flickerintwilights

[flickerintwilights]

We could just do this kind of drug research using convicted pedophiles and rapists, and avoid using animals altogether 🤷

Would probably yield better results since we'd have data about humans and not mice and rabbits. But oh, I forget people are still hung up on pretending pedophiles and rapists deserve dignity

you are like 1 step away from being outright fascist, congrats

#THIS. #all of this #dehumanization

[flickerintwilights]

#memes #you know what other two towers there are? #gender fell when barad-dûr did

[flickerintwilights]

So, there's a dirty little secret in indie publishing a lot of people won't tell you, and if you aren't aware of it, self-publishing feels even scarier than it actually is.

There's a subset of self-published indie authors who write a ludicrous number of books a year, we're talking double digit releases of full novels, and these folks make a lot of money telling you how you can do the same thing. A lot of them feature in breathless puff pieces about how "competitive" self-publishing is as an industry now.

A lot of these authors aren't being completely honest with you, though. They'll give you secrets for time management and plotting and outlining and marketing and what have you. But the way they're able to write, edit, and publish 10+ books a year, by and large, is that they're hiring ghostwriters.

They're using upwork or fiverr to find people to outline, draft, edit, and market their books. Most of them, presumably, do write some of their own stuff! But many "prolific" indie writers are absolutely using ghostwriters to speed up their process, get higher Amazon best-seller ratings, and, bluntly, make more money faster.

When you see some godawful puff piece floating around about how some indie writer is thinking about having to start using AI to "stay competitive in self-publishing", the part the journalist isn't telling you is that the 'indie writer' in question is planning to use AI instead of paying some guy on Upwork to do the drafting.

If you are writing your books the old fashioned way and are trying to build a readerbase who cares about your work, you don't need to use AI to 'stay competitive', because you're not competing with these people. You're playing an entirely different game.

#publishing #writing

[flickerintwilights]

#just got it cut two days ago actually #it’s fine #wish it were shorter though. and less straight #polls

[flickerintwilights]

if it sucks hit da bricks <- litany against sunk cost

take it easy but take it <- litany against burnout/apathy cycle

fuck it we ball <- litany against perfectionism

now say something beautiful and true <- litany against irony poisoning

#reminders #save #gotta do this

[flickerintwilights]

I know adverbs are controversial, but "said softly" means something different than "whispered" and this is the hill I will die on.

#wait adverbs are controversial? #<< prev - i think they’re referring to the idea that people should try to use more interesting words than ‘said [adverb]’ #for dialogue tags etc #which - yeah but not Excessively because never using said [adverb] ever is going to sound worse than having a healthy balance #and op very much has a point #writing

[flickerintwilights]

Even after all this time and awareness, it feels like asexuality is still not treated like a proper sexuality. Recently had a girl tell me that she was at a place where she ‘felt so asexual’ because all the other girls were so beautiful and guys were ignoring her because of it. She didn’t know I was asexual and I didn’t take offence (I know she didn't meant it in a malicious way) but it does feel uncomfortable that people are using ‘asexual’ in lieu of ‘unattractive' or 'lacking sexual appeal.' It's really giving 90's/early 2000's slang of using 'gay' to mean 'lame.' Even shows like Brooklyn 99 which took immense pride in being progressive with their comedy, had an episode where one of the characters says "Oh, and I'm sorry if we implied you're both asexual nerds who can only be friends with service animals."

I have mentioned this before also, when I talked about how I feel like people are more comfortable erasing the identities of canonical aro/ace characters in media but act like it's unacceptable with other sexualities... but it does feel like asexuality (and aromanticism tbh) are still not considered 'real' sexualities. In the case of shipping fictional characters, I understand there is nuance to that issue and so don't want to get into it, but it does kinda add to my point.

Why is it that people treat asexuality like it's not a sexuality? Why is it that when I come out to people I'm met with insistence that I'm wrong about my sexuality, that I'm 'self diagnosing' (it's not a medical condition), that I'm probably 'just inexperienced' or haven't 'met the right person' or have a hormone issue? Why can't people just accept that it's a sexuality like any other??

#asexual

[flickerintwilights]

#lmao

[flickerintwilights]

Look, we joke a lot, but really, "you were born evil, wretched, worse than the scum of the earth, and it took killing a god to make you salvageable, so now you'd better be grateful to that god and thank him 10,000 times a day for it and fill your thoughts with him 24/7 and abide by the letter of his every word, lest you suffer unimaginable torture for all of eternity" is a truly horrendous thing to believe about yourself and other people

#christianity

[flickerintwilights]

May Writing Challenge

This May I want to get back into writing. I’m not at all consistent. I’m at a point where I don’t feel like I can work on bigger things, because I can’t guarantee myself to keep working on it in a week from now. So I will take this month as a training month to get back into the habit of writing. I will do this by writing (or trying to write) 200 words every day. Topic is irrelevant. How great my writing is that day is irrelevant. Just 200 words written down. A habit taking 21 days to form was debunked, it does take a lot longer, but 31 days are a start I would say. These are already 140 words, so 200 words every day are hopefully manageable. You're more than welcome to join me if you like 😊

#wait fuck i should try this #been in such a dry spell #writing

[flickerintwilights]

#society #life #be kind #exactly!

[flickerintwilights]

#lmao #this very much does feel like a playing with dolls post

[flickerintwilights]

I hate when people imply that you can't love others before you love yourself, when actually most of us learn how to love ourselves through being loved by others. Which means that if you haven't been loved properly by others, the solution to that trauma usually isn't to try to fix yourself in isolation

#relationships

[flickerintwilights]

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

#nasa #space

[flickerintwilights]

The fact that homelessness is controversial tells you everything you need to know about conservatives.

#homelessness #exactly

[flickerintwilights]

a quiet moment above the clouds

-

got back into playing totk recently. i still haven't beaten the final boss bc i've been too distracted with finding koroks and playing hide-and-seek with the gloom hands

((link close up under the cut ¯\_(ツ)_/¯))

#tears of the kingdom #honestly good on you #i’m glad this is ‘finding koroks’ and not ‘brutally executing koroks’

[flickerintwilights]

imagine two mated wyrms twisting around each other, possessing an uncountable number of limbs, each claw of good or evil interlocked with its opposite, the coil twists further around itself into a skein of flesh. how i would describe DNA to a wizard

#AHAHA