How To Have a Good Beta Reading Experience (or: what I've learned from 3 years of beta reading)

So lately I've been having a lot of discussions about beta reading with my discord groups so I thought I would write it out here and also share some resources I've used over the years.

This is mostly by and for writers, however readers can learn from this post as well!

Here are the main points I'm going to talk about in this post, and I'll do it under the cut to save your dash space:

Meanwhile, on Twitter:

Brain farts, a thread

Continue Reading

I’m volunteering for a literary journal right now and there’s two things I think you all should know.

1. Most people that submit to literary journals are cis white men. We know this because our journal has an anonymous survey about demographics for people that submit.

2. Most things that get submitted to the creative non fiction section are on the level of middle school “What I did over the summer” essays.

I cannot see the demographics of the people whose essays I’m reading, but guys, if you are wondering if you should submit your work to a literary journal or not, I promise you that just in terms of statistics there are a lot of mediocre cis white men and people in general confidently submitting weird crap that isn’t literature to literature magazines. Do it. Submit your work. Please. If you want there to be more diversity in literature, be the diversity. Do it. Do it do it do it.

In general literary magazines want to include more diversity, but if poc, queer people, disabled people, etc. don’t submit their work then they aren’t gonna get more diverse because we just won’t have the material necessary to get more diverse. Submit your work. Do it. Do it. Do it do it do it.

Here’s a list of university run literary journals. Do it. Get published.

Many indie lit mags also welcome works from BIPOC and LGBTQIA creatives because the editorial staff themselves are in that demographic. Quarantine brought on the start of the SO many indie lit mags - it’s almost a golden age. Don’t be afraid to submit — there will always be so many niches and aesthetics that one will bound to be the one that fits your style. 

There is so much work from marginalized narratives in litmags these days — people lament there is no representation in media, but that disregards the progress and diversity of the works of editors and writers who help make these litmags possible. 

There is representation, and it is flourishing. They are waiting to be read. 

The Lumiere Review compiles a list of submission opportunities every month, and it are always very useful: 

https://lumierereview.com/sub-sep-oct-2021

List of Litmags that Specifically Look for Work from Marginalized Creators or is Run by Marginalized Creators:

Warning Lines: https://warninglines.com/

With Confetti: https://with-confetti.com/

Giving Room Magazine: http://www.givingroommag.com/

The Bitchin’ Kitsch: https://www.talbot-heindl.com/

Tealight Press: https://www.tealightpress.com/

Tipping the Scales: https://www.tippingthescalesjournal.co.uk/

The Winnow Magazine: https://www.thewinnowmagazine.com/

perhappened: https://www.perhappened.com/

AZE Journal: https://azejournal.com/

Honeyfire Lit: https://honeyfirelit.com/

and so much more!!

(And even if some litmags’ mission statement isn’t specifically for marginalized creators, they will always welcome these narratives.)

So please, please submit!

Independent magazines are great too! I’m more familiar with the university journal scene so I appreciate this addition.

locusimperium:

So I tried this recipe.

And it is GREAT.

It basically makes the platonic ideal of commercial sugar cookies, only in bar form. When I give them to people (which I do a lot, because this is one of those simple recipes where the results seem very impressive), I just tell them they’re sugar cookie bars.

Life hack: add white chocolate chips and sea salt

I made these today for the equinox with sea salt caramel chips and they are simply amazing. Let’s see how long they last with six people in the house!

Noting for later (as we need more butter for this, and probably won’t do a grocery shopping till the weekend).

The OP version of this has become my go-to cookie for basically all things and I have a whole cohort of friends and colleagues who would murder each other to get them. Haven’t tried any add ons yet, since the base recipe is SO GOOD.

I’ve reblogged this before and I’m reblogging it again because I’m about to make it again tomorrow and I wanted to add my own tale of just how amazingly delicious it. it was SO incredibly simple to bake and with an extra dusting of brown sugar on top and served warm and soft they gift you with the taste of the nectar of the gods when paired with a small glass of milk. this image is from when I first made them a couple years ago:

GO. MAKE THESE !!!!

Needed to make a dessert in a hurry to bring to Thanksgiving, and this recipe worked excellently. I did not have the right kind of sugar for the topping, so instead I used a packet of lemonade powder, which gave it a nice citrusy zing.

Forgot to mention: I made these. They were very high-end indeed: somewhere between a butter cookie and shortbread.

…Hmm. Maybe I’ll make some later after I finish wrestling with Lightworks.

Picrews I use for online RPG

Mermaid MakerMermaid MakerGot into online roleplaying? Your DM needs a character token and you want something else than google-searching random people’s art that may fit your character’s description? Or are you a DM looking for quick NPC tokens and portraits? Try these picrews!

(This is a completely personal post, my intention is to keep these as in-setting as possible so I’m omiting the overly simplistic styles and anime styles)

Humanoid characters:

Baydews avatar maker V. 2.0 - Supports characters in fantasy settings. Supports heterochromia.

Tiefling maker - Great for characters in fantasy settings, not only for Tieflings!

Djarn’s character maker - No clothing choices for fantasy settings, but it’s a very detailed realistic portrait maker.

Bright’s picrew hell - A bit more cartoonish but has a lot of options for humans and fantasy creatures. Supports heterochromia.

Cute D&D character creator - Something more lighthearted if you want to see your OCs as cute chibis.

Murmur Character Creator - Not many “fantasy” options but it’s good for creating a nice female character portrait.

Dragon Age elf/human maker - For fairly realistic female elves and humans

The Dragon Prince Elf creator - The Dragon Prince style, elves/elvish characters, has horn options too. No clothings.

Hadingley Hill maker - medieval/renaissance portrait maker

Fantasy Icon Maker - For fantasy characters. Supports heterochromia.

Fantasy icon maker - another nice maker with many options

Fantasy girl - elvish/human female characters

Fantasy Hero Creator - Simple maker with some nicely detailed elements

Female human&elf / Male human&elf - a detailed fantasy maker

Muscular female / Muscular male -  a detailed fantasy maker for buff characters

Fairytale duet M/M | F/F | F/M - Humans/elves, realistic skin tones only.

Mystical elf maker - Cute elf girl portrait maker

Elvish character creator - Elf lady. Limited realistic skintones but nice clothing and background choices

AATAVEITH CHARACTER CREATOR - Human/elf female. Natural human colors only but many clothing options.

Mermaid Maker - Female mermaid or humanoid

Witch Doctor - Female only

Victorian Steampunk Dressup - A detailed steampubk character maker

Elven Fashion - Female elf only. Realistic skintones and some nice clothing.

Enchanter Maker - Female elf/human

Deity maker - Lots of creative options for inhuman characters. Base/lineart only

Makowka character maker II - Not many fantasy option but ir’s a cool maker anyway

Nellseto’s maker - cute portrait maker

Black Centered Picrew - Very nice maker with huge variety of black haistyles

Wervty’s Chime Picrew - portrait

Wervty’s Gasp Chara Creator - waist up character

TTRPG Isometric Token - Full fantasy character token.    Base/lineart only

TTRPG Portrait Token - Same as above but for character portraits.    Base/lineart only

Sci-Fi fantasy portrait maker - Fantasy and sfici/Star wars themed character portraits

Non-humanoid characters:

Dracthyr Maker - For all your dragons and dragonkin

Dragon PNGtuber Base Generator - Dragon base/lineart only. 

DnD Frog Maker - Frog people

Catfolk Maker - Cat people

Dragonborn - dragon people

Wolf / werewolf designer - Wolf face portrait with many nice options

Werewolf - fantasy werewolf

Anthro character creator - Various animal people

Animals:

Wolf&dog - Fluffy friend custimizable with apparel

felidaze’s cool cat creator - Cats with lots of options

Wolf Maker - simple wolf creator

My Froggie - Fantasy frogs

Mouse Warrior - For all you Mouseguard/Mausritter players!

RATS!! - Realistic rat portrait maker

gay rat maker - realistic fullbody rat with apparel

Mouse Guard Maker - Creator for Mouse Guard characters

Dream Horse Maker - Horses

Cat Maker - Cats

Avian Creator - Birds

Fantasy Bird Creator - birds

Realistic Goat maker - realistic goat with lots of options

serval creator - Serval portrait

This is a resource for private online gaming between you and your friends, no commercial/advertisement usage!

Dungeon: How Grief Blooms

Adventure Hooks:

Weiterlesen

🛡 𝗡𝗲𝘄 𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗺! Protector’s Ward
Armor (shield), uncommon ___

This shield depicts a pair of knights reflected across its center. While holding this shield, you can use your reaction when a friendly creature that you can see within 15 feet of you is hit by an attack from a hostile creature. You then teleport to the friendly creature’s space, pushing it 5 feet away from you to an unoccupied space of your choice when you do. You take the damage from the attack, even if the total of the attack roll doesn’t meet or exceed your AC. Once this property of the shield has been used, it can’t be used again until the next dawn. ___

✨ Patrons get huge perks! Access this and hundreds of other item cards, art files, and compendium entries when you support The Griffon’s Saddlebag on Patreon for less than $10 a month!

Hello everyone! Since I have finished uploading all my notes from Anatomy & Physiology I, I decided to make a masterpost for the files. 

Chemistry Resource Masterpost

Videos

Crash Course Chemistry

Sci Show Chemistry

Energy/Fuels

Khan Academy Chemistry

Khan Academy Organic Chemistry

Experiment Videos

Royal Society of Chemistry

Tyler DeWitt Chemistry 

Resources

Interactive Periodic Table

History of Chemistry

How to Balance Equations

Simulations

 Glossary

 How to Lab Reports

Revision/Papers

Lecture Notes

Chem Collective

That Tutor Guy - Chemistry 

Chem Revise - A level revision guides 

Royal Society of Chemistry - Learn 

Chemistry for Dummies 

AP Chem notes

AP Chem notes

Cliffs Notes Chemistry 

Xtreme Papers - A Level Chemistry 

Spark Notes Chemistry 

Khan Academy - Chemistry 

Khan Academy - Organic Chemistry

Master Organic Chemistry

Chem Guide

Libre Texts - Chemistry

Physics and Maths Tutor - Chemistry

Hey look I made a chemistry revision tips post 

big subject masterpost!!

ENGLISH & ESSAYS - lit, lang, essays

SOCIAL SCIENCES - hug, gov, econ, ush, euro, world

SCIENCES - comp sci, psych, chem, physics

MATHEMATICS - algebra, precalc, calculus, general

NON ENGLISH LANGUAGES - specifics, general

MASTERPOSTS OF MASTERPOSTS

MISCELLANEOUS - art, printables, apps, organizing

Coming from a state champion baker:

If y’all use a decent box mix and use melted butter instead of vegetable oil, an extra egg, and milk instead of water, no one can tell the difference. I sure as hell can’t. 

Also, if you add a little almond extract to vanilla cake, or a little coffee to chocolate cake, it sends it through the roof. 

This concludes me attempting to be helpful. 

yo I can vouch for this I’ve done this for the last few cakes I’ve made and holy crap it makes suuuuch a difference the cake is still fluffy, but it also seems more dense, and it doesn’t dry out like at all you can leave it uncovered on the counter all day after being cut into, and it won’t get all crusty and dry this is an amazing way to take your cakes to the next level

Does this count as cake hacks?

cake: hacked

OK but if you’re adding all that to the mix why not just scratch bake? There are literally only four ingredients you’re NOT adding yourself at this point.

It’s always so baffling when mix hackers give you a whole ass cake recipe. Like there’s some kind of magic to mixes that needs to form the core of the thing instead of just, a couple dry ingredients and powdered milk.

presumably as a step of intermediate complexity between mix baking and scratch baking, when neither of those fits your complexity needs exactly?

In particular, this is a useful technique for people living in dorms, or traveling, or similar situations!

Baking from scratch means you’ve got to buy a whole tin of baking powder and only use a spoonful, and a whole thing of flour, and maybe multiple kinds of sugar, and maybe cocoa powder, maybe spices, and there’s no way you’re going to use up any of those, you’ll just have to pitch them when you move out.

Not to mention that you’ve got maybe one measuring cup, and there’s no way you’ve got a sifter, and you probably don’t have measuring spoons and how sure are you that your eating spoon is actually the right size…

Scratch baking is great if you’re going to do it regularly! But for situations where it doesn’t make sense to invest in all the tools and ingredients, cake mixes are very practical.

Scratch means you have to worry about ratios. Scratch means you have to keep cake flour on hand. Scratch means you don’t get the benefit of some of the CHEMICALS in the mix that are 100% beneficial to excellent cake.

I bake some things from scratch. Anything requiring creaming a mix is basically a sad joke because all the work is the creaming. Standard cake is not one of them.

Of course, me being me, a standard cake is usually just a component - I don’t actually like “just cake” that much and canned frosting is terrible. So while I don’t scratch bake cake, that cake is getting saturated with tres leches, or put in a trifle, or getting add-ins before baking anyway.

But in a larger sense, who cares? Baking is hard and for fun anyway. Why bake-shame someone?

Just FYI… A LOT of professional bakers (probably more than half) in the US at least use doctored mixes rather than scratch ingredients even for their more expensive cakes like wedding cakes. There are whole forums where they talk about this amongst themselves.

In taste tests they’ve found that while customers may ask for a cake from scratch they often end up preferring the taste and texture of the doctored mixes when all is said and done.

Unless you have some particular allergies or some other reason to avoid box mixes they are often the better way to go.

I’ve been looking into opening up a home bakery and part of the task of producing food for the public is making sure your items are standardized so that every person who gets a cupcake (for instance) is getting the same quality, size, etc., etc.

Doctored mixes really help with that since big companies like Duncan Hines buys in larger quantities, can afford to test/discard bad batches and will rarely have a one-off batch of flour or flavoring that are bad or go bad like you can at home.

Nice seeing this going around again!

My standard cake is box mix + milk for water + melted butter for oil + dash vanilla extract + frosting from scratch. This really seems to hit the right spot for people of “mmm, homemade” but also “exactly like Mom used to make.” (Do that for a yellow cake with chocolate buttercream frosting, add candles, and serve to a college student, for the maximum “this is exactly what I didn’t want to admit I wanted” potential.)

Seconding the addition of coffee to chocolate cake; a tablespoon of instant coffee powder in a dark chocolate cake makes it taste chocolatey-er without actually adding a perceptible coffee flavor (I don’t like coffee flavor, personally, and I still do this).

Another good option is a box lemon cake mix plus maybe 3 lemons. Zest the lemons, set the zest aside, then juice them and use that in place of the water; then use the zest to flavor the frosting. Adds a nice fresh kick.

Chocolate chips can be dumped straight into chocolate cake mix without fussing with anything to compensate. Sprinkles can go into white cake mix to make your own “confetti cake” with any specific color combo you like. Any kind of dried fruit can be chopped to raisin-size, soaked in hot water (or, better yet, hot juice with a couple of citrus peels added) for an hour, drained, and then added to batter.

Replacing part (up to maybe 1/3) of the water with yogurt (and then the rest with milk as usual) will give you a denser cake; make sure to check if it’s cooked through, and bake a little longer if necessary.

Swirling things through batter for that fancy marbled look is easy. Consider melting chocolate chips with butter, or mixing brown sugar with cinnamon and a little melted butter, or making up two different cake mixes and swirling those together.

I swear by the Cake Mix Doctor’s two cookbooks (one’s general, one’s specifically for chocolate cakes). I think every birthday cake I had as a child was out of those.

I started in my early days by using Betty Crocker mixes - an expensive import in Northern Ireland at the time, but very convenient since some of them were complete kits including a foil cake-tin. They also included cakes I’d never heard of - Red Velvet, Devil’s Food and Angel Food (why not Angel’s Food?)

NB, Angel Cake over here is a completely different thing made up of coloured layers.

After a while, with my Mum’s help, I started tweaking with an extra egg here, a bit of cream there, and the results were always good.

Though @dduane is a far better cake-baker than I’ll ever be, she also uses mixes to see how they stack up against made-from-scratch versions especially if the mixes produce something Really Nice - like, for instance, Betty Crocker brownies - or are more convenient with no huge drop in quality…..

Here’s an example: about 10 years ago Kremówka Papieska / “The Pope’s Cream Cake”  was mentioned as one of the EU 50th-birthday cakes, and DD made it from scratch.

Here’s her recipe and a photo of the result, which was great..

A bit later we found Gellwe-brand mix in one of our local branches of Polonez, and tried that too. The home-made one was definitely better, but the boxed version was also very good, needed only basic extras - milk, butter, sugar etc. - and took far less time to make (though after tasting the custard we added a bit extra vanilla extract…)

That’s why we still have a box in the store-cupboard.

Just in case one or both of us feel like pontifficating… :->

10 Ways To Beat Procrastination And Get Things Done

From time to time, even the most conscientious and productive individuals procrastinate. For some, pushing off a deadline is a rare and anxiety-inducing situation; other people thrive best under the pressure of waiting until the eleventh hour. However, when your tendency to procrastinate is starting to make your overall quality of work and life suffer, it’s time to do a reality check and break yourself of the habit.

Keep reading

It’s guys, I cant even

I don’t know how its legal (is it?)

Know how you spend money on books, then agonize about not reading them for ages?

Anybooks is an app.

A FREE LIBRARY APP

No credit cards, personal details. And no, the books are not old, boring public domain books.

Please someone more popular than me reblog this so people know about it.

9 Free Online Courses You Should Take

1. How to Reasons and Argue – Reasoning is important.  This course will teach you how to do it well.

2. Learning How to Learn – Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects.

3. Introduction to Computer Science – An introduction to the intellectual enterprises of computer science and the art of programming.

4. Science and Cooking – A public lecture series that discusses concepts from the physical sciences that underpin both everyday cooking and haute cuisine.

5. Negotiations – Negotiating helps you reach agreements, achieve objectives, strengthen your relationships, and ultimately be more productive.

6. Introduction to Statistics – Learn techniques for visualizing relationships in data and systematic techniques for understanding the relationships using mathematics.

7. Introduction to Finance – Through both theory and real world examples learn how to value any asset.

8. Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies – This course assists aspiring entrepreneurs in developing great ideas into great companies.

9. Principles of Project Management – If you’re looking to move into management, or want to gain some project management skills for your current role, this is the course for you.

Ha, why not!