liketolaugh-writes

[liketolaugh-writes]

at a conference I attended recently, a researcher pointed to the difficulty of finding material in archives because so much depends on the metadata and the terminology used to describe things changes over time. "it would be so helpful," the researcher said, "if I typed 'lesbian' into the library of congress database, it would also show me results that were categorised in the 50s, when the materials were interpreted as 'intimate female friendships'"

which is what tag wrangles at Archive Of Our Own do incredibly effectively: searching for "omegaverse" also leads to "alpha/beta/omega dynamics" and "alternate universe: a/b/o" and so on. but ao3 achieves this frankly incredible categorisation and indexing system by the power of countless volunteers putting in hours and hours of unpaid and unthanked free time, and it's completely understandable that most archives do not have that kind of infrastructure, but also how incredible that a fan-run website has better searchability, classification, and accessibility than the library of congress

[liketolaugh-writes]

Yeah, I’d argue that there are probably several different standards of what’s considered ‘appropriate’ in-universe. It would be super weird for most people - who, yes, seem to use Pokemon as service animals - to hold a professional trainer to the same standard that they do another hobbyist. And the player character is absolutely a professional trainer, ten years old or not.

Probably, where this applies most is when a competitive battle trainer enters a Contest. Even if it’s largely a different skillset, and they do also train their pokemon to do it pretty, it’s still considered a dick move to go full Pokemon League in a Contest.

HOWEVER, getting into it further re: why these idiots keep challenging you - it’s pretty strongly implied that most aspiring trainers wash out! I think it’s fair to assume that the player character is unusually skilled, which makes sense when you consider the fact that in-universe, much of the actual challenge of being a trainer is with getting them to trust and listen to you. So they probably see a ten year old and reasonably assume that you’re just another Youngster, because most trainers of your level are the older teen/young adult Ace Trainers.

But like. Ultimately. It’s not the kid’s fault that you assumed they were unskilled. You challenged them. If you invite a pro basketball player to a pickup game and they thrash you, that’s your own fault for playing basketball against a professional athlete.

i was playing pokemon blue on stream earlier at 350% speed and i got to thinking

what if the reason nobody in the pokemon world has any good teams is because its considered a dick move to have a proper team comp

like culturally everyone is like “haha pick the pokemon you want! if you’re happy with three geodudes, thats you and your life!” and then you’re supposed to just have a friendly battle with any other pokemon trainers and whatever pokemon they just happen to have

like the average trainer is probably just walking around with a growlithe because that’s their pet, or a hiker has three geodudes because the geodudes help him with hiking. and if this pet owner and geodude hiker meet, you’re supposed to have a friendly battle but nothing too serious

now imagine the 10 year old kid that has six pokeballs on their belt comes up. you’re like “haha, we’ll have a friendly battle!” and you throw out your geodude 

and they throw out a fucking gyarados, and it one-shots your geodude 

and then you throw out your pidgey you have because the pidgey helps you navigate mountains because you’re a hiker

and then electricity crackles around the gyarados and a thunderbolt flies off of this giant dragon and evaporates your pidgey 

so you’re down to your last pokemon. you tell them you’re gonna send out your bulbasaur. the ten year old is like “oh okay in that case i’m gonna pull out my vulpix.” like not only is this kid walking around with an amped-up super dragon, but theyve also got multiple pokemon specifically for making type advantage counter-picks?

this kid’s a fucking asshole! really, kid? what are you trying to prove here? this is a friendly match between strangers for fun! why are you composing real-ass competitive teams? what a fucker! 

[liketolaugh-writes]

[liketolaugh-writes]

The boy…

[liketolaugh-writes]

I've had a bad day and would like to remind u that these photos of the lotr cast t-posing exist because it always makes me feel better:

Don't forget this one of Frodo giving side eye like a diva:

And this one of Sam always makes me giggle:

And Saruman giving bat wings:

And these guys:

You're welcome <3

[liketolaugh-writes]

honestly, especially in the current state of the world, you all have GOT to kill whatever puritanical voice inside your head keeps insisting that if something is erotic it has no social, artistic, or intellectual merit.

stop acting as if someone can’t enjoy both erotica and literary fiction or classics. it’s not some dichotomy.

stop acting as if erotic art can’t be poignant and meaningful. and that includes all erotic art - not just fine art.

stop insisting that sex scenes or erotic material ruin movies and shows just because you, personally, get icked out watching it.

no, not all erotic art is high art, and not all erotic art is meant to invoke deep intellectual discussion - but insisting that makes erotic art valueless, a disservice to intellectualism, or whatever else - does nothing but add fuel to a fire built on conservative ideology.

[liketolaugh-writes]

it’s currently golden hour where I am and I just wanted to say your fics feel exactly like golden sunshine on skin in the middle of summer, your updates were literally a hug after a long day of school. Thank you so much for writing, your fics have helped me through very hard times (death of a loved one, abuse at home and even relapse) and I’ll never be able to thank you enough for everything you’ve done for me even though you don’t know about it <3

I’ve been meaning to send you an ask for a long time now, and I’ve finally gotten around to it, I dont think there’s nothing more to add than to say you showed so many new fandoms!! I love your writing in the PJO fandom so much (I must have have read the constellation series at least 5 times each fic) and was kinda sad when you stopped posted for it, so I tried your other Danny Phantom  fics even though I wasn’t in the fandom, and to put it simply, you did not disappoint! Then I got to More Like Home which was a new opening to the DC universe, and without it I couldn’t have gotten into it (and I wouldn’t have been offered batman socks for my birthday lol)

SL,SB and SOTW helped me through panic attacks though  I couldn’t even read most of the words, and they helped me feel better after relapsing (and not to mention all the soothing techniques I’ve learned from it that i still use to this day).

This may seem very stupid but MLH and TLDDP were the start of the most constant things in my life rn, I have a whole routine for every update day (drinking coffee from a specific cup and having snacks with it every time I come back from school), a whole lot of things have changed in my life this last year, but your writing was the only that stayed. 

TL;DR : I’m just a teenager struggling with teenage stuff who you have helped indirectly with your fics and i just couldnt not let you know how grateful I am. You dont have to answer to this long and excruciating ask but i just hope you’ve read it and understand that you’ve helped me immensely. 

God, I forgot I'd saved this to fawn over. An amazing thing to see right now, honestly. 💝

Thank you so much for your kind words. I'm absolutely thrilled that you've enjoyed my work so much and that it's helped you. I hope you're doing better than you were.

There is, sincerely, nothing that makes me happier than knowing that my stories have been a comfort to someone that needed it.

[liketolaugh-writes]

Re college start terms: at least in graduate school (my current job), there's sometimes programs that do everything in 8 week courses. So while you enroll in 6-9 hours (undergraduate more likely 12-16), you take half at a time, but go more often. Considering Gotham's rogue problem, would not be surprised if all programs, undergraduate and graduate, work that way to work around people recovering from attacks. So maybe Jazz is doing a "half" semester as part of her transfer?

I'll think about it, thank you! <3 Probably I won't address it more than briefly - I considered just moving her start date up from where I'd planned but I looked at my outline for January and February and I'm sorry Jazz but there just isn't room

[liketolaugh-writes]

Older Danny just kind of becomes Maddie from MOAT.

"this is my secret ghost lab!! It has to be secret or my husband would find out about it."

I'm not sure exactly which direction this is coming from but that is literally so funny <3 Yeah Danny doesn't tell people shit if he can help it. Sometimes because he doesn't want to, sometimes because it doesn't occur to him that he should

[liketolaugh-writes]

an incomplete list of things i have started actively blocking people for:

calling dpxdc fans parasitic

calling them entitled and selfish

swearing never to forgive them for uhhhhh existing

literally wishing ill on dpxdc fans???

sincerely. what is your fucking problem. what was your last fandom that you think this is acceptable behavior

[liketolaugh-writes]

Okay, while generally speaking, I’m strictly on the ‘can we just be civil about this’ side of the debate (getting tired SO fast of the outright vitriol) I want to be clear about something.

This is not ‘all of a sudden.’

I have been in this fandom since last year. (DP for longer, but that’s another conversation.) For at least that entire year - and it was already clear at that point that it was an old-and-settled debate - people in the DPxDC fandom have been reminding each other not to use the Danny Phantom tag. It was settled in the main DPxDC Discord, which is as close to a general consensus as you’re going to get in a fandom of this size. I was frankly a little disappointed to realize that my hypothesis that most people still posting in the main tag were 14/15/16 was wrong.

It’s blowing up now because a few people complained and the posts circulated a lot (thanks, Most Annoying Fandoms poll) so people are actively talking about it right now. But it is absolutely not a new debate.

This would be used in addition to the danny phantom tag, turning it into a true umbrella tag for everything related to Danny Phantom, while having a few major sub-tags for people to find exactly what they want.

---

After some more discussion with members of the fandom in the notes of my poll asking about a community and elsewhere, it seems like the better option for everyone might actually be a new tag, so I'm making a new poll here!

Some answers to questions I think people might have are below the readmore:

Q: Why are all of these only one word?

A: For the same reason the dpxdc tag is only one word! Tumblr's tagging implementation is Not Good. Tags with spaces don't play well with it, and especially don't play well with blocked tags. If someone wants to block non-crossover Danny Phantom content, we want to make it as painless as possible for them.

Q: What issues were raised around communities?

A: A few! To name some of them:

Limited interactions with posts: Communities only let you react with emoji and leave comments on posts reblogged into them. Not great, if we want to have long reblog chains riffing on one another

Original Posters aren't notified if someone else reblogs their post into a community, even if it's public. So if someone reblogged your post into the community for you, you wouldn't know about it -- or know to look for people interacting with it.

Communities have mods, and therefore would need trustworthy, engaged mods to make it work. Over a short time frame, we could probably manage it! But over a longer one, a community for an entire fandom would probably have moderator drama. That could lead to fracturing, or people leaving specifically because they don't like the mods, etc. A tag is a lot less active maintenance.

A few people also expressed a general dislike for the feature, even if they were willing to move to one. This seems like a much smaller change that will let those people stay away from a feature they don't like, while interacting with the content they do.

Q: What about less-common crossovers? Won't those get excluded from this tag?

A: They will. I'm asking about this poll first because I figured getting the community to make a decision about the other crossovers would be easier if we'd already decided on the non-crossovers.

The current idea is to move those to their own tag as well, so they can get dedicated attention from the crossover enthusiasts who love them. One of the people I talked to about this runs the niche-dp-crossovers blog, so it's on the radar. If you have concerns or suggestions about that, the notes on this post is as good a place as any to suggest them!

[liketolaugh-writes]

This would be used in addition to the danny phantom tag, turning it into a true umbrella tag for everything related to Danny Phantom, while having a few major sub-tags for people to find exactly what they want.

---

After some more discussion with members of the fandom in the notes of my poll asking about a community and elsewhere, it seems like the better option for everyone might actually be a new tag, so I'm making a new poll here!

Some answers to questions I think people might have are below the readmore:

Q: Why are all of these only one word?

A: For the same reason the dpxdc tag is only one word! Tumblr's tagging implementation is Not Good. Tags with spaces don't play well with it, and especially don't play well with blocked tags. If someone wants to block non-crossover Danny Phantom content, we want to make it as painless as possible for them.

Q: What issues were raised around communities?

A: A few! To name some of them:

Limited interactions with posts: Communities only let you react with emoji and leave comments on posts reblogged into them. Not great, if we want to have long reblog chains riffing on one another

Original Posters aren't notified if someone else reblogs their post into a community, even if it's public. So if someone reblogged your post into the community for you, you wouldn't know about it -- or know to look for people interacting with it.

Communities have mods, and therefore would need trustworthy, engaged mods to make it work. Over a short time frame, we could probably manage it! But over a longer one, a community for an entire fandom would probably have moderator drama. That could lead to fracturing, or people leaving specifically because they don't like the mods, etc. A tag is a lot less active maintenance.

A few people also expressed a general dislike for the feature, even if they were willing to move to one. This seems like a much smaller change that will let those people stay away from a feature they don't like, while interacting with the content they do.

Q: What about less-common crossovers? Won't those get excluded from this tag?

A: They will. I'm asking about this poll first because I figured getting the community to make a decision about the other crossovers would be easier if we'd already decided on the non-crossovers.

The current idea is to move those to their own tag as well, so they can get dedicated attention from the crossover enthusiasts who love them. One of the people I talked to about this runs the niche-dp-crossovers blog, so it's on the radar. If you have concerns or suggestions about that, the notes on this post is as good a place as any to suggest them!

[liketolaugh-writes]

(via FlimsyFlamingo on Twitter)

[liketolaugh-writes]

hitting my dashboard with a flyswatter until i stop seeing posts complaining about dp x dc

listen i love plain dp work too. i do. i write stuff for it. but i'm not putting up with 'lmao dp x dc fans are SOOOO annoying' bs in order to keep seeing it.

this is not how you get more of the content you want to see

[liketolaugh-writes]

its extremely important to read widely and deeply in a variety of genres. read obscure self published shit that only 4 people have read. read culturally relevant works of literature that have helped shape the canon. read horror. read women's lit. read historical fiction and comedies and nonfiction and hentai and poetry and science fiction and fantasy and mysteries and romance and good things and bad things and things u hate and things you love and things you COULD like if only the author changed x y and z and things which are beautiful but not meant for you.

doing all of this reading will lay a groundwork of rich complexity in your heart. so that you can write really good porn

[liketolaugh-writes]

here’s some more of jason todd being a naturally violent, rebellious, angry, and anti-social child so dangerous that batman HAD to take him in solely to prevent him from being even worse.

[liketolaugh-writes]

Brain Tickles Masterpost

Someone asked so now there is one. Only kind of a FAQ but it's easier to format this information as a series of questions.

Q: What's this brain tickles/brain implant thing you keep posting about?

A: I'm a cyborg science experiment. The less cool way to say this is that I'm a patient in a clinical trial testing a new application of deep brain stimulation. I have a pacemaker for my brain, basically. The device isn't new but the use is.

Q: What's the device like?

A: It's a couple of depth leads attached to a small box set into my skull, everything underneath the skin. It monitors my brain activity in one side of my amygdala, and when it detects a certain concerning biomarker (pattern of brain activity), it zaps my left ventral capsule in response.

You can check out the actual manuals for the device here, which include a step-by-step for neurosurgeons. I think that's pretty cool.

Q: So you don't have epilepsy. What disease are they studying this for?

A: I have treatment-resistant major depression. The study guys think this is probably a different disease altogether from what you can treat with medication, due to how it behaves, and also, because it won't respond to anything short of direct neurostimulation (like TMS or ECT, which will get a response but not ultimately work).

Besides making me not life-ruiningly miserable for literally no reason all the time, the stimulation makes major improvements to my otherwise pretty shaky cognition and memory, gives me the energy to perform basic tasks, and seems to fix a lot of autonomic stuff like insomnia and digestive issues as well.

Q: Does that mean they know what causes depression?

A: They know several different parts of the brain that you can tickle to treat otherwise intractable depression. Brains are awfully individually variant, and you can't reasonably guess which site is going to do it for a given person.

Q: What's the root cause, then?

A: No idea! If they have a guess, they're not telling me, and I'll find out when they publish.

Q: How did they figure out which part of your brain to tickle and which to monitor?

A: They gave me an SEEG and stimulated a bunch of likely areas to see what happened. After that, they spent a few months going through the literal terabytes of data recorded.

Q: How much did the surgery suck?

A: The SEEG was less bad than any root canals I'd had up to that point, although I've had less shitty ones since. The worst part was that I was considered a fall risk and needed to call a nurse whenever I had to pee.

The actual device implantation was worse to recover from than a root canal, but still sucked less than my totally easy, uncomplicated, textbook wisdom tooth removal. I spent two and a half days napping on-and-off, I took a lot of tylenol, and I couldn't sleep on that side of my head for a couple weeks. That's about it.

In advance, they told me there was about a 1% chance of infection and a 2-3% chance of bleeding. Neither thing happened. Yay! Compared to the odds of complications from other types of surgery, that's pretty great.

Q: Can you feel your brain getting zapped?

A: Normally, no. I can feel when it turns on in the morning because I pretty quickly start to feel more alert and less shitty, but the standard zaps aren't strong enough for me to feel physically. If they were to crank up the amperage some, I could feel that, and it'd be extremely distracting.

Q: What does that feel like?

A: At lower levels, if I can just barely feel it, it's kind of like a little anxiety thrill or tickle of anticipation down in the core of my chest, and my palms prickle. At higher levels, like they used during the SEEG, it's more like a rush of electric energy and heat that wells up in my core and spreads out into my limbs, and I have to wiggle them around to "shake it off" or it's too much to handle.

I felt some other, different things from other sites that they didn't end up going with. There was one that made my eyes unfocus unevenly and made me feel weird and lightheaded in a way I can only describe synesthetically (swell, rubber, gum, balloon, pink-red), and gave me the sense that something Bad would happen if they kept pushing that button. There was one that just made one or both of my hands start buzzing for some reason.

Neurostim that you can feel is incredibly distracting. It's not like inputs from outside that your brain can evaluate and filter. You can't ignore it any more than you could ignore having a seizure. There was one setting we tried that made me feel kind of like I had an intangible "itch" somewhere inside my right shoulder and my right leg, and every time it fired, it derailed my thoughts so badly that I couldn't even focus on a simple phone game. Something more intense is going to knock you on your ass.

Once in a long while (once every five months or so, maybe?), I have dreams where I experience a different, half-remembered version of that electric energy feeling, even though the device doesn't stimulate me at night. Actually, it's been happening ever since the SEEG. I think my brain just learned and filed away a new type of sensation.

Q: If I got my brain tickled in the same place, would I feel that?

A: Almost certainly not. I can't guess at what you'd feel, but as mentioned, brains are really individually variant. It's pretty much different for everyone. You might feel something I don't even have a frame of reference for.

It also depends on the exact way you're being stimulated. The same site can either make me feel better or make me cry uncontrollably, depending solely on how long the electrical pulses are.

Q: How many amps are they hitting you with?

A: They can't tell me (yet) in case it placebos me in some way. I know it's less than 3 mA (because I can feel 3 mA) and probably more than 1. 6 mA is the strongest they've ever given me, which is a brick-to-the-face biofeedback high.

Q: How do they know if it's working and not a placebo effect?

A: You report twice-daily on your symptoms throughout the whole thing. There's a phase where they occasionally change the type of stimulation or turn it off entirely for several weeks. They don't tell you when they change anything.

Personally, it's consistently obvious to me within about ~20 minutes when they change something -- they've commented on how consistent my responses are and how quickly I see differences. I can even tell when they turn it off during visits to do recordings. I've heard that's not true of all the patients, though.

Q: What's this piss signal thing you mention?

A: At one point, the stimulation started giving me bladder spasms, so every time it fired I felt like I had to pee. They had to find a new setting that didn't do that. They didn't change anything at the time, so we don't know exactly what caused it. Possibly the electrode drifted a very, very tiny amount, or possibly my brain just built an annoying new connection that allowed this to happen.

The study guys reached out to some other experts they know about it, though, and determined that could happen if my hypothalamus was getting some stimulation by accident -- entirely possible, since it's pretty close to the electrode.

Q: Do you recharge it or get the battery replaced or what?

A: I have to get the entire battery pack/computer part of the device replaced every, probably, six to twelve years when the battery starts to run down. It detaches from the leads, so they won't have to redo the part that involves threading wires into my brain every time.

Q: Aren't you worried about your brain getting hacked?

A: Well, my implant doesn't have wifi or anything. Literally anything can be hacked somehow, but I'll worry about that when I get into a sworn blood feud with an engineer.

Q: Aren't you worried about handing over part of your body to a corporation?

A: The alternative is being in hell at all times forever. I too would like to have an open-source brain implant that's easy to replace though.

Q: Aren't you worried about never being able to get an MRI again?

A: I actually can get an MRI, as long as the MRI scanner puts out a basic-bitch amount of teslas and my implant is switched into MRI mode. I'm not totally sure how that works, but it puts a strain on the battery, so I'm guessing it's generating its own little field. My implant isn't ferrous, so the worry is less "yanking wires around" and more "tissue heating".

Q: Aren't you worried about your body rejecting it?

A: No, medical implants are made of materials like titanium and silicone that the body doesn't care about (unless you have a titanium allergy). I'm really not sure where the pop-culture idea of cybernetic rejection came from. I'm guessing it's writers not understanding why organ transplants reject and thinking it works the same way. Or something about how steel implants can sometimes start to corrode and irritate tissue.

Q: Aren't you worried about this being used to mind control everyone?

A: In my case, mind control is sort of the point.

But also, not really. I mean, you're talking about each individual person getting multiple MRIs, a ~$40,000 implant, three brain surgeries (two of which bookend a multi-week hospital stay), and requiring like a year's worth of fine-tuning from a team of specialized professionals. And it all requires so much precision that if you cut corners on any of this, you're not going to get the results you want.

The cost, time, and effort involved to implant people at scale would be fucking insane. Even if all the tech involved became cheap, you'd still have the problem where you need to pay a competent neurosurgeon for the SEEG and the actual device implantation, and a team of competent neurologists to spend at minimum several months gathering and analyzing data on how each person's brain works, because the individualization of the brain means you can't plug-and-play this shit. And each group -- let's be generous and say it takes only five such specialized professionals -- would be able to do this to about two people a year.

Maybe that will change the day we develop some means of simply scanning people's brains to map how they work in detail, at which point we'll basically have solved neurology.

Usually whenever there's a tumblr post going around about brain implants, someone freaks out about a hypothetical of, like, Amazon installing pleasure buttons in their workers to keep them compliant. That would involve spending minimum a hundred thousand dollars (but probably much more) on surgery, hardware, and calibration per disposable worker, and then if you fire them or they get a brain infection or something, you just lose that money. And if you cheap out, it doesn't work and you lose the money. And then the result, if it works, is that you get a button that makes them worse at their jobs when you press it.

A large corporation bent on technological enslavement to save a few pennies would literally get better results from slapping $30 shock collars on everyone.

Q: Does the study pay you?

A: I get the medical care for free. And $10 every other week to cover transportation costs.