Are the stagehands of a doll theatre.. Also...? Much to consider

It/Her TME Demigirl / In my 20s / Call me Lilac I post whatever, but be aware of mature and sometimes dark themes and whatnot. Characters whose actions are to be replicated by no one. I like both making and consuming stories that explore terrible themes - and I sometimes reblog a post about the Sex. I also make art! Maybe check that out.

[suzdoinco]

something i just finished

[babyfoxcollectionthings]

[zitasaurusrex]

unrestrained summer fun

[calmdowncalmdown]

[tlirsgender]

Maybe one day we can stop moralizing the concept of privilege & everyone will get normaler about being told they have relative privilege over other people. Like literally everyone everywhere in some way. It's fine. Being aware of it can't hurt you

[tlirsgender]

There's such an endless chorus of outraged "but what if I'm poor? What if I'm autistic" and it's like. Ok. You're not getting this at all let's just start over

[markovchaingang]

we must protect the sanctity of divorce

[windup-stagehand]

I keep meaning to line this, but I have other things I'm working on and a lack of energy to complete them with, so this one's getting posted as is.

[catcrumb]

( hi everyone! it's that time of year again... expect me back sometime in august! in the meantime, consider donating to direct relief for earthquake recovery in venezuala! )

[thenugking]

Howsabout 11, 23, 24, 25 & 65 for Get To Know Your Fic Writer? :o Apologies if this is too many lol

11 - Link your three favorite fics right now

oh man I uh. I should be reading fics rn. It's been a while.

While I have a long list of I'm sure excellent fics piling up that I need to read, at the moment:

I am currently enjoying @dandelion-bride's Inexplicably Barovion Themed Adventure and very excited for what I know is coming.

I am still enjoying going back to reread @20furiousbluebirds' You Were Loved, Always because!! Fanfiction of my fanfiction!!! Never getting over this! It is so wonderful to see someone writing my horrible little Kallian!!

It's been a while since I read it but Shadowfell's Dancing With Dragons remains my Favourite BG3 fic that I turn over in my brain regularly and I am still constantly recommending What If Orin Was Rescued From The Bhaal Cult As A Kid And Was Best Friends With Wyll series to everyone who will listen.

(Swapping the next two questions round for Reasons.)

24 - Worst writing advice anyone ever gave you?

I meannn there's the classic "never use Said" but I think for something uniquely awful that I hated on a very personal level, there was "stick to one POV/never alternate POV within a chapter." And "You should stick to one POV to leave the readers with Questions/provide an opportunity to plot twists." Like… firstly sometimes that isn't important to the story, but even if it is, writing from a character's POV doesn't mean you actually have to share everything that goes on in their head! You can still have secrets!

But yeah I saw this "advice" around the time I was finishing writing Not A Place Of Honour, a fic about the fucked up relationships between four different people that simply could not have existed if it had only had one POV and was just like. what the fuck. what the fuckkk.

23 - Best writing advice for other writers?

My writing advice is that writing advice is so often contextual. Like, the above horrible "stick to one POV" feels like it originated as fairly sensible, "don't head hop without a reason," advice. Inexperienced writers can sometimes slip between POVs unintentionally and it can feel messy but that doesn't mean you have to go entirely the other way!!

Your writing should serve the story. That could mean that maybe you do stick to one limited POV character. It could mean you swap between a few. It could mean you switch constantly between the thoughts of every character. It could mean your POV is a third person narrator with very strong Opinions on what the characters are doing. It could be first person or second person or third person.

Ignore anyone who tells you a certain way of writing is always Wrong.

25 - What fic do you wish you got more of a response on?

I meannn all of them. There is no greater joy than Nice Fic Comments and after spending weeks or months pouring my soul into something it's sad that posting tends to feel like yelling into the void and getting no answer.

Nothing Valued Is Here has definitely been a big struggle with getting a lot less interaction than Not A Place of Honour (while also being a more difficult write because it's entirely Orin POV) and only getting sparse comments from people I am already friends with and maybe feel obligated to say something. I know a lot of it is just that a lot of people have moved onto newer fandoms than BG3 by now but there's a definite feeling that people care less about this one, which is sad. I miss the "hey what the FUCK" of the early days.

65 - Tell us about what you’re most looking forward to writing – in your current project, or a future project

Orin and Minthara talking about their families, and in particular their mothers in Nothing Valued Is Here, and the way this is going to lead to Orin [SPOILERS] and then Minthara [REDACTED]. I've been planning this for a longggg time.

[beaft]

common advice for social anxiety is to tell yourself "people aren't going to think less of you just because you said something a bit daft" but the thing is. sometimes they will. and you just have to learn to be cool with that and to treat it as a dnd random encounter rather than letting it ruin your whole day

[beaft]

recent example. lady at my careers appointment had a post-it with her name on it stuck to the monitor, so i introduced myself by saying "hello, i'm eliot! you must be [name], it's nice to meet you!" and she stared at me as if i was the stupidest person alive and said icily, "yeah, i'm [name]. congratulations, you can read."

in bygone times this would have reduced me to a sort of quivering blancmange. thankfully i am now in a place where i was able to pull back, calmly evaluate this interaction, and say to myself "this woman should probably not be working in a customer-facing job"

[beaft]

important additions!!!!

[vaspider]

Sometimes learning "wow, that person is a DICK" is the best thing for your social anxiety.

[problemnyatic]

the most valueable skill a white leftist can ever learn is how to take an L with grace.

[problemnyatic]

You gotta be able to take an L if your moral and ethical belief systems are to be capable of guiding you. Otherwise you just have an idealized self where you get really mad and scared when anyone points out it isn't actually you. How the fuck are you gonna walk the walk if you can't handle being told when you are not, in fact, actually walking it

[problemnyatic]

you cannot just socially transition into being a good person you are going to have to settle for being a messy human being who has to try and fail and keep trying to get better like everyone else. yeah even when it's embarassing and sucks for you a lot.

[livseses]

Ya gotta learn to earnestly and honestly say "Oh shit, my bad."

[tartrazeen]

And to then end the sentence there, not launch into a paragraph of explanation or panicked super-apology.

[ellasgarden1]

random lain

[gaydiation-poisoning]

It would kill half the 19-25 year olds online to realize "I can't help it I have trauma" is one of THE quintessential abuser excuses

[gaydiation-poisoning]

Like there is a difference between "My trauma creates impulsive urges and has changed my instinctive reactions to be irrational, I need to relearn shit." vs "I'm traumatized so I Can't Help It and you're not allowed to expect better of me"

[windup-stagehand]

I never imagined that reaching the final part of our journey would feel this difficult.

Thanks to the kindness of so many people, we've reached £2,576. Every donation brought us one step closer to hope, and we will always be grateful for that. 🤍

Today, our new goal is £3,000. We still have £424 to go, but lately our campaign has become very quiet. Days pass without any support, and it's heartbreaking to watch our progress come to a standstill while our needs remain the same. 💔

Our lives don't pause when donations do. We are still trying to rebuild after losing so much. I'm still fighting to continue my education, and my family is still doing everything they can to get through each day with dignity and hope.

If you've been following our story, please don't let this be where our journey stops.

Even the smallest donation can bring us closer to our goal, and if you're unable to give, sharing our campaign could help us reach someone who can. 🙏

Thank you for reading, for caring, and for reminding us that we haven't been forgotten. Your kindness gives us the strength to keep believing that better days are still possible. 🤍

https://gofund.me/5cdd060e

I do believe this was verified by bilal-sala7 ! If it's at all possible to donate then every little will help Mo'men and his family with housing, medical treatments, education and even just with daily living.

[redstonedust]

for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.

[ralfmaximus]

Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

I fucking hate it.

[bakedbananners]

this clarifies nothing

[melodyburst]

NOOOOOO! The Polyhedron! That's where I work!

[mousidy]

so can I just say there's a reason I wasn't going on and on for paragraphs underneath transfem voices project submissions about how "monstrous" and "demonic" submitters' abusers were, or how their experiences were "horror movie material"

first of all, TVP was not about centering my feelings about transfems' abusers or what they went through. going on about how disgusted and enraged I felt underneath submissions would have actively detracted from the voices I was trying to center. TVP was not about my voice

second, abusers are not a subhuman class of people. they are often very ordinary people that exist in our lives. even my worst abuser did not abuse me because he was a subhuman monster or a demon. he abused me because he had systemic power over me, and that power went unchecked by any of the people or systems that could have protected me. he was thoroughly, mundanely human

the world is full of TME people who abuse transfems in ways that range from minor to major. I do not believe this means the world is full of subhuman monsters and demons. I believe that it means there are systems and norms that facilitate and enable this abuse. this isn't "rot," it's systems working as designed

[mousidy]