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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • A lady standing on my neighbor’s back porch smoking a cigarette cussed me out when I let the dog out. Except my neighbor had moved out last week (I had helped) and I knew it hadn’t sold yet. A girlfriend of one of the guys up the block was having a episode of some kind and had decided to squat in my neighbor’s home. I locked the door, waiting for the next morning.

    I decided to call the Emergency Line to see if they would send mental health first but they sent the cops anyway. Our local cops are really delicate with mental patients so they got her back to her boyfriend and left the homeowner to cleanup.


  • This was true even in the 90s I’m sad to say. It’s one of the reason I didn’t pursue fiction writing as a career 30 years ago. I don’t think AI will replace any working authors because poorly written slop and computer generated text are both a lot older than today’s LLMs craze.

    The field of authorship has been in a slow decline for a long, long time. It has a lot to do with the way the book Publishing industry was run in the middle and later half of the 20th century. We stopped valuing authority and authors and it became a less valuable occupation. This happened to teachers and a lot of other thought-based fields too.


  • The reality is that statistically you are more likely to win $1 million in the lottery than to become an author in the US who can live on their income from writing fiction. It does still happen but the people who’s work leads them to become full time authors are extraordinarily lucky, talented, hard working, AND again, lucky.

    So you have to write for the joy of writing and expect to have a day job. And if that writing makes money, that’s great and you should keep doing as much of it as you can. But please accept that it’s not going to be your income driver for the foreseeable future.











  • That’s a bit of a misunderstanding, US Colleges have a bit of catch up period in the first year or 2 of study where you are both getting some exposure to your new topic but also ensuring your prior education is on par with everyone else. We call these “general education requirements” or “gen ed” and it’s because high school graduation isn’t well standardized across the states. Most students can test at the start of College or show their high school work and skip some of the basic writing and math classes to the next level. These “gen ed” classes ensure every student at the school has a basic level of reading, writing, and maths to base the rest of their work on. The amount of these other classes you have to take, is based on your major so for example people majoring in Teaching have more than other majoring in Engineering based on the logic a teacher needs a broader education in everything than an engineer will.

    It does sometimes result in odd situations like my Uncle who couldn’t pass a general education language course in his non-native language (Spanish for him) and so was denied a Mathematics Education Degree and needed an extra semester to finish a different mathematics degree that had fewer gen ed requirements.

    This all also plays into why US undergraduate degrees are usually 4-5 year programs instead of the shorter degrees tracks in Europe.

    That all said, JD has a 4 year degree in Poly-sci and an additional 3 in Law School and he’s still a complete moron. Not even Yale could fix that.