#hap answers

[bluering8]

Hello

I’m someone who struggles a lot A LOT with getting things done. and when your “make doing 60% your default” post showed up on my timeline it felt like a hug. because i have a tiny bully in my head who’s one of those wretched people who asks me to give my 100% every time and runs me dry.

but i, the loving me, struggle so much to get done with the 60% too. im scared shitless that when i do sit down to work I’ll discover that my default is 20% and reaching 60% feels like a dream.

Any thoughts on this? I just sent this because that post really was helpful.

So thanks and love 💗

I'm glad you felt my post could help you! I am unfortunately Just Some Guy who hammered out a sequence of words and pressed post without thinking too hard about it and then that sequence of words got reblogged a lot. but I am very grateful that people find my sequence of words helpful! it's been genuinely enlightening to discover that even if I don't think what I said was particularly novel or interesting, it can still resonate with people. everyone can be part of XKCD's lucky 10,000, I guess.

anyway! so! bulletpoints!

I wasn't expecting that post to blow up the way it did so I wasn't as clear on this as I should have been, but if I could go back in time and rewrite it I'd want to make this very very clear: THIS IS A POST ABOUT NOT WORKING YOURSELF TO EXHAUSTION

my point wasn't "you don't have to do 100 blorps you can just do 60 blorps and it's okay" it was "don't give 100% of yourself. if you want to function you need to keep some of that shit in reserve"

the most depressing reblogs on that post are from people thinking I neglected to think about disabled people in my post. I don't know how to explain to you that I think disabled people also should not be working themselves to exhaustion.

basically it's spoon theory. do kids these days still know spoon theory? I suspect spoons are cringe these days, but everyone should go read the spoon theory essay and understand what I was trying to say with that post.

I'm sorry I wish I could go back in time and write that post better. alas. time is linear and I travel forwards at the rate of one second per second.

sorry that got away from me. anyway:

if your "default is 20%" in that 20 blorps is the maximum number of blorps you can give, then get used to giving it 60% of 20 blorps. give it 12 blorps. THIS IS A POST ABOUT NOT WORKING YOURSELF TO EXHAUSTION.

if you know what your 100% looks like, and 20% of that is what you feel comfortable giving, then I'd gently suggest to reassess what your 100% actually is. is that actually your 100%, or is it your 200+% Extreme Stress Response?

do what you can. 20% is better than 0%. doing a little is better than doing nothing at all. ask people for help when you need it. don't exhaust yourself; make sure to keep energy in reserve. WORKING YOURSELF TO EXHAUSTION IS WORSE THAN 0% ACTUALLY.

I am very very aware that this advice is not always perfectly practical to put into operation. capitalism will often demand more from you than you're able to give. I don't have an answer for this! I am literally Just Some Guy! join a union, look into disability benefits, get into local politics, I don't know! I wish you the best but I'm literally Just Some Guy who typed some words on the internet, I can't solve everything forever!!

anyway uh. please read the original spoon theory essay. ALSO I highly recommend looking into disability activism more generally. I don't have any specific recs for this because again: I am literally Just Some Guy I'm not a scholar in this area. most of what I know is because I follow/befriend/interact with other people who are literally Just Some Guy/Gal/Gender-neutral within the disability sphere. but the more people you interact with the more you'll learn about your own life and your own needs.

IN CONCLUSION:

I'm glad my post could help you. I'm genuinely so so glad you found it and that something in it spoke to you. and please: really, really give it your 20%. do what you can, and don't exhaust yourself, and make sure to keep something in reserve for you and you only.

I hope you live a good life. I hope you live your best life. I'm sorry I can't help you do more.

[hugealienpie]

What are some facts readers may not know about The Hostess?

Huh. Are there facts readers do know about “The Hostess”?

This was my first MarMan fic, though I’ve certainly shipped both of these goobers with lots of other people in my day (every WW character is a Little Black Dress character, I swear)

iirc, the actual plot idea stemmed from how much I love the scene in “The Leadership Breakfast” where Josh and Sam almost set the building on fire while trying to perfect a seating chart

I wrote it for @sweaterkittensahoy, and probably also because of her; she is an enabler, and I am not to be trusted around her. Melisande Duchamp, embassy chef, may even be based on her.

OH SHIT NO NOW I REMEMBER!!! This whole thing happened because England passed same-sex marriage in June 2013, and SKA and I had this delightfully bizarre conversation about how, if Lord So-and-So married another dude, would that dude also be Lord So-and-So, or would he be Lady So-and-So, and SKA said, “Josh would absolutely make everyone call him Lady Marbury.” Yes, children. That is where fanfiction comes from.

Woo! Thanks for the ask. It was fun dredging up memories about this one.

(Y'all can still ask me stuff!)

[bluering8]

3, 13, and 14 for the ask culture asks? <3

oh, i forgot i queued that! uhhh

3. what are you looking forward to right now? uhhh idk. i've picked up bookbinding as a hobby recently, so i guess the thing i'm most excited about is getting more into that & gitting gud enough that i can work on bigger&fancier projects.

13. what's something you learned recently? i accidentally learnt a lot about scallops a while ago and i'm still mad about all of it. i hate that they swim like that. it makes me so angry and it looks fake and i hate it!!! anyway those little things on their shells are called "ears". okay. why not! why not!!!

14. if you could give a TED talk on anything, what would you talk about? octopodes! they're such cool and fun and weird little guys!! they're smart in ways which force us to reconsider what "intelligence" even means and what role it plays in evolutionary development!!! (guy with an octopus icon voice) hey no what makes you think i have a favourite animal. i'm literally normal about this.

[bluering8]

can you tell me about Briar Elan?

aah sure! Briar’s one of my magical girl OCs for Sleepless Domain fandom.

The basic gist of her is that she’s a high-strung perfectionist who is very very good at being a magical girl but kind of mediocre at everything else, and she’s terrified of what happens when she loses her mahou powers and has to spend the rest of her life as an underachieving loser who peaked at seventeen.

She’s a disaster I love her a lot. People in the Sleepless Domain fandom discord also seem to like her? And she’s my most popular character on Art Fight this year but I don’t know whether they actually think her character is interesting or just like that she’s a fancy sword princess.

[bluering8]

I'm sorry if you've been asked this before, but how do you get your lineart looking so good? Its so interesting and a pleasure to look at

That is definitely not a thing anyone has ever asked me before! I don’t usually feel like lineart’s a particular strength of mine so I’m very flattered that you like it.

I don’t know much about inking at all but here are the handful of useful things I’ve managed to hammer into my brain:

Varied lineweights: Using a single width of line can make an image look really flat. Compare this doodle, which was done with a single pen, to this one, which used a mixture. Brush pens in particular are great for this, although I freely confess that I’m a hack who can’t control a brush pen properly, so what I actually do is ink everything with a couple different sizes of fineliner then go back over the main shapes using a brush pen.

Spot blacks: Similar to fooling around with lineweights, areas of solid black can add solidity and structure to forms. I’m... really not confident with this so I vary in whether I do it or not, but I pretty consistently add spot blacks in little triangles in the angles of certain joints or on limbs further away from the viewer.

Details into the infinite forever: This is... a thing which very very much depends on individual art style. There are people out there who can draw the most amazing sleek clean shapes which would be ruined by extraneous detail, but I am not remotely one of those people and my art actually gains a lot when I’m willing to sit down and devote a chunk of my time to painstakingly drawing seam lines and stitching and stray hairs and stubble.

I hope this was at all useful to you? I’m not being self-deprecating when I say I don’t know much about inking, I mean that I genuinely never think about what I’m doing or why I’m doing it so when someone asks me questions I have no idea how to answer them.

[bluering8]

Transformers

my favourite female character: Nautica!! She is an absolute delight and I love her.

my favourite male character: Brainstorm. I mean I love… a lot of characters… this is a really unfair question!! But if you put a gun to my head and make me choose, I’m Team Mad Scientist all day every day. (Also I latched onto Brainstorm fast and fierce; with all my other faves they took a while to creep into my heart to the point where I can’t tell you when I realised that Ultra Magnus is my son and I would die to defend him, only that it happened.)

my favourite book/season/etc: This is a hard choice but uh, season two/second half of MTMTE??? I love Megatron so much that the comic just isn’t the same without him, and although Lost Light was very enjoyable it felt kind of… uneven? in places. I did love the absolute clusterfuck which was Getaway’s perfect blend of smart enough to take control of the ship but not smart enough to keep control, but if you force me to pick I love the slow build of his scheme unfolding even more.

my favourite episode: Hhhh fuck you don’t make me pick. (The secret true answer to this question is I can’t remember because it’s been a Long Time since I’ve read the comics all the way through and there are some Lost Light issues I’ve only read once. Ask me again when I finally get around to doing a proper re-read.)

my favourite ship: MEGATRON AND MINIMUM ANGLE ARE GOING TO GET MARRIED AND IT WILL BE BEAUTIFUL AND I WILL CRY TEARS OF JOY BECAUSE I AM SECURE IN MY MASCULINITY AND NOT AFRAID TO FEEL FEELINGS. Also Brainstorm/Perceptor is a really good ship and I will die for it but it’s the old ex-warlord and the tiny robot pretending to be a less tiny robot pretending to be a giant robot who make me have Emotions irl.

a character i’d die defending: Ultra Magnus is my son and I would die to defend him.

a character i just can’t sympathise with: …Swerve? I don’t know so much about sympathise, but I cannot bring myself to like Swerve at all. He’s kind of… a lot of traits he has are traits I dislike in myself, to the point where I can’t hold a reasonable conversation about him because I’m honestly incapable of not losing my shit about it.

a character i grew to love: Nautica. I felt kind of ehhh about her at first, because part of what I’d been enjoying so much about MTMTE was the history all the characters had (and specifically the way JRo would casually drop bits of that history into their interactions without feeling the need to explain in-depth; that’s an excellent technique which does not get used enough) and Nautica came out of a completely different background so it was like, why should I care about this random new character who has absolutely no connection to the rest of the cast or to anything else I’ve been enjoying about the world? But she endeared herself to me pretty effectively and now it’s like, actually Nautica’s great and I love her.

my anti otp: Brainstorm/Nautica. I love them both and Brainstorm&Nautica is absolutely my brotp, but it’s just like… their friendship is precious to me? And when Nautica was introduced I felt this immediate sense of dread because you know, I grew up watching every damn female character ever get a romantic plotline tacked on, and if you were lucky it was a sideplot and if you weren’t it was their entire purpose in the narrative but either way you’re just counting down until it happens, but then it didn’t happen and it kept not happening and then she and Brainstorm got Best Friend Married in a way which the comic went out of its way to explain meant they would definitely never ever get romance married ever and in conclusion I’m just so happy with how their canonical relationship turned out.

[hugealienpie]

Favorite Female Characters

Tagged by @fangirlunderground

Rules: Write your 10 favorite female characters from 10 different fandoms and tag 10 people!

Okay! I like memes with simple rules. So, mostly in the order they came to mind:

Beatrice, Much Ado About Nothing

Ford, Check, Please!

Sulla Pinsky, O Human Star

Roimata Mangakāhia, Within the Wires

Tiffany Aching, the Tiffany Aching books

Parker, Leverage

Sally Lockhart, the Sally Lockhart series

Ripley, Lumberjanes

Toni Chu, Chew

Alison Hendrix, Orphan Black

I like memes with simple rules so I can break them. Therefore, I present: the ten female characters who didn’t make the top 10 but I couldn’t bear not to shower with love:

Phryne Fisher, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries

Minerva McGonagall, Harry Potter

Dana Cardinal, Welcome to Night Vale

Alexandria, The Fall

Kate Bishop, Marvel (L.A. Woman in particular)

Kira Yukimura, Teen Wolf

Abbey Bartlet, West Wing

Lina Lamont, Singin’ in the Rain

Abby Suso, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda

Violet Parr, The Incredibles

Tagging @shinyletsbegoodguys, @thenochillgal, @donotpressrepeat, @ontheavalanche, @chronicbookworm, @rhysiana, @extasiswings, @softzimbits, @solidork, @aichu-chu-chu

[hugealienpie]

I once had the pleasure of seeing Roger Rees give a delightful dramatic reading of "A Christmas Carol"; tell me, what would Josh Lyman's reaction be to Lord John Marbury doing the same at a White House function?

Josh knows that, like most members of the peerage, John had the “proper” aristocratic education. He went to the best schools, where he learned the expected subjects and picked up the necessary social graces. (“Flatware and flirtation,” he calls it, but it apparently went far beyond flirtation. Josh is no prude, but he’s blushed clear down to his toes at some of John’s public school stories.) “The necessary social graces” apparently includes the ability to give dramatic readings of Victorian Christmas classics at the White House holiday party.

Josh had asked, on a rare lazy morning just before Thanksgiving, if John needed help getting ready. He hadn’t been sure of his welcome there; this thing between them got serious fast, but it was new, and he didn’t know what level he needed to be at before offering theatrical help. John had tutted, “One doesn’t ‘get ready’ for something like this, Joshua. One simply grabs the correct book from the shelf, and off one goes.” So Josh expects it to be… good, of course (because John won’t do anything he can’t excel at), and entertaining, but nothing mind-blowing.

Josh is so very wrong.

He’s sitting with Donna and Sam in the back. They’re all riveted. Everyone’s riveted—even Leo, who usually considers John a nuisance at best and a national security risk at worst. John does voices. He sets moods. He has blocking—moving around the small performance space in a way that makes him look vibrant rather than ridiculous. No one’s spoken a word since he began, but Donna’s poked Josh’s leg at least four times, and he’s shushed her every time. Those are the only times he’s remembered to properly breathe.

John takes a break between Christmas Past and Christmas Present, and the cheeky bugger winks at Josh as he goes. Josh groans. “Did you know?” he asks plaintively. “I didn’t know. I mean, I’ve joked about it, but I didn’t know.”

“Know what?” Sam asks.

Josh slumps in his chair. “I’m actually going to have to marry the smug maniac.”

Donna smiles and rubs comforting circles on Josh’s arm. “Oh, Josh,” she says. “Of course we knew.”