Well, my depressive episode has passed (yay!), but it ate my weekend (blarggg). The hardest part about coming out on the other side is seeing the mess I've made when I was in the midst of it. Like sobering up and finding out you destroyed your furniture in a drunken rage, my mind clears up and I find I've made some very stupid decisions. Thankfully, this time, those decisions were contained mostly to my creative outlets, so the damage is minimal and easily fixed. Still, it's all so stupid.

Anyway! I've been dying to write, but not quite getting there. I have a few prompts in my Tumblr inbox and a whole list of WIPs, but nothing is scratching the particular creative itch I have. I've been poking at a few original fic ideas, and a plethora of smut concepts, but I still can't get over the initial fear of committing anything to paper (or screen). Perhaps I should run my own personal Smutober to try to run through that list, but in the meantime, I'll try to pick away at a prompt or WIP. I just wish it was easier to focus on a single project and see it through to completion.

I also started a second part-time job last week, and it still hasn't become part of my routine yet, so that might be another factor leeching brainpower from my creative pursuits. One of these days, my brain will settle down and work with me! Until then, I can at least keep collecting ideas. :)

Not far from our hotel was a rock feature that had an interesting look to it. What was especially interesting to me were its walls.

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I have an incredible story today...

So I was on wplace, looking at around my area, and I saw someone drew Chuck E Cheese and wrote an invite to a Discord server. So I joined it, right. And I just started talking about how I went to Chuck E Cheese in the late 90s as a kid and then later on in the early-mid 00s. I have a really bad memory issues, but one childhood memory I have is when I went to Chuck E Cheese on my birthday and the Chuck E animatronic was sitting behind something. I wanted to see if the animatronic had feet/legs, so I peered over it, and he said "do you mind?" That scared the shit out of me!! It's like he knew I wasn't supposed to be there!

And I find out from people who have encyclopedic knowledge of Chuck E Cheese that only one animatronic could say "do you mind?", and it was a location where I lived during the late 90s. And the chat fucking exploded because I might have seen an exclusive stage set and design of Chuck E that was around for a month. This was in the summer of 1997, since I had a Disney's Hercules themed party. I told my mom, she dug out the scrapbook, and I sent the server some photos with my face edited out.

Guess what. I was at "the" location, the abbreviation is AAM. The photo of me with the mascot Chuck E didn't have his face, but what was shown was an exclusive suit. And they could identify it was that stage by zooming in on a shelf in the background. The chair and tablecloth in other photos are identifiable too.

I was at Montfort and this means a big fucking deal to Chuck E Cheese nerds. I've been getting pinged about it in the last hour and I showed my mom the reactions to the photo I sent, I got 2 friend requests too lol. I think I'm going to have fun here

A walk up onto the Purbeck Hills to watch the west wind blowing...

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I swear to god anyone that sings the praises of ChatGPT being the future must be an easily impressed normie. I was lurking another site, and saw the idea of using AI to analyze your sketches to critique it comes up. I figured that would be a theoretical "good usage" for AI art alongside thumbnails or a reference tool, so I gave ChatGPT a sketch that looks off to examine.

It took over 10 back-and-forths for it to do just that. What a useless clanker, I could've spent that time looking up photos lol. That's what gets me when people talk about the time spent training or editing AIgen images counts as "work"... the time you spent could've been used to just write/draw yourself... lazy asses...

I really hate to link to something by Andrew Sullivan. I'm aware of his issues ('94...), he's the type of commentator I just read privately for the sake of not having an echo chamber and to roll my eyes or nod at 40% of the time. He's been annoying me half of the time. But today's post hit me hard.

The Permanent Stain

When a disaffected conservative who loves Reagan and Thatcher is in the right (no pun intended), that's really when you need to reconsider who the fuck we elected. (I disagree with the successor part, but whatever. Trump is in awful shape, I don't think MAGA will live after he dies.)

From the Neocities feed:I don't even think the page was all that controversial and neither was the update with info from the book I was chipping at, but every day I wish the joy and investment I had in "smallweb" or whatever in 2022-2023 would come back. If I'm not reminded that my ex was my main inspiration and motivator, I just don't see a point in "making" anything because the same Twitter doomscrollers are there. This can be chalked up to just "depression" or whatever, but I really hate this. I feel like I can't express anything without "callout" types on my ass, social media is boring, my usual Discord company I'm also uncomfortable with. I'm tired and I don't know when things will get better.

Here's a tutorial on deploying to Neocities I found that's pretty good, by the way.

This week's questions were suggested by sparklesalad. 

1. What is one food (or meal) you used to hate but now love?

2. If you had to give up one of your favorite foods (or meals) for good, what would it be, and why?

3. Which food seems like it should be healthy and isn't, and do you eat it? Why?

4. If you were an item of food, personified, what would you be and why?

5. You've seen tomatoes and pies used for this purpose ... now think of a more inventive item of food one could throw at someone. What is it and why would throwing it at someone be hilarious?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

I recently found out about a long-running (since 2022) case of plagiarism in what news outlets are calling romantasy but is actually the paranormal romance sphere. It's been occupying me mentally and emotionally all day. Lynne Freeman's novel, Blue Moon Rising, 'died on submission' (I hate that industry phrasing). Ten years later she found a book in bookstores, Crave by Tracy Wolff, worked on by the same agent who had worked with Lynne, submitted to one of the publishing houses (Entangled Publishing) Lynne's book had been submitted to. It had basically copied her unpublished manuscript from top to bottom. I read the New Yorker article by Katy Waldman about the case (internet archive link) but the best source for information on it is Lynne's website.

I read the similarities documents and I cried. I have encountered ruthless, mercenary people in the book business, but this is on another level of evil. My thoughts are under a cut, since I am neither concise nor polite.
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Katy Waldman didn't say, in her New Yorker article, whether (after reading both books) she thought that Lynne Freeman's book had been stolen by them. Journalists can't put their personal opinion in as much, etc. But she later appeared on a podcast episode of the Write About Now podcast. And when the host asked her, she said that in her personal opinion, it was theft.

The way she describes Lynne's novel in her New Yorker piece rends my heart further.

Freeman’s manuscript is quieter, more internal. Unlike Wolff, she always knew that fantasy was her genre. She’d immersed herself in Tolkien growing up, and she used to imagine that the people walking around Anchorage were deer shifters or veela, long-haired maidens who called down storms from the sky. She wanted her novel to be as awash in mysterious possibility as her adolescence had been. Her book’s posture toward the natural world is one of respectful awe; reading it, you sense a deeply ingrained isolation.
[...]
Wolff’s story is sassy, fun, commercial, and hot. Freeman’s is raw, ruminative, interior, and possibly unsalable, given the murky volatility of the family dynamics and the protagonist’s wariness, bordering on hostility, toward other women. What is strange and spiky in one is palatable and familiar in the other. Freeman strews esoteric asides about Egyptian mythology, Captain Cook, and the passage of Celtic artifacts from New Zealand to Alaska, which have no counterpart in the “Crave” series. (Instead, there are the singer-songwriter Niall Horan, Restoration Hardware catalogues, “Final Destination.”) The mysticism that pervades “Blue Moon Rising” is muted in Wolff’s novels. The sense of phantasmagoria and unreality is gone.

In the podcast episode, Katy allowed herself to say more.

The way that the Crave novels got produced, like in a couple of months, like that felt very kind of sinister and also stupid. And I wish I had like a better critical language in which to say it, but like reading the Crave novels, they're not good books. They're not well written. They're not well thought through, and they're mean-spirited. And I just didn't find much to recommend them. I could see why people would buy them because they sort of scratch a certain itch in some ways[...] and it was very striking to me that like, if Lynne Freeman and Tracy Wolff had written the same story-ish, the same sort of blueprint of a story, one was a very kind of personal inward-looking creation, and the other was kind of commercialised slop. And that sounds like pretty vicious, but I really did leave the piece with a lot of dismay about the types of kind of book-flavoured products that some of these publishing companies are putting out.

The way she described Blue Moon Rising makes me wish I could read it. And when she described it as strange and possibly unsalable, I felt that. Because I tried for a few years to sell my debut novel (DW link) as YA, and it didn't sell. It sold as a literary-leaning coming-of-age fantasy, to a small press publishing lit fic and weird books. It's a book that's very personal to me. I wrote it to escape to this imaginary world, to make it vivid to myself, and it was, and it was also filtered through this fevered, obsessive protagonist who was on a journey similar to mine... when I imagine what happened to Lynne happening to me, I think it's unbearable.

How can one writer do this to another? How can an agent, an editor, people who live and breathe books do this to a writer? What the actual fuck?

I'm trying to bite the bullet and be more active in artist spaces despite my low social energy, so I'm alerting more people to my Toyhouse to get over my fear of being public. I "cleared" my mental inventory of OCs, but my yumeship or whatever OC doesn't have a page yet because I'm embarrassed. But I need to just look around more and get over myself, at some point... 

I don't want to be cunty, but I do find these art communities really frustrating on the surface and am trying to just block and find normal people. I'm aware my profile warning sounds rude, but so often I see "DNIs" laying out every opinion the user has, and I just think... You're not that important for people to know every thought in your head. Stop making your opinions so central to everything. Even as someone who has "un-PC" tendencies and dislikes a lot of stripes of "political people", I don't understand why people online act like this.

I used to be like that, until I dealt with someone who was a more extreme form of this. And I realized the way I felt seeing this person talk about nothing but their unpopular opinions was probably how other people feel with me. When I click on someone's page, I'm not looking for their opinion on abortion or gender politics or whatever. I'd go on someone's blog if I wanted to see that. And at this point, I really don't. I've been avoiding a lot of acquaintances more due to politics in the last year than I have in the last decade. I'm tired of walking on eggshells and being paranoid of everyone.

I don't live in Nova Scotia. The nearest big bodies of water to me are rivers, not oceans.

Still feeling awestruck at the sight of this. Apparently, some sharks do curiosity.



https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/close-encounter-with-great-white-shark-near-halifax-sparks-awe-disbelief-1.7600371

This song aged like fine wine...

I realized why I've been sleeping so badly lately. I need to lay off the melatonin. I have approx 1.5mg, which is... too much I guess... it makes me crazy and only sleep 4-5 hours and not go back to sleep. Going back to just 1mg and a Diphenhydramine even though it doesn't automatically knock me out like it does combined with 1.5. 1.5-2mg makes me paranoid as hell too.

These pictures show the Coles County Community Garden on Saturday, August 2. (Begin with Part 1: Right Side, Part 2: Left Side.)

( Walk with me ... )

-publish an amended page
-update my AF gallery
-add a link
-upload new art
-follow a bunch of AF people on TH
-upload art done for me on TH
-unprivate and make profiles/upload art of some OCs
-update my "for me" gallery

there's a pond with lots of frogs at my job and on my breaks I walk the perimeter and every couple steps I hear a croak and a sploosh and see one swim away. not this guy though, he wasn't scared of me at all :)

Our next travel stop was the Newport area and our hotel at Agate Beach. There was some fog the day we arrived but the next day dawned completely clear, giving us great views of the nearby lighthouse.

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Awesome news! A MLP Tales fansite from 1999 is still online... And it was even poked at again 20 years later in 2019, but not after.

https://www.angelfire.com/tx3/teddysplace/main.html

This week's questions were suggested by angelich. 

1. What is something you collect? Why?

2. If you could make one ice cream flavor, what would the ingredients be and what would be the name?

3. What can't you go a day without?

4. What position do you sleep in? *back, right side, left side, stomach . . . etc.*

5. What is your typical morning routine before work/school?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

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