Alysa Taladay 🦖SF/F Writer✨️🚀

Just "welcome/welcome back, this is a channel that does xyz," and the viewer knows what to expect. It's creative and I love that for the Internet, but ... warn a person, would ya? 😅

Just came across the second video in a row with a cartoon avatar narrator that is ... frankly bizarre. And I'm cool with that, really. Better than phoning it in with AI. But can folks, like, lead in with an intro of these characters, rather than springing them on us over 1min into the video? 🙏

Anyway . . . just taking a moment to get a laugh at my younger self. Perhaps this is what happens when half your teachers were Silent Gen, and they were nearing retirement and invested in seeing what fresh challenges they could present.

... and that just wouldn't fly, today. Pushing boundaries, teaching controversial material, and asking deep questions to test our neuroplasticity was a national pasttime in the classrooms of my youth.

If you had told me in 1999 that this is what education would look like in 2026 ... I might actually have gone into teaching. Would I have lasted long? No. I probably would've been fired before I had time to fully melt down and quit, because I would've emulated my own teachers/

ultimately designed to do nothing more than prove the student read the book. Congratulations: you read it! We're not going to talk about what you got out of it, no. No papers or book reports. Just answer some questions to test your memory of the content. I complained. Sweet summer child that I was.

Watching a bunch of videos about technology in classrooms and kids not learning to read properly (globally, apparently), and thinking about is that time in 8th grade when I complained about AR (Accelerated Reader) quizzes because they were lifeless, unengaging, and/

(I don't remember swearing, but I guess that goes to show how frustrated I've been. 😅)

Hope you feel better. 🤗

Several DAYS have gone by, poking at Proton, uninstalling and reinstalling software, running updates, deleting all of EA's stupid files and letting it do a clean reinstall. BLEH. And now, tonight, it's been "sudo apt justmakethisshitworkplease". 😂

Swear to God if it was all because I have the wrong driver selected, I'm quitting for the evening. There's always more dishes I can wash.

I *could* just see if it will play on my computer. Problem: Steam doesn't ever load properly. Cue the saga of looking up command lines to make sure I've deleted all of Steam's files, reinstalling it, getting the same issue (it has, in the past, opened on occasion...no longer), and removing it again.

Several days ago, Dragon Age: Inquisition stopped working. It opens, then crashes. Turns out it's very likely EA has updated and their stupid little app launcher no longer supports the 3rd party Proton tool required to make the game work.

Saga of a writer learning Linux stuff because Steam and EA won't get along and she wants to play her goddamn game, but exclusively uses Linux (Ubuntu)...:

2/2 with books including "The Quintaglio Ascension," "The Neanderthal Parallax" (both trilogies), and "Calculating God." The last, I'm sorry to say, is the only one I've read. (So, no: I did not get the idea to write about prehistoric/alien worlds/identities from RJS. 😁 I just respect his work.)

I am somewhat unsurprised to learn that Robert J. Sawyer was supposedly going to have a hand in this project, given that he's written quite a few books about being non-human (or not as we know it) 1/2
lucasfilm.fandom.com/wiki/Alien_C...

"Lucasfilm's Alien Chronicles" by Deborah Chester was a trilogy I read as a teenager in which none of the characters were human. (Arguably, you *could* say it was about furries before we called them that.)
www.goodreads.com/series/60527...

#TBRuary

Book: @voicesofvalhoon.bsky.social, are your MCs nonhuman? I know some of them are, but I don't know if they all are... If so, then Song of Broken Bells is my choice for today. I love Lilly's worldbuilding and I am excited to read their books one day!

Inspired by the Chinese New Year, I wanted to try my hand at drawing a fire horse in pixel art.

Er ... update since I feel like I went real quiet. I started a new job last week. Mostly weekends, but I agreed to do overtime last week and ended up working 6 days almost in a row. A colossal mistake. I'm tired. 😅

Meta took my childhood yearbook photo and suggested dolling it up with AI. Gave it cutsie cartoon kiddie eyes & face, then put BREASTS on it. 💀 It is a thing of nightmares.

Imagine how different the world would be if this was society's main goal! 💜
#WritingCommunity #selfcare #timetoslowdown

This is how we make the world a better place. 🥰
#WritingCommunity #bekind #compliments

I kinda feel like I got stuck doing this because every time I crawl back out of my comfy corner the world is still burning. Still, take time for yourself. Regularly set time aside if you need to and make a space that's yours to decompress in. It's okay to breathe.

YouTube video by Comedy Central UK Oldholio | Beavis And Butthead

Y'all I almost rolled off my couch. I think I broke something. I don't care. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
youtu.be/q_fh7d1zYF8

Four sketches of Torvosaurus showing details of its head, arms and entire body

Let’s sketch one of the giants of the Jurassic, Torvosaurus!

Torvosaurus was a genus of megalosaurid theropod that lived during the latest part of the Middle Jurassic and the Late Jurassic. The genus contains two described species found in North America and Europe

#paleoart #sciart #dinosaurs

A swordfish-like creature with a toothy mouth, bladelike fins and a silvery body swims alongside a shoal of its kin.

Protosphyraena, the edgiest fish of the Western Interior Seaway. Not only does it have a swordfish's needle-sharp bill, its mouth is armed with teeth and its pectoral fins are serrated. the whole front half is weaponized!

‪
#paleoart #SciArt #art #artist #paleontology #artistonbluesky #originalart

Today alone, YouTube so far has shown me ads offering AI substitutes for Dungeon Mastering and writing fanfics. I was getting sick of the AI furries, but this feels like a new low.

Stegosaurus stenops, an exploration of musculature, texture and color, based directly on Scott Hartman's skeletal.

I'm reposting my 6 years old piece of Stegosaurus stenops in conjunction to the quickly thrown together scale image of FHPR 1095, because a lot of people have gotten used to oversized depictions of Stegosaurus - in terms of previously known material.