Word Hoard

Began as a record of words that I have lost, recaptured, or am still hunting; mutated into random thoghts on fandom, stories, and theology (which, for me, are much the same thing)

[wordsthativelost]

Yes, I know that algorithms are evil and tumblr sure is a website, but sometimes the serendipitous joy is real.

Like this morning it recommended "cooking with leftovers" as being like "NASA" and after a moment of startle I realized, "naaah, that's totally legit."

[cryptiddies]

Hey shout out to every custodial/sanitation worker taking out and cleaning up literal hot garbage so that the rest of us can go about our summer days like it doesn’t exist

[cryptiddies]

Glad to see this resonated with someone, respect custodial staff or die<3

[beholdingslut]

in absolute tears about the pride module at my work

[dikdikpronouncedxylophone]

[bigfoots-biggest-fan]

HOLY SHIT GUYS, I WAS INSPIRED BY THIS POST TO TRY MAKE THE SONG AND YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE THE SCREAM I SCRUMPT WHEN I DRAGGED THE TRAINING AUDIO OVER THE BACKING TRACK AND IT LINED UP PERFECTLY

Visit Original Link

Tempted to actually put this on spotify so I can secretly stream it at work...

Tagging @batshit-auspol because as an Australian you're the only big account I know who might share (sorry).

[punkrorschach]

happy first day of pride everyone

[mister-a-z-fell]

It’s not right, yet. But it’s getting there.

[justalurkr]

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.

[irispurpurea]

This is the paper. It's excellent, highly recommend reading it.

I remember reading about Gebru's firing but I had no idea this was the paper she was fired over.

[bitterkarella]

Midnight Pals: The Pope

Pope Leo: eyyy its me, da chicago pope William Peter Blatty: gasp! your holiness! Blatty: what an honor! i Blatty: i just Blatty: i just Blatty: wow! Blatty: [geneflecting wildly] just wow!

Blatty: c'mon everyone, show some respect! Blatty: it's the pope! Barker: cool, good for him Blatty: oh my god Blatty: he doesn't mean that, your holiness Pope Leo: eyyy its all good Blatty: [geneflecting intensifies] oh my god, he's got the patience of a saint!

Pope Leo: eyyy listen i got somethin' ta say Blatty: listen up people! the pope's got something to say! Poe: oh he's got an encyclical? Pope Leo: dat's right Pope Leo: yeah i got your encyclical right here!!

Pope Leo: ok listen up yous guys Pope Leo: da chicago pope is talkin' Pope Leo: first of all, be it known through alla da whole world of catholicism Pope Leo: dat the only way to eat a dog is wit' tomato wedges an pickled peppers Pope Leo: ketchup is heresy Blatty: very wise, very wise!

Pope Leo: now second of all Pope Leo: i gots some words about all this here AI Pope Leo: in fact it reminds me of a quote by da smartest guy i've ever known Blatty: ah yes yes Blatty: you speak of Jesus Christ of course Pope Leo: nope Pope Leo: i'm talkin' gandalf Blatty:

Blatty: what Pope Leo: dat's right Pope Leo: in da immortal word of gandalf da gray Pope Leo: "It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set" Pope Leo: think about it

GRR Martin: hey jirt did you hear JRR Tolkien: what? Martin: you got quoted by the pope Tolkien: i got quoted by the pope? Martin: yeah Tolkien: THE pope? Martin: yeah Tolkien: the pope in rome?? the holy pontiff??? god's ambassador on earth????? THAT pope??????? Martin: yeah

Tolkien: well well well Tolkien: now look who's laughing! Tolkien: hmm hey clive CS Lewis: what Tolkien: remind me, has the archbishop of whatever ever quoted aslan? Lewis: Tolkien: i'm sorry i can't hear you Tolkien: what was that again? Lewis: no Tolkien: ha ha that's what i thought!

Tolkien: oh it's no big deal Tolkien: just the top guy in catholicism talkin' about gandalf Tolkien: nope nope not a big deal at all Tolkien: sorry you can never experience that, clive CS Lewis: Tolkien: but that's what you get for picking anglicanism Tolkien: lmao loser ass religion

CS Lewis: hey! it's a perfectly valid faith! Tolkien: yeah whatever Tolkien: "anglicanism" Tolkien: lol you don't even know what you're getting

[wordsthativelost]

As a Midwesterner, an Anglican, and a fan of both Tolkien and Lewis, this is all 100% correct

[animentality]

[eden-4004]

"It doesn't have to be happy to be good"

How about "it doesn't have to be tragic to be good"

Or "it doesn't have to be bittersweet to be meaningful"

OR "It doesn't have to end on some vague idea of souls and reincarnation for the characters' love to be deep and valid"

[no-luscinia-no-amore]

"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy."

Ursula K LeGuin (the queen of fiction)

[snogfairy]

they were just some guys. the whole point was that they were just some guys. they met in Eden. Aziraphale didn't like Crowley because he met him as an angel and saw the good in him. he met him as a demon on a random day that was the most important day in the beginning of the world because they both made it that way. they met and they quite simply hit it off. they kept meeting again and again because they sought each other out, not because some red string of fate twirled by god forced them together. two like-minded emissaries on earth. they liked each other from the start and neither felt bad about it at all. they both recognized that angels and demons were the same. they were equals. they challenged each other and grew together but also they were lazy bastards who didn't care about humans all that much. they cared about their earthly pleasures, like driving irresponsibly fast and hoarding treasures. they wanted to save the earth mostly for egoistical reasons, though humanity as a whole and as a concept had also grown dear to them. they were never more important than anyone else. they were not god's best or specialest little angels or grim-dark generals or leaders of armies or people called upon to make decisions on behalf of anyone. they weren't even good at what they were supposed to do, often consciously so. one was not better or smarter or more right than the other. they were some guys and they didn't give a fuck and they gave all the fucks and cared so much and they were truly, absolutely bastards worth knowing. their friendship and love story was so grand because it was not grand. they were supposed to be just some guys.

[sightkeeper]

Chosen Faces 125

This comic is a Good Omens AU wherein Aziraphale is an eldritch horror pretending to be an angel. Updates early on Patreon.

First - Previous - Next Masterpost - Patreon - Ko-Fi

[wordsthativelost]

THEY'RE BACK

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

[aivelin]

The Shuttered Garden: How the Good Omens Finale Betrayed its Humanistic Roots

Text: Aivelin Illustration: a-ida

The series finale of Good Omens dropped this Wednesday, leaving the fandom shaken and in absolute distress. The audience reaction was immediate, driving the Rotten Tomatoes score for Season 3 down to a disappointing 36%. The online debate grew so heated and overwhelmed with grief that numerous fan accounts faced 24-hour social media bans for their highly emotional confessions.

Viewers are highly divided. While a fraction accepts the heavy ending as a necessary evil, the overwhelming sentiment across platforms is utter bewilderment and heartbreak: "These characters do not feel like the ones we grew to love in previous seasons!"

This raises painful, critical questions: Is this sudden shift in characterization a narrative misstep? Is the tragic, suicidal ending a harsh subversion of the original book, which famously promised a comforting happily ever after?

To find the answer, one must look closely at who held the creative reins for the scripts of Seasons 2 and 3. By analyzing the writing credits, clear and undeniable patterns emerge, linking these distressing plot choices directly to Neil Gaiman’s broader, often dark and subversive, body of work.

The Solitary Vision and the Realigned Mold

While the first season captured the shared spirit of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s 1990 novel, the subsequent seasons belong to Gaiman’s solitary vision. When viewed alongside his wider world of storytelling, such as The Sandman, American Gods, and Stardust, the tragic fractures in Aziraphale and Crowley’s bond lose their surprise. Gaiman’s worlds are populated by immortal beings who are deeply fractured at best and cruel at worst. In these narratives, it is almost a rule that celestial entities will take advantage of the hearts that love them, turning devotion into a tool before abandoning those souls to a devastating fate.

Crucially, Gaiman always veils this emotional cruelty behind high-minded dilemmas. The act of abandonment is never framed as simple coldness; instead, it is masked as a profound moral crisis ("We cannot be together because I am a god and you are human"), a sacrifice of monumental importance ("I must leave our future to save my kingdom"), or an unyielding divine necessity. Even when Gaiman’s romances lack outward malice, they are consistently denied peace. In Stardust, the mortal husband passes away, leaving his immortal, celestial wife to endure eternity in silent, isolated grief. By transforming Aziraphale into a colder, more emotionally distant figure who abruptly leaves Crowley for a heavenly promotion, Gaiman is merely reshaping Good Omens to fit his favorite creative blueprint.

Deeply Pessimistic Parallels

Ultimately, the ending of Good Omens Season 3 and the conclusion of The Sandman reveal deeply pessimistic parallels. The Sandman closes with its protagonist suffering the consequences of his own rigid nature, forced by higher powers into self-destruction so that his kingdom might survive. In the wake of this death, the universe offers a surrogate replacement - a new entity stripped of the original’s memories, whom the remaining characters are forced to accept despite their lingering grief. 

Aziraphale’s sudden, illogical decision to leap at Heaven’s offer mirrors this exact brand of narrative cruelty. Neither Aziraphale nor Crowley deserved to have their hard-won autonomy stripped away for the sake of a grandiose self-sacrifice. 

A Profound Departure from Terry Pratchett

This shift represents a profound departure from the late Terry Pratchett’s fundamental worldview. Pratchett harbored a deep-seated aversion to suicide tropes and grand, sacrificial violence in fiction. His works respected the dignity of both life and death. In his narrative, the Apocalypse is defeated not through self-sacrifice or bloodshed, but by the quiet resilience and stubborn pragmatism of ordinary people. The first season beautifully honored this philosophy, as the Antichrist and a group of children stopped the Apocalypse through sheer, down-to-earth humanity.

The subsequent seasons discard this logic entirely, altering the very cosmology of the universe. In Season 1, God was an infallible, detached observer whose ineffable plan quietly empowered the right people at the right moment to prevent ruin. By Season 3, God is reframed as a petulant, semi-malicious entity capable of erasing existence on a whim.

Furthermore, while Pratchett and Gaiman likely brainstormed the concepts of the South Downs cottage and the conflict between Heaven, Hell and Earth together, Pratchett would never have designed an intentionally suicidal and destructive endgame. In his philosophy, survival is achieved through an attachment to mundane, earthly joys. In the first season, Crowley is saved from hellfire by his love for his car and his human-like imagination, while Aziraphale survives because of his eccentric, earthly devotion to collecting rare books.

Conclusion: Fanfiction or Harsh Reality

A true thematic continuation of both authors' visions would look radically different. It would find Aziraphale and Crowley left alone in a quiet bookshop for eternity, weaving their magical memories and shared love for humanity together to rewrite every lost book back into a brand-new universe. If that choice ultimately stripped them of their divinity and left them mortal, it would be a logical, bittersweet happily-ever-after within the sanctuary of a beautiful, earthly garden.

Instead, Gaiman has opted for character regression and profound emotional devastation. To pretend that Aziraphale's betrayal of Crowley and their martyrdom makes narrative sense within the established logic of Season 1 is an exercise in denial. Audiences are left with a stark choice: either view everything past the first season as high-budget, angst-driven fanfiction, or accept a harsher reality. The original, humanistic spirit of Good Omens died with Terry Pratchett, leaving behind a cold universe engineered for heartbreak.

[themostineptthateverstepped]

So you know why I love Good Omens?

Because it's HAPPY.

I am tired of watching shows and films that think that the only way to be compelling or "edgy" is to showcase abusive relationships and torture and kill their protagonists.

Good Omens is compelling because it shows genuine love, respect, and kindness when it would have been so easy to show literally anything else.

Crowley, a demon, doesn't lie to Aziraphale, doesn't hurt him or trick him, doesn't disrespect or power-trip him; he cares about him and treats him well. Aziraphale, an angel, never for a moment rejects Crowley for being a demon, he doesn't try to change him, tell him he is wrong or attempt to "save" him, but instead recognizes all of the good in him and treats him well.

The only unhealthy relationships are between heaven and hell, and they FREE THEMSELVES OF THESE ABUSES.

The whole thing is filled with healthy relationships of all kinds.

Adam and the Them? Even though Adam is seen as the leader of the group, he takes this as a responsibility to provide his friends with the best games and bring them joy, not as a means of controlling them.

Witches and witchfinders fall in love.

No one is tortured or tormented, the world does not end, and a fucking nightingale sings in Berkeley Square.

Good Omens was the first time I have watched a series that didn't leave me tense wondering when the hurt was going to start. I actually realized how emotionally abusive media has become, and that is so fucked up.

[wordsthativelost]

ALL OF THIS How we feeling after Season 3, fam?

[baggvinshield]

because it already was a real world. because the humans and all the life of the earth and the angels and demons were already real. just because they were created by a sadistic, psychopathic omnipotent being for a cynical, selfish purpose does not mean those people didn't have free will, and it certainly doesn't mean they weren't real. that was the whole point of the apple business, that was the whole reason that Aziraphale and Crowley could never really change them, try as they might to follow the orders of their respective head offices (or not). it's why Adam Young didn't need an upbringing by a demon to make mistakes with his power, or an upbringing by an angel to choose to reject it. he was already human, and real. it's why Crowley and Aziraphale loved each other at all, because they were already real, too, and yeah, they also had free will, which is why they chose "to the world", and each other. the point is that it was all worth saving, whatever its flaws.

I utterly reject the ill-conceived, capitalist, nihilistic, filmed & aired "finale" of this story as the anti-life, anti-humanist propaganda that it is.

the world is always worth saving, no matter who or what has tampered with, exploited, or tried to destroy it. that was & is the real message of Good Omens.

[olfactoryventriloquism]

So, I’ve been obsessed with Pratchett since I was 15. That’s 23 years for those keeping count. I just finished GO3 and these are my initial thoughts:

Crowley and Aziraphale becoming human: I don’t love, but you could argue that that was what he planned, and I would buy it. It does follow some of his themes.

But there is a knife’s edge that Pratchett balanced between fury and compassion. He absolutely loved humanity, but he also hated what humans did to each other out of malice, spite, or even laziness. Good Omens the novel was filled to bursting with that.

The end here lacked all of that somehow. God in S1 is unknowable, but God is S3 is just a capricious bitch who seems to have it out for Crowley specifically and through him Aziraphale. The viewer certainly gets angry at God, but the narrative seems to be that, while cold, she is doing the right thing and giving them their happy ending. And while Crowley expresses compassion for humanity, it falls on such deaf ears that the narrative doesn’t actually support that.

The closing sentiment seems to be that we can make their lives better by just erasing all their trauma and baggage. No. Sam Vimes did not pull himself out of the gutter and bodily hold himself out of it every day to be told that actually amnesia would be best. If you wanted to make them human: make them keep their memories. That would have been fine.

Terry would have Crowley and Aziraphale say “fuck you” to God and protect the earth as it was. The way they protected Job’s children. The way they did at Tadfield Airbase. Here they just throw in the towel and start a new universe. They accept their failure so quickly as to be farcical.

And you will never ever convince me that TERRY PRATCHETT would have allowed the words “a story shouldn’t live past its ending” to be spoken without the speaker being immediately eaten by a banshee.

[gabe-dasha]

It's been almost 48 hours. I have processed the finale. I'm past my grievances. I've ran out of the conventional stages of grief and I'm currently on the secret 6th one. It's time for memes

[gabe-dasha]

Alternatively

:)

[gabe-dasha]

By the way

[depsidase]