this bit of this long post is the part i feel obliged to warn people about:
i am just not ever going to systematically tag every post in which untrue things are said like they’re true as “unreality”. the reasons i am not going to do this are many, but include that it is genuinely very difficult for me to decipher which instances of sarcasm and evident falsehood are supposed to be the morally wrong or confusing ones to expose people to, and in general i am not a good person to follow if it is really important that all statements are factual and unambiguous. like, is the post about how in the cambrian era it was always sunday morning and the ocean was made of sprite ‘unreality’? is it ridiculous enough that it no longer counts as unreality? is it still unreality if it is clearly meant to be describing the impressions created by scientific illustrations of the cambrian, where that really is the atmosphere of those real scientific illustrations? the question occurred to me just now making this post, months after i reblogged it, but is not a filter i am capable of preemptively applying to things like that and you should not follow my blog if you would need that!
the rest of this is just me being sulky about goncharov discourse (well, about meta-goncharov discourse, i guess, as in, i am responding to the current discourse on whether it is acceptable to do goncharov posting, as opposed to “goncharov discourse” the joke about the imaginary film)
the other issue i experience with the moral imperative to label factually incorrect statements is because, uh, if i am making a joke premised on a particular pretense, and immediately follow it with an extensive description of how it was a joke and what the pretense is, it has ceased to be a joke. the post no longer contains a joke in it, because i have put a warning label on it that is in strict opposition to the thing that was supposed to be the joke part.
it’s not that it’s funny to intentionally mislead others. such jokes are premised on assuming others will understand that you are making a joke about something that is not true, since for instance i found the cambrian era post funny in part due to my knowledge that in reality it was sometimes not sunday morning back then and the ocean was made of water. but the joke is that one is pretending something obviously false is true, so by labeling it as “not true” you are no longer making the joke. i’m sincerely sorry that this kind of joke is bad for some people, but it is not the case that it is obvious or effortless to label this kind of thing, nor is it the case that doing so would not impact this kind of joke in the first place; it in fact makes it not a joke anymore.
it’s also not some kind of intrinsically cruel attempt to trick other people. like, the goncharov thing is in fact premised on assuming that other people have seen the goncharov shoe post and that goncharov knowers are the ones enjoying and sharing the joke. it’s not a malicious conspiracy crafted in the hopes that some of your followers have managed to spend two years not seeing the original goncharov post and will believe the movie is real. extensive serious-sounding analysis of an imaginary movie is funny because the audience knows the movie is imaginary and that the writer is in fact making up scenes for there to be symbolism of.
but the jokes. do not work. if you have to systematically re-explain the premise of the joke every time you make it to avoid anyone ever not knowing what you’re talking about. this is also a competing access need, actually: if i am supposed to self-police to avoid ever making a joke based on ironically saying something i think is obviously false, then i am curtailing a significant portion of my ability to ever make jokes online, because that kind of humor is part of how i grew up expressing myself and how i continue to communicate with others. if i am supposed to extensively label everything that’s a reference to something not directly contained within the post, that is in fact curtailing my ability to talk about things with other people, because i do not have anything even remotely resembling a reflexive ability to evaluate my speech for this kind of thing.
some people find it easy to maintain personal blogs with this kind of extensive signposting, or don’t have any particular inclination to make jokes in which things are not true or not labeled, and that’s good for them, and i’m glad they exist since there are people who need things communicated in that way. but it’s morally fine for me to have a blog which is not maximally accessible to all of humankind at all times. and i’m going to continue doing it
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Soulmate au but instead of showing who you'll love most in the world it matches you with the person you most want to kick the absolute shit out of. Skulduggery and Serpine get each other. So do China and Eliza (which makes working together only a little awkward).
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what do you mean “cutting songs”? also i absolutely agree with what you said man how come you’re always right? lol
What I mean by that is that an album should work as a cohesive unit and ideally every song should bring something new or exciting to the table, add to the narrative, expand the universe, etc. When we look at the vault tracks for Fearless TV and Red TV for example (though to be fair, less with Red), there are a bunch of tracks on there that wouldn't have added anything to the album except weight and runtime. And a long runtime makes a record less memorable imo – rarely am I going to take time out of my day to listen to an album that is 2+ hours long. And Taylor is a GREAT album artist, no doubt. I just dislike the narrative that has sprung up that Taylor releasing vault tracks etc. is a sign that she is freeee from the shakles of Big Machine where evil man Scott B told her to cut all of those good songs >:( like. Scott B fucking sucks but having an editor on you who really brings out your strengths and teaches you to sharpen your skill and vision is not bad per se. (I don't think their particular relationship was healthy in that regard, but that's not shocking information.) Obviously this is in part due to the streaming era, but we still have artists who create albums™ and I hope Taylor remains one of them.
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