#also coder problems

[xirayn]

The inability to crumple up the paper and toss it across the room in frustration is definitely a downside of digital.

[1tsjusty0u]

i am my own worst enemy…..

[misterghostfrog]

This is almost comedically common with any program that's meant to be for folks who can't code to make games with. It even goes beyond the devs a lot of the time, I fiddle with that stuff on a regular basis and 9/10 times if you go on a forum to find out how to use a tool or implement some mechanic almost every answer you'll find will have people saying 'just learn (scripting language the program uses) and code it yourself it's easier' forgetting that the main audience is meant to be folks with no coding background

"RPG Maker lets you create games without knowing how to program!" is both technically a true statement and a trap.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI turns Amazon coders into Amazon warehouse workers

HEY SEATTLE! I'm appearing at the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival NEXT SATURDAY (May 31) with the folks from NPR's On The Media!

On a recent This Machine Kills episode, guest Hagen Blix described the ultimate form of "AI therapy" with a "human in the loop":

https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/405-ai-is-the-demon-god-of-capital-ft-hagen-blix

One actual therapist is just having ten chat GPT windows open where they just like have five seconds to interrupt the chatGPT. They have to scan them all and see if it says something really inappropriate. That's your job, to stop it.

Blix admits that's not where therapy is at…yet, but he references Laura Preston's 2023 N Plus One essay, "HUMAN_FALLBACK," which describes her as a backstop to a real-estate "virtual assistant," that masqueraded as a human handling the queries that confused it, in a bid to keep the customers from figuring out that they were engaging with a chatbot:

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-44/essays/human_fallback/

This is what makes investors and bosses slobber so hard for AI – a "productivity" boost that arises from taking away the bargaining power of workers so that they can be made to labor under worse conditions for less money. The efficiency gains of automation aren't just about using fewer workers to achieve the same output – it's about the fact that the workers you fire in this process can be used as a threat against the remaining workers: "Do your job and shut up or I'll fire you and give your job to one of your former colleagues who's now on the breadline."

This has been at the heart of labor fights over automation since the Industrial Revolution, when skilled textile workers took up the Luddite cause because their bosses wanted to fire them and replace them with child workers snatched from Napoleonic War orphanages:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/26/enochs-hammer/#thats-fronkonsteen

Textile automation wasn't just about producing more cloth – it was about producing cheaper, worse cloth. The new machines were so easy a child could use them, because that's who was using them – kidnapped war orphans. The adult textile workers the machines displaced weren't afraid of technology. Far from it! Weavers used the most advanced machinery of the day, and apprenticed for seven years to learn how to operate it. Luddites had the equivalent of a Masters in Engineering from MIT.

Weavers' guilds presented two problems for their bosses: first, they had enormous power, thanks to the extensive training required to operate their looms; and second, they used that power to regulate the quality of the goods they made. Even before the Industrial Revolution, weavers could have produced more cloth at lower prices by skimping on quality, but they refused, out of principle, because their work mattered to them.

Now, of course weavers also appreciated the value of their products, and understood that innovations that would allow them to increase their productivity and make more fabric at lower prices would be good for the world. They weren't snobs who thought that only the wealthy should go clothed. Weavers had continuously adopted numerous innovations, each of which increased the productivity and the quality of their wares.

Long before the Luddite uprising, weavers had petitioned factory owners and Parliament under the laws that guaranteed the guilds the right to oversee textile automation to ensure that it didn't come at the price of worker power or the quality of the textiles the machines produced. But the factory owners and their investors had captured Parliament, which ignored its own laws and did nothing as the "dark, Satanic mills" proliferated. Luddites only turned to property destruction after the system failed them.

Now, it's true that eventually, the machines improved and the fabric they turned out matched and exceeded the quality of the fabric that preceded the Industrial Revolution. But there's nothing about the way the Industrial Revolution unfolded – increasing the power of capital to pay workers less and treat them worse while flooding the market with inferior products – that was necessary or beneficial to that progress. Every other innovation in textile production up until that time had been undertaken with the cooperation of the guilds, who'd ensured that "progress" meant better lives for workers, better products for consumers, and lower prices. If the Luddites' demands for co-determination in the Industrial Revolution had been met, we might have gotten to the same world of superior products at lower costs, but without the immiseration of generations of workers, mass killings to suppress worker uprisings, and decades of defective products being foisted on the public.

So there are two stories about automation and labor: in the dominant narrative, workers are afraid of the automation that delivers benefits to all of us, stand in the way of progress, and get steamrollered for their own good, as well as ours. In the other narrative, workers are glad to have boring and dangerous parts of their work automated away and happy to produce more high-quality goods and services, and stand ready to assess and plan the rollout of new tools, and when workers object to automation, it's because they see automation being used to crush them and worsen the outputs they care about, at the expense of the customers they care for.

In modern automation/labor theory, this debate is framed in terms of "centaurs" (humans who are assisted by technology) and "reverse-centaurs" (humans who are conscripted to assist technology):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

There are plenty of workers who are excited at the thought of using AI tools to relieve them of some drudgework. To the extent that these workers have power over their bosses and their working conditions, that excitement might well be justified. I hear a lot from programmers who work on their own projects about how nice it is to have a kind of hypertrophied macro system that can generate and tweak little automated tools on the fly so the humans can focus on the real, chewy challenges. Those workers are the centaurs, and it's no wonder that they're excited about improved tooling.

But the reverse-centaur version is a lot darker. The reverse-centaur coder is an assistant to the AI, charged with being a "human in the loop" who reviews the material that the AI produces. This is a pretty terrible job to have.

For starters, the kinds of mistakes that AI coders make are the hardest mistakes for human reviewers to catch. That's because LLMs are statistical prediction machines, spicy autocomplete that works by ingesting and analyzing a vast corpus of written materials and then producing outputs that represent a series of plausible guesses about which words should follow one another. To the extent that the reality the AI is participating in is statistically smooth and predictable, AI can often make eerily good guesses at words that turn into sentences or code that slot well into that reality.

But where reality is lumpy and irregular, AI stumbles. AI is intrinsically conservative. As a statistically informed guessing program, it wants the future to be like the past:

https://reallifemag.com/the-apophenic-machine/

This means that AI coders stumble wherever the world contains rough patches and snags. Take "slopsquatting." For the most part, software libraries follow regular naming conventions. For example, there might be a series of text-handling libraries with names like "text.parsing.docx," "text.parsing.xml," and "text.parsing.markdown." But for some reason – maybe two different projects were merged, or maybe someone was just inattentive – there's also a library called "text.txt.parsing" (instead of "text.parsing.txt").

AI coders are doing inference based on statistical analysis, and anyone inferring what the .txt parsing library is called would guess, based on the other libraries, that it was "text.parsing.txt." And that's what the AI guesses, and so it tries to import that library to its software projects.

This creates a new security vulnerability, "slopsquatting," in which a malicious actor creates a library with the expected name, which replicates the functionality of the real library, but also contains malicious code:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/12/ai_code_suggestions_sabotage_supply_chain/

Note that slopsquatting errors are extremely hard to spot. As is typical with AI coding errors, these are errors that are based on continuing a historical pattern, which is the sort of thing our own brains do all the time (think of trying to go up a step that isn't there after climbing to the top of a staircase). Notably, these are very different from the errors that a beginning programmer whose work is being reviewed by a more senior coder might make. These are the very hardest errors for humans to spot, and these are the errors that AIs make the most, and they do so at machine speed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

To be a human in the loop for an AI coder, a programmer must engage in sustained, careful, line-by-line and command-by-command scrutiny of the code. This is the hardest kind of code to review, and maintaining robotic vigilance over long periods at high speeds is something humans are very bad at. Indeed, it's the kind of task we try very hard to automate, since machines are much better at being machineline than humans are. This is the essence of reverse-centaurism: when a human is expected to act like a machine in order to help the machine do something it can't do.

Humans routinely fail at spotting these errors, unsurprisingly. If the purpose of automation is to make superior goods at lower prices, then this would be a real concern, since a reverse-centaur coding arrangement is bound to produce code with lurking, pernicious, especially hard-to-spot bugs that present serious risks to users. But if the purpose of automation is to discipline labor – to force coders to accept worse conditions and pay – irrespective of the impact on quality, then AI is the perfect tool for the job. The point of the human isn't to catch the AI's errors so much as it is to catch the blame for the AI's errors – to be what Madeleine Clare Elish calls a "moral crumple zone":

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

As has been the case since the Industrial Revolution, the project of automation isn't just about increasing productivity, it's about weakening labor power as a prelude to lowering quality. Take what's happened to the news industry, where mass layoffs are being offset by AI tools. At Hearst's King Features Syndicates, a single writer was charged with producing over 30 summer guides, the entire package:

https://www.404media.co/viral-ai-generated-summer-guide-printed-by-chicago-sun-times-was-made-by-magazine-giant-hearst/

That is an impossible task, which is why the writer turned to AI to do his homework, and then, infamously, published a "summer reading guide" that was full of nonexistent books that were hallucinated by a chatbot:

https://www.404media.co/chicago-sun-times-prints-ai-generated-summer-reading-list-with-books-that-dont-exist/

Most people reacted to this story as a consumer issue: they were outraged that the world was having a defective product foisted upon it. But the consumer issue here is downstream from the labor issue: when the writers at King Features Syndicate are turned into reverse-centaurs, they will inevitably produce defective outputs. The point of the worker – the "human in the loop" – isn't to supervise the AI, it's to take the blame for the AI. That's just what happened, as this poor schmuck absorbed an internet-sized rasher of shit flung his way by outraged social media users. After all, it was his byline on the story, not the chatbot's. He's the moral crumple-zone.

The implication of this is that consumers and workers are class allies in the automation wars. The point of using automation to weaken labor isn't just cheaper products – it's cheaper, defective products, inflicted on the unsuspecting and defenseless public who are no longer protected by workers' professionalism and pride in their jobs.

That's what's going on at Duolingo, where CEO Luis von Ahn created a firestorm by announcing mass firings of human language instructors, who would be replaced by AI. The "AI first" announcement pissed off Duolingo's workers, of course, but what caught von Ahn off-guard was how much this pissed off Duolingo's users:

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/25/0347239/duolingo-faces-massive-social-media-backlash-after-ai-first-comments

But of course, this makes perfect sense. After all, language-learners are literally incapable of spotting errors in the AI instruction they receive. If you spoke the language well enough to spot the AI's mistakes, you wouldn't need Duolingo! I don't doubt that there are countless ways in which AIs could benefit both language learners and the Duolingo workers who develop instructional materials, but for that to happen, workers' and learners' needs will have to be the focus of AI integration. Centaurs could produce great language learning materials with AI – but reverse-centaurs can only produce slop.

Unsurprisingly, many of the most successful AI products are "bossware" tools that let employers monitor and discipline workers who've been reverse-centaurized. Both blue-collar and white-collar workplaces have filled up with "electronic whips" that monitor and evaluate performance:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/02/despotism-on-demand/#virtual-whips

AI can give bosses "dashboards" that tell them which Amazon delivery drivers operate their vehicles with their mouths open (Amazon doesn't let its drivers sing on the job). Meanwhile, a German company called Celonis will sell your boss a kind of AI phrenology tool that assesses your "emotional quality" by spying on you while you work:

https://crackedlabs.org/en/data-work/publications/processmining-algomanage

Tech firms were among the first and most aggressive adopters of AI-based electronic whips. But these whips weren't used on coders – they were reserved for tech's vast blue-collar and contractor workforce: clickworkers, gig workers, warehouse workers, AI data-labelers and delivery drivers.

Tech bosses tormented these workers but pampered their coders. That wasn't out of any sentimental attachment to tech workers. Rather, tech bosses were afraid of tech workers, because tech workers possess a rare set of skills that can be harnessed by tech firms to produce gigantic returns. Tech workers have historically been princes of labor, able to command high salaries and deferential treatment from their bosses (think of the amazing tech "campus" perks), because their scarcity gave them power.

It's easy to predict how tech bosses would treat tech workers if they could get away with it – just look how they treat workers they aren't afraid of. Just like the textile mill owners of the Industrial Revolution, the thing that excites tech bosses about AI is the possibility of cutting off a group of powerful workers at the knees. After all, it took more than a century for strong labor unions to match the power that the pre-Industrial Revolution guilds had. If AI can crush the power of tech workers, it might buy tech bosses a century of free rein to shift value from their workforce to their investors, while also doing away with pesky Tron-pilled workers who believe they have a moral obligation to "fight for the user."

William Gibson famously wrote, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." The workers that tech bosses don't fear are living in the future of the workers that tech bosses can't easily replace.

This week, the New York Times's veteran Amazon labor report Noam Scheiber published a deeply reported piece about the experience of coders at Amazon in the age of AI:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/business/amazon-ai-coders.html

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is palpably horny for AI coders, evidenced by investor memos boasting of AI's returns in "productivity and cost avoidance" and pronouncements about AI saving "the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years":

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andy-jassy-8b1615_one-of-the-most-tedious-but-critical-tasks-activity-7232374162185461760-AdSz/

Amazon is among the most notorious abusers of blue-collar labor, the workplace where everyone who doesn't have a bullshit laptop job is expected to piss in a bottle and spend an unpaid hour before and after work going through a bag- and body-search. Amazon's blue-collar workers are under continuous, totalizing, judging AI scrutiny that scores them based on whether their eyeballs are correctly oriented, whether they take too long to pick up an object, whether they pee too often. Amazon warehouse workers are injured at three times national average. Amazon AIs scan social media for disgruntled workers talking about unions, and Amazon has another AI tool that predicts which shops and departments are most likely to want to unionize.

Scheiber's piece describes what it's like to be an Amazon tech worker who's getting the reverse-centaur treatment that has heretofore been reserved for warehouse workers and drivers. They describe "speedups" in which they are moved from writing code to reviewing AI code, their jobs transformed from solving chewy intellectual puzzles to racing to spot hard-to-find AI coding errors as a clock ticks down. Amazon bosses haven't ordered their tech workers to use AI, just raised their quotas to a level that can't be attained without getting an AI to do most of the work – just like the Chicago Sun-Times writer who was expected to write all 30 articles in the summer guide package on his own. No one made him use AI, but he wasn't going to produce 30 articles on deadline without a chatbot.

Amazon insists that it is treating AI as an assistant for its coders, but the actual working conditions make it clear that this is a reverse-centaur transformation. Scheiber discusses a dissident internal group at Amazon called Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, who link the company's use of AI to its carbon footprint. Beyond those climate concerns, these workers are treating AI as a labor issue.

Amazon's coders have been making tentative gestures of solidarity towards its blue-collar workforce since the pandemic broke out, walking out in support of striking warehouse workers (and getting fired for doing so):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/14/abolish-silicon-valley/#hang-together-hang-separately

But those firings haven't deterred Amazon's tech workers from making common cause with their comrades on the shop floor:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/19/deastroturfing/#real-power

When techies describe their experience of AI, it sometimes sounds like they're describing two completely different realities – and that's because they are. For workers with power and control, automation turns them into centaurs, who get to use AI tools to improve their work-lives. For workers whose power is waning, AI is a tool for reverse-centaurism, an electronic whip that pushes them to work at superhuman speeds. And when they fail, these workers become "moral crumple zones," absorbing the blame for the defective products their bosses pushed out in order to goose profits.

As ever, what a technology does pales in comparison to who it does it for and who it does it to.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[plaidos]

People aren't asking Toby Fox to translate Undertale and Deltarune into different languages by himself in a sweatshop using his feet because of his super totally not racism arthritis.

People just want Toby to do this simple thing called hire translators and maybe a coder or two to translate his games into different languages, which I'll also add doesn't cost millions to hire, especially with how much Undertale has sold and how much even more Deltarune has sold on various platforms and all the merch he has sold of both Undertale and Deltarune.

Don't give Toby any sorry excuses, especially since his behavior has caused other indie game developers to follow in his footsteps of only having English and Japanese as language options, including In Stars and Time which is made by FRENCH developers and yet there is no French language option.

i think you should probably blame in stars and time for in stars and time's translation problems instead of toby fox. i dont think he held a gun to their french little heads and made them do that.

[starryeyed-apple]

a fresh start (back to the beginning)

part i of small town au xavier series

synopsis: you thought that once you left your hometown, you were done with it forever. but fate has a funny way of working itself out, and your world falling apart drives you to return. and in the back of your mind, you can't help but remember him...

★pairing: xavier x fem!reader ★wc: 2.4k ★content: fluff and some angst, humor. small town dynamics, returning to hometown, childhood crushes. reader's grandpa had a health emergency as part of the plot (he's okay). reader is a medical coder, and still has heart problems. brief zayne mention (back in the city). mainly exposition in this chapter. ★a/n: YIPPEE YIPPEEEE im so excited to be starting this one. please be patient with me as this is the first series I've done in a while, and it may take time to get updates out because I want to take my time and have fun with this <3 ★masterlist ★read on ao3

Maybe you should've known, that despite everything in you trying to stay away, you'd always come back again.

There's a rush of relief when you see the deer on the town's welcome sign once you turn off the freeway, mixed with a sinking feeling of dread. A sensation that you've never been able to shake. A deep seated disappointment that yes, every road you'd taken away from here had eventually led you straight back.

You'd tried. You really did.

And you'd done pretty well for yourself, for a while. You'd landed a career that actually suited your education, one with benefits and a retirement plan on top of that. Also, it didn't make you want to peel your skin off 24/7, so that was a bonus.

You had a nice little townhouse all to yourself, with low enough rent, and good restaurants near your neighborhood.

A tight-knit group of sweet friends pulled you along with them when they went out on the weekends. And your boy—

You pause in your reminiscing, glancing down towards your hand on the steering wheel when you turn the car off the main street.

Yeah, no. Not thinking about that.

But it all boiled down to that phone call that nearly stopped your heart, already too faint for its own good all on its own.

The stop sign right before you turn onto your street is still a little crooked, a monument to the storm that had ravaged through the town back in '02. You'd only been a kid, and remembered how the water on the street came up to your knees before Gramps had swept you back inside.

Gramps, you think with an ache in your heart, hands tightening on the steering wheel before you force your grip to loosen.

His old beat-up truck is still in the driveway when you pull in next to it, and you have to remind yourself that that's all the scare was—fear, unrealized.

He was still inside, still okay. Maybe a little worse for wear, but alive.

Still, you wouldn't believe it until you saw it.

And so you're rushing out of the car when you've barely turned the ignition off. The keys dangle in your shaky hands when you take the steps up to the front door two at a time, an unbidden sob escaping your throat when the door's already opening.

Your grandpa just smiles, waving you closer from the wheelchair that his longtime neighbor pushes out—the very neighbor who'd found him passed out in the driver's seat of his truck when they came home after work.

"Oh, my girl," he sighs when you collapse into the hug he's waiting for, crying into his shoulder.

His wrinkled hand comes to pat the top of your head, and you finally feel at ease for the first time in the last 48 hours, since you'd gotten the call he was in the hospital. It was just a mini-stroke, they'd reassured, and you wanted to laugh bitterly if the sound wasn't stuck in your throat. Just.

"I'm okay. It's all okay now."

He wipes your tears and laughs, deep and joyous, when you pout at him.

"You scared me." You try not to sound like a whiny child, but the sound escapes you anyway, afraid you'd lost the only family you'd ever had in the blink of an eye.

"I'm sorry, girlie." He pats your head again, smiling, and it brings the first smile in the past two days onto your face. Relief finally floods your chest, and you deflate with it. "Come on, let's get you inside. Have you eaten? You look more like death than I do."

You laugh at the familiar dark humor as you grab onto his wheelchair handles to push him inside. Shooting a grateful glance towards Bethany, your neighbor, you mouth a sincere thank you. She just smiles.

"Anytime, sweetie," she hums, tucking your hair behind your ear, and the familiarity soothes that ache that still sits in your chest.

That persistent, gnawing feeling that now that you're back, you're not getting out again.

Still, there's comfort when she offers a warm greeting to your return, "Welcome home."

With a quiet groan, you squint at your laptop screen, all the letters making up the medical jargon jumbling together. You reread the sentence about which vein had been surgically connected to which artery for the fifth time, glance towards the codes, and lean back in your chair.

It had only been a week back home, and you were already going crazy. You could still do all your work remotely, thank god—but that just meant you were stuck with the same work and same old views all day, now. It was hard not to start feeling stir-crazy already, missing the life you had built for yourself.

Even if it had already started falling apart before you got the call.

Rubbing the heels of your palms against your eyes, you sigh, blinking rapidly at the lights that swim in your vision when you pull them back.

"Too many veins. Too many fucking arteries," you grumble, reaching for another sip of your latte, only to discover you were on its last dregs again. "Aarya—"

"No way," the barista calls from the counter, leveling you with a glare that rivals your own. "That's the second one you've had today, missy. I'm not making you another one, I know how your heart acts up when you've had too much."

You groan and huff, head dropping onto your arms on the corner of the table where you'd set up your work.

"It's not my fault." You switch tactics to whining instead, smirking into your arms when you sneak a glance to see your old high school friend wincing at the sound. If it grated on her nerves enough, she'd give in. She always had. "This is the fifth cardiovascular surgery in a row."

"That's too bad," Aarya sings, shooting you a smirk when you lift your head to glare at her. "Hey, you wanted to move to the city to work for a big hospital, now you have to deal with the consequences."

You stick your tongue out at her, and she returns it with a rude gesture that makes you bark out a laugh. It eases that tension at the base of your neck, and you sigh, rolling out the remaining tightness.

Glancing out the window you're seated next to, you squint at the small stage set up at the civic center right across the street from your favorite coffee shop.

"What's going on over there?" you ask, glancing over the small crowd that had gathered around whoever was giving a speech on stage.

Aarya leaves the counter to walk up behind you, leaning down to get a better look.

"Oh, that." She rolls her eyes, disinterested. "It's re-election time."

You look at the speaker for a few more seconds. Their platinum blond hair is graying, eyes too blue even from a distance, and then realization hits you.

"Is Mayor Shen still the mayor?"

"Yup," with a pop of the p, she shoots you a knowing smirk. "Some things never change, do they?"

"Is that even legal?" you ask, trying to remember if there was ever a time when the richest man in town hadn't also ran it. "Can you be mayor of a town for that long?"

"Who knows?" Aarya throws up her hands with a shrug, readjusting her septum piercing before sitting across from you. "Small towns and all that. People like things to stay the same."

"I guess so," you mutter, chin propped on your hand as you look back at your friend. "Does anybody even run against him?"

"Yeah, sometimes. I think somebody else is campaigning this year, but I can't remember who." She smirks, a familiar look in all its cynical charm. "They'll lose anyway."

You sigh, shaking your head as you look back at your laptop screen. With a groan, you slam it shut, earning an arch of Aarya's pierced eyebrow.

"Dr. Li will forgive me for taking a break," you tell her with a bright smile, and she huffs out a laugh.

"Dr. Li sounds like a merciful boss."

"Sometimes," you allow with a shrug. Zayne could be sweet if the mood struck him, especially if you were catering to his sweet tooth.

The surgeon was far too serious for his own good, but you had grown fond of him in the time you worked for the cardiovascular department in Linkon City's top hospital. His medical reports were way more organized than most other doctors you've coded for, and he was patient whenever you needed to ask for clarification.

"He's not really my boss, though."

"Oh?"

"Yeah." You nod, staring longingly at what had once been a full cup of coffee, as if willing it to refill on its own. "Hospital administration pays me."

Your phone chimes with a medication reminder, and you pass on the message in a quick text to your grandpa. Waiting, you see the read notification light up with the time, and frown when there's no further response.

With a sigh, you push yourself up from your seat, tucking your laptop back into your tote bag.

"Gotta go check on the old man," you explain at Aarya's questioning look. Fondness coats your voice at the nickname for him, emphasizing your hushed worry, and she softens.

"How's he doing?" she asks, her voice notably quieter, kinder than her usual harsh-edged monotone that you love so dearly.

"He's good," you brush off, because he was. Because he had to be.

You couldn't entertain any notion that he wasn't, even if he was remaining tight-lipped on everything the doctors had to say in his brief hospital visit. Stubborn as always, just like he'd raised you to be.

"Yeah, he's good."

"Good." Aarya is nodding, her mouth opening to say something else, but you're already spinning around towards the door, your practically empty drink in hand in preparation to throw away.

You stumble back in surprise when you collide right into somebody else as they walk into the café.

The jingle of the bell distantly rings in your mind while you sway dangerously, steadied by the gentle strength in the hands that quickly come around your shoulders.

"Woah," you hear a soft voice mumble.

It's faintly familiar in its melodic lilt, and your widening eyes shoot up towards its owner.

Deep blue eyes peer back at you, slowly widening a fraction as they take you in.

"Xavier," you breathe, and clear your throat. "Uh. Hi."

Xavier Shen blinks a few times.

Long, slow blinks, his head tilting to the side as he continues to take you in. It makes the bangs of his fluffy, silvery blond hair fall across his gaze, and he doesn't even bother to push it back.

"Oh," he finally says after a long moment that feels more and more like eternity. "It's you."

You try not to wince at the utterly lackluster reaction. Or retreat into your shell because of how long it took him to even recognize you.

"Yup." You attempt a laugh, grimacing internally when it comes out strained. "It's me…hi."

Trying to wave awkwardly, it gets even more awkward when you remember your cup is still in your hand.

The awkwardness intensifies when you realize even though it wasn't completely empty before, it's definitely empty now.

"Oh, shit," you hiss, eyes narrowing in on the very noticeable little coffee stain over the pocket of the completely white, pure as fucking snow hoodie that Xavier was wearing.

Your face heats up when he looks down and slowly blinks again.

"I'm so, so sorry," you begin to ramble, hovering around him in a panic. He just stares at the stain, then back up at you. "I—I can pay for you to get it cleaned, or get you a new—"

"It's fine," he interrupts you, not even trying to cover up the yawn that stretches across his face.

He rubs at his eyes, and with the tiniest tilt of his head that can hardly even be called a nod—honestly, it easily could've just been him looking at the menu behind you—he moves past you.

You're left blinking rapidly, empty cup still in hand, staring at the door you had been about to exit through.

You hear him ordering a drink from Aarya behind you, in that same soft-spoken tone he'd always had, and you try not to feel like you've just been left in the dust. A toy never even taken out of its box.

Some things never change, do they? You can practically hear Aarya's voice as you feel the weight of her gaze on your back when you leave, in a daze all the way back to your parked car.

Well.

That…wasn't exactly how you'd imagined it.

But in hindsight, it was Xavier Shen.

Effortlessly cool, top student Xavier Shen, having not a single care in the world as he aced every single test while hardly lifting a finger to study. Sleeping in the back of the classroom and finishing an exam in ten minutes when it was passed back to him.

Xavier Shen, who led the school's fencing team all the way to the national level of competition, and came home with the only first place trophy to grace its barren display cases. And another trophy every year after that, his name shining proudly on the top of the team's list on the shiny plaque.

Xavier Shen, only son of the rich and successful mayor, unsmiling but present in every newspaper photo of a town charity event.

Xavier, who disappeared from school for days or weeks a time, and came back paler, more tired than before.

Xavier, valedictorian and refusing to make a speech. Xavier, never bothering to show up at a school dance, absent even when he won the title of prom king.

Except for…

You clear your throat, shaking your head as you sink further into the driver's seat. Your face is hot when you bury it in your hands, banging your forehead against your steering wheel.

Popular without trying, without even caring, aloof and beautiful Xavier Shen.

Who met your eyes every time you would sneak a glance back at him. Who never said anything when you passed him in the halls, even with the way your eyes were glued to his every move.

Xavier, your biggest childhood crush, who hardly knew you ever even existed.

So maybe it should've been all you expected after all.

[max1461]

My brain is completely and wholly smashed to bits by an unknown problem. I can't really "think". I am very good semantic recall and I the ability to remember new semantic information but very little ability to like, compute, visualize, do anything like that. I can't work right now but when I get better I need to get a job and on the basis of my background that job will almost certainly involve some amount of coding and unfortunately I am not the world's greatest coder. If my brain was working I could practice and improve but it isn't so that's been a no-go. But I do think I could learn git I think I need to know how to use git and github, I've asked about this on here before but then I bookmarked the answers for later and well now's (a) later and I can't understand them.

So.

Is there a thing online that assume you're a smart guy with a basic knowledge of you know what code is what fucking directories are and shit, doesn't assume you were frozen in ice in 1950 and will have your mind blow at the concept of a file, but also kinda tbh just spoon feeds you the commands you need to do different shit? Uh. I can't THINK. Have I explained that on here? I'm like operating fully on the retrieval part of my brain. I can still make good posts because I thought about a lot of stuff before so there's a massive backlog of thoughts.

[edenfenixblogs]

Maybe my most genuinely controversial take?

We should talk about AI.

Generative AI, the kind that does Art for you or writes your school essay or does other tasks created for you to learn skills is super harmful. I feel like the vast majority of us agree on this.

Pattern-recognition AI? This can be genuinely lifesaving in applications like medicine where it can identify certain patterns that indicate a health condition. There are many examples of this. As long as these results are validated by an actual human being who understands medicine, this is a net good, I think.

No-nuance AI. This is the stuff of the devil. The stuff that decides insurance claims without a human eye or that determines if a bomb should be dropped somewhere with no human oversight is downright evil.

But let me tell you right now, there are things AI can help you do if you have a personal struggle with them otherwise, and those aren't inherently evil or dangerous. As someone who is writing a resume right now, I HATE having to figure out how to figure out what accomplishments I'm able to take credit for and condense them into snappy bullet points. It's very against my nature to peacock in the way that is required to get a job. It's nice to be able to tell AI "Here is a story of stuff I did. Make it into XYZ format" and just have AI condense it. I proof it. I edit it. I did the thing its helping to format.

But also, if you're a coder and your code isn't working and you've been staring at it too long, being able to copy your code into a chatbox and say "What isn't working here?" can help you when you've been staring at the same thing for too long and your brain keeps skipping over the problem.

Yeah, it's a problem that people can and will use AI as a replacement for human knowledge and skill.

At the same time, it's also a problem that we expect every person to have very skill or ability. And I'm glad we have tools that can help people.

[oxidi]

art already had a problem with gatekeeping. people instinctively appreciate form. ideas on the other hand require more attention from the viewer. now machines can mimic the form, but the ideas are still mostly developed by people. artists who'd use machines to give form to their ideas are gatekeeped by "real" artists, who excel in manual form, but not necessarily in ideas. there are also people who made money with form, not with ideas, who are now economically threatened by a new machine mind which is being developed by using their works as training examples. there are also people who genuinely steal other people's art without attribution and now programmers can automate away lots of ingenious acts via our brave new world technology. but well, script kiddies always did that, just with less power than today's vibe coders.

[twiniverse]

Just to give it its own post, because it's important enough to warrant it:

I'm not "the person choosing the give the finger to people who need accessibility tools". I have not once said that people can't write ids on my posts. I didn't say I wouldn't look into having someone else do it. I said that I can't do it, that it is not my job, and that a certain someone's attitude is foul and that makes people less likely to want to do what they say.

I also have not thrown a little hissy fit because someone isn't doing what I want. I haven't literally told anyone that I wouldn't leave them alone until they did what I wanted them to do. I haven't used several different accounts and ips to evade being blocked in order to angrily yell about how superior I am to everyone else in the fandom, or to belittle anyone. I haven't gone to the side account of someone who has blocked me to continue my tantrum there.

I don't have a problem with accessibility, or with people who volunteer their time to give access to more people. Believe it or not, accessibility is something I'm highly dedicated to and something I am often finding new ways to implement in my actual job. My team is implementing on-site image blockers on the user side so they don't have to see things that upset them. We're making sure our on-site games aren't going to be triggering people's vertigo. We're making sure there are colour themes so that no one has to choose between blinding white light or blinding white letters, but the people who do like those options will have them, too! We're implementing high contrast mode! Our head coder is blind, in fact. We'll be working with her quite a bit to make the site- which is visual based- still accessible for those with screen readers and other aids. She has a braille display, isn't that cool? I didn't even know those were a thing until she told me.

My problem is specifically with the person who has not only harassed me, but other people in the fandom. My problem is specifically with the person who outright admitted that their reaction to being told "no" is to become aggressive and condescending. My problem is specifically with the person who thinks they're the only person who gives a damn. My problem is with the person who says that they don't have to do it, that they're volunteering their time because they care, but also says it's their job and we need to let them do it. My problem is with the person who speaks on behalf of others who do not want to be spoken for. My problem is specifically with the person who told me that they would continue harassing me unless I met their demands. My problem is specifically with the person who will read a fraction of what I actually said here and will respond with how horrible of a human I am because I focus on accessibility with my actual job and not my fancomic that I barely have the energy to work on in the first place.

My problem is specifically with the person who read everything I said and instead of recognising and accepting that they're the only one I have a problem with decided to start attacking me and accusing me of being ableist because they, and no one else, have pissed me off.

As I said to begin with, I blocked them because of their attitude and the way they harass people. The way they've harassed my friends, the way they've harassed people I don't like, the way they've harassed newbies, etc, etc. It had nothing to do with IDs, and it still doesn't. I blocked a shitty person, and that person made an assumption and is throwing a hissy fit about it. That's all there is to it. The bottom line is that genuinely anyone can add id's to my posts except for that specific person because I don't want that specific person interacting with me.

This next bit is for you, that specific person: "-but you blocked me after writing a single image description for your posts, for some stupid reason." It was not a stupid reason. And like I said in my response, it had nothing to do with you writing an image description for my post. It's because you're a foul, slimy little cockroach with a superiority complex. You think you're the hero but you're the villain here.

So, again, as disrespectfully as possible: Fuck. Off.

[sodachalice]

info about them in order. perhaps some asks/requests could be fun if anyones curious about them... uuu

Darcy/Lyor Crawford - They/Them - Late twenties.

Darcy currently lives out of their truck and travels around Chamberlands more impoverished areas, giving out medical care and supplies they've stockpiled to the people who need it, something their family regularly did when they were a child. They have been fired from their job as IT/coder at Chamberlands archival facility after concerning behavior was exhibited when their close friend and coworker Dalton was found dead in his apartment. They are medically trained and take pride in their ability to withstand stressful situations. Darcy has problems with losing time, though it isn't something they particularly question as it was common for their family to experience the same. They can be a hopeless romantic and spend a lot of their life daydreaming, though in person they can tend to be painfully cold.

Sugar Chambers - He/Him - Old enough ;)

Sugar is Chamberlands special little guy, their mascot. He is less so a model, despite that being his job title, and moreso a real person who has been forceably turned into a mascot of commodity, he is Chamberlands Mickey Mouse, their special little touy. Due to an extremely restrictive and artificially scripted childhood Sugar has grown up into a very excitable, very spoiled manchild. He doesn't know how to handle being told no. Despite this, he craves something more in life, domesticity and love, two things he feels like he lacks. He is good at dancing, and acting, and being cute. He is also good at drinking, and screaming at people in their faces, and hiding his functional alcoholism. Sugar has no bad intentions but struggles to tolerate any sort of discomfort. He likes Dylan for the way Dylan does everything they can to make him happy and comfortable.

Dylan Wakeman - He/They - 25

Dylan has quit his job at modeling after resenting his brother for putting him into the family business extremely young and considers himself a burnout, something they are very happy about. They enjoy feeling like they have broken all of their brothers expectations. His experience in the modeling business has left him severely depressed, and he spends most of his time smoking pot and playing videogames, which Vigil allows out of guilt for the trauma that has happened. Dylan has also picked up making his own clothes, and on his twenty first birthday he threw his own catwalk with his own spin off clothing line for the Wakeman fashion CO. It did wonderfully, and is where he met Sugar. The two of them have been off and on dating since. Dylan is chronically bored, and finds himself getting involved in things they know tend to be harmful just to see what they can do or how they can manipulate the situation in their favor.

John "Joe" Doe - He/Him - 47

Not much is known publicly about John Doe specifically because he has lived off the grid for the past twenty years out of paranoia. Living in an RV that Vigil had bought for him John spends his time concocting "conspiracies" and stalking the Chambers internet activity. He has a phobia of closed in spaces and refuses to enter most buildings, and struggles to take care of himself. He and Vigil have been friends since highschool, and John has been aware of Vigils obvious crush since day one. He frequently uses this to get things out of Vigil, but struggles with the guilt of not being able to feel anything back that he feels like he should towards them. Dylan idolizes Joe, which makes him very uncomfortable.

Vigil Wakeman - They/He/She - 48

Vigil Wakeman is the owner and founder of Wakeman Fashion Co and has worked himself up from the bottom, doing anything he had to to get his name out there. Vigil has an insanely big heart that is full of an equally insane amount of anxiety that he frequently tends to over medicate, especially now that he has made the effort to become sober. Vigil is Dylans legal guardian and has recently dedicated his time to making up for the mistakes he's made in the past with prioritizing work over Dylans health, something Dylan, Joe AND Ginger all rail him on. Despite doing their best to make up for everything, they hate that Dylan has gotten himself involved with Sugar. But refuses to explain why. Vigil can come off like shes stuck in her own world, and that description wouldn't be too far off. She is a people pleaser, but her ideas of how to fix things are not always the most practical. They tend to try and avoid emotional consequences for things they've done.

Noemie Chambers - She/Her - 47

Noemie doesn't talk much to anyone anymore. Too many sweats. She has made enough people unhappy and is yet in a position where she cannot take back anything she has said. So she has decided she will be sticking to business, despite how much this upsets her son. They rarely hang out anymore, and this is adding to Sugars increased desperation for something new, somewhere else to go. Noemie used to personally work with Darcy in the archival unit out of a passion for archived media, but has since abandoned that as well. No one knows her well enough to have a problem with any of this, other than Sugar, whos complaints fall on deaf ears. Noemie hasn't been the same since her twin sister passed away in their late teens, and has since deteriorated into someone with a jaded disposition and apathetic outlook. Noemie in her childhood was very expressive, which she sees a lot in Sugar.

Ginger Brennan - She/Her - 49

A childhood friend of Vigils, Ginger has seen every part of Vigil and almost every part of Joes life and has firmly decided she refuses to let her daughter end up like the two of them, tenuously allowing Kestrel the ability to hang out with Dylan and Sugar as long as Kestrel promises to be open about it. Ginger is a strong believer in tough love and treating her children like friends and not prisoners, but this has caused her and Kestrel to struggle with boundaries between each other, either frequently overstepping them or refusing to talk to each other for days. Ginger is aware of Kestrels behaviors but feels as if they are significantly less bad than Dylans, so she allows them without judgement. Ginger tends to approach things like a big sister- always attempting to pull people under her wing, mostly because she views herself as one of the only competent people alive. Kestrel would have many words to say about that. None of them very nice.

Kestrel Brennan - They/She/He - 25

Kestrel is Dylans closest friend and someone who could easily be regarded as a "manic pixie dream girl", she frequently shoplifts and dumpster dives to satiate a desire for collecting things and expressing herself, and frequently collects things like animal bones or pieces of garbage from outside for her strange art projects she's been making with a new girl she's befriend. Kestrel is the only person who's able to keep up with Dylans more rapid moods as she herself is tightly wound, though Kestrel finds herself judging Dylan for his more obviously flagellant and performative self injurous behaviors- where as Dylan is eccentric as a form of self harm, Kestral is eccentric as a form of self expression. She is a hedonist before anything else.

[txttletale]

I think the problem that you're running into is that a lot of people who are invested in making art see the statement "ai art is art" and instead they hear "you will never be allowed to make art again and also you should throw yourself into an acid pit" , it's a very emotionally charged topic

yea i mean i definitely understand that especially when the loudest boosters about this stuff are absolutely soulless tech guys who think all artists should be mulched into slop to sustain coders and business degree holders but i think at some point people are going to have to move past the kneejerk reactionaryism and actually think about the topic seriously

[darkfictionjude]

I do like the DIY nature of the IF community, like there's very few coders and from reading a lot of what authors say a lot of their coding is held together with spit and tape, but so long as it ultimately functions, and other people are happy to help or make tutorials and guides. Its an uphill battle but everyone's committed to actually doing it and maybe make the path a bit easier for the next person and I do find that admirable, especially compared to other video game communities where people seem to quickly descend into "Oh you wouldn't get it, read these textbooks first then come back" which is perhaps more fair in more complex games but does seem to turn into esotericism pretty quick.

My issue, I guess worry more accurately is the CoG-ification of IF. There's plenty of CoG games and games in that style I love but I catch myself a lot, and I think a lot of people in the community do this, where if a game isn't the usual CoG blurb: -Customisable protagonist -ROs -Genre fiction I don't even read the rest of the description and just skip it and I worry that the games which got me into IF like Grim Baccaris' shorter games or Galatea etc. I would also just skip. So yeah just a bit worried that's becoming the default for both authors to write and readers to respond to and I feel if I were to write anything which didn't have those features I wouldn't even bother to post or drum up interest on Tumblr and just drop it straight on Itch because I don't think it'd get any traction. But hopefully I'm wrong, and ultimately there is a reason I default to reading CoG style games.

Yeah to me it’s the same problem that’s happening in the publishing industry. Romantasy is huge rn so if you want to make a living you’re encouraged to write those stories even if it’s not something you would choose to do

But there are still readers out there that aim to diversify their reading. I do think IFs without those three points won’t be incredibly popular but there are readers out there who give things a chance you just have to make yourself known to them

[whereserpentswalk]

There are creatures that work on keeping the code of the universe stable, making sure the laws of physics are in order and everything.

Sometimes you'll see their work if you get to a place that mortals weren't supposed to get to. It might be something simple, just a blank texture, maybe a few unfinished assets, or objects they didn't want to place somewhere accessible, and usually a sign saying something like "you weren't supposed to be here." And if you're lucky, you might see one of the reality coders at work.

The reality coders have true forms that aren't really anything comprehensible to mortals, but when they're doing work inside of the universe, they take on bodies that apply well to their work. Usually something the reality coders find easy to work exist inside of, which tends to mean a combination of amphibian anatomy and mechanical parts, though a few go with something else for more specific goals.

Reality coders tend to be rather relaxed around humanoids. They don't see us as a threat. A few are annoyed by humanoids and will shew us away, and a few others like us and tend to give us little gifts when someone finds them. Most of the time they're just apathetic to humanity, and how you treat them will be determined by how you treat them. The gods that created the universe made them to maintain the laws of physics and their underlaying nature, they didn't plan any beings within the universe to have interaction with them. It's unlikely a reality coder is going to give you superpowers or anything, but if they're in the right mood when you meet them, they'll be quite interesting to talk to.

Some people call the reality coders angels. They don't like being called angels. Most of them have seen the entities that humans know as angels, so they really don't want to be compared to creatures like that.

Reality coders might also show up when there's a serious glitch in reality. Glitches in the laws of physics are rare, but when they do occur, they're a serious problem. And rare is pretty common when it comes to something as large as the universe. If you're the victim of a glitch and reality coders show up, they'll likely be the only thing that can save you, but it's not common for them to be nice about it. Listen to their instructions if you fall victim to a glitch or get caught in a glitched area, because they give out the type of warnings where they won't be the ones to create the consequences.

As for those who actively try to utilize game breaking glitches in reality, they tend to take those people out. Though people who create exploits, or who use smaller scale or helpful glitches are a subject they're more mixed on. Some of the reality coders have a hatred for anyone breaking the rules, some have a strange sort of respect for them, and others have an appreciation or fascination with them. Still, there's a reason why they haven't let anyone get their hands on time travel or ftl yet, though someday they may change their mind on that.

Reality coders are very powerful, perhaps the most powerful type of non-deity entity there is. The main reason people don't know their power is that they don't have much of a reason to utilize it. But if a demon or eldritch horror tries to fuck with reality coders, reality coders can take them out as easily as they would a human. Whatever powers other entities might have, reality coders have admin privileges.

[writing-rat]

Cooking in Session

Pairings: Joey x Sammy

Content: Abigail Spoilersish, Fluff, Cooking lessons, mentions of drug use

Summary: Since Joey has a job has a school nurse now, she can't let Sammy not know how to cook. She needs to learn how to make lunch after all.

WC: 885

It had been a week since Sammy and Joey left the mansion. With Joey helping to kill Frank, Abigail promised to help a knocked-out vampire Sammy that Joey had managed to knock out and tie up. Kristof Lazar and Abigail had helped her out and Sammy was happy to be back to herself, Abigail promising she was saved. Safe to say Sammy wasn’t the same mentally, but she was trying. Currently, the 2 girls lived together while Caleb was also with them. He was currently in high school while Sammy was working at a company, looking at the data she was sent. She was a coder now and not a hacker unless needed to see if she could crack security systems. She was using her skills for good now. Joey meanwhile managed to make it as a school nurse and she was happy about that. She was currently using a holiday day after all as she wanted to teach Sammy cooking. She saw how she had eaten the entire week for lunch after all. She only had plain noodles and pasta.

“Sammy, are you on lunch break?” Joey asked. 

“Yeah babe, I am. Why?” she asked. 

“I am going to help you make a sauce for your pasta so you don’t have it plain when I am at work,” Joey explained. Sammy widened her eyes before she smiled, the same smile for when she was being figured out by Joey.

“You are the best,” she spoke. Joey shrugged. 

“I want my lover to be healthy,” she explained and Sammy nodded as she was quick to go into the kitchen with Joey. Sammy was excited. Joey meanwhile got a can of chopped tomatoes, peppers, tomato paste, ketchup, onions and different herbs out. “Those are onions,” Sammy spoke confidently. “I learnt the difference between garlic and onions,” she added. Joey snickered. 

“I’m glad,” she spoke and kissed Sammy’s cheek. She was happy they could joke about that at least.

“First, chopping onions,” Joey instructed. She showed Sammy how to hold the knife and chop them before she let Sammy take a go at it. Sammy was happy as she was doing it all before she looked at Joey when she finished. She wanted the praise that she knew Joey would give her. 

“How did I do?” she asked just to make sure she got it. 

“You did well mi amor,” Joey responded with a smile. “You could quicken up but it takes time to learn,” she added. Sammy nodded as Joey grabbed a red pepper. She once again taught her how to cut it and Sammy did as told, no injuries happening. She was also praised once again and it made her excited. 

“Now that these ingredients are cut, we put in the onions first,” she spoke, letting Sammy scrape them in. Sammy nodded as she was listening, choosing the pasta she wanted as Joey was admiring Sammy a bit. She was wearing some of Joey’s sweatpants and one of her tank tops. It was a hot day after all. Joey meanwhile was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, her scars from her old drug use being shown, and a pair of shorts. She was more confident showing them around Sammy and Caleb now, Caleb was happy to be with his mom rather than his fuck up of a father. Soon the onions were done, and Sammy put the peppers in under her lover’s command. She was being good as Joey was hoping she would memorise this. She was sure she would though if she could remember code. 

After 30 minutes, the sauce was done and was simmering as Joey and Sammy were getting something to drink. Joey got some water while Sammy got some Dr Pepper and was sitting on the counter. “Thank you for this,” Sammy thanked, looking at Joey genuinely with a soft smile. 

“It’s no problem mi vida. I am happy to teach you anything and I know you have had a hard childhood so I am happy to show you new things you need to learn,” she spoke. Sammy was happy. She felt loved. Soon enough the sauce and pasta were done and she got 2 plates ready for them. She let Sammy choose how much she wanted first. Sammy meanwhile made it even and Joey chuckled. She was happy to see how compassionate her lover was. The 2 girls soon sat down. 

“You know… it’s weird how we still call each other our undercover names,” Sammy teased. Joey widened her eyes then laughed and was nodding. 

“Agreed. Why don’t we use it when one of us is in trouble? Like if you made a mess in our room,” Joey teased. Sammy nodded excitedly. 

“Yeah! So… Ana, want to go on a date soon?” Jessica asked. 

“Yeah, I would love that Jess,” Ana spoke with a smile, then both proceeded to laugh. They were just happy. That was when Jess took a bite of her food and she widened her eyes. 

“Holy shit, this tastes so good. Fuck your school nurse job, become a chef,” Jess praised. 

“Thanks, but I don’t think I have that much skill,” Ana chuckled as she was eating. Sammy just smiled. She was sure she did, but she wouldn’t push her. For now, she would enjoy the food.

[sparklecarehospital-archive]

I love how accessible you're making the new site. It shows how much you care and it's wonderful :) not a lot of creators would go to lengths like this

thank you so much ;u; that's honestly my whole goal, i've always cared a lot about reader experience which is why i had the original content warning system implemented in the first place. the reboot originally was hosted on w*rdpress, but w*rdpress was way too limiting for me and didn't give me those tools i needed - so i decided to code the entire site myself.

however, when i originally built the site, i was 17 and... not very experienced. all my knowledge of web design came from making tumblr themes back in the day. i learned a lot over the past few years but the site had such a fatal flaw, the fact it was set on a foundation of an inexperienced coder made some parts of it relatively unusable.

though the saturation toggler was implemented to try and help with eye strain, it wasn't enough. there were still a lot of problems with the site, ESPECIALLY the mobile version, and a lot of stuff that people needed. the most requested feature from years ago was the ability to disable content warnings, but i... didn't know how to do that. but now i do! and the system is even better than just switching them on or off - you can literally selectively choose what type of content you don't want to see.

stuff like bookmarking and the arrow placement was also a huge thing that the site desperately needed. literally everything could be improved, but i didn't know how to do that when the OG code was so fucking bad. its a nightmare looking at it or trying to change anything in it now.

so... the revamp began. i want the new site and reader experience to be as comfortable as possible. it's really important to me! and i am absolutely confident that every reader regardless of platform is going to be relieved by a lot of features i've added. some stuff i've added PEOPLE DIDN'T EVEN ASK FOR but i promise it'll be great