#so it is something

[not-poignant]

🤯, 🤭 & 💔 for the kinkmeme

🤯 What's a genre you struggle with as a writer (ex. romance, action, etc.)?

The ones I'm not writing, lmao.

Okay but in all seriousness, I would say I struggle with mysteries, because I don't enjoy them in general. (I'm that person who always looks up the answer so I don't have to deal with the 'mystery' part which I generally find incredibly boring, so no, I can't really write the genre either). Ditto westerns.

I actually don't think I really struggle with romance, contemporary, action, fantasy, adventure, science fiction, erotica etc. I don't even struggle with hard science fiction. I don't think I'd struggle that much with horror or psychological or even supernatural thriller. Every time I've written elements of horror or thriller genres into my works, it's been pretty well-received actually. I'm just not really drawn to it. Genres are pretty easy to 'get' frankly (I did a media degree, I have done tertiary study of genre, so...formulas I understand). I struggle less with genre and more with base conceptuals that can be found in any genre - for example, I struggle with plot-based over character-based storylines. And that's true in any genre.

Oh! Actually I think maybe I struggle with procedurals and 'case of the week' style writing. That's what Eversion was supposed to be, and I profoundly did not like doing it, so basically removed Connor from the case and told a different story, lol, so I think that's one too!

🤭 Do you have a favorite tag to use when posting your works?

It's two and they go hand in hand: Angst and hurt/comfort. I think they're on just about every single one of my works. And they're usually among the first two I add.

💔 Is there a fic of yours that broke your heart?

Hmmm.

Strange Sights because it represents a time in my life that was extremely damaging for me, to the point where I nearly have deleted it several times (I won't though, it doesn't hurt in the same way anymore - time heals some wounds and all that).

All of The Ice Plague because it just did so badly re: engagement (Underline the Black is about to eclipse TIP 3 for kudos in almost a quarter of the time and far less words, lol, sigh), and it became the death knell of the Fae Tales canon, which was supposed to continue. I grieved that for years, on and off, until I finally accepted reality. In TIP 1, we could say it was just...teething issues. In TIP 2 (which did worse than TIP 1) we could be like 'oh well, these things happen.' In TIP 3, which has done the worst of any long fic I've ever written, across two separate accounts, I just put my head in my hands and never felt further away from trying to draw in readers and keeping my career going. I can't tell you how many times I nearly quit.

(I had some great times writing it, but I also had a lot of 'why am I even still doing this to myself' times while writing it too, and then I'd remember the readers that were engaging with it and commenting on it, and I'd remember like... I need to make a living, and I'd also remember that the characters deserved their happy ending, and I'd keep going).

Honestly, nothing else really comes close to TIP, especially TIP 3. I actually felt relieved when it ended. Everything I've written since has been more popular and drawn in more people. It speaks for itself. It just makes me sad as well, that proportionately, less than 1/7 of the readers of Game Theory ever got to read Augus and Gwyn's true happy ending and epilogue, in All that We Were, All That We Will Ever Be. It's just a massive drop off overall, and makes me feel like I let folks down.

-

From the fandom meme

[james-p-sullivan]

the older i get and the closer i am to reaching 30, the more the people around me try to deny me my age. it’s a constant ‘oh you’re just turning 29 again teehee 🤭’ or ‘dont tell your SO that, he’ll leave you for a younger model 😉’ and i just???? hate it?????????

i spent my entire teenaged years fighting for my life. i crawled through the deepest pits of my depression to cling to the promise of a life beyond that pain. i was so convinced that i was going to die young, that i would never see the grace of my age starting with a 2, let alone 3.

so im going to turn 30, and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do to stop me from loving it.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The math just adds up!

[pirateprincessjess]

Men are being very normal about the new Godzilla design

[paper-cities]

[vivi266]

[chiisana-lion]

[anarchopuppy]

I, a hearing person who likes subtitles just as a preference, shouldn't have to read a subtitle that's obvious nonsense, go back a couple seconds, and listen again in order to figure out what's going on. An accessibility feature should not be the most half-assed part of a professionally made production. Scripted media has absolutely no excuse for not having subtitles or having subtitles that aren't perfectly verbatim. Professional captioning services should be ashamed of the shoddy work that they put out. Captions should be treated as a part of the production, just like filming, editing, audio balancing, etc - and anything that releases with missing or bad captions should be seen as unfinished

[sirsheoth]

I kiss you with tongue and as that happens I slide an ibuprofen in your mouth since you have a headache

[thatrandomblogsays]

Annabeth: I, a child, had to earn Thalia’s love, that’s how the world works! I have to earn my moms love. Love is transactional, you gotta be worthy of it first silly :)

Percy, listening to this on the train

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[obsob]

i am a being capable of immeasurable love and whimsy

[ibtisams]

My father was martyred by Israel on 10 October 2023 after sacrificing his care in hospital so the injured children could take priority. Today would have been his 60th birthday. He was always selfless, kind, and giving for others. My father gave up everything for me to be able to have a better life, because that is what he always dreamed for me and my sister. The world suffered a great loss when he died, and my heart is always with him and every Palestinian who has lost someone.

In his honour and memory, I would love for anyone who is able to do so to consider donating to The Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.

The PCRF is an amazing organisation that does so much for those in Gaza right now, including helping provide food, water and medicine. You can donate any amount you are able to- there is no minimum! My father would have given his very last cent if he saw the way Palestine was continuing to suffer after over 100 days with this limited aid, so I know celebrating him by helping others is the least he would have wanted.

I saw @parrot-parent do a very successful donation match and I thought it was such a good idea so I will also match all donations up to $500! If you feel comfortable sending me proof of the amount of your donation, I will match it as a donation at the end of February. (My messages are set to mutuals only, but if you donate and we aren’t mutuals if you send an ask with the proof I will make sure to answer it privately.)

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Expertise can't help you here.

[millificent]

Every Nico Di Angelo fan focusing more on the background of the episode than the actual plot

[druid-for-hire]

[image id: a four-page comic. it is titled "immortality” after the poem by clare harner (more popularly known as “do not stand at my grave and weep”). the first page shows paleontologists digging up fossils at a dig. it reads, “do not stand at my grave and weep. i am not there. i do not sleep.” page two features several prehistoric creatures living in the wild. not featured but notable, each have modern descendants: horses, cetaceans, horsetail plants, and crocodilians. it reads, “i am a thousand winds that blow. i am the diamond glints on snow. i am the sunlight on ripened grain. i am the gentle autumn rain.” the third page shows archaeopteryx in the treetops and the skies, then a modern museum-goer reading the placard on a fossil display. it reads, “when you awaken in the morning’s hush, i am the swift uplifting rush, of quiet birds in circled flight. i am the soft stars that shine at night. do not stand at my grave and cry.” the fourth page shows a chicken in a field. it reads, “i am not there. i did not die” / end id]

a comic i made in about 15 hours for my school’s comic anthology. the theme was “evolution”