Cryptid Corner

if you want to start writing then my advice is to actually write it yourself instead of letting a machine do it for you. “ai prompting” is not writing.

all of this. heavy on “the fastest way to discourage fandom writers is by rating/assigning numerical value to fanfics”. also the “but don’t you want to get better?” argument is so exhausting to me. because if us fanfic writers want to “get better” at our hobbies, the things we do out of love, and if we want constructive criticism, we will either directly ask for it (so if we didn’t ask, keep your opinion to yourself) or we will go to our trusted friends, whose opinions we actually value, for their feedbacks.

because more often than not, the unsolicited constructive criticism random strangers give us isn’t even constructive criticism but what these people personally want to read. so here’s the thing, us fanfic writers write for ourselves first and foremost. we appreciate people who read our works and show us support, but we’re writing and sharing our works for free — it’s our hobby and passion, our source of comfort, something we do as a form of self care, it’s not a job we are paid to do — so we’re not writing to please anybody but ourselves.

you don’t go up to a stranger you see in public, tell them what you dislike about their clothes and how they can “dress better” then defend your actions by claiming you “have the rights to criticize their clothing because they are in public”.

My instant thought was that they had been trolled or attacked or that something terrible had happened in their life because this person is so passionate about their writing. It wasn't any of that. Engagement with their works has been going down, as it has for many of us. Comments are like gold dust a lot of the time, and just looking through the historical comment counts on old fics on ao3 demonstrates this trend very clearly. It was not simply the comments dropping off which caused them to decide to stop posting, however.

My friend came across a discord server for their fandom (I should point out here that their fandom interest and mine diverged a couple of years ago, we stay in touch but don't currently read each other's posts because I'm not into their fandom and they would rather gouge their eyes out with a wooden spoon than read anything Star Wars) and specifically to share fic in that fandom. They joined, because we all love a good fic rec, only to discover that their latest multichapter fic, which has almost no comments and very few kudos, is being hotly discussed in this server as one of the best stories ever. Not one of these people has bothered to say this to them on the fic. When they asked, none of participants could see the point in telling the author of the fic they apparently loved so much that they love it.

This discovery has absolutely destroyed my friend's love of sharing fic. They share because they love seeing other people's enjoyment, and fic writers do that through comments and kudos/reblogs/likes because we don't get paid. There is no literary critic writing a blog post/article about how amazing the story is for us to copy and keep/frame. There is no money from royalties. All we have are the words of the people reading our works.

Those people on that server could have taken five minutes of the time they spent gushing about how amazing my friend's story was to other people and used it to tell the one person guaranteed to want to hear that praise how much they loved it. They could have taken a moment to express their opinion to the person who spent hours upon hours plotting, writing, editing, and posting those chapters. Instead, they deprived my friend of thing that keeps them sharing their writing, and in the process have killed their love of it. My friend now feels used and unmotivated.

I won't be sharing a link to their fic, they said I could share their experience but not their identity. I know they plan to post one final chapter. I know they intend to express their hurt at being excluded from the praise for the thing they created, and I know they intend to announce that as a consequence they will not be posting for a long while, if at all.

But imagine you're a kid, and you invite a bunch of your classmates over to hang out. You take them to your room and show them all of your toys, and then you leave the room to get a drink of water or go to the bathroom or something.

When you come back, you can't find your classmates. You search the house and finally find them in another room, playing with your toys.

"Hey, how come you guys are in here?" you asked.

"Because we didn't want to play with you," they say, and close the door in your face.

But first they must catch you 🏳️‍⚧️ Prints

If you are a fanfiction author who posts to AO3. Your work has probably been scraped into these datasets.

Send them a copyright takedown notice if you think your work is in this. Escalate to a DMCA report if you need to: https://www.copyright.gov/512/sample-notice.pdf (and send it to: [email protected])

Make sure to grab all your work IDs from Ao3.

Restrict your work to the archive.

Glaze your art.

no but you can FORCE it away. use ublock origin and copy paste the blacklist i made into the filters to be able to remove the bullshit AI overview that google forces. it also removes youtube's forced ads (at least until they fix it)

you can also use the ublacklist extension and use this blacklist of AI image generation websites to curate your google image results

"Transgender rage is more powerful than the courts.

Transgender love is more hopeful than the law.

We have always been here and no "ruling" can eradicate us!"

Naturally everybody will think it's fake because of the date only to lose their minds (both positively and negatively based on their opinion of trump) when realizing it's real

There will be massive celebrations in the streets and on social media and lots of predictable "don't speak ill of the dead" discourse about those celebrations

Weird evangelicals will pull some weird number trick talking about how Jesus was conceived on April 1st and that makes Trump a sort of messiah and people will make fun of that

The Republicans (after they're done with the faux-sadness and faux-outrage) will stomp over each other to be his successor but none of them will succeed. They'll tear each other apart and have no single nominee for the November elections.

There will be discourse about if Biden and the living former presidents should go to his funeral (they won't, he was a traitor insurrectionist)

The Ukraine-Russia War immediately goes in favor of Ukraine as morale in the Kremlin is reduced. China similarly backs off from its threats on Taiwan.

Ten thousand new memes are made, some sticking around for years to come.