I have until the end of April August to finish my dissertation and have (finally) shifted into full ‘oh shit’ mode about it.

I will likely be a bit AWOL on here sometimes until then, and will probably be even worse/slower at communicating than usual.

Apologies in advance.

(EDIT/UPDATE: Welp. Change of plans. Good progress was made, but ultimately April was simply not in the cards. Miles to go before I sleep etc etc etc. New deadline is late August/early September. Wish me luck and perseverance and a bunch of other good qualities please.)

adayinthelesbianlife:

New York, 1992

geniusoflove:

guy who just had like 3 weeks to do several things and didn’t do them: boy i need a week off!

simplyabby:

wvterways:

dduane:

mattnathanson:

“No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a lot, your kitchen will become a happy home to wild yeasts, and all your bread will taste better. Even a failed loaf is not wasted. Likewise, cheese makers wash the dairy floor with whey. Tomato gardeners compost with rotten tomatoes. No writing is wasted: the words you can’t put in your book can wash the floor, live in the soil, lurk around in the air. They will make the next words better.”

— ERIN BOW

So, so very much this.

jcrewguy:

ALT

pasitheapowder:

the-sassy-composer:

Been thinking a lot about what inspires writers and creators to make what they do, so I’m curious- if you’re an audio drama creator, what is your show about and what are three pieces of media that helped give you inspiration?

This is the greatest prompt ever. We are ALWAYS here to talk about our inspirations!

The Pasithea Powder is a queer sci-fi thriller. On a faraway world, Captain Sophie Green is recovering from a war that ripped her planet apart and left her personal relationships for dead. Among the many atrocities committed on both sides was the invention of Pasithea Powder, a drug with memory altering properties. Thankfully, the drug has been eradicated and only a handful of scientists—now political prisoners—know how to recreate it. When Sophie sees one of those scientists walking free, she has no choice but to turn to an estranged friend for help…

We have…a lot of inspirations, but of all of them there’s probably one main one, one important secondary one, and then a dynamic that’s gonna have to count as a third one:

Giant inspiration forever and ever amen: Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, set during WWI. WWI in general was a major source of inspiration, and the second and third books of the trilogy spend a lot of time reflecting on the violent gratuity of war in general and that war in particular. As to Regeneration, the first book, which sets the terms for the whole series, I’ll let the description from the Penguin Random House website do the talking: “In 1917 Siegfried Sassoon, noted poet and decorated war hero, publicly refused to continue serving as a British officer in World War I. His reason: the war was a senseless slaughter. He was officially classified “mentally unsound” and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital. There a brilliant psychiatrist, Dr. William Rivers, set about restoring Sassoon’s “sanity” and sending him back to the trenches. This novel tells what happened as only a novel can. It is a war saga in which not a shot is fired. It is a story of a battle for a man’s mind in which only the reader can decide who is the victor, who the vanquished, and who the victim.”

Crucial additional inspiration: Wolf 359. Molly got extremely into Wolf 359 and then demanded that we make a podcast. Not only is Wolf 359 incredibly written, plotted, acted, etc., it’s a story told in an audio medium that could be told in a lot of other mediums, but it wouldn’t be the same.

Standing in for a third inspiration: There’s Sherlock Holmes and there’s John Watson. There’s Jack Aubrey and there’s Stephen Maturin. There’s a scientist and there’s a soldier. There’s the introvert and the extrovert. There’s one person who hasn’t given their loyalty the sniff test and there’s another person who might let their pursuit of knowledge get the better of them.

flutishly:

This may be a bit trivial, but I think that part of the unsettling “deadness” of proposed machine-learned/AI art (beyond all the ick regarding theft and banality and such) is that part of what makes art ART is the context. Like, sometimes I like a piece of art not just because of its technical capabilities or even how it specifically reached out and related to me (which are two things which could theoretically be replicated by a machine, though I don’t believe that’s currently true), I like it because there’s something about how it was made. Yes, there’s “death of the author” as useful distancing tool, but sometimes the journey is part of the art. Knowing that a writer originally wanted a different ending which recontextualizes the entire work. A line that’s meant as a reference to a known historical or personal event and places the story in a certain space. Easter eggs or jokes or even how something is a “ripoff” of something else. “I was inspired by [X] and wanted to see myself in it, so I wrote [Y]” - that adds a whole other layer! It’s beautiful! It’s part of the art! And sometimes it’s a part of the art which makes (or breaks) it for me.

fuckyeahgoodomens:

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman