From Against Worldbuilding by Lincoln Michel

At the same time, fans of worldbuilding works focus not on the arc of the story, the struggles of the characters, or the aesthetic power of the fiction. They focus on the inevitable moments when worldbuilding breaks down. My least favorite example of this is the “crazy fan theory.” These normally begin on a site like Reddit, then spread like Kudzu across the internet. Why didn’t the giant eagles simply fly Frodo to Mount Doom? Well, it would be a really boring story if they did! That doesn’t satisfy fans, who instead create fan theories that “explain” and “fix” and “change the way we see” famous works like The Lord of the Rings. (These crazy fan theories exist for basically every popular book or movie that has ever been produced.)

It isn’t a world that a writer is creating, it is a story. The goal of the writer is not to clutter the path with every object they can think of, but to clear the way for the reader’s journey.

The main reason I think worldbuilding has become a problem is that it leads people to believe that “realism” is the primary point of fiction, even fantasy fiction. But representing reality — whether “real” reality or a fictional one — is simply one way of telling a story, just one house in the city of fiction. Surrealists, magical realists, post-modernists, and countless other movements or styles create fantastic worlds that function on other levels — mythic, philosophical, Freudian, etc. — that are at odds with this idea of worldbuilding.

I enjoyed this a lot! Tim's work at Kotaku has been some of my favorite video games-related discussion over the last couple years.

Related: I don’t think it’s a badge of honor to have pristine books. The purpose of a book is to be read, and reading is disruptive. It’s a process that changes you, it’s hard work even if it looks and even feels peaceful, and it’s perfectly normal that both you and the book come out the other side looking different.

I knew a guy who said he took pride in treating his books carefully. No bends, no creases, no marks. He said he wanted someone to look at his shelves and never know he was there. I thought that was a sad dream. I also wondered whether this delicacy felt like love or abandonment, and what his wife thought about those sneaky hands.

I wonder if part of the “decline of books” is the way they’re bound. Most books, floppy or firm, do not lie peacefully flat. You turn the page of a book lying before you, and as you remove a hand to eat a bite of cereal, or to cut into a burrito, the page you just turned to flips itself back over. Then more pages. Unless you firmly crease each page as you open it — which feels violent, exhausting — the book is always trying to shut itself. Shows and movies, you start them and they just go. They beg you to stay. But the book closes off, adds friction, more than simple attention, it requires handling.

You can feel romantic about this, but I think it’s a problem.

Books can be made to lie flat. I have a notebook with a normal-looking spine, but when opened, and maybe with just a bit of pressure, it lies calmly flat. Waiting, welcoming. Take your time, it says. Don’t rush. Think at your own pace. It’s the best notebook I’ve ever had. And it cost less than a moleskine, even though it came from Japan.

and other ridiculous wishes

I've been dragging my past behind me, heavy comet. I'm tired. Constantly triangulating who I am relative to dozens of flat and liftless images is exhausting and useless.

Not the bright-eyed boy tinged with a melodramatic tendency. The performer, teacher's pet, self-centered but open-hearted nerd who fully invested in fictions, including stories he told himself about love and commitment at an age when there's nothing solid to commit with.

Not the disaffected obsessive, up all night in a solitary dorm room or in the strange square house where two years happened in six months, singing mournfully and meaningfully to no one as a body's worth of personhood slipped painfully to the floor. Rapid oscillation between zen-green afternoons and pitch-thick nights where self-destruction tried desperately to be rebirth.

Not the angry screenprinter. Not the musician whose voice was dissolving into ambient noise. Not the game-consumed property manager. Not the blooming bookseller and writer. Not the suicidal rat on the sinking copy shop. Not the surprised web professional, using sudden free time, money, and energy to dance and sing and flirt briefly with happiness. Not the debt-ridden, burned-out crater, feeling futility in every step.

I want a new story. New self-image. New me to lean into. That's a story, too, but it's what I want. Stop trying to be everything I was once, all at once. Ineffectively. Heartbreakingly, insufficient in every direction. I don't have to be these people anymore. I'm already not. Catching up to that is the hard part. Forgive me if I have to shed in the direction of something new. Because things are changing around me and I don't want to just be dragged along in the wake.

I really, really recommend you read the new House of Leaves TV scripts by Mark Z. Danielewski. Especially if you've read the book. These aren't simple adaptation. They're something else, nearly two decades(!) later.

Do me a favor and buy these for $9.

Just a thought!

You should just read this essay by Ken Baumann, but for my future reference:

Phrases which point to no distinct situation, but instead to other phrases which are just as vague. One of the pains of living today is that we live and make decisions without a clear picture of reality to reference or feel a part of. We feel pain not from this lack, but from knowing deeply and intuitively that we are mostly full of shit. And from feeling trapped in a petty game in which you can only proceed by gathering more and more of the right kind of phrases into your head then saying those phrases at the right time to the right people. (Job interviews and talking with customer service representatives are events that scream this truth: the game is not fun because the game was not made for you.)

I’ll say again our situation: we think in phrases that either stun us or which we resent; we want reality and our lives to make sense and feel purposeful but we have bad sources of information; we forget every day the immediate proof of our goodness and ability to choose. It’s as if we are dying of thirst yet stumble again and again to a well full of poisoned water. And when this water touches our lips we wonder: Is there any other way?

Those are the pains that must be admitted.

Now I want you to imagine a machine which can show us proofs of these pains, hundreds of thousands more proofs than we see stars in the night sky. A hundred proofs for every day of every year. Now imagine that this machine works everywhere. That we keep it within our reach every moment of our lives. That this machine is the first thing we use when we wake up and the last thing we use before we fall asleep.

No wonder we feel besieged. No wonder we feel naked to agony and disbelief. No wonder we accept the invitation to refuse to feel.

For nearly all our history as a species, we have lived because we have been where we are. By intimately understanding our environments, we have learned to thrive as a contributing part of them. We are local. This fact too is conveniently obliterated by cellphones and their makers. Knowing that we are best at surviving where we live—as opposed to living somewhere that doesn’t exist, like in some bullshit national narrative or in a battle between good and evil—knowing we are best when we are local helps us practice democracy. And the obviousness of the needs of your friends and neighbors reminds you of the ease of being where you’re at. Reality, and a language that makes sense of it, returns.

I define fascism as a kind of work. Fascism is a kind of maintenance. It is the work we do when we hurt others in order to maintain our belief that we are better than them. A fascist believes that another group is weaker and worse than theirs, then weakens and harms that group so that their original belief feels incontestably true. Fascism is cowardly work. We are fascists all the time. Knowing this, it is our personal and collective responsibility to change our thinking and behavior. Otherwise the logical end of fascism is not killing and torturing this or that specific group: it is destroying everyone and everything that is not you.

— Ken Baumann

There are always going to be linguistic taboos, because words have meaning & some things are unacceptable. It's telling that boomers and older can't abide words like "fuck" and "vagina" but think they should be able to use demographic slurs, while younger gens have flipped that.

There are words my friends hiss and recoil from, but they're all words that are ideologically harmful to material realities of humans: racist, sexist, *phobic, and other words that demean PEOPLE. Whereas our parents assert their right to use those, while objecting to baby words.

Like, "curses" and "swears" growing up in the 80s/90s/00s were all scatological, sexual, or deistic. And there's a whole area of study around what a given culture uses to swear! But it sounds SO pathetic to hear adults go, "Hey now!" when somebody says "ass" near them.

There may be something about boomers & up hiding from their bodies, treating normal bodily functions as so shameful they cannot be spoken, while obsessing over biological differences in skin, hair, and genitals as genocide-worthy offenses. That's something to think about!

But I just found myself going, "Wait is it weird that my friends have taboo words?" There's the conservative assertion that, "Well, I should be able to use ANY word because who cares, they're just words!" But we know that's not true. And it's not wrong to reject certain words.

The question is, what do we reject? What do we weaponize? What do we protect? Older generations weaponize bodies and defend oppressive norms while rejecting their own physicality. Whereas, widely, younger people want to protect bodies and identity while attacking ideology.

And this is a fundamental difference that conservatives don't seem to get. There's a difference between attacking someone's IDEAS vs attacking their BODIES. Being a Republican (ideas, incorrect, hurtful) isn't the same thing as being a person of color (bodies, normal, valid).

You can't be BORN wrong. Nothing about your physiology — not your skin, shape, genes, conditions, genitals, none of it — is invalid. Using words that demean people based on those characteristic IS wrong. It's immoral to be cruel toward people simply for existing.

But you can have wrong ideas. You can BE wrong in the way you regard our world, other people, and yourself. It's super easy to be wrong. Slurs represent wrong thinking. The whole human experience is learning, over and over again, what you were wrong about — and adapting.

And so, "boomer." It's not a slur. It's not making fun of people for just being older. It's a term being used now to encapsulate an ideology of ignorance, irresponsibility, selfishness, and disrespect. Those are common traits among older US people, for historical reasons.

And none of this is PURELY about age. There are teen boomers, because their inherited ideology sucks. And there are great older folks who still put in the work to learn and grow despite our nightmare history of oppression and violence. "ok boomer" signifies exhaustion with lazy thinking.

So it's HILARIOUS that an old white guy would get so hurt by "boomer" that he would ignore history, context, and good sense and compare boomer to the n-word. Unbelievable. Fuck off, boomer. :)