I Walk The Line Between Good And Evil

"baby names" is a real misnomer because they're often permanent

cats are really good at looking at things. very useful

having two cats essentially means you have a bug and rodent triangulation system. if they are both looking somewhere you know for damn sure there is some unauthorised fucking thing there.

god the horrible urge to vague post is eating me alive but i must

someone wronged me once

every day i smash gender norms by being a woman who’s avoidant and emotionally unavailable #feminism

Before committing an act of violence, think: "how would this reflect on the public opinion of my favorite band"

Chris Niedenthal, All Souls’ Day (Bieszczady Region, Poland), 1970s

Nuit Blanche. Brussels, October 2015.

there's that country music parody that goes "there's a beer in my boot and my boots in my truck, truck dirt boot dog beer boot truck," etc. and I can't help hearing the female equivalent that would be a Taylor Swift parody going [there's no way to do this without sounding hideously offensive]

>Read anti-psychiatry post

>Go to OP's blog

>Half their top posts are about talking to the ghost of the Sandy Hook shooter

If I was struggling with my mental health, but was too scared to start therapy or medication because I'd heard horror stories, and then someone came along and told me "You're right to be afraid; it's definitely a bad idea. Also, this dead school shooter was right about everything, but don't freak out: I talked to him in the spirit world, and he told me he felt bad about killing those kids," I would have the contact information of every mental health professional in a fifty mile radius pinned to my refrigerator by the end of the day

rediscovering music you liked years ago and completely forgot about is like finding cash you left in a winter coat you haven't worn in a couple seasons

Can't tell you how frequently I encounter posts on here for people with entirely opposite issues to me

how do i say "horror novels these days are too woke" without sounding like a right winger. what i mean is: this one is about a woman serial killer who kills Bad Men, that one is about ~anticapitalist activists~, this one is ~queer~, that one is about *spins wheel* someone dealing with the ghosts of their immigrant roots, all of them are about intergenerational traumaaaaa. okay. cool. but is it good though. is it fucking scary

something something, losing the ability to convey horror through abstraction, through metaphor, through symbolism, through allegory, through raw unexamined un-psychiatrized feeling. if the real horror is.... dun dun dun! the patriarchy then i just feel preached to. don't use fiction as a vehicle for Saying Something About Society. write with total vulnerability and then see what it says. it will be probably be far more interesting and horrifying than what if the monster was uhh my mom's abuse or whatever. this brand of new horror writers are all so terrified of actually disclosing anything about themselves. it's like if an instagram infographic performance was a mediocre contemporary novel

YOU ARE MAKING THE TEXT DO THE WORK OF ANALYSIS!!!!!!!

My take on this is that a certain brand of social media brand progressive politics is just incompatible with the horror genre because it's absolutely vital to that brand of "woke" that you never ever be surprised by anything. You know the young, white dude with the feminist slogan on his shirt is going to actually be a creep. You know the older, conservative generation is going to lash out against the enlightened youth. You're not surprised when you find out the police are covering up, like, 200 murders by copycat killer targeting Asian women. I don't just mean "it's too predictable" because I like being surprised -- I mean that the predictability makes you feel secure that you are a good person who is adequately engaged in hashtag-brand politics because you saw it all coming. If you're outraged, you win. If you're unsettled or surprised, you lose. Yes, some of these social justice takes are controversial on Twitter, but I guarantee these are not challenging or thought-provoking to the person who actually read your book.

Horror is always going to be about Society, because everything kind of is, and I do love me some very intentional politically engaged horror. Stephen Graham Jones's The Only Good Indians made me go to sleep with the lights on at the same time as I was thinking about what I can learn about historical trauma from a homicidal elk spirit. Very literary read but also an absolute bop. Highly recommend. But, like, as long as they're taking the genre seriously, even works that aren't trying to be political (or even ones that have overtly reactionary political agendas) are going to be way more interesting than a book where you just try to write a character who is The Worst White Man, so everyone can be like "Yes, I see, he is Bad." If you're engaging with the question "how can we make this Scary?" then you will always eventually say something meaningful (intentionally or not) about the environment you're making your story in. "How can we make this Scary?" is already an interesting question! But you have to be willing to really get into it rather than just telling your audience something they can feel good about already knowing.