J.B. Pinkle

Are you still deciding?

I would probably not do a disease unless you are are trying to evoke feelings related to covid, or it’s very, very different in symptoms. (and maybe not even then) - only because I feel like that’s carrying a lot of baggage right now for some folks.

Of the rest, I love the alien creature idea!

Really glad to have helped even a little. Best of luck to you! 😀

FWIW migrating from Mastodon migrates all your followers automatically and you can interact with them just as you did on Mastodon.

You do need to manually recreate your list of people you follow though, from what I could tell.

Once that’s done you haven’t really lost anything unless you were or were intended to be heavily active with the feed on your local mastodon instance. (Vs federation etc)

ok but how about you tell me why to move from mastodon to firefish?

I like the UI better (by a lot), I like the “antennas” feature, I like that I can do a traditional blog post if I choose (“pages” they call it), it’s very custom-configurable, and in the 3 days since I’ve joined I’ve already seen bugfixes and improvements deployed.

Why move? If Mastodon is 100% great for you and nothing about the look/feel/functionality of Firefish jumps out at you then there is really no reason.

This is like Deja Vu.

Even the same state.

In the article I linked about that prior incident , note that the driver who was PIT’d did exactly what the arkansas drivers manual said to do. (If challenged I can try digging up the pdf of the manual again, but I assure you it’s there.)

I have stronger opinions on this topic than I’m really going to get into here. Suffice to say, we need a change, and there needs to be more of an impact on police than a settlement a year later paid by taxpayers.

As a child of the 70s, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes have been a part of my earliest understanding of space and our exploration of it. I learned about them (multiple times) in school, and was excited (spoiler alert) years later with how central the fictional Voyager 6 was to the plot of the first Trek movie.

Every single time I have read that they are still sending data back I’m excited to hear it, though from what Wikipedia says there is really no likelihood either will be doing so later than 2025/2026 respectively.

This headline gave me a little “oh no” moment until I read the article. 😀

It is a real breath of fresh air though in terms of features and great UI!

I want to be able to do more than just upvote this lol. I was so pleasantly surprised. In minutes I was sure I wanted to migrate my Mastodon account.

My contribution to beehaw so far is this comment. I have confidence issues, and have been essentially radio silent on social media for the past ten years

Well, I feel honored that you are responding to my post! 🙂

but I’m at a turning point in my life and writing is the only thing that makes sense I need to start now

Turning points are precisely where you change direction in your life, so it sounds like you are doing the right thing! 👍

I’m primarily interested in short stories which I would like to potentially narrate in the future, but I’m slowly trying to get over the confidence problem at the moment.

While I can’t possibly know exactly how you feel or what factors may have led to this, I do somewhat understand. I had general anxiety issues and maybe a tinge of depression when I put my feet on this path. I barely touched the project for the first 6 months or more after I decided I was doing it.

My really very amateur advice is - take positivity from everything you can. For example, what helped me was a BUNCH of honestly sort of small sounding things that seemed to bear fruit over time. Two examples -

• I made a playlist called “Positive” and added any song to it that made me feel good. Even if it wasn’t explicitly a song about positivity - if it made me feel energized and happy to hear it, it went in. I would put that playlist on every time I sat down to write.

• When someone crossed my twitter feed who looked like they were spreading positive feelings to people, I followed them to ensure I’d get those positive messages in my feed.

I’d also suggest finding a writing podcast that you enjoy listening to. I’ve been listening to a few of them - at least one episode a day, and on one of them I’m about to start their back catalog for the third time. There are a lot of them out there, and they are all just a bit different from each other. One or more will click with you. It will not only educate and motivate you, but it will also help you feel more confident. Every one of these published writers that I have listened to has complained about the same feelings of doubt regarding their writing, the same difficulties with confidence and impostor syndrome, and really almost all the same problems that we beginners seem to have.

Although I don’t intend to plug a particular one, the Writing Excuses podcast often discusses short fiction, and gives specific advice for short story writers. At least one of the regular hosts has extensive experience with short fiction. Their show is also a little bit different every season - they change up the structure of the show and have guest hosts, and other things to add variety and to cover a lot of facets of writing.

I’m not qualified to give you any advice about how to write, but I will say this advice from B. Dave Walters is in my head all the time - I’m paraphrasing: The worst thing you write is better than the best thing you don’t write. (because it’s the only way to get better and that won’t happen if it stays in your head)

All the best to you!

So basically an 18th century vibe in terms of the culture and most forms of technology, but still using swords and the like for weapons?

Yes exactly that! Though again loosely, I admit. I am doubtful my setting is more historically accurate for the real-world period than the Kevin Costner Robin Hood is for its period, but I’m telling myself that’s OK since it’s really secondary world. That secondary world excuse is a double edged blade though because in the beginning I really had to work to pack away the part of my brain trying to convince me that I needed to invent new words for units of time, common foods, animals, etc. 😀

Very interesting idea.

Thanks! The use of swords, bows, staffs (staves?) etc is really the main impact of this that I’ve shown so far. More may creep in during revision. I have done a bit of research into likely impacts in other areas, but there seem to be surprisingly few for that point in history that have been significant enough to make it into the book.

I’m a huge fan of the Powdermage series by Brian McClellan, but I didn’t want to incorporate gunpowder into my magic system as he did, and I also didn’t want it to be a negating factor for my magic system. I’m sure I could have worked around those concerns, but ultimately it just seemed more likely to complicate things than add much to the story. Most fantasy I’ve read hasn’t included gunpowder/guns, and I’ve not generally found that I missed it. Anyhow is there really room for another page-turner flintlock-fantasy??!! ;-)

on one occasion I removed an entire 40k word section (I kept a backup in case I changed my mind.)

I’m almost pathologically incapable of deleting things. Both in my writing and otherwise. There’s always a backup of anything I could ever ever see needing again. That’s a huge chunk. I don’t think you could pay me to delete that much without a backup.

Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty and Jack London’s White Fang are good examples here

Read both of those decades ago, I didn’t even think of them - good examples, I loved them both. Now I understand better.

Richard Adams’ Watership Down

I have heard of but not read this, I will add it to my someday list.

So I think I want to write something focused on non-humans, but for an adult audience and not middle grade. Probably a limited market for it, but it’s what I want to read, which always seems like a good place to start when writing something!

I agree there, that’s part of why I described my book the way I did. I want to write about people mostly trying to be good to each other. That’s the sort of fantasy I always enjoyed reading the most, and although I hope it’s the kind of fantasy others want to read, it’s definitely he sort I want to write.

I read Tad Williams The Dragonbone Chair when it was new, so I admit I don’t remember too much about it. But what has stuck with me after all these years is feeling like it’s a book about true friendship, of a sort not everyone finds. I want to write books that folks remember that way years later. Bad things happen, villains exist, but the people you are going to spend the most time with are going to be the sort you would feel lucky to know IRL.

Couple of edits…

On purpose.

Only clearer by the day that this was all an exercise to intentionally kill Twitter to the benefit of billionaires, fascists and other extremists.

I truly thought it was just tone deafness and overconfidence on the part of Musk for a good potion of this. But the last few events, along with various comments he has made along the way, have me concluding that this must be true.