#but what the data points even are

[ganondoodle]

the company i work for decided that its switching from the german formal "You"(Sie) to the informal "you" (Du) in all of our websites so now we have to scour the entire database to change it and i quite frankly hate that, not just bc the unecessary extra work but especially bc its such a weird and unecessary change

i bet its bc everything here is getting englishfied (both literally and culturally it feels like, when my new boss talks its half in english bc every second german word is just replaced by an english one despite there being perfectly fine words for it in german too, its so annoying) and bc they want to sound more personal in hopes of getting more clients bc 'company is your fwiend uwu!!', i know this here is the amercian tm site so you wouldnt understand really but i do not want to be greeted with 'du' by companies, no, thats too personal, you dont know me and im not giving you my data, stay away!!

i guess thats how i would describe it .. the formal you is like a polite distance, like someone you dont know staying outside your personal space, but when its the informal 'you' it feels invasive unless i told you you can call me that, and that goes double for companies

maybe its a small thing that doesnt seem important but i cant stand it, im just a little part time worker doing data work so i got no say in it but the companies founder also announced hes giving his post to his kids some time ago so ...... since then theres been alot of changes and new projects that solely aim to imitate whats popular and whats done by other companies, despite ours being one that is, or used to be, intentionally different, like, that was the POINT, but i guess chasing trends is just too appealing for CEOs

[bowenoke]

i'm sure i am not the only one who is very concerned about the ~4 hours between when the midjourney change was made, and I knew to go opt out of it, so; glaze does not need to be on all your works to be effective. in the same way that one artist glazing all their works will ruin a broad, multi-artist dataset, glazing your works moving forward will ruin any dataset trained on you. if out of 100 comics I've posted, 10 are glazed, a dataset trained on all of my comics will not be able to make anything similar to my style. anyways. go download glaze.

[shikai-the-storyteller]

Literally every company has incorporated AI BS into it I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT!!! I HATE that there's no way to avoid it or safely post anything online anymore because god forbid some stupid company takes my art or photos or writing or WHATEVER and use it to fuel their stupid AI scraping BS to make more money

[chocolatepot]

A while back, when there was concurrent ship discourse on Twitter and Tumblr, I started looking at the AO3 statistics for OFMD to get a sense of what the actual proportions are of different ships. The basic stats are pretty clear from the sorting sidebar:

Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Stede Bonnet (12321)

Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Israel Hands (2269)

Black Pete/Lucius Spriggs (1561)

Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Stede Bonnet/Israel Hands (1411)

Oluwande Boodhari/Jim Jimenez (1394)

Stede Bonnet/Israel Hands (976)

Israel Hands/Lucius Spriggs (839)

Blackbeard | Edward Teach & Israel Hands (677)

Israel Hands/"Calico" Jack Rackham (474)

Minor or Background Relationships (283) (label not appearing in pie chart)

However! There's a significant amount of overlap with some of these. Pete/Lucius and Jim/Olu are common side ships to Ed/Stede, for instance - 327 fics are tagged with only Ed/Stede and Pete/Lucius (23% of the Pete/Lucius tag), 195 fics are tagged with only Ed/Stede and Olu/Jim (14% of the Olu/Jim tag), and 749 fics are tagged with Ed/Stede, Pete/Lucius, and Olu/Jim (48% of the Pete/Lucius tag and 54% of the Olu/Jim tag).

It's also common for fics with Ed/Stede/Izzy to tag one or more of the two-person ships that make up the triad - 378 (27% of the Steddyhands total) include all four ships, and each of the side ships have 600-700 fics that overlap with Steddyhands in some way. As best as I can tell from careful inclusions and exclusions in the filters, there are 11,106 fics that are just Ed/Stede and not the other three, 1,113 that are just Ed/Izzy, 456 that are just Ed/Stede/Izzy, and 248 that are just Stede/Izzy.

So then I went in and tried to find the data for fics with each of the ships as the only pairing out of the group (italics indicate that the label wouldn't generate because the slice was so small, but this is the order they appear in in the chart):

Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Stede Bonnet (9294)

Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Israel Hands (898)

Black Pete/Lucius Spriggs (214)

Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Stede Bonnet/Israel Hands (426)

Oluwande Boodhari/Jim Jimenez (320)

Stede Bonnet/Israel Hands (236)

Israel Hands/Lucius Spriggs (411)

Blackbeard | Edward Teach & Israel Hands (160)

Israel Hands/"Calico" Jack Rackham (279)

Minor or Background Relationships (31)

This isn't perfect - there's no way to filter main vs. background ships, so there's no way for me to differentiate between an Ed/Stede fic with Lucius/Pete and Olu/Jim tagged for background mentions and an Olu/Jim fic with Lucius Pete and Ed/Stede tagged for background mentions; there are also even smaller ships that come into play once I cropped out the heavy hitters. However, I think this data gives a clearer picture of authorial priorities on AO3.

[tvckerwash]

the noncanon s9 trailer as a whole is very serious, but the idea that wash and maine would have gotten their asses beat by sim troopers on multiple occasions had the outposts not been first established until after the break in is unbelievably funny. these big bad freelancers are more interested in fucking around and goofing off during what is supposed to be a Very SeriousTM simulation exercise and it comes back to bite them so hard, and yall already know that the other freelancers would make sure they never lived it down.

[everythingsbetterunderthestars]

WHAT DO YOU MEAN SPOTIFY DOESN’T TAKE NOVEMBER OR DECEMBER INTO ACCOUNT AT ALL NOT EVEN FOR NEXT YEAR’S WRAPPED??!!!!!!!

[duckprintspress]

This is the best spam I've ever received.

idk, AM I the master mind behind it all? 🤔🤔🤔

...I might be... 🤔🤔🤔

I AM. I AM THE MASTERMIND.

[alfhildr-the-word-weaver]

I was thinking about how a lot of people who are into the Vampire Diaries are also into Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and how there are some obvious parallels between the shows and between the relationships of Angel & Buffy and Stefan & Elena and then Spike & Buffy and Damon & Elena, but obviously they aren't exactly the same ships or characters, and it's made me curious. Fans of both, is there a correlation in what you ship?

[webcxre]

so! in this au basically everything in TADC and ena are the same, its just they take place in the same world!

so its no secret the circus is kinda buggy. we see it a lot in the pilot with things clipping, things popping in and out of existence, etc. turns out when you have an early ai running the show and throw human souls into the mix the computer doesn't run as smoothly as one would hope.

with so much going on at once, i'd assume the game would need a LOT of memory to keep track of it all.

then we have the void, which is kinda like going out of bounds...why can they even go into the void? honestly probably because of how buggy everything is dsgsh even caine's aware of it being there

so if you've ever gone out of bounds in earlier games, sometimes especially buggy games will just start pulling from the game's memory to figure out what the hell to put there. i'm especially thinking of early pokemon games. they're a MESS

(fun fact! pokemon RGBY/RBY is so buggy that you can program the memory from inside the game! people have even figured out how to run code IN OTHER GAMES by abusing pokemon's memory)

back to the digital circus. what if it's storing its memory somewhere out in the void? what if there's a whole "glitch city" out there that's simply garbage data from the circus?

well, what other world is full of nonsensical, well...EVERYTHING?

strange, once lively adventures left to collect dust in the game's memory. maze-like hallways and other inexplicable maps. some fully complete and populated while others sit unfinished

to put it simply: in this AU ena's world is the circus' memory dump!

i'd like to think caine is aware of this, but doesn't let the humans know as it's 1, not very safe due to being even more buggy than the circus, and 2, would probably drive them mad.

(something i realized while typing this out, its kinda funny that mannequins are NPCs in both worlds lol, wonder if caine just pulls em from here when he needs em)

i could even go further! like what the hell is an ena and why do npcs seem to not like them? whats their purpose?

well...what if they weren't meant to exist at all?

what if, while the game's ai was trying to learn, it tried to pull data from the humans to try to properly reproduce how they behave? but since new humans are almost always distressed...well, these smaller test runs are incredibly unstable. they achieve emotion, something even caine struggles with! but it's too much to bear, becoming an vulnerability in the code. enas are troublemakers. they break the game by simply existing.

so thats my silly little au with extremely niche usage :]

idk maybe i'll do something with it someday

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[gay-otlc]

Actually I'm curious and we have polls now. So I'm making a poll

*for purposes of this poll, the magic will keep you the same gender you are now, just the cis version of that gender. for example, a trans woman would become a cis woman rather than a cis man.

[elftwink]

one major difference i have found between service industry work (in my case food service but this is widely applicable to similar jobs) and other public-facing positions is that the job itself is often very similar because people is the same, it's just in service everyone approaches you already thinking they're right and you're a fucking idiot and its their god given right to disrespect you, where in other positions even if they are not nice to you they usually acknowledge that you know more than them on issues pertaining to your job. like the difference in behaviour from people who see you as serving them vs helping them is unreal. i am doing literally the exact same things. customer is always right mentality did irreparable damage to the fabric of society

[italiantea]

btw has it been said anywhere how frequently the alien stage competition is hosted? judging from the age gap between hyuna/luka's generation and the current gang I'm guessing it could be like every 4 years like the olympics? that would give the winners and contestants some time to capitalize on their popularity before they get killed off. like... surely they wouldn't want to burn through up and coming artists that quickly... idk tho im admittedly not up to date with all the lore

[aeolianblues]

I'm not an extrovert. At all. In everyday life, I'm a yapper, sure, but I need someone to first assure me I am okay to yap, so I don't start conversations, even when I really want to join in sometimes! It's just the social anxiety acting up. God knows where from and why I lose a lot of my inhibitions when it comes to talking to people about music. I don't know where the confidence has suddenly sprung from. I've made a crazy amount of friends in musical circles, either just talking to people about common music or (since it is after all in music circles) talking to bands about their own music. I let out a sigh of relief any time an interaction goes well, because in truth it's going against my every instinct. I wish I could do that in everyday life

[the-trans-dragon]

Two robots doing their jobs exactly as programmed by humans :3

[pichupurin]

Was zim hormonal while pregnant with the smeets? How did they even find out about them?

I mean, how would you even TELL if someone like him was hormonal? I think he stayed pretty much the same. Aside from the occasional (and initially inexplicable) nest building in randomass places, like behind the computers, inside a hole in the sofa, any place there's a corner... I personally don't think he would act much different lol still scheming, still screaming.

As for how they found out, well, in the comic I wanted to make (and this is a rough summary), Zim was trying to get some maintenance done on the PAK but it refused to dislodge from him. In a normal state they can go without the PAK for a few minutes, but with 8 little monsters eating up resources, the PAK read its host's status as life threatening and initiated an emergency protocol which put it into a hyperstate of preservation... or something or nother, lollll so sorry this sounded so cool when I thought of it like 3 years ago :(