millisande

I get asks like this every now and then, and they always contain the problem.

Your writing is not shitty. It is not worthless.

Bloggers using these terms to describe early writing are often being either glib or depressing. Ignore their advice if it is making you feel bad.

Do you write for pleasure or for praise/accomplishment? If the latter, then you are simply in the practice stage. Practice is inherently worthwhile and no effort in this regard is a waste.

If you write for pleasure, then everything you create fulfills its purpose by being entertaining to create. A small child does not drop the crayon when it realizes its drawing will never be in the MoMA, does it? No, they don't care they just like drawing stuff. Adopt that mindset. Just write to get words on the page and ideas developed because you want to.

My advice for the insecure writer:

Stop re-reading your own work; you're a very biased critic right now and that in itself is holding you back.

All improvements are for later drafts. Trust me, you'll have whole new ideas by draft three so put off the nitpicking and focus.

Avoid outside opinions, writing advice, and blogs like mine for a while; we tend to inadvertently make you feel like you've done everything wrong and need to start over.

Stop starting over. Stop deleting your early drafts. Save all of it (this was the best advice I ever received).

Read and watch books and movies for motivation, and to analyze their strengths and weaknesses.

Do. Not. Compare. Yourself. To Other. Writers—your art is about you and what concerns you, other creators have nothing to do with it.

Remind yourself dumber people are doing it wrong confidently. Copy their confidence.

When you feel self-doubt creeping in again, tell it to take a hike, you've got a story to write.

Whatever you write, no matter the quality, take pride in being a writer at all. Lazy suckers just use AI.

There's nothing wrong with making a mess. How are you supposed to learn from constant perfection? Scratch out dumb sentences, leave afterthoughts in the margins, and side tangents in brackets. If the writing isn't going well, write ROUGH DRAFT in big letters at the top to remind yourself it's just a sketch of what you had in mind, not the finished product.

"...i’m worried it can never get better" I have great news for you! This fear will only be realized if you quit. Since you feel the pull to write there's clearly no point in quitting, your brain already knows writing is the answer. Ideas don't like to wait, and life will keep trying to interrupt you with bigger things, so there's really no time like the present. Go write!

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Please review my pinned Ask Policy before sending in your ask. Thank you.

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal, that’s how you get math packages and stuff but

2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but

3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So

4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

And since I'm waiting I decided to contribute an over-simplified analogy to explain this.

Analogy: You're in charge of running a kitchen. You and your staff create recipes and sell the meals you make. Inevitably though your recipes will call for things like "a stove" and "a blender" which you and your staff would not want to create from scratch.

Luckily "a stove" and "a blender" are things you can acquire and not try to make from scratch. You and your staff, as humans, are capable of recognizing real appliances, and getting them from real sources.

(There is actually an existing threat where "a stov" is a malicious thing, created by someone who knows "a stove" is in hot demand and is trying to take advantage of someone who might typo when ordering "a stove". There are some safe-guards in this space, but not 100% guarded.)

But now there's Cooking AI that can run your kitchen for you 🙂. It can write your recipes, order the necessities, and assemble the dish for you 🙃. Your boss fires you and your staff and just uses the Cooking AI.

The AI, in its infinite wisdom, starts writing recipes that call to be cooked on "a hotcob". It writes recipes that call for the ingredients to be assembled in "a produceslicer". These are not real things. And usually when the AI tries this, the process will error out because it fails at the process of acquiring the hotcob or the produceslicer.

But the kinds of people already profiting off supplying "a stov" take notice. AI likes to request these appliances frequently. The retailer offering "a stov" starts offering "a hotcob" and "a produceslicer". Now these AI-automated chefs succeed because their recipe order comes together!

"A hotcob" adds liquid mercury to all the dishes. "A produceslicer" hacks your wifi and steals all of the business's information. This is allowed because the AI chef welcomed these things in, signed for them, and hooked them up.

Oh, but had the artisan who made me created me instead – a worthy woman... ...I would say "how lucky am I"

Father in heaven who did miracles for our ancestors with fire and water... ...Who would then transform me from a man to woman? Were I only to have merited this being so graced by goodness...

What shall I say? why cry or be bitter? If my father in heaven has decreed upon me and has maimed me with an immutable deformity then I do not wish to remove it. the sorrow of the impossible is a human pain that nothing will cure and for which no comfort can be found. So, I will bear and suffer until I die and wither in the ground. Since I have learned from our tradition that we bless both, the good and the bitter I will bless in a voice hushed and weak: blessed are you [HaShem] who has not made me a woman.

When Harry Met Sally turns 36 — July 12, 2025

So the thing about When Harry Met Sally, which you probably know as "the movie with the orgasm scene" and possibly as "the ur-text of the modern romantic comedy" and which Nora Ephron herself came to be slightly annoyed about being primarily known for — it's a 1989 movie about people who graduated from the University of Chicago in 1977, which means it's a movie about a very specific cohort that a lot of people have forgotten existed, which is: people who were born around 1955, missed the actual sixties entirely (you were 13 in 1968, which is the wrong age to have done anything), graduated into the Carter economy, and spent their twenties in the disco-into-Reagan transition that nobody has a good name for because nobody wants to claim it — and the movie is completely about this, it's about what happens when you're old enough that the sexual revolution is just ambient background radiation you grew up in rather than something you fought for, so you get all the license and none of the politics, which means you get to be cynical about sex in a way that would have been unthinkable to someone ten years older and embarrassing to someone ten years younger.

Harry is a political consultant. Sally is a journalist. They are bourgeois in a very particular late-70s/early-80s upwardly-mobile way — the movie is set in New York and the New York is the New York of Ed Koch, not the New York of the 1970s fiscal crisis, it's the city on the way up, and their apartments look like it, their careers look like it, their whole problem is a rich-people problem which the movie never once acknowledges as such because in 1989 this was just what movie people looked like.

The Katz's scene is the thing everyone remembers and it's so heavily mythologized (the "I'll have what she's having" line is carved into the booth) that it obscures what the scene is actually doing, which is a pretty aggressive argument about heterosexual miscommunication delivered in a register — woman publicly simulating orgasm in a deli to prove a point to a man about whether he would know — that in 2025 would read as either radical-feminist didacticism or cringe, but in 1989 was mainstream romantic comedy, this was the Thanksgiving movie, this played in Peoria. The frankness is the artifact. Nobody would make that scene now. Not because it's offensive but because it's too arguing, it's too interested in making a structural point about sex to be allowed inside the genre anymore — the rom-com as it evolved through the 90s and early 2000s (which WHMS basically invented as a genre) systematically removed the sociological content and kept only the meet-cute-to-wedding scaffolding, which is why the Katz's scene feels weirdly unlike the movie it's from if you only know it from clips.

The other thing is that Ephron was writing Rob Reiner's love life — Reiner had just gotten divorced, was depressed, kept telling Ephron horrible things about being a single man in his late thirties in Manhattan — and Ephron took his material and a bunch of her own material and made it into a movie that's structurally a Woody Allen movie (split-screen phone calls, walking-and-talking in autumn Central Park, the Gershwin, Jesus Christ the Gershwin) but with the Allen persona surgically removed and replaced with what is essentially Rob Reiner's therapy, performed by Billy Crystal doing Rob Reiner. Think about that for a second. The film that launched modern romantic comedy is a Woody Allen cover version performed by a director who was working through his divorce via his female friend's screenplay. The whole thing is a hall of mirrors and the mirror at the center is Reiner's loneliness, filtered through Ephron's ear for how men and women actually talk to each other, filtered through Billy Crystal's delivery, which softens Reiner's native abrasiveness into something female audiences could tolerate as a romantic lead.

What the movie argues — and this is where it's dated in the most interesting way — is that men and women can't be friends because sex always gets in the way, and it argues this as if it's a controversial claim that requires 95 minutes of screen time to establish, which tells you how much ambient optimism about post-revolution gender relations was still in the water in 1989. The premise of the argument is that the sexual revolution was supposed to have solved the friendship question — if sex isn't a big deal anymore, why can't men and women just hang out? — and Harry's position is that it didn't solve it, it just made the unsolvability less discussable, and the movie ends by agreeing with him, which is a fairly dark conclusion dressed up in a New Year's Eve kiss. The structural pessimism about heterosexuality is the actual engine of what reads as a feel-good movie, which is probably why it aged better than its imitators — the 90s and 2000s rom-coms inherited the scaffolding and threw out the pessimism, and without the pessimism the form is just machinery.

Another thing: the movie is obsessed with telling the story of how a couple met — the old-couple interviews interspersed throughout are a genius structural device that accomplishes about four things at once (tonal punctuation, thematic underlining, sociological documentary texture, and a running argument that every couple's story sounds stupid when you tell it, which is the movie's actual thesis about itself) — and this device was specifically mining the Studs Terkel-era appetite for oral history, which was a 1970s cultural product that was mostly dead by 1989 but whose aesthetic Ephron grabbed on the way out. Nobody would shoot those interviews now. They'd feel too slow. They'd also feel too real — they have the texture of actual documentary because Reiner shot them with actual couples first and then had actors redo the best ones, which is why they feel weirdly authentic compared to everything around them.

The movie is thirty-six years old. The characters, if they existed, would now be seventy. Their children, if they had any, are older than the movie's main characters are. The sexual revolution they were in the tail-end of is now something that happened in the deep past. And the genre it founded has largely collapsed under the weight of its own conventions, which is maybe just what happens when you strip-mine a specific sociological moment for a genre template and then run the template for thirty years past the moment.

Hi! Are you cis in the UK and you'd like to support trans rights? Great!

How: buy a trans flag pin and wear it in public.

Why: chaff is an overwhelming amount of false positives so that when a missile gets close to the plane, it hits the chaff and not the plane.

In practice: the goal is to make it DIFFICULT to identify trans people to target with bathroom bans, and to create many FALSE POSITIVES for businesses.

Basically, you might get accused of being trans and kicked out, because of the badge. You say: I wear the badge because trans rights matter.

You follow up with a letter to the business saying you're fucking furious because some nosy dipshit just tried to play fucking genital police with you in the loos. You know lots of trans people (don't name any, if you do) and you wear the pin in support and you're disgusted at them for allowing this.

Blame the business for allowing the behaviour.

Businesses see that their cis customers are getting bothered over a badge and may clarify trans-inclusive policies, so they can kick out the bathroom botherers instead of nice cis allies.

You only need to buy and wear the badge, and you are protecting trans people. You can be genuinely heroic. Even one cis person doing this helps, and everyone you get to join in helps even more.

Non-affiliated badge link:

https://rainbowandco.uk/collections/trans-pride/products/transgender-pride-flag-badge

and then. My partner started it. And the SAME THING happened to him.