#scraping data. etc

[tofumoons]

well. guess im finally moving to libre office.

[anti-rop]

how can you champion free speech and then celebrate when millions of voices on tiktok are censored. hypocrite.

I didn’t want to talk about politics on this blog but, oh well, here we go. Response under the cut.

Let me preface this: I’ve never been a fan of TikTok and when talk of a ban first started to come onto the scene 6 years ago, I thought it was a good thing, for a multitude of reasons but I won't go into all of it. I'll focus on what the proposed ban and SCOTUS corresponded to. This is a topic of US national security and the type of precedents it sets for foreign companies operating in the US. I thought it would be good to act now [2019] rather than later [2025] because looking at the growth curve, it was a service that would easily become so popular that lawmakers would find themselves in an impossible position and a ban would never happen. 

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what’s happened. Again, in my opinion, now a horrible precedent exists. To any foreign government out there, the message is that you are allowed to enter US markets under any pretense, with zero reciprocity for US companies, and as long as you are popular and influential enough the US government and population will go out of its way to facilitate your access

If we are going to go to such extraordinary lengths for a foreign company and government the US must make a demand of absolute reciprocity, in my opinion. Meta, X, Google, Snapchat, and other US-based technology companies must be allowed total market access in China immediately with zero control by the Chinese Government (because that is what they have done through ByteDance owning Tiktok). When the Chinese government inevitably laughs at this demand, ask yourself why. They correctly see Meta, X, Facebook, and Google as instruments of US soft power and as cultural contamination of their civic ideal which undermines their hold on power.

However, we seem to naively believe we're immune from the same influence and have waited so long to act now that we face terrible choices. The one we've made inevitably means we will have a natural experiment now of what it means to allow a government that actively seeks to undermine our civic institutions with the most powerful known technological tool to do so. And the fact that the CCP and ByteDance decided to “shut it down” rather than divest it tells us everything we need to know. No free enterprise would willingly shut off access to 170 million users. 

Also, we should be concerned that millions of Americans acted like drug addicts going through withdrawal when they couldn't access a social media app for roughly 12 hours. That is also cause for great concern. But that's a conversation for another day.

[notnulli]

doing research

[xecat]

am i the only one absolutely fuckin paranoid that nightshade glaze etc type stuff is also scraping data lol

[anaquariusfox]

I spent the evening looking into this AI shit and made a wee informative post of the information I found and thought all artists would be interested and maybe help yall?

edit: forgot to mention Glaze and Nightshade to alter/disrupt AI from taking your work into their machines. You can use these and post and it will apparently mess up the AI and it wont take your content into it's machine!

edit: ArtStation is not AI free! So make sure to read that when signing up if you do! (this post is also on twt)

[Image descriptions: A series of infographics titled: “Opt Out AI: [Social Media] and what I found.” The title image shows a drawing of a person holding up a stack of papers where the first says, ‘Terms of Service’ and the rest have logos for various social media sites and are falling onto the floor. Long transcriptions follow.

Instagram/Meta (I have to assume Facebook).

Hard for all users to locate the “opt out” options. The option has been known to move locations.

You have to click the opt out link to submit a request to opt out of the AI scraping. *You have to submit screenshots of your work/face/content you posted to the app, is curretnly being used in AI. If you do not have this, they will deny you.

Users are saying after being rejected, are being “meta blocked”

People’s requests are being accepted but they still have doubts that their content won’t be taken anyways.

Twitter/X

As of August 2023, Twitter’s ToS update:

“Twitter has the right to use any content that users post on its platform to train its AI models, and that users grant Twitter a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to do so.”

There isn’t much to say. They’re doing the same thing Instagram is doing (to my understanding) and we can’t even opt out.

Tumblr

They also take your data and content and sell it to AI models.

But you’re in luck!

It is very simply to opt out (Wow. Thank Gods)

Opt out on Desktop: click on your blog > blog settings > scroll til you see visibility options and it’ll be the last option to toggle

Out out of Mobile: click your blog > scroll then click visibility > toggle opt out option

TikTok

I took time skim their ToS and under “How We Use Your Information” and towards the end of the long list: “To train and improve our technology, such as our machine learning models and algorithms.”

Regarding data collected; they will only not sell your data when “where restricted by applicable law”. That is not many countries. You can refuse/disable some cookies by going into settings > ads > turn off targeted ads.

I couldn’t find much in AI besides “our machine learning models” which I think is the same thing.

What to do?

In this age of the internet, it’s scary! But you have options and can pick which are best for you!

Accepting these platforms collection of not only your artwork, but your face! And not only your faces but the faces of those in your photos. Your friends and family. Some of those family members are children! Some of those faces are minors! I shudder to think what darker purposes those faces could be used for.

Opt out where you can! Be mindful and know the content you are posting is at risk of being loaded to AI if unable to opt out.

Fully delete (not archive) your content/accounts with these platforms. I know it takes up to 90 days for instagram to “delete” your information. And even keep it for “legal” purposes like legal prevention.

Use lesser known social media platforms! Some examples are; Signal, Mastodon, Diaspora, et. As well as art platforms: Artfol, Cara, ArtStation, etc.

The last drawing shows the same person as the title saying, ‘I am, by no means, a ToS autistic! So feel free to share any relatable information to these topics via reply or qrt!

I just wanted to share the information I found while searching for my own answers cause I’m sure people have the same questions as me.’ \End description] (thank you @a-captions-blog!)

[cheese-water]

The moment when their worlds collide, world peace will finally be restored.

[dominiqueramseyart]

Some positivity in these turbulent AI times

*This does not minimize the crisis at hand, but is aimed at easing any anxieties.

With every social media selling our data to AI companies now, there is very little way to avoid being scraped. The sad thing is many of us still NEED social media to advertise ourselves and get seen by clients. I can't help but feeling that we as artists are not at risk of losing our livelihoods, here is why:

Just because your data is available does not mean that AI companies will/want to use it. Your work may never end up being scraped at all.

The possibility of someone who uses AI art prompts can replace you (if your work is scraped) is very unlikely. Art Directors and clients HAVE to work with people, the person using AI art cannot back up what a machine made. Their final product for a client will never be substantial since AI prompts cannot be consistent with use and edits requested will be impossible.

AI creators will NEVER be able to make a move unless us artists make a move first. They will always be behind in the industry.

AI creators lack the fundamental skills of art and therefore cannot detect when something looks off in a composition. Many professional artists like me get hired repeatedly for a reason! WE as artists know what we're doing.

The art community is close-knit and can fund itself. Look at furry commissions, Patreon, art conventions, Hollywood. Real art will always be able to make money and find an audience because it's how we communicate as a species.

AI creators lack the passion and ambition to make a career out of AI prompts. Not that they couldn't start drawing at any time, but these tend to be the people who don't enjoy creating art to begin with.

There is no story or personal experience that can be shared about AI prompts so paying customers will lose interest quickly.

Art is needed to help advance society along, history says so. To do that, companies will need to hire artists (music, architecture, photography, design, etc). The best way for us artists to keep fighting for our voice to be heard right now is staying visible. Do not hide or give in! That is what they want. Continue posting online and/or in person and sharing your art with the world. It takes a community and we need you!

[beforeastorm]

Methods, notes, etc. under the cut

Happy one year anniversary to "Buck, Bothered and Bi-wildered", to the kiss, to Buck discovering something new about himself, and to BuckTommy.

Methods: I used a data scraping tool to collect information from the works pages for the 'Evan "Buck" Buckley/Tommy Kinard' relationship tag on AO3. Although we're celebrating the one year anniversary, data for all works regardless of publish date were included.

The scraping tool can only collect information for unlocked works. No, data scraping is not prohibited by AO3's terms of service, but they reserve the right to boot you if you abuse it; I deliberately slow walked the tool to be a good partner. Information was collected on 4/4/2025 between 8:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. EDT. As this is a snapshot of dynamic data, it will already be out of date. Notes: Recognizing that not making editorial decisions is in fact making a decision, I did not exclude any tags or use additional filters to limit which works were included. I know some people may prefer this, but I decided to honor authorial intent: if they tagged it, I included it.

I am open and interested in potentially doing something similar for other ships/tags, but my artistic skills are very limited. If you'd be interested in collaborating on something, send me a message! Information from infographic:

Words: 38,688,046

Hits: 24,598,761

Kudos: 2,313,022

Bookmarks: 310,154

Comments: 215,801

Works: 7,396

Unique Authors: 1,567

many thanks to @aainiouu for their assistance with the infographic!

[jamingbenn]

year in review - hockey rpf on ao3

hello!! the annual ao3 year in review had some friends and i thinking - wouldn't it be cool if we had a hockey rpf specific version of that. so i went ahead and collated the data below!!

i start with a broad overview, then dive deeper into the 3 most popular ships this year (with one bonus!)

if any images appear blurry, click on them to expand and they should become clear!

₊˚⊹♡ . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁𐙚 ‧₊˚ ⋅. ݁

before we jump in, some key things to highlight: - CREDIT TO: the webscraping part of my code heavily utilized the ao3 wrapped google colab code, as lovingly created by @kyucultures on twitter, as the main skeleton. i tweaked a couple of things but having it as a reference saved me a LOT of time and effort as a first time web scraper!!! thank you stranger <3 - please do NOT, under ANY circumstances, share any part of this collation on any other website. please do not screenshot or repost to twitter, tiktok, or any other public social platform. thank u!!! T_T - but do feel free to send requests to my inbox! if you want more info on a specific ship, tag, or you have a cool idea or wanna see a correlation between two variables, reach out and i should be able to take a look. if you want to take a deeper dive into a specific trope not mentioned here/chapter count/word counts/fic tags/ship tags/ratings/etc, shoot me an ask!

˚　　. 　 ˚　.　　　　　 . ✦　　　 　˚　　　　 . ★⋆. ࿐࿔

with that all said and done... let's dive into hockey_rpf_2024_wrapped_insanity.ipynb

BIG PICTURE OVERVIEW

i scraped a total of 4266 fanfics that dated themselves as published or finished in the year 2024. of these 4000 odd fanfics, the most popular ships were:

Note: "Minor or Background Relationship(s)" clocked in at #9 with 91 fics, but I removed it as it was always a secondary tag and added no information to the chart. I did not discern between primary ship and secondary ship(s) either!

breaking down the 5 most popular ships over the course of the year, we see:

super interesting to see that HUGE jump for mattdrai in june/july for the stanley cup final. the general lull in the offseason is cool to see as well.

as for the most popular tags in all 2024 hockey rpf fic...

weee like our fluff. and our established relationships. and a little H/C never hurt no one.

i got curious here about which AUs were the most popular, so i filtered down for that. note that i only regex'd for tags that specifically start with "Alternate Universe - ", so A/B/O and some other stuff won't appear here!

idk it was cool to me.

also, here's a quick breakdown of the ratings % for works this year:

and as for the word counts, i pulled up a box plot of the top 20 most popular ships to see how the fic length distribution differed amongst ships:

mattdrai-ers you have some DEDICATION omg. respect

now for the ship by ship break down!!

₊ . ݁ ݁ . ⊹ ࣪ ˖͙͘͡★ ⊹ .

#1 MATTDRAI

most popular ship this year. peaked in june/july with the scf. so what do u people like to write about?

fun fun fun. i love that the scf is tagged there like yes actually she is also a main character

₊ . ݁ ݁ . ⊹ ࣪ ˖͙͘͡★ ⊹ .

#2 SIDGENO

(my babies) top tags for this ship are:

folks, we are a/b/o fiends and we cannot lie. thank you to all the selfless authors for feeding us good a/b/o fic this year. i hope to join your ranks soon.

(also: MPREG. omega sidney crosby. alpha geno. listen, the people have spoken, and like, i am listening.)

₊ . ݁ ݁ . ⊹ ࣪ ˖͙͘͡★ ⊹ .

#3 NICOJACK

top tags!!

it seems nice and cozy over there... room for one more?

₊ . ݁ ݁ . ⊹ ࣪ ˖͙͘͡★ ⊹ .

BONUS: JDTZ.

i wasnt gonna plot this but @marcandreyuri asked me if i could take a look and the results are so compelling i must include it. are yall ok. do u need a hug

top tags being h/c, angst, angst, TRADES, pining, open endings... T_T katie said its a "torture vortex" and i must concurr

₊ . ݁ ݁ . ⊹ ࣪ ˖͙͘͡★ ⊹ .

BONUS BONUS: ALPHA/BETA/OMEGA

as an a/b/o enthusiast myself i got curious as to what the most popular ships were within that tag. if you want me to take a look about this for any other tag lmk, but for a/b/o, as expected, SID GENO ON TOP BABY!:

thats all for now!!! if you have anything else you are interested in seeing the data for, send me an ask and i'll see if i can get it to ya!

[kyeomic]

i decided to upload my little baby svt file collection for everyone. its rly just a small random grab bag but i have access to some source files (basically meaning ts files so not screen recorded or watermarked, i will mark these as "source quality") + ive collected some concert recordings as well. enjoy.

!!! dont forget youre helping hybe finance the killing of palestinians when you give them money. consider donating to a palestinian child here. thank you

the links are hosted on gofile and WILL EXPIRE in about 2 weeks! you can send me an anon any time if you need me to reupload something, i want to share these files with as many people as possible! the only reason they'll expire is bc i can't afford permanent storage right now.

full list and links under the cut~ includes nana tour in the soup a selection of concerts some caratlands yadda yadda

❣️ stuff that will be added as soon as i get it: caratland 2025 both days no watermark + dokyeom focus cam, follow to japan fukuoka source quality

NANA TOUR source quality, 1080p, this is the full non-shortened weverse release!

IN THE SOOP Season 1 - source quality, 1080p, eng & spanish subs, this is the amazon version meaning it's shorter than the weverse release by 2 episodes. i don't have the full version in proper quality, if you do PLEASE dm me Season 2 - source quality, 1080p, eng subs, this is the full weverse release / ‼️ ATTENTION: for this one the audio and video streams are split but when you open the video file in VLC player you can simply add the audio stream in the settings. send me an ask if you need help with that!

CARATLAND 2024 - source quality, weverse release! 2024 - both days, both with multi and single cam each

CONCERTS

Right Here in Goyang - both days Right Here in Osaka - day 1 Follow Again Osaka - day 1 Follow Again to Incheon - day 2 CONCERT FILMS Follow Again to Cinemas 2024 - source quality Power of Love: The Movie 2023 - source quality Follow to Fukuoka 2023, source quality Ode to You in Seoul 2019 - source quality

OTHER PLACES TO DOWNLOAD FILES: therosebay 3cmgoogie dadeuthannie svt vlive archive

if you don't care about downloading files you can check out svtflix. it's an archive of almost every show, concert, documentary etc free to stream. and then there's also this old archive.

if you have high quality files you want to share please dm me!! i can store, upload & maintain links

some other resources: jdownloader - this program is the best for youtube downloads, not 4kdownloader!!! jdownloader also lets you download from a million other sites.. no limit no ads no scraping your data weversetools - to download wv lives

ok bye~

[frownyalfred]

How are you live what's happening with ao3 and the AI? Does it discourage you in any way from publishing your stories?

Great question. I haven't archive locked my stories and don't plan to. That's a personal decision I've made for myself and my own content, and that doesn't mean I don't wholeheartedly support my fellow authors who do so. But I'm of the (again personal) opinion that my works already have been scraped, and will continue to be scraped in some capacity. As have all of my texposts on here.

I appreciate the work the OTW is doing to take down data on other sites where it has been scraped. I think that's absolutely the right course of action. But personally, I am under no illusions that by archive-locking my fics, I am 100% preventing the scraping/sharing/AI use of my content. And at this point, even when we first learned of that big "scrape" a while back, it was too late.

My goal is to make my content as widely available for readers as possible, which comes with drawbacks. Archive-locking fics came with a significant reduction in hits/comments/kudos for some authors, and I decided that was a risk I personally did not want to take. Especially when, again, I was of the belief that many of my fics had already been scraped/were vulnerable to being scraped before we learned about these mass-scraping incidents.

Additionally, I'm quite certain people have been feeding my fics into AI processors, ChatGPT, etc, for a while now. It's not something I have control over, and people will continue to do it even when they know it's wrong. Even with ao3 accounts.

I don't own my fanfiction content, I can't make money off of it, and I don't want to. This would be a very different conversation if I did. Truthfully, my only hope is that by continuing to write a/b/o, and large amounts of it, I can "spike" whatever dataset is using my fics. That thought brings me joy, even if it's a little silly and far-fetched with these better algorithms.

[mecachrome]

📊 LANDOSCAR AO3 STATS (may 2025)

notes

sorry this literally took 2 weeks to write... unfortunately the data was retrieved april 28 and it is now may 12.

other work: i previously wrote a stats overview that covered landoscar's fic growth and breakout in 2023 :) i've kept some of the formatting and graphs that i showed there, while other things have been removed or refined because i felt they'd become redundant or unnecessary (aka they were basically just a reflection of fandom growth in general, and not unique or interesting to landoscar as a ship specifically).

methodology: i simply scraped the metadata for every fic in the landoscar tag (until april 28, 2025) and then imported it into google sheets to clean, with most visualizations done in tableau. again, all temporal data is by date updated (not posted) unless noted otherwise. this is because the date that appears on the parent view of the ao3 archives is the updated one, so it's the only feasible datapoint to collect for 3000+ fics.

content: this post does not mention any individual authors or concern itself with kudos, hits, comments, etc. i purely describe archive growth and overall analysis of metadata like word count and tagging metrics.

cleaning: after importing my data, i standardized ship spelling, removed extra "814" or "landoscar" tags, and merged all versions of one-sided, background, implied, past, mentioned etc. into a single "(side)" modifier. i also removed one fic entirely from the dataset because the "loscar" tag was being mistakenly wrangled as landoscar, but otherwise was not actually tagged as landoscar. i also removed extra commentary tags in the ships sets that did not pertain to any ships.

overall stats

before we get into any detailed distributions, let's first look at an overview of the archive as of 2025! in their 2-and-change years as teammates, landoscar have had over 3,409 fics written for them, good enough for 3rd overall in the f1 archives (behind lestappen and maxiel).

most landoscar fics are completed one-shots (although note that a one-shot could easily be 80k words—in fact they have about 30 single-chapter fics that are at least 50k words long), and they also benefit from a lot of first-tagged fic, which is to say 82.3% of landoscar-tagged fics have them as the first ship, implying that they aren't often used as a fleeting side pairing and artificially skewing perception of their popularity. in fact, over half of landoscar fics are PURELY tagged as landoscar (aka otp: true), with no other side pairings tagged at all.

this percentage has actually gone down a bit since 2023 (65.5%), which makes sense since more lando and oscar ships have become established and grown in popularity over the years, but it's also not a very big difference yet...

ship growth

of course, landoscar have grown at a frankly terrifying rate since 2023. remember this annotated graph i posted comparing their growth during the 2023 season to that of carlando and loscar, respectively their other biggest ship at the time? THIS IS HER NOW:

yes... that tiny squished down little rectangle... (wipes away stray tear) they grow up so fast. i also tried to annotate this graph to show other "big" landoscar moments in the timeline since, but i honestly struggled with this because they've just grown SO exponentially and consistently that i don't even feel like i can point to anything as a proper catalyst of production anymore. that is to say, i think landoscar are popular enough now that they have a large amount of dedicated fans/writers who will continuously work on certain drafts and stories regardless of what happens irl, so it's hard to point at certain events as inspiring a meaningful amount of work.

note also that this is all going by date updated, so it's not a true reflection of ~growth~ as a ficdom. thankfully ao3 does have a date_created filter that you can manually enter into the search, but because of this limitation i can't create graphs with the granularity and complexity that scraping an entire archive allows me. nevertheless, i picked a few big ships that landoscar have overtaken over the last 2 years and created this graph using actual date created metrics!!!

this is pretty self-explanatory of course but i think it's fun to look at... :) it's especially satisfying to see how many ships they casually crossed over before the end of 2024.

distributions

some quick graphs this time. rating distribution remains extremely similar to the 2023 graph, with explicit fic coming out on top at 28%:

last time i noted a skew in ratings between the overall f1 rpf tag and the landoscar tag (i.e. landoscar had a higher prevalence of e fic), but looking at it a second time i honestly believe this is more of a cultural shift in (f1? sports rpf? who knows) fandom at large and not specific to landoscar as a ship — filtering the f1 rpf tag to works updated from 2023 onward shows that explicit has since become the most popular rating in general, even when excluding landoscar-tagged fics. is it because fandom is getting more horny in general, or because the etiquette surrounding what constitutes t / m / e has changed, or because people are less afraid to post e fic publicly and no longer quarantine it to locked livejournal posts? or something else altogether? Well i don't know and this is a landoscar stats post so it doesn't matter but that could be something for another thought experiment. regardless because of that i feel like further graphs aren't really necessary 🤷‍♀️

onto word distribution:

still similar to last time, although i will note that there's a higher representation of longfic now!!! it might not seem like much, but i noted last year that 85% of landoscar fics were under 10k & 97% under 25k — these numbers are now 78% and 92% respectively, which adds up in the grand scheme of a much larger archive. you'll also notice that the prevalence of <1k fic has gone down as well.

for the fun of it here's the wc distribution but with a further rating breakdown; as previously discussed you're more likely to get G ratings in flashfic because there's less wordspace to Make The Porn Happen. of course there are nuances to this but that's just a broad overview

side ships

what other ships are landoscar shippers shipping these days??? a lot of these ships are familiar from last time, but there are two new entries in ham/ros and pia/sai overtaking nor/ric and gas/lec to enter the top 10. ships that include at least one of lando or oscar are highlighted in orange:

of course, i pulled other 814-adjacent ships, but unfortunately i've realized that a lot of them simply aren't that popular/prevalent (context: within the 814 tag specifically) so they didn't make the top 10... because of that, here's a graph with only ships that include lando or oscar and have a minimum of 10 works within the landoscar tag:

eta: other primarily includes oscar & lily and maxf & lando. lando doesn't really have that many popular pairings within landoscar shippers otherwise...

i had wanted to explore these ships further and look at their growth/do some more in depth breakdowns of their popularity, but atm they're simply not popular enough for me to really do anything here. maybe next year?!

that being said, i did make a table comparing the prevalence of side ships within the 814 tag to the global f1 archives, so as to contextualize the popularity of each ship (see 2023). as usually, maxiel is very underrepresented in the landoscar tag, with galex actually receiving quite a boost compared to before!

additional tags

so last time i only had about 400 fics to work with and i did some analysis on additional tags / essentially au tagging. however, the problem is that there are now 3000 fics in my set, and the limitations of web scraping means that i'm not privy to the tag wrangling that happens in Da Backend of ao3. basically i'm being given all the raw versions of these au tags, whereas on ao3 "a/b/o" and "alpha/beta/omega dynamics" and "au - alpha/beta/omega" and "alternate universe - a/b/o" are all being wrangled together. because it would take way too long for me to do all of this manually and i frankly just don't want to clean that many fics after already going through all the ship tags, i've decided to not do any au analysis because i don't think it would be an accurate reflection of the data...

that being said, i had one new little experiment! as landoscar get more and more competitive, i wanted to chart how ~angsty~ they've gotten as a ship on ao3. i wanted to make a cumulative graph that shows how the overall fluff % - angst % difference has shifted over time, but ummmm... tableau and i had a disagreement. so instead here is a graph of the MoM change in angst % (so basically what percentage of the fics updated in that month specifically were tagged angst?):

the overall number is still not very drastic at all and fluff still prevails over angst in the landoscar archive. to be clear, there are 33.2% fics tagged some variation of fluff and 21.4% fics tagged some variation of angst overall, so there's a fluff surplus of 11.8%. but there has definitely been a slight growth in angst metrics over the past few months!

—

i will leave this here for now... if there's anything specific that you're interested in lmk and i can whip it up!!! hehe ty for reading 🧡

[transmutationisms]

it feels like a fairly trivial point that any observation of reality also becomes part of that reality once it is made. like that is not really that sophisticated a point to make and yet every silicon adjacent data optimising hedge fund beholden tech/media class member seems to relearn and then forget this lesson so constantly. hey guys do you think if you publish exit poll results while voting is still going on it might change the outcome of the election. do you think if the spotify algorithm is recommending things based on listener data it might be shaping those behaviours and not just observing them. do you think if 'ai' is scraping up the collective wisdom of the internet it might also be basing its own predictive text on the similarly predictive text of every other 'ai'. etc

[writingquestionsanswered]

Is it okay to use generators to help you start writing or to give ideas? I see a lot of writers on other platforms bashing them and saying that by using them you are not a real writer.

I use them because I personally feel like I'm not that creative, and it gives me a vague start to go on.

Thank you, and I really love your blog!

Using Random Generators for Inspiration

It depends on what you actually mean when you say "generators." Random Generators - Random generators have existed on the internet for years and years and years. Some popular ones are Fantasy Names .com and Seventh Sanctum .com. These use predefined options that were created by someone who is offering them up for the express purpose of writers using them as prompts, inspiration, and ideas. These are absolutely fine to use, are used by even seasoned writers, and in no way undermine your validity as a writer.

Generative AI - Generative AI is relatively new on the scene and includes things like ChatGPT and Notion AI. These use data that is scraped from other sources without permission from the creators. In other words, the ideas and text isn't generated by a person who specifically put it there for your use, but is instead stolen from other writers who did not give anyone permission to use it.

To be more clear, it's the difference between someone saying "here are some ideas you can use" versus someone saying "here are other people's stolen ideas you can use."

Needless to say, the use of generative AI is extremely controversial, as it should be. We're not talking about robbing from the rich to feed the poor. We're talking about robbing from the poor to feed the poor. Many MANY creatives work around (and sometimes overcome) challenges to their work without resorting to theft from other creatives. And when creativity is something that even creatives struggle with at times, lacking creativity is not a good excuse for stealing someone else's hard work.

So... if you're using random generators for plot ideas, setting ideas, character names, etc., that's fine, and many writers use them. But, if you're using generative AI, you need to really think about what you're doing and why you feel entitled to using ideas stolen from other creatives.

In the meantime, here are some resources that can help you boost your own creativity:

Guide: Filling Your Creative Well Guide: How to Rekindle Your Motivation to Write Getting Unstuck: Motivation Beyond Mood Boards & Playlists Character Development Exercises Writing Exercises to Help You Become a Better Writer Want to Write, Can't Come Up with a Plot

Also, some great random generators:

Fantasy Name Generators Seventh Sanctum Chaotic Shiny RanGen DIYMFA WriterIgniter Plot Generator Writing Exercises.uk

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I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

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[tofupixel]

why r u taking down all ur art? r people stealing it too often? thats a shame u had to do that :( !

yes stealing, ai scraping, etc, in general im tired of these websites selling our data / not protecting artists, and i want to share my art on my own terms from now on

i already deleted everything from instagram and i will be abandoning the platform except to promo occasionally, twitter next

since i dont have to rely on commissions coming in from social media any more, i just want to make a point that im rly not happy with the way things are going and remove my work from websites that are doing this as much as possible. i dont know if it will help at all but generally if i disagree with something i opt out so thats what im doing

so where to find my art in future? i'll still be here but i think its best to branch out as much as possible cos i dont trust any company to do right by us

my discord server gamejolt kofi bluesky

i heard cara is good so i signed up just to snag the tofu username (so cool), i may or may not use it

i do appreciate everyone who wants to keep up with me and enjoys my work i really do <3

[autisticandroids]

quick guide on backing up your tumblr from someone who has tried it various ways over the years

so, you noticed that tumblr is so understaffed that they didn't even do april fools this year and you're thinking of backing up your tumblr. maybe even using tumblr's built-in export function.

there are plenty of third party apps that will scrape your blog and grab all the posts. tumblr-utils is one that i have used historically to great effect. another option here. or find your own.

however, if you want to save your dms and asks, you need to use tumblr's export function.

first go to your blog settings and click export blog. you'll get an email when it finishes exporting. this may take a couple days.

now, my blog's file was about 400GB. that's almost half a terabyte. it's a lot of data. there's no way to shrink it or only download parts. it also will not tell you how big the file is going to be. my blog has ~250k posts and another 5k unanswered asks. and yours will probably scale with that.

(this is a good reason to use third party scrapers instead, by the by. tumblr-utils at least allows you to 1) download only your own original posts and not reblogs, 2) download only text and not media, and 3) download in batches not all at once. you're not forced to take the whole thing, which is a lot of data. the html result from tumblr utils is also more usable than the one from tumblr as well).

anyway. the first thing you'll want to do is make sure you choose what folder something downloads to. you do NOT want half a terabyte in your downloads folder. you want it going straight to an external drive. you can set firefox to open a little "save as" dialogue box everytime you download something, which honestly i would recommend doing anyway. or you can use a download manager like jdownloader, which will also help in other ways. though personally i found that jdownloader seemed to choke on the fact that tumblr doesn't tell you the size of the download, and that meant i couldn't interrupt the download or jdownloader would assume it was done.

second is just. make sure your external drive is big enough. i ended up literally bailing out files onto other random thumb drives because i only had about 250GB free on my external drive when i started downloading.

third. turn off your computer's ability to sleep. if you've got a pc that should be in the control panel under power settings. it should say power plan. my blog took about 15 hours to download. i had to just let my computer sit there downloading, and my computer needed to not go to sleep.

fourth, i would recommend using an ethernet cable if you have one. that will make it go faster.

you should get a file. though my computer literally choked on mine and i had to open it with 7zip because the zip file didn't quite work.

honestly if you're willing to spend an unreasonable amount of time and storage space on this i would recommend grabbing the tumblr native backup and then also using tumblr utils and scarping the text, then using the tumblr utils version of the text. my suspicion is that you can just grab the media folder from the tumblr export download and dump it into the tumblr utils folder and you'll be good. tumblr utils handles the text posts way better and more accessibly.

another space saving option is to just literally delete the media folder. or to delete the media in the folder that's not labeled "conversations," since the stuff labeled "conversations" is media that was sent in your dms and you may want to save that.

tumblr export WILL give you all you dms (including with deactivated users and users you have blocked and who have blocked you) and it will also give you unanswered asks (again including from deactivated users etc). probably also submissions and possibly also old fanmail, i haven't checked. i have not figured out yet whether you get your draft posts. if you do they're not in their own folder they're just mixed in with the rest.

the html formatting, however, is dogshit. even of the dms. the dm conversations are literally presented backwards.