Gentle reminder that very little fandom labor is automated, because I think people forget that a lot.

That blog with a tagging system you love? A person curates those tags by hand.

That rec blog with a great organization scheme and pretty graphics? Someone designed and implemented that organization scheme and made those graphics.

That network that posts a cool variety of stuff? People track down all that variety and queue it by hand, and other people made all the individual pieces.

That post with umpteen links to helpful resources, and information about them? Someone gathered those links, researched the sources, wrote up the information about them.

That graphic about fandom statistics? Someone compiled those statistics, analyzed them, organized them, figured out a useful way to convey the information to others, and made the post.

That event that you think looks neat? Someone wrote the rules, created the blogs and Discords, designed the graphics, did their best to promo the event so it'd succeed.

None of this was done automatically. None of it just appears whole out of the internet ether.

I think everyone realizes that fic writing and fanart creation are work, and at least some folks have got it through their heads that gif creation and graphics and moodboards take effort, and meta is usually respected for the effort that goes into it, at least as far as I've seen, but I feel like a lot of people don't really get how much labor goes into curation, too.

If people are creating resources, curating content, organizing the creations of others, gathering information, and doing other fandom activities that aren't necessarily the direct action of creation, they're doing a lot of fandom labor, and it's often largely unrecognized.

Celebrate fan work!

To folks doing this kind of labor: I see you, and I thank you. You are the backbones of our fandoms and I love you.

David Szymanski: in my game i have invented the Iron Lung as a cautionary tale

Billionaires: at long last, we have created the Iron Lung from classic horror game Don’t Create The Iron Lung

Here's the truth: if this website collapses too, I will never know when a show has finally come out, because I won't suddenly see new gifs from it.

When questioned, chatgpt doubles down on how it is definitely correct.

But it's not relying on some weird glitchy interpretation of the art itself, a la adversarial turtle-gun. It just reports the drawing as definitely being of the word "lies" because that kind of self-consistency is what would happen in the kind of human-human conversations in its internet training data. I tested this by starting a brand new chat and then asking it what the art from the previous chat said.

Google's bard, on the other hand, interprets it differently

Bard has the same tendency to generate illegible ASCII art and then praise its legibility, except in its case, all its art is cows.

Not to be outdone, bing chat (GPT-4) will also praise its own ASCII art - once you get it to admit it even can generate and rate ASCII art. For the "balanced" and "precise" versions I had to make my request all fancy and quantitative.

With Bing chat I wasn't able to ask it to read its own ASCII art because it strips out all the formatting and is therefore illegible - oh wait, no, even the "precise" version tries to read it anyways.

These language models are so unmoored from the truth that it's astonishing that people are marketing them as search engines.

More at AI Weirdness

one of the last barriers keeping jester from sending ludinus da'leth the most threatening four part save the date to her wedding has finally been removed. only the cage surrounding the moon still protects him.

etc

dream from three days ago

Yeah but what if they're some oddly high budget cartoon from the 00s???

I am Autistic and need to know who, what, when, where and how

I CAN Network Ltd

Just finished watching the season finale of Puppet History from @wearewatcher … Wasn’t really planning on crying today but hey, plans change.

Thank you for another incredible season!

Hello! I’ve seen your work over the years and every time I see it I always get a kick over it. I have a sociological question to ask you about centaurs. How do humans or other races fit into their lives? Both in a general sense of life, platonically, and romantically? Sorry if you’ve answered this before.

Thank you! It always blows my mind that I've been puttering away in my little corner of the internet with my horse people for this long!

I've covered a couple different specific situations in my cultures; re platonic and romantic? but for the most part is it boils down to that romantic would probably be rare and boil down to individual choices for how they approach it? But for platonic I have sort of covered a lot of platonic relationships just from the standpoint that basically all my centaur cultures have a deep societal tie to another race. At first it was a lot of convenience- a way to get around the difficulties of centaur bodies getting in the way of certain ways of life, but at this point I just do it cause it's lovely to me!

Like the merchants build their cities with the dwarves and they both benefit from the dwarves engineering and centaur's strength and mobility re:trade. The centaurs easily manage huge farms, trade networks, and logging infrastructure on their strength and speed but benefit from dwarves (and a small portion of other bipeds) being better set up for building (try to imagine a centaur making a roof, it's vexed me for a year now..) and generally engineering wizzes so it's a mutually beneficial relationship to entwine their cultures in the main Merchant City

Obviously my Riders are wholly entwined with their biped family as I've talked extensively about in.. too many posts probably haha

but then my very lightly covered Mountain folk have a different, almost religious relationship with the Forest Giants in which the relationship between their two cultures is separate other than the spiritual importance they hold with each other. The giants live approximately 300 years but are very slow, sedate creatures who prize a life of peace and telling stories over all else. So the centaurs almost view them as minor deities and the giants keep and love the stories their fiery little companions entrust to them.

As you can tell, I really love building all these races and cultures and then mashing them together and see what comes out! I find it makes the world feel more real and lived in when I'm not only thinking about how a culture would work and operate, but also how they interact with their neighbors! What's their main export and how does that shape their life and relations?? These are the questions I get LOST in so thank you for asking :D

dee is a tragic character because of the silent faces she makes while dennis is talking about the gutter ball and trying to rile her up. she's trying so hard not to have a reaction so that he wont pounce on it. reminds me of that bit from chardee macdennis where mac and charlie talk about how good dee is at not rising to their personal insults. how it got really personal but she didnt appear bothered at all. thinking about how she must have had to learn that skill because of dennis. who jumps on any insecurity and exploits it. who wont let her have one day out with her friends. who twists the narrative and pits her against other women so she wont rely on them. who wont let her have one small thing to herself without trying to ruin it. who wont even bother to stick around and see her win. so she has to stay silent and pretend not to care. has to bury everything deep down. so that he doesnt take more things from her. doesnt find even more ways to hurt her.

she barely flinches when the waitress tells her she doesnt like her and that she's ugly. but she looks shocked that she is standing up for her.

maybe he’s just… different.

Hey.

OFMD fans? Thank you.

Thank you for making art and writing fic. Thank you for typing out meta and analyzing overlooked details and arguing about interpretation and intention. Thank you for making gifs and recoloring stills. Thank you for cosplaying. Thank you for collecting news, memes, and behind-the-scenes from other platforms and bringing them to Tumblr. Thank you for sharing your favorite fanworks so the rest of us can see them.

Thank you for being good to others. Thank you for donating to fundraisers and mutual aid. Thank you for uplifting other voices and creating a safe space ship where even timid people who have never participated in an intense fandom before feel welcome.

Thank you to the folks who are kind to the people who disagree with them. Thank you to people who are truly willing to talk it through, who block instead of engaging negatively, and who ignore opinions that make them mad.

Thank you to everyone who likes and comments and reblogs. Thank you to the lurkers and the cheerleaders. Thank you to creators who are still afraid to share their creations but create anyway.

I love Our Flag Means Death and I love this fandom. I love you, and I hope you'll stick around. No matter how much or little you participate, you're part of the crew; whether we've spoken or not, you're my friend.

Thank you.