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PSA: Don't use Open Office

I keep seeing people recommending Open Office as an alternative to Word, and uh... look, it is, technically, an open source alternative to Word. And it can do a lot of what Word can, genuinely! But it is also an abandoned project that hasn't been updated in nine years, and there's an active fork of it which is still receiving updates, and that fork is called LibreOffice, and it's fantastic.

Seriously, if you think that your choices are either "grit your teeth and pay Microsoft for a subscription" or "support free software but have a kind of subpar office suite experience", I guarantee that it's because you're working with outdated information, or outdated software. Most people I know who have used the latest version of LibreOffice prefer it to Word. I even know a handful of people who prefer it to Scrivener.

Open Office was the original project, and so it has the most name recognition, and as far as I can tell, that's really the only reason people are still recommending it. It's kind of like if people were saying "hey, the iPhone 14 isn't your only smart phone option!" but then were only ever recommending the Samsung Galaxy S5 as an alternative. LibreOffice is literally a version of the same exact program as Open Office that's just newer and better – please don't get locked into using a worse tool just because the updated version of the program has a different name!

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a comic about different types of storytellers

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I love Matilda because it's a story about a child who sees injustice around her and gets mad about it and questions why things aren't fair, and instead of the ending being that she learns how the world works and that life isn't fair, she catapults one of the adults who abused her out of a building with her mind

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I love that I can log in to tumblr in 2024 and see supernatural trending because something gay happened on a tv show I don’t watch that has nothing to do with Supernatural.

Time is a flat circle

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50 WORDS TO USE INSTEAD OF “SAID”

Do you ever find yourself over-using the word “said” in your writing? Try using these words/phrases instead:

stated

commented

declared

spoke

responded

voiced

noted

uttered

iterated

explained

remarked

acknowledged

mentioned

announced

shouted

expressed

articulated

exclaimed

proclaimed

whispered

babbled

observed

deadpanned

joked

hinted

informed

coaxed

offered

cried

affirmed

vocalized

laughed

ordered

suggested

admitted

verbalized

indicated

confirmed

apologized

muttered

proposed

chatted

lied

rambled

talked

pointed out

blurted out

chimed in

brought up

wondered aloud

(NOTE: Keep in mind that all of these words have slightly different meanings and are associated with different emotions/scenarios.)

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literally me every single night

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Keyboard go BRRRRRRRRRR

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Just create the thing you want to create. Because who's going to stop you? Oh, it's you yourself? Well you can't let that bastard win, can you?

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can you believe that we have fanfiction. that we have websites dedicated to fanfiction. that there is a place that you can go and read tens, hundreds, thousands and thousands of pieces of writing that strangers have made. people who are not "writers". people who come home at the end of the day and have feelings and say, i am going to put that into words. i am going to share those words. short, long, sweet, sad, horny, funny, wonderful words. we are all just human and we all love to make and remake and share that with others. can you believe that.

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Fanfic tiktok is wild... I see so many people saying shit like "I could never read anything below 60k!!", or "What story can you even tell in under 5k words?" or "A oneshot below 10k isn't even a story!" or "I always filter completed fics by 100k< only!"

And I'm like...

A) which fandoms are you reading fics for where you have this kind of offerings on the regular?

B) have you heard of short stories? If you truly think every story NEEDS to be longform to connect with people, I sincerely feel sorry for you.

C) Average novel length is between 50k to 100k. I'm sorry, but CONSISTENTLY demanding fic writers to push out fics of that length is insane. Just think about it: YOU DEMAND AUTHORS TO PUT OUT FICS THAT COMPARE TO COMMERCIAL NOVELS IN LENGTH (AND QUALITY) AS A BASELINE.

Yall are wilding.

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