Bees are coming! @makaeru - Tumblr Blog

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tonycurtis

this has been lingering in my mind ever since the episode aired ok iM SO SORRY

boymounter

so many people don't understand how abelist it is to kill your brother with a rock

fwizard

despazito

Another one for "objectively funny crimes should not be punished"

unpretty

How did you get so good at writing??? Did you take classes? I feel like you should get paid all the money for this! (I subscribe to your website!)

after i dropped out of high school i found a torrent of like 5GB of OCRd romance novels and i read like 3 romance novels a day for a while

read enough romance novels and you will realize that they live or die entirely on technical skill. if you are new to romance novels then even bad ones can dazzle you with novelty but by the time you are on your 30th historical fake engagement between a bluestocking and a rakish duke you can grade them and you know when they've failed. when two books have what should be the same main characters hitting the same plot beats, but one of those books is delightful and the other fucking sucks, you learn some things. some books are bad and still delightful. other books are good but they just don't hit. you start to see the seams in the bad ones. 'oh, this is a weird out of character moment because she wanted to have the kabedon moment and didn't know how to get there'. 'she didn't want the ust to end but couldn't think of a better reason than this deus ex cockblock.' that kind of thing.

you could probably do this with other genres but i like romance because the plot is two people fall in love. that's it. everything else is set dressing. if you can figure out how to make that work you can carry it over into whatever other genre you feel like. mysteries would give you a different skillset around plotting that i don't have.

anyway after that i wrote a lot.

unpretty

i said it in my original tags but i want to talk out of my ass and say that one place that a lot of current romantasy falls short for me is that it ends up being written by people who mostly read other romantasy without going back to the original genres of romance and fantasy. it's like a 'learn the rules before you can break them' kind of thing. you have all these magical macguffins to hit the tropes but can you make me believe that these characters have chemistry without that? is there chemistry, or did you tell me they're fated mates and now i'm supposed to assume this fight is sexy? does the fantasy aspect exist for anything aside from the magical macguffins? i'm not going to throw stones from inside my house made of worldbuilding designed to make all my fetishes happen, but the really fun part is when the lore spins out of control and you end up really going in depth on linguistic anthropology things that aren't relevant to the makeouts.

and the other thing is that you can't really sub in fanfic for this. plenty of fanfic takes characters from other genres and plops them into romance, but it's not the same. a good romance novel says, "here are two characters. you may know their archetypes, but you don't know them. you are going to get to know them, and you are going to love them, and you are going to want them to love each other, and when they love each other you are going to be happy for them". i love a rakish duke. when a man who's never had to do his own laundry is slutty as fuck that's my shit. but you still have to make me like him. you can take that archetype and make a guy who fucking sucks. most fanfic will not impart to you any knowledge about how to make a reader like a guy from scratch. you already know that guy. that's the whole point. fanfic with as much character building as an original work is the exception, not the rule.

the whole reason i get catty about fics that just make a different guy is that... you've made a different guy. i don't know who this guy is and i don't like him, and you haven't bothered trying to make me like him, because you slapped another guy's nametag on him like a cheat code. it's cool if you did make me like this new guy, but why is he wearing that other guy's nametag if no other aspect of him is present?

read the genres you want to write, obviously, but there's a reason the shitty comphet romantic subplot is a cliche. it's because romance is its own skillset, and if you try to fit romance in your thriller when you only read thrillers it's probably going to be the weakest part. if you want an ensemble cast then chemistry between characters is important regardless of whether they're going to fuck about it.

thegunlady

#this is also what i call the Star Wars Problem (although: wide category lol)#but i mean specifically the thing where george lucas watched a BUNCH of westerns and samurai films and ww2 flying ace films#and then made a space movie ABOUT high points in those other story forms#because he knew those pulp genres inside out and knew what bits he needed to hit in RAF Dambusters pulp when he added laser swords#or in western saloon showdowns when he added spaceships#but then you fast-forward a few decades and people are making star wars movies ABOUT other star wars movies#and like not many of those scenes are going to hit that way - they just wont have the chance#they’ll be a copy of a copy and the emotion is going to degrade like the worlds crustiest reformatted ocr PDF#or a xerox of a xerox of a xerox#they’ve ceased to be about the feeling generated by the Form and have become simply the Form in isolation (via harrietvane)

some-say-this-is-a-blog

In the words of Stephen Fry, “One would, one feels.”

tottlefish

Flats and shades

I'll finish Jeremy tomorrow and show the full thing

cuntyqueerleondraisaitl

Andy Weir: Contact with Alien life would be almost impossible, everything would be completely different. Will they be able to tolerate our atmosphere? Their number system would probably be different as base ten doesn't actually have any scientific backup, how would that affect the way they view the world? How would their friendships be formed? What phrases would be interchangeable and how would that match their worldview? How would our relationships with them be formed? What about non-verbal signals? How would they see or hear? How would this be affected by their environment? How would this affect the way we talk to them? What about small and specific customs? What inconsequential things do humans have strict rules around?

Marvel: Yeah Thanos speaks English.

ymas00

James and his Aeroplanes

Ellie Carter, Britain's youngest ever female pilot flew James's previous plane G-OCOK (around 17 at the time)

Yes, James, she knows this...

Engine Fail in G-OCOK

Compton Abbas Airfield

Uh... what?

The Decathlon was G-OCOK. The Scout is G-IIIJ. And in between there was a Cessna.

Bonus:

From the official accident report of James putting a Cessna upside-down while landing it at Bentwater Airfield in 2014.

"The pilot stated that he underestimated the severity of the gusting crosswind and had been unable to prevent the aircraft yawing into wind. He commented that the aircraft had a “notoriously big fin”, making it particularly susceptible to crosswinds, and that in future he would avoid landing in a crosswind of this magnitude."

No injuries, thank goodness, although I seem to remember James saying his passenger was almost hit in the head by a metal toolbox that had gone flying.

hereistherainbow

I can recommend this interview where James talks a lot about aviation (also boats, motorbikes and bicycles).

I transcribed the bit about that Cessna accident:

James: It was a fantastic example of being in that bit of the graph where your confidence has gone up, but your actual ability and experience hasn't gone up, so you've got one shallow curve and one steep, and at the point where the distance between them is at its greatest is where you are most at risk. That's I think where I was. So I flew off to Bentwater, and when we got there, there was a massive gusting crosswind right across the runway. I mean, far beyond what the airplane could really handle, unless you were an absolute Winkle Brown. I came into land, they did everything right, and I thought - oh, I'm gonna have to cross control a bit. There is a bit of wind from the left, and then it gusted it, and then one wheel touched, and it was just all over, and then turned over on its back and it was broken.

Interviewer: But you were all right?

James: Yeah, apart from a few bruises...Well, luckily it didn't burn, because it was full of fuel and it was all coming out when it was upside down and I was hanging upside down in the strap. The only thing I did that I am proud of...I mean, I am not proud of bending my plane, which was written off... The only thing I did that I was quite please with was as it went over I switched all the electrics off.

Interviewer: Is it a common thing among light aviation community?

James: Smashing your aeroplane? Well, minor landing prangs are not that unusual. There are quite a lot of bent aeroplanes around.

ymas00

Thank you so much for adding both the link and a transcript!!

contemptible-scoundrel

[aspiring highway bandit voice] oh yes absolutely your decentralized anticiv pastoral utopia with no form of organized or regulated transport of goods sounds incredible

markscherz

Favorite model of car? And if you could daily drive any car in the world what would it be? (No train/public transport is not an option I’m sorry )

there can be only one.

kitsnicket

I don’t like this actually

kitsnicket

This is depressing does anyone else find this depressing

mikkeneko

I would actually make the argument that the heart of the problem here is not either about fans, as the article claims, or production companies being exploitative cowards, as some of the comments are claiming. The heart of the problem is the increasingly eroding privacy we are seeing in the modern age.

There's some people in the comments saying "fandoms have always been like this" and others saying "No, it's worse than it was." And both are to some extent right. Fans (or at least a small percentage of fans, and the larger a fanbase gets the larger a group this will describe) have always been Like That; but they did not always have the level of access to creators and actors that they have now.

The notion that a performer needs to be constantly available to public scrutiny, that their personal information should by default be available to any rando with google, is pretty new. It used to be that actors would only be expected to engage with the public on limited, specific, and controlled occasions, usually with security provided. Now they're being asked to rawdog exposure to the mob 24/7 on their own.

(Also, production companies have always always always been exploitative cowards, just to get that straight; reading the biographies of literally any actress from golden Hollywood years makes that clear. It's just, again, more public now.)

There has also been a negative feedback loop as fandoms come to realize that the constant access they have to creatives increases their leverage and power. It did not use to be the case that this was so; fandoms pre-internet largely worked under the assumption that they didn't really have any meaningful way to contact or influence the publication houses. Even if they sent a letter or a campaign of letters, they wouldn't even know whether the letters were being received or read unless the publishing house chose to respond. So, without that expectation of access, the drama usually stayed internal. Nowadays, with constant immediate feedback from creators and publishers, fans are ever more incentivized to act out to try to push an agenda, get attention, or just vent whatever is going on in their lives onto a face contractually obliged to be friendly to them.

sztupy

A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for the content of its AI search overviews. According to the court, previou

ayeforscotland

Let’s fucking go

made-in-manetheren

This is HUGE.

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.

TL;DR Google reeeeeally stepped in it this time.