BRADY SKJEI Intermission | January 4, 2025

Maybe being good at social media should not be the main qualifier for all creative work

thank you mel

He used to be small you know

what the whole "please comment on fic you like, it will encourage more writing" vs. "fic writers shouldn't be writing for engagement and validation" debate fails to really grasp, for me, is that comments shouldn't be boiled down to "engagement and validation" in the first place. by which i mean: comments aren't payment for a service, they are communication and connection. they represent the audience reaching back.

i don't write just for myself. are you kidding me? the point of storytelling, to me, is to present certain narrative arguments and produce or encourage an emotional response to them. That communication is essentially useless if there's no endpoint, no listener. To me, there is no point if I'm not communicating with someone. When I write, I am talking to a reader. If you've read anything I've written, then I was talking TO YOU.

you are well within your right to consume fic as ~content~ and withhold your "payment" out of a sense that the writer should be satisfied at having created anything at all in an unresponsive void. but please be aware that it feels really good when you talk back.

the blog is coming I swear!! be patient 😚

i dont see why i cant start a trend, so here goes. lets try to build back our attention spans. lets try to focus on just one thing for as long as possible. lets not watch those "asmr for people with adhd" videos where they fuck up adhd folks even worse. lets resist the urge to reach for our phones when watching a movie. lets read the articles we reblog, even when theyre boring. i know its hard, i have adhd too, but its worth it. i also know that this hard work doesnt always seem super impressive to other people, so id love for yall to tell me in the tags or replies if youve done something, no matter how small, for your attention span. you deserve to feel like youve taken back some of what social media has ripped from you

Compared to other colors found in nature, true blues are pretty rare—but the indigo milk cap (Lactarius indigo) has just that! This vibrant mushroom gets its color from a pigment that is a derivative of guaiazulene, a dark blue crystalline hydrocarbon. You would think that its blueness is a marker for toxicity, but the mushroom is actually edible—although its color fades to a grayish hue when it’s cooked.

Photo: Andrey Loria, CC BY-SA 4.0, iNaturalist