I think at some point in the last year my mom has realized I might not give her grandchildren so instead she’s taken to pseudo-adopting every single one of my friends who are all misfit 20 somethings, who basically now camp in my backyard for fun and are apparently coming for thanksgiving (my mom texted them all individually for the invite it was actually very cute).
as an only child I’ve suddenly found myself with five other siblings in the span of months right before I turn 30. what is my life right now
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The girls met their first lemming yesterday. We startled two coming down the trail, Sparty was leashed (luckily, otherwise it'd be crunch time) but Troj was loose - blew recall for the first time in forever, caught up with one, and then just stood there looking down at it while it was screaming bloody murder at her like ???:D???
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i literally wont stand for the dawniefication of callie. the most annoying character in yellowjackets??? multiple people saying they wish she didnt exist and they hate her and she's just in the way and they want her to die. are you insane?? she is a Child living in the shadow of her mom's dead best friend that she never knew because her she froze to death in the wilderness years before callie was born. she is a little girl whose entire world got fucked up because she found out her mom is a murderer and her dad is a (bad) blackmailer and now they've all been backed into trying to cover up a murder. her whole life just got upended against her will. of course shes going to lash out on her parents and break up with her high school boyfriend and lie about staying at a friend's house and go to a bar she's not supposed to be at and date an older man she's not supposed to be seeing. even if it's destructive it's something she can control! the comfortable boring Safe life she thought she had was ripped away from her so yeah she's doing reckless shit without thinking about the consequences bc that's all she Can do.
it's dawn summers being voted the most annoying character on television ever all over again. you people just hate teenage girls when they act like teenage girls.
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There’s another post going around about this, but tumblr won’t let me reblog it but...
When I read a story written by a human being, I’m not just reading it because I want to read a coffee shop AU with a specific plot description. I’m reading it because it’s making a connection to another human storyteller and seeing a piece of them carved into the words. Storytelling is a human act of sharing joy, angst, tension, resolution, satisfaction. It’s an act of love.
Writing and reading a story isn’t just an act of creation and consumption. I hate that commercialism and AI are reducing it to that sort of transaction. Like oh, you need words on this subject and that’s the end of it. Like what we really needed was just a vending machine we can push buttons on to get a fix, as if the human creating the story wasn’t a factor. That the author’s life experience and views and feelings haven’t infused the words with their own unique touches.
I’ve read hundreds of coffee shop AU’s over the years (and thousands of fics in general). I’ve seen many similar tropes reused across stories, and just like an AI would, I’ve learned things about writing them that I will always carry with me. But unlike an AI, a human author is not just the sum total of coffee shop AU’s we’ve consumed. Even if we used the same prompt, the same sets of tropes, the same characters. I will always choose the human-crafted story over the computer generated one.
Because again, I’m not just looking for a very specific fix via a series of words. I’m looking for a human connection through story.
Unlike an AI, I have BEEN to a coffee shop. I’ve had experiences in coffee shops. I’ve had funny little meet-cutes with people. I’ve accidentally spilled coffee on myself and knocked heads with someone as we both rushed to wipe it up. I know what it FEELS like. The machine doesn’t.
I’ve also read millions of things that aren’t fanfic, or coffee shop AU’s. I’ve experienced things OTHER than going to coffee shops and having meet-cutes. And I know what all those things feel like when processed through my personal human lens of experience, which is different from every other personal human lens of experience.
All the machine can do is spit out what it THINKS a human experience is, and I honestly don’t care about that at all. Fic is not a “product” to be “generated.” It’s an art form that connects us to other people who share the same love of a thing that we do.
People who, even when all writing the same characters in the same setting to the exact same prompt, will all add something or have a viewpoint about something or bring a completely different personality and life experience to the story that no one else on the planet could. That’s what I’m actually reading.
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barnes and noble has been raising the prices of everything and further pushing for their premium membership option (which they raised the price of by 60 percent this year!) and then when they have big sales events, they're less than what they used to be.
last year at this time you could get one of their leather-bound book annex tomes for $12.50 (without a member discount) because of the 50 percent off all hardcover sales. but they raised the price of those tomes from 25 bucks to 30, and they decreased the sale from 50 percent off all hardcovers to 1/3rd off. so that same book that was $12.50 at last year's end-of-year sale is now 20 bucks. and that's supposed to be savings enough to induce me to walk into one of their stores this week?
i'm sorry but b&n has just gotten so greedy, even though their business has only been doing better and better in previous years. they do not have to be raising prices like they have been, and they can damn well afford to have the same savings events they used to. if you went to one of those hardcover sales a year or two ago, even if you lived in a less populated area like i do, you had never seen a b&n so busy in your life. things were flying off the shelves. they WERE making bank.
and as a company they've only been growing and growing (as much as the publishing industry has been, in recent years). but there are so many other ways to buy books. CHEAPER ways to buy books. MORE SUSTAINABLE ways to buy books. and since books and booksellers are doing really well right now, i don't see why barnes and noble is getting so greedy when they don't have to be. i dont like new shiny books that much. people buy books for the content, ultimately. sometimes we as consumers might make the choice that a new shiny book is worth paying a bit more for, but not that much. barnes and noble has just been demanding more and more of their customers' money for less and less benefit.
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