finished a chapter of my life so i'm doing a general cleanup, meaning emptying out my drafts and likes. which.
assuming i don't add any new posts to it and if i go at a rate of 100 queued posts a day will take me 401 days. yupee. yay.
i actually like talking to people through the askbox about whatever i'm currently into (right now going down a steep arcane spiral), so feel free to jump in.
I don't know if it's just me being in small fandoms, but fandom as a whole feels...really lonely as of late. People have split themselves up so much that they don't discuss things the way they did before, they just kind of post their stuff and leave and half their audience "consumes" it like "content". There's no comments, barely kudos, the only places fans talk with each other anymore are on private discord servers that no one ever finds out about...I don't know, I'm a bit of an old and I feel like I'm screaming out into the void for no reason at this point. Sure, "somebody" will like my stuff, but will I ever get to know about it?
I think about this kind of thing a lot, anon, and I think my generation (Gen X/xillennial) kind of did folks dirty a bit.
In our defense, we didn't know we were.
I'm an educator by profession, as well as on this hobby blog, and so I spend a lot of time thinking about how people learn things. A lot of learning is social, and a lot of it happens when parents teach their children.
When I was growing up, pre-internet, my parents taught me how to talk to other adults in our community, how to play with other children, how to order food in a restaurant, how to call a business and ask a question. They literally walked me through how to do all of that stuff and more because those were daily skills in the world at that time.
We've spent the last 20+ years talking about how kids today are "digital natives" - but have we spent enough time teaching kids how to keep a conversation going when you're not in the same room as the other person? How to leave a comment on a post by a person you don't know? How to show your appreciation to a content creator? What a content creator even is and how that differs from a fan creator?
I know there are a lot of jokes out there about different things that would kill a Victorian child, but I think what would actually be difficult for them would be the lack of rules and instructions that kids today receive from the adults in their lives.
I don't have kids myself, so maybe this is all just bullshit and I'm talking directly out of my ass. But a LOT of the time when I notice someone doing something 'wrong' it's because no one ever told them how to do it right.
I kind of suspect that might be part of what's happening in fandom these days. Combine the above with the fact that fandom got inundated with new members in 2020 during quarantine and lock downs, and it's not surprising to me that a large percentage of the people in fandom today don't approach things the way that we used to before.
i don't fault them for it. When fandom was smaller and the internet was new, we used to take the time to bring people in. But now, it feels like 'everyone knows XYZ' so why does it need to be taught? And with how fast things move, it's more rare for newcomers to lurk for a while before they dive into everything.
This is a very long answer to a problem that probably just needed a listening ear, but I hope what you take away from this is an understanding that you're not the only one who feels the difference. I see this same experience shared in the notes on my posts all the time.
There is no easy fix for the situation and it certainly won't be fast to change, but maybe if we mentor a bit more when we have the spoons to, we can shift the culture a bit? One fan at a time?
If you managed to get all the way to the end of this, do yourself a favour and leave a comment on a fic or reblog a post with some chatty tags. DM somemeone or tag them or send them an ask just to let them know you see them and you think they're cool.
Even if nothing happens as a result, you tried. And maybe you just made someone's day. 💗
Demographically, I have a fair amount in common with @ao3commentoftheday with the exception that I am a parent.
And my oldest child has entered online fandom.
Thankfully, my child and I don’t share fandoms (we both prefer it that way), but we did sit down to discuss how to maintain privacy and safety while also being friendly in online interactions. I taught my child about fandom red flags and green flags, from my experiences, and my child has since asked for my advice in terms of my child’s own fandom experiences and how to handle issues and concerns.
All that being said, I was surprised and confused when my child informed me that my child had not been leaving kudos or comments on AO3. Keep in mind, this child would read longfics for days, tell me how great the author’s writing captured the characters, etc.
“Why didn’t you kudos or comment if the fic was so good?” I asked.
While my child explained lack of ability to comment due to fic restrictions (my child has expressed not yet feeling ready to have an AO3 account even though my child is old enough and my husband and I would be fine with it), my child said kudos didn’t matter: “Who cares about one kudos?”
“The author cares. And, if the author for some reason doesn’t care, I know you care about doing the right thing. I think expressing appreciation for other people’s fanwork is the right thing to do. What do you think?”
My child went back and kudosed all stories read to that point.
But I’m just one parent. And it’s absolutely not the job of fandom to parent children. There’s an idea that the way we behave in real life is divorced from the way we behave online. There’s some merit to that in the form of maintaining privacy and boundaries online that might be different in person. When we’re talking about basic manners, though? Golden rule stuff? That’s what’s become lacking, and I hope it improves.
i do think that a lot of this is just the result of a lack of lurk moar attitude in fandom/the internet in general.
when i was a tween who first found fandom in the late 90s/early 2000s, people didn't explicitly teach me how to interact with fandom. i lurked for a solid year before i signed up for my own account on the forum i'd found. (i can still remember how the adrenaline coursed through me as i signed up for my own account--i felt tingy and more than a little ill!)
by that time, i had a very good sense of social norms there. i still made a few mistakes, and the more established members smacked me down in a matter-of-fact but not unkind way. but i'd learned by watching. hell, by the time i started actively participating, i knew all the inside jokes!
as op mentioned, i don't think that people lurk anymore, and my theory is that the rise of social media/web 2.0 created a different approach to web communities.
today, every site is presumed to be for every person. the entire point of the really big social media sites is that everyone is on them. (this is one of the things i hate about them btw because it results in context collapse. i do not want to talk to my third-grade teacher, my favorite cousin, complete strangers, and my fandom friends in the same voice, but that's another issue).
whereas in web 1.0, the internet was riddled with niche sites/communities. you had to go out and find your place (and sometimes it took a while!). once you found it, you were invested in becoming a part of that specific community, so you did the research (lurking) to find out how people interacted, what all the unspoken norms were. by the time you picked your handle and made your account, you just knew stuff.
i'm sure this was not true of everyone, but it was true of far more people at the time. people looked before they leapt.
there are many, many reasons that i think that fandom has suffered from the web 2.0 environment. the fact that creators/writers/actors and fans are all on the same sites using the same tags for general publicity and for fannish nonsense is a huge problem. the way that sites are so big that people feel that their contributions (as with kudos above) don't matter is a direct result of the way social media undermines community and makes everything a performance of whatever your late-capitalist brand is. the fast pace of those sites makes people think that interacting with older posts is a bad idea. the lack of filters of the kind that we had on livejournal where you could determine who saw what or even just the way that forums often made you join before you could see content created walls within which communities could grow (think frost and walls making good neighbors).
i know we can't go back to the assumptions that operated before social media. we have to explore other options. i love when people make psas here telling people about fandom norms and history! i think it's the best thing! and maybe at this point that is the only way to handle it.
tumblr and ao3 are very weird sites in that they straddle the web 1.0 and web 2.0 kinds of internet.
from web 1.0 they get the lack of algorithms, the way you have to make choices about what you see, chronological arrangements, and (on ao3) lack of ads, etc. tumblr has a slightly slower pace than most social media; ao3 has a much slower one.
from web 2.0, though, you get scale, centralization (which is both ao3's greatest strength and greatest weakness), and the fact that it takes little effort to locate these sites--anyone, no matter their level of investment in fandom, can just stumble on them.
so you end up having a lot of people who are not actually fannishly inclined (aren't invested in a gift economy, don't really understand that fandom is supposed to be fun, don't really get the creative urge etc.) interacting with people who are fannishly inclined, and it causes some really problems. especially with younger people whose experience of the internet is as a venue to signify and perform certain kinds of morality/coolness/trendiness that are at odds with what fandom has always been about. basically: you have a bunch of normies clashing with a bunch of nerds. (obviously the normie/nerd divide is a spectrum and not a binary, so i'm overstating, but still.)
when you have people who are coming to fandom from different angles--some people who are coming to it as a provider of content just like all other media in their lives, especially elsewhere online; some people who are coming to it as a participatory hobby wherein we build community around shared affection for [thing]--there's going to be lots of clashes and weirdness.
i kind of think that fans need to go back to create set-apart spaces for fandom to happen. note that i am NOT talking about gatekeeping. everyone who treats others with respect would be welcome. but just having fenced-off areas that are explicitly for certain kinds of fandom interactions. where we can basically have our party away from the normies, but other nerds who are younger or just getting in touch with their nerdiness can find us.
i'm not sure how we'd go about doing it. but i think smaller, more intimate internet spaces are really necessary for fandom to be enjoyable. for fandom to be fandom tbh.
A hand-drawn feminist film based on the Polish legend of the Warsaw mermaid.
Please go to my friend Tina’s kickstarter. They have one more day on their fundraising drive. It’s a lovely hand-drawn short, so please give what you can.
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.
Still never gonna be over the fact that it took Maes Hughes one night to figure out the truth about Amestris when it took the rest of the cast half the series
These tags by parkersgeorg are necessary to include actually 💅
#NO BUT THE THING IS! #he figured it out because the army was SHIT AT HIDING IT #he worked in intel! he had access to ALL the necessary elements #to understand it quickly #but that also meant he was under heavy surveillance himself #which is why his efforts to understand the truth were immediately noticed #and since he knew the army was rotten to the core there was no reason for the homunculi to 1) not try to kill him 2) bother being stealthy #lust tried to kill him IN HQ #and the thing is. it was clever of him to leave and try calling mustang from a phone booth #so the line wouldn't be tapped #but like... he'd already tried calling mustang and they knew that. #so had envy not caught up to him before he made the call #they wouldve assumed he'd managed to reach mustang #in a way dying in that phone booth was the best move hughes could make #to protect his allies #had he gotten the information out the homunculi would have disbanded mustang's team MUCH earlier #and after hughes came so close to spreading the truth #they made it MUCH HARDER to find #but also much harder for themselves to realize who was figuring it out and by what means #basically hughes was on easy mode #his death put everyone in hard mode. his allies AND his enemies #man fma is good #fma
In several of these, we see the challenging Witch introduce themself to the Majik, and then Majik replying with their trial terms.
Majik trials are consistently framed as being grand spectacles for witches that aren't Ichi. There's a level of presentation both sides are expected to maintain .
It appears as though Majiks aren't bound to tell the truth, nor to provide information on their trials. That being said, most Will tell you the truth about their trials, bcs of the challenge and pride aspect.
TRIALS ARE NOT MEANT TO BE IMPOSSIBLE. HUMAN HATER MAJIKS ARE AN OUTLIER!!!!
"Its clear the [human hater] majiks are actively trying not to be acquired"!! putting them in CONTRAST with the other majiks!!
Trials can be either informal conditions, or formal challenges.
Condition trials would be things like cutting Ariadne's horn, cutting Kindake's vine, cutting free the heart gem on Raiko, it kinda feels like low tier majiks let setting their trials as 'cut this thing' huh.
Formal challenges would be things like Iskandar's shooting trial, bakugami's sorrow trial, hitsugi's 10k deaths trial, golconda's 10k questions. These require the active participation of the Majik. While the human hater trials are more like torture, things like Iskandar appear to be more about finding a worthy wielder.
There's also some ones with slight ambiguity.
For example: Lazud's trial is to sit on this point unmoving for 100 days. I assume this is a formal challenge that Desscaras initiated, and not just. a thing to be done. like the odds are low but if some random kid in Kagami sat on a needle unmoving for 100 days would Lazud get suddenly teleport acquired to them?
Kizashi's trial is to kill him, but he's got 1k lives. this trial does not appear to have a formal process, and it operates on like. video game boss fight last one to get a hit gets the kill.
now hitsugi sends 10k zombies after desscaras as part of the trial, but the specfic mechanics of what is and isn't required for trial seem not to be set in stone, which is probably how hte majiks just set shit in general. like they just wanted to do that. the handcuff two challanger thing was bakugami pulling bullshit on the spot.
don't forget!
at the end of the day majiks can Do whtever they fucking want and the more they hate humans the more they'll capitalize on that!
thats all for now but there's certainly more to be extrapolated here, im just sleepy lol. this is mostly for my own reference for fic reasosn lol....
(send me a 🌻 and ill just tell you whatever the fuck i want)
the whole ass dumbass Discourse™ abt how zutara is colonialism and so on and so forth is really fuckin. it's really fuckin!! guys read franz fanon 😭😭😭 read edward said 😭😭😭 stop just walking around with your whole unwiped ass out!!! it's a children's cartoon 😭😭😭
(send me a 🌻 and ill just tell you whatever the fuck i want)
the fandom (and by the fandom i mostly mean the twitter fandom so you know my mistake starts there but also discord servers i'm in) really showed their whole misogynistic ass when they talk about spica.
we basically get kumugi angsting for an entire chapter about how she has trouble communicating with someone she loves, all but turning towards the reader to say "i love my sister but our relationship is complicated", we get insight into spica's pov and where her priorities are, plus both sisters' side of the story and. somehow spica is the only one at fault. somehow in this cast that includes murderers, the somewhat mean teenage girl is the most evil one who should "die in a fire"/end up in an abusive relationship/etc, etc. like. just bc you're """woke""" enough to not bring out the "fugly bitch" and other choice terminology, doesn't mean you're not doing misogynistic shit!!
nobody needs to know your real name or your hometown or where you work or your home country or your race or ethnicity or skin color or phone number or the name of your first pet or the model of your first car or your mother’s maiden name or how many siblings you have or what school you go to or your credit card number
