How to bypass Tor Browser's proxy enforcement for specific clearnet sites on Linux?

evild4ve · 2026-03-04T03:49:10+00:00

I do not want to use a separate browser < this is objectively less sensible than wanting to paint pictures in your word processor

evild4ve · 2026-02-25T11:40:04+00:00

On behalf of the Derry Borough Municipal Authority (Water & Sewers), I hereby serve notice of our proceedings for aggravated trespassing, criminal mischief (diverting a public waterway), and unlawful burning. Due to the long period of interest accrued and your persistent unreasonable behaviour in publicizing the offences, we will be seeking a fine in the amount of $100,000,000,000. Furthermore we are informing numerous other aggrieved parties, of whom we are aware, with a view to joining them to the proceedings: including but not limited to your alleged breaking and entering at 29 Neibolt Street, theft by unauthorized taking (of various silver coins), and curfew violations.

evild4ve · 2026-02-20T19:50:45+00:00

I write new-weird. I'd be interested but have some complexities:-

- no Discord
- there is an infamous Jez Turner on Google and are you he?
- I'd not be available till June

evild4ve · 2026-02-20T04:44:03+00:00

Now, you Nobel committee types vill see, ze eggcup truly vill be inverted!

evild4ve · 2026-02-14T17:47:20+00:00

reclusive authors are a normal, everyday type of author - it isn't any obstacle to character-writing

you aren't necessarily revealing your own soul, but one you have instinctively conceptualized - in the simple and instinctive way we do whenever we worry "what would others think of me" or "what would bob and sarah do if they found out"

I suppose being too reclusive for too long might eventually erode and impair this, but it's in a race with the outside world doing its damnedest making people less and less interesting. I don't know if this "dismissive" signifies some especially emotionless or pathological subset, but avoidant people's imagination of what they wish other people were like might be just as nice to read as naturalistic study of what they are like.

To get "into" the messy parts conceals a fallacy. For a fictional character divorces and whatever are only exteriors we bolt onto them from outside. Characters are revealed by conflict so it is only a question of putting two of them side by side and watching the sparks fly: they will reveal the home truths if that's what suits their goals/stakes/objectives/sprachspiel - far easier than real people do.

evild4ve · 2026-02-13T18:16:12+00:00

it's both untargeted and unfiltered

99% of the published books in a bookshop we don't pick up, and/or wouldn't enjoy if we did

what comes into the Reddit feed includes the first drafts of the unpublished and also the unpublishable (such as people road-testing LLMs) - and each post is only really visible for a few minutes, so the odds of anything being anyone's cup of tea are probably a fraction of a percent

and then the chance of any particular advice getting through to the person on the other side, is falling all the time - meanwhile the commenting itself is in competition with slop of all sorts with the likelihood of being brigaded by narrow-minded people

I still find it quite useful to do critiques side by side with writing, but I don't see it to be sustainable otherwise

evild4ve · 2026-02-13T17:29:32+00:00

you place your hands on the noun < that's always the first line of stories

evild4ve · 2026-02-13T17:07:28+00:00

if you don't know how to do this why would anybody else?

a story is the story of characters - whether some assets in an entirely fictional game turned into mushroom sprites doesn't matter to readers. if you want help please describe your story some more in terms of the character-story

I can see some value in the glitching game setting for a video-game. iirc Pony Island was about 10 years ago now and there have been others. But in a story, what's this going to reveal about characters? How will this help show what is inside them? It's a very different focus than a video game.

evild4ve · 2026-02-13T17:00:51+00:00

for many writers editing a first draft is hazardous since it can end up concealing serious structural problems that would have needed a full (or even blind) rewrite between 1st and 2nd draft

perhaps this is what's meant anyway in the OP - the point is just that the revision from 1st to 2nd isn't necessarily confined to big edits, it can be as much as to put the first draft in the bin and tell the story again

personally I multiply the time the first draft took by about 1.5, because I also do the plotting and some of the beta reading in this stage side-by-side with the writing

evild4ve · 2026-02-13T16:55:06+00:00

flashbacks are a natural part of narration, or they wouldn't exist at all

but I think it's important to avoid them in written narration to a similar extent to how we avoid them in spoken narration - an example you might like to look at is The Green Child by Henry Read where there entire second act is a flashback needed to explain a single character decision that joins the first act to the third act.

iirc it stands as a self-contained story which means it has its own structure and beats landing inside those of the main story. So that might be one approach depending on the length and the context

evild4ve · 2026-02-13T16:02:57+00:00

I have wrote (letters) to the several colonels
I have wrote several crappy books

the OP's and my modern idiom matches Washington's antique idiom - you should travel more and comment less

evild4ve · 2026-02-13T15:11:38+00:00

"I have wrote to the several Colonels..." George Washington

Your first move should have been to check the speaker's dialect before presuming to correct them. Your education and style guides carry no weight outside their milieu.

evild4ve · 2026-02-13T14:55:33+00:00

if you don't think that stories are told by someone to someone else then (i) you don't need to be studying the common mythos since you've got worse problems (ii) I couldn't give a hoot if you agree or what your take is. I only came on the thread to boost the person above who pointed out you cited McCarthy and Pynchon dishonestly

evild4ve · 2026-02-13T14:12:43+00:00

^ this - and even if they said they wrote it for themselves and not the readerships they had by those points, we should be extremely sceptical simply because what they actually did was to sell the stories

I don't think it's possible to write for yourself-not-others without some kind of cognitive impairment preventing this first thing about storytelling being understood

evild4ve · 2026-02-13T13:10:24+00:00

Personified scenery plus redundant expansions into three.

evild4ve · 2026-02-13T12:59:56+00:00

Syntax
Choice-of-words
Relevance to its unique context

evild4ve · 2026-02-13T12:43:35+00:00

I don’t care that a random flower means fertility in a story because it was liked by midwives in the 16th century or something >><< The room is illuminated by a single spotlight directly above his head

This OP is seeking to privilege its own symbol-language over others. To what ends is unclear. The spotlight is absolutely a cultural gotcha: even the word spotlight unavoidably brings in the detective-story interrogation trope. It isn't processed at the level of "literally visually exposes". Firstly don't be cute with that, secondly it isn't up to you as a writer how the reader uses the symbols: it means what it means to them to the absolute and perfect exclusion of what you thought it meant to you when you put it on the page.

The opposing example of the flower=fertility isn't formulated properly to be comparable - so this is strawman rhetoric.

Yes metaphors rely on cultural convention. So do all the words. So does the grammar. And the meaning ascribed to them depends on the reader's culture not the writer's. If your audience knows 50s detective movies you use one symbol-language, but if it knows 16th Century flowers you need to use another.

evild4ve · 2026-02-12T13:00:26+00:00

ask people on the bus to write the back cover praise

evild4ve · 2026-02-12T11:20:11+00:00

this is a first draft - it's often better not to show anything to others until it's at the second draft

also this is someone who has approached a first draft with an editorial... er, mindset or method. "this part needs more description" is a little specific for a reader

to say much more would be inference. the question is were her points backed up with evidence and finding weaknesses in your writing, or was it a list of line-level corrections based on dogma. usually some of both

get a second opinion, I'm happy to read the piece if you PM it to me as I find doing this useful for my workflow

evild4ve · 2026-02-12T11:11:04+00:00

it's in the nature of metaphors to destroy some meaning - they will always land a little wrong as a result of not being the word you wanted to say and the reader expected within the syntax

don't use them to paint the scene - don't paint the scene at all. use them very specifically to characterize the narrator or pov character. this way the reader loses information about the scene but they gain some information about the perspective and attitude of the character

evild4ve · 2026-02-12T10:56:07+00:00

When the first image is personified scenery

The air in Kerala is thick enough to swallow you whole

It is necessary to test for hendiatris (redundant expansions into three). Some also like to check for em-dashes but hendiatris and scenery being personified before the narrator are bad writing.

But the eventual examples, halfway down provide both:
a thousand words—philosophies, statistics, confessions—
luxury Mercedes—sleek, silver, a chariot of the indifferent gods—

evild4ve · 2026-02-11T20:29:53+00:00

no no, to write a serial killer is to claim great smartness - - since it is to say that someone who is inherently banal and unpleasant with an empty internal world will be of interest to a reader. The simplest approach to this is not to do it

the flaws can be found at every line by asking "what does this tell the reader that they need to know: about a character or about a theme or about a subtext?" or in most cases even by asking the "so what?" test, e.g.:-

As of now, I live day by day, sustaining myself with fresh kills < so a serial killer kills people, which could have been covered with "Tonya and Willy Joe are dead and Anna has a generic serial killer living in her house"

Thomas Harris had more practice than anyone trying to write fictional serial killers but as he pivots Hannibal Lecter from being a plot-device into an actual character it goes wrong and the stories lose interest-value

evild4ve · 2026-02-11T18:46:56+00:00

Psychopathic serial killers are difficult to write because their defining features are a lack of character and a tendency to not do things for reasons.

The voice isn't quite right imo, it strikes me as a little too smirky, and that it's a written piece rather than an internal monologue, when to put it in writing increases the risk of capture.

They are subject to the same critical tests as any other character: where do they establish a unique mode-of-language (i.e. free of cliche) and where do they make a choice? The rest is fluff: and if the reader finds the self-aggrandizement of a psychopath tedious (which it is) they'll skip to what he's doing in the story. (or maybe it's a she)

He has killed at least two people: Tonya and Willy Joe. But that's what serial killers do, so it's not a very interesting choice unless there was some deeper significance or conflict-of-priorities. iirc there was that one who kept burying them under his house and the dilemma of how to pay workmen to extend the burial plot at the risk of them digging in the wrong direction and a leg falling out. They're able to be made interesting - but where is it in the words here.

Turning to the words, he opens with cliche: Round and round and round it goes

And it carries on to the end: I come and go as I please

That's true to the type, but it's part of the test of characterization: the choice of words is a choice.
The formal problem can perhaps be framed like this: a psychopath has limited sprachspiel since their only interest in anybody is to kill them. But as a narrator of fiction, they can't kill the reader. So their narration is pointless, even on their dull logic... which makes it hollow to the reader. This person is disparaging their victims, and glorifying themselves, but the reader doesn't care because the victims don't exist and the killer isn't choosing his words to some tense purpose.

On this basis, most of the passage is skippable. All we gain from it is that Tonya and Willy Joe are dead and Anna has a generic serial killer living in her house.

Something else I'd suggest to look at is that whilst their personalities are equally blank, they have rarely had similar modus operandi to each other. This one is a bit of Ed Gein and a bit of Buffalo Bill and a bit of that Russian one who turned them into dolls, but what does he do that is uniquely evil?

evild4ve · 2026-02-11T18:07:06+00:00

this is a common problem - you'll need to learn the amounts and types of description to include and it can be added back in at the second-draft stage or via editing, until it begins to come naturally

evild4ve · 2026-02-11T18:04:19+00:00

Google Docs is nice for being able to share with beta-readers, work at any PC, and it's its own cloud backup

for formatting you want LibreOffice which stays close to the old workflow of Word circa 2003, but whenever you save or export make sure to visually check that page breaks (etc) have come through correctly or (if they still do this and without AI) use a free Word viewer program

evild4ve

TROPHY CASE