#ask bleh

[blehblarghblah]

Hello, I recently read your Magic Between the Moon & Sky series, and I really like the college AU series. It's really wonderful. I want to know if there will be an opportunity to update in the future. If you don't mind, I would like to know why you Not a fan of TDP anymoreFinally, I wish you well. The novels you wrote really bring me great joy.

Ahh, it means a lot to know that you enjoyed my work! I really enjoyed writing Rayllum immensely and I loved to see that a lot of people liked it as much as I did (if not more, apparently 😅). The reason for why I dropped off TDP is kinda... strange to explain. My second oldest sister and I were big fans of the show, and as you can obviously tell from my blog, I was excited about it for a time!

But when Season 4 of The Dragon Prince was announced I was really excited about it! But at the time, my sister and I had others shows we were watching. I was also busy writing for The Most Undoing Thing at the time and didn't want to be too sidetracked with other fandoms. And then, as time went on, it kinda got away from us but we were shocked to hear that Season 5 was announced later in 2023 summer.

Now I know Season 2 and 3 had a similar time gap, for us, we were kinda worried about hearing such an immediate follow up when it felt like Season 4 just came out. Apprehensively, I looked at some reviews and such. I won't say that I haven't been influenced by what I heard, but I also know that there was good reviews and legitimate excitement too! I already read a small amount of the comic materials and books that came out in the break between Season 3 and 4, so I knew a lot of the changes to come.

And the time skip.

So, seeing a bit of a divide, my sister and I slowly just thought, "Well, we'll get around to it." But evidently, it just became something we kind of lost interest in. Season 3 was good, but there were some pacing things we weren't a fan of. For me, I enjoyed the heart of the story and the characters throughout. In the end, I was also aware of the rushed aspects of the narrative too at times.

All in all, I started to have less attachment to really wanting to watch or enjoy the media I was into, and just started focusing on MBTMS itself. Because I still liked Rayllum, and people still liked what I wrote. Though, it became an issue for me, because now I was essentially writing for a fandom I was losing interest in, which meant motivation was hard to muster.

I just felt like I was obligating myself to writing something I wasn't invested in, which made me worry that it would reflect in my writing. And the last thing I wanted, was to write something and put it out when I wasn't even happy with it. With that aside, time just kept moving on and suddenly there's 6 Seasons of this series, and I felt like it was just a lot.

The pacing of TDP has always been... strange. I understand that it's been separated into sagas as well. For MBTMS, I genuinely do wish to finish it someday. But the issue with most of MBTMS, is that it's largely set in an AU stories. And AU or not, I do my best to emulate the canon characters in their personalities and behaviours. So it's hard to do that when you haven't looked at canon material for so long nor if you're just not all too keen on getting back into it.

TL;DR: After putting it off for awhile, it got away from me and my interest slowly waned based on the overall pacing and output of the show. From the reviews and responses, I just felt less inclined to get back into it which affected my motivation to writing for MBTMS. I don't think I'll return to MBTMS, but I wish to someday.

Thanks for the ask, Anon. Sorry to disappoint, but I'm glad and pleased to know you enjoyed my stories for the time you shared with them.

Until next ask,

- Bleh

[bi-writes]

whats wrong with ai?? genuinely curious <3

okay let's break it down. i'm an engineer, so i'm going to come at you from a perspective that may be different than someone else's.

i don't hate ai in every aspect. in theory, there are a lot of instances where, in fact, ai can help us do things a lot better without. here's a few examples:

ai detecting cancer

ai sorting recycling

some practical housekeeping that gemini (google ai) can do

all of the above examples are ways in which ai works with humans to do things in parallel with us. it's not overstepping--it's sorting, using pixels at a micro-level to detect abnormalities that we as humans can not, fixing a list. these are all really small, helpful ways that ai can work with us.

everything else about ai works against us. in general, ai is a huge consumer of natural resources. every prompt that you put into character.ai, chatgpt? this wastes water + energy. it's not free. a machine somewhere in the world has to swallow your prompt, call on a model to feed data into it and process more data, and then has to generate an answer for you all in a relatively short amount of time.

that is crazy expensive. someone is paying for that, and if it isn't you with your own money, it's the strain on the power grid, the water that cools the computers, the A/C that cools the data centers. and you aren't the only person using ai. chatgpt alone gets millions of users every single day, with probably thousands of prompts per second, so multiply your personal consumption by millions, and you can start to see how the picture is becoming overwhelming.

that is energy consumption alone. we haven't even talked about how problematic ai is ethically. there is currently no regulation in the united states about how ai should be developed, deployed, or used.

what does this mean for you?

it means that anything you post online is subject to data mining by an ai model (because why would they need to ask if there's no laws to stop them? wtf does it matter what it means to you to some idiot software engineer in the back room of an office making 3x your salary?). oh, that little fic you posted to wattpad that got a lot of attention? well now it's being used to teach ai how to write. oh, that sketch you made using adobe that you want to sell? adobe didn't tell you that anything you save to the cloud is now subject to being used for their ai models, so now your art is being replicated to generate ai images in photoshop, without crediting you (they have since said they don't do this...but privacy policies were never made to be human-readable, and i can't imagine they are the only company to sneakily try this). oh, your apartment just installed a new system that will use facial recognition to let their residents inside? oh, they didn't train their model with anyone but white people, so now all the black people living in that apartment building can't get into their homes. oh, you want to apply for a new job? the ai model that scans resumes learned from historical data that more men work that role than women (so the model basically thinks men are better than women), so now your resume is getting thrown out because you're a woman.

ai learns from data. and data is flawed. data is human. and as humans, we are racist, homophobic, misogynistic, transphobic, divided. so the ai models we train will learn from this. ai learns from people's creative works--their personal and artistic property. and now it's scrambling them all up to spit out generated images and written works that no one would ever want to read (because it's no longer a labor of love), and they're using that to make money. they're profiting off of people, and there's no one to stop them. they're also using generated images as marketing tools, to trick idiots on facebook, to make it so hard to be media literate that we have to question every single thing we see because now we don't know what's real and what's not.

the problem with ai is that it's doing more harm than good. and we as a society aren't doing our due diligence to understand the unintended consequences of it all. we aren't angry enough. we're too scared of stifling innovation that we're letting it regulate itself (aka letting companies decide), which has never been a good idea. we see it do one cool thing, and somehow that makes up for all the rest of the bullshit?

[wtfforged]

methinks they should put zoro in more situations because i'm a big fan of when he goes like fully red

i agree

[justabeewithapen]

has doey ever lashed out at lucas or bella?

Yes… though it’s never gotten physical.

While he mostly has a control on all the chunks of the boys floating around in there, on days that are particularly tiring or stressful he can lose his grip. Before Bella and Lucas this is when he would pick a corner of the room and mope in monster form (putting all focus on reigning things back in) but he is not allowed to do that anymore! You know how it feels when multiple people are talking to you or around you, feeling like you can’t hear your own thoughts… that but it starts smothering his feelings, jerking his insides around at random. They also tend to amplify how he is already feeling, concentrating it. Things become more vivid, every feeling, thought, mental image. It’s something he has to grit his teeth and try to ride out, using as much energy as possible to keep the turmoil inside. This is before Doey fully understands how he was made so he is not only being bombarded with these thoughts and feelings, but they all add up to something incoherent. Frequently contradicting each other, flashbacks for things he has, hasn’t, has, experienced as his mind tries to stitch together a coherent story. It makes it hard to know what is actually happening in the now, to those on the outside he isn’t fully there. I think Anger/Upset comes up frequently both from the stress of trying to just think, alongside the fact those are very very nuanced emotions that are built out of a lot of emotions at once that all sorta combine into yelling.

Bella and Lucas are somewhat used to Doey having energy swings (moments where he is quiet and tired and moments where he is very very enthusiastic and the such) but this is an entirely different beast. By the time either of them actually saw a proper moment(tm) they had grown fairly comfortable with him, and this was a scary awful thing. My guess is that it was probably Bella who saw it, sometime soon after Kip passed and his cork just popped. It was a lot of sobbing before he nearly smashed her with a fist. He was yelling a lot of stuff that didn’t make a lot of sense to her but he almost immediately retreated to the other side of the room after the fact. I think things were hard and scary for the rest of that day, but they figured it out soon after. They really didn’t have much choice but to figure it out, considering the situation. Still, took a bit for her to get a sense for them and how to deal with them (staying out of the way).

Lucas figured it out much faster, he is used to dealing with tantrums (he doesn’t remember why). The longest one of these outbursts has lasted with a critter around is maybe an hour and a half. If left to ride it out at most Doey will start muttering to himself thankfully!

[askoverkill]

"Does the other Siffrin know about this 'blessing'?"

transcript below:

(Does the other Siffrin know about this "Blessing?") (You'll have to remember to ask next time.)

Try to avoid... any pain, then. I don't like that this is happening to you. It can't be safe.

Uh, okay? It's not like I try to get hurt.

[chickensauras]

Dumb thing. is ref the answer on this ask

[thehelltingvilleclub]

Helltingville Epilogues

Want some old men? have old men and the lonely rat bastard Captain Dickey.

From left to right:

Jerry - Mandi - Cherri (Left) - William "Buck" Titus (Right) - Bill - May - Pete - Jane - Amari (Matt's younger sister) - Josh - Matt

dude this took me too long

but man do I love all of em

Jerry and Mandi don't end up together permanently-- but they do have their kids together. I genuinely imagine Jerry ends up like Scout TF2 style as a single dad to like 4 kids but he loves them all equally and gives them all the attention he can.

And when he can't handle them all, he'll just drag Bill over and make him deal with them.

Yes, in Helltingville the gang stick together.. kind of. Like old friends that happen to live nearby-- they meet up occasionally, they keep tabs on each other online, they might even have a christmas party together, but they definitely are not hanging out regularly like they did as kids.

Jerry and May's anxiety can't take it, Josh's heart can't take it, and Bill can't take the guilt of knowing that, so its sparingly, but they'll keep in touch.

During the heavy confrontation after Comicon and after, Bill kinda.. hit rock bottom? Like if he hit rock bottom as a teenager then he hit the bottom of satan's fucking boot. Getting reemed out by Matt, disgusting looks from everyone and even his sister, seeing everyone so happy without him--

he struggles with that, and he hates it. He gets so unbelievably angry with himself for being both equally stupid and selfish. He shouldn't be upset about this! They're just stupid fake fans that don't understand him, right? then why the hell is he three bottles in and he still feels like shit?

Jerry and May keep tabs on Bill the most, checking on him and forcing him into therapy. Jerry uses him as a free babysitter, May enjoys the company when she isn't on set with Pete, and Bill isn't passed out drunk in his mom's basement.

Jane and Amari were enemies in high school, they actually hated each others GUTS. Amari was captain of the cheerleading team and Jane had her punk girl gang. And yet, in college, they managed to get together and put aside their differences. (Plus, Amari has the same infatuation problem as Matt... and her type is scrawny women that could stab a bitch, apparently).

Matt does develop a bit.. of an alcohol issue. He's so stressed from work, worried about Josh and his health, BILL being ALIVE, Bill being NEAR HIM, Bill staring at his SISTER bro his liver is crying.

Josh.. kind of knows. He can tell that Matt drinks at dinner and maybe a sip or two before bed, but He doesn't want to step out of line and make Matt upset. The last thing he wants is to upset his fiance and get yelled at again for being useless. He doesn't need to go down memory lane.

Cherri develops a vocal stim similar to Jerry, and struggles to talk otherwise and is usually hiding behind him whenever they aren't in their room. Buck, on the other hand, will not stop asking questions or shut the fuck up. this kid has enough energy to power the sun and his brain never turns off. Sorry Bill, you're gonna have to explain the entire Star Trek lore because you mentioned Star Logs and did the Vulcan Salute and now he demands to know what that is.

May works with Pete on occasion, mostly on a commission basis from Butchie. She helps make props and walks new actresses through the ropes and makes sure they're safe on set. Pete is just happy his woman's with him and you BET he brags "guys look at my girlfriend god I love her--"

And yes, they're looking to name their kiddo Sidney, but it's still a toss up. Bill says the name sounds dumb but won't help May pick any new ones to add to the list, so his opinion can get stuck in a meatgrinder.

Guys i have too much to say about them.

[sunnyhanako1505]

[kalivasquezart]

i'd fall a billion times, but you wouldn't let me ♫

[genericpuff]

the Underworld is the only godly realm that was built on capitalism

So what's Olympus built on? Socialism? Are the gods and nymphs there living the good life compared to their underworld counterparts? Are Zeus and Hera good monarchs even if they're not good people? Or is it just bad in a different way?

Olympus does still participate in capitalism to a degree (especially considering that they do a lot of buying and selling between the Underworld, ex. Kore isn't the only one who travels for work between realms) but the realm was originally built on offerings and bartering which is a tradition that's still maintained between the gods themselves - and it's a big reason why they care for the mortals at all, because without their prayers and offerings, the entire foundation of their realm and the gods' status as rulers would crumble.

So in that way, the gods in power - aside from Hades who is an exception we'll touch on in a second - don't really care about the societal institutions of money, because money just doesn't really serve any function for them that the mortals' offerings - and their own abilities as gods - aren't already providing them. The capitalist system that exists in Olympus is more so to serve the residents who aren't being actively worshipped, such as the nymphs and satyrs (though some are lucky to gain recognition in ways that benefits them through offerings) and for budding gods who don't have as much influence in the Mortal Realm yet (such as Kore).

That said, there are plenty of complaints to be made about Hera and Zeus regardless of the economy that exists within Olympus, buuuut we'll be getting into those issues later ;3 As for the quality of life of Olympus vs. the Underworld, there are pros and cons to both, as with any economic system. The Underworld has a bit of a steeper divide between the rich and poor, but living in Olympus comes with the caveats of being in Zeus' territory where life can be... unpredictable, to say the least. BUT the Underworld being built on the free market has provided it with unique advantages through their technological advancements (ex. the existence of cars and cellphones in both realms is largely owed to the Underworld); whereas Olympus has greater access to the resources of the gods themselves due to literally being the home of the King of the Gods who everyone tries to keep in their good graces.

We've seen a mini example of this bartering system already back in Episode 56: Hera telling Kore she was going to help her with her garden wasn't just the Queen dishing out orders, she was telling Kore that gardening would be a sufficient enough trade for having her in her home and feeding her.

She's not offering to feed Kore for free (which WOULD be an honor coming from the Queen), she's telling her "I'll provide you with the company of royalty and good food / wine / etc. in exchange for your gardening services." (that said, it is still sort of a high honor in and of itself considering Hera wouldn't let just anyone tend to her property ;3)

But that brings us to the exception - Hades. The Underworld had to be built on a different system due to many of its gods and goddesses not being commonly worshipped, so offerings and tributes were hard to come by. For Hades especially, how was he supposed to earn the favors of mortals when they wouldn't even dare speak his name? This led to him having to build the Underworld on the value of specific resources - such as the minerals and metals and gemstones found in the Underworld itself - which were later refined into common currency that's now used across the realms.

Fun fact, this is also why Kore is ticked off that the Underworld costs a toll to enter for both shades and gods alike - because there isn't a toll booth to get into Olympus.

The Underworld has truly mastered the art of microtransactions LMAO

To wrap up this fun lil' lore dump, there's a WIP scene I have on the back burner that goes into greater detail on Olympus' bartering systems but I haven't had the chance to work it naturally into the story yet, I'm hoping it'll be included in an upcoming episode soon but it's basically a cute lil' shopping sequence between Persephone, Artemis, and Daphne :' )

(enjoy these never before seen sketches of Daphne sporting Y2K-style fashion LMAO)

[vinegar-rights]

on my knees crying sobbing begging you for the full version of your last jasky art 😭🙏🏻

Hereeeee 🦞

[blehblarghblah]

You asked how people who don't use ao3's bookmark feature revisit fics they like: I personally download my favorites to my phone. Granted I don't have an absurd amount of favorite fics like some of the other replies (I'm at about 200 downloaded) but I can generally remember the title of any specific fic I'm searching for.

I guess in that sense, that’s more logical. Don’t think my phone/laptop could handle downloading my 3000+ fics 😅

[confetti-smoker]

Hey so about your wire role swap AU Venellope.....

Hai hello! She’s just a little silly

(Doodled on my phone that’s why it looks like that)

I think I’ll make a couple big posts about this AU once im free from schoolwork

BUT I’m wondering if I should just dump all the information or if I should keep some just in case I turn this into a fic or something. There’s some stuff that would make people go “holy shit.” If they read it in a fic and idk if me just dumping it would do it justice,,, we shall see

Also if I do make posts it’ll be about Felix and Calhoun first! Since they’re the protagonists in this AU, hero’s cuties finally gets the A plot let’s go

[microvibing]

Sooooo I couldn't help but notice the words "requests open" on your bio and uh, I'd like to ask something. Pickpockets out on a date? If you have the time for it?

this is all my brain could conjure up ahahah....dumbasses<3

Clean ver for anyone who wants to put their own silly caption hehehe

[yuri-is-online]

Whenever one of my friends gets mad or upset, which is a lot, he goes to his girlfriend, picks her up, and literally just carries her around like a five year old carries around a teddy bear (they got that wattpad height difference so its pretty easy ig), it looks kinda goofy but its cute, so imagine Jade doing that when he's overwhelmed and he sees his little shrimp in the hallway.

Just picture Yuu have a completely normal conversation with Ace and Deuce (grim is stuck in the vending machine somewhere), and then they hear a door slam and footsteps approaching and Yuu just holds their arms out, still talking, and then Jade, who's supposed to be the "normal" one just comes up and straight up steels Yuu away, probably to Ramshakle (he needs cuddles and home cooked food), and Yuus like "sorry can't talk rn something just came up ^w^/♡" like this is all completely normal

Anyways I think Jade would simply cease giving a fuck about PDA the second he gets into a relationship and I'm spreading that propaganda 🤞����

(╥﹏╥)

It's not so much that Jade ah does not give a fuck about PDA you understand, he gives many many fucks. He wants everyone to know you and he are off the market because you are together forever kiss those other numbers goodbye because you are IT. But he does like to be a tease about it; guiding you with his hand on the small of your back, kissing you quickly on the cheek or the back of the hand, I think he really likes squishing his nose against yours and rubbing them together (idk my family always called those ugamuggas like from Mr. Rodger's Neighborhood) anything to get a brief bit of physical contact and make you smell like him.

When he's having a bad day though yeah, that's when he just carries you back to Ramshackle, or maybe the woods behind it, so he can breathe in your scent and just hold you. It's significantly less dignified than his usual persona so he only ever really goes to retrieve you himself when he's having a super bad day, he prides himself on having enough self control to just text usually but some days you just need a break.

Also wtf do you mean Grim is stuck in a vending machine someone get him out of there that's not safe-

[ask-the-pioneer]

it's hard, but you've got to keep on