I handpicked these five, which I think most resonated with me this year. Obviously, I trend towards shithosting, so goofy ones end up filling up all five nominations for me. I'd love to hear other nominations and they don't have to necessarily be funny to be your favorite.
My one request is: only suggest chosts from other people, not yourself.
friction by @vaudevilleghost
Because when you are attempting to cater to an audience's tastes, what you are doing is removing friction. You are making something that may very well be entertaining, but in the end becomes diminished. It says nothing, it accomplishes nothing, and it is ultimately unmemorable. Art as product to be consumed.
Nothing left to dream about by @NoelBWrites
I love writing, enough that I kept doing it and I started to get involved with other writers and with the publishing industry.
And since then, my dreams have gotten smaller and smaller every year.
Childhood, cartoons, and capitalism by @hecker
And thus, on the flip side, the reaction of people (usually male) who think such changes “ruined my childhood.” After all, these media “properties” are not in their eyes like the Mona Lisa, Seven Samurai, and other traditional works of art. They are instead products that as consumers they have paid for many times over during childhood and beyond, often to the tune of hundreds or even thousands of dollars. No wonder they react like regulars at a restaurant when the chef changes the recipes for their favorite dishes, complaining loudly to the manager and then hastening to Yelp to write negative reviews.
Comfort is a Weapon by @MOKKA
If you combine the general lack of ideological guidance, the emphasis on keeping discomfort away from the players and their overreliance on using predominantly white, liberal suburban aesthetics as markers for “cozyness”, you can quickly see how this could get very bad, very quickly.
MicroBlogVember by @Unangbangkay
There really are some things you can't quite prepare for before they happen, I suppose, and for those, you just have to do your best to keep the balls in the air, or the tracks on straight.
here's my big post about being a human and, of course, how capitalism tries to tell you that you aren't a human by @chirasul
if you go mute and inexpressive after a trying day, that isn't you "not being human". that's a lie from the ingrained ableism of our society. by affirming to yourself "this is human activity because im a human and i'm doing this", you're recentering the definition of humanity away from the expectations of capitalism, and onto your lived experiences. not only that, but you are throwing a lifeline to any person who does not feel human.
i do not dream of labor by @vaudevilleghost
"So, what do you do for a living?"
The same as anyone else: I exchange precious hours of my life in exchange for tokens that can, in turn, be exchanged for necessities like food and shelter. We have all decided that this system makes sense, for some reason.
The Problem with BG3's Racism Is The People Around It TBH by @pleasantlytwstd
Y'all need the racism in the game because it allows you to demonstrate how good of a person you could be with no introspection of how it reports on how good of a person in reality you're choosing not to be.
Thread on Feedback by @Kayin, @SuperBiasedGary, @NoelBWrites, @Quacksilver
Giving someone a narrow thing to focus on removes one of the biggest barriers to give feedback. It also lets people know what kind of feedback is okay to give. If you say "tell me when you stopped reading", it signals it's okay to stop reading and it's okay to let you know. Telling someone "this is a first draft, ignore the prose and just focus on pacing" let's them know they shouldn't waste their time suggesting word changes.
Human Bill of Rights by @hthrflwrs, @ClaireWerewolf
step 1: it's allowed for you to ask for what you need
step 2: it's good for you to ask for what you need
step 3: it's allowed for you to ask for what you want
step 4: it's good for you to ask for what you want
how toxic masculinity flourishes by @ireneista
When you're convinced of your own worthlessness, it becomes easy for anyone to control you - an individual, or a group. All they have to do is make you feel like you matter to them, even though, in the world view they taught you, you wouldn't matter to anyone else.
A Multiverse Around The Corner (Where Your Dead Friends Live) by @SamKeeper
Leaving aside the quality of any individual example, the proliferation of the trope feels significant, and a little eerie in the face of, bluntly, increasing incidences of mass death. It feels like we are in a moment culturally when a bunch of people in Hollywood independently took a gander at the world and said to themselves, "what the people need to hear, as a message, is that wanting a version of reality where your loved ones aren't dead is fundamentally villainous". Maybe sympathetically villainous, they mused, but villainous nevertheless. Such a quest is bound to drive you to madness, criminality, homicidal machinations, intergalactic war, the triumph of fascism, and even acts of violence against property.
Art is a community not a commodity by @highimpactsex, @Mightfo, @hecker
...we don't need to de-commodify the entire economy to allow non-mass-appeal art to flourish (bread is still a commodity, as are iPhones), or even the economy of mass-appeal art. But we do need to provide people a way to survive and make a living, at least of sorts, when they're not making art.
when the sawmill forgets how to keep the saw blades sharp by @zip, @NireBryce, @ghoulnoise
I think I was in college, visiting, probably Thanksgiving or Christmas, when he told us that the sawmill asked him and some of the other old timers come by to teach the young men how to sharpen the enormous, toothy blades.
"Hoo, it's fixin' to be bad news when none of us is left."
Thread on DJMAX and Lies of P by @gee-man, @mcc, @erica
Well, Memory of Beach, (one of my favs from Portable) is a song by M2U, who is one of the producers that stopped working with Neowiz post-Pentavision dissolution and made tracks for Beatcraft CYCLON and Superbeat XONIC. The same is true for NieN and his track/record, "Someday" (although he'd contribute to RESPECT/V later) "Feel", the first record you find in Lies of P, is a DJ Mocha track and DJ Mocha never worked on Pentavision titles past Portable 2/Trilogy.
The usage of the track "Steel Haze (Rusted Pride)" in Armored Core 6 might make it Fromsoft's greatest musical accomplishment by @gee-man
It's important that Rusty is a believer in something because one of Armored Core 6's central beliefs is that true freedom is having the ability to leverage your power toward any goal. That to have power is to inherently have the responsibility to use it toward a greater good. "Nothing is graver than power without purpose," as Rusty puts it. Despite your amicable relationship, Rusty starts wondering about you. Surely, something must drive you.
yotsuben's logo design challenge by @yotsuben
hoo boy! that's a lot of logos!
