dragonlady7

You can reply to replies on the new xkit. Its not quite threaded comments but it does allow you to g

2016-03-31T20:07:53Z

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You can reply to replies on regular Tumblr now.

It just doesn’t notify the person you’re replying to. So it’s like void-howling. It’s pointless. They’re so smug about having added this functionality? And it’s useless, because it’s not a conversation.

You can’t even cheat it by going straight to the post you replied on and checking there to see if anyone replied to your reply, because, wait for it, this is the stupidest fucking thing: REPLIES DON’T SHOW ON THE INDIVIDUAL POST PAGE. Nope! You can only see them if you view the post on your dashboard.

IT IS SO STUPID.

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

2016-03-12T22:01:09Z

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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! :)

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face, TBP!

2016-03-09T03:25:29Z

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I’m doing more than a sentence at a time so it makes sense.

“If you felt comfortable discussing your feelings in detail,” Dave said drily, “I’d know you weren’t really John, but some sort of pod person.”

John laughed, at that, and pushed himself to his feet. “C’mon,” he said, “let’s get shitfaced.”

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Would you like no-strings title suggestions? (I love thinking up possible names for things!)

2016-03-09T03:01:19Z

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Oh yes, title suggestions would be appreciated! I just– it’s too big and sprawling for me to feel like I can come up with a thing to call it! I’m hung up on making a home out of the wind somehow, but I just can’t figure it out.

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Threading is a cheap and effective way to get rid of facial hair. All you need is thread and a bit o

2016-03-01T13:04:00Z

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OK, that one I gotta check out. I had heard of it! I’ve seen terrifying demon implements that claim to be for such purposes and am terrified of them, but I may Google this one up a bit. Hmm!

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Glad you liked the flames! I totally got it about the subversive sparkles, too--I just liked how the

2016-02-17T12:49:00Z

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The world in general is a place of astonishment. I was only remembering the glitter text from MySpace, because I am that old– oh my gosh, we thought we were so cool, even though we were old enough to know better. You’re right that the flames are by far the best thing. Excellent choice.

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I, for one, am SO EXCITED about the novel that I wish I had thought to ask for! It sounds like it's

2016-02-08T16:47:55Z

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Oh gosh. I hope so. I still am not one hundred percent sure what the story I’m trying to tell actually *is*. That’s usually the last thing I figure out, though. :)

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THIS EXCERPT IS BEAUTIFUL AND I CAN'T WAIT FOR THIS FIC

2016-02-02T04:22:57Z

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I wrote this bit and I was like LOL self, that’s so fucking stupid, that’s totally not going to make the final draft. But I kind of. I can’t make myself delete it. It’s like. It’s my ship manifesto. It’s the clearest vision I had of what it’s like to be a Stormtrooper. (OK, this, and the snuggle barracks bench from the French & Indian War-era fort near my house, where it’s just a six-foot-wide bench along the wall that everyone sleeps on, and Stormtroopers are totally used to that. A snugglier form of space travel.)

IDK. Finn has no personal boundaries. This is my most enduring headcanon.

“So this is really weird for you people, huh?” Finn asked, when he figured enough time had passed.

“We really don’t shit socially,” Poe said. “It’s not just me being a prude. We’re pretty much all gonna think it’s weird.”

“Huh,” Finn said. He looked around. “So I’ve had to learn a lot of new stuff here, and I think this? This might be the weirdest thing. It’s a bodily function! It’s a thing literally everyone does! Why do you have to go do it secretly?”

“It’s probably the most intensely private thing we do,” Poe said. “Nudity, most of us get over that. Sex, whatever. But I don’t think I’ve ever in my life been in the same room as another adult while taking a crap.”

Finn thought about it a moment. “Babies, though! They just shit themselves all the time, don’t tell me that freaks you people out?”

“Oh, fuck me,” Poe said, “you just made me think about the fact that Leia fucking Organa has changed my shitty diapers in my life, and a big part of what I do here in the Resistance is avoid thinking about that.” He was laughing helplessly again.

“I can’t help what I do,” Finn said, amused. “I mean, I guess that gives me context, though. She has dealt with your literal shit, and you’d die for her. That’s a hell of a bond.”

“That’s not why,” Poe said, indignant but also possibly dying of laughter.

“No, no,” Finn said, “that’s totally it. The shit-bond. It’s sacred to your people. I get it now.”

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The idea of robots writing new programs for themselves is awesome and I can't believe I've never tho

2016-01-25T03:23:00Z

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I actually have a lot of thoughts on this! I think they’re meant to basically be AIs but, like, AIs learn. They adapt and streamline and tailor responses based on past feedback.

As with anything, though, they can sometimes get carried away. And so I figure like for real AIs, some of the recommended maintenance would probably involve manually going in and removing problematic or malformed code, where they’ve accidentally been conditioned the wrong way or drawn faulty conclusions from insufficient data or whatever. Many droid owners would be haphazard about this, and others would be sort of overzealous, deleting anything that makes the droid too contrary. But I feel like good droid owners, like Poe, would be a little more tolerant of eccentric habits and the like, and would more patiently try to redirect them, rather than pruning them. So some of the more cantankerous and ancient droids, and really feisty ones like BB-8, have these very organic personalities. (And the overzealously pruned ones probably wind up just as idiosyncratic, but not nearly so adorably or predictably so.)

Poe actually has worked out a number of things with BB that are camoflaged as him being overindulgent, but actually serve him exceptionally well in many circumstances; he often fakes arguments with BB, and BB pretends not to understand him, and they make everyone think they’re being cute when really they’re probably doing some pretty hardcore espionage.

(The idea of BB-8′s loyalty subroutine, specifically, comes from a photo and caption in I think the Star Wars Visual Dictionary or something, that’s been going around Tumblr, but I just sort of extrapolated from there.)

Poe’s over-the-top care for his astromech is going to wind up being Plot-Significant, I am determined to make that work.

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Will the longer thing from the 'dealing with your crush on poe dameron' go up on your ao3? I really

2016-01-19T23:19:43Z

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It will in fact go up on AO3! I don’t have a timeframe for it yet but it will definitely be posted there. Thank you for asking! :)

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you could post the scrap as an au drabble

2016-01-19T01:19:22Z

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I could, but here’s the thing– sometimes that works, and I have some plans to go back and do that in some older works, someday if I become less prolific– but a lot of times, these things are tossed out for a reason. The basic bones of it aren’t stable, but all the character notes are good, in this case. I had two characters I didn’t know well, and a third character I knew well whose POV it absolutely wasn’t, and I spent 10k flailing, having plot just– happen– and it won’t hold together, not even as an outtake. But all the good parts of it– I mean, I sorted the plot for *the entire work*, including the 50k of stuff that I’d thought was mostly finished beforehand– the good parts of it will work beautifully if i start over and build a new framework.

Nothing is ever wasted. Nothing is ever really thrown away. I don’t ever delete things; I sometimes even save a copy and do my revisions in a new draft, if I’m getting rid of a major direction. Anything more than a couple of paragraphs, I hang onto. Because you never know. It all gets reused eventually.

(The really hard part is when you have ¾ of something good, and eventually realize you’ll never get the other ¼, and you should just recycle the parts, and god, that’s hard, to go through and strip out the good parts, because it’s usually enough that you have to discard the old thing afterward. It’s hard! But it’s important and it helps you make stronger things going forward.)

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Hey so I know you've been bitten by the Star Wars bug and are working on a fic for that, but I was w

2016-01-18T22:34:13Z

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I have a bunch more Full of Grace material, not totally organized. I had to put it onto hiatus for various December reasons, and I partly killed my momentum beating myself up for not ever quite finishing the last chapter of Facepunch. So those are a Thing, and have pushpins stuck in them, but I have immediate plans to return to both as soon as this new thing (actually there are two new Things, one being Star Wars and the other being as-yet undiscussed) is beaten into a semblance of shape, enough so that I know I can walk away and it won’t fall over while I’m gone.

So– I don’t have a schedule, because precisely what I thought would happen if I let myself start a new fandom has happened– namely, it ate me headfirst and screaming– but someone bribed me with an art collaboration and I plumb lost my head. (As one does. Hey. I don’t get a lot of offers.)

But I do have a priority list in my head, and I haven’t said several of the major things I wanted to with FOG. Although another source of hesitation is that I’m about to take a plot twist there and I’m sort of thinking I should consider marking one story complete and starting another? I’d meant to about 20k ago– so– there’s that too. There’s organizational stuff to ponder.

Which is why I haven’t posted any Star Wars. It’s got to organize itself too, and I’m rather pleased actually at my own restraint, because spending another little while organizing it means I can do craaaazy things like actually foreshadowing plot twists and setting up emotional resolutions and stuff, instead of just blindsiding the reader all the damn time.

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re: strange vegetable uses: is there any that you can't make pickles of? pickled unripened tomatos a

2015-12-20T21:18:09Z

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I meant to write that you can make wine out of tomatoes.

You can make literally anything into booze. And you can pickle anything in vinegar, but you can also ferment just about anything to pickle it in its own juices. There’s more of an art to that, though.

Odd methods of harvest preservation are kind of a dying art but they’re also kind of undergoing a renaissance so I’m sort of pumped about that.

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Hi there just your Stucky Secret Santa checking in. Just wanted to see if there was any particular b

2015-12-17T13:59:52Z

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I have no particular dislikes of any pairings! Well, except Loki. I just don’t like him with anybody, not in MCU-verse anyway. Sorry. He’s pretty but also unredeemed. And I’m generally not keen on any sibling pairings, y’know? We’ll call that one a squick. Other than that I really can’t think of anyone I wouldn’t want to read about.

My style of music is pretty eclectic, though I have trouble with the really bubblegum stuff– I can’t get through Taylor Swift, for example, though I wish I liked her– so it’s hard to say. I’m always pleased to discover new things, let’s put it that way. :)

and as for an awesome day/night, my own writing is going far less well, I’ve written the wrong story and have to start over now, so. Ha! The wrong story is going very well, unfortunately.

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Re kittens: this is fun. :) maybe movie stars from Bucky's youth? Rita Hayworth, Errol Flynn, Jean H

2015-12-17T02:22:58Z

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I’ve been thinking that! (Also: hiii I have not commented on your latest chapter yet but it sustained me through a very difficult Christmas In Retail afternoon!) Only this is an AU and i haven’t decided exactly how much of Bucky’s backstory is the same. (I’ve set it in… my hometown… in the early 00s. It’s super original, shut up! I just felt like all my shit is based on social media so I set it long enough ago that there wasn’t social media to remove the temptation. I make super great authorial choices, okay?)

If I remove the Russian part of his backstory (for time/context purposes) (I know, shh, I’m sad too) I was actually considering heroes of the American revolution because it would be hilariously history-dorky. (Also the hometown in question is real close to the Saratoga Battlefield so it’d be fun to make fugitive-Bucky spend time as a tourist at our super-lame local attractions. Look we have poles painted blue and red to represent the British and American troops! Check out this 70s-era silkscreened placard with an audio interpretation of the site including a hunting horn call used by Morgan’s Riflemen! Do not sit on the historic chairs!)

Aside: in non-AU universes, I have a headcanon that Steve had a huge crush on Jean Harlow, partly because she and Bucky (as played by Seb Stan) kinda have the same chin. I managed to work this into one story but only as a passing mention not from Steve’s POV, and I have not yet managed to have Natasha totally embarrass him about it, alas.

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Re the kitten names: I named my cats after my favorite wizard and his owl, so they are Merlin and Ar

2015-12-16T12:11:48Z

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I also am a huge fan of, like, enormous complex names for tiny simple animals. Y’know? Simple’s not the word, but you know what I mean. My current cat has both a first and last name, and is called by both most of the time, because it’s somehow funnier. (I want a cat named Hercules Mulligan now. Polysyllabic and elaborate.)

Mythology is a good call, I have some scribbles elsewhere of Bucky being kinda good at classics. This one, I think he’d be a big reader, it makes sense he’d’ve dragged himself through the Iliad etc.

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Tried to write you a different way about kitten names based on childhood treats, but got cut off wit

2015-12-16T12:11:47Z

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I had not thought about sports at all.

Food names are traditional in my family. My childhood pets were Biscuit (dog), Cupcake (male cat), Snickerdoodle (male cat), Macaroon (male cat), Gingersnap… I currently have a cat named Chita Rivera after the Broadway star but that’s an anomaly. (She’s singing right now, though, so it’s fitting.)

For some reason it’s important to me that they’re secret names, and the POV character sort of builds it up that Bucky’s keeping these names secret, but he’s keeping them secret because they’re not his cats, see, he’s only fostering them, it’s not like these are their *real* names.

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I just wanted to leave a note b/c your work, especially the long Bucky epics, are my absolute favori

2015-12-10T23:20:02Z

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It means a lot to hear that people like the digging deeper thing. I just, that’s what I’m there for, is the shit you can only find out when you’ve been writing a character for thousands of words. And there’s no way to do that but long-and-slow.

Having composed Full of Grace in fragments is kind of making me think about pacing more. And the thing is, I compose everything in fragments. if I sit down and say “In the beginning, hm, there was a city, yes, and in this city there lived a, hm, a girl let’s say, okay, sure, and she wanted, um, a thing. OH and then her father was unjustly slain!” and I’m off to the races. Yeah okay that’s the notes to write to yourself, that’s not how you write a story. You need to start in the middle because the audience doesn’t need to hear any of those sentences, all of that should be context.

And so I sit down and I usually open on a subject-verb-object in the middle of an action– those scenes, I really write them like that at this point, I don’t do the trick I used to do of scrolling until it got interesting and then cutting everything before– now I just write that way. (it’s a good beginner trick, or if you’re super rusty– just let whatever come out at first, and then skim it afterward, you can usually delete the first ten percent because that’s just your brain warming up).

The problem is then you do that fifteen times or so, and you’ve got a collection of scenes, and you know these characters. And you’ve learned something important in each one, so they’re all ones you need to include in your story. (Okay, twelve of them you need to include, and the other three you just really like, and if this were pro work you’d probably throw them out but come on it’s fanfic, that one particular bit will make someone’s day.) But you can’t just– as you were writing those, most of them were freestanding. They can’t all happen, narratively, at once. You have to prune them and shape them into a linear thing. Because time happens linearly and so do stories. So okay, this one builds on that one, but this one can’t have happened until this other thing was known, and so on and so forth.

It becomes agonizing by this point, 60,000+ words in, if you had no outline, which I didn’t. I’ve been shaping it as I went, but like, especially since the main character has no POV sections, I have to be really careful about what is known about him in what order. And I’m not meaning it to sound like these are haphazard revelations. No, I’m building toward something.

It’s just really hard to sustain a reader’s interest for that long. I did get a recent comment where someone kindly observed that the angst is getting a little heavy. Yes, it is, it’s a long story, and it’s only going to get worse. But I’m really trying to make it not grimdark. But this is where, for sure, if I were writing pro fic– well, I wouldn’t post it without having finished the ending, for one thing, and so I’d finish it and then go back and cut about 30% of the length, I think. I’d get rid of everything not directly in service of the plot, or the B-plot. Hell, I might cut 50% of the length.

Remember a novel is usually around 75,000 words. My shit very often is twice that, at least. And part of that is that I’m a wordy motherfucker, and always have been– in writing classes, in high school and college, they always said “aim for your first draft to be about 110% the final length so you can cut it down” and I routinely wound up with final papers twice the length they should have been, from which I desperately had to last-minute excise whole segments. (And some of these were like, 15-page research papers, so it was no small thing.) It took me a long time to realize that my drafts had to be about 50% the final length. I write long, and editing only draws that out longer.

And the other part of it is, this is fanfic. I’m aware that fanfic readers love extra material. In the eyes of most, every single thing we write is extra material. (I would argue that there’s a bunch that is, in fact, more important than the source text, but that’s something to write about another time.) And so I have no incentive to cut these chapters down. I have no reason to try to keep this story succinct.

And the stories probably do suffer for that (is my incredibly long-winded point). I try to keep myself disciplined anyway; every chapter has to have something important in it, I try to hit certain key points. I figure, about 4k words of every chapter is necessary. 4-8k is plot-crucial. The rest is in there because I enjoy it, and I know most of the people reading will. (The chapters of most things I post average 10k.)

But I also know it’s a lot to read. There are many readers who will see the wordcount and just back-button away. That’s okay! And that’s what I sometimes, whinily, weigh to myself. I want to wallow in this material, so I will, but I understand that there are people for whom it’s going to be too much.

And I should give myself more practice at writing concise, shorter works.

But not today.

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Sending you sympathy re: cramps. Also thank you for reminding me to look at my calendar, so mine mig

2015-12-09T20:03:25Z

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Ha haa glad to help.

I got through as much of my work as I could post-haste, and skedaddled. Here at home I have a heating pad and a bunch of tincture of cramp bark I made like, months ago, and it’s knocked it down to manageable levels– I even managed to start a load of laundry and clean the cat’s litter box. I highly recommend cramp bark if you can get your hands on some, but like most herbal remedies, it’s really annoying because you can’t just like carry it around in your purse and take a pill once symptoms start. You gotta get high-proof vodka and steep it for three months and then filter it and then keep it somewhere, and you gotta put a few drops at a time into a glass of juice and it’s intensely bitter and kind of gross and you need to take a bunch of drops of it and I just literally poured myself a huge glass of juice and dumped in about ¾ of an ounce because I felt so wretched. So my feeling better at this point is more likely down to the vodka than anything else. (Well. The vodka and the heated seats in my car before that, most likely.)

I’m sure you can make this stuff with other methods but it tastes so ass-nasty I just wouldn’t want to deal with tea made from it.

Apparently painful cramps aren’t *supposed* to be universal? It’s not just supposed to happen? But literally no research has ever really been done on it so we don’t know why it’s so goddamn common?

I don’t even know, man. I just don’t. I’ve probably got 20 years to menopause so I’ll just have to deal.

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Hi there, it's your stucky secret stanta just checking in :) Hope you're having a better day. Also I

2015-12-09T00:56:05Z

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what do I want?

i want. Hmm. I’ve never done this before and I’m super excited!

yes: hurt/comfort, pining with resolution, characters convinced of their undeservingness getting won over by the power of love, etc. I am an unabashed fan of both fluff and angst, and am contented by hand-holding and x-rated-other-things-holding approximately equally.

no: i am not a big fan of like, public spectacles? i secondhand-embarrass real easily. guy with a boombox screaming about love in front of many appalled witnesses = nightmare. I’m not a big fan of cheating tropes but misunderstandings are a-ok.

AUs fine, no concept too overused. :)

Oh also I know this is Stucky-focused but I’m also into polyshipping so, like, that’s ok, I’m super super down with poly stuff instead of unresolved love triangles or whatever. (And poly doesn’t have to be orgies. Just. I’m not super into jealousy. Faith unto death doesn’t have to mean exclusivity. No sins, as long as there’s permission, to quote Kanye.)

Oh yeah I’m also down with like playlists or photo sets or whatever, I literally have no idea how those work and consider them benevolent sorcery, so if none of this spurs you to writing, I’m not sure how all these work but I would totally dig other kinds of gift as well, because I have no understanding of those processes like at all. Just saying! I have no particular expectations and am just super excited at the thought of someone making me a thing!

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reading your winter widow fics (buckynat is my all time favorite marvel pairing) and it's so good!!!

2015-12-08T00:56:10Z

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> hope you finish it

this is the sweetest most optimistic sentiment to express, LOL. Honey. I never finish anything. And I don’t mean that I abandon things, it’s that i keep going long after most people would have concluded. The facepunch story should have ended at chapter 9 minus cliffhanger, and 9 onward should’ve been a separate story, which I feel like I then could’ve wrapped up a little more neatly– as it is, I’m stuck on the finale because i feel like it needs to be weightier than I’m making it.

Well. I overthink things. And it was a sweet sentiment. My point was actually that I have so many ideas, it’s not a question of the story continuing a long time, it’s a question of me picking a stopping point. :)

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Oh man, I had a stamp making class with that exact stuff and sliced through a cuticle once. So much

2015-12-07T00:00:20Z

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I sort of feel like Tumblr taking replies away made it so really, there is no longer any etiquette, we’re not able to have enough control over our environment to develop any kind of social norm, we’re really all just howling savagely in the dark and being blown about at the whim of the careless staff who don’t give a fuck about user experience, so it’s kind of freed me to just communicate however, like, whatever, it doesn’t matter. Scream into the void! Bombard people with instant messages! It doesn’t matter, there’s no point coming up with sensible rules for discourse because staff is only going to take them away from us again.

So just– whatever!

And yeah, immediately after posting that I cut the shit out of my thumb and bled everywhere which is hilarious. So yeah. I’ve deffo suffered for my art. BRB gonna go block-print some shit now.

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So first of all, the tintype of you is SO COOL, because it really does look exactly like any 100 yea

2015-12-05T16:42:45Z

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Tintypes don’t record light the same way we’re used to film doing. The emulsions were markedly different– up until I think about the 1940s-50s black and white film didn’t respond to red light at all, and just recorded it as black. No, later than that– if you’ve seen the picture set going around of the Addams Family set, in color, it was all shades of pink and black because red would’ve just blended in with the black!

Which partly makes my point. If you take a photo with a modern camera and a “mid-1800s camera lens!!” and then use a modern Instagram or Photoshop filter to convert it to monochrome, it’s going to do so based on a totally different set of criteria than what was used to actually record images in monochrome when that was the state of the art technology.

And in the case of those photos I was ranting about, sepia-tint– that’s almost entirely what people use as shorthand for “old-fashioned”, but sepia wasn’t particularly popular at any point in history, it’s just that monochrome images on old media that yellows, like paper, are going to look sepia-toned. They’re not. Ambrotypes, cyanotypes– they were all artifacts of using different media to capture monotones.

And they’re all much different than just going into Photoshop and going image–>mode–>grayscale.

I’m not saying that modern digital-based photographers don’t work their asses off, both in setting up and capturing actual images, and in post-processing them afterward. The amount of work necessary hasn’t really gone down because the bar has been raised– you used to hand over a wedding album of like 100 prints after a professional job, having exposed probably 150-250 images in total during the actual event, but nowadays it’s routine to give a bride 500-1000 proofs for her to choose which 100 to bind into an album (and those 1000, you’ve winnowed down from the probably 3000 you took). (and yes it’s almost always the bride)

But it’s just different, and while there’s no real harm in artistically evoking the mystique of a bygone era by making an image take on the appearance of having been taken with now-defunct technology, it’s really not at all the same as having used said technology to actually expose an image.

And this is why, to conclude on a hopeful note, many high schools still teach their smartphone-wielding teenagers black-and-white film photography, even as it becomes increasingly difficult to source the materials and chemistry. Because nothing makes you really understand a medium better than learning the limitations it has expanded beyond.

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For the meme, 3 and 4 for Full of grace. Also for the record, that is the best fic ever. (I can't se

2015-12-02T00:25:26Z

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3:What’s your favorite line of narration?

Natasha watched the explosion in the rear-view mirror and thought to herself with grim satisfaction that, very occasionally, her job was kind of cool.

I think I wrote the whole fic to have an excuse to use that line. Just because, yeah, Natasha is a dork and probably learned a shitload of her how-to-be-human-ness from watching terrible movies and you can’t not internalize the occasional ridiculous trope.

4:What’s your favorite line of dialogue?

He laughed bitterly. “I mean, it’s never really gonna be okay. Nothin’ is ever goin’ to be okay again because that’s just not how the world works. It was really never okay in the first place, we just didn’t know any better.” He gestured vaguely. “But it’s okay for now, we’re in a, a place, okay, and it’s not– it’s not a bad place. It’s an okay place.”

It’s more monologue really, Bucky’s talking to a camera, in the scene I suppose I could call the Blanket Fort Soliloquy. But he follows it up with You don’t have to be very okay to survive, and the conclusion of the soliloquy is that as long as you survive you can still do good. And that’s his whole character in this: he’s doing some pretty fucked-up shit with what’s left to him, but it’s all to a plan that he’s following as best he can, and he doesn’t really know how to choose things and he doesn’t feel like he has any choice but to keep on trying.

And he’s saying it in a video because that’s the closest thing to a POV chapter he gets in this story.

And I’m pleased with this particular line, this really fucking inarticulate line, because that’s how I talk sometimes lately, I’m really intermittently struggling with expressing myself fluently in anything but fiction (maybe writing is taking my words! maybe it’s clinical depression! maybe it’s Maybelline!)– and something that’s plagued me the whole time I’ve been writing has been that in theory I love Strong Silent Hero Types and in practice they all fuckin’ run their mouths about their feelings nonstop. And this is an attempt at a more naturalistic style of monologue. I mean, he’s still running his mouth about his feelings but at least this is more like what I intended him to be like. (For lols, see: my collected works since uh ever. On second thought, no. Maybe later I can do a hilarious ask on my Worst Ever Writing, which is actually astonishingly recent.)

This is for the ask meme thing about fanfiction, if anyone else wants to ask, here’s the post!

[And to the asker, thank you for your kind words! I am starting to feel really embarrassed that I whined so much initially about FOG not being among my more successful ventures. Is it poor form to edit those notes? I appreciate every instance of someone telling me they like it, because see above re: inarticulacy, sometimes it’s really all I’ve got to prove to the world that I’m actually good at saying things sometimes!]

And if anyone is like what is this heartbreaking work of staggering genius (right?!), the WIP in question is Full of Grace, in the Now And At The Hour Of Our Death series, on AO3. (I can’t do anything succinctly, why would I have succinct titles?)

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I have to admit, I initially thought you were poly because so many of your stories end up that way.

2015-11-28T23:18:52Z

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I have a pretty big disconnect between real life and fiction life, as I think isn’t uncommon. I’m totally down with polyamory and actually generally experience an apparently uncommon freedom from sexual jealousy in my life so I’d probably be pretty well suited to it, but despite being sex-obsessed, when it comes down to it I don’t actually have an impulse to actually touch most other humans. I experience romantic attraction a lot more than sexual attraction. It might be a lack of practice, I’ve been in an exclusive monogamous relationship for 15 years with the same person, but even before that I was never very good at wrapping my head around the actual touching-people bits of relationships.

Which might be TMI but I feel like it’s relevant to my creative processes. And I gotta say, my last big fandom was Stargate:Atlantis, and I wrote a pretty strongly demisexual John Sheppard. It’s not like there’s no excellent poly shipping in that fandom, but I just never got those vibes from him. He’s so damaged, he’s so withdrawn, he’s so incredibly closed-off, and in canon despite being superficially flirty he is so very, very honestly chaste.

So uh. Everyone is poly because Avengers. That’s really what it is. I guess I’m amused by it; I used to worry when I was writing SG:A that I was projecting and henceforth all my characters would be demisexual and I’d never get the hang of diversity on that spectrum. So– not that demi and poly are actually mutually exclusive! Natasha might be demi, as I write her; she uses sex as a tool and a weapon and rarely actually *desires* it, and is confused when she does with James and with Steve. (And in the choice-bullet series, I have a half-written sequel where she figures out that she’s got really confusing feelings for Sam too.)

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