So, about anonymous works, what's the process like? Would I still be able to reply to comments while still anonymous? Would the work itself show up on my stats page, and/or my list of works? If I decide later to make it not anonymous anymore, is that option open, and what's that like?
Excellent questions! And handily enough I have a few anonymous works so I can tell you from personal experience :)
To post a fic anonymously, you create your fic the same way you would any other time, and you just add it to one of the collections on AO3 called anonymous. Do this in the “Post to Collections/Challenges” section of the Work Post form. It’s right above where you would gift a fic to someone. Type in anonymous and several collections will appear (screenshot below)
Looking at my own fics, it seems like I chose the second one on the list, personally.
The works still show up on my stats page, but it isn’t visible to other users when they visit my profile. I can still see it, but no one else can.
When I reply to comments, my user icon is a dark version of the default AO3 icon and my name is listed as Anonymous Creator (screenshot below)
When I look at my own fic, the top of the story shows the author name as Anonymous with my user name in brackets after it (screenshot below)
But when I log out and look at it again, all I see is Anonymous (screenshot below)
If you ever want to put your name back on the fic again in the future, edit the fic and go back down to that section where you can post to a collection or challenge. You’ll see the anonymous collection listed there with a little x to the right of the name (screenshot below)
Click the x to remove your fic from the collection. Your name will reappear on the fic and your username and icon will be visible next to your comment replies.
Someone asked whether you can post a series anonymously and the answer is yes and no.
No, you can’t add a series to an anonymous collection. You could add each individual work, but the series link would still lead back to your profile.
You could post the series to a pseudonym, but pseudonyms are also linked to your main profile which means it’s still not anonymous.
So that leaves you with the last option: create a second account and keep it a secret. Don’t link it to your main. Don’t talk about it on social media unless it’s with a separate socmed account. Don’t accidentally reply to comments with your main. Use that second account for the things you don’t want associated with the “you” that people know.
And yes, AO3 allows it. It’s specifically recommended in the FAQ as the response to the answer “Can I make an anonymous pseud?”
Note: You’ll need to have a second email address or to set up an alias on the email address that you already use for AO3. An alias still looks different to the database, so it works the same as a new email.
As far as I know, you can make a series anonymous if the works you put in it are anonymous from the start (as in if you post them as anonymous in the first place).
ALT
My series when I’m logged out.
ALT
My series when I’m logged in.
Nice! I was testing by editing a series and I didn’t have the option. Good to know! (and thank you for including alt text)
For those of you looking for these recipes, they’re from Cooking for Engineers. Which should shock nobody. But it’s a great site. Sadly seems to be defunct, but I can personally vouch for the recipes being presented in a foolproof* manner. Not only is the card layout great (honestly, just having the oven temperature right there instead of having to keep trying to find it in the recipe is a game changer), but every step has a photo. None of this “until done” rubbish, it’ll have a photo of “yeah, here’s how it should look, and no, this photo isn’t overly produced”.
And unlike most cooking blogs, the commentariat substitutions are generally competent!
If you’re still not sold on the site, may I add that he once took a pair of calipers to Chili’s to test their claim that “their new Smokehouse Bacon Burgers […] have ‘the thickest bacon you’ve ever seen’.”
Unsurprisingly, his verdict was:
(on Friday, April 13, 2008 at the Chili’s in Santa Clara, California) they served bacon that was (to an accuracy of 1/128th of an inch) 3/16 in. thick (4.75 mm ± 0.2mm) after cooking. […] Does it truly hold up to its claim that it’s the “thickest bacon you’ve ever seen”? My guess is that for most people that’s true, but for me it was most definitely not the case.
So yeah, definitely check out his website, whether you’re a novice or experienced cook, whether you’re an engineer or someone who didn’t even know what a caliper was before you started reading this. I highly recommend starting with the shepherd’s pie (yes, it’s the same one from Joy of Cooking), and either the creme brulee or the biscotti for dessert. The recipe image OP used was for espresso brownies. Presumably roasting your own beans is optional, though.
———
*It’s me. I’m the fool. I’m proof that even a fool can follow the recipes.
it’s simple: when I like an adaptation, everyone complaining about changes to the text is a whiny baby who needs to get over themselves and accept that sometimes you have to change the story to enrich the experience/work within the medium. when I don’t like an adaptation, it’s because nobody else understands the core themes of the original work and would be better off just creating a story independent of what they’re trying to adapt.
Sometimes you cautiously crack open the door for a second and watch alien conspiracy theorists talk and they’re like “this ancient drawing is a diagram of DNA” and then they show the drawing and it’s of two snakes fucking
There’s drawings all over the world of snakes doing a fuck because fertility symbolism and whatnot and a spiral makes for a good design but alien obsessed grandpas who have never seen snakes having sex before in their lives will point very hard at the snake sex and say it’s a double helix or whatever it must be aliens.
No my friend. You just need to get out more. Maybe you’ll see some snakes in the wild making some sweet twisty snake love and get some perspective on the world.
Twisty twisty it is not a DNA strand
brb me and the guys playing clash of clans on one of these bad boys
The time period between 20th August 1991 and 20th August 2016 will mark longest time period where Estonians have been independent, a quarter of a century, without interruptions first time since 1227
Happy to bring back this post from 10 years ago and confirm that yes, the record still stands and keeps growing :)
35 years today!
May it outlast the previous record a million times over.
So one thing about the Murderbot universe that I’d always just taken as read is that all of the human/machine constructs (Combat Units, Security Units, Comfort Units) were originally developed by the military, for military applications.
This is because our actual, real-world militaries are already developing this technology. They are actively pursuing research into developing robot supersoldiers, robot civilian supersecurity, and robot superprostitutes All in the name of promoting a more effective, more ethical military, of course.
There’s this really interesting scientific paper, funded by the US military and published in 2009, called “Robots in War: Issues of Risk and Ethics.” The authors are Patrick Lin, George Bekey, and Keith Abney. I read it in the book Ethics and Robotics edited by Rafael Capurro and Michael Nagenborg.
In the paper, they lay out all the reasons why we’d want to replace human military personnel with robots. An appalling amount of it has to do with the idea that humans are not only often incompetent, but liable to be absolute fucking monsters as well. The authors are not coy about framing it this way; in the introduction they say “our goal should be more practical and immediate: to design a machine that performs better than humans do on the battlefield, particularly with respect to reducing unlawful behavior or war crimes.”
So we want to employ robots because they’re dispassionate, they follow the rules, they won’t generate bad press for the warmongering nation by running around breaking the Geneva Conventions.
The only problem is that they’re, you know, robots. They don’t think like humans, they don’t think at all, and it’s incredibly difficult if not impossible to program a robot to make the wisest decision in any given scenario, particularly when human lives are on the line. And when the robot makes a bad call, who do we hold liable? Is a robot that miscalculates and kills a bunch of civilians any better than a human that does so out of cruelty and rage?
One of the recommendations the authors discuss is to merge robot and human. Not literally - this is not science fiction - but in the sense that a human soldier would be remotely monitoring the robot in realtime, able to provide input and veto power over the robot’s actions. That way, the robot could provide a thorough and dispassionate assessment of the situation, but it would be a human confirming the target and authorizing the strike.
This is exactly the kind of hybrid mind Martha Wells has created in Murderbot and its fellow constructs. In a universe filled with all different kinds of intelligences (bots designed for particular jobs, augmented humans, pet robots, disembodied general AIs like ART), only the constructs are designed to think both like machines and like humans. And as such, only the constructs are designed and optimized to excel in military contexts.
Now, this might not make total sense at first. Combat Units, sure, those are the robot supersoldiers we’re talking about here. But Security Units are for civilian protection, and what do the sexbots I mean Comfort Units have to do with anything?
Well, the paper discusses that too. Regarding civilian applications, they say: “Defense technologies often turn into public or consumer technologies… So a natural step in the evolution of military robots would seem to be their incarnation as civil security robots; they might guard corporate buildings, control crowds, and even chase down criminals.” Sounds a lot like Murderbot’s job description. The paper then goes on to discuss how the complex surveillance technologies built into soldier bots would be controversial when applied to security bots’ work with civilians, and hey, constantly surveilling its clients is also a big part of Murderbot’s job.
The Comfort Units are the most interesting to me, though. The paper actually uses the term “comfort robots,” a reference to the “comfort women” who were forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers in WWII. “Robots, then, may be able to serve the same function of providing ‘comfort’ to the troops in a much more humane way, i.e., without the exploitation of women and prisoners of war.” So, once again, the military wants to design robots specifically to derail the worst instincts of human soldiers. And the goal of merging human intelligence with robotic technology here would be to create a more realistic, more enticingly complex sex object.
Robots to fight, so soldiers won’t commit war crimes; robots to act as sexual outlets, so soldiers won’t r**e other humans. The military does not appear to hold its own personnel in particularly high regard.
Anyway.
Extrapolating all of these ideas into a distant future where there are no longer any nations or, as far as we know, any militaries in the modern sense, might seem like a stretch. But my assumption here is that the constructs are a very old technology, originally developed by national militaries and then appropriated into the corpocracy that rules Murderbot’s galaxy.
Because Murderbot and its ilk do seem like relics. Their human and machine parts don’t mesh well; they suffer from all kinds of mental illness; they have to be punished constantly by governor modules to keep them in line; their memories have to be wiped over and over after traumatic missions and the residues still bleed through; and so on and so on.
But their history as military tech would make their legal status as property completely airtight and uncontroversial. Their reputation as indefatigable supersoldiers would keep the populace from getting close to them in any sense. And there’s still no substitute, apparently, for human wisdom mixed with AI impartiality and processing power mixed with sheer mechanical strength and speed.
thank you platform decay for giving me what I never knew I needed in several pages of murderbot becoming increasingly unhinged trying to navigate an airport
ALT
ALT
