I got tired of watching us burn down. So I built a fire escape.
Hi.
I've been on the hellsite for ten ye....uh. You know what? my fair share.
I’ve watched us go from internet friends to "content sources" for algorithms. I’ve watched the platforms we made good with our creativity turn around and sell us out to the highest bidder. Or worse: get victimized themselves.
And I'm sick of it. I'm frustrated with the binary choice of bowing to our corporate overlords or unplugging my router. So...I stopped asking for permission. I stopped waiting for a savior. And I started building.
I am building The Greenfield Override.
Here's my bona fides, and a bit of a truth dump: some of you know me from way back when and a certain [barely anonymous] renewal campaign for Warehouse 13. I built the code. I made the twitter bot. I hosted the survey. I sent the email to NBC.
That was me 12 years ago.
Since then I moved to Silicon Valley and worked for Apple for almost a decade. I left a few months ago. And if you want to know why this isn't something I started while I was there?
I left for a reason.
I was legally not allowed to build open-source anything the whole time.
So I left. And I reflected. And this is the result of that reflection.
It isn't a startup. There is no VC money coming to rescue me, and I wouldn't take it anyway. I'm building an operating system for sovereign creators. It’s public good infrastructure designed to break the cycle of extraction that the broligarchy uses to grow their fortunes while the rest of us struggle.
The first tool I'm launching is DAON (Digital Asset Ownership Network).
It’s a blockchain shield I architected to give us cryptographic proof of ownership for our work. It stops AI companies from saying "well we didn't know who owned it." It gives us the receipt. It gives us the legal standing to say NO.
The main API is and will remain on servers in Germany, because Germany doesn't screw around with Intellectual Property, OpenAI.
Now, let’s address the pachyderm in the corner.
Yes, I used AI to help build this. I used LLMs.
But here is the reality: The companies stealing our work have billion-dollar infrastructures and armies of engineers, all of whom use AI to augment the speed of their work. I know! I was there! But that means I cannot fight them with manual labor alone. I'm good, but not that good. That's how this effort fails.
So I am using their tools against them. I am using AI as a force multiplier to build an anti-scraping infrastructure(DAON) and tools for liberation from the corporate gods fast enough for any of it to actually matter.
And the endgame? Crowdfunding a set of Artisan Models. Small, specialist AI tools trained, ideally, only on data that was consented to via DAON. No theft. No black box. Just a tool the people can own, scaled down far enough to be highly effective but extremely sustainable, running on green servers, working for the public.
This principle doesn't reject the potential good of the technology. It just evicts the capitalist landlords.
If you are feeling burned down, if you are tired of being "content" instead of a person, come help me build the new blueprint.
Link ---> https://greenfieldoverride.com
(P.S. I'm funding this myself. No investors. Just builders. If you want to help keep the lights on, the "Full Ledger" of our costs—including, ideally, my own rent—is on the site.)
(P.P.S. I'm a software engineer, right? So I test things. And I gave gemini a ~70 page rough outline of a book I'm writing from which I asked it for funsies to write an *ahem* scene. I've done this before for science, and 2.5 sucked. But Gemini 3? Y'all I had to take a cold shower. I said, "someone's been reading fanfic." To which it replied, "Let's just say I know what the people want." So this may not be 100% there yet? But I'm telling y'all about it now because that moment changes the equation, and I want DAON tested and ready by the end of the month, which frankly means I need to start funding it now. I have seen the future, and it is hot, and that means it is dangerous.)
Yesterday my sister was going to complain about how things could have been different with our parents but stopped herself and said "No use treading through the multiverse"
Sooo true bestie that's going straight into my lexicon
"I-- I don't understand! I followed everything it said --"
"Your first mistake was entrusting your work to the hallucination machine." It reached down to pinch the mixture, give it a sniff. "Potassium chloride? What ash is this?"
"Um." The disciple nudged a bucket with their boot.
"Tastes like ... maple. And potatoes. Blech." It wiped its fingertips clean on their robes. It paused, rubbing its tongues against the roof of its mouth. "Damnation, what did you anoint the candles with? Is that ... PAM?"
The disciple whimpered. "It wasn't specified."
"Pfft. Of course not." It sighed, and extended its tri-fingered hand. "Let me see that incantation." Shakily, the parchment was extended, and snatched with irritation. " 'Bene! Ecce incantatio initiorum ...' What the seven hells is this? You didn't even trim the auto response."
"Well, I don't speak Latin..."
The demon snorted. The parchment sailed over its shoulder to a candle and hovered there, alight, then disappeared in a puff of ash and smoke. "Right. Legally I could take at least a limb for this, but hey, you like your limbs, right? Pretty attached to them, you'd say?" The disciple desperately nodded. "Great. So here's what we're gonna do: you're going to write me an essay --"
"What?!" The disciple gasped, paled. "Wait, no, maybe an arm would be okay..."
"-- shut up. You're going to hand-write a 2,000 word essay -- listen, no -- and you're going to write it on the perils of sourcing research from generative AI. You are going to source this in MLA format -- yes the fuck you are --" tired of the protestations, the demon's hand loosely threatened the human's throat, and quickly made its point, "and you will do this and turn it in in two weeks' time, with a proper summoning ritual. And -- and this part is very important, mind you -- you are going to tell all your little demon-summoner buddies that if this ever happens again I will simply eat your fucking souls and be done with it. Do you understand me?"
The disciple nodded again, with wetter pants.
"Good. Fine." The demon roughly patted the student on the head and retreated back to the ruined glyph where it stood expectant, hands on what must have been its hips. "Alright. Banish me and call me up properly in two weeks. Don't make me come looking for you."
"I -- uh -- well, that is to say, I don't... um."
The demon's shoulders dropped. "You don't know how to banish."
"I don't know how to banish, no."
The demon let loose a series of deep, frustrated grumbles that had some resemblance to speech, enunciated with emphatic gestures, and gave the vague impression of a dinner getting cold. "Get a pen."
#writing prompt #flash fiction #my writing #NO ai used #you can pry the em dash from my cold dead hands we had it first tags from above post that deserved to be shared ✨
i think one of the main issues with "dating culture" in total is that the actual percentage of humans who want or need to pair bond or reproduce is a lot lower than we think it is and this creates conflict from dumping an enormous amount of resources into pursuing unsatisfactory goals, having an identity crisis when yet another relationship or partner is boring or disappointing, going through a destructive breakup and resource partition, and then being coerced into starting over from the beginning and just doing this over and over until we die. i don't think relationships and love and romantic attachment are fake I just think a lot of people don't actually need or want them who have been convinced otherwise
I'm not aromantic or asexual, in fact quite the opposite. I'm a full fledged poetry writing romantic and a lot of the most euphoric experiences of my life have been very stereotypical Falling In Love/Being In Love situations. I'm just saying if you really ask someone "do you like this. do you like your girlfriend. do you want to be around her. do you enjoy spending time with people you think you are romantically interested in. do you think about them in a way that makes you feel that way no one has successfully described. or are you just doing these things because you feel somehow that you are obligated or owed 'a girlfriend' (unspecified) like it's a desk lamp or toilet brush" and I think the honest answer is the second thing for a lot more people then is acknowledged
read this thread. this is by far the most concise explanation of a lot of different issues that i’ve seen in fandom spaces in a while. cosigning both the linked thread and the thread about aus/uk/can law that’s linked in-thread.
If someone has never taken a class that includes copyright law, they may not know this stuff, so I don’t necessarily blame random people for not knowing what copyright is, but like… maybe just maybe it’s something that should be taught????
Just another reminder, because this always drives me crazy, but even if monetizing your fic was 100% unambiguously legal and protected, AO3 would still not let you do it because AO3 was founded and is supported by people like me who want a fandom community that is completely divested from making money off of fic.
Yes, this. Lots of fanworks on AO3 are unambiguously legal. Fics based on Shakespeare plays and fairy tales and Greek mythology and The Great Gatsby and your original character from your D&D game are not violations of copyright, because no copyright applies to those things.
AO3 still doesn’t let you monetize those things on the site, because we don’t want the site to be commercial! Because that’s not what it’s for!
It’s not there for you (generic you) to make money off the efforts of the people who build and maintain the site for free! We aren’t getting paid for the work we do to give you a nice site to use, just like you aren’t getting paid for the work you do to create whatever art you share there. Because fandom is supposed to be a community where we share with each other, and therefore we all benefit.
The deal is, we give you a free, stable, safe platform to host your works. In exchange, you get a site that isn’t covered in ads and tip jars and links to gofundme and “read the next chapter at my patreon”. You get one goddamn place on the internet that isn’t trying to make money off you. And we will defend that space and keep it non-commercial.
I'm going to say something that will make sense to the Fandom Olds and will probably be slightly controversial to the younger crowds, but I'm going to say it anyways
TPTB becoming increasingly aware of fandom and fanfiction over the past two-ish decades and thus, the spawning of the expectation of your ship going canon has ruined fandom a little bit
I mean, fandom does a great job of ruining itself a lot of the time, but this idea that a ship isn't "real" or "valid" if it isn't canon
or the idea that one ship is superior to the other because one is canon and the other isn't?
it's absolutely bananas
I grew up in an era of fandom where characters didn't even have to be from the same media source to ship them. I mean, do you know how many BtVS/HP crossover fics I read back in the early 2000s???
That shit was never gonna be canon, but we had fun with it, anyways
Like. Yeah, a lot of fanon speculation is bullshit, but it always has been and always will be. You have hundreds and/or thousands of people riffing off each other, the observations and the meta will always be deeper than what TPTB intended, and that's okay! That's what makes it fun!
I just think more people would be a lot happier in their fandom experiences if they realized that fandom is supposed to be an escape instead of a crusade
Beautiful. The composition. Colors. The lamp. The fact that the photographer managed to make the moon look GOOD (not all cameras and photographers can achieve that).
My mom's cat is a common domestic shorthair we found on the side of the road as a kitten
Regular cat, not a maine coon or one of those massive breeds. His mom was smaller than a loaf of bread
But in a sort of a Clifford The Big Red Dog situation, he grew super fast, and really really big, and took a super long time to stop growing
Worried that she was overfeeding him, she eased back his portions, but he stayed a massive round baby
When he started having kidney problems, she took him to the vet.
The vet took a look at him and said, "holy fuck, what are you feeding him", checked the nutritional listings on his chow, and told her "Yeah, maybe he's reacting badly to the amount of grain in this, try a meatier diet"
So my mom wound up special-ordering this specific high-protein prescription cat food made of like. Kangaroo meat or some shit that cost like sixty bucks a bag
And, as typical act two in an episode of House, he somehow got worse on the fancy specialized stuff that was supposed to be Primo Athlete Olympic Feline Blend
Like. WAY worse. His guts were inflamed and his kidneys were shutting down and he was all sore and HE WAS STILL HUGE, just miserable and sad
So shetook him back to the vet, where they had to help him pee (he was apparently close to bursting and had some kind of blockage too) and went "Yeah no this is NOT normal and we don't know what's going on, we're gonna do some tests but in the meantime you should go back to what he was eating before, at least that wasn't actively killing him" so she did
And he still wasn't great, but he also improved
And so they take his blood and do an ultrasound and a couple g's later she gets a call back like "this is gonna sound crazy, but we want you to put him on a low-meat diet. Just the least amount of protein and iron and shit. We need you to find the grainiest, filler-iest dollar tree kibble available and give him some of that bad bad shit"
And my mother is a woman of science. So she did
And he GOT BETTER
His energy picked back up, inflammation went down, he started drinking normally again, got back to pissing like a fuckin champion
And so it turns out that out of all the random ass freeway bonus cats we possibly could have scooped out of a ditch, WE got the one-in-a-million freak of nature with a SPECIFIC genetic defect that means a paleo protein free range diet is essentially poison and he THRIVES on cheap ass garbage
Like. He medically NEEDS junk food
I dont really understand how that works, but i cant argue with results.
If we had four of him, they'd outweigh my mom. And he's FINE
Also blind, but that's unrelated
Im not using him as a symbol or a metaphor or anything. I just keep catching myself thinking about my mom's Big Fucking Cat
