On the Subject of Birds

[altered]

If I was legitimately derivative of you, I'd want to be shot into orbit before Tucson finished dragging me into the hot dark earth.

I've borrowed some stylistic flourishes, but there's no one I haven't borrowed a bit of the voice of. I'm like one of those hyper-Tourette's patients what have to spontaneously and constantly mimic everyone and everything around them, except with the written word.

I've said forever: originality is remixing and happy accident. I eat all the food that is even slightly like the steaming, grimy sludge I want to pump out, and what do you know! My toilet stain isn't quite like anyone else's, and it's turned green and fuzzy. I bet YOU don't have Cyanobacteria in your bowl (mostly on account of it being more hostile to life than Mickey Rooney's face.)

EDIT: Also, with regards to alienation, I've embraced it now. As a result I have an aura of strange that extends precisely 300 feet from me, and makes people both nervous and intrigued.

I'm alienated. That's just step one. The ultimate goal is to be alien. A towering nematode, a 1980s cyberpunk cyborg, a dark fantasy swamp witch, something frightening, abnormal, so far removed that they have to ask about hallucination to begin with then start parsing after that.

[Al Qədic]

So a while back I got handed a ticket onto a ship. The fuckin thing's apparently gone from Ai WeiWei's house to the site of the Pokhran tests to Kanda shrine to that one island that Canada and Denmark fight over with bottles of whisk(e)y, and now it's stuck in a desertified chasm somewhere because Eris decided she was done with her afternoon bath a little too early.


The ticket comes with a student-time guarantee, which is nice, but it's made of that weird compostable straw material and smells of almond extract and ghost jizz.


Those sailors say things are fun at sea; since Japan it's been nothing but fairy chess with ancient gold coins as board tiles, feeding hotdogs to tsuchinoko, watching the ittan-momen and shiro uneri duke it out like dogfighter pilots amongst the ship's forest of tiny car muffler exhaust pipes (which are naturally fed by the rowing of a hundred oars which are themselves powered by the techno-cultists below deck, who've been getting into fights with the treasure hunters, the egg-painters, the party-planners, and the spags), and weekly googly-eye-disease preparedness classes.


I'll forget I have the ticket eventually, but we'll see what happens to it once the ocean comes back to pick those fuckers up off the ground again.


Now I'm gonna go finish some ice cream.

[altered]

The problem I have with this is that there’s no central point. There’s nothing it revolves around. It just jumps from point 2848 to point 94 and so on at random. It’s not only that the points are totally unrelated, but they’re never returned to and so they have no impact.

It’s like if you were watching some cute lady do the dance of seven veils except at the end she just is fucking gone. Vanished into one of those silk hankies right before your eyes. A whole lot of teasing and colorful fabric followed by silence and a cold spotlight on nothing at all.

The entire time I read that I’m watching something happening but by the end I realize that it was basically empty. A fan blowing the drapes around.

That shouldn’t be meant to imply your WRITING is the problem. It’s the arrangement. Just like you can have a whole bunch of masterful pieces in a symphony but the total program feels hollow and worthless because there’s no leitmotif or theme, nothing is connected. It’s the same thing here: you have a bunch of pieces that are great but they contribute nothing because there’s nothing to contribute to.

On the other hand, a really horrible writer (say, Lovecraft) can become remembered as far better than he actually was because the arrangement of concepts was well done.

Return to your thesis early, return to it often, and create a recognizable cadence with it. You can recognize this in both of the pieces I’ve contributed to this thread.

Edit: And if you want to know where I learned that from, it’s Hofstadter’s Godel Escher Bach. Once you start drawing cross-discipline inspirations your start to realize that when it comes to art, a lot of concepts in the best art of one medium are perfectly applicable to the best art of EVERY OTHER medium.

[Doktor Howl]

If I was legitimately derivative of you, I'd want to be shot into orbit before Tucson finished dragging me into the hot dark earth.

I've borrowed some stylistic flourishes, but there's no one I haven't borrowed a bit of the voice of.

This is the awesome part.  You borrow a bit from me.  I ripped off Warren Ellis.  Warren Ellis ripped off Hunter S Thompson, who himself ripped off H.L. Mencken, who HIMSELF ripped off Mark Twain, and Mark Twain ripped off old Ben Franklin, who in fact ripped off Voltaire.

This is how this is done.  Any writer who says they are an island is fooling themselves.  Unless they're that lady that wrote 50 shades of whatever, and that SHOWS that she had no influences.

[chaotic neutral observer]

Sometimes, when I write something, it has this overwhelming aura of familiarity, such that it's hard for me to believe that I haven't plagiarized it from somewhere, and simply forgotten the original source.  Maybe I have, and it's just a matter of time before someone accuses me of such.

[chaotic neutral observer]

Birds are malevolent manifestations of a callow, heartless universe.

Poo-tee-weet?

[altered]

If I was legitimately derivative of you, I'd want to be shot into orbit before Tucson finished dragging me into the hot dark earth.

I've borrowed some stylistic flourishes, but there's no one I haven't borrowed a bit of the voice of.

This is the awesome part.  You borrow a bit from me.  I ripped off Warren Ellis.  Warren Ellis ripped off Hunter S Thompson, who himself ripped off H.L. Mencken, who HIMSELF ripped off Mark Twain, and Mark Twain ripped off old Ben Franklin, who in fact ripped off Voltaire.

This is how this is done.  Any writer who says they are an island is fooling themselves.  Unless they're that lady that wrote 50 shades of whatever, and that SHOWS that she had no influences.

What's great about that list you gave is that I can recognize each author reflected in the other, but they ALSO have their own style and some of them I can't stand even though their predecessors and successors are fine. (This is mostly just Mencken, who I cannot enjoy no matter how I try. And oh boy have I tried.)

[Cain]

Birds are dinosaurs too malicious to die. It's really that simple.

[altered]

Birds are dinosaurs too malicious to die. It's really that simple.

As I said, they ALREADY ARE DEAD.

Cain Aerte, a.k.a. The Betrayer, a.k.a. Gilgamesh of the South, a.k.a. The Planetfucker: you can tell your lies about birds all you like, but both I and the Stork of Wrath know your game and we will SHIT OURSELVES IN PUBLIC before we let you win.

[Cain]

Pfft, I can't be expected to remember things I just read.

[altered]

Pfft, I can't be expected to remember things I just read.

okay you win this round, PLANETFUCKER

[altered]

I've got another one coming on, like a spasmodic bowel movement, and it's going somewhere new, I think.

It might take longer to piece together. It probably won't end up here. But there's a crawling, burning spindliness in my viscera and whatever they might say, I didn't eat those centipedes.

[altered]

In fact, I think it might be an altogether different medium.

Audio.

[Fujikoma]

Anyone who's ever shared a house with a bird knows this to be true. Their spores get in the air, infect your brain, and before you know it, you are a servant of a vile, avian arch-lich.

[Fujikoma]

The only reason science hasn't yet proven this is that all the scientists involved get infected by the spores and must follow their unholy master's wishes, one of which is to deny any credibility to the sinister truth of the matter.