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tfg.bsky.social
TF Grognon
@tfg.bsky.social
310 followers 280 following 1.4K posts
writer (fiction & ttrpgs), enthuser | formerly a fist that was tiny | Toronto
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tfg.bsky.social
I need everyone to appreciate this depiction of a Mayan _way_ in the form of an incredibly stylin' jaguar

[source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayob ]
A polychrome cylinder vase originally from the Mayan culture. This side of the vessel depicts a supernatural being that looks like a jaguar wearing a red scarf. The jaguar is WERKING that scarf
November 30, 2025 at 1:58 AM
tfg.bsky.social
skill issue
Bluesky post reads: "Moxie Dougherty @moxiemonarch.bsky.so... Comrade hits the ear like a title, or a position within an army, rather than a term of endearment imo"
November 28, 2025 at 6:50 PM
tfg.bsky.social
does anyone know if this claim has merit? And if so, where I could learn more? (Cursory wiki research is not turning anything up, but I don't know what keywords to use.)
The first sentence of this is highlighted for emphasis: "The Celts in Gaul (now France) would just dig holes, make art, and throw that art into the hole. It sounds silly, at first, but the more I think about it, the more I'm drawn to the idea. I watch my friends knit scarves just to unravel them. I play piano to an empty room, writing songs I'll never play again. I grew far too many tomatoes this year, taking more joy in growing them than preserving them, and at a certain point I just let them rot on the vine."
November 28, 2025 at 5:38 PM
tfg.bsky.social
This is not a place of honour.
Reddit post in Fantasy: "What is "Prose"? ••• I'm so sorry, I just don't get it. I never enjoyed reading as a child. My wife got me into reading a couple years ago with Fourth Wing and I found that I love fantasy books! During my two years reading, I've found plenty of series that I absolutely adore, only to come to reddit to find that many of them are universally hated for having "bad prose". I've googled prose, I've looked for examples of good vs bad prose, and I simply am drawing a blank when it comes to comparing who has good prose."
November 25, 2025 at 1:31 AM
tfg.bsky.social
new nightmare
Ad on Reddit. It reads: "If Ghibli made an MM dungeon-crawl romantasy-this would be it."
November 24, 2025 at 2:30 PM
tfg.bsky.social
for #WoShoStoReMo
"Wapnintu’tijig They Sang Until Dawn", Tiffany Morris: nature undergoing profound change and the swamp mermaid experiencing it all, both the loss and the beauty. I loved the careful, skittish POV here & vivid details of disturbing change.

podcastle.org/2023/01/24/p...
. None of the animals seemed to recognize her, either, except the plants, which now grew in different directions and tangled together through the stems, but bloomed the same, opening to the sun when it stretched out over the water and reached them. The plants did not yet have a story of the world's transformation. As always, with the plants, it was a matter of having patience and respect.
November 23, 2025 at 5:16 PM
tfg.bsky.social
for #WoShoStoReMo
"The Gannets", Anna Kavan (1945): her stories frequently seem to concern the absence of meaning (either it has disappeared or, as here, never actually mattered). This very brief story is a jolt of vivid irrationality.
How did all this atrocious cruelty ever get into the world, that's what I often wonder. No one created it, no one invoked it: and no saint, no genius, no dictator, no millionaire, no, not God's son himself, is able to drive it out.
November 22, 2025 at 10:30 PM
tfg.bsky.social
going to be pondering this one for a long time
Reddit post. What flavor are onions? Question For whatever reason onions are a huge blank spot in my palate. Garlic is garlic. Ginger is ginger. Carrots are carrots. But onion was just the slimy, slug-like vegetable when I was young, and I didn't miss its flavor when it wasn't there. I have no idea what onions taste like, and I cook with them all the time. I figure I might as well because they're healthy, and people always love my food, but... I just don't know what they taste like, so l err on not putting in enough, and I make dishes where garlic can stand out to make up the difference. Seriously, what do onions taste like?
November 21, 2025 at 2:19 PM
tfg.bsky.social
The "structure turns plot into an unconscious patient brought in with a bullet wound"
But more than for overuse, the penultimate flashback episode should get thrown into TV-writing jail because it's a condensed expression of a particularly infuriating hang-up in so much television from the past few years, one in which a character is not just a character but a question with a straightforward answer that requires solving. Why is this woman so mean? She is grieving her child. What caused this man to snap and kill his wife? Daddy issues. Plots, similarly, are treated not like longer series of events, but crises developing because something terrible happened in the past: death, abuse, abandonment, bullying. The plot itself is the aftermath — it's all a revenge plot to get back at his wife's killer - but the energy of the show all goes toward locating the original source of the damage. That structure turns plot into an unconscious patient brought in with a bullet wound.
November 19, 2025 at 5:46 PM
tfg.bsky.social
Post a book you love from the 80s. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.
#BookSky #bookchallenge #readingchallenge #readingcommunity #booktok #bookish #books
Cover of _Monkeys_, Susan Minot. Below the title and author, an illustration of five kids in Halloween costumes. The children are in black and white but the background, a yard giving out to water, is in colour.
November 19, 2025 at 10:59 AM
tfg.bsky.social
truly, repulsively remarkable how, amid the coverage of despicable Nuzzi, there are plenty of men eager to share their thoughts on what's really important: their sexual access to, & opinions about, women's bodies
Gary Gogurt ® 35m I met her in DC when she was around 22/23; she had a face like a snowshovel and was wearing pearls and a white dress shirt with the collar flipped up like a parody of a wealthy housewife. I got the impression that she dated older men because men her age found her alien if not outright repugnant. If Hilary had won in 2016, she be married to a Jetski salesman and live in Hagerstown, MD. • LIKE (1) • REPLY (1)| 山 SHARE @ziggy162845 ® 29m That comment is hard to top! Let me try. She'll lose her fuckability soon enough, and thus her career. • LIKE (1) • REPLY (1)| Hot Vermin Summer @sciencehippies.bsky.so.. when will this waking nightmare end I already have to think about Corey and Noem fucking, now this? How do so many rizz-less men get so much pussy?! November 18, 2025 at 12:38 AM 11 likes
November 18, 2025 at 7:40 PM
tfg.bsky.social
For #WoShoStoReMo, "Night and the Loves of Joe Dicostanzo", Samuel R. Delany: frantically strange, the jerk that wakes you before your dreamself, falling, hits the pavement. A story that doesn't explain itself, only whirls & scurries through a psychic castle chockfull of repression & imagination.
"Oh, cut it out, Morgantha!" and felt his anger surge. He tried to stop. But it was too late because the emotion was what did it. There was no ritualized gesture, no motion of control. Morgantha stepped backwards. Not a ripple: she fell straight down while her reflection shot straight up. For one moment reality and image were joined at the waist like a queen on some grotesque playing card. Then, there was only the green gauze settling, darkening here and there. Regret had grown to pain in his belly and along the back of his neck, even before the anger peeled away. He lunged forward, grabbed up the wet shift, as if he might somehow retract, retrieve, recall.... Gold insects scurried from the dripping folds, splashed through the shallows to trail dark curves over the flags. He danced back from their scrabblings. A baker's dozen of them, at least!
November 16, 2025 at 1:24 PM
tfg.bsky.social
example below
_You know, everything here is a representation of a kind._ —A representation ... I said. _When your species interacts with me, I amplify, but I don't create, It's only you. Understand?_ -Only me. I nodded. _And because they cleaned out your memories, there will be fewer symbols, but those symbols will be quite powerful, do you understand? They may have greater effect than they otherwise would._ -I see, I said, though I had not even the slightest idea what she meant.
November 15, 2025 at 4:03 PM
tfg.bsky.social
today's #WoShoStoReMo piece:
"The Institute", Carol Emshwiller. She has such a deft touch with the absurd; like _Carmen Dog_'s Academy of Motherhood, this story's Old Ladies Institute of Higher Learning is the ridiculous ground for some serious, moving work.

Cliché to say but I want more of this
Grandmother had a lot to learn, but she made good progress. Her first semester she had three Bs and one C, but after that she always had a sprinkling of As. It was in her senior year that she discovered that her medium was really movies. She talked two other old ladies into posing for her films. Grandma had close-ups of their wonderful old skin, like around the eyes and under the arms, etc. (Grandma had learned by then to see everything though she only got a C in the freshman course, Finding New Things to See. Not such an easy course either.) And sometimes she had them pose together on a cot, but . . . well, that's how Grandmother landed in jail and never quite got to graduate. She died before she served out her time. But don't think she didn't know what she was doing.
November 15, 2025 at 12:27 AM
tfg.bsky.social
There's a reply criticizing Madame Bovary for "too much worldbuilding", too
lagree with the principle though, and I'd say French Naturalism is the worst for unnecessary worldbuilding. Madame fucking Bovary is my example. There was no need for an entire chapter on the manufacture and dimensions of a table. "The devil is in the details" my ass, Gustave Flaubert! At least with Victor Hugo, you can find a thematic reason for the chapter on why all the buildings in a certain part of Paris are painted a particular shade of yellow.
November 14, 2025 at 3:35 PM
tfg.bsky.social
why are genre readers like this; it's do goddamn depressing
Screencap from r/fantasy. Post reads: "My example of too much world building isn't a novel most would consider fantasy at all. Its Moby Dick. There are like 150 pages of story and 400 pages of whaling exposition. Its too much! Tom Hardy is another who goes overboard often on describing the setting in a way that detracts from the overall experience. "
November 14, 2025 at 3:35 PM
tfg.bsky.social
This is Austin Stephens-Cat. We found him yelling for help on our street; he was unchipped & declawed(!!!). The sweetest, calmest soul I have ever known (which is good, bc our other cat Buddy is nuts). I miss him every day since 12/2020.
A small gray cat with dreamy jade eyes and a little white cravat sits on a hardwood floor looking upward
November 13, 2025 at 8:19 PM
tfg.bsky.social
For #WoShoStoReMo : "Ernst in Civilian Clothes" by Mavis Gallant (on a rec from the great Bill Richardson). This story slips around in its tenses, just as the protag slithers through history; he's barely human, just a knot of selfishness & subsistence:
"It is a way of living, not quite a life.”
Ernst turns on the radio and, finding nothing but solemn music, turns it off. From the court he hears a romantic tune sung by Charles Aznavour and is moved by it. On an uncrowded screen a line of ghosts shuffles in snow, limps through the triumphant city, and a water cart cleans the pavement their feet have touched. Ernst, the eternally defeated, could know the difference between victory and failure, if he would apply his mind to it; but he has met young girls in Paris who think Dien Bien Phu was a French victory, and he has let them go on thinking it, because it is of no importance. Ernst was in Indo-China and knows it was a defeat. There is no fear in the memo-ry. Sometimes another, younger Ernst is in a place where he must save someone who calls "Mutti!" He advances; he wades in a flooded cellar. There is more fear in dreams than in life. What about the dream where someone known - sometimes a man, sometimes a woman - wears a mask and wig? The horror of the wig! He wakes dry-throated. Willi has always been ready to die. If the judge he is waiting for says "This is true, and you were not innocent," he says he will be ready to die. He could die tomorrow. But Ernst, who has been in uniform since he was seven, and defeated in every war, has never been prepared.
November 11, 2025 at 12:25 AM
tfg.bsky.social
I pulled on some red wool socks, dug out a toque, and went for a walk in this unexpected, very persistent snowstorm.

Some truly clichéd shots:
photo of a laneway park & side street; trees with autumn foliage are covered in snow. The sky is snow-blank between ugly condo towers. orange and green oak leaves sport snow layers a snowy sidewalk with lots of fallen leaves; some leaves are visible & autumn-tinted while other leaves are completely whitened by snow, like ghosts against the dark wet pavement
November 9, 2025 at 7:34 PM
tfg.bsky.social
For #WoShoStoReMo today I read Le Guin's "Old Music and the Slave Women". What she does in this story with spatiality and self, silence and speech, is incredible.
The next day he was able to get up and hobble to the broken-armed chair. He sat for a while looking out the window. The room looked out from the second floor over the gardens of Yaramera, terraced slopes and flowerbeds, walks, lawns, and a series of ornamental lakes and pools that descended gradually to the river: a vast pattern of curves and planes, plants and paths, earth and still water, embraced by the broad living curve of the river. All the plots and walks and terraces formed a soft geometry centered very subtly on an enormous tree down at the river-side. It must have been a great tree when the garden was laid out four hundred years ago. It stood above and well back from the bank, but its branches reached far out over the water and a village could have been built in its shade. The grass of the terraces had dried to soft gold. The river and the lakes and pools were all the misty blue of the summer sky. The flowerbeds and shrubberies were untended, overgrown, but not yet gone wild. The gardens of Yaramera were utterly beautiful in their desolation. Desolate, forlorn, forsaken, all such romantic words befitted them, yet they were also rational and noble, full of peace. They had been built by the labor of slaves. Their dignity and peace were founded on cruelty, misery, pain. Esdan was Hainish, from a very old people, people who had built and destroyed Yaramera a thousand times. His mind contained the beauty and the terrible grief of the place, assured that the existence of one cannot justify the other, the destruction of one cannot destroy the other He was aware of both, only aware.
November 9, 2025 at 4:52 PM
tfg.bsky.social
Today's short story for #WoShoStoReMo:
"Day Ten Thousand", Isabel J. Kim. I am still making my mind up about this one, but the first line is perfect & some passages are wonderful.

clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_06_23/
The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest stories. There are twelve standard tablets and various fragments. In tablet seven, the gods mark Enkidu for death, and he dies. This is written in stone. In the twelfth tablet, Enkidu is still alive. The story is one of the oldest pieces of human technology. It does not ordinarily appear in nature.
November 5, 2025 at 10:33 PM
tfg.bsky.social
Today's short story for #WoShoStoReMo:
"The Thin Queen of Elfhame", James Branch Cabell: a cynical & ironic quest through a magic wood populated by deeply weird, unsettling allegorical figures that are grounded by great, evocative description. I loved this.
“No,” the dragon was saying comfortably; “no, for I have just had dinner, and exercise upon a full stomach is unwholesome. So I shall not fight you, and you are welcome, for all of me, to go your ways into the Woods of Elfhame.” “Yet what,” says Anavalt, “if I were to be more observant than you of your duty and of your hellish origin? And what if I were to insist upon a fight to the death?” When dragons shrug in sunlight, their bodies are one long, green, glittering ripple.
November 4, 2025 at 11:12 PM
tfg.bsky.social
Today's short story for #WoShoStoReMo:
Joan Aiken, "Sonata for Harp and Bicycle". I love Aiken's novels, but her short fiction is new to me; this has some beautiful writing & a truly intriguing premise, but the execution was too expository for my taste
Now they were in the street, chilly with the winter dusk smells of celery on carts, of swept-up leaves heaped in faraway parks, and cold layers of dew sinking among the withered evening primroses in the bombed areas. London lay about them wreathed in twilit mystery and fading against the barred and smoky sky. Like a ninth wave the sound of traffic overtook and swallowed them.
November 3, 2025 at 11:34 PM
tfg.bsky.social
today's #WoShoStoReMo is a reread: "A Necessary Being" by @indrapramitdas.bsky.social

A story about rebirth and community-service mechs in a transforming Kolkata, it weaves commentary about infection & adaptation into a moving bio of a father and daughter. I love it so much
WHEN THEY HAD WANDERED LONG ENOUGH IN SERVICE, THE GIANTS OF KOLKATA returned to the mekha depots scattered throughout the city. There, the mekhas would periodically gather inside cavernous warehouse garages. Workers in gas masks and HEV suits would examine the giants and provide surgery on them if needed, sparks flying like glowing blood, lubricant oil seeping across the floor like bodily fluids, filling the air with an acrid scent. Their disinfectant tanks would be refilled, their backup batteries charged, their bodies trailing cables like hair. They would usually spend the night at the depots, when all the mekhar hridaya, all the hearts of the giants, would talk to each other over their radios while lounging in the open chests of their mekhas, smoking weed beedis that twinkled in the shadows. Brishti thought it a beautiful sight, all the giants kneeling and quiet, praying in peace while their hearts chattered. Glowing earrings of worklights hung from their sides, illuminating their freshly polished and stencil-tattooed arms in the gloom of the warehouses. During these visits, Daitya would tense up, always holding Brishti's hand, telling her not to wander off.
November 3, 2025 at 12:22 AM
tfg.bsky.social
The anecdote about Claude denying the East Wing demolition sure is something, but I am stuck on this. What an unbelievable waste when there's, you know, regular spell check and ordinary human common sense.
Screencap of Bluesky post reads: "Philip Bump0@pbump.com •2h I use Claude (an Al) to scan my posts for spelling and grammar errors."
October 30, 2025 at 6:05 PM