Since I've basically abandoned my long experiment with being a working writer -- that is, witing professionally and publicly in and around "the horror community" -- I've been trying to articulate what I didn't like about it. My gripe is not unique to that one group, it's probably a very general problem with internet life on the whole. I just hate the way people express themselves. Even people who are really smart and talented speak in this language that is adjusted for whatever expressions are trending at the moment, so there's just this constant spray of smug, meme-y, prefabricated punchlines, or if it's not all snark and fake cleverness then there's all this precious sloganeering and pompous speech-making going on, and it all feels way overly-familiar and inorganic and insincere. I mean I'm not such a terrible snob that I think everything everyone says should be totally original, and I understand that language is spread through shared patterns, I know culture isn't created by individuals in their individual vacuums. But I just can't stand how willing people are to homogenize themselves, how happy they are to sound exactly the same as everybody else. And then there's the hot takes, which went from being a form of like debate team trolling, to a bizarre new way of being aggressively emotional about something totally unnecessary. Like this, what the fuck is this:
I seriously wondered if this was supposed to be funny, or at least affectionately sarcastic, but I went into the notes and everyone seems to have taken it completely at face value as the truth. And like, it's one thing when someone says "The group hug scene from LORD OF THE RINGS is the single greatest acheivement in cinema history," and you know it was posted by someone who basically doesn't give a shit about movies at all, but they're dumb enough to assume that the entire art form has nothing better to offer than LORD OF THE RINGS. But the example above only came to my attention because it was being circulated by actual film professionals who are not nitwits, and who have published multiple books of academic analysis that is not moronic, and yet...instead of thinking "OP is probably not an expert on literary adaptations, they just felt like making this infantile statement," they all thought, "This is great and true and I want to help this person make this dumbass statement even LOUDER." I'm just saying, i don't have the grace or social adjustment or whatever it takes to pretend that the way people talk to each other now is cool. I don't enjoy this and it makes me feel like even at the cost of some imaginary "career" that would be aided by my visible participation in "community spaces", it's better if I just stay away from anything like that now and forever. Ok, goodbye!
izzy806
theartofmadeline
vaporwave
andulkaphoto
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
tangentwithtanner
