Promiseland

[Fetian]

What prompted that was someone spamming the zone chat in ESO to advertise their christian social guild and like. I just don't get it, I don't understand what need that's filling, or why christian people are like this. Aside from the obvious 'they can't stand to interact with people who aren't part of their special club because they might have their worldview challenged get cooties'

Like I would be equally baffled by a guild that's exclusively for fans of The Notebook or something. Like what do you do in there?? What do you talk about?? 'This is a The Office fan social guild' what is happening?? Like ma'am this is a Wendys!

[Fetian]

Yes I would also be baffled by a Muslim Social Guild or a Trans Social Guild

[Fetian]

Since I don't have ash to hang out with tonight, Dave and I started Satisfactory earlier than usual. We got a lot done! I fixed a chunk of railroad that had been left broken at the end of last week's session, and then the power plants failed so Dave and I spent a while getting them going again (the power plants were consuming power cores faster than they were being made, and so eventually just, ran out and shut down. Turning them back on was complicated by the fact that making power cores requires powered equipment, so.) After that I ran around gathering power slugs and harddrives for a while and then on a whim I started building a ramp into the sky, hit the max height limit, and started building the ramp back down to the ground -- I have an idea of extending the peak back to the ground in multiple directions and then building conveyor belts up and down all the legs to make escalators. I am kind of regretting the materials I used, and maybe also the location it starts at, and am considering tearing it down and starting it over with walkways or catwalks instead of foundations, but I need to test the conveyors on them before I really consider that.

Aside from that, not a lot done today. I should probably go to bed at a decent time tonight so I can be awake during the day tomorrow but I don't know if it's going to happen. Certainly I don't really want to go to bed Immediately Right Now, yet. We'll see how things go

[Fetian]

I started reading Clive Barker's Hellbound Heart (the novella later adapted into Hellraiser) this morning, and reading prose from the 80s has me thinking about The Issue With Books These Days that I keep going on about, and also about this tumblr post that I've been sitting on:

A lot of fiction these days reads as if—as I saw Peter Raleigh put it the other day, and as I’ve discussed it before—the author is trying to describe a video playing in their mind. Often there is little or no interiority. Scenes play out in “real time” without summary. First-person POV stories describe things the character can’t see, but a distant camera could. There’s an overemphasis on characters’ outfits and facial expressions, including my personal pet peeve: the “reaction shot round-up” in which we get a description of every character’s reaction to something as if a camera was cutting between sitcom actors.

When I talk with other creative writing professors, we all seem to agree that interiority is disappearing. Even in first-person POV stories, younger writers often skip describing their character’s hopes, dreams, fears, thoughts, memories, or reactions. This trend is hardly limited to young writers though. I was speaking to an editor yesterday who agreed interiority has largely vanished from commercial fiction, and I think you increasingly notice its absence even in works shelved as “literary fiction.” When interiority does appear on the page, it is often brief and redundant with the dialogue and action. All of this is a great shame. Interiority is perhaps the prime example of an advantage prose as a medium holds over other artforms.

fascinated by this article, “Turning Off the TV in Your Mind,” about the influences of visual narratives on writing prose narratives. i def notice the two things i excerpted above in fanfic, which i guess makes even more sense as most of the fic i read is for tv and film. i will also be thinking about its discussion of time in prose - i think that’s something i often struggle with and i will try to be more conscious of the differences between screen and page next time i’m writing.

(sapphoshands, on Turning off the TV in Your Mind, by Lincoln Michel)

I do not wholly agree with the conclusions drawn -- that is, I think what is being described is a symptom rather than the cause -- but the results are what I've been noticing and describing, I think. The 'and then this and then that and then this' nature of a lot of modern writing, just action after action with little variation, broken up with paragraphs of bland description, and when there is internality it is shallow and could have been an action instead.

Not long ago I was reading The Unworthy, by Agustina Bazterrica and translated into English by Sarah Moses, and I was thoroughly enjoying it. It is a modern book but, as said, translated into English from another language, and so potentially in that way avoids pitfalls of whatever is happening to English literature right now. While it is written in the style of a diary and with an extremely limited viewpoint (I've described the feeling of reading this book like peeking into a room through a keyhole), it is also deeply internal. Hellbound Heart, while I'm only twenty or so pages into it, is also deeply internal -- and, while I would not say it is skillfully so, it is still more engaging than other things I've tried to read in recent years.

But I don't think this is the whole story -- Freakslaw was very internal but had something about it that reeks of this 'modern prose' problem. Sheri S. Tepper's writing is heavily environmental, as opposed to internal, I think, and I greatly enjoy her works.

There's something about the rhythm of things, and while I think there is absolutely something to this internality theory, and possibly 'thinking in visual media', I think there's also something about the study I talked about previously where students, while reading, weren't able to fully connect the context of one line to the next. A disjointedness, perhaps.

As always I don't have any grand conclusion, here, except that I need to just read more twenty-, thirty-year-old fiction.

[Fetian]

Screenshot_2025-07-16_13-10-06.png

 
This is a thing I've been pecking at for... a while, and though it is only 78 words long, every one of those highlights is a footnote and I am delighted to inform you that the footnotes are 510% the body of the text

[Fetian]

Idiot fucking cat peed in an empty, litter-less box while I was in the process of putting new litter in it, got his feet wet, startled himself, and ran all over my room with his pee-wet feet

[erikavonkaiser]

There is something weirdly poetic about "pee-wet feet"

[Fetian]

If an arsonist sets your house on fire, and they also set your neighbour's house on fire, your neighbour's house-fire isn't a distraction from your house-fire it's just two house-fires

[Fetian]

-Took out my trash
-Cleaned the trash can
-Put water in the pool
-Called up dad just to chat and catch up

ash was out of the state last week, and while he was out there he caught covid, so we're continuing to not hang out. I have my air purifier running and am going to be wearing a mask when I'm in the body of the house, so hopefully I will not also catch it, but that does mean that I'm going to want to mostly stay in my room for another week or so. Obviously I've been playing a lot of ESO; I've also been watching more of that streamed conlang conference I was in the middle of yonks ago.

I need to go through all the words I made during the relay and make sure they're all ones I want to keep.

I don't think I have much of anything else to report. The weather has been gorgeous and it's supposed to stay that way for the foreseeable forecast.

[Fetian]

I got Cael a food puzzle ball -- the same one I had for Oz, which I threw out when it got full of ants that one time instead of trying to clean it, since she wasn't really using it anymore anyway. Cael gets three meals a day, the one in the middle being a small lunch less because he needs the food (he not infrequently just sleeps through his lunchtime and is fine until dinner) and more because it gives him something to do in the middle of the day, and it makes him happy. So now he's going to get a something to do that's a little more active, I'm putting his lunch in a puzzle ball and making him work for it. There's a couple high-value treats in there, too, to reward the efforts

He is not super thrilled about it, but he is more actively 'figuring it out' than Oz used to (she would just sit next to it and rock it back and forth to get food to fall out, which, I mean, at least she's using her brain?). He's rolling it around and occasionally picking it up and letting it drop to see if that'll help matters. The food is coming out at a very good pace, I think.

Cael is extremely hard to get to play with toys, but he does want to play. He just wants to chase things and has no real interest in making that happen for himself, so you have to throw the toys, but once they've landed and stopped moving they're no longer chase-able so he completely loses interest. Toy-on-a-string toys work to an extent but you can't like, throw those across the room so it's not really chase, and I think --

Well in a concerning turn of events he just threw up all the food he's just eaten. I did wash the ball before I put food in it, I hope it's not something about that that's made him sick. Possibly he ate something off the floor he shouldn't have, because he thought it was a food, or possibly there was a hairball in the middle of it. Will keep an eye on him.

Anyway, point is a toy that rewards him with food should keep his attention better, hopefully