#Fake It Until You Make it

[kombi-amarela]

today it's gonna be a good day and everything will work out amazing!!!!!!!!!!!

[grabby-smitten]

Shakespeare was found crying in a corner.

[authorsadiethatcher]

I’ve teased this previously, but now it’s here. The complete series of Fake It Until You Make It (all eight seasons, 115 episodes, and 261,000 words) is here. I decided to change up the cover and colors. Even though red was a major theme in the previous covers, the Thatcher College colors are blue and yellow, and I have to say blue looks pretty good on a bimbo. What do you think of this as a representation of Jessi?

I should mention that Fake It Until You Make It is no longer available on Kindle Vella. If you have purchased episodes previously, those episodes are still available to you (I checked on my own device). I also intent to have my friend record the series as an audiobook, but it will be a long process, so I don’t have a time frame for that yet.

Fake It Until You Make It is the longest single narrative story I have ever written. You will also notice the pricing falls outside my usual pricing structure for my books, but you will still get a significant discount over buying the seasons individually. And the cheapest way to get it now is to subscribe to my Ream. All the episodes were just added there today.

Fake It Until You Make It: The Complete Series is available from Amazon, Smashwords, Google Play, and Ream (Advanced Bimbo tier). It’s also available in a really thick paperback.

Jessica is tired of being a nerdy wallflower at college. Returning for her second year she vows to live her life differently. She vows to be one of the popular women. Her journey takes her places she never would have imagined, but her path is set. When Jessica is done, she will be a bimbo. There will be no turning back. This is the complete series of Fake It Until You Make It, featuring all eight seasons of the serialized story.

[katastrophickim]

Give me a therapy, I'm a walking travesty

But I'm smiling at everything

Therapy, you were never a friend to me

And you can keep all your misery

[backtonormallife]

Premature post-mortem

One of the things that came to mind as I was scrolling through my Tumblr feed this morning was the cliche, "I'd rather be a big fish in a small pond, rather than a small fish in a big pond." The other thing is an extreme appreciation for the grey suits at the palace. The courtiers are very good at making a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

I keep reading the feedback that people wished Meghan would dress for her body type. That's not hate. That's people wishing that Meghan would accept herself and learn about what shapes work for a body and accepting, especially in 2023, herself. There is so much more body acceptance now than there was in the 1990s. It also applies to what colors work for her.

I've read so many people asking social media to stop comparing Meghan and Catherine. Maybe SM wold stop comparing when Meghan would stop competing. Again, people want Meghan to be herself, find her strengths (ahem, networking) and live a happy life. Seven years into international fame, it looks like Meghan has returned to her life with a few friends who have been there since the beginning.

There is little organic interest in Meghan. Her claim to fame is the woman who was on the balcony at Buckingham Palace and that wasn't enough for her. Harry is going to go to rehab, then someplace quiet where he can live his life out of the spotlight. It's not a surprising ending to people who have seen it play out with non-famous people.

[fififive]

"Fake it until you make it!" <3

[thenerdsofcolor]

A Los Angeles Theatre Review: 'Fake It Until You Make It'

Despite some unevenness in the comedic writing, Larissa FastHorse's 'Fake It Until You Make It' at Center Theatre Group is a romping good time.

The satirical farce genre isn’t commonly utilized for global majority stories but it is always most welcome to see. Such is the case for the world premiere of Larissa FastHorse‘s Fake It Until You Make It at the Center Theatre Group (in association with Arena Stage) which sets its story in the Indigenous non-profit sector in the most wacky manner. While it is occasionally rough and uneven in…

[popblank]

Fake It Until You Make It at the Mark Taper Forum:

The play is (as advertised) a "door-slamming, mistaken identity satirical farce," where "identity" is not merely legal identification but identity as in who individual people believe themselves to be in terms of race, gender, values, social groups, and so forth. ( I can definitely say right now that the set is fun to look at and there are at least five doors that can be slammed.)

I saw this during what I think was its third preview—which is much earlier than I usually see any shows, let alone a first production—so my thoughts here are tempered by that fact. After the show I looked up playwright Larissa Fasthorse's Instagram page, which provided some interesting context: she rewrote the intro the day before, so some of the material I was watching was literally less than 24 hours old. This is something I know happens in previews but since I tend to see shows after opening, this glimpse into the process is fascinating to me as someone who is neither a writer nor an actor. At this point it did seem like some elements were not settled or felt uneven, and it made it a little difficult for me to figure out how effective the show itself was. However I am now pretty curious to come back and and see how the show is toward the end of the run (although to be honest it is unlikely due to other things I already have planned).

The play seems to be asking to what extent identity (in all of the above definitions) is fluid and what you might get if you took that to an extreme; the ecosystem of self-serious nonprofit organizations gets some mockery as well. The funny thing is that right now it feels like satire can barely stay a step ahead of reality, and I'm not sure this one manages to keep up (granted, the production was delayed for a year and a half due to Center Theatre Group budget issues). So one of this show's challenges is that it has to be very precise in its target, tone, and execution to really be funny. It felt like some of the identity jokes (if not delivered just right) wouldn't sound out of place if made by a right-wing conservative, which had a way of muting what I think was the intended humor.

[syntonylife]

La Mia Pelle, le Mie Regole

Impulso di scrittura giornalieroChe tatuaggio vuoi e dove lo faresti?Visualizza tutte le risposte Che coincidenza che questo prompt di scrittura sia uscito proprio oggi! La mia relazione con i tatuaggi ha iniziato da poco, nonostante la mia età avanzata. Non ho mai considerato seriamente l’idea di farmi un tatuaggio. Il timore della scelta definitiva e della sua durata mi ha sempre bloccato,…

[flufflecat]

[coyoteworks]

XV – The Devil | print

[jubileedeeznuts-posting]

a reflection of care

[mostlysignssomeportents]

You were promised a jetpack by liars

TONIGHT (May 17), I'm at the INTERNET ARCHIVE in SAN FRANCISCO to keynote the 10th anniversary of the AUTHORS ALLIANCE.

As a science fiction writer, I find it weird that some sf tropes – like space colonization – have become culture-war touchstones. You know, that whole "we were promised jetpacks" thing.

I confess, I never looked too hard at the practicalities of jetpacks, because they are so obviously either used as a visual shorthand (as in the Jetsons) or as a metaphor. Even a brief moment's serious consideration should make it clear why we wouldn't want the distracted, stoned, drunk, suicidal, homicidal maniacs who pilot their two-ton killbots through our residential streets at 75mph to be flying over our heads with a reservoir of high explosives strapped to their backs.

Jetpacks can make for interesting sf eyeball kicks or literary symbols, but I don't actually want to live in a world of jetpacks. I just want to read about them, and, of course, write about them:

https://reactormag.com/chicken-little/

I had blithely assumed that this was the principle reason we never got the jetpacks we were "promised." I mean, there kind of was a promise, right? I grew up seeing videos of rocketeers flying their jetpacks high above the heads of amazed crowds, at World's Fairs and Disneyland and big public spectacles. There was that scene in Thunderball where James Bond (the canonical Connery Bond, no less) makes an escape by jetpack. There was even a Gilligan's Island episode where the castaways find a jetpack and scheme to fly it all the way back to Hawai'i:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0588084/

Clearly, jetpacks were possible, but they didn't make any sense, so we decided not to use them, right?

Well, I was wrong. In a terrific new 99 Percent Invisible episode, Chris Berube tracks the history of all those jetpacks we saw on TV for decades, and reveals that they were all the same jetpack, flown by just one guy, who risked his life every time he went up in it:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/rocket-man/

The jetpack in question – technically a "rocket belt" – was built in the 1960s by Wendell Moore at the Bell Aircraft Corporation, with funding from the DoD. The Bell rocket belt used concentrated hydrogen peroxide as fuel, which burned at temperatures in excess of 1,000'. The rocket belt had a maximum flight time of just 21 seconds.

It was these limitations that disqualified the rocket belt from being used by anyone except stunt pilots with extremely high tolerances for danger. Any tactical advantage conferred on infantrymen by the power to soar over a battlefield for a whopping 21 seconds was totally obliterated by the fact that this infantryman would be encumbered by an extremely heavy, unwieldy and extremely explosive backpack, to say nothing of the high likelihood that rocketeers would plummet out of the sky after failing to track the split-second capacity of a jetpack.

And of course, the rocket belt wasn't going to be a civilian commuting option. If your commute can be accomplished in just 21 seconds of flight time, you should probably just walk, rather than strapping an inferno to your back and risking a lethal fall if you exceed a margin of error measured in just seconds.

Once you know about the jetpack's technical limitations, it's obvious why we never got jetpacks. So why did we expect them? Because we were promised them, and the promise was a lie.

Moore was a consummate showman, which is to say, a bullshitter. He was forever telling the press that his jetpacks would be on everyone's back in one to two years, and he got an impressionable young man, Bill Suitor, to stage showy public demonstrations of the rocket belt. If you ever saw a video of a brave rocketeer piloting a jetpack, it was almost certainly Suitor. Suitor was Connery's stunt-double in Thunderball, and it was he who flew the rocket belt around Sleeping Beauty castle.

Suitor's interview with Berube for the podcast is delightful. Suitor is a hilarious, profane old airman who led an extraordinary life and tells stories with expert timing, busting out great phrases like "a surprise is a fart with a lump in it."

But what's most striking about the tale of the Bell rocket belt is the shape of the deception that Moore and Bell pulled off. By conspicuously failing to mention the rocket belt's limitations, and by callously risking Suitor's life over and over again, they were able to create the impression that jetpacks were everywhere, and that they were trembling on the verge of widespread, popular adoption.

What's more, they played a double game: all the public enthusiasm they manufactured with their carefully stage-managed, canned demos was designed to help them win more defense contracts to keep their dream alive. Ultimately, Uncle Sucker declined to continue funding their boondoggle, and the demos petered out, and the "promise" of a jetpack was broken.

As I listened to the 99 Percent Invisible episode, I was struck by the familiarity of this shuck: this is exactly what the self-driving car bros did over the past decade to convince us all that the human driver was already obsolete. The playbook was nearly identical, right down to the shameless huckster insisting that "full self-driving is one to two years away" every year for a decade:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/23/23837598/tesla-elon-musk-self-driving-false-promises-land-of-the-giants

The Potemkin rocket belt was a calculated misdirection, as are the "full self-driving" demos that turn out to be routine, pre-programmed runs on carefully manicured closed tracks:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-autopilot-staged-engineer-says-company-faked-full-autopilot/

Practical rocketeering wasn't ever "just around the corner," because a flying, 21 second blast-furnace couldn't be refined into a practical transport. Making the tank bigger would not make this thing safer or easier to transport.

The jetpack showman hoped to cash out by tricking Uncle Sucker into handing him a fat military contract. Robo-car scammers used their conjurer's tricks to cash out to the public markets, taking Uber public on the promise of robo-taxis, even as Uber's self-driving program burned through $2.5b and produced a car with a half-mile mean time between fatal collisions, which the company had to pay someone else $400m to take the business off their hands:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

It's not just self-driving cars. Time and again, the incredibly impressive AI demos that the press credulously promotes turn out to be scams. The dancing robot on stage at the splashy event is literally a guy in a robot-suit:

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-ai-day-tesla-bot-is-just-a-guy-in-a-bodysuit-2021-8

The Hollywood-killing, AI-produced video prompting system is so cumbersome to use, and so severely limited, that it's arguably worse than useless:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/expectations-versus-reality/

The centuries' worth of progress the AI made in discovering new materials actually "discovered" a bunch of trivial variations on existing materials, as well as a huge swathe of materials that only exist at absolute zero:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

The AI grocery store where you just pick things up and put them in your shopping basket without using the checkout turns out to be a call-center full of low-waged Indian workers desperately squinting at videos of you, trying to figure out what you put in your bag:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

The discovery of these frauds somehow never precipitates disillusionment. Rather than getting angry with marketers for tricking them, reporters are ventriloquized into repeating the marketing claim that these aren't lies, they're premature truths. Sure, today these are faked, but once the product is refined, the fakery will no longer be required.

This must be the kinds of Magic Underpants Gnomery the credulous press engaged in during the jetpack days: "Sure, a 21-second rocket belt is totally useless for anything except wowing county fair yokels – but once they figure out how to fit an order of magnitude more high-explosive onto that guy's back, this thing will really take off!"

The AI version of this is that if we just keep throwing orders of magnitude more training data and compute at the stochastic parrot, it will eventually come to life and become our superintelligent, omnipotent techno-genie. In other words, if we just keep breeding these horses to run faster and faster, eventually one of our prize mares will give birth to a locomotive:

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

As a society, we have vested an alarming amount of power in the hands of tech billionaires who profess to be embittered science fiction fans who merely want to realize the "promises" of our Golden Age stfnal dreams. These bros insist that they can overcome both the technical hurdles and the absolutely insurmountable privation involved in space colonization:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

They have somehow mistaken Neal Stephenson's dystopian satirical "metaverse" for a roadmap:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/18/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video/

As Charlie Stross writes, it's not just that these weirdos can't tell the difference between imaginative parables about the future and predictions about the future – it's also that they keep mistaking dystopias for business plans:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tech-billionaires-need-to-stop-trying-to-make-the-science-fiction-they-grew-up-on-real/

Cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion. Please, I beg you, stop building the fucking torment nexus:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus

These techno-billionaires profess to be fulfilling a broken promise, but surely they know that the promises were made by liars – showmen using parlor tricks to sell the impossible. You were "promised a jetpack" in the same sense that table-rapping "spiritualists" promised you a conduit to talk with the dead, or that carny barkers promised you a girl that could turn into a gorilla:

https://milwaukeerecord.com/film/ape-girl-shes-alive-documentary-november-11-sugar-maple/

That's quite a supervillain origin story: "I was promised a jetpack, but then I grew up discovered that it was just a special effect. In revenge, I am promising you superintelligent AIs and self-driving cars, and these, too, are SFX."

In other words: "Die a disillusioned jetpack fan or live long enough to become the fraudster who cooked up the jetpack lie you despise."

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds

[authorsadiethatcher]

Here we go. The last of Fake It Until You Make It. Season 8 is now available for all readers everywhere. This book not only focuses on Jessi’s completely bimbofied life, it also includes two epilogues that showcase what her life is like in the future with Cole. If any of my books have a happily ever after, this one definitely does.

Fake It Until You Make It Season 8 is available from Amazon, Smashwords, and Google Play.

[iristial]

The fact that Shouma hid his heritage out of fear of being ostracized and hated on for being the same 'monster' as the ones partaking in human trafficking and drug dealing, because everyone he's met up until now gets terrified at the sight of him so it feeds into his poor self-image and insecurities, and Hanto's reaction basically 'proved' that Shouma was right to think no one would love him for who he was no matter where he goes...I'm gonna be sick

[iliothermia]

I wanna post happy things. I wanna feel hope and be happy. I'm gonna focus on getting back to where I need to be. I need to rip myself out of the hole I'm in and claw my way out. I greatly appreciate yall ❤️ I hope I can return to being the positive person I feel I once was. Thank yall so much for sticking by me while I've been down.