“This world can seem marvelously convincing until death collapses the illusion and evicts us from our hiding place.” ~ Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
Sometimes I see a girl’s shoulders/collarbone area and I’m suddenly possessed by the spirit of a 19th century lesbian first seeing another girl removing her dress to reveal pantaloons and corset in the dorms at the all-girls boarding school her parents sent her to so she may be trained in proper etiquette
ever notice how men criticize games like animal crossing and stardew valley on the basis of “the entire game is just doing tasks” without recognizing that “kill bad guy” is also just a task but violent?
”it’s so boring all you do is talk to people and do tasks so you can buy new things” yeah and all you do is press a bunch of buttons to kill people so you can buy new things? perish
One day Edward gets a call from Jacob and he’s like “DUDE TURN ON GHOST ADVENTURES RIGHT NOW THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT YOU” and they’re in an old “haunted” Chicago hospital and Zak Bagans says “one of the victims of the Spanish influenza was a seventeen year old boy named Edward who disappeared with no trace one day. Will we come into contact with his spirit tonight?” And Edward of course has to sit down and watch the whole thing and every time they hear anything they’re like “EDWARD? IS THAT YOU?” And Edward just yells at the screen “YEAH, MAYBE”
The family eventually gets a whiteboard to keep track of how many times they’ve each been featured on a ghost hunting show. Alice is in the lead.
The Twilight Renaissance is not what I expected in 2019 but you know what? Fine.
Creative Writing Professor at a former college: Welcome to creative writing! By the way,
you will not write fantasy, ghost stories, pranormal, or science fiction
in this class, as this is a creative writing course.”
What the ever loving fuck is with “creative” writing professors who think that speculative fiction of any stripe ISN’T CREATIVE?
I still remember my own creative writing teacher telling me this because he saw the Terry Pratchett book on my desk and got this smug smirk on his face like “aha, gotcha”. He had the nerve to pick it up and call it “popularist fiction”, like somehow being popular and easily accessible made it less inherent in intellectual value.
I had it in my back pack because I did my final thesis on the evolution of mythology and folk tails into fantasy and sci-fi and the societal importance of telling stories (before anyone asks, no I don’t have it, I lost it when I moved continents), and I used Terry Pratchett because there wasn’t a single humanitarian issue the man did not touch on.
Which I told him. And then he kind of floundered and went “ah, well but, it’s…well I mean it’s not exactly high brow”, like neither the fuck was Shakespeare or Dickens you self-important turnip. Dickens was literally selling his stories by the chapter. He was the popular author of his time. Shakespeare was too, he fucking made up words and phrases all the time because the language he needed to express himself didn’t exist in the way he needed it too.
Intellectual elitism is nothing more than a hold over from class warfare and the belief that only certain people should get to be truly educated. And it needs to be smashed.
