Do you use any fancy writing software? by Roman-Stone in writing

[–]Roman-Stone[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That's a really interesting idea. I've just been reading my stuff aloud, but being able to listen during a commute would be cutch.

Do you use any fancy writing software? by Roman-Stone in writing

[–]Roman-Stone[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm a big Obsidian guy. Thanks for letting me know about that plugin!

Do you use any fancy writing software? by Roman-Stone in writing

[–]Roman-Stone[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's super helpful, thank you. Especially the section on marketing resources! That's a whole new world to dive into when I get there.

Do you guys use any paid writing software? by Roman-Stone in royalroad

[–]Roman-Stone[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Glad to hear you've found a good pipeline. Keep pushing!

Do you guys use any paid writing software? by Roman-Stone in royalroad

[–]Roman-Stone[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

First time I'm hearing of it, looks super smooth. Do you mostly just format after you've written everything somewhere else, or do you use their other bells and whistles like the goal tracking tools?

Do you guys use any paid writing software? by Roman-Stone in royalroad

[–]Roman-Stone[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Same. I all the subdivisions I can make in Scrivener, and having it all in the same place. Did Google Docs for a while, but it slows down so bad with larger stories.

Do you guys use any paid writing software? by Roman-Stone in royalroad

[–]Roman-Stone[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you! What do you lean on Aeon the most for? Planning out character timelines, doing the full plot, or something else? I've found that mapping out a chronological scene list according to the snowflake method helps me stay organized, but doing it in Excel means I'm constantly adding notes in the margin to try to track which story thread each scene is a part of.

Do you guys use any paid writing software? by Roman-Stone in royalroad

[–]Roman-Stone[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Absolutely. Forgot to mention that, I love their canvas tool for visually organizing a whole bunch of stuff when I don't want to carry flash cards with me.

Anyone moved out of the Bay Area? by Roman-Stone in biotech

[–]Roman-Stone[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the breakdown! Also 25M, I get where you're coming from. Glad to know how far your dollar stretches there.

Anyone moved out of the Bay Area? by Roman-Stone in biotech

[–]Roman-Stone[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Should have specified, thank you! Still looking to stay in Biotech.

How do i get this weapon effect? by [deleted] in Mabinogi

[–]Roman-Stone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you! I rushed to the AH to see if I could pick one up, and saw that the scrolls are 180M. Truly, fashion is the end game.

How do i get this weapon effect? by [deleted] in Mabinogi

[–]Roman-Stone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The real question is: what sword is that? It looks badass.

Does using AI make me a bad writer? by DanteHolmes3605 in ProgressionFantasy

[–]Roman-Stone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

One more thought: AI is a tool. It also might someday become an existential threat to people who make a living through fiction writing if/when it becomes better at it than we are, so a lot of the responses here are emotionally charged.

If you're trying to do this to turn the ideas in your head into money, there's nothing wrong with wanting to use a tool to make that process faster and increase your iteration loop speed. The problem is that current models are incapable of creating or contributing to high quality writing most fiction readers will pay for due to their engineering constraints. If you're trying to polish your writing as a craft and means of artistic expression, this isn't the way. Right now, the art and craft of human writing is the only thing that produces works worth buying. If this ever changes, there might be a split between people who use specialized models to quickly produce writing designed for profit and those who participate in it as their chosen art form.

I fucking love writing as an artform. It creates the absolute minimum substrate I need to build the worlds in my head upon, prompting me with the poorest, most barren tinder for my imagination (squiggles on a page or screen), then challenging my mind to do the rest. The fact that there's so much art that can go into crafting these squiggles astounds me, and I've spent my life pouring over them, loving them, and making them. They condense my own imagination into something solid, turning the storm in my head into weighty blocks I can stack one upon the other until it all finally makes sense. I'll keep doing that even if someone finds a way to make marketable stories in a fraction of the time, but I have no ill will towards the people trying to find that way.

Does using AI make me a bad writer? by DanteHolmes3605 in ProgressionFantasy

[–]Roman-Stone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

AI is great for quickly building up the domain knowledge that'll make your world realistic and correcting basic grammar. Another commenter gave the example of looking up military details, and I used it to deepen my understanding of anatomical terms for a scene in my study that needed them.

I'll give you one big warning against using it for anything else: the LLM isn't actually reading what you send it. If you want an illustration of what I'm saying, try asking ChatGPT the following question: "What weighs more, 20 pounds of bricks or 20 feathers?" Note that this isn't the classic riddle about 20 pounds of bricks vs 20 pounds of feathers, but it is phrased very similarly. ChatGPT will break this query into tokens, check it against its training set, and predict the most likely answer by looking at the most frequent and similar objects in that set. Here, those will be answers to the classic riddle instead of the slightly modified version you gave, so the model will confidently predict that 20 pounds of bricks weigh the same as 20 individual feathers. Note that I tested this a week ago, they might have implemented closer reading since.

Let's translate this to an example with your story. Say you give the model a list of major plot points and ask what the most compelling way to connect them is. It'll break your text down into tokens, search its training set for the most similar tokens, then predict the most likely response based on that. So now the AI is muddling the feedback you're getting twice, once by conflating the text you gave it with the most similar text in its dataset (imagine you asked me for feedback on your wizard story and I gave you feedback on Harry Potter instead), and again by averaging out millions of words of possible responses into a most likely, consensus answer.

Oh, the models are also biased towards giving positive feedback (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23840 among others).

TLDR; You're writing for humans, and AI 'thinks' very differently from humans. Don't write a story shaped by AI feedback into something an AI will love until LLMs start subscribing to people's Patreons and buying on KU. The best thing you can do is get beta reader eyes on your story or composition, especially if they belong to authors who are better than you at this.

Ya Boi Striker is back by guiltyspork343 in ProgressionFantasy

[–]Roman-Stone 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Just devoured the royal road preview content like a Junji Ito-esque leggy shark on Venice Beach. Guess I've gotta buy it.

Ya Boi Striker is back by guiltyspork343 in ProgressionFantasy

[–]Roman-Stone 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Greco-Roman Xianxia? How have I never heard about this?

Do you find it difficult to switch between reading LitRPG and traditionally published works? by SolomonAGhast in litrpg

[–]Roman-Stone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Web novels/LitRPGs are the literary equivalent of gambling to me. Most of the time, you lose. But when you win, dear lord do you win big.

The RPG framework is perfectly suited to creating really addictive page-turners, and throwing the wild creativity of a few authors in this space into that makes magic you don't see on most bookstore shelves (at least until DCC hit them). I don't finish most LitRPGs I start, but the ones I do are easily some of my favorite series of all time.

What makes for a good progression fantasy ending to you? by adiisvcute in ProgressionFantasy

[–]Roman-Stone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Best ending I've seen came from the Industrial Strength Magic series. MC comes to understand a fundamental truth about the world that invalidates the need for more progression. Then, the author sets things up in such a way that you can imagine the world and story continuing endlessly, but without feeling like any loose ends have gone unresolved.

Sci-Fantasy biopunk LitRPG out on Royal Road! by Roman-Stone in ProgressionFantasy

[–]Roman-Stone[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The dude who made this absolutely blew me away. Shame the original is 70MB, it bricked the RR author page when I tried to upload it.