#but i love this story

[yelenablshop]

Yooo everyone!!! If you want a really cute Miranda fic with a interesting and unique story (plus the reader is so real lmao 💀) definitely go check out

She's a Murder-er.

By OG_Coffeestains

on ao3!!!

@macnbriee mvp for recommending it to me

[fangbangerghoul]

WIP WED EVEN THO IM SLACKIN

some wip of Fleeting Pleasures but like....not exactly the next chapter? chapter 7 will be released at a date and time I cannot provide BUT while you wait feel free to catch up or reread the story!

Fleeting Pleasures

He heard the water turn on from afar as he still focused on calming his temper, his breathing. He was angry, livid, at the truth that spilled from her mouth. She was a traitor all along and she slipped past his defenses so easily. It was shameful for him to think about and the hit in his pride just consumed his thoughts. He stood in his room looking out the window to the black sea of stars that was out there tapping his foot while his jaw felt so tight and rigid. She had a hold over him that he was trying to shake off. Her whimpers, the way her mouth and skin tasted, everything about her had him feeling like he could lose himself inside of her for hours more. Delgado knew he was rough with her, not as rough as he could have been. She took him all of him, submitted to him even if it was in exchange for her own sweet release, and watching her underneath him was sublime.

‘That fucking bitch’ The thought repeated within his mind in annoyance and frustration. Delgado was trying to think of anything else but then he heard her faintly get into his personal shower and soft whine came from her. A whine probably from the pain and soreness within her tender muscles, he thought begrudgingly. He was able to tell she hadn’t cleaned herself in a few days with how much blood and dirt was caked onto her skin and in her hair. Delgado wondered if Ghoul even ate in the last few days. Several of his assigned contacts that kept tabs for him within The Key would always comment on the obscene amount of aurora she had been ingesting, something that needed to end if he was going to utilize her to her fullest potential. 

Delgado knew he couldn’t kill her. He acknowledged if she was anybody else, he would without a second thought. The UC had made several attempts in the past to get past the defenses of the Crimson Fleet and most were painfully obvious from any perspective that wasn’t military. The last attempt the man had faltered so easily with his lies and his attempts to be something he was not. After the third time hesitating with an order Delgado was swift to fire his gun directly into the traitor's head. It was as if she belonged within the Fleet and everything about her was the complete opposite of what the UC SysDef’s or Ranger’s could ever produce. Ghoul was a wild card, she did not shy from violence or moral ambiguity, and at the end of the day was more ruthless than some of the members he had with him over the years.

[priestessamy]

genuine question, how do you have an official publisher, but not a single person took more than 5 minutes and 2$ worth of stock images to design the cover?

On the one hand, I appreciate you specifying this is a genuine question. On the other hand, that means you realize this was asked in kind of a shitty way, on anon. So you probably get that while we're not off on the wrong foot, we're not off on the right foot either. But I'm gonna take this in good faith regardless because I think it's worth being transparent.

Cool? Cool.

Bella Books doesn't have any artists on staff presently. That's the short answer.

The long answer is, predictably, longer. I had a whole concept for a cover that I wanted, with the two main characters standing back to back, hand in hand, each examining the instrument of destruction they can't seem to shake. It was poetic and cool. And Bella informed me it wasn't viable.

The best they can do on their mid-sized budget is manipulate stock photos.

[It should be noted at this point that I believe but have not confirmed that they will allow you to use art produced by an outsider artist. But! I didn't have anyone on speed dial nor any idea of who I could go with, I didn't have the money to commission, nor the confidence that after all our work would meet with approval.]

So I came up with a concept and cobbled together a selection of images that I felt would best convey the subject/tone of the book. You can still see that version in some places where the new cover hasn't been posted. Harper's knife, Esther's cross, some suggestive blood in the background. It was simple but good enough. I refused to use images of humans because no one really fit the bill and sometimes that can look even sloppier.

A few weeks before publication, the publisher came to me and said they had spoken with some store reps and gotten strong feedback that my original idea was a little too niche and wouldn't attract the broadest audience.

We were down to the wire and the new version they came up with was that dawn forest scene with the cross dangling off the title. I worries it looked a little too...A Walk to Remember-esque, and scoured the stock library for an appropriate wolf, one with black fur that looked relatively at ease, to give the reader the idea that "this werewolf isn't like other big scary werewolves".

So yes, they were rushed on their end, I was rushed on my end, and the cover ended up being uninspired. In a different universe, I would have just taken the hit and commissioned someone from the start.

But I'll say this much, and I know it's a massive cliche, but the old addage is true. Get past the cover, and I think the text speaks for itself. It's really really really good fucking text that I'm unbelievably proud of. I hope you read it. I hope you love it and tell other people to read it. Or maybe it won't be your thing. That's okay too.

Just, like... Be a little cooler about it next time? For me? Now that we're buddies and all?

[lordkingsmith]

@augment-techs @skyland2703

[yeepof]

I understand that tall men are our POV characters, but surely being like a foot taller than everyone around them would have some occasional consequences

[crow-caller]

as a child there's nothing cooler than a kid who gets subjected to evil experiments and gains special abilities. it's even cooler if these abilities also cause unfathomable suffering to use/against others. children love stories like this.

[lesbxdyke]

I could think of no better way to share the news than this!

So when I was 17, my cat went missing and I'd given up hope of ever seeing him again.

Until on Monday, 27th of May, 2024, my friend sent me a FB post asking 'isn't that your mother?' about the person named on the microchip.

Here he is! 16 years old, and found safe, twelve whole years after he went missing!

Yesterday (Tuesday the 28th of May, 2024) I went to the rescue that had him, and I reclaimed my boy, renaming him Artie! (He'd originally been called 'Cat' because my mother and I couldn't decide on a name)

He's home safe with me now, currently inhabiting my bathroom and purring up a storm every time someone goes in there!

I'll be doing slow introductions between him and my current cat to give them the best possible chance of living in harmony!

Here's some pictures of Artie once we let him out of the carrier:

[thothxv]

I'm going to hijack this thread slightly to talk about another one of Miku's forefathers.

Dennis Klatt was an early speech synthesis researcher at MIT. He did a lot of important things, but the one that's really recognizable is KlattTalk, better known as DECTalk. It sounds noticeably better and clearer than just about everything that came before it. It's still stiff and clipped, don't get me wrong, but it's really, genuinely better. If you want a sense of how much better, here's an audio recording of Dennis basically going through the evolution of speech synthesis, synthesizer by synthesizer. Dennis introduces each synthesizer, so you can get a sense of what his voice sounds like.

DECTalk's default voice, "Perfect Paul", was based on Dennis's voice directly. And while early units were expensive (one is pictured below with a cat for scale), later incarnations of DECTalk were more affordable, and the synthesizer snuck into all manner of places (you may know it as the voice from Moonbase Alpha, for example).

Dennis Klatt died in 1988 from thyroid cancer at the age of 50. In a cruel twist of fate, he began to lose his voice as the cancer developed.

But of course, in a way his voice lived on. One of the things Dennis had been interested in the accessibility applications of speech synthesis: creating ways for the blind to interact with the world, quite literally giving voice to the voiceless. And that's exactly what happened. The clipped, stiff, awkward, computer-generated rendition of Dennis Klatt's voice became someone else's.

This is the part I was omitting for dramatic reasons and that everyone who knows this story is probably screaming. A version of DECTalk's Perfect Paul served as Stephen Hawking's voice. And it was his voice. He went to such great lengths to keep it that when the original synthesizer was breaking down, an expert in hardware emulation was brought in to help develop a software version that would behave identically (the person in question was near, who you may know as the original developer of bsnes, although that is another, much more tragic story).

A dying man gave the very voice he was losing to a man who could no longer speak. There's something sad and bizarrely poetic about that.

whoever decided to turn daisy bell into a spooky dookie creepypasta song is fucking evil. that computer was brave enough to sing us a delightful little song and you do THIS to him? thats hatsune mikus grandpa dude. fuck you

[great-and-small]

Apparently the local university’s undergraduate entomology course sends students to catch insect specimens at the same place I like to go birdwatching, which explains why I saw three enormous frat looking dudes with tiny bug nets and overheard one emphatically say “bro BRO I told you we already have enough lepidopterans”

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

License to Kitty.

[jesncin]

"Who Is Superman? A Private Interview with Lois Lane" a fancomic about hope and connection. I've had this story in mind for so long and I'm very excited to be able to share it at last. Thank you for reading, and happy Lunar New Year!

[moomoorare]

I love nautical and seaside town horror stories. Tell me more about the fog and water that eats people

[creekfiend]

what's my biggest pet peeve well it's when someone makes a text post on tumblr dot com in which they are trying to romanticize the notion of the livestock guardian dog but they don't know the distinction between a livestock guardian dog and a herding dog and also they've never met a livestock guardian dog and do not realize what their attitudes towards the sheep that they protect actually are

[crowkip]

yeehaw, baby!

[autumnleaves1991-blog]

This is why writers abandon stories. It’s not that we don’t love them, it’s because we don’t want to love them alone.

[lackadaisycal-art]

I'm getting so sick of major female characters in historical media being incredibly feisty, outspoken and public defenders of women's rights with little to no realistic repercussions. Yes it feels like pandering, yes it's unrealistic and takes me out of the story, yes the dialogue almost always rings false - but beyond all that I think it does such a disservice to the women who lived during those periods. I'm not embarrassed of the women in history who didn't use every chance they had to Stick It To The Man. I'm not ashamed of women who were resigned to or enjoyed their lot in life. They weren't letting the side down by not having and representing modern gender ideals. It says a lot about how you view average ordinary women if the idea of one of your main characters behaving like one makes them seem lame and uninteresting to you.