#call this cloud computing

[fat-sad-cat]

No thoughts, just clouds.

Original Photography @fat-sad-cat

[waitineedaname]

wait oh my god did the crowdstrike thing fuck up microsoft outlook too

[phonesuite]

Explore the evolving diversification of telephone communication in hospitality. Let’s take a closer look at how modern telephony solutions can help you communicate better in a remote working world. Learn More...

[renapuppy]

I have been saying this for a while, this has contributed to the appification of the entire internet; including when you aren't even on mobile. it is just utter hubris. having worked in tech support allowed me to see this firsthand.

its how you get people who don't know what the fundamental concept of a website is; all they know is that you tell google what you want and it gives it to you. and its not their fault. its the overarching philosophy of trying to obfuscate how a computer works.

not to enforce gender roles but a computer should NOT fucking have apps okay. if I wanted an app I'd go on my phone my laptop is for Programs. I mean this.

[subjectsix]

I don't know I'm not done talking about it. It's insane that I can't just uninstall Edge or Copilot. That websites require my phone number to sign up. That people share their contacts to find their friends on social media.

I wouldn't use an adblocker if ads were just banners on the side funding a website I enjoy using and want to support. Ads pop up invasively and fill my whole screen, I misclick and get warped away to another page just for trying to read an article or get a recipe.

Every app shouldn't be like every other app. Instagram didn't need reels and a shop. TikTok doesn't need a store. Instagram doesn't need to be connected to Facebook. I don't want my apps to do everything, I want a hub for a specific thing, and I'll go to that place accordingly.

I love discord, but so much information gets lost to it. I don't want to join to view things. I want to lurk on forums. I want to be a user who can log in and join a conversation by replying to a thread, even if that conversation was two days ago. I know discord has threads, it's not the same. I don't want to have to verify my account with a phone number. I understand safety and digital concerns, but I'm concerned about information like that with leaks everywhere, even with password managers.

I shouldn't have to pay subscriptions to use services and get locked out of old versions. My old disk copy of photoshop should work. I should want to upgrade eventually because I like photoshop and supporting the business. Adobe is a whole other can of worms here.

Streaming is so splintered across everything. Shows release so fast. Things don't get physical releases. I can't stream a movie I own digitally to friends because the share-screen blocks it, even though I own two digital copies, even though I own a physical copy.

I have an iPod, and I had to install a third party OS to easily put my music on it without having to tangle with iTunes. Spotify bricked hardware I purchased because they were unwillingly to upkeep it. They don't pay their artists. iTunes isn't even iTunes anymore and Apple struggles to upkeep it.

My TV shows me ads on the home screen. My dad lost access to eBook he purchased because they were digital and got revoked by the company distributing them. Hitman 1-3 only runs online most of the time. Flash died and is staying alive because people love it and made efforts to keep it up.

I have to click "not now" and can't click "no". I don't just get emails, they want to text me to purchase things online too. My windows start search bar searches online, not just my computer. Everything is blindly called an app now. Everything wants me to upload to the cloud. These are good tools! But why am I forced to use them! Why am I not allowed to own or control them?

No more!!!!! I love my iPod with so much storage and FLAC files. I love having all my fics on my harddrive. I love having USBs and backups. I love running scripts to gut suck stuff out of my Windows computer I don't want that spies on me. I love having forums. I love sending letters. I love neocities and webpages and webrings. I will not be scanning QR codes. Please hand me a physical menu. If I didn't need a smartphone for work I'd get a "dumb" phone so fast. I want things to have buttons. I want to use a mouse. I want replaceable batteries. I want the right to repair. I grew up online and I won't forget how it was!

[realmyths]

Joe Tags

an artist just living out of case (joseph joe john jackson iii.)

live the life you dream (joe thoughts.)

head in the clouds (joe isms.)

fire in my heart (joe desires.)

the music of the ages (joe playlist.)

computer shaped music box (joe soundtrack.)

beauty can be unexpected (joe aesthetic.)

life goes on (joe: headcanon.)

you've got heart and you're going your own way (joe v1.)

chorus girls in neon were his closest thing to friends (joe arc 1.)

just call me joe rr tolkein (joe arc 2.)

but to a writer the truth is no big deal (c: joe jackson.)

[bibleofficial]

i just think it’s funny that raspberry pi seems to plan their releases around that of apple’s

[abbiistabbii]

I think every computer user needs to read this because holy fucking shit this is fucking horrible.

So Windows has a new feature incoming called Recall where your computer will first, monitor everything you do with screenshots every couple of seconds and "process that" with an AI.

Hey, errrr, fuck no? This isn't merely because AI is really energy intensive to the point that it causes environmental damage. This is because it's basically surveilling what you are doing on your fucking desktop.

This AI is not going to be on your desktop, like all AI, it's going to be done on another server, "in the cloud" to be precise, so all those data and screenshot? They're going to go off to Microsoft. Microsoft are going to be monitoring what you do on your own computer.

Now of course Microsoft are going to be all "oooh, it's okay, we'll keep your data safe". They won't. Let me just remind you that evidence given over from Facebook has been used to prosecute a mother and daughter for an "illegal abortion", Microsoft will likely do the same.

And before someone goes "durrr, nuthin' to fear, nuthin to hide", let me remind you that you can be doing completely legal and righteous acts and still have the police on your arse. Are you an activist? Don't even need to be a hackivist, you can just be very vocal about something concerning and have the fucking police on your arse. They did this with environmental protesters in the UK. The culture war against transgender people looks likely to be heading in a direction wherein people looking for information on transgender people or help transitioning will be tracked down too. You have plenty to hide from the government, including your opinions and ideas.

Again, look into backing up your shit and switching to Linux Mint or Ubuntu to get away from Microsoft doing this shit.

[cuz-reasons]

One thing I'll give ppl who save stuff online is that it would be nice to read my unposted stuff when I'm away from my computer

[jcmarchi]

Shaktiman Mall, Principal Product Manager, Aviatrix – Interview Series

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/shaktiman-mall-principal-product-manager-aviatrix-interview-series/

Shaktiman Mall, Principal Product Manager, Aviatrix – Interview Series

Shaktiman Mall is Principal Product Manager at Aviatrix. With more than a decade of experience designing and implementing network solutions, Mall prides himself on ingenuity, creativity, adaptability and precision. Prior to joining Aviatrix, Mall served as Senior Technical Marketing Manager at Palo Alto Networks and Principal Infrastructure Engineer at MphasiS.

Aviatrix is a company focused on simplifying cloud networking to help businesses remain agile. Their cloud networking platform is used by over 500 enterprises and is designed to provide visibility, security, and control for adapting to changing needs. The Aviatrix Certified Engineer (ACE) Program offers certification in multicloud networking and security, aimed at supporting professionals in staying current with digital transformation trends.

What initially attracted you to computer engineering and cybersecurity?

As a student, I was initially more interested in studying medicine and wanted to pursue a degree in biotechnology. However, I decided to switch to computer science after having conversations with my classmates about technological advancements over the preceding decade and emerging technologies on the horizon.

Could you describe your current role at Aviatrix and share with us what your responsibilities are and what an average day looks like?

I’ve been with Aviatrix for two years and currently serve as a principal product manager in the product organization. As a product manager, my responsibilities include building product vision, conducting market research, and consulting with the sales, marketing and support teams. These inputs combined with direct customer engagement help me define and prioritize features and bug fixes.

I also ensure that our products align with customers’ requirements. New product features should be easy to use and not overly or unnecessarily complex. In my role, I also need to be mindful of the timing for these features – can we put engineering resources toward it today, or can it wait six months? To that end, should the rollout be staggered or phased into different versions? Most importantly, what is the projected return on investment?

An average day includes meetings with engineering, project planning, customer calls, and meetings with sales and support. Those discussions allow me to get an update on upcoming features and use cases while understanding current issues and feedback to troubleshoot before a release.

What are the primary challenges IT teams face when integrating AI tools into their existing cloud infrastructure?

Based on real-world experience of integrating AI into our IT technology, I believe there are four challenges companies will encounter:

Harnessing data & integration: Data enriches AI, but when data is across different places and resources in an organization, it can be difficult to harness it properly.

Scaling: AI operations can be CPU intensive, making scaling challenging.

Training and raising awareness: A company could have the most powerful AI solution, but if employees don’t know how to use it or don’t understand it, then it will be underutilized.

Cost: For IT especially, a quality AI integration will not be cheap, and businesses must budget accordingly.

Security: Make sure that the cloud infrastructure meets security standards and regulatory requirements relevant to AI applications

How can businesses ensure their cloud infrastructure is robust enough to support the heavy computing needs of AI applications?

There are multiple factors to running AI applications. For starters, it’s critical to find the right type and instance for scale and performance.

Also, there needs to be adequate data storage, as these applications will draw from static data available within the company and build their own database of information. Data storage can be costly, forcing businesses to assess different types of storage optimization.

Another consideration is network bandwidth. If every employee in the company uses the same AI application at once, the network bandwidth needs to scale – otherwise, the application will be so slow as to be unusable. Likewise, companies need to decide if they will use a centralized AI model where computing happens in a single place or a distributed AI model where computing happens closer to the data sources.

With the increasing adoption of AI, how can IT teams protect their systems from the heightened risk of cyberattacks?

There are two main aspects to security every IT team must consider. First, how do we protect against external risks? Second, how do we ensure data, whether it is the personally identifiable information (PII) of customers or proprietary information, remains within the company and is not exposed? Businesses must determine who can and cannot access certain data. As a product manager, I need sensitive information others are not authorized to access or code.

At Aviatrix, we help our customers protect against attacks, allowing them to continue adopting technologies like AI that are essential for being competitive today. Recall network bandwidth optimization: because Aviatrix acts as the data plane for our customers, we can manage the data going through their network, providing visibility and enhancing security enforcement.

Likewise, our distributed cloud firewall (DCF) solves the challenges of a distributed AI model where data gets queried in multiple places, spanning geographical boundaries with different laws and compliances. Specifically, a DCF supports a single set of security compliance enforced across the globe, ensuring the same set of security and networking architecture is supported. Our Aviatrix Networks Architecture also allows us to identify choke points, where we can dynamically update the routing table or help customers create new connections to optimize AI requirements.

How can businesses optimize their cloud spending while implementing AI technologies, and what role does the Aviatrix platform play in this?

One of the main practices that will help businesses optimize their cloud spending when implementing AI is minimizing egress spend.

Cloud network data processing and egress fees are a material component of cloud costs. They are both difficult to understand and inflexible. These cost structures not only hinder scalability and data portability for enterprises, but also provide decreasing returns to scale as cloud data volume increases which can impact organizations’ bandwidth.

Aviatrix designed our egress solution to give the customer visibility and control. Not only do we perform enforcement on gateways through DCF, but we also do native orchestration, enforcing control at the network interface card level for significant cost savings. In fact, after crunching the numbers on egress spend, we had customers report savings between 20% and 40%.

We’re also building auto-rightsizing capabilities to automatically detect high resource utilization and automatically schedule upgrades as needed.

Lastly, we ensure optimal network performance with advanced networking capabilities like intelligent routing, traffic engineering and secure connectivity across multi-cloud environments.

How does Aviatrix CoPilot enhance operational efficiency and provide better visibility and control over AI deployments in multicloud environments?

Aviatrix CoPilot’s topology view provides real-time network latency and throughput, allowing customers to see the number of VPC/VNets. It also displays different cloud resources, accelerating problem identification. For example, if the customer sees a latency issue in a network, they will know which assets are getting affected. Also, Aviatrix CoPilot helps customers identify bottlenecks, configuration issues, and improper connections or network mapping. Furthermore, if a customer needs to scale up one of its gateways into the node to accommodate more AI capabilities, Aviatrix CoPilot can automatically detect, scale, and upgrade as necessary.

Can you explain how dynamic topology mapping and embedded security visibility in Aviatrix CoPilot assist in real-time troubleshooting of AI applications?

Aviatrix CoPilot’s dynamic topology mapping also facilitates robust troubleshooting capabilities. If a customer must troubleshoot an issue between different clouds (requiring them to understand where traffic was getting blocked), CoPilot can find it, streamlining resolution. Not only does Aviatrix CoPilot visualize network aspects, but it also provides security visualization components in the form of our own threat IQ, which performs security and vulnerability protection. We help our customers map the networking and security into one comprehensive visualization solution.

We also help with capacity planning for both cost with costIQ, and performance with auto right sizing and network optimization.

How does Aviatrix ensure data security and compliance across various cloud providers when integrating AI tools?

AWS and its AI engine, Amazon Bedrock, have different security requirements from Azure and Microsoft Copilot. Uniquely, Aviatrix can help our customers create an orchestration layer where we can automatically align security and network requirements to the CSP in question. For example, Aviatrix can automatically compartmentalize data for all CSPs irrespective of APIs or underlying architecture.

It is important to note that all of these AI engines are inside a public subnet, which means they have access to the internet, creating additional vulnerabilities because they consume proprietary data. Thankfully, our DCF can sit on a public and private subnet, ensuring security. Beyond public subnets, it can also sit across different regions and CSPs, between data centers and CSPs or VPC/VNets and even between a random site and the cloud. We establish end-to-end encryption across VPC/VNets and regions for secure transfer of data. We also have extensive auditing and logging for tasks performed on the system, as well as integrated network and policy with threat detection and deep packet inspection.

What future trends do you foresee in the intersection of AI and cloud computing, and how is Aviatrix preparing to address these trends?

I see the interaction of AI and cloud computing birthing incredible automation capabilities in key areas such as networking, security, visibility, and troubleshooting for significant cost savings and efficiency.

It could also analyze the different types of data entering the network and recommend the most suitable policies or security compliances. Similarly, if a customer needed to enforce HIPAA, this solution could scan through the customer’s networks and then recommend a corresponding strategy.

Troubleshooting is a major investment because it requires a call center to assist customers. However, most of these issues don’t necessitate human intervention.

Generative AI (GenAI) will also be a game changer for cloud computing. Today, a topology is a day-zero decision – once an architecture or networking topology gets built, it is difficult to make changes. One potential use case I believe is on the horizon is a solution that could recommend an optimal topology based on certain requirements. Another problem that GenAI could solve is related to security policies, which quickly become outdated after a few years. AGenAI solution could help users routinely create new security stacks per new laws and regulations.

Aviatrix can implement the same security architecture for a datacenter with our edge solution, given that more AI will sit close to the data sources. We can help connect branches and sites to the cloud and edge with AI computes running.

We also help in B2B integration with different customers or entities in the same company with separate operating models.

AI is driving new and exciting computing trends that will impact how infrastructure is built. At Aviatrix, we’re looking forward to seizing the moment with our secure and seamless cloud networking solution.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Aviatrix. 

[the-kick-of-bones-malone]

https://www.tumblr.com/akumeoy/728629735215775744?source=share

This is what they mean when they say your storage is cloud based. It flew

[newstrendline]

What is cloud technology

What is Cloud Technology? Cloud technology is changing the way businesses operate. With it, companies can access their IT infrastructure, applications and data from anywhere with an internet connection. There are many different types of cloud computing. These include public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud. They can also be categorized by deployment model and service model. What is cloud…

[txttletale]

what did you mean by "... produces ptsd on an industrial scale"? just trying to understand, thank u!

content moderation for platforms like facebook and tiktok employs thousands of people, sometimes in the usa but more commonly in the global south (so they can be paid less) to sit at computers and view hundreds of flagged posts a day, including graphic violence and csem, for awful wages, under ridiculously stringent conditions. this results in many, many of the people who work in this field developing PTSD -- and of course they are not given adequate treatment of support, one article cites facebook giving its moderaties nine minutes of 'wellness time' for employees to recover if they see something traumatic.

here's some articles on the topic that can give you a good overview of what working conditions in this field are like, but warning, there's pretty graphic descriptions of violence, animal abuse, and child sexual abuse in these articles, as well as frank discussion of suicidal ideation:

Nearby, in a shopping mall, I meet a young woman who I'll call Maria. She's on her lunch break from an outsourcing firm, where she works on a team that moderates photos and videos for the cloud storage service of a major US technology company. Maria is a quality-assurance representative, which means her duties include double-checking the work of the dozens of agents on her team to make sure they catch everything. This requires her to view many videos that have been flagged by moderators “I get really affected by bestiality with children,” she says. “I have to stop. I have to stop for a moment and loosen up, maybe go to Starbucks and have a coffee.” She laughs at the absurd juxtaposition of a horrific sex crime and an overpriced latte.

For Carlos, a former TikTok moderator, it was a video of child sexual abuse that gave him nightmares. The video showed a girl of five or six years old, he said [...] It hit him particularly hard, he said, because he’s a father himself. He hit pause, went outside for a cigarette, then returned to the queue of videos a few minutes later.

Randy also left after about a year. Like Chloe, he had been traumatized by a video of a stabbing. The victim had been about his age, and he remembers hearing the man crying for his mother as he died. “Every day I see that,” Randy says, “I have a genuine fear over knives. I like cooking — getting back into the kitchen and being around the knives is really hard for me.”

[phonesuite]

Hospitality brands must leverage new solutions to provide 24/7 support for guests while driving profitability and efficiency. In this post, we’ll explore how using CCPaaS can revolutionize guest experiences, from check-in directly through checkout and beyond. Read More...

[govindhtech]

Tech Breakdown: What Is a SuperNIC? Get the Inside Scoop!

The most recent development in the rapidly evolving digital realm is generative AI. A relatively new phrase, SuperNIC, is one of the revolutionary inventions that makes it feasible.

Describe a SuperNIC

On order to accelerate hyperscale AI workloads on Ethernet-based clouds, a new family of network accelerators called SuperNIC was created. With remote direct memory access (RDMA) over converged Ethernet (RoCE) technology, it offers extremely rapid network connectivity for GPU-to-GPU communication, with throughputs of up to 400Gb/s.

SuperNICs incorporate the following special qualities:

Ensuring that data packets are received and processed in the same sequence as they were originally delivered through high-speed packet reordering. This keeps the data flow’s sequential integrity intact.

In order to regulate and prevent congestion in AI networks, advanced congestion management uses network-aware algorithms and real-time telemetry data.

In AI cloud data centers, programmable computation on the input/output (I/O) channel facilitates network architecture adaptation and extension.

Low-profile, power-efficient architecture that effectively handles AI workloads under power-constrained budgets.

Optimization for full-stack AI, encompassing system software, communication libraries, application frameworks, networking, computing, and storage.

Recently, NVIDIA revealed the first SuperNIC in the world designed specifically for AI computing, built on the BlueField-3 networking architecture. It is a component of the NVIDIA Spectrum-X platform, which allows for smooth integration with the Ethernet switch system Spectrum-4.

The NVIDIA Spectrum-4 switch system and BlueField-3 SuperNIC work together to provide an accelerated computing fabric that is optimized for AI applications. Spectrum-X outperforms conventional Ethernet settings by continuously delivering high levels of network efficiency.

Yael Shenhav, vice president of DPU and NIC products at NVIDIA, stated, “In a world where AI is driving the next wave of technological innovation, the BlueField-3 SuperNIC is a vital cog in the machinery.” “SuperNICs are essential components for enabling the future of AI computing because they guarantee that your AI workloads are executed with efficiency and speed.”

The Changing Environment of Networking and AI

Large language models and generative AI are causing a seismic change in the area of artificial intelligence. These potent technologies have opened up new avenues and made it possible for computers to perform new functions.

GPU-accelerated computing plays a critical role in the development of AI by processing massive amounts of data, training huge AI models, and enabling real-time inference. While this increased computing capacity has created opportunities, Ethernet cloud networks have also been put to the test.

The internet’s foundational technology, traditional Ethernet, was designed to link loosely connected applications and provide wide compatibility. The complex computational requirements of contemporary AI workloads, which include quickly transferring large amounts of data, closely linked parallel processing, and unusual communication patterns all of which call for optimal network connectivity were not intended for it.

Basic network interface cards (NICs) were created with interoperability, universal data transfer, and general-purpose computing in mind. They were never intended to handle the special difficulties brought on by the high processing demands of AI applications.

The necessary characteristics and capabilities for effective data transmission, low latency, and the predictable performance required for AI activities are absent from standard NICs. In contrast, SuperNICs are designed specifically for contemporary AI workloads.

Benefits of SuperNICs in AI Computing Environments

Data processing units (DPUs) are capable of high throughput, low latency network connectivity, and many other sophisticated characteristics. DPUs have become more and more common in the field of cloud computing since its launch in 2020, mostly because of their ability to separate, speed up, and offload computation from data center hardware.

SuperNICs and DPUs both have many characteristics and functions in common, however SuperNICs are specially designed to speed up networks for artificial intelligence.

The performance of distributed AI training and inference communication flows is highly dependent on the availability of network capacity. Known for their elegant designs, SuperNICs scale better than DPUs and may provide an astounding 400Gb/s of network bandwidth per GPU.

When GPUs and SuperNICs are matched 1:1 in a system, AI workload efficiency may be greatly increased, resulting in higher productivity and better business outcomes.

SuperNICs are only intended to speed up networking for cloud computing with artificial intelligence. As a result, it uses less processing power than a DPU, which needs a lot of processing power to offload programs from a host CPU.

Less power usage results from the decreased computation needs, which is especially important in systems with up to eight SuperNICs.

One of the SuperNIC’s other unique selling points is its specialized AI networking capabilities. It provides optimal congestion control, adaptive routing, and out-of-order packet handling when tightly connected with an AI-optimized NVIDIA Spectrum-4 switch. Ethernet AI cloud settings are accelerated by these cutting-edge technologies.

Transforming cloud computing with AI

The NVIDIA BlueField-3 SuperNIC is essential for AI-ready infrastructure because of its many advantages.

Maximum efficiency for AI workloads: The BlueField-3 SuperNIC is perfect for AI workloads since it was designed specifically for network-intensive, massively parallel computing. It guarantees bottleneck-free, efficient operation of AI activities.

Performance that is consistent and predictable: The BlueField-3 SuperNIC makes sure that each job and tenant in multi-tenant data centers, where many jobs are executed concurrently, is isolated, predictable, and unaffected by other network operations.

Secure multi-tenant cloud infrastructure: Data centers that handle sensitive data place a high premium on security. High security levels are maintained by the BlueField-3 SuperNIC, allowing different tenants to cohabit with separate data and processing.

Broad network infrastructure: The BlueField-3 SuperNIC is very versatile and can be easily adjusted to meet a wide range of different network infrastructure requirements.

Wide compatibility with server manufacturers: The BlueField-3 SuperNIC integrates easily with the majority of enterprise-class servers without using an excessive amount of power in data centers.

[k0mmari]

Endless Abyss(kinda)! SY AU

First things first, this is very much inspired by this post by @/rainbowsmagicandshit and @/allpiesforourown, HIGHLY recommend reading that fist just to get a glimpse of where I started off, but do note I have accidentally deviated from the original idea a bit, so uh, oops ig.

This was born out of a mix of different ideas (as usual), so think of this as ‘The AU where SY is a demon, and also the Endless Abyss, and also my excuse to have Binghe possibly make a harem consisting entirely of SY’s’, or, as I like to call it:

As per usual, Shen Yuan has died. It happens to the best of us, and of course, he died while reading the glittering piece of trash that is Proud Immortal Demon Way.But, as he is in the process of getting snatched away by the System, something goes wrong, and the System has to quickly redirect itself and it causes SY to get knocked out of course.

His soul scrambles to find a new host, and it manages to find someone suitable enough. When SY wakes up though, he isn’t greeted by the sight of a roof, or a forest, or anything remotely familiar; instead, the moment he regains consciousness, he’s senses are flooded with as much information as possible. It’s like a computer with too many tabs open, but in this case, you can see all the tabs at the same time and all of them are playing the most obnoxiously loud videos possible, in fact, everything feels so overwhelming even thinking becomes too much.

What SY doesn’t know is that he has transmigrated into the body of a Titan, an almost extinct godly demon race that only existed in the confines of Airplane’s first drafts, and it turns out shoving a human soul into the body of a deity doesn’t bode so well, since what the human mind is able to process doesn’t even come close to what a Titan is able to feel. So because SY can’t get a hold of his own mind, his control of his own body is also not great, and he is completely unaware as his newly acquired body goes on a rampage.

See, SY is currently in a very old version of the Demon Realm, so old in fact, Heavenly Demons still rule over the Realm. It really is quite a shame that SY wasn’t in his right mind at the time, and instead of being able to observe how ancient Heavenly Demons governed demonic society, he instead accidentally set on a path of destruction, with the casualties being anything that had the bad luck of standing in his way. In fact, the destruction got so bad a few of the Heavenly Demons rulers, who notoriously hated each other, settles on a temporary peace agreement and joined forces to stop the mad Titan.

SY, in his frenzied state, didn’t even notice as hundreds of years went by as the Heavenly Demons tried to stop him, and also barely noticed when they finally managed to chain him down and cast him away to be forever banished to the Endless Abyss. His body, once so tall it grazed the clouds, was torn apart, with each of its different parts sealed away in various locations as an attempt to diminish the Titan’s power. It worked, actually, and unbeknownst to the demons, SY slowly began to get his thoughts in order; the event that finally pushed him to coherency was when a few of those Heavenly Demon rulers got greedy, and while sealing away SY’s body parts, attempted to harness his power for themselves, and tried to create legendary weapons out of his flesh and bone.

Most of them failed, a Titan’s power to overwhelming for even a Heavenly Demon to handle, but one of them succeeded, and created a powerful sword made from the Titan’s own heart: Xin Mo. Unfortunately for the creator of Xin Mo, it didn’t take long for them to fall into madness and eventually succumb to Xin Mo’s power, casting themselves away to hold onto the sword forever in the same valley SY’s hands were sealed; but it is as they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and while Xin MO’s creator perished, they managed to take enough power away from SY for him to finally be able to think.

It had been a thousand years at this point, and SY’s first coherent thought was that he desperately needed a break, and that in all these years, he hadn’t managed to get a single glimpse into the world of PIDW, and what a waste! Specially since he was now in the most interesting area Airplane had managed to create, he was itching to explore the world. Of course, in his current state he wasn’t exactly able to move (having his limbs cut off certainly didn’t help, but apparently it had been so long since he was imprisoned that his Main Body had started to fuse with the Abyss? Really, more of a slight inconvenience than anything), but he also had become tired of his Titan body with it’s Titan feelings, and so he decided to split his consciousness and create a small army of human sized avatars who were later dubbed his ‘Watchers’, who’s sole purpose was to explore the Endless Abyss and send their findings back to the Main Body (in bite sized, easy to understand thoughts).

It is the first years of his Watchers wandering about that SY finally understood what had happened to his body, and figured out that Xin Mo was a product of his flesh. He figured that since demons tried to use his body for malicious purposes before, with one even succeeding, he decided that one Xin Mo was enough, and came up with a plan: He was going to piece his Titan body back together as a means to prevent anything of the sort happening again, but he was immediately going to seal the Titan body away again, as to not have to deal with it’s overwhelming power.

As the Watchers were sent to locate his body parts again, one of their first findings were the hands, which also meant the resting place of Xin Mo itself. How lucky, he thought! He could just take the hands away and maybe leave one of the Watchers guarding Xin Mo so when Luo Binghe eventually comes to retrieve his sword, SY at least can catch a glimpse of his favorite protagonist! He wasted no time, and while his avatars tried to unseal his hands, one of them went to move Xin Mo, just so it was out of the way, and in doing so the sword retaliated and ended up disintegrating the poor Watcher. What a rude sword, going against its own body.

Fine! If Xin Mo was going to be difficult so be it, and SY formed a new plan: before reuniting his Titan body back together, SY send his Watchers to keep an eye on as much of the Endless Abyss as possible and the moment Luo Binghe fell in, he would turn to hugging the protagonist’s thigh and help him survive the harsh environment as long as Binghe took Xin Mo. Well, it should be no problem, right? Binghe was fated to get the sword one way or another, and SY is sure his involvement will be small insignificant enough that it won’t be much more of a side quest for the future Demon Emperor!

Now, if he were a half human, half Heavenly Demon teenager who just got pushed into hell by his teacher, where would he land….

*

So, as you can see, this is mostly more like SY’s origin story lol, but I’ll probably write Binghe’s first meetings with the Watchers sometime soon (hopefully).In the meantime though, enjoy some more of the bonus sketches I did while figuring out the AU, and of course, if anyone has any questions or thoughts about this, feel free to send them to me!