#ABSOLUTE RAMBLE

[ashertickler]

The first time Asher realizes he had feelings for David is when he comforted him after he fell off the tree in his backyard. The first time he kissed David was a little after Gabe's death.

~ 🦇🦑

STOP STOP OH MY GOD I CAN IMAGINE IT WAIT-

brain dump ramble about David x Asher below teehee 😸

Asher's softly sobbing after his arm got fixed and in a sling, and David isn't mad at him or grouchy... he looks worried? Concerned. David didn't comprehend the concept of death at that young age but in the moment where he saw Asher wailing and screaming on the ground with his arm looking... unnatural, scarily bent, blood pooling beneath it, he assumed the worst. And it hit him, what if that was death? And... if it happened to Asher? It mentally broke him, and in the aftermath David wouldn't leave Asher's side, always watching. Making sure Asher didn't slip away when he wasn't looking, making sure Asher was still with him.

Asher noticed the change in David instantly. He knows his best friend like the back of his hand. He knows all too well how easily he gets under David's skin, so to see his usually grouchy buddy so... soft? Always around Asher, holding his hand, helping him up and down stairs, even helping him eat anytime they had a meal together... Asher felt something more than friendship. His heart swelled... but he couldn't name this feeling. Oh, it's probably just super friendship! Yeah... like we're soul buddies! I don't want him to stop being this way around me...

---

After Gabe's post mortum, the Shaw Pack was inconsolable. Especially David, who'd now lost both parents and had the responsibility of being pack alpha imminently upon his shoulders. It broke everyone to hear about the passing of their beloved alpha, but for Asher... he couldn't stop worrying about David. How could he cope? How could he function? How lonely must he feel... and how sick with worry Asher felt at the thought. His thoughts were consumed my David, and it reached a point where he couldn't bare to spend time away from him. Asher swore he would always be by David's side, cos that's what soul buddies do, right? At night, he would hold David as he wept in only Asher's arms, then put a reassuring hand on David's shoulder during the day as David mustered up what little energy he had to tend to the pack and deal with the funeral arrangements. Asher could only watch with pained eyes as David struggled with all the duties he and Frank would soldier through, noting every laboured exhale his best friend shuddered out.

Asher noticed a lot of painful behaviours in David in the days after Gabe's death... but one struck him hard. Not out of worry, but instead with how his heart would swell. David became clingy. Which for David was incredibly difficult to decipher and point out. But Asher noticed. As he had always done, as he had always noticed whenever David's behaviour changed. Whenever it changed towards Ash.

Lingering touches. Hugs that lasted too long. Brushes of his hand against Asher's arm. Leaning into Asher's reassuring and grounding touch. Small nuzzles when crying into Asher's chest and shoulders when the pain of his father's death hit hardest, particularly in the lonely nights where he would have to sleep in his family's apartment alone. One night, David couldn't handle it. He needed Asher. One short call later, Asher had packed his bags and decided to move into the Shaw apartment for David. For his soul buddy. During the night, with Asher cradling David in his arms as he rambled about the funeral to come in the following days, David felt content. For the first time in the days that felt like years after Gabe's passing, being in Asher's arms felt like home. He finally felt warm again. Whole again. All it took was a sharp gulp and a yearning, tear-stained look at Asher for Ash to realise the feeling from his best friend in front of him. Asher cupped David's face and stroked his cheek, I'm always here for you David, and David choked up before breaking into a smile. A small one, but his first smile in... too long. He's smiling... I made him smile. Asher couldn't contain the surge of emotion any longer, it had remained dormant since he broke his arm. The unrequited yearning, the naive hoping, maybe this was the moment-

Thank you, Ash. For always being the one stable force in my life. David, smiling as a tear trails down his cheek, leans in to peck a kiss on Asher's cheek. And Asher freezes, his cheeks turning a soft pink. David stares, his heart skipping a beat, worried he'd been too bold, if this was stupid, if he fucked up, if he'd lose asher too-

Until Asher tilted his head and kissed David, closing his eyes and smiling into the kiss, cupping David's face as David brought his hand to Asher's head and held it before breaking apart. Foreheads touching, they stared into each other's eyes and smiled, before Asher broke into a giggle and David followed suit.

We'll be ok.

(tagging @dawnofiight lucid pookie for when you come back... my fellow dasher stan I hope you like this absolute word dump brain fart of a thingy about our sillies dasher... miss you dookie)

[kitsu-katsu]

I'm gonna make this post as condenaed and abridged brainrot to explain why Victor Frankenstein is my boy from 200 yr old media prompted by a tag question from @samathekittycat in a post I reblogged because that highjacking would've been too much

So. Basically every adaptation ever is way off, Victor in the og novel is a guy from a rich family, yes, but one that has it's own fucked up occurrences that shape him even though he says his life is the peak of idyllic and that can lead to really good character analysis

He becomes an alchemy fanatic at 13, completely obsesses over it, even harder when his father claims the whole subject to be trash and he's in general somewhat fascinated by natural occurrences as well, so he gets it into his head that he wants to change the world by attaining the alchemist dream of basically defeating death, and this is all exacerbated when he's about to be sent away to study in Ingolstadt at 17 and just days before his mother dies of an illness his cousin-sister-future wife (it's complicated, it's a whole mess with hiw mother's involvement too) contracted first, so his trip is delayed a bit, but he never really processes his grief and is not that interested in actual science at first until a professor he meets there validates the alchemists ambition and he starts to hyperfixate on science so bad he's surpassed his professors in 2 years, and with all this baggage, at 19, he decides he's going to decode the secrets of death basically, because as he sees it at this point, if applied enough in the right direction with a scientific method any mediocre man could change society

So he builds his creatire after 2 years of isolating himself completely to do it, so he finishes it at like 21, and the thing is, the guy basically did all of this in a hyperfocused state he started at 19 and influenced by All That Baggage and grief he has Not Processed, so he wasn't really thinking about the consequences of anything. So his creature opens its eyes and suddenly the weight and terror of everything falls upon him along with a good mix of uncanny valley, and he just. Collapses. He sleeps a bit, his creature's still there, and he's so scared he runs away from his dorm room and by chance meets with his bff who was back in Geneva with the rest of his family he hasn't talked to in 2 whole years, his creature sneaks out while this is happening, and when going back, Victor is so mentally collapsed and strained and also scared he mighr be called crazy that he's just glad that the creature's gone and enters a fragile state where he's just completely physically sick and done for for a Big While, he can't take care of himself anymore and can't even look at anything relatingnto science anymore

When he's getting better, he has to go back to Geneva because his brother died. Whoah-oh, it was the Creature. He confronts it eventually and it asks for a bride and promises to go away with her, this is a Whole Conflict, because Victor can't reveal what he knows or he'll be labelled insane, he also doesn't wanna finish the bride because she'll also be her own person and what if she doesn't wanna run away with og Creature as his bride? While all of this is happening, one family servant is being accused of the murder and trialed, Victor is squealing in a corner

Basically, he's very autistic, he's seen a hysteric, his creation of the Creature can be analyzed from so many different angles, from teenage pregnancy and postpartum depression, trans experiences (both transmasc and transfemme! I've seen excellent analysis from both perspectives, though I have a personal bias towards the transmasc reading), the process of artist in general (like, that point when you start drawing something and you start zooming into every detail for hours and once you zoom out again you realize you don't like how it came out at all even though you put so much time into it), his illnesses and disabilities both mental and physical are really interestingly depicted as well, overall, he's a very meaty character who was FAR from making everything right, in fact, he did a lot wrong, but he's also a victim of his circumstances, a teen/young adult in the whole duration of the thing, and is suffering tons of pressure from everywhere while losing his purpose and selse of self to his opposition to his own creation. They are the definition of "they can make eachother worse" and Victor loses everything. He's a tragedy. A tragedy that a lot of people wanna ignore and just say he's plain evil because the Creature must be plain good and they feel smart if they say the typical "Small brain: Frankenstein was the monster vs Big brain: Frankenstein was the scientist, not the monster vs Galaxy brain: Frankenstein was the monster all along" and they completely skip out on all the depth this character has

I went super aurface level in a lot of parts here, but I hope it's somewhat understandable

I recommend reading the novel though! It's Good

[tomsmusictaste]

New Found Glory have gotta have one of the hardest discogrophies to rank just for like. What’s canon, I guess?

Like there’s the official LPs, but then there’s stuff like From The Screen To Your Stereo, International Superheroes Of Hardcore, I’m pretty sure they’ve got a full album of Ramones covers kicking around somewhere, if you include ISOH do you also include What’s Eating Gilbert… it’s like, where do you draw the line

Anyway Sticks & Stones still number one no matter what

[louistonehill]

A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways. 

The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission. Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless—dogs become cats, cars become cows, and so forth. MIT Technology Review got an exclusive preview of the research, which has been submitted for peer review at computer security conference Usenix.   

AI companies such as OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Stability AI are facing a slew of lawsuits from artists who claim that their copyrighted material and personal information was scraped without consent or compensation. Ben Zhao, a professor at the University of Chicago, who led the team that created Nightshade, says the hope is that it will help tip the power balance back from AI companies towards artists, by creating a powerful deterrent against disrespecting artists’ copyright and intellectual property. Meta, Google, Stability AI, and OpenAI did not respond to MIT Technology Review’s request for comment on how they might respond. 

Zhao’s team also developed Glaze, a tool that allows artists to “mask” their own personal style to prevent it from being scraped by AI companies. It works in a similar way to Nightshade: by changing the pixels of images in subtle ways that are invisible to the human eye but manipulate machine-learning models to interpret the image as something different from what it actually shows. 

Continue reading article here

[youhavethewrong]

Advantages of being an elf:

- you get the pointy ears

- youre never in a hurry again, ever

Disadvantages of being an elf:

- every other race assumes youre racist

- every other race makes fun of your bland cooking, with good reason

- you gotta walk up a thousand stairs to make it to the 2nd room of any building bc the architect thought making it tall and ornate af was a good idea for some reason

- no other race laughs at your jokes, with good reason

- theres always some fucker high up the chain of command whos like "elven kind never interacts with the brutish orcs...." and youre like "who voted for this guy anyway" and then you find out he was chosen royal advisor 10,000 years before you were born

- every other race makes fun of your garbs. With good reason.

[secondbeatsongs]

for anyone too young to know this: watching The Truman Show is a vastly different experience now, compared to how it was before youtube and social media influencers became normal

before it was like, "what a horrifying thing to do to a human being! to take away their autonomy and privacy, all for the sake of profits! to create fake scenarios for them to react to, just to retain viewership! to ruin their happiness just so some corporate entity could harvest money from their very humanity! how could anyone do something so evil?"

and now it's like, "ah, yeah. this is still deeply fucked up, but it's pretty much what every influencer has been doing to their kids for a decade now. probably bad that we've normalized this experience"

[shadebloopnik]

Radioapple twitter goin thru a thing rn

LIKE AMIR????

AMIR???? CHAT???? AMIR WHAT IS THIS BEHAVIOR?????

[aethersea]

another thing fantasy writers should keep track of is how much of their worldbuilding is aesthetic-based. it's not unlike the sci-fi hardness scale, which measures how closely a story holds to known, real principles of science. The Martian is extremely hard sci-fi, with nearly every detail being grounded in realistic fact as we know it; Star Trek is extremely soft sci-fi, with a vaguely plausible "space travel and no resource scarcity" premise used as a foundation for the wildest ideas the writers' room could come up with. and much as Star Trek fuckin rules, there's nothing wrong with aesthetic-based fantasy worldbuilding!

(sidenote we're not calling this 'soft fantasy' bc there's already a hard/soft divide in fantasy: hard magic follows consistent rules, like "earthbenders can always and only bend earth", and soft magic follows vague rules that often just ~feel right~, like the Force. this frankly kinda maps, but I'm not talking about just the magic, I'm talking about the worldbuilding as a whole.

actually for the purposes of this post we're calling it grounded vs airy fantasy, bc that's succinct and sounds cool.)

a great example of grounded fantasy is Dungeon Meshi: the dungeon ecosystem is meticulously thought out, the plot is driven by the very realistic need to eat well while adventuring, the story touches on both social and psychological effects of the whole 'no one dies forever down here' situation, the list goes on. the worldbuilding wants to be engaged with on a mechanical level and it rewards that engagement.

deliberately airy fantasy is less common, because in a funny way it's much harder to do. people tend to like explanations. it takes skill to pull off "the world is this way because I said so." Narnia manages: these kids fall into a magic world through the back of a wardrobe, befriend talking beavers who drink tea, get weapons from Santa Claus, dance with Bacchus and his maenads, and sail to the edge of the world, without ever breaking suspension of disbelief. it works because every new thing that happens fits the vibes. it's all just vibes! engaging with the worldbuilding on a mechanical level wouldn't just be futile, it'd be missing the point entirely.

the reason I started off calling this aesthetic-based is that an airy story will usually lean hard on an existing aesthetic, ideally one that's widely known by the target audience. Lewis was drawing on fables, fairy tales, myths, children's stories, and the vague idea of ~medieval europe~ that is to this day our most generic fantasy setting. when a prince falls in love with a fallen star, when there are giants who welcome lost children warmly and fatten them up for the feast, it all fits because these are things we'd expect to find in this story. none of this jars against what we've already seen.

and the point of it is to be wondrous and whimsical, to set the tone for the story Lewis wants to tell. and it does a great job! the airy worldbuilding serves the purposes of the story, and it's no less elegant than Ryōko Kui's elaborately grounded dungeon. neither kind of worldbuilding is better than the other.

however.

you do have to know which one you're doing.

the whole reason I'm writing this is that I saw yet another long, entertaining post dragging GRRM for absolute filth. asoiaf is a fun one because on some axes it's pretty grounded (political fuck-around-and-find-out, rumors spread farther than fact, fastest way to lose a war is to let your people starve, etc), but on others it's entirely airy (some people have magic Just Cause, the various peoples are each based on an aesthetic/stereotype/cliché with no real thought to how they influence each other as neighbors, the super-long seasons have no effect on ecology, etc).

and again! none of this is actually bad! (well ok some of those stereotypes are quite bigoted. but other than that this isn't bad.) there's nothing wrong with the season thing being there to highlight how the nobles are focused on short-sighted wars for power instead of storing up resources for the extremely dangerous and inevitable winter, that's a nice allegory, and the looming threat of many harsh years set the narrative tone. and you can always mix and match airy and grounded worldbuilding – everyone does it, frankly it's a necessity, because sooner or later the answer to every worldbuilding question is "because the author wanted it to be that way." the only completely grounded writing is nonfiction.

the problem is when you pretend that your entirely airy worldbuilding is actually super duper grounded. like, for instance, claiming that your vibes-based depiction of Medieval Europe (Gritty Edition) is completely historical, and then never even showing anyone spinning. or sniffing dismissively at Tolkien for not detailing Aragorn's tax policy, and then never addressing how a pre-industrial grain-based agricultural society is going years without harvesting any crops. (stored grain goes bad! you can't even mouse-proof your silos, how are you going to deal with mold?) and the list goes on.

the man went up on national television and invited us to engage with his worldbuilding mechanically, and then if you actually do that, it shatters like spun sugar under the pressure. doesn't he realize that's not the part of the story that's load-bearing! he should've directed our focus to the political machinations and extensive trope deconstruction, not the handwavey bit.

point is, as a fantasy writer there will always be some amount of your worldbuilding that boils down to 'because I said so,' and there's nothing wrong with that. nor is there anything wrong with making that your whole thing – airy worldbuilding can be beautiful and inspiring. but you have to be aware of what you're doing, because if you ask your readers to engage with the worldbuilding in gritty mechanical detail, you had better have some actual mechanics to show them.

[rayalahon]

one thing about Joel Smallishbeans is that he's always giggling. I think most people overlook this in the fandom because most of the time his delivery is just so deadpan and sarcastic, but its when he's doing a bit with another person you can always hear him loudly giggling in between sentences trying not to break character. He is ESPECIALLY prone to doing this with Etho. Its so damn cute it makes me insane and I think more people deserve to notice this!!

[morganmnemonic]

I can't stop thinking about the relationship between Jon and Helen as perhaps one of the most important ones in the entire show. They are narrative parallels for each other, and they both know it. They've both known it from the very start!

Helen walks into the Archives, paranoid, unsure of who to trust, and Jon sees himself in her. And he thinks "If i can help her, maybe there's hope for me too." Then he can't save her. The next time they meet, she's a monster. They're both monsters. There was never any other way their stories could have gone, their fates entwined from the very start.

And Helen answers his original thought with one of her own: "Maybe if we can help each other, there's hope for us both." But Jon looks at her and sees everything that he fears becoming, and so he turns her away, and refuses to accept that their stories are still one and the same.

Helen went to the last person who was ever kind to her, the only person who both knew her as a human and had the context to understand what she'd become, and he hated her. He hated her because he liked Helen, and told her that she couldn't be Helen.

So she stopped trying to be Helen, and embraced being a monster. Reveled in it even. Then Jon wakes up from a six month coma, more monster than person, and tries so hard to cling to the things that mattered to him when he was human. Even with no support, even with the entire archives staff against him, he chooses humanity and compassion over and over again.

And this is a direct threat to Helen's world view. Their stories are entwined. If Jon can continue to be a person even after everything he's been through, then she could have clung to her humanity too, if only she'd tried a little harder. And that terrifies her! She wants to conceptualize herself as someone who was completely overwhelmed by forces beyond her control, who never had a choice but to become a monster. She want's to be an innocent victim. But Jon argues with his actions that they'd both had choices.

And, Jon, in turn, holds out hope that she might make better choices until the very end.

This is the conflict between them for all of season 4 and 5. Jon wants to prove that they can both be decent people, and Helen wants to prove that they were never going to be anything but monsters. This is why she's so devoted to trying to goad Jon into enjoying his newfound godhood. She knows that they are the same, and wants that to mean that he has a spark of evil inside of him, and not that she was always capable of doing good.

When Jon kills her, she loses her life, but wins the argument. Helen is nothing but a dangerous monster who needs to be killed for the good of everyone, and in the moment he decides that, Jon dooms himself to the same fate. Their stories are one and the same. "If i can help her, maybe there's hope for me too." he thought. But he couldn't help her, refused to, even, in the one moment when it actually mattered. And thus, there was never hope for him.

[egophiliac]

I have SO many thoughts about everything and they are in no kind of order yet, so here's just some quick little bits in the meantime!

I am not normal about any of these characters!

[purplepenguintime]

Thank you for finally giving them a happy ending 

[lazylittledragon]

ok someone please correct me if i'm wrong but am i weird for thinking those 'audiobooks don't count as reading' posts are ableist as fuck????

[teddyqd]

YOU - "Man, it sure is muggy out today."

LOGIC [Trivial: Success] - No it is not. It has barely been above freezing for the past week.

ENCYCLOPEDIA - In fact, 'muggy' is not a sensation that graces the isola of Insulinde often at all. For it to be muggy would require a sizable shift in the climate that surrounds you.

SHIVERS - Somewhere, northward, a Coupris Kineema is being taken apart, bit by bit, as a pair of young geniuses reverse engineer its creation. The blueprints-in-progress are lying on a damp crate, held by two heavy cans of beer. The wind tugs at them, to no avail.

KIM KITSURAGI - "Detective, if I go outside and there are mugs all over the ground, I *will* kill you."

EMPATHY [Legendary: Failure] - He's raising his Eyebrow. He might mean it.

ESPIRIT DE CORPS [Easy: Success] - No, he wouldn't. If nothing else, the paperwork involved wouldn't be worth it.

[COMPOSURE - Medium 10] Meet Kim's eyes.

[DRAMA - Godly 16] Convince Kim you don't know what a mug is.

Say nothing.

COMPOSURE [Medium: Success] - You raise your eyebrow back at Kim. Without breaking eye contact, you sip your coffee from a cereal bowl.

[quarter-life-crisis2]

I think the most delusional part of me enjoying kpop is being envious of the friendships between group members.

Like I know that in reality it’s not that simple, we see an idealised version of it all, because of course we do it’s entertainment.

But nonetheless I always wished I had a close group that knew me fully, that we had spend endless hours together, going through life and coming out on the other side. And I’m sure some are truly close, some aren’t, and even if they are it’s not the ideal version I picture.

I think at the end of the day these are the ramblings of an only child. I had a cousin I grew up with but that quickly got ripped away for different reasons (and I don’t even like him now). I always wished there was a person (platonic/familial) that truly got me and was my closest friend.

People with siblings tell me how even that vision is far from real, how many don’t even get along that well. But it’s something I don’t think I’ll ever experience, and something that always makes me feel a tad alone. I have close friends but I always feel a slight gap, a little wall between us.

So I can see how the platonic joy of the kpop world has filled a mental gap.

I should raise this with my therapist lol

[microvibing]

I like ward *gives him an existential crisis*

Character From marble sky comic by @ somerandomdudelmao, you should def read it right fucking now cuz its awesome