vishini

lmfao

Bsky

Another Dunk drawing 🛡️

As @aurpiment so concisely put it in the groupchat: "human or machine this prose is ass from a butt". This story, "The Serpent in the Garden", won the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and several people have aired suspicions that it was written by an LLM. But the problem isn't that it's bad and won a prize; it's that this kind of writing is so common. This is just the aesthetic of heightened prose right now. Also of poetry, a lot of poetry. Ocean Vuong writes kind of like this. But where on earth did this trend come from, and why is it so widespread?

maybe it makes sense that that's the style that becomes popular in accelerationist meritocratic careerist competitive literary environments though... something about how it comes from viewing 'quality' as some sort of measurable quantity that comes from complexity and opacity, and the need to squeeze as much quality-substance into every sentence as possible, to outrun your competition who are doing the same thing. in that mindset, it doesn't matter if the sentence that works, the sentence you really need, is 'She got into the car.' because that's a sentence that could be a vessel for more quality-juice. that's time that could be spent doing backflips and impressing the judges; it could say 'She shrimped her back and sidled into the gas guzzler like a hermit crab into a plastic bottlecap.' make every sentence overwrought and exhausting, and it looks like you're a deep thinker who makes every word count. but who knows, that's just how it appears to me

Dunkaerion keeping a piece of cloth with each other's scent on themselves at all time. I've been trying to get the idea out for a while