Aliens, Superheroes, and all things Fiction

Do y'all ever think about how cool it is that art inspires other art inspires other art inspires other art in an endless cycle

including the tags!!

My enjoyment of writing, my productivity, and the quality of my work improved tenfold when I started embracing slumps and taking them as an opportunity to read everything I could get my hands on, watch lots of films and shows, go to the theatre, play games, hang out with friends, visit new places, and generally absorb life and marinate my brain in the art of storytelling.

Take from that what you will.

[ID: tweet by @/user0000O0, text reads: sorry i took too long to reply i went to google to check if the word was correct /end ID]

the problem with being creative is that you start to feel very guilty when you haven’t created anything in a while

do you get upset when a field isn't ready for harvest at all times? your seeds are doing mysterious things in the dirt. but you have to leave them hidden in the dirt or they won't grow

Here's a potentially fun one:

The official sad ghost club

What’s the best editing tip you have?

Retype the whole thing.

Seriously.

Like open a fresh doc, put it side by side with the first draft, and start retyping every sentence.

At first you are writing it word for word, but eventually you start to see how clunky a paragraph is, what its missing, what would sound better, and boom. Before you know it you've got a solid 2nd draft to work from.

After that, edits get a lot easier.

(This is my experience anyway. It has helped me so much)

writing be like

feeling that twenty minute gap lads

The pastoralist fantasy of "modern life is too stressful so I should move to a remote area and do hard labor" is so funny

I have a theory about that.

I think that what people want, when they talk about a pastoralist fantasy is actually an anti-capitalistic fantasy: i noticed, even from my experience, that most people don't mind phisical labour if it gives them results: actual, tangible, results.

Once my boss asked me to copy every article from a website and paste them in the new one. It took me roughly four hours for three days to do and my soul was slowly leaving my body. It was easy work, i mean who wouldnt want to earn money to just click here and click there, rinse and repeat? But it was boring, ripetitive and basically useless.

But when I take some time and clean my house, i sweat, i am tired but... satisfied. I see in front of me the result of my hard labour and I am happy, or at least i don't think i wasted my time.

So the fantasy of working hard but at least getting something out of it is appealing: why do people work in kitchens? Or bakeries and wake up at dawn to make bread? Or any hard job like that? I knew a guy that had the possibility of having every job he wanted, but he opened a bar and couldnt be happier.

This is my idea, i'm not a student in sociology or anything but I hope i made a point.

I have two degrees, and my previous job was the marketing department head for an international biotech company. I was well-paid, but dreaded work every morning. The endless cycle of low-grade manipulation and feeling like “making money for someone else to pocket, HELPING no one else” felt miserable.

I left and now work at a garden center. I haul around plants and educate people about them, so they can make informed choices. I help people, and seeing the plants grow under my care is wonderful. My soul is flourishing, my heart is at peace. My coworkers are all honest (as far as I can tell), and there’s no push for upselling or pushing people to buy stuff if it’s not very suited for their landscape.

Even if my wallet is a lot lighter these days, so too are my worries!

I worked IT in a city and fuck. People try to controll your every second. Faster! More efficient! You took a second too long to type that. You drove 56 kmh but could have gone 58 without getting caught. I messaged you a minute ago but you didn't reply so I walked to your cubicle to ask you. Also let's have an efficiency meeting. You are too slow. That's your feedback. How long will that task take? Can we somehow shorten that?

And all for what? To manipulate the user to buy product. Not to improve the website mind you. Whenever I suggested: hey, our website is not useable for the visually impaired/people with motor problems. I got back an: we don't care they're too small of a market value

So can you really blame me for fantasizing about a life where I can just plant flowers and vegetables and walk everywhere without the need of manipulating people and mikromanage my every second

my current job is managing a plasma cutting machine, so i have to spend a lot of time dragging big chunks of iron on and off conveyor belts and i end up sore and filthy at the end of every shift, and usually a bit scratched up.

but it’s third shift and there’s no supervision whatsoever, so while the machine is running, i can type on my phone. i’ve written most of a novel so far with my thumbs, covered in grease and iron dust. and i also produced a lot of construction materials for bridges, dams, warehouses, and skyscrapers.

i really like my job.

This is Marx's theory of alienation.

When people are removed from the tangible results of their labor, they become distressed and dissatisfied - and this is the result of capitalist profit-focused processes.

If the right way is too hard, fuck it. Do it the wrong way.

Folding clothes keeps you from getting the laundry done? Stop folding clothes. Put a basket in your room and throw your unfolded clean stuff into it right out of the dryer, it's fine.

Rinsing dishes off keeps you from loading the dishwasher? Load them dirty and run it twice.

Chopping onions keeps you from making yourself dinner? Buy the freezer bags of chopped onions.

You forget to take your meds and don't want to get out of bed to get them? Start putting them next to the bed.

Can't keep up with the dishes? Get paper plates. Worried about environment impact? Order biodegradable ones online if your local store doesn't have one.

Make the task easier. Put things where you use them instead of where they "go." Eliminate the steps that keep you from finishing the task. Eliminate the task that is stressing you out.

Do it the "wrong" way. It's literally fine.

obsessed with the description of the fabric of the lothlórien cloaks... how could you try approaching this effect irl? I think shot silk, probably chameleon tafetta but with four instead of three colours somehow? Here's an explanation of chameleon tafetta, a very difficult to produce type of fabric.

light but warm silken stuff that the Galadhrim wove. It was hard to say of what colour they were: grey with the hue of twilight under the trees they seemed to be; and yet if they were moved, or set in another light, they were green as shadowed leaves, or brown as fallow fields by night, dusk-silver as water under the stars."

Only silk probably wouldn't be warm enough, so perhaps lined with something warmer on the inside? Hm. OR somehow chameleon tafetta technique but in wool though given the description of the technique in link I don't know how well that could work? Textile people help...

Either way not quite like the movie cloaks.

okay so there’s this book called Weaving Iridescence: Color Play for the Handweaver by Bobbie Irwin.

I now have it as an epub.

It features things like handweaving iridescent fabric with four different colours by hand! And as the author says, “There has been surprisingly little information in popular books and magazines about iridescence in textiles, even though weavers have been creating these magical fabrics deliberately for centuries. This book is intended to help fill that void and is the result of more than a dozen years of study and teaching.” 

here’s an example of a four- colour weave by the author. “This four-color scarf has two warp and two weft colors at every point of interlacement. This plain-weave fabric was woven with rayon sewing thread at 60 e.p.i., which was the closest sett I could use with the 30-dent reed I had available. It required a very gentle beat. Sleying the slippery rayon was difficult because it tended to fall out of the reed unless taped down temporarily.”  and another one;

Woven on a point twill threading, this four-color scarf in 20/2 mercerized cotton has orange and pink in the warp and blue and green in the weft. The sett is 48 e.p.i., doubled in a 24-dent reed.

 I think this is pretty much as close to the effect of the Lothlorien capes it might be possible to get; it doesn’t seem possible to get the fabric to adjust to the environment as described in the books (appearing greyer among the stones etc) but if anyone can think of a way to accomplish that you’re very welcome  to tell me. 

Even if it’s a bit out there and probably only possible in a lab. :)

anyway book seems worth it! 

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2298523-octopus-inspired-camouflage-fabric-can-change-colour-to-blend-in/

huh would you look at that. 

I desperately need everyone to know that 60 EPI, for handweaving is terrifying. That means 60 threads pulled, by hand, through the loom mechanism per inch of width, and 60 throws of the shuttle per inch of length.

this site has one setting

I’m laughing, but there’s a super useful corollary, which my husband calls “the Red Balloon.” He was a defense lawyer and had a fair number of drug addicts come through, and there is a thing where if you’re like, on your first offense, they’ll do a thing where you can go to treatment and if you complete it they’ll take the conviction off your record.  And he would tell his clients, “Look, everyone’s going to tell you not to do drugs. They’re going to say it over and over again. And it’s like, if people tell you not to think of a white elephant, you’re going to think of a white elephant. But the trick to not thinking about a white elephant is to think of a red balloon. So you need to find your red balloon. For some people it’s yoga. For others it’s woodworking. For some people it’s scrapbooking or gardening or any of a long list of things to do. They focus on that, it’s a lot easier to succeed in ignoring the white elephant.” So yeah, “watch yourself” is one thing… but the better idea is to watch something else. (Even if it’s fanfic about werewolves fucking.)

It’s a form of productive dissociation, and is super, super helpful. It’s easy for me to get bogged down in how much pain I’m in… but some of the most painful periods of my life have also been the most productive, writing-wise, because writing is one of my red balloons. 

There is a phrase I use A LOT in my parenting and my son gets very sick of it, but it’s true:

The thing you practise is the thing you get good at.

You may not intentionally be practicing “being grumpy” but if you don’t put effort into practicing “not being grumpy” then I’m afraid that’s what you’re doing. It’s hard! It’s really hard! Sometimes, for some things, it’s pretty much impossible and that sucks!

But being carefully aware that you are going to get good at the things you do most of is a good way to be more careful of what those things are. If that makes sense.

You gotta appreciate sometimes how tumblr works in such a way that everyone who wants to reblog this interesting or useful psychological advice is also forced to reblog the thing about werewolf fucking

Go read an old fic.

There’s such recency bias in fandom. As an author you post something, get a few reactions, and then it goes off into the bin. As a reader you check the tags, see what’s new, and move on. But a lot of old stuff is really good. It’s just sitting there, gathering dust, waiting for someone to take a peek.

So go on. Treat yourself.

Read an old fic.

I’d argue there’s a bias against like… middle-aged fics in particular. A lot of people sort by kudos or bookmarks, but that’s going to be strongly biased toward older fics, which have had more time to accumulate them. Then there’s people that sort by date and read the newest. But there’s so much good material in that middle area.

A friend taught me her trick for smaller fandoms, which is to sort by kudos and use the published date filters to go through the fandom in 6-month increments. Within a 6-month time span, you’re not really going to get the kudos-over-time bias. Basically, you end up reading the best fics of each 6-month period until you start hitting fics below your quality threshold, wherever that is. You’ll find so much good material that way that would never have crossed your line of sight otherwise.

This is a clever idea, and I’m reblogging it so I remember to do it.

So earlier in art class today, someone drew a characters hands in their pockets and mentioned that hands are really like the ultimate end boss of art, and most of us wholeheartedly agreed. So then, our teacher went ahead and free handed like a handful of hands on the board, earning a woah from a couple of students. So the one from earlier mentioned how it barely took the teacher ten seconds to do what I can’t do in three hours. And you know what he responded?

“It didn’t take me ten seconds, it took me forty years.”

And you know, that stuck with me somehow. Because yeah. Drawing a hand didn’t take him fourth years. But learning and practicing to draw a hand in ten seconds did. And I think there’s something to learn there but it’s so warm and my brain is fried so I can’t formulate the actual morale of the lesson.

Saying "I'm not going to draw this thing because I don't know how to draw this thing" is really shooting yourself in the foot, because you've now cut yourself off from an opportunity to grow.

I had a friend in college who was an absolutely amazing artist. I loved seeing his work! One time I said something to the effect of "I could never do that."

He told me something that, as an artist, I resonate with. He said art isn't about natural talent; it's a learned skill. When you tell an artist their level of skill is impossible for you to reach, you're assuming their level of skill is a natural gifting they have, and it discredits the hundreds to thousands of hours of hard work they've put into getting where they are today, and you're cutting yourself off from trying to reach that point yourself.