Welcome to the Rest of your Life

that's not great. but it's not the whole story.

a few things got worse right before the vote too. the language that explicitly protected encryption, saying the bill couldn't be used to force platforms to weaken it, got quietly stripped out on Friday. that safeguard just doesn't exist anymore.

but this isn't over. it heads to the senate next, and the senate is genuinely not on board. blumenthal and cantwell, two of the senators who wrote the original KOSA, are saying they don't want this version near a markup. blackburn, a republican and the other original author, called the missing duty of care provision a red line.

worth being clear here, blackburn isn't on our side. she wants the policy stronger, not gone. but that's still a crack we can use. her opposition means the house version has zero guaranteed path through the senate as written, and a stalled bill is a bill that isn't law yet. use her objection, don't trust her motive.

senate commerce hasn't even scheduled a markup yet. that's the next pressure point. this thing has died or gotten majorly rewritten at this stage before.

contact your senators: find yours here. tell them you don't want the house version anywhere near a vote.

and remember, if you have to, contact your senators scared. anything helps.

But I just read a pretty good fic published in 2014-2015 (you know, roughly TEN YEARS AGO) and I was like, damn this is so cool, I have to leave a comment, even if you know, they probably wont see it...

I think there is a broad cultural problem with the current state of fanfiction that likely stems from the proliferation of fics-turned-published-novels wherein fic authors now feel they have a duty to churn out a high volume of content at an inhuman rate. and in order to meet those demands, they resort to AI. and that sucks.

I think readers and consumers of fanfiction broadly speaking also have a bad habit of feeding into this culture by demanding and expecting a high volume of content churned out at an inhuman rate, and it often prevents them from accurately assessing the quality of what they're reading, leading to a general degeneration of fic quality, feeding an audience that is getting worse at recognizing good art vs. bad art. and that sucks.

going from 1,800 fics to over 38,000 fics for a single ship in less than six months is not normal and should have been a warning sign for people that there was likely a fuckton of slop being produced and posted. and that sucks.

I don't like the excuse that some authors are using that they only used AI to beta their work. there are plenty of humans who would happily beta your fic for you. and if your reasoning for not using a human is because you wanted your work beta'd faster, I would implore you to examine WHY you feel like you are on some kind of binding schedule in a hobby space. kill the profit-driven manager in your brain and take your time making shit.

generally speaking, I believe this is a problem that is driven by both readers and writers but at the end of the day, the real driver - as ever - is capital, and its influence on art and creativity. I don't blame authors or readers for falling victim to this because the world around us sucks, but my god we all need to at least try a little harder to resist.

if you're a reader, be critical of what you're seeing and consuming. and if you're a writer, stop giving away any piece of the creative process to AI. silence the part of you that insists you must post as much as possible all the time. you do not have to capitulate to hustle culture and also your fanfiction will probably not actually make you rich and famous, even if all those comments and kudos are making you feel important.