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.
I think I’ve been fully convinced to simply never, ever, use “grammar” software, because I think it’s actually just getting wildly worse now.
Tags:
#PSA #writing #disappointed permanent resident of The Future #embarrassment squick? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
me: you know what i’ve really gotten into lately? stone throwing. i’m not talking about skipping pebbles at the lake, i mean a sizable rock. something with a bit of heft to it. i love to get a feel for the arc, you know? i could probably throw stones all day, to be honest. not just outside, i’ll do it indoors as well. “don’t talk to me before i’ve thrown my stones,” ha he ha
my date, whose hobby is building glass houses: i’m sorry, this isn’t going to work out,
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #embarrassment squick? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
If you’re writing something that involves an aspect of life that you have not experienced, you obviously have to do research on it. You have to find other examples of it in order to accurately incorporate it into your story realistically.
But don’t just look at professional write ups. Don’t stop at wikepedia or webMD. Look up first person accounts.
I wrote a fic once where a character has frequent seizures. Naturally, I was all over the wikipedia page for seizures, the related pages, other medical websites, etc.
But I also looked at Yahoo asks where people where asking more obscure questions, sometimes asked by people who were experiencing seizures, sometimes answered by people who have had seizures.
I looked to YouTube. Found a few individual videos of people detailing how their seizures usually played out. So found a few channels that were mostly dedicated to displaying the daily habits of someone who was epileptic.
I looked at blogs and articles written by people who have had seizures regularly for as long as they can remember. But I also read the frantic posts from people who were newly diagnosed or had only had one and were worried about another.
When I wrote that fic, I got a comment from someone saying that I had touched upon aspects of movement disorders that they had never seen portrayed in media and that they had found representation in my art that they just never had before. And I think it’s because of the details. The little things.
The wiki page for seizures tells you the technicalities of it all, the terminology. It tells you what can cause them and what the symptoms are. It tells you how to deal with them, how to prevent them.
But it doesn’t tell you how some people with seizures are wary of holding sharp objects or hot liquids. It doesn’t tell you how epileptics feel when they’ve just found out that they’re prone to fits. It doesn’t tell you how their friends and family react to the news.
This applies to any and all writing. And any and all subjects. Disabilities. Sexualities. Ethnicities. Cultures. Professions. Hobbies. Traumas. If you haven’t experienced something first hand, talk to people that have. Listen to people that have. Don’t stop at the scholarly sources. They don’t always have all that you need.
I … LOVE reading the replies and tags for this post! I’m happy that, out of all my posts, this is the one that’s blown up so quickly.
I love the people who are a part of a minority, that are gushing about their favorite fics or books that seem to have done this and offer proper representation.
I love the people who are bringing up the toxic mindset that is very popular on tumblr, the “you can’t write about it if you haven’t lived it” ideology that makes writers feel guilty for providing representation.
I especially love the people who are mentioning how they should start doing this. I love the people who are probably young or inexperienced writers that are seeing this and thinking of doing this for the first time. I love that there are people who read this and then think to better their writing because of it.
i was writing an autistic character and tried looking into firsthand accounts of what a meltdown feels like so.
now i’m here to tell you that you also might learn something fun and interesting about yourself
Tags:
#the wondrous variety of sapient life #writing #embarrassment squick? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Extremely Important Update: in April 2023 the World Bird Sanctuary had an orphaned eagle chick in need of care, so they decided to see if Murphy could live up to his parental ambitions.
He successfully raised the chick, which is now thriving with the other juvenile eaglets!
Congrats Murphy, you made it happen through sheer determination.
(Pictures are from the Facebook page of the World Bird Sanctuary; I can’t link them directly because I don’t have a FB account and the site is a nightmare to interact with if you’re not logged in, constantly resetting and kicking you to registration pages.)
This bird took care of an effigy of a baby until the fae gave him a real baby
Tags:
#(I kind of thought I had queued a version of this update already but I can’t find it anywhere) #(apologies for any accidental duplicates) #birds #oh look an update #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #embarrassment squick? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once #(P.S. found the other copy I was thinking of) #(it was in an open tab‚ not yet queued) #(so we’re good)
now that’s a lot. Dabbing unicorn Love Is Love Zipper US Flag.
The best part is that a lot of these are vertically oriented and they only have a left-facing flag background to edit it over, which results in a ton of the american flags being flown upside down, which is a symbol of distress.
Alright, so the crimes against vexillology are uncountable so we’re not going to count them. Instead I’m going to say that my first reaction to “American flag skull + autism” was to automatically parse all American flag skulls as the Sport Death flag and go “makes perfect sense, Senior House (RIP) had tons of autistic people”.
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #flags #juxtaposition #home of the brave #computer generated images #war cw? #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
#I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #embarrassment squick? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
People keep showing up uninvited to our Vampire Club and we immediately know they don’t belong, for obvious reasons
If they’re the DoorDash delivery person, I at least hope y’all give them a good tip. /joking
Look, we’re vampires. We don’t eat. If we’re doordashing to a vampire club meeting, it’s so we can feed on the delivery guy.
And that’s a terrible idea, which is one of the reasons we have to have regular vampire club meetings. You can’t just eat delivery drivers, especially not ones you ordered to your own house, damn it!
There’s way too much of a paper trail. These drivers are GPS tracked and everything. You’re basically telling the police exactly when and where your snack went missing. You don’t think they’ll figure out you’re involved and start asking questions?
This is an important thing to teach old vampires because so many of us have been hanging out since the 1750s and don’t really understand this newfangled tech. And while it’s relatively easy to teach an old dog a new trick (like ordering stuff on a smartphone), the problem is that they don’t fully understand how it works. It’s basically magic to them. So they’ll just get themselves in trouble. Thus the whole “don’t DoorDash a victim to your house!” talk I give at all these vampire groups (ideally each vampire community should have their own tech guy, but wouldn’t you know it, a bunch of immortals are vaguely conservative in their ways and haven’t gotten with the program and turned some IT tech at the local call center… So I have to travel a lot)
And no, Orlop*, for the last time: using dating apps is not the Modern Vampire Lifehack you think it is either. There’s a paper trail again. Your virgin meal’s roommate is just gonna call the cops and go “my roommate went on a date and hadn’t been back in a week” and they’ll get grindr to give them the records and it’ll lead them right to LestatDaddy69.
Besides, your bewitching aura doesn’t work over an app, so you can’t exactly mesmerize them into coming home with you. Plus you can’t fill your profile with sexy selfies if YOU DON’T SHOW UP ON CAMERAS.
Anyway the current times are tough on vampires. They’re used to having a lot of their meals basically fall into their open mouths, but situations have changed. If some poor soul has their car break down outside your creepy mansion, they’re not gonna come inside and ask to stay the night or use your phone, they’re gonna call AAA or use an app to summon an Uber.
And no one is doing door to door salesman shit anymore, they’ll just spam your Hotmail address.
So vamps are getting desperate, and this is leading many of them to get sloppy and do foolish things. Which is exactly the opposites of how vampires need to act: we are immortals and need to look at the long game. Let humans do short-sighted things, we gotta think about what we’ll be doing in 200 years. And from that perspective, the absolute last thing we need to do is get a bunch of vamps caught by the cops and end up triggering another big anti-vampire crusade. Do you want another Svalbard Incident? Because I sure as fuck don’t!
The average batfuck can’t even imagine how bad it would be if we got the government on our asses. Do you know how easy it would be to figure out half the vamps in the country if they started doing metadata analysis specifically to look for us? Hell, census records alone would give you a bunch of vamps just because of how lazy ya’ll have been with hiding the fact that you’ve owned the same moldy mansion since before the revolutionary war.
This is the kind of shit I have to deal with all the time. These bloodsuckers who are so arrogant because they’ve been living large for a couple hundred years and don’t seem to realize what I’m telling them: the hemotypicals have them outnumbered a million to one and they have computers now. You can’t keep acting like this is still the depression era when you could grab some worker off the street and have no one notice or care that they went missing. You are going to get your undead ass killed, and more importantly, get the rest of us killed too.
Gah. At least I don’t have to teach them how to us windows 98 anymore. Thank fuck for the user friendliness of iPhones.
* editors note: the Orlop deck is part of wooden sailing ships. Vamp!Foone probably meant (Count) Orlok, the antagonist of the 1922 German expressionist film Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens)
Tags:
#storytime #vampires #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #embarrassment squick? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
ever since I learned about the “turned comma,” the rotated comma type that typographers once used as a superscript “c,” Michael G. Collins, M‘Culloch and the Turned Comma, 12 Green Bag 2d 265 (2009), I can’t help but notice when people get it wrong
Justice Kagan, for example, got it wrong in Kahler v. Kansas, No. 18-6135, slip op. at 2 (U.S. March 23, 2020):
word processors can’t rotate type, but we could approximate the “turned comma” much better if we used a single open quotation mark (‘) instead of an apostrophe (’), as Justice Kagan does here
or we could just use “c,” as we do for McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316 (1819), even though the report reads:
Tags:
#language #the more you know #embarrassment squick? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #embarrassment squick? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
This is an odd thought that I had. Canonically the Jedi are able to tell the clones apart easily with the Force. Let’s take it a step further. Because of the extra senses given by the Force, the Clones really don’t even look the same to the Jedi. (Sort of like that online test that goes around about how many color shades you can see, where some people can see four shades easily but others see one block of color.) They never quite forget that their troops are clones but whenever someone talks about them looking the same, or like Jango Fett, all the Jedi just laugh awkwardly or are really confused (There is some “are they talking about the helmets? I mean the men paint the helmets, but maybe the visor looks the same?”).
I just want wholesome shenanigans where various nat borns interact with the Jedi and the clones. With lots of side eye while the Jedi try fruitlessly to figure out why “they keep saying that Cody looks like Jango Fett, what?” or “How are they confusing Fives with Echo?”
Anakin goes to describe Rex in very specific detail except how he does leaves everyone (except the Jedi) confused because that’s not what Rex looks like
Obi-Wan: makes sense
Palpatine: I have no clue who you’re talking about
This reminds me of a Terry Prachet scene with a werewolf character trying to describe people in scents but human language lacks the vocabulary to translate the concepts. Anakin saying stuff like “Rex is so prilltz” , and “Echo is very schnorf when he’s just come on duty” and those are terms for how their personality feels or how their aura glistens in a jedi’s perception.
So first, ^ this exactly. Also all of the reblogs are amazing. Consider The Jedi trying to translate what they feel in the Force into Basic, like they have words in Dai Bendu for all of it but trying to describe something in Dai Bendu to a Force null is such a headache. So they say things like “He feels like the smell of precisely 1/25th of a rotten apple mixed with the color that goes with the taste of transparasteel” and all the Force Users in the room go “Oh, that asshole” while the poor LEO is trying to figure out how to input that into his database. The Coruscant Guard finally had to redesign their database for shit like that, then have Quinlan Vos come through hand help them fill it out and each and every one of them is violently angry when their ability to catch killers shot up 200%. Incidentally, and by complete accident, they found out that if a Jedi tells them someone has “the color that goes with the taste of transparasteel” in their description, the person has probably deceived someone in the past 48 hrs and no one can tell them why.
Second this opens up some many opportunities for hilarity with Jedi that go under cover. Like there has to be extra classes and all the Jedi that go undercover has to retake like every 4 months because they start to think that all they have to do is put in colored contacts, or forget the need for disguises entirely in favor of trying to change their Force signature and maybe their voice.
Third, Think about how funny it would be even the Sith did this. Like they don’t even realize it but Palpatine, Dooku, Ventress, Maul they can all tell the clones apart and do it without trying. Without realizing they are doing it. Consider Palpatine being in a meeting with the Jedi and several members of the Senate and not paying attention and greeting each clone by their number, and this is what starts making the Senator suspicious of him.
Like he is doing everything right, fooling everyone and he is not paying attention and so asks if “CC-1010” is feeling under the weather (it was the only way he would allow himself to gloat and feel the fond memories of torturing the Clone the day before), except there were the same number of guards as always and they had been trying to pass off Thorn as Fox (they knew that the Jedi wouldn’t say anything) to give him a break. This is the point that everything unravels, because ‘how can the Force Null Chancellor tell the Clones apart, that’s a Jedi thing”
I KEEP LOSING THIS SO I’M REBLOGGING AGAIN
Tags:
#Star Wars #story ideas I will never write #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #embarrassment squick? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Brinens and Things 