firecoloredwater

[firecoloredwater]

do you ever think about how sometimes it just... takes one random message? and suddenly you find yourself with a best friend or in constant conversation with someone who lives on the other side of the world but is just as much of a freak as you are or maybe you find yourself in love with someone without a last name but with so much kindness and affection in their words and presence. crazy how life and love and friendship just happen

[firecoloredwater]

Shou Xin aka 手訫 aka Xin Shou (Chinese, based Henan, China) - A group of mischievous little line-drawn cats is pouncing your way!, Drawings: Pencil, Eraser, and small Knives for added texture

[firecoloredwater]

(1/2) Hello El, I hope you are well despite, you know, *the horrors*. My request may seem strange to you, but as a non-American who has never set foot there, I have nevertheless embarked on writing a fanfiction set around the Great Lakes. The thing is, no matter how much I research, read articles, etc., I don't really have an opinion about what life is like in that region for a queer person in the scientific community (like my characters).

(2/2) Could you give me some insight into that? I don't want anything personal, of course, just a general opinion on what life is like in that region, etc. for queer people, and people who love science. I know I'm asking a lot so feel free to ignore! Thank you in advance and have a great day!

This is a very charming ask and I do not mean to be condescending at all when I say this, but I think you might have a slightly skewed understanding of just how big the Great Lakes region actually is and how many people and different cultural flavors it contains! You might have seen this map, but the Basin is huge, and it’s home to more than 34 million people:

A queer scientist in an urban Great Lakes city like Buffalo or Duluth or Detroit is going to have a very different experience than someone working rurally at a field station or as an observer on a commercial fishing vessel. I myself have had quite a range of experiences, from being aggressively stared down by an open-carrying gun club at a barbecue restaurant I went to with my research team in rural Illinois while trying to decide which bathroom was safest to use (due to apparently passing as a guy while wearing my muddy field clothes), to being at a conference in Milwaukee a few weeks ago where all the locals my (cishet guy) colleague and I talked to were wonderfully friendly and assumed we were in town for Pride rather than a work event! So the answer is gonna be: It Depends. What your characters experience is probably going to be better informed by picking specific locations and doing a little more site-specific research, with the understanding that there are plenty of bigots in cities and plenty of allies in rural areas, too. We’ve got all types out here, and while it sometimes feels like other queer scientists in the region are a rare find, there’s actually more of us than you’d think, and we are pretty good at finding each other!

[firecoloredwater]

[firecoloredwater]

This is definitely a tangent, but re: the egg size thing: in Dragonsong, when Menolly is passing out the firelizard eggs to various important people, she deliberately chooses the two largest to give to Robinton because she wants him to have a gold. And she does successfully give him a gold and a bronze, even if they actually impressed to the "wrong" person for Menolly's intentions.

So that could of course be coincidence, Menolly just got lucky, but I assume that the intent was for it to be true that egg size correlates with the rank of the hatchling in firelizards. (And while it could be true that egg size also correlates with the size of the gold/green laying them, I think it's more likely that "greens lay small eggs" was meant to be an extension of "greens lay low/small ranks". Though you could do interesting things if both the parent's and the hatchling's rank matters.)

On the other hand, gold firelizard eggs might not be colored any differently, since I don't think Menolly mentioned that at all when picking eggs. (Although it's been like 15 years since I reread, so I could have forgotten.)

Meanwhile in dragons gold eggs are literally gold, but we have at least one bronze canonically hatching from a small egg. So it would be possible to argue that rank and egg size only correlate in dragons in the case of gold eggs, and for green+blue+brown+bronze hatchlings, egg size is unrelated. (I suspect that's not the intention, I assume that Heth was meant to be a surprise anomaly to the usual pattern, but we can still make the argument.)

Pern thought of the day:

Kitti Ping absolutely screwed up how firelizards really work when making the dragons because nobody had observed enough of them in the wild. You just can't convince me that greens don't lay their eggs in gold nests to maintain genetic diversity of the species and also because Anne's ideas that greens just abandon their clutches is not how nature works. Even alligators take care of their nests! Anyway Kitti more or less invented how dragons breed and really put their genetic diversity at risk but probably had no idea (or maybe she did given our talks on the Discord about her being a war criminal who engineered a slave race on purpose :D).

[firecoloredwater]

Looking at some of your work, it is stunning but it is very similar in style to AI artwork, do you have any recommendations for how to tell apart photography like yours from AI.

I've been thinking about this. And this may sound controversial at first, but I'm hoping people will hear me out.

We should stop trying so hard to detect AI art.

I think we should all lift that burden from our brains.

I have often talked about "woke goggles." Where conservatives have lost the ability to enjoy anything because they are hypervigilant about detecting anything woke. They've cursed themselves into just hating everything. All they have left is the "God's Not Dead" Cinematic Universe.

And I worry people are getting AI goggles now. They are so concerned about accidentally enjoying robot art and hurting artists that they have overcorrected to the point where they are hurting artists.

One cannot say "AI is all soulless slop that always looks bad" and then accuse a real artist of making something that looks like AI and not hurt them. By doing so, it includes the baggage of all of the "slop" comments along with it. This crusade is having collateral damage to the very artists we are trying to protect.

Yes, we need to be cautious about malicious AI images. Misinformation and deepfakes are going to be a big problem. People using AI imagery for profit is already a mess. But if you are cruising your feed and like a cool sci-fi robot gal or a photo of a waterfall and it turns out to be AI... that's fine.

It was trained by real artists and AI is going to create some cool shit because of that.

Honestly, I think a lot of the worst slop is because the dipshits creating the prompts have no artistic taste. People keep blaming the AI for how bad it looks and often don't consider it is a product of the loser who published it.

There is plenty of non-slop out there that has fooled me. And, like it or not, it is going to get harder and harder to tell what is AI. Until there are better tools or better regulations, I don't think there is much we can do to avoid enjoying AI art every once in a while. If only by accident.

Current "AI detectors" are mostly a scam. Even the best forensic-level AI image detectors struggle to stay above 70–80% accuracy across a wide range of models and image types. And that's in controlled lab conditions.

Free online tools often drop to near coin-flip accuracy (50–60%), especially with newer image generators and post-processing applied.

The best way to avoid AI imagery is to look at an artist's body of work. It's much harder to create consistent, non-obvious fake images in a large sample size. That is usually enough to have confidence in authenticity. Plus, if they have posted similar art before 2022, you can pretty much rule out any shenanigans.

Otis literally died before genAI was available.

But images you see in the wild, just let yourself enjoy them if that is what your brain wants to do. It'll be okay.

I just think we are attacking this backwards. If we want to protect artists, we need to support them.

Calling out random AI art does not support them.

It does not put money in their pockets.

It does not grow their audience.

Over a decade ago I tried to lead a fight to create better systems of attribution on websites like Reddit and Imgur. I even spoke to the Imgur team after an article was written about me.

I asked them to allow sources on their posts and to develop tech that would help people find where an image came from. They said they were "working on it" and it never manifested.

IMAGE SHARING SITES STEAL MORE FROM ARTISTS THAN AI.

But we just kind of accepted it. No one really joined me in my fight. The prevailing defeatist attitude was, "That's just the way it is."

I think now is the time to demand better attribution systems. We need to be vigilant about making sure as many posts as possible have good sourcing. If an image on Reddit goes viral, the top comment should be the source. And if it isn't, you should try to find it and add it.

Just to be clear, "credit to the original artist" is NOT proper attribution.

And perhaps we can lobby these image sharing sites to create better sourcing systems and tools. They could even use fucking AI to find the earliest posted version of an image.

And it would be nice if it didn't require people to go into the comments to find the source. It could just be in the headline. They could even create little badges "made by a human" for verified artists.

Good attribution helps artists grow their audience. It is one of the single most effective things you can do to help them.

I literally just got this message...

There are maybe 10 popular artists who I helped grow their audience early on. Just because I reblogged their work and added links to all of their social media. I even hired my best friend to add sourcing information to every post because I believed so much in good attribution.

Calling out AI art may feel good in the moment. You caught someone trying to trick people and it feels like justice. But, in most cases, the tangible benefits to real artists seem small. It impedes your ability to enjoy art without always being suspicious. And the risk of telling someone you think they make soulless slop doesn't seem worth it.

But putting that time and effort into attribution *would* be worth it. I have proven it time and time again.

I also think people should consider having a monthly art budget. I don't care if it is $5. But if we all commit to seeking out cool artists and being their collective patrons, we could really make a difference and keep real art alive. Just commit to finding a cool new artist every month and financially contributing to them in some way.

On a bigger scale I think advocating for universal basic income, art grants for education and creation, and government regulation of AI would all be helpful long term goals. Though I think our friends in Europe may have to take the lead on regulation at the moment.

So...

Stop worrying about enjoying or calling out AI art.

Demand better attribution from image sharing sites.

Make sure all art has a source listed.

Start an art budget.

Advocate for better regulations.

[firecoloredwater]

Breathtaking work from @embroiderybynusik on Reddit and Instagram

[firecoloredwater]

When u think about it, Kakashi's history w Uchiha teammates is actually really funny. He's like 3 for 3 in the category of 'my Uchiha teammates went evil on me, betrayed the village, declared their intent to murder me'

Obito, Itachi, Sasuke— I think Shisui is the only exception to the rule (ignoring the many Uchiha teammates I'm sure are implied to have existed on teams w him before, were talking ab explicitly shown to be on major teams) Every time Kakashi is placed on a longterm team w an Uchiha he's given an allowance of like 2-3 years before they have a fucking mental break and run off into the woods to return years later trying to kill him in pursuit of greater goals. Amazing. Incredible.

I like to imagine that in Boruto, he's given the option of teaching Sarada but just mutters "the curse..." under his breath then runs away

[firecoloredwater]

My two yr old is looking through a book about prehistoric art and she saw a picture of those cave painting of hands and she held up her own and said "hand!" And I gotta be honest. That hit

[firecoloredwater]

[firecoloredwater]

i want to write a "closeted trans pernese candidate impresses a dragon of a color that only impresses their (hidden/partially denied) gender" story but in like, a "the horrors of being suddenly and forcibly outed in front of an enormous crowd of people when you hadn't even fully acknowledged your gender to yourself" way rather than a "nice, I got a cool gender-affirming dragon" way. the "nice, I got a cool gender-affirming dragon" moment happens, but not after like, minimum 6 months of the gruelling process of trying to speedrun self acceptance because they're making their dragon sad.

[firecoloredwater]

Some little drawings about how un-ergonomic Brioche is.

[firecoloredwater]

i've been going on archaeological expeditions into the depths of the SPN tags on AO3, and tonight i got drop-kicked into an out-of-body experience so cursed that it'd require LAYERS of explanations to convey to a civilian how fucking funny it was:

unfortunately, SPN fandom is as enamored of mundane AUs as every other goddamn fandom seems to be these days

noted gay angel Castiel is, as you may have heard, a celestial entity possessing some poor guy named Jimmy Novak

apparently standard practice when mundane-AUing Castiel is to just give him the surname of the guy he bodysnatched?

and since SPN angels are all referred to as siblings (and are, of course, highly normal about that) it seems pretty common to just slap the same name onto other humanverse'd angels too

in the middle seasons one of Castiel's endless procession of dickwad angelic bosses is named Naomi

now you gotta bear in mind that i was not thinking about ANY of this. my brain had to backfill it. while reeling after almost blacking out when i scrolled past this character tag:

me, sitting there with my soul about to vacate the premises, thinking this fic is doing something WAY more interestingly cursed than it really is: listen man. listen. just because it's possible to reductively summarize the origins of AO3 as "Naomi Novik wanted a site she knew would never take down her Wincest fic" doesn't mean you gotta--

[firecoloredwater]

"IT WAS ONLY SUPPOSED TO BE A ONESHOT!!!" i scream, desperately clawing at the floor, as the fic drags me back into The Depths to continue writing against my will for the rest of eternity

[firecoloredwater]

Okay, I'm not trawling any more books, so I turn to the tag!

Have been poking at dragonkin color mutation things, for my own use, but that requires multiple things including- wait for it- knowing how dragons actually fucking look. We all know the basics, but more the terms of patterning.

We all know Ruth is a whole thing, but he's also Ruth and so we have to be wary of considering any aspect of his coloration normal. Golanth's description in the writing of his Impression in the DLG says he has a sort of dappled appearance, but due to the circumstances we can't know if the "not an ordinary bronze" that goes along with the color description is a matter of such patterning being outside of the norm or if it's just the fact we're getting this from his rider in the early stages of Impression.

I've trawled some of the books, looking for points where a description of any dragonkin seems likely, to see if I can find any more examples of patterning description. I have not. Everything is just color. Not even shades of color, just color.

So I'm asking, since I know there's folks here who've read books I haven't, and likely who've read books more recently- are there any other examples of something like a pattern description you can remember for any dragonkin?

[firecoloredwater]

hey. remember when i made a post about how annoyed i was that a guy called pirate software was against software piracy?

lmao

[firecoloredwater]

I'm still kind of appalled that after everything Menolly went through, from escaping her awful life and surviving holdless, being bullied and belittled, to finally being recognised and having her talents nurtured and shared, that she wasn't named Masterharper of Pern after Robinton stepped down.

I get that women didn't traditionally have a good time of it on Pern, but the whole story of Menolly was that yes, women CAN be harpers, and walk the tables, even if it was a new and shocking concept to most people. So why, WHYYYY wasn't that carried on, and she could have been the first woman master harper to have been THE masterharper. That should have been the conclusion to her story and the beginnings of things being changed on Pern, just before AIVAS really did change things.

But no, she was simply the wife of the guy who became masterharper. It was dissapointing, to say the least.