#I don't think that the examples they gave are perfectly indicative

[lipglossboy]

I see a lot of posts that are like "this character isn't like you characterize him because look at this thing he does! Proof!" "No way these characters would get along because ____" "no way this character would do this because ____"

People have different qualities that don't seem to perfectly align with each other. That's the world. We contain multitudes! Truly! All of us!

Our behaviors will seem contradictory because the words and categories that we assign to them are completely arbitrary! Traits are just ways of making sense of people but you don't have to hold the person to the box you've put them in if they seem to spill out of it!

We're all capable of so many things and loving all differeng kinds of people for all different reasons. I've come to realize that I'm unconvinced by most of the critical fandom characterization takes I've read.

[theobsessedcookiefan]

I HAD THIS DRAFTS AAA 😭😭😭😭 (It's happiness).

Okay some clarifications, y/n in this story will be an apprentice witch, she won't be one of the ones who created the heroes, also I will call Shadow Milk Cookie Blueberry Milk Cookie since I think they had that kinda name before, I don't think for example Silent Salt was called that before that corruption right?

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Part 1. The Tower and the Witch.

"What story do you want me to tell you?" Asked the older cookie to a group of little ones gathered around him. "The one about the hero and the witch!" One of the little ones replied. "Yes! I like that one!" Replied another, finally the old man gave up and smiled. "Okay, but no interrupting me this time."

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The heroes of Earthbread, the closest thing the cookies had to deities besides their creators the witches; we all know the story, five heroes created and blessed by them, gaining powers beyond the comprehension of any common cookie. For example we have the cookie holder of the virtue of knowledge; Blueberry Milk Cookie, he spent day and night in his research, looking for answers to the strangest questions he could think of, which led him to discover the Witches' Banquet.

At first he thought it was just a legend, something parents told their children to obey them; "If you're good maybe the witches will take you with them and invite you to the Banquet." He heard a lot of parents say already, so it wasn't crazy to think that it was indeed a legend, but as the days passed in his research he found several clues that indicated that it did in fact exist! This did nothing but feed the curiosity of our hero, he wanted to know more about his creators and get answers to several questions; Why the cookies existed and why he and his friends were the ones chosen to carry such power were two of them.

Without wasting any more time he waited until the next date in which the legends said that the Banquet took place, when that awaited moment arrived he immediately went to the place where it was supposed to happen, he found something? Yes, a somewhat high tower that seemed abandoned at first sight, the smoke coming out of the chimney was barely noticeable to the eye. With a little effort and using his skills to climb the tower he managed to get to the window of the tower and take a little look inside, wow indeed it was big, bigger than when he was in his bigger form so it was definitely a witch tower and the best of all was that everything was perfectly taken care of, it looked so tidy and so pretty that he felt kinda bad to enter it uninvited, everything was clear until he heard a sound of something moving slightly, when he looked in the direction where that sound came from he saw a.. a witch? Yes, that was it, even though she was lying on a table, her clothes could be seen, it was just as the books described her, an apron and a pointed hat, besides being quite big.

Carefully he approached, using those shelves full of books to hide himself, he even had to dodge fallen things and jump through the spaces between shelves, adventure was definitely not his thing; he would have liked to stay in his own tower to do his writing, although science and knowledge require sacrifice and hard work! Or well, that's what he thought. As he approached the sleeping (or so he hoped) witch, he noticed a potions book on the table, there came instructions on how to make a love potion, huh- that was weird, witches were supposed to be the creators of their entire species, he never thought that on top of that they also created potions; that made them even stranger to his point of view.

As he got closer and closer he finally got as close as he could, being mere centimeters away from that big figure, it seems that the aroma of blueberries that he gave off did not pass unnoticed though, because little by little she began to wake up, with worry he took a few steps back and hid behind an inkwell.

"Mhh.. What time is it?" He heard that witch say in that tone of someone waking up after a long nap, as he stood up he noticed that she was actually taller than what he had seen from the window and that gave him a little shiver; in the stories they always talked about how witches as well as they could be merciful they were still like goddesses to them, they shouldn't be angered. He considered his options for a few minutes; either he stayed hidden and searched among those millions of books for the answers he was looking for or he made himself present and asked directly, because both options had several ups and downs, for example staying hidden and searching in books was the idea he liked the best since he would stay hidden and safe, but the downside was that he would have to look in millions of books too big even if he increased his size and he would also have to be careful not to be seen, on the other hand if he made himself present there were two possible results: either he was accepted and his doubts were solved or he would be crumbled by the witch.... Umm, difficult decisions indeed.

Finally he decided, he would show himself to the witch and hope for the best outcome. With a sigh, he came out of hiding, eyes closed and waiting for the witch's reaction... Nothing happened-, when he opened one eye he realized that the witch was no longer there; she was now in the other part of the tower, looking for something on a shelf, well that gave him time to think what she would say "Good morning! I'm Blueberry Milk Cookie, the cookie who possesses the virtue of knowledge." Umm no, too formal... "Hi, I came into your house through the window I hope I'm not disturbing you." That would make him sound like a weirdo- "Miss witch I demand answers!" No, just no! It was too much pressure to do something so soon. He seemed to take too long to decide as he heard the witch's voice again. "Can I help you?" She sounded as confused as he was at that strange interaction as it was as if a divine being was talking to you so casually like that. "Oh! I mean... I, umm, can you?" Shit, that was not a good first impression. "I mean.. Yes! You can and I'd appreciate it if you would!"

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:ﾟ･*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:

A/N: I personally imagine he looks like this before corruption:

(IF SOMEONE KNOWS THE ARTIST PLS TELL ME)

[caelum-in-the-avatarverse]

ive been a fan of ATLA since it came out, and I think I stopped reading fic for it once Korra came out. So (luckily?), I escaped Embers, but im curious to know what is its influence in fanon. Do you know any examples off the top of your head?

Whoa, that's impressive that you managed to skip it if you've been a fan that long. It started in 2009.

And yeah, I do. Admittedly I do not read ATLA fic often these days, so I'm probably behind on current trends. But if you know what you're looking at it's pretty obvious that lots of Zuko-focused fic is influenced by Embers. Granted, oftentimes the writer may not realize they were influenced by Embers--they may have been inspired by a fic that was inspired by a fic that was inspired by Embers. The fic is 14 years old, and the rabbithole runs deep.

So the effects Embers has had, off the top of my head:

The Wani. Zuko's ship does not have a canonical name, but so many writers have used Vathara's name for it that people are surprised when they learn it's not canon. Even I'm guilty of this one, it's such deeply-entrenched fanon that I figured I might as well use it in a throwaway line (tho I'm seriously considering going in and editing it out of the one fic I mentioned it in).

Dragon!Zuko. If Zuko or Fire Nation people are turning into dragons, that idea probably came from Embers; I don't recall ever seeing that trope in ATLA fic before Embers made it a thing.

Certain Aang-critical readings of canon. There are multiple ways people criticize Aang (fans have complained about him not killing Ozai since the finale aired, and shippers have their own gripes), but there are certain arguments that either originated with Embers or were popularized by it. The concept of "Aang told Zuko he'd come with him if he left the SWT alone, then Aang escaped, therefore he broke his word and lied and he's lucky Zuko is such a good person that he didn't turn around and burn the village to the ground because he totally would've been within his rights to do so" is an Embers original. Then there's the "Aang has totally killed people and is therefore a hypocrite and/or idiot who doesn't realize he kills people" criticism, which may have existed before Embers brought it up, but Embers definitely popularized it. (Canonically Aang has done things that would definitely result in people dying, but also canonically we never saw the bodies so the narrative didn't confirm or even acknowledge it, therefore there's plenty of room to interpret Aang's kill count and still be canon-compliant. I'll admit this is a pedantic argument if everyone else admits that some fans are overeager to give Aang a kill count and call him an idiotic mass murderer, especially when they point at the Siege of the North, where the only people he would've killed were enemy combatants). And apparently now there are stories where Zuko is very knowledgeable about Air Nomad culture and teaches Aang about it, or preaches to him about patience or maturity or morality--I reblogged a post about this recently. That entire mentality definitely came from Embers.

Hyper-competent Zuko. This is not solely Embers's doing, but let me explain. Zuko is the fandom's favorite, we love him, he ticks off a lot of boxes people love to see in a character. It is perfectly normal for a fandom to heap all sorts of awesomeness on their fave, and in fanon they become a super-competent badass who puts up with so much and fights so hard despite the odds, they are knowledgeable and intelligent and strategic, they are confident and compassionate and have iron-clad morals. (am I still describing Zuko or Obi-Wan Kenobi? lol) So this version of Zuko probably would've become a thing eventually; Embers was just the starting point. But things have to start somewhere, and in this case, it started with Embers showing off just how to make Zuko a hyper-competent badass. And Zuko is indeed a badass, but canon gave no indication that he'd actually be good at, like, politics, aside from the narrative implying it by saying he was the best person to become Fire Lord. There are takes on Zuko where he's politically astute, spiritually attuned, brilliantly strategic, extremely knowledgeable about all sorts of random things--none of which have much basis in canon, but they aren't necessarily contradicted by canon either. And again, this is just regular fandom behavior--but in the ATLA fandom these takes were sparked by Embers basically laying the foundation and creating the template for how to write Zuko.

Well-researched fic. Like the previous point, this is not solely Embers's doing. Researching stuff for fanfic has been a thing since forever. But Embers was huge, and Vathara talked a lot about the things she knew and the books she'd read, and people were very impressed and praised her for it, and it inspired them to do and show their own research for their fics, too. Unlike the other things on this list, this actually isn't something that annoys me--even I was inspired by this aspect of Embers, in conjunction with the racebending movement and cultural misappropriation criticism, to make research an important part of my own fic. I'd looked up information for my writing before, but Embers really showed how research could make a fic incredible. And frankly, I'm glad for it, because looking up stuff for my fics has proven to be a fun and rewarding pastime, and I love sharing my research with my own readers (tho I really hope my own author's notes aren't as condescending as Vathara's). Now, granted, given some of the opinions in her author's notes and things she's said elsewhere, I consider all of Vathara's information and reading recommendations to be suspect. But I'm glad it's inspired other people to do lots of great research and share it.

And that's all I can think of, off the top of my head. I'm sure there's more, but I haven't read Embers in years, and I don't read much ATLA fic in general these days, so if there's more I'm unaware. If anyone else can think of anything, please do chime in!

[supereaglephilosopher]

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[wistfulcynic]

okay well. @iverna you asked for it.

so. *rubs hands together* participle clauses. These are dependent clauses (parts of a sentence that cannot exist on their own but must be part of a larger sentence) that feature either a present or a past participle rather than an active verb.

present participles end in -ing. Past participles (sometimes called perfect participles) end in -ed.

(present participles should not be confused with gerunds, which are nouns, or with certain adjectives that also end in -ing. Past participles also should not be confused with certain adjectives that end in -ed. Isn't English fun.)

now participle clauses are a classic pitfall because they need to agree in subject with the main clause of the sentence. If they don't, you get what is called a dangling participle. Example:

"John ran from the guard dogs, snarling and snapping." <-Here John is the subject of the main clause of the sentence, but the dogs are the subject of the participle clause. This sentence makes it sound like John is the one snarling and snapping (which hey, maybe he is. We don't know John's life. Odds are however that it is the dogs.)

Compare this to:

"Snarling and snapping, the dogs chased John from the property." <-This is a correct use of a present participle clause. The dogs are the subject both of the main clause and the participle clause.

now my problem is actually not dangling participles! They are relatively rare though i do still see them sometimes. My problem is with sentences that follow this basic structure:

"Dialogue," said Character, [present participle clause].

eg: "Hello, Jane," said John, walking into the room.

so you're probably wondering what's wrong with ^^this sentence and the answer is nothing! Nothing at all. It's a perfectly correct and fine sentence but the structure is *so* overused. There are some fics that have a participle clause after every. single. dialogue tag and it just gets exhausting. i'm oversensitive to it i know, but that's the reason i use it with caution.

however. My main beef with participle clauses in fic is that they are very, very often used incorrectly. Their function is to indicate simultaneous actions. John is saying hello at the same time he is entering the room. If the actions aren't simultaneous then a participle clause should not be used.

example: John entered the room, kissing Jane on the cheek and giving Spot a scratch behind the ears. <-in this sentence, John is not kissing Jane and scratching Spot at the same time as he is entering the room. These are sequential actions, not simultaneous.

The sentence should read: John entered the room, kissed Jane, and gave Spot a scratch behind the ears.

this sentence structure, [main clause], [participle clause], [participle clause] when the actions are sequential not simultaneous is just. everywhere in fic. And increasingly in tradpub. It drives me insane.

i do realise i'm pissing into the wind here but that's sort of what we grammar nazis do. There are people who will argue (hopefully not in my notes) that participles can be used for sequential actions when the sequence is very rapid, and i don't entirely disagree with that but also that's not the case in most of the fic examples. Personally, i think it's just a good rule of thumb to reserve participle clauses for simultaneous actions only. But i am an English teacher and a prescriptivist, so. There we are.

use your participles responsibly, kids.

For the fic writing ask game - 💕 ⛔️ 😊 ?

an ask! i thank you!

💕 what is your favourite part of your writing process?

the editing. i am an intensive editor. My first drafts are terrible but i need to have something on the page that i then go through slowly and rewrite and rejig and add things until the writing flows. @thisonesatellite and i refer to this process as "enfleshenpolishing".

⛔️ what's something you try to avoid in your work?

there's a particularly fanficcy sentence structure that has begun to seep into tradpub as more and more fic writers publish and it gets on my nerves so much. A little bit of it is fine (provided it's grammatical which it often isn't) but there are some writers who use it in every. single. sentence. and i try not to be one of them.

(i won't go full grammar nazi here but the tl;dr version is be careful with your participle clauses)

😊 say something nice about your writing.

i think over the last couple of years i've really developed my own writing style and it's a style i really like. It's probably not for everyone but eh. i have fun writing it and fun reading my work so 🤷‍♀️

ask me many ficcy things

[magnetictapedatastorage]

Okay but how do you 1) find a tape recorder that doesn't suck in this day and age? and 2) rip audio from digital sources?

Would an old, non wi-fi connected mp3 player do roughly the same thing in protecting you from being tracked?

I'm really really over the whole contributing to data collection by being online thing, so this intrigues me.

for the first:

tape recorders can be found on eBay, at garage sales, and in thrift stores. absolutely avoid anything that's less than 20 years old, or that looks like a boombox. you want a rectangle that's built like a brick shithouse. it will likely be heavy, and that means it's built with high quality solid metal components. I use a TANDY-CCR-81, but there are many similar ones that work just as well.

the reason to AVOID ANYTHING NEW is that due to a recent lack of competition as well as the difficulty of manufacturing such a machine, companies these days cut corners even Pythagoras didn't know about just to barely stay in business. new machines will record like shit, play like shit, fall apart, and screw you over.

now, your vintage tape recorder may require some maintenance before it starts sounding its best. it will likely be something extremely easy and cheap, like needing the record-head and play-head to be gently cleaned with the correct type of alcohol in whatever way the manufacturer recommends (DO NOT WING IT - LOOK UP A SERVICE MANUAL), or having to replace a single rubber band on the inside. this is a mechanical device, so any problems will be purely mechanical.

for the second:

simply use an audio cable (a cheap wire with a headphone jack on both ends) to connect your tape recorder into the headphone jack of whatever you want to record from (TV, phone, computer, game console, mp3 player, radio, ANYTHING with a headphone jack) and then press PLAY▶ and RECORD⏺ at the same time to begin recording. the sound will be sent to the tape, and depending on your tape recorder, a red light🔴 may light up to indicate it is receiving the sound.

remember: you do not have to download anything! if you can hear the music, you're ready to record! For example, you won't have to use "youtube to mp3" or anything like that. Just connect the tape recorder, hit ▶⏺ on the recorder, and press play on the video.

for the mp3 player question:

I don't know how to record "directly" to an mp3 player like this. I think that would require some kind of software, but it's not my specialty. If I understand the absolute basics of them, you should be able to almost "launder" music onto them by recording to tape, digitizing through a PC, then splicing and saving it as a set of MP3s. it would be a lot of steps, but it would mean there is an exactly ZERO percent chance of being "caught" for your "piracy".

bonus (my own question) How do I find good blank tapes?:

cheap tapes are thankfully perfectly available, as they are easier to manufacture than recorders. they mostly all sound the same. I prefer the 90 minute length, because each side can hold an entire 45 minute album. Usual prices are $1-2 per tape. If there are none being sold near you, check eBay or Cassette Comeback for good deals, you'll likely want "Type I" or "normal" blank tapes. the other kinds are more likely to be used by professionals who know how to squeeze every drop of bass (no pun intended) out of them.

bonus 2, analogue boogaloo:

ask older family members if they have advice or anecdotes. you might hear some interesting stuff. (my mother hated a local radio DJ, because he always talked over the start of songs, ruining her recorded copy!)

final bonus, because you commented on being tired of being tracked:

cassettes have a rich history of being used as a subversive medium to distribute illegal materials. ranging from rock music in the USSR to sermons in Iran. they are plainly impossible to trace. If I gave you a home-recorded cassette, you copied it, and gave me the original back, nobody could tell which of us was the "original source".

[hellsbellschime]

Why Jaime Lannister's GoT Ending Was Actually Bad

Nearly every aspect of the end of Game of Thrones earned ire from the majority of the show and book fandom, but one aspect of the show's conclusion that seems to have frustrated fans across the board was the ending for Jaime Lannister. More specifically, that after a seemingly solid and nearly complete redemption arc, he returned to Cersei and King's Landing to die in a manner that somewhat works as a metaphor but didn't resonate well with the audience at all. And, while Jaime's ending was a flop, it didn't fail for the reasons that many viewers seem to think that it did.

The Lannisters are obviously some of the most complex and important characters in A Song of Ice and Fire, but one of the most interesting aspects of their family dynamic is that it was established far before the contemporary storyline actually began. And, while Game of Thrones seemed to paint it as if Cersei was a source of toxicity that Tyrion and Jaime couldn't get out from under the thumb of, the truth is that the bad apple that spoiled the bunch was never Cersei, it was always Tywin.

One of the most meaningful and important themes of George RR Martin's work is the long-term effects that abuse has on children, and there isn't really any example that is more present and potent than the horrific effects that Tywin's abuse had on all of his children, and how it affected them in different ways.

Jaime, Cersei, and Tyrion all have some of the most intriguing points of view in the entire story. And one aspect that all of their POVs seem to share in common is that while nearly everyone in their world perceives them as a villain, they all see themselves as victims. And the truth is, both sides of this coin are correct.

Yes, the Lannister children have done many horrific, irredeemable things in their lives, but they have also been the victims of extremely traumatic abuse that understandably altered their outlook on the world and on themselves in general. There is a balance between victim and perpetrator that needs to be struck with their characters, but one of Game of Thrones' bigger flaws was its inability to do that.

Unsurprisingly, nearly every character's book point of view grants themselves more sympathy than they should. Almost everyone sees themselves as a better person than they are or is capable of rationalizing away their bad deeds and focusing on their more positive decisions and personality traits. But this is of course one of the many ways in which George RR Martin utilizes his POV traps.

Translating a story that is told through the eyes of the characters themselves and filming it from a more objective third-person perspective means that plenty of important information is going to be lost in that translation. But one of the fatal flaws when it comes to the Lannisters is that, while Game of Thrones does still present Cersei as pretty forthrightly villainous, the narrative pretty drastically whitewashes Tyrion and Jaime. Essentially, it seems to take Tyrion and Jaime at their point-of-view word and treats them like they're much better people than they truly are. Thus, Jaime's ignominious end with the supposed biggest baddie of them all feels like a betrayal of his character development when it really shouldn't be.

Every character needs to be held responsible for their own choices, but the downfall of House Lannister really does rest in the hands of Tywin, and Game of Thrones ignoring that fact did a disservice to every one of the Lannister children in one way or another.

Yes, out of all of the Lannisters, Jaime was as close as Tywin could get to the golden child of his dreams, but it's easy to overlook that while Jaime may have been the favorite on the surface, every single one of Tywin's children was disgustingly mistreated, and the effects of his abuse all showed themselves in different malignant ways.

While Jaime may have gotten preferential treatment over his siblings, Tywin was never anything other than a terrible parent, and more importantly, Jaime's superior treatment only told him exactly how he could expect to be treated if he ever failed to live up to his father's high ideals. And of course, in many big and small ways, he did ultimately fail to live up to Tywin Lannister's exacting standards.

Tywin was a terrible parent because he was an abuser, but he also raised his children with his own values of pride, entitlement, and superiority. Obviously, the notion that they were simultaneously failures who had earned their own mistreatment but were also Lannisters who deserved to be above everyone else is opposing perspectives that are in constant conflict with one another, but it also seems to be how Cersei, Jaime, and Tyrion see themselves as constant victims while still perennially victimizing others.

George RR Martin has repeatedly discussed that one of the strongest themes of his work is the idea of the human heart in conflict with itself. Game of Thrones lost the plot with this in nearly every character adaptation, but Jaime's was one of the worst, largely because he is a character who has done some of the most monstrous and most heroic things in the story. He is both the man who doesn't hesitate to murder a child and the man who stopped a king from slaughtering thousands, and therefore his inner conflict is extremely vital.

Jaime's character arc in Game of Thrones follows a classic redemption arc almost perfectly, but that clearly doesn't seem to be the intent behind the character in the books. Yes, there is a part of Jaime that wants to be redeemed, but he does often revert back to his more brutal and nihilistic side, and his desire for so-called redemption seems to be driven more by how he wants the world to see him rather than how he wants to be.

And in that sense, the show did him a great disservice. Because there are many ways in which Jaime hasn't healed from Tywin's abuse, but the fact that he still seeks the approval of others in a rather superficial manner rather than developing a deeper understanding of true honor and justice is one of the clearest indications that, while Jaime does want to get out of the path that his father laid out for him, he is still crippled by what Tywin told him being a Lannister meant. And ironically, Tywin's belief about what being a Lannister means has essentially trapped all of his children into trying and failing to live up to that example simply because they can't survive unless they do.

Because ultimately, it's not necessarily just about what Jaime, or Cersei, or Tyrion wants. At some point, every single one of them has made obvious indications that they don't want to be a part of the legacy that Tywin Lannister laid out for them. But, when Game of Thrones presented Tywin as a super-intelligent master strategist instead of a completely unnecessarily violent and aggressive asshole, it made all of the Lannister children's choices harder to understand.

Both in the A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones fandoms, Tywin is typically put up on a pedestal, and that's completely baffling. Many viewers and readers perceive him to be brilliant and badass, but everything that Tywin is famous for actually makes him seem like a complete moron upon further contemplation. Winning battles by absolutely obliterating your enemies is a terrible precedent to set for many reasons, but one of the biggest is that it essentially requires all of the Lannister children to maintain this scorched earth policy because Tywin's hyper-aggressive superiority complex has put them in a position where they almost always have to choose to kill or be killed.

And, his cruel and dishonorable behavior as well as Jaime's reputation as the Kingslayer essentially guarantees that even if Jaime completely changes as a person and becomes the hero he wants to be, he really can't ever become that in the society that he lives in simply because the stigma around the Lannisters is something he can't escape.

That is one of the great tragedies that Game of Thrones failed to articulate, and that is one of the biggest reasons why Jaime's character conclusion was so off-putting to the audience. Because the audience saw the result of where this character arc would naturally go, but the story never actually took the steps to get there. In fact, the show went out of its way to erase a lot of the obvious building blocks that are leading up to both Cersei and Jaime's demise that makes it clear that, while they're obviously responsible for their own choices and actions, the groundwork that Tywin's abuse and cruelty laid and set in stone was something that they couldn't control, prevent, or undo.

Game of Thrones largely presented Jaime's characterization with the implication that if he could only escape Cersei, he would be a good man. But the reality was, if only Tywin hadn't been his father, then all of his siblings would have been better people. They may not have been good, but they almost certainly wouldn't be the kingdom-destroying villains that they became.

I also think the TV series likely bungled his character in that his story is meant to be a subversion of the classic redemption arc rather than the straightforward bad guy to good guy story that Game of Thrones told. George RR Martin obviously doesn't like flawless characters, and nearly every person in A Song of Ice and Fire does good things and bad things all the time, they never go in a straight line from point A to point B. So, of course it was going to be incredibly jarring when the show did move Jaime in a straight line from point A to point B and then abruptly gave him an ending that is probably somewhat similar to his end in the books.

But with that in mind, for all of the faults in Game of Thrones and the way they handled Jaime's character arc, I don't really understand the idea that his character was ruined by his ending either. These characters are clearly designed to never be just one thing, and if Jaime killing King Aerys or trying to kill Bran doesn't singularly define his character, then going back to Cersei in the very end shouldn't either.

[th3-z0diac]

How I Make Aesthetics.

Long post ahead, sorry :(

In the past, I've been asked multiple times how I create my aesthetics and where do I get the best pictures for them, so I figured I'd make this master post of what exactly I do. Btw this is coming from a person who has studied graphic design for 4 years and had about 4 years of experience in making zodiac collages here on tumblr. Do what you want with that information.

A few disclaimers

There are different types of aesthetics and in this post, I'm going to be specifically talking about a certain type that I like to make. Here, examples:

My most used format is 6 pictures in 3 rows, but I've also tried 4 pictures, like here for example:

There are other types such as minimalistic photos, dark academia, grunge, and SO many more. Please keep in mind that I'm not hating on these types and when I mention a rule such as don't use photos that are too minimalistic, I am not saying that minimalistic aesthetics are wrong or ugly or anything of that sort!

Just because I don't choose a certain photo doesn't mean I don't like it, it just means that the photo is not exactly what I'm looking for. By me showing you the examples below, I'm just trying to paint a picture. No hate here, okay?

I don't own any of the pictures I use (I've only used like one or two of my own photos in the past) but then again this is just for entertainment, I don't make money doing this or anything. If I ever get a message from an owner of any of these photos and they want me to delete it, I will delete it.

Where to get the photos

Pinterest! Period. AHAHAHA

No but seriously, pinterest and tumblr are my two favorite sources and you will find pretty much exactly what you need there. pinterest specifically.

On tumblr, I usually search for hipster, grunge, indie, and nature, but it also helps to just find specific blogs that focus on photography, follow them and then just download anything from your dashboard that you fancy.

I'll share what I search for on pinterest below👇. My secret tip would be to not always go for the first photo you find but rather to open a picture that sorta has what you like in it and then scroll down, because pinterest is going to recommend you similar, sometimes better fitting photos. On tumblr, I sometimes go to the blog of the person whose one photo I like, and there I tend to find many more of the same kind (since these bloggers usually post a specific kind of aesthetic).

How to choose photos

My number one tip would be to seek texture. Avoid photos that have little going on in them and anything too empty or minimalistic (unless that's what you're aiming for, obviously). Also, don't choose pictures that are very light or very dark, as they tend to stand out in aesthetics and that's not really what you want. At least in the type of aesthetics that I make, I want the final product to be almost a new picture in itself if that makes sense. To show you an example, look at this photo of two sleeping cats:

This photo seems like a good fit; it is well balanced in colours (there are shades of white, beige/ginger as well as some greens) and c'mon, it's two cats, what more do you need!!! However, let's look at it in a complete aesthetic:

While this aesthetic has a nice color scheme to it (well, it doesn't, I threw it together super quickly, but you get the gist), the photo of the two cats just stands out because the khaki background creates this kind of block of color that your eye will automatically go to and it sort of breaks the collage apart. So, by texture, I mean that a picture is filled, for example with trees, flowers, architecture, little people in the background, etc., etc. Furthermore, I prefer when there are more things photographed (for instance, look at the first picture of the aesthetic above; it has a mirror (and a tiny person in it), architecture and leaves all in one picture)

Next, personality. Go to Google Images and search 'Nature Photography' or 'Sunset Photos'. You might get something like this:

Or this:

Look at this absolute angel of a boy💚💚💚💚💚💚Isn't he the cutest freaking thing you've ever seen?????? I just want to give him all the treats and all the pets and — ...ehm, sorry, that's not why we're here.

So I don't quite know how to explain this point, but I guess usually professional photos like this are just so well done that they work perfectly well on their own and you usually don't put them in a set (only with other photos from the same photoshoot maybe). They're obviously well-balanced color-wise and high in quality, but they're just very individual and don't really need any addition in the form of other photos. This point also applies to the previous one (textures, in case you forgot); for example, a bunch of blueberries creates a nice texture, however it might be difficult to pair them with other photos. They have enough personality on their own (and this is not meant in a bad way to the photos I do use).

Related to this, you're looking for a story. Usually, if a photo gives off a certain vibe, tells a story, or just leaves any kind of strong impression, it might be a good indication that this is a good photo to use (given all the other rules as well, of course).

The main themes I search for are:

cities, villages, or abandoned places

related to that — architecture or only parts (details) of it

nature, specifically forests with either road or a body of water nearby, beaches, deserts and so on. plus points for tiny people in the distance

animals, usually with the addition of maybe the texture of a sweater sleeve or some blankets, something of that sort

people, my favorite kind is people turned away from the camera with an interesting background, because by them not having a face, they become a bit more relatable in a sense?

people in a river or some kind of water

museums, sculptures

etc.

Usually, I tend to avoid:

photos with text in it (though as an exception I would mention neon signs or letters/words that are for example above shops, on books, etc.)

heavily filtered pictures

photos with very specific (often bold) colors in them, unless you find multiple photos with that same shade. this again distracts the eye too much

GIFs, animated pictures, illustrations/drawings. also, don't use collages (cause you are creating a collage, duh)

black & white pictures

blurred pictures (or those that are purposely grainy — that goes back to the filters above)

anything obviously photoshopped

When trying to figure out where to put each photo

Squint your eyes. The photos should create a nice harmony, there shouldn't be a corner where it gets too light or dark or where some textures blend together, for example, if using multiple flower patterns, try to place them in different corners.

When to know your aesthetic is done

Actually even before you start, you should be in the mood. I have to admit, there have been times where I've felt pressured into making aesthetics, and now, looking back at them, I'm really ashamed of them. That is why I don't always post aesthetics as soon as I get them requested because I genuinely want them to look good.

Sometimes, it helps to not post the aesthetic straight away but to come back to it later with a fresh look. I'd say go with your gut. You should have a good, satisfying feeling about the aesthetic.

Last note

Rules are meant to be broken. Look at the aesthetic below. I used a minimalistic illustration (two birds with one stone I guess) (and admittedly, that one picture does stand out) and yet the aesthetic still came out pretty nice. So, just play around with your ideas and see what you like the most! I'm just a random person on the internet, you literally don't have to listen to any of the tips I gave you here today.

I know this might seem like a lot (honestly, if you've read this entire thing, you're crazy), but it gets easier and easier with practice, soon you won't even think about it.

Hopefully these tips will help you and please let me know if you decide to make any aesthetics. I would love to see them!! <3

[wannabemasterofwindintraining]

He is not insecure about his dream self abilities either??? I literally just talked about why i think this i gave examples from his own dialogue?? He is still overconfident in himself even when he can't even dream craft??

I wouldn't say he's "putting on an egotistical front" he just doesn't know these ppl he was literally calling mateo a loser last episode obviously he's not gonna immediately be buddies with them??

Him using lunias hourglass n cheating isn't out of insecurity like if i was playing fortnite w mu friends n they had a huge robot killing ppl for them I'd be mad too n he still makes comments about their dreamcrafting being cheating no how he's totally better than them still

The dallas thing is a headcanon you said we don't know much about their relationship it's all a headcanon good for you go enjoy your headcanons

I also talked about this did you even bother reading my rant yes night king tries to target his insecurities but it doesn't work he very quickly switches to targeting his ego

Yes he tells him he can stop being the guy that screws up n be a hero but if you pay attention to the dialogue in this show for 7 year olds what do you notice? Oh wow logan focusing on the hero part?? Wow he doesn't even register the not screwing up n only cares about being the hero?? Wow maybe a characters dialogue indicates their feelings on situations actually who could've thought!!!!

Again all of this i said in my rant you're not bringing up new points you're just saying stuff i already talked about

If you need a character to be insecure to be 2 dimensional that sounds like a you problem perfectly fine n happy characters can be multi layerd i am so sorry you're unable to partake in the whimsy of liking a character who's just a guy </3

How do you watch Dreamzzz and come to the conclusion Logan isn't insecure. Genuine question because I feel it's a central point to his character a lot

Why would his worst fear be his friends laughing at him and telling him he's not enough if he DIDN'T have insecurity issues??

A character is allowed to be Egotistical for no reason but LOGAN IS NOT ONE OF THOSE CHARACTERS

The whole Lunia hourglass thing WOULDNT have happened if Logan wasn't insecure. NK tells him that he's going to help him be a better team mate and Logan takes the offer. He would NOT have done this IF HE WAS CONFIDENT HE WAS A GOOD TEAM MEMBER

This isn't even getting into Mission Implausible

Hold on i am gonna be so insufferable about this

I think logan genuinely thinks he's better than everyone else and he wants people to know he's better than them

Wanting to prove you are better than someone isn't always about insecurity in logans case i think it's his big ego

I'm going to highlight episodes 5 and 7 cause i wanna use them as examples

Starting in episode 5 this is logan's first fuck up that the nightmare king is apparently gonna use to manipulate him later

However and this is me quoting the episode here go watch the episode if you wanna fact check me

Mateo: someone just had to turn it into a race

Logan: hey don't blame me! All i had to work with was lunia's dumb broken hourglass

Mateo: tell me you had the hourglass

Logan: that's not my fault you were the ones cheating at the race

Both lines show that logan doesn't think any of this is his fault he doesn't feel any guilt about it cause he does not view it as his fault (he does take accountability at the end of the episode but it will be shown later that he still thinks it's not his fault)

Also this is the first episode where the other kids first use their hourglasses to beat logan which I'd argue isn't building up any kind of inferiority complex in him but i think it's building up resentment (i think this is the right word?) For the others "cheating" in his own words

Now onto episode 7 i wanna highlight Lance's conversation with Logan cause i think it highlights how the nightmare king's way of getting to logan isn't by preying on his insecurities but targeting his ego

Lance: those were some sick moves bro! Logan was it?

Logan: uh yeah? That's me?

Lance: you are killing it! I'm over here like trying to study your game bro

Clear example of him showering him with complements to feed his ego

Lance: ugh that green dude has a totally unfair advantage

Logan: right?

Logan: hey! I'm no cheater

Lance: fight fire with fire bro

Logan: yeah they cheated so....

He is now supporting Logan's resentment of the others cheating that i talked about

Notice how he doesn't convince logan by telling him the hack will help him with his "weakness" or whatever he specifically told him to fight fire with fire and this is where we get to his fuck up

Now onto the big one the instance people point to to prove Logan is on fact insecure and that's his other conversation with lance

Lance: dude i used that cheatcode before and it was fine! It's probably the system that's jacked up

Lance: or you did it wrong that stuff happens

Lance: wouldn't be the first time you got your friends in hot water

Logan: what's that supposed to mean?

Lance: pillows peak and the hourglass

this time the nightmare king is trying a different approach he's trying to make Logan feel insecure about his mistakes

Logan: man how was i supposed to know that broken piece of junk was gonna be so important

However his new tactic isn't working cause Logan doesn't think it was his fault he does not care stay unbothered king

Lance: Logan you get that thing fixed you stop being the guy who screws everything up

Lance: you'd be kind of a hero

No this might sound like the inferiority complex is winning but based on what he says on the next episode I'd argue the part that got to him wasn't "you stop being the guy who screws everything up" but "you'd be kind of a hero"

Logan: let's get this bad boy fixed and show the team who the real clutch player is

Logan: now how do we get this thing repaired so i can be a ✨️hero✨️ like you said

Notice who the part he cares about is being a hero? Being the clutch player? He couldn't care less about his fuck up cause all he cares about is getting the W and showing the others he's better than them

I don't think there's an undertone of insecurity i think he's just a diva w a big ego

But the sick beats episode? He likes attention you don't need to be insecure to like attention n you don't need to be insecure to be sad when you don't get attention he says he's wants everyone to like his music he doesn't look at the camera n go what if ppl don't like my art 🥺👉👈 like mateo does he's just tiktoker

What about his dream trial? He's mildly annoyed at worse he's still sassing the fake dreamchasers n he also immediately wins he gets in goes ok i see what you're trying to do unfortunately NUUH!!!!! (Also lowkey i think his trial is about realising he doesn't need to be the centre of attention not overcoming his inferiority complex or whatever)

Also i really don't think he's insecure about the others being able to dreamcraft while he can't he thinks they're cheating n he's totally still better than them cause he's soooo cool

Like

Logan: jokes on you bro! I don't have an imagination

Logan speaking so casually about having no imagination shows he couldn't care less about it we love to see an unbothered king

It's so funny how ppl say logan is the jealous one one mateo has a scene where he looks at the camera n starts venting on main about how logan is better at him in everything

Like my guy lego isn't subtle they don't do show not tell if he did think he's inferior to the others he would turn to the camera n say it

Als a little point my bestie brought up logan is a foil to mateo (foil parallel?? I know words......) logan is good at sport mateo is bad at sport logan has no imagination mateo is very imaginative logan is over confident mateo is insecure

He is straight up acting egotistical all canon material say he's over confident n everyone still goes hmmm he's clearly insecure like I'm all for emo headcanons but that's what it is a headcanon

Also being insecure isn't a central part of his character being a silly little guy is the central part of his character he's the comic relief guy

Thanks for listening sorry you had to read my opinions you literally asked for it

[humanuser0613]

Touching on Matching: A discussion potential

Positing a hypothesis: when the members match accidentally they draw attention to it and provide an explanation.

Examining the evidence:

Here is a post from Namjoon and Yoongi:

Fans had been talking for some time about their love for FG gear and here they showed up in the same shirt and called it an "interesting" picture. They drew attention to it so the fans would stop joking about them all sharing the same clothes (which we know they already do anyway...and that they stalk stan Twitter 👀).

J-Hope posted:

Hobi posted that he and JM wore the same outfit. He was excited to be on the same wavelength as a team member a year after their debut. He did not have a picture included.

We also have examples of members matching during schedule:

One exception I would like to point out is that for the BE album the members gave direction for what they wanted for the photos and the music video and we had Jikook in a directly matching outfit and in pj's marketed as "Couple's".

Is there a difference for Jikook?

Jikook have drawn attention before, purposely posting on Valentine's Day with a laughing face. Does this mean that they matched accidentally (on a couple's holiday)? No explanation was given...

Here's the valentine's day post:

In the post JK was doing a sort of silly dance. And it was unexpected (a nice surprise for ARMY) for him to appear in frame since the video just started with JM.

Another time JK and JM drew attention to matching rings at 4th Muster. JK put his arm around JM and JM brought his hands up to his mic...which brought the rings in close proximity.

The mic was attached to the opposite side of the hand with the ring, but both hands were brought up to the mic. Did JK bump the mic on the ear when he put his arm around JM's shoulders??? So here is a picture of the same ring on both men on the 4th finger. Of note: in nearly every culture matching rings on the same 4th finger of two people does indicate some sort of commitment.

(They just look so happy in this picture. 🥰 I don't have the 4th muster DVDs and would love to read on someone's take about what happened before and after this moment. Was it a moment where they normally interacted during that song? Did their smiles get bigger? Was anything going on during this particular day?)

Here's a link for what it might mean in Korea. https://www.koreaboo.com/stories/meaning-behind-placement-couple-rings/

Another time we see them matching during schedule, but I think this is sponsored gear. (Correct me if I'm wrong 🤷‍♀️)

We have times where they match outside of schedule and do not draw attention to it themselves. We wouldn't know this happened if not for Big Hit...

Matching pants (note: the dance practice has JK in different pants and he's the only member to have a different article of clothing on between the practice and this picture.) We don't know why he would put on matching pants before or after the practice when he had a perfectly decent pair already. Was this picture unexpected?

In Mastermind gear as they're practicing.

Please don't forget about the Niagara Falls jean shirt matching as well - when Namjoon asked if they were a couple and sounded like he was playing it off, likely because the public would be viewing the footage. It was kinda an explanation...without a real explanation for why they were matching.

Dalloga has a post here 👇 https://dalloga.tumblr.com/post/637068856096145408/i-gotta-ask-about-festa-2020-what-is-your

Now those are the instances and what I saw was other members joking about matching, that matching is expected during schedules, but that Jikook match more often casually as well as (recently) during schedules. I haven't seen them joke about it or play it off like the other members. I have to add on that I'm not sure we've seen the other members match often enough to really say we've got good data here...and maybe that says something as well; we don't even get them accidentally matching behind the scenes, or during casual (meaning not performance or sponsored gear) scheduled events.

I also asked a friend (I'm not relying strictly on koreaboo articles here 😒) who is married to a native Korean man in South Korea if male friends matching is something done purposely or with frequency and the answer was, "no". (This is one man's experience in a country with 51.2 million people so...🧂liberally)

Skinship ✅

Matching 🙅‍♂️

https://www.maleq.org/gay-south-korea/ (only 1 person's, non-native, experience in SK...salt liberally)

https://theculturetrip.com/asia/south-korea/articles/9-things-you-should-know-about-dating-in-korea/

https://www.90daykorean.com/dating-in-korea/

https://gogohanguk.com/en/blog/korean-couple-culture/

I've provided additional links, but you can do your own research.

If you've got something else to add let me know. And I apologize for my ramblings.

[chibisquirt]

You don't have to answer, but if you wouldn't mind. What are some things you've learned about ADHD from Tumblr that are applicable to you, or others you may now? I've been reading more on it and how it manifests in girls/women and was curious when I read your rb on that post about Grammarly

I don’t mind at all!  Fair warning:  this is gonna be LONG.

I’m going to start by repeating something I mentioned in that post:  I was diagnosed in third grade, which was over two decades ago.  I had my diagnosis halfway through elementary school, much less high school and two rounds of college.  So a lot of the old information about ADHD I learned as a young person, and those things are worth exploring, too.  

Example:  It’s not that I’m not listening, Mrs. Nock, it’s just that if I try to keep my hands still, then the only thing I will retain from the lesson will be keep your hands still and not the things you trying to teach, which are supposedly important! 

(Mrs. Nock was the one who said to me, “I believe you believe you’re paying attention.”  Yes, it’s been fifteen years.  Yes, I’m still mad.  If you can’t have basic respect for your students, don’t teach.)

I figured out half on my own, half because of the counselling that if I had a fidget tool that didn’t require words I would pay better attention than if I tried to sit still.  (I still remember being mocked by my dad for fidgeting well after making that discovery, though.  Apparently diagnoses should only inform compassion when they’re his.)  On the same lines, I also figured out that music in the background wouldn’t work for me if it had words, and television is too distracting for me to use at all.  (I have a friend, though, whose ADHD works the opposite way:  he has difficulty focusing if there isn’t a television in the background.  Yes, both are valid.)

So, the Classics:  

I always had trouble with organization and cleaning, had trouble with schedules and calendars and managing my time.  Those are the things they’ll warn you about, the things they’ll tell you in counselling are natural and normal things for people with ADHD to have trouble with.  Trouble paying attention, sure.  Trouble sitting still.  Procrastination.  Got it.

But if you turn those traits around and re-frame them, they become a new set of symptoms.  Adaptations for these new symptoms are more personal and universally applicable in my life, and therefore, to my mind, more useful.

Take Procrastination.  (No really: please take it.)  That just means “putting it off until tomorrow,” and there are lots of reasons to do it:  “don’t have the tool I need” is one of the biggies, “want to conserve steps” trips me up a lot, “I still have time to get to it” is HUGE for me...  But a lot of times, these are just superficial reasons.  The re-framed symptom is, Trouble making yourself do things you don’t want to do.  

ADHD is an executive function disorder.  That’s a phrase I first learned on Tumblr, by the way; it may have been mentioned by one of my earlier counsellors, but it definitely wasn’t taught.  

This is why soooo many of us have struggled with the perception (including self-perception) that we’re lazy!  But no one tells the kid in the wheelchair he’s just lazy for not playing basketball.  (Okay, they totally do.  People are terrible.  Ignore that, stick to the point.)  I reframe this the way I do because acknowledging this as a symptom, taking the blame out of it, makes it easier to find adaptation.

Now, this is a personal post.  YMMV.  But I have an easier time managing my conduct if, instead of calling myself lazy a procrastinator, I say, “I keep not doing that --> oh it’s because I Don’t Wanna --> how can I con myself into doing it?”  (Strategies include bargaining, making it easier, powering through but then allowing yourself to stop afterwards, just acknowledging that I Don’t Wanna and allowing that to be valid...)  Procrastination is an action, but “executive function disorder” is a disease and “I Don’t Wanna” is its trigger, just as much as an allergy and a clump of ragweed are.  “Procrastination” is a powerful sphynx against which I’m helpless, but “I Don’t Wanna Disease” lets me start cultivating my metaphorical catnip and researching the answers to common riddles.

And while we’re talking about procrastination--and trouble with deadlines, and schedules in general--let’s talk about Time Insensitivity.  Missed deadlines and perpetual lateness (perpetual) are external actions, just like procrastination, and they can have all sorts of explanations.  

(Shoutout to Mrs. Pollack, who looked around a classroom containing thirteen-year-old me, and, knowing full well that I was chronically tardy, declared that “anybody who’s always running late, deep down, they just doesn’t care about anybody else’s time.”  Great job with calling the thirteen-year-old a heartless bitch, Mrs. Pollack!  As you can tell, I definitely forgot it very quickly, and didn’t at all have a self-critical breakdown about it, periodically revisiting the question of my own inherent selfishness for years!!!)

But ignoring the external actions, let’s take a compassionate look inside the head again.  Executive function includes regulation of, and awareness of the passing of, time.  Again: you can’t play the basketball with no legs.  We literally do not realize what time is doing.  Sometimes we do--if we devote enough of our attention to it, which may be a large amount for some, a small amount for others, or a variable amount for the same person.  But our brains literally don’t process it the same way.  

But hold on a minute--let’s go back to that analogy.  Because actually, people with no legs can play basketball!  It’s just that you have to use the adaptation of wheelchairs to do it--and that’s an adaptation for the game and for the players.  

I use alarms.  I’ve recently seen a post about audio memos as alarms.  There are people who just slap clocks everywhere.  When I was forced to work in a kitchen with no clocks, I used the multi-setting timer and set it for like four hours so I would know if I was keeping on schedule.  I also chose a job environment where much of my shift is the same as itself, and rigid punctuality isn’t enforced--that’s adapting my environment, instead of myself.  There’s all kinds of adaptations.  But you have to know you have the condition before you can compensate for it.

Here’s a fun little story:  when I was... oh, eleven?  Twelve?  My Quaker Meeting’s youth group (#7 whitest phrase I’ve ever written) went to the museum together.  One of the stops was in the children’s section, there was a... a pegboard, I think?  With some kind of problem on it.  A puzzle.  Me and a couple others sat down at it, and it took me a while, but eventually I solved it, and I looked up.  

I blinked.  “Where is everybody?” I said.

“They left,” said my mom.  “Half an hour ago.”  

I was stunned.  “Half an hour ago?!  But I couldn’t’ve spent more than ten minutes on this!”

“I promise you, it was half an hour.”

“Why didn’t you call me??  Why didn’t you say my name?”

“We did.  Several times.”

To this day, I will swear myself blind that I never heard a thing.

Hyperfocusing.  They’ll tell you about the problems focusing; oh yes.  They’ll tell you allll about that one.  But they won’t tell you about the flip side of it.  They won’t tell you about the times when the rest of the world falls away, and the only two things in the world are you and whatever problem you’re trying to solve.  

D’y’know what, I bet that’s the reason I test well.  I just realized this now, phrasing it like that, but--I’ve always tested well, even when my actual practical applications of things are mediocre I do well with the classroom testing on it.  I scored a 39 on the MCAT, back when it was out of 45 and not whatever it is now.  (To those with the plain good sense not to want to be doctors:  that’s pretty good.)  And I just bet it’s because, once I get focused on solving the problems, the other problems--nerves, intrusive thoughts, anxiety--just don’t have room to get in.  Hyperfocusing can be a superpower, if you can harness it.  

But it can also blind you to everything else.  And it works in smaller ways, too:  once I think I understand something, it is very difficult for me to perceive information that contradicts that understanding.  I still get the map of the Elflands backwards every time I read The Goblin Emperor, just because I pictured it one way, and every indication in the text that it was the other way just fell on deaf ears.  

And this one leads right into the next, which is Rejection Sensitivity Disorder.  RSD is hyperfocus, but it’s hyperfocus on how everyone must hate you.  It’s delightful!  I’ve been diagnosed with anxiety and depression, as well, and I do have both of those things, but for my money, I think that this one symptom of ADHD--which no doctor has ever even mentioned to me--has hurt me more than both of those conditions combined.  

The last one I’m going to bring up is Auditory Processing Disorder.  Now, I’ve gone and gotten re-diagnosed twice in my life, and the last time was just a few years ago, so they actually used this one in the test.  The psychologist told me about it, she just didn’t use the phrase Auditory Processing Disorder, and she didn’t tell me that it was its own symptom--she just used it for the test.  

What she did was, she gave me two hearing tests, one to test whether or not I could hear, and then the other a list of words that all sounded alike, and I had to mark which one I was hearing.  The second part of that was very long, and very boring, and despite scoring perfectly on the first test, I got several wrong on the second.  I was actually surprised by that; I at no point suspected I had heard any of them wrong.  When she gave me the test, told me this was proof by contradiction, that we were ruling out hearing loss as an alternative explanation for my difficulties.  It was only after the test was done that she explained that the pattern I showed was actually part of the diagnosis of ADHD; that we get bored, and stop really paying attention, and that we don’t even know we’re doing it.

...Okay, but you couldn’t have mentioned the part where I also do that every day in real life, lady?!?!  It’s not just when we’re bored, it’s not just for long processes.  I do this all the time.  I actually tell people now that “I actually have a neurological condition that makes it hard for me to hear; I can tell that you’re speaking, but I can’t tell what you’re saying.”  

This is 100% true.  It is a neurological condition.  

We label this a condition, but as a society, we don’t treat it that way.  Society treats it as yet another excuse.  It’s not.  You’re not lazy, stupid or crazy.  Neither am I.  

I have a condition.  Acknowledging that is the first step of treatment.  Not five thousand sticky notes, not binders or filing systems or even taking all the doors off the cupboards (although I definitely plan to do that one as soon as I possibly can).  Not counselling sessions with so many different people I can’t even name them all, for the love of god please understand that you can’t just fix it with pills.  

(Although mad props to the people who thought Concerta would magically solve me at the age of nine!  Spoiler alert:  it did not do that!  But it did mean that my parents felt comfortable blaming me for all my failures again, so it did at least some of what it was designed for, I guess. :) )   

I have spent the last few years re-understanding my ADHD it as is:  a neurological condition, a disability, and a simple fact of life.  A starting place, instead of yet more proof of my own inherent insufficiency.  And you know what?  When you take the blame and self-hatred out of the diagnosis--when you stop cursing it as the cause of all your problems and start trying to work with it, instead--it gets a lot easier to manage. 

[twolonesomestars]

(Shirt anon here~) Thank you for your long answer! Do you have any photos of them wearing the same clothes? I've seen XZ with a motorcycle jacket but I don't think YB was ever seen wearing the same jacket publicly. People seem convinced they share the same wardrobe, but the only things I've seen them share is two pairs of pants. I feel like I'm missing something... O_O

Motorcycle jacket? 👀👀👀

This got insanely long, once again, so I put it under the cut. 

Warning: This is all fake. Don’t take what I say to heart. These are just my random thoughts.

I don’t think there are any pictures of WYB with the motorcycle jacket (Iceberg jacket); and, I don’t think we’ll get any anytime soon. But, the main thing with the jacket is that only a professional racer could have gotten it. In August 2019, WYB competed in the Asia Road Racing Championship as a professional racer on the Yamaha China Racing Team (and actually won first place on the last day)! The jacket was part of the Spring 2019 collection. WYB was supposed to race back in May 2019 but had to withdraw in the middle of the race because of issues with his bike (a video if you want to be sad); I’m not sure if this race would have been his first as a professional or not. XZ wore the jacket for the first time at the airport in October 2019 and then in January 2020. More details about the selling restrictions of the jacket here.

Of course, we still have the tiny possibility that one of XZ’s friends or family members is a professional racer... but it’s a pretty dismissible percentage. I also don’t think XZ knows anyone else in the industry who’s a professional racer, at least not publicly. Even if he did, I honestly don’t think a typical friend (or even a family member really) would let him wear something that rare/ of pride so causally. I also don’t think XZ’s the type of person to wear something like that unless he was convinced extremely well.

I’m going to give another side to this because I can’t find any official post or proof that says that some Iceberg clothes are limited to professional racers. (If anyone has this, please let me know!) It would make sense if the company does limit some clothing to professionals because it was founded in Emilia-Romagna, Italy, which is where many famous motorcycle companies are housed (including the one WYB’s motorcyclist idol, Valentino Rossi, uses in races) and many races take place. However, if it turns out that there is no restriction in the selling... the jacket was, at the very least, limited edition. It’s a motorcycle/rider jacket and hip-hop style—the style both WYB and XZ started wearing in 2019. Taking the history into account, I place my bets on WYB knowing this particular company more than XZ.

Take from these two possible scenarios what you will.

-

This black coat one is another I think they share: clothes & explanation

I mean the fact that the company even confirmed it was the same... and that it was discontinued a while before XZ showed up with it the first time...

-

For those of you who don’t know about it, here are the shared pants that anon mentioned at the end: 1, 2

The replies on those tweets pretty much say it all: they fit differently on them. XZ has longer legs than WYB, so the jeans fit perfectly on him but WYB had to fold them. The black pants fit to XZ’s ankles, but go past that for WYB.

-

I know people say XZ’s shirt in his 2019 520 post is the same as one of WYB’s airport shirts, but I don’t think so. Look at the pockets. In WYB’s one, the black horizontal strips reach the button, but the black horizontal strips on XZ’s don’t reach the button. Not to mention, this checkered style on shirts is very, very common. Even I have one like it 😂

-

I keep attacking ones that have a pretty good following, sorry. As consolidation, I’ll link the shoe-lace switch one: here

I had to take several double-takes when I first saw this. I don’t know enough about shoes to say whether or not the laces match with each other perfectly, but what are the odds huh? Why would they take the time to change the laces on one shoe if it didn’t indicate something meaningful, whether they switched laces or not? Both their left feet have black laces and both their right feet have white laces. If they did indeed switch them: XZ gave his right lace & WYB gave his left lace.

(If you can’t tell, I really like this one 😂)

-

I also really, really like the pink jacket theory... here’s a post that gives a great background for it. Essentially, WYB used to be /practically/ allergic to the color pink. You would never catch him wearing the color casually. (I think there may have been one or two photoshoots where he wore pink, but they weren’t his clothes, obviously.) To be fair, XZ doesn’t wear pink too often either, but he has been seen at the airport (casual outfit) wearing a different, light pink hoodie:

I don’t know why the photo credit is blurred... if someone has the original or knows the fan site, please let me know so I can credit properly :/

It’s super cute to think that maybe XZ let him borrow his or bought it for him... or even WYB bought it for himself cause loveee~ 😘 

He’s worn it twice now! Here’s the second time on a recent DDU episode (clip):

- - -

So, yeah, I don’t really think they share as many clothes as some people indicate. Though, they do seem to have clothes that are very similar to one another (i.e. one is a shirt with lettering and the other is a jacket with the same lettering), which may actually be more telling... possibly shopping at the same store. And, I already mentioned the same hip-hop style emerging from both of them starting in 2019.

Here are a few examples via this post:

-

To round all that up, I have a few detailed explanations for some of the clothes they share, but not all of them. Some of the posts I linked have a few more. Most of them look to be general similarities with coloring and type of clothing (i.e. both wearing some sort of red coat, both wearing a black beanie, etc.) along with a few pairs of shoes from the same company in different colors, which is where I think a lot of people get the same wardrobe idea from. However, there are one or two clothing items here and there that look to be the same (the hands emoji was edited in by OP to point to the white star!):

- - -

Those are my thoughts on the same wardrobe theory. But, be aware that this is only one side. I’m sure people who are more into the clothes sharing than me have better explanations for other clothing pieces.

You decide what to think; remember, there’s no right or wrong here~

-

As you can probably tell, I like to focus on the ones that have more evidence than same style and dates backing them up… like the black coat not being sold anymore and the Iceberg jacket only being sold to a certain group of people/ limited edition (I like the meaning behind them), but it’s still pretty fun to look at other similarities. 

Keep in mind that XZ & WYB are very sly and enjoy playing around, so who knows, maybe all the things I talked about here were pure coincidences and the things I didn’t talk about here or tried to debunk were real.

I also believe their clothes-sharing is at a far lower level of importance, as compared to other things the two have done to show their love for each other. It kind of shows how daring they are. As much as they try to keep their relationship discreet, they don’t mind giving hints once in a while.

-

Overall, I don’t think you’re missing too much anon~ (But, I hope this post provided you a few more clothes-sharing instances to further help you form your opinion on the whole thing.)

[bethgreeneishopeunseen]

What state do u think she'll return in? I don't know much about brain injuries; would it be possible for her to have survived with her emotional/intellectual/motor abilities more or less intact? How "normal" could she be health wise? I know its fiction, so they could just say "she's alive and fine!" nd not be practical abt it. But this is such a big storyline thats been speculated on for YEARS. They have to execute it perfectly and be as realistic as they can be with this one.

https://bethgreeneishopeunseen.tumblr.com/tagged/bullet-evidence

https://bethgreeneishopeunseen.tumblr.com/tagged/headshot-%3D-death-my-ass

Hey anon! I think when Beth returns she will return relatively intact, just further scarred and hardened as a survivor. The links above are my tags related to her gunshot wound (GSW). For reference, Beth was shot through the left upper side of her forehead and not from under her chin as most viewers believed. Skybound even tweeted this gif two weeks after Coda aired (x). While the wound is still significant, it’s still survivable as the parts of her resemble for basic function wouldn’t be damaged.

(While Tyreese’s hallucination of Beth was inaccurate as she had an exit wound, which increases her odds, this is a good visual of the actual entry point.) Beth’s wound parallels comic!Andrea’s second facial scar, as Andrea was shot and the bullet skimmed her scalp, cutting a groove into her temple. In the early days of TD, people theorized that something similar happened to Beth. Rather than the bullet going straight through her brain, the bullet instead skimmed the inside of the skull. Such a thing has been observed in wartimes and was used in some Law & Order episode I think.

There are numerous cases in real-life and in fiction in which people suffer headshots and survive. In real-life the people may suffer some mild amnesia or a complete personality gage – Phineas Gage is a famous example. He suffered extensive damage to his to left frontal lobe and became a new person, with a breakdown in impulse control and general behavior throughout the remaining twelve years of his life. (Off-topic but serial killers suffered head injuries as children, indicating a connection between emotional empathy, impulse control, and the ability to feel remorse. Have you noticed yet that I’m a psychology nerd?) From what I’ve read about Phineas Gage his injury was considerably worse than Beth, and he lived during the 19th century. Beth is fictional and was last seen in the only known functioning hospital during the apocalypse. Grady was created for her character, and it was left standing for a reason. In a deleted scene from Coda, Dawn gave Edwards the keys to the medicine cabinet (x). He can make the call. If Beth was cured/immune to the virus (which I think she is), and he was horrified by her “death” and likely felt guilty, then he would want to do something. He would definitely want her body if she were immune for scientific purposes – his research. He could give her the medical treatment she would which would mostly consist of antibiotics and bandages as the bullet wouldn’t need to be removed. Furthermore, Beth had heparin in her system before she was shot. (Tagging @bethgreenewarriorprincess​ since this is her area of expertise.)

Long ago Christy discovered that Beth’s IV was a giant-ass bag of heparin, a strong blood thinner. Heparin will likely serve dual purposes in Beth’s story going forward: her survival and her role in a cure arc. (If you would like to read more about this theory, check out this tag: x.) In zombie literature, heparin is used as a cure. It’s anticoagulant so it keeps the blood from clotting. In TWD zombie blood is thicker than the living’s, so it’s possible heparin is part of a drug cocktail to fight the virus. Beth was bleeding more than normal in Grady because of this. If you go back and watch the opening of Slabtown, the blood on her bandage from the IV needle is more than what would be expected. Heparin also helps treat those with head trauma:

“Heparin is a low molecular weight anticoagulant; aka a medication that thins the blood. She was given this by IV and at a large dose (the reason for this is yet unexplained but I theorize about that here) that would still be in her body at the time she was shot  Heparin is used in many cases of TBI (traumatic brain injury), such as as a head-shot like Beth’s, and it’s felt to result in less progression of injury on brain imaging in studies that have been conducted. (x) The fact that she was given heparin beforehand could very well have been the very thing that saved her.” - bethgreenewarriorprincess (x)

About three weeks passed between 5x08 and 5x10. Some blogs theorized that the music box’s resurrection not only symbolized Beth’s survival but also her waking up from a coma. An injury like hers would justify a coma of that duration, and she would have plenty of time to recover. Several months passed between 5x08 and 7x08 (x), for example. She’s going to be an even bigger character when she returns, and I don’t think that the writers will permanently reduce her abilities. This is arc about building her up, not cutting her down.

In regards to possible symptoms of her injury, there are two major theories. The first is that she has reduced eyesight, possible blindness in one of her eyes. This is based mostly in Daryl’s comments about “nothing worth seeing out there” in Still and the one-eyed dog in Alone. I don’t think this will happen. Daryl’s statement reflected his cynicism and loss of hope, and one of the main themes in Still is that Beth is right, not Daryl the seasoned survivor. Furthermore, Father Gabriel already has an eye injury and it would be excessive to give it to Beth. The second theory is that she will have some form of amnesia. In the comics, when Carl wakes up from his eye injury he can’t remember anything from since before the prison fell. He even forgot that his mother and sister had died. Beth might undergo a similar thing during her journey, forgetting some key details about her past. She would likely remember the skills that Daryl had taught her though as that kind of memory is separate from episodic (personal) memory. This theory would explain why Beth as Boots didn’t reach out to Team Family. If Beth has amnesia, I don’t think it would be long-term or be affecting her when she would eventually reunite with her family. The writers would want to take full advantage of the emotions, and amnesia would reduce that, emphasizing the tragedy more than the relief and celebration.

Now this is totally a crack theory, but I could see the writers giving her an amnesia similar to Capgas Delusion. 

“Capgras delusion is a psychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusion that a friend, spouse, parent, or other close family member (or pet) has been replaced by an identical impostor. The Capgras delusion is classified as a delusional misidentification syndrome, a class of delusional beliefs that involves the misidentification of people, places, or objects.” (x)

(skip to 1:53)

As Boots, if Beth saw her family she might outright distrust and not believe it when she saw Rick at Alexandria. An amnesia akin to Capgras delusion would be interesting because it echoes the Whisperers, a group that will likely appear in some form this season and have already been foreshadowed. The Whisperers are a large antagonistic group from the comics who wore walker face-masks to move through herds and to camouflage themselves. Gross but affective. Emily’s first project post-TWD even included an egg that connoted the Whisperers and was repeated in season 7 (x). 

No matter what happens, I think the missing scenes will help to explain how Beth survived. The Grady set was also built in the studio and included a three-story elevator. Emily was filming into October 2014 when her scenes supposedly wrapped at the end of August (x); she supposedly started filming in mid-June of that year for Slabtown but she a month earlier she was at one missing set (the white houses). There are photographs and statements that confirm all of this. She’s likely filmed material since then too. I think all of that missing footage will be used in another some kind of miniseries/mini movie or flashbacks to explain her journey.

[kinformation-desk]

these questions are not intended to be rude at all!!!!!!!!, if kin is something you cannot choose or become then how is fictionkin /kin/? you don't know the character until you watch/read/play/etc. something involving said character, so is it like a discovery that you are kin with that character? do you have a post/resource on the history of kin? would you call the guy in arsenic and old lace that thought he was teddy roosevelt kin or just mentally ill? what would the difference be?

Most fictionkin have memories, shifts and other indicators of their fictiotypes even before they get introduced to them. When they meet that one character that matches their experiences (memories, shifts, etc.) perfectly, it’s usually a very emotional, sometimes overwhelming experience for them. They may not even like this particular character. Being fictionkin is not simply obsessing or extremely liking a character. I will take my own experience/awakening as fictionkin as an example here:

Personally, I’ve had many characters I obsessed over in my life. Some of them I could relate to, others less. Even though I knew about fictionkin, I didn’t take them seriously at first. That was until I discovered my first fictotype. Feelings of extreme familiarity, homesickness, recognition and strong emotions hit me. The world, the story, etc. felt like home to me. Past flashbacks and daydreams seemed to make sense all of a sudden. It fit together. I never experienced this with any other characters before and I don’t think I will again. At first I even tried to denied because I felt ashamed. I made sure I wasn’t simply tricking myself into believing I was that character in some way. I gave it time, I researched the storyline, the lore, the character’s story and personality, etc. In the end, I came to the conclusion that I am fictionkin. I can’t tell for sure if it’s a spiritual or psychologial thing for me, but this is how I feel and who I am. 

It’s common and normal, even healthy, for other- and fictionkin to question ourselves and philosophize about our identities and their origins. Discovering a kin- or fictotype is a long and not necessarily simple process, yes. It takes patience, introspection and research. Every fictionkin experiences and explains their identities differently, so my own may be similar but not completely the same to others. We don’t choose to be ‘kin nor do we “grow out of it”. 

I suggest you take a look at our resources page. A timeline of the otherkin community’s history is there as well.

Now, I am not familiar with that movie so I can’t tell. What I can say, though, is that being otherkin and fictionkin is not a mental illness, nor is it connected to or the symptom of one. We do not believe or claim that we are physically our kintypes. All other- and fictionkin are aware that they are not physcially their kintypes and will assure you that it’s a purely internal identity. Anyone who claims otherwise is probably a troll or actually delusional. As long as these beliefs regarding our identities do not harm us or others or cause discomfort, they do not even fall under the defintion of mental illness. (Here and here are two informational posts talking about ‘kin and mental health). If the guy in the movie claimed to be Roosevelt on all levels, he was most likely delusional. Roosevelt was also a real person from this world, so it would not make him fictionkin but factkin, which is a different thing that is usually met with controversy within the other- and fictionkin communities. 

I hope this answers your questions and cleared things up! If not, feel free to ask more !

-Mod Mave

[arukou-arukou]

Winteriron soulmate wing fic AU where your soulmate has inverted wings to you and your first words to each-other are written on the inside of your wings? Like if Tony has primary gold and trim red, Bucky's would be primarily red with gold? (they don't have to be those colors that's just my example)

I’m not sure how this is going to turn out because, to be perfectly honest, I really struggle with soulmate AUs. It’s not an idea that resonates easily with me, but I kind of wanted to try as a personal challenge to myself. I’m also twisting some of this a bit in terms of what indicates a match. This is gonna have a lot of gratuitous talk about my thoughts on destiny and I am so sorry and you should just not read it.

Tony never did have the patience for philosophy. Well, not philosophy for philosophy’s sake anyway. As it applied to science? As it applied to morality? Important shit. People needed to think about the implications of what they did not only as it related to the present, but also as it related to those who would follow, those whose lives would be dictated by present-day choices. He liked that kind of thinking. It was where his brain functioned best.

But all the, all the fluff? Waste of time. He remembered the first time he told Steve he’d never put much stock in amorphous concepts like “soul” and “destiny” and the shock on Steve’s face.

“But, but you’ve…what about the patterning?”

“Genetics.”

“You stock it all up to strands of DNA?”

“Damn right. Genetic markers telling us who’s the best mate. Complementary T-cell matches, missing immunities, genetic innovations. It’s all right there in our DNA. Why wouldn’t it be written on our wings. Damn good way to show off what you’ve got without having to do much more than a cursory glance.”

“Then what about same-sex matches? There’s no procreation in that.”

“Having babies isn’t the only reason to be with someone, Steve. There’s more to life than good genetic diversity and having a healthy clutch.”

“Well, yeah, but,” Steve paused, flustered. He looked down, clearly troubled, and toyed with a flight feather. “What about Peggy?” he asked softly, glancing up with quietly hurt eyes.

Oh. Oh fuck. Tony rubbed at the back of his head sheepishly. He’d forgotten about that. “You really loved her, huh?”

“So much.”

“And, and you were perfect matches?”

“Yeah. Right down to this little feather with the weird black patch,” Steve said, stretching out a wing and showing off a tiny contour feather very near his ribs. The bizarre splash of ink black was vivid against Steve’s white and brown feathers. “She had the same spot. Said even the best soldiers had a black mark or two in their records.” Steve touched the patch of black and Tony had the distinct impression that he’d somehow walked in on something he shouldn’t see.

“But Peggy got married after you went down. You know that, right? She had a clutch and she lived a happy life.” Almost the moment he said it, Tony regretted it, because Steve looked positively heartbroken.

“I know. I know she did.”

Tony wasn’t sure how to mitigate the damage he’d done. He didn’t mean to make Cap feel bad, but he also couldn’t buy into it all. He was pretty sure the universe didn’t have the time or inclination to be planning out every single romantic match of every single avian on Earth. So instead he prevaricated. “Maybe it’s a matter of, you know, faith? Belief? God? You know I don’t really…um…”

“It’s ok, Tony. I know you didn’t mean anything by it.”

Steve looked like he’d been kicked in the face and then watched a puppy also get kicked in the face. “Did you know Taoists believe the body has ten souls?” Tony blurted, waving his hands. “Seven for after death and three from your former, uh, mates. And a lot of religions think the soul is just part of god. That it has nothing to do with the individual avian. So really, no one has a clue anyway.”

He worried that he’d gone too far in the other direction, but Steve laughed a little, a sad hiccup, and sniffled. “I guess that’s true. I suppose no one really does know.”

Tony shrugged and hastily walked away. No one should unleash him for emotional support ever. Ever.

He was drunk the next time he ended up talking about that sort of thing with anyone, and it was just his luck it ended up being Supersoldier Lite. It was worse because he’d been deliberately avoiding Barnes ever since he first moved into the tower. There was too much there to unpack: dossiers that gave hints but no actual facts, haunted eyes and mutual PTSD from opposite sides of a gun sight, hauntingly familiar feather patterns. Tony tried damn hard not to think about that last one.

But he’d decided to let himself have a night with a really nice bottle of Scotch and to do that he had to be in the living quarters. It wasn’t weird or worrying if you were drinking where other people could see you, that’s what he told himself. And at some point he’d looked up and found Bucky helping himself to a glass. And who was Tony to say no to someone who needed a little bit of liquid comfort?

For a while it had just been comfortable silence, and from his warm lassitude, Tony was aware of the fall of Bucky’s hair, the flutter of feathers on his one flesh wing. He groomed absently for a while, neatening and tucking down beneath contour feathers, brushing out dust, spreading oils down the shafts. Then he started talking, and Tony started talking back and soon enough they were having a conversation. It was easier being around Bucky this way, when the stakes didn’t feel so damn high, when Tony wasn’t so damn afraid of everything.

And Barnes was a nice guy. Wicked sense of humor. Tony laughed, and laughed again, caught himself tangled in Bucky’s wry, raw edge. Tony noted, in a distant kind of way, that Barnes was attractive when he smiled, when he wasn’t practicing zombie Blue Steel. And somehow, before he could catch himself, they tumbled into the topic of feather matches.

“I had a theory,” he said, slumping happily back in the couch and staring at the domed ceiling of the living area. “You know? About mathematical probabilities and how hatchlings develop in the womb and…and melanin.”

“Uh huh,” Bucky murmured. He was hunched forward, elbows on knees, his tumbler dangling loosely in one hand. Tony didn’t think he could easily get drunk, but he also didn’t think that he was impossible to knock out like Cap was. But then, Bucky looked like a panther even when he was wandering around half-awake in the morning, so maybe the easy, loose slope of his shoulders was 100% natural.

“See, the colors in our feathers, it’s all, it’s all light, right? Trick of the light. Refraction. Nifty shift of the barbs and…and…the watchamacallits. So conceivably, mothers could, like, collect genetic information via scent while they’re just walking around pregnant. Chance encounter means feathers just happen to develop matching refractive patterns. And then years later, boom. Matching wings.”

“What about brown, genius?”

“What about it?”

“Brown’s from melanin. Not light.”

“Oh. Well…well if you think about it, all color’s from light.”

Bucky glanced over, swirling his tumbler lazily back and forth. “You still remember your patterns?”

“No,” Tony lied. The stumps of his wings twitched on his back and his muscles pulled taught and painful for just a second before relaxing back down into the warmth of a good buzz.

“Uh huh,” Bucky said again. He didn’t call Tony out on the lie, and for that, Tony was grateful.

“What about you?” Tony lazily turned his head so he could just see the slope of Bucky’s shoulders, the sharp line of vibranium alloy and solar foils that made up his prosthetic wing.

“Flashes. A set of bars here, a black tip there. Doesn’t even seem like me anymore. Feels like it belonged to someone else.”

“Bet you were a looker. Big osprey wings like that. Like a…uh…” Tony trailed off and then hastily looked away. Bucky didn’t call him on that either. Instead, he just topped off Tony’s glass and then absconded with the rest of the Scotch.

Tony didn’t blame him.

Tony tried not to think about it. He reminded himself that when he and Pepper had been going strongest, he’d been convinced their patterns matched. Maybe it was love that made things work together and not the other way around. He reminded himself that feather dye existed, that young rebels purposefully plucked parts of their wings to change patterns, bleached themselves white and then resoaked themselves in every color of the rainbow. He reminded himself that matches across different wing shapes were clearly genetic lottery and had nothing to do with cosmic design or destiny.

But when he looked at that little white star on Bucky’s right wing, that little freak confluence of contour feathers, he couldn’t help but remember that his left wing had once had a mirror image of them.

It didn’t matter. It wasn’t fate. And any romantic feelings Tony might be feeling were from proximity, from a compatibility of personality, from an instinctual desire for companionship and a warm body next to him in his nest. His fucking wings had nothing to do with it.

Besides which, Barnes was clearly not looking for romance. Hell, most nights Tony was pretty sure all he wanted in life was a full eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. Tony should know. He found him wandering the halls at three in the morning looking haunted and gaunt often enough.

They didn’t really have a spoken agreement or anything. But if Tony found Bucky wandering the halls hollow-eyed and unshaven, he pulled him down to the workshop or took him to the kitchen and forced him to drink warm milk. It was nice to feel needed. And Bucky returned the favor in his own gruff way. He quietly snuck away bottles when Tony had a few too many. He made biting remarks that left Tony laughing, unable to stew any longer in the images in his head, on the pain of his back muscles. All of the Avengers were fucked up and they all tried to help each other as best they could, but for the first time, Tony felt like he had someone who he was working in concert with, someone on the same wavelength. They were both of them broken, and it was nice to have someone else around who knew how that felt.

So no romance. Just support. That was more than enough.

And Tony got by on thinking that way right up until the night he found Bucky down in the workshop, a fully rendered hologram of Tony at twenty-nine right in the middle of the room, wings spread wide.

Bucky at least had the wherewithal to look embarrassed as he waved his hand and banished the hologram. Tony stood in the doorway, jaws and fists clenched, outrage and mortification warring like acid in his belly. “I just wanted to…” Bucky gestured weakly and then dropped his hand. “I wanted to see. To know.”

“You had no right.”

Bucky didn’t even deny it.

“I will not have my life dictated by some freak genetic coincidence. If I want someone, I want it to be because…because they’re kind to me. Because they make me want to be a better person. Because I want to take care of them. Fate’s got nothing to do with it.”

“You’re beautiful,” Bucky said softly.

“Don’t you mean ‘were’?” Tony spun on his heel and tried to leave, but Bucky was just as fast as Steve when he wanted to be, and silent like Death.

“No. No I mean ‘are.’ When you…when you’re like this. When you’re talking about what you believe in. You’re beautiful.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Don’t you know?” Bucky stepped into him, toes bracketing his heels, arms around his belly, chest to his back, chin on his shoulder. He felt so completely surrounded. It was almost like having his wings cloaking him again.

“You’re just doing this because you saw my wings,” Tony snapped, but he didn’t try to pull away. It felt so nice to be warm.

“No. I...I kind of wish I hadn’t looked. I wish I’d just asked you. I like you, Tony, and your wings have got nothing to do with it.”

“They have everything to do with it.”

“Well, if you’re talking about how...how their loss made you who you are today, then yeah. They do have everything to do with it. I wouldn’t have met you if you hadn’t become Iron Man. But your wings, they don’t define you. Just like my wings don’t define me. They’re a part. Not the whole.”

Tony felt wound like a trap spring, liable to snap at any moment. Whether he’d hurt himself or Bucky or just collapse, he couldn’t say.

“Can we try? Please? I’d like to try.”

“This isn’t fate,” Tony said.

“No. This is just you and me. Us?”

Bucky was so warm, it was almost unbearable. It felt a little like giving up, but in the best way possible. “I like the sound of us.”

[spilledreality]

PM,

I appreciate this response quite a bit! It gave me another chance to think through these issues with the changed perspective of an added year of reading. I’ll try to address the letter chronologically, as I read along with it, and as I do so, you’ll see I get carried away with certain themes. I only hope I haven’t missed your forest for the trees.

1.

Note with stotting—I always see it discussed as a signal to the predator, but it also functions as a signal to fellow antelope. What gives?

It's a good point here that anti-inductivity, broadly, is the reason you need certain classes of costly signaling. Solutions to problems, if visibly successful, will be imitated, leading to solution fads (widespread adoption). Because the fitness of this solution is frequency-dependent, widespread adoption reduces its efficacy as solution. When the "point" of the signal—the signal's function—is distinction from one's fellow organisms, a comparative “I’m fitter than they are, so hunt them,” frequency-dependence is always in play. “If everyone’s super, nobody is.” Syndrome could’ve been the hero of that movie, provided another set of writers.

But what Syndrome really represents is inevitability. That which lends advantage and can be copied is copied. As Bourdieu convincingly argues, symbolic capital works by differentiation, or distinction. That which signals wealth or sophistication is inevitably pioneered by the upper classes and imitated by the middle classes, because there is advantage in it. (Accompanied by some countersignaling—the high appropriate the low.) Tyrion purple worked because it was literally impossible to afford . Now (perhaps) we have luxury beliefs and risk tolerance (social risk and otherwise).

And so, like you note, signals (which are surrogates—they are "not the thing" but "stand for the thing") are context-sensitive; their efficacy or costliness is environmentally dependent. You end up with “evolutionary holdovers” that are either “no longer so hard to fake” or “no longer strong indicators of the relevant outcomes.” No surrogate measure or metric is perfectly robust to environmental change, because any correlation or heuristic can be uncoupled under the right circumstances.

I want to linger a bit on the way that these evolutionary holdovers “can continue to have power, in so far as things that are desirable themselves become symbols of status, in a self-reinforcing feedback loop.” I tried to think of examples of vestigial signals that had no effect on reproductive fitness, and I couldn't. And the main reason was more or less what you say: even if wide birthing hips no longer give a birthing/survival advantage to women moderately affluent countries, the sheer fact that such women are perceived as attractive means that, if a man reproduces with a woman with wide hips, his daughters will have wide(r) hips, and thus a greater chance of reproducing. It's "speculative" and "extrinsic"—it's a bet based on other people's bets, a Keynesian beauty contest. Sexual fitness, separate from survival fitness. Although it's easy to imagine that reproductively fit individuals are better protected and more prized by their community, and therefore survive at higher rates, so "reproducing" and "surviving" don't uncouple cleanly.

And with sexual fitness, it comes down to desire in a similar way that non-sexual fitness does. In the same way an organism who looks unappealing to a predator (separate from the reality of his caloric benefit) will survive at higher rates, an organism who looks appealing to the opposite sex will reproduce at higher rates. Beauty is a two-player game.

Not every desire is adaptive, of course; our sensibilities often lead us astray. But that’s what desire is designed for, that’s its purpose: to guide us toward what’s typically good for us.

Desire says “is this good for me?” And beauty says “get over here! You know you want to!” Desire is a lock, and beauty its key. Desire chases beauty, and beauty chases desire.

Beauty is the result of an on-going selection game, where the desiring player selects according to what he believes furthers his ends, and the organism selected passes on genes. Beauty is a surrogate for fitness, like limping is a surrogate for "easy prey to catch," and stotting is a surrogate for "hard prey to catch."

2.

We're in agreement thus far, but it's time for some conflict!

The first explanation we might instinctively provide for this difference is that stotting is not a conscious, calculated choice by the prey (“if I leap now, then that wolf will infer that I am strong, and realize how foolish it would be to chase me”), but rather behaviour that is essentially automatic, like some part of the fight or (in this case) flight response. That seems reasonable, except that presumably the “reading” by the predator is just as similarly unconscious and automatic (if that is indeed a fair characterization of the prey’s behaviour).

I wanna make two arguments against this. The first is that we have no idea what goes on in the mind of the deer. IMO, assuming that the deer is not making conscious decisions is as unscientific as "anthropomorphizing" it and assuming it is. Maybe less scientific, because anthropomorphizing is predicated on our evolutionary similarity and shared descent?

The second is that I'm not sure it's all that useful or coherent a carving to define writing by either consciousness or intent. There are extreme ends at which I think this is true: I think an herbivore trail, or the ethological concept of a cue, is “writing”—information is added to the environment through an organism's actions—but it is writing which is done as a byproduct of the primary action of the organism (e.g. browsing vegetation). When we walk dusty roads or snowy trails, we leave traces—we write evidence of our passage into the ground. When we log on to Facebook, we write that we are online, through our “online” marker. Sometimes we do this on purpose: we make ourselves online hoping someone will chat us, or set our status to “away” in order to have an excuse for not responding. Much of the time, the writing happens naturally in the process of logging on and logging off. But even then, we are often aware that we are writing information to others minds, and so we seek to limit or alter that writing. In my mind, it's incredibly hard to draw distinctions between these activities, given that I believe: (1) that following Trivers, our mind is constantly strategically acting in ways below our conscious awareness. (2) That we are constantly aware of both the informational effects (those that depend on the interpretation of reading organisms) and intrinsic effects (those that don't) of our actions, and consideration of both kinds of effects alters our acts. (3) That we often do not know exactly what we intend, determining our own motivations is very difficult, separating what is on accident from on purpose, etc. In other words, “consciousness” to me feels more like “was this made available at one level of an organism's control interface” than “was this action strategically modulated with reference to its informational effects.” Because so long as our projections of those informational effects alters our behavior—we don't wear that dress, we don't hang out in a neighborhood near the office on days we called in sick—then we are in some deeply meaningful way altering and modulating our "writing." And because this "writing" is impossible to escape—even our absence, our disappearance, alters the information state of others. And what to do when our writing does not have the effects we intended but does actually yield true information for the reader—like when our attempt at bluffing strength betrays our actual vulnerabilities? (You allude to this later, so I'll come back to it in a bit.)

It obviously has not carried out a precise statistical inference, but rather has applied various heuristics to do a kind of approximate inference, incorporating the new information into its model of each deer’s ability and it’s likelihood of catching each of them.

A year ago, I’d ++ you for this—having recently Gigerenzer & Taleb’s arguments, say, for the way baseball players seem to use simple heuristics, instead of unconscious calculus, to catch fly balls—but lately, skepticism waxes. My ideas on this are still incredibly crude—I apologize, but bear with me. It seems to me that our bodies are so incredibly precise with their movements, and our brains so remarkably good at inference from minuscule amounts of information, that it is difficult to believe it’s all "obviously" simple heuristics, instead of Bayesian-approximate statistical inference. At least at the lower levels of cognitive tasks, the kinds which our conscious mind delegates out. Second, even with all our novel inventions, visual stimuli, etc, our visual systems seem to only rarely fail us even when applied to subjects or domains that are unthinkable in the ancestral environment. My hunch is that if it were all simple heuristics, the rate of technological and social change we see, and the immense differences between ancestral and contemporary life, would lead to serious uncoupling.

That said, it is true that non-human animals appear to be less context-sensitive, less adaptable, etc than humans. They appear to be more instinctive, less acculturated. More hardwired, less plasticky. Which is to your point about humans having more flexibility to craft our signals or carry out our readings over an extended period of time. “Pragmatics,” in the linguistic sense of the “contextual modulation of meaning,” is—in my understanding—a key aspect of human linguistics specifically, and not so much animal communication. So, you may be right in the specific case, even if humans are less “homo heuristicus” than some anti-Bayesian Brainers would have it. (Although more homo heuristics than many pro-Bayesian Brainers hold—Compatibilism! Both sides are right!)

Especially on the writing side, it is no doubt the case that many times we very deliberately carry out actions that we believe will cause a reader to make particular inferences, and in some cases the calculated nature of this might sometimes lead this to be labeled manipulation.

I agree with the first separation, that sometimes we write deliberately, and sometimes writing is an inevitable byproduct of an action (or at least, of performing the action efficiently/cheaply). I take issue with the second claim, however: I believe that any time we deliberately carry out an action in order to cause a reader to make a particular inference, we "just are" manipulating them. Our representations of the world are fundamentally actions whose purpose is to bring about effects, a delta in the state of the world. The only way representations ("writing") can have such effects is by using a perceiver-interpreter ("reader") as its medium. The point of altering perception, then, is to alter action—full stop. It may not feel "manipulative" because it isn’t exploitative—it might advantage both parties; the information might be “true”; etc. But there’s never, in my opinion, a situation where deliberate representations are not intended to alter perceiver behavior.

3.

Onto actual reading and writing, instead of our generalized version!

At the same time, it seems implausible that writers begin purely with such calculated modeling. Rather, they begin. Either through practice, raw talent, or experience gained through feedback, they have some intuitive sense of what will work, and follow those intuitions, or even begin in the most non-deliberate writing they can, hoping that things will emerge, or that they will be able to shape the material into something later.

The question is, “what will work [to accomplish what goal]?” And given that the mechanism by which the writer figures out “what works” is “what people positively respond to,” I think it’s fair to say that writing is “about” and oriented to getting a set of positive effects out of readers—praise, regard, certain responses like “this text changed how I view the world,” etc. Now, to the writer, it feels like they want to produce text that actually changes how people view the world. Perhaps this is their actual, ulterior motivation, and it just so happens that the only real evidence of this transformative quality is the self-report of reader. Perhaps it's positive response which they actually, deep-down care about. We can't really tease apart the difference, can we? Either way it's opticratic. Surrogate or not, feedback is the selection pressure which determines what kinds of things the writer writes. It isn’t calculated, in the sense of “pre-planned”—it just evolves in the direction of its reward function, like we all do, always. That’s what progress is. That's what "good" is, more or less.

But you're exactly right that one effective strategy is to generate a lot of options, then keep what’s good. (As in automatic writing.)

Which of course is manipulation, like the insertion of music in a movie scene to “trigger emotional cues.” It’s not that the critic dislikes being manipulated: he loves it when it's done well. He just doesn’t like clumsy, transparent, artless manipulation (like the rest of us). And plus, the art encounter is a low-stakes "sandbox"—we might weep when the main character dies, but that's about as far as real-world consequences of manipulation go. Whereas in the real world, being under another's control can cost you everything.

(I also like this distinction of automatic reading vs considered, deliberated reading. The latter is far more context-sensitive and thus “human.”)

On Michael & Knapps, I’ve become a bit more sympathetic, since 2020, to their intentionalism argument in light of my Schutz reading—Schutz thinks that the normal interpretive mode of human beings, which he calls “verstehen,” is one which understands human actions, representation, etc primarily in terms of the actor’s “project”—the set of goals they’re trying to accomplish. “The task of fellow-actors, therefore, is necessarily one of inferring from a fragment of the other's conduct and its context what the other's project is, or is likely to be.” But I think that this is true because a person’s project in conjunction with theory of mind—that is, their algorithm of desire as filtered through belief, desire as made achievable or blocked by perceived affordances and constraints—is the most compressively powerful way of modeling them. Your crossword example illustrates this pretty well actually:

The goal of the puzzle solver is largely to infer what the writer intended for each clue, although in rare circumstances, there could be multiple solutions which would fit equally well, in which case one might fail to infer the intended meaning, and yet still “solve” the puzzle.

Intent here is a surrogate for a working solution to the problem.

Similarly, when we ask, is the “meaning” of a text the intention of the author, or the interpretations of the reader, our answer depends a lot on the perspective one takes on the system. If you’re taking the perspective of a text + world, and model the text as a stimulus, then all reader interpretations are part of its total effects. But if you take the perspective of a given reader, you are more or less trying to figure out the intent of the writer, because that intent unlocks the organizing principle, like it determines the solution to a crossword—the logic by which all the parts fit together. That logic is also what the reader can learn from the writer, insofar as the text has been vouched for, or is produced by a celebrated mind, then the writer comes for the insights of that mind or text. In cases where a text has been lauded for a certain message or set of insights which were not intended by the author, the reader’s probably best off interpreting it through that lens first! But it's about the goals of analysis—entailment for world, or entailment for you the reader.

This gets back to the example of a speaker attempting to bluff strength but betraying to the listener their real weakness. This is a core problem in hermeneutics: that there is information intended by the author, and then information which is yielded by a hermeneutics of suspicion—what does the way the author described a character tell us about their culture, their beliefs, their views? Which I think can only be answered by getting into the weeds of what information is: a difference that makes a difference. An indicator which inference is performed on. All different kinds of understandings, some close to the truth, some far from it, can be drawn from these indicators. The author at most intends a few of those inferences. If the meaning of a text is “all true inferences drawn from its information”—all [worldy] differences that are testified to by by its [textual] difference—then the space of intentionality is minuscule in comparison with all the true inferences that can be pulled out of a text.

Which I now see you get at perfectly, so I'm more or less in preemptive recap mode:

Moreover, there is simply much more than can be inferred. Indeed, much of the elaboration of criticism is in thinking about art as information which can be used to make inferences about the world, either about the world in which the work was created, or about aspects of the author which they themselves may not even be aware of, at least not consciously.

I do think you’re right that, because we can’t do continuous inference over many domains, particularly domains that are constantly changing up on us, so we use heuristics, the biggest of which is typification—reading parts to make a guess about whole—the superset of the politically charged “stereotype,” basically. Perhaps this contradicts my earlier arguments regarding the limits of “homo heuristicus.”

SR

Suspended,

It feels somewhat strange to respond to a letter that was not addressed to me, especially that is now perhaps more of a historical artefact. Nor was your letter purloined, but simply made public, published even, as part of a correspondence. In that sense, this is perhaps more of a commentary, or simply a piece of fan mail.

The main reason I felt compelled to respond was your conceptualization of reading as inference, which is very close to how I have been thinking about related issues.

In particular, the example that kept coming to mind, while I read your letter, is that of "stotting". This is a behavior that has been observed in animals such as deer, in which they needlessly jump while running from a predator. Since this sort of jumping does not increase the speed at which they can flee from the predator (and may in fact slow them down or make them more visible), this behaviour has been interpreted by some of those who study it as a kind of signaling. In effect, those animals who stot are flaunting their ability, suggesting to the predator that it should not bother trying to chase them down, because they clearly have enough speed and stamina to outrun the danger. The predator, in turn, will read this signaling appropriately, redirecting its efforts towards an animal that is not indicating that it is capable of escaping, which is more likely to be one that it will be able to catch (perhaps because the prey is old, or injured, for example).

The key to this, and the only reason it works, as others have noted, is that this signal is hard to fake. It wouldn't work for animals to try to convey their ability to outrun a predator using some means that was easily available to all; if all individuals are equally capable of sending that signal, no matter what their ability to actually outrun a predator, then anti-inductivity would kick in, and all of them would do so (at which point, the message would lose all meaning, effectively conveying no information, so in fact none of them would). It is only because the signal really does represent something that is highly indicative of ability to run fast that it works as a signal. Those who are not fast enough to stot will get eaten.

The same sort of thing of course explains many strange behaviours among animals, as far as I understand, including things like bird plumage and mating behaviours (we can also think of obvious analogies among humans). That does not mean, of course, that all such signals retain their intrinsic meaning forever. Especially among humans, evolutionary psychologists have suggested that all kinds of preferences can be traced to things which were once signals representing various characteristics likely to be beneficial for offspring, such as the ability to have children, or overall health or freedom from disease. These are now basically evolutionary holdovers because a) many of these are no longer so hard to fake, and b) they are no longer strong indicators of the relevant outcomes. Nevertheless, there is of course in which they can continue to have power, in so far things that are desirable themselves become symbols of status, in a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

Whether or not the above explanation is correct (let's say for the sake of argument that it is), we might conventionally think of the observation and reaction by the predator as a kind of "reading", though  it instinctively seems less appropriate to call the stotting itself a kind of "writing". The first explanation we might instinctively provide for this difference is that stotting is not a conscious, calculated choice by the prey ("if I leap now, then that wolf will infer that I am strong, and realize how foolish it would be to chase me"), but rather behaviour that is essentially automatic, like some part of the fight or (in this case) flight response. That seems reasonable, except that presumably the "reading" by the predator is just as similarly unconscious and automatic (if that is indeed a fair characterization of the prey's behaviour).

Even though this seems slightly inconsistent, I think it can actually be reasonably understood within your framework. If we think of reading as a kind of inference, then the predator is accurately inferring from the prey's stotting that it is a fast animal (assuming that the stotting is in fact a trustworthy signal), and adjusting its behaviour as a result. It obviously has not carried out a precise statistical inference, but rather has applied various heuristics to do a kind of approximate inference, incorporating the new information into its model of each deer's ability and it's likelihood of catching each of them. The deer is writing in a sense, signaling as it leaps, but "writing" still feels inappropriate. Perhaps the key is that it does not seem to be an individualized signal crafted to the particular situation, but just part of an automatic behaviour that would be triggered by any predator, and is similar across all prey, such that we would call it something more like "instinct".

All that is to say, we can think of both reading and writing as being more or less calculated or automatic. All of these notions clearly apply to humanity as well, with the added complexity that we humans have much richer models of the world, much more cognitive capacity, and often much more flexibility to craft our signals or carry out our readings over an extended period of time.

That's not to say, however, that we don't also have more automatic forms of these. A classic example (again from evolutionary theory), might be something like blushing. Blushing seems to be one of those evolutionary puzzles for which we can come up with numerous possible explanations. Part of the thinking on this will be guided by salient features of blushing, specifically the fact that it is automatic and uncontrollable, and also (perhaps to a lesser extent), that it is hard to fake. One could perhaps learn to blush on command, or to avoid blushing in any circumstance, but I expect it would take considerable practice in either case. I won't speculate here on the "true purpose" of blushing, but rather note that it a kind of writing that we carry out without intending it (to the extent that stotting is), and one that we similarly read in each other without needing to think about it; we see someone blush and immediately infer that they are embarrassed (or some more complex interpretation, depending on the context).

At the opposite extreme, I can finally turn to your discussion of more literal reading and writing, as with literature. Here there seems to be much more room for a more deliberate, calculated, drawn out form of intention and interpretation, though I think it is also more complicated than that. Especially on the writing side, it is no doubt the case that many times we very deliberately carry out actions that we believe will cause a reader to make particular inferences, and in some cases the calculated nature of this might sometimes lead this to be labeled manipulation.

To some extent this is what writers do. In editing a piece of work, a writer might think about how a particular sentence will be received, whether it is confusing, how it could be improved, based largely on how they think it will be read. At the same time, it seems implausible that writers begin purely with such calculated modeling. Rather, they begin. Either through practice, raw talent, or experience gained through feedback, they have some intuitive sense of what will work, and follow those intuitions, or even begin in the most non-deliberate writing they can, hoping that things will emerge, or that they will be able to shape the material into something later. One might also point to "automatic writing" as a tool used by writers to try to get past blocks or generate ideas, though ironically one seems to need to use fairly deliberate techniques in order to produce work that is adequately "automatic".

On the reading side, there is again a continuum. Even professional critics presumably have many automatic reactions while they are reading, though these of course will be shaped by their experience, and will likely be quite different from that of a more naive reader. (The critic is far less likely to be affected by simple manipulative techniques like music inserted to trigger emotional cues, and much more likely to have a negative reaction to overused tropes). Nevertheless, the interpretive part of a literal kind of reading (or listening or viewing) will likely be a more extended activity, with interpretations developed through reflection, discussion, debate, etc.

The scope for such reading is limitless of course. One very narrow type of reading is to assume that there is a single specific "meaning" intended by the writer, and that the goal is to figure out what that is. I'm not familiar with Knapp & Michaels, but based on your description, this seems to be the only type of meaning they are interested in, which seems to me to be an extremely impoverished view.

Certainly there are some settings in which that view is relevant. For example, in creating a crossword puzzle, the creator has an intended answer for each clue, such that the correct answers will cohere. The goal of the puzzle solver is largely to infer what the writer intended for each clue, although in rare circumstances, there could be multiple solutions which would fit equally well, in which case one might fail to infer the intended meaning, and yet still "solve" the puzzle. (Ironically, puzzle solving can be turned into puzzle creation, with enough creativity in interpreting the clues).

Another example would be something like detecting what seem to be typos, and trying to infer what the author intended to write, if they did in fact intend to write something different. In reading your letter, I noticed you say "in a class narrow-and-conquer method", which doesn't quite scan. I thought at first that you meant to write "crass", but upon reflection, you probably intended "classic". Perhaps it was both!

As for the "meaning" of most art, however, it seems overly simplistic to suggest that there is a single "intended" meaning by the creator, for the reasons discussed above. There might be ambiguities in the text for which the writer has a personal interpretation, but in most cases the larger "meaning" will not be a single intention by the author (except perhaps in their intention to create a particular emotional or affective response to a particular passage, etc.).

Moreover, there is simply much more than can be inferred. Indeed, much of the elaboration of criticism is in thinking about art as information which can be used to make inferences about the world, either about the world in which the work was created, or about aspects of the author which they themselves may not even be aware of, at least not consciously.

One subtlety I might suggest is worth drawing out a bit more is your suggestion that "inference is performed statistically". This is clearly true in the sense that we are dealing with uncertainties. We are not making syllogistic deductions, but rather assembling evidence into models. The reason I find this interesting is that we do now have very good theories and even systems for performing "correct" statistical inference. In fact, I was particularly struck (although I didn't notice it on my first read through) by your mention of a quest for a "so-called universal method of statistical inference which can be uniformly, automatically applied to any problem". This should be the subject for another letter, but there is a sense in which this is something that has in fact now been theorized and created by the statistical community.

The conclusion from such statistical theorizing and building, however, seems to be that this is not something that humans could plausibly be carrying out (because anything exact would be intractable). Hence my reference above to heuristics, and perhaps the reason that we can still be so easily fooled by crude signals. This also connects to your characterization of the link between color and capacity for action (within the context of traffic signals) as statistical, though I won't try to develop that here.

Regardless, reading will of course be dependent on our models of the world, and can be manipulated by misunderstanding. You mention GPT-3, which provides many such examples. In the absence of any prompting to that effect, many people would likely assume that various texts by GPT-3 were written by a person, and might proceed to interpret based on that assumption. Moreover, such interpretations might be "correct" within the confines of their assumptions. Upon learning that such text was in fact produced by an anthropomorphized computer program, many would similarly assume that the machine must in some sense be conscious or otherwise capable of various feats. Again, such an inference is not necessarily wrong within the confines of its assumption, though that is only because most people would be wrong about what they believe is possible or impossible to do with systems trained on large amounts of text.

In that sense, the ability to write coherently is something that, up until now, has been quite hard to fake. Because it must be learned, writing was a clear signal of a certain level of cognitive ability, and other abilities that could reliably be expected to come along with that. Now that GPT-3 exists, of course, people will need to recalibrate, though it seems likely that most people will remain perpetually behind in making truly accurate inferences, given the pace at which things are changing. Nevertheless, even if we do successfully adapt our conscious machinery in interpreting texts, it seems highly likely that we will continue to be "fooled" to some extent by convincing text. Just as we can't help but blush, and can't help but read blushing, we likely can't help but read text as meaningful, in the sense of having had a consciousness behind it, even if we then follow that with a more rigorous or creative reading.

PM

October 9, 2021