Another three weeks post. I'm behind, of course, but that's because work has gotten
intense and is likely to stay such for the time being, which is...fine...
(RIP having social time, honestly; I get home late enough that it's like, "ah, yay, I can...nope, everyone's already settled in for the night".)
Question 15: What is your opinion on social media? That most of it is pretty terrible? I don't trust anything algorithmic; creators of different sites realized a long time ago that things that get engagement are also the things that enrage us, and I'd rather not have my emotions manipulated,
thank you.
Question 16: What is something that you like that your parents do? Oh, God. This is a question for people who had good parents, isn't it? Ha. Um.
When I was little, my dad used to sit me down for impromptu music appreciation lessons. I can still remember him putting on different old records and such and explaining what the lyrics of the songs meant and why they were important to him. A lot of my love for music started with my dad walking me through e.g. the best of Simon and Garfunkel, and I'm still grateful for that.
Question 17: When are you most productive, and why? Mid-morning, because I am appropriately caffeinated,
thank you.
Question 18: What piece of art has had a large impact on you, and how? I mean I suppose it depends on how you define
art. Are we talking visual art? Music? Poetry?
(Not to be difficult, but:
precision in language!)
I'm going to guess that the intention is to talk about visual art, so!
Paintings that live rent-free in my head:
Las Meninas, by Velasquez, because it was one of the first times that someone walked me through the composition of a painting and helped me understand why it is A) regarded as a masterpiece, and B) why it's such a complex work of art/so hard to classify.
Ocean Park #67, by Richard Diebenkorn, because I saw it when I went to SF MOMA by myself ten(!) years ago, and was struck by how lovely it (and other paintings in the series) were, and how it made me realize that actually yes I
do like abstract art. (I later ended up reading up on Diebenkorn and his
own inspiration by Matisse, and actually attending
that exhibit as well — it was well-done and really made me think differently about some of my own work and whether or not it's 'derivative'.)
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, by Caspar David Friedrich, not for any particular reason except I like it (surprising absolutely no one, I like the art of the Romantic period quite a bit...), and I have inadvertently found myself taking many photos of Maximo that end up with him in more or less this pose. (Genuinely, there's a photo I took when we went to Olympic National Park in 2019 that's him standing on the edge of Hurricane Ridge and peering down into the fog that
always makes me laugh when I see it, because between the two of us, oops, we accidentally recreated
this painting.)
Question 19: How would you spend $1,000 to give the most happiness to the most number of people possible? I mean...how do we define happiness?
(Take your time; I'll wait.)
Truly, ah — I think I would do whatever I do whenever I have a bit of extra money, which is donate it to one of three local places:
-Outside In (they provide medical care for homeless youth and other marginalized people in the PDX area, including operating a safe needle exchange, providing gender-affirming care, and helping with addiction/chemical dependency — they are extremely compassionate and not judgmental)
-the local food bank (I know the people who run it; $1k would go
a long way, and they do good work in the community ensuring that everyone has enough to eat)
-the local humane society (it's where we've gotten all of our cats from; they're well-run and they also provide low/no-cost vet care for people in need)
Genuinely, I don't think there is one one-size-fits-all answer for this. There's no
wrong way to answer. Maybe it's that you go "fuck it" and throw a pizza party for your local elementary school, or buy a ton of rubber ducks and organizer a scavenger hunt for your community, or donate it to your local library or something...
...but I'm old and staid and boring, and I think that e.g. Outside In would do more good with it than I could, and I'm fine with that.
—
A little bit of non-three-weeks stuff:
I made a joke yesterday about how I "did it right" — I took all the writing classes in college, participated in and organized multiple writing workshops, did editing professionally, have spent years "honing my craft"...and now all I use it for is writing explicit fanfic, because truly, that is the best use of my skill.
"Is it good? Well, the intended audience of
three whole people liked it, so it succeeds at what it set out to do, ergo, it is Good."
Anyway, I joked about this, and it resulted in one of my friends going, "yes, but when are you going to query something, because I want to read whatever spec fic you write". (Paraphrased, but — yes.)
Made me realize that I don't remember the last time I thought about traditional publishing? Like,
oh yeah, at one point I very much wanted to do that, but that "at one point" was literally fifteen-odd years ago, and I just...
At one point I think I wanted to write and get something published mostly to prove that I could. I don't know that I necessarily had anything original to say or a story that I felt
had to be told; it was mostly, "well, this is the logical next step in Proving Myself", back when existence felt like a slog that had to be justified.
Now it's like —
I guess I could do that? Mostly it's like, "oh, I think this was meant as you telling me that you like my storytelling" (they're familiar with it through tabletop, mostly) "and you would like to enjoy more of it". Which is a nice feeling, truly.
There are some parts of tabletop stuff that are wholly original and which might be nice worldbuilding pieces for a book one day — but one thing at a time, of course, need to finish campaigns first and start in on
new stuff before I can begin looking at threads of old stuff and going, "okay, I know I want to play in this world, where do I start?" Mostly thinking about, well — I laughed earlier today when I realized that I have accidentally created a proper naming convention for how elven nicknames work in certain parts of the world, along with reasoning for why certain people have nicknames that follow those conventions while others don't.
(It's all very silly and setting-specific, but it has to do with levels of formality in elven society, how marriage and such is approached when you live A REALLY LONG TIME, and class and status. This is the sort of thing I find myself thinking about quite a lot, and,
welp.)
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