And yet, here we are

Design, writing, fandom musings

[anferneesuellcosplay]

Agen Kolar Cosplay (and some Dreamcon Footage)

[teaboot]

"Oh yeah, we have an outdoor Corgi, he just gets so bored cooped up inside all day. He knows to stay off the road. Don't worry, he's way too smart for coyotes and the neighbor's know to look out when they drive past."

"Us? Oh, of *course* our Dachshund sleeps inside- we just let him out in the morning and make sure he comes back for dinner. He just does his own thing, no worries."

"Um, you know it's not humane to keep a chihuahua confined to an apartment? They're dogs, they're natural predators. They need to experience hunting behaviors or they get depressed. No we don't leash ours, he absolutely hates it, we just let him come and go whenever."

Yall get how fucking stupid that sounds, right? So stop letting your goddamn cats get eaten and attacked and infected and hit by cars

A toddler would probably love full unattended access to the neighborhood too, but we don't do that either, do we

It's 2026, "keep your damn pet in a house or in your view" should not be controversial

[angel-stars]

I had to go on a hunt for this but it was worth it. 100% agree

[queermania]

i think it’s okay if people are a little bit stupid (or oblivious) and need things spelled out for them but i also think media should stop catering to these people

[queermania]

for example if you need a story to explicitly tell you that adultery is bad otherwise you might get confused about whether or not people should cheat on their partners in real life, that’s fine. it doesn’t make you a bad or unworthy person. it does however mean that you should probably start watching nick jr instead of Ambiguous Situations: The Television Show

[charlesoberonn]

Necessary and sufficient

[charlesoberonn]

[charlesoberonn]

Adding a second lock was not necessary.

[charlesoberonn]

Understanding the difference between necessary and sufficient is necessary, but not sufficient to earn a math degree.

[charlesoberonn]

Part 2

[charlesoberonn]

Gladly!

[ahsoka-in-a-hood]

Apparently some people still need to hear this so: using an 'ai checker' is still using ai. If you are feeding someone's fic to one of these checkers, you will still not be sure their fic is ai because they are not 100% accurate, but you can be 100% sure that you are using ai. For fic. Furthermore you are doing the work of an ai scraper for them. You are, personally, feeding the machine. There is no actual excuse for using an ai checker on fanfic as a hobby. YOU are the problem.

If you think a fic is ai, mute it and move on. That's it. That's all you do.

[swiftlark]

hot take possibly? but i actually think it’s okay for things to be marketed for adults. it’s literally okay if things aren’t suitable for children. i feel like we are losing the plot

[zoestorm]

Correct. Furthermore: children bending or breaking the rules to get a peek at something that's not intended for them is a part of growing up.

[sickle-clawed]

See the thing about the whole Claude AI exposing document thing is that as great as it sounds in theory, I can see how this leads to even more harassment and witch hunts in practice.

People have said the tag is unique to Claude only and therefore there’s no way a human-made fic could have gotten wrongly flagged as AI. But how accurate and trustworthy worthy this is, really? Even IF, hypothetically, this method is proved correct 99 times out of 100, that still means “there is 1 time out of 100 times where a human-made fic is wrongly flagged as AI due to an error”. And that to me nullified the credibility of the whole doc. Like, sorry for not trusting another newly-introduced machine and for being skeptical about it.

“But how could the tag get there if the author didn’t use AI?” Besides the possibility of an error, I can already see people weaponize this method by faking screenshots of fics that are about the ships or topics that they hate to make it look like these fics have Claude tag in them, and then spreading those fake screenshots around. And the worst part is that authors cannot prove their innocence because people would just say “they got caught so now they removed the Claude tag from their fics”.

Like. I hate AI, but I hate witch hunts, accusations and harassments more.

These comments below sum it up really well.

[redshift-corridor]

It's very telling that people will argue to hell and back against any and all possible flaws of this thing because this AI detector is 100% totally infallible this time trust me bro, but every single "flaw" in a fic that has been sern in AI texts MUST mean the writer was 100% totally using AI to write this trust me bro.

Almost like the people who claim they want to avoid actually want the opposite. They spend so much time and effort to try to detect AI that they could be spending reading because... idk actually. Maybe it's another weird purity thing where you're eternally tainted by seeing something "bad." Maybe they're addicted to the rush of feeling morally superior for five seconds on the internet and have discovered a new way to fill that hole.

It's so painfully clear that they want to find as much AI as possible for some reason. These are not people engaging with fandom for fun, they're here to destroy.

And if you, dear reader, engage in this behavior and for some reason genuinely believe you're doing a good thing, take a step back and take a good hard look at why you're more preoccupied with detecting perceived AI to the point of driving the actual real creators you claim you want to protect out of fandom, instead of investing all that effort into supporting those creators.

[anti-parent]

yesterday & today i've been thinking a lot about what it means to take children & teens seriously as knowledge creators. because of course people jump to the "oh so you want me to ask a 5 year old why the sky is blue act like the answer is true"

well no. but we should still be asking 5 year olds why the sky is blue. not just as a precursor to telling them the Right Answer but to encourage them to critically examine the things we take for granted every day. even if they don't know the correct answer immediately, whatever their answer is will tell you a lot about how they view the world. and it gets you as an older person in the practice of asking younger people for information instead of just assuming you have it all and they have none. and then if you ask them a question that you don't know the answer to, and they don't know the answer either, then you get to experience that process of discovery together.

this is something i need to work on. i answer a lot of "why" questions from the kids but i don't ask them many.

[anti-parent]

and then it extends to creative endeavors too. i'm a classically trained pianist & flautist and i really like that i got that experience growing up. it was one of the main ways that i got to enjoy being really good at something at a young age. but it took me a good 5 years of being absolutely miserable in piano lessons before i learned to enjoy it at all. and that was because of LABOR ALIENATION fuck ok i'm putting it all together now. i didn't get to choose what genre to play, what pieces to play, or how much to practice. my job was to reproduce The Greats with whatever little personality flair i could manage to add without bastardizing the work. i learned a lot of music theory but it was mostly so i could understand the pieces i was playing, not so i could use it to create my own work. nobody gave a shit about that.

i know i'm probably just reinventing the suzuki method or whatever but god how different would it have been if i'd been taught how to use music theory as building blocks to interpret my own experience, to create my own work. to have that as the central purpose of music education from the beginning, and then add education about historical movements & artists as a way to further inspire new creations. instead of acting like music composition is a right you have to earn.

what if we treated children's creations seriously as a body of work instead of as practice for the Real Thing. what then.

[radiant-sunlight-angel]

i have a friend doing piano lessons who is working on the exams before ABRSM exams (so shes rlly good at piano basically) and she absolutely hates it. her opinion of composition is that it is a task in her exams, that she has to "prepare" for composition.

on the other hand a family friend who is like 10 is encouraged to write his own songs and rlly finds joy in piano. he wrote this rlly lovely song that isnt the most expressive, beautiful thing ever, sure, but it's rlly lovely. and his family encourages it.

thats the thing i love about jazz. you are supposed to take the thing and make it your own. everything i play contains my soul

[anti-parent]

you got it exactly lmfao this post is based on my experience prepping for ABRSM too! and i LOVE playing jazz piano for the same reason. so exciting & spontaneous & beautiful. playing with a jazz band was such a magical feeling and it was also really hard to get used to after 10+ years of rote learning. i'm really glad your family friend is getting to do that, that's so special :')

[headspace-hotel]

My brother and I have been talking a lot about music (he is a guitarist and I don't play anything) and my friends that played music when i was in highschool made it sound like the most complicated torture labyrinth in the world, but apparently people can and do learn to play by just. picking up an instrument and messing with it until it makes neat sounds.

[creativepromptsforwriting]

Shout-out to all the stories that didn't make it out of the shower with us in time to be actually written down.

[ghostbitsforkicks]

Being a writer is hearing a new song, going "oh no", and surfacing a week and a half later with 50,000 words added to your WIP while you have lost track of time, space, food, and social obligations

[glowcowboy]

[moo-llenium]

I found a Uquiz that needs to be seen

This was mine :)

Oh no....

I think this needs to be a tag game. Someone start it for me cuz I know no one.

@mer-acle @oak-the-crow @themostrandommoon plz tag me if you do this, I'm curious :)

[therealsirstickbug]

😭

@flottes-fiasco @wings-26 @bisexydesaster

[bisexydesaster]

well. alright then. um

@l4w-l1et @jimmysownworld @prince-beetle

[jimmysownworld]

my spelling mistakes are posted because they love me not because i missed them and have no beta and die like a man

@wings-26 @snail-mail-33 @nautilussilk

[snail-mail-33]

thanks for tagging me @jimmysownworld I've been outed as a perv 😭😭 come put yourselves on blast @martelldoran @gimmiekiss1221 @vesnuszki

[vesnuszki]

strangely accurate tbh @allstarrocks @hr-rep @bethnoir-fic

[fluffysheeps]

Bumble sharks 🐝🦈

[sunderwight]

The problem with studying the deep ocean is that humans need light to look at things, the depths of the ocean are extremely dark, and what lives there is accustomed to spending most of its time in that darkness. So when we go down there with submersibles and turn on Big Lights to see, we invariably and dramatically alter what's going on, in the same way that it's generally difficult to observe the natural behaviors of terrestrial animals if you whip out a megaphone and shout HEY GUYS WHAT ARE YOU DOING at them first.

[adizzyninja]

A humble snubnose eelpout on its way to the whale fall buffet when some nearby humans give it a quick, unintrusive study:

[julianova44]

I put this in the comments but feel it needs a reblog- Check out some of Dr Edith Widder’s work on light in the deep sea! Among other things, she used the bioluminescence of stoplight fish to deduce wavelengths which most deep sea animals can’t perceive and used that to create light filters to be able to film with minimal disturbance! And that’s how we got 25 minutes of giant squid footage!!!!

[plaguedocboi]

So every year, my aquarium does a captive lobster hatchery project (hence all the loblings). The reason we’re doing it is because in the wild, loblings only have a 1 in 25,000 chance of surviving their larval phase. They’re plankton as babies and everything eats them. Additionally, as the Gulf of Maine warms, they are having even lower survival rates because the blooms of copepods they feed on as babies are happening earlier in the year, and they’re missing it.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

Conservation is so fucken sick

[twinklipsiero]

Little things I don't think non-cane users would know cause Issues™, for reference in writing!

- gusty wind not only throws personal centre of balance off but if you've got a lightweight metal cane it will throw your placement of the cane off

- same goes for being driven past by busses or lorries

- uneven pavements can suck my ass the cane is meant to be parallel to your leg and this is very hard to do when the pavement isn't level

- same goes for cobbled streets, brick paved streets tend to be smoother so I love them <3

- some paving slabs get really slippy when they're wet! This often means that I lean on my cane much heavier bc I can't rely as much on even my good leg to stay stable

- yes cane height should be adjusted to account for heels/ wedged shoes it's a bit of a bastard if you used a fixed length cane

- using a cane for the first few days/weeks hurts! If u only use it irregularly/ on bad days it can hurt every time! Wrists aren't used to taking weight in this way.

Check RBs and my asks tag for more info!

[jasper-stims]

If it's raining, your cane tip is probably going to slip all over the place once inside a building. Especially on tile floors.

It can be harder to carry things or balance things as a cane user because you can only really use one arm/hand, and over-the-shoulder bags sometimes get in the way of using your cane.

Unless your cane is collapsable, you're probably going to have to deal with it falling over/down a lot when you're not actively using it. Leaning it up against things only works so well, especially in busy/public places with lots of movement.

People (especially kids) will try to touch it. People will move it if it's "in their way". Some people will even try to grab you by it to get your attention.

Some handles and materials are more comfortable/supportive than others. You might have to try out a few different kinds to find the best one for you.

[olderthannetfic]

Reading is in the trenches because why did my 9 yr old nephew look at the word "jealous" and said "jewish"? And when asked why he mistaken it as such he said they both started with a "J". It's like his brain is doing autofill. No matter how many time I try to tell him slow down and sound out the words he just won't.

--

TRAP CARD ACTIVATED

No, but seriously, anon, you need to look into what's going on in his classroom because he's probably being taught this trash method instead of phonics. He does not know how to slow down and sound things out because his school has never taught him that. When you tell him to do this, he has no context for what you're even talking about.

This has come up repeatedly here, and I don't have time to froth at the mouth today, but look up "whole language".

This podcast made waves a few years ago when all the lockdown parents discovered, to their horror, that their kiddos weren't being taught to read in the NORMAL FUCKING WAY WE'VE USED FOR LITERALLY CENTURIES and were instead being taught a fake-ass method backed by vibes and antivax-levels of pseudoscience.

Intervene now, anon, or he's never going to read well.

[kittenwriter]

I remember one of my grade school teachers discussing with my mother the differences between me and my sister at learning to read, and he described me as a "sight reader from the start"... which is to say, an acknowledgement that most people do not do that and it's not reasonable to expect that of the majority of kids, who really do need the phonics and the "sound things out."

Generally speaking if a kid has arrived at school not knowing how to read already, they're not going to do well with sight reading and need phonics. The few kids who develop The Reading in the way the whole language people think they should do it before they hit school.

[olderthannetfic]

So true. I know a retired teacher who bawwws and tries to contradict me when I rant about whole language at our knitting meetup. She's all "different kids need different approaches!" and "I saw it work!"...

But of course it feels intuitively sensible to her. She taught herself to read at age 2. That's the exact kind of experience that does make this method sound reasonable. But like you say, if it's going to happen, it happens very early and without the school curriculum.

As for me, I've said it before, but I assume anon wasn't around: I could not learn to read.

I was in second grade. (First grade? I can't remember. Around then.) Most of my classmates were reading at least a little. Me: nothing. I could not learn.

It was even a god damn private school, but I had to have a fucking tutor. I got dragged over to that lady's office a few days a week for... two months? Four months? It really wasn't that long, as far as I know. I was more than ready to learn. I just needed an actual fucking method that wasn't lying trash. Almost at once I jumped from nothing to reading well above grade level. For the rest of my childhood, I continued to diverge from my classmates in how many words I knew, how well I could read, the works. Every year of grade school makes that gap widen. I was on the desirable side of that gap. I was lucky.

It's obvious how verbal I am from reading my tl;dr on this blog.

But I could not learn to read.

I was a couple years younger than this nephew, but not that much younger. It's not too late. Now is the perfect time for some tutoring. If you can afford it, get a pro. If you can't, do your best. But you've got to do something.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

The four cueing systems if whole language reading education are a band-aid method used by severely dyslexic people. When people's dyslexia is so bad that they simply cannot learn to read effectively, tricks like cueing allow them to function well enough in society to get by. They do NOT teach proper literacy.

This system was popularised by a guy who is obviously dyslexic, refuses to acknowledge that when asked, and essentially decided that everyone else must be like him and therefore the system that helped him get by was a substitute for real literacy since it was so much faster and more achievable for him to learn to "read" this way than phonically. It's kind of like if somebody without hands was learning to sew, found it incredibly frustrating to do without hands, so they started putting their creations together entirely with fabric glue which they found easier to apply... and told everyone how much easier it was so all the schools got rid of needles and thread and sewing machines and everyone was taught to "sew" using fabric glue only and then wondered why their clothing kept falling apart on their bodies.