[cetacean needed] @circlejourney - Tumblr Blog

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Hello 🐳 I'm Circlejourney

🇸🇬 they/them, 21+, chicken and cetacean enthusiast

I make a lot of things. I have a creative-work-focused blog for finished works: @circlejourneyart.

Useful links:

My website - I try to keep this up to date with all my main projects.

My link list

Other accounts:

@windowtoworlds - OC art zine I co-run every couple of years

@seaunseenzine - marine art zine I co-run every couple of years

@ocshare - sharing OC posts that deserve more love

@re-locative - my PhD research blog

@plotwarren - I throw all the story plots that pop into my head (but I know I will never make) there.

Creative projects:

Compass (webcomic) - two travellers sail towards the edge of the world with growing premonitions of what awaits them there

The Spindles of Spacetime (novel series) - the girl who holds the multiverse together finds her life under threat, so she goes seeking 8 prophesied defenders, each in a different universe

Offshore (novel) - a two-handed sailing team prepare for their final race together while trying not to fall in love

In Between (browser game) - you are a reaper coming to take the soul of a queen who has postponed her death for a millennium

My music albums

#life and times

circlejourney

Archival Adventures 4: Wow There's a Lot of Junk in Here

part 3

I've finished archiving my fan fiction (minus cleanup) and. Uh.

I may write a lot.

As I've been working through my FFnet collection, I've found myself reflecting on the nature of my relationship with writing back when I was a young teen.

I used to have a ridiculous writing regime, something like 2 fanfics/chapters a week, which I maintained for the better part of 3 years.

I did this because I felt like I had something to prove. I embodied a school-achievement mentality about it - I was ruled by a compulsion to pump up my numbers.

A lot of these stories start with apologies or self deprecation about the quality of the writing. My 14-year-old self was clearly terrified of poor feedback, and honestly? The writing I was putting out back then really wasn't good. (And considering some of them were supposedly written in less than an hour, is that any wonder?) The negative reviews I received on my fanfic were likely from people well above my age or experience level gauging my work on their standards.

But you know what else is clearer in hindsight? I improved astronomically between 2008 and 2009.

I'm just thankful my younger self did all this legwork so that, by 2010, I found translating my ideas into words to be a largely frictionless undertaking.

circlejourney

We're over 1 million!

lewislarbalestier-moved

happy republic day to all the italian tumblrinas gnc

Archival Adventures 4: Wow There's a Lot of Junk in Here

part 3

I've finished archiving my fan fiction (minus cleanup) and. Uh.

I may write a lot.

As I've been working through my FFnet collection, I've found myself reflecting on the nature of my relationship with writing back when I was a young teen.

I used to have a ridiculous writing regime, something like 2 fanfics/chapters a week, which I maintained for the better part of 3 years.

I did this because I felt like I had something to prove. I embodied a school-achievement mentality about it - I was ruled by a compulsion to pump up my numbers.

But you know what else is clearer in hindsight? I improved astronomically between 2008 and 2009.

I'm just thankful my younger self did all this legwork so that, by 2010, I found translating my ideas into words to be a largely frictionless undertaking.

#archival adventures #my writing #writing

flickringghosts

#I will always romanticises storm cells #photography #inspiration

Archival Adventures 3

part 2

Status update: I have downloaded all my fan fiction from ffnet and ao3.

the largest file so far is OTDOTS, which also happens to (still) be my longest single work. (It's OK, Spindles will overtake it next chapter.)

Given how much crap (affectionate) I have written, I'm almost positive that I have at least a couple of works sharing the same title. So, I'm going to have to think about disambiguation lol.

#archival adventures #my writing

Archival Adventures 2: Data structure and database

part 1

The purpose of my archive will just be to give me a way to 1. Access all of my own work in one place and 2. Make some of these projects available for public viewing. I don't intend to create info pages for every single work or project as part of this, only offer a gateway to access them.

So it is actually two separate projects:

Uploading the content of works as raw HTML, and

Recording metadata about each work.

Keeping these systems separate means that I can easily transfer specific projects to new locations, perhaps with better presentation, when I decide.

Metadata

A possible schema for the written project info database would be...

Title (string)

Description (string)

Format (string) - describing the type of experience encapsulated, which supports filtering, e.g. Novel, Short Story, Poetry, Interactive, Other

Original publish location (string)

Internal URL (string)

External URLs (string, nullable)

Publication start date (timestamp)

Publication end date (timestamp, nullable)

Word count (integer, unsigned)

Installment nomenclature (string, nullable)

Published installment count (integer, unsigned)

Total installment count (integer, unsigned)

Is complete (boolean)

Fanfiction of (string, nullable)

Archived at (timestamp)

In some cases, an exact date will be hard to pinpoint because they're written on paper, but I did have a habit of noting down exactly when I started and finished every story, so fingers crossed that these instances are few.

Truth be told, I'm a little nervous about making some of the really old stuff available 😅 I suppose I could note somewhere that this stuff is OLD and that I wrote it when I was a literal child etc etc and just hope only people who believe in my ability to grow as a person since I was 11 bother looking, hahaha.

Idk. I will decide how much I make public later.

#archival adventures #writing

Archival Adventures 1: Writing Part 1

To archive my creative works on my website is perhaps a fool's errand...but I really want to do it eventually. Not just for my own gratification (I want to finally know the true size of my body of work) but because I like to be able to point people to any of my works with just a website URL, even that embarrassing fanfic I wrote when I was 11. And I want to stop fearing for the day FFnet goes under.

I want to start with archiving all my writing on my website because:

It represents the biggest time investment by far among the types of creative output I publish

It has low data needs

It is easy to transfer quickly

It holds the most value to me - rather than archiving every single webpage graphic I made with GIMP in 2011, which would be mildly amusing in an abstract way at best, archiving and dating a poem or song lyrics I wrote in 2011 would be processually enjoyable.

Even though I would somewhat like to distance myself from my old fan fiction (it is just not good), it is still creative work I've spent innumerable hours on. I think at minimum, having it all in HTML format on my site's server would be nice.

Some of my other writing also has not been digitised. So some of the archival process will be transcribing it. I was flipping through some of my novels and the mould was starting to eat away some of the ink.

So writing archival checklist:

Fanfiction.net (166 works) - transfer

Archiveofourown.org (7 works) - transfer

Toyhouse (18 works) - transfer those that haven't already been

Handwritten novels (I have counted 7 but I think there's more back in Singapore) - transcribe

I also published some original writing on a site called Writer's Cafe I think? - transfer

Thesis and exegeses (3 works) - just upload maybe?

Zine poetry (idk) - convert to HTML or transfer

Other writing posted on various social media (idk) - convert to HTML

The goal is to have everything archived on my web server.

This seems achievable. Wish me luck.

#archival Adventures #writing

I'm discontinuing my #fowl category tag. Because, let's be real, 90% of what I post in there are chickens; it's basically#chicken++. The other 10% are easily found via their family/genus/species tags. There is no need for 3 levels of categorisation.

I began tagging Galloanserae as #fowl simply because I was also tagging other birds at order-to-family level, like #psittacine and #wader. The big difference is that, in the last 2 cases, I do not reblog nearly enough parrots/allies nor waders to individually tag any other subcategory.

This is not the case with Galloanserae, where I have numerous posts each about chickens, ducks, swans, ptarmigans, peafowl, and turkeys.

As a side note, I might start changing #ratite (polyphyletic) to #palaeognath (monophyletic)

#thinks #blog psa

deadbirdlife

Today my Advanced Clinical Pathology professor trailed off in the middle of class and said, “If I seem distracted, it’s because last night I was talking with a friend and she asked ‘Who’s that chick in Titanic?’ but all I heard was ‘Chicken Titanic,’ and ever since then I’ve been thinking about a chicken on the bow of the Titanic like Kate Winslet, wings held high. It’s all I can think about.”

deadbirdlife

My hand moved on its own

magicratfingers

so rare and beautiful when the art is exactly the image u saw in your mind

#this is the sort of image that goes through my mind on the regular #art #chicken #birds

doyoulovethewayzeylily

you'll feel like a total dipshit train wreck and no matter what some girl is gonna see you and think "role model". you can't kill yourself you have to go be clocky in the gas station so a 14 year old can have the trajectory of her life altered forever

duchessvongooseberg

as annoying as it is to work fast food, at my previous job one time a kid recognized the theta delta pin on my hat and was so fucking excited because i was the first other therian they had ever encountered offline.

"hey....are you a therian?" "yeah!" "what kind of animal?" "eh, some kinda dog" "😲😀 im like a wolf coyote hybrid" "that's fuckin awesome"

to be weird is to cast lifelines all around you

doyoulovethewayzeylily

tags from @k1ntsug1-r0b0t-g1rl

what really drives me nuts is that like. this happens an average of x times per year as a visibly weird person, but we only get made aware of it a small fraction of the time. you can't kill yourself you have to be clocky in the gas station.

analog-delight

Being clocky when i was working as a barista was one of my big joys. Being clocky when i was teaching high schoolers how to play the marimba was my reason for being for half a decade. It sucks how scared I am to leave the house I live in now. But I still need to try and be clocky at the grocery store. I wish i had a job to be clocky at. Being visibly me is one of the most radical acts I'm capable of, and I hope that one day we live in a world where it isn't radical at all.

doyoulovethewayzeylily

that's exactly what I was feeling when I wrote this. we all find ways to defy our fear, love is an excellent motivator.

#trans girls releasing music with their own singing are the reason I stopped being afraid to do that too

circlevoyage

I'm starting to really understand why the love triangle is perceived as such a severely, limitingly YA plot conceit, perhaps more so than any other I can think of.

Its pathos comes from our investment in the choice to be made by the love triangle's apex, the silent agreement that these are high stakes, that one of the two romantic options stands to seriously lose out because it means losing something irreplaceable.

The conflict is propped up by certain cultural norms. It depends not just on two people having romantic prospects with the apex, but with a range of other social assumptions like:

Only one of those relationships can be actualised as romance

Romance is the sole acceptable outcome for them

Any other kind of relationship will be inpossible after rejection

Because for many teens, romance really is all of these things. You (or many people, anyway) grow up in a culture that elevates mono romantic relationships—and if you're alloromantic or otherwise inclined to do so, and you fall in love for the first time, that is your sole reference point for what it means to be in love. You really do think this is special and will never happen again.

The love triangle plays entirely off of that belief in that one special, unlikely bond.

But once you've fallen in love a few times, maybe with multiple people at the same time, it becomes very clear that the conceit of the love triangle is making a huge deal out of something that is not a huge deal at all! It is only compelling in a limited phase of one's life that confines its appeal to a specific demographic, in a way that even a first love scenario is not.

The experience of falling in love and finding that feeling new and different continues to resonate no matter how many people you've been in love with. But the idea that who the apex chooses is a point of tension on par with the outcome of a war? Not so much.

#I couldn't decide if this should go on the writing takes blog or here but here you go

redstonedust

do most people actually have a thing in their brain that tells them to drink water before their mouth goes dry and they have a headache. is that real. i have been told that headache is not supposed to be the primary sign of being thirsty but that sounds fake to me.

circlejourney

Back when I was having 1 glass of water a day, I did not feel thirst at all. After getting in the habit of drinking about 50% of my RDI daily, I started feeling thirsty again. I still have a long way to go, but it is worth making the lifestyle shift because dehydration will impact a lot of aspects of your health that you probably did not realise were related