”I have this artistic idea but not the skills to achieve it to the standard I want.”
congrats! Now you have a motif! A recurring theme! A focus for your art! Something to haunt you!
Seventeen still lives of dandelions? Three hundred poems about grief? A sketchbook dedicated to your grandmother’s house? Two books trying to unravel the complexities of familial relationships?
Don’t let the fear of it not being perfect on the first try stop you from being Weird About It!
Please view Hokusai's gradual working towards The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, over a period of 39 years.
An early exploration of the themes Hokusai would keep coming back to is Spring in Enoshima, done in 1793 when he was 33. The wave is small and there are no boats, but Mt Fuji is clear in the background, and Enoshima is in Kanagawa, so we are clearly beginning to work towards something here.
A second pass, eleven years later in 1803 when he was 44. The title of this one begins to get more familiar: The View of Honmoku Off Kanazawa. It has a towering wave over a smaller boat, but Mt Fuji is not present, and the boat is considerably larger and has a sail. But the feeling of danger in the wave and the smallness of the boat are here, and of course the general composition is definitely recognizable.
This is A View Of Express Delivery Boats, done in 1805, merely two years later at age 46. Here we find the wave and the boats almost exactly as we'll find them in The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, though Mt Fuji isn't present, and the location is uncertain. And it's a good picture! The wave is threatening, the boats are small -- but the feeling of "ocean" isn't really there yet, is it? It's unlikely this picture would have become a classic for the ages. But that's okay, there's still time.
And here we have it, a full 26 years later, done by Hokusai in 1831 at the age of 72. The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, one of the most recognizable pieces of art in the world. The boats are there, the mountain is there, the wave is there, and the FEELING is there. He did it! He reached the apex of his ongoing motif and theme!
Or did he? Because the whole point of a motif is not that you're striving to get to the perfect version of it, the one idealized image you carried in your head all along, and when it is done, you are also done. Hokusai is on record at the age of 73 saying he'd only just begun to feel like he was learning how to draw things properly, and that "if I keep up my efforts, I will have even a better understanding when I was 80 and by 90 will have penetrated to the heart of things. At 100, I may reach a level of divine understanding, and if I live decades beyond that, everything I paint — dot and line — will be alive." He had drawn The Great Wave, but he didn't believe he was finished -- he thought that he was still just beginning to get started.
And he wasn't finished with his ocean motif, either. Please check out his Mt Fuji At Sea, done in 1834 at the age of 75.
It's all there; Mt Fuji, the ocean, the wave. The boats are gone, but replaced with birds, flying with the wave instead of fighting against it. It's not as famous as The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, but that's not what motifs are for -- each successive work does not have to surpass the previous in terms of success, especially in terms of external success. They're there for you to keep playing with, keep remixing and re-experiencing, for as long as you think you have something to say.
I also want everybody to know that Google and most of the internet think that all of those paintings bar the last one are called "The Great Wave Off Kanagawa", so I had to do a sort of middling deep dive just to find their actual names. And then I was like "I don't think those translations are very accurate", so I went on a second quest to retranslate them, which was particularly difficult with painting three (A View Of Express Delivery Boats) because for some reason he titled that one entirely in hiragana, and it's all archaic words that were very hard to chase down without their corresponding kanji. Google suggested "the push-off is a transportation route", which wasn't particularly helpful.
All of which is to say that I probably spent a bit too much time on all of that, but it was fun; and at least I know what those paintings are called now.
In Copenhagen you can visit The Round Tower. It used to be an astronomical observatory until light pollution and the vibrations from increased traffic in the streets made it useless for its original purpose.
Today it’s mostly famous for what it looks like on the inside.
It has an equestrian staircase though it’s so smooth it’s really just a gentle slope more than a staircase. It was build like that so our lazy bum king could ride his horse all the way to the top (king not in photo)
And naturally people have also driven cars up the tower
And held a bike race
For a while it was just sort of abandoned by the authorities and became a sloping marketplace
But today it has been restored and become a tourist spot as well as a popular destination for school trips. And yes, you can still watch the cosmos at the top.
man if you're disabled you've GOT to find some way to make your fuckass body a source of pleasure whenever you can. jacking off. eating good food. wearing soft clothes. kissing an animal on the head. whatever you can do
Life must be a rollercoaster for the D class. You live in a shitty prison cell for the remainder of your probably extremely short life. One day some security guards show up and take you to a big room where a scientist tells you to copy an image onto some paper. You do. The scientist shrugs and writes something down and you're taken back.
One day a scientist hands you a poptart and says "eat this". You say "is it full of some kind of fucked up interdimensional poison". The scientist says "eat it or that security guard will tase you and tie you down and make you eat it". You eat the poptart. It is not full of fucked up interdimensional poison, but it is kind of stale. You describe the taste to the scientist and he shrugs and writes something down and you go back to your shitty cell.
One day a security guard takes you to a big room and there's a flute sitting on a table. A scientist tells you "play Hot Cross Buns on that". You explain that you do not know how to play the flute. You are instructed to try. You play the flute and get immediately get dragged into some incomprehensible shadow dimension and torn to pieces for no reason that makes any sense to you. You are very lucky to have survived so long and died so quickly.
Sometimes you get blindfolded and told to repeatedly roll a basketball across the floor of a room and then you have to draw pictures and learn piano and cooking and you accidentally become a big monster's beloved Emotional Support Human, though, so there are potential upsides.
#i know Derin didnt invent this#but it is SUCH a Derin concept
I've been incorrectly credited with inventing rotational pseudogravity in colony ships and the "humanity, fuck yeah" subgenre, so this assumption would be par for the course.
(For the record I have never invented anything.)
Someone came in fully convinced that I wrote 17776 once. I'm waiting for the day that I get confused for the cookie clicker guy.
which one is worse: someone falsely attributing something to you that you think is better than your work, or something you think is worse than your work?
It's hard to be worse than my work because I've written some absolute nonsense before. Anyone who thinks all my work is good hasn't seen my old livejournal accounts.
I’ve seen your Animorphs fanfiction, I think that’s even what brought me to Tumblr for the first time. And I’ve got to say when it comes to the highs and lows of writing, I have yet to see anything you’ve written that’s below “hot damn this is fun,” level of quality writing. All of it excellent stuff.
Derin, how does one learn to set up plot points? Because I don’t know that I understand that myself. Are we talking worldbuilding and foreshadowing? Story arcs with rising action? I know the thing that needs to happen but what are the elements that need to be “set up” for it to…make sense? Or to not feel too abrupt?
Mostly you have to give the reader the information they need before they need it and, much more importantly, give them a reason to care about something before you try to make them care about it. They do not have to notice that you have done this, you can give them the context in asides and implications. But you do have to do it.
been thinking about cyborg theory, and gurathin, and murderbot
works referenced, in order of appearance
Rasper, R. Prototyping Criptical Neural Engineering — Tentatively Cripping Neural Engineering’s Cultural Practices for Cyborg Survival and Flourishing. Nanoethics 16, 35–49 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-021-00405-8
Williams, Damien P., Heavenly Bodies: Why It Matters That Cyborgs Have Always Been About Disability, Mental Health, and Marginalization (June 8, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3401342 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3401342
Kokhot, J. (2025). Overcoming life: Neuralink, cyborgs and the (an)aesthetics of cure. Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, 23(1), 29–45. https://doi.org/10.1386/tear_00140_1
Kurzman, Steven L. “Presence and Prosthesis: A Response to Nelson and Wright.” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 3 (2001): 374–87. http://www.jstor.org/stable/656681.
Kafer, Alison. "Accessible futures? Disability, feminist and queer theory, and progressive politics." The Claremont Graduate University ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2005. 3159642. https://www.proquest.com/docview/305006871, citing Jennifer Gonzalez: Gonzalez, Jennifer. "14. ‘Envisioning Cyborg Bodies: Notes from Current Research’". Cybersexualities: A Reader in Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999, pp. 264-279. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474473668-019
Weise, Jillian. "Common Cyborg." Granta, September 2018. https://granta.com/common-cyborg/
Kafer, Alison. "The Cyborg and the Crip." Feminist, Queer, Crip. 2013. citing Steven Kurzman.
Kurzman, Steven L. "Presence and Prosthesis: A Response to Nelson and Wright." Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 3 (2001): 374-87. https://www.jstor.org/stable/656681.
Rasper, R. Prototyping Criptical Neural Engineering — Tentatively Cripping Neural Engineering’s Cultural Practices for Cyborg Survival and Flourishing. Nanoethics 16, 35–49 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-021-00405-8
Crosby, Christina, “Allies and Enemies,” in Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics, ed. Elizabeth Weed (New York: Routledge, 1989), 206; as cited by Alison Kafer in "The Cyborg and the Crip."
Haraway, Donna J, as cited by Brennan, Dave in A Cyborg's Father: "Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 33. Haraway defines the word [sympoeisis] as “making-with.” Other interpretations include “worldling-with” or “becoming-with.” Haraway also points to M. Beth Dempter’s earlier definition of the word, sympoiesis as “collectively-producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries. Information and control are distributed among components. The systems are evolutionary and have the potential for surprising change” (ibid.)"
Forlano, L. (2017). “Data Rituals in Intimate Infrastructures: Crip Time and the Disabled Cyborg Body as an Epistemic Site of Feminist Science.” Catalyst. Special Issue on Science out of Feminist Theory. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v3i2.28843
I have absolutely zero doubts Martha Wells read at the very least Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, a seminal piece of queer cyberfeminist theory from 1985. Look at the dates, look at the topics: even Murderbot's positioning as agender vibes with it.
jacobvanloon
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vaporwave
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