☽◦☾ @mallevsmaleficarum - Tumblr Blog

this fucking sucks. I got soul-bonded to a living weapon who takes the form of a beautiful girl. But she has no fucking joie de vivre about it. I keep trying to do combined dramatic attack cries but she’s all like. “No that’s embarrassing” and “just kill him, don’t waste time.” she won’t even let me name her finishing move. I think she only has a finishing move because it’s just a reliable path of least resistance. This fucking sucks

oh diary of a lovesick mutant, i still think of you fondly

#the most 2009 fic to ever do it #i miss it #simpler times

finalgirlguy

disorientation

Having a "stupider people have done this" attitude about the things you want to do can open so many doors

thebonewitch

At the end of the day, my thoughts on job hunting are that it's incredibly stupid how every fiber of our current socioeconomic structure is screaming that you MUST have a job and nothing else matters because you MUST be working and that's the only thing of true importance so never forget that you MUST have a job, and I'm like damn okay so I'd like a job, can I have one? And the answer is No

incognitopolls

(1/2) How many fandoms do you WRITE fanfiction for?

Just one

5-10

10-15

15+

I don’t write fanfiction

Show results

Voting ended onApr 27

We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

#currently 2 #sort of #i have wips for both but one will take over my brain for a time #but ever? 5

bob-belcher

PRACTICAL MAGIC 2 (2026)

#just when i needed them most #they return to me like long lost friends i used to pick rosemary with in aunties' greenhouse

bemusedlybespectacled

Do you have an Assigned Animal™ (including extinct or mythical ones) that dominates the gifts people give you/your decor/etc.?

Yes, I have an Assigned Animal™ (owls, koalas, unicorns, dinosaurs, etc.)

No, but I've been assigned something else (fandom, color, plant, etc.).

I have more than one Thing (ex: koalas AND purple AND cacti)

BB what the fuck are you talking about

Voting ended onApr 26

#skull decorations lol #pillows #figurines #post cards

soul-hammered

weabooweedwitch

I love that the pandemic actually definitively proved a lot of those "hard" questions for us. Masking up reduced cases of the flu to almost nonexistent numbers and we had zero flu deaths for a time. The welfare and social service and unemployment programs helped keep people living paycheck to paycheck out of poverty, and those stimulus checks some folks keep complaining about actually massively benefitted the common man and the economy. Individual personal travel was so extremely restricted on a global scale that we basically have concrete proof that individual restraint in terms of driving cars or travelling means absolutely nothing by comparison because the mass pollution is coming from the fisheries and the corporations with private jets and container ships. Working from home actually has massive benefits for a company like productivity boosts and better mental health of employees while also saving gas

and we're just. Willingly going back to how everything was before. We were shown how to do things better and the people in charge said "that's nice but we just want to get everything 'back to normal' :)"

roach-works

we’re not willingly going back to how everything was before. we are being forced back into it by members of the ruling class who found out that making things better for almost everyone else made them feel bad.

silly-jellyghoty

Let's not forget about any of these things. Let's reblog and schedule this post to pop in in the future to remind us of what we may have forgotten a little.

cwicseolfor

Do not forget.

robotlyra

My primary takeaway from COVID was "The first thing people did when they had free time from work was they started demanding a better world. The next time this happens the executive ruling class will literally let everyone in the labor class die before they let them have 3 months free time ever again, because they cannot allow that better world to come to be."

fleshengine

Also people, when given the free time to be alone with themselves, will decide to learn new skills and make art and stuff.

bytedykes

fingering his plot hole

bytedykes

this site is so easy

brynnmclean

"I'm bad at commenting on fics" okay, but you know you can get better at it though, right? You know you can start with something as simple as "thanks, I like this!" and you'll still probably make a fic writer's day? You do know that it's in your power to "get better" about it, right? If you want to?

Do you want to?

brynnmclean

Also "but I want to write a GOOD comment" is a block that you are placing in front of yourself. You are creating that pressure.

The amount of writers I talk to that are happy for anything genuinely positive in this current day and age of AI slop and varying levels of awful bot comments.

Are you going to actually write that long "perfect" comment or would it help to instead focus on sending a small bright spark of happiness to a writer? To start there and build up to a longer comment later if you can? What I think I'm trying to say is that commenting can be a muscle that you train, if you feel like it. Or a habit you can form, if you feel like it. You can do better, if you want to. You can start small, too.

I see so many posts on here that are writers seeking community and/or mourning the shift in fandom from leaving feedback to passive consumption. And I really don't think it has to be like this.

brynnmclean

This post is getting a decent amount of notes and I hope folks don't misunderstand my intentions here -- I meant for this to be encouraging to readers who want to leave comments on fics.

I've heard people say things like "I'm sorry I'm bad at commenting" or "I want to comment, but..." and I just want to respond with this: please recognize that even a small comment like a string of heart emojis or "I like this a lot" is precious these days when writers are enduring either silence/lack of responses to their work and/or an influx in bot comments that say awful things or are commissions scams. I see so many posts on my dash about the difference in fandom responsiveness to fic over the past few years. A lot of writers wish for feedback. Readers, you do contribute to fandom communities. You can help fandom grow if you participate in it. And comments do not need to be huge or detailed to make a difference.

westiec

I have a frequent reader who only ever comments in emoji hearts

I have another who always comments :DDDDD with an absurd number of smiles

I LOVE THEM BOTH SO MUCH AND GENUINELY AM FILLED WITH JOY EVERY TIME I SEE AN AO3 EMAIL FROM THEM

it's as simple as that <3

brynnmclean

#comments are awesome to receive #and unlike kudos you can give as many comments as you want (via @encyclopika)

Hi, just want to pull these specific tags forward because I think they make a really great point, especially when it comes to longer, multi-chapter fics! You can only leave one (1) kudos on a whole fic, regardless of if it has multiple chapters -- and since more writers are locking their fics to only be seen by folks with AO3 accounts, that rules out any additional guest kudos.

I've seen posts about leaving "second kudos" comments or even "why can't I leave more kudos, AO3!!!" and those kind of comments are a delight to receive, speaking personally, because they tell me that readers are STILL HERE enjoying my chapter fics. It can be hard to know that anyone is reading new chapters, if I don't get new comments and if a reader left their allotted kudos when an earlier chapter was released and read.

TL;DR, receiving kudos is lovely, but limited!!!! And I think a nice, easy comment to leave on a fic you enjoy is "second kudos"

brynnmclean

I hope everyone who is liking and/or reblogging this series of posts goes out and comments on fics. I saw a post today about a newer ugly AO3 commenting bot out there and I really strongly feel, now more than ever, that it is important that we support fic writers by leaving positive feedback. We can encourage each other to keep creating. I'm tired of the world too, man, but we can give each other some light.

frociaggina97

"i don't care if they make their whole way though uni with chatgpt" i think you guys are so internetpilled that you have forgotten there are actual jobs out there that require people to know what they are doing in any way possible or else people die

frociaggina97

i know a lot of people study just to get paid well but girl this is engineering be for fucking real take this seriously

ironborealis

114 people died in the Hyatt Regency collapse, and in the US it's the third largest structural collapse fatality count, behind 9/11 and the Pemberton Mill collapse in 1860.

I've learned about this tragedy in my physics classes, to demonstrate tensile strength, and as a reminder about the importance of calculations being done right. I've also learned about it in my legal classes as an example of construction defect lawsuits. I've seen it referenced in disaster response classes.

Between AI and the current Presidential administration, we're barrelling right back towards this nightmare.

There are multiple errors that resulted in this collapse, but these stand out to me:

1. Kansas City was facing high unemployment and needed to attract jobs and business into the city. So the planning and inspection departments may have looked too closely at the designs.

2. An engineering firm too lazy to double check their designs or design changes by the manufacturer before approving them. The error that resulted in the collapse was one that the owner of the engineering firm said that a "first year engineering student" would spot.

3. The steel manufacturer treating preliminary plans as final plans, not verifying the math on their end.

The bridges' original design could only hold 60% of the minimum load required by city code. The design changes recommended by the manufacturer halved that. Less than a year and 3 weeks from opening to the public, the whole thing collapse.

Articles about the collapse say that everyone "trusted" the other party to have done the calculations correctly.

A significant portion of the population trusts what the computer or AI tells them, without checking. Imprecisely calibrated AI hallucinate information. The US economy is going into a downturn and federal regulatory agencies are being gutted.

We are going to see the Hyatt Regency Collapse repeat over and over for decades, not just in buildings, but in medicine, manufacturing, the environment, etc.

Some of this we're just going to have to weather, but the message for AI users comes straight from IBM (once the world's leading computer manufacturer) back in 1979:

"A Computer Cannot Be Held Accountable. Therefore A Computer Should Never Make A Management Decision."

The owner of the engineering firm that designed the Hyatt Regency spent the rest of his life lecturing on the disaster, to serve as a warning to his fellow engineers about the real-life consequences of sloppy design.

I don't think Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk will have the courage or the honor to do that when OpenAI / Meta / xAI are responsible for getting people killed.

So if you're going to blindly trust the AI to do critical work tasks, I hope you're prepared to be making an apology tour for the rest of your life if it all goes wrong.

vaspider

I've been thinking about this post since I first saw it, bc I think, like...

It is important not to walk away from it thinking "but I'm not going to be an engineer, so that's fine."

In my adult life, I have (among other things) run a small business, I have managed a bank branch, and I have been a mortgage processor. In any one of those three jobs, not knowing the exact correct laws and procedures for what I'm doing could really fuck up someone else's life.

If I don't set up payroll correctly, I could create a huge disaster for myself and employees, either immediately or come tax time. QuickBooks keeps trying to get me to let AI manage my payroll and I would rather stab myself in the hand.

If I didn't handle deposits and Fincen reporting correctly in my branch banking days, I could end up accidentally committing many many crimes and making it harder for people to catch some of the really big, really terrible crimes. (Hint: this was important to uncovering all the Epstein shit!) That's not even counting all the actual cash I was responsible for. (It makes me want to throw up thinking about the fact that I literally handled about a million dollars in cash every week for 2 years.)

If I didn't handle my mortgage processing exactly right, people could lose their homes. I cannot stress enough how easy it is for shit to get REALLY FUCKED UP if deeds and mortgages are not filed exactly right. People get their homes (legally!) stolen from them every year.

Yes, it's important for engineers to learn how to do their jobs, but man... our lives are so interconnected, and so many things matter much more than you know. If the shit you do matters at all, in any way, to anyone, ever, you fucking need to do it right, because someone is counting on you doing exactly that.

emobanana22

Being not a teenager on this app feels exactly like this fr

wizard-council-bureaucrat

the king has abruptly fired 60% of his wizard staff, so he’s about to be abruptly surprised at who floated 100% of his formerly floating sky castle

hyper-lynx

I heard they're planning to maintain their levitation rites with autonomous constructs from now on, saying wizards are going to be totally obsolete within the season... so, ah, I'd invest in falling island insurance.