I Have A Tumblr Now

1. Imagine you’re a powerful wizard

Eminent domain requires payment.

The government cannot come in and merely seize your land under eminent domain and pay you nothing. There is a process & they have to pay you market value for your land and the buildings on it. A couple of my former clients went through this about 15 years ago when the 202 Bypass went through in Montgomery & Bucks County in Pennsylvania. Their houses and land were taken via eminent domain so that the highway could be built, but, I need to say this again: they were paid.

They were paid and there was a process in which they were informed ahead of time. They didn't just drive home one day and find out their home had been snatched, too bad, so sad, no money for you, you should have put your house in a bank vault.

Just taking someone's shit like that without compensation has a name, and it's not eminent domain or anything like it:

It's fucking theft.

The torturer stepped back instinctively. Not out of mercy. Out of surprise. The prisoner laughed. Not loudly. Worse than loudly. Softly. Like he had just remembered a private joke older than civilization.

“You still think pain is a language,” he said.

Another blow. This time across the mouth. Teeth cracked. Blood sheeted down his chin in long ribbons.

The interrogator hissed through clenched teeth. “Tell me where God went.”

The prisoner turned his head slowly. There was blood in his smile now.

“There are organisms,” he said, “living beneath Antarctic ice that have never seen the sun and have still learned how to eat.”

The room had gone very still. Somewhere in the dark, machinery groaned.

The interrogator grabbed him by the jaw hard enough to bruise bone.

“You think this makes you immortal?”

The prisoner spat a clot of red onto the floor between them.

“No,” he whispered.

“I think it makes you temporary.”

The torches flickered.

For one impossible second, the interrogator became aware of his own pulse. The heat in his veins. The soft wetness of his eyes. The damp animal electricity inside every living thing. The prisoner watched realization bloom across his face and smiled wider, blood running between his teeth.

“You cannot threaten a creature from the dirt,” he said, “with returning to the dirt.”

I haven't written in years. Decades, probably. I know I don't do it for the "right" reasons, and anyway, nobody ever seemed to be able to find the time to read anything I sent them.

But when I do write, I sound like this. I always have. Because I wrote to impress my father, an unempathic and unhappy man who admires literature but believes he knows more about it than he does, and so my writing was tailored to his taste. It was the only thing I ever got praised for, even though it always came paired with unsolicited critique.

I recognize now that I only ever wrote so that I would be told I was good at something.

Sometimes when things are bad, I liked to imagine I could write again. After all, we live in a time where people are reading often and all kinds of books - maybe this time, I could find readers.

My career was the only other thing in my life I was ever told I was very good at; It collapsed in 2021, and I haven't heard anyone say that to me since. Sometimes I liked imagining that writing could be a way I would get to hear it again.

Again, I know that's not the right reason to make art. I should be content to make it for nobody except myself, and that should be enough - i should be satisfied that the story is now extant in the world, that I have read it should be enough for me. Alas I am a flawed person; I need to feel like I am doing a good job at something.

So, in a way, I am grateful to OP for this post. I can't imagine how destroyed I would be if I had taken a chance and posted a story, only to have eight thousand people all agree that its some kind of eye-melting slop. I would rather write and share nothing, than have thousands of people all casually laughing about how bad my writing is. OP has spared me from that.

if you look through the replies and tags, you'll find you're far from the only person who felt personally targeted— but you'll also find plenty of people saying they genuinely liked the original excerpt and wanted to read more. that's a good thing!! clearly, there's an audience for that style, and i don't have any interest in arguing otherwise!

what bothers me isn't the vocabulary, or even the (imo overly) lyrical prose itself. when i say “tumblr prose” i mean a particular trend where nearly every sentence feels optimized to sound profound rather than communicate something. beautiful prose isn't the problem! ambiguity isn't the problem either. my issue is when atmosphere begins cannibalizing the storytelling instead of supporting it.

with the original sample, even as the author, i came away knowing very little beyond the mood. i don't really know who these people are, why god is apparently gone, why the antarctic organisms are relevant, or what materially changed over the course of the conversation. there are lots of striking individual lines, but they don't really build into a coherent or particularly interesting whole. it feels like each sentence is trying to be The Line people screenshot and say "this goes hard," rather than working altogether to tell a story. that's ultimately what i was parodying, not people who enjoy this style, and certainly not people who just wanna write! just a trend in online prose that i personally find frustrating as an avid reader

And for a while, reading his posts started to make me really paranoid about my own writing, and to think anything I wrote could be dissected to that level. I almost never saw him compliment a cover, either - those he tended to only post when he disliked them, and it was a lot of covers where I actually liked the style.

Anyway, then one day he posted two covers he'd made for his own WIP, and I'll be honest lads, I thought they were dog shit. Bland, tonally mismatched to the genre, just bad. Absolute casserole. And instantly I was like, oh yeah. You're eloquent and passionate and good at critique, and you're also one person with human opinions that are going to diverge from mine. And that's okay.

And instantly, I no longer felt any insecurity about my own work from him lol.

like without government intervention, strawberry jam would have wood in it. like it's a thing. food companies realized that they could use less of the expensive strawberries as ingredients and just use wood. there are laws you cannot legally call it strawberry jam if you do this. you have to call it a strawberry product or spread. food companies are always trying to get that shit through. they have lobby groups pushing that all the time

it is more expensive to put metal detectors in a food processing plant. companies want to cut costs. it is a legal requirement in a lot of countries to have them. so it forces companies to install them.

also to do routine inspections. that is a government requirement. so are building codes. a lot of codes are the bare minimum. like some companies will exceed the code and have more protections but a lot don't. like if it is not in the code, they don't do it. so that's why having governing bodies that regulate building safety, worker safety, food safety and product safety are crucial. because without them, your employer will not see the need to have exit doors with quick release handles, or do routine fire sprinkler inspections or have road salt for the sidewalks. some of it is basic fucking stuff.

companies when left alone do not regulate themselves. it's been historically untrue. companies want to give you a product that is cheap for them to make and that they can sell at the highest price so they can get the most profit. for everyone who loves capitalism, that's what it is. the free market will not self-regulate. if you don't have anti-monopoly laws and anti-wage theft laws and workers' protections, the open market will not fix that organically.

You have a big work project?