Floating in the Blue

I'm a lazy perfectionist and a realist romantic || I'm Yeoyou over on AO3 || she/her, 30+, clueless bisexual || this blog contains nsfw material on occasion

[floating-in-the-blue]

On Wrestling Creativity

Your Imagination is a wild horse on the barren fields of your mind. It will only grow and breed if you feed it. It will only be tamed if you let it run free.

Your Muse is a squirrel tittering at you and demanding attention but often gone when you’ve finally followed. It guards its hoard well but is easily distracted.

Your Ideas are bunnies, multiplying when and where you least expect it, swarming and teasing but actually hard to catch and never there when you need one.

You are the zookeeper of your creative mind, never sure just who is in control of all the chaos. It’s a tough job with odd hours and sleepless nights. You’d never change it for anything else.

[kipgradybutmuchmuchworse]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Clearly, this fic was written for no particular reason of any wider fandom trends that may or may not have invaded the skip tag in the last 72 hours (immense sarcasm). But I hope it’s enjoyable regardless

[luna-azzurra]

Not every scene deserves the same amount of page time. Sometimes you need to summarize three weeks in a sentence. Sometimes five minutes takes three chapters. Pacing is about emphasis. Slow down when emotions are high, when decisions matter, when everything could fall apart. Speed up through the boring necessary stuff. Your reader doesn't need to experience every meal and every conversation, just the ones that change something.

[txttletale]

i have rule i semi-adhere to for media criticism which is to ideologically meet shit where it's at (or where it's presented to me). i like to call it the "i didn't make you market it that way" rule--like, if lancer's union was just presented as a sci-fi setting, that would be fine. i don't expect all sci-fi settings to be communist utopias! but when the creators of lancer use the word utopia like 20 times & bandy around words like 'mutual aid' and 'post-scarcity' and 'anticapitalist' when describing it, then to me that becomes absolutely fair game. similarly if someone says 'stardew valley is fun i like farming :)' then i'm not gonna reply with a long post about how it's ideologically petty-bourgeois--but if they say 'stardew valley is anticapitalist', then they've opened up that can of worms and it's fair for me to point out that the worms exist.

[txttletale]

it's the same phenomenon where a fantasy novel that says 'for the duration of this fantasy novel you need to just believe in the divine right of kings for the emotional stakes to make sense' is infinitely less objectionable than a fantasy novel that's also about restoring a king but takes painstaking time to point out how this king is A Good King who is Progressive and Nice and is going to do Nice Monarchy. when you try to sanitize something you end up turning any otherwise neutral or at least palatable depiction or framework you've included into a normative statement!

[ismenes]

you know those studies showing that cursing helps with pain tolerance or whatever. that’s how i feel about making my weird little noises to get through my basic daily activities. sometimes you just have to go hggblaaaah for a minute so you can find the strength within yourself to get up or wash the dishes or send an email. mmmnneh. urgh. the torments are unending but you can always make some little sounds about it.

[anxietyproblem]

[whiskersonkittens65]

by Debra Milne

[aubrietarose]

It was going to be a much darker vent piece, but it turned out that wasn’t what I needed. So here’s a little thought that helps me sometimes.

[rabbitmotifs]

big bad & little bit

[soundlessdragon]

My kids are still quite young (under school age), and I've been careful to try to make sure they only have kind role models. This has resulted in typical mean language being absent from their vocabulary, such as "you're stupid/ugly/I hate you", but they've started inventing their own ways to be mean lol, such as "you're not my brother anymore, you're a stranger to me now", and hearing that out of a toddler's mouth is so cutting lol

[soundlessdragon]

My favorite tags so far

[gator-crusador]

This is a great case-in-point about why designating certain words forbidden is an ineffective strategy. Words don’t dictate thoughts and feelings; they express them. The thoughts and feelings remain, even if the mode of expression is taken away, and a new mode of expression for the thought will be found.

[fierycavalier]

Yes but! The creativity is good for them

[shinybrightthing-deactivated202]

weird me out? no. you've weirded me in. let's merge souls

[haletostilinski]

Best MM Ship Ever: GROUP 1 - Round 5

Clex (Clark Kent | Superman/Lex Luthor) vs. Skip (Scott Hunter/Christopher "Kip" Grady)

Superman - Clex (Clark/Lex)

Heated Rivalry - Skip (Scott/Kip)

Remaining time: 2 days 10 hours

[countessrivers]

This skip divorce bs is also just really highlighting for me the growing discomfort I've been feeling about how a section of the fandom speaks about Scott and Skip in the face of Scott's openly bisexual actor talking multiple times about how much he relates to Scott and how he spent so many years closeted and the victim of homophobia and enduring the fear of what being queer means for his professional life and everything it's cost him, and how that makes Scott so familiar and precious to him.

But no, apparently Skip are straight coded. They're toned down to be palatable to the more homophobic viewers. It's totally the characters/writers/actor's fault that you're all but calling one of them the woman in the relationship.

(plus, like, we've all seen how faaaaar too many of you speak about Francois. You're not slick)

[innytoes]

Because sometimes the worbs won't worb and you need a custom Ferbinand reaction image for it.

[missjoolee]

Rebog! Rebog the worbs!

[uwuspaceboy]

[horreurscopes]

never forget the universal rule of the order of things: People Will Not Read It

[horreurscopes]

signs at stores? émail? menu ?? instruction ? post online ? caption with andswer to question ? group hand outs ??? street sign ??? no. The Written Word Is The Enemy

[lasrina]

#The number of compliments i have gotten for reading a thing

The ability to occasionally Read A Thing will make you a hero in your workplace, especially if it is for example an error message that tells you what you need to do differently, or instructions on unjamming a printer.

[stephaniematurin]

how dare you say we put jam in the printer

[berkelbites]

Ok reblogging this again because story time.

I work in tech, and much of what I do is support sales reps within the company by resolving errors with the software they use.

There is one sales rep who, every single time I send her a message or email with extremely specific instructions that will resolve her issue, does something completely different from what I tell her. Every time. Without fail. It is so glaringly obvious that she has never read even a single word that I have written to her.

So one day, she sends me a message that says little more than "(software) is broken, help"

So I do my standard song and dance of asking her what she's trying to accomplish, and what specifically is stopping her from doing that. And eventually, after much unnecessary back and forth, she tells me there's an error message. I ask her to send me a screenshot of the error message. She does.

The error message basically says, "these two required fields are blank. To resolve this, please fill in these two specific fields, and then click save."

So I take a few deep breaths.

Then I lie to her.

I message her back, saying "hey yeah, for some reason it's not loading that screenshot on my end. Could you type out the full text of the error message for me?"

She does.

I ask her if she still needs help.

She does not respond.

[samueldays]

I have similar story from tech support.

Client is reporting that Some Thing Program doesn't work. I ask if there's an error message with further information about what's not working. Client says "no". I go over and ask Client to open Some Thing. Client double-clicks on the icon for Some Thing, it starts to boot, an error message dialog flashes up on screen, Client closes error message before I can read it, Thing closes after the error.

"What did that error message say?" I ask.

"What error message?" asks Client.

I tell Client to open the Some Thing again and then not click anything else. Client opens Some Thing, error message appears, Client clicks it away again.

I tell Client to stand up, step away, and give me physical control of the computer. I open Some Thing, start looking at the error message without closing it, and Client says "You should close that." I tell Client that I am reading the error message. Client is apparently accustomed to treating error messages as a kind of spam email that should be deleted as fast as possible, and gets agitated that I'm reading it.

I read the error message. It tells me what the problem is. I fix the problem. Some Thing works now.

---

Later, I start thinking about how such an error message might perhaps be engineered to be more attention-grabbing and close-resistant as a way of making people read it. It's not important for some random program here, but there are more important systems (medical, etc) where it would be reasonable to demand the user's attention because people's lives depend on paying attention to the error message.

But then people with a perverted intellect would still be thinking about ways to avoid reading the message, like dragging it off edge of screen or hiding it behind another window. So maybe the dialog box could have an always-in-front feature to override other windows, and the alert could use the computer's hardware "beep" functionality that can't be switched off by muting the regular sound system, and keep beeping... shit, I realize I'm reinventing pain, and get philosophical about it.

[doccyuk]

Story from The Past about My Mum:

She was a computer programmer / analyst, a... Long Time Ago. Called in for a system she'd installed before, the office folk said they kept having problems where it Didn't Work Right (no error, a malfunction)

She investigated, and told them that could only happen if they did 3 specific things in a specific order, which they should not ever do.

So, she asked, did they ever do that?

No! Of course not, was the answer.

So she made a couple of small changes, packed up and said that should be fine, but they should call her if there were problems.

The next week

She had a call saying "We're getting a strange error message on the system, can you help?"

She said, of course, can they tell her the error?

And the message was:

"You Said You Didn't Do This"

[viktor-sbor]

In the 1830s, such books were very popular, as they showed the reader amazing 3D projections.

[frozenwolftemplar]

Honestly, this impresses me infinitely more than the snazziest 3D CGI imagery Hollywood can come up with.