#NO ONE DID THIS WHY DID YOU WANNA BE ORIGINAL????

[wonderjanga]

Can I Please be Your Friend?

Billy doesn’t have friends. Between being Marvel and working odd jobs, he hasn’t really had the time some. So when he got invited to join the newly formed Justice League. He was ecstatic! Sure, these people were at least a very minimum of 20 years older than him and sure they would probably talk about taxes and stuff, but superhero friends! Meanwhile, the Justice League is like, “wow this guy is so social. I like it!”

Marvel: “You have a lighthouse…?” *sounds so amazed*

Aquaman: “Yeah. My dad was a lighthouse keeper so I got it when he passed.”

Marvel: “That’s so awesome! Can I come over?”

Aquaman: “Oh, okay? Sure?” *a little surprised he asked but eh whatever*

That was how Arthur spent the day showing Cap around the lighthouse. The man was a really good listener and was surprisingly very interested in listening to Arthur talk about how to use the light. You couldn’t even ask Arthur how they both ended up jumping off the railings of the lighthouse of dive into the water. You also couldn’t ask him how they ended up having a water fight, with the Atlantean calling for some sea creatures as back up. You also also couldn’t ask him how shocked a hotdog vendor was when he saw Captain Marvel and Aquaman, both of which who are supposed to be revered heroes, soaked, looking like wet dogs, asking for a couple of hotdogs after they nearly caused a tidal wave.

They got scolded by Batman a little while later for acting like children and almost causing the previously mentioned tidal wave. It was a little funny to see Batman scolding a man a solid two feet taller than him.

Soon after that whole incident, Marvel went to befriend Martian Manhunter next.

Marvel: *staring at J’onn while holding a box of cookies*

MM: *can hear him thinking about how to approach him and looks over to Marvel*

Marvel: *thinks a little too loudly and J’onn hears a nearly deafening “FRIEND”*

MM: *flinches and clutches his head* “Captain. Is something the matter.”

Marvel: “Oh uh…” *walks over and looks between the cookies and J’onn* “I was uh- wondering if you wanted to eat these with me.”

And that’s how J’onn spent the rest of the afternoon eating cookies with Marvel. J’onn had at first thought Marvel was quiet because he was something humans called awkward. But no, every now and then, when J’onn forgot that humans preferred to keep their thoughts private, he’d hear how happy Marvel was that he accepted. He’d also heard a couple other voices which was slightly concerning. He didn’t know if that was normal for humans or not.

Then, the next was Batman. Bruce honestly didn’t even know how they had started talking about this. All he knows is that they were talking about the team’s performance in the field, then that somehow transitioned into talking about superheroes in general, which then somehow led to fictional superheroes, which led to now:

Marvel: “Oh, you like Gray Ghost?”

Batman: “I was… a fan of him when I was a child.” *doesn’t know why he’s telling Marvel this*

Marvel: “Cool! Did you see the movies?”

From there on was a forty minute yapping session about Gray Ghost, his lore, the movies, the comics, the action figures, and so on.

Marvel: “I even had his comics as a kid too.”

Batman: “Really? Reprints or originals?”

Marvel: “I wanna say originals? What do you mean by reprints though?”

Batman: “Reprinting is when they take a comic, and remake it to look a little better, such as brighter colors or slightly tweaked dialogue, so they can sell it again.”

Marvel: “Oh. Then I’d say I probably have originals then.”

Batman: “Interesting. Those are collectors items now. They go for thousands.”

Marvel; “Really?!” *eyes nearly bug out of his skull* “Huh. I had no idea. Which ones did you have?”

Batman: “Mostly reprints. But I do have a couple originals on display.”

So yeah. The two were geeking out and stuff. Bruce honestly has literally no one to talk about this with so he’ll admit he was a little (a lot) happy.

We can’t forget the other JL heroes though.

Flash: “Like, he is so nice, and for what?”

GL: “I know right he let me ramble for like 45 minutes about planes! He was asking questions too!”

Supes: “And he’s always willing to help with anything. I didn’t even get to finish asking if he could cover my monitor shifts before he said yes.” *sounds slightly guiltily (he still feels bad for asking)*

In conclusion, Billy really wants to be friends with these guys, and his methods are definitely working.

[nuggetpool-hi]

Guess who watched X-Men origins again

OK SO I got THOUGHTS of this movie but specially Wade's fight style because it's really similar to our current Deadpool's fighting style... so yeah I wanna yap about that hi

WELL FIRST OF wanna talk a lil about Victor, Logan and Wade's different styles... from a mortal's view point I am no expert on this just insane about these movies and I need to write my thoughts or i'll explode

Starting with Victor!! the ultimate kittycat girlypop

I love his kitty self I'm sorry ANYWAY EXAMPLES

OKAY SO VICTOR. Victor's style is obviously very animalistic but also stylized, he makes the fight a show for himself! He likes to hunt and he tries to always give chase or play around a bit before the kill, just like a cat playing with his food!

AND IF you pay attention to the start of the movie, this game he's got with his target isn't initially how he fought, he kinda developed it as the years went by and the eviler he got the more he played with his food. The first few wars he goes to he's fighting like a human soldier, then you can see him slip up some animal jumps and uses his claws more until at the end he's full on predator chasing his prey (just like when he captures Scott, my god I love that scene he's terryfing)

AND A BIG DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HIM AND LOGAN (that I will also talk about later I guess) is that with this play thing Victor has going on it SHOWS that he THINKS about the stragety when fighting, he's aware of his surroundings and his target's strenghs and weaknesses, he's good at coming up with solutions on the spot (see his fight with John, he can predict where he's going to teleport and catch him) and how to give a good chase without losing WHILE LOGAN WELL, at least in this movie he seems very lost when fighting?? he mostly just launches at his target and attacks, if the target runs away he chases, very animalistic but in a feral-based on instincts way... prolly why he coulnt win agaisnt Victor at first, because he was being blinded by his rage while Victor was quite literally playing with him lmao

ANYWAY LOGAN our favorite traumatized babygirl

and boy does he suffer in this one aughh EXAMPLES

Now you must be wondering why did I put the bathroom scene, well I feel like it represents Logan's general situation pretty well! (and its silly let me be), hes confused destroying everything and just keeps making it worse every time he tries to fix it.

The thing about Logan in this movie is that he's honestly just- confused and angry from the moment he killed his father, he runs away over and over again from EVERYTHING and he's constantly being manipulated BY EVERYONE!! Poor man has no idea what to do with himself of who he can actually trust but damn he tries, his enviroment is contantly changing and he's trying his best to adapt but he does it in a messy way.

The way he fights and acts in general is animalistic, yes, but more of the "scared dog attacks" kind of way, he's always acting on his instinct that it's mostly led by anger. When he fights he just throws himself and tries to slash whatever he can, he runs he hides and then when he gets the chance to he attacks again.

He constantly has little to no control of the situtation WHICH IS SPECIALLY SEEN pre-adamantium where he keeps losing to Victor because unlike him- he has no plan, he's being manipulated and kept blind of everything ON PURPOUSE which obviouly puts him in a disadvantage so yeah.

AFTER he gets the adamantium you can see his skills strengen with his knowledge, the more he lears about his situation the more focused he is and his fighting it's cleaner, he still moslty just launches himself head first into fights BUT he's not running away, he's able to evaluate his situation and adapt (See his fight with Gambit, he looks at him when running away and then destroys the stair so Gambit can't run away OR with Deadpool where he decides to gain height as a way to create the space needed to evaluate his enemy?? that one might be a lil bit of a stretch tho)

WADE WILSON THE ULTIMATE CUTIE PRINCESS

let's ignore how dirty they did him ok...

OKAY SO SADLY- The bullet scene is pretty much the only scene where we see him fight and it's honestly not enough to tell how his normal style is BUT I WILL SAY his general style is fancy to look at and scarily effective (which is mostly seen with our current Wade but you can see a bit in origins deadpool) he makes a show for everyone to see, which is also his stragedy to make himself even better at combat! He uses a lot of fancy movements and acrobatics that help him AND takes his enemies off-guard, confusing them as where they should attack or what he's going to hit?? anyway-

Comparison time yippieee THIS IS WHAT THIS POST IS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT LMAO

I did not get side tracked idk what you mean.... and now seeing it over and over I'm realizing not that noticeable.... so it's just not that much to talk about oops

LOOK AT THIS WADE, LOOK AT THE MOVEMENTS HE DOES WITH HIS LEGS!! HIS HANDS??? THIS MAN IS SHOWING OFF he's using all kinds of acrobatics and fancy movements while fighting, he attacks with his hands and dodges using mostly his legs, he's using all he has!! and it's making Logan lose BECAUSE LOGAN CAN'T FOCUS!! specially since he's so "target locked will attack", Wade makes it SO HARD for him to focus on a pose long enough to actually stab him also Logan ain't too good at dodging, I'm guessing it could be because he heals? dunno

now what inmediately came to my mind upon rewatch was THIS scene (maybe because I saw it recently who knows)

THE SETTING IS SO SIMILAR!! Wade is using a lot of fancy movements to get up, dodge and attack all way too fast for Logan to process, once again Logan is looking everywhere confused about where to aim bc this silly red guy it's dancing on his face and he's struggling to keep up JUST LIKE IN ORIGINS except well he IS able to get a hit bahah

Dodges like crazy, jumps over Logan (he did in origins too) just moves a lot between every attack

Actually now that I think about it Wade feels a bit less effective in the car, like yes sure he's putting up a good fight but Logan still feels like he's leading it BECAUSE WADE IS MORE EFFECTIVE WHEN HE HAS MORE SPACE!! he likes to be able to move around and do gimnastics while Logan it's a lot better the closer he gets to his target so omg yeah... ALSO LIKE WADE STILL TRIES TO MOVE AROUND he shoves Logan away from him, he gets out of the car choking logan with a seatbelt and gets to the back, he tries to create space because that's where his speciality WHILE LOGAN keeps trying to get closer to have him in his power, which he gets to do since the car isn't allowing Wade to move as freely as he would want to...

AND YOU CAN SEE HIS FANCY MOVEMENTS WITH FRANCIS TOO he's constantly circuling him, dodging and spinning while Francis is just trying to get a hit, Wade keeps his enemies chasing him when he fight THAT'S the way he controls it and gets it wherever he wants aughh

ANYWAY YEAH I think that's it, don't really know how much sense any of this does since I've been writing it on-and off the whole day lmao it's so messy but yeah feel free to add onto it I'd love to see opinions on this wahoo

Might keep talking about stuff I find interesting in the movies bahah this has been funn

[viaviavie]

I keep coming back to your profile to reread your fics because I immediately fell in love with how you write them.

The ones for Jamil? Immaculate. Absolutely amazing. I can clearly imagine how Yuu walks up to Riddle and Leona after winter break and apologized to them without giving them any context as to why they are sorry.

And „A painted white rose“? I feel so conflicted about that open ending. Not because I have any problems with it, I absolutely love it, but I just wish I could read more about it. I just enjoy reading about the conflicts that arise within that Au.

So thank you for you hard work in providing your readers with such amazing content. Can’t wait for what else you have in store. <3

UWAAA THANK YOU FOR YOUR PRAISE ;-;

Poor prefect, they feel so bad about the things they said, even if it was just for pretend. I do think that they ended up apologizing without context, cue some puzzled expressions from the two housewardens. Riddle's just "???", and will receive no context whatsoever... unless Floyd decides to blab about it in a fit of laughter, but there's nothing to worry about there. Prefect had to establish a little deal with Azul to ensure that Riddle hears nothing of that defamation incident in Scarabia.

Leona, on the other hand, does end up hearing about it one way or another. He does get momentarily annoyed for a good moment, at least until he realizes that Jamil fell for that stupid trick. It might even send Leona into a laughing fit when he finds out you practically seduced Jamil and succeeded. What a clever prefect you are. So much for a cunning housewarden, toppled down by the harmless magicless student. You bet that Leona doesn't let Jamil hear the end of it when Book 6 happens.

Regarding Painted White Rose, I actually do plan to post more blurbs/drabbles based on it. I really loved the idea of a Time Loop AU with Ace, and there was just so much potential for it! There was actually a few things that I removed from the original copy, like this:

Deuce does not understand why Ace awoke with tears in his eyes, gripping his blankets and hiding his face away like the prideful boy that he was. Suddenly, he found himself being dragged out of his own bed, following the panicked murmurs about the prefect going missing. Deuce does not understand why Ace struggled with his dreams, or why he finds himself waiting with him at the playing field, looking at the sky that day. And yet, nothing ever makes sense. The housewardens have never left, Ramshackle dorm was never destroyed, and you remained in one piece.

There was meant to be a small part dedicated to the events in Book 6, but I didn't wanna oversaturate that fic with flashbacks. However, let's consider Deuce for a hot second here.

He is probably the next person who has been consistently close to Ace through all timelines. Not to mention that Deuce is practically his neighbor, he was definitely witness to Ace waking up from those dreams. While Ace does look super crazy in those moments, Deuce was also willing to hitch a ride to NRC during the Scarabia fiasco. He would likely believe Ace if his friend was honest about what he was seeing.

Another deleted passage regarding the prefect's fate in the Book 7 bad ending!

Frozen in the crook of your shoulder, Ace mumbled against the cold fabric of your jacket. “How far did we get?” His heart was numb as he felt you shook your head against his dripping cheek. “We didn’t even get the chance to escape to the ocean before we all succumbed to Malleus’ magic.”

Kinda felt like it would have been better to let the readers imagine how Book 7, but this was my downer ending. Perhaps this was why Ace barely resists at the end of the fic. I mean, how could he possibly stand against the strongest student on campus? It's a futile attempt to fight back. But for what it was worth, his act of holding you close was the best he can do to piss off Malleus.

Speaking of Malleus and Book 7, one thing I never mentioned was that Ace would have been getting more bad dreams about Book 7. (Now that I thought about it more, I had opportunities to keep adding in glimpses of Malleus but never saw it. Massive L for me ;-;). Ace's view on Malleus shifts from one of indifference to absolute suspicion and anger. Ace doesn't like it when the prefect hangs out with Malleus, hence why he stayed with them at nights to stop those interactions. By a certain point, Ace does villainize Malleus to a degree because of how often he dreams of the prefect succumbing to sleep because of him. I do wanna explore this shift in relationships soon!

Thank you for sending in that ask! I love rambling and yapping about the stuff I write, so thank you for enabling me :)))

[lanawinterscigarettes]

Can you do “do any of the clothes you’re wearing belong to you?!” from the poly prompts with the reader and non judging breakfast club ?

sure thing! thanks for the poly njbc request btw <3

(original prompt list can be found here btw in case y'all wanna request something)

Sharing Is Caring (poly Non-Judging Breakfast Club x gn reader)

Warnings: makeout session between the reader and Chuck, offscreen sex/implied smut, hickeys mentioned, fluff other than that

It wasn't always easy being in a polycule, especially one with four of the most well-known Upper East Siders there ever were, but if there was one perk to the chaos of it all it was you never had to worry about running out of clothing.

Take now, for example. You couldn't find any of your own clothes, so naturally you just scouted around the shared penthouse for something, anything to wear before heading out for the day. You were meeting Dan for coffee and didn't want to end up being late.

After what seemed like forever, you were finally able to get together enough articles of clothing to make an outfit, and with that you were off, not bothering to check who the clothes belonged to before leaving. You were sure your partners wouldn't mind if you borrowed their stuff. They never did, because to them it was just further proof you were theirs.

"Hey," you greeted Dan in a slightly breathless voice, having rushed out of the penthouse to the coffee shop so you'd make it on time. "Sorry, my alarm didn't go off. What's up?"

"Well, I see the maid forgot to get your laundry done this morning," he quipped dryly while his eyes flickered along your form, noting the mismatched clothing. Nate's pants, Blair's shirt, Serena's scarf, Chuck's jacket... "As a matter of fact, do any of the clothes you're wearing belong to you?"

"Haha, Dan. Very funny." You rolled your eyes lightheartedly at the question, though you took the moment to glance down at your outfit before realizing he was right. "Um... my underwear is mine, I think. Maybe, I don't know. I didn't really check before putting clothes on."

"Ew," he responded as his nose wrinkled up in disgust. "That was a little bit more information than I needed to know."

"Hey, you asked. I was just answering your question," you gave a casual, unbothered shrug as you replied.

"Whatever. I didn't meet up with you so I could talk about whether the underwear you have on is yours or not," he said before changing the subject to something else. The two of you chatted for a good hour or so, starting to walk down the streets together after getting your coffee. You were just about to point out the time when a limo pulled up alongside the sidewalk. It didn't take a genius to realize who it belonged to.

Dan rolled his eyes while muttering something about unnecessary wealth, which you just ignored. The window to the backseat rolled down, revealing none other than Chuck. "I was in the area and figured you may need a ride given how cold it is," he spoke in that smooth baritone of his before you could ask what he was doing there.

This time it was your turn to roll your eyes. As if he didn't already know about you meeting up with Dan from Serena. You knew you couldn't trust her to keep her mouth shut. "Oh, I'm sure you were just 'in the area'," you said as he got out, holding the door open for you while shooting Dan a smug look that said "I get to have more time with them than you do".

"I guess I'll just catch up with you later, then," Dan grumbled as he watched you disappear into the back of the limo, clearly not too pleased about his meet-up with you getting cut short.

"Bye, Dan," you called out once Chuck got back in and the limo started to pull away, putting the window back up so the car wouldn't be affected by the cold chill in the air. You spoke again after a moment or so. "We need to stop by the penthouse before lunch so I can change."

"Why do you need to change? I think you look absolutely delectable in what you're wearing," Chuck purred out as his eyes flickered hungrily up and down your body where you sat in the backseat, taking in your choice of clothing.

"Nothing that I'm wearing is mine, Chuck. None of it matches, either," you began, your next sentence getting cut off by a squeal of surprise as he pulled you into his lap.

"You don't need to change. You look fine," he insisted as his hands held onto your hips, keeping you in his lap as he pulled you in for a needy kiss. "Besides, I'm sure the others would agree with me."

"Blair wouldn't. She'd think I look like an unorganized mess," you pointed out between kisses, instinctively tilting your head to the side as he started to trail his mouth down your jaw to your neck.

"Well, she's just going to have to deal with it, because we're not stopping." Chuck was a man of his word. Rather than taking you back to the penthouse so you could get changed, he took you in the backseat instead before you met with the rest of your partners for lunch.

Ever the gentleman, he opened the door for you once you got there and wrapped an arm snugly around your waist so your legs wouldn't give out, knowing how weak they currently were from your earlier activities. You were just happy the scarf you had on was hiding the fresh hickeys on your neck.

Everyone had the expected response to seeing you wear their clothes. Serena thought you looked amazing regardless, Blair questioned your taste minus the shirt you had on (and that was only because it belonged to her), and Nate had to be told who's clothes they were by Serena after commenting on how familiar they looked.

"Why couldn't you just put on your own clothes this morning?" Nate questioned in confusion, his head tilted slightly to the side in a way that you all agreed made him look like a puppy dog. A golden retriever, to be exact.

"Because I couldn't find any this morning when I looked, and I didn't want to be late to meet Dan." Noticing the scowl on Chuck's face at your words, you added, "Oh, relax. And unclench your jaw before you crack a tooth."

Serena giggled at the interaction before reaching her hand across the table to rest on top of yours. "Well, I think our stuff looks good on you. After all, sharing is caring, right?"

You couldn't argue with her there. Sharing was caring, especially in your case. And given just how much you loved your partners and the dynamic you shared with them, you wouldn't have it any other way.

End notes: I know there wasn't a big section with the actual njbc but I'm always eager to write more for them if y'all want!

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[canmom]

This an interesting angle. I've never been particularly taken with trying to determine True Art from False Art on the basis of specific qualities of the piece.

(I did ok-ish but not exceptionally on the AI art quiz, probably with a slight bias for misattributing human pieces as AI ones - like many other respondees, I found the Impressionist pieces hardest to distinguish, since they very much play to the AI's strengths.)

There are many different ways you could describe "art" as a human activity, I'm sure there's a post somewhere where I make a list, but a really big one is its communicative function - one purpose of art is to somehow pass on some aspect of our 'inner world' to another person, through a lossy and limited channel.

That a signal can be easily imitated doesn't mean it doesn't carry contextual information. For example, I could ask a yes/no question of enormous emotional importance - "should I take the shot", "has the baby been born", "will you go out with me", "am I a good girl" - and be answered with either "yes" or "no". It would be trivial to generate a machine which randomly substitutes for this communication - that's basically all a magic eight-ball is.

The amount of information that can be contained in an image of a given size and colour depth can also be calculated. For example, the number of fullscreen images that would fill my current monitor at 8 bits per channel would be 2^(3440 × 1440 × 24) ≈ 3 × 10^35788372 - about 15 megabytes uncompressed. It's a number that seems astronomically huge, though effectively the amount of information is much less than you'd calculate since all the likely pixels are correlated. The same goes for other art forms, like novels (encoded as, say, UTF-8 strings or PDFs) or pieces of music (encoded as sound files, MIDI, MuseScore files, etc.). The exact number is complicated, you end up getting into Kolmogorov complexity and shit like that, but the point is that it's finite.

If we want to claim that all the information about a human life that Hofstadter describes (grief, despair etc.) is in there somehow, we're claiming that this finitely many bits is adequate to capture all the nuances of a human life. I don't know that that's true!

This, however, doesn't really seem to align with how we interact with art. Human production and exchange of "art" is a social act - I would describe it as being continuous with "play". When we observe a piece, we are opening a communications channel - at least a one-way channel. The person on the other side sends some information into the channel, and we process it somehow.

Since it is a lossy channel with limited information, we must infer various things about the other mind on the opposite side of it. If I show you an artwork that I made, we might have a conversation about how I did it, why I made the choices I did. If I feel something looking at the work, I might imagine that you felt something similar, and designed the piece to evoke it intentionally (a guess that will often be wrong but sometimes still productive). I might also look at what specific choices you have made, compare them to the choices others have made in the same medium, etc etc.

We form these inferences on the basis of experience - the more you learn about making art, the more you learn to appreciate other peoples' art and vice versa. And we project these experiences, usually plausibly, onto other artists.

(Perhaps I am saying all art is in a sense performance art? Seems like a tasty soundbite, though I'm not fully sure I wanna commit to it.)

I'm not meaning to claim that a computer couldn't simulate this kind of 'how did you make it' interaction too. This line of argument was anticipated by Turing in his original 1950 paper on the 'imitation game' that someone links in the comments above, where he describes a poet undergoing a viva voce test interrogating their word choices, and argues that a computer might be programmed to give convincing answers to such a test. I imagine he's right - for a paper written in 1950 he makes some surprisingly sharp predictions for how future AIs might be made, such as the idea that an AI could be built to be 'educated' like a child. (He also thought the evidence for ESP is 'overwhelming', but hey, can't win 'em all).

A lot of the context around art would be quite easy to forge, had you a mind to. For example, suppose I go to a film screening, and someone is introduced as the director so we can all clap them. Did they really direct it? I don't know! You could totally send an actor. Less conspiratorially, if someone says they made an artistic choice for x or y reason, they could be lying about it, or misremembering, or most likely oversimplifying a complex and inscrutable process down to a simpler story.

At some point you have to take something like that on trust, or else simply accept that being lied to about it is part of the game you're there to play! (c.f. Oshi no Ko.)

Anyway, the sudden arrival of a new process that can produce, at least sometimes, near-indistinguishable output to various types of communication, throws a spanner in the process. If we're feeling uncharitable, we could call it something like a DDOS attack, stuffing the channels with spurious inputs that don't fit our design assumptions. I think that goes too far, though. AI gen doesn't preclude communication, but it does need we need to think differently about what is being communicated.[1]

So to consider that last question, if art is like a game, could you train an AI art to produce art that is meaningful to humans only by 'playing against' itself, like AlphaGo Zero? I don't think this is so likely. The rules of Go are strict and well-defined; the rules of what humans find meaningful are inseparable from the history of interacting with other humans, which is why art constantly evolves. Training an AI on existing human artworks is training it to compress and interpolate/extrapolate that dataset; training it to optimise for "making novel art that expresses something in a form that its interlocutor could understand" requires it to be interacting with someone.

You could imagine a training process with an "artist" AI and a "critic" AI (a sort of more sophisticated GAN, where the adversary is optimising not to distinguish human/AI art but to judge it on aesthetic grounds) - but how would you get the "critic" AI? Whose taste would it express?

Admittedly, the developers of image generators are constantly refining their models in response to users, so they are being optimised to appeal to someone, not just interpolate existing artworks. But I think it would be very hard to remove humans from the equation entirely. And the present means of providing feedback to the AI are very crude.

For an AI to learn from interacting with other AI (and the world), I feel like you'd need a whole new process that isn't about minimising loss against input-output pairs. Romantically, I imagine it would be closer to how humans learn from life, but I don't really know what will 'work' in the end.

below: some other remarks that were excised from the main post.

[1] We can view AI image gen as another channel for communication between humans, with its own set of inferences to make. If someone shows me a picture they've generated with AI, there's no point asking why they painted this bit that way, but I might approach them more as a curator and ask why they chose this generation over others, or how they went about prompting it.

The AI artists who go to the trouble of finetuning their models with LoRAs for a specific end goal, or using more involved processes with multiple stages of generation, probably have most to 'say', either through the work they generate or how they'd discuss it. (I find it very endearing when someone trains an AI to serve up a hyperspecific fetish.) And the more I know about how AI images are generated, the more I can probably have a productive conversation.

In this light, the "problem" of AI is mostly one of deception, insofar as it tries to look like something else and thereby tell a misleading story. That's probably a big reason why why it brings the rancour it does, although it doesn't explain all of it. It's not (usually) a forgery of a specific human's work, but it is designed to forge spurious communications in this channel in general, so the channel is 'noisier' - and this could be thought to undermine many of the contexts, i.e. the operating narratives and social games, which are why we exchange art in the first place. Over time, we'll presumably end up renegotiating the 'games', and spawning new ones, as humans always have.

And of course, the issue of provenance and plagiarism in art - particularly when prestige and money get involved - long predates AI and is full of all sorts of bizarre contortions when you look at it closely.

More intriguing is whether there is some possibility for "real communication" between humans and AIs - that is, could there be an AI output that does respect the 'rules of the game' in some way. This is harder to imagine! Like, if you ask why we aren't solipsists, we could point to how much we resemble other humans and say, all things considered, seems very unlikely we aren't the same type of entity. But I only know 'what it's like to be' a human. Conversely, while I know a reasonable amount about how AIs work, the attention mechanism and latent-space vectors and so on (thanks 3blue1brown), the analogy isn't so clear anymore, so I don't even know how I'd determine whether there even is a 'what is it like to be' under all the 'noise' of communications aggressively optimised to fit the patterns of something a human might say. If there is, it's probably very alien to all of my experience.

Ironically I feel like the current model of 'AI', which teaches us to regard any generated output with suspicion of having 'nothing behind it', would make it harder for any 'real', agentive, subjective-experience-having AI to make itself known to us. But perhaps it's good that we're forced to sharpen our criteria of what we're looking for out of these things.

Anyway, all of this is probably just idle imaginings, because nobody can figure out how to make anything like enough money to justify the exorbitant costs of training and operating AIs, so at some point this whole speculative bubble will go up in smoke and whatever AIs continue to be in use will likely remain about as good as they are today, or stupider - at least until the next 'AI summer' when a new paradigm emerges.

Thinking about that that "slop accelerationism" post, and also Scott's AI art Turing test.

I also hope AI text- and image-generation will help shake us loose from cheap bad art. For example, the fact that you can now generate perfectly rendered anime girls at the click of button kindof suggests that there was never much content in those drawings. Though maybe we didn't really need AI for that insight? It feels very similar to that shift in fashion that rejected Bouguereau-style laboriously-rendered pretty girls in favor of more sketchy brush work.

But will we really be so lucky that only things that we already suspected was slop will prove valueless?

As usual with AI, Douglas Hofstadter already thought about this a long time ago, in an essay from 2001. Back in 1979 he had written

Will a computer program ever write beautiful music? Speculation: Yes, but not soon. Music is a language of emotions, and until programs have emotions as complex as ours, there is no way a program will write anything beautiful. There can be "forgeries"—shallow imitations of the syntax of earlier music—but despite what one might think at first, there is much more to musical expression than can be captured in syntactical rules. There will be no new kinds of beauty turned up for a long time by computer music-composing programs. Let me carry this thought a little further. To think—and I have heard this suggested—that we might soon be able to command a preprogrammed mass-produced mail-order twenty-dollar desk-model "music box" to bring forth from its sterile [sic!] circuitry pieces which Chopin or Bach might have written had they lived longer is a grotesque and shameful misestimation of the depth of the human spirit. A "program" which could produce music as they did would have to wander around the world on its own, fighting its way through the maze of life and feeling every moment of it. It would have to understand the joy and loneliness of a chilly night wind, the longing for a cherished hand, the inaccessibility of a distant town, the heartbreak and regeneration after a human death. It would have to have known resignation and world-weariness, grief and despair, determination and victory, piety and awe. In it would have had to commingle such opposites as hope and fear, anguish and jubilation, serenity and suspense. Part and parcel of it would have to be a sense of grace, humor, rhythm, a sense of the unexpected and of course an exquisite awareness of the magic of fresh creation. Therein, and therein only, lie the sources of meaning in music.

I think this is helpful in pinning down what we would have liked to be true. Because in 1995, somebody wrote a program that generates music by applying simple syntactic rules to combine patterns from existing pieces, and it sounded really good! (In fact, it passed a kind of AI turing test.) Oops!

The worry, then, is that we just found out that the computer has as complex emotions as us, and they aren't complex at all. It would be like adversarial examples for humans: the noise-like pattern added to the panda doesn't "represent" a gibbon, it's an artifact of the particular weights and topology of the image recognizer, and the resulting classification doesn't "mean" anything. Similarly, Arnulf Rainer wrote that when he reworked Wine-Crucifix, "the quality and truth of the picture only grew as it became darker and darker"—doesn't this sound a bit like gradient descent? Did he stumble on a pattern that triggers our "truth" detector, even though the pattern is merely a shallow stimulus made of copies of religious iconography that we imprinted on as kids?

One attempt to recover is to say Chopin really did write music based on the experience of fighting through the maze of life, and it's just that philistine consumers can't tell the difference between the real and the counterfeit. But this is not very helpful, it means that we were fooling ourselves, and the meaning that we imagined never existed.

More promising, maybe the program is a "plagiarism machine", which just copies the hard-won grief, despair, world-weariness &c that Chopin recorded? On it's own it's not impressive that a program can output an image indistinguishable from Gauguin's, I can write such a program in a single line:

print("https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gauguin,Paul-Still_Life_with_Profile_of_Laval-_Google_Art_Project.jpg")

I think this is the conclusion that Hofstadter leans towards: the value of Chopin and the other composers was to discover the "template" that can then be instantiated to make many beautiful music pieces. Kind of ironically, this seems to push us back to some very turn-of-the-20th-century notion of avant-garde art. Each particular painting that (say) Monet executed is of low value, and the actual valuable thing is the novel art style...

That view isn't falsified yet, but it feels precarious. You could have said that AlphaGo was merely a plagiarism machine that selected good moves from historical human games, except then AlphaGo Zero proved that the humans were superfluous after all. Surely a couple of years from now somebody might train an image model on a set of photographs and movies excluding paintings, and it might reinvent impressionism from first principles, and then where will we be? Better start prepare a fallback-philosophy now.

[minu-moni]

They translated Peri’s name to Pervi in Brazil because “Periwinkle” in Portuguese is “pervinca”, I hate it, it sounds like a country name 😭

this also means Irep’s name’s gonna be “Ivrep” which sounds like a government institute and medication 🫠

[captainmaxatx]

Late Mermay idea!

Orca mer Ghost in an aquarium but he is almost always hiding and quite depressed so the aquarium decide to give him a little more enrichment.

With humans lack of mer knowledge they come to the conclusion that because orcas eat seals then surely an orca mer would eat a seal mer. They decide that during closing hours (to avoid guests seeing the blood bath that will surely follow) they will drop a live seal mer into ghosts tank so he has the natural experience of hunting instead of just being fed slabs of meet.

But mer’s don’t eat other mers, regardless of secondary species.

So when seal mer soap is dropped into his tank, ghost just thinks he’s being given a very energetic handsome roommate.

And the humans are confused as to why ghost hasn’t eaten the seal mer yet

[nevermeyers]

people need to calm down their delulu wishes and start focusing on the canon narrative. sorcerer world has always been about strength and cruelty. the becoming a monster in order to win conversation needs to be here and it's perfectly fine. one thing is you don't liking it, or don't liking how they disrespect someone's body, specially bc the majority of cultures do respect it and mourn it after death; it's normal to be repulsed, since gojo was ever seen as a human, that's the loneliness the strongest carries. the other thing is saying it doesn't make sense, became it narratively does. if you don't understand it, maybe read hidden inventory arc again, shibuya arc too maybe, or isn't enough what happened to megs for you to understand? jjk was always about an unfair and cruel world and sukuna won't be defeated by the power of friendship.

and, friendly reminder that this manga started by yuuji's body being used and dehumanized in order to contain and kill sukuna. but y'all don't seem to ever care about him.

[crystallizedday]

HELL YEAH!!

Gonna use this as an excuse to ramble a bit cause I love this lil fella so much…

Like I keep saying

Fusionfall has the BEST version of his character. It is NOT even close.

There’s just

SO much more to his character.

He HAD a bit of character in his debut episode

But Fusionfall makes him so much more well-rounded.

Yeah, you’ll occasionally have the world third person talk for some reason

But he’s like

Actually smart.

He actually STUDIES stuff related to magic.

He KNOWS his shit.

He is portrayed as THE most knowledgeable magic character in the entire game

Which

Says a LOT considering the roster.

He’s also incredibly crafty

Kinda being on par with the likes of the KND with how he utilizes average materials to benefit himself (even if uh… it most likely doesn’t work out for him since he’s trying to make himself look intimidating, but he’s trying, & that’s all that matters to me).

He’s incredibly snarky & smug, to such a pathetically adorable degree.

He keeps throwing around names like “child,” “human,” & “mortal” to make himself look like the tougher presence, even though he’s completely powerless in this point of Fusionfall’s story & he KNOWS it.

He copes SO hard, & it’s just adorable OQMWOSMSOXMMWOX

Not to mention

Just

I love when he genuinely gets invested in shit

Like his fuckin one sided beef with Billy.

Bro wants that kid DEAD, & it’s hilarious.

He FEELS.

He will try to be strictly logical & focus on the task at hand, but he STILL lets his emotions get to him.

Hell

Jack can’t even talk to Demongo himself cause Demmy is SO FUCKIN PETTY about his loss to the samurai that he doesn’t wanna even hear a PEEP out of the guy.

He’s so emotionally driven

& it’s only emphasized in his nano lines.

He isn’t like Aku, who is only fueled by hatred, pleasure in the suffering of others, & the occasional fear from getting killed by the samurai.

No.

When Demongo panics

He PANICS.

When he’s heartbroken

He starts SOBBING.

He can even get romantically attached if the stars ever aligned in his favor.

That’s not me being biased.

That’s just what his nano lines directly imply

& considering each nano is written to speak in a way that’s pretty much canon to their og counterpart (including Aku)

Any implications from the nano lines can apply to the original counterparts as well

& that is AMAZING to me, ya know?

That this DEMON

This guy who was birthed from the PIT OF HATE

Is written in a way where he can actively express a wide variety of emotions

But only seldom lets them show to ensure he can keep up appearances, just as he’s trying to do for at least 1/3rd of all his missions in-game.

He THINKS with his HEART!!

THIS is Fusionfall’s take on Demongo

& I LOVE him so much…

He is SUCH an adorable & interesting character that I wish we got to see more of.

I would’ve loved to have seen the original devs flesh out his character a bit more.

Like

Could you imagine if the og game touched upon the idea that he wasn’t working for Aku anymore?

That he at some point decided to be his OWN villain once Aku wanted nothing to do with him anymore?

& it makes him double down on keeping up appearances & growing stronger up until the invasion happened?

That would’ve been SO COOL to see such a concept unfold…

& maybe see Demongo be conflicted about whether he should return to Aku or not since he had some vital information on the resistance that the Shogun of Sorrow would have absolutely rewarded him for offering up, hence why Demongo did not confirm or deny working for Aku when the player & Jack question him on the subject.

Cause he legit doesn’t know his stance at that moment.

He’d love to have his safety ensured by Aku, but he had also grown to value his independence as well.

GOD, this game should have never been cancelled, bro…

The POTENTIAL!!!

I've been seeing alot of hear me out cakes so I've decided to make my own

[triglycercule]

killer eating food in front of horror as a way to taunt him. duuuude do you see this delectable parfait he has in his hands right now. he just put a spoonful in his mouth. horror is scratching at his own arms right now (trying not to jump this bitchass). killer can't even taste it LMAOOO another bite ‼️ imagine not being able to eat food 🤣🤣🤣 killer can't even taste it and enjoy the food but horror can't even EAT food

then horror grabs the parfait glass out of his hands and oh killer you should probably teleport away before horror does to you what undyne did to his eye

[xxplastic-cubexx]

sorry if you've already mentioned but what (re?)ignited your love of comics/x-men/cherik? curious because there are so many different adaptations of them

i think im gonna speak for a few (or a lot of) people when i say that TL;DR the wolverine x deadpool movie that came out this summer is what pulled me back into comics and i COULD leave it there but i will go into excruciating and unnecessary detail instead because i love an origin story and i love oversharing.

under the cut tho because im nice sometimes (there's also wxdp doodles in here. if you want to see that)

ironically (and probably commonly), growing up i was more of an avengers kid. Kinda. Loosely <- binge watched the cartoons and movies and read copious amounts of comics and fics and i am hoarding fanart in my old dresser as we speak ok 'loosely' is a modest lie.

embarrassingly i remember getting into discus cause of captain america LMAO so yeah needless to say i was a Humble Fan- me joining my school's comic class/club didnt help either (shoutout to my teach from that she was the realest one out there for. A Multitude of reasons). she definitely is was inspires me to even draw still and make comics and i often think bout the tips i learned from her class tbh she was great

back to the movies t and comics tho, i got into em because my brother would offer to take me and that's how we'd hang out (i rarely saw movies in theaters and i even more rarely went anywhere as a teenager. still kinda like that today tbh ooops) and yk. it just snowballed after that.

my brother and i have always liked comics- he just more than me for a while (though he still very much loves comics and As We Know From My Posts we still talk about them whenever i see him To An Exhausting Degree)

durin then i was really into stony and i have a few surviving doodles i made but those are between me and god. and anyone who asks tbh LOL

'snap can you make this related to x-men again this is long' ok so fast forward to This Summer again I Still Don't Really See Movies but my brother offered to take me and this was the first time i'd actually seen an x-men movie in full

as a kid i only remember seeing the 'perfection' scene between erik and raven in first class while i was channel surfing. pretty sure i changed the channel after seeing mystique naked cause i was scared my parents would get mad at me if they caught me watching it LOL

BUT MOVING ON As A Kid i think it's also natural you'll sometimes watch 92 if it's on And I Did though evidently it didn't stick too hard (i do remember really liking beast and gambit though.... still do really): my knowledge of x-men was. INCREDIBLY sparse. like diabolically so so i didnt have too much expectations (aside from the fact i vaguely liked deadpool beforehand).

tbh i dont know why my bro never took me to see any of the x-men movies. it's not like he doesn't Also like x-men (90% sure nightcrawler's his favorite but my brother will be caught dead saying he has absolute favorites like that)- he owns a bitch load of deadpool comics/omnibus sets too (of which ive read over the years and reread this year) but Shrug moving on

Much Like Most Of The Internet i fell down the rabbit hole that way. i have some doodles i made a couple days after seeing WxDP that i now have an excuse to throw at all of you Look And Perceive

and so. As I Do. i got curious and told myself i'd binge watch all the x-men movies the week before i went back to school And Then I Did ft. My Brother Sometimes and then i said i'd binge watch all of '92 and And I Did That ft. My Brother Sometimes But Less So and now we're here. currently watching Evolution...

once i got to school i realized i lived near a comic shop and started getting into the comics that way (the first ones i got since going down this rabbit hole was Magneto Was Right!, The Resurrection of Magneto, and The Trial of Magneto. if you were curious !!!!! clearly i didnt care too much about context i just needed to see My Guy jelvejlkvj i have no regrets and Evidently ive read more since)

i'm pretty sure what dragged me into cherik specifically was the fact i saw a clip of The Famous ending to 92 where erik's aghast at the notion jean even has to question his love for charles. i think that was what officially had me refocus my lens on them: not a single poolverine thought after that LOL (all the cherik posting i saw on twitter definitely helped too but that was the nail in the coffin for any other interests i had: i was locked into cherik and x-men in general now)

that clip specifically, i was surprised at the fact they- frequently even- have the x-men franchise say erik loves charles and vice versa so bluntly. even if it's not meant to be romantic, i fear im just a fan of how casually the word's thrown around with them two and i got tender bout it all. Then Yk. i just live for the drama. the hilarity even. the sincerity .... they make me sick if i think of them too long so im gonna end it here

before i go tho ironically enough, the first x-men issue i owned was This one (story a this is that while stuck in some wacko dimension charles accidentally gets himself trapped in logan's mind while utilizing his astral projection. if you were curious). pretty sure i got it for free with another comic set i got years ago since our old comic shop loved to do that, but it's poetic aint it. maybe ill doodle something referencing it..

i should probably look into finishing this arc someday im Dummy curious to even know how it started and how it ends.....

[agirlinthegalaxy]

It's been rolling around in my brain the last few days for some reason, but I still hate the family backstory reveals for Sophie and Eliot. I've seen some of the meta for it, but quite frankly, it still makes no sense. If it had been something actually thought of and intentional in the original, I think it could have been so fascinating. I mean, Sophie's willing abandonment of Astrid to contrast with Nate's loss of Sam or Eliot's adoption in contrast with Hardison's and Parker's? Could have been excellent! But they came out of nowhere in Redemption and don't work with these characters.

Sophie was still actively using the fucking alias that she met Astrid under! She met with someone from her past on the show! Like. Quite frankly, that one is unequivocally bullshit that they made up and threw in and pretended could fit with the established canon. (And I'm sorry, but the idea of Sophie abandoning Astrid and never telling Nate about her just... So much of Nate's trauma was rooted in the loss of Sam, and I think that introducing this element after he's gone and unable to respond to it taints Sophie and Nate's relationship in a way bc I'm not exactly sure how Nate would've responded to learning about this but I think that it's something he'd have needed to know. I don't know how to fully express my thoughts on that but yeah.)

As for Eliot, I don't like the adoption aspect literally at all. The way that he would interact with his family and the memory of his family would be different, and I think that it's flat out ridiculous to think that he'd have never mentioned it to the team in the original show, especially when dealing with the kid cases. (I also dislike the biracial adoption as its own element because if Eliot was actually raised by Black parents in the... idk what 80s/90s? That just. doesn't feel congruent with how they write Eliot interacting with PoC, not necessarily in a bad way, but babe, he's written like a white southern man raised in a specific kind of culture that does not jell with that. It also makes Eliot look... really bad that he was apparently raised with the knowledge of how fucked up the military was and his parents' history and made the choices that he did.) Like the show may not have explicitly stated it but the implication of that relationship was vastly fucking different throughout the original show.

Just. These were not backstories that were congruent with their depiction and characters in the original show, and they're also just moves that I don't particularly like or find interesting directions for those characters. There's also something to be said about how it was apparently unacceptable for a woman to not have kids or someone not reconciling with their biological family when that was something that the original show handled a lot better. Out of all the directions to take Sophie and Eliot's stories, that's just not really one that I think was a good idea.

[soup-is-here]

Mouthwashing Spoilers

TW: Addiction and Self Harm

I wanna go on about Swansea's final monologue but it's hard to put into words, but I'm gonna try anyways cause it's a short, but strong story about autonomy again. This post ended up significantly longer than I wanted though

It's the autonomy to choose the "less healthy" option because it's appealing to you. It's the moral assignment to normality and stability. An alcoholic is an alcoholic by choice, technically, but do they owe us otherwise? Is it morally reprehensible to enjoy taking LSD at a party? Should we see someone as less than because they relax with a xanax instead of a hot shower? It's not healthy. We know that. We've seen anti-drug ad after ad after ad. But is that the part that's morally wrong, in and of itself? Does enjoying the drugs and chaos make Swansea a worse person?

Like him talking about his entire life and ending it by saying between the "stable" "normal" life and him waking up every morning with a new hangover, he preferred the latter. People always talk about getting clean and fixing their lives and Swansea did it! He did the thing "good men" do! A wife and kids and a trade job and sobriety! He was doing it! He was finally "worth" something!

And he hated it! I mean I don't know if he actually hated/despised it, but he misses his previous life. He misses drugs and partying and living like you might not wake up the next day. He said the thing that changed him was seeing himself dead in a ditch under the bright beam of a streetlight. Now he's looking down the barrel of a gun. And as he looks down it, he looks back. That was his preference. It felt good to be like that. And he wouldn't be here if he stayed there

We always have a narrative about drugs or gambling or sleeping around where a person suddenly realizes that they aren't "doing anything" with their life and becomes stable and it's always played like addiction is a false pleasure. Swansea got to the stability people said would be the real pleasure of life and that just wasn't true for him. One bad paycheck could've been the difference between his stable life and falling apart anyways. His lifestyle was going to kill him someday apparently, yet he's staring down the barrel of a gun at his steady trade job to feed his wife and kids.

I don't know quite how to word it but Swansea is the poster child for rehabilitation. There's this weight to him saying his alcoholic period was the best time of his life. Like it just hits at that pang that makes people wear DARE shirts while smoking weed and post those videos of smoking 100 cigarettes at once. Anti-vaping ads tell you about the damage they do to your body but everyone knows that already. Everyone knows "this is what your brain looks like on drugs." I smoke medical marijuana and it isn't good for my lungs but it's good for my pain. Doing drugs isn't good for me and I know that and that's sorta the point sometimes.

I don't know it's just this weird pang where I know what Swansea means, just not to nearly the same extent. I don't have an addiction so I don't think I could fully understand it. Maybe a better thing I could relate it to for myself is self harm. It's not healthy sure, but who do I owe health? Myself? Other people? And what is healthy? Is it feeling better now? Is it resisting now and feeling worse for it until it stops? What if the coping skills I learn make it worse? What if they make it better? Do I want it to get better? Does Swansea want to get better? What would better feel like to either of us?

Who knows until you try. Swansea got a collared shirt, a mortgage, and a credit card. He got a job and a wife and kids. He got sober. He got healthier, depending on your definition.

But did he feel better? He's looking down a barrel of a gun and he has to decide if he feels better. It doesn't seem like he regrets his new life. He says he wants his kids to be better than him. He wants good things to happen for them. He saw himself as one bad slip away from falling again. I don't think he felt better though. I think he got healthier. He likely would've ended up in the ditch he dreamt about, but we don't know that. We also don't know if that's what he'd prefer. But, we do know he got healthier, depending on your definition.

[ilikedetectives]

Hi Colin, what's the endgame for Kalius (and Minty)? Does Kalius take a Balduran title at all or is it just Absolute power?? 😇

Hello hello! Minthy and Kalius become the Absolute, then they *call drops* on that illithid throne after Kalius proposes (they're practically engaged 7th time prior with all the rings on Minthara's fingers). After that they begin their conquest of Menzoberranzan and get Kalius' cambion wings back from Mizora (Kalius made a deal with Mizora a long time ago: trading her cambion powers and wings so the person she loved the most no longer had to suffer from terminal illness' pain).

Then things happen and Kalius reincarnates into Lily, The Dark Urge.

[blujayonthewing]

me: hm I keep wanting to build outfits around tank tops and camis but I only have a few right now in just a couple colors and they're pretty worn out, luckily something like a solid-color base layer should be pretty easy to just get a bunch of online

amazon: cool yeah would you like a five pack of the camis you want that go up to what is listed as a 2XL but is still at least two sizes too small, or would you like one Just Perfect For My Special Body brand plus tank top with wide straps and a built in foam bra for the same price

me: actually you know what why don't I just set myself on fire instead

[lixbf]

i was so productive in bg3 today fjsvcjdhd