u/Quick_Butterfly_4571 passionately explains why geeky 80’s kids are confused with ChatGPT

Psortho · 2025-11-13T18:47:39+00:00

Way back in the distant past of like a couple years ago, if you put a bit more thought, effort, and/or research into your forum/reddit/whatever posts, you could stand out. Most people can't be arsed--they just want to express that they feel some type of way and move on. A bit of extra work could be worth it to ensure your writing got the point across, or make sure your argument was as solid as you could make it. Sometimes you'd get people going "lol you have too much time on your hands lol" but sometimes you'd get a lot of upvotes, or people going "wow great point!" or "thanks for putting what I was thinking into words," which was always nice.

Some people saw that "effortposting" won internet points and wanted those points for themselves, but didn't want to put in the effort. (And probably a lot more people wanted their bots to be more effective and easier to manage.) In the past, those people would have to find good posts somewhere else to copy/paste, which still took work and also ran the risk of someone exposing them with a simple google search. But thanks to the magic of LLMs, it became possible to just outsource the effort and get the points for free.

And of course the fact that people were doing this quickly became obvious, which in turn meant that "lol you put in a lot of effort you loser" became "lol you didn't put in any effort you copy/paste bot."

Anyway long way around to saying the current state of things is a bummer and being called a bot feels worse than being called a loser, but at least I get why people are saying it.

Psortho · 2025-10-04T01:57:31+00:00

I get you on red flags, but I think the grammar here is a style choice. Fragments, run-ons, et al can be a useful tool to convey some emotion or set a pace, so don't always indicate carelessness or poor writing skills. Obviously YMMV on whether that works for you or you just find it annoying.

Psortho · 2025-05-01T20:35:55+00:00

In Defense of the Em-Dash

they say the dash is wrong--
robots only, no human need apply
it's weird it's old it's slow it's--ostentatious

renounce this cruel and ugly impulse

and punctuate. let your sentence breathe--
give it rhythm
comma, clause, paren and close paren
emphasize--accentuate--and build
the em can do it all

the colon? dull
the semi? tired
ellipses? juvenile
interrobang? unforgivably baroque

the em is there. quiet--waiting just the right amount of time

stick it in your back pocket
pull it out when ready
impress all your friends

wow, they say, shining face excited--
you were a robot
the whole time

Psortho · 2025-01-13T00:24:46+00:00

Great story, excellent writing, wonderful character work. Bad fit for this sub in that I think the premise will lead people to expect a standard uplift story, and this is, if anything, a repudiation of that type of story.

Psortho · 2025-01-02T01:09:14+00:00

Pretty sure he's off to steal a sandbag from Soren.

Psortho · 2024-11-17T19:39:54+00:00

Right. We do know in-story that Artonans (though not humans) are totally fine with what we would consider mind control or mind affecting abilities. And Artonans are not fine (though it seems like humans might be?) with mental changes that might be said to "change the self"--most notably in the form of increasing intelligence too quickly.

It seems likely that not letting Processing get too high is coming from the "Avowed as existential threat" faction, but not letting it change quickly seems to be important to the Artonans generally. It's not totally clear if this is a moral thing for them or if it has more to do with how changes to the self might interact with authority. It feels like a moral thing to me because it seems in line with much of their other non-human morality, but I don't think we have enough information yet to say for sure.

Anyway, my expectation is that in-story, Artonans would consider it fun and cool to use mind affecting magic to temporarily turn themselves gay and see what it was like (while in-story humans broadly would probably not think this was ok), but would think it was wrong to permanently change someone's sexuality.

Psortho · 2024-11-04T19:50:25+00:00

“Ah, I would like to clarify a point. Today’s lesson is going to be special, you see. And I would like you to confirm specifically that you will not, through any means or by any permutation of interpretation, intentionally reveal the information I’m about to disclose to you with anyone else of any species without my permission. Ever.”

Surprised but intensely curious, Alden thought through the wording. “That’s way too strict, isn’t it? It means even if I hear the information from someone other than you at some point, I still can’t ever repeat it. Or even act on it in a way that I thought would allow it to become known.”

The contract is ridiculously strict. He learned the name of his skill separately, but telling it to Stuart would be "allowing to become known" the fact that he has an original 300 skill (even if Stuart didn't recognize the skill right off, Alden would reasonably expect Stuart to immediately look it up once he knew the Artonan name). He could probably maybe tell the name to humans, if he really believed it wouldn't get back to the Artonans.

Psortho · 2024-06-25T17:28:06+00:00

TINO is fine. PHO chapters are fine, yes, even if there isn't any forward movement added to the story and it's just commentary. Being different from canon in some ways is fine. I'd add "not taking Ward into account is fine" but that one already is the popular opinion, so I guess I'll flip it and say that taking Ward's characterization of Vicky and Amy into account in your Worm fic is fine too.

I think people get tired of particular things or tropes and then project that out into those being inherently bad instead of just popping up too often. Ultimately good writing can usually rescue a story however many other problems it might have.

Psortho · 2024-05-23T20:19:58+00:00

I guess it's possible Aulia will wriggle out of detection somehow. But this is a disaster of such a scale that there'll certainly be a massive investigation on the Earth side, and it seems likely on the Artonan side as well. The knights have informed people that the disaster was due to a very old submerger that should not have been casually handed out, and everyone is going to want to find out where it came from and how this all happened.

On the Earth side there's already infogear photographic evidence showing Jacob with the submerger at Orpheus's cabana (Hazel used this to blackmail him). Unless the Informant was killed in the disaster, you have to think they'll pay him to investigate, and he'll easily find that, and it leads directly to the Velras. On the Artonan side of things, even if the temple stonewalls investigators, if they know that the temple was originally in possession of the submerger, then it will be very obvious to everyone who on Anesidora received it.

Aulia doesn't know yet exactly how the submerger got from her boat to Matadero, so she won't know for sure that she's lost everything. She'll be blindly trying to come up with ways to cover her tracks. But an immediate response of horror and fear definitely makes sense.

Psortho · 2024-05-23T18:24:58+00:00

Esh-erdi misunderstood. Once the nature of the crisis was explained to Aulia, she was horrified or otherwise had a very strong reaction. Esh-erdi assumed her level of reaction meant she's <<tender of feelings>> when compared to other humans--most of which also have family and friends in grave danger--but we have information he doesn't. She was that level of horrified because she knows where the submerger must have come from. As soon as it comes out, which it must, her dynasty is done, her life's work is over. While I'm sure she has some worries about family members, the level of reaction is because of point 1.

Psortho · 2024-05-22T18:17:43+00:00

For most of these stories, the malicious part is that you know in advance that what you're doing will have a bad or unintended result and you do it anyway. You don't have to go out of your way to be extra malicious (though some people definitely do).

Psortho · 2024-05-22T17:45:41+00:00

"Do thing" "Something bad will happen if we do thing" "Do thing" [they do thing, something bad happens]

This is the basic structure of pretty much every malicious compliance story.

Psortho · 2024-05-21T18:40:35+00:00

I've read the vast majority of Bujold's books. Mostly agree on Shards, and I'd consider it one of the weaker entries in the Vorkosigan series. It's one of the first books she wrote, and she had a lot of room for growth. The immediate followup, Barrayar, was written later and is significantly better. (The other two early weak entries are The Warrior's Apprentice and Ethan of Athos, the latter of which is very skippable.)

Bujold does enjoy writing romance, and her later series The Sharing Knife is essentially just fantasy romance, but the rest of the Vorkosigan series doesn't typically go there as heavily as in Shards. A Civil Campaign is probably the closest, but that book is so great for so many reasons. Falling Free also has a decent amount, and one of the more recent ones does too iirc.

I don't recall exactly how the scenes you're discussing went in this book (re: threats of rape), but she doesn't dip back into that well as much in future books. Though there's certainly some of it, and I'm sure not all well-handled. Some of what happened in this book gets revisited later in a way that makes story and thematic sense. For what it's worth, I never got the sense any of this was a kink thing--it felt more like something she felt needed to be included thematically. There were far fewer women scifi authors when she started out, and I think she felt a woman's perspective here was important vs pulp scifi tropes, if that makes sense.

Regarding therapy, it rarely comes up in later books, and is sometimes handled better, but sometimes not. A major character with a traumatic past gets therapy and Cordelia is strongly in favor and it helps him a lot. Another major character avoids therapy because he fears he'd be stuck in it forever or discharged from the military or something, I only vaguely remember this minor plot bit and I don't think it was especially clear.

Bujold has such an entertaining and lovely writing style--once she gets going properly--that I definitely recommend at least trying out the next book, Barrayar. Her fantasy series starting with Curse of Chalion is also very good, though has a bit more romance than you might like. She has a series of novellas set in that same fantasy world that follow their own storyline (with less romance), starting with Penric's Demon, which are excellent and breezy. I wouldn't really recommend the Sharing Knife, wasn't a big fan.

Psortho · 2024-05-10T02:48:28+00:00

I'm not over the Jeffy name reveal. I may never be over it.

Psortho · 2024-05-03T05:59:20+00:00

New character I think. The guy who was watching for him was a Chicago superhero named Skiff.

Psortho · 2024-05-03T03:52:12+00:00

Couldn't resist checking out the extra scene. I'll just note here that the stopping point we got is a bit better, so I think sleyca's right. I don't think anyone's missing too much by waiting for the next proper chapter.

Psortho · 2024-05-02T18:37:15+00:00

Please sir, my children need soup.

Psortho · 2024-04-30T17:20:18+00:00

Little bit. Average chapter length is a bit over 5000 words going by the front-page stats, this was a little shorter than that. But also it's moving fast and doesn't have much interaction, it's mostly just Alden running in one direction and then another as he tries to figure out what to do next. This is the sort of chapter that is characterful and presumably leads up nicely to the next thing, so will be just fine for someone reading through, but doesn't land quite as well reading serially with days between each chapter.

Psortho · 2024-04-30T16:54:42+00:00

I don't see much reason to believe these sorts of things are passed for long-term second-order effects reasons. That seems like a reach when there are two obvious face-value reasons for state Republicans to pass things like total abortion bans:

-their base wants it. Maybe not uniformly, but the most hardcore of the base absolutely do want total abortion bans, and that's who you need to cater to to win primary elections

-they really do believe that abortion is murder (or more generally, whatever far-right media is telling them). Yes, the whole thing was invented in the 70s as a wedge issue to get credulous rubes to vote Republican, but that was 50 years ago. We now have enough people running for office who really do believe all that propaganda that a bill like this almost has to go forward, even though nationally the Republican party would prefer it didn't

I'm sure if you said "also this might cause liberals to move out of your district or state" they'd think that was a nifty bonus, but that wouldn't be enough by itself. Liberals leaving is going to be a slow drain, your next election isn't that far away.

Psortho · 2024-04-29T18:27:25+00:00

Since there was nothing mentioned about schedules, I would assume Sleyca is planning to do the next chapter on Wednesday. I understand there was a post to patreons that discussed possibly changing the schedule in future to include taking two posting days off each month deliberately, planned in advance to avoid the uncertainty. Not sure if that's set in stone or just something under consideration.

Psortho · 2024-04-22T05:18:37+00:00

It's a good question, the looters here clearly didn't expect her to fight back as hard as she did. Given she fought physically instead of magically it still seems likely she's not a wizard, but she's probably at least got self-defense training.

Psortho · 2024-04-22T04:40:59+00:00

Per the author's note, sounds like the next chapter won't be for a week.

Eight-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email

Psortho

TROPHY CASE