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Had a moment here thinking "Miss Piggy is beautiful and I am built along similar lines, so awesome."

Miss Piggy's Guide to Life Photos

#miss piggy #muppets #fuck beauty standards I want to look like Miss Piggy

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the worst part about being an adult is thay its no longer socially acceptable to just roll down a really big hill and then run back up it and roll back down again. "oh is this a syphilis metaphor" passerby would ask. "is this for a tick tock". no i just wanna come home covered in dirt and scratches and bask in the the solace of childlike mirth

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Am now on day 2 of my first round ever of ADHD meds (Ritalin). I can focus but they make me extra sleepy and it's weird. I hope that side effect goes away.

#adhd #adhd meds

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Dark Hedge Creations on Etsy

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#american gods baby

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As an editor, I really appreciate reading this. Some of my authors extensively use grammar software (I had one poor author who was using both grammar software and an outside editor to check through her work, and while the grammar software might have been useful, the extra editor was charging her an arm and a leg for basically nothing and after four books with us, she wasn't improving on the things I flagged every single time and it was because she was relying on the grammar checker and useless editor) and it's helpful to hear where it's going wrong as well as where it's useful.

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.

#writing #editing #grammar software #problems with ai

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The Pacific Ocean: Hey baby, it's atmospheric river time!

South coast of BC: Bracing for impact.

#atmospheric river #I keep acquiring new weather vocab #seriously hadn't heard of atmospheric rivers until two years ago when one made Abbotsford flood #though building your city on a drained lakebed and not maintaining your dikes will make flooding more likely #my city flooded once back in the 90s and now we have a very well maintained dike system and a big reclaimed wetland

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When it comes to sex scenes, the rules say things like: Don’t write them at all, and if you do, don’t use these words. Don’t write them silly, porny, dramatic, tragic, pathological, grim, or ridiculous.

My whole practical thesis around the craft of writing a sex scene is this: it is exactly the same as any other scene. Our isolation of sex from other kinds of scenes is not indicative of sex’s difference, but the difference in our relationship to sex. It is our reluctance to name things, the shame we’ve been taught, our fraught compulsion to an act a theatre of types. It is indicative of the lack of imagination that centuries of patriarchy and white supremacy has wrought on us. 

To teach sex scenes is to talk about plot, dialogue, pacing, description and characterisation: all those elements that make a captivating scene. A sex scene should advance the story and occur in a chain of causality that springs from your characters’ choices. It should employ sensory detail that concretises and also speaks symbolically to the deeper content of the story. Or if not, it should service your work of art in whatever ways you want from your scenes.

“Mind Fuck: Writing Better Sex” in Body Work by Melissa Febos

#writing

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like literally if i didn’t want to see some weird nonsense i wouldn’t be consuming scifi

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It's very possible that the only way to ensure you don't become a conservative old person is to keep checking whether you're wrong. Every time. Genuinely mull over the opposing viewpoint even and especially when it's uncomfortable. You absolutely cannot a) consider yourself safely incapable of terrible principles because you're a good person, or b) treat a your disgust reaction to something as a moral truth. You can't get comfortable. Tiring! But you'd rather be tired and choose the right path, you know?

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I recently went on a dive into what fanfic I could find on Ao3 about Narnia after a discussion of the problem of Susan with a friend. Like, I've done this before, and I'll probably do it again, and it's going to continue to make me want to dig CS Lewis up and punch his corpse.

Child me identified with Lucy, the true believer, the one who always trust Aslan, and identified hard. Then I grew up and that unstinting trust just fell apart in the face of reality, of lived experience.

And this is Susan. Susan who is told she can't come back to Narnia, so she moves on and grows up. It probably rips her apart inside as she does, given what she's lost, but she knows she can't rely on Aslan's kindness anymore, so she doesn't.

And the person I am now identifies with Susan in a way that I couldn't with Lucy.

The lure of Narnia still calls to me sometimes, that sense that I'm meant for another world, another place and time. That sense that was instilled by the church and nurtured with promises that I was destined for something special, if only I obeyed.

But I live here. I live now. I can't live in the maybes and the possibility of stepping into some grand destiny and still do what good I can in the time I've been given. Susan couldn't either, and that lack of blind worship is perhaps what casts her out when the others, who refused to move on, were returned to Narnia permanently.

#the problem of susan #narnia

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There are so many fucking Teslas on the road around here. I once accidentally parked my beater of a VW Golf in between two shiny Teslas by accident. I don't know how so many people afford them with the cost of living in the lower mainland (Vancouver area, BC).

It amazes me how many teslas I see out and about. Like you guys bought one for real? On god? No joke?????

#why tesla? #electric cars are fine #but more comprehensive mass transit would be better

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My nerdy self would like to utilise my linguistics degree and make sure this is found.

As someone who has actually studied the English language there's a common phrase about English that kinda annoys me because while it makes for a funny haha line it's such a gross oversimplification that it actually ceases to be funny. It's the one that goes "The English language is just three languages stacked on top of each other wearing a trenchcoat" or something to that effect.

I'm not going to go into detail as to why that sentence is inaccurate, just take my word for it as a person with a master's in English. I suggest we withdraw this expression from usage and replace it with the much more accurate "The English language is a dirty little slut that loves it when other languages cum big loads in it"

#linguistics #language #english language

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Yeah, leopard geckos be like that.