"The Grapes of Wrath tortoise enters the chat."

Tubagoat writes, on the mildlyinfuriating subreddit, after ugly_duckling_5 — commenting on a post about a woman who gave an overlong answer to the question "How was your day?"  — said:

"I'm lost on talking about your day for 45 minutes. Reminds me of books where the author spends an entire chapter describing a wall."

Classy-girl-93 follows up: "At least the tortoise was going somewhere."

Was he, really? I was curious. I looked it up. From the full text:

"During my first 24 years at the Times, from 2000 to 2024, I faced very few editorial constraints on how and what I wrote...."

"[T]he editing was very light... even when I took positions that made Times leadership very nervous.... [T]he columns themselves were published as I wrote them.... Then, step by step, all the things that made writing at the Times worthwhile for me were taken away.... [I]n 2024, the editing of my regular columns went from light touch to extremely intrusive... toning down, introducing unnecessary qualifiers, and, as I saw it, false equivalence. I would rewrite the rewrites to restore the essence of my original argument.... ... I was putting more effort—especially emotional energy—into fixing editorial damage than I was into writing the original articles. And the end result of the back and forth often felt flat and colorless....  [W]hat I felt during my final year at the Times was a push toward blandness, toward avoiding saying anything too directly in a way that might get some people (particularly on the right) riled up. I guess my question is, if those are the ground rules, why even bother having an opinion section?"

Writes Paul Krugman, in "Departing the New York Times/I left to stay true to my byline" (The Contrarian).

What's going on there? Who wants blandly written columns? That doesn't solve any problem I'm aware of.

"'Looking at a girl totally naked is not exciting,' said Éric Stefanut, the communications director for the French Naturist Federation."

"Naturists, he explained, see new people naked all the time. 'So,' he added, 'it’s boring.'... When everyone in a room is naked, no one person stands out — although there were many body types among the visitors on Friday. There were tattoos and pierced nipples, ribs and fleshy tummies, bald spots and wispy beards. Scrotums and breasts swung wide. Some had cesarean scars.... Lucca Linke, 31, said she had thought about trimming her body hair. But why bother? Her friend, Kaja Baumgart, 22, agreed. She had worried that other guests would notice her tampon string. But soon, she said, she relaxed. 'Everybody is acting like normal,' she said. 'I can also be acting like normal.'"

From "At This French Exhibition, Check Your Clothes at the Door/A museum in Marseille, France, has a show dedicated to the history of social nudity. On a few special nights, visitors strolled around naked, too" (NYT).

It's art — purportedly — to take what is very interesting and endeavor to make it boring.

"Over the summer, everyone I know went to Greece. From Greece, everyone I know posted one picture: octopus suspended on a clothesline, hanging against the Aegean Sea."

"The picture was a picture of an octopus (suspended on a clothesline, hanging against the Aegean Sea), but it was also a subtle message that the person behind the camera was (1) traveling, (2) traveling to Greece, the summer-vacation spot of 2024, and not Puglia, the summer-vacation spot of 2023, and (3) not taking a selfie, but (4) you know, not just taking a picture of the Aegean Sea, which would be basic, unlike this one, which (5) managed a sort of high-low effect, given the octopus was dead and clipped to a clothesline. It would have been the perfect picture of an interesting summer, except everyone else was taking it too, stuck replicating one another in an effort to be perfectly interesting."

From "Going Dull/Being interesting is a burden. Is there relief in choosing to be bland?" (NY Magazine).

I think the problem here isn't being interesting. It's trying to be interesting, AKA trying not to be dull. Just stop trying. Ironically, that's your only real shot at interestingness. Let the chips fall where they may.

Just say no.