Max Gladstone

at its best there's something to be said here for "demythologizing" Western tropes but it's tricky tricky work

i settled into a self-talk pattern of 'this is a different fictional context in which there was no slavery—but weird to use those symbols *in* a different context, isn't minimizing slavery in the lost cause what we got in all those fights over—wait, that makes the reavers native americans??'

oh, mostly that people outside The South think about the civil war *much* less than people inside it do (or used to), so a lot of "these guys are *confederates*, this is *lost cause* stuff, what is *happening*" isn't as pressing on first exposure

"The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth" by Roger Zelazny has been described as "all speed and adventure" by Theodore Sturgeon, and indeed it is one of the most exciting adventure tales SF has produced. Let me change one word in every grammatical unit of every sentence, replacing it with a word that "means more or less the same thing" and I can diminish the excitement by half and expunge every trace of wit. Let me change one word and add one word, and I can make it so dull as to be practically unreadable. Yet a paragraph by paragraph synopsis of the "content" will be the same.

Samuel Delany on the inseparability of style and content (via @maxgladstone.bsky.social 's newsletter):

I don't recall, (I was a babe in arms) but my first live show was in a pub, The Clancy Brothers, and Tommy Makem

I grew up on "Irish Songs of Drinking and Rebellion".

They're baked into my bones.

(I was once asked "Doesn't that describe all Irish songs? "No," I replied... "we also have laments")

Oh for the days when one could just.... kick around in forums all the time

lost like tears in rain

Friends have said this about my occasional gestures toward "reading Homestuck"—that you *can* read the principle text and get something from it but it won't be "reading Homestuck 2007-Whenever" because that was the paratext, anticipation, etc

It’s worth mentioning that this was made by six guys in their dorm room for a sci-fi convention, and all six of them (which includes the creator of Evangelion) would go on to define the anime industry for decades to come.

That might be what they're going for—radio plays set in the pre-Serenity era? Would explain Alan Tudyk's involvement

but yes: for capitalism endings are anathema, truly the most necromantic of the social modes

I have a 13" tablet now and I've been devouring full indie comics series thanks to my library app - there's a melancholy aspect to consuming that much compressed time, that I really should write about. w/ comics you're sort of speed-running 5-10 years of someone's life

Pretty difficult to refute a single thing in this perfect assessment of where the f**k we are, from @iandunt.bsky.social:

(thinking specifically about shows with developing plot here, runs of shows like Columbo or Leverage can be arbitrarily long)

It works in X-Files I think because M & S aren't teasingly antagonistic anarcho-smugglers, they're coworkers in their 30s in a government job in the 90s, many powerful forces at play encouraging sublimation

Yep. & i just don't think that *plan* survives contact with the characters in the produced episodes. In Buffy (teenagers) maybe—but the "Mal and Inara don't realize they're in love" tension wouldn't have worked through the end of one season at the rate they were going

The "perfect run" is a rare and beautiful thing, and the economics of (western?) TV really don't seem to support it. I don't watch enough to really judge, but the last I can think of is "The Good Place"

As a Southerner, though, it sure was a weird show to watch with a bunch of Northern folks who weren't receiving on a number of frequencies it was broadcasting. & I'd rather see a new show as different from what's out there, than more of this

("mess it up" based only on announced bad plans which may have never made it out of the writer's room in a hypothetical extended run)

Also it *helps* that it got a strong start & cut off after 11 episodes, most of which were good-to-great. So much room for "what if," no room for the writers to mess it up

I really liked what we got of Firefly, and it's a miracle that it worked, fun to tease apart the why of it all. A great cast—on the page Mal's and Inara's relationship is kind of a mess, but Baccarin and Fillion make them work—a world that felt fresh to American audiences, spinning off anime—

Even if they did so in compliance with all laws and the Term of Service, this will bite Proton hard. Their sales is you can trust them and accounts are private.

On a practical level however, a reminder for email as a service that can’t be true.

me too

the steam servers have cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced

or there’s a payment processing issue, whatever

quitting social media so i can slay more spire

Todd @ Why are we bothering with the Strait of Hormuz when we could simply do this? Explain it to me like I'm 5. Canal RIOS 508 MOUNTAIN HARD AND BIG, WATER NO UP. MANY MANY DIG DIG.

sure feels like it—and make every emotion directly adjacent to every other emotion so instead of feeling an emotional story or a broad spectrum you feel a huge wall of them at once

though I don't have a basis for comparison, to be fair

I got straight up "become an ego monster." Because the reality is people who need to be told that don't have the ability to.

You're just tricking them into having a normal level of self assurance and confidence, which to them will FEEL like being a monster.

oh, and "despair"

gladstone, his whole body flinching