my name is legion, for we are thunnini

There is something really wrong with the way we talk about books on the Internet. When I have a discussion with my real life friends — which I do have! — about literature, I notice the lack of desperation in the air which seems to pervade online literary discourse. When we read fiction, we seem to have a very bad habit of projecting our neuroses onto it. The expectations placed upon the novel (both as a medium and in the sense of individual novels) these days are increasingly bewildering. In an earlier article, I articulated my opposition to the idea that the novel and the act of reading itself would save us from fascism, but this is only one of many burdens people have placed on the novel. People will put out deeply, uh, motivated interpretations of novels. People treat characters like they’re real people and real people like they’re characters. Pages and pages of arguments between two people who equally do not understand the themes of the book or show they’re talking about. Much discussion about books seems to have very little to do with the content of the books themselves and very much to do with the people having those discussions. In this article, I want to get to the bottom of why, and I believe the only way to find that ‘why’ is by interrogating the idea of fandom, and its relationship to consumerism.

And it pissed me off so badly that I spent the ENTIRE WORK DAY today compiling evidence from every project my team has ever done for her, pulling past emails she’d sent us, putting together an entire case proving that she had been the problem all along. That she got projects mixed up, that she’d made requests that were nonsensical, literally everything you could possibly imagine. Screenshots of emails, reports we’d submitted, EVERYTHING.

This woman in particular has been terrorizing my team for years, her name is almost a slur in my office, I had simply had ENOUGH of her.

I put all of this evidence together and sent it to all of my bosses at 4:30pm. Then I took a long break to eat a sweet treat and drink some tea.

After my break, my bosses all called in an emergency meeting with me and they said they read my report and fucking loved it. And I sat on a teams call with my boss’ boss as she wrote my nemesis the scathing email I had always fantasized about sending, using the evidence I’d compiled, and hit send.

"I don't want to be a burden anymore", your hat answers. "You are always carrying me around, and I can't carry you. That's not fair."

"I don't mind carrying you, little idiot", you tell your hat, "you hardly weight anything at all, and you shelter me from the sun."

"But that's different", your hat protests. "I don't mind the sun scorching on me. That happens anyway. It's literally no trouble for me to shade you too."

Love that we have a DoD that doesn’t believe in tradeoffs

>"Why does [rule] exist? Its pointless and only stops cool stuff!"

>leadership stops enforcing rule

>cool stuff happens for a while

>someone makes minor mistake at the wrong time

>100 civilians killed

>"How did we let this happen?"

You think you like cool shit until people die.