Run for your life!

does anyone else remember when that twitter user’s phone put together a slideshow with their photos but it was all photos of the car crash they were in set to “we like to party” by Vengaboys because every time I think of it I go insane still. Just the opening “BWAAAAAAAAA” over the car crash photos is all it takes to break me down completely.

oh thank god it was super easy to find

if you work in a creative field...or if you do creative hobbies like writing or drawing...you need to make friends with people who don't do those things. you need to befriend normie Steve who has never written a story in his life. and this is because when you are in a creative job or hobby and spend all your time doing that thing, surrounded by very capable people, who you inevitably compare your own progress and skills to, you forget what the baseline human skill at that thing is. and it's usually zero. normie Steve has not written a story since the 3rd grade when his teacher made him do it. he's very good at other things that are not storytelling - but if you tell normie Steve that you wrote a full 300-page book from start to finish, he will think you're some kind of savant. he does not know ANYONE else who has done this. you need this perspective. because when you're constantly on Let's Write Stories dot Com then everyone on Let's Write Stories dot Com will inevitably be like "oh of course everyone on earth has written a book or several at this point!" and you canNOT let yourself think that. that is not even close to the average human experience. you are in a bubble. do not put yourself down. do not give up.

the fact that fandom is a space where unfinished works proliferate is something to be celebrated. where else can you start a novel and never finish it and still people read and engage with what you’ve done and share your interest in it. where else can we get to read the work of people who do not have the time or capacity or resources for commitment to long projects over long time. i don’t know if there’s a way to measure the total volume and proportion of unfinished and abandoned works on ao3, but i’d bet good money it’s a large majority of multichapter works, and do you know what would happen if fandom required all works to be finished? none of that great volume of work would exist! what a tremendous loss would that be! fandom’s permissiveness of unfinished work is one of its greatest strengths as a creative environment, productive for readers and liberating for writers, and if we better recognized that, if we stopped allowing the dominant discourse of unfinished WIPs to be about failure or betrayal or whatever, we would get more stories, not fewer, more story, not less. 

the romance of hand-plotting. this guy looked at the numbers and drew each of those dots manually, and the image emerged. we can only imagine how he felt

I am wildly more obsessed with this than I expected to be

Color By Numbers but the original artist is the sky itself