Are the stagehands of a doll theatre.. Also...? Much to consider

11 - Link your three favorite fics right now

oh man I uh. I should be reading fics rn. It's been a while.

While I have a long list of I'm sure excellent fics piling up that I need to read, at the moment:

I am currently enjoying @dandelion-bride's Inexplicably Barovion Themed Adventure and very excited for what I know is coming.

I am still enjoying going back to reread @20furiousbluebirds' You Were Loved, Always because!! Fanfiction of my fanfiction!!! Never getting over this! It is so wonderful to see someone writing my horrible little Kallian!!

It's been a while since I read it but Shadowfell's Dancing With Dragons remains my Favourite BG3 fic that I turn over in my brain regularly and I am still constantly recommending What If Orin Was Rescued From The Bhaal Cult As A Kid And Was Best Friends With Wyll series to everyone who will listen.

(Swapping the next two questions round for Reasons.)

24 - Worst writing advice anyone ever gave you?

I meannn there's the classic "never use Said" but I think for something uniquely awful that I hated on a very personal level, there was "stick to one POV/never alternate POV within a chapter." And "You should stick to one POV to leave the readers with Questions/provide an opportunity to plot twists." Like… firstly sometimes that isn't important to the story, but even if it is, writing from a character's POV doesn't mean you actually have to share everything that goes on in their head! You can still have secrets!

But yeah I saw this "advice" around the time I was finishing writing Not A Place Of Honour, a fic about the fucked up relationships between four different people that simply could not have existed if it had only had one POV and was just like. what the fuck. what the fuckkk.

23 - Best writing advice for other writers?

My writing advice is that writing advice is so often contextual. Like, the above horrible "stick to one POV" feels like it originated as fairly sensible, "don't head hop without a reason," advice. Inexperienced writers can sometimes slip between POVs unintentionally and it can feel messy but that doesn't mean you have to go entirely the other way!!

Your writing should serve the story. That could mean that maybe you do stick to one limited POV character. It could mean you swap between a few. It could mean you switch constantly between the thoughts of every character. It could mean your POV is a third person narrator with very strong Opinions on what the characters are doing. It could be first person or second person or third person.

Ignore anyone who tells you a certain way of writing is always Wrong.

25 - What fic do you wish you got more of a response on?

I meannn all of them. There is no greater joy than Nice Fic Comments and after spending weeks or months pouring my soul into something it's sad that posting tends to feel like yelling into the void and getting no answer.

Nothing Valued Is Here has definitely been a big struggle with getting a lot less interaction than Not A Place of Honour (while also being a more difficult write because it's entirely Orin POV) and only getting sparse comments from people I am already friends with and maybe feel obligated to say something. I know a lot of it is just that a lot of people have moved onto newer fandoms than BG3 by now but there's a definite feeling that people care less about this one, which is sad. I miss the "hey what the FUCK" of the early days.

65 - Tell us about what you’re most looking forward to writing – in your current project, or a future project

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

first of all, TVP was not about centering my feelings about transfems' abusers or what they went through. going on about how disgusted and enraged I felt underneath submissions would have actively detracted from the voices I was trying to center. TVP was not about my voice

second, abusers are not a subhuman class of people. they are often very ordinary people that exist in our lives. even my worst abuser did not abuse me because he was a subhuman monster or a demon. he abused me because he had systemic power over me, and that power went unchecked by any of the people or systems that could have protected me. he was thoroughly, mundanely human

More Orins! This time mostly in the dark! My favourite act, but the absolute worst for taking photos in!

Act One