inkskinned:

“women don’t know how much rejection hurts” i wasn’t allowed to play with legos or touch a football or look at sports. i wasn’t allowed to eat more. i wasn’t allowed to talk loudly, to laugh too much, to inject myself into male conversations. i wasn’t allowed to be good at science. i was told “oh sweetheart, have another college in mind, STEM fields are hard.” i got turned down from jobs in favor of boys where were less qualified. one boss told me he was hesitant to hire me because my last name is hispanic and i’m pretty and he didn’t want the “controversy.” i couldn’t take up space on the train. i would be talked over in public places. i couldn’t eat steak or drink beer, they were “boy” things. video games were off limits, i wasn’t allowed to ask if i could see more characters like myself in them. super heroes were all men, women were just love interests. i wanted shirts with wonderwoman, with black widow, with harley quinn, i found next to nothing. i wanted pockets and colors other than pink and clothes designed for warmth, not sexy, i got nothing. women change their name to be published nationally. i wasn’t allowed to be emotional, i wasn’t good at driving, i wasn’t in charge of my own body. i wasn’t allowed to show off my body, i wasn’t allowed to dress modestly. i had to be pretty, whatever it took, but my eating was constantly made fun of. “she’s, like, anorexic” was a punchline, not a disorder. “she’s fat” was a death sentence. 

boys said no because: i wasn’t pretty i wasn’t small i was too loud i spent too much energy on being funny on because i wouldn’t shut up what a feminazi i wasn’t smart i was too smart for my own good i was always reading i was always busy i was too needy i was too independent i was not who you took home i was too much of a house mom i was perfect and it was scary.

women don’t know. women don’t know. never sat in a room and wrote angsty poetry about this shit. somehow both overemotional and not capable of knowing how much rejection stings. which one is it. which one is it. i’ll give you a hint: we’ve been rejected since the first time our parents said, “no, not the blue blanket, it’s for little boys to play with.” we are used to having “no” slammed in our faces. we got used to it. maybe the reason it seems so unnatural to hear “no” is because for your entire life, you heard “yes.”

clientsfromhell:

I was working on a “coming soon” page for a client. He had emailed me a photo and asked me to use it for the page. The photo was a landscape image with the brand logo and coming soon text embedded.

Me: Hey, I just got the image file. I don’t think its best to use an image for the page as it’s not going to look good on smaller screens.

Client: It’s fine, it has all the words there and there’s no need for you to spend lots of time coding it when I can just send you a photo.

Me: I’m just saying, I don’t think it will look good on mobiles because it’s a landscape photo and the text will be hard, if not impossible, to read.

Client: Just make the photo the homepage.

I sent my client over the link and he said it was great. After logging off and heading to bed I got a call from the client at 2 AM on my personal phone.

Client: I can’t read the text in the photo, it’s too small.

Me: I did tell you this before but you said you were happy with it.

Client: Yes but that was when I was on my laptop. I didn’t think it would make a difference. Most people use laptops anyway, right? It should be fine, right?

Me: Look, if you send me over the image and the font you want I can make the whole thing responsive so that the text increases in size and is easily readable.

My client then sends me the same image, along with two other images of just the text, without the backdrop. The image quality is terrible.  

Client: Just use the images of the text to save me time from coding so he doesn’t have to pay me as much.

Me: Okay, done. Have a look and tell me what you think. The images you have sent me of the text look low quality, can you send me higher quality ones?

Client: The font is going over the image too much and it looks kind of bad?

Me: Can you just tell me what font you are using? it would be easier.

Client: It will take more time and money though, so can’t you just Photoshop the image files so the text looks better?

Me: The images are low quality. Either send me the name of the font or higher quality images. 

The client then tells me the font name and says I have to make it in PS because it would take too much time to add the font onto the website and he wants shadows on the text.

Me: Okay I have created high quality image files and uploaded them.

Client: Now, on my friend’s phone the text looks fine. On my iPad the text looks too big.

Me: If you want, I can write some CSS so that different images show on different screens. Does that work for you?

Client: Can you come over to my house tomorrow so we can work on this together?

Me: I have three meetings tomorrow, so I’m afraid not.

Client: Please? It should only take ten minutes to get this sorted out.

After going to the client’s house he shows me where he wants the text to be positioned on each device. Each version is placed very differently. I tell him I will go back with the drawn designs and send him a link the next afternoon.

Client: No, that’s no good. Can you do it now?

Me: It’s after nine o’clock. I have been here with you since 7 PM and all you have done is draw sketches of where you want the text to be and you aren’t paying me for this.

Client: Well since it’s me doing the work why should I pay you?

Frustrated, I start coding the media queries needed to produce a different image for different devices. After ten minutes of this my client asks:

Client: Are you almost done?

Me: No, it will take a while for what you are asking, I need to make sure the images resize and move as the screen size changes.

The client watches over my shoulder for a while and asks annoying questions about the code I am using. I tell him why I am using the code and why the images of text are not easily moved into his exact positions without the code. After three hours of me working and my client making more changes about how big the text should be and where it should be I tell him that I am going home, and that I’ll work finish it tomorrow. 

Client: Can we not just finish it here?

Me: It is now well after one in the morning. I have a meeting at 10 AM and it takes me an hour to get home. 

Client: Well can you teach me the ‘codey bits’ [actual quote] so I can do it and don’t have to pay you? 

Me: No. I’m not teaching you for free. Also, I’m running your website in my test environment, which I’d rather not just give you access to because I have other projects there. Just let me go and I’ll finish it tomorrow.

He kept me there for another hour. I spent another two hours the next day working on it while he sent me messages over Facebook like “can you move the logo up a little bit,” and “I think ‘coming soon’ needs to be smaller on android.”

Eventually we were done and my client then refused to pay me for the work I’d already done, any travel time, the time I’d spent at his house, and most importantly, for all the time I spent making changes while he corrected me on Facebook. His reasoning?

Client: I thought it was free because I helped out a lot so you didn’t really do any of the work.

This was the last time I ever spoke to this client. He sent me several emails demanding I send him the work because I “used his sketches” and the work was “legally his.” 

Please take this as a lesson to always avoid these types of clients. They are not good for your physical, emotional, or mental health, not to mention your wallet.

Reading this makes me want to punch a hole in a wall.

andthewallsareonfire:

it’s weird how alienated you can feel when you’ve missed years and years of gaming because you couldn’t afford it/didn’t have time for it, and suddenly you don’t know how to play a fucking videogame anymore and the entire process is unenjoyable in nearly every aspect and everyone around you can’t understand why this is a thing

I actually relate to this a lot. I just don’t care enough to put effort into games anymore. I like watching other people play them though.

antonyjohnston:

“If you sit around waiting for the right moment to create, you will die waiting.”
    – Me, in a Scrivener user forum thread, some years ago. It’s a long story.

Every so often (that we don’t do it regularly is a great irony) I and my friends in comics figure out how much we’ve written in the past few months and tweet it.

No other medium is measured in pages output. A 300pp novel can easily become a 200pp novel by printing with smaller type; a 100pp screenplay can potentially become a film of between 60-140 minutes in length; a 200pp stage play could be performed in anything from 30 minutes to four hours. For all these media, the script length is agnostic to the final work.

But one comic page is one comic page, no more and no less. We actually write around the page as a unit, and a script for a 20pp comic will always produce a 20pp comic.

So that’s one reason. But there is another.

BEING PROLIFIC MATTERS.

I sometimes see People On The Internet decrying work-in-progress tweets and posts as worthless. “Measuring output by quantity rather than quality is dangerous,” they say. “More work doesn’t mean better work!”

These same people often dismiss NaNoWriMo as an exercise in futility. “Yeah, so you’ve written 50,000 words,” they say. “But that doesn’t mean it’s a good story! You’re just hacking it out to meet a word count!”

Here’s the thing: none of these people, not one of them, is a working writer. I say that with 100% confidence, for one simple reason – a reason that by definition only working writers truly understand.

WRITING MORE MAKES YOU A BETTER WRITER.

Woah, there. Controversial?!

No, not really.

Look: anyone can sit down and write two pages of a novel, then forget about it, and a week later write five pages of a screenplay, then forget about it, and a week later start another novel… etc, etc.

That shit is easy. Everyone (yes, even working writers) has a ton of projects they’ve started but never finished.

But writing a whole novel? Or a whole screenplay, or comic book, or stage play, or whatever? Actually seeing it through and finishing it?

Well, now. That shit is hard.

You learn from it. You learn how to sit your arse down and write, even when you don’t feel “inspired”. Even when you just want to play Peggle all day. Even when your dog is puking up because he ate something dodgy, and you’ve got a dentist’s appointment this afternoon, and by the way this room could really do with a good dusting couldn’t it, and, and, and you write anyway.

You improve. It’s impossible not to, because you have something finished, to review and assess in its entirety. And when it’s finished, it inevitably comes up wanting. What you write is never as good as what you had in your head when you started – never, ever, ever – so you make a promise to yourself, to do it better next time.

You can’t do that if you still haven’t finished this time.

Finishing something is the hardest part. You know it’s not as good as you hoped. You know there are plot problems. You know that by finishing it, you’re saying – even if only to yourself – “This is the best I can do.” And because it’s not perfect, that’s really hard.

But you do it anyway.

Will most people’s NaNoWriMo novels be awful? Sure, maybe. Guess what? Most people’s first novels are awful, period. Whether it takes four weeks or four years, it’s going to stink.

But that’s OK. Knowing it’s bad is half the battle.

If you can finish NaNoWriMo, then look back and think, “Wow, I did that… but it could be a lot better,” then as far as I’m concerned you’ve succeeded. Because that’s the point. It’s what “sort[s] the wannabes from the gonnabes”, as my friend Andy Diggle once put it.

If you make it through NaNoWriMo, and then later you write another novel because you want to do it better, congratulations: you’re already doing more to become a working writer than 99% of people in the world.

DON’T SIT AROUND WAITING FOR INSPIRATION. JUST WRITE.

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(If you want a permalink, this post is also available in the Articles section of my website.)

fr3ight-train:

acutelesbian:

fat-thin-skinny:

acutelesbian:

A lot of people ask me what my biggest fear is, or what scares me most. And I know they expect an answer like heights, or closed spaces, or people dressed like animals, but how do I tell them that when I was 17 I took a class called Relationships For Life and I learned that most people fall out of love for the same reasons they fell in it. That their lover’s once endearing stubbornness has now become refusal to compromise and their one track mind is now immaturity and their bad habits that you once adored is now money down the drain. Their spontaneity becomes reckless and irresponsible and their feet up on your dash is no longer sexy, just another distraction in your busy life.
Nothing saddens and scares me like the thought that I can become ugly to someone who once thought all the stars were in my eyes.

this fucks me up every single time

I never expected this to be my most popular poem out of the hundreds I’ve written. I was extremely bitter and sad when I wrote this and I left out the most beautiful part of that class.

After my teacher introduced us to this theory, she asked us, “is love a feeling? Or is it a choice?” We were all a bunch of teenagers. Naturally we said it was a feeling. She said that if we clung to that belief, we’d never have a lasting relationship of any sort.

She made us interview a dozen adults who were or had been married and we asked them about their marriages and why it lasted or why it failed. At the end, I asked every single person if love was an emotion or a choice.

Everybody said that it was a choice. It was a conscious commitment. It was something you choose to make work every day with a person who has chosen the same thing. They all said that at one point in their marriage, the “feeling of love” had vanished or faded and they weren’t happy. They said feelings are always changing and you cannot build something that will last on such a shaky foundation.

The married ones said that when things were bad, they chose to open the communication, chose to identify what broke and how to fix it, and chose to recreate something worth falling in love with.

The divorced ones said they chose to walk away.

Ever since that class, since that project, I never looked at relationships the same way. I understood why arranged marriages were successful. I discovered the difference in feelings and commitments. I’ve never gone for the person who makes my heart flutter or my head spin. I’ve chosen the people who were committed to choosing me, dedicated to finding something to adore even on the ugliest days.

I no longer fear the day someone who swore I was their universe can no longer see the stars in my eyes as long as they still choose to look until they find them again.

This is so fucking important and I think it’s something I needed right now