絶望な｜女

No friction, no flame; no struggle no progress

No sweat

How many times do we have to win

'Til you realise we have not lost yet?

I just want to catch spelling errors and accidental double spaces and repeated phrases and whenever I use the wrong too/to or affect/effect and shit. But no. They've shoved AI up the ass of every grammar checking software out there and now they all fucking suck and make the most random, obnoxious, nonsensical suggestions.

I get why people keep saying this (and other versions of it like "Use Adobe alternatives" and "Use Google product alternatives."). But here's the problem: I do not create in isolation. Even my own 100% personal projects are getting sent to other people whether it's editors or printers or beta readers and unless every single person in that train is using the same products, things can get wonky.

Libre Office and Word handle formatting differently on the back end, which can completely break documents if you move them back and forth between the two. So if I write in Libre Office but my beta readers are still using Word, when I send them a manuscript for review there's a good chance things won't look right and my beta reader will not actually be reviewing what I sent them.

:| :| :|

They are, I am certain, intentionally programmed that way because the user is supposed to see “errors” coming up every time they write anything and conclude that they Need the AI. That they CAN’T write without the AI. “Look how many things it fixed — I made so many mistakes — I never would have caught all this without the AI.” So they keep using it, because otherwise all their documents will be full of “errors” that they or their human proofreaders all “missed”.

I do a live “fuck Grammarly” demo near the beginning of each semester, where I give it a paragraph from a published work and point out all the mistakes it claims are there, very few if any of which are genuine mistakes of any kind. It also displays that “grammarly score”, which tends to be aggressively low, especially if the text is at all interesting or original — “let’s see what it thinks of some of the stuff you were assigned in high school English as examples of Great Works… ooh, Edgar Allan Poe gets a C, he should learn how to write.”

And, of course, any time you tell it to rewrite something, it can’t come back with “this is already good actually, you don’t need a subscription to Grammarly at all” — if given a text that is already perfectly fine, it will just randomly swap out various words for synonyms. Because it always has to Do Something. If the program makes no changes, you might decide you don’t need it. But if you’re not a confident writer, if Grammarly tells you this synonym is “better”, you’re likely to believe it.

by the way, just so everyone knows what not to do, shift+r reblogs a post instantly

“Camilla, we did it right, didn’t we?” Palamedes said, and now Nona knew he wasn’t speaking to anyone else in the universe. “We had something very nearly perfect…the perfect friendship, the perfect love. I cannot imagine reaching the end of this life and having any regrets, so long as I have been allowed to experience being your adept.”

Camilla: @skeleshancreative

Three for the gleam of a jewel, or a smile.

Naberius the Third is @gideoncav

Coronabeth Tridentarius is @skeleshancreative

Ianthe Tridentarius is @avomarquis

Learning about the history of the queer community does more than make you a better community member. It also just makes life seem less overwhelming. In a world where your feelings of powerlessness benefit the powerful, seeking historical precedent for being the underdog has worth.

Learning the stories of queer anti-fascists making zines to scare off Nazis is fun (Claude Cahun). Exploring the history of a radical newspaper that somehow turned into a cultural touchstone is a drama-filled journey and often so funny (The Village Voice). Reading queer peoples' diaries is generally a wild ride (Vaslav Nijinsky).

The reason so many people are drawn to these stories is not just because they are morally important, it's because they capture attention. They are interesting, and weird, and sometimes hilarious.

Queer history is important, of course. But it's also pleasurable, and understanding that is often the best motivation to start learning. As someone who is constantly researching this subject, the self-pitying cries of "but no one taught us this!" is getting a bit old.

ITS BAD FOR THEM

FEED THEM FROZEN PEAS