30+ Canadian (Queer, She/Her/They/Them) who is still unsure if she's doing things right. Enjoy story and romance. Believe in a good world for all. Can be found at pillowfort and twitter at (basically) the same name! Message me if you like, I don't bite!
POV: you are a tiny tan and white Shih Tzu with dark ears and big brown eyes, and your Mama has been crying in bed for days, but you’ve just had a haircut and the groomer gave you a pretty, new bandanna and you know Mama likes it when you have a new bandanna so you run through the house at Mach speed and launch yourself into the bed, eager to show it off with a big goofy grin and a helicopter tail.
Your Mama starts crying harder. Papa gives you string cheese as a reward. Mission failed successfully.
In Mina's first entry in may she mentions how her journal is going to be an actual journal, to practice her writing + documenting skills in order to develop more secretarial skills, and today's entry really shows how much Mina has evolved in that manner.
If one reads her entry in the context of being a newspaper tourist report about Whitby; without all of Mina's personal little quirks and the introduction of Mr. Swales, it paints an interesting picture of the town which involves all of the relevant points that people can visit. It's a subtle, yet really cool way to see the "passage of time" outside of the textual entries.
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I saw this video about a doctor who performed an MRI on a 5 year old and discovered she essentially had “brain damage” from excessive iPad use, as the white matter in her brain couldn’t form properly due to an understimulated environment.
Hmm it’s almost like there’s supposed to be adult figures responsible for monitoring her screen time and making sure she develops properly… certainly this isn’t the result of neglect at the hands of her parents…
“This 5 year old is brain damaged by excessive iPad use”
Translation: This 5 year old is developmentally impaired by neglectful parents who used an iPad as a stand-in for social and environmental stimulation / interaction for hours at a time during critical early stages of child development. The iPad is the cop-out.
“Children don’t have the strength to hold pencils anymore because they only use screens.”
Translation: Parents aren’t making the conscious effort to help their children develop necessary skills and letting iPads raise them.
When are people going to realize the iPads and whatnot are the instruments through which the neglect is happening through and not the cause? How the fuck do you let your child have such a severe lack of physical strength in their hands that they can’t hold a pencil properly?
People will see a study suggesting children with higher screen times have poorer or negative developmental outcomes and immediately say it’s the screens causing this, and not the more likely fact that higher screen time = less engagement time with their environment, physical exercise, parents, family, and their peers, all of which are NECESSARY for a healthy upbringing as a social species.
It’s like saying a dog who was kept in a cage all its life and left with atrophied muscles was damaged by the cage, and not by the fact its owners were too lazy to play or walk their dog in order for its muscles to build properly. The cage is the instrument of neglect and the owners are the perpetrators, in the same way parents are the perpetrators and weaponizing screen time as an excuse and painting themselves as helpless bystanders.
i thought the “this is the face that launched a thousand ships, although now it would maybe be five-hundred.” line was just an internet joke but apparently that's a line Menelaus actually says in Nolan's Odyssey??
Not only that the language itself sounds straight out of a marvel forcibly funny haha moment, but Menelaus? The Menelaus who all thoughout human history, from Homer, to Sappho, to Euripides, to Virgil, to Shakespeare, to Brooke, to Barth; from Classical vases to Medieval poetry to Reinessance art, has been known as the man whose sword fell from his hands at the sight of his wife after 10 years apart?
"What joy for me to hold my wife" Menelaus?
"He flung the sword away, and kissed her feet" Menelaus?
"I believe all. I understand nothing. I love you" Menelaus?
"I have no fault to find; my wife, he daughter of Zeus and Leda, is mine again, she whom her brothers on their snow-white steeds, whilst torches blazed, made my happy bride, but gods removed her from my home." Menelaus?
The Menelaus who was picked out of the suitors by Helen herself? The Menelaus who couldn't kill a begging Trojan so his brother had to do it for him? The Menelaus who rescued Odysseus and got out Patroclus' body? The Menelaus who volounteered to fight Paris one on one so everybody could go home? Who kept expressing his guilt about himself being the cause of war through every assembly he spoke at in the Iliad? Who after 10 years away at Troy, took his wife through a 7-year long journey at sea back home, where he reinstated her as the queen of Sparta? Who wept like a child in front of Telemachus recalling the war and his brother and all the friends he lost and the only consolation being his wife' gentle hand on his?
You want me to believe that man scarred Helen's face and called her only worth half the ships because of it?
I'm actually physically sick just thinking about it.
A fic written 2 years ago is NOT OLD. Two years is nothing. Two years ago was yesterday.
Also I don't care if a fic is 10 years old. Leave those comments!! Even if you think the author isn't active, or moved on from the fandom, I promise you it will make them smile.
I commented on a fic that was 11 years old, and there was already a response by the time I got up the next morning. Comment on the fics, please, comment on them, I promise it'll make the author's day either way
(transcript: Every time someone comments on my old fic, i feel like I'm an old actor getting paid residuals. Appreciate you, old-fic-commenters. Key source of emotional income, tbh.)
I'm definitely not demanding for people to stick to stories where they are the specific intended target audience, but a hella lot of pointless fandom wank could be avoided if they just kept in mind whether a story was meant for them in the first place.
Like - age group. There's nothing wrong with adults watching or reading stories meant for children and teens, but it IS weird when then they turn around and throw a fit that they weren't mature enough. Like how bronies complained that the lore and world-building of a show about neon-coloured ponies isn't deep and complicated enough. Or the adult audience of SU flipping that the villains weren't dispatched of with enough righteous fury.
Or tone. If you expect Clean, Wholesome Entertainment with Edifying Morals, then why do you keep watching GoT, the Murder Show About War Criminals, and its spinoffs? Find. Something. Else.
Or even background culture! No, that popular danmei is not a badly written, confusing book, it was just meant for an audience with a different background knowledge than yours. Nobody says that you, Westerner, can't still read it, but it's on you to look up the stuff you don't get, not on the author to spoonfeed it to you.
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you guys aren't gonna like this but if you want ao3 to be a neutral archive that will host anything that includes shit made with ai no matter how objectionable you find that
no. I disagree. ao3 is an archive of fan content. as in, created by fans. An AI is not a fan. it's not a person. it can't write or create. ao3 is an archive of transformative work and chatGPT cannot perform meaningful transformative work, it can only regurgitate slop.
and yes, as others have said, ao3 still does have certain limitations. You can't plagiarize - and AI is a plagiarism machine, you can't post 'iso' or 'placeholder' fics, etc. It can absolutely choose to say the content it hosts must be made by humans without censoring the acual content.
Except that Ao3 absolutely cannot choose to say the content it hosts must be made by humans without opening the door to the very censorship it was created to avoid.
Because there is no way to tell with 100% accuracy that a piece of writing was created by or with the aid of generative AI, and anything less than 100% accuracy is completely unacceptable, no nuance, no exceptions. You can tell with 100% accuracy if something is not a fanwork--like an ISO or placeholder post that does not contain a fanwork--and you can tell with 100% accuracy if a fanwork contains a link to a payment apparatus or is otherwise soliciting payment for fic in violation of the TOS, so these things can be disallowed and, when discovered and reported as violations, dealt with by PAC. And you can tell with 100% accuracy that a fic has been plagiarized, meaning that it has pulled entire passages word for word from another fic and this can therefore be detailed in a report in order for PAC to take action. (This is important to note because while generative AI is in fact The Plagiarism Machine, that can only be proven on the back end via the datasets used to train it. You can't actually look at generative output and tell which place the words were ripped from, because LLMs operate on statistical probabilities of word order, not actually pulling phrases wholesale from a specific work.)
But you cannot tell with 100% accuracy that a particular passage has been generated with AI.
And we are already seeing the problem with spurious AI accusations! People are claiming that 'excessive use of em-dashes' is a 'tell' for AI, when the only reason em-dashes exist in AI-generated output is because the machines were trained on human-generated writing that used them! (And as a writer who frequently ODs on em-dashes and italics, I find that particular 'tell' especially insulting. My overuse of em-dashes comes from my own brain, thank you very much.) So the only way to actually tell that someone on Ao3 is using AI to write their fic is if the admit as much up-front.
Guess what would happen if Ao3 decided to ban AI fics from the platform? Those fics would stop being tagged, and then we'd run into the exact same problems we had on FFN with fics being grudge-reported by bad faith actors, which was one of many reasons Ao3 was created in the first place--so that people couldn't do that.
Generative AI sucks and I think everyone who uses it to create fics is a loser, but I'd much rather be able to avoid them by excluding a tag or muting an author than have to worry about some asshole who hates me trying to get my fics deleted by reporting me to PAC for suspected AI use.
The corollary to this is that when people tag AI fic appropriately, you CANNOT send hate in the comments!! Because you know what happens then? People will stop tagging for AI! You must click the back button (and block the tag and maybe the author too) and come here to vent instead. Otherwise we'll be left with piles of untagged AI slop on AO3.
Actually, beekeepers take many precautions to keep their bees from leaving.
many clip the wings of the queen, destroy new queen cells, cull queens they don't like and use bee pheromones to prevent a hive from naturally swarming or absconding. They also try and prevent mating with the African honey bee, which makes them less docile among other things. During artificial insemination of queens, drones are crushed and „spare“ queens are killed.
and commercial beekeepers even cull their hives during winter, or when they are not producing well.
Coupled with the fact that there is evidence that insects do feel pain, this is not great.
(Not to mention that honeybees are an invasive species in most places, competing with native pollinators and spreading disease)
It is so fucking bold of you to link the exact same paywalled book thirteen times in your reblog to throw people off the fact that you're using one source from 1859.
I don't think there's ever been a funnier vegan response in the history of this hell site. This is actual gold. If you cited an argument like this in a first year undergrad intro to bio module, then your lecturer would be legally entitled to fire you out of a cannon. I think I'm dying
like yes actually there is a conversation to be had about how a characters actions are framed and how they thematically fit with the rest of the story and it can in fact reflect the author's beliefs. some authors are even trying to make a point
not all depiction is glorification but sometimes it is and you need to be able to tell the difference. not because your immortal soul will be tainted by reading The Bad One, but because you need to have reading comprehension skills
