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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • The only time ai is useful for writing is if you are the only one to read it. As a form of self entertainment, it’s whatever. But as a tool to create? Worse than useless. It isn’t even a good copy editor at this point; none of the models out there are good enough at that to be any better than doing it yourself.

    If you really want to write, accept that you are going to suck. Everyone sucks at writing. Ideas? We can be great at that with no effort.

    But writing is a craft. You don’t just grab a brush, some paint, and expect to be Renoir a week later. You don’t grab a hammer and saw and expect to have a nice piece of furniture a week later.

    But people seem to think that writing is going to be different. Yeah, there’s talent involved; inborn ability to process language in a useful way is a big asset. Having a genuinely creative mind where ideas just pop up all the time is a huge asset.

    But they ain’t shit without both practice and criticism. See, unlike more visual crafts, you can’t have any success at self critique. Not that you should rely on that with painting or whatever either, but at least you can look and see if the end results match your vision in a glance. So to get better at the craft of writing, you need readers, and you have to be willing to listen to what they say, even if it turns out they’re wrong.

    Writing, real writing, is not learnt in a week, a month, a year. Even with all the natural talent possible, all the workshops and creative writing classes out there, your first finished story is going to suck at least a little. The craft of writing takes no less time to master than what it would take to become a black belt at a serious martial arts school. Years at a bare minimum.

    My advice? Go over to !writingprompts@literatue.cafe

    Every day, every single day, go back and respond to one prompt. Just one. And start as far back as it goes. If whoever posted responds, great. If not, spend the first week or so reviewing what you wrote and thinking about how to make it better.

    If you respond to each and every prompt there, and by the end, you aren’t able to be coherent at all, give up. But i suspect you’ll reach coherency fairly fast as you go back and fix what you fucked up.

    I’d also advise that you don’t edit your responses. Rewrite each one as a fresh comment, so you can track what you’re doing, and anyone interested can give feedback as you adjust.

    Now, nor every prompt is going to spark an idea for you. That’s what craft is for. That’s how you learn craft: writing shit despite not being inspired. Wrangling words into order and sense is a skill. No better way to do that than writing shit that’s boring as hell.



  • In general, I think people run into confusing exactly what is and isn’t the kind of stupid that’s right for this place.

    Questions can be perfectly valid, but not really something you couldn’t ask anyone, any time, and get a deciding decent answer, so those get down voted a good bit.

    Then you run into posts that are really more shittyasklemmy territory. They’re essentially jokes that neither deserve nor can be answered in a useful way.

    There’s also the ones that are word salad that get down voted because nobody knows what the fuck is being asked.

    Your most recent one fell afoul of not really being a question as much as it was a rant in question form. Which never goes over well here (I always down vote those, personally). Still answered in that case, but it really wasn’t in the spirit of the C/, so I felt it worth the vote down.

    You had previous questions that were great, btw. It was just that one that rang funky.

    I can’t speak for everyone, obviously, but thats my take on the trends of heavily down voted posts.

    The ones that are genuine questions that wouldn’t be easy to ask and get answered irl or in most online spaces, those are the ones that tend to get up votes and plenty of responses








  • My understanding, and it is completely casual, layman level understanding, is that patriarchy started around the birth of property and inheritance.

    There’s plenty of evidence (that someone already linked to a layman’s level article) showing that our earliest societies didn’t have gendered hierarchy at all, and that it wasn’t all patriarchal when it started.

    But for the most part, the control of women was only a useful thing once the need to have control over inheritance became important. If you don’t have land or wealth to pass on, then there’s really no point to one sex/gender being dominant to another. There isn’t a point to it in that regard in my opinion, since I don’t view biological offspring to be more worthy of inheritance than otherwise, but some people did care, especially when leadership came with a great deal of ownership as well.

    Afaik, that’s when patriarchy became something that was etched into laws and religion. When the leadership, and thus ownership, was passed down, and the passing went from father to son. When that’s in place, controlling reproduction becomes paramount, and to control reproduction, you have to control women since while you couldn’t prove who someone’s father was way back then, it was hella hard to fake who gave birth.


  • First and foremost, dog training is language training.

    You aren’t really teaching them to do things, you’re teaching them to understand the sounds and movements you make when you want them to do things.

    This means that regardless of anything else, you have to be consistent in both the execution of and understanding of what language you’re using.

    Example: you say sit when training with a calm voice and a little lilt at the end. But in daily life, you say sit sharply and without the hand gesture you’d been using during lessons. When that’s the case, you can’t blame the dog for not understanding automatically that you want them to do the thing you used different words for.

    Animals don’t process language the same way we do, but we can still run into problems understanding what someone else wants us to do when they say it in an unusual way. Why would a dog magically understand the difference between “sit, puppy”, “puppy, sit”, and/or “dammit, why won’t you sit?!”

    Consistency is how we learn languages as humans, and we have sections of our brain dedicated to language that are very developed compared to even our closest relatives in the animal kingdom.

    The flip side of that is that you have to train yourself at the same time as the dog. You have to train yourself in the commands you want them to connect with a behavior. Make sure you learn how you’re saying things, and any secondary or tertiary signals are included.

    Example: if you want the dog to eventually know that the word sit, a hand gesture, and a tone of voice mean you want them to sit, you have to consistently use those commands. Eventually, even the dumbest dog will figure out that any of those commands mean you want their butt on the floor, but if you aren’t consistent with them, it’ll take longer.

    Remember, that dog hears your words and tone, sees your movements and posture, and reads your facial expressions. *All" of those are part of the command you’re teaching them to respond to with a specific behavior.

    That’s why a lot of trainers have a process of introducing those things in a controlled and specific way.

    And, if you deviate from the command you actually taught (like screaming word sit while making angry face, bent over and shaking a finger at them instead of the usual), don’t be mad at them for not responding to this totally new and different signal grouping with a behavior you taught them with a different combination of signals.


  • You know the difference between a garbanzo bean and a chickpea?

    !can’t pay fifty for a garbanzo to bean on my face!<

    Jokes aside, yes to both, though the jelly bean would be flavor specific like any oddity would.

    People do add sweet things to chill, and it works rather well. This includes things that are within your typical jellybean flavor range. Pretty much any jelly would be fine in small amounts (and pepper jelly really is one of those “secret” ingredients that folks love to pretend isn’t obvious). When that’s the case, a standard jellybean is going to be okay in similarly small amounts. I’m dubious that licorice ones would work, but I have been exposed to chili with anise before, and it wasn’t horrible.

    I definitely wouldn’t want bubblegum flavored jellybeans in my chili, but the rest? Eh, I’d be down to try them.


  • As everyone has essentially said, ain’t no such thing as bad beans for a chili. And that goes for stuff you might not think of as being good in chill. But I’ve cobbled together chili out of some seriously depleted pantries over the years, and I swear that any legume I’ve run across has worked, to some degree or another. Only question wound be the best prep for a given bean.

    No bullshit, ive done it with limas, lentils, and peas at various points in time, and they all worked fine. Different, yes, but still quite nice



  • Not improv like it used to be?

    Dude, it’s sketch comedy. It’s always been scripted, it’s just that it’s okay to go off script as needed. It’s been that way since the beginning.

    I mean, not every cast member is actually good for sure, and that’s been true since the beginning too. But that’s totally different from what you’re saying.

    I’m with you that weekend update has been the most reliable part of the show since Che and Jost have been the chairs though. Imo, the best or second best WE hosts in the entire run (depending on exactly which era of the various WE teams you look at, but I’d say Che and Jost have been the most consistent).

    And, while I think the term cringe has been so over used that it’s time to bury it, SNL has largely been about being cringe the entire time. To do live sketch comedy, you have to embrace being stupid and awkward. Not every bit is going to hit, so you gotta commit to all of them and that means a ton of cringe is inherent to the process. I mean, fuck, the Shannon/O’Terri/Ferrell era was intentionally cringe on purpose so often it kinda defines that era.


  • Ehhhh, I tend to think the distances are less important than the fact of the infrastructure being prohibitive to set up.

    Trains like that can’t just be dropped onto the existing rail network. I mean, even if the rails p tracks we have would allow them to operate at speed, it would be a nightmare getting them to mesh with existing rail traffic. You’d lose the high speed factor, defeating the purpose.

    So, even in individual states, where the distances are closer to what you’d see in japan, it’s not a net practical solution without some serious rejiggering.

    You could likely get some lines done anyway, like from D.C. to a few major cities on the east coast. But would there really be a benefit? Would it reduce highway traffic significantly? Would it be safer and more efficient than existing passenger rail? I genuinely have no idea, but there would be a need for that kind of thing to make it worth building out. If it’s just shifting a small fraction of city-to-city commute, I don’t know that or would be worth the massive project it would take



  • Damn. Hard call. There’s only been a few that have hit me because I don’t really have a parasocial connection to anyone to any degree worth mentioning.

    That being said, the three that made me actually cry were Vonnegut, Kris Kristofferson, and Chester Bennington.

    Chester, I was listening to the one more light album when I found out, so it hit extra hard.

    Vonnegut though, he more than any other writer made me think and want to create with words. He shaped how I view literature and think about writing. So his death hit harder than most.

    Kristofferson, it’s that I had known it was coming. He’d already been lost to a great degree, but I had been low key dreading the news because he’s so damn iconic. He’s the kind of poet I wish I could be. And his music was also damn good lol. Also, he’s symbolic of an era of music that’s disappeared, and as the last of the highwaymen have died, with only one left there’s this hole in the world that isn’t likely to be filled now that the entire music industry has fallen into disarray. It’s much harder for that kind of poet bard to exist and have their music spread now. In any genre, btw; the same difficulties exist in folk, metal, rap, etc.

    Anyway, those are the ones that made me cry as a grown-ass man. I suspect I’ll shed another tear when Willie goes, and I know I’m gonna fall apart a little when Dolly does. Luckily, the next wave of writers and musicians that I’d likely cry over are a good twenty years younger (or more) than them, so I’ll have a break after that. Likely be dead myself before most of the others would go.


  • Not stupid at all!

    Though I’ve heard that the path to being an NP is faster from RN than switching to PA. Might be worth looking at.

    Worst case scenario, you end up having to job jump between PA and nursing until you find a job that lets you settle into a specific practice/position. Which is harder in middle age, but isn’t prohibitive imo.

    From the patient side of things, an NP or PA with practical experience as a nurse is like gold. An MD might have more education and a broader knowledge base because of that; but nobody can match the hands on, dedicated skills of someone that’s done what you’re proposing. The best providers I have ever had in twenty years plus of disability have been the ones like that. You’ve not only been there and done that, you could teach all of it purely from experience.

    So stupid? Hell no! The only stupid part is that the industry is so fucked that an experienced nurse wants to stop doing that job. What you’ll bring to the table is going to help people. That’s never stupid. It will be a harder road for you in some ways (though not as physically brutal as nursing for damn sure), but at least it will be different.

    If you decide to go that route, good on you :)