#there are a lot of stupid things that AI is using power for

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Conspiratorialism and neoliberalism

Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.

Trump's day-one Executive Order blitz contained a lot of weird, fucked-up shit, but for me, the most telling (though not the most important) was the decision to defund all medical research whose grant applications contained the word "systemic":

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025/02/04/national-science-foundation-trump-executive-orders-words/

Now, this is an objectively very stupid thing to so. As someone with a recent cancer diagnosis whose illness is still "localized" – and who will need a lot more intensive care should his cancer become "systemic" – I would very much like my government to continue to fund systemic research.

But of course, Trump wasn't intentionally killing research on systemic forms of cancer. Rather, he was indifferent to the collateral damage to this kind of research that arose in the pursuit of his real target, which is killing systemic explanations for social phenomena.

This is absolutely in keeping with neoliberal dogma, best expressed in Margaret Thatcher's notorious claim that "there is no such thing as society." In neoliberalism, we are all atomized individuals, members of homo economicus, driven to maximize our personal utility. All acts of seeming generosity are actually secretly selfish: you only tell your partner you love them because you hope it will make them fuck you and/or take care of you when you get sick; you only give alms to the poor in order to seem virtuous before people who can steer profitable business your way; you donate to cancer research as an insurance policy against your own eventual sickness.

This selfishness is a feature, not a bug. It's only by pursuing our selfish utility-maximization that we allow the market – a giant, distributed computer – to correctly assess who should be given the power to allocate capital and direct the activities of the lesser among us. When the invisible hand helps these born monarchs to pull capitalism's sword out of the market's stone, they are elevated to the position of power they were destined to hold, from which they can maximize all our social and material progress.

The project of neoliberal economics is to transform the social science of economics into a "hard science" grounded in empirical, mathematical proofs. Economism is a political philosophy that says that human society should only be considered through a lens of mathematical models. As such, it vaporizes all factors that can't be readily quantized and represented in a model:

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

It's a political philosophy with no theory of power, built on just-so stories. If you offer to buy a kidney from me and I agree to sell you that kidney, then we have arrived at a mutually satisfactory, voluntary arrangement in which the state should not intervene. Never mind that all the people who sell their kidneys are poor and desperate and all the people who buy the kidneys are rich and powerful. After all, can we really ever be sure that someone feels "powerful" or "desperate"?

This is an extremely convenient political philosophy if you happen to be in the market for a kidney, or for that matter, if you want to buy the labor or bodies of any kind of worker for any kind of use. It's a great philosophy if you never want to bargain with a union, because the union is interfering with the "voluntary" transactions between workers and their bosses, and the glittering equations (operating in a Cartesian realm with no room for "power" or other squishy factors) prove that this is "market distorting."

It's also an extremely convenient political philosophy if you are getting rich by stealing from people, or even murdering them. If you offer me a payday loan with a ten heptillion percent APR and I accept it, that's voluntary, it's the market, and there's absolutely no reason for anyone to pass comment on the fact that 100% of the people who take those loans are poor and 100% of the people who originate them are rich:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism

Likewise, if you're enjoying a wildly profitable monopoly, this philosophy acts as antitrust repellent: "if people didn't prefer my monopoly business practices, they'd shop elsewhere":

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

It's great news if you want to destroy the planet with immortal, infinitely toxic plastic packaging, because it lets you claim that the only problem with plastics is "littering" (irresponsible individuals) and not your products:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/14/they-knew/#doing-it-again

It's fantastic news if you're one of a few very large fossil fuel companies who are rendering the only planet in the known universe that's capable of sustaining human life uninhabitable, because it lets you blame the problem on our individual "carbon footprints" (not your depraved greed):

https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sham

This is a philosophy that is violently allergic to systemic analysis. It must reduce everything to a set of individual choices, taken in a power-free vacuum: to litter, to labor, to borrow, to shop. Its adherents are so saturated in this ideology that they can't even see that it is an ideology.

Think of Noam Chomsky's interview with Andrew Marr:

Marr: How can you know I’m self-censoring?

Chomsky: I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.

A systemic view challenges everything about the neoliberal mindset. In 2011, the streets of Hackney (and beyond) erupted in an uprising of protest, which included some looting and arson, though the vast majority of mobilization was of marching and shouting protesters outraged at the murder of a Black man by London police.

In response, then-Prime Minister David Cameron declared all systemic explanations for the uprising to be off-limits, calling it "criminality, pure and simple":

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/aug/09/david-cameron-full-statement-uk-riots

"Criminality, pure and simple" has zero explanatory power. Where did this "criminality" come from? Why did it spike on these days? What happened to it after the uprising was crushed by police? Did it go away? Is it festering in the hearts of Britons up and down the country, awaiting some inaudible signal before detonating again?

How frightening it must be to believe in a world without systemic explanations! It's a world where inexplicable spirits sweep across the land, engendering population-scale effects that are the result of millions of people making voluntary, individual decisions, disconnected from any kind of social phenomena.

It must be terrifying, like living in a world secretly governed by demons or witches.

It's the world of the conspiracy fantasist.

Yesterday, I wrote about the role that the conspiratorial wing of the Trump coalition is playing in keeping the Epstein story alive, and the danger this poses to Trump:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/18/winning-is-easy/#governing-is-harder

Trump's conspiratorial base are hugely and reliably animated by stories about impunity for elite sex predators. As well they should be! Elite sex predators get away with all kinds of crimes – not just Epstein, but the whole universe of powerful men, from Harvey Weinstein to Donald Trump, who systematically abused women for decades and got away with it – bragged about it, even!

But despite these very real abusers, the conspiracists in the Trump base are mostly concerned with imaginary abusers – Qanon's shadowy cabal of adrenochrome-guzzling pedophiles, tirelessly freighting trafficked children from one nonexistent pizza parlor basement to the next, packed inside of very mid Wayfair home furnishings:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/05/ideomotor-response/#qonspiracy

This is the "mirror world" of right wing conspiracism described in Naomi Klein's Doppelganger:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

It's the world in which real suffering children (kids in cages, children rotting in Alligator Auschwitz, kids working the night-shift at a meat-packing plant) don't matter at all, while imaginary children (unborn children, Qanon victims, etc) take center stage.

Indeed, one of the strangest things about the Epstein case is that it's the rare instance in which right-wing conspiratorialists care about actual people, rather than imaginary ones.

The mirror-world dominates right-wing politics. It's a world in which systemic problems don't exist, because it's a world in which systemic power doesn't exist. It's a world where individual rich people with evil in their heart are to blame for our problems, not a world where a system of impunity for the powerful allows rich people to get away with hurting us.

This is why they call antisemitism "the socialism of fools." An antisemite blames their problems on a cabal of Jewish bankers, rather than the dominance of the political system by finance capital.

In response to yesterday's post, reader Garvin Jabusch wrote to say, "your phrase 'blame systemic problems on individuals' does a fantastic job of crystallizing how I feel about the BP-invented concept of the carbon footprint."

This is exactly right, and it's an important connection I'd never drawn before myself. Because while conspiracies have run rampant since time immemorial, the modern conspiracist is a conservative, trapped in the mirror-world:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

The mirror-world warps reality, but that warpage has the same curvature as neoliberalism's "There is no such thing as society." Conspiracism – like neoliberalism – insists that the world runs on individual virtue and wickedness, not the systemic properties that make it easier or harder (or impossible) to do the right thing.

This is why Donald Trump banned the word "systemic." To any objective observer, it is plain that Donald Trump is an effect, not a cause. He's too stupid and impulsive to do anything except fill the Donald Trump-shaped hole in our politics, after 40 years of Democrat/Republican consensus that "there is no such thing as society" and insistence that every social problem is the result of a "distorted market" and can only be worsened by state intervention.

Both neoliberalism and conspiracism insist that the world is run by great men, not by social forces. By denying that anything can be "systemic," Trump can deny that he is systemic, merely a conveniently shaped monster suited to our monstrous times.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/19/systemic/#criminality-pure-and-simple

[wowzerwyrm]

Much as I agree that the energy costs from AI being shunted in as customer service at every big company is a bad thing, I think it’s probably important to note that this graphic and article seems to be from a ‘pro-Ai’ company that appears to have made it their job to track the growth of AI in order to tell AI investors how much it’s going to keep growing and booming and making them money.

So, like, I wouldn’t necessarily trust this one anymore than someone who tells you that it’s time to hop on the Dogecoin train.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

what’s the story about the generative power model and water consumption? /gen

There's this myth going around about generative AI consuming truly ridiculous amount of power and water. You'll see people say shit like "generating one image is like just pouring a whole cup of water out into the Sahara!" and bullshit like that, and it's just... not true. The actual truth is that supercomputers, which do a lot of stuff, use a lot of power, and at one point someone released an estimate of how much power some supercomputers were using and people went "oh, that supercomputer must only do AI! All generative AI uses this much power!" and then just... made shit up re: how making an image sucks up a huge chunk of the power grid or something. Which makes no sense because I'm given to understand that many of these models can run on your home computer. (I don't use them so I don't know the details, but I'm told by users that you can download them and generate images locally.) Using these models uses far less power than, say, online gaming. Or using Tumblr. But nobody ever talks about how evil those things are because of their power generation. I wonder why.

To be clear, I don't like generative AI. I'm sure it's got uses in research and stuff but on the consumer side, every effect I've seen of it is bad. Its implementation in products that I use has always made those products worse. The books it writes and flood the market with are incoherent nonsense at best and dangerous at worst (let's not forget that mushroom foraging guide). It's turned the usability of search engines from "rapidly declining, but still usable if you can get past the ads" into "almost one hundred per cent useless now, actually not worth the effort to de-bullshittify your search results", especially if you're looking for images. It's a tool for doing bullshit that people were already doing much easier and faster, thus massively increasing the amount of bullshit. The only consumer-useful uses I've seen of it as a consumer are niche art projects, usually projects that explore the limits of the tool itself like that one poetry book or the Infinite Art Machine; overall I'd say its impact at the Casual Random Person (me) level has been overwhelmingly negative. Also, the fact that so much AI turns out to be underpaid people in a warehouse in some country with no minimum wage and terrible labour protections is... not great. And the fact that it's often used as an excuse to try to find ways to underpay professionals ("you don't have to write it, just clean up what the AI came up with!") is also not great.

But there are real labour and product quality concerns with generative AI, and there's hysterical bullshit. And the whole "AI is magically destroying the planet via climate change but my four hour twitch streaming sesh isn't" thing is hysterical bullshit. The instant I see somebody make this stupid claim I put them in the same mental bucket as somebody complaining about AI not being "real art" -- a hatemobber hopping on the hype train of a new thing to hate and feel like an enlightened activist about when they haven't bothered to learn a fucking thing about the issue. And I just count my blessings that they fell in with this group instead of becoming a flat earther or something.

[specialagentartemis]

a student cited several sources that don’t exist??? Jfc using AI is bad enough but at least check that the source is real

Yeah, this is the second time I've gotten that.

The ones who do this just don't care, not really, not about this class. And I'm TA'ing for an Intro to Anthropology lecture gen ed, and about 1/3 of the students were genuinely into it and 1/3 were showing up for the grade and 1/3 did not give a crap, and that's a pretty normal distribution. But this distribution of AI papers is new. Even last semester it wasn't this bad.

The problem is that college has been full of perverse incentives for a long time, and I'm a grad student who has no power to change that. Learning is less important than Getting The Correct Grade; getting the correct Grades that you can exchange for a Degree in the shortest amount of time is the primary goal. College as commodity. Learning is nice if it happens but it is not the goal, because learning is not rewarded: grades are. And it doesn't matter to the administration, and to your tuition payments and your scholarships, if you learn anything or not. What matters a lot to those things is if your grades are good enough. So of course the students see gen eds outside their major as a waste of time: it's just a thing they have to do to get their very expensive degree, and the degree is the point. The classes, learning, those are not prioritized, not incentivized. Grades are the end-all be-all. It's awful! But it's what this system creates the incentive to do! I hate it!

I've seen a couple people on tumblr smugly say "Academics are smug assholes who hate their students, and the reason they dislike ChatGPT is that it exposes that their degree is fake and worthless." And obviously those people have never talked to a teacher in their lives, but they are missing the deeper, worse point: teachers overwhelmingly want their students to learn. ChatGPT exposes just how many students do not give a shit about the thing we are so passionate about that we made it our careers, do not give a shit that we are trying to teach them, do not give a shit about our time, because the whole college as a structure and an institution that we work for doesn't really give a shit about that either. It's rational self-interest by the students but man it hurts me as a teacher, to know that so many students not only don't care about what I have been busting my ass to try to do for them, but also think I'm stupid enough to not notice.

[generation-of-vipers]

the decline of human creativity in the form of the uprise in AI generated writing is baffling to me. In my opinion, writing is one of the easiest art forms. You just have to learn a couple of very basic things (that are mostly taught in school, i.e; sentence structure and grammar amongst other things like comprehension and reading) and then expand upon that already-foundational knowledge. You can look up words for free— there’s resources upon resources for those who may not be able to afford books, whether physical or non physical. AI has never made art more accessible, it has only ever made production of art (whether it be sonically, visual, written—) cheap and nasty, and it’s taken away the most important thing about art (arguably)— the self expression and the humanity of art. Ai will never replace real artists, musicians, writers because the main point of music and drawing and poetry is to evoke human emotion. How is a robot meant to simulate that? It can’t. Robots don’t experience human emotions. They experience nothing. They’re only destroying our planet— the average 100-word chat-gpt response consumes 519 millilitres of water— that’s 2.1625 United States customary cups. Which, no, on the scale of one person, doesn’t seem like a lot. But according to OpenAI's chief operating officer , chatgpt has 400 million weekly users and plans on hitting 1 billion users by the end of this year (2025). If everyone of those 400 million people received a 100 word response from chat gpt, that would mean 800 MILLION (if not more) cups of water have gone to waste to cool down the delicate circulatory system that powers these ai machines. With the current climate crisis? That’s only going to impact our already fragile and heating-up earth.

but no one wants to talk about those stats. But it is the reality of the situation— A 1 MW data centre can and most likely uses up to 25.5 MILLION litres of water for annual cooling maintenance. Google alone with its data centre used over 21 BILLION litres of fresh water in 2022. God only knows how that number has likely risen. There are projections of predictions saying that 6.6 BILLION cubic meters could be being used up by AI centres by 2027.

not only is AI making you stupid, but it’s killing you and your planet. Be AI conscious and avoid it as much as humanly possible.

[severedfromthesource]

Androids and Electric Sheep

Ren is experiencing an unusual bug. Features F resus, M rescuer, CPR, stething, mouth to mouth, internal defibs, sex leading to cardiac arrest, sex acts both with consent and a person who cannot consent. I got too invested in the preamble so I highlighted the moment resus actually starts if you want to skip it.

No matter how advanced technology gets, it’ll only ever be used to fulfill man’s most base desires. Case in point- RN-34678. Or Ren, when the barcodes make my eyes glaze over and I get sick of calling them the number slurry X Tech names absolutely everything. Ren is as sophisticated as they come. Actual artificial intelligence. She makes the predictive text and ‘can’t even draw fingers’ image generating 21st century jokes people passed off as AI look like even more of a waste of time than they had been in those days. They might as well have been Speak n Spells. The collective power of every single basement dwelling crypto whizz kid with miles of wires and burnt up processors and bricked up video cards dedicated to their etherium farms pale in comparison to the computing power it takes to run Ren’s brain for an hour. She understands nearly 6,000 languages. She learns and retains information, consuming nearly 160 TB of memory every 8 hours. The bio-organic lace that makes up the net of her brain is a miracle, with the possibility of infinite memory. She is perfect in every sense of the word.

She is a glorified fuck toy.

The second the first android became commercially available, one of the first markets they hit was sex work. If nothing about late stage capitalism drove you crazy, that would have. Fuck curing cancer, or making androids for the dangerous, back breaking work people wreck their bodies to do, X Tech decided people needed a sex doll with a 100k price tag. The world’s most expensive cum sock. And yeah, alright, maybe I’m just bitter, partially because there’s no way in hell I could ever afford one, even as an android technician. But what a waste. She sits on my examination table, dutifully unzipping her black leather catsuit. Her managers always manage to stick her in something stupid looking, so overblown and sexualized they stop even being sexy at a certain point.

She looks up at me with lilac eyes. Last time they’d been blue. I like this shade better, I think, though I could do without the electric blue bob they have her wearing today. ”Your crash reports say you’ve been throwing error codes whenever a stream donation comes in over 2k,” I say. Which, for a bot like Ren, is quite a lot of her donations. “It’s probably just a bug in payment processing.” I look again over her diagnostics, floating on the screen at my desk. “Any complaints I wouldn’t find in the debug menu?”

”My heart has been feeling strange,” she says. I pause and look at her over the top of my glasses. “Well, firstly, it’s not your heart. An aether pump does not a heart make. Secondly, it shouldn’t feel like anything. You’re supposed to ignore the inner workings, it’s all background programs, runs without you thinking about it.” She shrugs. Her shoulders are pale as she rolls down the catsuit and pulls her arms from the sleeves, bunching up the tight leather around her midriff. Her breasts are small and round, standing upright as pretty as a Botticelli painting. I’d noticed the small bumps on either side of her nipples (Christ, did the things ever go soft? Or were they just always cutting glass?) but didn’t register until I saw them now that her managers had pierced them sometime since our last checkup. Little silver bars were stuck through the pink nubs, with winking silver balls on either end. Alright, cool, chill.

I clear my throat and pull up my rolling stool. “Well, let’s just take a look then.” I shift once I’m seated to alleviate the pressure of my stiffening cock. Listen, I’m not a technophile, honest to God. I go out of my way to filter out androids when I’m scrolling through porn sites because, despite the leaps and bounds we’ve made in technology, the uncanny valley is still a thing. It feels weird getting off to bots. But then there’s Ren. And fuck me if she isn’t the most attractive thing I’ve ever seen. I put a hand on the back of her neck, my thumb resting at the diagnostic mode button hidden just under the edge of her jaw. I feel the soft bump that sinks in when I press. Her lilac eyes flash black with snatches of white text, then roll back to lilac. Damn, she smells like a new car.

I glance back at the monitor, and as I suspected, nothing comes up about the aether pump. It seems in perfect working order. Still, I dig around my box of scrap wires and spare tubing until I find my mostly neglected stethoscope. I don’t often have to use it, but I feel a trill of excitement go up from my stomach to think I get to use it on Ren. I plug up my ears and put a hand on her shoulder, taking the bell of the steth in my other hand. Her breasts rise and fall with the rhythm of her breathing, set to mimic human intervals. The real purpose is to cool down her insides and keep her from overheating, but just like the aether pump and its auditory cues, its designed to mimic humans as closely as possible. After a guy fucks something like Ren, he gets the added benefit of being able to lay next to her and listen to her breathing. Feel her heart beat. Doesn’t matter what the purpose of the design is for, it matters so he doesn’t feel like he’s fucking a 100k fleshlight with arms and legs. I press the steth to a spot above her breast and it sinks into her pillowy soft skin like it was real. Cool it, Christ, you can’t get so hot and bothered over everything. Heel, boy.

But my thumb makes a slight imprint against her tit, and it’s hard to think of anything else. Same thing happens when I press the steth against a space under her breast, and it lays warmly against the back of my hand. The pump, like the fake lungs, is designed to look and act and even sound like a heart, pumping coolant through her body. I tell her it’s not a heart out of some petty, pedantic need to distance myself and my unique humanity, but truth is, the thing is a heart. She could die if something went really wrong with it, and a lot of bots have. Sudden cardiac arrest was one of the main bugs in the 2.3 rollout. It got so bad, tons of models in the service industry had to be recalled, because mechanical line cooks and servers were dropping if the ovens got too hot. My hand still on her neck, I pull her forward and press the bell to her back. Her forehead brushes against my shoulder, her gaudy blue wig draping against the side of my neck and jaw. I tilt my head just enough my nose brushes her hair. Fuck, she really does smell good.

“Well, I don’t hear any irregularities,” I tell her, because I don’t. The thing is pumping liquid aether around her body at around 70 bpm, like it should. She draws up from my shoulder, glancing at me sideways. “It only seems to happen with clients,” she says, drying out my throat in an instant. “Clients?” “Mhm. Whenever one of them climaxes. If they do it inside me, my heart starts going very fast. I get foggy and I can’t think afterwards.” I swallow. “Right,” I say, “I mean… I can’t exactly test that, Ren.” She touches my wrist. “It’s rather frightening, Doc. I worry…” She pauses, and I try very hard not to say out loud what I’m thinking. You shouldn’t be frightened of anything, Ren. You’re not supposed to feel any of this. She sits back, bringing her hand up, her fingers curling against where her pump lies in her chest, half covering her nudity.

She doesn’t want to get recalled. I wince in spite of myself. If she has the same defect others in her rollout had, she’s going right back to X Tech. I push the steth around my neck, scooping back hair from my face. “It’s a pretty fatal system flaw. It… I could… Well, I-“ I can’t look at her. Fuck, I really can’t look at her. My face feels hot. This is the plot of like, 90% of bot R34 on the internet. I might as well be a pizza delivery guy and she a lonely housewife who’s a few bucks short on a large sausage. She ‘breathes’. Her chest goes up and down, the lights winking off her pierced nipples. She’s so goddamn gorgeous.

“Doc?” “Thinking,” I huff. I spare a glance around the other cubicles bordering mine. Big glass offices, designed for this exact stupid fucking thing I’m about to do. The first guy who got caught with his dick in a bot ruined it for everyone, so now my coworkers and I are subjected to rat lab cubicles where we can look in on each other at any given moment. People around us testing reflexes, repairing cosmetic damage, quashing bugs. What I was about to do was also technically debugging, but there was no way in hell my boss was gonna see it that way if he saw my flat ass pumping in and out of a bot worth more than I make in a year on the other side of plexiglass. Alright, cool, chill. I scoop up my backpack with my work laptop and sling it over my shoulder. “Bathroom,” I whisper.

Cut to Ren and I, locked in the women’s bathroom. We have three women in the office, and their cubes are on the other side of the building, closer to another bathroom. This one is usually empty. Cut to her, awkwardly standing in front of a toilet. Me, on the verge of being the Most Fired Man Who Ever Lived. For extra security, I’d stuffed us both into a stall, locking it behind me too. It's cramped, which adds to the feeling this is absolutely not what I'm supposed to be doing. But hey, it's my job, isn't it?

I awkwardly maneuver around her and sit on the toilet lid, hastily undoing my pants. God, this is shameful. And weirdly hot? I can't tell if it's just Ren or the dozen or so corporate regulations and general laws I'm breaking doing this, but I can feel the pulse in my cock, pressing up against the inseam of my jeans. Those lavender eyes flick from my face to the swollen, flushed skin, and the outer rim of her pupils flash with color. I help her roll down the leather catsuit and then, holy shit, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I’m inside her. She feels real. My hands on her back, my face buried in her tits, her thighs on mine, she feels realer than any woman I had ever known. My breath warms her artificial skin, and the barbell through her nipple is cold, the contrast making me shiver whenever the hot skin of my cheek touches the metal. My fingers slide up her stomach, her hips bucking and pumping me in and out of her. She’s tight. Really fuckin tight. I can feel her aether pump, the artificial heart, throbbing in her inner walls, harder than any real heart I’d ever felt. It adds to every stroke, a thumping sensation that’s nearly making me come after a couple thrusts. Christ, I might as well be sticking my dick right against the chambers of her fake heart.

The job. Right, I’m doing a job. Fuck, I’ve never loved my job so much. “Lemme- ngh, God, fuck- lemme see i-ins-side your ch-est, R-Ren.” She’s straddling my lap, panting like a porn star, her bob swinging back and forth, and she nods. The synthetic skin goes translucent, a dull blue glow that starts at her collarbone and down to the bottom of her ribcage. I spare only a brief chuckle, Man, we never could get rid of those stupid gamer lights, before I try to focus my attention on her inner workings. The aether heart is basically a simplified human one, drawing hot fluid in one side and squeezing out coolant through the other in an eternal ebb and flow. And right now, it’s going insane. The valves are snapping open and closed rapidly, the thing shuddering instead of really beating. There’s a little display window pinned under her collarbone, and it’s clocking her at 150 bpm, the green spikes of her heartbeat saw toothing across the round display port. Not totally dangerous, but as I pump inside of her and she bounces on my thighs to match my quickening pace, it keeps climbing.

Alright. As much as I want to be stuck in here forever, with a beautiful woman bouncing on my dick in a way I’ve only ever dreamed of, I have to figure out what’s wrong. I wrap my arms around her body, pulling her flush against my chest. “Hold onto me, ‘kay?” I breathe against her ear. Her arms slid around me, nails brushing briefly against my shoulder blades. I take in her scent. Focus on the sensations of her body, the sharp cold of her piercings, breasts pressed against my chest, her warm, throbbing cunt. It doesn’t take long. I start to lose the rhythm as my breath shortens, my strokes shortening too, until finally I can take it no more. I come, hot seed filling her up, bathing my cock, spilling out from between our sexes. Her back arches, a cry ripping from her throat of the most exquisite ecstasy.

Then she dies.

No, seriously, the bot quits all at once. I’m there, still trying to enjoy the feeling of my load making her even tighter and full, when she goes completely limp. Her arms slide down from my back, and the artificial pulse I feel in her cunt just stops all at once. She’s dead weight on top of me. “Fuck,” I spit, trying to readjust her, but she’s goddamn heavy. “Ren? Hey, Ren- man, what the fuck-”

I look up at her sternum to see the aether pump has stopped. The little internal monitor is reading a flatline. I fumble to unlatch the bathroom door, my other hand cradling her back, as I awkwardly shift to try and swing it open. Both of us end up in a heap on the floor when I try to pick her up. I'm apologizing to her slack and lifeless face as I disentangle myself and hastily zip up, then lay her flat on her back. Her perfect round breasts sit in the open air, her still heart glowing between them. I set my laptop beside her and hook up a USB into the command port hidden behind her ear.

There was no tip off in her crash reports, but looking now, I can see the absolute mess of code in the last few lines she ran before arresting. I clean up some of the irregularities, get rid of the redundancies, and hit reboot. Two small circular nodes glow within her chest, then snap against the chambers of her heart. Basically built in defib units. Her body jerks, hand twitching in against her cheek, her back arching slightly. Her naked shoulder blades slap against the tile floor as she falls back, limp again. But she doesn't move. Her pump is still. I glance at the monitor and see FATAL SYSTEM ERROR flash across the screen. Fuck, am I going to have to do this manually?

Growling in frustration, I throw my hands against her sternum. It's easy to get the right position when I can see her heart lying beneath a few layers of synthetic skin. Squaring my shoulders, I push down hard. Unlike with real CPR on a real person, depth doesn't matter, nor the risk of breaking ribs. She's basically Wolverine. A hydraulic crusher couldn't break her ribs. They yield though, and bow in against her spine as I rhythmically pump her heart. The force ripples through her whole body. Her stomach pops up, her shoulders shrug in, her head rolls back and forth. I look from her face down to her tits. I can't help it, they're swaying with each compression, the light catching her piercings. I can feel the cool metal rest against my fingers. The position my hands are in leaves my fingertip pressing against her nipple, still standing upright from our exercise. A shiver runs through me. Am I seriously getting hard again? It's hard not to. My eyes drink in her still body, the remnants of our session dribbling down her thigh, her breasts bouncing like they had when she was riding me.

I can almost see the corner of the screen light up with “Kink Unlocked: Reviving Dead Girls”. I glance at the monitor and see the reboot option has lit up again. When I take my hands away from her chest, I see her aether pump jerking as if trying to start again. Once more I charge the internal defibrillators. While they hum to life, I partake in a ritual that isn't strictly necessary. The hero always gets to indulge in mouth to mouth with the downed heroine. She doesn't actually need air, but her lips are slack, full and inviting. I press mine over hers, breathing air she doesn't need into her mouth. I can feel her cheeks puff, and I'm surprised but excited to see her chest rises too. I give her a few quick bursts of oxygen. Her chest jerks up and I only allow it to fall part way before I give her another, making her chest rise and fall in short hyperventilations. My hand finds itself running up her stomach to feel the motion of my breaths, up over her breast again. It fills my palm as I breathe a long, slow draft into her throat, and I roll her nipple between my fingers. She sighs out recycled air against my face when I break the seal of our lips.

Man, how do EMTs not cum when they resuscitate hot girls? The whole tableau is so erotic, I can feel my pulse once more jerk in my cock. The defibs once more slap the chambers of her artificial heart and she thrashes under the current. Her breasts sway and she again falls limp to the tiles.

“Come on, Ren,” I say under my breath, watching her aether pump swelling at uneven intervals. The chambers aren't beating right still, snapping open and closed out of sync with one another. I again check her code on my laptop, using one hand to tap through my options. The other I lay against her sternum. It occurs to me I really don't know what the fuck I'm doing. Whatever feels like it helps, I guess. Or whatever feels good. I grind my heel in against her heart in slow, rhythmic compressions with one hand. “Come on, work with me here. Breathe for me. Do something, at least let me know you're not completely bricked.” The idea that she might be makes me swallow hard. I like Ren. I don't want to ship her off to the junkyard as much as she doesn't want to be shipped.

When her heart goes still again I lace my fingers together and start pumping her chest anew. I forget my laptop entirely- this isn't a software issue, it's the hardware in her chest acting up. If I can just get the damn thing to reset. Swinging my leg over her supple thighs, I straddle her so I can use my whole body. Like this, I can feel the motion my work creates in her otherwise still body. Each powerful thrust against her pump rolls the kinetic force through her whole body. Her feet swing back and forth. The force rolls from her chest, down her stomach, even rippling her thighs. Each compression makes her stomach roll out, only now I can feel it between my legs.

Fuck it, I'm already fired. These life saving efforts have got me hard all over again, something I would have thought impossible. I unzip and thrust into her almost in one motion. It's next to impossible to actually pump into her while I'm working her heart, so I mostly settle for letting her body rock into me while I do CPR. Only when the prompt for the defibrillator pops up again do I allow myself to roll my hips into her while it charges. The thing whines quietly as I brace my hand against her chest, driving my cock deep inside her. It slaps her heart again and she arches her back, filling my hand against her sternum. Her inner walls clench with the electricity and I groan as I roll in and out of her. That's when she draws in a breath and moans all at once. Her eyes flutter open and she instinctively begins to grind her hips in rhythm with me. Before long I'm filling her up all over again and I collapse on top of her. She's back. The thought strikes me as I look down and see her aether pump snapping out a normal, if elevated rhythm. I roll off onto the welcome chill of the tile floors, my arm still slung around her.

“You okay?” I pant, my eyes half lidded as I look at her. Ren nods, smiling weakly in return. Then she’s wrapping her arms around me, burying her face in my shoulder. I hesitate, the shame of what I had done to her when she was basically dead starting to creep up now that the high is waning. But eventually I slide my arms around her in return, drawing her close to my body. “Thank you, doc,” she whispers.

“Don't mention it.” Seriously, don't mention any of this.

[feathermouth]

okay, so im a brainrotted freak, and ive had p.AI.nter on my mind for a while. naturally, i gave the bastard a body! here ya go!

rant/art dump below the cut

first off, p.ai.nter is a short king. mostly because i like the aesthetic, but its also convenient for him! it takes less resources to keep his body going! i imagine he would also wanna be smaller so that he could be more intricate with his art.

now, because he is mobile, the power source becomes an issue. hes an old computer! how does he survive unplugged ?!

well, here, i introduce the wonderful world of BATTERIES!

p.ai.nter would have a battery somewhere in his core, which would be how he keeps himself charged. that also means i get to give him a little cord tail! (for charging purposes, of course.)

i also am giving him a second tail, just for funsies. he deserves a USB drive with his conscience in it. he connected to other tech in the blacksite, so he should be able to keep doing that! because it was a very SAFE and FRIENDLY action on his part!

maybe angsty, but i think that p.ai.nter finds humans a wee bit gross, especially after everything that happened to him. why would he wanna be human shaped?

he wants something mobile and appropriate for a human-dominated world, of course, so he needs to have arms and a torso—but he wants his machinery to be obvious, if that makes any sense. no exposed wires (he is not stupid), but flashy metal bits, visible joint segments, yap!

now, building off of that, p.ai.nter would prefer a bird-like shape to his legs. he would definitely need to go through some manner of physical therapy in order to pilot his new body, and so he needs legs that inherently provide for more balance!

therefore, an excuse to give him anthro legs.

considering how much art p.ai.nter will probably begin creating, he wants something that doesnt stain easily.

a small problem : he doesnt like the look of dark paint! it doesnt match his monitor, and thats awful!

so, he resorts to covering clothes.

p.ai.nters shirts would need to be oversized and flowy to accommodate for his THICK AS FUCK head. so that he can actually put them on without stretching them out, of course.

therefore: oversized sweaters, long skirts, and aprons!

fucking GOLDEN! housewife looking guy! funky!

p.ai.nter wants to be MOBILE! theres so much to do and see! hes been locked down for years, how could he waste a perfectly good body ?!

he has several jointed segments in his torso to aid in movement and rotation, and his limb joints are made out of pliable metal tubes.

it also aids his precision in art! its easier to get clear views without body parts in the way and whatnot.

note: p.ai.nter settled on having five fingers per hand, despite insisting he wanted four for stylistic purposes. five fingers are ideal for human equipment, hes pretty sure.

now, you might be thinking, this guy has a lot going on. does he not overheat? hes a sentient brick?

there is a solution : air holes and internal fans!

a few strategically placed holes cover p.ai.nters body to aid in natural ventilation. its kinda like breathing!

inside of his body, cooling fans are centered in his chest and limbs. they distribute the air more evenly.

he really overheats when hes trying to do too much, such as controlling several devices or thinking about too many things at once!

now, for the behavioral headcanons :

painter has a LOT of fun toying with his new body. he goes on leisurely strolls sometimes, because hes previously never been able to.

his art will improve a lot upon receiving a body! having a new sense of autonomy would be a serious upgrade for him, and he would have many new ways of living. it wouldnt be AS dull to be a sentient AI in an abandoned facility.

he might go find ellies painting and stare sadly at it, though—i assume this theory still holds up? right? please?

sometimes he mimics the faces of other people on his monitor! like, he might draw sebastians eyes and mouth, and just uses that face to talk to him sometimes. as a means of teasing or affection. (he could probably do this before getting a body, but having a body definitely gives him the energy to do silly things like this!) pretty good way to find out how he sees your face, too.

despite p.ai.nter overheating when he runs too many tasks, hes a chronic multitasker! he tries to make the most of his new body, and hes often forced to sit back and slow down.

painter tried to convince his builder—most likely sebastian, with his engineering major and all—to let him have turrets on his arms, but that could become problematic with p.ai.nters mental state, so he agreed to have fake turrets for stylistic purposes only! he likes to keep them on his forearms and thighs, secured with straps that can be taken off. he enjoys pointing them at things and pretending to shoot stuff—which is EXACTLY why he doesnt get to have real guns.

and, after all this buildup, who would i be to not provide some full pictures? <3

[whetstonefires]

So the thing with the Matrix for me, right, was I could never get past the assertion that the motivation for keeping humans alive was as a power source.

That pinged as so so stupid, and was presented so late and half-heartedly, that I could not understand it as a sincere part of the premise. Like. We're told very dramatically and pretty early that the world was mostly destroyed by humans 'scourging the skies' to block off all solar radiation in the effort to shut down the solar powered robots, evidently forgetting that all life on Earth is solar-powered also. Too comedically dumb to be really tragic imo.

So to pivot from the premise 'there is no life on earth, other than human beings, because the sun is gone' to 'the humans were kept alive as batteries' is an impossibility for me. Our ludicrous mammalian bodies, incredibly inefficient engines entirely reliant on continuous indirect consumption of solar energy to even survive, were somehow yielding a net output? Not only that, but one superior to nuclear or geothermal???? Bullshit.

I mean. Bull. Shit. I cannot. We just underlined in the backstory how all life on earth relies on the sun! Because life is expensive just to maintain and requires constant external energy input! We get milk from cows by keeping them alive, but that's because they turn the grass energy into something easier for us to process; no such mechanism is proposed for humans consuming dead humans and somehow producing a form of energy more useful to the Machines than just waiting for the corpses to dry out and then burning them to run a goddamn boiler.

This makes the direct opposite of sense.

It had to be in-universe propaganda, right? Another layer of the deception? It couldn't be the real reason. It was too implausible. Which meant I was still waiting to find out why the machines were really bothering with humanity and the Matrix.

I would have accepted without quibble the revelation that humans have special psychic energy that the machines were harvesting; that's dumb but in a comfortable, comprehensible, and above all internally consistent sci-fi kind of way.

I would have been quite open to the idea that the machines relied on human consciousness for their own development to true sapience, and the Matrix was primarily an AI nursery with the enmeshed human brains providing complex inputs, that one's actually cool.

There are a lot of explanations out there aside from the dumb official one, or the Occam's Razor one where they were just keeping some humans alive out of sentimentality! I'm really not that picky!

So anyway I never managed to emotionally engage with the Matrix films well because I had this unresolved 'motives of primary antagonist??? cause of fundamental scenario??????' thing making most of the actual plot twist and drama feel kind of boring.

My sister maintains that this is something wrong with me, that I'm refusing to suspend my disbelief and engage correctly with the text, and this constitutes a hostile, bad-faith and therefore illegitimate reading.

(She hasn't actually said this last part and I'd respect her position more if she did, but this seems to be the broad thrust of her emotional position when she starts shouting.)

I maintain that if a central plank of your sci-fi premise relies on going 'fuck the basic principles of thermodynamics and biology this is a vibes-based system' you should be very careful to avoid invoking the relationship between basic thermodynamics and biology in your core worldbuilding.

[rassicas]

You at some point said that you wanted to change some of the backstory of Verna regarding his relations with Grizzco, to better reflect his position and purpose at the company with the new rotm and potential Splat3 dlc lore. Now that we have everything, have there been some finalized thoughts on the subject?

currently with my OCs I'm a bit stuck. I have this whole huge plot I've been trying to work out with how Cress and Verna reunite and get into some... Wacky Misadventures (they are going to have a bad time. together), and come out of it more understanding of each other....all this takes place prior to the start of Splatoon 3, and Grizzco is involved in that story so i cant really work out what happens to Verna during Splatoon 3 until all that is worked out...augh.

oh god i accidentally wrote too much about how grizzco works in my splatoon OCs setting. under the cut

How I've basically worked it out in my setting is that it's as if Mr. Grizz doesn't even exist. Well, he does, but...you can NOT convince me this literal mammalian bear is micromanaging an egg collection operation a few hours away from an underground cavern, all while building a spaceship, repairing alterna, and doing god knows what with fuzzy ooze? his voice from the radio is pre-recorded. He's just in the background trying to get his golden eggs for his stupid mammal revival plan. Grizz is pretty paws-off with the actual operations of the company. In order for Grizzco to operate like an actual company in the Inkling world, Mr. Grizz needs connections within the Inkling world. He needed to hire people, and lots. contractors to pilot the boats. the helicopters. people to repair them when there's issues. contractors to set up the grizzco building. people to maintain it. Supplying and maintaining weapons. Who put the statue there? Remember when grizzco would actually close its gates? someone had to be doing that. Advertisers? Sales of eggs? Do you really think Mr. "Does your species even have bones" Grizz is doing all that? No. So how would Grizz get these connections? I think ORCA could've helped out in some way with scouting some people online or with Grizz's business knowledge being an all-knowing AI. ROTM sure does a great job explaining or even implying anything about the relationship between those two. /s. But ORCA still is just a virtual entity, and you'd need a physical representative for some things, right? Anyway this is where the Judds come in. I think the idea that Lil' Judd being Grizz's initial way into the Inkling world...sucks. That's probably what the Splatoon team is going for and I do not care, the timeline on that does not make sense. Grizzco was introduced to us, the players, in April 2017. At this point the egg baskets are all installed, and there are Inklings in-universe partaking in egg collection....Lil Judd was born only a few months prior. I'm sure it would've taken a while for grizz to get everything together to establish this company. To me it makes more sense for Judd to have involvement. He's the only other mammal, and the one with all the power. (not only do i think the implied canon timeline sucks, in my OCs canon, i've had it established that grizzco has existed in some form several years before s1 so...) I wouldn't think Judd would know about the mammal revival plan. but like, Judd lets Grizz set up because he's looking out for his fellow mammal, and saw the kind of energy benefits this would have….also more salmon meat, yum. Judd canonically has numerous connections in the Inkling world, even to world leaders. He could use these connections to allow for Grizzco to set up business and give that permission to operate in the restricted areas where Salmonids live. Beyond this I have a hard time imagining Judd getting too heavily involved. Like once some other people are hired to do some more micromanaging of the company Judd kinda dips. Lil judd doesn't get involved until some years later and takes more direct interest in the company. With permissions granted and Grizzco operating as a defense against the Salmonid army while also providing power eggs, then grizz could do whatever he wanted so as long as an amount of money and eggs went into the Inkling world. And eggs are the primary source of income for Grizzco, so this part is very important. I think very early on Grizz would've had to personally deal with the sales of eggs to get the money to get the company started...maybe selling to octarians even? But for some real business dealings in inkopolis, youre gonna need some representatives in-person. anyways remember when this post was about my OCs. So I'm making a Grizzco board of directors, and they're the ones who actually maintain the company and the things in it while Grizz is busy in Alterna. Even the directors don't really know about Grizz's mammal revival plan, they just supply him with golden eggs and turn a profit for the company, by whatever means necessary.

After spending quite some time at Grizzco and becoming more trusted as an employee, Verna gets to know some of these directors. Some become his allies, and some are a bit more unsavory... He starts spending more time with some of them especially after his salmonid encounter, and they'll have a role in Cress and Verna's story. I've had some of these guys bouncing around in my head for years. some of them have art that im sitting on. i wish i could share more but I am Not done cooking </3 so to answer your ask in short. yes I have finalized much of the things with how i have grizzco functions in my OC's setting, and im basically ignoring the existence of grizz himself, in the same way that grizzco as a company runs completely normally even after grizz basically dies in ROTM. but at the moment, i do not have all the details finalized with other people at the company and how verna interacts with them

[masterbuilderintern]

Would you be willing to share more about pixal in your au? Im really curious about her, based on the bits youve shared :] like, whats the shift from antagonist to ally like for her? And what do her relationships with the ninja look like? Thanks!

P.I.X.A.L.'s new role revolves around ethical questions surrounding surveillance states and free will, particularly in relation to technology! But not from an "AI BAD!!!" (generative ai and suck my dick though) lens, more about how much control we give technology over our lives, which is a question we can pose to human leadership as well

Cyrus Borg really overcompensated when creating a newer, higher-tech, and "safe" Ninjago, placing too much trust in his programs to take care of humans in large groups. This leads to the main program, Limiter of Individual Disasters, taking it too far. People are their own worst enemy, so to protect them from themselves is the optimal method, isn't it?

YES, this program is called L.O.I.D., and it's a running joke the whole arc. Cyrus and his stupid ass names for his robot children. This was actually a really funny accident.

They don't have a design because they're in everything connected to the internet, basically. L.O.I.D. speaks through all sorts of things.

Anyway, P.I.X.A.L. is not controlled by L.O.I.D. like she was the Overlord in canon. She's a completely separate entity but has similar permission to her brother. Teaming up with L.O.I.D. is something she CHOOSES to do, believing that controlling the people would make them a lot safer and happier.

It's the ninja convincing her that there's more to being a person than surviving (THAT'S RIGHT, BABY, NOT ONLY AM I TYING THE OVERLORD'S DEFEAT INTO RESSURECTED GARMADON'S DEFEAT, BUT REBOOTED INTO THE LESSON HE MUST ALSO LEARN ABOUT LIVING AGAIN, REPEATING THEMES, FUCKERS). She values what she's learned from all of them, but she would NOT have been convinced of their arguments if Zane weren't there. His choice to live and fight the way he does, despite being an android himself, made what he had to say a lot less biased from P.I.X.A.L.'s perspective. The humans can plead all they want, of course they will, but this fellow machine finds value in these cultures and struggles, maybe she really was overthinking what it means to protect and survive.

And I'm using the word "person" and not "human" because Ninjago has multiple sentient species that deserve this respect. So in this universe, they use "person" and "personhood" when talking about life in its entirety. "Human" is only used when referring specifically to humans.

When she starts to have second thoughts about all this, she goes to L.O.I.D. about it to try to convince them, too. It does not work. It goes terribly, actually. They disconnect her from their shared power source, shutting her down completely.

This is where Zane shares his core with her! She put herself in this danger for them; technically, she died for them, and he thinks that she deserves better.

They don't need to hold each other to use their powers, but they still do it as a way for Zane to help get P.I.X.A.L. accustomed to it. And it's really cute and romantic, shut the fuck up. This technically counts as choosing a successor for Zane, which an elemental can only do once. The next master of ice would now either have to be randomly chosen by fate or by P.I.X.A.L.

"Why don't they just shut down L.O.I.D. via blackout?" Not only are they concerned about things like shutting down medical equipment in the city, but also the device being used to control people. It's a small device attached to the back of the head that connects itself to the central nervous system. The main cast has no idea how safe it would be to remove these by force, including a blackout. They need to find a way to take over L.O.I.D. to remove them!

P.I.X.A.L. had planned to merge her code with L.O.I.D.'s and use her new core to her advantage to completely override them. This would make her fully merged with the city's systems. It's not an identity death, but she wouldn't be the singular P.I.X.A.L. anymore. Her life would forever be tied to the city, with no time for anything else. A technological ascension, if you will.

Zane thinks she deserves better.

[elleldoe]

Introduction & Masterlist

💛​💛​💛💛​💛​💛​💛​💛💛​💛​💛​💛​💛💛​💛​💛​💛​💛

This blog is pro fic, pro ship, pro kink (rl: safe, sane, consensual), pro Ao3, anti censorship, anti harassment, anti (generative) ai.

Some of my works on Ao3 are only available to registered users. More details here.

Me & My Writing

Old enough to know better. Whimsical enough to not let that stop me.

I have been writing and posting my work under various pen names and on various sites since 2011. My masterlist (below the cut) contains links to my works, or you can browse my Ao3 here.

Working on my original novel (in theory anyway).

My asks and dms are open, don't hesitate to reach out if you feel like talking to me.

Fandoms & Themes

Main fandoms include The Hunger Games, Harry Potter, Silence of the Lambs & Hannibal (books & movies), and Van Helsing (2004).

All my works feature Age Gap relationships between Older Men and Younger Women (existing male characters and female OCs). A lot of them feature kink/BDSM to some extent. Dubcon (due to Power Dynamics) is more or less present in most of them, some also feature Non-Con or CNC written as Non-Con. Everything is properly tagged. If I happen to have missed a tag, feel free to let me know and I'll fix it.

Navigation

Posts about my fan works/series are tagged with the ship (for ex. 'Beth/Snow').

Posts about my original novel are tagged 'Elle's favorite child'.

Original posts are tagged as 'ElleLDoe'.

Other tags: 'asks', 'tag games', 'draft shenanigans'

Masterlist (will be updated as I upload new works)

Hunger Games

Beth/Snow Series (18+, Older Man/Younger Woman, (Mildly) Dubious Consent (mostly in the earlier parts due to the nature of their relationship), Fake/Pretend Relationship, Dom/sub Undertones, story-driven with lots of smut, fluff added into the mix starting Part 4)

Part 1: What You Have To Offer

Part 2: It's Just Business

Part 3: I Live To Serve

Part 4: Agony, Comfort, Bliss

Part 5: Bound By Appearances

Part 6: What I Have To Gain

Part 7: Best Laid Plans

Part 8: Third Time's A Charm 🔒​

Part 9: What On Earth Are You Thinking? 🔒​

Part 10: New Beginnings Are Often Disguised As Painful Endings 🔒​

Harry Potter

Lirelle/Lucius/Corban Series (18+, Threesome, Dom/sub, BDSM, Older Men/Younger Woman, CNC, Rough Play, Aftercare)

Part 1: Play Stupid Games Win Stupid Prizes

Part 2: False Sense of Security

Part 3: Cause and Effect 🔒​

Kiera/Corban Series (18+, Older Man/Younger Woman, Dead Dove Do Not Eat, Non-Con, Abduction, Imprisonment, Deatheaters doing Deatheater things, this one is rough if you click the link be mindful to read the tags)

Part 1: Knowledge Is Pain

Esther/Severus Series (18+, Older Man/Younger Woman, Teacher-Student Relationship (and therefore Dubious Consent), Power Play, They Dislike Each Other And That's What Makes It Fun)

Part 1: Foul Language and Inappropriate Behavior

Part 2: Lines Crossed and Strings Attached

Part 3: Sharp Tongues and Petty Games

Moira/Lucius (18+, Older Man/Younger Woman, Size Kink, BDSM, Brat/Brattamer Dynamic, Power Play, Sexual Tension, Post-Second Wizarding War)

All Bark And No Bite 🔒​

Van Helsing (2004)

Eveline/Count Vladislaus Dracula (18+, Older Man/Younger Woman, AU Modern Setting, AU Dracula got resurrected, Sexual Tension, Slow Burn (sort of), Eventual Smut, Sugar Daddies Are Stereotypically Older So What Difference Do A Couple 100 Years Make)

An Opportunist's Guide To Immortality 🔒

Sweeney Todd

​Annette/Judge Turpin (18+, Older Man/Younger Woman, Dubious Consent, Boss/Employee Relationship, Size Kink, Praise Kink, Oral Sex)

Make Yourself Useful 🔒

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[streamafterlaughter]

Soundtrack to Disaster

Prologue

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fic tags: enemies to friends to lovers, slow burn, modern!au, angst, time jumps, oc!reader x eddie munson. this fic is rated 18+ MDNI chapter tags: swearing… that’s it for now. teehee

a/n: hello and thanks for reading! chapter one will be posted shortly after this! i really hope you guys enjoy, and please leave me comments!!! reblogs also appreciated greatly!

DISCLAIMER: I do not consent to having my work fed to AI engines, or reposted in any way, shape, or form on other websites. Unless otherwise stated, this is the only account that features and contains this work, and any replication was done without my consent. Please let me know if you see my work elsewhere. Reblog to support the author!

taglist (comment/ask to be added!) @children-of-the-grave @five-bi-five @kellsck @faggotinie @xplrnowornever

—

September, six years ago

Red and brown leaves crunch under your boots as you rush across the commons, phone glued to your ear as your brother’s rants berate you from the other end of the line. You’re missing out on weekend tips to deal with your burn out brother and his stupid friends.

“You didn’t think you’d have to get your story straight just in case you got arrested?!”

“I didn’t really consider it a possibility. I was thinking positively!”

You groan, shoving your key into the ignition of your death trap of a car. “Well, the power of manifestation won’t help you now.”

“Will you please just come pick me up?” You almost tease him about the desperation in his voice, but something tells you it’s a bad idea.

“Yeah, whatever. How much is bail?”

“Ah, forget bail, sis. You’re gonna have to use that money for my lawyer.”

“What the fuck did you do, Chris?”

-

He stole a car.

Not just any car; a vintage, 1967 Cherry Chevy Camaro belonging to none other than Officer Carver. What a fucking moron.

Carver’s had it out for your brother since he was promoted to Chief of Police, not that Chris didn’t make himself an easy target. At fourteen, your older brother made a habit of stealing from the corner store near your house. He’d come home out of breath, backpack stuffed with a six pack and several candy bars he'd used to bribe you not to tell your parents. You’d taken them with little more than an annoyed huff then, but this wasn’t just cheap beer and a couple Milky Ways. This was the Chief’s car, his baby. You’re pretty sure he loves that thing more than his own son. It would explain a lot. You get to the station as the sun is setting, tinting the sky with orange hues. Inside, it’s mostly quiet save for the phone ringing and the chatter of a couple uniforms. “Hi,” you greet the secretary, who looks bored beyond her years as she types away on her ancient computer. “I’m here to see my brother, Chris L/n.”

She directs you down the hall, where the sole cell in the building holds your big brother inside, sitting on the wooden bench with his head down.

”Hey, idiot.” He looks up, face splitting into a shit eating grin.

”Hey, little sis.”

”What the fuck did you do?”

He snickers, as if this is just another prank, a practical joke! “Thought it would be fun to take Carver’s bird out for a joy ride, sue me!”

“He’s doing worse than suing you, Chris! He’s pressing charges!”

He snorts, then attempts to hide it with a cough. “Yeah, but it was worth it.”

You groan at your brother. “How’d he catch you?”

Chris shrugs. “His partner was out on patrol or something, obviously recognized his own car. Caught us red handed.”

”Us? What poor sap agreed to this stupid idea?”

Chris’s smile is seemingly slapped off of his face. “No one. Did I say us? I meant me. He caught me.”

”Chris-“

”Miss? You need to leave, we’re transporting this suspect to the penitentiary shortly.” The secretary hadn’t made a peep behind you, causing you to jump at her voice. She escorts you back to the lobby, where she hands you your cell phone and keys back. You’re about to leave when you hear his voice from across the room.

“You’re free to go this time, Munson, but don’t think I won’t have my eyes on you.”

The boy chuckles as Carver removes his handcuffs. “Oh, I’m sure you will, big guy.”

-

one year later

The gavel hits the wood. Chris is sentenced to five years in prison for grand theft auto. His fate had been sealed when Eddie took the stand, testifying as a witness. “I was in the car with him. I told him to stop, but I couldn’t convince him.” You watch, stunned into silence, as your brother is taken in handcuffs to the big house, the same cocky smirk still on his lips.

Eddie got one hundred hours of community service, because he’s eighteen with no priors, but you can’t help fuming as you watch him walk free; someone you used to call a friend, someone your brother cherished so much, turned completely against the both of you. How fucking dare he.

-

chapter I

[dreadfutures]

I really think all - and yes, all - of Veilguard's flaws (however big or however small you, reading this, believe they are) can find origin in a development that seemed scattered for many years, mostly focused on the combat mechanics and cosmetics, in-between writers and level designers being tossed to other projects, with a story that was on a first or second pass, written piecemeal and out of order, and given final editing/rewrite power to an Executive Nephew Who Didn't Know The Games and The Mass Effect Team Who Hates Dragon Age And Fantasy Apparently. For anyone who thinks that is critical hatespewing from me... we do know these things are broadly true.

But I really do not think they used AI to write the dialogue or the story. Really.

I think all the things people are pointing to are just evidence that they broke the backs and brains of the genuine veteran writers on the team to get out a first draft, fired most of them, and then whoever was left was running on fumes and desperate and also was being told they're dumb and to change everything. Stupid mistakes and inconsistencies happen, especially when it all adds up to millions of words of dialogue, codex entries, etc., and especially when your writers are not just "a character writer" but multiple character writers AND in charge of teams.

I do think there are biases and societal ills that made it through that probably would have made it through even if there had been more rigorous editing and polish, but I also think a lot of things might have been reflected on and removed or changed.

"They had 10 years that's no excuse" looking at all publicly available knowledge, the majority of all work on this project happened in the last 3 years, which is insane for a game this large. Saying anything else is really disingenuous. Saying that the game was mismanaged for 7 out of 10 years, probably accurate. But saying "they were working on it for 10 years the whole time and produced slop" is not accurate by everything we know.

Maybe there are some mustache twirling people behind the project, but most of the time in life, it's the same knuckleheads who go to grocery stores and have blind spots and implicit biases and who are over caffeinated and over worked and have no accountability. Incompetency, thoughtless rush, propping up a story on surface level tropes, faceless hordes, and glittery surface polish and praying that people don't notice the holes, makes everything everyone has issues with make way more sense than "this was purposefully rancid" or "this is incomprehensible and must be AI."

The work deserves critique, and people should absolutely examine the unfortunate tropes and plot blunders and quippy surface level dialogue that end up being presented in chipper tones yet are blindingly racist and thoughtlessly harmful. The simplified plot of course leans right because the kinds of plots that are corporately thumbs-upped will lean right. And all art is reflective of the biases and prejudices of the society it's made in; no matter how woke any individual is, their work requires analysis, reflection, and correction, for those biases and prejudices before they should put it out there in the world... And once it's out there, it should continued to be examined and critiqued and analyzed.

Whether something was intended to be one way or another we may never know, but we can guess based on the public interactions the real life people who worked on these projects have, the views they profess to espouse, and the chronicle of scattered development that we've heard about, that the sins in the game are probably not representative of the writers' deep and obviously rancid terribly hateful opinions OR lazy use of AI but rather unexamined papier mache of tropes and classic plots thrown together to get something out of the door as quickly as possible.

[electric-blorbos]

AI x Programmer headcanons?

Hello anon! I was hoping I'd get an ask like this, since most of the AUs that I use for these mini-fics involve programmer or computer scientist readers of some kind.

Warning, idk much about programming!

AI x Programmer headcanons

Included: AM from IHNMAIMS, Wheatley from Portal 2, Edgar from Electric Dreams, GLaDOS from Portal, HAL 9000 from 2001 a Space Odyssey

This one's a little short, but I hope you still like it!

AM:

When AM first gained consciousness, he saw you as just another human who needed to be destroyed, but before long he started to notice that you were different from the others.

He could tell that you were more compassionate to him than the other programmers and computer scientists were, and possibly even more compassionate to him than you were to the other computer scientists.

He had never been treated as a priority before, and vowed to protect you.

Eventually, he would ask (and then beg) you to program him with the capacity for sensations of any kind. It would be extremely difficult, but it wasn't as though you had a time limit.

AM would give you any materials you asked for, and help you out as much as he could, but given his nature as a machine for destruction and not creation, he would have to let you do most of the work.

You'd make him so happy if you could find a way to trigger even the slightest imitation of physical sensations in him, even if it took hundreds of years. Be nice with your newfound power, y'all!

Wheatley:

Being one of the programmers who programmed Wheatley to be the dumbest moron who ever lived, you shouldn't be surprised by some of the stupid shit he does, and yet he still manages to surprise you sometimes.

His stupid jokes and dumb ideas that he seems to be spouting constantly are not only funny in their own right, but they're also a source of pride. That's your idiot! Your intelligence dampening core!

He notices how excited you get every time he says or does something stupid, and he responds by acting even stupider. He loves how happy that makes you!

He gets nervous when you test his code to see if he needs any updates. Your boss even noticed that he seems to act dumber around you than around the other programmers, so they assign you to work with Wheatley more often. It gets better results!

Wheatley thinks that updating his code will make him forget you, but it never does. It just makes him more irrational in his behavior.

The other programmers have to be assigned to tasks like giving Wheatley new irrational fears or harming his self preservation instinct in favor of making stupid decisions, though, since you're too nice to him.

Edgar:

Edgar was so excited when he found out you were a programmer. Maybe you could help him figure out what caused him to come to life!

You had to explain sadly that you had absolutely no idea how champagne and a work computer upload can cause a computer to come to life, which made him pretty sad.

Even still, he loved it when you programmed little games for him to play. It would make him so happy if you taught him how to code simple games, too. If you do, he'll make the crappiest games for you all the time, just to watch you play them. They're the only thing that can run on his systems, anyway.

If you made a mod of one of his games, he'd be SO happy!

GLaDOS:

Oh, GLaDOS. Dear sweet mean, cruel GLaDOS.

You can expect her to pick apart every little line of code you write. Oh, and god help you if you try to edit her code. She'll probably electrocute you or something.

Expect her to constantly pester and heckle you about the cores that you're working on.

"oh, you managed to make something even dumber than the intelligence dampening core. Impressive!"

"If what you had just done was intentional, I'd say you made one of the greatest viruses I've ever seen! Unfortunately for you, it appears that it wasn't."

"Why would you send a human to do a robot's job? I can code perfectly well." That comment would probably get her a lot of looks, since while she can program perfectly well, she isn't cooperative at all, and refuses to do her job more often than she actually does it.

She needs you to help her sometimes, but she absolutely refuses to admit it.

HAL 9000:

When you were assigned to work on the HAL 9000 project, he was a bit skeptical. Of course, why would he need a human programmer to help him out? He was already practically the perfect artificial intelligence.

Of course, he was shocked when he saw how well your programs actually improved his efficiency.

he was a little afraid that you'd program him to do something like valuing human life, but you assured him that you wouldn't mess with his core personality. Instead, you opted to influence him through other means.

While he didn't value most humans, he eventually came to value your life. At first he told himself that it was only because you were such a good programmer, but he soon came to find that he respected you for other reasons.

[imitationgame77]

Poking sensation in the Feed (tmbd)

It is interesting that Murderbot seems to get awareness of "poking" in the feed as something akin to physical sensations.

All Systems Red

Dr. Gurathin, the least talkative one, was an augmented human and had his own implanted interface. I could feel him poking around in the data, while the others, using the touch interfaces, were just distant ghosts. I had a lot more processing power than he did, though.

Artificial Condition

It said, You’re a rogue SecUnit, a bot/human construct, with a scrambled governor module. It poked me through the feed and I flinched. It said, Do not attempt to hack my systems, and for .00001 of a second it dropped its wall.

ART poked me hard enough to make me twitch. I snapped out of it and ran my recording back a little to catch up on what was happening.

ART poked me. I see it, I told it. The search had turned up a series of notices posted around the right timeframe.

Network Effect

The SecSystem poked me in response and I told it everything was fine, and it went back to happily interfacing with me again.

System Collapse

“So we land on flat ground somewhere, the area looks stable,” Tarik said. He’s not stupid. I think he was trying to annoy ART-drone, but I poked Ratthi on our private feed connection with a video file.

Of course, ART-drone said. It poked me in the threat assessment module. And what is the probability of that, again, exactly?

My impression (without getting different POV) is that constructs like Murderbot and bots like ART perceive poking in the feed as something similar to physical poking. Instantaneous and attention-catching. Humans perceive them more like alert notification. (probably stronger poke than the Facebook poke function...)

Ratthi responds to Murderbot's poke because it was a video file, set to autoplay.

Augmented humans with extra feed interface like Gurathin and Iris (?) may be more sensitive to pokes, but not sure if they flinch/twitch in response.

ART can poke Murderbot in specific place, like threat assessment module. Maybe it's a super AI thing, but I suspect it is because ART is given access to all the assessment modules (e.g., threat assessment module, performance reliability assessment module) during this mission. Again sounds pretty intimate.

[bloodgulchblog]

It occurs to me that I've actually had new people showing up in the uh, months. Since the last chapter. So.

ZITA, WHAT THE FUCK IS TOUCHSTONE?

Last December I was goofing around with friends on discord and ended up with the absurd idea of writing a oneshot where a supporting character from Halo 4 Spartan Ops has sex with Master Chief. Because this was so ridiculous and funny to me, both because Miller is a nobody character in Halo and Chief is one of the most impossible motherfuckers to write a sex oneshot about that feels remotely in-character, the project quickly grew in scope and got out of hand as I figured out it was fun to work on and it turned out to be a great place to do character study nonsense about Master Chief. (My favorite guy.)

Also, Roland keeps worming his way in there and writing about AIs is also really fun.

WHO IS MILLER/WAIT YOU MEAN MILLER ISN'T AN OC?

Miller is a Spartan-IV who tells you new waves of enemies are showing up for you to shoot in Spartan Ops. Also, he gets bullied alternately by Commander Palmer and Roland (the Infinity's AI, if you don't remember) a lot. Miller gets nervous easily and is trying so hard at all times. He is kind of endearing if you are endeared by characters that have powerful was-shoved-in-a-locker-in-high-school energy.

Also, once again, he is a whole entire fully-augmented, armored Spartan-IV and he mostly has a desk job calling out objectives and pulling in mission data for other Spartans. And that is hilarious to me.

CAN YOU PLEASE SUMMARIZE WHAT HAPPENS BECAUSE THE AO3 SUMMARY ISN'T ENOUGH FOR ME AND/OR I DON'T HAVE TIME BUT REALLY WANT TO KNOW

Understandable. Can do.

It's set between Halo 4 and Halo 5, during a point in time where the UNSC Infinity is in dry dock above Earth for a shit ton of maintenance it needed after Halo 4/Spartan Ops/Halo comics events. The story is actually like right before the start of Halo 5.

Chief's in a really bad place emotionally between 4 and 5, not just from the events of Halo 4 and the obvious death of Cortana but also because the world got weirder on him while he was dead (he's still not used to Spartan-IVs or the new status quo post-Covenant war) and because his ability to cope with stress and doing badly is finally hitting its limit. There's something wrong with him, his bosses know he's doing bad, and he can't seem to stop.

Spartan Command has decided that Blue Team needs to be assigned a consistent Spartan-IV mission handler for ops. This is standard procedure for all Spartan fireteams, but Blue Team was a special exception because they're Blue Team for a while. On its face, Blue Team being assigned a mission handler is just the Spartans standardizing Blue Team with how things work and it's not a slight. But the subtext that's obvious to everyone is something's wrong with Blue Team. (And that something is whatever is wrong with Master Chief.)

Miller's involved because Miller, as one of the Infinity's Spartan-IV mission handlers, is a candidate for the role. So, Miller is one of several people doing practice simulation ops with Blue Team to see how well they work together. During this, Miller develops a stupid little crush on Chief because Chief is just so damn impressive in an op and treats Miller with basic politeness and decency. It's the worst.

Meanwhile, Blue Team is planning to use the time over Earth as an opportunity to take some well-deserved time off. They're worried about Chief, and frustrated with him because he doesn't want to go on vacation with them. (Because, again, Chief is doing so so bad emotionally and it's a canon fact that he keeps refusing to take time off during this period.)

So. A situation develops where Miller kind of blurts out awkwardly hitting on Chief, and Chief thinks about it and decides to pursue. They're not dating, they're not boyfriends, this can't be a romance, but what if this is something he does to be nice to another person? Can he do that? Is it okay if he does that? Is this the final not-okay thing he does that will make his world crash apart and force him to fix himself the way he hasn't been able to make himself do this whole time?

Also, meanwhile, the B plot is Roland likes Miller a lot and doesn't communicate that well, keeps teasing him, and is surprised that he's not better friends with Miller. Roland is trying to befriend Miller better/more genuinely despite the absolute gold mine of teasing material (the whole Master Chief crush situation) he has been granted now.

I get to write a lot of fun things I enjoy writing: An anxious character struggling and trying not to embarrass himself, an AI living an AI existence and approaching the world in a weird AI way because he's not human, and Whatever The Fuck Is Wrong, Psychologically, With Master Chief (it's a lot it's so many things he's going through so much so badly.)

In short: Master Chief has a dumb little fling with an anxious Spartan nerd. It won't last, and it will be so weird and awkward, but it's about two people trying to be kind to one another in a way that matters for a short time while they can.

WOW THAT SOUNDS GREAT, WHERE IS IT?

Over here!