sqeedledob

[sqeedledob]

Instead of "Looked", consider

glanced

peered

gazed

stared

watched

observed

examined

scrutinized

surveyed

glimpsed

eyed

beheld

inspected

checked

viewed

glanced at

regarded

noticed

gawked

spied

[sqeedledob]

what are your fave books?

Right now—

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, not just a western but THE western. Retired Texas rangers decide to go on a cattle drive all the way to Montana. The Odyssey and Dante’s Inferno, but make it cowboys. (Heavy content warning: McMurtry was unable to conceive of characters other than white men with any depth or complexity. Perils of older installments to the genre, unfortunately. Still a great example of the style, though.)

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers and all its follow ups. Character driven novels set in space, narrative plot optional. Chambers imagines a galactic community fostered on peace and coexistence without avoiding the pitfalls of a multicultural interaction. Every Chambers book is a warm hug.

The Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir, “lesbian necromancers in space” as it’s known. Beyond that it’s about grief, trauma, life and death, companionship, and vintage internet memes repurposed to stab you between the ribs with pathos.

The Light Brigade by Katherine Hurley. How to describe this book. A completely corporatized Earth goes to war with Mars and develops teleportation technology for this purpose. One soldier, Dietz, after their first teleportation, begins to experience the war very differently from everyone else. Can’t explain further without spoiling it, but god, this novel is so tightly plotted and executed with a master’s finesse.

Tomorrow the Sex Will Be Good Again by Katherine Angel. An examination of consent, what it means, and why sometimes relying on consent for sex is simply not enough to avoid harm. This book describes a long held frustration I have had with the notion that communication will solve all of your sexual problems, because the state of communication between men and women as a whole in western culture is nowhere near prepared to handle the conversations that must happen.

[sqeedledob]

whats wrong with ai?? genuinely curious <3

okay let's break it down. i'm an engineer, so i'm going to come at you from a perspective that may be different than someone else's.

i don't hate ai in every aspect. in theory, there are a lot of instances where, in fact, ai can help us do things a lot better without. here's a few examples:

ai detecting cancer

ai sorting recycling

some practical housekeeping that gemini (google ai) can do

all of the above examples are ways in which ai works with humans to do things in parallel with us. it's not overstepping--it's sorting, using pixels at a micro-level to detect abnormalities that we as humans can not, fixing a list. these are all really small, helpful ways that ai can work with us.

everything else about ai works against us. in general, ai is a huge consumer of natural resources. every prompt that you put into character.ai, chatgpt? this wastes water + energy. it's not free. a machine somewhere in the world has to swallow your prompt, call on a model to feed data into it and process more data, and then has to generate an answer for you all in a relatively short amount of time.

that is crazy expensive. someone is paying for that, and if it isn't you with your own money, it's the strain on the power grid, the water that cools the computers, the A/C that cools the data centers. and you aren't the only person using ai. chatgpt alone gets millions of users every single day, with probably thousands of prompts per second, so multiply your personal consumption by millions, and you can start to see how the picture is becoming overwhelming.

that is energy consumption alone. we haven't even talked about how problematic ai is ethically. there is currently no regulation in the united states about how ai should be developed, deployed, or used.

what does this mean for you?

it means that anything you post online is subject to data mining by an ai model (because why would they need to ask if there's no laws to stop them? wtf does it matter what it means to you to some idiot software engineer in the back room of an office making 3x your salary?). oh, that little fic you posted to wattpad that got a lot of attention? well now it's being used to teach ai how to write. oh, that sketch you made using adobe that you want to sell? adobe didn't tell you that anything you save to the cloud is now subject to being used for their ai models, so now your art is being replicated to generate ai images in photoshop, without crediting you (they have since said they don't do this...but privacy policies were never made to be human-readable, and i can't imagine they are the only company to sneakily try this). oh, your apartment just installed a new system that will use facial recognition to let their residents inside? oh, they didn't train their model with anyone but white people, so now all the black people living in that apartment building can't get into their homes. oh, you want to apply for a new job? the ai model that scans resumes learned from historical data that more men work that role than women (so the model basically thinks men are better than women), so now your resume is getting thrown out because you're a woman.

ai learns from data. and data is flawed. data is human. and as humans, we are racist, homophobic, misogynistic, transphobic, divided. so the ai models we train will learn from this. ai learns from people's creative works--their personal and artistic property. and now it's scrambling them all up to spit out generated images and written works that no one would ever want to read (because it's no longer a labor of love), and they're using that to make money. they're profiting off of people, and there's no one to stop them. they're also using generated images as marketing tools, to trick idiots on facebook, to make it so hard to be media literate that we have to question every single thing we see because now we don't know what's real and what's not.

the problem with ai is that it's doing more harm than good. and we as a society aren't doing our due diligence to understand the unintended consequences of it all. we aren't angry enough. we're too scared of stifling innovation that we're letting it regulate itself (aka letting companies decide), which has never been a good idea. we see it do one cool thing, and somehow that makes up for all the rest of the bullshit?

[sqeedledob]

Any reading recs? Books or fic. I fear I have been let down by the last three books I checked out.

yes!

The Library at Mount Char [fiction; weird contemporary]

Severance [fiction; apocalyptic]

The Engines of God [fiction; sci fi]

Stories of Your Life and Others [fiction, short stories]

[sqeedledob]

if you use a.i. you’re a loser

[sqeedledob]

hot take apparently but i think it's good for white people to relate to poc's art. i think it's good for straight people to relate to queer art. stop acting like we're different species who could never possibly understand each other what the fuck is wrong with you

[sqeedledob]

Genuinely curious, no shade

*Y/N stands for "Your Name" and is commonly used in reader-insert fanfiction, in which the reader is intended to project themselves onto the protagonist

No fourth option you choose or you lose

[sqeedledob]

its so freeing when you realize you can literally write whatever you want 

[sqeedledob]

Its obvious to me when people who post about canaries in mines have never met a canary. Like yeah the miners had a special device to revive the canary because canaries are one of the most adorable creatures on the planet and they make adorable little chirping sounds and honestly probably loved the sounds of machinery and people talking so it was probably loud and friendly with the workers. Whatever though maybe meet a canary sometime and youd understand

[sqeedledob]

- cherry wine is about domestic abuse. it’s now called a cute proposal song.

- too sweet is about seizing the day and ignoring healthy habits in favor of having more fun with unhealthy ones. he’s actively critical of himself in the song. it’s now called a song about thinking you’re superior for drinking black coffee.

- take me to church is about worship as a metaphor for sex. it’s called a religious song.

- eat your young is a song about war and political greed. it’s called a song about sex.

- now, the strongly political message of nobody’s soldier is being ignored in favor of calling it a metaphor for hozier’s relationship with his fans.

when are we going to stop simplifying hozier’s music down to cute little cottagecore bogman forest music? maybe you dont want to hear this but i don’t care. quit listening to hozier for the aesthetic. there’s a reason why empire now, foreigner’s god, butchered tongue, etc. songs with unignorable political messages are among his least popular songs.

[sqeedledob]

Re: that Anon on writing Ghost as evil

Everyone processes trauma differently. Some break out of that cycle of abuse, some continue it, some start a completely different cycle unintentionally. I love seeing people write Simon differently because it's almost like you can understand more about the author and the author's personal experiences either facing or knowing someone/people with trauma. And I think that's really beautiful.

My partner was a victim of a lot of abuse in early childhood and, later in life, SA. I really have an appreciation for all the different ways Simon is written because I always find some sort of comfort watching the struggles he either goes through or his partner goes through as they navigate those flavors of PTSD. I don't think it's fair to expect him to be written in any one way. I really appreciate that you came to the defense of writers' explorations and made your stance clear on the idea.

Thank you for being so cool!!!

-💙 (idk if u have a blue heart Anon already but blue is my fave color. I normally send asks off Anon but I'm sending this one in on Anon just due to the nature of the ask ^^; so if u already have a blue heart Anon I'm not them!)

yes, fiction is such a beautiful thing. it could be really healing for a lot of people.

for me, i'm fortunate enough to really not have this kind of trauma in my past, at least not in a very serious manner. for me, i just like to explore how events can unfold in different ways. how simon can respond to events in his life, in good ways or bad, how the same situation can pull apart him for better or for worse.

it's fun to do this. it's fun to switch it up, to explore my own writing capability. i feel like i've posted a lot of range, and i'm pretty proud of that.

i also just think that at the end of the day, people are allowed to write however they want.

[sqeedledob]

I was gonna comment this but figured a reblog would get more eyes if anyone else has the same question

I was a barista for a local coffee brewery up in Alaska when I was transitioning for my senior year to Art School (lore(tm)). And honestly it was fucking great, sometimes I wish that job paid better cause it's definitely something I would go back and do. Thay being said, I've heard differing opinions if you work at chains like Starbucks, but even chain experiences are up to regional managers and how shitty they want to make the experience imo.

Pros:

- generally a chill environment, especially on opening and closing. Midshift is hectic but if you enjoy always being busy it's not bad

- T I P S. In 3 months I made 6k just in tips that shit was fucking WILD for 17 year old me

- if you like talking to people u get to talk to and meet so many different people!

Cons:

The only con was like 2 people I worked with cause they were shitheads and had to be miserable and make that miserable everyone else's problem. You get a good team and a good manager and hands down this could be one of the best experiences you've ever had.

have any of u cuties been baristas before???

pros/cons?? how hard is it to learn??????

[sqeedledob]

ok, because i just saw a terrible take, i feel compelled to say that there is no "fic market" to "oversaturate" in fandom. good gravy.

[sqeedledob]

You will not use AI to get ideas for your story. You will lie on the floor and have wretched visions like god intended

[sqeedledob]

core any writing tips?? im 800 words into my first ever fic and im questioning life and how people write more than 5k words for a singular chapter! what do i do!!!!!!! words are hard!!!!

1: the amount of words you write do not determine if your story is good or not

2: if you're having trouble with flow, think of the scene you're writing. is it important? are the characters just going through the motions? would it be easier to transition to a different scene? filler is fine if it's showing more about plot or we learn about characters, but if you're writing out everything step by step "mc does her hair like this and puts on clothes that look like this and then walks down stairs to make breakfast and then heads out for the day" will really clog up your flow.

3: if you're stuck on a sentence, it's probably because of the sentence itself and not you. try rewriting it and see if that gets you moving forward.

4: usually when people post chapters over 5k words it's because they're putting a lot of scenes in that chapter, not because they're making a lot of one scene. for example, chapter 13 of in limbo was 7.5k words long, and that had like 7 different scenes. but don't force yourself to put more scenes into a chapter just for sake of word count. most professionally published books only have chapters that are around 3-4k words, but even then an 800 word chapter is still better than never finishing it at all.

5: a lot of your writing (at least mine, anyway) will be done during the editing process. i mean, you guys all saw my in limbo chapter 13 word count i posted. it was under 7k words. i added like 600 words. you fine tune things a lot in editing to help things flow better.

uhh i think that's about all i have as far as like, the writing process and worrying about word count and stuff like that! i'm not sure if i'm exactly the best person to ask for advice but that's what i've got!

[sqeedledob]

*Modern AU, probably*

Lan: Remember how upset you got when Rand ended a text with ‘thx’ instead of ‘thanks’?

Moiraine *visibly upset*: Why would you bring that up?

[sqeedledob]

This is Money Snake. She only appears every 312 years. 

If you reblog her picture within the next twenty-five seconds you will have good luck and fortune for the rest of your life.