#// this is for the memes it's a joke i'm joking

[hidefdoritos]

I was 15 and just starting to figure myself out. Every couple days there was an anon wishing death or rape on me. Turning off anon slowed it to every couple weeks.

The discourse centered around a hypothetical person who was cisgender, heteroromantic, and asexual. Are they queer? Aces said, "Who cares? Allies and questioning people are welcome at pride. We welcome you and trust you to know yourself." Meanwhile, aphobes put "cishets aren't lgbt" in their blog headers and tried to push out the entire asexual community.

Exclusionists' posts told us over and over that no one cared if we didn't have sex. We weren't oppressed. The one existing study wasn't good enough, and anecdotal evidence was always lies. We just wanted to be special and subversive soooooooo badly.

They of course also mocked us constantly for not having sex. While insisting that no one cared.

Sex-having aros/aces were abusing/lying to/failing to fulfill a partner. Aros were disgusting and predatory. One big-name exclusionist insisted that aces made their partners rape them.

Aphobia often came with other bad opinions. I remember one TERF who claimed to be an elementary school teacher. She openly said that boys got so disgustingly sexual so young that they couldn't be sexually assaulted. They wanted it. I made a callout post without tagging her username, and she reblogged it with, "Tag me next time, whore."

Someone wrote a post about gatekeeping. Someone replied, disagreeing, with the line, "This sounds suspiciously aphobic and possibly terfy." That became the exclusionists' favorite joke. It was in blog headers and bios for years. Another reply said "do you know you're singlehandedly responsible for the funniest joke on this site?"

Anyone else remember the aphobe block list? Someone made a list of terfs, discourse blogs, and "uninvolved" people who mocked us. Once they found it, it was the second-favorite joke. It also went in headers and bios and got memed on constantly.

Anyway. I hope most of y'all exclusionists were teenagers piling on a bandwagon. I hope you've examined your behavior and changed your mind. But I'm sure there are plenty of y'all still lurking out there with these same opinions, just quieter.

I don't think younger/newer users fully grasp the shit show that ace discourse was around 2014-17

It was so hostile that, to this day, discussions that begin to derail just enough can make me physically nauseous, some specific mockery trigger crying sessions years later. We lost most accounts with any sort of ace positivity. There was no information, no support, and all this damage was done predominantly by other queer people.

All this to say that you, however you identify yourself, should be engaging with aphobic comments the same way you do any hate. We don't sugarcoat or try to be comprehensive with people who are blatantly racist, homophobic or terfs, so why give it a pass just because it's coming from a queer person? I see how this tolerance goes and it's done enough damage as it is.

[greenxgloss]

Can we get a bts fanboy headcanon?

BTS as Fanboys

themes: Idol!Reader, Gn!Reader, Fluff, angst

Gonna be completely honest im not sure if you wanted bts as fanboys or how bts interacts with their fanboys so I'm gonna do them as fanboys bc I feel like that's the more interesting of the two (I'm so so sorry if that's wrong in which case you can totally request it again and be more clear I would totally re-write it if I'm wrong)

Kim Seokjin

Jin definitely roasts other fans and claims to be a day 1 supporter.

"I literally knew them when they just posted covers online.

Jin buys all your merch, official and unofficial.

Jin spends hours watching fan-made edits of you.

Jin plays the Sims4 just to create you as a sim and then spoil your sim but forces it to write new music when you're on break/hiatus.

"Close enough. Welcome back, Y/N. When's the next album?"

Jin makes his own video compilations of your funny moments and then laughs at them for hours.

Proud of his obsession and talks about you when he doesn't know what else to talk about with new people.

Attends fan meets

Jin makes memes of the fandom's inside jokes

Min Yoongi

Yoongi buys all your albums (cd form, vinyl form etc.) just to have and collect

He writes fanfiction of you (series, one shots etc) mostly fluff but there is the occasional smutty fic, hyper erotic and juicy asf but still respectful.

He's secretly hugely infatuated but still keeps it subtle/ to himself

"Yeah their music is always in my playlists." with his usual kitten smile.

"Collaborating on something with them would be a huge accomplishment." Hed calmly reply to comments about you on weverse live.

Yoongi paints portraits of you/ makes tons of fan art but its not obvious that its fanart because he makes it look like regular everyday art.

Yoongi not only watches your interviews, he reads them, enjoying the articles far more than video interviews.

"they seem much more comfortable and open in the written interviews" hed say to himself

He's so delulu he learned all your rumoured favourite foods and how to cook them "just in case"

zones out thinking about the meanings behind your songs

Youre his celebrity crush

Yoongi doesn't attend fan meets or concerts because he a more lowkye/ private fan

just interact with the fandom

Jung heosok

Hobi writing remixes of your songs constantly

Hobi being the only one of the boys to actually be friends with you in real life

"can I get on a remix of your recent single?"

Gossiping with him about other idols

"did you hear about the scandal that group was in? they haven't even debuted yet." while tapping your hand before leaning back.

him still being a mega fan despite being friends with you

Having a yoongi and halsey dynamic

begging you to stream on weverse all the time just because he knows other fans want it just as bad.

"come on!! please just an hour. ill get you those cookies you really love.

reposting all your Instagram posts with sweet captions.

"bestie is looking so good!!!" with a ton of emojis

recreating your tiktok dances

also starts dance trends to your music and encourages people to jump on the trend

"I'll repost your video if you do this dance." big heart shaped smile.

Kim Namjoon

namjoon studies your lyrics, finds the double meanings and the word play

"reviews" and reacts to your music in YouTube videos

watches the countdown to your music being released on whatever platform (youtube, weverse etc.)

"supposedly the camera rig malfunctioned on set, that's why the camera is so shaky but they didn't re-shoot because it added to the windy scene" he'd say all jumpy and giddy like a kid on a sugar rush

has your autograph framed from the one and only time he met you

namjoon was very flustered and shy when he met you

"oh uh yeah I love your music and the double meanings in your last song."

gushes about the cinematography in your music videos

Namjoon writes questions he'd ask you if he got to interview you

Watches movies and tags you as characters that remind him of you

Park Jimin

Loves to let your music play while he's doing something and then harmonizes with your vocals

buys Vip tickets to all your events

posts your lyrics on social media

"this part omg!!!"

One time you smiled at him in the crowd and he freaked out and bragged about it for months

"they totally smiled at me last night"

"do you think they remember me from the fan meet last month?"

he's constantly talking with other fans

jimin makes bracelets with letter beads that spell your name or album names

jimin copies your makeup just because he thinks you're the picture of beauty purely in a view of admiration

he views you like greek statues.

"wow- their cheekbones-" he'd say in awh, face right up to the screen while he held a mirror and makeup brush in hands.

Kim Taehyung

requests your songs at parties and other events

begs the guys to do a cover of your songs on stage

name drops you in interviews and is always talking about you in his own interviews

has a huge crush on you and will say so proudly

"they're so pretty. Y/n if you see this, call me." with a sly smirk on his face, completely disregarding the uproar it would cause with army

Taehyung gets super shy when you say his name

Being shy despite being so confident when he talks about you in interviews

"uh- oh- the new song- yeah." while giggling

apologizing profusely when you tease him about the interviews when he comes to fan meets

Jeon Jungkook

Jungkook would write a song about you that's how down bad he is

Posts on social media in hopes you see it

Kook argues with taehyung about thinking he'd treat you better given the chance

argues with jin about being a bigger fan

picks out his outfits to coordinate with yours

kook hopes to run into you at award shows

stalks your fanpages

reads yoongis fanfiction about you

probably is the more devoted fan among the other members

sings your songs all the time, in the car, shower, while cooking, etc.

the only one of the boys that talks to you confidently

"Your style is amazing, I take inspiration all the time." while standing up straight and s soft confident smile on his lips, eye contact unwavering.

but he would never admit that he's written and released songs about you

+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

sorry this took so long i was trying to get all the requests in order! i hope these were up to par hcs are usually very rushed. if you'd like something more detailed or even full drabbles id totally be down to do that. if you wanna be tagged in future works to be notified when I've posted a fic please fill out the taglist form linked below along with the masterposts

➽ Yoongi Masterlist ➽ Main Masterlist ➽ Taglist Form

[johnnylandslide]

Sponsors Wanted!

Savage gear is pretty expensive, and so I am seeking sponsors for Johnny's upcoming debut in the Arcadion Cruiserweight division! In exchange, I would love to take photos of your WoL and their friends!

Base price is 2 mil, though the simpler stuff like memes and Discord stickers are half price. A scene with 3 people or more is +1 mil per extra character.

You can send me a .mcdf or .chara file through Discord, link it to me on Google Drive, or if you're on console I can meet up with you in-game to get your appearance data!

On Offer:

Portraits!

Use as a social media banner, or set these up on Tomestone.gg and then flex them using !me new in any Discord server with Kupo Bot!

Couples' Photos!

Tell me about your WoL and their partner or best friend, and I'll capture their relationship in film!

Action Shots!

Have a funny moment from raid, a cool MSQ headcanon, or a fanfic scene you want to see realized? Tell me and I can can bring them to life!

Memes!

Put yourself, your friends, or your favorite NPCs onto internet in-jokes!

Discord Stickers!

Transparent emoticons of your WoL or an NPC to use in your server! Get your raid leader's look of disapproval on demand!

SPECIAL OFFER: Magic the Gathering Cards!

Put yourself into the upcoming Final Fantasy set! I can throw this in as an add-on if your commission fits into the frame well.

If you're interested, you can send me the details here!

I'm excited to meet your character!

[kingsmoot]

🔥

Honestly I’ve always been confused on Roose’s problem (among the many others he has) on why he doesn’t remarry and have actual true born heirs.

Obviously Domeric is killed by Ramsay and he’s like hm that will happen again, but he should just marry some woman and have as many children as possible, surely Ramsay can’t kill then all, espically if he just hides them away.

This is only controversial because whenever I talk to people about this like they’re like are you fucking forgetteting about the serial killer in the back garden but just KILL him if you have more sons it’s not that hard Big Goosey!

ooooooooough i'm so happy to talk about this, and i'm so sorry it's taken me so long to respond to you. i just wanted to be able to sit down with this ask and get nice and carried away.

you are right that roose COULD remarry and just try for as many kids as possible. and if wife number four dies in childbirth or from pregnancy complications well let's just line up wife number five and try again. he could walder frey it and play a simple numbers game. surely rams can't kill ALL of them as babies. maybe we'll hide a few. send them off to foster. maybe rams will finally get murdered in one of those almost-happy-accidents that keep happening to him but somehow letting him fail upwards instead of dropping dead. what if everything worked out for a change!

but even though roose is a self-serving pragmatist, this isn't something he would do. i do not think roose will ever have another child after ramsay. he tells theon that walda has a "fertile feel to her" and that if she pops out sons the way she pops in tarts the dreadfort will soon be overrun with the fruit of their loins. but i think he's just being.... glib. especially because he dismisses this fantasy as soon as he shares it.

Lady Walda is a Frey, and she has a fertile feel to her. I have become oddly fond of my fat little wife. The two before her never made a sound in bed, but this one squeals and shudders. I find that quite endearing. If she pops out sons the way she pops in tarts, the Dreadfort will soon be overrun with Boltons. Ramsay will kill them all, of course. That's for the best. I will not live long enough to see new sons to manhood, and boy lords are the bane of any House. Walda will grieve to see them die, though."

adwd, chapter 32, reek iii

i'll back up a bit, here, to make my point.

the thing that makes roose bolton such a terrifying villain is not his leeching, his voice so soft other men strain to hear it, his ageless face or his queer, cold, pale eyes. it is the fact that he does not see other people as worthwhile. he simply does not believe in their personhood.

This is a cold man, Catelyn realized, not for the first time.

asos; chapter 49, catelyn vi

to me, the roose moment that makes my blood run cold is actually the above excerpt from reek iii where he describes himself as "oddly fond of his fat little wife". this passage gets memed on a lot. so much so that i feel like people take the whole thing as a joke that it's easy to dismiss. but i really disagree. roose's description of walda isn't funny to me. it isn't awkward. it's chilling.

this is not the way you talk about your living human wife. this is the kind of distant, impersonal affection you would use to describe a neighbor's dog. not your own dog, who you know well, but your neighbor's, who you only see from time to time. this is how roose bolton talks about a woman he likes. a woman he is fond of and intimate with and married to. and she's less than a pet to him.

there are lots more examples of roose's cold calloused solipsism in this chapter. for another:

"This miller's marriage had been performed without my leave or knowledge. The man had cheated me. So I had him hanged, and claimed my rights beneath the tree where he was swaying. If truth be told, the wench was hardly worth the rope. The fox escaped as well, and on our way back to the Dreadfort my favorite courser came up lame, so all in all it was a dismal day. "A year later this same wench had the impudence to turn up at the Dreadfort with a squalling, red-faced monster that she claimed was my own get. I should've had the mother whipped and thrown her child down a well … but the babe did have my eyes. She told me that when her dead husband's brother saw those eyes, he beat her bloody and drove her from the mill. That annoyed me, so I gave her the mill and had the brother's tongue cut out, to make certain he did not go running to Winterfell with tales that might disturb Lord Rickard. Each year I sent the woman some piglets and chickens and a bag of stars, on the understanding that she was never to tell the boy who had fathered him. A peaceful land, a quiet people, that has always been my rule."

adwd; chapter 32, reek iii

besides the abject horror of roose running down a random woman he spotted on a river bank with a gang of armed men to hold her down and rape her under her husband's corpse, the thing that really makes his treatment of ramsay's mother frightening to me is how casually he pays for her upkeep for the next couple decades.

i find it almost impossible to compare roose and the unnamed miller's wife of weeping waters socially and economically. she lives on the dreadfort's lands and he is her lord. the kind of money and resources that roose can toss around on an afternoon's diversion of fox hunting is more money and resources than this woman could have ever hoped to see if she had lived a dozen lifetimes. and when she comes to him beaten and scorned with his rape baby brandished in her arms, he kills her brother in law and gifts her her dead husband's mill and a generous annual allowance. in one casual motion he grants her more than she ever could have hoped to have. and he could have done that from the beginning. there was nothing stopping roose from making a gift of the mill to her after he raped her and left her bleeding on the river bank. besides, of course, the fact that it would never occur to him to do so. not until he got annoyed. before then, he hadn't thought of her at all.

but in addition to reek iii giving us a glimpse at roose bolton's pre-canon, casual, wanton, cruelty, it also gives us a glimpse into his own self perception. he says:

to ramsay:

"You are mistaken. It is not good. No tales were ever told of me. Do you think I would be sitting here if it were otherwise? Your amusements are your own, I will not chide you on that count, but you must be more discreet. A peaceful land, a quiet people. That has always been my rule. Make it yours." "Is this why you left Lady Dustin and your fat pig wife? So you could come down here and tell me to be quiet?"

and again to theon:

A peaceful land, a quiet people, that has always been my rule." "A fine rule, m'lord."

roose's criticism of ramsay is not the fact that he is a serial killing serial rapist. roose is both of those things. roose's criticism of ramsay is the fact that he's gouche. he's bruttish and rude and was not raised in a noble household to act a lord. he's classless as well as lower class.

roose's greatest criticism of ramsay is that he makes him look bad.

but, and this is the point i've been ramping up to make, i think that roose is actually ashamed of ramsay and what ramsay says about him. i think roose, like tywin, sees his child as evidence of his own corruption.

don't worry i have pullquotes.

"They're only leeches. My lord." "My squire could take a lesson from you, it would seem. Frequent leechings are the secret of a long life. A man must purge himself of bad blood. You will do, I think. For so long as I remain at Harrenhal, Nan, you shall be my cupbearer, and serve me at table and in chambers." This time she knew better than to say that she'd sooner work in the stables. "Yes, your lord. I mean, my lord."

acok; chapter 47; arya ix

"Yes," Roose Bolton said. "His blood is tainted, that cannot be denied. Yet he is a good fighter, as cunning as he is fearless. When the ironmen cut down Ser Rodrik, and Leobald Tallhart soon after, it fell to Ramsay to lead the battle, and he did. He swears that he shall not sheathe his sword so long as a single Greyjoy remains in the north. Perhaps such service might atone in some small measure for whatever crimes his bastard blood has led him to commit." He shrugged. "Or not. When the war is done, His Grace must weigh and judge. By then I hope to have a trueborn son by Lady Walda."

asos; chapter 49, catelyn vi

"Tell him … tell him to be afraid?" Reek felt ill at the very thought of it. "M'lord, I … if I did that, he'd …" "I know." Lord Bolton sighed. "His blood is bad. He needs to be leeched. The leeches suck away the bad blood, all the rage and pain. No man can think so full of anger. Ramsay, though … his tainted blood would poison even leeches, I fear." "He is your only son."

adwd; chapter 32, reek iii (sidenote i can't help but hear a note of pain in theon's voice, here. i don't think he's feelings empathy or sympathy for ramsay, here, but he does know what it's like to be dismissed and discounted by a lord father who has no other sons to choose from, and hearing how roose talks about ramsay threatens to remind him of a feeling he had before he learned his name.)

i have a really long post in which i pull these same quotes where i talk about the parallel of how robert talks about joff to how roose talks about ramsay. and while i'm talking about joffrey there, i did make the point that roose's phrasing about ramsay's bad blood that not even the leeches can drain away leaves us with the obvious question of whose blood it is that's in ramsay. and if we know whose blood it is that's in rams, then we can look at roose's frequent and obsessive leechings in a very different light.

roose tells ramsay that no tales were ever spread of him, and yet he is notoriously regarded as cold, cruel, and deeply unnerving by the whole of the north. he does, in fact, have a bad reputation. and it does precede him. but roose is protected by his high birth, his status and position as lord of the dreadfort, by his military strength, and by his political and social loyalties + securities as ned stark's bannerman who raised his banners in support of robert's (successful!) rebellion. he, like his son, preys on anonymous northern peasant girls who have no recourse for justice, but he's not quite so loud about it.

speaking of roose's son, let's pivot to domeric real quick.

"Lord Bolton has never acknowledged the boy, so far as I know," Ser Rodrik said. "I confess, I do not know him." "Few do," she replied. "He lived with his mother until two years past, when young Domeric died and left Bolton without an heir. That was when he brought his bastard to the Dreadfort. The boy is a sly creature by all accounts, and he has a servant who is almost as cruel as he is. Reek, they call the man. It's said he never bathes. They hunt together, the Bastard and this Reek, and not for deer. I've heard tales, things I can scarce believe, even of a Bolton. And now that my lord husband and my sweet son have gone to the gods, the Bastard looks at my lands hungrily."

acok; chapter 16, bran ii

from lady hornwood we learn that ramsay was only brought to the dreadfort (and still not publicly acknowledged) after the death of roose's only son and heir

The Lady Walda wrote from the Twins almost every day, but all the letters were the same. "I pray for you morn, noon, and night, my sweet lord," she wrote, "and count the days until you share my bed again. Return to me soon, and I will give you many trueborn sons to take the place of your dear Domeric and rule the Dreadfort after you." Arya pictured a plump pink baby in a cradle, covered with plump pink leeches.

acok; chapter 64, arya x

from walda we get a very young noblewoman's practiced courtesies, assuring her lord husband (a stranger to her) that she will do her duty as his wife and produce him healthy, hale heirs. and we might assume that "your dear domeric" here is just a bit of poetic alliteration that walda includes in her letter to be flowery.

but roose himself talks about domeric in a way that is totally unlike how roose talks about anyone else at all.

"He is your only son." "For the moment. I had another, once. Domeric. A quiet boy, but most accomplished. He served four years as Lady Dustin's page, and three in the Vale as a squire to Lord Redfort. He played the high harp, read histories, and rode like the wind. Horses … the boy was mad for horses, Lady Dustin will tell you. Not even Lord Rickard's daughter could outrace him, and that one was half a horse herself. Redfort said he showed great promise in the lists. A great jouster must be a great horseman first." "Ramsay killed him. A sickness of the bowels, Maester Uthor says, but I say poison. In the Vale, Domeric had enjoyed the company of Redfort's sons. He wanted a brother by his side, so he rode up the Weeping Water to seek my bastard out. I forbade it, but Domeric was a man grown and thought that he knew better than his father. Now his bones lie beneath the Dreadfort with the bones of his brothers, who died still in the cradle, and I am left with Ramsay. Tell me, my lord … if the kinslayer is accursed, what is a father to do when one son slays another?"

adwd; chapter 32, reek iii

domeric is given a depth and a personhood in roose's memories that his three wives and his rape victim are not. he speaks about domeric with a great and enduring father's love and a fierce pride. he goes out of his way to tell theon (a boy lord reduced to a pitiful, nearly inhuman state) about his accomplishments and his interests. roose loved his son.

and his other son -- a culmination of all his many years of cruelty and predation, a congealing together of all his bad blood -- kills him.

roose bringing ramsay to the dreadfort, even before legitimizing him, is his admission that ramsay is the only son he will ever have. he will never sire another heir. ramsay will make certain that any he might produce go to their graves. rams is the death of his house. roose acknowledges that explicitly in reek iii, but he admitted it to himself as soon as he summoned rams from weeping water.

roose's decision not to have any more children is a very intentional one. he is not trying to solve the problem of ramsay killing all his potential heirs. he knows that this will be inevitable. he has accepted that his bastard son snuffed out his one beloved heir, and that the gods have bound his hands. he cannot kill ramsay, for the gods abhor a kinslayer. and yet ramsay is a kinslayer himself, which roose is well aware of. ramsay is only a shadow of the father, and a reflection of his many sins. he is both a result of and a punishment for roose's cruelty.

[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 C��zanne, 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.

[transfemme-shelterdog]

Not to keep bothering you lol, but I saw this post from a trans woman I follow.

I don't want to complain / trivialize what all these transwomen are saying, bc I do understand what they're saying/ agree with them on some of this stuff.

But some of the stuff they're saying makes me go 🤨 Especially the use of 'TME' in a previous reblog gives me pause.

The post was about things that have been taken from the transfemme community by transmascs/ gay men.

Specifically the concept of the dysphoria hoodie & t4t. Everybody has articles of clothing they were when they're having bad days; I had my own "dysphoria hoodie" when I was 14-15, WAY before I realized I was trans (my family still jokes about it, bc they don't understand why I wore it so much). T4t too, the concept isn't new. Every marginalized community wants to date within themselves due to shared experiences. Maybe the term started as transfemme4transfemme, but it hasn't lost that meaning? Transbians still use that term. It just expanded the meaning & depends on what community.

I agree with her about computer science, anime, "femboy" culture. I know within the queer community tgirls get shit for it, but outside the community I think its just considered weird no matter who does it. I know 'egg' was started by tgirls, idk what transmascs would call ourselves but I'm happy to come up with a new name for us. Blahaj I saw on tiktok used by other transmascs, I didn't know were coined by tgirls. I will give credit to tgirls for blahaj.

You're not bothering me, don't worry.

Implying that femboys are just trans women is a problematic take. Lots of cis femboys out there, OnlyAfro, the Dark Souls streamer who invented the biggest meme in the community is a cis femboy, as is Sneaky, a League of Legends pro player for C9

Blahaj was always a trans thing, not just transfemme

Saying that only transfems use dysphoria hoodies is a wild ass take considering it's a huge thing for a lot of transmascs, as baggy hoodies cover up the chest, giving a more square look. I'd argue it's more a transmasc thing than transfem

Egg is again, neutral

Anime sure, the amount of trans women with anime pfps is sizable, I'll give them that. But trying to claim ownership over anime is a wild take considering how many trans guys have "goals" that are men

T4T was always neutral, it was never exclusively transfem, I'm tired of this myth

Also, even if all of this was stolen by trans guys and never was neutral, who gives a shit? We need to be allies, not at each others throat over which tropes belong to who. It's stupid, and needs to stop.

Also, no trans guy is calling you a groomer for using the term egg, what the fuck girl? The closest you get is people shouting "EGG! EGG! YOU'RE ACTUALLY A TRANS WOMAN" when a man is even remotely gender non confirming, and I agree. It's weird to claim that someone is actually trans because they don't fit the idea of a man 100%. You're just redoing gender rigidity all over again worstie.

[forestshadow-wolf]

I get so irrationally angry when people (namely non USAmericans) lean hard into meme-ing the "stupid americans" jokes

Because yeah, maybe you're right, a lot of us couldn't name your neighboring countries, or we can't point to your province on a map, or we haven't the foggiest clue of conversion rate of imperial to metric, or whatever reason or tidbit you want to add. Yes. We know that. We know that you know that.

But consider. A lot of us haven't left our own state before. A lot of us don't know half our own state. Please consider that a lot of people are simply trying to make it to the next day, next week, next month. I, myself, am extremely fortunate to be living with my parents at my age and my "rent" is extremely low. I'm fortunate. Many people are scrambling to pick up extra shifts at work or finding a second job to afford cost of living. Lots and lots of people are worrying about how to get karen out of their face without losing their job, they don't have time to study maps of europe.

And I get it. It's extremely easy to make that joke. We make it easy. And you don't what the average working class looks like. You hate our politics but can't change them, we hate them more and have no choice but to live with them. Your taxes go to public schools and healthcare. Ours go to military forces.

I can't police what anyone says, just asking that you think about your jokes. You're kicking a dying horse here.

[dandeliont3aandsageleaves]

A brief summary of The Twitter Fight

@destielenjoyer69 so like 4ish years ago Jensen announced that he would be producing a Supernatural prequel called The Winchesters. Everyone was super excited and congratulated him when Jared posted this:

This ended up sending the fandom into a frenzy, as you'd think that Jensen would have at least told Jared what was going on. Many thought it was a joke until Jared tweeted this:

This spawned a bunch of memes and debate. There were a lot of theories as to what happened, the most popular being that Jensen and Jared actually hated each other. I remember people analyzing their behaviors at previous cons, saying that Jensen looks more relaxed and happy when he's doing a panel with Misha, but he rarely smiles and keeps distance with Jared.

It was then announced that Robbie Thompson, a writer and producer of Supernatural, would be returning for The Winchesters. This is when Jared posted the infamous tweet:

This refers to Brutus literally stabbing Caesar in the back when the Roman Senate decided to team up and turn Julius Caesar into a pincushion.

Eventually both Jared and Jensen made posts stating that even though there's been bumps in their relationship, they're still brothers and they love each other. People still thought that the apologies seemed forced and that Jensen and Jared hated each other. People would analyze the wording of the tweets. There was Team Jensen (people who thought Jensen was in the right) and Team Jared (people who thought Jensen was in the wrong). Eventually everyone moved on though and now we just have the "I'm gutted" and "et tu, bute???" memes.

TLDR: Jensen didn't tell Jared that he was making a Supernatural Prequel, Jared got upset and complained on the internet, and then he made a tweet about being betrayed when he found out a Supernatural writer was working on said prequel.

Happy Ides of March guys

[jinmepark]

Every now and then I'm catch up by the fact that cartman is canonically a fundashi and reads yaoi

[theaceofarrows]

[fyeah-tmnt]

Yes i'm part of the LGBT

Leenage Gutant Binja Turtles

[st-just]

@sybaritick

I'm not the OP here but I have made a somewhat similar post before (that i see a weird number of people on Tumblr who seem to only accept the idea of an M/F ship if the woman is the dom, in a way that implies or outright states that a woman being submissive is unfeminist and "boring"/lame) so this makes me curious if I am also socially isolated in the same bizarre corner as OP, or if you are the one who has managed to avoid the people acting that way. Or some combination of the two/it's in between. (Either way I do think it's a Tumblr-specific complaint though/I am in no way arguing that most heterosexual romance is femdom-- not at all!) my context is mostly just casual rpg fandom tumblr (Baldur's Gate, Dragon Age, etc). I'm aware it's very "Smith College problem" but I think people just find the moralization of it around here grating (ie writing femdom is obviously good, saying femdom is morally superior is bad).

Oh I have definitely seen the jokes and memes and similar (and they are pretty eye-rolley). But like - the overwhelming majority of shippy fanart or fics I have actually seen for straight Dragon Age ships doesn't fit this at all? It's a kind of joke made by people who don't seem to actually care about this stuff, not the content actually made and obsessed over by the people who are actually invested in them.

I mean, look at Reylo.

I'm gonna be real I think all the people who make/rb posts like this are just carefully socially-bubbled out from 90% of the straight ships people on this website actually care about.

[ema-sahdmadhi]

"It seems you've had quite a life..." - Ema Skye, 6-5 Day 1 Investigation

[souvenir116]

So, someone tweeted this on f1twt:

And quotes made me lose it:

🥺🥺

[whyissupernaturaltrending]

November 5, 2024 - it's been four years since the destiel meme was born.

Supernatural continues trending as expected. At the time of writing this post, it's not appearing as a main tag but instead, 'destiel' is trending right under 'us politics.'

Because even if Supernatural isn't trending, it still is.

As shown below the cut.

[slyandthefamilybook]

I've heard this called "irony poisining" elsewhere. The alt-right has a chronic allergy to sincerity. They know their ideas are vile so they have to cover them in a dozen layers of "It's just a joke, bro." It can even get to the point where they lie to themselves about what they believe. It's why no one who was paying attention was surprised when the creators of South Park, a show that made its bread and butter on "it's just a joke, bro"-style humor said they were Republicans. Musk, for example, is a popular figure fundamentally because he's so so unserious. Even his inexpert use of decades-old memes is a convenient obscurative for the dangerous things he says and does. (To be clear: I'm not saying he does this intentionally, but it has the same effect nonetheless.)

Pardon my ignorance, but what is the "just here for a good time" alt right meme pipeline?

the alt right's primary method of luring people into its ideology online is via memes, jokes, and an overall "for the lulz" mentality. instead of micromanaging each others' labels or fandoms or language, they pick a common target to dissect with their brand of humor that holds a plausible deniability for anything truly sinister and find solidarity in their mockery of that target rather than any shared class they may have. it's why elon musk has amassed such a large following in spite of his noxious behavior: he gives them the world-stage permission they need to continue this behavior.

why are you so mad? it's just a joke, try not being so mad at my joke. we're just having a good time.