@alias-milamber / tumblr.aquarionics.com
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!
You know those "if this gets 50k notes I'll xyz"? I don't believe in those. Because I could say something crazy like: if this gets 20k notes, I'll write my next book. And then it'll get zero notes. I do not believe.
@scleroticstatue Yeah, okay. When this gets 20k, I'll do it. I don't see that happening though.
You heard em boys! Let's get to work!
*rubbing hands together*
@catkin-morgs-kookaburralover Can you toss this Rogue Squadron's way mayhap?
A Dakota.
Two Dakoten.
But:
An amount of Carolina,
Specific Carolinum
One of the most memorable interactions was Saturday. Into our booth strolls a small family, tempted by free samples of freshly brewed tea. We chatter and give them the spiel, that the tea is character merch and we’re a cozy health-based app called Forage Friends.
The young girl zeroes in on our pride pins.
“They have my pin!” She says excitedly. “They have my flag!”
The dad blinks. He is surprised, but also calm and positive when he sees it’s the lesbian flag. “Oh. That’s… different from what you told me.”
“That was months ago, dad.” And she rolls her eyes. Definitely a teenager.
I turn to him and say, “Yeah, dad.” And we share a little laugh about it.
He says, “No, it’s great. That’s amazing, honey. It was just news to me.”
“Well, I guess I just decided to stop lying to myself. About liking guys. Like right now.”
A little lesbian just came out to her dad and he was super cool about it.
I’m standing there in my tie-dye mask and my cheery blue apron pouring tea and making small talk and I’m trying really hard not to cry or compare it to my experience, the fire & brimstone, the disgust, the conditional acceptance as long as I never bring it up.
So as this beautiful bonding is going on, the girl’s even younger brother turns his gaze around. He’s in a snorlax hoodie and bored and wants to go look at the swords across the hall. But on the other side of our booth….
“WHY DO PEOPLE DRAW THAT?” He asks loudly, and we all turn to our neighboring booth.
Our neighbors were extremely lovely people. Every time we had a break we would talk, and we became good friends over the weekend. They kept apologizing that their booth was next to ours and we kept repeating that it was totally fine. Their booth was great. I even bought their merchandise.
The thing that was so contentious, that they felt the need to apologize for, was that they were selling explicit titty hentai stickers of popular characters. They were censored with little yellow R18 labels but the content was very clear.
So back to the family: I freeze and immediately go somewhere else to let dad handle this question. With adult customers I’ve been loud and positive about our neighbors. (“Man, how has it been boothing next to them?” It’s been great! They bring a lot of foot traffic and they’re kind and wonderful professional neighbors. If anything it’s a fun juxtaposition. We believe in artistic freedom. I bought a sticker too!)
But this is a kid, it’s not my place to explain anything…. But I was extremely curious about what this chill dad would say.
“Well,” dad says with a long measured silence between each word. “Sometimes people are horny.”
this is the single worst way i've ever read to describe an erection, frank herbert
I forgot how lonely it is to write original fiction.
Where are the kudos? The subscriptions? The comments? The people cheerleading me chapter to chapter? Where are the kind words and compliments and reassurances that what I'm writing isn't complete crap? Where are the unhinged emojis? The asks on Tumblr? Where are my mutuals in my dms apologizing for not reading the latest chapter right away (side note, you know you don't have to apologize at all, right??). Where is the fanart? Where are the recs?
Where is my motivation to keep going?
It's something I've been thinking about a lot, actually, lately. How the experience of writing fanfic is so unique. How you already have an audience, willing and waiting and captive. And that's really it, isn't it? You have an audience. It's almost performative, writing fanfic. It's being on a stage, a one-person show (or two, if you do it with a friend); it's getting live reactions to your performance, it's feeding off the energy of the crowd and informing it back in a feedback loop; it's improvised, sometimes, in almost-real-time. It's building something that you couldn't have built by yourself. A thing that takes on a life of its own.
It's an experience you can't get writing original fiction, and, honestly, not having it is making it hard to write something original at all.
"Where is my motivation to keep going?"
It's where it always was before fanfic, before online support; before recs, before asks, before moots, before fanart.
It's in realizing you're the story's only way out into the world.
In a world full of gatekeeping, this is the gate that only you keep. Turn your back on the responsibility to open the portal to the unborn (original) story and keep it open, and the story dies. And that death is on you.
Yes, it's lonely work, without the constant rush of input we've been trained to be used to. It's been lonely work for a long time: since the first storyteller came up against the silence that wanted to keep the story away from the breath that would make it real in other people's ears. And you could make a case that all the online adornments are just our recent generations' way of keeping both the storytellers and the listeners from being overwhelmed by that loneliness. (Because the listeners have their own version of it: the fear of what happens when the people who can tell stories fall silent. Good storytellers respect that fear, and remember every day their responsibility to do something about it.)
Where do the characters come from? A surprising amount of the time, without warning, they muscle their way into the back of your brain and grab you by the hand (or hair) (or throat) and shout Tell about me! You have to tell them, there's no one else who can do it! ...Sometimes you have to sneak up on them from behind, as you do get the shy ones occasionally whom you have to take by the hand and pull into the light. But give them enough silence—build the space for them—and they'll come.
The silence may be key. One of the smartest pieces of advice I was ever given was that, for half an hour in the morning every day, before starting work, I should sit down and do nothing, and listen. No music, no TV, no news, no reading, no nothing. Sit and listen. It's not meditation; it's not mindfulness. It's listening. Story's voice can be hard to hear, sometimes, until you get better at pushing aside all that relentless rush of situational and sensorial input, and better at waiting to hear the story that's as yet too frail to push its way through the portal without assistance.
To be clear: Fanfic work (or any work in universes not of your making) is a different kind of listening. Working well in already-extant universes requires sharp attention to the tones, concerns and qualities of voices already speaking there; and to a certain extent, to the voices speaking about them. And if you love the characters, too—one of the best reasons for fanfic, really—that's a pleasure.
But when working in your own universes, the listening also requires a selective quality, as the characters find their voices and their proper passions. And as for the love... you're the only one there is to love them, till you get them out into the world. If you've ever been the only one to love somebody, you know how tough that can be.
Then add to that the fillip that those people (or situations) won't be really real until you've worked with them long enough, hard enough, all by yourself? It's a tough row to hoe. And you can't ever be really sure that a summer will come to reveal whether the crop's taken root, and whether it's all been worthwhile.
Nonetheless: it's good work. Some of us don't seem able to stop. Some of us even like it that way.
When you're ready, take that leap and come join us.
reblog to give the person you reblogged this from a fucking break
The dog gets rewarded when he gets onto his grooming table.
The table for TTRPGs goes where the grooming table goes.
Today the dog is confused and briefly disappointed. (Briefly because he got a reward for jumping down when instructed, and his dissatisfaction rarely lasts beyond the next biscuit).
Deadlands is going quite well.
“Lord Byron gets up at two. I get up, quite contrary to my usual custom … at 12. After breakfast we sit talking till six. From six to eight we gallop through the pine forest which divide Ravenna from the sea; we then come home and dine, and sit up gossiping till six in the morning. I don’t suppose this will kill me in a week or fortnight, but I shall not try it longer. Lord B.’s establishment consists, besides servants, of ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these, except the horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were the masters of it… . [P.S.] I find that my enumeration of the animals in this Circean Palace was defective … . I have just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane. I wonder who all these animals were before they were changed into these shapes.”
— Percy Bysshe Shelley on the lifestyle of Lord Byron (via timemarauder)
Lord George Gordon Byron's excrement was so drastically diffuse that both the concept of science fiction and the computer itself were concieved in his shadow to balance the universe.
Can you do something for me, please?
I want you to reblog this if you believe that two people can be very close and physically affectionate with one another, but still have a completely nonsexual, non-romantic relationship.
Even if the two people in question are capable of being sexually or romantically attracted to one another.
Because the friendship I share with someone I consider family in a way that transcends blood has been typecast as a romantic relationship ENTIRELY too many times, and I’m beginning to get sick of it.
hey do you have a tumblr
no sorry
Reblog if you don’t have a tumblr
via richardscarrylove
Do you ever have a problem where you just don’t know how to reply to an argument, not because you don’t know the answer, but you just don’t know where to begin? Like, the foundation of knowledge you’d need to impart to this person before you could even begin to drag them out of their sinkhole of ignorance would cost thousands of dollars if it were coming from a university?
There is a quote I tend to resort to on this occasion:
(Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), ch. 5 "Difference Engine No. 1")
brb gotta go check out a band
i recommend beginning with 'that damned fly', 'you need Satan more than he needs you' and 'throwing bricks at trains'
also i'm envious that you're getting to have this first time experience
The downside of being in Oxford is that the answer is Radiohead.
A small parable:
Once upon a time the site last.fm was able to hook into your media player (iTunes, Winamp, Spotify, etc) and keep up to date with your listening tastes, often being able to recommend you things you might also like. They were also one of the founders of "Silicon Roundabout", now rebranded "East London Tech City", and would host parties. At these parties you would enter your last.fm username and the music would shift to play things most people at the party liked, or might like.
The larger these parties got, the more frequently it would end up back to back Radiohead albums, as the lowest common denominator of music for computer geeks - mostly apparently male - around 2010. The effect was like having a pain in all the diodes down your left hand side.
