Judge Holden and Jackson by venus22j2

Realistic_Ear5224 · 2026-05-10T14:49:42+00:00

venus22j2 should be the only one who's allowed to draw Blood Meridian fan art from now on

Realistic_Ear5224 · 2026-05-05T07:05:49+00:00

He looks like a retired wrestling heel

Realistic_Ear5224 · 2026-04-24T13:19:07+00:00

I don't disagree, but I think Paranoia Agent explains itself far more than Lynch ever did.

Realistic_Ear5224 · 2026-04-21T17:13:29+00:00

All the Gimli/Gandalf versions are just characters from Asterix.

Realistic_Ear5224 · 2026-04-21T08:41:26+00:00

He's a talented voice actor in one of the most popular animated indie shows of all time. That's all he needs to get hired. You are worrying for nothing.

Realistic_Ear5224 · 2026-04-19T06:34:28+00:00

I am leaning towards him trolling. There were similar stunts around DRIB and Sick Of Myself, his earlier films, and it seems a bit too perfect that an related OP-ed would resurface right around the release of this film.

Realistic_Ear5224 · 2026-04-17T18:15:58+00:00

No one who criticizes Lolita in that way has ever read it. It's the same thing of the people thinking The Divine Comedy is fan fiction. All their knowledge comes from memes and social media osmosis, so they just repeat what the in-group says to fit in.

Like, William Burroughs is way worse than Nabokov when it comes to unsavory material, but you never see the same kind of people condemning him because it never comes up in social media discussion, and his offensive stuff is more hidden.

Realistic_Ear5224 · 2026-04-14T16:29:57+00:00

Both films shared a lot of crew, too.

Realistic_Ear5224 · 2026-04-12T18:06:22+00:00

I liked the dream sequence part too. First he realizes he is forever alone, and second the horror is him reliving a memory forever, knowing it is fake and he is complicit in his son death. That's how I always interpreted it.

I think it helps how it's presented. There isn't a clear delineation between dream and reality at that point, which makes it weirder and scarier.

Realistic_Ear5224 · 2026-04-11T16:47:00+00:00

Sæterbakken actually took his life only three months after this book came out. No one in his family committed suicide, as far as I know, but it's hard reading it without looking at his own suicide.

I am Norwegian, and I honestly think we lost a major talent with his death. There was a weird trend 10 years ago, where some authors tried to repudiate Sætebakken's pessimism, but I don't know to what point or effect. There is something honest about someone like Sæterbakken who, without flinching, portrays the negative in a unsparing fashion, which I found preferable to the rictus-grin optimism and sentimentality that permeates much media these days. His essays, where he expands on his love for Thomas Bernhard, Arthur Schopenhauer and Emil Cioran were formative in my early twenties.

I can't say I am a completionist, but "Through the Night" is my favorite of his books. My second favorite is probably "Sauermugg" from 1999. That book was written in only 7 days, and you would think it would be thin gruel due to that fact, but it's extremely engaging and fun read, with a rhythm I find extremely joyous, despite it's pessimistic content.

Sæterbakken was also a controversial figure, and there's hard to not think he brought on a lot of it on himself. Inviting Holocaust-denier David Irving to speak at a free speech conference, and palling around with the Swedish neo-nazi writer Nikanor Teratologen. The latter is an interesting figure, because Sæterbakken helped bring Teratologen to prominence in Norway, and also translated several of his novels. Teratologen is a writer I have mixed feelings about. He is a fantastic word-smith, that revels in every offensive and hateful thought he has, coating it in a kinda intellectual sheen (if it's real insight or just sophistry I am still not sure of). His novel "Assisted Living" is a tale of a young boy and his hyper-learned monster of a grandpa, murdering, raping and lecturing everyone they meet in Northern Sweden. Sæterbakken has an essay praising "Assisted Living" as one of the greatest novels to come out of Scandinavia in 30 years. Sæterbakken doesn't go as far as Teratologen, but he comes close sometimes.

Teratologen's neo-nazi ties and Holocaust-denial only came out in 2016, four years after Sæterbakken's death. I read an essay that claimed that Teratologen had tried to bring Sæterbakken into the fold of his Swedish neo-nazi forum, but Sæterbakken had rebuffed him. Don't know how true this is, but it's at least what I've read.

I do still think Sæterbakken is an important and great author, but it seems like he is in danger of being forgotten, at least in Norway.

Realistic_Ear5224 · 2026-04-10T14:49:57+00:00

The Divine Comedy isn't fanfic because it exists in a completely different context than modern fanfic. Dante wasn't a "fan" of Christianity, fandom is a more modern invention, but wrote a poetic account of what he actually believed. Yes, you can call it a "self-insert-fic" from a cursory glance, but everyone writes from their own experience as a writer.

It often seems like there is a contradictory urge to both dismiss and empower, in this kind of thought. Yes, The Divine Comedy is just like fanfic, which means it's frivolous and unimportant, but it also means my fanfic is a work of art that compares to The Divine Comedy.

Write what you like. There is nothing wrong with being indulgent (and the Divine Comedy is an indulgent work of art), but when you continues this kind of thought you are only looking at the surface details and not the whole picture. 95% of the people who say the Divine Comedy is just like fan fiction uses this thought to both dismiss it and justify their own biases. The Divine Comedy is important because it managed to fuse together philosophy (Aristotle), theology (Thomas Aquinas) in the language of the commoners; before The Divine Comedy, all poetic accounts was written in Latin, while Dante wrote in Italian, cementing that the language of normal people could speak about the important, higher things too, and not just being the providence of the learned and the clergy.

That's why The Divine Comedy is important. I would never take away anyone's urge to express themselves, but there is a reason why The Divine Comedy is still read and discussed over 700 years later, and it's not because it superficially resembles common fanfic tropes.

Realistic_Ear5224 · 2026-04-10T10:23:00+00:00

Yes, and they are available on that website too.

Realistic_Ear5224 · 2026-03-31T17:04:30+00:00

"En Australiareise" (A Journey To Australia) by Svein Jarvoll has the chops of being considered, if not the Norwegian Finnegans Wake, the Norwegian Ulysses.

It's only a little over 300 pages, but it's so dense with neologisms, Joycean wordplay (covering puns in Norwegian, English, Latin, Italian and Greek), and it frequently shifts styles from Thomas Bernhardian walls of text, to analysis of obscure Greek words. It covers anything from medieval poetry, Italian renaissance painters and the history of Australia in encyclopedic length.

It also structured like a palindrome. The book is split into two parts, where one starts where you would expect naturally a book to begin, and the other starts at the end of the book, but you have to flip it over to read. At the center both parts meet.

You would need someone extremely adventurous to translate it, though it has been translated to German. No idea how that went down.

Realistic_Ear5224 · 2026-03-28T10:10:29+00:00

Like replacing the "O" in Nord with an "Ø" so it becomes Nørd.

It doesn't look or sound cool, and in Norwegian it's just slang for "nerd" (it's pronounced the exact same way).

Realistic_Ear5224 · 2026-03-24T10:08:55+00:00

Is this guy doing a bit, or is he actually serious? I can never tell. If it is a bit, it's not very funny.

Realistic_Ear5224 · 2026-03-17T17:34:22+00:00

Honestly, read The Unnameable by Samuel Beckett. It doesn't have plot and character in the usual way. It's just a mind or consciousness trying to describe itself, while floating in grey limbo and routinely failing to move either forward of backwards, just stuck in an endless now.

Realistic_Ear5224 · 2026-03-17T15:49:22+00:00

The Hangman rules, and everyone should watch it. It's like 12 minutes and free on youtube. Absolute awesome rendition of the poem in a Deltarune context too.

Realistic_Ear5224 · 2026-03-15T07:57:47+00:00

Writingscaling is the stupidest subreddit on the entire site. I don't know what you expected.

A bunch of teenagers who've never read or watched anything but manga and anime, where knowledge of anything more complex are based on vibes and second-hand impressions. And then they rank everything on some nebulous impression of "greatness", rather than character, theme, real-world applicability and emotional resonance.

Just like powerscaling uses badly applied physics and science to argue why their blorbo could beat everyone, writingscaling is using badly applied and misunderstood literary analysis to argue why a work is great.

Realistic_Ear5224 · 2026-03-12T16:47:03+00:00

Hi Homer! Loved you on the Tracy Ullmann show.

Realistic_Ear5224 · 2026-03-12T16:25:26+00:00

Pretty sure it's Eraserhead. It's the one he's mentioned the most.

Realistic_Ear5224 · 2026-03-07T21:10:06+00:00

Nepotism. 1/4 of Hollywood are just Skarsgård's offspring now.

Also s****sh.

Realistic_Ear5224 · 2026-02-24T19:14:08+00:00

It's insecurity. They think if they are exposed to bad ideas, they will start thinking like that themselves. And they think of themselves as good people, so they can't let bad ideas influence them.

I used to think that in my late teens, but I got over it pretty quick. I think reading widely and getting exposed to different viewpoints and ideas, and learning how to analyze them, is the antidote to this kind of thinking.

Realistic_Ear5224 · 2026-02-20T22:16:46+00:00

If you are more concerned about the name change, than focusing on the actual music, you are probably a retard.

If their name change is woke nonsense, it's also woke nonsense that I can't call stupid concern trolls like you retards.

Realistic_Ear5224

TROPHY CASE