for scrolling to the bottom and ‘contacting’ there, if email is more your thing.
Call script because phone calls are harder to ignore than emails:
“Hi, I’m calling to tell you that the reports you received of sexually abusive content on Steam and itch.io are fraudulent and were made by religious extremist groups.
As a [insert company] customer I’m expressing my discontent and requesting that you rescind your demands to these platforms.”
Something that gets me about Pokemon Pokopia is that you actually find out what led to the setting of Pokopia pretty early on. While exploring the world you find dozens of logs that explain in very clear terms what’s going on. But Ditto remains clueless about it no matter how many logs you collect, and cannot offer so much as a theory to Professor Tangrowth and the others.
And then I realized they have no reaction to the logs for the same reason they have no reaction to signs and info board items–
I think the thing that annoys me most about AI on a personal, day to day, level is what it has done to grammar checkers. If you’ve never done a lot of editing, or used to 5+ years ago but haven’t really in the last couple years, I can’t even begin to describe how fucking BAD this shit has gotten. And as an author it is EXHAUSTING.
I just want to catch spelling errors and accidental double spaces and repeated phrases and whenever I use the wrong too/to or affect/effect and shit. But no. They’ve shoved AI up the ass of every grammar checking software out there and now they all fucking suck and make the most random, obnoxious, nonsensical suggestions.
And yeah, I can ignore all the times it’s trying to get me to cut out any semblance of my own voice, or shove things into the wrong tense, or make the most random suggestions on comma usage. But if it’s getting all that WRONG, what is it just straight up missing that I SHOULD be correcting? What real spelling and grammar errors are still lurking in there?
“Use Libre Office.”
I get why people keep saying this (and other versions of it like “Use Adobe alternatives” and “Use Google product alternatives.”). But here’s the problem: I do not create in isolation. Even my own 100% personal projects are getting sent to other people whether it’s editors or printers or beta readers and unless every single person in that train is using the same products, things can get wonky.
Libre Office and Word handle formatting differently on the back end, which can completely break documents if you move them back and forth between the two. So if I write in Libre Office but my beta readers are still using Word, when I send them a manuscript for review there’s a good chance things won’t look right and my beta reader will not actually be reviewing what I sent them.
Industry standards are industry standards FOR A REASON. Having everyone on the same workflow can be crucial to getting things done effectively and correctly without creating a lot of extra work. And those things are not going to change overnight, as much as we might want them to.
:| :| :|
Yeah, Word, let me just leave this whole chunk of dialogue without the closing quotation marks. That’s the thing to do. How dare I have two punctuation marks in a row. It’s not like that’s how closing quotation marks fucking work.
I am going to light something on fire.
And you know, for young writers, this has got to be so detrimental just from the perspective of opening your document and seeing a million corrections that, frankly, don’t need to be there. If you’re a young writer you’re likely not going to have the background knowledge to know what is and isn’t a good suggestion, you’re just going to see a document that makes it look like you made every mistake possible so clearly you must be a terrible, stupid writer and should just give up.
have i ever told y’all about the greatest moment of my academic career
i was a freshman in college and i had this history teacher who was ~edgy~ and his hotness level on ratemyprofessor was off the charts and he was the first teacher i ever heard use the word “fuck.” anyway he would do this thing every so often where we’d have a “quiz” and the first two questions were always really easy and the last one was hard - they were all similar questions, and the point was to show what you learn about history and what you don’t.
so one day he’s like okay kids time for a quiz and the first question was who killed abraham lincoln. the second question was who killed JFK. third question was who killed william mckinley.
we all take a few minutes and write down our answers, and then the teacher asks the questions again so we can shout out the answers. everybody answered the first two with really no problem.
now, keep in mind that this class was at 9 a.m. and i was exhausted All The Time during my freshman year of college so i sat in the back in my sweats and never said a word and the teacher definitely had no clue who i was.
so you can imagine his surprise when he asked the class who shot william mckinley and without missing a beat i said, “czolgosz,” pronounced correctly and everything.
my teacher froze and in a very stern voice asked, “what was that? what did someone just say?”
i repeated: czolgosz.
my teacher: “who said that?”
i raised my hand, and my super cool history teacher glared at me. he then asked me how the hell i knew the answer. he said that in the TWENTY YEARS he’d been teaching this stupid class, nobody, not A SINGLE PERSON, had ever known the answer to that question.
i then had to quietly explain to a room full of people that there’s a musical called assassins and there’s a song about czolgosz shooting william mckinley at the great pan american exposition in buffaloooooooo (in buffaloooooooo)
The arts are important.
I shocked a teacher once because I could recite the preamble to the US Constitution (got bonus points to), She asked why I’d taken it upon myself to memorize it. I had to explain it was in a School House Rock song….
I shocked church with my ‘math skills’ when they were asking how many seconds in a minute, minutes in an hour, hours in a day, days in a year, now how about minutes in a year - and I call out five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes without pausing to think, cos Rent
Once aced a religion class pop quiz that asked me to list all of Jacob’s sons since they’re the names of the 12 tribes of Israel. The one and only time I’ve been thankful for Andrew Lloyd Webber. I even got points for getting the birth order correct.
My little brother got extra points in a social studies class once for knowing “O Canada” in its entirely (we’re American and grew up in Maryland, for context) because my older sister went to undergrad in Maine and her acapella group learned the Canadian National Anthem could sing it whenever the hockey teams played Canadian teams.
Who says the arts don’t have real world benefits?
When i was in high school, my history teacher asked what historic technology caused the biggest alteration in military tactics. I answered stirrups, and explained that the ability to brace against the horse to use a weapon and the better maneuverability vs a chariot created the entire concept of cavalry, which led to modern tactics, etc. The teacher said I was the first student to ever give that answer and that I was basically correct, and then asked where I had found that out. I then had to explain I had read it in a Star Trek novel.
I got a history question about the Roman general Marcus Crassus because of Xena, Warrior Princess.
Came across this art installation, Liza Lou’s Kitchen, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC. It’s a kitchen made of tiny glass beads, that artist Liza Lou did, taking 5 yrs. to complete, from 1991 - 1996.
