Okay, time for me to be realistic: With classes starting again and homework being A Thing already, I need to not push myself to finish my second Sot69 fic for this year.

I want to finish it! I do! And I want to have at least one more thing done for Sot69 this year! But if I push myself, I'm pretty sure that things won't go well. Even with no class or work on Monday, there's no guarantee that'd be enough recovery time for me, especially with Saturday now my only guaranteed day of the week with neither class nor work.

I think I'll probably at least try to get the outline I have typed up. (Actually, now that I think about it, that might even be a good entry for the final theme of Failed 69!) But I'm not going to pressure myself into writing the whole thing.

The important thing is, even if I don't finish it by September 6th, I can still finish it in the future!

IDK if I'll ever put it in a fic or anything, but the words "Eight-Legged Spider Hawk" spontaneously generated themselves in my brain as I was preparing for my evening ablutions.

My first reaction to this thought was that Peerless Cucumber absolutely roasted Airplane in the comments when this monster made its debut, because he thought that "Eight-Legged" and "Spider" were redundant. Airplane retaliated by introducing Six-Legged and Ten-Legged Spider Hawks in the next chapter, including important distinctions between the species.

I don't know about the six- or ten-legged varieties, but here's the lore I came up with for the eight-legged ones:

Appears very much like a very large spider with hawk's wings, it is often mistaken for one in flight or while hunting. Its movement on the ground, however, is unmistakable. These creatures line their nests with a particular type of silk that makes exquisite bondage rope.

The ten- and six-legged varieties probably have somewhat different venom or are more prized for their feathers or something.

Fandom: The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System
Summary: Shang Qinghua is in a meeting with Mu Qingfang about the innovative new peak first aid centers when they're interrupted by a disciple from the beast peak: Shen Yuan, an otherwise ordinary young man, has discovered yet another treatment for sex pollen that involves neither sex nor involvement with heavenly demons.
Mirrors: AO3 link
Wordcount: ~1900 words
Ships: None
Notes: Inspired by this post on Tumblr:

Post text

ceramicrambles:

Medical mystery Shen Yuan who literally every checkup has a new thing that should have killed him and Mu Qingfang is incredibly concerned

MQF: Shixiong, why is your blood purple?

SY: Oh right! it’s okay I was hit with the misty eyed-transfusion-curse-of-papapa pollen but I took the antidote so now I sprout a daisy every time I pee. It’s basically the closest thing to a cure haha and the only other treatment is heavenly demon blood so what are you gonna do, amirite?

MQF: what.

mikkeneko: mind you. I'm not saying Mu Qingfang is NOT concerned. But I also think that Known Mad Scientist Mu Qingfang would see an absolute golden opportunity in just following SQQ around with a notebook at this point

Thanks to ceramicrambles for both the inspiration and beta reading!
Fic: ( There's No Hippocratic Oath in Xianxia China )

I've been playing this game for just over a week now, and already the difficulty scaling is past where I find the rewards worth it. Most of the puzzles are around difficulty level 4 to 6 now, and I'm just not figuring enough of them out in the time limit I'm given. I'll still get some yarn when I finish the designated three puzzle set, but if I fail any of the puzzles, it's the lower quality yarn—even though the point total from all the puzzles, failures included, is higher than when I was playing the games on their lowest difficulty.

If I were getting more yarn per try, it might be worth it to me to keep playing. If the timers were more generous, it might be worth it to me. If I could choose which puzzles to play and which yarn to work towards, or if the difficulty scaling were a bit slower, it might be worth it to me. But at this point, I'll probably just play a few more days out of sunk cost fallacy driven hope, and then try to forget I even bought the damn game. Which is a shame, because I'd really love to have some sort of apartment-decorating game with the mechanics from the main room that I loved so much.

Honestly, I'd originally bought this game with the hopes of playing some of the puzzles with my niblings, but with how the game's set up, I'm not sure I'd even be able to reach all of the games, let alone be able to play in a way that didn't leave all of us frustrated in the end.

This disappointment aside, if Nintendo ever decided to put out a simple version of Voltorb Flip that works the same way as it does in HGSS, maybe for $2 or so, I'd buy that in a heartbeat. (They won't, they'd want to microtransaction and dark pattern the hell out of it, but that doesn't stop me from wanting it!)

I briefly saw (and participated in, for exactly one reblog) a thread on Tumblr about whether AO3 should allow works produced by Generative AI. OP was in favor, as was the first reblogger, where as at least one reblogger was firmly against all AI generated works on AO3, and several (myself included) shared the reasons why AI generated works currently are allowed on AO3. One of the rebloggers who is firmly against any AI generated works being allowed on AO3 said, "Like anything else in a shared social space, an enforced social norm requires actual social consequences for breaking it. This? Is just capitulation."

Anyway, that person also said that they're done talking about it, and I wanted to respect that, so I'm taking my thoughts over here. If you recognize the quote in question, or know who the person is, I will politely ask you to respect their boundaries and not go looking for the post and/or reblogging it from them with your own commentary; we can talk in the comments of this post, which they can safely ignore. I'm personally struggling with the point they raised, and will probably not be able to get to sleep without working some of it out, so I'm doing so over here where, again, they should be able to safely ignore it.

( So. AI generated works on AO3. )

Anyway, those are my current thoughts. So now probably the thing that will keep me up is trying to decide whether to create a Tumblr poll about that last point ("Do you post AI generated works to AO3, and if so, do you admit that they're AI generated?")

Just got my feedback for my Persuasive Speech!

Technically, I only had to hand in the outline, but since I wrote the speech to the outline template, it was effectively the same thing.

Anyway, here's the professor's feedback:

[Socchan], excellent job following the template. Well written and organized. Transitional statements were strong.

Yeah. Just kinda laugh-crying over "Excellent job following the template" 😂 Boy I sure hope it was, after how long I spent agonizing on it!

Anyway, I got 100% on the speech, and an additional 16/20 points of extra credit for presenting it. I could probably blow off the final quiz and assignment and still get at least a B in this class. I'm not going to, on account of being certain that it would tempt me into blowing off more and more assignments over the next semester, but it's good to be secure in my final grade.

I just wish that Minesweeper would count it as a win if you correctly identify and flag all of the mines, even if you don't click on every other non-mine square. The same way it auto-flags all of the mines if you do click every non-mine square, but don't use any flags.

Switched speech topic from "Why You Should Switch to Firefox" over to "Why You Should Learn Esperanto", because the former was giving me a headache to try and write. Esperanto speech is going much more smoothly! I still need to write the conclusion, but that's just one paragraph, and I've already got all of my sources listed and embedded as well.

...I should make an Esperanto Dreamsheep. And pick Esperanto back up in general. I remembered what I know better than I was expecting, but I really do want to know this language well.

Edit: Speech is (tentatively) complete! I just want to extract it from the template and give it a good look over for flow and so forth, and then it should be good to go. Thank goodness.

Oh god, it's finally happening; the smutty oneshot I'm plotting for Sot69 is trying to turn into either a multi-chapter fic or the first part of a series 😱

I'm a short fic writer! I'm not reeaaaadyyyyyy!

It's posting o'clock! Let's see, what to talk about...

I finally finished all the SVSSS short stories! All I can really say is, Cucumber's poor butt; I genuinely hope BingQiu figure things out soon off-camera...

First Sot69 fic didn't get quite the reception I'd hoped, but whatever; I'll just have to reset my expectations for the next one, which I've already begun outlining

It's time for the final speech in Speech class! Except, surprise, as long as we've given the other two speeches, we don't have to give this one! Which is slightly annoying, because that was how I was going to narrow down my possible speech topics; I'm pretty sure I'm instead going to have to go by "What do I have the most authority on," because the 'establish why people should listen to you about this' is the part of the speech templates I've had the most difficulty with so far

Oh, that's right; I guess I have one more thing to post about today...