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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedotter.bsky.social · 8h

I have still not actually compiled any kind of reading list.

I have, however, conned some of the rest of the Salon into providing theirs, accessible at brain-implant.tech/writing/cura...

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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedotter.bsky.social · 12h

I've written...several, but I suspect my definitive wizard is the self-taught and gleefully unsettling Malia the Many-Angled: brain-implant.tech/writing/fic/...

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Reposted by Caffeinated Otter

Fenrir Cerebellion @okaywolf.ink · 13h

I've sooo many magic users, like the daunting lesbians, the one whose familiar is just a regular guy, the uhhh guy who hasn't had a real night's sleep in possibly decades three-parter that gets a sad? happy? as good as the situation can be? ending
www.patreon.com/posts/wizard...

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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedotter.bsky.social · 14h

The basic difference between the people who fantasise about zombie apocalypse because it gets them off the hook for their "and then I'd get to murder all the subhumans :)" fantasies and your average Doberman appreciator is that bad dog ownership reasonably often actually kills people and dogs

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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedotter.bsky.social · 14h

Yet another day of people cooing over the boy because he's such a handsome dog (yes), and following it up with eager questions about his cropped ears (yeah no he's a rescue from a country where it's not fucking illegal on cruelty grounds and you can fuck right off)

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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedotter.bsky.social · 19h

What an excellent time to have never got into Ruby in the first place

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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedotter.bsky.social · 19h

...and the corp who attempted to yoink the whole thing will be official partners to this newly-blessed Official Ruby Infrastructure.

Y'know, with their inevitable, indirectly but distinctly related cloud of "oh, the execs are fucking mask-off Twitter Nazis these days"

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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedotter.bsky.social · 19h

So the community understandably forked, and now Matz, of Matz-invented-Ruby, has waded in to broker some kind of thing where the de facto corp-tainted package manager will be blessed as The Official Ruby Package Manager, control of the project brought under the Ruby project...

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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedotter.bsky.social · 19h

So if I have this right, Ruby went through the same kind of Cambrian explosion of post-hoc package managers + whittling-down to a de facto one, and after years of status quo, corps owning the trademarks went "yoink! gonna lock all you fucks (who've been doing the work for years) out of the Git repo"

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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedotter.bsky.social · 22h

"Oh no we need to save Wikipedia, one of the last unspoiled—" did they ever solve their known "murky, unaccountable editorial bureaucracy with known Nazi infestation, which regularly goes on sweeping purges of pages about e.g. women" problem or

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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedotter.bsky.social · 1d

Alright, Caffeinated "not a mechsplo author" Otter, what's this one about?

Caffeinated "not a mechsplo author" Otter, shiftily: ...housing insecurity?

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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedotter.bsky.social · 1d

brave little toasters #writing #ScienceFiction #MechPilot

brave little toasters

Content notices for: past sexual assault mentioned; self-injury with knife

brain-implant.tech

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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedotter.bsky.social · 1d

But that's a problem for after therapy, and maybe some gardening if therapy doesn't leave me too wrung out

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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedotter.bsky.social · 1d

Instead of sleeping I was up till 3AM writing something which I think, when I have a look at it later, will turn out to have no cohering subject, just dialogue and vibes. Which can, with conviction, carry a vignette, but probably not the entire ~3000 words that leaked out

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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedotter.bsky.social · 2d

Who says mechsploitation ain't mainstream

A plain greetings card, with only the following slogan on the front: "I saw this card and thought of you...simple, cheap, and blank inside. Happy birthday"

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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedotter.bsky.social · 2d

Anyone selling writing advice is *selling something* foremost

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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedotter.bsky.social · 2d

and unlike anyone else's advice, or the truthful "there are many, radically differing, ways of working and I can't tell you what'll work for you personally", it yields actionable diktats which are onerous enough that if it doesn't work for you, it's safe to blame *you* for not wikiïng hard enough

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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedotter.bsky.social · 2d

The thing about "yeah you have to do WORLDBUILDING which means exhaustively wikifying EVERY DETAIL of your fictional world so that you can then write a true and faithful account of what ACTUALLY HAPPENED THERE" is that I'm sure there are some writers it works for—

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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedotter.bsky.social · 2d

(I'm the reason the writers' Discord I'm in calls excessive worldbuilding-for-its-own-sake Gnollfucker Plate Tectonics)

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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedotter.bsky.social · 2d

Several years later, I ask how it's going. They're teaching themself a professional geoscience software package so they can define the setting's tectonic plates, simulate their motion, plot out realistic climate, prevailing weather, vegetation patterns, etc.

Word count: 0

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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedotter.bsky.social · 2d

A friend told me they were gonna write a story for nearly the first time since they were a preteen, a bit of portal fantasy gnollfucking smut—

—but they just needed to do some worldbuilding first—

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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedotter.bsky.social · 2d

Um Actually your story's going to be Wrong if you don't do the worldbuilding, etc.

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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedotter.bsky.social · 2d

Do you think an alleged writing teacher has ever stood in front of a class who aspire to the *literary fiction* genre and told them that if they want to write English professors banging their students, they first MUST draw up the whole floorplan and complete syllabus of the fictionalised university

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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedotter.bsky.social · 2d

("no, no, you see, you should be engaged with my OC's sprawling world and detailed lore, not merely hornily looking at the occasional art of them getting dicked down, which is the only part of this which will ever exist outside my own head—!")

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Caffeinated Otter @caffeinatedotter.bsky.social · 2d

(Possibly this is a thing where certain online artist spaces are really, really About the "OC" — which has approximately the relationship to the occasional art of them getting dicked down as the 10-page overwrought backstory does to playing a D&D character: none, but Somebody won't shut up about it)

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