Michael Tichy

Be there or stay square

Reading is also a skill. Like most people who dont read don’t have the patience to develop that skill of being able to sit still and sustain focus on one thing for like an hour or more at a time

I read horror but it’s got to be weird and I guess literary is as good a word as any. I read a lot of old lit fic so currently working through all the Steinbeck novels. I think i started consuming horror so young that I’m jaded lol.

When I think about the most popular subgenres and tropes i realize im in no position to judge because if fantasy, romance and horror by numbers were the totality of available writing i wouldn’t read either

He also claims musicians deliberately include occult references to achieve success and that he watched a woman transform into a lizard person once. Dude is completely unhinged and has just enough smart sounding stuff to say about the music industry that people seem to overlook it.

Ive only read Karate is a Thing of the Spirit. Keep meaning to read more

It’s been so rewarding. I think it’s impacting my own writing pretty significantly but there’s just something about losing yourself in an old book. It gets me out of my head and presses pause on the shitshow for a while

And here we are, in a world rich with people doing monstrous things. And it’s actually a comfort to remember they are human because a human can suffer the consequences of their behavior. A human can feel the revulsion they evoke and as much as they pretend to love it, we all know the truth

It let’s them off the hook too though. A monster can only be a monster. That’s the worst lie of all because to surrender humanity is a thing that must be effortful. Cruelty is a thing a person must recommit to daily and they are culpable for every act, every moment

It’s easy to believe in monsters. There is absolution there waiting for us. But it’s a lie that let’s everyone off the hook. They are fundamentally different from us so we don’t have to learn anything from their example and to the extent we cower it is forgivable to cower before a monster

There’s a moment where you can see him almost getting it, this realization that nature is indifferent. His cowardice is that he can’t hold onto that and believes instead he is an extension of the land and their fates are intertwined. Spoilers alert: this doesn’t end well.

So we can see how awful a thing an ideal becomes when exposed to the light. The rugged individual doesn’t have any real connection to anyone and ultimately his only path to meaning is believing he’s connected to something greater. In this case the land

But no one loves him, not really. Because no one can know him. And from his perch he can’t know anyone else. He has a homespun kind of nature worship that is likewise appealing on the surface but then it’s clear underneath it is vanity. Steinbeck starts with the ideal and then peals back layers

He’s the ideal if the rugged self made man, even an expression of the idea of manifest destiny, and people around him treat him nearly like a god and he believes it. At first he’s a sympathetic character. It’s easy to respect someone who seems unchangeable. We want so badly to believe in permanence

Steinbeck had a gift for finding humanity in characters that could easily be 2D villains. He took some criticism for this, especially with the Nazis in The Moon is Down. In this book the mc is a different kind of inhuman. Not really evil, but filled with an overriding obsession.

Anthology of early Steinbeck novels on an unfinished wood table

I’ve been reading a lot of Steinbeck. Working my way through all the novels I hadn’t already read and finished To a God Unknown today. I think it has a lot to say about American mythology that is extremely relevant today. THREAD

INTERVIEW: with author Alex Woodroe Alex Woodroe is a Romanian writer of dark speculative fiction and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated editor-in-chief of Tenebrous Press. She’s the author of Whisperwood, The Night Ship, and Tatratea, and...

📚⚫🗣️ New interview! 🗣️⚫📚

I chat with horror author & EiC of Tenebrous Press, the legendary @alexwoodroe.com, about:

⚰️ Her new book, the Weird apocalypse horror The Night Ship
⚰️What really scares her
⚰️Her work with Tenebrous
⚰️The future of horror
⚰️Why her next novel is her weirdest

and more!

The latest Hedone bullshit is exactly the reason orgs like the HWA *should* exist - to let people know about toxic, fraudulent practices in the publishing industry

Writers shouldn't be expected to assume every publisher is a potential embezzler. The onus to investigate should not be on them 🧵

Guy who doesn’t believe disease should be controlled running the center for disease control. What could go wrong?

Working my way through all of Steinbeck and finished Pastures of Heaven this morning. The whole book is basically a collection of anecdotes about living in a beautiful place and finding a surplus of misery but it’s the last chapter that in 4 pages turns into an eviscerating mirror. Ouch.

He basically depresses people to the point they don’t murder him

I missed Millenium when it first aired and decided to track down the dvds and I was in no way prepared for how strange this show is on a fundamental structural level. I’m on episode 9 and there is literally no overarching storyline yet. Frank Black is fighting evil but like physically totally inept

Tibetan monks destroy a mandala in an affirmation of the ephemeral nature of all things

Photo of me deleting all my Clair Obscur files immediately after completing the game

in community mental health we had a cfo who said statistically salary increases don’t result in increased satisfaction and my response was that might be true at exec salary but our frontline staff were a paycheck away from homelessness for the most part and a pay bump makes a big difference there

I think it invalidates the Turing test when you tie someone’s ability to pay rent and buy groceries to convincing themselves the machine is a person

I wonder if the magas boycotting the Super Bowl will measurably mitigate the spike in domestic violence that predictably occurs the weekend of the event every year.

No

Well, this is likely more about never pausing long enough to realize you don’t have any friends. It’s only a joyless life if you remember that joy is a thing. I used to think our process brains suffered most from our product aspirations but leave it to tech bros to invent something even worse

That stoker preliminary ballot reminds me of the scene in the Shawshank Redemption when they randomly choose people to do the roof tarring job.

Thanks!