Literally a mess @indecisivelyrics - Tumblr Blog

so uhh...

If anyone following me or anyone else sees this or is into this kind of thing, I started an 18+ kingdoms of amalur fanfic blog @fatelessonewrites bc I'm embracing the cringe and leaning hard into my hyperfixations being queer and koa. Idk whether to post wips or not but I'm thinking about it. Anyway yeah... Im bad at this lol I just wanna write fic again

#idk how to tag this #get ready for gay shit #kingdoms of amalur #kingdoms of amalur reckoning #koa #writing #fanfiction #rip my one brain cell

the full set 🧡

I love a mix n' match. It felt right for him

#i had way more fun with this than i expected #def gonna try to do the other guys too #i already have some ideas #we'll see if they actually pan out lol #tmnt #rottmnt #tutant meenage neetle teetles #my art #nails #nail art

my hand slipped

#i had to do a separate post of this half #its too good #that pizza nail is easily the most intense line art ive ever done #tmnt #rottmnt #tutant meenage neetle teetles #nails #nail art #my art

guess who

#tmnt #rottmnt #tutant meenage neetle teetles #my art #nail art #nails

lonely-little-astronaut

Hey there Tumblr. Trans kids in England are under threat. and no one is talking about it. so I need you to be noisy. The government is currently proposing “guidance” that would force teachers to out students who are questioning their gender. (here's an article in The Gardian about it)

I don't think I need to tell you how terrible this is. How it is ultimately going to cause so much harm to so many kids. And not just trans pupils. Just gender-non conforming students who don't fit stereotypes. Because this guidance isn't just about students who've come out to teachers. It's anyone they suspect to be questioning their gender.

And the worst part is. I can barely find anyone talking about it. I think there was an Instagram post I saw going around a little while ago, but even then... I was talking to some trans adults at a pride event a few weeks ago and they didn't even know this shit is happening to us. I don't know what to do. I feel completely powerless. And making a stupid Tumblr post is the only think I can think of. Because if people don't know this stuff is happening, there's no way we can stop it.

I think the guidance is due to come out next week, although they keep on saying things like that and then nothing happens, so who knows.

And to any others trans kids in England (or anywhere, really) right now. Good luck. I see you. We will stick together and we can make it through this

killingmoon

this is so upsetting, PLEASE rb to spread awareness

omniscient-omniromantic-deactiv

PLEASE, PLEASE REBLOG THIS, WHETHER YOURE JEWISH OR NOT.

THIS IS A SUPER IMPORTANT PART OF OUR HISTORY, DONT LET IT GET DESTROYED.

tinyshe

The nixing of a plan to building luxury apartments on the site of an Ashkenazi congregation of Tashkent followed an international outcry.

perhaps help take steps to stop them now from future attempts...

#i think the fuck not #let me get my therapy bat

yourfriendlyneighborhoodcatfish

cansomeonetoldmewhoiam

So, what have you down there? I know we've just met, but do you want me to understand you cis people or to hate you? So? Why aren't you answering? So?

Mybl God, you're so rude! Such a pervert! I'll keep the children away from you!

#looks into the camera

writingwithcolor

hi, im a gentile writing an ashkenazi jewish character in a zombie apocalypse rpg and i have some questions about keeping kosher in such a setting, specifically with regards to properly slaughtering animals. from my understanding, the slaughtering must be performed by a trained shochet. in situations where such a person is unavailable, would my character realistically decide to do the slaughtering himself or would he just abstain from meat?

Kashrut in the Apocalypse

Probably just go vegetarian like some of the people I’m around if they’re in a situation where kosher meat is unavailable.

–Shira

Oh interesting! Maybe one of the character’s parents was a shochet? It would be possible for the character to have been learning from them, at least enough to feel comfortable giving it a go in the Zombie Apocalypse.

Going vegetarian is a very real possibility, and it’s likely they would do that first. I imagine as food got more scarce, they would be making more allowances. For instance, in the early days they would be eating carefully, trying to pick through cans of food to find things that are kosher certified, then later they are eating a vegetarian diet with whatever they can find. There may come a time when they try shechting themselves, simply because finding plant protein has become too difficult.

The preservation of life comes before most things, so doing your best in the extremity of that situation would be reasonable. Just avoid having them eat pork for the reader, it might encourage a more vicious, voyeuristic pleasure in watching people break laws, rather than the cool thing you are setting up: watching people do their best to keep their own traditions, in the worst circumstances.

– Dierdra

Agree with all of Dierdra’s great points – and I want to add that point at the end about pork is very important. Pork seems to take a special role in the minds of Christians/culturally-Christian and ex-Christian atheists in terms of how much brain space seems to be spent on remembering that a lot of us don’t eat it. I have a feeling watching someone eating non-ritually-slaughtered chicken would be a lot less voyeuristically weird than pork. Even another form of treyf like a crawdad wouldn’t have the same semiotics, the same feeling of “Ha, got you.”

–Shira

OP might find it cool to read about real-life situations where kosher-observant Jews have found themselves stuck in odd places without certified food. There’s even one in the musical Come From Away (in fact, I know someone who is related to the real rabbi that character is based on), so you don’t have to look as far as you might think – certainly not as far as the apocalypse!

–Shoshi

ezlo-x

caelestishound-deactivated20240

Iguana womana 🌴

ewanmitchellcrumbs

PSA Regarding Hateful Anons

Tumblr recently made it a requirement for you to be logged in to send asks anonymously. If you receive a hateful ask, don’t publish it - report it to Tumblr. It can be traced back to the user that sent it and with enough reports that person’s account will be suspended.

Share to raise awareness but also to make the clowns who think this behaviour is acceptable think twice before acting brave behind the guise of invisibility.

baskeigh-ball

more Tails!!!! i love seeing the turtles with tails hehehehe

yeeees more tails indeed (plus some turtle tots as filler bc why not)

i don't draw og raph nearly enough :')

(close-ups under the cut)

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.

thehoneybeet

Pulling this out of Tee's tags because it's brilliant:

I am interested in reflections on the human condition from other human beings. I am not interested in the guided narrative of a theft powered sophisticated averaging machine.

Thank you for saying this so powerfully @skeptiquewrites

aemelia

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.

Hitting the nail on the head @thehoneybeet

orionsangel86

If I ever come across a fic that I liked and discovered it was written by a bot I would feel extremely cheated tbh. I'd rather read a badly written fic by a first time writer who poured their heart and time and love for their fandom into that fic than some souless attempt for clout, kudos, and online attention that AI fanfic "creators" have posted.

AI is a plague on creativity and I truly hope we can find ways to make it fail.

plaidadder

We used to have this conversation about plain old plagiarism. Back in the 1990s I discovered a couple people who were stealing my content and reposting it on their own sites and pretending they wrote it. Sometimes these were sites involving crude early forms of monetization, but sometimes there was no financial incentive.

I found this baffling. What, I thought, was the point of plagiarism in the absence of material benefit? How can you enjoy your stolen kudos, knowing you didn't actually write the thing people are praising?

I wonder now if for them, they thought of the stealing itself as a form of labor which entitled them somehow to those kudos. Because that's what's going on with AI written fic, only more indirectly. It's still plagiarism, because all AI writing is plagiarism; it can only do what it does because it's capable of stealing from 100,000,000,000 texts instead of just cutting and pasting from one or half a dozen. But because you have to design the prompt yourself, it creates the illusion that the product is your "work."

Anyway. I was having a conversation not long ago with @shdwsilk about this very question: what will AI do to fanfic? Because although I would assume that most writers see a major difference between writing your own story and telling a chatbot how to extrude one for you, I do wonder if there is a subset of readers out there who will cease to care about the distinction, and who will accept AI written stories if it means they can get more of their favorite content faster.

But I think this is actually the key thing pointed out in the conversation above: the whole idea of fiction as "content" is what got us here in the first place. Writing is valuable to me as a means through which human beings try to help each other understand the human condition. This is what fiction, IMHO, is supposed to do. This is as true for fanfiction as it is for Literature with a capital L.

From the point of view of monetization, however, it doesn't matter what the Content does or how it was generated as long as you can sell it. This is as true for film studios as it is for the people out there sending AI generated short stories to Clarkesworld. I think a lot of producers would be happy to make films based on AI generated scripts, provided people would watch them. In a way, they have always been trying to approximate this situation by constantly recombining whatever they think are the most profitable narrative elements of the most successful blockbuster movies.

In 1984, George Orwell incorporates this running gag about how Julia works in the Fiction Department--as a mechanic. Fiction is now written by machines which recombine the same six plots; humans are involved on the writing process only when the machine gets out of order. He was envisioning this as an aspect of Stalinist totalitarianism, but like so many things about 1984, it now functions as a description of life under unopposed capitalism.

I find all this infinitely depressing. How long will people persist in the quixotic business of attempting to use language to communicate with other humans? How long do we have before people just stop expecting or even seeking meaning from their fiction? How long do we have before writing has been fully mechanized--created by machines and directed toward other machines, with humans included in the chain only because they are the point at which the cash is infused?

Sorry. Anyway. Maybe fanfiction, because it is not monetized, because it is about community and human connection, will be an important site of resistance. Maybe fanfiction, because there is such constant demand for more and faster fiction, will be captured by AI generation. Most likely both things will happen. Which would mean among other things that intra fandom conflict will become much more high stakes, so, let us all brace ourselves, I guess.