gordon behaviour ive been thinking about the og vid all day so i animated it

Hlvrai animatic wip if you even care

Song - why did i say okie dokie by the stupendium

The important thing to remember is that, when Shrek came out in 2001, its subversive, ironical tone was groundbreaking because it was up against a Disney machine that played everything completely straight (notwithstanding "Emperor's New Groove", which came out a few months earlier). Then Disney itself bought into that tone and hegemonized it, and now, movies that actually take their own fucking characters and premises seriously feel like a breath of fresh air.

@mage8 This is why I don't actually think it's always useful to say that art is good or bad; sometimes a work of art is just out of phase with the cultural ecosystem.

One thing about Shrek versus its commodification is, like most such appropriations, it was done without an understanding of why the ironic tone worked. The people who drive commodification only know how to look for the "trick" and in Shrek they saw this as "characters have modern awareness and make jokes about stupid things in fairy tales," but what they overlooked is that the ironic tone was a veneer to add something fun and interesting to an otherwise sincere movie. All the silly fairy tale jokes were a means to an end for a solid, kind story. But of course you can't package and sell the latter, so they took the superficial irony and made it the product.

Shrek works specifically because it's tearing down and mocking a lot of what was sacred about Disney movies up until that point.

See also: the original script for Enchanted, which was written with a lot of anger directed at Disney. When Disney bought the script, which no doubt they did because of the success of Shrek, they sanded down the edges to make it less anti-Disney. The result is, y'know, fun, but significantly less barbed than the original script.

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!🫂💗

I don't think they're so much trying to get people to use AI to write fics - there seems to be some sort of a scam where the bots encourage commenters to put a fic through their 'AI scanner' to check if it was written by a robot.

They're literally trying to get readers to do the work of scraping fics for them.

I'm sure other folks have added this already in different reblog chains, but AO3 has disabled guest comments for now.

Just in case, I would recommend not going to any of the AI writing sites these comments mention since it's possible they have malware on them. Or maybe the comments are just intended to get people searching for the terms and then that might make them pop up in google search's autofill?? I have no idea 😑

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.

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good work everyone

BATTLESHIPS:

NOT BATTLESHIPS:

JUST BECAUSE A BOAT HAS GUNS ON IT DOES NOT MEAN THAT IT IS A BATTLESHIP. KNOW THE DIFFERENCES

Follow for more ❤️

so like. snakes don't actually have long tails- their tails are infact pretty short- and basically all of their length comes from just having a very long torso.

so as far as "accurate" anthro snakes go.

Do you love the colour of the snake?

I’m begging you to look at this.

Oh that face is Brennan realizing how predictable he is. That card got created in an hour with no notice.

Congrats Mike Trapp you may have also gotten played but truly you won.

[Image description]

Leonard Pollard

My mom was having trouble using they/them prnouns with some friends for a while. One day she said “I think the problem is that I haven’t changed the way I view their gender outside of their pronouncs which adds several extra steps in converting binary pronouns to they/them then conjugating it. So I need to shift how I see them as a gendered person entirely to make using their pronouns easier.” And since then she hardly ever messes up.

[End image description]

A lot of the cis people in my life need this

This is literally why people mess up pronouns and why it’s a problem.

Like the reason you’re not calling me “they” is because you still think of me as gendered the way you initially assumed. It’s not just the pronouns I want you to change, they only serve as an acknowledgement of the gender I want you to adjust your perspective to. If you did that, you wouldn’t struggle with it.

reminds me of the tweet that’s like “dad just think of me as a swarm of bees” and the dad was like “oh I get it now”