omg I need your thoughts on the terminally o line author culture bc ngl it makes my eye TWITCH, there are authors I deliberately avoid even tho I've heard their stuff is good bc they're like that 🙈

HHHHH oh good lord, okay, from how I see it, there are two angles on this, both aggravating and sad: the official decree one and the spontaneous ecosystem one.

The officious one is that the nature of publishing nowadays demands an author have an online presence. You need Twitter/X. You need to let every potential reader know your book is coming out. You need engagement through reviews and pre-orders incentives (if you buy now you’ll get a special keychain!!) and word of mouth assurances from your peers that yes your book is as cool as you say it is. You need a newsletter with links (more buying! more voting on lists that are simply popularity contests!) and promises you’re still working on the next thing, don’t forget about me in the morass of everyone else doing the same thing. You need an Instagram and TikTok now to post pretty pictures and videos because one or two authors made it big off this kind of promotion and now everyone thinks it’s the ticket to the bestseller list (sadly, it seems to be working). You need an OnlyFans (a joke but I do recall a twt spat that was a joke/not joke about how rupi kaur will always be more beautiful than her critics and people who took issue with the conflation of beauty with talent). At the end of all this, you’re basically an influencer, a content creator creating content for the content you should be focusing on creating, the finished novel. And the novel itself seems to be disappearing behind the masks used to promote it (fanfic-style tropes, moodboards, playlists, memes) until I now no longer trust the book that I’ll pick up to have any resemblance to the enticements that brought me here. I’ve seen an author or two complain about the stress all this self-promotion generates, but it’s become such an entrenched part of the industry, I think people just accept it. And thus spend too much time online hoping that if they tweet just a little more, produce just one more reel, maybe that’ll be the difference between a sale and no sale.

The other side of this, distinct but obviously connected, is the ecosystem created by this panic of being perpetually visible coupled with the fact that so many of the new authors came of age during the rise of internet fandom culture. That opinionated community mindset that blurs the line between anonymity and friendship is the lens they bring to their own work. I mean, it makes sense I suppose—if you love yelling about characters and words, why wouldn’t you do that once you start to produce your own? This really came home to me hearing about that reviewbombgate “scandal” and how people involved were in reylo circles and that was used to provide receipts. You’re interacting with your readers and peers about your intimate work but they are also all strangers. They will not always give you the benefit of the doubt, and now—as opposed to the past when maybe the worst that could happen was a handful of bad reviews in newspapers—you will either be tagged in hate reviews, sub-tweeted, explicitly called out, demanded to atone for your sins. It’s no longer the morality of consumption but the morality of production. Of course, the easy answer is just log-off, touch some grass. But that can work only when you and everyone else are separated by anonymous accounts or when you have no platform to maintain. As an author trying to make your livelihood from this, suddenly it’s do or die. We’re in a strange moment of authorship bringing the Internet’s echo-chamber and claustrophobic into the real world (this is a lie: publishing now is no longer the real world. But it looks like it) and thus you can kind of no longer escape things.

Will the average reader who isn’t aware of all these machinations care about reviewbombgate? Would a reader browsing at Target think about the controversies around Lightlark? Very likely not. But the impression I’m getting more and more is that the average reader isn’t the one buying all the books. Or shall we say—a bestseller’s status relies on bookstore stock. Bookstore stock is only huge when they know a book will be a good investment. They’ll only know a book is a good investment if it and its author has street cred based on booktokkers, bookstagram, bloggers and reviewers (have you noticed how many books out these last maybe 1-3 years have these kinds of accounts thanked in the acknowledgments? Yeah), and THESE are also chronically online people who will Know. And decide the cast of fate.

Honestly, @batrachised, I see why you avoid these kinds of writers, though I wonder how long it’ll be before the disease becomes epidemic.

Hayden Christensen im kissing you on the forehead. im giving you headpats. im wishing prequels you could see how crazy people are going over you right now. baby you deserve the world

"You finish it so I can trust you. Shoot him."

The Worst of Evil // Episode 3

Max blacksails character of all time. Max blacksails should be as famous and studied as hamlet.

wang yibo - asian film awards weibo update

#王一博# was nominated for Best New Actor at the 17th Asian Film Awardsfor the movie " #无名# ". It tells the story of the CCP's underground organization in Shanghai, dealing with Chongqing, Wang Jingwei's government and Japanese spy agencies until the victory of the Anti-Japanese War. Secretary Ye, played by Wang Yibo, wanders among the three forces, and his delicate acting skills show the tension of Mission: Impossible and the character's inner struggle.

✧ March 10th‧The 17th Asian Film Awards Ceremony✧ Hong Kong Xiqu Center‧Simultaneous live broadcast on multiple platforms✧ Stay tuned and pay attention to the latest news!

We’ve been hoping all year (and especially the past six weeks) that Fellow Travelers will be the project that gets Matt his due. He’s so phenomenally talented, yet almost criminally under appreciated. These nominations are a definite step in the right direction. (Really happy for Johnny, too, but our heart belongs to the White Collar folks!)

The Accolade by Edmund Blair Leighton

Marriage Story (2019, Noah Baumbach)

25/12/2023

How do you feel about "boop"?

Deeply confused… but also somewhat honored to have received so many of these virtual “boops”.

………… It has just been brought to my attention that there is a sort of reward system in place regarding the number of “boops” delivered.

… I must have those badges!

The Show Must Go On!

And end in celebration for a well deserving Starlight Accolade nominee turned 4x award winner! Of course, this time, she was just as jubilant and surprised as the last! Actually receiving tangible praise and admiration, for the actualization of dreams her baby sister selflessly encouraged, never gets old. Not for Roger either. He’s bussing up at the tears and emotions coming through as his wife accepts this award! He knows it’s the hormones, and with the way her speech is going, soon the worlds will too!

Previously. (The Sun Has Set...) | Next. (It Gets to a Point.)

Four weeks orbiting the BTS twitter sphere…

I hate solos. God, I hate solos…

For the love of everything that is holy, stop setting your favorites up. Stop shading the other members. Stop shading other fandoms. Please.

Just stop responding to hate. Report, block, do not interact and move on. How fucking hard can this be?

That is it. That is my update for now.

I love Brett and I think he did a fantastic job with what he was given this season, but he was just not (imo) better than Phil. Phil knocked it out the park! I dont quite know how it works so my apologies if this is overly cynical, but Brett was a big and constant presence on the SAG picket line, it almost feels like a reward for that

I think Brett is brilliant at playing Roy and I think he did a brilliant job at playing Roy in s3, i do! But I also think Phil has brought something new and special to his portrayal of Jamie in each consecutive season and never moreso than in s3. Phil/Jamie was to me the scene stealer and star of the show in s3, the one character I really couldn't get enough of seeing onscreen, whereas Brett didn't necessarily have as many "standout" scenes in s3 as he's had in previous seasons.

I'm not quite sure how to word it in a way that doesn't sound diminishing (because again, I think Brett plays Roy incredibly well), but Brett's portrayal was sort of "more of the same" whereas Phil took Jamie to new heights, had great material that he handled well and that showcased more of an emotional range (like, he had moments that were purely for funny comedy laughs and moments of deep emotional resonance, and he played both EQUALLY AND EXCEPTIONALLY WELL), and just generally elevated his performance all around, and I think he deserves the recognition for that!

Also, I feel almost the same way about Jason getting nommed over Phil as I do about Brett. Like, Jason's fantastic at playing Ted! But he didn't really bring anything new to the character ("one note" again sounds too diminishing for how I actually feel because he does a great job don't get me wrong, but also...maybe a bit of that?) And with him even more so than Brett, Ted/Jason had a lot less "standout" scenes acting-wise than he did in seasons one and two, whereas Jamie/Phil had a WHOLE BUNCH. So it's wild to me that they were both chosen over Phil and I am very sad about it.

February 13: I couldn't make it to the awards ceremony, but they sent me a certificate in the mail. I will definitely be framing it.

the thing that’s really hard about having a little bit of charm or sparkle or talent or intelligence or whatever when you’re young is that you really think you’re gonna be Somebody, like, in the world and then you’re not and you have to get to work and realize that happiness is an inside job for you just the same as for everyone else

Goddamn