After ESO, I Expected Something Like This In Oblivion.

@burgershopsammi I think I've seen someone else making the same (very good) point recently, and in the YEARS I've been playing Skyrim, it never hit me !

...anyways, now I'm in the middle of a 14-(small) page comic, sooooo... Thanks for the extra dose of brainworms !

You know what bugs me? Bosmer males. Look, idk how ESO does things, but from Morrowind to Oblivion they seem to be the butt of a joke that just says, aren't short men with squeaky voices funny and juvenile and stupid and ripe for mockery? (Fargoth, Gaenir, Glarthir, The Adoring Fan. I don't remember any Bosmer in Skyrim, but then I haven't played Skyrim since like 2015.) Plus there's that old lore about how the Bosmeri women are hot and the men are not, and frankly, fuck that. Where the short king Bosmer at? (Please share any cool Bosmeri male OCs with me.)

Disability is not a punishment, but I think the world would be genuinely improved if every person involved in writing or regulating ingredient labels was mysteriously inflicted with at least one food allergy falling under each of the following categories: "natural flavors," "modified food starch," "artificial flavors," "spices," and "color." Down with ingredient labels so vague that they defeat the entire fucking point.

“Do u hate me”

Yes babe now come back to bed

The trio is having a well deserved rest after a day full of adventuring and dragonslaying.

I don't know what they're talking about here, but I'd imagine Kharjo and J'zargo are trying to convince Faenil of something. They usually wait until Faenil is all happy and drunk until they ask for a day off or whatnot.

Got to watch the ending of Oblivion Remastered and tortured myself by listing to Amulet of Kings by Young Scrolls. Why are our heroes fated to lose everything they love?

Our heroes—blessed by Akatosh himself—are chosen to save the world and for what? Recognition? Fame? The world loving you? It doesn’t mean anything when the people who meant the world to you, who loved you, are gone. Why be a hero when you can’t even save the ones who saved your smiles, laughters, and joy?

“What a cruel joke the Time God played on you, to give you none at all.”

The Eternal Champion is hardly talked about anymore, their time as the Hero was done. Their identity unknown as to who they are but only known by who they became to be in the eyes of the Empire.

The Agent of Daggerfall was a twice-cursed victim of time. They were a Hero and a casualty lost to the very thing that the Time God stood for. They weren’t protected from the Warp in the West—the Dragon Break.

The Nerevarine was shoved into prophecy by the dragon rulers themselves (Akatosh and Uriel) with their life revolving around the time long ago that they couldn’t even begin to understand. Are you your own person or are you a man from 4,000 years ago where the gods were so desperate to keep him alive that instead of resurrecting him… they made you?

The Champion of Cyrodiil watched as their friend became the Avatar of Akatosh only to then die right in front of them. Were you really the Hero or was he the true Hero all along? Either way, you were fated to follow under the Aedra’s guidance and then doomed to become their biggest enemy.

The Dragonborn is a funny predicament, the dragon god wills you into being a dragon trapped in the body of a mortal. Now you must fight against Akatosh’s own SON, where you two are joined and destined by fate and by time to destroy each other. Will it happen again in the next world? Will you two be forced into this cycle for the rest of time? This oddly reminds me of a certain serpent… Satakal? Hilariously, Akatosh and Satakal are claimed to be the same in the French translation of the book The Monomyth.

Speaking of, they say that being born under the Serpent makes you the most blessed and the most cursed. It’s no coincidence that dragons look a lot like them. Maybe it wasn’t just about the constellations.

It was about him.

When the next Hero comes in TES6, who knows what they’ll become and lose to time, too?

And don’t get me started with the Vestige for ESO because that’s a whole can of worms I’m not hungry enough to open.

The recent AO3 AI scraping incident is killing my motivation to keep writing.

I have recently checked to see if my one (1) fic that I’ve posted on ao3 is indeed in the database. And it is.

I literally feel so shit rn. I felt like that ever since I’ve found out about the scraping.

I’m in college rn and my exams will start soon, so I should probably be preparing for them and not care too much about anything else, but I can’t.

There are only the first three chapters of my fic in that database - the latest one was uploaded a week ago or so and at that point, I’ve locked my fic. But I still feel so fucking nauseous that MY WORK is used to train a fucking GenAi model - a thing that I’ve been against for a long time. I’ve yet to write that asshole (which I won’t even bother to name) on huggingface a doi to remove my fic from the database (I still need to create an account on there).

When I saw that the fic is indeed in that database, I genuinely wanted to scream, cry, throw up, anything. I did not consent to this - I dare to say that the vast majority of ao3 authors didn’t.

I highly doubt that the scraper in question is reading this, but if they actually do, then I just want to tell them this:

Go fuck yourself. You are a fucking thief who stole other people’s work and is now using it for AI without the creators’s consent. You are nothing but a filthy parasite who is invading one of the very last places on the internet that hasn’t been corrupted with ads and aggressive capitalist tactics and is putting people there through misery. You are not a 'noble archivist' who is saving something that might become lost media in the future. Like I said, you are a parasite who is preying on actual creative people’s happiness and uses their work for something so pathetic, disgusting and shitty like training a GenAI model.

And to whoever defends this piece of shit or even tries to do the same things they did, go fuck yourself as well. Seriously.

Ever since I found out that someone did this to my work - my work that I’ve put my heart and soul into, I’ve felt hopeless. I’ve decided to take a break from writing so I could focus on my exams…but I still feel depressed because of it. Writing has been my passion ever since childhood, and now, that I’ve finally decided to post something of my own on the internet, it’s being stolen and used without my consent in such a disgusting way.

Like I already mentioned, I locked my fic. It will no longer be available to guest users because I want to have atleast some form of slight 'protection' against similar incidents in the future. But I also know that there have been those that had their fics appear in that database despite the fact that they were locked.

In which case I have to ask: WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE, AS FANFIC WRITERS (and artists in general) SUPPOSED TO DO TO PROTECT OUR WORKS AGAINST SHIT LIKE THIS???

As if I didn’t make it clear enough already, I never consented to my work being used to train AI and I never will. I hate generative AI with every fiber of my being and I sincerely wish that every such program would be completely destroyed and deleted from existence. If someone ever uses my work to train AI, than I want them to know that I fucking hate them and they should go fuck themselves.

AI """art""" is not art and it never will. It is nothing but a gross, pathetic form of theft.

I for one think the symbiotic relationship between Tumblr and AO3 is beautiful