#rubberducking myself with this plot

[brainworms-all-night-long]

Yk I had a thought around the time Nine Tailed Travel Guide Through The Multiverse was a thing, just never posted abt it. A fic basically about Nine sort of like, crash landing into the SCU in the time frame after the second movie with shenanigans ensuing

Didn't really plant out or thought through any major details but so far the basics are; something goes a little bit to the left when Nine was cruising through the Shatterverse after discovering the Grim, and he ends up crashing into scu Green Hills around dusk, sustaining a couple injuries with the Shatterdrive getting totaled but not completely unsalvageable.

So while Nine goes to scout out the situation, looking for ways to repair his ship and find something to treat his wounds, he stumbles into a nearby veterinary clinic where he, unbeknownst to either of them, almost gets caught by Maddie who was about to clock out but returned cuz she forgot to lock the back door. (This has an au within an au offshoot where Maddie does catch him and locks him up for questioning, but in this version Nine can already understand English well enough for banter with her but more on the language barrier later)

Unfortunately by the time Nine gets back to his ship it has already attracted the curious local town's folk and worst of all, Sonic and the gang who immediately suspect Nine's location, since he left a very faint blood trail. Fortunately for him, their investigation eventually grows cold. Afterwards the Shatterdrive gets police taped, but because everyone's experiences with aliens in this town no one is really too rattled or pressed to make big news about it, so I don't have to think about Gun being a problem for now.

It just so happens Nine is really good at navigating around security systems and people completely unseen even in near broad daylight, (courtesy of growing up under New Yoke's nonstop and overbearing surveillance system) so for a couple weeks he becomes this cryptid that everyone in town swears has stolen at least one part off their car but there's little to no evidence or pattern to pin it to one specific person or even a thing, best that can is blame the weird alien ship in the woods. Except for Crazy Carl swearing up and down he's "caught a fox stealing from his barn that looked suspiciously like you lot" while pointing at Tails. Speaking of the alien ship, during their first investigation Knuckles and Tails recognized some of the Not Earth alphabet used in the Shatterdrive so they're inclined to somewhat believe him, later coming up with a theory that perhaps another Mobian has escaped to Earth for whatever reason and is hiding out similarly to the way Sonic has. It's also really weird Tails could swear the ship was engineered in an uncanny familiar manner, like something he would've made. Sonic makes searching for this unseen thief a little competition game and while getting close a couple times, Nine still somehow remains elusive.

Until he's eventually forced to break into the Wachowski's house for Something (I was thinking like, the Shard the gang took from the Shatterdrive and stored in their house for 'safekeeping' but that has Implications I haven't thought through yet) and gets caught by Tails staying up late tinkering in the garage which Nine chose as an unfortunate point of entry.

Extra shenanigans ensue because who woulda thunk not all aliens speak perfect English immediately so there's a language barrier only Tails and Knuckles can somewhat get through since they're the most familiar with the dialect Nine knows, unfortunately Nine doesn't like either of them based on principle so he just stays quiet in protest, threatens Tails, nearly injures him in the process, and in the commotion disappears again.

Ofc now that the Catalizator Thief Cryptid has a face, it seems easier to search for him and whaddya know, Sonic does what Sonic does best and that is making Nine's life worse by winning the abandoned competition once he finds him in the woods in a makeshift workshop the fox set up as a means to slowly repair the Shatterdrive (Tails being the first one to properly see him in light technically doesn't count because he wasn't Actively Searching for Nine, or so Sonic says)

A quick questionnaire reveals the language barrier is still a problem but through Nine's broken English which he's managed to absorb over time in the town and Sonic's broken Mobian language he's mostly forgotten since he rarely spoke it once getting to Earth, they eventually settle why the fuck did Nine almost take Tails' head off in the garage, why did he break into their house in the first place, why he steals parts of machines and electronics instead of just going to to the hardware store like a normal person, how he got here and how he wants to leave as soon as possible.

Sonic obviously ends up thinking Nine is the coolest motherfucker on planet Earth, (right after himself ofc) those tails make him look like Doc Ock! And Nine decks him in the face because he doesn't want anything to do with "doctors" and tells him to leave him alone already.

Sonic promises to keep Nine's location a secret but manages that only about two days before he accidentally spills the beans to Knuckles and Tails who want to know What's Up with that guy in the woods and why does he look so much like Tails and so the lovely family bonding Nine never asked for begins.

Nine really really just wants to gtfo of this planet, but unfortunately all the snacks and music and casual company and the care make it really hard to focus on the singular goal of leaving it all behind and once Maddie and Tom find out about him, it's jover (he needs to get back to his Sonic and his perfect world in the Grim. These people don't matter)

———

Aaand that's abt all I have. If anybody wants to turn this into a fic or expand this plot further go right on ahead!!! (Just link it back to this post if you will and also tag me I wanna see what you make pretty olese)

[aquadestinyswriting]

Heya! From the Fall Asks:

🦇 Bat: If you could teleport to any point in your story where would it be? You can go back to correct past “mistakes” or into the future to something you’re most excited about. 🧥 Coat: Where do you feel most comfortable writing or brainstorming? ☕ Coffee or Tea: How often do you feel like you need to take breaks or unwind from working on your story?

Hi Dru, thank you so much for the asks <3. As usual, placing my answers under a cut to save everyone's' dashes. All the asks are from this ask game

🦇 Bat: If you could teleport to any point in your story where would it be? You can go back to correct past “mistakes” or into the future to something you’re most excited about.

Oh this is a tough question to answer since all my WIPs and series are basically one, huge story at this point. I think the one point I would teleport to would probably be to just after Merri's trial, when Laurence went to go "have words" with the Fangthane Council. Mostly to stop him from screwing up the celebrations and let the whole party attend Merri's wedding, damn it! Goddamn token human messing everything up and getting everyone kicked out of Fangthane early *muttergrumblecurse*. Sadly, I cannot change what happened in the roleplay canon as I do not have a time machine.

Another point in the timeline I'd like to rectify, and yet cannot, is that final battle against Darkhide. The angst potential there was too real. It's such a shame it was so much of a mess.

🧥 Coat: Where do you feel most comfortable writing or brainstorming?

I feel most comfortable writing at home at the table. I do have a lovely stand for my laptop now, but it needs a hard surface for me to type comfortably these days. As for brainstorming, that always happens when I'm out for a walk in nature and alone. Or at least with someone who isn't constantly talking. I also do sometimes brainstorm while riding public transport and am able to listen to music, but I can't rubberduck plot points or character conversations aloud to myself without everyone else getting disturbed.

☕ Coffee or Tea: How often do you feel like you need to take breaks or unwind from working on your story?

I do take regular breaks from working on any given story, usually after a week or two. In those cases, when I don't have many obligations, distractions or things to stress over, I'll hop onto another story for a week or two and rinse and repeat. I can take extended breaks from writing altogether, though when these happen and how long they are tends to be random as it is dependent on anything else going on in my life.

Thanks again for the questions, hen <3.

[mitigatedchaos]

The global production system can create a seemingly unlimited amount of food with flavors so intense they are beyond anything a king of the old world could taste. They are junk food.

It can create peppers so hot that they are lethal to human beings. If no one can eat them, then they are just poison.

It can create highly addictive drugs. The value of being addicted to drugs is negative.

After using AI image generators for a while when Stable Diffusion came out, I've barely touched them since then. This isn't just a matter of limits - although they have them.

I just don't care, and I don't see why I should care.

It's already considered rude to use AI to write a response online - not just among Twitter circles, but even on Reddit.

The logic is simple. I could already use the unlimited text bot myself if I wanted to. Using an AI response is wasting my time. In the same way that discourse warriors are expected to wager their belief systems to establish stakes, more general forum posters are expected to use time in writing replies to show their respect.

Everyone can access the pretty images machine. The same logic follows.

How the economics of this shape out, I don't know.

However, culturally, will anyone in the future care about books written by AIs right now? Aside from a few novelty examples that are well-timed, as historical curiosities, I don't think so.

There are basically two uses for the medium.

First, for interactivity. A whole background for a story could be written, and then the AI could be placed between the setting background and a player or interactive viewer. This would make it like a Game Master in a table top RPG. This fits the unique nature of the medium as able to generate new text on command - but current LLMs aren't yet advanced enough for this.

Second, for mobility.

People say that current LLMs are about as good as old Google was for searches, so it can aid in research. Rather than reading what the LLM says directly, because there can be LLM poisoning or bad quality or random sources, the LLM can take a very vague or natural language query, and then the sources it pulls up can be viewed and examined. It can also be used for vague-searching of documents, although the vaguer that is, the more unreliable it is.

There's also a thing called "rubber duck debugging," where programmers describe the nature of a problem to a rubber duck, and in distilling the problem to put it into the form of an explanation, they come to understand whatever detail it was that they were missing. LLMs as they currently exist can be used for a turbocharged version of this process, where an LLM is used to provide a wrong version of something (like a list of names), and then in figuring out why its response is wrong, the right answer (such as a correct name) comes to mind. (This is called "strawmanning" by patio11.) In my chatroom, about 4-6 people use it this way, including me. (A couple of people also use it for programming.)

Unaided human writing has a natural and true character to it, and reading it represents a conversation with someone across time and space, so in this way it has value, and it is time-for-time.

Marginal LLM-written text has very little value. Setting aside the economic perspective, there is essentially no point to a human being having an LLM write a book under the human's own name and then publishing that book, because anyone else could also just use the LLM to write that book if they wanted.

The role for machine-aided writing, then, is not to increase the quantity of text, but to increase the quality of the text, and not through directly writing any prose (among other reasons, LLM prose is low-density), but in allowing the author to increase the amount of consideration per unit of text. Conducting research. Answering questions about earlier chapters to avoid plot-holes. Possibly updating notes on characters. Rubberducking.

The degree to which this can be considered "too much" or "too little" AI is debatable, but we could view it through the lens of the author's level of exertion. An author who puts in the same amount of total effort will not have his dimensionality collapse, so AI use should be tuned until the author is under a similar amount of friction, producing strength from exercise, that he would otherwise have been subject to. However, it's unclear what such a book should be classified as.

AI can also be used for "beat the AI" weightlifting.

...and for motivation, for some reason. I fed much of my very long essay into LLMs, read the responses, and then completely ignored all of the recommendations and rewrote each section multiple times, and then, over months, completed my roughly 22,000-word report.

Anyhow, culturally, I think human-written books are here to stay. Culturally speaking, an AI-written book is only worth as much as the human-written prompt that created it. If we have an AI-driven economy with something like a UBI, people who don't want to become potatoes will probably make a habit of avoiding too much AI-created content, and writing a good book oneself will still be a sign of talent.

Questions about the broader economics are more difficult to work out. AIs aren't writing long-form books right now, but if they do, I'm not sure how to demonstrate human authorship in a legible way to potential buyers. Also, books didn't go away when social media and video games hit the scene, but the market did change.

You can't argue against a technology. No one has ever, ever, in the history of humanity, argued a technology out of existence. The closest we've come are nukes and human genetic engineering. Nukes exist and multiple countries have massive arsenals of them, but we've agreed not to use them because it would mean humanity's utter destruction. Human genetic engineering cuts right to the heart of a bunch of ethical questions about health, equality, identity, and so on, and also up until very recently genetic engineering has been a long and extremely expensive process. We'll see how long human genetic engineering remains taboo now that it's getting cheaper and easier. But these are absolute outliers. In the vast, vast majority of cases, I mean literally in virtually every single case, when people fight a new technology—for any reason—they loose.

There is no tenable "anti-AI art" position, just like there was never a tenable anti-loom position, or anti-railroad position, or anti-horseless carriage position. These things were doomed to fail absolutely from day one, as soon as the technology existed, and anti-AI art is doomed to fail just as utterly and completely. There is just no path here, if this is what you've hitched your wagon to I really do not know what to tell you.

[renofmanyalts]

Why I Didn’t Write It: a post-mortem discussion

I’ve been thinking about that bingo card I filled out. Recently, I’ve been in a process of trying to look at the things I struggle with and, rather than give in to all the unhelpful, shaming “It shouldn’t be that hard” and “just DO it” that gets tossed around in my head, actually go: 

Okay, so. It IS hard. What can I try that might make it EASIER?

And I’ve been thinking about that bingo card I filled out, and how... hopeless? helpless? it feels to stare down all those checkmarks on all the things that trip me up. That didn’t feel too great, so, I thought I would sit down and really examine those things and see what the barriers are and what kinds of things I could experiment with to get over/around/under/through them. 

This is going to be kind of a rambly self-meditation, so, cut goes here. 

With thanks to @ao3commentoftheday for putting the bingo card together and @ffxiv-writers for putting it on my dash.

---------

It’s an emotion not a plot

I didn’t write it YET

Couldn’t think of a beginning

Got distracted by a new WIP

Too much happening IRL

Fell asleep

The stars haven’t aligned

Fell into a research hole

Couldn’t think of an ending

Hit too close to home

Lost the idea because I didn’t write it down

Got stuck and can’t get past it

Forgot I was writing it

The first thing I’m noticing as I look at this list is that some of them have to do with the content of the writing itself, and some have to do with external factors. There may be other ways to divide this list up, but that’s what I’m seeing first, so let’s see where that gets me.

Content Problems

(aka, I actually started writing the fucking thing but it’s fighting me)

It’s an emotion not a plot

Couldn’t think of a beginning

Couldn’t think of an ending

Got stuck and can’t get past it

So, in descending order of troublesomeness/frequency, these are all things where I have an idea of something I want to write, but I’m snagging on something around developing the idea. I’ll sit down to write, but when I try starting, what comes out is boring as hell -- I tend to get “explainy” (related to “telling rather than showing”). Or, there’s a clear start, but where is it going? what am I trying to say? Or, some inconsistency in the middle makes getting from A to B difficult. 

How have I managed to get around these content-related things in the past? What could I try if I get stuck again?

Complain about it until I rubberduck myself into a solution

Outline-brainstorming (ideally with someone else)

Skip past the boring stuff and start with the fun stuff 

Do I have enough characters in the thing for this to be an interaction?

If this is a “character by themselves” scene -- can I insert some apostrophe? an imaginary dialogue? 

What’s the conflict/problem/point of tension? (even in fluffy scenes there is one -- that’s the payoff)

Start in the middle of the dialogue

Where do I want to end up? (positive/negative mood? location? circumstance?)

Where did I start (emotionally, circumstantially) -- what’s the “opposite” of that? (ensures movement over the scene)

Letting it be (but coming back to it) 

Scrapping the whole thing (but saving it to be cannibalized later)

...but sometimes I need to just let it go and take the EXP consolation prize rather than getting stuck on it. Not everything will “jell,” but it’s all grist for the mill.

But what gets in my way more often than not is...

External Factors

...which can further be divided into problems starting...

Too much happening IRL

Fell asleep

Lost the idea because I didn’t write it down

The stars haven’t aligned

Hit too close to home 

I didn’t write it YET

...and problems finishing.

Fell into a research hole

Got distracted by a new WIP

Forgot I was writing it

Now that I look at them, most of these have to do (for me) with either attention/motivation or energy. 

The biggest barrier for me is energy -- I call it “writing brain,” and it’s like a meter that is depleted by all kinds of things, including how much I’ve had to use my ability to focus on a given day, whether I’ve gotten enough sleep, if I’m in physical discomfort, how much stress I’m under, etc.

...speaking of energy. I just ran flat out of ability to focus on this post, so I’m going to post what I’ve got on top of my head so far.

Here’s the vague toss-out on the energy/attention/motivation thing:

BE GENTLE WITH MYSELF.

Give myself structure and opportunities to succeed (I’ve had great luck with a sticker chart)

Give myself credit for EVERYTHING I do, including partial credit. 

Write ANYTHING. It counts!

Figure out what “the stars aligning” looks like (for me: music, a deadline, several prompts to constrain possibilities)

...all fit for my own practice of writing, which is just to write at all -- I’m not working on a larger project or to a deadline. 

And sometimes it still doesn’t work. But shame takes up writing brain. So... maybe that’s not the best way for me to spend my energy?

[pathsofoak]

To Do List

Procrastinate the laundry

Make a list of plans for a private discord channel I have in mind to help myself with rubberducking without detailing every single plot twist in front of the very people I hope will read the story XD

Finish the Brenda & Teresa chapter. Only one more scene to go before it's Frypan, Gally, and Minho's turn to be bullied by my need to write angst

Procrastinate the mess on my floor the laundry

Email the karting people to say me and my friends would like to take the offer of a new date and a free snack menu if it's still available (it's uhh been a while... but we paid so I'll take it even if there's no more snack menu)

Make a bullet point list of issues with/ideas for The Late Fall, because I'm starting the rewrite (I'm splitting my free days. Mornings are for first drafts, afternoons for seconds)

Procrastinate the reason I almost tripped when I came out of bed the laundry