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Notes I wrote like a year ago about what was going to happen in this chapter:

I have no memory of how these things were connected, or how I intended these conversation pieces to fit together

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scars in fiction: I got this trying to save my lover from an assassin- but tragically, I was too late. now I carry the mark of my failure with me always, and I can never forget~

scars in real life: so I was trying to open macaroni sauce with a paring knife

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"Single people are on average less healthy, less financially stable, and overall less satisfied with life than partnered and married people are. This must mean that monogamous relationships and marriage are the solution to society's problems"

Huh, it's almost like society, both socially and financially, is set up to specifically benefit people who have monogamous relationships and get married and punish people who don't partner or get married. It's almost like there are financial benefits that exist specifically to incentivize people to get married and have kids and be a nuclear family. It's almost like it was very culturally normal until very very very recently to just not have any deeper platonic relationships after you get married, meaning that single people past a certain age just get left behind and get treated as spinsters or loser bachelors. It's like life just is not designed for single people to be able to easily participate and survive while still being single. Huh, very weird. I'm sure marriage will fix this.

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People have been doing this kind of stuff for decades, this shouldn't be new to anyone. 20 years ago, we were gaming Google's search indexing algorithm so that when you searched for George Dubya Bush you got a picture of a monkey, and shit like that. Like yes, this is a problem, but I feel like people have also become stupefyingly naive about this kind of stuff, as well.

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I knew what this was going to be and actually read the last option first, but I want you to know that I am Mad because I actually wanted to give a genuine answer to the question

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Same exact thing goes for asexuality, as well. And if someone doesn't want to have sex or engage with sexual content, that doesn't mean they're an evil prude, and it doesn't mean they're telling you you can't do those things. I wish tumblr would learn that one.

"aros can still date" well i don't want to. "aros can be in qprs" well i don't want to. "aros can still get married" i cannot stress enough how much i don't want to do that. "it can be completely platonic" i don't care i still don't want to. "aros can still go on dates and kiss people and act indistinguishably from an alloromantic person" why are you so hell bent on us fitting into amatonormative society as much as possible. "aros can still love" is this just to make you feel better? it feels like it's just to make you feel better

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This reminds me of a somewhat famous story about the early days of AI when someone tried to have a neural net learn how to form English past tense verbs the same way they thought human toddlers did, and when asked to produce the past-tense form of "mail", the neural net happily answered "membled"

When I say editing software is getting dumber, this is what I mean.

In what world is "What dinnered?" more legible than "What happened to dinner?" I just... what?!

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Ten years ago or so, I worked for a company that provided search engine services for things like university and library catalogs. They had customers all over the world. One day, my team got a ticket where we were instructed to block searches for certain content for Chinese customers (stuff like e.g. Tienanmen Square, etc.) because those libraries and schools could be charged with crimes if they allowed their users to search for that content. We joked about how Orwellian this was.

Today, that's now happening in the UK.

Uk media reporting on the OSA:

Reality:

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Tens of thousands of notes on a post claiming a bill introduced by the Republicans will make credit card companies support NSFW content, and only a handful going "hey maybe don't support this".

Let's look into how the bill is being reported elsewhere - in fact, from the Senator who introduced the Senate version of the Fair Access to Banking Act

"In recent years, prominent American banks have engaged in a discriminatory practice, referred to as debanking. Banks and financial institutions use their economic standing to categorically exclude law-abiding, legal industries by refusing to lend or provide services to them."

Hmm. What industries could he mean?

"This includes industries such as firearms, ammunition, crypto, federal prison contractors, as well as energy producers."

Wow. Who could've guessed that's what he meant

“When progressives failed at banning these entire industries, what they did instead is they turned to weaponizing banks as sort of a backdoor to carry out their activist goals..."

So it is, in fact, a bill around trying to stop left-wing activists from, say, going after oil and gas companies or private prisons or the arms industry

But - surely it would include NSFW bans too, right? It would overturn them, right? If you read the text of the bill, which is deliberately vague as you'd expect, it explicitly allows banks to deny payment based on "quantitative, impartial risk-based standards" - it only bans it for "political" or "reputational risk" considerations. And claims that the adult media industry is "high risk" is why payment processors drop it

But let's see who supports it!

"The Fair Access to Banking Act is endorsed by several organizations, including the National Shooting Sports Foundation, National Rifle Association, North Dakota Petroleum Council, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, The Digital Chamber, Blockchain Association, Independent Petroleum Association of America, Online Lenders Alliance, Day 1 Alliance, GEO Group, Lignite Energy Council, National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, National Mining Association, CoreCivic, and the National ATM Council."

Private prison companies, fossil fuel companies, blockchain companies, and the NRA. But surely...? SURELY a bill we're explicitly told again and again is about preventing left-wing activism against private industry, that's co-sponsored by fucking Lindsey Graham, and that certainly seems to include a carve-out specifically to let payment processors continue to deny adult content, but not deny conservative political causes...would secretly be pro-NSFW content?

This bill is all over the internet now, with viral pleas to GET IT PASSED and shutdowns of any criticism of a bill whose real intent is extremely overt. All of this is a simple search away and straight from the horse's mouth, and nobody wants to do even that modicum of research because they would prefer to take someone's word for it that a magic panacea is just a few phone calls away. If you make phone calls asking for this to pass, you're being played: tricked into supporting a bill crafted by the people leading the moral panic that harassed Itch into oblivion that would do nothing to help that, but that would ban any activism against payments for destructive fossil fuel extraction or gun lobbying. The guy who made it just told everyone that's what it's for! Does no one care to look? To read the bill? You can be the one to read it and say it's bad (being the only person to actually read an odious bill is called "Russ Feingold-ing")

Looking up the talk about this bill one theme I saw a lot was people dismissing anyone pointing out a Republican introduced it by saying "I don't care who introduced it! AS LONG AS SOMEBODY DOES SOMETHING!!!!" But you know what? If you saw that a Republican introduced the bill, and your reaction was to go "wow, so a Republican introduced a bill to protect adult content?" without even a pang of skepticism...I have no words tbh

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One of the simple joys of the main cats community on reddit is seeing people post adorable videos of their cats playing together with a title along the lines of "Help, my cats are fighting, what do I doooo??? :("

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Hey, I read the conversation about being intersex from that one poll. I just wanted to come and say that you're not wrong or "not willing to learn" or whatever bs the other people were saying. Insane conversation... These are the type of people who ignore medical definitions to fit as much stuff as they want under the "umbrella" to feel special about themselves.

Nope, sorry, I have no use for moral support from TERFs. Fuck off. You haven't understood a single thing I said in that conversation.

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I mean, you say "despite multiple safeguards in place", but in this particular case, I've seen no evidence whatsoever that there were any safeguards in place. It doesn't take AI to destroy your whole database, a human can already do that with one command fuckup, and this probably happens with some regularity, but responsible companies keep full backups of their production databases in case this happens. You can't just say "don't give irresponsible people access to the database" because someone's got to have access to the database, and everyone makes mistakes eventually. Like, there have definitely been times in my career where someone blew away or massively corrupted the prod database and it was kind of like, haha, whoops, let's restore the backup before anyone notices. Not that it's a good idea to give AI access to your database, or even use it in coding at all, but nothing I've seen about this indicates that this guy even had a backup.

This is actually the main problem with "vibe coders" who use AI to do software development for them so they don't have to hire actual developers - they aren't software developers, and they don't know extremely basic shit like how to avoid catastrophic failures like this, or how to store sensitive information, or how to implement good security features. Software development is a lot more than just writing lines of code.

I might add that this guy was apparently only nine days into this project, so I very much doubt that any real customers were affected. You said "it would be funny if it was just one guy", but I'm pretty sure that this "company" is, in fact, just one venture capitalist. As with every other thing a LLM has ever said, this LLM's claim to have impacted tons of customers and "months" of work is in fact completely fabricated garbage.

You have to admit it's funny

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Yeah, you might be right. It's a little hard to estimate exactly how immortal Lyctors really are, because Harrow wasn't quite as indestructable as the others in HtN, and then in NtN Pyrrha remarks at some point that Nona's regeneration is actually better than typical Lyctor regeneration would be, and most of the Lyctors except for Cytherea were killed by immensely powerful or otherwise metaphysically exceptional stuff, like resurrection beasts, being thrown into a star, entering the stoma (and I honestly think it's not actually certain that Augustine and Ulysses are really dead because of that), and River-related shenanigans. But I think you're right that with John it's not so much that he has regeneration as that his body just can't be destroyed or harmed in the first place. His sperm survived outside of his body for longer than Mercy's carefully preserved eggs. Mercy took him entirely apart into atoms and he just bounced back. Etc.

Does John Gaius not (need to) breathe?

I hadn't quite picked up on it before, because "you don't need to breathe in the River". But here's Harrow as they travel to the Mithraeum through the River, having recently been reminded of this fact:

"Your breath sounded an unlovely peal. Ianthe’s sounded like a bellows. You could not hear that of the Emperor of the Nine Houses—maybe you never had"

And then later it's revealed that John is locked in an airless room when the heralds attack. Lyctors need oxygen: they wear haz suits when they travel to other planets, and Harrow is nearly smothered with a pillow. But John isn't quite like them, is he...

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Did you see that the "Hot Rat Summer" mosaic is now listed as a tourist attraction on Google Maps?

I didn't! I initially got this when I was just on my phone, and wasn't able to find it on the mobile app, but I just checked on my computer, and it's there!

And it's got 5 five-star reviews and everything.

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I don't know if the Lyctors need to breath, either, technically. There was a scene where Augustine and G1deon practiced sparring after draining all of the air from their lungs. I figure it's probably like eating, where they technically don't need to do it because they're immortal, but it would be unpleasant not to.

Does John Gaius not (need to) breathe?

I hadn't quite picked up on it before, because "you don't need to breathe in the River". But here's Harrow as they travel to the Mithraeum through the River, having recently been reminded of this fact:

"Your breath sounded an unlovely peal. Ianthe’s sounded like a bellows. You could not hear that of the Emperor of the Nine Houses—maybe you never had"

And then later it's revealed that John is locked in an airless room when the heralds attack. Lyctors need oxygen: they wear haz suits when they travel to other planets, and Harrow is nearly smothered with a pillow. But John isn't quite like them, is he...

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Spellcheck actually already was AI, or at least natural language processing, back when it had a curated dictionary. It's not that they ruined it by replacing it with AI, they actually just ruined it by replacing it with a different type of AI that is not suited to that purpose because the actual scientists in this field are being drowned out by the hordes of trend chasing tech bros who just use whatever algorithm they heard about most recently to solve 100% of computer tasks.

"you can use ai to improve spelling and grammar"

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"This kind of thing"? You mean, making posts to voice opinions that I have here on tumblr dot com, exactly the same way you did? Yes, I do enjoy using this blogging platform as a blogging platform

I've read plenty of stuff that was really well-done, and usually, if I don't feel compelled to make fanwork or consume fanwork about a thing, it's because I don't feel like the worldbuilding and the setting was done as well as it could be, and that it's not compelling enough to make me want to explore it further. But I guess developing the world in which something takes place is just "superfluous", and "doesn't serve the story", and in order to "serve the story" something has to cease to exist in any meaningful way beyond the confines of the plot. Ok.

I still believe that for something to really grip fandom creators it can only be like. 60-70% good.

The writing, concept, and/or characters have to be there. But there has to be a flaw that requires transformation. Maybe a character arc is fumbled, or there’s scenes that we don’t see or a relationship that’s only implied. Maybe it gets cancelled too early!

It obviously can’t just be bad. If the characters don’t feel compelling, or the setting just isn’t exciting, people aren’t going to latch on.

But it also can’t be too good! If there’s no space for discovery, what’s the point of the transformation! It already does everything you could want! The only people who can create there are gif makers if it’s a visual medium, but even then if it’s perfectly shot and coloured why would they want to?