iwtv seasons one and two was like being tucked into bed and read a heartbreaking story by Louis du pointe du lac. The Vampire Lestat is like your blackout drunk uncle trying to tell you an anecdote at a family gathering

oozey mess
Today's Document
DEAR READER
h

occasionally subtle
Jules of Nature

shark vs the universe
i don't do bad sauce passes
wallacepolsom
almost home
YOU ARE THE REASON
todays bird

pixel skylines
Monterey Bay Aquarium
noise dept.

if i look back, i am lost

@theartofmadeline
Sweet Seals For You, Always
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

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@geniusorinsanity
iwtv seasons one and two was like being tucked into bed and read a heartbreaking story by Louis du pointe du lac. The Vampire Lestat is like your blackout drunk uncle trying to tell you an anecdote at a family gathering

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Sam Reid and Jacob Anderson Read Thirst Tweets
"Pride is not a party"
Yes the fuck it is, stop being a baby
Yes pride is a riot and a fight and yadda yadda yadda but you are not revolutionary for sucking the joy out of queerness. Sometimes, pride is a party. It is a celebration of the fact that we are here, we're queer, and we're not going anywhere. And that is just as important as throwing bricks and fighting cops, actually.
If your activism doesn't allow you to enjoy the fruits of your labors you will burn out babe. Go suck some dick. Hit on that lesbian. Get the faggy haircut!!! Dance, for the love of god.
#stop being dead it's pride and we're sharing your post again (via @lookninjas)
Any recommendations for fics where shane or ilya connect with queer culture/community? Loved that one where ilya bonds with Kip about poppers. Thanks!
Queer Culture/Pride🏳️🌈
🏒 PHaB | 1.1k
Ilya discovers that the Partners, Husbands, and Boyfriends of the queer hockey world have a secret group chat
🏒 Are you proud of yourself? | 1.6k
🔒 It's Pride Night for the Ottawa Centaurs and Shane realizes how far he came
🏒 How gay can you possibly be | 2.1k
Ilya is a bi-icon and Centaurs need that spelled out for them
🏒 Drag Brunch but make it emotional | 2.1k
Shane had always felt out of place within the queer community, and there were still many experiences he hadn't had since coming out. A brunch with drag queens should have been one of those fun experiences, but he didn't imagine it would be such an emotional one.
🏒 how to set up your gay ex for success | 2.1k
Rose's gay exes all have a group chat together and someone new is joining
🏒 Pride Night | 2.2k
Shane and Ilya have decided to finally come out and announce their relationship. The perfect opportunity presents itself when their teams play against each other during Pride Night
🏒 i'm beautiful in my way | 2.2k
shane and ilya get ready to attend their first pride parade with the help of fabian and ryan
🏒 Face to Face | 2.7k
Ilya, Shane, Alex and Henry find out they have quite a bit in common when they sit down for a discussion filmed for Queer News Network.
🏒 Mic'd up for the Pride game, what could go wrong? | 3.0k
Shane and Ilya are mic'd for the pride game.
🏒 Locker Room Talk | 3.0k
Ilya, Troy and Shane start a queer-friendly hockey podcast, that's a little more queer and hockey than it is friendly. Shane talks hockey, and Troy and Ilya bridge the gap between enlightening commentary and airing out the MLH's dirty laundry
🏒 get to know me close | 3.8k
Shane and Ilya attend Ottawa Pride, then go out to celebrate it
🏒 Baby's First Drag Show | 4.0k
After seeing Shane and Rose at the club in Montreal, Ilya spends the few days he has off before All-Star Weekend with his team in San Francisco. He didn't expect them to bring him to a drag brunch.
🏒 The Queerest Team in the NHL | 4.5k
Luca Haas comes out to the team. Thank goodness queer sherpas Ilya, Shane, and Troy are there to guide him. And the Centaurs are supportive, obviously. Maybe too supportive.
🏒 Ilya's Hot Girl Summer | 4.5k
“It says ‘Happy Pride Month,’” Ilya said. “What is wrong with that?”
🏒 No set timeline for queer joy | 4.6k
Somehow, Shane is convinced to go out clubbing with the "federation of gays in hockey". It somehow spirals into a night of tiny cocktail umbrellas and Ilya and Shane being obsessed with each other.
🏒 joining up the dots (with the freckles on your face) | 4.8k
Ilya convinces Shane to wear glitter freckles for their first Pride Month event
🏒 Glitter at A Pride Parade | 5.4k
The Ottawa Centaurs are invited to walk in the Ottawa Pride Parade in August after Shane and Ilya get back from their honeymoon. Shane has to navigate being a newly minted queer icon, learn to love in the spotlight, and finally feels accepted in a community he didn't realize that he was missing.
🏒 The Politics of Fleece | 5.8k
Shane Hollander never set out to be a queer icon, in fact he avoided it until now. Since marrying, Ilya and Shane had been enjoying their lives as an out queer couple, finally. They had become Canadian media and queer community darlings, enjoying the attention they never dreamed of in the closet. Their careers are protected because of it, they have become a moment. Upon the invitation of the Prime Minister, Shane Hollander decides it is time to make his first political appearance as a gay sports icon and Ilya knowing how politicians had abandoned queers in Russia, isn't happy about it.
🏒 NDA for a Beat Reporter | 5.8k
What if Shane and Ilya got to come out on their own terms, and Ilya had a good working relationship with a queer reporter he trusted?
🏒 Sonar Systems | 6.0k
Scott Hunter claims there are no other gay hockey players in the MLH, or at least none he's met. Ilya Rozanov is a smart dresser, a catty bitch, and a flirt. Kip Grady is starting to think maybe his boyfriend is a little gaydar-ically challenged, but he loves him anyway. He'll just have to show him the light, one $40 bet at a time
🏒 Trivia Night at the Kingfisher | 6.2k
Wyatt Hayes gets invited to Trivia Night at the Kingfisher and realizes his teammates have some blindspots when it comes to queer culture.
🏒 laugh until we think we’ll die, barefoot on a summer night | 6.3k
Shane and Ilya come out to all the queer hockey players at a BBQ.
🏒 the bisexual fairy godmother of the NHL | 6.9k
5 times Ilya played matchmaker to the queer guys in the league and showed them that he has insane gaydar and is extremely perceptive (and to maybe make sure they absolutely did not ask out his Shane, even when that wasn't happening, but you know Ilya he is so obsessed with Shane he assumes that everyone wants to date his man) +1 time they found out Rozanov wasn't just an ally
🏒 Capital Pride | 8.2k
Ilya buys too many flags, the team shows up in matching shirts, and Shane learns what it feels like to be proud
🏒 Show Up | 8.8k
Five times the Centaurs show up for Pride Night on the road, imperfect and unscripted. Plus one time they do it at home, deliberately and out loud.
🏒 They're Turning the [Hockey] Gay! | 9.1k
Shane Hollander didn't mean to become a gay icon, he meant to become a hockey player. The gay thing was just...incidental, or whatever. Who better to help him cope with this mixed bag of deeply complicated emotions and inadvertent responsibility while introducing Shane to the joyous parts of Queer Culture than a group chat with queer hockey players and the substantially better halves?
🏒 MLH’s Queer Conspiracy | 9.5k
after his father's funeral Ilya decides to gather all the queer hockey players for a mass coming out.
🏒 Hockey Camps but make them queer | 10.0k
Shane wants an earnest group chat to plan the Hockey Camps. Ilya has other ideas.
🏒 Louboutins and Liquor | 10.7k
All the queer hockey players and their partners attend New York Pride in the name of charity.
🏒 Hand in Hand, Let's Play with the Fire | 11.3k
Shane and Ilya have their first Centaurs Pride Night as a married couple. They're definitely not weird about it. (Bood disagrees)
🏒 New Queer Adventures for the First Husbands of Hockey | 11.3k
After getting married, Shane and Ilya share a lot of firsts as newlyweds and recently out queer men. This story features four opportunities for the couple (and sometimes their friends) to enjoy time to hang out with the happy couple, or are grateful to finally be able to be seen together.
🏒 I Laugh Like Me Again | 21.9k
Shane and Ilya do a sports podcast run by lesbians for members of the LGBTQ+ community, and the internet reacts
🏒 the hollander-rozanov annual gaycation | 26.6k
Five Times Shane and Ilya accidentally host the other out queer couples of the MHL (retired and active) + the one time they do it on purpose
🏒 Secret Gay Society | WIP
Ilya and Shane decide to do an anonymous group chat for queer hockey players
🏒 The Secret Society of Stick Handlers Series
🏒 The Recognition So Richly Deserved Series
Trans Hayden and supportive Hollanov
If you have any suggestions, feel free to add (:
Make sure to check out other fic rec request here -> Requested Lists
Similar to this trope -> Queer Ilya | Internalized Homophobia
alsoooo a big, big, big digital security lesson that you absolutely have to understand while making recommendations is that if your protocol is too complicated or inaccessible, even if it's somehow perfectly invulnerable, then people will start taking shortcuts that are way fucking worse.
ok, proton handed payment info over to swiss authorities, who then helped the fbi. if you start indiscriminately fearmongering about all proton services because of it (and implying that they can send more info than they have) then what are people switching to? people have to use email. not everyone is going to switch to tuta mail or whatever. but even if they did, they have paid plans too, which would likely be susceptible to the same issue. and if they decide, fuck it, there's no point, i'll just go back to using gmail instead, that puts everyone at way more risk than continuing to use protonmail.
it's also fine and good to say that people shouldn't be putting incriminating stuff in any emails. but we don't know that the fbi tracked them down through incriminating emails. they knew somehow that the account was associated with the stop cop city protestors, which could've very well been because their handle was stopcopcity at proton dot me or something. (i don't know if that was the case!) and then the payment information associated with that account was used to track someone down.
like the whole idea is that we have to break these cases down piece by piece and then come up with easily actionable recommendations that protect most people like 80-90% of the way, because that alone will make it much much harder for others to compromise them. and then there are various additional levels of precautions you can take based on the sensitivity & admin level of what you're working on. like. that's what digital security for orgs is.
and this is kind of a tangent but. you especially need to be prioritizing a risk mitigation approach because flock & ring cameras exist lmao. regardless of whether you use any consumer technologies at all, if you live in the US, these things are tagging your license plate & other visual attributes of your car. using facial recognition on drivers & passengers & pedestrians. aggregating all that data to track your movement like on a map. what are you going to do? not live in a city? not drive a car? not leave your house?
no. you have to be aware of what these security risks are and how to manage them depending on what actions you're taking.

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There's a pattern when it comes to witcher fics. Everyone's Eskel is game!Eskel. Everyone's Jaskier is Netflix!Jaskier. Geralt depends on whether the author actually likes Geralt as a character or has the hots for Henry Cavil. Lambert you can never tell until they mention his hair color. Aiden isn't in the show but everyone has a different version of him because he's a collective OC. Vesemir is just Vesemir.
The Power of Leverage
Hey, so many of you are familiar with fix-it fanfiction, the superglue which holds together the hearts canon has shattered, right? Well, I have a point to make. As of right now (1-28-2020), there are 6,659 fanfictions in the Leverage category on AO3. You know how many of those are fix-it fics? 25. A measly 0.38% of Leverage fanfiction is tagged as fix-it. For comparison, 2.20% of MCU fanfiction and 1.25% of Supernatural fanfiction are fix-its.
So yeah, Leverage is so amazing that hardly anything needs to be fixed. But we already knew that. No, it gets better. Of those 25 fix-it fanfictions, 16 (64%) of them are actually fix-its for OTHER fandoms. Leverage has been used in fix-its for White Collar, The Walking Dead, Coupling (UK), The Flash, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Kings, Person of Interest, Pacific Rim, Once Upon a Time, The Losers, Merlin, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the actual 2016 US election (yeah, that).
The point here, being, not only is Leverage’s own canon one of the most perfect to grace television, it is so brilliant that it can literally bust in and fix everyone else’s canon as well.
The bit about fixing other fandoms literally made me laugh out loud. Maybe more of a cackle. I love this show so much
Parker: *to the heartbroken or otherwise traumatised characters of other franchises* You are suffering under a tremendous weight. We provide… leverage.
Eliot busting in to fix your canon
I’m sorry I thought this was America
these are getting weird
Since people liked this post of Ilya proving to the internet why Shane is a good partner, let’s have a sequel of Shane doing similar
Ilya is in a depression low and the fact that his hockey persona is still “biggest asshole” no matter what he does has been getting to him even if he won’t admit it. So Shane posts a photo compilation titled “Every Reason Ilya Rozanov Is NHLs Biggest Asshole”
-“Bullies his teammates” with a picture of Ilya doing a celebratory fist pump next to Haas with his face in his hands, in front of a tv showing Ilya getting first in Mario Kart
-“Bullies his competitors” with a picture of Ilya laughing and Scott Hunter looking like he wants to set him on fire with his mind as he holds a birthday card labeled ‘Woah! You made it to 100!’
-“Bullies Hayden Pike” with a picture of Ilya and Jackie in the lake doing the Dirty Dancing lift while Hayden stands by with his hands on his hips and glaring
-“Stealing” with a group of pictures of Ilya wearing a Hollander 24 hoodie, wearing the Canadian Olympic fleece, and wearing one of Shane’s old jerseys
-“Dramatic” with a picture of Ilya in a feather boa at a karaoke night at a gay bar, eyes closed as he is clearly belting out some song
-“Takes jobs away from janitors” with a picture of Ilya in an arena post-game and picking up litter people dropped in the hallway
-“Bad role model to youth” with a picture of Ilya and a kid at one of the camps sticking their tongues out at each other
-“Child abuse” with a picture of Ilya playing paintball with a group of young boys
-“Animal abuse” with a picture of Ilya bathing an unhappy Anya in a kiddie pool in the backyard
-“Disturbing local wildlife” with a blurry picture of Ilya running away from a Canada goose
-“Encourages cavities” with a picture of Ilya letting trick or treaters take handfuls of candy from a bowl
-“Unfair sales tactics” with a picture of Ilya taking pictures with people at a Girl Scout cookie sale table, the table surrounded by a crowd of people waiting and holding cookie boxes
-“Trespassing” with a picture of Ilya shoveling a neighbors driveway
-“Fashion crimes” with a picture of Ilya in a pink baseball hat, a neon orange tank top, jorts, and neon green crocs
-“Not helpful at puzzles” with a picture of Ilya and David in front of a one thousand piece puzzle, both with their faces in their hands, pieces everywhere
-“Only falls asleep during movies when its his husbands turn to pick” with a selfie of Shane frowning at the camera and Ilya zonked out asleep on his chest

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Just watched Adam Conover (of Adam Ruins Everything) make such a solid point that I think we should spread far and wide. Yes, having AI write your emails is lazy, sure, but people love being lazy. We need to really emphasize that sending AI emails (or using AI responses on social media, or publishing AI flyers, or or or) is rude.
It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.
It's rude.
at some point in your life you will be boiling fruit, water, sugar, and lemon juice in a pot to make a syrup or jam. the instructions will tell you to simmer for a certain amt of time. your timer will go off and you will look at the pot and go, "hm, this doesn't look thick enough. maybe i'll let it go for another 10 minutes." this is the devil speaking. it's only so liquid right now because it is at boiling point. it will thicken when it cools down. learn from the follies of my youth and do not let this happen to you
at some point in your life you will be making a sauce or a stew in which you need to add cornstarch to thicken it. and you will prepare a slurry of starch in cold water and think "this looks like way too little starch to thicken this amount of liquid." this is the devil speaking. cornstarch instantly polymerizes at 95°C and if you add too much it will turn into an impossibly thick goop.
at some point in your life you will be making some sort of cream based dessert that requires gelatin to thicken it. and you will soak some gelatin sheets in water and think "this is too few gelatin sheets for this amount of cream." this is the devil speaking. it will thicken in the fridge and if you add too much you will end up with milk jelly
at some point in your life you will be baking cookies. you will take the sheet out after twelve minutes as the recipe instructs and the cookies will still be glistening and soft. "these don't seem cooked enough," you will think to yourself, "i should place them back into the oven until their edges are nice and golden." this is the devil talking. this is how you get dry, overdone cookies. the cookies will continue to bake on the warm sheet for several more minutes and then harden up after sitting on a rack for a while. trust the process. trust the process.
at some point in your life you will be adding a small pasta to a soup and you will think "that is not enough small pasta." this is the devil talking. the pasta will absorb the stock and expand. this is how you end up with a soup that is a solid mass of soggy ditalini.
At some point in your life you will be adding garlic to a dish and you will think "that is not enough garlic." These are angels speaking. They are correct. Add more garlic.
Hello!
I was wondering if you could recommend some fics that have Ilya bragging about his Jane to his team mates (Boston or Ottawa).
Thank you!
I tried to find fics close to what you asked but focused more on "Montreal Jane" being the topic and marks left on Ilya's body. I also sprinkled in a few where it's Shane showing off marks Ilya left on him (:
Montreal Jane
🏒 Ilya Rozanov's 2017 Dating Wrapped | 1.1k
Ilya drops a bunch of hints about his love life to his teammates. They do not pick up on them
🏒 Locker Room Talk | 1.7k
Shane is tired of having to sit and be quiet while his teammates brag about their sexcapades, so he decides to not be quiet anymore and tell them all about how great Boston Lily is in bed.
🏒 stop yelling at me, I saved the day | 2.1k
Cliff wouldn’t call himself the most observant person in the world, but it doesn’t take a genius to know something is wrong with Roz. He’s swinging from quiet and completely checked out to snapping at every little thing and back again. It started after the last Montreal game, Cliff is pretty sure. Jane From Montreal. This has something to do with her
🏒 You left your bite marks on my ribs | 2.6k
When the notoriously prudish Shane Hollander shows up to practice with some suspicious bruises, his teammates have something to say about it.
🏒 Save Us Jane, You’re Our Only Hope | 2.7k
Whatever his Captain did, Marleau takes it up on himself to tell Montreal Jane just how sorry Ilya is, and beg for forgiveness on his behalf. [Post tuna melt]
🏒 hall of fame jane | 2.7k
for years cliff marlow deals with jane. one unfortunate bluetooth connection reveals more
🏒 It had to be Jane | 2.8k
Roz was looking at his phone again. And he was blushing, even though he always loved to insist that Russians did not blush. It had to be Jane
🏒 a golden star, you think you're clever | 4.0k
Boston's got the Montreal Jane pattern basically locked down. The bite mark on Ilya's shoulder is new, though
🏒 Wow, This Montreal Girl Works You Up, Brother | 4.1k
5 times Cliff Marlow brought up Montreal Jane + the 1 time he finds out who that is
🏒 Do They Make a Greeting Card for This? | 4.3k
Five times Cliff learns something about Montreal Jane, and one time he learns her real name
🏒 match my freak | 4.8k
five times their teams find out they're freaks + one time they find out that they're freaks together
🏒 The Montreal Mystery: Cliff Marlow's Side of the Story | 5.7k
All the times Cliff Marlow almost clocks that his captain's secret hookup is Shane Hollander, and one time the trade to Ottawa makes it impossible to ignore.
🏒 The Montreal Girl | 5.8k
the Boston Bears’ perspective of Ilya and Shane’s “secret” relationship over the years
🏒 Lily and Jane Fall in Love | 6.6k
The five encounters with Shane that forced Ilya to lie (brag) to his teammates about his mysterious Montreal Girl, and the time they learned that the lies had never really mattered in the first place
🏒 The Jane from Montreal Mystery | 6.7k
Cliff has been suspecting that Roz moved to Ottawa for his Montreal girl for a while now. And tonight, they’re going to go out for drinks and he’s finally going to get some answers. Not even two overeager rookies are going to stop him. Except things don’t quite go as Cliff planned and Jane from Montreal is not what he expected
🏒 Maybe: Jane | 6.8k
The Boston Raiders tease Rozanov about his mystery long distance girlfriend, sending Jane stories and embarrassing pictures of Ilya. Shane and Ilya don’t think much of it - until Theo Michaud gets traded to from Boston to Montreal and updates his contact list.
🏒 the prayers we covered with dust | 7.5k
Ilya is really struggling with the fact that he wants to keep Shane forever and steal his clothes and leave dumb hickies on him and wake up to him in the morning. He's working on it
🏒 The Great Jane Debacle of 2016 | 7.7k
how the Raiders---in particular the long suffering Cliff Marleau, dealt with the Great Jane Debacle of 2016, told in a series of texts, posts, and Cliff being the best Bostonian friend Ilya could ask for
🏒 Jane from Montreal | 8.7k
How Cliff Marlow discovers Jane’s true identity.
🏒 I said nobody knows you | 8.7k
The Ottawa Centaurs have their own theories about what their captain gets up to in his free time. Wyatt Hayes organizes a bet about it. If only getting an answer out of Rozanov would be easy
🏒 it's all fun and games until cap is in his feels again | 10.4k
Cliff Marleau's seen his captain through some crazy times and some wild crash outs. This is a little foray into some of the group chats and nights out with the boys. Especially when Cap is in his feels about his Montreal Girl.
🏒 The Hickey | 12.6k
Three times Ilya can't resist marking what's his, and one time Shane decides to return the favor.
🏒 Jane is Ilya's Favourite Lay | 60.1k
In an attempt to socialise in this new country Ilya puts 'jane' down as his WAG to connect to the team, this has unforeseen consequences for himself.
🏒 Have you heard about Jane? | WIP
The Boston Raiders are desperate to find out who Montreal Jane is.
🏒 Ilya Rozanov is not fucking subtle | WIP
5 times Ilya Rozanov talks about his freak girl Jane and 1 time everybody realize Jane Hollander is an undercover freak
If you have any suggestions, feel free to add (:
Make sure to check out other fic rec request here -> Requested Lists
Dope Things To Watch This Pride Month (1/∞)
Sense8 scifi; psychic connection; polyamory; w/w; m/m; trans woman character
Eight strangers around the globe find themselves mentally connected to one another due to an unknown evolutionary leap.
Imagine being the gays at a pride event in 2004 living their lives when someone grabs the microphone and announces to the room that Ronald Reagan was pronounced dead. Can you even imagine the hype, the celebration, the pure elation
This is the Pride Month that It will happen. I feel it in my gay bones

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What is your opinion on using ChatGPT to help you write? I myself use it for moral boosters and when I'm doubting myself and ask it if something makes sense, nothing more as I'd never want a word of my novel to not be my own. But I've seen some hate online recently from writers saying that anyone who uses it at all isn't a writer? Which does make me awfully sad
-
It's not hate – we're scared and frustrated. Not just for ourselves, because AI is a genuine threat to our livelihoods, but also for the next generation of writers, like you. It's going to be a lot harder to get discovered or published with AI-generated content flooding the Internet and the book market.
Earlier this year, it was revealed that Meta trained Llama 3 on a massive body of pirated work. You can read more about it here. Meta employees knew this was morally wrong, but they did it anyway, because (1) they didn't want to pay anyone for the use of copyrighted work, and (2) they knew they could get away with it, and they have. They took our stories, born of real human experiences, and used them to feed something that's designed to be able to replace us. There are other reasons writers may be anti-AI, like the impact on the environment, but hopefully that gives you some context for why writers, specifically, are reacting to this so strongly.
You've said you wouldn't use ChatGPT to write your novel, which is great to hear. If you did, I would tell you that you weren't, in my opinion, a writer – just as I would never claim to be an artist if I used ChatGPT to create images, or a musician if I used it to generate a song. But I would also gently question why you feel like you need it to give you morale boosters or tell you if something makes sense. ChatGPT is not a human reader; unless you specifically instruct it not to flatter you, it will say what you want to hear. It isn't reacting to you, or to your story, with a human gut or a human heart. To me, any praise or encouragement it offers is empty. There's nobody and nothing behind it.
As for asking it to help you work out if something makes sense: I really do understand the temptation. I'm chronically ill, so I write at a slower pace than a lot of my colleagues, and it might help me churn out books faster if I asked ChatGPT to help me unpick a knot in the narrative, or fix a plot hole. But I don't want to surrender the ability to think and problem-solve for myself, and I would caution you against doing that – not just for the sake of your writing, but for everyday life. In this era of disinformation and propaganda, our ability to think, interrogate and analyse the world around us is more important than ever.
I can't stop you from using AI. But ask yourself: what would you have done before ChatGPT? Could you have figured out for yourself if something about your story makes sense? I think you definitely could have. It might have taken a bit longer, but you would have worked it out. I would encourage you to hold on to that ability. Cherish and nurture it. Rather than relying on artificial intelligence, trust your own.
All of this but I also want to add: OR ASK A FRIEND. MAKE FRIENDS AND THEN ASK FOR HELP FROM A HUMAN BEING. We're all so fucking scared of each other that we're turning to the hallucination machine to feed our hunger for connection, and ChatGPT can only give you a version of that which is utterly empty calories. It's like eating grass in a famine. Yeah, it'll fill your stomach so you stop hurting with hunger, but it won't nourish you, and it'll just make you sicker and you'll starve faster because your body will have to expend energy to try and fail to digest it.
Talk to other writers. Make friends. It's not rocket science, it's what a human being is wired to do. Just be kind and friendly and interested in other people and their writing, and they'll be interested in you and yours. And then if you can't figure it out, ASK FOR HELP. There is NOTHING wrong with asking for help. Asking for help is, in fact, a beautiful thing that will bring you closer together with a new friend. That's what you're sacrificing when you turn to ChatGPT for it -- you're losing out on the possibility of making a really profound, lasting, potentially lifetime friendship with another human being. You're missing out on something sacred and beautiful because you're impatient and scared and insecure.
Insecurity doesn't just vanish automatically. You have to file it down gradually over time, like filing your nails or sanding a piece of wood butter-smooth. You can do it. It is WORTH doing. It just takes some elbow grease.
Don't ask ChatGPT. Ask your new acquaintance, the one who you're like "ooh i don't know if we're good enough friends yet for me to ask for help..." DO IT. YOU ARE. DO IT. Experience shared humanity together! Open yourself to the possibility of connection! If you can't handle the small rejection of "ooh sorry, I can't, I'm at the grocery store right now and I've got errands the rest of the day," then you are ABSOLUTELY not cut out to have any kind of a writing career with bigger rejections than that. Build your muscles while you can, learn some resilience so that when you Make It as a writer, you're strong enough to survive the experience without being utterly annihilated.
i agree so much about making your blorbos pathetic but i do fear that many take this to mean 'make them more traditionally feminine/submissive' which genuinely hurts my soul. make your blorbos pathetic in interesting character-oriented ways. understand their neuroses and turn the dials up to eleven. juxtapose the parts of life they handle extremely well with the parts of their lives that make them eat shit. make them angry. make them cold. make them pave their own way to hell while building walls preventing them from seeing any other way. please i'm begging you no more pathetic as an euphemism for bottoming im gonna mclose it.