#reblogging from bed

[nebuladreamz]

A little different than last year's, but here we are again. To say that this past year hasn't been absolutely wild would be a lie, cause HOLY SHIT MAN

This year's birthday is. A little different for me, but you already have the silly comic to show that so I won't make like a broken record oops

But, despite the changes and hills that life's decided I should climb or throw at, it hasn't changed the fact that I'm so genuinely fucking thankful to the people that I've known since joining this fandom. I'm not even kidding when I say that being here has actually changed my life for the better. I know I said something similar last year, but this time, hoo boy it sure turned up the AMP and test how far I could go.

So, to everyone, both new and old; thank you for being here :D

@garbagechocolate @darkxsoulzyx @smoljeanius @bunmuffin @skizabaa

@tuzesdays @sleepykas @fernzwing @kandidandi @starsketchez

@just-a-drawing-bean @notdysfunk @ilsole @amberluvsbugs @cloudyvoid

@nomsthecat @alfinefalf @nosleepygay @theblog-with-thestuff

@cacaocheri

(Edit: ty kibbits for informing me of the. Fuck ass tagging system)

AND TAGGING OTHERS BECAUSE. POINTS. BONKS WITH HEAD. GETTING TO EITHER INTERACT OR TALK OR WHATEVER IS ALWAYS A DELIGHT

@ohno-the-sun @kibbits @ink-yy @saltyfryz @kaprisvn

@hierba-picante @sunny-sophies-garden @cookiiemancer @sneeblbop @justaduckarts

@pepethehumanz @crystalmagpie447 @woolysstuff @mocha-illustrates @duhsty1

@sanchensky @pillowspace @victarin @witherfide

[I DEFINITELY GOT SONAS WRONG AND THESE AREN'T ALL THE SILLY PEOPLE I KNOW BUT IM SITTING HERE AT 2:30 IN THE MORNING JUST KNOW YOU'RE THERE IN SPIRIT HANDING YOU ALL POPTARTS WAUGH]

[ghostzzy]

inspired by kitkat @crimeronan's codependency poll, here's a codependency poll of my own, featuring dynamics from my ocs <3

[luminlunii]

I have sat at my desk drawing and farting around for like I think eight hours? And I have not in fact finished any art. I was updating my commission info carrd and making scheduled posts for the rest of the month

This what I have after two hours and then some

I have gotten up like

less than five times

I'm feeling as right as rain (which is funny because it's raining and thundering rn) I'm doing great :)

[thedisablednaturalist]

Tw for weight loss mention

The whole exercise will cure your disability thing is a fucking joke. Yes exercise is beneficial for your health, but only if you aren't already on shaky foundations. You need to be on a treatment plan that WORKS before going into the maintenance phase. You wouldn't do regular maintenance on a broken item, you'd work on getting it up and running first. And maybe it would even need specialized maintenance afterwards if it's especially fragile.

I have fibromyalgia and acute degenerative disc disease. My immune system attacks my nerves and discs in my spine are slowly calcifying and causing the bones to constrict and damage my nerves (i think thats how it works). I have days where it feels like my body is on fire from nerve pain and days where it feels like my spine is about to rip from my back. And days where I have both (like today!). I get numbness in my hands and feet. I have horrible migraines. I can no longer walk unaided more than maybe 5 minutes without severe pain. I have something wrong with my knees and hips but the doctors don't know what yet.

You'd think I live an obviously seditary lifestyle correct?

Hell no.

I walk aided on average 6 miles a day over difficult terrain OUTSIDE of regular activity almost everyday. My legs are muscular and strong. I get my heart rate up and a good sweat, like all the gym rats swear on. I am often doing physical labor such as weeding, digging, sample collecting, pruning trees etc.

I'm not saying this to make other disabled people feel bad or prove that they can do anything if they just tried harder. This is an extremely painful lifestyle I've chosen that takes a lot of lifestyle management AND BOUNDARIES to keep up with the work. I also have an extremely forgiving boss who is also physically disabled and knows what I'm going through (deciding between your passion and your health and having to do so each and every day) No one should ever be expected to do what I do. I'm not even sure if I should be doing this myself.

This is to prove that exercise? Has not cured me. My muscles are strong but still hurt as if they're broken and I have to take more breaks than my coworker. I am constantly getting out of breath and I flare up regularly if I'm not careful. I am in excellent physical condition outside of my disabilities. I go to different doctors several times a month to get checked out.

I previously went through a diet program and lost a lot of weight (basically starving myself and got off my depression meds which cause weight gain but are also the only ones that work) and guess what? That didn't do shit either!!! I still felt horrible!!! I've since gained back the weight anyway after switching to focusing on adding more nutrient dense foods than taking stuff away from my diet (also muscle weighs more than fat, and fat helps cushion my aching joints and spine).

The muscle doesn't do shit for my disabilities outside of maybe some stability. Exercising everyday doesn't make the pain go away. Without my medications and aids and nutrition plans and steroid injections and spinal adjustments and physical therapy (that takes my fibro and spine into account) and alternative work methods I WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO DO WHAT I DO. Exercise alone is like trying to make a car run with no oil. Yes it'll go but it'll get more and more damaged till it can't and will need its entire engine replaced!

And yet I see new doctors and they look at me and the first thing out of their mouths is do I exercise? I should try doing a little every day :) and then i fucking blow their minds when I tell them about my job. No longer can they use that fucking cop out on me. I've been through this rodeo. Ive tried their suggestions. If you are in pain and nothing is helping? Exercise ain't going to do SHIT. You need to get to a point where you can move without severe pain first (if that's even possible). Then and only then should you consider implementing regular exercise if you can. Also weight loss talk is a red flag and a cop out. They made me lose 50+ lbs before they would look into the reasons behind my pain. Weight loss did nothing for me and exacerbated my pain.

I am living proof that all that shit is a lie and a cop out. That is the point of this post. I cannot believe people with serious medical conditions are being forced to put their bodies through extreme duress just to be believed. You are not disabled because of laziness or because you sit a lot. Plenty of people live seditary lifestyles and do not live in constant excruciating pain (they may develop disabilities later in life due to this however, and should be doing preventative exercises to maintain their health)

Please, share my story with doctors. Use me as an example. I am proof that "exercise first treat later" does not work. I should not have had to wait years to have my pain validated. I'd rather hundreds of fakers get (what? A blood test? An MRI?) than one chronically ill person get told to try yoga and go away by a doctor.

[fuckwhoeverpickedallthefunnyurls]

The problem with being in a mutual polycule (everyone is mutuals with each other) is that I go on one mutuals blog, scroll through their posts, go onto the next mutuals blog, scroll through the same posts, go to the next mutuals blog-

[vampiricsheep]

question for my fellow mordrem-havers:

what was it like for them under the dragon's influence? if they weren't 'born' mordrem, what was their corruption experience? how are they handling life without the dragon?

[moominpopzz]

how long do y’all think Ashe had to sleep in Mark’s bed with him after what happened to her mom. How often do you think Mark would try to put Ashe to bed and she’d run to him minutes after he leaves her room and begged him not to leave her. How often do you think Mark would hold her while she slept, staying awake for nights on end so that when she woke up screaming and sobbing from nightmares he could be awake to comfort her.

Do you think she moved back to her own room on her own or that she got to an age where Mark slowly started making her go back to her room instead. Do you think he’d sit in there and wait until she fell asleep or with his work one day he just stopped letting her crawl into bed with him. Do you think there were nights where when she could only fall asleep in his bed he’d carry her back to her room and she’d wake up, alone, in the room that damn book was in, do you think she’d just scream until Mark ran in to check on her?

[gomzdrawfr]

Thoughts during lab work, visualized:

[excali8ur]

You ever look through your follower list and realise how many people are following you who you absolutely cannot stand.

So anyway. Time to do some spring cleaning. Bioessentialists & transphobes get the fuck off my blog. Ace and aro exclusionists get the fuck off my blog. SWERFs and “no kink at pride” types get the fuck off my blog. Right wingers get the fuck off my blog. Antisemites get the fuck off my blog. None of you are welcome here.

(And if none of this applies to you, you’re totally welcome here!)

[blackrosesandwhump]

Random life advice for anyone who needs to hear it:

Don't be embarrased or ashamed of the things that get you out of bed in the morning.

If you want to get up just so you can play the Sims, do it. For whatever reason, get out of bed. Otherwise you'll end up lying there wasting time on your phone, when you could have gotten up and actually done something you wanted to do.

Not speaking from experience or anything, of course 😅

[hunnicute]

i think my favourite trope in hunnihawk fanfic is when bj calls hawk pretty

[muirmarie]

~3.5k; Leonard McCoy/Spock || Leonard McCoy & Spock (can be read platonically or romantically, but either way it's. romantic.)

_________

"Didn't know you cared,” he says gruffly. Spock lifts an eyebrow, and McCoy flushes, ducking his head a little. “All right, all right,” he says. “Didn't know we were saying it out loud.”

“Until now, I wouldn't have thought it needed to be said at all,” Spock says, his voice slow and thoughtful. “I'm beginning to wonder if I was mistaken on other points, as well.”

_________

AU The Empath/The Empath tag: Humans don't have katras, but why would something like that stop Spock from trying?

[tiny-cloud-of-flowers]

Despite her attempts to collect herself, it took Aria a long time of letting tears fall and letting herself purr before she could finally speak again. When she did so, her voice sounded somewhat hoarse, but it was still unmistakeable as hers.

"You.. would really love something like me.." she was mumbling.

"Of *course* I would! And do..!" Clio said back, keeping her own voice light in return. "I'm always gonna be here for you, Ari. And I'm just.. so so glad that you're okay.."

She trailed off and started crying again, this time fully with joy and relief.

(Anyone is welcome to comment on and/or reblog my work if they want to, as long as my DNI is respected)

Tag list: @starlit-selfships | @edencantstopfallininlove | @yoomtahsgf | @sunlight-ships | @dragonsmooch | @thatslikesometaldude | @kuroiikamen | @artificervaldi | @keyblade-ships | @seahydra | @dmclr | @neuvilline

(If you would like to be tagged in any of my future work, please use this form!)

Thank you kindly to anyone who has taken the time to look at this ^-^

[riskrush]

uhhh

hey

[bisexualamy]

I see people talk about fanfiction and novels being different mediums a lot, and while I don’t necessarily disagree, I don’t feel like I understand either. In your opinion, what makes them different mediums from each other? What decides that two things are separate mediums like in general? It’s totally cool if you don’t wanna answer this btw, I know it’s kind of a lot

No worries I think that's an interesting question! With any categories, the boundaries on this are going to be fuzzy, but the reason I believe they're different mediums is that fundamentally, on a metatextual level, the languages are different. What do I mean by this? Let's use film as an example, a medium that I'd argue is very obviously a different medium than novels, even if we may not be able to articulate all the reasons why.

What are some attributes of film that differentiate it from novels (another storytelling medium) or paintings (another visual medium)? Films and novels are both storytelling mediums, but films have visual and auditory components. They also mainly consist of storytelling through visual cues and dialogue. Exposition is given visually or in media res by characters speaking. In a novel, your omniscient narrator giving you a few paragraphs of background on your main characters is common, and so expected it probably flies over the reader's head. In a film, a narrator doing the exact same thing for all the main characters often comes off clumsy. It takes you out of the story in a film, where it doesn't in a novel.

Film is also a time-based medium. A film unfolds over time, and you cannot experience the entire film in one moment or glance. That's not true of a painting (at least traditionally). With a painting, you can view the whole painting in one look. Now, you can sit with a painting, pick out details, analyze the craft or ponder it for a long time and watch as new aspects jump out at you. Fundamentally, however, if you wanted to view a whole painting in one look, you can, and it would still make sense. You cannot do that with a film. On the other hand, a painting is typically not an auditory experience. To do so would be an experimental use of the form. In modern film-making, the exact opposite is true. Music, dialogue, and environmental sound, all of these things are essential to how a film tells a story. To not use them would be considered experimental or odd.

These are three different mediums with three different "languages" in how they interact with their audience. They may share parts of their languages, like I said above, but they don't speak the same language. What works well for one medium can come off clumsy or strange in another.

I believe fanfic and novels have sufficiently different languages that they should be considered different mediums. Both of them are short or long form written mediums telling some sort of story. But fanfic's relationship to its source material is such an inherent trait that novels do not have. The relationship doesn't have to be positive (it's often, in fact, argumentative or strained or dismissive), but the relationship exists. Even in AU fanfiction. Even in fics full of OCs.

In canon compliant and even canon divergent fics, this relationship is more obvious. These fics are both conversations with the source material as much as they are stories. They're playing in the author's sandbox, or they're wrecking their sandcastle and building something else. They're saying "I like/dislike what you did with this specific story, and I'm going to show you that by rewriting or expanding it." They take large aspects of the author's story whole cloth: the characters, the setting, the magic system, the tech, etc.

These fanfics often have little exposition at the top because they presume a familiarity with the characters, the world, or both. This alone makes them really different from novels. Creatively and seamlessly integrating exposition, immersing your audience in a new world and convincing them to stay, is a really important aspect of a novel that these fics don't have to contend with. This alone fundamentally changes how you'd structure a story.

For AU fics, both fics in AU settings and AU fics full of OCs, the above still applies. These fics are still a conversation with the source material. Something about the source material compelled an author to flip it and remix it and change it around. That conversation might be "in the source material, these characters suffered, and I don't want them to suffer any longer" or it could be "I felt the story had a vacancy that this OC fills" or it could be "if these characters had the time/awareness/ability to grow closer, they would've fallen in love." These are all direct commentaries on the original work.

An exercise that I believe illustrates this point the best is to try and adapt an AU fanfic to an original work. Try to file the serial numbers off. I've done this with some of my fic, and it just doesn't work. You don't realize how much you presume the audience knows until you have to cater to an audience who knows nothing of the source material. That hilarious joke you wrote? Turns out it's only funny because it's a nod to this character's original characterization. This awesome climatic plot point that ties the whole story together? Turns out in relies on a specific bit of lore, a quirk of the magic system, or an aspect of the character's past history or personality. Now that this is a novel, you have to back-fill all of that exposition. And you can try to do that, but watch how your story gets clunky and bloated. You will have to start viciously killing your darlings, as you realize that your favorite scene is beautiful in a fic, but sounds awkward and out of place in a novel. Soon, you're basically just rewriting the whole thing to fit a different medium.

Many fanfic writers are extremely talented. And much of that talent, that wit, that perfect line that you can't get out of your head, is integrally informed by your knowledge of the source material. The irony falls flat without having read the source books. The relationships suddenly feel shallow when you don't have seasons of backstory to deepen them. You do not realize how much of fanfic writing consists of this back and forth until you go looking for it.

And here's the thing: if your fanfic has a totally AU setting and it consists of completely original characters, I'd argue that's just a novel posted to AO3. If all you need to do is change the names to make it work, that's a novel. This is why Clueless is inspired by Jane Austen's Emma and not an AU fanfic of it. If you've never read Emma, if you went into Clueless not knowing that Emma was the inspiration for it, you'd perfectly understand the movie.

In fanfic, the source material is always present. It can be obviously present with canon compliant fic. It can be antagonistically present with canon divergent or AU fic. And it is still present, floating in the background, with totally AU fic. Ultimately, the changes a fanfic author makes to the source material are, themselves, as integral to the fanfic as the words on the page. It is a dialogue with the source material: what it did well, what it could've done better, what this author believes is the essence of the story, or the world pushed to its limit, that even though we're in space or in a coffee shop or 1920s New York, we're still, on some level talking about the source material.

This is an aspect of fanfic I love that novels do not have. Novels have a lot of other great stuff! I love novels! But while novels are often engaged in a dialogue with their present society or their predecessors in a genre, that conversation is much more nebulous than it is with fanfic. You can read Slaughterhouse-Five or Gravity's Rainbow, and while knowing their contexts helps you understand them on a deeper level, that is unnecessary to their enjoyment. They are fundamentally more standalone works than fanfic will ever be.

This is ultimately why I think comparing fanfic and novels is comparing apples to oranges. They're different mediums. They use different languages. They require different skills and they fill different artistic niches. You might as well be comparing a film to a painting just because they're both visual art.

[thatlittledandere]

Alright, you definitely should have listened to the village elders this time. Wandering too deep into the forest was a bad idea. They could have been more specific about what “too deep” meant though.

All you wanted to do was see if there were any valuable herbs in the area. You had heard rumors that if you went slightly beyond the usual reach of the villagers, a little to the west, you would find ingredients for most potential of healing potions. You didn’t think heeding the advice would cost you much; it was supposed to be only a little further, right? But which way was west again…

Before you knew it, you had gotten lost. Of course, forests always looked somewhat the same, but after 20 years of living in the same village, you came to recognize the areas you had always played, worked, and relaxed in. A tree that bent a little to the left; that boulder that looked like a fist without a thumb; the lightning-struck tree trunk, too heavy to be moved, blocking what used to be a path. You knew when you were near your home by the atmosphere alone.

And now you recognized nothing you saw.

It wasn’t dark yet - wouldn’t be for a long time - but you were still getting the shivers of being outside at night. This part of the forest was creepy. You didn’t know how else to describe it - threatening? It felt like something was out to get you. Or for that matter, anyone foolish enough to disturb the peace of whatever dwelled inside.

You stopped. Turned to look back — had you seen wrong? You must have — and turned back ahead. There was... It was like there was a line drawn on the ground. A border.

You looked to your right, then left. No, it really was… as strange as it seemed, it was clearly a huge circle. You were standing just outside it.

And everything inside was dead.

The grass was sickly, pale yellow, almost white, like after a scorching hot summer with too little rain. Trees gray and bare, bark flaking, crispy leaves lying sadly on the ground. Thousands of insect carcasses everywhere, a couple of dead birds and — oh no — a lone rabbit. All completely lifeless. How could this be?

You took a step back. Was this maybe… The work of magic? A fiendish warlock wielding dark sorcery?

You didn’t know much about magic; there weren’t many capable of using it in your tiny village, and the mages you knew were neither malicious nor the tiniest bit adventurous with it. But it was the only explanation you could come up with. Nature couldn’t do this on its own.

You felt a rush of excitement at the thought. Magic had always fascinated you. With nobody around to teach the craft, you had abandoned the idea of pursuing it years ago, but… It was exhilarating seeing its impact. Foul as this magic was, it drew you in - and if nothing inside was alive, it couldn’t do you any harm either. You had come so far; why not investigate a little?

You had barely taken two steps on the lifeless grass when you heard a soft voice plead: “Don’t come closer.”

You froze. Had there been a person around? Was it a bandit? Or, wait, maybe they could help you find your way home-

“Please get away from me,” asked the stranger again, even more desperate this time. Their voice was getting raspier, breaking towards the end of the sentence. Whoever it was must have been either sick or grievously injured. Perhaps you would have to help them more than they could help you.

You squinted your eyes, and finally caught a glimpse of a figure behind two trees.

He looked around your age. But not in such good health, as you had suspected. He was holding onto the tree, hunching, and the distance between you wasn't enough to hide the tremble of his hands or the hollowness in his eyes.

"Please, " he repeated, each word weaker yet more fearful than the last. "I can only bring misery. You must leave while you still can!"

His fear was contagious. You couldn't fight the shiver running along your spine nor the cold sweat erching your brow. It was like even the Sun knew better than to approach this self-proclaimed harbinger.

But you had always been too curious for your own good, much to your mother's chagrin. Weren't you an apprentice in the art of medicine? Wasn't this stranger in clear need of help? You couldn't just leave him alone to rot in his miserable circle of decay.

You forced a smile - sort of - and took a step closer. The stranger grabbed his face, screamed, and collapsed on his knees. You saw white and felt a strong gust of wind knock you off your feet.

And then there was nothing.