Rynling R&D

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These are the three lessons I should have learned:

(1) Upsetting content is none of your business.
(2) Very few people “accidentally” post bigotry.
(3) Some people are just unhinged and unpleasant.

In conclusion, the Block button is your friend. 💖

Quillbot AI Detector
https://quillbot.com/ai-content-detector

I've found that AI detectors tend to be hit or miss, but this one seems to work well. What I especially appreciate about the way it works is that it's able to detect text that was generated by AI and then altered, either by hand or by another AI program.

I learned about this through discourse in the Dragon Age fandom, by the way. Apparently, you can now enter a short prompt into Gemini with the name of a character or ship, and the AI can match this keyword not only with the fandom, but also with its specific writing tropes.

If you're curious about the wank, people have been arguing about whether it's possible to write a 400k-word novel in a month. What this ridiculous argument underlines is the fact that there is a substantial (and passionate) audience for novels written by AI. This is dystopian, and I hate it.

Here's an unannotated list of what the QAnon and Proship DNI movements have in common:

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These are all aspects of cult mentality, but I think the ways they manifest in these two loosely defined groups are specific to 2015-2025 internet culture. Annotation is necessary, but I wanted to go ahead and get the basics down.

I saw (this post) on Tumblr...

stories of people suffering for a long time and then healing in their 30s or 40s or 60s or something are the most important thing in the world and thinking about them is like wrapping my heart in a warm sheet

...and damn if it didn't resonate with me. I wasn't "suffering" in my teens and twenties as much as I was "desperately poor," and it's only when I was around 27 or 28 that I actually managed to achieve enough financial stability not to have to spend every spare moment working garbage jobs for pitiful amounts of money. It was only once I had that freedom that I was able to write and draw and play video games.

Ten years later, I realize that you're not actually that old in your late twenties, but there were a lot of people on Tumblr who were surprisingly mean to me at the time. Some of it was the general antifandom nonsense in the water during the 2010s, but some of it was personal, like accusations that I specifically was a sad and gross person for being on Tumblr at thirty years old. And that's a shame. The expectation that "adults" will spend all their time working (or caring for children) is horrible and depressing; and also, there's so much joy and creative energy that comes with the stability and perspective and accumulated experiences that are gained with age.

If I had to guess, I think that's probably why I write so many stories about people finding the courage to start the second act of their lives. They're good stories, and we need more of them.

Before I get into the case studies, this is a bit of contextualization. There's more to say, of course, but I think ten short paragraphs (about six to seven minutes of presentation time) is enough. Also, if you think I'm overemphasizing the impact of Homestuck, allow me to offer the alternative possibility that the Gen X crowd who studies live-action television fandom doesn't emphasize its impact enough. Okay, here goes:

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I need there to be an 18+ Final Fantasy server on Discord for writers and artists.

Not so anyone can do anything lewd. Rather, it would be nice to have a chill place to drop in and hang out and talk about video games where people can say "fuck" and discuss the plot of games that came out more than ten years ago without having to worry about spoilers.

There are two really good servers for Zelda artists (Zelda Creators and Linktober), but they're both purposely designed to be accommodating to children (under the age of thirteen). This is cool, but it's also not the type of space where I feel super comfortable.

Unfortunately I am terminally offline. I only check Discord once every three or four days, and then only for maybe five to ten minutes at a time. I can't create or maintain a server on Discord myself. The only way to be a part of a Final Fantasy community like this is to apply to zines and hope I get accepted.

So I guess my resolution for 2024 is to build a Final Fantasy portfolio and apply to Final Fantasy zines. My dream is for there to be a Final Fantasy VI zine one day, so that's what I'm going to focus on creating the perfect portfolio for. By this I mean that I am giving myself permission to write all the bizarre niche FFVI fic I always wanted to. I never wrote these stories because there is no audience, but that's okay; the audience is me.

I'm thinking about applying to Blood Moon Rising, a Legend of Zelda horror zine (on Twitter here). I've been feeling very shy and anxious about my writing recently and sort of want to disappear into a hole, so I'm not sure if I'll actually apply, but I put together some pitches.

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TLDR: I ship Calip and Tauro. The two of them are my ideal m/m dynamic; and, after doing the Thunderhead Isles quest to enter the fifth dungeon, I'm 99% certain that Tauro is canonically supposed to be in love with Calip (who unfortunately only cares about research). These two characters are so precious to me that I would gladly commission fanfic of them, but I'm afraid that I'm probably one of the only people in the Legend of Zelda fandom who can properly write "I would prefer for you to call me Dr." Calip. Bless his heart.

I decided to stop being a whiny little malcontent and actually do something productive, so I sent an email to one of the curators of The Rec Center, a lowkey weekly email newsletter collecting fandom news and interesting fan art. This is what I wrote:

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I actually think every artist who draws green-skinned Ganondorf in This Year of Our Lord 2023 needs to spend a solid fifteen minutes in time-out, but I'm trying to be more tolerant of accidental antisemitism and Islamophobia. It's just really in the water these days, and there isn't a lot of education concerning where it comes from or how it manifests. In the end, the most important thing is for everybody to be chill and not send death threats over fictional characters.

Must-know for Japanese fandom: the meaning of "proship" and the concept of "proshippers" in Western fandom
https://note.com/orangiah/n/n437e262ce2ce

I've been in my current fandom for almost one year ― I've seen artists who have quit drawing due to harassment for being proshippers, and I know several people who are currently still being harassed. This is not only a problem for fandoms of foreign media ― now that Japanese anime and games are so commonly consumed abroad, it can easily happen to anyone at any time. To antis, it doesn't matter if you are a Japanese person enjoying a Japanese work.

This is a translation of a short essay written by a Japanese artist who draws cute fan art of the video game Omori. It's a good, short, and interesting read that accurately outlines the process of getting harassed in fandom, as well as what to do about it. Essentially: don't engage, and block antis on sight.

In terms of how the harassment happens, it works like this: A concern troll will DM you, saying that you're following the wrong person, or that you used the wrong ship tag, or that you aren't using the right words in your bio. You, sweet summer child that you are, will have a conversation with them. At the end of the conversation, you will block them, but they will already have all the screenshots they need to accuse you of whatever they want. Because you've blocked them, you won't see how they're using these screenshots, and then suddenly you're being harassed by waves of people who seem to be coming out of nowhere.

It's horrifying, and I hate that this is happening to Japanese artists too.

“Anthro Bowser in Leather Pants” is the first story I posted on AO3 when I joined back in 2012. I was sitting in a friend’s apartment, and we had way too much to drink, and I told her that I had a crush on Godzilla.

These days, “having a crush on Godzilla” has become almost normcore, but at the time we both thought this was very, very silly. My friend was like, How would having sex with Godzilla even work, and I was like, He’d have to be Anthro Godzilla, and she was like, Do you mean Bowser from Super Mario. I remember that we laughed until we were literally crying, but then I made a point of waking up bright and early the next morning (with no hangover, isn’t it great to be young) in order to write “Anthro Bowser in Leather Pants.”

And let me tell you. I don’t get kudos on that story every day, or even most days, but it sure keeps getting kudos more than ten years later.

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