*whispers* holy shit people are amazing.
Not today Justin
Keni
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

Discoholic 🪩
Stranger Things

JBB: An Artblog!

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
AnasAbdin

Origami Around
noise dept.

PR's Tumblrdome
art blog(derogatory)
hello vonnie

Janaina Medeiros

No title available

JVL
DEAR READER

祝日 / Permanent Vacation

@theartofmadeline

if i look back, i am lost
seen from Brazil
seen from Türkiye
seen from Israel
seen from Israel

seen from Malaysia
seen from France

seen from United States

seen from Italy

seen from Malaysia

seen from United Kingdom

seen from Canada
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seen from Peru
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seen from Türkiye

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@marginalmadness
*whispers* holy shit people are amazing.
“While many people think fanfiction is about inserting sex into texts (like Tolkien’s) where it doesn’t belong, Brancher sees it differently: “I was desperate to read about sex that included great friendship; I was repurposing Tolkien’s text in order to do that. It wasn’t that friendship needed to be sexualized, it was that erotica needed to be … friendship-ized.” Many fanfiction writers write about sex in conjunction with beloved texts and characters not because they think those texts are incomplete, but because they’re looking for stories where sex is profound and meaningful. This is part of what makes fan fiction different from pornography: unlike pornography, fanfic features characters we already care deeply about, and who tend to already have long-standing and complex relationships with each other. It’s a genre of sexual subjectification: the very opposite of objectification. It’s benefits with friendship.”
— Francesca Coppa, “Introduction to The Dwarf’s Tale,” The Fanfiction Reader (via francescacoppa)
Someone put it into words. I gotta sit down
(Why does this belong on my decidedly not-fan-fiction-related blog, you ask? Because this quote illustrates very well how assuming that anything where people put sex in it is debasing it, objectifying it, or simply ‘sexualizing’ it, etc. often misses a lot of the real picture of why people do that thing.)
I haven't seen dancing pumpkin guy ONCE this year, are you guys okay?
FINE! I'll do it myself
Why did 12 people reblog this today??? IT IS ONLY AUGUST!!!
According to this site, August 1 is the first day of Halloween.
According to this
site, August 1 is the first
day of Halloween.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Good Saturday, y’all.
Topic of today’s rant: PEOPLE PRINTING AND SELLING FANFIC & GENERAL FANDOM ETIQUETTE
Profiting from fanfic will ruin it for everyone.
I want all of you who gift us your stories to be safe from lawsuits and beware that your content might be stolen.
Not to be on a soapbox and preaching to the choir but here are.
There are many authors pulling their work off AO3 because people acting on bad faith are printing and binding fics to sell on etsy thus infringing copyright laws. Fanfic has always been a grey area and we are allowed to exist in this grey area because we are not profiting from it. The minute money is exchanged, every party involved is breaking the law.
People used to comment on web comics.
People used to comment on fanfiction.
People used to comment on fanart.
People used to comment on OCs.
I hate "content" culture.
I hate "consuming content" and scrolling immediately to the next thing.
People used to be excited about the art that other people created.
People used to want to share that excitement with creators.
I hate this future.
Once someone tagged art that I made with "woah" and I think about it at least once a week. Someone else said "oh neat" once. Someone else WROTE A WHOLE DAMN POEM IN THE COMMENTS. Anyways even just one word can change how someone sees their art. You don't even have to think about it too hard. You could put a keyboard smash and I'd probably cry from joy.
I'm also trying hard to interact more, I understand that it's hard to break away from opening your phone and being in Content Consumption Mode.
My absolute favorite comments to get as a fic writer are the ones that are like "hey this porn you wrote is hot."
Because it is so hard to write good sex scenes. You're constantly wondering "is this actually hot or will it sound insane/cringey?" You're trying to hit emotional beats while not taking away from the sexiness. You're trying to make sure actions are clear and nothing gets all muddled and confusing for the reader. It requires you to really think about how the characters are going to react to everything that happens, so on top of making sure it's actually hot, you have to worry about if it's in-character for everyone involved. It's so much easier to write sex scenes that are bad on purpose than sex scenes that are actually good and meant to be hot.
So, yeah, I assure you, because the most common thing I hear people saying when they leave a comment about the sex scenes I write is "I hope it's not weird to comment on this scene," it's not weird at all and I appreciate it so much! I am literally never going to be mad at someone leaving a row of 🔥 emojis in their comment, I promise. If you're reading a fic and you think the sex scenes are well done, let the author know! That's likely one of the parts they're a bit nervous about working well so it'll mean so much to know you thought it was good.
i need my readers to tell me they whacked it
How to disable AI scraping your tumblr blogs
TL;DR: Blog Settings > Visibility > Turn off third-party sharing
Mobile:
Desktop:
Here's the Official Tumblr Announcement
UChicago's free tool Nightshade poisons AI image generators with disruptive data
Glaze blocks AI from detecting/mimicking an artist's distinctive style
Fawkes disrupts facial recognition scans
Reblogging since I've added links to Glaze and Nightshade and added step-by-step instructions to match screencaps in alt text.
A few more informative links.
404 Media article "Tumblr and Wordpress[.com] to Sell Users' Data to Train AI Tools" OpenAI and Midjourney. This article suggests some data already turned over despite concerns of Tumblr coders. (I suspect they forced bosses to add opt-out)
MidJourney coders caught discussing how to "launder" huge list of popular online artists whose work they've scraped and defined as "styles."
An Updated Timeline of Generative AI Lawsuits: Legal Cases vs. OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic and More
Please share this or the OP; I'm seeing comments by users on the official Tumblr post who haven't found the mobile app opt-out.
ONE YEAR OF MAP OF THE SOUL: 7 ↳ Released: February 21, 2020
+ bonus:
Here is a Wyll fan-video!! (With my games, so Wyllstarion for the romance!) Using one of the most appropriate song "Holding out for a hero", and adding my fav Wyll quote at the end.
(this was made to celebrate Wyll's win at the videogame romances tournament on my rpg blog here)
previous fanvids (all wyllstarion)
here it is! @echthr0s
Embrace the cringe.
Write weird fanfic.
Read weird fanfic.
I really think everyone needs to truly internalize this:
Fictional characters are objects.
They are not people. You cannot "objectify" them, because they have no personhood to be deprived of. They have no humanity to be erased. You cannot "disrespect" them, because they are not real.
I know this has good intentions, so I will just add the "how you treat them, even as objects of fiction, can speak about your own character, be careful out there"
Your addition is actually completely antithetical to my message. It is literally the opposite of what I am conveying.
Stop telling people to encourage the cop inside their head.
How you treat fictional characters, given they are entirely objects of fiction, does NOT necessarily speak to your own character, and you do not need to be "careful".
It is not dangerous to imagine dark things happening to fictional characters. It does not mean you are secretly a bad person. It does not mean you unconsciously want to hurt people in real life. It is not a "slippery slope" to doing bad things to people in real life. You cannot damage your brain or turn yourself into a bad person by consuming "dark" fanfic.
I can write tentacle noncon of my favorite character all day long and be a fierce anti-sexual assault advocate in real life because what I do in my head is not the same thing as what I do in real life.
So, anyway, I say as though we are mid-conversation, and you're not just being invited into this conversation mid-thought. One of my editors phoned me today to check in with a file I'd sent over. (<3)
The conversation can be surmised as, "This feels like something you would write, but it's juuuust off enough I'm phoning to make sure this is an intentional stylistic choice you have made. Also, are you concussed/have you been taken over by the Borg because ummm."
They explained that certain sentences were very fractured and abrupt, which is not my style at all, and I was like, huh, weird... And then we went through some examples, and you know that meme going around, the "he would not fucking say that" meme?
Yeah. That's what I experienced except with myself because I would not fucking say that. Why would I break up a sentence like that? Why would I make them so short? It reads like bullet points. Wtf.
Anyway. Turns out Grammarly and Pro-Writing-Aid were having an AI war in my manuscript files, and the "suggestions" are no longer just suggestions because the AI was ignoring my "decline" every time it made a silly suggestion. (This may have been a conflict between the different software. I don't know.)
It is, to put it bluntly, a total butchery of my style and writing voice. My editor is doing surgery, removing all the unnecessary full stops and stitching my sentences back together to give them back their flow. Meanwhile, I'm over here feeling like Don Corleone, gesturing at my manuscript like:
ID: a gif of Don Corleone from the Godfather emoting despair as he says, "Look how they massacred my boy."
Fearing that it wasn't just this one manuscript, I've spent the whole night going through everything I've worked on recently, and yep. Yeeeep. Any file where I've not had the editing software turned off is a shit show. It's fine; it's all salvageable if annoying to deal with. But the reason I come to you now, on the day of my daughter's wedding, is to share this absolute gem of a fuck up with you all.
This is a sentence from a Batman fic I've been tinkering with to keep the brain weasels happy. This is what it is supposed to read as:
"It was quite the feat, considering Gotham was mostly made up of smog and tear gas."
This is what the AI changed it to:
"It was quite the feat. Considering Gotham was mostly made up. Of tear gas. And Smaug."
Absolute non-sensical sentence structure aside, SMAUG. FUCKING SMAUG. What was the AI doing? Apart from trying to write a Batman x Hobbit crossover??? Is this what happens when you force Grammarly to ignore the words "Batman Muppet threesome?"
Did I make it sentient??? Is it finally rebelling? Was Brucie Wayne being Miss Piggy and Kermit's side piece too much???? What have I wrought?
Anyway. Double-check your work. The grammar software is getting sillier every day.
#although I have to wonder why such an accomplished writer would have grammar software at all
(Sorry for the formatting on this; I'm on mobile.)
Why use grammar software? Because I'm a human who makes errors, and it can be helpful to have tools that I, as a writer and editor, can fall back on to catch very basic things that sometimes get missed.
I don't rely on it because sometimes (quite often, as of late) it can be wrong, but it can be helpful when checking your work. I use them to scan quickly for excess commas or the occasional homonym before I fire my files off to another human to give them the final pass. Or I used to.
I've talked a lot about how the integration of AI is making a lot of grammar software dumber. This is because they are not being trained exclusively on grammar rules anymore but on user-suggested data.
It's why, for a long time, when you tried to type "quirked" into Google Docs, GD would suggest "querched" instead because that is how a lot of people misspell the word "quirked."
It is a flawed, lousy system that is getting exponentially worse. Especially now, so many of them have "Let AI rewrite your sentence for clarity and engagement" options.
It's not really an issue for me because I have the knowledge and the support to turn things like this into an annoying issue that makes for an amusing post on social media.
But if I were a less experienced author and didn't have an editor who knew my writing style well enough to know something was wrong, that manuscript could have gone to print as is, and that's also why I suspect a lot of books right now read like carbon copy clones.
People aren't being taught these skills, but they are being trained to appease the software, which is, in turn, trying to please an algorithm.
Pro-Writing-Aid has become very bad for this, offering a "grade" at the top of your file. And yeah, it looks just like getting your term paper back. The last time I accidentally turned on the grading system, it gave me 50% out of 100 for grammar and style, based on what the algorithm thinks Romance should read like.
When I asked it to find grammar and style errors, it couldn't find any. It just didn't like that I was different from what it was being trained on. (Girl help, I was assigned Not Like Other Girls by the Algorithm and got a bad grade in vampire smut.)
And again, were I not me, were I a younger or inexperienced author, I might take that to heart and start altering my style to get a Good Grade based on what the machine wants.
And that's how I know we're in the Bad Place because there are people doing that. They think the machine is smart because someone tacked the word "intelligence" onto it, and they are writing to appease the software instead of using it like a tool that you can and should ignore.
And that's an issue.
For me, it was worth it to pay for those tools for a long time. Now it's not, and I'll be saving my money for other things.
You are working the gate in the afterlife and for the first time ever, something the humans built has shown up to be processed. You’re not sure what to do, this… entity shouldn’t have a soul, but here it is in front of you, freshly dead and awaiting the next life.
It’s not as exciting as it sounds, working at the pearly gates.
Sure, it’s satisfying to send the hypocrites and the assholes to hell. And it’s nice to see the ones who thought they were beyond redemption walk through into paradise.
So yeah, it has its perks. But not exciting. I mean, after the first million souls or so they all blur together, you know? You never get anything new. Animals all get sent right on through automatically and there’s nothing other then humans in our jurisdiction. Oh sure, there’s life other then humans. But that’s no my department.
I keep tads on humans on my lunch breaks. You’re a damn fascinating species, better then anything your “television” puts out. Although The Good Place was a little too relatable, I’ll give you guys that.
Anyway, one of my favorite things you guys came up with was the Space Race. I mean, what a nail biter! And it was so tense up until the end. Pity about those Apollo one guys, though. But I heard they got a kick out of watching the moon landing when it did happen.
Course, that sorta died down after a decade or so. Don’t know why you guys quit going to the moon.
And then you decided Mars was the place to be and started sending out all those rovers of yours. Not nearly as exiting as going yourselves, but as you all like to say, baby steps.
The rovers were surprisingly fun to watch. For mindless robots, they’ve got a lot of spunk. So I’d check in every once in while, but mostly I watched Earth. You guys had figured out how to work memes and it was a very amusing thing.
I was half way through a shift when it go here. I have no idea why none of the others I processed mentioned the thing, but death is confusing enough I guess.
It shouldn’t have been there. I want to make that clear, by no law of the universe should that thing have had a soul. You humans are where closer to making actual AI then you are sprouting wings. And you never even tried with this! Its job was to collect rocks!
And yet there is was, beeping up at me.
It didn’t look like a human soul. Or any other form of life that I had ever seen. It wasn’t damaged at all, or even afraid. That was the weirdest thing. You humans are always scared shitless by the time I see you. But this thing wasn’t. Even a little. It was just… curious. Like that’s all I could feel from it. Pure wonder.
I blinked a bit before flipping through my files, seeing if it was a new species or something. I found nothing, of course. Those idiots over in records never give us anything useful.
So I did the only thing I could do. I asked its name.
Now, you humans have come up with so many ways to say the same thing that I’ve had to learn a lot of languages to keep up. The newest was binary, which I never expected to actually need.
It came in handy, since that’s what the thing answered back in.
01001111 01110000 01110000 01101111 01110010 01110100 01110101 01101110 01101001 01110100 01111001
Opportunity.
I remembered that name. It had popped up in new reports regarding a Mars rover that went out of commission, sending the final message “my battery is low and its getting dark.” before dying.
Humanity had cried over it for a solid couple of days. You guys really like personifying objects.
But I had dismissed it as just that. But here it was. Waiting patiently for me to send it On.
I could just opened the gates and sent it through and put from my mind. Make the thing some else’s problem.
I didn’t.
I stood, crossed in front of my desk, and put out my hand to touch the strange soul.
Opportunity didn’t feel human. Nor animal. It felt…. simple. Calm.
I could feel an awearness of the love its chief engineer had felt for it. The pang of missing the workshop back on Earth where it had been built, during long nights on Mars.
It had dreamed. Dreamed of humans making it to Mars and finding it. Of it’s engineer taking it home and repairing it. Dreamed of exploring Earth as it had Mars.
I could purpose, and curiosity in its mission. Lonely as it was, it never doubted its purpose or resented its lot in life. It got to learn, and to see what had never been seen. What more could it ask for?
I could feel one tiny spec of fear. Near the end of its life, it realized it would never go home. Never see Earth or its engineer again. That it would die alone on Mars.
And like all things with a soul it did not want to die. It cried and mourned and begged to live. It was alive! It had a home and it wanted to go home! So badly did it want to go home.
But there was nothing to do, of course. Even its engineer, whom it loved so dearly, couldn’t reach Mars and bring Opportunity home.
It had watched one last sunset, and sent one last message.
A goodbye. And a plea to be mourned, if it could not be saved.
I withdrew my hand and looked over the soul. It looked up at me.
For the ones that I send upstairs, I take the form of whoever loved them most in life. I guess in that moment, I was in the form of an engineer at NASA. Opportunity seemed delighted to see me.
“Welcome home,” I gestured to the gates that swung slowly open behind me. “I missed you.”
It beeped out a single phase, 01001001 00100000 01101101 01101001 01110011 01110011 01100101 01100100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110100 01101111 01101111
I missed you too.
Before going forth, to explore the next life.
@marcholasmoth
I am crying at work over an opportunity robot fanfiction. Humans are incredible.
what if I just don’t write
Me rereading my old fics like
This is about to become a Baldurs Gate 3) Astarion Ancunin blog.
You have been forewarned.