"If you devote a massive amount of energy to showing—to yourself and others—that you are not responsible for bad things that happen, you will put everyone around you on a defensive footing."

"so you want me to lie down and take the blame for everything that goes wrong?"

No. No. No. No. You do not need to frame it this way. It is possible to see blame as a question not worth asking, and it is vitally important to get in the habit of viewing blame as a question that is only sometimes-relevant. For the sake of your own sanity and your good relationships with others.

AI and Data Scraping on the Archive

An update regarding the OTW’s position on AI and scraping on AO3: https://otw.news/04ba07

For those in the tags and comments on these posts calling for a ban on AI-generated fics on AO3, I certainly understand. I have no desire to see AI-generated fics, and would like us to have better tools to filter them out. However, I think we should consider what our actual options are here to create a good experience on AO3 for readers and authors. It seems to me that all the tools out there for detecting AI-generated content are laughably bad right now, with many false positives. Given the weakness of AI-detecting tools, as well as the spam comments people are already getting about these tools on works on AO3, I would be very hesitant to create a system that could be used as vector for harassing people in this way.

We can demand an AI ban, and we can say that AI-created works are bad, but what’s the actual step here? I think we’ve all seen these turninit AI-generation detectors be laughably bad, constantly incorrectly marking things as AI-generated. Do we let people report works as AI-generated, knowing how certain toxic elements of fandom treat some creators?

I don’t want to see AI-generated fanworks, but even more than that, I don’t want to see harassers have a tool they can use to bring people down. The “our tool has detected your fic was made by an AI” harasser/scam comments that try to scam people on AO3 are already a problem - imagine how much worse they would be with this kind of policy in place.

One thing that would be nice would be to establish a strong norm of people tagging AI-generated works as “AI-Generated” - this would let us have AI-free experiences on AO3.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about is making my works viewable only to logged-in users. While OTW has made AO3 invisible to Common Crawl (yay!), this isn’t enough to stop a determined AI firm from scraping it. Fics being only viewable to logged-in users helps. Though, one downside is I know some of my fics (ex, a couple of smut fics I’ve written) are commonly viewed by people without accounts, and I have to weigh their experience vs avoiding getting scraped by AI :(

Anyway, it’s just important to bear in mind that we don’t live in a world where the OTW volunteers have a button they can push to remove all AI-generated content from AO3 without side effects. Moderation policies, especially ones based on finnicky standards like this, could easily result in people stopping tagging AI-generated content, and harassment campaigns aimed at vulnerable fic authors by the bad actors in fandom.

In a situation like that (which seems like it could happen, btw!) the result would be that I would no longer be able to avoid AI-generated work on AO3, and also the bigots and harassers in fandom would gain a tool to use against authors they don’t like. This would suck!

just realized I never posted the time lapse for this piece

unicorn tapestry inspired, obviously

my etsy

my redbubble

my commission request form

Thanks for the recs! I'm going to check them... btw, Lancer is illustrated by Abbadon right? I love KSBD!!!

Re DM moves as a storytelling feature, the modiphius star trek game has that wth being able to build up "threat points" to use later, and players can make tradeoffs about when to get them. Which adds a meta level thing where when teh GM does something that fucks you over its not unexpected, and often an indirect consequence of something you did earlier, so feels fairer

Not a system recommendation, but delegating to your players is an important skill! The GM doesn’t have to be the host, or figure out scheduling, or configure everything about VTT software.

Reminded again of the terrible website Mythcreants, and I think the main pattern, the biggest repeating problem I’ve seen with them, is how they, like, imagine a pretty broad Category of Thing, imagine it being in some way bigoted, and then instruct the audience to never do that Broad Category of Thing, and instead do the opposite - stay on the safe side, and saying anything inadvertently if anyone were to read into what they’re saying.

If you’ve got a character with a disability, you could imagine it potentially feeling demeaning or tiring or patronising if the disabled character is really vocally down on the disability and it’s a significant issue for them and it ruins their life. So the solution, you are instructed, is that your disabled character must not consider it that big of a deal. There’s a stereotype of having evil villains having certain minor distinctive disabilities like eyepatches and hook-hands and scars. And like, you can imagine that having some negative cultural effect. So the solution, you are instructed, is that villains are not allowed disabilities. Unless they are sympathetic about it. There was a bit about ‘Villain Redemption Arcs’ - one point in the numbered list of things not to do was the villain being too villainous. Villains get redeemed, but they were too evil in the past, so they don’t *deserve* to be redeemed. The solution, they instruct, is to just not redeem villains that are ‘irredeemable’, or to make your villains less evil.

It’s all just very… uncreative. Surface-level.

Like, it’s stuff that you could probably do to be *aware* of, but that *awareness* of it should lead you to do something *interesting* about it, and Mythcreants just seems so fundamentally afraid of doing things that are *interesting* over anxiously avoiding things that could be considered problematic. Just nervously hiding from it.

Like, good fiction, I find, grabs and idea, and just *goes into it*. It’s following it wherever it leads. Really *exploring* whatever the thing has to offer. Like it’d be so much better if you’re just… aware of the stereotype, or aware of how evil the villain is, and you just… explore that. You go somewhere with it. You do something interesting about it.

But the writing advice is always more ‘Covering your Ass’ and ‘Checking the boxes’ than, like, being interesting. It’s less about Good writing as it is about Inoffensive writing.

Like, in this article ‘ Five Anachronisms That Fantasy Needs ‘, it lists 5 things from history and instructs you to just Not Use them in your story, because it “Will Detract from your reader’s enjoyment” and “Risk normalising said views.” in the case of disagreeable social views.

And like, every single one of those 5 examples are things that could be really really interesting things to play with. Like you could really *explore* that, it could make for something really interesting and memorable. It’s the sort of thing that makes me want to start writing, y’know. You can do some crazy stuff with that.

But the instruction is just “Don’t”. In creative disciplines you never just “Don’t”! 

gonna start posting comics from my twitter

I often encounter exhortations for mentally ill people to "get help", as though the only thing standing between you and Mental Helth™ is that you haven't decided to get help yet, probably because of The Stigma™.

This is an incomplete list of the assumptions people are often making when they tell someone to "get help", any or all of which can be false:

More social media networks need to consider pronouns as actual metadata, not just a field in your profile or a bit of text in your profile. They should know what pronouns a user says they use, and they should use that to help you.

Like, if I’m replying to someone, it should be like:

* replying to UserBarBaz (he/him).

And if I type “This is the best thing @ UserQux has ever done!”, over “UserQux” it should hover some text saying like (she/her)”.

Because often you’re talking about or replying to people! Pronouns are important right then, so you can refer to them accurately. 

I dunno, maybe it’s just my ADHD, but I hate having to stop in the middle of writing a bunch of stuff to go open a new tab and click profiles and try to figure out pronouns so I can refer to them correctly, because it severely takes me out of the flow of writing. 

and we need to normalize cis people putting their fucking pronouns in their bios come on.

Coworker, I don’t care that your name is Dave McMan and your profile picture has you has you with a huge beard, I am not going to just assume you go by he/him. Welcome to they/them town unless you fucking TELL ME. We have pronoun fields on our profiles for a reason. 

To force closeted trans people to affirm the wrong gender?

Sorry, obviously I know that that’s not what you meant, but it’s the same thought I come back to every time I read something about this.

There’s a competing access needs issue here, so while it is perfectly fine to voluntarily put your own pronouns in your own bio, requiring it of other people is… fraught, let’s say. If Dave McMan doesn’t feel comfortable writing he/him, I don’t want to force it.

Thatʼs fine but then if I guess Daveʼs pronouns incorrectly, they donʼt really have grounds to complain; the cost of not giving people information is that then people wonʼt have that information.

Obviously. Obviously.

Interesting how nobody is proposing retvrning to tradition and just, like, vaguely assuming everyone is a (cis) man without being incredibly confident in it.

More seriously, gendered pronouns presumably improved efficiency in the past, when people dressed differently on the basis of gender and had different naming conventions and stuff and you also weren't doing instant messaging over the internet. They add mental overhead now. We should really just ditch them in a lot of contexts.

what kind of cutie marks would you guys have... be honest

and what kind of pony would you be... and be realistic

you know what I’m gonna say it it’s super lame to reblog this with “how the hell would I know” or some variant because like you literally have the option to just decide based on your interests or what you would just like. There are people saying they’d be an alicorn with a blunt cutie mark. there is no reason to give me this i didn’t ask some deep though provoking question i asked what kind of pony you’d be and what symbol would be on your pony ass. man up and be a pony.

plausibly a unicorn with an iBook G3 Snow with the desktop showing one of those rainbow arrays of folders I used to really like (and still like, tbh, but haven't bothered implementing on my current device)

A few months back, I read about a study that found that people who were told to regularly think about things they’re grateful for reported significantly improved physical and mental well-being at the end of the study. So I started going for a walk every day before work and making myself come up with 5 things that I’m grateful for. And I know it sounds like the most cornball shit ever, but it has fundamentally changed my brain chemistry.

I was aware that I was becoming a little bit too much of a sarcastic little hater before I started this experiment. Now I am almost startled to catch myself saying shit like, “Wow, look at the flowers on that tree, I am so grateful I decided to walk this way,” unironically, completely unprompted, and outside of the specific time in the day when I do the gratitude practice. I’ve rewired my brain to look for things to be grateful for, and so I look around me more and find more of them, which makes me feel happier, which makes me find even more good things.

For the record, I’m not saying, “Only think positive thoughts! No bad vibes!” Toxic positivity is probably about as unhealthy as only thinking negative thoughts. Sometimes shit does just suck. I’m not telling you to be grateful for the bad things around you. Being a sarcastic little hater definitely has its place. But setting aside like 2 minutes per day to come up with 5 things you’re grateful for will genuinely improve your outlook. It doesn’t have to be big stuff—sometimes the best I can manage is simple shit like, “I’m grateful that zippers were invented,” but even that forces me to be in the present moment and deepens my appreciation of the world around me. Try it, even if you have to do it badly or sarcastically at first. Even if you only do it so that you can come back and tell me I’m wrong in 3 months. Set a daily alarm on your phone and give it a try.

Serious question: Is there a way to do this without making it about fucking gratitude? Which implies intentionality, which implies both the existence of some force capable of making decisions and that that force is some way aware of me and working, however ineptly, on my behalf? The combination of hubris and humility this sort of gratitude calls for is absolutely repulsive to me. It's not like being grateful to a person, for whom you can do something good in turn; it's just... out there, eternally unbalanced, and even if there isn't some god or chthonic power out there feeding on it it still feels dangerous.

At the same time, though, I would like to have some way to be present in the moment without having a fucking panic attack.

Is there a practice for cultivating positive feelings, like "those daffodils are pretty," that doesn't immediately lead to "and therefore, I need to placate Something that could have made them flesh-eating but hasn't. Yet"?

I find gratitude journaling extremely unpleasant and upsetting because it trips the switch in my brain that says "see, you have so many things to be grateful for so you have no right to be miserable," so I generally just make enjoyment lists.

It's just things that make me happy, or that I enjoy, even if it's really minor. "Oh hey, there's a hummingbird diving through the water from the sprinkler. That's great, that's going on the list." "Oh I haven't heard this song in years, I'm glad I heard it at the grocery store, that's nice." Sometimes it's big stuff, or really exciting stuff, but mostly it's little. I'm not trying to pressure myself into feeling big happy feelings, just remembering to take notes that blankets fresh from the dryer feel good and there's a dude in my neighborhood who has two dogs who tow him on a skateboard like a chariot and that is in fact pretty cool and I enjoy it when I see him.

One of the really frustrating things about a lot of mental illness (and depression specifically) is that you stop noticing the things that make you feel good. Sitting down to think about the times that you felt good and making notes about them both forces you to remember that some things DO still feel good, even if it seems like everything sucks, and gives you a book of stuff you like to flip through so when you're feeling really shitty you can go "oh yeah, I like that song, I should look up the music video."

If you want an extremely low-pressure way to start this, get one sheet of paper and write "Cool Stuff" at the top and write down one or two things recently that were pretty cool. You can do it daily, you can do it weekly, you can set goals or do it whenever you feel like it. Sometimes I forget about my cool stuff lists and then I find them again and it's actually quite pleasant to sit down and write all the cool stuff that happened and catch up.

(also yeah I am drowning in cynicism and sometimes even being sincere enough to call something amazing or awesome or just *good* feels like a performance, but generally I can find stuff that's pretty cool without hating myself, which is why that's what I use as the starting exercise for this)

Really disappointing there isn’t a crow/raven emoji. (Yes I know they’re different birds, but at that level of detail and lack of scale reference it could represent either one.)

Not very implemented yet, but does this count?

Ok minor detail but ...

So I noticed in A:TLA, and it’s carried over in LoK, that Airbenders always seem to have an advantage in a fight. And at first, it felt like plot armour, particularly in A:TLA.

But when Aang fought Bumi, he lost most of that advantage. And I realised that this wasn’t just plot armour. Someone had sat and worked it out: nobody has had to fight Airbenders for generations. 

None of the other nations have had to train to face them, or practised sparring with them, or anything. Apart from Bumi, no bender in the show has ever even met an airbender before Aang comes along. And in LoK, for the most part people still haven’t. We never see fights between those who have (for e.g. we never see Tenzin and Lin fight); when Korra and Tenzin use airbending, its a unique fighting style that people aren’t trained to manage.

It’s a really small detail, and it fundamentally works to give the heroes an advantage (and make up for Aang’s young age and lack of combat experience), but I love how it’s an advantage in combat for completely logical reasons.

The detail in these shows is amazing. 

You can see the same principle in play whenever somebody fights somebody who uses a completely unfamiliar style. Combustion benders and lavabenders aren’t straight up more powerful, but they’re pretty much always something you haven’t dealt with which presents unique challenges. That red lotus lady with no arms is just a perfectly ordinary waterbender, but using forms and styles nobody else has seen before. Jet routinely smacks around benders and soldiers, but loses hard to the first person he met who had actually studied diverse styles of swordplay. When Toph invents metalbending, nobody can deal with that, but seventy years later the counters are pretty well known among people who might have to fight the cops.

And it’s why Azula, a genius prodigy who has thought long and hard about how to counter every kind of magic and martial arts out there, keeps getting messed up by a kid with a boomerang.

it’s also a detail from the second ever episode

aang straight up says to the fire nation guards on zuko’s ship “you’ve probably never fought an airbender before”, because he in-universe figures out that, if what everyone around him is saying is true, and airbenders have been extinct for a century (or at least have gone to ground enough to make people think that) then he is a totally unknown figure in anyone’s calculations

this has been brought up before but it’s also one of the reasons why hama is so thrown in her fight with katara - waterbending is about energy exchange, keeping things flowing, throwing your opponent’s power back at them and we see katara and hama do this in their fight. however, when katara is faced with a powerful blast from hama, she stands her ground and blows it apart:

[image ID: a gif of katara in the puppetmaster. she is a teenage girl with dark skin and hair and blue eyes, wearing a red outfit. she turns and throws her hand out, stopping a blast of water and turning it into a huge shield. the background is a dark forest. end image ID]

why do i bring this up?

because it’s a move - and a mindset - influenced by earthbending, which hama has never faced (she went from the south pole, to prison, to the fire nation). it’s an indication not only of katara’s skill and power, but also how she’s learned from her travels, and from toph

one of my favorite details of atla is how the main characters’ fighting styles adapt as they take on new enemies and make new friends with other bending styles. iroh straight up tells zuko about how he developed a technique for redirecting lightning by studying waterbenders, but if you watch closely especially in the last season, there’s a lot of this sort of thing happening unspoken with the gaang, using the bending forms of other elements like katara does above. it really shows the strength in differences and diversity coming up against a fascist regime that wants everyone to conform.

Look at Korra metal bending here

It’s completely different than anything we’ve seen from other metal benders, who bend metal with sharp movements like the derivative of earth bending that it is

But Korra is fluid. She is bending metal like it’s water. Because she is a water bender. And she is the first person in history to be able to bend both metal and water and so she is able to combine these styles into one and move seamlessly between them. This shows so beautifully how the Avatar is the embodiment of all bending

Every time I think this show has shown me all it can….it gives me more.

The fight between Tenzin and the Red Lotus reinforces this. Zaheer is pretty skilled for someone who’s only been Airbending for a few months, and he has the advantage against a lot of people because there still aren’t really enough airbenders for people to know how to fight them. But against an Airbending MASTER like Tenzin? He only wins because he has backup

I just wanna say that this mirrors something I got to watch in real life. I fenced as a teenager, with my wife, who continued fencing in college.

But her college had fencing equipment but no team, so she started coaching them. But she fenced lefthanded. She ended up with a team of fencers who almost ALL learned to fence lefthanded.

A small % of fencers are lefthanded, so even very good fencers are often NOT USED TO fencing lefties.

So her dinky little team of mostly newbies came in and fucked severely with teams of much more experienced fencers who couldn’t cope with fencing leftie after leftie. Her one protégé who was also very tall just laid waste to nationally rated fencers.

Whereas I, a very shitty fencer, can hold my own against my wife no problem, because I’ve fenced her from the start.

This isn’t JUST a fun plot point and a lovely way of showing social influences and planning and creativity, it’s completely based in real life. Even a shitty fighter can be a problem for a good fighter whose never encountered their style before.

"I can resurrect people but they come back twice. No I don't know 'which one is the real one'. "

Sometimes corporate speak is good.  For example, Space X calling their rocket explosion a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” is the funniest thing I’ve heard all week

while it is a very funny term it’s actually perfectly common rocketry terminology, it’s the technical term for “rocket sploded”

another fun rocketry term is “lithobraking”. Like, one way spaceships lower their orbits is by skimming along the top of the atmosphere, letting the friction slow them down. This is called “Aerobraking”, because they’re using the atmosphere as a brake.

Lithobraking, therefore, is coined by analogy, with “litho-” being the greek root for “stone”. It’s how you slow your spaceship down… by crashing it into the fucking ground. 

So a crashed rocket “executed a lithobraking maneuver”.

There’s also “Engine rich exhaust”, which is what happens when your rocket engine starts breaking apart and bits of machinery are burning along with the fuel that’s supposed to be burning. 

A more technical term is “Negative periapsis”. Orbits have a periapsis and an apoapsis, the lowest and highest altitude they reach each orbit. A negative periapsis, therefore, is a negative altitude. Your rocket hit the ground. 

And related is the term “ablative X”. Ablative heat shielding is a type of heat dissipation where you have a layer of some material covering your spaceship, which heats up into a gas and blows away. So you lose bits of it as you go through the atmosphere. The joke version is when you refer to things as “ablative” when they’re not intended to be: ablative sensors, ablative wings, ablative space probe. that is, your spaceship lost parts it wasn’t supposed to lose while flying through the atmosphere. 

the reason i love the comparison between angels and machines (robots, transmission towers, trains, computers, etc.) is that it gets to the heart of what angels essentially are: divine machines. they’re mechanisms through with the divine is able to act, created with a purpose and “happy” to fill it simply because they were made to do so. they have more in common with a machine programmed to run on algorithms and make calculations based on input commands than they do with humanity, even if they bear a human visage - an attempt by the divine to help bridge the gap. angels do not need to be eldritch monstrosities to be terrifying, because they are already alien to us simply by being angels. for an angel to choose to deviate from their purpose and achieve free will is to fall because in order to have free will they can no longer be an angel, because an angel is defined by its purpose. much like the stories we tell of robots that gain sentence, only to discover that they can never truly be human, but neither can they go back to being a machine, angels who fall become something else entirely, purposeless and adrift and alone. it is a tragic sacrifice.

“did it hurt when you fell from heaven?” did it hurt when you realized you no longer had any purpose? that you weren’t needed, and could easily be replaced? that the very fabric of your existence had been irreparably torn asunder and it was up to you to pick up the pieces and make something of them? that you would always be seen as a deviant monster by some no matter what you did next? that your choices have consequences? if you spent your whole life knowing exactly who you were and what you were meant to be, only to be cast aside and left to fend for yourself when you changed your mind, would you not be hurt? would you not be scared? would you not be angry?

The Pathfinder game I'm in gives angels space for free will but does this with Inevitables (Plane of Law constructs/outsiders). They aren't intended to survive changes in values.

Live in the United States and want to know the weather forecast?

Just go to weather.gov/[your zipcode], and get direct, bloat free access to the current conditions and forecasts that every commercial weather service is probably just copying and repeating to you anyway.

You can input longitude and latitude if you edit the URL.

Please re-blog if you’re OK with silly fan art of your characters.

the hero visits a utopian society except the supposed thing which makes the society utopian is merely that people wear yellow, and this somehow makes all the problems go away. (I am normally willing so suspend my disbelief about sociology, but the question becomes how far am I willing to do so)

absolutely fucking NOT

deactivate here

[ID: Snippet of a post by @/staff, which reads, "Blog-level settings: All blogs will be set to Blazable by default in your blog settings. We're giving you this heads-up"]

this is set as active by default on ALL blogs btw, including sideblogs. take the time to go into all your blogs' settings and update your preferences

now's a great time to use the support form to ask it be turned off by default instead, since this just makes the feature ripe for abuse as is

Also if we're contacting support, I'd say ask for it to be settable by post like community filters, not just the whole blog. Like pretty much nobody wants their personal vent posts blazed, but if you make a funny shitpost, a donation post, or post various forms of art, those being blazed could be objectively positive.

you can turn it on or off on individual posts!

Note: if you have sideblogs and you don't want your posts to be blazeable, you have to turn it off for each sideblog.

This is all true and important info! But so as not to spread panic, also note that you will be notified *before* a post of yours is Blazed, and given the chance to refuse

You can also cancel the Blaze partway through if something seems fine but then gets the wrong kind of attention

(This is honestly the part I would rather have changed - it should be "click here to approve" not "approved by default but click here to deny" - but it's much better than getting taken by surprise)

Koko the gorilla didn't know ASL but, like, you could say that without invalidating the existence of speech-supporting signs

<- post tags

Yeah that post was bothering me and i couldnt say why but yeah this bit especially

Where people are saying thats not communicating and its just repeating words dont under stand for hope for get it

But those things both are sound exactly like things i signed as a kid and said before and in speech therapy and i still know and go to school with people who are severely disabled and still speak or sign like that even after years of speech therapy and people who saying or signing that would be AMAZING amazing communication people be so happy manage that functional communication actually able to express that hungry or that give me orange

Idk it makes me sad i get its not actually sign language or not fluent sign language but that is communication and it makes me sad to people say its not cause even though for me that was more how i talked natural as a kid didnt need taught for some people i known its take years and years and years and intensive speech therapy to get to be able to say or sign like that and amazing effort and proud of them for able to communicate how feeling or what want even if not use grammar because the meaning is more important than the grammar how can the grammar even MATTER when after years of trying u kid who u never under stand can TELL u THEM SELF what theyre thinking and feeling!!!!????? How amazing how long u waited and hoped that one day they would be able to do that how proud and happy and relieved that they CAN!!!!??? How amazing!! How relieved and happy u kid must be to be able to say what they want or think or feel after a life of having every thing want to say trapped inside u head and frustrated and only ever get to have people guess!!! How success achievement relief happy amazing!!! How can u say its useless?? How can u say its not communicating and doesnt count!!!!