Miss This Dear Soul So Much

week five of lockdown and I’m feverishly inventing new dance names: hardbounce, swampdrift, Shrekstyle,

I can’t stop watching this 😂

Dear tumblr, have we heard about the sweeping reforms announced by the new LA DA?? Because I read a thread by the guy this morning that actually made me weep.

christ

Fireflies

I’ve been reading about werewolves on Wikipedia and I just have to say. “Werewolves are warriors that descend into hell to fight demons” kicks unbelievable amounts of ass as a concept

The Discourse, featuring 

a) An actual puppy

b) An AI, seemingly frustrated that said puppy, despite her advantages in being a biological entity, has failed to reach the level of intellectual and emotional maturity that she, the AI, has attained. Fish, tree, etc. 

Sometimes when Phaedra comes to sit on my lap while I’m writing she will just furiously jab her nose against my keyboard and type out whole sentences of incomprehensible nonsense. She likes to help. Let us see what she will write for me now: 

u7 n nb nnh

guys... we did it

I’m angry with the world. The world is broken. The world is a mess. The world is full of hatred, full of violence, full of suffering, full of uselessness, full of stupidity, full of pointless tragedy. The world is a terrible, terrible place.

And the world has not gotten worse in any way in the last fifty years. Not for any appreciable value of “worse.”

And I’m going to fix it. I’m going to bring back the sun and nature and the whole mess that is life, and we’re all going to be happy and we’re all going to be free and the world will not be full of suffering anymore. And we’ll be happy, and we’ll all be free, and then the world won’t be full of suffering anymore.

I’m going to do it. I’m going to fix the world. I’m going to save the world. No one else will. I’m going to fix the world. I’m going to save the world.

I’ve just started this new season of The Good Place, and it’s the best thing ever, and my heart is full of eternal optimism. (Ha ha, the sky is blue, ironic nihils!) Happiness is full of possibility. In this world, my love, in this life, in the whole wide world, we will be free.

i know an engineer-type dude who said fiction bored him, because fiction is mostly-formulaic and tropey, and you can generally guess what’s gonna happen next, and yada yada

so his solution for this problem was… to solely read serial web novels in languages that (1) he did not speak, and (2) for which there was no actual translation, fan or otherwise

apparently, the combined forces of “trying to figure out WTF is going on via the power of Google Translate" + “cultural differences in storytelling conventions” + “the inherent randomness of where the hell amateur authors are gonna take their plots”—those all mashed up to make stories that were unpredictable enough to keep him guessing all the time

then he described to me this totally batshit-sounding Hungarian story he’d been obsessively reading once a week for years

and god i think about him all the time.  like.  that is the most wild way to process fiction that i have ever heard of, but also, i’ve gotta admire the sheer chaos energy of it