read a book review where someone said “I didn’t like X character so I skipped all their chapters. really wish this book had [thing present in X character’s chapters].”
and…….I guess that’s fine because we’re all free citizens in this beautiful world, but I didn’t know you could do that. I didn’t know you could just skip chapters.
I think it’s the fact that they rated this book that threw me so much. because they gave it a low rating and said “I wish we’d learned more about Y character’s family” BUT WE DID! IT WAS IN THE CHAPTERS THEY SKIPPED! I’M GOING TO HAVE AN ANEURYSM
LMAOOOOO welcome to Being an Author. One time I got a goodreads review on A Taste of Gold and Iron which said it “didn’t have any worldbuilding in it” never mind the fact that it’s a second-world fantasy and this setting is inspired by the Ottoman Empire and has matrilineal inheritance which means they have three different words for “father” and a maternal uncle is more important than any of those, and they’ve got a two-god religion which explicitly influences some of the characters’ choices and perspectives and part of this religion involves basically doing therapy with a temple priest, and that’s not to mention all the countries and languages mentioned, or the magic system where some people get sort of a psychic synaesthesia when they touch metals –
no worldbuilding in this bad boy tho
I had a friend who once assumed I didnt do any world building in my books. She assumed Good, Clean Dirt was nonfiction.
One of the main characters is a cryptid.
Like… its set in modern day Appalachia but I very much had to do worldbuilding for the local legends.
I once saw a review of some phenomenal nonfiction where the reviewer complained that [thing in the book] was not in the book, and also half the review was quotes from only the first and last pages. Like wow pal, wonder what the other 398 pages of this bad boy have in ‘em?
sometimes i wonder if we have forgotten that sharing creative work is, fundamentally, a bid for human connection. like I’m not posting art or fic for ‘engagement’ i’m posting it looking for other sickos to play with! i’d be making it anyway for my own gratification because there’s something wrong with me, i’m sharing it hoping we can have something wrong with us together <3
It’s very common for people to get harassed online for being blunt or saying something in a very neutral way (ie: without any disclaimers or repeated reassurances or fawning) and part of that is because tone is very hard to read through text but I also think that uh.
That excuse doesn’t really hold any water when it’s very easy to just remember that the people you interact with online are in fact human beings who don’t always talk like they have an entire PR team whispering in their ears and checking everything they post.
If you were talking to someone irl and they said that they really like apples, you wouldn’t expect them to immediately follow that up with “but there’s nothing wrong with oranges and I think strawberries are great and I enjoy the cherries too and there’s nothing wrong with you if you like pineapple and grapes are great in fruit salad and—” but that’s the sort of behavior expected online.
And when people do add a million disclaimers and clarifications, then they’re attacked for that too! They’re accused of backtracking or doing damage control or trying to bury the controversy. There’s genuinely no way to win and it fucking sucks.
Someone will shoot off a quick post while making dinner and then log back on a few hours later or the next day and see that there are dozens of strangers suicide baiting them or saying that they should be killed for being the literal devil because their post was worded like a human wrote it instead of a team of 10 trained and well-paid PR employees.
I love the transformers fandom because someone will post something like ‘omg i love spingtron he’s everything to me!’ and you’ll go to the tfwiki to find that spingtron was a character who was in 2 panels of a single marvel comic that was only sold in Scotland on rainy days in December 1989
A rodent from Brazil and Uruguay. It hunts grubs and worms under the cover of leaves, logs, and stones. It has a long, flexible nose, and usually utilizes the tunnels and pathways created by other rodents.
So, if you’re not in a techbro-adjacent world you might not know this, but a lot of gamer bros have finally started rebelling against AI. Because they were all waiting for Black Friday sales to get new PC parts, but AI companies are buying up all the PC parts, so they all logged in on Black Friday looking for deals and found everything three times as expensive as it was a few months ago. And I mean everything. It’s not just GPUs this time like it was with the crypto miners, it’s RAM and SSDs and even fucking HDDs.
You tell a gamer bro he can’t get a 1TB SSD for less than 200 smackeroos and he’ll be against anything you tell him is to blame.
There’s also a large migration of gamers to Linux, which came as a surprise to me when I first learned it because the conventional wisdom for so long had been that you can’t game on Linux at all. The release of the Steam Deck changed that narrative overnight, since it runs on a custom Linux distro that Valve made because they don’t want to deal with Microsoft’s bullshit either. The vast majority of PC games now run just fine on Linux, and the only ones that don’t are ones that use a specific form of anti-cheat software (mostly online competetive games, like League of Legends). Even that will probably change in the future, since the migration to Linux will incentivize game companies to do their anti-cheat differently.
Most of the linux distros that people are moving to have no AI features and no intention of including them. And, of course, even if some develop them in the future, the linux community can always be counted on to provide a no-AI alternative. They are extremely protective of their disc space, after all. So there is a real coalition building here, in a population that has a lot of cash to use to lean on the powers that be. I think we have some reason to be optimistic.
ALT
ALT
