It’s not just the sexism though. And it’s not even just Korra, but that anything that isn’t ATLA isn’t okay.

A good example: peeking my head in looking for leaks, I saw tons of haters for Seven Havens before we have seen a single frame of the show. They were already skeptical just because the premise (a post apocalyptic future, an unconventional Avatar Cycle) is different. It reminds me of the cult around the original Star Wars trilogy.

…And personally, I adore LoK, which may have skewed me. If you ask me, it so dense that it gets better with a rewatch.

But I love pretty much all the Avatar media except a few of the comics. Hence it feels so weird to be alienated from the fandom.

Ugh.

Last I checked, deep lore discussions died down, especially from the novels. Interest in more elaborate/speculative discussion, or long fanfics, was gone. Takes on Korra got more and more sexist, far more than when LoK premiered. And, more and more, people worshipped ATLA like an evangelical Bible, like it could do no wrong, with this weird cultish mentality, hence a sea of unreasonable hate for NATLA (and Korra). And even Seven Havens, before it premiered.

People (or Reddit bots) would post straight up misinformation, or flame hints of ATLA critique, like considering it anything but the greatest show of all time was taboo. At one point, I kept running into fans discussed rewatching ATLA many dozens of times, or more, yet… clearly haven’t read the novels.

Okay, maybe I’m not coming across as sympathetic here. Fandom preferences are fine. As more of a lore buff for the whole franchise, I felt… excluded. Like I wasn’t even welcome anymore.

Some of the old, sexist takes on Katara and other women being “bitches” still flare up too, but from my perspective, that hasn’t changed over time.

I mean, yeah… It’s a blue checkmark account.

At this point, if you’re paying for extra engagement on Twitter, that is beyond “benefit of the doubt.” It seems safe to assume its some kind of attention farm.

Ah, moguls + FPTP strike again.

Yeah, I can see Green gaining traction as climate/environmental problems start to grow. The British Isles are relatively sensitive. Though it seems Green has had its own controversy (kinda like the small parties here in the US have).

Part of this is manosphere.

But ALSO, I’ve seen this before. Big fandoms that go through long “content droughts” tend to grow increasingly toxic and cultish over revered original material.

I experienced this in the Avatar: The Last Airbender fandom. It got so bad I just cut myself off from it.

At risk of being abrasive…

I see blue checkmarks, I downvote. Nothing personal. But I don’t want to support that even indirectly.

That sounds… British. Frustrating, in a frustratingly orderly way.

Outside far-right politics must be making reform look bad in the UK though. Right? Like Hungary, Turkey, whatever’s going in Germany…

Reminds me of:

https://www.npr.org/2012/04/13/150566153/airbender-creators-reclaim-their-world-in-korra

As for Korra herself, the show’s creators imagined their headstrong heroine as the kind of girl you might meet on a snowboard. “She’s muscular, and we like that,” Konietzko says. “It’s definitely better than being a waif about to pass out. I know, I look like a waif — who am I to judge?”

Some Nickelodeon executives were worried, says Konietzko, about backing an animated action show with a female lead character. Conventional TV wisdom has it that girls will watch shows about boys, but boys won’t watch shows about girls.

During test screenings, though, boys said they didn’t care that Korra was a girl. They just said she was awesome.

Look at it!

It just oozes cool. Ugh, I need to find mine in storage.

Funny how, in the PSP’s hayday, staring at a little glowing rectangle in public felt so awkward. And now it’s digital detox.

So I’ve started carrying this little guy around in public, as my “phone detox”:

And strangers approach me and ask “ohhh, what is that, a camera?" Like it’s alien technology they didn’t even know was an option. Same thing happens with my relative’s iPod, and I imagine a PSP would evoke a similar response.

I posit that people want dumb electronics. They want to be liberated from addictive smartphone slop. They just don’t realize it until they see it exists.

Sure seems like a roundabout way of just… being in the EU.

Are you British, by chance? What’s the mood on Brexit these days?

That’s not Xi’s style. I don’t think he’d try unless he wants a plausible excuse to kick off a Taiwan assault.

…And, as far as my understanding goes, if Xi wants to do it, now would be an optimal time. Wait any longer, and Taiwan will just get more fortified.

Y’all think the UK will rejoin the EU next?

And Ukraine, while they’re at it.

Tisza getting a supermajority

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c2d8zw2d3rkt?post=asset%3Ac1a77fae-f1ed-4199-b821-86c5fce32a01#post

We are now at 96.37% of the votes counted and Tisza is projected to have 138 seats, Fidesz 55 seats and Our Homeland on six. Tisza is in the lead in 93 constituencies, while Fidesz is ahead in 13. Some votes are yet to be counted but a landslide victory is all but certain.

If I was a conspiracist, I’d say he wanted the Iran deal to fall through.

This is proof of why OpenAI’s… opaqueness is so dangerous.

Chat LLMs tend to treat everything like an exam question or essay prompt, as a direct consequence of how the base models are finetuned. The hand is like a pivot point in a physic problem. But more importantly:

• The chat context is sort of their whole world. Again, due to training format. So they tend to stubbornly adhere to what has already been said, and have no real means of self correction.

• While we have no idea what OpenAI actually does, in basically every other open model, the vision component is trained separately from pure text input. Point being these models are alright at the very specific set of vision tasks they’re trained for, but the “coupling” of image input to the bulk of the LLM is very weak. The reasoning they can do over text does not carry over well.

Point I’m trying to make is the biggest lie of Altman is pitching ChatGPT as a general intelligence… It’s not. It’s a dumb, narrow tool, like a drill with specific changeable bits. But they package and market it like it’s “smart”, which is a big fat lie.

Go to any of the smaller AI vendors/models (like Minimax, with a new model today) and they do the opposite of this. They show specific uses in specific harnesses, and hyper optimize for that.

Be careful about assertions like that, though. Misinformation taken as fact is posted all the time… just yesterday, I looked up some picture everyone was harping on in a comment with hundreds of upvotes, and it was totally fake. Probably AI generated. No one even checked.

And when I’ve pointed this out in the past, no one cared. People only prune information if it doesn’t validate their beliefs.

I’m not saying the Factorio dev isn’t a jerk, necessarily, just that I don’t trust Fediverse commenters to have an ounce of information hygiene.

No. You ghost her. And you get everyone you can to ghost her.

Don’t feed the trolls. Anything else is just getting her engagement, even so much as mentioning the issue.

Also:

for some LGBTQ+ people to shoot videos telling how HP helped them to come out of hiding and reveal their true self to the world.

Thousands (millions?) of people have already done this. Hence the HP fanfic community is notorious for heavy LGBTQ+ plots, which is partially why her position is so ridiculous.

I know that Kovarex is a piece of shit but I still enjoy factorio.

You talking about this?

https://nichegamer.com/factorio-founder-kovarex-interview-cancel-culture-and-secret-support/

Eh, that’s problematic, but it feels mild by 2026 standards. Tons of people are abrasive and won’t admit they were wrong or went too far… shrug.

But yeah, I guess I’m saying I agree with you. JK Rowling’s actions are not personality “quirks,” nor one-off events, nor tertiary reactions. Not even close.

I’m just really tired of the parroted and reactionary “blockchain/AI bad” comments because they often have no nuance. It’s not the implementation that’s “bad”, it’s seemingly that they used the tech at all.

Agreed on that, too.

There was this one instance of a remastered” TV show, partially processed with GANs, a long time ago. I pointed this out (as apparently this little detail was forgotten with time), and I got chewed out. Reddit commenters either claimed I was lying (when I helped work on it), or declared it was now awful and intolerable just because it’s “AI”… something they had loved for years, way before the LLM bubble.

I have no clue what the controversy was about (manosphere stuff?), but even I heard the noise.

…And that noise got people to notice it and watch it.

It’s the 2020s. All attention is good attention. There is no bad engagement anymore, just engagement, which this Brad fellow basically reiterates in the article.