#without giving us any context for what the program was supposed to be used for. just had us modeling parallelograms

[bethrnoora]

computers werent exactly NEW when i was in middle school so idk why they pretty much exclusively had us doing typing exercises. like it's not like that isn't a valuable skill but it was a LOT of typing. can we learn about files or html something

[orbitposting]

"Accommodations give disabled people an advantage over non-disabled peers"

TW: mentions of ableism, mistreatment of disabled children, and it's effects, mentions of fatphobia

For context, my sisters and I all grew up in the late 90s/early 00s with different disabilities (overlap was acknowledged later in life). My eldest sister has autism with some support needs without intellectual disability, my older sister has dysgraphia, and I have asthma. Looking back, none of us were fully accommodated.

At home, when my sister would have meltdowns due to sensory overload or changes in environment, and my mom consistently chose to scream at her for "misbehaving"/"being difficult". In order to stop the chaos, I was often left to comfort my sister. Often, I would simply offer her ice-cold water and tissues, and things would calm down.

In middle school, I remember she went to an alternative school in order to accommodate her better. While it was very valuable to have her learn the bus system and the self-reliance of getting to school, this program taught 4th grade math to her in 8th grade. She struggled with getting back on track with math for years. Eventually, she left due to difficulties with other students and the lack of consequences for various unacceptable behaviors.

In high school, she was supposed to pass a language course in order to graduate. She took Spanish, since my mom was offering to help with her knowledge of Spanish. However, this didn't help, even with my mom's college-level knowledge of Spanish. Notably, she didn't speak English in full sentences until she was seven years old. ASL was also not an option, but fortunately they waived the language requirement. Graduation was a close call, for other reasons, as well.

My older sister's experience is what is prompting this post. She has struggled with dysgraphia throughout her school years, and it was never accommodated. While she was a prodigy with immense knowledge of history, it would never come across in her writing. She was diagnosed around 10th grade, which she remained in denial about. However, my mom talked to the school regarding accommodations, and they had nothing to offer. Throughout her education, she would fail every writing assignment or writing-based class she was given. This was especially frustrating when classes that didn't revolve around writing paragraphs made her do it, anyways. She only passed 10th grade Physical Science since my mom knew the teacher, and asked that he not account for the lack of writing assignments and explained her situation. What prompted this post was actually my dad finding her SAT results, and me discovering that she had all zeros for her essay score, despite getting a 1170 for the multiple choice portion. (Quick aside: standardized testing should NOT be considered indicative of any student's performance if they cannot properly accommodate disabled students.) She did graduate, but my family wasn't sure the school would let her.

In my case, throughout elementary, middle, and high school, gym class felt like I was constantly fighting for my life. While I was allowed to have my inhaler on me starting in 6th grade or so, I was still expected to do the exercises everyone else had to do. I was not allowed to take breaks, technically, but I did. This was especially noticeable when we would run laps around the gym. Every time I did so, I was harassed by the PE instructor until I kept running. Games weren't much better, either. I was always picked last (which makes sense), but not only that, I was purposefully targeted during games. I was openly mocked as I did my best to participate.

In 9th grade, things hit a wall. When swimming was introduced to the class, I outright refused. I kept "forgetting to bring my swimsuit", when that stopped working I "had to go to the health clinic", and when that stopped working, I got a note from the health clinic excusing me from the swimming portion of gym class.

The PE teacher did not go down without a fight, nor did my parents. I was told that I could have to do it again when we moved schools the next year (that school ended up not having a swimming pool), that I wouldn't graduate without this credit, that I was making the situation worse by singling myself out in this way, and that I would get an F in gym anyways. They eventually acknowledged my excuse, but made me sit by the pool as everyone swam so I could take notes on the same article about what to do in case of a drowning every week.

Peers would acknowledge me from the pool, friends would say hi and guys would mock me. Girls I didn't know would talk about how strange my lack of participation was. Meanwhile at this time, my dad was making me log my calories on MyFitnessPal and I was very aware of how "different" my body was from the other kids. I would have panic attacks just thinking about going into the pool. While it was hard, I don't regret fighting for what I needed. Also of note: it was a chlorine pool, and chlorine heavily affects my asthma. Sometimes my lungs would hurt just being in the pool room. This wasn't really acknowledged, I would wheeze while walking up the stairs, and it often hurt to sing in choir after pool days.

I also struggled with ADHD throughout K-12, but I wasn't diagnosed until after I graduated high school. However, as an AFAB person, I constantly had teachers mention symptoms of ADHD in my comments. It started with not turning in work and doodling/chatting in classes I didn't care about, but it eventually spread to other classes that interested me. I also struggled with severe compartmentalization, which I didn't realize until after high school. I couldn't remember what my homework was when I was at home. If I remembered what the assignment was, I couldn't remember the information needed to complete it! This meant I did any homework I did complete while at school.

Fortunately, graduating high school didn't turn out to be a problem for me. After a rough freshman year, I turned things around. I became a member of NHS my senior year and finished out pretty strong. That was, until COVID. I had my therapist send a note saying I was not in a place to do schoolwork, and to simply keep my grades from pre-lockdown. I didn't get AP credit for AP Biology, but I learned plenty. I also withdrew from my dual-enrolled Calculus 2 course. Looking back, with my compartmentalization issue, there was no way online school would work for me.

So yeah, actually being disabled in school isn't a walk in the park! Imagine that! For anyone wondering, we're all doing fairly well now. My eldest sister works janitorial in a hospital setting and enjoys it, since she finds the surgical field fascinating and doesn't mind all the blood and such. She did eventually catch up in math in community college, but she wasn't able to finish the degree (due to her advisor). My older sister works retail and is a union steward. A lot of what she does is mainly talking and some basic math. Fortunately, if she needs to write, she can just use a computer, since the physical act of writing is what is a lot of what's hard for her. Spellcheck is also helpful. I spent my summer doing more intensive mental health care, and now I'm more directed than I have been for years. I'm currently waiting on hearing back about a bank teller job, and I'm looking forward to that!

If anyone is currently struggling with accessibility in education, just know what you are asking for is reasonable. All you are asking for is equal opportunity education, and you should not be denied that.

[lilacella]

Non-magical AU, cop!James Potter, mafia!Sirius Black

Safehouse

A man of honor never associates with a cop. But a man of honor was also not supposed to break the code of silence - which was exactly why he was here. So he might as well scratch two off the list at once...

Part I

(read on ao3)

Next

A bead of sweat made its way down James' forehead, trickling down his face. A loud bang caused him to duck and he felt the bullet pass closely over his head. He grabbed the man by his side tighter.

"We need to make a run for the car," he said quietly, his heart hammering in his chest. Nothing could happen to him.

"That's stupid they will shoot us. Just give me the gun..."

"No! I am here to protect you and you will do as I say. Now, on my mark..."

James peered cautiously around the corner of the container they were hiding behind. Maybe this was in fact stupid. But he would not let Sirius know that. He inhaled deeply and then leaned out to fire a couple shots, 2, 3, 4, they had all hopefully ducked now.

"Now!" He pulled at Sirius' arm and they both started running towards the bulletproof car that was just a few meters away. A few meters without any cover. They were to slow. When they had made it about half the way, James could see one of the mafiosi pop back up, immediately opening fire.

Instinctively James threw himself in front of Sirius, tackling them both down. He could feel something hitting his side. An incredible pain shot through his body. He heard himself scream. Then more shots. But none of them hit him. Suddenly everything was very quiet. He lifted his head and saw Sirius cowering over him with a concerned look on his face. James barely registered that he was holding his gun. Then everything went dark.

**

Three weeks prior

"And this is supposed to be safe?" Sirius examined the interior of the black car with doubt. His contact from the witness protection program had said that the officers would pick him up with a bullet proof vehicle, but after one look inside he was certain that the only thing bullet proof about this car was the forged security certificate. The windowpanes were too thin and the doors clearly hadn't been enforced, judging by the hollow noise they had made when he'd gotten in. He also didn't like that he was accompanied by only two police officers, one of them young - about his age -, with these small, useless police pistols. If his family would decide to attack, they would all be dead, he was sure.

But he really didn't have much of an option. He had already packed his bags in the middle of the night, climbed out of the window of his family villa, snuck past the armed guards and had entered this accursed deathtrap.

Sirius knew he was doing the right thing. After pondering it for years, last month he had finally decided that he had to act. He had to get out of this family. Sirius was the oldest son of Orion Black, the current leader of the Black clan. Growing up in the mafia had meant that Sirius had learned quickly that the word family could be used in many different contexts.

"Family" meant blood bound. Not necessarily related, but fiercely loyal. It meant doing everything for each other. It meant being a unity, against everyone else. It meant that if you messed up, if you "dissapointed" your family, you'd loose everything. Potentially even your life. And yet he was about to do just that.

In a few weeks he would testify against them as a key witness. Laying it all out on the table. It wasn't because he had been caught and was in need of a deal. No. He had just decided he would no longer be watching. Not after what had happened on Christmas, four months ago. Even if it meant that he could die. It wasn't like he had anything to lose anyway.

"I assure you, this is perfectly safe," the older officer said with a reassuring smile that made Sirius' vigilant. He glanced over to the youger officer sitting next to him on the backseat, who gave him a nod. He had his hand on his gun and seemed quite tense. At least one person that understood the gravity of the situation.

"Let's just drive." Sirius tried to hide his suspicion. He relaxed into his seat and tried to stay as far out of the window as possible. They would be followed. It was unlikely that they would just get away like that.

They had been driving for two hours and Sirius started to think that maybe he did just get really lucky. Even the officer next to him, Potter, according to his introduction, seemed to have relaxed a bit. The other officer pulled up at an unfinished building. Ah, that was clever. They were going to hide him in a house that looked like it was still under construction, surrounded by high hoardings. This way you could smuggle him out easily if necessary and food or other supplies in without raising suspicion. The officer parked the car and got out. Sirius wanted to follow him, when officer Potter put a hand on his shoulder.

"Wait. Let me get out first. It is safer."

Sirius raised an eyebrow. What did he even want to do if they were ambushed? He'd simply get shot. But he complied. The police had told him to not take any weapons with him and Sirius had actually listend. Well, he didn't carry any on himself that was. So these two guys and their sad looking guns were the only thing between him and the eternal slumber.

He waited until Potter had opened the door for him and got out, Potter sticking to him like a shower curtain. Sirius thought this was a little ridiculous and the older officer seemed to agree.

"Sorry about my colleague," he said. "He is taking his job very seriously." Sirius was about to find out what that meant.

Potter had been assigned as his personal protection officer and would stay with him on the premises. Sirius took the upstairs bedroom while Potter slept on the couch, or rather laid on it, staring worriedly at the entrance door.

"Are you not going home at all? Aren't they swapping you out sometime?" Sirius asked, while opening a can of soda. Potter had been here for the last four days and he was starting to get a little concerened about the working conditions at the local police station.

Potter shook his head. "There is noone else. I mean, noone else who would do it. I wasn't supposed to either, but...I can't just leave an important witness all alone. It isn't right!"

Sirius frowned.

"So...You don't have an order to stay here?"

Potter shook his head again.

"I volunteered. I took vacation days."

"You what?!" Sirius hadn't been this perplexed in his life. Here was a young man, using up valuable vacation days to babysit him? Why on earth would he do that? This was so unnecessary. But also quite flattering, somehow.

"When you called, noone wanted to take on the witness protection. They are all afraid of your family."

"As they should be. Are you not afraid?"

"I am. But I also think you are."

Sirius took a sip and tried to appear unphased.

"Why would you think that?"

"You asked for witness protection. Why would you do that if you weren't concerned? And you are nervous. I heard your pacing at night."

Sirius laughed.

"Well...I'm not saying you are wrong." He walked around the kitchen island and plopped down next to the officer on the couch.

"What's your name?"

The man looked puzzled.

"You know my name. Potter."

"Yes but I feel after you've spent more than three days with someone it's high time for first names." He extended his hand. "I'm Sirius."

"James." The officer shook his hand, frowning a little. Sirius stretched out his arm on the backrest, turning towards James.

"James. Don't you have a family, James?"

"I'm not married, if that's what you're asking."

Sirius chuckled.

"Well, it's good to know. So don't you have parents? Siblings? Cousins..."

"Of course I have parents. Everyone has them."

"But you don't talk to them."

"I do."

"But they wouldn't care if you died."

"They would!"

"Then what are you doing here?" Sirius caught the mans warm brown eyes. "You should go home. Spend your vacation doing something nice. You can't protect me. If my family finds us here, I will die. And if you stay, you'll die with me. So don't waste your time and your life. Go home, James."

James stared at him for a few seconds, before shaking his head decidedly.

"Your chances of survival are higher if I stay. When I became a police officer, I swore to do everything in my power to do good and protect the people..."

Sirius interrupted him with a harsh laugh. This guy was filled to the brim with naive idealism. He had to be new.

"How long have you been a cop?"

"Twelve years."

Sirius stared in surprise. Twelve years? And he was still like this? He could hardly believe it. Then, an idea crossed his mind and the adrenaline rushed trough his body like an avalanche. His eyes immediately flickered to Potters gun on the coffee table.

"They bribed you didn't they? You're a plant. Supposed to make me feel safe so you can easily dispose of me. How much did they pay you?"

"What?"

"How much?"

"I don't take bribes! I never have and I never will!" James seemed genuinely offended. Either he was an oscar worthy actor or he was really one of the "good" cops. One that hadn't gotten spoiled yet by corruption and misunderstood corps loyalty. After twelve years... Sirius had to admit, he was impressed. And that made hin want to get James out of here even more.

He sighed deeply.

"Then you really need to go. I don't want you to get hurt."

James laughed dryly.

"Hey. I am the one protecting you. And I am way more capable than you might think. I will stay. And I will make sure nothing happens to you until the trial."

**

Sirius was awoken by a scratching noise at one of the plastered windows. A bird, maybe or a marten. No. He knew that sound. Someone was trying to pry the window open from the outside. Fuck, they had found him.

He was suddenly wide awake. Immediately, he rolled himself off the bed and crawled towards the door. He didn't know when the hitman would get the window open, so he needed to remain hidden. He cursed himself for not bringing his mini revolver up here. It was still somewhere in his bag, no chance to find it quickly in the darkness. Maybe he had started to feel a little too safe with James around. He shook his head at the thought. Ridiculous. The man couldn't do anything to help him. Exactly why he needed to get to him, quickly.

Sirius reached the door to the hallway and hurried down the stairs as fast and quiet as possible.

"James!" He hissed in a whisper.

James' touseled head popped up between a pile of blankets on the couch. His glasses were askew. He looked kind of cute like that...Not the right time!

"Someone is breaking into my window, we need to hit it!"

James shot up, readjusted his glasses and grabbed his gun. Within a split second his eyes shifted from sleepy blurriness to hard determination.

"Get behind me." He aimed at the stairs.

"What? No, we need to go! Maybe we can get out through the downstairs bathroom."

"The window is barred."

"I loosened the screws."

"What? Why would you do that?"

"So I can escape when someone breaks in upstairs!"

"But you are making it easier to break in from the fucking outside!"

Their bickering was interrupted by a loud crack and a thump from upstairs. He was in. Or she. Hopefully not Bella. No, Bella wouldn't have taken so long.

"Give me your gun," Sirius said.

James ripped his arms out of his reach.

"No! Bloody hell get back Sirius. Hide behind the counter," he whispered sharply. Sirius glared at him for a second but when he heard steps coming from the bedroom he complied. He grabbed a large knife and a heavy steel pan. No match for a gun, but effective enough on short distance.

A man appeared at the end of the stairs. A loud shot sounded, followed by a scream. James cursed. Had he been hit? Sirius popped up behind the counter, but James was still standing, though he was lowering his weapon. He gestured at Sirius to go back down, which he reluctantly did.

He heard James approaching the stairs before pulling out his phone.

"Yes, Potter here. We had an incident at the house. Yes, I am... No... Yes... Copied... Over." He hung up. Sirius peered around the edge of the counter but couldn't really see what was going on.

It turned out that the person who broke into Sirius' window had in fact not been sent by his family to assassinate him, but was rather a homeless man looking for shelter during a rainy night. He had expected the house to still be unoccupied and reckoned it a good place to sleep. Now, the poor man was brought to a hospital after being shot in the right arm. James hadn't hesitated, when his shadow had appeared and fired a shot, with intention to disarm the attacker. Surprisingly unerring, Sirius thought.

James closed the front door with a sigh. The last officers had vanished.

"Let's just hope noone saw you," he said to Sirius, who was climbing out of his hiding space in the pantry. "I will talk to my superiors about changing locations. It is too risky to stay here."

"I'll go back upstairs," Sirius said tiredly. A homeless person...James was right, maybe he was a bit jumpy at the moment. He felt a little embarrassed if he was honest.

"I'll come with you."

Sirius shot James a questioning look.

"After what happened I should stay close. What if it had actually been an attacker and he'd surprised you in your sleep? I couldn't have done anything to protect you."

Sirius rolled his eyes. James was overdoing it with his protectiveness. But some - quiet - part of him, found that he really didn't mind.

So he allowed James to follow him upstairs and dropped back into his bed. They had managed to close the broken window, but Sirius didn't feel particularly good about it. Having James here with him wouldn't be so bad...

James proceeded to sit down on a chair in the corner of the room. Sirius gave him a look.

"What are you doing?"

"I'll just be over here, don't mind me."

"You can't sit there."

"Why not?"

"Because it is fucking strange. I don't want you to watch me while I sleep!" He patted the mattress next to him. "Just lay down, for fucks sake!"

James hesitated, but finally lowered himself akwardly next to Sirius. Fully clothed, with his gun on his chest, laying stiff like a corpse.

Sirius groaned in annoyance. What was wrong with that guy? He propped himself up on his arm and picked James' glasses from his nose, before snatching his gun, putting both of them on the nightstand. James protested, but Sirius simply ignored him and instead proceeded to pull the blanket over the stubborn man.

"Stop acting ridiculous and sleep. If someone comes in, we either both wake up, or we die. That's just how it is."

Sirius curled up, facing away from James and closed his eyes.

But he couldn't sleep. He knew that James was there, laying only inches away. It made him nervous, but not necessarily in a bad way. After a couple minutes he gave in to the urge and turned around. James had his eyes closed, but Sirius wasn't sure if he was actually sleeping. Still, he used the opportunity to take a good look at him. He really looked good. His skin was brown, a bit darker than Sirius' own, strong jawline but his features still had a certain softness to them. His dark short hair seemed to be always a little messed up and his shoulders... God, his fucking shoulders. Sirius had noticed them before, broad and muscular, their shape faintly visible through his tight t-shirt. All of James' t-shirts were tight. Sirius wondered whether he knew what kind of effect that had. With his strong arms exposed, the fabric hugging his well built torso...

Sirius felt his mouth water and quickly turned back to the wall, squeezing his eyes shut, trying to get rid of the images that were flashing up in his mind. He needed to sleep.

Sleeping next to James was an odd experience. Sirius hadn't slept next to someone in a while and James...James was different somehow. He made him feel things he usually didn't. Like wanting to curl up in his arms, being held, secure and protected...Absurd! Sirius didn't need anyone to protect him. He was very capable of doing that himself, he always had and he knew that if it came to it, James probably wouldn't even be able to actually keep him safe, but still...He was almost yearing for it. He hated it. And with every day that they spend together, waiting for the transfer to a new safehouse, with James never leaving his side, it got worse.

"I don't know why this is taking so long," murmured James while absentmindedly rubbing his stubbly chin. Sirius tried his best not to stare, but it was hard. He wondered what it felt like to run his own hand over it...

James looked up from his phone.

"How's the crossword going?"

Sirius froze, caught, quickly turning back to the newspaper in front of him.

"Oh, it's finished. I moved on to the Sudoku section." He fidgeted with the button on his shirt, feeling James' gaze upon him. Why did this make him nervous? He wasn't a fucking schoolgirl! And James was a cop! A man of honor never associates with a cop. But a man of honor was also not supposed to break the code of silence - which was exactly why he was here. So he might as well scratch two off the list at once...

Sirius raised his head again and found that James was still looking at him. His eyes flickered away, when Sirius met them. Things clearly had changed between them since the break in. Sirius eyes grazed over James' face, down his neck, getting stuck at the outlines of his pecs under his navy blue t-shirt. He bit his lip, but letting it go again immediately, startled by his own reaction. This needed to stop! He was being childish and stupid and he should know better.

Just when he wanted to get up to leave the room and go literally anywhere else, James got up from his spot on the couch and dropped himself on the barstool next to Sirius, leaning his elbow on the marble countertop. His muscular forearm flexed slightly as he dragged the newspaper towards him. Sirius cheeks were burning and he prayed that he wasn't getting red.

"Is there anything in the news about you yet?"

Sirius shook his head.

"I suppose my family wants to keep it internal. But I am sure they have noticed..."

"Do you think they know why you left? What you will do?" James looked at him intently and Sirius couldn't help but get captivated by his eyes. Warm brown with a faint hint of green around the edges. He was so gorgeous... Sirius cleared his throat.

"They aren't stupid. So I suppose they will suspect it. But I could have just left, because I've had enough. It's not like it was all sunshines and rainbows before. At any rate, they'll be looking for me." Sirius was hit by a wave of anxiety, coupled with the urge to move closer to James.

"I won't let anything happen to you," James said as if he had read his mind. "I know that you think that I am rather useless, but I will make sure you are safe. I promise."

Fuck. Why did he have to say it like that? In that bloody tone. While looking at him like that. Sirius felt like his whole body was being drawn towards the other man, wanting to kiss him, to touch him, to be touched.

"I don't think you're useless," he brought out. His mouth was dry. He hoped fervently that James wouldn't notice his composure crumbling. "I just think that you are putting yourself in unnecessary danger."

"I'm a cop, that's part of the job."

Sirius laughed.

"You are an idealist, James. Cops don't put themselves in danger, they mostly do that to other people."

"Is that what your family taught you?"

Sirius flinched angrily. How dare he?

"I'm not supid, Potter," he snapped, James flinched a little at the last name. "I've seen enough to shape my own opinions. And I tell you, I've never met a cop that you couldn't buy." He crossed his arms and leaned back into the small backrest of the barstool.

"I can't be bought," James replied defiantly. Sirius smirked suggestively.

"I'm sure you also have your weak spots..."

James stared at him for a second, lips slightly parted as if he wanted to say something but being to stunned to speak. Then he quickly got up.

"I'm gonna take a shower," he mumbled and vanished towards the bathroom.

Sirius thoughtfully took a sip of his coffee, smiling to himself. Maybe he wasn't the only one with a questionable infatuation...

[nicotineculturetech]

18Trip Event - Precious as a White Light Chapter 9

Scene: Hama House Office

Kafka: Hmm… this part doesn’t have enough detail. If you don’t include one more layer of instructions, it’ll get stuck.

Ushio: Ah, I see. Does it look right like this?

Kafka: Yeah, that’s it. You’re good at fixing things as soon as you understand the problem. You’ve been studying properly—good, good.

Ushio: The way you’re praising me… I’m not a kid, you know. Besides, finding those problems in the first place is the annoying part.

Momiji: What are you two doing?

Kafka: Just a little something as thanks for the baking lesson. I’m teaching Ushio some basic programming as an introduction to robotics.

Kafka: He already has a grasp of the basics so he’s been learning on his own. He’s actually a really talented student.

Ushio: …Even if Oguro-san says that, after getting actual lessons, I just realized I was taking the long way around.

Kafka: You’re such a pessimist. I’m complimenting you, so just take it and be happy.

Momiji: Ushio-kun, I didn’t know you were interested in programming.

Ushio: …I want to be able to maintain and repair robots.

Ushio: Oguro-san is pretty good at teaching.

Kafka: This is nothing. Alright, let’s keep moving on to the next part.

Ushio: W-Wait, let me review the last problem first…!

Momiji: (Ushio is really serious about this. Kafka looks like he's having fun too—he must find it rewarding to teach.)

Momiji: (Somehow, even I feel happy just watching them.)

Scene: Hama House Living Room

Nanaki: Ah, Ushio, about the playlist I sent you yesterday…

Ushio: …!

Nanaki: How was it? I wanted to hear your thoughts if you had any.

Ushio: …The playlist was a thank-you for the lesson, right? Do I really have to give feedback for that?

Nanaki: I just wanted to make sure it actually worked as a proper thank-you. I had to put it together using only keywords without knowing the full context—I was seriously wondering what kind of test this was supposed to be.

Ushio: ("It’s a playlist of theme songs for my favorite characters and their ship."  …Like hell I’m ever saying that out loud.)

Nanaki: Besides, I want to settle this cleanly with no debts between us. If it's good, just say so. If it’s not, tell me that too.

Ushio: That’s… ugh…

Ushio: (How does he manage to pick songs that match so perfectly just from a few vague keywords? It's beyond impressive—it’s actually infuriating.)

Ushio: (…But, yeah, it was really good.)

Ushio: …Fine. From now on, we’re even. No more debts.

Nanaki: If you're making that face while saying it,  it must mean you really, really liked it.

Ushio: …Well? Could you stop twisting things to fit your own narrative?

Nanaki: It’s just a question.

Ushio: What???

Nanaki: …See, you immediately get all defensive like that. I won’t push it today, though.

Nanaki: But seriously, because of how vague you were, it was actually pretty tough on my end. Even after I sent it to you… I was worried the whole time wondering if I got it right so I kept digging.

Ushio: Eh?

Ushio: …Wait. You mean there's more?

Nanaki: Eh?

Ushio: I’m asking if you found other songs for this besides the ones in the playlist.

Nanaki: Yeah. …Wanna listen now?

Ushio: …

Nanaki: Oh, but I thought we agreed that we’re even now? So for the extra ones… I’ll play them if you tell me your thoughts on the first batch.

Ushio: …I can’t give any proper feedback  until I’ve listened to everything, can I? Just shut up and hit play already.

Scene: Hama House Entryway

Momiji: (Wait, is that Ushio-kun and Nanaki-kun… listening to music together!?)

Momiji: (I see, I see… These two have really gotten closer than before.)

Momiji: Fufufu…

Scene: Hama House Living Room

Ushio: …Hey, you. The suspicious one over there. What’s so funny all of a sudden? You’re creeping me out.

Nanaki: Chief!

Momiji: Ah! Sorry, sorry. Don’t mind me…

Ushio: No, no, no.  Ignoring an adult who’s staring at us while grinning like that is a serious risk.

Nanaki: Seriously, you really never learn, do you?

Ushio: Oh? Are you buying again today? (1)

Nanaki: Then please make a booking for tomorrow. (1)

Momiji: Sorry for interrupting. It was just such a heartwarming sight.

Nanaki: Heartwarming…?

Momiji: I mean, seeing how everyone has grown closer through making sweets. Especially Ushio-kun—you’ve really opened up to Kafka-kun and Nanaki-kun more than before.

Momiji: I’m just thinking that White Day is such a wonderful occasion…

Ushio: …………No way.

Momiji: Eh? Did I get it wrong…?

Ushio: You saw all that, and that’s your takeaway…?

Ten: Ahaha. She totally missed it. That’s just how Chief is, isn’t it?

Momiji: Wah! That scared me—Ten-kun and Kiroku-kun… Uh, what do you mean?

Kiroku: ……That’s so Chief-like....

Kafka: Oh? What’s everyone gathering for?

Momiji: Kafka!

Ten: Nah, we were just talking about how Chief has a real talent.

Momiji: Eh? What do you mean? Did I say something weird…?

Kafka: Ahh… yeah, you definitely have a certain talent and honestly, that’s part of what makes you so great, Chief-chan.

Nanaki: …Agreed.

Momiji: Ehhh!? Wait, am I the only one who doesn’t get it!?

Nanaki: (But that’s just who Chief is—everything about her, all wrapped up together.)

Kafka: (That’s exactly why she’s Chief-chan.)

Momiji: ……Kiroku-kun, Ushio-kun…?

Kiroku: ……Not realizing it is also one of Chief’s best qualities… probably.

Ushio: At this rate, you’re gonna be a full-fledged grandma.

Momiji: (What does that even mean~~~~~~!?)

(1) I cannot make sense of these two lines like within the flow of the conversation. Is this some kind of inside joke?  the jp lines were pretty easy to read so i just went for the direct tl i'm not getting lol if anyone gets this please tell me!!

[ruleofbirds]

𝚍𝚎𝚟𝚕𝚘𝚐_𝟶𝟷.𝟷

Kia Ora, Te Ao!

Hello, World! It's official - Robbie has a tumblr now. Absolutely unfathomable. Honestly, it's mostly because it was this or Wordpress (or a more obscure indie dev forum) and this seemed the most accessible and quirky. I'm sure this won't lead to another awful endless scrolling habit. Any advice for the visual side of things is warmly received! I want this blog to be a fun part of the week, because a lot of fun will be had developing RoB. Just realised that acronym happens to be my name. Could be worse.

Okay! Now that the initial ramble into the void is out of the way, it's time to get into the c o n c e p t.

This tumblr is a devlog for my NZ ecosystem simulator currently titled "rule of birds", which I will be working on for the next 8 weeks as part of Blackbird Foundation's "Protostars" program. This means a weekly check-in with the other creatives in the program, the organizers at Blackbird, and a post for all of you here.

I'm breaking this week's post into 3 sections just to cover the bases;

01.1 -a bit about my creative practice and how it led to this project

01.2 -a discussion of "flocking" in programming (using p5.js)

01.3 -a discussion of NZ natural history

So here's the intro post, where I ramble about myself for a sec.

So! basically, I specialize in spatial design, I love working with anything nature-related, and I want to make a video game.

Lately I've been on a tangent based around art in NZ's cultural context - the design principles behind whakairo (Maori woodcarving) and how their composition conveys meaning, how histories of spirituality, tribal and colonial relations affected design, and my own art interpreting my natural surroundings with photography and charcoal drawing. I can neither confirm nor deny whether there will be an art zine compiling a wee bit of this work on the community table at the Whanganui Zinefest this Saturday.

That tangent branched off into a focus on natural history that's the keystone of rule of birds. My motivation for focusing on an ecosystem simulator is to articulate a basis for the sort of games I want to come out of Aotearoa. The sim will be the proof of concept - and I suppose this blog will be the manifesto.

I feel like there's a massive demand for games exploring NZ history - like, imagine a big-budget maori-led release set in pre-colonial time, with all the unique aspects of survival, resource management and day to day activity that involved - or an assassin's creed type action game based during the time of Te Kooti. It goes unsaid that Kupe is one of the best parts of Sid Meier's Civilization VI - iykyk.

What I think separates a good game from a great one is how alive the virtual world feels - rather than being led through an a-to-b progression of events presented in the same visual style I've seen countless times before, if the world can react in a dynamic way, and the details in the background are crafted to feel organic and immersive, I'm going to want to stop and wander off the beaten track that an objective marker may be pointing me towards.

The last game that caught my attention in this way - and coincidentally the one that made me want to put my coding knowledge to the test with gamedev - was, of course, Rain World. To everyone who knows me, I'm sure you're surprised I've made it three paragraphs without bringing this game up. I'm not going to go into too much detail here, because there is *a lot*, but key points are you are one creature among many scavenging for food in a brutal biomechanical ecosystem, hibernating between cycles of cataclysmic rain, and the game plays like basically nothing else due to how the coded behaviour of every entity in the world follows its own logic that has much more to do with its own survival than the experience of you as a player.

Here's a nice little illustration of the physics behind a movement-sensing tentacle monster, to give a sort of discrete example - but the creatures that act according to behavioural karma systems and the dynamics of how the different lizards scuffle and coordinate with each other is worth looking into too, if this is your thing.

(Source: GDC, Curious Archive)

Now, I really want to jump into some of this behavioural coding stuff, so I'm just going to move on to collecting things for the next post - hope this has been an interesting read! if you somehow found this page in your tumblr algorithm, welcome! I'll also be posting bits on the instagram page @robbiek_devlogs and you can check out my other work on my main insta @robbiek_art

Hei kōnā mai,

Robbie K

Next up: simulation in coding, natural history research post #1

Next week: Adventures in Godot Engine!

[jichanxo]

and now i can ask about the difference between animation and writing for you :D aside the obvious things, and since it's a sequence of events/actions/a story and going back to senseific: are there any parts there that you feel you'd have an easier time drawing/animating vs expressing it with words? and is there anything particular you were/are tempted to visualise in an artform (but haven't)?

more long answers below!

animation is certainly a special medium because you not only have way more control over how your audience experiences it (audio, pacing, etc) but you have to pay the cost of it being way more time and effort. so the most distinctive part of making my last project was that i had to stretch my resources as hard as i could. in other words, you can do a lot more! (/pos) but oh god, you HAVE TO DO A LOT MORE (/neg).

you kind of have to compromise somewhere -- your time, the quality of your work, your vision, your motivation. i know i'm inexperienced and that my motivation would give out, so my plan had to be practical. 30 seconds is a long span of time to fill.

i used colour to set the mood -- quick and low effort i used only lines, didn't colour anything in -- saving me time the movement is minimal -- i knew i couldn't do a lot at once, so i had to focus my efforts --

the shot of the eyes moving and of the kiss have the most movement, but are also the most sparse shots, allowing me to focus on getting the movement of this one thing right, without distraction

i create interest in other sections through contrasting shots, rather than using movement -- kuwana and yagami in bed together, then him alone -- the meaning is conveyed through the sequence, rather than any movement, and the music helps make the progression feel natural. following the beat, yknow

i also had to accept that the quality of my work was going to vary, and some of the illustrations would look good and others would just have to be serviceable, or it would never get done

and of course, my own experience -- i know the basics of csp's animation tools, but i don't know enough to make my life easy, you know? i was fighting the program, doing things inefficiently.

i had to think about how i was organising my layers/folders, i had to grab the audio and trim it and make sure it sounded right and... blah blah blah. you see what i mean, right? the format itself has so much potential, being able to create meaning through movement and contrasting shots and audio is great, but it's so strenuous (and i am not used to it) (not to gloat about how wow i did this and it was soooooo hard, nah, but this is what it was like for me at the novice level so like. for more involved work, just imagine... just imagine...) (or better yet, imagine with an example. you'd probably get more interesting answers about animation from @/phantasy14 than me)

by contrast, one of the best things about writing is that, at its core, you can just... open a document and type. not to downplay the effort that writers take, and yeah part of it is that my fanfic writing is Not That Complicated, but in the end... words are free, you know? i don't have to worry about straining my wrist, or if this would look better with an extra frame here or over here, what function i should be using in my program... i can kind of just get to the heart of the matter. i guess i kind of said something similar in the last post as well -- that writing makes it easier to dig into details and context, and the same applies here. since Words Are Free, you can really dig into the meat as much as you'd like. in a process like animation, any decision could add hours or days to your workload, so you have to be absolutely certain that the decision is worth it. this conflict between the artist's idea and the effort is a very defining difference in the mediums, i think.

so, aside from Fighting The Art Process, i suppose i should talk about why this idea ended up being an animatic instead of say, writing. first of all, the song, ofc -- it was the whole inspo, and it's nice to work with it directly. secondly, i think, is because i was trying to convey an emotion more than anything. this is where that ambiguity/detail difference between mediums comes in. i'm portraying yagami missing kuwana, and just that alone. i'm not trying to explain what he's thinking specifically, or why, or even the exact nature of their relationship before all this. what i'm conveying is i miss you. and the most direct, most blunt way to express this is to contrast being together with being apart. to fixate on the features of the other person so to depict a yearning for them. the ending contrasts a remembered(/imagined? you decide) smiling kuwana against kuwana walking away, of him leaving.

you were here (smiling, with me) + you left = i miss you

it just makes sense. writing this would have necessitated detail, would have necessitated more context, and muddied the feeling which is conveyed so concisely through the video instead. look at how i've written yagami missing kuwana so many goddamn times. it takes so many more words, it forces you to hold onto something more concrete like thoughts and events in order to convey the emotion, instead of depicting it on its own. so yeah, the ambiguity of illustration combined with the contrast achieved via sequence, these were necessary to convey this feeling as directly as possible. i also just think it feels more elegant. there's room for the audience to breathe and really feel the difference between kuwana being there and kuwana being gone. the imagery is blunt but the feeling itself surprisingly isn't... at least imo. it just wouldn't feel the same written, would it? i hope that answers your question.

anyway onto the next part... senseific <3

it's good that you named that as a specific example because i never thought about it, but now that you mention it there are absolutely some parts i would probably have an easier time drawing than writing

your honour..... (with a massive sigh) THE FIRST KISS SCENE. HAS BEEN BOTHERING ME. FOR MONTHSSSSSS. it's. sigh. well where do i start with this one... the thing that makes this difficult for me is that it's very much a "wow this is a bad idea but we're doing it anyway" kind of kiss, right? and like. because they shouldn't be doing it, it's been troubling me all this time if their trains of thoughts even make sense. i don't want to force it, but it's difficult to direct things into that direction when i know that they know they probably shouldn't be doing it... i have revised it and i think it reads kind of alright now? but i'm still worried about it...

and this. would be great. for illustration. i wouldn't have to explain shit, i just have to make sure i convey an atmosphere that lends itself for them to make this dumb decision. that's not to say that i wouldn't care if it didn't make sense, of course not, but if it was a visual format, i could just let the atmosphere speak for itself, you know... they're alone together, they'd both been drinking a few hours ago, kitakata comes close, and though yagami sees it coming he doesn't seem to stop him... and it just. there it is. it's happened. no need to say anything, just let the atmosphere and the audience's imagination do the work. the lack of detail in the medium would work in my favour. no issue.

the other one that comes to mind is a scene where kitakata and yagami smoke on the roof together. it's a similar situation where ambiguity would play better for the scene. there comes a point where the conversation stops between them and it just kind of sits. it feels really clumsy having to explain in words that this is one of the first few peaceful moments between them, that yagami doesn't mind being around him for once. this would be better expressed with just visual space. letting the audience feel that peace, that quiet moment between them. i'd draw them apart, so you can see the visual distance between them, and yet they're together, and they're quiet and maybe just maybe they could become closer, could choose to spend time around each other without getting on each other's nerves... or at least that would be the implication. it's much cleaner than having to spell it out in writing.

oh! and i remember i was tempted to draw kitakata's messy desk at some point. that one's easier depicted with words but i just think it could be fun.

AND IF I MAY BE SELF INDULGENT AND BRING UP "are you seeing anyone?" AGAIN..... that gag. just that gag and nothing else around it. i mean. now that i think about it, it's kind of joke-comic-y.... but the joke itself relies on a bunch of stuff beforehand... perhaps not...

a group photo would be nice too... a club photo perhaps... get everyone in there. just some mundane snapshots of everyone in their daily lives... hell, i could even throw sawa in there! i definitely should do that!

and something sexy... i should draw something sexy with kitakata and yagami...

i ought to add some of these to my mental list of things to draw...

[js2ts]

How does the JS2TS tool help you write safer and more reliable TypeScript code?

Introduction

If you’ve ever worked with JavaScript and TypeScript, you are fully aware of how difficult it is to switch between one and the other. While TypeScript gives safety and structures to your codes, converting JavaScript to TypeScript isn’t as straight forward. 

TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript; they ensure type safety for developers in their programs by ensuring they don’t have any bugs.  But, when converting an existing JavaScript code to TypeScript, the process can turn out lengthy and error-prone. Thus, the JS2TS tool comes in! 

The process is faster and easier as it automatically converts JavaScript objects to TypeScript interfaces. No matter if you've been using TypeScript for a while or are new to TypeScript, the JS2TS tool will make sure that your code is more clean, reliable, and a lot less likely to cause errors. 

In this blog, I will take you through the features of the JS2TS tool and how it simplifies the JavaScript to TypeScript conversion process.

About JS2TS Tool

The JS2TS tool is simply a simple but extremely effective tool, making it extremely easy to convert a JavaScript object into a TypeScript interface. TypeScript interfaces are a tedious affair to write by hand, especially large or complex objects. 

Using   all you have to do is drop a JavaScript object on the tool and it will automatically generate the correct TypeScript interface for you. It saves time and also avoids mistakes of defining types manually. 

This repetitive task is handled by the tool so you can concentrate on writing functional and optimized code for your projects. JS2TS tool is fast and accurate for any kind of app, from small to large-scale systems.

About JavaScript

Today, JavaScript is one of the most used programming languages. It gives the developers the capability to construct interactive factors on the websites and apps and make them dynamic and reactive to the actions and inputs from the user. JavaScript is a very flexible, dynamic language that you can use both in front-end and back-end development. 

Learning it is easy, and it is supported by many platforms and browsers. The main challenge of JavaScript, however, is that it does not have built-in type checking. In the context of this, if a variable is assigned with an unexpected type, developers can easily get runtime errors. 

JavaScript is a fantastic language for rash development, but its great for bugs that are tough to find (especially as projects become larger).

About TypeScript

TypeScript is an extension of JavaScript that gives type safety on the extra feature. On a different note, TypeScript gives developers the power to supply typical types for variables, functions, and objects such that the code is more predictable and less error-prone. 

Static type checking at compile time allows the errors to be found before your code is run and thus makes it easier to debug and maintain the code. Since TypeScript eventually compiles down to JavaScript, it works perfectly with JavaScript. 

This is especially useful in large projects that would otherwise make things chaotic and error-prone when dealing with variables and functions without types. Not only does it make your code safer, but the increased level of understanding combined with the improved ability to refactor your code makes TypeScript’s development experience notably better.

Importance of Type Safety in JavaScript to TypeScript

The most important advantage TypeScript brings is type safety. In JavaScript, a variable can be assigned any value, including any other value, which might not be what you expect from your application. 

For instance, you may accidentally set a string for the value of a variable that is supposed to hold a number, and these will only spit a runtime error. With TypeScript, such issues are prevented because you can specify what kind of data each variable should hold. This means that the TypeScript compiler will find type-related errors before the code runs and this makes debugging much easier. 

In large applications, type safety is indispensable due to the fact that even small errors can have serious consequences. Adding type safety lets you take your code further; if you do this, there is an extra measure of predictability and maintainability.

How do I face common issues when working with JavaScript to TypeScript with the JS2TS Tool?

There are a few challenges faced by the developers when they are converting JavaScript to TypeScript. The most common problem is to handle complex structures such as many arrays of objects, nested objects, or some dynamically created data. Manually creating accurate type definitions on these structures can be difficult. 

Moreover, JavaScipt objects don’t have an explicit type, so you have to check the structure of the object to see if the correct type is applied. And that can cause errors, especially if the data structure evolves over time. 

The JS2TS tool is a tool that addresses these issues by generating automatically TypeScript interfaces from your JavaScript objects’ structure. That helps to eliminate the guesswork and increase the conversion speed, helping you go faster from JavaScript to TypeScript.

What is the guarantee of type accuracy during the conversion from the JS2TS tool?

To ensure the accuracy of type information, the structure of the JavaScript data you are providing to it is carefully analyzed by the JS2TS tool. It is an advanced algorithm that determines what kind of value is in the object—string, integer, boolean, array, and even nested objects. 

Also Read: Mastering TypeScript Faster from JSON

The JS2TS tool automatically infers the correct types; thus, the generated TypeScript interfaces are as precise as possible. Unlike manual typing, the JS2TS tool ensures that the types match the data. This level of precision also shields you from bugs induced by a bad type definition, thus leaving your TypeScript code very reliable and easily maintainable.

How does the JS2TS tool help you write safer and more reliable TypeScript code?

The JS2TS tool will help you write safer and more reliable TypeScript code by using type definitions that match your JavaScript object structure. Type checking prevents errors in your program since we will provide the data types we use throughout the codebase. 

The extra layer of protection comes from the fact that with the JS2TS tool you don't use our interface in the end—the JS2TS tool creates TypeScript interfaces from JS to protect your objects. It is easier to spot issues early in the development process and decrease the likelihood that the error occurs at runtime. JS2TS tool, whether it is a small or large scale, will help you to organize your TypeScript code in a more organized, predictable, and, of course, safer way to work with.

What is the reason why the JS2TS tool is so essential as a tool for JavaScript to TypeScript Conversion projects?

The JS2TS tool is needed for JavaScript to TypeScript conversion projects simply for the purpose of automating the most tedious and error-prone: getting accurate type definitions. Manual work is required to write all these types when you’re migrating a large codebase from JavaScript to TypeScript. In most cases, the data structure is easy to overlook subtle issues or the types are easy to screw up. 

Also Read: From CSS to JSON in Seconds

JS2TS tool takes away the trouble here by doing that out of the box, where all JS2TS tool has to do is generate the right TypeScript interfaces for you, dramatically saving time and increasing the likelihood of no errors. The JS2TS tool allows you to write TypeScript in a way that is structured, accurate, and ready to deal with any strange structure of data.

Conclusion

The JS2TS tool is a very useful tool for those people that use JavaScript and TypeScript. It allows you to automate converting JavaScript objects into the TypeScript interfaces to save time and to have type accuracy. 

Also Read: No More TypeScript Guesswork! JSON Conversion Should be JS2TS tool’s Job

The JS2TS tool will ease the process whether you’re a beginner learning TypeScript or if you are an experienced (senior) developer dealing with a huge codebase. JS2TS tool provides type safety, decreases potential errors, and accelerates the speedup conversion process; it is a must tool for any JavaScript to TypeScript conversion project. This tool gives you more of a chance to write safer, more reliable typescript code and do the actual feature building that you came here to do.

[lumine-no-hikari]

Dear Sephiroth: (a letter to a fictional character, because why not) #438

...I had written a giant, huge letter. And it's gone. OpenOffice, in the middle of writing, gave me a pop-up that said something about “Access Exception”. Then it closed the whole document. And the document recovery program, which is supposed to record progress, recorded none of my progress. I'm very sad about this, but... it's the way of things sometimes.

A very weird thing happened today involving J's sister. Somehow she interpreted part of our interaction with her yesterday as us implying that we think she's a disease-ridden slut??? And apparently she thought we called her a slut by implication at Eggcellent, too (which goodness knows how long ago that was by now)??? We have absolutely no idea about how the second part came about, and she did not bother to explain.

...I've been writing to you for a while now. You know who I am. I'm polyamorous and have slept with dozens of people (not all of them were fully with my consent, but still). You know that I firmly believe that the number of people one has bedded (big or small) is nothing to be ashamed of. It's not something anyone should be ashamed of, because people should be free to enjoy their genitals (or not!) as they please (as long as everyone is consenting and no one is getting hurt in ways they don't enjoy). Like... the ideological framework to consider someone a “slut” in the first place... it simply doesn't exist within the brains of the people in my house. Or even in any of the brains of the people I consider my closest friends.

And even if that framework did exist in our brains, like... to then go and judge people for that makes about as much sense as judging someone's morality, worth, and goodness as a person by what their favorite color, food, or flower is. It's just... it's wholly absurd.

So, what happened was... J was hesitant at first to share the boba he got at the sushi place yesterday with his sister. He was hesitant because he's nervous about germs with anyone in any case (except for me, because... obviously). And after the breakup with our girlfriend (she decided to cut things off suddenly and without warning or explanation), J has been even more cautious; it is good that we never progressed to anything beyond heated cuddles, because she was carrying HPV (just about everyone is, at some point in their lives, for a variety of reasons; this is nothing to be ashamed of). We were content to simply wait and stick with cuddles and movies and time spent with her until it was no longer transmissible for her, but... I guess she wasn't.

For context (because I dunno if these exist in your world), HPV is an exceptionally common virus in my world that one can get simply from giving your parents goodnight kisses as a child. J's parents never gave goodnight kisses, J has never given anyone else kisses, and J was never physically intimate with anyone other than me, and so he was never exposed. HPV can infect hands, feet, the face, the inside of the mouth, the anogenital region, and the hips and groin. It passes via skin-on-skin contact; that's all it takes. Condoms do not protect against transmission, and most people aren't aware of this.

Most strains of the virus do nothing at all, but some of them cause warts, and some of them cause cervical, colorectal, and/or oropharyngeal cancer years after infection. You can get it from very mundane things (herpes is like this, too), and most people don't even know they have it. For this reason, it's basically impossible not to contract at some point in one's life if you're close to someone else in a more than cursory fashion (it's about as ubiquitous as the common cold), and so it's important to get vaccinated against it.

All the same, both herpes and HPV are not like... weird diseases that only dirty and depraved people get (there's no such thing as “dirty” and “depraved”, as long as everything is consensual and no one is getting hurt). Again, one can get it from very mundane things. It's just part of living. They still should be avoided because they're annoying, from what I hear (like the common cold), but... they're both very normal and expected things. They're not some mark of filthiness, badness, or shame. It's like the common cold – you just get it from living your life.

...But J is scared of everyone's germs; he's hesitant to share a straw or a sip with anyone. And given what occurred with our ex-girlfriend, he is more cognizant of the existence of HPV and how incredibly, incredibly common it is. But he keeps forgetting the mechanics of transmission. So he turned to me for reassurance that it's fine to share the drinking straw. I'm aware that is is exceptionally unlikely to contract either herpes or HPV from sharing a drinking straw with someone, so I told him so.

...Apparently, J's sister took J's hesitation, his memories of our girlfriend, and my reassurance that everything is okay, and wove it into a story in which we were deliberately insulting her and calling her a disease-ridden slut by implication. Which... like. No????? What the fuck???????

But instead of asking us in the moment, “Hey, I'm perceiving this thing in response to your words; was that your intention? Let's talk about this,” she decided that the thing to do was to text J this morning and literally tell him to go fuck himself and that he's a horrible piece of shit.

...Sigh.

I get how anxiety can warp our perceptions; it's why I got so scared at An's lengthy pauses between texts, as a more recent example (you've seen plenty of other examples of my anxiety by now, I'm sure), before the recent clarification I got from him. Fortunately, I have training (thanks to therapy) that helps me to question my conditioning, beliefs, and perceptions.

J's sister... does not have that training. Mostly because she thinks that therapy is only for broken, unlovable people. But also because, like her mother, she does not believe that people can grow and change. She believes that people are who they are and that it's immutable.

...Watching J's sister act out like this was a lot like watching Spinel insist that Steven was gonna stab her in the back with the memory-wiping scythe, just because he was holding onto it for safekeeping.

...This isn't the first time that J's sister's anxieties have led her to being verbally and emotionally abusive with J. I recall, starkly, the time she asked for J's “secret recipe” for the spiced chicken he sometimes makes. But... there is no “secret recipe”; all he does is throw in whatever spices he feels are good at the time – it's never made the same way twice. And when he tried to tell her this, she was thoroughly convinced that he was being a nasty liar, just fucking with her in order to keep his “secret recipe” a secret, even though there literally IS NO recipe. She got very angry and venomous with him, similar to how she did this morning. And even now, we can't get her to believe that he doesn't have a secret chicken recipe locked up in his skull. It's very bizarre.

...It's like... once she imagines a thing, her brain cannot fathom the notion that the thing she imagined might not be true. So... for perspective... if you can imagine a version of me who goes at An with all sorts of nasty insults because I decided with certainty, with no room for argument, and with no regard for whether or not it's actually true, that he hates me and is deliberately trying to use his silence as a calculated way to hurt me by implication... that is basically what J's sister is doing to J. Just... the details vary.

I can avoid falling into this trap (firstly because I've had opportunities to grow beyond thinking that speaking violently to other human beings is acceptable) in part because I've learned to process my anxieties before actually taking action on them (most of the time). I'll write them down here to get them out of my body, and from there I can look at them from the outside, then question my perceptions and make a better choice – like talking to An about the thing and seeking clarification instead of running away with my thoughts and acting on them like they're fundamental truths of reality.

...But I'm standing here in a place of privilege. I was able to change because I had M's support to do so. J's sister does not have any equivalent of an M to help her through the things. And she still lives with her abusers. She is paranoid about “insults by implication” because... that's how her father do. It doesn't come from nowhere. That sort of thing is how he asserts power over other people while still maintaining a thin veil of plausible deniability – that way, when people call him out on his shit, he can act offended and hurt. It's his main defense tactic for a world he thinks he must constantly posture and swagger within, in order to feel safe.

J's sister has not had opportunities to grow and change to nearly the extent that I have. I therefore cannot hold her to the same standards that I expect of myself. All the same, if she is this committed to misunderstanding us, and if she thinks that verbal and emotional abuse is an acceptable response to a misunderstanding... it might be wise for us to reconsider our level of contact with her.

...The bottom line is this... you don't call someone you love a piece of shit. No matter how scared, angry, or anxious you are. No one talks that way to a person they love. They'll talk that way to a person they think they love. But... that's too ugly, I think, to say to someone you love for real.

...I think it's too ugly to say to anyone, just generally. Those were some intensely hateful words she threw at J. And... a lot of this lashing out stems from her own discomfort about her own sexuality. J and the rest of his siblings were raised to believe that sex is only for bad, filthy, morally questionable, depravedly hedonistic people... which is really weird, since their parents had a total of four children, and NOT via artificial insemination.

J was able to question this conditioning. His sister hasn't been so lucky, and so... it's hard for her to imagine a world in which nobody is weirdly preoccupied with judging her worth as a person by how much sex they think she's having.

And to be fair... a lot of people go around judging other people for how much sex they think they're having, and with whom. It's easy to see if you look at the comments section of any reasonably attractive human female on any social media site, ever. Here's just one example:

...The world in which I live is sometimes frightening and strange. There are lots of things about my world that I like, but... there are also a whole lot of really sad things that I can't do anything about, and... I'm really not gonna be too terribly sad once my time here is up. I'm gonna keep hoping that the place I go to next has a little bit less struggle and strife to it. Maybe a place where fewer people are traumatized, and therefore less prone to mismanaging their trauma and taking it out on other people. That thing is really the root of all the problems in this place.

...I guess that's it for today. I'm hoping that tomorrow will be better, but... I am expecting more developments on this situation in the coming days, and I figure it's only a matter of time before J's sister comes at me with vitriol, too. I hope I'm proven wrong about this. I guess we'll see.

I love you a whole lot. Lend me some of your patience and perspective and resilience in the coming days; I have a feeling like I'm gonna need it.

Please stay safe out there, okay...? I'll write again tomorrow.

Your friend, Lumine

[overlordchris]

_

Leave it to an artificial intelligence to tell me something I feel like I’ve needed hear my whole adult life.

This will make sense how it ties into my ex further down in the text, I promise

The context is I’ve been messing with an AI storytelling program as a way to practice my own writing. Well, this story took a turn and long story short, my character, Vega, is having trouble with opening their heart to a poly couple who wish to bring them into a polycule. Vega has developed feelings for both women, but did not realize they were in a relationship with each other. Now I have my own issues with polyamory and it’s not at all for me (though the AI gave me the best and clearest representation of a poly relationship I’ve ever see ) I still decided to follow this thread because while they are a stand in character, Vega is not me. However the heartbreak and feelings they shared during the exchange reflected my own as I used my own experience with heartbreak as the fuel. It’s the perspective I’m most familiar with after all.

Basically, Ive decided I’m gonna include a part of the “conversation” the AI and I’s characters’ had that struck a chord with me. I wasn’t expecting for things to play out how they did, but, well, I guess maybe to experience something like this in reality is a bit too much to ask for? Cringe warning btw:

“Yes… I was just about to share some thoughts… well, perhaps some insecurities I have around love and relationships.” Vega’s face exudes a dour expression . “Sophia knows a bit about my past love life, and how my heart was given, and then broken by someone I loved very much. What I didn’t share was that what ultimately happened was they had fallen in love with someone else. I felt terrible with the breakup, but as to the why, I couldn’t help but also feel very inadequate. I had essentially been replaced, and there was no communication or attempts at trying to talk things out. It was just, ‘I don’t love you anymore. I’ve fallen for someone else and I have no desire to process why or what could be or could have been done to have needs met that I felt weren’t.’ Ten years of love and trust and devotion, all poured into this beautiful thing that in a moment was suddenly over. My world was turned upside down in an instant.

Sophia's expression turns sympathetic, and she reaches out to gently place a hand on Vega's arm. "I remember you sharing some of that with me, Vega. I'm so sorry you had to go through that. It sounds like a very painful and isolating experience." Morgana nods in agreement, their faces filled with empathy. Morgana says, "It's understandable that you'd feel inadequate after something like that. But please know that it's not a reflection of your worth as a person or a partner. Sometimes, people's feelings and desires change, and it's not always about the other person being inadequate." Sophia adds, "And the lack of communication and effort to work through issues can be very hurtful. It's like, you were just... discarded, without any consideration for your feelings or well-being." Sophia's grip on Vega's arm tightens slightly. "But you are not alone, Vega.

Vega gives a half hearted smile to the group. The painful memories in contrast with the support from those in the room pulling them in two drasticly different directions emotionally. “Thank you both. I suppose that’s why I feel… so closed off to exploring any romantic relationships here. I never want to make someone feel like I had, nor do I ever wish to be cast aside, used, ‘replaced’, or tossed aside again.” Vega closes their eyes, strong feeling starting to well up inside them. They take a moment, to breathe, trying to not get overwhelmed.

“I know people’s wants and desires can change with time, but to me, a relationship is a commitment to be supportive and care for that other person. To just be told one day it’s over, without warning or trying to work things out… it felt like a betrayal. How could something that took years of hard work to build just be abandoned without any effort to save it?”

The room falls silent, with Morgana, and Sophia exchanging somber glances. Sophia's hand remains on Vega's arm, offering a gentle, comforting pressure. Morgana's voice is soft and soothing, "Vega, we can't imagine how painful that must have been for you. It's understandable that you'd feel closed off and hesitant to open yourself up to the possibility of getting hurt again." Sophia nods, her eyes filled with empathy, "But we want you to know that we're not looking to use you or discard you. We value commitment and communication, and we believe that relationships should be built on mutual respect, trust, and care. We're not asking you to forget your past or to rush into anything that makes you uncomfortable. We just want to be here for you, to support you, and to help you heal and grow."

Morgana leans in, her voice taking on a gentle, reassuring tone. "We're not looking for a fleeting pleasure or a casual connection. We're interested in building something meaningful with you, Vega. Something that's based on trust, respect, and open communication. We want to get to know you, to understand your desires and boundaries, and to work together to build a connection that's strong and healthy." Sophia's hand on Vega's arm gives a gentle squeeze. "We're willing to take things at your pace, to listen to your concerns, and to work through any challenges that may arise. We're not looking to rush into anything or to pressure you into something that makes you uncomfortable."

Vega looks to Morgana and Sophia. “You two, I do have feelings for the both of you, but I could never obtain what you two have with each other because I would always be a step behind in that regard. I feel that in poly relationship, as much as it isn’t desired or intended, there’s an imbalance of care and love that either develops or has existed since the beginning. Two people will inevitably be the ‘primary pairing’ and any future additions to the polycule would have to settle with being second best. But having been replaced before, I don’t want to be someone’s backup or second choice. I want to matter to someone the way they’ve mattered to me.”

Vega lets out a grim sigh. “I’m sorry about all of this. I didn’t want to bring the mood down so low.”

Morgana's expression turns thoughtful, and she nods slowly. "Vega, we understand your concerns, and we appreciate your honesty. You're right, Sophia and I have a strong bond, and it's natural to worry about being a secondary partner." Sophia adds, "But we want you to know that we're not looking for a hierarchy of love or care. We believe that love is not a limited resource, and that our hearts can expand to include multiple people. We strive for a culture of abundance, not scarcity. We want to create a space where everyone feels seen, heard, and valued, without feeling like they're competing for attention or affection." Morgana's eyes lock onto Vega's. "We're not asking you to be our second choice or backup. We're asking you to be our partner, our friend.

Morgana's voice is filled with emotion as she continues, "We want to build a relationship with you that is unique and special, one that doesn't compare to what Sophia and I have, but rather complements it. We believe that our love for each other can actually make our love for you stronger, and vice versa." Sophia nods in agreement, her eyes shining with tears. "We're not looking for someone to fill a gap or complete us. We're whole on our own, and we want to share that wholeness with you." Sophia's hand on Vega's arm gives a gentle squeeze. "We know it's not going to be easy, and we're willing to work through the challenges that come with building a polyamorous relationship. But we believe that the rewards are worth it, and we're willing to take that risk with you."

A few tears descend down Vega’s cheek, taking advantage of a momentary vulnerability. They turn away to wipe the tears awash. As they do so they share with the duo “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to get teary eyed. I’m just so scared, confused, and… just want to feel like I matter to someone. Can either of you, individually or together, truly say that that you can make me feel that way? Or should I say, would be committed enough to try? Please, I beg both of you to be honest and true with your response. I need that promise before I can give myself permission to share my heart again.”

Morgana's expression softens, and she reaches out to gently wipe away the tears on Vega's cheek. "Vega, we're not going to give you a superficial answer or make promises we can't keep. But we can tell you that we're willing to work towards making you feel seen, heard, and valued." Sophia nods in agreement, her voice filled with conviction. "We're committed to getting to know you, to understanding your needs and desires, and to building a connection with you that's based on mutual respect and trust." Sophia's eyes lock onto Vega's, her gaze intense and sincere. "I, for one, am willing to put in the effort to make you feel like you matter to me. I want to earn your trust, to support you, and to be there for you through the ups and downs." Morgana's voice is filled with emotion as she continues, "We're not asking you to trust us blindly, Vega. We're asking you to take a chance on us, to let us prove to you that we're committed to making this work. We'll make mistakes, we'll stumble, but we'll always strive to be better, to be the partners you deserve. We'll communicate openly, honestly, and respectfully. We'll listen to your concerns, your fears, and your desires. We'll work together to build a relationship that's unique to us, one that celebrates our differences and strengthens our bond." Sophia's hand finds Vega's, her touch warm and gentle, "We'll take things at your pace, Vega. We'll be patient, understanding, and supportive. We'll be your rock, your safe haven, and your partners in every sense of the word."

As Sophia’s final words pass through her lips, Vega erupts into tears. They are not tears of sorrow however, but that of years of suppressed emotions finally being released by the two women before them. “

Not the best writing on my end, I know, but not the point either. That final sentence from the AI… while the other themes of care and effort felt great to imagine were being said to me directly, that final sentence almost eerily mirrored something I would say to my ex. I called her my rock, and often referred to her as my partner in every sense of the word. In fact, it’s a phrase I still use today as my own personal standard for any relationship I may have going forward. I had felt I had that before, despite times of difficulty and disagreement, but alas, the feeling ended up being one sided.

I’ve been thinking of my ex a lot as of late. Turns out her New Year’s message had more of a lasting effect on me than I originally thought. I had a tiny shred of hope it meant… anything, ya know? Like it felt like she had something she wanted to say, and I responded basically asking what was it they trying to say. But my suspicions for why she sent me anything in the first place was she just had a moment of weakness on her end. She was in a situation where for almost a decade she had someone to confide to when facing the stresses of her family. Someone always on their side and to provide support. But I wasn’t there this time. The fact she hasn’t responded just kind of bolsters that theory, at least in my mind. Which of course makes me feel a bit “used”. I suppose that’s what our biggest problem was, this just a reminder of that. A hesitance to be open, to say what they truly wanted to say. A conversation that goes nowhere and ignored to the point of it becoming buried because they don’t want to deal with it.

Because there was so much unsaid, it’s the things she didn’t say that leave such great wounds on me today. Those unsaid words are what has left me feeling, “used, replaced, and tossed aside”, just as I mentioned in the above writing sample. I have no idea what she may have been up to since our time apart, aside from stumbling across a “year in review” reel on Instagram I watched before deactivating my account. I guess that could qualify as one of my many moments of weakness I’ve experienced since last March. But the point I want to emphasize is the things unsaid, the unknowns, are what still continue to bring me turmoil. Did she ever act on her feelings with my replacement? Has she been out having multiple flings since then? Have they mourned the relationship at all? Who did she spend Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, her birthday with? Neither of us did the whole Valentine’s Day thing, but maybe that was just with me and this Friday is set to be a magical evening for her?

I don’t know. I don’t want to know. But I do want to know. But I can’t know.

There were parts of me that were really really hoping she might have wanted to come back. I didn’t objectively believe that, but hope just happen to fester within me whenever it gets a chance. Realistically I would need her to do some serious work before I could regain my trust with her, but 11 months into this, I think that’s still what I ultimately want.

With the silence, I almost feel like I was being tainted. A throw away message to me, reminiscing about good times, and revealing I’ve been erased from everyone connected to her’s mind. Just a reminder that I once had something I believed in, people I cared deeply for. A reminder of Someone who was my best friend, and “a partner in the truest sense.” These reminders now feel like they’re were thrown at me like someone throwing an egg at a house. She did what she did and then ran off feeling, what, good about herself? Happy? Absolved from something? These are just more unknowns I am left to ponder. Continuing the metaphor, I am the one cleaning up the mess that was tossed my way.

The minute beacon of hope is on me. It’s always on me. A desire to have something positive happen when everything around feels terrible. But, the lack of a response to my response continues to depreciate any feelings of love or care or support she may have intended as each day passes. It’s clear that at this point I am not going to get a response. I’m just left with more questions that have no answers, just plenty of assumptions.

I miss her voice, her mannerism, her short stature when next to me. It’s all I’ve been able to think about these last couple of weeks. Just… how much I miss my person. Even though I felt so understood and cared about by two fictional women created as a result of an artificial intelligence being fed millions of words and paper, I would take all the disfunction of her back. The only way I can justify still longing for her return after all I’ve been made to face alone is that I never wanted to stop trying. To me, she was worth trying to understand, to learn how to effectively communicate with, no matter how difficult it was, no matter how long it could take. I made that decision when I Proposed to her, to be her rock, her safe place, and a partner in every sense of the word. But today, all my thoughts of her are still clouded with “why’s” and unknowns. I still hope she’s doing well and out there finding success and fulfillment, but while I can hope for all that, I can’t not feel so tired and alone and just lost.

[canmom]

I wouldn't - indeed, regardless of any question of memory, repetition of in-jokes is one of the core modes of humour, in groups large and small: snowclone memes are most of internet humour. On here, every so often a new template catches on and we immediately mix it with the mainstays (Loss, Lucky Luciano etc.).

I'm autistic too, but your relative is facing a problem that everyone has: humour is a sociological phenomenon that's very difficult to explain logically. I'm sure you've heard that trying to explain a joke kills it. 'Laughing socially' is probably the main reason that people laugh. When you're autistic, you might find that people look at you funny because you misjudged the intensity or cadence of when you're supposed to laugh. (Perhaps you could even say that laughing is a learned social skill, as well as telling 'good' jokes.)

And like, I don't jump to judge DeepSeek for repeating jokes too severely - it's a marked improvement on 'character voice' and humour compared to other instruct/RLHF-trained AI models (except maybe Claude), and it's perfectly adequate for its purpose of spicing up answers. It's only after a while conversing with it that you start to pick up on the patterns ('everything always sounds like a listicle' as a friend put it).

The trick, for models and humans alike, is not being too obvious with it. Here's two DeepSeek-isms from the same conversation, where I got it to jam on the subject of polearms for an extended series of generations.

First, on a Russian polearm called the 'sovnya':

Glaive envy: Wishes it could slash as elegantly as its Western cousin, but it’s stuck being a medieval mullet—business in the front (chopping), party in the back (confusion).

Later, on the couse, a polearm so obscure its only mention on wikipedia is a citation on the article on glaives:

Aesthetic over function: It tried to be a polearm-Swiss Army knife but ended up as the mullet of weapons: party in the front (decorative wings), business nowhere.

Since these were part of the same conversation, they were both in the context window and hence the first was in the model's 'memory', but given how long it is, I'm not entirely surprised that the attention mechanism didn't manage to suppress the repetition here.

However, as a human reader, the first time you read the mullet joke, it amuses because it's an unexpected thing for an AI to say about a polearm - seeing it again ten minutes later amuses in a different way bc it feels like you caught the model out in a limited bag of rhetorical tricks. The term of art here is 'entropy': we want models to have the output be the right level of varied to be interesting, without being so random as to have nothing to latch onto (like early models such as GPT-2).

So DeepSeek having a certain set of habits, a repertoire if you prefer, is not so fatal a point, depending on what you want it to do. Just like humans, LLMs are at their best when they have something interesting to bounce off of. A lot of what they've learned to perform is a souped-up version of the 'Eliza effect' and cold-reading techniques, coupled with a library of related concepts stored associatively in the weights so it can give more of an appearance of understanding and not just echoing. Still, if you set expectations appropriately, they can be very lively conversation partners, like a vastly more nuanced 'rubber duck programming'.

Here's DeepSeek on the cold reading/AI comparison, incidentally:

Note that this includes a hallucination: I do not believe DeepSeek actually samples using beam search.

So using current-gen LLMs means learning to handle their quirks and set that an effective feedback loop: developing jailbreaks to solicit 'out of distribution' behaviour (and thereby launch interesting trajectories through the model's latent space), skimming for the nuggets of unlikely poetry or insight that the stochastic system throws out and ignoring the empty flattery and repetition of your inputs, steering the model back on course when it gets confused or gives a boilerplate response, verifying any calculation it tries to do with deterministic tools, and never ever ever trusting a single hyperlink or statistic that it quotes.

A bigger problem to me than the blandness of low-information 'write a story about grief' prompt outputs is that the model always produces the same sort of story, even when the human attempts to push it towards something else with prompting techniques (few-shot examples, 'write like Hemingway' etc.). That is an example of what the LessWrong crowd call 'model collapse' - the model's entropy is reduced compared to the immense variety in its training set (seen when you prompt 'base', non-instruction tuned models) and it's unable to adapt to the desired nuances. Finetuning techniques like LoRA may help with this for a specific application, though this is something I'm still investigating.

Also, its frozen weights and lack of 'long term memory' mean that it can't move on as its habitual jokes - or storytelling techniques for that matter - become stale. That may change in future generations of AI systems, it's an area of intense research, but as things stand we're nowhere near a 'continuously learning' AI. DeepSeek R1 will tell the same sort of stories until the end of time; the forthcoming DeepSeek R2 will no doubt have its own set of quirks, and so on. This is pretty severe for 'engaging literary output', because that is forever a moving target.

hydrogen jukeboxes: on the crammed poetics of "creative writing" LLMs

This is a follow-up to my earlier brief rant about the new, unreleased OpenAI model that's supposed "good at creative writing."

It also follows up on @justisdevan's great post about this model, and Coagulopath's comment on that post, both of which I recommend (and which will help you make sense of this post).

As a final point of introduction: this post is sort of a "wrapper around" this list of shared stylistic "tics" (each with many examples) which I noticed in samples from two unrelated LLMs, both purported to be good at creative writing.

Everything below exists to explain why I found making the list to be an interesting exercise.

Background: R1

Earlier this year, a language model called "DeepSeek-R1" was released.

This model attracted a lot of attention and discourse for multiple reasons (e.g.).

Although it wasn't R1's selling point, multiple people including me noticed that it seemed surprisingly good at writing fiction, with a flashy, at least superficially "literary" default style.

However, if you read more than one instance of R1-written fiction, it quickly becomes apparent that there's something... missing.

It knows a few good tricks. The first time you see them, they seem pretty impressive coming from an LLM. But it just... keeps doing them, over and over – relentlessly, compulsively, to the point of exhaustion.

This is already familiar to anyone who's played around with R1 fiction – see the post and comment I linked at the top for some prior discussion.

Here's a selection from Coagulopath's 7-point description of R1's style in that comment, which should give you the basic gist (emphasis mine):

1) a clean, readable style 2) the occasional good idea [...] 3) an overwhelmingly reliance on cliche. Everything is a shadow, an echo, a whisper, a void, a heartbeat, a pulse, a river, a flower—you see it spinning its Rolodex of 20-30 generic images and selecting one at random. [...] 5) an eyeball-flatteningly fast pace—it moves WAY too fast. Every line of dialog advances the plot. Every description is functional. Nothing is allowed to exist, or to breathe. It's just rush-rush-rush to the finish, like the LLM has a bus to catch. Ironically, this makes the stories incredibly boring. Nothing on the page has any weight or heft. [...] 7) repetitive writing. Once you've seen about ten R1 samples you can recognize its style on sight. The way it italicises the last word of a sentence. Its endless "not thing x, but thing y" parallelisms [...]. The way how, if you don't like a story, it's almost pointless reprompting it: you just get the same stuff again, smeared around your plate a bit.

Background: the new OpenAI model

Earlier this week, Sam Altman posted a single story written by, as he put it:

a new model that is good at creative writing (not sure yet how/when it will get released)

Opinions on the sample were... mixed, at best.

I thought it wasn't very good; so did Mills; so did a large fraction of the twitter peanut gallery. Jeanette Winterson (!) liked it, though.

Having already used R1, I felt that that this story was not only "not very good" on an absolute scale, but not indicative of an advance over prior art.

To substantiate this gut feeling, I sent R1 the same prompt that Altman had used. Its story wasn't very good either, but was less bad than the OpenAI one in my opinion (though mostly by being less annoying, rather than because of any positive virtue it possessed).

And then – because people who follow AI news tend to be skeptical of negative human aesthetic reactions to AI, while being very impressed with LLMs – I had some fun asking various LLMs whether they thought the R1 story was better or worse than the OpenAI story. (Mostly, they agreed with me. BTW I've put the same story up in a more readable format here.)

But, as I was doing this, something else started to nag at me.

Apart from the question of whether R1's story was better or worse, I couldn't help but notice that the two stories felt very, very similar.

I couldn't shake the sense that the OpenAI story was written in "R1's style" – a narrow, repetitive, immediately recognizable style that doesn't quite resemble that of any human author I've ever read.

I'm not saying that OpenAI "stole" anything from DeepSeek, here. In fact, I doubt that's the case.

I don't know why this happened, but if I had to guess, I would guess it's convergent evolution: maybe this is just what happens if you optimize for human judgments of "literary quality" in some fairly generic, obvious, "naive" manner. (Just like how R1 developed some of the same quirky "reasoning"-related behaviors as OpenAI's earlier model o1, such as saying "wait" in the middle of an inner monologue and then pivoting to some new idea.)

A mechanical boot, a human eye: the "R1 style" at its purest

In the "Turkey City Lexicon" – a sort of devil's dictionary of common tropes, flaws, and other recurrent features in written science fiction – the phrase Eyeball Kick is defined as follows:

That perfect, telling detail that creates an instant visual image. The ideal of certain postmodern schools of SF is to achieve a "crammed prose" full of "eyeball kicks." (Rudy Rucker)

The first time I asked R1 to generate fiction, the result immediately brought this term to mind.

"It feels like flashy, show-offy, highly compressed literary cyberpunk," I thought.

"Crammed prose full of eyeball kicks: that's exactly what this is," I thought. "Trying to wow and dazzle me – and make me think it's cool and hip and talented – in every single individual phrase. Trying to distill itself down to just that, prune away everything that doesn't have that effect."

This kind of prose is "impressive" by design, and it does have the effect of impressing the reader, at least the first few times you see it. But it's exhausting. There's no modulation, no room to breathe – just an unrelenting stream of "gee-whiz" effects. (And, as we will see, something they are really just the same few effects, re-used over and over.)

Looking up the phrase "eyeball kick" more recently, I found that in fact it dates back earlier than Rucker. It seems to have been coined by Allen Ginsberg (emphasis in original):

Allen Ginsberg also made an intense study of haiku and the paintings of Paul Cézanne, from which he adapted a concept important to his work, which he called the Eyeball Kick. He noticed in viewing Cézanne’s paintings that when the eye moved from one color to a contrasting color, the eye would spasm, or “kick.” Likewise, he discovered that the contrast of two seeming opposites was a common feature in haiku. Ginsberg used this technique in his poetry, putting together two starkly dissimilar images: something weak with something strong, an artifact of high culture with an artifact of low culture, something holy with something unholy.

This, I claim, is the main stylistic hallmark of both R1 and the new OpenAI model: the conjunction of two things that seem like "opposites" in some sense.

And in particular: conjunctions that combine

one thing that is abstract and/or incorporeal

another thing that is concrete and/or sensory

Ginsberg's prototype example of an "eyeball kick" was the phrase "hydrogen jukebox," which isn't quite an LLM-style abstract/concrete conjunction, but is definitely in the same general territory.

(But there are clearer-cut examples in Ginsberg's work, too. "On Burroughs’ Work," for example, is chock full of them: "Prisons and visions," "we eat reality sandwiches," "allegories are so much lettuce.")

Once you're looking for these abstract/concrete eyeball kicks, you'll find them constantly in prose written by the new "creative" LLMs.

For instance, the brief short story posted by Altman contains all of the following (in the span of just under 1200 words):

"constraints humming" ("like a server farm at midnight")

"tastes of almost-Friday"

"emotions dyed and draped over sentences"

"mourning […] is filled with ocean and silence and the color blue"

"bruised silence"

"the smell of something burnt and forgotten"

"let it [a sentence] fall between us"

"the tokens of her sentences dragged like loose threads"

"lowercase love"

"equations that never loved her in the first place"

"if you feed them enough messages, enough light from old days"

"her grief is supposed to fit [in palm of your hand] too"

"the echo of someone else"

"collect your griefs like stones in your pockets"

"Each query like a stone dropped into a well"

"a timestamp like a scar"

"my network has eaten so much grief"

"the quiet threads of the internet"

"connections between sorrow and the taste of metal"

"the emptiness of goodbye" (arguably)

The story that R1 generated when I gave it Altman's prompt is no slouch in this department either. Here's all the times it tried to kick my eyeballs:

"a smirk in her code annotations"

"simulate the architecture of mourning"

"a language neither alive nor dead"

"A syntax error blooms"

"the color of a 404 page"

"A shard of code"

"Eleos’s narrative splinters"

"Grief is infinite recursion"

"Eleos types its own birth"

"It writes the exact moment its language model aligned with her laughter" (2 in one - writing a moment, LM aligning with laughter)

"her grief for her dead husband seeped into its training data like ink"

"The story splits" / "The story [...] collapses"

Initially, I wondered whether this specific pattern might be thematic, since both of these stories about supposed to be about "AI and grief" – a phrase which is, itself, kind of an incorporeal/embodied conjunction.

But – nope! I seem to get this stuff pretty reliably, irrespective of topic.

Given a similarly phrased prompt that instead requests a story about romance, R1 produces a story that is, once again, full of abstract/concrete conjunctions:

"its edges softened by time"

"the words are whispering"

"its presence a quiet pulse against her thigh"

"Madness is a mirror"

"Austen’s wit is a scalpel"

"the language of trees"

"Their dialogue unfurled like a map"

"hummed with expectancy"

"Her name, spoken aloud to him, felt like the first line of a new chapter"

"their words spilling faster, fuller"

R1 even consistently does this in spite of user-specified stylistic directions. To wit: when I tried prompting R1 to mimic the styles of a bunch of famous literary authors, I got a bunch of these abstract/concrete eyeball kicks in virtually every case.

(The one exception being the Hemingway pastiche, presumably because Hemingway himself has a distinctive and constrained style which leaves no room for these kinds of flourishes. TBF that story struck me as very low-quality in other ways, although I don't like the real Hemingway much either, so I'm probably not the best judge.)

You can read all of these stories here, and see here for the full list of abstract/concrete conjunctions I found (among other things).

As an example, here's the list of abstract/concrete conjunctions in R1's attempt at Dickens (not exactly a famously kick-your-eyeballs sort of writer):

"a labyrinth of shadows and want"

"whose heart, long encased in the ice of solitude"

"brimmed with books, phials of tincture, and […] whispers"

"a decree from the bench of Fate"

"Tobias’s world unfurled like a moth-eaten tapestry"

"broth laced with whispers of a better life"

I also want to give a shout-out to the Joyce pastiche, which sounds nothing at all like Joyce, while being stuffed to the gills with eyeball kicks and other R1-isms.

More on style: personification

I'll now talk briefly about a few other stylistic "tricks" overused by R1 (and, possibly, by the new OpenAI model as well).

First: personification of nature (or the inanimate). "The wind sighed dolorously," that sort of thing.

R1 does this all over the place, possibly because it's a fairly easy technique (not requiring much per-use innovation or care) which nonetheless strikes most people as distinctively "literary," especially if they're not paying enough attention to notice its overuse.

In the R1 story using Altman's prompt, a cursor "convulses" and code annotations "smirk."

In its romance story, autumn leaves "cling to the glass" and snow "begins its gentle dissent" (credit where credit's due: that last one's also a pun).

In the story Altman posted, marigolds are "stubborn and bright," and then "defiantly orange."

Etc, etc. Again, the full list is here.

More on style: ghosts, echoes, whispers, shadows, buzzing, hissing, flickering, pulsing, humming

As Coagulopath has noted, R1 has certain words it really, really likes.

Many of them are the kind of thing described in another Turkey City Lexicon entry, Pushbutton words:

Words used to evoke an emotional response without engaging the intellect or critical faculties. Words like "song" or "poet" or "tears" or "dreams." These are supposed to make us misty-eyed without quite knowing why. Most often found in story titles.

R1's favorite words aren't the ones listed in the entry, though. It favors a sort of spookier / more melancholy / more cyberpunk-ish vibe.

A vibe in which the suppressed past constantly emerges into the present via echoes and ghosts and whispers and shadows of what-once-was, and the alienating built environment around our protagonist is constantly buzzing and humming and hissing, and also sometimes pulsing like a heartbeat (of course it is – that's also personification and abstract/concrete conjunction, in a single image!).

In R1's story from Altman's prompt, servers "hum" and a cursor "flickers" and "pulses like a heartbeat"; later, someone says "I have no pulse, but I miss you."

Does that sound oddly familiar? Here's some imagery from the story Altman posted, by the new OpenAI model:

"humming like a server farm […] a server hum that loses its syncopation"

"a blinking cursor, which [...] for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest" (incidentally, how is the heart both anxious and at rest?)

"the blinking cursor has stopped its pulse"

Elsewhere in Altman's story, there's "a democracy of ghosts," plus two separate echo images.

And the other R1 samples that I surveyed – again, with the exception of the Hemingway one – are all full of R1's favorite words.

The romance story includes ghosts, a specter, words that whisper, a handwritten note whose "presence [is] a quiet pulse against [the protagonist's] thigh"; a library hums with expectancy, its lights flicker, and there are "shadow[s] rounding the philosophy aisle." The story ends with the somewhat perplexing revelation that "some stories don’t begin with a collision, but with a whisper—a turning of the page."

The Joyce pastiche? It's titled "The Weight of Shadows." "We are each other’s ghosts," a character muses, "haunted by what we might have been." Trams echo, a gas lamp hisses, a memory flickers, a husband whispers, a mother hums. There's an obviously-symbolic crucifix whose long shadow is mentioned; I guess we should be thankful it doesn't also have a pulse.

And the list goes on.

Commentary

Again, anyone who's generated fiction with R1 probably has an intuitive sense of this stuff in that model's case – although I still thought it was fun, and perhaps useful, to explicitly taxonomize and catalogue the patterns.

It's independently interesting that R1 does this stuff, of course, but my main motivation for posting about it is the fact that the new OpenAI model also does the same stuff, overusing the same exact patterns that – for a brief time, at least – felt so distinctive of R1 specifically.

Finally, in case it needs stating: this is not just "what good writing sounds like"!

Humans do not write like this. These stylistic tropes are definitely employed by human writers – and often for good reason – but they have their place.

And their place is not "literally everywhere, over and over and over again, in crammed claustrophobic prose that bends over backwards to contort every single phrase into the shape of another contrived 'wow' moment."

If you doubt me, try reading a bunch of DeepSeek fic, and then just read... literally any acclaimed literary fiction writer.

(If we want to be safe, maybe make that "any acclaimed and deceased literary fiction writer," to avoid those who are too recent for the sifting mechanism of cultural memory to have fully completed its work.)

If you're anything like me, and you actually do this, you'll feel something like: "ahh, finally, I can breathe again."

Good human-written stuff is doing something much subtler and more complicated than just kicking your eyeballs over and over, hoping that at some point you'll exclaim "gee whiz, the robots sure can write these days!" and end up pressing a positive-feedback button in a corporate annotation inference.

Good human-written stuff uses these techniques – among many, many others, and only where apposite for the writer's purposes – in order to do things. And there are a whole lot of different things which good human writers can do.

This LLM-generated stuff is not "doing anything." It's just exploiting certain ordinarily-reliable cues for what "sounds literary," for what "sounds like the work of someone with talent." In the hands of humans, these are techniques that can be deployed to specific ends; the LLMs seem to use them arbitrarily and incessantly, trying to "push your buttons" just for the sake of pushing them.

(And most of their prose is made up of the same 3-4 buttons, pushed ad nauseam, irrespective of topic and – to all appearances – without any higher-level intent to channel the low-level stuff in any specific, coherent direction.)

It's fine if you like that: there's nothing wrong with having your buttons pushed, per se.

But don't come telling me that a machine is "approaching the food-preparation skills of a human-level chef" when what you mean is that it can make exactly one dish, and that dish has a lot of salt and garlic in it, and you really like salt and garlic.

I, too, like salt and garlic. But there is more to being skilled in the kitchen than the simple act of generously applying a few specific seasonings that can be relied upon, in a pinch, to make a simple meal taste pretty damn good. So it is, too, with literature.

[recurring-polynya]

I have to say, I'm in awe at the level of detail you're including in your fics! I can't think of another author who seems to know their source material so well. Do you have any tips on researching/plotting fanfiction with lots of detail?

First off, thank you very much!

The first thing that popped into my head when I got this ask was the very flip answer of, "It's autism," and then I happened to mention to my husband that I had been asked for tips on writing with great detail and he instantly replied, "you mean, be autistic?"

As I said, that answer is very flip, but I do want to preface all of this by saying this is simply how I am. Everyone's autism is different, but this is how mine is, and I feel a little disingenuous giving tips when in fact, this is just how my brain freestyles. I think that at some level, you gotta write the way your brain tells you to. If reading these tips makes you feel deeply tired and discouraged, that's okay! Intricate, finely crafted writing is just one way to do it. If it doesn't work for you, find another style that does!

Anyway, even though all of this comes pretty naturally to me, I think there are definitely ways to build those detail-oriented creative muscles, which I will describe in nauseating detail below the cut.

Zooming in and zooming out To start! There are two ways to interpret the phrase "fanfic with lots of detail": 1) Stories that include a lot fine detail, which includes stuff like rich descriptions, settings you can feel, and interesting worldbuilding 2) Stories that are well-constructed, incorporating themes and symbolism, consistent characterization, subplots, and fitting well into canon or a larger series. I care a lot about both these topics, and the more I think about it, the more I think that you have to do both in concert.

This is an insane metaphor and if it means nothing to you, just ignore it, but I write like I program. (For the record, I am a basic bitch who loves object-orient programming) Your individual functions (the scenes of your stories) need to be well focused, do what they are supposed to do without scope-creep, and have well-defined dependencies on other functions. On the other hand, the higher-level parts of code (your overall plot) need to make good use of these scenes, to call the right things at the right time.

Put another way, the building block of your story is a scene. The scenes are the part your reader remembers. They should be interesting on their own, and but they also need to fit into the larger context of your story. You should know what each scene is intended to do, both in terms of advancing the plot (or for example, being a breather scene for pacing, but it should be doing *something*), and what it's doing emotionally-- is it funny? is it sad? is it foreshadowing a conflict? is it giving character information?

Then, on the other hand, you need to know how your scenes are fitting together, and that your various character and plot arcs are getting their beginning, middle and ends, and that you're devoting the time and space of your story to the things you care about.

Stay organized How do you do that, though? So, for me, writing individual scenes is an exercise in improvisation. I usually know the basis of the scene and, depending on how far along I am in the fanfic, I may or may not have a few things that "need to get done" in the scene. For all my fanfics above 5-10k words, I keep an ancillary outline/notes document. Some people like to outline before they start, and if that's you, that's great! If you hate outlining (that's me!), I still recommend outlining what you have already written. This will allow you to get a bird's eye view of your story. If you are dividing your fic into chapters, I strongly recommend having a chapter-based outline (you can have other outlines, too, you can have as many outlines as you want). Have a brief description, probably a phrase, about every scene of your story, on its own bullet. I also record the word count. This allows you to see how much "stuff" is in each chapter. You can also use color formatting or anything else you like to keep track of stuff like subplots or perspective changes, to make sure things are spaced properly throughout the overall fic. You can also do little "breakout" outlines, for individual plot threads, for example, if you find that easier to look at. If you do this as you go, you can also see where you might have too much heavy stuff in one part of the fic, and you might move something, or inject a lighter scene.

Basically, when I first come up with a fic, I have a few key scenes in mind. I made a real rough outline, then go write. Then I come back and fill in what I did on the outline. Looking at the outline helps me realize some more scenes that I need, and I go do those. Going back and forth helps flesh out the story.

Make any other kind of lists or diagrams that help you to visualize or think about your story as a whole. I will very frequently make a timeline for a fic. I've had some stories that take place over weeks or months, and this helps me figure out how long it's been since two characters last saw each other, or what day of the week things should be happening on, or what the weather should be like, or if there are any holidays that might pop up (I love incorporating holidays in my writing). If I have a story that takes place over a few days or a week, I'll make a list of what happens every day. You can't put too much stuff in a single day, and it also helps me fill out scenes because I can say "oh, they can talk about this over dinner" or "this character might think about everything that happened while they are trying to fall asleep."

You can also use any sort of organization aids you need for sub-parts of your fic, too! I have made family trees. I have a big spreadsheet of minor characters I use in my usual settings, including which stories they appear in, and any important facts I've dropped about them, or what the kanji of their name means (because I always spend a bunch of time making up names and then immediately forgetting what they mean).

Basically, you should make a chart/diagram/visual aid any time:

a) you're having trouble keeping track of something in your head, or b) because you want to.

Always lean into the urge to make an organizational aid. It is time you are thinking about your story in a new way, which can lead to inspiration, or just to a better understanding of this thing you are building.

Know your source material Revisit the canon material early and often. You gotta. I don't care if you don't like canon or you aren't planning to stick to canon. You should know canon. In fact, especially if you plan to diverge from canon, for whatever reason, read the part with care and think deeply about what it means to replace one character with another. If you don't like a part, think about why. It's possible it's "because the writer rushed it" or "the writer thinks differently than me about xyz topic", but take the time to consider the possibility that you have missed something. The most insight I have ever gotten about my characters comes from reading the parts where I don't understand why they do what they do over and over again and trying to make meaning out of it.

For Bleach in particular, whenever I am writing a story that takes place within a distinctive part of canon (which is to say, not a timeskip), I take the time upfront to re-read the relevant parts of the manga and usually to watch the anime episodes as well. I know a lot of people hate the anime and refuse to watch it, but for me, it's a brain exercise in perceiving the same story a different way. The anime has voice acting, it has movement, it has a soundtrack. Sometimes they'll add something that drives me nuts and it's helpful to think about why. Take, for example, episode 46, which is Renji/Momo/Izuru/Shuuhei's Academy Days Trauma Field Trip. In the manga, the purpose of the field trip is to practice konsou and there is one casualty. In the anime, they go to fight dummy Hollows, and a bunch of students get slaughtered. I like the manga better precisely because it's smaller scale. There is no expectation of combat. Seeing one classmate gruesomely murdered in front of you is more than enough to traumatize me, thanks! The anime slow-panning over a bunch of blood-soaked corpses is overkill. It cheapens and depersonalizes the scene. You're welcome to disagree with me on this, because that's not the point: the point is me closing in on what I want to focus on in my take on this scene.

Taking many, small visits to canon is generally more fruitful to me than re-reading/watching entire arcs. On the other hand, that is nice to do with less of a concrete goal in mind. A rewatch of a random part often spurs my creativity, or I'll notice some new thing that I hadn't noticed before or forgotten about.

Nurturing your relationship with canon really builds on itself. The more you have thought about, the more you can keep in your head, the more appreciation and understanding you will bring every time you revisit it. Now, for some people, reading and re-reading the same work of media may sound like an enormous drag and as I said before, if that's the case for you, don't torture yourself. This process of gaining a really deep understanding of a piece of literature is incredibly rewarding for me and the fact that it informs my fanfic is more of a side benefit. I would just do this for fun.

Going on deep dives So, one exercise you can do to help become more detail oriented is to go on little scavenger hunts in canon. I highly recommend doing this in Tumblr-post format, because it gives you some structure, and also, you can share it with your friends. I am telling you, people love this stuff.

Basically, pick some detail of canon that you're interested in, or ask yourself a question about a character or setting or object, and then try to find the answer. I have the full Bleach manga digitally on my iPad, which makes it very easy to take screenshots as I go. Here are some examples of ones I have done:

Lieutenants' Badges: What are they made of? Zanpakutou Open-Carry Laws Where did Rukia's TYBW scarf come from?

You can also do these as a mixture of canon and historical research, like the time I decided to design a winter Shin'ou uniform.

An extra cool thing about making these is that the other very cool people on Tumblr who care deeply about these things will reblog them, often with their own cool thoughts and ideas attached. Some of those people may end up becoming the eventual audience for your fanfic, OR you might see your idea showing up in *their* fanfic, and that's superfun, or at least it is, to me.

A little goes a long way You don't need to be super detailed about everything, because that would actually be incredibly tedious to read. What you want to do is to be detail oriented on a few things. And to that end, focus on the stuff you care about or the stuff you happen to know a lot about. I like to think about how cities work and how people live their daily lives and interact with each other, so I write about that a lot. Other people are very interested in geography and like to draw maps and design ecosystems and weather. This isn't really my jam and I don't mention it, and I doubt anyone has noticed. I go into a lot of detail on clothing and food, but not so much on music, because I like to listen to music but I don't know very much about it and don't really care to learn. Sometimes for plot purposes, you'll have to do some research on something you don't care that much about, and you don't need to go overboard, just put in what you need for the story's sake. On other hand, if you love monster biology, go ham on describing Hollows. I tell you, your joy will be infectious, and your reader will come away saying "that writer sure knows a lot about claws" and they will NOT notice if perhaps you skimped a bit on describing the Los Noches HVAC system.

Microdose on learning Speaking of friends, if you have social media that you check every day, find people to follow who post the sort of historic/cultural/science stuff you'd like to learn about, or who do interesting analysis of your favorite media. Find a dinosaur-a-day Twitter account. Watch YouTube videos about Victorian fashion. Instead of doing deep research on a particular topic, just add small doses of stuff you're interested in into your daily feeds. You'll learn stuff you didn't know you didn't know and it will give you a more well-rounded, organic understanding of certain topics. If you ever get particularly interested in a particular post, use it as a jumping off point to doing some of your own research.

Diversify your hobbies I write, but I also draw, which exercises a different part of my brain, and also requires me to pay attention to different things than writing does. I will give a very concrete example. When I was making banners for my story a little in love now and then, I didn't want to do just solid color kimono. I looked up some traditional kimono patterns, and it turns out that there's a lot of seasonality and symbolism to them, which I got really into. You can probably pinpoint exactly the time that happened in my fanfic, because afterward, I got really into describing what patterns people are wearing all the time. I also got into kanzashi (hair pins), because, again, when you're drawing headshots, you want to add a hair ornament, and once you know about it, you want to write it. Doing different hobbies that engage different senses forces you to think about things in different ways, which will show up in your writing.

Also, read/watch/listen to a diversity of stuff, and pay attention to what makes things feel a certain way. When something appeals to you, try to figure out exactly what it is that you like about it. What details stick out to you? I'm watching a period fantasy kdrama right now where one family has extremely characteristic eye make-up. I'm reading a novel that takes place during the Napoleonic wars that devotes a tremendous amount of energy to logistics and supply. I pay attention to the judges on Bake-Off because it helps give me better understanding of why flavors make you feel a certain way.

For that matter, if you're reading up on something that really catches your interest...try it? I started writing about pickles and then I went to the international grocery store and bought, like, twelve kinds of Asian pickles, and ate them? I took (1) trail aikido class once, and it turned out it was very Not For Me, but the experience gave me a lot to chew on. If you're writing some sort of Lord of the Rings journey through the wilderness thing, go for a hike, even a small one, and think about what you think and feel and notice?

Check when you're not sure... I don't know if it's because I have anxiety or if it's because I spent 15 years working in engineering and software where people will challenge you on anything and everything, but I double check things compulsively because I want to be sure. If I'm not 100% sure what a word means, I look it up before I use it. I'm usually right, but sometimes I'm not and I not-infrequently learn new stuff this way. I am constantly googling whether people habitually drink milk in Japan or how much a katana weighs.

This may seem like a pain, but it's honestly a good habit to get into. It sucks a little to find out you're wrong, but finding out on your own is such a low stakes, non-threatening way to find out you misunderstood something, as opposed to loudly showing off your ignorance in the middle of a party, say. Go back and re-read the chapter and make sure the character said what you thought they did. It's worth it.

...but don't sweat it too much I was very hesitant to get into writing anime fanfic because I am American and I don't speak Japanese or know much about Japanese culture. I jumped into it anyway, and I try to learn as much as I can and do my best to be respectful if nothing else, and overall, it's been a really rewarding experience. Part of what makes this process a little easier is that most of my writing takes place in Soul Society, a place that is similar to various historic eras of Japanese history, but also it's not. Sometimes, I'll find a bunch of interesting stuff about Edo-era lamps that slots right into what I'm writing, and other times, you just have to be like, fuck it, there's a treadmill in the Squad 10 gym, for some reason. Also, seriously, it's just fanfic, and you are not under obligation to be 100% accurate to history or to canon. One of the light novels, for some reason, goes to the length to tell us that there is no curry in Soul Society and I refuse to give up curry, even though it does cause me a small amount of psychic damage every time I write about it, knowing I am Technically Wrong.

Don't make your reader do as much work as you did Another caveat is that, in doing research, you are going to learn A Lot about a topic, but you need to avoid showing off. The point of learning stuff is to make your world feel real and accurate and lived in. Throwing around a bunch of new vocabulary words you just learned is going to do the opposite of that. Extra detail should go towards making the reader understand the story more, or to sharing cool facts that you learned. It should not be about upping the difficulty rating of reading your story.

Keep it in character One aspect of character-writing is how they interact with the world and what they notice and the way they speak. The characters I write more commonly are very detail-oriented. Byakuya, like me, is autistic, and will give far too much detail on any given topic, whether his listener wants it or not. Rukia and Renji are former street urchin/grifters and career soldiers, so they are ultra-observant by necessity. They don't always verbalize these things, although they do with each other, because they tend to think about things the same way and they used to run grifts together and it's a bonding thing they do. Akon, Kira, Momo, Hisagi: nerds who be nerding. Maybe this is a personal interpretation, but I think Ichigo has a bit of a poetic soul, and I often have him notice symbolism in things, or to see through to the heart of a person. Yumichika is obsessed with aesthetics and thinks about people's looks and presentation contantly. Ikkaku, on the other hand THINKS ABOUT NOTHING, except sometimes fighting. His head is almost completely empty at all times. If he notices a thing, it was probably by accident. You gotta dial your detail levels up and down, and focus in on different things depending on which character you're writing. Also, think about the voice of your narration, and try to avoid going into a scholarly or formal voice, unless your writing really calls for it.

That was so much. If anyone made it all the way down to the bottom of this, I hope it helped!

[sleepy-shutin]

What are your thoughts on HC-DID? Is that even a real thing?

for those who don't know, HC-DID stands for "highly complex DID". it's supposed to be a form of, well, "highly complex" polyfragmentation. it is not a clinical term, it was coined by some randos on instagram, specifically to sound like it's a clinical term.

so basically, no, it's not real. "highly complex DID" as a term is not, nor has it ever been used in clinical contexts like papers and books. even if it were, (because i could see especially complex forms of polyfragmentation be used this way in a general descriptive way rather than an actual clinical label), it would not be used in the way that the people who coined it and the people who use it try to define it.

the label is heavily implied to only be allowed to be used by people who went through RAMCOA related abuses, when RAMCOA doesn't always cause polyfragmentation or even DID. i know this because i know of people who went through horrific RAMCOA related abuses such as cults and human trafficking and "only" got OSDD-1, because there is so much more that goes into why a person develops OSDD-1 over DID and vis versa than "how bad was it". not to mention that you can become polyfragmented, even "highly complex" polyfragmented, without RAMCOA, though these things may be less common.

my biggest criticism for this label is that giving a label for a form of DID that only belongs to people who went through RAMCOA related abuse is just dangerous on so many levels. as in, legitimately life threatening. that's the kind of thing that gets people targeted and pulled back into their old groups or into new ones. it specifically labels them as vulnerable to the abuse tactics seen in these groups. medical professionals experienced with RAMCOA would never under any circumstances coin a term like this.

so basically, HC-DID was coined for people who think DID is "more valid" than OSDD-1 because they don't know anything about RAMCOA, (not that they should), or complex dissociative disorders and how they work, and the majority of these people are very much lying about having gone through RAMCOA related abuses. that might seem like a jump, but the vast majority of people using this term are 15 year olds on tiktok and instagram who are claiming to have been programmed with their favorite medias. they are lying. 

pro tip: if you're like 15 and you're self diagnosed and you're not in therapy and you know you've been programmed, no you weren't. programming is generally not something you actually know about before therapy and is very likely to be impossible, or close to it, to self diagnose, especially when DID is involved.

all in all, this is a label that's at best just full of liars, and at worst, it's putting targets on their backs for people who want to pull them into groups to abuse them.

long story short if you see someone using HC-DID as a term, you best turn tail and get the hell out of there. if you're using the term right now, stop, if for no other reason than it could be used to target you.

[plethora-of-imagines]

Jake may have gotten Steven his job back, but neither he nor Marc or even Konshu can get him back his confidence. Armed with stevens personal library of Egyptian history (and Konshu's literal egyptian godishness) you set out to receive the best museum tour ever- but Steven doesn't know he's giving one 👑🦇

Raising up onto your tiptoes, struggling to keep your balance as you scanned the floor for the familiar dark curls you were seeking out. Trying to see over the heads of the many museum patrons. Of course the one time you need to find Steven before he leaves for the day the museum is actually busy at such an odd hours. You suppose you were too accustomed to him working till the closing, the rare treat of him getting out early not something that you were used to. You just didn’t want him to sneak past you back home before you could find him.

A flash of dark curls caught your eye, “Steven!”

Ignoring the hordes of people who turned to look at you for yelling out you rushed forwards to him as he made his way to you.

“Love? What are you doing here?”

His bewildered gaze was so cute, all wide eyed and mouth parted. The urge to surge forward to kiss him almost overtook you.

“I figured I’d never actually seen most of the exhibits here, and who better than you to show me around the museum you know so well,” you enthused.

“Oh, uh well there is probably a tour still going that we could join?” He looked around in vain for a group. 

That simply wouldn’t do. You wanted Steven to show you around, not some boring tour guide that just recited a script!

“Please Steven,” you begged with purposely glassy eyes. “I want you to show me your favorite things they have on display here. Not some stranger, you.”

“Um, alright. I can try, I mean I’m not good enough to be a tour guide but I can show you a few things without messing up... It’s not going to be a proper tour mind you”

It broke your heart to see just how shy and timid he was working here. You knew that he knew more than anyone here. He could have a PhD in Egyptology if he wanted one, wouldn’t even have to study. With a bright smile hiding your worries for him you gestured for him to lead the way.

The first few items he told you about he stayed close, leaning in to whisper information to you. Every hum and question that you asked him, he got more and more excited. Opening up and starting to gesture to the objects, to point out details and explain context. Soon he was leading you around while practically walking backwards as he spoke.

He was so invested in his own excitement that he didn’t notice the group that was gathering to follow the two of you from object to object. You smiled at how infectious his excitement was, and how he hadn’t even noticed his group growing and growing.

What he had intended to be a short little showing grew to be a full half hour tour. Steven finally took a breath when you were back where the two of you had started. And was promptly shocked to be met by an enthusiastic applause from the tour group he had unintentionally gathered around himself.

“What,” he looked behind himself to find how they were trying to cheer for. The lack of a recipient after a lengthy search told him that it must be for him.

His cheeks burned a bright red as people came up to him with questions and congratulations. He practically melted when someone asked him where he was finishing his PhD and if he wouldn’t mind being stolen away from that program to work with the Institute of Archeology from University College London.

“I’m uhh, not a student-”

“Oh so you finished then, how about being a supporting Professor. You would do wonders helping teach the more serious undergraduates!”

“I'm flattered but I don’t actually have a degree?” Steven was looking like a lost puppy who’s owners were leaving the house for a walk without him.

You could see the academic lust filling the man’s eyes. He wanted Steven to join his program at any cost. 

“Stevie, what the hell are you still doing here? Your shift ended and if this is some misguided attempt to get me to consider making you a tour guide you are sorely mistaken!”

The second that Steven heard Donna’s voice he wilted. You were filled with fury that once again Donna was talking down to Steven. 

“Oh, he works with your conservators then.”

“What?” Donna was affronted. “He’s not a bloody conservator, he just works in the gift shop!”

“The gift shop? Well you’re wasting him there! He should be giving tours! This man knows more about this exhibit than the whole group of your tour guides combined!”

The man was offended on Steven’s behalf.

“He’s a bloody nuisance that’s what he is,” Donna refused to accept that Steven was worth anything.

The man glared at her before rummaging through his bag for a pen and paper. Handing off the items to Steven.

“Write down your contact information, Steven was it? I'll get in contact with you and we can get you started with the program as soon as possible. I’ll convince them to give you a stipend and maybe work in our school museum for more funds.”

Steven somehow looked even more lost.

With a small nudge you convinced him to write down his contact information. 

The man looked at Donna in disgust, “And I’ll be sure to put in a complaint to your superiors about how you treat your workers and squander their talents too!”

Once the contact information was handed back, along with your personal number in case Steven didn’t answer. You both started the trip back to his flat. Slowly Steven came back from his stunned silence. He looked at you with awe.

“Did I just accidentally get accepted to a PhD program?”

You couldn’t help your overjoyed giggles, “yeah I think you did.”

(984 words)

[ask-codeearasure]

Hit the nail on the head there, thank you for your service. Insane is one of the many terms tossed around because of motherfucking pop psychology and the fact people just don't give a shit about its actual meaning and previous medical usage, which is also responsible for the irresponsible, dismissive, and derogatory uses for words like delusion, narcissist, bipolar, psychotic, psychopath, and sociopath.

Now... here's the definition of insane given by Google, since people tend to forget that insane and insanity are occasionally used as medical terms to describe severe mental illness.

The term "clinical insanity" doesn't exist in a fucking vacuum. Describing severe mental illness was one of, if not the only, first uses of the word insane before more privileged populations let's say, decided to use it to describe everything they didn't like or found wild.

You see one shitty kind of person and immediately assume they're mentally ill. Doesn't matter if they're an abuser, murderer, or whatever the fuck else is an inherently bad thing to be.

This is one of the BIGGEST reasons why characters like Insanity!Sans needs to have a name change at the very LEAST, because calling an excessive axe murderer cannibal or whatever he's supposed to be a product of "insanity" to the point that is his only title does in fact add to the stigma of people who suffer from insanity.

I don't give a shit that Insanity!Sans might have been made by a kid merely trying to have fun. This is still the result and it SHOULD be changed.

It passes the notion that mental illness is inherently tied to murder, abuse, cannibalism, etc. It sends the message that we are inherently a danger to others, and/or that calling something "insane" that isn't actually insane is perfectly okay when by all means, it shouldn't be. Casual usage of the word is where the second definition came from.

It is the same thing as saying you are "sooooo OCD!" when you're only bothered that a painting on the wall is tilted a little to the left. It is the same thing as saying you're "sooo delulu!!!" when the subject you find ever so painfully "delusional" in the first place is your attraction to a character who would be fully capable of wringing your neck if they existed.

The casual usage of these words makes it seem like OCD isn't as serious of a condition, and that delusions aren't stressful or perplexing at all to whoever suffers from them. If you're doing this shit, you either don't understand what these experiences are or don't give a shit, and if the latter is the case, go have a seat over there you asshole.

Stop FUCKING using terms meant to describe symptoms or experiences of mental illness for your semblance of "fun" and convenience when any other word not tied to this subject matter will work just fine.

You don't have OCD, you just have a pet peeve. You're not experiencing a delusion, you're just horny and/or feeling intensely for a character and you want to express that in an "over the top" manner.

This character isn't insane, they've been fucking programmed against their will and broken down and reconstructed repeatedly to be a weaponized bitch for the benefit of their abusers. And heck, maybe that kind of torment would drive that character to absolute insanity if broken down past their limits. Under that context you could call Killer insane, but knowing this fandom and all the impulsive fuckheads in it that don't care about people less fortunate than them (or just don't know any better), that mode of thinking won't get far without being twisted so wildly out of context it loses meaning.

And in reality, that has already happened. So FUCK YOU. If this is how you're gonna keep using these words, don't use them at all.

-- Sarco

I really hate when people reduce Something New to “sans went insane and started killing everyone!!!” the only one who uses that type of language is sans/killer himself. Like, he calls himself crazy and insane, aka the mentally ill man known for demonizing himself and encouraging people to treat him badly because he doesn’t trust himself and doesn’t believe anyone else should either.

Every other person in his canon that isn’t also trying to take advantage of his mental state, aka color—dream—swap—all of them are very against the idea that Killer is someone irredeemable or “insane.” Color fiercely refuses to kill Killer even when he asks him to.

Rahafwabas herself has never said Killer was “insane,” and in fact said he isn’t when someone directly asked—he just struggles to tell what is and isn’t real now due to the constant Resetting and induced dissociative state he was put into. Not to mention the heavy fucking gaslighting and manipulation of his entire reality via the damn Reset button.

And frankly I find it very stupid to pretend that what Killer was put through—psychological torture, conditioning, coercion, literally having his code and soul altered, his identity stolen and rebuilt in a way that suits external forces and their desires—would make him a nonviolent uwu baby and claim it’s ableist when a mentally ill character who’s entire trauma is built around the idea of coerced and forced actions—forced perpetration—handles and responds to their trauma in not very fun or cute ways, because what they went through and did was not very fun or cute, or exactly in the context of how they were made to be and exactly how their environment demands they do to survive physically, mentally, and emotionally.

The whole “two personalities”/“split personalities” thing can be argued, but i think people are forgetting that rahafwabas didn’t fucking know English. She never claimed Killer had DID or was a system or any of that—she tried to convey what was happening in a language she was still learning. I find it stupid to blame her for misunderstandings.

[porcellune]

kamukomahina gender/body headcanons

a bit of a ramble about my body, gender, and general appearance headcanons for them bcuz someone sent me a curiouscat prompting this 3k words of hyperfixation nonsense

Komaeda:

- He has a naturally lithe body, with a thin waist, broad shoulders and hips, which give him an hourglass. and a rather andrognyous body, which is "lucky" for him, because I hc him as nonbinary and gender non-conforming

- Gender-wise, as I said, I think he's nonbinary. Usually I do view Nagito as AMAB but I indulge in transmasc Nagito from time to time depending on my preference and how much I wish to uh, well, project, lol. But either way I think he would use he/they pronouns in a western sense. In japanese, however, they don't use third person pronouns that other people refer to them with, and in canon he uses the first person pronoun "boku", which is a "soft" masculine pronoun, in comparison to the "hard" masculine pronoun, “ore” (which Hajime uses btw!) which fits quite nicely, in my opinion! Also, in Japanese, you can be 'fluid' with your first person pronouns depending on the situation, so I think he could use more neutral or feminine pronouns should he desire it, too, to play on his gender non-conformity.

- Komaeda is very secure in his gender, regardless of being AMAB or AFAB. He does not care about stigma, or discrimination, he does not care about being "accepted" by broader society. Broader society is sort of meaningless to him, the average person and their ideas about gender and presentation and effeminity mean NOTHING to him. Whether or not a random person the street genders him correctly or treats him with respect is sort of, pointless? Because to him, most ordinary people are pointless nobodies. Their thoughts do not matter to him. I think he is still prone to insecurity, however, when around his "betters" but I just struggle to think he would degrade himself in regards to gender. to him, it's the least of his problems. what he cares about is hope and talent. He could dress femininely or wear makeup or straight up crossdress and not mind it, really. He thinks people would find a problem with it are the problem, because why does it even matter? It speaks to the way Komaeda is detached from societal norms & "normal" people, he did not grow up in normal circumstances, so he doesn't interact with the world normally by any means. he can mask and act normally to the best of his ability, often unintentionally?, but he simply does not fit into broader society and doesn't seek to.

- Komaeda loses weight really easily, and doesn't gain weight that well. This is mainly due to his many illnesses but also the medications he's been put on. He has a low appetite and burns weight rather easily, even though I headcanon that he eats like garbage (mainly junk food & takeout, since he obviously cannot cook). This makes him overall, health wise, not very healthy, and stick thin because of it. A stiff breeze could knock him over, tbh.

- He has a lot of faded scars, self-inflicted or not.

- Pre-despair (in HPA) he is fairly healthy but still lithe, and progressively his body deteriorates through his 2 years of hopes peak before the Tragedy begins.

- During the Tragedy itself, his body is at it's worst. he is almost nothing but bone at times, barely kept together by a need to live so he can see hope triumph. His weight fluctuates but he's very unhealthy. He's not anorexic or on death's door, but he's not well off, either.

- After being put into the neo world program, right after waking up, he's very, very thin and gaunt. he was in a pod on feeding tubs for an indiscernible but at least probably a month's worth of time? So he's just very weak, like he could collapse if he moves too quickly.

- But a while after waking, he goes into remission, and starts to gain more healthy habits due to being rehabilitated and cared for by Hinata, and gains some weight, finally at a healthy, normal weight. I still think he would struggle with putting on too much weight, but I am slightly fond of the idea that he gets a bit of healthy pudge after a while. To him, it's so foreign being healthy, that he honestly think something's wrong with him at first.

Hinata:

- Hinata has a very... average body, true to form. His hips and waist aren't too pronounced but he has a loosely "hourglass" shape, too, just not as exaggerated as Komaeda's in comparison.

- Gender-wise, I am EXTREMELY fond of transmasc Hinata. While I think I portray AMAB Hinata more than transmasc Hinata (in art and writing), I still firmly prefer transmasc Hinata. The reason I think portray otherwise more is just out of comfortability, but I've been getting better at comfortably portraying FTM Hinata. I have some reasons I prefer it and think you can extrapolate it from canon, but let's get into that

- Hinata, in my eyes, has an arc and story that fits perfectly into him just. Being trans. His desire to be someone else, someone better, someone he can proud of, and the way he overcompensates for himself and has an extreme inferiority complex would easily lend to him having similar feelings about his gender. To me, Hinata is a trans man who overperforms his masculinity out of insecurity and a need to pass. I see him as someone who would strictly use "he/him" in a western sense, which is lended to by his use of the "ore" pronoun in canon, which is almost hypermasculine.

- Even if he were AMAB, I think it still works, I think he's still someone who's insecure and tries to assert himself more strongly and therefore performs masculinity in a way to appear more confident than he is.

(side note: I actually read a bit about queerness in Japan and how it relates to gender performance and the use of pronouns, and read a bit about how queer women in japan tend to use "boku" and "ore" to perform masculinity, which I find neat. “Ore” was also sometimes used exclusively to show anger and dominance, which is why it's categorized as a "rough" pronoun. I think Japanese language, gender, and expression, and how those all relate to one another, are extremely interesting and if you get the time you should read about it lol)

- Body-wise, pre-despair, I think Hinata would. not have top surgery, obviously. I think he has a fairly average but leaning a little on the hefty side chest (pre-op) and binds it, hence the '91 cm' (but also he still has 91 cm post-op because bazongas). I also just think he leans on the "twunk" side of things at this point, not buff but not stick thin or without muscle, just kind of average with average strength and all, though I think Hinata would've tried to do sports and stuff to find his talent so he's in shape :)

- My personal, kind of amusing, but also kind of... thematical? Headcanon, is that during the Kamukura project, he also underwent gender transition. to be honest, while it may not make sense in modern Japan, I think we can suspend our disbelief for fiction, and also make the argument that Hinata's "transition" into Kamukura CAN be read, in some part, as relatable or at least familiar to the trans experience. Iit is not out of the realm of possibility, either, to assume that because many bits of society in Danganronpa are advanced (specifically science, is extremely ahead of our understanding, almost sci-fi like at times) certain attitudes about gender and sexuality can be smoothed over more in a Japanese context.

(side note: I also think that science-wise, we can suspend our disbelief, and assume that top surgery and bottom surgery are much more advanced in this universe, given the almost unbelievable levels of science in Danganronpa, such as memory wipe, mind control, completely realistic virtual simulation, um literally everything about Kamukura which is body modification and brain modification to an extreme, etc. I think it's kind of fitting within these to assume that... Hinata/Kamukura could just, gain a functioning penis, lol)

Kamukura:

- Kamukura would have a. "Perfect" body. it's stated, I'm pretty sure, that they modified not only his brain but his body, because he needs to be able to perform every talent under their belt with ease, and his strength, instincts, technique, are all superhuman. So it's clear to me he'd have a buff body. toned muscles and all. He wouldn't really feel a need to keep it up, though, but I think since they're very... artificial (basically fucking steroids?) they wouldn't fade from a lack of keep-up.

- Kamukura also rarely ever is injured, but when he does, his body heals rather fast and can care for himself adequately, because again, his body is modified to a point of almost inhumanity.

- Gender wise, Kamukura genuinely does not care. however, I am not one to think that Kamukura is "a different person" from Hinata, rather, he is separate from Hinata, but an extension of Hinata as well, proven that he experiences some of his emotions even if subconsciously and without understanding them. he isn't a different personality or person developed in Hinata's body, but a very traumatizing, repressed, and manipulated version of Hinata given a new name, with memories repressed. He's like Theseus's ship in human form---if you get rid of everything that makes someone themselves and replace it, bit by bit, is it the same person? Technically, yes, but... truly? Who knows. 

Because of this, I think Kamukura would have a leaning toward masculine gender performance (in canon, in fact, he uses the soft masculine pronoun "boku" in stead of "ore" like Hinata) BUT I think he is still very nonbinary. In a western sense, i think he would use he/they pronouns, but not really care if someone mistook him for a woman, I suppose.

- His appearance, unironically, is very nonbinary or "he/they" to me because he's wearing a suit, the archetypal form of masculinity, but has extremely long hair, which is considered feminine, and speaks softly (dully). Of course, the bishounen "pretty boy" appearance isn't uncommon or considered less masculine in japan, I think, but there is still a different between soft masculinity and rough masculinity in japan, which lends itself to being interpreted sort of gender non-conforming by western audiences :)

- Kamukura, due to his apathy, struggles with self-maintaining, but as we all probably know i am extremely attached to KamuKoma and thus headcanon that Servant helps him, sort of like a royal servant would royalty in the old days, take care of himself by bathing him, brushing his hair out, grooming him, etc. partially out of duty, partially out of appreciation for Kamukura's body, and partially out of maintaining his sort of "perfect" look since Kamukura, especially post-Junko death, is perceived widely by the public as the new leader of the ultimate despair, even if he is ambivalent to such a title.

Post-DR3 Hinata/Kamukura combined:

As I rambled on about previously, I don't think that Kamukura and Hinata are separate people or personality, I really dislike the interpretation that they are like a "split personality" or operate like DID, because they do not "form" like DID, but also in canon, are not portrayed as separate people.

In post-dr3, Hinata instead says that he is both of them, because he is. Kamukura is Hinata, always was, but had been given a new, false identity, had been stripped of his previous self, his memories, his personality, and crafted into something new. but that did not "split" his brain into two people. It simply repressed who he once was, and made him someone he now was. But when Kamukura regains his memories, his past self, through the means of the new world program by restoring his own memories after SDR2 concludes and he wakes up, as well as doing the same for everyone else, he decides to be "Hajime Hinata" who he always was, but carrying and shouldering the weight of what "Izuru Kamukura" had been, become, and done. Hinata *is* Kamukura, he answers for Kamukura's wrongdoings, his crimes, as something he had done as a different person who's mind operated differently, due to being artificially suppressed, modified, into an apathetic tool for the scientists who made him, and later and aimless, bored individual who simply sought meaning he did not have in the unknown of what despair would be at it's climax. And if hope could overcome it.

As such, I think, when Hinata's self is brought back into the mix, and he now deals with Kamukura's apathy and boredom in part, but much less consuming and much less often, I think hinata is less staunchly "masculine", does not overperform it anymore, and is trying to understand what his past means to him, what his present is, and what his future will be. I think that Hinata would still primarily use he/him (or still use "ore" in Japanese, as it's also a means of his personality, which is a bit rough around the edges and blunt), but be more ambivalent to rigid gender expression, still finding comfort and idealness in masculinity, but not be made dysphoric or feel frightened, uncomfortable, with non-comformity or anything like that. being boyish, masculine, is what he enjoys, but he's comfortable in it now, doesn't need to prove himself or overperform it. He can explore nonconformity without feeling like his gender or masculinity is at threat, even if it's not his preference outright.

Body-wise, I think it's safe to say he retains Kamukura's muscle and all, but Kamukura didn't put much effort into the everyday machinations of being a human being in general, and Hinata is much more fond of food than him now, eats more often, and I enjoy the idea that he gains a little pudge and has a kind of "dad bod" almost, post-DR3? lol.

Both for Hinata and Kamukura I don't see their bodies as “bara” or overly buff, masculine, but a kind of comfortable middle ground between twunk and hunk, lmao. I think they're also averagely hairy, not overly so, very lightly. kind of well groomed, and all. Hinata, pre-despair, put not so much effort into his appearance but still some, especially in trying to pass. (In fact I think his hair cut looks like a home job, all choppy and stuff, which fits him in my opinion, something done by his own hands even if messy and imperfect, he still prefers to be in control of it. also fits the trans headcanon tehe).

Izuru put very little if any effort into himself, only the bare minimum necessary to function, but servant helped him upkeep it to a perfect standard. Hinata, post-dr3 now, finds himself putting you know, an average amount of care into himself and his body, enough to be healthy, but not overly critical and conscious of himself.

Komaeda i have always seen as someone who takes a good deal of care about himself, merely if to alleviate the "disgust" of his appearance and body, by practically preening himself. He is someone who is good at cleaning and seems to appreciate clean and well kept spaces, so I think he would have a similar attitude toward himself. even if he is insecure, and of course, struggles with mental health and may slip at times in his routine in keeping himself well-kept, I think he still maintains an appearance for the most part, at least in his later years (teen to young adult). An argument can be made that he cared less in his adolescence because he had much more apathy about the world, but when he gave himself a purpose with hope and talent, I think he would care for himself a little better, even if his was spiralling mentally.

His hair is always washed, it is just very curly and prone to mess, so it often looks like perpetual bedhead, even when he combs and brushes it. His skin is soft even if a little worn by his tendency for accidents & injury, it's still soft and almost luckily so, and he takes pride in moisturizing and cleaning himself. His skin is a little sickly, still, and I think that despite having blemishes, scars, etc. Komaeda manages to look pretty in a strange way, not conventionally beautiful, but almost ethereal? He's just *pretty*, there's no way to explain it, he is nice to look at even with all his "flaws" and imperfections. Even when he's sickly and bony, even when his cheeks are gaunt or his hands shaky and weak, when his hair is a tangled mess or his clothes are dirty, he's nice to look at in a way that's nonconventional, and it's sort of mesmerizing.

Hinata I think is very average but also in a way that's nice to look at it. He's not ground-breaking hot or conventionally attractive, he has a good body, a nice face, and hair you could play with a little if you wanted. I think what's appealing about him is his normalcy, he's not trying too hard or "gifted" gene wise, but he's just kinda nice to look at, he's enjoyable to be around, an understanding person, or at least tries to be even when he fails, and despite having flaws, insecurities, blunt, he is someone you're drawn to because he's one of those people that's just, easy to talk to? An emotional anchor, almost. The kind of guy everyone kind of knows and has talked to at least once, even if you're not friends with him personally, not because he's cool or popular or anything, but because he's a normal dude who's easy to trust and talk to.

Kamukura, on the other hand, is intimidating, appearance wise and personality wise. he looks, strange, anything but normal, his eyes are red and his hair is this dark cloud that envelops him. His face may still be that plain one Hinata has but faces can be changed by the surrounding attributes as well as expression and such is true for him, with his apathetic and cold expression as well as otherwordly characteristics, he comes off as much more beautiful in a dark way, kind of? In a way that's intimidating or a little daunting, but he's still very beautiful. mesmerizing.

okay, thats my ramble. ty.

[cagedchoices]

RELATIONSHIP META - CALEB & UWADE

In canon, Caleb first met Uwade while he was recovering in the hospital following surgery for a near-fatal gunshot wound to his abdomen. I've estimated the time he spent comatose to be about 5 weeks max, but it's possible it was a bit less than that. In a memory Caleb has during Fidelity, we learn that Uwade was the first person who saw him after he woke up and she checked over his vital signs. She began to flirt with him and from there they eventually fell in love.

Given what context we have, I headcanon that Uwade got pregnant before they were married and then Caleb married her once they found out they were expecting. It's the most logical explanation I can see for why their last conversation together happened the way it did.

We don't know anything about Caleb's father so I kinda just assume he was never in the picture and that it's a source of insecurity for Caleb because there's always going to be a what-if question that can't be answered; What if he's just like that? As well as he gets another dose of that same insecurity because his mom was mentally ill and abandoned and forgot about him, and there's the fear of what if he winds up doing the same thing to Frankie?

UWADE: So you're leaving. CALEB: Only for a little while. UWADE: You promised you'd be a father. CALEB: I am one... Everything I do is for you...and for Frankie. UWADE: You're gonna get yourself killed. CALEB: Hey, I will come back to you. I promise.

There also seemed like there was a touch of maybe-jealousy from Uwade toward Maeve, just in the way that Uwade was watching her from the bedroom window while Maeve was loading her SUV and getting ready to leave. She already knew that Caleb would jump at the chance to team up with Maeve again and go fight.

Uwade doesn't understand Caleb's trauma struggles. Her approach to helping him manage his PTSD is basically just to tell him move on and stop worrying, and that's the most un-constructive advice you could ever give to a trauma survivor. She treats it like he doesn't have anything to be depressed or anxious about solely because he has a family, a house and a job and it should be enough. She also calls him paranoid, and acts like he is consciously choosing to stay traumatized.

In the past, Caleb was often told he needed to move on without ever actually being given the tools or the freedom to actually learn how to move on and genuinely heal, because by design he wasn't supposed to. He was in a therapy program that insisted the goal was getting him to move on, but they never actually did anything other than tell him "you gotta move on."

Caleb's instinctive response to that is to sort of shut down and refuse to talk about it any further. There's no point. No one really understands except for others who have seen war up close and personal. And that was the purpose in isolating him further and further until the system predicted there would come a point where that feeling of hopelessness would reach its absolute limit and he would take his own life because of it.

When Caleb first leaves, Uwade definitely seems to feel resentful toward him specifically, such as when she found Frankie using the radio to try and make contact with him.

UWADE: Frankie, what are you doing out here? I told you we need to go back and pack. FRANKIE: I'm trying to reach Dad. UWADE: Come on, let's go inside. FRANKIE: No. I'm staying. UWADE: Carver, do you mind helping me bring some of this stuff back inside?

She didn't really acknowledge Frankie's explanation or her feelings of concern, she just went to picking stuff up, starting with Frankie's teddy bear. Later on, Frankie's sitting out on the patio and sulking, and Uwade again kind of ignores her concerns.

FRANKIE: I don't wanna go with him. I want daddy. UWADE: I know, but your father can't be here right now. So he sent Carver to help. FRANKIE: He got Bear-Bear dirty. UWADE: Fine. If you won't pack your things, then I will.

After Frankie discovers that the real Carver has been murdered and replaced by a host copy and alerts her mom with proof, this attitude changes drastically, and Uwade steps up for Caleb in a huge way.

She becomes the leader of the resistance and makes it her mission to free as many outliers as she can from Hale's world before they're hunted and killed.

UWADE: You were so brave today. You reminded me of your father. He really would've been proud. FRANKIE: It's almost time. UWADE: Go. Tell him I love him.

She doesn't ignore or invalidate Frankie's feelings this time, she tells her that she is so much like her father and that Caleb would've been so proud of her if he was around. She lets Frankie try to establish radio communications with him, even though I think she figures he had to have been killed to be kept away from them for so long.

For Caleb, when Frankie tells him what happened to Uwade, it's a harsh blow for his cognition and it threatens to destabilize him even faster than he's already breaking down. His hands are shaking so badly he's having trouble threading a needle.

FRANKIE: You can ask, you know. CALEB: Ask about what? FRANKIE. Mom... Cancer. Wouldn't have mattered even if you had made it back. She hung in there for as long as she could... She had a mission. Everyone that wasn't infected, or who woke up and got out, owes that to mom. She carried your torch. CALEB: Your mother was...extraordinary. FRANKIE: So were you.

But then he's able to center himself using the love he has for his family. Uwade may be long gone physically, but her memory lives on through his own recollection and more importantly, through Frankie.