i, write

Hi, I'm a writer. You may remember me from such publications as Starburst Magazine, Mindful Mum, and the Devilfish Review.

[paper-wounds]

via

[pocketss]

distressing things to say to your friends

[titsay]

[sweetfairy1]

The Elvenking and The Goblin King

I would reblog directly from you @lydiacroftart if you post this masterpiece also on tumblr.

[aschrecordings]

401 towards london by jack chambers, 1968-69

[muirneach]

north americans will literally have religious experiences about highways

[luna-azzurra]

The most interesting question you can ask about any character is not what do they want. it's what do they believe they deserve. because those two things are almost never the same and the gap between them is where your entire story lives. a person can want love completely and believe they don't deserve it and that belief will destroy every good thing that comes toward them in ways they won't even notice they're doing. write the gap. the gap is the character.

[kitsnicket]

I don’t like this actually

[kitsnicket]

This is depressing does anyone else find this depressing

[mikkeneko]

I would actually make the argument that the heart of the problem here is not either about fans, as the article claims, or production companies being exploitative cowards, as some of the comments are claiming. The heart of the problem is the increasingly eroding privacy we are seeing in the modern age.

There's some people in the comments saying "fandoms have always been like this" and others saying "No, it's worse than it was." And both are to some extent right. Fans (or at least a small percentage of fans, and the larger a fanbase gets the larger a group this will describe) have always been Like That; but they did not always have the level of access to creators and actors that they have now.

The notion that a performer needs to be constantly available to public scrutiny, that their personal information should by default be available to any rando with google, is pretty new. It used to be that actors would only be expected to engage with the public on limited, specific, and controlled occasions, usually with security provided. Now they're being asked to rawdog exposure to the mob 24/7 on their own.

(Also, production companies have always always always been exploitative cowards, just to get that straight; reading the biographies of literally any actress from golden Hollywood years makes that clear. It's just, again, more public now.)

There has also been a negative feedback loop as fandoms come to realize that the constant access they have to creatives increases their leverage and power. It did not use to be the case that this was so; fandoms pre-internet largely worked under the assumption that they didn't really have any meaningful way to contact or influence the publication houses. Even if they sent a letter or a campaign of letters, they wouldn't even know whether the letters were being received or read unless the publishing house chose to respond. So, without that expectation of access, the drama usually stayed internal. Nowadays, with constant immediate feedback from creators and publishers, fans are ever more incentivized to act out to try to push an agenda, get attention, or just vent whatever is going on in their lives onto a face contractually obliged to be friendly to them.

[riibrego]

morning glory

wallpaper sizes //  prints

[apoetreflects]

Painting: Andrew Wyeth, Army Blanket, 1957

[maureen2musings]

streetsandsnapshots

[teashoesandhair]

'A popular fanfic author stopped updating her fic because she said that the stress of being constantly falsely accused of using AI was a witch hunt and it was destroying her mental health to the extent that she needed to take a break from writing, leading to multiple online discussions defending her and debates about AI accusations and how You Can't Really Tell So Leave Her Alone, and then someone realised that there were Claude coding artefacts in her fics and that it was a super pervasive problem in that particular fandom, proven definitively by looking at the source coding of each work on AO3, and she denied it for a bit but then ultimately admitted that oopsie, she had been using genAI all along, and then she deleted all of her fics off AO3 and people got mad because they were being denied access to their favourite fics, even though they now knew definitively that they were genAI slop, and then it turned out that she'd actually stopped updating the fic on AO3 in the first place because she'd been shopping it around to agents and editors as an original work with the serial numbers filed off, and she'd been in conversations with a publisher which ultimately got dropped because she'd lied to them about her AI use' oh cool, so we're in Hell, then

[teashoesandhair]

Let me be clear: if you use AI to write fanfic, paticularly if you do so in the hopes of snapping up a tradpub deal off the basis of the popularity of your worthless slop, then you are an absolute grade A ding-dong, and may the vengeful spirits of our beloved Spirk Elders haunt you via the medium of perpetual papercuts forevermore.

[creativitycache]

I am unaware of who this is referring to and feel like a small fishing boat that just saw the dorsal fin of Leviathan off the starboard bow

[teashoesandhair]

That is so extremely valid, and truly I wish that I had not myself plunged into the depths and seen the truth of the Leviathan (a gigantic plastic fish effigy that's broken off a derelict Fish & Chip shop and washed into the Atlantic: a harbinger of doom in its own synthetic tongue)

[lttrsfrmlnrrgby]

So many lessons in fandom and life boil down to make your own works for love of the game, don't go looking for ways to be an asshole to people, don't lie when people ask you something that challenges you to be better, and don't fucking cheat.

[littleduke]

commissions are always open

[queenofattolia]

i know it's a common talking point by now that our tech overlords read the wrong (by which i mean sexist, racist, colonial, etc.) mid-century scifi or failed to understand the specfic they claim to love (hitchhiker's guide, lotr, etc.) we've all made jokes about how maybe they wouldn't be so awful if they'd read more le guin or butler or delaney.

however i don't think i've seen people talk about the fact that these "techno-optimists" who are so looking forward to a "techno-utopia" never reference, cite, or allude to star trek, which is the single most influential techno-optimistic piece of media ever created.

and i mean, it's obvious why. star trek isn't just about exploring the stars, discovering new planets, creating cyborgs and computers and all kinds of futuristic technologies.

star trek is about about eliminating scarcity so that everyone can thrive. star trek is about a multicultural future of peace and prosperity for all. star trek is about infinite diversity in infinite combinations. star trek is about finding new life forms who look at the world completely differently than we do and learning from them. star trek is about a globalism that is rooted in humanism and peace. star trek is about providing role models for people (especially kids) who have never seen those who look like them in scifi, igniting their imaginations, and helping them think, "wow, there will be people like me in the future! even if i'm black, a woman, blind, trans, queer, not from the u.s.a., etc.!"

these guys HATE all of those things, and star trek is so explicitly about them that they can't even misunderstand it, misappropriate, or misuse it. so we get palantir, m*sk talking about how much he loves hitchhiker's guide, and j.d. vance naming his venture capital company after one of the rings from lotr. but we don't see anyone naming their robot data or their talking computer after majel barrett or talking about how star trek inspired them to get where they are now. because it didn't inspire them. because its vision was not the one they latched onto.

you also don't hear them citing, say, carl sagan. or hedy lamarr or ada lovelace or rosalind franklin. or any of the other stem-y people who were also deeply humanist and who profoundly love our little blue planet. they only care about stories they can believe are about white dudes accomplishing things through a domination mindset and being oh so special. they're obsessed with jung and campbell and their bullshit ideas about ~hero's journeys~ and anything they can twist to be about their misogynist, racist, ableist, queerphobic, imperialist agenda.

and i just think that is very telling.

[queenofattolia]

#but it's also because star trek is cringe and the wrong kind of nerdy and gay and camp and effiminate and cheap and weird (via @lastvalyrian)

[acousticolateral]

decided to remake this gifset to celebrate the season 2 announcement!! 💖

[ouiouhie]

the earth watcher 🌏

[heleletr]

a little more of Doctor and Rose. I love them so much!!

[postarcadian]

truly the idea of "this scene is (un-)necessary to the story" is such a fundamentally uncurious and anti-art way of engaging with fiction. the story itself is unnecessary, in the sense that all art is unnecessary, because art is not a fucking optimization problem. that's the beauty of it