It’s the most wonderful time of year—the time to obsessively listen to A VHS Christmas Carol.

it’s me and my media literate mutuals against the world

me as a hotel receptionist: *greets guests by playing hotel california but cutting it off right before they say california*

Low Opacity Elrond: the trifecta

There are three things I've learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin.

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966) dir.  Bill Melendez

'Edward', meaning 'in the direction of Ed'

PACIFIC RIM (2013) dir. Guillermo del Toro

I think the first step to allowing your art to go public, to be seen, heard, connected with, and yes, possibly judged by a straggle of other humans is realising that everyone has the ugly thoughts. If you find whining-as-songwriting helps you get things out of your system, others have felt that too. If you find writing traumatic or cruel scenes a way to explore those terrorising ‘what-if’s in your head, someone else has thought that too. If you need to shriek and scream and fit that into a song, someone else wants to scream too. If your painting style fixated on certain themes, colour schemes, blood, whatever. You need to get stuff out of your head, or the thoughts will rot in there. It’s fine to do that.

I’m someone who’s always been a little afraid of the thought that people might know exactly what’s going on inside my head. Maybe I’m also worried people will go “are you okay?” or worse, think “guess I didn’t know you at all, that’s not the person I thought you were” or something similar. Sure, a public stage is not solely a place to air dirty laundry, but you’ve had angry thoughts? So have I. You’ve thought selfishly? Self-loathed? Felt like a mess? Felt alone even when it appears people love you? It’s not just you.

In stats and data analytics class we’ve been learning about clustering. Our professor says, “remember, it is absolutely not necessary that all data will cluster well, or fall into neat little clusters with patterns and similarities. However, we often deal with data involving humans, and for whatever psychological or evolutionary reasons, we’ve seen that human behaviour does tend to group together over time, circumstances, social groups, etc.”

I think recognising that most human thought is not original is comforting. Music or lyrics that touch upon harder or more personal themes, and that people have connected with, are often not because that writer was the only person who felt that way and it was unique, but because it reminded people listening that other people throughout history have had those thoughts too. There is some relief in finding you are not unique, no matter how niche, and for an artist that can definitely be freeing.

I’m not giving advice or anything, I am not in a position to, but I wish my teen self had been less embarrassed and more willing to open up to people and not hide away. Maybe something about the structures you are in as a teen almost preclude that, but I wish I’d known back then that it’s neither unique, not embarrassing nor momentous to Have A Thought. We all do.

Yes you are putting a piece of you out there, and 100% someone will judge it, but you can do whatever you want forever.

"you should be at the club" I should be working on my fanfic

my least favourite turn based strategy game is email