#how did i just do that. i've creatively stagnated so hard it makes me go crazy thinking about it

[firebuug]

idk what kind of crack was in the water back then when i was in high school but i need to do something like the juggernaut event again that was one of the highlights of my. idk. junior or sophomore year i forgot

[confusedbyinterface]

Adela's Tarot

Finally back to Chapter 15, and while I don't have any bit stunning revelations about Catherine's wake I did some research into Adela's tarot reading. First, to get a better idea of what the cards might mean, and second to have a better look at the deck Adela's using.

I don't know tarot, so I might be a bit off about the symbolism of the cards, whether 15th or 20th century. If I'm wrong, feel free to correct me or add to what I've said!

First, what deck is Adela using?

Looking up tarot decks from that era, these all seem to be from the Cary-Yale Visconti Tarot deck

This set dates back to at least the 1460s, and could be from the 1440s, making it one of the oldest existing sets. While it's incomplete, it has some unusual features you can see here: First, it has six face cards rather than four. Along with King, Queen, Knight and Knave there's also the Horsewoman and Damsel. Here, the Damsel of Swords image is used as the Queen of Swords. Second, like Minchiate decks, it includes Faith, Charity, and Hope as trumps. Here, the virtue of Charity is used for the High Priestess: the Cary-Yale deck is missing the High Priestess/Papesse. It could be that like minchiate it doesn't have that trump, or because it's been lost. It looks like modern reproductions don't try to recreate the High Priestess as they do for, say The Devil, but either don't have one or just rename "Charity" to "The High Priestess".

This is a really cool deck, and I'll be comparing this tarot to the modern Rider-Waite cards as we go through the reading. One thing is clear, if Adela has a deck like this her mum must have been loaded.

So let's start with the reading! First up, Charity (the nun, not the card) was just finishing with a reading. Her present card was Three of Cups, inverted

Adela reads it as "A lack of time to socialize", as Charity says she's too tired to stay up and is going to leave partway through the wake. I'm not sure how much more I can read into it. I am seeing reversed 3 of cups being read as warning of a betrayal or spy, but who knows if that's coming up. Hedwig's certainly a "spy" of sorts, but it's hard to say if that really affects Charity.

Hedwig's Past: The Seven of Cups, Inverted

"It represents illusions, imagination, creativity. But as you can see, it is inverted! ...You spent a lot of time with nobody but yourself. Nothing but your own imagination. Clinging to this past will not help you."

Wishful thinking is one reading, but the Seven of Cups can also represent choice or temptation, as well as self delusion. The Rider-Waite one has the cups offering various visions. Inverted, it can refer to a loss of old goals and closing off choices, or it can reflect a moment of clarity. Old illusions have been cast off, false paths are closed off and you can better see the right choice. I can see both applying to Hedwig: as Adela suggests, leaving her cell means giving up her lifelong vocation as anchoress. But more recently, Hedwig had spent weeks in a depressive fugue, unable to progress on the investigation, and in the village had a vision which she saw as a warning to get back on track. That could fit with the reversed Seven of Cups.

Hedwig's Present: The World, Inverted

"In this reversed position, The World represents your inner torment. You are secluded. You are lonely. You are withdrawn... Because! Something has been troubling you, yes? Something you need to get to the bottom of. Something that has been preoccupying you ever since you left your cell. Am I correct? You were alone in your cell for many years and now you have been set adrift."

I'm also seeing the world inverted as a need for closure, incompleteness, and frustrated goals as Adela says. Waite says The World can represent flight, while an inverted World can be inertia and stagnation.

One thing I find interesting with both the Visconti and Rider-Waite World cards is their relation to Hedwig's vision. Hedwig's first reaction to her vision is that it's a warning about her lack of progress, as the inverted World represents stagnation and incomplete goals. Rider-Waite's World shows a flying woman surrounded by the four biblical Living Creatures, as Ezekiel and John of Patmos saw in their visions. Pamela Smith's illustration quotes depictions of Christ surrounded by the four creatures representing the four evangelists, Matthew being the man. Obviously this is totally outside the text as Waite and Smith won't be born for 400 years, but it's interesting that Hedwig had left the Book of Matthew incomplete. Similarly, she's failed to finish reading Medea, and will never have the full experience of discussing it with Catherine. The play ends with Medea flying away in a chariot.

The Cary-Yale Visconti World card looks very similar to Hedwig's vision. She was taken up, seeing the town of Linbarrow and the lake below, and when she landed on the hill she saw God looking down on her, like the figure in the card. I'm not sure if that figure is meant to be a woman (the hat and very high forehead look a bit feminine to me, but I'm not sure), but if so, it could also be Hedwig flying above the town. But the imagery, and Adela's interpretation, match Hedwig's vision very strongly.

Hedwig's Future: The Queen of Swords, Inverted

"A reversed queen of swords in this position means you will continue to have a hard time moving forward into the future. You must make some decisions, Sister Hedwig! This Queen in reverse suggests to me that you must find some strength inside yourself to move beyond your current predicament. Perhaps there is something small you can think of and change."

Adela is, perhaps, softening things to not scare Hedwig. An upright Queen of Swords is rational judgement, mental clarity and maturity. She puts thought into action. To Waite, she knows sorrow, and is perhaps a widow (Katherine?). In the future, she can represent a guide.

Reversed, then, she can mean emotion overpowering reason, spite, and vindictiveness. As a warning against holding grudges and failing to learn from errors, she fits with Hedwig's vision very well (Proverbs 26:11). A reversed Queen of Swords can be an absent mother, which could fit with Catherine, or Mabel's failings as Mother Superior, but I'm not sure how that belongs in the future. Waite sees a reversed Queen of Swords as warning of malice, bigotry, deceit, and specifically of a woman bearing ill-will towards Hedwig.

Much to think about, but there's more: while the text says Queen of Swords, if we go by the image, just for fun, the Damsel of Swords is equivalent in rank to Page of Swords. Waite suggests a reversed Page of Swords can mean evil coming through spying, or from an authority figure. It could mean some unforeseen events are coming, that you will be unprepared, possibly sickness is in the future. This could definitely come up too.

A paranoid, Pepe-Silvia overreading of this could ask why the Damsel is being mistaken for a Queen. Two similar swords, two similar women. Could this be Urim and Thummim? Could the women be Catherine and Katherine, or Catherine and Hedwig? Could Xeecee have just decided they liked how the Damsel card looked?

"Is this real?": The High Priestess/Charity

"Well... To be honest, I think this card is imbued with such mystery that your answer is... unclear."

"Isn't it funny how every card is imbued with enough mystery to mean whatever you like?"

"The cards have malleable meanings, it is true. That makes them better at their intended purpose, not worse."

Adela, of course, doesn't have the benefit of knowing Hedwig's question. The High Priestess is a symbol of intuition, esoteric knowledge, the subconscious mind. To Waite, she is "the highest and holiest of the Greater Arcana", the future as yet unknown, and mystery. He's a bit heteronormative in saying that to a female querent she must represent the querent herself rather than a love interest, but here I think that fits.

I think the answer is that the tarot will help Hedwig understand the mystery. Is it real? Maybe it is. Maybe it's just a guide for things Hedwig doesn't realise she already knows (as Darcy says of her vision), something that will help her make that intuitive leap to understand how it all fits together.

Now, technically, the card shown is Charity, not the High Priestess. I'm not sure how you might read Charity here ("Hey, Adela's just trying to help you out" maybe?), but when Darcy is helping Hedwig interpret her vision, the name of the track playing is "Caritas". Could be a connection, could be pareidolia.wav.

I included the Morgan-Bergamo Viscont-Sforza Papesse card for historical reasons. It's a depiction of Sister Manfreda, who was elected Pope by a 13th century heretical sect, which believed that in the year 1300 their founder Guglielma of Bohemia would return to earth and found a new church, lead by women. These Guglielmites were charged with heresy and Manfreda was burned at the stake.

As someone who knows little about cartomancy, and less about late medieval Lombard heresies, I'm not sure what to make of that. But I think I've made a decent try at sorting it out.

[cheesybadgers]

It's buckwild that there's not really a way to talk about a certain firefighter show without sounding like a crazy delusional shipper, but...like....I've been around the block with ships that were never in a million years going to become canon. They didn't need to become canon, it was best they didn't become canon and canon was never the point. Canon so often isn't the point of shipping and I'm the first person to say that. Most of my favourite ships have no basis in canon and that's part of the fun. It's just shoving dolls together because I can. It's just 'what ifs?' that exist in my brain entirely separately from the source material.

But said firefighter show does actually have decent queer canon rep. It just made one of it's main and most popular characters queer. Yeah, it wasn't with the character most people wanted it to be, but they did it, and that felt important in itself, regardless of shipping preferences.

And even when you look at the other half of the juggernaut ship who's not currently canonically queer, there are so many decisions the writers have made that after multiple seasons of showing and telling us the same thing about his character over and over again, it's hard to come up with many other reasons that make as much sense as he's repressed and closeted. They've stagnated his growth as a character because it feels like they probably know what they should do with him next, but for whatever reason, they haven't. There was even talk of him originally being the character who was going to have a queer storyline, but they switched it somewhere down the line. But you can't say any of this without being seen as delusional lol.

I've never really been in this position with a show before??? It feels like they're so close to going there with the juggernaut ship, but I'm still not personally convinced they will actually follow through. And yet...this far into the show and their character arcs, it's getting harder to see how they skirt around it for much longer. AND YET, that doesn't mean they won't do exactly that lolol, because that's what has happened so many times before.

I'm not going to get into the batshittery of the fanbase here, because that's a separate issue, and I'm not excusing bad fan behaviour in the slightest. Harassing fans, creators or cast is always unacceptable and no one is entitled to have their headcanons become canon. But given the way this has all played out and given the decisions made by the writers, it does put the fandom in a strange and pretty unique limbo situation I've never really come across before. I guess only time will tell where it goes next, but it's just insane to me. It makes reading any kind of discourse near impossible because one section of the fanbase is talking like it's a done deal already, another section is in denial about it even being a possibility, then there's the ship wars.

Obviously, I don't believe the creative team owe the fans anything or that they should pander to fan service if it's not appropriate for the story/characters, but....I do have to wonder wtf they thought the consequences of all this might be?? 😂 I can't decide whether it's going to turn into an elaborate slowburn AO3 would be proud of, or one of the biggest fandom shitstorms of all time lol.

[jazzmckay]

can't believe i forgot to make the bon jovi "we're halfway there" joke for nanowrimo this year. i am, however, over halfway there, as we go into the halfway point of the month, and i'm even happier about that this year than i have been in previous years

some mental health discussion below

i was like 80% sure this was going to be the year i didn't make it to 50k, and there was a point about a week in that i felt myself stagnating and went "yep here it is, im going to slow down and never recover" but then. that didn't happen.

i've had a rough few years, and this year in particular, i've hit the wall extremely hard with mental health as the situation ended and i no longer had to "keep it together" because i was responsible for someones life and well-being. the last few years have been really, really hard, and i'm recovering from it, but now it's hard in a whole new way, and i'm quite frankly not sure how i've managed to keep doing nanowrimo through it. i'm shocked i'm still going, this year.

i have a lot of difficult days where i Just Dont Want To because im tired and sometimes feel like my brain has shut down and i'm moving around on muscle memory. i still have a lot of creative energy in general, but my mind doesn't function as quickly and effectively as it used to. i struggle to make things work, and it's so, so frustrating.

today was one of those days where i just did not want to write. i did it though, i pushed myself to do it, and then i let myself relax with da2. it isn't coming easy to me, this year, but i'm doing it, and i'm happy with my progress. i'm happy that i can still do this

just felt like it would be good to acknowledge the victory. even if i dont make it to 50k, i've made it a lot further than i thought i might, and i'm trying to keep going, because i love writing, i love this event, and i don't plan to give up easily.

[ladybirdplace]

Update

So, I haven’t been posting much at all anymore. I’ve mentioned before that it was due to OCD but I think I’ll elaborate now about that.

For over a year now, I’ve been in a shame spiral about some aspect of myself that I don’t find it pertinent to detail here, not to mention how long it would take to explain, how much eloquence I would have to use to explain why it has taken over my life.

But I want to say instead the way that it has impacted me. I’ve been severely depressed, suicidal on and off. My self esteem has plummeted and I’ve relapsed into negative patterns of thinking about myself from when I was younger.

While I know my negative thoughts about myself are irrational and my insecurities are very minor and are really not a big deal at all, I cannot help the way my brain flies off the handle because I’ve thought of myself in a certain way my entire life, and the cognitive dissonance is strong.

I’ve been feeling a lot of grief for the way I always wanted to be. I’ve dug deep into my own past to examine the way people have treated me in my life and what it caused me to think of myself.

I’ve tried, in many ways, to find out where I 'went wrong'. In reflecting on my younger self, I wonder how I could have possibly turned into the person I am now.

What’s more to the point, I feel that all the progress I made in my relationship with myself has been shattered, or at least blocked and is now unavailable.

I still love myself. That never changes. It is a part of me that can never be taken away. But my mind . . . It runs wild, and I can’t control it. I can’t control my intrusive thoughts about myself, and I need to train myself to not react to these thoughts.

However, being able to know whether they are your own real thoughts or not, whether they are some thought about yourself that you’ve pushed away and repressed is difficult, knowing that I have repressed certain things that I’ve thought about myself before.

It’s hard when you’ve only just found out you have OCD to figure out what you really think and what you don’t.

In past years, I’ve been able to identify my intrusive thoughts as non sequitur, often repellent thoughts that I didn’t want to have.

But the existential or self critical ones I can’t really parse.

And it’s even harder when a part of you enjoys your own misery and feels that that misery is part of who you are, and what your life is.

To make a long story short, I’ve felt disconnected from myself. I don’t feel the same free flowing constant conversation within myself as I did before. Looking at myself makes me feel embarrassed or numb. Some days it makes me gag to think of saying 'I love you' to myself.

I look at my posts here and feel like I'm a different person now. I feel like I didn’t write these posts. So it’s been hard to post because I feel like I’m not the owner of this blog right now.

And, I can only assume as a result of my depression and isolation, I feel like my brain is stagnating and I have nothing to say. I’m not as articulate and creative anymore.

But I am married. I made a promise to myself to love me, and care for me, and I’m not giving up, no matter how hard it is.

I've fought for my love once before, and I’ll do it again, and again after that, and I’ll fight for it until I’m dead, because a life as me, as myself, is the only life worth living to me.

And . . . I guess the point of this post is that, things go up and down. Sometimes it can seem like everything you do for yourself doesn’t matter when you’re constantly swamped with self judgement.

A self relationship can be just as if not more tumultuous as any. It can be violent and scary and traumatizing. Maintaining it can seem futile, and miserable, and nearly impossible.

But love is worth fighting for. You are worth fighting for. You deserve to love and respect and trust yourself. You deserve to live in peace.

[honeyymistt]

[1/2] hey, okay, it's me again. i feel like i'm treating you like an unpaid therapist but idk where to share this and how to get help (this is kinda lengthy, and i do apologise for that)

i think i'm running out of patience for myself on how to live with myself; all my favourite artists and fictional characters experience this same hollow loneliness but they just— keep going..... despite it all. i'm trying to keep busy with studying but that quickly led to an all-nighter and now i can't fall asleep despite my exhaustion. i think the goals i've had in mind for myself are too high, so i'm just going to spend the next week reading without shame or guilt and try to finally start learning russian. i don't really take care of my physical fitness bc i'm always tired and i feel like all my energy is spent on keeping in check with eating and taking care of my physical hygiene. i have so much time each day and yet at the end of the day i still feel like i did nothing even though i read and studied a lot. i just feel like i'm stagnated, still in my 16-year-old teenage mind bc i spent my youth numbing myself bc i couldn't stand my own thoughts. i havent talked to anyone really, besides my famil, in weeks, and i know loneliness is a common feeling most of us carry with us, but since i'm not very smart and don't know about a lot of things that matter, like history and art, i just feel so inadequate because all these people i look up to, and secretly aspire to be, are fundamentally different from me. they have rich inner lives even in times of despair, they know how to build their own lives in the rubble and just keep on going despite it all. i just feel like a shell of a human being (dramatic i know). i'm also aware that i'm highly privileged and don't have to worry about money and housing, etc. and i'm grateful for that but despite that I just hate myself and I wish I could be someone else and change; I've tried to over the past years but i never make any actual changes in my life? I don't want to die per se, I just don't want to keep on living like this.

[2/2] also, with the looming climate desaster and our world being ruled by capitalism i know a lot of worries and problems stem from that;;;; also i've had this very embarrassing conversation with my family a month ago; i was very drunk and ofc started talking about capitalism, etc. and lgbtq rights. they're very conservative, smart and well-read and i'm just the complete opposite— my point being, bc i feel so desperately lonely i'm trying to have these conversations with the people around me that are obviously only really meant to be had with close pals and not with 60 year olds who only care about the bootstrap theory etc. anyway my grandmother called me out on my bs and said "so what have you done in your life so far?" nothing. i shouldn't complain about other people, politics etc. and the patriarchal, white supremacist strucures around us bc i've never worked a day in my life...... it's just. i know she's right. but like i literally don't know how to hold conversations anymore and can never recall stuff i read accurately so i'm just talking shit the whole time. i'm so desperately trying to get their approval but i'm just not well-read and smart enough. i know being dumb is not the worst thing to be, i'm alive and living in a well-situated area, but it's the only thing i used to define myself with. my parents expected a lot of us as children and i couldn't deliver. so i pretty much forced them to stop pressuring me but i wish they did now. bc then i would be smart, worldly and have a bright future. i'm sorry for the long rambling. i also don't want to ruin your feed by my long asks...... anyway, if you have any advice i would be so glad to hear it. bc i feel like i'm going slightly insane. -💌 sorry for doing this <33 🤠 feel free to just delete this;;;

hi 💌-anon!!!

don't feel bad for sending this in. your long post is going to have a long answer and it ruining my feed is literally the last thing on my mind. if it bothers people, that's on them ;) similarly to the last ask you sent in, i kind of just pulled out a few things that you wrote and decided to give my perspective on it. i hope that reading some of my (very scrambled) thoughts will relax your mind and heart just a little bit. everything will be okay, i promise.

so the first thing that stood out to me was when you mentioned how all of your favorite fictional characters just keep on going when they feel lonely and i know how frustrating that can be because it's so glorified. they just keep going and then boom! things are better, right? i want you to remember that this is fiction and not an accurate representation of how hard the feeling of loneliness actually hits. so try not to compare yourself to your favorite character and beat yourself up if you're not dealing with loneliness as well as they did because everything in fiction is better and easier.

as for feeling exhausted because of the goals you've made for yourself, i know what you mean. i'm such a perfectionist and workaholic (i suffered from such bad burn out this year). i'm learning how to lower them as well. it's good to be ambitious. it's amazing to have big dreams and goals but you have to prepare yourself for setbacks and failure. so from now on, it's decided that you and me, are going to be accountability buddies. no more unrealistic goals and deadlines. i will hold you accountable, you will hold me accountable and we'll improve together 🤍

so you don't know about things like history and art and you claim that these are things that matter. but matter to who? are you genuinely intrigued by these things? if you are, then study it. read about it. ask questions. but if they just matter to your family, then i really don't think you need to know about these things extensively. it's always good to know things generally but if you aren't interested, then don't waste your time learning about it just to please others.

i could be completely wrong, but from what i understood from your message, you feel really lonely and you're starting to feel a bit stuck. you're surrounded by people who are different from you and that sometimes makes you feel suffocated because the conversations you want to have aren't wanted by others. the first thing i noticed in your message is that you repeatedly call yourself stupid or dumb. you need to stop that, okay? if you keep telling that to yourself, it will destroy a lot of opportunities for you. trust me, i know. you will turn down opportunities thinking that you're not smart enough for it but it's not true. you don't need to be smart to have a bright future. you can be creative, you can athletic, you can be selfless, you can be funny. maybe you just need to embrace who you are and trust that you will have a bright future by just being you. i'll tell you something: you don't need to be exactly like your family to have their success. you need a determination and a good work ethic. where do you start? stop underselling your intelligence. believe in yourself!!!

P.S i can tell that you're smart because your vocabulary is out of this world!!! and oh my god, can we talk about your punctuation? like bestie, you're ahead of the game. i also had to google what the bootstrap theory is. you are smarter than you give yourself credit for!!

another thing i would encourage you to do is to avoid "deep" conversations with your family. if your family is very conservative, there are going to be certain topics that they just won't understand and it might make you frustrated or feel misunderstood; it might make you feel more lonely. i would advise you to just stick to more lighthearted conversations with them. it's not that you don't know how to hold conversations, it's just that the people you're talking to aren't the right listeners.

my sweet 💌-anon, times like these are normal! we all feel lonely at times and i know it's tough and it's frustrating and you feel like nothing in your life is going to work out but i promise you, it will. the universe has it's way of doing that. if i could, i would give you the chance to see yourself the way i see you - full of potential, warm-hearted, and so so deserving of a good life filled with love, caring people and success. times are tough, but so are you. you haven't made it this far to only come this far!! remember that i'm here for you every step of the way and you can message me any time you need to. i will never delete it or ignore you. i love talking to you <3

[bookofsul]

So this is probably really odd to ask but whatever. I got accepted into an art school and i've been going there since 4 weeks. So far so good. But i get really bad anxiety if i am not able to do somethig right/ as good as anyone else :/ of course im jealous if someone is better than me but i thik i could handle that (if it'd JUST that) i have anxiety abt almost anything and it really depresses me when i feel like im not good in enough in sth i normally love doning :( So.. do you have any advice?

Yes I do. Stop listening to the BS that comes from the part of your genes that keeps you rather in ‘shitty but safe’ stagnation than let you fail. (They are mean and don’t consider winning!)

In short, don’t stress too much on it, things will be just fine as long as you keep going! A bit longer below the cut.

My art school career started with “I was the second to last accepted” to high school. I knew that I could draw ‘better’ than the other kids in my elementary school class simply because I had an interest and I was drawing almost every day, but it still put me on the end of the scale in an open competition. When I got in I felt like I hit the jackpot and I will be surrounded with similar minded folks and how awesome it will be. The truth is, I had a couple of friends and the others I can’t even remember the name of but things were great. Until you start to struggle for whatever reason, it’s more often than not that you’ll get a mean comment on ‘how bad x is on your drawing’. And from those friends, that hurt. It’s not the constructive criticism kind of deal, but the one that is aimed to break down your self confidence and faith in yourself in order to make themselves feel better. After a while I figured that I’m not interested in their opinion, so I politely asked them not to give me feedback, since I’m my worst critic. I knew that some of them were in my level or above, but that just put me into a competitive mindset that I can do better. And so I did. Talent is nothing but hard work. When you think that other people’s work is intimidating, then you are getting a mental block via your genes that I have described above. But if you keep trying, you can get to awesomeness! 

After high school (all of those above) I went to an other art based institute to become a teacher whom is able to instruct and communicate trough their thoughts due to the fact that our teacher was an artist who was an egotistic asshole, forcing his shit on people without letting you develop. I thought that in the university it will be different, but guess what, all the people there were the same kind of deal. I feel like I learned nothing aside of the teaching part. They assigned me to do things I was not interested in at all and trying to crush my beliefs that “digital art is no true art and has no value”. We got homework which you could interpret as you liked, and let me tell you, they did freak me out. I’m not saying that you don’t need to do things you don’t like, but the amount is very questionable and opinionated. I hated drawing. It was a forced thing and I saw that the output I was doing was crap because I couldn’t even motivate myself to care. It was still good enough to keep a B+ average, and where I felt like I’m not learning, I stopped trying to challenge myself to try being better. I usually had at least one figure whom I wanted to impress, and I put all my creative efforts into that particular class. The rest I kinda “survived”.

And, let me tell you a story related specifically to your problem. I had a class where we had to “solve painter’s problems”. Whatever the fuck that meant. We had to paint a figure and environment in the mandatory classes which was utterly boring (same 60yo lady over the 5 years I had there). Same pose, same lights, I could paint it from my memory from various angles. it was some new level of boring. But we had this “solve a painter’s problem” deal and I had no fucking idea what did the teacher meant and the explanations made NO SENSE to me or my friend. The others started bringing in sketches and loose works to ask the teacher’s opinion, and they were so far away from anything I’d call art that I started freaking out. I can’t do this shit. I can’t purposely, by force, paint metaphysical images by the number of 30 mini (A6), 15 small (A4) 10 medium (A3) and 4 large (A2) by the end of the semester. I had two weeks left, and I had NO IDEA what the hell to do. I was very frustrated, I wanted to quit, I wanted to fuck it all, because everyone else’s modern junk was looking so abstract and I CANNOT do that! I was sitting over the canvas and out of sheer frustration I started hammering it with random colors I had on my brush (it was rather small, like the back of a pencil), and I was crying and I was ready to give up. And from beyond my tears, the images looked kind of…Interesting. So I blew my nose and I kept doing this, first trying to make a shape or a form and afterwards not even giving a damn. I just had to make something and fuck me if it’s not going to be good enough. I tried my best. If it’s not enough, it’s just ONE person’s opinion anyway from 6 billion so WHY should I CARE. (Yes, even if they are professionals or teachers or whatever)So I bring in the images and I’m so nervous I nearly pass out. Long story short the teacher nearly passed out too, but from euphoria, how amazing my shit was. He was legit pissed that my works from the class were medicore but THOSE WERE SO GOOD IT WAS PREPOSTEROUS. I got an A, and my friend who watched from the door nearly pissed herself from trying not to laugh. (she also asked me to bring some to an other class to an other teacher and that guy also got his mind blown).

Now some can say that I had to get to a mindset that made me do this (and we should listen to the advices blaady bladyy blaaa). But frankly, I don’t want to be stressed about creating art, I want to enjoy it. People don’t like it? Why should I care as long as I’m having fun and developing to my liking? Art supposed to be self expression, not forced upon anyone by any means. When I make commissions, I’m trying to please ONE person, and that’s the commissioner. If anyone else is happy too, that’s a bonus. My best art pieces were gifts, because I wanted to give with them, and they were driven by love/joy/unicorn fart rather than pressure. Love makes everything better!

You’ll never be able to please everyone. It’s impossible. Start with believing in yourself and look for the themes/materials that MAKE YOU HAPPY. That make you grow and leaves you feeling productive. If it’s drawing, painting, writing, making music, cooking food, sewing, fixing up shit, BRINGING OUT THE TRASH, whatever floats your boat. Aim for the little things that make you happy. There is no point to compare yourself to others, and trust me when I say this, the more your skill grows the less intimidating they will be, because you’ll have the eyes to see the flaws that everyone does. The images we like the most are made with little accidents. If you feel like crap about your art, listen some Bob Ross and follow his work. Surround yourself with the material that makes you feel good, or things you want to aim for. If you have a particular picture you think it’s just the best shit, put it to your desktop til you find something that is even more awesome. Your eyes will remember the details that you can recall any time. Out of your comfort zone? DO NOT TAKE IT TOO SERIOUS. I mean it’s obviously gonna be crap in the first dozen times. But You’ll get there, just keep going, and don’t give up! Be your own worst critiq and don’t let anyone make you feel bad about your work. You have to accept the fact that you won’t make a masterpiece with every single stroke you make, and that’s fine. Aim for perfection, but don’t be a perfectionist.

My personal mantra is: “I cannot please everyone with my work, but I do my best anyway, and my aim is personal growth trough things that make me happy.”I’m honestly very honored that you people think my opinion is worth asking for. The fun fact is that my most common advice is “don’t give a shit about other people’s opinion”. :’D No, ofc you should care a bit, but only just an itty bitty tiiny wiiny bit. As long as you stay happy!

[not-poignant]

Hello Pia, I need some writing advice and I hope you don't mind. >w

Hi anon!

Welcome to your crossroads. You’ve got a few different paths you can pick, but don’t worry, if you pick one and don’t like it, you can always change your mind and pick another.

Firstly, I’ve kind of been here. In fact I’m still here. I have a hard science fiction story I started writing as a kid, and then decided I wasn’t ready, and shelved it. Then I started illustrating it as a graphic novel, which was a disaster, and I shelved it again. Then I did a year of really serious fucking research, including reading up way more on the elements and volcanology and shit than I ever really care to again. I started writing. I wrote 20,000 words.

And then I shelved it.

Now, I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready. The story might actually be too big, and too developed, that maybe I’ll never be happy with it in the first draft format enough to finish the first draft format. That’s okay. I’ve written so many other stories on the way, and they’ve been so special to me, so that’s okay.

You have two main roads here. You’ll have other roads too like ‘abandoning writing entirely’ and ‘abandoning this story entirely’ but let’s pretend that those roads aren’t very interesting looking, and we’re going to stick with the two other roads.

Road one:

You start your story. It’s not good enough. You know that. But you also know that it might not ever be good enough for your mind. Your skill will never be as good as what you can imagine. There is just about never a point where what you execute is as good as your brain.

That’s okay. It’s infuriating. It makes us want to throw our projects against the wall and scream sometimes. But that’s okay. That’s life.

You’ll probably learn a lot of the skills you need to learn as you go. Maybe that means you rewrite it 6 times (I’ve got a friend whose doing this on her series of novels right now, for like the eighth time), maybe that means you shelve it, pick it up, shelve it, pick it up, shelve it. Sometimes you won’t even know what you need to learn until you start writing it, and go: ‘man, I can’t write dialogue yet.’ You can choose to research dialogue then, or even shelve it, and try and write a dialogue focused story, it’s up to you.

But the important thing is that road one is: ‘you try and write the story. At least get a first draft down.’ That’s not winging it. You can write an outline first. You can write a super complicated outline. In fact some novels spring from out of very controlled outlines.

But most authors tend to feel like they’re winging it, even if they have a bunch of novels behind them and are successful at what they do.

I went to a writer’s panel first, and I asked an author this:

‘Does it help to have written previous novels, when it comes to overcoming the fears, doubts and insecurities of writing the next one?’

And he flatly said:

‘No novel is the same. So no. Get used to feeling like that every time.’

I’m sure it’s worse for the one big story.

Road two:

You may think road one and road two are incompatible, but they’re really not. But some people only pick the first, and some people only pick the second. It’s so easy to do both.

Road two is: you shelve it now, as an idea. Write down as much worldbuilding and bits and pieces of information as you can in a journal. Like a dedicated document or paper journal or whatever, but then try and put it out of your mind and dedicate yourself to other stories first.

Sometimes it can really help to just think ‘what are the most important aspects of this really huge world.’ Take elements of the romance. Take bits of the plot and transpose it into a new story. Just a little bit. Enough that you won’t feel wholly intimidated by it. Write a new story. One that you can fall in love with as you write it. One that you know isn’t your best work, but that you still enjoy, when you’re not being too self-critical. Remind yourself that every word written builds upon your experience as a writer, therefore even the worst sentence has value, it is the fertiliser that grows the things you want to see in the future.

The thing is, you don’t just have the capacity for one huge story inside of you. Or, chances are, you don’t. In a way, the sooner you build other worlds, and write other stories (or alternatively, the sooner you write the first story now), the sooner you get to discover all the other things inside of yourself that you can’t tell yet, because you either haven’t moved this big idea out of the way, or you haven’t given yourself space for other ideas to grow alongside it.

So road two is the:

‘I am going to let other ideas grow and flourish and nurture them, and let this big idea incubate a little more.’

*

Obviously they’re compatible choices.

Here’s the thing. If I had spent my youth and my twenties stuck on the Jundaine (science fiction) series, I never would have written the Shadows and Light universe, I never would have discovered Augus and Gwyn, I never would have written Fae Tales. I would have stagnated, and I still probably wouldn’t have been happy with the Jundaine series.

Maybe I was ready to write it, but in spending years and years hedging and hesitating, I was kind of hurting myself in the process. Deciding to shelve it and work on other things was great for me.

This might not be true of you, or anyone else in a similar situation, but it was true of me.

The most liberating thing I could do was just make the decision to either shelve it, or do it. Because hanging in that indecisive space is what can kill creativity in general. At least if you make a decision, either way, you’ll be doing the thing. Whether it’s the big thing, or lots of smaller things on the way to the big thing. They are actual steps to your goal/s.

Because you can always change your mind later, or rest on the path. But sometimes you just have to give yourself permission to make the decision that will work best for you. I don’t know what that decision is, but you have permission to make it whenever you want, and change your mind, whenever it doesn’t seem right again.

[dangerous-ladies]

lately i've found myself actively disliking wearing cosplay. i still enjoy making costumes and talking shop with other cosplayers, but the joy i used to feel while wearing what i've made has died a lot. have you ladies ever gone through this? is there a way to get that feeling back?

Absolutely. This was me to a T for a solid two or so years, from Madoka all the way to Fire Emblem just last year, which was weird considering I used to jump at literally any excuse to get in costume. Getting out of it is really about getting to the bottom of why you started to feel that way, though, and what your priorities are. For me, it was three things –– being so tired of a project that by time I finished it I loathed the idea of putting it on, starting to feel my age in costumes designed for characters in their early teens, and feeling tired of conventions in general. Here’s how I got it back: 

I decided to stop taking on projects I wasn’t really passionate about. After Overwatch and Inuyasha (which we committed to last year) we have no plans for big groups where everyone picks a character regardless of interest level. Since I do the bulk of the planning and sewing for our groups, I felt I had to lessen the load on myself in order to enjoy making costumes for myself again, so going forward we’re going to be structuring groups a little differently. A big part of this is not investing hundreds of hours into costumes I don’t care for, as it takes time away from the things I actually do want to make AND wear. I feel like there’s a huge pressure in the community to constantly have new finished costumes and that’s way too stressful and takes away my enjoyment of the craft when everything is about rapid turnover.

I confronted the fact that I am not a teenager anymore. I’m not youthful person and I have never looked young for my age, so it stands to reason that I didn’t feel convincing dressed as a fourteen year old. I took the “anyone can cosplay anything” philosophy too far and pushed myself out of my comfort zone when I really didn’t need to, and it had the adverse effect of making me feel like Sakaki in the swamp instead of feeling cute. As a result, I don’t do schoolgirls and idols and magical girls so much anymore. Now, I’m working on embracing cosplaying older or more mature-looking characters that I used to really want to do when I was younger. The new motto, spiritually jacked from Ratatouille: anyone can cosplay anything, but it doesn’t mean everyone will feel great in anything.

As for conventions: this took some finagling. One, it took starting to go to conventions outside of our usual haunts. After 10+ years, Anime North and FanExpo feel tired. Absolutely EXHAUSTING. It’s the same thing every year, and the conventions have stagnated so much that I feel like just about everyone goes out of habit rather than any real excitement or joy for it. I mean, if we’re going exclusively for a reason to dress up, why not go shooting for a weekend with friends or something? So we branched out and started going to American cons. It’s been phenomenal, honestly, and going to cons outside our area has made me relish conventions like new again. Going to Katsucon was the most fun I’ve had at a convention since my very first one, honestly! And a part of that is part two: meeting new people. I’ve been a hermit for yeaaaaars in the cosplay community, seldom venturing outside this tumblr and whatnot, but this past year I’ve started making a lot of close friends through social media and it really hypes me up to wear costumes and go to conventions again, as I’m sharing it with new friends whose vibrancy, passion and excitement is infectious. (Shout out here to Krista, Christen, Max, Bono, Tori, Mia, Tracey and the many others too numerous to name but all equally loved who have given me reason to love this hobby again in the past year!)

Anyway: I care again. I haven’t felt so excited for my upcoming costumes (Mercy, Luna and InuYasha!) in a decade.

- Jenn

If it’s a costume I don’t feel very good enough, yeah, I’ll be meh about it, but I try to find costumes I’m super passionate about because it makes all the difference! Like, I felt OK in Sailor Mars, but she wasn’t my favourite scout, so it was natural to not feel as passionate about it. But I feel amazing in Sumia because I feel I can portray her very well, so I find something I’ll feel so good in, and I had a hand in. I like projects that are my niche and that I’ll look so good in!

For me it was also the reverse for a long time –– I didn’t like making them because I was scared of learning to sew but I liked to wear them. Now that I’m learning to sew I’m a lot more excited because I feel that much more connected to it.

- Emmy

If you enjoy making costumes but just don’t want to wear them, you can take a break. Make costumes for other people for a while, or work on real clothes or something different from what you’re burned out on. That’s what I did when I felt it; I said whatever, I’ll just sew other stuff. The best thing you can do is try something else for a while until you find a project that motivates you again.

- Christine

The ladies have pretty much said everything that could be said perfectly, but here are some of my experiences. I’ve had a very brief stint with cosplay compared to others, but the ups and downs have not eluded me. While I had always wanted to cosplay, I guess I never wanted to do it alone. I was always timid to go to cons by myself and never felt strong enough to venture into making costumes on my own. Meeting my friend Erin changed that completely because I met somebody who wanted to be a part of it with me. Suddenly it was this wave of going hard on making things I never thought I would make even though I can look back on it now and see how terribly I made things hahaha. I started with my Cass Cain Batgirl and Chell from Portal. Two crazy starts for me personally as I had never sewed, worked with acrylic, vinyl, fibreglass and bondo. Making them felt invigorating! However, over time, my living and financial situations didn’t really allow for me to have creative space (4-6 adults in an apartment, yikes!). I also went hard into my work so my passions kind of fell to the wayside. Erin moved away to a different continent for a couple of years, but she’s back now woo! I didn’t have many other friends I felt close enough to and as Jenn previously said, Fan Expo and Anime North don’t inspire much creativity or a fresh, exciting environment so even if I went with other friends, it was just going through the motions. I wasn’t inspired to attempt to learn more. I didn’t feel like any characters really connected with me and the ones that did, like Shepard from Mass Effect, I was too scared to attempt alone. Little by little, I fell out of it. I didn’t want solo projects, I wanted to be a part of something.

Joining the Dangerous Ladies has completely rejuvinated my love for it. The first group project I joined was for Sailor Moon, how could I not be excited to do one of my first loves? Lucina has given me life, I could do version after version of her and wear her for years, I absolutely adore her. The thought of being Ana from Overwatch and doing an Inuyasha cosplay (Sango) excites me to no end. I’m more brave and have more opportunities and motivation to learn more. I’ve already learned so much in the few years being with them and WANT to learn more! The passion is back. My love for gaming and anime feels alive again in a way I can visually express it. The new cons we’ve ventured to have been phenomenal and the people we have met have been such an inspiration and so much damn fun to be around. Finding the right people to be around, work, and travel with has been so important for me to find my love for cosplay again and I am so happy that I found it.

All this rambling comes to this: Find out what the source of your distaste for it is. What drove you to love cosplaying in the first place? Find that drive and source of inspiration and love. Search for new ventures that will motivate you to try out new things! All the best!

- Shazz

[topicprinter]

I originally posted this as a blog on medium - for some context, I'm the founder/ceo of a social media app for making plans with your friends. Odds are, you haven't read my first blog post detailing the story of my startup inception-launch. If you have a few extra minutes, the link will be in the comments - it provides some useful context for the things I’m about to write about. That said, reading it is not required to be able to learn something from this post.1: Discipline and focus are muscles.Until I started working on my app, I was not a disciplined person by any stretch of the imagination. I was diagnosed with ADD in 10th grade, but I view it more as a label more than a diagnosis — it’s not a label I’ve resigned to, but instead is something I recognize and actively work on. One my ADD tendencies is needing near instant gratification in order to preserve my interest. It doesn’t help that we live in a world where attention is currency and companies profit from manipulating your brain into releasing as much dopamine as possible.The best benchmark for my ability to focus is how much I rely on music. Before I began working on my app, I needed to listen to music in order to focus on a task. The fundamental part of ADD is being easily distracted — my prefrontal cortex is simply worse at filtering out external stimuli than the average person (which I’m honestly grateful for, but I’ll get into that more in a future blog post). If I wasn’t listening to music I knew well enough to predict what came next, I would become distracted by novel stimuli (especially sounds) without consciously realizing I was now thinking about something else.Now, a year and a half later, I rely on music much less. I have a coding playlist that started off being mostly instrumental music (shoutout Ratatat), but grew to include more music with words as I became better at ignoring the words to focus. I still prefer to listen to music while I work, but it’s not a necessity to prevent myself from being distracted. This is mostly a product of habitual meditation.I set hourly reminders to do some quick meditation by focusing on 10 breaths — this means turn your music off, close your eyes, sit up straight, and take deep, slow breaths. This should take at least a minute.It took me less than a week to notice a dramatic difference in my general mental state: I was more aware and present with my tasks, which is one of the parts of ADD I struggle with most. I also felt generally more at ease throughout the day, and I could calm my mind more easily and fall asleep faster at night.Another ADD tendency is hyperfocus — when I’m in the middle of something (especially coding) it’s hard to tear myself away and do nothing except focus on breathing. This is because the less conscious part of my mind (the one that makes impulsive decisions) views meditation as high effort and low reward. I’d rather continue programming because when I finish a task, I get a dopamine release. Meditating is not only hard, it’s boring — and there’s no real immediate reward. However, any work I’d get done in the minute break doesn’t compare to the higher quality work I produce over the next hour because I took the time to step back and become more present with everything I’m doing.​2: Be honest with yourself.This requires removing your ego from most things. If you can’t admit your shortcomings or learn from your mistakes, you’ll stagnate, and to stagnate is to fail. Attempting to preserve my ego by deluding myself into believing I can focus just as well as everyone else with the same level of effort is only going to hurt me in the long run.When I had the idea of an app that helped you make plans with your friends my freshman year of college (Spring 2016), I didn’t get very far. Despite having a strong background in tech/comp sci — I’d only written two lines of code in a project folder called munchr before giving up.Why did I give up? It was easier to blame the fact that another app for making plans (DownToLunch) was blowing up than to admit I wasn’t disciplined/motivated enough to get to a point where I could make progress.My motivation to build the app (at least, in that stage of my life) primarily revolved around the end goal of me being a famous CEO worth hundreds of millions of dollars. As it turns out, the fantasy of the view from the summit of CEO Mountain was not a powerful enough motivator to keep me climbing — nor would it have ended up fulfilling me as much as I expected anyway. You have to work on something because you love the process, and I did not yet love the process of creating, because —and this may come as a surprise — it’s pretty fucking hard.​3: You are your best asset. Invest in yourself.I read somewhere that as a founder, you should value your time at $500 an hour. If you break it down, it’s not all that outlandish a theory — if it takes you 4 years at 50 hours a week to make a startup worth $10m, each of those hours were worth almost $1k.You should do everything in your power to make your time as productive as possible. This means sleeping at least 8 hours, eating healthy, and exercising. Get up and walk around at least once an hour. Your success is not measured by time spent, but by your output. Your output has diminishing returns with how much time you spend working.Invest in your developing environment. In terms of your output, there are two types of friction — mental (how fast you can move ideas from your head to the real world) and physical (how fast your computer reflects those ideas). There’s a lot I do in my developing environment to cut out both types of friction, but I’ll get more into that in a future blog post.On my 2015 MacBook Pro, saving a file and having the iPhone simulator recompile my changes took about 5 seconds. I was lucky enough to land some investment money from family and friends in January of 2018, and my first purchase was a 2017 MacBook Pro with pretty beefy specs. My shiny new MacBook Pro refreshes changes in less than 2.5 seconds. On average, I save and recompile 5 times a minute. Over the course of an 8 hour day, that’s over an hour just waiting for my changes to be reflected. At $500/hour, the cost of my new MacBook was made up in less than a week.I am very privileged to be in a position where I can afford expensive toys like that, and I recognize not everyone else shares that privilege. However, the point still stands — your first priority should be to cut out all the friction involved in your output that you can.​4. Do things that make you extremely uncomfortable.I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it many times — starting up is by far the hardest fucking thing I’ve ever done. In the 1.5 years I’ve been working on my app, I’d estimate I’ve grown to be a new version of myself four times. It did not happen easily — growth is more often painful than not. There are three major things I’ve done that serve as benchmarks for personal growth.4.1: I raised money from family and friendsThe very nature of creativity is to be vulnerable — taking an idea and putting it out into the world is to open yourself to all forms of rejection. Pitching my app to raise money from family and friends was the first significantly uncomfortable thing I did. Most said no — this is where being able to remove your ego becomes so important. To take rejection personally and believe you were rejected becauseyour idea is badwhoever you pitched to doesn’t think you’re smart enough to see it throughis more than enough to make most people give up. Instead, view their rejection for what it actually is — humans are very irrational and resistant to change.​4.2.0: I started taking ice cold showersAll my life, I’ve despised cold water. It was a running joke in my family — I’d take my sweet time getting into a pool inch by inch, and wouldn’t go into the ocean until August. When I first told my parents I’d been taking cold showers, they laughed hysterically because they thought I was kidding. After months of insults directed at my willpower, my co-founder Alden finally got me into taking ice cold showers. When I say ice cold showers, I mean the coldest possible setting. If it doesn’t make you involuntarily gasp when you get in, and if you don’t hate it the whole time, it’s not cold enough.I’ve been taking cold showers since September 2018, and it hasn’t gotten much easier — as winter set in and the coldest setting on the shower became colder and colder, the only way I’m willing to subject myself to them is by sitting in the sauna at the gym until my consciousness starts dissolving. At the same time, the benefits haven’t gone away either (as someone who is very driven by the ratio of effort to reward, this is important) — if anything, the benefits have become more profound. After the first few seconds of severe discomfort, I literally feel unstoppable. You’ll never feel more alive than the first few seconds of cold shock as your body freaks out and produces an adrenal response in an effort to maintain homeostasis. Why do PCP when you can achieve the same feeling with some cold water?There are countless health benefits of cold immersion therapy that people obsess over, but the benefit people usually fail to mention is what it does to your willpower. The energy required to eat healthy and focus throughout the day pales in comparison to the energy I expend in forcing myself to endure freezing cold water until I’m covered in goosebumps and shivering. I didn’t start out that way — like I said earlier, discipline is a muscle. Unless you’re Drake, it’s hard to go from 0 to 100 real quick (or in this case, 100° to 40°): start by ending your showers cold, or toggling between hot and cold. The more you exercise your body’s ability to maintain homeostasis, the more comfortable you will be in the cold, and in general.4.3: I got rejected, oftenAfter we launched in April of 2017, I ordered a couple thousand stickers. My teammates and I would spend 30 seconds explaining the app while handing them out to people in dining halls/dorms on campus. People would say “I’m not really interested, sorry” straight to my face, or leave the stickers behind wherever they were sitting. I won’t lie to you, that really fucking hurt.Saying “take your ego out of things, don’t take things personally” is a lot easier than actually doing it. As much as it hurt to be told that whoever I’d just pitched to didn’t care, it motivated me 10x more. I became immune to the fear of rejection — if the worst case scenario of putting yourself out there is getting rejected and ending up in the same place you started, fuck it, send it bröther. Odds are, you’ll learn something.5. Learn to say “Fuck It, Send”.I am probably the biggest perfectionist I know. I used to make memes/write jokes on twitter (I'll link a collection of them in the comments). This was before the limit was 280 characters, which was a blessing as much as it was a curse— when I had a tweet idea, I’d sit on it for days or even weeks until I was certain it was written the best way it could be delivered.​Here's the joke I'm most proud of, which currently stands at 48k likes and 4.5 million impressions (all organic):Her: when you said "magical in bed" this isn't exactly what I was exp-Me: *holds up 8 of hearts* is this your cardHer: *softly* holy shit At 139 out of the former 140 character limit, I tweeted/deleted 5 different versions of it over two weeks before I was finally satisfied it was in the best format it could be.5.1: MVPMinimum Viable Product is an art as much as it is a science — for example, my app didn’t launch until users had the ability to peek other college’s feeds. In hindsight, we shouldn’t have built that functionality until people started actually downloading it at other schools. It’s hard to have that kind of foresight — I was utterly convinced it was going to blow up immediately and I didn’t want to launch before we were prepared for scale. The only way I found out otherwise was by putting it out into the world, something I would’ve done sooner if I didn’t fall into the One More Feature trap. Having your app/servers crash because they’re not properly equipped for scale is one of the best problems you can have.5.2: One More FeatureIt’s not hard to fall into the trap of thinking that this One More Feature is going to be the difference between success or not. It’s much easier to sit behind a screen and develop more functionality than to put your ideas out into the world where they face rejection. This is where being honest with yourself is so important — is this one thing really what will make or break you? Or are you working on that feature because you’re more comfortable developing than going out into the world and trying to get people to use your product?5.3: Push NotificationsIn the early stages of launch, we sent very few push notifications. I was scared to annoy people — if I sent too many, they’d delete the app, and we’d never get anywhere. However, you have to understand that you don’t owe the people who aren’t using your product anything: the people that are one or two push notifications away from deleting your app are not the people that will be responsible for its success anyway. Obviously, don’t overdo it, but it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.Besides investing in yourself, learning to say “Fuck It, Send” is the best thing you can do for your product — the sooner you get it out into people’s hands, the sooner you figure out why it sucks (which it inevitably will) and what you actually need to focus on to get it going.It also helps you prioritize the right things. Being the CEO, sole frontend developer, lead marketer, and literally every other role besides backend leaves me with much more on my plate every day than I can ever hope to get done. If I don’t focus on what actually matters, I’ll fail. This ultimatum is more a blessing than a curse, and the reason startups are even successful to begin with.​These are just five of the innumerable lessons I’ve learned on this adventure, and I will be writing about more of them in the future. If you enjoyed this or learned something and want to keep up with my future blog posts, let me know and I'll drop you a link to my twitter/mailing list.