Slop and dangerous too.

his nod at the end. he accepted that so fast

Why has every day of 2026 so far felt like taking Benadryl and waking up Wrong at 2:00 AM on the couch in the dark

The thing about fantasy worldbuilding is that verisimilitude and the rule of cool are not enemies. Someone who looks at a pod of flying whales and asks "what do they eat?" is not being a spoilsport – they're engaging with the premise. There are any number of much more serious objections to aerial megafauna than lack of any obvious role in a trophic web that could have been raised if they just wanted to shoot the idea down; a person who wants to know what the flying whales eat is all but explicitly yes-anding the idea. Sure, you might not have an answer at your fingertips, but acting like it's unimaginative for them to have asked is a really fucking weird way to react.

Also if you've introduced sky whales without figuring out what they eat what are you even doing?

There's simply no answer to this question that isn't interesting.

Birds? Imagine the whales sinking into a murmuration of starlings like a shoal of fish.

Bugs? Are there spells to summon whales to clear out plagues of crop eating insects?

Sky squids? Now we're talking. They might be venerated as protection against the grasping death from above. Or seen as an omen of their arrival.

Ground based life? Utterly terrifying. It would radically restructure life on the surface.

Nothing at all? Doubtless the subject of endless study to determine how they live off nothing and how people can do the same.

The best kind of worldbuilding (to me) is the kind where you take a variable and then think through the logical implications backwards and forwards. For example:

How do skywhales fly? Obviously they generate hydrogen gas through metabolic processes, which they store in a flight-bladder (backwards explanation of how skywhales fly). So yes, skywhales can burn spectacularly, like dirigibles. A skywhale crashing down on a farmhouse won’t just crush the house, it will burn down all the fields too (forwards implication of what happens if you have giant hydrogen balloon animals in your world).

Contemplating crimes….

a thing

just some of the the changes in design for the Penguin Symbol on old Penguin Paperbacks 

he did a little dance and for this crime he was imprisoned in a bubble

They liked his little dance so much they gave him a spotlight

family album

If y’all needed any more proof that AI chatbot apps are extremely predatory and intentionally exploit vulnerable people…

For context, I have been open on this account about my chatbot addiction. I developed a parasocial dependency to using Character AI and similar apps despite them being detrimental to my mental health and quality of life in general. I downloaded CAI again today to finally wipe my account and discourage myself from relapsing, and this fucking text came up while I was confirming the deletion.

The developers of these apps are not your friends, they are exploiting you. They are manipulating your emotions and fostering dependency to keep you addicted to their product. No matter how much they claim to care and be “risk aware,” they absolutely do not.

(Image ID: a screenshot of the Character AI account deletion confirmation screen. The popup reads: “…you sure about this? You’ll lose everything. Characters associated to your account, chats, the love that we shared, likes, messages, posts, and the memories we have together. This action cannot be undone!” Below this block of text is a username entry box, used to confirm account deletion.)

If anyone texted you this I’d tell you the same thing I’m gonna say now- “forget their worthless ass, they’re not worth it.”

The idea of “but everyone knows that” needs to stop.

I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.

Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!

But let me tell you a story:

I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.

One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.

At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.

I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.

Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.

The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.

And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.

So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.

So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.

By all means, let them know so they can make informed decisions, but being kind will go a lot further than attacking them for some info they might not know yet.

personal opinion but, in fandom space, ai generated works are not fan-created contents. because a soulless robot cannot be passionate about something nor can it be “a fan” of something the way human artists are

🤣🤣🤣🤣

@angreav @russalex

24/7 coffee w the boss

(may or may not be an ongoing series of this)