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[mugasofer]

They. They forgor

[mugasofer]

I will probably write anything in this setting

Typo or glowfic speak?

My current worldbuilding project is a superhero thing. I will probably write anything set in this setting, but I like the worldbuilding of it all, marking down major events, names and places, imagining the people and how they react to what's happening around them.

I'm drawn to kitchen sink settings like a moth to flame, but I've abandoned the idea of having a true kitchen sink, one that actually has everything. Instead, we'll have a kitchen sink that has a little bit of everything, but which does not contain a near-infinity of power sources and concepts.

So there are a single kind of aliens. There are fairies, with their Crocus Court, but they're all of a single breed, or at most three. We have wizards who get their specialties from the same foundational base. There are technologists, who are pushing into the future, and some time travelers who are coming from both the future and the past, and maybe twelve other things. But then that's it. We have a tightly contained kitchen sink, one that sprawls but is very limited, and should probably be described some other way than kitchen sink. Maybe "genre orgy".

I'm still noodling whether this approach will bear fruit. Aside from the kitchen sink being a staple of comic book continuities, part of the aim is to plunge straight at the heart of the overwhelming nature of the information age and to a lesser extent, globalization and multiculturalism.

You see a woman with butterfly wings at the grocery store and you know fuck all about butterfly-winged people and you just sort of roll with it, not actually your business, but there's a part of you that thinks "man, do I need to be learning about butterfly-winged people?" But this sort of thing happens so often that you're just left with a feeling of alienation, and you rarely find any kind of lasting illumination on why there are guys with freeze rays holding up a blood bank, or why everyone suddenly cares a lot about a famous couple that you've never heard of before.

(It's been pointed out to me that I wrote a kitchen sink setting for Worth the Candle, and hopefully this isn't a retread of some kind, but it's mostly just worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding, seeing where the seams are, where the best stories sit within it, what the setting might be trying to say to me.)

[mugasofer]

John Walsh is discussed a bit in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe; not in enough detail to explain his fairy classification scheme, but enough is quoted for me to suspect that the original source doesn't actually contain any more detail.

Wait, the Internet Archive actually has a scan of the original primary source... and University of Michigan has a transcription which I suspect is OCR but is more legible IMO.

Yeah, CRTL+F has only one usage of "green", the one in the screenshot above. I don't think John Walsh ever really explained his faerie court system :(

Actually, it's pretty short, I just read the whole thing. Kind of a grizzly read TBH. It's... really obviously an interrogation transcript, even though it's very sanitized. Dude was just a village doctor. I really hope he survived.

Came across this on Wikipedia, and the cite is a physical book that seems like too much work to track down and might not actually add anything, but this is just the most shit worldbuilding I've ever seen, really amateur stuff.

[mugasofer]

If only there was a word for a butthole on something other than a butt

I hate when a bagel has a big butthole and you end up getting a bunch of cream cheese and butter in there, and then midway through eating it there's a little plug of pure mushy cream.

[mugasofer]

a general rule of thumb is that if someone is talking about inherent limitations of LLMs and they're using NP-completeness or undecidability then their argument is nonsense, because humans are also turing machines and so the argument in all likelihood applies just as well to them

[mugasofer]

Remember, history was awful. Never trust the romantics.

[mugasofer]

"Original" Sin is what i've titled this piece. by me. sorry if you don't have "collapse long posts" enabled. I have many thoughts.

Transcript - References

[mugasofer]

So, I'll admit I've never knowingly read a fanfic that was written by an AI, but this makes no sense to me.

I don't read fics to reward the author for their hard work. I read fics because they're good, they're entertaining. I typically find those good fics because someone recommended them to me.

If someone had an AI write a story for them, and liked it enough to share it... that seems like a positive recommendation, the same as any other story someone liked enough to share it with me! And it seems like just as reasonable a thing to do as sharing any other story you enjoyed with others.

(Of course 99% of everything is crap, and every terrible misspelled human-written story also had the author decide it was worth posting. Most people have shit taste so I'm probably still not gonna read/enjoy it unless you have good taste.)

"This fic was ai generated—" Cool, so lemme block you real quick

[mugasofer]

i am pro-copyright infringement. anybody who does fanfiction or fanart or anything should be pro-copyright infringement and obviously we are on the Fanart Website. why this is not a more popular stance among people who spend all their time doing transformative works is beyond me

[mugasofer]

I do think a lot about that bit in Girlfriend Girlfriend where the funny harem comedy sits down for a minute to explain how dire it is for polycules out there

[mugasofer]

Don't laugh at this because "Oh those silly monster f*ckers." This is a giant freaking RED FLAG just like with Only Fans.

[mugasofer]

trying not to uspol too hard but man i don't think people on tumblr understand how big of a deal it was for tim walz to be the gay-straight alliance coordinator at a high school in 1999. sodomy was still illegal in a lot of states. the gsa at my high school five years later was run by the teacher who couldn't even say out loud that she was a lesbian and lived with her wife. the idea that a heterosexual married man would do that willingly in 1999 is genuinely shocking

[mugasofer]

Certain people's politics essentially boil down to 'what if we didn't honor contracts, wouldn't that be cool' without ever confronting the fact that next time we'd like to form some sort of contract

the incentives will be different

no contract will be formed

things that used to work will grind to an invisible halt

It is absolutely maddening to watch people talk about iterated games with established rules and incentives as if they were one-off games.

[mugasofer]

By God I hate the stalkeresque fucking way different sites fuck around.

gmail offers a service where they'll redirect emails, so if you have "your.name@gmail.com", when you registered "your.name" they gave you that email, sure, but they also gave you every email address that starts with "your.name+"

So you can go to Github and make an account and when Github says "what's your email?" you answer "your.name+github@gmail.com" and Github sends all their mails to "your.name+github" and you get them like they're normal.

Which is great for many reasons.

Except one fucking company, at least, and it is fucking microsoft, they know that gmail does this, so if you have a Microsoft account with them as your.name+microsoft@gmail.com, and then you want to create another microsoft account for, I dunno, your.name+xbox@gmail.com (I don't have an xbox) they'll say "You already have a microsoft account as your.name+microsoft@gmail.com, you should log in with the account you already have."

Hey Microsoft guess what go fuck yourself. There are, like, ninety billion reasons to have separate accounts. You're not cute for doing this, you're just making me create another email account, don't fucking think I won't.

[mugasofer]

how it feels whenever somebody says "ummm don't look THAT up on deviantart unless you want to get nightmares!"

[mugasofer]

btw this should be obvious but if you are upset about the internet archive losing the appeal, but are also anti-ai training, you are holding two extremely contradictory views - either the law protects your intellectual property to the point where nobody is allowed to download it, or it doesn't - and you should try to examine where exactly the conflict is.

i've had the worst day in a long time so im not elaborating for now - if one of my many esteemed followers felt like getting more clear on the Ramifications and Dialectic here in a reblog i would greatly appreciate it but i did just want to strike while the thing was hot. either you think more IP protection is better, or you don't. you can't have it both ways.