#and you don't know how or why a combination of frequencies can do this

[abandoned-as-mustard]

why don't we talk about miscarriages more? i'm not convinced it's something that anyone really gets over. it's the mourning of a literal person without any of the closure. the baby wasn't even mine, but i still think about them every day and how cool it would fucking be to just have a new person around by now.

[olderthannetfic]

I thought it would be interesting to see if I could easily determine which ships had the most works updated in 2023.

It turned out to be fairly easy, though a little time consuming. I think these results should be reasonably accurate.

Some points to note:

I did this on my own account, and I have like 2 people muted. So I am capturing the effects of archive-locked works, but my numbers might be off by one or two works due to muting.

Works updated in 2023 is a number that constantly changes as works are deleted or updated again in 2024.

I didn't scrape the entire archive or anything like that, so it's possible I missed a ship that would bump one of these down below 100. I'd take the last few at the bottom there with a grain of salt. But I think we can be reasonably sure the top ones are accurate and that the kinds of numbers that we see at the bottom there (eighteen hundred plus works updated in 2023) are about where the cutoff will be even if we find a ship I missed.

--

As for how I did this, I went to the category tags and the rating tags, filtered for updating in 2023, then excluded ships in the sidebar till I got to 130-150 ships excluded. I also grabbed ships that are big in general from tag search, which you can use to find all relationship canonicals, ordered by frequency.

I combined those lists of ships, cleaned off the works numbers, and generated a list without duplicates. That got me three hundred and something (yes, they were mostly duplicates). I generated the relevant AO3 URLs, opened them in batches with Open Multiple URLs, and copied the works totals into a spreadsheet. Not as tidy as using a script but honestly pretty easy if you know a few spreadsheet formulas to clean up data.

The key here is that if you're only going for pretty good and not accurate beyond a shadow of a doubt, all you need to do is generate a list of likely ships, then check them.

It's possible that there's some much-updated ship that is so evenly spread across these various other tags that it just missed showing up in the sidebar. Hopefully, grabbing more than just the top 100 avoided this problem.

This method also doesn't take into account backdated works. If a whole archive was imported in 2023 but all backdated, there could be some ship that didn't have new works but where AO3 users experience in 2023 was of an influx of content.

I also did this just now, in late March/early April, so some 2023 works have inevitably been deleted or updated again. So the exact work counts don't represent the experience of using AO3 throughout 2023. A fandom active in early 2023 might not have much updating in early 2024, while a fandom active in late 2023 would. This could demote the latter a few places in the rankings since I didn't grab numbers on January 1st.

Even if a person scraped AO3 every day or was monkeying around in the databases, you also have to ask what conceptual answer you're after. Is it works a user could have read at some point during 2023, whether they were deleted by the year's end or not? Is it new-to-AO3 works or only newly-created ones, not including imported archives? Does it matter if the works are fic? If they're in English? What about accidental double-uploads or translations of a single work?

I hope this makes it clear why a definitive ranking is not actually possible.

However, despite these drawbacks, I am confident that the rankings above accurately represent the broad trends on AO3 in 2023. Just don't get too fixated on whether a ship should be at number 73 or number 74.

And, of course, I excluded these from the top 100:

Original Character(s)/Original Character(s) - 20,026

Minor or Background Relationship(s) - 16,187

No Romantic Relationship(s) - 8,052

Original Female Character(s)/Original Male Character(s) - 7,195

Original Male Character/Original Male Character - 6,283

Other Relationship Tags to Be Added - 5,618

Original Female Character(s)/Original Female Character(s) - 3,990

Original Character(s) & Original Character(s) - 3,210

Here's a spreadsheet if you want to see the actual numbers not as a shitty screencap. I left the next few below 100 for context.

[electrozeistyking]

You said Beanie didn't activate until three weeks shortly after N woke up. How pillbaby creation works in your au? In other stories I have read the parents transfer some of ther code to the pillbaby and they instantly wake up. So Beanie was just inactive and no one like try to throw her away when they saw no activity. Sounds mean but is like when animals lay an egg and they threw it away when it doesn't hatch when is supposed to. Also where was Beanie being kept and who was watching her while she was inactive.

Ahaha, I am not like other story writers. Just to clarify, I never said that Beanie activated three weeks after N woke up. She properly activated on the same day he woke up, then kinda didn't do anything but blink for three weeks.

So anyway. Since you asked about the creation of pill babies in Ghost Drone, I am going to once again reiterate I am not like other story writers. Forgo most everything you know about pill babies from other stories, because I up and said "haha lmao who says I need to share headcanons with people" at one point.

First off — these lil guys are first built by scratch and have a combination of their parents' code uploaded into them. It takes a few months to "work through the kinks" in their coding before they properly boot up, because they are fucking eggs and I will treat them as such. And it takes a while for eggs to hatch.

I'm not saying that pill babies hatch in Ghost Drone, though, because it's already been established they don't do that. I'm just saying I think it's funny if they took a few months to boot up. Need not question me for doing things for the sake of my own entertainment is always the answer.

I also decided it takes two months for that to happen. Why? You already know the answer, it's my sense of goddamn humour!!!

Beanie, however, was kind of a late booter. Kinda by a week at max. The numbers are not pinned down, all I can tell you is that she booted up December 8th in 3075 and that was also the day N woke up in the medical wing after the laser canon malfunction.

In fact, it should be noted that Beanie nearly didn't boot up whatsoever! Pretty sure it's speculated that N and Uzi's combined code was just that fucky that it took a few extra days for Beanie's code to finish doing whatever the fuck it was doing for two bloody months, and if it hadn't eventually sorted itself out, she'd be dead.

So. The mainline Ghost Drone AU is the timeline where Beanie decided to defy the odds and live.

While we're at it, here's some other pill baby headcanons that I have that I've never gotten a chance to share, which means I am now taking this as an excuse to share them. So buckle up, babydoll, we're doing this now.

As mentioned by the ghost drone known as Norm in the mainline fic, there is a proper way to hold pill babies, as the top of their heads is sensitive and applying the wrong sort of pressure could ruin their delicate components.

Norm also mentions that drones apparently needed a way to let parents know when they're about to fuck with their kids' programming. Hence why that happens.

Baby drones on Copper-9 are built with voiceboxes. Baby drones built by JCJenson were not, as. well. Why would you waste your money on that. JCJenson, a fucky ass company.

Baby drones also giggle at a frequency designed to encourage their parents to bond with them. Sort of rewards the parents for doing parental things, and not throwing their kid like a football the second they find themselves in danger.

Once a drone is named, it is eventually added into their code, very swanky programmer style. I swear I know what I'm talking about.

I like to imagine that the worker drones at one point originally built their pill babies by scratch, but then they needed to save their resources, so they eventually started reusing their kids' pill bodies for new babies.

You kinda just gotta transfer the first baby to their toddler body, ensure none of their code was somehow left behind, then pass it off to the next set of parents and/or reuse it. Yes I understand this sounds fucked up when you put too much thought into this but are you really expecting any less from me. Don't worry about it.

If a baby eventually doesn't boot up, you reset their code, then either try again or grieve. Yes I understand that sounds awful. Don't worry about it.

Also, before she booted up, Beanie was with her parents the whole time because turns out the nursery is optional. And then when she booted up and her dad woke up, she was with N... while he was in shock for a few weeks,

Does this make sense. Did I cover everything. Actually it turns out I don't care. I honestly just hope this answers everything because I am going to faceplant now

fuck i forgot about v. she was watching over beanie while n was out cold. okay i got it now im going to ascend now

[ghelgheli]

17! but also using the opportunity of the ask game to get to know more about the effortless worldbuilding in sff :)

from the end-of-year book ask

17: Did any books surprise you with how good they were?

I think Three Body Problem is the only one meeting this condition this year so I'll have no trouble staying on topic :> but I'm gonna specifically talk about "hard" SF as I conceive of it—I haven't read any analysis so this may just be a jumble of improvised thoughts.

SF, being "speculative" fiction, of course has to take on the problem of speculating and of presenting things that don't (and perhaps cannot) happen. On average this is accomplished thru a healthy combination of scientific grounding and good-natured handwaving: I drop a few sentences about "quantum entanglement" and you go along with my ansible, or you tell me about "positronic circuits" and I agree that you can make a brain with them. This is the compact that makes SF work because you fundamentally cannot expect speculation without, well, ceding ground on reality.

But at least a subset of SF readers are of the kind to really want to grok how it is that this or that scientific feature of the world works or may come about. Every contraption and novel technology is like a puzzle to be riddled out. This is the place where speculation becomes sincere mechanical prediction, and it's why I love hard SF.

This subset of readers can be matched to a subgenre of writers who commit fully to filling in as many blanks in their technological, biological, etc. speculation as possible. The rows of astronomical data can't be left vague—tell me what frequency of light we're dealing with here—xenobiology isn't taken for granted—what is the neurology of your aliens??—and so on. The dots are connected, the rest of the owl is drawn for real, the image is made crisp. Like fireworks for the reader's brain.

When this kind of worldbuilding is executed well imo it looks effortless. Looks, not is, because behind every explanation of near-c travel is hours of research into at least special relativity and time dilation, along with calculations by-hand. Behind every account of an exoplanet's atmosphere is probably a few papers perused on the subject and several articles on scientific american. Peter Watts, in the note at the end of Blindsight, includes a fucking bibliography of a hundred or so references as well as thank-yous to many an academic he split handles of liquor with. And this is only the visible fragment of what has to be a library of knowledge accumulated both passively and actively to make a speculated world feel as concretely plausible as possible.

None of this is necessary for good SF. The aforementioned compact means any author can opt out of this commitment at any time. But it's what it takes to make tightly-written hard SF, where your conceptual hands are kept diligently at your side, waving an idea through maybe once every five chapters when you have no other choice.

So anyway, Three Body Problem is a tour de force in doing this and doing it cleanly. It uses a storytelling device a lot of hard SF employs to make it work: rather than stuffing dense exposition into narration (at which point, just read the source papers) it deploys a cast of characters who more than anything else, really know their shit. We get exposition trickle-fed through experts who are trying, along with us, to make sense of their novel environments and unfamiliar technologies using their knowledge of the present limits of human understanding. This is what Watts does in Blindsight too, by the way: a claustrophobic ship crewed by technical specialists makes first contact, so everyone has something encyclopedic to say about everything and it's only natural.

What astounded me about Cixin Liu's writing is that he made it work just when I least thought he would be able to. I was sure I was being shown things completely inexplicable and necessarily supernatural until he went and explained them in plain terms; better yet, he explained them in ways that made so much sense in retrospect that I was kicking myself for not seeing the answer. This has exactly the flavour of a good puzzle.

The trade-off hard SF makes is that you are often limited in the metaphorical/thematic work you can do through your speculation. I think the contrast between "calendrical science" in Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire series and Asimov's "psychohistory" illustrates this well.

Yoon Ha Lee has mathematical training, and calendrical science is a speculative field consisting of theorems, conjectures, proofs, etc. in the language of mathematics that stand in for cultural hegemony and power projection. This makes for a great operationalization of soft power: space is filled and distorted by the quantifiable effects of whatever regime is dominant there (the "calendar" here being synecdoche for culture writ large). But obviously he can't fill in the blanks of how a calendar causes spacetime distortions that specifically make one side's weapons more effective, or provide certain formations with shielding effects. This is, I guess, semi-hard (lol) SF—you can see how it's supposed to work, but it's clear that it just won't. What you get in return is pretty politically interesting storytelling.

Psychohistory is the converse: a deterministic-enough lovechild of economics and sociology explained in the Foundation series as using all the familiar methods of linear algebra and differential equations together with unfamiliar innovations of just how to quantify human behaviour in order to make reliable predictions. There are entire chapters dedicated to explaining the conceptual nuance that went into developing psychohistory ("the hand on thigh principle" from prelude to foundation is just about how the theory resolves divergence by reducing insignificant terms to zero) and an entire book to exploring one of its limitations. It's fascinating to read. But you also get little narrative depth out of it, because hard SF, even when done well, is not guaranteed to make a story thematically interesting or politically compelling. This is the Three Body Problem problem too: its political commitments are threadbare and unserious because that's just not what it's about. I couldn't recommend it on those terms, but that's not what I like so much about it. I will say the conceptualization goes a little off the rails in the final chapters, but I think most SF authors were in some kind of string theory inspired fugue state at the time.

What I would love to see (and I'm sure exists) is hard SF that also has interesting politics. Unfortunately that's an intersection of two already-narrow intersections.

ty for ask✨🐐

[kiragecko]

How Common Are Various Vowels?

I've been making a bunch of charts of how common various vowels sounds are around the world. Decided to share them with you guys. Information about the source, limitations, and what they're actually saying is under the cut. (Google Sheets document here if you want a text version.)

These charts are based on data from PHOIBLE. PHOIBLE is a repository of phonological data, ie. the sounds used in various languages. While there are 5,000-7,000 languages in the world¹ PHOIBLE only has data for 2,186. Which may make it the largest phonological database in the world, but means it still covers less than half of the world's languages!

So, these numbers do NOT indicate how many languages have each sound. They indicate how many of the languages REPRESENTED have that sound!

Also, where linguists have disagreed about the sounds in a language, PHOIBLE includes both descriptions. So there are actually 3,020 inventories - which is almost 1,000 more than the number of distinct languages! Some sounds may be over-represented if they occur in a lot of debated languages.

Some areas of the world are more represented than others. Specialized databases for South America and Africa were copied over, but there wasn't anything similar for North America. I'm pretty sure I'd have been able to make a chart for voiceless vowels if there had been, and am sad to not get the opportunity!

I've made a chart for almost every type of vowel that's used in 6 or more languages. I didn't include over/under-rounded vowels because I find them confusing for some reason.² I also didn't include nasal dipthongs because I didn't want to design an entire additional chart OR have a giant one that's almost empty. Both groups only have one sound with 6 uses, anyways.

-

The chart is shaped somewhat differently than other vowel charts. I decided to lean a bit more into formant values for its shape.³ I also wanted to include every type of vowel that linguists actually used in PHOIBLE, not just the cardinal ones common to most IPA charts. So it includes lowered, raised, and centralized vowels.⁴

Some numbers are actually combinations of multiple entries I decided were close enough to group together. These are marked with an asterisk ( * ) on the dipthong chart, and are unmarked on the other charts.

For example, the cell for 'ui' shows 72 occurrences. In PHOIBLE this is 55 occurrences for 'ui', 13 for 'ui̯', and 4 for 'u̯i'. (The final two are indicating the sound is 'uy' and 'wi', respectively.)

Another example: On the main vowel chart, 'ɪ̈' is actually a combination of 'ɪ̈' and 'ɨ̞'. The first has 11 occurrences, and the second 8, for a total of 19.

-

Finally, vowels don't actually have boundaries between them. In many ways, these charts are MORE misleading than ones with fewer options. Its a 3 dimensional spectrum, and sounds can be produced anywhere inside of it. The way people will pronounce the 'same' vowel in different contexts can vary wildly, and easily line up with multiple cells.

At the same time, sometimes precise distinctions are necessary. Our ears are capable of hearing VERY precise distinctions. We learn to ignore many of them while learning to speak, but there are dialects of English that distinguish 'ɜ' and 'ɐ', two muddy sounds that are right next to each other. So there IS value in a chart like this, as long as you can recognize that things are actually really messy most of the time.

-

Notes:

⁰ Before we get into the other notes, I want to get ahead of the people wondering about 'ɶ'. Only ONE of the represented languages use that sound. It's on the main chart so you can know what fits in that space, but that's why it isn't coloured in.

¹ The number of languages varies wildly because the difference between languages and dialects is more political than practical.

² They aren't confusing. They make perfect sense. But my brain kicks up a fuss for some reason.

³ The shape of most charts is partially based on the average frequency of the first 2 peaks of vowels' acoustic spectrums - one acting as the y axis and the other as the x. These peaks are called 'formants'. My charts translate these values slightly more literally - which is why 'e' has a little corner to itself. But it's still stylized - the unrounded back vowels and rounded front vowels have both been pushed back towards the edges to leave some room in the centre. There are a LOT of central vowels!

⁴ If you go to the Google Sheet, you'll see that a few edge cases didn't make it in. I couldn't figure out how to fit them into an already packed space!

[vladdyissues]

Prepare some tea and pancakes because I'm gonna share with you my dp omegaverse au. Sorry for misprints, I try to fix them but always miss some of them.

1) Yes, halfas have ghost genders, too, because it's about a soul, not body. Dani? Well, she's too young yet, her personality isn't determinated

2) There are 3 ghost genders: alpha, omega and beta. Betas are the most part of ghosts (80%). As most people tgey exist to serve alphaa and omegas' wishes, ideas. Beta often doesn't even know what they really want or their desires are only a result of culture traditios. Examples: Bertrand, Technus, Bullet, Skulker*, Fright Knight (*hc that he is born ghost, so, he just want to survive being tge best hunter)

Alphas are the strongest gender (several alpha is stronger than several omega or beta). They dominate in a way people see it. They also barely doubt. They don't an appreciation but alphas often gather ghosts around themselves. As possible morpho feature is huge fangs. Examples: Young Blood, Pariah Dark, Danny* (at least we watched him developing as an alpha. Especially in season 3.)

Omegas dominates as well but through manipulations. This is why most omegas are demons (Desire, Ember, Spectra). They need appreciation, it's make omegas weaker. They make a cult from their persona or exist on their own. A possible morpho feature is fangs, too, but a bit smaller. One more example: Vlad.

3) Spirits is out of gender-party game (Clockwork, Valentine, Nocturn)

4) Instead of heat there's the vibrating period. (yea, sounds smutty, i know) It happens once in 4 years and lasts a month. This period is called from omegas' souls become extremely emotionally vulnerable and their core make vibrations that "vocals" all their deepest worries. Alphas of the same kind can apprehend vibrations and the scent of that omega (it's not sounds actually, they feel it by the whole body; more like snakes' bone conduction). This thoughts like a mantra sounds in alpha's mind, so, they try to help omega. Researchers-ghosts say that in the vibrating period increases the mating frequency.

An simple example of how it works on Pompous pep: Danny was 17 when oneday he started to hear in his head "Vlad needs you. He wants to get some love. You must be this one. He wants to love you and be loved by you. Vlad wants his happily ever after and vanilla family things with you. You know how much he's suffered from loneliness. What a hero would you unless you help him? At least one hug, a dinner, a kiss or just once have a..." Wherever or whever Danny is. This thought haunts him. The whole month.

And yes, omegas' emotions changes fast as a rollercoaster during the vibrating period. (sorry: they're purring. meow)

5) Fangs are for: a) mark your beta slaves; b) mark your omega (mate). Anyway, the mark means "you can't touch it, it's mine". It has the owner/mate's scent. Mated omega soul vibrations can't be apprehended by other alphas. Marks disappear after 4 years.

6) Betas lacks of gamets. Alphas and omegas are both isogamic. If they decide to make a child... they actually MAKE it. They form theur gamets and combine. Future parents watch for the egg, corrects the core from time to time. The eggs develops into the new ghost (halfa) after several months. But the child is still vulnerable. It can't survive without parents.

7) Sex? Well, ghosts can form genitals if they like too but it doesn't connect to mating or ghost born. It's like playing the ukulele. Do if you'd like to. However, I wouldn't say the same to halfas. They are half-humans after all.

That's all! Thanks for your attention and patience!

+ I forgot add to omegaverse au: Halfa born from alpha and omega can be connected to sex any way (e.g. the forming process starts a human way but after bones are ready the egg go out)

[elfhunk]

if i may ramble for a moment:

i need to start volunteering in some youth programs again when my health stuff is sorted out.

i have been dealing with a lot. i am definitely pretty sick in the brain. i will remain private about the gruesome detail, but i have had to check in with myself a lot lately. it hasn't been scary. just a new phase.

but i am walking away with a singular feeling of needing to survive so i can be a better role model for men & boys than they have currently. they deserve better than this.

like... what are their options presently? twitch streamers and youtubers who are affable nice boys? grindset libertarian gym rats & supplement shills? or, y'know, fascists?

or in... increasing frequency, a combination of the three!

in an environment where we mock or patronize even the slightest deviations from hegemonic masculinity to declare carrying a tote bag as fruity.

i can't help but observe a tendency to either minimize yourself into a harmless clown, or become addicted to the pursuit of power & superiority.

i can't help but see people who describe their ideal man as a golden retriever and take pause. a feeling of dread that hits my stomach every time i look in the mirror in the gym bathroom.

i often wonder if anyone wants us to be more than that. i don't know what to do with that feeling. but i know what many other men have done with that feeling. you do, too.

it's not an insignificant piece of how we got here.

i've joked with other people who've worked in youth programs that our job was to keep young white boys from becoming nazis.

and i need to be direct. this is an issue white boys & men are facing. this is our problem.

i am looking at exit poll data and remembering how important that job was.

because i have talked to a lot of boys who still feel like there's no space for them to be a complete human being in contemporary culture.

they feel like their existence is fundamentally harmful, and that the only way to achieve a "positive" masculinity is to ask for nothing and to receive nothing in return. to be stoic and stalwart. to be an impenetrable knight in shining armor with nothing inside. they live in a perpetual state of dimly simmering shame, worried that they are only making the world worse by their existence.

most suffer silently. brief admissions of vulnerability shared usually around some kind of fire. they worry they're burdening their partners with the emotions labor. so they shut up. they man up.

or, they fall prey to the ideology promising them that their rightful place in the world has been stolen. there is a reason they're sad. there's a reason they're angry. the reason is that they no longer have the mandate of heaven. and that it must be reclaimed by force.

and that is why am worried about men.

i want to help. even if i can barely help myself out of these cyclical & self-destructive expectations.

i can't pretend that i am above this as a gay man. it's important that i don't pretend. it's important that i acknowledge the parts of me that beg me to be less of a faggot so i could just fit in and get that power back. i have to shut that part of me up. the parts of me that still fetishize images of male power and domination without a second thought.

i have to start having these conversations with the other men in my life.

there's something really not okay with us.

that's it. thank you for listening, if you are reading the thoughts of one horse who has been without ADHD medication for well over a month but has entered a sort of dissociated zen state.

it's just been the one salient thought i have had all day on the matter.

[keezybees]

Hi! I follow you across social media and I really love your art and am super looking forward to reading Hello Sunshine! I wanted to reach out because I'm also Bipolar and I really appreciate the work you do to spread awareness about it but there's something that I find kind of harmful in how you talk about it, and it's just the insistance that it absolutely can't be treated through non-medical means. I fully understand that meds are life-saving and that depending on the severity of symptoms, length, and frequency of episodes, going without medication can be lethal. However, as someone with Bipolar I but controlled symptoms (and frankly symptoms that seem a lot less disruptive than yours, I'm sorry), hearing that there's no path forward without medication would easily have triggered suicidal thoughts when I was younger. There are a lot of reasons why people can't be medicated (for me it was a combination of family control and financial struggle), but hearing at your lowest that there's no way forward without something that you can't have is really damaging. I think it's totally possible to stress the importance of medical access and the need to work with your medical provider without erasing the ways that non-medical treatments can also be life-saving, depending on a person's situation/symptoms/etc and that some people can live full lives even if their symptoms aren't fully controlled. Anyway, I love your work and I just wanted to raise this alternate perspective because I think you're helping a lot of people, but I also think a lot of people can be harmed by this rhetoric, especially marginalized people who can't seek medication for any number of factors beyond their control.

Hi Anon! I totally hear what you're saying, and so I just wanted to run through a few things to clarify my stance, both for you and for others who might be reading this (omg I am SO sorry this is so long though haha):

I do emphasize treatment a lot, because I think it's really important for people to work with professionals to find ways to manage their illness. This is partly due to my own experience (I avoided treatment for a looong time) and anecdotally, but also because the research we have is pretty clear--untreated bipolar has much, much worse outcomes for a vast majority of people. However! When I say treatment, I don't necessarily mean medication, and certainly not only medication! I absolutely think some people (though it is sadly rare) can find ways of managing their illness medication-free. I just feel that it's best to do this work with the help of professionals + peers (whether that's a psychiatrist, psychologist, therapist, social worker, support group, etc) who can help you find your way, and help you manage symptoms that do crop up (this is especially true if you're currently on medication and choosing to go off of it, since that can come with physical risks). I could definitely stand to make this distinction a lot clearer though, and I'll try to be more mindful of it in the future.

I also can definitely see how my words could imply that I think non-medication ways of treating bipolar aren't valuable, and I'll work on my phrasing going forward, because they absolutely are! My aim is not to dismiss stuff like self-help or lifestyle changes or meditation or exercise, because I think they're great--for example, that kind of stuff has helped a ton with my anxiety and overall quality of life, and I know for a lot of people they help with their bipolar symptoms. But for me, these things simply don't have much of an impact on the bipolar, and our culture's emphasis on them frustrates me because it prevented me from getting proper care for a very long time, and made me feel like a failure for not being able to control my symptoms despite working so hard. So I'll also try to be more clear in the future about whether I'm venting about my own situation vs speaking broadly.

I also definitely hope I've never said anything that implies that our symptoms are inevitably life-ruining! My symptoms aren't completely controlled (particularly my lows), either, and I like to think I live a pretty good life. I think for many people un-treated bipolar can be life-ruining, and I've just heard too many stories about people who thought they could manage on their own only to have an absolutely devastating manic episode to not warn people of the risk. But most of us will continue to experience some degree of symptoms throughout our lives, absolutely.

I totally understand why someone would want to go med-free, or at least try it, and I in no way think the medications we have now are flawless haha. Side effects are awful, life-changing, and can even be life-threatening (I've had some horrible experiences with side effects myself); the meds we have now aren't very effective against depressive episodes for a lot of people (myself included), and for some people they're not effective at all; meds for most people don't completely eradicate symptoms, etc. I'm fully on board with the med struggle, and I honestly spend a lot of time criticizing the options available to us, though less so publicly, since I don't want to further stigmatize the idea of taking psych meds in general!

One of the reasons I emphasize medication (when I do emphasize meds, specifically) is because when I was younger, I was terrified of even the idea of them. I avoided it for years and really, really suffered because of it. I think our culture does in general look down on psych meds, particularly the kind we usually take, so I'm trying to destigmatize the concept of them, and emphasize for people with similar fears that taking meds can be just as life-saving and healing as they are harmful and frustrating, and that it's at least worth trying.

I'm a YA cartoonist (and former teacher, barista at a youth coffeehouse, tutor, I worked for a kids' gaming website...actually all of my jobs apart from dishwashing have involved kids, now that I think of it lmao), so a lot of the time when I'm talking about this stuff on social media, my target audience is sort of...very young people and kids who think they have bipolar (or may have even been diagnosed) but are afraid to seek help and/or don't think they need help and/or don't think help is going to actually help. So my goal is to demystify and normalize the idea of taking meds and/or seeking treatment for those people, and to emphasize that just because they're able to manage their illness now, that might change in the future, and imo they need to be aware of the very real risks, which includes things like an incredibly high suicide rate for unmedicated individuals, and the reality that the illness can be progressive (episodes can get worse and harder to treat the more you have them--they certainly did for me, and I wish I had been more open to the idea much earlier).

On a similar note, it's also important to recognize that a lot of things can look like bipolar, and a lot of people don't really know what bipolar actually looks like to begin with (particularly if you're getting your info from tiktok or similar). So if you've self-diagnosed and never explored treatment options (emphasis on options!) you can easily be missing stuff like thyroid issues, epilepsy, brain tumors, vitamin deficiencies, or a myriad of other treatable mental illnesses that mimic bipolar, and I strongly believe that people deserve care and help for whatever they're struggling with, including the possibility that it isn't bipolar at all!

Finally, I truly hope I've never said anything that comes off like I'm looking down on or judging people who choose to not be medicated for whatever reason! If it works for you then that's phenomenal (I'm jealous tbh) but it's honestly none of my business haha. When I talk about this stuff I do try to stress most people, because we're of course not a monolith, and when I say something like 'a majority of people with bipolar will need some form of medication to flourish' I don't mean to dismiss those who aren't in that majority. It's more that I want people to be open to the idea that they're not failures for needing meds, that they're actually in very good company, as well as to combat the 'just meditate! or try harder!' narrative that's so prevalent in our culture.

Edit: one last thought, which is that part of my target audience is also parents or guardians whose kids might be struggling--kids are obviously the group with the least access to treatment on their own terms. My hope is that talking about my experiences and discussing the risks will help motivate guardians to get help for their kids, and also help motivate kids to seek their own treatment as soon as they're able. Most people develop bipolar in their late teens and early 20s (though my first hypomanic ep was at 16), so it's a relatively small percentage of folks in this situation, but I do see how a kid whose parents aren't willing to help them could take my words badly, so I'll try to keep that in mind!

I'm definitely going to be more careful about how I phrase things going forward, because I can absolutely see how my intent could be lost. Hopefully this clears things up a bit (although it's also possible that we simply disagree, and I think that's okay too--like I said, our community is not a monolith, and a lot of these conversations are fundamentally ongoing)!

tldr; I'll make an effort to watch my words so that it's clear that my target audience really isn't my bipolar peers, and that the target of my criticisms is anti-medication wellness culture + psych med stigma, not the concept of non-medication alternatives or additions in general. And I'll try to do a better job of highlighting when I'm speaking only for myself vs our community as a whole!

[an-spideog]

this is a more general question that may have been asked before, but do you know of any resources or combination of that would help with learning in a similar way to duolingo? the easy access, repetition, and spoken word was extremely helpful with the beginnings of russian, italian, & irish for me but then they fucked everything up

Sorry for the delay on this one, I don't really have a good answer for you. In general there's a lack of high quality resources available for Irish. I made a post talking about why not to use duolingo and what you can use instead, but they're not really equivalents as much as other paths.

I'm not aware of any good apps which provide comprehensive teaching of Irish along with good pronunciation, but some of the stuff in that post may be helpful.

Oh this is gonna sound like such cheesy self promo but honestly I forgot I made this until someone reminded me of it today lmao. I made an anki flashcard deck for Irish, it features nearly 1000 of the most common words in Irish, if you like flashcards and anki you might find this helpful since it does have the repetition and the spoken word aspects (and unlike duolingo it has recordings of native speakers, not their bad TTS).

Anki is kind of annoying to use for some people, it's a bit confusing and has some setup time, but it's really powerful and can be really good for helping you get that initial vocabulary to move on to watching tv and reading books. (Also you can use it on mobile, the iOS app is expensive but the website works fine on phones).

For this deck I picked the words from a dataset of TV subtitles, so the words are actually common in everyday speech (I've seen a lot of Irish word frequency lists which just don't line up with speech), and it has recordings of each word along with definitions, example sentences and recordings of the example sentence. I also ordered the deck in such a way that the simplest example sentences are near the start and you should be able to understand the examples sentences (mostly) with only the words you've done up to that point.

The deck specifically uses Galway Irish, which I don't actually speak myself, but it's more common on the tv show Ros na Rún (and a lot of Irish TV in general), so it was easier to get clips of it.

There's a load more notes about how I made it on the deck page

[supersoakerfullofblood]

Seeing lots of discourse about the woman with a shelf full of NA erotica, and then the post saying she doesn't read, she just consumes porn, and then the backlash to that post. Imo both sides are right, there's just a communication gap.

There's always been a holier-than-thou sentiment about reading compared to other forms of media, which admittedly is fair when you compare it to like Youtube and Tiktok. But as mediums like those grow in popularity, so too does the reactionary stance of "reading good," and this has muddied what "reading" actually means. People conflate "reading" with just consuming the written word, like the act of looking at a page is itself a healthy thing to do. It's certainly healthier than other options, but this argument misunderstands the original conceit of "writing > other media." People who love literature don't love it because of the physical product of a book. They love it because books introduce them to another perspective, and stylized prose from that perspective (a book as a physical product is also nice, admittedly). Literature exists as an act of empathy from one lived experience to another, but the medium doesn't matter. It could be a movie or a show or a podcast. So then we get to the erotica argument.

There's nothing wrong with enjoying a book for whatever reason you want to enjoy it, just as you can enjoy any piece of art for whatever reason you'd like. But I think when you conflate books meant to be consumed (erotica) with books meant to be really thought over, you misunderstand why people have always "read" to begin with, what "reading" has always meant to people. So you have two groups of people:

1. People who have always read to try to refine their worldview and understand the people and cultures and etc. around them.

2. People who read books for pleasure's sake.

The best novels combine these in some ratio (though usually not with erotica, but erotica isn't incompatible with thoughtfulness). But both of these flags have been flown under the broad banner of "reading," even though each group is looking for different things in a book, which again, is totally fine. But you end up with increasingly polarizing, pretentious groups of people spouting about what a book should do, bragging about the titles they have or haven't read ("I've read/haven't read Infinite Jest" vs. "I have/haven't read The Love Hypothesis"), and just generally being annoying.

It's hard, because the verbiage isn't really there for good discourse. You can't really tell someone whose literary diet is 90% erotica that they don't read books like a literary scholar, because that triggers a knee-jerk reaction of "you can't tell me how to read," which, okay, fair, but let's be honest with ourselves. Your bookshelf is color coordinated, almost all of it is NA romance, and there's literal visual porn next to your books. These books are products more than they're art, which doesn't mean you can't read books for their empathetic value, just that you haven't for some of the books you've read. At the same time, if you tell a lit scholar that these are equally valid books, they'll turn their head up, because their definition of a book has always been synonymous with "thing that triggers deep personal inquiry," when in reality, what a "book" is is quite broad.

Again, read what you want, just know why you read and why other people read, and know that these are equally valid and fairly distinct aims, and that, because of this polarization, these aims are increasingly polarized by publishers so that their books sell well--the market churns out poorly written, soulless romance novels just as it churns out curmudgeonly Oscar bait novels at maybe the greatest frequency we've seen because people like picking one of those sides and snapping at the other.

TLDR: At the end of the day, we just can't equate Colleen Hoover and Kurt Vonnegut, and that's okay. Source: I write "serious fiction" and also (admittedly not smutty) McDonalds fanfic

[justkidneying]

Why You're Hungover on Monday Morning

So you know when you get drunk and feel like shit the next day? Have you ever wanted to be able to drink without getting a hangover? Well, I can't really help you there, but I can at least tell you why hair of the dog doesn't work.

Ethanol (CH3CH2OH): this is normal drinking alcohol. When you drink it, most of it gets dumped into your blood and into the liver. What does the liver do with it? It breaks it down into acetaldehyde (which is very toxic) and then breaks that down to acetate. The enzymes involved are Alcohol Dehydrogenase (in the cytosol) and Acetaldehyde Dehydrogenase (in the mitochondria). These both use NAD+ (which is needed for normal metabolism) to do their thing, which leaves us with NADH.

So why is drinking bad for you? Cause it inhibits gluconeogenesis, causes lactic acid build up, and damages your cells (yes, you can handle it and drinking in moderation is fine, but molecularly, it is bad).

Cell Damage: acetaldehyde damages pancreas, brain, liver, and GI tract. It also impairs memory and coordination (obviously, lol), and makes you tired (wow who could have guessed that??). Basically, this compound is the reason you feel like shit. Acetaldehyde is bad for you, but you have to make it to get rid of ethanol. Some people (especially those of Asian descent) don't have enough acetaldehyde dehydrogenase. This causes a build up, so they feel worse and get that nice red face when they drink.

Lactic Acid Build Up: okay so remember all that NADH we made to break down ethanol? It's making us have a bad NADH to NAD+ ratio. We really need that NAD+ to accept an electron and allow us to make ATP (energy). So how can we make more of that? We are going to convert pyruvate (made from breaking down glucose) to lactate. What does lactate cause? LACTIC ACIDOSIS! That is bad.

Inhibition of Gluconeogenesis: do you know what you do when you haven't eaten in a little while? You make glucose (gluconeogenesis). You can make glucose from all kinds of shit, isn't that cool? One of these things is called oxaloacetate. When you have no NAD+, you convert oxaloacetate to malate. You can't make glucose from that. The high NADH to NAD+ ratio also inhibits the gluconeogenesis dehydrogenases needed to make glucose. What I'm getting at here is hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) because you have no usable glucose and you can't make any.

So why is this bad? Well, because you don't have glucose, but your cells are still working (and getting damaged :() you need to give some energy to them to function. This comes in the form of ketone bodies. This is really only an issue for heavy drinkers, but over time and with increased frequency, drinking can lead to ketoacidosis.

But yeah, the reason you feel bad after drinking is mostly due to how toxic acetaldehyde is. That's what causes head ache, nausea, and memory problems (from all the damage it does to those cells). So no, drinking more won't get rid of a hangover, and hair of the dog does not work. Eating food helps though, so you can finally have some glucose to work with.

Now some more notes:

Fatty Liver: this is going to be more prevalent in heavy drinkers, but it happens because you convert DHAP to glycerol-3-phosphate. G3P can combine with fatty acids to make triglycerides, which can go live in the liver and cause hepatosteatosis (fatty liver). This is also bad.

Methanol (CH3OH): this is also called wood alcohol, and can most commonly be drunk via bootleg liquor. Your body uses the same enzymes to break it down, but this time it is making formaldehyde and fomic acid. Fomic acid causes ocular toxicity (aka going blind) and brain damage. So make sure you trust whoever you get your bootleg liquor from, okay?

Ethylene Glycol (OHCH2CH2OH): this is antifreeze. Same enzymes again, but you get glycoaldehyde. This then becomes oxalic acid and glyoxylic acid. These cause lactic acidosis and calcium oxalate formation, which crystalizes in the kidneys, causing renal failure.

Final note: your body can handle drinking, like 1-2 drinks per day. I'm not your mom, so do whatever you want, but at least now you know why you feel like shit as your friends hold your hair back so you can puke in the shitty bar toilet :)

[notbeingnoticed]

Here's an article that illustrates how I get skeptical and don't know how to react to climate change crises promoted in the media.

So... the images are beautiful and striking. There are six of them.

One is fires in California, used to illustrate how climate change is destroying the world through wildfires.

Except that California wildfires are caused by man doing things like sparking power lines or throwing cigarettes out of a car or arson, and the phenomena has been shown not to be related to climate change. (The Tubbs fire, from the images, was caused by faulty electrical equipment). Some will argue that climate change is making the fires worse, but there is far more evidence that poor forest and brush management combined with increased human activity in general (driving around, smoking, using electricity) is responsible for the increased damage and frequency of fires. It also doesn't show the amazing way nature reclaims burned areas. I live in one such place, where the visible remains of a brush fire have basically disappeared over the course of 8 years.

Another is the Aral Sea disappearing. Very visible. Except the article itself admits the sea is disappearing not because of climate change, but because of bad Russian water management and the building of dams to divert the water. Why did they present it as an example of climate change then?

Then we have the iceberg breaking off. OK, this one I don't know about. I do know it is perfectly normal for icebergs to break off, that's how we get them floating around in the ocean. This is a normal process.

But is this one breaking more rapidly or in an unusual manner? Uh... dunno. The article admits that two other ice calving events in the same area were caused by natural forces (i.e. not global warming). So... is this different? I am confused.

Then there's the receding Barnes ice cap on Baffin island. OK, this I can visually see some change and there is some evidence it might be because of global warming. I think. But given the disingenuous items elsewhere in the article my skepticism is kicking in.

Then there's the arctic sea shore receding. They had to look pretty hard for this one, because there doesn't appear to be much overwhelming evidence that the sea has claimed land in other areas of the world, or even other areas of the arctic. In spite of repeated dire and panicked warnings predicting the contrary, the Maldives are fine, Barrow is fine. The article even states this land is eroding due to storms, not being flooded by sea level rise, though the implication and subtle suggestion is that sea level rise is the thing we need to worry about.

So again, I see the earth is changing, but the reasons for it seem to be muddled. The changes are blamed on global warming, except if you look into it in more detail, it turns out... not really? Or only in some cases?

Then there's the image of solar panels being built in the desert. What they don't mention is how many solar power generation plants have failed to produce the desired amount of energy. That happened to a large solar plant in the California desert, where the contracting electric company has cut off their agreement because they aren't getting the promised level of electricity from the solar plant.

It also doesn't mention the huge land space required by these solar power installations, how inefficient they are, and the disruption to the environment that takes place for these space hungry solar electric plants that don't produce nearly enough electricity. (Conservationists in California scream about the impact of the solar power plants).

So from this article I have several takeaways.

First, there is some evidence that some ice caps have been shrinking, and maybe there is some ice shelf breakup due to global warming. There's some Alaskan coastline receding though it's unclear how much of this is due to global warming.

Second, that it is necessary to lie and say that fires and lakes drying up are due to climate change in order to make your point... uh... because there isn't enough evidence otherwise?

And lastly, they want to illustrate what a great thing solar is but in doing so they sort of forget to mention that it chews up huge amounts of space, costs a lot more, harms the environment, and the example used is in the #1 carbon polluting country in the world.

I read articles like this all the time and there is such a mix of truth along with falsehood and disingenuous reporting it makes me question the stuff that looks real and probably is real. If they lie about wildfires, are they lying about the ice caps? If they lie about lakes drying up, are they lying about the reasons why the Larsen C ice shelf broke?

Sure. Climate change is real, the climate has always changed and continues to change. But how much of it is due to man-made global warming and more importantly, what the actual impacts are going to be? I simply don't trust the media. They are hell-bent on presenting an agenda and will cherry-pick facts to support the agenda, not giving a complete and clear picture.

I am certain that some of the things that are reported are accurate and that global warming is happening. But what exactly is going on? I can't tell because I literally can't trust the news any more.

All this produces what I am. Skeptical. Not a denier, not an advocate, just... skeptical.

[kayssweetdreams]

A "Perfect" Vacation Ch 15

Meanwhile, On another part of the Island...

On the beach, Lucy wanted to capture their new environment in the best way she knew: With a painting. She currently was having Cal stand on the beach with a surfboard, in a very...eccentric outfit that combined surfer wear with his love of chess...and there were a lot of checkerprint.

Cal had been standing in his same position for quite a while now, and...he was getting rather hungry, as well as wanted to use the bathroom, but he was willing to wait until Lucy was finished. "Almost done Darling! Just a few more strokes to capture the sunlight...and..." she said as she could feel the inspiration flowing through her. Cal could feel a wave of relief at Lucy's announcement, but that's when he noticed some nearby bushes rustling in the distance.

Lucy, didn't seem to catch on when she let out a gentle but firm "Hold still now Darling. I'm almost finished." However, Cal didn't think he wanted to know what was coming, so in a flash, he grabbed Lucy's arm and pulled them into a nearby bush. The painter gave a cry of surprise before Cal gave a silent shushing motion as two different figures came out...and one of them was a rather grouchy Ka Lā. And next to her was a person that they had never seen before...but something about them spelled bad news.

"What is taking so long?! You said that you found her!" Ka Lā grumbled, her eyes narrowed at the figure "Yes. I did. But then again, you still have yet to convince Thea to sing those songs. Remember that our little experiment only reacts to the right kinds of frequencies. One that is only achieved by a Bruno's voice. And in this case, that voice is Thea Bruno's. You at least managed to get some of our 'guests' to take their bitter pill?" The other figure asked. Ka Lā rolled her eyes "Yes. I luckily managed to get two if them to take that pill...along with the pink haired Brat." She grumbled.

"Well good then. So when it's time for the rehearsal, just have them sit as CLOSELY to Thea as possible when she sings. That way we can see how well the it'll work in other forms as well...as long as we can isolate the subjects. Just remember, We have a deal, and unless you want to return to your...White walled room, you'll get Thea to sing those songs." The figure threatened. Lucy and Cal from their hiding spot could see fear in Ka Lā's eyes...and she seemed to shiver when the figure mentioned a "White Walled Room."

Ka Lā began to throw a tantrum on the beach, and she was very close to where Lucy was painting "Ugh...What a hideous portrait. Who would dare paint this?" She asked, picking it up. "It would belong to the Wong Painter. And I suggest unless you want to face her wrath, like you did from your last encounter with her, you won't lay a finger on it." The figure said. Ka Lā rolled her eyes as she sat it back on the easel and stomped away "Now come along...You have a rehearsal to get to." The figure said.

Cal and Lucy then heard the sounds of leaves and plants rustling and they slowly peeked out to see footprints from the beach going back into the forest. The two of them were visibly shaken by the close encounter, but they couldn't help but be confused by the conversation. They have never met Ka Lā in their entire lives...so why on earth would that figure from before mention a "Past Encounter?" And what kind of pill were they talking about? "Do you think this might be connected with what happened to Eis and Sana?" Lucy asked. Cal couldn't answer.

"I don't know. But I do know we need to tell the others." He said. Lucy nodded, before they could get back out into the sprawling Flora of the jungle, a sharp jab at his neck made him dizzy...but the last thing he saw was another shadowy figure jabbing something into Lucy's neck, as well as something slipping a small pill shaped item into his mouth "Say Aaaah..." The figure said before it all went dark once more...

[reverieaa]

I need a help again, i've problems with physical change subliminals?

I have been listening to subliminals for months to a whole year, I combine subliminals, detachment affirmations and a mental diet, but the problem is, I don't want to wait too many months to have a simple physical change, Im trying to have a good mentality but in the end, it isn't known if It will work for me, because I start reading manifestation guides and seeing gurus like Sammy Ingram Aiva Subliminal Goddess or Hyler, I like to change many things in my physique such as the Warrior skull, having features of my favorite celebrity, pale skin, male body etc. but every time I'm trying to listen to subliminals without obsessing without saying anything bad and maintaining a mental diet, I going to get together with my family and friends, they don't see my changes with subliminals, noticing me normal and nothing different, and i dont say that it doesn't work, it ends me desilusional and sad, I try to have a lot of faith and be consistent with subliminal audios but I see that I am wasting time adding many boosters, flushes, frequencies/morphic fields and law of attraction techniques, they also tell me to use the law of assumption techniques and apply techniques such as living in it end or improve my self-concept but I end up doubting because he wants me to do self-love drink more water and do my own subliminals, I hope to have answers about it

I believe you are looking more for a quick fix rather than an answer because you're not going to be satisfied when I tell you that you should drop everything and take the time to learn abt loa. I doesn't matter how long you listen to subs, what guides you read, how perfect your thoughts are or how long you've been doing this, if you countinue to try and change the outside and desperately search for something you refuse to trust that you already have, you will countinue to succeed in failure. You're not taking action to change yourself, you're taking action in desperation. You can't put other tools on a pedestal and then affirm you're the one in power, that's being double minded.

I believe I saw that you already asked a similar question to many loa blogs and they answered perfectly, I have no secret sauce or anything new to add which this is why i said before that you're not going to satisfied with my answer, because you've asked before and it's no different.

Go within and discover who you are in imagination, give yourself a break and practice trust with yourself. You already know what to do, just don't believe you can.

[re-coding]

I make a stupid decision to decide to make a (fic) writing app, cheers

Well now, I know there's like tons of them out there in the market. A lot of them are good! And even free (or have pretty good free versions)! A reddit thread I found have a few very good ones, you guys can check it out! (I'll add my own two cents later :3)

But look, the only thing I want to do, is to have a place when I can throw my ideas into a list (like what I'm did in my notes app) then auto convert it to a document when I feel like I want to write it. None of them (or at least, what I saw/found) have it!

To do that, I set up a Google Form-Google Sheets system so I can just fill in the form when I get some thoughts™. Then when I feel like I want to add another WIP to my ever-growing list of WIPs, I'll just open the associated sheet, see what idea I would like to write, then create a Google Docs and copy/paste the idea there.

Easy, right? Problem solved?

No, not really. For me, there're a few problems with this.

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The Problem(s)™

The process of opening Google Forms takes forever to load (depending on my Internet) and I have a goldfish memory. What are the odds that I forget my ideas by then.

(Just use phone notes app then) But I'm in the mood to type my fic in a computer 😔😔 I don't wanna copy my prompt there to a doc via phone, or worse, retype it out. There's like 4 steps there at least! I'll lose my motivation by then!

Google Sheets has this problem where the text refuses to wrap properly if you add a long text (my ideas are sometimes a few hundred words of rambling y'know). So whenever I decided to grace the sheet with my presence, I'll need to reformat the wrap if I wanna read what I wrote. That's 1 whole extra step.

I'll need to open at least two tabs here, 1. my sheet file, 2. open a new docs file

Look, they're all pretty minor inconveniences imo, but I'm 1. a lazy mf and 2. a tired mf

So, I made a decision any sane person with a job and 0-energy would do - I thought "Hey, why don't I make my own?".

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And thus begin the brain-storming

Ok, look I'm not that good at UX/UI designing. I figure that should be the first step so I went and watch a few video and stumbled upon Juxtopposed's world's shortest UI/UX design course (it's pretty great, do check it out!). Simple, quick, concise - perfect.

First, I started with designing the user flow. I planned out a general idea of what I want my app to do and how it would flow from there starting from the landing all the way to when users save their work and exit the app.

Boy, I sure hope I did that correctly.

This generally is made up of user actions (except for landing). You may notice how it's mostly AO3 focused because yes, I'm using this just for AO3 - as in I stopped using fanfiction.net, Wattpad and Quotev a long time ago.

I did get some inspirations for some of the features from other existing apps. Like:

Scriever - it's paid, but most people say it's a godsend but personally, I've never tried it. I think it pioneered the scenes idea tho.

Manuskript - Free open-sourced version of Scriever basically! They also have words and phrase frequency analyser and I think that's pretty neat!

MyStory.today - I like the idea that you can edit and view multiple scenes at once but the writing UI itself feels kinda clunky? It feels bothersome to add a new scene below my current one. But free version is enough and that's pretty nice. Oh yeah, not sure if it's just me, or it's kinda laggy

Wavemaker - ok this actually a great one! Everyone should give it a chance! But again, too complicated to just add one simple idea when I just wake up for instance.

Story Plotter - This one is nice. It actually have a idea to story button but, why are there... so many things... to choose before I can start writing the story. Granted, all of them are optional and you can just spam skip... a whole 7 times (unless it's a freeform, in that case, 4 times). But this provides a nice idea to combine more than 1 ideas into one plot tho. Also, not my style

Campfire - Is nice, there's so much things you can customize! But well, the free version can be quite limiting, like what if I need more than 25k words :(

Notion - Ok, here me out, it's not a great idea to write multi-chapters long fics here exactly without some amount of setting up too. BUT I love the markdown system here and I wanted to include it.

Do try some of them out, maybe you'll find your new writing app soulmate, who knows?

So... about the user flow diagram

I'm making this app because of two main features, ok maybe three, that I want to make my life easier and make me happier.

The ideas being converted and directly stored in my writing doc.

Being able to use markdowns to type unlike google docs *squint eyes*

Copying the whole chapter in HTML so I can just throw it in AO3 and click update without worrying about forgetting the formatting OR having to go to those docs to HTML converters.

And a secret fourth thing to maaaaaybe include things like chats, boxes, and other workskin related things

Oh, yes and how could I forgot, syncing progress across multiple devices

So I want to implement auto-save features (well, at least when you're connected to the internet, else it'll save locally first). The database I'm thinking to store these should be the user's own google drive (but that would required the user to sign in to their drive first).

Inversely, I'm thinking if the user did edit the doc in the drive, it should reflect in the app too, so I'll need to think about that. But the idea is that one chapter should be stored in one doc, and then separated by a scene separator symbol (I'll figure this out) to break it into scenes in the actual app. That may be a bit messy to edit in docs though so maybe a traditional folder + docs might suffice but then, there's also a space constraint, where there is too much scenes. That's probably where the web services come in.

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And, oh! another diagram!

Ok look, the user flow made perfect sense to me while I was making it. After looking at it again while writing this... In hindsight, I should also make a screen/page flow diagram, or sitemap, so here it is! So- ta-da~!

So this should be the whole flow of screens for the app. There may be more screens in the future but for now I think this should be it!

The app mainly just consist of -

The home page - which displays ALL your works/books

The ideas page - which is basically my notes app for, well, ideas, word vomit, random shower thoughts about how much you want a fictional character to be xxx

The writing page - which will be the main working space, the rest of the pages like references, characters, places, timeline, chapters and individual scenes can be accessed easily from this page too

The profile page - well, it's your profile! Access your profile settings, change themes, work space settings or what you want to copy in your html here - maybe add friends for collabs and betas in the future? We'll see

───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

And that's it! ...For now

Oh my god, I'll admit, this post went on longer than I expected haha. That's all that I have to share for now! Next up, I'll get started on the wireframing process (moodboards? hunting down apps? reddit???? ok nevermind, reddit sounds like a bad idea). I know I kept calling it app, but I think I want it to have an app, windows, (macs?) and web version.

Thanks for making it this far and reading it all!

[lightyearssurrogatedaddy]

The Void (also known as THE NO-PLATYPI-A-NA-TOR!):

Warning: long

no shadows or lighting, and anything that passes through it looks like they've been painted in flat color.

items not in close contact with a living thing will warp and teleport around.

its attacks your light and dark sensory thing, most people go blind if they spend too much time there. Its like a TV channel constantly switching from black to white at unimaginable speeds.

epileptic people should not enter The Void.

since the ground doesn't technically exist, most passers are able to sit on the 'ceiling'.

sounds appear to echo, even from great distances, and are still understandable.

pain hurts more here, you get a cut and you feel like your finger's on fire.

if you lose something in The Void, you can simply imagine it back into your hands. This trick doesn't work for things you haven't touched.

The Void behaves like a computer, a very, very complicated computer. If you happen to get stuck in it, due to either being mistaken for a non-sentient thing, or purposely forced into it by an outside force, start praying. It's awful.

after getting caught and somehow surviving, you'll take on traits of The Void; which can range from a lot of things including physical, mental, or spiritual alterations.

The Void does not like platypuses(platypi?), and will spit them out. Don't worry they don't get hurt.

its the Ultimate lair of Dr. Doofinsmirtz.

The Void just doesn't like platypi, nobody knows why.

nothing ages, and you can't create new life as a passer. (you literally cannot have children)

special beings can create life in it, either by conjuring up something imaginary or some other tactic.

anything can be zapped into the void, and anybody can zap out of it with ease.

monsters have a lower chance to getting stuck than any other creature due to their more soul based existence.

The Void and the AntiVoid are roughly the same thing, the only factor that makes it a notable difference is that living things vibrate on entirely separate frequencies on the same plane of existence, resulting in the illusion of being alone when someone is actually right next to you. There are other differences but I don't feel like writing them down.

its incredibly random, things happen for no reason.

Ways to create life in The Void:

biologically. (why would you do it that way though when the other options are so much cooler)

combining souls, magic, or mentalities together. Combining mentalities is the hardest to achieve, as you and the other person need to be nearly exactly similar personality-wise.

willing it into existence.

you cannot control things with this ability, just summon it, then its restricted to the few rules that still exist. And you can only summon living things.

How to get stuck in The Void:

breaking or drastically changing something in your sanity.

getting stressed often for the same reason.

experiencing severe, long-lasting PTSD.

repeating a task or word too much.

After surviving however, you cannot get stuck again no matter how hard you try. You're now officially a part of The Void, I'm sorry for your loss.

How to get into it in the first place:

concentrating a fuck ton of energy or magic.

locating a flimsy spot in reality.

being straight up yoinked by The Void for its own mysterious activities.

You can exit using the same methods.

The Void is not a living, breathing thing like you or me, but its still very much alive and you should take as much caution as approaching God. It might get offended by your haircut.