ao3cassandraic

[ao3cassandraic]

If you're a librarian, SURE you do.

Too many people overreact to normal library weeding processes out of the unexamined belief that library-purchased materials stay in the library forever.

It's not fucking L-Space, people. It couldn't work that way if librarians wanted it to, which we don't.

Not expalining WHY bookburning is bad and WHAT books were targeted has left us with Bookworm uwu girlies treating any art project or act involving destorying/modifying any random ass mass printed novel as if it was a crime against humanity

[ao3cassandraic]

So, let me get this straight. The leadership at Seattle's Worldcon, a SFF fan convention that is also hugely important to working creators:

used a chatbot service widely excoriated by working creators because it plagiarizes them and openly competes with their labor...

... to vet potential panelists, when its parent corporation is defending defamation lawsuits because it allegedly emits damaging lies about people...

... not to mention the service is demonstrably biased, in an area of publishing that absolutely doesn't need any more bias...

... without telling anyone.

Heckuva job, Kathy. Let's see if you manage to do as much damage to the Hugos as the Puppies did. Looks like it'll be a close race.

Additional commentary at Pivot to AI.

[ao3cassandraic]

Some outlets are. I myself support ProPublica, The Markup, and 404 Media with actual money, as well as two independent (that is, not owned by Lee Enterprises or anything Murdochian) local news outlets and one of the student newspapers where I work. (The student newspaper did me a solid a couple years back. I figure I owe 'em.)

I hate pontificating about "the future of" just about anything... but the future of news that I want to bring about is the kind of news I'm supporting today.

I invite all of us to consider doing likewise!

I really wish that the actual newspapers would adopt this model.

[ao3cassandraic]

This is hilarious and also I'm very glad my cats didn't try it when I was installing a new garbage disposal a few weeks back.

[ao3cassandraic]

Thank you. I needed this today for work reasons.

reblog to tell your mutual you’re proud of them and it’ll all work out

[ao3cassandraic]

Adoro rediseñar a los PrrrOmens y hoy vi un adorable gato gordo 🥹❤️ para hacer a crowley me base en mi propio gato 😁

[ao3cassandraic]

... there are reasons Murderbot Diaries is on the book list for my infosec class...

I won't say it's, like, the series' best feature, but on a personally relatable level my favourite thing about The Murderbot Diaries is the repeated implication that most of SecUnit's success as a hacker stems from the fact that it keeps bumping into mission-critical systems where nobody bothered to change the factory default wi-fi password.

[ao3cassandraic]

I wonder how much of this is Defensive Panic, honestly. Which isn't exclusively an American thing, but is totally an American thing.

No few of our negative stereotypes (regional stereotypes, classist stereotypes, racist stereotypes, gendered stereotypes, ableist stereotypes... there's lots; I don't care to be specific, so please don't ask me to) and sitcom-ish nasty-scornful-humor targeting revolve around ignorance. Ignorance is bad, ignorance is shameful, ignorance means you and everyone like you deserves to be bullied and laughed at -- that's what all that communicates.

Small wonder that when accused of ignorance, a lot of Americans freeze up and blurt out the first possibility they can think of for why it's not their fault. Small wonder a lot of Americans respond with anti-intellectualism, often of the flavor "experts are not All That and I'm as good as they are." It's classic shame deflection.

This isn't all there is to it, to be sure. Some of it is that Americans seem to have really weird expectations of how education works and what it's for; they think it's learning what instead of learning how to learn. When I encounter this, in my role as library-school educator, it's typically in the form of expecting a two-year (for full-timers) master's program to teach everything a librarian will ever need to know, and only what one person's particular flavor of librarianship needs to know.

Both these expectations are flatly ludicrous if thought about for more than two seconds, of course. But among working librarians they're common and easy to spot. A librarian who feels shame at not knowing everything they'll ever need to know snarls, "Well, I didn't learn that in library school!" A librarian who had to learn something not immediately relevant to what they do snarls, "All they taught me was THEEEEEEEE-ory!"

And yeah, absolutely some of it has to do with librarians feeling shame over not immediately knowing something -- we're a knowledge profession, after all.

But the shame is never, ever necessary, and it leads to poor responses. One of the best things I ever did for myself -- as a person, a librarian, and an educator -- was root it out from my soul, learn to respond "Huh, I didn't know that!" or "I'm not sure; let me see what I can find out!" and have that... just not be a big deal.

I recommend this approach to others. Not just librarians, either.

"some people just aren't intellectually curious and if you're mean to them about it they never will be"

🤨

I have never once met a person that was truly and inherently apathetic about every possible aspect of their lives.

Some people are really into baseball and know all the stats. Some people are really into their religion and can tell you everything about it. Some people know cars or baking or knitting or child rearing or, or, or.

You get the idea.

Some of you define ability and willingness to learn in a very limited manner and in doing so have decided that willful ignorance is okay because some people are ~incapable of learning~ anything about anything when that is fundamentally untrue for absolutely every person on this planet.

It's a matter of priorities, and if my fellow USAmericans are going to insist on being loud about our areas of ignorance the least they could do is admit it's just because they don't care to learn and stop talking in circles about ~The US Education System~.

Wikipedia is right the fuck there.

[ao3cassandraic]

I could say I'm not feeling any schadenfreude over these... but I'd be lying.

Recent generative-AI fail

Examples of fail that have crossed my radar recently:

Google AI engineer uses generative AI to "help" write a paper. Result: fail.

Right-wing conspiracy theorist Mike "My Pillow" Lindell's lawyers use generative AI to write a legal brief. Result: fail. (As a proud Wisconsinite, I'd love to see DeMaster disbarred over this.)

Using "vibe coding" creates security fails, even if you ask the generative AI pretty pretty please not to write vulnerabilities.

[ao3cassandraic]

A friend of mine posted a deliberate AI poisoner to ao3 last night.

I'm definitely considering doing likewise. I just need to do a bit of research on how best to accomplish it.

if i tell you my response to the "ao3 got scraped for genai again" thing is to write a story about how jd vance killed the pope because he was in heat and the pope wouldn't knot him and it's 1036 words, how many of you would call my mother to have her check on me?

[ao3cassandraic]

Edna Mode is wise.

Reminding everyone of Resistbot and 5Calls again.

From Ursula Vernon: Screaming at these people works. They’re fundamentally wimps, we just have to actually DO the screaming instead of preemptively admitting defeat.

I am talking about my fellow Americans, not the Democrats. We actually need to scream, gang, not just complain that Schumer isn’t.

In other words:

[ao3cassandraic]

[ao3cassandraic]

Yep. I believe Jon Hamm bowed out also.

I am so worried everyone is about to rain their shitty opinions down on the fandom, so I just wanted to flag this up before tonight:

I’d like to remind everybody before the episode of The Assembly comes out today that David and the other cast members of Good Omens have all been locked into iron-clad NDAs with Amazon, meaning that they cannot speak freely about Neil Gaiman or the allegations made against him.

In a recent interview, Doon Mackichan alluded to the allegations extremely briefly and got in trouble for that, so no, David’s response isn’t going to be what you’d hope to hear, but only because it can’t be.

Let’s face it, David is known for standing up for what’s right, AND for speaking without thinking things through first, so if he isn’t saying anything then it is only because he can’t.

[ao3cassandraic]

Haven't touched that shit, and won't.

I spent decades honing my voice. It's a tool for me now, and a well-made tool. Why on earth would I defer to a corporately-extruded overmasticated statistical pink slime word-barf machine? Why?

a writing competition i was going to participate in again this year has announced that they now allow AI generated content to be submitted

their reasoning being that "we couldn't ban it even if we wanted to, every writer already uses it anyway"

"Every writer"?

come on

[ao3cassandraic]