A lot of you guys are honestly super nice and I just want to say thank you for living in my phone and being lovely :)
So, going by the idea of "every truly great story has a random Texan" (see: Dracula, His Dark Materials), I asked my Tolkien encyclopedia wife what race/culture in The Lord of the Rings is the Texan equivalent. They got real mad when I suggested the Rohirrim (because horse culture, I didn't actually think that was the answer but I wanted to provoke my wife), and... I'm gonna step aside so my wife can rant about who in LotR is the actual Random Texan.
Horse =/= Texan.
See the thing about the Texan is that they’re alien, they think overly much of themselves, and they’re not actually as good at shit as they think they are.
You know who hits all those buttons?
LEGOLAS GREENLEAF.
1) he’s not familiar to the POV characters, being an elf.
2) He and all Silvan elves think very highly of themselves even when it’s not really justified anymore.
3) he foregoes a saddle in a situation where riding bareback is actively harder and more inclined to overexertion, probably bc he doesn’t actually know how to handle a saddle but is, bc of point 2, unwilling to reveal he has no idea what the fuck he’s doing.
Legolas Greenleaf is the Texan of Lord of the Rings.
I was thinking the dwarves myself, but yeah, this fits.
dwarves are miners, misunderstood, and live in the ancient mountains. Dwarves are Appalachian.
Sharing the secrets of your hearth with strangers who will never be able to meet or thank you. Honoring the dead through learning their traditions of the home; emulation and exaltation. A good carrot cake.
when jane austen said “i was quiet, but i was not blind.”
I could go on about all the ways that people misinterpret Jane Austen but one of the biggest is that Mary Bennet isn’t secretly smart or some misunderstood nerd hero, she is just as stupid as Lydia is, just in a self-important preachy way rather than a more extroverted party-girl way. Her character is focused on her being the most pious, morally-upright person in the room, who judges everyone around her for not living up to her standards that she fits mostly by not doing anything. Granted, a lot of adaptations also get this wrong, or just don’t spend enough time on her (she’s probably the least relevant Bennet sister to the larger plot, so she’s easy to sideline in that way in a more condensed version). But I also find it interesting that a lot of people who get this wrong it’s for….telling reasons. Because Mary is (in some ways) a cautionary tale about people who think they’re smart just because they read, even if they are incurious, closed-minded people who don’t understand what they're reading. I feel very strongly that a modern-day Mary Bennet would be the sort of person who fetishizes being a “reader” but all they read is YA, when they aren’t leaving middling Goodreads reviews on history books for having “too much detail.” And/or someone who harshly judges strangers with actual lives for not fitting strictly into the esoteric discourse norms of the extremely online. And it’s those people you see the most often getting Mary wrong or trying to twist her into something she’s not (and usually into someone whom Austen’s Mary would piously turn up her nose at, natch).
Interestingly, there is a character in Austen who is basically, or at least a lot more like, the character people want Mary to be — Fanny Price from Mansfield Park — and yet I feel like the same people are really unfairly hard on her?
every year I post this meme and every year people get more mad at me than they did the previous year
A note to all creatives:
Right now, you have to be a team player. You cannot complain about AI being used to fuck over your industry and then turn around and use it on somebody else’s industry.
No AI book covers. No making funny little videos using deepfakes to make an actor say stuff they never did. No AI translation of your book. No AI audiobooks. No AI generated moodboards or fancasts or any of that shit. No feeding someone else’s unfinished work into Chat GPT “because you just want to know how it ends*” (what the fuck is wrong with you?). No playing around with AI generated 3D assets you can’t ascertain the origin of. None of it. And stop using AI filters on your selfies or ESPECIALLY using AI on somebody else’s photo or artwork.
We are at a crossroad and at a time of historically shitty conditions for working artists across ALL creative fields, and we gotta stick together. And you know what? Not only is standing up for other artists against exploitation and theft the morally correct thing to do, it’s also the professionally smartest thing to do, too. Because the corporations will fuck you over too, and then they do it’s your peers that will hold you up. And we have a long memory.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking “your peers” are only the people in your own industry. Writers can’t succeed without artists, editors, translators, etc making their books a reality. Illustrators depend on writers and editors for work. Video creators co-exist with voice actors and animators and people who do 3D rendering etc. If you piss off everyone else but the ones who do the exact same job you do, congratulations! You’ve just sunk your career.
Always remember: the artists who succeed in this career path, the ones who get hired or are sought after for commissions or collaboration, they aren’t the super talented “fuck you I got mine” types. They’re the one who show up to do the work and are easy to get along with.
And they especially are not scabs.
*that’s not even how it ends that’s a statistically likely and creatively boring way for it to end. Why would you even want to read that.
Years ago I overheard (eavesdropped upon) a telephone conversation between a public parks official and a golf course owner.
Parks Official: No sir, you cannot
Parks Official: No. They are a protected species
Parks Official: You CANNOT shoot them
Parks Official: Or poison them, no. Or trap them
Parks Official: If you like, we can-- no, I'm it. I'm the ranking official here. There's nobody above me. My boss? You mean... the governor's office? Sure, I guess. Okay bye
After he hung up, he gave me this thousand-yard stare before answering my unvoiced question.
"There's a flock of flamingos at the 9th green disrupting golfers. He wanted permission to go out there with a shotgun and take care of matters, but sensed there might be... legal ramifications. So he called us."
I laughed. "Does that happen often?"
"Oh, we get calls like that a couple times a month."
Country clubs should be burned to the ground and their golf courses turned into community gardens i am 10000% serious
Was golf created for the sole purpose of hoarding ridiculously large amounts of land just to brag about how little they use it?
Yes, literally.
I do have a piece of writing advice, actually.
See, the first time I grew parsnips, I fucked it up good. I hadn't seen parsnips sprouting before, right, and in my eagerness I was keeping a close eye on the row. And every time I saw some intruding grass coming up, I twitched it right out, and went back to anticipating the germination of my parsnips.
But it turns out parsnips take a bit longer than anything else I'd ever grown to distinguish themselves visually. It's just the two little split leaves, almost identical to a newly seeded bit of kentucky bluegrass when they first come up, and they take a good bit to establish themselves and spread out flat before the main stem with its first distinctive scallopy leaf gets going.
I didn't get any parsnips, not that year, because I'd weeded them all out as soon as they showed their faces, with my 'ugh no that's grass' twitchy horticulture finger.
The next year, having in retrospect come to suspect what had happened, I left the row alone and didn't weed anything until all the sprouts coming up had all had a bit to set in and show their colors, and I've grown lots of parsnips since. They're kind of a slow crop, not a huge return, but I like them and watching them grow and digging them up, and their papery little seeds in the second year, if you don't harvest one either on purpose or because you misjudged the frost, so it's worth it.
Anyway, whenever I see someone stuck and struggling with their writing who's gotten into that frustration loop of typing a few words, rejecting them, backspacing, and starting again, I find myself thinking, you gotta stop weeding your parsnips, man.
reading this post be like
seeing people be like ‘I know it’s going to be hard to support the sag strike because movies and shows will stop coming out but-’ is so fucking funny like can I introduce you to a beautiful concept called the million billion movies and shows that already exist that you couldn’t even get through in a lifetime if you wanted. welcome to heaven <3
OK WAIT SO IF POC GET STRICTER SENTENCES IN COURT… AND IF WOC ARE MORE AT RISK OF MISCARRIAGE AND GENERAL MALPRACTICE… AND IF SEX EDUCATION IS WORSE IN INNER CITY PUBLIC SCHOOLS… AND IF RACIAL HOUSING DISCRIMINATION IS PRACTICED BY 85% OF REAL ESTATE AGENTS… AND IF SCHOOL DISTRICTS ARE FUNDED VIA PROPERTY TAXES WITHIN EACH DISTRICT… HOLD ON………. WAIT A MINUTE
This is what we mean by systemic racism
I'm generally of the opinion that trying to resurrect prematurely cancelled shows is like necromancy—odds are they'll come back wrong.
Except for Galavant. Any Galavant revivial will be funnier the longer it stayed cancelled.
Tags pass peer review, etc, because they SO perfectly capture the spirit of the show.
i do feel like it's really important that everyone knows the reason that the wga and sag have not called for people to cancel streaming services is because the studios are still trying to bullshit their way into not paying people what they're worth by claiming that streaming is still "new" and "volatile." cancelled subscriptions only feed the myth that they're trying to sell which is that they can't possibly pay people more because their source of revenue is so unstable. the biggest thing that anyone can do to help at this point remains just donating money to the links in this post, most especially the entertainment community fund as that is the resource most accessible to all of us who are out of work due to the labor stoppage.
I think people have truly lost any ability to be patient with storytelling.
‘I don’t understand this’ They’ll explain it if you wait.
‘I don’t like how this episode left things hanging’ There’s a continuation next week.
‘This character is flat’ Wait for them to be fleshed out.
So many of the complaints I see about shows lately are people being confused by things THAT THE SHOW WANTS YOU TO BE CONFUSED BY THATS THE FUN OF MYSTERY AND FORESHADOWING YOU ABSOLUTE GOBLINS THE MAIN CHARACTER IS ALSO CONFUSED AND THEYRE GONNA DO A BIG REVEAL AND EXPLANATION LATER IF YOU WOULD JUST FUCKING WAIT
