stormsbourne

[stormsbourne]

Kinda wish I wasn't feeling more and more vindicated every day about calling it from the start that treating the AI issue like a moral crusade where you have like a moral obligation to prioritize signalling and reaffirming your hatred of generative AI at any possible chance would lead to a lot of ostensibly "progressive" people uncritically parroting extremely reactionary rhetoric.

[stormsbourne]

"this is DEFINITELY written by AI, I can tell because it uses the writing quirks that AI uses (because it was trained on real people who write with those quirks)"

c'mon dudes we have got to do better than this

[stormsbourne]

pov: you are a part of the king's council and need to help dimitri bake a cake for the day of devotion sothis help you

does the duke felix fraldarius even like cake? mystery! (not actually a mystery.) but saint-cethleann has decreed that devotion must be shown with what seems to be a rather dubious cake recipe so who are we to argue with the patron saint of love.

so let's get cooking.

let's bake a dimilix cake yuri style!!!!

we're putting together a community collab collage for the dimilix yuri diy zine and everyone is invited to help dimitri and felix cook up the most normal cake medieval fodlan has ever seen <3

(and don't worry you'll also be able to help felix "bake" "a" "cake" too.)

[stormsbourne]

DAES DAE'MAR | The Wheel of Time 2x7

[stormsbourne]

the timeline of viz completely distancing themselves from hs is especially funny cause its like. they definitely did a poor job long before that, but them stopping after 1. skaianet drops, and them having to go "yeah we had nothing to do with this", 2. the epilogues happening and that discourse, and 3. andrew apparently asking for funds from them to fund hs2 allegedly? like i don't forgive them, but i get it.

it becomes even wilder when you combine all of the above with a) hs having some of the most toxic possible "brand ambassadors" shortly after the acquisition, b) the absurdity and inanity of the hs game dev timeline (remember when hiveswap was supposed to be 4 parts? where did the friendsim stuff even come from? you went through how many team leads?)

and most of all, c) hussie convinced them this was a ten million dollar property. ten million dollars! I just can't be convinced whatpumpkin ever did that amount of sales. maybe once you combine it with like, bandcamp and whatever shit merch company wp eventually gave rights to, and of course the 2mil from the kickstarter didn't hurt, but TEN MILLION? no wonder viz backed away the minute the creator started doing insane stuff. they realized they'd been bamboozled.

[stormsbourne]

tbh the funniest thing about this whole drama, ignoring who is right or wrong, is that you'd think viz would've been the one throwing these lawsuits like crazy when they were still involved. i mean granted, arguably this entire problem stems from their failure to maintain the main site in the first place, but its still funny in a cosmic way that the one person who isn't involved in legal disputes was the corpo.

it really is crazy. back in the day I fully assumed that viz would be the ones getting copyright litigious with people and being overly protective of The Brand but I guess they figured out fast that there wasn't actually that much profit to be made that they had to be protective of, which could be one reason they basically left the site in a completely busted state. I would not have called hussie being litigious at the time.

but when the whole reddit takeover thing happened and you started to really see the control freak version of hussie come out. it had always been there -- there used to be a policy regarding hs fan work that was like "you aren't allowed to profit on my thing (by selling prints, pins, etc), only I can profit off my thing." at the time I mistakenly thought this was reasonable; now I think it's cringe to begin with but also it really shows off that hussie comes from money and thinks like a businessperson. (I may be misremembering, but I'm pretty sure they come from money, and iirc they created a color correction plugin that made them a LOT of cash.) I guess we should have all seen it coming from way back then -- that policy, to my memory, was in the days before the fandom had its meteoric rise in 5.2, but man. still.

viz is still guilty of letting the property rot but tbh given how the hiveswap prototype debacle went down I'm fairly convinced Andrew didn't bother to give them any motive to preserve it. may have even been involved in helping let it die considering the current situation. they sure seen to wish it was gone! I've been burned so bad by hs that I can't produce fandom content for it anymore but it's a shame that it will basically no longer be accessible.

[stormsbourne]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

[stormsbourne]

[stormsbourne]

*harris bomberguy voice* if you like homestuck Andrew Hussie wants you dead

[stormsbourne]

i can tell by the way you successfully manage your emotions and reactions that you’re never experienced trauma, because i personally have never even considered the idea of learning how to manage and deal with my trauma response rather than stew in it and bring it up every time someone tries to tell me im acting out of pocket

[stormsbourne]

I'm not celebrating the possible end of homestuck in a decently readable form, but I am feeling VERY smug about how concerned I was about the viz buyout all those years ago. everybody called me a drama queen who was only worried about yaoi, but no. yet again, I was Cassandra. though I guess to be fair the main offender seems to be the clown author hussie themselves, yet again being litigious over absolutely nothing. still, I stand vindicated on that too because I've been calling the shit behavior for years.

(the unofficial hs collection is effectively dead)

[stormsbourne]

ALL kinktober submissions must include:

A description DURING sex of the lovers' tripartite relationship with God.

A scene that takes place BEFORE sex that makes it clear that it is NOT secular.

A scene AFTER which CONDEMNS or SHOWS AMBIVALENCE toward EMBODIMENT.

A depiction of both people SUBMISSIVE before God.

It must be thoroughly clear that a SPIRITUAL LOVE is coming and the bodily habits associated with it will gradually come to WITHER AWAY.

Please make it clear whether or not your characters think that the BOLSHEVIKS are the object of the APOCALYPTIC LONGING of our POETS.

[stormsbourne]

[stormsbourne]

pov: you are a part of the king's council and need to help dimitri bake a cake for the day of devotion sothis help you

does the duke felix fraldarius even like cake? mystery! (not actually a mystery.) but saint-cethleann has decreed that devotion must be shown with what seems to be a rather dubious cake recipe so who are we to argue with the patron saint of love.

so let's get cooking.

let's bake a dimilix cake yuri style!!!!

we're putting together a community collab collage for the dimilix yuri diy zine and everyone is invited to help dimitri and felix cook up the most normal cake medieval fodlan has ever seen <3

(and don't worry you'll also be able to help felix "bake" "a" "cake" too.)

[stormsbourne]

“hes a woman to me” IS HE? or are you equating women with submissive character traits you've arbitrarily put on a random man

[stormsbourne]

the new war of the worlds movie is actually one of the funniest things ive ever seen in my life if you like "so bad theyre good" movies PLEASE pirate this film. it's one of those "made during the pandemic so no one can be in the same room" movies so the entire film is just ice cube staring at his webcam reacting to the end of the world and his children being in mortal peril like he's losing at dark souls