Be The Gay You Want to See in the World

 "Pebbling" - a courtship ritual where Gentoo penguins pick up pebbles in their beaks and bring them to their prospective mates. Hospitalized children painted the pebbles for the penguins at the Edinburgh, Scotland, Zoo. Here they are picking their favorites.

He's got his, and is rushing off to present it to his mate. This is too cute.

"How do I motivate myself to write through the boring part of my story?"

"How do I make this boring scene not boring?"

Don't write it.

Don't write boring things just because you think the structure of the story demands it. I promise it doesn't need to be there.

If your characters need to have gone shopping for a later part of the story to make sense you can just have a sentence about how they went shopping and move on.

You are not obligated to write the boring parts. No matter what those parts are.

You are not obligated to make the parts of your story that you're not excited to write interesting somehow.

You can just write the fun and interesting parts and gloss over and summarize boring things.

I was a bit taken aback this week to find that there are some folks in the TBCBC who don't like the Doc Redfern reveal - because I think it's so integral to the story, for multiple reasons.

Out of the three twists, it's the one that's surprising.

Valancy's heart - I don't go generally go into a comedy/romance novel expecting the protagonist to die, and even if I did, there have been so many references to the improvement in Valancy's health since she left the oppressions of the house in Deerwood - readers may not know exactly how this is going to be resolved, but we're expecting it to be resolved.

Barney is John Foster - Could LMM have foreshadowed this any harder? By this point in the book, I feel like dream-Barney being hit on the head with a rolling pin. We've had Expected Revelation One, I'm bracing myself for Expected Revelation Two, when...

Doc Redfern is a real person, and is Barney's dad - I thought LMM was going to zig, and she zags! This is such a great twist. It's fully earned - Doc Redfern has been a prominent, recurring presence in the story so far - but it's been so deftly camouflaged as just a running gag of the world-building.

To be sure, there is the moment in which we learn that a) Valancy voluntarily purchased for Barney a liniment she herself had previously described as "Horrid, sticky stuff!" with "the vilest smell of any liniment I ever saw" (Why would you do that, Valancy? Were you seriously going to offer to rub it on the back of the husband you're deeply in love with, after years of having to do exactly that for Cousin Stickles? Urghhh no) and b) Barney hates Redfern's Liniment so much he actually speaks harshly to her for once. If you stop and think about it, that moment is so weird that it's clearly signposting something, but the momentum of the narrative at that point is all about the passing seasons bringing us to the end of Valancy's year, so it's easy to miss it.

It's a classic comedy trope.

The son or daughter rebelling against their parents/society by falling for someone in disguise - who ultimately is revealed to be exactly the kind of person of whom their parent/society would approve - is a classic trope, seen in everything from (IIRC) Roman New Comedy to Gidget. The beauty of the trope, in terms of appealing to a broad audience, is that it allows for portrayal of rebellion against social structures, while affirming (or at least not seriously threatening) those structures in the end.

Hence, the hilarity of the Stirlings having to wrap their heads around the fact that, as a direct result of flouting all the clan's rules and strictures and expectations, Valancy has managed to outdo them all in having "fulfilled the highest Stirling aspiration, “marrying money.”" Chef's kiss.

It introduces (very necessary) conflict.

Before Doc Redfern shows up, Valancy's plan was to go back to the island and explain Dr. Trent's mix-up to Barney. Barney's plan (mild spoiler) was to go back to the island and explain his epiphany to Valancy. The stage was set for them to have some great communication as a couple but as a climax to the story? Yawn.

By showing up at the absolute worst moment, with the worst emotional intelligence imaginable (finds out his son spent $15,000 on a necklace; is then genuinely perplexed to find out Barney is living with a woman; immediately tells his new daughter-in-law that her husband used to be deeply in love with someone else who is now available), Doc Redfern:

injects necessary conflict into the structure of the story's conclusion

heightens the stakes for Valancy in her fear that Barney will think she's tricked him into a relationship

propels Valancy into discovering the John Foster twist in such a way that it has (surprise!) a completely unexpected lack of impact on her John-Foster-fangirl self

lays the groundwork for the coming revelation of Barney's issues with his family (and his mirroring of Valancy in his damage from those)

It's a breath of fresh air.

Muskoka is lovely, and so are Barney and Valancy, but even the Club was getting bored with the last few chapters before the train showed up. Doc Redfern and Henry and the glorious purple car all bring the larger outside world crashing into the story with a vengeance, and not a moment too soon. They are all delightful and must be protected.

So...fancasting.

So, let's forget about budget when fancasting Doc Redfern. This is an actor who needs to be able to play "profoundly embarrassing" and also "deeply lovable." If I had a time machine, I might think about Miss Congeniality-era William Shatner, but since I come at this from a standpoint of "Who would be the Canadian actor I would cast today?" I'm going with Enrico Colantoni.

My new favorite, the blue glaze did and unexpected reaction and it looks so cool!

"People in the imperial core don't realize how much of the products in our lives are directly there because of colonialism. so they recreate that and then you have the weird implications of fantasy colonialism. You can say 'why does it matter for my fantasy Europe to have coffee' because you don't know why your real life Europe has coffee. And that these facts do actually have a death toll to them."

"The coffee example in particular its very interesting. Bc it'd be quite easy to justify having coffee in a fantasy story that's set in a tropical region. Or in a kingdom that trades with a tropical region or whatever. But then you realize that never happens because. sff writers NEVER set their stories in tropical weathers. I can count on one hand the fantasy worlds where there are prosperous kingdoms in tropical regions. And that opens the can of worms of: why is the default fantasy setting a temperate forest of pine and oak trees. Or a snowy mountainous landscape. While deserts and jungles are always dangerous exotic foreign lands."

“OpenAI is already shutting down ChatGPT Atlas, its browser that could do tasks for you on your behalf, less than a year after launching it.

Atlas was announced in October, but as part of its wave of news about ChatGPT Work today, the company confirmed that it will be “sunsetting” Atlas and is targeting an August 9th date for deprecation.”

“The shutdown follows OpenAI’s push to reduce “side quests” and catch up with Anthropic on productivity features.

As part of that push, in March, The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI planned to combine the ChatGPT app, Codex, and Atlas into a desktop “superapp” — ChatGPT Work appears to be the result of those efforts.”

“In a thread about the ChatGPT Work announcements, which includes an updated browser in the desktop ChatGPT app and a cloud browser for work mode,

OpenAI’s James Sun said that: “All these capabilities were built on what we learned from Atlas users who took a leap of faith on a new browser.

You taught us how agents can help make browsing and doing work on the open web better, and we are applying these learnings to these new products.”

In recent months, OpenAI has also shut down the video generation app Sora and paused plans for a ChatGPT “adult mode.””

Read something else

Bitch PRIVATELY to friends

Write your own take on the premise (strongly recommend!)

All of the above

So demons (concubi in this case) and humans are different species right?

Well since the most consensual definition of specie states that if two creatures are able to reproduce with each other giving rise to fertile offspring, then they are of the same species.

Then how can cambions be fertile?

How did The Merlin create the unbalanced cambions know as merlins?

Are cambions like Valec and Zoey fertile or was it just Merlin?

or 2) greater demons wear human bodies in the mortal plane so technically that's their form when they're reproducing(?)