Today is the reveal of the cover for new edition of YIELD UNDER GREAT PERSUASION, coming out July 16th from Tor UK and October 6th from Tor Bramble!

YIELD is a cozy M/M romantasy about doing the hard, unlovely, backbreaking work of learning to love and forgive yourself so that you can accept the love of other people which has been waiting for you all along. Tags include: One-sided enemies-to-lovers, one-sided yearning and pining, grumpy/sunshine, your honor they're idiots, busybody gods, and plant magic.

SUMMARY:

"Alongside the sexiness and absurdity (and the sexy absurdity) in Yield Under Great Persuasion is a tender, resonant story of second and third chances and being loved when we need it most and feel we deserve it least. Evocative, emotional, and endlessly entertaining." -Jules Arbeaux, author of Lord of the Empty Isles

"A hot cup of chocolate for the soul." --Book Riot Preorders should be available now wherever you buy your books, including Bookshop.org, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble.

(If your first question is "Where is the best place to get it?" check the FAQ page on my website!)

As an author, it is really hard to get the word out about books, so signal boosting would be immensely appreciated!

Now that the kickstarter for THE WISDOM OF EMPERORS is over, I am back on promo for YIELD UNDER GREAT PERSUASION! Comes out in July in the UK/EU and October in the US!

This bad boy comes out TOMORROW (July 16th) in hardcover in the UK/EU, and worldwide in audiobook format! It's also available RIGHT NOW in ebook format worldwide! (Hardcover release for the US is in October!)

If you read the first edition and loved it, this one has about 13,000 words of new chapters at the end :)

It's out today!!! And if you haven't been convinced already, here's the first page:

marvel movies are a type of microplastic. you know what i mean

Ayeeee

Adorable, beautiful magic

Guys, I think I might be gay

Tyson Yunkaporta, Right Story, Wrong Story

Trans people on this website really have convinced themselves of the transphobic cis gay lie that the categories of "trans women and gay men" and "trans men and lesbians" don't include gay trans men and trans lesbians respectively when we're discussing the history of community overlap that trans people share with cis gay people, and that's such a disservice to queer reality.

There is no one way to be trans, so of course there are both trans women and trans men in lesbian communities. Of course there are both trans women and trans men in gay male communities. We all touch each other's lives, we all touch each other's realities and share in our experiences. That's called being queer.

Your desire for comfort & easy categorization and your fear of "conflicting" identities is frankly, all rooted in the dominant culture of White Supremacy and you need to work through it.

Sit with why it makes you uncomfortable that a lesbian trans man, lesbian trans woman, lesbian nonbinary person, and lesbian cis woman are all lesbians in community with each other.

Sit with why it makes you uncomfortable that a gay trans man, trans woman who also identifies as a gay man, nonbinary person who also identifies as a gay man, and a cis gay man are all gay men in community with each other.

Does it feel like a threat to your own identity? Why? Why does it feel scary to you? Where is your anxiety coming from? Do you feel like some kind of sanctity is being disrupted? What specifically is so uncomfortable to you about a man experiencing womanhood and lesbian attraction or a woman experiencing manhood and gay male attraction? Why does someone else's experience with their own gender and sexuality upset you so much? Do you feel ownership over an identity because of the way you're attached to a word, and seeing someone else use it slightly differently upsets you? Why are you the arbiter of the words someone else uses for themself?

and fundamentally having conflicting identities and realities and experiences is queer thats what being queer is

and in being who we are we queer the idea of these social categories being clear and separate and distinct

queerness is and always has been inherently antithetical to the ways the cultural hegemony tells us the world exists

like you said we do a huge disservice to ourselves by layering the societally imposed false dichotomies that these systems use to erase us over our own ways of existing because we will always fit outside of these boxes

^the transmisogynistic upstairs neighbour stomping around like it's saying anything new or useful

Sounds like you're feeling threatened by the existence of other queer people outside of your own identity or who blur the lines of labels you claim for yourself. You should examine that insecurity with trusted loved ones instead of taking it out on internet strangers.

So Hank Green got caught using AI and it’s a whole huge blow up, and I really don’t have much interest in adding to the pile on.

However, I do think this case is great example of what happens when smart people decide they can use these systems “responsibly.”

Let’s put aside the plagiarism and the energy use for a second (not that these don’t matter, but they’re not relevant to my point at the moment) and pretend these systems were made with entirely properly obtained info and ran on only solar, but otherwise were entirely the same. If you’re a person, you might think “okay, I’m going to only use this to come up with ideas for my next paper: I’m going to do all the research myself and the writing, I’m just gonna brainstorm topics.”

The thing is, even if you’re trying to limit use to just “brainstorming” the chatbot isn’t going to limit itself to just brainstorming. You might ask it “what should I write about involving Greek history” and it may suggest “the plague of Athens” but it’s also going to suggest some “basic info” on the plague of Athens that you might end up picking up and deciding your topic is. It’s going to provide you with “research.” And even if you decide to check that research yourself, that’s still setting you down a specific path you might not have picked organically.

And speaking of double checking its “research”, fact checking is a time heavy process. Not only now do you have to read the original text the bot provided, but you also have to compare it line by line with the summary the bot provided. That’s more time than it would have taken to just read the article by itself. And with any time heavy task, people are going to get lazy. And in original research being lazy might mean skimming a paper or an abstract, chatbots allow you to be lazy without looking at the article at all.

And soon enough, despite telling yourself you were only going to use it for brainstorming, you have offloaded topic generation, research and eventually even drafting because that’s what these bots are intended to do. They are not meant to serve as research tools or help brainstorm or serve as a bouncing off board: they are built to encourage maximum engagement. And that means if you go at them with the best of ethical intentions, they are built to tempt you to use them as much as possible, regardless of whatever line you drew in the sand for yourself.

Anyway, my main thought here is you are not smart enough to outwit the dopamine machine. It wants your attention and nothing more. Do not assume you can resist just because you know what’s under the hood.

Whenever you decide to use a tool, you should consider “what is this tool designed to do” and for LLM’s that answer is “maximize user engagement.” Anything else is in service to that goal.

My read of this came from Hank’s own response to the situation which you can find here. I’ve screenshotted the part in particular that drew my attention and spawned this post below:

Obvs, Hank’s situation is not the same as the scenario I laid out but I think the snippet above gets back to my main point which is these tools are built to encourage interaction and that’s a hard thing to avoid, regardless of intentions.

Some other notes:

1. As stated, I don’t bring this up to add to a pile on, just to use this as an example of something I’ve seen happen with folks trying to engage in this tech with an ethical framework. This is because-

2. Frankly, I think shame is a shit motivator. I bring all this up to try to draw attention to something I find under discussed which is what these LLMS are meant to do, and what they are advertised for which are often very separate lists. (I didn’t even get into how they’re meant to train off user data but that’s another can of worms). If you want to discourage AI use, it’s a far better strategy to listen to why the person is engaging with AI and then address that reason.

3. I don’t want to come off as someone trying to scare folks that they’ll get addicted just by touching the stuff: my point is merely that is it critical to know what something is made for before engaging with it. This actually goes for a lot of tech besides AI like Google or social media (which are also designed to 1. Capture your attention and 2. Show you advertisements). AI isn’t a special kind of evil in this way, merely a continuation of a tech trend where a product is sold to a consumer with the goal of the time of the consumer becoming the source of revenue.

4. I have book recs on this topic. As you can guess, this is an academic interest of mine. But that’s another post if folks are interested.

That ‘comment on your a03 work’ email hits like a line of cocaine every time. unmatched dopamine increase. shoutout to everyone who leaves a comment on fics. you deserve the world

every conversation on here increasingly feeling like this tweet

Things to Practice Sending and Receiving

And yes, that means if someone doesn't actually say or believe one of the NOT THIS beliefs, you don't just pretend they do and respond like they're hostile anyway.

TRY THIS:

NOT THIS:

TRY THIS:

NOT THIS:

TRY THIS:

NOT THIS:

Again, sorry for being snippy about it yesterday. Though like, y'all try wearing a suit and being bored in a hot office and see what you do.

We, as a society, need to start simping on Dr Fareed Bhansali harder

Quilt guild president: the summer quilt challenge. As you know it is the 250th anniversary-

Guild: -chilly silence-

President: so the challenge to you all is a quilt with your interpretation and/or feelings towards our current “democracy”

Guild: 👏👏👏

President: I know this bunch. I am sure you will come up with something spectacular, and it will probably get angrier as the summer progresses. Full quilt, mini quilt. Go wild, release some emotions.

How I spent my July 4th.

Appliqué almost done. Then onward to the background stitching

At the start I thought stitching “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” for the last quarter would be therapeutic

I was correct.

Close to finishing the top. Now I gotta figure out how I want to quilt it.

I have one more line of embroidery and I think it needs to be bolder and messier than I started it.

Hard to tell in this light, and without ironing it, that the embroidery does get gradually bolder as it goes. Two strands at the top versus 5 at the bottom (6 for the started to be redone final line).

Not bad for first time doing appliqué.

Still need to decide how I want to quilt it.

btw dating sucks as a concept.

meeting up with someone with the explicit goal of figuring out whether or not you want a relationship with them spoils the dynamic. it sucks. it's terrible. fall in love with your friends like normal people.

as expected this one is a hit with the autism website

"dni if you engage with irredeemable media! dni to kill a mockingbird stans" ok well CLEARLY you have never read to kill a mockingbird if you think it's irredeemable media and also having a book that was published in 1960 on your dni stan list is kinda ridiculous actually

i literally do not think any of you have ever read a book published before the 2000s before in your entire life

#'Dni if you've read to kill a mockingbird' what's is this the Florida banned books list #Who r u Ron DeSantis

#can somwone pleasw provide context to whatever the fuck op is referring to

You really buried the lede by only mentioning To Kill a Mockingbird

i dont mean to victim blame but why do these vampires keep talking to daniel molloy when they know he's daniel molloy

They think they can outsmart him just because he’s a baby

the other thing about Internet dogpiling is that it is just not possible to think clearly during the acute stages. it’s so easy to criticize people for responding defensively or tactlessly to mass criticism but I cannot overstate the degree to which your brain becomes a rat in a trap. I think we do have to temporarily recalibrate our expectations in these circumstances and accept that they do not necessarily represent how that person responds to criticism. the skills for self-regulating and reacting to normal interpersonal criticism are not the same skills needed to respond to viral callouts.