#external keyboard WHERE

[engagemachine]

My laptop keyboard is doing a fun new thing where the 'space' key keeps sticking, so I have to press it twice, sometimes even three times before it actually works. IT'S MAKING WRIITNG SO DIFFICULT.

[dullahandyke]

i loooove typing like lol look at my fingers go. until i have to write an essay. then i start hitting my laptop with hammers

[you-have-made-a-fatal-error]

need to shell out for a new laptop before the end of the year - for a lot of reasons but mainly bc support ending for win8.1 makes fixing the current beast rather pointless :/ (and. admittedly. there is a lot to fix. she's old and she has suffered.)

but my current beastie is from the last gen of laptops with a disc drive and the thought of using an external/usb disc drive is enough to make me cry tears of blood

[prismit]

<- their ass has NOT been shiny hunting mew (23 days remain)

[ahordeofwasps]

Part of my laptop keyboard shortcircuited ): Most of my keys work. Some only work if they decide that the time is right and those keys refuse to work in tandem with the shift key, but have cautiously decided to cooperate with caps lock. The keyboard denies me use of the asterisk and typing feels awful in general now 

[slyandthefamilybook]

Who is the antisemite?

I've made many a post about the nature of antisemitism, and I don't expect I'll ever stop. But I've made relatively few posts about antisemites, who they are, and why they are. I don't mean to make a list of every antisemite in the world; I wouldn't be able to finish it before I died at my keyboard. Instead I want to explore a bit into the nature of antisemitic belief and what draws people to it, in the hopes of helping people recognize their own behaviors. This won't be a thorough taxonomy, but will focus on something I believe is at–or close to–the heart of the issue.

When I tell people antisemitism can have a racial component the response I usually get is, "but Jewish isn't a race so you can't be racist against Jews!" Now it's true that "Jewish" is not (currently) one of the accepted racial categories (up until some time in the 1950s you could list your race on U.S. censi as "Hebrew"), but that's not exactly what I mean. What I mean is that there's a pattern of thought that's part-and-parcel of racism and racist ideas, even if it's not always deployed against what we would consider a race. That pattern is bio-essentialism–the belief that there are certain inherent and largely invariant differences between discrete groups of people. This, for example, explains the significant overlap between racism and transphobia, if not always in practice than in thought. If you believe these differences exist along racial lines, it's simple enough to map them onto sex as well. Bio-essentialism is not the only driving force behind racism, but it is a significant one, and one that can be reasonably used as a predictor of racist thought. In this sense, focusing on phenotypes common among Jews (prominent noses, dark curly hair, olive skin) can have a racial component, and can result in behaviors and attitudes that behave like racism, even if Jews aren't a "race".

So we have racial antisemitism, and from here we can sit around and postulate on other alchemical combinations; the intersection of antisemitism and sexism, for example, resulting in stereotypes about nagging Jewish wives, overbearing Jewish mothers, and the Jewish American Princess. The intersection of antisemitism and patriarchy, creating anxieties about weak or effeminate Jewish men. Antisemitism and classism; antisemitism and homophobia; antisemitism and anti-theism; and on and on. But what about anti-Jewish antisemitism? What do we find that makes people hate Jews for being Jews?

I'm going to lean fairly heavily on Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition by intellectual historian David Nirenberg. It's a fantastic albeit excruciating read, and I highly recommend everyone–Jewish and not–pick it up from their local library.

Much like the habits of bio-essentialism characterize much of racism, obsession with blame is (I believe) the core driver of anti-Jewish antisemitism. Specifically blame of the other, although that's generally merely step two in the process. Jews occupy a fairly unique position in the world in that in the vast majority of places where we live we don't really belong. We're treated as guests, reliant on the grace and magnanimity of our hosts to ensure our protection and survival. Part of this is our own doing; throughout the Diaspora our struggle to cohere to our identity has set us apart from everyone else. We don't like to assimilate any more than we have to. But it would be wrong to place the blame for our status entirely on our shoulders, so I will not do so. For the purposes of this post let us take it prima facie that Jews maintain a role of perpetual outsiders–among the nations of the world but not of them.

Throughout history this status has allowed our hosts to define themselves in opposition to us. Jews, who never really belonged, became emblematic of whatever ill the current society, religion, or philosophy decided was most pressing. We gave people opportunity to externalize their own faults, to shift blame from themselves and their comrades to nefarious interlopers. To recontextualize their responsibility to themselves into a Manichaean (I use the word deliberately) struggle between darkness and light. If the anxieties of the day centered around hypocrisy, Jewish Rabbis were the hypocrites you should strive to be unlike. If it was infidelity, it was the Jewess temptresses who were to blame. If it was greed, it was certainly the Jewish bankers who were at fault.

Perhaps my use of past-tense verbs is misleading; this is still the nature of antisemitism today. But this is certainly also how it began. The urge to excise culpability is a fairly common one. It crosses cultural boundaries and expresses itself in toddlers the world around. And so whither the Jews went, childish vindictiveness followed.

When we understand how antisemitism is used as a tool, we can begin to understand the work it does for those who use it. Antisemitism is the antidote to critical thought, to skepticism and self-reflection. It creates a "them", not in reality but in the mind. It explains failure not through any self-conscious rumination, but in the creation of vagrants, infiltrators, and saboteurs.

It now becomes clear why nearly every conspiracy theory is antisemitic, or rapidly hurtling in that direction. One of the cornerstones of conspiratorial thought (as expounded by Michael Barkun in A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America) is the belief that the conspiracies are composed out outside forces. When neo-Nazis compose their "Every Aspect of _____ is Jewish" flyers, they can hardly focus on the fact that the vast majority of the people they blame are American. Americans are the in-group and as such cannot be at fault. Jews are an easily accessible out-group, in part because Jewishness is so "sneaky" (you can be Jewish and not even know it! Even Wikipedia can't seem to decide when someone is Jewish or not!). When people believe that the CIA was responsible for assassinating John F. Kennedy, it's never in their capacity as red-blooded patriotic Americans; it's always the result of insiders from Russia, China, and ultimately, Jews. Even conspiracy theories that don't explicitly name Jews are engaged in antisemitic thought, so long as they seek to pin events on the actions of "them". There's a reason "they" has become memetic in neo-Nazi circles; those who are "them" are most assuredly not "us".

It also becomes clear how and why antisemitism traverses political boundaries, and infects discourse left, right, and center. The extremes–the far-right and far-left (for all the usefulness of the political spectrum, which is not much)–are more prone to antisemitic thought precisely because they are so far from the norm. The more you see wrong with society the more you seek those who are responsible. (Again it's important to note that "antisemitic thought" in this context refers to the habit of looking for outsiders to blame, and does not always map perfectly onto open bigotry toward "real Jews".) When England is close to being a perfect country, it is only through the actions of the Jews that it is prevented from becoming so. When Sovyet communism begins to collapse in on itself, it is certainly the Jews who are accused. It is never "us" or "we"; it is always "they" and "them". And in a fit of cruel irony, when antisemitism becomes un-fashionable, the "no-true-scotsman" fallacy is often deployed, assigning the use of conspiratorial bigotry to impersonators and pretenders.

So what can we do? What can we learn, and how can we change? We can start by resolving to think critically, to not take the easy answers. We can look inward, not outward, and find things to improve in ourselves, rather than assuming that our faults are not our fault. We can be skeptical of conspiracy theories, of people who want to direct our anger in ways that serve their own goals. As always, we can protect and uplift Jews and Jewish communities worldwide. We can orient ourselves toward finding solutions, instead of finding reasons for why we can't. We can unlearn the thought patterns, cliches, and habits of antisemitic thought, or that lead to antisemitic thought. We can stop trying to look for the bad people, and start trying to be the good people.

[lovemyromance]

SJM:

Writes "If anyone can sense something amiss, it would be a mate"

*Azriel figures it out*

SJM:

Writes Azriel & Feyre question the Elucien mating bond

Writes the words "Elain had hoped for love that would trump even a mating bonds

Writes the words "What if the cauldron was wrong"

*HOFAS: Proved the Cauldron to be indeed, wrong*

SJM:

Writes "Elain was the only one who guessed." She nodded towards Azriel. "I think she has you beat for secret-keeping"

Writes Nesta wondering if Elain had been "taking lessons in stealth either from Azriel or those two shadow-wraiths she calls friends"

Can y'all not see where this is headed orrrrr...?

Foreshadowing for Elriel is clear. Has been done. Repeatedly. No interpretation involved. No "well you seee 🤓 - Elain says she is happy in the NC but actually she is miserable bc she wears a black dress " level twisted analysis involved.

And people are still out here sitting behind their keyboards analyzing pages upon pages of sparks and sunlight? Here's a hint: SJM is very obvious with her foreshadowing. If you do not immediately see it - chances are - your interpretation of "foreshadowing" is not accurate.

We have had 3 books of slow Elriel buildup in the background, SJM barely lets a single scene of Elain or Azriel go without mentioning the other one in some capacity (*cough* potatoes), there has been a romantic coded rescue, a scene where the trusted hero offers his love his most prized weapon/possession, a secret tryst under the moonlight, a clear set up of external obstacles (*cough* thank you Rhys for the forbidden love trope)

AND Y'ALL are still sitting here like HM. 🧐 I wonder🧐 who the next FMC could be 🧐 Who is the next couple 🧐 What could possibly happen next in SJM's overly complex and game of thrones level intricate writing and plotting for Fae Smut? 🧐 mayhaps have we even been introduced to the next FMC?

Please end this clownery 🤡🤡 Or just start practicing your shocked Pikachu faces now, ig.

[tanadrin]

all of my complaints about dwarf fortress's interface now are of the "this is actually a problem interesting enough to be worth engaging with" variety rather than the "this is too terrible to even think about where to begin" kind. like i cannot stress enough how much new DF's interface is a 10,000% improvement over the old DF interface. in every conceivable way. just not having to run an external program just to manage your dwarfs' labors is huge.

but there are ways it could be better. clicking on a dwarf in one menu should be able to take you to that dwarf in-game. clicking on food categories at the top of the screen should take you to stocks. i hsould be able to see at a glance, like, how many empty bags there are in my stockpiles, without having to tally up each bag of every type. i don't need to have dingo leather and capybara leather and llama wool and rope reed bags sorted differently. every button in every screen should have a keyboard hotkey. stocks and trading menus and other screens should allow you to select all items by quality/material/type/etc., and make specific assignments like melt/trash/forbid/etc from there. if my planters stopped planting cave wheat because they ran out of seeds, i probably don't need a cancellation notice for that *every time*, and it doesn't need to hang around in the notification list for a year, and be shown to me every time i mouse over the little cancellation icon to see what *new* jobs have been cancelled. can make it hard to tell what's actually a new notification and what isn't at a glance.

there are inconsistencies too--"make iron bookcase" and "make zinc bookcase" are two different jobs so when making work orders i can just search for "make zinc bookcase" directly. but i can only search for "make rock bookcase," and then i have to manually specify the stone (i don't know why you can't make a stone object out of stone, the fact it uses "rock" only in the names of jobs is v silly). it's not a huge pain in the ass, but it doesn't make sense that you specify the material for some jobs in different ways. also you can make too many things out of rock. i'm sorry but you just cannot make a rock book binding! it would be too heavy, and it would break the instant you dropped it. books were usually historically bound in wood or metal or leather. you cannot bind a book in granite or glass.

[callmearcturus]

@vmprsm replied to your post “Raw MKV rip of Mission Impossible: Fallout:...”:

Theoretically, if one wanted their own copies of the MI movies safely on a hard drive....where would one go?

​I mean, there is a site where you can acquire a lot of movies via torrent. I tend to use (rot13) 1337k.gb and I got a heavily discounted Windscribe VPN subscription that I use on almost all of my devices.

But my thing is that... I want commentary reels and special features, and sometimes you'll download a movie but the fucking subtitles are either bad or they become desynced over time and I haaaaate it.

So I've been gathering bits and pieces over the past year to get a Plex system going in my house and it works like a fucking DREAM. But it requires some investment. If you just want to have a few local copies of your favorite movies, this is way overkill. But me, I am canceling all of my family's streaming services and pivoting to our Plex.

So what I have for actually getting the files:

I don't have this model but it's similar to this, a Pioneer External Blu-ray Reader. It sits on a little shelf and is connected to my PC by a USB cable. (I think I got mine for around 68 bucks so you can wait for a sale.)

I use MakeMKV which will rip the big honking raw files from a Blu-ray and leave them as matroshka (.mkv) files.

Because these raw files are ENORMOUS, I compress them in Handbrake. Handbrake is wildly powerful, can convert file formats and make them super small. I have my Handbrake set up special to dump all the non-English language subtitles and audio tracks to save space.

(SUPER BONUS TIP FOR HANDBRAKE: If you have a dedicated GPU, you can give Handbrake permission to use it, and it'll compress shit literally 10x faster, love it.)

At the moment, I am using a Western Digital portable 5TB external harddrive because it was one sale and I couldn't beat the price. Eventually, I want to upgrade to two 10TB HDDs so I can keep a full backup of everything I'm ripping. Because this is a bit of a time and energy commitment and I don't wanna lose all my progress here!

At first I was running Plex off my desktop PC and that worked totally fine, but my family hates having to touch my desktop to wake it up every time, so I very recently grabbed one of these guys:

This is a Beelink Mini PC S12 Pro. It is small enough to fit in my hand but it is a speedy little demon that runs Windows 11. (And eventually I am gonna use it to firewall out ads from our entire home network, I'm pumped for that project but ANYWAY.)

The upside of these mini boys is that instead of being a hefty workhorse like my main computer, this is small and has a low-power draw.

So I moved my Plex Media Server to the mini PC, plugged in my 5TB drive of movies, and now everyone in the house can easily stream anything I have added to the library.

This is what it looks like, if you're curious. Any device in the house that runs Plex and is signed in can select any movie or TV show I have and just watch it like it was Netflix or something.

A month ago, I has like.... 65 movies? Now I'm ripping a few and we're gonna break 100 soon.

"But Arc, where do you get so many blurays!"

My local library.

When I lived in Broward County, FL, I had an extravagantly wonderful library system. Tax dollars at fucking WORK, y'all. Now I live in Georgia and the library system is not nearly as good, but I have still gotten my hands on a frankly ridiculous amount of blurays. Every week I'm picking up 3 to 10 movies or shows, taking them home, making good copies, and returning them.

All of this is an investment and it is work. But as someone who built my computer, built my keyboard, cracked my 3DS and PS Vita-- this is fun to me! This is what I love to do. And through doing it, I've seen more movies in the past year than the last ten years put together.

So yeah, I can't recommend this to everyone, but if you wanna get out of your subscriptions and to just have high quality shit on demand, this is what I'm doing.

Cannot stress this enough tho, if this seems interesting to you: wait for sales. All the components here go on steep sale if you wait patiently. Take your time assembling the parts and keep in mind that shit is modular, you can upgrade parts later.

[padme4000]

Modding on Patch 7 of Baldur's Gate 3

I realise Mac does not have Patch 7 yet, but preparing for users needing help when it does arrive for mac.

1. Delete your modsettings.lsx 

Mac: User/Documents/Larian Studios/Baldur's Gate 3/PlayerProfiles/Public Windows: %LocalAppdata%\Larian Studios\Baldur's Gate 3\PlayerProfiles\Public Linux: SteamLibrary/steamapps/compatdata/1086940/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Local/Larian Studios/Baldur's Gate 3/PlayerProfiles/Public

2. Launch Baldurs Gate 3 Mod Manager / Vortex / or your mod manager of choice and check for updates. In BG3MM press F7 to bring up the update checker.

You can also use the in game mod manager (IGMM) as well.

For me I use both BG3MM and IGMM without issue, however I do advise where possible to mostly stick to one. You can download mod.io mods via their website page here: Baldur's Gate 3 - Mods or Baldur's Gate 3 Mods - mod.io

In fact if you like increasing your party size there is a mod I highly suggest: Adjustable Party Limit for Baldur's Gate 3 - mod.io as it also covers making sure you don't run into those pesty bugs we can get with party increase.

4. Go to your Mods folder:

Mac: User/Documents/Larian Studios/Baldur's Gate 3/Mods Windows: %LocalAppdata%\Larian Studios\Baldur's Gate 3\Mods Linux: SteamLibrary/steamapps/compatdata/1086940/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Local/Larian Studios/Baldur's Gate 3/Mods

5. If you use mods such as ImprovedUI make sure to have the version for Patch 7 and remove all old Patch 6 versions of that mod from the above mods folder, as it states on the mod page.

6. remove Mod Fixer from your mods folder. It is no longer required in Patch 7.

7. You should be ready to launch your game.

A note that the game currently labels non mod.io mods with an alarming triangle icon with a ! in the centre. It is okay to press continue when the pop up shows up.

If using controller switch to keyboard and mouse, as there may be a bug not letting you press continue on controller.

This icon is just to inform you that some of the mods are from external sources, and to also give you a chance to remove the mods from your load order should you wish before continuing. 

Mod.io and external mods such as from nexus mods work fine together.

Some extra resources:

How to remove mods from BG3 | BG3 Modding Community Wiki

Patch 7 Troubleshooting | BG3 Modding Community Wiki

[topazadine]

How to Build a Sustainable Writing Habit Through SCIENCE (Fuck Off, NaNoWriMo)

This is a lightly edited repost from a previous post on my mostly-defunct blog, topazadine.com. I feel like it's an excellent thing to highlight now that everyone's wondering what the hell do to after NaNoWriMo showed their ass as anti-creative idiots.

I have never liked NaNoWriMo and think, frankly, that it is a garbage tool for new writers. If you've done it and enjoyed it, that's great, but overall, it is not the best way to build motivation. At all.

But why is NaNoWriMo so bad? (Other than the current controversy.)

It encourages younger writers to think of writing as something they do during the months of October through November. Not something they do all year round, day in and day out. People will prep for weeks to do a whole novel in one month and hinge all their writerly hopes on that one singular month.

We won't even get into the fact that November is the absolute shittiest month to try to get a novel done because the holidays are coming up, and many working-class people are busting their asses off to get extra hours in before Christmas.

Writing is something you do all. the. time. It is not bound by a singular month. It is not limited to a certain time of year. And when you are working to complete a draft, it doesn't matter season it is. What matters is that you get it done.

So let me show you something better. But first, why should you listen to me? And why is my method an improvement over a shitty organization's AI-riddled contest?

I wrote the first draft of my novel, Poesy (104,323 words) in 39 days.

That’s an average of 2,647 words per day. It is also about twice as much as the typical person aims for during NaNoWriMo. I did not set out to get it done in any given time period, but I still completed way, way more than NaNoWriMo would require in just about the same amount of time (plus 9 days).

I didn't have a buddy group. I didn't have checkins. I just had me and my keyboard and my secret weapon, which I'll show you in a bit.

How is it possible to get so much more done without that external motivator?

Simple: I compete with myself.

You Need to Develop Intrinsic Motivation

What in the world is intrinsic motivation?

Intrinsic motivation is defined as the doing of an activity for its inherent satisfaction rather than for some separable consequence. When intrinsically motivated, a person is moved to act for the fun or challenge entailed rather than because of external products, pressures, or rewards. Frontiers in Neurobiotics

That is, in essence, what we do when we’re writing for fun; or, rather, it should be what we’re doing when we write for fun.

A lack of intrinsic motivation is why people who see novels as a get-rich-quick scheme tend to burn out when they realize that most writers make less than minimum wage. That's called extrinsic motivation, and it doesn't work well for things like writing, where there may not be any easily-defined goals or motivators. Most of us are not going to become rich from our writing.

Here's why extrinsic motivation is unhelpful:

Extrinsic motivation does not always work best; sometimes it can make us perform poorly at certain tasks. For instance, studies reveal that high stake rewards, like cash bonuses, can hinder cognitive capacity. This happens because they shift our focus away from the task and onto the outcome. We can become preoccupied with rewards and all the things that come with them, such as our social status, instead of just doing the work. Extrinsic rewards also tend to narrow our focus on a defined goal and reduce our ability to see other possibilities, hindering creativity. Studies find people perform worse on tasks requiring imagination and ingenuity when they are offered extrinsic rewards, such as higher pay. Nir and Far

And, well, note that "performing worse on tasks requiring imagination and ingenuity." Extrinsic motivation is literally the WORST motivator for writing specifically.

NaNoWriMo is extrinsic motivation, which is not anywhere near as powerful or sustaining as intrinsic motivation. You want to get the shiny achievement award, so you just bang out 50,000 words of slop because you want to say you did it.

You're not motivated by anything but the outcome. That does not a sustainable writing practice make.

But there’s something about intrinsic motivation I want to highlight, because it’s crucial to what I am about to show you: the challenge.

Sometimes writing is a total slog because we’re worrying about all the other things and not on the words themselves. We’re fussing about whether we will ever get published, if we’ve added enough tension in a certain part, if our mom is going to read our porn and realize what a freak they raised.

You cannot think about those things while actively writing.

Instead, you need to focus on the writing process itself. John Schinnerer, a psychologist and life coach, explains further:

Remember as you are in the process of achieving your goals that the enjoyment comes from the doing not the attaining. It is important to find contentment in the act of pursuing the goal while placing less weight on the actual fulfillment of the goal itself.  PsychCentral

So we know you need to find the challenge fun, and you need to focus on the act of putting the words on the page.

In other words, you need to make it a contest with yourself. Here’s how.

Use a Word Count Spreadsheet

Finally! We get to why I’m telling you this! It's free, it's easy, it can be done all year round.

A daily word count spreadsheet is an amazing way to stay motivated and to keep pushing yourself to write because you can literally see the wins rack up. Every day, the word count jumps significantly, which can be much more motivating than just “oh, I’m at 8,453 words.”

More importantly, you’ll start to want to beat your “high score” from the day before.

I’ve highlighted one of the cells so that you can see the simple formula that you need to set up: it’s just yesterday’s count minus today’s count.

Put that in one cell, then click and drag the bottom righthand corner of the cell, and it will populate the rest of the cells in that column with the adjusted formula (B4-B3, and so on).

This is very easy to create. All you have to do is copy-paste the wordcount from your document into your spreadsheet, make sure you have that super-simple formula, and you're done. I have severe dyscalculia and can still use it.

But you can see how much this really helped me:

Things started to really ramp up right at the end because I was getting so motivated by the word counts of the day previous. I wanted to beat yesterday’s high score and keep going.

At the beginning, I was writing maybe 1.9k words; by the end, I was an absolute demon, regularly breaking over 2.8k and then some. On the last day, when the rest of the family was in a post-Christmas hangover, my butt was glued to my chair, banging out those last few thousand words.

Psychologists and life coaches agree that self-competition, a type of intrinsic motivation, is one of the best ways to improve.

Michelle Gibbings, a workplace expert, explains:

When you compete with yourself, you don’t become fixated on what other people are doing; you set the direction and speed. You put yourself in the driver’s seat and control your progress, setting meaningful goals rather than focusing on the progress of others. Michelle Gibbings

Making a word count spreadsheet like this is the definition of setting your own speed and controlling your progress. You can decide on a threshold you always want to hit and then feel very satisfied when you go beyond that.

I set my threshold at 1.5k words every day so that I didn’t feel bummed out when I had an off day and couldn’t get a lot done, but I really wanted my average to be around 2k, so I’d periodically check how close I was to that. If I had a terrible day or was busy, then I’d want to make up for lost time and write more the next day so I kept my average.

Now, I live a life that is quite advantageous to consistent writing: I’m single, I’m childless, I work from home, and most of my hobbies are pretty low-key.

Your life doesn’t look like mine, and that’s totally okay.

There’s no need to match the speed I showed here.

What matters is that your schedule works for you, and that you are consistent.

If you’re a caretaker or have a strenuous job, then set your threshold at just 100 words and aim for an average of 500. However, you’ll be sad if your spreadsheet has a blank cell, so you’ll want to get down at least something, even if you only have 15 minutes to write.

Plus, it’s so encouraging to see the word count go up day by day: much more satisfying than just seeing it in tiny font at the bottom of a Word document or Google Doc.

Or getting some dumb t-shirt from an organization that is actively trying to murder creativity for commercial gain. (Oh, and they protected an actual pedophile from consequences for months on end while he continued to groom children. But that was last year's controversy.)

There’s another reason why this particular method works so well for writers, though.

Word Counts Banish the Urge to Edit

You know you shouldn’t, but you do it anyway. A single word here. A removed sentence there.

The first draft is just about getting everything out, not fixing everything that needs fixing. That part comes later during your five billion revisions where you tweak every single word.

Revising means you have less to work with, which means you have less development. You can get rid of anything that shouldn’t be there when you’ve gotten to that very satisfying “The End” page.

If you are motivated by the spreadsheet method, then you are screwing yourself over if you edit.

Your word count went down! It looks like you did less than you did! You’re losing! Best add more, and fast!

(I had to include my placeholder chapter names; it was obligatory.)

Use strikethrough! Now you know exactly what you’ll be getting rid of when you get to the end of your draft, but you’re not decimating your word count. I removed the entire beginning of the book; that scene is super cute, though, so I later turned it into its own one-shot on my AO3 page.

I prefer doing that because then, if you find that you actually wanted to keep that scene or move it elsewhere, all you have to do is copy-paste from the old version, remove the strikethrough, and you’re all good.

So that’s my tool. It’s really that simple.

But even though it’s so simple, it works wonders for your motivation and consistency, which are crucial for a good writer.

Are you going to give it a whirl? You may find it nervewracking at first, but I encourage you to sample this method, especially if you have a hard time getting motivated.

And if you enjoyed this article, maybe you'll consider purchasing my debut novel, 9 Years Yearning.

This is not the book I drafted last year; it is in fact a prequel of sorts to that first novel. However, it helps set the scene for Poesy (the sixth book in the Eirenic Verses) so that you'll be all prepped for the masterpiece.

9 Years Yearning is a coming of age romance that follows the life of two young soldiers as they go from sorta-enemies, to frenemies, to friends, and then finally to lovers. It is a short read; you can probably finish it in about 2 hours all the way through. Perfect for a weekend romp.

If you do read my book, please don't forget to leave a review!

Reviews are essential to success on Amazon as they boost visibility. (Yes, even bad ones.) Always leave reviews, no matter how short, to support indie authors!

[julesnjian]

Fake Claiming, Side-Eyeing, and the General Distaste Surrounding CDD Systems in Recovery: A rant.

Going to give personal context to get this started up. Welcome to my first syscourse post.

I started off with very little communication between alters besides very passive aggressive, downright abusive remarks. Switches weren't noticeable to us, nor were splits, or any sort of system changes/information, hence why I have no clue who was fronting most of the time during the majority of my life. I also had 0 awareness of how bad my amnesia/time loss was (because duh amnesia).

And then January of 2022, we finally found the CDD community, and we began questioning.

From there we did a lot of communication and empathy work on our own, including system mapping, having conversations between alters and friends, and overall letting whoever could express themselves as safely as possible, which led to an increase in internal and external communication overall.

By the time we were diagnosed in 2024, we had already done a lot of phase 1 work, including a bit of DBT due to our BPD diagnosis in 2019. We had also escaped our abusive household, so it was safer than ever to start delving into more intensive work.

Currently:

- We have a group of about 3 alters that can easily switch in and out with eachother quickly, and can communicate for and with eachother easily

- if other alters are cocon or cofronting we can also communicate with them easily.

- One insys relationship that is going to result in a fusion eventually.

- utilize blending as a technique to gain empathy and understanding with eachother. We can't fully intentionally do this but we have found ways to help initiate it.

I also...

- have two jobs

- live in a rented house with my partner

And....

These are all things that the internet and syscourse in general use as "evidence" to fakeclaim systems online. Because apparently everyone with DID has severe blackout amnesia and is forever ashamed and stuck in their parents basement, unable to lift a single finger to their phone and/or keyboard to even create a discord or tumblr.

This is bullshit.

Someone using multiple PKs is not a sign of faking. Someone able to verbally talk to their alters in real time is not faking. Someone with lower dissociative barriers is not faking. Someone that's able to intentionally blend is not faking.

Recovery. Is not. Faking.

And you will never know where someone is in their recovery via their social media profile.

I've done so much therapeutic work. And I'm tired of being told it's impossible for me to heal by people who think ignoring alters is a valid treatment option.

Do better internet.

[landoscaring]

I really appreciate what you said in your Monza thoughts post.

I feel like people are taking all of this way too far and are trying to create drama where there isn’t. McLaren NEEDS to figure out this championship situation. They have to decide straight up are they going to push for the drivers championship or not bc what happened today cannot keep happening.

Lando and Oscar did everything they could do. They did their jobs as drivers. There is no need for any hate towards either of them. It’s been so disheartening to see how divided fans of Lando and Oscar are.

I grew up in the days of team loyalty (it was less common to solely support a driver and not a team) so it’s exhausting to see the constant hate/criticism back and forth where it really just isn’t necessary or is directed towards the wrong people. (The driver rather than the McLaren team)

As someone who was a Nico Rosberg fan during the Silver Wars era, you are absolutely right that many fans today would never be able to handle a situation like that and it scares me for when/if a true rivalry does occur. I truly wish people would take a step back before spreading hate and negativity. The world could use a little more kindness or even just tolerance.

Anyways sorry for the rambles lmao. Your words just got me thinking <3

anon! let's be friends!!! absolutely 100% with you here.

let me respond to each thing properly:

I feel like people are taking all of this way too far and are trying to create drama where there isn’t. McLaren NEEDS to figure out this championship situation. They have to decide straight up are they going to push for the drivers championship or not bc what happened today cannot keep happening.

people are being fucking annoying, yes. i completely understand that this sport, like any other, makes people feel things very passionately. like, yeah, it's one of the loveliest sports in the world. but because we only have 20 drivers on the grid it can create a really tight vacuum effect where people's opinions are...extremely heightened and a little dramatic? idk. the need to create drama comes with social media, i guess. unnecessary, if you ask me.

Lando and Oscar did everything they could do. They did their jobs as drivers. There is no need for any hate towards either of them. It’s been so disheartening to see how divided fans of Lando and Oscar are.

there are a few things going on here, yeah. i think people expected oscar to be danny ric 2.0 or carlos 2.0 and, well, while it's true the car is of course a large part of it, oscar is not them. he's lando's direct competitor at the moment, which wasn't ever really the case with them. and that's tough to handle internally, and to understand externally. so, there's an underlying expectation for oscar to roll over and let lando win. i think that's problematic for a few reasons, but specifically cause lando is adamantly opposed to it. and oscar shouldn't be expected to, either. all of a sudden oscar is no longer the happy go lucky guy who's making eyes at lando and fits people's narratives as a 2nd driver. that's the problem with having two consistently great drivers, i guess (again, not complaining, i'll take this every day of the week). but yes, ultimately, i think it's human to want to pit them against each other, but so, soooo counterproductive.

I grew up in the days of team loyalty (it was less common to solely support a driver and not a team) so it’s exhausting to see the constant hate/criticism back and forth where it really just isn’t necessary or is directed towards the wrong people. (The driver rather than the McLaren team)

!!! yes. again, the social media effect. i gotta say as someone who's been around the sport for years, and who's attended a gp etc, i gotta say that most of the takes i see on x, for instance, are SO far removed from the actual things people say in an actual gp, it's unreal. there's a lot of animosity and hate and you know, the whole "easy to talk behind a keyboard" could not be truer. i attended last year's gp in austria and sat in the max verstappen grandstand (kind of by accident, but that's another story) and i gotta admit i was NERVOUS AS ALL HELL and thought i'd get strangled, basically. turns out the people around me where SUPER NICE and totally okay with me being a mclaren girly in a sea of dutchies. so. again. vacuum effect. sometimes we also need to learn to not engage (i say this to myself every day before getting into petty fights with people on x, lol). mclaren's the only one responsible for this mess, and they should be the only ones held accountable for it.

As someone who was a Nico Rosberg fan during the Silver Wars era, you are absolutely right that many fans today would never be able to handle a situation like that and it scares me for when/if a true rivalry does occur. I truly wish people would take a step back before spreading hate and negativity. The world could use a little more kindness or even just tolerance.

yup! and it's hilarious that people are so quick to talk about lando's mental health and still continue to engage in this kind of behavior towards oscar (or any other driver, really). it's so unnecessary. oscar has been played out to be like this chill dude without feelings but today's radio after crossing the line? yeah, no. dude's not doing okay either. also... i appreciate a fellow nico rosberg fan! i was a fellow soldier, too.

anyways. thank you for your ask, pal! feel free to just send me a message so we can talk about it a little bit more. it's been an exhausting day, huh? fingers crossed for baku!

kisses!

[word-wytch]

tldr: extremely sappy and vulnerable post ahead

My baby, Don't Stand So Close To Me, turns one year old today.

After a lifelong history of abandoning creative projects, my love for the story I wanted to tell and my newly found passion for the art of writing finally surpassed my fear of rejection, and so I stepped out of the Shire and onto this very long road.

Listen, I know I'm talking about a fanfiction and being very dramatic, but in my opinion every creative endeavor holds the same amount of weight no matter if you're writing books for money, or writing songs for the radio, or songs played only in your bedroom. It all requires you to dig deep and face yourself.

This is the longest and hardest I have ever worked on a creative project in my life.

Over the course of the past year I have come to know myself in a way that I think only writing a novel chapter by chapter for an online community could accomplish. There have been some very dark times, but facing your shadow is always illuminating. Through it, I have grown exponentially both as a writer and as a person.

If I could offer one piece of writing (and life) advice it would be this: Let yourself be where you are. Love yourself here, now. You have been good enough, are good enough, and will be good enough, always. You have nothing to prove to anyone. Your only responsibility is to keep the flame of your joy for creating alive. And that's it. The rest will take care of itself.

I know this is easier said than done. I know this from the painful experience of having believed the opposite about myself at one point.

All artists want to be seen on some level, we need to be. But ultimately, no amount of external validation can supplement the intrinsic love you have for creating. It's even better shared with others, but it comes first from within. I would argue that even if all you had was an idea that made you so giddy that you had to run laps around the room, then you have it all. Your only job is to keep that love alive. It's what I'm chasing every day. More than followers, or notes, or any superficial measure of success. That feeling is everything. The love that I have for my art and this character is everything. The love that I have for myself is, ultimately, everything.

It is a natural part of the journey for all creatives to encounter blocks and adversities, so when it feels like you've lost that joy or you're dragging your forehead against your keyboard in the thick of it, please do not fret. The real secret is that you can never really lose the spark, because you are the spark. You'll feel it again. You're not broken. You haven't failed. Just love yourself anyway and let yourself be where you are, even if that's crying into your ice cream.

Because the gap between how you feel and how you want to feel is not something that once closed, will stay closed forever. It's something you love yourself back to again, and again, and again, and again. And maybe, after your muscles build and your blisters heal, you'll come to enjoy the journey.

For the first time in my creative life I truly feel seen. Thank you all for seeing me, for coming on this journey with me. Thank you to every reader who's left a kind word, every friend that I've made as a result of pursuing this. There are too many to name. I have never been a part of a fan community in this capacity and I feel so unspeakably lucky to have found such a home in this one.

I want to thank, most especially, the people who have both figuratively and literally held my hand throughout the last year behind the scenes. Thank you for sending me coffee, letting me bounce ideas, send massive emails, text feverish voice messages back and forth, keysmash spoilers at you, cry on your shoulder, and fangirl over our boy (and his teacher) @toxicjayhoo @storiesbyrhi @the-unforgivenn @munson-blurbs @jo-harrington @rip-quizilla

I love you.

[spockandawe]

Hello! I've been thinking about binding some danmei novels in my native language, but I don't know where to start. I found your blog recently and find it very inspiring! I was wondering if maybe you could share with me what tools and materials would be good to get started with?

Sure!!!! So, I'm on mobile and don't have links at hand, but if you go back through my bookbinding tag, there are other replies I've got about the materials for making a book specifically. The renegade publishing blog also has resource documents that walk through the bookbinding process and include links to educational materials, etc. So for here, I'll focus on the danmei side of things!

So, a fun feature about these books is that they tend to run LONG. I've seen a number of people try to take up bookbinding in google docs, and honestly, it's doing things on hard mode. For many danmei, it's basically impossible. I think my EARLIEST earliest attempt at svsss began in gdocs, and that's not a super long novel, but gdocs was choking on it. A word processor on your desktop is going to be your best bet. Personally, i invested in a microsoft office license, because it was familiar and i could afford it. But the free parallel to that will be libre office, which does basically everything word can do, with just minor differences.

On the fancy end of bookbinding software, affinity, indesign, and microsoft publisher are also names you may hear tossed around. These can do fancier, more artistic layouts, but also come with a heavier price tag. And because i had webnovels on my radar from the start, i wanted something ROBUST. I wanted to be able to dump all of the husky and his white cat shizun into a single file and work from it. And i did eventually do that! Being able to typeset a single file rather than repeat each step across several is great, especially since i tend to tweak design choices as i go.

For danmei, you're also going to want a robust printer. I have a color laser that's been an absolute beast of a machine, but a black and white laser can get you a long ways, and monochrome designs can be very elegant. You don't want an HP brand printer, their toner subscription practices are downright predatory, but Brother and Canon are names I've seen recommended highly. You probably don't want an inkjet printer, because long books take a LOT of ink. The one exception would be if you can find an affordable ink tank printer.

And the last major thing i can think of is that if your main computer is a laptop, consider typesetting with an external mouse and keyboard! Danmei novels are split into lots of short chapters, frequently split across just as many web pages, with lots of footnotes to format, and laptops are convenient but not ergonomic. Doing too much on there is just asking for a repetitive strain injury. I've done it, but often paid for my sins in pain! And your laptop keyboard may start complaining too, I'm almost certain my first typeset of mdzs was the nail in the coffin for my last laptop's keyboard, haha

I hope that helps! Best of luck to you! Ive found binding cnovels to be EXTREMELY rewarding, even though my original reason was because these things would NEVER be licensed in english 😂 I'm delighted to see people experimenting with it for other translations in other languages, I really hope it goes well for you!!!!

[iwonderwh0]

I have thoughts about JB300 androids that we see in the Stratford Tower that work on TV.

Live translations require a ridiculous amount of equipment: cameras, tripods, cables (A LOT of cables), computers, keyboards, monitors, additional monitors for operators to see what's up, audio equipment, extension cords, all kinds of converters...my point is that it's a lot of stuff and shit is heavy and expensive. Even the most simple set-up requires the amount of equipment that's heavy, expensive and requires several people to operate.

But now let's imagine an android being involved — that's already a camera + tripod + operator + computer + potentially audio tech. It's like most of the heavy equipment and necessary crew at once.

JB300 are probably amongst the most powerful androids in terms of their hardware as they potentially process multiple raw video/audio inputs, but also the least human-like as a consequence of their function. If they record through their eyes they need to stay still, if they hold an external camera their hands should not shake even a little and they have to be able to walk in such a speed with such stability that from a bystander perspective it'll look disturbingly inhuman as no human can move in this precise way, be so still and hold a heavy camera for that long. I headcanon that JB androids don't even breathe as this action will only disturb their otherwise perfect stability and they already are too uncanny with most of their humanisation filters being incompatible with the kind of work they do.

It's possible that setup for live translation can look simply like two-three JB300 that act like operators+camera+transmitters+converters+audio-techs and a human with monitor for live-stream editing which, however can also be omitted if JB300 already can run the stream with deciding on the fly which input to send live, when and how with which captions/additional graphics. Hell, they can basically replace the whole crew and truck worth of equipment with only like three-four JB300.

Thinking about it I arrived at the point where I started to speculate how can this affect the existing set-up and here's the vision:

Being on the other side of the camera it's one thing to look into the camera and another to be watched by eerie motionless android whose eyes are switched to record mode and don't even look human. It's possible that JB300 would be filming through one-way mirrors so that those people who are being filmed would look at their reflection instead of JB300 whose sight is only making them feel uneasy.

Basically yeah, JB300 androids are probably amongst the most powerful yet inhumanly-looking androids there are. They may not have that much of the social protocols to hold a conversation as they are really much practical tools that need to follow instructions rather than appealing to someone as friendly customer service faces. Also they probably have the most expensive eyes among all androids.