making and weaving and loving! like we have done for millennia!!

i saw a post today where someone stated that they often can't tell real information from misinformation online. i am not here to make fun of that person. that being said, the ability to figure out if information is real or not is a critical skill for everyone who uses the internet. you need to be able to do that on your own. it's great if you can get help or if people will tell you what's real and what's not, but you also need to be able to do it by yourself. simple, easy tips under the cut.

the most common style of misinformation i see on tumblr is the fake news headline. it's an image or multiple images of a headline and sometimes an attached story. easy tips to discovering whether this is real or not:

is there a link in the post? click it and see where it goes. no link? possibly fake, possibly the poster just didn't include it.

google the full headline, not just key words. even better, google the headline with the full headline in quotes so you get exact matches. can't find a match? probably fake.

is there a clear url/website attached to the headline? if so, go to the website and search for the headline. can't find a match? probably fake.

is there an author? google them. see if they're real. see if the subject of the article matches the stuff they usually write about. see if they have social media where they may have posted the headline. can't find an author, or they seem way off-track? probably fake.

if it's an image of a tweet, look up the person's twitter handle. can't find the tweet? possibly fake. it could also be a real tweet with the text or date edited.

is there a date? a story written in 2002 may have very different ramifications than a story written in 2022. it depends on the subject, but some subjects change rapidly and even a 5-year-old story may be out of date. see if you can find anything recent. if not, it may be fake or out of context.

go to google news and do a quick scan. this is going to work better for headlines that are about world news, but it's still worth a try. google news also allows you to search stories and limit by date. see if you can find a matching headline. if you can't, it may be fake or old news.

general tips:

don't trust social media. just don't. please. people can and will say literally anything they want. anything you read on social media that has real-world implications, you should fact-check.

you may think it's overkill, but google everything. even things you're mostly sure of. reading more headlines and more news can help you get better at discerning between real and fake headlines.

every source of information is biased in some way. try to seek out less biased sources. look up the bias media chart (here's a link) and use it to find sources that do less biased and more original reporting.

think about bias as you're reading. who is the author writing for? why are they writing? what do they want the audience to feel? what facts are they choosing to include or omit? how might the presentation of the facts change if someone with a different perspective was writing?

there are also websites dedicated to fact-checking. this works best for major world news, but try snopes or factcheck. the rand corporation has a huge list of tools for rooting out disinformation as well.

there's nothing wrong with asking for help, but if you genuinely cannot figure out if something is real or not on your own, and you give up trying to figure it out without help, you run the risk of believing and even spreading misinformation. some misinformation is essentially harmless (a celebrity's favorite color, for example). some misinformation is incredibly dangerous. please please PLEASE check your facts. it is quick and easy and worth it.

if you need more help, let me know.

Falling back in love with your craft

Got up early (for me), ate a light and healthy breakfast, applied to some jobs, took a long mental health walk with the dogs, gave one of them a bath, and even did some phone calls and messaging regarding my medication and pharmacy problems and managed to sort it out without breaking down!!! And! Showered!! Kicking ASS at mental health today

i'm sure i am not the only one who is very concerned about the ~4 hours between when the midjourney change was made, and I knew to go opt out of it, so; glaze does not need to be on all your works to be effective. in the same way that one artist glazing all their works will ruin a broad, multi-artist dataset, glazing your works moving forward will ruin any dataset trained on you. if out of 100 comics I've posted, 10 are glazed, a dataset trained on all of my comics will not be able to make anything similar to my style. anyways. go download glaze.

your requested reminder to post knives going nuclear on zazie when you can :)

ok so im going to be reblogging this to the body horrors week later cause. uh. well. knives. quite literally goes nuclear?

all of these screenshots are from the overhaul project cause i haven't managed to catch the dark horse digital editions on sale yet, though i'll provide the dark horse translations where i can because i have physical copies, and the dark horse translations are imo clearer here.

there are ids in all the alt texts for the photos, it's why this took several days longer than i'd originally planned -finger guns- alt texts might look a little weird in the first set btw - tumblr started eating the photoset and i had to spend an extra half an hour fixing it -finger guns-

the pages are volume 11, pages 90-92, and 114-17, because a lot of the pages in between are leadup pages and also have the zazie control worm. thing.

pages 90-2 are the distant explosion (you can click on the first image and see it in the photo viewer, if for some reason it will not view in dashboard mode. But it does exist!)

(on page 90, dark horse is a lot more specific, with "the northeast sky is glowing" instead of "the whole sky is glowing". the other two boxes with text read "what is--?!" and "oh my..!" respectfully as if they were cut off mid sentence.)

so uh.

knives went uh.

literal "nuclear bomb exploded just above a town"

because he kind of did. Unlike a true nuclear bomb, he did not form a mushroom cloud, but the metaphor is still there. that is a nuclear metaphor

per pages 114-117 (pages are from left to right, read the pages right to left. sorry)

(legato's speech bubbles on page 114 in the dark horse edition read: Survival of the fittest is the law of nature. What is about to happen now is a just a logical extension of that. Be very afraid. You are in his presence. Did you not notice, Leader of the Sand Worms?

It reads very differently, imo, more like Zazie was caught up in their own plots and schemes to realize the control worm didn't work. Legato is also telling Zazie that Zazie should be afraid of Knives. Okay? Not asking if Zazie is afraid. Telling Zazie to be afraid. Like some sort of reverse "Be Not Afraid" from the bible.

Zazie's thought bubbles on page 115 are translated as "the dark hole is swallowing the poison" which reads more like knives made a black hole. given the visuals? that sounds more likely. Black holes, as a real life thing that we know about and have tried to study, are often referred to as swallowing things that pass too close. knives made a mini black hole to eat the poison from the sand worm venom. knives has consumed the dependent plants.)

the fact is, as a metatextual read, plants are nuclear reactors. independent plants are walking nuclear bombs. Nightow did this on purpose. We're meant to read them as something nuclear.

This is, as i was saying to @needle-noggins the other night when i was working on it in an attempt to get more of the alt texts written, a casual display of power. Knives is throwing a hissy fit! Knives is throwing a multi-megaton display of power because Zazie tried to take him over with the control worm. Page 91 had needle-noggins and i speechless because on the low end that tower of debris from the explosion is (if we did the very, very rough math right) THIRTY MILES TALL. Twice as tall as the tallest mountain in the solar system, Olympus Mons! or roughly five and a half times as tall as Mount Everest. On the outside, because we figured its anywhere from 25-30 times taller than the cloud cover, it could be up to thirty seven miles

Over halfway to space on earth.

like.

I know we love the independent plants and all. But Holy Shit. just.

holy shit

IT ARRIVED IT ARRIVED IT ARRIVED

DESPITE EVERYTHING DESPITE MY CHRONICALLY CURSED INTERNATIONAL MAIL PROBLEM I AM STILL THE ZONE RPG

ive made myself more wet and pathetic

also i really shouldn't have written stp because now i have a million ideas for spirit's adventures in new hyrule that I will never have time to actually write :((

so often i see people try to downplay violet and minervas relationship like it wasnt Real enough or was some Inferior Romance that her relationship with clementine could Never compare to, and i find it so annoying and boring

she LOVED minerva!! and its okay that she did!! she was her first love!! childhood best friends turned girlfriends!! seeing her being so heartbroken and miserable about what happened to minnie, how deeply and desperately she missed her, hugging that bed frame so pathetically. but clementine makes her CARE again. makes her LOVE again. slowly violet becomes comfortable with the idea of opening her heart up to people again, after trying so hard not to because the pain of losing people she cared about was too much to bear (especially when she blamed herself for them being gone)

then she learns minnie didnt die. shes falling in love with clem while grappling with the fact that minnie might still be out there??

then she meets minnie in the woods. but minnie has changed just like she has. theyre both different people now. and slowly violet is forced to come to terms with the fact that the person she loved so deeply isnt that person anymore??

violet at the beginning mourning minerva and blaming herself, to shooting her to save clems life. she LOVED minerva once, but she doesnt like the person she is now. and shes not gonna let her hurt anyone else she cares about. shes done mourning her by the time they get to the bridge, only crying out for tenn

like idk i just find their relationship evolution to be so interesting and sad as shit. the fact that they once loved each other so much and it has now come to this?? but violet makes her choice and she Chooses clementine, because she admires and loves clementine, probably similar to the way she used to admire and love minerva if the way she talked about her is any indication

i just think "i never thought i would ever feel this way again" is way more interesting than "wow minnie Never made me feel like This"

once again living vicariously through writers, artists, performers, adventurers, fictional characters, historical figures, and anyone else who has ever done or is doing anything even remotely interesting, etc., because i have no energy to participate in life myself and it's easier to maladaptively daydream my days away instead

when people bring up the racism, homophobia, transphobia, romanticization of domestic abuse / rape / pedophilia / incest, literal actual written porn of literal actual real life flesh and blood children, et cetera et cetera on archive of our own, one of the ao3 stannies’ main defenses is “you can just filter out the tags if you don’t want to see that!” when that defense has no fucking legs to stand on.

ao3 is not an archive, it is barely even a website: a rant <3 (very long)

ignoring the fact that it’s a problem that all of that is permitted on the site in the first place (i guess child porn and racism are fine, and the people who allow it on their platform are fine, as long as i, personally, do not see it), that defense literally means nothing. it’s assuming that every little thing on ao3 is tagged properly and it absolutely is not, and if you think it is you are dumber than rocks. i mean for fuck’s sake, just touching on archive warnings and not tags, “creator chose not to use archive warnings” is literally a valid option for fic authors to use when it should fucking not be.

if someone is a freak who thinks that pedo shit is hot, they might not tag it as “rape” (archive warnings OR tags). i’ve literally seen underage father/son rape porn with no trigger warning tags but “child abuse if you squint”. IF YOU SQUINT. if someone thinks that domestic abuse is actually cool and sexy when attractive people do it, they might not tag it as “abuse”. if someone is a freak who likes incest, but bends over backwards to justify it by only shipping adopted family members, then they tell themselves that they don’t view it as incest, and might not tag it as “incest”. if someone is a racist, a homophobe, a transphobe, et cetera and they wrote bigotry into their fic (or else wrote a deliberate troll fic to trigger people on purpose), do you really think they’re going to tag it as racism / homophobia / transphobia / et cetera? and some people get kicks out of writing purposefully triggering content and either leaving it untagged or mistagging it so that people will read it unsuspectingly.

even for just general content tags, it’s a mess. people just forget to tag things all the time. people deliberately won’t tag the endgame ship of their fic because “it’s a spoiler heehee”. people use the romantic or sexual “x / y” tag instead of the platonic or otherwise “x & y” tag, sometimes by mistake sometimes on purpose. it’s a joked about issue how people will tag characters or ships that appear in their fic for two sentences.

there’s no standardization of tags, which is a pretty obvious problem. what first comes to mind is the “dead dove: do not eat” tag which should just not be a tag at all because it just has no meaning. depending on the individual fic writer using it, it could mean anything from “literally the most sickening and depraved thing you’ve ever read in your life” to “horror w/ gore”. but it applies to other vague tags too - different fic writers will have different ideas of what the tag means.

in addition to that, what is and isn’t made a filterable tag, what tags are made synonymous, et cetera, is entirely up to the whims of the site staff. as an example, if you’re trying to look for fanfiction of a singular animated disney movie, the infinite crossovers with other disney movies will not actually be counted as crossovers (which they are) because they’re classified as the “disney theatrical animated universe” (which isn’t a fucking thing), so you can’t filter them out the “exclude crossovers” way. if you try to filter out the fandom tag “disney theatrical animated universe”, it’ll show up with zero fics because that tag is synonymous with every disney animated film (regardless of if the fic author actually used the tag “disney theatrical animated universe” or not), thus also filtering out the one you actually wanted to find.

and do not get me fucking started on the “all media types tags”, which also just shouldn’t be a thing because it makes it fucking impossible to find the specific fics you’re looking for. some people use it in place of tagging a specific canon / adaptation when their fic very clearly draws from one specific canon / adaptation, and you can’t filter it out because it’s synonymous with every fandom tag under its umbrella.

as an example of the issues of both the “all media types” tag and mistagging in general: as a fan of the witcher books, it used to be a fucking ordeal to find fanfiction specifically for the books (post netflix show release). some show fans would, for whatever reason, tag their fics with the book fandom tag in addition to (or even in place of!!) the show fandom tag when their fics were unquestionably show-specific, meaning i could not simply search only in the book fandom tag. i could not simply filter out the show tag, because some show fans would, for whatever reason, tag as fucking “all media types”, when their fics were unquestionably show-specific. and alas, i could not filter out “all media types” and the show tag, so that i see only those fics which have been deliberately and exclusively tagged as the book, not only because as mentioned some show fans would tag their show fics with only the book tag, but also because the fucking all media types tag filters out the book tag as well, leaving me with zero fucking fics REGARDLESS of if the author actually used the “all media types” tag. now, thankfully, i’ve thankfully seen this issue in this specific fandom lessen, but it still occurs in other fandoms and i guarantee that it didn’t lessen in the witcher fandom because of any fixing of the site on the part of ao3 staff.

another common defense of ao3 freaks is that it’s an “archive”, and therefore can’t get rid of anything anyone posts, and disregarding the fact that that is not how archives fucking work, they don’t just allow anything and also ao3 DOES get rid of fics... when they say that they don’t like proshippers, apparently, archives have... you know... archivists. they have someone or a team of someones making sure that everything in the archive is *properly fucking categorized*. they have someone or multiple someones making sure that everything they recieve (1) belongs there and (2) is properly labeled and organized. same for libraries. meaning that if ao3 really were an archive and not a sub par fanfiction website, they’d have something like that in place. something as simple as a report button for fics with a review team that will see if something’s been mis- or untagged. they’d have some kind of standardization of tags (especially the warning / trigger tags) and have proper tagging enforced in some way. and then they could also do something like stop being spineless racists, queerphobes, and pedos have the barest minimum of content guidelines saying that you can’t post fucking hate speech.

if something is mistagged or untagged, the most you can do is leave a comment politely asking that the author fix the issue, and then hope and pray that they do that. and if that person thinks [insert form of abuse] is hot, or if they’re just straight up a bigot that wrote bigotry into their fics to be bigoted, or they’re a troll that gets kick out of deliberately traumatizing people by tricking them into reading their mis/untagged fics, they might not! AND if you see a major tagging issue on an orphaned work, or a work that has an inactive author / hasn’t been updated in forever, good fucking luck getting even a negative response.

you can’t permanently block tags (i mean even tumblr.hell has that), meaning that if you would like to search for fic without coming across something troubling, triggering, or just something you don’t like, you have to either (1) do a work around by having a bookmarked link for every fandom you’re in or every character you like with all of your tags already blocked, (2) download browser extensions that do the work for ao3 because they can’t be bothered themselves, or (3) input every individual tag every time you search ao3 and don’t forget that all of those options only fucking work at all when everything is tagged properly, and we’ve already established its not. you also can’t actually block people (you can only prevent them from commenting) meaning that if there’s a specific person you’d like to stay away from your fics or a specific fic author that you don’t like and would like to stop seeing their fics clogging up the tag, you’re out of luck (though for the latter you could insert “-[username]” into the “search within results” box, but then uh oh we’re right back around to having to input that every time or have a bookmark)

their archive warning system is shit. first of all it’s functionally useless because, as mentioned, “creator chose not to use archive warnings” is an option. what’s the fucking point of special required archive warnings if you’re going to allow people to opt out anyway. second of all, aside from “chose not to use warnings” and “no warnings apply”, the only warnings are “major character death”, “graphic depictions of violence”, “rape/non-con”, and “underage”. disregarding the fact that they shouldn’t be allowing porn of underage characters in the first place (but i’m talking to a brick wall on that issue) and that “non-con” (and “dub-con”) as terminology needs to die, it’s just fucking rape lets not use weasel words... this is a paltry list of possible warnings. there’s no official warnings for depictions of: domestic abuse, animal abuse, depictions of racism / homophobia / transphobia / et cetera, suicide, self harm, et cetera et cetera. and we return to the issue of standardization of tags. in your required archive warnings at very least, there should be a standardization of what these mean, but ao3′s own faq is just like “ehh... you decide. we’ll leave it up to you”. what qualifies as graphic depictions of violence? two people may write the same level of violence, but qualify “graphic” differently, and make different decisions regarding their warnings. and we also return to the issue of: if a freak doesn’t see something that is clearly rape as rape, they might not tag it as such.

this website gets a disgustingly large amount of money every year that it doesn’t fucking do anything with. it’s been over a decade and they’re still in fucking beta. features that would actually be useful, like an actual block system, don’t exist. they technically have a report system for abuse and harassment and such, but apparently what they qualify as abuse and harassment is fickle. ao3 defenders seem to be very proud of the legal work they do for fandom / fanfic authors, but they set aside a very small amount of the money they get every year for legal advocacy, and they actually use even less of that, because it’s not the early 2000s “anne rice hates fanfiction” era anymore - you aren’t going to get fucking sued for writing fanfiction in the first place. based on their own self-reported yearly cost of upkeep, they literally already have enough money to run the site as they are now for the next twenty years.

once again: ao3 is not an archive. it is not a library. it is barely a even a website.

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More misc. daily life pictures and such

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I hope you have a lovely day with lots of snacks

Tl;dr the day was not lovely but there might be snacks

I actually didn't have many snacks today but I'm about to make up with it with a couple of churros and dark chocolate dipped strawberries.

Today I...woke up and showered and replied to comments on AO3 for a while, and then I spent about 4 hours formatting documents into PDFs of varying sizes for Patreon and Ream and uploading chapter commentaries into compilations. And then I did more formatting stuff behind the scenes while I stared at all the other behind the scenes stuff I need to do and thought 'writing is a hard job' quietly and intensely.

I ate lunch while I was working. I also made some memes about how overwhelmed I felt, and then made some for my readers too, lol.

And then I laid down for about 4 hours because I also have chronic illness (whee) and I am constantly in pain and varying degrees of fatigue and I literally must lie down every afternoon so I don't collapse in the evening (literally) - and I did a tiny bit of reading (webtoon: Shutline (which I immediately realised I'd read before and didn't fondly remember), webtoon: December (didn't mind this)) and then dozed restlessly because it was 40C/104F today. I also edited a Tiktok art video in Adobe Premier Rush, but I haven't put it up yet, and I should really do that.

Got up and made ham and cucumber sandwiches for dinner, and watched Girl with the Dogs on YouTube while I ate, and a Smosh video.

Then did some more work and helped a friend with her work stuff, and then I watered the garden for 1.5 hours because *points tiredly to the heatwave* and stared balefully at the dark sky (you can't water during the day - it's literally a heatwave but also it's illegal here to water during the day) with its few stars because they'd set up a severe weather warning due to extreme winds in our specific area and it was dead AF and oppressive out there and it was just hot instead.

I watched a few Tiktoks while I watered.

When I hung the hose up back on the holder thingo, I sang to my plants: 'I hope you make the best out of the water I just gave you, you little fucks' like a sweet lullaby, and a person who I didn't know was outside next door because it was like 9pm and pitch black laughed softly and sweetly, like they didn't expect it, and felt kind of fond. I didn't know I had any nice neighbours on that side of the house, so I mostly just thought 'WHOOPS SHIT' and then felt too embarrassed to say anything.

And then I came back inside and replied to some asks (hi!) and am hopefully going to eat churro's soon and it's 10pm and so I'm probably going to do some more work and then I'm going to go to bed while I feel stressed about the work I haven't done (currently Palmarosa is the heart beating beneath my floorboards). I will probably keep reading December. It's okayish.

I don't know if I'd call today lovely, because I'm burnt out and I want to put up the Christmas decorations but it's 10pm and idk if I should start that because it tends to make me severely ill to do it for a few days.

I'm a little sad, a lot lonely, a little melancholic, a little grumpy, and a little very excited about churros and chocolate dipped strawberries. I resent days that are 'work and sleep' sometimes, especially during November. That's my fault. That's on me. I'm a mean and shitty boss to myself.

Gotta do something about this burnout at some point, because December is the worst month for my PTSD, but I also need to keep getting paid, because medical bills and food and stuff. So like...finding the balance there is a constant work in progress.

There were some lovely moments today:

That little laugh from the neighbour in the dark

The first yellow peach of the season

Doing tricks with my cat (who is trained) for treats

Making silly little memes

Helping a friend with work stuff

Replying to some amazing comments

Watching cute dogs

Feeling pretty accomplished at putting up those compilations on Patreon/Ream even if I'm not done yet.

I hope you're having a lovely day too, anon, with many snacks.