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[captain-price-returns]

Israel Exposed — War Crimes Archive

Documented evidence of war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank.

[st-just]

I have exceptionally limited interest in reading anything branded as 'Romantasy' I've heard of but I am honestly kind of curious what's happening with the apparent hammering of 'fae' into a coherent and instantly understood sort of fantasy-creature-archtype (ala vampire, werewolf, etc) over there. Like I feel like the chain of transmission would be interesting to read about in a media history sense?

[booksandchainmail]

I am very talking out of my ass here, just going with books I've read rather than any actual research, but my theory:

Fae Romantasy comes down to Sarah J. Maas. Maybe (probably) there was more of it going on before her, but she mainstreamed it and got to define the tropes. From that we get fae as sexy, powerful, sort of primal people referred to as males and females, who have soulmates, often look down on humans, use magic, and have an elaborate structure of monarchy and nobility. Sarah J Maas had a successful YA fantasy series that abruptly pivoted in book 3 to include fae, and then her next series was fae romantasy from the start, and also caused incredible discourse due to having explicit sex scenes in a book marketed as YA.

But where did she get this fae archetype from? My argument would be that prior to being romantasy characters, fae were urban fantasy characters. Jim Butcher gets mentioned here for possibly codifying the summer/winter court structure, and also just having a bunch of humanoid human-sized fae nobles in his Dresden Files books. But IMO the stronger connection would be Holly Black.

In 2018, post Sarah J Maas fae romantasy wave, Holly Black publishes a YA fae dark romance which has many many elements that seem recognizable to existing fae romantasy. A human girl raised in the fae realm, a fae prince who hates her even as he can't resist her, lots and lots of court politics and power dynamic swings. The difference here is that Holly Black has been writing these kinds of books since 2002 (which makes her earlier books old enough to have been influences on the beginnings of fae romantasy). She's maybe best known for her Spiderwick Chronicles series of children's books, which feature all kinds of creepy and gross fae creatures, which feels similar to older folklore. But at the same time she's also writing the Modern Tales of Faerie series, which are YA dark romances about humanish girls and the powerful (but vulnerable) fae boys they meet. Notable here is that the fae here are not monolithic in species: you've got humanish fae (iirc most main characters are in this category), sure, but also more classic creatures like trolls (I remember there being others but not the specifics).

Notable for these books is that they aren't secondary world fantasy: iirc the Modern Tales of Faerie books are set in New York. There's also a sensibility about them that I want to describe as punkish? The protagonists aren't relatable everywomen, or destined princesses: they're mostly homeless teenagers, squatting in subways and trying to survive on the edges between fae society and human society.

And so let's go one step further back. What influenced Holly Black? And here we have a definite answer, because she was co-editor of a Welcome to Bordertown, a 2011 remake/tribute to the Bordertown series, done as a collaboration between some of the original authors and younger authors, like Holly Black, who had grown up with them. The original Bordertown books were a 1980s series of anthologies, with each chapter a short story by a different author. They were set in Bordertown, a city founded on the edge of our modern world and a resurgent magical one, full of strange magic meeting modern technology, populated largely by outcasts and runaways. The summary I have pulled up describes Bordertown as "a place of half-lit neighborhoods of hidden magic, of flamboyant artists and pagan motorcycle gangs", which should give you an idea of the vibe.

This is very clearly the predecessor to Holly Black's Fae books. Only this is published in 1986, and so the magical world that Bordertown sits at the edge of is Elfland. And that's where I think the root is, taking folkloric elves, making them sexy feudal intrusions on the world, and then to avoid confusion with the better known elves of Tolkein, pivoting the name to fae. After all, older sources use the two interchangeably: if you look at variants of Tam Lin some of them have a Queen of Fairies, some an Elfin Queen.

A coda: I think Wen Spencer's 2003 book Tinker is illuminating here. It starts an unusual but modern young woman who meets a powerful, domineering elfin lord when he is uniquely vulnerable, then struggles between her attraction to him and the political and magical dangers he brings. The love interest here is very in line with romantasy fae males! But it's 2003, so he's still an elf, and the book is largely set in Pittsburgh.

[miranda-basset]

I love when people start doing this sort of thing for genre literature! I feel compelled to jump in here and add that while, yes, Holly Block is probably the most influential writer of fae romance novels of the past few decades, she really cannot be considered the initiator of this subgenre - fae romance was already an increasingly common and popular style of romance in the late 90s and early 00s. The earliest one that comes to mind for me is O.R. Melling's Chronicles of Fae series, starting with Hunter's Moon, which was published in 1993; this was back when romantic YA marketed explicitly to teen girls / young women was just beginning to become a popular category. I also have to note that Butcher is not the codifer of the Summer & Winter Court motif in modern fantasies about faeries - this is an older preexisting trope that shows up in Melling as well (the second book of her series is The Summer King, for example, published in 1999), and can probably be traced back to New Age & contemporary pagan / Wiccan ideas about older Celtic mythologies (which itself likely has at least some loose basis in historical ancient druidic religions etc, but I fear I don't have the necessary scholarly background to assess precisely how much.)

I find it interesting that you can really see the difference in reader expectations in a book like Hunter's Moon - Melling can't rely on people already being familiar with 'standard' fairy romance tropes, so she's doing a lot more work to create and build up the surrounding mythology than you see in current publications (and basing it off a great deal of actual historical mythological and folkloric sources) - and the result is a much more grounded and compelling setting, to my eyes. Though I'd have to reread the book to verify this, my memory of Melling's series was that it owed a pretty clear debt to earlier low fantasy YA-adjacent series like Susan Collins's The Dark is Rising (about Arthuriana myths recurring in a modern urban setting; first book published in 1965), and that the author had probably also at least read some of Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry series (a portal fantasy about a group of college students getting sent to a Tolkienesque, Arthuriana-inspired high fantasy world; first book published 1984). So I would link some of the earliest versions of this trope to the growing popularity of Arthuriana retellings in a low fantasy mode.

The explosion of fae romance within YA specifically is also fairly co-terminous with the explosion of YA itself, which took off around the 2000s in large part due to tailwinds from the Harry Potter (first book 1997) and Twilight (2005) booms. (I would probably trace romantasy as a direct descendent of YA more than of any other genre.) Note that Twilight was not just urban fantasy but specifically a YA paranormal romance, which was also becoming a huge category within the adult romance industry at around the same time. The early 2000s are when you get paranormal romance novel writers like Nalini Singh, Kelly Armstrong, Patricia Briggs (who could also be fairly called an urban fantasy writer with a large dose of romance), Laini Taylor, and Kresley Cole etc all taking off; most of the paranormal romances out there began with more traditional vampire & werewolf stuff, but a lot of them start getting very eclectic and 'anything goes' with their mythological references in much the same way Jim Butcher does. (Note that the first Harry Dresden book comes out in 2002, and the first Nightside book - a very similar noir urban fantasy - by Simon R Green in 2003; these authors are all influencing each other, yes, but also all responding to the same trends at more or less the same time.)

Before these authors, the first genuinely popular paranormal romance writers I know of are Tanya Huff's Victory Nelson series (1991), and Laurel K Hamilton with her Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series (1993). Hamilton was in turn extremely influenced by, who else, Anne Rice & her Interview with the Vampire, from all the way back in 1976. Huff herself is also writing in the shadow of Rice, but I think even more than Hamilton owes a debt to the low fantasy tradition of 'fantasy noir,' ie fantasy in the style of noir mysteries like Raymond Chandler's or Hammett's - you see this influence in 70s authors like Roger Zelazny, who was writing from the intersection of high fantasy & 'sword & sorcery' Conan the Barbarian style low fantasy, which is linked, fascinatingly, to the rise of the 'fantasy hero as hardboiled PI' trope. I've heard this can be traced to works like Leiber's The Swords of Lankmar (1968) and Cook's Garrett PI series (1987), neither of which I've read - but this is how you get Huff's hardboiled PI heroine investigating & romancing various handsome supernatural creatures in the 90s, which in turn is how characters like Butcher's Harry Dresden arrive on the scene. Anyway, Hamilton's subsequent Merry Gentry series is one of the first adult fae romances out there, & it started publishing in 2000.

Wen Spencer's 2003 Tinker seems like another key step in the development of the fae romance trend, I agree! I would suggest that Tinker in turn seems very influenced by Mercedes Lackey's SERRATed Edge series (first book published 1992), about magical Tolkien-esque elves living in modern society & engaging in hobbies like car racing, wooing mortal women, etc. (Older fantasy romance authors like Mercedes Lackey are underrated as influences in the current romantasy explosion, imo.) Charles de Lint also kicks off his Newford series with its first book, Dreams Underfoot, in 1993, which I would argue is probably one of the major influences on Butcher & other urban fantasy writers in terms of the sort of classic urban fantasy setting, ie a bunch of magical / fantastical beings from diverse & contradictory myths jostling uncomfortably together in a modern Western city. (Neil Gaiman also copies de Lint fairly shamelessly in American Gods and Neverwhere.) As far as I'm aware, de Lint is the one of the earliest authors to invent this kind of location as a permanent basis for an ongoing series. Holly Black's first book, the fae romance Tithe (2002) owes quite a bit to de Lint, and I think probably also made it to publication in part due to Hamilton's making the fae romance trend relevant via her own Merry Gentry series.

I wasn't aware of Terri Windling's 1986 Borderland series before, so I'm glad I've stumbled across it because of this post! A glance at the authors who wrote for this anthology is pretty interesting - Charles de Lint is published in it, as is Ellen Kushner and, later on, Patricia McKillip and Steven Brust, all of whom are major fantasy writers of the late 20th c. McKillip is a writer best known to me as one of the group of authors who first started to popularize the 'fairy tale retelling' as a distinct form of fantasy in the 80s and 90s, along with people like Gail Carson Levine (Ella Enchanted, 1997), Robin McKinley (Beauty: A Retelling, 1978), Patricia Wrede (Dealing with Dragons, 1990), Juliet Marillier (Daughter of the Forest, 1999), and Tanith Lee (Red as Blood, 1983).

So I would make the inference from this connection that the earliest forms of paranormal / urban fantasy are developing in relation to the popularization of the 'gritty' or 'dark' fairy tale retelling that starts to take off in this era (along with the similar but lighter 'fairy tale satire' which is more in line with what Wrede is doing, for instance; think also Shrek), and that this is directly related to the newfound popularity of writing about faeries who are tall, dangerous, inhumanly beautiful, immoral or amoral, & thus appealing love interests - as opposed to the kind of classic, bowdlerized Victorian / Disney version of fairies as small friendly cutesy creatuers with wands & flowers etc. (Terry Pratchet is doing something similar in his 1992 novel Lords and Ladies, where much of the humor derives from the contrast between the characters' expecations of elves and the unpleasant reality they encounter.) The same cultural push to create 'realistic' adult versions of children's fairy tales seems to be behind some of the earliest books about faeries in urban fantasy settings.

(I think it's also helpful to keep in mind that the elf vs faerie distinction is more or less a modern invention - these aren't really discrete categories in most of the historical mythologies they're derived from, and of course the modern concept of the 'fantasy elf' is pretty much entirely due to Tolkien, who was himself working from essentially the same body of myths that people later went back to in order to reinvent cutesy Victorian faeries as sexy fae lords. As you note above, older anglophone literature often uses 'elf' synonymously with faerie! Obviously this is a bit of a simplication & the divergences between Germanic versus Celtic folklore etc are real - but that's more a matter of interest to actual folklorists. The takeaway is, when Mercedes Lackey or Wen Spencer write about urban fantasy elves, they're often pulling from a similar mélange of source folklore as other contemporary authors writing about the fae. It's all more or less the same trope, imo.)

Anyway, then Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely series publishes its first book in 2007, and this is, I would say, where the tropes of fae romance that are most popular today really become codified - this is an explicitly romantic YA urban fantasy series about high school girls falling in love with various faerie kings and lords, and the plot beats I think will be pretty recognizable to anyone reading contemporary books in this genre today. Holly Black's later The Wicked Prince series is definitely, to some degree, in conversation with Marr (who of course was in turn writing in conversation with Black's earlier Tithe when she created Wicked Lovely).

All of which is to say that I think it's correct to point to urban fantasy as an influence in the development of the 'fae lord' as a classic romantasy love interest today, but it isn't quite fair to call urban fantasy the 'source' of tropes about the fae - because urban fantsy itself developed in tandem with paranormal romance, which was in turn strongly influenced by straightforward fantasy authors like Patricia McKillip and Susan Collins. I would argue that the real innovation that Sarah J Maas made in turn was to take what was already, by 2015 (when A Crown of Thorns and Roses was published), the extremely well-known paranormal romance trope of the 'fae lord' love interest, and move him out of the urban fantasy setting back into a high fantasy world.

It's the combination of classic high fantasy stakes and setting (every major character is a king or a lord or a general or a royal advisor! their actions have consequences for thousands upon thousands of innocent nameless subjects! everyone bows & curtsies a lot! the continued existence of the world is always somehow in need of saving yet another time! etc) with the narrative tropes of paranormal romance, in particular (every aspect of the plot revolves around the heroine and her romantic choices & desirability! every man she meets is doomed to love her! every problem can only be solved via the correct utilization of her unique magical abilities, ancestral inheritance, piercing insight, or innate personal virtue! which i say with amusement & affection, not scorn), that makes 'romantasy' a distinct genre, imo. Romantasy is the importation of the paranormal romance plot into a high fantasy world. And that's essentially what Maas invented with her fae romance series.

So in summary, I would argue there are two threads here: one is the paranormal romance, which I trace back to originating authors like Hamilton and Huff, and which is strongly influenced by Anne Rice's take on vampires on the one hand, and by the low fantasy 'noir' trends popularized by writers like Glenn Cook and Roger Zelazny (Simon R Green is an early 90s trendsetter for this kind of thing, as well) on the other. Thus all roads lead back to Anne Rice (obviously) and also to Raymond Chandler (less obviously but more or less inevitably for any American author - and the British are not immune! look at Pratchett's Night Watch). I would classify this thread as the stylization and codification of horror, grit, cynicism, urban grime, etc in a fantastical / supernatural context - things that used to be regarded as frightening, inappropriate, ugly, unspeakable, or otherwise transgressive, like murder and corrupt cops (see: Chandler) or scary monsters from folklore committing thinly-veiled metaphors for sexual assault (see: Rice).

This becomes the standard spooky, gritty, cynical, hardboiled vibe for a lot of early books in the paranormal line. The prevalent attitude is basically 'you thought werewolves were a silly children's story? jokes on you! this werewolf is about to eat your face &/or attempt to sexually assault you' (and of course, in the explicitly romantic books especially, this is all highly eroticized). As happens with all tropes, the original transgressive sources of these vibes are eventually lost until only the vibes remain, and we end up with things like the trope of the paranormal PI main character with no clear explanation for why except that 'it's paranormal, of course you need a PI hero' or 'it's paranormal, of course you need a vampire love interest.' Faeries thus become incorporated here as another instance of the seemingly harmless child's story that are, in the story's mythbusting 'reality,' highly dangerous, scary, & socially liminal figures, & thus capable of filling essentially the same narrative role as the vampire or werewolf lover.

The other thread is the urban fantasy setting itself, which is what revitalizes the modern concept of the faerie as a potential style of love interest in the first place, and this I would trace to late 90s - early 00s YA like Melling's faerie series, which draws from Arthuriana and Celtic mythology - and again, dating to 1993, is the earliest publication of explicitly romantic fae novels that I know of (as in the romance is a large chunk of the main narrative, and not just a subplot). (The separate but related notion of dropping your characters into a hodgepodge of conflicting myths and enjoying the chaos as a storytelling method I think is also coming into popularity at the same time via authors like K.A. Applegate in her very underrated 1999 Everworld series, a truly and delightfully insane YA portal fantasy involving, yes, dangerous faeries.) Melling is writing in turn at the same moment that Charles de Lint's urban fantasies are coming out, and both authors are influenced by the popularization of the 'fractured fairy tale' retelling taken up by many major female fantasy authors of the late 20th c. - all of which blend together in a lot of interesting weird ways in the 90s and then play a major role in shaping the YA boom of the 2000s. The role of Arthuriana retellings in the works of writers like Susan Collins and Guy Gavriel Kay I think is also important (both of whom have also, amusingly, admitted to being directly influenced by Sir James Frazer's iconic 1890 work of late Victorian anthropology, The Golden Bough, thus confirming my personal conspiracy theories re: all modern literature. But that's beyond the scope!)

The style of love interest that emerges from this thread is, at least originally, somewhat more in line with much older legends about faeries taking mortals as lovers - that is, these are highly aestheticized and romanticized narratives (as opposed to the 'grit' of early paranormal) that nonetheless derive most of their tension and suspense from the impossibility of any mortal truly being able to trust or rely on a faerie, who are depicted as inherently capricious, inhuman, unfeeling, and unreliable lovers. (Think of the faeries playing games with the mortal characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream - not quite actively malicious, but certainly high-handed and careless enough to feel that way to their victims.)

In the hands of 2000s and 2010s writers like Holly Black, Julie Kagawa, and Melissa Marr (all of whom I would read as some of the direct antecedents to Maas, especially Marr) this narrative merges with the tropes of the paranormal romance to create a kind of gritty fairy tale romance, with fae love interests who take on the narrative role traditionally played by vampires in, for example, Twilight - powerful and compelling supernatural figures who, because of their fundamental nature, pose a danger to the female heroine they are inevitably in love with. (Vampires inherently want to drink your blood! Werewolves inherently want to eat you! Faeries inherently want to fuck with you just for the sake of it! Which makes a human woman attempting to romance any of them inherently fraught & dangerous, & therefore a structurally interesting premise for a romance novel. And, of course, the metaphors for the difficulty of regular human heterosexual romance abound.)

The appeal of the faerie lover specifically over the vampire or werewolf is, I think, that the faerie still retains some of the wondrous, fanastical, romantic glamor by which we tend to define high fantasies and classic fairy tales more generally - they can be magical, capital r Romantic figures in a way quite distinct from the gritty, noir-coded, 'realistic' supernatural appeal of the vampire as depicted in paranormal romance. So the resurgence in popularity of fae lord love intersts today over the vampires or werewolves of the previous decades we might put down to a broader cultural turn away from a kind of emphasis on realism, cynicism, low fantasy 'punk' aesthetics etc, and towards a desire for more idealistic or romantic (or, in the cynical view, more sanitized) narrative figures - which is also, perhaps, echoed in the current parallel surge of the popularity of romantasy over the older paranormal romance.

I think there's also something worth unpacking in the transition from the popularity of socially liminal paranormal love interests like vampires, werewolves, etc - all of whom, in urban fantasy / paranormal settings, tend to explicitly exist in various underworlds, demimondes, on the margins of real or normal society, & so on - to today's version of the romantasy fae lord, who has been transformed from his original urban fantasy character (where, again, he essentially fulfills the same narrative function as the vampire - mysterious, dangerous, liminal, beyond the bounds of the real) into sort of the opposite of a socially marginalized role. Instead of living in the fantasy demimonde & concealing his true nature as a faerie from society etc, the romantasy fae lord (who in most romantasy I've seen - ie the Maas version - is functionally just a pop version of a Tolkien elf; there's very little of actual faerie mythology remaining in these depictions) is fully socially integrated into his world, & inhabits a role of overt social & political power - he's literally a feudal lord. So what's being eroticized & romanticized is no longer transgression or 'the outsider' in any sense, but rather a much more traditional (some might argue regressive) figure of inherited, established (& necessarily masculine) authority. It's a really interesting shift, anyway!

*post script: I'll also add that the various permutations of 'soulmates' and 'mated lovers' & the relentless tendency to call people 'males' & 'females' etc in romantasy I believe comes almost entirely from Maas, who in turn is getting it pretty exclusively from older high fantasy paranormal mashups like Sherrilyn Kenyon's Hunter Legends series (1999) and Wilson's Lord of the Fading Lands series (2007). (So for example the Wilson series is, to the best of my memory, about an immortal shapeshifting dragon king & his romance with his reincarnated true love / fated soulmate, a human woman; I do acknowledge that I read it a very long time ago & so may be wildly misstating the plot - the jacket summary calls him a 'Fey King,' which I simply don't remember at all, but seems even more suggestive!) Anyway, these are all popular tropes in this kind of fantasy romance, & as far I'm aware don't really have much to do with the incorporation of faeries as love interests specifically - it's just a sort of intersection of Maas's particular writing habits & the paranormal romance tradition that shaped them.

*post post script: a little more browsing led me to Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, published 1987, which according to Wikipedia is in fact one of the earliest instances of urban fantasy & is also, serendipitously, a faerie romance. Cool! Anyway this seems relevant for those interested in the timeline; I haven't read it myself & thus can't especially comment on its role in the development of the genre, however, beyond noting the fact that it too seems to be taking much of its fantasy & fae references from pre-existing Celtic & British folklore.

[conservethis]

I was starting to get annoyed at the lack of any mention of Charles De Lint but this just turned out to be my own fault for jumping the gun.

Also holy shit I absolutely forgot about that KA Applegate series Everworld! Literally a “memory unlocked” moment. I never finished it but I absolutely read at least the first two books the year they came out.

[ekjohnston]

Something to keep in mind is that since YA is a marketing category (not a genre), it tends to be very experimental. And authors pivot to Adult for a variety of reasons, but ALL female presenting authors tend to be labeled YA, even if they've never written it. However, a hallmark of YA is that it's *fun*, so people will read something and say it "feels YA" because they're enjoying themselves.

So: experimental, fun, "stereotypical". It's kind of a mess (and when the romantasy label is applied retroactively it gets weird fast), but we're mostly having a good time.

[dreadwedge]

[justalurkr]

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.

[shi1498912]

Here is Gebru's paper if anyone wants to read it (X)

[bisexualbaker]

So it seems like some of you might be interested in learning more about Dreamwidth.

Listen, here's the thing: Dreamwidth is not slick. It is not fancy. Its base code was originally put together some two decades ago or more, and it looks like it. It can't do much with images and definitely not with video—like, I think there's some way to embed video, but I have no idea how to do it, and hosting it on Dreamwidth is, uh...

The point is! Dreamwidth is a lot different from Tumblr. It's closer to Tumblr than it is to Facebook or Instagram, but it's a lot more old-school internet than Tumblr is. And that means that, for anyone who wasn't on the internet some ten, fifteen years ago, there's probably going to be a steep learning curve. It can take more effort to post things there, and more effort to find your people, its image hosting capacity can charitably be described as both "limited" and "poorly organized", and overall it may still never be the kind of website where you, personally, will want to spend a lot of time or do a lot of things. Dreamwidth does not and will never have an app, for pretty much the same reasons as AO3.

But there is one thing I can guarantee, and that is that Dreamwidth is willing to fight for us and our rights. They're already doing so.

[explorersaremadeofhope]

Since this post isn't super specific in terms of facts I'm gonna be just adding some off the top of my head! (More at OP's link, this is just for the 'first glance pls' crowd)

Dreamwidth is predominantly text. Your feed will not be as visual as on Tumblr. -> You can embed videos from e.g. YouTube, and you can post your own images/video, but Dreamwidth itself cannot host the images/video (like Tumblr can), so you will need to host them somewhere else, like imgur, and upload via link in the New Post editor.

Dreamwidth's New Post editor is very similar to Tumblr's. You can work in Rich Text (click buttons to do all the formatting), or HTML (code all formatting manually).

Your feed is similar to Tumblr's. You see the posts from the people and communities you follow, most recent first, and only those. -> When reading, you can filter your feed (Reading page) and see only posts from people, or only posts from Communities.

No reblogging. Everything you post on your blog stays on your blog. It will be seen by fewer people -- this is a pro and a con. It will never spread wildly out of your control, and nobody can add anything to your posts.

Multiple levels of privacy. You can set your entries viewable to everyone, just friends, or just you, on an entry-by-entry basis. It can be changed after posting. Within "just friends", you can create more defined filters, and e.g. show an entry only to your Severance fan friends and not to your 911 fan friends. Or whatever.

There are comment sections under each post! You can delete comments on your entries. (You can also write very long comments. Up to 16k characters.)

You can make VERY LONG posts. The limit is 300k characters. You can easily host fanfics or long fic chapters as journal entries (and a lot of people do and always have done!). -> Long posts can go under a Read More (Tumblr inherited this function from LJ and DW.)

Communities function like shared journals with mods, where all community members can make posts, and comment on each other's posts. You follow Communities the same way you follow people.

You can find communities by searching Dreamwidth for an interest (eg "crocheting") and filtering the results to Communities only.

Managing your friends: You can let someone read your entries (Grant access), or follow their blog (Subscribe), or both, depending on what suits you.

YOUR USERNAME IS FOREVER. Basically. If you want to change it, you need a token that costs money. (It's one of the few ways they get any money in, since using the site is free.) Choose carefully! :'D

[bisexualbaker]

Thank you for the at-a-glance summary! I do have two minor corrections to make, and one addition.

First, Dreamwidth does have its own image hosting, it's just non-intuitive for anyone used to Tumblr or Facebook or Instagram or what-have-you. Free users get 500 MB, which is not a lot for artists; paid users get 1.5 GB, and premium paid users get 3 GB. You can only embed images uploaded to Dreamwidth on Dreamwidth. Find out more about Dreamwidth's image hosting at this link. Again, this isn't really a lot of space for artists, and to the best of my knowledge there currently isn't a way to buy more storage space; your best bet may be to set up an account at squidge.org to host images instead.

Second, there's no native reblogging feature. It is technically possible to do with the use of a third party script, but it's not something that's built into Dreamwidth. You can find out how to reblog things on Dreamwidth at this link. What it effectively does is copy the post to share on your own account, without informing the original poster, so it's not quite the same as a Tumblr reblog, but if reblogging is something you rely heavily on, you may like this workaround.

Third is something really cool about Dreamwidth's cut tags (the native "read more" feature): You can close them. You know how on Tumblr, the second you add a Read More, everything you put after that is under the Read More? Not so on Dreamwidth! If you close the cut tag, you can have more stuff that's visible outside it. You can even have multiple cut tags in a single entry! (And that's not getting into things like nested cut tags 👀)

If you have any other questions about Dreamwidth, I'll do my best to answer them! Message me or reply to one of my posts here, or come visit the community Newcomers on Dreamwidth, or the Tumblr community Dreamwidth Sharing, and we'll see if we can't help you out 👍

[bisexualbaker]

Socchan's Dreamwidth Tutorials (as of 10/6/25):

What to post about on Dreamwidth Dreamwidth alternatives to talking in the tags A quick guide to mood themes The (beta) Create Entries page Personal Communities: Dreamwidth's "side blogs" What do I do instead of reblogging? Audience on Dreamwidth vs Audience on Tumblr Cut Tag Basics

[shurikthereject]

Who up Hailing their Mary 🙏🙏

[emhidesart]

First meetings <3

[axeospades]

Saw a passage from the book and got inspired

Said passage btw

[shrimpdotpng]

read @startingatmidnight 's fic The Astrobiology Immersion Program, then read it again, then again, then drew fanart about it. it's the world's most perfect bodyswap fic and everyone should read it right now!!!

[noworneverphantom]

The headcanon that Ryland Grace is aroace is so important to me. Because the respresentation of his relationship with Rocky being the most important relationship in his life is SO meaningful.

Like that’s just his buddy. His little guy. A friend, and that’s ENOUGH for him. It’s the most meaningful relationship he has and will have and he’s perfectly content with it

[bugsnbites]

God can you imagine being Rocky?

You're sick. You recognise the symptoms from your crew, you have radiation poisoning. The astrophages that were protecting you and powering the ship are gone. You couldn't find the leak in time to stop it. And now you're dying out here in space, alone.

The life support systems on the ship are shutting down. Everything is shutting down. Your planet will die– your entire star system will die. They'll never know how close you came to saving them.

You think about Grace. Is his ship dying too? Or is he on his way home, none the wiser to your fate?

Maybe you're fighting until the end, or maybe you've 'made peace' with it.

And then you hear knocking, on the outside of your ship. Furious, desperate banging on the window. Your friend, your lab partner, your first contact, has come back to save you.

Amaze amaze amaze.

[theprofessional-amateur]

Oh hey, do you know what time it is? It is highly specific resource time!

Today we have the Royal School of Needlework Stitch Bank! There are HUNDREDS of stitch types in the RSN Stitch Bank.

And more added regularly, let’s look at a recent addition

I picked the first one in the 25 recently added Elizabethan stitches, the Elizabethan French Stitch

The stitch bank provides written and photo tutorials as well as a video option to learn to do it yourself. There are examples of the stitch in use, resources, references, everything but a needle and thread!

RSN Stitchbank

rsnstitchbank.org

[vincentbriggs]

I looked at some of the tutorials last night and holy shit I'm so impressed! They're SO thorough! Not only do they have written and video instructions, but there are photo and illustration options for each image AND a "flip view" button so that left handed people can see all the images in reverse!

[theprofessional-amateur]

I am going to jump in and add, as you said they are very detailed in their directions, something that takes a lot of time and money.

If anyone who has enjoyed this resource has the means, I encourage you to adopt or sponsor a stitch to help keep this free to access. I know not everyone has the means to (fair, been there) but if you can, check out their sponsor options

RSN Stitch Bank Progress

And one other resource I have shared before, The Lady's Magazine. Embroidery patterns from 1770-1819. In case anyone wants some historic ideas for using all these new embroidery stitches

The Lady's Magazine: Patterns of Perfection

[gatheringbones]

I think franz kafka’s letter to his abusive father is one of the best early works of domestic violence literature and I wish we all talked about it more.

[gatheringbones]

[“We were so different and in our difference so dangerous to each other that if anyone had tried to calculate in advance how I, the slowly developing child, and you, the full-grown man, would stand to each other, he could have assumed that you would simply trample me underfoot so that nothing was left of me. Well, that did not happen. Nothing alive can be calculated. But perhaps something worse happened. And in saying this I would all the time beg of you not to forget that I never, and not even for a single moment, believe any guilt to be on your side. The effect you had on me was the effect you could not help having. But you should stop considering it some particular malice on my part that I succumbed to that effect.”]

[gatheringbones]

[“Hence the world was for me divided into three parts: one in which I, the slave, lived under laws that had been invented only for me and which I could, I did not know why, never completely comply with; then a second world, which was infinitely remote from mine, in which you lived, concerned with government, with the issuing of orders and with the annoyance about their not being obeyed; and finally a third world where everybody else lived happily and free from orders and from having to obey. I was continually in disgrace; either I obeyed your orders, and that was a disgrace, for they applied, after all, only to me; or I was defiant, and that was a disgrace too, for how could I presume to defy you; or I could not obey because I did not, for instance, have your strength, your appetite, your skill, although you expected it of me as a matter of course; this was the greatest disgrace of all.”]

[rylandgraces]

ok I know I seem insane for watching project hail mary for the fourth time in 10 days but I got to watch it with the directors commentary tonight and it’s incredible how much thought and love went into this film by EVERYONE. the directors, ryan gosling himself, the sound department, costumes, set production, cameras. everyone has so much pride and the story is so beloved by all. anyway here are some of my favorite things from the commentary

no one knew how to pronounce eridani (air-id-ah-ni or air-re-deni) so they just literally never said it in the film

the “good luck” at the beginning is supposed to have been written by the astronauts on the ISS who delivered ryland to the hail mary

the mop ryland was dancing with was called moppy ringwald

when ryland calls stratt after successfully breeding astrophage and he says “carl and I made a baby,” that was ryan gosling calling sandra hüller on her day off and she had no idea that’s what he was going to say. that “what” was her genuine first reaction

the scientist whom ryland called a stagnating waste of carbon was the bearded guy sitting next to him and stratt in the initial phm meeting

the idea of the soundtrack being so hopeful was supposed to be like there were two different planets cheering him on

when ryland is sitting on the beach in that don’t-go-crazy room and sees a figure walking towards him, that’s him on erid at the end. he’s seeing himself 

among the markings on rocky were the petrova line mission patch, his rank, family crest, and wedding band

rocky always stamped his claw on the ground twice for a question

they wanted to make it so that eridani could have different tones. so it could be a given series of keys for one word and then you could change the frequencies for happy, sad, scared, etc.

after rocky wakes up and asks ryland if they caught the taumeoba and ryland shakes his head no and then yes, the directors went “what an odd thing to do”

ryan gosling wrapped all the gifts that ryland gave to rocky himself

the entire reason that exchange panel was put on rocky’s ball was so that ryland could pass him the little beanie earth

the movie starts with an upside down shot of ryland waking up. the epilogue starts with a right-side up shot of ryland waking up. he also makes his bed and brushes his teeth to show how time has passed LOL

their headcanon for explaining the rocky nature of the beach is that the eridians tried to emulate sand but got the scale of the grains wrong

rocky had them create a beach, and wave machine for the beach, and a tree for ryland so that he felt closer to home, but rocky was all he needed for that

[thestuffedalligator]

I’m going to level with you. I have listened to The Devil Went Down to Georgia for most of my life. We were a country music household, this was a staple of my childhood along with Johnny Cash, Garth Brooks, and that one Chipmunks country album.

I have no idea what “Fire on the mountain run boys run/The Devil's in the house of the rising sun/Chicken in the bread pan picking out dough/Granny does your dog bite no child no” means and at this point I’m too scared to ask.

[dementian]

For once I can be of assistance.

Each of the lyrics comes from an old-time hickory song for fiddles, and is a lyric from that corresponding song.

"Fire on the Mountain" --> "Fire on the Mountain, run boys run"

Fire On The Mountain - Fiddle Player POV

"The House of the Rising Sun" --> "The Devil's in the house of the rising sun"

House of the Rising Sun

"Ida Red" --> "Chicken in the bread pan peckin' out dough"

Ida Red - Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys

"Granny Will Your Dog Bite" --> "Granny does your dog bite? 'No child, no'."

FTC #149 Granny Will Your Dog Bite

And for your furthered education, The Mountain Whipporwill.

Mountain Whippoorwill (aka How Hillbilly Jim Won the Great Fiddler's Prize)

[noirandchocolate]

Terry was once asked why he worked across six monitors; ‘Because I don’t have room for eight’ was his cheeky response, although I suspect that if he had really wanted more screens he would have insisted that I found the space.  These days, a multi-screen setup isn’t unusual for the professional author, but when I first joined him, Terry, like most people back then, was still using clunky CRT monitors, which couldn’t possibly have been stacked up in multiples.  The lure of being able to spread Windows across two screens prompted him to invest in flat LCD panels–cutting edge at the time.  Soon though, two screens just weren’t enough, so we looked for ways to expand further.

…

You might wonder what an author–who was surely only ever working on one thing at a time–could possibly need with six screens.  It’s true that the text of Terry’s latest novel was always front and center, but it was never the only document open.  There was fan mail–lots and lots of fan mail–and letters to The Times, written under the guise of ‘Sir Terence,’ should the need for a social conscience arise.  There were letters to the bank, letters to the lawyers, letters to his publisher and agents–and there was Doom.  Most gamers had long-since moved on from this 1993 classic as computer capabilities increased, but Terry remained faithful to what is now considered to be one of the most significant and influential titles in gaming history.  It had its own screen and he loved it, calling it ‘bubblegum for the brain.’ 

–Rob Wilkins (Taken from “Terry Pratchett: His World”)

[copperbadge]

I love it when we get tiny glimpses of Terry Pratchett, Mad Scientist.

[Description: An image of Terry Pratchett’s workspace: A smallish desk with a phone, keyboard, mug of tea, books and paperwork, mouse and mousepad, and mounted above, six monitors in two rows of three. While not all are identifiable, one is an article about himself, one is a Wikipedia page, and the upper right screen shows the loading screen for Doom. Behind the screen is a wall of bookshelves.]

[discworld-heritage-posts]

Discworld Heritage Post

[rogue-ai-cat]

The thing is, even if you were lucky and your parents taught you how to clean, they probably didn't teach you how to clean the stuff you clean stuff with, like brushes, mops, sponges, rags, and so on. Or how to clean your cleaning appliances, like a dish washer, clothes washing machine, and clothes dryer and its ducts (if you have a ducted dryer), or a carpet cleaner, vacuum, Or how to clean up clean messes, like spilled bleach or detergent.

My parents threw away all of these things (even the vacuum cleaners and the dryer) when they got too dirty to function, because no one even told them THAT they could be cleaned. Cost them thousands of dollars over the years.

All I'm saying is that cleaning is not intuitive, and not knowing how to clean is not a moral failing, but it is something you can learn.

I'm going to reblog this post with resources for learning how to clean things and how to clean cleaning things (I'm not at my desk at the moment). If you have any favorites, please feel free to add them in too!

[rogue-ai-cat]

I like this video because it does a great job of introducing the basic foundations of house cleaning (and because he doesn't use bleach, which is a common allergy in addition to being awful to inhale). He also talks a little about how to clean a vacuum. And why you shouldn't put grease from your pots and pans down the sink drain. I also love that he mentions that different houses and different people have different needs and different versions of what clean and cleaning looks like.

He doesn't mention though that the toilet seat comes off. I take my toilet seat off to clean under the hinges and clean the seat more thoroughly once a quarter.

[rogue-ai-cat]

This is another video from the same guy about cleaning and depression. This advice, especially at the beginning, can feel really really difficult and oppressive to hear. However, I find that it's generally pretty solid. But I'm autistic and so is he, so that gets a massive Your Mileage May Vary stamp on it.

I have a favorite part of this video. It's from 10:52 to 12:36. I think we could all use to hear that. There's a HEFTY pause after that one. I promise the narration does come back.

I'm also going to recommend KC Davis' book "How To Keep House While Drowning"

[rogue-ai-cat]

This is a pair of videos about how to correctly load and use a dish washer.

The first one is a quick 1 minute 30 second overview on loading. I can't find the exact video I'm looking for, so consider this a substitute for that. If I can find the one I'm looking for, I'll swap it in.

The second is a half hour deep dive on dishwashers and detergents. The short form of that is you shouldn't need to pre-rinse anything, detergent pods are overpriced and can cause problems, some dishwashers have a filter in the bottom that needs to be cleaned (but most don't), run your sink until the water is HOT before starting your dish washer, and put a little detergent in the pre-rinse dispenser when you're washing extra dirty dishes (or on the inside of the door if your dishwasher doesn't have a pre-rinse dispenser).

[rogue-ai-cat]

Favorite Scrub Brushes + How to Clean Them - Clean Mama

Favorite Scrub Brushes + How to Clean Them. The right tools for cleaning tasks make all the difference! Scrub brushes are great tools and it

Here's a blog post about scrubbing brushes and how to clean them.

And a video for all cleaning tools, including scrub brushes. This video does use bleach. I'll try to find some alternatives to that.

[rogue-ai-cat]

How to clean a front load washer (with bleach). This should be done monthly or every time you wash really soiled clothes.

The Dirty Truth About How Often You Should Clean Your Washing Machine

With expert tips and tricks for all types of washers.

How to clean a top loader (without the removable agitator thing). This should be done every 1-3 months depending on you unit, or every time you wash really soiled clothes.

Clean Your Washer and You'll Have Cleaner Laundry

Regular cleaning of a top-load washing machine will prolong the life of the appliance and leave your laundry cleaner and brighter.

How to clean a top loader (with the removable agitator thing). This should be done every month, or every time you wash really soiled clothes.

[rogue-ai-cat]

This video is for pet owners.

These carpet brushes are a LIFE SAVER if you have dogs. This thing allows me to go from vacuuming about 4 square feet before my vacuum is full to vacuuming half the living room (I don't vacuum often enough. You should vacuum weekly, and I just can't.). I have to unclog the vacuum less often. It fluffs up some of the flat spots in the carpet. And I also use the brush to shampoo my rugs in the spring.

A spot cleaner (or a carpet cleaner with a spot cleaner attachment) is another life saver, ESPECIALLY if you can afford to splurge on a heated one. I see them at Goodwill or at yard sales occasionally, and they're worth picking up. The shark one in the video is great too.

This channel is gold. There's tutorials for cleaning EVERYTHING on there. Just go subscribe!

[fivekoboldsinacoat]

Gonna throw another potential resource at the end of this very long list, which may be potentially helpful for others like me who loathe videos. It's... the weirdest thing that has genuinely been helpful to me in housekeeping. Absolutely full of useful advice, and bizarrely still relevant in large part. (Though, caveat, research ANYTHING to do with chemicals or cleaning products more complicated than vinegar + lemon + water for modern information.)

It's America's Housekeeping Book (1941). Available for free download on the Internet Archive. (Large PDF file at the link here).

The LISTS y'all. The step by step lists. The emphasis on efficiency and arranging spaces for the least resistance possible. The basic concept of "take a tray or basket into a room when you are tidying up so you can put things that belong elsewhere on it and take them out LATER in ONE GO".

My ADHD-having ass could cry.