u/ChikyScaresYou

As the title says, I just found out that one of my beta readers fed an AI with each of my chapters to answer the questionaries of each and give feedback that way.

The first few chapters do have human replies, but then they just become generic and contained only to the chapter in question and not to the whole novel. For example, if i ask about how they feel about two characters' relationship that takes several chapters to develop, they only answer about what happened to those chatacters in that specific chapter, meaning the LLM had no context of what had happened, unlike a human being who actually read it...

I instantly revoked all acces to my documents upon finding out the feedback was AI, but now I fear they could still have my chapters copied somewhere, in a chatgpt chat or something, idk... Should I worry? Should i just move on? I dont really know what to do, as this is the first time that happens. In the survey to select the beta readers I include a section that says that by submitting you agree not to submit anything to AI, they even violated that... :/

This is the second time I charge my x4, and I noticed it doesnt go over 89%. Also, when I decided to plug it in it was at 5%, but in that moment it instantly went to 25%. Is it a battery issue, a crosspoint issue, or just a display bug?

La cosa es que soy un diseñador de juegos de mesa, y hoy sabado imprimo mi juego mas reciente, pero no tengo con quien jugarlo 😬

El plan es ir a Fenix (en guadalupe) tipo 1pm y jugar unas cuantas veces para ver si el juego funca como lo planee. Gratis obvio. El juego es de apuestas de peleas, pero super random ahhaaha la idea es ser el jugador con mas plata cuando acaba el juego.

El juego es de 2 a 8 jugadores, pero me gustaría probarlo con 4 o más, entonces entre mas se apunten mejor.

Si alguno o alguna esta interesado aviseme para ponernos de acuerdo :) pura vida

After 2 weeks of daily work to finish my lastest game, I finally finished the print files a couple of hours ago, and I'll go print the game tomorrow, but despite the fact that I have told everyone that I got a new game to test on sunday, nobody replied or showed any interest in it, not even other local designers who ould also go test their games.

As much as I love designing games and bringing them to life, it's always discouraging when nobody ever is interested in helping with playtesting. My best friend is the only one who helps, but she isn't always available, and if the game requires a player xount higher than 2 i:m screwed... One thing I miss a lot about london (altho i was there for only 1.5 months) was the fact that they had playtest sesions at least once a week. Over here, every 4-5 months (or even more time) some designers make an "event" and a few show up, but besides that, I havent been able to make them test any more frequently or other random people interested in playing either....

How do you guys playtest your games? What I end up doing is playing solo while simulating multiple players at once, which helps with mechanics, but bot with interactions and so... :/ it's what it is

I'm currently looking for feedback on my fight scenes, as I want to know if they are understandable, easy to follow, and clear. But i'm not sure if it's useful or not to ask for that kind of feedback as I believe things likefight scenes require a bit of connection to the characters for them to be successful...

But either way, if anyone's interested, I have a document I can share. It's ~20K words, containing all (9) fight scenes from my survival sci-fi thriller novel. I'm mostly looking for feedback on the previously mentioned categories, so if anyone has a bit of free time, let me know and i'll send you the link :)

I find it absolutely insane that the UK government wants us to pay for a 3rd party software instead of using their own service but I guess we live in weird times...

Is there any software/website that allows webfilling for small/micro businesses with just a 1 time fee per use? I dont want a monthly subscription dor something I will use 1 day a year. Hopefully the cheapest option available.

I want the simplest thing possible. A way to input my P&L myself and submit them to companies house.

Hi, I'm a board game designer, and for my latest game I want to use the classic old vintage cartoon style from like the 20s, say steamboat mickey, or cuphead, or that kind of art. The issue is that I have no idea how to study or learn a specific style, idk what to do. So, any help pointing me on the right direction would be really appreciated. Thanks

So, I'm currently designing a game where 4 characters fight. If I only had 4 characters, there would be no issue, but I'm considering having 6 characters for variability, and that's where the problems begin.

Esch character uses cards for actions. Say for example Chaarcter A attacks Character B, but when character B is not in play and instead it's character E, then that card would be useless...

To solve the issue I have so far two options:

1- Instead of saying Character A attacks Character B, it'd be Blue attacks Red, and at the beginning of the game each character is assigned a color

2- Instead of specifying which character is attacked, it'd be something like "The character with the most life" or "the closest character" and so on.

But with each of those solutions come more problems. The first one makes it so it's not intuitive at first glance who preforms each action, especially if one game Character A is blue, and fhe next it's Red. It's still the best option to keep it closer to what I want, but it doesnt convince me. The second option sounds more logic, but it reduces completely the predictibility of the outcome, as any character could be closer to Character A and the attack that was supposed to affect only Character B now can affect Character C or D.

So, do any of you have any idea that could help me? is option 1 okay and I'm just overthingling it? Please help hahah

Last week I finished my first round of line edits for my novel (after over 364 hours of documented work) and, altho i'm still far from getting it finished and ready to publish, I feel that I should start thinking about the cover...

In the past, I was thinking to use one "snapshot" of my novel to use as the cover image, but then I heard someone somewhere say something that changed completely the way I think about book covers. It was something in the lines of: "The cover is for the reader, not for you. It's part of the marketing and not of the book. Think of it as a movie poster." After hearing that, any idea I had for my cover got obliterated...

I know the basics for deciding what type of cover to have (compare to other covers in the genre, make sure it does fit the genre, make it legible, not cluttered, etc), but in terms of finally deciding what to use.... blank....

I want to hire an illustrator (have a few in mind, altho idk if they accept commissions), but as now I have no idea what to do as a cover, I can't even try to contact them...

So, the questions are: what tips do you have for choosing a cover? What elements should I include? what should I do? how can I study that? any help would be great. I still have a lot of time to work on this, but i want to start with the process now not to feel overwhelmed later. Thanks in advance

As someone who also has aphantasia (not a 10, but high) and also a writer, I'm looking for other people with aphantasia who'd be interested in reading my novel (or part of it) to help me know if the descriptions and the way I "set the scene" is clear to you.

I think i did a good job, as when I re-read my work I can "see" the things, but it doesnt help much because of course I know, i wrote it. People without aphantasia has had mixed opinions about it, both with "too many descriptions" and "it's perfectly fine", so I'm looking for someone with aphantasia to help me know if they can "picture" the text clearly.

As for the novel, it's a survival sci-fi thriller, you can find the blurb pinned in my profile.

Thanks in advance 🙌🏼

When updating from 1.1 to 1.2, there was no issue, but now from 1.2 to 1.3, it just gives me "Update failed" every time after "Updating..." for a few minutes.

Besides the OTA update, how else can I update the firmware?

Hi, first of all, sorry, as this will be a massive post.

As the title says, I'm looking for volunteers for a program I'm making in python to help with editing. I call it "Virtual Editor", as that's the intended function, but the project is still on the first "stage", so it just gathers the metadata and the challenge now is to see how I could use that metadata.

##Why am I creating it? If you browse through my profile, you'll see that I wrote a MASSIVE book, and after quoting several editors, the cheapest quote was around $8K (I got quotes for $18K and $24K, the average was around $12K), which is insane, and something I would never be able to afford. I've been doing my own line editing by using another program/macro in excel+word that highlights words in different colors so I can check them, and altho that works, I want something more in depth. That's why I started with this thing.

##What is that Virtual Editor (VE)? As I said, it's a program in python that uses several libraries and a few (not really) LLMs to analyze the text. I say not really LLMs because, and I quote, they are "encoder-only transformer models designed for understanding tasks, not generative tasks". So they don't generate anything, they are basically used to check the text vs a "hypothesis" (For example, "is this text fantasy?") and gives a "confidence score" (0.27% yes, for example). The program works 100% offline, run in my own PC, and is not used to train anything. I'm too paranoid with my novel to send the text to any online service that could copy it or get trained with it, so I'm not risking it.

##How it works: I'll tr to simplify the explanation, as it does a LOT of things ahhaha

Basically, I have a "style guide" which I fill with the basics, like characters names, location names, POV, genre (the ones I think the book fits in), terms I created, etc. This works for 2 things. First, it makes the VE "learn" that the names with weird spellings are not typos or spelling mistakes,so it doesnt flag them as errors. Second, It compares your intentions (genre, tone, etc) with what the VE finds to see how close/far you're from it. For example, If my novel is Sci-fi + Horror + Thriller, but the VE detects Sci-fi + Romance + Slice of Life, then it'd mark it as dissonant, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

I also have my novel document. The VE creates a copy of it, and separates the text into "chunks", which is then used to analyze the text.

Here's the meaty part. The VE takes each chunk and analyzes the entire thing, each paragraph, each sentence, and each word. Doing a lot of processes, it will extract a lot of information (which I call metadata) and then creates a file where the metadata is saved (called metrics).

I also have a "summarizer" which, as the name says, summarizes each chunk, then each scene, each chapter, and the whole book, but I need to refine that because it's not accurate. But for the purposes of this post, all I need is to check that metadata extractor.

##What it does NOT do? It does not geneate anything, it doesn't "learn" anything, it doesnt copy, stores, modify, change, adjusts, sends, duplicates, etc, anything. It literally just takes the text, exteacts the metadata, and that's all. If the metadata file gets deleted, all ghe hours and hours of processing are gone lol

##What is that metadata? When I started making the program, I wanted to have the most information I could, and I think I overdid that lol

When using programs like prowritingaid, grammarly, or similar, you get to see some stats like passive voice usage, reading difficulty, sentence lengths, etc. Well, every single thing you could think of is in my metadata (i made 120+ data points)

So, just to mention a few:

• italics detection (i plan to implement that in the future to check for -inner thoughts vs emphasized words)
• 14 lexical diversity: measures how varied/rich the vocabulary is
• 8 readability stats: ease/difficulty of reading
• several pace measurements, including "maps" on how the pace changes (say for example "Static", "Static", "Gaining Momentum", "Gentle Slowdown", "Static", "Static"... (taken from my own metadata)) cliche detection both in dialogue and outside of dialogue (vs a list of around 3K cliches)
• 5 sensory measures: visual, audio, taste, smell, touch
• 4 scene type measures: introspection, description, exposition, action
• The genre related measurements i mentioned before
• a LOT of sentiment, valence, arousal, emotions, and mood stats, separated for dialogue and not dialogue
• several sentence construction stats, such as length, variety, "formula" (the types of words used in each)
• passive voice detection
• several dialogue vs non-dialogue stats
• 4 style measures: prose styles, style matching, style dissonance, missing style dissonance
• warnings, such as spelling and grammar mistakes
• and a lot more, even a "character data base"

It's all saved in a .json file that is TECHNICALLY easy to read. I mean technically because you really need to know what the numbers mean, otherwise it's not useful. It's also HUGE!!! hahah just as an example, the metadta of my own novel has a total of 2.465.048 lines (yes, almost 2.5 million). I do plan to get each stat on its own file later for easier analysis, but for now I just have one single mega file.

Here's a fraction of the first chunk data so you get an idea:

    "dale_chall": 8.281040325578775,
    "linsear_write": 4.6,
    "gunning_fog": 6.0719653016391595,
    "reading_difficulty": [
            "Easy",
            "6 Grade"
        ],
    "avg_sentence_length": 10.069767441860465,
    "unique_word_distribution": 5.1395348837209305,
    "very_short_sentence_count": 11,
    "short_sentence_count": 17,
    "medium_sentence_count": 15,
    "long_sentence_count": 0,
    "very_long_sentence_count": 0,
    "avg_paragraph_len_sentences": 2.8666666666666667,
    "avg_paragraph_len_words": 29.333333333333332,

You can think of this as just stats for nerds hahaha

##What you'll receive: Well, you'll get the emtadata file of course. I'll see if I can create some graphs for easier comprehention of the data (because let's be real, nobody will be checking each line individually), or create a small "report" program that tells you where are the higher and lower stats (in which chater and scene) so you can check if that's intended or not. You can do with that metadata whatever you want, as it's yours.

Mine is not that heavy, just 58MB.

I could send you the data from the summarizer as well, and the character data base, but those do use local LLMs (using LM-studio), but that takes much more time, and as I havent refined it, the outcome isn't guaranteed to be accurate in the slightest. Here are a few examples of the outputs from the summarizer.

Character database:

    "scene": 1,
    "characters": {
      "Alice": {
        "matches_existing": "new",
        "name": "Alice",
        "presence": "Present",
        "status": "Alive",
        "profession": "Scientist or researcher",
        "age": "",
        "gender": "female",
        "physical_appearance": [
          {
            "trait": "hair color",
            "description": "rusted tangerine",
            "confidence": "explicit",
            "found_in": [
              1,
              1
            ]
          },
          {
            "trait": "hair length",
            "description": "flows down to her breasts and ending at her hips",
            "confidence": "explicit",
            "found_in": [
              1,
              1
            ]
          },
          {
            "trait": "skin tone",
            "description": "pale",
            "confidence": "explicit",
            "found_in": [
              1,
              1
            ]
          }
        ],
        "psychological_traits": [
          {
            "trait": "panicked when threatened by danger",
            "description": "reacts with panic when realizing she is drowning, leading to flailing movements",
            "tier": "situational",
            "confidence": "high",
            "found_in": [
              1,
              1
            ]
          },
          {
            "trait": "calm when instructed to relax",
            "description": "stops flailing and calms down after being told to relax, showing responsiveness to guidance",
            "tier": "situational",
            "confidence": "medium",
            "found_in": [
              1,
              1
            ]
          },
          {
            "trait": "inquisitive about surroundings",
            "description": "repeatedly asks questions about her location and time, showing a desire to understand her situation",
            "tier": "situational",
            "confidence": "medium",
            "found_in": [
              1,
              1
            ]
         },

themes:

  "chunk_id": 1,
  "chapter": 1,
  "scene": 1,
  "theme_name": "Temporal Dislocation",
  "theme_category": "Time and Identity",
  "theme_description": "Awakening in a future world with no recollection of time passed",
  "confidence": "HIGH",
  "paragraph_range": [
    1,
    15
  ]
},
{
  "chunk_id": 2,
  "chapter": 1,
  "scene": 1,
  "theme_name": "Temporal Dislocation and Mission Identity",
  "theme_category": "Isolation",
  "theme_description": "Awakening reveals time passed and mission identity unchanged",
  "confidence": "HIGH",
  "paragraph_range": [
    16,
    28
  ]
},
{
  "chunk_id": 3,
  "chapter": 1,
  "scene": 1,
  "theme_name": "Emotional Vulnerability in Alien Environments",
  "theme_category": "Human-Technology Dynamics",
  "theme_description": "Alice's hunger reveals her emotional vulnerability in a sterile, controlled setting",
  "confidence": "HIGH",
  "paragraph_range": [
    29,
    47
  ]
},

summaries:

  "chapter": 1,
  "scene": 1,
  "chunk_ids": [
    1,
    2,
    3,
    4,
    5,
    6,
    7,
    8
  ],
  "summary": "Alice awakens in a cryogenic capsule on the Heracles III in 2277, having slept for twelve years. She regains consciousness, finds herself alone, and explores the ship, encountering empty rooms and learning of restricted access. Guided by Apala, she visits the dining area, drinks a vitamin cocktail, and observes the stars after a jump. Despite her curiosity about signals, Apala denies her attempts to listen. Alice reflects on her solitude, career, and the ship’s journey, settling into her room with a private bathroom and considering reading, hopeful for recognition upon returning to restore the Ninlil."
},
{
  "chapter": 1,
  "scene": 2,
  "chunk_ids": [
    9,
    10,
    11,
    12
  ],
  "summary": "Alice wakes in the Communications Area, noticing the dimmed light. Apala greets her, but Alice feels unwelcome due to the crew’s lack of warmth and her unfamiliarity. Marlan eats the last breakfast paste. Alice considers repairing her cryosleep capsule and listening to the signal. Apala confirms the Cryosleep Area is closed and informs of the next jump. She restricts device use and forbids signal listening, citing energy concerns. Despite this, Alice remains determined and curious about the signal, acknowledging it may be accessible upon waking. She accepts the restriction and focuses on the view, showing persistent interest in understanding the signal's significance."
},
{
  "chapter": 1,
  "scene": 3,
  "chunk_ids": [
    13,
    14,
    15,
    16,
    17,
    18,
    19,
    20,
    21,
    22
  ],
  "summary": "Alice wakes up in the Dining Area, meets maintenance crew member Nathan, and learns the signal reappeared in 2129. She observes a hostile new crew member and a naked stranger, highlighting privacy concerns. At a mandatory lounge meeting, Captain Natasha Hierkov introduces herself and clarifies the mission's duration and scope, noting poor communication and lack of formal briefing. Crew members express disappointment and concern about isolation and mission details. Alice denies hearing a signal from Earth despite surveillance, prompting the captain’s concern and suspicion of hidden information. The crew learns their nine-hour jump time and departure timeline, with Natasha emphasizing no one will be left behind."
},

NOTE: These summaries are NOT accurate. Alice never wakes up in the Dining Area for example. The rest is kind of alright tho.

If you want, I can also send you the “Highlight Gide for Self-Editing. A guide to format and highlight your manuscript so you can do best use of your line self-editing.” which requires Word and Excel to work (I’ve only tested it in word 2007, but it should work in all of them I suppose). It’s the guide I made for myself and what helps me edit my novel. I think it’s insanely useful.

##How can you use that: As I said, you can do whatever you like with it. I'll try to get something more "user friendly" done as well so you can get some value out of it, regardless of how tech-savvy you are. I used some of my metadata to help me fix pacing issues, as well as making me realize my sentence structure was almost always the same. You can also check the errors to fix them, and you can see if the sentiment, mood, and emotions are correct with the story (for example, in my novel it was cool to see that the spot with the lowest sentiment (the saddest part) was in the climax, as intended. It was also curious to note how negative my entire story was overall... But yeah, there are a lot of things you can do with it, you just have to know how.

##What I'd need from you: If you’re interested, you can send me a DM. I will send you the blank Style Guide for you to fill in, and then I’d need you to send me your manuscript in a word document (starting directly on chapter 1, it needs a few specific style settings for it to function, but it’s easy to set that up) and the style guide back. Once I get that, it should take me around a day if the book is normal-sized hahah but let’s say between 2-5 days, then I’d send you back whatever comes out of it. (the downside is that the program uses 100% of my CPU, so while processing your text, I cant play any games lol, but that’d force me to focus on editing my novel, I’m only 32K words from finishing the first editing pass!!!!)

##What would happen with your manuscript? Once I get the metadata, I’ll delete it along with the style guide. You can trust me, it’s safe with me. NOTE: I won’t read the book or the style guide unless it gives me an error and I need to check out why. So, don’t ask me about what I think of your story because I literally won’t know.

##How will I use your metadata? I need it to check 2 things (and a 3rd secret thing)

First, the pace scores. I currently have this based on my own stats:

    "Fantasy": (110, 310),
    "Science Fiction": (125, 335),
    "Horror": (70, 280),
    "Historical Fiction": (55, 220),
    "Contemporary Fiction": (100, 235),
    "Romance": (105, 270),
    "Mystery/Thriller": (190, 390),
    }

The issue with this is that I have no other pace scores to compare to mine, so I'm not sure if the thresholds are correct.

Second, genre and prose style detection. I need to know how accurate the VE detects genres, so I want to compare something that isn’t Survival Sci-fi Thriller to see if it detects the right stuff.

The third secret thing is just to know that the program runs without errors. Especially the prose style section, as that is basically just guessed... I’m pretty sure my own novel didn’t even pass the first check of most of them, so if there’s an error in a formula in there I have absolutely no idea, and that’s what I need to test.

Once I get those numbers, I’ll also delete the metadata, as I won’t need it anymore.

Thanks and future plans

So, yeah, thanks if interested. This is a passion project that hopefully could see the light of day in the future. For now, I just want to polish what I have. The idea is that in the future I can sell it so people can use it locally to analyze and edit their own novels without needing to pay insane amounts of money, or subscriptions or whatever. I do not intend this to replace human editors, tho, but as an assistant to your own self-editing process, a process that every single author should go through, be it because they can’t afford an editor (my case), because they want to polish their manuscript before sending it to beta readers or editors, or because they have finished everything and they need to run a final pass.

after that, my plan is to have the Local LLM to answer a series of questions (a LOT of them) and create a “report” showcasing everything, with graphs, explanations, quotes, etc, for every aspect of the story so you can then check the results and do you own edits with a better understanding. It will never generate any new text, or change your sentences or your voice or anything. The idea is that it just helps you do your job; it doesn’t do it for you. I also plan to make it able to answer questions you leave for each chapter or for the full novel (like the questions you (or at least I) leave for beta readers, and hopefully leave the comments directly in the word doc. There’s still a lot of work left for what I have intended, hopefully it all works out. For now, the metadata in theory is working fine, so at least I got that covered

If interested, send me a DM.

Thanks, and sorry for the insanely long post

Title. I want to buy a few books to support the authors, but they have them only on Amazon. idk how to take them from there to my x4 and be able to read them...

So, the thing is that one of the games i'm designing has a LARGE number of cards. It's a deckbuilder, with an exploration mechanic. I was thinking that it'd be fun to divide the cards from the decks into smaller packs that could be "unlocked" after some playthroughs or "achievements", which would represent how the players "learn" what's in the game (story-wise). The thing is, idk if that's something that sounds appealing.

tbh, I've only heard of something similar to it in Mind MGMT (i think) and legacy games, nowhere else. Is it a good idea to do this? I know that logistically it'd make the game more difficult to produce and a bit more expensive, but i feel the idea of unlocking stuff sounds cool, but idk if that's a thing normal games do or what

I havent needed to charge my x4 since getting it back on march 6, but now it's currently at 14%. When is it recommended to charge it? I was planning to let it drop to ~2%...

I have an LTD, and I'm its sole member. I need to file the accounts of this past year for the fist time, and I was wondering if there's a free excel template I can use for this. I've searched online but I can't find any, nor examples on how to do it. As i'm comsidered a micro-entity, I'm able to send abridged accounts, so a template for that would be great, but the full template would also be aueful. I saw something about freeagent, but I dont want to be paying monthly for something I need to use once a year... Finally, are there any other templates I could obtain such as tax return, balance sheet, profit and loss accounts, etc,? Thanks