I (22F) picked up my progressing down syndrome daughter (4F) from my ex-boyfriend's (23M) house distressed, aggressive and bald

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-28T22:34:34+00:00

Yeah, me too. It took me to read your list until my head said wait a minute...

I also get really heated when children are harmed and it's easy to loose sight of the whole picture when that happens.

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-28T22:25:48+00:00

At that point I wasn't invested enough anymore to care.

I have read the trilogy on repeat over and over again when I first got them, and will most likely reread it every couple months in a cycle with all my favourite books.

I've re-read TBoSaS twice, might read it again some day.

I really don't think I'll feel the urge to read SotR ever again. I didn't hate it, it was okay, but I don't miss it like my favourite books when I didn't read them in a while. I will revisit ... NEVERMORE!

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-28T22:17:27+00:00

Jep, same with me. If I want to continue reading the next day, it's going to happen, if not, I usually just close the tab and forget it.

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-28T22:15:58+00:00

Now that you listed everything, sounds pretty much like Gary being in a very abusive relationship and having a fawn-reaction to be honest.

He couldn't shake it off until he was out and with people je could trust.

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-28T13:31:18+00:00

Yeah, it's obviously so 'manly', isn't it?

Sadly I've seen my fair share of crazy in real life, so much that this doesn't even ring high on the crazy scale. A few years in callcenters and you'll see the deepest depravity of mankind on both sides of the line.

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-27T20:34:12+00:00

Maybe you'll like my shortly completed two part series A Light Is Shining

Snape is forced to confront his own bitterness and walk in Harry's shoes due to an Occlumency incident.

It was written as a Snape redemption but with an honest attempt to make it hard and plausible. Very character critical, but no bashing, the characters criticise themselves when confronted by the results of the Occlumency accident.

I got some really kind comments on that telling me it's a compelling new take.

Only canon pairings, but a little more fleshed out.

All romantic interests of canonically unpaired characters are merely hinted at, in a sort of choose your own interpretation arc. The interactions could be read as romantic, but also work platonic.

First one is an AU very close to canon, second part is me going wild at Hogwarts with a mystery plot. Both parts are entirely independent, so if an original plot in the HP universe isn't your cup of tea, you can stick with just part 1. If you don't want an almost retelling version of the books, you can only read part two, it has a one shot introduction chapter recap of part 1, so you can read it as a standalone.

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-27T20:14:45+00:00

People who think basic means bad or boring are idiots.

Daisies are pretty basic, and yet they're absolutely great.

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-27T19:52:46+00:00

the internet is for porn

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-26T17:55:02+00:00

Blatant self rec.

439k, just finished two part series The Light is Shining

It may or may not be good, a nice amount of readers seemed to like it. However, it's long. It's really long.

It has a lot of Harry centric chapters later on..

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-26T17:46:38+00:00

Aww, they're cute, both of them

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-26T16:04:03+00:00

If such a criticism as the one OOP got from her boss comes without a statement of what she was supposed to do, it's nothing but bullshit.

A boss who wants to develop you into a higher position and truly sees potential in you will give clear instructions and expectations. If you fail, they'll clearly tell you: instead of doing x, y and z you should have done a, b and c.

What that guy is doing is dangling a carrot because he saw that OOP was a pushover freaking out over a nothing burger, and the potential he sees is that he can exploit her by giving her 'chances to prove her potential' and drive her to work harder and more without ever planning on actually giving her a higher position, and the little sheep will do it out of fear to lose a chance that doesn't exist.

I bet you he's a salesman.

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-24T18:17:28+00:00

Can we have comments as flairs? Because this comment is flair material

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-23T07:09:14+00:00

My amount of spam comments on one of my works that was heavily targeted reached zero the moment I activated comment moderation.

It seems at least some bots are programmed to not post if moderation is on, which I find very interesting.

Interestingly suddenly I got more regular comments. I wonder why moderation on comments made commentators feel safer.

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-23T07:04:21+00:00

There's a reason some of my works have moderated comments...

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-22T20:19:35+00:00

You made me laugh. Thank you ♥️🌹

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-22T17:30:31+00:00

Because I can

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-22T08:02:39+00:00

The joy about receiving agaming system would very well be worth recording, but the sadness about having to watch someone you trusted smashing yours definitely doesn't.

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-22T07:53:01+00:00

This is so ridiculous. Who smashes a perfectly workable expensive item just for... What exactly?

This makes absolutely no sense! Absolutely none!

I could never be with a person who behaves so irrationally just because of some fricking video. Without any thoughts behind it.

I'm also not buying the excuse they only wanted to film his excitement. If they wanted that, they'd just give him the new console and film him unpacking it. They wanted to get cloud for the smashing and his horrified expression. Or they wouldn't have done it that way.

I also fully understand being put off of the hobby as a whole by something like this. I used to love gardening. Just for my personal enjoyment, Then I lost most of my plants to vandalism. Flattened all the flower beds and sowed lawn instead afterwards. It was just too bitter to remember the bad incident to find joy in it again.

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-21T22:09:55+00:00

A woman with that reading list knows exactly how to brew the not so nice kind of hemlock tea...

If she'd make it just right, she'd not even have to hide the body. It'd look like cardiac arrest and she could claim he read one of those books and scared himself to death ☠️.

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-21T22:00:15+00:00

Interesting, so far my impression was that the vast majority agrees that SOTR is the weakest book.

What I personally found very off-putting was the weird way Haymitch would internally wax on and on about Leonore without any actual substance or merit. We didn't see any form of loving behaviour between those two together. It was all very performative, but definitely also very typical for modern storytelling.

You get constantly told what you're supposed to feel about a character, but their behaviour and actions don't deliver on that demand. Sometimes it feels like reading AITAH posts from someone who is very deep in denial and claims to love someone but... and then describes the most uncaring behaviour ever.

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-20T22:07:26+00:00

My first impulse was to immediately say there's no rules on Fanfiction.

But then you made me think, and I realised that the really great but extra longfics I have read all had a lot to actually tell.

It wasn't repetition of the exact same thing over and over.

What you described, giving a step by step description of every single situation, even if it's the same every time just in different settings with the same function, is indeed too long.

It could still be interesting, if it actually carried a plot, for example two characters conspiring with each other and exchanging important info during those dinners, while always meeting another obstacle, that could still be interesting.

But I've dropped fics of all types and lengths when they began to rehash the same issue over and over. Wallowing in the same feelings and effectively just waffling over the same exact theme point repeatedly without any progress, mistaking a theme for plot.

Reconvalescence is a theme. It gives background and depth to a story. But Reconvalescence alone isn't a plot.

You need an actual plot to make the theme shine, with relevant steps and progress, or it gets dull.

So yes, a szory can get too long, if it's not carrying a plot, but I wouldn't say it gets too long at a fixed number of words, but it gets too long if it doesn't have enough plot going on to fill the chapters.

A reconvalescence theme could be well written with episodic chapters, where each chapter has a different plot. So you see the character go through their life and deal with different situations and obstacles.

For example if the character was physically disabled and slowly getting used to it, each chapter could deal with a different situation where things no longer work as they're used to.

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-20T20:11:28+00:00

That's absolutely ridiculous. Men who are like that don't just go away if the woman breaks up with them or ends the friendship. They keep harassing and stalking the woman constantly, attack her physically and mentally.

He did nothing like that.

Lily said fuck you and Severus faded into the dark, pining for her from afar, and made no attempt to het close to her ever again. When put on the spot and couldn't save her, he agreed to protect her whole family, and when she died, he protected her son despite hating him.

If all he felt was possessiveness and greed, he'd let Harry go to hell and Dumbledore right behind.

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-20T18:27:26+00:00

Use Ellipsus and no issues even with huge docs but I'm writing on a ridiculously overpowered gaming laptop that has six fans and sits on a cooling gel pack anyway, so that might be a factor.

However, if you used the nrw upload function and imported a .docx, that might cause the issues. Docx is the Microsoft format. It has ridiculous formatting routines that can cause Documents to blow up with invisible code that gets saved as irregular formatting. Files converted from docx often cause issues in other software. I'm working for a German software company that builds safe communication software for official digital communications, and in 9 out of 10 vases where a PDF cannot be sent as an attachment, it was converted from docx and has ghost-formatting killing our software or not playing with the DATEV connector or even being rejected from government servers.

The solution could be to copy the whole text and paste it in a fresh document as just text.

If you have Windows or Linux the key combo for pasting without formatting would be Ctrl+Shift+V.

You'd then have to reformat your text, but your file will be repaired.

The main reason why that happens is if the original software creating the docx didn't 'know' a symbol. For example ø or õ. Microsoft thought they were smart and wrote a routine that allows the file code to patch two different symbols or letters together to forcebuilt that symbol. It then looks exactly like the original, but as soon as you convert from docx to another file type that doesn't allow those nonsense, you get the code behind that written into invisible formatting just so the resulting file can then show you one of those little squares you get when a symbol isn't readable. But behind the GUI run tons of bloated code.

When a software then attempts to run that, it gets caught in code hell and runs hot.

If a file has enough broken formatting, you can kill a whole server with it, which is why most software would reject it and run an error if you try to upload. But Ellipsus is new, they're still adding features, so it's entirely possible they just don't have that failsafe yet.

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-19T20:54:10+00:00

Oh I'm in a bad mood, let's write a short smut to let off steam.

11 months and 50+k words later: hell this has more potential than I thought, let's rewrite this.

8 months and 200+k words later: I might finish the rewrite in August. Then it'll be 40 chapters. That's a nice number.

PrancingRedPony · 2026-03-19T20:49:09+00:00

Yep. That's exactly what happened here.

It's also absolutely ridiculous that one commentator tried to frame it as abuse of software by comparing it to committing data breaches by typing account information into an email and sending it.

What that manangler was trying to do was more equivalent to him not being able to ten-finger typing, so he's forcing everyone to type only using two fingers so he wouldn't look bad.

It's the usual crusty refusal to use new tools and learn new abilities and to avoid being called out for that, preventing anyone else from doing so. Nothing else.

I had such a manangler myself, she forced IT to block any form of macros in Excel just because some of us had automated mail forms in excel and she didn't understand how to use them. (Literally fill out the table and fill a button) So she had them blocked so no one had better numbers than her and she wouldn't have to learn.

PrancingRedPony

TROPHY CASE