Radio Writes @radiowrites - Tumblr Blog

Rare Little Folks Edition of Through the looking glass and what Alice found there

First Edition 1903 - beautiful coloured illustrations

Fuyumi Ono Q&A (Part 2)

This was written before Akumu LNs were released, so that's two decades ago now. Some tidbits I do find interesting and can definitely be useful as your GH fanfic prompts XD Enjoy~

If you missed the first part, check here~

Shibuya Branch Office

#ghost hunt

witchhuntress

When the SPR men miss Mai👀😉

#ghost hunt

marauders4evr

It occurs to me that there are people who weren’t on this website in 2012 and therefore never saw the magical gif that you can actually hear:

It’s been over five years and that still impresses the hell out of me.

nattousan

sending this to my lineman friend…

#favorite

ao3commentoftheday

Is using spell check okay at all now?

In writing groups I'm in it's grammar and spell check is for newbies and those wanting a crutch or a cheat code.

I'm going to be frank with you, anon. Those writing groups sound toxic as fuck and I'd recommend finding a better place to spend your time.

Grammar check and spell check are embedded in most word processing software and have been since the 1990s. People don't have to use them if they don't want to, of course, but there's nothing wrong with using them.

English spelling is famously a bastardization of French multiplied by German divided by Latin with fifty other languages thrown in for fun. And don't even get me started on the Great Vowel Shift.

All that to say, being bad at spelling is not a moral failing nor is it a sign of weak character. It's a fact of life for an overwhelming majority of people writing in English.

Or, to put it another way, would you tell a near-sighted person such as myself that wearing glasses is a cheat code and that I should just "see better"? I really hope not.

lytefoot

Spell check - yes, literally every time. Spell checking was, like, the third thing people wanted personal computers to do, after calculating mortgage payments and balancing their checkbook. (Maybe fourth, playing blackjack is on that list somewhere.) If you were a serious writer, your typewriter had a rudimentary spell checker in it by the late 1970s!

People who refuse to use a spell checker are the same kind of pretentious assholes that think you shouldn't use a calculator ever. Absolutely there are steps you can take to improve your spelling, and being able to spell most words easily will make the writing process easier and more fluent. (Although you'll get a lot more mileage out of improving your touch typing.) But use the spell checker. Also use a calculator when you want to know the answer to a long division problem.

Grammar check - iffy, and it depends on the software. I don't use it because I think a lot of what it calls "grammar" is actually a point of style that I disagree with. However, if you find that when you're typing quickly you often omit or double words, grammar check is a really efficient way to type that.

Stuff like Grammarly's "reword this"? This is questionable. Now you're getting into something that is no longer your writing. If you're trying to build your voice, don't do it, because the voice you'll build is someone else's.

Asking ChatGPT to reword something for you? Now that is a crutch for people who don't want to learn to write.

Spelling and grammar checkers are no substitute for proofreading, but they are useful tools to help you conform to the conventions of standard English. Don't take their word as gospel, make sure to look up words if you're not 100% sure which option from the spell checker you want, and take every recommendation of the grammar checker with a grain of salt. And find better writers groups.

megpie71

Seconding all of the above, with the note that the thing to be aware of is where the limitations of various tools lie.

Using spelling and grammar checkers cannot substitute for learning the skills of spelling and grammar entirely - but they can make the process of proofreading a lot easier to run through, because they will point out your errors rather than letting them be lost and overwhelmed by the good stuff you've put around them.

Be aware that a spell-check program (even the best ones out there) is not able to handle things like homophones (words that sound alike, but mean different things), homographs (words which are spelled alike, but mean different things), or anagrams (two valid words composed of the same set of letters, each arranged differently, and meaning different things). So if you've made a mistake and put "bugle" where you meant to put "bulge", your spell-check program won't notice.

(Your readers, meanwhile, probably will).

Grammar checkers in most word processing programs tend to be optimised for creating corporate documents - corporate reports to managers, for example. Which means that a grammar checker which is set to proof read a corporate report is going to look at your sonnet (or your free verse) and metaphorically have a breakdown.

All tools are imperfect, and part of learning how to use a tool well involves recognising when the tool you have handy isn't going to be able to do the job. Often, the best way to learn this is to do things the long, hard, tool-free way at first, then use the tools so you can see where they can help you, and where they will hinder.

#writing #fanfiction

ao3commentoftheday

I don't know if it's just me being in small fandoms, but fandom as a whole feels...really lonely as of late. People have split themselves up so much that they don't discuss things the way they did before, they just kind of post their stuff and leave and half their audience "consumes" it like "content". There's no comments, barely kudos, the only places fans talk with each other anymore are on private discord servers that no one ever finds out about...I don't know, I'm a bit of an old and I feel like I'm screaming out into the void for no reason at this point. Sure, "somebody" will like my stuff, but will I ever get to know about it?

I think about this kind of thing a lot, anon, and I think my generation (Gen X/xillennial) kind of did folks dirty a bit.

In our defense, we didn't know we were.

I'm an educator by profession, as well as on this hobby blog, and so I spend a lot of time thinking about how people learn things. A lot of learning is social, and a lot of it happens when parents teach their children.

When I was growing up, pre-internet, my parents taught me how to talk to other adults in our community, how to play with other children, how to order food in a restaurant, how to call a business and ask a question. They literally walked me through how to do all of that stuff and more because those were daily skills in the world at that time.

We've spent the last 20+ years talking about how kids today are "digital natives" - but have we spent enough time teaching kids how to keep a conversation going when you're not in the same room as the other person? How to leave a comment on a post by a person you don't know? How to show your appreciation to a content creator? What a content creator even is and how that differs from a fan creator?

I know there are a lot of jokes out there about different things that would kill a Victorian child, but I think what would actually be difficult for them would be the lack of rules and instructions that kids today receive from the adults in their lives.

I don't have kids myself, so maybe this is all just bullshit and I'm talking directly out of my ass. But a LOT of the time when I notice someone doing something 'wrong' it's because no one ever told them how to do it right.

I kind of suspect that might be part of what's happening in fandom these days. Combine the above with the fact that fandom got inundated with new members in 2020 during quarantine and lock downs, and it's not surprising to me that a large percentage of the people in fandom today don't approach things the way that we used to before.

i don't fault them for it. When fandom was smaller and the internet was new, we used to take the time to bring people in. But now, it feels like 'everyone knows XYZ' so why does it need to be taught? And with how fast things move, it's more rare for newcomers to lurk for a while before they dive into everything.

This is a very long answer to a problem that probably just needed a listening ear, but I hope what you take away from this is an understanding that you're not the only one who feels the difference. I see this same experience shared in the notes on my posts all the time.

There is no easy fix for the situation and it certainly won't be fast to change, but maybe if we mentor a bit more when we have the spoons to, we can shift the culture a bit? One fan at a time?

If you managed to get all the way to the end of this, do yourself a favour and leave a comment on a fic or reblog a post with some chatty tags. DM somemeone or tag them or send them an ask just to let them know you see them and you think they're cool.

Even if nothing happens as a result, you tried. And maybe you just made someone's day. 💗

curator-on-ao3

Demographically, I have a fair amount in common with @ao3commentoftheday with the exception that I am a parent.

And my oldest child has entered online fandom.

Thankfully, my child and I don’t share fandoms (we both prefer it that way), but we did sit down to discuss how to maintain privacy and safety while also being friendly in online interactions. I taught my child about fandom red flags and green flags, from my experiences, and my child has since asked for my advice in terms of my child’s own fandom experiences and how to handle issues and concerns.

All that being said, I was surprised and confused when my child informed me that my child had not been leaving kudos or comments on AO3. Keep in mind, this child would read longfics for days, tell me how great the author’s writing captured the characters, etc.

“Why didn’t you kudos or comment if the fic was so good?” I asked.

While my child explained lack of ability to comment due to fic restrictions (my child has expressed not yet feeling ready to have an AO3 account even though my child is old enough and my husband and I would be fine with it), my child said kudos didn’t matter: “Who cares about one kudos?”

“The author cares. And, if the author for some reason doesn’t care, I know you care about doing the right thing. I think expressing appreciation for other people’s fanwork is the right thing to do. What do you think?”

My child went back and kudosed all stories read to that point.

But I’m just one parent. And it’s absolutely not the job of fandom to parent children. There’s an idea that the way we behave in real life is divorced from the way we behave online. There’s some merit to that in the form of maintaining privacy and boundaries online that might be different in person. When we’re talking about basic manners, though? Golden rule stuff? That’s what’s become lacking, and I hope it improves.

queenofattolia

i do think that a lot of this is just the result of a lack of lurk moar attitude in fandom/the internet in general.

when i was a tween who first found fandom in the late 90s/early 2000s, people didn't explicitly teach me how to interact with fandom. i lurked for a solid year before i signed up for my own account on the forum i'd found. (i can still remember how the adrenaline coursed through me as i signed up for my own account--i felt tingy and more than a little ill!)

by that time, i had a very good sense of social norms there. i still made a few mistakes, and the more established members smacked me down in a matter-of-fact but not unkind way. but i'd learned by watching. hell, by the time i started actively participating, i knew all the inside jokes!

as op mentioned, i don't think that people lurk anymore, and my theory is that the rise of social media/web 2.0 created a different approach to web communities.

today, every site is presumed to be for every person. the entire point of the really big social media sites is that everyone is on them. (this is one of the things i hate about them btw because it results in context collapse. i do not want to talk to my third-grade teacher, my favorite cousin, complete strangers, and my fandom friends in the same voice, but that's another issue).

whereas in web 1.0, the internet was riddled with niche sites/communities. you had to go out and find your place (and sometimes it took a while!). once you found it, you were invested in becoming a part of that specific community, so you did the research (lurking) to find out how people interacted, what all the unspoken norms were. by the time you picked your handle and made your account, you just knew stuff.

i'm sure this was not true of everyone, but it was true of far more people at the time. people looked before they leapt.

there are many, many reasons that i think that fandom has suffered from the web 2.0 environment. the fact that creators/writers/actors and fans are all on the same sites using the same tags for general publicity and for fannish nonsense is a huge problem. the way that sites are so big that people feel that their contributions (as with kudos above) don't matter is a direct result of the way social media undermines community and makes everything a performance of whatever your late-capitalist brand is. the fast pace of those sites makes people think that interacting with older posts is a bad idea. the lack of filters of the kind that we had on livejournal where you could determine who saw what or even just the way that forums often made you join before you could see content created walls within which communities could grow (think frost and walls making good neighbors).

i know we can't go back to the assumptions that operated before social media. we have to explore other options. i love when people make psas here telling people about fandom norms and history! i think it's the best thing! and maybe at this point that is the only way to handle it.

tumblr and ao3 are very weird sites in that they straddle the web 1.0 and web 2.0 kinds of internet.

from web 1.0 they get the lack of algorithms, the way you have to make choices about what you see, chronological arrangements, and (on ao3) lack of ads, etc. tumblr has a slightly slower pace than most social media; ao3 has a much slower one.

from web 2.0, though, you get scale, centralization (which is both ao3's greatest strength and greatest weakness), and the fact that it takes little effort to locate these sites--anyone, no matter their level of investment in fandom, can just stumble on them.

so you end up having a lot of people who are not actually fannishly inclined (aren't invested in a gift economy, don't really understand that fandom is supposed to be fun, don't really get the creative urge etc.) interacting with people who are fannishly inclined, and it causes some really problems. especially with younger people whose experience of the internet is as a venue to signify and perform certain kinds of morality/coolness/trendiness that are at odds with what fandom has always been about. basically: you have a bunch of normies clashing with a bunch of nerds. (obviously the normie/nerd divide is a spectrum and not a binary, so i'm overstating, but still.)

when you have people who are coming to fandom from different angles--some people who are coming to it as a provider of content just like all other media in their lives, especially elsewhere online; some people who are coming to it as a participatory hobby wherein we build community around shared affection for [thing]--there's going to be lots of clashes and weirdness.

i kind of think that fans need to go back to create set-apart spaces for fandom to happen. note that i am NOT talking about gatekeeping. everyone who treats others with respect would be welcome. but just having fenced-off areas that are explicitly for certain kinds of fandom interactions. where we can basically have our party away from the normies, but other nerds who are younger or just getting in touch with their nerdiness can find us.

i'm not sure how we'd go about doing it. but i think smaller, more intimate internet spaces are really necessary for fandom to be enjoyable. for fandom to be fandom tbh.

jonathankai

While "the lack of rules and instructions" is a very real, very serious problem and comes from the lack of communication between some parents and children (source: I work in school), I don't think it's THE reason behind the changes. If we take all age groups in internet fandoms, how many of us are teens? How many of us are in the twenties? I believe a good part of fandom (if not a majority) comes from "the old internet".

That being said, @queenofattolia has a lot of great points about "forums and social networks" and "nerds and normies". At first I disagreed with the last, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. I'd say it's about fans and casual enjoyers.

When I was a middle shcooler, there were maybe four kids watching anime in my class. For two it was just something they liked to do in their free time, but for me and the other guy it was HUGE. We identified as "otaku" and for us it wasn't simply interesting, but instead everything surrounding anime and manga was big and important enough to shape our personalitites. Heck, the only reason I became an artist is because my classmate shared a link to the site, which had "how to draw anime eyes" type of drawing tutorials.

Since then I've seen anime go from 'subculture thing' to 'mainstream thing'. A looooot of middle schoolers watch anime now, many read manga, which you can now buy in a book store or even borrow from a library! (non-existent options in my prime otaku years)

But I wonder how many of these kids indentify as otakus. How many treat this interest as a something... Something more, something vital.

The difference between fans and casual enjoyers is summed above really good, I just want to add that True FansTM realize the existence of a community. They realize there are people behind "content" and that these people need support to keeep going, because every fan themselves is the same - they need to be seen as a person, not 'content creator' or 'poster' or whatever. We're all pillars upon pillars, if some of us don't get supported, it all starts crumbling down.

The difference is maybe not even about the passion for original source, but between the original needs (informational vs social), the level of involvement and the understanding and acceptance of personal responsibility. There is an ecosystem and some people interact with it without realizing what they come in touch with. Some people, like @curator-on-ao3 's child will probably get there with time, but this is a case of a young fan having a mentor, I'm a millenial, and I have a feeling that a lot of millenials can feast on content/information without understanding - how do I put it - the social proces behind "content creating". And I don't think some of them are all that interested to learn about it. After all, they are here for some leisure time, not for commitments.

Finally, I would like to add that for me some of the coziest, feels-like-home fandom experience on tumblr happened within:

a) a small fandom (uses to be bigger, but I joined past the "golden age")

b) small subfandoms inside big fandoms (dedicated to certain characters and plot arcs)

One thing in common is all of these had "the gang" - same bunch of people, who shared their art and thoughts as well as they were looking out for others' art and thoughts, And yeah, a lot of interactions happened back and forth.

I feel terrible for anon and personally I feel the same (sometimes new hyperfixation striked, sometimes my fandom spaces declined over time - all in all, I don't feel like I have a place atm). Actually it's feeling rather quiet in my current big and active fandoms. There is a lot of "content", but there's very little interaction.

But maybe finding a smaller, more concetrated community is the key. And yeah, more interaction.

#ao3 #fanfiction #long post

salmoncidd-art

One is all, all is one

#fma #fanart

dumbledoreisabamf-deactivated20

hash-tag-whatever

Merry: confused awe

Frodo: confused awe

Sam: confused awe

Pippin: finally i’m getting the respect i deserve from these peasants

so accurate i am choking on my carrot. this is making me giggle harder than it should. I love Pippin so much.

I don’t think there will come time when I’m not reblogging this. Sorry guys.

pippin4242

no no no you guys don’t understand, Pippin is someone really important in the Shire! The books don’t talk about it a lot, and the movies won’t touch that stuff with a bargepole, but Pippin will be inheriting land rights to about a quarter of the Shire. He’s second in line to becoming military leader of all Hobbits. His dad is currently in charge of that stuff, but he’s completely aware of it, and educated for it, and that’s why he’s such an over privileged little shit in the books.

I thought it was a shame the movies didn’t talk about class differences in the Shire. Also puts M&P stealing food in an uglier light.

animate-mush

To be fair, at the time of the Party, Pippin would have been 12, which puts it back into a more acceptable light. And they’re stealing food from Bilbo, a wealthy and eccentric family member, which again makes things a bit different.

But yes, when they call Pippin Ernil i Perrianath - Prince of the Halflings - they are actually completely spot on.

And when Pippin tells Bergil “my father farms the land around Tuckborough” he’s deliberately downplaying his class so that he can greet the boy as an equal rather than a superior. It’s Pippin’s most adult moment in the series. Bergil is engaging in a status contest which Pippin can totally win - but instead chooses not to compete. Pippin is a gilded and spoiled lordling in the Shire, but he becomes a Man of Gondor.

iridescentoracle

Yeah, to add a bit of unnecessary trivia/level of preciseness, Frodo is the oldest of the four; he was born in 2968, was (obviously) 33 at the time of the Party, and so he’s 51 here. Sam’s second-oldest; born in 2980, he was 21 when Bilbo left and is 39 at this point. Merry’s two years younger than Sam, making him 18 or 19 in 3001, when the Party took place, and Pippin was born in 2990, so he was actually 10 or 11 during the Party, and during this scene they’re ~37 and ~29, respectively.

So yeah, Pippin’s the youngest by a lot. Plus, taking hobbit aging into account, he really is still in the equivalent of his teens; remember the Party was half to celebrate Frodo’s coming-of-age at 33, and Pippin’s around twenty years younger than Frodo.

This fucked me up. I didn’t read the books and in the movie it was shown like Frodo took off with the ring like 2 days after Bilbo’s gone away, but it was 17 years after that. OMFG.

bramblepatch

Also worth noting that “Merry and Pippin stealing food” isn’t in the book - raiding Farmer Maggot’s fields, specifically the mushrooms, is something Frodo used to do when he was a kid, before his parents died and he moved to Hobbiton to live with Bilbo. Frodo’s still afraid of Maggot’s guard dogs, but the farmer himself is sympathetic and helpful when he finds Frodo & Co. cutting through his field.

mikkeneko

And this is specifically invoked in the books at the Council of Elrond, where Elrond argues against Pippin in particular going, because he is so young. He’s okay with Merry going but wants to keep Pippin in Rivendell. Elrond has serious misgivings against sending an early-teenager off to face the Shadow, and given what happens to Pippin in The Two Towers, he was not wrong.

library-seraph

@cyrefinns

krool-gwooptsoov

@cyrefinns

the-books-we-travel

This is just so great. I just–I can’t.

wrangletangle

Merry is also a prince of sorts - his father is Master of Buckland, which is the semi-autonomous boundary community between the Brandywine river and the Old Forest (never, alas, discussed in the movies). Merry and Pippin are friends in the books in part because they’re of relatively equal status and in part because they’re cousins (like all nobs, Shire nobs mostly marry each other).

However, the books also clearly make Merry the Responsible One, even though he’s only been a full adult for four years. (Think early 20s in human terms.) Merry buys and prepares the house at Crickhollow. Merry figures out the secret of the ring before Bilbo even gives it to Frodo, but Merry keeps Bilbo’s secret. Merry convinces Sam to spy on Frodo. Merry explains that they’re all joining Frodo on the Quest, whether Frodo wants them to or not. Merry cautions about the Old Forest and doesn’t go down to drink in the taproom at the Prancing Pony.

So in the books, Merry isn’t Pippin’s partner in pranks - instead, Merry and Pippin spend all their time together on the Quest because Merry’s looking after his younger cousin. Can you imagine what his mother would say if he came home without Pippin? Merry can, and that’s why he takes some pretty absurd personal risks during the books to make sure that doesn’t happen. Like, he literally rides into battle on the back of someone else’s horse, in disguise, because Pippin is probably somewhere in that battle.

Merry is 99%* common sense unless Pippin is involved, and then he is 100% save/rescue/protect/support Pippin. The character growth and maturation we see in Merry in the movies isn’t in the books; instead he has almost the exact opposite arc of becoming an extreme risk-taker, driven by his protective instincts.

(*The other 1% stabbed a ringwraith in the calf that one time, but we can argue that this was due to a natural expansion of Merry’s protective instincts toward Eowyn, with whom he’d bonded quite a lot recently, and toward Theoden, who he deeply respected as being kind of like his dad.)

mikkeneko

bonus kleenex moment:

when pippin finds merry stumbling half-blind and sick through the streets of Minas Tirith after killing the Ringwraith, he tells Merry “Poor old fellow! I’ll look after you,” half-carries him to the healing halls, and is worried sick about him until he can finally get Aragorn in to give him medicine.

It’s the first time in the story that Pippin has looked after Merry, instead of the other way around.

It shows that Pippin has grown up, that he can protect the people who always protected him.

inthroughthesunroof

This is also why it’s awesome when they finally come back to the Shire, and Saruman’s made a right mess of things, and it’s Merry and Pippin that kick ass and take names. They’re the closest things the Shire has to princes and military leaders, and they’ve just had adventures that make this look like a minor action. Frodo’s tired, and Sam’s just worried about Frodo, and Merry and Pippin are like hold my pint, I got this.

amuseoffyre

Something I noticed when seeing the Fellowship on the big screen again for the first time in 20-ish years was the details they put into the character costumes that tell you a lot about the hobbits without even saying a word.

While the clothing is of a general style - shirt, waistcoat for gentlefolk, breeches and coat, it’s the details on all of them that show how much thought was put into the costumes.

Compared to the average hobbit, Bilbo and Frodo both have well cut shirts made of fine fabrics and velvet or brocade waistcoats, showing their respectable and comfortably wealthy status.

Compare Frodo’s clothing with Sam and the other hobbits in the bar - similar in style, but Frodo’s is clearly well-to-do compared to the coarser fabrics Sam and the others wear, which makes sense when Sam is a gardener and doing manual labour.

Then we have Merry and Pippin in the same scene:

Like Frodo, Merry does have a nicer cut of shirt and waistcoat in a bold colour, but not quite as fancy. Meanwhile Pip, who is a kid at this point, doesn’t wear one yet.

And this shot of the boys in Rivendell really brings home the difference in the quality and expense of their clothes.

Pippin has a fine white shirt with a lace patterned collar and his braces are intricately woven, both things that would be markers of high-quality, labour intensive fibrework, not to mention the fancy white buttons.

Sam’s collar, by comparison has clear hand-stitching and the fabric of both the shirt and waistcoat are much coarser and more natural colours with buttons probably made from horn or wood.

Merry’s shirt is definitely a step or two up from Sam, but definitely not near the fanciness and quality of Pippin’s or Frodo’s. Likewise, his waistcoat is more elaborate than Sam’s with quilted patterning, but it’s also not the same quality as Frodo’s velvets and brocades.

They didn’t say much about the shire class structure in the film, but the costume designers definitely knew what they were about.

#lotr

spin-the-wheel-polls

make a bunch of wheels with bread/cheese/meat/vegetables/sauce/extra so that you can Spin for Sandwich

you're making a sandwich!! Spin THIS wheel 2-4 times for the toppings!

How is it!

good!!

it's alright

ew

EW

inedible

Results

Voting ended onJun 3

op note: I GOT JAM, JAM AND HOT SAUCE. IM DEAD.

#hot sauce #a third piece of bread in the middle #MORE hot sauce #and finally…marmite #yikes

dragongirlsweetie

ok i am curious. how long is the longest song in your library (not counting tracks that are like several songs in one file like a full album mix or symphony recording or whatever) (also if it is longer than 20 minutes say the name in the tags i am curious)

how long

< 3:00

3:00–3:59

4:00–4:59

5:00–5:59

6:00–6:59

7:00–7:59

8:00–11:59

12:00–15:59

16:00–20:59

21:00–24:59

25:00–30:00

≥ 30:00

Voting ended onJun 1

dragongirlsweetie

ok i would like to clarify it has to be music and it can't just be a short song that's been looped a bunch. that still counts as several songs in one file, it's just several of the same song in one file. no audiobooks no podcasts no plants vs zombies theme 2 hour loop

#2112 by Rush #20 minutes 34 seconds #music

depsidase

barkingbarghest

Here is an article from NPR about it (May 22, 2026):

Carolina Milanesi, an independent technology analyst, said Google is trying to make its cash cow business — search — richer and more personalized, and it will make shopping easier. But there is a risk that users may have fewer choices about what to click. "Right now it's: I ask a question, I get a bunch of answers and I feel that I'm in control as to which answer I take, or if I'm looking for something, which product I'm going to end up buying. That is going to be less so going forward," she said. Milanesi envisions AI-enabled search and agents proposing products to consumers — perhaps even those they have requested — but with less clarity or choice around where it's coming from. "If you're going to say: 'I want a pair of Jordans, go find them,' you're not necessarily sure what steps have been taken and whether the AI has used a source or a store that was paid for and therefore came up in the search results," she said, "or if AI actually went and did their due diligence and picked the best for me as a customer."

And here's one from Time magazine (May 20, 2026):

While Google already has “AI Mode,” the company will now power the whole search bar through its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model. Instead of the classic list of blue links, Google Search will now also generate a custom page with an AI-generated summary of what you’re searching about, which will then trigger a conversation with AI Mode on the main page, allowing users to ask follow-up questions—similar to the kind of layout you would see when opening ChatGPT.

And a little more from Time's article on how this may affect the websites that we are trying to search for:

When Google first started implementing AI-assisted results, news publishers warned of “catastrophic” impacts on the industry, much of which relies on Google search to drive users to their websites. Last year, news websites saw significant traffic declines as chatbots increasingly replaced Google search as the primary way to find sites and ask questions. Small businesses also noted drops in traffic to their sites from Google, which has traditionally delivered customers. Lily Ray, vice president of SEO strategy & research at Amsive, a digital marketing agency, warned as early as last year that Google’s planned changes to search are “going to have a devastating impact on the Internet.” “It will severely cut into the main source of revenue for most publishers and it will disincentivize content creators who rely on organic search traffic, which is millions of websites, maybe more,” she told Technology Magazine.

anarchopuppy

noai.duckduckgo.com blocks all AI content in search results automatically

#info

witchhuntress

Translations/Content Masterlist

-For educational and recreational purposes only. I'll keep on adding to this when I finish anything ^u^ Pending is pending release.

Ghost Hunt

~Akuryou LN~

Volume 3

Chapter 3 Part 5

Chapter 3 Part 6

Chapter 4 Part 1

Chapter 4 Part 2

Chapter 4 Part 3

Chapter 4 Parts 4-6

Chapter 5 Parts 1-2

Chapter 5 Parts 3-4

Chapter 5 Part 5 and Chapter 6 (Pending)

~Short Stories or Short Works~

#ghost hunt

star-anise

Yeah sure Tumblr is a hellsite but I know someone who wrote a fanfic in the 1990s that someone else didn’t like, so when she was selling printed copies of the zine with the story in it out of her hotel room at a convention, this other woman STOOD IN FRONT OF HER DOOR TO REFUSE PEOPLE ACCESS. Because the story featured a ship she disliked. And I feel like somehow, 10,000 Tumblrs still can’t compare to that level of Extra.

ineptshieldmaid

Your periodic reminder that the technology and the scale of distribution changes, the basic impulse to fandom wank does not

themarchrabbit

I’ve actually heard about this event [or a similar event, which I can believe] from someone who was trying to get into the room to either buy the zine, or visit with the writer, or just see what was going on [idr]. Apparently it was quite the talk of the bar that night, and resulted in several heated [re: drunken] debates over whether Door Stander was violating Writer’s free speech, or if removing Door Stander would have violated Door Stander’s free speech.

Me, at the time, a 19yo with very little understanding of the law: “I mean…was it?”

Fandom Friend, who was a 40-something lawyer: “I’ll tell you the same thing I told everyone in that bar. No one was violating anyone’s free speech. Bitch was just being rude, and worse, obnoxious about it. You ever act like that in public, be aware you’re not changing anyone’s opinion. You’re just giving them a brand new opinion about you.”

It was a very formative conversation in my young adulthood.

Same person also told me to never mix coke and acid. Which was also pretty solid advice.

#fanfiction

shamanfox

the poet does not write—

she bleeds in metaphors

and mops it up with torn-out pages.

she chews silence like raw bark,

spits out sap that tastes like childhood,

and calls it verse.

she doesn’t sleep—she drifts.

half in this world,

half in the marrow of stars

that whisper stanzas through her ribs.

a poet walks barefoot across thought,

picking up every broken bottle of memory,

licking the glass for meaning,

naming each shard beloved.

she is not sane.

not fully.

you can’t be

and survive the weight

of feeling everything

all the time.

her body is a cathedral of echoes,

her mind—a wilderness of burning maps.

she’s never truly lost,

just unwilling to settle

on one direction.

to be a poet is to kneel

before every passing moment

as if it were God in disguise,

to weep in a grocery store aisle

because the way light hit the pears

reminded her of her grandmother’s hands.

she lives for the unbearable ache—

not because she loves pain,

but because only in breaking

can language be made holy.

she writes with bones dipped in dusk,

pulls oceans through her fingers

to ink the unbearable edge

of being alive and knowing it.

truly knowing it.

she marries the moon,

beds the void,

suckles myth and spits prophecy

into torn notebooks and lovers’ mouths.

to be a poet is to die a thousand deaths

and rise with teeth full of vowels,

to look into the eyes of a stranger

and see a sonnet aching to be born.

the poet is not special.

she is simply the one

who said yes

when the universe asked

will you feel it all for me?

and every poem since

has been her answer.

#writing

facts-i-just-made-up

Is it just me or is it now impossible to even scroll past ads on the tumblr app? They used to freeze and only allow scrolling if you swipe from above or below them, but now they open the app store even if you even try to do that. Are my thumbs growing clumsy or did the app grow more evil?

I also want to stress that these ads try to download obvious scam fake gambling apps. Like they’re fine with us getting our identities stolen so long as they get a tenth of a cent ad revenue each time.

#this has been happening to me too #its like if I can somehow NOT touch the ad it will not pop open #but they have made that near impossible because the ad takes up the entire screen

background-character-341

For all its faults Tumblr has truly ruined all other social media for me because my friends all have Instagram and are all trying to get me on Instagram more but every time I open Instagram there are like fifteen things screaming for my attention and when I get over myself long enough to start scrolling it's like. Where is my chronological dash. Where is the following-only option. Who are these people. Why are there so many videos. Everyone is screaming at me. And then before I know it I'm thirty minutes into scrolling and I haven't seen a single thing that I actually care about. At least on Tumblr when I see stuff I don't care about I know someone I follow has found a new interest.

#finally deleted my instagram exactly because of this

thatdisasterauthor

I think the thing that annoys me most about AI on a personal, day to day, level is what it has done to grammar checkers. If you've never done a lot of editing, or used to 5+ years ago but haven't really in the last couple years, I can't even begin to describe how fucking BAD this shit has gotten. And as an author it is EXHAUSTING.

I just want to catch spelling errors and accidental double spaces and repeated phrases and whenever I use the wrong too/to or affect/effect and shit. But no. They've shoved AI up the ass of every grammar checking software out there and now they all fucking suck and make the most random, obnoxious, nonsensical suggestions.

And yeah, I can ignore all the times it's trying to get me to cut out any semblance of my own voice, or shove things into the wrong tense, or make the most random suggestions on comma usage. But if it's getting all that WRONG, what is it just straight up missing that I SHOULD be correcting? What real spelling and grammar errors are still lurking in there?

#writing #fanfiction #it is exhausting

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