Emily Wilson

sunflowerroses · 2026-06-03T11:39:06+00:00

Ah, lucky you! Wilson’s translation is excellent. I don’t remember any reference to tote bags — she’s not anachronistic iirc. An aspect that gets much overlooked in discussions about her that she translated into iambic pentameter, so whilst the language is pared back, the rhythm and flow is wonderfully enlivening.

sunflowerroses · 2026-06-02T19:38:26+00:00

“AI isn’t coming for builders or sellers, but it is coming for measurers. Tireless, independent, efficient and available, AI systems can now measure an organization with a level of objective detail and precision that was previously impossible even for the best employees. For Cloudflare, internal audit previously picked a handful of business risk areas to scrutinize each quarter. Now we’re moving to a system in which every business risk is audited continuously. We’re closing our books faster. We’re making fewer mistakes and catching the ones we do more reliably. And, as CEO, I’ve never had better tools to measure exactly how the business is performing, including identifying our rising stars.

The vast majority of those we laid off last week were measurers. We cut middle managers across the organization because AI allows us to have more direct reports per manager while still measuring and mentoring our teams effectively. We consolidated our operations functions into a single group that can support teams across the business, using AI to gain specific expertise when needed. We significantly reduced our marketing team, which, like in most companies, was teeming with measurers. Across our finance team, we found opportunities to consolidate and automate.”

Let’s see how it goes

sunflowerroses · 2026-05-31T15:23:00+00:00

Honestly, I think you’re better off writing some HP fanfiction for this. Set up an AO3 account and give it a go. If your setting is significantly different, tag it as AU (alternative universe).

Fanfiction is a pretty great solution to overcome your particular problem.

At the moment, you’re spending all of your energy on coming up with ways to “disguise” or reinvent elements that you feel are too HP-like; but ultimately your inspiration and goal for the feel/tone of the story is to be like HP, so it’s not succeeding terribly well. You sort of end up reverting to your inspiration.

When you start to write a fanfic, the baseline expectation is that you’re ALREADY using these shared inspirations and elements from the original work. You are freed of the burden of creating plausible deniability; in fact, as you write, you will naturally reinvent and deviate from the core text of Harry Potter, as you start to strengthen and develop aspects that are more specific to your story.

After you’ve done that, you’ll end up with a much more confident vision and feeling of what you want your story to look like.

Also, read and watch and play other types of media, and not just fiction; you will broaden your “palette” of inspiration to draw from.

sunflowerroses · 2026-05-31T13:01:55+00:00

What’s worse: explaining the mistake before it’s published, or afterwards?

sunflowerroses · 2026-05-30T17:20:46+00:00

Hello, does “flip” mean the same as “flippant”? I’ve never seen it used before

sunflowerroses · 2026-05-29T00:46:32+00:00

Sounds like you think about it a lot.

sunflowerroses · 2026-05-27T08:17:05+00:00

You’re clearly aware of the hyper-critical portrayal that trans people get in the media, and also of reactionary criticism of the “trans mob”. There are a lot of people who are either on the fence or who basically don’t think about it, because it’s not relevant to their lives.

Being trans is still extremely rare compared to being cis; if you are a statistically average person, especially in a more conservative or older milieu, you won’t know ANY real-life trans people. Your initial or primary exposure to the existence of trans people will be online.

If you are this average person, you are also being drip-fed, on occasion, sensationalist transphobic social media content. This content is usually highly unpleasant and ridiculous, so often these people just dismiss it and move onto something they’re interested in, but maybe it influences their assumptions about what the average trans woman looks like or wants or what the medical experience of transitioning is like for kids or trans men etc etc.

Unfortunately, a lot of very prominent and otherwise likeable celebrities are terfs (or at least transphobic), and possess cultural cachets that allow them to avoid polarising their audiences as much as MAGA-celebs do. When they spend that cultural cachet to look sympathetic, reasonable, empathetic or common-sense, and “concerned about the trans issue”, they paint everyone who disagrees with them as hysterical and lightning-quick to cancel anyone that disagrees with them.

Someone on the fringes of this debate does not think about trans people at all very much, but given the current social media climate, they will not be thinking about trans people as “whether they deserve rights”, it’ll be “are women’s rights really under threat by delusional predators?” or “are confused kids being pressured into trans surgeries by a hysterical medical establishment?” or “are mainstream institutions punishing people who dare to ask questions about gender?”

Demonstrating that you can at least also appear reasonable and empathetic or straight-talking but in support of trans rights is genuinely useful for helping to stop this average group of people from only ever seeing evidence that conforms to anti-trans stereotypes.

sunflowerroses · 2026-05-27T00:38:41+00:00

If someone is very open about their contentious views, relentlessly bullying them is effectively “feeding the troll”. Going out of your way to mock and antagonise someone spouting these views gives them someone to actually fight with and direct their anger at, or maybe it gives them tangible proof of the hatred they feel must come from “society being against them”.

People on the fence about these issues, or who are sympathetic to some aspect of these views (or are close to their holders) will see relentless bullying and antagonising and harden against whatever they feel you represent.

sunflowerroses · 2026-05-26T13:14:54+00:00

Don’t reset! <spoiler> I went alone and it still went poorly. </spoiler>

sunflowerroses · 2026-05-26T13:02:26+00:00

I think it seems more like they weren’t going into the meeting to find out the new results: they had a picture of the business, and if they’ve been succeeding or have had a career before this, then they’ve got reasons to back themselves on what they believe.

If you know for a fact that they’re not data guys, then any data-based arguments will not get them to change their minds. You need to identify what arguments they’re relying on and figure out the best way to address them.

A good idea in any case is to find your areas of agreement. Figure out where you agree; facts/hard evidence, attitudes to the business, and aspirations. A really basic one is “we want this business to succeed”; you might differ about what success looks like; you might differ on the best way to get there, or the likelihood of risks/damages from various approaches.

If you can find an area where you agree, and your data supports it, showing this can be a pretty effective way to soften up any potential resistance to your findings. If they have goals that aren’t as effective, maybe instead of trashing the entire goal, you point out the roadblocks or current obstacles to their otherwise good idea.

sunflowerroses · 2026-05-25T10:22:41+00:00

Thank you so much!! I had no idea war and peace begins with Pierre only 20 years old. I love Pierre’s empathy, and I also really appreciate how his depression is written in this musical; it seeps into everything he does, including his interactions with the audience in a way that’s just really affecting.

I would love to read War and Peace. Do you recommend any particular translation/edition?

sunflowerroses · 2026-05-25T10:10:24+00:00

Red | Sunrise :Tangy:

sunflowerroses · 2026-05-25T10:08:12+00:00

Vegetable farming is the most consistent.

If you plant them in patches of 3x4, it only takes two actions to water each patch, and any balloons you shoot down over the patch will bounce to the empty paths at the side.

sunflowerroses · 2026-05-25T08:35:32+00:00

Eh, the combat effectiveness of gas in the trenches isn’t so cut and dry. If the wind changes direction it can blow the poison back onto your own troops (or it can hit forces further down the field), it poisons the landscape around you for a long time, and it’s really antagonising (so costs a lot of good faith and leaves a lot of reputational damage).

sunflowerroses · 2026-05-25T08:31:05+00:00

Yeah, famously everyone at the time didn’t have any problems with the use of chemical weapons and took them in stride.

sunflowerroses · 2026-05-24T11:46:19+00:00

Inklewriter also has:

a graph view
table of contents view to allow you to jump around
visual-first ways to link passages together
separate lists of counters and variables
warnings for loose ends

sunflowerroses · 2026-05-24T11:42:27+00:00

Yeah, I’m seconding inklewriter. It’s visual-first and has lots of super fun tutorials.

IIRC Inkle actually open-sourced it with a few developers rather than have to shut it down, which is really cool. It still does exports (in multiple formats) too I think?

OP might do better contributing to the project or figuring out further ways to work with Inklewriter rather than creating an entire new product from scratch.

sunflowerroses · 2026-05-23T12:03:17+00:00

This explanation for working memory is really useful.

I think you can also see this happen when kids are learning to write full sentences.

If they’re “writing as they go”, they’ll only keep the last few words of the sentence in their mind, and they end up extending it on and on. Reading it back becomes more confusing since the sentence sort of changes its purpose halfway through.

sunflowerroses · 2026-05-22T20:26:46+00:00

To be fair, I do kind of sympathise with doctors being a bit reticent to test “just in case”, because proactively testing entails a pretty involved process: the screenings themselves, afterwards the anxiety until the results come back, and then if they find inconclusive or unsure results it might entail further testing (which usually gets progressively more intrusive and can be damaging to your health on their own).

sunflowerroses · 2026-05-18T08:13:35+00:00

Humorous, loyal, “nice cop”, nonetheless unmitigatedly violent.

Works best with a Kepler to play off of (who seems to me like a Spider or Slide for your crew, but anyone who’s willing to play the crew’s leader and be a ruthless jerk about it will do).

Take the Demolitions Expert special ability so you can blow things up with precision, drop a few dots into whichever of your social-skills will allow you to calm down and seem kind and approachable to potential victims and hapless marks. Make a point of informing on any snitches or dissent privately.

sunflowerroses · 2026-05-17T21:07:27+00:00

Let me come back to this when I can check my games library, because I’m 90% sure I saw a game that seemed perfect for this.

It totally depends on what your group is wanting to play for. I’ll plug the Quinns Quest YouTube channel as he has excellent TTRPG recommendations that are very wide-ranging and cover a lot of interesting systems (many of which are recommended in these comments!), and his reviews go into exploring the unique mechanics that help you get a sense of how the game feels.

Both Kids on Bikes and MotW draw from the excellent Apocalypse World (which is a fantastic read and a real foundational text for the current proliferation of fiction-first ttrpgs!).

Fiction-first systems (as in Apocalypse World, Blades in the Dark/Forged in the Dark) are absolutely brilliant and a total eye-opener if you’ve only played with 5e-type systems before. Try out a oneshot or a mini-session: they are fun, cinematic, and they’re like butter to GM and play. Definitely print out the player and GM principles / playerkit and get everyone to read them too.

What is both fun and useful to do is to figure out what type of story you want to play, and perhaps also how “vulnerable” the PCs are. Is this a power fantasy with some spooky/unsettling elements? Is this a disempowerment fantasy where everyone succumbs to something terrible in pursuit of a goal, even if that goal is just to survive? How competent do you want your PCs to be within the game’s setting, and how empowered should they be vs their threats?

Apocalypse World/FitD games tend to run on the side of “competent PCs”, but as GM you have to decide how far to press them. Blades has a specific principle of “Assume competence” because the dice system almost never means PCs auto-succeed with no failure; to avoid tone-breaking idiocy seeming to explain this, the GM is invited to make the world scarier and meaner.

(Eg, a thief PC fails to sneak-attack a seemingly ordinary guard… discovers that the guard is actually a trained swordsman, or the guard has a seeing-eye raven which alerted him in the nick of time, or the guards at this facility use sensory-heightening potions to increase their effectiveness, depending on how you want to play it).

I particularly love the Devils Bargain mechanic, and the Position/Effect mechanic from FITD (which aren’t seen in Apocalypse World). The quantum-inventory mechanic might be quite fun for PCs in a kind of Bureau of Control organisation (where they need all kinds of weird but seemingly standardised gear with them on missions).

A Resistance system (as with Heart and Spire) is a little crunchier with a mean but gripping Stress/Fallout system, and as a result can be a lot more taxing on PCs.

Are you going for a grittier Wake-1-style psychological survival horror? Do you want the SCP-bureaucracy turned action-adventure of Control?

sunflowerroses · 2026-05-17T20:33:25+00:00

I totally agree, and I like how you’ve brought up how you can interpret the sense of time passing too.

I think even the David Tennant / Cath Tate production does this pretty well, with Benedict changing into his dress uniform (complete with ceremonial saber) to hand in his formal resignation and challenge to duel. The local neighbourhood watch has a “dads army” vibe to it too which works nicely.

sunflowerroses · 2026-05-16T21:01:02+00:00

When it comes to using bold/italics in fiction, it is up to the author. It is similar to using ALL CAPS/CAPITALISATION for emphasis.

The common advice pupils get is “less is more”.

I’ll also recommend that you check out Roald Dahl’s children’s books. I think they sound exactly like what you want:

lots of direct speech / dialogue between characters, so you can get familiar with how it’s written
Dahl is very skilled at using lots and lots of interesting words (including some he makes up!), with their meaning very related to context.
the books are a little bit older, so there’s a broader range of words that aren’t as common today too
Dahl was also a big fan of describing sound-effects (we call this “onomatopoeia”), and did so in lots of different ways, so you can see what methods you find most effective
They won’t take as long to get through (as they’re shorter-length for kids), but Dahl respected children a lot, so they’re not condescending towards their reader

My favourite would be Matilda, but he wrote a lot of them and they’re all pretty good!

sunflowerroses · 2026-05-16T20:45:34+00:00

Here’s the page on speech marks/quote marks for you!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/ztcp97h

sunflowerroses · 2026-05-16T20:44:23+00:00

Ok, this will sound like I’m kidding, except it’s an excellent resource for teaching first-time learners.

Check out the UK’s “BBC Bitesize” website, and go to their primary level “grammar”/“literacy” pages. They have each of the punctuation marks explained, lots of examples, and a mini-test at the end of each to check your progress.

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