Explain Your Signature.

I also change my username a lot, so I've gotten in the habit of keeping Mage in there for consistency.

Pronouns are there so people know how to refer to me gender-wise, even though I'm admittedly still figuring that out. And the roleplaying part is a nod to how much I love roleplaying with my friends. <33

My current signature is:

i can't love you if you don't know the difference between teal & dark cyan
&
you should know i am a time traveler
&
there is no season as achingly temporary as now

~ napo 2021

And I've had it since NaPo last year. :')

I've had the chunk "i can't love you if you don't know the difference between teal and dark cyan" for a much longer time though. The line comes from this poem from NaPo 2018 (though my obsession with dark cyan came slightly before) the second link in that quote is to this article I wrote in my art thread titled "A STUDY IN COLOR: DARK CYAN VERSUS TEAL" which actually shows that teal and dark cyan are different colors (they actually are! not even just as a joke!) and also explains why dark cyan is the ultimate color. I can't really explain the entire background of why I like dark-cyan so much, but will say I have pretty much always loved color-poems and put a lot of significance in colors. The quote to me means that we need to look for the poetry (ie. dark cyan) in the world, and not settle for the ordinary (teal) even when to everyone else it looks the same. Things like poetic cadence are worth fighting for.

The next part of my signature is "you should know i am a time traveler" which is not a doctor who reference, but is left-over from when I used to have a list of my "yws credentials" in my signature like my kotgr involvement etc, and I thought it was sort of poetic too and links to this really really funny thing I posted on YWS in the discussion forums once about time-travel that I think is probably my funniest moment on YWS as well as encapsulates a lot of my personality. It also is a little bit of a reference to how much my current poetic-voice is involved with ancestry / memory references, and also because a lot of my "big" yws projects have to do with archive things (like my "this month in history" squills column and the "big book of YWS records") which are both "time traveler" type things.

Then the last chunk says "there is no season as achingly temporary as now" which is a line from one of my 2021 napo poems here and I think really spoke to my poetic vibe in napo this year as well as being an important message that I think people (including myself!) need to remember, time (& life) is really fleeting and precious and there is no time like the present. I think that message also is one that meshes in a really interesting way with the time traveler comment too - with the idea that if a person traveled across all of time, the most precious time would still be "right now" - to me that means don't get lost in worry about the past or the future but be what you can and appreciate who you are and what you have in the moment.

Lastly I have a link to my 2021 napo (even though it is literally march now) because NaPo is my favorite YWS activity and I like to read my napo all year and am really proud of what I wrote for NaPo too. :')

Also all three of the colors are significant! dark cyan for obvious reasons, dodger blue because it reminds me of the first RevMo I participated in when we got dodger blue usernames, and then the salmony-pink because that's the color I used a lot in my 2020 napo when I did a pink + grey + blue vibe.

On punctuation -> I purposely used two ampersands (&) even though grammatically only one is needed in a list of three, because one of my favorite poetic techniques is over-using conjunctions and I've written an entire post on that before. I use the squiggly line before the "napo 2021" because the squiggly is also something I use on YWS /constantly/. :3

I think all three of the phrases really well cover my YWS personality and poetic-voice in different ways, and capture a certain level of silliness if you know the background of the first two phrases, while also capturing something very poetic and intriguing.

So, besides a bit of self-promotion, these three quotes at the moment are there:

Reality is a prison and time is its guard.

This saying actually came about when I was watching a YouTube video about gravity from other planets and they were talking about space and time being something natural and something artificial. And that's when this thought came to me that artificial space and time (our grasp of place and time) is like a prison where we are trapped.

I'm just a random girl with gentle manners

That's a line from one of my favourite songs and I like the line because it comes towards the end where the singer/character from the video is just dreaming it all but still imagining it all.

Every bad voice in your head was once outside.

I got that from my professor of psychology at university. He explained at the time about upbringing and that a child is shaped by it, and much is taken for granted by the brain, although punishment and reward are often situation-dependent and also depend on the character and mood of the other person. In short, personality is something static but character is changeable and one should not confuse and associate the two.

hooah yes yes yes yes yes

This is my favorite clean vine and I thought everyone should see it. My favorite non-clean one is the Thomas the Tank Birthday Rap.

Ah my signature, it is my own qoute, it urges respectful behaviour.

Hello! My signature is my own quote or phrasing.


I always had better luck sorting out my ambitions, hopes, fears, and a plethora of mistakes in the many forms of art. My attachment to my art helped me as a child and still guides me now when I struggle with anything I can't seem to let go of. My signature is a way of saying that not everyone has or had the chances I did, and still do, and I can only hope to be there for any person when they have the courage to ask. I will always shoulder any burden that weighs a person down too much and discard it into the deepest of oceans, just so they can grant me the gift of knowing they still walk on.

As a side note, there is another part of this quote that I couldn't quite attach to it. The full phrasing is;

I was born from ashes and deemed far from perfect, granting me the illusion that I could walk alongside our faults together with no quarrels, and see myself worthy of such an honor. However bittersweet illusions taste, they are still filling and I could only hope to my wildest dreams that I could burden those tastes for you, and you can keep dancing in the artful rain.

Either way, you can't have one without the other, but that's the beauty of walking the tight rope. You are blessed to see both sides and be granted equality in knowledge.

confession time: i really am a chunk of shiny valuable metal that isn't easy to melt (and that uses she/her pronouns)

I just can't think of something yet, may you be blessed by the blank.