Reblogged resonance-reblogs
People on Tumblr love sharing information about themselves no matter how asinine it is. And I'm the same way. Everybody tell me what the last thing you drank was.
Reblogged
Chum, Worm, The Boys, Telos, and Jesus H. Christ
This is a very long blog post.
I write occasionally about Chum and its relation to Worm not because I'm trying to dickmeasure, but because it is so obvious that Chum is written in Worm's wake the same way basically any superhero story written past like 2015 is written in Worm's wake. Even if Joss Whedon didn't do it on purpose you can feel the Worm in the writer's room of basically every major superhero franchise and comic story. If someone in the writer's room didn't read it, they almost certainly know someone who has, and so on. It's the web serial sized elephant in the room that nobody in Hollywood or an NYC publisher's shop will ever address.
So if I wrote a story about my favorite storytelling philosophy - "Wouldn't that be fucked up? I'm Rod Serling." - and my favorite genre, superheroes, it sort of has to exist in conversation with Worm, right? Even disbarring the fact that it's a very long web serial. We live in a post-Worm world. If I didn't compare Chum to Worm, someone else would.
Gurren Lagann exists in the shadow of Evangelion and Pacific Rim lives in the shadow of Gurren Lagann. Dragon Ball Z exists in the shadow of Journey to the West. Homestuck may not be your favorite webcomic, but it's your favorite cartoonist's favorite webcomic—dozens of them have said that out loud. Worm lives in the shadow of the death of Gwen Stacy and Kingdom Come.
And we live in the shadow of Worm. Not only am I writing a superhero story but I'm writing a hard sci-fi superhero story with physics-based, specific powers given to people after The Worst Days In Their Lives, albeit in different ways. Pretending I'm not talking about Worm is like if the writers at Atlus pretended Persona wasn't about Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. I do not think I'm flattering myself or Wildbow by comparing the two. I don't flatter apples by comparing them to pears. But sometimes I like to think about the differences.
A lot of people will not read Chum because it is a very very long web serial and it is only getting longer because I cannot stop myself. And that's fine. This is not a post to convince you that Chum is good, only to step backwards and examine my own work from the outside as an academic slash person who reads a lot of superhero media. "What is it doing?" not "Is it good?"
Anyway, have you ever watched Amazon TV's The Boys? Boy, that Homelander sure is something, right?
Reblogged resonance-reblogs
Mushroom Musician by Jennifires
Reblogged resonance-reblogs
Anonymous asked:
Why would you want to hear out creationists on any issue whatsoever
Not specific to young earth creationists, but I like to talk to people who are wrong about things because if I can understand what led them to their conclusions and how their misconceptions are maintained then I can deconstruct the process and find better ways of communicating with them.
I can also better understand where other people who hold the same beliefs are coming from when I encounter them later on.
This makes it easier to correct incorrect information without coming off as belligerent or condescending, helps me understand functions and behaviours of the society I’m living in, and bridges gaps between people of different views that wouldn’t otherwise interact.
I’ll read articles written by transphobes and racists and Holocaust deniers and climate change deniers and hardcore fundamentalists, too. Because I know they’re wrong and I’m interested in how they operate- in where they get their misconceptions, and where the weak points in their arguments are, and what their actual goals and desires point to.
What I’ve learned is that no matter how different from mine someone’s views are, no matter how repulsive or bizarre or provably wrong their beliefs are, we all essentially want the same things: a prosperous future for our children, a safe environment to live in, and an easy supply of food, shelter, and medical aid.
If you can understand what people want, you can find ways of bypassing their dangerous and harmful plans for getting there by appealing to their practicality regardless of morality. And if their idea of practicality is different from mine, I can plan around that to get them there anyways.
People often don’t change beliefs tied to strong emotions even when presented with new evidence. If you want them to change their beliefs, you need to find their information source, understand their thought pattern, and then meet them on their level in a way that they can see as respectful and noncombative.
And even if the goal isn’t to change their mind, on places like social media, conversations can educate the audience too.
Plus, it plants the seed in their head that not everyone who disagrees with them is dangerous, or inflammatory, or rude. Maybe that’s what they need to know to start feeling safe venturing outside their echo chamber and seeing how the rest of the world works. Maybe they’ll see it’s not all as nefarious and scary as they’ve been led to believe. And that’s the first step for all of us, really.
I’m not afraid of consuming media that is wrong or holds harmful messages because I know it’s not correct, and I am firm in my own sense of morality, and I want to know how people who produce those messages exist.
It can also help me find flaws in my own reasoning, correct my own misconceptions, analyze and improve who I am and what I believe.
Also. It’s just kind of fascinating. Sometimes fascinating like an old science textbook, sometimes fascinating like a train wreck, but still fascinating.
Everything has value, my guy. Sometimes you just have to put the legwork in.
Reblogged resonance-reblogs
pspspspsps poetry mutuals come here... new quiz... making you the patron saint of something...
Reblogged bamboocounting
DIFFERENT WAYS THE RAIN COULD BE
- When it rains, it all falls down in one single gigantic continuous blob of water instead of many individual drops falling gradually. Rain usually only lasts a few seconds, but has the force of a natural disaster every time it happens, and life has evolved under the burdensome constraint of having to work around the great destruction potentially wrought by each rainfall.
- Both clouds and rain exist as thin vapour invisible to the human eye. Rain-vapour still falls and condenses as it reaches the surface, it still replenishes rivers and waters plants, and generally makes things damp and humid, but for most of human history this appeared to be a sort of spontaneous generation of water and was thought of as a creative power belonging to terrestrial things, and only after much scientific advance was it discovered that the sky had anything to do with it. With no visible clouds, rain is much harder to predict in this world.
---
Wisely, our creator choose a middle path between these extremes.
Playing...
Whatever death flees from, it fled the Elder Continent first; the stories come back to that again and again.
You ask whether there are any animals traders. There are. They don't sell monkeys. You ask if anyone recognises the monkey. The monkey is unfamiliar. You ask if Watchmaker's Hill has any tradition of monkeys. This does not make a favourable impression. You carry the monkey through the crowd at the Medusa's Head, hoping someone will recognize him. Nobody does, although one kind soul buys him a beer.
You are standing between two mirrors. Your reflection smiles, so you smile. Your reflection moves its hand, so you move yours. It takes a very long while for you to realise that this is the wrong way round.
Solacefruit: In smaller quantities, delightful and refreshing. In larger quantities, one of the very nicest ways to die.
Things surround the camp, howling your name, and several other names that you did not previously know belonged to you.
The Counsellor tells you of a halcyon childhood. A home she lost. Of— but surely that can't be right? A green place, far from London, where she was perfect. Much of what she told you sounded like elaborate fiction stretched over the bones of truth. Your pen cuts down to those bones. Your poem rhymes beautifully with her lost place.
For a still brackish lake in a cavern beneath the Earth, the Unterzee harbours a great deal of life. Much of it has an improbable number of teeth.
The swaying of the boat, and the difficulty in finding a fixed landmark in the eastern distance, must cause substantial error in your measurements. Still, you have some approximate numbers, though only the Red Science can make sense of them. You could not describe what is East – only what the equations say, when they are solved. They say that the East is a plane that extends infinitely in that direction, and also a sharp line where existence halts. They say that light bends under the weight of the cavern roof, slowing down as it goes, until it finds the particular place where those two solutions cleave apart. They say, alarmingly, that it is terribly beautiful there.
The result will be by far the worst thing that can happen on this storylet. But aren’t you curious?
What Might Be a Thunderbolt: Long-dead light, held in your hand. A sky-spear, bright and deadly. It is only there when you dream – or is it? Raise your hand. See them cower.
Memory of a Much Stranger Self: You are the negative space drawn by all your roads not traveled.
The game is fierce and old. And now you play with its master. The pawns you sacrifice will never be – and never were – just pawns.
Should the lights go out and all laws flee, you will get where you are going.
...Fallen London.
Reblogged bamboocounting
Are you Ĺ̵̨̪̯O̴̻̠̥̤̪̲̜̞͐̓̕͠S̷T̵͉̤͉̹̝̻̘̹͆̐̀̀͗̎̆? Another freebie spooky pattern, huge thanks to BlindCherub for letting me share this design based on his pixel art!! by Erotavlas_SVD
Rereading...
“Think of your Pokémon. That Lopunny there, Umbreon, all the rest. You went through hell with them. They're not just your pets. They're your family…Imagine next year,” Domino said, “the rules change. Your Pokémon are shit now. New Pokémon are good. Pokémon you don't have. Say goodbye to your family, go get a new one. See what I mean? The heart. The heart can't keep up.”
Lachlan Nguyen, during an uncommon loser's interview only minutes after his final Pokémon fell, faced all watching and tearfully announced his retirement from competitive battling at the age of twenty-five. He went on to explain his intention to become a gym leader in his native Giday region and train the next generation of Gidayers so that one might one day hoist the Champion's Cup. The crowd gave him a standing ovation with more enthusiasm than they gave the frankly boring match that preceded. Then Lachlan Nguyen vanished from all human memory.
We think the IPL has determined the course of battling history, but in reality, it's only existed for 64 years. After another century, will my region win? Or will the world end before it?
Aracely Sosa, burning bright, arms extended outward, eyes shut serenely. She ceased looking at him, at anything. Yet he felt her gaze burning into his forehead. Burning into his skull. He felt her eyeballs inside his brain. She's reading my mind! “Shut up,” he said to himself. His words broadcast to all. “Shut up.”
Science, officially stumped, tossed up its hands. Toril had her own theory. Shedinja was a shard of Nincada's soul. The part of it that was weak and afraid, motionless underground as it prayed no predator would detect it, sifting antennae through the soil for microscopic bits of sustenance. In that state it dreamed of the Ninjask it would become, its ideal self, but while other Pokémon could simply achieve their dreams with effort, Nincada was always too miserable and empty and alone, so alone in that dark hole. Bottom of the food chain, interaction with any other living creature meant death, interaction was loathsome, yet some part longed to interact, longed to reach out and touch, for why else did its antennae ceaselessly sift?
When Aracely was seventeen, the age Toril was now, she fell out of the world.
It's nonsense. It had to be nonsense. It was rebellion against a world grown too sensible, where too much unknown was stamped out. To them, it was only possible to create their own story by ignoring the story of the world entirely. That's what made them a cult; the willed divorce from reality.
You began to believe their narrative. The narrative keeping this world at a standstill. The narrative of endless repetition, annual cycles of pointless entertainment, winners crowned, winners to replace history.
Most first-time tournament challengers learned in regionals to blot out the crowd. Toril a few years back created her own method, to imagine the crowd as wind atop a mountain. That wind was the loudest thing on the planet, yet somehow the brain learned to filter it to nothing, to the point it became possible to sleep, to the point that on the rare occasions it suddenly stopped, the silence sounded louder.
In that parallel line of history, humanity lost the race. And all 8 billion of us were dead. I have seen many other lines now. I am a seer of all. And what I see is: This world will end on October 12.
Reblogged bamboocounting
A friend has once again brought it to my attention that it is unusual to have an intact chronological memory of life prior to age 12 and you know what’s weird to ME is that the rest of yall forgot how to sing the clean-up song
Other shit:
- The crotch-and-chin destroying hell of a toddler’s carseat
- How fucking scary stairs are when you JUST figured out walking. “You can stand up” nah fuck that these steps go up to my knees and I’m top-heavy I’m gonna scoot down on my ass thank you
- Walking alongside fucking giants whose legs are bigger than your whole fucking body and trying to keep up
- Not knowing how to blow your nose and everyone expecting you to just figure it out by holding a tissue and saying “blow” like WHAT DO YOU MEAN CLOSE MY THROAT? Just an absolute snot waterboarding
- People describing how to make sounds with your mouth but you can’t see inside their mouth when they do it so you kind of just guess over and over while they tell you you still don’t got it
- Not having a full grasp of language but fully understanding CONCEPTS so you say shit like “are we going to the park later?” When you mean TOMORROW but all you can come up with is shit like “the next time we have lunch, not today but after today, after that” like a fucked up game of verbal post-brain injury Pictionary where people won’t let you get mad about it
- Just. Mucus. Mucus and chapped skin, all the time, chin and upper lip. And you’re not supposed to lick it cause the spit is the PROBLEM but it’s fucking OBNOXIOUS. “Just keep the skin dry” wow thanks I’ve been aware of this mechsuit for about ten minutes and still haven’t fully mastered not falling into the toilet but yeah I know how to stay on top of that, cool
- FALLING INTO THE TOILET
- Trying to eat at a table where the surface comes up to your chin but not being able to get high or close enough cause you can’t scoot your chair in and your hands still don’t coordinate good so you end up just spooning tomato sauce onto your lap like an asshole. Like yeah mom my bad, have you considered though that I ALSO don’t want me to be covered in sauce? Cool
- Adults being WAY too excited about shit that straight up is not worth the hype
- Carpet burn. Constant carpet burn. Crawling, tripping, shuffling between toys on the floor. So much goddamn carpet burn
- Knowing exactly what you’re talking about and zero people understanding because they think you’re too dumb for what you’re trying to communicate
- Being told to wave at or hug complete strangers. And they always smelled kinda weird but you weren’t supposed to say it
- The feeling of meeting an older kid and they act like they’re your manager or something
- Encyclopedic knowledge and name of every single person in your grade 1 class, and their interests
- Stroller rides. You could zone out at the ground for hours I swear to god
- Dropping something while buckled into a carseat or stroller and not being able to get it and just resigning yourself to a life in hell
- Dropping something while you’re in a carseat and it goes UNDER YOUR ASS and you can’t fucking GET IT
- Other children getting away with just absolute war crimes. Imagine if Sharon showed up to the office potluck and offered you a cookie and after you ate one revealed that she licked it. Imagine if Gord took your stapler and put it down his pants so you couldn’t get it back. Imagine if for no reason at all your coworker told you your dad was stupid and then put your laptop in the garbage
- Not remembering what different foods are called and getting pressured into agreeing to food you were NOT FULLY AWARE OF. How the FUCK is a chicken wing different from a chicken strip you ask? “Well, one just has a bone in it!” You fool. You fucking idiot. They might as well be from different animals entirely. But now you gotta eat it cause we don’t waste food (hell)
Yes I’ve talked about this before and yes I’m going to talk about it again because every single person on earth should be fully and viscerally aware that being a kid feels like every description I’ve ever read of recovering from a stroke and we all grow up and forget and talk about childhood like it was magic.
Yeah some of it was fun and all but don’t you remember FALLING DOWN CONSTANTLY? You don’t remember needing help putting a shirt on cause you got your arm stuck and couldn’t get out and panicked so bad you started crying? You DON’T remember being just CONSTANTLY STICKY? Ohhh my good, pissing yourself. Pissing yourself was the worst. Christ alive, and being put in the playpen with a weird kid
Why were you falling into the toilet?
I WAS LIKE TWO FEET TALL
what's weird about my brain is that i have extremely bad *voluntary* recall but if someone else can prompt me, it turns out that more often than not, the memories are still on file
i would like to also add:
-being a nervous kid means living in silent hill permanently forever. there are monsters. they WILL get you. you can't predict when. no one thinks this is noteworthy.
-some foods make you sick. somehow this doesn't mean you can just not eat them. being sick is really inconsiderate of you, too.
-sticky crumbs are the worst.
-kids cooler than you hate you. kids weirder than you are even more unpredictably violent.
-no one understands your creative vision. 'house' would be so much better with a dragon. why does this require extensive debate.
-the assholes who never put the play dough caps back on the tubs should get their hands unscrewed.
-that one girl who can't tell a story but cries if you interrupt whatever boring thing she was failing to say
-boys are allowed to kill any creature they want in front of you specifically to hurt your feelings and you're the bad guy when you bite them???
-rose petals should taste good but don't. WHY.
-that one church lady who thinks screaming in a shrill and pathetic way at the rude boys is going to work THIS time. what the fuck is wrong with her
-snail slime washes off but slug slime is forever. i still don't understand this one.
-if there are millions of grownups in the world why can't they replace the one currently fucking up being in charge of you and the six boys who like to to torture you. like there's lots more teachers. can't you get one who is trained in not letting kids get tortured? no one in the room has been sneaky about the torture thing. come on.
-clay soil should taste good. look at it. deeply unfair that it doesn't.
-you will never regret putting a small smooth rock in your mouth.
-you chewed too much string and are having an unprecedented bathroom situation.
-why does your friend's mom smell so bad? bad-smelling moms seems like it should be against the rules.
-why does your other friend's mom smell so good? can you get your mom to smell like this?
-extremely specific pretend game scenarios you revisit over and over until your friends are exasperated and ten years later you go OH SHIT as you understand some very embarrassing things about yourself.
-rolling down a grassy hill was such a fantastic combination of chaos and freedom and safety. it's still fun as a grownup but my joints don't agree.
-the utter devastation of squishing a bug you were trying to save. you go from disney princess to warcrimes mcbloodhands in one irreversible second.
-sometimes the free lollipop is just kinda mid. and they don't give you another one to make up for it. and you can't even get THAT mad because mid is still better than nothing.
-mom tells you to clean your toys up but you only have one basket for your stuffed animals, who are currently having a civil war. not good.
-being small enough to climb into a box full of packing peanuts. incredibly good noise. incredibly good texture.
-do you also remember unspooling a tape measure allll the way out, confirming to everyone that the metal end bit COULD rip your eye out, then dropping the tape measure and running out of range before the tape respooled?
-pissing your pants sucks so bad. it stings. and it seems to take so much longer to dry than a water spill does
-you're still a person, every year of your life. everyone says you'll be different when you grow up. and every grownup is so strange, so distant, so unsympathetic and illogical and dismissive and alien. you wonder what could ever make you that different. you wonder why no one can explain.
Reblogged resonance-reblogs
samsweetmilk
Our good friend @quietpinetrees has brought his microfiction to tumblr and it is achingly beautiful.
momnar
oh this is gorgeous
I really miss QPT’s microfiction.
Reblogged resonance-reblogs
The most fulfilled people I know tend to have two traits. They’re insatiably curious—about new ideas, experiences, information and people.And they seem to exist in a state of perpetual, self-inflicted unhappiness.
These people tend to have a project they’re working on. An essay. A poem. They’re reading Wittgenstein for the first time. Or rereading Proust. They’re rehearsing for a dance performance. Learning about carbon capture technologies. Making a track in Ableton. Knitting a jumper. Testing out a new recipe. Improving their Cantonese. Taking a painting class…
They’re serious about the project, although they may exhibit some self-consciousness, some hesitancy, about how badly they want it to go well. If you catch them on a good day, they’re full of freshness and vigor and excitement—an infectious enthusiasm that makes you a little more lighthearted, and a little more excited about whatever projects you have in your life. But if you catch these people on a bad day—well. I’m stuck, they’ll say. The project’s not going well. I’m not getting any better at this. It’s not as good as I want it to be.
[…] But it’s this restless pursuit of greatness, even when they feel demoralized and inadequate, that shapes their lives and makes things interesting. So let’s not call it dissatisfaction. Let’s call it a divine discontent.
Celine Nguyen, the divine discontent
Currently playing...
Food cube: Spongy foodstuff molded into a slate-hued cube of perfect proportions. What forces married the messiness of eating with the precision of cubes? Large boulder: It's a large piece of rock, older than every idea. Normality gas pump: It's a hermetic cask, hose, and nozzle. Inscribed are the words: 'in case of dimensional emergency, spray'. Crib: Wood slats are megaliths to a child. Feather pillows are cold meadows. Here are the boundaries of their dusk-world. Electromagnetic sensor: Small distortions in the electromagnetic field caused by machine folk are visible to this sensor. Hills: Blips in the wave graph of stone over time. Ruins: Here crumble the mysterious Eaters' vine-swathed works, spun on the cyclopean lathe in an ageless past. Chrome steeples and parapets that rise above the clutches of shale hint at the labyrinths beneath them. Box of crayons: Wax from the hives of Odrum is mixed in dye and moulded to the shape of styli. Together in the box they sample the iridescence of the world and offer the tools to expand it. Glover: Hand-coats for sale! Spare your digits the indignity of early removal! Small sphere of negative weight: A sphere of some black pyritic metal succumbs to the negative pressures of gravity and tries to fall upward. Mechanical wings: Force is pushed across bronze spines through an improbable series of flapping motions, whereupon parasols pop open to catch the mercurial wind. Penetrating radar: Picophase transceiver arrays assemble an exquisitely detailed model of one's surroundings. Gemcutter: If you bend the light just so, it frays into brilliance.
...Caves of Qud.
Reblogged bamboocounting
Mozu: 小さなスペース (2023)