#extradirty
Three Goblin Art
dirt enthusiast
occasionally subtle
almost home
AnasAbdin
we're not kids anymore.
NASA
Stranger Things
taylor price
sheepfilms
No title available
art blog(derogatory)
DEAR READER
izzy's playlists!
ellievsbear
Love Begins
PR's Tumblrdome
RMH
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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@beckytext
Something I'm Good At, Something I'm Bad At
We have somehow defeated February — the shortest, but somehow also usually the worst, month. Slowly but surely, the days are getting longer again, and soon we’ll change the clocks and then hopefully I can resume being a functional human, after a long, extra-snowy winter. Where I’m At I’m at the beginning of a new project, and mostly having fun with it. That’s a pretty big relief, since last…
Learning Things is Fun, Actually
January is finally over, after what felt like about five years. It was a long slog of a month with horrific news throughout, brightened only by incredible communities taking action to protect themselves and their neighbors. (If you are able to, please stand with Minnesota; if you’re in the US, you can also look for events and opportunities to get involved near you.) I continue to try to limit my…
So many people who love generative AI don't have a creative bone in their body and can't imagine anyone actually enjoying the time and effort it takes to write something or draw something.
Briefly coming out of "oh no I can't keep up with tumblr goodbye forever" retirement because I've been thinking a lot about what this post gets at recently. I don't think this is the main way we got here with shitty LLMs stealing people's work and destroying the environment but I do think there's something here:
People love the idea of Being A Writer. There's a kind of cultural cachet to it -- the idea that writers are intellectual and creative and talented. When you see writers in movies and on TV, they're usually rich and fabulous; they go to parties with influential people, their book signings have lines out the door, they're swimming in free time to have adventures or whatever the show/movie happens to be about.
People want that life. Heck, I want that life, and I know it's a fiction, that 99.9% of writers don't live like that. Most novelists have day jobs because writing rarely pays the bills, let alone gives you that lifestyle.
The thing is, not only is that not what most writers ever experience, it also lacks one big thing that all writers do experience: actually writing. The part where you have to translate what's in your brain to something on a page, which requires sitting down at a computer and making words -- lots of words -- sometimes when you don't wanna. Making those words into coherent stories. Learning how to finish a draft, which is hard, and then how to edit said draft, which means learning how to spot where your writing is borked and then how to fix it. That is all actually hard work, it's a skill that takes time to develop, and it's the actual job of being a writer. (Writing is skilled labor but that's a side rant.)
So when we pull it all together you have a job that takes time and effort to learn how to do well enough to be a professional, and then does not actually pay well or give you benefits -- and you only get that meager pay if you've made it through many flaming hoops, none of which are in your control -- and it's all still most likely a side hustle on top of your full time job. It doesn't give you the glam lifestyle it gets shown as. So why do people do it?
Because they enjoy writing. If you don't actually like doing the work, you're not going to practice enough to get to a level where you can become a professional at it. You have to love doing it. (That doesn't mean you love every moment you spend sitting at your computer; sometimes it's like pulling teeth. But on the whole? You'd rather do the work than not because doing the work is rewarding in and of itself.)
But that's not what people think of when they think about Being A Writer. The idea of Being A Writer has basically nothing to do with the actual art or labor of writing. So of course people who know nothing about writing figure ChatGPT can do it all for you. Why do all the tedious work of writing when you could just Be A Writer and get all the benefits they imagine exist? Heck, anyone can do that now!
Those people completely miss the point. People who try writing thinking it's basically a get rich quick scheme tend to fail out, because it really, really isn't. The people who stick around and keep doing it (I've been thinking of novelists, but tbh it goes for anyone who actually does the work, regardless of if it's for pay or for fun or what genre or format you're doing it in) ... they do it because they actually love writing. The labor.
All ChatGPT does is remove the fun part. But people who aren't writers aren't going to see that, because what they see is Being A Wrtier, not the actual act of writing.
2023 Word Count, and 2024 Goals
Quick check in: with the demise of Tinyletter, I’ve moved my newsletter over to Buttondown. If you subscribed previously you don’t have to subscribe again, and I’m going to continue cross-posting here, too, since I think this version looks nicer than the Buttondown archives. (And if you haven’t subscribed yet: please do!) It’s February, which means three things: 1) I meant to write and send…
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23 Nice Things From 2023
Hi, friends!First, a bit of housekeeping. To my great sadness, Tinyletter (the service I use to send this) is shutting down. I like Tinyletter a lot because it really is just a text editor where I can toss my thoughts out and send them to you all, and every other newsletter service I’ve looked at is either meant more for sales and formal communication, or is Substack, which I’m not into.All of…
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Turning forty
Hi friends,I’m forty years old. While not exactly news, this is new, in that my birthday was the day before I’m writing this. I’ve been surprised by the number of people who’ve asked how I feel about this. There’s a lot to unpack around why peple ask that question, but that’s not what I’m writing about. Let me answer the question instead.How do I feel about turning forty? I feel fucking awesome…
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Rereading my own work -
Hi friends, It started with career day. My sister/roommate is a high school teacher and once a year I get invited to take part in her school’s career day, and spend a morning talking to kids about my career. I go back and forth between talking about my day job in tech and my creative job as a writer, or some years try to talk about both, but let us be real: the writing stuff is way more…
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#when you hear people saying to judge people by the standards of their time#i am judging racists slaveholders and essentialists by the standard of the public universal friend#there were people who knew the right thing centuries ago#it wasn't popular but the ideas existed
Behind the Animation for Nimona | Netflix
i can’t blame him i’d do the same thing
You ever just… yell about #queer sff??
me_irl
whoops
#when you set out for revenge dig two graves#unless you’re hamlet#in which case you’re going to want to rent a backhoe (x) YOU’RE NOT LEAVING THAT IN THE TAGS BUDDY
NIMONA + LETTERBOXD REVIEWS
another underappreciated tumblr feature that you dont get on other sites is the queue. i love it when something i thought was funny six months ago and then forgot about a week later crawlts its way out of the processing vortex and i get to see it all over again.
you should queue this post it would be funny and grant me immortality
you motherfuckers put me in the processing vortex
Pour one out for all the stories you'll never find again, that you barely remember in totality, but that left an impression on you that you'll never forget.
The short stories from standardized tests that you only had a few minutes to read, but those minutes will last a lifetime.
The books on the library display shelf you used to occupy time until your mom could come pick you up from school.
The graphic novel you picked up when you were first getting into comics and could never find again.
The single lines or themes from stories you otherwise don't remember, save for the one thing that you saw and internalized as a new part of your personality.
Let's pour one out for the books that built us, even if we never could find them again, and couldn't of we wanted to.
