Caleb Caudell @LitMiddle Twitter profile

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

10 months

A little ahead of schedule, my book is now available for order on amazon.

Novelty: and other stories

www.amazon.com

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

4 years

As you hit your mid-thirties, the realization that, because of your starchy lower middle class genetic stock, you were meant to work in a rock quarry, drive a pickup truck and read Dean Koontz novels, but because you grew up with the internet, you thought you were a bohemian.

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

2 years

A man who can't disentangle his loneliness from his sex drive is doomed

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 years

Is this the least erotic age in history? Has eros ebbed?

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

4 years

I am my dad, only plugged into the internet at age 11 instead of age 45, my developing mind twisted, contorted and pulled in all directions, convinced of its hyperspeed processing. But really, I should have been playing baseball and going fishing.

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

4 years

I should have settled into a modest living lifting stones or fixing cars. Instead I became an artist and an intellectual, and I really have to wonder if it was worth it.

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

4 months

@KILLTOPARTY Less practical familiarity with each other, voyeuristic saturation instead, which induces disgust

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 months

@ClickingSeason I’d say it’s not really an issue of IQ, it’s religion and history. Bach could only be Bach in his exact time with his exact faith. We can produce smarter people, but the baroque era is over

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 years

For all the celebration of sexuality, am I the only one who gets the sense that people don't really desire each other all that much? At best, we have fixations on body parts and acts. Sex as mechanics and therapy, interminable rather than uplifting.

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

4 years

I am 34 years old today. I have no job and I am happy.

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

5 months

I thought Grand Rapids would be a little grander than this

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 years

@Heghoulian The term was originally intended to criticize industries that exploit emotion, ie service work where you are forced to be nice or happy for money, but now people use it in a push to further commodify social bonds

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 months

Blurbs have gotten out of hand. Frankly, people are starting to sound a little nuts, a little desperate. This one has so much effusive description I can’t even really tell what’s going on, but it’s not enticing

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 months

The vast majority of things under popular discussion are so humiliatingly stupid, even to make oblique reference to them is degrade yourself

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

5 months

People always say if you want to become a better writer you have to write consistently, but really you need to think more. About everything Who cares how tight your sentences are if you think in stuporous cliches

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

2 years

@default_friend Telling atomized people decades into hedonistic coping lifestyles to hurry up and have kids isn’t going to help much. Or they’ll have to realize that, at best, they can only sow the seeds of healthier social conditions that won’t flower in their own lifetimes

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

2 years

@acczibit But who's going to make the food and generate the energy? Huh? *goes back to making ten second dance clips*

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

2 years

Thinking that the machines are becoming conscious obscures the greater issue, that consciousness is becoming automated, mechanical.

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

1 year

All those stories about haunting, destructive and decades long love affairs becoming more unbelievable in an era of sanitized self-care, where the automatic solution to all obsessive passion is therapeutic neutering, "just love yourself and find someone else better for you"

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

5 months

I don't see how having kids automatically saves you from the abyss, crushing loneliness or a lack of meaning in life. Look at how families fall apart, how selfishness and stupidity send people into bitter old age and isolation, how weak blood ties can be

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

4 months

Idle distraction is what's draining. It's not a coping mechanism for exhaustion, it's reinforcement of torpor and passivity. You need to reverse the causality. Not people are distracted because they're exhausted, but rather people are exhausted because they're distracted

Librarianshipwreck

@libshipwreck

4 months

That so many people are emotionally and intellectually exhausted by their workday and wind up only having energy for idle distraction at the day’s end is not an indictment of those people but an indictment of the society they live in that keeps them so wrung out…

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 years

@ClickingSeason @fxxfy Everyone needs to keep this in mind. Power is cybernetic, dispersed, bureacratic, headless. It has no locus, there is no occupation of physical space that can disrupt its functioning

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

4 months

Why is fitness/health/weightlifting associated with fascism? What is it about being concerned with economic class or inequality or even DEI style identity politics that precludes working out or enjoying strenuous activity?

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

1 month

Being a poor farmer sucks, but so does being an urban cyborg. Might just be life that’s the problem

Tristan S. Rapp

@Hieraaetus

1 month

Most reports from traditional agrarian societies are that people despised their subsistence farming life and would do anything to escape it. See for instance Blythe's Akenfield.

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

4 years

@HalifaxShadow the whole signaling that you like rough dirty sex thing is often women compensating for not being interesting.

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

4 months

Writers who produce anything worthwhile before 30 are an exception. I consider publishing a novel before 35 to be an early start

JP

@jpbrammer

4 months

It makes me sad seeing people worry about being too old to get into writing. WRITING, of all things? and it's coming from people in their 30s! maybe I'm missing something but a lot of writing in people's 20s is just being annoying in hopefully a profitable way

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 years

My first novel is now available on Amazon.

The Neighbor

www.amazon.com

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

4 years

@CityBureaucrat This guy became a professor and he's still nursing his asspain from a perceived slight years ago.

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

2 months

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

1 year

@poetrygrifter Sorry babe, I can’t date you because of this whole Heideggerian being-with-you-people-looking at me thing

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 months

The narrator of in search of lost time spends most of his adult life among the brilliant talkers of a declining and irrelevant aristocracy. He realizes that all these society figures will leave nothing behind; all their quips will be forgotten. Twitter reminds me of this

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 years

@acczibit The disconnection and ambivalence of that cultural moment directly feeds into the exaggerated misery of today

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 years

@HarryTWalton what is wrong with people like this

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 years

A dystopian society where everyone sits around consuming tv series and young adult novels about dystopias.

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

1 month

If you cut out a compulsion; smoking, snacking, checking phone constantly, etc, you might notice just how slowly time moves, and how much time you have, and how all these little acts and apparent pleasures are all you really look forward to, and that you don’t even want more time

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

2 years

@moth_pirate Open to the interpretation, but what I most have in mind is how a man might be isolated, yet put the bulk of his energy into pursuing romantic love and sex at the expense of building more resilient and extensive social networks

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

5 months

@ClickingSeason The oldest sophistical argument in the books is that you only do the right thing, the more reasonable thing, because you're too weak and scared to satisfy all your cravings

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

4 months

Let’s say you come home from an exhausting day of work. Take what’s left of your focus and put it into doing something challenging/productive. Accept that it won’t go well at first. Keep it up and over time you’ll find reserves of energy, build a higher capacity for attention

Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

4 months

Idle distraction is what's draining. It's not a coping mechanism for exhaustion, it's reinforcement of torpor and passivity. You need to reverse the causality. Not people are distracted because they're exhausted, but rather people are exhausted because they're distracted

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

9 months

As per the last psychiatrist, narcissism isn’t excessive self love, it’s persistent misrecognition of self and the obsession with finding the right image or experience that matches ever shifting desires implanted into us by the social machine

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

2 years

@joeyhiles1 College dissolves communities. The brain and social drain it causes is devastating

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 months

Houellebecq writes about how, in a sexually permissive and secular society, food is a consolatory pleasure for those who struggle to maximize their sexual enjoyment. It often seems to me that present interest in food is borderline erotic, and interest in sex is alimentary

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 years

In real life, when I tell people I write, they often say, "oh, I wish I could write, but I get so intimidated. I feel stupid. I don't know where to start." Maybe you struggle too. But I know how to defeat this feeling. THREAD

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

4 years

@HalifaxShadow "ooo, I like to be degraded. Bet you didn't expect that from a woman." so fucking boring.

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

10 months

Good morning. Today is my birthday. I’m 37

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

2 years

@Heghoulian Push enlightenment far enough and you get total obscurity over basic moral issues

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

6 months

Society of the spectacle doesn't just mean that everyone is watching shows or is on their phone all the time. It means relationships, from the most intimate to the most distant, are structured by the industrial production of fantasies

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

2 years

The more powerless a man feels, the more cartoonish his fantasy of what a powerful man should be

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

1 year

much practical advice on relationships aims at making your life extremely uninteresting, turning chance amorous encounters into a fordist model of production

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

9 months

The dizzying confusion of living in two worlds at once: one, largely online, where people are boorishly confrontational and assertive. And the other other, largely offline, where people are more and more indirect, passive or scheming

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

29 days

Adverbs and passive voice are fine, sometimes better than alternatives

Heghoulian

@Heghoulian

29 days

What literature opinion will have you like this?

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 years

@nytimes No one genuinely believes this is a good poem

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 months

I’ve decided I’m going to die in this apartment. I’m not moving this shit again

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 years

@Heghoulian I’ve put it like this: everyone is watching you, but no one cares.

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

1 year

@Delicious_Tacos De-ejaculate?

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 years

@ajdhenry "Are you sure all these lockdowns will increase our safety?" "Safety?"

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 years

@owenbroadcast why do I need to identify with any of it? Seems the deeper sickness is the rush to see oneself mirrored in everything.

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

4 years

@ajdhenry The void of meaning and purpose is really gaping these days when people's dominant emotions and outlook are determined by decontextualized clips and harebrained explanations for events which have nothing to do with them

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

4 years

@Blair_A_Nathan We're undergoing a shift from a softer managerial regime to a harder one. The discourse now is less about the benefits and pleasures of the desired social order and more about the sacrifices and punishments to be endured.

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

5 months

Sitting at home or in the woods alone for a full day without electronic stimulation seems likely to induce a full blown psychedelic trip, buried memories resurfacing and walls melting, visions of past lives, etc

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

8 months

Faulkner here prefiguring mccarthy’s character the judge

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

1 year

First mistake: adults don't remember pre-smartphone life, those memories have been distorted/destroyed by time and the technological current. Second: Hypostasizing the difference between daily life pre-phone and post-phone obscures the nature of technological change in modernity

rosey🌹

@thechosenberg

1 year

Tell us about the before times papa

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

6 months

Went to the country and made a new friend

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

2 years

@SolBrah One cocktail at a restaurant pays for a whole bottle of liquor

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

4 months

Some of the signifiers that people on left associate with fascism, like discipline, seem to me crucial qualities regardless of political orientation. Why would you leave the notion of discipline to the enemy?You think justice will be won by not having control over yourself?

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

2 years

You hear a lot about identity but almost nothing about character. Character is formed in an organic, evolutionary way, through consistent action and moral choice. While identity is a set of stickers you slap on and peel off

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 years

Giorgio Agamben made a career arguing that the state uses health and security pretexts to suspend rights. When he criticized the state response to covid as the latest troubling development of biopower, he was called a paranoid old man by the academics who used to revere him

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

2 years

Controlling mothers and passive or absent fathers lead to listless men on the serial monogamy treadmill. No model for masculine leadership, just the grinding pursuit of female approval that never quite satisfies, never clicks

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

4 years

@curablefury Once when I was living in dc I was in a bar that was hosting a big poly convention and I wouldn't have touched a single one of them.

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

4 months

The chronic stress of modern life vs acute stress of ancient life seems overblown to me. Ancient man almost gets his nuts torn off by a tiger and as soon as the threat is gone he just takes a nap and forgets all about it? No anxiety or nightmares?

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

5 months

Everyone is missing the background of this: a mass society of accelerated population churn in which a majority of interactions are entirely transactional. A service economy of interchangeable goods, agents and environments drains people of moral and social energy

nohobal head of marketing

@nohohankpilled

6 months

i’m sorry are you guys serious right now

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

8 months

@BjornIronSkull Maybe you could fly the plane, maybe not. More important is the oily rhetoric in the cartoon of conflating skepticism toward the social engineering of dubiously educated experts with rejection of basic differences in technical skills

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

29 days

It’s not autofiction as such that anyone objects to, it’s the sensibility, the way of life, that irritates. Imagine the autofiction of a Jesuit priest or a long haul trucker

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

4 years

@gaitanalyst Thank you for being a friend

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 months

The scientist of today is, for the most part, a far cry from his forebears, is rather a sniveling and arrogant creature who obsesses over the idiocy of his supposed inferiors to compensate for the narrowness of his soul and the middling quality of his accomplishments

Saint Brian The Godless

@AWorldOutOfMind

3 months

i feel this to the point of softly weeping

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

11 months

Who are the up and coming writers of our time, how do we find and nurture them? They’re not in oprah’s book club. They’re working two jobs, taking care of families, neglecting their families. They’re almost 37 and childless. Sometimes they’re in oprahs book club

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

2 years

Got stuck in nyc for one more night. Flight was cancelled. Sporting a dissident t-shirt from @718Tv

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 months

The wisdom of life and councils and maxims. Striking how antithetical this book is to the two prevailing modes of advice, the hustle/grind grab as much as you can, as well as the therapeutic/victimhood perspective.

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

11 months

Short story collection coming out July 28th. If you’d like to review the book, I’ll send you a pdf copy

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 years

@westerngoals @bronzeagemantis I wouldn't mind living in a hut and eating bugs if I lived in a cohesive culture with strong social bonds

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

2 months

You ever look at those pictures of realtors on signs outside of houses for sale and wonder what monstrous vices and dark cravings they harbor

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

2 years

I serve the children of men younger than me in a supposedly childless world

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

2 years

@whitemoons3 The red pill idea that men aren’t damaged by promiscuity is a load of horse shit

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

9 months

@duncanreyburn “Evolving values” I think they mean engineered values

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

2 years

In all this embittered talk about childless millennials, cats have gotten an unfair bad rap. I’m staring down the barrel of genetic annihilation myself, but at least I have cat consolation.

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

6 months

The literary mind is superior to the video brain and podcast people. And it’s not even close. But part of the structural problem is that literature is now influenced by dominant visual and conversational media, so that it tends to resemble screenplays and fragmented dialogue

garfieldbot

@robertlasagna1

6 months

I really dislike in a structural way how video an audio technology has taken precedence over writing. forget about the advertisement model fucks up intensives for a minute, just the format of casual conversation is infinitely inferior to writing, which is inherently more focused

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

6 months

My parents have started reading my short story collection. They’ve decided not to send a copy to my 93 year old grandmother, on account of the book’s dark and disturbed content

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

2 months

Solid egg report. Indeed, despair is comforting self-absorption. The possibility of choosing joy is what makes us tremble, we're hardly up for the task

garfieldbot

@robertlasagna1

2 months

featuring an actual etymological party trick for the edutainment of the deaf and blind

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

4 years

@ajdhenry how much of a cratered wasteland does your personal/spiritual/local life have to be to devote your sincere attention to an incidental event which you would never even hear of if it weren't for your digital device blaring in your face

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

2 months

Well guys, the whole internet thing hasn't really worked out for me. I didn't make much money or have much of an impact, never participated in the right way. Guess I'll console myself with my rich social and family life and my highly respected and well paying job. Wait a minute

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

1 month

From Bonfire Books:

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

2 months

Calling anything high value makes you sound like a manager at a grocery store

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

4 years

@Blair_A_Nathan In times of relative security, the dominant regime can use softer manipulative techniques to control populations. In times of greater insecurity, we get much more stick and less carrot.

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

4 years

Forget automation of jobs. We have achieved automation of events, of spectacles and opinions. Each controversy appears and disappears and elicits the same reactions and counter-reactions in a stale present of hyperstimulation.

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 years

In despair over the prospect of writing a novel set in the present. “And she looked at her phone and he got out his phone and scrolled through Instagram and felt bad about not having a hotter girlfriend. They sat in the restaurant where everyone texted and sent emails.”

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 years

@WokeCapital the scarf she's wearing means she's very smart

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

2 months

Don’t even think about doing this to me

@social

@social_rate

2 months

can we stop asking “how are you” and start asking questions that prompt meaningful responses

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

4 years

@sansoIeil that thread, and the replies to it, are the side of twitter that is so petty and pointless, it makes me question why I'm on here. But then I remind myself there are better uses of the platform

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

3 months

20 somethings born into a world of smartphones are developmentally disabled. I, on the other hand, who watched mighty morphing power rangers and ren and stimpy when my brain was pure putty, have turned out fine and can accurately diagnose our current social problems

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

4 years

@LaurenKGurley @fawzy_zablah Many of these replies illustrate a "free market" cretinism. The important thing is for people of the same socioeconomic class to compete with each other for the favor of billionaires by offering to work for less.

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Caleb Caudell

@LitMiddle

2 months

Throughout my life, every now and then people will ask if I’ve ever thought about doing stand up comedy. This is not something anyone should ever want to hear

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