Another slice of internets?

[temporalreplicsimile]

🌈rice🌈

[philcollinsenjoyer]

explained to an 8 year old that once a fruit is ripe you only have so much time until it rots so you have to eat it soon and she said so i'll never be able to keep it perfect like this forever? no and there are about a million pieces of art for you unrelatedly

[desolendate]

im literally in tears what the fuck

[exeggcute]

one of my favorite this american life segments of late is about the people who played orchestra pit for phantom of the opera on broadway and how, like, a sizeable majority of them had literally been playing the show since it opened in 1988 (on broadway. I know it opened in 86 on the west end, you random pedants, but I am specifically talking about broadway musicians) because their contracts stipulated that they'd have jobs throughout the show's entire run... but nobody anticipated that phantom would become the longest-running broadway show of all time.

and none of these people wanted to walk away from a guaranteed job, so very few of them ever quit. they just kept doing the same show eight nights a week... for twenty or thirty years... and by the time it finally closed last year most of these musicians (who had been working together for DECADES) hated each other and really really fucking loathed phantom. I can't stop thinking about it. it's indescribably hellish to imagine but also the funniest thing I've ever heard in my life.

[exeggcute]

can you imagine.

[bisexualshakespeare]

[ID: excerpt from an article reading: One of my favorite stories, which should drive anyone who has every played in a band crazy-- there’s this bassoon player who has sat next to the same clarinet player since 1988. She’s convinced he plays half a note4 flat on every note he’s every played. He denies this. /]

[cleverlittlefox]

[cleverlittlefox]

[cleverlittlefox]

[megamindsupremacy]

first rule of storing tupperware is have fun and be yourself. second suggestion is slam the cabinet door quickly and don’t worry ‘bout it.

[ghelgheli]

being trans is a little like an onion, you see, what with the layers, because when a cis man i exchange emails with refers to me being a trans girl as a "life choice" i bristle at the evocation of cisnormative rhetoric, positioning cisness as the default and transness as the choice, deviation from the trodden path. but when a trans girl refers to transness as inborn i wince at the appeal to the essence that precedes existence, to something in the brainbody that is supposed to explain "why" we are this way, to the abdication of autonomy. and then at the core of the onion i am repeating that we are all choosing to be what we are, which is why anyone can be cis and anyone can be trans, only sometimes the decision may kill you one way or another. and which is more liberating, when you say "estrogen would fix her": the proposal that something physical is being aligned with an immutable underlying truth, or that anyone can at any point make the choice to be something else? in the next email, the man asks me if i am "interested in LGBTQ+", and i am once again on the skin of the onion.

[pierppasolini]

Peanuts (March 4, 1960) by Charles M. Schulz

[laranoa]

I hate what AI has done to the sparkle emoji. Give it back

[elliespectacular]

wanna hang out [remembers it's rude to put expectations on people] it's cool if not [remembers people like to know they're wanted] but I'd really like it if you did [remembers selfishness is bad] we can do whatever you want though [remembers that handing someone a blank canvas isn't as effective as providing a suggestion to bounce ideas off of] like sucking each others fingers for example

[darlingofdots]

ten years ago as part of my creative writing degree we had a class on professional development where we learned how the publishing process works for different mediums and how to choose an agent and what the role of a publishing house is and back then, the advice was "self-publishing has its advantages but a traditional publisher will provide editorial support and market your book and if your book sells well enough they want to invest in your future" and now basically none of that is true anymore. books make it to shelves with noticeable errors and structural issues that could be addressed with one or two more rounds of developmental editing, authors are expected to do more and more of the marketing themselves to the point that they are expected to be social media influencers in their own right, and publishers appear to be prioritising flashy debut novels with huge advances they don't outsell, which means the author is less likely to get a follow-up deal.

Obviously a publisher is a business and a business needs to make money, but the idea used to be that you'd have a couple of very successful authors who bring in so much cash that they subsidise the new kid who is building a back catalogue of books that sell okay until they get name recognition and pay for themselves. I was told back then that a couple thousand pounds was very reasonable for a debut novel because you want to get royalties for the sales exceeding your advance and that way the publisher sees you as a profitable investment. The last couple of years I keep hearing about six figure book deals for debut (!) literary fiction (!) novels, what on earth?

I'm not saying that the publishing industry is uniquely awful or that it's worse than it's ever been or whatever, but especially in a time when reading and talking about books is trendy and there is so much money in books, it feels very, I don't know, symbolic? Prioritising flashy one-time projects over sustained and sustainable growth. Investing only enough resources to make your product fit for sale but not enough to make it good because people will buy it anyway. It's frustrating to me as a reader and as an aspiring writer and as a person existing in a capitalist system.

[poorshadowspaintedqueens]

One of the tags referred to people thanking their editorial teams in acknowledgments, and I want to point out the growing prevalence of people thanking beta-readers and writing groups, both of which usually rely on a pre-existing community or relationship and, just as importantly, are unpaid.

My day job is as a freelance editor for nonfiction books, and I can safely say that if the publishing industry were operating as intended, I would either not have a job at all or be working for a specific press. Authors pay me directly to do the work that a press editor used to do as part of publication contracts. This is because so many presses have started outsourcing all their editorial work to either third-party contractors or, even worse, to genAI.

In short, venture capital has broken the publication industry the same way it's broken the retail, restaurant, and travel industries.

[darlingofdots]

I didn't go into this side of it in my original post but YES! Fuck! I know this is a huge issue for translators too because they're being asked to do more work in less time for less money and I've heard rumblings about human translators being brought in only to essentially proofread work done by AI, which is so disrespectful to the sheer skill and artistic abilities of (literary) translation...

Anyway, I love editing. I think I love editing almost more than writing, and I'm pretty sure that I'm better at it. Last year I edited an academic article from 11k to 9k words for my supervisor and I felt like a god when I finished it, but when my supervisor asked if I'd thought about doing this professionally, I had to tell her that there's just not a viable career in editing anymore. Publishers used to employ! editors! Several different kinds of editors for different stages of the process! That used to be my dream job!

Editing is so essential to making a text good. It doesn't matter how talented or dedicated you are as a writer, you cannot achieve the level of quality by yourself that you could achieve by working with a skilled editor. That's normal! The lone genius who comes out of the cave with the perfect novel does not exist! The manuscript that gets sold to a publisher is supposed to be handed off to an editor who tells you to tighten up that plotline and reminds you that every day can't be Tuesday and sharpens your prose so your voice really shines. Skimping out on that part of the publication process takes money out of the hands of skilled professionals, leads to consumers (ew) receiving subpar products (ew!), and is such an injustice to the writers whose work can't reach its full potential (and the writers who won't get published because they can't afford to pay an editor out of pocket!).

It drives me up the wall. I hate reading a mediocre book and knowing that a skilled editor could have easily raised it from 3 stars to 4. We should all be way angrier about it, frankly.

[kalgalen]

my beige flag is that i do Not pay attention to what people look like

[kalgalen]

"what did this man you talked to for 10 minutes 2 hours ago look like" man idk?? i think he had gray hair

[kalgalen]

the neurodivergent experience is realizing way into your adult life that some things that take 0 effort or even intention for most people is a skill you have to learn on purpose

[pocketss]

It was important to me that she puts emphasis on the TOK

[sentient-tent]

This is Tie, she is going to eat all of the notes

[sentient-tent]

reblog to feed her notes

[elodieunderglass]

How is she doing this

[elodieunderglass]

Oh well none of my business

[gothycollie]

A long time ago, in the Age of Physical, software would be stored on beautiful mirrored discs, and inside each disc a tiny wizard lived who would install the software for you.

[cardboardlife]

A video about making bubble prints. Prints?? Not sure if they're prints exactly. Anyway I want to animate with this somehow

[the-boring-distopia]

There is something so profound about how necro cav relationships are meant to make the necromancer stronger and lead to the cavalier's inevitable demise upon reaching lyctorhood, but every lyctor we ever meet regards the loss of their cavaliers with maddened despair and it inevitably leads to every betrayal against god. The thorn in the side of John's empire is that he can't take loved away and all of his creatures will turn on him for making them try.

Ianthe is the only exception but only because she never truly had a cavalier. She has a sister and she will rather starve herself into an undying death until the sun burn out than eat her sister. The greatest necromancer from the house of gold and greed refuses to do that.

I am not even going to try unravelling the Sixth, that's THE can of worms to ever worm of cans. They saw the stages of grief and said "no, we're going heresy any lysis instead".

[vividciggy]

That was definitely Pyrrha's last cigarette

Bonus: