pearls-gone-wild

[pearls-gone-wild]

I read once in a fan forum, and have never forgotten, that the way he handled this situation has all the hallmarks of Lady Alys. No matter how difficult the circumstances, carry on because Things Must Be Done The Right Way, And With Style.

I highly doubt she intended her life lessons to be used thusly, but I like to think she'd have been proud of him.

it’s always a good time to remember that time Ivan Vorpatril got discreetly dosed with Cetagandan anti-viagra right before being “invited upstairs” by 2 beautiful noblewomen, so he improvised some bullshit about it being a matter of Male Vor Honor(TM) to get a woman off 3 times before he himself came, and proceeded to foreplay so well and so thoroughly that he successfully exhausted all of them to sleep and snuck out; and the next day started getting a flood of invites to “private parties” hosted by more noblewomen, including at least 1 who was married.

[pearls-gone-wild]

It's very Miles Vorkosigan that this party includes several empire-threatening secrets and it's not even going to be his worst one.

Cetaganda ch. 5: The Party

Party here we go!

I love scifi words! Tecnomed! Vueloliviano (lightflyer?)! Comus (comms)!

Miles' "but what if they're incompetent, i better just do it alone and never ask for help and handle 300 problems myself" attitude is hm. Oddly relatable.

Oh. Perfumes and drugs. Because nothing has ever gone wrong with perfumes and drugs in the Vorkosigan family before. My bets are now on an allergic reaction.

Miles sent up a short silent prayer to the guardian god of fools, lovers, and madmen

XDDDD Poor Ivan. Doesn't deserve this slander. But it's cool that Miles worries.

Oh, we're profiling suspects! This is really Detective Miles: the book. So, Lord X (or Lady X, Miles), is our suspect. It makes sense that even if Yenaro was actively trying to harm them he needed help to make the sculpture.

My main suspect rn is the Emperor but we'll see.

Me: Too much drink description. Is it poisoned? Maybe it's like in the Princess Bride where... Miles: Ah. Yes. This could easily be poisoned in this and that way. Me: Miles I adore you.

A mysterious girl! A ba! Rian Degtiar here we go!

Btw how does one pronounce Rian? I've been thinking "Ryan" but it might be "Ree-ann" as well.

Why did Rian know Miles was gonna be there though?

Oh??? So the Key was being taken somewhere.

"Pentarrápida"! New word!! Fast penta has been translated as penta-fast. Good enough.

Aunt Alys mention!

"OH" IS SUCH A FANFIC THING TO SAY.

WOW I LOVED THIS CHAPTER'S END, WITH RIAN'S DESCRIPTION!!

[pearls-gone-wild]

(claws out of the other side of the chasm, battle scarred and trauma-laden, waving about their diploma with the weary cry, "What do you mean this barely makes me any more employable?")

the voice of the devil

[pearls-gone-wild]

When I was in college, I got into the habit of stress-baking cookies, and because I was living in a dorm, this would bring in anyone within the olfactory radius who wanted cookies. That's a lot of people! It was like I'd discovered the magical spell of Summon Group Therapy.

Anyways, when you're not living in a dorm anymore, you have to go around with the cookies yourself, but that's ok, the summoning spells still work, just a little differently as you get into different stages of life.

[pearls-gone-wild]

Thank you for justifying my reading "Mythos" (Stephen Fry) right after "How the world made the west" (Josephine Quinn) right after The Wife App (Carolyn Macker) right after Strange Practice (Vivian Shaw) right after System Collapse (Martha Wells)-

Ok. Quite possibly I spent some insomnia putting everything on my library hold list.

"The problem is people don't read classics anymore"

No I think the problem is people don't read WIDELY. The ONLY ya and/or fantasy romance crowd is just as insufferable as the ONLY classics crowd or the ONLY litfic crowd or the ONLY nonfiction crowd and vice versa.

You gotta get some variety in there my guys

[pearls-gone-wild]

Oh, please, ONE Nac Mac Feegle in a shepherd's coat would win practically any fight.

Silly Fantasy Creature Poll

[pearls-gone-wild]

lol, folks,

what do you think parenting is but following around a goose

(or in my case, 3 geese)

and finding out where the fuck it ends up?

because you really never know

if you follow too close, it runs away

if you try to hold on to it, you'll get bitten and hissed at

and just when you've stopped paying attention, you'll turn around and discover

it's following you

and that's just so counter to all of its previous behavior

that you don't know whether to be pleased or freaked out

because you don't know where you're going either.

It's all the same thing, honestly.

Oh look someone drew a cartoon about me

[pearls-gone-wild]

reblogging so I can have this for the future

Dealing With Executive Dysfunction - A Masterpost

The “getting it done in an unconventional way” method.

The “it’s not cheating to do it the easy way” method.

The “fuck what you’re supposed to do” method.

The “get stuff done while you wait” method.

The “you don’t have to do everything at once” method.

The “it doesn’t have to be permanent to be helpful” method.

The “break the task into smaller steps” method.

The “treat yourself like a pet” method.

The “it doesn’t have to be all or nothing” method.

The “put on a persona” method.

The “act like you’re filming a tutorial” method.

The “you don’t have to do it perfectly” method.

The “wait for a trigger” method.

The “do it for your future self” method.

The “might as well” method.

The “when self discipline doesn’t cut it” method.

The “taking care of yourself to take care of your pet” method.

The “make it easy” method.

The “junebugging” method.

The “just show up” method.

The “accept when you need help” method.

The “make it into a game” method.

The “everything worth doing is worth doing poorly” method.

The “trick yourself” method.

The “break it into even smaller steps” method.

The “let go of should” method.

The “your body is an animal you have to take care of” method.

The “fork theory” method.

The “effectivity over aesthetics” method.

[pearls-gone-wild]

Obligatory plug for Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead where there exists an entire arbitration system for managing the division of a dead god's corporate corpse to their various spiritual creditors. It's amazing and you should read it.

i would cannibalize god's rotting corpse. if the opportunity arose

[pearls-gone-wild]

Follow-up: I just attended a New Year's party because the theme was "the 80s of whatever century you choose, be it 1580s, 1980s or 2180s" and then I realized, "WAIT, YOU MADE YOURSELF AN 1880s BUSTLE GOWN, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR".

(They were also opening an 1884 time capsule which was intended to be opened in 1984, only it got lost in the back of some organizational closet and was only found in 2024. Take note, time capsule warriors.)

So that's how I, a 40-something suburbanite, came back from a NYE dinner timed to suit the kids in our social circle, put on an 1880s bustle gown ensemble in 10 minutes, just so I could book it to this party to be the rando in period dress. I arrived exactly in the middle of the time capsule opening, looking like the Ghost Of New Year's Eve Wait That's My Watch Factory Manual. My friend who'd invited me was playing sheet music from the capsule and were relieved to find, amidst the period standards that no one had ever heard of, a piano arrangement of Auld Lang Syne.

Anyways, moral of the story: if you craft it, sometimes you will be provided with exactly the right moment to bring it out again.

Fellow ADHD multicrafters, do you guys also get the urge to host elaborately themed parties just so you can do food and/or decor for them? Because I definitely do. Like, I don't really want people in my house but I DO want to make a halloween-themed grazing board with matching cocktails, you know? I think I'm just going to have a couple friends over and warn them that I'm going to go catastrophically overboard for no reason, just to vent the creative fury.

[pearls-gone-wild]

Reblogging for self and spawn

WEBSITES FOR WRITERS {masterpost}

E.A. Deverell - FREE worksheets (characters, world building, narrator, etc.) and paid courses;

Hiveword - Helps to research any topic to write about (has other resources, too);

BetaBooks - Share your draft with your beta reader (can be more than one), and see where they stopped reading, their comments, etc.;

Charlotte Dillon - Research links;

Writing realistic injuries - The title is pretty self-explanatory: while writing about an injury, take a look at this useful website;

One Stop for Writers - You guys... this website has literally everything we need: a) Description thesaurus collection, b) Character builder, c) Story maps, d) Scene maps & timelines, e) World building surveys, f) Worksheets, f) Tutorials, and much more! Although it has a paid plan ($90/year | $50/6 months | $9/month), you can still get a 2-week FREE trial;

One Stop for Writers Roadmap - It has many tips for you, divided into three different topics: a) How to plan a story, b) How to write a story, c) How to revise a story. The best thing about this? It's FREE!

Story Structure Database - The Story Structure Database is an archive of books and movies, recording all their major plot points;

National Centre for Writing - FREE worksheets and writing courses. Has also paid courses;

Penguin Random House - Has some writing contests and great opportunities;

Crime Reads - Get inspired before writing a crime scene;

The Creative Academy for Writers - "Writers helping writers along every step of the path to publication." It's FREE and has ZOOM writing rooms;

Reedsy - "A trusted place to learn how to successfully publish your book" It has many tips, and tools (generators), contests, prompts lists, etc. FREE;

QueryTracker - Find agents for your books (personally, I've never used this before, but I thought I should feature it here);

Pacemaker - Track your goals (example: Write 50K words - then, everytime you write, you track the number of the words, and it will make a graphic for you with your progress). It's FREE but has a paid plan;

Save the Cat! - The blog of the most known storytelling method. You can find posts, sheets, a software (student discount - 70%), and other things;

I hope this is helpful for you!

(Also, check my gumroad store if you want to!)

[pearls-gone-wild]

Reblogging to remind all unemployed biology PhDs out there that there are paths that aren't academia. No PhD advisor has ever told you about Dexter Holland, so I will.

Still feels weird that the same band made "You're Gonna Go Far, Kid" and "Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)"

[pearls-gone-wild]

(quietly picks up her favorite biography of Elizabeth I of England in preparation for playing this game)

I love this game.

[pearls-gone-wild]

Counterpoint: my kids whenever I serve them a leafy green vegetable

sam sifton, from the nyt “what to cook right now” newsletter

[pearls-gone-wild]

At a conference back in 2015, I heard about an ML model that was trained to tell the difference between images of wolves and huskies. The model had a persistent 10% error rate because it was tagging every picture as "wolf" if there was snow in the background.

We should always ask ourselves these questions:

What features are your algorithms using to make judgements?

What features is your brain using to make judgements?

They trained an AI model on a widely used knee osteoarthritis dataset to see if it would be able to make nonsensical predictions - whether the patient ate refried beans, or drank beer. It did, in part by somehow figuring out where the x-ray was taken.

The authors point out that AI models base their predictions on sneaky shortcut effects all the time; they're just easier to identify when the conclusions (beer drinking) are clearly spurious.

Algorithmic shortcutting is tough to avoid. Sometimes it's based on something easy to identify - like rulers in images of skin cancer, or sicker patients getting their chest x-rays while lying down.

But as they found here, often it's a subtle mix of non-obvious correlations. They eliminated as many differences between x-ray machines at different sites as they could find, and the model could still tell where the x-ray was taken - and whether the patient drank beer.

AI models are not approaching the problem like a human scientist would - they'll latch onto all sorts of unintended information in an effort to make their predictions.

This is one reason AI models often end up amplifying the racism and gender discrimination in their training data.

When I wrote a book on AI in 2019, it focused on AIs making sneaky shortcuts.

Aside from the vintage generative text (Pumpkin Trash Break ice cream, anyone?), the algorithmic shortcutting is still completely recognizable today.

[pearls-gone-wild]

Reblogging to spread the idea that we keep pets but just for the comfort and the companionship and the no judgement as long as dinner arrives on time, but to nurture and care for a creature so it never has to sell any part of itself to continue existing.

[pearls-gone-wild]