Tag: writing

Edginess
Edginess as a concept is a fatal package-dealing of two separate concepts. In their complete and meaningful expression, these two concepts are interwoven to highlight something valuable: the performance of suffering, mental illness, or darkness that is neither deserved nor authentic. However, those two concepts have begun to be torn apart by cultural shearing forces (specifically due to a sort of artistic self-consciousness and cynicism); as a result, what many people mean when they say edginess...
What I like about Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk
There are really two things. The first aspect is the way it balances the "pink mohawk" and "black trenchcoat" aspects of cyberpunk as a wider genre. In "black trenchcoat" mode, the narrative focuses on very serious, very depressed, noir style detectives or hackers, often working for corporations or police forces or the government, and there's no working against the system really, there's not a lot of flamboyance, not a lot of punk to it, even if there's a lot of cyber, and it leans much more hea...
Fiction and Writing Meta
In the 1990s, when the possibility of hypertext became more widely known, there was a wave of literary theorists in acadamia who hailed hypermedia as an epochal shift in the nature of fiction itself -- perhaps, indeed, its final form. They were so sure of this because they saw it as the truest, most concrete fulfillment of critical and post-structuralist theory -- freeing the reader from the tyranny of the author and of structure and narrative. They believed that, perceiving this new freedom, hy...
High culture, low culture, and what I want to write
Although reading in depth is very difficult withmy disability, and after years of having to rely nearly exclusively on audiobooks for my entertainment I've been finding myself deeply burnt out on them, I try to make a point to really challenge myself in my reading. To choose things that, while still within my range of interests, are dense, complex, nuanced, have interesting ideas, try new literary devices, or are part of the literary canon of whatever genre or subgenre I'm exploring. I push myse...
Hyperfiction and Org-Mode
I've been interested in parser interactive fiction for a very long time -- it's a wonderful, fascinating topic which I was introduced to by one of my favorite books of all time. The way in which the world is not just represented at the base level of the program as a cloud of points and numbers with no inherent meaning, assembled into trees of containers that are ultimately elided at compile time and cannot be directly manipulated, in such a way that meaning must be arbitrarily constructed on the...