how violently uplifting

And the kids are like "but they get into our bug traps" and "we didn't catch him he followed us home"

And their parents are like. Please i do not believe that 6 fucking pixies smuggled themselves into our garage on the underside of your bicycle saddle and then set up shop in the old dolls house. These are living beings they're not toys it's not kind to treat them like this

And the kids are like we are NOT treating them like anything you said we're not allowed to trap them and they always get into our traps so we always run away when they see us and then they follow us and get inside our backpacks and stuff

And the parents are like

Stop lying!!!

And then they set up wildlife cams and not only can pixies apparently do all of that and are very desperate to hang out with these human kids (who have fun life-sized toys and are covered in wonderful things like glitter and are a free source of fresh bugs and pop tart crumbs)

But they can also like. Fully just pick locks and shit.

People have said the tag is unique to Claude only and therefore there’s no way a human-made fic could have gotten wrongly flagged as AI. But how accurate and trustworthy worthy this is, really? Even IF, hypothetically, this method is proved correct 99 times out of 100, that still means “there is 1 time out of 100 times where a human-made fic is wrongly flagged as AI due to an error”. And that to me nullified the credibility of the whole doc. Like, sorry for not trusting another newly-introduced machine and for being skeptical about it.

“But how could the tag get there if the author didn’t use AI?” Besides the possibility of an error, I can already see people weaponize this method by faking screenshots of fics that are about the ships or topics that they hate to make it look like these fics have Claude tag in them, and then spreading those fake screenshots around. And the worst part is that authors cannot prove their innocence because people would just say “they got caught so now they removed the Claude tag from their fics”.

Like. I hate AI, but I hate witch hunts, accusations and harassments more.

These comments below sum it up really well.

Almost like the people who claim they want to avoid actually want the opposite. They spend so much time and effort to try to detect AI that they could be spending reading because... idk actually. Maybe it's another weird purity thing where you're eternally tainted by seeing something "bad." Maybe they're addicted to the rush of feeling morally superior for five seconds on the internet and have discovered a new way to fill that hole.

It's so painfully clear that they want to find as much AI as possible for some reason. These are not people engaging with fandom for fun, they're here to destroy.

@vividaway​ Randall Munroe is an internet cartoonist who runs the ‘xkcd’ online comic series, which has run from 2006 up to today, with new comics every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Xkcd isn’t an ongoing story, just a series of funny, wholesome, depressing, or oddly scientifically informative comics.

In 2010, Randall’s fiance was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer. He didn’t share too many details at first, but things tended to bleed into his comics: sometimes funny, sometimes sad.

Often in this time, other cartoonists would write in guest comics for Randall, or he’d put in short filler pieces, to try and fill space while nonstop cancer treatments took up most of his time.

In 2012, he posted a comic called ‘Two Years’, about the time since the diagnosis. It’s the one that hasn’t yet been posted here (although parts of it are included in the other comics), and it commemorates some of the things that had happened in the two years since the diagnosis.

There are representations of Randall and his fiance being together for her treatment, worrying together, traveling the world, and getting married. It’s still depressing, but it’s a lot more hopeful, showing how they’ve still managed to have happy moments together, and things will still get better.

Themes of cancer continued in xkcd, but they increasingly became less about fear and nihilism, and more about hope, or just cool facts related to cancer.

At the top of this post is the comic posted in 2017: Seven Years. In it, Randall and his wife are traveling more, trying to have fun and continue old and new hobbies, with cancer ever-present in the background of it all. At the end, the two of them observe the 2017 solar eclipse, and despite all the uncertainty that comes with the thought of another seven years, agree to watch the 2024 eclipse together too.

There are just about no cancer comics between that one and the most recent comic, the one I posted: Ten Years, written in 2020. It’s by far the most hopeful of the three in the little series: the two of them are happy, they’re playing with rabbits and riding on handcarts and going out hiking and stargazing, together. At the end, Ten Years breaks the format with a conversation in which they talk about how unbelievable it is that it’s been so long, and share their worries as well as their hopes. It even ends on a much more lighthearted joke about immortality.

It’s a good comic. Definitely in my top two comics wherein internet cartoonists express emotions about an illness suffered by their wife.

The first time I reblogged this it was three years after large bastard's heart attack and quad bypass and one year after his transplant.

Now it has been five years since his transplant, and seven years since his bypass.

eclipses and drove to see

the aurora too.

I’ve followed XKCD on and off since… probably 2007? Earlier? I think I’m like the least parasocial about Randall compared to other creators I’ve followed that long bc in my head he’s legit just a faceless stick figure, and the only things I really know about him as a person are (a) big nerd and (b) wife had a serious and scary cancer diagnosis.

Anyway, literal decades of sharing comics, memeing with nerdy friends, catching up and falling behind and catching up again. Then I see this and it’s like…

His majesty's castle is stuck doing a barrel roll. Rescue operations are on the way.

Unfortunately, the sky island rescue department has had their budget cut by half by his majesty's treasurer to invest in automation and are now limited in both staff and equipment.

Tags passing peer review, gonna share.