@barbex
writing, reading, gaming, fanfic. occasional raging. not acting my age since before the internet. angry engineer. feminist. german she\her. 🔗 AO3/barbex, on tumblr: the960writers, the-wip-project, barbex, on threads: @barbarabecc
Star Trek Deep Space Nine scene. A PADD is shown up close held by a pair of hands. (Kind of looks like an old palm pilot and if you're not old this will mean nothing to you) The beautiful LCARS user interface is displaying the text, "GO AWAY."
I would like to congratulate Grammarly’s lawyers for belatedly realizing their shitty AI product was gonna get them class-action yeeted into the sun.
I would also like to encourage Grammerly to eat shit forever and ever amen.
I get almost as many comments about how ugly or fat I am on my workout posts as I did on my posts before I started lifting. I’m not asking for sympathy. I just want to remind Black women that the point isn’t if we are pretty or skinny or not. The point is they want us to not exist.🙄
Once on a panel for a professional conference, someone asked me if technology gives me hope for access.
I said let’s get ramps on every building first, and the tech bro manager was PISSED. People want to believe that they invented the answer to systemic issues…without understanding the issues.
A cartoon by Ron Cobb (1975), showing a shadow of US B-52 bomber above cratered landscape. Two people who look like Vietnamese peasants look up; one says “they’re having problems with their economy again.”
This is from 1975.
Quite a few good companies providing useful services shot themselves in the dick by shoving AI into them.
British politics, more than any other, has an unrivalled streak of paternalism where marginalized people are easily dehumanized as spoilt children who must be sternly punished and managed and whipped into shape.
Our advocacy is simply seen as as tantrums.
we remain firmly on track for 'republican president leaves the country an omnishambles, next democratic president is punished for not cleaning it up fast enough'
“He does what?”
“He likes to guess their shoe size and orders it for them.”
“And they don’t fit?”
“No, he’s comically wrong. Like, every time.”
“And they wear them anyway?”
“Yeah. See, that’s how you know how sycophantic they are. It’s symbolism.”
(beat)
“Eh. We can’t do that. It’s too on the nose.”
...it's just the grinding, unrelenting stupidity of the details of this administration that get to you.
I talked to dozens of experts in government, academia, cybersecurity, and industry about exactly this scenario last year and not only did not one of them think I was being alarmist, many brought it up unprompted and many said there was zero chance it hadn’t already happened
So basically the new Human Authored scheme doesn't have any verification at all. It's 100% honour based. As long as you're an SoA member you can assert that your work wasn't generated by LLM / AI and put a logo on it.
AKA we're taking people's word that they aren't dishonest.
defending art's right to exist, especially nsfw art, inherenetly involves you having to allow art you don't like or even think is abhorrent or reprehensible to exist. you do not have to pretend to like it or engage with it, but you need to let it exist. you give fascists an inch they take a mile.
I finally lost my shit about so-called AIs, LLMs, enshittification & everything fucking evil that @officialgrammarly.bsky.social is doing. I'm fucking furious, and not just about what 1 company has done. An open letter to Grammarly & the rest of the LLM hype machine www.moryan.com/an-open-lett...
I do kind of wonder if part of the push for the idea that highly compressed AI writing is a better replacement for human writing is that a large number of people are functionally illiterate and don’t understand nuance, figurative language, or any of of the flourishes that make writing creative.
This is just fucking appalling on every level. Like, what a violation.
None of them can talk coherently about strategy or goals but they are completely in sync in all their macho posturing because that is all they’re really focused on. Everything else is just whatever limply offered fiction is convenient to them at the time.
It's looking increasingly like these guys thought that if they could wreak more death and destruction than the other side then they would be respected as strong powerful men and they would "win" and that would make them big important heroes. Very possibly they had no rationale deeper than that.
Must read: xAI is poisoning Mississippi, captured via thermal imaging.
There is no hope for the large conglomerates, but I really hope all the people who listened to the bullshit about how the continued flow of fossil fuels into this country was way more dependable than *checks notes* the sun rising every day take note.
Solidarity against AI theft means everyone. You can't campaign for 'don't use the word plagiariser' while using the image plagiariser. @societyofauthors.bsky.social
i say this to my students a lot and am always surprised when they find it discouraging rather than exciting. no one cares as much as you do whether you write that book! you can write it however you want!
No one cares what a comic book writer thinks but if we all stand up and say this is wrong, we have seen that elections can be won, and a lot of people are fed up with Transphobes.
So please, let’s do that and not just shrug this off as another shitty thing in a long parade of shitty things.
5/
Three different Trans friends, all creatives, productive, well-loved people with years in our communities told me they feel they have no choice but to leave the USA for their safety.
They have to start again because of bigot scum, the worst people in our country.
2/
No, payment for the vast majority of writers has always been low and even the most celebrated authors of the past century spent a good deal of time being broke as fuck. We have a unique set of circumstances these days driving down wages, but there was never a time when most writers did well.
saw somebody suggesting that women (and people treated like women) are less sexual/need more emotional connection to get turned on and listen: being reduced to body parts/sex is something that happens on the street every day, in the magazines, on tv, in politics. maybe we just want something fresh 👍
If you’re asking for recommendations of spicy books featuring ICE agents, maybe you need to take a good look at yourself, you know?
A graphic captioned Trans Femme Leads. Little Fish by Casey Plett. Little Blue Encyclopedia by Hazel Jane Plante. Letters for My Sisters edited by Andrea James and Deanne Thornton. For Today I am a boy by Kim Fu. Trans Galactic Bike Ride edited by Lydia Rogue. Dreadnought by April Daniels. The Companion by EE Ottoman. In the Valley, A Shadow by Samantha Tano. Finding my Name by Estelle Grant.
A graphic captioned Trans Femme Leads. Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin. The Seep by Chana Porter. Disintegrate Dissociate by Arielle Twist. Reverse Tomboy by Auto Anon. Queen of Faces by Petra Lord. Nameless Woman An Anthology of Fiction by Trans Women of Color edited by Ellyn Pena, Jamie Berrout, and Venus Selenite. Scatter by Molly J. Bragg. The Hatchling by Vyria Durav. Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki.
A graphic captioned Trans Femme Leads. Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyen. Once Upon a Punk Show by Katie Lyn Forrest. Alters by Paul Jenkins and Leila Leiz. Wild Geese by Soula Emmanuel. As Old as Thyme by Alix Nicoud. Infect by Torrey Peters. The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang. Succulent Trans-Inclusive Sapphic Erotic Comics edited by Niki Smith, Ollie Hicks and Tab Kimpton. Best Woman by Rose Dommu.
A graphic captioned Trans Femme Leads. Mother Maiden Crone edited by Gwen Benaway. Brooms by Jasmine Walls and Teo Duvall. Fierce Femmes and Notorius Liars by Kai Cheng Thom. For the Love of April French by Penny Almes. Where the Stars are by Micah Flowers. Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor. I Hope we Choose Love by Kai Cheng Thom. The Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach. The Library Thief by Kuchenga Shenje.
Women, am I right? 🏳️⚧️✨️
A collection of books with trans women or transfemme leads, not all authors may be transfemme but most are. (1/2)
"Grammarly curated a list of real people, gave its models free rein to hallucinate plausible-sounding advice on their behalf, and put it all behind a subscription. That's a deliberate choice to monetize the identities of real people without involving them, and it sucks." @caseynewton.bsky.social