“is This Character Good Or Bad” “is This Ship Unproblematic Or Not” “is This Arc Deserving

the problem with autism is sometimes you want to do something (brave) but you need someone to gently walk you through each step so you know what will happen. and people don’t like doing that

ed zitron, a tech beat reporter, wrote an article about a recent paper that came out from goldman-sachs calling AI, in nicer terms, a grift. it is a really interesting article; hearing criticism from people who are not ignorant of the tech and have no reason to mince words is refreshing. it also brings up points and asks the right questions:

if AI is going to be a trillion dollar investment, what trillion dollar problem is it solving?

what does it mean when people say that AI will "get better"? what does that look like and how would it even be achieved? the article makes a point to debunk talking points about how all tech is misunderstood at first by pointing out that the tech it gets compared to the most, the internet and smartphones, were both created over the course of decades with roadmaps and clear goals. AI does not have this.

the american power grid straight up cannot handle the load required to run AI because it has not been meaningfully developed in decades. how are they going to overcome this hurdle (they aren't)?

people who are losing their jobs to this tech aren't being "replaced". they're just getting a taste of how little their managers care about their craft and how little they think of their consumer base. ai is not capable of replacing humans and there's no indication they ever will because...

all of these models use the same training data so now they're all giving the same wrong answers in the same voice. without massive and i mean EXPONENTIALLY MASSIVE troves of data to work with, they are pretty much as a standstill for any innovation they're imagining in their heads

Continuing on from here my personal take on writing romance is there are three essential components: care/affection, profound mutual understanding and intense mutual admiration.

If you have all three you have the bones for something not just functional but aspirational. If you have the first and second but not the third, you have something that may be more of a deep, strong friendship but I can understand and appreciate the romantic overtones. If you have the second and third but not the first that's classic archenemy-shipping. If you have the first and third but are struggling on the second you have the bones of a painful tragedy. If you only have one, then what you have is probably not a romance, and my real quarrel is with people who think you only need the first.

Top 8 WORST Books of 2024 + DNFS

sad reality of the fanfic-to-published work economy is that the weirdest people are willing to do it. that's why there's now hundreds of shitty no plot cishet hate-to-love enemies-to-lovers books that are ex reylo fanfic. and it's not even good. that's because the people who wrote book-quality steve/bucky and kirk/spock fic are too normal to think to themselves "i should get this porn published". they're too busy working in local government offices

“Where exactly do you put your hands on somebody who hurts everywhere?”

— Charles D’Ambrosio, The Dead Fish Museum: Stories

ok, the OTHER thing is that Tamsyn Muir's writing style is -- it's exactly everything I've ever wanted or loved. By turns insanely technical, rich, evocative, and also *deeply* irreverent. You have high level vocabulary and an obvious love for language and worldbuilding pressed right up against the memes and sex jokes. There's nothing better. and it's even better that it very much isn't one-note, that she has a strong understanding of character voice, which is *so* important in this story where souls are all possessing each other's bodies. I fell in love with Gideon and Harrow, but I was just as struck and pleased with Nona, so happy seeing the language pare down and simplify, as the tone of the story morphed perfectly to match Nona's own way of perceiving the world around her. what a writer

my honest reaction after reading htn

no matter how terrible my day is. i can always end my day in bed imagining fictional characters making out sloppy style and fucking raw. and that's beautiful. there's some good in this world mister frodo and it's worth fighting for