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mostlysignssomeportents · 9 months

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The surprising truth about data-driven dictatorships

Here’s the “dictator’s dilemma”: they want to block their country’s frustrated elites from mobilizing against them, so they censor public communications; but they also want to know what their people truly believe, so they can head off simmering resentments before they boil over into regime-toppling revolutions.

These two strategies are in tension: the more you censor, the less you know about the true feelings of your citizens and the easier it will be to miss serious problems until they spill over into the streets (think: the fall of the Berlin Wall or Tunisia before the Arab Spring). Dictators try to square this circle with things like private opinion polling or petition systems, but these capture a small slice of the potentially destabiziling moods circulating in the body politic.

Enter AI: back in 2018, Yuval Harari proposed that AI would supercharge dictatorships by mining and summarizing the public mood — as captured on social media — allowing dictators to tack into serious discontent and diffuse it before it erupted into unequenchable wildfire:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/

Harari wrote that “the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place may become [dictators] decisive advantage in the 21st century.” But other political scientists sharply disagreed. Last year, Henry Farrell, Jeremy Wallace and Abraham Newman published a thoroughgoing rebuttal to Harari in Foreign Affairs:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/spirals-delusion-artificial-intelligence-decision-making

They argued that — like everyone who gets excited about AI, only to have their hopes dashed — dictators seeking to use AI to understand the public mood would run into serious training data bias problems. After all, people living under dictatorships know that spouting off about their discontent and desire for change is a risky business, so they will self-censor on social media. That’s true even if a person isn’t afraid of retaliation: if you know that using certain words or phrases in a post will get it autoblocked by a censorbot, what’s the point of trying to use those words?

The phrase “Garbage In, Garbage Out” dates back to 1957. That’s how long we’ve known that a computer that operates on bad data will barf up bad conclusions. But this is a very inconvenient truth for AI weirdos: having given up on manually assembling training data based on careful human judgment with multiple review steps, the AI industry “pivoted” to mass ingestion of scraped data from the whole internet.

But adding more unreliable data to an unreliable dataset doesn’t improve its reliability. GIGO is the iron law of computing, and you can’t repeal it by shoveling more garbage into the top of the training funnel:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/05/29/garbage-in-garbage-out-machine-learning-has-not-repealed-the-iron-law-of-computer-science/

When it comes to “AI” that’s used for decision support — that is, when an algorithm tells humans what to do and they do it — then you get something worse than Garbage In, Garbage Out — you get Garbage In, Garbage Out, Garbage Back In Again. That’s when the AI spits out something wrong, and then another AI sucks up that wrong conclusion and uses it to generate more conclusions.

To see this in action, consider the deeply flawed predictive policing systems that cities around the world rely on. These systems suck up crime data from the cops, then predict where crime is going to be, and send cops to those “hotspots” to do things like throw Black kids up against a wall and make them turn out their pockets, or pull over drivers and search their cars after pretending to have smelled cannabis.

The problem here is that “crime the police detected” isn’t the same as “crime.” You only find crime where you look for it. For example, there are far more incidents of domestic abuse reported in apartment buildings than in fully detached homes. That’s not because apartment dwellers are more likely to be wife-beaters: it’s because domestic abuse is most often reported by a neighbor who hears it through the walls.

So if your cops practice racially biased policing (I know, this is hard to imagine, but stay with me /s), then the crime they detect will already be a function of bias. If you only ever throw Black kids up against a wall and turn out their pockets, then every knife and dime-bag you find in someone’s pockets will come from some Black kid the cops decided to harass.

That’s life without AI. But now let’s throw in predictive policing: feed your “knives found in pockets” data to an algorithm and ask it to predict where there are more knives in pockets, and it will send you back to that Black neighborhood and tell you do throw even more Black kids up against a wall and search their pockets. The more you do this, the more knives you’ll find, and the more you’ll go back and do it again.

This is what Patrick Ball from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group calls “empiricism washing”: take a biased procedure and feed it to an algorithm, and then you get to go and do more biased procedures, and whenever anyone accuses you of bias, you can insist that you’re just following an empirical conclusion of a neutral algorithm, because “math can’t be racist.”

HRDAG has done excellent work on this, finding a natural experiment that makes the problem of GIGOGBI crystal clear. The National Survey On Drug Use and Health produces the gold standard snapshot of drug use in America. Kristian Lum and William Isaac took Oakland’s drug arrest data from 2010 and asked Predpol, a leading predictive policing product, to predict where Oakland’s 2011 drug use would take place.

[Image ID: (a) Number of drug arrests made by Oakland police department, 2010. (1) West Oakland, (2) International Boulevard. (b) Estimated number of drug users, based on 2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health]

Then, they compared those predictions to the outcomes of the 2011 survey, which shows where actual drug use took place. The two maps couldn’t be more different:

https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00960.x

Predpol told cops to go and look for drug use in a predominantly Black, working class neighborhood. Meanwhile the NSDUH survey showed the actual drug use took place all over Oakland, with a higher concentration in the Berkeley-neighboring student neighborhood.

What’s even more vivid is what happens when you simulate running Predpol on the new arrest data that would be generated by cops following its recommendations. If the cops went to that Black neighborhood and found more drugs there and told Predpol about it, the recommendation gets stronger and more confident.

In other words, GIGOGBI is a system for concentrating bias. Even trace amounts of bias in the original training data get refined and magnified when they are output though a decision support system that directs humans to go an act on that output. Algorithms are to bias what centrifuges are to radioactive ore: a way to turn minute amounts of bias into pluripotent, indestructible toxic waste.

There’s a great name for an AI that’s trained on an AI’s output, courtesy of Jathan Sadowski: “Habsburg AI.”

And that brings me back to the Dictator’s Dilemma. If your citizens are self-censoring in order to avoid retaliation or algorithmic shadowbanning, then the AI you train on their posts in order to find out what they’re really thinking will steer you in the opposite direction, so you make bad policies that make people angrier and destabilize things more.

Or at least, that was Farrell(et al)’s theory. And for many years, that’s where the debate over AI and dictatorship has stalled: theory vs theory. But now, there’s some empirical data on this, thanks to the “The Digital Dictator’s Dilemma,” a new paper from UCSD PhD candidate Eddie Yang:

https://www.eddieyang.net/research/DDD.pdf

Yang figured out a way to test these dueling hypotheses. He got 10 million Chinese social media posts from the start of the pandemic, before companies like Weibo were required to censor certain pandemic-related posts as politically sensitive. Yang treats these posts as a robust snapshot of public opinion: because there was no censorship of pandemic-related chatter, Chinese users were free to post anything they wanted without having to self-censor for fear of retaliation or deletion.

Next, Yang acquired the censorship model used by a real Chinese social media company to decide which posts should be blocked. Using this, he was able to determine which of the posts in the original set would be censored today in China.

That means that Yang knows that the “real” sentiment in the Chinese social media snapshot is, and what Chinese authorities would believe it to be if Chinese users were self-censoring all the posts that would be flagged by censorware today.

From here, Yang was able to play with the knobs, and determine how “preference-falsification” (when users lie about their feelings) and self-censorship would give a dictatorship a misleading view of public sentiment. What he finds is that the more repressive a regime is — the more people are incentivized to falsify or censor their views — the worse the system gets at uncovering the true public mood.

What’s more, adding additional (bad) data to the system doesn’t fix this “missing data” problem. GIGO remains an iron law of computing in this context, too.

But it gets better (or worse, I guess): Yang models a “crisis” scenario in which users stop self-censoring and start articulating their true views (because they’ve run out of fucks to give). This is the most dangerous moment for a dictator, and depending on the dictatorship handles it, they either get another decade or rule, or they wake up with guillotines on their lawns.

But “crisis” is where AI performs the worst. Trained on the “status quo” data where users are continuously self-censoring and preference-falsifying, AI has no clue how to handle the unvarnished truth. Both its recommendations about what to censor and its summaries of public sentiment are the least accurate when crisis erupts.

But here’s an interesting wrinkle: Yang scraped a bunch of Chinese users’ posts from Twitter — which the Chinese government doesn’t get to censor (yet) or spy on (yet) — and fed them to the model. He hypothesized that when Chinese users post to American social media, they don’t self-censor or preference-falsify, so this data should help the model improve its accuracy.

He was right — the model got significantly better once it ingested data from Twitter than when it was working solely from Weibo posts. And Yang notes that dictatorships all over the world are widely understood to be scraping western/northern social media.

But even though Twitter data improved the model’s accuracy, it was still wildly inaccurate, compared to the same model trained on a full set of un-self-censored, un-falsified data. GIGO is not an option, it’s the law (of computing).

Writing about the study on Crooked Timber, Farrell notes that as the world fills up with “garbage and noise” (he invokes Philip K Dick’s delighted coinage “gubbish”), “approximately correct knowledge becomes the scarce and valuable resource.”

https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/25/51610/

This “probably approximately correct knowledge” comes from humans, not LLMs or AI, and so “the social applications of machine learning in non-authoritarian societies are just as parasitic on these forms of human knowledge production as authoritarian governments.”

The Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop summer fundraiser is almost over! I am an alum, instructor and volunteer board member for this nonprofit workshop whose alums include Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, Nalo Hopkinson, Kameron Hurley, Nnedi Okorafor, Lucius Shepard, and Ted Chiang! Your donations will help us subsidize tuition for students, making Clarion — and sf/f — more accessible for all kinds of writers.

Libro.fm is the indie-bookstore-friendly, DRM-free audiobook alternative to Audible, the Amazon-owned monopolist that locks every book you buy to Amazon forever. When you buy a book on Libro, they share some of the purchase price with a local indie bookstore of your choosing (Libro is the best partner I have in selling my own DRM-free audiobooks!). As of today, Libro is even better, because it’s available in five new territories and currencies: Canada, the UK, the EU, Australia and New Zealand!

[Image ID: An altered image of the Nuremberg rally, with ranked lines of soldiers facing a towering figure in a many-ribboned soldier's coat. He wears a high-peaked cap with a microchip in place of insignia. His head has been replaced with the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The sky behind him is filled with a 'code waterfall' from 'The Matrix.']

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

—

Raimond Spekking (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Acer_Extensa_5220_-_Columbia_MB_06236-1N_-_Intel_Celeron_M_530_-_SLA2G_-_in_Socket_479-5029.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

—

Russian Airborne Troops (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vladislav_Achalov_at_the_Airborne_Troops_Day_in_Moscow_%E2%80%93_August_2,_2008.jpg

“Soldiers of Russia” Cultural Center (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Col._Leonid_Khabarov_in_an_everyday_service_uniform.JPG

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

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cozylittleartblog · 2 months

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cant tell you how bad it feels to constantly tell other artists to come to tumblr, because its the last good website that isn't fucked up by spoonfeeding algorithms and AI bullshit and isn't based around meaningless likes

just to watch that all fall apart in the last year or so and especially the last two weeks

there's nowhere good to go anymore for artists.

edit - a lot of people are saying the tags are important so actually, you'll look at my tags.

#please dont delete your accounts because of the AI crap. your art deserves more than being lost like that #if you have a good PC please glaze or nightshade it. if you dont or it doesnt work with your style (like mine) please start watermarking #use a plain-ish font. make it your username. if people can't google what your watermark says and find ur account its not a good watermark #it needs to be central in the image - NOT on the canvas edges - and put it in multiple places if you are compelled #please dont stop posting your art because of this shit. we just have to hope regulations will come slamming down on these shitheads#in the next year or two and you want to have accounts to come back to. the world Needs real art #if we all leave that just makes more room for these scam artists to fill in with their soulless recycled garbage #improvise adapt overcome. it sucks but it is what it is for the moment. safeguard yourself as best you can without making #years of art from thousands of artists lost media. the digital world and art is too temporary to hastily click a Delete button out of spite

#not art #but important #please dont delete your accounts because of the AI crap. your art deserves more than being lost like that #if you have a good PC please glaze or nightshade it. if you dont or it doesnt work with your style (like mine) please start watermarking #use a plain-ish font. make it your username. if people can't google what your watermark says and find ur account its not a good watermark #it needs to be central in the image - NOT on the canvas edges - and put it in multiple places if you are compelled #please dont stop posting your art because of this shit. we just have to hope regulations will come slamming down on these shitheads #in the next year or two and you want to have accounts to come back to. the world Needs real art #if we all leave that just makes more room for these scam artists to fill in with their soulless recycled garbage #improvise adapt overcome. it sucks but it is what it is for the moment. safeguard yourself as best you can without making #years of art from thousands of artists lost media. the digital world and art is too temporary to hastily click a Delete button out of spite

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biggest-gaudiest-patronuses · 1 year

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it is. so weird to me that I'm having to say this again after a real-life cartoon supervillian already once ran for president on a platform of hatred & fascism and won, but.

it's November, please fucking vote

#not a shitpost #serious post #this election cycle will DETERMINE what legislation gets passed #it will DETERMINE THE FUTURE OF ABORTION RIGHTS AND GAY MARRIAGE AND OTHER LGBTQ+ PROTECTIONS #the supreme court plans to destroy as much progress as possible and that means we have to rely on congress to protect those rights #which they can only do if the Dems control the senate and the house #we are in FULL BLOWN DAMAGE CONTROL MODE here #especially because it is still somehow perfectly possible and actually probable #that the festering pile of garbage in human form who recently tried to overthrow the government will end up back on the ballot in 2024 #we still haven't recovered from 4 years of trump and if we don't show up at the polls it is perfectly possible we will get another 4 years #vote this november to protect basic human rights #and vote in november 2024 so we don't have to survive another 4 years under trump #because many of us--the most vulnerable of us--won't survive. and many many more will suffer #vote to protect yourself and your neighbors. vote to protect those who most need protection.#vote because it is the right thing to do #vote out of kindness #and vote out of spite--because billionaires are spending insane amounts of money to prevent you from voting #so tell them to get fucked and vote anyway #do it out of spite and do it out of heart and do it out of rage and do it out of love #show up #us politics

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delineate-creates · 7 months

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Day 11: Wander

Wandering…sneaking…it’s all semantics, really…

#inktober #inktober2023 #hp #harry potter #tom riddle #tomarry #tomarrymort #my art #fanart #yes I know this is a day late 😭#my cell signal AND wifi went out yesterday afternoon and didn’t come back until 2pm today #and on top of that I had the workday from hell #had to drive to an Exxon half an hour away and put my laptop on a hotspot #and our dumbass deployment had dumbass errors that took forever to pin down #I haven’t even done day 12’s drawing so it’s about to look like hot garbage :)

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orangeblossombitch · 6 months

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Maybe don't say you want to eat all Zionists if you don't want to be told not to do that idk :/

(Also not that you'll care but political Zionism and the version of Zionism that just says 'Jews should be able to visit or live in the Levant since it once was our home and if nowhere else is safe for us, there at least should be' are different and saying they're deserving of equal condemnation and violence or that those people should die is kinda fucked of you)

(Also also you shouldn't get to choose who lives or who dies regardless of how bad of people they are according to you. Like idk how to explain to you that you shouldn't think the right to be alive is conditional.)

As a Muslim i obviously cannot condone eating ppl since its not halal and especially fascist lil piggies are sure to be extra haram and yucky :)). Idgaf about some version of zionism that existed at some point and meant something positive when there is a real version out there that is fucking fascist and responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people. N literally no one ever forbade Jewish ppl from visiting or living in the Levant. Youll be surprised to find that there were in fact many Jewish ppl living in Palestine prior to 1948, many of them immigrants from other countries. Also nice fucking job at equating Jewish ppl w zionists ya 7mar. Idgaf about what you think the rights of ppl should be that are indulging a fascist and genocidal ideology, if you dont wanna be eaten by the wolf dont be zionist, its That easy❤. And its absolutely hysterical how you fall in line w the ppl who cry that Jewish ppl are safe nowhere else, like maybe that should be fixed instead of shipping everyone off, away from the places that have been their homes for centuries, plus the fact that you are the same ppl bitching about how "israel" is surrounded by murderous Arabs who wanna toss all the Jewish ppl in the sea. Like make up your mind, cuz that doesnt sound safe to me.

Lastly whats kinda fucked is your cognitive function and ability to think for yourself, clearly. Israeli politicians and Zionists in the West literally calling to wipe Gazans off the face of the earth, using the same language Nazis did. Idk ya might wanna readjust your priorities a bit. Now you better climb a tree or smt bc the wolf is imprinted on your scent and its coming for youuu 🐺

#lol #lmao even #10000 wiped out and you got the audacity whime about the term zionism #travel back in time and off ben gurion amd theodor herzl if its such a big concern for you #whos oomf is this #pls reclaim your garbage chold

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thecmaly · 4 months

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enabling chuu-knife-suke

more tgaa comics

#back at it with my first chun post for 2024!#man i fr thought my digital art had become garbage from the rust but turns out drawing when delirious with a flu does that go figure #the great ace attorney #tgaa #tgaa comics #comics #dgs #dai gyakuten saiban #chuunosuke #for those wondering yes that is asougis hand winkus #thecmart

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wabblebees · 9 months

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((please rb if you vote! obv this is just silly but im curious+wanna see ppls opinions<3))

#considered including cigarette butts and 'random green goop puddle' and a few other things but ultimately decided against it #so absolutely tell me if that was a mistake #ive never made a poll before! just thot itd be fun:]#garbage repeats as a gag across all kindsa media is SO funny to me for some reason #point+click games... childrens cartoons... comics of all kinds... so much dumpster diving #smth gets tossed & clangs+clatters a ruckus. smth else is yote+squeaks like a rubber duck. smth else flies by+makes an unseen cat caterwaul #how many people are throwing away perfectly intact fish skeletons in all these worlds across time & space #whats up with that #lmao #anyway. i desperately need to sleep but Cant so made this instead. cant tell if its funny or no but #who can tell! and hopefully if i typoed or anyth it wont be too bad when i look back at this lmao #ok byeeeee. mwah #bee speaks #polls #OMG JUST REALIZED I FORGOT TO INCLUDE CDs....... well pretend i left it out on purpose ig. bc obv EVERYONE would vote for cds if they could

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lillazyboithings · 5 months

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Time to feed the Michie shippers (also me) again

I definitely did not just draw this while reviewing for 4 midterm exams-

Might possibly render

#michie #max x richie #richie x max #richie lipschitz #max jagerman #max jägerman #max jägerman x richie lipschitz #npmd #nerdy prudes must die #doodle #guys i will fucking throw myself into a garbage disposal because my back is killing me after an insanely long work out

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gothamstreetcat · 26 days

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Okay, but what if: instead of terminating their employees by killing them, Wolfram & Hart has them turned into goats instead? Realistically speaking, they would use them as sacrifices but they also could open their own petting zoo

ANGEL 2.11 │2.15

#every time I see a gif of lilah talking about growing horns and eating garbage #i immediately think about the goat scene #what if W&H is really turning everyone into goats and hiding them in some off location? also been really thinking about lilah as a goat #and rescuing her and helping wesley figure out a way to change her back #angel the series #ats #atsedit #this is mostly about lilah but i don't know how to tag it #lilah morgan #lindsey mcdonald #angel

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asickandtirednobody · 2 days

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Where do I go now?

Guess what, I'm trans, for you who don't know.

But I don't feel safe in a community that has excluded me because of my ethnicity and my faith.

Sad, I helped (and continue to) make this community, to help people like me who needed somewhere to go.

I have been called so many hurtful names.

So if you are a pro-palestine member of the lgbtqai, do not touch my posts. They are not for you.

I had a shit childhood because of the "weirdo jew", the freak.

I never found solace anywhere until Tumblr came into my life in 2009 or something. I found people who were like me, they didn't care I was Jewish either. I was just "Tovi".

Ive been told to die, people have tried to kill me.

But I breathe to spite anyone who wishes bad upon Israelis and Jews.

#antisemitism #Lgbtq turning their backs on Jews #Jewish #Jewish transman #A community that used to be welcoming is now toxic #What happened #We forgot love was the message to send out #Not spiteful little comments and quips #Pro Hamas people are literally human garbage #Tw I/p war mentioned #shut your fucking goyium mouth #The goyium who like Jews are welcome though

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cleromancy · 7 months

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"tim needs to get a new mantle he didnt steal from his siblings" wrong. Say hello to the new huntress

#🙅nuclear family 'wayne' posters dni🙅#but honestly. why do you even want him to make his own identity #because itd be 'establishing his individuality'? because itd be 'healthier'? what are you a cop #honestly like its so boringgggg give me tim who crawled into dicks old uniform and stayed there until he got kicked out and then dragged+#Jason's out of the literal garbage or I don't want any #genuinely its really difficult for me to wrap my head around the idea of using TIM of all people in an arc about like. what.#establishing yourself as an independent new thing in an actually interesting arc that rings true for him bc.#hes always been pretty independent for all that he was the Team-Up Robin like #if he didmt have that connection in the form of taking on someone elses discarded mantle hed just up and float away man 🤷#dc #like he doesn't need to have... like nightwing but for tim drake #hes not dick lol.#however i do not want him to just be robin any mote #more*. Thats no good #in fact its horrible and im puking blood all over everyone involved #in making that decision #blergheejfggegh oh im puking blood on yuo <- pov you put tim drake #back in the robin suit

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bonebabbles · 6 months

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God the new ultimate guide sucks

It's not JUST the awful art, either. The art's just worth mentioning because even if the book's info had been terrible or contained nothing new, really cute art can make it still worth having.

But, no, it's even full of recycled lines we've been hearing for years like "Bramblestar Can Match Squirrelflight's Fire Not Contain It," and that's when it DOES get everything right. These entries leave out major, important details (making them bad summaries) and are sometimes even straight-up incorrect.

SUMMARY THOUGHTS

Leafpool is said to have watched Brambleclaw kill Hawkfrost to save Firestar-- but for one, no, she was not there because Ashfur was still leading her and Squilf towards the scene. For two, no, Brambleclaw did not kill Hawkfrost just to save Firestar, it was self-defense. Hawkfrost had him pinned and was going to kill him.

They're REAL cute about Leafpool's death, too, neglecting to mention WHY the Sisters needed to be saved at all and just saying Leafpool's "generosity" lead to her death in that cave-in.

I'm not even going to get into everything on Bramble's entry jesus christ.

Sagewhisker's entry is ESPECIALLY fucken' dandy, framing Yellowfang's Secret like she was simply waiting patiently for Yellow to realize her 'destiny' and not actively shoving it on her at every opportunity.

Leopardstar's entry states that romantic interest in Tigerstar was part of her motivation. "Perhaps she'd hoped he would be her mate" please speak to a woman irl for once in your life.

Gray Wing's entry forgot that the reason he "blamed himself" for Bright Stream's death is because he was literally staring at his big strong brother too much and tripped on a root in front of him. It IS his fault she died.

Clear Sky/Skystar's entry is just obscene. "He regretted abandoning his son and after a fire, he encouraged him to live with him" instead of "saw his teenage child was useful now and bullied and belittled the kid and his uncle into letting Thunder come with him." "Retaining his fierceness towards his cats and outsiders which caused his son to leave" instead of "murdering, brutalizing, and abusing everyone around him caused Thunder to leave." I'll just say this tho; "Fierce" is an interesting way to spell "Cruel."

It's interesting that they don't point out that a major part of Jagged Peak's arc was proving he was "Just As Good" as every other cat in spite of his disability, thanks to his introduced-and-pregnant-in-the-same-book wife becoming his life coach, only earning Clear Sky's respect after being allowed to physically lead a patrol in Blazing Star. Instead they frame him finding his place through taking care of kits, which... was something he seemed to resent in the actual series, considering how the books suddenly treat Gray Wing's protective treatment of him as a terrible thing in Blazing Star because he "didn't give him a chance". But at the same time I actually strongly dislike Jagged Peak and his messy, frustrating character arc so I'm not really UPSET with it. Just... noting it. I suppose this is the official direction they're taking away from it?

Shadowstar's entry is barely even 3 paragraphs yikes.

SHORT STORY THOUGHTS

And if you're wondering if the 4 brand new stories they smooshed into the end in a desperate attempt to make the rush job worth buying are good? No. Of course not. They're all slop.

Story 1: Firestar and Graystripe

First one's a marginally cute story about Graystripe and Firestar which is setting up the framing device linking the mini-tales together. They both remember this situation where Firestar fell into a ditch wrong. The punchline is that Thunderstar remembers it perfectly and they're both like, "WOW! Too bad Thunderstar's memory sucks!"

It's not terrible, but it does feel a bit pointless. But, hey, if you want more Firestar and Graystripe in the series that tosses them fanservice at every turn, who am I to judge?

Story 2: Dovewing and Ivypool

The next one is the Dovewing/Ivypool reconciliation passage everyone's talking about. It's... fine, but immensely dissatisfying to me.

Dovewing is apparently having problems adjusting to her Clan, grapples a little bit with the fact she has no friends but is going to be finding meaning in helping tigerHeartstar "bring the new ShadowClan into existence." She ultimately decides that she needs to talk to her sister, and begs for reassurance that Ivypool believes in her, feeling that her support can help her get through this difficult time in her life.

I think its biggest problem is that Dovewing was not the right choice for the POV here.

Dove was never the one responsible for the rift in their relationship. Ivypool is. Ivypool is the one who was jealous, willing to sabotage anything that would put Dovewing closer to Tigerheart, and continues to be generally aggressive towards her. So when Dovewing is reaching out to Ivypool in hopes of them reconciling, it feels wrong because Ivypool is the one that should be reaching out to Dovewing. SHE is the one who has some things to apologize for, and to show how much she loves and misses her.

It's even kind of frustrating, because Dovewing can never catch a break. She has to have these problems to force her to reach out, Ivypool even ends up suggesting that she leave and come home and take her kids with her, but in the end even a LITTLE bit of assurance from her aggressive sister helps.

I feel super bad for Dovewing, man. She deserves better than this cheap writing. What was the point of such an unsatisfying, rushed reconciliation, shoved into a crummy field guide, when we KNOW from the newest book that they're just going to use tension between them as part of the drama anyway?

shouldn't have even been written, imo. Even ends off with, "They'll always have each other :)" which is so... cliche. It's TIRED. Are any of you really happy with just getting a retconned platitude in a good-for-nothing field guide, instead of seeing complicated, INTERESTING feelings in a main book?

Story 3: Alderheart and Twigbranch

A tale of Cherryfall getting sick during TBC and Alderheart sneaks back into the territory to treat her. Also Crowfeather has a scene where he yells at him. Charming.

Twigbranch comes up with a diversion while Alderheart does his work, which is cute. It's a fine story.

Story 4: Clear Sky

Trash. Three dogs spawn in the middle of a gathering so that Skystar can have an uwu big boy sendoff saving his grandkit. Then he goes to StarClan and throws a fit because they can't give him ANOTHER life, becoming so upset that he attacks the nearest woman. Naturally, Shadowstar brushes it off because it's not the first time Clear Sky has pummeled her in the midst of an adult tantrum and this book series thinks violence is fine if their favorite sadboy does it.

Then Gray Wing brings him to the magic mirror pool where you can see the living, to confirm that Star Flower is ok and that makes him feel better.

Then it launches into Firestar saying "ouuuugh yum I LOVE the taste of his butthole. Clear Sky is so misunderstood, He Just Loved Too Much."

to which Graystripe responds, "Yes, he was a good and amazing person and his farts smells SO good, and can you believe that some people think StarClan punished his Clan for his arrogance? As if he ever did anything wrong, ever?"

Firestar, indignant, refutes it with, "Ugh!! StarClan would NEVER be interesting, we don't punish living cats we just float around and make vague, frustrating prophecies that do nothing but pad the word count. Why cant ppl understand that, gosh."

who wrote this? Gray Wing??

#The amount of passive voice Clear Sky has to be surrounded with in order to look like a redeemable character is dizzying #I feel like I'm reading a headline about cops who blew up an orphanage every time I read anything official about him #oh wait im sorry. A ''high-pressure accident which occurred at a government institution with 3 officers present'' lmaooooo #ultimate field guide #bone babble #im actually REALLY glad actually they havent been making these #This was garbage #There were a few good things in this but overall? Absolute slop. I wouldn't even feed this to a pig.#I think this is actually down there with Cats of the Clans (with Rock) for worst field guide #This is abysmal #You would be better with the wiki summaries and the 4 stories are mid at best #What a shame that they re-pivoted so hard from Riverstar's SE which I was JUST praising for tossing out that shitty ''redemption arc''#Nope. We're right back to square one.#How much do you guys wanna bet it's ONE writer who's OBSESSED with Clear Sky and every time he writes anything he does this #I'm not sure who wrote this one but let's see if my hunch is right lmao

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knickynoo · 8 months

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Michael, on receiving the Back to the Future script (from the Tales from the Future documentary)

#back to the future #bttf #michael j fox #it's especially funny when you compare this with Chris Lloyd's initial reaction to the script #which was to immediately‚ as he said in this documentary‚ put it aside because he had zero interest #and I must point out that I recall him in a different interview saying that he put the script IN THE TRASH #until someone convinced him to give it a chance #like. I just feel that the reactions from both are so on brand for Mike and Chris #Mike: *doesn't even open it* ''Best movie ever. Let's do it.''#Chris: ''Into the garbage it goes''

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paperbooart · 3 months

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the evil/opposite art style challenge going around looks fun and it's always important to try things differently from what you're used to but i have no idea how i would do it personally because having a consistent style has never been my goal. i feel like i have about 5 different styles at this point. but if anyone has suggestions of stuff that you've noticed i never do in art that i could try, i'd be interested to hear them

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latealzalost · 2 months

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Project Voltage song about Shadow Pokemon? Starring Team GO Rocket?

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stergeon · 4 months

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at some point i will figure out how to write the post-canon, post-empire edelgard autonomy fic of my dreams. it just feels like a very big task and maybe like with playing the dane, i’m simply not old and traumatized enough to manage it yet.

but my vision is thus: it’s set years (realistically, decades) after the end of crimson flower, when everything has gone as right as it can possibly go. fódlan is thriving. the social reforms have taken effect. the nobility system is nearly eliminated, if not entirely so, with titles made merely symbolic. social mobility, welfare, and prosperity are high. there’s an explosion in arts and culture and technology. brigid and duscur have gained independence; relations with sreng and almyra are much improved; heck, maybe they've even figured it out with dagda. in my most idealistic version, leicester and faerghus would eventually be ceded back to become autonomous regions, essentially disbanding the adrestian empire. rule is no longer hereditary, but merit-based. there's a roadmap for the future, and everything is on track—and more than that, people at all points on the power spectrum have already seen it bear fruit. with or without edelgard, it will be pursued. there's buy-in. they believe.

of course, it's not perfect—nothing can be—but edelgard's vision has been fulfilled. the people are empowered. humanity is free. fódlan has healed.

and somehow, she's had enough time to resolve her goals outside of politics, too. those who slither in the dark have been eradicated. edelgard and lysithea's second crests have been successfully removed, allowing them to live if not full lives, then substantially longer ones than they would have with their twin crests intact. who knows—maybe she finally gets around to having that wedding.

point for point, every item listed in edelgard's manifesto has been checked off. the ghosts of her past have been laid to rest. she can finally take off her crown. she can finally pursue the quiet, humble life she's wanted for so long. she can finally breathe.

... but can she?

edelgard is nothing if not driven. her intelligence, vision, and sheer willpower allowed her to plan and execute a revolution against two countries and the most powerful institution on the continent, all while she was still a teenager. as royalty, her life was never truly hers even before she became heir to the adrestian throne, with all the additional baggage of survivor's guilt and the desire for vengeance and her need to ensure nothing that happened to her can ever happen to anyone else, ever again.

so what happens when that drive has no outlet? what happens when someone who has been constantly in motion, constantly working and planning and preparing every spare second of every day since she was fourteen years old, suddenly has to stand still? what happens when someone whose hands have been bound for so long—first literally in the dungeons of enbarr, then by the weight and responsibilities of her crown—is set free?

being edelgard, she would step away from the throne, no matter how hard it was for her to give up control. she's always been focused on the endgame, and she knows that if she doesn't let go, she'll be setting the wrong tone for fódlan's future. she's too devoted to that endgame to cling to power much longer than she needs to, though i could see her making some excuses and trying to iron out just a few more things to buy herself some more time to mentally prepare before she's done for good.

but who would she be then? who is the woman without the crown? what becomes of a machine once it is no longer needed, when it has made itself obsolete? what about when that machine is a person with legs and arms and an innate unwillingness to gather dust on a shelf?

what happens when you get everything you want? what happens when all your wanting has been for others to thrive, and now you have to want only for yourself? how do you discover who you are when you've spent decades being everything for everyone else? how do you find meaning again? how do you find purpose?

after a lifetime of devotion and passion and movement, how do you learn to sit with yourself, and be quiet, and be still?

gosh, i would love to meet her. i would love to pick her brain. but boy, i do not envy the work that girl has to do.

#sterge.rtf #fire emblem #fe3h #edelgard von hresvelg #realistically edelgard is not getting all of this done in her lifetime. but that wouldn't keep her from stepping away anyway #'cause a funny thing happened to edelgard during the crimson flower route: she learned to have faith again.#so even if she couldn't check every box and fix every societal ill she'd still be able to pass the crown to the next ruler.#maybe not without fear. but with confidence. with optimism. with the belief that she's leaving the world better than she found it.#she'd have faith in her people. faith in the future. faith in the groundwork she's laid. faith in the systems she's put in place.#faith that her vision will be carried out with or without her.#and that faith would allow her to eventually let go.#i so love edelgard pulling a george washington and saying nah i'm good on power. peace #though unfortunately i could also see her pulling a teddy roosevelt #and saying nah i'm good on power. peace. wait what are you doing. you're ruining it. you're bungling everything. i can't believe this #and making several (failed and increasingly insane) attempts to get back into politics #who is the taft to edelgard's ted tho. i don't want to do ferdinand the disservice of saying it's him even though i think it's very funny.#it's literally the opposite of his character as taft notoriously sniffed roosevelt's farts for a long time #until he finally pulled his head out of the guy's ass and realized there are other smells. such as the sewer. and garbage.#smells which he pursued quite happily much to ol ted's chagrin #meanwhile ferdinand does not think anything of edelgard's ass except that his is definitely better-looking than hers #(he's wrong on so many levels but you try telling the guy that)#in fact ferdinand has always taken great joy in pointing out all the things that smell better than edelgard does #which gives him an instant up on mr Take-Advice-From-Theodore #all this to say i think ferdinand von aegir would have been a much better president than william howard taft. that's just my opinion.#i'm getting off the rails in these tags idk what's wrong with me #sorry for equating your blorbos to long-dead american politicians everyone. i know this is a cardinal sin #also please don't take this to mean i think positively of washington or roosevelt or taft or whatever.#i hate all dead old white guys who ever held a modicum of power #i just had a hyperfixation on american presidents when i was in grade school and unfortunately now my brain works like this

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