spacecasehobbit

[spacecasehobbit]

Sense8 2.06

[spacecasehobbit]

Also that's just a great way to practice a skill! Paint the same thing enough times, and you'll inevitably get pretty dang good at painting it.

if you ever feel silly about painting the same stuff over and over again pls remember that Monet spent all of the money he's made (by the time he was in his 40s he's made enough money to retire) to build a garden exactly to his liking and then proceeded to paint it over and over again until he died at 86

[spacecasehobbit]

Make sure you don't accidentally punish people for communicating their needs and boundaries. When someone cares enough to have the uncomfortable conversation, that's a compliment and a clear sign that they are invested in the relationship. Yes of course it's uncomfortable to hear that something you've been doing has been upsetting someone you care about when that was never your intention, but people generally only bother to have these conversations with the people they want to keep around - the people they trust to care. If they just didn't like you, they'd probably just try to avoid you. So make sure you don't make it into a more punishing experience than it has to be. Try to see the care and the trust behind the criticism, even when it triggers uncomfortable emotions. It's a good sign that they're there telling you.

[spacecasehobbit]

Something I've learned recently is that there's multiple ways you can respond when you identify hypocrisy in yourself.... like, supposing you notice that you have treated someone in a way that is not in line with your values. You COULD beat yourself up about it and be like "ugh you hypocrite, you SAY you have x values but then you treated these people in this other way"

Or, and I think this qualifies much better as "taking responsibility for your actions": you can go "huh. I definitely do have x values and believe people should be treated in these ways... and much of the time I am able to behave in ways that are in line with those values... and yet under these specific circumstances I was for some reason not able to do that. Let's look at those situations and people and try to find some patterns there so I can identify what types of scenarios make it hard for me to behave according to my values"

And then when you identify situations like that in the future, you can try and give yourself the time and space to really process stuff and try to remind yourself "this is a situation where behaving according to my values has been difficult in the past" which will help you be more intentional and careful in how you proceed.

Anyway. That's hard but it's a big relief to do because it really feels like being armed with magical knowledge lolol

[spacecasehobbit]

i wish all my mutuals who @ me in those tag games a very i swear i see it and i love being thought of even though i rarely if ever do them. i love you.

[spacecasehobbit]

If posting creative work online makes you unhappy, then don't post your creative work online.

It's okay to take time and space to reconnect with your art, your writing, whatever it is, on your own terms, without the stress of wondering whether or not other people will like it or talk about it or treat it well.

When sharing that work online becomes stressful and anxiety-inducing to the point that you're considering not sharing it online anymore, it is a positive and healthy thing for your mental well-being to stop sharing it online for a while.

"I might stop posting my creative hobby work for your free consumption online if you don't give it enough comments," shouldn't be a threat to total strangers.

It should be a sign to yourself that maybe you haven't been finding the community you wanted with your creative works, to the point that is sapping away the joy you find in creating and sharing those works at all. And the solution to that is to stop sharing it online (or at least, in those spaces that make you most anxious) until you've taken the time to reconnect with your own joy in your own art.

Fanfiction isn't a job. You have no obligation to share anything you've created as a hobby for free with the rest of the world. If you don't feel comfortable sharing your work, then take some time away from sharing it, and work on your creative hobby for its own sake until you do feel comfortable sharing the results of that hobby with others again.

[spacecasehobbit]

On fanfiction as a community hobby space-

Your community is not the people from whom you expect to recieve only a range of polite to effusive praise, or silence.

Your community is the people you like enough to share ideas with and trust enough to at least hear out constructive criticism from.

If those are not things you want to find in your fanfiction comments, then your fanfiction comments are not a place where you are going to find your fandom community.

[spacecasehobbit]

eleanor shellstrop one of the protagonists of all time honestly. woman who sucks so much who gets put in a situation specifically made to make her worse and instead she gets better. filled with love for other people but replaced it with malice for as long as she could because love got her nothing. went from being selfish for survival to selfless for survival and in the end she lands on being selfless for selflessness's sake. she even has mommy issues. she's even bisexual.

[spacecasehobbit]

Ghosts of the bridge Future print sale mailing list sign-up

[spacecasehobbit]

death of the author yeah whatever but death of the fandom is so integral to enjoying legitimately anything like that is just a necessary step to take in ur head always. do not let them affect the text in any way exterminate them all with ur death ray. they r not real and cannot hurt u

[spacecasehobbit]

Genuine ideological consistency with progressive values requires questioning things you are told.

Even and especially things that feel true when you hear them.

If you want to defend yourself against conservative propaganda, if you want to ensure that your actions and beliefs remain ideologically consistent with the progressive values that you hold, then you must question things you are told, you must do your own due diligence of fact checking and critical thinking - even when those things come from trusted sources and/or feel right to you in the moment.

Otherwise, you will fall for propaganda, and you will be susceptible to further conservative rhetoric and conservative radicalization.

--

Fair warning: I'll discuss an aspect of the tumblr discourse around JKR and the Harry Potter books in the rest of this post, as it provides a fantastic & deeply insidious example of the above point that I have seen propagated on tumblr a lot over the past few years.

--

As most people around here likely know, there has been a loud and pervasive messaging on tumblr for years, now, that to even speak of the HP books in public spaces, let alone participate in fandom or even continue to enjoy the books or related fan merch you bought years ago in the privacy of your own home, is tantamount to active ideological support of JKR's horrifically transphobic views and the transphobic violence that her rhetoric encourages and which she herself monetarily supports.

(This message is, overall, a whole can of worms that I will not waste time on a thorough discussion of in this particular post, because there are about a zillion different rhetorical tricks and logical fallacies that can and have been used on tumblr alone to make this argument sound reasonable, and I do not have the time nor the patience to address all of them.)

I will be limiting my discussion to one specific argument for the above which I have seen utilized with disturbing frequency. The argument in question is deeply unsettling and concerning each time I see it, and it cuts right to the heart of the issue in bold at the top of this post - that in order to defend yourself effectively against conservative propaganda, you must question things even when they feel right to you.

--

-> The argument appears, generally speaking, as follows:

JKR herself has said that anyone who enjoys the Harry Potter books agrees with her and supports her views of trans people. Therefore, any positive engagement with or discussion of Harry Potter - whether in fandom spaces, in other public spaces, or even alone in the privacy of one's own home - is tantamount to supporting JKR, transphobia, and transphobic violence.

-> The issue:

JKR's views, and transphobia in general, is predicated on the notion that there are certain people who possess the authority to impose their own criteria - criteria not based in objective reality or supported by objective evidence - on the world at large in order to dictate the identity, intentions, and even political ideologies of other individuals in defiance of anything those individuals say about themselves.

-> The logical conflict:

You cannot maintain a consistent progressive ideological argument against JKR's transphobia, when you agree that JKR does have the right to impose her own criteria - which are, again, utterly unsupported by any evidence outside of the presumed authority of her own words - to dictate the identity, political views, and intentions of complete strangers, as long as what she is saying is something you already agree with.

To validate the authority of JKR's words that you agree with in order to deny the authority of JKR's words that you disagree with is a logical contradiction.

There is only way to make this argument logically consistent: to claim the existence of an authority to your words and feelings, in absence of any appeal to objective & veriafiable external evidence, that overrides the authority of individuals you disagree with to define their own views and intentions, for those cases in which their words about themselves contradict your feelings.

And that is an incredibly conservative ideological path to go down.

--

(I'm sure many of you may be ready, at this point, to jump in with an, "Aha! I do have external evidence to back up my claim!" At which point I invite you to take a moment and ask yourself the following questions: -> i) "How thorough have I been in fact-checking the evidence I claim to hold?" -> ii) "Is it possible I'm doing the equivalent, here, of using high school level biology as 'evidence' that trans people can't exist?")

--

I want to end, now, with the following closing statement: if you have read through this whole post up to here and are currently feeling angry/distressed/upset/attacked/any other slew of negative emotions, that's okay. Please feel free to take space for yourself to sit with your emotions and process through them as you need.

Your emotions are a valid, objective reality when you feel them.

Whether or not the conclusions you draw from those emotions are equally based in objective reality is a separate question.

All I ask is that you take the time, afterwards, to come back, give this another read, and think critically through the logic for yourself, at your own pace, before deciding whether or not you agree.

Question, fact check, and do your own critical thinking before taking other people's words at face value.

Even mine.

[spacecasehobbit]

Me, selecting filters on Ao3

[spacecasehobbit]

i have a croissant related grievance

[spacecasehobbit]

Song of the Sea (2014) dir. Tomm Moore

[spacecasehobbit]

You say the story could only ever have one outcome, that every tragedy is marked as such before the story even begins.

I say maybe your stories are only doomed to such misery because you surrendered to your fear of failure before you even started, and so you never tried to write the outcome any other way.

[spacecasehobbit]

Every unhinged fic writer needs an equally unhinged friend who "yes ands" their ideas and encourages them to write all their most far fetched and insane stories.

[spacecasehobbit]

on watching a parent age

i saw somebody say “what if you’re gone and i haven’t become anything yet” and basically that broke me on a random thursday evening