I’m going to tell you a story that I have never fully told to anyone before, but it is one of the only times I have ever felt proud of myself. Looking back it was incredibly risky, but I’m glad I did it.
When I was twenty I still lived on the old family farm. I was doing a degree by distance education and working full time. I had a little Australia Terrier since I was a child and she was getting on in years but she still followed me everywhere. Her name was Holly. It was near about Valentines Day, and I had recently ended a short lived relationship but it ended messy. Given the man in questions temperament when Holly went missing I immediately suspected him. When I got home and she wasn’t there to greet me I immediately knew something was wrong. I walked around the farm calling for her, a trail of cats curiously following in my wake. I checked the security cameras and saw Holly leave the front of the house and walking out of view of the camera. She looked like she was wandering and not being called so that was a relief at least. When they got home my family rang all the neighbours and one had received a visit by a woman travelling along the nearby busy highway who had found a dog on the side of the road. I have no idea how Holly got there. Holly didn’t have a collar, and my neighbour has never met my dog so she told this stranger she didn’t know who Holly’s family was. The stranger left her number, but when I rang it nobody answered.
I was distraught of course. This little dog had been my shadow for a decade. I printed missing flyers and stuck a poster on the gate of my families farm. I kept ringing the phone number and when nobody answered by nightfall I looked up the address and saw it was for a place a little over an hour away.
The next day I called in sick to work. I was determined to find my dog. There was a vet between my house and their’s so I stopped there hoping maybe the stranger had left Holly with them. No, but they were kind enough to put up one of my lost dog posters. Making the way to this mystery address I was pretty shaken, and when I showed up I probably looked an absolute fright because by this point I was crying nonstop. I drove down a long dirt driveway to this absolutely beautiful old manor, knocked on the closest door and frightened this poor young mother and her two baby toddlers in the kitchen. She was very sweet, and the first thing she asked was “are you lost honey?”. Poor lady was very patient when I blubbered how my dog had been picked up and the number the stranger gave was for this address. It wasn’t unfortunately, the stranger had wrote it wrong and had even mentioned to my neighbour she couldn’t remember her own landline. I asked if she knew anyone by the name of the stranger but the young mother didn’t know many people in the area. The young mother offered me tea, handed me some tissues and sent me off to the local hotel/pub.
Now I was a little less teary now, because I hadn’t wanted to scare the babies at the manor, but I was digging my nails into my hand as an old stress reaction so when I turned up at the pub I did get a few second looks. I’m still a little confused why it had so many people so early in the morning but this far out in the sticks you don’t ask questions of strange happenings. I explained to the old lady behind the bar I was looking for a woman who had picked up my dog, and if she knew anyone by that name. And my gods, she did. The bar lady said the farm was tricky to get to, and the owner mighty strange, but I was determined as hell despite her good natured worry.
So away I went. This was my last lead, and if this didn’t pan out I had no idea if I was ever going to see Holly again. This driveway was older, longer, and the bar lady was right because it was tricky to find and terrible to drive down. But when I got there guess who was there to greet me? Holly was dirty, and manic as all hell but it was damn obvious she was as glad to see me as I was her. The strange lady was kind of gobsmacked I found her actually. She was kind and even offered to let me use her landline to call home and let them know I was on my way back. Mobiles don’t work in the middle of literal nowhere. The strange lady confessed she thought Holly belonged to a little old lady, because Holly would look at you when you talked to her and was very attentive. Holly was covered in mud and sitting prim on my lap ruining my favourite doctor who shirt, and I couldn’t stop smiling.
I got home, and gave Holly a bath. The next day I got her a dog collar with my number on it with a little bell.
Holly was loved, kept safe and well fed until she was eighteen and she died of bladder cancer. She and my beloved cat Kovu accompanied me across an ocean, to an even remoter location at literally the edge of the world, until we moved to the city by the sea where we settled for good. They’re both deceased now and I miss them every day.
Ive never gone into specifics, and no one ever questioned why I was missing a whole day.
It was incredibly risky for a young female to drive into the heart of darkness. I was incredibly, incredibly lucky and am so, so thankful to the three women I met that day. It could have gone very badly. I could have never seen Holly again.
I am glad I did it.
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at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"
like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.
"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."
... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.
and i'd still keep writing.
i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.
i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley
"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"
and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.
it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.
you create because you're greedy.
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Have you taken any pottery classes or were you entirely self taught? I REALLY want to get into it but classes are quite expensive
I took some sculpting in undergrad, but it was in the context of casting and mold-making, not ceramics. So I'm fairly comfortable with clay as a medium but not so much with clay as an end product--not being able to do armatures and having to think about firing is weird. (If I had the opportunity to do bronze casting again, though, I would, no hesitation.) That puts me in the minority of my current pottery peers, who are largely self-taught or only learned in our studio.
I do pottery now at a co-op studio space, and technically that means that I'm taking classes there--but the classes are more like guided lab time? There's not really assignments or anything, and there's only a couple other people who sculpt, none of whom are in my class. Mostly the class just means that the person in charge demonstrates a technique or two once a week and then lets us do our thing.
Personally I think that shared studio space is the absolute best way to go. You spend less in startup costs (kilns are EXPENSIVE, running kilns is expensive, glaze is expensive) and it plugs you directly in to a group of fellow artists who can help and support you at whatever skill level you're at. Yes, classes are expensive--my class is $250 per season. But for me that includes lab space, 50 lbs of clay per season, almost all of the glaze I use, kiln time, and other people doing all the maintenance and kiln loading/unloading etc. Very much money well spent.
Artist-run shared spaces are often not turning a profit on anything with studio fees, just covering operations costs, so while it's pricey, it generally is just...what it costs to do that hobby. And it is sooooo much easier to be motivated when you're going to what is, basically, Grown-Up Art Club.
But if costs are prohibitive for you to do pottery via classes, and you want to learn to sculpt, then get some polymer clay and see what you can do. It's a different game than actual clay, but form is form, and the medium is secondary to figuring out how to translate an idea into reality.
Polymer clay is relatively affordable and doesn't require nearly the infrastructure of ceramics. If you can't spend the money on classes or a shared studio, then polymer clay is a great way to develop technique and an eye so that when you're in a position to spend the money, you already have the skills to make it worth what you're spending.
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otome isekai snippets - geo boys
synopsis: in which your favorite characters get dropped into a random stereotypical isekai plot of the author's choosing
characters: albedo, gorou, itto, zhongli
notes: title, synopsis, then snippet
Albedo - Protecting the Hero With Love
The hero’s journey was met with betrayal from every end, the first of which from his adoptive guardian, Duke Kreideprinz, who experimented on him endlessly as a child in an attempt to use his unique mana to defy the gods. Reborn as the hero’s sibling, there was no way you would be letting your brother go down such a harsh path! First obstacle? You would stop the duke from ever taking notice of your brother! Wait, what do you mean marriage!?
“Goodnight!” You exclaimed as you slammed your bedroom door shut.
You ignored the heat that flooded your cheeks as you fled to the comforting embrace of your bed. Your hands shook as you took your fluffiest pillow, buried your face into it…
And screamed.
Something was wrong. Something was very very wrong. Why in the world was he doing things like… that!? Dining with you every evening, placing his hand upon your waist in public, walking to your room at night and taking your hand to kiss while he looks up at you with those piercing blue–
You screamed into your pillow again.
What in the world was going on!? He wasn’t supposed to be like this! By saving his sister from her terrible fate, you planned to prevent him from even taking interest in your brother’s mana. He was supposed to thank you with a sum of money and then send you on your way. His offer of a marriage contract as a form of protection for you and your brother came as a surprise, but when he simply stated it would be a benefit to him as well, you agreed. Since it was a mutually beneficial arrangement, he certainly had no reason to take interest in you.
So why in the world was he–
You slammed your fist into the pillow.
You knew the duke! Not only did you know him from the book, but you even heard rumors of him before you even met him in this world! He was supposed to be a loner! He was dismissive of most of his peers! He preferred the company of beakers and potions to actual people! The only person he truly cared about was his sister! So what in the world was that!? Just as his lips brushed against your fingers, he gazed up at you with those seafoam eyes and–
“So you don’t mind if I pursue you seriously then?”
You flopped forward onto your pillow and buried your face into it. Your heart couldn’t take this. Especially not when he looked at you like that.
--
gorou, itto, and zhongli under the cut!
Gorou - I’m Not the Villainess Anymore!
It was the classic tale told many times past of a beautiful, yet pitiful woman that was saved by a handsome man. Together they overcame jealous villainesses, corrupt politicians, and jealous older siblings to live happily ever after. But that was not your story. You, as the jealous ultimate villainess, were exiled to a lonely monastery at the edge of the kingdom. But you know what? It was about time! Finally, you can live your life unfettered by the chains of the novel! But if that was the case, why does the head knight keep bothering you!? Your job as the villainess is done! It’s about time he left you alone!
You bit your lip as you scrubbed that light spot in the corridor for the fiftieth time. Who would have thought that after months of getting General Gorou to leave, the moment your wish came true you wanted nothing more than to keep him here with you. You knew his strengths and accomplishments. You knew he wouldn’t be taken down easily. But the thought that he’d be going up against the Shogunate…
You gritted your teeth and pressed your scrubber even harder into the spot.
Who cared? Regardless of what happened, Sangonomiya Kingdom had nothing to do with you. Your job there was done. And once General Gorou left, you’d finally be free. You’d finally be able to live your life the way you wanted to. You would be able to leave the monastery behind, jump on a ship to a land far away, and restart your life there. And–
You froze when you heard the sound of hooves accompanied with a familiar voice.
“Woah there! Jeez, I know you’re happy to go running again, but this won’t be for fun, boy.”
General Gorou? Was he leaving already?
Your heart caught in your throat as you tossed everything to the side and dashed toward the front doors. Throwing them open, you froze upon seeing the general securing the last of his luggage to his trusted steed. And when his eyes fell upon you, he froze in return. Was he at a loss of what to say just like you? But by the steely expression that soon overtook his face, it seemed he found his words first.
“I’ll return safely to you, I promise.”
You wanted to laugh in response. He’ll return safely? How could he promise such a thing so easily? The Shogun’s army was mighty and the Sangonomiya Kingdom was so small. Sure, he was a mighty warrior. Sure, he proved himself in battle many times over, but that didn’t mean–
He took your hands and squeezed them tightly.
“I’ll come back to you safely. I promise. So…” He then cupped your cheek and smiled that adorable smile of his. “Don’t worry too much, okay? Make sure to eat your vegetables. And don’t get into fights with the priest. Oh! And the children adore you, so I’ll check to see you set a good example for them when I return.”
Disbelief exploded from your chest in the form of a bark of laughter.
“Don’t scold me right before you march to your death! Don’t worry about me! Just…” You turned away as tears filled your eyes. “Just come back alive.”
--
Itto - My Seventh Round of Life
You lived six lives before this one, each ending in failure. Murder, sickness, betrayal—the list goes on. You did everything right. You fulfilled all the duties of each life, and still each time ended in your early demise. So when you woke up for the seventh time, you decided you had enough. You’ll give life one last chance. This time you’ll make your own decisions! Although… getting caught by a gang of bandits certainly was not one of them!!!
“You can’t just… do this!!! They’re not going to allow it!” You exclaimed as you tried to pull the big burly oni back.
You had no clue what in the world made him think it was okay to simply set up a stage in the middle of such an illustrious city, but here was this big dope doing so! Didn’t he know what could happen? What if permits were needed? What if everybody was arrested for the fifth time this month!? But much to your dismay, Itto erupted in a big belly laughter at your despair.
“C’mon, First! Why are you getting your obi all tied in a knot? It’s not a big deal. We've done this maaaany times and it always turned out fine. Just trust me! It’s gonna be a riot!”
You wanted to scream. Of course, he wouldn’t see anything wrong with this. Didn’t this guy have any sense of self-preservation? But when you turned to Shinobu for assistance, there she was supervising the setup of the stage. Was literally everyone in this accursed gang insane?
Upon noticing your distressed expression, Itto let out a sigh. Soon you were wincing as a huge hand ruffled your carefully styled hair.
“Don’t worry, I get it! You’re standing here brought to tears over worrying about your great boss. It’ll be fine!” But when your expression didn’t change, his turned stern. “Look, if you spend all your time racking your brain over hows-its and whats-its, you’ll get all old and pruney before you know it. You only live once. Might as well make it worth it, right?”
You wanted to laugh. If only he knew this was your seventh life. You got killed for less. But… unlike your previous lives, it wasn’t as if the Arataki Gang was involved in anything illegal. Their antics only incurred, not the threat of bows and spears, but the rolling of eyes. You left your old life away too. They didn’t want you anymore. So… perhaps… Perhaps it couldn’t be that bad?
Your shoulders dropped.
“Fine.”
So when he jumped in front of the crowd with fireflies strapped to his horns and the rest of the gang jumping and dancing around him, the audience hooted and hollered with glee. With the music twanging high in the air and the children of the city rushing around you, somewhere along the line you found yourself laughing along too. It felt odd. Weird. Like there was a lightness in your chest you never felt before.
Was this what it felt like to live?
--
Zhongli - I Didn’t Mean to Sleep With the Celestial Emperor
Every century, the celestial emperor came down to the Kingdom of Liyue to grace his people with the divine knowledge needed to flourish until his return. After enjoying the week-long festival in the harbor to your heart’s content, you were excited for the main event. But as the celestial emperor descended from the heavens, what filled your chest was not awe, but confusion. Wasn’t he the guy you slept with last night?
“It has been said that while the Harbor represents the will of Liyue, Qingce Village represents its heart. It is a joy to see that it has remained just as I remembered.”
“O-Oh, is that so?” You asked as the corner of your smile twitched slightly.
You didn’t know how it came to this, bringing the celestial emperor around Liyue, that is. When you first saw his face, you nervously assumed you were mistaken. You clearly saw him descend from the heavens, after all. The man you spent a passionate evening with the night before certainly could not be him. But when he locked eyes with you from the parapet, dread filled your stomach.
You tried. You really did. The moment the procession was over, you upped and headed straight to the inn to pack your belongings to leave and leave to anywhere out of Liyue Harbor. But that would’ve been too easy. No, the moment you rushed downstairs and paid your bill, you turned to run straight into a young adeptus and was therefore whisked over to the man himself.
Though it would have been weird, you would have been fine if he simply wished to thank you for the evening, but things were never that simple, were they? No, when you were brought before him, he said that you promised to show him the delights of Liyue. You said he could take it as a verbal contract between you both and he wished to cash in on it.
Now, let it be said that you didn’t mean it. After having had a few drinks last night, you were in the mood to flirt and really, could you be held accountable for what came out of your mouth? You didn’t think he’d hold you to it! But at the same time, how could you refuse!? Only a fool would invalidate a contract made with the very being of contracts!
So here you were bringing the celestial emperor around as if he were some random normal traveler from a foreign land trying to hide from the common folk the divinity that oozed off of him in waves. It certainly did not help that he was handsome to boot and could steal hearts with a simple smile. And when he directed all that at you…?
“To be able to share this view with you…” His amber eyes glowed with warmth. “Your presence makes this trip even more of a delight.”
You couldn’t think straight.
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