Hi guys

[farla]

Despite available evidence, I'm still not dead.

Although actually if I was dead you guys would probably be the second or so group to know about it. So it's more that I haven't been kidnapped or in a coma. I'd hope, anyway, if I came out of a coma to find out Mom's told you guys stuff I'd be pretty upset.

Wow this is morbid.

So anyway, yeah. I've just been stressed about other stuff and avoiding everything. Sorry, no good reason for any of it. Now to get to work on all the stuff I have to do and people I have to contact now.

Speaking of things that aren't dead, the rats are still doing well despite all our hopes and plans. Does anyone know if we can leave them out once it gets below freezing? They're living in a pretty good brushpile and have access to plenty of nesting material, but they're elderly pet albino rats, so I'm dubious of their survival capabilities. Although they've been outdoing the chickens by a fair margin so far.

Comments

[bay115.livejournal.com]

^_^ My classmates may disagree, but that's what they get for saying proper critique is to find something the person's done right and encourage them to put more of that in.

How about the teacher? Will she say the same thing? Or she just doesn't care about writing proper poetry anymore? D:

[farla.livejournal.com]

She's the one who started all the bullshit with her "if someone says something critical about a piece of your writing and you don't want to change it, that means it's your ~style~ and you should make it a centerpiece of your writing" introduction to concrit. Oh, and if people point out something they hated, that means you did a good job and should put more of it in the next thing you wrote because the most important thing is getting a ~reaction~.

Also she made us do this bullshit exercise where we basically played poetry mad libs for an hour then cooed over how "imaginative" the results were. I can write shitty nonsense fine by myself without spending an hour on it. It's a fucking writing course, we don't need to be doing intro exercises to get people over their fear of words on a paper, by fucking definition people signed up because they wanted to write shit. So if she wants to waste my time in class with what a computer could generate, she's getting computer generated poetry.

[bay115.livejournal.com]

Wow, just wow. :/

In short, if I ever had to deal with a writing teacher like that, I'll be doing computer generated writing too.

[farla.livejournal.com]

She's pretty young, I think she's trying to be encouraging and stuff. We're also reading short stories and they're all awful. You know that generic English class reading, the one about the randomness of life with some sex and death mixed in, and maybe a bit of people-acting-bizarre-and-not-like-people dabbed on top and called surreal? She keeps assigning those and acting like she expects it to blow our tiny minds.

It's a pretty easy course though, and she hasn't picked up on the fact that while yes, I'm writing as she talks, it's generally something else entirely.

[charizamdc.livejournal.com]

because the most important thing is getting a ~reaction~.

...So, when you say young, you mean she's about five, right?

[farla.livejournal.com]

It's a sadly common viewpoint among some groups that things like "reader enjoyment" or "plot" or "legibility" are irrelevant. It's sort of a thing where writing is all looked at from the perspective of the writer, who already knows what they meant to say and finds it more interesting to do weird stuff mutilating the story structure, and doesn't care about the reader beyond this an almost passive-aggressive trolling.

Also shows up all the time in comic interviews and with some TV writing, because people are under the impression it's better to be hated than for people not to have any strong feeling. It's stupid, but unfortunately it's not rare.