Me, Personally, I Think They'd Have A Sort Of Begrudging, Quiet Bond Called "I'm Surrounded By People

Guys I need to stop having ideas that I don't have the time or artistic skills for. I'm sitting at work thinking about how cool (and undoubtedly heartbreaking) it would be if there was a tlt animatic to Vulture by Bear Ghost and I'm like 5 seconds from going insane because of it.

Like this song has made me a little feral since it came out last year (I think. Time is an illusion) but I just listened to it for the first time in a few weeks and oh my god. I might come back to this post later and write an essay about it because the locked tomb has consumed my life even more so than it did when I was actually reading the series.

It wasn't until high school that I began seeing the world as a story to be written. It was a survival tactic, I think, for covid. That and a general habit created by my near-constant writing.

To that extent, it wasn't until post-lockdown that I realized how fucking cool fog is. And since it's foggy today, I'm going to talk about it.

I think that fog is only cool as a visual medium. Book descriptions don't do it justice. "A bank of fog rolls in" "tendrils of fog reach through the trees" yeah but what does that LOOK like?

It looks like a digital artist was drawing clouds behind a mountain and misplaced a layer. It looks like a cloud bisecting the landscape. The tops of the trees look like an island rising out of a flat calm, gray sea while the bottom half of it, the bushes and the houses and the roads, looks like an unfinished painting. If two people were to stand down the road and hold a flashlight, it would be a damn good impression of a car.

And I think a lot of authors forget to describe how fucking damp everything is. There's always this impending sense of rain. Nothing is dry except maybe your clothes, and odds are they're not gonna stay dry for long. Your socks and shoes are toast the moment you stray from a paved road. Hope you like wet socks.

Fog doesn't work like the poison mist in the hunger games. You don't walk into a wall of fog unless some outside force has confined the fog to a specific area. It's a gradual claustrophobia, a slow loss of sight.

It's also usually still when the fog is thick. Otherwise, the wind would blow it away, right? But unless a monsoon is following the fog, there's not quite that eerie "calm before the storm" stillness. It has a different vibe to it.

But you can't say all that without interrupting the flow of the story, so people tend to stick to the simpler descriptions.

just as a general reminder

learn how to fact-check for yourself, cause soon enough, most online sources won't be reliable

When I go to the gym and there's other people working out

Slightly unrelated to the original post but I saw an ai "artist" on Instagram who had the nerve to charge a commission for their "art". Charging money. Real money. For typing some words into an ai program. They had "ai artist" in their bio. And they were charging real money for their commissions. I wish I got screenshots but instead I chose to click "not interested" and move on with my life.

ai does not belong in creative spaces. period.

the venn diagram of “people who write” and “people who are perpetually confused by their own plot” is a circle.

some people think writers are so eloquent and good with words, but the reality is that we can sit there with our fingers on the keyboard going, “what’s the word for non-sunlight lighting? Like, fake lighting?” and for ten minutes, all our brain will supply is “unofficial”, and we know that’s not the right word, but it’s the only word we can come up with…until finally it’s like our face got smashed into a brick wall and we remember the word we want is “artificial”.

My teammate said she got busted for using chatgpt today and I burst out laughing and said "so not only did you USE chatgpt, but you also got CAUGHT doing it?"

We need to publicly shame these people.

we need to make using chatgpt embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you can’t write an email