about how being referred to as girls instead of women rubs them the wrong way.

[tommycorriander]

I have a vague idea for a short ficlet/scene regarding Morgott and chronic pain, brought on by the fact that my hips are KILLING me after my stress test today. Idk I see him with his Old Body and his cane and I rotate him in my brain. He probably pushes himself too hard, always feeling like he HAS to perform at a certain level, which is admirable to a point but like. You can't tell me at his age and everything that he doesn't have some form of chronic pain. "Oh but he's a demigod and an Omen so he doesn't have the same body as a normal human" booooo I blast him with my Fucking Beam !!!!!!

[tommycorriander]

banging my head on the wall BEGGING people on the internet to learn what an Inside Thought is. like you do not need to express every nasty opinion you have, and if you do so publicly, you gotta accept that people are gonna get mad at you for saying shit like "i find gay men repulsive". social media is not your private diary, it is public. there are consequences for saying terrible things, such as thousands of people thinking you're an asshole.

PLEASE learn what an inside thought is. you do not need to share everything that goes through your head. you shouldn't.