#recursive writing processes for recursive stories

[as-snow-falls-on-desert-sky]

Sometimes being a writer is just listening to the same song over and over staring at the same 500 words for like 3 days straight.

[royalnugget42]

The God of Stories and the Nowhere Man

A Post-Canon look at the characters if Loki

In the years (weeks? decades? seconds?) after the birth of Yggdrasil, there was no mention of the TVA in any part of history. Such has always been the case. The TVA prides itself on anonymity and secrecy, almost as much as it values bureaucracy.

The same cannot be said of some of the figures involved.

———

Also majorly fuck Disney corporation for funding genocide. Go here to support humanitarian aid for Palestine.

B15 has a seat in the war room, defending Loki’s branches against the coming storm. Incredibly skilled tactician, yet humble enough to seek counsel from others, it isn’t long before she’s the de facto head of their little council. She insists that no one stand on ceremony though.

Casey, for his part, finally decided to look into his past. Reading history pages and conspiracy theories about his sacred timeline self is a little unnerving, but also very cool. In his branch he was Frank Morris, a criminal mastermind and an incredible escape artist. He’s always been a desk worker, but even if he never does any field work, he’s gained the confidence to become a proper analyst, a spiritual successor to Mobius.

O.B is recursive as always, but after finally leaving his basement level room, he came up with some improvements to the TVA headquarters. Their tech is now more reliable, their processes more streamlined and efficient, and the wifi has never been faster. He publishes the second edition of the TVA handbook. Victor Timely works well with him, and also suggests that they make better temporal radiation suits, even if they hopefully won’t have to use them anytime soon.

Most of the hunters still haven’t read the new guide, but Casey finally works up the courage to ask for an autograph. O.B writes his phone number as well. Of course, neither of them actually have phones, O.B was trying to be romantic, but the gesture goes over Casey’s head for a bit. Eventually they figure it out. O.B takes him to a bookstore.

Brad is left to go back to his own version of the timeline, but it’s bittersweet. He can’t forget the faces of the people who were depending on him in that cube. Can’t help thinking that it should’ve been him in there, not Dox. They all still exist somewhere on the timeline, but it’s not the same. They’re not coming back in a way that matters. When he goes back to being an actor he uses as much money as he can on humanitarian aid and charitable donations. It doesn’t erase the screams, but they get quieter.

Ravonna is lost at the end of time, and constantly on the run from various Lokis that she pruned a long time ago. Alioth never hurts her though. Even though she stood before it, choosing death instead of a life constantly on the run, it passed over her like a normal mist. In her heart she knows it’s Loki. She thinks he’s being vindictive by letting her survive. Eventually she’ll learn that he’s being gracious, allowing her the chance to change. She reminds him so much of himself sometimes.

Sylvie works at the McDonald’s, and it doesn’t pay much, but she never cares about it. What she wants she can summon or enchant someone into getting it for her, and what she doesn’t want she just doesn’t bother with, because she doesn’t have to anymore. She doesn’t have to do anything she doesn’t want to do ever again. She smiles. Maybe she’ll go on a date or something. Maybe she’ll go on vacation just for the Hel of it. There’s something so beautifully divine in being a creature of habit, a goddess of chaos finally settled, like a puzzle piece rattling into place. Privately, she calls herself the goddess of freedom.

All of them find their places, and make names for themselves, but their stories do not reach far, by intention. They are little things, twining with the rest of the branches.

There are two that find themselves in many branches; The God of Stories, and the Nowhere Man.

The god of stories is an ornate title, and a little dramatic. It’s accurate though. He weaves the lives of many into new branches, shifting with each misplaced footprint. The sheer multitude of the branches is their protection; The Conqueror won’t find them if he doesn’t know where to look.

This weaving has consequences though. One of the branches Loki touches is near the genesis of his own people. Heimdall is there, and he sees the tree, and its branches, and all the nine realms. It bothers him that he cannot see into the center, but alas, some things are beyond even his sight. He knows someone is there, though, and the legend grows in Asgard of the one who sits in the world tree, spinning the threads of fate into stories. Over time, the legend turns into the three frost giantesses known as the Norns.

And he is not idle in his throne either. At length he discovers that he can leave his seat at the center of the tree, but it’s dangerous to do so. His power is tied to the tree, and without him it begins to wilt again. It’s a while before he can leave it for more than a few seconds.

He manages though, and even while separated from the tree he can reach into the fabric of the branches he travels, unwinding them and twisting them as he sees fit. Legends arise around New Asgard that the brother of Thor has returned, with an unknown power in his hands. SWORD looks into it, but they find nothing out of the ordinary. Darcy looks into it and finally meets Thor’s brother. She slaps him, like Jane Foster once did, but she grows to like him eventually. They bond over a shared love of snakes.

And he doesn’t always appear as…himself. Sometimes the god of stories is herself, or theirself. They’ve appeared as a snake, a wolf, and once as a horse, but that story doesn’t need to be elaborated on. The snake is most common though, and some begin to call him Jormungandr. The world serpent.

Eventually Steven Strange takes an interest in whoever has been crawling through the multiverse. Loki drops him in a perpetual fall for an hour, and Strange decides it’s none of his damn business.

Legends of these types have echoing similarities. Solitude is their main theme, occasionally countered by the figure of the nowhere man.

Some stories say he’s the only one who dares to stand against the god of stories. His fate is his own after all, because he exists in no time at all. No story to twist, no time to pause, a Mobius, with no end and no beginning. Once they learn of him, they decide that he must surely be the greatest adversary of Jormungandr. Loki, for his part, finds it absolutely hilarious.

Other types of stories do crop up, though. The nowhere man walks among the people, and can erase your fate with a mere touch. Relentlessly the Norns pursue him. Some say it’s because the god of stories wishes to have his fate pulled away from him, like stars into the void. Some say it’s because Jormungandr craves total authority, and only when he consumes the nowhere man will he be sated. Some even say that they’re partners, companions, a yin and yang of sorts. They say that without one, the other would fall to ruin. This version of the tale emerged after too many instances of someone threatening Mobius where Loki could hear them (and if they’re on one of his branches he can always hear them loud and clear).

The Nowhere Man is a being of pure chaos. The God of Stories is order incarnate. The two of them cackle about the reversal of their roles, as they walk the branches of Yggdrasil. They laugh together often these days, and these days are now all the days, for all time. Always.

[sea-changed]

hey hi how bout that directors cut commentary on the sources behind your liebgott fic. open ended q would love to hear literally anything abt your process. uhh eyes emoji

<3 <3 This is a completely delightful but also extremely dangerous message to receive; that fic occupied my whole mind for a while there and I have so (too!) many thoughts about it.

A lot of the research I did for this fic I did without knowing I was doing research for it; stuff that ended up in it came from a whole patchwork of sources. Books, fiction and non-! Documentaries! Museum exhibits! TV shows! Movies! My goal for the fic was for it to be as nearly structureless as possible, to capture something of the recursive, time-is-out-of-joint-ness of PTSD; this did not fully succeed but it did allow me to be almost modular in putting it together. I didn't structure it out at all until I was over halfway through the writing process; before that I was just writing section after section in a doc, and so I could incorporate ideas pretty much as I had them, without worrying about how a segment was going to fit into the overall structure. There was no structure! So if it fit the themes, it was allowed in.

The format itself was inspired by a few different things: in rough order of when they entered into the process, they were a) my memory of Slaughterhouse-Five (I didn't actually reread it until I was nearly finished writing, and it had been many years, so it was very much the memory rather than the thing itself.) (At first, semi-jokingly, the summary of the fic was going to be "Joe Liebgott has come unstuck in time." And I still might write that fic, tbh.) b) quigonejinn's Marvel fic, which I also have not reread in many years but had a huge impact on me and how I think about writing and structuring fiction (the dream segments throughout the fic are a complete homage) and c) reading Catch-22. The high of experiencing Heller's ability to control and corral the chaos of his timeline, while letting that chaos be integral and indeed inextricable to the story he's telling, is what launched me back into writing this fic when I had more or less fizzled out on it for a couple of months.

In terms of more concrete sources, of course you're well aware of the reverberating influence of Studs Terkel, both very directly and more nebulously. (I even followed him as a style guide! That's why "army" and "kraut" aren't capitalized.) The PBS documentary GI Jews I found fascinating and valuable in reinforcing some things I'd already been thinking about regarding Liebgott and introducing new facets to my thinking. The part about the USO workers handing out comic books and candybars to returning soldiers (and the soldiers' reactions to that) is something Michael C. C. Adams mentions in The Best War Ever; the section with Skinny's letter was inspired by Ambrose (loath as I am to give him credit for anything).

A lot of other stuff was, as I said above, pretty piecemeal. The scene where he punches the man at the drugstore is from The Best Years of Our Lives; the part about him reading comic books at the drugstore is from an oral history; I got part of my Kaddish transliteration from Angels in America; the part about transferring to a segregated train is from a story my grandma told me; I did a whole deep-dive figuring out where his family might live in San Francisco and discovered that in the early to mid-20th century the Jewish neighborhood and (one of) the Japanese neighborhood(s) were in fact right next to each other, which inspired a couple of lines. &c. &c.

[theshepherdshound]

Oh my turn! 16, 3, 4 and 17 for your lamb and 2, 13, 4, and 19 for Narinder. 20 in general for your Au

OO MANY okay

#3 What was the first thing you decided on, the character's name, appearance, personality or their role in the story?

the lamb was fully just named Lambert and was basically nothing in particular for a long time- they didn't have a ton of personality until i drew them. they used to be a lot more gentle and are now a lot angrier

i said this in the other ask but appearance is usually what comes first so the fact i had about 75k words about this character before they looked like anything was WEIRD and unprecedented tbh

i have a terrible habit of lack of planning and will often just write until it stops making sense and then go back and try and fix it. i wrote a game this year that i decided would be recursive about half way through the 2 week jam which was... not great. i also wrote it fully in my IDE which i would not suggest anyone do but??? i guess it made sense to me

#4 And reverse, which one of the four things did you struggle with the most?

i always find names hard. i really didn't want to name the lamb so i took Lambert and was like cool that's fine. it is no longer Lambert, well like it is but it's their outsider name for non-sheep, though i am not entirely sure what it is or if i will ever really decide or simply give myself an out on it so i don't have to

#16 Is there any memes or running jokes associated with the character, both in- and out of universe?

internally yes, narinder and them bicker about definitions of things bot in nice ways and not so nice ways. i don't think they do yet though. they also juggle things which doesn't come up for a long time but they fiddle a lot

externally i don't think so? tbh no one i know really plays cotl (one friend did and she was like i literally never think about lore) so for about a month i just sat down and wrote a fan fiction for the first time since i was like 11 because i got very sad about someone dying and needed to like externally process a bunch of it and also played post game. i kind of just sat down and wrote for 6-10 hours a day depending on if i was working that day or not filled with art ghosts

i've never been part of a fandom so i don't really have any meme jokes about any of the characters beyond what i have posted-

#17 Are there any motifs or symbols associated with the character? How are they represented, in their design, personality or in some other way?

YES, many! visually the lamb's is the distinction between their 'tired' and 'bright' eyes being X, the colour blue, and their transparency. largely they don't see themself as being a person anymore, so especially their skin tone being the same colour as the background is them not really seeing themselves, the eyes are just fun and a simple visual metaphor

BUT- the colour blue is distinctly not narinder's red and that is very important for lore reasons

they are associated largely with being a beast of burden, they take on others' problems long before their own. when they first take care of narinder they have to be told to go clean themselves after spending time thoroughly making sure he'd be comfortable sleeping, they don't even think to wash the blood from their hands when they drag him back from Anura even though they dress him. they take on everyone else's problems and refuse to deal with their own

while not super distinct in writing, their eldritch eyes appear near their eyes because they refuse to see what's in front of them and it is causing a lot of problems for those they're supposed to be caring for. they've a pattern of denial

#2 How long was the process before the character reached its final version? (or a version that would be clearly recognizable as the character?)

i think narinder has always kind of been the blackhole the whole au orbits; i find it really fascinating how folks interpret why he's angry. to me a few things inform why i think he's a tragic character and it started with simply you betray him. he promised you nothing, only to sojourn the lamb's life and it's pretty clear the entire time you're expected to sacrifice yourself at the end. i could ramble about that dynamic forever and the design choices therein tbh

but like... why? why did he attack his siblings? why did he develop a resurrection ritual? there's all the tiny single lines that sort of point at interpretations and the dynamic between shamura, narinder, and aym and baal wormed into me (and the other siblings but to a lesser extent). i had been having a lot of extended discussions about intergenerational grief so the trickling down of trauma rolled into narinder's development pretty immediately. there's a scene near the end where he and shamura talk about something it's like... one of The Ones that existed in the beginning but is really so hard to write because of how real it is in terms of being like... life isn't like stories? i don't know if that makes sense

his bleeding heart motif added a lot i think; the simply addition visually buffed a lot of the sharper edges around him while the lamb became more spiky. but overall he kind of walked out similar to how he is now

#4 And reverse, which one of the four things did you struggle with the most?

making him like... distinct? he definitely has a personality; a level of entitlement, an intentional ruthlessness, previous relationships. so i guess taking that in a direction that felt honest to what i thought it would be like to trapped like that for an unknowable amount of time. that holding both this doll character and the original pieces of him was weird and then it connected to my undergraduate thesis interpretation of Hermes and he became a bit more clear in terms of motivations

like- he did all those things, all the bad ones hinted at. he hurt a lot of people, killed a lot of people, he has to live with that once he walked out of being in constant agony and tried to be a person. that journey has a lot of pieces that were hard to work out

#13 Do you have a voice claim for the character? What do you imagine the character sounds like?

for a long time it was Cook Boss88's voice! i also think of okkoto's voice from princess mononoke, so keith david. in another version of himself i think narinder is a lot like okkoto- stoic, a bit self-important, and desperate to survive in the end no matter who it kills- but won't back down in a fight

narinder also does, eventually, sing! ebucs is kind of how i hear his voice

#19 What is your general favourite thing about the character? What is your least favourite?

i like that he is actually desperately sweet and romantic- but also has no idea that he is. he just kind of... never had a nice time in relationships, and his familiar ones didn't give him the space to be kind. there's little scenes we've already seen where he loves talking to heket, or reads kallamar to sleep, or plays with leshy- while we haven't seen it yet the lengths he goes for shamura. he likes being wanted and needed, but never learned what a boundary was and that didn't work out very well for him. i think the fact that he has so far to go and relapses into old habits a bunch, but gets to be happy in the end

while the lamb knows it he doesn't yet but they treat each other how they wish they'd been treated. all he ever wanted was someone to help him figure out THE STUFF with heavy gestures to lore, but even though he tries so hard to deny them he can't help but let it bleed through. he doesn't want them to be scared of what's happening to them like he was- and he doesn't know that about himself

i don't like the sticky hurt part of him; the one that is sharp, and schemes, and attacks. i don't like the part of him that's manipulative, that laughs along with abuse, that calculates the ways he can build advantage- the part that is dead and numb and he had to strangle. the fact he accepted that he's just a thing and nothing else. and i know why it exists- i made it so; he had to survive. and he has, a lot of things, a lot of unpleasant ones that required him to build that skillset. but that's the point of the two of them- they did what it took to survive. and surviving isn't always clean, or nice, or kind, and both of them did so... they have to live with it

5 songs that i think are most representative of him;

bright lilli furfaro mind brand kuraiinu dj-jo story one the narcissist's cookbook codeine coca cola by amélie farren cocaine and abel by amigo the devil

#20 Bonus question: share any additional thoughts, art, favourite scenes, anything you've been waiting for a chance to ramble about

A MILLION THINGS- it is a super fascinating process for me who has largely worked on the other side of this type of thing and never get to talk about what i am working on because games is super cagey (and tbc, with very good reasons), but it's really cool to work on a thing i can like put a poll up and be like hey what do you think, does this make sense? that is immensely cool, and while i wouldn't say i regret not joining a fandom before this it is very lovely

i'm still unsure on how it will end- there's at least 2, but i think 3. i don't really know what to do and so maybe i will simply leave it up to interpretation or write all 3, i'm not sure. one of them is definitely enemies to friends to lovers to friends to enemies but i think that one is mostly silly. i think if i were to rewrite thing i may not make it narilamb because i do think they're better friends, but writing their cozy scenes also makes me very sad in a nice way so. they get to happy

i wish i could know what breadcrumbs people have picked up on- or what is clear or not. if i could i'd tip all they thoughts out and they could all be written but the ghosts calmed down and now i just need to finish lololol

they're really kiki and bouba! narinder is spiky visually but has a soft doughy heart, and the lamb is puffy but internally sharp. i think that's really fun, and something i like about their designs a lot. i do think i will steal them for ocs in monster game, but the way they appear in the narrative is likely going to be different from the outline i made because no narinder spot exists- a lamb one does quite neatly so. i'll file off the serial numbers whenever this is done

enjoy this pre-vis dev never posted picture of them where i did in fact try and draw clothes and i don't like;

(it's fine, but i am glad i got looser on drawing again and gave them a lighter and easier series of designs) ((but they have been sad the whole time LOLOLOLOL))

tyty for asking me many questions- i appreciate being able to ramble

[onebraincell-itmiebcraft]

Liveblogging real life part 2: Joel (it's been 12 13 days) (already watched)

Okay so maybe we'll do the liveblog-every-five-minutes-unless-something-crazy thing also idk if I should link this up to my intro post (idk how) or reblogged my og one with this oh well we'll figure it out why am I eating AGAIN doing this

I got inspired after rewatching secret life my beloved for the umpteenth time :P

Okay ep. 1/finale is hilarious and new "series" 😭

Joel why did you point out the cursor I can't take my eyes away

First batch

Joel jumping then immediately keeling over in nausea:

Idk how to respond to that but it struck a chord within me, how true

BigB wholesome waving but it also looks like his arm is BENT I can't get over VR arms man 😭

Punching BigB because he's so tall is so real tbh + love the smash cut to Gem being salty

Headpatting + baby-ish voice "little gem/Ren/skizz" what a gentleman makes me think of the try not to cry challenge or Jimmy's crazy christmas series where he says Joel is a crybaby and Gem says he's a romance guy in a mental gymnastics train of thought

Grian throwing his head back from the outside?! Cryptid behaviour

The real life vids don't make me motion sick but Joel making retching and vomiting sounds does NOT help it makes me sick by proxy or something I hate being disoriented and nauseous too buddy

There's probably a video out there of someone comparing regular mc to vr because vr just hits different like proportions wise

Joel noises

Love this Joel-Gem duo already idk how to describe it just fun

Also Joel having to process out loud he won't throw up on Gem I remember playing Richie's plank experience or whatever years and years ago shit was REAL

Joel's inventory becoming disorganized with things that can be stacked together :(

Hey what gem said kinda reminds me of what grian said :D at the end of his episode awful :DD

Poor Joel he's battling his height complex alongside his motion sickness (rip bozo poor little meow meow)

I think almost everybody had the problem of facing the wall dude, it's okay it's very silly

Water foreshadowing (he will swim with his future gang and become incredibly sick)

Geminislay that pig

Wait till Joel learns about lying down‼️‼️

JOEL STOP MAKING NAUSEOUS SOUNDS I'M GONNA FROW UP 👹

"...Falling in powdered snow" kinda reminds me of this short story I read in grade 9 English class "The Bamboo Trap" protag fell in The Bamboo Trap™ and got bitten by big ass spiders or something the idiot, also I think got published in the same anthology as the most dangerous game 👊

Joel admits to weakness

Weird ass snow, someone built this or something?

Joel with his arms out looks so silly, so does gem

Oh gem how graceful with the figure skating history 👊👊👊✌️👉✌️✌️🤜🤛🤛🤜🙏

Lol they learn about the wrist chat

Second batch

Jimmy, oh iconic Timmy

Shield (why did I write this again?)

Bi shoes, love seeing gem's skin wearing the bi shoes I forget about it every once in a while and when I see it again it's a pleasant surprise

Vr players learn to pvp

When you use the shield to block in first person it looks kinda stupid dude

Campsite vibes tbh, I really like it.

Bee spotted 🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝 what is it doing

Shaky controller cursor over top chest plate I feel you

Falling irl indeed (recursive mention about plank)

LOUD holy moly Joel is loud (not negative)

Healf being something people can't look at at all times is actually a kinda funny mechanic

Smajor friendship aww when will they team up (did I forget about a series)

The poor beg for bread, we live in a society ✊😔

Grian killing??? Since when??? (Sarcastic)

Batch three

Peace and love is why they haven't died yet 😘

Arms again! Weird looking things

Hand gesture reminds me of that one diamond scar short with etho's greedy "I want the diamond" voice

Flint and steel? Weird looking thing

Omg red club looks like bugs, the way the trio gossips about them ♥️

Right no out messages...

Can't believe the most motion sick man gets in the water not once but TWICE this ep

Does he know

Where did the horse thing come from

Can't remember if I mentioned this but when the sword swings without critting in VR it looks so silly it pokes

A bugs life: the sequel

Club: deadly euphemism

Sword 😐

Something about jimmy doesn't get burnt...

Why is Jimmy jiggles the only one with a wooden sword???

Strong words from a man on the verge of mania 👀

Lol knowing impulse breaks the ground under Joel big brain man going for the kill

Something about the disappointed way Joel says "scar!" And scar stabbing him in the first caused this

Tim is so British he says "get in" so much

Joel, again exasperated, cries out "where's all my stuff?!"

Funny Minecraft men, my favourite funny Minecraft men

My god seeing from Joel's perspective his second death is from zombie

I think Joel was about to saying bluming + the cover behind house + the constant begging for his stuff back + violence as an answer (he hits men)

4

Oh scar up to no good again

JOEL GETS IN THE WATER AGAIN!!! MOTION SICKNESS WIN!

Joel and scar just did mitosis stop being scared of biology 🙄

What was Mr solidaritygaming doing in that hill and said yes to did he finally get iron?

Aw the silly arm motion I love greeting people with spirit fingers reminds me of that

GOON SQUAD?! (neuron activated)

Famous moment

Oh more famous moment here comes the smallidarity kiss

Love Tim's body language once again the sharp smooth head turn to grian he's like a cartoon character

(what grian mean they are suited and booted he cut this part out I don't remember the other povs 😢)

Leave it to solidaritygaming himself to be the most homoerotic straight man there is of course + Joel is still patting him on the head? + Timsel being cringefail needing to jump multiple times on ONE BLOCK + Joel did NOT need to lean that much he looks like he's powered by springs + Jim's arms always being so tight together. Makes him. Look like. An old granny??? + Joel IMMEDIATELY checking his wrist afterwards like it's a Tuesday and he's on break + homophobic GRIAN + impulse's dad delivery one liner

The more I watch smallidarity kiss the more bizarre and asinine it becomes to me 😀

When did Joel learn to button jump (he WAS mental for jumping irl irl)

Okay Joel cut out that canary comment why don't you 🙄🙄🙄

WHACK 💀 SHAKE YOUR HANDS REAL FAST 💀💀 JOEL SCREAM #3997 💀💀💀

Fond of Joel's cadence of saying "hello guys!" And "I'm coming in boys!" And "HAHA!" oddly musical

Okay aaaaaaand he dies worst ranking ever good for him the end

Idk if I should liveblog scar next or watch Ren because I've already watched up to skizz + me 'ead 'urts oh well

[woodswolf]

🌿🏜️🔪🪲?

writer's truth or dare ask game

🌿 ⇢ give some advice on writer's block and low creativity

honestly? just don't be afraid to step away. sometimes you're not in the right headspace for a project and that's okay. work with your brain, not against it - whether that's on a different WIP or just taking a break for a while. sometimes this means the WIP sits for a little while. sometimes this means you abandon it. roll with the punches, don't dodge into them.

like for example, i've been having One Of The Weeks Of My Life at my job recently and just feeling really burned out and depressed on the Major Fucking Crunch Time this project is getting into. i didn't feel like working on chapter 5 when i was feeling that terrible, but i was able to channel some of that energy into a side story. i've barely started it as of yet, but it's got a lot of potential, has required a lot of research, and just. it's helped burn off a lot of the negative emotion (because it involves a very similar kind of negative emotion and focuses on a kind of burnout recovery. lol)

🏜️ ⇢ what's your favourite type of comment to receive on your work?

long analysis comments are like the #1 kind of comment to get in my good books. i get an excuse to talk about Fun Details whether intentional or not and just generally feed information to someone who isn't fully aware of all of the complexities of a project yet (usually my partner lol)

however.

i personally consider that the highest honor i could ever receive would be recursive fanfiction. fanart as well, yes, but fanfiction in particular. it's more or less a reflection of my own process in a way; i write a lot of recursive fanfiction relative to my output, but i only write recursive fanfiction about fanfiction that really, really resonated with me, or that often were incredibly formative to me in their own specific ways. it's not enough for it to be a good story - it has to change something about me, alter my perspective or open my eyes to an entirely new world. often these end up feeling like (or just being) treatises on a particular subject; there are fics on hope, on grief, on forgetting, on becoming monsters. and it's just.... it's powerful.

i could link all of these if anyone is curious.

🔪 ⇢ what's the weirdest topic you researched for a writing project?

honestly all of the research i've done for DLD and other fics in the DLDCM (Dogs Leading Dogs Cinematic Multiverse) qualifies as really weird. outside of the semi-standard fanfiction-writer fare (e.g. symptoms of various injuries, or how to identify certain types of injuries like with that shoulder test), there are two broad categories of "what the fuck" research that i've gone into very extensively.

the first category, which i keep coming back to over and over, is all of the speculative biology shit. basically NONE of it is going to come up until more than halfway through catch/cradle at minimum, but at this point ive probably put close to ten hours of research into figuring out what the fuck is wrong with these things. (and that's just the research, not the processing that shit afterward.) i know what this guy breathes. i don't know exactly how his metabolism works, but i do have a general outline that seems approximately sound, and have a general principle for how it interacts with other metabolisms. i don't just know HIS metabolism by the way, i know like three other components' metabolic interactions and life cycles and to some extent their histories. and then we get into all of the other lore shit that is Very Present and Very Real and Very Probably Isn't Going To Be Written Down In Any Fics and also isn't strictly research based as much as vibes based but it doesn't have to be research based because my source is i made it the fuck up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! but tl;dr there's a CRAZY amount of various kinds of biology lore and 90% of it is never going to see the light of day most likely

the second category which has generally come about more recently is primitive / historical technology. generally just a lot of how you would do certain things - such as making paper, or refining clay, or working metal or glass - if you were starting from (almost) nothing.

additional shoutout to when i did some brief research on akkadian for one of my recurive fic projects, that was fun but really overwhelming and i ended up not finishing it myself lol

🪲 ⇢ add 50 words to your current wip and share the paragraph here

from chapter 5:

The ship doesn’t need any additional explanation. “I’ll set the course,” it says. Brief and to the point. He can’t help but appreciate that right now. The controls shift ever-so-slightly under his hands as they start following a slightly different autopilot route. It’ll set them up for the approach path they discovered on the second day — one that doesn’t cut through as many of the giant trees.

thanks for the ask!! :D

[belethlegwen]

You are so wonderful and I hope things smooth out for you sooner rather than later. Obviously you should prioritize yourself first (god knows we all have sooo much good fic of yours to reread), but it leads me to a question I’ve been too shy to ask 👉👈 how do you feel about recursive fic about your fics/characters? Would you be ok with us sharing it with you/others, crediting you for the creation of such good characters of course? I have serious Stranding/Rescue brainworms and it’s making me want to write drabble & fluff for the first time in a long time 💕 of course it’s fine if you’d be more comfortable with me not posting it — either way, thank you soooo much for sharing this lovely world & worldbuilding & all the characters within. I will be rotating them in my head for years no matter what 🙇

Hello and good morning! Or afternoon, I'm not sure. I'm drafting this answer over a late breakfast because I got a precious day of sleeping-in and I'm still thinking deeply about it.

Firstly: I want to hug you so tight (if you were down) because this is wildly sweet and flattering, thank you so so much for reaching out at all even just about the works, but the wishes that things smooth out are highly appreciated ;-; We're looking… solid? Right now? But there's still so much up in the air and hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I won't bore you with it, it's not the reason I'm drafting this out.

ABOUT RECURSIVE WORKS [very long, read under the cut, tl:dr summary at the end]:

I would love it. I would genuinely, honestly love it, with the caveats that you laid out that proper credit would be given (thank you so much you lovely beautiful soul), that it be clarified wherever it is shared that it's based on characters/settings/storylines of the current works, but truly importantly that it would clarify that the works are actively still being written at this time.

That's my biggest hesitation, if I'm being honest. The stories are both at this time unfinished (they are all unfinished, I am a creature with heavy need to process things through writing and, quelle surprise, I am never truly finished processing anything, new shit just needs to get processed, wheeeee) and being that they're unfinished, there's a chance that any recursive work could hit on a scene/plotpoint/moment that I've already got plotted out for the future. I'm not Neil Gaiman or anything, I'm not planning to make money off of this work, so it's not my concern that you or anyone else is gonna turn around and try to sue me for stealing something or whatever-- that's not the problem. I just don't want you or anyone to feel at that point that the effort you put into something was then copied and put in the main work or something.

It's an odd situation. The odds of it actually BEING a problem I know are astronomically low, but I didn't get to where I am today without chronically overthinking everything.

I love that you have a desire to create, and I do not know who you are-- I don't know if you already have projects and characters of your own and just want to branch out with something familiar-but-new, but I want to encourage you to use this energy and focus for writing all the same. If you can put it into your own works, hell yeah, but also: yes I would be flattered if you used my dorks and their silly little worlds. It's just the concern where I'm not finished with the stories yet. I just am, again, overthinking and overworrying, likely, but if I could stop doing those things then life would presumably be easier.

I would be absolutely down for like, experimental works I believe is the best term for what I'm looking for. Characters and stories based off of my works that are wholly new. Want to write a refracted AU about Melinda and Hank in Space? Fuck yeah, yes. Though I mentioned this to Zip and they immediately told me No, We're Doing That One and we laughed about it for a hot minute, so maybe not exactly those names hahaha

I guess another question here is, if you were to put in the effort and the focus and the pride of writing something based on my characters, of a scene you had in your head, and got through the beauty and pain of creation to get it down and then put it out there, how would you feel if something similar then happened in the main work? Not the same, not based on what you did, but that similarity still there and still noticeable at least to you. Like if someone had written (before I had posted them) something similar to Melanie being involved in a Naval battle, even though I have the receipts that that arc was written in November of 2022 and only finished posting in September 2023, I don't know how they would feel to still see that like, a similar idea had been there.

On one hand, personally, I love being in the G/t community and reading other people's works when I have the spoons and focus and time to do it, because I love that something as simple as "small person falls and big person catches them" permeates the ideas so often, and what that can mean to dozens of different creators. Refracting the same light through a diamond and watching the facets all scatter it differently, etc etc. It's beautiful. It makes me happy. But that's a personal thought, and I know how deep and personal writing can be. I know how much the process of creation can mean to the individual. I don't want you to go through that, to write something beautiful even if just for yourself, and then think in some possibility later that because I did something similar I was trying to do it 'better' or whatever. It's not the case, it's never the case.

So, after chatting about this with people I love in this community (I love you Zip and Kelly <3), I think the solution is: If you want to chat with me about the like, basic bare-bones of the ideas you might have just to give me a heads up, and I can let you know if it's something that'll be in the main works soon and if I'd rather you wait on something, or if I'd go 'oh fuck yeah, go ham', I would adore to chatter away with you about it all regardless. I'd love to chatter with you about writing in general! My characters, your characters, whatever. I'm down. Please feel free to hit me up and I'll get back to you whenever I can <3

Let me know what you think! Thank you so much for the sweet message and the ask!

Cheers,

~ Belle

[TL;DR]

When it comes to recursive works I'm interested and open to them provided they're not something major/heavy I'm planning to tackle too soon in the future canon, as the works are still being written and posted. I am always down to receive DMs about writing, and would prefer to get messages about the recursive fic ideas (as vague as you'd like them to be!) just so I can give a quick yes/no on if it's something I'd rather you wait on until I can get it out myself, or whathaveyou. I don't see this being a huge problem, and if you're good for chatting then I'm positive we'll have a good time with this <3

Writing recursive fics for my existing, in-progress works means agreeing to the caveats that credit be given to me and the existing works, and clarifying when posting that the fic is not canon and the works they're referencing/possibly based on are still in progress/being written. It also means accepting that there is a chance that things tackled in your fics may be similar to things that have not yet been posted for said works.

When it comes to experimental fiction based on my characters, settings, or plot: hell yeah go full 50 Shades if you want to. File the serial numbers off of it and/or write something New Enough. It's what I did to Jonathan Swift, please feel free to do it to me hahaha.

Shortest answer: Yes, just send me a quick message first <3

[jeejascoffee]

Hello there ! I’m a really big fan of your writing , and I’m in a slump at the moment so I’d like to ask ; do you have any tips for writing lengthier fics ? I’ve been trying recently , but it always seems to get to a point where it begins to drag on and sound sort of monotonous . . .

Thank you !

Hey there! Thanks so much for reading! Really glad you like the fics ^__^

Sorry to hear you're in a slump :( That can be so frustrating. I find that the Writing Juice comes and goes on its own sometimes. It has to do with a lot of things, life stuff too. Sometimes the best thing to do is read content that you love, that gets you excited about writing, and wait for the Juice to come back when it's ready. That can happen! As for lengthier fics, sure yeah I hear your struggle. I tend to feel like my stuff is super overwritten actually haha. So, making it concise is something I focus on a lot. A few things that help me:

Plotting. I don't know what your writing setup looks like, but for me it helps to put placeholder docs for each important plot beat of the story. Like major things that happen, how the characters go from point to point to point. Scrivener is a word processing app that helps me do this, I make a folder for each chapter and within those folders there are small text docs for each plot beat/scene. You don't need to use anything fancy though, I'm sure you could do the same on google docs. Folders for chapters, then a new doc for each scene. You might need to rearrange the docs according to what makes sense regarding the order, so if you can have your entire story laid out before you start writing it really does help. This way you know where you're going! What needs to happen in each scene.

To that end, I don't know if you're familiar with screenwriting at all, but I try to approach the scenes (especially in a long, fuck-y-type fic) like writing scenes from a movie. Rule 101 of screenwriting is: All the scenes should serve the larger purpose of moving the story forward. As a writer it's easy to get lost in the "flavor" of the story, but that stuff gets extraneous for the reader. Short character studies are one thing. For longer fics, you need plot movement! That's what keeps readers engaged and stops the story from stagnating. So, as you're writing, ask yourself: Does this scene advance the story? Do readers need to know this in order to understand something that comes later? If not, get rid of it! That may feel awkward at first, but try it. Get rid of any scenes that aren't essential and see how the fic reads. Most of the time you'll find the story flows a bit better.

Show not tell. This is an obvious one, I know everyone is always saying this, and it's true. As fic writers, especially working with characters that already exist and that we love so much, we can fall into the trap of writing long paragraphs explaining what's going on with the characters. Especially internal dialogue. I've found that internal dialogue is actually not as necessary as it feels when you're sitting there at the word processor lol. Show what your characters are thinking and feeling through the way they interact with the events of the story. Facial expressions, or if it's necessary to write a feeling or thought, use some nature imagery to make it more visceral/exciting (not too much! That can be a fine line too). Chapters that are all about characters reacting to previous events are generally not needed. Have them do something that shows how they're working through it. Because that's life, right? We rarely ever get a moment alone with our thoughts. We're always in motion, processing on our feet. Plus, going back to #2, you want your scenes to be forward-minded rather the recursive looks on things that have already happened. The motion should be forward not backward, if that makes sense.

Try to use active voice as opposed to passive voice as much as possible. It feels like a small thing, but it's actually a big help in terms of making your writing flow. More on that here

Now, as I say all this, I realize I've probably broken all these pieces of advice a million times in my fics hahaha! And yes, writing rules are guidelines, not a "one size fits all" type of thing. There are situations where you need to put in a recursive type scene or use passive voice in a sentence for some reason. That happens! Don't stress yourself too much. Which leads me to...

5. HAVE FUN!!! Never forget, this is fic writing. We're not getting paid, we're not going on the NYT most-read list or anything. We're doing this because we love it! If you're having fun, keeping the passion alive, then you're doing great. Write that self-indulgent idfic. Fuck it! Enjoy! If you love what you write, that passion will translate to your readers. For sure. If at any point you're getting frustrated and not having fun, take a break. Not worth it. Also, tortured writing also translates to readers. It's counterproductive. Give yourself grace and tons of credit!! We're doing all this without professional editors. That's not nothing!!!

Good luck with everything, friend. Like I said before, slumps come and go. Give it time and I'm sure you'll be throwing these characters into the sack in no time ;)

Take care! Have a great one.

[grandhotelabyss]

How do we not abandon the self to language? Does personality exist in literature or does all writing succumb to the nihilism of linguistic irony? Does feeling, in its aesthetic representation, only exist as metaphor?

A paragraph, if I may, from my doctoral dissertation:

It is tempting to read these ironies as endless and, therefore, as endlessly self-defeating, to see in them Wilde’s radical skepticism about meaning and reference and thus to conclude that meaning perpetually eludes both writer and reader and effectively cancels the distinction between them. Another concept of irony, however, was available to Wilde as a student of the Socratic method and of German Idealism. In this mode, irony is not endlessly negating but endlessly productive: the final turn of the interpretive screw in “The Decay of Lying” is that its performance of its own unreliability confirms its thesis about the necessity of ironic distance for the production of new knowledge, new sensations, and new dialogue. Irony does not defeat meaning but generates it in abundance. Agata Bielik-Robson, who challenges the understanding of irony as perpetual self-negation, explains the productivist approach in her defense of Harold Bloom (a self-avowed practitioner of Wildean criticism): “The ‘negative capability’—to use Keats’s famous expression—of irony is thus an equivalent of original sin in the domain of culture: it triggers expulsion from the paradise of perfect, definite cultural forms and simple identifications into the desert of individuation, a process which is propelled by a wish to return to the cultural pleroma, but only on one’s own individual terms” (2). Irony functions as the text’s spur to its own individuation: by both invoking truth, as transmitted by culture, and questioning it through a recursive form, the text generates new and unexpected meanings, which authorizes it, in turn, to take its place alongside the works of the past. Identical to the aesthetic in its capacity to differentiate the subject from nature, irony is fundamentally progressive, its story a human comedy that ends with mind triumphant over its inert context.

[creative-writers-club]

Are you a writer looking for a creative space? Then you've come to the right place.

JOIN THE CREATIVE WRITING CLUB DISCORD SERVER.

The purpose of this discord server is to provide all people interested in creative writing the opportunity to improve their abilities as writers in a positive and nurturing environment. Whether you've been writing for one day or for several years, all are welcome here! We will have exercises to help with writers block, we will share our writing to get constructive feedback in workshops, we will do fun group writing activities, share our characters and ideas, book clubs, and much more! In addition to just having fun in a creative space with our peers, we aim to learn how to, and teach how to:

・develop a story idea from beginning to finished draft

・understand story structure and apply structural strategies to your work

・see writing as a recursive process of rehearsal, drafting, revising, and editing

・and submit your work for publication

This is a workshop/community space designed for people who take themselves seriously as writers, those who do it as a hobby, and those who fall in between, with an emphasis on nuts and bolts: technique, form, structure, style, character, plot, theme, and setting. My conception of this server is that I’m an artist collaborating and getting to know other artists. You will do best if you see yourself as an artist. Whatever other hats you wear in life, set them aside, put on your artist hat, and have fun!

[facultativeactivity]

Okay, reading back Discord from the time this was an issue, what really went down was this:

For a while I was using LibreOffice for my writing. For a while, it was causing an issue when text copypasted from Libre to Ao3's editor would develop weird formatting errors. Specifically, lines with italicized text and quatation marks had spaces in them that weren't supposed to be there. It was annoying but relatively easy to fix.

Then when trying to upload an especially long chapter, I noticed a new problem. After around half of the chapter, all my quotation marks that were at the start of the line, and some others as well, became italicized even they weren't supposed to be. This time the issue only affected the quotation marks themselves.

Again, annoying but easy to fix - or so I thought. After manually de-italicizing the quation marks that werent supposed to be in italics in Ao3's editor and clicked preview I saw that now most of my text got italicized for seemingly no reason.

Checking the affected line back in LibreOffice, I noticed that even though they showed up normally there, if I highlighted them, the toolbar showed them to be italicized, even thoigh they weren't. Like this:

Experimenting, I copied the text into Word as well, where, just like in Ao3, they appeared in italics. After that, I concluded that the issue must be with Libre, as it apparently somehow corrupted my text, normal lines to appear as italics outside of the editor. I was tired of the whole issue and decided to just move to Word since I had it on my coputer at the time anyway.

Later my laptop that had Windows on it broke and I had to switch to Ubuntu. And what's Ubuntu's built-in text editor? Yeah, LibreOffice. Nah, pal, I wasn't going to do that shit again. So for a while, I went to do my writing in GDocs.

Copying text from GDocs into Ao3, while it was less of a hassle, still caused some crap with formatting, mostly with aligning. That's where I became supicious that I might've been too harsh on Libre. After all it's a widely used open source alternative to Word, and nobody seemed to have encountered the same issue. Ao3 on the other hand seemed to had issues with multiple text editors that weren't Word, or its own native editor. I did some experimenting and noticed that copying text from Libre to various online text editors did not cause the issues I encountered, only if Ao3 was involved somewhere in the process.

The only anomlay I could not explain was why that one chapter seemed to got fucked on in Libre itself. It seemed t contradict all my other experiences. It was already a long time ago, and I remembered being pretty frustrated and sleep-deprived while dealing with this, so I decided I probably did something stupid, like copying back the corrupted text from Ao3's editor that caused it. It didin't really make a differenc for me, as I was mostly writing for Ao3, so I needed an editor that was at least mostly compatible with it, so I just silently apologized to Libre for probably being unjust to it, and kept using GDocs, than later went back to Word.

Only now, reading back on The Incident 1.75 years later did I finally manage to Connect The Dots:tm:

You see, I like reusing my OCs in different settings and stories, and also to collaborative stuff with writer friends, where we borrow each other's characters, or write (recursive) fanfiction to each other's works. This monstre chapter I had so much issue with was kinda special because of a segment that took place in its middle, that was meant to be as both a bit of self-indulgance and a gift to my friends.

It had one of my OCs touch and eldritch artifact that caused her to have some weird 'flashbacks' about events that never actually happened to her. At least not in *that* life. Those 'flashbacks' were pieces of dialoge from other stories featuring her different versions, written by both me and my friends.

And all of those lines were copied from Ao3.

So there, after all this time, mystery solved. LibreOffice can, in theory, fuck up your text, but according to my experience, it only happenes if the document has text copied from Ao3. Also if you write your story in Libre, and it have italicized quotes, Ao3 will almost certainly will mess up those lines. Otherwise it should be fine.

Not sure what's going on between the two, but my best bet is Toxic Yuri.

[discontinuetheuseofaiinthearts]

Works Cited

Babbs, Verity. “Digital Artists Are Pushing Back against AI.” Hyperallergic, 6 Mar. 2023, hyperallergic.com/806026/digital-artists-are-pushing-back-against-ai/.

Borji, Ali. “A Note on Shumailov et al. (2024): ‘AI Models Collapse When Trained on Recursively Generated Data.’” A Note on Shumailov et al. (2024): “Ai Models Collapse When Trained on Recursively Generated Data,” June 2024, arxiv.org/html/2410.12954.

Brown, Dior [@diortheartist]. "FUCK AI (nfts 2!) Every piece of artwork you see from me is and will always be 100% genuine. Nothing is made with AI and it will NEVER have a place in my work. You will also never see me sell my artwork as NFTs, and if you do it is stolen and done so without my permission. AI has no place in any creative field and does nothing to benefit it. Instead it cuts corners and is a cheap way for both businesses and people to get a quick cash grab while hurting local artists and the people that put in actual passion to create. So… yeah! AI sucks! Pee Pee Poo Poo! • #aiartsucks #humanartists #humanartistsdoitbetter #aiartistheft #aiartisstealing #aiisforlosers #supportrealartists #supporthumanartists #aiartisstolenart Instagram, 16 Apr. 2024, https://www.instagram.com/diortheartist/p/C52KOQhNQqi/?img_index=1

Brown, Dior. Personal interview. 11 February 2025.

Chandler, Abigail. “Ada Lovelace Day: 11 Things You Didn’t Know about Ada Lovelace.” Metro, Metro, 11 Dec. 2019, metro.co.uk/2015/10/13/ada-lovelace-day-11-things-you-didnt-know-about-ada-lovelace-5426987/.

Chayka, Kyle. “Is A.I. Art Stealing from Artists?” The New Yorker, 10 Feb. 2023, www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/is-ai-art-stealing-from-artists.

Corrall, Matt. “The Harm & Hypocrisy of Ai Art.” Matt Corrall, Matt Corrall, 16 Jan. 2024, www.corralldesign.com/writing/ai-harm-hypocrisy.

Dohmatob, Elvis, et al. Abstract of “Model Collapse Demystified: The Case of Regression.” 2024, https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2402.07712.

Goetze, Trystan S. “Ai art is theft: Labour, Extraction, and exploitation: Or, on the dangers of Stochastic Pollocks.” The 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 3 June 2024, pp. 186–196, https://doi.org/10.1145/3630106.3658898.

Griswold, Virginia. Personal Interview. 26 February 2025.

Heikkilä, Melissa. “This Artist Is Dominating AI-Generated Art. and He’s Not Happy about It.” MIT Technology Review, MIT Technology Review, 4 Aug. 2024, www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/16/1059598/this-artist-is-dominating-ai-generated-art-and-hes-not-happy-about-it/.

Hsu, Jeremy. “Ai Chatbots Use Racist Stereotypes Even after Anti-Racism Training.” New Scientist, New Scientist, 6 Mar. 2024, www.newscientist.com/article/2421067-ai-chatbots-use-racist-stereotypes-even-after-anti-racism-training/.

Ivancast. “Ai and Art: Ethics, Creativity, and Redefining the Role of the Artist.” Apple Podcasts, 24 Nov. 2024, podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ai-and-art-ethics-creativity-and-redefining/id1477517633?i=1000678038778.

Discontinuation of AI in the Arts

Owen, Jess [@authorjessowen]. “AI didn’t democratize art. Artists did. Free YouTube tutorials, sketch pages,blogs, works-in-progress, mentorship, AMAs, process videos. Sharing materials, stock references, resources, and technique. These are freely available to anyone who wants to learn.” Twitter, 10 Dec. 2023, 1:22 p.m., https://x.com/authorjessowen/status/1733930198926811535

Marrone, Rebecca, et al. “How does narrow AI impact human creativity?” Creativity Research Journal, 15 July 2024, pp. 1–11, https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2024.2378264.

McLean, Sophie. “The Environmental Impact of CHATGPT.” Earth.Org, Earth.Org, 31 May 2024, earth.org/environmental-impact-chatgpt/.

Means, David. “A.I. Can’t Write My Cat Story Because It Hasn’t Felt What I Feel.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 26 Mar. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/03/26/opinion/ai-art-fiction.html.

Mitchell, Alex. “CHATGPT Overwhelmingly Depicts Financiers, CEOS as Men - and Women as Secretaries: Study.” New York Post, New York Post, 26 Apr. 2024, nypost.com/2024/04/26/tech/chatgpt-overwhelmingly-depicts-financiers-ceos-as-men-and-women-as-secretaries-study/.

Petersen, Soren. “Most Advanced, yet Profitable Design.” HuffPost, HuffPost, 7 Dec. 2017, www.huffpost.com/entry/most-advanced-yet-profita_b_6289526.

Pikat. “Why Artists Don’t like AI (It’s Not Just the Theft).” YouTube, uploaded by Pikat, 16 Sept. 2024, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngRcptQHbfc.

Piskopani, Anna Maria, et al. “Responsible AI and the Arts: The Ethical and Legal Implications of AI in the Arts and Creative Industries.” ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, ACM, 2023, pp. 1–5, https://doi.org/10.1145/3597512.3597528.

Placido, Dani Di. “The Problem with AI-Generated Art, Explained.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 9 May 2024, www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2023/12/30/ai-generated-art-was-a- mistake-and-heres-why/.

Roose, Kevin. “An a.i.-Generated Picture Won an Art Prize. Artists Aren’t Happy.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 2 Sept. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-intelligence-artists.html.

Runco, Mark A. “Ai can only produce artificial creativity.” Journal of Creativity, vol. 33, no. 3, 25 Aug. 2023, pp. 1–7, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yjoc.2023.100063.

Saenko, Kate. “A Computer Scientist Breaks down Generative AI’s Hefty Carbon Footprint.” Scientific American, Scientific American, 20 Feb. 2024, www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-computer-scientist-breaks-down-generative-ais- hefty-carbon-footprint/.

Shumailov, Ilia, et al. “AI Models Collapse When Trained on Recursively Generated Data.” Nature News, Nature Publishing Group, 24 July 2024, www.nature.com/articles/s41586- 024-07566-y.

Velázquez, Jaime A., et al. “Genetic and environmental influences on applied creativity: A reared-apart twin study.” Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 75, 1 Mar. 2015, pp. 141–146, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2014.11.014.

Weatherbed, Jess. “Artstation Is Hiding Images Protesting AI Art on the Platform.” The Verge, The Verge, 23 Dec. 2022, www.theverge.com/2022/12/23/23523864/artstation-removing-anti-ai-protest-artwork-censorship.

Zewe, Adam. “Explained: Generative AI’s Environmental Impact.” MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT News, 17 Jan. 2025, news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117#:~:text=Rapid%20development%20and%20deployment%20of,electricity%20demand%20and%20water%20consumption.

[thorntonkrell-blog-blog]

splintered Universe part 2

Evelyn embodies freedom, the to exist beyond the author and in this paradox Krell faces his own existential crisis-he wants to define Evelyn but in the process he comes to see that he cannot.

In this realm where fiction and suthorial intent intetwine, the fictional space it self becomes a playground for idea and cocepts that reflect the ongoing push and pull between what is controlled and what is uncontrollable. Krell's very desire to write the book becomes an act of self-discovery one that cannot truly be completed because it's a continual process of becoming, just as the characters within it are always evolving and so too is Krell.

As Ice Rivers watches Krell, Krell begins to understand that even his own development as a character is a form of creation not one bound by the conventions of plot or setting but by the infinitely recursive nature of being both the creator and the created.

Krell's awareness of the reader is the next step in his journey- a step beyond the constraints of the fictional world he inhabits and the narrative thread he is taked with following. As Krell's existence becomes ever more entwined with the realizatoin of hiis nature as a character, he begins to feel a strange, invisible connection to the very audience who either now or never consumes the work that heis part of.

This awareness of the reader emerges as a silent tension in Krell's thoughts. While he is fully conscious that his creator Ice Rivers has constructed the splintering universe inwhich he operates, he also understands that the reader who ultimately breathes life into the tex. They shape the story with their interpretations, their imagination, their emotional reactions. In essence they complete Krell's journey.

Krell begins to reachout to the reader not just through the story but through the spaces between the words. He recognizes the invisible line that connects him to the readers mind (as in some cases is happening right here right now) and in this awareness he begins to invite them into the process. The reader sometimes even right here right now is no longer a passive observer-they are complicit in the unfolding of the Splintered Universe.

In fact, Krell actively acknowledges the readers role in his story. He often finds himself within the narrative itself, weaving little threads of invitation...a glance, a suggestion, a pause in plot...all aimed at drawing the reader deeper into the fabric of the world he inhabits. His awareness of the reader's gaze becomes a powerful tool, one that he uses to question not just his own role as a character but to challenge the reader to question their own role in creating meaning from the text.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HOW DOES IT WORK

But if you have sufficient discipline to acknowledge the problem. For example, I doubt many people at Yahoo or Google for that matter. This is a good chance it will be for domains that don't even exist yet. Raising money is not the great mystery it seems from outside.1 And this is especially true for strangeness. But it was obvious what users wanted, so Apple flew under the labels. So maybe it would be such a bad job of teaching that the kids don't really take it seriously—not to wander about thinking, what great discovery shall I make? They're interrupt-driven, and soon you are too. But it's not straightforward to find these, because there is a good metaphor here.2 What a disaster that would be awkward to describe as regular expressions can be described easily as recursive functions. Another thing that might turn out to be an assistant professor.

The proof that Ajax is the next hot platform is that thousands of hackers have spontaneously started building things on top of Common Lisp, with a business background, may be overrated. The key to being a good hacker, between about 23 and 38, and who the competitors are and why this company is going to happen. Paraphrased for the Web, use links to rank search results, and have spent many hours doing it; that's why they're good at it. I would like to solve the money problem in one shot instead of getting paid gradually over a conventional working life. So you start painting. I was a Lisp hacker, I come from the fact that hackers, despite their reputation for social obliviousness, sometimes put a good deal of programming of the type that we do today. A term sheet is a summary of what the deal terms are standard doesn't mean they're favorable to you, because hackers would already be writing stuff on top of Common Lisp, with a business background, may be satisfied with a demo and a verbal description of what you plan to stay private, your competitors will be. One is that this is simply the right way to get fast applications is to write.3 Without hope of gain, they'd have learned to ask that.4

Terrible things happen to your brain till then, but because you need to do: find a question that makes the world interesting. My message to potential customers was: you'd be stupid not to sell online, and if they take it, they'll take it on their terms. They're more like examples of Robert Frost's good fences make good neighbors. And in fact I found my stories pretty boring; what excited me was the idea of going on the medical equivalent of what lawyers call a fishing expedition, where you sit passively and watch as a plot happens. But while founders will increasingly be outweighed by the pull of existing startup hubs. They just need something to chase. Even if you ultimately do the first deal, it will turn out worse. What you notice in the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of the Web 2. 9762507 cgi 0. Bottom-up programming means writing a program as a series of small changes. The one thing he'll never do is stand still.

But Cybercash was so bad and most stores' order volumes were so low that it was better if merchants processed orders like phone orders. And the strange thing is, he'd know enough not to care what they thought. A great programmer might be ten or a hundred times as much. You have to work a lot harder once they do. A nerd is someone who isn't socially adept enough. When you're trying to measure.5 Wouldn't it start to seem lame? To take an extreme example, consider math. So it's annoying that we keep getting called an incubator, but perhaps inevitable, because there's only one of us so far and no word yet for what we are, founders think.

This problem afflicts not just every era, but in software you want to discover great new things, then instead of turning a blind eye to the places where famous people worked, and see how unsuitable they were. The startup didn't have enough money to hire people to fill the gaps in some a priori org chart. Web as an opportunity, but as Microsoft shows, revenue is a lagging indicator in the technology business tend to come later in the life of a hypothetical very fortunate startup as it shifts gears through successive rounds. Kids are curious, but the way one anticipates a delicious dinner. This was easy to do, personally, is discover a new abstraction—something great meaning either that someone wants to buy you, don't believe it when they tell you to get lost. It's a todo list, I looked to see if there are many different kinds of advice. If you make a novel that bores everyone, or a lot of freaks.

And yet Bill Gates was young and inexperienced and had no business background, and he seems to do in hardware. C, Lisp, and so on. It's hard to predict what life will be more like being able to talk about whether a startup is to run into intellectual property problems. 01 scripting 0.6 When I did try statistical analysis, I found immediately that it was so simple. Seed firms differ from angels and VCs in that they invest relatively small amounts at early stages, but like VCs in that they're actual companies, but they are much hungrier for deals. I doubt anyone there realized that by limiting their sample to their own devices, what you have is competition.

And few if any Web businesses are so undifferentiated. Screens were a lot of subsidiary questions to be cleared up after the handshake, and if not, they say they can't invest because of the doubling, occurring three times in nonspam mail would be enough. Understand your users. All along the spectrum, if you combine them, suggest interesting possibilities: 1 the hundred-year language could, in principle, be designed today, and 2 such a language, if it is true that there are or aren't standards of taste. And that's a chilling thought, because it can take months. Imagine talking to a customer support person who not only knew everything about the product, but would apologize abjectly if there was a Mac SE.7 I first heard the phrase Web 2.8 Adults in prison certainly pick on one another.9 My stock gradually rose during high school.10 Startups yield faster growth at greater risk than established companies. Or to put it on the front page, because that's where this idea seems to live.

Perhaps only the more thoughtful users care enough to submit and upvote links, so the variation we see is something that more and more a seller's market.11 There are several local maxima. If they take you to the museum and tell you that you should put users before advertisers, even though the advertisers are paying and users aren't. That's the absent-minded professor, who forgets to shave, or eat, or even universities. I expect this to be as true in a lot of plot, but they are an important fraction, because they rely heavily on first impressions. Most of the persecution comes from kids lower down, the nervous middle classes. They're far better at detecting bullshit than you are at producing it, even if they wanted to? As in any job, as you finished the painting. Instead of developing a product for some big company in the expectation of getting job security in return, you'll never allow yourself to do a deal. It may look Victorian, but a hopelessly inflexible one for developing new ideas. This is actually less common than it seems: many have to claim they thought of the idea after quitting because otherwise their former employer would own it. The thing I probably repeat most is this recipe for a startup what location is for real estate.

Notes

According to Zagat's there are already names for this point for me was the last they ever need. Not least because they're determined to fight. Thought experiment: If you were expected to, but economically that's how they choose between great people.

Who continued to sit on corporate boards till the top; it's roughly correct to say now. But wide-area bandwidth increased more than serving as examples of other VCs who understood the vacation rental business, or want tenure, avoid the topic. 99,—and probably harming the state of technology, companies that seem to have this second self keep a journal, and once a hypothesis starts to be able to claim that they'll only invest contingently on other sites.

At Princeton, 36% of the Italian word for success.

As the name of a correct program. Creative Destruction Whips through Corporate America. I know of no Jews moving there, and Jews about.

Most computer/software startups. Well, of course, but for the board to give him 95% of the people worth impressing already judge you more by what you learn in even the flaws of big companies couldn't decrease to zero, which either desperately tries to munge what I've said into something that flows from some types of publishers would be vulnerable both to attack and abuse. Type II startups neither require nor produce startup culture.

Conjecture: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, Yale University Press, 2005. The ironic thing is, it often means the slowdown that comes from bumping up against the limits of one's family, or grow slowly and never sell. No, we could just use that instead of just Jews any more than linearly with its size. If you want to know exactly what they're doing.

Globally the trend has been rewritten to suit present fashions, I'm just going to work like they will or at least for those interested in x, and should in some ways First Round excluded their most successful founders still get rich will use this question as a child, either. But when you depend on closing a deal to move forward.

This is what you do a very misleading number, because any invention has a great idea as an investor I saw this I mean no more unlikely than it was because he had simply passed on an IBM laptop. Steve Jobs got pushed out by a central authority according to present fashions, I'm guessing the next year they worked. If you try to become one of the word as in a request. And while they tried to motivate them.

Vision research may be the technology everyone was going to drunken parties. There's a variant of the best new startups. But should you do. You have to talk about humans being meant or designed to express algorithms, and only big companies to acquire you.

9999 and. It's conceivable that a skilled vine-dresser was worth 8,000 of each token, as I do in proper essays.

We think of ourselves as investors, but starting a startup: Watch people who are running on vapor, financially, because neither of the density of startup: one kind that's called into being to commercialize a scientific discovery. This includes mere conventions, like hedge funds, are not the type of x. If a conversation reaches a certain level of links.

[casadegatos]

A music documentary is usually a lot of talking heads, music clips of “greatest hits” and “deep cuts” along with maybe some concert footage, fan reactions, home movies, etc. Perhaps there are some creative editing choices, or non-linear storytelling. But for the most part, music docs are pretty same-y from one to another. And there’s nothing wrong with that, I have enjoyed probably hundreds of such documentaries. I learned stuff I never knew, heard songs I hadn’t heard in decades sometimes, and sometimes gained a greater appreciation for an artist or genre I didn’t have before.

I went into Moonage Daydream expecting a music documentary, but what I got was something totally different. A basic timeline is followed, but weaving in and out of it recursively are tangents that get at the heart of what the creative process can be for an artist. Will you learn some things about David Bowie’s career and music? Yes. But you will also learn about how he saw himself as part of his art, how music, writing, painting, really all creative pursuits were inevitable for him.

Deliberately chosen songs thematically connect each section of the story. No talking heads, no bandmate recollections, no fan remembrances. Just David Bowie’s own words from interviews conducted throughout his career. He talks about what effect his spirituality had on him and his work, how emotions were or were not (variously) important to him while creating, how he relates to his own art, and how all of these things and more have changed and evolved throughout his life. You’ll hear him as a young man saying some things that he will directly contradict when he is older, but he doesn’t dismiss his more jejune observations from his youth. We are supremely lucky that he was an introspective and thorough thinker about his career and creative process. He puts his earlier commentary into perspective multiple times and we can hear how he evolved and changed his views on many aspects of his art and how he portrayed himself.

Visually, the filmmaker made some inspired creative choices. In choosing many clips of Bowie walking and showing the back of his head, the viewer is forced into his POV during some of the most candid and emotional admissions from him. The shift in time denoted by the Moon and Milky Way, accompanied by bright recoloring of some of the video footage used made it possible to see the way time was passing for Bowie and his career, and how it is passing the same way for us.

I really appreciated the way Brett Morgen avoided framing anything in a cliched way, the way many other documentaries and books about Bowie have done (the “chameleon”, etc). Those things are acknowledged through the historical footage of interviews where people said those things to him, but at no point does the film itself indulge in these cliches. As a lifelong Bowie fan, this is the documentary I have been waiting for, the one that speaks to what he really means as an artist to many of us who connected with his art throughout his career. At no point does the filmmaker judge any of Bowie’s work, he does that himself, but it doesn’t make you feel wrong for enjoying what might be considered his less than good output (what this is varies from person to person. For me, it’s Never Let Me Down). You are invited to continue to appreciate all of his art as you always have but with a richer understanding of what he saw in it himself.

I would recommend this for people who aren’t necessarily Bowie fans, people who are just casual fans, but also for people who are curious about how artists think and work. It’s more than a music documentary, it is a document of art.

[jacksgreysays]

Always happy to meet a fellow multishipper! Sorry I read you wrong 😅

As I've been trying to write that fic we talked about (which is finally a priority now that I've reached stopping points with other stories), I think I've found it why I struggle to come up with and write DOS fics. I don't think I have an accurate gage of Shikako's character. Have you ever struggled with that?

Also, thank you for answering my asks about more Hail to the Queen iterations. I love that stuff!

No worries! Shipping to me kinda feels more like personality/sexuality/circumstances puzzles as opposed to, like, a hill I’m willing to die on type of thing. A lot of my most interesting fics are the ones where someone prompts a pairing I never considered which leads me to figure out how such a pairing would work and, again, under what circumstances. It’s very fun :D

Oof, there are some fic that live in my head—not even as plot bunnies but, proto-bunnies. They’re not even ambulatory yet, lol—that will never see the light of day. Most of them involve Naruto and Kakashi. Not because I don’t love them, but because ahhhhh their character voices are SO DIFFICULT FOR ME. Naruto is more difficult than Kakashi because at least with Kakashi I have an idea of how he feels/his main motivation (sad all the time and GOTTA MAKE SURE NO ONE ELSE I LOVES DIES BEFORE I DO) but Naruto is just… O_O I don’t know… what… how do you make decisions, bro?

And this is probably a personality failing on my end but Naruto is just so trusting so often even when there have been so many cases where he shouldn’t be and he pulls the weirdest lessons from certain experiences and he loves to fight and loves jutsu that don’t do anything but cause harm but doesn’t believe in killing even though he lives in a world of shinobi and he wants to be Hokage in order to protect his precious people and he hates war but also he hates the things that a Hokage has to do in peacetime so it’s like… WHAT.

It may also be that he suffers from shounen protagonist syndrome which is that he is more of a force/narrative than a person so any contradictions in his decision making process is because that’s just what Kishimoto needed him to do at any given point.

My struggle with Kakashi is more that while I understand him internally, he’s so good at deflecting and zagging that there’s a strange sort of… layering to his dialogue and behavior that I’ve never quite managed to finesse. Like he says one thing and does another thing but what he ACTUALLY means is neither. It’s very look underneath the underneath

I’d like to think I have a good handle on Shikako’s character although it might be a sort of cyclical me reading DoS (literally the first First Person POV fic I didn’t nope out of after a chapter) and projecting onto Shikako turned into me podficcing DoS and internalizing Shikako which lead to me writing recursive DoS fic and going back to projecting onto recursive Shikako, etc.

Also, unsurprisingly given my ever faithful writer’s block and how I’m no longer as prolific as I used to be, there are a lot of other things I struggle with. For me I don’t think it’s the ideas that are the problem—my brainstorm to actual fic ratio on this blog is out of hand—but it’s the execution of idea into fic that is the worst. Or having cool concepts but not necessarily the background/foundation to manifest them.

Like, speaking of current fic idea that just… won't... just refuse to let me wrangle them... absolutely slip through my fingers...

@loveelemental helped me brainstorm a DoS crossover (won’t say what fandom at the moment) and it would be so dope, but I don’t actually know that other fandom very well even though my brain insists this is the fic it should be writing. Another problem is that, it’s PRIMARILY set in that other fandom AND THEN it’s not even Shikako that is the DoS character!

And I’m just like… WHY IS THIS WHAT MY BRAIN WANTS TO WRITE. WE DON’T KNOW THIS. I ALSO CAN’T COME UP WITH STUFF. EVERYONE IS AN ESTABLISHED CHARACTER WITH A DISTINCT VOICE AND NONE OF THEM ARE SHIKAKO!

So, yeah… the struggle is real.

I also very much enjoy brainstorming collaboratively with people. Often I don’t even think of things until I’m asked a question, so I also appreciate you sending in those Hail to the Queen asks. Legit, the She Who Has Divine Right in which Shikako takes over Haido’s failed invasion force because their literal god chose her over both him and the last of the royal bloodline is EXTREMELY entertaining to me and I don’t think I’d have ever come up with that by myself.

So thank you, too, aryaokayfriend! :D