Hi! If you're here because you met me in a fandom context, I reblog fandom things on niasfanspace, so that might be more relevant to you! Also: I don't tag consistently (or at all) on this blog, but if there's something specific you want me to tag for, please let me know! [- Icon by the awesome elennumen]
“beauty and the beast” where beauty’s dad comes home with the rose and is like oh shit oh shit this terrible monster says i have to come live with him forever because i picked his favorite flower and beauty just goes fuck that and puts on her pants and marches down to the beast’s castle herself
and she’s expecting this horrifying dark fortress but it’s actually sort of just a normal castle with big rose bushes and furniture that’s sometimes alive
and she thinks, i can work with this
and the beast comes out and he’s like don’t look at me i am a hideous monster and beauty’s like dude you’re like a talking tiger in a cape are you kidding you’re AWESOME can i pet you can i stroke your paws can you give me a ride
and he’s like what and she goes around the castle like okay we’ll put curtains here and expand the kitchen and this could be a really cute breakfast nook
and the beast is confused because isn’t she supposed to be terrified and hate him and he had all these intimidating speeches planned and he’s like uh aren’t you going to try to run away
and beauty’s all are you kidding this is a magic castle i’m going to live here forever
so they just sort of settle in together and one day beauty goes home for the weekend to visit her family and they’re all amazed that she’s alive and her sisters go WHY DIDN’T THE HUGE MONSTER EAT YOU TO DEATH and she’s like nahhh he’s basically just a big cat he’s kind of cute actually sometimes he plays with yarn when he thinks i’m not looking
and she explains how it’s really not that bad, all the dishes wash themselves and i get all these gorgeous dresses for free because the castle doesn’t know what else to do with them and yeah there are flowers everywhere but hey that’s his hobby y’know i’m not gonna discourage that man
and then one day while beauty’s re-alphabetizing her magic library and trying to decide where to put that enchanted mirror the beast comes up and he’s like hey so this is awkward but are you like………………………………..in love with me……?????????
and beauty’s like oh uh wow haha um sorry no you’re…sort of a tiger
and the beast is like thank goodness because if you were i’d have to turn back into a human and i’ve kind of gotten used to being a big lion thing with horns and the ability to speak english for some reason like why would i want to go back to being a spindly little man and then beauty laughs and she’s like okay well can you go catch us a wild boar for dinner, dear
and they end up getting married in the end just because it’s easier to explain that way, you know, a single lady ~~living alone with a man~~ even if he’s not actually a man, and that’s fine with them because beauty was never really into the whole boys and sex thing and the beast (whose name is jeff) is honestly more interested in his flowers
and whenever any of the other ladies in the village give her any shit beauty is just like, oh, you don’t like my crepes? well you know my husband, who is literally a tiger, loves them and then everyone leaves her alone, which is really all she ever wanted
and she goes back to her magic castle and sits down with a book in front of the fire and rests her feet on her cat husband and nobody bothers her ever again
no more assigning babies a legal sex at birth. i feel like this should go without saying, but no more surgeries on intersex infants. no more surgeries on intersex children. embrace intersex traits as natural. because they are.
no more gendered dress codes. no more gender markers on passports, driver's licenses, ids. i'm not talking about "adding x" or "adding a third category" i'm talking about no more categories, period. why does the government need to know what my genital situation is? why does the government feel the need to assign me a sex on the basis of genitals? why does the cop who pulled me over need to see an m, or an f, or an x?
no more "gender is a social construct, sex is the thing that's binary." sex is not binary. abolish the idea that it is. normalize conversations about intersex traits. being intersex is natural. the sex binary is a thing imposed by the state.
no more gendered sports. if you really care about equity, sort people into categories based on skill level and athleticism, not gender or sex. the concept that there are only two sexes and that one is inherently weaker than the other is pseudoscience. the male/female hunter/gatherer dichotomy is not based in fact, and is a product of modern sexist cultural biases. one gender is not inherently subservient to the other. people are not inherently different on the basis of sex or gender. it is just more complicated than that.
the concept of multiple genders and sexes beyond the man/woman male/female dichotomy has existed as long as humans have existed. the sex binary only serves to benefit the patriarchy. the gender binary only serves to benefit the patriarchy. continuing to impose it just controls (and harms) the people it forcibly categorizes.
i'm not asking for the end of gender, i'm calling for an acknowledgement of gender and sex that understands the infinite diversity of the human species. i'm suggesting an end to binary systems that only benefit the ruling class. just think about it. okay?
I do love the thought of body swap stories that highlight when characters have like, chronic pain or other bodily issues
Like two characters swap bodies and one immediately turns to the other and is just like "You really need glasses, man", and the other one's just like "Holy shit I can see"
The villain is always going on about how "Life is pain" and everyone assumes its because he's evil and trying to kill everything... until someone gets bodyswapped with him and they just go down screaming from the chronic pain he lives with, while the villain in a new body is confused "You guys DON'T hurt all the time?!"
The stigma of self-inserts is so harmful to the creative process. Relax. Admit it. Everything you make is derivative of yourself, always, no exceptions. You can turn the mirror into tinier and tinier shards or you can make it as big as you want to reflect as much as you want. At the end of the day it's always going to show you inside of it. Pretending otherwise is stupid.
It's about doing it in a way so that the reader doesn't know.
If I read the book and come to a moment where "oh, this is the author writing about themselves" my interest in the story drops by about 300%. Don't make it obvious and you'll be fine.
Nope. You're missing the point still. Stop acting like it's acceptable behavior for you to call the earnest creation of art "lame". Power fantasy characters are rad as fuck. Everybody loves seeing John Wick do that shit. You're not just being needlessly rude and harmful to others, you're also just flat out fuckin wrong.
WRITE THE COOLEST, FUNNIEST, MOST ATTRACTIVE PERSON WHO WAS COMPLETELY OVERLOOKED UNTIL THEY MET THE RIGHT PEOPLE WHO RECOGNIZE THEM FOR HOW AWESOME THEY ARE
WRITE THE SADDEST, MOST TRAGIC AND UNLOVED PERSON WHO'S PARENTS DIDN'T EVEN SHOW UP TO THEIR BIRTH
WRITE THE MOST FUCKED UP EVIL PERSON WHO IS CRUEL AND IMMORAL AND POWERFUL AND UNTOUCHABLE
WRITE THE KINDEST, GENTLEST PERSON WHO'S TEARS HEAL MORTAL WOUNDS AND WHO WOULD SACRIFICE THEMSELVES FOR A UNIVERSE THAT DOESN'T KNOW THEM
Just woke up from an incredibly vivid dream that there was a new trend on reddit called r/Am I the sinner? where Victorian women asked if they were being sinful. The most viral post was like that:
Am I the sinner for enjoying my marital duty?
My (F23) husband (M42) is trying to conceive an heir and has been laying with me increasingly often. I always lay back and think about God, as I have been taught to, but he is so considerate and gentle that I never feel pain during intercourse and even find myself enjoying it, to the point that I caught myself looking toward our next appointed night together with trepidation. I never initiate intimacy nor do I show any physical affection to my husband outside of our attempts at conceiving and yet I still feel tempted by him, be it day or night. When I catch myself having these thoughts I always pray to God, and I have taken to go confession twice a week for my sinfully lustful thoughts.
Am I the sinner?
Answers:
- NTS, you are doing your duty as a wife and it is natural to swoon when your husband is this considerate with you. May God bless your marriage
- YATS. A woman should stay pure of thought and above base urged such as what you describe. You are sinning with lust and should see a doctor for this is the path to moral decay and hysteria.
-NTS, the wish for a child may cause thoughts that seem sinful at first, but your eagerness to bear an heir for your husband is a holy thought. The feelings that you describe are merely a sign that you are being rewarded for being a dutiful wife. May your union be fruitful and blessed!
Anyway, I should go back to sleep for a couple more hours but I needed to share this dream here.
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.
a character being a perpetrator does not negate their victimhood and neither does their victimhood negate being a perpetrator. u can accept and reckon w both dimensions in ur analysis
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