sunsalute / paperbagghost

thebiballerina

The image editing tools being discussed here are user applications. These particular applications are more visible due to being promoted by Discord, but they operate the same as other third-party user applications. The individual user has to choose to enable these applications, and choose which images they use them on, entirely at their discretion. It is functionally equivalent to saving the image to one's computer and uploading it on another website.

A user application cannot read content in a server of its own accord, and thus cannot "scrape" a server for AI training data.

That's another post that was due back in January ;) I mentioned that I'd asked beta-readers if they would be up for trying out Ellipsus with me for beta-reading the Cursed Witch. Unfortunately, after a couple of them agreed and started, I ended up having to ask folks to use another platform.

I know a few people in my circles are using Ellipsus for writing - if some of this information is out of date, let me know! From extracting the beta-reader comments and feedback this month, I think the pieces that are deal-breakers for me are still present. I still massively support Ellipsus and the stance they're taking against generative AI. We need more small independent writer-friendly companies like this.

As an additional note, if you stay subscribed to the email "welcome" sequence after joining, at the end they send you a friendly email from one of the co-founders asking for feedback, which I did share. I received a very gracious reply explaining what they were working on at the moment and when they'd hopefully get to these issues. I understand the need to prioritise, and I'm totally rooting for them.

Having said that, here's why Ellipsus didn't work for me for beta-reading compared to a tool like GoogleDoc or LibreOffice.

Finding the changes

( Read more... )

Can't see both comments and in-text suggestions at the same time

( Read more... )

Email stuff, minor and a bit annoying though not a deal breaker

( Read more... )

So that's been my experience! The third one can be avoided with some email filtering, but from starting to incorporate comments and feedback from beta-reading this month, I believe the two deal-breakers are still a problem. However, this is all for a very specific, "beta-reader" use case rather than actual writing. I understand Ellipsus is an amazing GDoc replacement for that use case, and excellent for real-time collaborative writing. If you've been looking for GDoc alternative for your writing, one that doesn't feed your work to an AI training corpus, consider it!

And if you're using Ellipsus already, would love to hear about your experience so I can understand better what it does well and less well, and more easily recommend it when applicable to people looking for a new tool :)

I just posted the last story for the hurt/comfort series! I started writing this sometime in... February? When I was just trying to find the joy of writing again in the middle of personal and world overwhelm. And slowly, I got back to where I wanted :) As noted by a friend, the series has 25 stories (which is absolutely coincidental but I will pretend was Totally The Plan, 25 for 2025 yay XD), and nearly 40k words. I think one of the things I wanted to teach myself with the series is also that not everything has to be edited to death. Everything having to do with editing started to feel like an gigantic, impossible ordeal after how long it took for the original novella.

I have some ideas about what I'd like to work on next (back to the Cursed Witch, hopefully! 🤞), but we'll see what happens :)

( 6 prompts, 7 stories, 3 ships )