one fun thing about being a teacher in march 2023 is that chess is a literal epidemic among teens. we are starting to have meetings about how we can STOP teenagers from playing too much chess which is like if we were trying to figure out how to stop them from reading for fun. When i was in high school five years ago chess was nerd shit only but now it is transcending every social and language barrier and is absolutely rampant. kids aren’t on their phone texting in class anymore it’s ONLY chess.com. kids are playing chess on their phones while playing chess in real life. this is still better than tiktok because at least the kids are developing an attention span from this
I think the reason so many LOTR ripoffs fail is because they make their Aragorn analogue the main character, when the entire point of Aragorn is that he’s “the person the villains think is the main character, but is Not.”
Aragorn seems like a traditional King Arthur style hero— he has huge Main Character Energy because he’s supported by destiny, by bloodline, by all these magic artifacts and prophecies, and etc etc. Frodo and Sam are Just Some Guys. Aragorn recognizes that Sauron understandably thinks he’s the main hero of this story ….and he pretends to believe it too, spending the entire series using himself as a diversion to prevent Sauron from seeing Frodo and Sam.
Aragorn’s whole thing is that knows he seems like the Main Hero of this legend to people who don’t know better —- but he also knows that he isn’t, and that his role is just to keep Sauron’s eye on him in order to protect the people around him.
And it works! Sauron is so fixated on defeating his Legendary Destined Archenemy with Extreme Main Character Energy that he completely overlooks the two ordinary little guys who were the real threat to him all along.
I've seen this before, but it's been years and it just came across my Twitter in its dying days. The words are from a favorite author of mine, Maggie Stiefvater, and they are the words I most need to hear when it comes to dealing with chronic pain and illness. I didn't need this the first time I saw it, six years ago. I need it now. Maybe you do, too.
The real reason fantasy and sci fi book covers painted by human artists are superior to their AI-generated counterparts is that when the AI gets everything wrong it's almost always a trivial exercise to figure out what prompt it was given and how it free-associated its way to the result, but a human artist will hit you with an elaborately laid out black-velvet rendering of a scene which absolutely does not happen in the book, populated by people who in spite of their distinctive and wildly eccentric designs are not identifiable as any specific character, and the challenge of puzzling out what the fuck they thought they were painting is often more interesting than the actual book.
The book: Paint-by-numbers Tolkienesque fantasy.
The cover artist: Fuck you, here's a cowboy on a spaceship.
Me: This is the happiest day of my life.
The cover art spec: A medieval warrior with a magic sword fights orcs in some ancient ruins.
The art-generating AI: I drew a medieval warrior with a magic sword fighting orcs in some ancient ruins.
The human artist: I drew a dude wearing a Viking-themed BDSM harness wielding a lightsabre against a horde of jacked lion-men amid the wreckage of a crashed alien starship under the light of a triple sun. Also, one of the lion-men is being eaten by a pterodactyl. I don't remember why.
I think the most unintentionally pretentious part of me is I genuinely forget that most people do not have a near-encyclopedic knowledge of mythology and folklore. I literally just assume most people know at least the name of every Greek god. My mom and I were watching the Banshees of Inisherin and at the start, she asked "Do you know what a banshee is?" and I was so stunned because it would never occur to me to ask that question because I would never assume the average person doesn't know what a banshee is. The average person knows what a banshee is right. You know what a banshee is right. You know the names of the greek gods right. You know that norse myth where loki fucked the horse right. Right. RIGHT
this tiktok screenshot ruined my life i need to see the serbian pigeon movie so so badly but it doesn't exist it's so foul to make this bad of a point with something so cool and then take it away from me.
Tiktok marvel fans really will be out here like "movie fan SHOCKED because i'd rather watch superhero movie #54 in blue and not a sensual 1987 french horror film about a man discovering his wife may not exist set in what is gradually revealed to be a space station" as if you're supposed to agree that superhero movie #54 is the clear winner in this comparison
Love the idea of a story about a complex issue that's told from the perspective of something that cannot comprehend or care about the issue. The way the story would be sliced up and moments that a human would consider pointless would be focused on because the pigeon happened to be there would be hype as fuck
Ok FINE I made the movie poster of it
Mališa, otherwise known as Little One, is a pet pigeon owned by a conservative butler of the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy. She is loved, and she is pampered— until her owner is murdered in cold blood, and she is left to fend for herself in Sarajevo.
In the wilds of the city, she feeds from the poor, working nationalist radicals, and the vieux riches alike.
To Mališa, there are no ethical concerns. No politics. No burgeoning nationalism.
There are only hands that feed her, and hands that do not.
This is compelling. Consider me fucking compelled.
something charmingly twentieth century about this
This counts as a spell
the idea that your friends won't like you if you're too weird is wrong for example one time I told a friend whenever I was losing my mind I laid down on the floor under my desk and stared at it until I was better and next time she visited me she taped a bag of salami snacks to the underside of my desk with a message saying "going insane all by yourself, handsome?" which I only saw months later when I had a breakdown. that's friendship.
just saw a post complaining about how hard it is to find adhd resources for adults and one of the comments said “tiktok has a lot of adhd tips” as if telling someone with adhd to enter the algorithmic quicksand of perpetual dopamine hits isn’t the most insane thing you could suggest for someone with adhd
"The language of flowers and silent things."
– Charles Baudelaire, from Elevation; Fleurs Du Mal (tr. by William Aggeler), 1857
"The language of the unsaid."
– The Glass Essay, Anne Carson
The worst thing in the entire world is when you’re sweeping a big pile of dirt into a dustpan and it leaves that little coke line of grit behind. No matter how you position your pan or your broom and no matter how many times you sweep over it your outcome cannot change. As immovable as fate. I hate it so
