Cemetery Boys Review (No Spoilers)

Cemetery Boys Review (No Spoilers)

I absolutely adore Cemetery Boys, it so quickly became my favourite book and I'm so glad I actually purchased it. I almost didn't as I only went in expecting to leave with one book, yet, I left with two and don't regret it at all.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Favourite Character: Julian Diaz Favourite Quote: "He was about to snap it shut when he noticed. Beneath his photo, his deadname had been scribbled out with black marker. Under, written in lopsided letters, it read, Yadriel."

The representation throughout the book is wonderfully done, I loved reading from the perspective of a trans protagonist. Not to mention how compelling the rest of the main characters are! The amount of queer representation was amazing.

I have to say I really appreciated reading a book with only one perspective! Changing points of view can often leave me confused, so I was thrilled this book didn't include that.

The book wasn't perfect, the pacing was off and certainly could have been handled better in some areas but it didn't take away from the reading experience at all for me personally!

I had managed to figure out what was going on but the ending still left me pleasantly surprised. I hadn't expected it to end the way it did; I was honestly expecting something more bittersweet. Yet this left me with happy tears.

If you're looking for a queer book to read, THIS IS IT. Just saying.

Please Tumblr sexbots, leave me alone.

why I never post

What the F even is Show not tell?

Show not tell is a very popular writing advice… But what does it mean?

The amount of advice about showing instead of telling that you’ll find out there can be very conflicting, and most of it focuses on the wrong things.

Really, you can apply the “show not tell” aspect to most elements in your writing.

You can apply it to:

Imagery: The wind was blowing. (Tell) → The branches knocked stubbornly against the window. (Show)

Narration: She was brave for as long as I knew her. (Tell) → Even when we were children, she’d stand up to the teachers who raised their voices at her. (Show)

Emotion: This caused him to feel sad and he didn’t know what to say. (Tell) → This caused his shoulders to sag, and his mouth emptied of any viable words that could fill the silence. (Show)

But you can (and should!) also think about applying the advice on a larger scale. Your chapters, for example. They shouldn’t just tell your reader what happens, but immerse them fully, and show them the moment you’re describing. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that your chapters should be designed as a whole to SHOW a certain point your story is trying to make, through the subtext of its scenes.

Your book as a whole, should also be one big Show not tell!

This means you should have an underlying message of what your story is truly about, and your whole book serves to show us that message → therefore no chapter and no scene is there for the sake of being there, but has a purpose.

Tumblr just deleted my post while I was still writing it, not that HOUR of work is gone. I normally wouldn't write directly into tumblr but it was my intro post I don't want to have to do that all again

this is really important to me so I'm reblogging on my main

AI is unethical and always will be regarding how much content it needs. There is no way as things stand to make ethical AI.

how c.ai works and why it's unethical

Okay, since the AI discourse is happening again, I want to make this very clear, because a few weeks ago I had to explain to a (well meaning) person in the community how AI works. I'm going to be addressing people who are maybe younger or aren't familiar with the latest type of "AI", not people who purposely devalue the work of creatives and/or are shills.

The name "Artificial Intelligence" is a bit misleading when it comes to things like AI chatbots. When you think of AI, you think of a robot, and you might think that by making a chatbot you're simply programming a robot to talk about something you want them to talk about, and it's similar to an rp partner. But with current technology, that's not how AI works. For a breakdown on how AI is programmed, CGP grey made a great video about this several years ago (he updated the title and thumbnail recently)

I HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend you watch this because CGP Grey is good at explaining, but the tl;dr for this post is this: bots are made with a metric shit-ton of data. In C.AI's case, the data is writing. Stolen writing, usually scraped fanfiction.

How do we know chatbots are stealing from fanfiction writers? It knows what omegaverse is [SOURCE] (it's a Wired article, put it in incognito mode if it won't let you read it), and when a Reddit user asked a chatbot to write a story about "Steve", it automatically wrote about characters named "Bucky" and "Tony" [SOURCE].

I also said this in the tags of a previous reblog, but when you're talking to C.AI bots, it's also taking your writing and using it in its algorithm: which seems fine until you realize 1. They're using your work uncredited 2. It's not staying private, they're using your work to make their service better, a service they're trying to make money off of.

"But Bucca," you might say. "Human writers work like that too. We read books and other fanfictions and that's how we come up with material for roleplay or fanfiction."

Well, what's the difference between plagiarism and original writing? The answer is that plagiarism is taking what someone else has made and simply editing it or mixing it up to look original. You didn't do any thinking yourself. C.AI doesn't "think" because it's not a brain, it takes all the fanfiction it was taught on, mixes it up with whatever topic you've given it, and generates a response like in old-timey mysteries where somebody cuts a bunch of letters out of magazines and pastes them together to write a letter.

(And might I remind you, people can't monetize their fanfiction the way C.AI is trying to monetize itself. Authors are very lax about fanfiction nowadays: we've come a long way since the Anne Rice days of terror. But this issue is cropping back up again with BookTok complaining that they can't pay someone else for bound copies of fanfiction. Don't do that either.)

Bottom line, here are the problems with using things like C.AI:

It is using material it doesn't have permission to use and doesn't credit anybody. Not only is it ethically wrong, but AI is already beginning to contend with copyright issues.

C.AI sucks at its job anyway. It's not good at basic story structure like building tension, and can't even remember things you've told it. I've also seen many instances of bots saying triggering or disgusting things that deeply upset the user. You don't get that with properly trigger tagged fanworks.

Your work and your time put into the app can be taken away from you at any moment and used to make money for someone else. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people who use AI panic about accidentally deleting a bot that they spent hours conversing with. Your time and effort is so much more stable and well-preserved if you wrote a fanfiction or roleplayed with someone and saved the chatlogs. The company that owns and runs C.AI can not only use whatever you've written as they see fit, they can take your shit away on a whim, either on purpose or by accident due to the nature of the Internet.

DON'T USE C.AI, OR AT THE VERY BARE MINIMUM DO NOT DO THE AI'S WORK FOR IT BY STEALING OTHER PEOPLES' WORK TO PUT INTO IT. Writing fanfiction is a communal labor of love. We share it with each other for free for the love of the original work and ideas we share. Not only can AI not replicate this, but it shouldn't.

(also, this goes without saying, but this entire post also applies to ai art)