Sharp Central

My {EVIL} tank top has raised many questions that are answered by my {EVIL} tank top

scoop!

the hoggish knight 🐷🐗

Audio please 🔉

this video is extremely high-tier comedy

by Lieumare@lieumare

@coldgoldlazarus dragon girl

Bro? How much Coffee did you drink?

so back in the day i read HPMOR, right? like many people. and as it went on (& yudkowsky kept talking about his writing process on tumblr) it became more and more clear that this was fiction approached from an angle i had never really considered before. i had been vaguely aware of places like the spacebattles forum or the dark lord potter forum, where apparently people wrote stories that were mostly just a long-form way to debate “would the USS Enterprise win against a star trek star destroyer”, or whatever. yudkowsky kept saying wild things like “the point of this scene is to vicariously enjoy somebody solving a problem” or “all characters should always do smart things so the reader doesn’t get frustrated with them” or “i wanted to add a short arc where this character doesn’t instantly solve all his problems but i was worried it would alienate the reader”. (see also.) just like, expressing this conceptualization that the point of fiction was to… write a character stomping through a little fake world going from victory to victory so that the reader could enjoy the vicarious glow of having a hard problem presented to them and then immediately resolved. how smart you are for following the line of thought of the main character, who did this smart thing!!

so that was very weird, but it was mostly a singular kind of weirdness. another weird, out-of-touch artifact from the rationalists, like roko’s basilisk but harry potter fanfiction instead.

anyway a while back i stumbled across “Mother of Learning”, and i think my initial response to it was ‘this is less a story with a plot and more a series of obstacles that are presented to the main character to be sequentially overcome’. there was a furry webcomic years ago that was a calvin & hobbes knockoff – small child, stuffed animal companion who became alive when they were alone, whimsy, etc – only where calvin & hobbes left the premise unstated, this comic, roughly 30 strips in, had a whole plot explaining: okay so these are a special kind of magical creature that bonds with children. in this metaphor susie’s mr. bun is also a magical creature. eventually they start going on adventures together. my overall thought was like, oh i guess i was assuming this was a narrative framing device structured around the themes of the work, but actually this was all meant to be fully diagetic and fully explained as part of the work’s “worldbuilding”.

anyway mother of learning is like that but for groundhog day. the time loop isn’t an unexplained device used to inspect a character through a lens, it’s a dragon ball-style training chamber. there are “plot developments” as more information is revealed, but all of that takes a back seat to extensively and exhaustively describing every ability and technique that the main character learns and how they use them to be more powerful. mother of learning is 800,000 words long. the time loop is because they’re actually duplicates of the ‘real people’, in a pocket universe constructed inside of an eldrich monstrosity that was designed to be used every x years by some kind of fated hero to keep it sealed. the main character has to escape partly to make sure some evil cultists don’t unseal some stuff, but mostly so he doesn’t lose all his experience gains.

anyway so reading that brought me to royal road. (i’ve always found the name very funny since my main familiarity with the term is the phrase “there is no royal road to geometry - euclid”, aka there is no shortcut to learning something; you always have to put in the hard struggle of comprehension. it’s actually named after… something from a light novel or something? it used to be a fan forum for a specific work before branching out into a publishing platform.) anyway it’s a place to post stuff, like fanfiction.net or fictionpress or whatever. there is a strong genre constraint: they mostly want to hear about their protagonists getting endlessly more and more powerful, and sometimes collecting a harem of sexy women. it’s for that kind of fiction. reading a few stories there was very illuminating, in that finally i could place HPMOR in a genre: that of the ‘progression fantasy’, a profoundly self-indulgent and formulaic genre that’s mostly just an action story with a lot of the bits stripped away so they can describe how much more powerful the protagonist is getting. a subgenre of this is the ‘litrpg’, which are stories with a diagetic video-game-mechanics layer. people are checking their stats and getting experience from killing monsters and leveling up and all that. a lot of them read like text LPs of videogames that don’t exist. where the author is, of course, executing a min-maxed run.

(there’s a lot of overlap here between progression fantasies and like, xianxia stories? cultivation stories are generally all progression fantasies, and so there’s a lot of overlap thematically.)

anyway so that was kind of a grim awareness of a dark corner of the literary world. this stuff is popular. royal road is pretty aggressively farmed by publishers wanting to license stuff so they can make ebooks or w/e; there are author patreons there that make like, thousands of dollars a month for writing chapter 1394 of “my character with a cool spear levels up more”. i’ve read a bunch of progression fantasies but i wouldn’t say i really enjoyed any of them, partly because a lot of them are really bad at like… constructing a narrative with any kind of stakes. it’s all gonna be jettisoned away in favor of talking more about level ups. it is actually almost exactly the experience of grinding for levels in an RPG: it’s not really fun, but it can be engaging in the moment, and also you get to see a number go up, so that’s like a reward.

(i started writing one of my own as a writing exercise b/c i wanted to try some short-paced serial work that wasn’t porn, and it shot up to uh #40 top-rated on the entire site. it was in the top 10 for a few days. i have some complicated feelings about that.)

recently, i’ve been reading a lot of, uh, gay incest teenage mutant ninja turtles fanfiction. a lot of it is incredibly overwrought. 200k words of characters pining guiltily over each other! soap opera antics with miscommunications and secrets! genre cliches piled up in a big heap and remixed! and like, fanfic as a genre can be real formulaic too, right? a lot of people who read&write fanfic don’t read much else, and there’s absolutely a ‘house style’ for most fanfic. but when i read fanfic i get the sense that the authors are, you know, aware of some literary conventions, of the various aspects that make up a story, and they’re struggling to convey concepts and themes. apparently i’m responsible for inspiring somebody to write what i think is the only sincere donkey/shrek porn fanfic in existence, and personally i think that porn fanfic has a million times the literary and artistic merit as chapter 1400 of randitly fucking ghosthound, because porn, overwrought incest soap opera dramas, is at least saying something about the nature of human desire, whereas most progression fantasy stuff is an utterly self-absorbed thesis on “writing somebody cool and powerful is escapism so i can feel cool & powerful”, stretched out to a million words.

like i guess ‘i want to feel powerful’ is an expression of human desire but it’s a particularly flat one. i think a lot about that bit in dead zones of the imagination:

a fantasy of having power is, i think, fundamentally a fantasy of never having to know anything you don’t want to, of never having to deal with the consequences of your actions. i feel it’s a particularly grim thing to enshrine into a millon-word epic.

anyway, hi, i’m back on tumblr, i guess. who can say if this will last. i’m still not happy about the porn ban! for reasons hopefully partially explained by the whole bit about porn above. also the increasing sidelining of custom layouts in favor of a uniform interface. sadly even with that it seems like tumblr is basically the only well-travelled social media site that’s not a total algorithmic nightmare, although the first thing i did when i remade this account was to go into the settings and turn off like a dozen algorithmic switches that were all defaulted to 'yes’.

i ended up moving cross-country during the peak of covid b/c my former housemate started having screaming panic attacks literally any time somebody stepped outside the house (literally literally, not emphatically literally). i would not recommend it. now i live somewhere where 'fire’ is a season, which is introducing new complications to my life. we’ll see how things go from here.

oh yeah, also my icon has more points now. i leveled up V:

vamps

Got a brand new Magpie comic.

I Have been wondering for a while if i should or not post more of her comics, so please let me know if you guys like it and want more.

eating MARZIPAN CHOCOLATE while reading AN ANTHOLOGY OF DU FU'S POETRY tonight. truly an excellent way to spend a Tuesday evening.

starting to think that it might suck to live through the collapse of an empire. I'll do my best to avoid that (<- clueless)

Sound on

just encountered a new type of guy in the wild: "man who mods his shitty green hatchback to be loud as fuck, under the apparent delusion that it is a muscle car"

it was so fucking loud, the pedestrian twenty feet in front of us flipped him off for an entire block.

Her spell backfired️‍🔥🔥🔥