Wiredferret!
@wiredferret.bsky.social
5.5K followers 1.1K following 6.3K posts
Explaininator, Sticker Thoughtleader, Marketing nerd. Not straight, she/her. Parent of adults, catbox scooper, wife of @silmaria.bsky.social, Kermit-coded. Find me at heidiwaterhouse.com #quilting #sewing #knitting #therbligs
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cabell.bsky.social
The older I get the more I feel like Plato was possibly right about the inadvisability of writing
bleary.off-the-records.com
If anyone needs me I will be in the museum, lying down next to the bog bodies.
Did people really memorize phone numbers before cell phones, or is that just a movie thing?
2? Questions
I was watching some old shows from the 90s and noticed people would just dial numbers from memory - like they'd call their friends or family without looking anything up.
Made me wonder if that was actually normal back then? Did people genuinely have all their important numbers memorized, or did most folks keep a little address book or written list nearby?
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sarahejoyal.bsky.social
Seriously we're old enough to realize that life is always going to suck, can we at least just have the low stakes tales with happy endings
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msemilyedwards.bsky.social
i feel like i need to share this oldie but a goodie today
A tumblr post that reads "WHo would have believed that the perfect wikipedia photo caption could have been improved upon?" Two identical images are then side by side. The first caption is "Piper Kerr, a member of the Scottis National Antarctix Expedition, plays the bagpipes for an indifferent penguin, March 1904". The Caption for the image on the left reads, "Piper Kerr (right), a member of the Scottis National Antarctix Expedition, plays the bagpipes for an indifferent penguin, March 1904"
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scalzi.com
Also, this cultural "uncanny valley" gets really weird for science fiction, which is supposed to be about "the future" but was written for a then-contemporary audience (with a then-contemporary understanding of tech/science) so it has two full vectors of cultural shift, running at different speeds
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scalzi.com
ACTUALLY, I have a theory that most books enter a cultural "uncanny valley" 20-25 years after release, where the culture has shifted just enough they're not contemporary anymore, so new readers can't directly relate, and they stay in the valley for about 50 years until they're clearly historical
madoccassia.bsky.social
Is there, like, an interregnum during which a book should be gracefully retired, until such time as it becomes "a classic, an artifact of its times"?
wiredferret.bsky.social
We’ve got it all backwards. Youth lit should be all Thomas Hardy and On the Beach, because the youth can handle it - everything feels that dire to them. Grownups should get more cute little stories that end well.
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psiamnotdrunk.bsky.social
You cannot, nor should you attempt to translate the following authors into film: Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman* — their work is far too dependent on the inner narrative worlds of both the characters and authors.

*ALSO A LOT OF OTHER REASONS WITH THIS ONE HOO BOY
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teeaitchare.bsky.social
Flatland is feminist literature
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helenm40.bsky.social
To this day, I think some of the most brutal and chilling novels I've ever read were the kids' books by Christopher Pike (aka Kevin Christopher McFadden).
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manxinwales.bsky.social
Terry Pratchett will save the world!

Everything he wrote was spectacularly 'woke' and the generation of teens who devoured his novels like sweets are now coming of age as politicians and leaders.

Vimes' boots will become the call for the death of capitalism and dwarves can use any toilet they like
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darklyadapted.bsky.social
Some of the best writing is in genres ignored by people who think that because it's accessible, it's too lightweight for them.

An author who can hold a reader spellbound for 250 pages has got it right.
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joshdobbin.bsky.social
DRACULA is the first "found footage" horror work & should be counted (no pun intended) as such.
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ricevermicelli.bsky.social
The emdash is unjustly reviled because it is heavily associated with female writers. It is considered ungrammatical, but it is an accurate representation of domestic conversation, where it's more important to convey information on multiple subjects than to sort them neatly.
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syyyyyyyyy.bsky.social
Listening to an audiobook is "real" reading, and in many cases it's a better way to parse text. Both because some texts beg to be experienced aloud, and because in many cases audiobook readers can get more out of the text that way. (And I'm not even talking about accessibility!)
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hazelebaumgartner.bsky.social
If Steinbeck can tell one of the best stories of the 20th century in 107 pages, there's no reason a story about "scary clown eats children" should be 1,168 pages.

Signed, the author of a 252 page horror novel.
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clacksee.bsky.social
Last year, I re-read A Christmas Carol. I was struck by the idea that Scrooge was in love with Marley. His grief for his lost love is the whole reason he’s as rotten as he is.

I will not be taking questions.
a black and white photo of a man with the word humbug written in yellow
Alt: a black and white photo of a man with the word humbug written in yellow
media.tenor.com
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delrex.bsky.social
Hamlet's to be or not to be is NOT a sincere soliloquy, but a deliberate ploy to convince the King and Polonius that he might kill himself so they don't take action. "Death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns" is complete bullshit, he's doing revenge FOR A GHOST HE SAW
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garethmedwards.bsky.social
Charles Dickens wrote some of the best paragraphs ever written, and these occur randomly across thousands of pages of impenetrable boring guff.
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tomfodw.bsky.social
A. A. Milne is one of the great English poets.
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profchander.bsky.social
no way dude all my takes are grounded in carefully collected and analyzed empirical evidence, and i have the receipts to show that the elevation of white tory women writers in the nineteenth century was a deliberate plot to suppress a nascent radical feminism
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aktange.bsky.social
And the best adaptation of any Dickens that has ever been put onto the screen, or ever will be, is the Muppets Christmas Carol. But I think that is quite possibly the least unhinged opinion it is possible to have about Dickens. It's simply fact.
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raphlife.bsky.social
Damaged people make damaged companies is probably the best way to summarize the game industry right now.
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silmaria.bsky.social
30 years together!

See, good things can happen online! (We met on my old BBS, The Travelers Guild, which ran Citadel-86. I wooed her with my cat and Mustang.)
wiredferret.bsky.social
This is the day, 30 years ago, that @silmaria.bsky.social and I went on our first date.

We've accomplished so much together, but I think the really important thing is that we continue to choose each other, over and over, every day.