#I’m trying to get as big a sample size as possible

[ho-ho-homosxual]

Hey there you little shits (/pos)

So recently I have mentioned a webtoon that I’ve been working on. Now, while it is no where near finished, I really need some help. Even if you don’t know me super well or at all. Even if you don’t care about this (I can respect that)

So I have a character in my webtoon who is mute and communicates through sign language. I’m going to be honest I don’t know too much on this specific topic so I came here for help. I really want to know

What is a stereotype/way it’s depicted in media/common misconception that bothers you? As many as you want, the more the better!

My main goal here is to make this character & their experiences realistic as possible. I really don’t want accidentally portray some form of misinformation.

Thank you to everyone who read this through <3

I hope you have an absolutely lovely day

[slugcatmusings]

What is the Rot? Why is the Rot?

Spoiler Warning and Holy Wall of Text Batman Warning. I got WAY too into questioning the turbo-cancer here, hopefully my rambling makes sense.

So, the Rot is… weird, from a biological standpoint. Really weird, if you stop to think about it. It’s most frequently described as some variation of cancer, and it certainly fits the criteria for it. Caused by damage to DNA? Check. Multiplies uncontrollably? Check. Comes in both benign and malignant forms, one stationary and the other mobile? Big fat check. Heck, even the Rot cysts eating other creatures kind of fits, according to some research I’ve done – there are apparently cancer cells that will eat other cells, which makes sense in hindsight since cancer cells are cells that have lost important genetic restrictions, which may include whatever lets cells identify other cells as “do not eat.”

(I ain’t a biology whiz and I’m doing research on the fly while getting my thoughts out here, so take whatever I say about biology with a grain of salt)

So, Rot is clearly cancer of some kind, right? Case closed. Except when me and a friend of mine were talking Rain World theories on Discord, she brought up some interesting points that got me thinking.

First point: Rot cells obviously mutate in a way that affects FAR more than just cell replication and termination. Some of the cysts can HEAR. As far as I know, cells in the body do not hear sounds. They communicate via chemical signals and maybe, MAYBE react to temperature. Hearing involves complicated, specialized sensory apparatus to pick up on vibrations in the air. Even if you simplify it and say that it’s only vibrations, that’s STILL a multicellular thing, not a single-cell thing. It’s something that took millions of years to evolve on Earth, if not billions.

And while Rain World’s timeline goes on for long enough that it those kinds of mutations might happen eventually, Rot cysts have the ability to hear pretty much right from the start – because even the Proto-Long-Legs react to your presence like the Daddy Long Legs do, and the Rot in Spearmaster’s campaign, where Pebbles has recently contracted it, reacts the same way as it does in later campaigns. It’s already able to hear.

As far as I know, cancer just means the same cell duplicating over and over again. Are more mutations possible with each division, as errors are made in the DNA during splitting? Probably. But not to THAT extent. There’s no way a lump of cancer somehow mutated the exact complicated genetic blueprint needed to grow organs, at least not without outside interference.

Second point: Cases of Rot are way too consistent across the board. Now, we don’t have a huge sample size to work from, but from what we see from both Pebbles’ Rot, and Hunter Long Legs, they’re… pretty similar. Hunter Long Legs is basically a mobile Rot cyst. They move the same way, seem to grow the same way (starts as a growth inside/on the body before eventually freeing itself from whatever wall/flesh it grew from in some capacity and moving elsewhere), they have the same senses, and they even eat the same way, via something like phagocytosis (how white blood cells “eat” invading organisms via engulfing them and breaking them down in a sac in their main “body.”)

Now, this doesn’t tell us much, because cancer, when it does emerge, is pretty consistent in symptoms/what the mutated cells do once they start replicating. It’s pretty much the same regardless of whatever organism the cancer is happening in. But what ISN’T consistent is what causes the DNA error in the cancer cell in the first place. IRL, cancer can be caused by all kinds of things – smoking, radiation poisoning, being out in the sun too long, drinking deadly chemicals and whatnot, anything that damages DNA. But in RW, the only time we ever hear Rot talked about, or see it present, is in the context of an iterator having f*cked up while mucking around with DNA. Pebbles was trying to create an organism that could change his own genome, and No Significant Harassment created Hunter as a messenger and probably mucked something up in the process in his haste to get them to Moon.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t other causes of it, of course, we’re working with a sample size of two in an apocalyptic world with who knows how much potentially DNA-damaging stuff around, but… that’s still awfully consistent.

So, combining these points and everything we know to be canon, Rot is:

an organism that lives inside another organism

Until a certain condition is met, it cannot harm said host organism.

Once said condition is met, it goes out of control, wreaking havoc on the organism’s systems and mutating, giving it sensory capabilities and an appetite

Said condition is apparently someone messing up when re-arranging genomes, in yourself or others

It is widespread across multiple different species, at least iterators and slugcats but potentially other species as well.

Once you have a bad case of it, it is apparently NOT CURABLE. Pebbles tried everything he could think of but apparently exhausted all of his options by the time of the Survivor/Monk campaigns.

So, with all the context FINALLY laid out, here’s my wild theory: Rot isn’t a cancer. It’s a symbiote turned parasite. Specifically, I believe it’s a symbiotic microbe that lives inside the cells that make up every other creature in Rain World, and is held in check by a specific gene that all species share, and altering or getting rid of that gene causes it to go berserk, taking over and eventually mutating the host cells.

Yeah, I did watch Parasite Eve let’s plays as a kid, why do you ask? Anyway, hear me out here.

There is precedence for single-celled organisms living inside of other single-celled organisms. They’re referred to as intracellular endosymbiots (hopefully I got the spelling right there), and the most well-known one is probably the mitochondria. The powerhouse of the cell is thought to be descended from some bacteria way, WAY back that was engulfed by a larger cell and not only survived it, but BENEFITED from it. Since then those ancient proto-mitochondria and eukaryotic cells have mutually evolved to be dependent on each other. So it’s entirely possible for something similar to have happened in Rain World.

However, I don’t think it happened NATURALLY, here. Because something that’s able to take over a cell entirely and begin wildly mutating it is NOT something your average cell wants inside of it. There’s a VERY high chance of extinction if you do that. Which means that of course those funky bio-tech loving Ancients either took a look at a wildly dangerous cellular parasite and went “hmmm we can use this” or made one themselves.

Why did they do this? Who knows! Currently, I’m tied between “they needed a better powerhouse for the cell to power the various weird adaptations they’re building into various creatures,” “there was some sort of disease that this parasite gave immunity against and they wanted to make use of it,” and “it gave their creations massively powerful regeneration factors that made them much easier to maintain.” Possibly it was all three. Whatever the reason, the Ancients either found or created this parasite, and put it into their creations’ cells, hoping to reap the benefits.

Well, they got the benefits, but they also got a microbe that hijacked the cells and harnessed their pre-existing DNA blueprints to build organisms disguised as great big blobs of cancer. Which is not exactly ideal, but hey, they just had to figure out a way of keeping the cell hijacking from happening! And the way they ended up going about it was to alter the thing so that so long as there was a specific DNA sequence in the cell, it laid mostly dormant. All the benefits, none of the risks – so long as that specific string of genes remained intact.

And then BECAUSE it was so beneficial, they spread their artificial symbiote and it’s genetic reins throughout ALL of their creations, from the smallest pipe-cleaning slugs to the iterators. Which meant that as their purposed organisms replaced most of the original ecosystem, they spread the symbiote as well. Thus making it possible for pretty much ANY creature on the planet to come down with a bad case of the Rot. And with the iterators, I wouldn’t be surprised if this symbiote is tied to their self-destruction taboos. Try to cross yourself out? Well, it’s gonna maybe happen now, but it’ll be a slow painful death as you’re eaten alive from the inside and all your own parts turn against you, so was it really worth it?

And they never told their creations this perhaps even actively hid it, because why tell them the cause of the main deterrent to them mucking with their taboos? They might find a way around it. The iterators were left ignorant of how Rot works, and because of this they never figured out that Rot HAD a cure after all: rebuilding that genome that reins in the symbiote. Because why in the name of the Void would they repeat the same mistakes that gave them Rot in the first place, and potentially make it worse?

[anistarrose]

Lup's terms of endearment

[Plain text: "Lup's terms of endearment". End plain text.]

Lup is a character that it takes a lot of practice for me to write, but there's a particular calling card for Lup that jumps out both from her canon dialogue and from fanon, right? We all know it: Lup absolutely loves to call people "babe".

But... when I'm writing her, I also end up wondering if I'm overusing any given signature vocative, or other element of her speech. After all, fanfic writers, myself very much included, are always looking for quick effective ways to make characters sound like themselves — and in a case of a character like Lup, peppering in a "babe" often seems to work like a charm in terms of making her more Lup-like, especially if you're writing Blupjeans.

The thing about this vocative-centric, vocabulary-centric approach to character voice is that it can, at least theoretically, lead to us overdoing it, and overshooting how the amount that Lup would use "babe" in canon. Which isn't a big deal, it's just fic — but I'm very hyperfixated and I love Lup very much, so I wanted to break down a some of when, where, and why she uses "babe" and other terms of endearment, as well as other little nuances I noticed.

Continuing under the cut, but the tl;dr is: Lup absolutely calls people "babe" a lot, but it's not exclusively romantic, it can be either sincere or teasing in tone, and she tends to do so more as time goes on, not so much at the start of the century.

(Partially inspired by and overlapping with the contents of this post (link) by @keplercryptids!)

"Babe"

[Plaintext: "Babe". End plaintext.]

Lup (to Barry): Don’t blow yourself up, babe, I’m sure your beautiful body’s gonna get killed by the Hunger soon enough.

-Ep. 67: Story and Song Part 1.

Lup (to Barry): Babe, I love you more than life and undeath itself, but let’s get somewhere safe first, so we can really savor this tender reunion.

-Ep. 67: Story and Song Part 1.

Lup: Taako, Barry and I got this. You gotta keep trying babe, I know you can do this.

-Ep. 68: Story and Song Part 2.

Lup (to Barry): Hear that, babe? We're legends.

-Ep. 68: Story and Song Part 2.

Lup (to Barry): I’m about to smooch your fucking brains out, babe.

-Ep. 69: Story and Song Part 3.

Lup (to Barry, during heist planning): We’re good, babe.

-Live in Nashville!

The first thing that jumps out at me is how back-loaded, for lack of a better term, the use of "babe" is among all Lup's appearances. It's part of one of her most iconic lines from Story and Song, but she doesn't drop a single "babe" throughout the whole The Stolen Century! Go up and read those lines again — pre-Story and Song, there's not a single one!

I have a few conjectures here that might explain this. First, on a Doyalist level, one could attribute this to small sample size (Lup just doesn't have that much dialogue relative to her thematic presence), and/or to Griffin himself still feeling out her character in the first few episodes that she appeared in.

But on a Watsonian level: I'm purely speculating, but I wonder if it was a nickname she that first started using (or at least, using with regularity) for Barry at some point well into the establishment of their relationship, and from there, it bled out into platonic contexts too. Speaking of which, the fact that she predominantly uses it for Barry doesn't stop her from using it for Taako — in fact, though it only comes up once, it's in a very sincere moment of encouragement (as Taako struggles to transmute all of Phandalin into sapphire).

On that note, if there's anything I'll personally admit to wanting to see more of in fic, it's more of Lup using "babe" in platonic/familial contexts! It's hard to extrapolate from canon if this is a "just Taako" thing, an "any close platonic bond" thing, or an "anyone whatsoever" thing, but I just think it's so cute! (And I'd personally vibe check it as realistic for her to say to other IPRE crewmates, for example — but I'm possibly biased, as a Lup and Magnus friendship writer/enjoyer.)

Lastly on the topic of "babe," it comes up in a variety of contexts, but as alluded to above, it can be sincere or teasing — of which the teasing can, but doesn't necessarily, overlap with flirting.

Specifically, Lup uses "babe" twice while gently, lightheartedly questioning Barry's decisions or priorities, like his intent to blow himself up. It also comes up in teasing or flirtatious moments within emotionally charged moments, like the reunion, or when she gets her body back. It's just not exclusively used for deflating tension — see her sheer confidence in the "we're legends" line and how she revels in it, for example.

All in all, "babe" is clearly one of Lup's go-to all-purpose words, and I like that it shows her voice evolving over time, whether or not that was intentional by Griffin. "Babe" is by far the most worth analyzing of Lup's terms of endearment, but we'll also talk about:

"Dear"

[Plain text: "Dear". End plain text.]

Lup: We need to make sure our friends in the ethereal plane aren’t listening. Taako, could you do the honors and shoo them away? Taako: Go away! Lup: Dear, you need to Blink.

-Ep. 66, The Stolen Century Part 7.

Lup: Lucretia, dear, I’ve already forgotten about the whole thing. Oh, uh! [Smiling] Sorry, bad choice of words.

-Ep. 68, Story and Song Part 2.

With the obligatory caveat that we have an even smaller sample size here, it jumps out at me that Lup only ever uses "dear" in teasing contexts, reacting to mistakes both big and small. But it's also a word she uses to emphasize love and forgiveness — especially communicating that she won't breeze past a mistake like it didn't happen, but also isn't going to maintain hostility over it, which we see with Lucretia.

(You can even make an argument that Lup teasing Taako with a "dear" is at least a little tension-defusing too, because that scene happens in the leadup to Lup and Barry presenting the Relic plan. But it's less clear there if she's using it consciously with that purpose.)

Miscellaneous: "Honey," "Bud," "(My) Man"

[Plain text: "Miscellaneous". End plain text.]

Barry: I mean um… the Conservatories, I guess, for obvious reasons. Lup: Oh, oh sure, honey, that was a… that was a good one but, man, the food in Tesseralia though, like. It's hard to beat that.

-Ep. 66: The Stolen Century Part 6

Lup (to Magnus): What are you- why? [Laughs] We need to get- we need to- we gotta bounce. Look up. Look up, bud. It’s, it’s the Big H. It’s time to roll.

-Ep. 64: The Stolen Century Part 5.

Taako: Am I…? I’m not going to lose you again. Lup: Never. Never again, bud.

-Ep. 68, Story and Song Part 2.

Lup: So, uh, Davenport, bud, kinda curious why you’d, uh, decided to come back out here after you wrote us about all the ghost-based dangers you encountered, my man, didn’t you consider that we’d be coming to collect for, you know, the goddess of death?

-Live in San Francisco!

Now, a few more odds and ends for the sake of completeness! The first thing I noticed is that she calls Barry "honey" while teasing him a little bit, as they compare their favorite cycles (though I don't think she's necessarily lying, either) — overall very similar to how she uses "babe" in playful contexts sometimes, or how she uses "dear" with Taako or Lucretia.

"Bud" is for Taako, Magnus, and Davenport! Like "babe," it seems to be a very multi-purpose vocative — ranging from questioning her friends' judgment, all the way to deeply sincere moments. (Taako seems to bring out the sincerity more than anyone, unsurprisingly.)

Lastly, "Man" is used both as a general filler word/emphasizing word without necessarily filling in for a name or subject, or alternatively, transforms into "my man" exactly once when talking to Davenport. That one's interesting to me because "my man" is something associated a lot more with Taako — and specifically, used by Taako with people he likes and trusts (link), though it may or may not actually be a serious context.

Merle (giving Taako some shitty kelp shoes):  There’s a lot of give in kelp and if they’re too small, get ‘em wet and they’ll get bigger and these— These are for you. Taako (pretending he won't immediately cast Levitate on them): Oh, well, thank you, my man. These are just beautiful!

-Ep. 62: The Stolen Century Part 3.

Taako: Barry, I— You got all the time in the world, my man.

-Ep. 62: The Stolen Century Part 3.

To compare and contrast, Lup's only known "my man" is deployed against Davenport when she's kind of questioning his judgment, but he's obviously a person she likes. If you'll let me speculate, I wouldn't be shocked if Lup overheard Taako hit Davenport with plenty of "my man"-s over the course of the Stolen Century — just a guess, but it's something I'd really like to believe in, because the twins influencing each other's speaking styles is just so cute.

And that's all! This was an exercise I undertook to get better at writing Lup, but I always really intended to post it too, so I hope it was interesting and insightful — I knew it definitely left me with a new appreciation for how Lup's way of speaking evolves over time, in particular!

[hyumjim]

I think it’s only natural that transgender people may take a while to settle on a name that feels right, and yet whenever i feel like trying out another name i feel a deep seated sense of insecurity well up, like i am doing the trans thing wrong. So, I wanted to see how frequent name changes are within the trans community! Please reblog because I’d really like to get as big a sample size as possible!

[tater-tot-jr]

I think I should put in my two cents considering the Hazbin hotel leaked Angel Dust clip. I’ll say that this post should be one absolutely massive trigger warning. If you’re sensitive please don’t read this, I’m pretty blunt. Also I’m only talking about a small leak but SPOILERS!!!

So before I make any points I’ll start by saying that I’m not an inherent fan of vivziepop, this isn’t meat riding, it’s a genuine attempt at open conversation and discussion. I’ll also say I’m a survivor myself and while I don’t claim to speak for anyone else I have some ground to stand on here. I completely understand that people can be triggered by this type of imagery and will at least skip this particular scene or episode, I promise I’m not talking about you guys.

You wanna know who I am talking about though? The weird ass moral police I’ve been watching mobilize. It’s crazy how people are making a big deal out of this. I’ve seen three arguments and all of them are terrible in themselves and being used to justify terrible behavior.

I’ve only seen people claim three major things, this is a bad depiction of a s/a survivor and situation, this is something that’s too graphic and immoral to put in a TV show, the fact that the singing and dancing lightens the tone in a way people find distasteful. I’m going to be trying to prove why I find these arguments mostly ridiculous and unfounded.

As for argument one, s/a survivors come in all shapes and sizes and hyper sexuality happens to be an incredibly common reaction to sexual trauma. I haven’t watched episode one and two but even if I had I’d still have too small of a sample size to determine the entire tone of an incredibly messed up complex dynamic between too incredibly interesting and layered characters. It’s ridiculous to have so many assumptions and expectations of an *11 second leaked clip.*

Secondly. Creative freedom is possible the most important thing in art. If we didn’t have the freedom to put what we wanted on paper or on screen then we wouldn’t have had so much societal change recently. Just because you might find something distasteful and immoral doesn’t mean it absolutely has to be hated on and removed. It’s okay to not like things because you find them gross, it’s okay to not enjoy graphic depictions of serious subjects, it’s not okay to start internet wars over moral bullshit. It’s okay to be mad in silence sometimes, guys.

Thirdly. I kinda get this one, I don’t agree with it but I do understand the point. The idea you don’t want a serious subject framed with a sexy pop song is not inherently bad, it’s just something that makes me think you wouldn’t have liked Hazbin Hotel anyway. I actually appreciate the fact they are using the creative medium to make bold and shocking decisions but I get some people are sensitive to new things, that’s fine. Where this argument gets ridiculous is when people act like this is very out of line for a show like this. This isn’t a Saturday morning kids cartoon it’s and adult animated show about people in hell. It’s highly likely that this won’t be the worst thing we see, you either need to heed the trigger warnings at the beginning of each episode or get over it.

You’ll notice that I didn’t bring up anything about the merchandise pins or the storyboard artist, I did this because they aren’t arguments but barely related attempts at character assassinations. When you spend five minutes thinking about them critically you come to realize that there is nothing substantial to those arguments.

I’d like to finish up talking about how I think this scene is doing more good than harm. It’s important to make people uncomfortable when you’re talking about things so horrible like s/a and rape. It shouldn’t be meek and palatable for a general audience, it should upset you. I remember hearing something in a video game once that stuck with me. There was a character who said that when you’re sick you need strong medicine and that the strongest medication is very bitter.

I think episode four will be some very bitter medicine.

[twistedminutia]

Twst Talk: How Natural is Unnatural Hair?

Like a lot of anime and cartoons, many of the characters in Twisted Wonderland have fantastical hair (and eye) colors that seem to be natural to them, despite being completely unnatural hair colors here. Which made me wonder: how common is it to have strange hair colors in the world of Twisted Wonderland?

Some basic guidelines before we start: first, I will be doing two groups of comparison, one human and one nonhuman. We don’t have merfolk or beastmen or Fae in our world, so there’s no telling what kind of hair color is natural for them, and it didn’t seem fair to include them with other humans without a baseline looking at just humans. For the purposes of this writing, Sebek will be classified as a Fae (I’m sure he’d be thrilled).

Second, hair dye and presumably even magical methods of changing hair color exist in Twisted Wonderland. I am going to assume that everyone’s hair color is their natural hair color unless there is canon material (in or out of game) that states otherwise or I have a good reason to suspect their hair color is not natural.

Third, in the interest of getting as big of a sample size as possible, I’m going to be including all named characters with sprites that have been introduced so far, including in the JP server, so there will be spoilers for JP server events and chapter 7. Theoretically, I guess I could include the background characters as well, but I am not interested in trying to categorize all of them. If someone else wants to do that and add to my results, feel free.

Fourth, there are going to be some exclusions. First on the list: Idia and Ortho. Their hair color is explicitly stated to be part of a curse, which means that it’s magically caused. Since this list is supposed to be about what hair colors occur naturally in Twisted Wonderland, they’re out. Second: Marja (Epel’s grandmother) and professor Trein. Both of them have had their hair turn white and gray, respectively, with age. Since we don’t know what their original hair color was, I’m making the executive decision not to include them in the count. I’ll also exclude the Faerie Queen and assorted elemental fairies and Eliza, since their hair seems to be more like element or vapor based than actual hair. Everybody else is fair game. Let’s get into it!

The Humans

We’ll be listing all humans with unnatural hair colors first, along with their hair color, then the natural ones, then the conclusion and percentages.

Unnatural hair colors: Deuce (blue), Trey (green), Riddle (yes, red is technically a natural hair color, but what we refer to as red is usually more of an orange color, like Cater or Ace’s hair; I’m going to consider Riddle’s blood red hair as unnatural), Kalim (yes, white is also technically natural, but it’s pretty rare for someone his age and there’s no indication that his hair color is unusual that I’ve seen so I’ll count it), Epel (lavender), Mama Spade (seemingly mixed blue and blonde), Rollo (white/gray). Total: 7

Natural hair colors: Cater (ginger), Ace (ginger), Jamil (brown), Rook (blond), Vil (OKAY YES HE HAS PURPLE IN HIS HAIR but we never see any other character who has ombré hair like that, even in other two-color characters, so I’m going to make an executive decision and list him as blond), Silver (yes, silver hair is not natural, but we learn in Ch 7 that his silver hair is caused by magic and his natural hair color is blond, so he will be listed as a blond here), Coach Vargas (black), Crewel (black; he canonically dyes the white part of his hair), Sam (black), Najma (brown), Neige (black). Total: 11

So that makes 18 total human characters with 7 having unnatural hair colors and 10 having natural ones. It’s unfortunate that the characters I had to exclude were all human, since this is kind of a small sample size. But, with 7/18 characters having unnatural hair colors, the total percentage of weird hair is about 39%. So, a bit below half. Unnatural colors would seem to be less common than natural colors, then, at least in humans, but not really rare. Let’s see how that stacks up with the nonhumans!

The Nonhumans

Unnatural hair colors: Jack (I debated on him being considered natural or unnatural, since he’s a wolf-boy and white hair is technically a natural color for a wolf, but to keep things consistent, we’ll go with hair colors that are unnatural for humans, so we’ll count his white hair as unnatural), Jade (turquoise), Floyd (turquoise), Azul (white), Sebek (green), Baul (green), Snick (this one’s on the edge, but it looks more red to me, so I’m giving it to the unnaturals), Dominic (silver), Grum (magenta), Shelpie (green), Timmy (blue), Toby (purple? I think?), Chenya (purple), Cheka (red/yellow), Kifaji (blue), Gidel (kinda reddish-purple, I think?) Total: 16

Naturals: Leona (brown), Ruggie (blond), Lilia (black; according to an interview with Yana, he dyes the pink part of his hair), Malleus (black), Crowley (black), Malenoa (Malleus’ mother, black), Hop (blond), Fellow (orange) Total: 8

Wow, pretty much a complete reversal! That’s a total of 24 nonhuman characters with 16 having unnatural hair and 8 having natural hair. Literally over twice as many have unnatural hair! Even if we remove the seven dwarves, who you could argue are slightly skewing the total, we still have 9 people with unnatural hair and 6 with natural. That makes 68% of the characters here with unnatural hair! As for specific species proportions, Fae have 8/13 or 61% unnatural hair, beastmen have 5/7 or 71% unnatural hair, and merfolk have 3/3 or 100% with unnatural hair (and this makes me realize we literally haven’t met any merfolk outside the main cast. Huh. Makes sense, I guess, if they all live underwater and have to attend a boot camp to learn to live on land.)

Interesting comments: this means that nonhumans as a group outnumber the humans, though only by 6, and no single group of nonhumans outnumbers humans. Fae have the most characters shown in game as nonhumans (not even counting the faeries from the gala and camping events!) thought the seven dwarves skew this a bit. There are more recurring characters who are human, though- of the humans, 14 of the 18 characters are part of the main cast whereas only 10 of the 24 nonhuman characters are recurring. The dwarves might be skewing this again, though.

Final Totals

If we combine all characters, human and nonhuman, that makes 42 total characters. Of those 42, 24 have unnatural hair colors and 19 have natural, meaning that, overall, 57% of characters have unnatural hair. That makes a majority! Unnatural hair colors are actually more common is Twisted Wonderland, just based on the sample size we have.

Couple other fun stats: for exclusively the main cast, 10 out of the 24 (42%) characters have unnatural hair, so side characters bulk out a lot of the unnatural hair havers. Speaking of side characters, their total is 13 out of 18 (72%) characters with unnatural hair. The seven dwarves seem to be the biggest skew in terms of unnatural hair, so if we remove them from the original total, we have 18 out of 35 (51%) of characters with unnatural hair, which may be a slightly more representative sample.

Conclusion

Based exclusively on this data, we can say that having unnaturally colored hair is actually more common in Twisted Wonderland than having naturally colored hair. Humans have the lowest likelihood of having unnatural hair, and merfolk have the highest.

Of course, this is an extremely small sample size, so this data may not be generalizable to the entire population of Twisted Wonderland. The sample also has a lot of mages in it, so we also don’t know if having magic may affect your hair color or something. Regardless, this was an interesting attempt to study hair color in Twisted Wonderland.

As always, I appreciate comments. Let me know if the math is wrong or if I’ve missed any characters. Or if you would classify anyone differently! I know Vil’s positioning might be controversial… and let me know if you want to see anything else analyzed too. Thank you, and good night.

[datamodel-of-disaster]

Wondering about something.

Whenever I play choice-based, narrative games, I actively spoil myself. I’m not really a re-player for the sake of it; in most of these scenarios, I want to get my own “best version” of the story on the first go.

The bigger the investment of time and energy a single playthrough requires, the less likely I am to replay it to see where other choices lead. If a I chose “wrong” in a way I can’t undo, and the resulting impact on the narrative makes me not want to engage with that storyline anymore, I will usually just… abandon the game.

My husband is a replayer. He makes up characters to “be the player character” and then makes in-game choices that fit them, regardless of consequences. He’s unfazed by painful, sad, or embarrassing scenes and will even go back and make “bad” choices on purpose, just to see what happens. (I meanwhile already cringe if an NPC is vaguely mean to me)

I wonder how common either approach is. So…

I doubt this will get more than 10 replies, but feel free to share for bigger sample size!

[spoiledleaff]

i’m trying to prove a bit of a point to myself, especially as i find something fucking jackhammered in life, haha! i don’t want this blog to just randomly die and kick back up again in activity? but my brain is very much the ‘you CANNOT show anything that isn’t finished and polished or else people will hate your guts and—‘ you get the point :’D

so!! this is just to prove a bit of a point to myself if you will! :’D i’m already doing my best to encourage myself to just randomly drop my ideas/headcanons and then run?? but even that’s been a bit of a struggle lately; i won’t get into specifics, haha! i still don’t really like merging my life here with my personal life very much, as i don’t enjoy dumping on to you poor little sprouts. but the brain and the body have not been very kind to me lately big surprise, haha!

regardless! answering this silly little personal poll as honestly as possible helps! but don’t worry about reblogging or anything, i don’t particularly care about sample sizes :>

[simonalkenmayer]

Causal relationships are as complicated as a million piece puzzle. Reality is a cesspool of feedback relationships. Everything in there is affecting every other thing to varying degrees. Such that an entire movement doesn’t change one thing, and the way one man wakes up in the morning can affect the planet.

Most of my companies build predictive models. Let me see if I can make this easy for everyone to grasp. Let’s use politics, since it’s election season. Let’s say you want to predict how people will vote. Let’s say you have a general idea of questions to ask. You need to get a small group or “sample” that you can quickly change. You ask them the questions you’ve prepared. Like “will you vote for Mr Dog, democrat” and all the democrats in your sample say “we love dogs. We will vote for Mr. Dog” all the republicans admit to murdering dogs, and all the independents talk about times they wished they could murder their neighbors dog but wouldn’t do it. (That was a politics joke). In any case, from that sample you can get a general idea of how to refine your questions and how to predict what a larger, more diverse group will say. You get a larger sample and run the questions again with modifications for refinement. Say you began with 100 people who generally mimicked the political breakdown of the country (60 Dems, 40 of whom are white, half female etc). You built your predictive model on those 100 responses. So now you create your larger sample and run the model experiment. You refine again, now based on 1000 responses. So forth. As the sample size increases, the number of potential correlations occur. In our above model, let’s say when you get to a sample size of 10k you begin to see that women vote overwhelmingly liberal. This raises questions. You can decide to further explore that relationship through further refinement, or leave it. But there’s just no way to tell fully how much any one thing, say something like a regional specific weather disaster, will change the model. And for every extraneous bit of data you add, the more complicated your predictions will be—white women given the choice between a black female candidate and a white male candidate will choose the male. Why? Etc.

We build artificial intelligences to analyze these huge data sets, and we spit out new questions to provide detail. We do it well.

When people ask me for predictions about reality, I have to weigh as many of these tiny things as I can, I have to account for emotions of people, trends, investments and finances, and on and on. But why should I do this when I can just explain it to you.

Point is, predictions are fun, but it’s an art and a science, and you’re never completely right. Never.

Well that’s not true. Once, I predicted the entire 1-4 lineup of the Kentucky Derby. I won $500 from the pool, but that’s not that spectacular. I’ve won more money play Faro or Poker or even Primero. Of course, I have to adjust for inflation.

In any case…point is, predicting is difficult, especially human behavior. NO ONE knows what’s going to happen. No one. We can only ever say, based on x y z I think abc. And leave it there.

So…if you don’t know what to expect…fair. If you are always wrong? You’re missing a big something or possibly a large group of tiny things. Who knows. Good luck debugging that code.

If you’re always right, you have made a very good tiny model. Time to refine it. Try it out in a bigger pond and see what happens. Or maybe you’re psychic. Or maybe you only think you’re right. Who can say. Good luck dealing with the congratulations

Let’s say you’re right about 2/3 the time. Good job. You’re an analyst who reads.

What I’m trying to say is that predictive modeling takes a lot of skill in many disciplines to do well. It’s not simple. It can be fun. It’s never perfect, but we aren’t omniscient and shit happens, as the proverb goes.

If you want to be a fortune teller, it’s a difficult business.

[whentherewerebicycles]

my beloved pups :) period started overnight and I woke up so sad. but I think the one good thing from this bummer of a weekend is that I feel like I’ve reached some clarity about next steps. I want to hold firm to the original boundary I set before starting this process: no IVF, at least in the US. truly zero judgment of anyone else’s choices but having a biological child is not so important to me that I want to mortgage my own future (and my kids’ futures) to it financially. and I’m genuinely interested in and open to fostering to adopt even though I have some nervousness around the idea.

so here’s my plan, because you know I can’t function without a plan:

depending on what my dr says tomorrow, I’ll pursue additional testing if it’s not crazy expensive. if there’s a physical reason IUI can’t work for me I would like to know so I can feel confident I’ve fully tried that option.

assuming there isn’t a physical reason and I just haven’t gotten lucky yet… I have gone through a lot research to try to understand the clinical guidance. I wanted to understand if the “3 failed IUIs = IVF is your only option” advice is based in good science or if it’s one of those things that people repeat to each other because they’ve heard it a lot. (I also wanted to know if it’s one of those things where our culture’s tendency to pathologize and hypermedicalize pushes people towards the invasive high-tech expensive options sooner than necessary). I am not 100% confident in my ability to interpret scientific data so you know, grain of salt but: it does seem like a lot of the studies that recommend the 3 cycle limit are single-clinic studies with small sample sizes. I found a more recent and much larger study that concluded that people who do 6-9 cycles still achieve similar rates of pregnancy as people who do 3-4. so it seems like the drop-off maybe isn’t as precipitous as the internet would have you believe. it’s hard to imagine doing 9 cycles (financially and emotionally) but I think I could do up to six.

I signed up this morning for the foster care licensing course online (in my state you have to be licensed both to foster and to adopt from foster care). I have to complete eight 3-hour sessions plus additional in-person stuff at the end. I want to set a goal of completing one session per week—maybe an hour a night spread over a few nights. I also want to use this process to engage in sustained reflection and writing about my feelings/fears around pursuing parenting by another route. it seems totally normal and expected that I’d have a lot of head/heart-clearing to do before I’m ready to tackle a big life-changing commitment. so I want to begin that work now. I would like to complete the online training by July 15 (and I of course have my own syllabus of secondary readings I want to do too lol). I’ve heard the home study process you have to complete after training can take anywhere from 3-9 months, so starting now will get me moving in that direction but won’t obligate me to make any big decisions for a while yet.

IVF abroad is still a possibility—I budgeted it out for one of the Greece clinics and I think I could do it for $8-9k which includes all travel and lodging costs (not bad if I also get a fun two-week vacation out of it!). but I couldn’t afford to do that financially or PTO-wise until November/December, so I think it makes sense to move forward on other fronts for now and keep that as a back-burner idea I can return to in a couple months.

and lastly: here’s a final emotional thing I want to register. as I expected it might, this process has been stirring up a lot of old buried gender shame, which isn’t specifically about my body but has more to do with that one quote people reblog on tumblr that goes something like I have always been ashamed of being witnessed in the act of wanting what I can’t have. my gender shame has always had so little to do with my gendered body and so much to do with the feeling that people are watching me want to embody something I can’t embody in a way that convinces anyone. I spent so much of my life feeling shut out of girlhood, and even though most of the time I couldn’t decide if I even wanted to be let into girlhood (my feelings are still decidedly mixed!), that feeling of being shut out still kinda fucks you up inside, you know? I feel like I’ve made a lot of peace with that old pain and a lot of progress towards expanding my conception of what being a woman means (as emi koyama puts it in the transfeminist manifesto: there are as many ways of being a woman as there are women). but it makes sense that when you encounter new triggers for old pain it would take a while to kinda recalibrate and find your equilibrium again. right now I want to have a baby—ie I want to do this human thing that our culture associates (strongly, insistently, at times punitively) with “successful” womanhood. and I am so far failing repeatedly to have a baby! I am failing even with the help of medical interventions that are supposed to ramp up my ~insufficiently feminine~ body’s ability to do this thing that “women’s bodies” are supposed to be able to do without help. like, one million scare quotes around ALL of this—this isn’t what I believe in my head but it is the deeply ingrained cultural script that’s been drilled into my heart! so I think a lot of the heaviness I’m feeling around this whole thing is just like, the old pain, the old shame, the old buried humiliation of being witnessed in the act of wanting something I can’t have. and I may need to make a bit more space for myself to do some gentle and compassionate excavating of those ugly, shameful feelings so I can look at them in the light and say: yes, that’s a thought, but it isn’t mine. it never was. it came from somewhere else, a tiny little fragment of cultural shrapnel embedded in my heart. I may never be able to remove it completely but I don’t have to confuse it for part of me and I have the tools now to keep its slow poison from leaching into my blood. I am whole as I am. I am loved as I am; I love myself as I am. I can acknowledge the old bad feelings with compassion, but I don’t ever have to ever go back to that time in my life when I treated shame as the only or truest truth.

[prurientpuddlejumper]

OK OK OK, I HAVE TO SHOW YOU WHAT I’VE BEEN WORKING ON TODAY

There’s this plant called Bedstraw (Galium sp.) that is related to Madder (Rubia tinctorum) which is one of THE traditional dyes used since ancient times in Europe and Asia for making red/orange dyes. Bedstraw can be used the same way! 

After taking a short class on natural dying at my local LARP and figuring out what mordanting is, I felt like I was ready to finally dye something! 

First I dug up some bedstraw and cleaned the roots. This is where the pigment comes from! I ended up with waaaay more than I need.

Next, I boiled the roots in a big pot with enough water to cover. 

I’m not actually sure if you’re supposed to bring the water to a full boil. Madder is a tricky dye that can produce colors ranging from bright red/pink, to yellowy orange, to brown, and there are all kinds of tricks for getting the shade you want involving temperature and pH. I threw some soda ash in to raise the pH because I read that somewhere, and forgot basically everything else! Living on a prayer! 

So much dye I had to use every spare container! I boiled the roots until the water was nearly black, then strained off the liquid into containers. Then I added more water and boiled again. (Apparently the color can shift through various batches, so I wrote down which batch it was on the labels.)

Next, we scour and mordant the fabric. Scouring just means simmering it with a bunch of soda ash for an hour or so to clean it really good. Strips out all the.... uh.... *tries to remember research* stuff. Yep. Gets all the stuff out. 

Mordanting is basically the same thing in the sense of “boil the fabric again but with different stuff,” only instead of stripping the fabric, you’re adding stuff back. Stuff that will help the dye stick to the fabric.  

Wool and other protein-based fibers (ex. silk) are much easier to dye than cellulose-based fibers from plants (ex. cotton). But my project is a waxed-canvas pouch. Canvas. Cellulose. Of course I had to make this hard for myself. 

And APPARENTLY (I read this after I’d already started making my dye, hours before I was supposed start dyeing) you can’t JUST mordant cotton with alum, you need to TANNIN it, too!!! @#$$^%@!! 

Back outside to grab some twigs off an oak tree! 

How much tannin is in this many oak twigs? How long do I need to boil the twigs to extract it? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Simmer the canvas in oak-juice for a few hours, then in an alum bath, and FINALLY it’s prepped for dyeing! 

I THINK IT DID IT RIGHT BECAUSE THIS IS AFTER ONLY ABOUT 10 MINUTES IN THE DYEBATH!!! 

And it’s a nice red-orange color, which feels like a huge success! Anything but muddy brown is a success in my book! (The canvas itself is an unbleached beige color, so the end result is sort of an orange-brown, but hey--) 

NATURALLY I HAD TO TRY THIS WITH WOOL, TOO!!!! 

I have some plain white wool, so I grabbed a sample size of it, stuck it in a mordant bath without bothering to scour (I made the possibly foolish assumption that it's pre-scoured since I bought it from a woman who sells hand-dyed wools.... so she very well might pre-treat all her wool?) 

 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

BUT HEY IT SEEMS TO HAVE WORKED??? BECAUSE LOOK AT THAT BEAUTIFUL BRIGHT ORANGE!!! YESSSSSS. 

Thank you, wool, for making my dyes look good :’) 

[timelesslords]

have my back, yeah, every day

Annabeth realizes that Percy started sleeping on his back, and she’s determined to know why.

or, a one shot based on this post 

Read on AO3

Annabeth had spent a surprising amount of her life watching Percy Jackson sleep. 

Not in a weird way. It wasn’t like she’d been sneaking into his cabin at night— at least, she hadn’t been before they started dating a month ago. It was just that the life of a demigod was inherently transient, and they’d spent a lot of time questing with each other, and questing meant sleeping in shifts. 

And sure, one could argue that the purpose of shift-sleeping was to watch out for threats, not watch your questing companions sleep. But in the absence of imposing threats it wasn’t like there was a lot else to do besides watch your friends sleep. And maybe Annabeth had focused on watching one friend in particular, so much so that she had picked up on a lot of his sleeping habits.

In the past month since they'd started dating, she'd only honed those observations to their minutiae: she could tell from the twitch of his fingers whether the dream he was having was good or bad. She could tell from his breathing whether he was in a deep sleep or a shallow one. She knew he ran hot and only slept with a sheet, if anything at all. 

So that was why Annabeth found it odd that Percy had suddenly shifted from being an adamant side-and-stomach sleeper to always, always, sleeping on his back.

Admittedly, she’d probably spent more time in the past two weeks watching Percy sleep than she had every other time combined, so her sample size had grown, which could somewhat account for the shift from stomach to back. Except that it wasn’t an occasional switch, something she could have caught onto earlier. It was every single time.

Every random nap (which he took a lot of, these days). Every time she snuck into his cabin at night and he fell asleep before her. Everytime she fell asleep first and woke up before him. Even right now, both of them on his bunk together, his head in her lap-- despite the fact that there was a perfectly good pillow not two feet away. On his back. Always.

Annabeth really wasn’t supposed to be here at all, but Percy spent a lot of time asleep lately, and she didn’t mind bending the rules to spend more time with him. Summer was starting to wind down, and that meant her time with him was starting to dwindle as well. She wanted to spend every possible minute they could together, even if it meant all she was doing was watching him sleep. And okay, maybe they’d spent some time making out before Percy’s nap, but still. He wasn’t asleep yet, but he was getting close. 

He looked so peaceful and relaxed Annabeth almost just kept her mouth shut altogether. But they’d both be going home in a few days, and she knew this was going to drive her crazy until she sucked it up and asked him about it.

"You never used to sleep on your back," Annabeth said, finally unable to take it anymore. 

Percy’s eyes fluttered open sleepily. Annabeth immediately felt a little guilty for depriving him of his nap, but he didn’t seem upset, just confused. 

“Huh?” he yawned. 

“You always used to sleep on your side. Or your stomach. And now you never do,” Annabeth said. She watched as recognition flitted across his features, but he still hesitated before answering. 

"Oh, yeah,” he said, unhelpfully. But Annabeth could tell that her instincts were right, and this was something going on, not just her being a crazy person who spent way too much time memorizing her boyfriend’s sleeping habits. 

Maybe she should leave it alone. He clearly didn’t seem all that excited to talk about it. But she’d already brought it up, and it was clearly bothering him, and well-- Annabeth was curious. 

“Why?” she asked. 

This time he glanced away, his eyes finding the ceiling instead of meeting her gaze. 

I guess after… everything, it just sort of felt exposed," he said, slowly. 

It took Annabeth a second to realize what he meant by "everything." There was the obvious answer, the one that went along with “exposed,” the one that frankly, she was already kicking herself for not guessing from the start. His Achilles spot was on his back, so no fucking wonder he didn’t want to sleep back to the world anymore. 

Annabeth could tell by the tone of his voice that it was more than that, just slightly. But she couldn’t even begin to parse out what that meant without acknowledging the obvious.

“Oh. Gods, I’m dumb,” she groaned, covering her face with one hand. 

He laughed, his shoulders shaking against her legs just slightly.

“You’re not dumb,” he said. His voice was affectionate, but she could tell his nerves about the whole thing hadn’t completely melted away. His finger had started tapping against the bedspread beside him, a nervous, unconscious gesture.  

“Yeah, but I should have…” 

Annabeth trailed off. She should have known. It was obvious. She was the only one who could have possibly known, because she was the only one who knew where his spot was, the only one he’d ever trusted with that information. And she hadn’t realized.

“What? Known?” Percy finished for her, raising an eyebrow. 

“Well, shouldn’t I have?” Annabeth asked, peering down at him through her fingers. 

Percy reached up, tugging on the hand that was still covering her face, pulling it away, down above his head, wrapped in his own. 

“Annabeth, I didn’t even know that you’d noticed I’d switched. It’s not a big deal.”

It had been so easy to forget about it all, the past month. Things had been normal, happy, better than normal, because now they were dating and the war was over and nobody was on the verge of predetermined death. And Annabeth had spent a month wondering why he’d stopped sleeping on his stomach and it hadn’t, not once, occurred to her why, even with the answer staring at her right in the face. She just hadn’t wanted to look. 

If she was honest, the curse scared her. Sure, it provided protection in a more general sense. He was never going to get a cut or a scrape or a burn from the lava wall. But it made everything so tenuous-- all of him was tethered to life through one tiny spot on his back. It could all fall away so easily, and Annabeth had been pushing that thought out of her mind for the entire past month. 

“Hey, you okay?” 

Annabeth glanced back down at Percy, jolted back to reality by his voice. He was frowning, little worried lines etched between his brows. 

“The curse isn’t the only reason,” Annabeth said, ignoring his question, “I mean it is, but-- there’s more.”  

He grimaced a little, but didn’t drop his eyes this time. 

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, trying to cover up his frown with a smile, squeezing her hand. 

But then his eyes flickered almost imperceptibly to her shoulder—where, under the fabric of her t-shirt, there was still a thick white scar from a poisoned knife that wasn't meant for her at all— and Annabeth suddenly understood everything. 

Percy could say what he wanted about the strategic placement of his Achilles heel; that it was small and hard to hit with armor on and all those other things. But Annabeth knew why he’d put it on his back maybe even better than he did. It was the same reason he’d always slept on his stomach, at least until now. Because even after everything he’d been through, all the fights he’d survived and all the betrayals he’d suffered, he was still a little too damn trusting. 

He’d put his weak spot on his back because there was some part of him, however small, that still believed people were good and decent and would face you head on, the same way he would. That they wouldn’t attack you when your back was turned, because even if it would give him the advantage, Percy would never win a fight that way. He’d banked on his own instinct, because that goodness was so built into his worldview he probably hadn’t even realized he’d done it.  

Obviously that hadn’t quite worked out, and Annabeth had almost died taking the knife that was literally and figuratively meant to stab him in the back. And Annabeth knew that that was what he meant by “everything,” not just the curse itself. 

Percy was still looking up at her, patiently waiting for her to be finished thinking, completely oblivious to her realizations. Annabeth bit her lip. She couldn’t tell him all that. For one, it was the opposite of “not worrying,” and for another she didn’t want him to worry about her. 

And she didn’t want him to be scared anymore. She wanted him to bear his back to the world as freely as he had before, because the thought of losing that part of him was painful in a way she didn’t even know how to describe. 

“Get up,” she said, nudging his head with her knee. 

“Why? Ow—” Another nudge and Percy was sitting up next to her, rubbing his temple. As soon as he was up, Annabeth laid down, pressing her back to the wall of the cabin. 

“What are you doing?” Percy asked, his expression a mixture of confusion and amusement.

“Fixing it,” Annabeth said, patting the bed next to her, “Lie down.” 

Percy gave her a weird look, but followed her instructions, tentatively lowering himself onto the mattress next to her, back down. 

“On your side, dummy,” Annabeth said, poking him in the ribs for emphasis. 

Percy frowned, suddenly realizing what she was trying to do.

“But your—”

Annabeth didn’t even need him to finish his sentence to know that he was protesting the fact that her back would be uncovered this way, nevermind the fact(s) that a) the chances of them being attacked at camp in his cabin were slim to none and b) Annabeth was not the one with her lifeline attached to one very specific exposed spot on her body. 

“Wall,” Annabeth reminded him, kicking the cabin wall behind her with one foot, just to remind him that it was there. 

Percy sighed, but was either out of protests or too tired to use them. He rolled over tentatively, his back pressed against her front. Annabeth curled into him, wrapping her arm around his chest, tucking her chin into the crook of his neck.

She could feel him relax under her, something tense in his limbs melting away, his breath slowing and evening out. 

“Better?” she asked, quietly, suddenly a little self-conscious. 

“Better,” he agreed, finding her hand and squeezing it again, “Thank you.” 

Annabeth smiled into his neck, lacing her fingers more securely through his. 

“You’re welcome,” she said, snuggling a little closer to him. 

They spent a quiet few minutes like that before either of them spoke again. Annabeth would almost think Percy had fallen asleep, except that he was rubbing little circles into her palm with his thumb. 

“I could get used to this,” he admitted. 

Annabeth’s chest felt warm, and she didn’t think it was from Percy’s body heat. He was trying to sound casual, but Annabeth could tell he meant it. 

“Yeah?” she asked, softly. 

She could hear the smile in his reply, even if she couldn’t see it. 

“Yeah. If you don’t mind.” 

It was Annabeth’s turn to smile, then. 

“I’m always gonna have your back, Seaweed Brain. You’re going to have to get used to it.” 

[bearificationtransformations]

Becoming a Mass Monster

“Dear Daniel,

Are you looking to get huge? To dominate in the weight room and on stage? To get freakishly big? Of course are! Even since your early days lifting at Eagle Gym, you’ve always dreamed at stepping on stage as a total mass monster. We know you’re hesitant to take on the extreme steroid cycles and growth hormone required to pack on that kind of insane size.   Well, Your friends at Énorme have created the perfect lean mass gainer that’ll add more size and strength than you could imagine.”

That’s how the email began. At first, Daniel figured it was just another new supplement company looking to find representatives, but the little details about his life startled him. How did they know he had an itch to get seriously big? How did they know where he got his start lifting?  Something about the email unsettled him, but it also intrigued him. 

Since he was, afterall, a middle-weight bodybuilder looking to get big, so to speak, in the fitness industry, this  didn’t seem like a bad deal at all. A new supplement for lean mass? He was on board with the idea. 

Daniel Hernandez, with movie star good looks and in fantastic shape, had high hopes of getting attention in the fitness world. A recent set of professional pics had just been sent around to a supplement ad agency only hours ago, but this was the first “bite” he had gotten. He wrote back and said he was interested.  

A few minutes after he shot off an email expressing interest he got a reply:

“Thanks Daniel, 

We’re very happy you’re going to try out product. Just take some before and after photos, and I’m sure the results will speak for themselves! No need to get professional pictures done. Just send us the email with the updated shots and we’ll send you the money.  Your shipment is in the mail and will be sent to: 142 Chestnut Ave, Los Angeles, CA. 90042 USA.

Happy lifting and massive gains, 

The Énorme team”

How did they know his address? This was a bit freaky. Unless his publicist had shared it with them? That must have been the case. Odd, because he didn’t think publicists would share addresses like that, but maybe it was to help him get free samples. 

Only two days later a small package arrived addressed to him from Énorme. Inside was two small vials that simply said “Lean Mass gainer”. 

At first Daniel thought it was a joke. No way was this stuff real.  He hadn’t spoken to his publicist about it, but something about the packaging, its simplicity, the professionalism of how it was put together and the instructions convinced him otherwise. He was intrigued, and the more he looked at the packaging, the more he read the label, the more intrigued he became. After a few days he felt compelled to try the stuff. 

Daniel, following the instructions, downed the first vial. What harm could it do? He treated it like a preworkout and went to the gym. He lifted with so much energy, with a newfound vigor and strength that surprised him. He looked so pumped in the mirror.  His tank top even felt more snug than usual.

As the day went on Daniel swore he could feel his muscles growing. It was like the gym pump never subsided, but kept going. His arms and shoulders were looking bigger and more jacked than ever. Daniel knew his way around anabolics, but he never had heard of anything that worked like this. As he stared at his reflection in the bathroom at home he knew he was bigger. He looked bigger for sure, and his beard was coming in fast. Daniel showered put on a clean shirt and it felt tighter than normal. How was that possible? As the evening went on he continued to feel like his body was gaining more and more muscle mass.

Daniel stepped on the scale that evening. There was no denying now that he had grown. Instead of normal 210 pounds, Daniel was now pushing 240. He was so into this growth he got a boner from just looking at the numbers. Fucking hell, he had actually gained 30 pounds of solid muscle in a matter of hours. He jacked off at his own reflection, seeing his bigger arms flex with each pump. Fuck it felt so good to be big.

Daniel was horned up all night. He kept feeling up his bigger pecs and thicker arms and got worked up all over again. His chest hair, which he usually kept short, was growing in, and his beard was getting longer quickly. Fuck, he was getting hairier. All this testosterone was overloading his system. Even his dick felt fatter in his hands. Daniel slept like a rock after jerking off for the third time in bed. The

The next morning he moved quickly to head to the gym again. He cleaned up all the used up socks around his bed and got dressed. He was bigger and his shirts were tighter. He had a full beard. For the first time in his life he had grown out a full beard. He wore one of his big tank tops only to find it fit him well, hugging his increasingly hairy pecs. Fuck, He looked even bigger. After jerking off quickly Daniel went to the gym.

Fuck he was big. He looked like a pro bodybuilder. The scale at the gym confirmed it. 260 pounds. He was one of the big boys now. Forget fitness magazines, Daniel wanted to be on the cover of FLEX magazine, or on stage at Mr. Olympia. He looked practically stage ready. 50 pounds of lean muscle mass had piled on without seemingly a single pound of fat. If anything, he looked even more defined.

It was hard to concentrate at the gym, he was so horned up. So obsessed with his new size. His strength was way up. Benching 405 was no problem now. He was probably the most jacked, and the strongest dude in his gym.

And he was nearly the size of a real mass monster now. Goddamn he loved this. He loved ever second of it. He was getting boned up at the gym just seeing his own muscles flex and press.

His libido continued running at this extreme high.The growth may have run its course but his testerone seemed to be supercharged. A super horned up 260 pound bodybuilder. Goddamn that wasn’t such a bad arrangement, not at all.

Days went by, and his libido didn’t repent. He had to jack off four or five times a day to keep himself in check. He needed new shirts to fit his broader, beefier muscular frame. Friends at the gym were shocked by his sudden growth. He kept jerking off in the mirror, loving his size, feeling his huge muscles up with his hands as he stroked his fat heavy cock. Goddamn, had that grown too? It felt thicker and maybe even longer, but it was hard to tell.

But Daniel wanted more still. He dreamed of more mass piling on to his frame again. That wave of growth had been such a high, he still hadn’t come down from it. Daniel had to keep trimming his beard and trimming back the chest hair every day. It was growing in fast and thick. He was a beast. It had to be his hyped up test levels.

And that second vial. It sat there on his nightstand, tempting him. He wanted more, he fucking loved being huge, and what a better way to get noticed than to be an absolute mass monster? This was his ticket, it would make his dreams of true muscle freakdom come true. He could be inhumanly massive. Inhumanly strong. Damn, had he always wanted to be that huge? Wasn’t he big enough? Nahh, he wanted more. Whatever voice of his that envisioned him at 260 forever was getting drowned out by the desire for more. Lots more.

So four days after his first transformation into a heavyweight bodybuilder, Daniel decided to make the plunge. Would it bring him another 50 pounds of pure muscle mass? Fuck, he’d be over 300 pounds if it did. Just the idea turned him on so much.

When did he get so horny thinking about muscle mass like this? Was this the side effect of stuff he took? Even other men’s muscles got him worked up now. Fuck, was he gay? Not that he had anything against gay guys, but he didn’t used to get a boner looking at other jacked guys. Now he was into it. Totally into it.

Fuck, maybe he was bi?

Daniel shrugged at the idea. Muscle mass was so fucking hot, who cares. He just wanted more. He wanted to get so huge that he wouldn’t be able to fit into any of his clothes. He wanted to outgrow the fucking doorway.

After hitting the gym that morning, Daniel came back home and without jesistaying, just downed that second vial. A warmth spread over his entire body like he hadn’t felt before. Fuck yeah, it was starting to work.

Daniel could actually see his muscles grow minute by minute, he stood there with the biggest boner of his life, flexing, posing, jerking off.. watching himself steadily grow larger and larger. It was intoxicating, insanely hot. He stepped on the scale just 30 minutes after taking the potion to find his weight had climbed to 280 pounds. He jerked off on the scale looking at those numbers and looking at the mass monster in the mirror in front of him. Jizz flung everywhere in the bathroom.

This was the best experience in his whole life, the best thing he had ever felt. Better than sex, better than drugs. Growth was the hottest thing he’d ever experience. He was so indebted to this company, what was their name? God he would rep them in anything they did now. He owed everything to them now.

God he was getting so huge. So enormous. Becoming the mass monster he always dreamed of being.

The mass kept piling on, faster than before. He walked around his apartment, noticing how his arms had to swing out further to move around his massive blown up lats. His saunter was more exaggerated as his quads had grown thicker and were now pressing against each other. His footfalls were heavy, deliberate. They seemed to shake the walls a little. He was getting hard, his fat dick slapping heavily against his massive thighs. He loved this. Daniel made his way back to the bathroom to examine the changes further. His triceps hit the doorframe as he walked into the bathroom.

How big was he going to get? He looked into the mirror and was shocked to see his size. Looking down he could barely see passed his pumped up pecs, which now was getting a thick coat of fur on them. He sauntered back to the scale. 304... fuck no wonder his arms were flaired out to his sides like that, no wonder his footsteps were so heavy. Goddamn he had made it. He had grown to muscle freak status.

And he was still growing. Steadily growing. It wasn’t noticeable with the passing seconds, but it was event he was still getting bigger with the passing minutes. Lats pushing out wider, shoulders growing more and more broad, pecs blowing up, his arms packing on more mass. He tested the doorway to see if he could clear it at his shoulders now. He still had tiny bit off space to clear the doorway at his shoulders, but not at his arms, which pushed out far from his sides due to their hulking mass. Damn, he really was wider than the doorway now. It was such a rush.

Daniel jerked off furiously again, watching the overblown muscular beast in the mirror flex with each tug on his thick cock. His dick felt heavy and fat in his hands. He was definitely bigger down there now too. No way to deny it now.

He came again just looking at himself. All that freaky mass, that size, that bulk. He was a monster, a gigantic hulking stud. Overblown muscles growing so big they seemed almost impossible. So overgrown.

327 pounds. Fucking hell, that was more than 50 pounds. No wonder this was so much more intense than last time. He began jerking up again, unable to keep his big fat dick down. It had a mind of its own now and it didn’t want to quit.

His beard was getting heavy. Growing higher up on his cheeks. It was getting heavy on his massive chest too. Swirling fur was starting to cover those huge bulging pecs. God he was an animal. A freaky huge muscle bear he thought. Wait, what? A bear? Where did that term come from?

Daniel kept growing over the next few hours. His shoulders finally growing too wide for his door frame. Even sideways, getting through doors in his home would be a little tricky. He was that massive, that thick. All night he had Slowly morphed into a freak of inhuman size. An utter overblown giant in the world of bodybuilding that would put most mass monsters to shame. 360 something pounds of hairy lean muscle. Pure, extreme, mass.

Daniel lost count how many times he blew his loads, he just knew his hefty 9 incher was tired by the end of it, sore from too much use and abuse. His heavy balls were still pumping out more cum, but he could keep up. He passed out that night with cum soaked towels covering every inch of his floor.

Daniel could hardly reconcile with the freak had become. Muscle mass competed for space on his 5’9” frame. He could barely His libido was now barely manageable, his dick was huge, beer-can thick, constantly sporting a chub, and eager to blow. He had to trim his beard back, it had grown enormous since taking the potion. He had to clean up all the hair on his stomach and abs too...at least if he wanted people to see the definition. And he definitely wanted people to see the definition.

Jerking off, Working out, eating, and jerking off more. This was his life now. He was meant to be seen, meant to be stared at. And he did get stared at. Everywhere he went.

Daniel got a new set of professional physique photos taken a few days later. The world of bodybuilding ignited into furious speculation and talk over this new giant, this new 360 pound freak, that was now making his presence known online and on instagram.

Daniel didn’t know how to thank Enorme except to write them back with the new photos attached. He explained to them how much attention he was getting now, how many other offers he was getting from supplement companies... and his deep deep gratitude to their product.

A few weeks later, Daniel got another vial. A hot gay bodybuilder, Jordan, had come over for another hot session of muscle worship when the package arrived. Jordan was just starting to suck off the giant muscle freak when Daniel heard the package come to the front door.

It was from Enorme. A letter of thanks for the photos and a little note. “We wanted to provide you with some more lean mass, in case you’d like to show anyone else how well it works” Daniel look at three more vials with the note “these extra vials are for sharing, that is, if you want to” and a smile crossed his face.

“Hey Jordan” Daniel called out from the hall. “Are you looking to get huge?” Daniel went back to the bedrooms and handed Jordan the vial. “Just drink this”.

[iplaywithstring]

One thing I will never understand is elitism and snobbery in fiber arts, or the idea that the quality (and price) of one’s tools is a sort of factor or reflection of the work or skill of the artist. We are standing on a ton of history that tells us that literal rocks and sticks are perfectly acceptable tools. We have thousands of years of hand sewn garments. Every type of textile has a form that was produced with what was on hand, accessible, and available - and it is amazing. Yes, quality tools make things easier or faster or more comfortable to produce. Yes, the making of those tools is often an art in itself, and there is nothing wrong with wanting or having beautiful tools. Lots of skill and time and effort go into making them, and there is a lot of value in being able to do things more quickly or more comfortably or more consistently. I get that - I’m not saying investing in those things is bad.  What I’m saying, is that when someone is wanting to try things out, it makes a lot more sense to point them towards accessible means rather than making it seem like good results are only possible with a huge investment into tools. It ignores the reality of history, pushes out the traditional practices that have existed and are still in use, and makes taking up these arts seem more daunting and difficult for the average person to take up. What I’m saying is go ahead a make a spindle with a DPN and a bead (CDs and pencils also work, but who even has cds anymore?). Use clothes pins and crochet cotton for bobbin lace (size up the pricking though, or you’ll have a hard time). Go ahead an punch holes in a deck of cards for tablet weaving, or make a backstrap loom out of dowels you have on hand (a yard or two of warp is plenty for sampling, which is the fancy word for trying things out). Knit with acrylic yarn (and then throw it in the dryer if you can, it makes a big difference). Sew with old bed sheets and found fabric and do it all by hand (and amaze people at your dedication, because not many people could keep at it).

[aiweirdness]

How to begin a novel

Last year for National Novel Writing Month I trained a neural net called torch-rnn on 10,096 unique ways to begin a novel. It came up with some intriguing possibilities, my personal favorite being “I am forced to write to my neighbors about the beast.” But many of its sentences used made-up words, or had such weird grammar that they were difficult to read, or meandered too erratically. (“The first day of the world was born in the year 1985, in an old side of the world, and the air of the old sky of lemon and waves and berries.”) The neural net was struggling to write more than a few words at a time.

This year, I decided to revisit this dataset with a larger, more-powerful neural net called GPT-2. Unlike most of the neural nets that came earlier, GPT-2 can write entire essays with readable sentences that stay mostly on topic (even if it has a tendency to lose its train of thought or get very weird). I trained the largest size that was easily fine-tunable via GPT-2-simple, the 355M size of GPT-2. Would a more-powerful neural net produce better first lines?

One of the parameters I can tweak when I’m getting a trained neural net to generate text is temperature - this controls whether the neural net chooses the most likely next bit of text as it writes, or whether it’s permitted to use its less-likely predictions. At a default of 0.7, a relatively conservative temperature, the neural net’s first lines not only make grammatical sense, but they even have the rhythm of a novel’s first line. This is DRAMATICALLY better than torch-rnn did.

I am, or was.

At the mid-day meal the sun began to set and the quiet dragged on.

There was once a man who lived for a very long time; perhaps three thousand years, or perhaps a thousand million years, maybe a trillion or so, depending on how the scientists look at it.

He had the heart of a lion, and the fangs of a man-eater.

"I am Eilie, and I am here to kill the world."

The old woman was sitting on a rock near the sea, smoking a pipe.

I have just been informed, that the debate over the question 'is it right or wrong to have immortal souls' has been finally brought to a conclusion.

When I was a boy, I was fond of the story of the pirate god.

He had a strange name, and he was a very big boy indeed.

The purple-haired woman came to the clearing in the plain, and without looking up from her book, said, "It's too late to be thinking about baby names."

The village of Pembrokeshire, in the county of Mersey, lies on a wide, happy plain, which, in a few years, was to become known as the "Land of the Endless Mountains."

I don’t think the neural net plagiarized any of these? They are so good that I’m suspicious. But others of the neural net’s lines are even weirder, yet in an effective way that opens with an intriguing premise.

The moon had gone out.

I was playing with my dog, Mark the brown Labrador, and I had forgotten that I was also playing with a dead man.

The black stone was aching from the rain.

The short, dirty, and dirty-looking ship that weighed three tons and was three feet in diameter landed on a desolate and green plain.

How many times have I had the misfortune to die?

The first black dog in the park had been captured alive.

Behold the Sky Rabbits!

In the belly of the great beast that was the bovine Aurore there lived, upon the right hand of the throne, the Empress Penelope; and she had, as it were, a heart of gold.

The moon stood on its own two feet.

The reeking maw of the blood-drunk ship, the enemy's flagship, was silent and empty.

The first day I met my future self, I was aboard the old dirigible that lay in wait for me on the far side of the moon.

The child of two cats, and a tiger, a clown, a horse, a bird, a ship, and a dragon, stood on either side of the threshold of the Gatehouse, watching the throng of travelers who came in from all around the world, before he had any idea what was going on.

I think it’s probably doing this accidentally, stringing likely words and phrases together without understanding what any of them really mean. It’s not that it’s good at science fiction or magical realism; it’s that it’s trying and failing to predict what would have fit in with the usual human-written stuff. Some of the neural net’s first lines really betray its lack of the understanding of the laws of physics. It really likes to describe the weather, but it doesn’t really understand how weather works. Or other things, really.

The moon was low in the sky, as though it had been shipped in from the farthest reaches of the solar system.

The first star I saw was a blue one, which became a scarlet one, and then a gold one, and green, and finally a yellow one, which for some years afterwards seemed to be an ebony one, or even a bubbling mass.

The sun rose slowly, like a mighty black cat, and then sank into a state of deep sleep.

The sea of stars was filled with the serenity of a million little birds.

The great blue field was all white, swept away by the blue-gold breeze that blew from the south.

The sky was cold and dark, and the cold wind, if it had not been for the clouds, would have lashed the children to the roof of the house.

The morning sun was shining brightly, but the sky was grey and the clouds aching.

The night that he finally made up his mind to kill the dog, the man was walking home from the store with his wife and child in the back seat.

Arthur the lion had been pretty much extinct for some time, until the time when he was petted by Abernathy the old woman, and her son, Mr. Popp.

One of the disadvantages of having a neural net that can string together a grammatical sentence is that its sentences now can begin to be terrible in a more-human sense, rather than merely incomprehensible. It ventures into the realm of the awful simile, or the mindnumbingly repetitive, and it makes a decent stab at the 19th century style of bombastic wordiness. I selected the examples above for uncomprehending brilliance but the utter tediousness below is more the norm.

The whites of my eyes shimmered, as if my mind were dancing.

I once went to a party where the dress code was as strict as a chicken coop with no leggings and no boots.

A black cloud drifted by, a mottled mass of hydrogen, a black cloud of hydrogen, with the definite characteristic of being black.

I say I am at sea, because I am standing upon the ocean, and look out across the barren, vast throng of the sea.

It is, of course, a trifling matter in the ordinary course of things, if a certain writer were to write a novel, which is a book of stories, which is a book of characters, wherein every detail of the story is stated, together with a brief description of the theme which it concerns.

There was a boy with blue eyes, with sandy hair and blue eyes that looked at all times like he had been pushed through a million compartments.

The Sun, with its rolling shaft of bright light, the brilliant blue of the distant golden sun, and the red glow of its waning corona, was shining.

The man who was not Jack the Ripper had been promoted four times in the last two years.

Felix the Paw was sitting at the table of his favorite restaurant, the "Bordeaux" in the town of Bordeaux, when his father, Cincinnata, came in to say good-by to the restaurant.

It, sir, gives me the greatest pleasure to hear that the Court be not too long in passing away: but that I may have leisure to prepare a new work for the publication of my friend and colleague, the renowned Epistemology, which is now finished; and in which I shall endeavour to show, that this very point is of the highest importance in the subject of the philosophy which I am about to treat of.

It was a rainy, drizzling day in the summer of 1869 and the people of New York, who had become accustomed to the warm, kissable air of the city, were having another bad one.

Repetitiveness is also common, especially at this conservative temperature setting. Once the neural net gets itself into a repetitive state, it doesn’t seem to rescue itself - it’s a problem that people have noticed in several versions of this algorithm. (It doesn’t help that I forgot to scrub the “title” that someone submitted to the dataset that consists of the word “sand” repeated 2,000 times)

The sky was blue and the stars were blue and the sun was blue and the water was blue and the clouds were blue and the blue sky was like a piece of glass.

At the end of the world, where the tides burst upon the drowned, there exists a land of dragons, of dragons, which is the land of the dragons.

It's the end of the world, it's the end of the world, it's the end of the world, it's the end of the world, it's the end of the world, you're dead.

There was once a land of sand, and sand, sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand

Increasing the temperature of the sampling would help the repetitiveness problem, in theory, letting the neural net venture into more interesting territory. But at a temperature of 1.0 the text tends to venture out of everyday surrealism and into wordy yet distractible incomprehensibility.

The praying mules on the top of the hills sounded the final klaxon, lifting their spiked front hoofs as they crept the last few feet of desert landscape past the crest of the enormous swathe of prehistoric sand.

In the glen of the Loch is a ladder that winds way up through a passage to a ledge with soft, moss-laden environmental standards.

Someone whipped a dead squash gibbet across the room, like some formidable war lord unleashing a heavy hunk of silver at home.

One blue eyed child stood up and cried out: "Douay, saurines, my Uncle – Fanny Pemble the loader!"

Jud - an elderly despot, or queen in emopheles, was sitting across the table from the king, looking very thoughtfully into the perplexions of the proceedings.

Oh, you're a coward little fool, as if you couldn't bear to leer at a Prunker or white-clad bodyguard quickly emerging from a shady, storm-damaged area of the city.

Hanging presently in his little bell-bottomed chamber on the landing-house, early in the morning, the iron traveler sat on a broad-blonde sandbricksannel blanket outside the gate of a vast and ancient island.

Long, glowing tongues trailed from your mouth as you listened to what was being said across this kingdom of ours, but growing a little more somber since the week that caused us to proclaim general war.

The night I first met Winnie the Pooh, I had sat in the Tasting-House and heard the Chef unpack the last of the poison upon his quiet dinnertable.

There is, of course, no perfect setting at which the neural net churns out sensible yet non-repetitive first lines. There are just varying shades of general awfulness, interspersed with accidental brilliance.

No matter how much you’re struggling with your novel, at least you can take comfort in the fact that AI is struggling even more.

I generated all the neural net sentences above using a generic “It” as the prompt that the neural net had to build on (it would usually go on to generate another 20-30 sentences at a time). But although the sentences are independent in my training data, GPT-2 is used to large blocks of text that go together. The result is if I prompt it instead with, say, a line from Harry Potter fanfic, the neural net will tend to stick with that vein for a while. I've included a few examples as bonus content for subscribers.

Update: I now have a few thousand unfiltered examples of neural net-generated first lines at the GitHub repository where I have the original crowdsourced dataset. Themes include: Harry Potter, Victorian, My Little Pony, and Ancient Gods.

My book on AI is out, and, you can now get it any of these several ways! Amazon - Barnes & Noble - Indiebound - Tattered Cover - Powell’s

[indieninja92]

Tips for short story submissions

Hello, friends! I haven’t talked about this very much on here, but since around April 2020 I’ve been working as a slush pile reader for a major SF short story magazine. For those who aren’t aware, slush readers - also known as first readers or editorial assistants - are the people who read submissions, also known as the slush pile!

As a writer myself with a couple of short story publications under my belt, I thought it might be helpful for other writers if I shared some tips for getting your story out there into the world. This is going to get LONG, so I’ll pop it under the cut, but the tl;dr is pretty simple - read the magazines you’re submitting to, stick to the submission guidelines, and don’t be an ass. Now... en avant!

For clarity, I’m going to use “market” here to mean any publication that accepts short stories. They’re usually magazines, but sometimes they’re anthologies or competitions etc. “Market” is just a bit of a catch-all term.

1 - Finding open markets

Right out the gate, if you’re not using it already then I really recommend using The Submission Grinder as a way to search for magazines and keep track of your submissions. You can search by genre, word count, how much the magazine pays per word, and a bunch of other criteria. It’s also super handy for keeping track of where you’ve submitted, when you should query about a response, etc. It’s by far the easiest way I’ve found of discovering places to submit my work to.

Otherwise, Twitter is a great place to find short story mags of all sizes. Following a few big ones will get the algorithm working in your favour, and will make you aware of others you might not have heard of.

But what if you don’t know who the big names are in your genre? To be blunt, if you don’t have at least some idea of what the field looks like then you’re probably not ready to submit. You need to be reading short stories if you want to write them, especially if you want to be published. You have to know what’s out there!

This is especially important for...

2 - Finding the right market for your piece

The best and easiest way to know whether a market is right for your work is to read what they’ve already published.

Many markets have free stories available to read online, even if they charge for their full publication. That said, supporting short story markets financially makes sense for short story authors, i.e., some of the people who most benefit from these markets existing. If you have the money, please consider buying a copy of the magazines you want to submit to. If you don’t want to read the magazine because it doesn’t seem like your thing, you probably shouldn’t be submitting to them - it’s pretty unlikely that your writing will be their thing, either.

That said, sometimes money is tight! If you really can’t afford a copy, and they have no examples for free online, try emailing them to ask for a sample story. People are pretty nice, and you lose nothing by asking!

When you’re reading, ask yourself whether your work fits in these terms: content; style; and quality.

Content and style are pretty easy to spot, in my opinion. Let’s say you write science fiction. You go to a newsagent, pick up a copy of Analog. You flick through, and see a lot of hard sci-fi, a lot of real science extrapolated outwards, a lot of clean, clear writing concerned with big philosophies. You look at your story: a high lyrical piece of science fantasy set in a world where wizards move spaceships with their alien mind powers. You think, “Hm. Perhaps all science fiction is not the same,” and submit to Interzone instead.

Quality is harder, as you have to be pretty brutally honest with yourself. Something I see a lot in the slush pile is people submitting and saying “I’ve never submitted to a magazine before” or even “this is the first story I’ve ever written”. Everyone starts somewhere, and good for them for taking the plunge! Aaand they’re not going to be accepted. (OK, maybe, maybe they could possibly be... but also... they won’t!)

That’s not because first submissions are all inherently bad. It’s just that the magazine I read for is one of the most prestigious in its genre. It’s got very high standards, and pays accordingly. Its standards are high. These writers would be far, far better off submitting to lower rates magazines and getting some more practise!

On the other hand, you won’t get published if you don’t submit! There is a middle ground between, “The first draft of the first story I ever wrote is as good as anything Ursula Le Guin ever penned” and “Nothing I write is worth anything so why bother showing it to anyone”. Find that middle ground. Be confident, and realistic. Don’t self-reject, but don’t waste your own time either.

3 - The submission

Read the submission guidelines. Read the submission guidelines, read the submission guidelines, read the submission guidelines, read the submission guidelines!!

If I read 10 stories in our slush pile, I reject 2 at least for being in the wrong format. I don’t even read the first paragraph. I open the document, I see it’s in the wrong format, I close the document and reject it. “But Indie! What if that story was the most perfectly crafted--” Don’t care. If you haven’t formatted your story correctly that means you haven’t met our submission requirements.

Every market has rules. Some of them are basic - a request for a certain font or file format, for example. Some need you show proof of purchase of an old issue of the magazine. For all I know there might be ones out there that ask for a recording of you singing your country’s national anthem underwater. The point is, whatever hoops they hold up for you, if you want to submit then you gotta start jumping.

This goes for content as well as formatting, by the way. If a magazine says “We don’t want vampires” then don’t submit your vampire story to them. You’d think this would be obvious. I know from experience that it, apparently, is not.

Sometimes you’ll see things described as “hard sells” on the submission guidelines. Clarkesworld, for example, includes “talking cats or swords” as something they consider a hard sell. In my experience, this is something editors say because they’re aware of the faint possibility that Margaret Atwood is just this moment putting the finishing touches on her short story, Once Upon A Time There Was A Talking Cat Who Was Also A Sword. You’re (probably) not Margaret Atwood. Your story is (probably) not good enough to make up for the inclusion of something the editor hates.

4 - The cover letter

Popping this in its own bullet point because people fret about them. Don’t fret. Read the submission guidelines. They should tell you what information they’re looking for. Otherwise, some things that I’d expect to see in a cover letter are:

A polite salutation. I don’t mind if you know all the slush readers by name, if you write “Dear Readers”, if you name the editor, etc. Just be polite.

The title of the story, the word count, and any content warnings if that’s appropriate. Don’t outline the plot or the themes - let me see that for myself.

Publication history, if any. If you’ve been published a lot, just mention the highest paying, most recent, or most impressive. If you’ve never been published, you can say that if you like but it won’t make a difference to how we read your story.

A short bio. Remember those short story magazines you’ve been reading? Crib off them. I usually say where I live and the themes I’m interested in exploring. You’ll find your own style pretty quickly.

A polite sign-off. “Yours, FIRSTNAME SURNAME (pronouns)” gets the job done nicely

If any of this is contradicted in the rules then obviously do not do them. Again, please, for the love of all things holy, read the submission guidelines!

Also, don’t put yourself down in your cover letter. Just don’t. “This is a story I just knocked together, it’s OK I guess, I suppose you might like it,” why would I ever want to read that story? Why are you making me open this document dreading what I’m going to find inside? Similarly, “I don’t really know what to put here.” It’s just unprofessional.

Finally, we’ll end at the beginning with:

5 - The story

Your story needs to be finished. It needs to be polished. I rejected one yesterday that still had tracked changes in the document - don’t do that! “I’m happy to make edits as suggested,” you say, but frankly your story shouldn’t need much editing. It should be coming to me done, every comma nailed down and every plot point polished till it shines.

Most of the stories I reject, I do so on the grounds of either not meeting  submission guidelines or being very poor writing on a basic, sentence level. When it comes to stories rejected for actual story reasons, there are two main culprits: stale plot or premise; or nothing happens.

To the first, I would say that I’ve seen more Space Detective stories than I’ve had hot dinners. Oh, it’s the future and they’re farming children for their organs? Yeah I’ve seen that one. What if humanity uploaded their consciousness into virtual reality? Yep, I see that about five times a week. And heaven preserve me from plucky young women in vaguely medieval fantasy settings who are finally coming into their power.

Be different! And if you can’t be different, be very, very, very good. Being different is easier.

To the second point, please. Please, for the sake of your slush reader. Please make something happen in your story. Make it go somewhere. These are the stories that make me actually angry - a premise I’m interested in, a character I care about, a style I like reading... and nothing happens. Nothing changes. Nobody moves from one point to another, nothing is different from the beginning to the end of the story. It makes me want to throw myself through plate glass.

This applies throughout your story, by the way, not only at the end. You have a limited amount of space, so your priorities need to be: establishing what your protagonist wants and cares about, and; making me care about it too. The only way to get good at this is practice, I’m afraid.

Finally, I hope this doesn’t need to be said but don’t be a dick. Don’t respond to rejection letters, don’t submit graphic or triggering stories without warnings, don’t slag off markets who rejected you on social media. Just... Just don’t.

Anyway, I hope that completely unsolicited wall of advice is helpful! Please feel free to add on if there’s other things you’ve learnt as a writer or editor, and here’s to next year being one of great publishing successes for the former, and great stories in the slush pile for the latter!