when u come up with a tiny change for your story that not only makes the writing flow better but also hammers in the character motivations and story theme

in another hundred years people are gonna go search for the titans wreckage in a boat called the tit

Reddit started removing moderators from protesting subreddits, so /r/PoliticalHumor just made all their over one million subscribers moderators.

Very meta: the Political Humor subreddit is becoming political humor itself.

an internal memo leaked from ceo steve huffman saying the "noise" of the blackout will die out and they just need to weather it until we give up. fuck you spez.

first of all it's OVER EIGHT THOUSAND subreddits that went dark.

second of all he clearly doesn't give one single shit about the users or the UNPAID army of mods who slog through a million miles of shit every day to keep illegal and offensive content off the site (i'm a mod in a small fandom subreddit and even the shit i've seen is beyond the pale) and therefore make it appealing to the advertizers.

you have no fucking business without us. and you don't care one single bit about it.

he clearly did not mean for this memo to leak, but someone at reddit thought it was important enough to send it out anyway. please spread it (spreddit?) especially because so much of reddit is still in blackout.

there is always some fucking laundry and dust and some other shit

a piece of media that is bad: mundane. effectless

a piece of media that is bad but had the potential to be so so good: unbearable. agonizing. soul crushing even

FanFiction.net is not gone.

Right now it's a victim of DNS (Domain Name Service) spoofing. This means that a malicious party is trying to trick people into thinking that they are the real FFn (/steal traffic/make money/whatever) by purchasing a very similar domain.

So if you want to read fanfiction and not see leaves, you have have to type out "www.fanfiction.net"

reminder since we're gettin another wave of bots:

if you don't distinguish yourself from a bot, just any sorta indication that a human made the blog, like a funny pfp or description, or even a disclaimer that you're a lurker, then you're almost certainly gonna be blocked n reported for spam when you follow people

Having a good URL is no longer an excuse. We shoot on sight, it's up to you to warn us you're real.

— comment on a MetaFilter post about AI: “My goal is to be helpful, harmless, and honest.”

I got someone to ask it about the difference between two grasses I know well, Festuca ovina and F. rubra, seeing as telling them apart was a vital part of my job, just to see what it was like. It took me a bit of thinking really hard to tell exactly how wrong it was, despite the fact I’m literally an expert in telling the difference between the two. It wasn’t just missing out on freely available information on reliably differentiating them, but it made up facts about one of the grasses that were just incorrect. E.g. saying F. rubra leaves were wider than those of F. ovina (true), but then saying they were up to 6mm wide (extremely not true, they max our around 1.5-2mm if we’re being generous). But it sounded so right that I had to spend several minutes picking apart what was incorrect and it turned out to be most of it.

StackOverflow similarly had issues when it was first released with people using it to generate answers that sounded like authoritative solutions but were, in fact, utter nonsense.

And that’s the issue, it can mimic the shape but it’s not intelligent. It’s not good at being right, it’s good at sounding right.

I got this comment on a story from my Other AO3 Account this morning.

(Info redacted because I prefer keeping these accounts separate but no one follows me on the side blog I have for that account.)

The story was posted almost a year ago and is relatively “popular” by my average statistics even though it has tropes and themes that are big turnoffs for a lot of people (hence separate accounts). This popularity is undoubtedly because it’s a Marvel Loki story and that fandom is massive.

So there is obviously an algorithm or a bot scrubbing ao3 statistics and leaving this comment on fics that meet a certain metric with the main character of the fic inserted into the comment.

I had a little time to kill this morning so I decided to investigate further. And y’all this is so predatory. Come on this journey with me. It made me mad. It may make you mad.

First, if you go to Webnovel’s website, you HAVE to choose between male lead or female lead stories before you can go any further. WTF?

And that’s weird, but this gets so much worse. This is basically a pay-to-read site that has different subscription models. Which… okay BUT! The authors don’t get paid! Look at that comment again. They’re promising a supportive and nurturing community, but zero monetary compensation. It’s basically, “post your stuff here so we can get paid and you can get… nice vibes?” I mean look at this Orwellian writing:

Using the phrase “pay-to-read model” in the same sentence as “qualitative changes in lifestyles for authors” deliberately makes you think that you can get paid and maybe even make a living on this website. But that’s not actually what it says and authors will not receive one red cent.

Oh but wait, the worst is still to come. In case this breaks containment (which I kind of hope it does) this is where I mention that I’m a lawyer in the US.

I don’t do intellectual property or copyright law but I do read and write contracts for a living. So I went to look at their terms of service. It was fun!

Highlights the first, in which Webnovel gets a license to do basically whatever they want with content you post on their site. This is how they get to be paid for people reading authors’ writing without paying them anything.

Highlights the second, in which Webnovel takes no responsibility for illegally profiting off of fan fic. This all says that the writer is 100% responsible for everything the writer posts (even though only Webnovel is making money from it).

Highlights the third which say that by posting, the author is representing that they have the legal right to use and to let Webnovel use the content according to these terms. So if a writer posts fan fiction and Webnovel makes money from people reading the fan fiction, and the House of the Mouse catches wise, these sections say that that’s ALL on the writer.

So that’s a little skeevy to start off with but the thing that is seriously shitty and made me make this post was that these assholes are coming to ao3. They are actively recruiting people in comments on their fan fiction. And they are saying they are big fans of the character you’re writing about and that they share your interests.

They are recruiting fan fiction writers and giving every impression that you can make money from posting fan fiction on their site and hiding the fact that you absolutely cannot but they can make money off of you while you try, deep in their terms of service which no one but a lawyer who writes fan fic and has some time to kill will read.

I see posts on here regularly from people who don’t understand how this stuff works, don’t understand that they (and others) can not legally make a financial profit from fan fiction. And there are tons of people who will not take the time to dig into the details.

Don’t deal with these bastards. Fuck Webnovel.

just to add, you can report these sort of comments to ao3 as it's against site rules to profit off of your fanworks/mention any kind of funding (e.g. kofi) - that way, these guys might realise that they're not going to successfully swindle the userbase and give up

Watch every Zelink fanartist ignore Link being shorter than Zelda for the second game in a row

Me when I'm in denial

There's something wrong with you people I think

they need to make an app for the mentally ill …

this is the app we r on it rn babe

I'm setting my trap, to catch the damn haiku bot. Quiet! Here it comes.

I’m setting my trap,

to catch the damn haiku bot.

Quiet! Here it comes.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

I hate... fanon archetypes. You know how people sand down their blorbos to fit into the same handful of incorrect quote templates and then they forget their actual canon personalities because they've gone too long without engaging with the source material? I hate it. I hate it. He would not fucking say that. The joke was slightly funny when it was on the office or whatever but we've all heard it over and over with different characters pasted into it how are you still laughing please let me out

The funny character has no other personality traits. Also he's incompetent now. The one who's kind of prickly is just weirdly mean OR sad and did nothing wrong, take your pick. Gotta have the Sunshine Boy. Woman 1 is yass slay badass. Woman 2 is the rest of the cast's Mother. If there's only one woman, she can be both. Do you want to kill yourself yet

I didn't say a fandom but you thought of one, didn't you? That's because they all do this. All of them. You search the main tags for the media of your choice and you will find them there. The same incorrect quotes you've been hearing for years. It's like a time loop. It's my own personal torment nexus

"the writer's strike could stop the MCU from making new movies for months!" fuck dont dirtytalk me like that. it's only 9:34 am

2 genres of fanfiction:

1) put that guy into situations

2) take that guy OUT of situations for the love of GOD let them REST 

Finding a new blorbo like:

star trek heritage post (June 13th, 2013)

oh you’re insufferable? *suffers you easily and gladly*

god I hate some of these. but I love some of these too!

you don’t have to have a good reason we’re here to be haters