Update #120 The art of Bombadillian rambling

Hellooohooo! Oh toodledeedoo, how may I help you?

By never saying toodledeedoo again? You know I'll just come up with something more infuriating, right? I went to the Bombadil School of Talkilidoo, you know. (I know, I know, this is not Bombadillian at all, I'm just cracking a joke, okay? GET OFF MY CASE YOU TOLKIENATICS!)

So, as I mentioned last week, I'm going on vacation tomorrow and I'll be gone for a week.

Also dropped the creative writing course I was taking. I talked a while ago about how last semester had me stressed out, but this semester was only going to be at half pace, so it should be fine. Well, it seems to me that they're more or less expecting us to write at about the same pace despite it being worth half the course credits. I'd started contemplating using the vacation as a way to catch up by bringing a laptop to write on. Uh, yeah, that's a good sign that it's high time to cut down on daily obligations.

I would've liked to keep going, it's been a very enjoyable experience outside of the stress. At the same time, it's reaffirmed my belief that you can learn anything and everything they teach in universities by yourself. Whether that's online or through reading books.

A university course is curated to contain the good stuff, or at least, what the people holding the course consider to be the good stuff. When you learn by yourself you have to be mindful that a lot of stuff, especially online, is absolute horseshit. Lies and misinformation abound. In that context, to get your information in an already distilled form is great. But if one isn't going for a degree, something to prove their learning in a given field, then I maintain that learning by oneself works just fine.

Though at some point you probably should get some outside critique. Wish I had done that with my episode 1 renders before releasing. Ah well, you live and you learn.

Uh, I just saw that shadow on Tanathil's back... Oh, well. It's fiiiiiine (actually dying on the inside)

Watched a video or two that talked about some popular modern poets. I know very little of poetry, but I'm slowly learning a little. Apparently, there's a trend of using ampersands, & strikethroughs, and such. It's a bit odd, since in my mind, good poetry flows nicely when read out loud, and these things don't alter how you read something out loud what so ever.

Now, I've also heard it argued that poetry is supposed to make you feel something, which is about as vague as a criteria as you can have for anything. Is ragebait poetry? It sure is designed to make you feel something, yet I think I speak for most people when I say that ragebait is generally not an accepted art form.

Most porn is made to make you feel something as well, I suppose. Assuming we count lust. Again, not really accepted as an art form. Dancing is considered an art form, stripping is not, though one might argue burlesque shows sometimes straddle an odd middle ground there.

I think I was supposed to circle back to the poetry thing, but I kind of lost the plot of what I was talking about. Do I have a point with all this? Uh... Let me see...

Distraction image!

That statuette kinda looks like it's an award of some kind. "And the Bummer goes to..." Wait, have I made that joke before?

Man, last chapter of One Piece went hard. Cold take here: if Oda nails the ending of One Piece, that'll be a monument of storytelling for a good century or two. It might be one of those stories that people in the year 2387 reference every now and then, though most of them haven't actually read the original.

It's funny, by just about every metric we use here in the west, One Piece is fantasy. High fantasy even. It takes place in a secondary world, it's got a magic system (devil fruits), there are races other than humans. Yet, because it doesn't really follow western fantasy tropes, it's not usually referred to as such, at least not within earshot of me.

I suppose genres are a bit similar to what we consider arts and not, it's all rather arbitrary. People will argue in circles about where something fits for days. So much effort spent on defining things, and no matter how much effort is spent, there's rarely a full-on consensus on where exactly a hard line should be drawn.

In the end, the person that sets out to create something within a specific genre or art form is constraining themselves to a set of tropes/norms/rules. I can see the value in assigning a label to things, it helps people find what they're looking for, but I think they should be mostly ignored during the creative process. They narrow the scope within which you can work, makes you feel as if you have to have certain things in there.

Constraints can be good, don't get me wrong, they can force you into places where you make something very interesting due to the limitations themselves. There are things like marketability and consumer expectations to keep in mind as well, of course. But overall, I find it all annoying and boring and I don't like it. Though, that goes for my feelings of the world in general.

And so here I come to the surprising conclusion that I'm actually sort of okay with people using ampersands & strikethroughs in poetry. Mind you, I don't want to read it myself, but if others want to consider that bona fide poetry, that's alright with me. We can call it & style poetry. How does one pronounce that? Very carefully.

With that said, AI-slop should be crucified, burnt at a stake, and subsequently buried in nuclear waste. Thank you, thank you, that's quite enough, thank you. You may all stop applauding now. Please?

Well, with that standing ovation out of the way, I think we can call it quits here. Quit while you're a head, isn't that right? And I'm the headiest head that was ever headed anywhere!

Thank you very merry-dol! muchly derry-dol! for your support my hearties, and wish you much joy in the coming weeky-dol! and many playful sorties!