kovertlord

And as much gorgeousness as there is with the cover, the trade edition (the one you're seeing here) has such a beautiful gold-stamped cover and lovely Kitty endpapers* (swoon, thank you @frostbitestudios!), so swipe to see those, too. Trade edition means "the one you will find around everywhere and can buy at Amazon or indies" — I'll update a bit later with special edition news!

*Lest anyone decide this contains important information about who is taller, Kit is on a different step than Ty :)

“college is absolutely nothing like this” “why are we writing four people on the team scoring a hat trick in one game” “so tech work is nothing like this, hope that helps!”

there appears to be a surge of newly created tumblr blogs mass reaching out to people who post anything related to writing (under writing-related tags) and offering to "beta read their works" for them.

I don't know if they are bots trying to trick people into handing their works to them (so they can then use these works to train their ai machine), or if they have any other ill intentions. but the way they are approaching people (and how all of them are newly created blogs) makes me extremely wary.

as someone who prefers to work alone without a beta reader and someone who will only reach out to a trusted friend (whom I personally know) for beta reading, if I ever want one, I don't know if it's normal for people to reach out to random people and offer to beta read their works for them like this, but I've never seen it before until recently. and I've always been under the impression that a beta reader, especially for fanfics, is someone within the same fandom an author is in, and someone who's friends with an author (or at the very least online mutuals). these new "beta-reading blogs" are apparently reaching out to a lot of random people across various random fandoms, and if I'm being honest, they sound extremely sketchy.

Saw this going around and tested it myself, and I can confirm that this is unfortunately legit. Four hidden bots have been placed in any existing or newly created Discord server that are harvesting data, images, and most concerningly, one seems to be a face swap bot.

Due to them being invisible, banning them from your servers isn't possible without their ID's, which I've typed out for easy access.

1153984868804468756 1288638725869535283 1090660574196674713 1104973139257081909

Banning is done with the /ban command with each string pasted in one at a time. Four ban commands in total.

Image proof below and further information. This was in my PERSONAL server that has existed for +5 years. Discord is harvesting your shit without your consent, fight back.

The answer is yes, you absolutely can! It'll look like this - the numbers you paste will be what's "banned"

However my sibling tried this in her servers and found that One of them was NOT a string of numbers, like so:

And for clarity it isn't a difference in user or device, this is what she got elsewhere:

So if you ban these numbers and the message shows the actual username? Pretty sure that means they were in there.

Very unpleasant way to check the veracity of this post but hopefully this is a helpful tip for anyone who was concerned - my sib would have No Reason to add these in herself and didn't have any clue it was in there.

Personally, I'd say even if you are still worried about misinfo/fearmongering/etc from this post, think of it this way - worst case scenario is you're banning a bot you'll never use or need. Not a person, a bot. There's no real damage done playing it safe and running the ban commands through, aside from maybe losing some time doing so.

Good morning! I’m salty.

I think we, as a general community, need to start taking this little moment more seriously.

This, right here? This is asking for consent. It’s a legal necessity, yes, but it is also you, the reader, actively consenting to see adult content; and in doing so, saying that you are of an age to see it, and that you’re emotionally capable of handling it.

You find the content you find behind this warning disgusting, horrifying, upsetting, triggering? You consented. You said you could handle it, and you were able to back out at any time. You take responsibility for yourself when you click through this, and so long as the creator used warnings and tags correctly, you bear full responsibility for its impact on you.

“Children are going to lie about their age” is probably true, but that’s the problem of them and the people who are responsible for them, not the people that they lie to.

1) chosen to go onto AO3 in the first place

2) chosen the fandom you wish to read about

3) had the chance to filter for the things you do want to see like a specific pairing or a specific AU

4) had the chance to specifically filter out any tags you don’t want to see like, oh I don’t know, incest and non-con and dub-con and paedophilia

5) had the chance to set the rating level if you wish to remove any explicit content at all

6) have read the summary of the story, which aren’t always great but are the only indicator of what the story will be like writing wise so something about it was good enough for you to click on it.

7) have read the tags of the story which will tell you what is actually in the story. If you have used filters to remove stories with things you don’t want then there shouldn’t be anything in here that’s a shock to you but maybe there is. That’s why the tags are there for you to check for yourself.

8) Then you have to actually click on the story. You cannot see anything other than the summary or the tags without personally deciding that you are going to open and read this story.

9) Only here, at step number nine, do you get to the adult content warning pictured above. You have been through eight different steps, the last six of which have also been opportunities for you to see that this has adult content. And AO3 has *STILL* stopped you to ask one last time “are you sure you want to read this because it has things that only adults should see in it”.

If after this point you are reading incest and paedophilia then it’s probably because you specifically went looking for it.