As a disabled person who's loved LEVERAGE and LEVERAGE REDEMPTION since the beginning - for the characters but also the whole ethos of performing acts that help people against crap systems, it's wonderful to be reminded that it springs from reality.
people’s dismissal of history as a worthwhile subject of attention really begins to make sense when you see these utterly baffling takes like ‘today we all have to work to earn money and pay rent, I wish it were [Roman antiquity / the Middle Ages / the Renaissance] and I could just lounge in an orchard somewhere playing the lute’ etc. … even when they fall short of transparent fantasies of aristocratic luxury, this idea that people [general] worked less and had access to fresh food and could afford wine, is divorced from reality. even short of ‘oh, and who is gathering the harvest in this scenario?’ - which is an extremely valid question - I also just feel: aren’t you bored? of this image you’ve invented, of whole centuries, completely without detail? and I wouldn’t understand why people study history either if I thought it were all one big monotonous swathe of Nice.
“Nobody’s going to want to sit on high-speed rail for fifteen hours to get from New York City to LA.”
Me. I will sit on high-speed rail for fifteen hours. I’ll sit on it for days. I’ll write and read and nap and eat and then do it all over again. I’ll stare out the windows and see America from ground level and not have to drive. I’ll see the Rockies and the deserts and cornfields and the Mississippi River and your house and yours and yours too. I’ll make up stories in my head about the small towns I see as we go along. I’ll see the states I’ve yet to see because driving or flying there is a fucking slog and expensive to boot. I’ll enjoy the ride as much as the destination. And then I’ll do it all over again to come the fuck home.
I had a new "oh, my family were the weird ones" moment recently: it seems no one else's family celebrated Frog Night (the first warm rainy night of spring) by going down to the local vernal pool after dark to help the amphibians safely across the road and listening to the spring peepers. (We'd then go back in daytime later on to observe the egg masses, of course.)
Apparently "Frog Night" as a holiday is a thing my mother invented and not a widely-accepted idea, which is a shame because I've been referring to it as if it was for the past 30 years.
i mean this in an entirely platonic, slightly powerhungry way, but i love when people call me the friendly "boss." like "you got is boss" or "whatever ya say, boss." it's so fun. like we're in the worlds shittiest cartoon mafia
Working on my novel and couldn’t figure out why it felt so empty. I didn’t have any filler. It was all 100% plot. The characters only interacted when necessary. I didn’t prattle on about the scenery or how the birds sounded. I had all my fuller stuff that I loved saved in another file because I “didn’t need it”.
Y’all, I knew this existed in TV shows but it didn’t hit me until this that everything is being whittled down. We are so starving for filler that we snap up anything. I unload all mine on Tumblr or keep it in a massive Google Docs. It SUCKS.
Honestly? Death to plot necessity. Revive filler. Revive unnecessary interactions. Revive just vibing with characters sometimes. I don’t want to just consume the plot and I don’t want to just create the plot either.
So earlier in art class today, someone drew a characters hands in their pockets and mentioned that hands are really like the ultimate end boss of art, and most of us wholeheartedly agreed. So then, our teacher went ahead and free handed like a handful of hands on the board, earning a woah from a couple of students. So the one from earlier mentioned how it barely took the teacher ten seconds to do what I can’t do in three hours. And you know what he responded?
“It didn’t take me ten seconds, it took me forty years.”
And you know, that stuck with me somehow. Because yeah. Drawing a hand didn’t take him fourth years. But learning and practicing to draw a hand in ten seconds did. And I think there’s something to learn there but it’s so warm and my brain is fried so I can’t formulate the actual morale of the lesson.