Ghost-of-a-Chance
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Everything posted by Ghost-of-a-Chance
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Just now, I saw something absolutely smoking hot on the internet. I mean, she was a seriously sexy beast—the kind of beauty I see in my dreams and drool over in centerfolds, regardless of whether I’m in public. If I encountered her on the street, I would absolutely embarrass myself, stare like a loon, and profess my undying adoration to her.
A wolf-whistle, three muttered “damns,” and a couple of impressed tongue-clicks later, my husband gave in. Cold sighed, rolled his eyes, and grumbled, “just show me the car.”
He knows me so well. 😆 It was, in fact, a classic muscle car—a ‘67 Oldsmobile Tornado. In my defense the lines on this bad girl are what wet dreams are made of, and I pity Cold for his lack of taste. It’s a sad way to live.
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My daft bugger would be drooling right next to you. He still has a picture of his 1966 Chevy Bel Air on “his” bookshelf.
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My guy doesn’t get why I love classic cars so much, but you bet your butt he lets me drag him around car shows by his hand. I went absolutely fangirl over a sweet, rare classic in a parking lot awhile back—I won’t name it for risk of doxxing myself, but it’s something I’ve never seen in person, and it had a wooden chassis!—and Cold was just
“It’s a car,” the whole time. 😆 Your guy has good taste—Bel Aires are an instant squeal-fest in this family, Cold aside, and that was a great year!
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Y’all, my husband needs a warning label. I’m sitting here, sucking on a peppermint and minding my business with headphones on—the better to block out his party chat trash-talk—and I hear THIS: “You ain’t had pussy since you came out a pussy.”
I don’t know who was laughing louder, the recipient of the burn, Cold, or me, but I very nearly had a Star-Brite lodged in my throat.
This guy kills me.
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Possible issue with bolding text?
Ghost-of-a-Chance replied to Deadman's topic in Archive Tech Support
Laughing because apparently your corgi is as difficult as our cats. 😆 In all seriousness, though, I came to see if anyone else was having this problem. Not just me, then. Is there a workaround that we know of? (I’ve also had linebreaks show up and vanish seemingly at random. Missing the old text formatting options like crazy.) -
Whoever has the Ghost Chance voodoo doll right now, if they could give it a break, that would be nice. I don’t want to share details, lest my family find this site, recognize those details, and realize it’s me—right now, the last thing I need is a mass-shunning because I’m bi in a family of homophobes. But…
Woozle. Our cat, Woozle. The little bag-obsessed orange garbage-baby. Our sweet, smelly, mouthy, single-braincell-bearing fur-son. That Woozle. We just found out he’s incredibly sick, the kind of sick that creeps in without warning, may not even show, and will eventually end his life. Right now, he’s still healthy and happy enough that his quality of life isn’t in question, but that could change without much notice. It could be a few years, or a few days, or who knows how long, but my little monster is terminally ill, and I’m a fucking mess right now. We’re doing everything we can, but there’s not much we can do to begin with.
So. Yeah. Give your pets some cuddles for me. I’m probably going to go cry again because this fucking sucks.
- Show previous comments 5 more
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I occasionally spiked the canned food with tuna, my furbabies usually appreciated that!
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Thanks, you two.
At our last checkup, we found out that Woozle managed to gain back some of the weight he lost, and his blood levels were a little better. 
Along with the new medications, we’re adding a calorie-rich topper to his food to encourage him to eat, and if he finishes his breakfast, lunch, and dinner, he gets extra. So far, it’s working…but he also had a seizure a couple weeks ago and scared the shit out of us. (He’s never had a seizure before, so that came out of the blue.) All in all, he’s taking more medication than my husband ever has; he’s making progress and seems more like himself than he has in awhile.
We’re keeping an eye on him and giving him lots of snuggles. I’ll give him butt-pats for y’all. 🩷
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I can empathize entirely with the terror of seizures. She Who Is an Agent of Chaos has idiopathic epilepsy, so I’m more than passing familiar.
But the weight gain is good news, and getting back to more of his old self is even better. Give Woozle lots of butt-pats from us!
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No. No. HAY-ell to the no! We have had enough fucking tornadoes here for several lifetimes, and I’m fed the fuck up with them. 🤬
Yes. Tornado in 2011. Tornado several years ago. Tornado last month, and another last freaking night. Yes. Last night. My family, husband, and I are all safe, and I believe all our friends are safe. We didn’t live within the danger zone this time, but my PTSD was already kicking up over the season and impending trauma-versary. This? This is going to give me night terrors. Again. Can’t have Ghost go more than a month without dreaming about Cold dying a bloody, gruesome, tragic death in her arms, now can we? 😭 It’s a good thing I put everything on hiatus because I’m barely able to function right now, and it’s just gonna get worse.
If you see this post and you live in the United States, take this as your cue to go buy a weather radio and keep it on and stocked with batteries. The sirens in my hometown didn’t go off, and they weren’t sounded in another nearby town last month. Weather alerts on your phone won’t go off if the cellular network fails, and you can’t count on hearing the sirens, and a tornado can happen anytime of the year, on any continent, given the right conditions. If you’re looking for volunteer opportunities, there are several communities that are going to need help over the next week or so.
Seriously. Fuck tornadoes.
- Show previous comments 14 more
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Safe rooms were becoming more common for awhile, but more often than not, people wind up putting a trap door in to access the crawl space. Shelters elsewhere open for watches, and when I was a kid, we went to the basement even for severe thunderstorm warnings. That city has become so backwards it’s embarrassing, and that was before they shut down the public transportation system.
In the alley, we tend to get desensitized to tornadoes happening in nearby communities—we sometimes spend entire days under a tornado watch with nothing coming of it—but when you have one carving through your backyard, it’s a different story. The news outlets, by the way, finally confirmed the one Monday night/Tuesday morning as an an EF-1. It was nasty enough to bend billboard supports down to the ground, strip trees, wreck roofs, and fuck shit up, but weak enough for the damage to be relatively minimal. Today, I spent god only knows how long sitting on the floor in the closet shaking like a leaf, and it seems to have missed us.
The current outbreak, described in this news article, has spawned over 60 tornadoes across several states since Monday. I’m trying to stay away from the news right now because it’s traumatizing.Thanks for being patient right now. I know I sound like a broken record. PTSD sucks balls and it can just go straight to the pit.
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Don’t fret, it’s perfectly good to be sending support hugs/vibes through the chat here, to give the morale support to our fellow AFF’ers.
My area… prone to the occasional hurricane, and it’s big news when an EF-0 pops off shingles to a barn roof. Your area… sounds like the pasttime is playing ping-pong with the EF-2/3 tornados in the game.
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Sending big hugs to Ghost and Cold and the furbabies…
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It’s never an easy decision to make, but I’ve had to make it: all my active stories are now officially on hiatus.
Nothing (very) bad’s happened – at least, this time around, nobody is dead, dying, or terminally ill. Life’s just thrown us a curveball and Cold and I are even busier than usual. Most days, I barely have the energy to handle day-to-day work, let alone time and energy to write. Heck, I haven’t even gotten anything written on my most recent chapter of my novel in a few months now; that’s how crazy it’s been lately. Since my fanfiction may not be updated anytime soon, I decided to head it off at the pass before readers start deciding I’m dead.
...yes. That’s always a possibility, considering how infrequently I can update.
It sucks, but better to give myself permission to not write than continue to bludgeon the desktop with my head when my brain is too stress-fried to write. On FFN and AO3, I put notes in my current stories, and updated the summaries of the stories that have fallen by the wayside. AFF frowns on author’s notes as chapters, so I’m not sure where to go beyond adding something to the summaries.
I hope the fanfiction writer’s curse has missed more of y’all than it’s hit, that spring is treating you well, and that this doesn’t last too many months. Now if any of y’all need me, I’ll be in my burrito-blanket muttering there’s no place like home and fuck-this-shit-I’m-out.
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It’s hard to feel in the writing mood when so much is going on, and most of it is less than great. I certainly know what that’s like. I’m sure your creativity will return when things settle down again.
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@Desiderius Price that doesn’t typically work for me, unfortunately. I did, however, viciously tear up some invasive weeds earlier this week. That said, shit kinda hit the fan yesterday. It might take awhile to clean it all up.
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@Ghost-of-a-Chance wish it did… can be very gratifying to send a tornado to your characters, see how they cope with it
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So. Is it colder than a witch’s cunt where y’all are, too? No? Just us? Muh-zurr-uh’s done froze over, folks.
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Been sitting in the -40s all week with the bloody north wind. Well my fault for being in Manisnowba.
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@manta2g Think you need two of these… at least.
And… ☕ ☕ ☕
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@manta2g, you do know that fully fifty percent of your fellow Canadians live well south of the 49th Parallel for a reason, don’t you?
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That moment when you keep hearing a soprano velociraptor playing one-sided Marco Polo out in the hallway and realize, oh, no, it’s just the Velcro cat wailing pitifully because you locked him out of the office.
Woozle. Because of course, it’s Woozle. Never mind that I locked him out because I have cramps, a headache, and writer’s block, and I don’t feel up to fending off his usual shenanigans. By Shenanigans, I mean shaking slobber everywhere, whining, trying to insinuate his fat butt between the desk and my rack, and trying to scale Mount Mom’s-Desk and causing a landslide.Kid, Mama needs to work! Stay in your box!
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Y’all, I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried. I’m editing a new chapter of A New Lease on Life <500 words at a time with ProWritingAid, and the Readability checker gave me such a double take I heard my neck crack. I posted a screenshot on Tumblr because pics or it didn’t happen.
An (admittedly wordy) paragraph got a hard to read flag. Everything is spelled correctly, but it has several big words regarding language and its various parts and traits. You know. Words like consonants, syllables, dialects, and pronunciation. Hard, however, seems excessive.
Right above this paragraph is one marked easy to read. The entire thing is written in (intentionally) misspelled Scots and Scots-Gaelic that gave the spelling and grammar checker a stroke…and it’s easy to read…
…what…the actual…fuck…
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Guess I’m a bit… don’t have a great opinion about bots, so I focus on human readability over some electromechanical Turk.
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@BronxWench, thank you so freaking much! I’m FINALLY logged back into my account! I can finally update my stories here. Thanks for your patience and determination. 💜 Give the grumpy corgi a chin scritch for us. (“Us” being myself, and my kitties Woozle and Heiferlump.)
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The activation link worked, but I got the same “this password reset is no longer valid” error message when I followed the password reset link. From opening the email to reaching the site, it couldn’t have been a whole minute. I’d include a screenshot, but it’s coming up larger than the limit even after cropping. This locked-out saga has completely ruined my ability to believe I’m in any way technologically literate. EDIT: I uploaded a cropped screenshot to my Google drive HERE.
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Over a year later, and I’m still locked out of my account, and still not able to reset my password. Only difference? Now I’m getting this error message when I try resetting my password: …all except for one email address. That address, once the password reset link from my inbox loads, I get the message that it expired…in seconds. I’m starting to consider just scrapping the whole posting on AFF deal. 😔
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While my husband fed the cats a moment ago, I squirted the younger one’s liquid medicine down his throat. Woozle, the little shit, let half the dose drip out of his mouth and roll down my shirt and shorts. I grumbled about it—because that medicine stains, turns into tar, and smells like rotten fish a roadkill—and what did Cold say?
”Well. Pussy likes to dribble.”
I married this clown. I married him. (He’s not wrong, though.)
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Good puns are appreciated here
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Using AI to edit your smut can be so wild. ProWritingAid decided that this sentence…
QuoteKai’e’ie is insatiable—ravenous, breath-stealing, and covetous—and its expression is primal and passionate fucking.
…needs this correction:
QuoteKai’e’ie is insatiable—ravenous, breath-stealing, and covetous—and its expression is primal and passionate about fucking.
I mean, sure, I’m as passionate about fucking as anyone, but that isn’t quite what I was going for there. I can only assume the algorithm assumed Kai’e’ie is a name rather than an emotion and that I was trying to make small talk instead of comparing two different emotional states—Kai’e’ie versus mi’lee’veez—related to intimacy. (Kai’e’ie’: combined from syllables from words meaning love, say, life, and bond; combined, the meaning is, literally love said, life-bound, or figuratively, without you, I die. The fictional people who created this word are apparently as dramatic as I can write them. Mi’lee’veez: the root words in their entirety and proper order mean my dream heart. Sappity-sap-sop, someone get a mop.)
This is what I get for creating a fictional language for my novel. 🙄 J.R.R., you’re a horrible influence.
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Welcome to the world that also guides youtube’s AI-generated recommendations.
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I’m enjoying AI art personally at this point. It’s far from perfect but it’s solid.
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AI art can be great, especially if you’re wanting some visualization for a scene you’re writing but you’re not an artist.
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How long is long enough to become a badass?
Ghost-of-a-Chance replied to Ghost-of-a-Chance's topic in Writers' Corner
Just a quick word. I’m putting writing on the back burner for a while. When I started this topic last night, I didn’t expect to get word this morning that my parents lost another furbaby. I grew up with that particular furball, and I’m devastated. I’m going to spend a few days just hugging my cats. I’ll come back to this when I’m less likely to cry. This was the last thing I needed right now. -
How long is long enough to become a badass?
Ghost-of-a-Chance replied to Ghost-of-a-Chance's topic in Writers' Corner
So, apparently when I wrote this out, I didn’t word it as well as I thought I did. (Overnights suck.) I also left plenty out because I didn’t want to include anything which could be used to identify the story when it’s finished. Privacy is important when you’re a closeted disaster-bi in the Bible Belt. Let me try again. X being character in question, A being the non-human allies, K being the non-human enemies, and D being the idjit who got kidnapped by the enemies and who now needs to be brought home. D also has a piggybacking spirit (nope, this one doesn’t do anything useful beyond keep people alive) and he and X are related. The training is only part of the story—a means to an end rather than the whole plot—and other than one outburst from the piggybacker, I’m not pushing X’s abilities beyond anything humanly possible. The intention of her trainers (A) is to teach X to use the spirit’s abilities, or at the very least, how to not get killed during the final confrontation. Because X is human, however, she’s going to be fighting a losing battle. She’s fit, more so than the average American, perhaps, but trying to make her superhuman is impossible without breaking the rules I’ve laid down for the world. This is fantasy realism, not ‘screw it, tiny children can save the world and Santa Clause gives away weapons.’ It’s a spoiler, but…X is going to fail. Fantastically. She won’t be able to harness the spirit’s abilities—it’s an entirely separate entity, not a buff. She won’t be able to take down the baddies, or even fight the baddies. She’s human, and they’re far tougher with fewer weaknesses. She will, however, become a much stronger human, learn how to fight non-humans defensively without getting gutted, and discover that her humanity—or, more specifically, the critical way the C view her on account of her humanity—is one of her greatest strengths. Compare it to a tiny angry monkey demanding a fight while her big buff friends sneak in the back door and free D, then they all make use of a distraction to escape. X is the tiny angry monkey; all she has to do is scream loudly enough and keep their eyes on her. Fighting-wise, I’m planning on the majority of said training involving endurance, strength, the usual, and some hand-to-hand, mostly defensive. I might include non-lethal weapons like staves at one point; the C mostly use their fists, claws, and teeth, but the use of bladed spears and daggers isn’t uncommon. I’m intentionally giving X only enough time to make marked improvements, but not enough to become, say, John Wick. The timing is important because the date of the attack is supposed to coincide with another event, and that event occurs regularly. (For instance, a full moon, or something like it.) The first number of days (plus some) represents the number of days in a year on the A’s planet, while the second represents the number of days in a year on the C’s planet. Choosing a time closer to the first number would allow more opportunities to immerse X in the world of the A, the lives they live, and her love interest’s friends and family, but it might open up confusion regarding the timing of the event. Choosing a number closer to 600 would leave X experiencing all of this twice and risk her coming home to find herself declared dead despite the protective measures taken, but it would give more time for the romance between X and her love interest to grow more organically. …I think I got the most of it this time. Anything else I missed, just ask. I really appreciate y’all’s help with this; Reddit’s writing sub is surprisingly judgy about asking for help with your writing, and you can only ask on the Fanfiction sub about original fiction so many times before getting the boot. -
Simply put, my character X is fit-healthy—she kickboxes weekly, runs with her dogs daily, and has a regular routine—and she’s getting dragged to another world to be made into a badass for plot-identifying purposes. Part of that process will include possibly learning to harness some abilities imparted by a guardian spirit piggybacking on her like she’s the neighbor’s wi-fi. X will be trained by people of a much stronger species and there aren’t any shortcuts. How many days would be reasonable to allow for building X from fit to badass? I’m leaning toward between 400 and 600, but considering I’m comfortably chunky and too old and decrepit to care, it’s like a vegan offering opinions on steakhouses. We also have to keep in mind that the world keeps spinning while she’s gone; too long, and she’s likely to come back and find her bank account empty and all her shit on the auction block. …anyone got any advice?
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Our cats have access to two cat beds, several chairs, a couch, a couple boxes, a footrest, a beanbag, countless pillows and blankets, a sunny windowsill with a blanket in it, our bed, and a cat tree. The cats are permitted to have a cuddle, nap, or lazy moment in all of these places. If we don’t catch them first, there’s even a couple baskets of clean laundry that might be comfy.
…and Woozle wants to sleep on top of a flat of toilet paper jammed into a storage shelf.
Cats, man. You just can’t make sense of them.- Show previous comments 3 more
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No surprise to me – my cats always seem to have a new favorite thing to lie down in or on. We call it “surface of the week.”
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I no longer have cats, but my half-Maine Coon brothers, Toivo and Aino, preferred to nap on top of the kitchen cabinets, or in Toivo’s case, on the very small window ledge in the bathroom, after he’d swept it clear of offending shampoo bottles. Both of them would deign to sit in boxes, which was often complicated by their size, but Aino also liked to hide inside paper bags, which for some reason offended Toivo no ends. The battle to free Aino could last for a good half hour before the paper bag was in tatters.
They weren’t fond of my feet (unlike my corgi who has cost me several years of lifespan when she stealth-licks my ankles) but Toivo liked to give me large, dead horseflies. They were placed carefully on the pillow next to my head.
I miss having cats...
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Mine? Starts with me hearing the high pitch noises, find the Queen having kittens, so I claimed half the litter (three of six). Seventeen years later, I still have one of them with me (the other two have ventured across the rainbow bridge).
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Thank you, both for taking the time to answer and for fighting the good fight against the hacker spawn. I can be patient. Best of luck!
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I’m still locked out of my account. (I had to put writing aside for awhile; depression sucks, and it and all its little assbuddies can go jump off the dirty end of a cow with poke intoxication.) Well, now when I try logging in, I get a different error: “The email you provided may not be registered or is registered multiple times.” …any possible way this is due to the site being in read-only, or is this still the same problem as before. 😣 EDIT: the pen name is correct now, at least. No doxxing risk, yay!
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My smartass husband almost doomed us all. He’s eating animal crackers and found a cookie that appeared to be two different critters stuck together. What’s he suggest? ”Hey. Think we can fix this chimera with alchemy?”
No, Cold. HAYELL no. We are not breaking the alchemical taboo in twenty-twenty-anything, this is not the decade to risk it! There are two whole anime series about just why we don’t mess around with that!
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We ordered Chinese tonight, and got a broken fortune cookie. My husband’s response? “Now that’s a misfortune right there.”
I’m choking on my chicken, people.
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That’s still accomplishing nothing. Is there any way someone could send a link for me to reset my password, because I’m not getting the emails when I try that. They aren’t in junk or spam, either. I’ve tried signing in, resetting, clearing, and everything else I know how to do dozens of times on three different devices now and I’m still locked out and unable to fix it. I’m starting to panic here.
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Yes, but I’ll give it another try. Maybe the nth time is the charm.
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I tried clearing my cache/cookies/website data on my iPad, and nothing changed. My password has a non-alphanumerical character, which according to other posts here, may be causing problems. Either way, how do I log out if I can’t log in??? The only option I see on the page is “log in,” and it won’t show any of the shortcuts you see when you’re logged in.
