"Perhaps They Were Right Putting Love Into Books. Perhaps It Could Not Live Anywhere Else."

Oh.

We're at "traffic tickets are justification for disappearing people off the street and sending them to death camps with no due process" levels of fascism now.

Okay yeah we're like fucked, fucked.

The person I reblogged this from deserves to be happy

I tried to scroll past this. I really did

here's the thing about the fucking tariffs. besides Unfairly Punishing Our FUCKING ALLIES YOU MORON- okay okay. anyway. the other thing

the other thing is that we have no manufacturing here

most of the fabric I buy to make my clothes is made overseas. I would actually love to buy wool from a local, unionized woolen mill! I'd be pleased as punch to do that! it's better for the environment and creates good local jobs that don't have a barrier of entry re: college degrees, which we need more of!

except we don't have any more fucking woolen mills because your billionaire ilk outsourced all of them to avoid union rules, OSHA, and paying minimum wage, when those things became commonplace and/or law. you orange fuckface

"buy American instead!!!" okay FROM FUCKING WHERE. we don't MAKE shit here anymore. and the few remaining local producers have been forced to charge exorbitant prices because they're competing with cheap unethical labor practices from big companies, so most people can't afford to buy local

god it's all so fucking stupid and I have to suffer for other people's idiocy that I actively tried to prevent

How to Tell If That Post of Advice Is AI Bullshit

Right, I wasn't going to write more on this, but every time I block an obvious AI-driven blog, five more clutter up the tags. So this is my current (April 2024) advice on how to spot AI posts passing themselves off as useful writing advice.

No Personality - Look up a long-running writing blog, you'll notice most people try to make their posts engaging and coming from a personal perspective. We do this because we're writers and, well, we want to convey a sense of ourselves to our readers. A lot of AI posts are straight-forward - no sense of an actual person writing them, no variation in tone or text.

No Examples - No attempts to show how pieces of advice would work in a story, or cite a work where you could see it in action. An AI post might tell you to describe a person by highlighting two or three features, and that's great, but it's hard to figure out how that works without an example.

Short, Unhelpful Definitions - A lot of what I've seen amount to two or three-sentence listicles. 'When you want to write foreshadowing, include a hint of what you want foreshadowed in an earlier chapter.' Cool beans, could've figured that out myself.

SEO/AI Prompt Language Included - I've seen way too many posts start with "this post is about..." or "now we will discuss..." or "in this post we will..." in every single blog. This language is meant to catch a search engine or is ChatGPT reframing the prompt question. It's not a natural way of writing a post for the average tumblr user.

Oddly Clinical Language - Right, I'm calling out that post that tried to give advice on writing gay characters that called us "homosexuals" the entire time. That's a generative machine trying to stay within certain parameters, not an actual person who knows that's not a word you'd use unless you were trying to be insulting or dunking on your own gay ass in the funniest way possible.

Too Perfect - Most generative AI does not make mistakes (this is how many a student gets caught trying to use it to cheat). You can find ways to make it sound more natural and have it make mistakes, but that takes time and effort, and neither of those are really a factor in these posts. They also tend to have really polished graphics and use the same format every time.

Maximized Tags (That Are Pointless) - Anyone who uses more than 10 one-word tags is a cop. Okay, fine, I'm joking, but there's a minimal amount of tags that are actually useful when promoting a post. More tags are not going to get a post noticed by the algorithm, there is no algorithm. Not everyone has to use their tags to make snarky comments, but if your tags look like a spambot, I'm gonna assume you're a spambot.

No Reblogs From The Rest of Writblr - I'm always finding new Writblr folks who have been around for awhile, but every real person I've seen reblogs posts from other people. We've all got other stuff to do, I'm writing this blog to help others and so are they, the whole point of tumblr is to pass along something you think is great.

While you'll probably see some variation in the future - as people get wise to obviously generated text, they'll try to make it look less generated - but overall, there's still going to be tells to when something is fake.

I don't have any real advice for what to do about this (other than block those blogs, which is what I do). Like most AI bullshit, I suspect most of these blogs are just another grift, attempting to build large follower counts to leverage or sell something to in the future. They may progress past these tattletale features, but I'm still going to block them when I see them. I don't see any value in writing advice compiled from the work of better writers who put the effort in when I can just go find those writers myself.

The disproportionate hate on YQY is doing more to kill any scant sympathy I had for SJ than anything else

tbh i dunno why so many sj apologists are anti-yqy. because like????? he is your mascot. he was the originator. the head honcho of excusing sj's levels of unmitigated villainy. look into my eyes and tell me that qi ge wouldn't blush and kick his feet if he saw xiao jiu commit murder. actually we don't NEED to imagine bc jiumei did just that and yue qi just grabbed his hand and ran, no thoughts head empty. arson? child abuse?? yue qi doesn't care. whatever makes xiao jiu happy <3

hey don't cry. one day jk rowling and elon musk will be dead. also donald trump and jd vance. oh and vladimir putin. all dead.

s9: Remember gadreel?(warning: rant)

Remember gadreel?....

How the arc was: sam was dying after the trials and dean was desperate to save him n on the brink of shaking hands with Death, dean tricks sam n stuffs an angel into him (aka rape) ? .... n then how it led to:

And

And then all this?:

That led to idiot dean doing this

& you know what the kicker is? - all of it - completely unnecessary 🙄...

Its just a Massive plot hole OR a very clear indication of deans selfishness being clearly portrayed: let me explain-

- they had OG Death still around back then - Billie wasn't in the picture and so there wasn't a reaper'-"fatwa" on the winchesters n "losing 'em in the empty"-campaign yet...

Dean & tfw in general ALREADY KNEW HOW TO SUMMON n make deals with Death- hell, dean did it just to shove sams soul back n they were still allies at that point just before in s8 (&again in s10/11)

Not to mention, they ALSO knew how to make deals with reapers - THEY'D literally used it to help Sam complete his 2nd trial in s8, just earlier!....

So it wasn't like an angel possessing sam was literally the ONLY option available to dean to save his dying brother- he could have reached out to Death or reapers or literally anything else!....

Hell, when gadreel showed dean sam chatting to Death - that alone should have given him an idea to make a deal with death or reapers ....

Point is - he could have let sam die n then brought him back as he'd done before...

why was violating sam the 1st and only option he considered at that point? - especially KNOWING how sam would feel about it?- hell he even said it to gadreel....n then proceeded to do the exact opposite

dean is supposed to be the "genius at hunting and lore" - he knows all sorts of things about all sorts of gods n beings even if he didn't deal with death - & we know it was hours they'd spent in the hospital if not days ... he could've been looking for options - but it's clear he hasn't been...

but no, nothing else considered n sam raped by proxy and violated by the person he trusted the most - because to dean sam wasn't a human being, just this living-doll he possessed n carried around with him, labelled "little brother" like a toy a boy carries around for his own comfort....which is why sam is EXACTLY right when he said: "you didn't save me for me, you did it for you"

If not for Dumbass,selfish deans decisions, none of this would have happened:

Kevin not killed, his mom not killed

No moc!dean n demon!dean

maybe metatron still and gadreel but differently

No darkness released n dumb undercooked "return of mary" doesn't happen

No Charlie dying - hell we could had Kevin AND Charlie - it'd be hilarious to watch them together!...

Maybe they still get Jack n Rowena n return of lucifer etc...but at least sam wouldn't have to face the horrific reality of his beloved brother violating him

The current discussion about "a big advantage for the yeerks is that no one knows there's an alien invasion" reminds me of your ficlet that became the first chapter of All Assorted Animorphs AUs; Elfangor meets the team as adults, and they *do* go public about the invasion. It ends poorly. Sorry kids, no clean option here.

The yeerks' need for secrecy and the Animorphs' need for secrecy are not the same, in a really interesting way.

The yeerks need to keep humans as a whole from knowing that mind-controlling alien invaders exist. This means suppressing all knowledge of extraterrestrial everything, even when it means covering up for their enemies.

The Animorphs need to avoid controllers knowing who they are, and don't have a reliable way to know which humans are controllers. This means they have to protect their names and faces at all costs, but would prefer it if humanity did know the yeerks exist.

Like, look at #22 where the controller-cops indirectly protect Jake by inventing reasons a tiger could be unconscious on the floor of a California mall. Or the times the kids win victories over controllers by getting them to act alien in front of civilians (e.g. #12, #35). The yeerks are the ones who have to keep the entire war secret.

By contrast, the kids just have to keep themselves secret. Look at the number of times they straight-up admit they're morphers and not real animals. Sometimes it's around people too remote to be controllers, like Derek (#25) and Yami (#44). Sometimes it's a civilian who just reacted with shock instead of anger to the sight of morphing (e.g. the home cook in #5, the busboy in #35). Sometimes it's even a known controller, just as long as they don't give their names (e.g. the opening of #18, Visser One in #30). They don't even go out of their way to actively maintain the fiction they're andalites — they don't dispel that belief if they can help it, because it's useful, but they're not going to spend a ton of time and energy on it. Just as long as no controllers know that Jake Berenson of 123 Street Road, Townsville, CA, can morph, it doesn't matter what else leaks.