every net social formation is that one knife that Nice Pete invented in Achewood: the guy who owns the thing kinda does whatever & makes pronoid gestures to an invisible silent majority to justify it. I kinda doubt it'd pass legal muster as a defense against murder, but these days maybe who knows

no amount of people consuming media in weird ways on pre-legalization ditch oregano meant that the studios could play hardball with the artists in squeezing them to make a sequel to something they weren't interested in. In the case of Oz it was mostly impossible by the late 60s/70s anyway!

big difference between the older practice of creative reintepretation & the modern fan-theorist moment is this: "hey, did you know that if you sync up Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz it totally works" picked neither pink floyd nor the wizard of oz's cast's pockets nor breaks their legs

on the other hand, for senior personnel (esp. directors, lead writers, etc) it can launder both decisionmaking and consequences; and for the people whose money pays for the text-as-product, it both provides free market research & a free source of blame deflection for screwy decisions

the existence of the fan-theorist as a cultural figure offers the fan-theorist roughly fuckall - being a huge deal in blogging about Lost or w/e is very, very unlikely to mean a person's name will be recognizable to you in 2026 - and less to most people in a collaborative work

in practice, this form of "death of the author" - the theorycrafting shit, the live watchalong shit, the sense of obsessive, personality-defining hyper-engagement as a bar to clear before existing near a thing currently being made - is one that offers more power to the powerful

for an industry whose profits all come from selling ad space, whose price depends strongly on high and consistent engagement (we say 'ratings' but everyone, even the ad industry, kinda knows the Nielsen system is not really sufficient to tell a complete story & suspects it) - slam dunk to adopt this

so Family Guy & Lost - in practice, both of these events did a lot to transgress the conventional boundaries and purpose of the 'fourth wall', inviting the perception that yelling at the TV loud enough or with enough of your friends would make the people in it jump & do your bidding

but on early web 2.0 we had: the period where fans were engaged by teams on popular broadcasts to get uncancelled after the network decided to pull the plug; & the 'watchalong' / 'theory' content category, a sort of mass hallucination symbolist fantasia used for derivative work of ongoing media

plot-centered criticism, speculation, secondary work, 'headcanons' whatever, these are actually completely fine; they're often used as a way to re-engage with text with fresh eyes (using the broad media studies sense of 'text', so e.g. a tv show or a song would count)

the place where death of the author categorically goes too far for me is if the author is still very much present in the story

if i saw a horny toad i would pick his ass up and throw him like an olympic hammer thrower. that's a lizard i like. for the other guys it's shot put at best

everyone who lives in arid zones is constantly picking up giant handfuls of lizards and throwing them randomly

this one goes out to any girls who is lizards

my ass is out here doing sidequests and accruing negative statuses

celebrities love to tempt fate by wearing a tiny cowboy hat. But just ask Lee Harvey Oswald or John Lennon how worth it wearing a tiny hat is

broke atm, any help would be big here. sorry to be a drain, i hate it.

we've been trying to reach you about the childish fear of divine judgment that we can smell on you from here Forget the phase of the houseproud moon, divide the earth by an iron law of your design. All the lambs have had their chance, all the meek have cashed their checks, all the waiting for the new world slouched to breech and came out a stillbirth. Forget the bloody triumph of carnal union and forget all the lessons hunger taught you, tries to teach you still. There was summer coming once but now what's coming's worse, come jubilee for all the kings of Hell below, for jackal laughter & for limbs gone spoiled for little wounds all over. Pick up the fucking phone! Pick up the fucking telephone, baby girl! Deplex that bullshit all spoken on high and take close notes of all the wildcats' words screamed at this ungrateful world in the dead of dreamless night and what do you get a country It's like they always say, what do you get a country that has it all? That's right: slaughter without mercy on the day of the devil's jubilee

a poem called "we've been trying to reach you about the childish fear of divine judgment that we can smell on you from here"

A sticker on the bathroom door at Bukowski Tavern in Boston that reads “transsexuals have got to get meaner.”

No notes.

Watching Vanilla Ice's very bad movie "Cool as Ice", and I misheard his lyric "Then I disappear in a puff of smoke" as "Then I disappear in a public swamp". I really like the idea of Vanilla Ice flexing that he might go missing in a bog

man reading book. title: "all doomed bitches: their lore and awful fates". second panel; he points at a picture of himself, captioned "Mr. Pointin At Shit Ahh", with several quotes - "No, I want that one in the back"; "You guys lookit! Lookit!"; "That oughta help me keep my place" -- all attributed to him. Mr. Pointin At Shit Ahh. The book says he is: "A meager bitch & barely known, doomed to die by pointing at a book with serious anti-indication security features -- such as this one." As if to emphasize this, his fingers seem to be evaporating.

and that's that

the trauma lens is important to have in the collective toolbox. it is also the bricks of which lynch law is built. the farther you get from anyone who's been casually fucked with sexually by white people, the less obvious the latter becomes

i am willing to rebuild my life around a statement that fucks this hard

most other places in the country there is not actually any need to socialize with people who do sensitivity training for IBM's congressional staff. but if the DC beltway is within hookup range you kinda do

tbh i think it's partially beltway/northern virginia culture. if you hang around with people whose jobs or hobbies include networking for the DNC or DNC-affiliated lobbyists, certain subjects just seem to demand aggressive, vicious conservatism

this is the fucked up way i have to hold my sword to kill guys so they don't find out the bad ass lone knight known by the doleful sobriquet Le Reynard en Grysein has just dealt them their mortal blow with a perfect sword that has "Kissy Boy" engraved on the blade

a photo of a wave at the beach on a cloudy day

i am starting a new life this new moon, as a symbolic gesture i have thrown my big Jamiroquai Virtual Insanity replica hat that i have worn every day for the past 16 years into the ocean.

dwarf fortress bugs @dwarffort... • 50m [0007364] Wild animals "flee" northwest next post is a picture of a small possum screaming