professional grumpypants

candy-m-s: rumpuswriters: Writing Tip: If you don’t feel like actually writing, prepare for...

Tue, 26 Jun 2018 23:05:58 +0300

rumpuswriters:

Writing Tip:

If you don’t feel like actually writing, prepare for writing:

Open your WIP Word doc

Read the last page again

Scribble notes on what happens next

Once you’ve done this, you might just find yourself wanting to continue after all. And if you don’t, no worries. You’ve made it easier to jump back into it later.

This always works for me! Really good advice!

e-doro: e-doro: -we’ve been approved for an apartment with 3 months down + security deposit,...

Tue, 26 Jun 2018 22:50:24 +0300

e-doro:

e-doro:

-we’ve been approved for an apartment with 3 months down + security deposit, approximately $1750

-we will also need to pay to set up our electric utilities (haven’t talked to the electric company yet but my friends who live there say their account took $150 to set up)

-WE ALSO NEED TO BREAK OUR LEASE HERE BETWEEN THE 1ST AND 5TH OF NEXT MONTH, OR WE WON’T BE ABLE TO GET OUT ($625)

-we’ll need to be able to rent a car and pay to eat for the first little while we get up there before we can get signed up for foodstamps/get jobs, unless we get them ahead of time, and even then we won’t be paid immediately

-we’re okay for food right now because of my foodstamps

i’m going to ask my family for help, and i’ve updated our fundraiser and the tumblr post

but i’m also going to link fred’s paypal to solicit donations. we just had to pay our internet bill, will have to pay it again next month before we leave plus any disconnection fees, and fred will have at least 2 more doctor’s appointments (one coming up in the next couple of days, one with its psychiatrist to get a prescription for its medication) before we move! since we don’t have a car, that all adds up

so please spread our fundraiser post, and consider reblogging or boosting this as well

i just had to go to the hospital for a kidney stone! fred is undergoing various medical treatments to determine whether or not it has cancer! our internet bill is $109!! we haven’t gotten anything on paypal or any donations on the fundraiser in a week!

things are getting pretty dire here and we don’t have a lot of margin for error. if we miss our chance to get out of this hell hole we are probably going to end up evicted, because neither of us can get a job within walking distance and i don’t have a functioning vehicle! please help by signal boosting our fundraising post, we have about ~350 more to go on there and it would really help give us a cushion!

surkuzoo: Rilla, cornish rex cat♥ (ig: @crx_curlyaliens )

Tue, 26 Jun 2018 03:30:16 +0300

surkuzoo:

Rilla, cornish rex cat♥ (ig: @crx_curlyaliens )

roachpatrol: owl-and-the-moon: sespursongles: I found out recently that at a time of his life when...

Mon, 25 Jun 2018 23:42:23 +0300

roachpatrol:

owl-and-the-moon:

sespursongles:

I found out recently that at a time of his life when Tolstoy was in a slump and had stopped writing & earning money, his wife Sophia borrowed money from her mum to start her own publishing office and publish editions of his works—and in order to figure out how publishing worked, she travelled to St Petersburg to ask Anna Dostoyevsky for advice, as Anna had also spent the past 14 years planning the editions of her husband’s work, correcting proofs, placing ads in papers, battling official censors, etc.
It reminded me of this post about women writers supporting each other—so many links between women in history that we never hear about. Someone please write a book about the wives of all the great male writers…

(In previous years Sophia, while giving birth to Tolstoy’s 13 children and raising them and managing his estate (he was a count) pretty much on her own, also wrote the clean copies of all of his manuscripts out of his nearly illegible drafts—the final draft of War and Peace was 3,000 pages and she copied it seven times, correcting spelling and grammar and offering key suggestions and critiques of the plot; for example explaining to him that people would be more interested in the social or romantic plots, the human aspects, than in the minutiae of the battles and war strategy plots. A few months before his death, Tolstoy named a male friend the executor of his literary estate rather than his wife, who had been doing this thankless job since she was 19, and gave to the public domain all the copyrights to his works that Sophia had previously owned (for her publishing company). She wrote in her diary “Now I am cast aside as of no further use, although I am, nevertheless, expected to do impossible things.”)

Also I shouldn’t be surprised (but I am) at just how many “great male writers” read their wife’s (or female relatives’) diaries and drew a lot of inspiration from them, stealing ideas or even sometimes entire sentences / paragraphs / poems out of them. This is such a recurrent pattern. There’s Tolstoy (who read Sophia’s diaries and also asked her, when she was 17, to show him a short story she’d written, gave it back to her the next day saying he’d barely glanced at it, when he actually wrote in his diary “What force of truth and simplicity!” and used the story as the embryo for the Rostov family in War and Peace), but also William Wordsworth who read his sister Dorothy’s journal and drew a lot from it, and F. Scott Fitzgerald of course. When Zelda was still young a magazine editor offered to publish parts of her journals, and her husband (of 5 months!) said he couldn’t allow it because he drew a lot of inspiration from them and planned on using parts of them in his future novels and short stories. There’s also French novelist Raymond Radiguet who stole his female lover’s diary to write his novel The Devil in the Flesh, and was lauded by fellow male writers & critics for his brilliant insights into a woman’s mind. Which had been copy/pasted from this woman’s diary.
[Also, while he didn’t read it until after her death, Henry James’s sister Alice mentions in her diary that he “embedded in his pages many pearls fallen from my lips, which he steals in the most unblushing way, saying, simply, that he knew they had been said by the family, so it did not matter.”]
I really love reading women’s journals, and when they were married to a famous writer, you wouldn’t believe how often the person who edited them mentions in the introduction “if some passages sound familiar it’s because her husband was reading her diary and ~getting inspired” ie plagiarising although the term technically doesn’t apply because every word his wife wrote and idea she had was legally his property (just like she was).

It makes me feel so bitter to contrast what women do—decades of unpaid, unacknowledged work to proofread, copy, publish, preserve from censorship, improve, develop and promote their husband’s writing—with what men do—openly steal ideas and whole sentences from their wife’s writing while forcing her to give birth to 13 children that she didn’t want and he doesn’t help raise.

There has been a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet in my house as long as I can remember, and I held dear many verses from it for a long time. Then I read about his relationship with one Elizabeth Haskell, who supported and edited and worked so closely with him that, “Haskell’s contribution to his writing, including The Prophet, was such that by today’s standard she would be acknowledged as co-author.” (Wikipedia, but there was a much longer article about her I stumbled across once.)

Kind of takes the mystic-spiritual edge off a male writer when you learn that much of what was published under his name was discreetly written into his work by a talented but nameless woman behind the scenes.

Victoria

Mon, 25 Jun 2018 15:08:19 +0300

Victoria:

elanorpam:

Another Etsy thing I’m selling!

This is a lithograph. For the people who don’t know how lithographs are made, I… have no words to convey how fucking hard traditional lithographs are to make, if you happen to not be a professional artist with a handy assistant to do all the unpleasant bits. But basically, I drew this on a big hunk of limestone. I used printing ink diluted in turpentine for the lines, a special lithographic pencil for the more delicate shading, and paper and plastic for the big surfaces and effects– masked the artwork, smoothed paper on a thin surface of ink then pressed it on the stone, same with crumpled plastic.

And then there was this whole rigamarole with gum arabic mixed with several percentages of acid, which i applied like twice to different parts of the stone to preserve the shades of grey, and there was talcum, the industrial sort, and then I had to carry that bigass slab of limestone to this huge old metallic hunk of a hand-cranked printer, some really jurassic shit, and I hand-cranked it twenty times to get twenty copies of this baby here!

And then I dragged that biggass slab of limestone to a big ol’ sink and spent like two to four hours erasing my hard work by rubbing another big hunk of limestone on it with carborundum powder and vinegar under an indiscriminate spray of water so i could go and draw something else on it.

Lithography is suffering, wetness, many colds and powerful arm muscles.

By the way I also have a Teepublic store! I hope to add this one and more as a print as soon as I have access to a proper working scanner so keep an eye on it!

#5yrsago App shows you the way to the illegally hidden public beaches of Malibu

Mon, 25 Jun 2018 09:28:08 +0300

mostlysignssomeportents:

Back in May, Mark wrote about a Kickstarter project to fund a mobile app that will help you locate the hidden entrances to Malibu’s public beaches, which the local rich and famous people have done everything they can to obscure (including putting up illegal fake signs that falsely declare passage to be trespassing).

The Kickstarter was fully funded and the app is out, and the public is finding its way to Malibu’s public beaches, which is great news – unless you’re one of those people who’s spent decades treating a public beach as your own private patch. Local residents are pissed:

https://boingboing.net/2013/06/24/app-shows-you-the-way-to-the-i.html

mazarinedrake: prokopetz: Sufficiently advanced coping mechanisms are indistinguishable from...

Mon, 25 Jun 2018 09:26:06 +0300

mazarinedrake:

prokopetz:

Sufficiently advanced coping mechanisms are indistinguishable from adulthood.

This is literally the reason why I wasn’t able to get diagnosed with autism last year.

The psychologist actually *said,* to my face, that maybe if I’d been screened as a kid, I’d have been diagnosed. But my coping mechanisms are so good that they throw off the test results. Which would be great, if they were also good enough to *let me hold down a regular job.*

holy shit, big mood right there.

kikkerje: slav-reject: markv5: Мамино Солнышко!!!😃… “Mama’s...

Mon, 25 Jun 2018 03:30:15 +0300

kikkerje:

slav-reject:

markv5:

Мамино Солнышко!!!😃…

“Mama’s sunshine”

Awwww

victoriousvocabulary: CALAVERA [noun] a representation of a...

Sun, 24 Jun 2018 03:30:06 +0300

victoriousvocabulary:

CALAVERA

[noun]

a representation of a human skull. The term is most often applied to decorative or edible skulls made (usually by hand) from either sugar (called Alfeñiques) or clay which are used in the Mexican celebration of the Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos cona) and the Roman Catholic holiday All Souls’ Day.

Etymology: Spanish and Catalan for “skull”, from Latin calvaria.

Original: The World As You See It by Kate MacDowell

elanorpam: pudgy-puk: yeah yeah yeah estinien did a cool thing, estinien used jumps to make big...

Sat, 23 Jun 2018 08:49:50 +0300

elanorpam:

pudgy-puk:

yeah yeah yeah estinien did a cool thing, estinien used jumps to make big explosions on bad guy cannons, estinien finally got rid of eggnog’s bullshit for good, whatever

if you ask me

we were robbed of the most important stormblood!estinien moment

which would have been the moment when, months and months after estinien bailed out of the ishgardian infirmary and just went off to live in the wilderness or whatever he did in relative peace and quiet now that the war was over

someone told him about shinryu, and what it was, and how it was fucking powered by nidhogg’s fucking eyeballs

and he instantly aged about fifteen years and had a combination stroke-coronary-nervous breakdown right in front of whoever broke the news to him

that’s all well and good but we all know Estinien elusive-jumped straight out of bed into an unwashed suit of armor and then spineshatter-dove out the window and mirage-dove straight into the stratosphere the moment he found himself not tied to the sickbed

only one person aged fifteen years on the spot and that was the nurse assigned to him, who incidentally needs all our thoughts and prayers right now

I object to this! Estinien is wearing the AF3 now, so that implies that at the time he put it on, it was clean. It’s probably pretty grody by now, tho.

Otherwise, I agree, our boy isn’t the type to be happy unless he has something to do (and per the SB drg quests? He is actually happy). That nurse, however…

orbitaldropkick:KILL SIX BILLION DEMONS

Sat, 23 Jun 2018 08:46:05 +0300

orbitaldropkick:

KILL SIX BILLION DEMONS

holepsi:don’t trust the apostate 2: reborn

Sat, 23 Jun 2018 03:30:07 +0300

holepsi:

don’t trust the apostate 2: reborn

dodostad: So unfortunately my cat Susu was diagnosed with cancer today, Feline Lymphoma. He’s...

Fri, 22 Jun 2018 23:00:18 +0300

dodostad:

So unfortunately my cat Susu was diagnosed with cancer today, Feline Lymphoma. He’s currently with my wife in Canada (I’m in Europe) so I can’t see him which is breaking my heart.

I am in the middle of transitioning to sick leave myself so I cannot offer commissions since my health won’t allow any extra work (this is also why I haven’t been posting much). But if any of you have some money you can spare for his treatment costs I’d appreciate it. I only wish his remaining time is free of pain and happy.

Here’s a link to my wife’s Ko-fi for donations https://ko-fi.com/A8068ZH

She’s also open for work so please check her stuff out here https://twitter.com/playerprophet

catchymemes: The Claw strikes

Fri, 22 Jun 2018 09:34:56 +0300

catchymemes:

The Claw strikes

Click here to support Help Us Move To Ft. Wayne organized by Jamie Bishop

Fri, 22 Jun 2018 09:29:46 +0300

Click here to support Help Us Move To Ft. Wayne organized by Jamie Bishop:

e-doro:

e-doro:

e-doro:

e-doro:

Long story short: Fred and I are trying to move out of this hellhole and into an apartment complex up north in Ft Wayne, IN, where we know a couple of people who have been helping us.

Our current apartment is a disgusting, toxic mess, the surrounding area is shitty and has few job opportunities, and we’re very socially isolated. Additionally, we are paying over $600 a month to live in this bug-infested, moldy hellhole where none of the outlets work.

The climate here also exacerbates both of our health issues.

Our old goal was $2500. I’ve just increase that to $3000, because I’m trying to buy a car. My car will no longer even start, and is far past the point of being worth repairs. I thought Fred and I would both be able to get jobs close by and use that money to add to our moving fund/help break our lease, but that has fallen through.

I should be able to trade my car in or sell it for parts for a few hundred dollars. I’m also asking my mom for help, but I don’t know how much she will be able to help. I desperately need a functioning vehicle. I’m hoping that if I can put $1000 down on a used car - the ones I’m looking at cost between 2-3.5k - then I can lower my monthly payments, pay a couple of them off in advance, and use that car to get a job as well as to move us up north.

So we need $600 more!

Any amount helps! If you have $1 or $5 or $10 floating around, consider throwing it at us! If you don’t, and I completely understand, please signal boost.

400 to our goal! i just spoke to the leasing manager of the apartment we’re trying to get into, and she says that with 3 months down + a cosigner it is EXTREMELY LIKELY the property manager will approve us to move in!

the apartment complex is on a bus line which will make job seeking a lot easier! we’re also exploring several job opportunities at this moment and will continue to apply to places up there in the meantime!

anyway please reblog or donate if you can, every dollar helps us!

375 to our goal!

still 375! addtionally, was just emailed back by the leasing manager and she confirms that the property manager will approve us for 3 months rent up front (~1500) along with the security deposit (250) and the fee for our co-signer (10)!

so we’ll be able to do that as well as set up an electric utility account and have our apartment waiting for us! our move-in date will be july 20th!

the only real worry now is that we’ll need to break our lease here (625) and rent a car to get up there! i should have a few hundred left over after securing the apartment and i can ask for help from my family, but it is now really crucial that we get as close to our goal as possible so we don’t end up stuck here!

wordswithkittywitch: Maybe I’m biased because I make my own clothes, but skirts are better than...

Fri, 22 Jun 2018 03:30:03 +0300

wordswithkittywitch:

Maybe I’m biased because I make my own clothes, but skirts are better than trousers because you can put bigger pockets in skirts. With trousers, you’re limited to the size of your leg but with skirts you can just fill it up and people will just assume you’re wearing a petticoat until they hear the crunch of the Dorito bags.

Just once I’d like the see an historical heroine be asked if it bothers her that she has to wear skirts and have say, “Not really. I couldn’t fit this in a waistcoat.” and just pull out a loaf of bread or something and start eating it right in front of the baffled male lead.

It would work great in the 1700s with those removable pockets, you could fit a couple of Italian loaves in there.

Reblog this with a terrible one-sentence summary of your WIP

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 21:51:15 +0300

roachpatrol:

shadowwood:

ceescedasticity:

bethany-sensei:

imaginatrixproductions:

kiaradimari:

damawrites:

ink-poisoning-archive:

arynneva:

I love reading purposefully awful summaries of stories (e.g. Two dudes trash stolen jewelry while its previous owner throws a hissy fit: LotR)

Two insufferable old men challenge God to a big dick contest, and a different insufferable old man is friendzoned and pissed about it.

Area woman destroys world; area men forced to talk to each other like human beings.

Grown man throws a tantrum when his adopted brother is named King instead of him; he decides to destroy the whole country, but he must face a ragtag group of teens bent on sticking his nose in the corner for being a bad man.

A set of estranged siblings on the path to become magical girls/boys undo the work of another set of siblings and their mother, who throw a lot of temper tantrums as a result.

Trans man blunders into politics, gets involved in other countries’ war.

Human trainwreck imprints on blackmailers.

Heavily drugged teenager dries out for the first time and immediate gets drafted by the army, tries to fuck a robot, and finds out all their lives are a lie.

Local teens expect to have a nice summer break, but don’t.

So a fae, a clown, and a priest go on a roadtrip…

effelants: theconqueeror: labambinafantasma: If you’re European, in a couple of weeks you will be...

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 20:30:48 +0300

effelants:

theconqueeror:

labambinafantasma:

If you’re European, in a couple of weeks you will be denied any and all access to fandom contents on Tumblr and everywhere else on the internet. Here’s why.

On June, 20th the JURI of European Parliament approved of the articles 11 and 13 of the new Copyright Law. These articles are also known as the “Link Tax” and the “Censorship Machines” articles.

Articles 13 in particular forces every internet platform to filter all the contents we upload online, ending once and for all the fandom culture. Which means you won’t be able to upload any type of fandom works like fan arts, fan fictions, gif sets from your favourite films and series, edits, because it’s all copyrighted material. And you won’t also be able to share, enjoy or download other’s contents, because the use of links will be completely restricted.

But not everything’s lost yet. There’s another round of voting scheduled for the early days of July.

What you can do now to save our internet, is to share these informations with all of your family members and friends, and to ask to your MEP (the members of the European Parliament from your country) to vote NO at the next round, to vote against articles 11 and 13.

Here you can find more news and all the details to contact your MEP:

https://saveyourinternet.eu

Also, sign and share this petition:

https://www.change.org/p/european-parliament-stop-the-censorship-machinery-save-the-internet?recruiter=50668942&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=psf_combo_share_initial

We have just a couple of weeks to stop this complete madness, don’t let them dictating the way we enjoy our internet.

#SaveYourInternet now!

It’s funny how y'all will reblog any and all US things but when whole Europe might lose access to internet then everything is quiet.

Hey, guys! It’s me, your friendly neighborhood law student!

I am seeing this circling my dashboard (yet again) and I would like to say a few things about it. Once again, as I have stated before when I’ve weighed in on something, I am not a lawyer (yet). But, that being said…

Please stop being sensationalist. There are many legitimate criticisms of this directive, but these are not the criticisms I am seeing being spread around. Instead, what’s being spread around amounts to fearmongering. I don’t blame you for doing so - the vast majority of this is being started by the people this will hit hardest, AKA big corporate giants such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft. They have the kind of press pull that very easily leads to this kind of panic.

So, for any of my followers having anxiety about this, let me soothe your worries and address them point by point.

1. “This will destroy the internet in two weeks”

No, no, it won’t. This is a directive, meaning (unlike, say, the the last thing to bring my work onto my tumblr, the fucking GDPR) that it leaves the goals of the directive open to somewhat free implementation by member states, as long as the basic goals of the directive are met on time. As such, it will be years before we actually see any binding legislation as a result of this directive, and how member states choose to implement it will vary on the state in question.

2. “Article 11 will completely restrict the use of links”

Article 11, AKA what is being referred to as the link tax, essentially implements what we call the ancillary copyright of press publishers. This right gives press publishers the right to demand compensation when snippets of their content are displayed on other web pages. So, essentially, this is an article almost directly designed to bop Google (who currently holds the kind of leading market position that the EU sees as incredibly problematic because it kind of goes against everything the EU stands for) on the nose. This would force Google (and, with it, other companies) to compensate the writers of articles that are mirrored to their sites in a truncated form, often leading to less traffic to the actual site in question and thus the mirroring site gaining the revenue that would otherwise be due to the writer of the article.

Now - there are legitimate criticisms of this, which mostly hinge on the fact that forcing people to pay the content creator for content they are using may lead some people to stop using that content. Personally, I think it’s better for people to receive compensation for their work, even if it comes at the cost of less sharing of the work. You are allowed to disagree. The most legitimate form of criticism of this article, in my humble opinion, is that it may lead to a picking and choosing of what content to share and what not to. The thing is - is this not something that is being done already? What does this article add to that other than to make sure that if you do choose to share someone else’s work, that other party gets compensated accordingly?

3. “Article 13 will destroy fandom culture”

No, no, it won’t. The vast majority of fandom culture falls under what US law refers to as fair use and most European national laws (which, in the case of EU countries, are harmonized according to the European Union Copyright Directive) refer to as private use. Article 13 in and of itself does not change the allowances made for private use of media in derivative works already. It merely mandates that companies must take effective measures to stop the users of their services from sharing media that infringes on copyright.

Again, I am in the boring camp of agreeing with the EU - I believe it is better for people to be compensated for their work. If the way we are currently using media in fandom is infringing on copyright, then I think we should stop using it that way. You are entirely welcome to disagree with me on this. Notice how the wording of the article constantly emphasizes how measures taken must be appropriate and proportionate. How the the content recognition technology is mentioned as an example of effective measures that could be taken to stop the uploading and sharing of copyrighted works, not as the only way of doing so. Notice how the entire third paragraph of this article deals with best practices and appropriate and proportionate technology which takes into account the availability and effectiveness of technology - so, essentially, if it sucks and flags too many things as infringing on copyright, it should not be used because it is not appropriate, proportionate or effective. And that’s right there in the directive.

And, yet again, there are legitimate criticisms of this article, including the one mentioned in the OP I am replying to regarding the limitations of sharing copyrighted material on, say, Youtube. That’s true - but you haven’t been allowed to upload full films onto Youtube as is, have you? Videos with copyrighted music in the background have been muted or deleted, as well. The most legitimate criticism I’ve seen is that these automatic copyright infringement flagging algorithms are generally overzealous, and this could lead to over-censoring of content that would actually fall under fair use/personal use/whatever you want to call it. That’s true, very true - but the article doesn’t require countries to enforce algorithms being used if they don’t work as they should. See above paragraph.

So, in conclusion: yes, this directive could stand to be worded better. Yes, it may technically lead to the kinds of doomsday scenarios people are imagining - but I really don’t think it will. In fact, I doubt you’ll notice much difference when (in a few years) these laws actually start getting implemented. Notice how no one has heard about the GDPR for like three weeks now, even though we’re living in that supposedly apocalyptic post-GDPR world? (I say, bitterly, as I wade through piles of GDPR every day at work… :D)

Still don’t like the directive proposal? That’s totally fine. By all means, call up your MEP, take a stand! Now, you’re doing it for the right reasons.

Articles cited retrieved from https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A52016PC0593 on 21.06.18 at around 10AM GMT.

rainbowbarnacle: rainbowbarnacle: also another thing that helped in dragging me out of that...

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 14:21:10 +0300

rainbowbarnacle:

rainbowbarnacle:

also another thing that helped in dragging me out of that particular depressive pit

is that it’s June 20th, a day very close to my heart

like, do you ever have wonderful days, the kind that you never, ever forget, and so when those days come around on the calendar again, you think of what you were doing then right now?

Riiiight about now in 2008 I was hugging @mercurialmalcontent for the first time.

And tomorrow, I can remember when I got to meet @peoplemask and @vastderp and @jumpingjacktrash and @the-real-seebs and @scloutier and the Captain

and we gave Jesse the spoiler cake

and the sky was so blue

I never knew so many good things could happen in one day

You guys saved me, you make my life bright in countless little ways, and I am lucky as hell to know you.

One of the best days of my life happened ten years ago today.

Ten. Years. Ago.

I’m still happily bewildered that so much good could happen to me. <3

septi-art: Yabalchoath, Queen of Thieves

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 03:30:27 +0300

septi-art:

Yabalchoath, Queen of Thieves