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:
“It was quite the feat, considering Gotham was mostly made up of smog and tear gas.”
This is what the AI changed it to:
“It was quite the feat. Considering Gotham was mostly made up. Of tear gas. And Smaug.”
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.
(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.
The ableism is showing in a lot of the tags, and I need you to know I’m mentally holding some of you under water until the thrashing stops.
You are not intellectually superior for never using or paying for grammar software.
Regardless of the fact that some corporate jobs now require you to use programs like Grammarly (it was required to be on my company machine when I worked with certain clients), grammar software is an accessibility feature.
The fact that it’s being made intentionally shit by the companies that own them is a major issue and is not the fault of the people who do struggle to read and write and who would benefit from easily accessible, competent writing aids.
It’s the fault of the people pushing for the enshitification of everything we know and love to please an algorithm.
Get off your fucking high horse and think with some compassion instead of your ego. Not everyone is the same. Not everyone has the same experience or opportunities. That doesn’t make them stupid or worthy of your derision or scorn.
But the way you talk about them sure makes you worthy of mine.
They really don’t. They grew up on tablets and phones and other closed systems that are completely different and much more simplified then a personal computer. They don’t have the knowledge because it wasn’t taught to them and they never used it in day to day life.
I work in tech support and I can back this up with personal experience; they’re as bad as boomers are only instead of not understanding tech at all, they refuse to learn or dig into the tech. They can use it but they don’t have the curiosity to understand it. And when tech breaks, they don’t have the know-how to fix it on their own or to even look for how to fix it (a task made all the harder by the enshitification of the internet and AI articles that litter search results)
They consistently act surprised when ‘turn it off and back on again’ actually works because that’s become a meme and not understood to be a valid first troubleshooting step.
The blame lies with the big tech companies, and how strongly they’ve pushed hardware and software that has been designed to be obtuse at best.
That last part is important, because killing tech literacy has been an explicit goal for electronics manufacturers for 20 years now.
Apple found that if you create a walled and impervious garden where the company can control all aspects of how the technology works, you can nickel-and-dime the customer for unspeakable billions of dollars, and if you make your devices literally impossible to repair for the layman and charge an obscene premium at your own vertically integrated specialized repair stores, then you can either make bank off people insisting on repairing their broken devices, or you can incentivize them to replace and replace and replace, to get used to buying an entirely new phone every 12-14 months. They started doing that long before the iPhone, but the proliferation of smart devices kickstarted the avalanche.
And there’s MONEY in that, baby, so the entire electronics industry immediately rushed to follow. That’s WHY your fridge and your lightbulb and your washing machine and your car comes with a smart app and an integrated processing unit with proprietary firmware now. It allows the companies to absolutely butcher to death the concept of independent repair, and allows them to shepherd the customer away from ever engaging with their own devices, away from understanding their inner workings, away from modifying or adapting them, and towards paying a premium for every single function they would like to have access to.
You know how some car manufacturers have started trying to sell subscriptions to unlock the heating in their car seats?
Yeah.
Zoomers and Alphas aren’t stupid, they’ve just grown up in a technological environment where there very often quite literally isn’t a point to engaging with tech beyond the surface level, because the companies have built walled gardens, and set up bear traps for anyone who tries to venture beyond them.
And it’s not like our educations systems have done jack shit to try and keep up or teach tech literacy, so literally how are these kids supposed to have learned?
I remember, back in 3rd or 4th grade, school started started having “computer classes” where they taught us how to use computers and even started teaching us basic html.
I guess y'all don’t have that anymore do ya?
Where I live we still have mandatory computer classes for 3 years in middle school. But as with most classes, due to our dysfunctional school system, that class isn’t done nearly seriously enough.
Spell: Exploding Holy Symbol; a Paladin or Cleric may cast this spell, causing a duplicate of their Holy Symbol to fly towards their enemies. Once it is within five feet of one whose actions or behaviors offend the caster’s deity, it explodes in a ball of the deity’s preferred method of smiting (this particular one looks to be Fiery Radiance but some prefer lightning or poison gas or whatever)
The British should put a time limit on the Monarchy.
Not like declaring a republic tomorrow, but deciding on a date in the future that ends the British Monarchy.
And there’s a perfect date for it coming up!
October 14th, 2066.
A thousand years since the Battle of Hastings. A thousand years of this one specific bloodline ruling England.
Call time on the Monarchy after exactly one thousand years. Nice, and neat.
Even better: Charles isn’t living 44 years. He’ll be gone in about twenty. Now William? He’s what, 40? Yeah, he can live another 44 years. His great grandmother was over a hundred, his granny was 96, William can make it to 84 barring accident or assassination.
So on October 14th 2066, William the Last steps down a thousand years after William the First won the crown.
Nice, neat, and fair. William gets the crown he’s been waiting forty years for already, but ten-year-old George grows up without expectation of it.
Have a nice big abdication ceremony, even.
Plus, what an absolute baller move to announce your regnal name as William the Last.
I think more people need to learn the phrase “I don’t know enough about that to have a strong opinion” its literally a cheat code for awkward conversations
It’s funny how clearly uninformed a lot of criticism of Mozilla and its browser Firefox is. Like people say “it’s just another corporation, out to make profit, just like Google.” And that ordinary users promoting Firefox are just giving them free advertising.
It’s in basically any post criticizing Mozilla, including on this site. Like using tumblr search I quickly found a post that was largely positive, but argued that Mozilla operates “under capitalist incentives” And outside tumblr I found a blog post out on the interwebs that criticized Mozilla and outright wondered “I don’t know if Mozilla’s business model ever made sense, it makes a lot more sense if it’s something closer to a nonprofit rather than a commercial entity.”
Well, let’s research the Mozilla Corporation, see what that business model actually is. Let’s begin that research by going to the wikipedia article, and read the two introductory paragraphs. And it turns out that it’s “a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation”, which is a non-profit.
“The Mozilla Foundation will ultimately control the activities of the Mozilla Corporation and will retain its 100 percent ownership of the new subsidiary. Any profits made by the Mozilla Corporation will be invested back into the Mozilla project. There will be no shareholders, no stock options will be issued and no dividends will be paid. The Mozilla Corporation will not be floating on the stock market and it will be impossible for any company to take over or buy a stake in the subsidiary.”
Turns out that it is not just “closer to a non-profit”, it is literally a non-profit. Turns out you only needed two paragraphs on wikipedia to learn that, the most basic online research possible, which basically every post I found criticizing Mozilla failed to do.
This is entirely different from any other entity calling itself corporation, which is all about creating profit or money for its shareholders, the “capitalist incentives” spoken about earlier.
If you read further into that article, you will learn that the Mozilla corporation literally only exists separate from the foundation for tax and legal purposes, but it’s still a non-profit operation.
This makes it reasonably immune from the enshittification process I’ve written about before. there is no incentive to fuck over the experience for end users for the sake of shareholder profits, like what tumblr is doing right now.
It means that Firefox is an exemption to the rule that “if something is free, you are the product”, because there is no product to produce profits for shareholders, it’s a charitable endeavour for a free and open internet, as laid out in the Mozilla manifesto.
This doesn’t mean non-profits make corruption impossible, there is plenty of corruption in non-profit foundations. But unlike actual capitalist corporations, it doesn’t have the greed and corruption built in. And if you are going to criticize Mozilla and Firefox, which it does sometimes deserve, you should have your basic facts straight before doing so, if you expect me to take you seriously.
They really don’t. They grew up on tablets and phones and other closed systems that are completely different and much more simplified then a personal computer. They don’t have the knowledge because it wasn’t taught to them and they never used it in day to day life.
I work in tech support and I can back this up with personal experience; they’re as bad as boomers are only instead of not understanding tech at all, they refuse to learn or dig into the tech. They can use it but they don’t have the curiosity to understand it. And when tech breaks, they don’t have the know-how to fix it on their own or to even look for how to fix it (a task made all the harder by the enshitification of the internet and AI articles that litter search results)
They consistently act surprised when ‘turn it off and back on again’ actually works because that’s become a meme and not understood to be a valid first troubleshooting step.
The blame lies with the big tech companies, and how strongly they’ve pushed hardware and software that has been designed to be obtuse at best.
That last part is important, because killing tech literacy has been an explicit goal for electronics manufacturers for 20 years now.
Apple found that if you create a walled and impervious garden where the company can control all aspects of how the technology works, you can nickel-and-dime the customer for unspeakable billions of dollars, and if you make your devices literally impossible to repair for the layman and charge an obscene premium at your own vertically integrated specialized repair stores, then you can either make bank off people insisting on repairing their broken devices, or you can incentivize them to replace and replace and replace, to get used to buying an entirely new phone every 12-14 months. They started doing that long before the iPhone, but the proliferation of smart devices kickstarted the avalanche.
And there’s MONEY in that, baby, so the entire electronics industry immediately rushed to follow. That’s WHY your fridge and your lightbulb and your washing machine and your car comes with a smart app and an integrated processing unit with proprietary firmware now. It allows the companies to absolutely butcher to death the concept of independent repair, and allows them to shepherd the customer away from ever engaging with their own devices, away from understanding their inner workings, away from modifying or adapting them, and towards paying a premium for every single function they would like to have access to.
You know how some car manufacturers have started trying to sell subscriptions to unlock the heating in their car seats?
Yeah.
Zoomers and Alphas aren’t stupid, they’ve just grown up in a technological environment where there very often quite literally isn’t a point to engaging with tech beyond the surface level, because the companies have built walled gardens, and set up bear traps for anyone who tries to venture beyond them.
And it’s not like our educations systems have done jack shit to try and keep up or teach tech literacy, so literally how are these kids supposed to have learned?
Had a dream that Taylor Swift announced she was doing a “pronoun reveal” and all the annoying swifties were losing their shit for weeks and saying “I told you so” and then Taylor just tweeted “she/her”
To say the Panama Papers accomplished nothing is an insult to Daphne Galizia’s memory. Her work, and the work of the hundreds of other journalists who contributed to the Papers, changed the world.
Disinformation like this is designed to discourage you, to make you feel you’re powerless against the monsters of the world. They want you to feel that way, because they are terrified of your power to make change.
Take your power back. Demand better. Keep fighting for a better world, because a better world is possible.
i love in fantasy when its like “king galamir the mighty golden eagle and his most trusted advisor who would never betray him, gruelworm bloodeye the treacherous”
When my sister and I were kids we had this one action figure, who was actually a brutalized batman doll without his cape (the dog chewed half his head, too), who we dubbed ‘Evil Chancellor Traytor’. The idea was that in the fictional society of our toys, ‘chancellor’ just came with the word ‘evil’ in front of it, as a matter of ancient tradition. Like ‘grand’ or ‘high’ or something along those lines.
Anyway, the running gag was that the king (an old Power Rangers knock-off doll) had absolute and unwavering faith in Evil Chancellor Traytor, who basically comported himself like a mix between Grima Wormtongue and Jafar from the Aladdin movies. Everyone was always sure that Evil Chancellor Traytor had something to do with the nefarious scheme of the day. The dude even carried around a poisoned knife called ‘the kingslayer’.
The additional twist on the joke, though, was that he never was behind anything. The king was actually right. Evil Chancellor Traytor was the most devoted civil servant in the entire Action Figure Dystopia. He spent his nights working on writing up new legislature to ensure that broken toys had access to mobility devices, was always on the lookout to acquire new shoeboxes for expanding city infrastructure, and drafted a proposal that once got half the ‘settlement’ in my sister and I’s closet moved to the upper shelf so that vulnerable toys were less likely to be snatched up by the dog.
The knife, as it turned out, was as symbolic as the ‘evil’ in his name. See, Action Figure Dystopia had a long history of corrupted monarchs getting too big for their thrones and exploiting the underclasses. The job of the Evil Chancellor was to always remain vigilant, and loyally serve a good ruler - or, if the regent should became a despot, to slay them on behalf of the people.
But since killing the king would be a terrible crime, the Evil Chancellor had to be the kind of person who would willingly die to spare the people from the plight of a wicked leader; because the murder would be pinned on them, in order to keep the ‘machinery of politics’ working as smoothly as ever.
Anyway, Evil Chancellor Traytor had a diary, in which my sister I would take turns writing out the most over-the-top good shit he’d done behind the scenes. Usually after everyone else had finished talking shit about him. I don’t know why but we got the biggest kick out of being like:
Barbie With the Unfortunate Haircut: Oh that Evil Chancellor Traytor! Why can’t the king see how wicked he is?!
Charmander From the Vending Machine: Char!
Jurassic Park Toy of Jeff Goldblum With Disturbingly Realistic Face: At least if someone puts a knife in the king’s back, we’ll know where to look!
Evil Chancellor Traytor’s Diary: Today I was feeding ducks at the park when I noticed another legless action figure sitting by the benches. I put a hundred dollars into his bag while he wasn’t looking. I really need to increase budgeting to the medical treatment centers. If only we had enough glue, I think we would see far fewer toys trying to get by without limbs… *insert iconic evil laugh*
Anyway, Evil Chancellor Traytor eventually fell victim to one of my mom’s cleaning sprees, and she decided he was too busted up to keep and tossed him out. My littler brother, who tended to follow my sister and I’s games like he was watching a daily soap opera, cried so hard that we had to do a special ‘episode’ where one of the toys found the Evil Chancellor’s diary, and so he got a big huge memorial and the king threw himself into the empty grave and then ordered the toys driving the toy bulldozer to bury him so that ‘Traytor’s grave would have a body’ (this seemed very important for some reason).
And then we had the Quest For a New King. Somehow or another that ended up being a giant rubber snake called ‘Tyrant King Cobra’.
::closes tab, shuts off computer, and proceeds to have the best day ever just by knowing this exists::
@eating-the-inedible due to the sheer power of me and @get-spam-reblogged (thank you by the way you are a real one for that) have gotten this bitch to 700+ notes :)
silverstaked has literally sent my friend exorcisms before. nothing strong enough to send them back to hell but theyve been weakened for days because of it. block and report.
🐺 howlin4u Follow
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adding these tags from @vamplovingwolf theyre targeting werewolves too i guess
Ten inessential worldbuilding features for local communities in your fantasy RPG:
A grievance or conflict of interest with a neighbouring community which the community’s members feel much more strongly about than the issue’s magnitude really warrants
A substance or commodity important to everyday life with no local source, and the complicated and inconvenient arrangement the community has made to obtain it from outside sources
A local practice or custom whose original motivation has been rendered obsolete by changing circumstances, and which is now carried forward out of tradition
Something that’s technically illegal, but everyone does it on the sly anyway, with enforcement of its illegality being reserved for people the community’s leaders want to mess with for unrelated reasons
An obscure piece of trivia or local history which the community’s members regard as obvious and widely known, to the extent of treating outsiders with contempt for revealing their ignorance of it
Some undertaking or realm of achievement in which the community isn’t particularly exceptional, but which the community’s members believe they’re the best around at as a point of civic pride
A mostly harmless thing that nobody talks about because its existence or some facet of its historical context is regarded as an embarrassment to the community
A particular prank that’s become traditional to play on visitors to the community, and which occasionally gets taken further than is strictly appropriate
A specific area of the setting’s history where what the community’s members insist really happened is wildly at odds with the accepted version of events
A genuinely dangerous circumstance that everyone treats with casual disregard because it’s always been there, and only a damn fool would actually get hurt by it anyway
Combining them - a local extremely dangerous monster/cryptid that no one ever does anything about (10) because it follows certain Rules and anyone who doesn’t deal with it properly frankly got what they deserved (5).
I’m from West Virginia. The mothman has official stats in Pathfinder. This is absolutely how we would handle things if it were real.
Yeah, 5+10 is always a fun combo. Other frequently entertaining ones include 1+6, 2+4 and 3+9.
It’s literally impossible for you to make yourself known to everyone you meet. Some people will just get the wrong impression about you and you have to let it go.
I was walking down the street with my brother on a hot day on our way into a bookstore and I said “I hate the sun. It’s too hot. Name ONE reason we need the sun. Literally I can’t think of a single reason why we can’t just figure out a way to block it”
And a guy turned and looked at me with the most dumbfounded and horrified expression Id seen since the last time someone looked at me like that (about a week before) and then turned to the girl with him and they both looked mistified in the worst way.
They really thought I don’t know what the sun’s for.
I could’ve told them I work in environmental science but I was having a conversation with my brother.
Those two people think that’s the day they overheard probably the stupidest thing any human being has ever loudly said in a bookstore.
fun fact about me is that when i was a kid id write capital E’s with as many of those little horizontal lines as possible and id call them ladder E’s and adults fucking hated them
artistic rendition
All capital letters should have a leveled-up form
So far I’ve got
ladder letters: A, E, F, H, T
humpback B’s and P’s get as many bumps as you think they need
circle O’s, you just keep spiraling in til you feel like you’ve made your point
tree letters branch into smaller versions of themselves ad nauseum: X, Y
spider Q’s, so many legs
Please add your own unsettling godtier capitals!
New alphabet dropped!
oh my god, it’s beautiful
(future handwritten notes are gonna be so wonderfully cursed now, thank you! :D )
well it’s going to take some getting used to, @ceekari (don’t mind the redacted letter between T and U)
But I think i’ve taken a real shine to it!
recursive
So i may have done a thing in an insomnia fueled jaunt into insanity.
You Got MailAOLWindows 95 StartUpMicrosoftWindows XP StartupMicrosoftWindows XP ShutdownMicrosoftWindows XP ErrorMicrosoftWii StartupNintendoNintendo DS StartupNintendoFlipnote Studio StartupNintendo
Various audio snippets of my childhood that I’ve collected.
Windows 95 Error Sound EffectMicrosoftWindows 98 StartupMicrosoftWindows 98 ErrorMicrosoftApple Mac Startup (iMac G3+)AppleDisney Fast PlayDisneyClassic Walt Disney Pictures IntroDisney
(1/3) Nostalgia Fan Service
I’m frankly really fond of the sounds and music used in older media and devices. Might as well put out more on here since this post blew up for some reason even though I did not grow with some. Does Disney still even make fast plays or is it boring now?
Gameboy StartupNintendoGameboy Advance StartupNintendoPS1 StartupSonyPS2 StartupSonySega Dreamcast StartupSegaGamecube StartupNintendoNintendo DSi StartupNintendoNintendo DSI Home Menu MusicNintendoSample Flipnote SongNintendoMii Channel IntroNintendo
(2/3) Nostalgia Fan Service- Gamer Edition
I only have a few more stored up since Tumblr only lets your post a certain amount of audio per day. I was definitely a Nintendo kid when growing up, though only the wii and Ds era, got into gaming much later though.
Did you know the Ds and wii have backwards compatibility? I only learned that a few months ago. (Well certain versions of the wii)
I did grew up with these except it was the 3ds, the wii u, and the school computers, but I did grew up with these sounds effects on youtube, the game card getting put in (a ds game put in the 3ds), and bc we have a wii upstairs, that also became my childhood
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