John Cale // Dying on the Vine

And I was thinking about my mother I was thinking about what's mine I was living like a Hollywood But I was dying on the vine

Infinite list of favourite lyrics: 222/?

John Cale - Dying on the Vine (1985)

"Who could sleep through all that noisy chatter?

The troops, the celebrations in the sun.

The authorities say my papers are all in order

And if I wasn't such a coward

I would run.

I'll see you when all the shooting's over;

Meet me on the other side of town.

Yes, you can bring all your friends along for protection,

It's always nice to have them hanging around.

I was thinking about my mother,

I was thinking about what's mine.

I was living my life like a Hollywood,

But I was dying, dying on the vine."

paper history

bowser's fury is a very intense game, i can't imagine mario is keeping a level head 100% of the time. knowing you could actually die with little warning at any given moment gets to you, who would have guessed! good thing junior is there to be right about everything all the time

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.

Obsessed with love between diary and devil bc every character seems to think they’re living in a different genre. Xiao Lanhua is convinced she’s in a silly romcom (and she’s right about half the time). To her, Dongfang Qingcang is doing all these things for her because he’s helplessly in love, not because he needs her skill and definitely not because she has any kind of power over him. Lord Changheng is in a palace drama—he’s returned from the war and longs to settle down with the sweet girl who saved him once, but his arranged marriage takes precedence over his true desires. Dongfang Qingcang is in, like, a power fantasy xianxia webnovel, so taking time to care for Xiao Lanhua pisses him off sooooo much. He just wants to skip to the part where he beheads everyone who ever opposed him

No but the California gang, the Hawkins gang, and the Alaska adults kicking ass and taking names for the whole freaking finale and then we have these mother fuckers who were doing this for half an episode.

Ayrton, 1993

I HAVE THE POWER OF GOD AND ANIME ON MY SIDE

day 104/548 of taehyung's military service

this selca was posted on 140717 with the caption:

Look forward to next week~

(trans cr: Nika @ bts-trans)

bangtan bomb posed that day:

🤡🔪

charles leclerc is a lana del rey girlie. i have no proof but also absolutely no doubt

Sometimes the dialogue for Ronan is just *chef's kiss* exactly what he would say

Precisely. PRECISELY what this quiet bloodthirsty dragon man would say to someone he just spent a day in a swamp looking for an excuse to murder

Semi negative below the cut - 

Here's the thing like...fundamentally, what the majority of the US Tour 6 indicating that they believe "the wrong cat died" really shows to me is that the understanding of the show has been somewhat lost over the years.

This is no disrespect towards any of them, and I believe that joking about this subject is absolutely within an area of general fun and lightheartedness (we do it literally all the time), but at the end of the day it misses the point.

MY GIRL UMHA finally in her much needed upgrade! That’s how her inclosure started, had to take the sedum out bc aphids hatched out on it :( I’ll need to root it in treated soil and give it a month or two. + Ulu who got upgraded too.

7? 👁️

ITERATOR ASK GAME!!!!!!

7. Does your iterator have any specific quirks or niches unlike "typical" iterators? Special jobs, equipment, etc.? If so, what?

YOU DIDNT SPECIFY WHICH ITERATOR AHHHHHH ......i'll answer for all of them >:)

AfA-- Ash has a side purpose of weather and atmospheric monitoring!! they're built at a really high altitude, so their sensors can better monitor the air without the pollution from lower atmospheric levels skewing the data

And then for the Crystalline_Fragments group, cause all of their purposes are semi-interconnected--

TTV-- TOURISM ITERATOR!!!!!! i've never seen an iterator oc with the secondary purpose of being a tourist attraction, so I figured I'd bust my way into that niche. his primary attraction is the northern lights, but his entire structure is then built to be a resort

DoBD-- Dreams is a very science/geology/vulcanology-focused facility. the entire idea for her structure was me going "...what if void fluid volcanoes 👀"

GO-- Oceans is the backbone of the group. the technical one. her facility and city house all of the factories and farms that keep the other two iterators of the group (the fancy golden child ones) going. she's not appreciated enough for this lol

ever since i told my friend about the ship dream he’s been insufferable i’ll forget to respond to his snap and he’ll test me like wow. so you’re abandoning me. just like you left me to die on the bridge.