i wanted to practice setting scenes and facial expressions so i drew a scene from the fic Flowers Like Ashes by @noirsongbird
minor spoilers i guess but its a reallllllly good fic pls read it
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I. Ohmygod ahhhhhhhh this is amazing, you really captured what was going on in the scene and the mood of the whole thing and — this is so amazing, thank you so very very very much!
Oddly specific. Got a deposit for 6,837 today
fuck it, i never ever do those “reblog for X, this one really works!” posts, but this one doesn’t have any of that BS, this is just straight up wishing us good things; and then the comment doesn’t even say any of that either. Zero claims on this post, all positive vibes
May you end this week feeling ever more certain of a future you’ll love
dva & ramattra: a comic about broken people, broken robots, and ratatouille. not canon-compliant
I spend a lot of time keeping track of right wing media figures for work, and to be perfectly honest I'm cautiously optimistic. The Limbaugh era was turbo-charged by a combination of organized evangelical voting blocks, post-9/11 patriotism, and once-in-a-generation media personalities, that are all running on fumes now. They've got momentum, but it's coasting.
While on the other hand, the resurgence of union power is seeing people actually working with their community to materially improve their lives. That's the concrete for a strong foundation.
I don't really have a point here, I'm just sharing some guarded optimism.
felt like this deserved to be on the main post
some dipshit uploaded my book to an AI site, so suffice to say, I will fucking kill them
emailed my agent cuz our contract states she has to protect me from shit like this, so we'll see what she says
but I will still kill these ppl
hey so, just so there's no ambiguity about what just happened-- this was about Prosecraft, a website that would help you compare your writing to your favorite author by analyzing the "vividness" of the words used, passive voice vs active voice and the number of adverbs used in a given section.
unfortunately, the service is dogshit for various reasons but that's not the issue here.
the issue is that the website had trained an AI on 25,000 books, one of which included mine. and i definitely did not give anyone permission to use my work to train an AI. it's literally stated in my contract.
and if i didn't give permission--i can imagine quite a number of authors didn't give permission either. (oops, i don't have to imagine--because hundreds of authors came forward and said they didn't give permission either!)
so i emailed my agent about this. my agent directed me to my publisher which has a legal department that looks into piracy on this scale. all of those authors did the same, emailing their legal team, getting The Authors Guild involved.
EVERY AUTHOR pretty much roasting this guy named Benji Smith on Twitter for claiming to "support authors" yet clearly using pirated work to train an AI.
of course, he decided to take the website down. authors are now talking about getting AI protection clauses in their contracts going forward. i already have one with my agent, but I imagine I will have to get it instated into every publishing contract moving forward.
source: it happened to me lol (but if you don't believe me, here's a link)
You know, an interesting tumblr transformation that's happened gradually, and which I've seen no one talk about: ask-culture has essentially dropped off to nothing.
By which I mean, asks used to be WAY more of the tumblr economy. They used to be more common to send, and receive, and see. They were integral to the collaborative, forum-like behavior of old tumblr communities, not even to speak on the HUGE number of ask-blogs that used to exist to only be interacted with in ask-form.
I'm not saying this in a vying-for-attention way but instead in an observational way: I used to get way way more asks in like 2015, even with a fraction of my follower count. I wonder if it's due to the homogenization of social media sites? There's a lot more of this divide between "content creator" and "consumer" instead of just a bunch of peer blogs who would talk to each other. "Asks" aren't really a thing on twitter, are they? And as I understand it, the closest thing to an "ask" on instagram or tiktok would be a creator screenshotting some comment and responding to it in a new reel or video or whatever those content mediums are. Are asks just too tumblr-specific? Is that aspect of the site culture dying out as more and more people converge to using all their social media sites in the same way?
the upside of ADHD is that it makes you a fucking genius
the downside is that you don't get to decide when and for how long you're a genius.
Or what you are going to be a genius about.
You have a big work project?
Nah. You're now a genius at making boardgames. For 7 hours.
i'm not the praying sort, but i'll probably always have a soft spot for the astronaut's prayer
for those who aren't familiar with it, it's a possibly-spurious quote by alan shepard (and is thus sometimes referred to as the shepard's prayer) on the launchpad of Freedom 7, immediately before he became the first american in space. it goes like this:
"Dear Lord, please don't let me fuck up."
What if WWX has to put curse repelling talismans around the crops on the Burial Mounds because one of the fastest ways for illness and curses to spread is through food.
Except. The crops absorb the talismans effects. So then you have Curse Repelling Radishes that WWX and WN sell in Yilling.
At first no one notices, especially not the Burial Mounds Gang but the people that buy from WWX at first are those that fortune has shied away from, they're looking for something cheap and healthy to eat and oh such big radishes for only this much is a steal!
But then they eat it and oh suddenly their fate seems to have taken a turn for the best. Their sick husband is suddenly better. Their child is more healthy. (It was a slow curse eating away at them, something very prominent in Yilling) and slowly they make the connection to the radishes. Even more so when they realise that the radish seller is in fact The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation.
And thus begins Yilling accepting WWX as their Laozu.
The name of this creature is YOTAcat or POTOOcat.
This creature is a combination of Yotaka (potoo) and cat.
His true identity is one of an alien reconnaissance unit that plans to invade the earth.
His body can change its shape at will by copying other creatures and objects.
When he came to Earth, he first tried to copy the appearance of the planet's main life form.
However, the first thing he saw there was a cat. He decided that the creature was the main life form and tried to copy the cat's form.
However, by some accident, he also copied the information of Potoo, and his body became a chimera of cat and Potoo.
What was even more unexpected for these aliens was that once they copied the earth creatures, the original spirit invaded their psyche.
His spirit was about to be taken over by cats and POTOO!
The human who found the strange creature brought it home out of curiosity. Not knowing it was a vicious alien.......
