obstinatecondolement | Entries tagged with disability: mental illness

Search in your current space, whether brick-and-mortar or digital. Post a picture (a link to a picture will be fine!) or description of something that is or represents:
1. Something your favorite character would like
2. Something that makes you laugh
3. A fandom place you would like to visit
4. A fandom creator (pro or not) you'd like to meet
5. Something you find comforting
6. Something from a favorite TV series or movie from your childhood
7. A piece of clothing you love
8. A book or song with a color in the title
9. Something only someone in your fandom would understand

Something your favorite character would like
This one was tricky! For one, I have so many characters who I love it would be hard to single out out as my absolute number one favourite, and for another I am quite different from a lot of my favourite characters in the things I like, or at least am a bit short on stuff they'd like at the moment. So, in the spirit of a well-intentioned relative doing their very best:
It's the thought that counts, Blorbo...
Who doesn't love nice, warm hand knitted socks? They're made from 100% alpaca fibre yarn! Well, almost 100%, there's a bit of polyamide in there to make them more hardwearing. But all the better, really, less darning! Really, Blorbo, you could be a little grateful.

Something that makes you laugh
This one was a lot easier, because I was in the middle of laughing at it when I first read today's challenge on the snowflake_challenge community.
You gotta make your own fun sometimes...
This is a once-off single episode podcast I recorded with my fellow trek-rarepair-swap co-mod cosmic_llin recently for voiceteam's Mystery Box 2023 event. The challege was Temptation and bluedreaming tempted people to record a mini-podcast or oral not!fic about their favourite overlooked fandom/rare ship/etc., which I all but jumped at and immediately asked the mods if it would be okay to record something with a non-Mystery Box participant if I did the rest of the work of creating the audio work, i.e. organising, editing and cover art, etc., and fortunately they gave me the all clear.
It was really lovely to record this with Llin and reminisce on the magical four years we spent modding trek-rarepair-swap together, the amazing community that built around it, the many wonderful fanworks that were created for it, and the Star Trek rarepairs of our own that inspired the creation of the swap.
If you're interested, you can listen to the pod on AO3 via an embedded stream, or you can use the download link on the work to get a copy of the MP3. Or not, this is not intended as a hard sell, haha. But in my subjective opinion it is a pleasant 51 minutes of listening to two Star Trek nerds being silly.

A fandom place you would like to visit
Now, to be clear, I am not saying that this would be a good idea, but:
All roads lead to...
or rather away from, the Big Wahoonie itself: Ankh-Morpork! More specifically, the offices of The Ankh-Morpork Times to visit William de Worde, who in many ways is The pedantic, morally scrupulous, yet often a bit of a dick, OCD/autistic character of all time. Also, going to visit a newspaper office at a place that's vaguely analogous to a Gutenberg-era print shop is too good a chance to pass up.

A fandom creator (pro or not) you'd like to meet
I am going to cheat here and pick two...
I went to World Con 2019 in no small part to see both of these creators. Sadly, Lindsay Ellis overslept, I think due to jet-lag, and missed the panel she was supposed to do on the day I had a ticket for, but I did get to go to two things where Naomi Novik spoke, which were both fabulous. In one, she read the first chapter of the then-upcoming A Deadly Education. She was a very engaging and funny speaker and had both sets of crowds in the palm of her hand.
I've loved Novik's Temereaire series for years, and reading Spinning Silver was what finally got me to get my drop spindle out again after having it for a full year before then but not being able to figure out how to use it from videos, and I at long last managed to crack how to get the first bit of fluff to catch onto my leader thread, which has brought a great deal of fun and quality of life to me in the years since. From reading Novik's work, I really like her sense of humour and her ideas, and I think she'd be fun to chat to in a low stakes sort of setting.
And, regarding my cheat-y second pick, it would be nice to see Lindsay Ellis speak in person at some point, even if I didn't get to "meet" her, since I didn't get the chance to see her panel in 2019.

Something you find comforting
This one was a doozy...
I've blurred most of the handwriting here to protect the innocent, or myself at any rate, but this is a kind of three, or perhaps even four-for-one thing that I find comforting. Firstly, I find planners and journals very helpful in terms of using pen and paper as a better memory than my fallible meaty brain and in helping me unplug a bit and do something tactile to stop my eyes from getting too square from looking at a screen. Secondly, I also like printing out digital photos on either of my two Polaroid printers, because I so often lose my photographs when I change phones, or I never back them up, and it's nice to just have them somewhere printed out and maybe stuck down. Even, and maybe especially, silly fandom-y ones. Thirdly and fourthly, in the photo-in-the-photo here, you can see my current knitting project, which is another non-digital hobby I am trying to give more time to, and the show that's paused on my laptop in the photo is Porridge, which I've been finding to be very comforting to revisit recently.
More specifically about journaling though, I have found that with my five-year Hobonichi journal, I've been trying to talk about the things, which so far this year have mostly been silly little fandom things, I'm doing that I want to remember five years from now, and that I want to remember how I felt about them at the time.
It has been kind of interesting having a five-year journal for the first time, because I've been finding myself very hestitant to be too optimistic about looking ahead, knowing that I will be looking back on what I'm writing, because historically with journaling it has been a bit dispiriting reading about things I wanted/intended/thought I would do that never happened or didn't work out.
But I suppose that's all part of life, really, and I do want to be able to capture how I really feel in part because I know it will change and I don't want to fall prey to thinking that I don't change my mind and that I've always thought X, Y or Z. The only constant is change, but I like to keep in touch with my past self and write my future self letters about how I'm getting on, you know? So I have, at the very least, been writing down that I'm worried about being optimistic and that it feels foolish, because I don't want to forget that's how I felt. I don't want to put on a brave face to my future self and hope the shame of having over-promised how well I'd do will keep me on the straight and narrow, but I also don't want to self-censor out of some kind of misguided PR-motivated impulse to not look foolish to myself.

Something from a favorite TV series or movie from your childhood
I actually had another plan for this one, until I saw this during the IRL portion of my scavenger hunt...
It wasn't actually the Boom! comics that got me into my brief, but intense, summer of writing Bulk/Skull fic and talking about Power Rangers on Tumblr in 2016, but it was this intense revisitation of my childhood favourite that led me to read the first few volumes of the MMPR and Go Go Power Rangers comics. I sort of fell off around Shattered Grid, and did intend on catching up again at one point, but there has been a lot of lamentation and rending of garments about writing choices that the comics have made from the people I follow on Tumblr who have kept up, so I may or may not at this point.
Regardless though, it's nice to be reminded of my summer of Power Rangers, because that felt like a very pure and unabashed expression of fannish joy and I want to do that more often for whatever niche corners of fandom I find myself in. It was also around that time that I was revisiting a lot of stuff from my childhood again and allowing myself to just be self-indulgent and juvenile about liking what I liked, up to and including campy '90s shows with questionable monster costumes, which is another thing I want to remember to do more often.

A piece of clothing you love
In the context of #3, this one is kind of funny...
I coveted this Beach Boys-print Aloha shirt a lot before I bought it, because I was, at the time, trying very hard to be better about not buying things on the other side of the world impulsively and wanted to a) buy less new clothes in general and b) buy fewer clothes that weren't 100% natural fibres (this is 50/50 cotton and polyester IIRC). However, after about 5 weeks of sitting on my hands and Thinking Seriously about if I Really Needed it, I bought it. Just in time, really, because my size was very nearly sold out and it's a limited edition print that wasn't going to be brought back in stock. But I absolutely love it and I feel that it is very representative of me as a person, so I think that counts as mindful consumption, haha.
I have been trying to be more comfortable with the fact that I am not ever going to be able to pull off the willowy androgyne, or tall lumberjack, take on masculinity just because of my basic body type, which even with HRT can only change so much. I will always be short and round with small hands and feet, but that's okay because there are lots of short, round-faced men (and otherwise masculine-of-centre people) and they are great, so if I'm more of the Justin McElroy school of masculine gender presentation then I want to do that very hard and on purpose instead of living in bland unisex clothes that I try to hide in. I've fallen off a bit on this fashion-effort lately, so this is a good reminder to keep persisting in trying to get better at this.
And, regarding what I said about the relationship to #3, I wore this shirt when I was going to visit some friends in North Wales, one of whom happened to be wearing a Rincewind shirt when I got off the train. The friend wearing the Rincewind shirt took my luggage for me and my other friend remarked, shortly after I got done taking a photograph of the sign for Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch,^* "Um, so I've noticed something here..." and we all had a good laugh about me doing touristy things while I was doing an unintentional closet cosplay of Twoflower and my friend was channeling Rincewind at the same time. I, fortunately, did not leave my luggage in Wales, however.
*Which, incidentally, is a request only stop, so I had to tell the conductor that it was where I was disembarking ahead of time, a task for which I prepared by relentlessly drilling myself with Welsh language tutorials on YouTube and getting Welsh friends at vidukon_cardiff, where I was travelling from, to tutor me on the pronunciation before I left the hotel. All told, I spent almost a full day on this preparation (remember what I said about finding William de Worde relatable?), only, after all that, for the conductor to tell me he was getting off at Chester and I would have to tell the next fella.
Should you ever be in this situation though, I have been reliably informed that you don't have to say the whole name, and would seem like a bit of a try-hard if you attempted to, and all that you need to do is say "Llanfair-PG" or, if you really want to seem like you're in the know, "Llanfairpwllgwyngyll." I tried the latter the first time pretty successfully with conductor #1, but stumbled at the fence by not taking a long enough run up to it with conductor #2, and had to resort to shamefacedly saying that I'd meant Llanfair-PG.
The rather unfortuante thing is that even with an abbreviated version of the name in question, I'm really bad at the ll sound in Welsh (to say nothing of other sounds in Welsh that weren't there to trip me up on this occasion, like the trilled r), so I run into issues straight away. But, as an Irish person who gets very irate about tourists on the train who do not even attempt to learn how to say Irish language place-names and just blithely and confidently mangle them by assuming they should be pronounced like English, I wanted to do my best and make a genuine attempt. Which, unfortunately, was not amazing. Better luck next time, I guess, lol. At least I knew that written Welsh has it's own phonetic conventions that are not identical to written English, I suppose?
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A book or song with a color in the title
This is very cheeky, but...
I also recorded this filk for voiceteam's Mystery Box event. It's based on Under a Blanket of Blue, as performed by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. I was taking part in a Filk Broken Telephone and the work before mine was 'Meet me in the blanket fort' (based on Meet Me in the Battlefield) by irrationalpie, so this seemed like a good lead on from that and I liked the opportunity for green as a reference to BrickGrass's browser extension that highlights the usernames of users on Rindle's directory of creators with blanket permission statements for transformative works of their fanworks in green, because an audio fanwork event seemed like the right venue for a work about blanket permission statements.
I do a fair bit of amateur singing and other kinds of music in a non-fannish context, but this is the first time I've made an attempt at a musical fanwork, so I hope it turned out okay. If I was doing it again I'd use my other mic, because this sounded a bit tinny, but I think it's listenable.
If you're curious, you can click on the image itself to follow the link to the AO3 work, or for convenience, here's another link here. But absolutely no pressure, and I am linking purely in case people wanted to hear it to save them from hunting it down or asking for a link. My 2024 fandom mission statement is doing whatever I want whether people are interested or not, so if you're not interested then that's genuinely fine.

Something only someone in your fandom would understand
Some more cheekiness...
Once again, the image is a link and here is another one, haha. But also, once again, I genuinely do not expect anyone to make use of either of these links and am just putting them there on the off-chance someone does want a link and, honestly, to scratch the itch caused by the HTML-fuelled goblin that lives in my brain.
I'm mostly including this at all to show that I am walking the walk re: doing whatever niche bullshit I want as I resolved to as part of my day #2 resolutions, because I've already written another fic for one of the micro fandoms I nominated, requested, and offered for Yuletide,^* in addition to the one I wrote for my assignment.
I am 10,000% delighted with how well I did out of Yuletide this year—so much in fact that I still wanted to write more because I was all fired up. So I did. Even though it will be completely impenetratible to, I'm gonna say, 100% of the people who are subscribed to my AO3 profile. And I may still write more! I have an idea for a vid too.
^*And, happily, which I was gifted two wonderful fics for as well, Long Drawn Sunday Night by twoam and A Bit of Bottle by nomadicwriter, as having the opportunity to write one of my own, What Good Are Cupid's Arrows to a Fletcher Without a Beau?, for my recip Emma_Oz.
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I got very link happy in this, so if any are broken, give me a shout in the comments and I'll fix them.

P.S. I've screened comments on this because of a minor brain weasels concern about [REDACTED], but I've unscreened every comment I've gotten so far and if yours is screened for a while I'm probably just asleep or haven't checked DW for a bit.

So I have dipped into a lot of non-fic fanwork creation of various kinds—fan crafts, playlists, graphics, vids, podfic, icons, typesets and books of fic—but I am generally not super prolific in any of them. I started vidding in 2019 and have since only made 14 vids, which is not not due to tech issues, but it's still not a great innings, especially when you consider that the first four were all posted within the 21 days of each other, because I started off on a hot streak that then immediately cooled to a rate of two and a half vids a year after that. I also have been orbiting fan binding spaces for like... three years and have only gotten started actually binding books this year, and it also almost didn't happen for me again because of tech issues (my dad's printer and the imposition process joined forces to ruin my life, but luckily a renegadepublishing mod held my hand through troubleshooting the issues I was having.

this got very long, lol

I am doing better with podfic, likely due to the lower barrier for entry. I posted my first pod last year towards the end of May, and as of now I have six completed podfics posted publicly on my AO3 account (plus one WIP, plus one that's in the Chromatic Characters Podfic Anthology IV collection and will be revealed on September 30th and, if I'm being a bit cheeky, plus a fraction of (one of) my

pod_together partner(s),

semperfiona's Discworld pod: [Podfic] Radio Killed the Semaphore Star, because I read the footnotes for the podfic version).

This still isn't amazing compared with my fic output,^* and that is also in large part because I have also had tech issues that have held me back with podfic. My microphone is, by all accounts I've seen online from audiophiles, Very Good and an exceptional XLR condenser mic at its price point, and I haven't read any horror stories about the audio interface or XLR cables I use, but consistently it has recorded incredibly quietly for me, even with the gain on the audio interface set as high as it will go. I have kind of improved that as of this evening, because apparently some versions of Windows set the input audio levels very low by default and you have to manually change them in settings, so that was a big part of the issue, but I still have to set my gain up higher than I'd like to get the audio to a place where I don't have to drastically change the volume when I normalise it to between 19 and 16 LUFS, because I lose a lot of the audio quality with huge changes from very quiet to very loud, but if I set the gain as high as I think is appropriate then I get a hiss that I have to take out with two rounds of noise reduction that, to my ear, takes a lot of the warmth out of the tone of my voice and makes me sound a little tinny.

I have gotten some feedback on this, though, and someone else said that they felt one round of noise reduction made the hiss inaudible unless they turned the volume up uncomfortably loud, so they at least would not notice it if that was what the final edited version of audio sounded like. I do think I will ask for an inline preamp for my mic for my birthday, just so I can set the gain as low as it will go. I have heard good things about the FetHead Phantom (I need to get one that allows phantom power to flow, since my mic needs 48V phantom power) and at €75 plus fifteen quid delivery, I would not feel outrageous asking my siblings and parents to chip in on it for my birthday present.

However! I have also recorded the last two pods I've done (plus the footnotes of the one I guest-voiced on) on my phone, which is like... definitely more than adequate! It's 1000% not a hobby that requires top of the line microphones and I would never recommend someone starting out get a mic before they've recorded a few pods on their phone or their laptop's in-built mic, or whatever they already have, and edited on an open source DAW like Audacity to see if they enjoy the hobby.

I did not, I hasten to add, run out and buy expensive equipment on a whim to try podfic. I ran out and bought expensive equipment on a whim, because at one point I had plans to do a Star Trek podcast with my friend that we kind of lost momentum on when we were Going Through It. So, basically, all the advice I had come across, when I was researching what to buy to start a podcast was aimed at people who were trying to make podcasting or other kinds of Content Creation™ a side-hustle. And, in that specific context, the getting highest quality audio you can afford out the gate is good advice,^** because good audio is a solid investment for someone who makes their living creating audio(/audio-visual) stuff online. If you buy something that isn't going to give you the kind of audio that people have come to expect from Content Creators™©® it's often just a false economy that will slow the growth of your career and you will have to replace it much sooner than if you'd even gone one tier up from the absolutely ground level of the budget options on the market.

But for podfic? Literally do not spent a fucking penny if you have anything at home already that can record audio, which you almost certainly do if you are in online fandom. Plenty of very prolific podficcers record on their phones (or on headset mics, or laptop mics, or whatever they had when they started out) for their entire tenure in the podfic fandom. And that's not only literally fine, it is a lot more typical than having a set-up comparable to someone whose job involves recording and editing audio just for podfic. And actually? Mics on smartphones have great audio quality that can sound better than a higher quality mic that someone who doesn't really know what they are doing (*raises hand*) is recording on, because they can be extremely sensitive to the point of picking up a pin dropping in the next room, while phones are literally designed to exclude outside sound. Because they're phones.

And like, I think I kinda know what to do with my set-up now, but it has taken a lot of trial and error and Google/YouTube/Reddit/Discord have turned up a lot of dead ends or told me to do things I've already done/not to do things I am not doing. If I hadn't already owned a mic and had just started out on my phone instead, I might have already recorded and posted a lot more podfics and I likely would never have felt the need to get a microphone. And, you know, it's very nice to know that I have the option of just using my phone when I don't feel like taking out all my equipment and setting up my mic stand and all that shite and it will be Fine. I'm not unhappy that I have such a nice mic and I do want to make it work as well as it can for me, given that I did buy it for that podcast that never happened, but I am glad that I don't feel like it is the only option available to me that is up to my own standards for audio quality (which aren't even my own standards really, but those of some dads with YouTube channels, and I have been known to be very forgiving of pretty questionable audio quality when I've been listening to music or whatever in the past). And even if I get good enough at wrangling my mic that the quality is unequivocally and objectively Much Better than what I can achieve on a phone, I feel like I'm finally starting to escape from the prison of perfectionism and I'll be able to say and actually believe that doing something imperfectly is better than not doing it at all, because I don't feel up do doing it The Best That I (hypothetically) Could. I am feeling this in other parts of my life too, which has been great, but it is a very welcome change here.

But anyway, obviously I want to be empowered in non-fandom parts of my life by this, but I also am kind of excited to get more vids/books/etc. done because I'm gonna stop waiting to be able to whole-ass things that I can absolutely get done to a Good Enough standard with 45% of my ass. Like, I mean, I went from having recorded A podfic in January this year, and seven in the span of eight months, to having (at least contributed to) three in one month and honestly I think [podfic] Death with Dignity by Thebiwife is maybe my best work to date.^***

I think that I have this very warped idea of what I Should be able to do, because I am very, very productive and can perform to very high standards... sometimes. And over short periods of time through small bursts of effort that are not sustainable to do All The Time. I can't reasonably expect the same level of "productivity" and "quality" non-stop. It's like saying that Usain Bolt would be the fastest marathon runner in the world if he'd only stop giving up after 200 metres. And also... sometimes, it is Bad, Actually, when I am working that fast and that much and to such a high standard, because it means either I have put myself under too much pressure by overcommitting and/or procrastinating, or that I'm Doing A Hypomania, or all of the above, and then I crash hard and can hardly function on much more basic and essential level for however long it takes me to recover. Which is not good!

On the other hand, I do very much hesitate to say something like "I should just be Steady and Consistent and Never do things over short, intense sprints" here, because I don't really think that's realistic given how many times I have tried really hard to do that and it doesn't seem to be how my brain works, but also it's not always bad that I get bursts of energy where I do Lots of things to a very high standard. I don't think that I should expect it of myself as a default, and I don't think I should ignore when it can be a red flag or the result of a bad decision, but I don't think it's a bad and pathological thing that I need to ruthlessly stamp out. I remember when I was writing reams of Cobra Kai fic while incredibly depressed (or, I guess, having a mixed episode) and not being able to do various basic self care things that are pretty much non-negotiables like showering, but I don't think that I would have suddenly been able to do those things if I had cut myself off from my sole source of happiness because I wasn't allowed to have fun until I could Be Healthy.

So, yeah, it's a pretty multifaceted thing, I guess. I think it would be healthy for me to let myself off the hook for not running the marathon in 01:07:28, and not basing my plans for the future around being able to do that, or thinking that it's something I Could do but am just being too lazy to apply myself to achieve because I'm a bad person who hates hard work, but I also have to allow myself to be happy when I can run 200 metres in 19.19 seconds and it's not hurting me in other areas. And I shouldn't hate myself for being a bad marathon runner no matter how fast or slow I can sprint right then. I can work on my marathon end time without being self-loathing about how I've Frivolously decided to be good at sprinting instead, because it must mean I'm a show off and have no stamina. I don't know if this metaphor is still working, but you basically get the idea.

^*Which is like, to be clear, not a problem. You don't need to focus completely equally on all the different things you do in fandom and it's not really surprising that a skill I've been working on almost ceaselessly since childhood that involves absolutely no technical skills involving hardware or software that are unfamiliar to me anymore, and only requires a machine (not saying computer here for a reason—I wrote a lot of fic on my phone that I posted to AO3 when my laptop was not cooperating for literally months) that has a word processor and an internet connection to create that kind of fanwork, and that I started doing in fandom years before I tried making other kinds of fanworks, is something that I generally do more of compared with my other fannish hobbies.
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^**Honestly, given that I did not want to monetise this podcast, I don't know what my excuse is. I think I got rather carried away and went mad, because I am extremely susceptible to dogmatic didacticism from people on the internet telling me the Best way to do things that Everyone should do and how Only A Fool would do the much more accessible and inexpensive thing. Don't let me near salespeople, basically.
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^***Which I say not because it was the first one I used effects on, but the one where I flubbed the fewest number of lines while recording it. I usually end up with raw audio that is ten times as long as the finished run time will be after editing, but I got this one out pretty fluently. And I think what made the difference there was that I used a (free) teleprompter desktop app when I was recording and tweaked my script a bit ahead of time instead of making decisions on the fly about whether I was going to add dialogue tags to make it less ambiguous who was speaking or to leave it as written. Literally a game changer and I strongly recommend it to anyone who records podfic hasn't tried one. I used to have the fic open on my phone and I'd be squinting at a tiny screen and trying to juggle a thousand bits of hardware at once and it was Rather Hard. I much prefer just reading off my laptop screen as it scrolls down a teleprompter with multiple font sizes that I can pause, speed up, slow down, and page up and down the playback of while I read into my phone. Fucking luxury compared to how I was living before, lol.

And, speaking of making small changes to the text like adding dialogue tags, I also started to be a bit more judicious about replacing descriptions of sounds (laughing, snorting, etc.) with just... doing that sound myself and changing the dialogue tag to "[they] said" and so on.

But, I mean, while I very much would still think this was my best work if I'd done any sound effects or not, I am also very proud of the soundscaping I did in that pod—in particular the section I did where Deanna's empathy overwhelms her in a crowd, which I tried to make a Stressful Listening Experience that evoked sensory overload in a way that would, hopefully, not just tip over into being too stressful to listen to for 100% of listeners (although I did make a version without sound effects and added warnings and timestamps, so that it was a completely opt-in experience). I got a lot of lovely feedback about that from people over last weekend during pod_together's listening jam where a bunch of us listened to and read stuff in this years collection and commented on it, keeping track of our comments and amount of time we spent listening over the weekend.

Collectively, I think we got to a very impressive 70+ hours and 150-ish comments. I was in the top five listeners and top five commenters, which I'm very pleased about, because historically I have had an awful habit of just... not looking through collections of events that I particate in very extensively, because I get overwhelmed and put it off. And then forget. Having a weekend long group thing, which included some communal listening hours hosted on the Discord as well as us doing our own thing, really helped me make it a priority.

Also, by the end of the weekend there was nothing left in the collection that didn't have any comments! This was a first for the exchange, as they've often had years go by before a particular years collection had comments on every work and this year we got to everyone within a week of the end of the event. Obviously people (and especially podficcers) aren't just creating their art to get praised, but it can be a bit of a bummer to work on something for an event and then not hear any feedback at all about it, and I think with podfic (which doesn't get a lot of love directed towards the creator at the best of times) it's disspiriting because it can feel like "Oh wow, even when I'm making something for a podfic-centric event, there are not going to be a lot of people who like or care about what I do, and the few who do don't tell me about it." In my case, I went from having no (0) comments on Death with Dignity (which, as I mentioned, I think is my best podfic to date) to having six very generous and thoughtful ones in a few days, and I'm very glad that I got to pay that kindness forward to other participants.
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Anyway, TL;DR, if there's something that is genuinely pretty accessible you want to try, but there are barriers to entry that you are actively opting in to by expecting that you have to be an expert or have expensive specialist equipment right away, then you have my permission to be a beginner and to have fun half-assing things with whatever you have that'll get the job done. And, although this is not at all the point of hobbies, you will ultimately get better by half-assing lots of things than you will by dreaming of what you could accomplish with your whole ass and not doing anything. And some day 10% of your ass and Tony Stark's figurative pile of scraps will be able to accomplish what your whole ass and all the expensive tools in the world could not even hope to right now. But also, while it's not bad to want to do things well or to care about craftsmanship, it is very, very important not to let anxiety about the quality of what you can produce at your skill level, and with the tools available to you, ruin the fun you could have with the process of getting there.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Location: perfectionists of the world unite: you have nothing to lose by your shame
Current Music: also fandom is not your job and you do not have to do the job of a professional

So! I have been incommunicado on here for Some Time now, but I thought I'd swing by and write a quick update.

RL stuff involving workplace bullying and mental illness

I've been having kind of A Time of it with my mental health and various RL things—I was bullied very badly at work by a supervisor and eventually let go at the end of the probationary period^*, which has been a blow. I will be starting a 1–2 year accountancy technician course soon though, so onwards and upwards.

In more fandom-y news however, I participated in

pod_together for the second year, and had a great time. I was in two teams: one as a writer and one as a podficcer. I also contributed some line readings to the team I wrote for, because it was a Discworld fic and I thought that having a second reader for the footnotes would help mitigate potential confusion.

I wrote Radio Killed the Semaphore Star which

semperfiona adapted to audio in the podfic version of the story. It's a post-canon imagining of the invention of radio on Discworld (full credit for this premise to

semperfiona! I thought it was such a great idea for this event) in the form of various connected vignettes featuring different sets of characters interacting with and reacting to the new medium. The podfic is very creative and

semperfiona did a great job with it.

The podfic I made for the event was [Podfic] Death with Dignity, based on a fic by

Thebiwife's fic Death with Dignity. The story is s an examination of the social model of disability through the lens of Deanna Troi's backstory and the extent to which she experiences extra sensory abilities having been aritrarily pathologised both on Betazed and Earth depending on what's considered the "default" where she happens to be at the time. In the final part of the fic, she interacts with everyone's favourite ex-Maquis Betazoid murderer, Lon Suder from Star Trek: Voyager, whose lack of empathic abilities have also been pathologised and problematised throughout his life. The fic is very poignant and I think it hit it out of the park.

There is a fully soundscaped version of the audio version I made featuring some intro and outro music, in addition to many bells and whistles as I could ~~jam in~~ artfully integrate from a combination of sound effects available on TrekCore and Free Sound. This was my first time experimenting with audio effects beyond just trying to get the raw audio of my own recording cleaner with noise reduction and the Audacity de-esser plugin etc., and I had a lot of fun with it.

For people who prefer less busy audio in their podfics, there is also an effects light version that is mostly vanilla audio with the exception of a little echo and reverb added to telepathic lines of dialogue—there are time stamps for the above lines in the work itself as well as information and time stamps for specific sound effects I thought could trigger misophonia in the soundscaped version. I will try and add a completely vanilla version in the near future!

^*Possibly these are somewhat related, but it was also just... a mess there for various reasons that I don't think were my fault and I frankly think that it was a terrible management decision to let me go and they didn't know what a good thing they had with me, but you'll have to take my word for it. I also got fired almost immediately after disclosing my disability, so. Lol. [click to return]

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Like a dandelion up through the pavement, I persist

resistance is not futile

Entries tagged with disability: mental illness

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Like a dandelion up through the pavement, I persist

resistance is not futile

Entries tagged with disability: mental illness

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Snowflake day 5

podfic musings

*taps mic* Is this thing on?

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October 2024

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taps mic Is this thing on?