Chilling in My Web

The last few months I've blocked a number of tme moots because they've fallen down the terf rabbit hole, usually with the starting point of male socialisation and it's just been depressing to see.

FFXIV got its claws firmly grasping at my throat I needed to draw Alisaie throwing a bucket of water at her own brother.

The great critic Barbara McClay has written about the "politics creep" in every corner of human life, though really of bourgeois Anglophone human life, where every act from reading a novel to lighting a scented candle can be justified - and in fact, self-consciously needs to be justified in advance - as a bold act of resistance. Pretending that self-care is a brave political act detracts from actual political acts, and it sucks the life out of life itself: turning every moment into a performance for an audience, for an imagined crowd of other people on social media. This is other people not as fellow complicated human beings, but as fearful object, whose inner lives are imaginable only insofar as they might be watching and comparing and judging us for whether we've done enough, whether we're wasting our time. And books and movies and TV shows and every other form of fiction will always be, to some extent, a waste of time, as having friends will be a waste of time, as being in love is a waste of time, as every possible action or thought you may have could be considered a waste of time if every second of your life has to prove its value, and has to get a job.

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

#I am not a comic artist#but I had a similar problem when I was in film school#I call it “the door problem”#in my thesis film I had written that two characters walk out the back of the club into the alley behind the club#and my club location did not have a back alley but did have a side room that we used as the door#but that door opened in#and the location I used for the alley had a back door but that door opened outwards#and I knew it looked weird#I struggled framing the shots#and blocking the actors#and I got really really caught in my own head about how to make this door work#because to me it was really important that you saw every step from club to outside#because even though we had learned in school that you could transition it didn't feel right because it didn't feel like a new scene to me#(this being one of the struggles with a short film. It can all feel like one scene if your script is short!)#AND THEN#when we got into the editing room we just...cut the door transition entirely#initially not on purpose#what happened was that we decided to tighten up the timing by cutting non-linearly to the custom music I had commissioned#which made it much more experimental especially in comparison to my fellow classmates#however it showed me that the story still absolutely worked without needing to show how they got into the alley#the audience can infer the door#so now anytime I can feel myself getting stuck on something when I'm filming I think#“Is this a Door Problem?”#as a storyteller it's always a question of what is the absolute bare minimum you need to convey what you're trying to say#and sometimes that means you just need to already be outside the club

it's a well-known fact in the textile crafting community that "making objects from textiles" is an entirely separate hobby from "having a collection of materials to make things with."

Leonid Pasternak is the best! My favorite of his is The Night Before The Exam (1895).