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floating-in-the-blue · 1 minute

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1920 "New York By Night" by Christopher R.W. Nevinson. From New York City-Vintage History, FB.

#artfloat

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floating-in-the-blue · 5 minutes

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not to be controversial bc I know this is like…not in line with shifting opinions on fanfic comment culture but if there’s a glaring typo in my work I will NOT be offended by pointing it out. if ao3 fucks up the formatting…I will also not be offended by having this pointed out…

‘looking forward to the next update’ and ‘I hope you update soon!’ are different vibes than a demand, and should be read in good faith because a reader is finding their way to tell you how much they love it. I will not be mad at this.

‘I don’t usually like this ship but this fic made me feel something’ is also incredibly high praise. I’m not going to get mad at this.

even ‘I love this fic but I’m curious about why you made [x] choice’ is just another way a reader is engaging in and putting thought into your work.

I just feel like a lot of authors take any comment that’s not perfectly articulated glowing praise in the exact manner they’re hoping to receive it in bad faith.

fic engagement has been dropping across the board over the last several years, and yes it’s frustrating but it isn’t as though I can’t see how it happens. comment anxiety can be a real thing. the last thing anyone wants to do is offend an author they love, and that means sometimes people default to silence.

idk where I’m going with this I guess aside from saying unless a comment is outright attacking me I’m never going to get mad at it, and I think a lot of authors should feel the same way. ESPECIALLY TYPOS PLZ GOD POINT OUT MY TYPOS.

#co-signed #I will take every comment in good faith and respond as such #I will still respond that way even if I'm annoyed or irritated by a poor word choice in the comment #because my irritation is a me problem #and I'm grown up enough to realise that other people might not have the same handle on language as I do #I'm also grateful if you do point out a typo or formatting issue to me #fanficfloat #fandomfloat

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floating-in-the-blue · 13 minutes

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i want 60 thousand votes by next thursday

#yes

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floating-in-the-blue · 15 minutes

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Poll for writers and artists

Whether you write fanfic or original works or paint/draw, be it fan art or original work or whatever else - I have to know, because I have a feeling this is going to be very decisive:

Please reblog for sample size!

#pls don’t feed any of my works to AI without my consent #but i would be delighted if you created something inspired by my works without AI #<- same #fanficfloat #yes there's a compliment somewhere in there if someone likes my style/story enough to want more of it #but the gift is not to the author/artist but to the person who simply wants more without encouraging the author/artist or waiting for it #whereas fanfic or fanart created in honour of someone else's art is a gift to the creator #because here was someone who was so inspired by what I did that they put in time and effort to create something themself #TIME and EFFORT are the gift #it doesn't matter if the result might not look as good as an AI product would #it's about the TIME and the EFFORT because in an attention economy where people only chase comfort #both time and effort are so precious #is there any time and effort invested into ai prompting?#yes maybe #but it's the distinction of someone gathering flowers for someone and someone giving directions to someone else to buy flowers #the directions might take some time and effort but ultimately you're sending out someone else to buy the flowers #because you can't be arsed to do it yourself #so no I don't care if the lavish bouquet is prettier than the slightly bedraggled looking handful of flowers the other person gifted to me #(okay I'll stop ranting now)

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floating-in-the-blue · 35 minutes

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Alex: *prima ballerina mode enabled*

#I love him #best anxious gay ghost #phantomfloat

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floating-in-the-blue · 1 hour

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Zuhair Murad | Spring/Summer 2024 Couture

#fashionfloat

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floating-in-the-blue · 2 hours

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floating-in-the-blue · 2 hours

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Miss Sohee Spring 2024

#beautiful!!#fashionfloat

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floating-in-the-blue · 3 hours

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I attended a seminar on Legal Issues and the LGBTI community and one HILARIOUS side effect of same sex marriage getting legalised was in reality…horrible for estate planning and property disputes, but also sounds like an incredible fic premise

Before same sex marriage was legal a fair few gay couples got married in foreign countries; it had no effect in Australia but it was the principle of the thing. When it became legal, their marriages took effect in Aussie too.

This was wonderful for couples who were still together, but for couples who had broken up, and hadn’t bothered to go back to that foreign country to get divorced (and they rarely did)…they suddenly found themselves married again.

#this sounds like a legal nightmare and a fic dream

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floating-in-the-blue · 4 hours

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Love this detail on Russian attempts to hack St Andrews: https://t.co/5spKC66UnV — James Shield (@jshield)

#hats off to Dame Sally Mapstone

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floating-in-the-blue · 4 hours

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floating-in-the-blue · 5 hours

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I love the generational gap between emoji usage. Anyone over 50 sees 🙃 and thinks "silly time! whee 🙃", whereas the rest of us immediately hear, verbatim, "they ask you how you are, and you just have to say that you're fine, when you're not really fine, but you just can't get into it because they would ne--"

#I am sometimes over 50 apparently #and sometimes not

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floating-in-the-blue · 5 hours

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floating-in-the-blue · 6 hours

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angel and spike's relationship and their eligibility for the shanshu prophecy have got my brain on puree and i'm tossing episodes in one at a time

when spike was first turned, immortality was a gift. he could live forever! the first goddamn thing he did was go to his mother and turn her. he told dru the three of them can travel the world together! it didn’t go well, but that was okay, because he still had dru, and she was his everything. she was his whole world, his sire, the woman who gave him life. she was his destiny. spike-as-william was perfectly content to just live with drusilla, and angel and darla, because he loved dru, and she loved them. they were family, they were his home, and that was all he ever wanted. just somewhere to belong.

and that pissed angelus right the fuck off. angelus, whose first act as a vampire was to kill his father, whose love for darla was more like rage, who took every opportunity to slaughter and bathe in the blood of innocents, could not fucking stand that this guy was just like "hahaha that was so funny when you killed that guy. anyway, i think i'm just gonna go hang out with dru." angelus didn’t want love, or peace, or contentment. he wanted to rip heads off of shoulders, eat babies, and rape teenaged girls. seeing spike so well adjusted made him genuinely angry, so he did something that he knew would ruffle spike's calm: he slept with dru.

ever since then, they've hated each other. angel literally started it, but neither of them was ever particularly kind about their retaliation. angel tortured spike emotionally and psychologically for like a hundred years, and spike had angel physically tortured for like, three whole hours for information, plus spike definitely went after buffy (in more ways than one) just to piss off angel. but even without a soul, spike was never anywhere near as bad as angel. not even close.

so angel gets a soul. it's an enormous burden, because of how much of a shitstain he's been for the past 150 years or whatever, and he suddenly is capable of guilt again. it's a curse.

(but then he sees a 14 year old girl, the one girl in the world who might put him out of his misery, and he, a 27-slash-200 year old man, literally immediately decides he's in love with that 14 year old girl. okay dude. sure.)

angel becomes a good guy and joins the fight against evil, instead of just eating rats and not dying, because he wants the girl to like him. she does, they bang, he loses his soul again, tortures her psychologically, kills some people, gets sent to a hell dimension, gets out, and leaves. honestly, can't blame him for that one.

angel leaves buffy voluntarily so that he won't/can't hurt her by being a shitstain without a soul again.

and then there's spike. spike basically just noodles around, delivering threatening monologues from rooftops while watching one protagonist or another, and it's very cool and scary until it's time for the dastardly plan to kick in, at which point everything immediately falls apart like a cartoon car with no bolts, leaving spike blinking comically, holding a steering wheel and sitting on air. spike refers to angel as a drama queen several times, and he's not wrong, but he is very hypocritical.

spike gets to sunnydale and goes after buffy for fun, fails terribly, then succeeds at kidnapping angel, who he needs because dru, the light of his life, his moon and stars, his effulgent beauty, his destiny, is not feeling well and he needs the blood of her sire to heal her. that's it. no real ulterior motive, no "i'm gonna getcha" threats, just. business. his wife is sick and he's getting her magical chicken noodle soup. it just so happens that the chicken in said soup is angel, and spike has no problem with that.

then he continues noodling around, tortures angel about a ring, fails terribly, goes back to sunnydale, and immediately gets caught and collared by the literally underground military group operating out of a california college campus. and then he can't hurt humans anymore without getting a migraine, and he's the world's biggest baby, so he is effectively neutered from here on out.

gradually, he learns to be less of a shithead, and falls for buffy the real way, the long way, the hard way—he sees her, and he knows her, and he learns to respect and love her. he is dogged in his pursuit of her. relentless. because even when she tells him to back off, she kisses him right after. she's putting on a show for the benefit of her own pride, and he knows that, and he understands, because he believes it when she says he's beneath her. he knows it. he's not good enough for her, and he never could be.

but he could be better.

so he leaves. he goes and gets his soul back. he fights tooth and nail to get it, almost dying several times in the process. because he's not being cursed with a soul—he's earning his. he's proving, once and for all, to himself, to angel, to buffy, to everyone, that he is better than what everyone thought he could ever be.

and, just in case anyone had any doubt, he goes back to sunnydale and he does the one thing angel could never do: he gives his life to save the goddamn world. burns up, knowing he's leaving buffy behind, knowing there's no coming back from this. knowing, ultimately, this is the only thing worth doing. he dies, not for buffy, but because it's the right thing to do.

and that pisses angel off, too.

he's like, why the fuck should it be so easy for him? all he has to do is die and now suddenly he's a hero? a champion? angel's spent a thousand years suffering! that has to be worth more! that has to mean he's the better man! because if he's not, if spike can be weighed against angel and find a balanced scale, then he suffered for nothing! and spike barely suffered at all! (factually untrue, but angel doesn't exactly see clearly when it comes to his protege) so, no. he does not keep his cool when it turns out spike is eligible for the shanshu prophecy just as much as angel

and the reason for all of angel's dumbfuck behavior is made all too clear when he tries to convince spike not to claim the shanshu prophecy for himself: "it's a burden. a cross. you have to live."

diagnosis: terminal catholicism

angel is catholic and spike is not and that's why all of this happened the way it did.

p.s. also: SPIKE WITH A SOUL WAS NOT A DIFFERENT MAN THAN THE SPIKE WITHOUT A SOUL WHO LEARNED TO BE GOOD. he put the fucking work in, he just needed it to be official. like a high school diploma. "went through hell and here's the proof."

p.p.s. also: the initial angelus getting mad was because angelus totally wanted to fuck spike, took him on a date, and spike bailed to hang out with dru, so angelus had revenge sex with dru. canon.

#excellent analysis #angel is catholic and spike is not is the perfect explanation #buffloat #whedonfloat

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floating-in-the-blue · 6 hours

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So I started working again today, and me and my coworker had to squeeze lemons which usually is a really un fun job but TODAY. We had the mostly lovely batch of lemons to work with. So we rated how smoothly they cut and how nice the insides of them looked for about an hour. An absolutely marvelous time I gotta say

#when life gives you lemons: rate them #(and then squeeze them to death)

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floating-in-the-blue · 7 hours

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#omg everything about this is perfect #buffloat #whedonfloat

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floating-in-the-blue · 8 hours

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Experimental bookbinding!

A couple of years ago there was a conversation in the Renegade discord about books styled after corsetry, and I thought it would be cool to model the actual construction after corsetry, not just the aesthetics. So,

Book pages are often held together by being sewn onto cords or tapes, which are then glued or tied to the cover boards

What if they were laced to the cover boards instead?

In this notebook, each section of folded pages is sewn individually. The sewing creates channels to thread the lacing through.

It took a couple of lacing attempts to get it to work. On an actual corset, the lacing would alternate being threaded out to in vs in to out, so that the corset would be able to lace completely closed. When I laced the book like this, the pages didn't stay in place--I needed the lacing to pull the pages towards the outside edge of the board at every pass through.

The pages are made of onesided graph paper, so they're blank on one side and gridded on the other. I plan to use this as a bookbinding planning journal. Technically, one could unlace the pages and replace them with a blank set when it's full.

The flat-felled seams and boning channels on the cover are purely decorative.

#this is so pretty and cool #artfloat

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