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Hi! I'm Mal or M; 26-yr-old Queer writer, they/them. Multifandom, currently obsessed with Elder Scrolls.
My fics are posted both on AO3 and Toyhou.se; there are links in the Projects page. If you send an ask addressed to any of my ocs, I can answer in-character.
My current fic-posting schedule is Ebonsong chapters every Wednesday when I have them, other things are more variable. (Unless I forget, which happens)
See below the cut for project descriptions and more links.
What is Ebonsong?
Ebonsong is my primary Skyrim fanfiction, beginning about twenty years before Alduin's attack on Helgen. It primarily follows the story of a genderfluid Half-Breton Dragonborn named Erlind during their journey through Skyrim, along with a Reachfolk named Nathari and her quest to reclaim the Reach through politics instead of force. Other key characters are a Nord vampire who doesn't want to be an assassin, an Altmer/Imperial thief on a quest to kill her father, and a transfem Orsimer mage intent on learning everything she can about magic.
Themes included in Ebonsong are found family, friends to lovers, acceptance of destiny, the danger of being favoured by the gods, questions of humanity and identity, the power of being given a choice, and more. The overall tone is affected by taking a more realistic look at how certain events will affect a person, but there will be a happy ending.
Posted on AO3 and Toyhou.se. Announcements posted here with every chapter post.
What is Dancing with the Dead?
Dancing with the Dead is the continuation of what was Faolaine's Journals, following a pair of Last Dragonborn first on their own paths apart until they meet and are forever entwined during Alduin's attack on Helgen, occasionally joined by a Reachfolk werewolf with a quest for vengeance. It is told in a journal format, including the return of Faolaine with her writing now in a more-accurate style, a Redguard adventurer archaeologist named Ahsan at-Idris, and a Dunmer knight-errant turned vampire named Nisimar Sailen.
Will be posted on AO3 and Toyhouse.
Faolaine's original journals are posted here, on Toyhou.se, and on AO3.
What is Lion Flower?
Lion Flower is a not-yet-started Skyrim fanfiction series adapted from the first trilogy I ever tried to write, following the story of Laurelia Ailiana, the last princess of Summerset who was spared from the execution of the royal family by the Thalmor thanks to a single moment of 'weakness' from one of the agents sent. She is rescued from a life of domestic servitude by a pair of undercover members of the resistance against the Thalmor and goes on to discover several incriminating documents that lead her to flee the Summerset Isles toward mainland Tamriel, where eventually she ends up in Skyrim...and the discovery of a power that would grant a path she had not truly anticipated.
Will be posted on AO3 and Toyhouse.
What is Blood, Frozen and Aflame?
Blood, Frozen and Aflame is a smaller series set in the same version of Tamriel as Ebonsong, focused on Verandis Ravenwatch and a Vestige by the name of Alvaren Moorston. Alvaren is a Breton trans man who did not realise his state until after being reformed in Coldharbour after his death with the body that he didn't know he'd wanted for years. His history before that shares accidental similarities with the movie A Knight's Tale, but that is a matter - perhaps - for its own installment to the series.
Posted on AO3.
What is Sunsteel and Roses?
Sunsteel and Roses is a not-yet-started Skyrim fanfiction that will follow the story of a Redguard Paladin of Tava named Khayal as they discover that they're Dragonborn and how they respond to the challenges that arise when all they wanted to do was a scholarly pilgrimage. It features a smaller cast than Ebonsong and Lion Flower, primarily being focused on Khayal and the courtesan they eventually fall for.
Will be posted on AO3 and Toyhouse.
🚨BREAKING: OpenAI published a paper proving that ChatGPT will always make things up.
Not sometimes. Not until the next update. Always. They proved it with math.
Even with perfect training data and unlimited computing power, AI models will still confidently tell you things that are completely false. This isn't a bug they're working on. It's baked into how these systems work at a fundamental level.
And their own numbers are brutal. OpenAI's o1 reasoning model hallucinates 16% of the time. Their newer o3 model? 33%. Their newest o4-mini? 48%. Nearly half of what their most recent model tells you could be fabricated. The "smarter" models are actually getting worse at telling the truth.
Here's why it can't be fixed. Language models work by predicting the next word based on probability. When they hit something uncertain, they don't pause. They don't flag it. They guess. And they guess with complete confidence, because that's exactly what they were trained to do.
The researchers looked at the 10 biggest AI benchmarks used to measure how good these models are. 9 out of 10 give the same score for saying "I don't know" as for giving a completely wrong answer: zero points. The entire testing system literally punishes honesty and rewards guessing.
So the AI learned the optimal strategy: always guess. Never admit uncertainty. Sound confident even when you're making it up.
OpenAI's proposed fix? Have ChatGPT say "I don't know" when it's unsure. Their own math shows this would mean roughly 30% of your questions get no answer. Imagine asking ChatGPT something three times out of ten and getting "I'm not confident enough to respond." Users would leave overnight. So the fix exists, but it would kill the product.
This isn't just OpenAI's problem. DeepMind and Tsinghua University independently reached the same conclusion. Three of the world's top AI labs, working separately, all agree: this is permanent.
Every time ChatGPT gives you an answer, ask yourself: is this real, or is it just a confident guess?
I often see posts about curating your own online experience that make the point, “content creators aren’t your parents.” And, yes, that is absolutely true! And I try not to be like “as a parent,“ but as a parent…
EVEN PARENTS ARE SUPPOSED TO ENCOURAGE RESPONSIBLE READING/VIEWING BEHAVIOR. NOT filter everything ahead of time for their kid.
When my kiddo was 5, his pediatrician was asking him the usual Well Child Visit questions (“What are your favorite foods? What do you do to get your body moving? Do you know what to do if you get lost in a public place?” Etc.) and she asked, “What do you do if you see something on TV that scares or upsets you?”
I piped up like, “Oh, he doesn’t watch TV without one of us in the room,” which was true at the time and is still largely true now. She said, “Yes, but that won’t always be the case, so make sure you’re talking to him about what to do if he sees something that upsets him.”
So we started talking to him about that, and the answer is simple: “Turn it off or leave the room, and talk to someone you trust about what you saw and what you’re feeling.”
The answer is NOT “Ask your parents to make sure you never see anything upsetting again,” because that’s just not possible — and ultimately that would be doing the kid a disservice, since sooner or later he’s going to be out in the world where we can’t control what he watches or reads. That doesn’t mean we don’t try to make sure he’s watching/reading age-appropriate stuff, it just means that’s not the only safeguard he has — and that’s a good thing.
So yes, content creators aren’t your parents and aren’t responsible for making sure you never see anything you don’t like — but also, your own parents should have taught you what to do when that happens. So if they didn’t, take it from me, your internet mom:
Turn it off.
Walk away.
Talk to someone you trust about how you’re feeling.
And leave the person who created the thing that upset you alone.
Contrary to popular belief the biggest beginner's roadblock to art isn't even technical skill it's frustration tolerance, especially in the age of social media. It hurts and the frustration is endless but you must build the frustration tolerance equivalent to a roach's capacity to survive a nuclear explosion. That's how you build on the technical skill. Throw that "won't even start because I'm afraid it won't be perfect" shit out the window. Just do it. Just start. Good luck.
maybe this isn’t an interesting observation but I feel like people (myself included) equate the struggle/drudgery of writing with a failure to actually ‘do’ writing, instead of an extremely common and core component of writing. Like there’s an idealised sense that you’re only “doing writing” when you have these eureka moments that lead you to write like 3 pages in a single sitting. When realistically that is going to be a very small portion of your time actually spent writing. Thinking + reading + editing + struggling + zoning out + getting frustrated are all legitimate parts of “doing writing,” but even knowing that isn’t especially helpful. And it’s hard not to feel like a failure when this type of inspiration is absent because writing is idealised as a revelation-based activity. and that revelation can come in waves of course, where you feel like you’re on a roll for a while, but it’s not something that can be infinitely sustained, and the much more mundane reality is that revelation is not a common occurrence
fuck. yeah ok theres this dude who just, eats different fruits from all over the world and tells you what they taste like and if youre a patreon subscriber he sends you souvenirs from his journeys where he travels to eat fruits. he sent me salt from iceland once. all his video titles are formatted like typical clickbait except specifically about fruits which i think is really funny and when i remember he exists i go through all of his new videos at once for hours
I wish I could make white people(and not just white Americans) understand how diverse the pre-columbian Americas were. The history, religion, culture, politics was at least as complex as Europe's. There was the full gamut of religions, from monotheists to animists to ancestral religions. There were city building empires, village farmers, nomadic traders, and so many other ways to live. This is all just based on what we know, the fragments left behind and the stories of survivors of an apocalyptic plague. All this before the most extended campaign of genocide in history was waged in an attempt to wipe out those survivors.
Over 500 years spent trying to cut down a whole trunk of human culture.
Do you understand how much poorer our whole species is because of it? Can you imagine where art, religion, and science would be if we still had these vast bodies of knowledge? The stain of the colonial project will never be fully washed clean. We owe more than just the land to those we stole from. We owe them a whole future, a future that could have been brighter for all of us. If only greed and fear weren't allowed to rule this land.
my brother and I get on bandcamp and click on songs from the live updating list of albums that are selling and we listen to 30 seconds or so of a song and if we like it we add it to a playlist. and we call this "foraging for music."
anyways one of terminology we have coined to talk about music is "Knee Music" which is derived from the fact that album covers that show a person's knees tend to sound the same as each other. It's kind of a sleepy, grungy indie folk pop sound with youthful-sounding, vocals that affect a candid and vulnerable feeling.
or anyway we found multiple album covers with knees in quick succession, and they all sounded the same, hence "Knee Music"
but it doesn't have to be knees to be Knee Music. any kind of blurry, candid-looking photos that include skinny white people is likely to be knee music
My other brother's method of foraging for music is slightly more complicated: he gets on everynoise and uses random number generators to get a random genre, a random artist, and then a random song from that artist.
For a while, his method was slightly different, instead choosing a random genre and listening to it until he found a song from that genre that he liked.
However, this could be very time-consuming. once he became trapped for a long time in "geek rap" which was mostly a lot of people rapping in potentially spanish or portuguese (?) about Five Nights at Freddy's
My brother and I have a rating system where we rate songs on a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is absolute dogshit and 7 is the best song ever.
The challenge in this is that even if a song isn't particularly pleasant to listen to, novelty will increase the rating, because it's something interesting we haven't heard before. So, it's incredibly difficult for a song to get the lowest rating, because a song that is outstandingly bad has something different about it to make it bad, which paradoxically makes it good.
We had a very hard time rating this song, Burial Etiquette- Ivy Staircase in Ruin. We both disliked it, but we had never disliked a song in this way. The harsh vocals are so far to the background and relatively quiet that it's like, a kind of generic song but there's a guy screaming incoherently somewhere in the next room
We didn't like the harsh vocals, but we also thought they should raise the rating of the song because they made it weirder. We ultimately didn't settle on a rating at all for it.
We both agree that the best random song we found is Butcher Brown- No Way Around It. It is groovy and makes you want to dance, with a unique style.
The genre is Funk, so we looked into funk some more, but it turns out that funk is not very popular anymore and it was popular mostly in the 1970s.
Only one other random song we rated with a 7, which is Thrailkill- Cattywampus.
Those are the two songs we rated with a 7. I haven't counted up how many songs we rated yet, but the ratings suggest that an excellent song is hard to find...
The random songs we rated with a 6 are these. a 6 rating means it is a really good song that we would listen to again and again but not the most excellent song possible
