the best fanfiction you've ever read was written by a woman in her 40s before she made dinner for her kids. it was written by a teenager after school when they should've been studying for a history test. and a barista came up with the idea while they cleaned the espresso machine and busser fact-checked it on their break and the post-doc edited between writing grant proposals and the nurse apologized for typos in the notes after a long shift and behind every drabble and one-shot and multi-chapter fic there is a person with a wonderful and interesting and chaotic life and it is such a privilege that we get to be apart of it because they decided to do this thing we all share, for fun.
(a friend shared the twitter thread with me, but alas, i don't have twitter so i'm doing it here on this blog:)
-shriek week was just okay. it's a strange case where players not taking the game seriously enhanced the mediocre game design. Lily and Ally finding the craziest bits out of the world they were given was fun. if Gabe Hicks didn't give everyone the Gabe Icks, it wouldn't be considered the "worst season ever" and just be a "forgotten campaign" like pirates was.
-the 2023/2024 sidequest run was better than all of the intrepid heroes seasons that came out then. mentopolis is one of the best designed campaigns in any actual play series.
-the intrepid heroes need to branch out of 5e more. ccod is proving this. wotc does not deserve any of the attention d20 and the fandom are giving them when other, better systems exist.
-Persephone Valentine needs to gm a d20 season because that game of thirsty sword lesbians was a delight. i highly recommend her actual play podcast fast times at d&d high if you liked that parlor room episode and want more of her as a gm.
-Jess Ross needs her redemption in a McElroy-free campaign. Agnes was such a good character but the brothers' antics in Tiny Heist wasted any development she got. it felt like she had to fight for the spotlight with the brothers, and it's a shame because she brings such a wonderful attitude to everything she's in.
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.
Im just sitting here staring at the "bit" around darkness man being assaulted by Butty. *
*yes, I acknowledge this is a comedy show and non of the actor has publicly expressed discomfort around the themes represented by this bit and that is partly why I'm frustrated trying to talk about this.
Before I say anything. This isn't about me trying to cancel brennan or other players, this isn't me trying to infantalized murph or parasocially assume intent hear. This is me processing media I consume, enjoy, have thoughts on and feel deserves indepth thought and analysis.
Ive already said my peice about this with the "pervert bit" following a long formed habit of the intrepid hero table-wide habit of making bits based on when npcs get sexually aggressive with Murphs pcs (especially ones who explicitly avoid sexual jokes or situations) on d20.
And I'm just going piont out that here we are again with an explicit (table aknowleged) assault happen AS A JOKE that the foundations are "darkness man is terrified to be called a pervert or be seen sexualizing others"
the comedy instinct being used for this bit is at its basis: 'it is funny when men who do not perform within typically assumed sexual dynamics get made to feel/ put in uncomfortable sexual positions that including rape and assault."
This is normalized in comedy in a way that is deeply uncomfortable (to me) and, I feel deserves better holistic and nuanced conversations around this.
Im especially frustrated that this is happening at a table that has continually talked about power dynamics and sensitivity to how sexual themes and coersion show up at their table as a whole.
And it seems pretty clear this ongoing habit of running bits using murph's pcs aversion to sexual themes as an opportunity for unwelcomed sexual situations is not something they are think about how meta textually this comes off and also appear to be unaware of how this habit has formed as a table wide dynamic.
Im not trying to splash cold water on any body's fun. Genuinly, not a problem how you engage with this sort of material if it is within your comfort and bounds. But it is a conversation threat is relevant to discussions on this and previous seasons.
Im not trying to say I need anything from d20 to change nessacerily (I do not know what off mike dynamics these players have consented to-and for this conversation it doesn't matter) because this is about how as a viewer these themes come off.
The Butty bit is the first time has aknowleged table portrayal of assault. It is done inside of a bit, and (as aknowleged by brennan) that bit has a long standing history at this particular table.
I know people give the gooey/gumbar nonconsensual "she grabs your junk" a pass because gumbar is interested in gooey. But the adventuring party for that season brennan has a quote about how he wishes murph let him flirt with his pcs more often.
Perry the pigeon, the way Riz was handled with baron, and other times this has come up there is an over arching trend of npcs pursuing pcs who are played with pretty explicit character themes that involved being unavailable sexually or romantically (asexual and/or explicityly avoidant of sex and romance, "scary"/"ugly" social pariahs, grieving or going through a divorce and not over their s/o, etc) and this is played comedically.
Obviously, murph is a grown man and he and Brannan as far as we know publicly are friends and brennan has stated they use an x card system and the have discussions around season themes and hard nos players might have. I have no reason to believe murph is being coerced into themes bits or that brennan is doing something players (as a whole table) have not concented to playing or having at their table.
That can be true AND it still be a table wide behaviour that, as an audience member, can be disconcerting to see keeps coming up; especially since there is rarely follow up or empathy delivered to pcs that are made to be uncomfortable in this specific way.
Last time, I posted about this I had some really shitty responses about how this is a joke and so its not that big of a deal. Murph hasn't said he's uncomfortable so its not a problem. How its parasocial to be uncomfortable about this because im projecting feelings onto murph. That I'm stirring up trouble or trying to cause problems because I said I'm talking about assault and rape.
So if you've sat through this entire post and feel the urge to tell me any of these things hey, I've heard this dont send me any more rude asks or comments. Im a grown adult, I dont need soothing, i dont need to be told to shut up and I really dont need to be told I'm putting feelings on to murph.
-I dont actually think this has to do with how comfortable murph is with these jokes. He is not his pcsand I've tried to be pretty clear this is about character dynamics and how the table dynimics influence how these stories are told.
- dont like talking about this conversation? Don't engage. Feel free to block if your pissed.
-and before you try and tell me that this is a joke, get over it, its not that big of a deal, and that its not deep; I would REALLY encourage some reflection on how saying those things to an assault survivor feels. Because it absolutly sucks.
If this is a topic you haven't really explored, you want larger context, or are actually wanting to talk about how thos impacts a story like city council of darkeness(which i actually would be open to discussion and hearing how otheres are engaging with this season) here's an overview of how it show up in films and television as a whole.
i know its been said before but DO NOT advertise something to me as "three ingredient only" "two ingredient only" etc and not include the herbs and flavourings. in what world do you live in where vanilla extract is not an ingredient? FRESH BASIL LEAVES are you kidding me??? fuck you honestly
ambitious indie project this, surprise box-office hit that, iron lung (production budget: $3mil) is the 'someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this, my family is dying' tweet.
update when markiplier announced he's producing the dvd/blu-ray himself i was like cool he's personally supervising the process and then he was like no i mean i'm making them myself at my house and i imagined some kind of complicated gargantuan contraption dutifully chugging along 24/7 blowing up this man's electricity bill and then he was like
anyway if you buy an iron lung dvd/blu-ray: it was made on a printer-sized machine. at markiplier's house.
i do love and respect the idea of the world at large being stunned at finding out how long ilya and shane have been together, but i truly think that under NO circumstances would shane ever choose to offer ANY personal details about himself or their relationship willingly.
which combined with ilya loving just making things up and saying them (as seen in the "yes, the rumors are true-" scene) offers the very funny idea that ilya actively tries to offer as much privacy as possible by just throwing out stories about them at random so there IS no central story for people to hound shane about.
assorted backstories a la "ilya just started talking and found out with everyone else where he was going with this":
they got snowed in at all stars one year (b-but wasn't that year in florida?) and decided there was nothing better to do
it started as a bit and neither is willing to give up first
they paired off to combine forces like nato
they paired off to limit how many kids they could have in the future to make sure hockey stayed fair
ilya lost a bet six years ago
shane lost a bet three years ago
ilya got tired of remembering phone numbers for his hookups and shane's is easy
ilya got tired of having to look things up in english and french when talking to other people and decide to marry someone who speaks two languages to save time
shane is gifted enough (wink wink wink) that other people are cowards and only ilya was brave enough to rise to the challenge (this one gets him in trouble on the phone later but it also gets him laid that night at home and also confuses the online speculation about who tops and bottoms, so net positive tbh)
yuna hollander is the best manager in the business and a political marriage was the best way to secure her services longterm
with the end result that all shane has to do is shrug and "my husband has already told our story a thousand times by this point. no point in repeating it and boring people." in interviews to get out of people trying to dig into things he doesn't want to tell them.
the reporter obviously knows he's not serious (...mostly) but plays along with "what kids?" and ilya just ☝️ as he pulls out his phone and starts looking through, and everyone is like "surely not...bUT WHAT IF", and then he goes "ah! here", and holds out his phone
and it's a picture of anya and luca haas
and ilya just "thirteen hours of labor, but worth every minute, yes?" as he puts his phone back looking SO fucking pleased with himself because he really at least 33% had them for a second
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