A Creator's Lair

on survival

Manuscript. Me. Now. The end of the month.

39,173

People talk about how you can’t see stars in the city and yeah, that’s true, but their concept of “seeing stars” is being able to make out orion’s belt.

So, so few people have see the sky in all its glory and it’s not sad. It’s a fucking crime. Seeing a perfectly dark night, no clouds, not a hint of light pollution? That’s a fucking religious experience.

The sky the vast vast majority of us grew up with is not the sky that inspired us to look up. It is not the sky that inspired constellations. You can’t even see most constellations.

Your ancestors looked at the night sky and said “surely, that is where the gods must live.” And you might be lucky if you can see hardly more than a handful of stars.

When we were on a field trip to the middle of the red sea, I remember us all crowding at the end of the boat that didn’t have lights and just lying on our backs and staring

When you see a properly dark starscape

You understand why people wrote poems and made up legends and built rockets and said heaven’s in the sky

You think of the night sky like fairy lights on black velvet, but it’s not it’s not it’s like, like, dust in sunlight, like - I can’t find the words.

The stars are everywhere, like sugar, like glitter, like dust. You can’t find the constellations at first, not because you can’t recognise them, but because there’s so many stars you can’t pick out the familiar line of Orion’s belt. The North star has gone from bright familiarity to almost vanishing among a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million other lights. The milky way is a line of light arcing across the sky like a moon-trail on water only infinitely, infinitely bigger.

And for the first time in your life you’ll understand why people call it a dome, because it is, it’s three dimensional in exactly the way a city skyscape isn’t.

You’ll understand why Luthien Tinúviel danced under starlight, not moonlight, why people in a time before we knew the earth was round still looked up and wondered and built telescopes and dreamed about the stars.

The stars are endless and ancient and infinite and you will stand with your head craned back and your rucksack forgotten at your feet and you’ll feel like you’re falling upwards into that great bright sky like it’s calling you home and you’ll wonder how you ever thought the stars were beautiful before tonight when all you’d ever seen were the naked empty skyscapes of your home. And you’ll cry and you’ll spend the rest of your time there gazing up and wondering and imagining what it would be like to stand among those bright silver flecks

I’d often set an alarm to wake me in the middle of the night, so it was as dark as possible and my eyes as dark-adapted as they coud get, and starlight alone was enough to guide me

this post was inflicted upon me so now i’m inflicting it on all of you

Manuscript. Me. Now. The end of the month.

39,173

Like this. And it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful to hear a soliloquy I loved so much already, and have it come to life in a way it never, ever, did before. I feel like I grasp his motivations, his twists and turns, no longer on an academic level but on a visceral, instinctive one. Because he’s presenting his mental and emotional journey in a way that speaks honestly, like a real person.

Went to the library and everything

...library was closed. After frantically trying to get my documents ready for printing in time, library closed.

We do it by hand. I refuse to admit defeat

Can i ask for a few words of comfort? I've been having a rough time with finals, so I would really appreciate it coming from you

anon, it sounds like you're having a shitter. i hate this for you, and i hope you've indulged in a bit of a wallow. you deserve it.

but, unless i've misread this, it doesn't look like any decisions have actually been made yet? people with more experience may very well have submitted stories to this contest. the outcome of their submissions is - as yet - not something you know.

which seems important.

"don't borrow grief from the future" is one of the few pithy pop psychology phrases which is genuinely good advice. trying to pre-guess how this contest will unfold is futile, pre-empting feeling miserable in the future just makes you miserable in the present.

but - i'll be honest - it's also a mantra which i've always found a bit... solemn. a bit sincere. a bit passive, even.

i've said before that my main piece of life advice is fortune favours the bold - that the best thing you can have in your arsenal is the audacity. my other main piece of life advice is similar, and is something i've always found useful in situations such as this:

but first they must catch you

this is not - to be clear - me telling you to commit crimes [although, let's be honest, you should have it in mind if you want to start...].

it's what the sun said to a rabbit named el-ahrairah.

All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.

el-ahrairah is being told here that rabbits will never be more powerful than foxes and weasels. you are at a stage in your life where you have less experience than other contestants who have also submitted stories. on paper, the fight can only ever have one outcome: the fox eats the rabbit; the professor with half a century of creative writing experience clobbers the undergraduate student into last place.

but there are going to be lots and lots of things in life which - on paper - you are almost guaranteed to fail or lose or be terrible at or embarrass yourself doing. you will find yourself in lots of situations in which the competition is bigger than you and stronger than you, and has more numbers or more resources or more experience than you.

and you have to be able to be clear-eyed about that - this is one of those times when delulu is not the solulu.

but what you also have to bear in mind is that any and every assessment of things on paper is meaningless. because it fails to take into account that there must be a catching first.

a fox will eat a rabbit. but first it must catch it.

a professor with half a century of creative writing experience expects their story to outperform an undergraduate's. but first it must catch it.

the other contestants may very well have much, much more experience than you. they might have more free time to spend writing. they might know famous authors who give them advice for free. and if the competition is a "quote your cv" or "name-drop your nepotism", sure, you might be fucked.

but if the competition is "is this story compelling?" the piece that wins won't self-importantly present a list of its credentials. it will slip through a gap, escape a dead end, play a prank, pull off a feat. it will be plucky and bold and sly. it will evade the clutches of the bigger and stronger stories by being full of cunning.

all of which is to say, i am a great proponent of living the life of a trickster god - or, to stick with the rabbit theme, bugs bunny. i have always believed that "who's going to stop me?" is a legitimate motivation for anything. i have always believed that "you and who's army?" is the only response to being told you don't have a chance. and i have always believed that it doesn't matter what it seems on paper that the outcome of something should be... because that outcome is only guaranteed if they catch you.

and they've only caught you when you're dead.

because - sure - your prediction of what's going to happen might be absolutely right - or maybe i did misread this, and what you feared would happen did indeed happen. you might get told that your story is an affront to language and you should never pick up a pen again. the same is true with your finals. yes, the worse case scenario you can imagine for yourself might indeed happen.

i bet your enemies would feel pretty pleased with themselves if that happened. they'd think that was final! that there was no way you could wiggle out of that one! that you were never going to dust yourself off, and get back to the drawing board, and - motivated by a healthy dose of audacity and spite - keep surviving, and writing, and thinking, and being curious, and practising, and getting ever more cunning with every word. ready to pop up later and say "yeah... you should have tried a bit harder to stop me, shouldn't you?"

have your night of sulking - an impeccably fun activity - but then send your self-defeating impulses hence.

Went to the library and everything

...library was closed. After frantically trying to get my documents ready for printing in time, library closed.

We do it by hand. I refuse to admit defeat

skips every song on my ipod

lets the music play without interruption

as long as you smile and nod, people are satisfied. it’s just to show that you are nice and there with good intentions. we’re small in a big world and have to rely on other people to be decent to us. so we do our little human dance to each other to say, “i’m not here to hurt you. here’s something we have in common, like the weather or sports or itchy sweaters, so we both know we’re on the same team. we both agree on a basic fact, like that it is rainy or that being itchy is uncomfortable, and this proves we can get along. i’m being light-hearted and non-threatening right now.”

small talk isn’t to get to know a person. it’s just a greeting to affirm you’re buddies in the universe.

This post talks about a new DM feature in youtube. What it fails to mention is that as part of this new feature is that when you send someone a link to a video, and they open it in the youtube app, they will see who sent them the link. Specifically, your channel name.

If your google account name is your real name, so is your channel name by default.

This means the new default behavior is that everyone you send a youtube link to will see your full name if they open it in the mobile app.

To turn this off:

Go to your youtube app settings

Go to Privacy

Turn off "Channel visibility for shared links"

https://youtu.be/93wE-2E0b4Q

you know this one: https://youtu.be/YMcGLQ-RZ44