emma

hey you. teenage girl writing in her diary. quit talking about the boy you have a crush on and start writing about the current political situation, the valuation of currencies, and the level of technology your people hold. your diary might be the only piece of evidence our society existed after nuclear war fries all of our data backups. future historians don't need to know about damian, they need at least a secondhand accounts of the great water wars and whether or not your leaders truly did worship a deity called "the free hand of the market"

Keep writing about your crush Teenaged Girl. About your clothes, and how that other girl wore the same dress as you. Paint me a picture of what you were like.

Historians are going to hear about Damian and they're gonna LIKE IT

Make those future Historians reverse engineer the socioeconomic hierarchies of the 21st century from dreamy descriptions of Damian's current fashions. It's giving them enrichment.

Talk about the things you want to talk about. You never know what mysteries your diary might solve in future generations bc you are the only person who talks about something that other people thought was too obvious to talk about, like whatever that third condiment dish that used to be on the table with salt and pepper was for.

It was mustard. There's actually a decent number of advertisements and household guides and so forth that give details.

As a professional historian who just spent my morning reading through people's diaries, I'd love to learn about Damian, actually. Tell me all about how much you hate the teachers in X class and what's happening on your social media feed and all that daily life shit. If your writing is going to be the last record of a lost society, let it be real and let it be human.

I want to apologize to @homunculus-argument for assuming their claim that pigeons can identify cancer was a shitpost.

LotR using a translation framing device to get out of having to drown the reader in constructed languages for characters that are supposed to be mundane to the viewpoint, but also being written when it was from the perspective of someone who was genuinely handling translation at the time, leads me to the admittedly silly sentiment of "you couldn't write lord of the rings today -- because that's not how modern literature approaches the translation of proper nouns"

You mean we would have the adventures of Razanur, Kalimac, Maura, and Zilbirâpha?

an adventure prompted by dear old G[no further components of gandalf's adûni name were ever confirmed] [see also: G is for Garden]

https://web.archive.org/web/20160222191014/http://the-toast.net/2014/12/08/defeated-tolkien-estate/

i swear to god if people don't start understanding that responding to doylist critique of a piece of media with watsonian exonerations is not an actual rebuttal

somebody saying "hey i don't like that the only gay man in this story is a weird pervert and it portrays gay sexual promiscuity as a moral failing and character flaw" cannot be rebuked by arguing about how the character's backstory or personality traits explain their behaviour. the choices made by a writer are all fundamentally mutable; somebody saying an author's choices should have been different is not going to be persuaded by an argument that takes those choices as immovable fact

i wish we were able to talk about women's rights without someone mentioning how much they do or don't want to have sex with them. i don't care if you're a lesbian Stop finding worth in women purely from their perceived attractiveness

"I think women should not be expected to shave for societal respect / to avoid discrimination" "yeah🤤 i love bush" ok well that's not what we're talking about is it.

i hate how many posts about trans women deserving respect always devolve into "I love girldick" or "trans rights but I don't want to date a trans person" because that's entirely unrelated to the topic at hand. you should not respond to feminism with "YESSS I loveeee you because I see you as nothing but a sex object" you people sound like other men I get stuck talking with that end up saying "free the nipple so I can see boobies in public" and thinking they're feminists. why can't we just respect women regardless of your attraction to them or not. why does it need to be brought up in every conversation regarding their rights

"girl dinner" "boy kibble" can y'all just eat a meal gender neutrally

gender neutrients

The thing about the moon is maybe you don’t need to write a poem about the moon. The moon’s been done, we’ve discussed it. It’s a coin a mirror an eye a lantern in the darkness. It’s a rock in space. It’s the dang moon we’ve all seen it! Is there something you can notice that’s is more surprising than the moon???

When BoJack Horseman (2014-2020) said "you can't keep doing shitty things and then feel bad about yourself like that makes it ok. you need to be better" and "all we have are the connections we make" and "I really should've thought about the view from halfway down" and "sometimes you have to take responsibility for your own happiness" and "you do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself around, you turn yourself around, THAT'S what it's all about" and "things have to get worse before they can get better" and "in real life, the big gesture isn't enough, you need to be consistent" and "if we hadn't met each other until now, we wouldn't be the people we are now" and, my personal favourite, "every day it gets a little easier, but you gotta do it every day, that's the hard part, but it does get easier".

swifties always going on the "you just hate women" defense like first of all Taylor Swift is not a woman she's an unskippable ad