Got 33% through last night before tapping out. I usually Sunk Cost Fallacy my way into finishing movies I don’t dig, but the acting is bad, the writing is bad, and despite how everyone gushes over the visuals, I’ve seen Geico commercials that were more mesmerizing.
Amazon’s 48-hour rental period is egregiously stingy. I am an elder millennial with two young kids; I’m lucky if I can watch a movie I enjoy in two sittings, much less Avatar.
Just a thought: How about we stop shaming the poor for buying things that may not be essential, and start shaming the rich for making a profit off things that are essential?
A very astute (and upsetting!) piece that touches on four scary cultural trends: 1) The demand for spelled-out moral clarity in stories 2) A growing inability to understand different types of narratives 3) The "customer's always right" version of fandom 4) The growth of fandom as a social identity.
I genuinely, genuinely HATE that "cope" has become a negative word, and a noun at that. What one syllable am I supposed to use now to mean "handle a bad thing in a healthy way by adjusting my frame of mind and making choices that ameliorate the stress of the situation"?
Omg, Livia is one of the best parts of the novel. She’s hilarious. I’m guessing you’re right, and they’re put off by the succubus being…a succubus. There are a couple other women, but I can’t fathom why they’d be the source of any ire.
Just finished the Red Winter and absolutely loved it. 10/10. Not perfect, but still clever, ambitious, and the audiobook is fantastic.
I made the mistake of going to Goodreads. There’s people complaining about a “negative portrayal” of women, and honestly I’m baffled.
Malicious compliance: leave colorful dildos around the house in plain sight. Do not comment on them. Refuse to hide them. Use a dildo to type your magnum opus. “This is how I live.”
Holy shit!
“In-Person Filming Session (6–8 hours)
5:00 Films & Media will spend one day filming with you during the window of March 9 – March 20, 2026, capturing observational footage and visual elements that reflect your work and daily environment.”
Hopeless I realize but I would love it if we stopped it with the "TACO" thing which implies he should have followed through with it
just to be clear, everyone, when 8 pm EDT comes and goes, regardless of what does or does not happen, the president still threatened genocide and war crimes and we should still impeach, arrest, and try him
yeah man i'll circle back to you on that agenda item from yesterday's all hands in just a sec. our pedophile king just threatened to destroy a whole civilization
Medical Billing Person: “Cigna doesn’t consider a colonoscopy preventative care if you’re under 45.”
Me: “So ten people in my family could’ve died of colon cancer and it doesn’t matter?”
MBP: [hesitates] “That is correct.”
I wonder what age James Van Der Beek was diagnosed with Stage III.
NASA just dropped this image of Artemis II astronaut Christina Koch looking back at us. The first woman to ever see our planet in its entirety. I’m not crying you’re crying 🥹🔭🧪 📸: NASA
Keep going. Save yourself.
gotta say I really hate the "it's okay for kids' media to be empty nonsense, don't think so much about it" attitude
kids deserve good stuff. even stuff that's not singular high art should, like, strive to be the best version of itself, not just check off some boxes and stumble over the finish line
Moaning about writing is one of those things that is culturally expected of writers. If anything, we love complaining about how hard writing is. That's part of the 'role'. It doesn't mean we hate writing.
But we enact the difficulty of writing because, well, it's hard and we validate each other
fiction? in this era of disinformation you read lies for FUN?!?
Zero sympathy for these editors. Writers spend months, years, on a manuscript and now our work is being stolen before it’s even published. If it isn’t grounds for a lawsuit, it should be.
Seriously it’s like there is a giant chunk of tech people who don’t understand that when you’ve learned how to write, you feel proud, you look forward to doing more of it, you cheerfully neglect your other work just so you can write more
I agree, so far as it goes, that stories whose sole interest is advancing a specific didactic point are often kind of bad. But
"[has] no point to make" is the most damning things I can imagine saying about someone else's stories. I could never imagine saying it about mine!
“I dislike social commentary. Like… I really hate it. When I’m reading a book, I just want to be entertained, not preached at by the author. Plus, it ruins the wonder of the story if I know the author has a political or social axe to grind. I no longer speculate about all possible outcomes of the story because I know for a fact that the universe of that book will conspire to ensure that the author’s political agenda is validated. I hate that,” Weir said. “I put no politics or social commentary into my stories at all. Anyone who thinks they see something like that is reading it in on their own. I have no point to make, and I’m not trying to affect the reader’s opinion on anything. My sole job is to entertain, and I stick to that.” “For instance, as a lifelong Star Trek fan, it’s always bothered me that there is a presumed ‘responsibility’ within Star Trek shows to talk about social issues,” the writer added. “I just want to watch Romulans and the Federation shoot at each other.”
Ah, so Andy Weir is like... *dumb* dumb
gizmodo.com/andy-weir-st...
As one of the few people who’ve read Artemis, it was obvious to me that he has zero understanding of anything beyond hard science.
Project Hail Mary is a fantastic movie, a faithful adaptation, and better than the book. I wish Weir wasn’t using its success to tell us about his shitty takes on Star Trek and storytelling.
Always been laughable to me how some will say universal basic income will never work but universal basic poverty is apparently cool.
"But AI uses em dashes and semi-colons and figures of speech, so you can't use them in your--"
Let me stop you right there. I don't give a damn what AI does. It will never impact the way I write. Ever. Nothing is less relevant to me than generative AI "writing" tendencies.
People who say there are no politics in their stories absolutely have politics in their stories. They tend just to be the politics of maintaining the status quo.
If you hate the word “moist,” may I kindly redirect your ire to the people coining words like “buttne?”
a tumblr post with a user named bvckbiter writing "is this character good or bad" "is this shop unproblematic or not" "is this arc deserving of redemption or not" girl... underneath it is a screenshot from the show shōgun of a character saying "i don't have time for this christian nonsense"
How I feel reading 99% of art and media critique these days
“Anyone could fall for this—“
Idk, man. I’m a writer. I don’t trust anyone or anything that tries to validate me.