One tight hug would solve their problems i think

i cannot stress enough the amount of trial and error that learning this entails

interestingly, you also learn a lot about how much somebody can annoy You before You try to physically kill Them -- and, if you grow as a person in a healthy way, experiencing this with siblings can teach you how to not let people annoy you most of the time

and there are other lessons. One time i needed an extradited passport from the American Embassy in England [because they took mine away when i arrived at Heathrow airport, stranding me nearly broke in England all summer and forcing me to do circus performance on the streets for enough money to survive, but that's another post]

Anyway they made me jump through crazy hoops, and one was the Embassy said even though i was THERE IN PERSON after having waited in line for more than two hours to make an appointment, they could not make me an appointment in person, and i had to use their website to make the appointment or, they said, i could call to make the appointment but warned that the phone call would not be a good way to do it.

Well, the website had clearly been created by someone's nephew in 1995, and was so bad it was literally impossible to use, so i called. The person who answered told me they were unable to make an appointment by phone and that i had to use the website. They did not care that i had tried and was unable. I said "I was told at the embassy that i could call to make an appointment" to which they simply repeated that they were unable to make appointments over the phone.

At first i was sooooo frustrated, but then as they were telling me for the 3rd time that they were unable to make appointments by phone, i felt a wave of familiarity wash over me. This person was doing the same thing my siblings and i used to do to each other, and there was no way they were better at it than my siblings had been. Also, as a low ranking public facing bureaucrat, as long as i was polite and calm, they were NOT ALLOWED to hang up on me.

So i settled into the familiar game - with a cheerful and stupid tone of voice, i said "But i was told i could call to make an appointment"

"I'm sorry, but we are unable to make appointments over the phone"

Filling my soul with the kind of mindless patience that lets you torment a sibling past their breaking point simply because you have an entire day of nothing ahead of you to fill, i repeated brightly "but i was told i could call to make an appointment"

after about our sixth cycle of this, they said "let me put you on hold" and then hung up on me - i am absolutely certain this was done on purpose in a way to create plausible deniability

As i hit redial, i remember actually thinking how my siblings were far more diabolical adversaries in games like this, how our torturous childhood interactions was a baptism by fire that had perfectly prepared me for this exact moment.

This person did have a job, they HAD to answer the phone when i re-dialed the number, and as soon as they did i said "hello, i think we must have been accidentally disconnected -- i was told i could call to make an appointment?"

I was full prepared to, in the exact same brightly stupid tone of voice every time, repeat myself for literal hours. But only a couple minutes later, they cracked and made me my appointment. In that moment, it felt like all my sibling torture of each other growing up had been preparation for dealing with life, like wolf pups playing tag to practice hunting.

lien

you've heard of death of the author, now get ready for death of the audience: where instead of basing your reaction on a thousand uninformed opinions online, you actually read the text and engage with it

girl help there's people on this post who can't actually read my text

#the way that this is literally how death of the author works lmao

OKAY i'm fucking sick of people who can't read leaving these comments so here we go, we're gonna read Barthes together. hold my hand

Barthes' 1967 essay The Death of the Author (La mort de l'auteur) loosely takes the form of a literary history: he relates the changing attitudes of criticism towards the text and of literature towards criticism down to his day. He is interested in what writing is, and thus, what a book is: "a tissue of signs," which the critic claims to be able to interpret. But Barthes argues that once the necessity of connecting the author to the book is removed, the critic has no work to do: "Once the Author is gone, the claim to 'decipher' a text becomes quite useless." This is a rejection of both the supremacy of the critic and the intentions of the author.

When Barthes says "critic," he doesn't "anyone who has encountered the text," however. He differentiates the critic from the "reader":

For Barthes, the reader's understanding of the text is supreme because it weaves together the "tissue of signs" into a coherent whole, producing a singular interpretation. He concludes by advocating for the overthrow of the critical establishment in favor of individual interpretation: "to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author." In other words, in order for us to allow readers their own experiences, we must stop prioritizing the critic -- not the reader, but the critic -- and instead allow the reader to engage the text.

We're gonna un-Barthes Barthes now, okay? Stay with me. Here's the context:

Barthes was responding to a stifling and rigid environment in which criticism was the sole province of the academic expert. As part of the deconstructionist wave, he wanted to upend the traditional hierarchy that dictated how a text should be understood and what it was for, instead prioritizing language and reaction.

He got his wish. We live in a world of reaction.

Gone is the tyranny of the formal critic; gone even is the formal literary education of the reader. Our "tissue of signs" is no longer the text, but an infinite mirrored hall of reactions to reactions to reactions in which the text diminishes into a vanishing point, as the Author once did on Barthes' literary stage.

We do not need to resist the tyranny of the academy. The academy has been destroyed. Adjunctification, the widespread corporatization of universities, the resulting devaluation of college degrees, the devastation of humanities departments in widespread shutdowns, and now the revocation of billions of dollars of government funding have left the academy on its knees. Public trust in academic expertise has declined so sharply that people on this very hellsite will tell you that if someone has an advanced degree in a specific field, that actually makes them less trustworthy.

And in Ozymandias' place, we have the reader.

The reader consumes a variety of "content" and regurgitates its reactions in a variety of "posts." It transmutes text into more text which further readers wriggle eagerly through, refining what might have had meaning into a rarefied fertilizer of emotion and echo. What it leaves behind becomes the literary history for new strata of reactions, nostalgia, and imitation.

This is the audience: an ouroboros of interpretation, a rat king of readership. It has no end but itself. Ultimately, it needs no text to function. In this world, the truly radical act is to disentangle yourself from the other worms and rebuild the edifice of meaning. This may require you to do such tasks as "read the actual book," but because we no longer have the support -- however oppressive -- of literary criticism to inform our reading, we must also learn how to read, explore the historical context on our own, and recover both the facts and the symbols from which the text is woven.

That is what death of the audience means: not a rejection of the critic in favor of language, but a rejection of endless language and infinite readers in favor of fact, history, and skill.

It's a pun, by the way: "La mort de l'auteur," spoken aloud, recalls Le Morte d'Arthur, a 15th-century collection of Arthurian legend which marked the turn away from the Middle Ages and into a nostalgic Early Modern period which valorized them. The Author becomes the mythic King; as myth, he can be severed from fact and dismissed.

Fact has now itself become the myth.

Fucking read.

I love how whenever ATLA recognizes Sokka is smart enough to solve a problem but it’d be too fast they just stick him in some kind of situation. Like he COULD’VE stopped jet from drowning a town so they tied him up and dumped him in a forest. He COULD’VE figured out what that spirits deal was so they lost him in the spirit world for 24 hours.

One time they just stuck him in a hole in the ground for a whole episode.

This is how writers should deal with characters who are too smart for the arc instead of making them suddenly dumber for no apparent reason.

If you frequently find yourself in random situations while your friends happen to be experiencing problems maybe you, too, are too smart for the narrative.

Freezing Your Tits Off Friday

escaped medical leech

There are medical leeches!?

Yes! They work very hard to get their medical degrees. 

not this one, though. this one’s trying to ditch class. 

what was the class, color theory?

WHY THE HIFL WOULD YOU HIDE THIS IN THE TAGS!?

Once I was doing fieldwork with someone from Europe and said “careful, there’s a rattlesnake over there.” And she rushed over like I’d said there was a quetzal.

I said “Ma’am please, we’re three hours from a hospital!” and she said

1.) I don’t understand how that can be

2.) But I’ve never done fieldwork from a car before (!!!) so I’ll take your word for it.

3.) Did you just call me ma’am? Like a cowboy?

We drove through the Los Angeles megacity together — and at one point were stuck in traffic.

“Heeeey”, she said, like someone gently broaching a topic I should have noticed, “Why does the lane next to us have diamond shaped symbols on it?”

That is! A subtle and friendly way of asking why we’re sitting in traffic when there’s a carpool lane Right There! I laughed and pulled into the lane and started driving.

Unfortunately. That isn’t what she was implying, she was genuinely asking. So we were stuck in traffic, she asked about what was clearly a breakdown or emergency access lane, and I laughed and started driving in it. She was Alarmed.

“Hello! Excuse me! We can’t drive in this lane! No one else is driving in this lane!!”

“Oh! I should have said — this lane is for people with more than one person in their car.”

“That is RIDICULOUS. You are lying. You are lying about what this lane is for and we’ll get arrested! (ma’am it’s fine but if it weren’t it would be more of a “ticket” situation) we’ll get a “ticket”! (Ma’am again it’s fine but were it not I alone would get the ticket) because that IS NOT the purpose of this lane. That is a RIDICULOUS lie.”

“I’m sorry, I should have said — I thought you were being subtle about my oversight. Please observe the carpool sign.”

“I don’t know what a carpool is and I don’t believe you.”

“How about you look at all the cars stuck in traffic and see how many have more than one driver, and if there are at least five I’ll get back into the traffic jam.”

“FINE!”

<a pause>

(With dawning horror) “none of these cars have more than one person in them.”

“I know.”

“None of these cars have more than one person!!”

“If you weren’t here I’d be right there with them.”

“OK but there was no train to where we needed to go.”

“There’s no train to where they needed to go either.”

“HOW.”

Later that day:

“I know McDonalds and Burger King sell Burgers, but what does Wendy’s sell?”

“Burgers”

“And Sonic?”

“Burgers.”

“Jack in the Box?”

“Burgers.”

“In’n’Out?”

“Look, It’s burgers all the way down.”

She hopped off a plane, went camping on Catalina with her husband and his lab, and then I showed her a rattlesnake, dragged her through heavy brush, took her (food) shopping in Beverly Hills, illustrated American car dependency and love of burger, and threatened to shoot someone trying to break into our hotel room. (I did not have a gun) She speed-ran the US American experience in eight days.

Send her a get-well-soon card and a bottle of bourbon

in response to @akaiikowrites fic about a hybrid doggo Keith an vet. Shiro with PTSD

I might be in my pink period.

writing is so funny because i could write nonstop for 9hrs and then hit a block where im like "how do i transition between this moment and the next?" and then i just dont touch it for 6 months

Serious advice tho if this happens, it's likely because you already wrote past the end of the scene and wandered too far from the more logical transition point, and you should go back to the last time the writing felt "unforced" and cut everything after.

You can also just skip the transition. Really good writing can span years in a single sentence, like you can just authoritatively state fact and your reader will go with it.

This is GOLD! You just saved me like thousands of therapy costs lmao

him again

Coyote vs Road Runner

nature is beautiful

hey, we’ll be ok

the spirit is willing but the flesh is so fucking out of it rn. actually the flesh would like to pack it up and leave. it's done with the horrors.