#i want to make a difference (ic)

[nibbelraz]

Pls consider MBJ looking between his spy and his spy's didi and just trying to make sense of these two

POV: you are Mobei Jun looking at your loyal servant glare absolute murderous daggers at you while his younger brother (that you didn't know about) is just staring at you weirdly

[marlequinncos]

I couldn't get Fitzjames' cunty little fur-lined coat out of my head after finishing "The Terror", so I decided I needed my own version. I found the base coat secondhand, modified and tailored it, and hand sewed on the faux fur trim. Maybe one day I'll make the screen accurate version, but I'm very happy with this for now.

[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.

[plutonious]

wahtever I like emmie and gogo I want to talk about them.

after emmet gets to hisui ingo is verrry cheerful due to the amount of affection he recives from emmet

ingo's been basically trained out of initiating physical contact from being a part of pearl clan for so long, but that doesn't mean he doesn't like it, just that he forgets he's allowed to do so when theres someone he can do so with, so everytime emmet touches him he practially melts. emmet is latched onto ingo half the time so that's really often. something something he grew up with one million affection and then didn't realize he was missing it until he got it back. now he doesn't like being apart from his brother for too long. because it's warm and cozy to be hugged.

[chrisrin]

after reading @sixteenth-days's very lovely new fic chapter (go read here!) i just HAD to do a take on a flower husbands fusion design!

[toomanysubcultures]

idie headshot + movement sketches!!

[crossthread]

No jokes here. The Navy’s best pilot and the Navy’s best admiral. Between them, eight air-to-air combat kills and five stars. These were men who commanded respect with or without your approval. This was the picture of ruthless competence.

Debriefing (& Other Stories) • part 2 of Easier Done Than Said by @compacflt

[lightblueminecraftorchid]

Misconceptions my family/friends about the food bank at my school:

- "Going to the food bank takes food from other people". The more people go, the more they can demonstrate a need in the student population and apply for more funding.

- "I can afford basic staple groceries, so I wouldn't benefit". The food bank has a variety of food items, including a lot of "treats" and foods you wouldn't expect to see. Even if you can buy what you need to get through the week, having some seasonings, produce, meat, shelf staples, etc. can still go a long way. Coffee, tea, and cocoa packets can make life a lot nicer. And the local grocery stores donate lots of just-past-sell-by baked goods, so if you like donuts with your coffee or lemon cake to brighten your afternoon, the food bank can help you out.

- "Don't they pick out the food for you? I don't want someone else deciding what I eat." The food bank here is like a much smaller grocery store; you're given bags and you fill them with what you need. Even someone like me, who has a lot of dietary restrictions, can benefit.

- "I can afford food, so I don't need anything. Im just struggling to buy other things, like school supplies" The food bank here has a separate care pantry. I've gotten hygiene items (pads, tampons, shampoo/conditioner/body wash, etc), kitchen items (plastic cups, ziplocs, trash bags, etc), toilet paper, and even sexual health items (sex health kits including lube, condoms, sometimes dental dams) from the care pantry. At the start of the semester, they had a back to school kit which included a notebook, a folder, a pen, and a highlighter. They have ESL books for international students. I've gotten gloves and socks from them. One time, I saw three pairs of shoes.

"So you can just take as much as you want?" No. Most food items are limited. All care items are limited, except for sex health kits and period products. The more popular items are, the more likely they are to be limited, bc they run out faster. It's a great day when the food bank gets a large donation of some type of produce like apples or grapefruit, bc that's the one time produce isn't super restricted. The food bank is really good for getting a little bit of a lot of things, not stocking up in bulk.

"So I can just walk in the door and get free stuff?" No. I was surprised how many hoops I had to jump through. I had to present my student ID three times to get to the food, as well as complete a detailed form. I had to give my full name, my employment status, how many people were in my household, my student status, my age, and sign up for a specific day to visit the food bank. That form also included two waivers, which absolve the school and donors of any responsibility for giving you spoiled food.

- "The food bank is accessible to everyone on campus". No. The food bank is frustratingly inaccessible. It's located all the way to the north end of campus, as far as possible from all of the dorms. There are two parking spaces; every other space within a quarter mile is metered. The food bank is open for two hours a day, but the hours are different for every day of the week, and they change every semester. The food bank entrance is down a flight of stairs, and there's no clear alternate entrance for people who can't use stairs safely. The first checkpoint to present your ID and proof of form completion is outside, and the building only lets in about ten students at a time; in the winter, this means standing outside in the bitter cold for up to an hour. Many of these students don't have closed toed shoes, gloves, or other cold weather gear. Student IDs can be physical cards, but the form and waivers can only be completed online; if your smartphone dies, you're fucked. The form itself is difficult to navigate to and only in English, despite a disproportionate amount of the students using the food bank speaking English as a second (or third or fourth) language. Worst of all, a lot of these issues aren't clear to students until they try to go.

- "Only the most desperate students use the foodbank; it's shameful/embarrassing to go there". 1 in 3 students use this food bank. Every time I've mentioned going to the food bank in conversation, nobody has reacted negatively. At most, they might ask me how to go there themselves. Even with all the hoops, the food bank massively improves my quality of life; I would keep going even if I were still employed. Do you know how much money I've saved on toilet paper and pads? On shampoo? On dish soap? I'm able to access free lube discreetly, which makes using tampons possible for me. I can get foods I don't strictly *need*, but make eating a joy again. I can get sparkling water, juice boxes, cocoa packets, and coffee. I got bags of apples and an orange this fall and made the best fucking cider in the world for no money at all. I get oil and butter and salt and pepper and eggs and bread. Yeah, they have the cheapest version of everything, and I hve to check the bread loaves for mold. It's still worth it. It's Free Food And Care Items.

[jamiethebeeart]

I'm so very very normal about Dani, I promise (lineart by @five-rivers ) @green-with-envy-phandom-event

[raddest-laddest]

ok. someone’s gonna have to come get my dad or i’m gonna tweak.

[whateverthought]

Personally, I think 'the Prince That Was Promised' and Azor Ahai is about more than 1 person. I'd even go so far as to say its about all 3 of them. If the point is that prophecies are self-fulfilling and subject to interpretation, then how far of a stretch is it to believe people of the past would assume it was all about one person when it wasn't actually? To think it would be more believable that everything is the act of one hero than a group of scenes that actually just belong in the same time frame

[rabbitindisguise]

THE EXPRESSION ON MY FACE WHEN I READ THIS, I'M-

[lesbiantimrand]

[perilegs]

shoutout to people working their dream jobs doing something mundane

[valiant-portabella-pirkko]

Alright know what here's a little Guild Wars 2 reblog game for everybody; what mounts (if any) do your characters have in their canon, do they have names? Personalities? How'd they meet??

Spill it all below, tell me about all your creatures!!

[boypussydilf]

okay, so casper and nova, right? the casper and nova game is one big metaphor for simon and betty’s relationship. and the last thing we see in it is: nova tries to sacrifice herself so casper can get what he wants, and the choices are to either go with that, or nova lives but casper forgets her. and it’s obviously meant to parallel simon and betty’s situation in come along with me after they get swallowed by golb: either betty can sacrifice herself to keep simon safe, or she doesn’t but he goes back to being ice king. (um, that is, assuming that she was correct to think they might revert to the forms they had before getting digested after exiting golb. which is not something we have any actual evidence for. it was just a possibility that occurred to her and a risk she wasn’t willing to take.)

UM. EVERY PART OF THAT WAS BECAUSE OF DECISIONS BETTY MADE INDEPENDENTLY?

betty decides to jump through the portal when simon is trying to say goodbye to her, betty decides to fix the crown and then try to find a way to cure him even after he’s told her he’d rather die than be ice king again, betty decides to fucking summon golb, betty decides to push simon out of golb before he can react at all just in case the crown goes back to its former state once it leaves and just in case there’s no way to get rid of golb without its wish magic.

IT WAS BETTYS CHOICES IT WAS BETTYS CHOICES IT WAS ALL BETTYS OWN CHOICES THAT SHE MADE IT WAS BETTY BETTY WAS THE REASON THEY WERE IN THAT SITUATION