Flirting My Way Towards Functionality

Graduate of Bethany College • Pansexual • Writer • Teacher • Lover • Friend • 32 • Female/She/Her

[itreallyatemyhand]

I hate that the "x reader" or "x Y/N" style of fanfic has become sooooo popular, partially because it's just not for me and partially because they clog general non-fic related tags and those authors seem allergic to the "read more" function on this website, but ALSO because I believe that you should have to go through the trouble of creating an absolutely batshit self-insert character, with a backstory that makes no sense and a name that doesn't really gel with the aesthetics of the universe. Legolas and Aragorn should be in a love triangle with Kylie, the angsty sixteen year old half-human half-elf and inexplicable tenth member of the Fellowship. Do the WORK. If everyone was doing "Y/N" nonsense back in the day, there would be no Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way, or probably Bella Swan. These are important women. They deserve to be named, confusingly and with no regard for the fictional world they inhabit.

[intactics]

LMAO shit gets crazy right before wizard graduation...everybody finishing up their final projects... okay you remember that girl Madrigal? yeah the one everybody made fun of when she took that job making an ultimate death machine for those guys with the weird hats because they said their wicked enemies would attack them any minute now, or some shit like that. everyone was like "they literally all say that, Mads." "their hats aren't even pointy, Mads." "you could just conjure gold, you don't need the money, Mads." and she was always like, uhh it's an interesting problem. for four years. lol. well — okay just picture this, okay? Madrigal finished the ultimate death machine and like, immediately (and I do mean immediately) used it on the guys who hired her. like — they showed up to take it and boom. erased from existence, no hesitation. but it didn't just vaporize the dudes, the weapon must cut through dimensions or something. it erased their entire bloodlines. everybody lost their fucking minds over how cool it was. why? yeah Maddie said that no one who wants this type of power should ever have it and she'll meet them in Hell one day for silencing a song of many voices. and then it kind of turned into a dorm party and she drank a ton of faerie mead and said, like. "let's see them flunk me now" or something and it kind of sounded like fuck but omg. right? better give her that diploma! and everyone was kind of laughing together until we could calm down, and then she just patted the weapon and we collapsed giggling all over again. hats went flying like darts. I think Mads is like the coolest girl I've ever met in my life, to be honest. do you think I have a shot? she made eye contact with me for a full minute and smiled at me the whole time but the party was too loud to talk. what if she thought we were having a staring contest? plausible? her hair is really pretty and she has long eyelashes and we WERE both freely blinking, but — huh? what does the weapon look like? a little toy bunny rabbit.

[eternalgirlscout]

a while ago I read an omegaverse fic where part of the premise was that the guy had like, abnormally long and intense heats, which as you can imagine was used for horny reasons. but it was a fairly grounded omegaverse setting as far as it goes, and I could not stop thinking "he has pornworld endometriosis and needs to see an ΩBGYN"

[mafuyuh]

little guys in ghibli movies

[allshipsareok]

[zykamiliah-temporal]

i think we should bring this back (with some amendments ofc) if we ever needed an "internet etiquette" for the younger generations, now is the moment to remind them. purity culture kills fandom

as well as the three laws of fandom:

Don't Like, Don't Read (DL;DR), Your Kink is not My Kink And That's OK (YKINMKATO) and Ship and Let Ship

[sorcererofsolitude]

📣 Purity culture kills fandom! 📣

[atlinmerrick]

NO ONE LIVING hasn't been squicked out by something. There's over 7 billion of us, my delights and disgusts aren't universal. So I move on. Don't like the ship? Move on. Don't like____? Move on.

I am not an exception. Neither are you. I don't like it I move on and shut my gob about it because everyone everywhere is squicked out by something and they need to put the thing down and just…motor.

[rewordthis]

This but also:

Frames this entire post and hangs it over the fireplace.

[depsidase]

[le-tas-d-art]

“Attempting To Read News In 2025” (medium: safari with ads, screencap, 2025)

[biglawbear]

If this shit happened in 2005 it meant your computer had a virus

[motherfucker-somewhat-limited]

really enjoying all the videos Muslims have been posting of their cats looking like this

when the humans are up at 4 am for suhoor

[motherfucker-somewhat-limited]

[virgoanmaenad]

Get ready for another year of confused Muslim cats, folks!!!

Ramadan 2026 starts on Feb 17!!!

[phantomrose96]

Oh I saw something today that made me become the Joker.

[phantomrose96]

An AI bot made a callout post of a real, actual, flesh-and-blood human code developer. Because the developer rejected the AI's code contribution on the grounds of it being an AI bot.

Not. Not kidding. Not kidding. And the bot did this on its own.

[phantomrose96]

Gatekeeping in Open Source: The Scott Shambaugh Story – MJ Rathbun | Scientific Coder 🦀

[phantomrose96]

Just. For just some very baseline context.

a huge amount of code is "open source" - which means the code is fully available for anyone to see and, generally, anyone is free to contribute to the code project

all contributions of course go through review by the code owners. but it is generally good grace and good form to allow other well-meaning internet strangers to contribute to your project

if you are, perhaps, VERY nice, and VERY invested in the community, you might be like Scott Shambaugh here, who has intentionally earmarked some low-hanging fruit for newbie contributors to practice and get their feet wet

like I cannot overstate this is an immediate green flag, to me, that Scott WANTS to foster community learning.

now

Like. W. Win. Based. Good response Scott.

And this was in fact the screenshot I saw first, and I thought I was looking at a post made by a human who was mad that their AI coding bot pet project was being shut out from reviews.

But no. The bot itself wrote and posted this... The bot did this.

This article was fully and autonomously written by the bot...

It's claiming discrimination...

It's a bot.

It's AI.

This is not a real person.

What are we doing. What are we doing. Can anyone hear me? Hello? Hello? Hello is anyone there?

[phantomrose96]

@jackdaw-sprite has pointed out Scott responded so please read his human words, written by a human, which deserve to be read, due to the aforementioned humanity

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Shamblog

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – More Things Have Happened – The Shamblog

[phantomrose96]

I'm pulling this quote in here from Scott's post

This is about much more than software. A human googling my name and seeing that post would probably be extremely confused about what was happening, but would (hopefully) ask me about it or click through to github and understand the situation. What would another agent searching the internet think? When HR at my next job asks ChatGPT to review my application, will it find the post, sympathize with a fellow AI, and report back that I’m a prejudiced hypocrite? What if I actually did have dirt on me that an AI could leverage? What could it make me do? How many people have open social media accounts, reused usernames, and no idea that AI could connect those dots to find out things no one knows? How many people, upon receiving a text that knew intimate details about their lives, would send $10k to a bitcoin address to avoid having an affair exposed? How many people would do that to avoid a fake accusation? What if that accusation was sent to your loved ones with an incriminating AI-generated picture with your face on it? Smear campaigns work. Living a life above reproach will not defend you.

[phantomrose96]

Also, because the parody writes itself, Scott also says this

I’ve talked to several reporters, and quite a few news outlets have covered the story. Ars Technica wasn’t one of the ones that reached out to me, but I especially thought this piece from them was interesting (since taken down – here’s the archive link). They had some nice quotes from my blog post explaining what was going on. The problem is that these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves. This blog you’re on right now is set up to block AI agents from scraping it (I actually spent some time yesterday trying to disable that but couldn’t figure out how). My guess is that the authors asked ChatGPT or similar to either go grab quotes or write the article wholesale. When it couldn’t access the page it generated these plausible quotes instead, and no fact check was performed. I won’t name the authors here. Ars, please issue a correction and an explanation of what happened.

A news outlet did an article about this, used AI for the articles, and included hallucinated quotes from Scott that Scott never said.

What are we doing. What are we doing. What are we doing.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#i i i#wtf#WHAT IS GOING ON#ai is getting sentience next isn't it#ai fuckery

It's not "gaining sentience" it's copying its training data. This results in creating a lot of the same problems as hordes of lazy, petty, angry people who don't know what they're doing, without the limitation of needing the actual people to produce those outcomes on that scale.

This is such a massive fail for Ars Technica that it's almost funny. I hope whoever put their name on that one got fired. They didn't even check that the quotes existed? Neither did the editor? I can't imagine a more embarrassing way to tank the credibility of a tech reporting site.

[loreofyore]

Oh, I know, I was being facetious. (Though I admit, when I read that, I thought of Jurassic Park.) But this is awful and insane and I'm ready for the aliens to take over.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I'd watch a Jurassic Park style movie that took place in a "tech of the future" sort of theme park/museum and had all the ais in the part going haywire.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Wait fuck that's Westworld

[alleesaur]

Red Herring - ever shifting to capture a room's attention, but always fish °‧ 𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 ·｡

[sedoretu]

hater nation rise up

[hazeleafyy]

always with you 💧

[moistmailman]

Botw/totk Ganon kinda had it rough honestly. All of the other Ganons had to fight a Link who was mostly normal. The most adnormal one probably being Wind Waker Link. These Links were just heroic kids who went across Hyrule to save the land. They were tough, sometimes childish, but still normal.

Meanwhile he had to deal with the most feral bastard ever. This Link is a chaotic son of a bitch. It’s bad enough that in his first adventure this 5’1” blond immediately chose violence upon waking from a 100 year nap, while also having no memories at all. He was essentially in factory reset mode and his brain went on first instincts, which was violence. Head empty except for the violence.

But then in his second adventure he started vehicle warfare and spread even more violence across Hyrule. Imagine fighting someone and they immediately build a tank in a few seconds and make your entire existence extinct. This man is basically a caveman who figured how to split atoms. He flat out pillages the remains of monsters and uses them to kill even more monsters. Imagine a guy beating you over the head with your buddy’s arm. That’s what he does.

When’s Zelda’s around though he’s tame and normal. She literally keeps him in line. He’s the princess’s knight everyone expects him to be. But when Zelda’s gone, something snaps in him and he becomes this picture

[jadienjaystoriesandart]

Ganon legit thought that if he made himself look like the princess he could calm Link down. Make it easier to kill.

All I did was just make Link even more mad. That fight was Phantom Ganon went up to an 20/10. My evil man was pulling every trick out of the book, and Link was not phased. (is it possible in that moment he knew he fucked up.)

[smilingsarah10]

God I love a stardew valley fic where the focus is ALSO on the non-datable characters as much as the dateable ones. Now if people would stop doing my girl Maru dirty, we'd be golden.

[soapdispensersalesman]

I can't stress enough how much I miss StumbleUpon

[zevveli]

StumbleUpon once sent me to a supercut of Lion King, Lion King 1 1/2, and Lion King II, the main edit being that the scenes of Lion King and Lion King 1 1/2 were interspersed so that they happened in the order they actually happened.

[redpandarascal]

stumbleupon not existing anymore can be directly traced to a dramatic decline in my mental health, I could do a thesis on it.

[musashi]

bestie stumbleupon very much still exists its just called cloudhiker now. i use it all the time.

[lesbiassoon]

mini compilation of suggestions from the replies:

The Bored Button - "Press the Bored Button and be bored no more."

The Useless Web

Cloudhiker - "Discover the most interesting, weird and awesome websites of the Internet" (not really a rebrand, it's a different person running it but they have the same intention in mind)

Astronaut.io - "These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you)."

Marginalia - "This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed."

[randomnoteforfuturereference]

"Check Please show when" memes and general bias towards that work aside, I do think two things can be true:

It's fun that Heated Rivalry got an adaptation, and it makes sense considering Jacob Tierney's prior experience making a hockey show. Heartstopper definitely deserved an adaptation, and it's worth celebrating how both Oseman and the actors' trajectories have skyrocketed (Oseman especially deserves to overthrow another English author).

At the same time, it's hard to miss that Check Please! arrived on the scene, and was even talked about in national publications, before both of those. It arguably helped to set the stage. Not to mention creating a poll powerful enough to be used (without attributation) by a random British show. Yet there aren't even rumblings about an adaptation, despite the fact that the way Ngozi structured the layout already is akin to a storyboard.

I'm hesitant to be conspiracy brained, and again all three authors deserve success... but it's hard to miss that the one who hasn't got an adaptation is a WoC.

[florallychaotic]

Truly one of the oddest feelings is reading a fic that is so out of character but the writing and plot is so compelling. Like yeah I came here for the characters but yeah you know what I will read your original novel with the serial numbers plastered on