Vixenscratch

"A marriage ending isn't a failure at all. I spent eleven years with her. We were so in love that we couldn't image life apart from each other. We got our own place, adopted a dog, and supported each other through school. I thought if tow people loved each other enough the rest would fall into place, except... love isn't everything.

And I didn't want to believe that, but we were sitting in counseling one day, talking about our future and I realized we were describing two completely different lives. Where we'd live, what kind of life we wanted, what made us happy. And it hit me that- I love this woman and this woman loved me. And after eleven years of loss, grief, career changes, we were so deeply in love... but we weren't aligned. And I kept thinking 'We just need to try harder. We can find some compromise to make this work,' because that's what you're supposed to do when you love someone, right?

But the reality was, we had just become different people. Her trade school took her in one direction, my graduate degree in another and trying to force us back into who we were five years ago wasn't coming from a place of love. It was coming from a place of fear. Fear that, if this ended, it meant we wasted eleven years. But sitting there across from her, I realized: That's not how love works.

Those eleven years happened. They were real. The dog, our home, showing up for each other through grad school and trade school. I wouldn't change a single thing because loving someone doesn't mean you're meant to stay with them forever. And letting go doesn't erase what you had. We measure marriage by whether it lasts forever or not, but what if we measured it by whether it mattered?

What if we measured it by the love we gave, the life we built, and the people we became? Because love's job isn't to last forever, it's to help you become fully completely yourself, and sometimes the most loving thing you can do is give each other permission to be yourselves, separately. But the dog doesn't know were' divorced. He just gets two Christmases now."

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

I'm gonna be a bit of a Debbie Downer for a second and point out that it's not just people who use screen readers who have difficulty with those fonts. It's also people with dyslexia, lower reading comprehension, lack of familiarity with cursive or fancy fonts, and non-native speakers.

I myself am none of the above, but I still can't read more than one or two words of either strikethrough or Zalgo text before I can feel a strain in my eyes.

For those who are able to visually read the words, I'll explain what the issue is with screen readers. Fancy Unicode Text isn't actually text. It's letters formed by unicode symbols that were created for use in, for example, mathematical equations. Each of those symbols has a name, and a screen reader will read out each "letter"'s name instead of reading the whole word. I'll put an example below, as an image, to save people who are using screen readers to read this post (there's a brief alt text though).

example courtesy of https://givemefonts.com/blog/accessibility-in-unicode

So, now that everyone is up to speed on the question, I have one question and two possible solutions.

The question: What is the purpose of using the fancy unicode text?

First possible solution: If you just want to be able to differentiate the font and/or colour of text within a fic, you can do that with a work skin and leave the text fully readable by screen readers. Here's one that was created for Undertale and has a whole bunch of web safe fonts you can switch between. There's one for Homestuck as well. And a third workskin that does lots of formatting, including fonts and colours.

Second possible solution: If you're going for a specific look that can only be achieved by fancy unicode text, then you might want to include that as an image and set the image's alt text to be the plain text version.

The problem is the lack of universal fonts, unless you’re using web fonts, and I wasn’t having much luck with looking for a “here, hotlink from us, it’s cool” repository.

The other problem, which I feel is something that might be solvable but have no idea how, is that, well. If I were to set the font color to, say, #2B0202, it would be absolutely unreadable for anyone using a dark site skin. I’d love to have work skins able to do “if light site skin, use this text color for this class, if dark site skin use this other color.”

Go my kid i wanted to laugh

Prev is an alien.

@theyhavefoundme

@seriouslythisisagoodname

@herwonderlandfirefreakingevil

@freedom-motif-offical

@free-flying-faigel

@kaiyorice

@herwonderlandfirefreakingevil

@nonbinarydiseaseexpert @sunnysunsunsunsunshine @g00fyg4bsters

@a-slice-of-dice

@nico-flo

@ssj2hindudude @queenofapeacefuldawn @melonmagnet @abiissthewriter @inejisgirl (I DONT KNOW WHO TO TAGGG)

@the-ellia-west @loftwingofcrimson @the-ellia-west @sunflowerrosy

@autisticartistnauthor @voidwitchboots @wisdom-gem @quokkaquill @qoldenskies @w1nged-bats @ekomori @rolmariane @rolmariane @ricedoll @remyuzaki @thelonely0wl @timelessforgefang @themodernmontecristo @yoursocialchameleon @urfriendlyneighborhoodweirdo @insomniacchamomille @iwantzoro @iamfullydeadinside @opalzennasaphhire @othellovr @fal-con, @hotflatwaffleyaps @himariandtoon @kit-kat-76 @lanes-the-art-lover @lloyd-and-behold @likesugarandcyanide @camakiss @vulstare @vacetuuuuu @nurt3

The new magic stops working after three days and every spell uses proprietary runes.

Oh, anon. Lemme give you a great big virtual hug 💗

From what you've written here, you're being very harsh in your criticisms of yourself - and especially in the way you see yourself compared to others. In almost every sentence of this ask, you're putting yourself down and saying that you're "less than" in some way. No wonder writing anything seems impossible right now!

It seems like you might be having a crisis of confidence, anon, and you might benefit from taking some time away to regain perspective. Right now, you're seeing other stories by other authors and everything you read is making you feel worse.

So stop reading for a while. Remove that catalyst from your equation and see if you're still feeling "mediocre" or "superfluous". I've had feelings like that before when I was deep in my fic writing period and taking time away really helped me gain a better perspective.

I also recommend that you spend some time building yourself up instead of tearing yourself down. Find things about yourself that you like - whether they're connected to your writing or not - and celebrate them. Give yourself credit for your hard work or your creativity or your ability to make a really good sandwich. You can start small or big, but try to take time each day if you can. The more your practice being kind to yourself, the easier it gets.

Because the thing of it is, we're all average in some ways and above average in others. And yes, we're all below average in way things as well. That's just part of being human. But average isn't all that bad. It describes most people, after all, and most people are pretty alright. 💕

I kept going at this point, specifically addressing the last question in this ask, but I got kind of long winded, so I put the rest under a cut.

If any of you have some thoughts you'd like to share with anon, please do so in the notes.

The simplest one is cake. And it’s, really, at the core of a lot of lessons about this. You see a prettier cake than you think you could make, and you want to put your baking utensils and ingredients away. But someone else will see two cakes and be excited about the extra cake! Yet some other person might not enjoy the flavor the baker picked for the fancy fancy cake, but hears you made a cherry lemon cake and started drooling like one of Pavlov’s dogs. Your cake is just what they were craving!

I know (this is where I digress into Actual Cake, rather than cake as metaphor, but I think the actual cake still serves the metaphor) some days I have a hankering for American grocery store sheet cake with mediocre frosting. Some nights I want nothing more than a chocolate mug cake even though I know the cake my recipe makes is kinda rubbery. I could get objectively better cake than that. Something that wouldn’t make Mary Berry cry. But right then, I have a specific craving. I can’t do much about wanting grocery store cake, but you better believe I’m going for that mug cake!

Mmmh, cake…

So on to some of my personal experiences with this kind of thinking:

I have a kind of love-hate relationship with writing smut. I can’t say I outright hate it, but it is a struggle nearly every time, and tends to slow my progress to a crawl. We’re talking half the word count per hour or less. It’s probably at least in part because I don’t have a lot of practice.

See, my husband @somecrazyskunk (sorry about the random tag, hon, I’m just proud of you) writes great smut. And at some point I slipped into comparing us. Why write this when I know he could do it so much better? Isn’t that just wasting the idea? (I did this with non-smut, too, but it’s stronger with the smut because I’m so unconfident with it.)

But the thing is… I don’t live in his brain. Just because he could write some idea I have better doesn’t mean he has any interest in writing it at all. So if I keep leaving all the good ideas to him, they’ll just… sit in limbo forever. And that’s truly wasting the idea. (Besides, while there’s overlap between us he doesn’t enjoy all the same things I do, and I need my fix of the sort of dead dove fuckery that he’d rather not think about.)

And when I mentioned this feeling of… let’s call it inferiority, though it’s more nuanced than that, to a friend, he made another great point: just because I made cake and hubby-dearest made cake doesn’t mean everyone is going to see both cakes. My friend reads my work, so if I don’t write it he doesn’t get cake at all.

Incidentally, I also happen to think my friend fucking kills it as a writer, so it’s flattering as hell when he says he likes my work. At least twice when he’s beta read stuff for me he’s said something to the effect of “I was sad when I could tell I was coming up to the end” and if that’s not one hell of a compliment and confidence booster I don’t know what is.

It does help to get a little insane about a character (or a set of them). In the last two years and change I’ve been a completely normal (ha!) amount of unhinged about one of my OC’s and one of my friends’. I’ve got like two dozen WIPs with them, I have written and posted a little over another dozen. And, genuinely? In this time, I’ve written at least two fics that I felt were significantly better than anything I’ve written before. Fics I was, like… extra proud of. A few more than that I’ve been satisfied enough with to be chomping at the bit to have them ready to post.

Two major things went into those fics happening, and turning out a step above: practice and obsession. I cannot understate how much being absolutely wormbrained about these guys has done for my writing process.

I’m not saying getting that insane about some guys is something you can force, nor that it’s absolutely necessary, but if you can find something you’re so passionate about that you keep turning it over in your head whenever your brain is otherwise idling, it does help. Might occasionally drive you a little bit crazy, but it does help.

The last thing I want to share about my own experiences is this: For some reason I go into hating practically everything I create and feeling like “what’s the point?” about once a month (yes, it’s a PMS thing). It sucks. But it’s not about my actual skill. I’m pretty sure there’s nothing that could convince my brain that what I create is Good Enough when it gets like that. While that realization doesn’t always get me writing, it has helped me put the feelings into perspective.

Because the doubt doesn’t come from how good or bad I am at it. The doubt comes from somewhere else (in my case my brain chemistry not playing nicely with my hormones). And I think that’s true for a lot of people who think they’re worse at the thing than everyone around them.

So bake that cake. Do it scared if you have to. Find a friend into the same shit you are (same fandom or same tropes or dynamics doesn’t really matter as long as they’re someone you can hype with) and talk to them as you work. Share excerpts that you’re excited about, or passages you’re having trouble with. You don’t have to share the final product with anyone else, but having at least that one friend will help keep you from feeling isolated. Which in my experience kills creativity and drive.

Though if you choose to share, I can almost guarantee someone will be excited to see it. Maybe not today or tomorrow or even a week or month from now. Maybe they won’t comment on your fic. Maybe they won’t even leave a kudos (please leave kudos when you enjoy something, everyone!). But the person who thinks you picked the perfect ingredients for your cake is somewhere out there.

And a lot of people are pretty willing to ignore if your cake has a slightly weird texture or raw spots or is a little charred on the corners. (Though I suspect you’re harder on yourself than you need to be, Anon.) We’re not all going to win the Great British Bake-off. But if only bake-off winners were allowed to bake, there would be hell of a lot less cake in the world.

all the miis i have on my island. whoops all ocs + whoops all men (even if greyson and trick both only sort of count)

front row: matt, felix, sebastian, benji, tyler, damien, luke second row: trick, mitch, wynn, trey, alejandro, rowan, nate third row: ferret, johnny, ryan, skye, greyson, will, rev

I was seriously so excited when Tox first showed me screenshots of him interacting with Nate. My little guy. (And my favorite blorbo trash man Nate. Though some of these guys make Nate look well behaved by comparison at least he doesn’t fucking murder people. Looking especially at you, Felix.)