advice i think we should tell children is that when adults say stuff like ‘now that i’m an adult i get really excited about stuff like coffee tables and bathrooms and rugs etc’ they don’t mean ‘and now i don’t care about blorbo and squimbus from my childhood tv shows anymore’ bc your average adult still loves all the same pop culture stuff they always did; they just have a greater appreciation for the mundane as well. growing up just means you can enjoy life twice as much now. you can get really excited about a new stuffed animal AND about a new kitchen sponge. peace and love

Sylvia Plath, September 1950 journal entry

Caught in the crosshairs of “makeup is so cool and gender and I wanna wear funky clown paint all the time but pretty” and “art hard me lazy ;-;”

Okay. Imma say it. I’m officially fed up with ChatGPT. I mean, I never was okay with it, but this was just another reason to hate it.

Apologies in advance, cause this is gonna be a long post. I have a lot to say.

I’m currently in the process of writing a research paper right now and I’m in the finding sources stage. I found this one paper and as I was reading it I was like “This is super lacklustre.” It was providing research data but wasn’t actually elaborating on any of it, and didn’t provide any in-depth analysis on why the data mattered. It seemed to be trying to as well, but was struggling to communicate any depth and was kind of just parroting and rehashing its same few points over and over again. As I reached the end I was just annoyed by it because it was so incredibly useless and felt like a student paper written in a Bachelor program. Like, one of my peers could have written it.

I scrolled to the bottom and lo and behold it states that “In order to correct and improve the academic writing of our paper, we have used the language model ChatGPT”

I now have to find more sources cause this one now is unreliable because it compromised any academic merit it may have had by using ChatGPT. I don’t think academics should be using AI to write their papers. Or even edit them, to be honest.

I wasted like a whole half hour on that stupid useless LLM mess. May not seem like a ton of time, but I have deadlines, people. It’s currently crunch time with like five other papers on the go.

The especially annoying part is that I could tell it was weird by reading it, because it had that annoyingly pretentious but also very surface-level style of writing to it that ChatGPT is known for in academics. It’s so bad at actually analyzing anything sufficiently so it just reports data without actually understanding or deepening any of it.

The fact that ChatGPT is being used in published works is terrifying as well, because it flattens any existing knowledge into a very dry and shallow version. Like, no LLM can act as a substitute for human thought and analysis, but with people trying, and in the academic sphere no less, it makes research and verifying the validity of academic works more difficult than it used to be.

I also found the article on the first page of Google scholar. I feel like scholar used to be a lot better at giving me reliable sources, but if it’s now pushing LLM generated articles then it’s compromised its credibility in a way. I don’t know if I’ve just not been around in the space long enough to know whether Google scholar is reliable, or if it was in the past and isn’t now, or what.

God I hate AI.

tldr; I came across an academic published paper that was ChatGPT written and am filled with fury about AI generated shit finding more foothold online.

the world needs more handwritten letters confessing love

If you're lamenting the fact that you used to be able to shoot through a 500-page novel in like a day when you were in middle school and now you can't, it's worth bearing in mind that a big part of that is because when you were in middle school, your reading comprehension sucked. Yes, mental health and the stresses of adult life can definitely be factors, but it's also the case that reading is typically more effortful as an adult because you've learned to Ponder The Implications. The material isn't just skimming over the surface of your brain anymore, and some of the spoons you used to spend on maximising your daily page count are now spent on actually thinking about what you're reading!

I LOVE YOU EM DASH. mwah mwah mwah mwah mwah a thousand kisses for the em dash.

— A. Y.

My queers, we really need to put the "no men" thing away. Men are not inherently bad. There are queer men. There are questioning men. There's men that are just plain cool. Denying these men a space at our table is not helping - except the TERFs. I just came off the back of reading a transphobe gleeful rant about the need to have pride without men - They of course mean me. This kind of stuff is damaging to me and I really need us all to take a step back and maybe kill this "men dni, men not allowed" stuff. What you mean is "no men who are going to do mean stuff to me." And frankly those men won't give a shit about that kind of boundary.

But I promise you there's a fleet of good honest men who will see that and be sad they're not allowed in your version of queer spaces.

PATRIARCHY is what you hate. Dni Patriarchs.

“Woolf famously said of reading: “The only advice … is to take no advice, … follow your instincts, … use your reason.” A similar thought was voiced by her elder contemporary Oscar Wilde, who did not believe in recommending books, only in de-recommending them. Later, Jorge Luis Borges echoed the same sentiment by discouraging “systematic bibliographies” in favor of “adulterous” reading. More recently, Gregg Bordowitz has promoted “promiscuous” reading in which you impulsively allow an “imposter” book to overrule any reading trajectory you might have set for yourself, simply because, for instance, a friend tells you in conversation that he is reading it and is excited by it. This evokes for me that most potent kind of reading — reading as flirtation with or eavesdropping on someone you love or desire, someone who figures in your fantasy life.” -Moyra Davey, in The Problem of Reading, from Index Cards [ed. Nicolas Linnert]

Dear Mr. Neil Gaiman

Is there hope?

Signed a Scared teenager

There's always hope. Sometimes it's the last thing left.

I’m so good at theme. Theme, character backstories, and exactly how character development will happen. Aesthetics? I’ve got those nailed down. Plot though? Pfft. Hahaha. You’re funny. I can’t write a plot to save my life.

What do you think your strengths and weaknesses are as a writer? For me I think I'm good at high concepts, plot, and worldbuilding but characters are hard and I suck shit at dialog.

When you get 100% on an assignment and then get to use that assignment as a reference point for all future assignments.

I love knowing exactly what I have to do to excel.

So incessantly bad with and scared of computers that every time I have to delete an app I’m convinced it’ll turn into malware out of spite.

how to go from daydream to draft:

begin by daydreaming as you normally do, or just after you've finished doing so. write down every thought you have. one after another. do not reread. do not stop for spelling mistakes. just dump out every thought. this is called stream of consciousness writing. you can do this for every scene you need a first draft for.

struggling to draft the scene? try to daydream about it. start thinking about how it would look, feel, what the characters would say, act it out in your head and then write out the stream of your thoughts as they arrive.

by now you have a few scene dumps. you may be tempted to go back and edit. do not do this expect for obvious spelling mistakes. do not read closely and start thinking "i need to rework this sentence." that is for later. now you're in the zone. draft more scenes. or work out what the next scene needs to be, scaffold it with a few comments. this will be the inspiration for your next deliberate thought stream that you will write out. repeat this process until you have the whole draft.

now that you have a draft or part of a draft you get to do this very fun thing called revise until you're happy. sweep through your draft with specific goals each time. one sweep to fix spelling/grammar. another for character voice. another for plot. repeat until you're happy with it.

leave it alone. just leave it for a bit. at least a few hours or days or even weeks. forget it exists. this will allow you come back with fresh eyes. then you can do your revisions with an eagle eye. now you may realize you need to add/remove scenes. you know how to get the first version down. close your eyes and daydream at your desk if that's what takes!

remember that fiction writing is persuasive writing. you are trying to persuade the reader to care about what happens next, the character's, the world, the feelings. as you're revising, consider whether you are persuaded. is the feeling/thoughts you wanted to provoke being felt by you when you read it? when working with beta readers, be sure to communicate what you're trying to convey so they can tell you if you've been successful or not.

this got a bit beyond getting the first draft done. hope you found it helpful.

bonus tip: check the spellings of names and places and other nouns that are not typically used, like the name of a magic tool!