Welcome to the April Tildes Writing Prompt! Hopefully the first installment of many monthly writing prompts.

This is an offshoot of the writing contests hosted by @TheMeerkat, but a bit less formal and running all month long. Though we'll still have a contest, with a prize of a $20 gift code for Proton or Tuta courtesy of Meerkat. That said, the ultimate goal is to just have an excuse to write.

Among the changes: we have two options for prompts this time!

The Traditional Prompt: The arrival of spring brings a clearer mind, and new revelations.

The Keywords Prompt: Rain, Spring, Renewal

You can choose to do either one, combine them, or do both in separate stories! The keywords are a bit experimental, so while ideally you should aim to incorporate all three, you can choose to use just one or two. I chose words that can be interpreted in a few ways, so don't feel like you have to write about renewing library books on a rainy day in spring.

General Guidelines

1. Creative writing only. Any format is allowed—prose, poetry, fanfics, creative nonfiction, branching narrative, what have you. Just keep it creative!
2. The contest is optional. Some of us just want to dip our toes into writing or share our creations with no pressure or interest in prizes. So just state if you want to opt in or out.
3. Length. Soft rule of 1,000 to 7,500 words, especially if you opt to enter the contest. However, any length is acceptable. Got a two-sentence horror story? Go for it! Somehow hammer out a full 60,000 word novel in a month? No guarantees many people will have time to read it, but that sort of effort deserves to be shared! (Seriously, you'd earn those bragging rights.)
4. The contest winner will be decided via a poll. @TheMeerkat will post a link when the time comes. We'll be doing ranked voting rather than picking just one. So please read all the stories you can!
5. You can write multiple stories, but only one can be entered in the contest! This rule was particularly made with shorter entries in mind, but the big goal is just to write. So if you've got multiple ideas, don't feel like you need to pick just one!
6. Formatting notes. As with the contests, please use collapsible formatting if posting directly to the comments. If posting externally like with Google Docs or a PDF, just keep in mind that people are reading this on all sorts of screen sizes so fixed formats may not work the way you like.

The contest deadline is Saturday, April 26th, at 11:59:59 EST.. This should hopefully give everyone plenty of time to write and read entries before voting starts, and enough time to announce a winner before the end of the month.

And as a final note, please leave feedback on other stories when you can! Getting feedback is one of the best parts of being a writer. I know I always get a big grin at even just simple heart emoji, though you should probably leave a bit more than just that in your feedback here.

Happy writing! I look forward to seeing what everyone comes up with!

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

User and book club ping recipient Maevens said that it would help them if the book and questions were posted to Storygraph, so I created a basic book club template, but I haven't done anything with it yet.

What do you all think? Options include simply posting the book title each month, posting the book title and the discussion questions each month or posting and including a link to the Tildes book club discussion. I'm going to do something minimal regardless, to honor Maevens' request but I want to know what you all think and whether there are things you specifically don't want me to do.

Bottom line, the two book clubs could run in parallel with crossover and links, or they could be essentially separate. Please advise.

I was reading the recent post about strategy games, and I'm still astonished to see for how many hours (at least hundreds, often 1000+) people are playing these. I'm guessing that in these cases, all your gaming time is exclusively taken by that single game.

So, do you have (or did you have) games, or series, like that? Do you play solo or multi? What compels you to spend so much time on a single game? How do you feel about it?

Its a heavy show but three episodes in, I'm loving the single shot approach that they took.

Without cuts, it's all about the pace of the drama, the honesty of each beat and the quality of the performance. That, and I haven't seen a show tackle toxic masculinity in quite this way and I'm super here for it.

Has anybody else seen it? What did you think?

An RPG book is a book containing the rules and setting for a tabletop RPG game. Like Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, Worlds Without Number, Star Trek Adventures, etc.

The fact that they are rarely in text format always puts me off reading RPG books. I don't want to diminish the importance of art, but importing printed RPG books is prohibitively expensive, and reading huge PDFs on a laptop is not a good experience for me.

I also find it unpleasant to navigate the complicated design of these books. They're distracting.

I have a 6.8" Kindle Paperwhite but reading RPG PDFs on it is awful. RPG books have lots of art and complicated layouts. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to make an RPG into text. I was seriously considering just copying the text and converting it to markdown myself (it doesn't need to be markdown, just something that I can convert into a format my Kindle understands) when I remembered chatGPT.

Copying the text and asking GPT to make it into markdown worked okay, but it missed the tables. Sending an image of a page worked pretty well, so I think AI is the way here. But I am not a GPT subscriber and I bet I'll hit a limit at some point. Also, instead of sending pages individually, I would prefer to send the PDF and get the result in text. Even if there were limitations (like only 10 pages in one go), it would be an improvement.

In any case, using chatGPT will be much better than doing it by hand. But is there an AI or other kind of PDF service that is better suited for that task, so I can reduce the amount of manual input?