ivyblossom

[ivyblossom]

Costume appreciation series: Wicked: Part I (2024) dir Jon M. Chu

Costume Design by Paul Tazewell

bonus:

[ivyblossom]

The Tuvix manoeuvre.

effectively killing two of your protagonists who are actually the same protagonist by forcing them to develop into a kind of mutual twin-absorbed-in-the-womb type chimeric synthesis of each other thereby introducing a third new protagonist who is actually both and neither of them. and at the end of season two episode three no less.

[ivyblossom]

That is an incredibly stupid film and this detail couldn't matter any less, but it is still bothering me that this kid is a) this excited about a CD-rom, but also, b) somehow intuiting that this program could not possibly be running on the built-in drive, but had to be running off a CD drive. Like, why?

There was no CD slot on the machine. It was a kiosk screen built into a land rover running this dumb touchscreen map program and she just randomly decided couldn't be running off a hard drive. She is meant to be a "computer nerd" though she prefers the term "hacker". The hacker can hear the whiz of the CD drive through that plastic housing and distinguish it from the whiz of a hard disk spinning up, I guess?

Imagine the logistics, though: why on earth wouldn't you just put your built-in program on the hard drive? In 1993, even that would have been fragile, given that it was still moving parts, but at least it's not running off a device more sensitive than balls. CD drives, the things that are notoriously averse to any kind of movement, and were never very good at being portable, why would you put one of those in your land-rover-mounted kiosk in a dinosaur park?

That's why I never bothered to buy a discman, they were so finicky and sensitive people had to try to walk with them upright to get them to work. It was such a downgrade from the walkman. Tapes don't give a shit what direction they're facing, CDs need the vibes and the temperature to be just so, and even the slightly nudge causes them to catastrophically fail.

But sure, put a spinning, fragile, removable disc in your dinosaur park land rover kiosk for all the sticky-fingered kids to enjoy. Why?

Is this why the land rovers in Jurassic Park (1993) are on tracks? To keep the movement smooth for the interactive CD-rom?

I mean that guess that tracks, these are also the people who put poisonous plants, apex predators, and dinosaurs spitting acid into their family-friendly amusement park, so sure. These people are made of bad decisions.

Maybe the cd-rom in the land rover is Jurassic Park (1993) in a nutshell, really.

Unrated lines from Jurassic Park, 1993

A child looks at a screen, ecstatic: "It's an interactive CD-rom!"

[ivyblossom]

Unrated lines from Jurassic Park, 1993

A child looks at a screen, ecstatic: "It's an interactive CD-rom!"

[ivyblossom]

Feed Your Own Beast

The perennial complaint from fanfic writers that they put so much effort into a story, therefore they are owed fannish engagement, and there ought to be some sort of return on investment for their fannish labour: I am perplexed. I'm not sure where these folks got the message that readers have the option to rank and sort fics by author effort. I must have glossed over that AO3 field all these years. Is it a Likert scale?

I understand wanting comments and kudos and all that. Getting fannish engagement on your work is amazing. Nothing has shaped me or helped me improve as a writer more than fannish interaction. I understand hoping for it, and I understand being disappointed when you don't get it. I understand bailing on a story because no one seems to be into it and that harshes your squee. Posting something in a vacuum when you were hoping to contribute to a fannish conversation is a bummer.

But in a "don't like, don't read" world where unsolicited con crit is harshly frowned upon, where the interaction you get should be neutral at worst and is usually only positive, thinking of that enthusiastic engagement as basic payment for entry is ugly.

It's not healthy to be annoyed that your effort isn't being duly rewarded when the only reward available is unalloyed praise. If you were being rewarded for effort, that praise wouldn't be genuine. Praise must be given freely. Fandom isn't a reward system for creator effort, and it's not a capitalist structure when people need to pay to participate, or where we should feel compelled to compensate anyone in fannish tokens.

I've read quite a lot of angry push back against the response "write for yourself", as if it means that you can't want or value fannish interaction and validation, and you can't be disappointed if you don't get any. That's not what it means. Most fannish creators hope their work will be well-received and that other fans will engage with it. But if you're writing fanfiction with the expectation that you will be doused in praise for your efforts, you're setting yourself up for a fall.

If you are writing for praise, you will always be disappointed no matter how much of it you get. Writing is hard, and there isn't enough praise to compensate for the effort and time it takes. "Write for yourself" doesn't mean "place no value on fannish enthusiasm for your work". It means "don't do this if you aren't feeding your own beast by doing so". Producing that fic needs to be part of your reward system. If it's not, if creating that fic and putting in the world doesn't feed your beast at all and you need the involvement of others to make it worth the effort, don't write the fic.

I don't care it that means fewer fics. We don't need more fics created by people sacrificing their time and effort when that labour doesn't bring them joy and/or satisfaction. Fan creators don't work for fandom, and fandom doesn't owe us payment.

The most heartbreaking part of this to me is what the complaints about insufficient interaction do to the people who have interacted. When fan writers claim they are not getting sufficient feedback and admonish people to interact more and better, it invariably makes the people who did interact with their work feel like their interaction wasn't good enough. That's unfair and untrue. If you expect more and better praise for your own efforts, give more and better praise.

I love fannish interaction. I cherish comments and kudos. I love recs and reviews. I am thrilled by any and all comments on fics, even fics that are a decade old or older, it's all great, validating, and wonderful. I am so grateful to the people who offer it and I welcome interaction at all times. I will never not welcome it with absolute and genuine delight, even when it's a key smash. But there is and never will be a toll to pay for reading.

Readers who read and don't kudos or comment: you are valid. Readers who feel guilt when reading admonishments to interact more: you are valid, and having nothing to feel guilty about. Fannish engagement should only ever be freely offered, never coerced. Enthusiastic consent only. If/when you decide to kudos/comment, do it because you mean it and you want to. And only then. Don't let anyone tell you what you should want to do. That's up to you.

[ivyblossom]

Lessons in Story: Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is not an element of story, and yet here we are.

I'm aware that AI is bad for the environment. So's tumblr. That's all true. I'm also aware that AI scrapes copyrighted material like google does. I'm aware of how it steals art for its knowledge base without compensating artists and uses is as a model and replacement for skills. That's bad. I'm not going to address any of that here.

I have been observing how people talk about using AI in various parts of their writing process at the same time as I'm been trying to understand my own process and the obstacles I'm facing, and these two topics have oddly collided.

As I've said previously, my background is in some kind of woo woo where narrative comes out in one whole piece. So the fact that writing is many different and iterative pieces is something I had to figure out in my own bizarre way, but at the moment I now understand the basic process to be in these four general stages:

dreaming/planning (coming up with characters, ideas, goals, worlds, etc.)

outlining (not to say that this isn't many sub-stages, all of these steps are big catagories)

writing (actually putting words into sentences so your story exists)

Editing (revising, restructuring, polishing, etc.)

Are there more steps that I'm not accounting for? Those are the stages as I understand them. You can move back and forth through these stages throughout the process, so it's not necessarily linear, though it could be. For me, the key has been embracing the fact these are all radically different activities that require a completely different headspace, different skills, sometimes different tools, and a different perspective on narrative. That has been freeing revelation, because I was trying to do most of it at the same time.

But here's what else I've learned:

Dreaming/planning: this is a zero consistency space when it comes to how close or how far away you are from your protagonist. Are you feeling what they feel, or are you 30,000 feet up looking at the task they have in front of them and the path they're going to take? Or are you somewhere in between? Kind of all of the above at different points.

Outlining: in my experience, this can and should include emotional through lines, but outlining usually focuses on the 30,000 foot view. I have personally never written an outline that didn't miss critical details because of the 30,000 foot gap between me and the protagonist when I outline.

Writing: this seems like the very closest and most intimate you get with your story and your protagonist, right? This is where you live through it with them in extreme detail. There is no distance between you and them, you have to use a telescope to see 30,000 feet up. I find I have to revise my outline in small ways because I often underestimate or overestimate what something's going to feel like on the ground. This is like a micro-discovery phase: not plot discovery, emotional and intimate detail discovery.

Editing: I'm not an expert at this, but so far I feel like it goes back to being extremely inconsistent. It's either very close in a different way, or 30,000 feet up, or various in-between levels, depending on the type of editing or revision. And sometimes it's none of those, it's completely outside looking at how many times you use the word "feel" or whether your verbs and nouns agree.

Right. So people try to insert AI to do the graft for one or more of these stages.

AI in stage 1: I've seen some folks talk about using AI to get ideas for stories. I don't understand that, ideas are the easiest part of this process, as far as I can tell. Life's a rich pageant, maybe that's not universally true. Now, having AI to help you refine an idea, I can see that. Especially if you ask it to point out tropes and cliches as you go. Is that bad? Is that cheating? I dunno.

AI in stage 2: I've never seen anyone say they do this. If you have an amazing and complete story idea and you want to shaped into a 3 or 5 act structure, or a hero's journey, etc. I'm sure AI could do that, but that's mainly just typing. That's like AI as workbook. Is that cheating? I dunno. Does an AI generated outline help you? Or do you just skip the thinking that would have created the details of your story? Hard to say.

AI in stage 3: The wildest version of using AI in the creation of fiction, and there are whole subreddits for it. This is the people who are constructing novels scene by scene by telling AI to write it for them to their specifications and then "heavily editing" the result. So they are ostensibly doing stage 1, 2, and 4 themselves, and are outsourcing stage 3, the hard graft. Though I'd be very surprised if they aren't also using AI for stage 4, but let's assume they aren't.

Stage 3 is the only part of writing process that is protected by copyright, so it's a weird one to outsource. It's also the stage, in my experience, where you do micro-discovery, the in-the-moment scene details and the actual, living emotional experience of your story that you can't completely capture in outline. So if you just animate your outline without living through the story with your characters, it's always going to feel emotionally 30,000 feet in the air, I think. Right? If you feed AI an outline, that's what you'd get. i think doing this is just avoiding doing the most intimate and immediate discovery process of creating a story, and I don't think that serves the story or the writer (or "writer").

I'm intrigued that people think you can do this and it makes sense. You'd have to believe that the writing process is simply describing the contents of your outline, but I don't think that's true. It's like trying to get from the twelfth floor to the first floor by skipping the stairs, the elevator or the escalator and just leaping into the air assuming you'll land just fine because those intermediary systems are just time-wasters anyway.

I've read some arguments that using AI for stage 3 is something people with disabilities need to get their stories out into the world. As a neurodivergent person, I think that's short-sighted and is a disservice to those stories. I'm pretty sure it's just skipping the work of living through the emotional through line of the story and just not making all the little decisions and constructing the tiny details that go into the telling of a story. That's a heck of a missing staircase. Outlines aren't stories. Skipping the writing part means you're missing 2/3rds of the discovery, and therefore 2/3rds of the richness and depth of the story. How does that serve disabled voices? I don't buy it.

AI in stage 4: the one that looks innocuous but is actually dangerous. Dumping your work into AI and having it fix everything for you. This is a bad idea. Dump your work in there if you want to, but have it tell you what it's finding that needs adjustment so you can make decisions about it yourself. Copying and pasting out of an AI engine means you aren't making decisions about it, you're deferring decisions to a machine. That's the fastest way possible to erase your own voice. I can see getting it to flag things it has questions about, but taking AI advice on your writing is way too trusting.

I think this is especially dangerous for writers who don't have confidence in their own voice. AI's voice may seem like a better chose to them, and that's really sad.

I have more to say about AI, but this is more than enough for now.

[ivyblossom]

Julia Howarth, editor for The Communicator (a Star Trek fanzine/newsletter), 1975.

"There is a new baby in the family. His name is Randy. He is grey, with green teeth and a great carriage. He typed the entire COMMUNICATOR. He is my typewriter, which I up and bought with $20 that should have gone to the electric bill!" "[The Communicator] was assembled by literally cutting and pasting. Articles were cut out and glued on the pages. Artwork was also cut out and glued to the page. The titles and page numbers were hand written or calligraphed. Sources of artwork were fannish artists, prints of Star Trek film clips, TV Guides and newspapers, and photocopies of pictures from professional magazines. We then took the masters to one of the few copy shops available in the 1970s to print the pages. The magazine was hand folded and collated, then stapled with a tiny Swingline Cub stapler. This magazine was a very amateur labor of love."

[ivyblossom]

The fair field of BBC Sherlock and ACD fic is so crowded, and so many of its treasures are brand new, that I'm constantly perplexed by the question "is the Sherlock fandom dead?"

Here are some new or current fics that deserve to be known and read, and if they are, will be loved:

Keeping the Bees by emilycare (5/7 ch., 9600 words so far): No one touches the strings joining music and the heart more finely than @keirgreeneyes. Every chapter is a delight, and can be read independently. Apply generously in case of cosmic despair.

Summary: Moments from the life of Rosie Watson-Holmes and the bees of 221B Baker Street. Music, memories, love and loss.

Some Variations of the Verb ‘To Love’ by Snowfilly1 (2/3 ch., 6022 words so far). I can't say with any precision what it is about Snowfilly2's writing that is so rich yet weightless, lush yet light--I think it's the things they leave out as much as what they put in. An utterly unique voice in the fandom.

Summary: Three times John went on holiday; three different tenses of the verb ‘to love.’ A love story, over and over.

H.O.U.N.D. by KtwoNtwo (11/16 ch., 24K words so far): What if Sherlock only found John Watson in Baskerville? This story shows us Sherlock investigating Baskerville without John.

Summary: When Sherlock takes on the case of Henry Knight he is unprepared for what he will find at Baskerville. Behind the facade of doped up monkeys, glowing rabbits, and the ever-present alien joke Sherlock suspects there's a darker trial being run. One without full govt authority that involves a very human subject.

Our Division by 72reasons (1/? ch., 1587 words): from the writer of The Perfect Stranger, Big Ben, and Walk of Shame. Need I say more? @onesmallfamily is always a wonder.

Summary: Sherlock Holmes returns from two years away, after acquiring a slight cocaine addiction and dismantling Moriarty's network, with all of the hope in the world that he will be able to re-claim his life, his flat, and the love of his live, his best friend John Watson. Sherlock's hopes are dashed when he returns to find John has moved on and is practically engaged to be married.

A note for those who only read completed fics: I hear you, but hear me out: timely encouragement is often what makes for completed fics. 👀 THANKS FOR REBLOGGING!

If you'd like "to be or not to be" tagged just let me know.

@iwlyanmw @starrla89 @helloliriels @ghostofnuggetspast @naefelldaurk @jobooksncoffee @lololollywrites @redmondcollege @copperplatebeech @imnova @kettykika78 @mazaherstuff @bluebellofbakerstreet @johnwatso @topsyturvy-turtely @meetinginsamarra @stellacartography @missdeliadili @chriscalledmesweetie @shiplocks-of-love @itzmi @safedistancefrombeingsmart @whatnext2020 @fieryphrazes

[ivyblossom]

Lessons in Story: Blather

I've been on a journey with planning and outlining for a long time now, but as a former pantser, it still feels very fresh to me, and everything about it is surprising.

None of this comes naturally to me at all. Once again: when I say "lessons", I mean the lessons I have learned, not lessons of value to anyone else, you're probably better at this than I am. I'm very open to feedback and ideas on planning, this is foreign territory for me.

My biggest revelation about planning and outlining is that, after years of hating and dreading anything even remotely structured, it turns out that I really enjoy this part. It's ridiculous and fun.

My paradigm shift was going from thinking of it as some (ugh!) structured version of writing to it being an entirely different activity. I seems closer to daydreaming than to writing. It doesn't take from the experience of writing, it's adding a new, fun version of composing story that's just as creative and immersive and fun, and even more self-indulgent, it's just from a slightly different vantage point and is less gruelling. It's also easier to do when I'm tired, so I can even see it as something I can do when I don't feel like writing, so it's not even overlapping time-wise.

It's taken me a while to figure how to do this in a way that makes sense and feels good. This is what I've managed so far.

It's blathering. It has no order and no structure, and I'm not sure I even understand what's happening in this process. Maybe one day I will. It comes out as a mess of random thoughts and ideas. It is documented daydreaming.

There have been times when I would just keep all that in my head and have it fuel whatever I did, but that isn't a very reliable or predictable way to function, and it means I'm not making choices between options. So what I'm doing now is to just write it all down, which helps me see it and think about it some more. Once I write it down, it change. Is that weird?

The blather has no rules. It's total free-associating. I write down whatever I'm thinking about related to this story, anything that grabs my attention about it. Things that don't work or things I don't know, things I'm obsessed with, anything. And none of it is artful.

Every time I pick the document up again, I start at the top. I don't reread it. I just blather. I repeat myself. At first it's just bits and pieces of things and me droning on about characters and what I think they're worrying about and wanting, etc. etc. Blather is functional, I don't know why. It helps me make decisions and work through ideas. The ideas get bigger and deeper as I blather about them, and problems emerge and get solved.

At a certain point, the blather starts to coalesce into scenes or pieces of them. And then I start telling myself the story as I know it. Over and over. Eventually I can't tell myself the whole story, I get stuck on some part and spend days circling around it. Sometimes I start telling myself the story from the middle, or work backwards, or whatever appeals to me. But there starts to be a sense of order and linked events, and ideas arrive, spend time in the story, stick around or get kicked out. New day, I start again at the top and tell myself the story again. This is kind of weird and obsessive, but it feels like what I want to be doing, it's like a fidget toy or something.

When I do this enough, eventually I want to start lining up the stuff I know about what happens in the order it happens. I can do that in the document for a bit, but then it starts to get out of hand. Then I start wanting a specific tool that lets me put this in order without putting it in order. Every time I reach this point I try different tools, and none of them work the way I want them to. That might be because I want to do something but not do it at the same time. But that's the point where I want to lay it out in a more structured way, but the thing doesn't have a structure.

At some point, and I don't know what triggers this, but the thing untangles in a way that even though it's not complete yet, it becomes linear. I can line up scenes and it makes perfect sense, I don't need a weird tool. That's the point when I'm ready for a proper outline. I can't say I completely understand what's going on here, but this is what it looks like.

The blathering is so fun I keep doing it even once I've started a formal, structured outline.

That's blather. Maybe there's as better word for it. Maybe there's a better way to do it. I have no idea! But this is what I've settled on. At least it's fun! I'm really glad it's fun, because I only willingly do things that are fun. As I've said, maturity is not my strong suit.

[ivyblossom]

Lessons in Story: Editing

I was a pantser for a very long time. I lived in the writing of a story, and couldn't be bothered planning it. Or editing it, frankly. I was just a drafter. The writing of it is glorious, and then it's over, and I'm done. Is that a best practice? Definitely not. But that's what so great about fanfiction. I can do that. It might not make for the best fics, and they would be full of typos, but the whole point of fanwork doing what you want the way you want to do it, right? So I did the part I understood and loved, and nothing else.

Why did I do that? Because I'm a brat, probably? I mentioned already that my maturity level has always been low.

But I think there's more to it than that. I think I worked that way because it was fun and it produced stories that weren't bad, they were sometimes pretty good, but I had no idea how they functioned. If you don't know how a story works, how do you edit or tweak it? I think I was afraid to look back at it most of the time. The only way I knew how to fix a story was to start over and write another one. That's the only thing I knew how to do. The experience of the story was living the story. How do you edit that? I always felt like restructuring the beginning of a story would mean a new branch had started, the rest of the story wouldn't match anymore. It would be a new story, I would be throwing this one way. You see what I mean?

I learned to be a slightly better editor over time (but not really). At least I fixed dropped words and typos (mostly). But even then could say to me, "Hey, this could be good if you edited it and expanded on X and got rid of Y." I'm sure people tried. But I didn't know how to do that. (Okay: I technically knew how to do that, but this basic misunderstanding made that really difficult.) It would probably freak me out a bit. I would have understood what you meant, but the only way I knew who to do that is to delete the whole thing and start over. Because I didn't really understand the pieces that make up a story. It was all one piece to me. You could cut it up, sure, but it wouldn't be one piece any more. It would be broken.

I'm not suggesting this make sense, that's what I'm learning about my own history of process.

I wouldn't have said any of this at the time because I really didn't understand that that's how it was. I could (and did) talk until I was blue in the face about narrative, but I really didn't understand how it was working from a writing perspective. If I had understood it and said it out loud, it would have been easier to fix, but I didn't realize this was my obstacle. Now I'm learning about it, and repairing it. Because of course a story isn't one piece. It's many pieces, and they fit together and look like one piece when you're done.

This is also connected to planning, which I can (and will) go on about at great length.

How did I come to have this completely bonkers belief system about how creative writing works? Who can say. It might have something to do with learning to read by myself at a very young age (2). Stories were always whole pieces that I fell into face first. I don't even exist when I read, I just experience a story whole and then return to myself. I was writing the way I was reading.

So that's an obstacle I've deconstructed, and let me tell you: it's a lot easier when you know that's behind your own process and thinking.

[ivyblossom]

Lessons in Story: Ideas and their Shapes

I am currently working on a story that I intended to be a bog-standard structure that would fit the exact beats and timing of a 5 act story structure. That was what I wanted to write: a perfectly rule-abiding story. My goal was to write a story that works exactly the way stories are supposed to so I can learn how to do that. I don't think I should break rules I don't understand.

My long history with fanfiction has shaped how I think about ideas and story. For me, all story starts with characters and relationships and works outward from there. I see a lot of people who aspire to write building worlds to set their stories in, and then coming up with people for stories. I don't know how to do that. I find the people first, and then build a world they live in and the challenges they face based on who they are and the emotional journey they're on. I find worlds more malleable than people.

The nature of my interest in characters often has me generating reluctant protagonists. I learned long ago that a reluctant protagonist isn't a great thing, because a reader wants a protagonist to get what they want, and if what your character wants is to be left alone, that doesn't give you a very satisfying desire to fulfill. It leads to a character to whom the story happens rather than a character who drives the story, which is underwhelming. We don't want a story about things that happen to a person, we want people to shape their circumstances. I think all those years writing fanfiction have left me inclined to design stories that are narrative justifications for why a character does a thing you might not expect rather than constructing characters with a drive to do a thing. That might be a fatal flaw.

My goal is to recognize my deficits and make intentional, thoughtful decisions about these things instead of just running away on the tide of my own enthusiasm. So rather than let my reluctant protagonist function reluctantly, I have given her an environment and circumstances that radicalizes her into becoming an active force in her world. I don't know if it's enough.

I can already see that I broke a rule from the beginning by continuing forward with a reluctant protagonist. As I said, I find worlds more malleable than people. Maybe I shouldn't be writing about this girl!

I have learned that I have no clue what is too little, enough, or too much story. Because my focus is so much on character and emotional journeys, I always feel like there's insufficient story, even if there might actually be too much. By story here I mean action, plot points, external things. My fear is that I default to too few plot elements and too much self-indulgent interiority because I enjoy writing that so much.

I think this tendency also comes from writing lots of fanfiction. We don't really care all that much about plot (I mean, not really) and we love to just spend time with characters. I love that about us. But it means my gauge for this is really off.

I constructed a story that I thought felt thin in outline, so I kept playing with it, and then stuffed more in there, and then I got interested in a side character and wrote a whole other novel-length outline that's in a different genre altogether slapped it into the background of this story, thinking that at least it would feel like things are happening. That seemed like a good idea at the time, and in retrospect, that was me once again breaking rules I don't understand. So this story is already not the normal story I thought I was writing.

Now I think I have might too much going on and not enough space to process in between things, but I guess that remains to be seen. I have bad judgment about how much story a story has and I'm not sure how to remedy that yet.

I hope it's clear when I say "lessons in story" I mean the ones I'm learning and trying to learn and not any that I'm giving. I'm certainly not qualified to give lessons.

[ivyblossom]

Lessons in Story

I love writing. Fanfiction has been fun for me for 25 years. I'm not very good at producing original stories, I have skill deficits. I've read the great advice books, I've been gifted amazing advice in person over the years from amazing people who have told exactly what I needed to know, and they were 100% right in every case. As with most things in my life, there are obstacles I don't completely understand that have made it hard for me to do those right things. All advice I get in life is like that. I'm either really obstinate, thick as a post, or wired funny, probably all three. For reasons I don't understand, I always choose to do things the hardest possible way.

I've been working on it again with the goal of observing the rules and the process and trying to analyze and document my own obstacles so I can break through them. I'm trying to be as deliberate as I can about everything I'm doing, thinking, and feeling, and then observing the results and consequences.

I would like to document some of my learning about constructing a story. Partly just for myself, because it's been a journey, and partly in the hopes that someone else will recognize my challenges and point me in better directions.

Also, before I start sharing my learning, I want to acknowledge that I am a person who matured extremely late in life. I say that not being fully certain I have reached a level anyone would consider "mature" even now, and I'm getting to be an old lady. If you've known me for a long time, you've known me to be an immature dickhead who has no fucking clue many, many times. That might make my lessons extremely pedestrian and ridiculous to most people. That's okay. I accept my fate.

More to come.

[ivyblossom]

[ivyblossom]

I have been applying writing advice I was given years ago. Advice I very much appreciated at the time and should have taken years ago, and didn't mean to not take. But there were obstacles in my way at the time that I didn't understand. So, I have figured out how to remove those obstacles and finally take that advice.

I always seem to take the longest possible route no matter where it is I'm going. But, on the upside, I get there eventually!

[ivyblossom]

Bluesky?

Do you have bluesky? What's your username?

[ivyblossom]

Imagine thinking two teen boys crushing on each other and kissing each other is porn. Like, have you met porn? The sexualization of anything related to queer people including their basic existence continues apace, I see.

Yes we need more chaste twee baby gay romances like heartstopper and yes we also need more shows where men fuck raw to express their love for one another like Élite and yes we need more toxic gays having hate sex like Interview with the Vampire and yes we need more incidental gay characters like the dads in cartoons like Owl House.

It's not a competition! It's a hoard and I'm like a gay little Smaug.

[ivyblossom]

But it makes sure the bears know you're coming. You don't want to surprise a bear.

Be aware of bears.

I know, I know, gatekeeping the outdoors, that's supposedly bad, right, but I think if you show up to do a hike and you brought a portable speaker with you to play music while you hike, I think, like hear me out, there should be a gate, and someone at the gate should keep you from doing the hike.