Novella-November

Hey i’m a fashion design student so i have tons and tons of pdfs and docs with basic sewing techniques, pattern how-tos, and resources for fabric and trims. I’ve compiled it all into a shareable folder for anyone who wants to look into sewing and making their own clothing. I’ll be adding to this folder whenever i come across new resources

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/16uhmMb8kE4P_vOSycr6XSa9zpmDijZSd?usp=sharing

Updated just now with new hand sewing resources (mainly buttonholes) and textbook pdfs on fashion history, fashion illustration, and thinking through designs!

OP I owe you my life

OP you are the greatest person currently in my life. You beautiful, thoughtful creature.

a scene can start wherever you want it to

writing isn't real life. You don't need to set up a character walking into a room or two characters greeting each other and talking about the weather or what-have-you in order to lead into the conversation you actually want them to have. just start at the conversation.

hell, start in the middle of the conversation. you could even start at the end and then have one of them leave and the other one left behind to reflect back on what just happened.

writing gets easier when you open yourself up to writing the parts that are interesting, to starting where it's easy instead of where you think you should start.

if it ends up not working? that's okay. you tried it, and sometimes just getting something out of your head is a necessary first step to getting the words right

how i'm handling my students using AI to write papers:

-don't accuse them on using AI from the get-go and instead ask them to informally define all the huge words that they used in their essay which i know they don't know the meaning of

-ask to see their original file where they "wrote" the essay. go to version history to see if it was just copy and pasted and then just edited a bit. i keep an eye out for the shit like "certainly! here's an essay about...."

-if they own up to it, they can re-do the assignment for a higher grade even if there will be an automatic penalty. if they don't, i process it like plagiarism and get my supervisor involved.

And this is much better than the immediate accusations. Some students have a good vocabulary. Stop accusing them of faking their essays without proof, and this is a good way to check.

Fellow students please stop using AI, go back to promising not to kill the school nerd if they do all your homework or something.

so as you might have guessed because I said I was camping in the woods to avoid getting sick:

someone in my household has covid unfortunately but we did manage to get them a Paxlovid subscription. they’re uninsured, and even GoodRx coupons only brought the cost down to $1,300 USD.

I thought to check the drug manufacturer website and quickly signed up online through its portal and received a pharmacy card by email that lowered the cost to $0

There are also options for insured patients to dramatically lower their copays. I’m in the U.S., and I’m unsure whether this is applicable elsewhere, but I wanted to share this info on access to potentially lifesaving medication, for anyone it may help!

you can click on this button once daily to help palestine and support other causes in the middle east for free. it takes literally 5 seconds and could help save lives so please take the time to click and share this link.

I know this is a joke but like, yeah. It is. I promise you.

See, I had graduated early from highschool and then got my associates in Zoology. But then, from ages 18-23, I was medicated with antipsychotics and (for those last two years) a deadly combo of sedatives due to misdiagnosis after misdiagnosis, and then a psychiatrist who was legitimately on drugs and just writing random shit that almost killed me.

Anyway, needless to say, my brain turned to mush and stopped working, and it took me 6 years to get some sort of bachelors degree (in fashion??) and I graduated at the bottom of my class.

And then I got properly diagnosed (the “psychosis” was just narcolepsy) and got off all those meds. And I was so afraid my brain was permanently fucked. And it is, cause of the narcolepsy part, but the narcolepsy doesn’t kill the parts of your brain where your smarts are.

But I went back to school. Got another bachelors studying sustainable tourism. Turns out my smarts hadn’t gone anywhere when my brain turned to mush. I graduated with a 3.98 GPA.

Now I’m getting my masters in biology studying the intersection of tourism and the conservation of the critically endangered Cozumel raccoon. And doing well. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Your brain is not a muscle in the literal sense, but it is a muscle in the sense that the more you use it, the better developed it becomes. Not using it might make its usefulness dip for a bit, but that doesn't mean it's gone forever. You might have to work your way back up, start with easier exercises (puzzles, creative exercises, critical thinking questions) before jumping back into the stuff you used to do, but like a couch to 5k slowly ramp up the difficulty and you'll get there in the end. No one's brains are useless, you just gotta meet 'em where they're at.

more character should have speech impediments &/or stutters. for me. for my specific benefit

not all speech impediments / stutters need "reasoning" btw. sometimes ppl just have them. you dont need to come up with some massive lore element to it lawl

From now until May 1, 50% of proceeds from sales of the Re: Dracula Audiobook and Re: Carmilla Supercut will be going to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund!

hi, a lot of you need a perspective reset

You, writer, yes you, you have the capability to write someone’s new favorite story, and don’t let your goblin brain tell you otherwise. Keep going, that person/those people are probably wandering bookstores as we speak with blank expressions because they can’t find your story yet.

shit ton of people are repeating the thing about hayao miyazaki saying AI art is an "insult to life itself" and just as a reminder he was talking about the zombies that team made that were intended to be scary in how much they shook, but instead reminded him of his disabled friend. the insult to life itself was referring to the team trying to make scary real symptoms that people live with.

it was a quote about ableism. if he has said other things about AI type stuff, that is a different thing. but that specific quote was about ableism.

this is the full quote.

[Image description: A photo of a man looking mischeviously at the camera with the text: "Sunlight and fresh air got me thinking about characters. There is no hope for me !!!!!" End image description.]

I have no idea why this needs to be said, but you can hate generative AI, love the Public Domain, love media preservation, hate the overbearing US Copyright system, and... still believe that Copyright Laws exist in the first place for a reason, (even if, thanks to Big Corporation Monopolies, it's been twisted into its current behemoth monstrosity.)

These things are not mutually exclusive, and if you think that

or that

I just genuinely don't understand how you can say this kind of crap if you've ever interacted with any creative person in your life.

I'm a wanna-be-author.

I want as many people to be able to afford my written works as possible without restrictions, and I fully plan on having free ebooks of my works available for those who can't afford to buy them.

*That does *not* mean I, in any way shape or form, would ever consent to people stealing my work and uploading it into a Large Language Model and telling it to spit out fifty unauthorized sequels that are then sold for cash profit!*

You cannot support generative AI and turn around and try to claim you're actually just defending small time artists, and *also* you think no one should have any legal protections at all protecting their work from plagiarism at all.

Supporting unethical generative AI (which is literally all of them currently), protecting artists, and *completely abolishing* copyright and intellectual property laws instead of reforming them *are* mutually exclusive concepts.

You *cannot* worship the plagiarism machine, claim to care about small artists, and then say that those same small artists should have absolutely *zero* legal protections to stop their work being plagiarized.

The only way AI could even begin to approach being ethical would be if using it to begin with wasn't a huge hazard to the enviornment, and if it was trained *exclusively * on Public Domain works that had to be checked and confirmed by multiple real human beings before it was put into the training data.

And oh, would you look at that?

Every single AI model is currently just sucking up the entire fucking goddamn internet and everything ever posted on it and everything ever downloaded from it with no way to really truly opt out of it or even just to know if your work has been fed to the machine until an entire page of text from your book pops out when it generates text from someone's writing prompt.

And no, it's not just "privileged Western authors" who are being exploited by AI.

For an updating list of global legal cases again AI tech giants, see this link here to stay up to date as cases develop:

Appreciation post for all the beginner artists who work hard despite the AI ​​looming over us. You are fabulous. You are precious. Keep up the hard work, you are needed.

"it's okay, i can peel back the layers of you until i find the soft and gentle core of you you've had to work so hard to hide"? no. no, it's okay, i know you're hollow; i'm here anyway. you don't have to pretend it isn't masks the whole way down. whatever face you want to wear, i still love you. i don't need you to be good or unflinching or the antonym of violence. if i did, i wouldn't be here. i wouldn't ask that of you.

i have nothing against a character who is layers of scar tissue and callous protecting a small little sliver of their before self, who just wants to be safe to let that sliver grow and heal

however. when the only thing under all the scarring is more scarring. when there's nothing of the before self left at all. when there was a precipice, and they tumbled over it, and even if they got back up they'll never heal right.

and then to have someone still say i care for you. you are broken and i can't fix you and i'm here anyway. so what if you're a ghost of yourself? you can haunt me