dragonlady7 | Dec. 2nd, 2016

Dec. 2nd, 2016

via http://ift.tt/2fRl3AM:deputychairman replied to your post “I hadn’t actually read the entire expanded thinkpiece about bringing…”

Post truth is a fucking terrifying place, isn’t it? We’ll give £350 million to the NHS, you’ll give people the ‘right’ to bring back child labour - as you say, what *are* facts, anyway? They’re for liberals and left wingers and losers, apparently

I have this new thing I do since november 9th where every morning I wake up two hours before I have to get up and I just lie there and fucking Dread Everything.

I don’t know. Facts don’t matter. I don’t know. He’s having fucking victory rallies as we speak. I don’t know. It’s like being on a seesaw between total despair and spitting defiance and it’s absolutely dizzying. And I get the headlines mixed up on the two sides of the ocean, because the way news works on the Internet makes it not super clear who’s really talking about what. Does anybody believe anything anymore? Is anything actually real anyway? I mean, what does anything mean?

Nothing means anything. Truth is a construct, and history is a fabrication and a conceit.

Everything is new, and everything is terrifying.

via http://ift.tt/2gS9OJk:Exxon CEO being considered for U.S. Secretary of State:

danceswchopstck:

No. Just No. If you don’t want U.S. foreign policy spearheaded by an oilman who is committed to courses of action that would drastically worsen the kinds of climate problems already affecting people all over the world, click the link above and sign your opposition.

ANYONE can sign this one—not just U.S. residents. There’s a place to enter a zip code, but if you don’t have one, keep scrolling down and you’ll come to a place where you can indicate your country.

Please pass the word, especially those of you with significant follower counts!

via http://ift.tt/2fRkdns:
I feel like I’m in the final scene of the main story, before the epilogue, but I’m sure I’ll find other things I need to wrap up.

And part of the characterization is that the POV character is extremely tired, a bit physically battered, extremely emotionally beat-up, and near the end of his rope. He’s just worn down to almost nothing, and he’s trying to, he’s not even sure what he’s trying to do, he’s trying to get an answer about a friend he thinks might be dead, he’s really not sure, maybe nobody knows, but he has to try to find out at least. He’s so tired, see. And everything hurts.

And I’m so tired, just now. I’ve been close to tears all day, all week. Everything is just so much, and so– out of my control, and terrible. And I don’t know what to do but life has to go on. And so I’m. This scene is probably the only thing I could write, under the circumstances. But it is going very slowly, and very painfully, and i keep pausing every half-sentence to go refresh the Internet, and everything I see makes me almost cry.

Petting the cat makes me almost cry. I made tea, and almost cried. I put whiskey in it, and almost cried; of late I am too overwrought to drink, not out of self-preservation but because it’s too hard to figure out what to drink, see.

The cat just rolled over so her head is upside-down, and that almost made me cry.

And he just, this character, he can’t find if anybody knows what happened to his friend, and he’s so tired, he might just– sit down here, but if he sits down he won’t get up. And he’s not going to cry because he can’t do that in public and he’s too tired to cry anyway. But he can’t– there’s no answer, and he can’t do anything, and he can’t rest.

It’s all just a little too vivid, at the moment, but I just– I want it to be over, I’m almost done, I can’t rest.

via http://ift.tt/2fNTBbW:
I think a lot of people do. I know a particular extremely popular author who does 30k chapters in extremely-multi-chaptered works, and people love that. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a long chapter.

I just feel like, for myself, I’ve sort of set 10k-word-chunk goals, and consistency is good right, and I don’t think that at all as a reader?, but it has been a good discipline for me as an author– i check the word count, and if it’s 4k, I haven’t done enough work yet, and if it’s 9k, then I’m probably at a good stopping point. And then I go back and peep the chapter and think that over, and if we’re good, I push it, and if it’s not, I rearrange, then make an effort to get it back up to between 7-11k, and then I post it.

It’s just so hard to get perspective on your stuff, otherwise– sometimes 4k takes, like, a breezy afternoon of composition, and you have gin and tonics and laugh alone with salad and so on and it just flows and you’re like oh that was nothing, ho ho, and people think this is hard or something, I am So Naturally Talented Ah-Ha-Ha. And sometimes 4k is like pulling your own guts out through your teeth and it’s awkward and messy and takes you two weeks and you’re pretty sure you’re going to die, and you are inwardly certain you have just written three novels and also that the sweet release of death would be a mercy.

So having that approximate wordcount goal has substituted as a proxy for perspective, for me. And there are some chapters that are 6k long, probably because they came out nice and easy and then the next piece was a dense undigestible chunk of a single scene that was 7k long and full of horrors.

But since I’m sort of overdue for The End, I’m trying to simultaneously keep it from sprawling, and also make sure I don’t cheap out on any of the promises I made earlier. Some of y’all’s arcs are only gonna get brief wrap-ups, but at least they’ll be mentioned. Some of them, though, I think I’ve got redundant scenes, and scenes that don’t serve the pacing.

But I’m so tired, and I want it to be done, and cutting is much harder than adding.

via http://ift.tt/2fSKXUA:
deputychairman:

I love my colleagues very very much but this morning one of them is on leave and the other two are nearly an hour late and really it just gives me so much uninterrupted quality time with the internet that I don’t normally get and sometimes i need to be able to CONCENTRATE on my feelings about Star Wars, you know?

#99% of my life i am trying to do at least 2 things at once#this is why i don’t watch videos you know #you have to watch AND listen#like who’s got the time for THAT?

ME TOO about the videos! I don’t ever ever ever click on them. There are videos I’ve sent to people without having watched first. I don’t click through even if there’s nobody to hear, I don’t have time for that shit. (The vast majority of my overstuffed Drafts folder is videos I’ve been convinced I *must* watch. I don’t. They sit there. I go through about once a year and delete them.)

I actually get uninterrupted quality time with the Internet for like 45 minutes basically every morning because nobody pays attention to me during that time. Sometimes it’s bad though. Sometimes I get Too Into It. And then the person who cares shows up and I look up through a haze of tears and ask him what year it is because I don’t know. And then I have to pretend I’ve been doing real work this whole time. And I’m just really emotional about how many Fuji Instax camera cases we’ve sold that we don’t have in stock yet. [I have a Pavlovian response of shutting my laptop when I hear his keys jingling in the other room. I Always Know when it’s him, even if nobody in the other room greets him. Nobody else puts their keys away like that. I’m super good at this. I could be a secret agent. But I really do wonder what he thinks, because every day he gets to the windowless cubbyhole in the back that he and I are crammed into, and I’m sitting there with invoices all over my desk staring owl-eyed at him like I’m high or something, and when he asks about the status of various things I’m all chirpy like “I was just about to find that out, I had to restart!” which is plausible but eerily coincidental that it happens every day.]

There is an under-appreciated art of Looking Busy that i just don’t think people really appreciate. It’s impossible not to resent someone who’s openly fucking off, but it’s really hard to get mad at someone who constantly seems like they’re right on the cusp of getting shit done but always thwarted by some nebulous thing.

via http://ift.tt/2fZZy4c:
barryjenkins:

ninebagatelles:

“We often have to explain to young people why study is useful. It’s pointless telling them that it’s for the sake of knowledge, if they don’t care about knowledge. Nor is there any point in telling them that an educated person gets through life better than an ignoramus, because they can always point to some genius who, from their standpoint, leads a wretched life. And so the only answer is that the exercise of knowledge creates relationships, continuity, and emotional attachments. It introduces us to parents other than our biological ones. It allows us to live longer, because we don’t just remember our own life but also those of others. It creates an unbroken thread that runs from our adolescence (and sometimes from infancy) to the present day. And all this is very beautiful.”

Umberto Eco (1932 - 2016, RIP)

Oh my….

via http://ift.tt/2g0d5Zm:
Gross. I got what was clearly a spam ask that contained a bunch of really icky fetishy language about rapey things, and my inbox wouldn’t let me delete or block it. It just wouldn’t pop up the options. I had to open it to reply, save it as a draft, and then delete the draft in order to not have that be the first thing I saw when I looked at my askbox.

Gross! Upsetting! Weird!

via http://ift.tt/2gUst76:ms-daphne replied to your post “I feel like I’m in the final scene of the main story, before the…”

I love all these characters, and I want you to take care of them, but please please take care of yourself, too.

Good reminder, thank you. I am trying. Sometimes when you’re writing a thing it’s just– it’s a thing that you have to get out, you know? and it is not exactly easy but it’s necessary and it’s not like you could do anything else?

i keep avoiding it but it just makes me more anxious. I have to goddamn finish this thing, I just do. RL will come for me in about four more days so if I don’t finish it by then I might just explode.

And this time of year at work is just very– it’s a lot of the same thing over and over, and you can’t look away and you can’t work on something else and you can’t leave and the place is really tense because everyone’s too busy and there’s a lot of pressure. Add in that I’m really used to one week at office job, one week at physical-labor job, and each is stressful but in opposite ways, and I’m now off that schedule, and so now we’re staring down not seeing the sky for weeks at a time (because office job has no windows, and it’s whiplashy because physical-labor job is basically just outside all day), so it’s pretty bad for the brainmeats.

(My activity tracker on my watch is hilarious; I go from averaging 12k steps a day at the farm to averaging less than 2k steps a day at the office job, so i don’t know what my body even thinks of it.)

I just need this story to be done, I feel like I’ll at least have that weight off me if I can get it done.

(For the record I also have a great like, 5k-word blowjob scene with Finn and Poe from the Found Cat series that needs about an hour more of work on it before I can post it and I’m also blocked on that because it’s Too Difficult, so. It’s not the subject matter, really.)

via http://ift.tt/2g0n0Ow:
One more weird complaint fueled by too much coffee: when you go to your Activity page on Tumblr, and it collapses things down so you don’t see too much activity.

I always sort of assumed it collapsed like-with-like and put more recent stuff at the top, but today I’m noticing that’s not the case. it had folded up a bunch of different people’s interactions with different posts underneath one mutual’s comment on one particular post. And I get that people who are mutuals are a different color than people I do not follow, but it collapses them all in together.

And it puts the ones it thinks I’ll respond to at the top. Meaning, mostly, replies from people whose replies I generally respond to. Which is, I mean, yes, usually there are a couple of you who reply pretty regularly and I reply to, but– in this case, that person said something similar to another person, and i already replied to that other person, so I felt like it wasn’t necessary? And so– but then there are some people, I’m realizing, that since i don’t reply to their replies (normally they come to a post I’ve already kind of done a batch reply-to, or sometimes it’s just if somebody’s just saying nice things, I like that but I feel like replying and reposting it is just, I dunno, why would anyone else want to read praise of me? if there’s no question, just niceness, I often don’t feel like I ought to re-post that because it would be sort of like bragging? anyway?)– anyway, my activity page has decided I don’t need to see that person’s reply because I don’t respond to them.

Like, what the fuck, Tumblr, don’t hide people saying nice things to me because I don’t interact with that content.

I have no idea if Xkit is managing that tab or not. (I know the replying to replies is Xkit, so I don’t know how regular Tumblr would even have access to that data, of what I’m replying to?)

Anyway. It’s weird and confusing and I’m realizing that many people have probably said things to me that I didn’t notice, even though I obsessively lurk my own Activity page to look for that very thing because I Hunger For Validation.

Come on, man. I don’t understand things.

(I do know that if I scroll my dashboard, it will display all my notifications in chunks periodically, and repeatedly. But if I’ve been scrolling my dash on mobile, I don’t see those, so.)

Anyway. It’s weird.

via http://ift.tt/2gQyanN:
This is her “why are you taking my picture” face. #chita

Crossposts: http://dragonlady7.livejournal.com/1593261.html

via http://ift.tt/2g1Mv22:
I might be done with that– novel. Epic. Trilogy. Whatever.
I’m not sure but I might be.

Crossposts: http://dragonlady7.livejournal.com/1593360.html

via http://ift.tt/2gR7Tpn:Sky Blue Sky - lookninjas - Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015) [Archive of Our Own]:

lookninjas:

She stares at the steps, at the ruins just behind them, and tries to see herself and Ben sitting there, the way they were. When she was five and he was fifteen and their world was on the verge of changing forever, even if neither of them understood. And it shouldn’t be possible, but the longer she looks, the closer she comes to seeing something. To seeing them again, those ghosts of who they used to be. She can’t quite bring herself into focus – just a small shadow draped in fabric, so covered up that she’s almost invisible – but for just a moment, Ben is so clear. He looks at her, at Finn standing with her. Like he sees them. Like he knows that they’re there. And he smiles the exact way he smiled then, like he just got the best news of his life.

Only for a moment, and then he’s gone again.

Rey can barely breathe. Her eyes fill up with tears. It just – he just seemed so real.

(Or: Snoke dies. The world doesn’t end. We keep moving forward.)