there's nowhere to go

Breaking my silence on heated rivalry. Here's my main thought. It is so fabulous to me to watch these two like proper acting theory pilled animal work clowning physical theatre guys (a type i am highly familiar with) grappling in some kind of sisyphean hand to hand combat with some of the most awkward fanfiction dialogue ever written. And well sometimes they win. But always the point of fascination is the fight.

2026: more ugly people please

It's difficult to talk about the politics of fetish art or pornography because people attribute a much more narrow and much more powerful set of meanings to it. Anything that is meant to titilate must elicit positive, noncritical emotions from the viewer and creator and must do so much more effectively than other media can. A horror movie might deal with something deeply traumatic and (by most people) be tolerated or praised for portraying that topic despite it existing primarily to entertain. In contrast, pornographic portrayals of something must be assumed to exist only to "normalize" a corresponding negative behavior, and the viewer must be assumed to view it with no critical thought. Pornography can't have a range of opinions on a subject, depending on creator and audience politics. The politics have to be "pornography" which is necessarily "romanticization" which is necessarily "endorsement".

What's everyone's favorite book they read this year?

if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it being the last line of the brokeback mountain novella is so crazy it makes me feel like my guts are falling out. if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it. jesus fucking christ

this works best when the dude's narrative role is side antagonist, which in most popular fiction genres means he spends most of the time losing and/or getting dunked on. this imbues him with a slight patheticness that crucially is not really actual vulnerability (which would make him too well-defined a character to project headcanons onto so easily) but is possible to read that way if you squint, giving him a sort of wet cat je ne sais quoi that is essential to this genre of fanon guy