Flummery

Cool on the inside.
Sentimental curmudgeon.

[Flummery @flummery5]

@TheEsteemedFox @Aatif_Rashid Most people struggle with a paragraph with main idea and supporting sentences, let alone a merely cogent essay. In that sense, an LLM does what most people can’t. But that’s wholly different from style, persuasion, art. There are whole strata of writing abilities.

[Flummery @flummery5]

@WhatHoARat Right. It’s really disheartening to walk into such an old friend’s home and have sanctimonious politics pushed right in your face immediately.

[Flummery @flummery5]

Maybe peak schism won’t happen for another five years.

Maybe we’ll get “lucky” and peak schism will be tomorrow and it’ll be awful but over with.

[Flummery @flummery5]

@mtaibbi There are actually books with Stalin’s name as author. One is mainly quotations. He hated intellectuals but still insisted on out Marxing them.

[Flummery @flummery5]

@MegKeene @BovyMaltz I just meant the way these made-up orientations imply being so beyond mere attraction to a body or male/female traits. “Demi-sexual,” etc.

[Flummery @flummery5]

@HannahGraceLong For a man, the thought of failing to protect a woman or child induces enough shame to make us braver and more self-sacrificing than we’d otherwise be.

That poll (if remotely accurate) shows that.

[Flummery @flummery5]

@jmasseypoet He was portrayed as so humorless in Wolf Hall. And I just didn’t know other portrayals to compare against. Odd to love a book and only later realize it had its own slant.

[Flummery @flummery5]

@default_friend Not sure if this is close enough, but there’s the fictional Elmer Gantry. I know Sinclair Lewis did a lot of in-person research for it, so I’m assuming it hewed closely enough to real life.

[Flummery @flummery5]

@nycexpatmom As families shrink, pets become royalty.

[Flummery @flummery5]

@Etanarachel I’ve always been fascinated with Paglia but hearing her speak for an hour in person sent my mind spinning in overstimulation. I’d be the one staring in paralysis from Pagli-dwork synthesis.

[Flummery @flummery5]

@thewaronbeauty Woolf can be very vague. I’ve adored To the Lighthouse for a very long time because, to me, it beautifully conveys a longing for connection through characters talking right past each other. But I know lots of readers can’t take a minute of her.

[Flummery @flummery5]

@WhatHoARat It’s so funny throughout that it’s easy to miss the seriousness. Until that very last moment. You know a story works when you desperately don’t want the awful-but-right ending to happen.

[Flummery @flummery5]

Did anyone ask why One Battle After Another wasn’t more realistic? Meaning: leftist radicals virulently hunting Jews?

[Flummery @flummery5]

@WhatHoARat There’s so much less talk about what our own duty is in a relationship. It’s hard, and humbling, to ask if it’s me who’s not doing enough.

[Flummery @flummery5]

@neerajadeshp @amishescapee Who are the people actually urging or liking plastic surgery, lip-filler, etc.? There must be an audience because people keep doing it, but my world only includes the criticisms or lamentations.

I must be asking, “Do people really play video games?”

[Flummery @flummery5]

@MegKeene Keep it post-secondary smut.

[Flummery @flummery5]

@EleonoraFall There’s a nice Robert Hughes documentary on Caravaggio on YouTube. Might require a fondness for faded, slow seventies documentaries and Hughes’s Australo-posh sneer.