#-gestures-

[aparticularbandit]

moving the tags discussion into actual post

but like

mikan and yasuke both being werewolves but mikan's not as open with it. werewolves being common in the medical industry, but mikan is just ferocious when she changes (think despair!mikan vs. pre-despair!mikan). mikan taking suppressants because she doesn't know how to control herself, so junko sends her off to fight with wolf!mukuro when they both change because she needs her wolf.

junko getting to curl up with her big wolf family. junko with her wolf pack, even though she isn't a wolf herself. she's just surrounded by them at all times. junko playing fetch with mukuro and hiding the ball but having those longer nails because they give the best scritches.

mikan in wolf form finding junko right after junko kills yasuke but this is a girl with a wolf with a dead not-quite-transformed wolf in front of her and she's howling like she's a wolf, too, but she's not.

(junko who wants nothing more than to be a wolf like the rest of her family but she can't be.)

[flannelshirtandjeans]

Stealing art back from art block one messy sketch at a time, this time featuring my (good) Dark Urge called They, Astarion, and Halsin! And a druid cub. They are my endgame dream now even tho I haven't even finished the game lmao. Two hot menaces and a wonderful big bear of a man, and a kid who is literally a bear most of the time (comes after his dad). The kid is absolutely a menace also when he grows up bc come on. There are some braincells in this combo of people, but they're WILDLY prone to whim and mischief (and come from places of horrid trauma).

[one-winged-dreams]

WoW lore really is hell on earth rn, huh?

Unless Metzen fixes some shit when he comes back I'm still outiiiiiie lmao

[mydetheturk]

wip wednesday in the form of a fic i need my but kicked into gear to actually work on

~~

The gunslinger fled across the desert, and the man in black followed.

That is how this story goes.

That is how this story must go.

(There is another version of this story, the other way round, with another gunslinger and a different man in black, but theirs is a tragedy that spins round and round and round, cycle after cycle after cycle.) 

Nicholas D. Wolfwood. Pastor. Undertaker. Assassin.

Nicholas the Punisher.

His Target: Vash the Stampede, Humanoid Typhoon.

God and all the Saints protect him from this threat. It's become ritual, asking the Saints to grant him strength. Nicholas isn't sure God is listening, doesn't really care, but the Saints could be, and from Nicholas's studies, they were people. Good people, too good for the likes of Nicholas, but people nonetheless. He can't trust people, but the Saints each had their own things going for them.

There's not a saint for fucked up, probably going to die young gunmen like Nicholas, but there is one for lost causes, and oh, how Nicholas is a lost cause. The Eye of Michael is going to have Nicholas dead sooner rather than later, and all Nicholas has to keep him going is the promise that the Hopeland Orphanage remains untouched. That is one thing he'll actually pray for, the safety of the Orphanage. He'll pray as much as he has to, to keep the kids there safe.

He'll condemn himself to hell to keep those kids out of it.

[aparticularbandit]

Hey, look, Lynda Carter found her way on my dash pretty much immediately. All I ask is that Ryan do the same.

I refuse to seek out Ryan Reynolds' Tumblr account. If it has any value it will find it's way into my dash naturally. This is how the Tumblr ecosystem is meant to work.

[butchfalin]

the funniest meltdown ive ever had was in college when i got so overstimulated that i could Not speak, including over text. one of my friends was trying to talk me through it but i was solely using emojis because they were easier than trying to come up with words so he started using primarily emojis as well just to make things feel balanced. this was not the Most effective strategy... until. he tried to ask me "you okay?" but the way he chose to do that was by sending "👉🏼👌🏼❓" and i was so shocked by suddenly being asked if i was dtf that i was like WHAT???? WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME?????????? and thus was verbal again

[valtsv]

i know that when a book describes dragons picking up their riders they probably mean scruffing them by the neck in their mouths like a kitten, but i always imagine something like this

[melonsharks]

au where everything is the same except mabel and dipper have been going to gravity falls every year before the show takes place since like kindergarten.

its a pretty simple premise that derives mostly from my desire to explore interpersonal relationships and the ways a place and people can change from a young child’s point of view. it doesn’t change canon that much either, admittedly, i just wanted to draw childhood friends stuff LOL. ill call it uhhhhhhhh every summer au.

[phantomrose96]

If anyone wants to know why every tech company in the world right now is clamoring for AI like drowned rats scrabbling to board a ship, I decided to make a post to explain what's happening.

(Disclaimer to start: I'm a software engineer who's been employed full time since 2018. I am not a historian nor an overconfident Youtube essayist, so this post is my working knowledge of what I see around me and the logical bridges between pieces.)

Okay anyway. The explanation starts further back than what's going on now. I'm gonna start with the year 2000. The Dot Com Bubble just spectacularly burst. The model of "we get the users first, we learn how to profit off them later" went out in a no-money-having bang (remember this, it will be relevant later). A lot of money was lost. A lot of people ended up out of a job. A lot of startup companies went under. Investors left with a sour taste in their mouth and, in general, investment in the internet stayed pretty cooled for that decade. This was, in my opinion, very good for the internet as it was an era not suffocating under the grip of mega-corporation oligarchs and was, instead, filled with Club Penguin and I Can Haz Cheezburger websites.

Then around the 2010-2012 years, a few things happened. Interest rates got low, and then lower. Facebook got huge. The iPhone took off. And suddenly there was a huge new potential market of internet users and phone-havers, and the cheap money was available to start backing new tech startup companies trying to hop on this opportunity. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon either started in this time, or hit their ramp-up in these years by shifting focus to the internet and apps.

Now, every start-up tech company dreaming of being the next big thing has one thing in common: they need to start off by getting themselves massively in debt. Because before you can turn a profit you need to first spend money on employees and spend money on equipment and spend money on data centers and spend money on advertising and spend money on scale and and and

But also, everyone wants to be on the ship for The Next Big Thing that takes off to the moon.

So there is a mutual interest between new tech companies, and venture capitalists who are willing to invest $$$ into said new tech companies. Because if the venture capitalists can identify a prize pig and get in early, that money could come back to them 100-fold or 1,000-fold. In fact it hardly matters if they invest in 10 or 20 total bust projects along the way to find that unicorn.

But also, becoming profitable takes time. And that might mean being in debt for a long long time before that rocket ship takes off to make everyone onboard a gazzilionaire.

But luckily, for tech startup bros and venture capitalists, being in debt in the 2010's was cheap, and it only got cheaper between 2010 and 2020. If people could secure loans for ~3% or 4% annual interest, well then a $100,000 loan only really costs $3,000 of interest a year to keep afloat. And if inflation is higher than that or at least similar, you're still beating the system.

So from 2010 through early 2022, times were good for tech companies. Startups could take off with massive growth, showing massive potential for something, and venture capitalists would throw infinite money at them in the hopes of pegging just one winner who will take off. And supporting the struggling investments or the long-haulers remained pretty cheap to keep funding.

You hear constantly about "Such and such app has 10-bazillion users gained over the last 10 years and has never once been profitable", yet the thing keeps chugging along because the investors backing it aren't stressed about the immediate future, and are still banking on that "eventually" when it learns how to really monetize its users and turn that profit.

The pandemic in 2020 took a magnifying-glass-in-the-sun effect to this, as EVERYTHING was forcibly turned online which pumped a ton of money and workers into tech investment. Simultaneously, money got really REALLY cheap, bottoming out with historic lows for interest rates.

Then the tide changed with the massive inflation that struck late 2021. Because this all-gas no-brakes state of things was also contributing to off-the-rails inflation (along with your standard-fare greedflation and price gouging, given the extremely convenient excuses of pandemic hardships and supply chain issues). The federal reserve whipped out interest rate hikes to try to curb this huge inflation, which is like a fire extinguisher dousing and suffocating your really-cool, actively-on-fire party where everyone else is burning but you're in the pool. And then they did this more, and then more. And the financial climate followed suit. And suddenly money was not cheap anymore, and new loans became expensive, because loans that used to compound at 2% a year are now compounding at 7 or 8% which, in the language of compounding, is a HUGE difference. A $100,000 loan at a 2% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, accrues to $121,899. A $100,000 loan at an 8% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, more than doubles to $215,892.

Now it is scary and risky to throw money at "could eventually be profitable" tech companies. Now investors are watching companies burn through their current funding and, when the companies come back asking for more, investors are tightening their coin purses instead. The bill is coming due. The free money is drying up and companies are under compounding pressure to produce a profit for their waiting investors who are now done waiting.

You get enshittification. You get quality going down and price going up. You get "now that you're a captive audience here, we're forcing ads or we're forcing subscriptions on you." Don't get me wrong, the plan was ALWAYS to monetize the users. It's just that it's come earlier than expected, with way more feet-to-the-fire than these companies were expecting. ESPECIALLY with Wall Street as the other factor in funding (public) companies, where Wall Street exhibits roughly the same temperament as a baby screaming crying upset that it's soiled its own diaper (maybe that's too mean a comparison to babies), and now companies are being put through the wringer for anything LESS than infinite growth that Wall Street demands of them.

Internal to the tech industry, you get MASSIVE wide-spread layoffs. You get an industry that used to be easy to land multiple job offers shriveling up and leaving recent graduates in a desperately awful situation where no company is hiring and the market is flooded with laid-off workers trying to get back on their feet.

Because those coin-purse-clutching investors DO love virtue-signaling efforts from companies that say "See! We're not being frivolous with your money! We only spend on the essentials." And this is true even for MASSIVE, PROFITABLE companies, because those companies' value is based on the Rich Person Feeling Graph (their stock) rather than the literal profit money. A company making a genuine gazillion dollars a year still tears through layoffs and freezes hiring and removes the free batteries from the printer room (totally not speaking from experience, surely) because the investors LOVE when you cut costs and take away employee perks. The "beer on tap, ping pong table in the common area" era of tech is drying up. And we're still unionless.

Never mind that last part.

And then in early 2023, AI (more specifically, Chat-GPT which is OpenAI's Large Language Model creation) tears its way into the tech scene with a meteor's amount of momentum. Here's Microsoft's prize pig, which it invested heavily in and is galivanting around the pig-show with, to the desperate jealousy and rapture of every other tech company and investor wishing it had that pig. And for the first time since the interest rate hikes, investors have dollar signs in their eyes, both venture capital and Wall Street alike. They're willing to restart the hose of money (even with the new risk) because this feels big enough for them to take the risk.

Now all these companies, who were in varying stages of sweating as their bill came due, or wringing their hands as their stock prices tanked, see a single glorious gold-plated rocket up out of here, the likes of which haven't been seen since the free money days. It's their ticket to buy time, and buy investors, and say "see THIS is what will wring money forth, finally, we promise, just let us show you."

To be clear, AI is NOT profitable yet. It's a money-sink. Perhaps a money-black-hole. But everyone in the space is so wowed by it that there is a wide-spread and powerful conviction that it will become profitable and earn its keep. (Let's be real, half of that profit "potential" is the promise of automating away jobs of pesky employees who peskily cost money.) It's a tech-space industrial revolution that will automate away skilled jobs, and getting in on the ground floor is the absolute best thing you can do to get your pie slice's worth.

It's the thing that will win investors back. It's the thing that will get the investment money coming in again (or, get it second-hand if the company can be the PROVIDER of something needed for AI, which other companies with venture-back will pay handsomely for). It's the thing companies are terrified of missing out on, lest it leave them utterly irrelevant in a future where not having AI-integration is like not having a mobile phone app for your company or not having a website.

So I guess to reiterate on my earlier point:

Drowned rats. Swimming to the one ship in sight.

[exilley]

I do sort of wish western anime fans would analyze anime and manga from a framework of japanese historical and cultural context. Specifically a lot of works from the 90s being influenced by the general aimlessness and ennui that a lot of people were experiencing due to the burst in the bubble economy and the national trauma caused by the sarin terrorist attack. I think in interacting with media that’s not local to our sociocultural/sociopolitical sphere it’s easy to forget that it’s influenced and shaped by the same kinds of factors that influence media within our own cultural dome and there ends up being this baseline misalignment of perception between the causative elements of a narrative and viewer interpretation of those elements. It’s a form of death of the author that i think, in some measure, hinders our ability to fully understand/come to terms with creator intent and the full scope of a work’s merits

[luna-azzurra]

Soft Gestures for Comfort

Bringing them a blanket when they’re curled up on the couch.

Whispering, "It’s okay, I’m here," when they wake up from a bad dream.

Stroking their hair gently when they’re lying on your lap.

Running a warm bath for them after a tough day.

Holding them close and saying, "I’ve got you," when they’re upset.

Preparing their favorite comfort food when they’re feeling low.

Turning off their alarm and letting them sleep in when they’re exhausted.

Reading their favorite book to them before bed.

Playing their favorite soothing music to help them relax.

Just sitting in silence with them, letting them know your presence is their safe space.

[aparticularbandit]

Election Eve

Summary: Eve worries, and Claire comforts her.

Rating: G.

AO3

Something is wrong.

Claire feels it even as she slumbers, and it peeps through her dreams.  She struggles against that feeling until, finally, she wakes.  The lamp on her wife’s side of the bed is on; that must be what startled her, even though it’s rarely been a problem before.  Eve often wakes before she does – or did, when they still lived in Connecticut, since sometimes Eve would need to be up early for an emergency with one of her seniors – so it isn’t as though she hasn’t slept through this sort of thing before.

But something is…something is wrong.

Hey.  Claire slowly sits up.  She reaches over and rubs her wife’s back gently.  Something wrong?

Eve starts to shake her head – a lie, Claire can feel how it’s a lie – and then stops.  She presses her lips together, swallows, and then says, What if they don’t want you?

Oh.

Claire’s thought about that question a thousand times in the past few days, more than that over the past few months, even more over the course of her lifetime.  She can’t tell Eve that she’s as marketable now as she can be; there are still things Eve doesn’t know, still things she doesn’t want her to find out.  After a while, she’d gotten used to expecting that she was unwanted; after a while, she’d done her best anyway.  Most of the time, that worked out.

But not always.

It doesn’t change anything, Claire murmurs gently.  If they don’t want me, I’m out of work for a bit, but—

How could they—

People are scared.  Clare wraps her arm around Eve and pulls her close.  People are trying their best.  They’re doing their best.  Just like us.  That’s all.

It’s not all, Claire wants to say.  She wants to bite and snarl and fight.  Which is really the answer.

Gently, gently Claire lifts Eve’s chin so that their eyes can just meet.  If they don’t want me, then we regroup and fight harder.  She shrugs.  That’s all we can do.  Fight and fight and keep fighting.  So that even if they don’t want me now, maybe they’ll want someone like me later.  Brendan, maybe.

Eve smiles, the barest hint of humor.  Brendan wouldn’t be cut out for politics.  He’s not interested in them either.

Hm.  Claire pretends to consider this for a few moments.  What about Rowena?  When Eve’s brows knit together, she continues.  Or Agatha.  She’d be a great—

Eve laughs at that, long and loud, and that’s how Claire knows she’s won.

Claire leans forward and kisses her wife’s forehead.  I love you.

I love you, too, Eve murmurs, and if they saw you the way I did, the whole world would want you.

With a chuckle, Claire kisses her wife’s nose.  I don’t want them to want me like you—

That’s not what I meant!  Eve frowns and then leans up and kisses her wife.  Then she curls up against her.  Remind me.  When I get nervous again.  Okay?

Of course.  Claire leans back and holds Eve against her chest.  As many times as you need.

[attleboy]

YES ‼️ KILL ‼️ ‼️ ‼️ ‼️

[chumbie]

personally i think more games would benefit from hiring a yaoi expert

[bigolialragu]

i like thinking that laios would go crazy on birdwatching after the [SPOILERS] curse

[z-mizcellaneous-z]

Fucking CRYING IM USING THAT PHRASE FOR EVERYTHING NOW