Trix, she/her, ace, Australian, totally blind. I'm Christian but mind my own f**king business, and would rather live out my beliefs in ways that are kind and respectful. This blog is safe for anyone in the LGBTQ+ community who is not actively a dick to anyone else in the LGBTQ+ community. Yes, that means transphobes and aphobes and other such exclusionist types can fuck right off. Fandoms include, but are not limited to: Dragon Ball, Yu-Gi-Oh! DM/GX/5D's, Pokémon, TMNT 2003, Steven Universe, the Roddaverse (Rowan of Rin/Deltora Quest/related series), the Sevenwaters series/everything by Juliet Marillier, Star Trek: TNG/DS9/Voyager especially, fairy tales (yes that counts), and other random miscellaneous stuff! I am also a writer of both original fantasy and fanfiction. Currently the fanfic front has been overtaken by DS9 and I honestly do not know when it will simmer down, because I have had a lot of fun so far!
Hi, I'm Trix! I write stuff! And sing stuff sometimes! And am looking into branching out into podfic territory!
I'm also totally blind, Ace and Australian! And a Christian who knows when to mind her business and is determined to not be a bigoted arsehole (I may not always know if I'm failing at this, but I was raised with the understanding we never stop learning and growing unless we're arrogant enough to believe we don't need to anymore). Vehemently anti-Capitalist, hate bigotry in all its forms, think progressives need to stop with the bullying because abuse and harassment have no correct target, and am working hard at being kind and open-minded.
List of important sideblogs:
Main writing sideblog, for discussions about writing, including fanfiction, though it's mostly full of reblogged writing advice as of now (this will change): @imaginatrixproductions
My sideblog specifically for my biggest ficverse, including reblogs I feel are relevant to it: @themaginitechronicles
My political blog, where I have somewhat sporadically been reblogging political posts I agree with: @politicallytrix
Tumblr changed how you select blogs to post to recently so I've had a bit of a tough time adjusting and haven't reblogged/posted to my sideblogs much lately, but I'll get back into it, promise!
The great big list of fandoms!
Dragon Ball
Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters, and its first two spinoffs
Pokémon
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the 2003 version)
Winx Club
Avatar: The Last Airbender/LoK to a lesser degree
The Sevenwaters series, Blackthorn and Grim trilogy, and Warrior Bards trilogy, all by Juliet Marillier
The Deltora Quest and Rowan of Rin series by Emily Rodda
Steven Universe
Star Trek, though notably not Star Trek: Picard. I may give Discovery and Prodigy a go but I am of the opinion that ST:PIC was unnecessary nostalgia bait and they should've let those characters (and actors) rest. And not doing so led to some things being technically canon that I have firmly rejected.
To be more specific, though, my main Treks are TNG, Voyager, and most important of all, Deep Space Nine.
Fairy tales! (Yes, this counts as a fandom. And it has bled into a lot of things I write, even the fics that aren't specifically fairy tale retellings).
Aaaand I think that's everything that needs covering for now! Enjoy yourselves, and don't be mean or I shall block you.
One thing about the Euros is that the English still haven’t quite adjusted to the Queen dying so during the national anthem they keep singing “God Save The Quing” like there’s a non-binary monarch on the throne.
I have been telling people for years that the company behind Pokemon Go had no-shit, for-realsies ties to the CIA and people never really took it that seriously. Anyway.
Fellow trans people I'm begging you to remember that being trans isn't the Only Oppression Ever. Racism exists. (I'm looking at you, white trans people!!!) Being white gives you privilege. Being perisex gives you privilege. Being able bodied gives you privilege. Being a citizen of your country gives you privilege. Living in a developed/first world country gives you privilege. Being a settler gives you privilege. Not having an intellectual disability gives you privilege. Not being severely mentally ill gives you privilege. Being housed gives you privilege. Having internet access gives you privilege. Speaking the dominant language of your area gives you privilege. Not living with addiction gives you privilege.
You are not the most oppressed person ever on earth, white able bodied perisex trans person. Even with being trans, if you're eg from America, canada, western Europe, or Australia, you absolutely have way more political power than eg some cis het indigenous man in rural Brazil.
“oh no, my audience has begun to guess the big twists of my story and are accurately predicting what will happen!”
incorrect response: write the rest of the story to be as twisty, shocking and counter to expectations as possible, regardless of whether this is a logical or satisfying way for the plot to go
(you’re not stupid. I posted this thinking it would amuse a handful of mutuals who all knew the context and that would be about it, so I didn’t think about providing any other explanation. I had no idea it would spread this far.)
I’ll start from the very beginning just to be thorough. so this is Alex Hirsch, creator and head writer of Gravity Falls, a show which had a big focus on mystery, conspiracies, codes and ciphers, etc. the whole plot is kicked off by one of the main characters finding a mysterious old journal in the woods, which detailed all kinds of weird and supernatural things, but then ended abruptly with the author saying they had to hide the journal because they were being watched. the central driving mystery of the show, therefore, was the question of who wrote the journal and what happened to them.
now, the thing about Gravity Falls is that, while it must be said that the writers weren’t always quite as sure of their plans as we tend to like to think they are, it is very much a fair play mystery, with legitimate clues to what was going on. but the writers were caught off guard by how quickly the show attracted a dedicated audience, including a lot of people outside the primary presumed demographic, who started solving the clues faster than expected. so some of the fans were able to correctly guess who the author was before it was revealed in the show, and the theory started spreading. this put the writers in something of a panic, because this was THE mystery that the whole story revolved around, with ¾ of the show building up to the dramatic reveal in the middle of season 2. they wanted it to be a mystery that could be figured out, sure, but they weren’t prepared for people to solve it so far in advance of when it was planned to be revealed, which would have really taken away from the big moment. they weren’t going to change the main story itself, but having been caught unaware by how much attention the fans were paying, they wanted to up the ante and make the mystery more complex to solve going forward–but first they needed to buy some time and throw the fandom off the scent for a little longer.
hence, Alex’s plan as described above. they whipped up a fake shot that appears to give away the identity of the author as being another character in the show, put it on a screen in the studio as if it was a real animation frame, took a picture of it, and ‘leaked’ it online. it was initially decided to be a hoax (albeit, I think, presumed to be a hoax originating from outside the production team), until Alex posted this tweet:
…before quickly deleting it (though not so quickly that it didn’t get seen, of course).
it worked well enough to distract most people for a while, and wasn’t revealed as a hoax until a year later, when an episode aired that definitively proved that the supposed screenshot could never have happened, at which point Alex owned up to the whole thing as seen in the tweet above. by then the episode with the real reveal wasn’t far off, and while people did still work it out ahead of time, it was more of an “OH MY GOD I KNEW IT!” moment than a “booooooring, we’ve known that for ages” moment, which of course was what the writers wanted all along.
personally I find this a fascinating approach to dealing with the problem of spoilers, because it doesn’t affect the story itself at all; if you watch Gravity Falls today–or if you were watching it when it aired without any significant contact with the fandom–you’d never know about it. ultimately, the problem the writers were facing wasn’t that some people might guess the answer to the mystery–they never wanted to make it completely impossible to predict–so much as it was that they hadn’t designed the story to stand up to so many people working on the puzzle together, which resulted in a sort of total output of puzzle-solving ability that far outstripped the capability of any one solo human being. so their solution is something that’s very much targeted toward delaying that group problem-solving, without actually affecting the experience of any individual person watching the show.
plus, it’s very in keeping with the overall tone of the show.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Over the weekend, I did an interview about my forthcoming book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (a book about being a better AI critic), and the interviewer said she was surprised that I wasn't an AI booster, based on my demographics and work history:
I could see where she was coming from. I encountered computers in the mid-seventies, as a small child. My first computer was a CARDIAC, a working, Turing-complete, mechanical computer made entirely of cardboard, that I spent endless hours with:
Then I graduated to a teletype terminal and acoustic coupler connected to a minicomputer at the University of Toronto. My mom, a kindergarten teacher, used to smuggle home 1,000' rolls of paper towel from the kids' bathroom. I'd get 1,000' feet of computing up one side, then another 1,000' down the other side, then I'd carefully re-roll the paper towel so she could put it back in the bathroom for the kids to dry their hands on.
After that, I got an Apple ][+ in 1979, and shortly thereafter acquired a modem, and that was it: I was hooked for life. I became an amateur programmer, then a professional programmer. I hosted forums on dial-up BBSes where I distributed software and offered support to strangers who wanted to connect their computers to the internet. I got a job as a gopher developer, then a web developer, then a CIO-for-hire, helping wire up small businesses and connect them to the net. Eventually, I co-founded a free/open source software startup, before transitioning to 25 years as a digital rights activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And for most of that time, I was energetically writing science fiction, eventually becoming associated with a school sometimes called "post-cyberpunk":
The force that energized all this work was a dialectical one, the contradiction that powered cyberpunk literature itself. For all that cyberpunk was undeniably enamored with the coolness and combustibility of new technology, it was also terrified of how technology could be a force for oppression, surveillance and control. As William Gibson says, "cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion."
Gibson's more famous quote, of course, is "the street finds its own use for things." In Gibson's novels (and in my own life in technology) all the most interesting things happen when users of technology (often without formal training or credentials) find ways to adapt the technology they use to suit their needs:
This is why I remain an ardent fan of Hypercard, Scratch and other meta-tools that are designed to allow non-programmers to write software that exactly conforms to their desires. Whatever the apps produced by these tools lack in sophistication and efficiency is more than offset by the fact that they give everyday people the power to directly control the tools they rely upon.
If "epistemic humility" means anything, it means acknowledging that no amount of "requirements gathering" can capture the needs of people totally unlike yourself as faithfully as those users can capture their own needs. Giving people the tools to produce their own software is always going to make tools – vernacular, idiosyncratic, homespun – that are more suited to their own hands and minds than anything a technologist working on their behalf could make.
The ancient dictum of "nothing about us without us" – born in 16th century Poland and taken up by the modern disability rights movement – asserts the right of people to control their own living conditions, and also the unique capacity of people to understand their own needs. You know what's even better than being consulted on the design of the technology you use? Having direct control over that technology!
This is why I was so suspicious of the iPad. The iPad's much-lauded "ease of use" was entirely about how easy it was to use an iPad to consume technology. But the iPad remains the single most user-innovation-hostile technology in modern history, a device designed to make it impossible to produce technology without permission from a remorseless multinational corporation. This is cyberpunk as a demand, not a warning:
The technology I've championed all my life is technology that gives more control to its users. One of my immutable precepts is that people who are different from me know things I can't know, and the only way I can get the benefit of their unique knowledge and perspective is if they are free to make and share things that matter to them. As Dan Gillmor said, back when he was inventing the study of citizen journalism, "My readers know more than I do":
And while I am broadly very skeptical of AI, and deeply alarmed by the proliferation of "vibe coded" software in production environments, vibe coding for personal projects is a useful and exciting addition to the lineage of tools that let computer users decide how their computers will work. For people making personal projects, vibe coding extends the power of shell scripting, cron jobs, Applescript, and other desktop automation tools to a wider audience.
One of the journalists I spoke to last week about my book described how he had vibe coded an app that showed him an alert every time a plane flew over his house, giving the tail number and other details of the flight. This is information that I have no need for, no interest in, and that I'm therefore excited to learn about, because its very existence affirms that the world is full of people who are delightfully, irreducibly, amazingly different from me, and moreover, that their unique needs can be directly met using their imaginations and their personal computers.
I recently sat down with my colleague Naomi Novik, a brilliant author who also co-founded Archive of Our Own. Naomi demoed her followup to AO3 for me: Wreccer, a system to help you find small groups of people with taste similar to your own, in order to facilitate media recommendations within that group – a kind of personal, relationship-driven alternative to massive, centralized, monolithic algorithmic recommendation systems:
https://github.com/wreccer
Naomi told me that Wreccer was being built using the same design ethos that the original Twitter embraced. When Twitter launched, it was an API first, and the official Twitter front end was built on that API – but anyone could build their own front end for Twitter that worked in the way they wanted it to. Now, the word "anyone" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because most people don't even know what an API is, and of the people who do, most of them were not capable of writing their own software front end for Twitter.
But Wreccer is being designed for the age of vibe coding, and the API will really allow anyone who uses the service to design their own interface to the system, one that elevates and centers the features they find useful and tucks away the ones they're not interested in. Your personal, custom front end could also bring in other data-sources – pulling in your Mastodon messages, for example, or even showing you an alert with the tail-number of any plane flying over your home.
This is the part of vibe coding that I'm quite excited about, but it's not the part the industry focuses on. Instead of hearing about how personal, homemade software utilities can be an end unto themselves, we hear about vibe coded projects as prototypes for commercial production code. We hear about clueless bosses vibe coding software products and services that run fine for one user on a siloed desktop computer, and then demanding to know why it takes 50 engineers a year to make the same thing work for millions of users on the public internet. We hear about people who vibe code and submit patches to free/open-source software projects with millions of users, overwhelming project maintainers with slop code that is riddled with security vulnerabilities.
Of course, there's an obvious reason why the industry wants to focus on the potential for vibe coded software to replace production code. The AI bubble has burned up $1.4t to date, while bringing in mere tens of billions of dollars per year, even as its unit economics grow steadily worse:
To keep the bubble inflated, AI hucksters must promise massive economic returns to the technology. They want investors to believe that vibe code is about to replace working programmers, who are skilled, high-waged, high-demand workers. Their pitch is that for every million dollars' worth of programmers that an AI salesman and a boss conspire to fire, half a million dollars will go to the AI company whose bots shit out that vibe code.
That's par for the course with the AI bubble, whose focus is entirely on how AI can centralize, control and homogenize our lives. Whereas early desktop publishing, web publishing and social media gave us a glorious higgledy-piggledy of chaotic, weird and transgressive hobbyist media and retina-searing designs, AI art and design are instantly recognizable at a thousand yards, and it all looks the same, boring, and washed:
AI companies have released open weight/open source models that can run on your own computer, but these are treated as side-shows and toys and demos. The real action, we're told, is in "frontier models," which is industry-speak for "a piece of software whose running costs exceed the GDP of most countries":
Perhaps this is why the dynamics of AI are so different from the early dynamics of the web. Early web users were workers, who demanded that their bosses allow them to use the web and so devolve more power to people doing their jobs. By contrast, today's most ardent AI boosters are bosses, who threaten workers who don't use AI enough in the course of their duties:
Where we do see idiosyncrasy emerging from AI usage, it's often terrible. AI can help you create a folie-a-un in which you and a chatbot team up to reinforce your delusions and drive you deeper into a world of dangerous mirage:
There's a (false) story that's told about people who championed the early internet: that we were blithely certain that technology could only be a force for good, and negligently disinterested in the possibility that technology could control, extract and harm. That's demonstrably untrue: recall cyberpunk's dualism of "the street finds its own use for things" and "cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion."
More true is to say that early internet champions were alive to the importance of the internet, and therefore both excited about the possibilities of the internet to deliver a world of connection, idiosyncrasy, love and solidarity; and about the danger of the internet as a dystopian system of surveillance and manipulation:
History isn't finished. Long after the AI bubble pops, there will be local models and people vibe coding homemade software that respond directly to their needs. The stuff we make on our own computers, for ourselves, is deplatformed from its inception. It's part of the life we can build in technology's "shadowy corners" that we used to just call "technology." The fact that this stuff is utterly unsuited to be production code makes it inherently unmonetizable. It's how the street finds its own use for things:
As a blind person, my ability to play mainstream video games has been historically limited by such factors as having a modder who cares enough about helping my community play the game to dedicate a decent chunk of their time to development of such a mod.
Recently, I found out a mod had been made for RimWorld to make it accessible, and was so taken with the game as demonstrated on the youtube channel I was watching that I bought it and installed the mod so I could play it for myself.
It wasn't until nearly a month into playing that I learned the mod had been made entirely with AI, and I felt like a traitor for even using it for a hot second.
But the thing is, I want to be able to play more games. I want accessibility mods to be easier to create/roll out. I've dreamed of such a future for years. And now it's here, and AI vibe-coding is enabling it.
The mod works. There are errors but those get fixed with another pass over the code. The mod does what it's supposed to and I can play the game.
I don't know if other accessibility mods that didn't previously use AI will/have done so. I dunno if the next mod I hear about will be made with AI or a small dedicated dev team. I just know I can play more games than I could before, and I'm not gonna avoid a game I want to play just because the mod enabling me to play it was vibe-coded.
random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google
I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.
also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo
also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)
i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:
Search Engines
Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy
DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)
WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.
Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.
Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.
Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines.
Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted.
Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy.
Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.
Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden.
MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.
Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching.
Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar.
https://search.marginalia.nu/ 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. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results.
https://www.mojeek.com/
https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites.
https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.
https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.
https://yep.com/ is a crawler
https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx
https://www.dogpile.com/
https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)
https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?
https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?
https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.
Other Searchers
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine
we do have to contend with the fact that the reason there is this like perpetual conflation funnel that turns aave and other black dialects into 'gen z slang' and memes and the reason non black performers keep putting on blaccents and the reason pictures of black people just existing gets turned into memes is the same and its because its all minstrelsy.
gonna post a controversial take alright are y’all ready??
…
actually typing out emoticons like XD and :D and :V never should have gone out of fashion and you can pry them out of my cold dead hands okay I know emojis are fun but THEY DON’T CAPTURE THE EMOTION IN THE SAME WAY
There is no emoji that captures what I mean by :P (I do NOT mean “hur hur goofy-ass face!”) and the one for :^/ is not great. And lest we forget, 🤷🏻♀️ is absolutely inadequate compared to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Tumblr should never have given us polls. Everyday I have to see years-old polls cross my dash proudly proclaiming past-me's vote which I now disagree with. Let me change my vote!! I have rethought which Tetris piece is the sexiest.
I love this incredibly niche complaint! Get some heritage breeds, they do totally still exist. Same could likely be said about some other animals like pigs, sheep, and cows.
I think the thing that annoys me most about AI on a personal, day to day, level is what it has done to grammar checkers. If you've never done a lot of editing, or used to 5+ years ago but haven't really in the last couple years, I can't even begin to describe how fucking BAD this shit has gotten. And as an author it is EXHAUSTING.
I just want to catch spelling errors and accidental double spaces and repeated phrases and whenever I use the wrong too/to or affect/effect and shit. But no. They've shoved AI up the ass of every grammar checking software out there and now they all fucking suck and make the most random, obnoxious, nonsensical suggestions.
And yeah, I can ignore all the times it's trying to get me to cut out any semblance of my own voice, or shove things into the wrong tense, or make the most random suggestions on comma usage. But if it's getting all that WRONG, what is it just straight up missing that I SHOULD be correcting? What real spelling and grammar errors are still lurking in there?
I get why people keep saying this (and other versions of it like "Use Adobe alternatives" and "Use Google product alternatives."). But here's the problem: I do not create in isolation. Even my own 100% personal projects are getting sent to other people whether it's editors or printers or beta readers and unless every single person in that train is using the same products, things can get wonky.
Libre Office and Word handle formatting differently on the back end, which can completely break documents if you move them back and forth between the two. So if I write in Libre Office but my beta readers are still using Word, when I send them a manuscript for review there's a good chance things won't look right and my beta reader will not actually be reviewing what I sent them.
Industry standards are industry standards FOR A REASON. Having everyone on the same workflow can be crucial to getting things done effectively and correctly without creating a lot of extra work. And those things are not going to change overnight, as much as we might want them to.
Yeah, Word, let me just leave this whole chunk of dialogue without the closing quotation marks. That's the thing to do. How dare I have two punctuation marks in a row. It's not like that's how closing quotation marks fucking work.
And you know, for young writers, this has got to be so detrimental just from the perspective of opening your document and seeing a million corrections that, frankly, don't need to be there. If you're a young writer you're likely not going to have the background knowledge to know what is and isn't a good suggestion, you're just going to see a document that makes it look like you made every mistake possible so clearly you must be a terrible, stupid writer and should just give up.
UNPOPULAR OPINION: A lot of "mental health issues" disappear when bills are paid, rent is secure, and the fridge is full. Peace is expensive. And pretending money doesn't affect mental health is privilege.
Quark in Body Parts being like "That's who I am. That's what I do. I'm a businessman. And more than that, I'm a Ferengi businessman. Do you know what that means? It means that I'm not exploiting and cheating people at random. I'm doing it according to a specific set of rules. The Rules of Acquisition. And I won't disregard them when I find them inconvenient."
