stuckyparty

[stuckyparty]

jokes to make after failure that aren’t self-deprecating:

I’m the best to ever do it

Nobody saw that (best if said loudly)

No one’s ever done it like me

I could be President/they should make me President

Behold, a mere fraction of my power!

The public wants to be me soooooo bad

I’m an expert in (thing you just failed at)

How could this have happened to god’s favorite princess?

Nothing ibuprofen and a glass of water cant fix

I’m being sabotaged

[stuckyparty]

being a symbolism enjoyer should humble you because at the end of the day no matter how eloquently you articulate it youre essentially saying "i love it when things have meaning"

[stuckyparty]

Corn syrup has gotten such a (deserved) bad rap that everyone is real cagey about saying they have corn syrup in their products, and "grain-based syrup (corn or wheat)" has cost me so many potential snacks. I have a corn allergy. Just say if it's corn syrup, goddammit, I want snacks.

sorry to be brave on the internet but I think food labels should list every single ingredient and that there should be harsher penalties for mislabeling and deceptive labeling

[stuckyparty]

Love when some stupid bullshit app i was forced to install for a singular purpose even though i knew i'd never use it again in my life has the audacity to send me a notification and remind me of its pathetic existence like You fool. had you kept silent, i might have allowed you to languish, forgotten, on the third page of my homescreen for another few months. but no, you simply couldn't resist. "☀️ Mornings are brighter with Zippadee! 😊✨" i'll shoot you like a dog

[stuckyparty]

obligatory leyendecker-style bucky and steve

[stuckyparty]

sebatian stan signed on with marvel and was like cool this will definitely make everyone forget that I launched my career playing tortured homosexuals and that I'll never be as good at anything as I am at crying and kissing boys. And then we didn't

[stuckyparty]

wizard: i have trapped you in a time loop >:)

me, loves routines: oh darn whatever shall i do

[stuckyparty]

I took my little brother (autistic, mostly non verbal) out and he was using his voice keyboard to tell me something, and this little boy (maybe 4 or 5?) heard him and asked me "Is he a robot??" I tried to explain to him that no, he isn't a robot, he just communicates differently, but my darling brother was in the background max volume "I am robot I am robot I am robot I am robot"

[stuckyparty]

big fan of stories that, while undoubtedly being about the power of friendship, acknowledge that the power of incredible violence is just as important

the love was there. the love changed everything. the crowbar helped also

[stuckyparty]

This was going to be a tag rant but I'm putting this in the reblogs instead because, fam, this is literally why people don't like autistic people.

I am doing all the same things you are doing to be social and indicate I'm listening, show you I care, demonstrate that I am looking for a solution and not blaming you for whatever shit thing happened, building community, indicating that you're important to me, etc. I just have to define all the rules and deploy them on purpose.

I say, "Hey, Susan, how are you? How is your dad?" because I have a to-do list in my desk drawer that says, "Susan's dad is in the hospital, ask her about her dad." I put that on my to-do list because I care and want to demonstrate that. It isn't manipulative, I have no ulterior motives. I will Do Work Task for eight hours and go home unless I remind myself other people need maintenance. I like Susan and want to be her friend, and it's hard for me to remember the personal things and follow up, so I write down the tasks required to be a good friend.

It doesn't mean less because I had to write it down. And it's not manipulative. But damn do allistics sense the premeditation and hate it.

there's a fine line between being wary of manipulation and becoming completely paranoid because you get very close to the realisation that pretty much all human interaction involves doing things we hope will lead to a result we like

[stuckyparty]

Need to deploy some sort of mandatory seminar to IT people, "How to make your security upgrade instructions not look like a phishing email"

[stuckyparty]

[stuckyparty]

Idk who needs to hear this but bisexuality includes trans people. Not "it can" include trans people or it "sometimes" includes trans people. It does. It always has. Any bisexual who says there's doesn't is just a transphobe and doesn't fucking represent what we're about.

[stuckyparty]

Hi! Hope you're doimg well! I wanted to ask, what do you do when you get stuck when writing? Like, I know I want to go from point A to point B, but I'm stuck at point A and not sure how to get to point B.

nonny i am busting in here all excitedly like the koolaid man at four in the god o’clock of the morning to answer this, because I ACTUALLY KNOW THIS ONE: 

the solution to this issue is, in fact, square brackets. like this: [???]

what? you say. how works this? you say. READ ON I WILL TELL YOU

so right now in the scene i’m trying to pull together/make into prose, from tattered drafts/sentences/allcaps/bullet points/etc., i have three things that need to happen: 1) police will search a suspect’s house, 2) one of them has to find something incriminating, 3) the suspect’s son has to burst in and cause a lot of trouble. those are my B points. but right now, i’m stuck at point A: shen yi and he rongyue are sitting in the car talking about feelings when they need to get out and go do their damn jobs. how do i get them to move. why aren’t they moving. why are they still sitting there talking, this isn’t brunch goddammit.

at this point as a writer, you get to make a decision: EITHER a) your idea about what needs to happen in this scene was all wrong, and the reason you’re “stuck” at point A is that maybe point A is actually a very interesting place for your characters to linger inside, and maybe they really need to be there a while longer, in case they have things to say or do. and point B maybe isn’t the point B you thought it was going to be, but it’s going to be something different (maybe shen yi and he rongyue realize they need backup, or they decide they’re going someplace else to do something different, instead).

OR: square brackets. it works like this. (and by the way i learned this from @seperis because she is literally a genius, thank you sep darling you should know saved my whole entire life.) here is some of my draft to illustrate:

[shen yi and he rongyue saying a bunch of words about feelings and things not related to the case they’re supposed to be investigating]

“I wonder,” said Shen Yi thoughtfully, “what would happen if you just asked her to go for a walk with you?”

[TK]

Shen Yi stopped in front of the painting and looked at it, at first out of habit, and then more closely, as he instinctively stepped back the correct distance to see both the whole canvas at once as well as its technique. From the other room, he could hear He Rongyue and [Name of Her Assistant] doing [something something something]. He still had on nitrile gloves, so he came closer again, to touch the varnish, feel along the grooves of the brushwork. He frowned. This wasn’t a reproduction—this was a genuine [name of painter redacted bc it’s a plot point and a surprise].

[TK]

“What the fuck are you people doing in my house?” came an aggrieved voice from the landing. Everyone turned to look up at the young man standing there, keys in one hand, a cup of iced coffee in the other. He was, Shen Yi realized, Huang Wei, and that was neither unexpected nor a particular problem, but the person with him was probably going to be a very particular problem indeed.

you can see how i gestured towards three different parts of this scene, even though i didn’t finish any of them here and have no idea what the connective tissue will be between them. and i did this by skipping huge wads of prose and just tossing in “[TK]” for now. ”TK” by the way is an abbreviation i learned while working for newspapers/magazines; journalists use it to mean “to come,” as in, “something important is missing here so i promise i will make a bunch of phone calls and get that detail/fact shoved in there before we go to press.” We use TK instead of TC because you can word-search TK and that letter combination isn’t in any english words (or at least very few; anyway i can’t think of any).

at some point, of course, you will have to fill in “[TK]” or rather, i will, here with all the stuff that’s missing—dialogue, action, and description, mostly; i tend not to summarize or use exposition much, but usually default to telling a story in-scene (a time-honored tradition in fanfic). but the beauty of TK and above all, the square brackets, is that you don’t bog down. you don’t go down a research rabbit hole because you can’t remember the name of He Rongyue’s assistant (Xiao something? Feng?) and you don’t wind yourself into knots figuring out how to get them out of the car and into the house. you keep moving, like a shark.

so if you’re stuck getting from A to B? stop trying to get from A to B. just SKIP there, skip to where you want to be. throw in “[something goes here]” so you remember to go back and add it later. if you have a general idea of what goes there, put that instead: “[somehow they get out of the car still talking and head inside. oh wait how do they break the door down. is jiang xue with them?]”—like that.

the trick with any piece of fic longer than, say, 7-8k, is NOT to get bogged down. anything with multiple scenes, really—even if you have, say, five scenes planned for your oneshot, you will find one really easy to write and then you’ll stare at the next one, which SHOULD be easy to write, for eleventy hours, sweating like that gif of jordan peele. don’t do that. just put “[this is the scene where chen fei throws a chair and ruan nanzhu says something cutting and walks out, and that’s the moment chen fei knows he actually likes the bastard.]” then skip! skip, skip. skip to the moment where you know the next thing that will happen! write that part instead! “it’s two years later and chen fei is furious, because he has to see that lovesick look on ruan nanzhu’s face whenever he thinks qiushi isn’t paying attention. the worst part is that lin qiushi is genuinely loveable, so chen fei can’t even hate him. he starts hiding in his room.” etc.

the thing about writing ANYTHING is not to lose momentum, not to get stuck in what novelist robert pirsig called “a gumption trap.” or, as alec baldwin’s character says in glengarry glen ross: always be closing. keep moving! don’t sit in one place too long or you really will get stuck. if you find yourself fussing with a paragraph, or adding more to a scene when you didn’t mean to add more instead of stopping and moving on, or pacing around the house irritated with yourself, drink a lot of very cold water and then SKIP.

skip to the part where you know what happens. if you don’t know what happens, either go for a long walk and think about what exactly Han Juwon or Naruto or Bob the Builder or Taylor Swift or Viktor Nikiforov or Wang Meng or whomstthefuckever would do/say in this situation. after about 15-20 minutes i’m usually either turning around to go home and write it down, or giving myself complicate mnemonics based on trees and street signs, so i have a chance of remembering what i just realized absolutely has to happen next in the story.

in conclusion:

1. [TK!] [square brackets are your friends!] [you can use them!] [to skip ahead!] [and leave a stuck spot BYYYYYEEEE hit da bricks] [and just go to a more pleasant spot where there’s a shady tree and some soft green grass to lie on]

2. …and then later when you take another pass through the document, on some day when you’re mentally fresher and maybe you haven’t read it for a couple days, you’ll find yourself adding a few sentences. or one sentence. or some words. it’s fine. it’s all fine. look we can’t all be out here writing a million words a year. some people do, sure. as writer annie dillard says, some people eat cars. but if you want to write something with some bite to it, some texture and grit and heft, you’re gonna endure some tortuous slowness and a lot of [TK]. so best start getting real comfortable with that now. if you wanted an easy hobby i have some difficult news for you, you picked the wrong fucking one.

3. the reward for your patience with yourself and your writing process will be all those times when you’re driving, showering, cooking, and/or DMing with bestie, and suddenly What's About To Happen Next will hit you like a bolt of lightning and nearly scalp you in the process. holy shit, you’ll say to yourself, stunned. i now know exactly who’s coming through the door with huang wei and it’s not at all who i thought it was. (this jolt of electricity is why people are pantsers, by the way. we suffer through our own cluelessness for an eternity, just to have that one shocking moment of godlike clarity. the crash usually sucks but the high is unbelievable.) (and i say this, but i always have an outline. i just usually mostly ignore it, because apparently my continued survival is predicated on the fact that imaginary people talk in my head and i just write down what they say.)

4. finally i have ABSOLUTELY written fics of every length just to get to One Particular Scene which i wrote first. i wrote the ending of my current long wip really early on, and everything leading up to it has just been me trying to figure out: okay, so what’s it going to take to get them there? in the words of george w. bush, whom i am not much given to quoting, you are the decider. you can decide to write your fic backwards if you want to! write C first and then go back and add B and at the very end A! no one will ever know, it’s between you and your drafts. then you can do what i do, and write an excessively long nervous a/n about it all, when you post.

this got long but tldr just remember: [tk]. love you have fun writing!!! <3 <3

[stuckyparty]

Congress is back in session this week. If any of these Republican senators represent you, let them know in no uncertain terms that they must not enact Trump’s Big Ugly Bill that would make devastating cuts to Medicaid and food assistance programs to finance tax cuts predominantly going to the super rich.

[stuckyparty]

"There's no platonic explanation for this."

I genuinely worry about some of yalls friendships.

[stuckyparty]

Let’s go back to addressing each other by second name, so we can experience the unbearable intimacy of calling out our beloved’s first name when great distress momentarily makes us lose our restraint.