#(said with comma whimsy)

[sage-is-in-fact-very-tired]

I made a starbound blorbo ! i got bored the other day and decided to make a lil creature ! astro is loosely based off of a spiral type galaxy; which in my mind lends itself to extra arms and some silly shapes. cosmos has got a black hole for a heart - because galaxy - as well as one ending off its tail! it's joints are made of larger stars, having a functional purpose of keeping their limbs Mostly attached - while it's star-freckles are considerably smaller, and are pretty much just human freckles but star shaped and colored. the holes are mostly there bc I thought they looked cool - but do also lend themself to the whole idea that space is ever shifting and also like . something about imperfections . shrug.

i don't have Too Much lore thoughts in regards to it, other than that man . it's such a little shit .

(^ mostly copied from what I put in the discord)

[borzoilover69]

Jake Writing Guide : 2024 Colourised!

Ok well, this isn't the prime year 2014 but I really wanted to make a concise and easy to consume guide for how to write Jake accurately since he can be quite the fussy tosspot if you dont know where to start. [ WARNING ITS A BIT LONG I INCLUDE JAKE DIALOGUE TO HELP WITH UNDERSTANDING WHAT IM SAYING. ] First off: drop the commas, and the apostrophes. He uses largely run-on sentences and has a sort of rambly sense of words. He does however use "these" every now and then and just as it strikes him tends to *Drag out the ole roleplayisms.* when it suits the situation.

Jake doesn't really tend to use old-timey slang but he does have rather antiquated ways of speaking, with a pension for more articulated language. He only REALLY breaks out the old timey words when particularly impressed or exasperated for emphasis. Usually, these words are british slang.

Note how he goes on a ramble that is slightly self-centred. He also spins stories similiar to how Dirk does, but without the ice-cold deal. Tossing in his own spin with his own words.

This one is just really fucking funny.

When hes particularly exasperated he leans into it MORE. Just really spreads it on thick. Like if he continues to say funny words you'll forget everything else and be distracted by his whimsy.

Jake is FAR more socially aware than people give him credit for but prefers to avoid tricky subjects hes not too comfortable with until he feels suitably ready for it, prefers battles he knows he can win so to speak. He also tends to think hes overthinking it and backtrack into ignorance. He overcomplicates things same as dirk does but rather than doing Dirks "yup thats a me problem. Im going to quietly stress about it now!", jake brushes it under the rug and tries not to think about it like a college student trying not to think about their outstanding academic paper and the promise of "Yeah, I'll do it later" (doesn't)

Note his more genuine understanding of why Dirk functions the way he does, well aware of the pros AND cons of having something like a combat machine hunting him.

His awareness of Janes crush and reluctance to deal with it:

Subsequent backtracking and denial of said premonitions, brushing it under the rug. Again, stating his reluctance to get into it because it's a situation he's not wellversed. Jake doesn't like being put into unpredictable situations, he prefers the easy road that won't inconvenience him much.

Also his desire to be seen as seemingly perfect and not have to dwell on others intents. Now this is something I don't see touched on as MUCH on writing guides for Jake English (then again the majority were made in 2014 so who can blame them.) But when Jake touches on what he views as MORE TABOO feelings aka ones which compromise the go-getter Adventurer image that arent BRAVE and GUSTO and GUNS, such as weakness, hesitation, he tends to pose back to the asking party as a question and reconsider his thought process. Like: Do YOU think its ok for me to feel this way? Why do you think that? Could you imagine me thinking something like that? He cares a LOT about his image and whats acceptable for him to be and to mask his difficulty in some social situations.

He doesn't like acknowledging that which might be sort of difficult for him to come to terms with, with the ye olde character trait of repression that him and John share, believing if he keeps his feelings buttoned up, they don't need to feel embarassed (aka: avoidance)

Hes also a fair bit more snarkier than fanon gives him hooks for. His subconscious takes the form of his best friend, but its commented as being “like hal, in terms of snarks”. Jake can also be the snarky customer to Dirk AND Hal, and Caliborn too. He's a gentleman to ladies (TO A DEGREE) but with guys he's not afraid to be more cutting with it. I am begging you on your hands and knees to drop the woobified jake english and make him slightly snarky and a bit offputting and weird. Jake grew up in the middle of a jungle and burned his grandmother.

Also he seems to be slightly aware of outside forces, note him calling attention to the fact he knows things he shouldn't canonically even be able to know.

Because Jake IS a little freak. He thinks corpse puppetry is funny. He punches what he thinks is fish hitler while ranting about movies. Hes funny as fuck. Hello.

However, with all of THAT out of the way, lets focus on some of the more ABRASIVE parts of his personality. While Jake is funnily charming with his old lingo and tendency to ramble, he has issues! One HUGE one is reluctance to fully FACE things he doesnt feel he has a full grasp on. He DOESNT like going out of his comfort zone, he DOESNT like talking about his emotions to people he really cares about or thinks has fallen for his manic dreamboat pixie persona, He's well aware people fall for it. He works hard to make sure people DO. But it sort of restricts him to that persona, he can't grow from it as long as he holds onto the idea that this persona hes chasing is the only way he can BE without being vulnerable.

Jake can be OVERBEARING, and not just that, painfully unaware when he's up his own ass! This critic he gives to Dirk applies to himself! The reason why he doesn't like brainghost dirk is because GOD forbid the man self-reflect juuust a little and find something that upsets him. Nope! Not going to deal with it. Just as quickly as he is to switch the thought that everyone loves him, he is just as likely to switch to think that everyone doesnt.

Anyways, I think thats all I have to say, Jakes words speak a LOT about his character, and I genuinely love him a lot. He has some words i think about a lot and hes genuinely such an awesome guy. I'll let a few choice pieces of dialogue from Jake himself close this out for me.

This was one of the last conversations we see with him. And I still think about his words a lot.

I'll probably edit this when I get the energy. But I think i covered most of it. Happy writing!

[shepscapades]

The "I'm sorry you're so stubborn" line hits different in this au. Especially since you drew Etho pulling down his mask while saying that (Revealing the cracks in his face. Cracks received from Etho taking the creeper blast for Bdubs, who at the time was adamantly against even being paired with Etho.)

I KNOWWWW they've been through so much in this au, I'd be lying if I wasn't listening through that quarrel with the thought of everything that's happened in dbhc on my mind— from how bdubs treated etho at the beginning to bdubs' last life betrayal of tango (thinking abt when bdubs said "like I've ever done anything to anybody!!!"), To etho shutting down, to doublelife with reset etho, to ethos re-deviation and the slow climb back towards friendship they both fought for through the end of season nine... It makes me crazy

HOWEVER COMMA. And I'm doing some doodles to accentuate this point. I do think there's something really special/funny/positive about the idea that they could be bickering and fighting like this on good terms. Like, that they've settled with their history so much so that they're comfortable to pick at each other and yell and get cranky but still be laughing through it. I definitely take it more as a good thing that they're being playful like this, bc even though they're being ugly to each other, they still obviously care abt the others safety and are obviously still basing/teaming together. Y'KNOW? I just think they could be so special and silly to me and that it's important that we don't lose our sense of whimsy when they "fight"

[myheadsgonenumb]

Someone over on the fanfic writers community was (understandably) upset because they showed their fic to a friend and their friend said it was so obviously written by AI "it was embarrassing". Apparently - in the dick move to end all dick moves - this person had taken their friend's lovingly crafted prose, ignored how vulnerable they had made themselves in sharing it with them, and fed it into an AI detector.

Some people just don't deserve to have friends.

But anyway, it got me curious about what AI detectors would say about my work, so I fed chapter one of sixth year of The Wolf's Tail into it section by section. As it happens, the overwhelming result was that my work was human written (little do they know I'm a lizard in disguise🦎) but the following sentences were deemed to have been generated by a computer:

From "The Other Minister" section - There was a scratching at the door, and Wilberforce, Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, slunk inside. He climbed up into the Prime Minister's lap and began to purr.

I'm not sure why. Maybe because the AI detector didn't understand that Wilberforce is quite obviously a cat and, without that context, the idea of some dude called Wilberforce climbing into James Callaghan's lap and starting to purr is so batshit and nonsensical that only a computer could dream it up?

From the "Lily in Cokeworth" section:  But things were, she was sure, particularly unbearable in Cokeworth, where the streets were narrow and the heat was funnelled down them. The air was still and stifling, and the whole town felt like it was being slowly baked in an oven. The grass, up near the park, was wilting and turning brown, while the metal of the climbing frame was too hot to touch.

I'm starting to think it's about the commas, as if only AI can use a subordinate clause. There was nothing that rang alarm bells in the "Sirius suffering at Grimmauld Place" section, but my comma theory is further supported by the first line of

the "Dumbledore" section: Dumbledore was, in fact, strolling down the winding path that led from the castle of Hogwarts to Hogsmeade village, appearing to all the world as if he did not have a single care in it. His smile was genial, he was humming softly, and once he even stopped and picked a clematis from its vine, then popped it in his beard in a fit of whimsy.

I take offence to this snippet being deemed AI - as if a computer is aware of whimsy, or would be able to write a human character having a fit of it. That sentence is, I would argue, the most human of any I have written in the entire chapter.

Dumbledore's section was actually the one suspected to contain the most AI (at over 7%) as this section of dialogue also failed the human test:  ‘I might have known; you Unspeakables have always had a flair for the melodramatic.’ 

‘Dumbledore!’ Some of the worry seemed to melt from the man’s face as he got to his feet and held his hand out to shake. ‘Good to see you, thanks for coming.’

‘And to what do I owe the pleasure?’

It's all true, I tell ya, I absolutely needed a robot to come up with the line 'Good to see you, thanks for coming.'

Finally in the "Remus recovers from a full moon" section the line: I haven’t heard from him all summer, and I’m starting to worry was enough to set the AI detector's spidey senses tingling. Who on earth can tell us why?

I think it must be the commas, but I write hundreds of run on sentences with masses of commas and clauses, and the vast majority of them didn't flag up as AI. And some of these sentences are so basic. So I can't see any rhyme or reason to how these lines were decided to be suspect.

These results were with Zero GPT. Grammarly came back as all human written (which it is) so is possibly a better AI detector. However, I largely suspect that - much like when it comes to writing stories in the first place - humans are far better at detecting when stories are written by AI than machines are. I've only ever seen AI fanfic when it's been used in experiments to see if people can tell which is AI and which is human written and I have always been able to tell. The fact that the AI generator doesn't actually know what it is talking about (because a computer cannot be a fan) and is just throwing around buzzwords is always immediately apparent.

There is just something about creating and crafting stories that can never be properly replicated by a machine. I'm not religious - and I don't believe in such things - but I think the best way to describe it as lacking a soul.

Similarly, i think it is that same "soul" (for lack of a better word) that makes us, as human readers, attuned to generatve works vs the real thing. And if you can't see that difference, then it suggests a problem with you rather than a problem with the author you are accusing of cheating and stealing.

In conclusion, AI has no place in fandom but neither do people who take the work authors and artists lovingly craft and accuse them of using AI. The tools you are using to do this are also AI and don't know jackshit about art. If something is written by AI, or drawn using AI, you don't need a machine to tell you that - your own human eyeballs will spot it. Yes, we need to be vigilant about AI use in fandom spaces but we also need fandom etiquette around reading something someone poured hours of time, their heart and vunerability into, and telling them you think that they are a cheat and that a computer did their work for them.

Because that is one foolproof way to kill fanfic stone dead.