skill7spark04

[skill7spark04]

I see. I agree. frankly I think it's that "feminine" culture is still tied too much to attractiveness and romance. ... personally I think Men should be given the same treatment because the women deserve hot guy fanservice, but that's in short supply in comparison. but that's why I like Honkai: Star Rail. most of the designs (again, most) aren't sexualized. and yes, there are more female than male characters, but their designs are actually fire. the only ones I can really think off off rip I believe are Lady Jade and Acheron. and even then saying Acheron is Sexualized is a stretch. it feels more so she has less so she can show off the sick ass tattoos, which most characters don't have. tbh, the most exposed characters in the game are men. everyone has actual functional clothes, and there's no "bathing suit skin" for no reason. they represent character through their outfits really well. it's not just for show. but it's identity. I'd bet you could recognize Guinaifen's fit regardless of who's wearing it. I swear if I ever make a game I'm gonna make it so that gooner looking armor suck ass and actual functional peices are god tier. fucking boob armor man. give my knight girls regular fucking armor. I don't care if they stop looking like women. it's lore acurate. goddamn. I also hate how the story expects you to take the character seriously in their storyline when they'd honestly look less inappropriate WITHOUT clothes. (looking at you Silver and Blood. loved the story. hated the gooning.) I think it sucks too. but games and media have this problem. unless being ugly is a plot device, unrealistic body standards are held to both women AND men. don't forget that men have similar and less spoken on issues. it's just harder for the public to notice because men don't seem to care as much that all the dudes in fiction look like Henry fucking Cavil, Astolfo, or some weird skinny inbetween (Robert Pattinson in twilight). kids media doesn't seem to do this though. especially cartoons.

very ace post I'm about to make here

I think I'm just exhausted by how much of everything has to be Hot Woman

of course I'm responsible for choosing a lot of media I engage with here, that might be what's degrading my tolerance level, but like there's no escape from Hot Woman

you look into any kind of artistry by a man who's great at drawing or painting etc... as soon as you look for more stuff you'll also encounter 'guess how small I made her waist in proportion to her boobs'. but like, you can't judge. everyone can draw what they like.

fictional women in male dominated spaces have always been idealised but it feels like that overton window shifted once they figured out they could get away with anything. but it's just fanservice right. but it's so unavoidable. waifuslop dominates as a moneymaker which ensures there'll be more of it. character designs are less tasteful sideboob and more 'outfit with nothing on the legs just straight up underwear and we're pretending it's normal'

fantasy setting with grotesque monsters to be killed? the monsters can also be Hot Woman. a game where you obtain and raise creatres, well, of course, those can also be Hot Woman! here at women we are all about being controlled and managed by someone else, and we will do a little dance for you.

It's not any one thing. it's just everywhere. there's so many fantastic artists online, and they're working very hard with their own styles and ideas to formulate their very own best Hot Woman. And they have amazing taste! I love seeing designs and creativity, and yet in the back of my mind I know it's a variation on Hot Woman, the cultural topic. The inspirational ideal. I do this too!! I make up a character and I realise that I have a chance to be part of the Hot Woman moment. Whatever I'm not, she can be. But instead of that potential being varied and personal, I'm leaning towards the mould I've seen so many times. I can be a part of Hot Woman too.

And I should be part of it, right? Because there's supposed to be common ground there right? I identify as a woman for lack of anything more suitable. I guess that's what I am. My body represents those same ideas I'm seeing. Some anime lady with boobs bigger than her head... and me. Both women. There's gotta be some overlap.

And it's not the kind of dichotomy that gets solved by 'we should treat men the same! more male fanservice!' to me. You cannot do any of this to men. We will never be culturally inundated by images of men in speedos with massive cockbulges in our daily lives, in ads, on posters. We will never have every blockbuster movie based around dynamic interesting women while a dude is thrown in the back somewhere and just has a small romance going on. We will never trope-ify men into broad flavours like 'cute and fun and helpful' or 'dark and tall and sexy (dubious)' to classify them from the POV of picking The One For You off the shelf. We will never have animes about schoolboys where people argue on imageboards about which one is 'best boy', the one who succeeded in being Commodity.

I don't know what to do with this. This is an idea that has escaped out the window. Women get hired to stand in front of things. I'm in spaces that don't want me and freely advertise it - every convention I've ever been to has stalls with body pillows and a woman who wants to be fucked on it. And that's me, apparently! That's what I am! I'm supposed to be like that. Hot Woman doesn't look like me - I'm unfortunate enough to sit in anime video game spaces where they can't even be an average weight, let alone having realistic diversity. But Hot Woman does have the appeal of weight while being thin, because now every girl - that's me! - has a random belt strap around her skinny thigh, with a meticulously drawn flesh pudge either side. She's thicc now. That's what thicc means, being underweight, having huge tits, an utterly flat stomach, and a strap on your leg that would cut off circulation.

This is a genre. Of course it's always existed. And how can I blame anyone for the fun of a fantasy, for idealisation, for people joining in without wondering if it could ever be different. Imagine a world, people say, where Hot Woman can ALSO... wear glasses. Incredible. Just imagine. She's still hot though. Hot Woman cannot be dulled or diluted, but we can expand her domain.

I don't know. Obviously nobody is doing this with the expectation that real life women should conform to a concept on paper. It's not coercive. There are women who choose to have vtuber avatars with boobs that fill the entire screen. That's what they want.

I should be grateful for the rows of sultry-eyed babes staring at me across the convention hall, because the next booth is gonna have children, girls who look maybe 6-8, on the pillows, right there among the families cosplaying together. So it could be worse. Sometimes the girls look visibly distressed. It doesn't really get mentioned. Nobody else is taking issue with it, I wouldn't want to be a killjoy. So it's fine. It's fine. Let's see some massive boobs, haha.

[skill7spark04]

I do this not because I care about causing a scene but because I know no matter how right I am or how much I explain it it'll either devolve into baseless adhominem and childish anti-debate starts (the dreaded Nuh-Uh gambit) or they'll just argue the same points on loop without changing their mind. anyone else, or just my Autistic Dork ass?

[skill7spark04]

"the asshole is always right trust" "the borderline misanthropic man always proves your argumentative self wrong, and that means YOU'RE the asshole." "you should make out with the dickweed who doesn't take you seriously and refuses to even consider your opinions as a person" ARE WE SURE this archetype was written BY women FOR women? cause... I feel like it's either BY men FOR women or BY women FOR men.

my mom is listening to an audiobook that involves fake dating, only one bed, and the two leads teaming up to solve a conspiracy. I should be down with this one. unfortunately the male lead is the brooding, dominant alpha-male archetype and they're having a horrible slap-slap-kiss romance where every time she feistily challenges him he turns out to be Right about whatever he's being brusque and domineering and giving her orders but not explaining about, and I want to bite glass. how is this sexy. all I want her to do with that man is stab him and push him into the harbor

[skill7spark04]

I'm not a knowledgeable artist. but I do want this on my blog.

[skill7spark04]

wow. just like the foundation to not fucking apologize to the goddamn cereal box. this is why we have a hyperdeath Artificial Intelligence trapped in a faraday cage goddammit. yall just REFUSE to be nice. and then justify it as "necessay" all you had to do was apologize, and now the cereal box is angry. forever. until wright is dead.

this is the funniest scp and yet i've never seen anyone posting about it:

[skill7spark04]

huh. so there are bottish people. to counter this, make it so accounts have to be verified to comment. as much as it sucks for your guest users, if it stops the bots, it stops the bots. with Ao3, signing up is a commitment. they aren't gonna waste 3-7 months for their bot army to all get verified accounts only to get banned off the site the following day.

Another reason to ignore negative comments (especially on AO3)

So at work I’ve been forced to learn about “AI Agentic Workflows”. But being an AO3 author, I couldn’t help but think of how this technology affects authors on AO3 (and honestly on other social media platforms too).

What I learned was this: Agentic AI workflow software makes it extremely easy to automate, and bulk-post, HIGHLY-STORY-SPECIFIC negative comments to AO3 fics.

If you’re not familiar with what an AI Agentic Workflow is, I highly recommend informing yourself. You’ll be hearing it a LOT very soon. Basically, it’s a linked linked chain of AI prompts on one/many software platforms. Each “agent” completes a task. Then it hands off the completed task to the next AI Agent in the chain, which builds on it. Then that result is handed off to another agent, etc etc, even potentially to a final agent which analyzes what worked well and what didn’t, and changes what the other agents do.

There are a ton of repercussions here.

But let’s stay focused on AO3.

With AI Agentic workflow software, a person/group who wants to silence the voice of a community can easily scrape a tag, analyze stories by the thousands, then post thousands of highly customized, story specific negative comments, all without a human being ever seeing your words.

They could even set up AI agents watching to see if you delete your story, or delete your profile, which would be a marker of success. That success marker could be shared back to the other AI agents, and the whole workflow could be changed via automation to use that more effective approach.

I’m sure the OTF is working on ways of stopping this. I’m sure most social media companies are too.

But as usual the tools to create havoc are ahead of the ones to prevent havoc.

Anyway.

TL;DR: If you get a highly-story-specific negative AO3 comment — it does NOT MEAN it was written by a HUMAN! You were probably just story 20,031 in a scraped database of 50,000 stories, all of which were being targeted because they belong to a group/topic/tag that some shitty group or agency wanted to silence because of their horrible political or social.

Don’t let them silence you. They never looked at your words to begin with.

[skill7spark04]

via yu_yu_yu_yu_yyu

[skill7spark04]

I guess I'm woman now. we do share the same body, so like... they'd know a lot better than I would. probably.

[skill7spark04]

"ice mage but it's just the school nurse who thinks ice packs cure everything instead of cold and distant anti-hero" would definitely fall in love with the wholesome fire character. let them kiss. romantically. like people in love do.

yeah yeah fire-based characters are destructive and angry and violent and evil blah blah blah BORING overdone. more fire as a lifegiver. warm and comforting. fire-based characters as guides lighting the way. personal heater in the cold and dark but don’t sleep too close or you’ll wake up with heat rash. fire sterilizes and cauterizes!! more fire-based healers. plants perking up and flowers turning towards them and they attract moths. fire-based characters who are hearths instead of wildfires!! the core of a home the pillar of a community the key to societal advancement. give them an internal flame that visibly glows and flickers instead of a heart that beats. extinguish that light when they die. etc

[skill7spark04]

Talents and Skills are different. Skills are earned. Talents are inherent. being talented means you have an advantage towards gaining skill in certain areas. I am talented at reading, which helped me with training my writing skills. I still had to improve my reading and writing, but I started with a slight advantage. that's all. I can see why people hate when their skills are called talent. it's like suggesting you didn't work for it because you were already that good. it took me years to become the writer I am and I still feel like a layman. I don't FEEL like a writer. I have to remind myself I am one. that I worked to become one. that I put so much effort to get from bad to mediocre to good writing. I have people who ENJOY what I write now. genuinely. like, actively engaged with the story. back then, it was all critical feedback and "it's okay, but this could be better". now I get told "you are good at writing". and I smile, because I earned it. I took their feedback and grew.

I WORKED FOR THIS.

[skill7spark04]

I am all three of these. somehow. then again I am autistic.

[skill7spark04]

there are two sides to every coin. one is heads. the other is tails. they're both sides of coins. that's all. nope. there's no metaphor being made. just talking about coins. totally.

[skill7spark04]

Conspiracy Theory Time

>4chan goes down >Anonymous loses it's main gathering site to ONE hacker >only a handful of months ago >our online people first Hacker Group known for challenging the government and even the Cartels in Mexico suddenly homeless >about 4 months later >governments start trying to pass bills in co-ordination >Online Censorship disguised as "Protecting Children" #MFW Anonymous goes off line for 4 fucking months and the governments of the world immediately start attacking the entire fucking internet using fear tactics and hidden line dystopian bullshit. I believe that the government intentionally paid someone to assassinate 4chan so that their main threat to censoring the internet couldn't bear arms against them. I'm scared. more than anything. Collective shout is helping this agenda through payment processors. it feels like the whole of the world's governments are all trying to attack the internet all at once to remove what they DEEM to be problematic content because THEY DON'T LIKE IT, not because it protects children. this is a new era of prohibition they're trying to start. the era of internet censorship. I might deadass start writing in journals again. and my handwriting sucks, so that's gonna suck, but if the internet continues to fall apart like this...? if you can, fight back. sign petitions to remove bills. attempt to repeal these opressive laws. all those media about the government being oppressive and dystopian were training for moments like this. they're declaring war. a lot of us just don't know it yet.

[skill7spark04]

HOLY SHIT WAS THAT A- wait a machete under your bed? really? -UFO!?

[skill7spark04]

I'm sitting here like "I shouldn't be a perfectionist, people love intentionally shitty writing" and the demon on my shoulder is like: "but the crack fic COULD be better." and the Angel on my Shoulder is the only one actually writing.

[skill7spark04]

only Slannesh followers misinterperet this tweet.

[skill7spark04]

I want freaky ass aliens with even freakier ass robots to help them with their freaky ass needs. I got one that's basically a gorilla with an angler fish for a head and has four fingers on each hand that are attached to different sides of the nub they call a hand. they were a race of bottom feeders that pulled themselves along the bottom of their world's ocean, but also needed to be able to throw things at their predators like rocks or bones, or even just throw hands. they make some FREAKY machines. one is actually a small box with thousands of spike tipped arms protruding in all directions and slithers like a swarm of snakes knotted together at the center. they are used for disassembling devices in junkyards. a more notable one is that their most common machine doesn't even have legs at all, and only functions underwater. it's a drone that functions on jets and can have a nearly unlimited pool of function. while they can live on the surface for about 3 weeks due to their body's ability to store "unrespirated" water that was absorbed through the skin and stored like fat, making them really squishy. to be able to punch at an effective rate underwater, their arms grew to massive sizes, which also helped them with throwing and pulling themselves along the ocean floor. they can't swim, they just walk along the bottom of the ocean. on the surface, their punch can just about puncture most ceramic plating. it's also MUCH faster, but they still prefer living in water, to the point that all their spaceships are flooded with water that is held inside the ship with a gravity anchor, so that even when a hole is made depressurization is nearly impossible. the downside is that if the anchor goes offline, all wounds will depressurize at once, which could cause an implosion. they are one of the first species to discover space travel, due to their interest in other water words. both salt and freshwater versions eventually come to exist after billions of years of evolution across the stars. they aren't a fan of each other. the reason their head looks like an angler fish is 1: the light is useful for baiting prey and for seeing the scraps that sink to the bottom of the ocean. they are mostly opportunity predators with scavenger elements. they are capable of speaking by releasing sound waves into the water and through a specially evolved oriface that absorbs those sound waves and processes the sounds into understandable speech. to allow them to hear on the surface, they made small plastic boxes of water that trap water in their "ears" to allow them to hear -albeit muffled- sounds above the water I love my creatures.