#i don't think it can be possible but idk

[auriidae]

an assortment of silly mimic angel grian doodles (ft. some other buttercup lads)

[ohhgingersnaps]

I'm seeing some frustration over fandom creatives expressing anger or distress over people feeding their work into ChatGPT. I'm not responding to OP directly because I don't want to derail their post (their intent was to provide perspective on how these models actually work, and reduce undue panic, which is all coming from a good place!), but reassurances that the addition of our work will have a negligible impact on the model (which is true at this point) does kind of miss the point? Speaking for myself, my distress is less about the practical ramifications of feeding my fic into ChatGPT, and more about the principle of someone taking my work and deliberately adding it to the dataset.

Like, I fully realize that my work is a drop in the bucket of ChatGPT's several-billion-token training set! It will not make a demonstrable practical difference in the output of the model! That doesn't change the fact that I do not want my work to be part of the set of data that the ChatGPT devs use for training.

According to their FAQ, ChatGPT can and will use user input to train itself. The terms and conditions explicitly state that they save your chats to help train and improve their models. (You can opt-out, but sharing is the default.) So if you're feeding a fic into ChatGPT, unless you've explicitly opted out, you are handing it to the ChatGPT team and giving them permission to use it for training, whether or not that was your intent.

Now, will one fic make a demonstrable difference in the output of the model? No! But as the person who spent a year and a handful of months laboring over my fic, it makes a difference to me whether my fic, specifically, is being used in the dataset. If authors are allowed to have a problem with the ChatGPT devs for scraping millions of fics without permission, they're also allowed to have a problem with folks handing their individual fics over via the chat interface.

I do want to add that if you've done this to a fic, please don't take this as me being upset with you personally! Folks are still learning new information and puzzling out what "good" vs. "bad" use is, from an ethical standpoint. (Heck, my own perspective on this is deeply based on my own subjective feelings!) And we certainly shouldn't act like one person feeding a fic into ChatGPT has the same practical negative impact, on a broad societal scale, as a team using a web crawler to scrape five billion pieces of artwork for Stable Diffusion.

The point is that fundamentally, an ethical dataset should be obtained with the consent of those providing the data. Just because it's normalized for our data to be scraped without consent doesn't make it ethical, and this is why ChatGPT gives users the option to not share data— there is actually a standardized way (robots.txt) for website servers to set policies for how bots/crawlers can interact with them, for exactly this reason— and I think fandom artists and authors are well within their rights to express a desire for opting out to be the socially-respected default within the fandom community.

[royalarchivist]

The official trailer for Squidcraft 3 just dropped, and it features some of our favorite Spanish-speaking creators from the QSMP!

(Please keep in mind that cameos aren't necessarily an indication of confirmed participants!)

[bacchuschucklefuck]

and! barbarian!fig! its her

[satsuha]

when i see aa fans not even giving aa5 and 6 a chance it's just so. sad to me. like you can never know what your opinion on something is until you give it a try and why wouldn't you do that for a series you love? i understand that pre-AJ trilogy remaster it was more difficult to play 5/6 but that's also not the case anymore since they're now on all platforms

it's especially bizarre when it seems to be purely a fandom echo chamber perspective like.. aa5 and 6 have the same metacritic score as aa3, one of the most beloved games in the fandom. aa5 is the highest rated aa game by famitsu. i know critic scores are rarely the best indicator for a game's quality but these games don't even have mixed critic/audience ratings and yet they're treated like the worst things to ever happen to the series by large groups of fans?

and it isn't like the older games don't have parts that are heavily criticized but for some reason flaws are just. impermissible for these two games. i don't know it just sucks i wish more people would trust their own judgments instead of blindly following others... everyone has different tastes and will experience things differently!!

tl;dr can you at least hate on aa5 and 6 after playing them. PLEASE

[lettuce-gremlin]

Something Something Beckett declaring that he doesn't want anyone to feel the pain of losing a loved one again, but by self isolating to the extent that he is, he has basically caused his family and friends to lose him anyway

[sunnykeysmash]

Man of words

[fayevalcntine]

The whole framing of Lestat as the sole symbol of patriarchy that fandom is so desperate to put him in doesn't work unless you deliberately ignore how he was also a victim of rape and abuse before he was turned. People want him to be fit into this strict role of "father figure/violent husband/perpetrator" that is only that and not even a whole person, and in doing so they need to push aside the fact that despite being his family's provider, he was also pushed into that role when his father forbid him from joining a monastery or gaining an education that he wanted. Lestat wanted to run away with a theater group as a kid, and actually managed to do so once Gabrielle gave him her blessing and monetary support in order to go to Paris. He didn't always want to be the provider, he was forced into that role and became despondent when he thought he would never get a chance to leave his home.

His new life prior to being turned is pretty much the antithesis to the whole "Lestat is a manly man who would sooner throw up than be compared to a woman" spiel: he lived with another man in Paris while also being an actor, having left his family and "responsibility" to them. The only family member he was ever close to was his mother, all the other male members shunned or ridiculed him. Add onto that the fact that his turning firmly placed him within the role of the damsel/victim: he's kidnapped from his bed by a stranger, taken into a tower and left to rot while being fed on for a week, before then being raped and violently turned all while never even being asked if he would consent to it in any normal circumstance. But you of course have to ignore all of this if you want him to only represent the aggressor/patriarch while Louis is the helpless unhappy matriarch of the family.

My issue isn't that I think Louis isn't a victim, it's that it's not unrealistic for Lestat to be an aggressor/abuser while also displaying traits that aren't regularly assigned to stereotypical depictions of male characters. He's abusive to Claudia while also having been a victim of abuse from his own family. He's not a good maker/teacher, but he also didn't even have one when he was turned. He's the provider/attempted protector of the family and seemed to like being that, while also having run away from his own family prior to this to act in a theater in Paris. He's a rich white man while also being obviously effeminate in public spaces, even to Tom's own bigoted humor.

Like Louis' own complicated story with being his family's benefactor and provider, you can't firmly place Lestat as being one thing or another in terms of gender ideals without deliberately ignoring parts about him that don't fit this. And I don't think it's an absolute necessity, when even in Louis' own story, Lestat isn't stripped of his effeminate mannerisms or behavior while also being the abusive maker/father/lover.

[thedreadvampy]

lmao it is undeniably true that I am Depressi Spaghetti but you know. fuck it we continue.

[godisasimp]

Whoa KuroGames just decided to absolutely decimate every other gacha games, I think they just won like, you can now win every argument by saying "at least our game has Vergil." and no one can make a valid counter to that, nothing is as cool as that.

[mysticalcats]

ok fellas this post is really different from my other stuff so i'm putting it under the cut for people who don't care and also because i'm slightly embarrassed

ok so. is it unusual for a girl to want to have a deep voice and a flat chest and a more square face and also feel slightly jealous of men and want to sound like them and look like them

and also is it unusual to want to be all that, but also simultaneously not be very bothered very much by how you look right now or by being referred to with she/her except for sometimes when you think about it too much. because i usually don't think about it except for sometimes where i suddenly just get really sad about being a girl or i'll always have this faint feeling that i am just unhappy about it

and also is it unusual to try to ignore it and go about your life being unbothered by it even though deep down it does kinda bother you but you can't really. like. say anything to anyone because your family won't react well and neither will your friends because they'll think it's weird and uncomfortable. i feel afraid to ever feel this way because i know the people in my life won't react well to it

so like. genuine question please lmk wtf is goin on because i'm unsure if it's normal and i've felt like this for a long time and it's confusing me and i don't even know what i'm going to do with the information once i know i'm just sort of lost LMAO

[a-god-in-ruins-rises]

actually...

looking at a bunch of my old favorite mutuals blogs that have been inactive for years. i miss them, even if i never really talked to any of them. when you're mutuals with a person for so long they become a comforting presence even without talking. you see them every day and read their posts about their thoughts or feelings or about what's going on in their life and so on. and they just become a part of your daily life in such a subtle way.

and then one day they just never post again. without warning. shit sucks. i actually hate it.

[infiniteglitterfall]

listen i know everyone wants to help but for fuck's sake, vetting a gofundme does not mean saying so-and-so vetted it. there needs to be some kind of reason given, somewhere, by someone.

if you want to be really generous, there should AT LEAST be a reblog, by blog-you-trust-that-actually-supposedly-vets-people-somehow, saying they vetted it and it's a real fundraiser.

but realistically, anyone claiming to vet fundraisers should be saying what they do to vet them. something. anything. fucking transparency of some sort.

i cannot even tell you anymore how many gofundmes i've seen that claim to be for people in gaza, with posts saying they were vetted by this or that blog right here!

and then that links to... the blog they're claiming vetted it, just reblogging it. not saying they vetted it. just smashing that reblog button in passing for whatever reason.

Or to a reblog by someone ELSE claiming that some blog vetted it.

Or to a Google Sheet that says it's a list of vetted gofundmes, which doesn't have any information at all about almost any of them.

And ALL the ones I've looked at recently have conflicting information, too.

Like: the Tumblr post about the gofundme will say this person is starving and their brother needs medical care urgently because he has the autisms and their life was beautiful before the war and they've lost their home and their entire family needs help. But then the gofundme itself will say they're trying to raise money to rebuild their home. And then ask for a strangely low amount, like $60k.

(Yeah, I know, exchange rates and costs of living vary. But nobody is rebuilding their home in the middle of a war. Nobody can give you an estimate for what it will eventually cost in the middle of a war. The building could get hit again. The number of people rebuilding all at once could drive up the cost of materials and labor. Etc.)

I saw one last week that was supposed to be for a computer science student whose entire family had infections, and needed cleaning supplies and urgent medical supplies stat.

And it said she was living with her family and then all her five siblings had joined with their families, so it was.... five families. Which doesn't add up.

But then the gofundme said they needed $5k each to leave the country, for a total of $50k, which means 10 people, which doesn't seem like enough to cover five (or six) families.

But then, Egypt (or the company it contracts with) has been charging $5k for women and children but $10k for men, and how can it just be $5k a person for her family? A

nd then people were urgently reblogging it, saying they needed to raise the full $50k within like 3 days so the family wouldn't have to choose between food and cleaning supplies?? (You can withdraw money on gofundme before you're done fundraising, so it wasn't that.)

It had a fuckton of reblogs and had raised something like $38k of the $50k already. And just.

It would be nice to go, "oh, it's probably fine, it's always good to help people."

But at this point, what I'm seeing has already passed "people are being scammed," and is approaching "big, trusted bloggers might be organizing scams."

[fideidefenswhore]

the tudors (2007-2010) / wolf hall (2009) / henry viii & the king's men (2020) / eustace chapuys to the emperor (june 1535) / the other boleyn girl (2008) / the downfall and execution of a tudor queen (2023) / eustace chapuys to the emperor (april 1536) / henry viii, stratford festival production (2019) / wolf hall (2009) / elizabeth i & her enemies (2017) / the mirror & the light (2020) / becoming elizabeth (2022) / the mirror & the light (2020) / the tudors (2007-2010) / the mirror & the light (2020) / the tudors (2007-2010)

[liquidstar]

This is such a tangent btw but on the topic of guilt tripping and reblogs... I remember a few years back there were some terrible fires in Greece (and again this year, entire island villages are gone now) and at that time I had family who were caught in them. I can't describe the desperation I felt with these horrible things happening to my family and loved ones in my country. And I remember being frustrated and desperate with how no one around me in America really seemed to give a shit. I remember blogging asking people to PLEASE care please share something please reblog this link for mutual aid please think about the stories and fires etc etc etc. And the thing is I was very much in a state of grief myself, maybe not every word or action was perfectly reasonable, because I don't realistically expect everyone everywhere to care about every tragedy in the world. You can't. Emotionally it's just not possible, especially with all the stuff going on in the states rn too. Yeah it's a lot. It's not like I blog about every tragedy that ever happens either. I understand.

HOWEVER what I also remember was at this time there were a couple mutuals very clearly making vagueposts along the lines of "remember not everyone has the energy to care about everything in the world uwu" while I was posting about family who died and family who were drifting in the ocean for hours as their homes and loved ones burned. Listen. You have to understand sometimes that when a person in grief and frustration with things going on in their countries and communities impacts them very personally beg you to care... It's coming from a place of needing to see that care in the world in general. They're not holding a gun to your head Specifically saying you have to reblog the posts, if you don't have the energy just ignore it.

You don't have to go out of your way saying "um actually I can't care about the horrible stuff you and your family and your country are experiencing rn. I'm too busy focusing on my own stuff so can you be quiet or more reasonable with your grief thanks." Like. Just keep it to yourself then??? Have some fucking sympathy for other people and understand that maybe it's not always logical. The same way you don't have the emotional energy to think about every tragedy in the world, people who've been impacted by them often don't have the emotional energy to handle that alone and may seek somekinda community or solidarity. Idk. It's not about forcing shit on you sometimes it's not about you

[thepoisonroom]

that post that's like "learning social skills helps with social anxiety" applies to dating also btw