- I’ll be ding-dong-ditching Discord, and there aren’t many good alternatives to it currently, so if you want to get in touch with me Tumblr is probly the best place to do so for now.
- Friendly reminder to new peeps stumbling on this blog or older peeps who simply weren’t aware; I’m old. I write naughty (and often “problematic”) things in fanfiction. If you’re scandalized by this, you can block me and move on. If you’re intrigued by this, you can find me on AO3.
- I used to allow anonymous (moderated) comments on my fics, understanding that some people are too shy or afraid to have their usernames attached to my work…but given my intense hatred for AI and the fact that I’ve had to deal with suicide-bait anons lately, (jokes on you, bitch, I’m a tenacious hedonist who will cling to life as long as humanly possible) I will no longer be allowing this. You can of course still read and give kudos without logging in to AO3.
- I deal with chronic pain, burn out, and brain fog, so fic updates will be very sporadic. I’m a hobbyist fanfic writer, not a content creator. If you treat me like a vending machine, prepare to lose all your quarters.
- My askbox and PMs remain open.
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—MAIN FANDOMS—
- Fallout (ghouls ghouls ghouls~~and political satire/social commentary my beloved)
- Undertale (mostly bonezone and Gaster-centric things)
—MISC FANDOMS—
- Cult of the Lamb (LeshLamb mostly, with a hint of Beastars inspiration)
- Planet of the Apes (Been a fan since the OG films)
- Elden Ring (Omen twins~~but also the lore/environmental storytelling)
Anita Sarkeesian, feminist who interpreted media under a feminist lens. She did a series about video games and she was the subject of targeted harassment. That was the start of gamergate
Minor correction, the start of gamergate was based around a different reporter, Zoe Quinn, but they were both absolutely violently threatened over their involvement in video game criticism and development. A hate campaign was started by Quinn's ex-boyfriend when he wrote a post falsely accusing them of dating video game journalists in order to receive positive reviews on their own game, Depression Quest, which led other bad actors to accuse all women in the industry (Zoe identified as female at the time) of perceived sexual immorality. Anita Sarkeesian's brilliant Youtube series Tropes vs Women in Video Games (which everyone should watch, right now) sparked a particular nerve for criticizing popular games of killing and/or victimizing any important female character (there is a CHILLING bit that borders on ludicrous where she describes the plots of a seemingly endless parades of games as "In [title], [male player character's] wife dies, and you then have to rescue [his] daughter."). That series did actually make a huge change in the industry, especially when touted by progressive legacy developers like Tim Schafer (Monkey Island, Psychonauts), who went on to expand hiring in his company to front women and minority voices, but the shift didn't really show for a long time and echoes of the sexism that plagues the industry at its core are still rampant.
In all seriousness, if you live in the US and you aren't familiar with the misogynistic harassment these people in the game industry faced during Gamergate, you need to watch this series right now.
This was the beggining of the current form of the US fascist movement and it underpins the entire thing about it to this day. If you live in the US and Gamergate isn't familiar to you, you're missing critical history to understanding US fascism. I'm not joking even a little bit here, you will understand modern United States fascism so much better if you are familiar with Gamergate.
Not an exaggeration. Gamergate led directly to the redpill/incel movement, which white supremacists exploited and colonized. Not to say that most of the white men in those movements weren't already racist to some extent, but that wasn't an active part of their politics until white supremacist recruiters came along and convinced them that the women ruining their videogames were part of the conspiracy to destroy the white race.
That's a very brief summary but you can go back step by step over the past decade and see how they did it.
we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason
i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3
unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it
i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map
i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs
this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.
crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.
Tumblr: Hey look at this random blog’s posts based on an algorithm we’re keeping on you! Hey look this ad for tumblr TV that you can’t block! Hey you liked several posts about moths—look at this video of a centipede because if you like one type of bug you must like looking at all of them, right? Hey here’s community posts from communities that you aren’t following!
Officially finished leaving Discord. I’ve been trying to do research on a lot of things, though that was impeded a bit by lack of internet last week—thus far looks like our best alternative might be Matrix, but it’ll be awhile until I can set something like that up, given my lack of code experience and the fact that I’m still actively trying to switch over to Linux before doing any major computer stuff changes.
Again, for now we have tumblr and email as a means of contact/communication.
I want to dig more thoroughly before jumping to Matrix too, because I’ve learned to be paranoid now about the intentions behind programs and infrastructure set up by other people. :’D
We live in a lawless time where companies are often not held accountable for their actions, and tech bros could easily add sneaky code into malleable systems. This already happened on Discord with some bots that were collecting data/scraping/malware.
Also, @suppuration if I manage to get my hands on a steam machine in the future…I think FO76 will be considered PC version? So I’m aiming for that too. :3
I have…so much research to do in general with the goal of not only navigating Linux but also trying my hand at (indie) game dev in the future. This is something I already have attempted a few times over the years. I had hopes of pursuing indie book publishing but given the current climate with AI it’s not really safely attainable and far too easy for your work (that you could have spent literal years on) to be buried in algorithms, stolen/pirated, or flooded with bad review bots, or even taken off your shop because of censorship.
There are also risks surrounding game dev but it is more difficult for the plagiarism-machine-enjoyers to manipulate this kind of media than it is for them to nab data or images with a bot, so I think it is more viable currently for me. (Also if I git gud enough at this kind of thing it could open other career opportunities or even just enable me to have way more control over my online environment and my life)
Hey why is my dash drunk suddenly? Random blogs I don’t follow popping up. Mutuals posts showing up out of order (ex.: someone timestamped 16 hrs ago, then the next person who pops up it’s like 5 hours ago)
today's reason I fucking love the open source community: Ageless Linux, a brand new Debian-based operating system specifically designed to break the law by giving children access to computers that explicitly refuse to track their age.
"I beat the game in 30 hours" okay but did you explore the map to find spots that look pretty? did you put your characters in silly little outfits? did you try the mini games? did you let the characters become friends? did you have fun? did you have fun playing your game???
it makes me so sad seeing people in my life who tell me they think they might be trans but they’re too scared to confront that reality because the transgender experience just seems to be filled with terror and misery. trans people please never stop talking about the joys of being transgender. please never stop talking about your excitement and joy and happiness. maybe you think that the trans experience is all doom and gloom, too. I promise it’s not. focus on the joy and you will feel better I promise.
Rotating mass effect in my brain again lately, and I wanted to share more of my thought process/headcanon regarding salarian sexuality or lack thereof.
It is a combination of physical prerequisites and cultural phenomenon. Traditionally salarian males need exposure to female pheromones to trigger arousal, and the male-to-female ratios on ancient Sur’kesh came in generational swings. An over abundance of males one season, an over abundance of females the next, chaotically fluctuating and possibly creating hindrances to social progress/cohesion during heavily-male years.
Mating season was a battleground. Females were highly-territorial over their spawn areas and while sons typically spent their time protecting their mothers and younger siblings from threats—mating seasons would be a cause for them to drift away temporarily in search of unrelated females, leaving their matriarchs unprotected. Juvenile females stick close to their mothers until they are old enough to lay eggs, and often mothers would hide them during mating season to keep them out of the crossfire.
The threat was not only from native wildlife but also from rival females (again, territorial, trying to eliminate competition for resources) and overly enthusiastic males.
Because of this background history, advancing salarian civilization became necessarily about the control of their own reproduction and population. Females found ways to mask their pheromones and kept their distance from males during the season, the defense of spawning areas became more complex, and then with technology they became more portable.
Mating became pre-arranged and culturally males had to be invited into the matriarch’s territory before the season started. A male’s right to mate became decided by meetings between matriarchs. This cultural shift also meant that sons were less likely to drift and became not only guards but also a matriarch’s workforce.
Therefore, modern salarians have in themselves fostered a strong sense of duty toward their circles and a mentality that the needs of society should come before the needs of the individual.
Sexual desire as a foreign concept to most of the salarian population is very much intentional and by design, as it allows matriarchs to have more control and makes their collective workforces more efficient. Like an allied network of queen bees surrounded by young queens and worker-drones.
Also, where in ancient times daughters would leave their mother’s territories and strike out on their own once they started laying eggs—modern day salarian daughters now serve the same function that sons once did, as personal attendants and guards.
Unfertilized eggs are now a commodity, to be used as bargaining chips in political and economic negotiations. Males are essentially a servant caste.
In addition, salarian society doesn’t seem the type to be shy about encouraging genetic alteration and has likely further domesticated itself as a result, or posed male sexual desire as something “selfish” or “below their station” or “a personal moral failure”—to the point where I would not be at all surprised if Sur’kesh offers (or once did offer) services to eliminate those pesky urges. (Medical intervention, psychological therapy, or gene therapy—maybe even a notation on their chart that matriarchs should avoid reproduction with this one)
Sur’keshian propaganda likely even posits lack of sexual desire as something that makes salarians “superior” to other species. Males chosen to create daughters may not even actually mate with the matriarch, but rather make a genetic donation in a container (The container given to the male provided with a packet of pheromone to aid the process) that then gets shipped long-distance to the recipient and dumped in the female’s personal spawning tank.
This line of thinking is actually what inspired my salarian OC, who is an intersex male who regularly produces female pheromone and has human-levels of libido. (Also due to genetic tampering, but in his and his many siblings case—for the purpose of the batarian slave trade)
Long story short, my headcanon is that salarian asexuality is not a natural species-wide occurrence, but instead a manufactured one.
I’ll be without internet for about a week potentially so expect me to be quiet for a bit—on the plus side today I found 3 MASSIVE books on general Linux, Debian, HTML, and CSS use. :)
A long post about fandom, AI, Linux, disenshittification, and creativity.
I must admit that a big reason why I haven’t been very creative in a good long while is because I already knew how easy it would be to have your work scraped on AO3 even with the “registered users only/exclude my works from search” options. Because it’s not difficult to make an AO3 account.
I’m glad it’s easy to make an AO3 account, (if AO3 ever requires ID I will toss my computer out a window and become a hermit for the next decade until I teach myself how to build my own damn infrastructure) but, unfortunately, it also means it is easy for scrapers to get in.
Knowing that it is possible to poison your fics via work skins honestly gives me a lot of hope for the future of fandom, even if it’s not currently a perfect solution, because it means we can continue to tweak things until it works effectively. Finding a balance of uploading something that poisons AI datasets while also still being readable on e-readers or in PDF format I think is key.
Naturally, this means we’ll be looking at an ongoing tennis match between anti-AI and pro-AI people coming up with newer ways of trying to outdo each other (Swiper, no swiping!) but that might be just what we (fandom) need to survive as a community until the bubble bursts and actual legal action starts being taken against theft in a major way.
(I am convinced that the reason AI is not being held accountable for massive creative theft is because the US economy is currently “dependent” on the AI industry—and once it stops being dependent on it, copyright law is going to get heavily revised/enforced)
I also think self-hosting/homelabbing is going to become important for fandom as well, in terms of fan-to-fan communication going forward. That is specifically to prevent your messages and shared files from being stored in a corporate server, so you are less likely to be surveilled, be victim to mass data breaches, or have a company using you to sell data.
It might also go a long way toward pulling fandom out of the mainstream again. If I manage to compile all the data on this, I’ll be making some tutorials for those of us (like me) who are less tech-savvy on how to do these kinds of things, because I know that’s a big obstacle and the reason so many people rely on social media in the first place.
Moderating Discord servers and years of dealing with the sanitization of online spaces (therefore, people being afraid to post publicly their interests and hobbies) has taught me that if you want to talk to people about a given topic, you have to create a space for them to gather in the first place.
So the more people know how to create those spaces themselves, how to protect those spaces, how to have more control over their online environments, (less reliance on big tech) the better.
Awhile back I thought “I’ll just start using Linux! Then maybe I can feel safe enough to start creating again!” But the reality is much more complex than that. Switching to Linux is a first step, at this point in time, merely to leave behind corporate giants like windows and apple. In the future Linux could also become one of those corporate giants.
So, right now, it is imperative to take a practical look at how you use tech in general. Because in much the same way that giving people less education or not teaching them to read makes them more vulnerable to being manipulated by politics—being casual-users of tech has allowed (some greedy, bad faith) savvy-users to have a horrific amount of control over our lives—especially in the last 5-10 years or so.
We should know how to do basic repairs on our hardware, so we don’t have to keep buying newer shittier versions of it. We should be able to check programs for malicious code. We should be able to use operating systems that don’t force obsolescence or shove AI down our throats or disallow us from making any alterations to our system. We shouldn’t have to pay for basic privacy, or to get rid of ads, or to store our files, or to be able to use phone data for more than a few days if we decide to listen to some music.
Right now we are in (I believe, possibly) a narrow window of time where we will be able to do things like boot Linux distros onto old computers and teach ourselves HTML and access places like Reddit for free information on the technical know-how of skills without having to pay someone to teach us. Your searches get tracked. Most YouTube “tutorials” are teasers with sponsors attached or a link to someone’s (not free) educational course. Library books may not have the answers you seek for very specific, current-day tech problems.
Laws are changing. They want to force ALL operating systems to use DOB registration or ID verification, including Linux. Valve is poised to make Linux the new “big” OS, but that opens them to the same problems of going mainstream and their userbase (gamers) is crawling with fascists already.
I still urge people to start exchanging emails to keep in touch with each other if we should get an internet “blackout” where we are forced to leave various socmed platforms for our own safety. (Be gay, do crime) Even that is tricky, since a lot of us still use gmail, and because of that “storing things on someone else’s server” issue it’s hard to trust any company right now. (Again, why I think we should do self-hosting)
At the least, an email allows you to say “hey buddy, I’ve moved to this other platform, same username as before :)” without giving too much information. Which brings me to another point, which is that I think it will also be important to try to maintain the same handle, at least for awhile, if you want your friends to be able to find you again. I plan on keeping this one permanently, if I can.
Bottom line is, I don’t want to be at the mercy of some evangelist tech assholes anymore, and I don’t want the rest of you to be either, so we need to stop jumping from platform to platform at some point and actually start creating something with our own hands that will last.
