This song is completely lyrically nonsensical. But

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This song is completely lyrically nonsensical. 

But it’s Oscar again, and I’m weirdly a sucker for the falsetto. (I also really enjoy the way the camera lens is fogged so you can’t really see him in the halo from the light behind him. It’s an aesthetic.) It’s just the high range of a tenor voice like that, the transition from the head-voice to the chest-voice, you don’t get a ton of that in pop music. But girls’ parts are always written so you have to do that transition all the time, and it’s, I dunno. The aesthetic. I keep deleting personal rants about my life as a folksinger in these posts, and this is another one of those, so I’ll stop here. 

Anyway. That aesthetic is why I’ve watched this video like twenty-five times, and so it’s really sunk in. And so one of the songs Poe sings has taken on a lot of the aesthetic of this song, melodically (none of the idiosyncratic pauses or odd structure, just some of the cresting melodic elements and a bit of the meditative sweetness). So, the imaginary song, is just a pop song about an unfaithful lover, a little over-sentimental but very popular.

At one point, Poe is in a noisy room full of frightened people, so he starts singing a trite patriotic song about the now-basically-defunct New Republic, to kind of kick off an unofficial performance they’re doing to kind of calm the volatile morale of the suddenly-overcrowded base. The room quiets down, and by the end of the patriotic song people are paying attention to him, and it’s a little more poignant than it ought to have been; this trite song is, after all, about a defeated government that most of the people in the room had served. 

Now, this popular ballad that’s going around the holo exchanges, about the unfaithful lover– coincidentally, its chorus transitions beautifully straight into the chorus of the trite patriotic song. Poe and the other musicians he plays with have often done that transition, to humorous effect– everyone knows the song, it’s popular, everyone cries about their lost loves, then bam! suddenly it’s this stodgy patriotic song, everyone laughs. 

Spontaneously, with everyone staring at him and the trite patriotic song a little too relevant, Poe transitions the other direction, into the popular ballad. Straight from “For The Republic” right into, more or less, “my baby done me wrong”. And sort of inadvertently, sort of serendipitously, he makes a powerful point about how the New Republic’s inaction betrayed them all. 

So, anyway. (Later, Rey hears the recording BB-8 made of this performance, which got popular on the holo exchanges too, and the popular ballad is popular enough that even she’s heard it, and she realizes then that what Poe does in the Resistance is not “just” piloting.)

I made an AO3 post for Dealing With Your Inevitable Crush On Poe Dameron. It seemed the wise thing..

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I made an AO3 post for Dealing With Your Inevitable Crush On Poe Dameron. It seemed the wise thing to do. That way it can be linked to the art and the podfic in a more permanent fashion. 

First thing I’ve posted on AO3 since mid-December, so– it seemed like it was time. 

I also uh. May have uh. Another short thing to put up there that got too long for Tumblr. 

Maybe. Gotta edit it though. We’ll see.

I’m so close to finishing the whole novel, I need to buckle down and do that. I might need encouragement. I don’t know what would encourage me. I need to get off the computer too, is the problem, I have to actually live my actual life or I’ll go insane. I don’t want to, but I ought to.

Anyway. Having accomplished one thing, maybe others will follow more easily.

Another thing I need to do today is fix my Dreamwidth. It’s not really compatible with Tumblr tags, so the crossposter is broken, so if I put any tags on a thing here, it won’t crosspost. I have to fix that, just *not tagging* things is not how Tumblr works.  

When your dude makes you brunch. I took the photo and laughed,...

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When your dude makes you brunch.
I took the photo and laughed, because in the background was a bourbon bottle I’d left out on the table, but IG’s square format crops it out, aiding in the careful curation of the image of my life.

Mending. Long overdue chore. These are sheets,

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Mending. Long overdue chore. These are sheets, that’ll free up a lot of room in the mending basket!

so i was just reading a book of gothic literature and i stumbled upon "the yellow wallpaper" which r

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Heck yeah! It’s considered by some to have pioneered psychological horror and “weird fiction,” having been cited by H.P. Lovecraft as one of his major inspirations.

There’s a pdf of it here for anyone else who wants to read: http://ift.tt/1tBx1hH
It was also a story with a strong social message, based on the author’s personal experiences. Back then it was normal for women to be diagnosed with a vague sort of “madness” or “hysteria” if they were unhappy or stressed in any way, and the “treatments” ranged from the nonsensical to the barbaric. She explained it all here: 

 For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia–and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to “live as domestic a life as far as possible,” to “have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,” and “never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again” as long as I lived. This was in 1887.
       I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.

       Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again–work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite–ultimately recovering some measure of power.

       Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had  hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad. He never acknowledged it.

       The little book is valued by alienists and as a good specimen of one kind of literature. It has, to my knowledge, saved one woman from a similar fate–so terrifying her family that they let her out into normal activity and she recovered.

       But the best result is this. Many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper.

       It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.

I’m doing very badly at staying focused and

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I’m doing very badly at staying focused and finishing the damn novel. Clearly, being quiet and sitting by myself is not the way to go. I need some form of encouragement. But I feel like nobody’s particularly active today online. 

I did lose my tiny mind last night and write about 3k of crack about @deputychairman‘s tags about the just-shower-thoughts post. I’ll put that up on AO3 but I feel like nobody’s around to read it right now, and I shamelessly need attention so I’m going to hang onto that until I think someone would actually read it. I *just* broke my 3-month silence on AO3, I need a little time to let that settle. 

The problem is that the crack wants a sequel, and it really really wants Jess Pava to overcome her shyness and explain her sexual fantasies to Rey. Hey, man. When I write id, I really write id, okay? 

None of this is helping me write the end of the novel, though. I sort of need somebody to talk to me about it or something but since I don’t know what to ask, that wouldn’t be much of a conversation. 

It’s a hard transition, I think, to switch to trying to have something beta-read when you’re used to posting as you go. I got some really important and objectively phenomenal feedback on the first section, but at the moment I’ve mostly just got myself all twisted up worrying about if the second section is just too much to read and did I fuck up and blah blah unhelpful brainweasels. (I *am* perhaps justified in freaking out that the link to the second section didn’t work, though, I just am so bad at passwords that i’m afraid to log out to check.)

tl;dr it’s too quiet and I’m lonely and stressing myself out. I need to wrap this shit up because I’m going back out to the farm next week and there’s no time while I’m there. 

So if you’re online, do drop me a line in chat, my dude is really absorbed in coding and I’m getting The Fear off this blinking cursor.

Hey! *waves* Writing is def hard, though I think that can be half the fun.

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If it were all easy it wouldn’t be worth doing. There’d be nothing satisfying in it. I just. It’s not the writing. It’s the surrounding stuff. 

Yeah ok it’s the writing too. 

*waves back* Hi! :)

Oh.Domhnall Gleeson does have green eyes. I thought

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Oh.

Domhnall Gleeson does have green eyes. I thought that was just a fanfic thing.

My dude has green eyes and we’d been going together (this is a coy way of saying that we never dated, I basically just moved in) for kind of a while before I figured out that they weren’t blue. And I’m such an awkward piece of shit, I still remember that I said “what the hell are your eyes they’re weird” and he gave me this look like he was pretty sure I was crazy, which he probably was, he gave me that look a lot (after all, we never dated, I just moved into his apartment, because that’s how people do, right– kids, I’m bad at life, don’t ever think I’m not)– and he said, like he was talking to a very small child, “They’re green.” 

And I actually had never known anyone with green eyes before, it turns out they’re sort of uncommon. 

So I’m real used to green eyes in novels and things, and my whole life I just sort of assumed they were kind of not really a thing, and for fifteen years now I’ve been living with a dude with green eyes and there’s still a big part of my brain that’s like, but that’s just people being flowery in stories that’s not real.

No, they really are a thing. 

In my feeble defense, basically everyone I know has blue eyes and I just figured green was a shade of blue and so it was just poetic description. Nope! They’re actually different.

They’re also nothing like the books make them sound. They’re always being compared to grass and emeralds and things, so forgive me for thinking that it was unfeasible. (Because blue eyes *can* be like sapphires, or like the sea or steel or whatever; mine are a dull unprepossessing shade, but my father and my sisters have lovely deep-blue eyes.) (Green eyes are a kind of washed-out opaque that is hard to describe, so I sort of can’t and sort of totally do blame romance-novel authors for not even fucking trying.)

generallyhuxurious: crackedverbosity: lyhaonguyen: permian-tro...

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generallyhuxurious:

crackedverbosity:

lyhaonguyen:

permian-tropos:

venificas:

“dark black eyes”

yeah they’re fucking hazel get with the program fic writers

on that note can we talk about hux’s “blue” eyes??? they’re green. sorry. they r green. greeny green.

Wait according to the Wookieepedia it said Hux’s eyes are blueCan anyone enlighten me

Okay, so.  I, too, have been confused by the Hux thing, but let’s clarify a few things about Kylo Ren.  In the novelization, they speak of Kylo Ren’s “dark” eyes.  Also,  it lists “brown” for Kylo Ren’s eyes, as far as Wookieepedia is concerned.

As a person with hazel eyes, I can tell you that sometimes, my eyes look black.  Sometimes, they look green.  Sometimes, they look gold.  It depends on what I’m wearing, what the light is doing, and multiple other factors.  Black tends to make my eyes look dark brown.  It’s not incorrect to write Kylo Ren in a similar fashion, so how about we NOT jump on the writers for this?   That’s not necessary.  ;)

Hazel eyes read very differently depending on lighting and surrounding colour palettes. Similarly, this is one of Domhnall Gleeson’s eyes from a Harry Potter promo photo. There’s not just green/grey/blue in there but some touches of gold as well at the bottom of the iris. Like hazel eyes they’re going to depend on the lighting. During the Starkiller speech with all the snowy lighting effects and the red of the fire, his eyes are definitely a very pale icy blue, during “Careful, Ren” I read them more as green. Personally in fics I will ALWAYS call them turquoise cos I’m pretentious and it sits in the middle of the colour options. Eyes are weird! 

HAHA great timing on this, I was just writing about this. 

Eye color is so subjective and changes so much depending on reflection and such, and I barely notice it in real life, and it’s always such a big deal in fic. Like– I’d complain more about this but I totally do it too. I’m kind of really enjoying the novelty of an OT3 where everyone’s eyes are brown because you can just– stop fussing with fucking adjectives, all right? 

And it’s not like even very dark brown eyes don’t change depending on reflections and all, but it’s just less of a thing.