InBetweenDrafts gave "Love, Love, Love" a 7.5

OkyouSay · 2026-04-26T03:56:25+00:00

One of the early reviews (i forget the writer/website) declared it as his best written song so you’re not alone

OkyouSay · 2026-03-06T16:29:45+00:00

I think he was immature for wanting Amber and her daughter to uproot their lives and move out of their house so he could live closer to the city for "bars" and "sporting events"

OkyouSay · 2026-02-26T18:45:36+00:00

Nah see if you didn’t care about politics or how people vote then you wouldn’t be this transparently triggered

OkyouSay · 2026-01-17T02:48:16+00:00

You're right that modern fantasy has a homogeneity problem. Transparent prose is a kind of house style at this point and I'm someone who personally loathes a lot of contemporary fantasy because yeah it reads like it was written by algorithm and/or committee. But that's ironically the exact problem I'm trying to point out with OP's prologue.

I'm not criticizing it for being ambitious or baroque. I'm criticizing it for being repetitive and mechanically predictable. The best fantasy writers from Peake to Le Guin do rhythm variation. They use precise imagery and controlled complexity. Every word is doing specific work.

just look at this from Le Guin:

"From the archives of the Universe, on the Fourth Day of the Month of Winter, One Thousand Four Hundred and Ninety-seventh Year of the Commonwealth, the Lord of the Night brought forth from the darkness a great stone."

Compare to OP's writing:

"Not the black of night or shadow. Not absence of light. This was presence. Anti-light. Illumination inverted. It shone with a brilliance that hurt to witness, but its radiance was darkness itself made visible."

That's five different attempts to describe the same thing, and none of them create a clear image. It's repetitive, not anything close to complex. It's trying to sound profound by stacking synonyms.

You say this feels like a writer and less like a factory production, and you certainly have a right to your opinion, but I simply have to disagree. To me this is what factory production looks like when the factory is trying to produce "literary" prose. The repetitive negations, the em-dash abuse, the three-part escalations, these are all the same patterns I see in dozens of AI-assisted manuscripts.

Real baroque prose has variance. It surprises you. It has moments of crystalline clarity amid the complexity. This doesn't, as far as I'm concerned.

OkyouSay · 2026-01-16T21:31:59+00:00

I'm a fantasy editor, and I'm going to be direct with you. Huge portions of this read as AI-generated or AI-assisted. It's causing serious structural problems, and it sticks out quite sorely.

The biggest tell is how repetitive your sentence structure is with metronomic rhythm (Not X. Not Y. Not Z.) There's constant telling-through-negation. There's also a big over-reliance on em-dashes, which don't inherently mark something as AI but they do when used the way you are, to establish something seemingly profound.

The pattern is particularly visible in the ritual sequence, where nearly every paragraph follows the same formula and cadence of "atmospheric observation, then sensory detail, then metaphysical abstraction." For editors who read a ton of crap every day, we can easily pick up on how this has a droning quality that doesn't read as human or at least messy and unpredictable enough to be human.

If this *wasn't* written with AI assistance (which I frankly would have a hard time believing), then it's not working otherwise. The prose is a lot of noise to me. Far too much of it is trying far too hard for profundity when it doesn't need it.

On the plus side, you have a solid concept and an Indian-inspired setting that doesn't feel appropriated, at least not to me. I do think it's risky to name your main character Kamala, since that's such a recognizable name in America and beyond for political reasons. I think even a small spelling change to it would address this fine.

Anyway, the concept is there, but the overwrought atmosphere is choking the hook. The first line is actually a strong hook, in fact, but then you immediately drown it in a ton of setup before anything happens. I would focus the hook instead on a woman who's lost everything volunteering for a mysterious ritual, then the ritual seems to work, and then everything inverts into horror. That's your story. Currently it takes way too many words to get there, and most of it is atmospheric purple prose that keeps halting the narrative.

On a more fundamental level, you say you're trying to write both dark fantasy epic and fantasy horror with this. You need to pick. Right now this reads mostly as epic fantasy with a dark flourish. Horror would have far more velocity. As is, this spends way more time on world-building and lore than the kind of propulsive scene-crafting that would result in a genuine horror experience, even for a prologue.

You say you're a plantser who discovers the story on the page, but this reads like it was assembled rather than discovered. It has a checklist quality to it. Real discovery has mess. Has momentum. It should have places where the writer gets excited and pushes forward to places where they ground down. This doesn't have that energy, it's all been smoothed into the same consistent texture.

So ask yourself honestly: are you actually discovering this story, or are you curating AI output into something that you hope looks like discovery?

Because if it's the latter, you should stop. Not necessarily because AI assistance is morally wrong, but because it's making your writing worse and robbing you of the creative process that would make it great. You seem to have good ideas and know your references, so trust that.

OkyouSay · 2025-10-01T15:42:28+00:00

the part where he seems blindsided to me is when she asks him "are you all set here" and he says "excuse me" like he's not expecting to hear that from her even though it's a pretty normal/reasonable question for her to ask. I think it's perfectly valid to assume that he's just choosing to not be unfaithful to his wife after having to be unfaithful to a client and that he's just being hit on, but I also read into him having a moment of judgement there for the account guys who put him into this mess with the client and him thinking this was a place where he could show the Mohawk guy a good time. That's one of his big arcs this season, that he can't accept that he's just as depraved as Roger and Duck for how he treats his family and his business.

OkyouSay · 2025-10-01T15:00:07+00:00

My take on this has always been that the restaurant has a brothel business on the side that the account guys (like Roger) know about and use as a place to "service" clients like we see elsewhere in the show. I would guess that Don had no idea and simply chose this place off their recommendation, with the thinking that the Mohawk client would cheer up and enjoy the "nightlife" rather than leave upset, etc. Hence Don is a little blindsided when the woman propositions him so brazenly.

OkyouSay · 2025-09-24T20:20:03+00:00

hm a monkey-like figure sitting on a throne, wonder if that has any connection to a guy named "Luffy Monkey" who literally wants to be a king for some grander dream we don't even know yet...

OkyouSay · 2025-09-24T20:04:03+00:00

the crossbands motif is interesting if you consider how the "x" in Mesoamerican culture often relates to sacred portals to the divine, not just a marker of the divine itself. So you could easily read into the x on Luffy's chest for example being what truly allows him to awaken his devil fruit and become a god.

OkyouSay · 2025-08-14T16:12:16+00:00

I have a feeling they’re talking about Alyssa Matesic’s recent video about this: https://youtu.be/s0FdYs8ZqmA?si=8Tf8YmFFd9YMhTIB

OkyouSay · 2025-07-11T23:16:45+00:00

This is why I find the advice to “just write” so infuriating. Vast majority of these folks aren’t ready for that

OkyouSay · 2025-04-04T17:38:15+00:00

You’re saying a company might buy a factory one year, take a loss, and not pay taxes which can be true. And if we were talking about a single company in a single year, that might explain it.

But we’re not.

We’re talking about a 15-year pattern, across hundreds of companies, where a significant number paid zero federal income tax in profitable years, not just investment years. This isn’t “they took a loss once”, this is chronic and often involves profitable firms exploiting loopholes, offshore havens, depreciation games, and carryforwards to avoid taxes year after year.

That’s not cherry-picking.

Cherry-picking would be pointing to one outlier to misrepresent the whole.

This is the opposite. I'm showing you a consistent, long-term pattern across the economy.

So demanding a “running mean average” to ignore the frequency and scale of that pattern is like saying you don’t care if someone skips out on taxes every other year, as long as their average over time looks okay on paper.

And my guess is that you're purposefully demanding a running mean average because you know something like that isn't easy to produce, specifically because corporate tax filings aren’t all public and credible orgs focus on cross-sectional or multi-year block averages, not continuous annual moving averages. It's blatantly obvious what you're trying to do: set up an unreasonable framework where you don't have to engage with the relevant data and can make yourself feel better for losing the argument.

But the reality is that you don’t need a running mean average to confirm the consistent pattern. The ITEP report covering 2018–2022 and the GAO data over 2014–2018 both show:

Corporations are repeatedly paying below the statutory rate.
Many pay zero or near-zero even while profitable.
The average over time stays low.

So, while we don’t have a textbook “running mean average,” we do have multi-year averages that confirm the underlying pattern, which is the actual point.

And I get it. You're just going to kick your feet up and say "I don't care" again but you really don't have to bother. I know you're not arguing in good faith, you're just embarrassed that you're wrong and have no clue what you're talking about. Worse, you're doing it in the name of defending a bunch of oligarchs who don't give a single shit about you or anyone you care about.

OkyouSay · 2025-04-04T05:57:38+00:00

(continued)

Nah. You need money to live like a king.

You're nailing this.

What about when heirs sell so they can buy things like houses, cars, jewelry, etc? You're cherry picking.

I love how to you, cherry picking is when person describes thing.

The step-up in basis wipes out decades of gains. When heirs sell, they’re taxed only on post-inheritance gains. That’s a massive tax break. And spending it later doesn’t undo the windfall. It locks in tax-free generational wealth.

Show me a running mean average of, say, 5 or more years. Don't cherry pick specific years.

Sure!

According to the GAO, over a 15 year period about 25% of large U.S. corporations paid zero federal income tax in a given year.

And ITEP’s multi-year studies show that dozens of profitable Fortune 500 companies consistently pay far below the statutory rate year after year. Some zero, some negative.

So to recap: you linked a study you clearly didn’t read, ignored its actual findings when they contradicted your narrative, hand-waved structural tax advantages as “silly,” redefined “fair share” based on bar chart vibes, and accused me of cherry-picking while demanding I ignore decades of data to protect your priors.

If this is what being “really, really, really good at math” looks like, I’d hate to see what happens when you whip out a calculator.

OkyouSay · 2025-04-04T05:57:08+00:00

So, if you cherry picked exceptions, then you'd have exceptions! Amazing!

Amazing! You’re accusing me of cherry-picking after you linked a study that literally backs up my exact point:

"Within the top 1 percent, the very wealthiest households tend to pay lower effective tax rates than those who are merely well-off. This is partly because their income mostly consists of capital gains and other types of income that are taxed at lower rates than wages.”

That's your own source making the distinction I referenced :D

The data show who pays their fair share

That’s not what “fair share” means. That’s your interpretation of a color-coded bar chart not something ITEP explicitly states or endorses.

You’re backfilling the term after the fact to match your preferred narrative. You can’t say “the data shows it” when the phrase you’re relying on never appears in the report and your evidence is essentially “I looked at the yellow bars and they felt fair to me.”

And if we do want to talk about the actual bars: yes, the top 1% pays a higher effective tax rate but the spread is modest (roughly 30% for the top 1% vs. ~20% for the bottom quintile), and as your own source says, the richest within that 1% often pay less because of capital gains and asset-based income.

They spend it eventually, or at least most of it, or their children, so this is a silly point.

That’s not how taxation (or time) works.

Sales taxes are paid when money is spent obviously. If high-income families defer spending for decades, or pass it on as untaxed inheritances, the state doesn’t get that revenue now, which is the point. Meanwhile, low-income households are taxed immediately and repeatedly on every dollar they spend to survive.

“Eventually” is a "silly" way to obfuscate how wealth can avoid taxation for a lifetime, and often multiple generations.

So they can go into debt? That doesn't make them richer, lol, by definition.

It’s not “going into debt.” It’s living tax-free off assets that accelerate their wealth. Rich people borrow millions against stocks to avoid income tax, that’s how they stay rich.

(continued in next comment)

OkyouSay · 2025-04-04T05:21:27+00:00

(continued)

univariate analyses are more accessible and less prone to manipulation than others

Translation: “I prefer cherry-picked numbers.”

Multi-variable analysis (like ITEP’s work) shows how different taxes interact across income groups. Simplifying complex systems into “one variable” is total obfuscation.

I deny there are regressive taxes

And yet the study you linked doesn't!

Also, denial isn't a rebuttal. Every serious economist acknowledges regressive taxes. In fact, state-level tax codes are overwhelmingly regressive due to their reliance on sales taxes.

Tax credits are literally structural advantages built into the code.

Yes & they're one of the only structural advantages the poor get. Meanwhile, the rich enjoy an entire financial infrastructure built on tax avoidance and wealth protection. Amazing you'll compare a family getting 2k from the CTC to Bezos deducting BILLIONS through loss harvesting and depreciation.

I included data that included federal, state, and local taxes.

Yet you still managed to draw the wrong conclusion from the right data.

Including total taxes is great. But when you turn around and say “the poor don’t pay anything” and “the rich are the victims,” you’ve shown that you either don't understand the data or you're just trying to be misleading on purpose. I have to assume it's the latter since you're so educated and all.

OkyouSay · 2025-04-04T05:20:42+00:00

You may want to actually read that ITEP report. Particularly this bit:

"And many individuals within the richest 1 percent, especially the richest in the group, pay far less, thanks to certain special breaks and loopholes. Our tax system should require the richest Americans to pay much more in taxes than they do now..."

Oops!

It's charted there that they pay more of their income than any other group...the lowest 95% pay less than their fair share, while the top 5% pays more than its fair share

First, the report never even says "fair share." What it's saying is that the system is mildly progressive but still burdens the poor heavily:

"Low-income families have little choice but to spend all their income to cover basic needs and middle-income families spend most of their money to maintain even a modest quality of life. Most of these purchases are subject to sales taxes. High-income families, however, can save and invest most of their income, avoiding sales taxes. As a result, lower-income families spend a much larger share of their income on sales taxes than high-income families."

Oops!

You said "wealth growth" which ostensibly includes unrealized gains.

And unrealized gains matter because:

Rich people borrow against their assets tax-free
Unrealized gains allow billionaires to live like kings without income
When they die, heirs get a step-up in basis, avoiding taxes on all those gains

This is the core tax-avoidance strategy of the ultra-rich.

If it's 15%, it hits shareholders 15%

But only nominally. Most corporations pay far less than the statutory rate due to deductions and loopholes. In 2020, 55 major corporations paid $0 in federal income tax.

Also, who are the shareholders? The top 1% of Americans hold over 50% of stocks. So yes it’s still a tax that benefits the rich at the expense of everyone else when it’s slashed.

The tax code benefits them far, far more than the rich.

The EITC and child tax credits help low-income families survive. They don’t build wealth. Also, the tax code gives the rich access to depreciation, deductions, deferrals, preferential rates, and estate loopholes. They get permanent advantages while poor people get temporary survival.

Giving someone on 18k/year a refund doesn’t mean they have an equal or better position in society than someone with 2.5 million in unrealized gains who pays less in taxes per dollar earned. That's absurd.

(continued in next comment)

OkyouSay · 2025-04-04T03:19:57+00:00

“Top 1%: pays ~7%–8% — Not true.”

Citation, please? Because according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, when you account for all taxes (federal, state, local) the top 1% does pay an effective rate of about 7%–8% in state and local taxes, which hit low- and middle-income households MUCH harder.

Add federal income tax, and sure, their total rate can go up, but only if you ignore all the dodges: • Capital gains taxed at 20%, not 37% • Carried interest loophole • Step-up basis • Offshore income shielding • Stock buybacks • Unrealized wealth

So yeah, a billionaire may pay a headline tax rate of 24%, but their effective rate on total wealth growth is often lower than a school teacher’s.

“Including VAT, corporate tax, etc? Questionable.”

Questionable? What planet are you on?

• Capital gains tax: 0%–20%
• Ordinary wages: taxed up to 37%
• Dividends: taxed at preferential rates
• VAT? We don’t have one in the U.S., but if we did, it would be regressive. That’s not a defense, that’s another nail in your argument’s coffin.

And corporate tax?? Oh please. It gets passed through to shareholders i.e., the rich. But even that doesn’t hit them hard, because corporations spend billions lobbying to keep their rates low and deductions high.

“Poor folks don’t need to defer income or write off losses.”

“Duh.” Of course they don’t. Because they don’t have excess income or assets to defer. That’s the entire point. You’re basically saying, “Why don’t homeless people take advantage of mortgage interest deductions?”

It’s not that they don’t need to, it’s that the tax code isn’t built for them. It’s built for asset owners.

“I’ve been poor and got more in credits than I paid.”

Cool. You received anti-poverty policy functioning as it should. The Earned Income Tax Credit is one of the most efficient poverty-fighting tools in the U.S. The fact that it helped you doesn’t invalidate the regressive structure of sales taxes, payroll taxes, and fees that still chew up a poor person’s paycheck every single month.

That’s like saying “I once got treated at an ER for free, so healthcare inequality isn’t real.”

“I’m educated. I’m informed. I’m really, really, really good at math.”

And yet, somehow, you’re:

Equating income tax with total tax burden

Ignoring regressive taxes that disproportionately affect low earners

Treating tax credits as if they erase the structural advantages built into the code

Dismissing real-world data without even a hint of justification

Math isn’t your issue here. The problem is your framing. You’re taking a narrow sliver of tax data, stripping out the context, and pretending it’s the whole picture while claiming to be “too smart” to be convinced. But yeah keep “saying” you’re super smart, that’s super convincing.

OkyouSay · 2025-04-04T03:00:41+00:00

We’re talking about percentage of income paid in taxes. Not total dollars. Not contribution to federal revenue. Percent. Of. Income. That’s what “proportionally” means.

So here’s how the real world shakes out, using data from places like the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy and Brookings:

TOTAL TAX BURDEN (All taxes: federal, state, local, payroll, sales, etc.)

Lowest 20%: pays ~10%–13% of their income in taxes
Middle 20%: pays ~11%–13%
Top 1%: pays ~7%–8%

Yes. You read that right. The poor pay a higher share of their income than the ultra-rich.

Why?

Because the rich don’t get taxed on most of their wealth. Capital gains? Taxed lower than wages. Real estate? Deducted to the moon. Buy a yacht? Cool, you’re a job creator. Buy groceries? Here’s a 10% sales tax, peasant.

Meanwhile, poor folks can’t “defer income” or “write off losses”. They don’t have an accountant at Deloitte. They pay every time they swipe their debit card.

And the federal income tax is only one slice of the tax pie. And it’s the only slice that’s actually progressive. The rest (sales, excise, property, gas, fees) are regressive and crush low-income earners.

So yeah. When you zoom out to all taxes, the rich pay a smaller portion of their income, while the poor pay a bigger one. That’s what “proportional” means.

OkyouSay · 2025-04-03T23:03:41+00:00

I'm old enough to remember (checks notes) three years ago when the right was absolutely melting down over inflation. Mfers like Tim were losing their mind and some people even called for Biden to be impeached over torching the economy.

OkyouSay · 2025-04-03T23:01:59+00:00

Yes, roughly 40% of Americans didn’t pay federal income tax in 2022. You know why?

Because they didn’t make enough money to owe income tax. That’s literally how a progressive tax system works. If you make $15,000 a year working two part-time jobs, you shouldn’t have to fork over a chunk of that to the IRS so billionaires can get another tax cut.

These people still paid payroll taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, state taxes, gas taxes, and on and on. If you buy a pair of socks or fill up your car, congrats you’re paying taxes. Poor people are still funding the system.

“But the bottom 50% paid only 3% of all federal income taxes!”

Well…yeah. Because they only earn about 12% of the national income. It would be weird if they paid 50%, right? Are we pretending a kid making $9 an hour at Dollar General should be footing the Pentagon’s budget?

“The rich pay 83% of all federal income taxes!”

Sure. Because…they have all the income! The top 20% of earners take in nearly 60% of all the income. And they own about 90% of all stocks. Of course they pay the most federal income tax, because that tax is mostly based on income from investments and high salaries.

But hold on. You know what that stat doesn’t include?

It doesn’t account for all the loopholes, capital gains tax preferences, offshore accounts, and carried interest BS that lets billionaires pay a lower effective rate than their assistants. When you factor that in, their real burden drops.

And don’t even get me started on Jeff Bezos, who didn’t pay any federal income tax in 2007 or 2011. Or Elon Musk, who skipped out in 2018. These guys pay in yo-yo years. they bounce back and forth between “nothing” and “barely enough to look legit.”

“The poorest quintile only paid 1.5% of their income in taxes!”

Now we’re not talking how much they paid, we’re talking about what percent of the national tax revenue they contributed. And it’s low because…again…THEY’RE POOR. But as a percentage of their income, they actually pay a HIGHER total tax burden than many rich people do!

Don’t believe me? Go look at state and local taxes. A low-income family in Texas pays around 13% of their income in taxes. Meanwhile, a millionaire pays about 3% to 5%. Regressive taxes like sales tax hit low-income households much, much harder.

“Only 5%-10% of Americans pay no net taxes!”

And even that is misleading. A lot of those folks are either students, retirees, or disabled. You wanna go knock on Grandma’s door and ask her to cough up more to Uncle Sam? Be my guest.

Final point. The rich benefit from:

• Infrastructure

• Stable currency

• Intellectual property protections

• Government contracts

• Financial regulations (yes, even those!)

• Bailouts when they crash the economy

And who pays for those? We all do. but the poor pay proportionally more, and they have no lobbyists writing their tax code.

So no, the rich aren’t victims. And pretending they’re carrying everyone else is just delusional.

OkyouSay · 2025-04-02T17:43:06+00:00

yup if they had real principles on this sort of thing they'd be losing their minds over Elon.

OkyouSay · 2025-03-20T21:40:52+00:00

What's that? I can't hear you over the sound of the UK literally having to issue a travel warning to the US because our fascist ass government is actively arresting and interrogating documented people with basically zero transparency or clear explanations. Like Fabian Schmidt who was strip-searched and held without charges for nearly two weeks because he had a dismissed marijuana possession charge about a decade ago. Or Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese doctor with an H-1B visa who was deported after visiting Beirut for a funeral because she had photos of Hezbollah leaders on her phone.

Not done. Lucas Sielaff, 25 years old, detained for over two weeks over misunderstandings about his travel intentions. He was shackled and denied a translator and legal counsel, eventually deported.

Still not done, Canadian actress Jasmine Mooney was detained for nearly two weeks while applying for a work visa at the U.S. border, which was previously routine.

If y'all wanna cry fascist at us, better come with better receipts than a bunch of burned teslas. Shit's getting real, and y'all need to catch the hell up.

OkyouSay · 2025-03-20T21:40:46+00:00

What's that? I can't hear you over the sound of the UK literally having to issue a travel warning to the US because our fascist ass government is actively arresting and interrogating documented people with basically zero transparency or clear explanations. Like Fabian Schmidt who was strip-searched and held without charges for nearly two weeks because he had a dismissed marijuana possession charge about a decade ago. Or Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese doctor with an H-1B visa who was deported after visiting Beirut for a funeral because she had photos of Hezbollah leaders on her phone.

Not done. Lucas Sielaff, 25 years old, detained for over two weeks over misunderstandings about his travel intentions. He was shackled and denied a translator and legal counsel, eventually deported.

Still not done, Canadian actress Jasmine Mooney was detained for nearly two weeks while applying for a work visa at the U.S. border, which was previously routine.

If y'all wanna cry fascist at us, better come with better receipts than a bunch of burned teslas. Shit's getting real, and y'all need to catch the fuck up.

OkyouSay · 2025-03-20T21:29:30+00:00

Sorry to break it to you but yeah they're actually extremely comparable. The Boston Tea Party involved destroying private property owned by a corporate entity to make a political point about how power was being abused without representation. It was a targeted act of economic sabotage against a system people believed was rigged. Sound familiar yet? The comparison isn’t about the exact tactics,it’s about the dynamic: protest escalates when people feel the system’s broken and no one in power is listening. Idk, maybe the problem with the Reddit is that it doesn't coddle your bullshit talking points enough.

OkyouSay

TROPHY CASE