The depiction of self-help seminar culture in 90s and 00s movies is so fascinating bc that's all like MLMs and crypto now
violet allen
@blipstress.bsky.social
The last literata. Pleasure is the law. L'art pour l'art. Not a dream, not an imaginary story. No crying until the end. Here comes tomorrow.
Genuinely very troubling to me how everyone complains about people only reading the headline and not the article while still doing it themselves.
On X they are discovering that cows used to be money.
Reed Richards is a white man who calls people "gate" in 1963.
If you will excuse the intrusion of Nerd Violet, my Fantastic Four hot take is that the key to unlocking Reed Richards as a character lies in Fantastic Four #15, wherein Reed Richards gets a job at a regular science business and his boss yells at him for being too much a nerd weirdo.
I kept seeing people post this saying "this is the craziest thing I ever read," and I was like, "it's probably not that that crazy," but I read it and can confirm it is pretty fucking crazy.
The Mysterious Case of the JetBlue Flight That Went Into Free Fall
Why would a perfectly good plane suddenly go rogue? The answer was disturbing enough to ground 6,000 aircraft.
nymag.com
I really dislike when people can't accept that they have power in a situation and pretend they are a pathetic little worm.
Could it be that we are living through an extreme backlash against the marginalized? The abolition of abortion rights? Forced resegregation of government and private business? Fucking concentration camps? Could the trans backlash be related to that? No, it's bc we said "valid" too much.
I feel like some people just really believe in their guts that the reason we are facing anti-trans backlash is because we used the wrong words in the 2010s and not, you know, the concerted efforts of people who hate us, plus the well-documented history of backlash as a political phenomenon.
"Let's talk about sax, baby Coltrane and Adderley Let's talk about all the blue notes And extended harmonies Let's talk about sax" - me if i were a "cool" music teacher circa 1993, desperate for approval after my own kids decided to move in with my ex and his new girlfriend bc they have a pool.
I had a dream I was watching the Surf Dracula version of That Thing You Do!, where it was about them as a small time band performing gigs and juggling regular jobs and dating lives. There were multiple teases, but they never played the song. It was interminable, a purgatorial experience.
The best day to write a review of my book for a major publication was two months ago. The second best day is tomorrow.
Novel progress update. The Good: Ideas are flowing too fast to write. The Bad: Ideas are flowing too fast to write.
I had this same thing happen to me where I was in the process of telling a story about a ridiculous person who didn't realize they were allergic to bananas and realized I was allergic to muscadines.
Dan Hon@danhon.com · 2d agoSpicy fruit thing
Social media threads and Youtube video essays and blog posts/newsletters are fun but we gotta read real books more.
I like Hank Green well enough as "science-themed entertainer who pops up on my Youtube algorithm sometimes bc he does stuff with Dropout" but I guess a lot of people had a lot more invested in him as an intellectual than I realized.
There's something about the language of "dopamine" to describe feelings that makes me less generous than I would otherwise be.
You all know how much I hate crowing about my accomplishments or, God forbid, bragging, but I am starting to think that Plastic, Prism, Void: Part 2 might end up the greatest piece of fiction ever written by anyone ever.
this is all part of the Violet's Five-Star Fiction Pyramid: CONTEXT, PREMISE, INCIDENT, THEME, CONCEPT. if you master all these elements, you too can be a writer whom the academy loves but publishing is kind of hot and cold on.
Rolling into August with no prospects and I am beginning to wonder if maybe there might possibly be a chance that perhaps I won't get married this year.
violet allen@blipstress.bsky.social · 2mo agoI went to a picnic yesterday and people scoffed at my plans to get married before I turn 40, simply because I turn 40 in seven months and am not currently dating anyone. Once again, I suffer a world of philistines and bores.
I just don't understand why people don't seem to enjoy the transcendent pleasure of crafting artisanal thoughts with your own brain.
It looks like my book is starting to spread from my core audience (insane trans women, trans guy poets, and dudes who work at book stores) to my extended audience (insane cis women, trans guy novelists, and dudes who work at libraries). In the bookselling business, we call this "tail."
Sometimes I worry I come off like those Freakazoid bits where he would do an over-the-top Jerry Lewis impersonation being goofy followed by an impersonation of Jerry Lewis being pompous and pretentious talking about the souls of artists.
I am turning 40 in a few months and I can feel the boomer particles entering my body. More and more often I find myself irritated by the lack of rigor and care in the writing world these days, the insistence that everything is equally good and if it "works for you" then it is good.
I just fundamentally have a "you didn't cheat me, you cheated yourself" response to AI. Like the idea of inspecting things for AI usage and feeling bad if I am wrong is alien to me, but when I hear about people using it to do their work, it's like, why do you bother getting up in the morning?
People who read my book and get to the end and are like, "This is a great ending to this story, totally satisfying, no need for more," you are my most beautiful and terrifying soldiers.
Like, the fact that the male lead of my novel is called Number 6 is not a coincidence. I don't play about the Prisoner.
violet allen@blipstress.bsky.social · 6d agoLowkey The Prisoner is the only show I am a classic, push-up-my-glasses um actually nerd about.