i do think theres something sad about how largely only the literature that's considered especially good or important is intentionally preserved. i want to read stuff that ancient people thought sucked enormous balls
Time to take this post entirely too seriously:
- I often wonder if this is why you so commonly see the sentiment that we are in an era of uniquely bad literature, or at least that the fact that most books don't have artistic aspirations and are not aiming to be anything other than mindless entertainment is new. In fact what's new is the idea that everything is worth preserving (and also the internet making it easier to preserve it). The dumb artistically unambitious trash books of the past have survived only sporadically, because people thought of them as literally disposable.
- When I was in college I had a professor who was an expert on detective fiction. He had a longstanding beef with the idea that "Murders in the Rue Morgue" was the first detective story. He thought that it seemed way too polished to be inventing a new genre, and also that the whole orangutan business had the vibe of someone subverting preexisting audience expectations and maybe engaging in a bit of stealth parody. With the help of some student volunteers, he went trawling through old magazines and newspapers and found hundreds of detective stories from the early 1800s that just hadn't garnered enough individual attention to be remembered. This was because most of them sucked balls. He created an online archive of them, so you too can read these mostly terrible stories.
I've spent a ridiculous amount of time on Project Gutenberg sifting through forgotten old fiction and lemme tell ya. a lot of that stuff sucks ass.
Tremendously comforting, really.
If your children do not trust you it's your fault [clap clap]
If your children do not trust you it's your fault [clap clap]
If they're hurting and don't show it
'Cause they don't want you to know it
If your children do not trust you it's your fault [clap clap]
I'm probably gonna get yelled at for saying this but sometimes something isn't a real problem in fandom, you just learned a Japanese word describing a general fandom practice and got scared and decided it meant "The Bad Ones" of that practice
Whenever you see someone being like "we don't mind when women enjoy or even create m/m content, we just hate fujoshis" you are being racist. If you mean "I hate the way some female fans treat gay men like fetish objects" then say that, and we can have a conversation based on that, but "fujoshi" is, I cannot stress this enough, just a word for any woman who likes M/M content, for better or worse. It may have started out as a reclaimed insult (by the way, the insult was based on "liking gay shit makes you perverted and sinful," not "please respect the humanity of gay men") but it does not make a distinction between The Good Ones and The Bad Ones. You just decided to No True Scotsman it and that the English word for that should describe The Good Ones and the Japanese word for it should describe The Bad Ones
Same goes for the people I saw just the other day whose discord server explicitly disallowed "Yaoi" but said that M/M content was allowed. What they meant was "M/M content is allowed as long as it isn't pornographic and fetishistic." What they actually said was "M/M content is allowed, but M/M content is strictly forbidden," and expected you to understand that the Japan-Adjacent term has porn/fetish connotations while the English-language term for THE SAME THING refers to the "normal, non-perverted" version.
It'd be like if you used the word "cartoons" to refer to all Family-Friendly animation, regardless of style or country of origin, whether it's Japanese or American or French or whatever, and used the term "anime" to refer to all animated pornography regardless of style or country of origin. There's plenty of animated pornography that isn't Japanese! There's plenty of anime that's not pornographic! But this is the sort of thing you do when you say shit like "obviously women can read stories about gay men, but NO FUJOSHIS"
OP is correct and smart for saying this. this is related to/a subset of how people are about non-fandom foreign words, too, like how people say "Christians worship God (good), Muslims worship Allah (bad and scary)" when gues swh. gu. guess what. gues s w hat Allah mea. guess what the word "Allah" means--!!
"Quick" "easy" "lazy" recipes love to pretend that prep and cleanup occur within a pocket dimension outside time and space.
sometimes there really is a single load bearing piece of information about a blogger that elucidates everything about their whole deal and recently for me it was learning that someone was from jersey. another time it was a prolonged history of concussions
Honestly all things considered insect taxonomy up until like family is pretty straightforward. I can see a weird insect and then later learn it's heteroptera and be like "oh yeah that makes sense, the pointy mouth part is right there." And, "yeah now that you mention it tiger beetles and snail eating beetles do have pretty similar mandibles." Meanwhile everything else is like, what do you MEAN a falcon is closer to a parrot than a hawk???? How is a mola mola closer related to a human being than it is to a shark???? Don't even get me started on plants.




