A painting process.

This is by the same guy who draws horses in his funky style (videos here and here)

[eng by me]

About the AO3 "No Guest Comments for a while" warning

If you're not following any of AO3's social media accounts you might be in the dark as to what kind of "spam comments" have engendered this banner at the top of the site:

These spam comments have been posted about a great deal on the AO3 subreddit for the past couple of days. Initially they comprised a bunch of guest (logged out users) bot comments that insulted authors by suggesting they were using AI and not writing their own fics. Some examples, from the subreddit:

But it then escalated to outright graphic porn images and gifs being posted in comments, again by logged out 'Guest' accounts. Obviously, I'm not going to give examples of those, but between these two bot infestations, AO3 has clearly decided to act and has temporarily closed the ability to post comments for users who are not logged in with an AO3 account.

Unfortunately, this means that genuine readers who don't have an AO3 account won't be able to leave comments on fics that they enjoy.

If you are a genuine reader who doesn't yet have an AO3 account, I strongly suggest getting yourself on the waiting list for one. More and more AO3 authors are now locking their fics down to registered users only - either due to these bot comments or concerns about AI scraping their work - which means you're probably missing out on a lot of great stuff.

Hopefully guest commenting will be enabled again at some point soon, but I suggest not waiting until then. Get yourself on that list.

Wait times are going to be longer than usual at the moment, due to the current Wattpad purge [info on Fanlore | Wattpad subreddit thread], but if you're in line, then your invite will come through eventually.

Update: There's now a Megathread about this on the AO3 subreddit.

So today I got a rather unkind comment on AO3 (one could call it hate), but I believe it to be a bot for several reasons:

I'm curious, did anyone else get comments like this? Let me know.

And to those who have gotten rude comments and are now worried/upset: Maybe it was just a bot too. Either way: You're awesome for putting your writing out there for others to enjoy and you don't deserve to get rude comments for it. If you want feel free to message me to compare cases and discuss details :)

For comparison, this is the one I received.

Here are some more examples fellow writers allowed me to share:

As you can see, these comments all the match the description above. Also they seem to be weirdly obsessed with AI and this entire operation may be an attempt to promote writing AI - which, if true, is disgusting on several levels.

(If any of the people with the AO3 usernames in question happen to see this: Don't worry, we're all sure it wasn't you, no hard feelings and sorry that a bot stole your name for hate comments. The names are only shown as proof that they are indeed stolen)

Oh I was just wondering why I got a weird comment today!

This is mine. Looking at the pattern, it is definitely a bot. Stealing usernames and posting as guests under that.

I was upset for a hot minute, replied asking what did they mean... Turns out I shouldn't have bothered.

Thank you for the addition! This certainly paints a picture - they're claiming that the work of actual human authors is subpar (the toddler comment on mine and the human comment on yours) and/or bring up AI.

Sorry this happened and I hope you're feeling better now💕 personally, I do believe this work was written by a human being and a lovely too!🫂💗

Looks like it's time for Round Two of Ao3 Bots Who Fling AI Insults!

If this bugs you, you can lock all your fics at once. It keeps the bots at bay, but only registered users can see your fics.

If you don't wish to lock your fics, you could enable comment moderation, restrict comments to registered users only, or restrict comments altogether.

Cidolfus Telamon

saw a poll about dry/humid heat and like OBVIOUSLY everyone preferred dry heat but. would love to know what everyone considers to be “too hot”

me personally it’s a hard cutoff at 75°F. don’t need anything more than that thank you 🫶🫶🫶

stupid fahrenheit temperatures screwing with my results...

Im curious.

Most Huggable Job Trainer (Healer)

By popular request, I have separated out A-Ruhn-Senna and Raya-O-Senna, even though that means that almost half of the options are White Mage-specific.

I was today years old when I learned that when you type "otp: true" in AO3 search results it filters out fics with additional ships, leaving only the fics where your otp is the main ship

Gamechanger

Here’s a cheatsheet of all the available hidden search functions. “-creators:[whatever]” is another exclusion that can be particularly useful.

read something recently that said a majority of people don’t have a wall clock these days, thought it was interesting since I’ve always considered it an essential and functional piece of home decor.

Dev Patel on shooting Monkey Man:

Average color of US states based on satellite imaging.

fond of the average by county version of this:

also the world version:

Australia is really out there doing her own thing

You’re just jealous of our apocalyptic arse sand

Why is the ground made of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos?

It rusty

You know when Terry Pratchett said 'It doesn't stop being magic just because you know how it works'? Yeah, he meant this.

Oh gosh look: another successful UBI pilot program.

Not only was employment doubled in the test group, their savings increased, and health & life insurance coverage tripled. Many participants got health insurance for the first time.

It's time to roll this out nationwide and with more money. The return on investment is undeniable and would be huge if it applied to everyone.