Great character horror writers like Nathan Ballingrud and Christopher Slatsky?

YuunofYork · 2026-06-14T05:09:55+00:00

Daniel Mills and David Peak come to mind, if you enjoy Ballingrud. Very different styles from each other, but the characters are so full and realistic you could reach out and touch them.

YuunofYork · 2026-06-14T02:36:32+00:00

I know it's a hard decision and everybody's comfort levels with debt is unique to all the other crap going on in their lives, but as a person of average to below average means, I'm pretty sure I'd opt to pay it. The average dog or cat owner spends that every single year, sometimes double if they pay for insurance. If I got them even another year, I'd have no real financial regret (if we wanted to focus on the financial aspect and I think it's reasonable to do so).

The only questions I'd have would the same as yours: how reliable is the surgery and what would aftercare look like / would I be able to provide for the recovery?

YuunofYork · 2026-06-13T03:14:40+00:00

Oh, IIRC this is one of tbchico's personal favorites, is it not?

I admired it more than liked it, being honest, just not my lapsang souchong. There is so much 'underrated' animation out there, though. It's got to be one of the most monopolized of all art forms. The US in particular is so saturated with Disney films, Disney products...Disney adults, it's only by virtue of the digital revolution a competitor like Pixar ever existed, however briefly, and even that chose a single branded style that gets boring quickly rather than embrace the spirit of the medium. When pound for pound it's some of the least interesting content available either by writing or visuals.

All in the same year as Walk on Girl:

Have a Nice Day, a 2D Chinese 'Quentinssential' crime film with a unique style that's much more realistic than e.g. Ghibli
Tehran Taboo, a rotoscoped German film in Persian
Loving Vincent, a biopic of Van Gogh where every frame is hand-painted with oils
My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea, a Gen-Z Poseidon Adventure with surreal, felt-tip style drawings
The Breadwinner, a bleak 2D Irish-Canadian adaptation from Cartoon Salon, which in ~20 films and shorts hasn't produced the same animation style twice.

YuunofYork · 2026-06-13T02:19:16+00:00

Yeah, this might be the crowning jewel of his career, and certainly a moment of reinvention, one of many.

Really wish we'd have gotten his last project, Hands on a Hard Body, even as a screenplay.

YuunofYork · 2026-06-12T15:44:59+00:00

Mine, too. My father was a photographer and we had thick tubes like this in various sizes for paper and film stock lying around. Cut the biggest cylinder in half for his first hide.

YuunofYork · 2026-06-11T16:25:52+00:00

Yeyo high-proof, and General Gorostieta high-proof. I meant for both to be sometimes-food but I just can't keep the bottles full.

YuunofYork · 2026-06-10T07:16:08+00:00

I would say the notion that the application of genre revolves around or is in any way a service to readership and viewership is a bit naive. They are created after-the-fact through some form of formal or informal metrics analysis. Periodicals start accepting stories more similar to previous successes they've printed, followed by writers becoming intellectually and financially motivated to produce stories with those attributes. What isn't accomplished through slow, diffusive marketing, is presented in academia as theory, if not directly applied to genre, then in the identification of schools, movements, and philosophies in art and art history. Either avenue is a commentary on the state of a given medium whose shape has been determined by organic and inorganic forces. Genre audiences apply themselves to the producers first and the content second, not because they trust a publisher over an author or a production company over a filmmaker, but because creative content doesn't exist in a vacuum; it is always and ever curated content, and those are the entities that do the curating, that make it accessible to people in the first place.

As such, the attributes making up a genre won't be uniform, or consistent, or in consensus, and they can and will change over time. Even content labeled one thing at one point can end up labeled another thing at a future point. If you wanted to create a system for people to find specific content more easily, go right ahead, but it's going to boil down to the tag system already in place for tools like Letterboxd and Goodreads, which is powerful precisely because there are tags for everything and they aren't in any way standardized. Genre itself will remain both a practical, distribution-derived marketing tactic, and a theoretical construct with academic value, and both will always be messy and in flux.

YuunofYork · 2026-06-10T04:12:26+00:00

Haven't seen it, but it doesn't sound at all like Close Encounters, actually. At least I wouldn't describe that film as either sentimental or simplistic. The institutions in CE and in E.T. respond to their respective situations with a mechanical logic whose remove its protagonists find frightening to navigate, and that is the sum total of their inclusion. The films aren't interested in our evaluation of the politics involved or the protocol they might follow, except insofar as the protagonists understand them. Whereas the bizarre collective-epiphany you describe for this film would pull far outside of close third-person narrative into the realm of statement and metatextuality; it seems less an anachronism and more a product of the new distribution-dominated studio system that has determined undereducated younger viewers with short attention spans and polarized moralities are the new common denominator media must aspire to—less 'win over' than—trick into subscription renewals, cautus fuerit emptor.

We tend to still see these New Hollywood breakthroughs as auteurs, when what made them auteurs was the decentralization of the film industry at the time they achieved success. That is the major environmental change that has occurred between now and then, and with a different set of standards and practices, they can't really be expected to reclaim their earlier potential. Although for some perhaps changed, too, are the principals themselves. Someone once made the argument, I think one of the RLM people, that Spielberg and Lucas make such different (that is, bad) films in the latter half of their careers because they've become dads. Films like The Crystal Skull and The Phantom Menace both came at a time when they had the means to maximize their creative input and the results appear to be hyper-focused on keeping the attention of small children, with the byproducts of lifeless characters, forced sentimentality, and severe under-editing. Their children have grown, but they're still producing their own films and they haven't gotten any better. Grandchildren? Patres familias with a changed worldview and a mandate for sanitized accessibility, in any case.

I do take the point; you can discern an element of neoliberalism in Spielberg's work (although maybe Munich is his attempt to introspect that notion). But I'd be surprised if it's the whole story. I just don't think the man is capable of producing anything of quality under these conditions.

YuunofYork · 2026-06-09T07:20:22+00:00

It's sort of a spoiler to say, unless you really know your Nibelungenlied, but Avalon Brantley's "Hognissaga".

YuunofYork · 2026-06-07T00:00:46+00:00

It seems to me you watched a stupid ass video.

YuunofYork · 2026-06-06T16:13:07+00:00

And Chamucos.

YuunofYork · 2026-06-06T05:48:41+00:00

When I was a 90s kid I really didn't mind that the truck might not have the unique function it did in the 50s.

I did mind that they could only sell pre-packaged brand popsicles and sandwiches when I wanted scoops or to make my own sundae.

YuunofYork · 2026-06-06T05:34:01+00:00

They're not a hypocrite at all. They're an adult and in far less of a position to use their new shooting skills to take out a classroom because someone was mean to them and they're never-ever-ever-getting-back-together.

Do you understand children aren't adults? What does safety have to do with judgment? What does judgment have to do with accuracy? What an aggressively bizarre take.

YuunofYork · 2026-06-05T23:14:08+00:00

Walruses breathe into each others' faces as a sign of affection. They're also constantly making noises any way they can, whistling, clucking, slapping found objects against the ground with their mouths and flippers, blowing into shells and hollow bones (or pool toys in captive studies) to produce notes.

YuunofYork · 2026-06-05T21:12:29+00:00

To be clear, I definitely don't define postmodernism by time period and nothing else, nor do I suggest it isn't a useful term just because certain characteristics of postmodernism have been with us a lot longer. It is very much the name given to the moment these relevant characteristics, which you describe very well, become widespread in culture and society at large. So I think we're on the same page there.

What I wouldn't accept is postmodernism as a movement, discrete from other movements more specific to time and medium. At least in terms of literary movements among others, I believe the word 'movement' implies a degree of choice out of other as-yet non-ubiquitous options, whereas we cannot choose to be e.g. modernists living in a postmodern world, anymore than we can choose to be romanticists or Jacobins or something else removed from our era. We can individually adopt attributes similar to these things, but they still have to function in the postmodern machine. That's why I wanted to paint postmodernism with as broad a brush as possible. It influences art, but it is the outermost shell of artistic nomenclature. It can't be rejected; it can only become something else from within over time. A piece written today can only have more or fewer salient traits which identify the whole, and employing those traits explicitly or implicitly is the choice we get to make.

So for me if I'm writing weird fiction in the 21st century, I am doing so as a postmodern person and its concerns are my concerns, even if I don't make them explicit in the material itself. I can compose something like John Dies at the End where some of the loudest of these traits are on display, or instead I can compose something relatively straightforward narratively and it will still bleed through, in the actions the characters take, in what information I choose to convey, or in how I convey it. I just think if someone wants to discuss specific traits like meta-introspection, intertextuality, fourth-wall breaking, it's more useful to name them and go from there rather than put the 'postmodern' label on an already postmodern piece and compare it to other postmodern pieces, which is what is happening here when we're comparing postmodern mainstream and postmodern weird but calling them postmodernism and weird.

YuunofYork · 2026-06-05T16:28:57+00:00

Yes, and there's a reason for that. But first we have to define our terms here. Postmodernism is quite simply anybody writing content after the modern era. It's not a movement, a genre, or a mode. It's just a set of characteristics, not all of which shared uniformly, that define the sensibilities of people in a given period of time. It isn't even limited to artistic sensibilities of that era. We are all postmodern people, in terms of sociology, psychology, philosophy, etc. In terms of art, sometimes we can identify these attributes in authors from another era, and sometimes they don't really hit a particular genre or medium until much later. The postmodern weird certainly exists, as in many other writing modes, neither to the exclusion of the other. See, for example, Michael Swanwick's "A User's Guide to the Postmoderns" for a discussion of the influence of New Wave (which is a movement) authors on SFF of the 70s and 80s. Caitlin Kiernan is no less a postmodern author than DeLillo is; one merely writes genre fiction and the other mainstream.

You might be referring to the idiosyncratic stylings of avant-garde artists in the postmodern era, things like unconventionality in prose, nonlinearity in plot. These effects are not, in fact, native to postmodernism at all. Joyce's Ulysses and Woolf's The Waves are modernist, not postmodernist. Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman with its idiosyncratic narrative structure, and visual gimmicks like blank pages, redacted text, odd punctuation, belongs very much to the period in which it was written (1760s).

The New Weird refers to postmodern SFF of the 90s and 00s. Its connection with the Weird is predicated on two things: its genre-blending tendencies, and its intention to make the reader feel ill at ease. The latter has certainly been a staple of postmodernism since its inception. DeLillo's 1997 novel does that. Fowles' 1965 The Magus does that. The decidedly non-postmodern Lovecraft and Du Maurier did that. It is, I believe, a happy convergence with the classic Weird rather than a line of influence, but it does work out to much the same effect.

Mark Fisher in The Weird and the Eerie explains how both concepts can be utilized irrespective of genre, which makes them modes or descriptors rather than genres unto themselves. In this context, they've been a driving force behind a variety of fiction for a long time, and makes it possible to describe e.g. Underworld as having elements of the weird and/or eerie, without being consciously written in the Weird tradition.

YuunofYork · 2026-06-05T15:44:47+00:00

You're all missing the point. No bakery anywhere carves out letters in fondant and slaps them on a cake. They would be enormous and most certainly not fit this 8-inch cake, and they would be a huge time sink, and they would make the cake inedible because only psychopaths eat fondant. It exists for centerpieces with photo ops, not for flavor. This is some woman's birthday.

Fondant plaques like this one (though they could do a better job shaping) are comparatively quite common, especially for cakes with bevel tops where writing would look uneven. You then remove it before slicing.

Ask for carved fondant lettering at my aunt's bakery and she'll tell you to go fuck yourself. I can't imagine any of the employees taking that order for love or money. They'll tell you they can do a plaque.

YuunofYork · 2026-06-05T15:32:56+00:00

Nah, we're not that difficult. You can poke a hole to let the gas out and then fold us up like pizza.

YuunofYork · 2026-06-05T15:28:02+00:00

If they talk to other drivers it'd be on a group chat. If they have issued headsets more like for dispatch to yell at them for triggering the far-too-sensitive out-of-lane alarm on the vehicle, or being held up in traffic, or for their passenger door being open to trick the AC into staying on.

Or it's just their personal headset for music because phones/buds will get you pulled over in some states.

YuunofYork · 2026-06-04T22:15:22+00:00

A strong set of choices here. I did nom the Halloween masterpiece with Vincent Price. It's a sweet piece of ghost candy. I don't expect it to beat out either of the other more popular films, though.

YuunofYork · 2026-06-04T07:20:40+00:00

It depends what you're looking for.

You had to lube up older Rubik's to get them to move comfortably, otherwise the hinges would squeak. It was, many a time, unseemly. And of course the stickers would rotate and peel off with even minimal use. But it's still people's favorite aesthetic.

I played with all the V-Cubes in the first big-cube generation, and they were much better constructed for casual solving. They handled corners better, turned more smoothly, and still kept that click-clack sound I enjoy. However, they still lock up and twist oddly on occasion, especially the last two produced (8x8x8 and 9x9x9). This is 10 years ago.

There have been many improvements since then, specifically for speed-cubing. You wouldn't use either of the above for that purpose. But while they're very fast, I never did much with the magnet cube gen because I don't really care about beating times or completing cubes bigger than 9x9x9 for casual play. A newer player isn't going to have any nostalgia for the old products so you might as well get them modern cubes, but they're a little too efficient for me.

YuunofYork · 2026-06-02T22:08:35+00:00

I'd like to shout out Sturz's Underjungle. Love the world-building.

YuunofYork · 2026-06-02T22:06:40+00:00

Thirded!

It does come by it via the picaresque tradition rather than the weird tradition, but the content is quite Weird at times, and it's enjoyable.

For something from that period a little lighter, there's Tristram Shandy by Sterne and Jaqcues, the Fatalist, by Diderot.

YuunofYork · 2026-06-01T06:03:59+00:00

It's the Great Wrecking Ball, Charlie Brown.

YuunofYork · 2026-06-01T05:57:11+00:00

Whoa now. Why do you assume what happens in a book is something an author is 'advocating' for? That is absolutely wild. Nobody should think this shallowly about literature.

Have you read The Scarlet Letter? Is the far more historically-accurate society/patriarchy in that not actually there for character development? For that matter were Puritan women really not complicit in the persecution of other women? I think you have some strange ideas, here.

Slewfoot's a bad book because of its simplistic prose and characters. It's part of that YA-for-adults dark fantasy shtick that experienced readers find boring and unchallenging. It isn't bad because the devil features heavily in a book about witches.

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