shovel

dnp blog: cheekybumsecks | they/them | used to be trash4bechloe but now this is my writing blog/main | zhovel on ao3

[tosharchives]

i have the kind of melancholy that attracts me to large bodies of water.

[writingdose]

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

[nibeul]

you know what, fuck you *unkills your character*

[nibeul]

[nibeul]

this is the funniest fucking reply, everyone else go home

[honestlyprettychill]

I did a Dan and Phil/Voltron crossover….. because i have no self control and too much time XD

I could see Keith and Lance doing a gaming channel together XD  I’d totally watch it!  And Dan and Phil in Paladin armor??? good shit XD

[thewollfgang]

Ao3 Officially Exiting Beta!

They grow up so fast :')

[zhovel]

coming back to ao3/tumblr after years of being away feels so good. i'm reliving my teenagehood but now i'm on antidepressants.

[cruuelsister-moved]

will people ever learn that animation is not an inferior medium of storytelling and actually some stories are fundamentally much better suited for animation and trying to make them live action might be doing them a huge disservice

[brockpkmn-deactivated20221115]

ok but legitimately i think the reason why kids aren’t taking internet safety seriously is because the people who are telling us not to put our personal information out seem so out of touch. no one acknowledges the possibility of meeting very real teenaged friends online, they always say that everyone you meet is a 40 year old white man in disguise. because they aren’t acknowledging things we know are true, it becomes a lot easier to dismiss the rest of what they’re saying as well. internet safety lessons absolutely must keep up with the times and acknowledge the internet’s capacity for good if you want kids to take to heart warnings about its capacity for bad.

[ajthebumblebee]

Some actual safety tips for teenagers:

1. Have proof they're a teenager first. More than just a picture, have a video call with them.

2. If you want to meet up with them, have your parents or a trusted adult come with you. Even if they are a proven teenager, its still good to have supervision in case any issues happen.

3. If you are talking to an adult, and they start being sexual in any way, you run the fuck away. It doesn't matter if they're 40 or 20. An adult inherently has a power dynamic that teenagers do not. And its up to the adult to act responsible about it. There's exceptions of course, if you're 16 and dating an 18 year old, that's not a problem, we're not talking about that.

4. Being in a server with adults or ran by adults is not inherently bad. Talking to adults is not inherently a problem, and will likely happen in any number of Discord servers. It is only an issue when they are acting sexual and show predatory behavior.

5. Look out for grooming behavior. It can be difficult, because at first it seems like innocuous behavior, like complimenting or giving gifts. Especially if you feel lonely and have low self esteem. And groomers actively target people like that.

If they start trying to isolate you, talk sexual with you, state they depend on you for emotional needs, blame you for their own actions, try to be secretive about the relationship- Then you need to talk to people you trust, block the perpetrator, and call the police on them.

6. If this does happen to you, remember this: It is not your fault. Even if you didn't listen to a single thing listed here, it is not your fault. It is the fault of the adults who knew better, and didn't care. It's not your fault.

[tomboyjessie13]

To my followers: if any of you guys are underaged, please be very VERY careful on here, and don’t fall for any of the tricks the groomer would use on you, just block them and report them.

[shego1142]

I think, as someone who has been online since I was 10 years old, that there are some very important things to add to this but all my points are pretty circumstantial and nuanced so…. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I would say never lie about your age, because you really just shouldn’t, but as someone who grew up online and who frequently lied about my age I know it’s going to happen so these are kind of just guidelines to keep in mind if you find yourself in that situation, especially if you feel backed into a corner by your own lie.

Don’t lie to adults asking about your age in discord servers (or the like) especially not just because you’re wanting to be included in an adult/sexual space. Don’t do that. That will lead to bad things all around and can get you and others seriously hurt. Find friends your age and make a nsfw server if you want to but don’t lie about your age in that situation please

Don’t feel the need to give anyone your age. The Internet is spectacular for its ability to let you be anonymous. Yes some people may decide they don’t want to interact with you if you refuse to let them know your age but that is something you just have to be okay with. It’s alright to not be able to hang out with everyone right now and no one is entitled to information about you.

If you do lie about your age in order to insinuate yourself in a fandom space that is 18+, no one can actually stop you but be aware of the dangers that come with that please. Adults who think you’re an adult are going to hold you to the same level of responsibility for your actions as any other person they assume is an adult. But you very likely won’t pass as well as you think and predators can be hyper aware of stuff like that and will attempt to use it against you. If you’ve gotten yourself into that situation be wary of who you’re speaking to, and yes I am speaking from experience, you may think you seem like an adult but you can still have subtle tells that predators look for. They will try to exploit you into telling them more about yourself. Don’t hand out your information (age, birthday, private email, home address or phone number)

Be aware of the dangers that come with interacting with an adult/nsfw/18+ fandom period. Like I said, I’d love to just tell you to not to, to wait till your 18, that the fandom will still be there, but this is addressing people who have already put themselves in this situation. So just please be extra safe if you’re doing shit you know you shouldn’t be. Do NOT approach an adult irl just because you see them wearing merch of something you’re a fan of if you know that that fandom is one you shouldn’t be a part of to begin with. Sure, they may be perfectly fine people but they also may be predators and you have no way of knowing.

The last one happened to me once and for me it was just extremely awkward and uncomfortable but I was hyper aware of how wrong it could have gone for the underaged person in question.

I was wearing merch of a video game character from a nsfw video game. The merch was totally innocent/innocuous and only fans of the game (all of whom should be 18+) would recognise the character.

Someone who couldn’t have been older than 13 approached me and started trying to talk to me about the game. It was very obvious that they had played the game, loved the game, and wanted friends to talk to about it.

But I am 26 years old and I have a responsibility to not engage with someone who’s underage in this instance.

Was it my responsibility to not wear that merch? No. I am not here to parent someone else’s kid.

Was it the underaged person’s responsibility to not play the game? Sort of, at the age that I think they were, it probably should have been their parent’s responsibility to check what games they were downloading.

Was it the underaged person’s responsibility, having already insinuated themselves into an adult fandom, to not approach an adult in that situation. Yes.

I ended up very awkwardly explaining to them that I did not want to talk to them about the game, and that they should never approach an adult about a fandom if they know that the fandom is not a space that’s meant for them. Especially in the way that they did, they had left their parents and found me on the other side of the store. I was horrified and frankly terrified for them.

Thankfully they did seem to understand the severity of that warning and they took me seriously.

Thankfully it was me they approached and not someone who would have kidnapped them.

I cant stop anyone from doing stuff online that they shouldn’t, but I do think you should be aware of what to do to get yourself out of situations like that.

You shouldn’t be putting yourself into fandom spaces that are not meant for you, but if you’re going to ignore me on that and do it anyway then do it as safely as possible. Be hyper aware of who you’re talking to, don’t give out your identifying information and NEVER approach an adult irl.

Also, if an adult asks you to lie about your age to “infiltrate” a discord server or whatever it is I’ve seen going on lately in certain fandom spaces, do not listen to that adult. Block them.

They’re not being responsible or looking out for you or your safety and whatever “cause” or “reason” or “crusade” they’ve given you is not at all as important as your safety and feelings.

The Internet can be a great place to connect with great people, and I promise not every adult online is a creeper or a horrible person, but you have to be safe and aware of who you’re talking to, what you’re talking to them about, and what information you’re giving them.

[doppelutiful]

Hello, guys. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but in my beloved, you’d think civilised, beautiful country, located in central Europe, Poland, the basic human rights are about to be taken away from women. Why is that? The Polish government, inspired mainly by the Catholic Church (that has definitely too much power in Poland), has created an anti-abortion project. For now, abortion in Poland is legal in case of rape or if the mother’s/child’s life is in danger. If the anti-abortion project comes through (which is very likely) the situation of Polish women will change dramatically:

- aborting a pregnancy that has started because of rape will no longer be legal (3 months to 5 years of prison for the mother and the doctor),

- aborting a pregnancy that endangers the mother’s life will no longer be legal (3 months to 5 years of prison for the mother and the doctor),

- aborting a pregnancy in case of a fatal disease of the fetus will no longer be legal (3 months to 5 years of prison for the mother and the doctor),

- the project says that whoever puts the woman in a situation of a probable miscarriage could be charged of 3 years in prison, which in practice means that some of the medical exams (like the prental exam which helps to indicate if the fetus is healthy) could not be available because of the doctors being afraid of going to prison,

- it all also means that men could get easily away with rape, since the women would be afraid of going to the police in case they got pregnant and didn’t want to get birth to the rapist’s child (which they will now be forced to do),

- also, on the side of this project, the Catholic Church wants to make in vitro even less available for families struggling to have children, since apparently “it’s basically just killing unconcieved babies” (?? fuck logic),

- what’s more, they’ve recently withdrawn chemical contraception for women from the pharmacies (things like spermicidal gels, liquids, creams, vaginal suppositories) cause they’re apparently “dangerous for women’s health”, so now the only contraception available without a prescription are condoms,

- don’t even get me started with the level of sexual education in Poland which is basically non-existent. Recently, just this week, a 12 year old girl gave birth to a child. A fucking 12-yr old. She had sex (they said it was consensual, but who fucking even believes this shit) with a 29 year old man. The doctors said she didn’t even know what was going on during the labour, she of course had to have C-section because her body was obviously not ready to have a baby at such young age. There are so many cases like this.

- all of this is supposed to “help” with the demographic decline and to “encourage” people to have more kids. Let me tell you something - if anything this encourges me to is to not have babies  a t    a l l.

Let me also show you some of the social media responses of “pro-life” activists and give you a glimpse of what kind of shit Polish women have to deal with:

“If the pregnancy started because of rape, the only victim is the child that can lose its life.”

“If abortion is such a dramatic decision to make, it’ll be better to not let women make it. To ban abortion.”

“Womanhood is all about being in service of life. Women/female MPs who are against life, contradict their own womanhood.”

“All of these women screaming that “their belly, their choice” [should know] that the life in their bellies belongs only to the child. Selfish women, assassins like during Holocaust. You just lend your body to give new life. You should be happy you were not killed. There should be no abortion.”

“Abortion is barbaric (…) and it will be remembered as equally bad as genocide and gas chambers.”

I found these in 5 minutes. Women are treated with no respect, they’re believed to be stupid and as not able to make their own choice about their own body. Men leading our country (most of them are very religious) want to decide about what we should do with our bodies. Please, help us. Spread the word. We are trying to fight this, but we’re in the minority… The world needs to know!!

[a-pirate-my-hearties]

Guys, please signal boost this, it’s important to us!!!

[guerrillatech]

[annoyingalchemist]

Ok so can someone explain to me how cryptocurrency pollutes? Like what crazy calculations are they running that they need enough brainpower to significantly effect things? Like I’m assuming what’s causing the pollution is increased electricity consumption but… how does sending lil pretend money tokens back and forth or whatever cause so much pollution?

Also, what the fuck is “mining”? How d'you mine… like bitcoin is not a naturally occurring resource, and I assume that you can’t just make it, cause that would make it instantly worthless… help?

[commiemartyrshighschool]

So you get “coins” as a reward for performing the cryptographic calculations necessary to update the public ledger which is the blockchain. This is, by design, an increasingly complex and resource intensive process to slow down the collection of (intentionally finite) coins.

So every transaction with bitcoins requires the ledger to be updated with the current ownership of every already existing bitcoin, which also requires encrypting and decrypting a bunch of information and sharing it across the public ledger. So every transaction made with bitcoins increases the energy requirements of updating the ledger making it harder and harder to complete the latest version and get the coin which is a reward for doing that work.

There’s a lot I don’t fully understand myself but the long and short of it is that the actual value of any crypto currency is pretty much just what people agree on, except instead of a fiat currency where a government says it’s worth something and a mint that makes physical currency, there’s a bunch of nerds who agree that solving certain math problems is worth rewarding.

[brokenmachine3553]

Feeling like adding on for a bit of context, I know it’s kind of hard to understand how mining for really any kind of crypto is hard to imagine, but seeing what a bitcoin mining facility looks like for the first time really helped me realize just how energy intensive it is.

See all these warehouses? They’re quite literally filled to the brim with specialized computers that do nothing but mine, each one filled with thousands of these computers, just row after row of this:

So all the power consumption winds up adding up like crazy.

[white-throated-packrat]

Yep, that’s why cryptocurrency and NFTs are considered major contributors to pollution – because the energy needs of all those computers doing the calculation are equivalent to a medium sized country. Currently, crypto consumes more energy than Argentina.

[ralfmaximus]

Guess what’s inside a lot of mining rigs? Gowan, guess.

Graphics cards! 

Lots and lots of these puppies side by side, spinning their little fans as fast as they can go because as it turns out: GPUs are perfect for doing the calculations required for mining cryptocurrency.

Which means amateur miners buy a lot of these things.

So many, in fact, that there is now (May 2021) a world-wide shortage of NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards and building a new gaming rig is damn near impossible because of the shortage. 

OR you can pay a ridiculously inflated price by GPU scalpers on eBay.

Seriously. Places that sell GPUs impose quantity limits because if they don’t… some crypto asshole will buy out their entire stock in one go.

But the “good” news is that the professional miners (like the Bitmain site up there, in the photos) use dedicated ASIC mining rigs which don’t use consumer GPUs. But (bad news) they DO use the same sort of chips that NVIDIA & AMD rely on to make their products, which just starves the supply pipeline at a different point.

Bottom line: not only does cryptocurrency mining consume terawatts of electricity, it also consumes megatons of computer hardware. Which is expensive to produce (in resource terms, like rare metals, petroleum, water, electricity, paper) and will, someday, require even MORE resources to recycle. Or else it ends up in a landfill.

Note that current dedicated mining rigs are so highly specialized they are useless for anything other than mining. They cannot be easily repurposed to  (say) sequence DNA or fold proteins for miracle cures.

What a waste.

[smute]

was anyone gonna tell me that some nerds peepee poopoo “currency” is the reason why graphics cards are sold out everywhere or was i supposed to find that out from comments under a screenshot from twitter user whoreganic cop puncher explaining how bitcoin is just an artificially complicated math problem

[hotvampireadjacent]

Also I’ve read be very wary about buying used graphic cards cause there’s a chance it’s one that’s mostly heavily used from one of these bastards. These thing are very heavily used so a used one sold by one of these guys would be on its last leg of life from being on 24/7

Make sure there’s a return policy just be very careful if you’re buying used.

[commiemartyrshighschool]

To be more fair than Crypto miners deserve, they’re only one of the factors driving the current chip shortage.

The other issues are both related to the pandemic. The first one is that manufacturing of a many things, especially cars, slowed down quite a bit until recently when the factories reopened. But so many reopened at the same time and went full blast that the demand far outstripped the supply, a supply already reduced by the shutdown of those factories.

The other bottleneck is literal mining. Computer chips rely on silicon and various metals, especially gold and copper to conduct electricity to do their work. In normal times this means that crypto’s environmental impact is even higher than just the energy requirements. But in the meantime the mines and refineries that provide the raw materials were also shut down in many cases due to the pandemic, squeezing the supply further.

Mining shutdowns have also caused a huge shortage of ammunition in the US (brass bullet casings need copper). Which means for anybody wanting to buy consumer electronics of a reasonable complexity you’re competing against both ends of the libertarian spectrum, the crypto techies and the gun nuts.

[blackwoolncrown]

Really glad someone brought this home to actual mining, and I want to show you what the mines look like:

These are silica mines, necessary for making ALL things requiring silicon, among other things.

These are rare-earth mineral mines.

Both are required for the manufacture of computer technologies. Both requre excavating huge amounts of earth, decimating all life in that area and more often than not, ruining land that is supposed to be stewarded by indigenous people.

They’re very, very bad for the environment.

This is where the ‘online’ world comes from. It’s not another place. Every transaction, every pixel comes from the ground.

So yeah, crypto mining is definitely deceptive. That ‘value’ isn’t coming from nowhere. It’s ripped from the earth.

[penpolyon]

So Iain up Earth’s rarest reasorces to make nerd horoscopes, got it.

[upsettingandunfortunateclasshate]

This educated the fuck out of me. Thank you

[myoxisbroken-deactivated2024022]

[ao3commentoftheday]

image description: a tweet from Ceinwen Langley from Oct. 2020. “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but writing is hard because you care about it and you want it to be good, not because you’re bad at it.”

[homo-sex-shoe-whale]

I’ve done something.. a little weird

[going2hell4everythingbutbeingbi]

seeing the fandoms people write fics for is honestly more concerning than the fact you made this.

[oofmilk]

[Video ID: Various screenshots of Ao3 fanfiction titles to the lyrics of Toxic by Britney Spears. Toxic is playing in the background, and the fanfiction titles pop up in time with the music. End ID]

[gracie-buns]

Okay.. so suppose you’re a fanfiction writer….

And I’m a fan of your stories…

would it be alright to bribe you with a fanart that i made,

so I can read the next chapter? 

:) just asking…. but srsly tho… can you bribe a fanfiction writer with fanart of their stories?

[goficyourself]

Yessssss bribe ussssssss

[writing-in-the-grave]

Someone once gave me fan art of a story I finished years ago and I immediately wrote more, almost exclusively for them.

So yes.

[labelleizzy]

Hell yeah bribe us

[northstarfan]

Anyone who’s getting ideas - yes, I am extremely susceptible to bribes! XD

[bananonbinary]

i just saw the tag “canon complicit” instead of “canon compliant” and im laughing its like “canon is a criminal act that i unfortunately support with this fic”

[quillingmesoftly]

The Three Grades:

Canon Compliant: “This fic goes along with canon.” (Because I like it? Because I’m too tired to disagree by writing my own fic? Who knows? The author may or may not tell us.)

Canon Compatible: “Listen, I know it ISN’T canon, but think of it as Microsoft Office for Mac, it’s COMPATIBLE with canon, and that counts.”

Canon Complicit: “I have not died a hero, so I have become an accessory to the Villainy of Canon.”

[faustandfurious]

Canon Compatible is a great term for when your fic is Probably Not What Tolkien Would Have Wanted but it doesn’t really contradict anything in canon either

[quillingmesoftly]

#you can install this fic without canon crashing and that’s what matters

[handsomeboymodelingschool]

You need to draw and make art or else all the images will stay in your head and you'll get sick

[festival-of-pudding]

is there anything better as a writer than an AO3 message that someone went through all your fics in a fandom? “[person] left kudos on [story1]. [person] left kudos on [story2]. [person] left kudos on [story3].” GLORIOUS. like you actually read words I wrote and thought “hmm, yes good, I will continue” and then did so. magical. i saw some Youths out there afraid this is “stalking” but as an Old let me tell you au contraire, it is a rare sweet nectar that warms our ancient dead hearts 💖

[vodkassassin]

Oh I always get super flustered whenever I see a long string of notifications in my email detailing the path the same person took through all/most of my writing. If you do this just imagine a very deeply blushing Vod who is squealing into a pillow