Introducing the 2024 MXTX Food Zine!

The third edition of the MXTX Food Zine is out now in PDF and ready-to-print format! Inside, you’ll find 55 delicious recipes and over 70 new fanworks from all three MXTX fandoms, including art, fanfiction, and themed recipe cards. You can also download the front cover as a poster here.

Special thanks to our editor @czeriah for the print tests and design work, to @conscydraws for the cover art, and to all the creators: this project would never have been possible without you.

To the fandom: reblog this post, download the zine, and enjoy! If you can’t access the documents, email [email protected] for help or message the mods here on tumblr.

The mods would like to note that this zine has always been free: but if you would like to donate something or support us via platforms like Ko-Fi, we ask instead that you donate to a humanitarian organization such as the World Food Kitchen, the Trevor Project, or another trusted charity of your choice.

Thank you for sharing this project with us, and happy reading! If you'd like to share/leave kudos and comments on your favorite entries, you can find them at our AO3 collection (fanfiction) or on tumblr/twitter/Bluesky (artwork) starting November 17.

Previous editions: 2022 | 2023

it’s really funny seeing that “all that pain and misery and loneliness and it only made you kind” quote used on wei wuxian because like… he became a heretical necromancer who tortured his enemies into carving their living own bodies up and eating it i’m—

As someone who has never seen the untamed I’m starting to feel like I have gotten a very skewed picture of what happens in this show.

several thousand people and a main character die within the first 10 minutes

It’s a romcom inside a horror movie written like a Shakespearean tragedy with an episode of Scooby-Doo on top.

Untamed Heritage Post

drew chengxian bc i was pissed off

birthday wish for jiujiu

so like I said, I work in the tech industry, and it's been kind of fascinating watching whole new taboos develop at work around this genAI stuff. All we do is talk about genAI, everything is genAI now, "we have to win the AI race," blah blah blah, but nobody asks - you can't ask -

What's it for?

What's it for?

Why would anyone want this?

I sit in so many meetings and listen to genuinely very intelligent people talk until steam is rising off their skulls about genAI, and wonder how fast I'd get fired if I asked: do real people actually want this product, or are the only people excited about this technology the shareholders who want to see lines go up?

like you realize this is a bubble, right, guys? because nobody actually needs this? because it's not actually very good? normal people are excited by the novelty of it, and finance bro capitalists are wetting their shorts about it because they want to get rich quick off of the Next Big Thing In Tech, but the novelty will wear off and the bros will move on to something else and we'll just be left with billions and billions of dollars invested in technology that nobody wants.

and I don't say it, because I need my job. And I wonder how many other people sitting at the same table, in the same meeting, are also not saying it, because they need their jobs.

idk man it's just become a really weird environment.

Like, I remember reading an article and one of the questions the author posed and that's repeated here stuck with me, namely: what is it for? If this is a trillion dollar investment what's the trillion dollar problem it is solving?

I finally think I have an answer to that. It's to eliminate the need to pay another person ever again. The trillion dollar problem it's solving is Payroll.

Except like... it's not solving that either.

A metaphor I've been using lately is that being a tech-interested person and watching the AI hype is like if you had followed the development of blenders for years. You watched them go from prototypes that were basically just a spinning open blade all the way to a design that has the potential to be a consumer Vitamix! It's really cool! Blenders have come such a long way, and they're ready for prime time!

And then you turn on the news and see otherwise rational, intelligent people saying "gosh, imagine, soon we'll replace all of our chefs, and our surgeons, and our high school teachers with blenders!" and your friends and family all nod and agree and say things like "wow, blenders can basically do everything now!" And when you ask people "are you HIGH?!" they show you the new blender they bought, and how well it makes a smoothie, and then they act like that's evidence for a statement like "blenders will replace 90% of the workforce" not being utterly nonsensical and deranged.

"Scientists just have to fix the hallucination problem!" they say. When you ask what the hallucination problem is, they say "I'll show you" and then they put their unfinished math homework into the blender and hit pulse. "You see, I wanted it to solve those math problems, but it just shredded the paper. It must have hallucinated a world where the answer to 2+2 was puree." When you point out that it did exactly what it was designed to do, because a blender cannot do math and it will never do math and expecting it to be able to do math just because it can make both smoothies and soup is ludicrous and bizarre, they tell you that they're sure that blenders will be able to do math any day now, just you wait, "I mean, look how far they've come! A year ago I would have said that blenders could never be strong enough to blend ice into sorbet, but now they can. So who are you to say they'll never do math???"

The thing is, there are plenty of things that LLMs and generative AI are good for. OCR is still a vital need, and AI is excellent at it. Facial recognition is an area where AI has a lot of potential. It can be used as a screening step for the analysis of all sorts of large datasets. Better autocomplete on your phone is a real thing that real people want. There are a ton of problems that these tools genuinely do solve!

...But none of them are trillion dollar problems, and that's an issue, because no one wanted to pour a trillion dollars into "improved OCR" and "somewhat better autocomplete".

So, we get snakeoil to make up the weight. It'll solve payroll; it'll democratize visual art; it'll make it so that anyone can do anything – you name it, blenders will do it, eventually! Once we've fixed the problems with using blenders to do everything, including tasks which aren't blending things, then blenders will be worth the trillion dollars that people have already spent developing them! Look at the progress we've already made: we're working on attaching a calculator to the blender, and that could make it so that blenders can do math! Don't you dare suggest that calculators already exist and work just fine without being attached to blenders – we need our blenders to do math, because we promised that one day they'd be able to do everything! And they will! Blenders are the future and don't you dare suggest that maybe that future is just "we can blend things now"; if you so much as breath those words, the bubble will pop.

BEAUT

if you look closely, you can pinpoint the exact moment my heart broke

It‘s scary to see how very important european petitions get no visibility whatsoever. We had a basic income petition last year which failed because not enough people knew about it. Now we have a „tax the rich“ one that only lasts until october this year and only has around 250k out of 1 mio. signings.

Most EU people go through their every day life w/o knowing about them. There are no ads, no marketing…nothing. I know that costs money though one might think important petitions that lead to a better and progressive life would be supported by the government or ministries in some way, but nooooo

And why should they? It’s petitions that would help out the poor and middle class, but endanger capitalism and their exploitation, sooo: government and business leads for example.

So here the link for those who are interested:

The petition has to reach not only 1 million statements of support, but also a minimum threshold of support in at least 7 EU states. If you have citizenship for an EU country other than Germany and France, your country has yet to meet the minimum threshold for this petition.

The petition currently sits at 300k of 1mil signatures!

There's only about 3 weeks left to support it, so please share and sign, if you can.

The Untamed || Nie brothers

what the hell have i done

jiang cheng has a reddit alt, on which he writes incredibly bitchy posts complaining about how jin guangyao is raising jin ling during his custody time. unbeknownst to him, jin guangyao also has a reddit alt, on which he writes equally bitchy posts complaining about how jiang cheng is raising jin ling during his custody time.

their alt accounts find each other on the single parent subreddit they both frequent, fail to recognize each other, and end up bonding over a (perceived) shared struggle....

chengyao endgame

THE UNTAMED episode 20

Jiang Cheng being described as a "sentimental fool" is perhaps one of the only rumours confirmed to be true about him. The condition Chenqing had been kept in, well cleaned, in working condition and carried on his person is a testament of that.

We see that in the scenes prior that Jiang Cheng cherises his belongings that he values and cares deeply for (he is noted to clean his sword regularly, a valued possession of his, clearly). Chenqing, giving its sentimental value and who it belonged to, was thus also a cherished item of his.

Jiang Cheng really is all bark and no bite. And Wei Wuxian was wrong to assume that he vehemently hated him all these years. His feelings towards Wei Wuxian were complicated but despite all the talk and all the rumours, we can infer from this piece of evidence that he truly didn't hate Wei Wuxian. The condition Chenqing was kept in is proof of that and I believe that was what MXTX was trying to convey when she included this fine detail.