the NPC who tells you the bridges are open

wanted to share this - partly a reminder to myself

2013-06-03T12:39:04Z

(Text: Amanda Palmer; image: Brainpickings.org.)

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Typography

2013-01-07T04:46:31Z

I don't understand typography. I think, this year, I'm going to get a grounding in it.

Why? Because of a very particular annoyance. Being a reader of ebooks and interested in crowdfunding, I try to give self-published books a chance. Self-published books almost unavoidably have terrible covers. Take a look at this ebook cover awards post. There are a lot of "this can't be saved" covers in there, but quite a number have lovely concept/illustrations, spoiled by awful typography.

I see this same pattern everywhere with self-published books. It's often a fair warning sign: those "would not touch" covers probably mean the same is inside. (Judging a book by its cover has worked out well for me.) But it's making my teeth itch with frustration, and I feel that the most useful way for me to handle this crossness is to learn how to use text well.

The other option is to publicly mock ebook covers and, well, that's mostly pointless and certainly cruel! Some of those authors are so proud of their horrible covers. (Having looked through a few of the ebook design posts, a wall of text praising the cover warns you to prepare your eyes.)

In the long run, I would love to learn about producing ebooks. It's not something I could imagine my non-existent talent for design ever suiting (any more than I expect anything but a workmanlike grasp of typography), but I find it interesting: the mechanics of generating ebooks and ensuring they work well on various devices, plus all the other issues with book production. Also, useful; a practical craft for me as a prolific reader.

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Writing

2013-01-02T02:31:03Z

Every waking hour I'm reading, even if only the text on tshirts and bottles around me. I have a Kindle-enabled phone, ipad, stocked shelves so that I need never be far from stories any time. Words, books especially, are such a part of my world that imagining who I'd be without them is genuinely an impossibility.

Why, then, am I feeling like writing is a pointless act?

I don't know if I've lost faith or if I never had it to begin with. A dark night of the soul for writing? Maybe the belief that I have nothing to say has extended its silence into the production of words, too.

ETA: As usual, I turned to Google to see how other people feel. This comment nudged me a little in the preferred direction: "Writing is an opportunity to lose yourself in something; to find something within you that's buried deep that you may not even know is there. Embrace whatever comes out when you write as it was something that needed to be said." (from libellule in a Nano thread)

I should also take heart that I often "feel" a lot of things are pointless (eating, sleeping) but know otherwise. Feelings aren't fact.

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Driveby ooh-shinying

2012-07-19T17:19:32Z

There's a Reddit Q&A at 8 CST tonight (July 19th) with a bunch of recently debuted fantasy authors. Kameron Hurley'd be the standout there for me.

I'm a fan of the Clockwork Phoenix anthologies ("new stories of beauty and strangeness"), so was glad to support the Kickstarter for Clockwork Phoenix 4. You can get e-copies of the forthcoming and previous anthologies very affordably by sponsoring it, and they're easily worth it.

And, oh, the Steam sale is on. Click with caution.

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PSA: Planned Parenthood vgifts on LJ

2012-05-03T18:19:43Z

This is a neat idea: v-gifts to support Planned Parenthood in the US in the light of attacks on it. The total payment goes to PP, none of it to LJ, just so you know.

(Comments, predictably, include some very loud anti-abortion folk right from the start.)

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Cathy Davey

2012-02-03T15:23:15Z

I'm going to listen to you until I sleep, and again. Soft against my bruised heart. Lyrics to this are great (and painful/soothing to loneliness), too.

( Lyrics )

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Creepy/intriguing

2012-01-25T17:45:33Z

So anandimide mentioned Google's Ad Preference Manager, which shows what Google thinks you're into. Interesting results! Because I'm of the meme generation and nothing's embarrassing, here's what it has for me:

Games - Computer & Video Games
Games - Roleplaying Games
Hobbies & Leisure - Clubs & Organizations
Law & Government - Government - Legislative Branch
News - Politics
People & Society
Reference - General Reference - Biographies & Quotations
Reference - Humanities - Myth & Folklore

Not inaccurate - apparently Google can describe me better than I can! Anyone else feel like sharing?

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Idle-mode

2012-01-17T21:37:38Z

How compulsively do I need to do idle-tasks like clicky games and solitaire? I don't know exactly what it is, but if I quit one, I immediately find another that fills my free time, or another takes my attention just as one fades. There is no point to clicking at just the right moment to get another of these dragons, which I'll ignore once hatched because it's the point to have them, not to regard or enjoy them. (What's the point? They're pixels.) There is no point to yet another game of solitaire, any of the variants I occupy myself with. There's just the sense of doing something, the sense of having an activity keeping my restless eyes busy without filling my brain with words, the sense of creating a small amount of order, the soothing repetitiveness of it.

I tried this evening to resist the repetitiveness craving. I closed Quicksilver every time I tried to bring up the app by typing "sol". I closed Dragcave after a minute or so of frantic refreshing. I persistently closed the window when I reloaded my friends page and read page despite having done so a very brief while before.

About fifteen minutes ago my willpower snapped like an elastic band and I frantically played a whole load of games of solitaire. Why? Stop it!

Technically I don't even need to stop. My time is my own, my time is leisure time right now... I can do what I want. But isn't that the point? I don't think I want to do this, I'm just doing it because it puts me in a state of mind that knows what's coming next.

I'd rather be writing - if writing, before I am actually writing, didn't feel as futile as panning for gold in a breeze. I'd rather be doing something Of Note - if thinking of what to do didn't plunge me into a little biteen of an existential crisis.

I'm thinking that maybe these brainless busy activities are like handrails I can grab onto when thinking unaided evokes the abyss. Doing them, I can daydream, let my brain idle. They're not relaxing: I get tense playing solitaire, I get frustrated when I miss catching a dragon. But they feel safe. They soothe the cactus-head (the spikes are on the inside) anxious frustration at myself by retargeting it, diffusing it over various minor things.

The clicky games are not the problem. They're a solution. Not a particularly helpful one, though I can think of worse. (Very few solutions do not have a worse, anyway.)

It's time I start practicing meditation again, isn't it? Yeah, I do think so.

(Edit: I put down the distractions, got really anxious, heart beating too fast. I'm lying down now and feeling somewhere better - listened to a song on repeat, focused on the music and kept returning my attention to it. It seemed like the right kind of meditation to try. Move softly, there is a reason for resistance.)

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phoenix @ 2012-01-16T09:13:00

2012-01-16T09:13:33Z

Back on the horse! I've written 541 words already today, and on the nano novel too!

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phoenix @ 2012-01-09T08:38:00

2012-01-09T08:39:58Z

Also also: cards, yay! I received these last week but put them in a Safe Place and have only refound them now. Thanks ladyvox and jd and teshiron for the cards :DDD

*pear*

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The Restart Page

2012-01-09T08:22:43Z

Just what you didn't know you needed in your life but truly do: The Restart Page. See restart sequences from old OSes! No, really, this is the best toy.

I'm Santa Phoenix today, so here's another great toy: Black Market, a game where you play a guy zooming from planet to planet making and losing money and fights while trying to figure out how he got another mind in his head and lost his own memories and what that means. I love the writing in this - the side quests are so thoughtful; unexpected little stories and moral choices. It's not free - you can technically play it forever, I think, but your stat increases will be capped at 18. I loved it so much that I bought it as soon as I hit the cap, which should tell you something.

This year, I figure I'm going to talk more about things I like and things I'm into. Both here and IRL. Who's going to know that I'm kind of a neat person when I've got a bag of things too precious to talk about? Like books. Though... that's a complicated one. My experience of reading is very private, very personal. I have my own "language" for how a book feels, something I have no idea how to translate. And I'm protective of reading. It's a huge part of my life and it's been something no one can get their filthy fingers on and spoil deliberately. Not a problem now, no one's out to get me, but the caution stays. I want to protect what I love, but also want to be able to share what I love, and up till now the first has voted against the second.

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Enough procrastinating, child

2012-01-02T05:37:13Z

( A to-do list )

The bit about clothing: my room is taken over with clothes, most of which have been heaped in the corner getting smelly since I moved in over a year ago. I feel bad about throwing away clothes and protect things by saying "I'll wear that for slumming around the house!". I don't, because anything that's at the point of getting thrown out is shapeless and I hate even to wear it when fecking around doing nothing. So! Get tough. Have a clean floor!

I looked at ourbedrooms and it inspired me to clean up! Cmon, if you get the place clean you can pretty the place up. *peptalks*

inkingitout/getyourwordsout word counts: 1793. (592 + 1201)

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phoenix @ 2012-01-01T03:40:00

2012-01-01T03:55:09Z

I don't think now is a good time for a recap of the year (I'd come up with nothing, the mood I'm in) or to go into resolutions (CHANGE EVERYTHING, and that's not going to work). But isabelthespy's new year's motto resonated. Passivity is corrosive to the soul.* Yes. If I could redo this year, I'd face, head-on, the hard things, the problems, the points where my options were conflict and hiding. This year, I hid. Next year, I will probably hide also, habits and pain-avoidance are not things that change fast. But I will try not to, I won't let it be the cowardly default.

I celebrated the new year by throwing on clothes at 11.50 and rushing into town! Something in me demanded people, lights, sounds. I found them, was alone but not lonely and carried my camera like a friend. Fireworks, church bells, a parade of Hare Krishnas bearing a speaker and excited New Year celebrators dancing after them, passing the crowds outside the Front/Back Lounge and observing the handful of women there, phoning my mother from the middle of Dame Street and cheerfully offering "happy new year!" with the parade chanting beside me. Balm to the soul.

* (For her and me and Caroline Knapp (quote's originator), I will add. If anyone takes this as some kind of attack on passivity or on them I will eat them and all of their descendants.)

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fuck yeah maps

2011-12-31T01:05:27Z

I have a fine big map on my wall! Now I can figure out where on it I want to go next. It's so reassuring to see how extraordinarily large the world is. Technically, you can be anywhere in a number of hours. I think of that and I feel the ceiling pressing in on me, feel this city of a million people is too small, this island of four million. And then I see how small it is on that great map. The country's as small as the first joint of my index finger, the city a fleck of chewed skin from that same finger, and me, I'm too small to appear at any likely resolution.* I love to feel like life is near-infinite, like I'll never run out of new.

Besides the joy of maps, things aren't so good. Internally; externally all is good. I lost my balance a few days ago and this is my mind wobbling, flailing wretchedly as it tries to remember what way up should be. Up forgets questions of worth.

* How large would a world map need to be to show the humans of Dublin at a visible size? Say, at the size of a full stop, in 12pt Times or similar. There's an exercise for... well, probably Google, but if no one's sorted that out yet, for the mathematical-minded in the audience. And I'm not fussy about the projection; just something people actually use rather than a pure academic exercise.

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On resolutions

2011-12-28T06:32:34Z

This year, I'm going to prefer the answer that works over the answer that's right.

(It's late, and I'm fighting brainweasels, and I feel like apologising for the cryptic-looking one-liner. It makes sense to me as a direction for the new year.)

(I'm stressed and I feel like apologising.)

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Support Scarleteen

2011-12-27T23:49:17Z

There's now an auction comm supporting Scarleteen's yearly fund drive: scarleteenfans!

Why Scarleteen is worth supporting.

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phoenix @ 2011-12-19T20:35:00

2011-12-19T20:42:15Z

This is a very me comment:

<phoenix> hm, that reminds me. either i hit someone in the balls the other night or they were very convincing at acting like i did
<phoenix> i thought it was the latter at the time. i'm not so sure now. aww. i'd rather my first punch to the nuts be to someone who deserved it :(

Make of that what you will.

Onto a topic that harms few balls: I've signed up to getyourwordsout with a year's goal of 150k. While small relative to what some of the other members are going for, it would be a major achievement for me. I think it's within reach, too.

I know a couple of you are members or have been. How do you find the comm? Does it motivate you?

Edit: oh, hey! There's a comm of that sort on DW, inkingitout! Should I sign up for both of them? Can I count my writing towards both?

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Cards, Katie West, Toys

2011-12-04T23:10:30Z

Whee. Cards are getting written! Feel free to add your details to the address post now (DW or LJ) - I'm hoping to send everything tomorrow, since Tuesday is the last posting date for getting stuff out to the non-EU world before Christmas. This is fun! I don't think I've ever sent out cards before. If I get them all done I'll also go through and look for posts seeking addresses (you're welcome to link!).

I'm fangirling Katie West again. I'm often fangirling Katie West. Came across this wonderful, simple video clip she made a few years ago: you had to make it complicated and i had to try to prove you wrong.(NquiteSFW, but it was her eyes that drew mine, not her chest.) I can't even understand *why* that has lodged in my head, don't understand its simplicity - she comes into the picture, she walks up to the camera, she turns it off - but it works. Her gaze is exquisite.

The Five Best Toys of All Time. Truth.

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rambling post is rambling - oh, and cards! Give addresses!

2011-12-02T20:55:26Z

Swiftly turning my flat back into a reputable habitation isn't going to happen unless I hit a mood of cleaning frenzy, not something I can summon at need. What I have been able to do, though, is store some thing each time I'm up from under the laptop, or wipe a surface clean when I'm in the kitchen or bathroom. I already see the clean spots.

So it is with DW/LJ, maybe? I'm not going to jump back in and suddenly start posting wonderful heartfelt essays and beautiful photographs, though I'd like to convince myself to believe otherwise. Fuck that, here's a small wipe of a post to get the table clean so I can say things again another time.

syna said the quietness of LJ these days gives her freedom. I get that. That's how DW felt for me right at the start, and tumblr, briefly, way back when I had a fling with it. I need something like that. A quieter DW or an LJ with the bunch of cool people I know from DW. The second isn't going to happen, but I might try reading fewer journals on DW so I feel closer to those of you I particularly like and admire. A little meta and a dark hint of readlist cuts always makes people grow closer, har har.

A few things:

- Maple syrup is magic and better than normal sugar. It's in my tea and my coffee and I need some pancakes now.
- I've felt down lately. Turning off my feelings made things worse. I think I'm on the up again now. I am tired of being silent for those spells.
- I have so many photos from the holiday. SO many. I'm thinking of posting one a day until I get through the good ones. That involves organisation. Projects, why must you insist on requiring organisation?
- I have thoughts on what makes me effective/ineffective as a worker; small things for a *really* big difference. I'm going to post about that, partly for my own reference, partly because I'm curious how other people's good working conditions differ.
- Photobooth photos are fun. Should I post a few of those?

Oh yeah, and the whole reason I started this post: would you like a Christmas card? I say Christmas because that's what I have and what I celebrate, but they're the secular glittery kind (again, like me). Want one? Give me your address! I'm screening comments to this post - comment here or email me at my journal address - phoenix at dreamwidth.org and phoenixdreaming at LJ should both work.

(There's a tiny tiny chance I'll put in something else, but that will require planning and efficiency, two things I"m a tad inadequate at.)

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What to do, what to say

2011-11-16T01:30:42Z

Journal, journal, I don't know what to do with you, what to write here. Turn off comments and spam. Spam with comments enabled. Do something to get my head in gear and into words.

"Someone who writes a journal online" is a part of my identity that I like and want to keep, but I'm not sure what to make of that, or how to be it now when my head is quiet and I'm distant from my emotions and time is such that a day feels four hours long (and not just in Glitch!).

I've been writing, though I won't win Nano. That's such an exciting thing for me, to put words down and feel a story rising up to meet me. I reached a mental milestone a couple of months ago, when I felt that advice was starting to click with me in such a way that I was but a few steps from story writing. I heeded that click feeling, the subsequent ones, and now it's working. Now I've got myself on a beginning writer path, learning by encounter just what the writing manuals and suchlike mean when they talk about shaping a plot or dealing with transitions.

The biggest obstacle is that I try to stop myself daydreaming.

That's okay, though. It's a smaller obstacle than the old one: that there was no point to writing. Now that I sense a point to writing, a personal joy in it, I *can* write. And when I know I'm willing to put things into words, I'm more willing to allow myself into the unmapped spaces of my head, where it might get boring or claim to be empty.

The biggest obstacle is no longer that I have nothing to say. I don't have anything to say when I sit down and begin to type, but when I do, something forms. The blank page has nothing to say. Once a single word or line goes onto that page, it collaborates with me, it helps me dream something into being.

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Where pattern-seeking fails

2011-11-14T03:08:28Z

I'm a pattern-seeker. I react slowly, collecting multiple experiences of situations or a person's behavior before I try to judge or assert my own view of it.

Where this really falls down: when I try to understand myself relative to the world based on very limited data. Trying to generalize "how friendship is for me" based on just my friendship with Dar, or just my friendship with one of the ponies (my IRC people). Not enough data. Flawed, highly skewed results that have me feeling contradictory, over-complicated, when the problem is that I'm trying to over-simplify.

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Shake it out

2011-11-09T01:44:10Z

I see a whole lot of people are listening to/referring to Florence & the Machine's Shake It Out today and recently. That makes me almost as happy as the song. *beam*

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Nanowrimo!

2011-11-05T20:22:24Z

There are a few things that stymie me about a major task like organising a large batch of photos. First, there's the task itself. It's something complicated and it's going to take a big portion of time to manage. Big portions of time generally have other interesting things vying to use them and somehow just don't get set aside for photo-managing. Then there are the tools for the task - should I stick with Picasa, should I get some other photo manager? Should I tag and bag and photoslop the crap out of them all? This part of the task is quite fun with all its downloading and its blog post reading and its information-gathering, but, again, nothing much is getting done.

So, time is passing, no photos are organised. I don't want to post here because I've promised to post photos, and-- well, if you're still reading, you might guess this is one long apology for not posting photos. It is, kinda! Though since I like to at least pretend I write here for myself, I'm also working out the things I trip over in a task like this. Mostly, trying to do everything at once: wanting to do the task For Once And For All And For Perfect with a big blast of energy.

Maybe the project I *am* working on diligently and daily will teach me a few new habits. I'm doing Nanowrimo for the first time (under the username phoenixdreaming, no surprise to that). I can't believe it, but I'm writing fiction for the first time in years. I've long had this block on writing - why should I write when I could be reading other people's already-written novels, isn't that more interesting? I finally have an answer for that: only my novel has dragon churches! (Essentially, in this world there are stone dragons. They went to sleep for a long time, long enough for humans to get the idea that carving the stone dragons into /churches/ was a good idea. It was okay until they woke up.)

The probability that I will ever show anyone what I'm working on is low, low, low, and certainly won't happen during November. I was talking to a coworker about this, and exclaimed that people wanting to read my shite is the most frightening part of Nano. Eek, no. I'm writing shit. You can see it if or when flowers grow in it. For now it is confined to the compost heap/text editor.

BUT. WORDS. I know I've never written more than a couple of thousand words on a single story. Now I have almost 7000, written in a few days. It feels like I've grown a new part of my brain.

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Writing and games are meaningful

2011-09-18T16:30:25Z

How Games Saved My Life - a tumblr collecting personal stories about videogaming as life-affirming. I know a lot of people who can relate, whether through finding meaning in JRPGs, community in MMOs, or friendship through game fanfic.

I've decided that this year I'm going to attempt Nanowrimo. It's a challenge that I'm finally in the right place to try. I've mentioned before that I've been having trouble feeling creative - having ideas, having anything in my head beyond the mundane - and I've made a few breakthroughs lately. A lot of the motion has been internal, but here's one of the big external pushes, a post from Kristin Cashore:

If "writer's block" refers to the hopeless confusion of not knowing what to write, having an "I don't wanna" feeling, and knowing that if one sits down to write, it's going to be hard and the product isn't going to be very good... well, then OF COURSE I've had that. I've had it for weeks and months at a time. That's not writers block. That's writing. Or more accurately, it's one of the possible states of writing (maybe I should write a post sometime on the multiple states of writing). Welcome to writing! Get used to all those bad feelings and don't let them make your decisions for you. Understand that the only way out of that kind of blockage is through (to paraphrase Robert Frost).

Yeah, I'm not going to lie, I feel that way and assume it's because I'm "not a writer". Technically that's true, since when I feel that way I don't write, but that's because I'm assuming how I feel is true. Realising that a good, professional writer feels like that and works through it by writing is emboldening.

I've also been putting myself in the way of streams of ideas. I recently started following ailelie, whose journal is a collection of snips from works in progress, ideas she's had, and notes on fics she'd like to read or write. I've also been reading the Changeling: The Lost core sourcebook and it's *brilliantly* inspiring - it's full of 'what if's and story seeds that spawn independent 'what if's in my head. I have no intention of taking an idea wholesale from either of these places - it's getting the juices running in my own imagination by permitting them movement, showing them what other people do. I might reread Catherine Valente too; she's one writer whose books I read and then think "you're allowed to write like this? You're allowed to use ideas like this?" And I'm collecting photos that have moods and visuals that spark something in my writing mind. Using photos as prompts works pretty well for me! Same thought with the Tarot cards, which are visually more flexible but limited in number.

Other things: I've been playing the Night Circus, a game from Failbetter Games (makers of Echo Bazaar), which has enchanting textual images. (Want to play? Sign up through me!) It's an 'advert' for a book by the same name - now that's fecking cool, a interactive fiction game specially for your debut novel.

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Eight of Swords

2011-09-17T00:00:28Z

I bought a set of tarot cards last week (for creative purposes and self-discovery - though I'm not disregarding the mystic side, just I needed other things to persuade myself to spend money). In a targetless anxious rage earlier, I pulled a card asking "why am I feeling this way?" ( And got the Eight of Swords. Warning, spider shown in one corner, also not quite worksafe. )

Which certainly represents the feeling quite perfectly, and quite possibly the reason too. It depends on your interpretation. Mine is that my predicament is mostly of my own making and escapable if I can see clearly, though it's not all in my head - those swords are sharp, and the broken and fading friendships troubling me are likely real. It amuses me that the card shows a web - *the* Web is a complicated thing for me, necessary but, because of how I think of my place in it, not as nourishing as I want it to be.

The 8 of Swords keeps popping into my head as I try to write this entry, reminding me of the ways in which what I think are outside limits are limits I made. It's a good thing to set certain limits, obviously, but I have a strict soul - avoiding repressing myself, that's a hard road for me. I don't want to take up too much space and need to be reminded of my place, but it's continuing unsustainable to wait for permission to exist.

Things that are true: I have energy and ideas (ideas! I have ideas! I'm not empty!). I am feeling a little hostile and sad and bored and tempestuous.

I am too well-behaved for tantrums - I threw my hairbrush at the wall earlier, then pulled that tarot card. I laughed at its dramatised accuracy, because when you're in a twisting rage recognition has a way of illuminating how silly you are. Then, still mad and determined to get something out of my swords, I went for a walk with my camera, bare-armed to fight the cold breeze, and photographed bridges and a mud-perched heron.

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