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hermannsthumb · 1 year ago

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Hello! For the summer prompts, if you feel the inspiration, I'd love to see "sunburn" and "mosquito" combined please! 💜

2. Sunburn + 29. Mosquitos

from summer prompt memes here

i'm at the beach for a little bit, so i am in a beachy mood and wanted to send these guys off to one too!! been so busy with zine stuff that I haven't had time to write a silly fic in a while, so here's a short one :-)

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“This is fun, isn’t it?” Newt says.

Hermann, swathed under a large sunhat and a loose terrycloth button-down, peers out at the ocean with an expression that Newt might call, generously, vague skepticism, and ungenerously outright distaste. But the crease in his brow smooths out as he turns his attention towards Newt, and he quirks up the corner of his mouth. Not exactly a smile from anyone but Hermann. “Er, yes,” he says. “It’s very—hot. But lovely,” he adds quickly. “Very—hot, and lovely.”

Newt hasn’t been to the beach—for non-work related reasons, which is to say a beach that isn’t crawling in, like, enough xenobiological radiation to kill him under ten minutes without the proper PPE—in what must be almost fifteen years at this point, back since the days when he used to crouch for hours over tide pools and scribble barely-legible notes in a composition book before he had to hustle back off to campus for class. Baby’s first field journal. The Pacific coasts are still very much a gamble for a fun day out, but they’re chilling outside DC for the week while they’re traded between nearby universities and fancy banquet halls to get their hands shaken and backs patted or whatever, and by God (Newt decided) he was going to take Hermann on a good, proper beach date if it killed him. Metaphorically. Hopefully not actually with kaiju blue poisoning, because that would suck.

Whether through the lingering effects of their drift or Hermann just being fluent in Newtonian mannerisms at this point, he picked up on Newt’s ulterior motives for insisting on getting a jeep from the car rental place pretty much immediately. He was at least surprisingly chill about it all: all he did was tell Newt, calmly, that he’ll need to stop off at a department store for the proper attire, and that Newt might want to consider a motel room as well so they don’t have to spend seven hours on the road in one day, both of which were pretty reasonable requests. Newt was just planning on swimming in boxers. Not like anyone but Hermann would be able to tell the difference.

They hit miserable traffic on the world’s most terrifying bridge while the A/C sputtered tragically at them (Newt is so asking for a partial refund, it’s July man, come on), and Hermann stared out the window at the ocean a long drop below without making a peep while Newt tried to awkwardly fill the silence with anything that came to his head. Mostly about how much fun they were going to have. They shelled out ten bucks for parking at the public access beach and even more money to rent a tattered umbrella, and the beach was just enough on the wrong side of practically empty that it set both of them on edge (though Newt could tell Hermann was trying to hide it). People are still a little wary of setting foot within fifteen miles of an ocean.

It's romantic, Newt told Hermann, and he tried to rub sunblock on his shoulders sensually, but accidentally jabbed his thumb in the wrong way and made Hermann full-body recoil away from him. I can handle that, he told Newt tersely, but he gave Newt a small thank-you kiss anyway as he wrestled the bottle away from him. The umbrella doesn’t work—too many metal prongs broken with age or over-use. Newt wonders if they dug it out of the bottom of the pile or something. Not wanting to risk getting impaled by a spoke, they ended up closing it and just hoping the sunblock does the job right.

“You’re hot and lovely,” Newt tries, lamely.

Hermann doesn’t acknowledge Newt’s half-assed flirting beyond a small sigh. Newt can’t blame him. Hermann lifts the brim of his hat, peering at a fly that’s just landed on Newt’s calf, and Newt winces a second later when it bites him. "Fuck," he says, and slaps at it. It buzzes away angrily to Hermann’s ankle, presumably to bite him too, so Newt leans forward to valiantly shoo it again. Hermann looks down at him in mingled annoyance and fondness. “Biting flies,” Newt sighs. “Forgot about these bastards.” Benefits of living in various UN-sanctioned basements for ten-odd years, weird bugs that like to cause you bodily harm are a rare occurrence.

“Newton, ah,” Hermann says, adjusting the brim of the hat against a sudden gust of slightly fishy sea-breeze, “how long did you want to stay out here? On the beach, I mean?”

“As long as you want, dude,” Newt says. It’s date-day, and when they drive back they’ll be consumed by their lectures and suits and making good impressions again, so he wants to enjoy himself for as long as possible. More specifically he wants Hermann to enjoy himself for as long as possible. Then again—he’s hot and a little on the sting-y side of tanned, and he’s pretty sure he just saw a mosquito settling on Hermann’s shoulder. “Why, did you want to leave?”

He sounds pathetically hopeful and immediately feels guilty about it. He hyped this up to Hermann so much, he’s not gonna ruin the guy’s fun. “No, no,” Hermann says. “Of course not. I’m having—er—a wonderful time.” He begins to scratch absently at his shoulder. There’s a small bump rising up from what looks like a gnarly patch of sunburn.

“Cool,” Newt says.

“Bit buggy though, isn’t it?” Hermann says. He scratches at another mosquito bite on his ankle.

“It’s not too bad!” Newt says. “I can deal with it.”

“If you're sure,” Hermann says.

They pack the rented jeep up around sunset when the public beach blessedly closes at last. Newt drops the busted umbrella twice on the dunes on the hike back to the parking lot, and Hermann (who’s clutching on to Newt so he doesn’t lose his footing on the uneven ground) finally loses his sunhat for good when he tries to bend down to help Newt the second time: it’s caught in the wind and blown out to sea. They watch sadly as a wave swallows it. “I’ll buy you another one,” Newt says.

They sit in silence in the jeep for a few minutes when Newt starts it, enjoying the A/C (however weak it is) after a day spent in the thick humidity. Hermann’s bony shoulders and fine cheekbones are lobster-red. He’s scratching absently at his thigh. It’s the first time Newt’s ever seen the guy in shorts, and he can’t even enjoy it through the uncomfortable haze of guilt. “Newton,” Hermann finally sighs. “I very much appreciate your, er, enthusiasm for the day, but—” He touches the back of his red neck, wincing, and cranks the A/C up a notch. “—perhaps next time, we might just see a film, or go for dinner?”

“Oh, my God,” Newt says. He sags in the driver’s seat. “Fucking yes, please. That was awful.” It’s cruel to rip them from the comfort of their underground lab and drop them back into the elements of, like, the great outdoors without some build-up, even if this was in fact all Newt’s doing. Like a zoo putting a penguin in a lion habitat or something. Except Newt was the one to tell them to do it.

“It was terrible,” Hermann agrees.

“Why the hell didn’t you say something?!” Historically Hermann has never, ever had a problem bitching at Newt about even the slightest inconvenience or perceived annoyance.

“You went to all that trouble,” Hermann says, “and I was trying to be—” He grits his teeth. “Nice.”

“Gross, dude,” Newt says. “Don’t ever do that again.”

#newmann #maria's fanfiction tag #saturnvalleycoffee

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transienttheologyproject · 1 year ago

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i hope my followers & others keeping up & supporting this project know that whenever you leave a kind message on my post — whether it be something as simple as a tagging your reblog of my posts with ‘!!!’ or as personal as sending me a message to the effect of ‘this type of work means so much to me thank you for doing it,’ you are helping me keep my momentum going.

bit of a whole big rant below, sorry for the length, but tl;dr i’m just immensely grateful for what support this project has received because the backlash it has gotten has taken way more of a toll on me & my mental health than i anticipated, and your kindness has helped in motivating me to not just completely wipe this whole thing from the internet.

today yesterday kinda sucked. a lot of the past couple weeks have sucked, especially since pushing more of an online presence with this zine, because of course, with something like this you’re naturally gonna attract a range of Christians, from those ‘gender-criticals’ (whatever that means) who think I’m misguided, to those who begin their messages by calling me & my work perverted, to those whose vitriolic transphobia manifests in sending me Gospel verses weaponized as straight-up death threats. and obviously i knew this was going to happen, and it did, even from as early on as when i was posting the calls-for-art.

and at first i handled it well — i deleted whatever i felt wasn’t worth my time responding to, and if i could meme a hate-comment into a promotional tiktok, then i kept it around to do exactly that. and that worked. i told myself i wasn’t going to get defensive and bound up in keyboard wars because the purpose of this specific project, this specific platform isn’t for debating or dialoguing with Christians who don’t affirm trans+ identities — it’s to serve those who are trans+ and Christian, and I didn’t want this intra-community effort to become an inter-community debate forum. dialogue is a perfectly necessary thing, don’t get me wrong, but there’s a time & a place for everything and this project wasn’t meant to be it.

as the weeks went on, however, the negative attention this project was receiving began to take a toll on me. it didn’t help that in addition to the anticipated pushback from Christian peers, some of the trans+ folks i knew gave me a hard time for ‘bootlicking the oppressor.’ i was, and still definitely am, having the most intense experience i’ve had to this day of the exact type of ostracization that inspired me to pursue this project in the first place — too trans for the Christians, too Christian for the trans folks.

receiving comments calling an academic research project i dedicated my entire summer to “perverted” made me doubt everything i had worked so hard on. accusations of “heresy” and “blasphemy” i had expected and received plenty of, but perversion was not something i had anticipated. comments like “you make me sick” made me second-guess everything i had done leading up to that moment — am i sickening? i was falling for the false narrative that exists as the backbone of much of today’s transphobia — that trans+ people are inherently groomers, monstrous predators. i was perverting my body, they said, and scripture, too — and i began to wonder if they were right.

receiving comments like “enjoy your insanity! I hope the boot still tastes good when they've taken away all our rights so you could feel like ‘one of the good ones’” made me doubt my identity as a Christian. yeah, it’s no secret that the anti-trans legislation running rampant and scaffolding an era of fascism in the United States is the result of neoconservative Christians who represent more the Rome that Jesus mocked & condemned than Christ’s mission itself. i began to worry if calling myself Christian identified me with the oppressor and if talking about transness from a Christian perspective was really a helpful endeavor or if i was essentially stabbing my trans+ community in the back.

you’d think that given the nature of this project, i would be better about not letting those sorts of interactions wear me out. because i’m conducting a project that’ll say “hey, trans+ Christians, you don’t have to choose between those two facets of your identity because they’re not mutually exclusive,” you’d think i would’ve had that mindset confidently internalized. or maybe you wouldn’t think that, but i guess i thought so myself. and i guess i thought that expecting the petty backlash & having done enough research to dismiss it was enough to be prepared for it. not really.

from the beginning, i told myself, “don’t let the mean ones get to you, you’re smart and have done your research and know what you’re talking about.” but there was such a separation between myself and my work this summer that i never truly internalized what i was writing about — i believed it, but i didn’t necessarily believe it for myself.

this project has been a labor of love. and i definitely think the labor part got the best of me this whole summer. the literary review was a drag. writing up the annotated bibliography was immensely frustrating and took me way longer than i would have liked. same with the zine’s section prefaces. and i had planned and hoped to meet with and interview several professionals in the various fields examined in the zine — and i totally dropped the ball because of… something that felt like burnout, which actually made me feel like i had committed the biggest blunder of my professional career before it had even begun. I’m still recovering from that.

the mental and emotional toll this has caused me, the academic, spiritual, psychological, and physical strife this whole endeavor has proven to have been has resulted in me sort of dissociating from the project; i talked about it as though it was a passion project of mine — which it is — but as i was working on it, i felt so disconnected from the material. as if it were akin to a homework assignment in a class i couldn’t care less about.

i’ve been in a tough spot regarding mental health for a long while now (for various other reasons besides this), and i’ve reached the point where i’ve wanted to pull the plug on something to just try and break whatever vicious cycle im trapped in, whether that something be as large-scale as dropping out of university, or as low-scale as shaving all my hair off, or maybe…well, maybe since i can pinpoint these online interactions and this research pursuit as a whole as contributing substantially to my poor mental state, maybe i should pull the plug on the zine. screw it, delete the social media pages & the website, make sure artists get their copies & be done with it.

but i have folks who have been legitimately looking forward to this — not even just people of the intended audience! i have cis Christian friends on my college campus who had never met a(n openly) trans+ person, let alone a trans Christian, before they had met me who have demonstrated such a genuine eagerness to learn from the expressions of faith and gender from myself & others like me. i know a Catholic mother — the sweetest woman — who is ordering a physical copy of the zine so she can try to understand and support her two trans+ daughters, and any other trans+ people she meets, better. i’ve had countless people — strangers — message me “this work you are doing is incredible and incredibly needed. thank you for doing it.” i’ve seen several people, folks just scrolling through their tiktok for you page who don’t even usually follow after leaving me comments to the effect of “yknow, this is a strange crossover episode, but i’m here for it, this is cool!”

there are people who want this work out there. and what’s more is that there are people who need this work out there. and i guess every time someone goes out of their way to extend some kindness towards me and gratitude for this project, i am reminded that i am among those who need this work. those little moments ground me in the purpose and mission of this project — to serve my trans+ Christian community, particularly those who may be having trouble reconciling their intersection within those identities especially within the current socio-political climate. and like, that’s me!!! i am a member of my community, i am a part of the people i am hoping to serve.

everything i was (and truthfully, still am) anxious about, everything that was (and is) weighing on my heart is everything that this project hopes to challenge. all the doubt i’ve been experiencing as of late is exactly what inspired me to do this work in the first place.

and the kindness and gratitude so many of you have extended towards me in the past few weeks, especially within the past few days, have truly helped ground me. i’m still struggling to get back on my emotional feet per se, which is why i will ask that if you find a moment, you keep me in your prayers — but i genuinely mean it when i say that every positive tag on a reblog, every share on one’s story and every kind comment serves as a reminder to me that a.) there are people will be genuinely served by a project like this, and not only that, but b.) i am one of those people. you all remind me to take a look at what i’ve done from the perspective of a trans Christian, not of a student researcher or a graphic designer or a social media moderator or any of the other practical roles i had to take on this summer. you remind me to look at this project as the type of person it’s meant to serve. you remind me of my initial hopes and goals with this endeavor.

you remind me to allow myself to be transformed by the work i have done.

when you share with me how inspirational this project is to you, you remind me to let myself be inspired by the work i’ve done. when you share how much this zine means to you, you remind me to let myself take meaning in it.

and i think it’s sort of ironic in a very beautiful way — so much of this zine focuses on the idea of entanglement and the interdependence of many facets of our lives, and it wasn’t until this project became entangled with you all so much that your experience with the zine is no longer just dependent on mine, but that ours are interdependent on each other. the positivity you feel at learning about this project is poured back into my cup, giving me the breathing room to finally allow myself to feel positively about it, too.

so truly, from the bottom of my soul, thank you. thank you for your kindness and your support, and for making it this far in my ramblings if you have. i know it was quite disorganized and probably very repetitive but this is my first time sort of articulating what i’ve been feeling so heavily recently. so, thank you again — i hold each and every one of you always in my heart, mind, and prayers!

<3 - Soup

(the man behind the curtain)

#tw transphobia #wow this is a lot #thanks for reading #i love yall #transgender christian #trans christian #trans and religious #trans and christian

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enigmalea · 2 years ago

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Why I Contributed to FujoGuide

If you follow me here or mastodon you may have noticed that I've been reblogging/boosting a lot of posts for something called The Fujoshi Guide to Web Development (@fujowebdev). There's a good chance you followed me or know me from the Dragon Age fandom where I run communities, events, and zines and write fanfic, and you might be wondering why the sudden and drastic departure from my normal content. Why would a writer contribute to something related to webdev? Why have you stopped seeing thirst for Dragon Age characters and started seeing… whatever a FujoGuide is?

The answers to those questions (and more!) are below the cut.

My Coding Journey

I wrote my first lines of code in 1996 (yes, I'm old AF). It was the early days of the internet and tutorials for how to make your own websites were literally everywhere. You couldn't go more than two clicks without finding a how-to written in plain language. But it was painstaking and tedious. CSS didn't exist yet (literally, I started coding about six months before it was released) and even when it appeared it wasn't widely adopted or supported.

It was the "glory days" of Geocities, Myspace themes, Neopets, and Livejournal. If there was a cool site, you could use HTML and/or CSS to customize it. I honed my skills by coding so many tables character profiles for RPs, creating themes, painstakingly laying out user info pages, and building my own site.

Gradually, things changed. Web 2.0 showed up with locked down profiles and feeds you couldn't customize, free website hosts became more difficult to find, and point and click page builders became the way of the web. Shortly after, I took a long break from fandom; frustrated and disappointed with site closures, lost communities, and general fandom wank… it felt like it just wasn't worth it anymore.

I eventually came back, and when I did it meant customizing themes, figuring out how to create tools for my communities, coding tumblr pages (and learning they're not really supported on mobile), and looking at automations for my common tasks. One day, I woke up and thought, "I'm going to make a Discord bot… it can't be that hard."

So, I did it.

An Unexpected Friendship

About a month after I launched my bot to the public, I received a random Discord message from @essential-randomness. A friend had told her about my bot, and she was working on BobaBoard which needed volunteers. I was shocked. First, people were talking about my bot. Second, I wasn't a real coder. I didn't know anything! I just googled a bunch of stuff and got something working. I had no idea what I was doing.

She assured me it was okay. She was willing to teach me what I didn't know - and most of all, that she wanted my help. I took a day or two to think it over, and fatefully filled out the volunteer form. I didn't know if I could be useful or how I could be useful, but I wanted to try.

Programming Is Awful

In the years months that followed, I spent a lot of time in @essential-randomness' DMs complaining about programming… at least once I realized she wouldn't judge me. I was still very much doing things the hard way, taking hours to update a site to add a single link on all the pages. I knew there were easier methods, but I either couldn't find them or once I found them, they were filled with dense jargon which was terrifying.

"An all-in-one zero-javascript frontend architecture framework!" Is that even English? "A headless open-source CMS." Cool. Sounds good. "A full-stack SSG based on Jamstack extending React and integrating Rust-based JS." Those sure are words. With meanings. That someone knows. Not me, though.

I spent so much time looking at what sites claimed was documentation and losing my mind because I had no idea where to even start most of the time. With @essential-randomness' encouragement, I kept at it, experimenting with new things, and jumping in headfirst even when I had no idea what I was doing. And I was so glad. Where I used to struggle keeping one website updated, last year I managed to deploy and update 7 websites. Yeah, you read that right. It was amazing.

The new stuff made it all much, much easier.

An Idea Is Born

Meanwhile, we spent hours discussing why it was difficult to get fandom to try coding. Part of the barrier was the belief you must be some sort of genius or know math or that creative/humanities people can't do it. It is also partially coding communities being unfriendly to newbies and hobbyists; a culture which often thrives on debasing people's choices, deriding them for not understanding, and shouting rtfm (read the fucking manual) and lmgtfy (let me google that for you)- all of which are unhelpful at best and humiliating and abusive at worst. The tech dudebro culture can be unforgiving and mean.

The number of coding-based Discords I've left far outnumbers the ones I've stayed in.

We determined what fandom needed was a place for coders of all skill levels to come together to help and support one another; where they could learn to code and how to join open-source projects they love, and where they could make friends and connections and show off their projects whether they were new or experienced programmers.

And thus… Fandom Coders was born.

What About FujoGuide?

Of course, running a coding group and working on BobaBoard together means we spent a lot of time talking about the state of the web. We both lamented over poor documentation, jargon-rich tutorials, and guides which assume a baseline of knowledge most people don't have. What we needed to do was provide tutorials which start at the beginning… from the ground up (what is a terminal and how do I open it?) without skipping steps. What we needed to do was make those tutorials fun and appealing.

I don't remember exactly the journey it took to get us here if I'm honest. I have no clue who said it first. But I do remember I first started thinking about anthropomorphizing programming languages when we attempted to cast the languages as the Ouran High School boys… and again when I suggested we do a [TOP SECRET IN CASE WE DO IT] group project in Fandom Coders to help people learn about programming.

What I do know is that as last year ended, @essential-randomness became laser-focused on creating our gijinka and moving forward with FujoGuide… and I couldn't say no.

Okay, But… Why Contribute?

To be honest, it's not just that I was around for the birth of the idea. It's ALL of the things in this post - the culmination of three years of frustration trying to figure out what I'm doing with coding, of wading through dense documentation, of wanting to give up before I even start. It's three years of dipping my toes into toxic techbro culture before running away. All added to decades of watching the web become corporate-sanitized, frustratingly difficult to customize, increasingly less fun, and overtly hostile to fans who dare enjoy sexual content.

To sum all of this up, it's the firm belief that we desperately need a resource like this. Something that's for us, by us. Something that builds fans up, instead of tears them down; that empowers them to create for themselves and their communities what no one is creating for them. It is a project I'm deeply passionate about.

And I can't wait until we can bring it to life for you all.

#FujoGuide

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sashaforthewin · 2 years ago

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Fuck it, here is a very small excerpt from a long fic I'm hoping I'll someday actually finish and post. But just in case I never post the fic, I at least want to share this backstory because I think it was a pretty good one.

CW: period-typical homophobia and slur mention

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When Eddie saw his entire torso bare for the first time, completely uncovered from bandages, he lamented.

"Ah, no, my Hellfire demon!"

Only the bottom and very edge of his tattoo remained, the rest lost to the grotesque mass of flesh trying to knit itself together in any way it could. There were weird shiny stretched areas from skin grafts, and uneven lumpy areas from stitches and all of the tattoos on Eddie’s torso had taken damage of some sort, but he only focused on the hip tattoo.

"Probably can't even get this redone if this skin isn't gonna smooth out."

"Look, I know that club was important to you but-"

"-This wasn't a tattoo of a club logo, Steve; the club had a logo of my tattoo. Look, I know I'm being way too pissy about this but this was my first tattoo and it meant a lot to me.

"You know those little chick tracks religious people hand you? Just little zines basically but with absolute nonsense judgemental over-the-top Christian crap in them. Well, so obviously I am like a prime target for people trying to 'save me' or whatever, so I get handed them all the time. But one day this guy just started harassing me and wouldn't fucking let up. He's yelling at me and following me for blocks and finally I got fed up and turned around to tell him off and he gives me this chick track called Hellfire, which I thought was a pretty fucking cool title, actually, and it was all about how Dungeons and Dragons was summoning actual demons and turning the kids gay and making them like heavy metal and wear jewelry and grow their hair out and all this other badass shit. Like, this list was basically everything that makes me me, and there was this actually really badass drawing of a demon and the guy just wouldn't stop so I told him he was entirely right and that a demon made me this way and then I walked right over to the tattoo parlor to get the demon from the chick track tattooed on my arm.

"But then when I got in there and showed the asshole working there, he said 'you gonna get this somewhere cool or somewhere faggy like your hip' so I said 'faggy hip' obviously because fuck that guy, too. It was my first real step to sort of claiming my body for myself and specifically choosing to be the things about me that everyone wanted me to hide or not be. So, yeah, Hellfire chick track demon on my hip."

Steve watched Eddie, imagining all of this happening, and his heart broke for what he'd had to go through in life just for being authentically himself.

Unable to think of how to respond, Steve kneeled down and very gently kissed the very bottom of the Hellfire demon tattoo that remained, careful to not touch any of the angry scarred skin.

"Stevie, that is real sweet and all but also I'm gonna need you to knock it off unless you want to change your mind about the no-fooling-around-in-the-hospital rule."

"Sorry."

"Never apologize for kneeling in front of me. But also, get up, I don't want to have an erection in front of Blanche when she comes back in."

Blushing more than he thought himself possible, Steve got up and tried to calm down. He hadn't really thought about what he was doing until he was doing it, but once it was pointed out to him, Steve realized he was in over his head. He didn't know how to do any of this stuff with guys.

But he's not a guy, he's Eddie. He isn't some random man, he's Steve's favorite person. And besides, they had already agreed to have no expectations about sexual activity. Obviously he knew he had just gotten close to blow job territory, but Steve wasn't sure if that was why he was feeling a bit hot; if the tension was why, or if he was just nervous about the situation. But once again he remembered this was Eddie, not just some guy, and he decided that he would at some point try to give a blowjob. Definitely not in the hospital, though. Probably not in the hospital.

Steve snapped back to the present and watched Eddie examine the rest of his torso, trying to will away the erection he had at some point gotten while thinking of blowing Eddie.

+++

#steddie fic #steve/eddie #steddie #fic excerpt #mind the warnings

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lamarckianenterprises · 1 year ago

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Sucks to be Me But I'm built Different Now

My work got accepted in a Litmag (technically a Zine, CoinOperated Press to be precise) for the first time today, and outside of being thoroughly excited to announce that my humble flier will be included in their next Zine, Dungeons and Dragons Part 2. (Learn more about it on the following link)

I just want to say that looking back, I think a lot of my opinions about my own creative work is based off of like, no one really praising me for my writing. Like I didn't keep writing because people said that I was doing great or good or was talented or whatever, I kept writing because I wanted to get to that point, in spite of the lack of praise not because of it.

Hell, my mother was basically radio silent on my writing after noting that my very first work, the weird fugue state nanowrimo novel that's lost to the sands of time was, and I'm quoting here, "At least he has good grammar." Admittedly I kinda avoided showing her stuff after that, but still.

Outside of her and my even less present father there was my brother who was barely present in my teenage years, and so I basically had jack all for validation outside of an RPing community I immediately antagonized by being an attention seeking edgy teenager who fired out a self insert the GM immediately recognized somehow.

So while it gave me an easy way to keep writing and a sense of community which genuinely helped me practice and learn the craft among other things, it also meant that I didn't really get praise? Or when I did it was from someone close enough to me personally that my brain could immediately dismiss them and their opinions as being invalid as they are tainted by other people's impressions of me as a person.

I think the one bit of praise I registered as genuine was when people said they had fun in the complete mess of a Shadowrun world plot I ran in that RP which is really just a high I've been chasing ever since with every tabletop game I have ever run.

And I couldn't rely on internal validation either because I spent literal years thinking that I was somehow getting worse over time because for some fucking reason I measured that shit based off of output as in the amount of words and paragraphs written down on (virtual) paper as opposed to like, actual quality.

And how hard it was to write, which uhhh, honestly writing has never really gotten easier for me, like I am far more aware of what constitutes 'good' writing now, but it's not like the actual process has gotten much easier, and honestly as the years went on I ended up constraining my own creativity more in vague pursuit of 'better, more respectable and praiseworthy writing'.

Which meant that on top of the tyranny of time eating away at my ability to remember how difficult it was to write in the first place, I had a growing list of hangups and fears that meant that I could always refer back to some past paragraphs I think are real zingers and go, "Damn, where did I go wrong? How am I worse than I use to be?" while ignoring the veritable sea of word vomit, every little thing I did to piss other people off, and the fact that I unironically just naturally obtained more responsibilities as I grew up and obtained a job that slowly crushed my will to live that just made it harder to sit down and write LMAO.

Now I'd love to say that I've thrown of all of my chains, learned to write the proper way, and focused my life entirely towards mastering the craft without interruptions, or that this one acceptance has fulfilled my lifelong desire for validation from a complete stranger once and for all.

Really all I have to say about all this is what you read at the top, "man it sucks to be me but I'm built different," I am in more ways than one no longer the same man who started writing just to have something to do in November, nor am I the man who sat down and chose to make himself when told to make absolutely anything he could want to be.

But then again I am the woman who started whooping and whollering and going, "OLE OLE OLE" and praising God after reading this so like, maybe I'm not that different after all.

#writing #on writing #writer things #journaling #creative writing

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razorsadness · 2 years ago

Text

A week ago Thursday, I took a long walk around my neighborhood. Later, at night, I sat out on the back steps for a while, listening to all the night sounds: the pop and snap of wood burning in a neighbor’s fire pit, critters rustling in the weeds, the lonesome howl of a freight train in the near distance.

The next day started off kinda shitty. I was dealing with more confusing and annoying bureaucratic red tape re: energy assistance, plus some other stuff along similar lines, and the kids were cranky, and I was feeling all sad and cranky myself and dwelling on some old issues that rear up from time to time—maybe cuz of PMS, maybe cuz of Mercury Rx, probably a little of both. C. and I took a little outing to the garden center, and I got some more soil for this year’s garden, and some pansies for outside, and a little African violet for indoors. That helped a bit, but when I got back, I was still stressed and sad, and P. could tell, and he told me to take the rest of the evening to do whatever would make me feel better. So I had a tiny bit of an edible, then took a long, hot bath and ate some dark chocolate, and it worked wonders.

Saturday was better. I wrote a poem, worked on editing some poems, and submitted some poems to a couple lit zines. After the kids were asleep, P. and I had sex.

That night I had a strange dream that P. and I were visiting some old friends of his, and we were there for hours and hours and I wanted to leave because I was tired, but he decided he had to make this elaborate slow-cooked pepper sauce (??) before he left. So I was like: “Can I just leave, and you can crash here?” But he said that would be rude so I had to stay, too and I was pissed. I don’t know where the fuck that dream came from.

The next day my anxiety was through the roof—about (lack of) money, about bills, about other things that I couldn’t even identify. And we were going to have dinner with my mom because my dad was out of town, and having dinner with my parents often stresses me out. But it turned out okay. I remembered that my parents are much less awful to be around when it’s just one of them, not both.

That night I had another weird dream. I was in Chicago, at a zine fest held at my alma mater, CCC (much like the actual MWPZF was, last October), and I had a new zine with me that I’d just finished the day before and hadn’t had a chance to make copies of. (Which, again, is much like real life experiences I’ve had—I’m notorious for rushing to make copies the day before or day of zine fests.) Anyway, someone told me there was a Xerox machine in one of the offices where they’d let me make copies for free, so I went there. The guy working was this super hot punky French dude named Guillaume, and it was like we locked eyes and immediately knew we wanted to bang. We were just gonna fuck right there in the office, but people kept coming in and interrupting us, so we couldn’t. Later, we decided to go find a hotel and get a room and fuck there, so we were wandering downtown Chicago looking for a hotel we could afford, and we finally found one—but it was being used as a vaccine clinic, and was so packed with people waiting to get vaxxed that we couldn’t even get inside to see if there were rooms available. Also my parents were there for some reason, waiting to get vaccines at a hotel in Chicago, which kinda killed my horny mood. It was a terribly frustrating dream. And also hella weird. (And also my dream dude Guillaume was really hot, and he’s been popping up in my fantasies ever since.)

The first of May was probably the best day of the week. It was too cold and rainy to do any outdoor activities, but I taught D. a bit about the labor rights/anarchist history of May Day for school, did a bunch of artsy-crafty stuff, did some witchy stuff. I started mapping out my new poetry project—a (book-length!) sonnet sequence about a love affair I had in the summer of 2005. I’d already planned on writing a poem about that lover and that summer, but then realized I had more to say about it than would fit in just one poem. Then I thought of a book I recently read and loved—Maggie Millner’s Couplets, which is a book of poems about a love affair—and thought: oh! I could write a book of poems about it! And then I thought of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Fatal Interview, and thought: oh! the book could be a sonnet sequence! Which is incredibly nerdy, I know, but is also super exciting for me, as I’ve been getting back into sonnets with a vengeance; and seems especially appropriate considering that the spring/summer of 2005 was when I first got obsessed with Edna Millay and with writing my own sonnets. Later, I listened to electro-swing while making pasta primavera for dinner. And P. and I got to have sexytimes again that night.

Tuesday, my period started, and my anxiety was through the roof again. But I did yoga, which helped a little, as did listening to some good old fashioned punk rock. And I worked a bit more on my sonnet-book, which, I decided that day, will be titled Untrue Aftermath—both because it has the same syllable count as/a similar feeling to Fatal Interview, and because it comes from a sonnet I wrote in the summer of 2005.

I started off Wednesday feeling so good. I did yoga, made myself a strawberry-blueberry-banana smoothie for breakfast. But then I got a phone call from energy assistance saying that I needed to call back and verify more stuff—stuff which I had already verified, by the way—or my application was going to expire. Which sent me into a panic, because I’d already received the disconnection notice from the power company, and though I didn’t know what day they’d turn it off, I knew it wasn’t far off. So I verified it all again, and then kept calling back to make sure they had all the information they needed and my application wouldn’t expire, and they assured me it was fine! It was all good now! So I thought I had that taken care of, but I was still stressed just from dealing with it, and also was thinking about my cousin C.W., who was going into surgery later that day, to remove part of his colon and intestines, due to cancer.

But the day got better. It was sunny, and warm enough to go outside and plant the pansies and get some veggies sprouting. We also did other yard work, like cutting back the mulberry bushes which are trying to overtake the yard, and then I helped C. build a lean-to from some of the mulberry branches. Then I worked on more of Untrue Aftermath, and P. and I cooked delicious Jamaican jerk burgers for dinner. And I got good news about my cousin—the surgery went well, and they’re pretty sure they got all the cancer.

I didn’t sleep well that night, either. At first it was fun being up late; I sat on the porch alone to listen to the night sounds, to dream and scheme. But then, even when I wanted to go to sleep, I couldn’t, and started, once again, worrying about everything.

I woke up the next day exhausted, with jaw and tooth pain, because I sometimes grind my teeth in my sleep when I’m stressed. The morning light on the yard was beautiful, though, and in the afternoon, I dropped D. off with my parents, and went to run a couple errands. I was feeling good, driving around, drinking an iced coffee, looking at all the trees in bloom and singing along to old favorite songs I still love. I thought I’d get home, work on my sonnet sequence, and make a cake. And then I got home and I just crashed. I felt ancient and tired and sad and ugly. I started missing the good old bad old days, while simultaneously feeling like I was in them.

Let’s see if I can explain…working on Untrue Aftermath, well, I’ve been delving back into the summer of 2005, reconstructing events and emotions from old journal entries and photographs and mix tapes. But what sometimes happens when I fall too deep into the nostalgic k-hole of a particular timeframe—it’s happened before, and it happened this time—is, I start remembering things I hadn’t even kept record of, and I start feeling how I felt back then, and then the wave of memories and emotions becomes so vivid and intense that it feels like it’s happening again, in real time. Which, to paraphrase myself, is good for my writing, but so very bad for my delicate heart.

But then the other thing that happens is that, though I may be experiencing all the old memories and feelings in real time, my brain also likes to remind me of all the ways that the Now is not like Ye Olde Days. That was happening on Thursday, too. You know, my brain was going: Remember all your lovers and all your adventures? You barely have adventures anymore. And you’ll never have a new lover again, not just because of the relationship you’re in but because you’re old and ugly and no one would even want you. (To quote an Edna St. Vincent sonnet that’s not from Fatal Interview: I only know that summer sang in me / A little while, that in me sings no more.)

All that got me too sad and restless to focus on writing or baking. So I read my friend Jonas’s newest book, and built some LEGOs with C., and ate linguini and clam sauce for dinner. Later, I sat out on the front porch again and watched the almost-full Flower Moon rising through the flowering trees. It wasn’t what I wanted, but it was what I had, and it was enough to get me through.

Friday, I woke up in a better mood, and the weather was good. I had such plans for the day. I was going to bake the cake, and then we were going to do more gardening, and then make burritos (with homemade guacamole) for dinner. I was in the middle of making the cake—batter was more than half done, oven was preheating—when our gas and electricity got shut off. I immediately called energy assistance to see what the fuck was going on. The woman I talked to was like: “Well, see, it was really confusing because you reported this and then you reported this conflicting thing, you sent in this form but then sent in that other form, blah blah.” And I didn’t yell because I knew it wasn’t her fault individually, but I said: “It was confusing to me, too! I only sent in and verified what I was asked to, it’s not my fault that people told me to send in and verify conflicting things.” She said: “We can book you for a crisis appointment over the phone at 4:40 p.m. today, to cancel out your previous application and put in a crisis one.” I agreed to it, but said: “This would not have been a crisis situation had everything been processed a month ago like it should have been.” I was pissed. For once in my life I was on top of my end of shit, and this still happened?!

We packed as much of our refrigerated food as possible into an ice chest with a bunch of ice and packed all our frozen food (plus the meat for the burritos) into the big freezer in our basement with several large bags of ice. Then I booked a hotel room for the night, and put a call for help on my main blog.

It may have been slightly irresponsible, financially, to book a hotel room, rather than stay with my parents—but mentally/emotionally, it was the right thing to do. Because my parents would have made that night hell for me. Whenever anything like this has happened in the past, even if I am not asking them for financial help and am finding other ways to take care of it myself, they just berate me, endlessly. “Why didn’t you just pay the bill off months ago?” they say. “We didn’t have the money,” I tell them. “Why didn’t you have the money? Why don’t you get a better job? Why doesn’t P. get a better job? Blah blah blah.” This time would have been no different. They wouldn’t have cared that it actually wasn’t my fault, that I applied for assistance as soon as I knew I wouldn’t be able to pay the bill, and that I stayed on top of it but e.a. didn’t have their shit together. No, that wouldn’t have mattered at all. They would have insisted on giving me the money to pay the bill—even if I told them I didn’t want them to, and was working on other ways to get the power back on. Then they would have spent the rest of the night lecturing me about how they shouldn’t have to help me out financially like that anymore and can’t afford to now that my dad’s retired (which I know and agree! which is why I wouldn’t ask them to!), and on all the ways in which both I and my partner are fuck-ups (which, news flash: lecturing someone about how they’re a failure doesn’t help them not be a failure).

Once we got to the motel, I did the math, and figured out that if I got around $1000 from my emergency post, I could put that together with the money I had set aside for rent, ask my landlord to hold off on cashing the check until I get paid from my most recent proofreading gig (which should be by the 10th, and she usually doesn’t cash our rent checks until after the 10th of the month anyway), and pay the minimum balance to get the power turned back on, so that even if the e.a. thing didn’t work out, I could still get our power back on the next day.

Then I had the crisis appointment. If only they had given me one of those a month ago, it wouldn’t have been a crisis! The woman I spoke to this time was actually on top of things. She gathered all the information she could from our previous application, and just asked me to verify/clarify a few more things. The approval for the amount of help they can give went through right away, but she told me the payment wouldn’t go through until Wednesday. Well, fuck, I thought, there’s no way we can afford to stay in a motel for that many nights, plus by then all our food would spoil, and we can’t afford to replace all that, either. So I was just praying that my emergency post would get enough of a response that I could pay the minimum the next day. I asked the woman from e.a. what would happen if I did that, if it would somehow cancel the assistance, and she said no, it would just go toward paying off whatever was left on the bill and/or be put towards the next one.

After that, there was nothing more I could do for the night other than periodically reblog my emergency post, so I decided to try and enjoy myself/relax as best I could. I did have a brief thought that the universe heard me longing for ye olde days, and decided to grant my wish, in a very monkey’s paw way. Like: Oh, you want the old days back? The days of adventure, when you could never afford to pay your bills on time and were constantly living with no gas or electricity? Fuck, Universe, that’s not what I meant; guess I should have been more careful what I wished for.

But I also did get a bit of the good parts of the old days—namely, staying in a roadside motel. I just love hotels and motels so much. All the people coming in and out, the free coffee 24/7, the way that they’re liminal spaces so even if you’re staying in your own town it’s like you’ve stepped out of daily time and into something different. We ordered pizza for dinner, cuz one of the better pizza places in town opened up a new carryout-and-delivery spot just down the road from where we were staying, and they delivered it right to the room. P. and I both took long hot showers; the kids both took baths.

I kept going outside to smoke, which I have been so good about not doing recently, but all the stress just fucking got to me and I caved. I’d go outside to smoke, watch the cars pulling into and out of the parking lot, the people checking into the hotel, the parking lot across the way with the rehab center next to the coffeeshop where I saw Adam Fell do a reading back in early 2018. I watched and listened to the redwing blackbirds, swooping and chirring in the roadside marsh. In my head, I played a medley of all my favorite hotel and motel songs. One of them being, of course, “Can’t Hardly Wait.” And at one point I noticed that most of the vehicles in the parking lot had Minnesota plates. Turned out that there was a youth football team from Minnesota staying there for the night. And then a little while later, outside having another smoke, this trio of young punks approached me—I guess they saw my tattoos and my t-shirt with the sleeves torn off and knew I was one of them—we all stood around smoking and chatting, and it turned out they were a punk band…from Minnesota. What are the fucking odds?

I was up late. Full moons and motels both make me restless, plus I was still worried about the power situation. Wondering if my emergency post would get enough traction to get me the money I needed; wondering if my landlord would be pissed when I asked her to hold the rent check, and if I’d have to pay her the $50 late fee. I was up late, sipping whiskey, wishing that I was having a fun motel night of drinking and sex rather than the type of motel night I was having, but I was enjoying myself despite it. When I went out to have my last cigarette of the night, and look at the full moon, I took my little plastic motel cup of ice & whiskey out with me, and the Minnesota punks were out there too, smoking and drinking beer. We talked again. They asked me to come party with them in their room, and I was like “oh, boys, thank you, but I am here with my husband and kids and I don’t think they’d appreciate me bailing on them to go party.” I mean I really was thankful that they asked me. Made me feel like I’m not so old and boring after all, if some punk kids nearly two decades younger than I am think I’m cool enough to party with.

When I finally fell asleep, I dreamt that I met [redacted] and we got drunk and had sloppy-drunk motel sex.

In the morning, we partook of the complimentary breakfast and coffee, and I checked on the money and energy situation. People really stepped up, I got enough that I could have paid the minimum balance and any late fee my landlord asked. So I called the energy company, asked them how I needed to pay the balance to get my power back on that day, and they let me know. I went on the website, and as I was entering my information to pay, I mean I was literally about to hit the ‘complete payment’ button, I got a phone call from energy assistance. Telling me that, because they’d marked it as a crisis, their assistance amount went through that day instead of needing to wait until Wednesday. So I called the power company back, they confirmed it had gone through and told me how much I now owed, and because it was less than I’d initially thought due to the assistance going through, I was able to pay the bill completely off without even needing to put a hold on the rent check.

After that, we packed up, grabbed some more free coffee (and cocoa for the kids) from the lobby, checked out, came home, and called the power company one last time to get the power back on. Then we checked our food—everything was still good, hallelujah.

The rest of Saturday, I was exhausted, but happy. Glad to be home. Thinking maybe I learned a couple lessons from all this. One being that if I ever need energy assistance again, I should apply at least two months ahead of time. The other being: appreciate what you have. Adventure’s not all it’s cracked up to be, at least not when it comes with that kind of chaos. And I was appreciative. Appreciative that friends and strangers alike helped me out when I most needed it. Appreciative that the energy assistance came through after all, even if it was last minute. Appreciative that the food was still good, and we were able to make the guacamole and burritos for dinner that we’d planned on making the night before.

I was so sure I’d sleep well that night because I was so tired. I fell asleep fine, but then C. woke up in the middle of the night, and it was difficult to get him back to sleep. And then even when he did fall back to sleep, I was awake for another couple hours.

So yesterday I was even more exhausted than I was Saturday. I mean, I hadn’t slept well in several nights; that was a problem even before the power outage. I was exhausted, and C. was exhausted and cranky, and I had to catch up on a bunch of laundry. But it wasn’t all bad, in fact there was a lot of good. The weather was beautiful. A couple of the poems from one of the lit zine submissions I sent out at the end of April got accepted for publication. I got hired for a new proofreading gig, a pretty well-paying one. Because of that, and the fact that I’m getting the paycheck from my last gig very soon, and the fact that my energy bill is now square, I actually have a teeny bit of extra money—which I’m using a portion of to give to other causes and people who are in urgent situations right now. Then, last night, we went to have dinner with my parents. We did tell them some of what happened on Friday, but because it was no longer urgent we could play it off as ‘oh, our power was out for a night, we stayed in a motel, it was an adventure,’ and there was no lecture and everything was fine. They watched the kids for a bit; P. and I went to get takeout to bring back for everyone, and had a round of beers while we waited. (My parents treated us.) I was absolutely enamored by the bartender and the two waitresses. They were all queer femmes (takes one to know one); these young, rough-ass bitches (and oh, I mean rough-ass bitches in an absolutely positive way) wearing these ridiculous, amazing outfits (stuff I would love to wear but probably wouldn’t have the guts to; but probably would have worn when I was as young as they are). And Halsey’s “Bad At Love” came on, and they all started singing along, at the top of their lungs and so full of feeling in that “I’ve been there” way and god, I love people. Truly, I do. Then, dinner with the kids and the parents, and it was actually pleasant and low-key, for once. And then home again, home again, once again exhausted and happy. We all finally slept well. I only woke up in the night once. I was having a dream in which I was reading a beautiful poem (I am one of those rare people who can actually read text in my dreams sometimes), and I woke up with one line from the poem still in my mind. I rolled over, pulled up the notes app on my phone, typed it in, then went back to sleep. This morning, I read what I’d typed: in the time of the witches / the streets were smoked with blue perfume. That’s pretty excellent. I need to use it (or something like it) in a real poem. Today I started my new proofreading gig, did schooling with the kiddos. I had to make one last call to the power company, to make sure the payment/arrangement went through so we don’t end up in that situation again; according to them it’s all good and now this hellish cycle of phone calls and panic is done. I’m not in the best mood today—all the stress of the past few days has worn me down; and everything has been so weird and wild lately that the past few days has felt more like a few weeks. And oh, now our oven is crapping out, which is another thing we can’t afford. Plus it’s rainy and chilly again, so I can’t go outside and garden or just sit in the sun, and I’m just kinda sad, really. I’m trying to make the most of today and not get into a total funk. I dressed up in a way that’s comfy and fabulous at the same time. I made myself a box of Annie’s mac and cheese for lunch, because that’s one of my comfort foods. Now I’m drinking tea, and I’m hoping to find the time to work on poetry stuff later. Tomorrow the weather is supposed to be better, so I’m planning to go to the library (I have a novel on hold there that I’m very excited for); maybe go to the post office (some people ordered books and zines from my emergency post; also the post office has Lichtenstein stamps now and I need some!). Over all, I am so grateful for how everything turned out. It’s been a fucked up few days, but it could have been a lot worse. And next time I’m lonely for adventure? Please remind me that just a trip to the library or a walk around my neighborhood will suffice.

#ashtrayfloors #dear livejournal #this one's long #and i don't feel like tagging for everything so.#read at yr own risk

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rage-against-the-dying-of-light · 2 years ago

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hi there big fan. id say first time writer but i think this is my second ask ive sent you actually. i was meaning to ask how you wind up participating in so many zines! it seems like every time i catch one taking applications it's something i'm just not a fit for, and the ones that i WOULD fit right in with always manage to pass me by. is it just a matter of knowing people? tracking certain tags? luck? genuinely asking because i'd love to take part in something like that and i always see you in so many! ok thats my ask. thanks for writing sooo good i love to read it. sparkle on

Hey Musashi, thanks for the ask, nice to see you in my ask box again.

Anyways, getting into zines! Well, for Ace Attorney getting my start was luck, I didn't even know what a zine was until a new friend told me and some others in our private server that they were in an AA zine and pre-orders had just opened, and so I rushed to support them. I won't ramble your ear off with the whole damn story, but eventually I found the @ aafancalendar which reblogs pretty much every AA event that could be going on. Not every fandom has it's own dedicated calender, but that one is fantastic!

In terms of getting into zines? Most zines have a blind submission process, so I am pleased to say I got into them via skill. But in terms of knowing ppl? That usually helps for running a zine.

Running a zine is a lot of work, but mods also get to be in their own zine, it's kind of a mod privileges thing. So that can be a place where knowing ppl helps, bc if you've shown you're a great mod, they might ask for your help on future projects. But there are still lots of opportunities to get into modding (many zines invite intern mods to learn the ropes!), and you can always just be head mod yourself too, (that's another story for another time). I’m also just autistic af and cold called ppl in the fandom who I admired and wanted to work with and who had worked on other zines. Your mileage may vary, but there’s no harm in asking, just make sure you’re fine taking no for an answer.

That's about how I got into half the zines I'm in, is I'm helping run them. But part of it is just persistence and not counting yourself out before you even apply. I want to get traditionally published too, so been trying the magazine scene, so I already had 1 years worth of magazine rejections under my belt, but even still, it does still hurt to get rejected even from zines, but you have to be persistent. I think I'm at a 50/50 acception to rejection rate when it comes to getting into zines. Sometimes, even if you're skilled, your prose style or whatever just doesn't vibe with the zine mods and that's not a reflection of your skill.

The short of it: put your best works forward and apply to everything you’re interested in.

I'll also leave you with some more resources. So in terms of finding zines from other fandoms, the best resource I've found is @ ZineTown on Twitter. (I know we might not like Twitter, but they're incredibly professional, active and a huge community, extremely worth following.) I'd also suggest joining their Discord channel, bc it is not only great to find zines to contribute to, a ton of mods there also post looking for mods to help out and you can choose to get pinged for specific fandoms, or specific mod roles.

Also if you're into Genshin Impact at all, just from casual observation, they have a bonker yonkers amount of zines, so good time to be a Genshin zine fan.

Sorry this was so rambly, but I hope it helped!

tl;dr: Follow aafancalendar and ZineTown, apply for literally everything. Make sure to have a private friends server to build you back up after rejections (they will happen, sometimes zines have to reject even highly skilled ppl just for numbers reasons). Crying is allowed and encouraged, make sure to have snacks for either celebration or comfort after rejection.

#asks #zines #kind of rambling lol sorry

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imagymnasia · 12 days ago

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personal yelling below the cut, feel free to keep scrolling. I just need to be sappy and hopeful for like two seconds before The Despair tries to take me again.

So first, some context I guess.

I've always loved books; always been a storyteller. And when I realized that writing was something anyone could do, the entire world opened up. (Shout out to my 2nd grade teacher, Mrs. Nutzman. I owe you my life.) And for a long while I wrote for the joy of it, you know? Just because I could. Just because I had stories that needed to be told. Sometimes the story was profound or about processing deep emotion, and sometimes it was making a self-insert OC and kissing your childhood cartoon crush.

You know. Like you do.

And then I graduated and went to college and learned about the world and (for a multitude of reasons that would take me a book to explain fully) I gave up. I lost it. My muse, my motivation, my spark, whatever you want to call it. It was just gone. I stopped writing, I hit the wall, and all that shiny-eyed wonder and joy and purpose simply vanished.

Years pass. I try again, sometimes, but it never sticks. I can't recapture what I had, but neither can I make it anew. I try again. I fail. I try agan, but with less optimism. I fail.

I stop trying.

Fast forward to the pandemic, and discovering a fandom that inspired me so much I started writing fanfic again. I hadn't written fanfic in 20+ years. Hell, I'd barely written ANYTHING since the early 2000s. And it feels good! I'm on a roll. I join zines, I slap stuff on AO3, I trade headcanons with my buddies. It was great! But it wasn't enough. People leave. Fandom fizzles. ButI keep trying.

And I burn out. Again. And I quit. AGAIN.

Then FFXIV took hold of me and I give it one last shot. Just a little; just a TASTE. It's not even writing, I tell myself, as I give my character backstory and watch as she slays gods and falls in love. It's just for me and like one other person, anyway. (Hi, Haj! You are the Newt to my Herman, the Sain to my Kent, and I forever adore you.)

And it's fine. At this point in my story, I'd given up on Writing, but I could play in my little sandbox. Whatever dregs of happiness I could find in my pretend world were enough. Honestly, I was just happy to be imagining again.

And THEN I found more XIV fans, and god help me but they cared? About my character? About her story? About ME? And the fans became friends. And then we started writing together. And then we made a small writing group together. And somehow in the two decades since I decided I was going to Be a Writer I was actually for-real writing again.

So here we are at present day and we're trading fics and talking about poetry and doing writing challenges and sharing prompts and building resources and ??????

[The writer pauses here because she is once again overcome with emotion because the profundity of what is happening hits her all over again.]

...

You know, I was trying to be witty and articulate about this but I just gotta say it: I'm so happy.

I'm so fucking happy it hurts, because this is all I've ever wanted. All I have ever truly wanted was to find a group of friends who love this as much as I do. Who want to write, who want to create, who care what other folks are doing and working on and creating, who cheer for each other and lift up the things we make and say This is Good. This Matters.

Not all of us want to be capital-w Writers (in fact I may be the only one? One of two? I don't know and I haven't asked and that's on me) but the fact that we all came together because this thing that brings me, personally, so much joy ALSO does that for the rest of us? It gives me hope. It is inspiring and beautiful and I am not at all exaggerating when I say that sometimes I am so overwhelmed with emotion just because our little writing corner exists that it brings me to tears.

I'm crying right now.

Community matters. Art matters. And for the first time in my life those two things have finally intersected in this wonderful awkward beautiful messy imperfect incredible space, with people I care about and trust with my whole heart, and I am so

fucking

happy

that I truly do not have the proper words to convey what it means to me.

I feel like I've found a little piece of myself again, a piece I have long neglected and ignored and told it didn't matter---all because it only ever mattered to me, and that just wasn't enough. Dreams long since dead are rising up again; for they were never dead actually, they were just sleeping and now that season is over and it's time to grow again.

So while I'm processing a lot of Big Dark Scary Things right now, I am also thinking of the Good, and holding to hope and defiance and beauty in the face of all that. And I'm going to keep creating, because to do otherwise would be to turn my back on the things that make me, me; to give up is to let Big Dark Scary win, and I refuse to let it take these things from me again.

I don't really know how to end this so I guess I'll just say it's really nice to have direction again, and to have people to share it with. I don't talk about this stuff irl and there are a myriad reasons why that I won't get into.

So. I guess if you're in the group and you've read this then thank you.

It feels weird to thank people for this but I'm truly grateful to each and every one of you. Thanks for being a bright spot in a dark world and giving me a place to actually, fearlessly, be my fucking self. It may seem like a small inconsequential thing but I promise you, it's not.

That's all.

I'm going to go have another cry and eat snacks, now.... and then? Then I will write.

Ioj out.

#personal #op yells a lot #had a bad day at work and maybe want to elbow drop a coworker #and also really hitting the grief train this week so that's floating in me brain #so I'm trying to focus on the good #and this is really really good #like life-giving good #anyway I just needed to put this out there #if I'm gonna cry I'd rather good cry than bad cry #hope is a choice and this is the good I'm clinging to #in the end the shadow is but a small and passing thing and there is light and high beauty forever beyond its reach

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bbybrahms · 2 months ago

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Coming out to tell the story of the Repo! Zine from discord. Idk if there are multiple Repo! servers so to be clear this is all from the server titled 'TESTIFY', since I don't want any other servers reps getting tarnished by this cus I'm sure they're doing a better job than whatever this is.

Maybe it's a case of ESH but I can't clear up anything in the server and already stuffs being said about me, so I'm posting here.

From the start the organisation of the zine was messy. It's a passion project on discord so I really don't expect perfectly organised perfection, but it was red flags from day one.

Firstly, before anything started, we were led to believe that it was going to charity, specifically a palestinian charity. For me, that was a leading motivator in applying. Although iirc one person argued against it being palestinian (suspicious), there were ppl looking at different charities and essentially it was very heavily implied by the end that would be what we're doing. Except this was never brought up again.

The lack of communication was astounding. Contributors weren't outwardly informed their application was successful, a channel was just silently made and roles silently given. It took weeks to get info on the dimensions/format/deadline etc. (the deadline was given 2 WEEKS before any info on filetypes and colour profiles etc) and a lot of the time it would be organisers going "idk I'll ask this person" "idk wait for that person to respond" just no respect for the creatives they'd gotten involved. Zero communication. Told us next to nothing for Weeks.

At this point, I wasn't seeing these as red flags I just waited for the info I needed then got on with it.

I submit my piece a few days early, then when the deadline comes I'm curious what the other contributors did so took a nosy peak in the folder (idk if this is frowned upon or not I just wanted to see others art and mine was in the same folder so I think it's ok?) But there's like 1/4 of the amount there should be in there and this is a small project to begin with. So I follow up and get told the deadlines actually moved (was this decided privately or could they just not be bothered to chase up late submissions? Idk?)

The deadline gets moved 4 times total - a lot of the time after the deadlines been, like they'd message day after for example like "btw deadlines moved". This drags the project out months more than it originally was meant to be. The creatives who submitted on time are told nothing, they just have to wait what will happen to their art.

A final deadline finally happens. They say it's final, everyone agrees. Many people have dropped out at this point and frankly I should have done the same, but since I had already submitted I didn't really see the point in calling quits so late.

After the deadlines been, there's no word. So a little while later (iirc just under a month but don't quote me on this), I chase up again about how we haven't heard anything. I get told the zines still on, the deadlines closed, things are in the works. This was early July.

In early August, someone else follows up and ask if the zine is still on and if they should post the work they made for their submission on their own. OVER A MONTH LATER(mid September), they are told they can post their work if they so please. In this same convo, a mod comes in to say they'll probably get started that week - and then ask what file type we're doing. The deadline was in June. The disrespect to the people who put hours of work into a submission for a fandom they obviously care deeply about. Not only is it months before anyone is told what's being done with their work, not only is getting a response like pulling teeth, the people organising reveal they've only just given a single thought to how they're actually going to put it together. I see this and while I don't really care about whether or not my submission makes it into the zine, I feel so bad for the other contributors who showed so much interest and enthusiasm for this project.

So first day of October (last we heard was in mid-September, deadline was end of June, whole thing began in April where the original deadline was 6 weeks), I'm like "whatever, I'm over this zine, I'll take the L and whatever discord mod wrath this server has to offer, and point out how poorly they're treating their contributors." So I tell them straightforward that the zine has been a mess from day one and that their lack of communication is disrespectful and rude, not responding for over a month is just lazy and again rude.

I'll just post what I said:

(I use light mode because I can't read light text on a dark background easily, so no one needs to go 'haha lightmode')

I absolutely stand by every word btw. The zine was a joke. The lack of respect for the creatives was just so bad, the lack of communication, the lack of organisation. All of it.

I get this in response:

one mod says "contact me if you want your piece removed" and the other mod says "if you contact anyone I'll report you for harassment"

Anyway... yeah. I get told I'M the one being disrespectful, they don't bother remembering I was the one who checked in TWICE (guess I'm forgettable that way), I get called disgraceful, embarrassing and told I should never work professionally at all?? and that I'm a disgrace to the art community. And that I'm overreacting. Haha ok.

I'd also like to bring back how we were all lead to believe this would be for charity. And suddenly it's no ones priority? Were the mods never intending to actually follow through with the charity thing or did they just forget completely since it was six months ago this was decided? Ig if anyone would be interested in buying a Repo! zine just donate to Palestine instead. Safer that way.

As you can see in the screenshots, I got timed out🫶 I can't respond to any of this and basically have to just let them lie about me never checking in and being a rude and horrible disgrace out of nowhere, also implying I don't have my own stuff going on which is Bold to say the least.

Seeing as this was the first time anyone got a response on the same day, I hope at least I helped the other contributors by spiting the mods into action? Idk? Regardless, I'd say I dodged a bullet and the mods showed their true colours. I don't want my submission used but if I contact anyone I'm getting reported (to who??) for harassment (it was one message) so I just removed my submission from the folder and hope no copies were made🤞

If anyone in the server sees this: I stand by what I said, please don't include my work, and see you round ig✌️

I don't think I'll join another Repo! server, I love Repo! it's a huge passion of mine, I'll continue making art for it when I feel like, but yeah. That's my experience in the 'TESTIFY' server. It kinda sucked.

#repo! the genetic opera #repo fans dont support the zine pls just donate to 🇵🇸 directly #and um good luck to anyone else in that server ig? the other contributors seemed nice #ive privated my pinned intro post in case of any further escalation (it has my other accounts listed) so fyi:#if you would like to chat shit about me i go by any pronouns👍#i also removed any art i posted in the server

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from-dre · 2 months ago

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The Fine Line Between Awareness & Fanaticism

Can you tell I wrote this in 2014?

11:32am—I checked the clock on my microwave twice before sitting down in the desk chair with my morning coffee today. It was still steaming so as I began blowing a gentle stream of cool air into the cup, I hopped on YouTube knowing I'll have some time to kill before beginning my day.

A good headline should be attention grabbing. It should pop out at you amidst a sea of other unrelated clutter. More often than not, if it doesn't stand out the first time my eyes glaze over it, I won't even know I missed it much less give it a second chance. So I begin to skim—typical compilations or foreign music videos or news segments of world events fill up most of my screen. Then, something along the lines of, “How the CIA manufactured Isis.” Here we go, I think to myself, almost rolling my eyes. I know I shouldn't. But we've all been through this exact minute in one way or another. Maybe you're running to the grocery store to pick up some milk or whatever and there, in the checkout lane sits The National Inquirer, shouting at you from its rack: “HEY! I KNOW EMBARRASSING THINGS ABOUT FAMOUS PEOPLE! BUY ME AND READ ME!” You know you shouldn't, that you're above it. But its got a picture of a pot-bellied Brad Pitt on an exotic beach somewhere with another unrelated snapshot of a black-eyed Angelina staring down in some type of shameful pose. Could it be true?,your mind thinks. “I NEED TO KNOW!” I don't blame you. In return though, I ask that you give me the same courtesy during my own display of attempting to show zero self-restraint and giving in to that guilty pleasure which goes against my better judgement. I click on the video as I prepare for the next few minutes.

It's what you'd expect. Decent graphics, a fancy set designed to emulate a respectable news studio, and an expensive diaphragm microphone with a very animated man shouting frantically behind it—arms flailing, voice heightening to new peaks every other sentence, all while the overly-agitated speaker spews opinions dressed-up as factual reporting.

The 10th Circle of Hell

It's interesting to see these people work themselves into such a frenzy, such anxiety-riddled rants that they must feel as if they don't hit every single angle and theory, then the “sheeple,” or “uninformed” audience will miss their point entirely. I don't want to pick solely on this specific man, there are hundreds of like-minded people who dedicate every free moment of their lives to producing new content for their YouTube channels, blogs, podcasts, or if they're super edgy, their still-in-circulation zines. I'm not knocking the passion. Their dedication is honorable. Even their motives, I suppose, are admirable—to merely wake up the sleeping. All fine and good. It's their processing abilities that they've shrunk down themselves that signals a loss of a perfectly valuable mind, before it had baseless theories pelted at it from all sides—and worse, forced to accept.

Though I'm perfectly satisfied with The Divine Comedy as is, I'm sure if Dante were to have gone any further, the tenth circle of the Inferno would consist of nothing but having to convince one single conspiracy theorist of rethinking his arguments, even for a moment. It just isn't possible. Their world is just as sick and chaotic as everyone else's, they don't need to look any farther to find a news story ripe with injustice. We then, begin to differ on how we mentally process such things. A balanced brain can admit the sadness of the story at hand, they're also able to leave it alone, as is. They don't need to attach any extra narratives to make sense of what they've just heard or seen. It is what it is. Tragic. Or a miserable example of human interaction. To a conspiracy theorist, there must always be something else that we're not being told. We aren't given all the facts, ever. Surely, certain words have been blackened out of the official transcript before the cameras went live. Everywhere they look, there's a connection to be made. It's all run by The Man Behind The Curtain, down to the very last detail. Nothing is under-thought or left to chance. Big Brother is very real and is watching them even in this very instance. Like the final shot of Hitchcock's Psycho,Norman knows he's being observed, analyzed, so acts that much calmer. Not even a fly can break the man's concentration when it's time to put on the poker face.

Their incessant warnings have fallen on deaf ears for so long that they've adapted the same formula they profess to be exposing: fear mongering. They say mainstream, State-run media is all one huge sham. That their stories are used to advance hidden agendas. The irony is that they are employing these same tactics themselves. It takes a willful eye to pick up on the hypocrisy, but it's there. Was it really necessary for this opinionated speaker to keep reiterating his validation of a particular politician again and again? Say you respect the man's views once, then move on. Things like that. It's bothersome, not because they hold allegiance to their own political figures as the big boys do, but because they do it all while making such a huge fuss about how honest their aims are, how thankful the general public should be toward them because of their unwavering courage in exposing the truth.

Patterns = Safety

Well, “the truth”—in my opinion—is that they're just as scared and bewildered and let down in humanity as the rest of us are. They don't understand how such pure hatred could go unnoticed for so long, how so many innocent lives are lost for the furthering of poisonous ideologies. That much is completely understandable. However, they get diluted with fantasy—that if some shadow government was behind it all, everything would make that much more sense. There would be a pattern again. Life would cease to be so chaotic and they'd be able to sleep once more. They're amazing talkers who have no interest in exercising any reason whatsoever, so a good conspiracy theorist is quite able of convincing even himself that up is down or that the sky is actually bright red. Once connections are drawn from seemingly unrelated events, they begin seeing it goes farther than planes flying into buildings. That it's bigger than the gas chambers and extermination camps built solely with the purpose of wiping millions of innocent lives off the face of the planet. In fact, it's the most extraordinary piece of knowledge ever—and they're the ones who stumbled upon it. They will expose these criminals hidden-in-plain-view to the rest of the world and because the assassins must already be on their way to their homes, they'll go down as martyrs for humanity. Truth seekers who saw it all before anyone else.

Either way, listen to any one of them talk long enough and you'll quickly start getting tired of hearing about their sure-deaths. How they'll be used to cover-up the truth they were trying to expose. They say it with such certainty. From the mouth of this man himself: "When the nuke finally goes off, expect every last one of us leaders to be killed within an hour. That's all it'll take. An hour. You'll see!”

Rabbit Holes

With all of that said, here's the whole point of this essay: after sipping the last of my coffee, I looked up from my computer screen—12:47pm.

More than an hour later and I was still jumping from video to video, listening to mumble I could either poke holes the size of these men’s egos in or—while trying to give him the benefit of the doubt—not only accept, but strengthen his arguments with much better logic on my end. Both were incredible wastes of time. It was useless trying to reason with hyperbole. So how did I lose track of time? The sheer arrogance of it all engulfed me. I was in a trance. Much like flipping through channels and stumbling upon The Wiggles or Teletubbies or any Kardashian-centered show, you can't help but take a few extra seconds to admire the awkwardness. “How does anyone watch this?!,” you ask yourself, while watching it. Not even noticing the seconds ticking by, turning into entire minutes.

As I closed out Safari and began getting myself ready for the day, all these thoughts swirled around my head. This is how honest, good-natured people get sucked in, I thought. The need some humans hold in their black hearts to see Western Civilization burn down to nothing but ash is a terrifying thought and a properly-wired, down-to-Earth mind tries to make sense of such a thing. The reality of there being no good motive behind these crimes against humanity is a tough pill to swallow. So the armchair geopoliticians flock to their keyboards and offer their skewed theories, promising the truth. The ones with louder personalities and intrusive characteristics eventually build a following, get noticed and maybe get a talk show, with real producers, because someone will still listen to a complete stranger’s opinion, no matter how much lunacy they radiate.

Advocates & Worshippers

But a true thinker considers all viewpoints, no matter the source. So, let's play Devil's Advocate and for a minute, humor these people and their delusions. Even a shadow government is still compromised of human beings. Even if they're secretly praying to evil deities and placing subliminal symbols in everyday environments, they're still two arms, two legs, and a torso with a talking head. Even if they perform Satanic rituals at meetings of the world's utmost elite, they're still buying weekly groceries, eating at their favorite places, trying to stay in shape, arguing with their wives or husbands, accidentally backing up their toilets, walking their dogs, oversleeping, getting sick, getting old, dying. These devil-worshippers draped in scarlet robes who wear animal skulls as masks and chant in ancient tongues are not real threats. The real danger is a poisoned ideology.

Those are what this speaker and Co. should be concerning themselves with dispelling and eradicating. Those ideas are what live on, much longer than that of the men who spend entire lives living for, spreading and eventually dying for. Hitler is no longer with us, so why are Neo-Nazis still sprouting up randomly? His theories can be called out for the sick rhetoric they are—but as long as they hold weight in sick hearts, they retain enough power to destroy lives. An internet show or podcast built around the discussion and dissection of ideas doesn't pull in the masses though. We're talking ratings people! YouTube has been writing out some hefty checks—let’s get in on that action! Instead of exposing why and psychologically where these monstrous acts of violence come from, taking the time to destroy their threads of logic from the inside out and exposing their followers as blind and ignorant, they choose to paint a picture full of hidden plots, mystique, secrets, connections that are so outlandish, they just might work. And of course, they do. Every time. They speak to an audience who doesn't like thinking for themselves. Unfortunately though, these are the types of people they replace their innate intuitions with.

Just the fact that people lose their lives, isn't that enough of a news story? Isn't that enough to bring out the best in us? Why does there always have to be even darker, ulterior motives? No matter what the event, an even grimmer truth is waiting underneath the surface. Look long and hard at something and a person will trick himself into seeing exactly what he wants. If there are governments in bed with each other who also invite Big Pharma and The World Bank for one huge orgy and their ultimate goal is the enslavement of 99% of Earth's population so that they can feed us nothing but that weird paste fast food places pass off as beef, then I'll be a pretty bummed out slave. But until the day comes where I am taken from my home by MIB-looking agents dressed in expensive Gucci suits with sunglasses to match, why obsess over the possibility and eventual rise of this New World Order? Why spend all my waking hours and gorgeous summer days listening to Apocalypse-enthusiasts who make it a point to dream up the most brutal scenarios they can, as if it’s a sport? The end of the world is never close enough for these soapbox preachers. Disease! Famine! The fact that Joan Rivers once had a joke about Scientology in her set! Can't we see how simple and related it all is?!

Finale

Which brings us to the end of this long diatribe. I left my studio and stepped out into a sunshine so bright and invigorating, so powerful and lifting, that I suddenly felt more alive just standing outside my front door than I had in the entire past week. The sounds of the city flowed in and through my head; laughter, birds singing, church bells, an airplane soaring high above taking people I'll never meet to new places they've never seen. It was all so real, so perfect. It reminded me what life truly is. Or at least, what it can be if looked at with the right frame of reference.

There's been so much sadness lately. A million reasons to just break down or shout at the sky or give up completely. I've realized that the continuous stream of bad news will never stop. There'll always be a tragedy waiting to happen and be reminded of in the weeks afterward. You get mentally and emotionally exhausted. You forget how important it is to be able to appreciate a nice day outdoors. The trick isn't to disconnect from the mainstream media by just jumping ship from these opinions to those. Rather, it's to disconnect entirely. No more theories. No more “strange” and “curious” camera edits. No more tracing back the paper trails and who was whose distant relative. It may all be related, sure. But that's because they're all things vying for your full attention, energy, and heart. All of which are so precious and valuable and nobody but yours.

Of course it’s important to be aware of the world you live in. Of the evils which are possible and those carried out everyday by tyrants. But to know is one thing. To fill your life with them to the point where they’ve consumed all you are is another.

If these men behind the microphones ever allow themselves to truly experience a moment’s worth of honest happiness where they aren’t looking for connections or hidden plots put in motion by scary men in the depths of dark shadows, I’ve never seen it caught on tape. Maybe at some point they too, chuckled at something funny. Or maybe they got home one day and instead of their usual B-line for the conspiracy websites, they grabbed their wives, spun them around and while in their arms, planted a huge kiss on the women’s lips for no other reason than to make them smile, just for that moment. Maybe. Who am I to assume to know these complete strangers? I just wish they and the millions of similarly confused theorists would just take up a hobby every now and then. Something that doesn’t involve a computer or a webcam. Crocheting circles? Then they could harness those beautiful brains of theirs on who keeps using all the green thread or why the jar of raspberry jam they’re all supposed to share always turns up mysteriously missing. At least it’ll keep them busy.

#essay #opinion #conspiracy theories #politics

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illustratorintheprocess · 2 years ago

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FMP Part 1: Disseminating Rsearch

The Brief:

I thought it was about time I got into the nitty gritty of what we were actually briefed for.

The Final Major Project (or FMP) for year 3 is worth 60 credits. To pit this into perspective, the Minor Project earlier this year was only worth 20 credits while the 10k word Dissertation was 40 credits. This means the FMP needs me to put as much effort in it as I did with the other two projects combined. Pretty wild.

We are free to chose whatever subject we want to base our project on but there is some guidance still. Some check marks along the was we need to hit. This is where the FMP is split into 3 "mini briefs", 1.) Disseminating Research, 2.) Viable Practice, 3.) Portfolio or Viable Practice #2 or simply FMP (I've seen it called a lot of things). We are the first year where they split the FMP into 3 mini briefs and it was intended for us to have an easier time to steadily work through the project at a good pace without neglecting any important parts (like research) of it. However, from what I have heard from other students everyone is struggling with the mini briefs, especially the first one, and it is adding a lot more stress to an already stressful time because everyone seems to have fallen behind.

The outcome of the FMP will also be showcased in the UAL graduates exhibit in June, which is kind of cool but you know...PRESSURE.

Now to 1.) Disseminating Research and how I intend to deal with it:

I would like to print a research zine in A5 format with maybe 15 pages that would be printed digitally and simply saddle stitched together. Printing it digitally is new for me because I have become very proficient in offset litho and relief print in the past 2 years but barely touched a modern printer for my work. Still it would have to be printed digitally to save time and nerves. I'm a little anxious about preparing the files correctly in InDesign for the job but it's not like that's ever without hiccups for me anyway. Saddle stitching just makes sense for a zine that size. You don't bust out the coptic binding for 15 pages. As much as I would like to do that. Regarding the colours of the zine I am unsure and it is making me nervous. I like to work in black but was told to try and incorporate more colours in my work so I was thinking red and purple maybe? Maybe I could print on coloured paper with black and red ink? I'd have to ask the Digital Printing Team about that. [Mental note made to ask them next time I'm at lcc]

Now the contents of the zine is a different story. It will have to be a lot of 1st hand research, which means my sketches and process drawings as well as mindmaps maybe. Secondary research might be easier accumulated but it would have to be cited which adds a whole new headache to the thing. + there should probably be some written text in there where I reflect on my conclusions from the research, how it helped me or how I used it. The research itself would have to be on specific Cryptids in my case. I would have to explain terminology and what a Cryptid even is and then go into detail with certain Cryptids. Then there has to research of material and processes to produce the final outcome. What paper I use and why, maybe? To be honest, including the technical research part in this feels kind of weird and unnatural but hey, whatever.

So this is how I plan to deal with the 1.) Disseminating Research Mini Brief. Let's hope it all goes to plan.

#student life #ual #university of the arts london #studyblr #london college of communication #illustration and visual media #lcc #uni life #research #zine #Cryptids

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aziraphales-library · 3 years ago

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hello! i’m looking for any canon-compliant fics where we see more into aziraphale and crowley’s relationship throughout the years much like in episode three of Good Omens but the missing scenes.

Hello!

Here's a few for you:

Līgfāmblāwende [G] by Lurlur, robynthemagpie_writes, WyvernQuill

What is a dragon if not just a really big snake?

We present the true story of how St George vanquished the Dragon.

some chocolate to sweeten the deal [G] by Enelica, sevdrag (seventhe)

“Heathens.” Crowley snorts. “Did you know they’ve already discovered four of the planets? Lot of work went into those, let me tell you, and these clever bastards have spotted four of them already. Britannia should weep.”

Aziraphale’s smile softens in pleasure. The angel’s too soft over humanity, and unfortunately, it’s one of the things Crowley likes best about him. “Did you know they’re only eight hundred and ninety years off calculating when the earth began?” The angel glances away, and Crowley has to cover a sharp breath at Aziraphale’s profile, pale and happy. “That’s the closest anyone’s gotten, I believe.”

Like a Box of Chocolates [T] by animeangelriku

“Oh!” Aziraphale moves towards him and stares warily at the box, like he doesn’t know what to make of it. “Crowley, did you… Is this for me?”

“Who else?” The demon decides to ignore the awe in the angel’s voice. It’s not the first time he’s given Aziraphale what might be called a present, and he refuses to look any more into it. It’s never gotten him anywhere good. “Unless there’s another ethereal being opening another bookshop in Soho.”

“Not as far as I’m aware.” Aziraphale’s smile softens, and when he tentatively reaches for the box, Crowley all but surrenders it. “I assume this is a housewarming gift, then?”

“’f you like,” Crowley mutters with a deliberately casual shrug, which kind of defeats the purpose.

everything strange washes up near Miami [T] by MovesLikeBucky

“Crowley, what are you doing here?”

“Investigating,” Crowley said as the bartender returned with their drinks, frozen concoctions of a completely unnatural blue color garnished with pineapples and cherries. “Been a surge of unaccounted for demonic activity in the area, Beelzebub sent me to investigate.”

“Ah, me as well,” Aziraphale said as he sipped the fruity drink, relishing the cold of it, “Gabriel sent me. Whatever it is seems to be interfering with my connection, I can’t perform miracles.”

“Well that makes it interesting, looks like we might be dealing with a third party.”

“Oh dear, I hate those.”

“Still, could do it together? S’ been a while, angel.”

Aziraphale arched an eyebrow at that. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to work with Crowley — he did, more than anything. But seeing Crowley here, seeing him with an easy smile fitting in like he belonged, happiness alighting behind those pink and purple lenses… brought back memories. It wasn’t all that long ago he’d told Crowley he went too fast.

Aziraphale and Crowley meet up in 1980s Miami. Surely this will go smoothly.

There's also a The Days of Their Lives zine fic Collection and I believe there's still a few days left to buy the zine if anyone's interested!

~Mod N

#canon #through the ages #cold open #missing scenes #t rated #g rated

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jesuisgourde · 3 years ago

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Peter said this in a Dutch interview in 2019: “I always work on something: I come up with songs, make paintings and drawings … I even write a novel. The story is about a blues musician, Ed Belly. He goes in London in search of fortune and fame. But he falls into the trap of drugs, and ultimately only his music remains as a lifebuoy.“

Here’s a couple fragments of that Ed Belly novel, from the Typecast Zine:

Ed Bellys sighed with a dramatic heaviness when Fuddy came into the empty back bar. Fuddy or Fudd or whatever the fuck the fella's name was. Ed had been living and working at The Hand&Racket for 2 years and only in the last week or so had he been formally instructed by the owners of the pub as to policy regarding this shaven headed menacing figure in a stained parka and fingerless gloves. Neckercheif and hobnail boots. Victoriana scumbag chic, except this fella was a bonafide London street soldier and not dressed this way from the fashionista angle. He was in before Ed could shake out of such thoughts. A fingerless glove was thrust into his face. “állo mate, Ed is it?” “You're barred” “The name's Jud” “Hello Jud, you're barred” “You want a fat one?” Jud tipped an oily flurry of white powder on the bar and chopped out two lines with a Thaifood menu. “Er..” “You'd rather pipe it?” Jud looked concerned at the indecision. “ok, fussy-pants. Give us a sec” And was charging through to the disabled toilet. Ed shook his head and reached for the fat red house phone that could only dial-out if you wanted to speak to the upstairs office. There was a rumour that a secret code existed that allowed all calls but noone had ever shared it with Ed. He heard the ringing from the office up the staircase in the small entrance. A furious face appeared over the bannister. “the 'fuck do you want Ed you fucker?” It was Dave , one of the management. “Er, this Jud guy” “oh aye, you fucker, he's just out of prison for Arson, so be nice to him. '' He picked up a broken cricket bat and snapped it across his knee “I was told yesterday..” “Now fuck off, ad if I catch you stealing Ill, well, Ill be after hurting you quite badly. You cunt” Dave disappeared away into the peeling-paint technicolour curiosity of the upper-floors . A thousand half-finished decorating jobs and a million unlikely objects, posters, long-abandoned personal effects.. weapons on every landing. Bats of every sporting kind. Ed muttered to himself and shuffled back through to the back bar. Shyly smiling at Catalina who was on afternoon shift in the front bar , her first and last shift Ed had decided, given that she had already flooded the place twice (with water in the cellar and with the guiness tap behind the bar). Dave had raved and screamed of course but Catalina had just laughed at him and slinked over to her coffee and fag at the end of the bar. “It's no smoking behind the bar” Dave had bawled “O.k, I go home” she had said, knowing Dave needed her today. “Fucksake” He cried “Ed, you fucker, you better mop all this mess up” Dave went to swipe at Ed with a hockey stick he had in his fat fist and shrieked with manic laughter as Ed flinched and yelped. “Yiz focker!”

Ed sat up in the street lamp glow of his lonely little room on the third floor of the Hand&Racket ' s wonky , Escherlike construct. The light-bulb was working part-time , and when it was off Ed's room filled with a grim neon orange from the street lights.. trippy glare trippy care of the street-lamp that stood naked outside his window. He sucked a pen awhile and then wrote: 'I love you like a monkey loves to monkey around I love you like a junky loves to head down town'

Ed Belly tried in vain to see the floor without moving his head, straining his eyes but.. this hurt quite a lot. He was causing himself quite a lot of pain , and said as much out loud: “Am hurting” The bar was all but deserted and no sod heard his strangely worded announcement. “Am hurting ” he repeated and then laughed at his own peculiar behaviour. Ronnie Bowles, landlord Bar manager and long-term observer witness of (to?) Ed's lonely outbursts put down the newspaper down he was flicking through and turned up the volume on the pub stereo. He wasn't sure who was singing but knew it was one of Ed's compilations and as such was a sure-fire remedy Business to any early symptoms of Ed Oddness. “Tune” said Ed as he was immediately arrested by the chiming guitar and sweet, low voice of the singer recording. He sang along “Let the mermaids flirt with me..” Ed's soul was swathed in the sad and sensuous dream of blues oblivion that had left everything else in his life at the mercy of Life as he knew it was a hopeless and dreary burden, unless the it played out to a soundtrack of old blues. He had known this for all time, and became surer everylittle standard turnaround. “I'm a lost cause baby, you gonna have to set me free” He sang to himself now, pissing into the stinking urinal through “St Jude done got the dirt on me, Miss Lucille Lalucilly” He zipped up and dripped down his inside leg. “Piss poor, boy, long way from home” He chuckled and stumbled out of the gents toilet back into the front bar of the Hand&Racket public house. The pub was his home, his employer and his for one night a week– the theatre of his dearest dreams and only ambition. Open mic night, Thursdays. Ten o'clock blues with Lordy Lawd Bawdy Bill o'Wrongs. As Ed had been explaining to a japanese kid in the audience this very night, Bill O'wrongs was a local legend. A postman with a hernia, and a mean finger pickin fluency who could knock out blues from the gut and did, interspersing his role as m.c with songs of his own and a few classics her and there. He had a line in cockney smut that Ed interpreted as mysogyny at its most melodic, given that Ed rarely felt any tenderness in the songs, aggressive porkRind bawd “slimey cunt, she played me like an ex-box had me “was one line from ex-blues” Bill O'wrongs seemed to focus all his angst on one long-lost love that did him wrong and left him forever stricken with a rotton taste in his mouth. Ed was unsuccessful in his attempts to find the facts of the matter, although from the various songs he gathered that she had been a very big girl, from south East London (she had a charlton Athletic shirt too, as sung about in d[illegible] Valley Blues')

#peter doherty #pete doherty #books of albion

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harrypotter-imaginess · 4 years ago

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Etsy Store Here l Ko-Fi l Commission Info I Instagram I Zine

Based on this Headcanon list (x) : Part 1 Here! / Part 2 Here! / Part 3 Here! / Part 4 Here! <This is Part 5!>

A/N: As said, I switched to a headcanon list because we have 7 books to get through, and it will take years if I only do the blurbs. Oh, and if you are in the market for some cute pro-Weasley shirts, check out my 'Weasley Suprmeacy' shirt here!

Let me know if you want to be added to the tag list!

* It’s your third year at Hogwarts, Harry Potter’s second, and you’re having a pretty good year so far

* You’ve made your house team, and you’re doing pretty good in school, in fact, you’ve got a knack for potions and herbology

* “Good thing too or we’d be stuck up a creek without ya” Fred says grinning as he watches you show him how to make the simple “cure for boils” potion

* “And not sooner either, these things hurt more than you think” George complains, wincing every time he touches one

* “Well what did you think was going to happen when you tried to go into the girl’s changing room?” You ask with a sigh

* “In our defense we didn’t know it was the girls changing room, we just wanted a shortcut to the pitch”

* You hide a smile, that sounds about right

* Life is pretty good

* Until it isn’t

* “Enemy’s of the heir beware” the words leave your mouth in a murmur

* Your eyes trained on the blood-coated words on the wall

* You think you're going to be sick

* “That’s right you’ll be next mudbloods!” Draco shouts and immediately you feel two hands clasp both of your shoulders

* One is Fred’s and the other is George’s

* They insist on walking you back to your dorm

* “Really I’ll be fine, you should go check on your brother, Ginny was looking a little pale too” you insist but they keep pushing you forward

* “We can do that after you get back to your common room safely”

* If you’re Muggle-born they’re really protective of you over the next few months

* You’ve woken up to taping on your window more than once, yawning as you walk over to see who it is

* Only to see your favorite red-headed pair of doppelgängers

* “Couldn’t sleep” Fred says with a yawn

* “We were too afraid the heir of Slytherin would kill us in our sleep” George adds

* “Best we sleep here, so you can protect us and keep us safe” they finish in unison

* The next morning your dorm mates wake up to see them sleeping on the floor at the foot of your bed, drooling all over each other, wands clasped in their hands

* They absolutely refuse to let you stay in the castle for Christmas

* “Nope, no, no way in bloody hell,” George says defiantly

* “But I want-“

* “If you’ve got a death wish, you can just come home with us and eat mum’s cooking-”

* “So good you’ll go to heaven”

* They’re tugging you to the station before you can even protest

* “What about Ron?” You ask

* “What about Ron? He’s a big boy, besides it looks like those three are scheming-“ George starts

* “Schemings best left to the young ones, us old-timers have no place in it, best for us to go home and have some Christmas pudding, isn’t that right Percy?”

* Percy, who was only passing by gives you three a quizzical look before turning away with a shake of his head

* “Whatever nonsense you’re up to, leave me out of it”

* Fred turns to you with a grin

* “See even Percy agrees, leave the nonsense to the youngins’”

* Percy just keeps shaking his head

* “Come, Ginny, let’s sit somewhere away from them- don’t want you to be around bad influences”

* Their parents are thrilled to meet you

* “So you’re (Y/N)! We’ve heard so much about you-“

* So the twins talk about you at home huh?

* “- from Percy, he says your next in line to make prefect in your house,” she says patting you affectionately on the shoulder

* Percy nods from behind her

* “Cedric’s been recommending you to Sprout” He adds

* Your face burns and the twins grin behind you

* “Prefect (Y/N) I like the sound of that” George says with a mischievous grin

* “Don’t forget us when you’re rich and famous, soaking in the prefect bathroom like a big shot”

* You roll your eyes

* “Well since I’m such a big shot I guess I can overlook when you explode a toilet or two”

* The Weasley’s stay up until well past midnight for Christmas

* Molly knits you a matching scarf for the sweater she gave you last year

* “Well doesn’t it look dashing on you!” She says with a smile and she wraps it around your neck

* George and Fred are nervous you might not like it but you grin

* “I love it”

* George scrambles over

* “You want my scarf too?” He says already unwrapping his from around his neck

* “Take mine too, you look awfully cold,” Fred says

* There’s a Polaroid somewhere of you swaddled in five scarfs while Ginny and the twins laugh

* Percy is in the background looking disappointed- but one of those scarves is how

* At night, when the sleeping arrangements are all drawn up you’re with Ginny

* You lie side by side in her bed, you’re half asleep

* “Can I talk to you about something”

* You yawn and nod, not moving

* And then when she doesn’t say anything you say-

* “About Harry?”

* There’s another silence, but this one feels heavier somehow, and it wakes you up a bit

* “Just send him some chocolates for Valentine’s Day” you yawn patting her shoulder

* “Sign it with ‘your secret admirer’ if it makes you too nervous” you yawn again, feeling your eyes droop

* Is that why she’s been looking so sick lately? Too many nights lying awake at night thinking about a boy who doesn’t share her feelings

* “You know Ginny if something does nothing but cause you pain, and I know it’s not very Gryffindor-like, but you can just walk away from it yknow” you’re slurring, barely awake.

* “I can’t just walk away?” She asks and you nod

* “Of course you can”

* And then you fall asleep

* Completely forgetting about the conversation until it’s Valentine’s Day and you see Harry followed around by a singing valentine

* “So this is the fantastic advice you gave Ginny?” George asks, a teasing smile lifting onto his face

* “I told her to give chocolates! I don’t know a boy alive who doesn’t like sweets”

* “Well where’s our chocolate then?” Fred asks expectantly

* You look to George for some support, but he’s looking at you expectantly too

* “Oh I get it, all your chocolates are saved for pretty boy Diggory”

* You roll your eyes and shake your head while walking away

* What’s up with them and thinking that you have a crush on Cedric

* They do come back to their dorms with small bags of chocolate on their beds, just two pieces each

* But they smile like you gave them a lump of gold

* “Did you make them by hand?” One teases

* “Tasted like they were made with love, and all those warm fuzzy feelings” the other finishes

* You roll your eyes

* “You should just be glad the house-elf I found didn’t mind me taking a bit of chocolate”

* It surprises both of them that you actually did make them by hand

* They were really just teasing

* George is the one to make the first move

* “Well next time you go invite us too, I think it would be fun to learn how to make chocolates”

* George wraps an arm around your shoulders

* “We could give them to Snape and make him think he has a secret admirer,” Fred says with a grin, wrapping one of his arms around your shoulders as well

* “Send him a singing Telegraph and everything” George grins

* You shake your head and laugh, what a couple of bozos

* It is pretty funny to see Snape get all flustered though

* They get even more protective when Muggle-born students start getting petrified

* You’re never without one, or both of them

* “Looks like your bodyguard is here,” Cedric says with a teasing smile when he sees George waiting in the corridor outside your class for you

* You nod, moving to go meet him when you feel a gentle touch on your arm

* “Let him know that if he’s ever looking for a career change, I’ll gladly fill the spot” he ruffles your hair before you leave and you can see the teasing coming from a mile away

* But George doesn’t say anything when you walk over to him, walking together to transfigurations in moderate silence

* “So you and Diggory are pretty close” he finally says, breaking the silence

* You look up at him, his eyebrows are threaded together and his mouth is pinched into a frown

* It makes you think about the time you thought that maybe they wouldn’t spend as much time with you anymore when you were brewing the amortentia potion

* “Yeah but we’re closer,” you say bumping your shoulder against his arm, he laughs

* “That’s true”

* The mischievous glint in his eyes returns

* “I doubt he’ll feel the same once he finds out you drool in your sleep”

* You roll your eyes shoving him lightly which earns a laugh

* “I mean really (Y/N), it’s just a bit excessive innit? Most mornings your pillow is more drool than Cotten at this point, you should really get it checked-“

* You shove him harder laughing when he starts laughing

* “Big words from the boy who snores so loud his dorm mates left him floating on the lake”

* “It wasn’t my dorm mates, it was Fred and he did it to because I pretended I was him when I said something that upset Oliver Wood”

* Your eyebrows thread together

* Haven’t seen much of Oliver around now that quidditch has been canceled

* “What did you say?”

* George turns bright red and turns away

* “You’ve been spending an awful lot of time around that keeper for Hufflepuff lately” Wood was especially cranky as of late now that quidditch was canceled for the rest of the year

* And George doesn’t know why, but he gets so irked by it

* What does Wood care who he spends time with off the pitch? It’s not like he’s been taking it easy on you during matches or anything

* “It’s not my fault you don’t know how to talk to someone you’re attracted to”

* And then realizing how it sounded, and flushing red George claimed he was Fred

* He sounded like he was a jealous boyfriend or something

* It’s almost mortifying

* Almost

* “Nothing, don’t worry about it”

* And it’s the first sign for George that someone might have seen something in him that he hasn’t noticed

* But for now that doesn’t matter

* Because you’re here telling jokes like nothing’s changed

* When Ginny gets taken to the chamber you’re sitting with George and Fred in their dorm hugging them close

* You showed up outside their window on your broom, tapping on the glass until they opened it and enveloped you in a hug

* “Maybe it’s just one big mistake, and she’ll pop out any second saying she got lost on her way to the loo”

* “Maybe,” Fred says, but he doesn’t sound like he believes it

* “Everything’s going to be fine,” George says

* And you nod, because you really hope it does

* And by morning Ron and Harry show up covered in dirt with Ginny behind them who looks like she did at first

* With color on her face and vibrancy you haven’t seen on her all year

* “So good old Gildy was a fraud all along huh?”

* “Coulda fooled me”

* And then just like that you’re on the train home

* Joking with Harry, Ron, Ginny, Fred, and George about Percy’s secret girlfriend

* “It feels like it was just yesterday we were getting off the train and starting the year,” you say slightly wistful

* “Speak for yourself, Oliver Wood nearly killed me at practice with punishment drills for something I said apparently” Fred groans

* “Best to leave the adventuring to the young ones” George grins teasing you as you step onto the platform

* And just like that, it’s over

* And just like that it’ll be a new school year

* And the beginning of a new adventure

#harry potter imagine #harry potter #george wealsey x reader #fred and george weasley imagine #george Weasley imagine #fred weasley x reader #Fred Weasley imagine #harry potter headcanon #harry potter hogwarts mystery #charlie weasley x reader #charlie weasley x jacob's sibling #george weasley #george weasley x reader #harry potter x reader

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