zelamorre

[zelamorre]

I will also add on to this that Trump has a history of not paying his bills. Both throughout his business life and in his campaign. See all the rally bills his campaign won't pay for despite owning the money: St. Paul, Erie, Albuquerque, etc. See his habit of milking cash out of his companies, then using bankruptcy laws to dodge having to pay his creditors.

And also that Musk didn't pay severance to the Twitter employees he fired when he should have.

Also, also: See Trump saying to freeze ALL federal spending.

Trump is doing what he's always done: promises payment with no intention of following through. He'll promise you the world, then say "Well, there's a federal spending freeze on, so we can't pay you. Too bad, so sad. But you DID quit, so you can't complain!"

If you’re an American federal employee and got an email saying “it’s ok to quit your job.” Do not, for the love of everything, quit your job. This is purely a scare tactic to get rid of as many people as possible without legal consequences.

[zelamorre]

Finally got my 1k booping badge. No auto-clicker, done mostly on mobile because my desktop is still borked to hell and back and will only occasionally let me send boops.

Boop still looks like a word. User names, not so much. I have lost track of the many people I booped while scrolling through the boop tag.

My old lady neck hurts.

My thumbs hurt.

But I have the crazy cat lady collection complete, and that's what matters!.

(You can continue to boop me to fill up your meters if you like.)

[zelamorre]

you can EVIL BOOP?

if you hover longer than SUPER BOOP it turns into EVIL BOOP

[zelamorre]

if you wanna get your 1000 boops in and are worried abt boop spamming a stranger, feel free to boop me, i dont mind!

[zelamorre]

Just some Gale doodles… nothing to see here…

[zelamorre]

Not me switching to mobile because booping on my desktop keeps glitching out. (In my defense, the badges are cute.)

[zelamorre]

The blue eye brigade [FULL VIEW]

——- Unlimited commissions are open so I can pay off the final part of a loan–consider checking out this post <3

[zelamorre]

Been playing a lot of My Time at Sandrock while recovering from surgery and I'm smitten with Owen ;v; I just got his proposal scene and had to put my switch down to giggle and kick my feet

[zelamorre]

The thing I love about Baldur's Gate 3 is that you can ship any of the Origin Characters with any love interest, and nobody can come around with the old "They'd never!" Because, yeah. They explicitly WOULD do that. The game is specifically built so you can do just that.

They even have unique dialogues for those romances.

[zelamorre]

I’m Declaring War Against “What If” Videos: Project Copy-Knight

What Are “What If” Videos?

These videos follow a common recipe: A narrator, given a fandom (usually anime ones like My Hero Academia and Naruto), explores an alternative timeline where something is different. Maybe the main character has extra powers, maybe a key plot point goes differently. They then go on and make up a whole new story, detailing the conflicts and romance between characters, much like an ordinary fanfic.

Except, they are fanfics. Actual fanfics, pulled off AO3, FFN and Wattpad, given a different title, with random thumbnail and background images added to them, narrated by computer text-to-speech synthesizers.

They are very easy to make: pick a fanfic, copy all the text into a text-to-speech generator, mix the resulting audio file with some generic art from the fandom as the background, give it a snappy title like “What if Deku had the Power of Ten Rings”, photoshop an attention-grabbing thumbnail, dump it onto YouTube and get thousands of views.

In fact, the process is so straightforward and requires so little effort, it’s pretty clear some of these channels have automated pipelines to pump these out en-masse. They don’t bother with asking the fic authors for permission. Sometimes they don’t even bother with putting the fic’s link in the description or crediting the author. These content-farms then monetise these videos, so they get a cut from YouTube’s ads.

In short, an industry has emerged from the systematic copyright theft of fanfiction, for profit.

Project Copy-Knight

Since the adversaries almost certainly have automated systems set up for this, the only realistic countermeasure is with another automated system. Identifying fanfics manually by listening to the videos and searching them up with tags is just too slow and impractical.

And so, I came up with a simple automated pipeline to identify the original authors of “What If” videos.

It would go download these videos, run speech recognition on it, search the text through a database full of AO3 fics, and identify which work it came from. After manual confirmation, the original authors will be notified that their works have been subject to copyright theft, and instructions provided on how to DMCA-strike the channel out of existence.

I built a prototype over the weekend, and it works surprisingly well:

On a randomly-selected YouTube channel (in this case Infinite Paradox Fanfic), the toolchain was able to identify the origin of half of the content. The raw output, after manual verification, turned out to be extremely accurate. The time taken to identify the source of a video was about 5 minutes, most of those were spent running Whisper, and the actual full-text-search query and Levenshtein analysis was less than 5 seconds.

The other videos probably came from fanfiction websites other than AO3, like fanfiction.net or Wattpad. As I do not have access to archives of those websites, I cannot identify the other ones, but they are almost certainly not original.

Armed with this fantastic proof-of-concept, I’m officially declaring war against “What If” videos. The mission statement of Project Copy-Knight will be the elimination of “What If” videos based on the theft of AO3 content on YouTube.

I Need Your Help

I am acutely aware that I cannot accomplish this on my own. There are many moving parts in this system that simply cannot be completely automated – like the selection of YouTube channels to feed into the toolchain, the manual verification step to prevent false-positives being sent to authors, the reaching-out to authors who have comments disabled, etc, etc.

So, if you are interested in helping to defend fanworks, or just want to have a chat or ask about the technical details of the toolchain, please consider joining my Discord server. I could really use your help.

------

See full blog article and acknowledgements here: https://echoekhi.com/2023/11/25/project-copy-knight/

[zelamorre]

Sketches of an angry wizard 😡

[zelamorre]

Gale, the Wizard of Waterdeep

[zelamorre]

Stray Gods is such a David Gaider production.

Sad, depressed blond boy. (With hidden anger issues.)

Complaining Ice Queen (Complete with sad past (TM) and a sekrit wuvving side if you put up with her bullshit long enough.)

Roguish scoundrel who everyone agrees is untrustworthy, including themselves, is actually a good person - surprising even themselves when it happens.

Musclebound dude in a leather harness.

Every magical person in your inner circle is keeping major secrets and using you in some way. Because that's just what Gaider Mages do.

[zelamorre]

I just realized you can headcanon away all of Gale's bugs by assuming that his Netherese Orb is collapsing and making him the focus of a bunch of converging timelines.

He's not losing his mind, thinking you said yes to Raphael's deal. He's just experiencing a different timeline where you did.

Your Tav may have never had a single thought about romancing him, but in another world you've been doing that weaving together so hard you've made a whole damned arcane tapestry.

And everyone else gets momentary glitches too. That's why they randomly think you've been flirting when you haven't. That's why you cannot pick up that all important, empty bottle that is RIGHT THERE. It's not RIGHT THERE. It's five time streams over.

And the entire time, nobody is noticing, yet everyone is annoyed.

[zelamorre]

For the Baldur's Gate Depraved Among Us

Everyone feel free to vote - especially rare pair folks.

[zelamorre]

Me needing to compulsively loot everything vs me getting tired of seeing "Astarion disapproves!" because I'm doing things like not letting slaves get murdered.

But look, I need those locks picked. So emo boy gonna have to live with it. (Hopefully if this is a "betrayal because your friendship meter is too low" situation he does it at the end of the game so I don't miss out on the random garbage that's amassed me my small fortune and hoard of random scrolls, potions and camp supplies that I'll never use.)

[zelamorre]

Good Omens S3 Speculation

Things I fully expect will be a BIG DEAL (TM) in Good Omens S3.

The fact that Crowley and Aziraphale's "half-miracles together" magic is as powerful and noticeable as Gabriel's. (Yes, color coded pink - because love.) But also that's probably why Metatron wants Aziraphale and wanted Crowley - they already have that kind of power together.

German Zombies - I mean, obviously they're going to show up again because they're still on Earth and still kicking. No idea how they'll be important, but I'm betting they'll show up for another "Aww, let me just do a tiny thing JUST FOR YOU BABE!" moment given that's what they've been around for in the past 2 seasons.

Crowley's memory problems. That got hinted at enough in this season to be more than just a way to excuse the scene showing he'd actually met Aziraphale before The Garden.