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Some Things I Like and Even Reblog: FANDOM, SO MUCH FANDOM (Guardian (Zhen Hun), Granting You a Dreamlike Life, The Lost Tomb Reboot, ...let's just say "all things Zhu Yilong" and call it a day, yeah? XD, Dao Mu Bi Ji/The Lost Tomb/Grave Robbers' Chronicles, The Untamed (MDZS), Les Miserables, Star Wars, Rocketman/Elton John, Maze Runner, and many other fandoms, i.e., The Umbrella Academy, Teen Wolf, Harry Potter, Star Trek: TOS, TNG, DS9, AOS, Leverage, Being Human UK, anime, nostalgia fandoms, SO MANY MORE), MUSICALS (Hair, BoM, Newsies, so many Broadway and West End actors), SOCIAL JUSTICE THINGS (antisemitism, rape culture, misogyny, feminism, education, racism, sexuality, gender), CUTE ANIMALS, SCIENCE THINGS, PRETTY NATURE THINGS, AUTUMN THINGS, SO MUCH RANDOM... really, my blog is a mess. O_o;;;
OK, so I figured it was about time I started one of these, especially given the fact that my old tag post is so outdated, it’s not even funny. This is going to be a work in progress because I have a LOT of content to sort through and I will probably start with just linking the big tags, but… we have to start somewhere, I guess? ^_^
(Note: These are also going to be in backwards chronological order from newest to oldest, and there are going to be repeat posts, especially in the parts that are split by fandom, because those are search links, not tags.)
(Note #2: I have never been able to figure out how to make tumblr links work on mobile. None of these do. Sorry. :P If you want to use any of the links in the masterpost on mobile, just open them (or the master post) in a mobile browser; then they should work just fine.)
And behind a cut for the fandom specific stuff, I think. ^_^
AO3 has recently seen a rise in guest spambot comments making false accusations about work creators or other users. For example, they may claim that a particular user is discriminating against minorities, trying to hide the fact that they use AI, or are at risk of having their works stolen or deleted.
These comments often copy existing AO3 usernames in order to make their accusations seem more legitimate. They may also try to lure people onto other platforms (similar to the art commission scam), or use fake links that actually lead to pornographic images.
As always, we recommend that you do not click on any suspicious links or give your contact information to scammers. Instead, simply mark the comments as spam or report them so that the Policy & Abuse committee can remove comments left by these spambots.
Learn how to recognize them and what to do below the cut!
As of December 2025, bots have also left guest comments harassing users by:
threatening to report you/your fic to the authorities or your employers
alleging security concerns like your email being compromised or spyware on your computer
claiming that they know your address and are going to visit you at your house
saying that you will die alone and unemployed over the holidays
What these bots claim is not true. These accusations do not mean your work will be deleted or that your accounts are insecure. We recommend that you mark these comments as spam following the instructions in our previous post.
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I got a new one of these that I’ve never seen before:
I have to assume that this is a bot scanning for keywords, because I think the key word it caught was a bathing partition. 🙄
That’s it, everyone! This spam bot has laid down the law! No more partition screens when bathing! Just let it all hang out, no matter who’s in the room!
I mean… Really.
If the beliefs in that comment are your goal… This is absolutely not the way to go about it.
Something that I get chills about is the fact that the oldest story told made by the oldest civilization opens with “In those days, in those distant days, in those ancient nights.”
This confirms that there is a civilization older than the Sumerians that we have yet to find
Some people get existential dread from this
Me? I think it’s fucking awesome it shows just how much of this world we have yet to discover and that is just fascinating
@makaeru peer review cos this made me check when the Sumerians happened and I forget how recent history is for every other continent. 7000 - 8000 years ago just isn’t that long when you’re in Australia, and the amount of detailed history we have access to here is wonderful and should be recognised more internationally
And a quote I picked out from a longer interview with an Aboriginal local elder about the area where he touched on the history
Source (the rest of the interview is really interesting and all transcribed, have a look if you’re curious)
This is part of my Ancient Civilizations class that I teach, which does a whole week about Australia and the Torres Strait Islands because I was sick of never seeing them represented in USAmerican history contexts. With the help of @micewithknives and @acearchaeologist I’ve learned so many incredible things about Australia’s past and it’s been incredibly rewarding to share them with students.
My favorite fact about Aboriginal oral history is the fact that we pretty recently discovered that the Aboriginal myth of the 7 Sisters, an origin story for the Pleiades star cluster, accurately reflects a point TEN THOUSAND YEARS AGO when two stars in the constellation got close enough together to no longer be distinguishable by the naked eye.
The story? 6 sisters running from something that took their 7th sister.
as a gilgar gunditj woman, i was not expecting to see my culture on my dash.
thank you for spreading our words and treating our culture with respect.
Boosting signal.
Echoes from the ancient human past, wonderful.
Their oral history also contains stories about hunting prehistoric megafauna too. Native Australians are the oldest existing culture on earth, which is even more amazing considering how hard the british tried to wipe it out.
Budji Bim volcano.
I actually looked up the story of The Seven Sisters / Pleiades on Wikipedia, the other day, ‘cause I woke up from a dream that mentioned how ancient that story was. And I wanted to check how much of that was invented in-dream, and how much I was remembering something I learned while I was awake.
According to that article, some astronomers think that story is not ten thousand years old; they believe it to be a Hundred Thousand years old.
oxford was built and operational as a college before the rise of the mayans and cleopatra lived in a time nearer to pizza hut’s invention than to the pyramids being built
I need a noncomprehensive history book that covers Known World History in time periods, like “in this century, all this shit was happening concurrently” and not just all spread out so I have to piece it together like some unpaid uneducated scholar
I grew up with this book, which is frickin’ enormous, and it was endlessly fascinating to young me to pour over the side by side comparison of events taking place concurrently under different headings and in different parts of the world.
Or if you want something you can put on your wall, there’s this:
oxford was built and operational as a college before the rise of the mayans and cleopatra lived in a time nearer to pizza hut’s invention than to the pyramids being built
I need a noncomprehensive history book that covers Known World History in time periods, like “in this century, all this shit was happening concurrently” and not just all spread out so I have to piece it together like some unpaid uneducated scholar
I grew up with this book, which is frickin’ enormous, and it was endlessly fascinating to young me to pour over the side by side comparison of events taking place concurrently under different headings and in different parts of the world.
Or if you want something you can put on your wall, there’s this:
HI FIXA! :D I've been waiting for a chance since this post For the askgame: I wish you'd write a fic where Wu Xie is doing research on western sunken treasure and finds a picture of Xiaoge on the titanic. (It may or may not include other evidence, such as art of someone painted like one of those french- huh, anyway...)
Theoretical excerpt: (Wu Xie is looking for a particular object which could be a puzzle piece in a more complex investigation.)
Antiques this modern were not my forte to begin with and to make matters worse this clock was a Swiss build - modern AND Western, fully out of my field of expertise.
Thankfully the relative abundance of primary sources at least somewhat made up for it. The clock in question was supposedly brought on board and installed on the Titanic, which if true, put it completely out of my reach and would cut off this lead in my investigation, but I needed to know this for sure, confirm it without a shadow of a doubt before I was ready to let it go.
…Which was why I spent four days in a row holed up in my room, buried under a pile of photos, etchings and drawings I amassed over the last couple of months, all depicting life on board the Titanic, carefully examining the background of every last one of them.
I never found the clock, but I did find something much more interesting and confusing.
As I was leafing through the pictures, all focused on interior design, I found a drawing of a young man. Since it had no defined background I almost tossed it aside, but something made me pause and take a closer look.
And once I did I could not tear my eyes away.
There was no mistaking of that face, of those eyes.
It was Pokerface. It had to be, unless he had a twin brother he forgot about and whom even Zhang Haike failed to mention. He was depicted reclining on a sofa, dress shirt half unbuttoned, looking bored and stoic as ever.
I have no idea how long I must have sat there, blinking in sheer confusion, the questions in my head melting together in a puddle of static noise.
Should I ask him about it? Would showing him the picture jog a memory?
You might have seen some scary headlines going around about Wikipedia partnering with AI companies. A lot of people are upset at this without really understanding what it is or means. Tech writer Molly White wrote a great explanation on bluesky about the whole thing and I wanted to share it before the wrong story spreads too far.
Sure. AI companies have ALWAYS been training their models on Wikipedia content, which under the free and open access model is available to anyone — including AI companies. Agreements like these require AI companies to limit and offset the strain they place on Wikimedia infrastructure.
I think people are erroneously interpreting the headline to mean that the Wikimedia Foundation is embracing AI for purposes like generating encyclopedia content, or are providing AI companies with more training data than they were already scraping.
Neither is true. The first isn’t even really possible without community buy-in, and so far the English Wikipedia community has been extremely resistant to AI or AI-assisted editing. As for the latter, all Wikimedia content has always been free, and was already widely used for AI training.
And FWIW these programs have been in place since 2021. While the WMF just announced new participants, I’m not sure why some of these articles suggest that the program is new, or that this signals that the WMF is “embracing AI”
Tl;dr AI has always been heavily dependent on Wikipedia. That’s part of being open source and will not change. This program allows Wikimedia to be compensated for AI using their content; it’s a beneficial arrangement for Wikipedia and, by extension, for its users.
So I’ve got this friend whose nervous because she’s trans and dating this guy who she hasn’t told yet because they’ve only been on a two dates. For this story let’s call the friend Jane and the guy she was dating Jason. Happy ending don’t worry.
So I tell Jane to bring her boy over to a bbq I’m having and she can tell him she’s trans at my place surrounded by queer and trans people who love her and will support her if he ends up being awful.
She waits till the end of the bbq to tell him the news, by which point the rest of us have learned that Jason is a kind, friendly, empathetic, hard working, dummy. So we sit down, all of us a little worried about this gym bro’s reaction when she tells him she’s trans, and that she understands if he doesn’t want to keep dating her it’s no big deal.
He’s baffled, so we explain what trans is, and after the disclosure that she hasn’t had bottom surgery yet… “Oh you have a dick?” “… yeah.” He look’s around at the room full of people with baited breath, his clearly a little afraid girl friend says “Oooohhhh! I get it! You think- don’t worry Babe! Watch this!”
And ya’ll this man jumps up, runs into the kitchen and returns with one of the bratwurst we had for grilling and proceeds to tilt his head back, put it down his throat, hold it in his mouth for a moment, and spit it up without even a whisper of a gag and then looks around at the group absolutely beaming with pride.
My mans saw his worried girlfriend and her support network and thought to him self “Oh they don’t think I can please my girl but I’ll show them!”
Do you ever wonder what on earth possesses people like this?
Like, to be clear, I do not mean that as an insult. I mean this woman put together like at least three completely different, unrelated forms of craftwork, all three of which require significant amounts of time to master, and went “yeah I’m just gonna throw these in a blender now” and then this came out. Like. You understand how insane it is to do just mirrorwork? To do just color-tinting? To do just bas-relief sculpture? And none of that touches on the preparatory sketching or the finishing resin or the glitter.
Like. I want to know how this woman thinks. How did she come up with this. What made her want to do this. Where she got this idea. I can’t imagine being able to think in enough dimensions to do this successfully with a shape as simple as an apple, much less fur or feathers or all those tiny flower ruffles. Hell, I can’t imagine being able to think in enough dimensions to do it unsuccessfully.
❄️ Zhang Qiling’s and Wu Xie’s birthday illustrations from the ARPG mobile game “Daomu Biji: The Journey Begins” — 《盗墓笔记：启程》 (officially licensed by Nanpai Sanshu), released in March and November 2025
