I have been writing fiction since 1988, discovered fan-fiction in 1992, and started posting fanfics online in 1998. Website: The BookWorm's Library AO3: KLCtheBookWorm
Wanted to do a Ghibli redraw for a while now and since I wanted to draw their Stargaze designs for once, thought might as well. I find it hilarious that WW and Vash look the freaking same. Like, me putting cracks on Vash's glasses and arm and making WW's fucking boob window bigger in my old Future AU sketches were more of a change. 😂 Well, all the design budget went into Meryl and Milly and I'm not complaining
Also added some sketches I did the last few weeks! I post them on @grimmy-sketches and Im not always gonna include sketches if I do them, but since I know a lot of people here followed for the Trigun stuff I thought it would eb nice to share here as well.
Some tips and tricks I’ve seen on Tumblr, on Pinterest or have learned the hard way while writing. These are pretty basic but sometimes basic is good!
Realizing they can feel the person touching them. Maybe they’re not touching but they can feel the warmth.
Accidentally saying something flirty and both of you freeze. Or saying something flirty and the other person panicking and running away
Eyes dropping to lips. Eyes looking them up and down. Eyes unable to look away. Eyes unable to make contact without blushing. Eyes are you best friend.
Mirroring. When people have crushes or like someone (or want someone to like them) they do what is called mirroring. If character 1 crosses their arms and character 2 has a crush on them, have character 2 cross their arms too.
New Girl taught me about toes. If their feet are facing you, they want to stay. If their feet are pointed away, they want to leave. I’ve found its not always true but its something you can mention or use.
Unable to stop smiling. Unable to stop laughing.
Touching the other one when you laugh. Touching them to move them out of the way. Touching them and not moving your hand away
Hugging them when you see them. Sharing a bed. Trying to be near them at all moments.
Looking at their lips and fantasizing about kissing them.
Watching others interact in some way with them or how they act around them and being super jealous, wondering why they don’t act that way with you.
the draft-by-draft guide to not losing your mind (aka: when is this thing ready to post?)
One of the biggest lies we tell ourselves is that good stories just happen the first time we type them out. they don't. writing is just fancy editing. If you’re staring at a blank page (or a messy one) and wondering "is this enough?", here is a breakdown of the three-draft method for your chapters.
Draft one: the skeleton draft (the what)
the goal: get the story out of your head and onto the screen. that’s it.
the vibe: it’s messy. it’s ugly. there are probably notes in brackets like [insert brilliant argument here] or [add some narrative about so and so].
what to ignore: grammar, repetitive words, and whether or not the pacing is perfect.
when it’s done: when you’ve reached the end of the chapter or scene. even if the ending is just a sentence saying "and then they left."
Draft two: the muscle draft (the how)
the goal: make it look like a story.
the vibe: this is where you go back and fill in those brackets. you add the sensory details we talked about; the smell of the library, the itch of the wool, the way the light hits the floor. You add the narrative you missed or the world building details you think could enhance the story.
the focus: check your dialogue. does it sound like them? if you’re writing dramione, is draco being sufficiently posh or cruel? is hermione’s brilliant, chaotic energy coming through?
what to fix: pacing. if a conversation is dragging on for three pages and nothing is happening, chop it.
Draft three: the polish draft (the shine)
the goal: make it readable.
the vibe: word-level editing. you’re looking for filter words (like he saw, she felt, he realized) and trying to cut them.
the tool: read it out loud. if you trip over a sentence, your reader will too.
the clash check: look at your descriptions. did you use "blue" five times? change one to cobalt or the color of a bruised sky, make it pop, make it flow.
How do I know it's ready to post?
This is the hardest part. The truth? It’s ready when you’re bored of looking at it, but if you want a checklist:
does the scene accomplish its goal? (did they get the info? did they have the fight? did the tension increase?)
is the formatting clean? (if you're posting to AO3 or tumblr, check your paragraph breaks!)
have you done a vibe check? read the last paragraph. if it makes you want to read the next chapter, it’s ready.
A final reminder: Especially in fanfic, your readers aren't looking for a pulitzer-winning masterpiece. they are looking for your voice and the characters they love. A good enough chapter that actually gets posted is 100% better than a perfect chapter that stays in your docs forever.
I'm loving the discussions about the role and purpose of fandom, as well and what activities are needed to keep fandoms alive and flourishing!
However... as a fandom creator (writer and artist), I sometimes feel like too much pressure is concentrated on creators. I don't know if this is a frustration others share? Not only should we keep making things, but somehow we also end up becoming these central fandom figures who can feel pressured into responding to comments (or else we're called arrogant or ungrateful), making friends (or else we're rude for ignoring well-meaning people who reach out), and being the drivers and pillars of that community (running events, responding to memes, etc. – and everything falls silent if we stop). It's a lot of work!! I don't always have the time and energy to make things for fun and then also engage in all the ways people might sometimes feel entitled to because they enjoy my works.
I really wish that more "non-creating" fans in the community would discover their fandom power!! and not just rely on the visible "producing" creators to be the only people worth engaging with. It takes nothing more than passion to write a meta-post about a character or a plot point, or to create an ask game, or to DM someone else who you see posting funny tags – not just the creator! Maybe your followers have other tips for evening out the balance a little more?
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this, anon. This is an observation I've seen in many parts of life, not just fandom.
A lot of people feel as though they need permission or an invitation of some sort in order to contribute. That's why I always end my answers by asking people to share their thoughts. I want to make it explicitly clear that I want people to add things into the reblogs (which I can then share out for more people to see) and the replies (which people can at least read even if I can't reblog).
I have heard fans who are readers but don't write fic say that they think they can't get an AO3 account unless they plan to post something. This is incorrect, of course, but a lot of people make that assumption.
I think at least some people (I don't know what kind of percentage) assume that someone who is writing fic or posting art or making podfics and video edits etc. has some sort of expertise that "allows" them to post.
People with less confidence or with less practice etc. sometimes need an extra nudge before they realize that they're welcome to contribute too. If that's the case for you, please allow me to say:
You are welcome to post in your fandom, even if no one invites you to. Even if you think you're not good enough. Even if your idea isn't "popular."
Start a conversation. Share a thought. Talk to folks who reblog cool shit. Be a folk who reblogs cool shit. You don't have to do everything in order to do something.
As mentioned above, please do share your thoughts in the reblogs and replies to keep the conversation going.
Record and post clips of your show to get more people into your fandom
Make incorrect quote memes
Make silly little TikTok-style edits of your favs
Make character playlists
Figure out the layout of buildings/cities
Recreate those building in the Sims or with an online floor planner or even just draw it out because holy hell writers will be so thankful for that
Make your blorbo in various video game character creations
Build a pokemon team for your blorbo
Make up silly headcanons! What does everyone do at the fair or the beach or during a fire drill?
Outline a fic idea you have — maybe you don’t have the time or energy or you just don’t feel confident enough to create it, but share it anyway!
Create outfits based on your blorbo’s design or outfits they would wear
There are so many ways you can engage with fandom that aren’t making fanart or writing fanfics. Fandom is community - Please don’t be afraid to join in!
(I've been on tumblr for 15 years, far longer than I was ever on twitter, but I've never engaged much beyond reblogging so please pardon how many times I reference fandom activities I witnessed on twitter)
Collect interviews with the author, producer, director, mangaka etc
Similarly, translate interviews
I remember someone in the haikyuu!! fandom kept a twt thread of every time two characters were in the same panel. Not sure what the tumblr equivalent would be. I guess just a regular old post with lots of additions? (Send help; i'm not sure why my brain is struggling so badly to translate twitter threads to tumblr posts)
Run a quote bot account: I'm not sure of the status of quote bots in a post twitter era, but those were quite fun. Again an example from the hq!! fandom, there was the hq!! bastille bot which would spit out a bastille lyric + a ship. The siken bot would spit out a line of poetry + a ship name. On tumblr maybe the equivalent would be a gimmick blog?
Run a ship/character week. I think these are probably the easiest kind of fandom event to run. it doesn't take more than one person, a blog, and rudimentary graphics skills.
Are socmed AUs still a thing?
Make gifs
Try to figure out the layers to a character's outfit and share your studies with the world. (I'm looking directly at you, Hoyoverse and all you're what-even-is-that how-do-they-even-put-that-on character design. beautiful, but confusing)
Update fandom wikis
Log fandom history on fanlore.org (another project run by the Organization for Transformative Works, aka the parent of ao3)
Volunteer for the Organization for Transformative Works/ao3
Fandom wikis!! One thousand blessings upon everyone who maintains fandom wikis, oh my god.
Some suggestions:
Transcribe episodes for film/audio canons
Podfic! We can always use more podfic, and most people's phones have a voice recorder.
Create bingo sheets (e.g. make a fanwork with five or more of these tropes for a bingo; read/reblog fanworks in five or more of these categories for a bingo)
Be a Your Blorbo expert consultant! If I'm writing about a character I don't have strong feelings about, but I know one of my friends is constantly reblogging and posting about them, even if it's all silly memes and "character <3"-type posting, I'll sometimes reach out to them for advice on if I'm getting Their Blorbo right. It's absolutely invaluable and I appreciate these people so much.
We are all just enthusiastic nerds on the internet. You have as much right to share your enthusiasm as anyone. One of the things I love about tumblr as a platform is that you can just start saying whatever about something you like, and you will find other people who like it too.
Run a prompt / kink meme: either for a show, a character or a ship you want to see more of (ao3 makes that supposedly quite easy though i only have experience with filling prompts, but dreamwidth is also an option)
Write prompts for prompt / kink memes (seriously, you never know what people might fill or use as an inspiration)
Answer asks pertaining to expertise / life experience you have: I've learned so much when writing for the untamed by people answering asks about character naming, how Chinese names work in general, and the themes behind certains aspects, simply by fandom people being open to answer tumblr asks or in general give more background information on certain aspects of a show.
Go old school and actually write a ship manifest (seriously, they are an amazing idea and i find it so sad they aren't as ubiquitous any more)
Make moodboards/aesthetic edits for ships/characters/shows/your fav fanfic/...
Conduct stats analysis: track how many line a character has from one season to the other, how much new fic appears on ao3 for pairings on a show after seasons/episodes, etc.
Fandom old here, been in fandom since I was 13 and I'm not in my early thirties. In regards to the Beta and Writer conversation I have been seeing on your dashboard as of late, I wanted to say that Fanfiction.Net actually had the ingenious idea a long time ago to make a list of beta readers. What you did was you filled out a beta-editor profile and your fandoms that you were willing to do. They still have it up. The issue is that Archive of Our Own Does *not* have this. There's no official list of active beta readers or what fandoms they will do publically. Instead, most beta readers that I have found are in fandom discord servers. Tumblr doesn't give enough traction to do a beta reader call because everyone posts and can get lost in the feed. That helps no one, not the writer and certainly not the beta whose looking for someone to help.
The other issue that I am seeing is that there was a unspoken yet quite loud rule that betas were people who wished to be editors one day and just like many of us on fanfiction were hoping to become writers or were going to go into English Degrees, understood that we had to practice for our own rejection. So basically, rejective sensitivity didn't exist for us because the betas were in as much practice as we were. This is their craft as much as writing was ours. Now there were bad betas, don't get me wrong. But you knew a bad beta from a good one.
Now, I don't know about everyone else's school. But in my high school we were taught how to give criticism. Art and English teachers used to make us grade each other's art and grade each other's essays long before the teacher ever got a hold of them. We had a rubic to follow in English to help us, and for art...that could get brutal. Big time. You didn't get a I'm afraid. We got "oh god, she's going to hate it and I'm going to be re-writing this again" because English teachers back in my day gave back essays and told you to re-write it. You had four drafts before you could turn in a "final". I don't know how classes are run now, but this is another huge problem that I am seeing.
So, how does this work in fandom etiquette today? I don't think anyone really wants a "beta", they want assurance. Every time I see "it's my writing style" I leave because I already know they didn't want me to edit and it wasn't a writing style they just don't know how to break the rules properly. Betas can help you break grammar rules *properly*, because that's their craft. They know the rules therefore they know how to bend them, break them, and make them theirs. Writers, we should know how to do that too, but they know it better. Let them have it. Let them know what really is a writing style because if it's just insecurity, guess what? Here's the tough truth: you either get a beta and you enhance your writing and you learn how to hone your craft to be a better writer or you don't. And the problem is that you can get better if you don't. A beta isn't a have to...but a beta can make you get better faster. You'll be getting better slower especially with lack of engagement on fics on AO3 if you don't. Which is a valid way to go. And a whole other ask/blog entirely. Editors and writers go hand in hand, betas aren't an enemy you fight. People who are afraid of the red pen weren't afraid because of the mistakes they made, it was once more going to the typewriter and figuring out how to make it *better*.
idk how old this person is, but i'm 40, so at the very least not that young.
I used to be in a "brutal criticism" writing environment when I was ~18. what it did was kill my desire and ability to write, and I didn't get it back until I got into fandom and met people who approached my writing with warmth and a desire to help me learn.
a brutal criticism can feel satisfying to make or read. it is not actually better in improving a story than a gently phrased "hey the thing you did has X effect, is that what you meant to do?"
"when I was young we didn't have rejection sensitivity!" or maybe all the rejection sensitive people were driven out of the writing circles you were in. maybe you'd prefer that. I don't.
I am a fandom old, been in fandom since I was 13 and I'm 42 next month. I used to write a writing advice column on fanfiction.net (I was fifteen and my only qualifications were I wanted to do it) and while yes it was more common to have a beta reader at the time, it was also well known that there are different kinds of betas, and what anon describes was often not called a beta at all but an edit. A beta reader was there to tell you if you misspelled the character's name or forgot a piece of lore, or if you had used a word incorrectly, or if this fic had the emotional impact you intended. A beta reader has never been primarily about harsh criticism, and anon is the kind of beta reader I would have shrugged off as "not really interested in fandom."
Also fandom old - sometimes what someone needs is not so much a beta but an excited reader
Someone they can bounce ideas off and be told - that'll be sooooo coool
Personally I need a second pair of eyes so my betas fix terrible punctuation and paragraphing
But I've also had betas that go okay you used this - how are you going to take it forward and then when you don't chewed me out for it and that was what I needed then
Knowing what you need might be hey someone wanna read this and tell me if it works; and someone good at fixing stray commas; and someone who will put this through the wronger to make it better
Sometimes it's not 1 person who can do all three, or more
Fandom is a gestalt and it's at its best when more of us participate, and it makes the work we share better
I will vote for any candidate who promises to go scorched fucking earth on every tech company. Break every single one of them up into companies based around a single product and then split those in thirds. Weaponize existing antitrust laws to the hilt and pass the most draconian versions of them ever seen on this planet. Nationalize google search specifically. Pass consumer privacy protections strict enough to kill the data harvesting industry for good. Make all of these fuckers go bankrupt for this rent-seeking shit
Things that will make your computer meaningfully faster:
Replacing a HDD with an SSD
Adding RAM
Graphics cards if you're nasty
Uninstalling resource hogs like Norton or McAfee (if you're using Windows then the built-in Windows Security is perfectly fine; if you're using a mac consider bitdefender as a free antivirus or eset as a less resource intensive paid option)
Customizing what runs on startup for your computer
Things that are likely to make internet browsing specifically meaningfully faster:
Installing firefox and setting it up with ublock origin
adding the Auto Tab Discard extension to firefox to sleep unused tabs so that they aren't constantly reloading
Closing some fucking tabs bud I'm sorry I know it hurts I'm guilty of this too
Things that will make your computer faster if you are actually having a problem:
Running malwarebytes and shutting down any malicious programs it finds.
Correcting disk utilization errors
Things that will make your computer superficially faster and may slightly improve your user experience temporarily:
Clearing cache and cookies on your browser
Restarting the computer
Changing your screen resolution
Uninstalling unused browser extensions
Things that do not actually make your computer faster:
Deleting files
Registry cleaners
Defragging your drive
Passively wishing that your computer was faster instead of actually just adding more fucking RAM.
This post is brought to you by the lady with the 7-year-old laptop that she refuses to leave overnight for us to run scans on or take apart so that we can put RAM in it and who insists on coming by for 30-minute visits hoping we can make her computer faster.
HDD means "hard disk drive" SSD means "solid state drive." An HDD has a spinning platter and a mechanical arm that has to wiggle back and forth very quickly to read the information written on the platter, while an SSD is a silicon chip that has the information "flashed" into it (basically it takes a snapshot of bits with electricity - it's unimportant how it works, just that it doesn't require mechanical movement to access data, and is therefore MUCH faster).
Installing an SSD does *not* require an M.2 slot and does *not* require a ton of expertise on most computers. There are many SATA SSDs available and if you want to replace your HDD all that you need to do is clone your hard drive and look up how to install your new SSD on ifixit (link in a bit).
Your storage drive (SSD or HDD) is the drive that stores the files and programs on your computer. People often confuse long-term drive storage with "memory" and when they get low-memory warnings they think they need to delete stored files. This is inaccurate because:
RAM is Random Access Memory - if is basically the "working memory" of your computer, it keeps track of all the things that your computer does/is doing. For example: if you are working in your browser, the browser is not saving everything that you're doing to your desktop so everything that is going on in your browser is using RAM to remember what pages you've got open and what images are on them, etc. Same if you're working in any other program: if you're writing a word doc and you haven't saved it in a while, all the changes are being tracked by the RAM but are not yet saved on your storage drive. "Low Memory" doesn't mean you're out of room for your computer to hold onto files, it means your computer is low on memory to think about stuff. Because programs are written to use more and more memory as time passes (which is a good thing, for the most part, but causes frustrating problems for people with older devices) older computers will struggle to run modern programs with the amount of RAM the older computers have in them.
RAM comes in different speeds, and the speed of your RAM does matter but if you get RAM that matches the speed of your installed RAM you should experience better speeds from your computer. Some computers have the RAM directly soldiered to the motherboard and cannot have RAM added (this is pretty much true of all macs. I do not recommend buying macs.) but if your computer DOES allow you to add RAM it is generally an easy process - check IFixIt.Com for instructions: just search the model number of your computer and look at the replacement guide for RAM and you will be able to see if you can replace your RAM and see the steps to follow along if you want to do that. There are a large number of tools to look up what RAM will work in your computer. Personally I like the Crucial RAM Configurator tool. Just look up your computer and it will recommend compatible RAM. You don't have to buy the Crucial RAM, you can use the Crucial RAM configurator to get the specs you need and then search for yourself by Size, Memory Technology, Speed, Format, and number of Pins.
Graphics cards are for graphics processing and they're "if you're nasty" because adding a dedicated graphics card is kind of a big hurdle these days: computers are smaller inside than they used to be and graphics cards are big and they are also very expensive right now. Unless you are using a gaming laptop you likely cannot add a graphics card to your laptop, and unless you have at least a couple hundred dollars to spare you can't add a graphics card to your desktop either. But also they will only speed up a very specific subset of applications; if you don't do anything that requires a GPU to get shit done (video rendering, really complicated math, etc) then it isn't going to make your computer faster.
Norton and McAfee run in the background of your computer at all times and can suck up a lot of valuable memory, especially if they decide to randomly start a scan or check back in with the mothership to make sure you've paid for another seven years. They are annoying and they can slow everything else down - McAfee in particular is notorious for this. Modern Windows Operating systems (10 and 11) have a lot of security features built in at baseline and Windows Defender is a perfectly functional whole-device antivirus for almost all users. It was never true that macs couldn't have software infections or couldn't be infected with malware, it's just that *people used to write fewer malicious softwares for mac( and NOW there are a lot more infections written for OSX *and* mac users often think they don't need antivirus. Buds. You do need antivirus. Since Bitdefender only has a free virus scanner for Mac, not antivirus, and Sophos Free is only good for a month, and Avast has recently sold customer data, try Avira.
If you hit Ctrl+Alt+Del and click on "task manager" you will find a list of applications that run on startup. Programs that run on startup are turned on and active every time you start your computer, regardless of whether you use the program or not. So, for instance, let's say you have an HP printer and there are drivers for the printer on your computer but you only print things maybe twice a year. If your HP Printer Print Utility is set to run on startup that means that every time you start your computer it wakes up and turns on this program, which slows down your startup time and takes processing power in the background. So just disable it on startup and only start the program when you need it. The only difference here is that it'll take a few seconds to start the utility when it's time to print. Things that I've got disabled on startup include: Microsoft Edge, Adobe, and Cortana.
Faster Browsing
You should be using Firefox anyway because Firefox rules and in literally hundreds of tests performs as well or better than chrome. If someone says that firefox is ridiculously slow it is because they've either set up a really weird configuration, have had the install go wrong, or just don't understand what they're doing. But ASIDE from that you should use Firefox with Ublock Origin because Ublock Origin is an *amazing* adblocker that doesn't whitelist ads and lets you do things like manage cookies and block annoying popups and a bunch of other stuff. And as of 2023 it will be impossible to install Ublock Origin on Chrome so you may as well switch to Firefox now and live that ad-free life. Ad-blocked browsing speeds up your browser because your computer isn't spending extra energy on loading ads and less shit loading means less RAM utilization means faster computing.
Auto Tab Discard is an extension that allows you to set tabs to sleep after an amount of time that you determine. You can customize your experience so that it doesn't sleep tabs with partially filled forms, or doesn't sleep tabs with media playing in them, or doesn't sleep a specific tab for a session, or doesn't ever sleep tabs from a specific website. Many people use OneTab, which basically turns your tabs into a bookmark list that opens the page when you click in OneTab, but I personally prefer Auto Tab Discard - neither of those are "better" than the other, it's just a question of what works for you.
Faster if you are having an actual problem
Open tabs eat RAM. Your computer is expending memory thinking about what's on all of those pages and even if most of them are slept you probably have more awake tabs than you need.
Malwarebytes has a free virus/malware scanning and removal tool that you can download and run to identify and remove malware or viruses that may be stealing your information and running background programs that are fucking up your speeds. If you think your computer might be slow because you might have a virus, go to malwarebytes, download the free version, run a scan, and follow the instructions that it gives you.
Disk utilization errors happen for a number of reasons and they will all slow down your computer. Here are some of the reasons they happen and some ways to fix them. If you hare having a persistent disk usage error issue *DO NOT* replace your HDD with an SSD until it is resolved because these errors can destroy an SSD.
Superficially Faster
Your browser cache and cookies are the things that your browser remembers between sessions: it might be logins for various sites or the logos of your homepage or a bunch of other stuff. If your browser is running super slow because you haven't cleared cache/cookies for a long time, doing this can help because it will basically make your browser forget about the cookies it has been carrying around for five years for a site you haven't logged into since four years and seven months ago. These are tiny pieces of data but they can add up over time which is why they will make your browsing experience faster if you haven't done it in years but won't make a difference if you clear your cookies and cache monthly. Doing this will log you out of all the sites you're logged into (which shouldn't be a huge deal, but you do need to be ready to log in a bunch, so you should HAVE A PASSWORD MANAGER TO MAKE THAT EASIER). This will make your browser run a bit faster, but if your computer is slow for non-browser reasons or if your cache/cookies have been cleared recently it will have no impact on your computer speeds.
Restarting your computer will speed your computer up for a bit because it will shut down all the programs you had running and clear your computer's RAM of all the stuff it was remembering for as long as you had those programs open. This is, again, a superficial improvement, and if you have, say, restarted your computer three times today it is unlikely that restarting again will do anything for you. But yeah if it's been a couple weeks, friend, restart your computer it is tired and it wants to run patches and it needs to forget the twenty docs you're editing for a minute so it can get its head on straight.
Reducing your screen resolution can make your computer run a bit faster if you're doing graphics-heavy stuff and have really shit built-in graphics support, but realistically all it is likely to do is make your computer look weird.
Your browser extensions run on startup and cause your browser to use more RAM at baseline; you should be installing minimal browser extensions and uninstalling any that you don't need. If it's been a while since you checked your extensions go uninstall the unused ones right now and restart the browser and you may speed up a bit. But the majority of people in the world run pretty minimal extensions so this is unlikely to fix most people's problems.
Will not make your computer faster
Unless your storage drive is within 10% of its maximum capacity it is in no way fucking up your speed. If it is within 10% of capacity go delete whatever's in your downloads folder, clear out your temp files, and empty your recycle bin. If that doesn't take care of it, use a backup drive or a thumb drive and copy off the photos, videos, and music you don't use very often, and only keep what you're using on your computer. If you've got an SSD having too little storage available can fuck with the lifespan, so aim to keep at least 10% free.
Registry cleaners are supposed to clean your computer's registry; basically they're supposed to look at the index of all the stuff your computer knows and delete redundant or outdated entries on the index. However it has been literal decades since a registry cleaner would be able to meaningfully improve performance while they can still absolutely fuck your computer up bad enough that it needs a reinstall and a lot of them are just straight up malware, some of them are actual for-realsies ransomware, a bunch of them sell your data, and you don't need ANY of them. If you don't know enough to fuck around with your registry by hand you shouldn't trust some random ass software that has a history of data breaches and virus infections associated with it. Fuck all registry cleaners.
Manual drive defragging has been obsolete on Windows Machines since Windows 7 shipped with an automatic defragging utility in 2011. In the past when you saved a file to a hard drive it might save that file in a bunch of little pieces scattered all over the platter, so accessing that file meant accessing all the *fragments* of that file and "defragging" meant taking some time every once in a while to put files together into whole files instead of fragments. But then eleven years ago Windows made that process automatic, so unless you have *seriously* fucked up your computer somehow it shouldn't be an issue, and if it is an issue you can run a defrag and then make sure automatic defragging is enabled. But that whole conversation is probably moot since SSDs don't need to be defragmented (and defragging them actually adds to the device wear). So basically if your computer actually DOES need a defrag it is probably more fucked than you initially thought and unless that is the case then it is already defragging so doing an additional defrag won't make anything faster and/or might cause extra wear to an SSD.
If you are using an older computer and it is tortuously slow and you can't upgrade the RAM or swap in an SSD but you *can* install software, I would strongly recommend installing Linux.
The vast majority of people these days use computers primarily for web browsing and occasionally use an office suite. Most people don't even store their music or photos on their computers these days. If your computer is basically an internet machine that you don't use for anything other than browsing and basic word processing/spreadsheets, then there is no reason not to switch to Linux.
I would recommend installing Linux Lite, which is a well-supported, widely-used distro that most computers built within the last twenty years should be able to run. It's called "Lite" because it is an operating system that requires minimal processing, storage, and memory to run.
To do this you will need:
A 4GB USB stick or a blank DVD to create installation media
An internet connection to download the software
Another computer or phone that you can use to follow the instructions, or a printed/written copy of the installation guide
A computer on which to install Linux. Installing Linux as the sole operating system on this computer (which is my recommendation here) will mean that everything else on the computer is deleted. Save all of your files/movies/music/etc. to a backup drive or another computer before you install Linux, because installing a new OS will delete literally everything on the computer and make it impossible to get back.
Here is where you can download Linux Lite.
Here is the Linux Lite help manual, I've linked you directly to the step-by-step installation guide. If you get to a step that you don't understand, search the terms that you're unfamiliar with phrased as questions like "why do I need an ISO to install linux?" or "how do I enter UEFI BIOS on my version of Windows?"
Follow the instructions for installing Linux Lite, and then you can install software on your new OS. Linux Lite comes bundled with Libre Office, which is a free office suite like Microsoft Office that has programs similar to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. It installs with Chrome, so I would recommend installing Firefox and uninstalling Chrome as soon as you're able to get on the internet.
After that you can pick and choose from a wide variety of linux-compatible software and you can use your computer as a regular computer. I'd say that it's probably a good idea to be picky about what software you install, and to try to keep your computer as lean as possible if you're trying to get a longer life out of an old device.
There are a lot of people in the notes who are saying "my computer can't even load four tabs" or "my computer can't even open the software I need to do this" and if that is your computer I think you've pretty much got nothing to lose from installing Linux. If your computer is essentially unusable in Windows then it's probably not going to be *less* functional in Linux, unless you're keeping the computer the way that it is for some very specific software you're using.
A lot of people think that they can't uses Linux because it's entirely in the command line or doesn't have a graphic interface or something, but most linux distros only look about as different to users as windows does to mac or vice versa.
This is what the Linux Lite default desktop looks like:
It's got a start menu and a task bar and folders on the desktop, same as any other computer. It's very easy to use and has the help manual installed right there as soon as you're up and running so that you can troubleshoot your way through any issues.
Really, seriously: if your computer is slow as fuck and all you use it for is web browsing, this will make your computing experience significantly better without having to buy anything but a thumb drive.
People are reblogging just the first section of this post and asking what these things mean, so I'm reblogging this in hopes that they'll see the comprehensive update in the notes.
I want everyone reading this to know that importing bookmarks from any other browser to firefox is a very simple process that will take just a few minutes. Here are some step-by-step instructions from Mozilla on how to import your bookmarks: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/import-data-another-browser
My next book is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, out next month. Pre-order it now, including as a DRM-free audiobook or ebook, at my Kickstarter, and help me continue to prove that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them.
One of the surprise breakout software products of the early web was Lotus Notes, a kind of primitive precursor to all-in-one office productivity suites like GDocs, Office365, etc. It was so important that its creator, Ray Ozzie, was promoted to Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, succeeding Bill Gates himself:
People who remember Notes tend to deride it for its clunky user interface and demi-functional administrative tools. But what made Notes so central to Microsoft wasn't its polish – it was the fact that Notes represented a brokered peace between IT managers, who wanted mainframe-like control over everything their users could do with business equipment, and the users themselves – workers who kept smuggling internet-based tools into the enterprise network on the very sensible grounds that they had a job to do, and these were the best tools to do it.
The arrival of internet-based tools – especially ones that ran in browsers – represented a major challenge to IT departments, who had been long accustomed to dictating terms to their users. If the IT manager and the compliance department decided that the best way to manage disclosure and leak risks was to block all email attachments for outside users, then that was that: no one could send those attachments.
But after the internet arrived on the corporate desktop, employees who needed to get documents to supply chain partners and customers could treat these IT policies as damage and route around them. Just fire up your Hotmail or Yahoo mail window, or hop on MSN Messenger or ICQ or AIM, or drop the file on an anonymous FTP server and send the link to your counterparty. Job done!
IT managers hated this, and to be fair to them, they weren't (always) wrong. These outside tools came from a variety of untrustworthy sources, including malicious sites that pushed virus-infected versions to their users. Also, by evading firewall rules with these tools, users made it impossible to achieve the compliance goals that IT had been charged with enforcing, and it was IT's asses on the line if the company got in trouble as a result.
Foundationally, IT was being asked to do two irreconcilable things: they were supposed to be enabling workers to get their jobs done, and they were supposed to be stopping those workers from doing things that could harm the business. This can't be done, because the only way to eliminate the possibility that a worker will take an action that harms the business is to gag that worker and lock them in a dungeon. Workers need flexibility and freedom to achieve business goals, and that flexibility and freedom means that those workers might (deliberately or accidentally) thwart the business's goals.
What's more, workers will always run into situations that were not anticipated by policy, and if they are denied any agency or initiative, they will fail to get their jobs done. In work, the exception is the rule, hence the importance of "process knowledge" (all the implicit knowledge shared among workers across the firm and its suppliers and customers, which cannot be captured or recorded):
Indeed, there's a form of labor action called a "work to rule," in which workers only do the things dictated by their rulebooks, without taking any of the routine additional measures dictated by process knowledge. Merely by following every rule to the letter, workers can grind a shop to a halt:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule
Since the dawn of personal computers, workers and IT departments have come into conflict, as workers literally smuggled technology into the business that could do things the IT department had (often arbitrarily and capriciously) prohibited. When Visicalc emerged as the killer app for the Apple ][+, workers snuck these computers into work and used them to sort spreadsheets in ways that IT had declined to permit. They didn't do this to cheat or steal from the company – the whole point was to do a better job.
So it was with the early web: workers discovered a myriad of new capabilities in the free-to-use world of web-based tools and realized how these tools would make them much more effective at their jobs. The fact that IT wouldn't let them do these things was just more evidence that IT – and the managers who set IT's agenda – didn't understand the business as well as workers.
It didn't help that IT managers' first line of defense was the high-tech version of abstinence-only education: "You only think you need your work computers to do this, but really, you don't, so stop trying":
Abstinence-only education never works, but where "you only think you need this" failed, Lotus Notes succeeded. Lotus Notes provided a whole suite of tools that largely (if imperfectly) replaced the universe of free tools that workers were using to evade their IT departments' edicts, so they could get their jobs done. At the same time, Lotus Notes provided a set of management tools that let IT fine-tune how these tools worked, giving them (some) of the controls they needed to achieve their compliance goals.
Like all brokered peace settlements, Lotus Notes left both sides feeling like they'd made a compromise they could live with, giving up some of their goals, but keeping the things that really mattered to them.
It's impossible to overstate how important Lotus Notes and similar products were, because workers demanded the right to use the web on their work computers, and they made those demands so forcefully that managers had to completely re-do their IT policies, lest those workers treat them as damage and route around them. Back then, the tech press was full of stories about these conflicts, as workers insisted that the new technology that was sweeping the nation was so foundational and transformative that they had to be allowed to use it.
What we never saw back then were stories about how managers had to monitor workers to ensure that they were using the web as much as possible. No one had to force workers to find ways to integrate the web into their workflows.
In other words, the story of the web at work was the opposite of the story of AI at work. Today, you can't turn around without reading a story about bosses who are threatening to fire workers if they don't increase their AI usage:
It's conceivable that over the past quarter-century, bosses have become technophiles while workers have fallen prey to superstitious technophobia, but it hardly seems likely. Historically, workers have always been enthusiastic about tools that let them do a better job – indeed, it's a truism that labor-led automation produces improvements in quality, while capital-driven automation increases throughput (often at the expense of quality).
Workers aren't the only typical early adopters who find AI lacking. As a group, teenagers and young adults hate AI:
That's not what it was like during the early web days. Back then, young people entering the workforce were passionate devotees of the web, to the point where the business press routinely ran articles asking how today's workplaces were going to adapt to the demands of these webbed-up workers.
AI boosters insist that the deficits we see in AI – its lack of profitability, its primitive and error-riddled outputs – are no different from the shakedown problems of the early web (and we know how the web turned out!). But this is a profoundly flawed comparison: the early web and AI are very different from one another.
For one thing, the early web may have lost money, but it had great unit economics. Every new web user brought the web closer to profitability, as did every new use of the web, and every new generation of web technology. By contrast, AI has – in the memorable phrasing of Ed Zitron – "dogshit unit economics." Every new AI user makes AI less profitable, as does every new use for AI, and each generation of AI loses more money than the last. AI is the money-losingest endeavor in human history:
In other words, the early web was a technology that grew more profitable every day, which workers and young people had to force on their bosses – and AI is a technology that grows less profitable every day, and bosses have to force it on workers and young people.
Now, it's true that some workers don't have to be forced to use AI. Workers who enjoy a high degree of autonomy (that is to say, workers who are positioned to ignore workplace coercion) can adopt AI in ways that they feel suited to, just as those early web users and Visicalc smugglers did. They can fulfill the maxim that labor-driven automation improves quality, while resisting capital's insistence that automation be used to increase throughput at quality's expense.
They can act as centaurs (workers assisted by technology), not as reverse-centaurs (workers who are recruited to serve as peripherals for machines). As with all technology questions, what the technology does is nowhere near as important as who the tech does it for and who the tech does it to:
And there's another group of workers who adopt AI voluntarily: workers who see that AI can do a lot of work that they view as dull and unimportant for them. These workers might be right – there are plenty of bullshit jobs out there:
But it's also possible that they're wrong, and they're substituting AI for something that really should be done by a person.
But on the plus side, at least no one has to force them to adopt AI.
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:
People familiar with the books, let's all take a moment to think kindly of the people who have only learned about :: gestures :: all this from trailers. Those poor people. Their heads are going to explode.
Okay but you forgot the best part! During the scene where Aragorn, Gandalf and the other Main CharaktersTM ride ahead to go shout at the gate (and talk to the mouth of sauron in the extended edition) they were very firmly told only to ride up ahead “this far” because that area was cleared and beyond that it wasn’t.
But. Viggo Mortensen is absolutely mad and lead them just…. a bit farther than that. Everyone else was very scared they might blow up any second. Viggo said it “added a little extra tension”.
Viggo was just Like That™ for the whole trilogy, taking method acting to extreme levels:
he would spend multiple days walking overland to locations in full pack, sword, & armour when everyone else was travelling in trucks
refused to use any prop swords that weren’t actual steel
basically lived in the forest in-costume, sleeping rough under the sky, even fishing & foraging for his food when possible
often spent hours in the barn just bonding with the horses. He adopted the horse he rode, Uranus, after filming ended
repaired all his own gear by hand, which was often since he never took it off
had a tooth knocked out during filming but had the crew simply glue it back in place so they could keep filming
the instructor who taught everyone swordplay said Viggo was the best swordsman he had ever trained
carried his sword literally everywhere & practiced non-stop, resulting in the cops being called when locals reported “a wild man swinging a sword around his head" outside a gym in Wellington
an orc actor fucked up & accidentally threw a dagger directly into Viggo’s face, but Viggo just deflected it with his sword. They kept that shot
infamously broke 3 toes kicking that helmet but stayed in-character & sold his very real scream as part of the scene. They also kept that shot
Viggo insists on doing his own stunts; in The Two Towers where Aragorn is unconscious & floating down the river, the strong current pulled him underwater for so long that a rescue team had to go in to save him. Viggo survived by grabbing a boulder on the riverbed and pulling himself to the surface
It’s probably more accurate to say that Aragorn played Viggo Mortensen in the off season, so I’m 100% unsurprised to hear he put a whole crowd of fellow actors in genuine mortal peril for a 12% increase in authenticity
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.
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
I keep thinking about the fact that Eridians seem so much stronger and sturdier than humans, so what humans-are-space-orcs thing could Grace even do that would freak Rocky out... and then I remembered humans are persistence predators.
So picture some years in the future when the xenonite suits are so safe that Grace's class can now take field trips into his biodome. Rocky's there because this is a big moment for everyone involved and also he just loves listening to Grace in his element. One of the more mischievous kids tries to sneak off from the group and there are plenty of chaperones but Grace is the first to notice.
His posture changes, goes focused but loose in a way Rocky's never seen before as he peels of from the crowd. Rocky just stands there, stunned, as he watches his sweet, gangly, goofy, clumsy blob of a friend turn into a hunter. Grace circles around the pebble, slightly crouched, head turned and honed in, arms loose to the sides, and maybe the little one notices and does that nervously excited giggle-squeal thing kids do when they're being chased and tries to get away, but Grace expertly corrals them. He doesn't even have to run for it, he just pens the kid in, lunges-
And takes the little pebble by the claw to lead them safely back to their peers. And just like that he's Grace again, smiling and joking and tripping over his improvised shoelaces. Rocky hasn't been scared of Grace since first contact. Have you seen the guy? ... but for a second there his instincts were telling him to run.
The thing is, for now, they’ve always mentioned that Ryland is seen as soft and "leaky/wet" by Rocky whenever other Eridians ask about him.
Plus, Ryland is openly clumsy, emotional, and seems to adore teaching and being gentle with children. Sure, they know he’s brave and terrifyingly intelligent—he didn’t achieve what he achieved for nothing.
But it’s when other Eridians ask about human evolution that they start to get a bit scared.
The fact that the human species developed ocular vision just to be able to navigate is quite something. Because, even if it's deficient by Eridian standards, apparently the environment and the human race needed something more than just sound and touch stimuli.
Whenever small rocks or pebbles found their way into the human habitat, Ryland seemed capable of "herding" them so they wouldn't wander too far. Also, on the rare occasions Ryland left his habitat in his suit to walk around Erid (a custom suit with special light generators so he could move and withstand the pressure), he seemed to move with a caution similar to that of a predator.
And another thing? His voice. Ugh.
His vocal cords were mediocre at best. But they could easily recognise the inflections of his emotions.
Ryland was incapable of speaking Eridian properly. He was highly limited. He always used his translator to avoid misunderstandings.
But bloody hell, they once saw him arguing with Rocky.
Rocky was practically cornered by the soft human. Ryland’s shouting and his sharp, biting tone only became more terrifying when they noticed how he was leaning over the other Eridian. And it was only because he’d been interrupted by the scientist that he noticed Ryland was practically in attack-and-hunt mode.
As if his body was instinctively ready to strike at the slightest right stimulus.
Only for him to completely relax and snap right back into that friendly tone the moment he noticed someone else’s presence.
And his reflexes? Terrifying. If his cup was about to fall? Or if one of his children had rushed too quickly up a mound?
Ryland would sprint at a terrifying speed to catch the object
