Linya's Corner

Random stuff I like

[linya333]

My avatar is shen qingqiu from scum villain's self-saving system (svsss). Art by @artisticallycrafty on Tumblr aka artisticC_RN on twitter

I'm Linya333 on most platforms. I am a 30-something mom. I have been reading fanfiction for over 20 years. I have been in and out of a lot of fandoms in that time. I mostly reblog through the queue so I can see things I like again a few months later.

Some of the tags i use

I try to tag anything that's USA specific "American politics" so people from other countries can easily mute.

Current events: for news stories

Linya talks: original or blog posts

fic rec: sometimes I make fanfiction recommendations, going to try to do this more often

Svsss: scum villain's self-saving system book series

Mdzs: madao zushi book series aka the grandmaster of demonic cultivation aka TV version is the untamed

Naruto things: Naruto stuff

Naruto founders: for those characters

Star wars

Zelda my beloved: anything legend of Zelda

Botw: breath of the wild, legend of Zelda game

Totk: tears of the kingdom, legend of Zelda game

oh tumblr: for things to do with tumblr culture or funny posts

Fandom: general posts related to ao3 or fanfiction culture

Story: for original stories i reblog

Bnha: boku no hero academia: my hero academia manga

Fma: Fullmetal alchemist manga

leverage: the TV show

Lotr: lord of the rings

Rotg: rise of the gaurdians

Atla: avatar the last Airbender

Pretty art

Dragons: I like them

Fox : tend to reblog any i see

Bird : I like bird photography

Photography

For reference: anything I want to find later

Healthcare

Fiber art: sewing, crochet, quilting, etc

[idk-i-was-bored]

I decided to do something a little bit insane. I sat down and typed every word spoken in revenge of the Sith so I could then hand write every word to create this scene redraw. I am very pleased with the final result I’m not gonna lie.

[buff-shizun]

What if, after the conference and the reforging of Zheng Yang and the making of the sword mound, Shen Qingqiu gets drunk? I mean, super drunk. Stumbling around drunk. Needs help getting home drunk. And since Binghe isn't around, it falls, naturally, to Ning Yingying to assist.

As she supports her shizun's drunk self back up to the bamboo house, Yingying can't help but worry. Her Shizun has never gotten drunk like this before; and though he isn't saying much, his usually stoic face is twisting in unusually open displays of emotion. It was...unsettling.

But it was also an opportunity.

"Shizun," Yingying starts quietly. "Shizun, lately..."

"Mm?" Shen Qingqiu turns his head to look at her. At the same time he stumbles, and Yingying has to quickly correct his balance. "Ah, careful, careful!"

Yingying feels the urge to smile. Her silly Shizun...

She smothers it.

"Yingying wonders if Shizun will do her a favor?"

The words take a visible moment to register. When they do, Yingying feels warmed that her Shizun’s first response was worry.

"Is Yingying in trouble? Is someone daring to trouble my disciple?"

Yingying nods, mustering up all her daring. "Shizun has been, yes."

She watches his face closely, waiting only long enough for his face to twist in confusion before barreling forward. "Shizun has been grieving- no, Shizun, don't deny it. I have seen it. More than that, though, Shizun has been withdrawn and will not confide in even this Yingying. What is wrong, Shizun?"

Her shizun tries to deflect, but Yingying expected that. In a way she couldn't have when her Shizun was sober, she maneuvers him into a verbal corner, waits for him to make a mistake, then stikes.

"Shizun, what happened at the conference?"

It was strange to see Shen Qingqiu so open with his emotions. She almost didn't recognize the shapes his brows took or the curve of his mouth like this.

Almost.

"....Shizun looks so miserable. Was it really that bad?"

".......worse than you could imagine," he pauses, glances to the side. Something flicks through his eyes- Surprise? Outrage? Exasperation??- before focusing back on her. ".....if you truly wish to know, then it's best we speak elsewhere."

Yingying gets the hint. They continue to the bamboo house.

Once she's settled Shizun in on a seat, she takes the seat across, not daring to make tea lest Shizun changes his mind.

"Shizun, what happened?"

He purses his lips. "Yingting must promise to speak of this with no one-...."

-and for the next half-hour Yingying hears of the conference from her Shizun's perspective. The chaos, the fighting, and also- also-

Oh, A-Luo...he must have been so scared.

Shizun seems to agree. There's this far off look in his eyes as he explains how A-Luo begged and pleaded. He spares no detail of the confrontation, telling Yingying exactly what he did. What he said. Giving himself no excuses to hide behind as his eyes mist and stare somewhere past her head.

Yingying doesn't need to hear his reasoning. She can guess why he did what he did. However, she still asks him anyway. She just...needed to know for sure.

"They would have killed him, Yingying. A Heavenly Demon, discovered at the sight of an invasion in progress?" He shakes his head. "There is nothing so hated amongst the four cultivation clans as one with his blood. The Abyss is hell, but atleast he would live and come out of it stronger. Death is not something so easily beaten."

"I only regret," He continues. "That I said such terrible things to him before pushing him in." He deflated, hunching in on himself. "Undoubtedly, Binghe hates this master now; and while I know I deserve it, it is a hard pill to swallow."

Yingying blinks, silently reeling. She's barely processed any of that before she's blurting out, "Then why say it at all? Shizun is not usually one to say what he doesn't mean."

"This Master panicked. Binghe has always been so sticky. He needed a way to cut ties, otherwise..."

Oh. Otherwise A-Luo would just come right back.

Yingying understands now. Shizun...really had tried his best for A-Luo, hadn't he?

That said, "Shizun must know that A-Luo could never hate him."

Resignation lined his entire body. "You more than anyone must know that Binghe, while a sweet child, gives back exactly what is given to him." Which...yes, that is true. But still-! "If he returns, it will be to return the harm I've done to him ten times over." Shizun sighs, "But that's alright. This Master will accept whatever he plans to do with me."

She can see that, in this, Shizun is resolute.

Except...

Except.

Does it really have to be like this? When her shidi returns, will she really have to watch the two people she loves suffer and fight?

No. "Shizun should find a way to save A-Luo."

Shen Qingqiu watches her with confused eyes, but she is sure. Determined. It...almost seems to fill him with a new light.

"Remind me of this conversation tomorrow."

A month later, they have a plan, and it's simple: Shizun will find an item or spell that will allow he and Binghe to switch bodies. While Yingying is helping A-Luo readjust to the human realm and hiding that he's taken over Shen Qingqiu's body, Shizun will navigate A-Luo's safely out of the Abyss and return it to Binghe as soon as possible! This way, all debts are paid, and A-Luo won't be left to stew in suffering in a pit designed specifically just for that!

(And while Shizun is gone, Yingying can secretly dissolve the entire misunderstanding! A win-win!)

Yes, a simple, foolproof plan. Nothing could possibly go wrong!

System: (+^ + "I sense an opportunity."

[nasa]

Join Moon Joy June!

Are you in need of some serious Moon joy? Get ready for Moon Joy June. NASA is hosting a month-long art challenge and we would love for you to participate! For every week of June, NASA will introduce a new prompt to inspire artists and creators of all kinds:

June 1-7: Launch 

June 8-14: Moon 

June 15-21: Crew 

June 22-30: Earth 

To share your Moon joy-inspired art on Tumblr, use the hashtag #ArtemisArtShow.

The sky is (not) the limit! We encourage all forms of art, including but not limited to: paintings, drawings, sculptures, dances, music, animations, nail art, latte foam art, poetry, fashion. Choose your favorite medium and share it with us!

Learn more about the challenge in our FAQ. Happy Moon Joy June to all who celebrate!

[zayzaycomics]

watch this video because it's objectively cool

[devinellekurtz]

Modern Phoenix

My print shop will be opening on Thursday, Nov 20th at 9am Pacific time and closing on the 28th. This page will become the shop page, and you can sign up for a mailing list alert.

[teamunee]

chapter 13

[blumineck]

Inspired by my recent love of the Raven Thrower (it looks like a corvid that you chuck at things!)

Also obligatory reminder that it’s the final week on my Bluminarmour fundraiser. If you want to see me test dumb stuff in proper historical armour please consider pitching in and/or sharing!

The Bluminarmour Project

Blumineck is trying to fun a video series doing fun and serious historical and fantasy testing in fitted plate armour.

[akahlt0]

[jnyfmg]

Something about having an universal translator, and learning to understand without it

[cheshire-wink]

(just a silly little drabble because I was reminded of this old trend/meme thing. Unedited)

“Lan Zhan!”

Lan Wangji paused in the doorway of the Jingshi to savor the warmth that flooded him at the sight of his husband, ink smudged on his fingers and across one cheek from whatever he was working on and smiling in honest joy from simply seeing him. “Wei Ying.”

Wei Wuxian’s smile widened happily. Lan Wangji would never tire of seeing it. He crossed the room to lean down and kiss his husband softly on the forehead before moving further. Wei Ying was busy, and Lan Wangji didn’t want to distract him too much yet. He was heading toward his guqin when Wei Wuxian spoke.

“Lan Zhan, would you still love me if I was a worm?”

The ‘yes’ was on Lan Wangji’s tongue, ready to speak when a sudden terrifying thought occured. He turned on his heel to scrutinize his husband, but Wei Wuxian had gone back to whatever he was working on. “Do not,” Lan Wangji spoke seriously, “attempt a transformation talisman.”

Wei Wuxian paused, looked up and blinked at him. And then he started to laugh. “That’s not…” he gasped out, “no no no, it’s just something I heard a few children saying in Caiyi.” He got to his feet, abandoning his work to move to Lan Wangji and give him a quick peck on the lips. He then held up three fingers and said, still grinning, “I promise I’m not planning to turn myself into a worm.” He lowered his hand before adding, “at least not intentionally.”

“Wei Ying.”

Wei Wuxian laughed again, and again leaned in to kiss him. “Fine, fine, er-gege says no transformation spells, so no transformation spells it is.”

Lan Wangji’s hands came up to his husband’s waist at the next kiss, pulling him in closer. When they parted again he said, “Yes.”

“Hm?”

“I would love Wei Ying even if he was a worm.”

“Lan Zhan!”

[justalurkr]

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.

[irispurpurea]

This is the paper. It's excellent, highly recommend reading it.

I remember reading about Gebru's firing but I had no idea this was the paper she was fired over.

[durnesque-esque]

Just a quick grab for some of what's being discussed:

"4. UNFATHOMABLE TRAINING DATA The size of data available on the web has enabled deep learning models to achieve high accuracy on specific benchmarks in NLP and computer vision applications. However, in both application areas, the training data has been shown to have problematic characteristics [18, 38, 42, 47, 61] resulting in models that encode stereotypical and derogatory associations along gender, race, ethnicity, and disability status [11, 12, 69, 69, 132, 132, 157]. In this section, we discuss how large, uncurated, Internet-based datasets encode the dominant/hegemonic view, which further harms people at the margins, and recommend significant resource allocation towards dataset curation and documentation practices."

"6. STOCHASTIC PARROTS In this section, we explore the ways in which the factors laid out in §4 and §5 — the tendency of training data ingested from the Internet to encode hegemonic worldviews, the tendency of LMs to amplify biases and other issues in the training data, and the tendency of researchers and other people to mistake LM-driven performance gains for actual natural language understanding — present real-world risks of harm, as these technologies are deployed. After exploring some reasons why humans mistake LM output for meaningful text, we turn to the risks and harms from deploying such a model at scale. We find that the mix of human biases and seemingly coherent language heightens the potential for automation bias, deliberate misuse, and amplification of a hegemonic worldview."

[ohlooh]

Shen Qingqiu was in the bamboo house finishing his reports (secretly reading the terrible yellow book he confiscated), when one of his disciples knocked on the door.

The poor boy looked very nervous, stammering his greeting, so Shen Qingqiu sat him down, got him some calming tea and let him calm down before asking why he came all the way here.

Turns out the boy was not actually a boy but a girl. And only just now gathered the strength to confess this to his shizun.

Now, Shen Yuan is a modern man, he knows trans people are a thing. He personally never met any, but he understands the basic concept. And honestly becoming a girl just raised his disciples chance of survival in this nonsense porn novel by 100 percent.

And as luck would have it Shen Qingqiu has the perfect herb. You see, there was a plot in PIDW (which was not just Mulan ripoff, no sir) about a wife drinking a tea made from roots of a special plant to become a man to take her fathers place in a war.

In that plot Binghe quickly realised that something was up with that particular soldier (despite not having a reason to interact with common foot soldiers as an emperor) and had her drink a tea made from the blooms of that same plant, which turned her back into a woman. Que a quick wedding and some terrible papapa (not a particularly popular wife, though Shen Yuan personally quite liked her, at least before she got absorbed into the harem).

Shen Qingqiu just so happens to have this exact plant growing in his personal garden. It was interesting okay? He needed to study it and you never know when it might come in handy. So he just hops to the garden gets some blooms and makes sure his disciple knows how to prepare them correctly.

He also makes sure the disciple gets new proper robes and that there is a place for hi-, her in the female dorm.

He also schedules a check up on Qian Cao. He then gives the disciple a long lecture on various issues he might encounter in her new body. From periods (if the pain is worse than just mildly annoying, go to the healers), to creeps (to be dealt with extreme prejudice), to a new center of gravity (actually a big problem when it came sword flight). His meimei complained endlessly to him about all the inconvenient things about being a girl so he had a lot of advice. He also goes into a lot of detail about the special tea itself.

The taste, the effects, how long the change will take. He makes sure to emphasise how important it is to be careful with cultivation, because new body means new spiritual veins that could get damaged or cause qi deviations.

Shen Qingqiu sends the girl away while patting himself on the back how well he handled that. The disciple leaves fully convinced her shizun is trans. There is a big debate whether he was born a woman. Or worse if he was born a man and now uses the tea frequently to change back and forth from his true form as a woman to that of a man, to not lose face for the sect.

It causes all sorts of rumours and Binghe gets to have a little crisis about potentially misgendering and assuming things about his shizun.

[drachenmagier]

Dragon. For the sake of drawing dragons, of course. What other reason would I need~?

[ineffectualdemon]

Omegaverse AU where heats don't make Omegas crazy horny and down to bone unless they have already decided they approve of the alpha as a partner. They don't even necessarily go horny at first. Just super clingy and happy to be near their Alpha

If they don't approve and the Alpha tries to force them they can and will kill

An Omega is most dangerous when in heat and they are very dangerous

Ok so Jin Ling [EDIT: Jin LAN not Jin Ling. Reminder to Self - don't write Tumblr posts after taking your melatonin] city happens and they meet and it kickstarts Shen Qingqiu's heat because system shenanigans and even though they are both expecting violent rejection omegapilled Shen Qingqiu just perks up and makes Grabby Hands™ at Luo Binghe as soon as he sees him and neither of them know how to handle this development. Like Luo Binghe totally expected Shen Qingqiu to try and rip out his throat and was upset about it even before he showed up

And Shen Qingqiu is still scared but also it's Binghe! Of course he approves of Binghe as an Alpha! It is illogical to not approve!

So Shen Qingqiu is like "no you should go cause I'm scared" but also refusing to let go of Binghe and crawling into his lap

It's very confusing for everyone.

Meanwhile Shang Qinghua has assumed his king would murder him if he approached him during his heat but walks into An Ding one day post canon to find a nest on his bed and a bit Ice Demon pulling him into it

Mobei had waited too fucking long for his Alpha to get the fucking hint

Shang Qinghua is happy but very confused

[ineffectualdemon]

This is getting traction again and I'm thinking about it again

Ok so the system triggers the heat and expects that maybe drama will happen

But what what happens is when Shen Qingqiu meets Binghe again he lights the fuck up with a big beaming "BINGHE!!!" And is immediately "wtf was that" about it and his hackles keep being raised by everyone else in the room and he keeps getting closer to Binghe who is a bit stunlocked

When he leaves and Gongyi Xiao leans in to speak to him he backs up because ewwww alpha stank

But then Binghe seeing him back up approaches and Shen Qingqiu lights up again and ends up clinging to his arm on the way back to Mu Qingfang while also asking himself why he's holding Binghe's arm and why Binghe is letting him.

"This Master apologies and will let Binghe go." They both look down at Shen Qingqiu's hand which is very pointedly not letting go.

When they get there Mu Qingfang declares Shen Qingqiu in preheat because idk without a cure is acting up and sends Shen Qingqiu upstairs alone with an emergency nesting qiankun pouch.

It takes an embarrassing amount of time for him to let go of Binghe

Binghe, driven by Xin Mo shows up to make sure Liu Qingge isn't with Shizun and hears a cross Shen Qingqiu say "Ok Liu-Shidi you can clear my meridians but then get out."

That...gives him hope and opens the door and Shen Qingqiu perks up from the middle of his nest and makes literally grabby hands with a cry of "Binghe!!! Binghe Binghe Binghe!" Before realising and being mortified

[ineffectualdemon]

Shen Qingqiu: Binghe should go!

Luo Binghe: *takes a step back*

Shen Qingqiu: *whines of distress*

Luo Binghe: ...*takes two steps forwards*

Shen Qingqiu: *purring* no Binghe. go away*back to purring*

Luo Binghe: ...Does Shizun not know what he wants?

[sunflower-galaxy-star]

If I die young - The Band Perry

[brawltogethernow]

Coda