togglesbloggle

[togglesbloggle]

Twenty years ago, February 15th, 2004, I got married for the first time.

It was twenty years earlier than I ever expected to.

To celebrate/comemorate the date, I'm sitting down to write out everything I remember as I remember it. No checking all the pictures I took or all the times I've written about this before. I'm not going to turn to my husband (of twenty years, how the f'ing hell) to remember a detail for me.

This is not a 100% accurate recounting of that first wild weekend in San Francisco. But it -is- a 100% accurate recounting of how I remember it today, twenty years after the fact.

Join me below, if you would.

2004 was an election year, and much like conservatives are whipping up anti-trans hysteria and anti-trans bills and propositions to drive out the vote today, in 2004 it was all anti-gay stuff. Specifically, preventing the evil scourge of same-sex marriage from destroying everything good and decent in the world.

Enter Gavin Newstrom. At the time, he was the newly elected mayor of San Francisco. Despite living next door to the city all my life, I hadn’t even heard of the man until Valentines Day 2004 when he announced that gay marriage was legal in San Francisco and started marrying people at city hall.

It was a political stunt. It was very obviously a political stunt. That shit was illegal, after all. But it was a very sweet political stunt. I still remember the front page photo of two ancient women hugging each other forehead to forehead and crying happy tears.

But it was only going to last for as long as it took for the California legal system to come in and make them knock it off.

The next day, we’re on the phone with an acquaintance, and she casually mentions that she’s surprised the two of us aren’t up at San Francisco getting married with everyone else.

“Everyone else?” Goes I, “I thought they would’ve shut that down already?”

“Oh no!” goes she, “The courts aren’t open until Tuesday. Presidents Day on Monday and all. They’re doing them all weekend long!”

We didn’t know because social media wasn’t a thing yet. I only knew as much about it as I’d read on CNN, and most of the blogs I was following were more focused on what bullshit President George W Bush was up to that day.

"Well shit", me and my man go, "do you wanna?" I mean, it’s a political stunt, it wont really mean anything, but we’re not going to get another chance like this for at least 20 years. Why not?

The next day, Sunday, we get up early. We drive north to the southern-most BART station. We load onto Bay Area Rapid Transit, and rattle back and forth all the way to the San Francisco City Hall stop.

We had slightly miscalculated.

Apparently, demand for marriages was far outstripping the staff they had on hand to process them. Who knew. Everyone who’d gotten turned away Saturday had been given tickets with times to show up Sunday to get their marriages done. My babe and I, we could either wait to see if there was a space that opened up, or come back the next day, Monday.

“Isn’t City Hall closed on Monday?” I asked. “It’s a holiday”

“Oh sure,” they reply, “but people are allowed to volunteer their time to come in and work on stuff anyways. And we have a lot of people who want to volunteer their time to have the marriage licensing offices open tomorrow.”

“Oh cool,” we go, “Backup.”

“Make sure you’re here if you do,” they say, “because the California Supreme Court is back in session Tuesday, and will be reviewing the motion that got filed to shut us down.”

And all this shit is super not-legal, so they’ll totally be shutting us down goes unsaid.

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We don’t get in Saturday. We wind up hanging out most of the day, though.

It’s… incredible. I can say, without hyperbole, that I have never experienced so much concentrated joy and happiness and celebration of others’ joy and happiness in all my life before or since. My face literally ached from grinning. Every other minute, a new couple was coming out of City Hall, waving their paperwork to the crowd and cheering and leaping and skipping. Two glorious Latina women in full Mariachi band outfits came out, one in the arms of another. A pair of Jewish boys with their families and Rabbi. One couple managed to get a Just Married convertible arranged complete with tin-cans tied to the bumper to drive off in. More than once I was giving some rice to throw at whoever was coming out next.

At some point in the mid-afternoon, there was a sudden wave of extra cheering from the several hundred of us gathered at the steps, even though no one was coming out. There was a group going up the steps to head inside, with some generic black-haired shiny guy at the front. My not-yet-husband nudged me, “That’s Newsom.” He said, because he knew I was hopeless about matching names and people.

Ooooooh, I go. That explains it. Then I joined in the cheers. He waved and ducked inside.

So dusk is starting to fall. It’s February, so it’s only six or so, but it’s getting dark.

“Should we just try getting in line for tomorrow -now-?” we ask.

“Yeah, I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible.” One of the volunteers tells us. “We’re not allowed to have people hang out overnight like this unless there are facilities for them and security. We’d need Porta-Poties for a thousand people and police patrols and the whole lot, and no one had time to get all that organized. Your best bet is to get home, sleep, and then catch the first BART train up at 5am and keep your fingers crossed.

Monday is the last day to do this, after all.

00000

So we go home. We crash out early. We wake up at 4:00. We drive an hour to hit the BART station. We get the first train up. We arrive at City Hall at 6:30AM.

The line stretches around the entirety of San Francisco City Hall. You could toss a can of Coke from the end of the line to the people who’re up to be first through the doors and not have to worry about cracking it open after.

“Uh.” We go. “What the fuck is -this-?”

So.

Remember why they weren’t going to be able to have people hang out overnight?

Turns out, enough SF cops were willing to volunteer unpaid time to do patrols to cover security. And some anonymous person delivered over a dozen Porta-Poties that’d gotten dropped off around 8 the night before.

It’s 6:30 am, there are almost a thousand people in front of us in line to get this literal once in a lifetime marriage, the last chance we expect to have for at least 15 more years (it was 2004, gay rights were getting shoved back on every front. It was not looking good. We were just happy we lived in California were we at least weren’t likely to loose job protections any time soon.).

Then it starts to rain.

We had not dressed for rain.

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Here is how the next six hours go.

We’re in line. Once the doors open at 7am, it will creep forward at a slow crawl. It’s around 7 when someone shows up with garbage bags for everyone. Cut holes for the head and arms and you’ve got a makeshift raincoat! So you’ve got hundreds of gays and lesbians decked out in the nicest shit they could get on short notice wearing trashbags over it.

Everyone is so happy.

Everyone is so nervous/scared/frantic that we wont be able to get through the doors before they close for the day.

People online start making delivery orders.

Coffee and bagels are ordered in bulk and delivered to City Hall for whoever needs it. We get pizza. We get roses. Random people come by who just want to give hugs to people in line because they’re just so happy for us. The tour busses make detours to go past the lines. Chinese tourists lean out with their cameras and shout GOOD LUCK while car horns honk.

A single sad man holding a Bible tries to talk people out of doing this, tells us all we’re sinning and to please don’t. He gives up after an hour. A nun replaces him with a small sign about how this is against God’s will. She leaves after it disintegrates in the rain.

The day before, when it was sunny, there had been a lot of protestors. Including a large Muslim group with their signs about how “Not even DOGS do such things!” Which… Yes they do.

A lot of snide words are said (by me) about how the fact that we’re willing to come out in the rain to do this while they’re not willing to come out in the rain to protest it proves who actually gives an actual shit about the topic.

Time passes. I measure it based on which side of City Hall we’re on. The doors face East. We start on Northside. Coffee and trashbags are delivered when we’re on the North Side. Pizza first starts showing up when we’re on Westside, which is also where I see Bible Man and Nun. Roses are delivered on Southside. And so forth.

00000

We have Line Neighbors.

Ahead of us are a gay couple a decade or two older than us. They’ve been together for eight years. The older one is a school teacher. He has his coat collar up and turns away from any news cameras that come near while we reposition ourselves between the lenses and him. He’s worried about the parents of one of his students seeing him on the news and getting him fired. The younger one will step away to get interviewed on his own later on. They drove down for the weekend once they heard what was going on. They’d started around the same time we did, coming from the Northeast, and are parked in a nearby garage.

The most perky energetic joyful woman I’ve ever met shows up right after we turned the corner to Southside to tackle the younger of the two into a hug. She’s their local friend who’d just gotten their message about what they’re doing and she will NOT be missing this. She is -so- happy for them. Her friends cry on her shoulders at her unconditional joy.

Behind us are a lesbian couple who’d been up in San Francisco to celebrate their 12th anniversary together. “We met here Valentines Day weekend! We live down in San Diego, now, but we like to come up for the weekend because it’s our first love city.”

“Then they announced -this-,” the other one says, “and we can’t leave until we get married. I called work Sunday and told them I calling in sick until Wednesday.”

“I told them why,” her partner says, “I don’t care if they want to give me trouble for it. This is worth it. Fuck them.”

My husband-to-be and I look at each other. We’ve been together for not even two years at this point. Less than two years. Is it right for us to be here? We’re potentially taking a spot from another couple that’d been together longer, who needed it more, who deserved it more.”

“Don’t you fucking dare.” Says the 40-something gay couple in front of us.

“This is as much for you as it is for us!” says the lesbian couple who’ve been together for over a decade behind us.

“You kids are too cute together,” says the gay couple’s friend. “you -have- to. Someday -you’re- going to be the old gay couple that’s been together for years and years, and you deserve to have been married by then.”

We stay in line.

It’s while we’re on the Southside of City Hall, just about to turn the corner to Eastside at long last that we pick up our own companions. A white woman who reminds me an awful lot of my aunt with a four year old black boy riding on her shoulders. “Can we say we’re with you? His uncles are already inside and they’re not letting anyone in who isn’t with a couple right there.” “Of course!” we say.

The kid is so very confused about what all the big deal is, but there’s free pizza and the busses keep driving by and honking, so he’s having a great time.

We pass by a statue of Lincoln with ‘Marriage for All!’ and "Gay Rights are Human Rights!" flags tucked in the crooks of his arms and hanging off his hat.

It’s about noon, noon-thirty when we finally make it through the doors and out of the rain.

They’ve promised that anyone who’s inside when the doors shut will get married. We made it. We’re safe.

We still have a -long- way to go.

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They’re trying to fit as many people into City Hall as possible. Partially to get people out of the rain, mostly to get as many people indoors as possible. The line now stretches down into the basement and up side stairs and through hallways I’m not entirely sure the public should ever be given access to. We crawl along slowly but surely.

It’s after we’ve gone through the low-ceiling basement hallways past offices and storage and back up another set of staircases and are going through a back hallway of low-ranked functionary offices that someone comes along handing out the paperwork. “It’s an hour or so until you hit the office, but take the time to fill these out so you don’t have to do it there!”

We spend our time filling out the paperwork against walls, against backs, on stone floors, on books.

We enter one of the public areas, filled with displays and photos of City Hall Demonstrations of years past.

I take pictures of the big black and white photo of the Abraham Lincoln statue holding banners and signs against segregation and for civil rights.

The four year old boy we helped get inside runs past us around this time, chased by a blond haired girl about his own age, both perused by an exhausted looking teenager helplessly begging them to stop running.

Everyone is wet and exhausted and vibrating with anticipation and the building-wide aura of happiness that infuses everything.

The line goes into the marriage office. A dozen people are at the desk, shoulder to shoulder, far more than it was built to have working it at once.

A Sister of Perpetual Indulgence is directing people to city officials the moment they open up. She’s done up in her nun getup with all her makeup on and her beard is fluffed and be-glittered and on point. “Oh, I was here yesterday getting married myself, but today I’m acting as your guide. Number 4 sweeties, and -Congradulatiooooons!-“

The guy behind the counter has been there since six. It’s now 1:30. He’s still giddy with joy. He counts our money. He takes our paperwork, reviews it, stamps it, sends off the parts he needs to, and hands the rest back to us. “Alright, go to the Rotunda, they’ll direct you to someone who’ll do the ceremony. Then, if you want the certificate, they’ll direct you to -that- line.” “Can’t you just mail it to us?” “Normally, yeah, but the moment the courts shut us down, we’re not going to be allowed to.”

We take our paperwork and join the line to the Rotunda.

If you’ve seen James Bond: A View to a Kill, you’ve seen the San Francisco City Hall Rotunda. There are literally a dozen spots set up along the balconies that overlook the open area where marriage officials and witnesses are gathered and are just processing people through as fast as they can.

That’s for the people who didn’t bring their own wedding officials.

There’s a Catholic-adjacent couple there who seem to have brought their entire families -and- the priest on the main steps. They’re doing the whole damn thing. There’s at least one more Rabbi at work, I can’t remember what else. Just that there was a -lot-.

We get directed to the second story, northside. The San Francisco City Treasurer is one of our two witnesses. Our marriage officient is some other elected official I cannot remember for the life of me (and I'm only writing down what I can actively remember, so I can't turn to my husband next to me and ask, but he'll have remembered because that's what he does.)

I have a wilting lily flower tucked into my shirt pocket. My pants have water stains up to the knees. My hair is still wet from the rain, I am blubbering, and I can’t get the ring on my husband’s finger. The picture is a treat, I tell you.

There really isn’t a word for the mix of emotions I had at that time. Complete disbelief that this was reality and was happening. Relief that we’d made it. Awe at how many dozens of people had personally cheered for us along the way and the hundreds to thousands who’d cheered for us generally.

Then we're married.

Then we get in line to get our license.

It’s another hour. This time, the line goes through the higher stories. Then snakes around and goes past the doorway to the mayor’s office.

Mayor Newsom is not in today. And will be having trouble getting into his office on Tuesday because of the absolute barricade of letters and flowers and folded up notes and stuffed animals and City Hall maps with black marked “THANK YOU!”s that have been piled up against it.

We make it to the marriage records office.

I take a picture of my now husband standing in front of a case of the marriage records for 1902-1912. Numerous kids are curled up in corners sleeping. My own memory is spotty. I just know we got the papers, and then we’re done with lines. We get out, we head to the front entrance, and we walk out onto the City Hall steps.

It's almost 3PM.

00000

There are cheers, there’s rice thrown at us, there are hundreds of people celebrating us with unconditional love and joy and I had never before felt the goodness that exists in humanity to such an extent. It’s no longer raining, just a light sprinkle, but there are still no protestors. There’s barely even any news vans.

We make our way through the gauntlet, we get hands shaked, people with signs reading ”Congratulations!” jump up and down for us. We hit the sidewalks, and we begin to limp our way back to the BART station.

I’m at the BART station, we’re waiting for our train back south, and I’m sitting on the ground leaning against a pillar and in danger of falling asleep when a nondescript young man stops in front of me and shuffles his feet nervously. “Hey. I just- I saw you guys, down at City Hall, and I just… I’m so happy for you. I’m so proud of what you could do. I’m- I’m just really glad, glad you could get to do this.”

He shakes my hand, clasps it with both of his and shakes it. I thank him and he smiles and then hurries away as fast as he can without running.

Our train arrives and the trip south passes in a semilucid blur.

We get back to our car and climb in.

It’s 4:30 and we are starving.

There’s a Carls Jr near the station that we stop off at and have our first official meal as a married couple. We sit by the window and watch people walking past and pick out others who are returning from San Francisco. We're all easy to pick out, what with the combination of giddiness and water damage.

We get home about 6-7. We take the dog out for a good long walk after being left alone for two days in a row. We shower. We bundle ourselves up. We bury ourselves in blankets and curl up and just sort of sit adrift in the surrealness of what we’d just done.

We wake up the next day, Tuesday, to read that the California State Supreme Court has rejected the petition to shut down the San Francisco weddings because the paperwork had a misplaced comma that made the meaning of one phrase unclear.

The State Supreme Court would proceed to play similar bureaucratic tricks to drag the process out for nearly a full month before they have nothing left and finally shut down Mayor Newsom’s marriages.

My parents had been out of state at the time at a convention. They were flying into SFO about the same moment we were walking out of City Hall. I apologized to them later for not waiting and my mom all but shook me by the shoulders. “No! No one knew that they’d go on for so long! You did what you needed to do! I’ll just be there for the next one!”

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It was just a piece of paper. Legally, it didn’t even hold any weight thirty days later. My philosophy at the time was “marriage really isn’t that important, aside from the legal benefits. It’s just confirming what you already have.”

But maybe it’s just societal weight, or ingrained culture, or something, but it was different after. The way I described it at the time, and I’ve never really come up with a better metaphor is, “It’s like we were both holding onto each other in the middle of the ocean in the middle of a storm. We were keeping each other above water, we were each other’s support. But then we got this piece of paper. And it was like the ground rose up to meet our feet. We were still in an ocean, still in the middle of a storm, but there was a solid foundation beneath our feet. We still supported each other, but there was this other thing that was also keeping our heads above the water.

It was different. It was better. It made things more solid and real.

I am forever grateful for all the forces and all the people who came together to make it possible. It’s been twenty years and we’re still together and still married.

We did a domestic partnership a year later to get the legal paperwork. We’d done a private ceremony with proper rings (not just ones grabbed out of the husband’s collection hours before) before then. And in 2008, we did a legal marriage again.

Rushed. In a hurry. Because there was Proposition 13 to be voted on which would make them all illegal again if it passed.

It did, but we were already married at that point, and they couldn’t negate it that time.

Another few years after that, the Supreme Court finally threw up their hands and said "Fine! It's been legal in places and nothing's caught on fire or been devoured by locusts. It's legal everywhere. Shut up about it!"

And that was that.

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When I was in highschool, in the late 90s, I didn’t expect to see legal gay marriage until I was in my 50s. I just couldn’t see how the American public as it was would ever be okay with it.

I never expected to be getting married within five years. I never expected it to be legal nationwide before I’d barely started by 30s. I never thought I’d be in my 40s and it’d be such a non-issue that the conservative rabble rousers would’ve had to move onto other wedge issues altogether.

I never thought that I could introduce another man as my husband and absolutely no one involved would so much as blink.

I never thought I’d live in this world.

And it’s twenty years later today. I wonder how our line buddies are doing. Those babies who were running around the wide open rooms playing tag will have graduated college by now. The kids whose parents the one line-buddy was worried would see him are probably married too now. Some of them to others of the same gender.

I don’t have some greater message to make with all this. Other then, culture can shift suddenly in ways you can’t predict. For good or ill. Mainly this is just me remembering the craziest fucking 36 hours of my life twenty years after the fact and sharing them with all of you.

The future we’re resigned to doesn’t have to be the one we live in. Society can shift faster than you think. The unimaginable of twenty years ago is the baseline reality of today.

And always remember that the people who want to get married will show up by the thousands in rain that none of those who’re against it will brave.

[togglesbloggle]

<trying to practice the virtue of using asks more>

For me, the biggest barrier to writing more is achieving consistency, that is, being able to decide "I will write today" rather than waiting for the muse to show up and then getting a few days or a few weeks of really good text. It's not as bad as it used to be, but I'm coming to terms with the fact that this is going to be a lifelong struggle that I slowly get better at year-by-year, and there's no silver bullet that will make it happen all at once.

From your comments, it seems like you're quite good at writing consistently, whether or not The Noumenal Spirit of the Word takes possession of your hands on any given day. Is this a talent of yours, or did you similarly have to fight for it? And do you have any particular insights about that process, or how to make progress with it?

This is a great question! And it's one that I often see people asking, so I think this is a pretty widespread problem that people have.

Is this a talent of yours, or did you similarly have to fight for it?

It's both, and I will get to that. First, I will say up front that I am not well-qualified to advise people on writing consistently, because I am not, in fact, a consistent writer in the sense that most people usually mean it. While it's true that I am both a prolific writer and that I write almost every day, I am not generally a consistent writer and most of my writing isn't manuscript text for my fiction; it's less-valuable stuff (usually reaction commentary). I routinely go for days and sometimes weeks without working on either of my two big novels. In the big picture, this is one of the main reasons why I have been working on those novels for almost a decade with no end in sight.

But here is my answer anyway. I'm going to cover a few different topics:

Writing consistently at all

Writing consistently over a long period of time

Writing high-value creative work consistently

Where high-value refers to "the work that's most important to you / that you most want to be doing."

Also, this essay is full of "you" pronouns. Usually these are directed at a generic "for the sake conversation" you; that's just how I write. If I'm talking to togglesbloggle specifically, I'll make a note of it.

1. Writing Consistently at All

I absolutely can write consistently. I do it for freelance work regularly. And back in the mid-2010s when I was doing weekly features on my website, I regularly wrote fiction on pain of my self-imposed external deadline. For as long as those efforts lasted, I almost never missed an installment of The Great Galavar or Empire on Ice. I got some really got work done that way, but more importantly I proved that it's something I am capable of doing. Because it's not a given that a person actually is capable of that.

I do think most people are capable of forcing themselves to write in this way, at least for a time. And I would challenge anyone who wants to write more consistently to undertake some kind of regularly-scheduled writing obligation, if they have never done so previously or have not done so recently. And I mean really do it: Make it happen no matter what it costs you. It's not for the sake of the content. The content doesn't matter; treat that like icing. The purpose is to complete a proof-of-concept exercise. Because if you can't do this on demand, then there probably isn't much point in trying to develop a more consistent writing output; you're not likely to succeed. Either you are psychologically not capable of it, or you are not taking it seriously enough. And I don't say that flippantly; I really don't. But this is one of those things you can't make excuses for not doing: If you set out to do it, you either have to succeed or face the fact that you haven't got the stuff. If you consider yourself an artist, it might be one of the most important commitments you ever undertake.

Write something creative that is ideally but not necessarily in the neighborhood of what you want to be writing. (You don't have to touch your magnum opus; you can, but you don't have to. You can tackle something else, or even invent something new for this occasion.)

I think it would be helpful to undertake something with predetermined parameters (e.g., an episode of The Great Galavar) so that you're not starting from scratch each week. For example, writing one poem each week. (Or each day, or whatever works for you.) Or writing one character dossier each week. Or one location profile. Or one piece of flash fiction. What I mean when I say "predetermined parameters" is that you should know in advance what format or medium or thing you're going to be writing, if not the actual contents.

Write it on a periodic schedule (e.g. weekly; I think weekly and daily are the best options; if daily you can do "weekdays only" or "every day"). Do it for a couple of months, or better yet a whole year, and in that time never miss an installment unless you have a damn good reason. Write your obligations even if you have to write a total dud now and then that isn't satisfying in any way. It's not about the content; it's about the discipline.

Where does this discipline come from? That's the $64,000 question. Ultimately, if the discipline is internal, it must come from one (or both) of two sources: your dignity and your determination. And determination is a fair-weather friend; if you struggle with consistency it probably isn't wise to rely on determination. So, really, it comes down to dignity, I think. It comes down to understanding that your performance in this undertaking will say something about who you are, and your character and capability as a person, and your power and integrity as an artist. And you might not like what your performance says. Dignity, then—in its positive mode i.e. honor, and in its negative mode i.e. fear. Let your motto be: Dignity obliges.

In a less general sense, there are many particular things you can do to write more consistently. Your mileage will vary with each aid. Some common techniques include:

Do it first thing in the morning.

Do it at a specific and consistent time in the day.

Do it in a specific and consistent place.

Do it with specific and consistent environmental prompts, like turning on a favorite light or pouring yourself a favorite beverage. Ideally, limit these prompts elsewhere in your daily life.

Do it right after doing something else that you know often helps, e.g. eating, working out, showering.

On that point, one thing I found helpful in the year that I was doing this was to let myself think about that week's installments during my walks. I would take a leisure walk most days, and if the deadline was coming up in the next day or two and I didn't already know what I would be writing, I would sometimes think about it as I walked. That was very, very helpful. Also, I didn't have my notepad with me, or a phone. I had to remember anything that I came up with, which, up to a certain point, I also find very helpful, because storing a backlog of compelling ideas is a form of excitement and excitement is a power-up.

Something else that is very helpful, albeit often not viable, is to power your consistent writing by putting your nervous energy in front of it. Most of the writing that I do is "throwaway" writing. Today I listened to some of the oral arguments at the Supreme Court about Trump's presidential immunity case, and I felt the compulsion to respond to that, so I wrote a whole essay about it. I also wrote a short commentary on the FCC's ruling to restore net neutrality. (Yay!) These compulsive writings today happened to occur on Facebook, and what I've gotten good at doing these days is that, once I'm finished writing whatever I am compelled to write, I'll usually step back and say "Okay, I got it out of my system, but this isn't really appropriate to post here." And then I'll discard it or tuck it away somewhere.

I call it "throwaway" writing because it doesn't serve any purpose once it's finished. But it is possible, sometimes, to change that. I haven't officially announced this yet, but I actually wrote a book this year—in just two-and-a-half months, actually. (It's one reason I haven't been super active on Tumblr lately.) It's a book of essays, and the way I wrote it was by changing my behavior so that my compulsive writing "itch" each day was in response to prompts that could become essays in the book. I aimed to write three essays a day, every day, and while 81 essays in 10 weeks actually only averages out to a little better than one essay per day, that was still good enough for me to break 70,000 words in just 10 weeks and finish the book. (This book is completely done, by the way, and will be published in a couple of weeks. I'll be making an official announcement when it comes out.) For the first month-and-a-half, I tried never to let a day pass without writing at least one essay. There were no "days off." If it was clear I wasn't going to hit three essays, I would strive for just one. And I would only let myself off the hook for that one essay if I was too tired to think clearly, or if I had a commitment in the morning that required me to get some timely sleep. Later on, during the final month, once it was clear that I was going to succeed, I began allowing myself to take weekends off.

Importantly, I never let myself write more than three essays per day. There were quite a few days when I hit that number easily and wanted to keep going, and I told myself no on the grounds of "leave them wanting more." If you occasionally quit an activity while still wanting to do it, I think that helps make the activity sustainable over a longer period of time.

If you have a firehose of nervous energy, and if you can point it at a constructive writing project, and if you force yourself to abide by an easily attainable daily minimum goal, then you will make progress. Looking back on my experience this year, it was startlingly easy to write "at least one but ideally three" essays per day. I was doing all that throwaway writing anyway; so, for a little while, I made it not be throwaway writing.

The general form of this is that any compulsive creative behavior you have is potentially an energy source in a constructive creative project.

To recap, the point of writing consistently at all is to demonstrate, explore, and develop your self-discipline. It's not really about the content at this stage. But that brings me to the next topic: indefinite commitments and sustainability.

2. Writing Consistently Over a Long Period of Time

I am one of those people who is severely psychologically hindered in my ability to stick with the same workload over an indefinite, long-term period of time. It's a good thing I was able to write my book in less than three months, because, generally speaking, three months is about the limit for me. I can sustain intense work on a project for a short period of time: days, weeks, maybe a few months. But after that I usually lose motivation, and usually there is no recovering from that. I can sometimes force myself, but this will lead toward, and eventually result in, burnout and a nervous breakdown.

Some people struggle with this like I do, and others scarcely struggle with it at all. If you are one of the latter, count yourself lucky.

Writing consistently over a long period of time is all about sustainability and incentivization. Sustainability is shaped by your writing environment, your behavioral run-up to writing sessions, the placement of those sessions in your day, the difficulty of the workload in technical and mechanical terms, the interestingness of the work, and the amount of work. Incentivization is also shaped by the interestingness of the work, as well as the pleasantness of doing it, the rewards of success, and other such things.

For me, sustainability and incentivization broadly converge on outlets that involve variety and intellectual stimulation. One reason that chess appeals to me is because you never really play the same game twice. Same goes for Magic: The Gathering. (Well, unless you're up against obnoxious netdecks, but I digress.) If the work is both easy and interesting, that makes it a lot likelier to be something I can maintain over the long term.

I don't have a big track record of success to draw from when it comes to long-term consistent writing. I presided over the ATH RPG for over a year back in 1999 – 2000. I did those weekly features in 2014 – 2016 (and again briefly in 2018). And of course I have my throwaway writing, which is not "consistent" in any other regard than that it is commentary, but still qualifies in that narrow respect.

One of my weekly features back in the 2010s, Empire on Ice, was literally just "write a comedy sketch each week, drawing freely from this large pool of characters who I already know and like, with few constraints of continuity between weeks." That's a nearly endlessly-renewable formula, and I never tired of it in all the time that I worked on it, and indeed would still like to get back to it in the future.

By keeping the laborious work of actually doing it low, and the variety and stimulation of that work high, I give myself the best chance of long-term sustainability. I stopped doing my weekly features because my life fell apart; I don't know what would have happened otherwise, but my intent at the time was to keep up with it. I tried coming back to these features a few years later, but I still wasn't mentally recovered enough.

That's an important detail, worth taking a tangent into: Much like a runner's ability to run is contingent on the condition of their body and mind, so too is an artist's ability to art. Many's the day in recent years when fatigue, brain fog, depression, or other illnesses of various sorts completely ruined my prospects of writing that day. If I had more self-discipline, I have no doubt that I could've made something out of at least some of those days, but my point here is to acknowledge that not all days are equal, not all seasons are equal; our lives and our health move up and down.

Long-term consistent writing is really about getting to know yourself, your capabilities and limitations, your positive and negative triggers for being able to produce more art or less. You have to notice what works and what doesn't, and try to bias those things accordingly. From my own long-term declining health I have learned that, in general, I must forsake my night-owl nature and try to write early in the day, because I usually just don't have enough mental clarity left at the end of the day anymore. Sustainability requires me to work within the boundaries of my health; I really don't have any alternative.

Self-awareness is great for getting to know oneself and deriving actionable insights therefrom, but there are other ways to get those actionable insights. Oftentimes, observant self-awareness results in self-help recommendations that one could probably guess at randomly and enjoy a nonzero success rate with, like eating enough food (and the right kinds of food, whatever that means for your body on that day), sleeping enough, taking a hot shower when you're feeling low, etc. Simply playing around in the space of common sense can help make long-term workloads more sustainable.

It's not as bad as it used to be, but I'm coming to terms with the fact that this is going to be a lifelong struggle that I slowly get better at year-by-year, and there's no silver bullet that will make it happen all at once.

This is also an important point. Those who struggle with consistency are always going to struggle with it, most likely. Optimizing and normalizing your environment can make it easier. Building a routine can also make it easier. But if you struggle, you're probably always going to struggle.

I say this because many people give up because of it. Many people lose the struggle, and fall away from their art for years or forever. To this I would apply two parallel ideas which exist in tension but which are not strictly contradictory of each other: First, the better you keep up with your art, the easier it is for you to keep going with it. So don't fall off the wagon if you can help it. You're so much better off doing any amount of art than none, no matter how small. Second, if you do fall off the wagon, you don't have to climb a mountain to get back on that wagon. You can start small, slow, and easy. So don't lose heart if you feel like you're back at Square One. Square One is vastly better than Square Zero.

Finally, I will say that sometimes you just have to bow to the reality of your limitations, both intrinsic and situational, and that long-term consistent writing isn't always possible. Sometimes you have to fall away from it for a few months, or even longer. Whenever that happens, give yourself the option of the offramp: You are not required to be an artist. You don't have to keep going. Some of us do, but most of us don't. If you're in the latter, you can always reevaluate who you are and what you want.

Giving yourself the offramp actually makes the active decision to press on a clearer and more meaningful one. Knowing that you can quit, that you can retire from art, clarifies any purposeful decision to keep going. You only keep going if you have to (which doesn't apply to most people, though it does to me), or if there is something you want. And it can be helpful to remind yourself just what exactly you want and why you're doing this stuff in the first place.

3. Writing High-Value Creative Work Consistently

Okay, so this is probably what the ask was really getting at. You (togglesbloggle) wrote this:

From your comments, it seems like you're quite good at writing consistently, whether or not The Noumenal Spirit of the Word takes possession of your hands on any given day.

I think many people who approach the subject of consistency in the act of writing have some prior understanding (right or wrong) that "the Muse" is fickle and does not supply steady inspiration, and that consistent writing is therefore a construct, a discipline of the craft.

So in a rather reductive sense, yes: If you (writers out there) want to write consistently, you must discipline yourself to do so. It will never come effortlessly all the time.

However...

In my own experience, when it comes to the kind of creative writing that is most important to me, it is simply not economical of spark (i.e. worthwhile creatively) to drive my artistic mind like a vehicle.

A friend of mine trains horses, and once told me that reins and stirrups and so forth aren't like gas pedals and steering wheels in a car, because a horse is not a car. A horse is a living animal, whose behavior is inextricably tied up in its wellness and state of mind, and treating a horse like a machine that can be commanded without regard to its own interests and preferences will forever result in an inferior riding experience.

In my experience, when I have forced myself to write creatively without the presence of inspiration, I have usually come back to that writing later and found it lacking and sometimes unsalvageable. I won't say that the effort was truly wasted, but I will say that it often wasn't worth it, especially in those times when forcing myself to write decelerated my enthusiasm to write—which doesn't always happen but sometimes does.

In my experience, it is better to wait for the Muse than to aim for consistency. Instead, I think the key to success in creative writing is to stretch the inspiration we do receive; to get more out of it by being cleverer with it, by setting ourselves up for success with it, and by being better attuned to its presence when it is weak but usable. In short, to be more efficient with my Muse—and not to enforce a regime of consistency—is how I get more writing done for my novels.

Assuming I have any inspiration at all, my major success–failure points in my creative writing productivity on a given day are as follows:

Will I notice that inspiration is present?

Will I move over from my main computer (or whatever else I am doing) to the computer where I do my creative writing?

Will I pick the correct thing to work on?

The third of these is the easiest by far, because over time I have developed a good sense of whether or not I'm working on a scene that feeds from my enthusiasm or not. Nevertheless, it does happen sometimes that I will work on the wrong thing and not figure it out in time, and then my chance for the day will be lost.

The first item on the list is in the middle ground. Many days I have nonzero inspiration, and could theoretically get some creative writing done that day. But sometimes the signal is very weak, and goes unnoticed.

But it's the middle item on the list that is, by far, the hardest: moving over to Joshiba and actually fomenting and applying the intention to write. Deciding to write, as it were.

I live with an enormous, overwhelming amount of stress in my life, and I am pulled every day to attend to the matters associated with that stress—often to the exclusion of all other productive activities. I also have a crippling inability to make decisions, which can make non-default activities next to impossible for me sometimes. Sometimes, the simple act of severing myself from my current activity and swiveling this chair around to the other desk is a harder struggle than anything else I will do that day.

Today, I had good inspiration. I had genuine insight for an important scene in After The Hero, and could have definitely tried writing it down. But because stress obliges me to attend to other matters (namely, earning enough to pay the bills), I didn't. That same stress also ended up making my day mostly unproductive. That is the special hell I live in, and my creative writing is one of many routine casualties to it most days.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that it's water under the bridge, and, until I die, there is always tomorrow. And some days I avail myself of that.

Last September, for nearly the entire month, I had more productivity with After The Hero than at basically any point ever since the early days of novelization in the early 2000s. And that happened because I was of a mental orientation to make creative writing the default. That was my first and highest priority many days, and the Muse was strong. And working on it each day created a feedback loop of success that ended up lasting for weeks. In fact last year in general was a very productive year for my novels.

But unsustainably, because I am not making any money when I am working on my novels. So, for me at least, the final player in the story is the rent.

I have always been at my most productive creatively at a certain sweet spot of stress in my life. Too little stress and I seem to waste time. Too much stress and I become a neurotic mess. But the right amount is like tempered glass, making me strong and focused and hard. It has always been so. The problem is that I usually have too much stress in my life, and can't seem to shake it off, for reasons that are best left as a topic for another day, but which basically boil down to mental health issues making it difficult to earn a livable income.

My biggest struggle as a writer is to move over from this computer to that one, because my need to earn enough money to survive glues me to this one, and sometimes paralyzes me so that nothing happens at all.

Having the Muse; noticing that it's there; deciding to indulge it; feeding it into the right scenes; and doing all these things in the most economical way so as to make the most of even small degrees of inspiration...these are the ingredients of "consistent" creative writing for me: consistent perhaps not in the mathematical sense of having a low variance of productivity between days, but in the big-picture sense of "I've done more creative writing than usual this month."

I don't know that I have great advice to offer when it comes to the natural question of maximizing these things. Get enough sleep. Eat well. Don't let one day's failure preemptively ruin the next day's chances, but do let one day's success egg on the next day's efforts.

In the end, though, I write because I have to. I have always had to. I have the soul of an artist and no choice not to write. It is Sisyphus and his stone, I suppose, except that I find the work enjoyable and meaningful. And this is not something one can cultivate; you either have it or you don't.

Well, forgive me for such a longwinded answer, but these are my thoughts on the matter. It's a great question; I don't know that I have done it great justice.

#saving this here #so that I accidentally stumble back on it in several months #and several years #this is dramatically inspirational to me on one axis in particular #which is the fable about not treating inspiration like a car I should aspire to drive #but rather like an organic process #because I have a lot of work in place in my brain to help navigate organic processes like that #and I'm hoping that this nudge will allow me to link together two already-complex patterns in a way that I couldn't before

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That cool bee book I was talking about a while ago mostly refrains from philosophical digressions (which I think is a strength, I appreciated how the author had total confidence that just clearly presenting the facts about his subject would be enough to make a fascinating book without the need for any "...and here's why that should blow your mind" editorializing, and he's totally right), but there was one towards the end I've found myself thinking about a lot, which is: he wants people to stop using "self-consciousness" (i.e. the concept exemplified by the mirror test but used implicitly or explicitly in tons of other contexts) as a criterion for which animals can be considered sentient/morally relevant/having significant inner lives/however you want to describe it. Not, as you might expect, because he thinks it's an unreasonably high bar to meet, but because it's such a low bar that it produces no distinctions: he argues that basically any animal with any kind of developed central nervous system has to have some kind of self-consciousness almost by definition.

The example I remember best is: imagine you can see an object in your visual field getting closer to you. No matter the specifics, it's obviously always going to make a huge difference to how you evaluate this situation whether the cause of the object getting closer is a] the object is moving towards you, or b] you are moving towards the object. If a, then something might be pursuing you or falling on you or a thousand other things that are just not even worth considering in the case of b. But visually the two cases are indistinguishable; if you're going to be able to track the difference, your brain has to be putting at least some work into keeping tabs on what your own intentions are and what choices you're making as you move through the world, predicting the expected consequences of those choices, and maintaining a fairly tidy mental separation between stuff in the world that you're making happen and stuff in the world that's just happening of its own volition. Otherwise, every time you walk towards a rock you'll freak out and think the rock is rolling into you, or vice versa.

And it's not hard to see how this applies to your entire sensory world right, it applies to sounds and tactile sensations and even feelings internal to your body to some extent, if you're going to both perceive the world and take actions in the world then it's mandatory to mentally separate yourself and the world before that's going to yield even an ounce of helpful information, you just can't function successfully on the most basic level if you're processing stuff that you're doing on the same level as stuff that's happening, if you're in that state then you simply don't have a usable model of the world at all, you just have chaos.

So you can very easily eliminate a certain seductive narrative about the evolution of consciousness, which starts with very primitive animals who are mentally processing nothing but basic sensory inputs, then as you rise up the chain more complex animals are forming concepts of objects and building up a more nuanced understanding of the world, until finally you approach humans and the mind becomes so subtle and sophisticated that it gains access to this special advanced meta-level of thought where it can even understand itself! No, the self is precisely the one idea that has to be in place from the very beginning, before any of it has even the most rudimentary practical value. Self-consciousness isn't the pinnacle of the mind's evolution, it's one of the lowest, most basic foundations that everything else builds off of.

I think this is really cool stuff! I don't know enough about the relevant academic philosophy of mind debates to say how far all this does or doesn't speak to that, maybe someone will tell me the "self-consciousness" concept being attacked here is a strawman somehow, I don't know. But it's definitely impacted the way I (just a dumb guy who likes creatures) think about our small small cousins and what their lives might be like and I think it's super interesting. If you think it's interesting too then maybe you wanna buy The Mind of a Bee by Lars Chittka and read it. It's mostly not about this stuff, as I say it's light on philosophy and heavy on bee-life immersion, but if you actually read this whole post then you're probably in the market for that I feel like.

#hmmm #not sure if agree #but in to the brain it goes

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Shoutout to @eka-mark for giving me some useful corrections to my understanding of how gravity propagates through space; this stuff is madness and I'm cheered to know that a competent scholar is around to keep me centered on reality.

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Selected recurrent patterns or "laws" of evolution, of potential use for speculative biology. List compiled by Neocene's Pavel Volkov, who in turn credits its content to Nikolay Rejmers (original presumably in Russian). These are guidelines, and not necessarily scientifically rigorous.

Dollo's Law, or irreversibility of evolution: organisms do not evolve back into their own ancestors. When mammals returned to the sea, they did not develop gills and dermal scales and change back into fish: they became whales or seals or manatees, who retain mammalian traits and show marks of land-dwelling ancestry.

Roulliet's law, or increase of complexity: both organisms and ecosystems tend to become more complex over time, with subparts that are increasingly differentiated and integrated. This one is dodgier: there are many examples of simplification over time when it is selected for, for example in parasites. At least, over very large time scales, the maximum achievable complexity seems to increase.

Law of unlimited change: there is no point at which a species or system is complete and has finished evolving. Stasis only occurs when there is strong selective pressure in favor of it, and organism can always adapt to chaging conditions if they are not beyond the limits of survival.

Law of pre-adaptation or exaptation: new structures do not appear ex novo. When a new organ or behavior is developed, it is a modification or a re-purposing of something that already existed. Bone tissue probably evolved as reserves of energy before it was suitable to build an internal skeleton from, and feathers most likely evolved for thermal isolation and display before they were refined enough for flight.

Law of increasing variety: diversity at all levels tends to increase over time. While some forms originate from hybridization, most importantly the Eukaryotic cells, generally one ancestor species tends to leave many descendants, if it has any at all.

Law of Severtsov or of Eldredge-Gould or of punctuated equilibrium: while evolution is always slow from the human standpoint, there are moments of relatively rapid change and diversification when some especily fertile innovation appears (e.g. eyes and shells in the Cambrian), or new environments become inhabitable (e.g. continental surface in the Devonian), or disaster clears out space (e.g. at the end of the Permian or Cretaceous), followed by relative stability once all low-hanging fruit has been picked.

Law of environmental conformity: changes in the structure and functions of organisms follow the features or their environment, but the specifics of those changes depend on the structural and developmental constraints of the organisms. Squids and dolphins both have spindle-shaped bodies because physics make it necessary to move quickly through water, but water is broken by the anterior end of the skull in dolphins and by the posterior end of the mantle in squids. Superficial similarity is due to shared environment, deep structural similarity to shared ancestry.

Cope's and Marsh's laws: the most highly specialized members of a group (which often includes the physically largest) tend to go extinct first when conditions change. It is the generalist, least specialized members that usually survive and give rise to the next generations of specialists.

Deperet's law of increasing specialization: once a lineage has started to specialize for a particular niche, lifestyle, or resource, it will keep specializing in the same direction, as any deviation would be outcompeted by the rest. In contrast, their generalist ancestors can survive with a marginal presence in multiple niches.

Osborn's law, or adaptive radiation: as the previous takes place, different lines of descent from a common ancestor become increasingly different in form and specializations.

Shmalhausen's law, or increasing integration: over time, complex systems also tend to become increasingly integrated, with components (e.g. organs of an organism, or species in a symbiotic relationship) being increasingly indispensable to the whole, and increasingly tightly controlled.

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For body horror, one obscure story I like is The Black Pool by Alex Beyman

Looks interesting, anon. Thanks!

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Alas, another brush with covid. Ironies of catching the plague while helping recreate the papal election of 1492 shall be left as an exercise for the reader.

Last time, Tumblr had some absolutely fabulous reading suggestions for giving myself extremely cool fever dreams. So, let's see if lightning will strike twice! Can you point me towards any stories about deeply perplexing or unsettling subject matter, especially with a touch of body horror or the monstrous?

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Do you have a list or collection or directory of some type of your best tumblr posts? I think the reactionary / sente post is the post that’s made the single biggest impact on me of anything I’ve read on tumblr and I’ve never been able to find it again.

That's incredibly kind, thank you! That post is here, under the title "On Soldiers."

Honestly, I probably should throw some kind of list together, Tumblr being what it is. This space has always been sort of a writing scratchpad or sketchbook for me, and a lot of its value comes from feeling like it's a low-stakes place where it's safe to play with weird styles or weird ideas, and to fail at a useful frequency. But of course, some of it does end up being pretty good, and the cavalier attitude can be a little unfortunate when it allows the fun stuff to just fall down a hole. There's probably a happy medium where I save my favorite work in some kind of directory without psyching myself out or getting too self-conscious about it.

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In Defense of Bad Things

'Bad' here meaning mostly 'amateur'; stuff made enthusiastically by people at an unprofessional level. Art with visible gaps between what the artist imagined and what they achieved, products of flawed craftsmanship. I suppose everybody can appreciate them to some extent, it's a rare parent that doesn't put up their kid's drawings on the fridge in one way or another. But it turns out to be a fully general skill you can cultivate, and the more I do, the more I'm glad I did.

Partly, it's the teacher thing; finding delight in amateur work is one of the ways to find delight in the process of learning. Cultivating a love of striving-qua-striving can help make you a force for good in the world, as people start to feel safe trying to do things when you're around, even when their efforts are wobbly. You get to participate a little more in the process of atoms spinning themselves into ideas, even when there aren't any illusions about whether you're helping cultivate some revolutionary genius in the field.

And partly it's a fabulous way to build community. By necessity, our professional-level skills tend to be at the service of other people, performed for economic benefit; that's kind of how you get professionally good at something in the first place. When we're acting for our own sake, and among friends, most of what we do with one another is amateurish. I only cook middling-okay, I can't hold a tune that well, I'll never be a speed runner for anything. If you can only enjoy singing from the hundred best singers in the whole world, manufactured and polished by major studios, then you and your friends will sit shoulder-to-shoulder and passively listen to music. But it's so much richer an experience to sit face-to-face, actually singing together, even badly; you expose yourself to so many new ways to appreciate and respect one another, building relationships on what you've accomplished and not just by witty criticism or liking the same things.

And partly it's because some of the most powerful and innovative artistic experiences are in high-churn environments with low expectations and low barriers to entry, if only because those catch the passionate and driven young people that have been otherwise overlooked by our systems. The golden age of webcomics meant that a ton of the actual art involved was pretty lousy, but it also produced work that people still talk about today. D&D began as a profoundly unpolished collection of handmade rulebooks sold at cons in a plastic baggie. By the time these products of enthusiastic amateurs filter themselves through various levels of popularity and absorb mainstream cash influx, they're often risk-averse and missing a lot of the bold spark that inspired their fans in the first place; others will simply never drift towards the mainstream at all. I'm not saying you should be the person who goes out to dig through the slush piles of the internet looking for overlooked art, unless you want to be-- but sometimes a work of actual staggering genius also happens to be a Supernatural fanfic by a first-time author who's a little hazy on commas, and if that's a dealbreaker, you're going to miss out on some profoundly valuable experiences.

And hiding behind all of these things is, like...

Our appreciation of beauty has an odd structure, right? When things are done very skillfully, by brilliant artists with years of training, we can usually appreciate those accomplishments. And when we're looking at nature without human influence, and especially when we think very deeply about natural processes and understand them in context, we often rediscover that sense of beauty. There's just this bizarre hole in the middle where we declare things 'ugly'; as if a little skill is worse than none at all.

I really don't trust that gap. It feels like a trick my brain is playing on me, you know? It has me suspicious that a lot of what I consider 'ugly' or 'bad' is not a very direct experience of the world at all, or an informed judgment. That it is, rather, a declaration of (self-, social-) identity; a desire to be seen as a person of good taste, or as somebody who does things well, or just more primitively as one of the monkeys who is in the good-stuff-tribe and not one of the monkeys who is in the bad-stuff-tribe.

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“So I was in the park just now. The roots of the chestnut tree were sunk in the ground just under my bench. I couldn’t remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished and with them the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping forward, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me. Then I had this vision. It left me breathless. Never, until these last few days, had I understood the meaning of “existence.” I was like the others, like the ones walking along the seashore, all dressed in their spring finery. I said, like them, “The ocean is green; that white speck up there is a seagull,” but I didn’t feel that it existed or that the seagull was an “existing seagull”; usually existence hides itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can’t say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it. When I believed I was thinking about it, I must believe that I was thinking nothing, my head was empty, or there was just one word in my head, the word “to be.” Or else I was thinking . . . how can I explain it? I was thinking of belonging, I was telling myself that the sea belonged to the class of green objects, or that the green was a part of the quality of the sea. Even when I looked at things, I was miles from dreaming that they existed: they looked like scenery to me. I picked them up in my hands, they served me as tools, I foresaw their resistance. But that all happened on the surface. If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered, in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form which was added to external things without changing anything in their nature. And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder—naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness.” —Sartre

I want xray vision for tree roots in urban environments. where exactly are you going you sneaky lignin tentacle

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The colors of the rainbow So pretty in the sky Are also on the faces Of people going by I see friends shaking hands, saying, "How do you do?" They're really saying, "I love you"

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So I may have started a land war in Asia,

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In Defense of Bad Things

'Bad' here meaning mostly 'amateur'; stuff made enthusiastically by people at an unprofessional level. Art with visible gaps between what the artist imagined and what they achieved, products of flawed craftsmanship. I suppose everybody can appreciate them to some extent, it's a rare parent that doesn't put up their kid's drawings on the fridge in one way or another. But it turns out to be a fully general skill you can cultivate, and the more I do, the more I'm glad I did.

Partly, it's the teacher thing; finding delight in amateur work is one of the ways to find delight in the process of learning. Cultivating a love of striving-qua-striving can help make you a force for good in the world, as people start to feel safe trying to do things when you're around, even when their efforts are wobbly. You get to participate a little more in the process of atoms spinning themselves into ideas, even when there aren't any illusions about whether you're helping cultivate some revolutionary genius in the field.

And partly it's a fabulous way to build community. By necessity, our professional-level skills tend to be at the service of other people, performed for economic benefit; that's kind of how you get professionally good at something in the first place. When we're acting for our own sake, and among friends, most of what we do with one another is amateurish. I only cook middling-okay, I can't hold a tune that well, I'll never be a speed runner for anything. If you can only enjoy singing from the hundred best singers in the whole world, manufactured and polished by major studios, then you and your friends will sit shoulder-to-shoulder and passively listen to music. But it's so much richer an experience to sit face-to-face, actually singing together, even badly; you expose yourself to so many new ways to appreciate and respect one another, building relationships on what you've accomplished and not just by witty criticism or liking the same things.

And partly it's because some of the most powerful and innovative artistic experiences are in high-churn environments with low expectations and low barriers to entry, if only because those catch the passionate and driven young people that have been otherwise overlooked by our systems. The golden age of webcomics meant that a ton of the actual art involved was pretty lousy, but it also produced work that people still talk about today. D&D began as a profoundly unpolished collection of handmade rulebooks sold at cons in a plastic baggie. By the time these products of enthusiastic amateurs filter themselves through various levels of popularity and absorb mainstream cash influx, they're often risk-averse and missing a lot of the bold spark that inspired their fans in the first place; others will simply never drift towards the mainstream at all. I'm not saying you should be the person who goes out to dig through the slush piles of the internet looking for overlooked art, unless you want to be-- but sometimes a work of actual staggering genius also happens to be a Supernatural fanfic by a first-time author who's a little hazy on commas, and if that's a dealbreaker, you're going to miss out on some profoundly valuable experiences.

And hiding behind all of these things is, like...

Our appreciation of beauty has an odd structure, right? When things are done very skillfully, by brilliant artists with years of training, we can usually appreciate those accomplishments. And when we're looking at nature without human influence, and especially when we think very deeply about natural processes and understand them in context, we often rediscover that sense of beauty. There's just this bizarre hole in the middle where we declare things 'ugly'; as if a little skill is worse than none at all.

I really don't trust that gap. It feels like a trick my brain is playing on me, you know? It has me suspicious that a lot of what I consider 'ugly' or 'bad' is not a very direct experience of the world at all, or an informed judgment. That it is, rather, a declaration of (self-, social-) identity; a desire to be seen as a person of good taste, or as somebody who does things well, or just more primitively as one of the monkeys who is in the good-stuff-tribe and not one of the monkeys who is in the bad-stuff-tribe.

[togglesbloggle]

Hej meine deutschsprachige freunde, what are some good german-language series on netflix to practice german on? me and the bf are looking for sum media to consume

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There are a lot of deeply weird things about slowly healing from my chronic-health-issues nadir in '20-'21. In conversation with @ritterum today, I described it as 'aging backwards'; fitness, memory, sleep patterns, task-juggling, agency, all slowly improving at a pace just a bit too slow to watch in real time.

(Usually slowly, that is. There are a few real discontinuities where improvement was sudden and obvious, particularly with mental function.)

There's a small Alp nearby that I've been hiking a few times a year since 2022, getting a little bit further up the slopes every time. Today, I finally reached the natural limits of that metric, which is to say, I've regained my capacity to wander in the mountains indefinitely, without having to stop due to exhaustion. At least on a good day. It's a great feeling!

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The Netflix adaptation of 3 Body Problem is pretty good, but it's reminding me of all the things that managed to rub me wrong about the original text.

Some of those objections were superficial, but at some point I need to sit down and definitively go after the Dark Forest Hypothesis in a substantive way. The construction is taken rather seriously in some quarters, by people that I respect, but my understanding of how reality works gives me such a different answer with such insistence! I think I would benefit greatly from actually tracing what my brain is doing on this one from beginning to end, actually going to the effort of rendering it all in language so I can check my work or let other people offer critique.

Finding a way to do it in less than 20,000 words, might be more of a trick...

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Brown Bluff, Antarctic Peninsula

jordanbanksphoto