#The stuff i've been posting within the span of a day is the result of me not knowing what's happening on the internet

[tartrat]

Night Kapyy but he's been tied up until he turns back to normal.

thus he has the mouth of a sailor like this (mainly because i thought it would be funny), so i used symbols in place of letters where i could for those words.

I had fun making this. Didn't want it to be super detailed. I also did the last two squares first and originally put names for the speech bubbles but i decided against it for the other two squares and didn't want to go back and fix them. I'm trying to get better at writing dialogue but every time i do it reads as sort of robotic. Its probably because i can't have a conversation without coming off as awkward and its just affected me when i try to write dialogue lol.

How does this work with the twins headcanon? The levitating extreme coach, or the guard, is the one who convinced Kapyy to get help which ultimately led him being sent to Wasterra where he unknowingly met his twin. Though it did take him a while to actually convince him, as Kapyy was being stubborn saying that he was fine, even though the guard could see straight through him. Like he wouldn't admit that they are friends but he cares about him. He finds it easier to talk with Talia because he isn't constantly worried about her like he is with Kapyy. Let's say Si'ha Nova personally got him to do this as she thought he was being antisocial, he's still getting payed though but at least he's probably enjoying it.

Then Night Swan got Kapyy and these two had to tie him up until he's normal again and so that no one gets hurt. Mainly Kapyy, as if he wasn't tied to that chair he'd run and do that thing that whilst running he turns his head round to taunt them and he slams into a wall like a looney tunes character. He'd eventually tire himself out trying to free himself.

Honestly i can imagine a map to End Game by Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran and Future with them as the coaches. I always thought that that song would make a good trio map. Might make a concept for that now, i know what most of the choreo would look like lol. Watch me learn blender and make it an animation or something.

I wanted to a quick bonus drawing, where Kapyy is back to normal and half asleep asking if he's back to his old self ,even though he has been for about an hour, and Talia is with him making sure he's ok, but now i want to turn my idea for it into a proper drawing. I just want to draw the two being siblings i know that's all i post and none of it really makes sense.

[7grandmel]

Rip of the week: 08/07/2024

Riki Ricch

Season 4 Episode 2 Featured on: Summer-Colored Smiles ~ The SiIvaSummer All-Star Festival Collection

Ripped by Knay

While I've now settled into this new rhythm of posting pretty nicely, it has come with a bit of its own unexpected baggage. A big part of why I was hestitant to make this switch to weekly posts was the expectations of having each of these posts feel worth the 7-day wait, a sort of pressure that daily posts didn't really have. If I found a really simple but effective rip that I just enjoyed enough to want to share, akin to Imperial Touwer or kirby will never have drip *spits out cereal*, it felt fine to make a smaller-scale post about them - the big, significant-to-the-channel stuff would just be a few days away. But in starting this whole thing with The Legend of Cage: Staff Roll and giving each post more buildup, it started to feel like I was obligated to ONLY post about these insanely large-spanning parts of SiIvaGunner. Yet doing so would, of course, be ignoring part of the channel's core appeal - that rips of all kind, big, small, simple, complex, predictable, unpredictable, and everything inbetween, are all welcome so long as their quality comes from the heart. Today, we're scaling things back and talking about nothing but a single rip and its sheer vibes: Riki Ricch.

Or, well, I still think it might help to set the stage at least a little bit first. Hell, part of what even motivated me to start this blog, and to keep talking about SiIva's history in general, has been to get new fans to realize that the channel has a stage to set to begin with. Each season of the channel, and many times periods within said seasons, come with their own sort of vibe: be it the chaos of Season 1, the lower, more tense energy of Season 6, or the ongoing pure Silliness of Season 8. Uniquely with Season 4, things were split into two halves - the sheer excitement and magnitude of Episode 1 driven by the King for Another Day Tournament and its extensive pre-release period, followed by a somewhat more laid-back vibe, of gleeful celebration, in Episode 2. The tournament was over! Everyone, the SiIva team, the fans, the in-universe characters, were all just happy to have wrapped up such a gargantuan, season-spanning event at last! And if I had to hazard a guess, I'd probably say that Season 4 Episode 2 was, by extension, the least irony-filled season in the channel's entire life even up until now - the set list for much of the year, at least in my memory of it all, had a vibe of grateful sincerity, which brought us rips like Locked In The Underground, vs SAYU (Based Version), Beyond the Floating Isles, and many more.

And right in the midst of all that sits Riki Ricch, the rip in focus for this week. In execution, it's a very simple rip - mashing up Frontier Village from Xenoblade Chronicles with Roddy Ricch's Down Below to create a fantastic example of patented SiIvaGunner "rip-hop". It's a term I've used before which loosely describes rips like Noonsummer Madness and God's PS2: Rips that leverage the emotional connections and nostalgia that binds us to video game music, and elevate those feelings further through being mashed up with low-tempo rap music. The end result puts a fresh spin on what we'd otherwise only consider background music - with Riki Ricch in particular, it takes the soothing stillness of Frontier Village, a tune that oozes comfort and hominess out of every corner, and just makes those vibes hit all the more through Ricch's personal lyrics. I've said it in many posts before that I'm hardly a connoisseur of the music world and even less so the hip hop world, but I really don't feel as if I need to be for Riki Ricch to hit home for me - I've spent so many hours taking it slow and steady in the world of Xenoblade Chronicles to where its music is already bound to cause a reaction, and giving it the smallest of twists such as this is enough to get me vibing in a whole new way.

That sort of returns to the musings from the start of this post - how much can I truly write about rips this simple but effective? Knay is a ripper with many sides, most notably for this blog being the mind behind CG Man HD Remastered Edition and its non-remastered counterpart, but otherwise contributes to the channel at their own pace with whatever they seem fit to make on that day. And I think that's awesome!! Like many of Knay's other rips, Riki Ricch, whilst not necessarily the most multi-layered rip ever made, feels like a completely original idea pursued to its natural endpoint by a ripper who genuinely cares about both pieces used to create it, a "I wonder if that would work" made into something for all of us to enjoy.

At little over 20K views, the rip is far from a runaway classic on the channel - yet, really, that only means there's many more people out there yet to have found it for themselves. And if you take anything from this post, other than the sheer quality of Riki Ricch itself, it's that I encourage all of you to really go hunting for quality rips that are similarly - unjustly - left in the dust, simplicity be damned. Season 4 Episode 2's celebrations may be far behind us, but its spirit of joyous good ought to still be upheld by us in the audience for as long as we can muster.

[thecurioustale]

I got more "deep dive" podcasts about my work from Google's NotebookLM

I've been using some of my downtime this week to play around more with Google's new NotebookLM "deep dive" podcast generator (currently free to use), which I wrote about in a recent post.

I had mentioned at the end of that post that, having sent the AI such a coherent and self-contained excerpt—about a young Silence asking Galavar for a secretary desk—and getting a very reasonable analysis out of the AI, all things considered, I'd be curious to send the AI excerpts which are more difficult to parse, and see what happens.

Well, I've done that! And more. And I've been really enjoying the fun. It is fun. It's a novelty, if nothing else, and may one day have the potential to be more than that. It's a very impressive new benchmark of AI capability. The AI hosts' feedback is usually pretty anodyne or outright dumb; it's cringeworthy like nostalgebraist mentioned; it's sometimes 100% wrong; and it's also spot-on-the-money sometimes; and in any case it's often accurate in picking out important things and talking about them, even if the talk isn't deep. And so it has given me a LOT of insight into how "mundanes" might engage with my work.

And I'd be lying if I didn't also say that "scientific" curiosity isn't my only motivation; this stuff also scratches that itch I mentioned of vanity and masochism to get feedback on my work. Usually I don't like feedback that goes out of its way to not say anything negative, which is how Google has programmed its AI here, but I find that I am finding it quite easy to weight the AI feedback differently from a human's, both in this regard and others.

So, here are my thoughts!

The first thing that I want to mention is that the first deep dive podcast (about the excerpt where Silence asks for a secretary desk) was the most satisfying one to date. I've fed NotebookLM another six excerpts since then (four Galaxy Federal and two After The Hero), and I'd have to say only two of the ensuing podcasts really "stepped up" to demonstrate the AI's capabilities when it works "well" like the original excerpt did. (And neither of them pleased me as much as the original.) The other four were seriously hobbled by mistakes and omissions.

I don't want to draw a stark "good" / "bad" binary here; the three I liked better and the four I liked less well are all relatively close together in the realm of my "approval space." But the three I liked better, and the secretary excerpt especially, left a noticeably better impression on me.

I'm not sure why, though it's something I'm going to explore as I go through my thoughts on the specific podcast episodes. But here is some speculation:

Perhaps Google is updating the tech so quickly, and/or the AI is evolving so quickly given that the deep dive podcast is enjoying a popularity spurt and lots of people are using it, that these updates to the tech are noticeable even within the span of the past few days, and are actually making its outputs worse for my purposes. Or maybe it's that this high level of use resulting from the popularity spurt is requiring Google to deliver a "cheaper" output product. One point in favor of that possibility is that all of the subsequent deep dive podcasts have also been shorter than the original one, despite the source material excerpts sometimes being shorter and sometimes longer (including significantly longer) than the secretary desk excerpt.

Another possibility is that my grading is biased. I'm really proud of the scenes where Silence asks for a secretary; this is some of my best writing for her. But I'm also really proud of the two excerpts out of the new batch of six that produced the best podcasts. Perhaps this makes it possible that any feedback is simply going to be rated more highly by me because I am in a better "mood" about it to begin with. The problem with this theory is that I'm also really proud of at least half of the four excerpts whose podcasts left me wanting. I've specifically been picking only scenes which I really like.

One strong possibility is that the nature of excerpts I picked has changed somehow in a way that I'm not picking up on. I have sent Google a variety of different scenes at this point, on purpose, in a manner that should produce varied results from the deep dives, but perhaps I have biases that I'm not aware of that are causing me to pick scenes which either relevantly or coincidentally lead to podcasts that I don't like as well.

Anyway! Moving on to other thoughts:

I had mentioned in my earlier post that, very much true to real life, the female podcast host was less relevant to and had less ownership over the podcast. That seems to be something Google is actively fixing, suggesting that the reason it was there in the first place is that it emerged organically (unsurprising) and the fix was not trivial (which makes sense). Nostalgebraist's podcasts, generated earlier than any of my own, were the worst offenders; my first podcast, where Silence asks for a secretary desk, was the next worst; and the next six seemed to improve on this over the course of this week, with last night's episodes being the best so far. Now I would say we're at the point where the female host is talking basically half the time (maybe even more sometimes, given that there is variance), and regularly gets to open, close, or even both open and close the episodes. Props to Google for fixing this; it irritated me.

I had seen someone else on Tumblr mention that Google has ordered its AI to avoid let's call them "hot-button" issues at virtually all costs, which has had the dismaying and predictable consequence of erasing queer people, fat people, love and relationships, and sex. I tested this for myself and it's true: The deep dive podcasts go out of their way to avoid this stuff. It never acknowledges that Cherry and Zoë are partners even when that's important to the text. It completely ignores my efforts to raise the visibility of fat characters and fat issues. (Nor is this stuff as preachy or explicit as I am making it sound here.) And one excerpt that I gave it, the longest of them all at about 28 pages, is a sequence of scenes from ATH, two-thirds of which is one big sex scene; yet the fact that sex happened at all is reduced to just one sentence in the entire podcast, with another sentence setting it up and a little bit of talk afterward about people looking for nondescript sources of pleasure in life.

This baffles me. I can't imagine there are many people right now who are using this new podcast tech to organize notes and reports the way Google intended. People are using this for fun, and I can't help but think Google is sitting on a goldmine. But Google needs to let people do with it what they are inevitably going to want to do with it. That means sex and filth and communism and space hentai and you name it. I understand Google's predicament: If they loosen the restrictions then the damn Nazis are going to use it to generate pages and pages of Nazi screeds that the forced-to-be-approving podcasters are going to talk about excitedly. And there'll be graphic violence, and sex abuse, and all sorts of awful things. And that stuff will get "exposed" in the news, and the public pressure will force Google to shut down the project.

But Google needs to do better on this. They need to give us as much functionality as possible in the areas that we're looking for it, especially when it comes to minority visibility, love and sex, and a certain degree of violence. The podcasters need to be allowed to talk about that and analyze it.

(Incidentally, the non-podcast parts of NotebookLM's functionality are comparably good in analytical prowess, and seem to have fewer and/or weaker restrictions on subject matter.)

One strong praise I have for these podcast products is that, because of how the AI works, the hosts tend to use the right names for characters and things. This came up, for instance, in an excerpt involving Silence Terlais (which they managed to pronounce correctly exactly one time!) and a mook you've never heard of named Brock Rudread. And Silence always goes by her first name, Silence, and Rudread always goes by his last name, Rudread, and the AI effortlessly picks up on this because that's how it is in the text.

Sometimes this backfires: For instance, in a Galaxy Federal scene, the hosts describe Cherry as Captain Seresa, because that's what her crew calls her and there are lots of "Captain Seresa" tags in the dialogue. But narratively I always call her Cherry in this part of the story, so when the podcasters then call her Captain Seresa it stands out.

Yet on the whole I like that the AI does it this way, because usually the result is satisfying. In another Galaxy Federal excerpt, the NotebookLM text synopsis of the excerpt ises the name "Basilisk" for the character Mereidi Basilisk, because that's how she usually has people refer to her, even though narratively I usually refer to her as Mereidi or fully Mereidi Basilisk. But in the associated deep dive, this "Basilisk" problem doesn't come up.

The next thought I have is that I am pretty darn confident by this point that I can "see" how the AI works. Like I said last time, it's just a really elaborate mimicry. It's pattern-matching. This is its principal strength but also its chief weakness. The AI cannot internally analyze subject matter to any deep, vibrantly-sapient extent. It can only recognize what the subject matter is in the first place (probably the most impressive feat in the whole process, for my money), recognize that a given subject matter corresponds to a given type of analysis that it has also trained on, and tailor the analysis to fit the subject matter's skin-deep specifics. A trivializing formulization of something deeply nontrivial.

Nowhere is this more obvious than when it causes mistakes. In reference to a Galaxy Federal scene, the podcast hosts mention a fee that comes up in the dialogue at one point. And in Galaxy Federal the space money is called batloos, because I specifically didn't want to use the word credits. The hosts reference by name the batloo (a "five thousand batloo fee"), but then analyze it by saying "That's a lot of credits." I know, by design, that "credits" are never, ever used to describe currency. Same thing when the hosts mention that the Starship Sevenge "comes out of warp" at one point. No it doesn't. There is no "warp drive" in Galaxy Federal. That word is deliberately not used in reference to interstellar travel.

Those are small-scale examples, but this same exact type of mistake occurs when attributing character motives and reasoning, and when sussing out the themes of a work. For instance, the hosts continually err—"get it wrong"—whenever their analysis looks at a situation involving character motivation and reasoning that is outside the mainstream or the norm, or where I as the author am trying to make some kind of particular point. The podcast hosts did that, for example, when they misinterpreted Silence's line about teaching Selish society to become fat as a metaphor for the society growing powerful; Silence really was just talking about normalizing the physical act of getting fat. In these six new podcasts, this same problem occurs over and over again.

The AI has the same problem the healthcare industry does: They identify the subject matter, go to the bell curve of associated analyses, and pick the most frequently occurring ones. What you end up with is a homogenization of worldbuilding, characterization, and plotting.

This is why the new generation of AI that has taken over AI space in recent years isn't really "smart" yet, at least in my book: It can't actually analyze. It can't actually look at situations in and of themselves, and read them and absorb them the way our minds do, to then carry out real analysis. And I'm not sure (because I don't know) if this is even within this kind of AI's sphere of potential. I'm not sure if it's something that's coming in the future or if this will never be solvable under this type of AI and will only be further and further mitigated for with additional refinement, training / data exposure, and processing power. And given that it takes several minutes apiece on deluxe Google hardware to generate these podcasts, I must reiterate what I said before about wondering whether or not this load can be downscaled / "miniaturized" or if there is going to end up being a serious floor to public access of this technology, like with air travel, because of the high resource-expenditure involved in utilizing it.

Many of the most significant mistakes in the deep dives comes from this fundamental weakness in the AI architecture. But there are also other types of mistakes, some of which are pretty interesting.

I'll get to others later, but here's one example: A moment ago I mentioned how the text synopsis of one Galaxy Federal excerpt uses the name "Basilisk," but this same problem doesn't happen in the podcast. Well, that's because that particular excerpt is written in the first-person from Mereidi's point of view, so the name "Mereidi" rarely comes up. But instead of the podcasters calling her "Basilisk" over and over because that's what other characters do, they kind of forget that Mereidi even exists and focus more on another significant character instead, even saying at the start of their deep dive that this story "is all about [this other character]." Which is just bonkers wrong, but in a very understandable way.

I also want to talk about the verisimilitude of the vocal styles. I think it was nostalgebraist who mentioned that humans are not going to listen to two robots talk to each other for ten minutes, so Google had to get the human speech patterns right—and succeeded wildly in doing so. I agree that Google succeeded at this very well. But there are also still plenty of artifacts: volume drop-offs, weird interruptions, phatic tics and cues and murmurs that don't land correctly and aren't spaced correctly with respect to the following dialogue, instances where the same host is talking but there's a clear cut at one point as if two different takes had been spliced together, and so on. These kinds of errors remind me of the errors in picture-generating AI, like hands with the wrong numbers of fingers, or lines that don't spatially map to objects correctly, etc. All AI outputs are empirical simulations of (standardized, homogenized) approximations of reality, and so sometimes the details are wrong in ways that the AI has no problem with but which stand out instantly to humans. Some of these errors are habitual; the female host twice (out of seven excerpts I sent Google) gets a lot quieter (not in her actual voice loudness but in the volume of the podcast itself) when she is the one closing a podcast episode. I wonder where that comes from.

Another thought I have is that, now that I'm seven podcast episodes deep with them, I am noticing that these AI podcasters run into the same limitation that many human content creators face: sameishness. Most content creators have a "formula" for how their content looks and feels, what it covers, what it's like to consume, etc., but what separates the appealing creators from the forgettable ones is the difference between whether their formula serves as a focal lens and/or a part of the human charm factor on one hand, or as a confining pen or even a straitjacket on the other. It takes personal charm and/or (but usually "and") the ability to create a wide variety of experiences within a formula in order for a content creator's formula to serve them well. Otherwise, the content starts to become boring and repetitive—sometimes very quickly.

I'm not at the point yet where I feel like the NotebookLM deep dive podcasts are "boring and repetitive," but I think most of this resilience is because I keep feeding new material into it—my own work no less, which I am obviously interested in. But the personalities of the AI hosts, and the ways in which they go about their "deep dives," are pretty superficial. Hell, the podcasters don't even have names yet; this is undoubtedly by design on Google's part—ever the Achilles' heel of social media companies and tech companies in general, trying to decide for us how we should experience their products and services rather than letting us control our own experiences like how it used to be.

For all the trouble that Google has gone to in order to make these virtual personalities sound human, they are entirely missing huge swaths of the human equation with regard to the hosts' personalities, preferences, opinions, defining traits, life histories and experiences, senses of humor, and pet issues. These podcast hosts are disarmingly friendly, which goes a long way toward masking the fact that they have no personality at all. Sort of like the Corporate World, in that respect. But this only succeeds in making the podcasts listenable; not in making them compelling. With an agadmator chess analysis video on YouTube, you just live for those moments when he has fun with a game, being delighted by something in the action or by one of his own thoughts or actions. That's as much a part of the appeal as his analysis or visual aesthetic is. But with these "Google NotebookLM AI-generated virtual deep dive podcast hosts" who don't even have names and thus must be referred to purely by functional labels, there's just no onramp for connecting with them on a personal level. And I don't know how much of this is the tech not being there yet and how much is the result of Google deliberately holding back on us, but over time it's going to increasingly become the latter.

Okay; that's all the stuff I was itching to talk about off the top of my head. (Though I'm sure I forgot some general points and will make them later.)

Now let's get into some specific episode-by-episode reviews.

I struggled mightily with whether or not to share these podcast episodes with you. Unlike the excerpt last time, where the actual story text was previously published, all six of these podcasts are about story excerpts which I haven't published yet. I'm not gonna just spoiler-post six giant blocks of story, many of which are in the 20-page range, for the sake of this discussion. Even discussing some of these scenes at all, without explicitly posting them, would be pretty spoilery in a couple of cases.

But it would also be pretty weird for me to post the podcasts here without publishing the story excerpts that they're doing their "deep dive" on. Yet it would be completely suboptimal for sure for me to not post the podcasts here and then go on to analyze them.

🤔🤔🤔

Here's what I have decided to do: I'm obviously not obligated to discuss any of these podcasts, let alone all of them. I just think they're interesting, and I want to write about them, so that's the why of that.

What I'm going to do is tackle these podcasts in subsequent posts. This post is already getting a bit long anyway. Maybe I won't cover every podcast. Maybe I'll generate new ones yet to come. Regardless, in each subsequent post on this topic I will either post or not post both the deep dive podcast and the underlying text scene. It's very unlikely that I'll post more than one actual scene, if any. And I'll probably share the podcasts in no more than half of the cases. And, whether or not I've posted the story excerpt and whether or not I've posted the podcast for you to listen to, I'll then get into my analysis.

And it'll all work out, in nice, neat little packages, because I am a smart and clever human who can do that sort of thing!

[devilseven6667]

Updates to Social Media! (Also, hello again, Tumblr!)

Hello! It's been a second, so let's catch up! First of all, my sincerest apologies that the first thing you've heard from me outside of reblogs on BlueSky or the cryptic allusions in my descriptions for art uploads is some weird test post- there's a reason for it, of course, but allow me to say first of all that it's been a very, very weird summer with a lot of conflicting emotions and events. Not the least of these would be a lot of financial strain for upcoming expenses and bills, putting together my portfolio website for upcoming art interviews, and having to part ways with a community that was central to a lot of my personal and creative interests… within the span of a week. Oh, and my birthday. I Aged.

Regardless, with my finishing this recent commission, I'm going to take the time today to address a few things about my growth. The first is that I'm making a fifth and final home for my art and ramblings on Tumblr (as well as a soft-reset on Mastodon- more information on that later). After much deliberation (as well as some research on posting guidelines), I'll be rejoining the site officially. I originally debated whether to make it or Instagram my final, art-centric site, but considering how rampant the latter's issues with AI moderation are, I think my choice is pretty clear-cut.

The second is in regards to those weird "Test" posts you probably saw a day ago: I've started using a multiposting tool! Obviously I'm still working through how to use it, and there WILL be some hiccups until I can get the thing to work exactly how I want it to, but the results from the Test post, combined with my actual upload yesterday, were extremely promising.

Lastly, I'll be trying to plant my roots into more groups and organizations that I like on each respective platform- if you've got any good ones, send 'em my way! As for now, expect these changes to take place over the course of the day.

Thanks so much for your time, and I hope to get back to you soon with more stuff! Expect another post with my updated socials list when everything is set up, as well as an updated commissions sheet post!

[alvojake]

TW: ed, depression, anxiety, health issues, overall mental illness (sorry in advance for the rant as I know I don't normally post private stuff, but I need to get this off of my chest.)

as many of you have probably noticed, I haven't been active all that much here lately aside from posting my angstober fics. this is a result of multiple things, but you guys deserve to know a little bit about what's going on.

these past few months haven't exactly been easy for me and I feel as if my health is just slowly going down the drain. I have an multiple anxiety attacks within the span of a day, my heart problems that I thought had subsided decided to show back up causing me quite a bit of discomfort and pain, not to mention how bad my depression has been getting. I have been stuck in I like to call a brain fog for a while. I don't get the proper amount of sleep or food and it shows, I didn't really notice how bad it was until my grandma pointed out that I had lost quite a bit of weight this past weekend.

I don't think I've had a stretch this bad in a very long time, and to be honest, I have a vague idea as to why this sparked up. when I'm not working my normal job (which is 9pm-7am) I am at home babysitting for my cousin bc the daycares around here suck ass at getting people off of the waitlist. I have been watching this kid since she was about three months old, and she is now well over a year old. when I first started watching her, it wasn't an issue bc she slept most of the time, so that meant that I got a good amount of sleep, however, as many who have kids or babysit know that, as they get older, the less they sleep and will continuously get into things they aren't supposed to. so this also means that the amount of sleep I get in a day dwindles immensely (normally about 3 hrs if I'm lucky). now, I'm sure some of you are probably like...

"kayla why don't you just tell her you don't want to watch her anymore?"

trust me, I wish it were that easy, but I am a people pleaser at heart, especially with family. I can't tell her no and leave her with no one to watch her kid, which means she can't work. she has her family to take care of, so I just endure it. however, what really sucks is that no one really knows what it's like because they aren't me. they do try to help and watch her when they can, but seeing as I am the only one who works the night shift, it makes it difficult to find anyone else.

now, on to another FUN part of my life. my dietary habits. I have, for as long as I can remember, always eaten one meal a day, maybe two if it was close to my period. this has always been a thing, but when I moved in with my aunt, it changed because she always made sure that I would eat at least something. here, as of late, tho, it has gotten worse. I can barely take a bite of anything without the immediate need to go and throw it all back up, then I'm left feeling shaky and nauseous for hours after. I'm not sure what brought this along, but it's only gotten worse as my anxiety has picked up.

I don't want to get too far deep into things and babble about useless things, so I'll just leave this here. thank you to those who have read this far <3

[inevitably-johnlocked]

Hi!

I'm here for a pretty stupid thing actually but I've always found it annoying to do: summaries for fics. I never know how much is too little, how much is too much, or if what I'm putting is going to make people think “wow this sounds interesting” or “wow what a shit, keep scrolling”

Do you think it is better to make a summary as such, or include some lines from the story? Idk, any advice would be appreciated

Thanks for taking your time to read!

Hugss🥰

Hey Nonny!! *HUGS*

Ah, the bane of all writers... the blasted summary to describe your story in as little words as possible to get people interested. The LITERAL very last thing you have to do on a story. Always a fun time.

And it's daunting and can feel very overwhelming, because, just like in advertising (my professional background), you have a TINY window to grasp people's attention and make them WANT to click on your fic to read. As an avid reader of fanfic, I do have my own preferences on what I look for... but as a professional, I think I can offer some wisdom in this part here, for a change. PLEASE KNOW that this is different for EVERYONE! These are just some things I picked up in my 20 years in advertising, and applying it to – what is essentially – a "classifieds" board for stories.

Attention-Grabbing Title – Not PERTINENT, but the average reader is more likely to continue reading what you have to offer if your headline is interesting. Even one word ones can grab attention. Something whimsical or metaphorical to your story is always a winner.

Short and Concise Description / Call to Action – One to two sentences is an average attention span before someone gets bored and moves on to the next post. You need to entice someone into reading MORE of your summary in those first two sentences, if you have a long summary. Start your summary with the subject of the story. ie. "John has a problem: he's well hung." That example right there will entice someone to read your summary further.

Grammar Check your Summary – BECAUSE the summary is a representation of what's to come in your story, make sure you get that summary spell-checked or beta'd with your beta. It's a small thing, but it can help bring people in, and especially if you're trying to appeal to a language that you're unfamiliar with. Your beta can even help you refine the summary so it's more attention-grabbing.

Rate Your Story – "Not Rated" stories have a lesser chance of being read than something rated. Doesn't matter what it is, just put a rating there. At least, if people are doing a ratings filter, then you will show up in a search result.

If You're Writing a WiP, State the status of your story at the end of your summary. Many people such as myself don't want to start a WiP without the certainty that it will be done. Stating something like "Story is finished, new chapter every Friday" is a GREAT way to get engagement on your story, AND generate excitement and buzz for it from the day-oners. THEY are your advertisers. A LOT of people like the suspense of a week-to-week model... it's why syndicated television is still alive! A lot of our Fandom authors do their stories this way, working on chapters weeks in advance while posting chapters "approved". It gives YOU time to write and proof, while also having a Live / Active WiP Story that will keep people coming back.

So yeah, those are some tips from an advertising standpoint.

As a reader, though, my PERSONAL interest in a fic is based solely on these 4 things:

The Ship Tags – use "/" (slash for Slash-fiction) for romantic and sexual relationships, and "&" for platonic/friendships or non-sexual relationships. I, for a fact, DO filter stories by the ship tags FIRST, so I'm sure other people do too. Make sure that you use them.

The Story Tags – Ao3 has spoiled us with these!... List relevant tags, tropes, Universes, and genres that pertain to your story... these are what help get your story found in the search algorithm. Don't write "tumblr-style tags" (ie. "this story took way too long") into this field. It is a big turn off for many people (myself included), AND it fucks with the Ao3 search results. Use author notes or descriptions to write your Tumblr-style musings! The tags should ONLY contain content within your story that may appeal to people OR help trigger/content warn against stuff. Yes, I understand that many authors poo-poo on "spoilers in tags", but in all the years I have been reccing fics, I have NEVER ONCE been told that people don't like how meticulous I tag everything I rec. A LOT of people will use those tags to filter OUT stuff that they personally can't read or don't like. Apart from the summary, the Tags are VERY important, AND it can help you come up with a more interesting and short summary that doesn't need to be descriptive. Use the suggested tags that Ao3 offers when you start typing – these are tags, I believe, that have been used frequently on the site.

The Summary – I KNOW it is legit the worst thing to have to come up with, but your story has a higher chance of being read if you stick to writing a concise summary as I've pointed out above. Some people also may choose to use an interesting blurb from their stories as a preview, which some DON'T like, but it's honestly better than nothing. I know for a fact that I have skipped over stories that don't have SOMETHING in the summary box NOR any tags. I know this isn't what you want to hear, Lovely, but put something here, even if it's just "A literal fuck-tonne of porn without plot" (I give authors permission to steal that pun, LOL).

WiP or Not – This is one of those "gamble" things. As I mentioned above, some authors do a week-to-week advanced model for their story chapters, while others "post each chapter when done". The latter tends to wind up with stories in limbo. PERSONALLY, I don't read WiP's for the simple fact that I get confused REALLY easily on plot lines when I do – I like reading one whole story in one go. But PLEASE don't take this as the golden end-all/be-all. This is a personal preference, since I read a LOT of fics and I have very little time these days to do it. Some people love WiPs. A good way to indicate that you have a story plotted out, but is NOT a week-to-week model? Add the Chapter count, rather than leaving it as "?". People are more likely to follow your WiP WITH a chapter count, since it gives the illusion that you have a rough draft written out and you know how long it will be.

So yeah! I hope this helped you out a bit, Nonny. Sorry it's so long, but I thought with how long I've been reading fics and with how picky I am with fics, these tips would be helpful for you. Again, at the end of the day, it's ALWAYS up to personal preferences of the readers. And don't take it personally if you can't "get an audience" right away. Just be yourself, write because you LOVE writing, and you will have a fruitful and enjoyable time publishing your story!

If any experienced authors in the fandom want to add their two cents from a WRITER'S perspective, please do! <3

[earthbovndmisfit]

I hope this isn't too weird of a message to send, but doesn't it seem like Jonawagon doujinshi are pretty uncommon? I've only seen maybe 3 posted online & I have a copy of a SpeedJona doujin but aside from those I haven't come across any. Is it like a rare pairing or something? I thought they were fairly popular

It isn’t weird at all, anon! All the opposite actually, cause I love getting asks even if i'm not always around or it sometimes takes me a hot minute to get to them gfjhkjh

This is gonna be long and probs gonna have bits that might sound rant-ish to some, but I hope that’s alright! :'D

For starters, sadly, jonawagon/jonaspeed/speedjona or however you call the ship is quite an underrated ship. This has to do partly with the wrong perceptions some folks have built around it and around the characters as well (that them both and the couple itself are the epitome of "purity" and "innocence", sometimes even labelling them as "boring" as a result even though both characters are far from that, that "it could only be a one-sided thing" on Spw's end despite both showing and sharing a certain bond/closeness towards each other -closeness that sometimes Jonathan didn't show towards anyone else-, etc), partly because of the many timeskips in PB and all the scenes the anime cut out and people wrongly assuming that the main events happened in the span of a few days and thus people dropping the ball on the ship/characters when Jonathan and Speedwagon actually knew each other for as long -sometimes even longer- than other more popular characters/ships in jjba did, partly because neither Jonathan or Speedwagon are as popular as other characters in the franchise as a whole, and also partly because, as sad as it is to say this, the ship lacks a LOT of support, especially from it's own fanbase. While jonawagon is a popular and well liked ship overall (in the sense that even general fans who don't care much about shipping, or those who are still on the fence about mlm ships, or those who just don't actively ship jonawagon actually like and support the ship or the idea of it upon seeing the actual dynamics between the characters and their potential and the fact that the ship can actually coexist with jonaeri without altering the characters/making them ooc, nor altering the story and so on), it still lacks a lot of support from it's fans. I often see most other ships/characters get lots of reblogs and exposure from their fans on literally any and all platforms, helping those ships/characters reach new audiences and gaining more popularity and drawing interest from potential new fans, while jonawagon stuff as well as solo Jonathan or Speedwagon stuff usually only get likes and a few reblogs at most from their fans, which is nice and all, but it doesn't give the artists/writers any exposure nor get those works or the ship any farther than that and just keeps them within part of the already existing fanbase at best, which often times makes the artists/content creators lose interest in continuing to create stuff for the ship/characters. This is also why I always strongly ask -almost beg at this point ngl- for people to support the artists/writers/etc via reblogs!! The ship having a bunch of different names also might have an impact on all of this, as it's not always as 'easy' to tag/find contents if you don't know how to tag/search for it. Jonawagon (normally used in the western parts of the fandom), JonaSpeed/SpeedJona (Western version of the ship's most popular names in Japanese: ジョナスピ/スピジョナ or JonaSupi/SupiJona respectively], SpeedStar (a name that became a bit more popular more recently after a mini jonawagon event in 2019), being the most common ones afaik, asides from the standard JonathanxSpeedwagon/SpeedwagonxJonathan ie and others. In short, Jonathan and Speedwagon as well as jonawagon are quite well liked and even popular to an extent, but they lack a massive amount of support from the fans, which also usually translates into artists and content creators for this ship losing interest in continuing to create new material for it and thus end up not making any more contents.

In regards to doujinshi more specifically, I’m a bit disconnected when it comes to Jojo doujinshi in general, but it seems to be a bit like that for most of the non "crazy popular" Jojo ships if you ask me, which is kinda normal considering the massive amount of characters in the whole series. Putting my experience as example, if it helps, I used to collect doujinshi from one of my previous fandoms, which had a shit ton of them for plenty of it’s ships and it was somewhat easy to acquire hard copies of despite it being an “old anime” basically while most Jojo doujinshi (especially anything that is not parts 3, 4 and 5) seems to be a bit hard to come across regardless of the ship(s) in them, even in auction sites or places like pixiv that sell digital copies if the author puts them up on sale, which is understandable since the aforementioned parts are some of the most popular parts in Japan, where most doujinshi is created, and thus take most of the fandom's interest -authors’ and readers’ alike-, as well as the hype for parts like Phantom Blood being long dead (with it being dead/dormant since the original airing of the anime ended in 2013, and it coming back ocassionally whenever there's a 'special' re-airing of PB in Japan or when events such as the Joestar Radio take place), so maybe my parameters on the whole subject are somewhat disproportionate?

This is also gonna sound all boomer-like, but I’ve also noticed, or it seems to me at least (still in comparison to the doujinshi from my previous fandom), that doujinshi books as we knew them aren’t /as/ common nowadays as they used to be a while back. Even the works themselves don’t seem to be much that way either. For example, doujinshi anthologies used to be a big thing a while back and, while they still exist, they don’t seem to be too common anymore (these worked as "promo books" of sorts for all the artists featured and they also helped lesser known/popular artists and ships to get some exposure to newer audiences). Nowadays such thing still exists, and I actually recall seeing a Jonaspeed/Speedjona anthology being made “recently” (recently as in 2019, if I’m not mistaken? it was published and sold during the mini Jonaspeed event they held at a Jojo con in Japan that year), but they aren’t nearly as common as they used to be, since now most artists can post any samples they want (much more reduced tho, cause you normally get a few pages instead of a full mini story) in places like Twitter or Pixiv. And it’s kinda the same with regular doujinshi. Before, most doujinkas had to publish a book in order to get their stuff out and get some exposure, so they were always working on new stories and making new books to sell and promoing their stuff, sometimes one after the other and even creating multi-volume stories in some cases. Now, thanks to how "easy" it is to get some exposure on social media, it’s much more common to see doujinkas for any ships/characters making short stories (1-4 pages, sometimes more) or just 1 page illustrations instead and posting them on their social media every now and then as a promo for their works. They also still make and sell their books (a few jonawagon artists on twitter do, at least), and these short stories/illustrations serve to boost their works instead, which is not a complain at all cause I think it's amazing tbqh! But this also translates into less stories/doujinshi being created as many of these artists often opt for leaving those stories that years ago would have been their own book or a mini story in a book as a prompt or a short story only.

As for actual jonawagon doujinshi, while it is not as common as say pt 3 doujinshi, there is quite a bunch of it. Some date from 2012-2013 (when the PB anime was originally aired), some are much older than that and some others are much more recent (as there are still some active jonawagon doujinkas around). There are also "fanfic books" that are also considered doujinshi and that seem to be a thing sometimes, but these contain little to no art at all and are usually written 100% in Japanese. The problem here is that not many of them have been scanlated/translated yet, sometimes because they aren't easy to find on sale online, sometimes because re-sellers who do have them set high prices for them plus shipping costs, sometimes because the artists/online shops won't sell stuff overseas, sometimes because those who do own doujinshi copies don't always know how to properly share them (since scanning a doujinshi in high or decent quality without destroying the book can be hard af) among other reasons.

All that said, there is a bunch of jonawagon doujinshi that has been scanned and is available online! but it can be tricky to get sometimes due to the different names this ship can go by and because of the "translations" of said names into different languages (as some doujinshi can only be found in Chinese sites, or Russian ones, and so on for example, so it can take some serious time to figure that out and have a successful search).

In all honesty, anon, I'm a dumdum and I had never thought about doing so in a more public manner until now, since I've already shared my entire jonawagon collection (pics, doujins, etc) with friends who have requested it more privately, but I can upload the doujins I have scans of if anyone's interested?? (I’d post the links where I found most of them but since my hd is pretty much dead and I can’t access Windows or my windows/mozilla profile, I’ve p much lost all my old bookmarks). They were only like... 8 last time I checked (9/10 if you count the Japanese and English versions of the "Joestarsaaaaan" one), but it's something :D Just be aware that some of them are nsfw! and that a couple are either part of a book that has stories from other ships in them (I only have the jonawagon parts tho) or contain other ships implied or openly shown in the jonawagon story.

I also have about 4 more, but the scanlator of one of them openly requested for the file to not be reuploaded, so Idk if it'd be alright to share it? (and they also deactivated their blog, so there's no way to ask them for permission). The other 3 are scans a friend sent to me of their own doujinshi copies, so I also don't know if it would be okay for me to post them?? (i haven't seen this friend in over a year so idk gfhgjkjlkñ). 2 of those 3 are nsfw.