dumbass with sword found dead with 2 gunshot wounds
Diane Seuss, ‘Romantic Poetry’, from the New Yorker (Oct 2022).
Character gets a facial cut, and their entourage is shocked: they bleed ember.
Discuss.
Old worldbuilding map
I felt the need to unwind a little and remembered that I have this little (10x18k pixels) labour of slow and unmethodical love. The setting behind it has been brewing in me for almost nine years now, and will take some more time before it, if ever, becomes anything publishable.
Such timeframe has made it unwieldy at times. Back in 2014 I carelessly lifted themes from every game I was into (mainly Warcraft and HoMM3), and this approach remained as my interests changed. Instead of poorly drafted epic tales I moved to poorly drafted conlangs and histories.
Eventually themes of empire and expansion emerged at its core. Is conquest ever justified? Do the cultural scars it leaves ever heal? For the last semester I kept pestering my professor who taught Displacement in Roman Literature class, asking about creative applications of literature on space and displacement. This passion project was among my main reasons.
It is still a work in progress: for every empty spot on the map there is a dozen conceptual gaps. Most of all, I am struggling to assign a form and an audience for it. I’d ran one and a half pseudo-D&D adventures in it, have several different drafts for games - a Zeldalike and a (T)RPG - but these have to be localized stories. But the main thing I like in this idea is the view through its ages, a discussion about cultural development.
This too has solutions. The Zeldalike draft is narratively focused on its characters seeing how their respective cultures shaped them and learning to overcome it; and the D&D adventures had been placed in different times with metatextual intent. But who on earth would play this?
I'm writing an essay on literary theory and I'm so done with it, I want it over, but this line is either the best thing I've ever written, or the stupidest -
if a poem ceases to be, then it ceases to be a poem.
What do you mean by “ceases to be”? Because, methinks, lost poems are no less poems. Or, on the opposite end, how little damage is enough to make poem cease to be under your terminology? Are the barely intelligible crumbs of Sappho not poems anymore on your account?
I am genuinely curious - asking as a clueless philosophy major, so definitely less familiar with what poems are than you are.
I have come to realize why my teenage self was so enticed by the My Little Pony: the saccharine appearance and, prima facie, naïve message about friendship are set in a world of corrupt systems and dangerous forces, and the utopia of today is repeatedly shown as exceptionally fragile.
The greatest threats almost always come from the past: instead of achieving stability by solving problems, the rulers have found a way to mitigate their effects until it is unresolvable by conventional means. A history of irresponsible governance is catching up to the happy world, and the only thing to prevail against natural, systemic, and societal horrors is the communal spirit: the titular magic of friendship. In this essay I will…
regalvoid
