#navel-gazing

[mishacollins]

Time.

I’m at home alone with COVID, which is giving me time to naval-gaze and empty my inbox. In that inbox, I discovered that my friend Alex Gorosh (director of my series RoadFood) sent me this little documentary short on the topic of time.

For some reason, the unfathomable magnitude of space and time has always been a great source of comfort to me. I remember feeling miserable as a teenager and looking up at the stars of the night sky and taking great comfort in the fact that I was just a speck on this tiny blue planet in an ever-expanding universe of quintillions of planets. Looking up at the night sky on a clear night in New England as a kid I could see faint glow of the milky way—hundreds of billions of stars so distant they ceased to be points of light, but together they added up to a dusty smudge of luminosity across the sky—and all of the stars the Milky Way are in our own galaxy! And there are hundreds of billions of stars in hundreds of billions of other galaxies in this universe. To my high school mind all of this comforted me, because how could my little problems ever feel big when held up to the enormity of everything.

I always remember being soothed by the vastness of the universe, but when I was 40, I read “Annals of the Former World,” a tome on geology by John McPhee. The book beautifully illustrated the great expanse of geologic time, which so often exceeds the limits of our comprehension with this simple quote, “Consider the Earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.”

When I remember to remember, this too comforts me. The infinitesimally-small-smallness of my troubles helps them fade into nothing. Watching these few minutes on Youtube this morning, it was comforting to see that I am not alone in this perspective on our blink of time in this world. 

https://youtu.be/nOVvEbH2GC0

#Misha #Alex Gorosh #Time #Navel-Gazing

[lastontheboat]

Fandom creators self rec game! Choose five favourites from your own creations (and tell me why, if you like!), then pass on to at least five other people. I'd love to hear what you're proudest of.

Thank you @tackytigerfic for providing me an opportunity for navel-gazing! I enjoyed reading about your own favourites; I find it super interesting to see what other creators value about their works.

Per my last letter (I hope you choke on it)

This is my favourite completed fic for a number of reasons:

1. I had always wanted to try writing an epistolary

2. I had always wanted to try collaborating on a fic with a friend

3. The writing process was an absolute joy

It feels like a distillation of many of my favourite things, but unlike many fics the creation process didn't involve tearing my hair out trying to make it do what I wanted. Whenever I'd get stuck, I'd just close the document and go to bed, then when I woke up the next morning @fluxweeed would have added several new scenes that set my brain on fire. It was an absolutely magical experience for me, and I'm extremely fond of the end result. This is probably the fic of mine that I've re-read the most, and it delights me every time!

Podfic of Stop All The Clocks, by firethesound

I've got a lot of podfics to choose from, but this is one that I'm particularly proud of. The original fic is imprinted on my soul, but the thing that sticks with me more than the actual plot is the sensation of reading it and feeling my heart break over and over.

Making podfics is a very personal craft for me. It's an investment of my time, and I generally choose ones to record that I strongly associate with a particular first-time reading experience. This was my sixth large podfic project, and I really wanted my reading to amplify the heartbreak that's already present in the text. It was a much more emotional recording and editing process than most of my podfics, but it's also the only one I've listened to entirely after releasing it.

I'm extremely fond of every listener who has taken the plunge and commented about their experience of it, and completely understand everyone who has been like "I don't fuck with that fic. You couldn't pay me to listen it."

body electric

This is the first fic I can recall writing that was entirely driven by a feeling. I remember being consumed by the idea of that spark between Harry and Draco, of them needing to feed it and hold it but being unable to act upon it. I was between jobs and had a lot of time to myself, and I wrote this fic in a fugue state over the space of two days. I had never experienced a writing process so feverish before, and I don't know if I will again.

I also need to shout out the beta feedback I got from @zaharya on this one, whose very insightful comments about the passage of time in the second chapter led to me adding a bunch of my favourite lines to it:

“I want to bend you over this table,” he says, panting now. “I want you under me, here in my workshop. You’ll leave here and every time you smell wood shavings you’ll think of me.” “I already do,” Malfoy says, his voice cracking.

Podfic of If The Fates Allow, by saras_girl

I spend a lot of time listening to audiobooks these days, and I really appreciate being able to consume so many stories while driving or cooking. For me, recording a podfic is about giving others the opportunity to experience some of my favourite fics, and trying to capture some of what they mean to me in my voicing.

saras_girls fics hold a very special place in my heart, and this one is my absolute favourite of hers. As a podfic, the biggest challenge here was dealing with the ensemble cast—it stretched the limits of unique voices I could do without them sounding forced, but it was also exciting trying to keep the voices consistent across 25 chapters.

the spirit is willing (the flesh is weak)

This is the newest fic that I finished (the only one so far in 2023), but I haven't made too much noise about it on here because it's attached to my alt account. This one started out as a concept that wouldn't leave me alone (Bill/Ginny fuck or die), but it's also another data point in my exploration of what it's like to write smut.

I still don't think it comes naturally to me, whatever that means—I'm much more comfortable keeping my writing to Teen, but I'm very satisfied with how this fic achieves what I set out to do with it. It was a stretch, but a good stretch!

#my works #navel-gazing #i've always wanted to put together some behind the scenes posts about my creations #thank you helping that process along!

[jomiddlemarch]

First Words Meme

Tagged by the incredible @tortoisesshells...

Rules: post the first lines of your 10 most recent fanfics.

1. Aleksander had thanked every Saint he could think of and a few he’d probably invented when he took that first bite of Alina’s showstopper and tasted too much tsaoko and not enough fennel. (If I'm going to do something, I'll do it properly or not at all, Shadow and Bone)

2. “I think you must carry the entire weight of the world on your shoulders,” Alina said, resting her hands lightly on Aleksander’s broad back. (Though it to body first repair, Shadow and Bone)

3. “The Thornton place is to let,” Helen said. (through the whisky mists, ch. 21, All Creatures Great and Small, only picking the last of the 21 drabbles to increase variety here)

4. “You may have needed me. I never needed you.” (Can have no way but falsehood to be true?, Shadow and Bone)

5. “Here,” Audrey said, holding out a cup of tea in one hand and an old-fashioned hot water bottle wrapped in a bit of worn toweling. (Friendship is really the finest balm, All Creatures Great and Small)

6. “Plausible deniability? Plausible deniability, Alina?” Aleksander said, his voice tight and the utter absence of any nickname or endearment was not lost upon her but she knew enough not begin with anything resembling an apology. (what it is to be a thin crescent moon, Shadow and Bone, Ch. 30)

7. After the coup, after the treaties were signed and the pacts, the embassies established, after General Kirigan was installed as First Minister of the Council and seven additional training centers were set up to correspond to the most populous regions of Ravka, Erriot’h and Tris were told to exchange their crimson keftas for the pale brown that had been chosen for the Tvarynysts, that cadre of Healers who’d been found to have a particular affinity for animals. (a life of endless interest and variety, Shadow and Bone x All Creatures Great and Small)

8. “Darrowby—yes, all right, of course. I’ll tell them, straightaway,” Mrs. Hall said, setting down the telephone and looking at it as if it were a creature she had never seen before. (We shall new shadows make the other way, All Creatures Great and Small x Shadow and Bone, and yes, I’ve used this title more than once...)

9. “‘Lustrous?’ Again? How did I even, this is going to kill me—” Alina broke off, squinting at the screen as if she could arrange her eyes and eyelids in some way that would make the passage she’d been laboring over for the past hour read how she needed it to. (All shall love me and despair, Shadow and Bone)

10. “I’ve a confession to make, Anne-girl,” Gilbert said, pitching his voice just loud enough to catch her attention without risking waking Jem, who’d finally settled down to sleep in her arms after a fractious afternoon cutting his second tooth. (it is always that eternal poetry of Christmas night, Anne of Green Gables)

BONUS ROUND, from my open tab WIP:

11. “On leave Thursday next. Taking 4:15. Will need extra rations,” James read the telegram aloud again, holding the flimsy paper in his hand, though he might as well have left it propped on the mantle as he knew the words by heart. (untitled All Creatures Great and Small fic)

Tagging @orlissa @vesperass-anuna @aquitainequeen @asteraceae-blue @nervousladytraveler @oldshrewsburyian @kivrin and anyone else who wants to play!

#so trends shows opening with dialogue #and I am the queen of Very Long Sentences Indeed #I think I open with dialogue more in fic I anticipate will be shorter #more scene-setting for something I imagine as longer form #I do often hear the characters' voices very clearly so the dialogue opening is easy #navel-gazing

[brutish-impulse]

So I think I probably am ND in some way...

can intensely focus on things, but I can't just choose on what

extremely distracted by language (people talking, music with lyrics, I have to read everything before my eyes)

weird obsessive interests

how do I social skills lol?

frankly excessive amount of daydreaming

I'm just skeptical if getting a diagnosis is gonna make my life better in any way, and I don't want to run around self-dxing...

#navel-gazing #personal

[merge-conflict]

Going from the "happy" gorov universe:

“It seems everyone believes you have seduced me, and I am helpless to refuse.” He closed his eyes, just for a moment. “I want the things they believe I have already.” It was far too much to ask. V herself was most at risk from Hanako’s displeasure, just as she now endured the consequences of rumor and gossip. No matter how she claimed it might be an advantage to be underestimated, it infuriated him to hear her reputation sullied by cowards who cared only for their own survival. And yet how else could he protect her, except to stop holding her at arms length? “Little do they know,” she said, a strange smile tugging at the corner of her lips, “that I’m the one helpless to refuse.”

To the very unhappy one:

“You came alone.” It’s a statement of fact, and not a question. Arasaka has few interests in this city, but the owner of this building has debts. Had debts. “I came alone,” she agrees, bitterly. “I came alone and I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. She is busy with other projects.”

#navel-gazing #just described my 'rapid prototyping' method of playing with plot ideas to a friend #an important part is boundary checking what someone will and won't do (separate from what they CLAIM they will and won't do) #but it's satisfying to kind of compare them and see it #i know it's my own writing but i don't usually cross reference so carefully so it was cool to see when i was doing some thinking #anyway enjoy these snippets of valentine thinking solely with his pussy #consistent characterization ho! #;3

[max1461]

"I would never-"

You would if you were tired enough. You would if you were hungry enough. You would if your mind and body had been worn down enough, through pain or disease or toil or violent struggle. You might if you were put on the wrong medicine, or you got the wrong kind of head injury, or you were forced to choose between someone else and yourself. You might if your livelihood was staked on it, or all your hopes and dreams. You might if you didn't know what else to do, if it's what you were taught or if nobody taught you anything else.

I have not been worn down in most of these ways. I have lived a remarkably privileged life. But I have been worn down in some ways. And they were enough to teach me that in the wrong circumstances, any of us can become someone we don't want to be. It's worth keeping that in mind.

#navel gazing

[purplecatruins]

Why would I stargaze if I could navel-gaze?

#just kidding #unsent texts #unsent project #quotes #fun fun fun #navel-gazing #navel gazing

[somelocusts]

I have this annoying bad habit where if I see everybody on Earth talking about how fantastic some movie is I just won't watch it because I am fully convinced that the movie must be completely overhyped because nothing popular is ever any good and then ten million years later someone will ask me if I've seen it and I'll admit that I haven't and they'll sit me down and make me watch it and I'll humor them and then the movie will be really awesome and I'll love it and I'll be like "Why did I wait so long to watch this?" But then I'll learn nothing from this experience and the cycle continues forever unabated.

...So yeah, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish was pretty good.

#Puss in boots #Puss in boots 2 #Navel-gazing

[chamerionwrites]

As an unabashed writer, reader, and enjoyer of fanfic, 50K-note Tumblr posts about how gr8 fanfic is are almost universally insufferable

#wrong navel-gazing AND smug. we are not the same lol

[sandpaper-blues]

So this is how it's gone...

I used to blog. A lot. And I loved it. It fit my way of communicating with the world. Blabbing my thoughts one letter at a time onto a page and hitting Publish. Done. It was there; a record to refer back to; a placeholder for who I used to be at one specific point in time. A few likes would trickle in. Maybe the odd comment. Some of those would be from a curated list of people I know IRL so…

View On WordPress

#blogging #navel-gazing #return to form #social media #the bitch is back

[hopeymchope]

Ye ol’ hypersomnia/narcolepsy is incredibly bad this week. The medication I’ve been shifted to just doesn’t work? Like, at all, evidently? And thus, I literally just woke up from losing 2.25 hours in the middle of my work day. YEAH. That’s a bad look. 

The problem is that, yeah, my most effective medication? No one can get it anymore because it’s been prescribed to so many people for so many things yet is considered a controlled substance by the U.S. government, so there are limits on production and the government refuses to allow increased production so they’re just OUT OF IT. EVERYWHERE. ALL THE TIME. 

The doctor is understandably not willing to just keep moving every single patient’s prescriptions around to suit whatever current stock exists in whatever obscure pharmacy for the current fleeting moment (it’s a Schedule II drug so the doctor has to move it between pharmacies, patient can’t do it alone), so I had to change meds or simply not have anything anymore. Because of the fucking FDA’s refusal to budge or whatever.

This is actually my SECOND attempt to replace the Actually Working med, though! The first time I got put on something SO effective that I just COULDN’T SLEEP, PERIOD. By the end of the work week, I was technically “awake” but my heart was pounding from exhaustion and I could barely piece together coherent thought. So. That sucked, too.

Well, I gotta change AGAIN. And again and again, I guess, until we find something functional. This situation will not stand.

#hypersomnia #narcolepsy #self #navel-gazing

[chimeric-art]

literally just vibing

#indulging in navel gazing via fursona #this was my fit yesterday and it felt Nice #the plaid shirt was new and very soft uvu #yes it's time for my biannual furry art #red panda #fursona #chimera #my art #my characters #sfw furry

[holdoncallfailed]

it's all well and good to criticize taylor swift for her private jet usage or her marketing tactics or being a billionaire or her insufferable fanbase but in that kind of moral posturing we must not lose sight of the most fundamental critique of her as an artist and a public figure: her music just doesn't sound very good.

#quality of work always trumps morality in these cases at least in MY opinion. #idc that she only writes breakup songs or introspective navel gazing whatever. the problem is that those breakup songs sound like doodoo #and her lyrics are insanely corny. all the other stuff is secondary #text

[imsobadatnicknames2]

While I've repeatedly made the argument in the past that "D&D 5e is mostly a combat-centric action-adventure game, literally the vast majority of its pagecount is dedicated to combat mechanics", after giving it much thought I think that argument is pretty flawed.

Now, I STILL think modern D&D is a very combat centric game (and I still think that makes it pretty silly when certain people will decide to run their combat-light political intrigue campaign in 5e and then gush about how the sessions where they have the most fun are the ones where they engage the least with the game mechanics and "barely touch the dice") but I think that arguing that on the basis of "most of its mechanics are tied to combat" is incompatible with my views on what TTRPG rules and mechanics ARE in the fist place.

I've talked about in the past about how I fundamentally view mechanics as decision tools that the referee/GM (or the group, in the case of GMless games) defers the responsibility of deciding the outcome of certain situations to, so that they don't have the pressure of having to manually arbitrate the outcome every time (and so that they can be confident that the outcome is not affected by the GM's biases)

And the thing is, under this view of mechanics, the bulk of a game's mechanical detail doesn't necessarily correspond (or need to correspond) with the actions that players will be engaging in the most often.

So I think modern D&D is primarily a combat game but I don't think this is the case because having most of its mechanical detail centered around combat inherently makes it a combat game, I think it is because the way the mechanics interact with each other makes combat a very optimal way to solve problems.

#navel gazing #i will elaborate more in a bit lol #ttrpg

[max1461]

A moral lesson I wish literally everybody would learn is this: the very same actions that keep you safe when you are powerless can be abusive when you hold power over someone. The difference between resisting subjugation and subjugating others is often more a matter of context than anything else. And when context changes, it can be hard to relearn one's behavior—it requires an active effort. Probably all of us have hurt others needlessly, in some way or another, by doing things out of a reactive instinct for self-preservation. Probably all of us have been hurt by others, sometimes very deeply, when they were acting out of the same instinct.

I don't like speaking about ethics in the language of blame, but insofar as blame is a coherent notion to begin with, I'll say this: neither is anyone evil for the failure to fully rework themselves and free themselves of bad habit after struggle, nor does the difficulty of reworking oneself excuse the abuse of others. Nor, though we may wish otherwise, is it always epistemically possible to our own actions with confidence in one camp or the other. We can only do our best to treat others well and at the same time ourselves, though it is often not clear how.

#navel gazing

[chillguy180]

Some ab flexes after a workout. Excuse my lower area -_-

#me #male heartbeat #cardiophila #cardiophile #fast heartbeat #heartbeat #slow heartbeat #bellybutton #bellybutton navel #hot navel #male bellybutton #lean body #male navel #navel gazing #deep navel #male abs #male cardiophilia #oval navel #sexy navel #sexy tummy #sexy male #running #straight boys #beating heart #male model #hot male #straight men #navelfetish #navel #female belly button