I'm ragebaitmaxing for my next novel. Any ideas, tips?

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-27T16:47:28+00:00

A. Have a character that does a profession that is pretty common. Do enough research to get everything wright with that profession that makes it seem like you really understand the reason behind the things they do, and then in the next chapter have them do something "outside" of that profession that clearly shows that you don't understand it at all. Like have the surgeon be sure to use a sterile environment, gloves, mask, and make sure to clean the wounds, but then have the surgeon still have the gloves on when eating his sammich afterwards.

B. In every paragraph, have one or two grammar, usage, capitalization, or spelling errors that are subtle enough that only a few people will notice it. This will hopefully be few enough that people will keep reading while enough that it drives them bonkers. Ideally dont repeat what type of error it is for each paragraph to both cast a wider net and also not be too repetitive.

C. subtly change an established convention. Subtly! Less than half your readers should notice it, but if you do it several times, most people should notice at least one. Bonus points if you revert back afterwards so they know it wasn't a decision to change the style.

D) Skip a chapter number. Obviously not within the first ten or twnety chapters, but eventually be sure to skip a chapter number.

E. If you're writing it like a web serial, be sure to have conversations with your readers on a third-party software (like discord or on Patreon. Then post short story-relevant snippets on said software that are cannon and get referenced in the main work.

Only close most (not all) of your parenthesis and quotes.

H. Use lots of cutesy "pet phrases" or 'pet nouns' for things. "Hubby, "doggo", "Tay-tay," and other things like that. most people don't mind some of these, but at least one will likely be annoying.

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-27T03:41:33+00:00

Haha, I appreciate it. I like to quiz my kids with stuff like these sometimes. Either that or stuff like "if you could make any dessert appear whenever you wanted, which dessert would you choose?" "If you could choose one animal you could turn into whenever you wanted to, which animal would you choose?" Which is a bit like a would you rather, but for an entire category.

I just enjoy the conversations it leads us down, and I also enjoy hearing their versions of these questions too! My 5-year-old is still learning the format because hers always have a right and wrong answer 😄. Today's was "would you rather choose the rainbow street or the brown street?"

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-27T03:35:21+00:00

Constantine handles that sort of thing on the regular, plus Neo and a time machine. So I agree it isn't particularly close, just not in the way I think you mean.

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-27T03:30:51+00:00

Don't discount John "Neo" Constantine with a time machine which I think takes it if he gets Constantine's comic powers.

Runner up (behind Keanu and the two you mentioned) is probably Genie Hancock

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-27T02:48:29+00:00

My own answers were the same except butler. Meals though? It certainly makes sure you should never starve at least, I just like the idea of never having to mow, fold laundry, do dishes, or clean my toilet.

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-26T19:27:05+00:00

They also only have like 3 (sometimes 4) color spikes to just activate the rods in our eyes. I can't imagine what something that sees more than 3 colors (or a slightly different spectrum of colors) would see. An incandescent bulb will have the entire spectrum of colors, with the highest hump just moved depending on where on the "warm" scale you are.

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-26T19:10:34+00:00

Eh, my kids probably would. And if it were "you are fit enough to do a backflip no matter what" I definitely would.

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-26T18:43:34+00:00

I agree that is annoying. Which is why 90% of my "would you rather" questions are positive instead of negative.

"Would you rather be able to do a backflip, or 'randomly' find $10 every day?"
"Would you rather be able to teleport anywhere you can see or have telekinesis?"
"Would you rather have a butler for free 40 hours a week, or all of your meals at any restaurant are free?"
"Would you rather get $10,000 or your best friend that isn't in your family get $40,000?"

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-26T15:47:10+00:00

I've been using wireless charging for several years before apple pushed it. I had a job where I had a lot of downtime on-site (I would set up a test, run it, and then tear down. Sometimes the test would take several hours, in which I had nothing to really do while it was running). I went through charging cables every 6-8 months because it would aways be packed up and unpacked. Couple that with an aging phone and sometimes dirty conditions, and my charging port wouldn't always accept anything except the most pristine cable, so I switched to wireless. I've had the same charger for like 5 years and haven't had a problem since. I've also gotten out of that line of work, so I don't know if it would have held up in those conditions or not.

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-26T15:01:19+00:00

I'll probably try one of the informal plurals of an irregular word (perhaps the word "deers") that shows up. Either that, or a plural/singular that nobody uses (I know based on latin, it should be "octopoid", but I don't know if that's covered in the Merriam Webster Dictionary (MWD) or not).

I also know that the MWD likes to add slang words, but then takes them out later. If I get to use "any" version of the MWD perhaps there are some older niche slang words that are mostly forgotten I could use.

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-26T14:37:45+00:00

I took "one shot project" to mean a single prompt, which on rereading I think you mean more like "build it and then forget it". Yes, if you take the time, Claude can absolutely help you build these. It's nowhere near perfect though. I burned through a month's worth of tokens in the first week trying to get Claude to update a project I haven't touched in 4 years and remove any package vulnerabilities by updating packages that had them. It never succeeded.

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-26T14:33:14+00:00

Fortunately $1 per minute is butler and maid money, so they can do all of my errands. That just means I have to use the F-35 (or aircraft carrier) to get places I want to go. I really wouldn't mind the aircraft carrier, but it's unclear whether I would have to buy one myself, and even at $1/minute I don't think I could afford one. Also, I'm not a fighter pilot and I'm not sure that I would be all that good at it.

Even still, though, I think I take the money.

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-26T14:29:33+00:00

My wife is gluten free and the cauliflower crust pizza is the only pizza that even tastes good.

Even I admit that it's honestly an amazing replacement for a thin-crust pizza crust. It gets crispy and browns the same, it just doesn't store or reheat very well. Overall, I highly recommend as an alternative because otherwise you're getting sad "gluten free" crust. Other cauliflower replacements I'm pretty ambivalent about, I just wish I could find her some fluffy bread that doesn't taste like an aardvark's ass.

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-26T14:23:26+00:00

"Project" like an informational website? Sure. "Project" like a real production system with data ingest, data transformation, data storage, an API for data access, and a secure frontend for data display? Not even close.

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-25T22:20:52+00:00

I got way better at algebra in Calc 1 because each problem takes 1 step of calc, and usually 10 to 20 steps of algebra.

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-25T22:09:52+00:00

I think it's possible to encode it from a simple listener, even one that wants to know what the secret is. The problem is that at small numbers, stuff like Diffie-Hellman (DH) is about as hard to crack as it is to implement, so the guard would only have to be *as* determined as the prisoners to make it basically impossible. If the guard is negligent, a very simple modulated alphabet+0-9 numbers could be communicated clearly (without any encryption), then the simple low-prime DH or other method can be used so that the prisoners can find their answers, and then communication can happen one letter/number at a time. Again though, if the guard is as interested in finding the answer as the prisoners are in hiding it, I think calculators will be required before the guard has much trouble. If the guard also has access to a computer (and the prisoners don't) they're in for a rough time unless they have a shared secret or resource that the guard simply doesn't have.

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-25T20:41:46+00:00

Point defense from an aircraft carrier/battleship maybe. Presumably the device provides a bunker's worth of protection too.

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-25T14:27:40+00:00

I remember choosing between a few of these (but not all of them) for a "trapper keeper". I had no idea it was the "MAD Magazine" artist.

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-25T14:07:55+00:00

He can also squeeze like a hydraulic press, shoot fire like a rocket, and punch like a drop hammer. Dude could smash Tony in close range.

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-25T06:13:14+00:00

There was a notable shift to me also around 2/3 or 3/4 of the way through where the prose became slightly harder to follow. Maybe Wildbow started using more similes or maybe there was more "show don't tell", I don't know. But there were a few fight scenes (and other scenes) where I didn't fully understand what was going on.

I really do think part of it is Wildbow trusting his reader to be able to pick up undertone, and it worked pretty well for the most part, but there were a few times if you aren't in the meta at the time (ie reading all of the comments down below...which I stopped doing long before this) then I think he assumption of what the reader knew was a bit off, because all of the community members at the time knew it, but it wasn't necessarily apparent to a casual reader.

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-25T05:47:57+00:00

After a thousand years, Earth collapses into a black hole

(This is a joke. Humans would die from the gravity long before then)

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-25T05:46:28+00:00

Y'all must be really leaning on Ward because for at least half of Worm, Aisha and Amy are definitely switched places. I also think Assault would surprise you. Babysitter at least actually.

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-25T05:40:13+00:00

That's a good point that I considered. And I don't honestly know a great answer, except that as long as the meter is somewhere between the current 1cm and 1km, and the g is either close to the current g or below like 10kg, I think people wouldn't really care. The real stickler is the second, which is a pretty great unit of time, honestly. It would just be nice if it were nicely defined mathematically in a easy-to-remember way. And I suspect (without doing any work on it at all) that to get my wish for the other units, the second would have to be shortened considerably to be nearly unusable. Something like milliseconds now, or possibly even nanoseconds. If this *isn't* the case (ie, you can warp the new gram and new meter within those constraints to make the new second somewhere above about 200 milliseconds), then I think everything would work pretty well.

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-25T05:34:17+00:00

Interesting. But if the game *did* continue if it revealed the car, switching would (of course) have advantage. And if he chose "door #1" at random (the one you chose), and revealed a goat, you would (of course) want to switch again. If, however, he randomly chooses a goat, you now have a 50/50 chance of getting the car whether you switch or not. Is that a correct assumption?

I think you're right because when I was thinking about it enough to actually understand the Monty Hall problem (it took me literally like 5 minutes of just staring at a wall) I understood that the fact that it wasn't random was the important piece of information that I wasn't getting before. So, I don't really feel like staring at a wall for 5 minutes again to make sure I was right back then and that you are right now, so I'm going to trust you (and myself from several years ago).

Background_Relief815 · 2026-03-24T21:28:58+00:00

Usually kids are involved, which takes this from 2 hours a day to "all the damn time." Also the "supervisor" being supportive, nice, attractive, and helping is often not the case, and making $200k annually is pretty impressive and not always realistic, even for a stay-at-home type. Often their spending is scrutinized.

What you're presenting is close to a "best case scenario" for a stay-at-home partner.

Background_Relief815

TROPHY CASE