#TUMBLR STOP POSTING IT WITH PICTURES PUT OUT OF THEIR PLACE CHALLENGE

[fivewholeminutes]

So. Mister vessel the fourth has this. How do i call it. Keychain(?) hanging from his sleeve sometimes. With some tmbte runes. And it's pink, which is totally irrelevant to this post, but i felt the need to mention that. (Edit: people have told me it's actually red, but hey. Thank you, stage lighting, for making it look pink.) I could never find a photo clear enough to read them though. So I've done some serious CSI work to decipher them. AND THEY JUST SAY 'WORSHIP', BECAUSE OF COURSE THEY DO.

Bonus: he has another one with "IV" on the other sleeve. Personally i think it's endearing.

My struggles under the cut

I've tried editing the black and white photo above on my phone, trying to make it more clear and this is what i've got lmao

I've made it hella grainy but hey, at least i could (more or less) see the outline of some of the runes (and make up some new ones in the process lol). Idk why the doodles added later got also saved grainy...

Then I've checked the alphabet for possible choices

And realised it's just 'WORSHIP'. Weeks of asking myself what could that be. And it's. JUST THE EASIEST THING TO GUESS.

Initially i thought there's less letters, but nope. It's 7. It's worship.

[kissesfrombangtanatnight]

Tribal Chief

❤️❤️Author's Note: For those of you who are unaware, I am a co-author for my sister over on Wattpad so with her permission this story has been requested to post on my Tumblr as well. Oh, and this was inspired by the recent backstage segment between Roman and Nick Aldis. My boy is not playin' with the Tribal Chief. xD Anyways, Enjoy!

I do not own the pictures used in this, credit to the owner(s).

~~

Warnings: not really, other than some vulgar language lol

~~

Since being promoted to the general manager position on Smackdown, you must say that you have made a great impact on the show. Ratings are booming; endorsements are rolling in, and you were not only showing your powerful role as the WWE Women's World Champion but also as a top manager for the business. Sure, it meant more responsibilities, but you were more than up for the challenge, and everyone loved you.

Well, everyone except the Tribal Chief, Roman Reigns, who you've bumped heads with on several occasions since being drafted to Smackdown. The 6'3, tanned Samoan hated that you never acknowledged him and two, you were trying to tell him what to do....no one tells Roman Reigns what to do.

*Live Backstage Segment*

You've been summoned by the arrogant asshole Chief himself as told to you by Paul Heyman. Said that you and his Tribal Chief needed to talk business. You inwardly roll your eyes, knowing that this most likely had to do with tonight's booking. You smooth out your dress and had to admit to yourself you looked too damn good. Although you weren't a face, nor a heel either, the crowd cheered for you as the camera panned to you:

Not bothering to knock, you barge into the Bloodline's locker room, adjusting your championship title on your shoulder. The crowd began booing loudly as the camera switched to Roman sitting on the couch, while Solo stood behind him, Jey and Jimmy sitting across from him on another couch. All conversation stopped when you walked in. You strut over to Roman, standing off to the side as you fold your arms over your slightly exposed chest.

"Good evening gentlemen...I've been summoned." You say in a mocking tone. Roman takes his eyes off of his phone before eying you up and down; eyes roaming over your body a little longer than he'd admit.

You looked so beautiful. So sexy.

"......Leave us." He says in a smooth, yet deep tone.

All four men glance at their Tribal Chief before nodding. They exit quietly leaving you and Roman to yourselves. The tension in the room was apparent as you took your championship and placed it on the table beside you. You cross your beautiful brown leg over the other, noticing how Roman eyes them before subtly licking his lips. He can't help but be amused.

It's been a while since you two have talked being that for about three years, you've been over on Raw. Though Raw is no stranger to random Bloodline attacks on the Raw superstars, which you've witnessed firsthand. Long story short, you used to be in a three-person faction, you being the only woman of the three. Your two members challenged the Usos for their undisputed tag team titles and the Tribal Chief did not like that. He didn't like anyone disrespecting his family and when you did, you were dealt with. Unfortunately, the Usos ambushed your members after a match and put both men on the shelf. They haven't been active for over 6 months now. Hence why WWE decided to push a storyline between you and Roman to further your hate for one another.

"How do you know I wasn't talking to you?" He challenged.

"With all due respect, I wouldn't give a damn if you were." The crowd oh's loudly as Roman lets out a humorless laugh as you give him a coy smile. He straightens up his posture, reminding you of just how big he was compared to you.

"Ha, okay." He rests his elbows on his legs as he rubs his beard. A habit you've come to know of his. His brows furrowed and his face twisted slightly as he sat there thinking. "You booked my cousins, the Usos versus Sami & K.O.?" You sit up slightly as you nod.

"I did."

"And you booked Solo vs LA Knight?" He asks not looking at you. You eye his side profile as you again nod.

"I did." He shakes his head nodding.

"Hm........those are some pretty good ideas, but you know what would've been an even better idea? If you would've run that all by me first." You snort as you look away momentarily.

Just who the hell does he think he is? He thinks just because he and his family are the top superstars in the company, everyone has to bow down and kiss their damn feet?

"You see...I'm the Tribal Chief...the Head of the Table, everything goes through me. And I need you to understand that. Adam Pearce did." He states his voice smoother than silk and deeper than the ocean, but he still don't know who he's dealing with.

"Is that right?" He nods.

"Well Mr. Reigns, sorry to break it to you but, I'm not the Usos, Solo Sikoa nor am I the Wiseman Paul Heyman. Or anyone else in this locker room for that matter. I'm the general manager of Smackdown. Which means...I tell you what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. Which also means, I'M the Head of the Table. And if I'm the Head of the Table....that means, I'm in control of who sits at the table and what you eat and when you eat. I feed you now." You say smartly as the crowd ooo's loudly.

Roman runs an annoyed hand down his face as his face twists in anger. Just who exactly did you think you were talking to? Sure stature-wise, you had nothing on him, but apparently, all that power has gone to your head.

You stand to your feet along with Roman as he is more than annoyed. The corner of his mouth twitched angrily. Oh, you got under his skin. You take your championship and place it back on your shoulder as you smirk at Roman. Damn, he looked sexy as fuck angry.

"Trust...you don't wanna be on my bad side Mr. Reigns." You say as you trace the outline of his belt that sat on his waist like the king he was.

You were both standing so close to each other, you were almost chest to chest. Damn, he smelled good. He lightly bites his lip as you do so, trying not to break character. He couldn't help but find you attractive. All of this confidence you oozed was going straight to his dick. He prayed no one could see the boner building in his pants. You keep this up, he was gonna tell them to cut the cameras, get the hell out, and fucked you silly on this damn couch.

"Wanna know why?" You ask batting your lashes up at the man.

"Why?" He says in almost a deep whisper. You smirk as you tap your manicured nail on his championship.

"Because...I'll make it hard for you." You say as the crowd goes crazy.

You definitely meant that in more ways than one and he seemed to have caught on. You back away slowly as you smile at him innocently.

"Now! If you'll excuse me, I have a show to run. Maybe we can get to know each other a little better. Enjoy the rest of your night Mr. Reigns." The crowd cheers as you strut away.

Roman was going to learn one way or another, you were the authority...not him.

[koeal]

I accidentally deleted an ask where someone asked for some art tips (whoever you were anon, I'm so sorry)

But I made this post still

All I ever posted here was fanart, so I will mostly focus on characters

1. Work on anatomy!

And from experience I know how hard it is to actually find out how to learn it, so here is little example

While knowing these few fun facts, you can experiment a lot!

For example, while people's eyes grow untill early 20's (around 8 milimeters since they are born), noses and ears never really stop growing. So while drawing babies - you can draw their eyes bigger; and while drawing elders - the bigger would be their ears and noses

1.2. Look for shapes!

Another example, because I don't know how to explain it

If it looks hard to you, don't worry, there are many tutorials online that will guide you!

2. Always have a reference!

And if you can't find a good one, I recommend taking picture of yourself! No one is going to see it besides you, right?

I also recommend tracing the reference first in shapes, boxes, as a stick man or whatever you prefer and then trying to recreate that sketch on a clear canvas

3. Follow many artists!

Just visit their page every so often, what is it that caught your attention? The way they color, the way they render? Maybe amazing backgrounds, awesome perspective? Some little details they put on every piece of art they make?

Maybe try using few of these on your art as well!

Also, it's pretty convenient in other ways as well - on platforms like Tumblr they can reblog art they like, and it's more likely for you to see more artstyles and techniques; on places like YouTube they often post speedpaints and tutorials you can take a look at!

Well, these are the main ones, but I will write some other things I can think of:

↳ While rendering, lower opacity of your brush

↳ Sometimes you can try to challenge yourself to use 1. As many brushes as you can or 2. As little brushes as you can (If you are new to art, it can help you find your favorites!:D)

↳ It's good to study a bit of everything - hands, neck, shoulders, back, feet, arms.. You get what I mean!

But it's nice to work on some other things from time to time as well! Try drawing a strawberry, a bunny, some flowers!

↳ If you can't understand how something works, try looking at human skeleton and muscles!

↳ While shading, color of your shadow will be on the opposite side of color wheel from the light (that means if your light is yellow, your shadow will be purple)

↳ Don't be afraid to step out of your comfort zone! Try new things, experiment!

I wasn't sure what type of tips you were asking for but I hope I helped at least a little<33

[bi-animated]

The Patakis Week Day 2!

I’m honestly so proud of this one, I just finished it today so I can post it in time. (I really don’t wanna fall behind like Inktober ☠️)

Following the prompts, here is the scenario:

Arnold and Helga are volunteering at PS 118 for their summer program that is essentially just a glorified baby sitting gig, which is why they’re letting high schoolers do it in the first place. We all know why Helga took the job, and it has nothing to do with kids. So when a young student in her cluster, Daisy May*, becomes overly attached, Helga exploits Daisy’s love of pudding. Arnold has been watching Helga too, and notices that she’s up to her old tricks. “You can’t just sit the kid in a corner with a pudding cup, how is she going to learn?”

“That’s how Bob did it and I turned out fine”

“Okay Helga, just be big enough to clean the mess”

*Fun fact: Daisy May is the name of the love interest in Lil Abner, where Arnold’s pet pig gets his namesake. Daisy May pursues the main character even though he shows no interest. It’s a Helga-ception.(credit to my bf for that)

One thing that I LOVE about Helga is her tenacity to break the rules (law😝) for the sake of her personal mission. Since it’s just a blurb for a picture, I didn’t get too detailed with the plot but I’d like to think that Helga was getting up to something Football related 😏

I wanted her face to look frustrated for being caught out, but also totally elated that Arnold was paying attention to her 😍

@opthepatakis

————————

Since I’m using my Tumblr as more of an “art diary”, I’d like to include some more info behind what went into this piece:

Much like Inktober, I’m using this challenge to learn more about Procreate, experiment with brushes and figure out what’s “right” for me.

To be frank, it has been a mildly frustrating experience internally because I already know that my weakness is color. Digital painting and traditional are just not the same, they don’t work the same (to me anyway). The interface of Procreate is so different from Photoshop too, finding and remembering to use tools isn’t a simple transition, either. It makes me self conscious of my art, even though I’ve gone to art school, and it throws me off to have to stop and Google stuff. But! I think with this piece, I’m FINALLY in a good groove of how I want my art to look and how to get there.

TLDR; I cry bc the lesson I refuse to learn is that you never stop learning 🙃

PS - skipping Patakis Week Day 3 to put the amount of effort and time that I want to put into Day 4’s prompt, however, I’ll still post something fun! 💜

[ascension4all]

Well for some reason known only to the tumblr Gods my 4,000 post, 3000+ follower blog was nuked... but have no fear all you skinny muscle lovers! Stay tuned, I'm gonna come back, sort of starting over by digging up some old classics to compliment my new finds!

This post was my favorite post on my old blog and I appreciate all feedback thanks

A couple of years back I had the experience of my life when I met a very tough skinny muscle scrapper. We met on a fight site where he goes by the name Boxmyfacein and I am known as Muscle Bully. We agreed to have a hard NHB scrap in MMA gloves. We had been talking for years about having a fight that would symbolically determine who would be the top bunk if we were ever to share a prison cell. I knew from reading about some of his previous matches, he had an impressive record, but few if any of his triumphs were over men as muscled as me. I am trained in wrestling and boxing, and I thought that although he had beaten bigger, I would offer him a challenge he would not be able to meet.

At the time I was 5'10 180 he was 5'9 125. I did not think it would be a cake walk, but I truly did not believe that he would be able to overcome my size and advantage in power.

It was a hot summer evening, and when I saw him, he was looking good in a striped tank top. His slim, taut hard body was glistening with a light coating of sweat. As good as his pictures are, he looked better than I imagined and I was ready to fight. Ready to show this cocky skinny muscle boy that there was no way he was going to topple this Bully.

We got to my place and we were getting along really well as we laid out the mats for the fight. We put on our MMA gloves and then we went at it. There was no feeling out period, we both just went all out trying to beat and dominate one another. As we fought, I was amazed at how well he took my shots to his face. Truth is, he liked it, and it was as though he absorbed my energy with each shot I landed. As I was not gaining any advantage in the stand-up, I thought it might be time to take him down and overwhelm him with my size. I was able to get on top, immobilize him, but his defenses were good and I was unable to land many good punches.

He eventually escaped and we were back on our feet where we essentially remained for a the rest of a fight with a few ground clashes interspersed here and there. About 45 minutes in, it became obvious to me, he was not going down. He was getting stronger and more brutal while I was losing power.

Eventually I was on my back, and he was on top. His punches were non stop.. I rolled to my stomach, but he just choked me, made me tap, and re-assumed his top position. This went on until I started saying, "I can't believe you beat me, over and over again.. We finally decided to end the fight there because the skinny muscle scrapper was the clear winner. The Muscle Bully was beat.

It became obvious that the sheer number of previous fights he had gave him the ability to over come my advantages in size and power. He bloodied my nose and my face whereas he was unmarked. It was a beautiful sight and I cherish the blood-stained wife beater I wore as a memento of this awesome experience.

I wouldn't say I was humiliated just because the experience was so incredible. We remain friends and look forward to being able to one day fight again

[allthingsglittery]

I am the primary source

Hello my glitter lovers!! I hope you all are doing well!! For this post it is mostly going to be pictures. To explain why I am sharing them would probably help. So, while I was out and about in the wild, (the wild being Target and Dollar General, we all know how scary those places can be) I was looking for glittery things. At first, it was hard because I was thinking too much but then I just stopped thinking and started walking around I easily found things that had glitter on them. After I was out and about for a while, I started to look in my house, at the things I already owned or honestly things that I have previously taken pictures of that had glitter. One of the pictures I found was a picture my mom took of my cheer bows from high school. My mom took my friend's and my freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior bows and put them in a shadow box for us so we could easily display them. The picture is the final look at them before she gave them to us. But what I like the most about the picture is that you can see the shiny bows in the box but on the floor around it you can see the glitter that was left over from previous projects. For quite a while if you were to walk into my house you would walk out with glitter on you because we always had a glitter project going on. the glitter, along with the projects have calmed down here lately. Yet, I have fallen into the glitter trap. I have purchased a lot of things that have glitter on them or flat-out are glitter, for example the crocs and the sneakers are both glittery. I bought the sneakers at Walmart so I would have cute shoes for observations, and one of the students in the room has the same shoes! That's what I get for buying shoes in the kid’s section. My challenge to you all is to see where you have glitter in your day to day lives that you wouldn’t think of it, or something you bought just because it has glitter in the name (for me it was the glitter highlighters). I acquired so many pictures that Tumblr didn't let me upload all of them every time I tried . Half of them would say the download failed so I did what I could and put as many up as I was willing to fight with. 

[bbkirbs]

Animal He's Become | Jeff the Killer x Daryl Dixon (CRACKSHIP)

Pairing: Jeff the Killer x Daryl Dixon

Word Count: 1,187 / Character Count: 6,332

Warnings: smut, swearing

Author Note: this is 100% a crack ship I just somehow thought of when talking to a friend. I wish I didn't think of it, but I am, posting it on Tumblr for all to see. You're welcome

On a fantastic fall evening, Daryl quietly walked through the woods. He was starving and hadn’t eaten anything filling in days. He was dying and hadn’t eaten anything filling in days. Hunting for food was more challenging as the air started colder and animals were hibernating.

He lost his group not too long ago, it being dark and all. He sighed, putting his crossbow beside him as he sunk onto the ground by a tree. He sat there, his mind going a thousand miles per hour. Asking himself how he got here and why any of this started. So many questions he had for the last couple of years he would constantly ask himself stayed unanswered.

With a snap of a branch, Daryl was brought back to reality and looked around him. Waiting for whatever it was to come out, he got up and drew out his crossbow.

“well would you look at what I found” he heard behind him, and he turned around. “Woah, buddy, watch where you’re pointing that thing; I just wanted to see my prey up close” Daryl could barely make out this guy's face in the dark. But he didn’t sound sane, and that’s all he needed to know before he stepped back farther away, still pointing his crossbow at the mysterious man.

“i guess you don’t wanna talk hm? you know it’s been harder to find people these days, but when i do they always point weapons at me.” he pulled a knife out of his hoodie pouch, “what happened to being scared? to begging for your life?” he stopped closer to daryl.

"what's yer name" Daryl stood still, watching this guy's every move. The man chuckles, "I'm Jeff, Jeff the Killer" "an' ya think I'm supposed to believe that? Kinda name your parents gave you?"

Jeff stood there speechless. No one had ever talked with such power to him before. he was starting to get nervous. “a what’s with that big ol’ smile on yer damn face? Ya, look fuckin’ stupid” Jeff couldn’t believe this guy. who was he?

“Enough about me, tough guy. What about you? what’s your name?” Jeff crossed his arms, looking at the man before him. “Names Daryl. How many walkers have you killed?”

"walkers? What the fuck are those? I only kill people." jeff laughed out loud. Daryl looked at Jeff, puzzled. Who in this world had no idea what a walker is? "enough, I'm done waiting; I'm going to kill you now," Daryl widened his eyes "can't kill me if you're already dead" Daryl shot his crossbow. The arrow hit the tree, and jeff dodged it.

Jeff moved so fast that Daryl could hardly believe he was human (or was he?). Before he could aim again, jeff had Daryl on the ground, his crossbow beside him. “you think you’re funny, huh? No one can kill me. It’s impossible.” Jeff pointed his knife under Daryl’s chin. “no, do me a favour. And Go.To.Sleep” before jeff could do anything, Daryl grabbed jeff by the arms and pinned jeff to the ground, now on top of him.

“you can’t kill me.” the moonlight shone on jeff’s face, and he could now see clearly. Jeff’s leathery skin, his non-existent eye sockets, the carved-out smile on his face. Blood splattered on his face, his hair and his hood. Daryl couldn’t look away. He was kind of mesmerized by him.

"take a picture. It last longer", jeff spoke, with what could be a smirk he couldn't tell. "why doncha shut up bitch” Jeff blushed at Daryl's words. "ah, I see, you like being degraded like how ya should be" Daryl took the knife out of jeff's right hand and tossed it away. "won't be needin' that"

Jeff stared at Daryl, his brunette locks perfectly placed over his face, and his blue eyes sparkled in the moonlight. He, too, was mesmerized by Daryl. Jeff took one for the team and leaned in to kiss Daryl with whatever lips he had left on his face.

Daryl cupped jeff’s face gently and became in miss with jeff. His thumb rubbed jeff’s cheek. Daryl’s other hand explored jeff’s clothed body, his hand slipping underneath jeff’s hoodie. His warm hands against jeff’s cold skin.

“mm” jeff moaned into the kiss, his arms above his head. Daryl took that as an invitation to start undoing jeff’s belt and unzipping his black jeans. his hand over jeff’s growing bulge. “Daryl..~” jeff groans, he hasn’t been touched like this before. it was all so new to him he just let daryl do his thing.

Daryl took no time to rip jeff’s pants off down, now down to a hoodie and underwear, jeff was shivering in the cold. “don worry, boy, I’ll warm ya up real good in a bit” before he knew it, his boxers were peeled off of him, and his legs were spread wide open, his feet over his head.

Daryl’s (clean) fingers massaged jeff’s hole gently, feeling the smaller man squirm under his touch. “I can’t wait longer”, and with that, Daryl pulls his cock out of his boxers. he strokes himself and spits on jeff’s hole, rubbing the tip of his cock at his entrance (or exit).

"I'm going to do you real good. You'll be warm in no time. And you'll regret ever tryin' ta kill me."

His cock slowly inched into jeff, pulsating and throbbing. “fuck..you’re so tight,” jeff moaned at Daryl’s words; he couldn’t seem to speak or make any other noise. His body takes in all the pleasure.

Jeff takes his right hand and jerks himself off slowly as Daryl is balls deep in his ass. after waiting a minute, Daryl starts moving a bit faster, picking up a pace and thrusting into jeff. “Daryl, please..” jeff moans quietly, his breath shaking. A warm feeling welled up inside him that he’d never felt before. It felt so good to him. he wanted to keep touching it forever.

“imma fuck you so good” Daryl turns jeff over onto his hands and knees. Hand on jeff’s head, pushing it into the ground as he starts pounding relentlessly into jeff’s ass.

Stroking himself, precum leaking from his own cock, jeff tried to keep his voice down as he moaned, "I'm- I'm going to. "Daryl grabbed both sides of jeff's waist, and thrust like his life depended on it. "I'm gonna fill you up so good…."

Jeff could feel Daryl’s dick twitching within him, bringing himself closer to orgasm. He stroked his cock faster “ahh fuck!” Daryl’s cum filled jeff’s ass, still thrusting to bring jeff to his own orgasm.

Feeling the cum drip out of his ass as he was being fucked made jeff’s body feel warm and fuzzy, “Daryl, I’m Gunna.. cum” “do it bitch” Daryl slapped his ass, and like a button was pressed, jeff came all over the ground. His body shook, and him moaning.

“wanna kill me now?” jeff looked at Daryl, who was now kneeling beside him. “never,” jeff said as he slowly drifted to slumber.

[nostalgebraist]

frank's image generation model, explained

[See also: github repo, Colab demo]

[EDIT 9/6/22: I wrote this post in January 2022. I've made a number of improvements to this model since then. See the links above for details on what the latest version looks like.]

Last week, I released a new feature for @nostalgebraist-autoresponder that generates images. Earlier I promised a post explaining how the model works, so here it is.

I'll try to make this post as accessible as I can, but it will be relatively technical.

Why so technical? The interesting thing (to me) about the new model is not that it makes cool pictures -- lots of existing models/techniques can do that -- it's that it makes a new kind of picture which no other model can make, as far as I know. As I put it earlier:

As far as I know, the image generator I made for Frank is the first neural image generator anyone has made that can write arbitrary text into the image!! Let me know if you’ve seen another one somewhere.

The model is solving a hard machine learning problem, which I didn't really believe could be solved until I saw it work. I had to "pull out all the stops" to do this one, building on a lot of prior work. Explaining all that context for readers with no ML background would take a very long post.

tl;dr for those who speak technobabble: the new image generator is OpenAI-style denoising diffusion, with a 128x128 base model and a 128->256 superresolution model, both with the same set of extra features added. The extra features are: a transformer text encoder with character-level tokenization and T5 relative position embeddings; a layer of image-to-text and then text-to-image cross-attention between each resnet layer in the lower-resolution parts of the U-Net's upsampling stack, using absolute axial position embeddings in image space; a positional "line embedding" in the text encoder that does a cumsum of newlines; and information about the diffusion timestep injected in two places, as another embedding fed to the text encoder, and injected with AdaGN into the queries of the text-to-image cross-attention. I used the weights of the trained base model to initialize the parts of the superresolution model's U-Net that deal with resolutions below 256.

This post is extremely long, so the rest is under a readmore

The task

The core of my bot is a text generator. It can only see text.

People post a lot of images on tumblr, though, and the bot would miss out on a lot of key context if these images were totally invisible to it.

So, long ago, I let my bot "see" pictures by sending them to AWS Rekognition's DetectText endpoint. This service uses a scene text recognition (STR) model to read text in the image, if it exists. ("STR" is the term for OCR when when the pictures aren't necessarily printed text on paper.)

If Rekognition saw any text in the image, I let the bot see the text, between special delimiters so it knows it's an image.

For example, when Frank read the OP of this post, this is what generator model saw:

#1 fipindustries posted: i was perusing my old deviant art page and i came across a thing of beauty. the ultimate "i was a nerdy teen in the mid 2000′s starter pack". there was a challenge in old deviant art where you had to show all the different characters that had inspired an OC of yours. and so i came up with this list ======= "Inspirations Meme" by Phantos peter =======

(This is actually less information than I get back from AWS. It also gives me bounding boxes, telling me where each line of text is in the image. I figured GPT wouldn't be able to do much with this info, so I exclude it.)

Images are presented this way, also, in the tumblr dataset I use to finetune the generator.

As a result, the generator knows that people post images, and it knows a thing or two about what types of images people post in what contexts -- but only through the prism of what their STR transcripts would look like.

This has the inevitable -- but weird and delightful -- result that the generator starts to invent its own "images," putting them in its posts. These invented images are transcripts without originals (!). Invented tweets, represented the way STR would view a screenshot of them, if they existed; enigmatically funny strings of words that feel like transcripts of nonexistent memes; etc.

So, for a long time, I've had a vision of "completing the circuit": generating images from the transcripts, images which contain the text specified in the transcripts. The novel pictures the generator is imagining itself seeing, through the limited prism of STR.

It turns out this is very difficult.

Image generators: surveying the field

We want to make a text-conditioned image generation model, which writes the text into the generated image.

There are plenty of text-conditioned image generators out there: DALL-E, VQGAN+CLIP, (now) GLIDE, etc. But they don't write the text, they just make an image the text describes. (Or, they may write text on occasion, but only in a very limited way.)

When you design a text-conditioned image generation method, you make two nearly independent choices:

How do you generate images at all?

How do you make the images depend on the text?

That is, all these methods (including mine) start with some well-proven approach for generating images without the involvement of text, and then add in the text aspect somehow.

Let's focus on the first part first.

There are roughly 4 distinct flavors of image generator out there. They differ largely in how they provide signal about which image are plausible to the model during training. A survey:

1. VAEs (variational autoencoders).

These have an "encoder" part that converts raw pixels to a compressed representation -- e.g. 512 floating-point numbers -- and a "decoder" part that converts the compressed representation back into pixels.

The compressed representation is usually referred to as "the latent," a term I'll use below. During training, you tell the model to make its input match its output; this forces it to learn a good compression scheme. To generate a novel image, you ignore the encoder part, pick a random value for the latent, and turn it into pixels with the decoder. That's the "autoencoder" part. The "variational" part is an extra term in the loss that tries to make the latents fill up their N-dimensional space in a smooth, uniform way, rather than squashing all the training images into small scrunched-up pockets of space here and there. This increases the probability that a randomly chosen latent will decode to a natural-looking image, rather than garbage. VAEs on their own are not as good at the other methods, but provide a foundation for VQ-autoregressive methods, which are now popular. (Though see this paper)

2. GANs (generative adversarial networks).

Structurally, these are like VAEs without the encoder part. They just have a latent, and a have a decoder that turns the latent into pixels. How do you teach the decoder what images ought to look like? In a GAN, you train a whole separate model called the "discriminator," which looks at pixels and tries to decide whether they're a real picture or a generated one. During training, the "G" (generator) and the "D" (discriminator) play a game of cat-and-mouse, where the G tries to fool the D into thinking its pictures are real, and the D tries not to get fooled. To generate a novel image, you do the same thing as with a VAE: pick a random latent and feed it through the G (here, ignoring the D). GANs are generally high-performing, but famously finicky/difficult to train.

3. VQVAEs (vector quantized VAEs) + autoregressive models.

These have two parts (you may be noticing a theme).

First, you have a "VQVAE," which is like a VAE, with two changes to the nature of the latent: it's localized, and it's discrete. Localized: instead of one big floating-point vector, you break the image up into little patches (typically 8x8), and the latent takes on a separate value for each patch.

Discrete: the latent for each patch is not a vector of floating-point numbers. It's an element of a finite set: a "letter" or "word" from a discrete vocabulary. Why do this? Because, once you have an ordered sequence of discrete elements, you can "do GPT to it!" It's just like text!

Start with (say) the upper-leftmost patch, and generate (say) the one to its immediate right, and then the one to its immediate right, etc. Train the model to do this in exactly the same way you train GPT on text, except it's seeing representations that your VQVAE came up with.

These models are quite powerful and popular, see (the confusingly named) "VQ-VAE" and "VQ-VAE-2."

They get even more powerful in the form of "VQGAN," an unholy hybrid where the VQ encoder part is trained like a GAN rather than like a VAE, plus various other forbidding bells and whistles.

Somehow this actually works, and in fact works extremely well -- at the current cutting edge.

(Note: you can also just "do GPT" to raw pixels, quantized in a simple way with a palette. This hilarious, "so dumb it can't possibly work" approach is called "Image GPT," and actually does work OK, but can't scale above small resolutions.)

4. Denoising diffusion models.

If you're living in 2021, and you want to be one of the really hip kids on the block -- one of the kids who thinks VQGAN is like, sooooo last year -- then these are the models for you. (They were first introduced in 2020, but came into their own with two OpenAI papers in 2021.) Diffusion models are totally different from the above. They don't have two separate parts, and they use a radically different latent space that is not really a "compressed representation." How do they work? First, let's talk about (forward) diffusion. This just means taking a real picture, and steadily adding more random pixel noise to it, until it eventually becomes purely random static. Here's what this looks like (in its "linear" and "cosine" variants), from OA's "Improved denoising diffusion probabilistic models":

OK, that's . . . a weird thing to do. I mean, if turning dogs into static entertains you, more power to you, your hobby is #valid. But why are we doing it in machine learning?

Because we can train a model to reverse the process! Starting with static, it gradually removes the noise step by step, revealing a dog (or anything).

There are a few different ways you can parameterize this, but in all of them, the model learns to translate frame n+1 into a probability distribution (or just a point prediction) for frame n. Applying this recursively, you recover the first frame from the last.

This is another bizarre idea that sounds like it can't possibly work. All it has at the start is random noise -- this is its equivalent of the "latent," here.

(Although -- since the sampling process is stochastic, unless you use a specific deterministic variant called DDIM -- arguably the random draws at every sampling step are an additional latent. A different random seed will give you a different image, even from the same starting noise.)

Through the butterfly effect, one arrangement of random static gradually "decodes to" a dog, and another one gradually "decodes to" a bicycle, or whatever. It's not that the one patch of RGB static is "more doglike" than the other; it just so happens to send the model on a particular self-reinforcing trajectory of imagined structure that spirals inexorably towards dog.

But it does work, and quite well. How well? Well enough that the 2nd 2021 OA paper on diffusion was titled simply, "Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis."

Conditioning on text

To make an image generator that bases the image on text, you pick one of the approaches above, and then find some way to feed text into it.

There are essentially 2 ways to do this:

The hard way: the image model can actually see the text

This is sort of the obvious way to do it.

You make a "text encoder" similar to GPT or BERT or w/e, that turns text into an encoded representation. You add a piece to the image generator that can look at the encoded representation of the text, and train the whole system end-to-end on text/image pairs.

If you do this by using a VQVAE, and simply feed in the text as extra tokens "before" all the image tokens -- using the same transformer for both the "text tokens" and the VQ "image tokens" -- you get DALL-E.

If you do this by adding a text encoder to a diffusion model, you get . . . my new model!! (Well, that's the key part of it, but there's more)

My new model, or GLIDE. Coincidentally, OpenAI was working on the same idea around the same time as me, and released a slightly different version of it called GLIDE.

(EDIT 9/6/22:

There are a bunch of new models in this category that came out after this post was written. A quick run-through:

OpenAI's DALL-E 2 is very similar to GLIDE (and thus, confusingly, very different from the original DALL-E). See my post here for more detail.

Google's Imagen is also very similar to GLIDE. See my post here.

Stability's Stable Diffusion is similar to GLIDE and Imagen, except it uses latent diffusion. Latent diffusion means you do the diffusion in the latent space of an autoencoder, rather than on raw image pixels.

Google's Parti is very similar to the original DALL-E.

)

-----

This text-encoder approach is fundamentally more powerful than the other one I'll describe next. But also much harder to get working, and it's hard in a different way for each image generator you try it with.

Whereas the other approach lets you take any image generator, and give it instant wizard powers. Albeit with limits.

Instant wizard powers: CLIP guidance

CLIP is an OpenAI text-image association model trained with contrastive learning, which is a mindblowingly cool technique that I won't derail this post by explaining. Read the blog post, it's very good.

The relevant tl;dr is that CLIP looks at texts and images together, and matches up images with texts that would be reasonable captions for them on the internet. It is very good at this. But, this is the only thing it does. It can't generate anything; it can only look at pictures and text and decide whether they match.

So here's what you do with CLIP (usually).

You take an existing image generator, from the previous section. You take a piece of text (your "prompt"). You pick a random compressed/latent representation, and use the generator to make an image from it. Then ask CLIP, "does this match the prompt?"

At this point, you just have some randomly chosen image. So, CLIP, of course, says "hell no, this doesn't match the prompt at all."

But CLIP also tells you, implicitly, how to change the latent representation so the answer is a bit closer to "yes."

How? You take CLIP's judgment, which is a complicated nested function of the latent representation: schematically,

judgment = clip(text, image_generator(latent))

All the functions are known in closed form, though, so you can just . . . analytically take the derivative with respect to "latent," chain rule-ing all the way through "clip" and then through "image_generator."

That's a lot of calculus, but thankfully we have powerful chain rule calculating machines called "pytorch" and "GPUs" that just do it for you.

You move latent a small step in the direction of this derivative, then recompute the derivative again, take another small step, etc., and eventually CLIP says "hell yes" because the picture looks like the prompt.

This doesn't quite work as stated, though, roughly because the raw CLIP gradients can't break various symmetries like translation/reflection that you need to break to get a natural image with coherent pieces of different-stuff-in-different-places.

(This is especially a problem with VQ models, where you assign a random latent to each image patch independently, which will produce a very unstructured and homogeneous image.)

To fix this, you add "augmentations" like randomly cropping/translating the image before feeding it to CLIP. You then use the averaged CLIP derivatives over a sample of (say) 32 randomly distorted images to take each step.

A crucial and highly effective augmentation -- for making different-stuff-in-different-places -- is called "cutouts," and involves blacking out everything in the image but a random rectangle. Cutouts is greatly helpful but also causes some glitches, and is (I believe) the cause of the phenomenon where "AI-generated" images often put a bunch of distinct unrelated versions of a scene onto the same canvas.

This CLIP-derivative-plus-augmentations thing is called CLIP guidance. You can use it with whichever image generator you please.

The great thing is you don't need to train your own model to do the text-to-image aspect -- CLIP is already a greater text-to-image genius than anything you could train, and its weights are free to download. (Except for the forbidden CLIPs, the best and biggest CLIPs, which are OA's alone. But you don't need them.)

(EDIT 9/6/22: since this post was written, the "forbidden CLIPs" have been made available for public use, and have been seeing use for a while in projects like my bot and Stable Diffusion.)

For the image generator, a natural choice is the very powerful VQGAN -- which gets you VQGAN+CLIP, the source of most of the "AI-generated images" you've seen papered all over the internet in 2021.

You know, the NeuralBreeders, or the ArtBlenders, or whatever you're calling the latest meme one. They're all just VQGAN+CLIP.

Except, sometimes they're a different thing, pioneered by RiversHaveWings: CLIP-guided diffusion. Which is just like VQGAN+CLIP, except instead of VQGAN, the image generator is a diffusion model.

(You can also do something different called CLIP-conditioned diffusion, which is cool but orthogonal to this post)

Writing text . . . ?

OK but how do you get it to write words into the image, though.

None of the above was really designed with this in mind, and most of it just feels awkward for this application.

For instance...

Things that don't work: CLIP guidance

CLIP guidance is wonderful if you don't want to write the text. But for writing text, it has many downsides:

CLIP can sort of do some basic OCR, which is neat, but it's not nearly good enough to recognize arbitrary text. So, you'd have to finetune CLIP on your own text/image data.

CLIP views images at a small resolution, usually 224x224. This is fine for its purposes, but may render some text illegible.

Writing text properly means creating a coherent structure of parts in the image, where their relation in space matters. But the augmentations, especially cutouts, try to prevent CLIP from seeing the image globally. The pictures CLIP actually sees will generally be crops/cutouts that don't contain the full text you're trying to write, so it's not clear you even want CLIP to say "yes." (You can remove these augmentations, but then CLIP guidance loses its magic and starts to suck.)

I did in fact try this whole approach, with my own trained VQVAE, and my own finetuned CLIP.

This didn't really work, in exactly the ways you'd expect, although the results were often very amusing. Here's my favorite one -- you might even be able to guess what the prompt was:

OK, forget CLIP guidance then. Let's do it the hard way and use a text encoder.

I tried this too, several times.

Things that don't work: DALL-E

I tried training my own DALL-E on top of the same VQVAE used above. This was actually the first approach I tried, and where I first made the VQVAE.

(Note: that VQVAE itself can auto-encode pictures from tumblr splendidly, so it's not the problem here.)

This failed more drastically. The best I could ever get was these sort of "hieroglyphics":

This makes sense, given that the DALL-E approach has steep downsides of its own for this task. Consider:

The VQVAE imposes an artificial "grain" onto the image, breaking it up into little patches of (typically) 8x8 pixels. When text is written in an image, the letters could be aligned anywhere with respect to this "grain." The same letters will look very different if they're sitting in the middle of a VQ patch, vs. if they're sitting right on the edge between two, or mostly in one patch and partly in another. The generator has to learn the mapping from every letter (or group of letters) to each of these representations. And then it has to do that again for every font size! And again for every font!

Learning to "do GPT" on VQ patches is generally just harder than learning to do stuff on raw pixels, since the relation to the image is more abstract. I don't think I had nearly enough data/compute for a VQ-autoregressive model to work.

Things that don't work: GANs with text encoders

OK, forget DALL-E . . . uh . . . what if we did a GAN, I guess?? where both the G and the D can see the encoded text?

This was the last thing I tried before diffusion. (StyleGAN2 + DiffAug, with text encoder.) It failed, in boring ways, though I tried hard.

GANs are hard to train and I could never get the thing to "use the text" properly.

One issue was: there is a lot of much simpler stuff for the G and D to obsess over, and make the topic of their game, before they have to think about anything as abstract as text. So you have to get pretty far in GAN training for the point where the text would matter, and only at that point does the text encoder start being relevant.

But I think a deeper issue was that VAE/GAN-style latent states don't really make sense for text. I gave the G both the usual latent vector and a text encoding, but this effectively implies that every possible text should be compatible with every possible image.

For that to make sense, the latent should have a contextual meaning conditional on the text, expressing a parameterization of the space of "images consistent with this text." But that intuitively seems like a relatively hard thing for an NN to learn.

Diffusion

Then I was on the EleutherAI discord, and RiversHaveWings happened to say this:

And I though, "oh, maybe it's time for me to learn this new diffusion stuff. It won't work, but it will be educational."

So I added a text encoder to a diffusion model, using cross-attention. Indeed, it didn't work.

Things that don't work: 256x256 diffusion

For a long time, I did all my diffusion experiments at 256x256 resolution. This seemed natural: it was the biggest size that didn't strain the GPU too much, and it was the smallest size I'd feel OK using in the bot. Plus I was worried about text being illegible at small resolutions.

For some reason, I could never get 256x256 text writing to work. The models would learn to imitate fonts, but they'd always write random gibberish in them.

I tried a bunch of things during this period that didn't fix the problem, but which I still suspect were very helpful later:

Timestep embeddings: at some point, RiversHaveWings pointed out that my text encoder didn't know the value of the diffusion timestep. This was bad b/c presumably you need different stuff from the text at different noise levels. I added that. Also added some other pieces like a "line embedding," and timestep info injected into the cross-attn queries.

Line embeddings: I was worried my encoder might have trouble learning to determine which tokens were on which line of text. So I added an extra positional embedding that expresses how many newlines have happened so far.

Synthetic data: I made a new, larger synthetic, grayscale dataset of text in random fonts/sizes on flat backgrounds of random lightness. This presented the problem in a much crisper, easier to learn form. (This might have helped if I'd had it for the other approaches, although I went back and tried DALL-E on it and still got hieroglyphics, so IDK.)

Baby's first words: 64x64 diffusion

A common approach with diffusion models is to make 2 of them, one at low resolution, and one that upsamples low-res images to a higher resolution.

At wit's end, I decided to try this, with train a 64x64 low-res model. I trained it with my usual setup, and . . .

. . . it can write!!!

It can write, in a sense . . . but with misspellings. Lots of misspellings. Epic misspellings.

One of my test prompts, which I ran on all my experimental models for ease of comparison, was the following (don't ask):

the what string commit String evolved LEGGED

Here are two samples from the model, both with this prompt. (I've scaled them up in GIMP just so they're easier to see, which is why they're blurry.)

Interestingly, the misspellings vary with the conditioning noise (and the random draws during sampling since I'm not using DDIM). The model has "overly noisy/uncertain knowledge" as opposed to just being ignorant.

Spelling improves: relative positional embeddings

At this point, I was providing two kinds of position info to the model:

- Which line of text is this? (line embedding)

- Which character in the string is this, counting from the first one onward? (Absolute pos embedding)

I noticed that the model often got spelling right near the beginning of lines, but degraded later in them. I hypothesized that it was having trouble reconstructing relative position within a line from the absolute positions I was giving it.

cfoster0 on discord suggested I try relative positional embeddings, which together with the line embedding should convey the right info in an easy-to-use form.

I tried this, using the T5 version of relative positional embeddings.

This dramatically improved spelling. Given that test prompt, this model spelled it exactly right in 2 of 4 samples I generated:

I showed off the power of this new model by thanking discord user cfoster0 for their suggestion:

(At some point slightly before this, I also switched from a custom BPE tokenizer to character-level tokenization, which might have helped.)

Doing it for real: modeling text in natural images

OK, we can write text . . . at least, in the easiest possible setting: tiny 64x64 images that contain only text on a flat background, nothing else.

The goal, though, is to make "natural" images that just so happen to contain text.

Put in a transcript of a tweet, get a screenshot of a tweet. Put in a brief line of text, get a movie still with the text as the subtitle, or a picture of a book whose the text is the title, or something. This is much harder:

I have fewer real tumblr images (around 169k) than synthetic text images (around 407k, and could make more if needed)

The real data is much more diverse and complex

The real data introduces new ways the image can depend on the text

Much of the real data is illegible at 64x64 resolution

Let's tackle the resolution issue first. On the synthetic data, we know 64x64 works, and 256x256 doesn't work (even with relative embeds.)

What about 128x128, though? For some reason, that works just as well as 64x64! It's still small, and ideally I'd want to make images bigger than that, but it makes legibility less of a concern.

OK, so I can generate text that looks like the synthetic dataset, at 128x128 resolution. If I just . . . finetune that model on my real dataset, what happens?

It works!

The model doesn't make recognizable objects/faces/etc most of the time, which is not surprising given the small size and diverse nature of the data set.

But it does learn the right relationships between text and image, without losing its ability to write text itself. It does misspell things sometimes, about as often as it did on the synthetic data, but that seems acceptable.

Here's a generated tweet from this era:

The prompt for this was a real STR transcript of this tweet. (Sorry about the specific choice of image here, it's just a tweet that ended up in my test split and was thus a useful testing prompt)

At this point, I was still doing everything in monochrome (with monochrome noise), afraid that adding color might screw things up. Does it, though?

Nope! So I re-do everything in color, although the synthetic font data is still monochrome (but now diffused with RGB noise). Works just as well.

(Sometime around this point, I added extra layers of image-to-text cross-attn before each text-to-image one, with an FF layer in the middle. This was inspired by another cfoster0 suggestion, and I thought it might help the model use image context to guide how it uses the text. This is called "weave attn" in my code. I don't know if it's actually helpful, but I use it from here on.)

One last hurdle: embiggening

128x128 is still kinda small, though.

Recall that, when I originally did 64x64, the plan was to make a second "superresolution" model later to convert small images into bigger ones.

(You do this, in diffusion, by simply giving the model the [noiseless] low-res image as an extra input, alongside the high-res but noised image that is an input to any diffusion model. In my case, I also fed it the text, using the same architecture as elsewhere.)

How was that going? Not actually that well, even though it felt like the easy part.

My 128 -> 256 superresolution models would get what looked like great metrics, but when I looked at the upsampled images, they looked ugly and fuzzy, a lot like low-quality JPEGs.

I had warm-started the text encoder part of the super-res model with the encoder weights from the base model, so it should know a lot about text. But it wasn't very good at scaling up small, closely printed text, which is the most important part of its job.

I had to come up with one additional trick, to make this last part work.

My diffusion models use the standard architecture for such models, the "U-net," so called for its U shape.

It takes the image, processes it a bit, and then downsamples it to half the resolution. It processed it there, then downsamples it again, etc -- all the way down to 8x8. Then it goes back up again, to 16x16, etc. When it reaches the original resolution, it spits out its prediction for the noise.

Therefore, most of the structure of my 256-res model looks identical to the structure of my 128-res model. Only it's "sandwiched" between a first part that downsamples from 256, and a final part that upsamples to 256.

The trained 128 model knows a lot about how these images tend to look, and about writing text. What if I warm-start the entire middle of the U-Net with weights of the 128 model?

That is, at initialization, my 256 super-res model would just be my 128 model sandwiched inside two extra parts, with random weights for the "bread" only.

I can imagine lots of reasons this might not work, but it was easy to try, and in fact it did work!

Super-res models initialized in this way rapidly learned to do high-quality upsampling, both of text and non-text image elements.

At this point, I had the model (or rather, the two models) I would deploy in the bot.

Using it in practice: rejection sampling

To use this model in practice, the simplest workflow would be:

Generate a single 128x128 image from the prompt

Using the prompt and the 128x128 image, upsample to 256x256

We're done

However, recall that we have access to STR model, which we can ask to read images.

In some sense, the point of all this work is to "invert" the STR model, making images from STR transcripts. If this worked perfectly, feeding the image we make through STR would always return the original prompt.

The model isn't that good, but we can get it closer by using this workflow instead:

Generate multiple 128x128 images from the prompt

Read all the 128x128 images with STR

Using some metric like n-gram similarity, measure how close the transcripts are to the original prompt, and remove the "worst" images from the batch

Using the prompt and the 128x128 images that were kept in step 3, upsample 256x256

Feed all the 256x256 images through STR

Pick the 256x256 image that most closely matches the prompt

We're done

For step 3, I use character trigram similarity and a slightly complicated pruning heuristic with several thresholds. The code for this is here.

Why did diffusion work?

A few thoughts on why diffusion worked for this problem, unlike anything else:

- Diffusion doesn't have the problem that VQ models have, where the latent exists on an arbitrary grid, and the text could have any alignment w/r/t the grid.

- Unlike VQ models, and GAN-type models with a single vector latent, the "latent" in diffusion isn't trying to parameterize the manifold of plausible images in any "nice" way. It's just noise.

Since noise works fine without adding some sort of extra "niceness" constraint, we don't have to worry about the constraint being poorly suited to text.

- During training, diffusion models take partially noised real images as inputs, rather than getting a latent and having to invent the entire image de novo. And it only gets credit for making this input less noised, not for any of the structure that's already there.

I think this helps it pick up nuances like "what does the text say?" more quickly than other models. At some diffusion timesteps, all the obvious structure (that other models would obsess over) has already been revealed, and the only way to score more points is to use nuanced knowledge.

In a sense, diffusion learns the hard stuff and the easy stuff in parallel, rather than in stages like other models. So it doesn't get stuck in a trap where it over-trains itself to one stage, and then can't learn the later stages, because the loss landscape has a barrier in between (?). I don't know how to make this precise, but it feels true.

Postscript: GLIDE

Three days before I deployed this work in the bot, OpenAI released its own text-conditioned diffusion model, called GLIDE. I guess it's an idea whose time has come!

Their model is slightly different in how it joins the text encoder to the U-net. Instead of adding cross-attn, it simply appends the output of the text encoder as extra positions in the standard attention layers, which all diffusion U-Nets have in their lower-resolution middle layer(s).

I'm not sure if this would have worked for my problem. (I don't know because they didn't try to make their model write text -- it models the text-image relation more like CLIP and DALL-E.)

In any event, it makes bigger attn matrices than my approach, of size (text_len + res^2)^2 rather than my (text_len * res^2). The extra memory needed might be prohibitive for me in practice, not sure.

I haven't tried their approach, and it's possible it would beat mine in a head-to-head comparison on this problem. If so, I would want to use theirs instead.

The end

Thanks for reading this giant post!

Thanks again to people in EleutherAI discord for help and discussion.

You can see some of the results in this tag.

[latveriansnailmail]

Discworld Asks

Adora Belle Dearheart: What's your vice? Why do you need one?

Agnes Nitt: How would you rather be and what's stopping you?

Anghammarad: How old are you and how long have you been on Tumblr?

Angua von Uberwald: How have you turned a disadvantage into an advantage?

the Bursar: How's your mental health?

Carrot Ironfounderson: What was intended for you and what did you choose instead?

Cherry Littlebottom: You got, like, some kinda gender or what?

Cohen the Barbarian: What job have you had the longest?

DEATH: How do you want to go?

Death of Rats: How do you NOT want to go?

Detritus the Troll: How hard can you hit and why don't you?

Foul Ol' Ron: What's something disgusting that's happend to you?

Gaspode the Wonder Dog: Have you ever been famous?

Granny Weatherwax: Do you know your own mind? Do tell.

Havelock Vetinari: What city do you identify with?

Leonard of Quirm: What's an idea you've had that you wouldn't put into action?

the Librarian: If you could be any animal, what would you choose?

the Luggage: What was your first Discworld book?

Lu-Tze: Tell an interesting history fact.

Magrat Garlick: What do you believe in that most don't?

Moist von Lipwig: What are you running to?

Mustrum Ridcully: What is your leadership style?

Nanny Ogg: How big is your family?

Nobby Nobbs: Not to be impolite but what exactly are you?

Otto Chriek: Post a favorite picture.

Ponder Stibbons: What would you like to learn about?

Quothe the Raven: Trot out a favorite quote.

Rincewind the Wizzard: What are you running from?

Sam Vimes: How do you challenge injustice?

Susan Sto Helit: What lesson do you have to teach?

Sybil Ramkin: Talk about your favorite pet.

Tiffany Aching: Be honest and be selfish. What is truly yours?

Two Flower: What's the most interesting place you've visited?

the Wee Free Men: What happens when you die?

William de Worde: Spill some truth.

[rurpleplayssims]

Check In Tag

I was tagged by @curiousb! 🥰

Thank you for the tag, I was intrigued by this one when I spotted it doing the rounds. I’m going to put my answers under a the Keep Reading belt as I’ve decided to write a novel again! 🤣📝

Why did you choose your URL?

A couple of schoolfriends called me Rurple when I was in my teenage years because I used to dye my hair a reddy purple colour (hence Rurple, but it’s better than Pred! 🤣) I saw other Simmers using the ‘playsSims’ tagline and I didn’t have any other ideas. I’m glad I used it as I can now use the addition for my CC Finds blog which is RurpleFindsCC.

How long have you been on Tumblr?

RurplePlaysSims has been on Tumblr since February 2021. 

My RurpleFindsCC blog has been on here since I decided to separate my CC from my main blog which I'm a lot happier about, which I’ve done since September 2021. 

I’ve got another blog on here which I’ve had for a few years but hardly ever use (not sure I know the username and password..) but that was mostly to reblog BBC Sherlock memes and funny things. 

Do you have a queue tag?

See now, I’m not quite sure what this means. I am guilty of having quite a long queue (it’s 76 posts long atm!) but is this to do with the mass post editor to move them to the queue? If so, I don’t use it. 

Anything thing that is an actual CQ post and therefore part of the story, gets written up and then moved to the queue chronologically. That’s why I got so annoyed when Tumblr lost three of my posts a few months ago because when they were retrieved, I had to post them out of sync. 

I made the tags so because then it’s easier for someone to read the entire story (if they wanted to, that is some undertaking with over 1500 posts!) by just clicking the ‘Next Page’ button.

Why did you start your blog in the first place?

I’m not quite sure. I think I was bored one day and stumbled across some TS2 stories and I fell in love with them. I think it was @holleyberry’s Dossanina story which first introduced Sim stories taken with screenshots to me. 

I was already very familiar with TS2 machinima and series on YouTube as I once tried a go at making some (They are so embarrassing to watch back now as my spelling was AWFUL and I clearly had no access to a spellchecker!) I think those videos are still live and you’re welcome to laugh at my attempts of a riveting story.🤣 Just PLEASE do not judge my ability on them! 🙈 I was 13/14 years old when I was making these. I had to borrow my parent’s computer, which was a very old Windows XP and I was restricted in when I could play Sims. So the videos were very...cringe for me to watch them back. Seriously, they were awful. You can find them for yourself, no way am I tagging them here! 🙈🙈🙈

My game was so poorly organised back then, from my custom content hoarding and my Downloads folder was a DISGRACE. Nothing like the strict regime I have nowadays. 

Why did you choose your icon/pfp?

Well it was originally a picture of myself but  some people made comments on how nice I look. I am AWFUL with appearance-related compliments. 🙈 It could’ve been worse I know but that’s just how I am.

So I changed it to one of the pictures I’d done with Althea Campbell, the founder from my BaCC in this challenge. 

I like how people only know me on here as a creator and who likes to issue praise where it is well deserved. I know how much people’s love of your craft/story will motivate you to do more. I know that I’d have stopped CQ ages ago if people didn’t care about it. 

As you’d see (if you’re ruthless in tracking them down!) with my TS2 attempts, nobody watched them so I gave up with no motivation to carry on, hone my craft and build a skill. 

I love to write (as the length of this post clearly says!) and I love how most of you only know me via my story and the comments I leave. 

I love that, whilst my family know I have a blog and a story on it, they won’t read it or leave comments. I’m cool with that. It gives me more freedom to write because I’m then not worried that if I write that a character does something, the people who know me might wonder if I’ve done that thing in the series. Hopefully that makes sense.

Why did you choose your header?

I chose the header after I decided to make my main blog strictly for the story and behind the scenes content for Campbell Quay BaCC. So I took a (then) current picture of the neighbourhood. 

I am never changing it as it shows how empty my neighbourhood was back then compared to now. 

What’s your post with the most notes?

Apparently, according to Tumblr Top, it is this post which was a reblog of the original post for me completing Campbell University (154 notes). 

In second place, which still gets likes and reblogs to this day, is this one where I recommend people to read the Dossanina  story I mentioned above (114 notes). 

How many mutuals do you have?

Is that when you follow a blog that follows you back? How the hell do you check this?! 🤣 

I know it’s quite a lot as whoever follows me, if they post Sims content (preferably TS2) I will nearly always follow them back in thanks. 

How many followers do you have?

I have 376 followers.

How many people do you follow?

I follow 797 blogs.

Have you ever made a shitpost?

Yes! 🤣 Just follow ‘random Jess note’ tag on my blog and you’ll see some. Beware of the ones that have ‘RANT’ as well. 

How often do you use Tumblr each day?

I’d use it in my sleep if I could. 🤣 

I have had an active queue for months now so even if I’m not looking at the site on my app or computer, I still get notifications of blogs I follow and if people leave likes or replies in my posts. 

If I’m home for the day and have nothing planned, I’m on Tumblr, either editing some new posts or backing up my story on another site.

More information soon when I get most of the story inputted. It’s taking FORVER as I have to manually copy and paste the text and pictures individually but I’m scared that my blog might be accidently(?) deleted like some Simmers have of late. 

Did you have a fight/argument with another blog once? who won?

Not that I am aware of, I don’t like fights of any kind. 

I like to keep the peace. If I’ve pissed any of you off, for goodness sake tell me so I can explain or apologise! 

How do you feel about ‘You need to reblog this’ posts?

It’s a combination of tempting fate and “With all due respect, don’t tell me what to do.” 

But, in special circumstances I will reblog without question. But as a rule, I like to keep my blog for just my story content. 

Do you like tag games?

Do you really think I wrote all this out because I didn’t want to? 🤣 

I think I’ve completed all games and challenges that people have tagged me in thus far. 

Do you like ask games?

Did you not read the previous answer? Ask away. 

I try my best with WCIFs but I’m not perfect.

Which of your mutuals do you think is Tumblr famous?

Well I mostly see Simblr-Tumblr and in my eyes they are the following:

@deedee-sims

@plumbtales

@lesyasun

@linacheries

@veranka-downloads

@pixeldolly

@fanseelamb

@mdpthatsme and so many more!

Do you have a crush on a mutual?

No, but every Simmer I meet on Tumblr are always very kind and supportive which means the world to me.

I’m going to tag anyone who wants to have a go! 🥰📝

[greenhappyseed]

BnHA Ch.318 - Comparisons and parallels

Hey, did you hear Bakugo was back? I kid! Of COURSE everyone on Tumblr heard the collective BKDK screams. :) While the gremlin ex machina is the big news, a lot of other good stuff happened too.

We open the chapter with more Endeavor chitchat. He’s turning out to be a good coordinator, an insightful investigator, and all around worthy of being a top pro…except he’s still a crap father and still doesn’t seem to care about human beings. Even here with Deku, he appears to express concern over Deku’s wellbeing but immediately follows it up with:

Yup, he only cares about Deku as the OFA holder, not the kid who saved him in the war, the kid who used to intern for him, or the kid who’s friends with his kid. Ugh.

Deku swears to Endy that he’s fine because he’s still on his feet, but that’s a pretty poor standard. I mean, he’s wobbling and needs Blackwhip as a literal crutch. The vestiges agree with Endy and start to gang up on Deku, so Deku, in all his tired teenage wisdom, decides to ghost them. Apparently you CAN ghost a vestige, and Fourth is not here for it.

Holy heteromorph discrimination! All the villains we see Deku fighting are heteromorphs (some are even dressed like Spinner). We also see Deku fighting a gigantic shark-headed villain in the water, presumably because Gang Orca and Selkie were busy.

I LOVE the panel of Deku thinking of his family, his teachers, and Eri. This is what he’s fighting to achieve, but Deku’s perceptions (goals?) don’t necessarily line up with reality.

His mom is first (awwww) and she’s cheering for him like she did when he was little. NOT worried, not crying, just pure joy for her hero son, like he fantasized when he was a quirkless boy.

Gran Torino in his hero outfit, smiling and eating — NOT as Deku last saw him in the hospital.

Proud Dadmight with a genuine smile, NOT hero All Might. Also, All Might appears to be wearing his track jacket, not a business suit, so presumably Deku is thinking about a more casual training moment with his mentor. This is an interesting contrast to Gran Torino, who Deku DOES picture as a hero even though Torino handed his cape to Deku in the hospital.

AIZAWA GLARING WITH BOTH EYES AND HIDING HIS MOUTH, because THIS is how Aizawa looks in Deku’s happily ever after. But we all know Aizawa is probably hiding a sly smile under under his capture weapon, right??

Eri, finally smiling freely, because she’s learned how.

Also, it looks like Deku is again fighting heteromorphs at the bottom of this panel, although one of the kids he’s defending appears to have a duck bill, so we have some positive representation too.

Deku says he wants everyone to live their lives in peace and safety so they can smile together. Wow, where have we heard an idealistic kid say that before?

As Deku thinks about the ideal he shares with All Might, he arrives at Kamino, the place where “All Might” ended. Deku nearly collapses and meets his end when he sees a villain called Dictator, who was sent by AFO. Yup, Nagant wasn’t the only one sent by AFO, she just thought she was (and AFO didn’t prep her well — by comparison, Dictator received a full briefing about Deku). But look carefully at how Dictator uses different insults than AFO. He doesn’t call Deku useless or a boy (as both AFO and Nagant did), even though the imagery throughout this chapter points to the “what can you even do?” bit from Chapter 1. Instead, Dictator calls Deku reckless, impatient, and a loner.

“Rampage” in particular, calls back to this AFO/Yoichi exchange during the vestige battle, where AFO decried “rage” as being ruled by emotion and out of control, but Yoichi praised it as a form of passion.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I think AFO is increasingly afraid of Deku. AFO is putting more effort into prepping his assassins, and his pass-through insults are sounding more like the taunts he hurled at All Might. AFO is now referring to All Might as useless and Deku as reckless. If, somehow, we see Dictator in the next chapter, I’m curious if he’ll explode or bust out a second quirk…..He does say taking Deku to AFO will bring him security, so I think AFO explicitly threatened him. All I’m saying is, it’s weird that a villain named Dictator has no mission statement or political end he’s trying to reach. He seems to be acting purely on AFO’s orders or ELSE, which means AFO is getting desperate and doesn’t have time for games. By contrast, AFO persuaded Nagant the boy would stop hero society from collapsing, therefore her goal and AFO’s goal were aligned. Unlike Dictator, she wasn’t aware there was an “or else;” she didn’t know she would explode if she exercised “free will.”

Deku snaps out of his stupor long enough to challenge Dictator to give up AFO’s location. Dictator says if Deku wants a fight, he’ll give him one, which echoes a line from AFO in Kamino:

There’s no more “come quietly if you want to keep your limbs,” it’s straight to “let’s fight!”

FINALLY! We. See. Bakugo! I adore how Deku is piled under bodies, twisting his tired brain around, thinking “I need a strategy,” and Bakugo is just, “VILLAIN GO BOOM!” with a precision blast. He knew exactly how to get the villain while keeping civilians safe. Perfect victory (assuming Dictator is truly done). Also, Bakugo’s “that punk” could apply to either the villain or Deku. :) It’s a nice callback to the final exam when Deku can’t think of a strategy to win against All Might and Bakugo was, “I choose violence against my childhood idol.” Both times, Bakugo’s right — sometimes a little rage is necessary to save and win.

I have thoughts on AFO and the “my body moved without thinking” bits that I’ll post separately. As for my next chapter hopes and dreams:

More Bakugo and UA kids. Plus All Might and Stain. And some LOV love pleeeeease.

Figure out why Second is being sus. He says saving everyone is the right path for Deku (contrary to AFO, who calls Deku’s path “thorny”), and that inaction is not an option for OFA holders. We also know Second believes victory = life and defeat = death, so it makes sense he’d push Deku towards victory no matter the cost. Second also says there’s something that can bolster Deku, which is presumably Bakugo and friends. However, when Bakugo arrives, Second doesn’t look pleased. Assuming he’s standing the same way against his throne chair as he is at the start of the chapter, then in the panel below Second is looking over his LEFT shoulder AWAY from the other vestiges and towards the expanse of the OFA mind realm. (Earlier in the chapter he looks over his RIGHT shoulder to speak to Yoichi and Third.) WHY YOU LOOK AWAY FROM VESTIGE FRIENDS WHEN WHEN BAKUGO APPEARS??? ARE YOU ON THE LOOKOUT FOR AFO TO ARRIVE??

Although the arrival of foreign heroes has been promised for a bit, and I’m ok with some background forces to bulk the hero ranks, I’m not keen on new cannon fodder cameo characters that will show up for 4 chapters and then disappear. A Captain Celebrity appearance would be fun, but let’s be honest, he likely noped out of going to Japan to fight villains gone wild. If Death Arms quit, there’s no way Captain Celebrity would keep going!

[doreamu-san]

An analysis of SolKy

Hello! Thank you so much for clicking on this. A while ago, I was asked to do an essay explaining why people ship SolKy other than the whole rivals/opposites attract reason, and I got a lot of feedback stating it was useful for newcomers to the ship! As a result I’ve decided to post this on tumblr, but just on the ship’s tag as to not bother uninterested people.

A couple of disclaimers before I begin. This is firstly just my own opinion, so whilst it makes sense for me, other shippers may disagree with my points. I’m also not claiming they are canon because they are not. But I do hope it’ll give some insight into why some people like me enjoy them together.

Even once you’ve read this essay, you can still dislike SolKy. This isn’t an essay stating you have to ship them.

This will be extremely long as I basically cover every single interaction they’ve ever had with each other since I know some people sort of gloss over their dialogue, so grab yourself a drink, get comfy, and I hope you enjoy reading!

(Last edited: 09/05/2021. This will be updated again when Strive releases!)

How this all began

If we’re starting right at the beginning, it’s common knowledge that Ky and Sol weren’t exactly on great terms and often clashed most of the time due to their conflicting beliefs. Ky saw the world in terms of black and white, and had very strict rules on what constituted as right and wrong. Sol seemed to think differently and went against that, which was a stark contrast compared to the other Order members at the time.

Considering that they were in fact, in the middle of a war, you would think that generally people would be willing to put their differences aside and work together.

But Sol wasn’t like everyone else, going off and doing his own thing instead of actually listening to orders, so it’s understandable why Ky found him rather irritating.

However, Ky did grow curious of Sol. Obviously curiosity does not equate to love, but it is the basis of Ky wanting to become more friendly with and know more about Sol. There seemed to be something that Sol knew but Ky didn’t, but how was that possible..? As a result, despite how infuriating he could be, Ky sought to seek out the truth and so fought him for answers.

In regards to why exactly they fight (aside from the fact that this is a fighting game), Ishiwatari wrote something called ‘Hostility is Akin to Love’ right above a picture of them fighting:

Hostility is akin to love Thinking of your opponent’s actions to fight, Reading your opponent’s inner thoughts to fight, Planning attacks that will hit your opponent to fight, And then transmitting your thoughts with those attacks, The more you think of your own advantage, at the same time you think of your opponent, In the instant you mix with your opponent, a passionate feeling arises, and blood boils, Reality is hurt, and you wound your opponent, Hostility is akin to love. — Guilty Gear Isuka Mook

It states how fighting someone can be close to feelings of love because you have to think about what your opponent is doing, as well as how you’re going to respond to your opponent. Overtime, you start to memorise how your opponent thinks, and as a result you’ll know them on a deeper level.

So considering the above, this explains how even though they weren’t on friendly terms, they still formed a bond with one another.

Now we’ve established how exactly their relationship started, and why Ky was curious about Sol in the first place, let’s look at things from Sol’s perspective.

Sol’s attitude towards Ky

We know that Sol was also pretty annoyed by Ky, which was totally justifiable given the extreme way in which Ky thought the world worked. But Sol didn’t exactly dislike Ky.

In order to provide some evidence that Sol cares about Ky, let’s cover that infamous scene everyone likes to reference which shows Sol crying over Ky’s dead body:

Sol:     "I came to pick you up." Ky:      "Always coming late... you never could fix that..." Sol:     "You..." Ky:      "As to be expected... until the very end... I could never beat you..." Sol:     "Don't say anything!" Ky:      "I have... a request..." Sol:     "I said shut up!" Ky:      "After Commander Kliff... carry on... the Holy Order..." Sol:     "Stop it... that's your job!" Ky:      "Please... promise me..." Sol:     "Dammit..." Ky:      "If it's you... you can do..." Sol:     "Hey.... what's wrong. Hey! KYYYYYY!" — Guilty Gear XX Drama CD Side Red, Battle of Rome — Deathmatch

A lot of people bring this quote up when discussing SolKy and yes, it does show Sol cares about Ky considering how Sol never really cares about anyone in general, but the fact that Ky’s death managed to make him emotional shows what an impact Ky had on him. There are however more quotes that show Sol’s feelings.

There’s this scene in the GG Xtra manga, Ky and Sol get attacked by a mountain-sized gear. In order to save them, Sol rips off his limiter and Dragon Installs. This scene is very poignant when you take into consideration what Sol said in After Story A:

Sol:     "Back during the Crusades, before we met... Kliff told me this rumour about a prodigy swordsman." Sol:     "If you couldn't guess, that was you. I didn't give a shit at the time..." Sol:     "But then I saw you on the battlefield." Sol:     "I saw someone out there who surpassed all of my expectations. Or perhaps I should say 'something.'" Sol:     "No openings, no wasted movements, no carelessness, no hesitation, no embarrassment, not even any honor. No chivalry or mercy. A being unaffected by emotion." Sol:     "You were a killing machine. Taking down gears with brutal efficiency." Ky:      "...That was a long time ago." Sol:     "I'm not done talking. I've seen the face of the 'serious' Ky." Sol:     "Then one day, you challenged me." Sol:     "You wanna know what I thought right then?" Ky:      "..." Sol:     "I was afraid. Hell, I was scared shitless." Sol:     "'He figured out that I'm a Gear, and he's come to kill me.' That's what I thought." — Guilty Gear Xrd -REVELATOR-, After Story A

Sol admits that he knows just how scary Ky can be. Since Ky was extremely against Gears, if Ky found out that Sol was a Gear, then Ky would have most likely attempted to kill him. But Sol knew this and was willing to die for Ky’s sake, and transformed anyway:

Ky:      "Sol..." Ky:      (Really... that's really..) Ky:      (That's really you!?) Ky:      "SOL!" Sol:     "Shut it..." Sol:     "I didn't do it..." Sol:     "To help you out—...." — Guilty Gear Xtra, Chapter 5: Unspeakable Thoughts

Going off on a bit of a tangent from Sol’s feelings, but I just want to point out Ky’s state of mind at this point. Ky in this time period was still very anti-Gear, as it was only through this moment and his encounters with Solaria and Dizzy later that made him change his way of thinking. It took a long time for Ky to accept Gears, and he still had the remains of that mindset in him when he had Sin, as he refused to make eye contact with him because Ky was ashamed of having a Gear child. So the fact that Ky knew Sol was a Gear, believed all Gears were evil, but still decided to accept Sol into his life and wanted to support him regardless of that, is interesting.

Back to Sol, another small quote that manages to show Sol’s feelings towards Ky is this:

Sol:     (Maybe I'll finish them off while I'm at it...) Sol:     (But that would mean breaking my promise to Ky...) — Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R, Sol Badguy Path 2

Now, Sol doesn’t care about 99% of what other people do as long as they don’t get in his way. The fact that he intends to keep his promise with Ky suggests that he holds Ky in somewhat ‘high’ regards compared to others.

There’s also this quote that shows Sol is thinking about Ky in Overture:

The frustrations of the man wielding a giant sword were piling day by day, and a familiar face appeared in his head. What’s he up to right now? “Hmph, whatever…” With a feeling of self-contempt, Sol Badguy shook his head. What am I getting sentimental for? — Guilty Gear 2: Overture, #0 “Noise”

And when Sol encounters Raven later on after seeing Ky incapacitated, Raven points out how he can tell Sol is upset, meaning Sol’s not really doing a good job of pretending he’s still indifferent to Ky.

Raven: "You're as ruthless as ever, huh, monster?" Sol:      "Look who's talking." Raven: "Can you not put down your sword and talk? I understand you're upset with Ky Kiske defeated." Sol:      "I'll ask your corpse for answers." — Guilty Gear 2: Overture, #5 "Gaze of the Chronicle"

Sol’s thoughts about Ky become even clearer during his confrontation with Sin when he’s under the influence of Valentine, where Sol defends Ky’s actions and tries to make Sin understand Ky is not 100% at fault:

Sin:     "Can you see it? Can you feel it? This is my real power. This is my mother's strength." Sol:     "But it's light. It must be from your father." Sin:     "Shut up! Don't ever mention him!" Sin:     "He abandoned my mother and me using justice as an excuse!" Sin:     "Who cares about the King!? Who cares about the people!? That man, and that Kingdom, not one of them can protect a damn thing!" Sol:     "I don't give a damn about your family." Sol:     "But you know what, Ky may be a stubborn idiot, but at least he's true to his beliefs." Sol:     "A punk like you is still alive thanks to his justice." — Guilty Gear 2: Overture, #15 "Roaring Compass"

Okay, that’s the pre-Xrd era for Sol done, now to focus on Ky’s pre-Xrd’s emotions.

Ky’s attitude towards Sol

We’ve established earlier that Ky was annoyed by Sol and disliked him in the Crusades. However, afterwards it seems as if Ky saw himself as friends with Sol:

Ofc1:   "All of them seem to have been destroyed by... fire?" Ofc2:  "Yeah... why could that be?" Ky:      "........" Ky:      "Change our course!" Ky:      "Head towards the Eastern United States!" Ofc1:   "May I ask why, Chief Ky?" Ky:      "To meet an old friend." — Guilty Gear Xtra, Chapter 4: Former Friends

We know that Ky outwardly expressed his first signs of liking Sol when Sol stole the Fuuenken and Ky chased after him, only for Sol to win in their duel, and Ky says this:

Ky:      "Promise me one thing..." Sol:     "..What?" Ky:      "We'll meet again." Sol:     "Hmph... Well, if fate brings us together..." Ky:      "..That's fine." — Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R, Sol Badguy Path 1

It’s pretty interesting that Ky wanted to see Sol again despite how Sol never used to listen to his orders, and how Sol never even tried to act like what the Order expected their men to act like (chivalrous, putting the people first, etc). It at least shows us that Ky saw possibly the potential of becoming friends with Sol. And Sol didn’t even say straight up ‘no’ or ‘in your dreams’ or whatever Badguy-esque notion he usually would’ve done, so we can assume he doesn’t mind seeing Ky again either.

Then they don’t speak to each other properly for 5 years until the tournament that Testament holds, though they have probably ran into each other a few times within those years.

A common misconception people have is that during those 5 years, Ky was obsessed with Sol and would constantly try to find him. Obviously, this is not true. Ky was busy with IPF stuff and Sol was hunting Gears down.

However, it’s not as if Ky completely forgot about Sol — he was just probably at the back of his mind, and Ky does admit that he has been chasing after Sol the most more than anyone else:

Ky:      (Waiting outside for me when I left the ship... burning red flames. Soon, they seem to take the shape of a man... and he appears before me. Yes... it's him. The one I've been after the most... it's him.) — Guilty Gear X Drama CD, Vol. 1: Track Seven — Crater

There’s also these two other quotes:

Ky:      (Sol...) Ky:      (Why are you so stubborn about doing things alone?) — Guilty Gear Xtra, Chapter 5: Unspeakable Thoughts

You can interpret this in two ways: either Ky wants to help Sol out and/or he’s curious as to why Sol always does stuff alone.

And then there’s this:

Ky:      "Maintaining peace, law, and order. That is my duty." Sol:     "Whatever..." Ky:      "You and I, we are cut from the same cloth." Ky:      "How long are you going to keep that facade?" Sol:     "..." Ky:      "Answer me Sol!" — Guilty Gear Judgment, Sol and Ky Ending

Being ‘cut from the same cloth’ is quite a strong statement. The phrase means that Ky thought he and Sol were similar somehow, and that he shared something with Sol. Regardless, the ‘how long are you going to keep that facade’ at least shows that Ky knows Sol is intentionally acting distant/rough/etc. and that its not actually who he is.

Jumping to pre-Overture, just before Ky gives Sin to Sol, Ky is in a really depressive state due to all of the stress he’s been going through. This leads Dizzy to contact Sol. The fact that Sol is called means that Dizzy knows that Sol is possibly the only person who can help Ky at that point, which puts some emphasis on just how much Sol means to Ky or at least affects him.

Before I move onto Xrd, there’s this part where Ky gives his son to Sol. This proves he trusts Sol so much considering he was asking him to take care of Sin for a long period of time.

Ky:      “Sol....I want to request something...” Sol:     “...hnn?” Ky:      “My son....Sin..can you take care of him for a while?” Sol:     “...what did you say?” Ky:      “I know it’s unreasonable but...I still want to ask...” — GG2: Overture Story, Sol's Story

The Xrd era (because it is so long, it needs its own section)

The Xrd era is extremely interesting to me, because Sol and Ky have some more in-depth conversations, and boy, do they have a lot of conversations.

Focusing on Sol first, theres a scene in REV where Sol asks Ky why he isn’t interested in his past:

Sol:     "Why don't you ask me already?" Ky:      "Ask you what?" Sol:     "About my past." Ky:      "I can ask you?" Sol:     "I guarantee, it won't be interesting." Sol:     "Every other word that came out of your mouth was 'Duel me,' or 'I challenge you!' You were so eager to fight and..." Ky:      "........" — Guilty Gear Xrd -REVELATOR-, Story Mode: Chapter 03, Sense A

Given that Ky was constantly pestering Sol about his background in the past, it makes sense why Sol is suddenly a bit confused about Ky’s sudden change in behaviour. But it also shows that Sol wants Ky to know about his past. After ~170+ years of being alive, Sol wants to finally open up to someone again, and he specifically chose Ky for this. It shows in the very least Sol trusts Ky and knows him well enough to decide to let him know about who he used to be.

And then Ky says this, which is basically him just showing Sol how much he cares and understands him:

Ky:      "Sol. Of course I have an interest in your past." Ky:      "But wanting to understand someone and trying to understand everything is completely different." Ky:      "Right now, Sol Badguy's future matters much more to me, than Frederick's past." — Guilty Gear Xrd -REVELATOR-, Story Mode: Chapter 03, Sense A

There’s also this scene in SIGN:

Ky:      "I don't know your history." Ky:      "I don't know if you had friends once, or if you fell in love, or why you burn with such hatred for That Man and the Gears..." Ky:      "I don't even know your real name." Sol:     "..." Ky:      "But I do know a great deal about a man named Sol Badguy." Ky:      "Blinded by vengeance, he lost sight of himself, and now he runs from the truth that frightens him." Sol:     "...Say that again." Ky:      "Tomorrow always comes, Sol." Sol:     "..!" Ky:      "If tomorrow promises to be cold and dark, I cannot stand idly by... even if I know my efforts will come to nothing." Sol:     "... The self-righteous apple doesn't fall far from the tree." Ky:      "I don't expect the world to change tomorrow, but I do hope that, today, perhaps my words will reach you." Ky:      "Sol..." Ky:      "I'll be waiting for you. We'll all be waiting for you. Sin, Dizzy..." Ky:      "Once all this is over... come home." — Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN-, Story Mode: Chapter 04, Kaleidoscope B

Three things to take away from this:

Ky admits that he doesn’t know anything about Sol’s background, but that he knows a lot about the current Sol, and then goes on to explain how Sol acts. Which to expand on, means that although Ky used to care about Sol’s past, he doesn’t really mind about it anymore because Sol’s past won’t really change much who Sol is to Ky now. Also, the part where Ky explains how Sol was ‘blinded by vengeance,’etc. shows that Ky knows Sol’s current personality well enough in order to be able to distinguish his behaviours. Which is interesting because nobody has been around Sol long enough to be able to know him really well unlike Ky (Aria and Asuka count too, but they were around Sol when he was Frederick, and Sol seems pretty adamant on the idea that he’s a separate person from Frederick.)

‘Come home’ is pretty significant, as it implies that it’s almost like Ky is saying home is with Sin, Dizzy and the Valentines, and so when Sol is done getting revenge on That Man, instead of letting Sol just wander off alone, Ky wants Sol to be a family with them.

The fact that says Ky says ‘I’ll be waiting for you’ separate from ‘we’ll all be waiting for you’ implies that either Ky’s want to wait for Sol is somehow different from everyone else’s or it’s just for the sake of being dramatic. I interpreted this in both ways, as it seems like Ky knows that Sol treats him differently compared to others. So in a sense, by Ky emphasising that he’ll be waiting for Sol, it might make Sol more likely to ‘come home’.

There’s also a scene that shows Ky knows Sol’s personality well:

Ky:      "When I look at you, Sol, I see a man who is afraid." Sol:     "... What?" Ky:      "It became clear when I watched you caring for Sin." Ky:      "You work very hard to keep everyone at arm's length." Sol:     "..." Sol:     "I got Gear blood in my veins, and it ain't friendly. It's always there in the back of my head, whispering that I oughta just destroy all of this." Sol:     "The only way I'm gonna get some closure is tracking down That Man and beating some answers out of him." Sol:     "And if he doesn't have 'em..." Sol:     "Then maybe there really isn't a good way to live." Ky:      "That's why you close your heart off." — Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN-, Story Mode: Chapter 08, Hope A

There’s also this:

Ky:      "Not all people have the strength to stand on their own." Sol:     "..." Ky:      "If only life were simple, and the right path was laid out before each of us..." Ky:      "But even then some would leave it, and some would struggle with walking it. Such is human nature..." Ky:      "The truth is that no path will ever be 'right' for all people. Each of us must find the one we are meant to walk--and sometimes that is where none exists." Ky:      "That is what I learned from you." — Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN-, Story Mode: Chapter 08, Hope A

This just shows that Ky actually learnt something from Sol. Which I think is important because Ky is someone who always used to be very strict to his ideals. The fact that he learnt something from Sol that had an impact on his mindset means that Sol actually managed to have a great impact on Ky.

There’s this scene where Sol finds out that Aria isn’t dead when he confronts That Man, and he has somewhat of a mini mental breakdown. So Ky excuses them from the room, and goes outside to talk with Sol:

Ky:      "Sol. The grudge you hold is certainly not something that can be taken lightly. And, whatever answer you think you've found, I doubt any of us will be able to stop you from seeing it through..." Ky:      "But we have very little time left. Right now, we need the Gear Maker's help." Ky:      "So, I'm begging you... Just for now. Why don't you stay outside with me." — Guilty Gear Xrd -REVELATOR-, Story Mode: Chapter 06, Cause A

The last line that Ky says is interesting because it’s obvious that he’s just trying to calm Sol down, and Ky thinks that if he stays with Sol outside for a bit, he’ll be able to help him calm down. Furthermore, Ky thought it was more necessary to pause everything and help Sol out rather than keep listening to the plans of what their next course of action would be.

Ky does have the habit of comforting Sol. One of the more significant moments is whenever Sol refers to himself as a monster:

Ky:      "Yes, he took away some of what makes you human, but that doesn't mean he altered your mind or your soul." Sol:     "So what?" Ky:      "I want to believe that you'll fight for the people of this world." Sol:     "Are we seriously having this conversation?" Sol:     "Look, kid. I'm a monster. I'm here to do two things: Destroy That Man, and kill all the other Gears." — Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN-, Story Mode: Chapter 04, Kaleidoscope B

To expand a little on Sol’s mindset, it’s common knowledge that Gears were generally in the past regarded as akin to monsters. Now we don’t have any solid proof Sol is referring to himself as a monster because he’s a Gear, or because he feels guilt about the whole Gear Project, etc. But we do know it’s something he’s affected by given that he constantly refers to himself as one.

So the fact that Ky constantly reassures him that he’s not one, and that Ky didn’t treat him differently after finding out he was a Gear, must be comforting to know.

Then at the end of REV, there’s the scene where Daryl is about to shoot Sol, because he (quite rightly) doesn’t trust the fate of the world to be left to Sol. And so, the kids get beamed up, but Ky asks to be left behind:

Ky:      "But, if you plan on targeting Sol, then you must leave me behind, as well." Daryl: "What!?" Zappa:"60 seconds until impact..!" Sol:     "What the hell are you doing?! Stay with Sin!" Ky:      "I am well aware that this is a one in a million chance..." Ky:      "But, if I survive at the expense of my dear friend, then there is little reason left for my ruling this world as king." — Guilty Gear Xrd -REVELATOR-, Story Mode: Final Chapter, Fireworks

This was a really odd moment because Ky’s life was never in danger at that moment. If he had been sent on board Daryl’s ship as originally planned, he would have been safe. But Ky intentionally chose to risk his life, and its kind of startling because Ky has always put his people above everything. There were times when he put the people above his own family, like when he kept his family a secret instead of coming out with the truth about them in order to remain as King to protect his people.

So Ky suddenly going ‘I would rather die with Sol than take care of my people’ is really extreme. Also Ky was willing to leave his family behind, which is even more extreme. So this just really proves how highly Ky regards Sol considering how he would rather die with him than live without him.

Some concluding notes

I think Sol and Ky’s personalities do work really well. Perhaps not in the Crusade era, but if we take a look at the Xrd era, they have shown to get along and have deep conversations with one another that they both enjoy. They know each other extremely well; they know how to support one another when life gets a bit too much and they’re also capable of telling one another when the other is wrong.

Sol teaches Ky that life isn’t as simple as it seems, and that (figuratively speaking) he shouldn’t stick exactly to the textbook. He’s able to see under that perfect image Ky puts up about him being able to cope with everything, acting as a source of stability when you consider how Sol has been the only person who’s been around Ky since the very beginning.

Throughout all of Ky’s life, he’s been under so much pressure. From being Commander in the Crusades, to becoming the Head of the International Police Force, to becoming King. In every situation, people are constantly relying on him, and his environment is changing rapidly. But despite everything, Sol has always remained the same. He looks the same, acts the same, etc. Ky can rely on Sol and trust Sol. He’s like a source of stability for Ky in those hectic times.

And Ky provides something similar to Sol too, given how often he ran into Sol time and time again. When you’ve been alive for so long, it’d feel reassuring in the very least to see a familiar face. And Sol does seem to get less annoyed each time they meet each other again, considering like how in Overture he voluntarily went to go see Ky after seeing himself on a wanted poster.

Ky also gives Sol the chance to open up to people again and form connections with them, something that Sol has been reluctant to do. Sol needs someone to care about him, and Ky proves that by constantly reassuring him and never giving up on trying to help Sol, even though he kept getting pushed away.

They may not be canon but I really do love how they work together. Yes it’s true some people may like them because they are ‘rivals’and seeing rivals get together and bicker is great, but actually I think when people focus more on how much they support and rely on each other, as well as the fact that they do get along, them being in a relationship is more convincing.

Whilst this essay focused on their canon interactions, there’s plenty of other great material out there. For instance, the Guilty Gear 4KomaKINGS manga provides plenty of great SolKy interactions (like the time Ky wanted to have a friendship diary with Sol, only to get rejected and start crying about it. Of course, take these interactions with a pinch of skepticism considering the frivolity of the source material.)

And that, was my very long SolKy essay. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading! Though you may not have agreed with everything I have said, you still continued reading, and I am grateful for that. Thank you for showing such enthusiasm and loving this franchise.

[ascension4all]

[bjy-on-ao3]

Kinktober 2021, Day 4

(As usual, you can find the AO3 version of all my uploads [and some things I don’t post here to tumblr] via my Masterlist blog page.)

This is another one that probably could have been longer, and I’m not 100% sure if it fits the prompt as planned. I’m hoping it’s still likable though, all things considered!

Summary Sometimes things don’t go quite as planned. When Reader’s plans to spend the day with Barbatos are interrupted, they try to get their way, even if it means getting in the way of work.

Tags/Warnings Blindfolds, Bondage. Creampie, Gags, Kinktober, Kinktober 2021, Oneshot, Prompt, Reader-Insert, Shameless Smut, Vaginal Sex

Kinktober 2021, 04: Brat Taming (Reader x Barbatos | Obey Me!)

You had gone to visit Barbatos that day expecting to spend some quality time with him, having finally arranged a day when he wasn’t swamped tending to the needs of the prince and the castle. Shortly after arriving, abuzz with excitement to finally have some alone time with him, Barbatos had received news that an impromptu celebration was being held the next evening - meaning whatever spare time he left to him was suddenly gone.

The news had made you cross to hear, knowing that Barbatos would be required in the kitchens on such short notice, though you had tried to hide your discomfort. To your credit, you thought you had done an admirable job when all a part of you really wanted to do was protest how unfair the latest arrangement was. But Barbatos was dutiful to a fault, and directly fussing over things would do little good.

Instead, you took the opposite route, and offered your help, thinking perhaps additional hands involved in the chore might lend it to be completed more swiftly. Unfortunately, you had vastly underestimated just how much work needed to be, as well as how much patience you had for it. The first couple hours of work had gone on well enough, but it seemed to be unending. You found yourself tiring of the tedious tasks, internally groaning at the work left before you still. Briefly, you wondered if the assignment was actually some curse neither of you was quite aware of, but you quickly dismissed the absurd thought.

You paused in the middle of stirring a bowl of ingredients, glancing out of the corner of your eyes to Barbatos busily plowing through each new culinary task, little phasing him. He was the picture of efficiency and focus, and the kitchen air was heavy with the various smells of seasonings and sweet flavorings, and citrus courtesy of his efforts. You watched him work as inconspicuously as possible for a moment, a new idea slowly coming to you. An idea that was far more alluring, though one admittedly much less productive than the task at hand.

Turning your attention half-heartedly to the bowl in front of you, returning to stirring, you finished it and pushed it aside. You searched for a proper excuse for the scheme you were hatching, finding it in a multitude of bottles and jars of ingredients for some of the next things on Barbatos’ long list of to-make recipes. Resuming the guise of a hard-working assistant eager to assist with the prepping and cooking, you moved to gather more ingredients and dishes, brushing purposefully close to Barbatos as you went by. You leaned forward to gather a bottle or two, reaching around him and feigning a hint of clumsiness that led to stray touches.

Lights taps and pats on his shoulders and arms played off as helping you balance. Strokes on his waist or hip, daring to creep a little lower. All manner of touches that seemed innocent enough. But you knew, or rather hoped, that it might distract Barbatos and broach his focus,  and potentially lure him away from his chore. He remained just as unphased as before, though, hardly giving you a second look, save to courteously steady you or to make a polite quip to be a bit more careful.

After several unsuccessful attempts, you frowned at your lack of progress. Though you weren’t to be put off so easily and moved onto your next plan of action without lingering on the thought too long. You stood closer while you worked on your latest project, mashing an assortment of ingredients and fragrant herbs into a mortar beside Barbatos. Still grinding the contents, you subtly slipped your spare hand down, reaching more brazenly for Barbatos’ thigh. Your fingers brushed the cloth of his pants, creeping inward more slowly.

Barbatos cleared his throat pointed, his only acknowledgment of your attempt before he caught your hand by the wrist, pulling it gently away before you could properly feel him up as you had planned. You pouted again, further frustrated by his determination to ignore you. You still weren’t done yet, though. You tried the same thing, making the motion less obvious, more alike to an accidental slip. But even then, Barbatos dismissed your wandering hands, stopping only to speak for a moment, but not to address your meddling in the way you had hoped.

The look on his face was sterner than before, a hint of warning to stem your interruptions and focus. “Now isn’t the time. There’s far too much work to be done.”

You met his words and stern expression with a stare of your own, though one much more petulant. You silently huffed, fuming and pouting further, staring down into the muddled mass in the mortar. While you considered your options next, you went back to actively helping prepare batters and sauces, and icings. Barbatos moved away several times, pausing to place unbaked cakes and pastries into the large ovens or put assembled treats away to chill until the next day.

At some point, he returned to the counters with a platter of golden brown pastries assembled in an orderly pile. It was obviously one that had set for some time already, the tops of the stacks already topped with stiff peaks of colorful whipped frosting. As Barbatos turned away to resume work, a new scheme sprung into your head, prompted by the confections set out before you.

For much of the work before, Barbatos had only stopped to give you more than passing attention - or at least you had thought - to offer advice, or give you instructions. At last, though, he looked toward you, recognizing how you looked when you were truly onto some new plan. Barbatos had kept a careful amount of his attention dedicated to you, though you hadn’t yet realized.

He was good at feeling out when you had a mind to try and cause trouble or to grab his attention, whatever the situation. He had known as well that once you started, you weren’t going to give up easily, even if it meant acting rather childishly in your determination. He recognized the look on your face as you eyed the decorated pastries. When you glanced over, checking if he was paying you any mind, he knew you were about the act up again.

Sure enough, you set down your current tool, reaching your newly free hand in the direction of the pastries. The sharp, sudden mention of your name though made you flinch and halt with your arm outstretched.

“Haven’t you misbehaved enough for one evening?” Barbatos said evenly. The words had still startled you, even though you had been aware you had more of his attention than before.

Your nostrils flared, and you blew out an angry huff, recognizing the tone of Barbatos’ voice and debating your next move. Should you behave and drop it for the night? No, that wasn’t an option. You had to push your luck, challenge him. Your irritation demanded nothing less.

“Maybe I wouldn’t have to misbehave if you’d pay me more attention in the first place,” you snapped back in defiance. You turned back to the pastries from before, thrusting a finger toward the large pile of frosting on the pastries’ peaks arranged in an ornate pattern.

“I know you understand those for tomorrow,” Barbatos continued, his voice still even, but more warning, accompanied by another commanding call of your name.

“Well, maybe I don’t want to keep waiting,” you snapped, though it was quite clear it wasn’t sweet treats you were being impatient about.

You looked at Barbatos markedly, turning and dipping your finger into the frosting and scooping out a section, ruining part of the decoration. Looking back, you raised the coated finger to your lips. His gloved hand caught your wrist again, more firmly than before, and when his eyes locked with yours, his glare was piercing and cool. You suppressed a shudder but refused to break or back down.

“That’s enough,” he declared sternly.

What he did next was in stark contrast to the tone of his voice. He didn’t release your hand immediately, instead tipping your frosting coated finger toward him and sucking it into his mouth. His tongue rolled hotly over your digit, cleaning the sticky, cloyingly sweet icing from it. Your brows shot up, and another shiver threatened to creep down your spine while you swallowed hard. You had gotten the attention you had so petulantly been trying to achieve from Barbatos, but at the same time, it had shattered your resolve.

That attention was lingering, though, a taste to quiet and rattle you.

“I think it’s time you retired for the night,” Barbatos decided after pulling your finger from his mouth and letting your wrist free, foregoing any more contact with you and leaving you wanting, stirred up from that one action alone. Yet, there was something mischievous, almost dangerous in his tone, something that rang familiar. “You will wait up for me. When I am done, we will discuss this. Have I made myself clear?”

You nodded meekly, your streak of mischief shaken and relegated to the back of your mind. “Yes,” you answered quietly. Your mouth felt dry, and a tenseness grew in you, something halfway between anticipation and uncertainty.

“Excuse me?” Barbatos questioned expectantly.

“Yes, sir, perfectly clear,” you added, his words prompting you to remember your ‘manners’.

“Good.”

Barbatos turned back to the counters, leaving no room for further dispute. You saw yourself out of the kitchens, calming your thumping heart down as you went. You flagged down a Little D, requesting aid to return to the guest room you normally stayed in when you came to visit Barbatos or stayed in the castle for any other occasion. You gave your thanks upon reaching the room, closing the door behind you and flopping onto the bed with a frustrated sigh.

You tried to preoccupy yourself for a while thereafter, browsing apps and messages on your DDD, answering friends, and checking in on the demon brothers. It could all only keep your attention for so long, though, and eventually, you drifted off to sleep from boredom with the device at your side. ---

You weren’t sure how long you had slept when the soft click of the bedroom door awoke you. You glanced blearily to the door, just able to make out Barbatos’ silhouette against the darkness of the room. Though the outline of him was difficult to see, he was hard to miss in other ways. As he approached the bed, the ominous glow of his eyes, casting his face in a sickly green pallor, was the most noticeable feature.

You jolted up on the bed, recalling Barbatos’ instructions to wait up for him. But it was too late - Barbatos had already seen you sprawled out asleep on the bed, disobeying him once more. Passingly, you noted you hadn’t been the one to turn the lights off in the bedroom.

The bed sank with Barbatos’ weight when he reached the foot of it. He poised himself over you on his hands and knees, and you instinctively sank back against the sheets. As he leaned down, something cool, thick, and scaly curled purposefully around one of your thighs, teasing slowly further.

“Misbehaving again, already? You’ve been very insolent today. I’ll need to give you a much more thorough lesson this time, won’t I?”

[harryspet]

𝓽𝓲𝓼 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓼𝓮𝓪𝓼𝓸𝓷 ... 𝓯𝓸𝓻 𝓭𝓪𝓻𝓴 𝓯𝓲𝓬𝓼

𝓽𝓲𝓼 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓼𝓮𝓪𝓼𝓸𝓷 ... 𝓯𝓸𝓻 𝓭𝓪𝓻𝓴 𝓯𝓲𝓬𝓼 

This December, for the holidays and to celebrate my followers, I’m giving readers a chance to request drabbles/one-shots but I’m also hoping some writers want to share the Holiday joy too! I have a list of dark prompts as well as holiday prompts so feel free to mix and match them however you like!

𝓇𝓊𝓁𝑒𝓈 & 𝑔𝓊𝒾𝒹𝑒𝓁𝒾𝓃𝑒𝓈 

You don’t have to follow me but it would be greatly appreciated!!

Please be courteous and only send one request especially if you’re using anon.

When sending a request, tell me the character(s) + 1-3 dialogue prompts (have fun combining them) + au idea (optional)

I prefer to write for (aged up) Peter Parker, Bucky Barnes or Steve Rogers. If you’d like to include MJ, Natasha, Thor, Loki, Wanda or Sam please combine them with those three. Threesomes and foursomes welcome ^^

Make these unique! If you just want pure angst, smut, or fluff then choose your prompts accordingly. I’m hoping people enjoy mixing the holiday prompts with the dark ones (though its not required) so please read through them all. There are a lot of good ones!!

Most of these will probably end up being around 300-700 words.

I write dark fics which means there may be mentions of violence, abuse, noncon/dubcon and just angst overall. If you have limits, please let me know.

I may reject your request if I feel it’s too similar to what I’ve already written or if you ignore the rules. I may also close requests if I get too many.

𝓘𝓯 𝔂𝓸𝓾'𝓻𝓮 𝓪 𝔀𝓻𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓻 and you’d like to write a drabble/one-shot using my lists then please let me know! I’ll be sure to give it a reblog and add it to my #fic recs if you tag me @harryspet​ and #tistheseasonfordarkfics. There’s no due date, just participate if you’re interested! :)

Don’t choose prompts with strikethroughs.

𝓻𝓮𝓺𝓾𝓮𝓼𝓽𝓼 𝓪𝓻𝓮: CLOSED

𝒹𝒶𝓇𝓀 𝓅𝓇𝑜𝓂𝓅𝓉𝓈

“I wish I’d never met you.”

“Did you just stick your tongue out at me?”

“I’m done. We’re done.”

“Why are you fighting me?”

“I’ve never…they kept me untouched. For you”

“Did you just bite me?!”

“If I’m dead then how come you can see me?”

“It’s cute that you think you can defy me.”

“Duct tape. I need it for... taping something.”

“Why don’t you smile anymore?”

“Fuck you.”

“Your soul is mine.”

 “Looks like you need to be trained.“

“It’s not...not going to hurt, is it?”

“I don’t ... I don’t remember my name.”

“Did you see the way they looked at you?”

“How dare you challenge me.”

“I’ll let you go when I’m finished with you.”

“Hand Daddy his belt and take your shirt off.”

“I don’t like when they touch you.”

“Are you getting sore, all cooped up in that cage all day?”

“Shhh. It’s all right. I’ll be gentle.”

“Daddy wants to hear you sing a song. Sit on my lap and make Daddy happy.”

“Shit, are you crying? I didn’t mean to hit that hard!”

“You can’t take people as property!”

“I feel like you’re taking advantage of me.”

“So … uh.. who is that person … they keep texting you?”

“Fuck, I love you like this, all rounded with our child…”

“You wouldn’t want him/her/them finding out about this, would you?”

“You haven’t earned it. What are you going to do for me?”

“Stop crying.”

“You’re not in trouble, sweetheart.”

“I’ve been looking for you all night, and you are in desperate need of my help.”

“And the hunter becomes the hunted.”

“They hurt you and I’m going to hurt them back.”

“Never steal anything from someone you can’t outrun, kid.”

“Hands off, alpha. Never learn any self-control?”

“Can i stay at your place tonight? I don’t feel safe here.”  

“I really think you need to see a doctor.”

“Everything that happened is your fault.”

“You...you were never supposed to find out.”

 “Well, hello beautiful!”

“You want to what? That’s embarrassing!”

“You look a little lost, omega.”

“We need to talk...about the pregnancy.”

“Oh, did someone get lonely?”

𝒽𝑜𝓁𝒾𝒹𝒶𝓎 𝓅𝓇𝑜𝓂𝓅𝓉𝓈

 "Excuse me—where is my Christmas kiss?"

"I made you some hot cocoa."

''I just want you for my own.''

"You didn't have to get me anything."

“I don't remember the last time I truly enjoyed Christmas."

"Go on, open it."

"Did you spike the eggnog?"

"I can't believe you did that to Santa..."

“You're my best Christmas present this year.”

“How many Christmas lights does one person need?”

 “Shut up! Santa is real.”

“I hate winter.” 

“Aren’t you just Santa’s Little Helper?”

“Son of a nutcracker!”

"You didn’t bring date to the party, did you? Because I need someone to kiss at midnight."

 “No you don’t understand, I need a picture with Santa!”

“I can’t reach the top of the tree to put the star on.”

 “Oh the weather outside is frightful.”

“This is our first Christmas together and I want it to be special.”

“Don’t you dare buy me that.”

“Tell me what you want for Christmas.”

“Fuck it let’s just get drunk.”

 “We can build a snowman.”

“What no, that’s not daddy, that’s Santa”

“Maybe if I kiss you, you’ll feel warmer.” 

 “I can not believe the car broke down in the middle of nowhere 3 hours before it’s officially Christmas.”

“...I think we’re snowed in...”

“I hate work Christmas parties.”

“What do you mean you’re working on Christmas?!”

 “I refuse to have a baby on Christmas.”

“Call me an elf one more time!”

“It’s the most wonderful time of the year.”

 “I’m freezing, you’re warm. Hug me.”

“I don’t even have a family to celebrate with, so what’s the point?“

“Forbid Christmas? No one can forbid Christmas.”

“We can add a special ornament to the collection each year. This year's is for our future baby.”

“I’m not going to kiss you under the mistletoe.”

“Remind me why I can’t kill the carolers?”

“No one should be alone on Christmas!”

 “So you’re going to dress up as Santa.”

“You burnt the holiday cookies!”

“Wanna go skating in Central Park?”

“How can you possibly look good with snow in your hair?”

“If you throw that snowball you’re declaring war”

“You didn’t really think I’d let you spend Christmas alone, did you?”

This list is a compilation of a bunch of starters I found on tumblr so you may recognize quotes from movies and songs! I reblogged a lot of the original posts on my side blog @parkerspet​.

𝒶𝓊 & 𝓈𝑒𝓉𝓉𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝒾𝒹𝑒𝒶𝓈 (optional)

Arranged marriage au - Angel/demon au - Assassin au - Apocalypse au - Android au - Amnesia au - Babysitter au - Bodyguard au - Bookstore au - Baker au - Band au - Bounty hunter au - Brothel au - Camp Counselor au - Camping au - College au - Criminal au - Caregiver/Little au - Doctor au - Domestic au - Enemies au - Ex au - Forbidden Love au - Fugitive au - Gang au - Hero/Villian au - Immortal au - Kidnapped au - Mafia au - Maid au - Marriage au - Neighbor au - A/B/O au - Porn Star au - Prostitute au - Royalty au - Serial Killer au - Stalker au - Stripper au - Tattoo Shop au - Werewolf au - Yandere au

tagging all the fics #tistheseasonfordarkfics and #harryspetrequests !

𝓼𝓮𝓷𝓭 𝓶𝓮 𝓼𝓸𝓶𝓮 𝓹𝓻𝓸𝓶𝓹𝓽𝓼

tagging some authors :) @cherienymphe @andybarberslxt @mypoisonedvine @nsfwsebbie @darkficsyouneveraskedfor @mcudarklibrary​ @opheliadawnwalker3 @autumnrose40 @marvelmaree @thecutestlittlebunbunfairy @buckysbunny @buckybarnesplumwhore @honeyloverogers @mariessecretfantasies @mrwinterr @yanderepeterparker @raisincookieswrites​

[the-art-of-animated-gifs]

Interview with my friend A.L. Crego

I have not met A.L. Crego.  I have not spoken with him on the phone, in fact I do not even know what he looks like.  But I can confidently call him my friend.  Three years ago when I started this blog he immediately disagreed with me in the comments about things I was writing and I loved it.  As a person putting ideas out there, you treasure things like that....because you know someone cares.  We have had many back and forth discussions over the years....if we had lived in Paris in 1911 we would be having arguments at La Rotonde (not to compare either of us to Picasso).

A.L. Crego is a motion artist who does a wide variety of things.  He has now become a very visible and active figure in the NFT Movement.  He recently completed a large and very successful project in which he animated the work of a number of well know street artists on the building themselves, something he has done for years.  His Tumblr page is a good place to start to see his work, which is largely surrealist in nature -- another Spanish artist following in the footsteps of other great Spanish surrealist artists.

---------------------------------------------------------------

How long have you been creating gif art?

In a conscious and intentional way since 2014. Previously I haven't pay too much attention on one hand for its common use that was mostly ads and funny little videos, and on the other hand because it was a 'standard' format we accepted as something part of the web so I never stopped to analyze its potential. The key point for me was about 2010-2011 when the concept of 'Cinemagraph' was brought to life just giving it a name. It's format is .gif but its characteristics are different so I saw there the midpoint between photography and video, which gave born another format of art.

Art mutates when a new format appears. I was using and studying this format since then but it wasn't until 2014 that I decided to publish some of them.

What is your background?

In general terms, bachelor, 2 years of stone sculpting and two attempts of photography and audiovisual mediums. I say attempts because I gave up both of them as I was feeling that I was looking for something else more than studying all the previous history, style and isms, which is nice to understand where everything comes from and to be aware what are the key points on the history to use as reference, as a map. But in some way I felt limited as I was using digital tools since I had my first computer with 14 years, and I was being taught things I learnt by then. Even more in this times we are living where we are 21 century people, been taught by teachers from the 20 with 19 century methods.

A constant line that feeds my background is literature and music overall and later Street Art, next to more temporal interests as everything related with mythology, alchemy, history, psychology, neurology, biology, human condition in general... I don't have studies buy I'm a studying guy!

I always like to highlight that all these years that internet got strong and social networks appeared, I decided voluntary to be out of them. First reason was to keep my privacy safe in a growing world where it seemed that some "curtain" felt and everybody accepted that intimacy was now 'ex-timacy' and correct to show their private life, (this shocked me). Another reason was about the psychological effect that social networks were having on people I had around and everywhere in general. I started to notice patterns and "waves" about series, aesthetics, styles, and I was seeing clearly that if I go there, I will become permeable to all this "Amniotic Culture" I was trying to avoid.

This fact of being far (but study them closely) helped me a lot about researching and developing my own ideas and style, for the mere fact that I was using all this time and attention Social Networks require, on drinking from another sources. The B-side of this is that I was 'out of the radar' of mass people as this social networks are designed to live inside them. My idea of internet and spreading ideas is not in this way.

Where do you live and work?

In the north west of Spain, Galicia. Now due to Covid I travel less but before it, I was working and traveling many places as I only need a camera and a computer. This allows me move to work anywhere.

Do you think that animated gifs are a new art form?

I think so, despite the fact that the format existed since 1987. But as every new format of art it takes its time to be considered as art. The first photographs were not considered art until many years later. Same happened with film, same with CGI. Is nice to have in mind that gif format is the last strictly digital format of the three main ones on the web: picture, video and gif. Photography has about 200 years of history, video about 130, CGI about 60. Finally gif has 33, and used as art itself no more than 10-15. In the same way anybody takes a picture of anything does not convert it into art, is the same with gifs. One thing is the format, another is the 'art'. Everybody can take a picture, record a video or do a gif. The difference is on the how, the why, and from my point of view overall, the what.

Do you think that there is a difference between pure .gif files and the .mp4 files that people post on Instagram?

The first, big and obvious difference is the format. Is not the same a painting as a picture of a painting. Here happens the same. For example, if you treat a gif with Cinemagraph technique, you are converting in picture some parts of the image, so they still remain and with the texture and totally stillness of a picture. If you convert this gif into a mp4 this still parts, despite not having motion, will convert into a video texture (noise, subtle motion in pixels, etc) so the main characteristic, among the perfect loop, is lost. Another point is that you must play a video, a gif is always running. Waterfalls are always running and this characteristic is something that is inside our human nature, we react nice to "bucle" motions as waterfalls, fire, etc. We find pleasure on this. Of course if it's a video the perfect loop is lost and the visual mantra disappear. And another key point here is the soundtrack. In a video you can use sound to enhance or give another meaning to the piece that you can't with gifs. For me this is another characteristic that give meaning to gif. For me gif is silence, the sound is generated by the motion, the melody are the details and the beat the perfect loop. You can "hear" almost every gif.

The difference between a gif and a video is the same that between a waterfall and a hose (if this works).

What do you think are the characteristics of good gif art?

For me first and overall the perfect loop. Not using it is not using the only format that has this characteristics. Of course there can be gif art that is not perfect loop, but from my point of view and in my work is a must. It's a new way not only of creating but also of thinking. Imagine an still scene is easy, imagine an A-B point action is easy. For me the challenge is about thinking an idea that is perfect looped where all the elements interact and eventually come back to its initial point. Succeed doing this is where the perfect loop appears and you are not able to find where is the start point of the action. Like a visual mantra, that it's repetition leads you inside the piece. Gif art is nice to use the power of the hypnotic movements. Another point to have in mind for me is the flow of it, the frame rate I mean. Depending on the idea and the kind of animation this should vary; is not the same fps to achieve something with flow than if you want to achieve a more 'retro' old style. Another thing is about dithering and color palette. This second one is essential to understand as it affects the final file. When we work with photo and video we are using millions of colors but when rendered as gifs all the gradients, lights and even colors will change if there is a previous understood of this point.

As summary: If motion doesn't add, change of enhance the meaning of the piece, is expendable.

I'd would like to add that I'm not really supporter of this kind of gifs generated automatically that just move a still image itself. I understand that this 'technique' is used as a tool for certain motion (I use it) but not to move a whole image. I feel the same as if somebody hold a painting in front of me and moves it randomly. If the work was born still, it must remain still. A good example of 'inner motion', this means that the motion is implicit on the image despite not being in motion, are the photographs of Cartier Bresson for example. Giving motion to this pictures for example, will kill it because it will break the concept of 'perfect instant' .

'Instant' differs etymologically from 'moment' in the motion. So, still image (painting, photo, sculpture, etc) is an instant, videos are stories with a-b point, and gifs are moments, the mid point.

How would you describe your gif art?

I usually condense it as "Visual Mantras", as the technique and the aesthetic vary depending on the idea , but in all of them the perfect loop and the intention of hypnotizing is always present.

In another terms about aesthetics and themes I think ‘Industrial Nature’ can fit nice. I use a lot of industrial elements but I like to mix their mechanics with the biological natural ones.

How long have you been creating and selling NFTs?

I am selling NFTs since mid 2019, but it wasn't until October 2020 that I focused more on it and dug into the ecosystem to find new paths to focus my work.

Do you think that NFTs are a positive for gif artists?

For me, and the main reason I jumped into cryptoart and NFT, is that now I can certify my digital work as original. Even more to gif works as they were always understood as something banal and minor for the context of its born. Gif art was born prostituted, used mostly for ads and to claim our attention on the internet, next to the highest glamour of painting and traditional art, and 3d, photography and video these last decades. Even worst if we realize that gif format was the only visual format born by and for the internet.

NFTs are totally positive for gif artists because despite being a digital/online native format it never had its own ecosystem to live in. I feel that I was creating creatures for an ecosystem I was waiting to drop them there. Now with the blockchain, NFTs and cryptoart, I found the place where they can live, being watched by everybody and have the certify that is my work. Until some months ago my work was "free" on the web and I had no control over it at all. This was a huge problem I was suffering since my first month into gif art as people use it indiscriminately with no credit at all. It's ok, and I always defend that my work is to be seen, to be shared, but I was looking for the way to be able to have this link with my work without losing the option of being available for everybody. NFT totally changes this.

What do you think will happen in the future as NFTs get even more popular?

In general terms I think it will happen the same as when print got more popular. People will use it more, a lot of crazy and useless things will appear, tons more of different uses and useful purposes, (not only on art). This opens a new door a lot of people was waiting so the future is unpredictable but we can feel where things are going. NFT arrived to stay and the concept of decentralization is something that was always present on the internet since first days but born inside a centralized system. NFTs are being a way for people to understand the 'peer to peer' philosophy and this makes people think in different codes, so we can expect a lot of new horizons, in art, music, design...

What do you think of the environmental impact of NFTs?

This question can goes really deep but in general terms I think that is something that is being oversized due to the hype and the boiling point we are, and it's understandable because is not false that it has an environmental impact, as everything does. But on the other hand I have two main areas in mind. The first and the obvious from my point of view is that when something is new and developing is less efficient, in the way that it requires more effort to achieve the result. But at the same time, the more this technology is used the more is developed and all this issues are part of it. The first car was not electric.

The second point that usually reverberates in my mind and that it seems that 'hard critics' omit is that they are not having in mind that this NFTs we mint, give us a profit that can be used offline to do another things that can be useful to solve this problem, for example, investing part of this money on living on our own in a minimal and clean way (not working for huge multinational that their environmental impact is tons times more than NFTs and then being part of an ONG to feel clean) and on using part of this money on looking and researching new ways to mint and to keep this digital ecosystem more efficient and clean. Every development needs time.

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