Emily I Brown

Unfortunately, I am only a writer who specializes in those things...

The background in this piece is pretty.

If you rest your brain you will be able to draw betterer later.

Nanami. Had to go back and look. How did I forget that name when it's also the name of a main character from one of my favorite manga?

I imagine this scene occurring directly after she catches Felt and [character whose name I can't remember] in the window on her way to work, so she's already headed up to here with people's shit for the day.

"From each according to their ability, to each according to their need."

This is an interesting way to do things.

Is there anything in place to keep the larger folk, with higher income, from using that as leverage over the smaller folk?

Listen. Just seeing people spend time on world building elements that get neglected is to my liking. Having spent quite a lot of time on economic worldbuilding myself, it's exciting to see others do it too.

That would be this delightful comic which had me rolling:

bsky.app/profile/aide...

You have said all the magic words necessary to pique my interest. I'm looking forward to seeing it!

This comment doesn't have nearly enough likes.

This is the second funniest thing I've ever seen you draw.

4th Circuit Rules That States Can Compel Trans Adults To "Appreciate Their Sex" Via Care Bans They ruled that states "encouraging citizens to appreciate their sex" through care bans is a constitutional goal, affirming West Virginia's Medicaid ban for trans adults.

1. Horrifying ruling out of the 4th Circuit.

An all-Republican 4th Circuit panel has just ruled that states can compel trans adults to "appreciate their sex" by enacting care bans.

It even directly says that trans adult care bans are legal in the ruling.

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The thing about a train speeding toward a cliff is that optimists who think everything will be fine and work out somehow will never help break down the engine room door and throw the brake.

It's the gentrification of the internet. They are giving it the Times Square treatment.

NSFW Artists being attacked on all fronts while the government actively protects pedos is fucking nuts and shouldn't be ignored.

Going through a list of over 8000 words to turn it into a workable vocabulary list for conlanging because all the existing lists I've found online suck, and not in the fun way.

I don't know why it is that my brain develops blocks about doing very basic things that take me five minutes or less, but occasionally, it will just decide that I can't do a thing, and then I have to really cheerlead myself for hours and then manage the "oh really? five minutes?" of it at the end.

So, yeah. This is the sort of mad project I work on. I'm hoping this will not only increase the speed and quality of language creation for myself, but that it might open the door to me creating languages for others - maybe even for commissions. But that's still a ways off.

Instead of trying to brainstorm a lexicon, I'll have a quasi-neutral, neatly referenced lexicon I can use as a basis, picking and choosing and making variations as is appropriate for a given language. And then I can use LIN to keep track of that new language's lexicon, and to find holes and gaps.

The LIN system references words and word fragments by meaning, form, and function across languages. I've been hammering out the details of it for a week - and it's now basically finished. If it works the way I think it will, it should be a game changer in language making - at least for me.

I've attempted to compile sample lexicons to help with this, but they are always a huge mess and heavily biased towards English.

So, instead, I've been working on building a huge sample lexicon using an indexing system I call Lexical Identity Numbers (LIN).

The biggest pain-in-the-ass part of language construction is generating a lexicon. Sure, it's easy enough to make up words and assign them meanings - but to have enough words, and the right words, covering all necessary range of meaning and function, to have a working language is a bear of a task.

This feels like someone asking if they're giving me too much money. Like. As long as the drawing ain't a burden on you there's no such thing as too much.

This isn't even a joke. It should be a crime. Especially when you can't disable it, or when it keeps reenabling itself. Like Glance on my phone, which I have to kill all over again every time it updates...

I'm a writer, not a drawer. How does a writer build community, especially in the early stages of writing? Where do you find feedback? How does one bootstrap this from nothing - no community, no resources, no money?

And, if I posted more about these stories and worlds, what would you want to see?

The catch? I can't draw worth a damn, and I won't use AI to generate anything for public consumption, so I have no flashy visuals with bits and pieces of my worlds to hook people and get the interested. I only have words, which I'm fine with, but I'm not sure how to use them to the same effect.

And I have no way to gauge from this if my work is actually worth a damn, where the real problems are, or what would actually improve it. I have no mirror to look into that isn't heavily distorted. For that, I need to find ways to engage others to get their feedback.

That's been a huge problem for me. Because, I don't know if it's even any good. Positive feedback is usually very non-specific or too prompted. Negative feedback, though needed, often comes in destructive rather than constructive forms.

I'm doing all of this despite chronic illness, disability, and life circumstances making everything go painfully slow, which sends the imposter syndrome into overdrive. But the biggest issue right now is that I'm doing it all entirely alone, without any feedback of substance.

Besides those, I have two TTRPGs I've been slowly cobbling together - one designed for solo play, the other more like D&D but setting neutral and with VERY different mechanics. Plus several half-written novels that are collecting dust.