Lady of the Land @Lady@cat.family

i don’t want to just be like “straight people don’t know how to fucking read” but in a very real way straight fiction is comprised of a number of literary slights of hand which serve to artificially uphold and reinforce the myths of straight culture, and i don’t know how you can care about literature and not see that happening, and i don’t know how you can see it happening and tolerate it, and i don’t know how you can refuse to tolerate it and still maintain that you are straight

i'm a good writer but there's things i absolutely will not tolerate in my own fiction namely :—

• pretending something normative is actually controversial (just write actual controversy)

• using bullshit or tropey conflicts for the sake of creating narrative tension (there are always better sources of tension)

• stating things with a flourish for the sake of making it appear more dramatic than it actually is (drama should be situational not a farce of prose [unless it is an actual farce i.e. comedy])

• “cheap tricks” more broadly, i.e. any technique which is justified primarily on account of what it does to the reader as opposed to what it does to the story (the story itself should justify the reader’s interest, so the job of the prose should be to support the story)

sometimes however it feels like refusing to do these things limits my potential audience quite severely, especially among straights (as the first two points are absolute mainstays of straight romance fiction)

you had to contrive a completely bullshit tension because literally every force in the universe endorses this relationship

as a gay person seeing straight people tear up over some straight relationship is just like… guys… how is this what you consider “emotional” there isn’t even any omnipresent somatic fear

anyway i'm reading the comments on one of the most popular zelda shortfics and not only do i not understand why the commenters feel these things, but i do not understand how they are choosing to express them either

this is a lie i do that

my complaint isn’t actually against swearing it’s against contemporary fannish culture of using really loud words (“i HATE that this is over”; “this DESTROYED me”; “gorgeous”; “asfkhfsfdjjtsvsa”; etc) as proxy for actual engagement with a work (the louder the words, the fewer interesting remarks are present); swearing is just the cheapest way that people do this and also the most unnecessary (because swears do not ever encode meaning just volume)

you may counter this with “but kibi! just saying ‘this is good’ isn’t any better!” but consider: nobody does that

like “let's fucking gooo” is but whatever, but then you get things like “this is so fucking good. holy fuck” and it's like

do you think saying fuck makes you sound more sincere? because it sounds like you’re reading a line right now

the way kids swear annoys me

you ever think about how qui-gon canonically was like "damn this kid has some thick plot armor"

@TheyOfHIShirts yeah we (samvera community) had a guy from there speak with us about it a while back, and he was very friendly and seemed very interested in its potential for decentralized peer review (to help break down some barriers there) and like, overlay journals and such

in my area of libraries we would be more interested in using it for getting materials from management systems into discovery platforms; right now we're doing that on an internal network (using RabbitMQ if you want technical details) but it's interesting to think about what a solution might look like over the open web

anyway what i was trying to say is that in addition to the benefits libraries might be able to offer to fediverse users (getting them on the fediverse etc), i think (from a technologist’s perspective) there are ALSO things libraries can offer the fediverse in terms of making the technology itself better. i'd like to see more lines of communication between those communities because i really do think they have a lot in common.

@TheyOfHIShirts i don’t think this is quite what you are talking about, but if you aren’t familiar with https://www.coar-repositories.org/notify/ (it’s ActivityStreams!) — i can only really speak regarding academic & research libraries, but i think a tide is turning towards really embracing federation As A Library Technology

i would really like to see library best-practices (e.g. regarding persistent identifiers) break into fediverse technologies more broadly but unfortunately a lot of the work on the library side is very institutionally-oriented and a lot of non-library folks are taking all their cues from social media not cultural heritage spaces

disappointing NYTimes article refuses to mention the decimation of public transit infrastructure in list of reasons why gas prices have sway over public opinion

if only there were infrastructural changes which could alleviate this problem

did you know cyclizar likes being ridden by people because they are warm

sure there are 29 arabic letters and only 28 current unown forms but it's okay if they leave out ء

they should add a regional form of unown to the new pokémon games which are arabic

pokémon is fun because they like to pretend that ghost-type pokémon are scary when the actual scary pokémon are like parasect and spoink

link: we should not have sex

zelda: let me explain to you why you are wrong: i'm horny

link: this is a good argument and i definitely do not have thoughts or feelings of my own