God and Tumblr

so, in other words,

tags via @procrastinatorproject

So while it’s true that the Enterprise is not as big as people think, that goes double for the Falcon!

A good way of thinking about the relative size is by using a bridge comparison:

The Enterprise bridge has space for 11 people to work, as well as a significant amount of space between stations to move around comfortably:

[Bridge illustration by Tobias Weinmann via here]

And the whole thing fits in the nipple thing up on top of the saucer:

Meanwhile the Falcon (beloved weed bus) has a cockpit that seats 4, with only 2 main operational stations, and zero floor space:

And since Serenity was mentioned too…

Serenity has a bridge more comparable to La Sirena - with 2 stations at the front and quite a bit of floor space.

And for those interested in a visual comparison:

(Boeing 747 for scale as well as the Delta Flyer because Why Not)

Like, Qui-Gon would still be sent to Naboo and end up on Tatooine, he'd still meet Anakin and take him back to the Temple. But, in this AU, he survives the battle on Theed and takes Anakin as his padawan. And the entire Order would be making jokes:

"Congrats on the new padawan! Hope he sticks around longer than the last one!" "We'll keep this one off the bodyguard missions, eh Qui-Gon?"

So one day little Anakin’s like "hey master, what happened to your last padawan?" And Qui-Gon's like "oh he ran off with a girl, yeah he's royalty in the Outer Rim now".

The cops

The terrorist surveillance branch of said cops

The government

No, seriously, multiple current and former government officials have openly stated beef with him

The most violent crime family in Australia

The gambling lobby

Money launderers

Other journalists

Drug dealers

The seventh richest man in Australia

Property Developers

And a partridge in a pear tree

He legitimately doesn’t know which one of his enemies might have done it (even though he has strong suspicions) because they’ve collectively already attempted to shut him up with legal attacks that could’ve resulted in actual jail time and many, many more shady tactics, including smear campaigns, outright lying to authorities (who also hate him) and lying under oath (the courts probably also hate him but are more quiet about it).

He legitimately went into hiding for a few months to assess the threat level after being firebombed and escaping with his life by sheer luck.

My spouse and I have been watching the updates that are actively being released and calling each other like

and it’s three am on a school night, yeah, so i’m looking out my window at the sky, and i’m thinking, i am so used to not wanting to be alive. but i did want to be alive, right then, and so i thought, why is that? when and how did i get to that point?

so i wrote it down, and i posted it, because my therapist told me that i should share more of my work, even if i think its points are hackneyed and its details are messy. and then, people liked it. which is so fucking weird. and kind. and good. and fucking weird.

a close up to just... light shining through those waves, makes me feel faint with exhilaration every time

Because there is no way to tell with 100% accuracy that a piece of writing was created by or with the aid of generative AI, and anything less than 100% accuracy is completely unacceptable, no nuance, no exceptions. You can tell with 100% accuracy if something is not a fanwork--like an ISO or placeholder post that does not contain a fanwork--and you can tell with 100% accuracy if a fanwork contains a link to a payment apparatus or is otherwise soliciting payment for fic in violation of the TOS, so these things can be disallowed and, when discovered and reported as violations, dealt with by PAC. And you can tell with 100% accuracy that a fic has been plagiarized, meaning that it has pulled entire passages word for word from another fic and this can therefore be detailed in a report in order for PAC to take action. (This is important to note because while generative AI is in fact The Plagiarism Machine, that can only be proven on the back end via the datasets used to train it. You can't actually look at generative output and tell which place the words were ripped from, because LLMs operate on statistical probabilities of word order, not actually pulling phrases wholesale from a specific work.)

But you cannot tell with 100% accuracy that a particular passage has been generated with AI.

And we are already seeing the problem with spurious AI accusations! People are claiming that 'excessive use of em-dashes' is a 'tell' for AI, when the only reason em-dashes exist in AI-generated output is because the machines were trained on human-generated writing that used them! (And as a writer who frequently ODs on em-dashes and italics, I find that particular 'tell' especially insulting. My overuse of em-dashes comes from my own brain, thank you very much.) So the only way to actually tell that someone on Ao3 is using AI to write their fic is if the admit as much up-front.

Guess what would happen if Ao3 decided to ban AI fics from the platform? Those fics would stop being tagged, and then we'd run into the exact same problems we had on FFN with fics being grudge-reported by bad faith actors, which was one of many reasons Ao3 was created in the first place--so that people couldn't do that.