Satsuma @Satsuma@cat.family

@sublingual yeah the river does kinda squash everything to one side so it makes sense

@sublingual this makes Philly look incredibly triangular

I don’t think these two essays are intentionally responding to each-other, but I do think SuperDoomedPlanet’s critique of what they call the “novelization style” (transparent prose, consistently close 3rd person narrator, short time-frames & high stakes, narrative structures you’d expect from a tv show or a movie) reflects a lot of the reasons why I found Ex Urbe’s argument that specific worldbuilding is bad because someone might disagree with it so baffling

«Every really good novel is a little bit imperfect. The most fun, engaging books aren’t perfectly engineered; they have ambiguities, multiple interpretations, detours, and odd protuberances. They often include passages that look like side trips and diversions, straying from the plot but developing themes, ideas, and characters….They’re eccentric and weirdly shaped and packed with stuff. Some of the stuff may or may not work. Readers may disagree about which stuff worked and which didn’t. When that happens, that’s a clue that the novel is interesting.»

From: http://www.superdoomedplanet.com/blog/2016/04/15/conclusions-and-caveats/

@GwenfarsGarden we say that in the US too haha

@technomancy clearly a kid with tenacity and a willingness to c&p random code he finds on the internet

@Lady huh nice

@Lady i’m really not sure what their funding situation is tbh, there are indications pointing in both directions so I suspect it’s uneven

@Lady public, uni uses worldcat which has decent subject search for most purposes

@Lady generally if i dont know what i’m looking for i’ll just wander the stacks & rely on serendipity (this works better for non-fiction)

@Lady my local library’s interface is p janky for browsing actually imo

@timhildred hey! Just so you know, all links are parsed by mastodon’s software as being the same number of characters, so there’s no need to use a link shortener

@susannah@octodon.social thanks!

@finn what could be hornier than inventing several new languages

@ljwrites lit fic & non-fiction primarily

@naugeleh thanks!

I've bought everyone else a book but she prefers audiobooks to print/ebooks and I've got auditory processing issues so I have literally zero idea about who makes good ones etc

People who listen to audiobooks, have y'all listened to any good ones recently?