@shinseifer / shinseifer.tumblr.com
a 500 word short story with the same plot as your novel that explores how quickly the problem could be solved by sonic the hedgehog
knuckles gamgee
sonic heritage post
I’ve never seen this one before and it just punched me in the fucking face.
Just like Knuckles did to Sonic
"Now let me get this straight Skinner, you call hamburgers Steamed Hams?"
"It's a reigonal dialect lieutenant, Steamed Hams is what we used to call hamburgers in upstate New York"
"Now that's strange because my wife's from Utica and i've never heard her use the phrase 'Steamed Hams' before"
"Well it must be some sort of Albany expression then"
"Albany huh I'll have to look into that. Now you call them steamed hams, despite the fact they are obviously grilled?"
"Could we get going Columbo, I've had a busy day and I have no more time for your pointless small talk"
"One more thing Seymour, what is happening over there?"
"Um, Aurora Boreali"
"Aurora Borealis? At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within this parking lot?"
Leptodeira septentrionalis eating frog’s eggs Photo by ahctin on Instagram
Here's one change made by Watchmen (2009) that's basically a microcosm of everything I dislike about the film. After the reveal that Comedian was Laurie's father, Manhattan espouses the idea that in spite of his search for thermodynamic miracles in contexts devoid of life, his detachment from humanity blinded him to the chain of remarkable circumstances necessary for Laurie to exist; he returns to save earth because Earth produced Laurie, specifically, his ex-girlfriend and superheroine extraordinare.
In the comic, Laurie points out that the unlikelyhood of her own specificity isn't actually less unlikely than the circumstances by which billions of other people came to exist- and that, exactly, is Manhattan's point. He expressly extrapolates this logic to the rest of humanity- Earth is a miracle factory by virtue of being the one place that can support humans, all of whom have the exact same kind of contradictory history and interiority as Laurie, all of which he was paradoxically blinded to due to his power-induced self-absorption.
This, in turn, ties into one of the biggest ideas that the comic has regarding the superhero genre, which is that it's necessarily myopic, because it's very difficult to tell a superhero story that doesn't on some level implicitly buy into the idea that the superhero specifically is uniquely worthy of attention- the world contorts itself around the person who's name is on the cover. Structurally, non-superhero characters in superhero stories find themselves in an orbit; supporting cast members, love interests kept in the dark, civilians to be saved. Cape stories that deliberately defy this dynamic exist- Watchmen itself is one of them!- but are visibly positioning themselves opposite the standard assumptions of the genre by doing so. Many of the other characters embody this myopia. Rorschach's whole opening spiel is about how intellectually and morally elevated he is over the teeming masses, and his mask killer theory is fundamentally motivated by an ego-flattering desire for the neutered institution of costumed heroism to be relevant enough to sit at the center of a widespread conspiracy. Comedian's gleeful amorality is a means of justifying his horrible actions as the work of a man who's fundamentally above and smarter than every convention and concern of the little people. Dan is the most "normal" and in ways the most cynical about the change-making potential of heroism, but when he finds out about Hollis's murder it takes less than a second for him to start throwing his weight around and threatening Comedian-tier atrocities against the entire neighborhood- because Hollis was one of the characters who mattered. And, of course, Ozymandias, who positions himself as above the sophomoric dynamics of traditional superheroism, is nonetheless still pursuing a plan by which he, the Big Man Of History, unilaterally sacrifices countless nameless NPCS in order to trick the rest of the unthinking hordes into behaving themselves, eschewing anything remotely involving collective action. Almost everything untoward that happens in the book can be directly tied to a failure to internalize what Manhattan did- that other people are important. That everyone who gets blown up at the end of issue 11 could have been the subject of a whole comic book themselves.
But in the movie- which, for space, axed most of the supporting cast even in the ultimate cut- Jon's epiphany stops and starts with Laurie. She's not a microcosm of the miraculous phenomena of humanity at large, no, she specifically- a badass superheroine played by a Hollywood starlet- is just so very special and worth saving the planet over. The scene is adapted almost word for word, right up until the part about "you and everyone else." I guess you can infer that bit, given that from there Manhattan is still out to preserve human life in general, but nonetheless the scene now feels like it's reinforcing the exact logic that it was supposed to be arguing against- that only superheroes matter, and that only the interiority of superheroes can move the needle.
This is a complaint that can be made about pretty much any fiction, from a sci-fi epic where whole planets are incinerated just for a bad guy to show off his juice to a boomer-era litfic piece where the middle-aged male protagonist learns to love life again at the expense of the wife and kids he ghosted. And to me it cuts right to the core of what a 'story' is and why this line of inquiry is a dead end.
The human brain is barely equipped to handle the fact that there are ~8 billion real people in the world right now, who all putatively deserve the same level of humanity and consideration, and many of whom are in rather dire situations. I don't think Dunbar's Number is a hard upper limit or anything, but...okay, let's say I'm a heartless monster and you (general you, not OP) care about little kids in Bangladesh dying of preventable diseases in a way that I simply don't and never will. What does that cash out to? Do you have the money and expertise to heal all of them? Well, what about just one? Then how on earth do you pick? What happens to the rest of them?
And outside of moral considerations, the ability to cleanly and discretely chart cause and effect, action and outcome soon runs into similar problems of scale and complexity. "How did the 2008 financial crisis happen?" Well, do I start with Bush's banking policy? Reagan's? The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act? The Baby Boomer era making everyone think a nice cheap house in a good suburban neighborhood is the natural order of things? The original American 'every man a smallholding farmer' dream 200 years before that?
My point is, psychologically dealing with the enormity of human existence, let alone human suffering, is something that will drive anyone crazy who thinks about it too much, thus most philosophies and religions will allow that not fixing it all yourself doesn't make you a bad person.
So, bluntly, why on earth would I expect one person's made-up story, an artificial construct grasping for the rings of both 'artistic merit' and 'commercial success' to be better at it?
If there's one thing that surprised me the most about rubbing elbows with some genuinely successful professional writers at conferences and such was the hardcore focus on structure. Plot, theme, character, are all whatever, but the viewpoint character has to make active choices and those choices have to have a visible effect and both the character and the world around them have to be changed in some way. It's why 'it doesn't feel like anything is happening here' can apply to even stories that on the surface seem bursting with Plot, and why so many amateurish protagonists are just People That Things Happen To. (Yes, a good enough writer can nibble at this with postmodernism and stuff, but there's a reason it doesn't usually break containment from academia.)
"Impossible" is a loaded word in conversations like this, so I'll just say it's hard enough to craft a handful of convincing POV characters for a book of normal length, and it takes an extraordinary amount of talent to even begin to capture the feeling that OP is talking about here, where every single character matters just as much as the protagonists. In 2004 there was a movie called Crash which followed 12 different characters whose lives only intersected in minor ways, and people hated it! "Everyone's connected and our actions have consequences? No fucking shit, dude, any other brilliant insights?" And people have more specific complaints about the script and characters sure (and ofc it beat Brokeback for best picture, can't forget that), but like, is there a director you think could have made it work? Get an audience to care equally about a dozen different people over the course of two hours, in a non-fart-sniffing way that would actually sell tickets?
Literature is a better shot, but odds are good a publisher won't take a chance on your 1,000-page multi-generation 20-different-povs opus unless you're David Mitchell or Steven Erikson already. Or you could be Wildbow and try and fully ensoul your fictional universe through sheer word count while even your biggest stans say things like "It gets good after the first 200,000 words". It's difficult, is what I'm saying.
So for me, in both writing and reading, I just kind of take it for granted that I'm entering an alternate universe where the fate of the world really does hinge on individual choices and personalities, where the protagonist is in fact more important and worthy and some people really are just background/filler/NPCs, and this does not conflict with any IRL egalitarian political beliefs because fiction is fiction and reality is reality and they are fundamentally different. And I think if you (again, general you) don't keep that divide reasonably strong, not only will you make the mistake of expecting a work of fiction to be a guide to real-world ethics, but the opposite happens: you start seeing actual people as compressible archetypes and NPCs, actual people as protagonists acting out a role. If all the energy people had for policing anti-egalitarianism in fiction was transferred to policing it IRL, both spheres would be better off.
I was trying to find out if Kermit was eligible to be pope and I found a blog that says he's the perfect example of a catholic priest
What do you expect? He's a man of the cloth
Why were you trying to find out if Kermit was eligible to be a catholic priest ?
Usual reasons
"the magnus archives sounds cool! what are the content warnings?"
kidnapping stalking insanity sleepwalking cannibalism and teeth, gaslighting gun violence pipe murder and silence and medical trauma and meat. bugs in your body and poisoned black coffee and self-mutilation and lies, police brutality breaks from reality suicide spiders and eyes. paaaaaranoia degloving the uncanny valley and running like prey to survive, agonies torture and drowning and falling and then being buried alive.
I cannot tell you how delighted I am by the fact that this perfectly scans
nothing to add
During a general web search into Tolkien stuff I happened to randomly click on this particular twenty-years-old link and it's been a few days year and a half and I'm still feeling *things* about it!
Feeling blown away at the passion and eloquence and culture of this invective against Peter Jackson's movies from a time when they were still very fresh and not the untouchable sacred cow they now are in pop culture, but on a completely different level from some other semi-incoherent fanboyish screed from that era. The author is scathing and sarcastic, yes, but extremely, deeply in touch with Tolkien's Themes, Aesthetics and Spirit in a way that she could actually put into words!
Feeling a weird kind of nostalgia for the Old Web of personal sites and bulletin boards, and for this kind of in depth, fresh, contemporary discussion around PJ's movies that I couldn't participate in because i was fourteen and didn't read English yet.
Feeling more than a pang of sadness that this survives only as an Internet Archive snapshot, the actual website offline for more than ten years now, to be found only as the result of a serendipitous dive.
Feeling the strong urge to reach out for the author to express the above feelings followed by the realization that the website is offline, and so are the forums and e-mail addresses by now, and this is a weird feeling in an era where in the back of your mind you just assume everyone to be online somewhere, on a social network or another.
Cursory navigation using the Internet Archive reveals that the author also wrote the famed Silmarillion fanfiction "The Leithian Script" a.k.a. "The Script" a.k.a. "A Boy, a Girl and a Dog", that is Philosopher-at-large a.k.a. Bellatrys.
Is there any old time fan of hers on Tumblr who happens to know if she is still active anywhere on the Internet today? It would be so fascinating to hear from her, twenty years later, and see if she updated at all her take on Peter Jackson (or on movies in general in the XXI century). Or at least keep alive her original, passionate words wrote at a time when the trilogy had just come out
I keep seeing people say "play Outer Wilds, no, I can't tell you anything about it". Bitch. It's an exploration game about astronauts fucking around in space, doing archeology, astrology astronomy and science, with the gameplay itself consisting mostly of navigation in various 3D spaces with your legs or your trusty spaceship. There are interesting characters and tantalizing mysteries. It will require a fair bit of reading and thinking, it will sometimes test your speed, reflexes and precision. The story is about curiosity, courage, compassion, music, death, rebirth, and the terrifying vastness of space. The game can induce agoraphobia, claustrophobia, fear of heights, fear of depths and that which is unseen or hidden. Your character has four eyes and can roast marshmallows on any bonfire. Bitch.
