Notices by Humphrey Archer (screwturn@mastodon.social)

@alice

As a teen I made copies of many medieval implements - war hammers, picks, swords, daggers, morning stars, maces, etc. I also made nunchaku, arrows and bows, but it never once occurred to me that THIS was a thing.

My life may have veered down a very different path had I seen this :)

@Gargron
"Why sure, I would like to smell like a deer's ass"

As an almost 70 year old man, I have some advice for young men.

Please boost this if you think it will help

1. Your voice doesn't need to be heard. In fact, realizing that you don’t HAVE to have an opinion on everything and voice opinions or ideas in meetings or social gatherings, is amazingly liberating. You can actually just shut up, and relieve yourself of all that effort and stress. Let Bob utter his embarrassingly dumb idea, let Shirley have a say. You can just let it be for the most part

2. Sissyphus was a stupid allegory.

Doing something useless, and especially for which you get no praise, is not as soul destroying as people would have you believe. If you like rolling a rock up a hill and having it roll back down, it's actually huge fucking fun if you just embrace the irony and the fun of rolling a rock, building up a sweat, and then letting that sucker go tumbling down.

Corollary: you don't actually need praise. Just enjoy what you do, and try to do it well

@evan
Start with the abundant leads related to Epstein, for example

@skinnylatte
Is the mirror thing linked to the aphantasia, or are those separate things?

@lxo
Like start with how writing is taught from grade school on. *this* is the "right way", rules upon rules upon rules to homogenize writing, brick it in, fill it with goo.
Then layer on the cruelty and Hunger-Games of querying markets, seeking agents, talking to publishers, and the grinding fuckery of literary critics, book reviewers, book influencers.
Coat that with the endless grifters and gatekeepers, and people with their hands out.

LLMs are hardly even wallpaper

@WeirdWriter @tante

@lxo
It's a good piece, I agree with much of it, but I think the LLM stuff is frankly just a nasty wallpaper on a fractured and oozing prison wall

Conversations about LLMs and writing seem to orbit this fantastical space up in the atmosphere, and ignore the ugly ground underneath

The whole publishing industry has ALWAYS BEEN this ugly, this homogenizing, and predatory, and LLMs are just one more sometimes useful fuckery in a long line of them that fuck writers to death

@WeirdWriter @tante

@futurebird

God, I hate to spoil this but here I am, to tell you that using an LLM to help with editing a manuscript can be really useful.

Every defect found in a manuscript is a defect found and corrected, and getting an LLM to do a line by line technical edit catches a lot of defects I may not have noticed anymore, and which my beta-readers might also miss because they are focused on plot and character.
The LLM also picks up when I called "Agatha", "Agnes" etc.

@tante

@dansup
Ditto

#ScribesAndMakers 14: Shameless someone else promotion day.

@kristiedegaris wrote a book, and it deserves promotion

Kristie De Garis - Writer, photographer and drystone waller based in Perthshire, Scotland. https://share.google/E8qeVuOaT4YvjbOub

@alice

"They're all social signals"

Totally underappreciated thought.
Soooo much of human behavior, preferences, and thinking is "this is the group I am in, this is what we value"

@Stoori @h3mmy @agturcz

@benroyce
Indeed

Also, if they mean the "Democratic Party" by "the democrats", then I think the "lesson" was very different to what these people assume. They think what they "taught" the party was that the party should go more to the left.

The lesson they actually taught the party was that the people on the left are untrustworthy and it is better to appeal to centrists who are greater in number and turn out more.

@mmalc @HamonWry @Strandjunker

@alice
"How can one man so visibly fuck up on every god damned thing...and still have this much power?"

Truly is a fascinating question.
Like how did this guy fail upwards for his whole life, and then does a horrendous job and get voted in again anyway. Maybe we are just a very stupid species

@Chrisblue @bmacDonald94

@skinnylatte
Writer here.
I am very curious what goes on with you when you read one of my short stories.

May I offer you a link to one?

@bobjonkman
lol
actually that is lovely, thanks

#WritersCoffeeClub 14 January: Are you a pantser or a plotter? Have you always been this way? What brought you here?

Both
I plot some, pants some

@molly0xfff
This made me laugh

I have 31 subscribers to my newsletter, and the notion of having 20,000 sounds so unlikely that it is funny.

Thanks