i’m starting a movement to stop calling this shit “artificial intelligence” cause it’s fucking not. it’s not intelligent, and the things it produces are not informed by logical choices. it doesn’t know how to research sources for you. it doesn’t compose art thoughtfully or meaningfully.
call it machine-generated, text generator, chat bot, but it’s not intelligent.
I would absolutely LOVE IT if someone did fan art for my books! Fan fiction, too!
"the abused and enslaved in the red queen's court! all of you! stand up and fight! rise up against the bloody red queen. downal wyth bluddy behg hid!"
...books and pillows...a rainy first day of summer...
The novella I wrote for last year's Peachtober, The Hunt and the Haunting, is now available in ebook! It's a queer regency ghost story that I loved to write and hope you'll love to read.
Agnes Marchdale loved to tell fantastical stories. She never expected to find herself in one. Everything seems to be looking up for the Marchdale sisters after Marianne's engagement to the rich and handsome Lord Blackett. But when a long-buried scandal rears its head and threatens to overturn everything, Agnes must determine where truth lies or risk greater danger than she ever imagined. The Hunt and the Haunting is a story about ghosts, both literal and metaphorical; a story about the stories we love, the stories we believe, and the stories that shape the world around us.
You can pick up a copy at all of these storefronts, or directly from me on Ko-fi. Patreon & Ko-fi supporters get 50% off – here in the shop for Ko-fi members, and here are the instructions for Patreon members.
Note to self: I need to read this.
All throughout your life you’ve saved the life of the same person again and again. You eventually began joking that you are their guardian angel. When you died and entered heaven you were surprised to see them being berated by an angel. Apparently they were supposed to be your guardian angel.
It was instinct, by now; before I’d even thought about it I was moving, grabbing her arm and pushing her (gently, always so gently) behind me as I bristled up at the being of light. “Hey! You need to back off!”
The being’s head tilted to the side. “This is not your concern. This angel failed in its duties.”
The light from behind me (and she was always made of light too, always had been, I don’t know how I didn’t notice until now except somehow I think I did) dimmed. I could feel her shaking, fingers twisting in the folds of the diaphanous robes I’d found myself wearing on arrival. I planted my feet more firmly. “No, she hasn’t! You don’t know what you’re talking about! And even if she had, you still don’t get to talk to her like that. She’s good, she tries so hard-” I could hear my voice becoming shaky, angry tears threatening, and forced myself to take a deep breath. “No, you know what? I don’t care if you understand or not. I love her. I’m not going to let anyone disrespect her, whether it makes sense to you or not.”
Memories flashed through my head. Three years old, finding the toddler who’d wandered too far away from the adults and fallen from a tree, wrapping my pudgy baby arms around her and half-carrying, half-dragging her back to someone who could bandage her wounds. Eleven years old, standing over a crying girl and throwing rocks at the big boys who’d made her cry until they ran away. 18, buying beer late at night on a fake i.d., when the cashier whispered that the man who’d come in behind me always stayed too long, stared too hard, made comments that made her feel gross even after he’d left. I’d stayed with her, glowering at him with my phone out ready to record, and he bought his cigarettes meekly and left.
That was the day she finally told me her name.
There were more times: finding her stranded on the side of the road in the heat of summer and letting her sit in my air-conditioned car until the tow truck came. Finding her again in the dead of winter, hitchhiking, and giving her a ride to her motel. A freak accident, a limb cracking and falling from a tree: I reached out to pull the person in front of me out of the way, and I wasn’t even surprised to discover who I held in my arms.
That was when she first agreed to go on a date with me.
Later there were the homophobes, the bigots and racists who didn’t know what she was, exactly, but sensed that she wasn’t like them and hated her for it. The illness, when I spent hours filling out paperwork and screaming at corporations and government officials alike to get her on my insurance. The blood transfusions, the transplant. The home invasion, years later, when some asshole pointed a gun at my wife and I knew in that moment I could kill a man and never lose sleep over it. In our last years, when I found out they were hurting her, the nurses were hurting her, and everyone said I was too old, too weak and frail by now, to take care of her myself in our home, but I did. I did. To the end of our lives, I did.
And the secret, the secret is this: every time I did, she would look at me with those eyes made of light and she would smile, and everything in the world would be okay. Every time the world was too hard or too overwhelming, I would remember that she was in it and I was in it and we were in it together, that there was someone in this world who needed me and who I needed like I need air and sunlight, and I knew I could get through it.
I would fight God or the devil for her. I would certainly fight an angel.
The angel didn’t have much of a face, but I could still feel it frown. “Your life was destined to be hard, little one. To be full of struggle and pain, doubt and despair. This angel was assigned to guard and protect you. Instead it became yet another burden. Instead of easing your strife, you had to save and protect the very one who was supposed to do that for you.”
Oh, my dear one. I swallowed away the tears. I had to remain fierce. “Then she didn’t fail at all. She helped me find strength I wouldn’t have had otherwise. She kept me from giving up. She eased my strife, every day I was with her. Because of her, my life was worth living.”
The angel was silent, an inhuman silence that stretched into infinity. Finally, it spoke. “I have decided on a suitable punishment for the disgraced angel.” From behind me came a small gasp and I braced myself, ready to intercept, but the angel held up a hand. “For your failure to protect this mortal, you are hereby stripped of your status as a guardian angel. You will not be reassigned to a new mortal. Instead you will stay here and accompany this mortal soul through her afterlife, until such time as she decided you have made amends for your failure and releases you from her service.”
I blinked.
The angel, seemingly having said all there was to stay, turned to glide away. As it turned I swear I could see a glint that might have been a wink.
Finally allowing the tears to fall, I turned and wrapped my arms around my wife.
To anyone living in or near Frenchburg, Kentucky:
What do you think of a second hand book store and a craft store downtown?
It’s pride month, but that’s not the only sin we’re good at! And remember, you’re not answering for you, but for the person whose blog you’re seeing this on!
I'm Greed. I want all the Cottagecore home improvement stuffs.
PSA- this is going on right now. I wouldn't care if the stories linked to my AO3 or ffn account, but no, it's fully copied and pasted to this site. Three of mine were there. Make sure you check for yours, and write them an email to take it down!!
@jessicanjpa @edwardskhakipants @palmofafreezinghand @gisellelx @acewardcullen @therealvinelle share far and wide!!!!
FYI authors. A bunch of mine were posted here without my consent 😒
yeah uh... don't do this :)
as a fanfic writer! who has a few semi-abandoned fics! if you do this i will personally bite you with my teeth. you are disrespecting art and the love people put into their work by pretending that an AI can even compare to it
Saw my first post with someone admitting they used chatGPT to ‘write a fic’ which they then shared here on tumblr and on Ao3.
To be clear, using AI to churn out a piece of fiction is not writing.
Using a bot (possibly one that was trained using a scrape of Ao3, that is to say, the theft of work from every writer who has posted their work on Ao3) is NOT WRITING.
It is theft. It isn’t creation. It’s a regurgitation of the consumed collective work and effort and heart and time of every writer who has shared their work on Ao3.
‘I’m not a good writer’ is no excuse.
Want to be a writer? Put in the time everyone else does to practice.
Don’t feel confident in your work? Open yourself up to the same vulnerability and risk that the rest of us do.
You don’t get to use a fucking bot to vomit out an approximation of a story and pretend you’ve got skin in the game.
The sad thing? This bot-assembled fic wasn’t bad. It was bland, but it had internal logic, some passing context to character and canon. It wasn’t like those early AI art pieces that had surreal compositions and extra fingers. It wasn’t immediately obvious it was made by a bot.
In this instance the person who posted it admitted they had used a bot. Which, actually, I have some respect for. But it probably isn’t the first and it won’t be the last.
I don’t know that there’s a solution to this, but it is both hurting my heart and enraging me.
"what's your dream job??" Uhh to have 17 weird little hobbies that I don't have to be good at and hang out with friends. I get money via being the world's specialist little princess
To be an author, museum employee, and a freelance researcher for hire.
“Authors should not be ALLOWED to write about–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot
“I only read YA fantasy books because every classic novel or work of literary fiction is problematic and features–” you are an anti-intellectual and you are robbing yourself of the full richness of the human experience.
"you are functionally a conservative" is such a good and clarifying insult
Literally right after I saw this post, I saw another post in a discord chat for BOOK EDITORS in which an outspokenly liberal editor talked about how Nabokov should have never been published because he wrote about p*dophiles and described women's bodies in ways that made her uncomfortable. She described his writing as "objectively terrible" and said she wanted to burn his books. And other editors were bringing up classics they didn't like and talking about how they wanted to throw them in the trash. This wasn't like a light "unpopular opinion!" conversation. This was actual book editors talking about how books should be destroyed and censored.
There is something so scary and toxic in global culture right now. The revival of fascism is influencing everyone's mindset and approach to art, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.
I see far more books being censored today than when I was a kid. Librarians handed me The Catcher in the Rye, The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Animal Farm when I was literally 8-11. My mom would never have taken a book away from me. I read everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Qur'an to atheist texts under my desk at school. Teachers thought nothing of it or encouraged it. Books seemed universally acknowledged as sacrosanct to me.
Now I can't find any adults who don't hesitate or want to make exceptions when it comes to censorship. Even the most liberal social activist librarians I know go, "well except for book X..."
Functionally conservative. It's so important to have the language to express that.
Thank you for this addition!
lol name something more “functionally conservative” than thinking what you’ve written here applies to everyone except for … feminists
Right now it's a victim of DNS (Domain Name Service) spoofing. This means that a malicious party is trying to steal traffic from FFn by purchasing a very similar domain.
Its not this either. the web server that fanfiction.net is pointed at is just misconfigured. if you look the DNS resolution chain points correctly to the nameservers in the whois info:
[Whois info showing that the nameservers for fanfction.net point to: NS11.CONSTELLIX.COM NS21.CONSTELLIX.COM NS31.CONSTELLIX.COM NS41.CONSTELLIX.NET NS51.CONSTELLIX.NET NS61.CONSTELLIX.NET]
If you then do a DNS lookup for www.fanfiction.net it hits those constellix.com nameservers and sends you to www.fanfiction.net.cdn.cloudflare.net:
This is perfectly normal in cloudflare enterprise. The issue is the hosting company didn't set up a redirect from fanfiction.net to www.fanfiction.net
Hanlion's razor at work.
Still seeing the posts saying it's either completely gone or maliciously encroached, when, no, it looks like it's a simple mistake somewhere
but you should still back your stuff up
