Hey followers, just a quick note that I’ve locked my AO3 fics to registered users only. I’m sorry if you are a guest only reader. But I am posting stories for people, not to help train AIs to write better, and I prefer not to have my work exploited for anything I did not sign up for. It also helps prevent spam bots, and while I’m sure “Jennifer” and “Laura” guest users were utterly sincere in their unintelligible comments with urls yesterday, I have no great desire to keep hitting that Spam button on the comment box. (I am wondering what the difference between that and “Delete” is though!)
If you would like an Ao3 invite to make an account, I still have seven six to give away, and my ask box and PMs are always open.
Cheers,
NRG
What would you spend all day doing if you were an Animal Crossing villager?
Eat snack
Look at weeds with a magnifying glass
Sit on the ground next to a bench
Naruto run everywhere
Sing your heart out in public
Hang out in the museum
Sit in the exact spot that someone else is trying to terraform
Nap
Yoga/Exercise
Never succeed at catching a fish/bug
You know when someone goes through your blog on a mass like-spree for a fandom? I love those like, 19 notifications in a row. it’s like “Ah, I see you’re well into a fixation. God bless.”
🦀🦀🦀
Reblog if you're comfortable receiving crabs on Crab Day (July 29th) so all your beloved followers know who they can comfortably crab on crab day (July 29th) without feeling nervous about crabbing someone 9n Crab Day (July 29th).
🦀🦀🦀
More Twiyor bcs why not .👁👄👁 For first sketch I used this as reference, second one was random "couples" tiktoks I run into on Instagram xD
Deep Tie Knot
What's happening to AO3 right now?
As you may have noticed already, Archive of Our Own is currently down. This is temporary, but unfortunately.. we now know that this is much deeper than we thought.
AO3 is currently the victim of a DDOS attack orchestrated by "Anonymous Sudan"
Why? Because AO3 is home to thousands of LGBTQIA+ content and lots of NSFW content. They're doing this as an Anti-LGBTQ+ attack. If they're doing this for or from America specifically, we're not sure. But this is what AO3 is facing at this time.
What can we do?
Spread the word. Spread the fucking word. I'll be providing updates to my Tumblr page directly from the r/AO3 subreddit. I know that not everyone here is comfortable using Reddit, so I'm taking the blow for you. I cannot access Twitter though.
And please, whatever you do...
Stop using the Archive of Our Own website at this time.
The moderators, showrunners, and service providers all need to repair the damage done by this group. The amount of data flooding in from people trying to log in will cause more problems. Keep yourselves off of the website.
The Devil Wears Prada (2006) dir. David Frankel
WEIRDLY SPECIFIC BUT HELPFUL CHARACTER BUILDING QUESTIONS
- What’s the lie your character says most often?
- How loosely or strictly do they use the word ‘friend’?
- How often do they show their genuine emotions to others versus just the audience knowing?
- What’s a hobby they used to have that they miss?
- Can they cry on command? If so, what do they think about to make it happen?
- What’s their favorite [insert anything] that they’ve never recommended to anyone before?
- What would you (mun) yell in the middle of a crowd to find them? What would their best friend and/or romantic partner yell?
- How loose is their use of the phrase ‘I love you’?
- Do they give tough love or gentle love most often? Which do they prefer to receive?
- What fact do they excitedly tell everyone about at every opportunity?
- If someone was impersonating them, what would friends / family ask or do to tell the difference?
- What’s something that makes them laugh every single time? Be specific!
- When do they fake a smile? How often?
- How do they put out a candle?
- What’s the most obvious difference between their behavior at home, at work, at school, with friends, and when they’re alone?
- What kinds of people do they have arguments with in their head?
- What do they notice first in the mirror versus what most people first notice looking at them?
- Who do they love truly, 100% unconditionally (if anyone)?
- What would they do if stuck in a room with the person they’ve been avoiding?
- Who do they like as a person but hate their work? Vice versa, whose work do they like but don’t like the person?
- What common etiquette do they disagree with? Do they still follow it?
- What simple activity that most people do / can do scares your character?
- What do they feel guilty for that the other person(s) doesn’t / don’t even remember?
- Did they take a cookie from the cookie jar? What kind of cookie was it?
- What subject / topic do they know a lot about that’s completely useless to the direct plot?
- How would they respond to being fired by a good boss?
- What’s the worst gift they ever received? How did they respond?
- What do they tell people they want? What do they actually want?
- How do they respond when someone doesn’t believe them?
- When they make a mistake and feel bad, does the guilt differ when it’s personal versus when it’s professional?
- When do they feel the most guilt? How do they respond to it?
- If they committed one petty crime / misdemeanor, what would it be? Why?
- How do they greet someone they dislike / hate?
- How do they greet someone they like / love?
- What is the smallest, morally questionable choice they’ve made?
- Who do they keep in their life for professional gain? Is it for malicious intent?
- What’s a secret they haven’t told serious romantic partners and don’t plan to tell?
- What hobby are they good at in private, but bad at in front of others? Why?
- Would they rather be invited to an event to feel included or be excluded from an event if they were not genuinely wanted there?
- How do they respond to a loose handshake? What goes through their head?
- What phrases, pronunciations, or mannerisms did they pick up from someone / somewhere else?
- If invited to a TED Talk, what topic would they present on? What would the title of their presentation be?
- What do they commonly misinterpret because of their own upbringing / environment / biases? How do they respond when realizing the misunderstanding?
- What language would be easiest for them to learn? Why?
- What’s something unimportant / frivolous that they hate passionately?
- Are they a listener or a talker? If they’re a listener, what makes them talk? If they’re a talker, what makes them listen?
- Who have they forgotten about that remembers them very well?
- Who would they say ‘yes’ to if invited to do something they abhorred / strongly didn’t want to do?
- Would they eat something they find gross to be polite?
- What belief / moral / personality trait do they stand by that you (mun) personally don’t agree with?
- What’s a phrase they say a lot?
- Do they act on their immediate emotions, or do they wait for the facts before acting?
- Who would / do they believe without question?
- What’s their instinct in a fight / flight / freeze / fawn situation?
- What’s something they’re expected to enjoy based on their hobbies / profession that they actually dislike / hate?
- If they’re scared, who do they want comfort from? Does this answer change depending on the type of fear?
- What’s a simple daily activity / motion that they mess up often?
- How many hobbies have they attempted to have over their lifetime? Is there a common theme?
Oh hell yeah
“For some time, Hollywood has marketed family entertainment according to a two-pronged strategy, with cute stuff and kinetic motion for the kids and sly pop-cultural references and tame double entendres for mom and dad. Miyazaki has no interest in such trickery, or in the alternative method, most successfully deployed in Pixar features like Finding Nemo, Toy Story 3 and Inside/Out, of blending silliness with sentimentality.”
“Most films made for children are flashy adventure-comedies. Structurally and tonally, they feel almost exactly like blockbusters made for adults, scrubbed of any potentially offensive material. They aren’t so much made for children as they’re made to be not not for children. It’s perhaps telling that the genre is generally called “Family,” rather than “Children’s.” The films are designed to be pleasing to a broad, age-diverse audience, but they’re not necessarily specially made for young minds.”
“My Neighbor Totoro, on the other hand, is a genuine children’s film, attuned to child psychology. Satsuki and Mei move and speak like children: they run and romp, giggle and yell. The sibling dynamic is sensitively rendered: Satsuki is eager to impress her parents but sometimes succumbs to silliness, while Mei is Satsuki’s shadow and echo (with an independent streak). But perhaps most uniquely, My Neighbor Totoro follows children’s goals and concerns. Its protagonists aren’t given a mission or a call to adventure - in the absence of a larger drama, they create their own, as children in stable environments do. They play.”
“Consider the sequence just before Mei first encounters Totoro. Satsuki has left for school, and Dad is working from home, so Mei dons a hat and a shoulder bag and tells her father that she’s “off to run some errands” - The film is hers for the next ten minutes, with very little dialogue. She’s seized by ideas, and then abandons them; her goals switch from moment to moment. First she wants to play “flower shop” with her dad, but then she becomes distracted by a pool full of tadpoles. Then, of course, she needs a bucket to catch tadpoles in - but the bucket has a hole in it. And on it goes, but we’re never bored, because Mei is never bored.”
“[…] You can only ride a ride so many times before the thrill wears off. But a child can never exhaust the possibilities of a park or a neighborhood or a forest, and Totoro exists in this mode. The film is made up of travel and transit and exploration, set against lush, evocative landscapes that seem to extend far beyond the frame. We enter the film driving along a dirt road past houses and rice paddies; we follow Mei as she clambers through a thicket and into the forest; we walk home from school with the girls, ducking into a shrine to take shelter from the rain; we run past endless green fields with Satsuki as she searches for Mei. The psychic center of Totoro’s world is an impossibly giant camphor tree covered in moss. The girls climb over it, bow to it as a forest-guardian, and at one point fly high above it, with the help of Totoro. Much like Totoro himself, the tree is enormous and initially intimidating, but ultimately a source of shelter and inspiration.”
“My Neighbor Totoro has a story, but it’s the kind of story that a child might make up, or that a parent might tell as a bedtime story, prodded along by the refrain, “And then what happened?” This kind of whimsicality is actually baked into Miyazaki’s process: he begins animating his films before they’re fully written. Totoro has chase scenes and fantastical creatures, but these are flights of fancy rooted in a familiar world. A big part of being a kid is watching and waiting, and Miyazaki understands this. When Mei catches a glimpse of a small Totoro running under her house, she crouches down and stares into the gap, waiting. Miyazaki holds on this image: we wait with her. Magical things happen, but most of life happens in between those things—and there is a kind of gentle magic, for a child, in seeing those in-betweens brought to life truthfully on screen.”
A.O. Scott and Lauren Wilford on “My Neighbor Totoro”, 2017.
every time this shows up on my blog, I’m rescheduling it to show up again at a later date so I can keep remembering how important a child’s perspective is.
THE TUMBLR HORSE DERBY
WELCOME TO THE FIRST TUMBLR HORSE DERBY (that i know of, anyway)
HOW TO HORSE: 🐎🐎🐎
- Vote for your FAVOURITE horse to make them go faster! (yknow, like those carnival horse derby games!)
MAY THE BEST HORSE WIN
CHOOSE YOUR RACER🐎🐎🐎🐎
🐎Little Big Huge
🐎 CLOPFUCKER 5000
🐎Father Chrysler
🐎I Like Your Shoelaces
🐎THE END OF ALL THINGS
🐎squanch
🐎of course
🐎honse
🐎Sisyphus of Plinko
🐎cheese charcuterie
See Results(also sample size reblog yadda yadda yadda HORSE)
Anonymous
sent a message
I had to abandon writing for about 3 months because I was too busy studying. but now that I have time, i just can't get back into the mindset that allowed me to write. i used to enjoy writing so much, but now it just doesn't have the same appeal to me. It's not a writer's block or a burnout, you can't get those from not writing. do you have any advice on how to handle it?
Burn out happens in other areas of our lives besides writing. If you’ve had a stressful or busy few months, then the burnout from the rest of your life can definitely affect your ability to write. What you do about it will depend on what kind of burnout you have:
1) Exhaustion - feeling overwhelmed and emotionally drained. You might have anxious feelings or trouble sleeping and you probably have trouble focusing.
To deal with this kind of burn out, decide what it is that you want to do (in this case, write a fic) and break it down into smaller and smaller pieces until you find one that you’re actually able to tackle. You might not be able to write a full story right now, but you might be able to look through prompt lists until you find an idea that interests you.
2) Cynicism - feeling disengaged or disinterested or separate from what you want to do. Dealing with it is stressful, and so you are removing yourself from it in order to avoid that stress. This might lead to feelings of isolation or lack of motivation or just a feeling like whatever you’re doing is meaningless and there is no point.
To deal with this kind of burnout, you need to figure out if what you want to do is gain positive feelings or avoid negative feelings. If you want to gain positive feelings, then reaching out to others and sharing your ideas and fics could be helpful. If you’re trying to avoid negative feelings, then you’d be better off deciding not to share anything you’re writing until you’re in a better headspace. By removing the idea of sharing your work with other people, you’re removing the possibility of getting a negative reaction to it.
3) Inadequacy - feeling like you’re unable to do a good job or that you won’t be able to finish something so why even start. This can lead to feelings of helplessnes and also hopelessness.
The key to dealing with this kind of burn out is finding a balance between things that you have to do and things that you want to do. If everything comes with feelings of obligation, then you can get overwhelmed by the idea that you’ll never get it all done. This in turn means that you feel like it’s useless to even try.
Right now, you want to write, but in order to write you have to decide on what to write about. If you can find ways to make those “have to” steps easier, you’ll be able to get to the “want to” steps with enough energy left to actually do them. In this case, you could ask people to submit prompts. This still leaves you with the have to step of choosing which one to write, though, so you can either prioritize them based on your interest or use a random number generator to just pick a prompt for you.
I’m not an expert on burnout, but these are the concepts I’ve learned over the years. I hope you find them useful, but in case you don’t let’s see how other people manage when they’re in your position.
Very Brief Guide to [tumblr], for Reddit refugees
Shit You Must Do Right Fucking Now:
- Change your profile picture, blog header, and title to something other than the defaults. Do it right now. You will be mistaken for a bot otherwise, and blocked.
- Go into Settings -> Dashboard, scroll down to Preferences, and turn off the options in the picture. This will get rid of most of the algorithmic stuff.
- Turn off Tumblr Live. You have to snooze it once every 7 days for some stupid reason. It's hosted through another company and will steal your data if you use it.
- Go to your blog settings (under the little person menu) and turn off these two settings:
- Turn off infinite scroll (lags the site) and turn on timestamps on posts, in the same menu as Preferences.
Basic Features of the Site:
- Reblogs drive the entire site. If you'd upvote something on Reddit, you'd reblog it on Tumblr. You can add text, images, or tags to a reblog, but you're not required to.
- The dashboard is the equivalent to your Reddit feed, and contains the posts of all the people you follow, with the newest at the top
- You can send an ask to someone, and it'll appear in their askbox for them to answer. You can receive them too, or turn off the settings if you don't want.
- Tags aren't actually used for finding stuff (search function is dogshit), but are more for categorizing. People also talk in tags. Because Tumblr is weird, you can't use quotation marks (") or commas in them without fucking it up
- You can filter both tags and phrases under Account Settings; doing this will put a filter over a post that contains them, which you'll have to click through to see the post itself. Useful for avoiding hate speech or blocking out annoying stuff
- You can make polls in posts. Here's one now.
holy shit it's a poll
cool!
ooh clicky clicky button!! i wanna press it!! lemme press it!
you can add up to 10 options btw
See Results- Likes are useless. They literally do fuck-all except send a notification to the OP.
Stuff Tumblr Does That Other Sites Don't:
- Very old posts (I'm talking from like 2012) often circulate on this site. There's no such thing as a post being "too old" to reblog
- Blocking is highly encouraged; you can block someone for any reason. Even for just being annoying.
- If you and someone else are following each other, you are mutuals. Mutuals are fucking awesome and are treasured like friends. Mutuals are a thing on other sites but Tumblr treats em differently.
- You can screenshot someone's tags if you like them and add them to a reblog. This is called "peer review"
- Sometimes someone will find a blog and go through it and like/reblog a bunch of posts. This is totally fine and not "creepy" like it is seen as on other sites.
- Tumblr jokes often rely on Continuing The Bit and a "yes, and?" attitude. Goncharov is probably the best example of this.
- We are fucking infested with bots. They will either have totally blank profiles or be filled with porn. Block and report on sight.
- Censorship is pretty lax here. I can say "I want to brutally stab Elon Musk to death and watch him bleed out in front of a crowd" and nobody gives a shit.
General Etiquette:
- Don't try to do epic clapbacks here, you'll probably just get laughed at or blocked. If someone is bugging you or spouting bigoted bullshit, block them.
- Reblog art!!! Artists often struggle to gain traction on here; reblogging will give them a boost.
- Not every reblog needs a comment or tag in it
- You can go all out with tagging your stuff to organize it, or you can just leave it all blank. Someone might ask "hey, can you tag these posts as [x]?" and you can decide if you want to do that or not. It's generally polite to oblige, but "no" is still reasonable.
- Avoid discourse like the plague. Filter it, block people who start it, scroll past it when you see it. Just don't get involved in it. Ever.
- Don't put fandom tags or jokes on someone's posts about serious matters or personal shit
- You're responsible for curating your own dashboard; if you complain about constantly seeing stuff you don't like, that's probably on you. Don't be afraid to unfollow.
- Follower count doesn't matter much here and you don't have to make yours known if you don't want to.
- Reblog, don't repost. Reblogging keeps the credit and doesn't "steal" engagement like Twitter retweets.
- If someone likes something a LOT, they might reblog it like 30 times in a row. This is normal
- Having a post blow up is actually kinda a bad thing, since it floods your notifications. There's a sort of in-joke about how having a big post is awful and people jokingly try to stop their own posts from blowing up, often in vain.
Tips:
- Get XKit Rewritten if you're on desktop, it's a really helpful extension
- In the little drop-down menu next to the 'Post now' button you can either save a draft, schedule a post, or add it to your queue. The queue lets you post things in order at a certain interval, which you can change. It's good for spreading stuff out over time.
- You can use Shift+R to quickly reblog stuff and Shift+Q to queue!
- Filter your notifications under Activity - you can also see some neat graphs
- Find each other! If you want your old Reddit communities to stick together, seek out other refugees and follow them.
Have fun on [tumblr], everyone!
This should be the first post every new user sees.
