Just Lurking

Not to mention how good he is with his physicality, not just the touching peoples shoulders constantly, but the little twitches of his head and shoulders that are so similar to his younger self, his very precise mannerisms, wanting to make things just so (fixing Christine’s dress after laying her on the bed, pushing the note forward after setting down the veil box), all just screams a man desperately grasping for control anywhere he can find it.

this show was also my first time seeing the outdoor track, and i had i would say the perfect view of clay for the entirety of all i ask of you, and it was the first time i just genuinely didn’t watch christine and raoul because clay was just acting his ass off the whole song. he was like clutching the corner of the roof and looking utterly miserable, really felt like watching him regress into the boy in the cage in real time. or more accurately, clay’s phantom feels like he never really left his cage he just transferred to a new one.

This is one of those non-poem things that are among my favorite poems.

As the OP stated, the use of alliterative consonants is aesthetically just great, especially the placement of the strongest use at the end: “fuck him on the floor.” The use of “chintz” is indeed great word choice.

Because I’m insane, decided to scan the poem:

Not only is the second sentence, indeed, perfect iambic pentameter, the entire poem is perfectly metered, though the first sentence has four iambs rather than five.

There are further things I love about this poem, though: I like the casual connotations of “keep it real” juxtaposed with “chintz.” It causes me to interpret the “chintz” more strongly as meaning something fake, a facade. There is also of course the coarseness of “fuck,” which is a contrast with “chintz” but a different kind of contrast, gutsy and carnal where “chintz” is flimsy and inanimate.

And then there is the storytelling: there is SO MUCH storytelling in just these two lines. To break it down: The speaker is having sex with a married man, in the house he shares with his wife, which is “filled with chintz”—something that here connotes fakeness, in contrast with “keep it real.”

The illicit encounter in the poem takes place within a house filled with facade, the flimsy construction of the wife’s marriage and domestic sphere, but the encounter itself is a taste of something “real.” That’s a story, and it’s just two lines.

This is EIGHTEEN SYLLABLES, y’all. The amount of meaning condensed into these eighteen syllables is stunning, and it is so elegantly done.

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

please rb for larger sample size!

Question 1/3

Thank you for helping with this data collection. Please rb for as big a sample as possible!

Edit: AI here is referring to generative AI, rather than closed models or custom made LLMs trained on internal datasets

Edit" "tumblr is not the best place to do data collection" "most biased sample group" yup. cool. good.

There's a lot of "sample bias" feedback and although you're not wrong, I would challenge anyone to find a platform or sample source without that bias in either direction and an even bigger challenge would be finding literally anything else that over 97% of responders agree about.

closer shots of the force tree under cut

SQH: Wait you read ‘Dawn of the Red Mountain’? As in critically acclaimed novel ‘Dawn of the Red Mountain’? By author Xiang Fei?

SY: Yes, though you clearly didn’t or you would know how to write male leads with complex relationships to papapa and strong platonic relationships.

#he got a shitty deal with his publisher and gets basically no money from his mainstream books 

Turns out that there's this ancient society of wizards who perfected the means of telepathically linking up two individuals. While early uses included stuff like espionage and such, early on there was an incident where a wizard accidentally synced the wrong targets up. It just so happened that instead of syncing the crown prince to the intended informant, the mistaken target was a young lady who was a shrewd political match, and both their parents had been looking to arrange the matter (but were struggling with the reluctance of the relevant parties).

With sudden telepathic bonding on the table, the couple took it as a sign from the gods that they were meant to be, and got together of their own accord.

The wizards realized the potential for matchmaking as a means of manipulating the political landscape, and abandoned their prior attempts at subterfuge (a limit of the telepathic bond is that it's two-way, so the target also gains your secrets, which meant a lot of them had to be assassinated after the fact.)

So the wizards converted their lair into an ostensible temple of the Goddess of Love, where people could come to pray to find their soulmates. Wizards were also sent out to arrange matches that would advance the interests of their cult, as well as some random ones just to help cover their tracks. As the influence of the Goddess of Love grew, new branches of the temples sprang up. The cultists were soon divided into two categories: wizards who still knew the truth and pretended to be priests, and actual priests who weren't in on it and genuinely believed they were helping soulmates find one another.

The culture around it goes something like this:

Not everyone has a soulmate, and not all soulmates are destined to be together in every lifetime. But if they are, the Goddess will bless you with the ability to hear one another's inner voice, if it is your fate and/or if you pray hard enough. Some soulmates know each other from their first meeting, but others take time to recognize the bond and open their hearts to the possibility of connection. If you're wondering why it took like eighteen separate meetings with someone before the bond manifested, do some introspection and consider why you might have closed your heart off or whatever. Like it's definitely a you problem, and it's rude to blame the Temple of Love, which is only trying to help people and has no other agendas whatsoever.

Also consider donating more money to the temple next time. Higher donations mean more priests can petition the Goddess on your behalf, and she's a busy lady, sometimes it takes a lot of petitions to get her attention. 👌

How would this factor into a plot?

My thinking is that a pair get setup as soulmates, and they are just absolutely both adamantly convinced that they are not. Like not in an enemies-to-lovers sense or anything, they just get the psychic bond thing and it's like, no. I don't know what's up but the Goddess of Love has definitely made a mistake. So they set out to gain an audience with her, but along the way they uncover the truth about the cult and its manipulation of generations of political marriages and business alliances.

It could be a metaphor for amatonormativity. Like some of the priests argue that even if it's a con, it's one that's been running for so long it's already steeped into the culture. How could the main characters bring themselves to expose it? To tell people who think they've found their soulmates that it's not really the case? Think of all those bonds they'd be threatening!

But then like, wait a minute. That's bullshit. This whole format for relationships has so many problems, and it's all working in service of manipulating and controlling people anyway! Why should they let the cult go on hooking up individuals that suit it? Shouldn't people know that it's possible to CHOOSE to make a telepathic bond with someone they actually want to? Shouldn't they be able to decide to manage their own relationships as they see fit, without some misleading pressure of fate or gods? And what about the ones left feeling excluded and unlovable because they don't "have" a soulmate? It's not like people are going to stop loving one another or finding themselves if they aren't being led around to do it this specific way!

So they upend the whole thing, and upset a lot of people, and then have to deal with the fact that they're still telepathically bonded until one of them dies.

Ugh.

Wow thanks for the ingot man let me just inspect the quality real quick

Dude come on