I wrote a giant Raven Cycle analysis

Hi! Over the last year or so I've been working on a sort of essay about various themes in the raven cycle series, and I finally finished it a few weeks ago.

It is titled: "Why I love The Raven Cycle - An excessive analysis of the themes of friendship, queerness and growing up".

And since tumblr loves its meta (and bc I love peer validation) I've decided to start uploading it bit by bit here, making this the masterpost (if I can figure out the logistics of the linking lmao, bear with me)

(beware of spoilers up to greywaren starting at like 3b!)

Click here to start with the introductory parts!

We are currently living in an era where tech moguls are realizing there is no more long-term perpetually growing profit in information technology because all the niche markets with any real demand have been filled. And this horrifies them so they're going to keep rinsing and recycling old tired schemes as many times as they can to wring the last dregs of money out of the system until the whole thing collapses in on itself. I just don't have the energy anymore to join the pack of rats racing back and forth from one sinking ship to another.

Crypto will fail. AI will fail. Dropshipping will fail. Influencer partnerships will fail. Selling user info will fail. Ultimately aggregated social media will fail. It's all going to suck really bad for a while but I just can't find the energy to fret about where I'm going to make my """new home""" because it's all the same out of touch people making the same mistakes at different speeds. I'm gonna stick around in the only place where I understand the mechanics and the culture and already have a decent community built up and when that ship goes under I'll make myself a gay little personal website with a comment box and you can all come find me and we'll figure it out from there.

how to write a likeable grumpy character

neocities guide - why you should build your own html website

what is neocities?

why should I make my own website?

what would I even put on a website?

getting started: neocities/html guide

fun stuff to add to your site

web revival manifestos & communities

in conclusion

Pluralistic is four

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW in SALT LAKE CITY (Feb 21, Weller Book Works) and then SAN DIEGO (Feb 22, Mysterious Galaxy). After that, it's LA, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix and more!

Four years ago, I started pluralistic.net, my post-Boing Boing, solo blog project: an ad-free, tracker-free site that anyone can republish, commercially or noncommercially. It's been a wild four years, featuring over 1,150 editions, many consisting of multiple articles:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/

As a project, Pluralistic has been a roaring success. I've published multiple, significant "breakout" articles that popularized obscure, important, highly technical ideas, most notably "adversarial interoperability":

http://pluralistic.net/tag/adversarial-interoperability

"End-to-end" as a remedy for multiple internet ripoffs, including as a superior alternative to link-taxes as a means of saving the news industry from Big Tech predation:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/e2e/

and, of course, "enshittification":

https://pluralistic.net/tag/enshittification/

These are emblematic of the sorts of ideas that I've spent the past 20+ years trying to popularize in tech-policy debates dominated by technologically illiterate policy ideas ("abolish Section 230!") and politically illiterate technical ideas (so many to choose from, but let's just say "cryptocurrency"). They require that the reader come along for a lot of cross-disciplinary analysis that often gets deep into the weeds. These are some of the hardest ideas to convey, but nuanced proposals and critiques that work on both political and technical axes are the best hope we have of successfully weathering the polycrisis.

Blogging has always been a part of this project. For nearly 20 years, I posted nearly every day on Boing Boing – 53,906 posts in all! – taking note of everything that seemed important. Keeping a "writer's notebook" in public imposes an unbeatable rigor, since you can't slack off and leave notes so brief and cryptic that they neither lodge in your subconscious nor form a record clear enough to refer to in future. By contrast, keeping public notes produces both a subconscious, supersaturated solution of fragmentary ideas that rattle around, periodically cohering into nucleii that crystallize into full-blown ideas for stories, novels, essays, speeches and nonfiction books. What's more, those ripened ideas are supported by a searchable database of everything I've thought about the subject, often annotated by readers and other writers who've commented on the posts. I call this "The Memex Method":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

Pluralistic marks a new phase in my deployment of the Memex Method. With 50K+ notes in a database, I've gradually turned Pluralistic into a forum for far more synthetic, longer-form work that pulls on threads from decades of research into nothing in particular and everything that seemed important.

Pluralistic is also an experiment in retaining control over my destiny – but not my work. Rather than hitching my ability to reach an audience through a platform that can be enshittified at the whim of a mercurial, infantile billionaire or their venal, callous shareholders, Pluralistic is published web-first, on a site I control, and then syndicated to every platform that matters to me. It's a process called POSSE (Post Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd

I can't stress enough how much I miss StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon once sent me to a supercut of Lion King, Lion King 1 1/2, and Lion King II, the main edit being that the scenes of Lion King and Lion King 1 1/2 were interspersed so that they happened in the order they actually happened.

stumbleupon not existing anymore can be directly traced to a dramatic decline in my mental health, I could do a thesis on it.

bestie stumbleupon very much still exists its just called cloudhiker now. i use it all the time.

mini compilation of suggestions from the replies:

The Bored Button - "Press the Bored Button and be bored no more."

The Useless Web

Cloudhiker - "Discover the most interesting, weird and awesome websites of the Internet" (not really a rebrand, it's a different person running it but they have the same intention in mind)

Astronaut.io - "These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you)."

Marginalia - "This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed."

Hot take: Actual literary analysis requires at least as much skill as writing itself, with less obvious measures of whether or not you’re shit at it, and nobody is allowed to do any more god damn litcrit until they learn what the terms “show, don’t tell” and “pacing” mean.

Pacing

The “pacing” of a piece of media comes down to one thing, and one thing only, and it has nothing to do with your personal level of interest. It comes down to this question alone: Is the piece of media making effective use of the time it has?

That’s it.

So, for example, things which are NOT a example of bad pacing include a piece of media that is:

Bad pacing IS when a piece of media has

Another note on pacing: There are, except arguably in standalone movies, at least two levels of pacing going on at any given time. There’s the pacing within the installment, and the pacing within the series. Generally, there’s three levels of pacing–within the installment (a chapter, an episode, a level), within the volume (a season, a novel, a game), and within the series as a whole. Sometimes, in fact FREQUENTLY, a piece of media will work on one of these levels but not on all of them. (Usually the ideal is that it works on all three, but that’s not always important! Not every individual chapter of a novel needs to be actively relevant to the entire overarching series.)

Honestly, the best possible masterclass in how to recognize good, bad, and “they tried their best but needed more space” pacing? If you want to learn this skill, and get better at recognizing it?

Doctor Who.

ESPECIALLY Classic Who, which has clearly-delineated “serials” within their seasons. You can pretty much pick any serial at random, and once you’ve seen a few of them, you get a REALLY good feel for things like, for example…

If you’re not actively trying to learn pacing, either for literary analysis or your own writing…honestly? Just learn to differentiate between whether the pacing is bad or if it just doesn’t appeal to you. There’s a WORLD of difference between “The pacing is too slow” and “the pacing is too slow for me.” 

“I really prefer a slower build into a universe; the fact that it opens in medias res and you piece together where you are and how the magic system works over the next several chapters from context is way too fast-paced for me and makes me feel lost, so I bounced off it” is, usually, a much more constructive commentary than “the pacing is bad”. 

And when the pacing really is bad, you’ll be doing everyone a favor by being able to actually articulate why.

Show, Don’t Tell

This is a very specific rule that has been taken dramatically out of context and is almost always used incorrectly.

“Show, don’t tell” applies to character traits and worldbuilding, not information in the plot.

It may be easier to “get” this rule if you forget the specific phrasing for a minute. This is a mnemonic device to avoid Informed Attributes, nothing more and nothing less. 

Character traits like a character being funny, smart, kind, annoying, badass, etc, should be established by their behavior in-universe and the reactions of others to them–if you just SAY they’re X thing but never show it, then you’re just telling the audience these things. Similarly you can’t just tell the audience that a setting has brutal winters and expect to be believed, when the clothing, architecture, preparations, etc shown as common in that setting do not match those that brutal winters would necessitate. 

To recap:

Violations of Show Don’t Tell:

NOT Violations of Show Don’t Tell:

Keep in mind that “Show, don’t tell” is meant to be advice for beginning authors. Because “telling” is easier and requires less skill than “showing,” inexperienced authors need to focus on getting as much “show” in as possible. 

However, “telling” is also extremely important. Sometimes, especially in written formats, the most appropriate way to deliver information to the audience is to just say it and move on.

Keep in mind that a viewpoint character in anything but…a portal fantasy, essentially…is going to be familiar with the world they’re in. Not every protagonist needs to be a raw newcomer with zero knowledge of their new world! In most cases, a viewpoint character is going to know things that the audience doesn’t. Generally, the ONLY natural way to introduce worldbuilding in this situation is to just have the narration point them out. (It makes sense for Obi-Wan to have to explain the Force; it would make no sense for Han to explain the concept of space travel to Luke, who grew up in this universe and knows what the hell a starship is. So, if you’re writing the novelization of A New Hope, you need to just say “and so they jumped into hyperspace, the strange blue-white plane that allowed faster-than-light travel” and move the hell on.)

For that matter, in some media (ie, children’s cartoons) where teaching a moral lesson is the clear intent, a certain level of “telling” is not only appropriate but necessary!

The actual goal of “showing” and “telling” is to maintain a balance, and make sure everything feels natural. Show things that need to be shown, and…don’t waste everyone’s time showing things that would feel much more natural if they were just told.

But that’s not nearly as pithy a slogan.

(Reblog this version y’all I fixed some really serious typos)

Quick addition: When you Show, you Slow.

Taking the time to Show something rather than simply Telling it slows the moment down–and that can be a good thing! When you want a moment to have real emotional impact, when you want the audience to linger and really connect with the scene, use Show to slow them down and really make them live in it. Use descriptive language, engage the senses, and make your audience spend some time with it.

This is Not always desirable. If you’re heavily Showing in moments that aren’t truly important, your audience will disengage and get impatient and then bored. I always err on the side of over showing in a first draft, over trimming to lots of telling in a second draft, then marrying them together in a third once I’ve gotten a better understanding of the pacing with the second Telling draft.

This is the FUNNIEST SHIT I HAVE EVER SEEN

Reblogging for cultural enrichment

bout time I brought back the Laurel and Hardy flex tape-

From The Killers, 1946. A Film Noir Classic

I’m an archivist, behold my growing collection was of old photos mirroring timeless memes I’ve come across at various places I’ve worked.

I want to see a work of fiction that reverses the "vampires are snobby upper class, werewolves are brutish lower class" stereotypes

Consider a vampire's reliance on blood as a metaphor for living paycheck-to-paycheck and depending on the kindness of others to get by, and the desparation that can make one slip into taking.

@tiredspacedragon's tags.

[Image description: Tags reading:

#meanwhile werewolves who like #treat the full moon like a monthly vacation#or like aristocrats on a hunting trip #claiming unnecessarily large swaths of land as territory #or just throwing their weight around wherever they please #waking up the next morning either oblivious#or entirely indifferent #to the devastation#environmental and personal #they've left in their wake #maybe even doing it on purpose#most dangerous game-ing people #just to keep the wolf 'stimulated' #something like this?

A gif from Pacific Rim, where Stacker Pentecost says "You, keep talking.]

Week 2 sips!

All the words you'll see comin' over the next week:

Starting tomorrow.

You can reblog this post and do em all now, save 'em and find 'em as you have the energy/time, or just use it as a heads up for what's comin'.

Up to you!

All I ask is that you use the #sipofsnips tag so people can find each other's snips and get excited about writing.

Have fun ^.-

She grabbed her phone to look up sigils when another text came in.

DON’T GO IN. ON MY WAY.

Julia sat up slowly, staring at the words.

TOO LATE, she sent back.

Because I occasionally feature movie titles, Pinterest keeps recommending them to me. Yesterday’s bunch though was particularly good—I more or less picked these left and right until I had 10 of them.

DRAMATIC SCOOTING

can you conceive of anything fucking worse

Reblogging because I LITERALLY just read this line earlier today. Weird.

Daily Sip 1/11

Just tag it sipofsnips so everyone can find each other. ^.-

"Magic had always been just an idea. Even meeting Greg, seeing magic on the street, she’d never considered magic as a thing — a physical thing. She’d always imagined it as… like an illusion. Immaterial. A distraction of the senses. But this…

This was real.

And deadly."

Daily Sip 1/8

Just tag it sipofsnips so everyone can find each other. ^.-

From "The Curse of the Mad Dragon:"

He ducked into his apartment building for a change of clothes, looked longingly at his bed, and decided to skip a shave.  

~*~

She suddenly felt a soul-deep longing for home, but she couldn’t identify if it was a place, a person, or just a feeling she wanted. The apartment didn’t count; it was just a place to sleep. For a moment, she desperately wanted to call her mom, so much that she pulled out her phone. But she hesitated. What could she say? What could her mother offer that would make anything better? Even thinking about her childhood bedroom in her parents’ tidy home didn’t feel like it could fill the chasm of loneliness and longing that felt like it might swallow her whole.

Text: Part demons eat pain, which makes them unpopular travel companions. Still, I am in desperate need of a second body guard. And I have plenty of pain to spare.

You know how companies used to make flour sacks with pretty flower patterns on them because mothers would make dresses out of them for their daughters? We should bring that back. Paper bags designed to be reused as wrapping paper. Jars of jam designed to look nice filled with pencils or homemade sauces. Fabric that's high quality enough to use as a patch.

Give things a second life!!

Ugh, take me back. Half of my parents' drinking glasses were like this, originally holding jelly or peanut butter some five owners back, but still being used as drinking glasses decades later. They still did this in the 90's, which I know because there were even glasses with pokemon on them.

Of course, the caveat to this is that you still need more jelly even after you get all 9 pokemon glasses. That's why we also need to bring back true bottle deposits, where you return your jars and bottles to the store, where they are sent out to be sterilized and refilled and used again, creating a closed loop of packaging.

This part is so important. Consumer re-use is great - everyone who's able should do it - but think about how big a difference could be made if every cafe in a city returned their milk bottles for refill, instead of throwing out literal tons of plastic 2L bottles every week. If every takeaway container could be cleaned and re-used.

I know there's a few individual places that have started to offer these kinds of things (usually after a TON of back-and-forth around how to comply with government health and safety regs), but it wouldn't be terribly difficult to implement on a city-wide or regional scale, with a relatively modest amount of infrastructure investment.

We get our milk from a local dairy (I KNOW!) and they put the milk in glass bottles that we return.

I get toilet paper from the company Who Gives A Crap and the rolls come wrapped in pretty patterned paper that you could absolutely use for gift wrap — or just recycle, unlike the plastic most toilet paper comes in. Plus they donate to build toilet facilities in countries that need them.

Anyway, all this to say, IT IS POSSIBLE and we must demand it.

passages that make you whisper "oh my god"