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Briar Ripley Page @flameswallower.bsky.social · 14m

maybe mine too! I gave up a while ago on writing “for” particular genres

Briar Ripley Page @flameswallower.bsky.social · 1h

I don’t even mean the most lurid cruelties &c.; I mean stuff like “an emotionally unstable or depressed person who doesn’t Get Better.” truths of life we are literally all familiar with! death, grief, bleeding, pain.

Briar Ripley Page @flameswallower.bsky.social · 1h

I would say for me, the compelling thing about “horror” is that it’s the one genre I can count on not to sanitize the cruelties and absurdities and grotesqueness of life. But once those things are allowed into a narrative, I’m all for that narrative *mostly* being about falling in love & hanging out

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Briar Ripley Page @flameswallower.bsky.social · 1h

I think this is the kind of book that will make someone who enjoys “horror” for the reason I do pretty happy, but will frustrate people who either are very concerned with genre delineations or enjoy “horror” because they like to be grossed out, scared, or made to contemplate a very bleak vision.

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Briar Ripley Page @flameswallower.bsky.social · 1h

for happy or bittersweet or ambiguous, shrugging endings; for some earned philosophizing or sentimentality; for the point of the grotesque or the cruel in a narrative not to be “freak the audience out” or “put forth a cynical, bleak view of existence.”

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Briar Ripley Page @flameswallower.bsky.social · 1h

I would say for me, the compelling thing about “horror” is that it’s the one genre I can count on not to sanitize the cruelties and absurdities and grotesqueness of life. But once those things are allowed into a narrative, I’m all for that narrative *mostly* being about falling in love & hanging out

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Briar Ripley Page @flameswallower.bsky.social · 1h

I think most “horror fans” and “SF fans” who pick up this book will be disappointed, which is too bad! It’s probably also too gross and melancholy for most “romance fans.” Fabulism? Introspective slice of life (with SF/horror elements for flavor)?

Em Reed (Debut novel MORE BUGS out now)!!! @dayofthemutants.bsky.social · 2h

I pitch it as SF because that's my strongest influence, but it also explores the terrain of body horror, eerie doppelgangers and suburban alienation & is just as likely to get shelved there. It's only listed as horror in the janky Goodreads tagging system I can't figure out lol emreed.net/more_bugs

MORE BUGS, a novel by Em Reed

emreed.net

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Reposted by Briar Ripley Page

June White 🫀 @cuntmoney.bsky.social · 2h

I do not think the average liberal actually gets that transphobia is kind of bigoted hatred rather than a difference of opinion, or that Harry Potter literally funds hate campaigns that target vulnerable people.

I also think they don’t *want* to get it.

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Briar Ripley Page @flameswallower.bsky.social · 2h

Humans and dogs clearly bonded in part because they have similar hunting strategies: teamwork, stamina, tracking and pursuit as opposed to ambush, sometimes psyching out the prey by letting it know it's being pursued by tenacious pack hunters

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Reposted by Briar Ripley Page

Pookleblinky @pookleblinky.bsky.social · Jul 14

Look at how basically every other non-human predator works, it takes down its prey out of nowhere in a frenzied blur of motion.

*Humans* are the ones who stretch this out into a literal marathon.

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Reposted by Briar Ripley Page

Pookleblinky @pookleblinky.bsky.social · Jul 14

Behind every slow stalky dude in horror, is a very long history of humans being *the* biggest threat to other humans.

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Briar Ripley Page @flameswallower.bsky.social · 2h

I generally try to do this in writing that isn't social media posts.

Reposted by Briar Ripley Page

natasha @natasharedmane.bsky.social · 4h

you have to kill the devil's advocate in your brain when you're writing, you have to smother the imaginary bad faith reader that lives in your head. Trying to please the voice that tells you the person reading your work is ignorant/malicious is a mind-killer. There are better ways to create cohesion

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Reposted by Briar Ripley Page

Preacher from the Black Lagoon @revpoppop.bsky.social · 8h

“Why are they upset about the frog?”

Because the frog has power. As silly as it sounds. The frog is not just a good idea. It’s our greatest weapon.

And I’m going to explain why…

🧵

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Briar Ripley Page @flameswallower.bsky.social · 2h

I think sometimes fiction is like one of those enrichment pumpkins they give to big cats at the zoo, and the satisfaction isn't so much the raw ground beef of story or insight or emotion, it's how you have to break open the pumpkin shell to GET at that raw ground beef

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Briar Ripley Page @flameswallower.bsky.social · 2h

most of the stuff in this thread also goes for written fiction, except maybe this-- I like it and appreciate it when fiction throws the challenge of confusion and frustration before me!

Briar Ripley Page @flameswallower.bsky.social · 3h

I think the most intelligent writers give readers the sense of both doing real investigative or logical work to *understand* something, and succeeding in their progress along that path without a discouraging amount of confusion or frustration. A sense of discovery, not of confirmation!

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Briar Ripley Page @flameswallower.bsky.social · 2h

there are great thinkers who cannot do this! & imo it's important to note that this is the result of those otherwise great minds lacking perspective-taking and communication skills, not an inherent consequence of high intelligence

Briar Ripley Page @flameswallower.bsky.social · 3h

years ago I came to the conclusion that one of the marks of a great writer & great thinker is whether they can communicate complicated ideas or lead readers on sophisticated trains of thought via modest paragraphs of concise, relatively simple sentences.

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Briar Ripley Page @flameswallower.bsky.social · 2h

And also, like I said, they know how to keep it brief and they know *when* to keep it brief!

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Briar Ripley Page @flameswallower.bsky.social · 2h

I think the most intelligent writers give readers the sense of both doing real investigative or logical work to *understand* something, and succeeding in their progress along that path without a discouraging amount of confusion or frustration. A sense of discovery, not of confirmation!

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Briar Ripley Page @flameswallower.bsky.social · 3h

(This is, for instance, how I feel about much of Scott Alexander's literary output; again, I think one tell as to the writing not being as intelligent or deep as S wants you to think it is is that he simply cannot help going on for 8-15x long as he really needs to.)

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Briar Ripley Page @flameswallower.bsky.social · 3h

I think a person should be suspicious any time they are reading something and it makes them feel "smart" in an ego-flattering way; sometimes this feeling is true, and sometimes it's the result of fatuous, sophomoric writing that serves the purpose of flattering Dunning-Kruger victims.

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Briar Ripley Page @flameswallower.bsky.social · 3h

I've heard it said as a truism that reading the writing of an intelligent person who communicates clearly, one doesn't feel they are "reading an intelligent thinker" but rather that *they* are an intelligent thinker. I believe I half-agree with this:

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Briar Ripley Page @flameswallower.bsky.social · 3h

years ago I came to the conclusion that one of the marks of a great writer & great thinker is whether they can communicate complicated ideas or lead readers on sophisticated trains of thought via modest paragraphs of concise, relatively simple sentences.

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Reposted by Briar Ripley Page

Caitlin G. DeAngelis @caitlindeangelis.bsky.social · 17h

ICE kidnapped a 7th-grader with a pending asylum claim and spirited him out of state without notifying his parents, seemingly with the cooperation of the local police in Everett, MA.

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/12/m...

Everett 13-year-old arrested by ICE and sent to Virginia detention facility
By Marcela Rodrigues Globe Staff,Updated October 12, 2025, 44 minutes ago

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A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Everett after an interaction with members of the Everett Police Department and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia, according to his mother and immigration lawyer Andrew Lattarulo.

The boy’s mother, Josiele Berto, was called to pick her son up from the Everett Police Department on Thursday, the day he was arrested. After waiting for about an hour and a half, she was told her son was taken by ICE, Berto told the Globe in a phone interview.

“My world collapsed,” Berto said in Portuguese.

From the police department, the boy was taken to ICE’s holding facility in Burlington on Thursday evening, where he spent a night before being transferred by car to the Northwestern Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Winchester, Va., on Friday morning, his mother said. The juvenile facility is more than 500 miles away from Everett.

The boy is a 7th-grader at Albert N. Parlin School in Everett, his mother said. The teen and his family, who are Brazilian nationals, have a pending asylum case and are authorized to work legally in the United States, Lattarulo said.

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Briar Ripley Page @flameswallower.bsky.social · 4h

Considering that I was spanked until I was 9 or so, and was not allowed to watch an R rated movie until I was 14– and then it had to be with my mom— I don’t think “overly permissive” is the right way to describe my parents. I think they just didn’t want to treat their children cruelly!

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Briar Ripley Page @flameswallower.bsky.social · 4h

I don’t have very traumatic memories of childhood therapy, but I think that’s mostly because my parents just wouldn’t enforce anything where they were like “this seems more akin to a spirit-breaking exercise than normal discipline.”

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