Feeling inspired today, so I decided to finally redesign my oldest OCs, as well as share them with the world! The ideal is to one day make an animated series, but that's far down the line lol
(details under the cutoff, picrew link & credits below that)
Sen
He/They
Aro/Ace
Theme: Space, particularly nebulae
He was originally a self-insert, but really grew to be his own character, separate from me. His can alter matter on the atomic level, as well as create portals, even to other dimensions. He also harbors a being known as Void within him, but I go into that here. Ask if you're interested, however! Quite broody, but fiercely cares for the ones he loves.
(his hair is normally lavender, though when he's particularly riled up, it reflects the cosmos)
Name: Cass
She/Her
Bi
Theme: The Sun
She's something of a sister to Sen, as they knew each other as kids, then grew up together after... Certain events. She enjoys exercising, and fighting in particular! Also somewhat of a tinkerer! She can conjure and control sunflame! Also, her left arm is supposed to be a prosthetic, but the picrew didn't have any, unfortunately. Very tomboyish and energetic!
Jordan
Genderfluid
Pan
Theme: Water
They have the ability to morph into and control water, so they tend to change their appearance pretty often (and yes, that's why they're genderfluid), but they usually only change their hair. They have a great love for animals, especially frogs and other amphibians. Very joyful and positive!
Olive
She/Her
Bi
Theme: Earth
Probably the least developed character at the moment. She can control the earth around her, and I might add plant related powers. She and Jordan end up together later on! Also pretty tomboyish, though not as much as Cass. Enjoys gardening!
13
They/Them
Aro/Ace
Theme: The Mind
They come in much later, and due to the specifics of the arc, become something of an adopted child/younger sibling to Sen. Their ability is a psychic power so potent, it can affect the senses, even doing harm to someone. They enjoy messing with people. Very laid-back.
Lunas
He/They (transmasc)
Pan
Theme: The Moon
Cass' biological older brother, and well as an older brother figure to Sen. He was the only one by their sides throughout the years of torturous experimentation, and the only other family they had.
May he rest in peace.
Nina (name pending (for like four years now))
She/Her
She's a child
Theme: Time
The group's adopted child, she is the most recent experiment performed by [redacted], she has the ability to manipulate the flow of time, though she cannot yet control it. She and Sen have a very close bond. She particularly enjoys drawing and dancing. Around most, she is very reserved and melancholy, though around her family, she is quite bright and bubbly.
Feel free to ask any questions! In fact, please do. I've had writer's block on this since like 2021 and I write pretty well when improvising. Please, they've been trapped in stasis for so long-
picrews and art credits!
main picrew: @drowninnoodles OCMaker. They have several, so I'd recommend looking them up. Incredible artist!
when they think we’re mutilating ourselves to the point that they pose as SRS doctors and literally mutilate us for their agenda. cis ppl don’t forget this
topsurgery.net is a site with lots of before + after pics categorised by surgeon. I encourage everyone with other resources on srs surgeons and their results to share them here, for mtf/mtx surgeries too please
In my opinion it's a lot more healthy to be able to own that you dislike someone for petty reasons than to do all kinds of mental gymnastics to make everyone you don't really vibe with out to be a bad person actually
I doubt it will gain any interest, but I'll give it a try anyway.
Guys, maybe some of you remember my old unfinished comic that I gave up on due to lack of time...
Anyway, I really wish I could get myself together and start over. again.
BUT
I would need help.
I am looking for people who would be interested in helping either as artists or writers.
Listen, you don't need super skills if you want to write. It's just a script, but I'd like to slow down the pace of the story, stretch it out a bit. I can provide most of the old version as reference.
As for drawing, it's a bit more difficult, you would have to be able to draw in my style.
If there's no such person, I'll take it upon myself, but at least I need people to color/shade in a similar style to me AND people to do storyboards.
No, we're not professionals. It'll be a mess, but I want to see if it works because I really want to release it in its entirety.
So yeah. Stuff important:
> should have discord
Stuff for artists
> should be able to either draw in my style OR at least color and shade
> or make storyboards and plan look of the pages
Stuff for Writers:
> should be able to write. That's.. it. edit/correct mistakes, typos...
Yeah, not too complicated i think.
If anyone is interested or has any questions, feel free to ask.
I can help color and shade! As long as I have references to go based on I can totally color in everything. It might even help me get back on track with my own art too!
Fuck ever news outlet for naming the murderer and blasting his face all over the internet, but the trans woman he murdered is never shown and only referred to as "transgender woman."
Her name was Juniper Blessing, and she was just doing her laundry.
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.
literally though if you feel like your life is slipping through your fingers and every day goes too fast… try doing hard things, not just taking the easy route, like reading and making art and exercising and cooking a meal from scratch and journaling, doing these things without distraction, without being absorbed on a screen… the time will stretch and you’ll be reminded that life is long and beautiful if you make it so.
If you don't already know you have issues doing so, squat down real quick. Bend your knees all the way and touch the floor. Just make sure you can do it. Okay? For me? And then stand up all the way and make sure you can balance on one foot.
Like. You don't need to blow it into some huge thing. Just. Make sure all your bits and peices still work the way you think they do.
Can you turn your head to look behind you without twisting your shoulders? What about standing on your toes? If you sit down on the floor can you get back up without using your hands?
If there was ever a tumblr post worth sending to your mom, it's this one.
Just saying, bodies are a use it or lose it kinda thing.
okay so every time I see this post crop back up in queues and notifications I end up thinking about it. Because I made the post and even I'm still doing the thing where I read the post about maintaining range of motion in my delicate meatsuit and I nod and hmm and think yeah that's a good idea and then dont move from where I'm curled up shrimp style staring at the nightmare rectangle.
So like. Thinking real hard about moving doesn't count as moving. Major bummer. Anyways. Joints.
hi, call me grace! @sennyside - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
