Rynling R&D

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.

This post contains a link to a tweet with a brief bit of context. I want to put a strong content warning for online harassment, as well as a description of a serious medical condition.

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In conclusion, my dream fix for Twitter would be to require everyone who signs up for the site to be at least 18 years old. I don't think 15-year-old children should have the power to ruin someone's life like this, and I also don't think a 15-year-old child should have the capacity to set themself up as the target of backlash harassment.

On a more personal note, this is why I'm afraid to write or publish anything remotely resembling YA fiction. It's terrifying to think that a teenage Twitter user having a bad day could destroy your entire professional career by claiming that you're "fetishizing" an aspect of your own identity.

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.

I think this has died down over the past week, but a recent trend on Tumblr has been to create movie posters and fan art for Goncharov, a film noir crime thriller that doesn’t exist. The concept is vaguely this: a heist where everyone is beautiful and dangerous and gay.

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It’s been really nice to see a beautiful outpouring of art on Tumblr since people returned to the site after the Twitter debacle, but I also get the distinct sense that a finger has curled on a monkey’s paw somewhere.

Speaking of the "zines should be indie and subversive" conversation, this tweet just blew up...

https://twitter.com/rogvaettr/status/1465335292035010566

Since there's no reason to have something like this in your algorithm, I'm going to quote the tweet here:

Just saw someone talk about a zine with a 'do not apply if you've ever created NSFW art' rule, and I want you to know that you people have completely appropriated and pissed on what zines are supposed to be, which is 1000% subversive, transformative, makes-society-flinch shit.

I know from inside information (that came to me in a very roundabout way via the con programming server of an anime convention) that what actually happened was this: An artist applied with a portfolio comprised entirely of explicit cp. I saw some of the images, which are beyond debate and extremely disturbing. When it became clear that some of the artist's friends were planning on sending similar portfolios, the mods made an announcement that they wouldn't be considering portfolios that included nsfw material. Which is fair, I think.

Anyway, I think people are forgetting that oldschool punk zines were and continue to be extremely exclusive. In fact, a lot of famous punk and ska songs from the 1990s are complaints about people being excluded from the scene because they're "not punk enough." Speaking from personal experience, just last year the South Street Art Mart in Philadelphia declined to stock my "transformative, makes-society-flinch" queer horror zines for basically the same reason. (Heaven forbid your zine covers are printed with full bleed lol.)

My own view of the matter is that, if you run a zine, you can include or exclude anyone you want. Like, it's your zine. If someone doesn't like it they can make their own zine. Anyone can make a zine. That's what's so nice about the medium honestly.

I've been lazy about this recently, but for years I posted and reblogged things on Tumblr at regularly scheduled intervals throughout the day. My account on Tumblr exists so that I can scroll through the front page of my own blog when I'm bored or stressed out. My main criteria for what I reblog when is therefore the creation of eye-pleasing color coordination on the vertically-scrolling column, but there are some loose themes. No Ganondorf before 9:00pm, for example.

Because people are petty and awful, I would generally lose one or two followers almost every time I reblogged art that wasn't 100% professional and polished. Around 3:00pm EST was (and probably still is) a general deadzone on Tumblr, so I took advantage of that to reblog the work of emerging artists with supportive comments in the tags.

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So this is why I try not to interact with the posts of anyone who has an "immature" art style. I also don't know how old anyone is on AO3, which is one of the main reasons I started to move away from that site as well.

I just needed to get that off my chest so I can get over it and move on, because damn this nonsense has been living in my head rent-free for the past five years.

On "Fandom Moms"
https://out-there-on-the-maroon.tumblr.com/post/620585756682027009/fandom-mom-used-to-a-jokey-affectionate-term-for
Oh gosh yes. Wow.

For me, as a queer nonbinary person, I was really only able to do things that made me happy once I had a stable source of income. I got kicked out of high school and then kicked out of home for being gay a few months after I turned sixteen, and the following twelve or thirteen years were a constant struggle just to survive. I couldn't watch television or play video games because I had to work all the time to pay rent while putting myself through grad school on a fellowship that was generous but not quite enough to live on. If I had time to "have fun," it was time I needed to spend networking by attending various parties and other social events. I couldn't afford to go to conventions, and I certainly didn't have energy to devote to developing my skills at creative writing and visual art.

I was 27 or 28 before I had enough breathing room to even think about doing something that wasn't work, and getting involved in fandom felt (at the time) like one of the best things that had ever happened to me, not in the least because I didn't have to pretend to be a serious adult.

So when I was accused of being a creepy older person (when I was 32, which I maintain isn't actually that old, not that it matters) for existing in a fandom space that was shared by people of various ages, it precipitated an incredible jolt of anxiety, like, what if it actually is Too Late for me to enjoy myself and follow my dreams? I had been getting this message from various places for my entire life - even when I was in college! - and it was a serious blow to suddenly start getting it from a previously supportive fandom community as well.

Also:


I've also experienced this. I've conscientiously not disclosed my gender and used they/them pronouns since I got on Tumblr, but I've noticed that people won't hesitate to use female designations if they decide they don't like me.

I'm so relieved that this culture is fading... or has at least moved to some terrible far corner of Twitter.

I'm not going to link to this post, but I want to preserve it. Since the conventional wisdom is "don't feed the trolls," it's rare that anyone has the courage to be frank about online harassment.

What I've personally experienced was nowhere near this level, but I don't think Corseque is rounding up these numbers. When people talk about online harassment, they're not talking about one random asshole sending a mean anonymous message. Rather, once people start to dogpile you on social media, dealing with it becomes your entire life until that particular group gets bored and moves on.

I should probably mention that I'm a huge fan of this writer and artist. I don't care about Star Wars, and I don't know anything about Dragon Age, but I always enjoy reading Corseque's essays. In fact, my real and honest goal as a writer is to create the sort of story that Corseque would appreciate and write meta about.

- If someone sends you one or more messages saying that they will hurt you or encouraging you to hurt yourself, do not respond in any way. Screencap the messages, report the person, and then block them. Anyone who resorts to this type of harassment isn’t interested in communication, and any action you take to publicly address this behavior will be used as ammunition against you. It can be frustrating to allow this person (or group of people) to influence your behavior, but the best course of action is to remove yourself from the conflict by whatever means necessary, which may include switching platforms or temporarily going silent.

- If someone watches this happening to you and decides to remain friendly with the person (or people) who are engaging in this behavior, they are not your friend. It is in your best interests to minimize engagement with anyone who encourages or tolerates harassment, so unfollow or block them as necessary, and don’t respond to them if they immediately contact you to ask what happened. If someone who inadvertently becomes involved in a conflict really is your friend, they will find a way to make this clear, but you have to give yourself a sense of distance from the situation and then allow them to take the first step toward repairing the friendship.

- It’s important to recognize that losing a friend hurts, as does losing a community. Take your grief seriously, and give yourself time to be angry, mourn your loss, and recover.

- There is no value in wondering what you did to deserve harassment or whether you deserve it. If someone has sent you messages encouraging harm against you, there could be any number of reasons (from that person’s mental illness to the general culture of that particular platform), but those reasons have nothing to do with you.

To summarize: Privately document and report harassment but do not publicly acknowledge it in any way. Do not engage with the conflict and step away from the fandom or platform if necessary. The only thing that will extinguish the fire is a lack of fuel, and there’s no need to get burned in the process.

This past August I discovered a Tumblr blog called Free To Fanfic after someone reblogged a viral post making fun of the author. Basically, some immature assclown had taken a screencap of her "How to Deal with Fandom Antis" FAQ page and captioned it with "GO OUTSIDE," the joke being that anyone who cares that much about online fan cultures should probably get a life. I remember seeing that post and being like, "WHERE'S THE LINK OP."

My main motivation for trying to process the weirdness I've experienced on Tumblr has been an attempt to figure out some sort of pattern. Like, why were all of these randos sending hatemail to a Zelda blog that does nothing but reblog cute fanart five times a day and occasionally post silly fandom shitposts over the weekend? If it were just one or two people, I'd assume that they were going through a rough patch in their lives and taking their anger out on a safe target, but the problem was pervasive. To give a specific example that requires no context or explanation, I got about two dozen scary messages accusing me of "animal abuse" for posting a commissioned marker drawing of Wind Waker Ganondorf holding a pig. What exactly was going on there? Like, this is definitely something bigger than me and my stupid blog.

I put up with this sort of thing for years, but my breaking point was being called a pedophile. I had seen posts like "Don't interact with me if you're a pedophile!" circulating within the Zelda fandom since around April 2018, and I innocently assumed that some drama had gone down on a ship tag. When I started to get hatemail calling me a pedophile for being a fan of Ganondorf, though, I was like, "...but that doesn't even make sense."

Because I had been staying in my lane and doing nothing more than reblogging cute fan art within the Zelda fandom, I had no idea that "pedophile" had become a codeword on Tumblr for "someone who likes a character or ship I don't like." The logistical maneuvering necessary to get from "thinks an older adult fictional character is attractive" to "is therefore a pedophile" was beyond me, and the situation got even stranger when people in my own small subfandom began to use that sort of hyperbolic language.

Discovering the Free To Fanfic blog was a godsend. What the person writing this blog has managed to do is to connect the threads of the various types of bullying masquerading as "social justice" on Tumblr. I hadn't been able to do this myself because most of the sources of this bullying lay in other fandoms (the Voltron fandom seems to be one of the primary sites). When the person behind Free To Fanfic put everything together, however, it suddenly made sense. For example, why was I randomly getting so much hatemail from femslash blogs and "Lesbian [Character Name]" blogs? Perhaps because exclusionary radical feminists have a long history of using the language of social justice to attack marginalized groups and people who are queer in "the wrong way," thus using ingrained prejudice to recruit people by making their own message seem more righteous. There's a lot going on here, obviously, but the Free To Fanfic blog explains it better than I ever could.

In any case, what bothers me about the trend of casually throwing around accusations of "pedophilia" is that there really are creepy people (like RationalWiki Editors) online, and creating a community in which a "pedophile" is "someone who likes a problematic ship" runs counter to the legitimately worthwhile goal of helping the younger (and not-so-young) members of the community recognize the warning signs of these creeps.

...and honestly, I can't help but wonder if some of the "fandom moms" who claim to be "protecting the children" aren't in fact borderline creeps themselves, especially in their acknowledgement of knowing the exact ages of the "children" for whom they're drawing and writing porn. I mean, it's a lot creepier for an adult to create smut custom-tailored to the interests of someone they know is fifteen than it is for an adult to reblog, like, a picture of sexy Ganondorf petting a cat or something. I'm just saying.