screaming into the void since '89

welcomedmachine:

IF YOUR “POSITIVITY” IS INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM “ACCEPT YOUR FATE, YOU ARE BIOLOGICALLY INFERIOR” PLEASE CONSIDER IT IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK IT IS

talesfromweirdland:

The Cornish Owlman, spotted around the village of Mawnan, Cornwall, England, in April 1976.

iesika:

noirandchocolate:

“A British bookshop chain held a vote to find the country’s favourite book. It was The Lord of the Rings. Another one not long afterwards, held this time to find the favourite author, came up with J.R.R. Tolkien. The critics carped, which was expected but nevertheless strange. After all, the bookshops were merely using the word favourite. That’s a very personal word. No one ever said it was a synonym for best. But a critic’s chorus hailed the results as a terrible indictment of the taste of the British public, who’d been given the precious gift of democracy and were wasting it on quite unsuitable choices. There were hints of a conspiracy amongst the furry-footed fans. But there was another message, too. It ran: ‘Look, we’ve been trying to tell you for years which books are good! And you just don’t listen! You’re not listening now! You’re just going out there and buying this damn book! And the worst part is that we can’t stop you! We can tell you it’s rubbish, it’s not relevant, it’s the worst kind of escapism, it was written by an author who never came to our parties and didn’t care what we thought, but unfortunately the law allows you to go on not listening! You are stupid, stupid, stupid!’ And once again, no one listened. Instead, a couple of years later, a national newspaper’s Millennium Masterworks poll produced five works of what could loosely be called ‘narrative fiction’ among the top fifty ‘masterworks’ of the last thousand years, and, yes, there was The Lord of the Rings again.”

— Terry Pratchett, “Cult Classic” (A Slip of the Keyboard)
(Still burning mad that at least one critic did the same exact kind of carping about Pratchett’s body of work being praised by its fans, shortly after his death.)

I stumbled on an article last night where some douche was ranting about how mad he was that, in the wake of Terry’s death, people were mourning and calling him a great writer when they should have been reading something sublime like Bukowski.

In the first paragraph he said he’d never read anything by Pratchett and never intended to, which is pretty typical of that kind of angry elitism.

As someone who has been deeply impacted by Terry’s ideas about character and storytelling, that article made me so mad. Livid. Terry Pratchett levels of righteous fury.

Can I tell you how happy and unsurprised I am that Terry himself wrote such a lovely takedown of that snobbish, splainy mentality.

A thing being popular doesn’t automatically make it bad, and fantastic elements don’t make a work of literature into not-literature.

awed-frog:

Today’s another day when way too many people are saying this stuff happens in high school because that’s just how men are like, and if you add alcohol to the equation, whatever, what else can you expect?, and I’m suddenly thinking about Hockey Boy (my next door neighbour growing up), and a party we found ourselves at when we were seventeen and summer was almost there, enticing and sweet like ripening strawberries. I considered it a wild thing at the time, but I now understand we were innocent nobodies in the middle of an isolated nowhere. Still, there was music and spin the bottle and some very hard liquor and I think two people disappeared in a room together and everyone laughed and cheered. And anyway, Hockey Boy drank too much of whatever that thing was (‘Oven cleaner’, the host described it) and finally passed out on the couch, his freckles standing out like scars in the fading candlelight. 

On the whole, a most interesting & satisfying night. 

Only the next day I was made aware of a prank they were playing on him, and here it’s where it gets complicated for half a second: Hockey Boy and I were very good friends, but I was best friends with his best friend, Silver Earring, another boy who lived in the neighbourhood, and we’d all grown up together and spent time together and were in a band and did all those things teenagers did before the internet. What I never realized at the time is that Silver Earring had a tentative crush on me and what I did realize of is that I had a tentative crush on Hockey Boy because he’d basically put on thirty pounds of muscle over the previous summer and there’s a moment you get around friends of the opposite sex, right (or friends of the same sex for whomever’s so inclined) – that Shit, okay tHEN flash of realization that your childhood playmates have actual physical bodies attached to them, that they’re not only jokes and weird habits and shared memories but real people with bits and bobs and lips you could potentially kiss and wouldn’t that be a good story for your future children? And anyway, Silver Earring was trying to find out how I felt about him, also he needed to get back at Hockey Boy for some situation involving a guitar I never knew the full truth of, so what he did is that he told Hockey Boy that he’d been Very Inappropriate with me the night before, Very Inappropriate Indeed, and when asked for details he smiled a wild fox smile and dropped concepts like ‘nudity’ and ‘didn’t know you had it in you’ and also ‘not sure she’s happy btw’ and we were seventeen and idiotic, and this was all a big joke to him, time of his life, really, and when he came to me and asked me to lie and help him out so he could turn this prank into something Epic, I honestly didn’t see anything wrong with it? 

(I now understand he was hoping I’d cry out, ‘Oh no, I couldn’t possibly pretend to have feelings for him’ and ‘I don’t want you, specifically, to think I’m interested in someone else’, but, well – miscommunication and missed chances and life taking us both in better and more suitable directions.)

No: we all knew one another really well and school was boring boring boring and people were always lying and going on adventures in my books, so this was exciting and new and something to write in my diary about. Yay. We both assumed Hockey Boy would be embarrassed, that he would blush that rare blush of his, and it was fun to have this stupid secret between us. 

(As I said: yay.)

But when I got back from school that very same day, Hockey Boy was waiting for me in my driveway, all miserable and washed-out in the hot afternoon sun, and suddenly the thing didn’t seem so fun anymore. As soon as he saw me, as soon as I got off my bike, he stood up – he tried to look at me, couldn’t – and staring at his feet, he delivered a stumbling, heartfelt, soul-shattering apology for something I knew perfectly well he hadn’t even done. He told me he didn’t remember anything about that night, that he regretted drinking because he never wanted to embarrass or hurt me in any way, that Silver Earring hadn’t told him the details of what had happened but it didn’t matter – it was bad, and it was his fault, and he hoped we could still be friends but he understood if I –

“You fell asleep,” I blurted out, and I don’t think I’d ever been more ashamed of myself in my entire life. He was pale and red-eyed and freaking undone. “You fell asleep and nothing happened.”

“But he said – wait – that bastard -”

It ended, luckily, in nothing at all. Silver Earring paid us both drinks the next Saturday night, apologized profusely for being an idiot, and there was some blushing and a couple of uncomfortable smiles, but that was it. And if I think of my (boy) friends, of the people (men) I grew up with, stuff like this is mostly what I remember. Boys being careful, boys being kind, boys asking if you’re sure, boys backing off, boys saying sorry and looking at their feet and knowing exactly where the line is. 

(Boys being normal, that is.

Boys being human beings and not freaks and not monsters.)

So, I don’t know – it physically hurts, it

physically

makes me sick to sit here and listen to grown-ass adults pretending boys and men are inherently violent, inherently brutal, inherently selfish and criminal and mean-spirited – and that we, as a society (as women) should simply let them be as violent and brutal and selfish and criminal and mean-spirited as they were born to be. 

Seriously, enough with this bullshit. 

Just – enough.

(And also: if men and boys are so utterly incapable of self-control, why do those same people insist of they should be in charge of virtually everything? You can’t both argue men are way more rational than hormone-driven, blood-dripping, borderline hysterical women and then explain away shitty and illegal behaviour as ‘just male nature’, surely? How does that work?)