Crying about elves.

I hate when king arthur has all these fussy little steps in the instructions and you're like "no way do these fussy little steps matter" but you try it and they do. they matter so much.

I thought you meant Camelot quests and I was like "that's fair, 'never pick a four leaf clover on the last Wednesday of the month' IS a fussy little step that shouldn't matter" but then I was like "wait isn't that also a flour company"

nooo I am not a beleaguered knight of the round table I am making elaborate focaccia 😭

That's because this is Silmarillion

If I may be lairy on main, I have just discovered that someone from my workshop group has almost certainly (I say this because perhaps - perhaps! - it is possible to write with the exact cadence, vocabulary and structure as ChatGPT output, even if your day job is literally working for an AI 'outreach' and 'equity' company!) been feeding people's work into AI to generate her 'feedback', and lads, I'm trying to be cool about this and approach it correctly by informing the tutor and letting them handle it, but I am, to put it mildly, somewhat fucking irked. Not only does it completely go against the entire ethos of the group, which is to workshop other people's stuff and then have them workshop yours in a reciprocal, safe space, and not only is the 'feedback' literally just a third person summary of the piece under a nonsensical collection of unrelated headings and bullet points with nothing actionable, whereas I wrote her a solid 1,000 words of genuine, fully engaged feedback, but more importantly, none of us consented to having our works in progress fed through the plagiarism machine. It's just like... fab, amazing, thanks babe, much appreciated, and also fuuuuuuuuck.

I'm going to lose my mind, because at the start of the session, this person admitted that she completely forgot to read someone's submission this week, but then miraculously she managed to read all 3,000 words of it in our 5 minute break, and had produced an entire page of 'notes' which she proceeded to read from her screen, including gems like 'the descriptive prose focuses on the granularity of identity'

I run a workshop. There are quite a few older folks in it. they have no understanding of AI, but sadly, that means when they get a cold email out of nowhere from an agent who 'happened to get a copy of your novel from a good friend', or very long review from a new reader who 'heard about the hottest new manuscript from someone in the industry' that looks just like this, they cannot clock it as AI. One of these gentlemen got conned into sending the full text of his latest novel +$5000 to an 'agent' who wrote the most milquetoast, bland feedback to effuse their love of his book and wanted to publish it. I wrote them a very long guide for how to clock AI (that is part of my day job), but the bottommost rule was, "SEND IT TO ME BEFORE YOU SEND THEM ANY MONEY FOR THE LOVE OF GOD." The thing that really bothers me is that these folks in my workshop are very intelligent people, but they are so eager for positive feedback, they're willing to suspend their disbelief enough to get conned. They put a lot of hard work into some incredible and moving books, but then are willing to settle for comments like, "the use of this [surface-level metaphor] shows the author's commitment to poetic language." As if that means anything at all. As I tell them: your writing deserves better!

Getting “you’re in a car with a beautiful boy” privileged revoked by the author himself is unprecedented. How bad do you have to piss off Richard Siken to get Tumblr’s favorite gay quote put up on a shelf like that?

I bring sort of a 'peasants of the past were not as debased,uneducated and dirty as a lot of pesudo-medieval fiction makes them out to be but this new wave of attempting to sweep the very real indentured servitude, corporal ownership, poverty and lack of basic human rights under the rug isn't achieving what you think it's achieving' vibe to the party that people don't really like

I see a lot of nobles out here who think "Well I have a 10,000 square foot castle, surely that's enough space for a knight." WRONG. Knights are WORKING BREEDS, they need to go on regular quests to prove their fealty and come home horribly wounded. I have seen SO MANY adopted knights DESPONDENT because their liege keeps them cooped up in a castle and won't let them go on quests. If you want an armored warrior who will be happy in your castle you need to get a castellan. They're closely related to the knight breed but adapted to the castle environment.

*writing this down* amazing