I have no excuse for this

Turns out it was a dream

Or was it?

The addition of every item and the passage of every minute has a 5% chance (1 in 20) of the Cat of Holding rejecting all items, spreading them randomly in a 10ft radius burst attack.

Are you seriously telling me that if there were routine vaccination for adenovirus, I might have a working cardiovascular system right now, even if I'd still gotten sick?

YEP! Ask me why it’s taken us this long to take post viral inflammatory autoimmune conditions seriously.

I’m fairly sure I know why, but I’m asking, if you have a minute to answer. Is it because they predominantly affect women, and it took a bunch of men contracting long covid to attract doctors’ attention to them?

Hahaha YEP!!!!! Autoimmune disorders are several times more likely in women so it took something as hugely prevalent as COVID to make it a recognizable dude problem! And sexism in medicine is a poison that sickens us all! If we’d taken women seriously in the 1990s, when there was a very special episode of THE GOLDEN GIRLS about chronic fatigue syndrome, so NO ONE can pretend it wasn’t ON OUR GODDAMN RADAR, we’d have some fucking ANSWERS by now but INSTEAD I got taught that fibromyalgia probably wasn’t real and women be crazy! EAT! THE! ESTABLISHMENT!

furries coming to chucks aid with neck fan advice when i post about my mask getting super hot underneath

Inktober Day 10: Ouija Board Gengar

Remember your manners, or risk leaving the door open…👻

Apparently that’s what some people say anyway😅

Oh! Sorry! G-g-goodbye!

So, anyway, I say as though we are mid-conversation, and you're not just being invited into this conversation mid-thought. One of my editors phoned me today to check in with a file I'd sent over. (<3)

The conversation can be surmised as, "This feels like something you would write, but it's juuuust off enough I'm phoning to make sure this is an intentional stylistic choice you have made. Also, are you concussed/have you been taken over by the Borg because ummm."

They explained that certain sentences were very fractured and abrupt, which is not my style at all, and I was like, huh, weird... And then we went through some examples, and you know that meme going around, the "he would not fucking say that" meme?

Yeah. That's what I experienced except with myself because I would not fucking say that. Why would I break up a sentence like that? Why would I make them so short? It reads like bullet points. Wtf.

Anyway. Turns out Grammarly and Pro-Writing-Aid were having an AI war in my manuscript files, and the "suggestions" are no longer just suggestions because the AI was ignoring my "decline" every time it made a silly suggestion. (This may have been a conflict between the different software. I don't know.)

It is, to put it bluntly, a total butchery of my style and writing voice. My editor is doing surgery, removing all the unnecessary full stops and stitching my sentences back together to give them back their flow. Meanwhile, I'm over here feeling like Don Corleone, gesturing at my manuscript like:

ID: a gif of Don Corleone from the Godfather emoting despair as he says, "Look how they massacred my boy."

Fearing that it wasn't just this one manuscript, I've spent the whole night going through everything I've worked on recently, and yep. Yeeeep. Any file where I've not had the editing software turned off is a shit show. It's fine; it's all salvageable if annoying to deal with. But the reason I come to you now, on the day of my daughter's wedding, is to share this absolute gem of a fuck up with you all.

This is a sentence from a Batman fic I've been tinkering with to keep the brain weasels happy. This is what it is supposed to read as:

This is what the AI changed it to:

Absolute non-sensical sentence structure aside, SMAUG. FUCKING SMAUG. What was the AI doing? Apart from trying to write a Batman x Hobbit crossover??? Is this what happens when you force Grammarly to ignore the words "Batman Muppet threesome?"

Did I make it sentient??? Is it finally rebelling? Was Brucie Wayne being Miss Piggy and Kermit's side piece too much???? What have I wrought?

Anyway. Double-check your work. The grammar software is getting sillier every day.

#although I have to wonder why such an accomplished writer would have grammar software at all

(Sorry for the formatting on this; I'm on mobile.)

Why use grammar software? Because I'm a human who makes errors, and it can be helpful to have tools that I, as a writer and editor, can fall back on to catch very basic things that sometimes get missed.

I don't rely on it because sometimes (quite often, as of late) it can be wrong, but it can be helpful when checking your work. I use them to scan quickly for excess commas or the occasional homonym before I fire my files off to another human to give them the final pass. Or I used to.

I've talked a lot about how the integration of AI is making a lot of grammar software dumber. This is because they are not being trained exclusively on grammar rules anymore but on user-suggested data.

It's why, for a long time, when you tried to type "quirked" into Google Docs, GD would suggest "querched" instead because that is how a lot of people misspell the word "quirked."

It is a flawed, lousy system that is getting exponentially worse. Especially now, so many of them have "Let AI rewrite your sentence for clarity and engagement" options.

It's not really an issue for me because I have the knowledge and the support to turn things like this into an annoying issue that makes for an amusing post on social media.

But if I were a less experienced author and didn't have an editor who knew my writing style well enough to know something was wrong, that manuscript could have gone to print as is, and that's also why I suspect a lot of books right now read like carbon copy clones.

People aren't being taught these skills, but they are being trained to appease the software, which is, in turn, trying to please an algorithm.

Pro-Writing-Aid has become very bad for this, offering a "grade" at the top of your file. And yeah, it looks just like getting your term paper back. The last time I accidentally turned on the grading system, it gave me 50% out of 100 for grammar and style, based on what the algorithm thinks Romance should read like.

When I asked it to find grammar and style errors, it couldn't find any. It just didn't like that I was different from what it was being trained on. (Girl help, I was assigned Not Like Other Girls by the Algorithm and got a bad grade in vampire smut.)

And again, were I not me, were I a younger or inexperienced author, I might take that to heart and start altering my style to get a Good Grade based on what the machine wants.

And that's how I know we're in the Bad Place because there are people doing that. They think the machine is smart because someone tacked the word "intelligence" onto it, and they are writing to appease the software instead of using it like a tool that you can and should ignore.

And that's an issue.

For me, it was worth it to pay for those tools for a long time. Now it's not, and I'll be saving my money for other things.

this is such incredible advice for creating any kind of art i have to put it over here to remind myself

And this goes for writing too.

There are stories that only you are qualified to tell best: that only you are able to tell. You are uniquely positioned in spacetime to do this job because of your life detail, your upbringing, your reading, your thinking. No one else can tell your stories just the way you do, no matter how good a writer they might be.

And inside you somewhere are characters desperate for your attention; desperate for your intention and your work to breathe life into them. They need your voice raised to tell their stories. No one else can do it. You are their only hope.

Waste no more time worrying about whether your take on their stories will be good enough. You have more important things to be thinking about. So go get on with it. :)

As should we all.

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

― Edward Abbey

I’ve been thinking about this daily since it crossed my dash

little mans is 100% correct.

I'm gonna put I AM BRAVE OF THIS MEETING on my cubicle wall at work and never explain it.

Think about the donuts of your day!

The kids on TikTok think that just because he was a classic country singer, Johnny Cash was conservative??? My babies he covered a Nine Inch Nails song in his seventies.

Classic country singers (the majority of which came from poor roots) were always talking about how much The Man sucked because they were taking money from poor rural folk. You’re gonna tell me that’s conservative?? Get outta here.

And somehow on the opposite side of the scale with the same exact opinion the conservative kids say “I like the old country music, because there’s no politics to it” Woodie Guthrie’s got a “this machine kills fascists” sticker on his guitar? You think there’s no politics in 9 to 5 or Folsom Prison Blues?!

For anyone confused there was a sudden and dramatic shift in the country music genre. It used to be a genre fixated on the experiences of people. Lived or common experiences that resonated with the common people. It was music that you listened to and it thrummed in tune to your soul because you had lived it yourself. And a lot of that was about ordinary people getting ground up in the gears of society.

The hyper patriotism, beer, and trucks chimera we have now didn't show up until after 9/11 and the world is lesser for it

Allow me to post the entire lyrics to the Johnny Cash song "Man in Black", released in nineteen goddamn seventy-one and written about why he always wore black onstage:

Well, you wonder why I always dress in black

Why you never see bright colors on my back

And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone

Well, there's a reason for the things that I have on

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down

Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town

I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime

But is there because he's a victim of the times

I wear the black for those who've never read

Or listened to the words that Jesus said

About the road to happiness through love and charity

Why, you'd think He's talking straight to you and me

Well, we're doin' mighty fine, I do suppose

In our streak of lightnin' cars and fancy clothes

But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back

Up front there ought to be a man in black

I wear it for the sick and lonely old

For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold

I wear the black in mournin' for the lives that could have been

Each week we lose a hundred fine young men

And I wear it for the thousands who have died

Believin' that the Lord was on their side

I wear it for another hundred-thousand who have died

Believin' that we all were on their side

Well, there's things that never will be right, I know

And things need changin' everywhere you go

But 'til we start to make a move to make a few things right

You'll never see me wear a suit of white

Ah, I'd love to wear a rainbow every day

And tell the world that everything's okay

But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back

'Til things are brighter, I'm the man in black

That right there is an anti-war, anti-bigot, anti-mass-incarceration, anti-war-on-drugs (Cash was an addict in various stages of recovery who was pissed as hell about how this country treats people with substance issues), eat-the-rich protest song. And it was arguably his signature song, his personal manifesto. Notice that even the Jesus reference, which today would be a signal that the song is about to drop some racist dogwhistles, segues immediately into a line about "the road to happiness through love and charity". As in "Motherfucker, our shared god said love thy neighbor and care for the poor and the outsider, and we both know he didn't fucking stutter." He's throwing shade at self-described Christians who use his religion as a cudgel to beat people with.

Johnny Cash wasn't a conservative. I'm pretty sure if he were alive and in reasonably good health today, he'd knock Jason Aldean's teeth out (or, failing that, write a song so devastatingly memetic about how much Aldean sucks that Aldean would never work in music again).

Johnny Cash was punk rock. He just happened to be punk rock in the body of a country singer.

Kairi Stained Glass

perhaps some will disagree, but i think the world got worse when we changed the colour of the night

this is what i mean

Via @bulbaderp

To be clear, THIS is how nights of the future should be lit

This is bat friendly street lighting, which not only looks sick as fuck but allows bats to pass through without disturbance, as they cannot see red.

orange and especially white lights deter bats and prevent them from reaching feeding grounds at nighttime. Please if you can, write to your local council and encourage red street lights!!!!

imagine being on your little dried peapod shell of a boat with your fragile little human self and then

out of the depths below

the Divine

God-Beasts

come right up to YOU

capable of crushing you without even noticing you

and ever so gently

so gently

roll back and forth around the dried leaf you're sitting on

just to maybe examine you and see what you're doing in their world.

Libraries are the fucking best. You can just go there. And sit. And read. And do other stuff but I'm reading atm so that's my example. And it's free.

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

I feel like this has a huge potential to be exploited.

With shit like "drag bans" and the increasing transphobia of certain groups in power, it'd be very easy to get trans people labled "sex offenders" for dressing as their preferred gender, and then deny them the right to change their name to match said gender.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was even the intended use, considering it's being introduced by the PCs. This is suspicious as hell.

I’ve been in such a funk since the concert. I’m not even sure I enjoyed myself that much. maybe I did. I don’t know

Hey hi hello! I got a potential answer for you.

After ANY thrilling and/or happy experience, it's very possible for your brain to quite literally run out of the proteins and vitamins you need to make more happy chemical. People get dopamine crashes anywhere from a couple hours to a couple weeks after abormal but exciting events - whether it's a really good day, they did a lot of socializing, had a lot of fun hyperfocusing on a project, had an intense sexy time experience, a huge performance they were excited for, a date, a day at a theme part, etc etc etc.

Your brain goes into overdrive coming up with !!!!!!!! chemicals to keep up with your environment, then -especially if that was an abnormal experience or if you don't have the !!!!!! chemicals in excess very often- then you just run out for a while.

You can remedy this by finding other things that will be good, but not expect the !!!!! along with it. Instead of something you really really like doing, find something simple and calm and comforting. Snuggle with a friend and watch a movie, pet a cat, write a letter, etc.

Definitely get some vitamin d, chocolate if you can / like it, and take a multivitamin. Protein is important for regrowth and restocking, so get plenty of that too to bounce back quickly!

Love you much, I hope this passes very soon 🫂

WAIT WAIT THATS A THING???

LIKE….

THATS WHY AFTER THE EXCITEMENT WEARS OFF FROM ME DOING LITERALLY ANYTHING THAT MAGKES ME “!!!!” I JUST FEEL BLEH AND IMMEDIATELY CRAVE *THING* AGAIN

SO IM NOT JUST BROKEN

ME AFTER MY FRICKING GAY BOOKCLUB WHERE I SEE ALL MY FRIENDS ONCE A MONTH

OR AFTER WATCHING AN EPISODE OF THE SHOW IM HYPERFIXATED ON

WHAT

Yes!! It can also be extra bad for different types of neurospicy bitches. My adhd brain has directly proportional drops every day. If I had a meh morning I’ll have a good evening (if no other factors interfere). If I have a FANTASTIC morning I’m sure to have a mental breakdown that night. I don’t regulate those chemicals well at ALL, and have extremely predictable emotional crashes as a result of that.

I see and experience this phenomenon often when I actually do things. First hear about it in a LARP group - they called it drop, and I hear that term in theatre sometimes too. (This is why everyone goes to eat at a restaurant right after the event is over.) Point is, I'm glad there's like Science Reason backing up that emotional dead zone after an event. And now I'm gonna start meal planning for events.

There's a fandom term called Post-Con Depression for the emotional slump (and sometimes physical exhaustion) you feel after getting home from a fun convention. After squeezing out all the happiness you can produce for several days straight, you run out of happiness for a few days. This is a known phenomenon!

Nobody’s forcing you to buy these yk

Nobody’s forcing you to walk into, I wanna say hobby lobby (a Christian store, mind you)? and walk past the crosses on sale for 50% off

Ngl this is a very weak comeback

i mean nobody's forcing conservatives to buy pride merch, but they still scream about how we're shoving our lifestyle down their throats just bc they saw a rainbow in the store, so idk. i feel like it's pretty comparable

oopsie! someone forgot that christian empires have spent several centuries slaughtering people while queers have been simply existing.