megofnuts

[megofnuts]

“It is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, from Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2020)

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for the love of god, write all the self-indulgent scenes you want.  be utterly  shameless about including every last fantasy.  i know everyone likes to share quotes and quips about how miserably hard writing is, but please please try thinking of it as a joyful act where you get to be a messy human who makes art rather than some pain filled quest for icy perfection.

[megofnuts]

Everyone gets “The 90s” look wrong and I hate it

Couple years ago I saw these two board games at the store back to back. Well, not saw them per se, but ya know. Spied them out of the corner of my eye. And for a moment without reading the text, I couldn’t tell you which was which decade at first. Funny. Either they were in a rush to get these out the door or they wanted their throwback trivia game boxes to look uniform. I didn’t think too much of it.

Only, from then on I started seeing it MORE. Every time someone markets a 90s or 80s throwback…

Goddammit they’re identical! What??! How did we let this happen? As a 90s survivor and a designer, this drives me up a wall.

Look, I know I’m late to the party to complain about “the 90s look” when we’re just starting to get sick of the Y2K nostalgia train. But c’mon, the 90s were not The 80s: Part Two™ 

Trust me when I say that we weren’t all wearing neon trapezoids up until the year 2000. The 90s look being peddled is so specific to the tail end of the 80s and an early early part of the 90s - a part of the 90s when it wouldn’t stop being the 80s. This is Memphis design being conflated with the wrong decade.

Keep reading for a long ass graphic design history lesson and pictures of old soda and fast food.

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[megofnuts]

To everyone who has lush fields ripe with story ideas but is struggling to go out and actually harvest them with your writer’s scythe: that’s alright. There’s a reason.

I see writers despairing or making self-deprecating jokes about how many wips they have, as if the ability to come up with the idea is equal to the ability to finish it out into an end product.

It isn’t.

A lot of our ideas come about, not because we were determined to be productive writers, but because daydreaming is an internal escape from life’s demands.

Writing is a demand, too.

Resting and relaxing are basic needs, unlike the high level, abstract satisfaction of being creatively productive. That’s why you might daydream (which is a mild and normal form of dissociation) ideas that you feel good about, and then struggle to research, write the words, fill plotholes, check grammar, revise— all the critical thinking and executive function things involved in creation. Your basic needs must be satisfied before your higher needs can be met effectively.

So, if you’re daydreaming about your stories extensively to mitigate stress, it’s expecting a lot of your stressed self to return from fantasy land, sit down in the cold hard real world and do the hard work to write masterpieces of literature. Those operations are at opposite ends of the spectrum.

Writing is hard. Making yourself feel guilty is only going to make it harder. You don’t have to atone for entertaining or distracting your mind by making that available to other people. Daydreaming is a valid end in itself.

Don’t feel bad about having ideas but not being able to write them. Scribble some notes if you can, if you want, but above all enjoy the escapism and take care of yourself first. The words will come after.

[megofnuts]

“We met at the wrong time. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway. Maybe one day years from now, we’ll meet in a coffee shop in a far away city somewhere and we could give it another shot.”

— Unknown

[megofnuts]

A SILK AND METAL-THREAD EMBROIDERED PANEL DECCAN, INDIA, 18TH CENTURY.

[megofnuts]

today is great day to create something, to fill the void with a piece of yourself that wasnt there before and to push back against the darkness. you can create a song or painting or sandwich or a walk in the park or even a MOMENT. use this mighty power to defy the cosmic nothing

[megofnuts]

hey. don’t cry. crush four cloves of garlic into a pot with a dollop of olive oil and stir until golden then add one can of crushed tomatoes a bit of balsamic vinegar half a tablespoon of brown sugar half a cup of grated parmesan cheese and stir for a few minutes adding a handful of fresh spinach until wilted and mix in pasta of your choice ok?

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[megofnuts]

[ID: A “This Barbie is” generated movie poster with a photo of a hand pointing directly toward you and the caption edited to read “This Barbie is not working on their WIPs.” End ID]

[megofnuts]

i achieved my wildest little creature dreams this weekend and turned my regular bed into a mossbed and it’s everything i’ve ever wanted in a snooze spot

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LIghthouse keepers will never be memorialized like soldiers or cops because they didn’t kill anyone (as part of their job) but they’re like, heroes who saved untold lives through discipline and self-sacrifice doing an impossible lonely job and I’m worked up about  it 

[megofnuts]

“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”

— Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver (b. 8 April 1955)

[megofnuts]

friend!

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[megofnuts]

“Thoughts on one of the hardest things: banishing the imagined bad faith reader from your writing process” by Melissa Febos on Twitter is hitting really hard today.

[megofnuts]

no idea if this is true, but it feels true