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__lain__ commented on I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me   marcusolang.substack.com/... · Posted by u/florian_s
komali2 · 4 days ago
> There were unspoken rules, commandments passed down from teacher to student, year after year. The first commandment? Thou shalt begin with a proverb or a powerful opening statement. “Haste makes waste,” we would write, before launching into a tale about rushing to the market and forgetting the money. The second? Thou shalt demonstrate a wide vocabulary. You didn’t just ‘walk’; you ‘strode purposefully’, ‘trudged wearily’, or ‘ambled nonchalantly’. You didn’t just ‘see’ a thing; you ‘beheld a magnificent spectacle’. Our exercise books were filled with lists of these “wow words,” their synonyms and antonyms drilled into us like multiplication tables.

Well, this is very interesting, because I'm a native English speaker that studied writing in university, and the deeper I got into the world of literature, the further I was pushed towards simpler language and shorter sentences. It's all Hemingway now, and if I spot an adverb or, lord forbid, a "proceeded to," I feel the pain in my bones.

The way ChatGPT writes drives me insane. As for the author, clearly they're very good, but I prefer a much simpler style. I feel like the big boy SAT words should pop out of the page unaccompanied, just one per page at most.

__lain__ · 3 days ago
Hemingway was still a master of word choice. I recall an entire class spent on a few lines that conveyed a sense of heaviness to the scene. 'Plodding' was given a lot of attention.

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__lain__ commented on How to see bright, vivid images in your mind’s eye (2016)   photographyinsider.info/i... · Posted by u/kalkr
tzs · 2 years ago
A bit OT: I'm curious what, if anything, people here see when their eyes are closed while falling asleep.

I usually see one of the following:

1. Just the brown/black of my eyelids, with some slight variations in darkness.

2. A blob of white light. It looks a lot like what you'd see if you were in a dark room with a sink full of water that is draining, and there was a drop of some glowing dye in the water which is circling the drain and expanding.

3. Gears, pistons, linkages, pulleys, wheels, etc forming elaborate moving mechanisms. I have no idea what the mechanisms are doing or if any of the mechanisms are sensible or even possible. I'm very much not mechanically inclined and so this is the most puzzling nighttime visualization to me.

4. Plants. I seem to be flying low over land with patches of grass, flowers, and trees. The scene is quite detailed, with individual leaves and blades of grass visible, and any gaps between things filled with things farther behind, giving a strong sense of 3D.

5. Animals. Unlike the plants of #4 that I see in a full environment if I see animals they are just kind of there against the brown/black background. Sometimes they are normal animals, and sometimes they are weird creatures that belong in science fiction or mythology. The animals often morph into other animals.

__lain__ · 2 years ago
> 3. Gears, pistons, linkages, pulleys, wheels, etc forming elaborate moving mechanisms...

This is a really interesting phenomenon. Elaborate machinescapes are present in a lot of psychedelic closed eye visuals. Its unusual because we typically don't have a lot of interaction with these things, yet there's this shared experience. I wonder if the experiences we have had seeing complex machinery in real life have embedded some primal response to them.

I commonly see blobs of light, but a particularly frequent recurring visualization is circus imagery. If I'm listening to music I seem to be more prone to seeing something like cardboard cutouts of the Beatles in their Sgt Pepper outfits sort of bouncing up and down moving off to the side.

u/__lain__

KarmaCake day5September 20, 2023View Original