Turtle from the Kyzylkum desert

May. 28th, 2025 02:43 pm
pilottttt: (Default)
[personal profile] pilottttt posting in [community profile] common_nature


For more details about our trip to this desert (in Russian), see here: https://pilottttt.dreamwidth.org/445028.html

Beta-reading on Ellipsus

May. 28th, 2025 07:32 am
vriddy: Studious, smiling Eri (studious)
[personal profile] vriddy

That's another post that was due back in January ;) I mentioned that I'd asked beta-readers if they would be up for trying out Ellipsus with me for beta-reading the Cursed Witch. Unfortunately, after a couple of them agreed and started, I ended up having to ask folks to use another platform.

I know a few people in my circles are using Ellipsus for writing - if some of this information is out of date, let me know! From extracting the beta-reader comments and feedback this month, I think the pieces that are deal-breakers for me are still present. I still massively support Ellipsus and the stance they're taking against generative AI. We need more small independent writer-friendly companies like this.

As an additional note, if you stay subscribed to the email "welcome" sequence after joining, at the end they send you a friendly email from one of the co-founders asking for feedback, which I did share. I received a very gracious reply explaining what they were working on at the moment and when they'd hopefully get to these issues. I understand the need to prioritise, and I'm totally rooting for them.

Having said that, here's why Ellipsus didn't work for me for beta-reading compared to a tool like GoogleDoc or LibreOffice.

Finding the changes

Read more... )

Can't see both comments and in-text suggestions at the same time

Read more... )

Email stuff, minor and a bit annoying though not a deal breaker

Read more... )

So that's been my experience! The third one can be avoided with some email filtering, but from starting to incorporate comments and feedback from beta-reading this month, I believe the two deal-breakers are still a problem. However, this is all for a very specific, "beta-reader" use case rather than actual writing. I understand Ellipsus is an amazing GDoc replacement for that use case, and excellent for real-time collaborative writing. If you've been looking for GDoc alternative for your writing, one that doesn't feed your work to an AI training corpus, consider it!

And if you're using Ellipsus already, would love to hear about your experience so I can understand better what it does well and less well, and more easily recommend it when applicable to people looking for a new tool :)

Tech/code question

May. 27th, 2025 07:37 pm
elisheva_m: a water colour rainbow on a water colour sky with the word hope (Default)
[personal profile] elisheva_m posting in [community profile] little_details
I'm trying to write a scene where two co-workers are trouble-shooting a new custom security or encryption routine. Someone else (who isn't present) wrote the code and he will have been careful to ensure it works before sending it to them. So maybe something in the implementation of it?

The scene is dual purpose, showing their interaction growing closer while also hiding something else in plain sight. The tech part of it can be whatever is plausible and easy to convey without bogging it down in details. I am so out of touch with that sort of thing I don't know what's plausible any more.

What could go wrong with uploading the new code into their office network or onto their phones which would need a bit of trouble-shooting? The kind of thing one person might overlook and another catch. Preferably with them being literally close while they do this. And again - easy to convey without bogging it down in details. Jargon is fine.

Edit: Turns out jargon is not fine. Well it would be in the sense I meant, but that's not how it was taken. Am overwhelmed by how much I can't understand well enough to follow here, let alone distill into a few phrases. I know the readers for my lakorn-novel are non-existent but I can't swamp them with details.

Edit 2: Sorry to have bothered everyone. I'm just going to trash this. It was a stupid idea in the first place. Thank you for your time.
feurioo: (tv: coffee prince eun-chan cute)
[personal profile] feurioo posting in [community profile] tv_talk

Laptop-TV combo with DVDs on top and smartphone on the desk


It’s often been the case that the rich and powerful are shown on TV far more often than lower middle class, working class, or poor people, despite their actual percentages in most populations. Does this bother you as a viewer? Does genre play any role in that?
full_metal_ox: A National Geographic cover mock-up, with three marigolds in an analogous orange-yellow color harmony. (Nature)
[personal profile] full_metal_ox posting in [community profile] common_nature
Taken last year, this is pictorial tax for my previous post; this little guy was one of a family headquartered in a vacant lot along one of my habitual shopping routes.





Note the ropes cordoning the space off, as well as the designated perch set up for the owls. In the upper background, across the path, is another staked-off owl nesting site; unusually for birds of prey, Burrowing Owls are social animals who sometimes form communities of multiple families.

(If I’ve slipped into Earnest School Essay Mode, it’s because this is stuff I myself am very much newly learning.)

New neighbors!

May. 26th, 2025 12:54 pm
full_metal_ox: A National Geographic cover mock-up, with three marigolds in an analogous orange-yellow color harmony. (Nature)
[personal profile] full_metal_ox posting in [community profile] common_nature
Lizards have been somewhat fewer in the apartment complex than last year, and the other night I learned a possible reason: a Burrowing Owl (Athene cunicularia) couple have set up housekeeping on the back lawn next door! (No pictorial tax as yet: their nest, less than five feet from the curb, overlooks a back alley heavily travelled by garbage, service, and delivery vehicles as well as human pedestrians—meaning that they’re probably experiencing botherance enough without amateur paparazzi. (1)

Burrowing Owls are regarded as local mascots and rigorously protected here; standard procedure upon discovering an inhabited burrow is to erect a little designated perch for the owls and cordon it off, crime-scene style, halting any human construction until the young have left the nest.

(1) Rule of thumb is that if the owls are reacting to your presence, you’re too close; the risk of attracting gawkers is one reason that doxxing Burrowing Owls nesting on private property is frowned upon around here. Schools, museums, and other such facilities, however, will encourage on-site nesting, observable by remote cam.

I’m finding varying accounts of how capable they are of digging their own burrows, but certainly the owls prefer the convenience of found housing when they can get it, not only taking over burrows constructed by other animals but occupying such human artifacts as PVC pipes; it’s quite possible to build artificial burrows to attract them.

Hurt/Comfort series 2025: Complete!

May. 26th, 2025 07:59 am
vriddy: Hawks with Fukuoka skyline at night (fukuoka skyline)
[personal profile] vriddy

I just posted the last story for the hurt/comfort series! I started writing this sometime in... February? When I was just trying to find the joy of writing again in the middle of personal and world overwhelm. And slowly, I got back to where I wanted :) As noted by a friend, the series has 25 stories (which is absolutely coincidental but I will pretend was Totally The Plan, 25 for 2025 yay XD), and nearly 40k words. I think one of the things I wanted to teach myself with the series is also that not everything has to be edited to death. Everything having to do with editing started to feel like an gigantic, impossible ordeal after how long it took for the original novella.

I have some ideas about what I'd like to work on next (back to the Cursed Witch, hopefully! 🤞), but we'll see what happens :)

6 prompts, 7 stories, 3 ships )

Pet Peeve

May. 25th, 2025 08:02 pm
soc_puppet: A young man with glasses and messy brown hair staring blankly (and somewhat tiredly) at the viewer, as if he has just been informed of some outlandish news that he should have somehow expected. (Simply out of the ability to)
[personal profile] soc_puppet
Dear My Parents,

Sometimes when I am making a meal that is more complicated than a sandwich, I want to make it for just me. Especially when I have only bought ingredients with a meal for a single person in mind. Like, I'm usually happy to make something else instead! Just. I'd like to know before I start making a meal for Just Me that it's instead going to be for three people. Possibly so I can start making something else instead.

(I would be willing to accept "Not feeling guilty when saying that I'm only making enough for one" as a compromise.)

Yours,
Someone who really wanted to eat what was initially planned as one hungry person's worth of gyudon last night.
lilly_c: Kathryn and Chakotay close together with K💖C in white text (Kathryn & Chakotay - K💖C)
[personal profile] lilly_c posting in [community profile] fan_flashworks
Title: nothing is better
Fandom: Star Trek: Voyager
Rating: G
Length: 200
Content notes:
Author notes: Partly inspired by this quote and it can take place pretty much anywhere.
Summary: Using the override codes she entered the darkened living space, carefully removing her boots and uniform jacket before making her way to the bedroom.

nothing is better )

Reading Roundup, May 2025

May. 25th, 2025 02:00 pm
phantomtomato: (Default)
[personal profile] phantomtomato
I’m calling this month a bit early so that I enjoy the rest of my holiday reading without rushing to finish in the next week. :) I really enjoyed this month, especially the first two—and that’s another reason for this going up now! After two great books in a row, it’s a bit difficult to want to follow them with something which simply won’t be as good (to me), as much to my tastes. Do you ever feel that way after reading something? I need a sort of come-down to adjust back to books that aren’t nearly perfectly aligned with my interests.

The Temple, by Stephen Spender

This was the first great book that I’d finished in what felt like a long time. I loved it. It also felt like I was completing part of my literary collection in reading it, as I’ve read Auden and Isherwood before, and now I have Spender as well.

The Temple is a thinly-fictionalized account of Stephen Spender’s youth spent living abroad in Hamburg, Germany. It opens on him as Paul (all real figures have been given aliases), badly managing an early infatuation with a fellow university student. His poems about this crush lead to friendships with Auden and Isherwood expies as well as a man named Ernst Stockmann, who is a friend of one of the college deans and soon becomes an admirer (romantic, artistic) of Paul. Ernst invites Paul to spend the summer of 1929 with his family in Hamburg. Germany was then an escape from censorship and the anti-homosexuality laws of Britain, and both Auden and Isherwood were already making use of this. Paul, their disciple, seizes on the invitation to launch himself there.

Read more... )

I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys Auden or Isherwood, who is interested in queer or Jewish experiences during the Interwar period, or who enjoys autofiction. It’s one of those rare books in which a queer author, late in life, has outlived the profanity laws which stifled their younger writing and can finally see it published. That alone makes it a story worth reading.

The Secret History, by Donna Tartt

Where does one begin when a novel occupies so much space in the modern imagination? It is night-impossible to escape some peripheral awareness of The Secret History as a reader of campus novels. The book’s fame and accolades have only been augmented by the past decade’s creation of Dark Academia—literary trend, clothing style, digital aesthetic. In such a context, a book cannot only be a book.

Despite all of the forces against it, The Secret History is a very good book. It tells the tale of a group of college students studying Classics at a small liberal arts college in Vermont, modeled very much on Tartt’s own undergraduate experience at Bennington College. (This is, by the by, how I first encountered the novel: the Esquire piece from 2019 got shared around to me as a liberal arts grad. I read and enjoyed it at the time, but wasn’t moved to read any of the novels mentioned.)

Read more... )

The Bacchae, by Euripedes

When embarking on a new genre, I never know how to write about the first work I encounter. That’s a bit of a lie—I think that I read Oedipus Rex and Lysistrata in high school. I certainly don’t remember particulars. The sum total is that, in reading The Bacchae, I am both unsurprised by and unfamiliar with its conventions. I’ve seen the form, but I have no meaningful context for it. I’ve spent years circling around the classics by reading those old Victorians and Edwardians, and so I’ve grown a sense of their consequence, a certain era of their cultural cachet and meaning, and read my share of one-off poems. But to sit with a long piece, one of the great tragedies, is a different task.

Read more... )

Land of Art has moved to dreamwidth

May. 25th, 2025 08:34 pm
tinny: Something Else holding up its colorful drawing - "be different" (Default)
[personal profile] tinny posting in [community profile] icontalking


A Landcomm for Graphic Lovers:
- Icons
- Wallpapers
- Fanmixes
- Headers
- Picspams
and so much more..

Apply for a team here: https://land-of-art.dreamwidth.org/453688.html

If you mention me as the referrer I'll get extra points.

Birdfeeding

May. 25th, 2025 01:06 am
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith posting in [site community profile] dw_community_promo
[community profile] birdfeeding is a community started on January 1, 2023. It's all about birdfeeding, birdwatching, and other topics relating to birds. It also touches on nature in general, and observations that may effect bird activity such as local weather. Both text and image posts are welcome.

Community resources include posts about birding events, nurseries that sell seeds or plants attractive to birds, bird identification apps, the benefits of birdwatching, and other useful materials. Check out the anchor posts from Three Weeks for Dreamwidth.


Recent posts:

Garden for Wildlife Month

Poem: "Birdsong" by Matt Merritt

Photos: House Yard

Photos: Prairie Garden

Baseball birds

SABLE achieved

May. 24th, 2025 08:51 pm
soc_puppet: Words "Creative Process" in purple (Creative Process)
[personal profile] soc_puppet
Our local Joann's has five days left before it closes, unless it completely runs out of everything before then.

In related news, guess who has two thumbs and impulse-bought ten yards of fleece featuring sharks spyhopping. I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do with it, but like. It was only $15. I am very, very, very weak to that kind of deal.

(Note to self: Do something with Avery and Zeek and spyhopping; it would be adorable.)


Footnote: SABLE = Stash Accumulated Beyond Life Expectancy. I have perhaps purchased too much fabric in general...

Just Create - Counter Edition

May. 24th, 2025 02:31 pm
silvercat17: silhouette of a cat washing itself (cat silhouette)
[personal profile] silvercat17 posting in [community profile] justcreate
What are you working on? What have you finished? What do you need encouragement on?

Are there any cool events or challenges happening that you want to hype?

What do you just want to talk about?

What have you been watching or reading?

Chores and other not-fun things count!

Remember to encourage other commenters and we have a discord where we can do work-alongs and chat, linked in the sticky

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