#failure is a part of the process

[kausijuoppo]

Final experiment

[coquelicoq]

i fucking love prereading. getting documents about what's going to be discussed in a meeting and reading them and then going to the meeting and having context for all the things that are happening. if i could do this in all areas of life i would. send me a list of the words i'm going to need the definition of in order to understand what you will be talking about. give me a rundown of what topics might come up during this social encounter. provide detailed documentation of what to expect in a new setting. i will read the fuck out of that shit.

[questforgalas]

Constantly reminding myself that healing and recovery are not linear, that they’re filled with rolling highs and steep tumbling downs, and sometimes the downs feel like falling into a cavern that I’m cursed to lay on the floor of for eternity, but even the small act of simply sitting up from the floor is a step up. Standing from the floor is a step up. Stepping towards the wall is a step up. And soon I’ll find the hand holds and the foot holds and will start climbing again. And sometimes during that climb, I might slip. I might fall. But I’ll grab on again and climb again. Little by little. And eventually, in hours, days, weeks, months, or maybe even a year, I’ll reach the flat surface on the other side of that cavern, and pull myself up. And I’ll walk straight for a bit, maybe walk up a hill, maybe stumble here and there. And maybe I’ll meet another cavern in the future, but it’ll be ok. Because just sitting up from the cavern floor is a step up.

[muirmarie]

I got the screenshot right before I went to sleep last night =)

I know this will seem like a lot to some people and very little to some others haha, but! It's silly to compare it to anyone else, since we all write in different fandoms over the years and write different types and lengths and amounts of fics.

So this is really just me thinking about the number itself, and like. Kinda wild that 30,000 times someone had pushed a little button to say they liked one of my fics!

Kissing all your faces xoxoxo

[blueminuet]

Apparently you can’t put two videos in one post on this godforsaken webbed site, here’s the blooper reel for the other post I just made.

Anyway, here is the main post.

[jvzebel-x]

🦋

[journey-to-the-attic]

We know what goes on between them in DDVD, but would Lucifer and Zhao ever take an interest in each other in mainline JTTA?

it's not an impossibility! if they're compatible in ddvd, they'd still be in jtta, since zhao is still very much the same person at his core - the main difference is that, in ddvd, zhao doesn't have the time to make the mistakes he does in jtta, since he ends up in the devildom. ultimately he is still the same pathetic little man who is full of love but never knows how to express it

it'd take a while for them to actually see each other in that light, though - it'd only really become viable once zhao is at least significantly on his way to making up for how lonely ik's home life has been. before that, lucifer's disdain in regards to it would stop him from entertaining the fact that he finds zhao kind of cute

also in ddvd, i'd say it's only after getting down to the devildom that zhao realises he also likes men, so zhao in baseline jtta is even MORE repressed about being bi - which is another hurdle he's gonna have to cross before he even thinks about the fact he might have an interest in that demon dude who's adopted his kid

(also if we want to be sappy perhaps it's just a matter of zhaolu finding each other in every reality )!

[cartoon-skeleton]

im fucking fighting demons as if i didnt ACTIVELY CHOOSE to write and draw an entire comic, make a series of giant oil paintings, construct an elaborate idea for my senior project involving a human-size marionette and a live feed camera and an insane amount of portraits, take a class where i have to write a fucking play for the final, and take another class where i have to analyze 208083287 movies per week this semester. like how am i mad at anyone or anything other than myself LOL

[raplinesmoon]

i think the thing that no one tells you about being forced into being a high achieving child/teen is how much it comes to fuck you over later in life when you can’t do anything without holding yourself to an insane level of perfectionism and then you realize it’s basically leeched all the fun out of any hobbies you created for yourself and left you with a shell of a personality

[the-cat-at-the-theatre-door]

Thinking about Deuteronomy again, being that first point of contact for most cats in being welcomed into their family, newborns and new additions alike, but I'm thinking specifically about cats who were perhaps born into their group, left, and *then* came back, and how those are usually situations where Deuteronomy can sort of...tell if they'll be back when they do leave. He can't say anything about it, but he knows. Cats who know him very well can almost catch the expression that indicates one way or the other when he's informed of their leaving if he believes they'll be back. And - outside of the occasional anomaly - he's usually right about it.

He remembers, distantly, holding a little grey queenkit in his arms during one of his visits years and years ago, fresh faced and lovely, thinking: "This one will do big things" - not great things, not even potentially successful things, but big things nonetheless. He remembers a whisper of her little voice filled with confidence fading suddenly into silence; remembers thinking he hoped she would eventually find whatever it was she couldn't here, that she would find her way back when it was time, carefully avoiding the even stare of her mother as he passed her back.

And when he holds that little grey queen in his arms decades later, just when he thought he'd been wrong, only a little bigger, the sharp curves of her bones jutting from her fur, face so much older now, he sees that little one again, and smiles. Murmurs: "Welcome home", before he passes her onto the stars, hoping she finds her way back again to make up for lost time.

[garciapimienta]

Barcelona are young and exciting. But Barcelona are also still naive and inexperienced. Just like their coach. (Domagoj Kostanjsak)

[mortalityplays]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

[ponytailcoby]

The only way Mr Throwback should get another season is if they let Steph curse.

[botchallthethings]

FINALLY. The last bit of last year's crossbreed is in the final rinsewater. I have been washing wool like a fiend all week.

[tarantula-hawk-wasp]

last post about my mental state for tonight i promise but like im annoyed at myself constantly too bc im dpressed this semester and i have no like reason to be objectively and i know that isnt how that works but its dumb bc ive had far worse semesters where my life was actually in shambles and this one is the one where my mental health is shit??? this one??? when I have no right to be??? and there is nothing actionable I can do to improve it?

[ambrosiagourmet]

I think one of the biggest tragedies of Laios & Falin and their relationship is how much his actions impact her life. But like. Specifically how much they WOULDN’T impact her life as much if they weren’t both stuck in such a shitty abusive situation.

This part of the Falin-tries-makeup daydream hour comic is what got me thinking about it again because truly it just... it seems like such a like an offhand comment that I'm sure Laios didn't mean to be cruel or anything. That's just like. A little kid not thinking about what they are saying. ESPECIALLY when the kid in question is Laios.

But man they depended on each other SO much as kids. Too much. It really feels like they didn't have any other source of positive reinforcement, or anyone else to share themselves with. So of course an offhand comment like that has a huge impact on Falin.

Or this little bit from one of the flashbacks:

This tears me apart. Do you think it tears him apart to think about? I think it does. I think Laios holds every small failure to care for Falin against himself.

And then there's the Bigger stuff. The way that him coping with his own trauma ended up impacting her.

Like his interest in monsters. Like him going to find a ghost, and accidentally revealing Falin's magic to the whole village in the process.

Like him needing to leave. And leaving her behind.

He shaped her life so much, and he carries so much guilt for it. And again, there should have been other people there to help. The same things that made Laios need to leave home are the things that made his leaving so hard on Falin. She ate alone after that. She shouldn't have had to eat alone just because Laios wasn't there.

She was 9 when he left for school, and he was 11.

Nine. And Laios feels like he failed her because he didn't stand by her through this better. As an eleven year old.

Both of these kids deserved so much better from the world.