autumnimagining

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I've just finished the first Murderbot book and it's very funny coming from Star Trek to this. In Star Trek you have androids and such actively campaigning for themselves to be considered full people with rights that deserve the same considerations as anyone else. Meanwhile in Murderbot all the humans are telling this guy that it's a person with rights and it's their friend and they like it and its response is basically

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reminder that if you ever buy wool yarn secondhand you should put it in a plastic bag in the freezer for a week, let it thaw 24 hours, then refreeze another week. this makes sure that if there are any moths or pests they are killed by the first freeze, and the remaining eggs are lured to hatch by the thawing and then killed with the second freeze. until this process is complete you must keep the yarn isolated from your existing stash or you risk any infestation spreading. i buy a lot of wool yarn from thrift and antique shops and always do this and have never had a problem with moths or other bugs. if you buy wool sweaters or other wool things secondhand you should also do this just to be safe

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Peter Joseph on structural violence, from this video.

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A hill i will die standing on is that picky eaters deserve respect and accommodation and to eat food they enjoy too. Sensory issues, disliked flavors, allergies, intolerances, cultural differences, religious restrictions, moral or political choices, they all deserve to be given consideration if you know you're gonna be cooking for them and to not be excluded from the fundamental right to food & access to the many important social bonding acitivities centered around food

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300 year old leather star map by the Skidi, one of the four bands of the Pawnee tribe. The Skidi Pawnee historically lived on the Central Plains of Nebraska and Kansas.

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Breaking my hiatus to bring everyone’s attention to the fact that Cornwall is now attempting to be officially recognised as a nation within the United Kingdom.

Kernow has its own language, culture, history and identity. The language was forcibly removed by the English until the last monolingual speaker died in 1777–her name was Dolly Pentreath. It has existed as a kingdom before England had ever existed. Historically, Cornwall has been a place exploited for minerals and resources and labour. Currently, it still is. There are now ghost towns where once thriving fishing villages stood (Mousehole, Pentreath’s home, was one of these). Cornwall is now a playground for second home owners who drive up house and rent prices and drive out permanent residents and workers. Local businesses go out of business and struggle to stay afloat when the influx of tourists come who only purchase from supermarkets, putting nothing into the local economy. There is a long, long and often very gruesome and bloody history behind this—leaders of rebellions executed all the way into 1715.

If you are in the UK, and sign the petition to get this to a debate in Parliament.

Can you spare 60 seconds to sign

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Mercifully, this appears to not be true. Censorship is appalling and the OSA needs to be completely repealed, but let's not spread misinformation about it in order to discredit it.

hey guys just here to say that the new online safety act in the uk has blocked the suicide hotline

this is extremely problematic for very obvious reasons and i have no idea what the fuck this country is fucking coming to

childline has also been restricted

if you're a uk citizen and still haven't signed the petition please do so

even if you're not a uk citizen please reblog to spread the word !!!!!

this isn't safety, it's censorship

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we are all “difficult” sometimes. that doesn’t make you a problem or a burden or an inconvenience. it makes you a human being with feelings.

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i genuinely believe that when you fall in love with learning, everything else begins to realign. confidence stops being this elusive concept and becomes the quiet result of knowing yourself. knowing your mind. knowing your worth. i’ve never met a well-read person with low self esteem.

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also pls tag the first game you remember playing

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It's a bit like watching people suddenly decide that in order to build a house, you have to smash the bricks together with your head. And when you point out that there are other, less painful ways of building a house, the bleeding masses all turn and shriek at you so loudly and so consistently you start to doubt whether you're right.

A lot of otherwise intelligent people are scared to criticize chatGPT because they think there is an observed pattern in history where new technology is always either good or inevitable, and people who are skeptical of new technology always look like fools, and they are scared to look foolish when AI is The New Technology That Revolutionized Everything.

I am not scared of any of that nonsense. The first reason, is that chatGPT isn't a "new technology" at all, both because it is just a scaled-up version of stuff that already existed, and because "technology" implies a thing that does something useful and ChatGPT doesn't appear to do anything useful.

The second reason, is that the people frightened of looking like Luddites assume that because we are all alive, the feared bad outcomes of new technology have never happened, and that is just completely false. New technologies have sometimes had awful impacts upon human quality of life and the environment. Sometimes, unilaterally inferior technologies have replaced superior technologies for economic or other reasons. Almost always new technologies have a mix of positive and negative impacts.

In fact, I think the uncontrolled, rapid growth of generative AI and large language models is happening because of the common belief that "new technology" is always inevitable and good. This is a new technology, therefore "developing" it is inherently leading towards Something. But instead, the amount of resources and environmental and human devastation is simply accelerating and accelerating. The new technology takes everything and gives us nothing.

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Hnngh. The Audible "hack" is making the rounds again, with people claiming you can use your Audible credit to listen to a book and then return it "for free." While I am the first among many to say "fuck Amazon and we should gullotine Jeff Bezos," I need you all to know it's not Amazon refunding you.

It's the authors.

They take that out of our royalties. And that's after they take 80% of our royalties on sales we do make.

(Note: Also, do not assume that your credit is worth the price listing that Amazon shows. Amazon does not pay us the cost of the listing. ((WHICH THEY PICK, we cannot set our own prices on audiobooks and then that forces us to use the Amazon price for the rest of the market!!)) What we get is 20% of the credit's value, so my book might appear on Audible for $20-30. However, if you received an Amazon credit for one of those $4.99 deals, I'd get 20% of $4.99. Yes, it's fucked, it's all fucked. Yes, other audio retailers do the exact same thing. This is one of the reasons authors don't make half as much money as people think they do.)

This became such a big issue that they had to make it impossible to return books after a certain point without talking to a customer service representative, because people were using Kindle/Audible and Amazon's return policy "like a library," and some authors (myself included) were getting royalty checks that showed negative income.

At this point, I don't even know if the Audible "hack" still works (Amazon has made changes to protect authors from this kind of thing at a glacial pace), but I need you to know it's not Amazon that's refunding you. This isn't a fun little "fuck Amazon" thing. The way Amazon has it set up, it's directly fucking the authors over.

So, yeah. Obviously, if you download something and can't get into it, or if something pops up on the author's side that makes you not want to support them anymore, yeah, process that return. Yeet the bitch. But please don't use it "like a library."

It's really harrowing to see your predicted income based on sales and then find out you're getting one-tenth of that because of refunds. And it's not even because people didn't like your book. They're just using the wrong place like a library and fucking over your algorithm as well, because once you get too many returns, you stop getting promoted.

Try using a library. You can access places like @queerliblib for FREE provided you have a US library account that you've hooked up to Libby. It's a little bit of work, but once you've got a card number, you're golden.

Just, y'know, throwing it out there because I don't think people realize this is how it works. You're not taking something back to Walmart, and Walmart is eating the refund before dumping the item in the garbage. Amazon takes the refund, turns to the author, and takes it off our plates.

Note: this does not affect Kindle Unlimited. Flip through the end pages to give the author maximum pages read, and then return that bad boy so the author can get paid. But also, please, maybe think about switching to a Kobo+ account instead. It offers the same subscription-based membership without demanding exclusivity, so authors aren't locked into just Amazon the way they are with KU. (Royalty rates are roughly the same, but it's a better deal in terms of allowing broader market access.)

This has been a rambling and exhausted PSA from your local peddler of weres.

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Hey, random writing tip: Instead of having something be a ridiculously unlikely coincidence, you can make the thing happen due to who this particular character is as a person. Instead of getting stuck on "there's no logical reason to why that would happen", try to bend it into a case of "something like this would never happen to anybody but this specific fucker." Something that makes your reader chuckle and roll their eyes, going "well of course you would."

Why would the timid shy nerd be at a huge sketchy downtown black market bazaar? Well, she's got this beetle colony she's raising that needs a very specific kind of leaf for nest material, and there only place to get it is this one guy at the bazaar that sells that stuff. Why would the most femininely flamboyant guy ever known just happen to have downright encyclopedic knowledge about professional boxing? Well, there was this one time when he was down bad for this guy who was an aspiring professional boxer...

I know it sounds stupidly obvious when written out like this, but when you're up close to your writing, it's hard to see the forest for the trees. Some time ago I finished reading a book, where the whole plot hinges on character A, who is 100% certain that character B is dead, personally getting up and coming down from the top rooms of a castle, to the gates, at 3 am, to come look at some drunk who claims to be this guy who died 17 years ago. Why would A do that, if he's sure that B is dead?

Because he's a Warrior Guy from a culture of Loyalty And Honour, and hearing that someone's got the audacity to go about claiming to be his long-lost brother in battle, there is no other option than to immediately personally go down there to beat the ever-loving shit out of this guy. Who then turns out to actually be character B, after all.

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The Dungeons & Dragons paladin is objectively the funniest class because at first glance it seems like an artefact of an earlier age of the fantasy genre for which contemporary inspirations are thin on the ground, but then you dig into its thematic core and realise there are contemporary popular media characters who almost perfectly fit the mould, but like 80% of them are deeply unwell teenage lesbians.

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I'm gonna be real with you, i don't think weirdo kinksters should be considered acceptable collateral damage when banks/credit card companies enforce adult content bans on sites like patreon and ko-fi