As another example, the Path of Exile community moved off onto their own community-run wiki domain, but the Fandom variant (which is woefully out of date) continues to be one of the top results when searching for a PoE wiki page.

In some regards that’s inevitable, but it clearly shows what Fandom’s priorities are.

Fandom purchasing Gamepedia and moving everything onto Fandom Wikia was so awful. I’m so upset the Dota2 Gamepedia wiki is now on Fandom, and I’m sure many other communities feel that way for their own community run and community led wiki pages.

Not that I was particularly warm about Gamepedia either, but at the bare minimum I didn’t feel like the page was all ads and no information. Fandom wikis are explicitly set-up to drive as many eyeballs as possible onto advertising and engagement, and are holding actually relevant information for the visitor as a hostage to get those eyeballs. It’s information masquerading as a social media site.

The Runescape community convincing Jagex to cover the hosting costs and moving all their wiki pages to their own set-up has been such a huge boon for their community. It is super unfortunate that for many communities, the community-led wiki pages are a huge trove of information but the companies/games/groups these communities coalesce around have shown little to no interest in merely just financially supporting the endeavor.

Yeap!

Crafting a subjectively terrible one-liner in a good way requires a good amount of experience. It’s not enough to just cobble words together to have something that’s “objectively” bad writing, but it requires putting together some really disparate ideas together into something that, for the most part, would absolutely not fly in most settings, but are absolutely hilarious in the right one.

The 2012 winner for example is a viscerally disgusting image, but it reveals so much about the character involved (and the narrator, if they aren’t the same person).

Some examples:

2012 winner

As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.

2003 winner

They had but one last remaining night together, so they embraced each other as tightly as that two-flavor entwined string cheese that is orange and yellowish-white, the orange probably being a bland Cheddar and the white … Mozzarella, although it could possibly be Provolone or just plain American, as it really doesn’t taste distinctly dissimilar from the orange, yet they would have you believe it does by coloring it differently.

2016 Adventure Dishonorable Mention

The sea roiled like water in a pasta pot about to boil, an apt simile thought Captain Samuel Turner, because if they didn’t fix their engine soon he and his crew would be floating face down like overcooked manicotti—bloated, white, limp and about to be consumed by something that wished it were eating ahi tuna instead.

TVTropes is what I sink my time in when I want a good laugh and have absolutely no motivation to do anything but doomscroll through text. Pick a favourite series you don’t mind spoilers on and read through all the tropes for a good laugh or to reminisce over what was good or bad about the series.

The key difference between manifest V2.0 and V3.0 with regards to uBO is in V2, the extension has direct access to the browser’s process in making web requests and can make direct changes to those requests. V3 instead requires the extension to declare a list of urls and the browser will act on the extension’s behalf. This is a very simplified explanation that isn’t in any meaningful depth and misses a ton of nuance.

The outcome though is V3 makes it significantly more difficult for uBO to achieve its goals for its users. It is a downright and explicit downgrade, and when Chrome fully moves to Manifest V3.0, uBO’s ability to serve its core functions will likely be diminished.

Scrivener has been my default go-to but mostly because I’ve been attached to it for a while. I reckon there’s a lot of better tools nowadays though.

If some of the challenge here is getting words on the page, a lot of the strategies many people employ for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month – a self-imposed challenge to write a 50k+ word novel in November) usually works out somewhat well:

1. It is ok to take a break, or have an unproductive day. For NaNoWriMo, the idea is to average about 1667~ words a day, but you don’t actually have to do that much everyday. Sometimes you have productive days, sometimes you have less. That’s ok.
2. You are always “writing” even if you’re not actually putting words on the page. The creative process that comes with thinking about characters, planning, imagining settings, world building, plot considerations, conflict resolutions, and so on are all “writing” even if at the end of the day you wrote one sentence into your actual novel then took it out 5 hours later because you weren’t happy with it. If you do a lot of planning and note-taking, you might be surprised at how many words are actually in that big bulk of stuff.
3. Less “should” mentality. It’s not a bad idea to frame away from thinking of it as “I should be writing”, or “my writing should be good/better”.
4. Less use of the backspace button. Dump words on page, fix later (this 100% takes getting used to).
5. Oftentimes, a novel can be broken down into scenes, stitched together with entry and exit transitions, chained together to flow from one scene to the next. A “scene” isn’t strictly a chapter per se (but a chapter can be a whole scene in and of itself), but rather a set of interactions between characters, setting, plot, and conflict (among other things). In the immediate term, you could consider changing your perspective from “writing a novel” to “writing a scene in the novel”, and as you build up scenes over time you start getting something that feels like a longer piece of work even if all you’ve done is write a few 500-1500 “in the moment” short stories chained together.

Additionally, the traditional novel isn’t really the only kind of writing you can do. Novellas, short stories, poems, vignettes, scripts, even the Japanese Light Novel structure are all ways to write without necessarily feeling like one is forced into putting together this massive (or semi-massive) epic.