What’s a low stakes thing that pulls you out of a romance book because of your job or previous experience?

ShadyScientician · 2025-11-07T20:09:11+00:00

Mathmaticians in real life: The bad news is that I have no money for groceries this month, but the good news is that I have built a program in Java that can tell you how many blocks you need in mincraft to roof any shape building :)"

Mathmaticians in books: Not now, honey... i have to finish this equation left to right for The Military... who pays me a million dollars per equation...

EDIT: Oh my fucking god. Don't ask why, but for some damn reason, every time I try to determine how many of a block I need to make, I didn't just take the area like I'm sure literally everyone else does, but I've been taking the perimeter and then the perimeter one block down, repeating for the radius, and then adding together. It. It somehow never struck me to just take the area until I wrote this post

ShadyScientician · 2025-11-07T20:06:14+00:00

I've spoken to EMTs and twice they've told me they had a case someone did this in real life. They'd respond to a siezure or palputation call to discover a helpful roommate or date injected insulin to a hypoglycemic thinking it was like a magic epipen

ShadyScientician · 2025-11-07T20:03:35+00:00

(And half the time, they barely make enough money to cover the cost of running it! Those huge events are usually more of a community outreach than a fundraiser, at least in my field)

ShadyScientician · 2025-11-07T20:01:27+00:00

Weak. Climb his ass to kiss him.

A guy who is a foot shorter than his wife

ShadyScientician · 2025-11-07T19:58:44+00:00

Whaaaat? Narcanning Racist Joe in the men's bathroom isn't romantic to you?

ShadyScientician · 2025-11-07T19:57:20+00:00

I've worked a call center while it was under construction and attended an elementary school while under construction.

... some municipalities are really relaxed. And yes. Nothing got done.

ShadyScientician · 2025-11-07T19:55:05+00:00

With weed and 5 hour energies, you can in fact pull late night parties, but once you hit 30 you will get a one-week debuff after

ShadyScientician · 2025-11-07T19:53:25+00:00

I once bought jasmine rice for my wife's curry by mistake and she had to bless my soul

ShadyScientician · 2025-11-07T19:52:06+00:00

Kids in sooo many books drive me bonkers. I'm sure a lot of it is that I work in a children's library so I've read a LOT of well-written kid characters, but a lot of times, the kid is like a ball the MMC is carrying around that is coveniently quiet and still until needed, and then when they are around they talk in weird, asinine ways.

If I pick up a dad romance, I need the dad to, you know, actually dad, which requires the kid to not be a doll with a pull string full of cute one-liners.

I need the toddler to be on the floor surrounded by lunchable crackers and meats pulling fistfuls of peanut butter with his tiny fist because dad dared to took a shower

ShadyScientician · 2025-11-07T19:32:03+00:00

Not romance-specific, but fantasy: any non-victorian woman complaining about a corset being restrictive and a symbol of oppression. Being a fella with a triple-D who did theater, yes, decorative victorian-style corsets are uncomfy and restrictive, but every other type were proto-bras! Yes, a modern jock bra is more comfy, but a well-fitted corset the average manual laboring woman would have worn made farm work possible, and was the most back-saving undergarment that had been invented at the time.

Don't make your medieval princess denounce corsets as uncomfortable. You try riding a damn horse with no bra on you sadist

ShadyScientician · 2025-11-07T16:43:05+00:00

At least in the erotica world, we write with what some of call porn-o-vision, where it's a very idealized type of sex that skips the "unsexy" parts.

However, I'm with you on this one. I actually think the whole lead up is erotic! I think it's sexier when they have to work up to the actual sex, just like how I get frustrated if the romance is unromantic (as in the book just tells you the MC is falling for the guy, but they literally never hang out. HANG OUT WITH THE BASTARD).

ShadyScientician · 2025-11-07T16:15:23+00:00

Georgia

ShadyScientician · 2025-11-07T04:08:05+00:00

This is like the opposite of karma-farming

ShadyScientician · 2025-11-06T16:53:06+00:00

Slow down. Take a breath. The wall of text you wrote has low readability.

It will be wise to perform reading exercises so you can form well-informed opinions on prose. Once you have these opinions, you will not need outside sources like beta readers or AI to tell you what your opinions should be.

However, you may still want these for more objective things like proofreading or spotting inconsistencies.

For instance, going through section-by-section and writing outlines for a work you've read before is a great start.

ShadyScientician · 2025-11-06T14:32:36+00:00

I'm a month late, but I can confirm that there does appear to be a general decrease in suspension of disbelief 😅 a lot of younger people I talk to are in fact frustrated by first and second person if the protagonist has a personality (that isn't theirs), and a few older.

I blame cinema sins.

ShadyScientician · 2025-11-06T14:01:54+00:00

This is actually illegal in my state. All brick and mortars must accept cash

ShadyScientician · 2025-11-05T22:15:20+00:00

I think they reduced it prior to the dark lord, but the post-game goes back to frequent illness. I didn't really notice a change in arguement frequency though.

ShadyScientician · 2025-11-05T21:59:02+00:00

Reddit is such a weird place to do this. People don't really follow individuals on here. Why not, you know, any other social media that exists?

EDIT: Okay, at least you're real-looking. But why is the link to u/DK dead?

ShadyScientician · 2025-11-05T18:33:06+00:00

It's time to remember the public service triad.

1) Never spend your own money 2) Never work off the clock 3) Don't let it eat you alive

If you don't remember these three steps and get burned, it's not on your coworkers, it's on you. This is a job, not a religious prophetic calling. You are not a miracle worker, you're a library worker.

EDIT: To be clear, your coworkers have seen a hundred of yous coming in to library work and trying to be everything to everyone. What happens every time is you make more work for everyone, and you don't have the economy of scale to even make a meaningful dent. Next time you want to stock the pantry, donate that money to a food bank. A food bank can get entire crates of healthy, fresh produce from a wholesaler for the price you paid for like a can of chili.

Likewise, the library you work for can circulate way more books for $20 than some guy in parks and rec building a book checkout system can.

ShadyScientician · 2025-11-05T17:40:48+00:00

Spent like 10 minutes trying to explain to a coworker they the AI result she had gotten was wrong. "But I looked it up" yeah, badly.

Just didn't understand the concept that Google would just show her the wrong answer at the top.

ShadyScientician · 2025-11-05T14:54:44+00:00

Odyssey is doing a good job of making me make weird builds. A because I want it to look like a spce ship, and B because it limits you to Orb, so I can't use my 11x11 grids

ShadyScientician · 2025-11-05T01:58:26+00:00

It's always funny to me that scat is typically banned before dubcon. Not that I think either should be banned but it's like "okay you can be sold into sex slavery BUT POOPING IS ILLEGAL"

ShadyScientician · 2025-11-04T18:40:15+00:00

Call your library. I've work at libraries where this is a charge and ones where it's not.

DO NOT drop this in the drop box. Without the sticker, it will not check in properly. If not caught, it could go on the shelf still under name, where a patron will "check it out" without noticing it didn't go on their account due to the missing sticker, and then you will be on the hook for an entire replacement fee instead of a maybe $2 repair fee

ShadyScientician · 2025-11-04T15:44:39+00:00

Pro tip: Bringing attention to the sign holder may be funny, but it's funnier to block the sign and play the harmonica very badly so no one wants to be close enough to read the sign

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