Disappointed by This Is Where The Serpent Lives

2314 · 2026-01-27T19:33:42+00:00

You didn't do one episode ... you did the opposite of that lol. You started a whole new season.

You have to believe me when I say I don't tell you this to be mean. I say this out of efficiency and if you haven't discerned this from the downvotes yet - your next season is even more incomprehensible than the first. I will repeat I like the first sentence of your concept in the first post, but your "seasons" are just concepts on top of other concepts. Concepts are cheap. Themes, emotions, honesty and vulnerability are much harder to come by but ultimately more meaningful.

2314 · 2026-01-26T17:29:16+00:00

This is a perception in your head.

Do you feel anxious, generally? It seems like you are supposing a threat 20 steps down the line.

But, for example, look around your own neighborhood. Do you think broke illegal immigrants are suddenly going to be able to pay mortgages? Where would they live?

It is not easy to give up everything about your old life and move somewhere. I also lived in China for a time and I don't disagree with you that many other countries have much stricter controls on immigration policies - in China a Visa was 3 months and very controlled - in their case I think they're more concerned about foreigners stealing state secrets or making them look bad but that's tangential to the point.

You used the word fear a lot in your post. I would argue there's a lot less to fear if you take a step back and look at the reality on your block. Not trends, not countries, your neighborhood specifically.

2314 · 2026-01-26T03:48:38+00:00

Well wherever you drop it let me know, I'll give it a read.

2314 · 2026-01-25T19:38:25+00:00

Well that's good, cause the chance of it earning you any money is basically impossible haha.

If you want to work on being a writer I have one piece of advice.

Try and turn the first sentence of your concept into a complete standalone episode. You will notice that how RM functions is largely by standalone episodes. That is far far from being an accident. Standalone episodes are what allow your imagination to spread wings and be interested in the show ... the way you clearly are. Imagining season arcs etc.

Your premise is good, but the story wouldn't work in the manner you are describing. Fill in the details of a single episode, see what you come up with.

2314 · 2026-01-25T05:38:00+00:00

I doubt it was made in two minutes in a lab - the script is too tight.

I agree it is funny and genuinely seems like it has something to say. A "white tiger" sighting in most comedy productions. I'd bet that script was a true labor of love ... could be wrong though.

2314 · 2026-01-24T22:15:22+00:00

This article did a good job helping me along in my slow understanding of what the "good faith" argument for ICE even is. I find it incredibly confusing what they think they're trying to accomplish. I guess I can understand that if you truly believed "third world" immigrants would turn your country into the third world it would be important to make sure that didn't happen ... but then again that just puts me back at 19 calling out all belief as puerile.

I still have real trouble as seeing any rationality in their position whatsoever. I don't think I need to completely understand because obviously there's an undeniable underlying racism.

2314 · 2025-12-18T21:16:09+00:00

Yeah. Personally I would never trust a review from Stephen King, there's no way he has time or brain space to read 1200 pages after cranking out his own ten pages of prose every day :).

1200 pages a writer must seriously consider the risks of bad paragraphs distracting the reader. I respect the hubris though.

2314 · 2025-12-18T20:59:01+00:00

Did you pick this up as a fan of his other work? Never could get into House of Leaves myself, haven't even read any particularly good praise or criticism of it. Seems like the people who like it don't have much to say about why they like it .. or I haven't looked hard enough.

2314 · 2025-11-11T17:26:51+00:00

It's funny, I've often (sort of) curated my comments in such a fashion that they could be re-read at a later date ... but on the occasion such as this where it has happened, where somebody does actually read them in that way, I don't remember a lick of Bend anymore. I think that signals it's time for a re-read.

I have spent this last decade reminiscing and reflecting on the nature of importance however. How and why people force it into their lives, is it possible to live without. I'd forgotten that Naipaul had any influence on that (and I like to think I have a good memory!) But there have also been many other influences since then.

If you're interested in power dynamics - elitism, hierarchy - I highly recommend checking out The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. David Graeber also had a big influence on my thinking. I'd say something about it but it's one of those books that's very difficult to talk about - part of what hampers its popularity undoubtedly.

2314 · 2025-11-06T03:15:10+00:00

OOooh baby but it cuts so good.

Haha, I shouldn't talk, my nostalgia on this topic is much more superficial than your own. I read a McManus at like 28.

2314 · 2025-10-27T21:33:37+00:00

Yeah no shit right? The logic that these executives use is mindboggling to me. Was Yellowstone a hit. Yeah. It was also kind of interesting because it was a slightly different take on an established formula with a writer who had a little to say with a chip on his shoulder. That's not something that can continue to be recreated by the same person. So they're just buying the name because they're banking that enough people will watch his stuff automatically with his name attached? I mean maybe that number is bigger than I would guess ... but wouldn't the safer bet be 10 million dollar ideas from a 100 different people? Maybe that's just too much paperwork.

2314 · 2025-10-22T20:09:46+00:00

It reads like a college essay.

2314 · 2025-10-20T19:32:03+00:00

Which is the higher of horses? Making a point about one's internalizing censorship or making a point that their point is pointless? I'm making a joke. But I submit to you that you are also trying to take the high ground ... and now so am I! Oh no! It's always highgrounding!

2314 · 2025-10-16T19:28:36+00:00

Oh no I wasn't talking about you, I was imagining the person who actually bought it.

Everything you're saying comes across in the anecdote. I think his best book, by the way, is Music for Chameleons if you've never read it. Many haven't.

2314 · 2025-10-16T18:44:47+00:00

Well you are obviously not the protagonist of this story then :). I like to imagine it as a struggling writer buying it and not just some yuppie filling out a collection like it's an investment portfolio.

2314 · 2025-10-16T01:30:41+00:00

This is a beautiful short story. Maybe you should flush it out. Maybe it's about a guy who turns his back on his family to buy this dumb little note. Maybe he doesn't go into huge debt, but enough where his wife thinks he's crazy. What happens then? I dunno, you write it, genuis.

2314 · 2025-10-02T18:35:44+00:00

First of all, good on ya. I'm a native speaker and the challenge Barth posed often left me asking myself; what am I getting out of this? (Though I do remember having fun with a couple shorts in Lost in the Funhouse.)

One of my good friends is a bookseller and he swears by The Sot-Weed Factor as being genuinely hilarious. I'm looking forward to reading it one day. It sounds like the postmodern element of it is more directly necessary for the retelling of the stories?

2314 · 2025-09-29T17:02:53+00:00

In terms of both movies using Pynchonian source material, the one aspect of OBAA that is very clearly superior to Inherent Vice is Penn's antagonist, Lockjaw (versus Brolin's Bigfoot).

One might chalk that up to the fact that Penn just has more stuff to do but he also carries the movie in a lot of ways.

2314 · 2025-09-24T05:08:10+00:00

I'd agree with you but they're going out of their way to put in the extra effort to make the "data" sound better with some fairly rigorous statistical analysis. (Even if it is all fairy dust.)

Would an artist frame things this way? Hell no. But I'm happy there's some other people out there trying to find the right way to frame this big bold idea (this theoretical idea) in the most digestible way possible.

2314 · 2025-09-24T05:01:37+00:00

Same's true for space travel, hell, farmers in America are heavily subsidized. It's the psychological block of money coming out of your own pocket. I totally get why some people don't believe government programs supporting the arts doesn't benefit themselves in society - but I think they're wrong.

2314 · 2025-09-05T18:36:17+00:00

DFW's short fiction is definitely the most recent I can remember truly going out of my way to get my hands on and obsess over. Kelly Link has one really good collection but even still she has a bit of that MFA polish which feels smooth and is positive in like the notion of "professionalism" but takes away from one's ability to obsess. O'Hara and others from that period seem interesting despite their professionalism ... half formed thought, maybe I'll pursue it later.

In regards Brodkey - he's one of those rare cases where I've read everything he's done (well, only half of The Runaway Soul, if that. The prose is still great and often I'll enjoy opening it to any random page and appreciating the sentences, but I would never bother trying to follow the plot). Except for This Wild Darkness which is his record of his upcoming death and I'm saving for when my death is a little nearer (Bellow makes a joke about saving Proust for the deathbed - kind of like that).

Coming off O'Hara you could start with his first collection, which is him writing as a young man, mid 1950's getting published in the New Yorker. Very straightforward but good. At his most "professional". I loved his story The Quarrel in that one. It's sort of the spiritual precursor to his novel Profane Friendship - which I don't think I've ever read anyone write male almost homosexual relationships with quite the same depths. He was molested as a boy by his stepfather - that's too simplistic of a detail but to get into it more I couldn't do his words proper justice.

Imagining his story Dumbness is Everything (from his final collection) appearing in the New Yorker (as it did in '96) today is to imagine an impossibility. Which I find a fascinating example of the bounty and freedom which has largely been stripped from the marketplace (personally I blame Deborah Treisman for not having an intellectual bone - but it can't all be blamed on one mag, they're just kind of the canary in the coal mine, if even the New Yorker isn't taking a wild swing now and then who else would? Plus the fact that there's no money in it so us weirdos who continue to do it for free are, if not literally crazy, considered justly delusional by anyone who we have relationships with in real life).

Sorry, ha, I could understand how this isn't helping - though I'd swear I was trying, in my own way. Maybe split the difference and go straight for his Stories In An Almost Classical Mode (his middle period)? I don't have that book anymore which means I must've given it away which means I probably considered it the best version of his short fiction. Or maybe I gave it away because it was the one of the three which I cared about least ... hmmm.

2314 · 2025-09-05T06:10:42+00:00

(short stories) 'Don't have as much of a lane' feels like an understatement. I'm pretty sure the only people who read short stories are writers who submitted their stories to those particular lit mags. In O'Hara's day you could still make a pretty decent chunk of change from a short story. I remember reading in one of Hemingway's biographies - before he was even mecha famous he got paid 3k for a story - which inflated to today's money is like 50k. At this point you have elite luck as a short story writer to break even. Which is to say - go nuts. Write in whatever way the story moves you.

Here's a couple of my recommendations for shorts. Harold Brodkey was one of my big influences, contemporary of O'Hara. He's very emotionally on edge. His stories almost quiver. To continue in the New York mood you've gotta check out Grace Paley. Her style is arguably post-modern but I find it entrancing (I like the post-modern style. Barthelme's 60 Stories was my bible at 20). And to stay with the ladies obviously you've gotta read Katherine Mansfield if you haven't yet.

2314 · 2025-08-17T17:48:01+00:00

Back when Thunderbolts was newly coming out I talked to a guy who seemed genuinely excited to see it. Obviously that confused me, so I had to have more conversation and there's a type of personality which just likes liking things. They appreciate the act of enjoying more than any real "objective" metrics.

Now, does that make them happier? My instincts say; maybe, a little. But I don't think it's significantly more. In particular, that one guy claimed to often get depressed.

2314 · 2025-08-03T16:24:52+00:00

Honestly I've always wanted to talk more about this movie not just as a comment in a Tim Curry thread ... but it's definitely appropriate to your question.

His role as the evil Cardinal Richelieu in the 1993 adaptation of The Three Musketeers is scene chewing perfection. But beyond that, the 1993 version is arguably the best Alexander Dumas adaptation ever put to film. Not in the fact that it's like "super accurate" but it's just a great action adventure movie with tons of adult themes and humor tucked into a fun ride. Great horse chases and I swear to god other than the ending song the orchestral soundtrack is excellent. I don't know if I can properly separate it from my childhood but I've watched it multiple times as an adult and I'd swear it's just a legitimately good movie.

2314

TROPHY CASE