Hi there! | (Mirror Pronouns) | This is an account for me to post some larger fanart and world building projects I've been thinking about for a while now.
Enjoy!
I think trying to make a movie out of The Odyssey (not the story of Odysseus, but The Odyssey as in the poem) is a bit of a doomed endeavour as the structure of The Odyssey simply does not jive with the structure of the Hollywood movie
I think you COULD make a good movie out of the odyssey but would need to engage w the fact that it's a work which veers back and forth between fantasy and realism; that it's a story told out of chronogical order; and also that it is a Trickster Hero story first and foremost. It is perhaps best done as a comedy but with the occasional shocking swerve into graphic violence.
The Odyssey should be a musical but ☝️only some of the time. When Odysseus is narrating? Musical. Penelope and Telemachus on Ithaca? 🙅♀️
Odysseus can break the fourth wall during the parts where he's narrating.
Movie opens with Odysseus inside Charybdis, whirling around and around clinging to a tiny raft and screaming. *Freeze frame* yeah, that's me. You're probably wondering how I got here.
Sometimes the most devastating depiction of the inherent tragedy of insatiable violence and isolation vampirism causes comes in the form of a 15 year old Welsh teenager whose dad hates her for being a girl. Also she has the highest on screen kill count in the entire show.
Everyone say thank you to trans femmes for showing us a version of femininity born from joy and desire instead of just through coercion
Everyone say thank you to trans mascs for showing us a version of masculinity born from joy and desire instead of just through coercion
Everyone say thank you to all people outside of the cis gender binary for showing us a version of gender born from joy and desire instead of just through a simple frame work in which our oppressor have used to kill, erase, and censor us.
Thank you for showing us the existence of a history before and a future ahead.
Tumblr added a bunch of tracking shit to share urls, so now ill teach you how to get rid of them
if you copy a url by sharing on the website, the link will look like this
getting rid of tracking in these is easy, just delete everything after the question mark and you are golden
in the case for the app, its slightly more complicated
first you have to delete at. that appears before tumblr(.)com the other tracking shit on this one has a lot more info, so please, clean app urls. after the first set of numbers, there's a / you have to delete everything after it
For a second I didn’t realize it meant “high” as in a stoner–I thought “High Geologist” was like a rank of geologist or something and he was insulted you would challenge him to naming stones
It’s important to know that hijab is banned in schools in most of the european countries, such as france, belgium, switzerland etc. Millions of girls have to take their hijab off everyday in order to have access to education, and I am one of them. Please spread this as much as possible, it has become so normal here that I feel like a fool for even mentioning it, but I’m pretty sure it goes against the human rights. This senseless law has been on since 2004 and pretends that all the students have to be “equal” and it is prohibited to show that you belong to any religion, any religious sign must be set aside. However, most of us have to take our hijab off in schools where you can clearly see a christmas tree or a christian cross. “Yeah but it’s not the same”, they say. Tell me about double standards. I pray for days when we don’t have to chose between religion and education.
This, but don’t read the notes. It’s all just French people and/or Catholics going “I’m totally not racist or antisemitic, it’s just that I think that Xmas, a holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus, is secular, whereas a Muslim or Jew wearing a hijab or kippah is somehow forcing their religion on me by existing in public.” LOL
thank you for the warning because i have no energy to deal with islamophobia today, and YES. THIS. ALL OF IT. not to mention that a cross is something you can easily tuck under a shirt if necessary without compromising your values, whereas a muslim woman having to choose between her hijab and education (who will not be faulted for taking it off in the eyes of Allah SWT) absolutely is compromising her values. it’s disgusting
france, switzerland, belgium, quebec: do better. all of you
Does no one realize how racist this assumption can be? Most LLMs are trained heavily on Commonwealth and other standardized English corpora, yet now when people from Commonwealth countries naturally write in polished English, others immediately say it “sounds AI-generated.”
I fear this is the beginning of a really awful trend that will make it even harder for non-white writers to get published.
Got curious, so I went and read it myself. The AI accusation is completely absurd to me. The story is small scale, personal, laden with metaphor, and clearly draws heavily from the writer's cultural history. It's not conventionally told, but the ideas set up in the beginning are woven throughout the narrative nicely - nothing is extraneous, no threads are dropped, and it ends on a thoughtful and somewhat poetic note that explores its core themes. Unless I'm sorely mistaken, this is not kind of writing AI generally produces (at least not without significant human intervention - at which point who cares?)
The idea that it's AI generated because of a couple difficult-to-parse similes (in a piece that employs flowery simile multiple times per paragraph) is so insidious. Oh I'm sorry, this Trinidadian writer's piece exploring the cultural intersections of the Carribean and Indian diasporas on the island wasn't instantly understandable to me, an ignorant anglophone reader - so therefore he must be a fraud? Ridiculous, and in my opinion clearly racist.
first off the bat, "ai detection tools" are certainly worthless vaporware. i am fully agreed on this point. like hagiomoto, i also worry about the weaponization of AI accusations against authors of color, especially ones writing in englishes other than american or british english.
that said, these posts have the absolute wrong end of the stick. first of all, the very first to call this story out were -- understandably, because they were the ones most closely watching the commonwealth prize regional winners -- Black and caribbean writers and poets, like chiemeziem everest udochukwu and previous commonwealth prize winner and fellow trinidadian kevin jared hosain.
secondly, OP (and many, many people in the notes) correctly describes a phenomenon -- the way in which AI writing can resemble styles of writing common in nations that were formerly colonized by the UK -- almost certainly in reference to marcus olang's essay I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me. but this phenomenon has absolutely nothing to do with jamir nazir's piece. the similarities olang' draws between kenyan english and chatgpt are strict structure, the use of specific sayings, and a propensity to use 'wow words' --
The third, and perhaps most important commandment, was that of structure. An essay had to be a perfect edifice. The introduction was the foundation, the body was the walls, and the conclusion was the roof, neatly summarising the moral of the story and, if you were clever, circling back to the introductory proverb to create a satisfying, if predictable, loop. We were taught to build our paragraphs around a strong topic sentence. We were taught the sin of the sentence fragment and the virtue of the compound-complex sentence.
whatever you might think of "the serpent in the grove", i think it is extremely safe to say that this very much does not describe it.
and now i want to get onto the reblog, which really truly bothers me because of the ways it is unintentionally closing ranks around the profoundly racist and imperialist set of pre-approved conceptions of 'postcolonial literature'. because frankly, the serpent in the grove is not thoughtful or complex--it is barely coherent, in very obvious ways. everyone who has written about it has pulled all the same quotes, but here's a few of the nonsense metaphors to illustrate:
A man who had cleared brush like a conscience
Hard living lays itself on a man like wet sacking; it never asks permission
Coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all
She had the kind of walking that made benches become men
(this sort of bluntly failed similie is incredibly characteristic of ai creative writing by the by, far more than any of the elements olang' complains about being accused over, which mostly show up in technical/conversational AI material. @nostalgebraist calls it the "eyeball kick". my favourite exmaple i've seen over the years is “the moon was truly mother-of-pearl, the white of the sea, rubbed smooth by the groins of drowned brides.”)
what it is, however, is essentially an intense pastiche of all the frankly racist tropes of "prestige postcolonial literature". i mean, look at what judge sharma taylor said about it:
Jamir Nazir’s language is sublime—precise yet richly evocative—conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy. Through sharp sensory detail, he renders the Grove as a living presence, where labour, landscape, and memory are intimately entwined. Polished and confident, this is a story with a melodic voice that lingers long after the final line. Jamir Nazir’s prose pulses with a voice of restraint and quiet authority—a beautifully told and assured piece of storytelling.
writing from the global periphery, from the caribbean or africa or south east asia or latin america, is always "rich", it is always "sensory," "lush", it is always "about landscape and memory", it is always "melodic." these are exhausted tropes that have been used to describe basically all literature from ex-colonies for the last 50 years, regardless of what they're actually like
latin american writers and critics like sylvia molloy and jorge volpi have talked about the "choke-chain" of 'magical realism', this titanic sweeping label that gets applied to anything coming out of latin america, something that for a long time sreved as a measuring stick to evaluate Real Prestigious Worthwhile Latin American Literature.
there is a commonality there, and that is that literature from The Third World is meant to be about the Land, about the Peoples, about the Personal Struggles, about the Rich Fantastical Vibrant Melody History Memory--this is a mold that has been imposed first by the european and usamerican literary establishments and from there internalized and adopted in literary scenes around the world. volpi criticizes the picture of latin america that the "magical realism" wants to push onto all latin american ltierature as one of "irrationality [...] a lack of reason".
incomprehensibility--the very reaction in the reblog of "oh, i don't understand this, it must be some Cultural Element i'm not understanding" is treated as a de facto mark of authenticity. it's the mass exoticization of this literature, treating it as some endlessly mysterious Other whose incomprehensiblity gives the white literary world a look into the Mysterious Foreign Mind
and it is genuinely really frustrating after years of authors from the global periphery (and in various diaspora, because this type of ritualized Authenticty Signalling is a huge feature of prestige diaspora literature and the subject of the exact same ongoing fierce internal debate, e.g. this piece or this one) trying to escape these stifling tropes, these exotifying expectations, to have a story that--AI or not (and i don't think the 'not' is very likely)--thoughtlessly and mechanistically repeats them, drowning itself in florid incoherence, get this kind of defense from people who earnestly think they are being anti-racist.
i leave off with a couple of good pieces on the story itself and its reception:
Can we say that between the prize and the story and Jamir Nazir, there is something perverse and disrespectful to other writers, because it
The Granta controversy surrounding a Commonwealth Prize-winning story tells us less about AI than about the enduring metropolitan expectatio
Yet another new study debunked the basis for the anti-trans sports bans. It was never about sports but for creating legal avenues for exclusion and abjection. This is one of the largest analyses ever conducted, involving 52 studies and 6,485 trans people. Read the study here.
1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.
2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.
3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."
4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.
Additional source and more details below. Absolutely thrilled to say that this is real. And yeah, it's huge.
For all the reasons above AND ALSO because this particular lawsuit is a defamation case
Privacy lawsuits are hard because most privacy laws are super super weak, and there's very rarely a lot of money or enforcement backing privacy laws for...twenty million reasons, really...
But defamation suits? Those have teeth.
(In large part because, at least in some countries and including in the US, defamation laws protect public figures the least - and "public figures" legally includes most if not all politicians, and a hell of a lot of other rich ppl too)
A Munich court ruled Google's AI Overviews are its own words, making it liable for false claims, a decision that, if it holds, could reach e
A German court has ruled that Google can be held directly liable for false claims made by its AI Overviews, a decision that could put a serious legal dent in the whole “the AI made me do it” defense.
According to The Next Web, the Regional Court of Munich issued a temporary injunction after Google’s AI Overviews wrongly tied two Munich publishers to scams, subscription traps, and dubious business practices. The court treated those AI-generated summaries as Google’s own statements, not just ordinary search results pointing to third-party pages.
That distinction matters. Search engines have traditionally had more protection because they index and link to other people’s content. AI Overviews changes the machinery. Google is not just showing the web anymore. It is summarizing it, rewriting it, and sometimes apparently hallucinating a tiny legal grenade into the results page.
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