Entirely too fixated on Horizon, at the moment. Pulled back into fanfiction after over 20 years away. 40+. He/Him. Find me at AO3 as Valin_Malthor PFP from the amazing @hartlesshart's ALOY X3
A pinnable about me, or my work, at least.
I write fanfic on AO3 as Valin_Malthor. Currently all Horizon, not had anything else brainrot me in quite the same way, so far.
I'm primarily hung up on Beta as a Character, but I love the whole cast and the world they're in, or I probably would never have gotten so hooked to want to write.
Long Fics
Machine Mage Beta - A Proving - Sort of a start or a "proving" for Beta to carve her own path in the world, alongside her sister. Teen rated. Mostly fluff, mostly all my fave characters talking to one another and getting up-to-date about Zero Dawn and Nemesis. Some shipping, some fade-to-black. There are planned companion fics that should fill in the faded out bits. Those won't be rated Teen.
A Good Night - Takes place immediately after chapter 17 of A Proving. Seyka and Aloy go beyond just kissing for the first time. Explicit.
Not Long Fics
(The author tells themself valiantly. There will probably be more, they're brainrotting me.)
A Second Chance - New Game Plus, with a twist. First thing I published, while working on Machine Mage Beta. It's haunting me a little and I keep notes on it. Teen or Mature.
Greenshine Alignment - What is greenshine for anyway? A cute little soulmates type thing. General for now.
Sacred Valley Saga - The cast of Horizon put into a smutty soap opera. The Sacred Valley Condominium complex, where everyone* gets a happy ending. A fun place for me to dump any dumb, cracked ideas I have for the cast. Teen for now, pretty certainly Mature or Explicit later.
*except Ted Faro
One Shots (Or Short Series)
A Much Needed Break - Part of The Horizon Gift Exchange 2025 - Kotallo meets Alva for a vacation and tells her a story about his childhood. General.
A Relentless Aversion To Entropy - A bit of psychological horror where I'm not very nice to Tilda. Teen.
Brunt of the Storm - Sona finds out about Varl and gets a little help from Dekka dealing with the grief. General.
Buried Secrets - Samina and Travis have a moment in the GAIA Prime bunker. Teen.
Distractions - Aloy and Beta find themselves distracted during a conversation with Petra. Teen.
Light Duty Day - Penttoh is on a light duty day and has a conversation with an old bully. General.
Listening In - Aloy listens in and learns why Oseram men getting clothing in Chainscrape have exposed nipples. Teen.
The Power of LUV - Erend observes as Aloy and Beta deliver great news about a powerful weapon they've learned to wield. General.
The Sobecks Are The Cats Of RCC-9 - Aloy and Beta exhibit some cat-like behavior around the base. General.
Travis Tate's Life Lessons - Transcript of a recording Travis Tate left in ELUTHIA code for impressionable youth. General.
Earth Girls Are Easy - A Beta Sobeck Femmeslash Collection - A collection of One Shots that all involve Beta getting the girl, one way or the other. Adventure, fluff, smut, whatever. Stories below are a part of that.
Just Like Your Sister! - Beta's living and working in Meridian and has a chat with Milu that improves her life in ways she didn't think possible. Teen.
Difficult Choices - Aloy and Zo head back to the base and catch Beta making out with Milu and Sokorra. Fluff. Teen.
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.
I just went looking for the post on X and got a message that it didn't exist
I searched for Guri Singh and got search results showing his account existed, but when I clicked on it I got a message his account did not exist
Does anyone know if he made his account private or if he got nuked by Elon? Or do I just suck at X (because I never go there)?
Maybe this is my reflection of being into Dishonored for so long and it does this constantly as it's a core mechanic of the game to make you think about your actions impact the world, and who you are and that big choices don't matter as much as little one's and -
But Nil quietly does a thing that I always find refreshing in games. He looks straight past Aloy at you the player and goes 'killing is killing, and are you okay with that?'
I think on a surface level that line above can be him brushing off his crimes, and it certainly is to an extent, but the phrasing of it like that sticks in my mind especially.
Because it asks, very indirectly, what makes one kind of killing a crime, and one justified? Is it something that should be so negotiable? Is that better because all of a society got together and decided to slaughter is acceptable from time to time?
Does that somehow stop the grieving mother, father, spouse, sibling, child? Has not a crime been committed to them that shall never be compensated? By saying one is just and one isn't, we say that one is worth paying attention too and one isn't. Some lives are worth justice, then, and some aren't.
Nil as a character, offers no judgement on Aloy or the players actions. He is himself is much like players - he likes honing his skill, landing those combos in the right series to execute their execution in perfect hits. Nil enjoys it, savours it, like any gamer would. He does this vocally and eloquently.
Aloy wrinkles her nose and turns away from his glory, his enjoyment, as if that ultimately makes a difference in the end that killing is killing is killing. Killing is a cosmic horror, a truth once known, there can be no return, when you look into its eyes, and once you know that you can snuff out life it can never be unknown. Nil himself is that. A man who has stared in the Abyss and it stared back. Once human life can be taken, then society is by the same unable to return to the state before. Ursula K Le Guin asked that question way better than I ever could.
Aren't all wars a crime to someone? No matter who, when, how - someone has died, a life has been cut short unfairly. And long drawn out wars are even worse, it can rob a generation from existence, it can cause famines, disease, cause societies to shatter even if they never touched a weapon yourself. It can affect countries who never even fought.
But... if murder is wrong, then is it not always wrong? Why do some get to pretend they're so much less reprehensible than someone like Nil? Because they have an excuse? Because they didn't enjoy it? Then you're doing something awful and you don't even like it? Why?
Nil makes his line clear, he has spent time thinking about this - and wonders at those who haven't. He himself is clearly framed as distasteful in his plain blood-lust, and you are clearly meant to find it hard to stomach his words, and refuse to put yourself in the same category.
He is not lying, he is an honest killer. He is honest about exactly who and what he is. He even went to jail because he fully understood what he had done. He is completely aware that murder is wrong, ethically as a society, if not in his own moral core. But even his tone makes you question. Bandits are odorous scum in his words, and yet you can feel the rejection of the sentiment even as he says it from the tone he says it. Are they? These words barely even feel like his, I don't think he even cares, it feels always like the justification others need that he goes through the motions of for the sake of getting away with it.
In doing so, he shows the hypocrisy of the world and the conceit of the 'righteous killing' mentality. He wants you to know he does it for sport, and do not confuse him.
But Aloy, and thus the player? Have you thought about it? Have you considered where you stand? Have you even questioned why this is acceptable? Can you look at even a small group of people, and without knowing them, think 'yeah i can just kill everyone here, and i am 100% the better person for doing so'. Nil makes it clear he does this so he can avoid consequences because some lives are always worth less than others.
You can, of course, decide for yourself. But the question is posed, because it should always be asked. It's just a good writing beat that is framed well, in a way that is perfectly able to be disregarded so it doesnt weigh the story down, but its such a good moment that a question of true compassion and humanity is framed by someone who is a hairs breadth away from being a straight up serial killer simply because he found an outlet that society finds acceptable. It doesn't make a big song and dance of it either because it knows that's not what this game is about, the story is about progress and it's cost. Hanging onto the past vs mindless drive to the future.
But it asks that which always should be asked, when we naturalise killing: aren't all wars a crime to someone?
this reminds me of in burning shores when we find out Londra has been brainwashing Quen. when it's revealed that the process makes them super loyal and violent, and the victims have been posted as guards, Aloy and Seyka realise those are the people they've been killing.
Ashly Burch's line deliver is amazing here, Aloy's pause before "fighting" and the way her voice trails off 🤌. i really felt the guilt and horror.
personally i completed the entire burning shores main quest line before most of the side quests, meaning i learned this harrowing information and then went on to complete all the side quests afer. i tried to stealth them where possible but in some (e.g. when Otosu requests Aloy bring Lan back) you're forced to kill everyone in the camp otherwise the quest doesn't progress.
Aloy and Seyka's shared look made my skin crawl, realising i fell so easily into killing the NPCs before learning this, just like wiping out bandit and rebel camps in the other games. yes it is just a game, and yes the game forces you to do that by design, but it matters in a way.
i'm glad the developers explored the morality of this rather than just chucking in bandit/rebel/devotee camps for more in-game tasks to do with no commentary on what it means (through Nil, through giving Regalla and her rebels convincing motives and humanising idle dialogue, and most recently through Londra's brainwashing).
by the way something to keep in mind is that regardless of whether that transfem who got terminated did or did not break any rules, tumblr still passed over multiple nazis, sexual harassers, people making death threats, and so on that they have been ignoring reports on for months to prioritize terminating the transfem instead. they will pass over clear violations that have been reported for weeks and months to punish any random transfem on this site who didn't even have an account when those reports were made.
why is that? if it was just a matter of report inundation, of them being swamped and not getting around to it, then why are reports against transfems seemingly immune to those delays?
A Simple Favor (2018) - Old Acquaintance (1943) - Squid Game (TV 2021–2025) -Morocco (1930) - Now and Then (1995) - Victor/Victoria (1982) - She's the Man (2006) - Killing Eve (TV 2018–2022) - School of Rock (2003) - Sylvia Scarlett (1935) - Lullaby of Broadway (1951) - Flashdance (1983) - Annie Hall (1977) - The Hot Chick (2002) - Yentl (1983) - Notting Hill (1999)
Right now I’m thinking mid month and minimum 3 slots. Everything kinda hinges on this current job situation. Soon as I get that locked down, I’ll post specifics!
Be prepared with ideas and refs ahead of time as my spots filled up in a matter of hours before. If you don’t have refs ready upon submission, you will be sent a refund and waitlisted. I want to keep it fair for everyone and give plenty of early notice!
ALSO ADDING A NEW OPTION!
Phone Backgrounds. A great way to customize devices!
