Axolotl fan

He/they, dni harry potter fans, was anonymous2, 20

[cavegirlpoems]

actually, you know what, as a fan of transgressive art, tabletop rpgs as an artistic medium, and transgressive tabletop rpgs, I'm gonna say this up front: DrivethruRPG's willingness to host basically anything legal - no matter how graphic, tasteless or bizarre - is a good thing, and should be celebrated.

[petterwass]

Similarly for itch really. Both for RPG's and computer games

[cavegirlpoems]

Oh yeah, Itch does a similar thing and likewise deserves a lot of credit for the weird shit it's willing to host, even if it's not my go-to platform.

[story-richmond]

Can I tell you why I respect DrivethruRPG?

Years ago I created a game called Tokyo Brain Pop. It was a psychic schoolgirl rpg. About fighting demons and having best friends and blowing up heads with your mind. A pretty harmless PG rated game. I released it as a PDF on my site as well as Drivethru and a few other sites. I also ran a small pre-order for a print version. I think the pre-order generated about $400. So not a big project at all.

Just after the pre-order ended I received a cease and desist letter from a lawfirm representing a company. I can't name them for legal reasons. Their claim was the name of our game violated their clients copyright. Their client was a robot themed educational website with a vaguely similar name. They thought people would confuse our game for their site. So they demanded that we stop publishing, remove our product and website from the internet and pay them damages of $10k.

Obviously this was bullshit. I sent them a letter explaining that I was a small hobbyist, that I didn't think there was any issue and that I'd be happy to include a disclaimer on my site stating that my game wasn't associated with their thing at all.

They wouldn't have it. I got a flurry of letters and legal documents, including a threat to sue for damages. I wasn't sure what to do. Luckily a friend pointed me to an attorney that did free work for artists. The attorney looked over the documents and came to a few conclusions.

1. The whole thing was bullshit. The lawfirm was almost certainly just scouring the internet looking for people to harass in order to bill hours to their client.

2. The lawfirm didn't understand that i made a ttrpg. They thought I was making a video game. The attorney assumed that was why they thought they could get so much money from me.

3. The company did not in fact have a copyright on their name. Even if they did, the attorney felt the names were so wildly different that we would probably win any lawsuit.

4. But... defending a lawsuit like this is expensive and time consuming. It would be very difficult for us.

The attorney offered to send a strongly wordde letter covering the above points. With the hopes of scaring them off.

It... didn't work.

The lawfirm didn't sue me. Thank God. But they ruined me. They sent cease and desist letters to everyone i dealt with. My site host. My distributors. My social media. My printers. The stores that sokd my games. At the time I was making a modest living off my games. I had 5 games in print, and selling them was how I paid my bills. That all went away. I lost my website. Online stores took my pdfs down and canceled my accounts. My Facebook and Twitter accounts were locked. My printer canceled my orders. 2 of my 3 distributors canceled contracts and sent back all copies of my games.

I tried to make new accounts. Find new printers. Find new stores. The lawfirm was thorough. For months every time I sat up a new account or signed up with a new distributor, they'd immediately receive a cease and desist letter and I'd be shut down.

When I tried to contact these businesses and explain what happened, they told me that they couldn't do business with me anymore. They wouldn't listen. They didn't care.

Except DrivethruRPG. Drivethru got the letter and told them to fuck off. Told them that they recognized it was an empty threat, and wouldn't comply even if it wasn't. They did this without ever hearing from me. It was their automatic response. They then contacted me to let me know what waas happening and made sure I knew that they'd continue carrying my games.

The lawfirm drove me out of business. I couldn't pay my bills. I couldnt even sell the books I had in stock. I eventually had to give up and stop making games. It was years before I came back to game dedign. It was awful and demoralizing. I lost the one thing I had built myself.

But DrivethruRPG stuck with me (Indie Press Revolution too). I didn't even have a website or social media presence, and none of my games were in pri t or available in stores, but you could buy the PDFs from Drivethru. Even after multiple cease and desist letters and threats.

Eventually the lawfirm gave up. My game Tokyo Brainpop is still on sale at DrivethruRPG.

[them-faetale]

This, this right here, is why we say IP law is not the friend of individual creators.

[dubstepcarcommercial]

^the last comment

intellectual copywrite law is not the friend of individual creators

[anomymous3]

my prevoos account uas been restored so im goong back ro tgat

[steve-likes-robots]

It’s funny to follow Minecraft smp fans because the stuff they say is so wildly out of context for me

[steve-likes-robots]

Scrumpus just killed Bleeborp’s father? And got sentenced to hell for a thousand years? Fucking hell, what show is this? Oh. Minecraft SMP.

[anomymous3]

@goodtimeswithshane

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

reblog if you love archive of our own and how they firmly refuse to let censorship have any place on their platform

[carsonjonesfiance]

“You can’t vote out Capitalism” yeah but you can vote for Elizabeth Warren and her Consumer Financial Protection Bureau you can vote for not abolishing food stamp. You can vote for Biden’s millions of dollars in federal loan forgiveness. You can vote for Medicaid expansion to help those at the bottom rungs. You can vote for racial, gender, and sexuality protections in the workplace. You can vote for a million things that improve our life under Capitalism and saying “voting doesn’t change anything” only shows how much privilege you must have that you wouldn’t notice the difference.

[transchaoswizard]

"You can vote for Biden's millions of dollars in federal loan forgiveness" We did that though, and he proceeded to quite immediately and explicitly Not make it happen.

[carsonjonesfiance]

He forgave $188.8 Billion USD in federal student loans. I’m sorry you weren’t one of the borrowers who qualified, but he forgave billions with a B

[carsonjonesfiance]

5.3 million borrowers had their loans forgiven and while, yes, that’s only a drop in the bucket, that’s still a 5.3 million Americans who had a financial burden taken off their back and acting like that didn’t happen when these numbers are a Google search away can only be explained by ignorance or malice.

[emptydragonseverywhere]

Also, acting like it was Biden and not the GOP who blocked further student loan forgiveness can also only be explained by ignorance or malice. Biden fought his entire presidency to expand loan forgiveness and Republicans in every branch and every level of government fought back at every opportunity. Biden was unable to expand loan forgiveness because Trump got to stack the Supreme Court in his first term (after the GOP's senate majority took the unprecedented step to refuse to confirm Obama's justice pick in his last year as president) and bc folks didn't show up to vote blue in the midterms in 2022, giving Republicans the majority in the House and thus the ability to block Biden's policies.

It wasn't Biden's fault that he had his student loan forgiveness plans blocked. It was the fault of every Republican and, truly, every American who could have voted blue down-ballot in every election they were eligible to vote in since 2012 and chose not to. If you aren't voting for dems in congressional and gubanatorial elections then you can't blame the dems when they don't have the power to implement the leftist policies you want to see. That's on you.

[zigdirty]

As someone who did benefit from the student loan forgiveness (on loans that my mother's second husband fraudulently took out using my information, no less), it absolutely provided immense relief. And I ONLY had less than $5k left to be paid back (although I never even received a dime of the loans.)

Reagan put the US on a path to destruction and every time anyone that isn't a far-right lunatic tries to course-correct, the conservative dark money made sure they never succeeded.

Every nationally beneficial piece of legislation in the last fifty years was from the left. Saying otherwise is sheer ignorance.

[callmearcturus]

And as someone who would have qualified for 10K of forgiveness only for the GOP to launch a dozen legal challenges: I hold all of you "lol the dems are useless" people personally responsible.

I think we've turned incrementalism into some great evil that must be destroyed because passing imperfect solutions isn't as sexy and fun as total reform. And I'm sick to my teeth about it.

Obamacare, the ACA, is an imperfect solution. It was not a universal option, and allowing the individual states to choose whether to take federal subsidies that were set aside for them regardless to expand Medicare created an enormous ironic hell. In red states, which refused the subsidies obvsly, you could be too poor for ACA coverage. I know because I lived in three such states. After Obamacare passed, I still was without insurance for years because I was too poor to be covered.

That, all of that? Is about as imperfect and fucked as a "solution" can be.

But then Obamacare literally saved my life. I would be dead without it. A few years ago, in Florida, I made barely enough money to qualify for ACA coverage. And then something went extremely wrong with my esophagus, and I had to get a magnetic ring surgically inserted around my throat or, y'all, I would have been dead in another month.

I'm sitting here alive because imperfect solutions. And when virtue-signaling cowards talk about how the Dems and GOP are the same, I want to scream, "The GOP would have let me fucking die! They have let so many others die! What the fuck is WRONG with you?"

You, all of you, are surrounded by people who are only here because imperfect Democratic solutions. And I think it's hideously disrespectful to the people who aren't here, who didn't survive, who didn't get the SNAP benefits they needed or didn't get the insurance they needed or didn't get the housing subsidy they needed, to pretend otherwise.

If that's you, if you have ever sat there and gone "the dems do nothing, I'm not going to bother voting," I want you to understand you were incorrect. And then I want you to do better.

[madlori]

"I didn't get the perfect progressive Utopia I wanted with a single election so WHY BOTHER, the left is USELESS."

--way too many fucking people

[steve-likes-robots]

It’s a whole lot of Clean-Hands-ism. “If I can’t be morally pure then I don’t want it” and then they accomplish absolutely nothing

[bumblebeerror]

Watched a cool video of a teenager who lost her hands as a small child demonstrating bionic hands that respond to her using the muscles in her remaining forearm.

Checked the comments to tell her how sick her hands are and how amazing it is that they’re 10k as opposed to in the US where they’re like 30k.

The comments were just a wall of people calling her a “clanker” or a “wireback”.

Like. Why. These people know that’s not funny on its own right. These people are aware this random girl is not their friend they share in jokes with right. They realize this is just being ableist when the whole robophobia “joke” is just doing discrimination. Like that is a human being who they are just calling a clanker for being disabled.

What the fuck.

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

people getting mad at ao3 for rightfully being firmly against censorship and allowing dark fics that depict taboo subjects in explicit details to be on their platform is so funny to me because ao3 was created specifically to be a fuck you to capitalism and censorship. the point of ao3 is that it’s a place to host and archive any fanwork, which includes fanwork about taboo topics that are not allowed on other platforms like wattpad or fanfiction.net

the whole point of ao3 is that it’s a safe space for all fics, and that includes fics about taboo subjects

ao3 has always been firmly against censorship since the day it was created, that’s why it’s run by fans, for fans, on fans’ donations, why it’s a nonprofit organization, that’s also why it has no ads or algorithms or any of those capitalism bullshit

if you have a problem with that, go to fanfiction.net or wattpad. no one forces you to stay in the house made specifically for the (affectionate) freaks

[steve-likes-robots]

AO3 isn’t the wholesome fic site invaded by perverts. AO3 is the pervert site that has some wholesome fics

[jester-nonconforming]

People still tend to lump JK Rowling in with the category of ~problematic artists~ and I need everyone to understand that is not the problem with her. She is not comparable to anyone who wrote a piece of fiction you hate, or someone who made rude comments in 2015 and has since learned better.

She is far more like Elon Musk. She is a radicalized person with an extreme amount of social and financial power, and for YEARS she has been using that power to try to influence her government into hurting vulnerable people, on purpose. And she has succeeded. THAT is the problem with her, and THAT is why spending money on her books is so dangerous, not because her books aged badly.

Critiquing her work is fine, of course (I personally was never a fan so I really don’t care) but you NEED to understand that fiction is not the main issue here. And I truly think acting like she’s the same as the rest of any giant list of ~problematic creators of the week~ waters down how dangerous she is.

[decadent-trans-girl]

[casceth]

i have to reblog this again because i go insane when people act like the problem with her is "its cringe for adults to like kids media" or like "the books sucked anyways" like those are completely irrelevant and try to shift the blame and focus from the active harm. even the fact the books also have bioessentialism and antisemitism is a whole different conversation

[ratbastarddotfuck]

tumblr keeps giving me these ads with straight up porn in them (like, nude dickriding) and while idgaf about seeing porn I really am like, exhausted by the double edged swords of "terms of service" and "advertising".

I can't post images that show too much of my stomach, because notable body fat trips whatever alarms are up in tumblr HQ. but advertisers can show me skinny white girls bouncing on it all day long bc like, they're advertisers.

we live in advertising world. companies have more rights to "expression" in public than individuals. once you notice it you won't stop seeing it. you have a moral duty to resist it.

[genderkoolaid]

& i sincerely doubt that the sex workers in those ads are profiting from them anyways. but i guess porn is allowed on here as long as sex workers aren't the ones benefitting

[melodies-stereo]

heartwarming: white USAmerican soldier comes back to stolen land from [Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Stolen Native American Land, Laos, Cambodia, Mexico, Guatemala, Republic of the Congo, Angola, El Salvador, Grenada, Venezuela, Indonesia, Japan, Cuba, Colombia, Timor-Leste, The Dominican Republic, Chile, Grenada, Nicaragua, Iran, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, Panama, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, Palestine, Syria,] after gleefully killing and/or aiding in the pointless killing and disenfranchisement of countless of innocent people in [any one of those countries, very likely several] for the horrifically imperialist country he knowingly serves. He reunites with his nuclear family as they all hug and emotional music plays over the video of it posted online. No one in the room cares to consider what he has done, except to celebrate it and admire the blood dripping from all their hands

[sour-echinacea]

i hate group projects so much

[shamebats]

[image ID: TikTok comment by Spedubopy: I once had a german bouncer look at my pre transition-ID and then back at me and just go "ja das ist an improvement" /end ID]

[abigailunderthemoon]

After I came out as an adult to my childhood best friend, he went back to his family and told them and then when we next spoke he said, ‘we’ve decided this is a good move for you.’

[moss-wizard]

[emilyelizabethfowl]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

No one wants to read your AI slop

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/02/nonconsensual-slopping/#robowanking

Everyone knows (or should know) that as fascinating as your dreams are to you, they are eye-glazingly dull to everyone else. Perhaps you have a friend or two who will tolerate you recounting your dreams at them (treasure those friends), but you should never, ever presume that other people want to hear about your dreams.

The same is true of your conversations with chatbots. Even if you find these conversations interesting, you should never assume that anyone else will be entertained by them. In the absence of an explicit reassurance to the contrary, you should presume that recounting your AI chatbot sessions to your friends is an imposition on the friendship, and forwarding the transcripts of those sessions doubly so (perhaps triply so, given the verbosity of chatbot responses).

I will stipulate that there might be friend groups out there where pastebombs of AI chat transcripts are welcome, but even if you work in such a milieu, you should never, ever assume that a stranger wants to see or hear about your AI "conversations." Tagging a chatbot into a social media conversation with a stranger and typing, "Hey Grok‡, what do you think of that?" is like masturbating in front of a stranger.

‡ Ugh

It's rude. It's an imposition. It's gross.

There's an even worse circle of hell than the one you create when you nonconsensually add a chatbot to a dialog: the hell that comes from reading something a stranger wrote, and then asking a chatbot to generate "commentary" on it and emailing it to that stranger.

Even the AI companies pitching their products claim that they need human oversight because they are prone to errors (including the errors that the companies dress up by calling them "hallucinations"). If you've read something you disagree with but don't understand well enough to rebut, and you ask an AI to generate a rebuttal for you, you still don't understand it well enough to rebut it.

You haven't generated a rebuttal: you have generated a blob of plausible sentences that may or may not constitute a valid critique of the work you're upset with – but until a human being who understands the issue goes through the AI output line by line and verifies it, it's just stochastic word-salad.

Once again: the act of prompting a sentence generator to create a rebuttal-shaped series of sentences does not impart understanding to the prompter. In the dialog between someone who's written something and someone who disagrees with it, but doesn't understand it well enough to rebut it, the only person qualified to evaluate the chatbot's output is the original author – that is, the stranger you've just emailed a chat transcript to.

Emailing a stranger a blob of unverified AI output is not a form of dialogue – it's an attempt to coerce a stranger into unpaid labor on your behalf. Strangers are not your "human in the loop" whose expensive time is on offer to painstakingly work through the plausible sentences a chatbot made for you for free.

Remember: even the AI companies will tell you that the work of overseeing an AI's output is valuable labor. The fact that you can costlessly (to you) generate infinite volumes of verbose, plausible-seeming topical sentences in no way implies that the people who actually think about things and then write them down have the time to mark your chatbot's homework.

That is a fatal flaw in the idea that we will increase our productivity by asking chatbots to summarize things we don't understand: by definition, if we don't understand a subject, then we won't be qualified to evaluate the summary, either.

There simply is no substitute for learning about a subject and coming to understand it well enough to advance the subject, whether by contributing your own additions or by critiquing its flaws. That's not to say that we shouldn't aspire to participate in discourse about areas that seem interesting or momentous – but asking a chatbot to contribute on your behalf does not impart insight to you, and it is a gross imposition on people who have taken the time to understand and participate using their own minds and experience.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[mostlysignssomeportents]

[hymnsofnauseatingbanality]

As a teacher who has to read essays written by AI, this resonates.

[sztupy]

I'm at the point where I'll just block anyone commenting KI've asked ChatGPT and..." under any of my posts

[clickrtrained]

its really interesting how you can say something like "opression of the transmisogynized appears to be a historical constant across history even in societies with different conceptualizations of gender" and some dude thinks it Makes Sense to say shit like "that statement is transandrophobic because it does not mention Me"

[tgirl-tamag0tchi]

I may post a lot about how awful being a man/boy was.

But that’s because I’m a girl, being a man was existentially wrong for me.

Im glad transmascs exist, and that others enjoy the aspects of gender that brought me discomfort. Just as I find wonder in what ailed them.

[kris29301]

start using doctor as nonbinary sir/maam, its so much fun i PROMISE

[kris29301]