When life gives you lemmings...

i think every publisher should have to institute a ban on books that fail what i’m calling the “little life” and “what else?” tests

I don't like this as general advice because it's basically uninterpretable outside of its context. What on earth is actually wrong with writing about your dead sister or your life? We don't know. Morrison's and Glück's students had more than we get here. Glück's student knows her own piece, has an easier time figuring out what weaknesses Glück saw in it, and probably got to talk more about it; Morrison's students had a lot more background statements to read her comments against. So the specific audiences of these remarks could make something useful out of it. But anyone reading this in Post Form is just going to project whatever they think Glück or Morrison meant (in the best case scenario they've read the authors' works but many won't have). So people aren't even really going to take away any good writing guidance except what they already thought, mutated by these memeified remarks.

Well I think there is a recognizable tendency of young writers, the kind you would find in a creative writing class to write sad stories about their lives and to present them in as "raw" a fashion as possible. And they're all really, really boring and they really suck to grade. And I think "no one cares" is just a useful tool for producing better writing from your students and the people trying to submit to your shitty literary journal. It's fine. The memefied form is fine.

I read that fish breathe in with their mouth and out through their gills so if one got yoinked backwards in the water would it feel like throwing up

That’s actually how you do fish CPR. I’ve had to resuscitate a couple of VIOLENTLY stupid garibaldi (illegal to catch but hellbent on sending me to Fish And Game Jail) before tossing them overboard and moving to a new spot

Yooooooooooooo fish facts!

Imagining a fisherman X mermaid romance where the fisherman saves the mermaid’s life by swinging it around like a bolas

We Are the Daughters of the Microbes Who Could Survive in an Oxygen-rich Atmosphere

scientists have recently announced that exoplanet HR 3499a is no longer believed to be potentially capable of supporting life, after new spectroscopic readings indicated that it doesn't even have a dishwasher. "i mean, it doesn't even have a fucking dishwasher," said the lead researcher. "I guess you could live there, but, like, would you really want to?"

Invasive plants need to be understood as part of a much larger cycle of incredible violence against the land.

For context: erosion on that scale occurred as a result of our clear-cutting entire states. The land east of the Mississippi used to be covered in old-growth forest to an extent that we literally can’t imagine anymore, because most of us have never seen a forest over 100 years old. It turns out if you remove all vegetation from a landscape, you end up with a bunch of loose soil ready to move downstream. A fast-growing plant that covers everything in dense vegetation sounds like salvation when you’re surrounded by 40-foot deep gullies that get wider with every rainstorm.

A lot of the south too was covered in Canebreaks, basically bamboo forests like a lot of South Asia, I don't know the specifics of the ecology, but bamboo being a grass I assume is rhizomatic like other grasses and forms a big net of roots that prevent erosion. *I assume* (pleez ecologists weigh in)

This is a case study in how violence against ecosystems goes so closely hand in hand with violence against people. The violence against the indigenous caretakers of the land, and the violence against the enslaved captives that were forced to clear the Rivercane and work the cotton fields that would degrade the soil into nothing.

This painting was added in another reblog chain, it's good to have it on this thread