Rynling R&D

Scandal Rocks Publishing as Debut Author Is Linked To Fake Goodread Accounts That Review Bombed Peers
https://www.themarysue.com/cait-corrain-goodreads-controversy-explained/

What’s particularly baffling and infuriating here is that Corrain seemed set up for a successful debut prior to the review bombing and deflection coming to light. Crown of Starlight had a strong marketing push behind it and a lot of buzz and positive reviews for early ARCs. Corrain has a two-book deal, the May Illumicrate pick, and by all accounts was headed toward success.

Holy shit. This is horrifying.

I think this is what happened: A debut author who had a large following from the Reylo fandom was in a Slack group with other SFF authors whose novels were also set to debut in 2024. They created "more than nine" sock puppet accounts to leave one-star reviews of the other authors' work on Goodreads. It seems that they specifically went out of their way to target women of color.

Thankfully, the author has been dropped by their agent, their publisher, and various promotional organizations, all of whom made social media announcements this afternoon. Still, the writers targeted by this author had known what was going on for months (since February), and they were told by professionals in the publishing industry to keep their heads down and not say anything. Jesus Christ. What the fuck.

What's so scary to me is that, as mentioned in the passage I excerpted, this author had everything going for them. Why would they do something like this? And, if more than a dozen people hadn't made a concentrated effort to call them out, they would have gotten away with it.

Content warning for Nazis and their bullshit.

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To be clear: Free Palestine!!
But also: Maybe this is not the slogan to use.

Eastern Mind
https://easternmind.tumblr.com/

This blog is my new favorite thing. I am here for deep dives into obscure retro games and the history of game development in Japan.

The curator's account on Twitter is interesting too:
https://twitter.com/dieubussy

Remember that time they made a Dark Souls themed cafe
https://twitter.com/ZullieTheWitch/status/1677850636006637569

Together, we will devour this 16-piece order of gods, now only $19.99 for a limited time.

Some of these dishes look legitimately interesting and tasty ngl. I'm especially keen on the "Roasted Mushroom People," not in the least because said Mushroom People absolutely wrecked my shit in Dark Souls 1.

Yesterday, Elon Musk rolled out a new policy for Twitter. There are now "daily reading limits" for different tiers of accounts. This policy was implemented without much thought. For example, opening a tweet thread counts as "reading" all of the comments on all of the tweets in the thread, meaning that it's possible to the exceed your daily limit with just one tweet. Given the giant protests in France and Israel, and well as the recent Supreme Count decisions and mass shootings in the United States, this isn't as unlikely as you might think.

Because Twitter had to send out so many error messages to users, it has essentially staged a DDS attack on itself, causing several service outages yesterday afternoon.

Based on reporting by NPR and the Washington Post, a probable cause for what's going on is: (a) Musk fired roughly half the staff at Twitter, and the team is suffering from a severe labor shortage, and (b) Twitter has lost so much money during the past year that they can no longer afford to pay their server costs.

This is obviously frustrating, but Twitter has been in severe decline since last November. Everyone threatened to move to Mastodon, but all of the accounts I've seen there are lonely and sad and have no engagement. Instagram is becoming more hostile with each passing week as it tries to mimic the endless scroll of videos on TikTok, and many creatives have abandoned the platform entirely over the past few months. TikTok continues to be the death of culture.

Meanwhile, Reddit is even more of a trashfire than usual, with the "Reddit blackout" protest against API changes going on for almost a month now. Half of the boards are dark, and the other half are unmoderated. As a result, a lot of Reddit users have migrated to Tumblr (which means that I now have all sorts of people jumping onto my posts to try to explain Legend of Zelda to me). All the while, Tumblr continues to roll out site updates that make its user interface even more difficult to navigate.

The internet continues to burn. What a great time to be an emerging creative. 🙃

Let's talk about writers and AI, including the studios' response to our proposal.
https://twitter.com/LisaCullen/status/1653430642183659521

Writers are well aware AI will play a role in filmmaking. We're hearing that producers are already asking writers to rewrite AI-sourced scripts and using AI to read scripts and generate notes (!).

On one hand, everything about this is stupid and I hate it. Hooray for unions and creative professionals organizing to make clear and reasonable demands.

On the other hand, I could not give less of a shit about what goes on in Hollywood. I honestly can't remember the last time I watched a show that didn't feel like it was written by AI. The early seasons of Breaking Bad, maybe? I've enjoyed shows I've watched since then, but I didn't feel moved or inspired by them. And don't get me started about Hollywood movies. You know what they say about capitalism: overproduction leads to waste, and this is killing big-budget media ecosystems.

The same goes for YA fiction. I went into a depression spiral late last year while trying to look for comps for my Unfound Door novel project. Everything I checked out from the library was unreadable, to such an extent that it made me hate myself as well as the entire human endeavor of storytelling.

What I want to say is: (a) almost nobody makes money from writing anyway, so (b) why not just let AI write shitty mass-market media? Let the snake devour its own tail so we can be done with it already.

Food Disgust Test
https://www.idrlabs.com/food-disgust/test.php

via Butt Praxis on Twitter:
This is ten thousand times more fun than the meyers briggs pls post yours
https://twitter.com/buttpraxis/status/1648168039290896387

My favorite question is:
"I would lose my appetite if I found a little snail in my salad."

Personally speaking I would love little snails in all of my food. That's adorable.

Anyway, this is my result: "Your food disgust is very low (7.88%)."

I mean, I used to work in the food service industry. I have seen some things. I'm not super into bloody steak; but otherwise, nothing on this test bothered me in the slightest. Like, "Would you eat an apple where a caterpillar has crawled across the peel?" Yes of course I would, may we all be so blessed. 10/10 wholesome online quiz, thank you Butt Praxis on Twitter for sharing.

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.

Yesterday evening I experienced a brief bout of harassment on Twitter. Maybe this might be interesting to talk about, so I'm including a few screenshots with commentary under the cut.

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I saw one of those posts saying there’s no Discourse™ here
https://corseque.tumblr.com/post/700567828007419904/you-all-must-never-have-been-on-twitter-and-are

You all must never have been on twitter and are imagining that the terrible drama you’ve seen on tumblr could possibly, in any world, compare to the drama that happens every hour when there’s an actual algorithm that causes drama and puts inflammatory posts directly in people’s faces without them following anyone involved, just so people click more.

Once again Corseque has the right of it.

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