#absolute rambles

[milf-murdock]

Oh my god. So I’m looking up call signs for a potential fic idea and I stumbled upon this absolute *chefs kiss* 👩‍🍳💋 masterpiece:

And just TELL ME the fun the 141 crew would have with a squad mate like, letting loose together after a successful mission

Price: dad-friend vibes, swapping all your tequila shots for water after a certain point in the night

Soap: fully encourages it, just as drunk as you, he’s the one ordering the tequila shots

Ghost: stone cold sober, watching you from the corner of the bar with his arms crossed. Dutifully intercepts every drunk guy who tries to wander over to you and silently intimidates them to keep walking. Picks you up and pulls you off the table when you attempt to get up and show the team that you definitely do remember every move to Beyonc��’s All the Single Ladies dance. Tries to support you as you stumble to the car before eventually giving up and just picking you up bridal style to carry you the rest of the way.

Gaz: DD—makes sure everyone is getting home safe 😇😇😇😇

*but obviously Simon, the man secretly in love with you, is the one making sure you make it to the bed safely, all tucked in, with a glass of water and some Tylenol tablets on the side table

Lmao please tell me I’m not the only one with these deranged thoughts 😂😂

[gianttol]

time to draw a new icon :3 it will be the end of the flipped burger chub icon o7

[internalweepingmentality]

actually fell in love with Daniil watching 2021 RG which is also where Stef beat him for the first time at a slam and the final slam that all of the big 3 were playing at and the only slam where Rafa and Roger and Novak were all in the same half of the draw

[louistonehill]

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

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

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

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

Continue reading article here

[youhavethewrong]

Advantages of being an elf:

- you get the pointy ears

- youre never in a hurry again, ever

Disadvantages of being an elf:

- every other race assumes youre racist

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

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

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

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

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

[secondbeatsongs]

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

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

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

[shadebloopnik]

Radioapple twitter goin thru a thing rn

LIKE AMIR????

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

[lazylittledragon]

y'know every time i feel guilty about bothering someone by singing along when i'm listening to music, i just remember that i have to tolerate my dirtbag brother screaming at his ps5 for hours every day so listening to muffled off-key fall out boy is probably preferable

[aethersea]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

however.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[welcomebacktohoimicraf]

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

[gianttol]

QwQ almost done my busy summer days!! i fly back to the city sep 10

been on that tour guiding grind. last day is the 31st. im so eepy. been giving tours since june 13 🥱

cant wait to be home and get back to drawing. esp beth n cherry. i NEED to draw these babes

[morganmnemonic]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[terapsina]

Taking a moment to away from squeeing about Vidarkness...

Let's talk about Lorna Wu.

This woman loved her daughter so freaking much. Like, imagine being in her shoes, suffering under potentially centuries long generational curse that she knows is going to kill her.

Doing everything to make sure it doesn't get her daughter too.

I mean she literally crafted a spell out of a much much older very powerful different spell. Which is huge in itself.

But then. BUT THEN, she must have dedicated every bit of time and energy to make SURE that her spell song would become as famous as it possibly could be.

Not because she wanted to be a star... but because as long as someone, somewhere was playing that song her daughter would remain protected.

And I bet Alice felt forgotten, like she wasn't as important as being famous. Except that it turns out fame was just a means to an end, what mattared to Lorna - the only thing that mattered to Lorna - was saving her daughter.

And here Alice finally knows that.

[egophiliac]

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

I am not normal about any of these characters!

[purplepenguintime]

Thank you for finally giving them a happy ending 

[teddyqd]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Say nothing.

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