TINSOLDAT

You can learn more of my interests by reading ahead. Make sure to complain about how much you disagree once you're done. Really, I love it. And if you agree, congratulations on having taste.

Video Games

With some exceptions (Animal Crossing, obviously), I have narrowed my focus to horror. The genre has enough range to keep things interesting and enough bad entries to keep me occupied.

Limiting yourself to a single sub-genre is the fastest way to become a predictable writer, and I have no interest in reaching that particular destination.

Writing

I have been writing since I could hold a pen and have finished more stories than most people start. Not all of them deserved to be finished, but the standard has gone up considerably and it will keep going up until I am writing and directing my own film.

You will see my name headlining eventually, unless any of our other goals take place before then.

Film

Most of your opinions on film are probably shit and I say that with genuine warmth.

There is more to cinema than whatever Letterboxd has decided to agree on this week, and I intend to be obnoxious about it until the situation improves.

The Passion — Jeanette Winterson
 A soldier and a boatman's daughter who keeps her heart in a jar. The Venice sections operate on dream logic and the writing is wise enough never to apologize for it. One of the few books that understands obsession well enough to replicate its texture.

Venus in Furs — Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
 The term masochism comes from this man directly, which should tell you something about the autobiographical urgency behind it. Severin constructs the fantasy with great care and then resents the woman for fulfilling it, which is the most honest failure in the book. I have plenty of thoughts on the ending that I suspect even Sacher-Masoch would agree with.

The Great God Pan — Arthur Machen
 A woman undergoes surgery to see through the fabric of reality. You can see the way Machen treats the supernatural as something obscene rather than frightening. Lovecraft considered it one of the greatest horror stories ever written, which is both accurate and the least interesting thing about it.

The Hearing Trumpet — Leonora Carrington
 A 92 year old woman gets sent to a rather questionable institution and reality dissolves from there on. Carrington painted before she wrote and it shows in every sentence. One of the few genuinely surreal novels that earns the word outside of just atmosphere.

The Unconsoled — Ishiguro
 A pianist arrives somewhere in Europe to perform a concert and spends the entire novel failing to get anywhere or accomplish anything. Ishiguro never holds you steady, which some people find insulting. You can guess how I feel about that.

Confessions of a Mask — Yukio Mishima
 A man builds a public self entirely disconnected from his interior one and documents the construction. Mishima's relationship with desire and destruction is unlike anything else in literature. Read it before you read anything about Mishima.

Twelve Towers — Li Yu
 Twelve stories about wanting things that cannot be properly held. Quieter than the rest of Li Yu's work and more interested in the interior of an obsession than its conclusion. I am not entirely sure why I am including this one. Read it anyway.

There are plenty of things in this world I cannot stand, and an even longer list I have learned to tolerate. The following do not make that second list. If you recognize yourself here, that is your problem to sit with.

Weak-minds

If you cannot hold a disagreement without it becoming a personal crisis, the internet was not made for you, or rather you were not made for it. The same goes for anyone who engages with something deliberately challenging and then needs everyone to know how it affected them, as if the content ambushed them personally and the runtime held them hostage.

Nobody forced you to watch a man get his spine removed. Nobody forced you to engage with themes you personally find uncomfortable. The whining that follows only further rots the Internet.

Most "fandoms"

The specific talent some people have for taking a well-constructed character and sanding them down to whatever is easiest to project onto is genuinely impressive in the worst way. The louder the analysis gets the worse it becomes, and there is something almost admirable about how consistently even the most blatant intentions get misconstrued.

At a certain point, they don't deserve the story.

Open mouth chewers

I fucking hate everyone who chews with their mouth open, it is outright sickening. Close your damn mouth and mind your goddamn manners, for fuck's sake. I hate seeing any spit. I hate spit. Disgusting.

Bringing yourself to a work is not the problem. It is not only unavoidable, but often it may even be the whole point. Something made with enough honesty will find the people it was made for, and leave a mark that feels personal because it is. That is the work doing its job.

The issue is what happens after. The slow drift from this speaks to me, toward this is about me, and further still, toward this should have been made for me. At some point, the audience stops receiving and new lines get drawn. The original blueprint is still cited but bears little resemblance to what is being built on top of it.

Interpretation has rules. Meaning was intended, choices were deliberate, and it is within those choices that alternate readings can be debated in good faith. But a work points somewhere, and the direction is not simply wherever you happen to be standing. To insist otherwise is a conversation held entirely with yourself using someone else's work as ventriloquism. Novice performers rarely have the sense to keep their voice down, and some of them have discovered the internet.

When the gap between what it is and what you need grows wide enough, something gets sacrificed. The inconvenient details go first, then the resistant characters, then the ending that had the audacity not to reward them personally. What remains is a comfortable fiction about a fiction, which is a remarkable amount of effort to have never really engaged with anything.

There is a courtesy owed to intention. The willingness to sit with what is actually there, even when it does not confirm you, even when it asks something you did not come prepared to give. The works worth your time are rarely the ones you can easily predict.