Untitled

Chekov's printer requires percussive maintenance again due to a lack of yuri in it's vicinity.

"You can turn me down, but I'll still be here for you" - Lal showing just how well she understands Wine in so many ways in so few words.

To be fair, Proud was giving off "in love with Wine" signals (mostly by being over* protective in a misleading way) and Wine really didn't help not long before (saying too much and too little, but actually opening up to anyone is a big step). I wasn't sure about this pairing when it was introduced but it's definitely growing on me. *whether it's actually over protective given what else we learned in this episode is up to Wine, who seemed to either not notice or accept it even when it caused problems with Lal.

Wine is so sweet in this episode, gentle, caring, committing murder by audit. We were overdue for a reminder that Wine has claws.

And you know, for young writers, this has got to be so detrimental just from the perspective of opening your document and seeing a million corrections that, frankly, don't need to be there. If you're a young writer you're likely not going to have the background knowledge to know what is and isn't a good suggestion, you're just going to see a document that makes it look like you made every mistake possible so clearly you must be a terrible, stupid writer and should just give up.

What we would really need is a universal, open, standardized file format. PDF is the closest we got and it is godawful. Trying to impose a rules on a dog shit factory like MS to make their product 5% less fecal is not only not feasible, it is absurd to think it can do anything. Enshittification is Microsoft's entire business model so unless we stop vendor locking ourselves nothing is ever going to change. In academic writing (specifically, the case where people agree to use LaTeX) you aren't forced to use a garbage editor because there are countless editors that all produce the same files. But (La)TeX has terrible syntax and an extremely duct taped ecosystem. It can't replace word.

I'm guessing this is why Ellipsus chose to run with Markdown. Syntax is simple and quick to pick up, and is probably sufficient formatting for the majority of people doing creative writing (vs. the formatting complexity of academic or technical writing).

Markdown is great for a lot of things (I use it almost exclusively for my own writing, though I'm using Obsidian not Ellipsus because I prefer it for multiple reasons), but the great thing is I could switch with little effort. Unlike the doc/docx format where MS Word frequently isn't compatible even with itself. It doesn't do layout and typesetting though, and the extensions for graphs, footnotes, etc are complex. So it doesn't work well enough for much actual academic writing where specific formatting and layout is often required.

Also if you respond to a comment on an anonymous story that you wrote you appear as "Anonymous Creator" (presumably this is undone if you de-anonymise as it's changed the other way if you add a fic to an anonymous collection).

every few months i try to figure out how to build a website so that if tumblr ever gets nuked i dont lose all my writing and every few months i have to remind myself that i am a fish trying to climb a tree

lots of helpful suggestions in the comments, but you don't have to build your own website and doing so can be a chore you might not want to spend a lot of time on. (or you might). probably the most important thing is backups - do a tumblr export on as regular basis as you can remember. otherwise you really do lose all your writing if tumblr breaks or decides they don't like your account. you can crosspost (and there's some tools that help you do that) to a mastodon instance, or some other platform like dreamwidth or bluesky. mastodon has the advantage that you can self-host if you want to (but we're back in software/server maintenance land again - there's a reason cloud services are popular - someone else's computer means they are doing most of the work for you). you can use a site builder (wix, neocities, etc) or a paid service like ghost. if you are self hosting, that almost certainly means you are paying for at least two things anyway - a domain name, and a (virtual) server. the ability to host a server out of your closet are unfortunately very limited (and require more technical knowledge and/or paying your ISP for a business plan). so paying for a writing platform might be less expensive (in both time and currency).

There also needs to be a button for “this is the 5000th time I’ve read your fic because I’m having a horrible day and this is the only thing in the world that always brings me happiness.”

Support the folks posting work on comment-ebabled sites!

Honestly though, comments like that are gold to me. I love to write and a comment telling me that something I’ve done has improved someone’s life even in a small way? That’s impact. We live in societies that tell us over and over we have no value and nothing we do is ever good enough. So for someone to post a comment telling us that we improved their lives with our stories? That tells us our effort had value. We writers set out to improve the world in tiny ways, offering random acts of kindness in the form of a few minutes’ entertainment, and comments tell us we’ve achieved that little goal.

You can totally come back and leave a comment under that comment a year later! I’m glad to know you are still enjoying it and want to know if you’re doing okay.

There is no higher compliment than a re-read.  The longer the time that has passed, the higher it is.  It means a story resonated and stayed with someone. 

I still have the repeat-reader comment I received saved.

I may have to subscribe just to watch this (only the first episode is free to view)

i wish people would stop romanticizing not eating breakfast and not getting enough sleep and being dependent on coffee to function and always being in a bad mood and treating yourself poorly because that behavior is very unhealthy for you

[ID: A panel of the manga Delicious in Dungeon. The character Laios is gesturing with determination towards the reader and yelling “WE’VE BEEN EATING THREE SQUARE MEALS A DAY AND GETTING PLENTY OF SLEEP… AND THAT MAKES US MORE SERIOUS ABOUT THIS THAN YOU ARE!!” End ID]

Outdoor cat owners have no concept of basic ecology and it shows. "You're saying my kitty is EVIL for following its instincts???????" obviously not, you idiot, its an animal. I don't blame it because it is designed to hunt and doesn't understand human morality. The cat's human owner, though, should stop pretending that millions of people letting their pets hunt native species for fun WON'T make their ecossystem collapse. If you stop hearing birdsong in your neighborhood its your fault 👍.

Also cats are domestic animals????? Its your pet. Its your responsability to take care of it and it certainly doesn't look like you are doing this if your pet spends 90% of the day on the streets. Outside cats are in great risk for being ran over, stolen, beaten, poisoned, mauled or eaten by wild animals. A mildly bored cat is way better than a dead one and besides? Just offer your pet enrichment. You don't need to risk its life to keep it happy. You can even let it outside with supervision!! Look how many options we have. Insisting the only way to keep your cat happy is allowing it to wreck the environment and possibly die is not only fucking irresponsible, but also lazy and shows that you don't really care for the wildlife around you.

Thanks to @hope-and-hopepunk for tagging me in this story!

It’s so unfair i don’t get to see where evolution will go in 50 million years

crab

@daysleftofsecondterm

the other day a friend of a friend referred to "busting out of your abdomen like the alien from the Predator films" and I was completely caught off guard. like I guess that's - that's not wrong. the alien was. okay she was in the Predator films. well some of them. but like. she had her own. she's the alien from the Alien films. like. they have her name on them. he's not "King Kong from the Godzilla films"

there's also a reason it's not called an "abdomenburster" but one issue at a time

it's like when headlines refer to a famous woman via her husband. that's not "Predator's wife" she's got her own franchise!!