"To Sam, brother is more than what it is to everyone else. Sometimes it’s a prayer, sometimes it’s a cry for help. It’s don’t ever leave me and I won’t ever leave you and my heart is only beating because it’s your blood it pumps through my veins." x
I’m Bash, I’m from Australia and my passion is finding accurate and sensitive representations of disability in fiction! I also read a lot of LGBT+ romance, horror and a splash of crime/thriller here and there, from middle grade to YA to adult!
if you wanna take a browse around my blog, I highly recommend:
my book reviews - there are 100s of them, all tagged by title and author, and they are 100% okay to reblog, no matter how old they are 😊
my book recommendations - these are also perfectly fine to reblog - sharing them around is kind of the point after all lol
my #LoveOzYA tag - a collection of all my posts, pics and reviews of Australian YA fiction. if you’re looking for a new author to try, this is a great way to find one because very few Aussie authors get published outside of Australia (which is a crying shame because they write some incredible books)
I also tag for #lgbt books, #disabled characters, and #authors of colour if you’re looking for anything that fits those descriptors. I do have a #not YA tag for things that aren’t YA but I haven’t always been good at labelling things that way lol
either way: welcome to my blog! it’s so great to see new people in the booklr community <3 I can’t wait to see what books we all discover together! - Bash xoxo
ps. feel free to friend or follow me on StoryGraph!
just a quick note: TERFs are not welcome here. don’t follow me and don’t interact with my posts. we love and support trans people on this blog specifically but in the booklr community as a whole too. that kind of ignorance and hate has no place here.
Chapters: 9/9
Fandom: Doctor Who (1963)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Charles Crichton & Sarah Jane Smith, K9 & Sarah Jane Smith
Characters: K-9, Sarah Jane Smith, Charles Crichton, Original Characters, Winifred Bambera
Additional Tags: United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (Doctor Who), Torchwood One, 1980s, 1980s UNIT, 1980s Torchwood, Original Character-centric, Original Character Death(s), Case Fic, Action/Adventure, Military, Aliens, Plot, Cliffhangers, Angst, Zombies (sort of), Infection, Peril, Explosions, Period Typical Attitudes, (here and there anyway), and one lost victorian housemaid
Series: Part 1 of 1980s UNIT
Summary:
April 1985: Good scientific advisors are hard to find. Dr Webber discovers why when he's expected to deal with zombies, aliens and Torchwood on his second day, and his only help is a tin dog and a ghost. Colonel Crichton and Sarah Jane are planning an exit strategy of sorts, while Captain Bambera is trying to keep her men from joining the opposing forces. They'll all be lucky to stay alive.
Because Din, in the hylian creation myth, created the physical world. Naryu then created the laws - gravity, time, etc. And Farore finally created life - plants and people.
Din created the body, naryu the mind, Farore the soul.
And the triforce and its wielders so perfectly reflect that.
Ganon is physical power, he is big and intimidating and he breaks things. He is cunning and determined, but that's not what he focuses on. He is might makes right.
Zelda is wisdom and cleverness. She is stall tactics and information and team work. She is a powerful mage with a spine of steel, but that's not how she'll win. She is the pen being mightier than the sword.
Link is courage and persistence. He is the wild card sneaking behind enemy ranks, always moving, plunging into terrifying situations head first. He's a phenomenal fighter with a keen wit, but that's not what will get him through his challenges. He is bravery not being the absence of fear but the triumph over it.
They sit in perfect parallels to each other.
And ganon is reborn through his body - his resurrection is immortality. No matter how low he is cast, as long as he has a body he can claw his way back. He can cling to his power, build it ever higher.
Zelda is reborn through the magic of her bloodline. It's the accumulated knowledge handed down for generations, the unique power she must master, the skills she must develop to survive and get her kingdom out the other side intact. Even her name, the knowledge of herself, is handed down from all the way from the very first. Her ancestors knowledge of her future presence, her stability, is what gives her the edge.
Link is reborn in spirit. He is not bound by flesh or blood. Just like his wanderlust soul he can reappear in any time or place. His variation, his unpredictability, is exactly how he fights. It's what makes him so hard to pin down.
Ganons need to build strength means he can't chase after link. Links impulsiveness means zelda can outwit him. Zeldas stationary predictability means she's an easy target for ganon.
But the other direction?
Fire melts ice, ice redirects lightning, lightning burns fire.
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.
ask game; Victoria Dallon, aka Glory Girl aka Antares
I've always thought that Victoria's first appearance is quite the bit of deft needle-threading.
The thing about Interlude 2 is that Vicky is our first example of one of this setting's established heroes actively fighting crime- not just swooping in to vulture up the accomplishments of an up-and-comer- and a therefore a major goal of the sequence is to ensure that the audience comes away structurally unnerved by what counts as business as usual for the heroes, set the stage for the hurricane of ass-covering to come. So we have a sequence where she lords her power over a baseline criminal who has no realistic chance to fight back or get away, where she cripples and nearly kills him in a display of excessive force, where she uses her connections to other capes to duck out on the consequences of her excess once she realizes that she's crossed certain moral and optical Rubicons. All of this is gross, all of this speaks to an alarmingly cavalier attitude amongst even the most ostensibly accountable heroes. And from a protagonistic perspective, all of this serves to soften the blow of Taylor's actions at the bank in act three, because we're predisposed to see Vicky as an arrogant, overprivileged loose cannon who'd actually have a significantly higher body count than all of the Undersiders put together if not for the cushion afforded to her by her status as a superhero. A golden child up against the already put-upon underdog.
But. She also does all of that to a Neo-Nazi, who was fresh off committing a hate crime. I mean, if this was violence against a purse-snatcher, a drug-dealer- It would be very, very easy to block this sequence in a way that would set her up as a villain and nothing else for the rest of the work. In The Boys, for example, Homelander debuts by incinerating one bank robber's hand and throwing another a thousand feet into the air to land hard on a parked car, and the dissonance between that casual brutality and his chumminess with the onlookers is the thematic backbone for... basically the entire show, because he was in such total control of the situation that the only reason to do it that way is that he fundamentally doesn't care. In Super Crooks, it's made abundantly clear that the superheroes trying to arrest the titular supervillains are significantly more destructive to the city than the villains are, because their institutional backing removes any incentive to do anything but pursue the flashiest arrests possible for the sake of ratings. But Glory Girl? She's a sixteen year old putting her money where her mouth is on the unconsidered-dilettante suburban-left-ish tumblrite rallying cry of punching a Nazi. She's living out a near-boilerplate superheroic fantasy of righteous violence against an uncomplicatedly righteous target- likely a fantasy entertained at least once by the median cape fan, if we're being honest- and then, in the aftermath, blood on her hands and on the pavement, staring down the full weight of the prospect of actually having killed a person in an unconsidered spate of rage, is very much a panicked teenager about it, scrambling for a way to walk it back.
Which, independent of the specifics of whether this particular asshole had it coming, is the problematic element of this that generalizes- that superheroism in this world is a system that puts the social license to use concrete-shattering power in the hands of a kid with the judgement and attitude of someone scheming up ways to dodge curfew. She's done this before, she's gonna keep doing this, she's gonna keep being two-faced about it with her public-facing golden-girl image. But she wasn't wrong to be angry. And the fact that this is the kind of thing she gets angry about is hard to separate from later beats where she tries to do right by people, hard to separate from her willingness to put herself on the line against Endbringers and the Slaughterhouse 9. It's a bad situation, a horrible system that's guaranteed to incentivize bad behavior, they shouldn't be assigning any of this shit to a 17-year-old. But later on, when things go south for her, the seeds are planted so that she can retain audience sympathy in a way that she likely wouldn't be able to if this story was a banal hatswap, with unfairly maligned "villains" who do no real wrong against supervillains who happen to call themselves superheroes.