Otter's Rock

I was too lazy to go back to that thread, but I'm still really charmed by the idea of AOS Kirk vs TOS Kirk in any gender configuration but especially (unsurprisingly) women, all the more if the retcons from the various films/TNG are treated as their own thing (the only way I can wrap my brain around them) so we're just at maximum contrast.

Our latest is live! 🏒 Kayti Burt reports on the fallout around the recent document attempting to identify fanfiction authors using AI, and how Heated Rivalry is ground zero for fandom's broader reckoning with AI-generated text on all sides:

“Fandom Has A Hidden Generative AI Problem” gives shape to a breakdown in a basic social contract for online fandom and all online community and discourse. While fanfiction writing is  generally pseudonymous, readers have historically at least been able to rely on the assumption that a fellow human being is writing the story they are reading. With the introduction of AI, that fundamental pact between fic writer and fic reader has been fractured. Fandom is a place for people to be in community together—to bond over shared obsessions in a way that can make us feel a little less alone. Realizing someone has outsourced that connection to a machine can make us feel even more alone.

One of the deleted scenes has his buddies telling on him that he used to recite poetry. I wish we'd gotten to see more of his interests and talents that don't directly correlate to killing wraith.

There's also the fact that neatly all the Satedans we spent any time with were his war buddies, so it's hard to gage what his society was like as a whole.

Aha! Found it! It's not much but I like that he and Zelenka bond a bit over the course of this book.

This week’s Featured Article is a The Greatest, a multifandom vid by bironic focused on characters of color in science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

It was created for the 2017 Fandom Trumps Hate auction, and premiered at 2018 Wiscon. Bironic used clips from 75 live-action media sources and it took them fifteen months to complete.

Learn more and find a link to The Greatest on Fanlore!

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If you have several connected ideas that don't quite work as a regular multichap story but also don't quite feel like a series, a 5+1 style of fic might work for you.

In general, the fic is six chapters long (although you can format it however you'd like if that doesn't work for you). It chronicles 5 times that one thing happened and 1 time that something else happened instead.

For example: 5 times A and B didn't kiss... and one time they did.

It's an easily recognizable structure for many and it's a handy way for writers to get to "the good bits" without agonizing over transitions etc. in between. Each chapter hits with the power of a oneshot, but you still get the build up and release of a multichapter fic.

You don't have to follow the numbers exactly. 5+1 is just the most common format.

• Castlevania AMV set to Julia Ecklar’s “The Hand of God” (I feel the reasoning here is self explanatory for anyone who has heard the song)

WHY has nobody ever made a Spock vid to The Logical Song by Supertramp?

When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful A miracle, oh, it was beautiful, magical And all the birds in the trees, well, they'd be singing so happily Oh, joyfully, oh, playfully watching me But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible Logical, oh, responsible, practical And then they showed me a world where I could be so dependable Oh, clinical, oh, intellectual, cynical

On a related note, WHY has nobody made a Stargate SG-1 vid to Jeepers Creepers?

Jeepers Creepers, where'd ya get those peepers? Jeepers Creepers, where'd ya get those eyes? Gosh all git up, how'd they get so lit up? Gosh all git up, how'd they get that size?

Now, this last one is a bit niche, but there's a song from WWII called There'll Be A Hot Time In The Town of Berlin that would be a great Captain America vid. Not just from the original movie where he's actually fighting in Germany, but also the later movies.

“This is the standard tech playbook. Fire the engineers who know how the system works, fire the ones organizing labor, hope nothing catastrophic breaks before you can ship something splashy. Twitter did it. Meta did it. Salesforce did it. Google did it. We have all seen this movie.”

If you edit Wikipedia, there is a petition of solidarity if you don’t want this nonsense to fly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Workers_United_solidarity

So I have had...several medical procedures this year. Two colonoscopies...the first as a checkup for management of Crohn's disease, and the second three months later because the first found inflammation in my large intestine and the doc adjusted my meds. Second showed improvement so that's great!

I have also this year, after a Lot Of Shit, been diagnosed with endometriosis. My left ovary, in fact, is completely encysted in a 9.2 cm endometrioma. In one month and two days I am having surgery to completely remove the cyst, which will involve completely removing my left ovary. (Righty is hanging on and being a model citizen so far, no cysts at all currently.) After going back and forth with my care team and considering options, I'm going to follow their reccomendations and also undergo a hysterectomy at the same time. Right ovary can stay for now.

This, since American healthcare is a hellscape, costs money. I've done the regular measures to reduce the bills, but they're still adding up. I've maxed out my FSA already for the year and still have about $4,500 to go before I hit out of pocket maximum for my insurance for the year.

So. Any help to defray medical costs...the ones already incurred and the ones I'm about to...would be wildly appriciated.

like. i think boring heterosexual women writing boring heterosexual romance novels with standard tropes is extremely 'normal' actually by any meaningful definition of the word. it is literally one of the most conventional, mainstream forms of publishing that exists. there's nothing 'weird' about it, or the people doing it, by any societal standard. what they mean to say is that those books and fanfictions are bad. (which, for what it's worth, i agree - they largely are bad.)

it invokes 'normality' as a moral framework while completely detaching it from its descriptive meaning. it's using these terms as pure value judgments to disguise what's essentially just taste-based criticism.

e.g there are a lot of posts that follow the general pattern of "are you normal about [xyz]". like "sure you say you support neurodivergent people but are you normal about autistic people who stim loudly in public. you say you support trans rights but are you normal about trans people who don't pass. you say you're a feminist but are you normal about fat women" etc etc etc. it's a common type of post; i've certainly shared similar posts before, but it's interesting, right, because ableism, transphobia, fatphobia are in fact exceedingly 'normal'. obviously everyone knows what is meant when someone says 'are you normal about [xyz]'; i'm not trying to be all 'um actually', about it, but it is very interesting that 'are you normal' gets used to mean, literally, 'are you moral'. much like how 'weird' and 'untalented' are used synonymously in the above post, 'weird' and 'immoral' become synonymous in this other context.

the sleight of hand here is in presenting 'normality' as a natural, obvious basis for determining both moral worth and artistic quality. people get to invoke the spectre of 'weirdness' as inherently problematic without ever having to defend why social conformity should be valued in the first place. when they say boring tropey published romance novels are written by 'weird' people (when by any meaningful definition of the word, they're not and in fact the best writers are usually freaks. stop insulting freaks' good name by comparing them to love hypothesis slop!!), they're reinforcing the unexamined premise that 'normality' is the proper standard for judging both people and their creative work.

but I find it very difficult to believe people who look like Whoopi Goldberg and whatever that white guy's name is could produce a biological child who looks like Paolo Montalban

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.

I am not uptight about privacy because I'm hiding something. I'm uptight about it because the people who dismiss my right to privacy are dangerous to you and me and our families, personally, all the time.