Satsuma @Satsuma@cat.family

We’re right at the northernmost edge of the maypops native range & our plants are still building up their rootstock which slows them down a bit

But since global warming saw fit to grace us with a sixty degree December, our plants hung on just long enough to actually get a crop!

#Ao3TagOfTheDay: Quinn runs from his feelings but his feelings have a moped

I don’t think these two essays are intentionally responding to each-other, but I do think SuperDoomedPlanet’s critique of what they call the “novelization style” (transparent prose, consistently close 3rd person narrator, short time-frames & high stakes, narrative structures you’d expect from a tv show or a movie) reflects a lot of the reasons why I found Ex Urbe’s argument that specific worldbuilding is bad because someone might disagree with it so baffling

«Every really good novel is a little bit imperfect. The most fun, engaging books aren’t perfectly engineered; they have ambiguities, multiple interpretations, detours, and odd protuberances. They often include passages that look like side trips and diversions, straying from the plot but developing themes, ideas, and characters….They’re eccentric and weirdly shaped and packed with stuff. Some of the stuff may or may not work. Readers may disagree about which stuff worked and which didn’t. When that happens, that’s a clue that the novel is interesting.»

From: http://www.superdoomedplanet.com/blog/2016/04/15/conclusions-and-caveats/

I've bought everyone else a book but she prefers audiobooks to print/ebooks and I've got auditory processing issues so I have literally zero idea about who makes good ones etc

People who listen to audiobooks, have y'all listened to any good ones recently?

#Ao3TagOfTheDay: Oh No Oh Woe Canon Slipped In The Shower And I Am The Grieving Widow With An Inheritance

SWCW fandom is so fucking wild tho, this shit happens to me like once a week

Wait helix is an OC????????

Okay fixed that issue, going to go have a snack & take a bit of a break before I reread these for final edits

(and then it's spanish studying time 😔)

seriously tho the number of times I use the words "discusses" and "experiences" in these abstracts is ABSURD

They're both like 200 words long and I'm pretty sure I uses experiences 5-6 times in each 😬

There's a point in this interview where my childhood neighborhood comes up and you can hear me almost give the interviewee my cross-street before I very obviously remember this whole thing is being recorded for a public archive and start backpedaling.

One of the things that linguists are trying to figure out is whether words are stored as discrete objects in the bring or if they're each 'assembled' from their component parts.

The most likely answer seems to be "a bit of both" but tbh I'm pretty sure I lean heavily towards component parts personally because I will just inflect things/stick suffixes on roots in non-standard ways with *incredible* frequency

Love making up words and then finding out they're real words

« Another thing which makes this worse is that our science changes over time. If I did the best possible research on what we right now think would be the best shape for a superfast flying thing (based on the Blackbird perhaps?), nonetheless ten years from now we might do other research and discover a new shape is better, and using that shape would come across as wrong and super dated. To give a real example though I forget what story it was, there’s an SF story set in the future where an explorer entering a derelict spaceship pulls out her cell phone and turns the screen white so she can see by its light–instantly dates it to the brief phase when phones didn’t have flashlights, and feels distracting. If it just said “She shone a light” it wouldn’t be distracting at all, it would always feel correct no matter how much tech changes.» from https://www.exurbe.com/terra-ignota-ama-questions-craft-of-writing-performer-casting/

I find it really interesting that the author thinks this is bad instead of one of my favorite things about reading older scifi. Everyone’s taste is different I guess??