Castor | 20s | She/Her | White | Skills include being bad at video games, drawing art but never posting it, and dreaming up stories I'll never write. Ask A Question.
"But it's not FOR them!!!" The biggest military power in the world belongs to a christofascist nation overseen by a felon found guilty of 34 federal crimes and has greenlit a gestapo with more direct funding than the entire military of Canada for the purpose of ethnic cleansing. Let Hetero Jessica throw some biodegradable glitter at a municipal parade
At this point if anyone is trying to exclude anyone benignly pro-queer from a pro-queer space I'm just going to assume you're a fed or something idk like something something destabilize the movement from within or whatever
I am making a VERY big point of the Ally flag in all my pride stuff at work.
Feel awkward about people maybe thinking you’re queer but still want to clearly signal “queers are okay with me”? SURE. LOVE IT. HERE’S YOUR WEIRD FLAG.
Don’t fucking at me about allies right now, they are ALSO actually getting fucking killed over us. Take your puri-gay shitty tent somewhere else mine is great with people’s cishet friends and relatives showing up to have our backs.
(“but what if they -“ shitty behavior is shitty behavior I don’t care if you INVENTED queer sex, if you’re acting like a douche i’ll kick you out. wanna act decent and accept the premises of queer coexistence and freedom, cool, i’m not judging you for feeling ok with the gender title they gave you in the delivery room or being attracted to people with the other standard issue title, grab a pop).
If you're with us, you're welcome. Sure, sometimes you have to wear the costume before it becomes the clothes, but also, some of the best people at Pride are the slightly confused moms, dads, and siblings who show up whether or not they understand. "Love is love" also means "I don't need to get it to show up for you."
You can enjoy things in fiction that would be awful in the real world. Like playing a murderhobo in a game! In the real world, being or supporting a murderer-thief would be pretty damn awful, while in the game it's just good fun. Same with anything else you choose to do with the pixels on the screen, like kinks that don't affect anyone real, so they're okay in fiction, but would be pretty damn bad in real life.
No one else is responsible for your online experience. They are required not to harass you, but they are not and never will be obligated to not post about ships, kinks, or tropes you dislike just to avoid you seeing them. It's up to you to blacklist words or phrases, block tags, or even block users as needed to avoid seeing content that upsets you.
No one can force you to read anything against your consent. Any content you don't like seeing can be instantly avoided by closing out of the offending post/fic.
You are not owed an online experience free of discomfort.
Nothing that happens in your imagination can ever make you a bad person. Words you write or read about fictional characters will never make you a bad person.
The claim that media consumption influences real-life behavior is intellectually dishonest and serves only to excuse the behavior of real offenders.
Fiction is a safe way to explore horrifying or confusing concepts. Therapists agree that fiction, even (or especially) about taboo topics is a good coping mechanism, especially, but not exclusively, for trauma survivors. Fiction is to adults what play therapy is to children. This doesn't stop being true if the work in question is of a sexual nature.
Sex isn't an inherently worse or better motivation than anything else. A work written to create feelings of arousal isn't dirty, shameful, or in any way less pure than works written to entertain, provoke moral questions, or for other reasons. And worth noting is that multiple purposes can exist in the same story, especially fanfiction.
You aren't entitled to an explanation for why someone reads, writes, or otherwise enjoys certain works, kinks, tropes, ships, etc.
btw it is sexy and cool to uplift and admire people who have skills you wish you had without using their ability as a stick to beat yourself with. even and especially if you are jealous of them.
At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think that college should be free and also not a requirement for employment outside of highly specialized career fields
technically you can, if you don't care about degrees.
Free Harvard courses.
Free Courses from Stanford.
Free Courses from MIT.
Free courses from Yale.
Free courses from Princeton.
Free courses on Coursera.
Free Courses on EDx
Free Courses on Alison
For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.
When searching, the phrases you're looking for are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), or you can do a general search of say, "free online college courses."
Oh, and so you don't get surprised like I did, have an avoid: Hillsdale College is a conservative Christian site and not a valid MOOC place. Sign up with them and you will get things like THIS IS WHY THE LEFT IS TURNING YOUR KIDS TRANS AND GAY in your inbox.
fictional characters can't consent because they aren't real.. but YOU can consent to reading heavy themes, and you can withdraw consent by clicking the back button and stopping any time, it is your choice to read stories that include or exclude consent 👍
Heya! Sorry In advance if this sounds like the rambling of an insane man I’m running on 2 hours of sleep rn lol.
I was wondering about a character I’ve seen you and a couple others describe as a non-white character: Alistair Theirin from dragon age origins. Personally I’ve always thought he seemed pretty obviously white (There’s a scene where he describes the food he makes as ‘textureless grey mush” ….nobody is doing that like white ppl), so I was wondering what flagged him as non-white for you? I was also wondering if you’d be able to run a poll for me since this is a new blog (old blog got nuked :/) and you have a large fan base of people who this would be relevant to, maybe something like this?:
Do you consider Alistair (DAO) to be White?
Yes because of his in game context
Yes because of his character design
No because of his in game context
No because of his character design
All good if not, have a great day and know that I love your blog :D
I will not be running a poll for that, as the last time the words poll and Dragon Age were together on this page, I had to deal with the most overtly stupid level of gaslighting and racism I have ever experienced.
What I WILL do is leave this here for the cool dragon age people to explain their reasoning.
Hi 👋 I've been protesting the whitewashing of Alistair since this blog's creation in 2014. So I'm very familiar with people arguing things like "how can you whitewash a white character". Because fandom has a short term memory, I guess.
When Dragon Age: Origins (the first game) came out in 2009, Alistair was designed with light brown skin - specifically 4 out of 6 on their scale of the limited tints used in that game. (For comparison, Zevran has the darkest skin tint available.)
When Dragon Age II came out in 2011, Alistair was designed with tanned skin - specifically 6 out of 12.
When Dragon Age: Inquisition came out in 2014, Alistair was designed with the palest skin you can imagine, and blonde hair - specifically 0 out of 11. ZERO! He was so unrecognizable that fans at the time speculated who the hell he even was when BioWare promoted the game with screenshots and video clips including him. Because they did not clock him as Alistair.
This is all Alistair throughout the game series (I use this image a lot because the progressive change is so clear):
(His nose shape changes too, though it's not as noticeable from the front view.)
There are canonically confirmed characters of colour with about the same skin tone as Alistair in DAO. Why is that good enough for them, but not for him? Oops, those characters get whitewashed too. Because the DA fandom is racist as hell.
Some fans are so desperate to argue that the above change isn't that bad by doing things like showing edited screenshots of DAO, or claiming it's all just DAO's poor lighting, (note that the above image is of his head model outside of the game's lighting,) or claiming that he's just really tan. And it pisses me off, because what exactly do they get out of that argument? Why are they so desperate to cling to the idea that Alistair, their prince charming, cannot possibly be a brown man?
Meanwhile, the Dragon Age franchise as a whole is incredibly white. And even the characters that are unmistakably people of colour get ignored and/or whitewashed to death and back. So yes, I am passionate about defending Alistair as being brown. Especially because Alistair is specifically mixed, like me.
Now, I myself am whitepassing because I take after my white mother, but I have many family members who are sure as hell not. And I know exactly what it's like to have other kids ask questions like "is that your real dad" when getting picked up from school. Or learning that it's safe to get stopped by the RCMP with my mother driving the car but not my father. Or being ridiculed by white family members for never being white enough for their standards. So, when I read in the Dragon Age novel, The Calling, how Alistair's mother chose to give him up instead of raising him herself because she was terrified of how he would be treated as a mixed-race prince born out of wedlock, yeah, I got it. It was incredibly sad, but I got where she was coming from, as a character. What makes it even more sad is that Alistair was subsequently placed in the care of a white man who neglected him - specifically, the brother of King Maric's dead wife. This is again, something that a lot of mixed people can relate to. I think that kind of context is more important than him joking about how he's a shitty cook. (Again, he was raised by a negligent white man in Ferelden, of course he's never gotten to experience culinary delights.)
I've talked about the "ambiguous brown" trope found in Dragon Age before - being fantasy not an excuse for BioWare not to put in the effort when crafting their characters of colour to be more respectful and authentic racialized representation. Yes, the franchise has certainly improved over the years, but it still always feels like two steps forward, one step back. That said, it is no stronger an excuse for some fans to try and claim that just because BioWare pulled this trope, somehow any brown character is now invalidated and Actually White™. More whitewashing is not the answer. Effort is the answer - which is something that makes blogs like @creatingblackcharacters so valuable, actually!
hello fellow artists. google has fallen. pinterest/duckduckgo AI filters don't work. do not despair; here is a list i made of places to find reference images without having to sift through piles of worthless garbage. (for future editing convenience i am just linking my blog post on dreamwidth.)
✨ good places to find art reference that are not full of AI trash 🌈
If you don't want LinkTree putting your imagery into AI... get out now
Just canceled my account (not that I used it that much). But I won’t permit this. Via @unaminh.bsky.social:
IMPORTANT: For any artists/writers/etc etc, using Linktree to point people to their work, from 5 July, they'll be feeding all imagery you use on your landing page into DALL-E by OpenAI.
the best fanfiction you've ever read was written by a woman in her 40s before she made dinner for her kids. it was written by a teenager after school when they should've been studying for a history test. and a barista came up with the idea while they cleaned the espresso machine and busser fact-checked it on their break and the post-doc edited between writing grant proposals and the nurse apologized for typos in the notes after a long shift and behind every drabble and one-shot and multi-chapter fic there is a person with a wonderful and interesting and chaotic life and it is such a privilege that we get to be apart of it because they decided to do this thing we all share, for fun.
one time i told a group of lesbian and bi women that i have never watched wicked and they were shocked, gagged, gooped, “but you’re queer. you like pussy. how have you not seen wicked?” yeah. well. i like pussy, not musicals?
"why polyamorous people aren't valid" "mspec lesbians AREN'T okay actually" "aroallos are freaks" "he/him dni. cis men dni" "this post is for non-men only" yessss and the one with long hair goes in the girl box, then the one with short hair goes in the boy box!!
maybe I'm just a boring he/him white guy but inventing about 7 trillion terms to define "man" and "woman" so you can reinforce gender essentialism isn't very "love is love" of you. maybe i just don't have a sexuality but picking and choosing what sexualities are normal and which ones are "weird and predatory" sounds like we're all a bunch of republicans on fox news. if you attend your local pride parade and look REAAALLLYYY closely, you'll notice you can't actually tell if someone's gay or not from their appearance, and there's no way to know if they're "invading queer spaces". maybe it's just me, but when i attended my local gaybar last night for the drag show, they didn't ask for my gay-card with a peer reviewed diagnosis of faggot stamped on it. they just let me in the building. i live a life of bliss and luxury in not caring about any queer discourse ever, and just going "WHATEVER MAKES YOU HAPPY :-)" while booting up the latest cod game. and it seems much more fun than whatever the fuck you people are on about
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
I recently stumbled upon people discussing headcanons on this topic under another post and now I'm Curioise. (rbs for reach are appreciated!! and please share details in the tags I'd love to know!)
if you have multiple Rooks, vote for whoever is your main/favourite!
so why does *your* Rook wear that shoddy starting armour?
they literally just dress like that. it's their style (or lack thereof)
sold their old armour to get money while on the road
trying to look inconspicuous (of their own volition)
trying to look inconspicuous (varric and/or harding made them)
act of fashion defiance towards whoever kicked them out/solas/varric/the world
I headcanon/mod them into wearing something different (like what?)
fictional characters can't consent because they aren't real.. but YOU can consent to reading heavy themes, and you can withdraw consent by clicking the back button and stopping any time, it is your choice to read stories that include or exclude consent 👍
