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oh hey, the TAZ Don’t Let’s Start animatic, yeah I loved making that—IT’S BEEN NEARLY A DECADE????
anyways, balance is still one of the best shows out there, rewrote my brain chemistry when I was 16 and made me believe in the power of love. (and thanks for almost 900,000 views <3)
like okay am i being too much of a hater or (bitching about the prose in this novel under the cut)
I can hear your objections mounting. That until this point, at least I'd been in the Fayetons' direct proximity. How could I have, even retroactively, achieved such intimate access to someone like Arun Patil? Simple divination strains credulity, and journalistic effort brands a fraud. Better chalk it up to delusions of grandeur—as if the difference between confidence and delusion hasn't generally been a little extra skin and muscle hanging between the legs. Women are always, on some level, unreliable narrators. Victims. But do not mistake my victimhood for weakness—this isn't like old times. There are advantages to victimhood, narratively, and I know how to take advantage of them. My unreliability frees me from any burden of proof. Consider that before Veblen there was George Eliot; before Girard, Flaubert. Remember every great novel is an unbelievable truth.
...so maybe this just reflects that i don't read much Literature Published Within The Past Ten Years, but this reminds me so distinctly of a style of post that was really popular in the play-by-post horse RPG scene of the 2000s
in which you'd open your post with some dramatic epigraph—like, "Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist," or whatever—and then you'd sort of riff in a free-association-y way thereafter, like—start with a description of the night sky, and then shift from the night sky to a vague meditation on the nature of sanity, and then link the sanity-meditation back to the character, and FINALLY get back to a backhanded callback to that epigraph, in a way dense with Reference and Vibe but otherwise kind of shallow, and like... this prose reads to me as the somewhat-more-sophisticated version of the horse RPG thing? but it's still the horse RPG thing? so i can't help but cringe?
(i actually dug through my files to see if i could find an example from an actual old horse RPG, but... those files are mysteriously missing, and i do not presently have access to The Dusty Attic In Kentucky Where A Bunch Of Those Posts Are Printed Out, woe. but hopefully someone here's familiar with the style?)
anyway idk. do readers get something out of this. it just seems so. airy and rootless
(may just be a question of "well are you good at doing it"; iirc Tokarczuk does similar vibing in her novels, but there i found it fine & interesting & did not think of horse RPGs even once)
@courtyardhound said: THE HORSE RPG SCENE??? (that’s entirely without judgement, that’s just not the image i would have conjured up for. horse rpg scene.)
oh i am SO excited to make you into one of today's lucky 10,000 (brief primer on the 00s horse RPG scene under the cut)
i imagine the horse RPG scene started out like most text-based RPGs do—you'd write a couple sentences describing your charater's actions/dialogue; someone else would reply in turn; things were brief and to the point. (i got started out on the neopets message boards this way.)
but something about the scene that evolved on geocities/brinkster+boardhost/voy/boards2go/etc started getting very... literary pretensions.
some of this arose due to a reasonable effort to try and set some minimum bar for quality-of-prose/quality-of-effort (e.g. a lot of games would make you "apply" with a writing sample, to verify that you could write grammatically-correct sentences and that you understood the overall tone of the game)
and some of this arose due to games skewing toward asynchronous formats (e.g. if your RP partner lives in Australia and you live in the eastern US, you probably want to implement something like "posts need to be at least 250 words" so that your opposite-time-zone partner has SOMETHING to reply to in the morning—this was a shift from e.g. Neopets or MUD-based RP, which largely relied on both players being online at the same time)
but imo the big thing that led to WILDLY INFLATED wordcounts was when games started making quality of prose (as judged by, uh, the game staff) a core game mechanic.
see, horse RPGs often had mechanics for fighting other horses (either to steal them into your own herd, to win a herd-vs-herd battle, or simply to gain rank/status), but by the time i came onto the scene, almost no games were using dice or numerical stats for this sort of thing.
instead, you'd challenge a horse to a battle, and you'd each make a specific number of posts in a specific format, and once you'd both finished posting, the mods would judge the outcome of the battle based on a rubric.
e.g., a rubric might be something like: "each post can contain at most 1 attack and 1 defensive maneuver; the combatants will be graded on (1) quality of prose, (2) inventiveness/quality of attacks, and (3) realism of defensive maneuvers"
so you might earn points for having really banger prose, and get points deducted if you were "powerplaying" too much with your defensive maneuvers (e.g. wriggling out of the way EVERY SINGLE TIME, etc), and so on
"inventiveness/quality of attacks" was an excuse to flex your comprehensive knowledge of horse behavior and anatomy—i was actually taking horseback riding lessons when i was in this scene, and you better BELIEVE every other lesson i was asking my instructor increasingly-alarming questions about "what's the most violent thing you've ever seen a stallion do to another stallion," "how sharp are horse hooves really," and so on. there was this incredible book at the library with detailed illustrations of horse skeletons, muscular systems, etc, and i scanned pages from it & taped to the walls of the computer nook at home for quick reference. and "realism of defensive maneuvers" was this very funny "push your luck" game where, if you just took every hit on the nose, you would lose the battle, BUT, if you tried to wriggle out of too much, the mods would Pass Judgment Upon Ye and you'd lose that way
but "quality of prose," well. that's something you had a lot of control over actually! and people went fucking wild with it
—here's a relevant spot to mention that the interquartile range for players of these games was probably, like, age 14 to 17?
so, uh, imagine the kind of prose that pretentious tryhard teenagers would be impressed by, and that's what we were all trying to write. longer = better, pretty much always without question. some games would actually set minimum lengths for battle posts of 500 or 1,000 words, and some games would give more points per word in the post, so you'd have people writing 5k word sagas simply to describe "so-and-so kicked such-and-such in the face," or whatever
and, er, since padding that out ALL THE WAY TO 5K WORDS actually is kind of tricky, we all organically developed... well, the prose style i described above! where you're just sort of free-associating between your character's tragic backstory, and then the weather, and then the dictionary definition of a random somewhat-relevant word, and on and on and on until you were pretty sure you had out-worded your opponent
also we all fucking wrote like we'd swallowed a thesaurus. thesaurus.com was my god. i memorized the dictionary.com word of the day religiously. so i could have my horse beat up other horses better. with purple prose attacks.
and, i mean, once you got used to WRITING in this style, once you'd earned ACCLAIM and HONOR and GLORY for it, you weren't going to go back and write like a normie in your non-battle posts, were you? ABSOLUTELY NOT. so you had this unbounded chain reaction of a bunch of teenagers scrambling to out-flex and out-purple and out-word everyone else all the time and that's what i spent uncountable numbers of hours in front of my computer reading & writing haha
i once explained all this to another friend and he told me, somewhat wonderingly, that this sure sounded like a bunch of online teens had independently reinvented Tang Dynasty poetry battles & the status games associated with them, and like... yeah kinda lmao
anyway i dug a little harder and managed to find a battle post from The 13th Dimension, one of the most popular/influential games in this scene. here are the first two paragraphs. so you can sense the Vibe. enjoy:
Sweet iniquity. Anthem made no pretenses and spoke no lies, and all the worse for the object of her wrath. A dazzling spectrum of fires swept a barren frame to adorn the rebellious patriot with the brazen chestnut gloss that she now called her own, and in the conflagration, her own soul had been forged. But ignition had led to ignition, and though Anthem often seemed plunged in ice and cooled solid, there was a veritable roiling holocaust shrieking to be released within. She was sensible and stolid, but there was passion concealed in the subtle folds of her being; and that passion came as hate, rage, love, or bloodlust all equally fierce in their magnitudes. Now the passion poured forth, as inexorable and lethal as a flood of lava exhumed from the depths of the cool-fired earth, devouring and scorching, utterly destructive: bloodlust. But her soul’s calm poise and unshakeable intelligence ruled over the primal instinct that drove her in battle, and she swooped in to examine her new nemesis.
if it isn’t valiente,
the princess of amazonhollow’s very own
c i n d e r e l l a s t o r y
where guard charming
was smitten with the lovely servant
Her tone was tranquil, though caustic; she was no longer consumed with jealousy as before, fool that Anthem had been. The departure of Default was certainly not something she would dream of brandishing in the other’s face; that would be cruel, gratuitous, and altogether stupid. She respected Valiente, and her voice was not taunting; if anything, it was a subtle, if somewhat inscrutable, joke of hers. Anthem, your sense of humor never did match up with others’, so you might as well shut up before someone takes offense. Ooh, speaking of offense! I believe we have a battle to fight, Valiente…
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nobody warns you this but addiction happens without you noticing and one of the first things that it attacks is your ability to care. if you find yourself using recreational drugs every day, stop and take one day a week sober. if you struggle with this or if you don't see the point of the exercise, you are likely already addicted and you need help.
nobody ever taught me the warning signs for drug addiction, only that "it costs lots of money and destroys your life!!!1" which is not helpful if you can't recognize a developing addiction in yourself.
so here's some things to watch out for with recreational drug use:
planning your day around drugs e.g "i'll give myself an extra half hour before heading out so i can get high first"
rapidly switching emotions around drugs. you love them but you hate that you love them so much. you hate the way you feel on them but you hate being sober. feeling guilty after using even when you didn't give a crap beforehand.
caring less about spending money. if you are budgeting for drugs like they are food, you are likely prioritizing them more than is healthy.
getting high to do household chores and other unpleasant things because it would suck less and be more bearable on drugs
feeling anxious or restless while sober, not knowing what to do with oneself, feeling lost or ungrounded.
thinking about doing drugs constantly even while sober. maybe it's the first thing you think of when you wake up. maybe when you're bored or otherwise have free time, drugs are one of the first things you can think of to occupy yourself with.
going to work or school while under the influence, especially if it happens regularly and if you're seeing your performance suffer as a result.
the idea of taking a 'tolerance break' sounds good to you until it's actually break time, at which point you can come up with 20 very reasonable sounding points to explain why it wouldn't benefit you actually and you should just keep doing drugs regardless.
even if you succeed at quitting the drug, you keep your dealer's number on your phone "just in case"
you pretend to be sober when you aren't. you worry about other people noticing how much time you spend high. you make efforts to hide your drug use or minimize how much other people think you're using. you're scared of other people's judgement if they were to find out.
you have mood swings laced with self-hatred, regret, financial worries, and guilt. these mood swings are then very quickly wiped away by feelings of "but it doesn't matter, i can do what i want, and clearly i'm doing just fine while using drugs frequently". news flash, if you are rapidly switching between feeling numb-ok and hating yourself more than anything because of your drug use, you are mentally ill.
yes this applies to weed. weed is a drug and you can get addicted to it like any other substance. addiction is not the same as physical dependence; it is psychological and it can happen to anyone. you are not immune to addiction.
real talk tho ive seen ppl talk abt how long hair on men isn't intrinsically feminine & assuming so is racist can we get the same convo going for Black women w short hair can we start talking abt how short hair isn't intrinsically masculine or is that a step too far
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sorry this was going to be a tags addition because I only get to use my coated pantone swatchbook like 6 times a year when i have a new enamel pin to design, but...
I would actually go as far as to say that MOST abuse is unintentional. I think most people will go through their lives without ever experiencing intentional abuse. People are abusive because they're selfish, because they're stressed, because they care more about what society thinks they should do than the impacts of their actions on their children and partners, because they think what they're doing is correct, because they've made it make sense in their own heads, because they think they can fix their victims, they think they can fix their relationships, they think they can stop you from leaving, they think they can make you a better partner to them, they think that means you need to do what they want. We've sort of constructed mental illness in a way that doing this shit to other people counts as a form of mental illness because it is anti social behavior in the literal sense— it is behavior that causes social harm.
I don't say any of this to excuse it. I think everyone needs to be more aware of this because if you think abuse has to be intentional you will never realize you are capable of abusive behavior. You will never realize you are being shitty to the people you love, because YOU know what you mean, YOU know you don't mean any harm. But you're doing harm. You need to pay attention to the impact you have on other people, and you need to do it all the time, Especially when you feel least capable of doing so. Sorry! You live in a society. Get your head out of your ass.
The mythology of "fighting for real" is based on the idea that there's some hidden, powerful resource that, if tapped, will immediately begin to win.
This resource exists, and it's organisational and personnel, not some other kind. But even there, it takes six months to a year for the changes to take effect. Considering the current war is being waged to keep everything as is, it won't be used.
tweets on the subject of Russia's reaction to Ukrainian attacks, but that's a really good point: so many attempts to win break down when winning requires change and people are fighting to avoid change.
Then the United States and Israel attacked Iran. The entire operation, but especially the behavior of Pete Hegseth, revealed a bizarre misunderstanding of global affairs. The United States Secretary of War started shouting that we were going to commit atrocities and crimes against humanity, and that is why we were going to win. This alarmed even the most ardent supporters of U.S. empire. The parallels with Bolsonaro are obvious. These guys thought there was a giant red button marked VIOLENCE being guarded by a couple of queer studies professors, and all you have to do is smash it to subjugate countries at will. As if no one had tried that before. As if the Islamic Republic had never contemplated an attack from Washington.
it's wild because we've had literally hundreds of years of this! stabbed in the back, "fighting with one hand tied behind our back", unleash Chiang Kai-shek, the ever present belief that victory is a choice and not something that requires clear aims and organisational competence.
love the idea of the big red button guarded by a couple of queer studies professors though, are they dating? does one always lie and one tell the truth? do they ever press the button themselves, while making out? are they into buttonplay??
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My favorite thing about The Drama is Rachel's character because she reminds me of the kind of young person online who thinks the mere act of performing disgust or outrage at the morally wrong actions of someone else is somehow politically productive at all, or that it makes them a "good person."
Whenever I see someone disregard or disparage ideas of rehabilitation for people who have done (or in this movie's case, almost did) unforgivable things, I want to grab them and ask "what should be done, then?" Because, people like that do exist, in spades, and short of executing or imprisoning or Black Mirror White Bearing every person who's done or thought of doing something immoral, rehabilitation is probably the best bet for minimizing harm, right? (And if your answer to immorality IS execution or isolation... i do not think youre really the more moral one here...) But even taking out any potential empathy for the humans who do or think of doing immoral acts, sometimes, giving them the tools to lead a happy and fulfilling life are the exact thing that leads them AWAY from the potential acts of like, shooting up a school, regardless of how undeserving you think they are of that.
Its especially interesting because, in the movie, Emma had arguably done way more activism against gun violence than Rachel ever did, despite her cousin, but this means nothing. Emma's primary motivation for her planned shooting was bullying and the isolation she felt (and TCC tumblr), but it was when she found friends and real community and something else to invest her energy into, she was able to pull herself out of those dark thoughts and, like, rejoin society. And what does Rachel do when she finds out? Spreads rumors, and tries to isolate her. And, I say this not to victim blame, but to acknowledge that no one makes those big decisions in a vacuum and that understanding these things better is a NECESSITY for preventing them, which should be the fucking goal; that is exactly the kind of behavior that made her want to do that when she was 15.
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