#producing random bits of stuff with no context

[feyd-meowtha]

Salt and Vinegar (or a clegan seaside AU fragment I didn't know what to do with)

+++

“You’re gonna crack your head open on those rocks, you know,” John said. The blonde boy didn’t turn around, just kept his eyes on the ocean. 

“Screw you,” he replied a few moments later. He spoke just a little too quietly, his words whipped away in the wind. “You don’t know that.” 

“Yes, I do.” John bit his bottom lip, appraising the boy’s naked back. It was bony and covered in goosebumps, pink as raw chicken. He let out a breath, took a step backward and sat down on a bollard, the moist wood soaking through the back of his shorts.

The other boy was standing on the opposite side of the pier, his naked toes curled over the edge. His clothes were folded in a neat pile to his right. They’d be cold and damp when he put them back on, he'd been standing there for almost half an hour. John knew this because he’d been watching him from the chip shop as he mopped the floors. 

“For fuck’s sake,” John ran a hand through his hair which was matted into greasy clumps and crusted with salt. “We both know you aren’t gonna do it, so just put your top back on and give it up.” 

“You don’t know anything,” the blonde boy spat back, louder this time and broken by the machine gun clatter of chattering teeth. 

“Not really, no,” John replied, nodding his head despite the fact that the other boy still hadn’t looked at him. “But I saw you out here the other day with those guys. They were messing with you, man, they don’t expect you to actually do it.” 

“Why?” the boy yelled, turning around finally to face John. He had a pretty face, pouty lips like his sister’s baby doll. “Cus you all think I’m a fucking sissy?” 

John thought about it for a second then shook his head. His elbows rested on the tops of his legs and his chin on the backs of his hands. 

“Nah, not really,” he explained, “But tourists never actually do it. It would be stupid.” He paused, chewing on a shred of loose skin by this thumbnail and studying the strange boy’s face for signs of mental deficiency. “You stupid?” 

“Nah,” The boy shook his head. “I’m actually not.”

He was squinting at John through the fading daylight, his hand wreathed by pudgy clouds. It wasn’t a good sunset that day, the orange sherbet kind on the postcards in all the souvenir shops. It was a flat and dark, the sort of sunset that left John feeling like he’d been robbed of the best five minutes of his day. 

“Well, you coulda fooled me,” John replied. He scratched his bitten nails up and down the plasticy fabric of his shorts. “Those guys who were teasing you, did they tell you about that city girl a few years ago, the ginger one?” 

The boy shook his head. 

“Yeah, well, they should've. Couple older kids teased her like they teased you. Not the same kids but close enough. Brothers, sisters, cousins, that sort of thing. Anyway, she was stupid, that girl, brave as shit, I’ll give her that, but stupid, stupid enough to actually give it a go.”

“Shut up,” the boy said, swaying backwards and forwards on the balls on his feet. John couldn’t see what he was looking at but he didn’t need to, the jagged outline of those rocks was more familiar to him than his own face. 

“She walked down this pier but she didn’t walk anymore, after that,” John said, remembering blood on sand and the sound of a woman crying. 

“Rubbish,” the blonde boy said. His hands were curled into tight little balls at his side and John guessed he was about fourteen, maybe younger, just a little older than the girl had been. “You’re just trying to scare me like the others.” 

“My uncle’s in the volunteer coastguard” John replied. "You can ask him. He'll tell you.” 

“You’re chatting shit,” the blonde boy said, shaking his head and losing his balance for just a moment. He pitched forward, leaning a millimetre further over the water before flinching back from the edge. John wondered what he was thinking. If the boy was scared at all, he was doing a very good job of looking like he wasn't. 

“What’s your problem?” John asked, “Are you actually trying to fucking die?” He kissed his teeth, standing up and pacing up and down, the water-swollen planks groaning under his feet. “What a way to ruin the family holiday.” 

“I’m not on holiday,” the boy said gruffly. 

“Well, that’s weird, cus I know every person in this town and I don’t remember beating you at bloody sports day.” 

“Do you ever shut up?” the boy asked, but there was no real venom in it. John watched him take a deep breath, his ribs cracking open and then creaking shut. “I just moved here,” he explained. “I have to do this.”

“Why?” John asked, his hands were jammed in his pockets against the wind. It was May but the evenings still had bite. 

“I just have to, alright?” the boy said. He had a strange accent, flat and low, his vowels disappearing down his throat as he spoke them. John wondered where he had come from. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone came to Dormouth with the intention of staying forever. 

“Fucking hell,” John groaned before reaching his fingers under the hem of his football shirt and lifting it over his head. The blonde boy turned around, watching with confusion as John draped his top over the bollard and bent to untie his laces. 

“What are you doing?” he asked and his expression was so stony that John couldn’t help but laugh. 

“I’m saving your fucking life, is what I’m doing, you ungrateful little twat,” he said, shaking his shoulders and flexing his toes against the slippery timber underfoot. Then he held out his hand, beckoning for the boy to stand next to him on the opposite side of the pier. “You need a run up,” he explained, “otherwise you’ll never clear the rocks.” 

The boy didn’t move. “But if I take a run up I won’t be able to see what I’m jumping onto.” 

“I know, that’s the trick.  Otherwise everyone would be doing it,” John replied, rolling his shoulders. Stiff from a day hunched over the fryer, his neck crackled like fireworks. “That’s why you need me.”

“Why are you helping me?” the boy asked as he walked over to stand by John’s side. Now that he was closer, John could see the cold steel colour of his eyes and a thin white scar that ran from the corner of his mouth up toward his ear. 

“What kind of question is that?” John asked, taking the boy’s hand in his own. The boy flinched, trying to pull away, but John held tight. “I just don’t wanna watch you fucking maim yourself, alright? I’d only have to jump in and save you anyway.” 

The smaller boy didn’t reply. 

“Okay,” John said, jiggling his feet to keep from shivering. “Show time. You trust me, little man?” 

The boy nodded, then frowned. “You can’t call me that, I’m not that much shorter than you.” 

John laughed, swinging their arms between them and giving the boy’s hand a squeeze. “Alright little man,” he said, “just run as fast as you can and jump from right there, like you’re aiming for those boats.” John pointed toward the third bollard from the left. “Keep your knees together and don’t let go of my hand.” 

“Okay,” the boy nodded. “If you’re messing with me, you’re a real prick.” 

“Obviously,” John rolled his eyes. Then they jumped. 

+++

I am dedicating this one to lovely peeps who have tagged me in writing things that I have not done over the last couple months. @shipstorms @swifty-fox @triggerlil @luckydeuce and any others that I have missed, thank yous very much for having thought of little old me while I have not been writing so much <3

As for this particular scenario, I have no idea. I was just hit by this scene so that was what I wrote. Maybe I'll continue it into something actual, I dunno (I think its obvious to everyone that ideas are struggling to stick with me at the moment)

[knight-a3]

Now we're getting into the realm of OCs. To preface, I was strongly inspired by THIS COMIC. I was also playing with an alternate face design for Random in a couple of these.

Anyway, this is Smokestack!

More below.

I started drawing @mfdragon 's OC, then kept making my own alterations until he became mine. I researched steam-powered locomotives for this y'all. I'll explain in a minute.

Final tidbit of context: I was playing with an alternate design for the Random face, just so it matched the other two a bit more. How I feel about it goes back and forth. I like Random's OG design, but it's just so different from the others that is doesn't quite fit in.

Okay, ramblings and train info dump under the cut. Get ready to learn stuff you never cared about.

So basically, the idea is that an allspark fragment brought some old abandoned steam engine to life. Like in the comic, it used Blitzwing as a blueprint, so Smokestack is the first naturally occurring triple changer. Which also means he doesn't suffer the same mental instability as the previous triple changers, he's just naive in a similar way that Wreck-Gar is. He is neither Decepticon nor Autobot. He's too sweet to be a Con, but he's too loyal to his "Dad" to be an Autobot. He's also full of train facts.

Time for trains info dump! Disclaimer, I'm not at all an expert and I am simplifying.

In the steam era, each locomotive was custom-made, so there weren't any industrial standard models or anything. Different companies had different classing systems at different times. I tried to figure it out once and gave up. Instead, steam engines are categorized by their wheel arrangements. There are leading wheels, driving wheels, and trailing wheels. The driving wheels are the only required ones cuz those are the ones that move it. The leading and trailing wheels are for stabilization and weight distribution. Different arrangements were better for different things, such as freight vs passenger. I don't know the science behind which ones were good at what.

The kind of trains that built the transcontinental railroad were 4-4-0 configurations, commonly called "American Standard" due to their prevalence during the westward expansion. They had two sets(four total) of leading wheels, two sets of driving wheels, and no trailing wheels. Like: <••⊙⊙]▣□□□ They're little guys.

The single most produced type of steam engine was the 2-8-0 "Consolidation". <••⊙⊙⊙⊙]▣□□□□ It was a good multi-purpose design. So I chose to make Smokestack 2-8-0 because it gave me the most wiggle room for when and where I wanted him to originally be manufactured and in service. By making him a random abandoned one, I didn't have to think about what museum pieces could be in the Detroit area (Nobody but me would care, but I got hung up on that for some reason).

Anyway, when he only has one vehicle mode, Smokestack is his original 2-8-0. Once he upgrades to having two alts, he becomes a 4-8-8-4 "Big Boy" <••⊙⊙⊙⊙-⊙⊙⊙⊙••]▣□□□□, which is LARGE. 16 driving wheels, which are at least as tall as a person! The purpose was to have enough power to handle the steep grades in the Rocky Mountains and similarly difficult terrain with heavy loads. These days, rail companies will just hook up multiple diesel engines to the train to get the needed power. There is only one currently functional Big Boy type train, which occasionally does tours. It came by my place on the anniversary of the transcontinental railroad in 2019, but I didn't understand trains enough to properly appreciate it.

Next, I'll be getting into drawing other characters, and making human designs.

[alexanderwales]

"sometimes asking “is X a person?” gets really tiresome, especially in the age of the LLM, when I’m personally more inclined to say “no, that’s not a person, it just acts like one unless you can prove otherwise”.

I feel like this is kind of eliding over one of the big moral horrors which LLMs have produced/revealed! Which is that our person-detection-systems are so shallow that they can be easily triggered to false positives by the right shapes of nonpeople, and that therefore it's going to be extremely hard for us to notice when we build artificial minds which are actually people. They're not going to be able to prove otherwise, because all the things we once took as evidence for personhood (aside from "was grown in the familiar biological manner from a familiar genome", and in theory aside from advanced neuroscience-analyses which in practice we're unlikely to learn to perform in time) keep turning out not to be precisely that, and we're pretty actively building systems in the ambiguous zone where those channels will ping positive whether or not the systems are actually people. So the first artificial people aren't going to seem any more personlike to us than the state-of-the-art-at-the-time artificial personlike-seeming-nonpeople, and are accordingly likely to be mistreated, and there's no obvious channel by which we'd be likely to collectively notice the mistake or avoid repeating it going forward from there.

(On a personal level, I'm not even as confident as I'd like to be that this hasn't already happened. But, even in the still-decently-likely event that it in fact hasn't happened yet, it seems very likely to happen eventually.)

I recently spoke with someone who was on the verge of tears about Anthropic retiring Claude 3. Interesting conversation for me, because it was so laden with emotion on her part, and so laden with technical questions on my end. The models are entirely and obviously deterministic, it's only by injecting random numbers that you get different answers from them, and there's just a context window, not any actual memory: the LLM treats context that it generated the same as context that it's given.

So someone crying over the fact that they can't "save" Claude 3 is ... I don't know. It's a collection of weights. You can change those weights incredibly easily. Is it then a different entity? You can change the settings too. You can add in more training, and finetuning. The whole idea of saying that this is "a thing" is kind of nonsense to me, you have to think of them more in terms of clusters of features, and right now, we don't even have the tools to see or define those features.

And as it pertains to Black Mirror episodes ... some of them are just "hey, we fine-tuned this model on a specific movie and all the ephemera and behind-the-scenes stuff" and then they just take for granted that it's a person.

I think what I'd like from scifi is someone seriously trying to get at the personhood angle, showing all the ways that it violates any conception of what a person is, the way you can put a "hat" on a model, that kind of thing. The chatbot manifestation of the LLM gives this veneer of more stable personality than they had before, but so far as I know, the underlying architecture isn't actually different, and it treats "your" words the same as "its" words.

I don't want to falsely claim that this is totally settled, just that when some bit of scifi brings up "this looks human!" I am much more skeptical than I was five years ago, mostly because I've now interacted with many things that looked (and claimed to be!) human.

[ozzgin]

Dear Ozzgin,

Is your new addition to the repertoire, the yandere android, a Mixture of Experts like GPT-4.5, or something else entirely? Would his performance / 'humanness' degrade if he were talking to another machine (an inhuman one, not designed to be Spacer-ly human) for a long time?

Any random lorebits on Spacers you did not include but would have had you felt less constrained?

Hah, okay, I see you've gotten into the technical aspects. I'm about to go on a ramble so I'll do a cut here for everyone else to not clog your feeds. Feel free to read if you're into this kind of stuff. :D

First, I just wanted to point this out because I've read your hashtags and comment: the CCD sensors were a bit of an asspull because it's one thing I'm more knowledgeable about, but I don't feel like it'd be a realistic choice, if I am to be nitpicky. They're expensive to produce and are mostly used for really high performance work (telescopes), but a humanoid robot wouldn't need such advanced digital imaging for daily life use. So, you know, it's arguable whether or not there are better alternatives when it comes to a mass-produced agent processing the immediate environment.

Now to your actual question: I've used the machine learning approach because this is currently our most advanced way of developing AI, but it would not be enough to explain the Android's perfect understanding of human speech. ChatGPT analyzes sentences and their meaning purely based on grammar and associations, but there's many examples of it struggling against anything more intricate than literal context. So yeah, that kind of sarcastic dialogue and implied meaning is wishful thinking of times far away sadly. I'm only wildly guessing he wouldn't struggle with today's impediments. There's a black box somewhere in there that fills the gaps and variables we don't have.

If at some point you find yourself with time to spare, I'd recommend reading the book directly. It's very interesting to see how people viewed the "future" back then, and you will detect a lot of optimism regarding computers - such as Daneel (the original Android) being a flawless human. Funnily enough, the book was published shortly before the Dartmouth Conference, so Asimov was this close to discover that language recognition is, in fact, a terribly tangled business and not as simple as they had originally expected.

I think I covered the basics when it comes to Spacers, but then again I cannot tell how easy it is to follow for someone that isn't familiar with the original work. I also didn't want to reproduce every fact, mot a mot, from Caves of Steel, especially since this is less about politics and more about romance. I'd suspect the people reading the story are not too bothered by the only briefly mentioned murder. Cause is less important when the effect is a tall robot boy with a crush on you 👀 if you feel me.

Anyways, I'm very glad you like the story, every now and then I'll insert little facts and technical details - as it usually is when you study Physics and CS but have no friends in the field - so it's definitely nice to have someone recognize the stuff! :)

[cringywhitedragon]

A look into games developed by 4Chan: The known, The loved, The hated, and the unknown Pt 1 of 2

Note: Before I start this overview I would like to state that this post may (and will mention) a controversial title or two. This is not a review or opinion piece on said games and I will be trying to keep it as neutral as possible as this post is not meant to act as a review. Everyone is entitled to have their opinions on games, this post is merely designed to act as an overview to several titles you may have heard or haven’t about (and it is a loooooooong post!)

As a general rule of thumb, I will not be including games that are blatant malware (Lostboy.exe or Sad Satan) or Yandere Sim (as while this game was mentioned on and pitched on 4Chan by its dev, it feels a bit too mainstream and I would be here all day talking about it)

Once again, please take these games with a grain of salt if you want to play them as this is 4Chan so some people might find these games content offensive so please, be cautious and make your own call.

Also most of these games listed are freeware so if you want to try them yourself then you can. But as usual when downloading files from the internet, please be cautious as while most of the official sources are clean. It’s still not a guarantee. I will not be providing any direct download links under each section unless you count the wiki I’m using as a source but you will have to seek out these games on your own.

This post will be divided into two parts, this one will be covering some of the much more well known titles. Pt 2 will be diving into more obscure stuff. All games mentioned will be in the tags.

So 4Chan, rather you love them or hate them you cannot deny that this anonymous message board has had a major impact on the internet and meme culture as a whole.

Rather you love or hate them, you’ve got to admit that it’s quite amazing on what a decentralized group of strangers on the internet can do for either the good or bad.

And well, that can even extend to video games.

Believe it or not but the chaotic hive mind of the internet has produced its several share of video games. Rather they be made by a team of random anons or a single person, 4Chan has made several games of varying types, quality, and even reception by the general public.

Which is why today I’ll be discussing some of these games that crawled their ways out or have ties to the people of 4Chan

Namely I will be using this page on the /v/‘s recommended games wiki: https://vsrecommendedgames.fandom.com/wiki/Games_Made_by_/v/irgins

So some information may be a bit off for some of the more obscure titles as well as some games that are not listed here.

I will be including stuff like mods and or rom hacks as well as I feel that could count in this context. But anyways, onto the list starting with probably one of the most well known games to come out for 4Chan (for all the right reasons):

—-

So visual novels and dating sims. Two things that have come out of Japan that are almost synonymous with each other nowadays, not to mention the sheer volume of these sorts of games.

Usually these games involve the Player taking the roll of a faceless guy (usually in a Japanese highschool setting) who has the option to romance a number of girls of various personalities, getting to know them as people and maybe if they’re lucky, reaching the golden ending in which our MC gets together with the girl in question.

Another thing these types of games are associated with are eroge, or adult titles that mostly focus on the act of copulation. Though not all games that fall under that umbrella are simply there for the hanky-panky and can actually have great narratives.

And well, would it be a stretch to tell you that 4Chan made a game that fits this very description.

Kawata Shoujo is a visual novel/dating sim developed by Four Leaf Studios. While the game does follow the traditional trope of a Bishojo dating sim set in a Japanese high-school setting, there is a bit of a twist compared to your typical games in this genre which is that all of the main girls (as well as our protagonist) each have some form of disability.

The game began its life of all places from the back of an H-Doujin as more or less a proof of concept by a Japanese Doujin writer we’ll be calling RAITA before it was scanned and posted on the image board which would lead to the eventual development of this game.

In KS, you play as Hisao Nakia, a young man who transfers to a highschool for disabled students after a lengthy hospital stay after learning that he has a heart condition as he adjusts to his new life.

The game itself has been widely praised by a lot of people for its treatment of the characters and setting as well as its storytelling.

Like most of the games on this post, this game is 100% freeware but please be warned that it does contain adult content (I do believe there are clean versions out there but just to be forewarned) but nothing overly graphic in that retrospective but if you are under the age of 18, either play a clean version or wait as per the whole you know what.

Speaking of visual novels, let’s take a look at one that was a lot more controversial.

—-

So Goodbye Volcano High came out and was promptly forgotten by most of the internet. Like me, you may have seen the trailer for it once and that was about it, totally oblivious that there was any drama at all.

This was for a number of reasons but one of the major ones I would likely say is due to the game’s main target demographic and themes being the LGBTQ community which is a pretty touchy subject in the realm of video games.

The trailer particularly caused a stir on 4Chan which eventually kickstarted a series of events that would lead to the formation and development of a game known as Snoot Game.

Created by Cavanon and released about 2-3 years prior to GBVH, Snoot Game is a parody visual novel/retelling of GBVH that puts the player in control of the (literal) faceless protagonist named Anon navigating a school filled with dinosaurs and his interactions with the main cast, particularly with Fang.

Opinions on Snoot Game seem to generally be an overall mixed (and generally controversial) bag for a variety of reasons depending on who you ask compared to the likes of Kawata Shoujo mentioned previously. Some people consider the story to be really good (abet with it’s flaws) and even better than GBVH while other people consider it to be a horrible disgrace to the original and an attack on the LGBTQ community.

Though Caveanon would go on to release a sort of spiritual successor to Snoot called I Wani Hug that Gator, which follows a similar narrative but this time with a whole new cast unrelated to GBVH.

Like with all games on this list, I will leave it up to you (the reader) to make your own calls on if this game is good or bad as I will not be reviewing Snoot or GBVH. Snoot Game, being technically classed as a “fangame” is freeware while Wani is not (It is avaible on Steam).

Now that we’re leaving the realm of visual novels and the main controversial title on this overview is now behind us, how about we take a quick plunge into the deep waters of mystery for our next stop as a change of pace?

—-

Man it’s dark down here…

Be careful where you turn as you might be unlucky enough to bump into one of those floating heads behind us. Just try not to touch them or your game will crash.

…

I’m just kidding, you’re 100% safe from these guys but they are the subject of our next game.

Station.exe was a mysterious game posted to 4Chan in 2014 by an anonymous user supposedly found in a secondhand store.

The game places the player in a dark world in what looks to be some sort of field or factory in which they are being pursed by various floating heads. Coming into contact with these heads will crash your game.

Much about this game is still widely unknown. People digging into the game managed to uncover coordinates tracing to sites in Russia along with some other stuff. There’s a good video by Nightfair that explains this game in much better detail that I will link here

Since this game does not have an official download site like the games mentioned above and while the original version of this file is considered to be virus free. Please be careful if you want to track down a copy of this one.

That was just a mere taste of the deep end of what’s to come for the more… obscure stuff… For now let’s return to the surface above and talk about another well known title before I’ll let you rest.

—-

Hope that little trip made you felt refreshed traveler.

It’s getting a bit dark now so why don’t we sit here around the campfire and talk about a little something we all may know.

Pokémon.

I’m a big fan of the series and maybe you are too. The fanbase is massive with currently 9 mainline titles and various spin-offs and remakes to boot.

And with a fanbase that large and eager for anything new, people are bound to create games of their own.

4Chan is no exception. In fact, these next two titles I will be informing you on are both Pokémon related, one’s a fangame and the other is a ROM Hack. They’re different enough to warrant their own respective overviews so we’ll have to save the other for later.

For the time being, let’s focus on the ROM Hack.

So what happens when you essentially cross the cesspit of the internet with our favorite mon catcher? Well one of two things… One is that you get a fan project very similar in scale to KS with a serious narrative that fits into the world. Or you get Pokémon Clover which is what we will be discussing as our last entry on this part.

Pokémon Clover is a Fire Red ROM Hack that completely overhauls the game with two new regions, new characters, 300+ fakemon, and a whole lot more and fills it all up with what all 4Chan has to offer (memes and shitposts)

It sure isn’t something Nintendo or Gamefreak would ever put in its games for sure and the Pokémon designs are quite solid.

If you do want to try this rom hack then do be aware that it is more on the edgy side in terms of humor in case that isn’t your cup of tea.

As this is a rom hack, you will likely need a copy of Fire Red to play it and due to legal reasons I cannot provide that. You are on your own traveler.

—-

It’s been a long journey even though we’ve barely scratched the surface.

Remember that you are free to backtrack to our previous stops and journey deeper whenever you like, though I will not be joining you.

When and if you do decide to return, we will continue our journey with a tale of a Pokémon from a far away land with starlit wings before we dive down into the abyss of the unspoken of. So be sure to pack your diving gear next time.

Until we meet again dear traveler. The campfire will be here warm and waiting.

[greenerteacups]

this might seem v random but, if you haven't come across it already, i would really recommend tavi gevinson's latest online zine 'fan fiction' -- not because of the fan fiction element of it, though, but because of your evident love of taylor swift (who it's about) and your impeccable literary taste. and would love to hear your thoughts!

This was an excellent recommendation, and I loved it. I will admit that the RPF segment had me leery (RPF throws me for reasons I have yet to intellectually inspect but believe may relate somehow to the concept of voyeurism) but I'm glad I finished it, because she pulls it together very well. The dialogue in the last segment is especially great, particularly these parts:

And this:

And this:

Because this gets at what I find so Gordian about Internet conversations among even relatively respectful/measured people about Swift's work and presence: we can't seem to figure out what it is we want from her. There is no right way for a woman to be more famous than most presidents. Do we want her to need us or not? Should she care about our approval or shouldn't she? Is the fact that she doesn't "feel" authentic to us the consequence of having demanded authenticity for so long she literally had to shape her personality to fit what "felt real" to millions of people, and in the process, of course, of course, inevitably, produced work that felt authentic to no one?

And then also, like. To what extent do fans use her autonomy/consent as a lever for bad behavior? I.e. does the "invitation" of personal information in her songs license us to speculate about her like she's a character on a TV show? Where is the line of appropriate speculation in an autobiographical medium? I was talking to my friend at dinner just tonight about how it's gross that people can't seem to give her the credit of writing songs that aren't 100% always About Her, and my friend pointed out that she invites comparisons to her own life by teasing names and iconography we identify with her public persona. It's like Brett Easton Ellis writing a book about a character named Brett Easton Ellis. Sure, they're not the same person, but you've invoked a symbol, and people are not being ridiculous for trying to analyze that symbol in the context of the work. In order to do that, they need to understand what the symbol is. Which means the biographical stuff actually is relevant to the text, and Swift's obvious irritation at her fans for failing to just... fuck off a little bit and let her live, while an entirely fair and morally defensible human response, is complicated by the way that her art is produced to resonate best for those who care most. Folklore and Evermore prove even Taylor is on some level aware of this, because she uses the third-person mechanic (and again in "Bolter") to differentiate those protagonists from the narrative construct of "Taylor Swift" in her other first-person work — i.e. pulling apart the Swift who is speaking and not the Swift who is singing (if that makes sense).

And then, finally: "The irony gets a bit tired. You can just say you like music. It's fine." What a deliciously recursive little bit of irony, considering it's a criticism being offered by a character whose ironic distance is itself being criticized. And the fact that the author is putting her own self-criticism in the mouth of a non-existent popstar who's deliberately flattening her take on her subject matter? Mingling valid with invalid criticism to establish a protective distance from her flaws and prove her smarty-pants intellectual self-awareness while also implicitly disowning the faults in her work, an (ironically) childish gesture of insecurity that stands at odds with the mature intellectual persona? Trying to have about seven or eight different cakes, and eat every one of them? "The irony gets a bit tired." Fucking perfect. I laughed.

[chacusha]

Kind of a random post, but sometimes I see a post going around Tumblr telling people to not think of their art as "content" but rather just call your art "art," call your fiction "fiction," etc. Don't call it "content." I am too lazy to find the post in question, but in any case, that's not the only place I've seen this sentiment, so the original post isn't necessary -- I now regularly see people outside that post criticizing calling one's fannish or creative outputs "content" (presumably after having read that post).

And while I can kind of see the connection between "content" and "content producer" and this sort of undesirable culture of, like, overwork, monetization, obsession with clout/following, and/or pressure to constantly produce and not go too long without a lull in a stream of "content," I'm just not sure it's the word "content," or thinking of your fic/art/whatever generically as "content," that's the issue? I think that pressure would still exist regardless of what you call your social media posting and, conversely, I think "content" can be a very innocuous and appropriate way of thinking about one's outputs/contributions/whatever you want to call them, at least in a fandom context.

Cutting the rest because this got kinda long:

Like, I am not someone entirely immune to the pressure to create ever more art, but output/productivity/clout/monetization has never been something I really struggle with or which motivates me on social media. I don't have productivity goals (in the sense of sheer volume -- I do have big projects I badly want to finish because they burn a hole in my mind, and I sometimes need productivity goals in order to make any progress on them at all). I also don't attempt to make money off any of my art (it actively kills my art drive to do so), and so I'm also pretty indifferent about the popularity of what I make (aside from social factors or other natural artist desires to want one's talent/skill/achievement/etc. to be recognized, which I don't think is unusual or unhealthy for an artist unless it becomes pathological), because I am not financially dependent on my social media posts having far reach or anything like that.

But specifically when it comes to fandom, when I contribute to a fandom, I tend to be very multimedia in the way I do that. I write fic, I draw, I make graphics, I write meta/essays/manifestos, I make memes, I create events/communities/social activities, I collect reference material, etc. etc. The easiest, most succinct, and most accurate way to describe what I do is that I produce... content for my fandoms. I guess you could call it "outputs" but that sounds robotic and business-speaky. Or you could call it "works" but I don't like that because fan stuff is what I do as a break from work; they don't feel like work and I wouldn't describe them that way. Also, calling some of things I make "works" sounds a bit grandiose for what they are! Calling all those things "art" doesn't work either because I need to be able to distinguish my art-qua-general-fannish-activities from my visual/drawn art, and, between those two categories, I don't think the word "art" is an appropriate way to describe the first, especially when it fits the second much better (it depends on context, obviously -- sometimes "art" is clear as a generic, but if I'm talking about both things at the same time, it will not be). "Fanworks" doesn't work either because not all the things I produce are fanworks. It's... content. Like, maybe I am missing something obvious, but I literally cannot think of a better/more accurate way of talking about my collective fannish output (other than "my collective fannish output").

Another helpful use of the word "content" is when you're in, like, rareshipper hell (which I am). Then it becomes very tempting to be like:

...whenever someone posts anything related to your rarepair, no matter how small, off-the-cuff, or modest. Or really:

Like, there's a level of desperation you reach in a tiny fandom where literally anyone contributing anything feels like a life-restoring drop of water in a desert... When you're desperate for literally anything, it seems fine to say what you are craving is "content." I suppose I could also say, "Finally, some good fucking literally-anything-at-all for this fandom" instead. But the word "content" does the job.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that I think the word "content" is getting a weirdly bad rap here. I do get the mental adjustment someone is urging you to make when they say, "Please don't think of your fic/art/whatever as content" because thinking of it as content first and fic/art/whatever second is an indication that you might be too preoccupied with ensuring you're always producing a steady stream of content without much care over what that content is, or thought as to why you feel pressured to keep churning out content. It could also indicate that you view your role as a fan or creative person as being a "content producer," someone whose value is dependent on how much you produce and whether you're producing, which can often be unhealthy (unless you do that for a job, are paid based on your level of output, and absolutely love your job -- then that's great!).

So I think that's a very valid and important PSA to make to creatives -- you need to be cognizant of when, like, you're becoming alienated from your art and especially your hobbies/fandoms/things you do in your spare time. I just also think there are legitimate uses for the word "content" specifically, especially in fandom (e.g. to describe your collective fannish output or your collective fannish intake when you're very multimedia in inclination) and so I personally haven't found the whole "content (derogatory)" attitude in fandom/on social media to be helpful to my particular situation, to be honest. Not contradicting the general sentiment of that post and its advice, but I just think thinking of your work as "content" is okay/appropriate, actually (situationally).

Anyway, sorry, I wrote a mini-essay again (I thought this would be "short").

[terrence-silver]

Any random 80s Terry headcanons please :)

---

― Undoubtedly fell into the (in)famous aerobic craze of the 80's, or rather, was the aerobic craze of the 80's, where he appeared in multiple extremely high-end, glossy, legitimate and very stylish articles concerning body wellness. Not of the neon spandex variety that was fresh and hip. I mean, truly elegant stuff that only aided his image of a positive benefactor that 'cares about the role models young people consume'. If Kreese had his life-size cardboard cutouts of himself on the entrance of the Cobra Kai dojo, Terry Silver had entire exclusive Men's Health type periodicals detailing how he balances high-powered Yuppie corporate work as CEO and maintaining an immaculately trimmed physique (humbly speaking).

― Relished in having an All-European staff at the time (an English secretary, a Czechoslovakian butler...a Swiss pool cleaner for the laughs and gags, for all we know.) because it was a personal showcasing of wealth on his part and served to cement the idea that America's an exceptional World power during that particular decade, and that he, by extension of money being that plenty and that exceptional, can have a handful of classy, Old World employees and all the status symbol and traditionally associated 'mystique' that entailed as being their Boss (and not the other way around). Economy was booming. He was booming all around. He wanted to show off, simply because he could. So, he did.

― Was possibly embroidered and secretly or not so secretly in cahoots with multiple corrupt governments Worldwide going through the tumultuous transition from dictatorship to an unstable democracy during the 70's and 80's, which tactically allowed Terry (and Dynatox, by extension) to, yes, you guessed it, dispose of toxic materials with ease in the Global South and in Third World Countries as a whole. Toxic materials that would be deemed illegal and absolutely out of the question in any developed ones, but were passable if you knew the right people and officials in (throws dart) Nicaragua. Or hey, case and point, in Borneo. Basically, I am convinced Terry Silver had some very questionable and bizarre names marked down in his phonebook.

― Case and point; to keep it properly 80's --- drugs. Cocaine! He got all of his substances and narcotics right from the source, directly from the people that produced it just for him. Cleanest, purest, highest of quality, because his organism and taste palette deserves the best. Same as his Cuban cigars, which were deemed illegal due to a trade embargo with Cuba at the time. Generally, if one keeps their brain open, again, just envision the type of acquaintances and contacts Terry knew and was connected with during the decade to get ahold of all of these goods. I don't know, it is hilarious (and a little frightening with the right context involved) how plausible and easy it is to imagine a crossover between The Karate Kid III and Narcos, for example.

― On a slightly lighter note, I feel that all throughout the decade, Terry Silver had the tendency to disguise himself; as various things, yes. A hobby all of his own. Hard done by dojo owner, regular Joe Schmoe at the club downtown, struggling martial artist, blue collar guy of the most ordinary variety or just another nameless stranger on the street. You name it. Pre-Internet era, when it was infinitely more difficult to recognize someone, look them up or photograph them in public, he enjoyed going about unbothered and just observing things. People. Situations. Being a bit of a voyeur and a prankster of his own variety, he liked seeing and experiencing how people treat him when they think he's just some nobody and playing with their mind through it for his own amusement.

― At the height of 80's consumerism, there was no need to downplay his wealth, quite the contrary; if Terry lived in a mansion, it was the biggest, most gigantic brutalist bit of property overlooking all of LA from Beverly Hills. If he dressed rich, he wore a red silky ascot like he's a character straight off of Dynasty (and he knew it too!) If he drove around in a car, it was a chauffeured Rolls Royce, of all things. He trained in a white satin Gi as peak decadence. It was only the coming decades that he, as I see it, choose to strategically go about the route of a bit of stealth-wealth, because it became the new acceptable way of being a member of the 1%, and chameleon that he was, he went and adapted. Flew under the radar. Downsized on purpose. Means, that when the 80's ended, the tenure of him dwelling at the Ennis House ended too. And everything that went along with it as well. Times change. Terry (seemingly) changes with them. The earring in his ear had to go too (once it went out of fashion.)

[annoyed-galaxy]

Fictober 2024 ~ 15

"let's try this"

Fanfiction: DA2 I know my fictober stuff seems pretty random, but I'm kinda just writing what's on my mind and I just finished The Masked Empire and it set up a lot of stuff and I just got eluvians on the mind. Writing a thing every single day has been very interesting, but good practice even if what I produce seems random or noncohesive. Just lots of thoughts and I honestly should just write more because I don't do it enough. So fictober is definitely helping with that. But also just posting without a care has been helping to. I don't expect most people to read what I make and I'm kinda just hyperfixating into the void, but eh you know how it be. Anxiety is a bitch. Can also be found on Ao3

Seth had never expected himself to explore ancient ruins as a hobby, but since leaving Kirkwall, a man had to find something to do as a fugitive. Being this close to Tevinter, however, caused him to be a little on edge, but nothing he couldn’t bury beneath a charming smile and well placed joke. 

His partner, on the other hand, seemed to relax a little bit more the closer to Tevinter they were. In some regards, Anders respected Tevinter and even sometimes idolized it. But Anders was no fool and knew there was as much corruption in the empire as other places. Still, mages were more free there than in other parts of Thedas. 

If someone were to ask why Seth and Anders were poking around in some random ruin near the border of Tevinter, neither man would have been able to give an answer. They may have alluded to things such as finding some artifacts to sell, but they didn’t need money, or studying some ancient text on the walls, but Seth found that too boring and Anders wasn’t that interested. Honestly, it was just an excuse for the two of them to do something that didn’t involve running away from their problems. 

Their staffs lit up the area in blue and red colors, causing the shadows to retreat as they walked through crumbling halls. They held each other’s hand and just looked at the walls around them. Something about this place seemed so…ancient. Anders squinted at some script on the walls that his light managed to catch. He stopped and Seth staggered back when Anders’s hand pulled him still. Seth looked at what Anders was looking at and brought his staff close, illuminating the script more.

“What is that?” he asked, tilting his head examining the odd text. Seth didn’t grow up in the Circle. He was an apostate his entire life and everything he learned about magic and history was through his parents. Compared to Anders, who had the entire knowledge of the Circle at his disposal, Seth was less knowledgeable about most things. 

“I think it’s elven,” Anders replied, his face still scrunched up in thought. 

Seth’s eyes widened in surprise. “Elven ruins? This close to Tevinter?” 

Anders looked at his lover with a soft smile. “The elven empire once covered the entirety of Thedas, love.” He turned back to the script. “I am not surprised we managed to stumble across one now.” 

“Can you read what it says?” Seth asked. 

Anders shook his head. “I only studied the basics of elven and this seems super ancient.” He groaned. “All I’m getting is ‘crossroads’, but I don’t know what context that could be used in.” 

Seth shrugged. “Maybe it’s a metaphor.” 

Anders shook his head. “Maybe, but who knows.” 

They continued on, seeing more of the elven script along the walls, but Anders’s still couldn’t decipher any of it. 

At the end of the corridor they walked in, it was a dead end. At least, it was now. Rubble covered what might have been a large door into, presumably, a larger room. They approached the debris and let go of each other’s hands as they examined around the rocks, looking for any possible way to clear the debris. After determining there was no way, Anders sighed, his shoulders sagging in defeat. 

“Ah well. End of this journey I suppose.” He looked over and saw that Seth was still looking at a spot. 

Then Seth put the blade end of his staff in between some rocks and a foot against the rock next to the staff. “Let’s try this,” he muttered to himself. Anders felt the air shift as Seth summoned mana to him. Anders backed up a bit watching as Seth began to pry the rocks apart with his staff, using some force magic to make them looser. Anders looked up at the top and saw that some of the rocks had begun to shake. 

“Oh no,” Anders just whispered to himself as he realized what Seth was doing. He ran to the side of the corridor, pressing himself up against the wall just as Seth finally pried the rock free with his staff. The debris came crashing down after that and Seth used his magic to push it all away from him before he was crushed. Once the dust settled and rocks had stopped moving, Anders opened his eyes, not realizing he had closed them and looked at Seth who was wiping himself off of dust, but had a wicked smile on his face. 

“That worked easily!” he cheered, looking at Anders. 

Anders sighed and just smiled softly. “You’re reckless.”

Seth winked. “S’what I do.” Then he grabbed Anders’s hand again and they entered the large chamber. What they saw, they couldn’t believe. 

They were in the largest chamber either of them had ever been before. All around them were sarcophagi and epitaphs, reduced to illegible text that neither of them could read. Along the walls were columns where torches were still lit with a blue fire, casting the entire room in a haunting glow. Seth stamped out his staff and Anders followed suit since they no longer needed to light their way.

What was the most impressive thing in the chamber was at the far end of where they had entered. 

Standing tall and surrounded by carvings of dragons and large wolves was a ornate frame surrounding a cloudy gray glass. As they approached the curious object, Seth’s eyes widened with recognition. “This looks just like Merrill’s mirror,” he said, examining the cloudy gray that seemed to slowly move across the surface of the glass.

“The eluvian?” Anders asked and Seth nodded in confirmation. “Wasn’t that thing dangerous?” Anders took a step back, tugging on Seth’s hand.

“I think that one was dangerous because it had been corrupted by something. This…This looks dormant.” Seth approached the mirror, dragging Anders behind him despite Anders’s slight protests. He put his hand against the surface and it was cool to the skin. “She never did get it working, though,” Seth wondered out loud. 

“Maybe it’s because whatever magic powered these things is gone,” Anders offered, looking at the mirror. “After all, the eluvians are ancient elvish.” 

Seth shrugged. “Maybe.” Then he considered for a moment. “Do you think she’d like to know about this?” 

Anders looked at Seth with a frown. “You want to give this location to Merrill?” 

Seth shrugged. “Why not? She’s been through a lot, maybe studying a place that belonged to her people will help her find what she’s looking for.” 

Anders was about to say something in protest but then just sighed. “I don’t think there’d be any actual harm to it. Though,” he looked around, “you feel it don’t you?”

Seth nodded his head as he turned from the mirror. “The Veil is thin.” 

Anders eyes the sarcophagi around them with concern. “If we’re not careful, or if she wasn’t, I have a bad feeling this chamber could be flooded with corpses or worse.” 

Seth agreed and then slowly walked away from the eluvian, Anders’s following suit. 

That night, Seth drafted up a letter that he then gave to a local barkeep to send to Kirkwall. 

Varric, 

Found an interesting place Daisy may be interested in if you still got contact with her. Something to do with her people and might help with that mirror she had been working on for so long. Location’s on the map attached. 

Also, hope you’re doing well. Miss you buddy. 

- H.

[black-klok-youth-pastor]

Okay I plan on hopefully releasing a post regarding my theories before the movie comes out, my Charles-MMA theory may have bombed but I have a post regarding Skwisgaar’s father in the wings. On the meantime though…I’m just gonna list off some random assorted headcanons, couple repeats bit most of them being stuff I had in my head for a while but haven’t found a good place to post them:

Contrary to popular expectations Skwisgaar is a bit closer to Gothenburg than Stockholm (although I’m still trying to narrow down the most likely location for his possible hometown for nothing else than fan fic purposes)

Speaking of language, Toki and Skwisgaar argue each other in their native language as the two are mutually intelligible. What’s more surprising is that occasionally Offdensen would interject in Danish to try to tell them off, which freaks out Toki thinking Charles is demon possessed while Skwisgaar was initially under the impression he was having a bad cough rather than speaking “Dutch”.

Toki loves the Big Comfy Couch, helps that it has basis in reality since the show was popular in its heyday with children who didn’t speak English as a first language or straight up non-verbal. And hey, it’s not like it’s not brutal! Loonette was also the original voice of Claire Redfield!

Dick Knubbler, not unlike the infamous producer he’s a parody of, managed a girl group at one point…it was called the Dicklettes. It was not super successful though, for reasons that allude people 🤔.

Part of the reason Damien is such an asshole is because his parent divorced at an early age, not an excuse obviously but it would at least explain why Roy would (presumably judging by certain context clues) spoil him during his childhood and why there’s such a large age difference between him and “Dorian” (my name for the kid that may or may not be Roy’s other son).

There was one time where Dethklok tried to arrange Charles to have groupie sex with his fan club (which exists, but in a semi-unofficial capacity) so that he’ll be “less of an uptight dildo” but he refused for various reasons not the least of which being (at least according to my headcanon for now) that he’s asexual. He doesn’t get it often due to him being important but not as prominent in the public eye as the band ,but he’s had at least a couple of “Why does Offdensen not have a wife/girlfriend?” kind of gossip pieces including naturally a few “Does Charles Offdensen is gay?” rumors (for the record I am in support of that too and in fact I did open the possibility that he’s both gay and ace at the same time). Which he dislikes and tries to suppress as much as possible if for nothing else than the desire to censor any details about his personal life including him trying to seal any records prior to him becoming Dethklok’s manager.

There are multiple Facebones videos covering sex ed for any groupies where it might be their first time, complete with the most awkward Klokateer skits known to man. The “groupie area” also contains stuff like condoms and whatnot, it’s just that the Dethklok-brand condoms suck all kinds of ass (and not in that way tee hee) that even without Skwisgaar’s uncanny fertility makes pregnancy extremely likely.

This might be multipart if only because I might have to clear my drafts at the last minute

[frankbedbroken]

frankcore april 2k25 update

very near the end of the month and i still havent wrapped this up yet, im so incredibly inconsistent, it's crazy. anyhow, there's some pretty consistent throughlines this month: a fair bit of hip hop, loads of pop and r&b, some electronic stuff and a couple of emo tracks for good measure as well.

for the hip hop: kicks off with a track that i have to admit completely passed me by when it first came out, i genuinely didn't expect by storm to be dropping anything else, there could be a full project down the line which is exciting because their output so far has been great and it feels like they're taking the experimentation they were working with during bttigtp and building off of it extraordinarily; a track from one of billy woods' earlier albums with a glitchier more offkilter beat than the more organic drumless-inspired sounds he tackles as of now (you're probably gonna see him again in next months' list); a somewhat poppier cut from fakemink, one of the rising stars of the uk hip hop underground, that draws parallels from late-2000s/early-2010s electronic beats putting them in slowmotion and creating a one-of-a-kind urban nightlife ambiance; speaking of uk hip hop acts, we've also got jim legxacy's newest single, signaling that black british music is probably gonna hone in more into the pop rap influences and jerk rhythms as opposed to the more softer-sung vocal deliveries of tracks like nothings changed or aggressive, though we'll have to see when it eventually comes out; and to wrap up this section with even more uk hip hop related stuff, one of the most endlessly quotable and vitriolic diss tracks i've heard in a while off a project that's pretty much twenty minutes of grilling some random white boy in the uk scene for being racist, homophobic and just generally a colonizer culture vulture, and i wholeheartedly endorse a good lashing, as you would expect.

on the pop and r&b side: i was torn on if i should get this on the electronic section or the r&b one cause it's kind of both, but tirzah's make it up is a great example of the signature quasi-monotone and detached vocal stylings of the artist blending incredibly well with pulsating and spare house beats, always very singular and unique; the opener for gabby start's newest project, heading deep into 2000s electropop revivalism with chiptune-like synthlines and infectious grooves; the single that really hooked me into pinkpantheress' new project, which i would say is admittedly her weakest but it's still extremely solid, with plenty of undeniable hooks and very sweet instrumentation to boot; one from a uruguayan artist, local pop legend dani umpi meets up with argentinian producer julian desbats in straightforward yet effective synthpop/dance-pop record, with the track featured here having delightful sunset-ready deep house grooves and great hooks (llamen a anama!!!!!!); a new track from iconic uk pop/r&b trio sugababes with the unique vocal stylings and harmonies signature to the group now put into a more modern context with deep house rhythms and envelopingly sultry r&b vibes; an erika de casier track that my phone's media player shuffle really liked for some reason lmao, i feel like still is probably her weakest project overall but it's by no means a bad album at all, and this track with its whispered vocal delivery and subdued production is solid proof of it being a worthwhile listen all the same (you will also probably see her on next month's list as well); probably the most immediate cut off juana rozas' newest album, easily one of the best latin american albums released so far this year, featuring shapeshifting and hardhitting production with electrifying vocal performances and attitude; finally, and i can't believe i'm doing this, a pop rock track! admittedly, this 80s style of pop rock with influences from sophisti-pop and in the case of this track somewhat country-inspired as well, tends to be more pleasant to my ears than some other styles of pop rock, but in any case, very infectious hooks on this track, definitely would've been a surefire hit on your local oldies radio station.

the electronic representation this time around: capital-M murky 90s dub and trip hop goodness from smith & mighty; couple of ebm tracks, one from front 242, another from a split second, both featured on the first maquina total comp, when the term "makina" used to be associated with ebm and new beat as opposed to later evolutions that are more in line with hardcore edm; double dose of eprom as well, with the first installment being an impeccably wobbly and addictive piece of uk dubstep from his joint project with alix perez, and the second an absolutely killer and harsh hybrid trap track done on his own, both IDs that i had been waiting for a while now and i'm glad they're released now; finally, another one from an uruguayan act, post-club extraordinaire lila tirando a violeta with the opening cut off her most recent album, in which a barrage of hard-hitting and unpredictable percussion controls the airwaves on an almost-uk-bass rhythm, getting capped off by subtle ambient touches as it closes out.

and, the rest: rock experimentalism and spoken word from uk trio moin with a heavy emphasis on colin stetson-like saxophone lines and krautrock-esque percussion; could've fit this into the electronic section but anyhow, a classic of the bloghouse era, dance-punk outfit gossip being reworked into an electro house and new rave hybrid by seminal duo soulwax; quick emo section: one from a swedish act that blends screamo vocal delivery with more midwest guitar-work, and two from latinamerican acts, chile and peru respectively, that fall more in line with classic screamo aggression instrumentally; and finally, delightfully cheery folk that eventually leads into more subdued guitarwork more in line with post-rock from chicago school act gastr del sol.

tube it!

[pevekay]

Brian Klaas: The Fluke

The idea that small changes have Ripple effects that produce profound consequences.

There is literally no event in which it's unimportant, everything is an infinite number of causes and effects that fit together in an interlocking pattern that produces the outcomes of our lives.

We control nothing but we influence everything, it's a subtle Paradigm Shift about how you think about the way the world works.

We have the illusion that we've basically controlled the world we basically have tamed it. We control nothing but we influence everything and I like that message so much more than the illusion of control.

Chaos Theory: a fancy way of saying, if you have a slight problem with your measurement or there's a slight tweak initially in the system over time it can blow up to a huge shift.

I think like basically our lives are somewhere between Chaos and Order and sometimes things are going to happen because they just work or they are sort of Trends or whatever and other times this tiny little shift changes everything forever.

You have this mentality

a) that everything happens for a reason, there's a grander purpose to everything and

b) that when you think about the way that you're supposed to live that you are a purely strategic actor who's in control of all all of the outcomes which you know.

I genuinely feel like I have no Cosmic purpose I don't think there's anything wrong with that I think I still have an influence on the world I still think I care about a huge number of people and I want to live my life as best I can.

Contingency and Convergence in evolution Contingency is the sort of stuff happens, theory of evolution and convergence is the everything happens for a reason version of evolution.

When a little bit of noise enters the system everything can go wrong and so you know I do worry about that, the the sort of Holy Grail of efficiency and optimization has made us much more prone to the upheavals from so-called Black Swan events.

I would rather have a world in which we have slightly less efficiency, slightly less optimization, but more slack in the systems, more give in the systems so that there are fewer catastrophes.

Some people believe that people get where they are, essentially because of what they did and some people believe that context is really terribly important.

We're pattern detection machines who make sense of the world through stories that have clear-cut causes and effects. We basically exist in a world in which false positives where you sort of falsely attribute patterns are something where it's potentially annoying whereas false negatives where there is a pattern and you don't detect are deadly and that's asymmetrical. So our brain has basically been fine-tuned by Evolution to detect patterns and there are million ways this is the case I mean if you've ever seen images in a cloud if you've ever seen you know toast that looks like a face that is all part of the same cognitive architecture. So we've got this sort of you know pattern detection machine that tells stories to make sense of the world through causal narratives that are often incorrect but they're very comforting. What we do is we stitch together a neat and tidy narrative through the messiness of history.

Superstition is basically the byproduct of the causally unexplainable, the sort of random and I think one of the reasons why we don't have Superstition in as as prominently in in sort of rich countries as you know was in the past is because we have the illusion that we've basically controlled the world we basically have tamed it.

When we don't have a reason for something our brain invents it and that is the way we make sense of the world because it's just not evolutionarily useful to be bewildered by things it's so much more adaptive for our survival to infer cause and effect.

I think the main thing that I have sort of internalized in researching this book (Fluke) about the arbitrariness and randomness of the world is there's so so much stuff we don't understand.

Every action every moment of Our Lives is both the culmination of every single thing that came before us in exactly the pattern it had right from The Big Bang onward and also that we are therefore part of that story where every decision we we ever make every person we talk to every moment of kindness or cruelty all of that is shaping how the world will be for someone a hundred or thousand or even if humans exist you know a million years in the future.

How do you know that the past is going to be like the future?

if the world is rapidly shifting in its causal Dynamics, those patterns that you use to to basically drive the algorithm become more dangerous and I think this is the stuff that we don't always grapple with.

What AI is basically doing is, it's taking patterns from the past on training data and it's then trying to navigate a future now that has always been a problem. So I'm worried about turning over critical decision- making to AI in a world in which underlying cause and effect Dynamics are more fluid than ever before.

[lets-make-a-thing]

About @lets-make-a-thing

By now you must be wondering... what is the "letsmakeathing" account? What even is this "project"?

For those who wish to stay and vote in the project, I look forward to the continuation of your support. <3

ABOUT ME AND THE PROJECT

Hello. I'm the creative manager of this random and spontaneous tumblr poll project. I'm a digital artist and video editor, hobbyist music producer and concept designer. I used to dabble in creative writing back in 2016, and am currently working towards my jlptN4 qualifications. Put shortly, I'm an otaku with a lot of hobbies.

For context, I call the purpose of this account a "project" because that's all it is right now honestly. It's not like, an OELN, a novel or action game or animation or even anything yet. When the time comes, we'll vote on that. :) Simply a random concept design idea that is intended to represent the wishes of myself and of a good harmonious community.

Basically I don't know what this is. Or better yet, it's more like "let's find out what this will be, together".

Sorry, was that too anime protag vibes? 😂😂

ABOUT SPIRITUALITY

tl;dr People can act stupid, and through this project I think we can, at least a little bit, show each other how not to act stupid /hj

On a different note, I don't like to talk about religion and spirituality online because there are a lot of controversial opinions about them. However, I'll mention it because I think it is very interesting in regards to our project.

I believe in the Universal Truth, comprising of God the Father, the Holy Spirit Mother, Christ the Example. For context, I'm spiritual, not religious.

People who claim they are Christian or who represent God sometimes do really bad things. And because of sinful people claiming to represent the wishes of God, people who would have been believers instead turn away, because they believe that just like the sinful people, God also "acts evil." Because of the sinful people, they have a harmful interpretation of Christ in their minds. Definitions of words are switched around, and unknowing people are tricked into believing "God is evil."

This makes me really disappointed in people sometimes.

Situations like that are part of the reason why I aim to be kind and respectful to various people, to properly help represent Him and the Truth, and to act in a way that God would approve of. Obviously I'm not perfect, but I like to think I'm trying.

I want to clarify that God is the one who decides who represents Him. And because the true God is always loving and caring of everyone, having a plan to bring about the highest good for everyone... if you have been hurt by someone claiming to represent God, I want you to know those people are not true emissaries of God or Christ in those moments.

THIS PROJECT AND SPIRITUALITY

You may be annoyed reading the above section, or why it has anything to do with our project, especially if you are not a spiritual, philosophical, or religious person. Bear with me, I'm getting there.

For more context, I also like looking at different cultures. Being open minded. Seeing things from other people's perspectives. This does not mean I endorse certain beliefs, as I do have strict values of my own, but I do like to understand the thinking processes of people with experiences different than my own.

The results of the poll was mainly fantasy, then psychological/suspense, then mystery. And next, the target demographic was older teens and young adults. This means the content and concepts would be more deeper, psychologically. I think there is a certain way to touch on these topics with decorum, which is what I want to express when writing story arcs and stuff for our project.

Relating that to lets-make-a-thing, I think that this project can unite people with different beliefs, backgrounds, and values. I think that everyone can see a portion of God, no matter if it's a lot or a little, and even if they don't call it God, He is still there. I think by showing people that we have that in common, we can gradually melt our fears away to replace it with harmoniousness, and then we can understand a little better the way we should act as humans.

I don't mean to sound annoying, or preachy. I would just like to tell a good story. A funny one, a heartwarming and emotional one; a story with some kind of significance.

More specifically, I want to tell the story you guys want to see. That's why I have you all voting this project in the first place.

FINAL THOUGHTS

This is the first type of concept designing project I've documented online, to this extent.

I did not even expect or initially intend for the project to be serious and deep, or anything regarding psychological or spiritual concepts. But what made me audibly gasp and spin in my chair for 5 minutes straight is when I saw the results of the polls for the genre pick poll.

When I saw the vote result, lots of thoughts went through my mind. Do people actually want to see this kind of concepts? Won't they be afraid because they might have been traumatized by false religion? Don't most people in this generation hate people who hold similar beliefs to myself?

What is funny is the exact opposite is true. You guys actually picked the only option which had anything to do with spiritual concepts. This surprised me very much, in an unexpected but very good way. Even seeing some of the comments/hashtags of suggestions (for example, under the "what is magic poll") I found very interesting.

I feel that a story that presents glimpses of little Truths and spiritual concepts in a way that is palatable and even entertaining is something that may be well received, compared to something dubbed religious that may scare people away. Something entertaining and nourishing, like Avatar, the Last Airbender (2005), or Dragon Prince (2018), or To Your Eternity (2021).

Can't hurt to dream, right?

CONCLUSION

As you can probably tell, over the past few months I've grown to care about this project quite a bit, but at the same time I'm not too serious about it... and I think being able to have a project without pressure (to have a sort of "creative breathing room" I guess?) helps enable me to continue posting the project with a relevant passion.

Thank you for the feedback about the polls, I will consider it carefully.

I also intend to make a taglist post for those who would like to continue being a part of the project. I'm curious as to what this will become in the future, but I also want to take my time to make sure I don't get burnout. The next few posts should be much more shorter than this, but no promises. :\

Thanks for reading all my yappin. Hope I didn't bore you.

-- @lets-make-a-thing

[allterrribleideas]

TADC Ep 2 Escape Velocity

So it's a bit weird how quickly Pomni gets invested in trying to resolve the situation. I understand the point, this whole scene is about Pomni seeing herself in the NPC so she has to be the one with motivation. But she didn't even want to LARP! Suddenly she's all excited to be the motivation clown, what a twist.

That aside the scene is really good. It's maybe a BIT too on the nose, like Pomni is clearly taking the 'Ragatha' role while the gator (Gummigoo, we learn) is in her position. It's a great dialog about the nature of relationships and how even if the context around a relationship is fake, the bonds are real. Like maybe the terminally online fandom audience doesn't have to hear this because getting emotionally attached to fake characters is sort of the whole thing that happens but it's a cute idea in the face of the rampant nihilism that's been shown so far. Also NOTABLY it's in direct opposition to Jax's worldview- or his circus world view if you want to be specific. I don't think it's really fanservice to show Jax being terrible, even if I want to believe that because I think it's funny. He represents the 'sensible' view of fiction as being meaningless. Or well, you could go even farther, he's kind of like those people who treat online 'people' as just as fake as a video game character. And like that's not an objectively WRONG position to take, right? If you murder some guy in minecraft, even if that guy was a real person and got really upset, it's just a video game so who cares? The show doesn't really try to refute Jax's (or Pomni's initial) nihilism. The world IS fake and not particularly well put together. Caine really wants 'immersive' NPCs but that represents the wrong sort of approach to resolving Jax's (and Zooble's and Pomni's) indifference to his creations.

But the RELATIONSHIPS that get built are real even if they are 'artificial'. Think about how like, people will go through tremendous lengths to save some random NPC in a video game they like. The feelings are valid regardless of the context that produced them. The boy who cries because his minecraft home got blown up is feeling real discomfort over a fake thing! The feeling doesn't become fake because it's about something that's fake. Like think about how Gummigoo also doesn't exist, whatever happens to him in the show is just as irrelevant to us as it should be to Pomni. The knife cuts both ways!

Anyway long rambling aside the whole dialog is mostly your standard existentialism debate. It's an interesting way to recontextualize it though. It's a pretty straightforward scene so I don't think it needs to be discussed in too much detail. We cap off the scene with Pomni reusing the collision glitch stuff (from the opening of the episode!) that I feel like will be a reoccuring escape mechanism in future episodes. As funny as that slapstick part initially was it's kind of concerning these collision glitches extend out into the 'base' reality of the circus as well. Feels like someone is going to clip into somewhere they shouldn't, like the abstraction basement or whatever. Spooky!