Cas

Only connect.

-E. M. Forster

It’s kind of wild that Google Docs and Word have slipped generative AI into their writing tools without much attention.

Sudowrite got pushback for using ChatGPT – but so does Microsoft Word. Microsoft invested… a lot of money in OpenAI, and rebranded GPT for Word as “Copilot.” (Tagline: Uplevel your writing journey!) Google launched Bard in March, and is currently testing AI in Google Docs, accessed by a button marked “Help Me Write.”

… How does AI “help” writers?

You can’t improve if you don’t write. Generative AI cuts corners, devalues craft and growth, and robs us of the pleasure of actually writing. What makes writing so satisfying is doing it, and (with perseverance, time, trial, and error) pulling it off.

… Is AI a good “copilot?”

My copilots are writers + friends. A 1AM brainstorm session / moral support chat with my beta makes my work (and life) richer. Community is integral to good work, and sharing stories helps us connect, human to human.

Not just going outside is hot, or the sun warms up everything it touches.

Things that aren't supposed to get warm, things that have never gotten warm regardless of how hot a summer was, are warm.

My toothpaste is warm.

My toothpaste, which is on a shelf that is not facing the the window, that is not getting direct heat from the sun, is warm. I have never had warm toothpaste in my mouth before. It is disgusting.

The table top, which is always if not cold at least not warm to the touch feels like the furniture has been standing in direct heat. It does not.

The handle to my bedroom door - all the way across from the window, nowhere near the sun - is warm. It's metal. It's supposed to always be cold to the first touch, because it's metal. Metal warms up when exposed to warmth for a longer time.

But I've seen this blog floating around claiming certain things about being able to "tell" which fics on AO3 have artificial metrics or not. And their example account of this problem has hit-to-view ratios that just... look like mine?? So I feel the need to say something lol.

As a general rule, there are too many factors involved in what counts as a "hit" on AO3, so any "accurate ratio" you think you should be getting is... probably hogwash. But I've heard numbers thrown around like ~10% of your hits become kudos (usually) and a supposed ~3% ratio is a "sign" that the work has had inflated views.

Nope.

~3% kudos-to-hits is a sign of concurrent viewership. If you are releasing multiple chapters of a work, and people subscribe to follow that work, and then you post another chapter of that work... they read that chapter. You get another hit. You do not get another kudos.

If I have 400 subscriptions (yippee!), and then I post another chapter... I'm gonna get something close to 400 more hits. NONE of those are going to convert to kudos. I mean, maybe Stephanie from Ontario is going to realize that she hasn't given the fic a kudos and click the button... but you get the idea. My "view-to-kudo" ratio or whatever the fuck is going to get a wider gap. That gap is going to stay wide until I've called the work "complete" and it may never "recover" to anything close to 10%. That's just how longer fiction goes.

Kudos, hits, etc. are terrible metrics of if a fic is doing well/is valued by its audience. I understand the desire to want to support real authors, but a witch hunt over which fic with 11,000 hits is real or not is going to hurt more people than it helps. This feels like em dash 2.0.

grace just has a lot of fox imagery and symbolism associated with him in the movie (on his cardigan, the keychain he has on the hail mary, a fox mask)

foxes typically symbolize things like adaptability and intelligence, but also cowardice and self-serving, as in many stories and folktales the fox only adapts and is cunning to save his own tail and typically is a coward with confidence only given to him by his ability to be smarter than others

fun fact too is that yellow can be associated with fear in the movie and i like to think its bc of the phrase “yellow-bellied coward” and the general meaning of fear that yellow is associated with

100000000 km of space can’t stop you from running into your college situationship