vcsupertramp

Latest Posts by vcsupertramp

Nikki Giovanni, The Collected Poetry, 1968-1998

Be the pond, Danny

The longer you have to wait for something, the more you will appreciate it when it finally arrives. The harder you have to fight for something, the more priceless it will become once you achieve it. And the more pain you have to endure on your journey, the sweeter the arrival at your destination. All good things are worth waiting for and worth fighting for.

“Let someone love you just the way you are - as flawed as you might be, as unattractive as you sometimes feel, and as unaccomplished as you think you are. To believe you must hide of all the parts of you that are broken, out of fear that someone else is incapable of loving what is less than perfect, is to believe that sunlight is incapable of entering a broken window and illuminating a dark room.”

— Marc Hack

the concept of how sir arthur conan doyle was as a person always sends me into fits. imagine making the most famous literary character of all time but you hate the character so much you try to kill him off. but everyone is so horny for this asshole detective they make you bring him back. even your own mother gets mad when he’s dead because she likes him. raising your prices to ridiculous rates to avoid writing holmes stories backfired and now you’re rich. it’s absolutely a pain because it’s keeping you from your true passion which is spiritualism despite how one of your good friends harry houdini keeps telling you it’s bullshit. you consider your best novels to be historical ones but they’re well over shadowed by the nemesis of your own creation sherlock fucking holmes. some fake photographs from some kids convinced you faeries were real and you wrote a whole book about it. you started writing stories in medical school. and yes, also you are a doctor. after you’re dead, they erect a statue of sherlock holmes across the street from your birthplace, causing you to probably roll over one hundred eighty degrees in your grave and scream into your casket pillow.

Not to be that person but I feel like sometimes Shrek being so memeable prevents people from seeing how truly revolutionary and radical the first two films really were. A children’s fairy tale that argues that no, ugliness does not mean bad and beautiful does not mean good. A fairy tale that argues that everyone deserves love, even those cast out of the margins of society. A fairy tale that dares to have a female protagonist not be conventionally attractive or helpless. A fairy tale that argues that love does not happen at first sight, but is grown through mutual respect and interest. That’s pretty fucking sick if you ask me

I lost my best friend 3 years ago- not lost as in dead but lost as in we only text each other on our birthdays now. Movies and books don't tell you that a friendship dying is like the sinking of a ship, you try to get higher and higher and hold onto the rails and unanswered texts, the captain tries to steer it to safety and salvage pieces of two broken hearts until you're left with memories of what once was. We were friends for a decade and knew each other's diaries by heart, I still remember her phone number and the way she took her coffee. Seeing her in streets is like breathing in a scent you forgot you knew but it immediately takes you back to a summer in '07.

Movies and books also don't tell you that friendships don't just end after one fight or incident, it's like the rusting of a bridge, the slow decay of flesh and bones and secrets. It took weeks, months- until one day I woke up and I realized I hadn't thought of her in a while. And I wrote a poem that day and I titled it 'The dying of a best friend' and I put all my love for her in a tiny box with my half of the matching pendant of a dolphin we had and stored them in a corner of my heart under the heading Grief. Where else can one hide unspent love?

It's been 3 years since I lost my best friend, lost as in I still carry our secrets in a tiny box but we only text each other on our birthdays.

-Ritika Jyala, excerpt from The world is a sphere of ice and our hands are made of fire

Edit: here's the visualizer for this piece

When insults had class

These glorious insults are from an era before the English language got boiled down to 4-letter words. A member of Parliament to Disraeli: “Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease”. “That depends, Sir,“ said Disraeli, “whether I embrace your policies or your mistress.” “He had delusions of adequacy.” - Walter Kerr “He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”- Winston Churchill “I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.” -Clarence Darrow “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway). “Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I’ll waste no time reading it.” - Moses Hadas “I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.” - Mark Twain “He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends..” - Oscar Wilde “I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend…. if you have one.” (George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill) “Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second  …. if there is one.“  (Winston Churchill, in response.) “I feel so miserable without you; it’s almost like having you here.” - Stephen Bishop “He is a self-made man and worships his creator.” - John Bright “I’ve just learned about his illness. Let’s hope it’s nothing trivial.” - Irvin S. Cobb “He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others.” - Samuel Johnson “He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up.” - Paul Keating “In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily.” - Charles, Count Talleyrand “He loves nature in spite of what it did to him.” - Forrest Tucker “Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?” -Mark Twain “His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.” - Mae West “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.” - Oscar Wilde “He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts… for support rather than illumination.” Andrew Lang (1844-1912) “He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.” - Billy Wilder “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.” Groucho Marx

supervillains fucking hate fighting the x-men because the teams change constantly and sometimes there are??? totally new people there???? fuck there’s a teenager who literally just has eyes all over his body. is he even technically a superhero yet or is he a student. who the fuck knows. how do we counter this shit

I caught her human parents defiling my forest. They threw their baby at my feet as they ran away. Instead of eating her, I raised her as my own. Now, my poor, ugly, beautiful daughter is neither human nor wolf. PRINCESS MONONOKE もののけ姫 | Mononoke-hime 1997 • dir. Hayao Miyazaki

The smoothness of the “walk"🎵♬ ♩ ♪ 

“Frequently knowledge is treated as an end in itself, and then the goal becomes to heap it up and display it when called for. This static, cold-storage ideal of knowledge is inimical to educative development. It not only lets occasions for thinking go unused, but it swamps thinking. No one could construct a house on ground cluttered with miscellaneous junk.”

— John Dewey, Democracy and Education

Writing advice from my uni teachers:

If your dialog feels flat, rewrite the scene pretending the characters cannot at any cost say exactly what they mean. No one says “I’m mad” but they can say it in 100 other ways.

Wrote a chapter but you dislike it? Rewrite it again from memory. That way you’re only remembering the main parts and can fill in extra details. My teacher who was a playwright literally writes every single script twice because of this.

Don’t overuse metaphors, or they lose their potency. Limit yourself.

Before you write your novel, write a page of anything from your characters POV so you can get their voice right. Do this for every main character introduced.

Lord of the Rings was published in the fifties, and largely written in the forties. Tolkien’s opinions on society and morality and technology are at some points genuinely more conservative than what I’m comfortable with. And yet, the more I think about it, the more sure I am that Tolkien actually deconstructs most of the clichéd fantasy tropes he supposedly originates. Some examples.

The long-lost heir is not the hero, he’s a side character who deliberately uses himself as a decoy.

The real hero actually fails in his quest, his goodness and determination and willpower utterly fail in the face of evil, and the world is saved by a series seemingly unrelated good deeds.

The central conflict is not between destroying the world and preserving it. An age of the world will come to an end, and many great and beautiful things will perish, whether the heroes win or lose. The past may have been glorious, but preserving it is impossible, and returning to it is impossible, time has passed and the world has moved on. The king returns, but the elves are gone and magic fades from the very substance of Middle Earth. The goal is not to preserve the status quo, the goal is the chance to rebuild something on the ruins.

Killing the main villain seems to instantly solve the problem, eradicate all enemies and fix the world, except it doesn’t, not wholly, since the scouring of the Shire still has to happen.

Also, the hero gets no real reward, and what he gets, he cannot really enjoy. He is hurt by his ordeal, and never fully recovers.

There is a team of heroes, a classic adventuring party, except the Fellowship is together for less one sixth of the series. The Fellowship is intact from the Council of Elrond to Gandalf’s death, four chapters. The remaining eight are together until Boromir’s death, an additional six chapters. This is nothing compared to LOTR’s length of sixty-one chapters, if I count correctly.

Tolkien is not classic high fantasy. If you actually think about it, there is very little magic. The hobbits’ stealth is not magical, most elven wonders are not unambigously magical, wizards are extremely rare, and even Gandalf hardly uses magic if you compare him to the average DnD wizard. Most magic is indistinguishable from craft, there is no clear difference between a magic armor and a very good armor, between magic bread and very good bread, between magical healing and competent first-aid plus a few kind words.

TLDR: Stop praising recent fantasy for deconstructing Tolkien if they’re “deconstructing” something Tolkien has never actually constructed.

“Private institutions are under systemic and legal obligations to make money quickly to reward their capitalist investors; thus expensive, uncertain long-term research is inevitably harder and harder to justify as quarters tick by with few money-making breakthroughs to show for it. Small wonder, then, that the Internet, the web, the GUI, modern processors, Wi-Fi signaling, fundamental computer languages, and even Google itself arose from the academic or military research settings where steady funding is more or less assured and near-term stock prices don’t drive whether projects get axed. The history is long—Guglielmo Marconi developed radio for the Royal Navy, Berners-Lee the web protocols for CERN. The OSTP notes, “Past DOD research has resulted in revolutionary technological capabilities such as radar, digital computers, wireless mobile communications, lasers, fiber optics, composite materials, the Internet (and other ‘packet switched’ networks), and satellite navigation.””

— Rob Larson, Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley

“Daydreaming does not enjoy tremendous prestige in our culture, which tends to regard it as unproductive thought. Writers perhaps appreciate its importance better than most, since a fair amount of what they call work consists of little more than daydreaming edited. Yet anyone who reads for pleasure should prize it too, for what is reading a good book but a daydream at second hand? Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward. For regardless of the result (if any), the very process of daydreaming is pleasurable. And, I would guess, is probably a psychological necessity. For isn’t it in our daydreams that we acquire some sense of what we are about? Where we try on futures and practice our voices before committing ourselves to words or deeds? Daydreaming is where we go to cultivate the self, or, more likely, selves, out of the view and earshot of other people.” –Michael Pollan “A Place of My Own”

let’s treat ourselves more gently. let’s go to bed early. let’s rest when we need to. let’s live life in a way that doesn’t make you feel burnt out after a few weeks. i want us to have fun, to enjoy everyday life, to be present and not to always push ourselves to the last limit. challenge yourself but also treat yourself with love. okay?

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

— Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

SPIRITED AWAY (2001) dir. Hayao Miyazaki

concept sketches / final result

It does not do to dwell on dreams, Harry, and forget to live. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) Dir. Chris Columbus