I feel like when I say ‘relatable’ what I really mean is ‘resonant.’ I don’t want characters who I feel are like me, I want characters who have emotions so strong I can feel them through the page.

A.I. photos are flooding social media and contributing to an Internet where we can't believe what we see. Spotting A.I. 📷s is an important media literacy skill.

None of us have time to research every image we see. We just need people to notice BEFORE THEY LIKE OR SHARE that an image might be fake. If unsure, check it or don't share.

I've started drawing some comics explaining the basic of AI spot-checking and media literacy in the age of disinformation. Follow along here or on my Twitter.

the usa shouldn’t be the political and economic focal point of the entire fucking planet, actually

So p/atreon is amping up its lockdown on nsfw material, gumroads is amping up its nsfw material-

Pornhub is currently not available in texas.

KOSA keeps coming closer to getting actually passed-

Can people please just admit that nsfw is being driven underground? That adult artists are being banned and pushed out of their spaces?

And dont start saying "oh just the yucky stuff." No, this is *ALL* Nsfw.

We are losing spaces left and right...

Not only that, it feels like we creatives are being killed. And that isnt exactly hyperbolic.

Paypal implemented taxes not that long ago, a hit to those who use it. Artists especially. Midjourney and other ai, stealing artworks, having people think less of artists.

Platforms kicking and banning artists left and right.

It feels like being an indie creator is being choked out of possibility. That you have to be born rich and lucky for your creative dreams to come true.

"oh you're just a porn addict its not that bad"

Its not that bad until your stuff is banned.

We had ROE VS FUCKING WADE thrown out the window. You dont think we could have LGBTQA+ rights thrown out too!?

The internet is becoming SO HOSTILE to creatives of all sorts. Its fucking heartbreaking.

Its like we're entering nsfw prohibition of the internet, buy a 160 dollar keychain for a 'free' picture of a dragon fucking a Volkswagen 😭

"Should trans women be allowed to compete in women's sports" I don't think there should be women's sports. I think it's a silly artificial construction that only upholds the gender binary while it's benefits are incidental and would be better addressed directly.

Care about giving people with different body types and muscle mass a shot? Split your league by weight categories like boxing, or some other direct physical measurement. Gender is at best a poor proxy for these and we only do it because we still treat women are a different species. "But that still wouldn't be fully fair to everyone?" Sport isn't fully fair, it's about rewarding people with the most biological advantage. That's the whole point of it.

You want to give more sporting opportunity to women and minorities specifically? Okay then do that. Create your own opportunities league, but if we're giving up the pretense that it's about essential biological advantage then you better let trans women in.

What's that, the extra league would be treated as a novelty afterthought and would lack the prestige of the real main event? You mean like how women's events were treated when they were introduced? True! In fact women's leagues are still largely treated as secondary now, and you know how we can fix it? Make the main leagues open to everyone with weight, height or muscle mass categories so that people with different body types can excel. Like I suggested before. Problem solved.

Women's sport is bad actually.

Replacing physical buttons and controls with touchscreens also means removing accessibility features. Physical buttons can be textured or have Braille and can be located by touch and don't need to be pressed with a bare finger. Touchscreens usually require precise taps and hand-eye coordination for the same task.

Many point-of-sale machines now are essentially just a smartphone with a card reader attached and the interface. The control layout can change at a moment's notice and there are no physical boundaries between buttons. With a keypad-style machine, the buttons are always in the same place and can be located by touch, especially since the middle button has a raised ridge on it.

Buttons can also be located by touch without activating them, which enables a "locate then press" style of interaction which is not possible on touchscreens, where even light touches will register as presses and the buttons must be located visually rather than by touch.

When elevator or door controls are replaced by touch screens, will existing accessibility features be preserved, or will some people no longer be able to use those controls?

Who is allowed to control the physical world, and who is making that decision?

Hey this is really really fucked up. Can we talk about this because holy shit

So a free tool called GLAZE has been developed that allows artists to cloak their artwork so it can't be mimicked by AI art tools.

AI art bros are big mad about it.

psst, tumblr just quietly rolled out collaboration with ai training models, and it's opt-out, not opt-in, go into your blog settings to fix it [on desktop, anyway, dunno where you'd look on mobile] keep fighting the good fight <3

I don't see an option for it now, so it may not have rolled out for everyone yet? Unless I'm just missing where it is

© maomao爱花卷

※re-posted with permission ※please don’t remove the source

🎨 狐狸大王a

What is this about the tumblr staff wanting to sell art data to midjourney?

An ex-colleague of mine mentioned yesterday that there may be contacts between Automattic and midjourney in that direction, but nothing is public yet and I don't have any more info. They probably won't have anything specific to share either, since they left the company weeks ago too. That being said:

I have no reason to doubt my ex-coworker word, they are a trustworthy person.

Tumblr's CEO has been absurdly enthusiastic (comically, even) about AI, and is a big fan of LLMs and 'AI' companies.

A deal with midjourney could solve tumblr financial issues (not the same company, but openAi is paying up to 5 million/year to news companies to use their content as training data... tumblr generates several orders of magnitude more content than any newspaper or any media company and it only would need a 20 to 30 million per year deal to be profitable)

So I don't have any extra info yet, but I'm keeping my ears open.

The Earth 🌍 Warrior

What happened in the MCU is that they made Bucky unquestionably a victim and then did not know how to handle it. 

In the comics, Bucky’s brainwashing leaves him with enough agency that his past as the Winter Soldier is absolutely comparable to Natasha’s. Both were used and abused and manipulated, but they maintained enough control over their own actions that it is reasonable to question whether it mattered that they didn’t know who they truly were because they were still people.  In the MCU, they specifically wrote Bucky Barnes as a character whose agency was not just compromised but actually removed. It’s not just torture and coercion, though there are 70 years’ worth of explicit torture and coercion, it’s that for him to act as the Winter Soldier they have to cauterize out what makes him a person. In the MCU Hydra/the Soviets have not one but two ways to do it: the chair and the activation words. The Winter Soldier does not comply without them. This is not a question of a prisoner breaking after years of enslavement. This is explicitly shown as a mechanical way of erasing Bucky’s consciousness and capacity for consent. And it was a choice by the MCU to characterize his captivity like that, much like it was a (subtle) choice to make Bucky a man who was drafted rather than a man who enlisted.  And up to Phase 4 that had played out alright; the characters who see him as culpable are also shown to not be objective (Tony, for example, or Bucky himself). The audience knows better, though, because we are privy to all of the flashbacks and the medical torture and the him being bodily dragged out of cryo to be activated. But then the MCU actually had to confront its choices in TFATWS and they did it in the worse possible manner because they both chose to reinforce the narrative that Bucky was a powerless victim during his enslavement while making his recovery conditional on accepting responsibility for it. They pretend to sell Bucky along with the activation codes. There’s a whole pivotal scene by the firelight where Bucky finally does not respond to the activation codes and Ayo tells him he’s free and that’s because he was not free beforehand. In a storyline which places explicit moral value on refusing the serum, never once was it mentioned that Bucky did not consent to being injected with it in the first place. His situation obviously parallels Isaiah’s, not Steve’s.

But now the audience is being asked to see Bucky as someone who needs to make amends, not just because his therapist says so but because the moral compass of the series, Sam, makes it explicitly clear that what Bucky needs to do is “do the work”.  And this is INSANE. It’s insane. To have Bucky weep when the trigger words wash over him and still, still, try to have the audience buy into the narrative of his recovery as one where he needs to admit wrongdoing is absurd. It would be normal and expected of Bucky to feel wretched guilt over his past but the recovery is overcoming that, not reinforcing it. Bucky admits, word for word, that he had no choice and that would be bad enough, but the Winter Soldier was made to not even conceive of the possibility of choice. 

There can be no culpability without agency and guilt is not a measure of responsibility.

Bucky Barnes has, for ten years of MCU canon, been written as a man who was powerless to stop the abuse that was inflicted on him and now that they have to cash that check the MCU cannot handle it. I don’t even know if it’s because they, like society in general, cannot abide the concept of men - masculine men, especially masculine leading men - as victims but the end result is that TFATWS is an explicit exercise in victim blaming. 

Fanwork Research & Reference Guides Compilation

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All in the Wangxian Family by tungstenpincenez (G, 19k, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, family tree, Comic-Con, Humor, tutorial, Chinese names, chinese honorifics, warning: mental illness discussion)

Writers Guide: The Guqin by ThisIsWhereTheMagicHappens (Not Rated, 1k, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Writers, guqin, chinese instrument, Meta, non-fiction)

How Mo Dao Zu Shi Uses Classical Chinese Literature and Ideas in Character- and World-Building by yakuzakuma (G, 5k, Reviews, Meta, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides)

Working Guide to almost every single mxtx character by Nightfeather18 (M, 1k, all the characters, every single one, help guide, Spoilers, my horrible sense of humor)

On Character’s Ages by thewickling (Diviana) (G, 5k, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Meta, Nonfiction, Cross-posted on Dreamwidth)

On Qishan Indocrination’s Duration by thewickling (Diviana) for pumpkinpaix (G, 1k, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Módào Zǔshī History, Qíshān Wēn Indoctrination,Timelines)

A Compiled List of Known Lan Clan Rules by Unforth (Not Rated, 2k, Meta, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Nonfiction, Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Podfic by dangercupcake)

A Writer’s Unofficial Guide to Chinese Naming by FireflyPie (G, 2k, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Chinese Language, no knowledge of the MXTX novels strictly required)

List of Differences Between Modao Zushi and CQL/The Untamed by Unforth (Not Rated, 3k, Meta, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Nonfiction, Cross-Posted on Tumblr)

The Untamed / MDZS, resources link post, stuff I needed as a writer by AteanaLenn (G, 1k, Meta, Metafiction, resources, linkdrop, Nonfiction, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides)

Chinese naming basics for fanfiction writers by miqqumi (Not Rated, 937, Meta, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides)

MDZS Timeline by thewickling (Diviana) (G, 22k, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Meta, Nonfiction, Módào Zǔshī History)

Grandmaster of Demonic Timeline by chrisemrys (G, 2k, timeline, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides)

MDZS Audio Drama Episode Guide by pumpkinpaix (Not Rated, 5k, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides)

Mo Dao Zu Shi Writer Reference: Novel Chapter Summaries by threerings (Not Rated, 2k, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Podfic by dangercupcake)

Reference for Modao Zushi Writers: Chinese terms by chaoticjoy (G, 3k, WIP, Meta, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides)

MDZS History Context for Dummies by enbysaurus_rex (Not Rated, 14k, WIP, Meta, Analysis, Historical Accuracy, Historical Metaphors)

Ghostbusting Economics: The Great Cultivator Labor Shortage by GhostySword (G, 3k, Meta, Economics, Worldbuilding, Crack, Though honestly it’s not that wild and pretty well supported by the text)

RL Cultivation 101 by Gina3 (T, 2k, Meta, cultivation, Taoism)

Fanwork Research & Reference Guides tag on AO3

WangXiantics: The (unofficial) Untamed Episode Guide by Trensu (T, 116k) although it’s a reaction work, it also serves as a list of episode summaries highlighting key moments.

dyingstar14’s (unofficial) guide to writing ancient china by dyingstar14 (Not Rated, 6k, WIP, Ancient China, Ancient History, non-fiction, information, Units of Time, Hair, Units of Distance, Education)

meta and translation masterpost by @songfeng-shuiyue

The Reading of Sorrow (and other works) by Tavina (T, 10k, WIP, Meta, Worldbuilding, Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368 CE), Essays, Research, Historical References, Historical Accuracy, Chinese Mythology & Folklore, Yuan Dynasty Paintings and Painters, Future Fic, Appendixes, Music) historical research underlying the fic but I’m not in charge of sorrow (so please don’t ask me when) with abundant book recs.

Who Knew the Truth About the Wen Remnants? by Karmiya (T, 8k, Meta, Essay)

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Google Docs

transcripts and translations for the entirety of The Untamed (Spreadsheets)

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Maps of MDZS

Tumblr post by mondengel

Twitter thread by @/wangxianling

Twitter thread by @/bosbiee

Tumblr post by lalunaticscribe

Stunted, Starving Juvenility - Addendum by TomatenMark

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Those who were once oppressed under an Apartheid regime have stepped up to help those being oppressed under another one.

Meanwhile, the so-called "free" world is still trying to find ways to justify "standing with" and defending دو Israel's rogue racist Apartheid regime.

They should feel deep shame. They don't. But they all should.

My therapist just told me my problem is that I need to write more fanfiction.