An Important Lesson from the Authors Who Came Before Us

We all know the story of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

Childhood friends, high school sweethearts, and university rivals.

They showed up at Cambridge with trunks full of typewritten stories featuring talking lions, magical rings, a demon named Screwtape, and a dragon named Smog.

Their Creative Writing professor, James Joyce, famously suffered a fit of apoplexy when he first read their writing. He was so furious over their whimsical stories that he banished them from his classroom and forced them to work as unpaid innkeepers at his pub. He told them they could only come back once they proved they'd learned enough about the "real world" to write stories about "real things, like eagles and children."

Professor Joyce was forced to admit them back into his classroom when Tolkien wrote his eagles into Middle Earth and Lewis created the Pevensie children to visit Narnia. Their contemporary, Bede Griffiths, alleges that Joyce could be heard raging and screeching about how the clever young authors had willfully misinterpreted his assignment as far away as Gertrude Stein's Edinburgh apartment!

I remember this moment in history every time my professors tell me that I need to change my writing--when they try to get me to conform to a dying format. When they tell me that my Land Before Time fanfiction isn't appropriate for a class on Immigration Stories and Travel Narratives. When they tell me that my Babe fics "can't" be considered an essay on Orwell's Animal Farm.

Won't they feel silly in a few decades, when there will be sold-out university courses focused on studying work like mine.

There's a reason James Joyce's work has never been turned into movies. There's a reason his fandom is practically nonexistent.

The only reason we know his name is because he was a footnote in the intertwined heroes' journeys of authors who weren't afraid to try something new.

Vinyl records are circular because it's an efficient use of space: the grooves that encode the music are laid out in a spiral on the disc, so that the needle only has to move as far as the disc's radius to read the entire thing. Before this clever idea was thought of, the grooves were instead laid out in a straight line, and every LP was a narrow rectangle more than a thousand feet long. To flip an album to side b at least two people were needed, one at each end, coordinating via shouted instructions.

so I would like to bring your attention to the fact that music can in fact be stored on very long skinny rectangles

they made them smaller to make it easy to flip to the B side though

naan before beer you’re in the clear. beer before naan ghengis khan

When you consider that Gollum is an extremely old man who's spent most of his life in solitary confinement with heroin being injected directly into his brain every day, he's really not that unreasonable

It is crazy how set post-2015 USA is for oil. I think there’s this idea sometimes that the 70s style shortages could return any day and like. That was a long time ago. A lot has changed.

Scooby-Doo is a dog who can talk, which is amazing, and he largely uses his powers of speech to communicate how scared he is of ghosts and monsters, and basically the only thing his owners do is drive him around the country putting him inside various haunted houses and such. I wish I could take Scooby-Doo aside, I want to say to him, these people are not your friends.

naan before beer you’re in the clear. beer before naan ghengis khan

this year is going to be the one. this year ill be a thing of focus and momentum, heat and hustle. this year the path between me and what i want is bright and cold and terrible. this year it's happening for me. im getting it together and im doing what i have to do with perfect, mechanical precision. this year my eye is on the fucking ball. it's just me and destiny! get it fucking twisted, this year im making it happen

update it hasn't happened yet but we'll get em in the back half

well! there's always next year

Natural phenomenon of diffraction of light transforms black hummingbird’s wings into tiny rainbows

~photo credit: Christian Spencer~

guitar with "the purpose of this machine is what it does" written on it

made some egg drop soup. The trick is dropping the egg into the soup. Also some other stuff

The average person should probably post more (not just reblog without comment or emoji react on Discord or w/e). It is probably better to frequently make 80% good posts than to basically never make a 99% good post.

(I would go into more detail but then I would probably stall out, so instead you get this self-demonstration.)

all posts that are at least marginally more good than bad should be posted

i dont fuck with clerics anymore im all about barber surgeons these days