of course you should be afraid of the dark

everything around you is light & it’s gorgeous & if you stay too long it will kill you | M0stlyVoid on Ao3 | do not follow if you are under 18 | if you’re a hockey blog and i followed you, you’re looking for @idontlikeem :)

[bonesliketambourines]

Every morning when I take my vitamin D pill, I look at the label on the top of the pot, which says Bones, and think: "Uh-huh, bones like tambourines" and I thought you should know this.

anon, this is the best ask i’ve ever gotten in my whole entire life, you were right i DID need to know this.

[kinkuary]

master list

hi everyone <3 i hope you like this year's prompt list! here is this year's collection, which i'm going to open sometime on january 31.

a few notes:

the collection is unmoderated and i am not reading each individual entry. please be mindful of your fellow participants and tag and warn as is appropriate!

this is a pan-fandom event. all pairings from all fandoms are welcome, no exceptions. no anti nonsense will be tolerated, and if you see any please send me a note so i can ban that person from participating.

there are no minimum participation requirements for this event. you can do some, all, or none, and the prompt fills don't have to be posted the day of—this is just a guideline to hopefully help spark your creativity in a tough month of the year! in the past, people have even combined multiple prompts for one larger work. whatever you want! just try to keep the theme in mind.

the use of AI in any capacity is not permitted. that includes for artwork, writing, and editing. if i discover that AI has been used, the submission will be removed and the participant banned.

leave comments! we all do our best to create for ourselves, but communities are only as strong as the participants. the best way to encourage others to comment on your stuff is to lead by example—be the change!

and finally—this is an 18+ only event. no exceptions.

happy writing!

last year we had 270 entries- do you guys think we can do that again?

[maesterchill]

Custom pet emojis and profile pics

Hey tumblr friends. I've started doing pet emoji/avatar commissions - below are a few examples with my Leo.

If you'd like one of your pet, head on over to my ko-fi page ☕ or send me a DM

Show off your pup or kitty (or budgie or sheep) in the group chat with a cute emoji or profile pic!

Can't wait to see and draw all of your lovely furry friends!

Reblogging = love 💖💖💖 Thank you for your support!

(For full pet portraits printed on canvas or framed, you can check out my website)

[saintgarbanzo]

✨🏳️‍⚧️ support rooney's top surgery 🏳️‍⚧️✨

hello friends! have you been thinking to yourself, "wow i'd love to give rooney a birthday present that also gives the middle finger to jkr"? well i have good news for you! you can contribute to rooney's top surgery fund! what better way to say "happy birthday and fuck you, terfs!" than to mobilize our hp fic community to fund gender affirming surgery for our sweetest cinnamon roll @academicdisasterfic!

visit rooney's gofundme page to donate! we're trying to raise £2500!

any donation amount is appreciated!

as a thank you for a donation of £25 you can submit a prompt for one of the following:

a microfic from @lqtraintracks

a microfic from @nv-md

a curated playlist from @lou-ifyouwant

a three card tarot reading from @saintgarbanzo

a microfic from our dearest @academicdisasterfic himself!

AND! a wonderful anonymous member of our community has already pledged to match the first £150 of donations!

this community is a safe haven where so many of us have been able to explore and affirm our queerness. rooney was able to realize and begin his gender journey through the stories we tell here and the support of this community 💙💖🤍💖💙

we thank you from the bottom of our queer little hearts for all your support! 🌈❤️🧡💛💚💙💜🌈 let's do this!

[saintgarbanzo]

i was going to wait a few hours to do the time zone reblog but we just passed £1000. this community raised over £1000 in only six hours.

i am crying right now and feel so lucky and proud to be a part of this amazing, loving, generous community.

thank you so much to every one who has donated, reblogged, liked, commented, and sent me beautiful messages of support. it's been a tough year for queer rights and all of your generous support is an incredible reminder of just how many people out there love and value trans lives. i cannot thank you enough.

one of the lovely messages i received was from @babooshkart who kindly volunteered to offer doodles for £25 donations!

i also received a message from another wonderful person in our community who offered to match the next £50

the donations are incredible and mind blowing and the support is priceless. i love you all. you have given me the gift of getting to wake rooney up on his birthday to tell him we've raised over £1000 while he was asleep.

[academicdisasterfic]

Holy fucking shit. Guys. Guys.

The past few months have been hard. I’ve been stressed and burnt out and sorting out top surgery has felt often futile and hopeless. I didn’t know if it was going to be able to happen for such a long time and my chest dysphoria has been getting worse and worse. I’ve pushed back the idea of fundraising for months - years, really, and I was only able to with my darling’s @saintgarbanzo help. I thought maybe we’d get a few hundred to help with my initial consultation costs that are currently sitting on my credit card.

I still haven’t really processed what this community has done for me. You all have already saved me so many times. I felt like asking for more was greedy. I have no idea what I did to deserve any of you, but I’m so, so grateful, and this money is going to help more than I can possibly say. Thank you so much to Chickpea for helping me do this and to @nv-md @lqtraintracks @lou-ifyouwant @oknowkiss @babooshkart for offering up their time and talent to help me. You are all so precious to me and I’ve been crying all day thinking about it (in a good way). You’re changing my life in a way I didn’t think was going to be possible this soon for me. I adore you all.

Thank you to this sweet, loving community for welcoming me in and making me one of you. I’ll never be able to tell you how grateful I am. Thank you so, so much.

[saintgarbanzo]

just wanted to give everyone an update!!

we've raised close to £2000 for rooney in two days, which is incredible.

almost all of that money has come from this community and your enthusiasm for this cause and your love for rooney. i am just floored. proud. awed. extremely grateful. every time i sit down to write another little update and think about how all of you came through for rooney i cry a little more.

we have some tentatively exciting news that might give our fundraiser even wider coverage, but we're being cautious about it until we know rooney's privacy and safety will be respected. but in anticipation of that wider coverage, we've decided to raise the fund raising amount to cover the taxes rooney will have to pay when he withdraws from his govt retirement fund (close to £1000 in taxes) and the cost of the flight from australia to scotland for rooney's mum, so she can come take care of him after his surgery. i just wanted to be transparent about why we did that, and also say that, truly, you've all helped so much already. all i want to do with this update is thank you.

i've gotten a lot of messages from people asking how they can help now. the best way to help now is to spread the word beyond our little community here. if you have an account on a different social media platform, please consider posting the link there. if you're in other discord servers, check with the mods of that server to see if you can post it there. if you feel comfortable and safe sending it to people in your life, please do. i've made sure the gofundme page has no mention of fanfic to keep us all safe in our little community.

from the bottom of my heart, thank you. this will change rooney's life. i keep imagining that ten years from now we'll be thinking about how much happier rooney has been since his surgery and how all of you helped make that happen. i feel like i'll be grateful for this for my entire life. i'll never run out of love or gratitude for all of you.

[themirokai]

I got this comment on a story from my Other AO3 Account this morning.

(Info redacted because I prefer keeping these accounts separate but no one follows me on the side blog I have for that account.)

The story was posted almost a year ago and is relatively “popular” by my average statistics even though it has tropes and themes that are big turnoffs for a lot of people (hence separate accounts). This popularity is undoubtedly because it’s a Marvel Loki story and that fandom is massive.

So there is obviously an algorithm or a bot scrubbing ao3 statistics and leaving this comment on fics that meet a certain metric with the main character of the fic inserted into the comment.

I had a little time to kill this morning so I decided to investigate further. And y’all this is so predatory. Come on this journey with me. It made me mad. It may make you mad.

First, if you go to Webnovel’s website, you HAVE to choose between male lead or female lead stories before you can go any further. WTF?

And that’s weird, but this gets so much worse. This is basically a pay-to-read site that has different subscription models. Which… okay BUT! The authors don’t get paid! Look at that comment again. They’re promising a supportive and nurturing community, but zero monetary compensation. It’s basically, “post your stuff here so we can get paid and you can get… nice vibes?” I mean look at this Orwellian writing:

Using the phrase “pay-to-read model” in the same sentence as “qualitative changes in lifestyles for authors” deliberately makes you think that you can get paid and maybe even make a living on this website. But that’s not actually what it says and authors will not receive one red cent.

Oh but wait, the worst is still to come. In case this breaks containment (which I kind of hope it does) this is where I mention that I’m a lawyer in the US.

I don’t do intellectual property or copyright law but I do read and write contracts for a living. So I went to look at their terms of service. It was fun!

Highlights the first, in which Webnovel gets a license to do basically whatever they want with content you post on their site. This is how they get to be paid for people reading authors’ writing without paying them anything.

Highlights the second, in which Webnovel takes no responsibility for illegally profiting off of fan fic. This all says that the writer is 100% responsible for everything the writer posts (even though only Webnovel is making money from it).

Highlights the third which say that by posting, the author is representing that they have the legal right to use and to let Webnovel use the content according to these terms. So if a writer posts fan fiction and Webnovel makes money from people reading the fan fiction, and the House of the Mouse catches wise, these sections say that that’s ALL on the writer.

So that’s a little skeevy to start off with but the thing that is seriously shitty and made me make this post was that these assholes are coming to ao3. They are actively recruiting people in comments on their fan fiction. And they are saying they are big fans of the character you’re writing about and that they share your interests.

They are recruiting fan fiction writers and giving every impression that you can make money from posting fan fiction on their site and hiding the fact that you absolutely cannot but they can make money off of you while you try, deep in their terms of service which no one but a lawyer who writes fan fic and has some time to kill will read.

I see posts on here regularly from people who don’t understand how this stuff works, don’t understand that they (and others) can not legally make a financial profit from fan fiction. And there are tons of people who will not take the time to dig into the details.

Don’t deal with these bastards. Fuck Webnovel.

[mapsontheweb]

The Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River superimposed on a map of Europe

[shadow-manor]

The rest of the thread is here.

tl;dr: Don’t monetize AO3, kids.  You won’t like what happens next.

[ratherembarrassing]

read this thread. this is by far the most concise explanation of a lot of different issues that i’ve seen in fandom spaces in a while. cosigning both the linked thread and the thread about aus/uk/can law that’s linked in-thread.

[billybluboy]

AHDHXHEBSG TWITTER WRITERS DID WHAT NOW???? AND PEOPLE PAID THEM????

[prof-grace-aspen]

If someone has never taken a class that includes copyright law, they may not know this stuff, so I don’t necessarily blame random people for not knowing what copyright is, but like… maybe just maybe it’s something that should be taught????

[antifa-stray]

[etakeh]

You know, every so often I think I should update my pirated copy of CS2.

Then I see things like this, and remember that I don't need it more than I need it, you know?

Dated 3/22/23

[tinylongwing]

Heads up, folks. I haven't seen this going around tumblr yet, but it's all over my twitter feed. If you're using a current version of photoshop, make sure this is switched off - it's opted in by default.

[shealwaysreads]

Saw my first post with someone admitting they used chatGPT to ‘write a fic’ which they then shared here on tumblr and on Ao3.

To be clear, using AI to churn out a piece of fiction is not writing.

Using a bot (possibly one that was trained using a scrape of Ao3, that is to say, the theft of work from every writer who has posted their work on Ao3) is NOT WRITING.

It is theft. It isn’t creation. It’s a regurgitation of the consumed collective work and effort and heart and time of every writer who has shared their work on Ao3.

‘I’m not a good writer’ is no excuse.

Want to be a writer? Put in the time everyone else does to practice.

Don’t feel confident in your work? Open yourself up to the same vulnerability and risk that the rest of us do.

You don’t get to use a fucking bot to vomit out an approximation of a story and pretend you’ve got skin in the game.

The sad thing? This bot-assembled fic wasn’t bad. It was bland, but it had internal logic, some passing context to character and canon. It wasn’t like those early AI art pieces that had surreal compositions and extra fingers. It wasn’t immediately obvious it was made by a bot.

In this instance the person who posted it admitted they had used a bot. Which, actually, I have some respect for. But it probably isn’t the first and it won’t be the last.

I don’t know that there’s a solution to this, but it is both hurting my heart and enraging me.

[thehoneybeet]

Just wanted to add to this really important post. (Thank you sm @shealwaysreads)

I think part of the issue here is that people who do this think of fic as an end product. As a thing to be consumed. As content.

That's not fanfic.

Fic, in its essence, is the act of creation, of transformation. It is critically analyzing characters, exploring ideas, relationships, societal values, the dynamics of love and sexuality... the list goes on. Fic is a process that encapsulates all of this, the effort to make something that means something. That says something about what it means to be human (yes, kinky smut included). That takes vulnerability and guts and love to put out into the world.

If you think of fic as content that is there to be consumed, then yeah, it makes sense to find a quick and easy way to produce it. If the point for you is getting attention (kudos, reblogs, etc) with little to no work, using AI is tempting. But that's a capitalistic mindset that entirely negates what fanfic is.

If we instead think of fanfic as a creative process, then AI fic is not fanfic at all. Call it something else.

[vukovich]

Lukewarm take from left field. I'm not threatened by this, in part because I write weird. Like, nobody following me is here for a bot-logical good story. If I thought my writing could be indistinguishable from a bot, I would *die* terrifically.

[shealwaysreads]

Fascinating to see a take on a post about the intrusion of ai tech into a creative community be so entirely focused on the self.

To clarify for anyone confused:

I made my original post because this is the first time I saw it happening, despite the fact we all knew this was coming as soon as midjourney landed in the art scene and we heard about the ao3 scrape.

While my writing is my own, and I’m secure and proud of it, I’m not under any self-congratulatory illusion that I was that good when I started. Many of the fics I’ve read by first-time writers are similar to what this bot produced, and those writers still deserve basic respect and civility.

Anyone working under the delusion that ai tech won’t get better at its manipulation of the data is sadly mistaken. If you haven’t been following the ai progress on visual art, you might have missed that you can now request pieces to be produced in the specific style of an established artist. And the bots can do that now! They can make visual pieces almost indistinguishable from the original artist’s style—no matter how unique, or weird, that original artist’s style is.

My post wasn’t about me, or my writing. It was about the encroachment of ai and the accompanying cultural devaluation of human artistic expression outside of the work-based capitalist model.

It was about the impact of wholesale thefts of a community’s collective work.

It was about the meaning and importance of people’s generosity in sharing their genuine creations.

It was about vulnerability and the creative process being more important than the ego.

[not-terezi-pyrope]

You guys are getting so pathetic about this oh my God. The case that works created by machine learning systems are somehow more derivative than the output of any person who is engaged with their culture (we all learn from what we read and hear, folks!) is already absurd, but. Imagine claiming that you've been stolen from by a machine learning algorithm pulling metadata from web text to build a language distribution model when you yourselves are writing fanfiction, which is directly based on the work of others. What happened to "everything is a remix?" This website flipped to rabid copyright worship the minute somebody yelled that the scary machines were coming, which is ironic because nothing these AIs are producing, bar cases of willful human mimicry and some of bad data, has any identifiable/tangible connection to existing human works at all. If you want to go join the IP lawyers trying to take down the OfTW then go do that, but don't try and make the double standard mesh because one is your hobby and the other is spooky computer science you feel threatened by.

"Cultural devaluation of human expression" we already live under capitalism, which has always been able to exploit people to churn out schlock that will make money. In fact, the corporations you are concerned about can buy the rights to training text, so this complaint doesn't even concern them. This isn't Big Tech invading a space, this is people having fun by asking a machine to write about the characters they like. Start finding value in your own artistic voice rather than pushing this culture club exceptionalist entitlement to all works made in your medium. Nothing has been stolen from you except your dignity, and it wasn't AI that took it.

[shealwaysreads]

Saw my first post with someone admitting they used chatGPT to ‘write a fic’ which they then shared here on tumblr and on Ao3.

To be clear, using AI to churn out a piece of fiction is not writing.

Using a bot (possibly one that was trained using a scrape of Ao3, that is to say, the theft of work from every writer who has posted their work on Ao3) is NOT WRITING.

It is theft. It isn’t creation. It’s a regurgitation of the consumed collective work and effort and heart and time of every writer who has shared their work on Ao3.

‘I’m not a good writer’ is no excuse.

Want to be a writer? Put in the time everyone else does to practice.

Don’t feel confident in your work? Open yourself up to the same vulnerability and risk that the rest of us do.

You don’t get to use a fucking bot to vomit out an approximation of a story and pretend you’ve got skin in the game.

The sad thing? This bot-assembled fic wasn’t bad. It was bland, but it had internal logic, some passing context to character and canon. It wasn’t like those early AI art pieces that had surreal compositions and extra fingers. It wasn’t immediately obvious it was made by a bot.

In this instance the person who posted it admitted they had used a bot. Which, actually, I have some respect for. But it probably isn’t the first and it won’t be the last.

I don’t know that there’s a solution to this, but it is both hurting my heart and enraging me.

[thehoneybeet]

Just wanted to add to this really important post. (Thank you sm @shealwaysreads)

I think part of the issue here is that people who do this think of fic as an end product. As a thing to be consumed. As content.

That's not fanfic.

Fic, in its essence, is the act of creation, of transformation. It is critically analyzing characters, exploring ideas, relationships, societal values, the dynamics of love and sexuality... the list goes on. Fic is a process that encapsulates all of this, the effort to make something that means something. That says something about what it means to be human (yes, kinky smut included). That takes vulnerability and guts and love to put out into the world.

If you think of fic as content that is there to be consumed, then yeah, it makes sense to find a quick and easy way to produce it. If the point for you is getting attention (kudos, reblogs, etc) with little to no work, using AI is tempting. But that's a capitalistic mindset that entirely negates what fanfic is.

If we instead think of fanfic as a creative process, then AI fic is not fanfic at all. Call it something else.

[vukovich]

Lukewarm take from left field. I'm not threatened by this, in part because I write weird. Like, nobody following me is here for a bot-logical good story. If I thought my writing could be indistinguishable from a bot, I would *die* terrifically.

[shealwaysreads]

Fascinating to see a take on a post about the intrusion of ai tech into a creative community be so entirely focused on the self.

To clarify for anyone confused:

I made my original post because this is the first time I saw it happening, despite the fact we all knew this was coming as soon as midjourney landed in the art scene and we heard about the ao3 scrape.

While my writing is my own, and I’m secure and proud of it, I’m not under any self-congratulatory illusion that I was that good when I started. Many of the fics I’ve read by first-time writers are similar to what this bot produced, and those writers still deserve basic respect and civility.

Anyone working under the delusion that ai tech won’t get better at its manipulation of the data is sadly mistaken. If you haven’t been following the ai progress on visual art, you might have missed that you can now request pieces to be produced in the specific style of an established artist. And the bots can do that now! They can make visual pieces almost indistinguishable from the original artist’s style—no matter how unique, or weird, that original artist’s style is.

My post wasn’t about me, or my writing. It was about the encroachment of ai and the accompanying cultural devaluation of human artistic expression outside of the work-based capitalist model.

It was about the impact of wholesale thefts of a community’s collective work.

It was about the meaning and importance of people’s generosity in sharing their genuine creations.

It was about vulnerability and the creative process being more important than the ego.

[bonesliketambourines]

Oh my god lol imagine being so convinced that you’re soooooo different and better than the other lowly boring members of fandom that the encroachment of AI on creative endeavors doesn’t worth you? Because you’re ~weird? “I would die if a bot could mimic me” baby they’re going to learn to mimic everyone, and that’s not even the point, the point is that it’s hurting people in the fandom already. Or do you not care since you’re so edgy and special compared to the rest of us boring losers?

I’m sorry but that sort of attitude does not belong in a community-based hobby like this. If you’re going to “not like other girls” about fanfic and fandom I don’t want you anywhere near me. That mindset is toxic.

Do better.

[shealwaysreads]

Saw my first post with someone admitting they used chatGPT to ‘write a fic’ which they then shared here on tumblr and on Ao3.

To be clear, using AI to churn out a piece of fiction is not writing.

Using a bot (possibly one that was trained using a scrape of Ao3, that is to say, the theft of work from every writer who has posted their work on Ao3) is NOT WRITING.

It is theft. It isn’t creation. It’s a regurgitation of the consumed collective work and effort and heart and time of every writer who has shared their work on Ao3.

‘I’m not a good writer’ is no excuse.

Want to be a writer? Put in the time everyone else does to practice.

Don’t feel confident in your work? Open yourself up to the same vulnerability and risk that the rest of us do.

You don’t get to use a fucking bot to vomit out an approximation of a story and pretend you’ve got skin in the game.

The sad thing? This bot-assembled fic wasn’t bad. It was bland, but it had internal logic, some passing context to character and canon. It wasn’t like those early AI art pieces that had surreal compositions and extra fingers. It wasn’t immediately obvious it was made by a bot.

In this instance the person who posted it admitted they had used a bot. Which, actually, I have some respect for. But it probably isn’t the first and it won’t be the last.

I don’t know that there’s a solution to this, but it is both hurting my heart and enraging me.

[kinkuary]

day two

find the rules and post to the collection here!

[kinkuary]

welcome to kinkuary 2023

happy new year to you all :) we're back!

if you're new, kinkuary is a low-key, no-pressure, all-fandom event. you can write (or draw, or whatever!) as many or as few prompts as you want, and they do not have to be posted on the exact day of the prompt if you need more time. there's no minimum word count or requirement for beta-reading, but i do request comprehensive tagging just because some of the prompts can involve triggers—we want everyone to have an enjoyable and safe fest :)

feel free to combine these prompts with other events (for example, if you're writing for a specific pairing, you can use one of these prompts to help guide your ficlet). you can switch fandoms and pairings if that floats your boat—this event is open to all, so feel free to reblog and tell all your friends in case they're looking for a little smutty inspiration this month!

if you have any questions, you can message me here or send an ask—please be patient as this is not my primary blog and i will only be checking it once a day.

you can find the ao3 collection here! happy creating!

*as in years past, this event is 18+ only. thank you for respecting this.

[kinkuary]

welcome to kinkuary 2023

happy new year to you all :) we're back!

if you're new, kinkuary is a low-key, no-pressure, all-fandom event. you can write (or draw, or whatever!) as many or as few prompts as you want, and they do not have to be posted on the exact day of the prompt if you need more time. there's no minimum word count or requirement for beta-reading, but i do request comprehensive tagging just because some of the prompts can involve triggers—we want everyone to have an enjoyable and safe fest :)

feel free to combine these prompts with other events (for example, if you're writing for a specific pairing, you can use one of these prompts to help guide your ficlet). you can switch fandoms and pairings if that floats your boat—this event is open to all, so feel free to reblog and tell all your friends in case they're looking for a little smutty inspiration this month!

if you have any questions, you can message me here or send an ask—please be patient as this is not my primary blog and i will only be checking it once a day.

you can find the ao3 collection here! happy creating!

*as in years past, this event is 18+ only. thank you for respecting this.

[only-tiktoks]

[kinkuary]

hmm i'd originally planned to put the master list up on the 25th, should i do it the 18th instead?

[kinkuary]

hi everyone.