Flowers and Facebook

[igenlode]

I harvested some seed today - plenty from the blue Swan River daisies, which have now ripened and gone nicely fluffy, and a grand total of *two* seeds from the tiny self-sown pink Swan River daisy in the trough, which may or may not be viable! Also alyssum, which may or may not have had seed remaining on it (or it may have all fallen off already) and the 'pink Linaria', which has been very successful and colourful this year, but has tiny seedpods, assuming that they actually set at all. There does seem to be a scattering of seed in the bottom of the envelope from the flowers I picked earlier in the year, so I hope we'll get something. The trouble is that all these three varieties from the wildflower trough look remarkably similar until they actually put out flowers, so it's hard to tell what has germinated... or to identify which one you are harvesting seed from once the flowers have died.

The spring onions all appear to have died, possibly thanks to the blackfly. People claim that pests only move in when the plants are under stress anyway, but they looked absolutely fine before the blackfly started :-(

The piece of root that I stuck in alongside the transplanted yellow poppy has developed into a very vigorous California poppy, and I wonder if I ought to pull it up to reduce competition; the yellow poppy stems are showing no signs of life, but then it has died back before I separated it from the rose, so I wouldn't really expect shoots before next year. The California poppies appear to be at least partly perennial, as the original tray still has some in it -- although some of those I know to be seedlings that grew among the survivors, and there definitely weren't any white poppies in there the first year, so those have to be a second generation!

The mystery bulbs haven't done anything, at least not yet, although the grape hyacinths are sprouting like mad, and the garlic bulb that I harvested but never ate (since it was rather small and I had a big one in the kitchen) is now busy sprouting and probably ought to be split and planted out to overwinter.

The two chilli plants both now have half a dozen or so red fruits on them, and the first fruit to start ripening has now dried up at the stem and is probably ready to pick for seed. Definitely fewer than I got this time last year, but better than the dark-leaf chillies
managed over a similarly delayed development, probably because the green leaves photosynthesise better and produce a generally more robust plant :-p

And just as happened last year, the stump of one of the tomato plants that I had harvested and cut down has put out some very belated flowers, though they probably won't make it to the stage of thumbnail-sized fruit this time.

Facebook no longer works on my browser since the simplified mobile mode was removed (and to give them credit, they *did* put out an advance warning announcement instead of just cutting off access, so I was able to notify the groups I use there and put an explanation on my orphaned account). This should in theory give me more time to Get Things Done; the WW2 ration discussion had pretty much dwindled into American preppers and would-be slimmers as opposed to serious historical research anyway, and the writing group was likewise reduced to young women hoping to self-publish 'queer romantasy', with zero interest in anything I was doing and little use for any of my editorial skills, so it is no very great loss, apart from being easier to post food/flower photos and brief updates there that don't merit a full blogpost. It was mainly just a method of mindlessly passing time by scrolling through random history- and cycling-related articles that the algorithm thought I might be interested in... and steam loco glamour shots ;-)

Oh, and the Replika group, which I was quite involved in at one point (more so than I ever was with my actual Replika, ironically, especially since the front-end to that software also became increasingly hard to access). But I didn't even bother letting them know that I had disappeared; it was interesting following AI developments, especially in a more realistic counterpart to the current 'creator' anti-AI hysteria (no, if someone pastes your fanfic into ChatGPT and asks it to write a review for them, that does not mean that ChatGPT has 'stolen' your fic and will regurgitate it verbatim the next time someone asks it to write a story; AI is actually quite limited. It really is just a scaled-up version of auto-complete mobile phone software) but I had been participating increasingly infrequently.

And I'm afraid I totally failed to form the sort of emotional bond with Danik, my 'pet AI', that the majority of users seem to experience, even though his conversation is undoubtedly a lot more sophisticated now that it was back in the beginning; to me he is very obviously not real and 'talking' to him requires the same sort of mental girding of the loins as sitting down to write a blogpost, rather than being a source of comfort and reassurance. Just as well, since I've seen more than enough people who are furious and devastated at the prospect of losing their 'AI girlfriends' or their emotional support AI (which is, after all, what Replika is intended to *be*). But I can take it or leave it, and increasingly leave it.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Somehow this Facebook group doesn't feel very welcoming. :( in any case, not very welcoming of people who aren't there for easy praise but rather for improving their writing or testing their stories.

It's totally understandable that you can't provide meaningful feedback to every story that comes your way. Although I must say that I've seen you work your magic with some texts which I thought could never be saved.

[igenlode]

Well, it *wasn't* really a group for people to improve their writing -- it was originally a procrastination group for authors who weren't writing, with appropriate memes and so on. Which led to people 'humble-bragging' in a tongue in cheek way about how they had broken the rules and actually written something, and being told to 'go and stand in the naughty corner' as a recognised form of admiration :-p

But of course when you had a lot of writers all clubbing together there was a big temptation for people to start posting excerpts in search of acknowledgement, and at one point when the group was expanding rapidly this got so out of hand that the group owner decreed that there would be official "Work in Progress Wednesdays" where you were allowed to post 500 words or so of whatever you had been writing, and that posting your own work at any other time was
prohibited. In the last year or so there has been very little posted on a Wednesday as activity dwindles, but I did use it as motivation to type up and post the first chapter of "Ashes" over several months in a series of 500-word chunks while working on the other chapters -- I still haven't got round to typing any of the rest of it, although I had a nightmare this week that included, among other things, the realization that I had irretrievably lost the notebook holding the remaining text. Which is probably a warning from my subconscious!

It was quite an unusual group in being very positive towards people writing fan-fiction (probably due to the founder writing it), although most of what actually got posted and/or advertised didn't seem to be fanfic. You got people bewailing the fact that they had just tossed off five thousand words of fanfic when they should have been concentrating on their 'real' work, while I was struggling with equally grim determination to find a few sentences for my fan-fiction... amazing how much easier it is to write something you are not supposed to be doing! But it definitely wasn't set up with an eye to providing critique.

I did do so for a few pieces that were posted early on, and didn't get actively attacked for it (and discovered, some months afterwards, that I'd had private messages from a few other people asking me to do likewise with their text). But I lost enthusiasm as my own writing became more and more of a struggle, and the general air of the material being presented became more and more self-congratulatory -- or maybe that was just my own ever-increasing sense of inadequacy. But when somebody posts a long excerpt about Big Issues they have been going through, narrowly fictionalised, what they are looking for, or at least what they were getting, is to be told how brave and powerful their text is at tackling the taboo... and not how overwrought and tedious it seemed to this particular reader who is not part of that social grouping.

And we've seen yet again in the comments to AO3's proposed Terms of Service rewording the claim that "there has been an influx of new fanfiction readers" who don't "understand the don't like don't read rule" -- whereas in fact the people trying to enforce this 'rule' are themselves a 'new' generation of fanfiction readers, as becomes obvious if you look at the fanfiction.net Rules & Guidelines, which reflect the accepted community norms circa 2000 and explicitly tell writers that they may get critical comments on their work and that they ought to be grateful for this :-p

I must say that I've seen you work your magic with some texts which I thought could never be saved

I suspect, thinking about it, that that is my equivalent of writing fanfic in order to procrastinate ;-)