#access control system training

[luulapants]

Adding into the discussion of the incarcerated young people fighting fires in California:

I can think of no place worse than prison for emotionally stunting or regressing a person or for dismantling their ability to make good decisions.

You take an adult or child who maybe has exhibited some antisocial behaviors, right? So you remove them from whatever community and support network they have, put enormous financial and logistical barriers between them and any communication with that community. Incarcerate them hours from home in a place not accessible by train or plane with narrow visiting hours that conflict with people's work schedules, and maybe you're fighting to prevent in person visits at all, maybe you got a kickback from a company selling expensive video call visits so people can't even hug their kids when they drive 6 hours on a Wednesday to see them. Get a kickback from a phone service provider that's going to charge extortionate prices for every minute a person spends talking to their loved ones, and if the state passes a law saying you can't do that anymore, pivot and go after the mail. Subvert USPS. Get a kickback from a company that'll give prisoners shitty scans of letters or refuse to deliver it because it was flagged for drug contamination by a machine with a 70% false positive rate, force them instead to send texts at extortionate rates through their proprietary app.

Put them in an environment with a bunch of other people with social issues and force them to compete for resources. Give them no mental healthcare. If they are victimized by other prisoners, punish the victims with solitary confinement. Transfer people around so they can't form meaningful long-term friendships. Tell them that once they get out, it will be illegal for them to talk to any of the people they meet here.

Hire guards who have no qualifications other than a willingness to be a modern day slave overseer or the ignorance to not realize that's what it is, give them complete control over every aspect of other people's lives and tell them those people want to kill them and that any object can be covered in drugs so dangerous that touching them can kill. Allow the guards to traffic drugs into the prison with impunity. Have the guards discourage racial mixing because racial conflict in the prison means the prisoners won't join up against the staff.

You do all of this and you ask if a 20-year-old, who's been in the system since 14, is emotionally mature or psychologically healthy enough to choose to risk their life in exchange for slightly better living arrangements.

You take someone who has probably made some bad decisions, right? And you put them in a place where every detail of every day is decided for them: what they eat, when they eat, when they sleep, where they sleep, what clothes they wear, who they talk to, where they work. Or maybe you give them big decisions that have no right answer. Maybe at the start of the day, you open the cells and they have 10 minutes to decide if they want to be stuck in their cell all day - no shower, no recreation, no library - or go outside and be stuck in genpop all day - no napping, no alone time, no escape if someone is hassling you. You let them decide if they're going to eat breakfast at 3am (because there's too many meal shifts) or sleep in and spend their precious commissary funds on toaster strudel (they have no toaster) or sleep in and not eat even though you're barely giving them 1000 calories a day. You let them start to make decisions about how to spend their day, then you put them on lockdown, take all those decisions away.

You do all this and then you ask if anyone who's spent time in this environment has the decision-making skills to choose to risk their life in exchange for slightly better living arrangements.

All of the incarcerated firefighters in California are 18 or older, and all of them volunteered, but there is no world in which they were adequately prepared to make that decision.

[pricetagged]

Idk how to label this. Wifehunter John?

The idea of possessive/obsessive John manipulating a situation and stealing a wife for himself struck me, so just coughing the idea up while I sneak away for a coffee before I actually have to start work in 20 mins 💖 entirely unedited, abrupt ending

Masterlist l Part Two

________

For someone married to his job, he has put quite a bit of thought into what he is looking for in a wife. Namely, that she's already married.

His reasoning is threefold. He can admit to himself, firstly, that it satisfies his need for control. Competency. He's a busy man with a demanding job. Not quite retired yet, no time to build his own from scratch. With this, he gets a wife boxed up and ready-trained. Broken in.

Secondly, the need for control bleeds into his saviour complex. She'll need a shoulder to cry on, someone strong and capable to get her back on her feet. She'll be feeling a little fragile. Needy. Perfect.

And thirdly, it does something wild to his jealous, possessive streak. The idea of taking something precious, of breaking her bond to another man and tying it to him? Delicious. The idea that she used to be someone else's, that he has to imprint himself onto her knowing that in doing so he is erasing the imprint of another man? It has his teeth aching, grinding even as heat rises in his belly. Stirs at him.

The idea swirls lazily in the back of his mind, never quite finding the right time or right partner. He bats at it a few times, lazy cat playing with the notion, seeing how far it can stretch before it snaps. Eyes up pretty things everywhere he goes, glancing down at their left hands just to check, but nothing quite tugs on that string. Until one day it does when he's outfitting the security system at your house.

It's side work. Cash in hand, word of mouth. Something to keep him busy when on mandated leave. Something to keep in mind as his retirement from active duty creeps closer. And your husband is a real piece of work, all blustering braggadocio energy. Young buck, not knowing his place in the herd. Not knowing that he'd be better scratching his antlers off on a tree than going head-to-head with a gristled thing like John.

It's like John's energy, his presence in the house, sends alarm bells ringing in your husband's mind (Be the man. Don't back down. Puff up your chest and strut). And it plays so perfectly into John's hands because your young buck doesn't realise that what he's really doing is fawning. To John. (Look at me, be impressed by me!) He makes his biggest mistake in putting you down in front of him, trying to sidle up to John and create some kind of desperate camaraderie. Ordering you to bring tea to the men at work. Rolling his eyes at your attempts to talk, to ask questions about the work being done. Waving you off so he can stand and watch the proceedings. Like he could supervise. Like he has any clue what he's doing.

Only the promise of the long game keeps John from levelling him with a hard look, from calling him outblike he'd love to.

He hears you both in the in the other room, having swatted the young buck off like a particularly virulent pest. Noisy and bothersome. Not needed - or wanted- in this home. And entirely too stupid to realise that John wasn't being jocular in his dismissal.

You've been scribbling away for the past few days, something occupying your time, keeping you happy and hidden away in the kitchen.

"You're not serious, are you?"

"Well, yes," he hears the slight quaver in your voice before you find your footing. You've got at least a bit of spine. Good. "You said that I should find an occupation. Not just 'laze around the house playing housewife'. This is what I-"

"Oh come on, I didn't mean- You don't think that this is viable, do you?"

"Well... I love gardening. And I'm good at it. And there's no reason that it can't be more accessible for people, especially with the current economic-"

He cuts you off with a scoff. "Dear, just- I don't want you to be disappointed. I think you don't quite understand the time and effort this will take. And you know nothing of marketing, publishing. Why don't you put that away and start on dinner?"

And oh, isn't that delicious. He can taste it now, that idea that has been swirling. It's thick, almost tangible on his tongue. The tension in the house, the bitter lacryma of stifled tears. The slight acidity of words you left unsaid. It has his mouth watering, pupils dilating.

And when he's packing up that evening, tools and materials tucked in to the heavy workman's case, he swings by the kitchen on his way out. Catches the way something is jutting out slightly from the bin, lid slightly askew. When he pulls it out he realises it's some kind of notebook, carefully (lovingly) bound. Pictures pasted, mindmaps and notes and plans scribbled in the margins. Your gardening tips. Kitchen scraps, window boxes, rooftop plots. Urban gardening. It's deeply thoughtful, well researched.

A labour of love, lying in the rubbish.

Sweet, clever little thing. That just won't do.

He leaves your house with a little piece of you tucked away in his toolkit and a nice plan forming. He'll be back, of course, not quite finished with his work. He'd planted a few little links into the system he'd almost installed, projecting not just to the monitor in your home but also in his. Got to keep his eyes on you, keep you safe and cared for in ways that your useless husband can't.

Finding that book was a boon. He'd say it was divinely ordained if he believed in all that. It weighs heavy in his toolbox as he whistles out the door.

Now, how to get you alone and return it to you..

________________

This idea may have been done before? I'm not sure, sorry! I've seen a lot of possessive John floating around. Tagging @stellewriites because I said I would last time, and you've been so encouraging of my nonsense.

Anyway I've got like 4 long-form WIPs that I'm working on, so I may never actually write this one but thought I'd share since that image set I just reblogged made me feral 💖

[poolseason]

more Ninjagelion AU

Setup: In the aftermath of a cataclysmic event on the Dark Island where humans accidentally awakened an entity known as the [OVERLORD] the world was plunged into eternal chaos. 20 years later, Ninjago has managed to rebuild. Now in New Ninjago City, a bustling and lively hub at the heart of Ninjago, has been under attack by monsters- onis, dragons, serpents, unexplainable beasts,- creatures made from the [OVERLORD]'s darkness. Luckily the Special Division ELEMENTS is here to protect the realm from these monstrous threats, with the NINJA mechs. This cant be possible without some valuable members of the team!

Characters, lore, and more ↓

Characters:

Pixal: In this au she's a human scientist, and probably the one person who knows the most about how the NINJA mechs are created. She's in charge of the technical division, and head of research and development. During a monster battle, her order's are second to Cole's. Her highest priority is the integrity of the mechs, to the point she might be a bit negligent of the safety of their pilots. Pixal is deeply involved in some suspicious agendas involving the secret entities hidden under the base, and while she's the most knowledgeable person in the force, she's not the most trustworthy. Pixal is Zane's personal "doctor" and knows more about his schematics than anyone else. She created the Nindroid plugs (aka the Dummy system, an autopilot of sorts) with his personality data. Pixal is also one of the few people who know what happened to the original Dr. Julien and Echo.

Jay: For a little history on him, Jay is on the younger side, have graduated from college a couple of years ago. He originally interned here as an electrical engineer in the Weapons Deparment, but Pixal saw his skill and ingenuity and gave him an unrefusable return offer in the R&D department as her right hand. Jay's parents, Ed and Edna Walker were colleagues of Cyrus Borg and were involved in the engineering and design of the Geofront and NNC's civilian safety infrastructure, so Jay's always been somewhat interested in ELEMENT's work. It was kind of a dream come true when the Pixal Borg hired him. During monster attacks, Jay's in charge of making sure the NINJA mechs operate properly, have access to their weapons and gear, and making sure the NNC fortress moves as needed. Jay's always seen with his goggles and he almost never follows uniform protocol.

Jay is also one of the few Technicians who personally work with the Pilots, he's one of the first people Lloyd warmed up to at ELEMENTS, and he becomes kind of a big brother figure to him after one particularly crazy mission when he has to personally go out onto the field with Lloyd in Unit-01. When Nya arrives the pair work together a lot outside of pilot training, but Nya definitely likes him and he... needs to figure some things out. whoops!

Skylor: Having grown up in the aftermath of the 2nd (Overlord) Impact, Skylor's seen a lot of destruction and cruelty, even first hand from her own father who lead a doomsday cult that wreaked havoc on innocent communities trying to survive in the near apocalyptic event. Vowing to protect the world from similar chaos, she joined the NINJA program's tactical division. When the monster attacks began, she's in-charge of monitoring the enemy's health, pilot life signs, and mapping.

Dareth: His last name is Presley bc of the Elvis hair and inspiration lmao. He's not really a high ranking member of the organization but Cole and the others seem to really trust him, despite his mess ups. Dareth normally handles ferrying radio messages between ground teams and mission control. Dareth is a relaxed guy who values a positive work environment, even if that kind of makes him a bad employee. He's a very good uncle figure to a lot of members of ELEMENTS

MORE Cole: Cole is the leader of the tactical division. He was drafted into the military when he was only a young teenager in the aftermath of the [OVERLORD] but he was recognized by Wu and not long after he completed college and grad school he was quickly hired by ELEMENTS to oversee the tactical division. He's vengeful towards the Overlord's darkness monsters because his mother Lily was the captain of the disastrous expedition to the Dark Island 20 years ago. The dog tags he wears are his own and his mother's.

Lloyd and Zane, on neural headsets: As pilots of a NINJA mech they have a lot of pressure on them, obviously this can cause a lot of mental turmoil and stress. In order to pilot a mech they must synchronize their own mind to their mech's soul*, so stress isn't really a good thing for a pilot to have. Zane was programmed to not experience such emotions, but over the course of the series, its proven that he grows to feel quite strongly and become more human. Despite his programming, the lack of emotion early on was actually a detriment to his ability to pilot, since the NINJA soul wouldn't be able to synchronize it's feelings with an entity that feels nothing. Sometimes its necessary for pilots to wear more complicated neural headsets and spinal connections for more controlled sync testing. During the cross-sync experiment when Zane and Lloyd traded units, they were stuck wearing extra uncomfortable test suits -- too many wires and junk! The only downside to extra connection is that the mech could overload and go berserk. (which big surprise, happened!), so usually Lloyd, the designated Unstable Pilottm, only needs the barebones neural interface in most situations.

[nostalgebraist]

Anthropic's stated "AI timelines" seem wildly aggressive to me.

As far as I can tell, they are now saying that by 2028 – and possibly even by 2027, or late 2026 – something they call "powerful AI" will exist.

And by "powerful AI," they mean... this (source, emphasis mine):

In terms of pure intelligence, it is smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields – biology, programming, math, engineering, writing, etc. This means it can prove unsolved mathematical theorems, write extremely good novels, write difficult codebases from scratch, etc. In addition to just being a “smart thing you talk to”, it has all the “interfaces” available to a human working virtually, including text, audio, video, mouse and keyboard control, and internet access. It can engage in any actions, communications, or remote operations enabled by this interface, including taking actions on the internet, taking or giving directions to humans, ordering materials, directing experiments, watching videos, making videos, and so on. It does all of these tasks with, again, a skill exceeding that of the most capable humans in the world. It does not just passively answer questions; instead, it can be given tasks that take hours, days, or weeks to complete, and then goes off and does those tasks autonomously, in the way a smart employee would, asking for clarification as necessary. It does not have a physical embodiment (other than living on a computer screen), but it can control existing physical tools, robots, or laboratory equipment through a computer; in theory it could even design robots or equipment for itself to use. The resources used to train the model can be repurposed to run millions of instances of it (this matches projected cluster sizes by ~2027), and the model can absorb information and generate actions at roughly 10x-100x human speed. It may however be limited by the response time of the physical world or of software it interacts with. Each of these million copies can act independently on unrelated tasks, or if needed can all work together in the same way humans would collaborate, perhaps with different subpopulations fine-tuned to be especially good at particular tasks.

In the post I'm quoting, Amodei is coy about the timeline for this stuff, saying only that

I think it could come as early as 2026, though there are also ways it could take much longer. But for the purposes of this essay, I’d like to put these issues aside [...]

However, other official communications from Anthropic have been more specific. Most notable is their recent OSTP submission, which states (emphasis in original):

Based on current research trajectories, we anticipate that powerful AI systems could emerge as soon as late 2026 or 2027 [...] Powerful AI technology will be built during this Administration. [i.e. the current Trump administration -nost]

See also here, where Jack Clark says (my emphasis):

People underrate how significant and fast-moving AI progress is. We have this notion that in late 2026, or early 2027, powerful AI systems will be built that will have intellectual capabilities that match or exceed Nobel Prize winners. They’ll have the ability to navigate all of the interfaces… [Clark goes on, mentioning some of the other tenets of "powerful AI" as in other Anthropic communications -nost]

----

To be clear, extremely short timelines like these are not unique to Anthropic.

Miles Brundage (ex-OpenAI) says something similar, albeit less specific, in this post. And Daniel Kokotajlo (also ex-OpenAI) has held views like this for a long time now.

Even Sam Altman himself has said similar things (though in much, much vaguer terms, both on the content of the deliverable and the timeline).

Still, Anthropic's statements are unique in being

official positions of the company

extremely specific and ambitious about the details

extremely aggressive about the timing, even by the standards of "short timelines" AI prognosticators in the same social cluster

Re: ambition, note that the definition of "powerful AI" seems almost the opposite of what you'd come up with if you were trying to make a confident forecast of something.

Often people will talk about "AI capable of transforming the world economy" or something more like that, leaving room for the AI in question to do that in one of several ways, or to do so while still failing at some important things.

But instead, Anthropic's definition is a big conjunctive list of "it'll be able to do this and that and this other thing and...", and each individual capability is defined in the most aggressive possible way, too! Not just "good enough at science to be extremely useful for scientists," but "smarter than a Nobel Prize winner," across "most relevant fields" (whatever that means). And not just good at science but also able to "write extremely good novels" (note that we have a long way to go on that front, and I get the feeling that people at AI labs don't appreciate the extent of the gap [cf]). Not only can it use a computer interface, it can use every computer interface; not only can it use them competently, but it can do so better than the best humans in the world. And all of that is in the first two paragraphs – there's four more paragraphs I haven't even touched in this little summary!

Re: timing, they have even shorter timelines than Kokotajlo these days, which is remarkable since he's historically been considered "the guy with the really short timelines." (See here where Kokotajlo states a median prediction of 2028 for "AGI," by which he means something less impressive than "powerful AI"; he expects something close to the "powerful AI" vision ["ASI"] ~1 year or so after "AGI" arrives.)

----

I, uh, really do not think this is going to happen in "late 2026 or 2027."

Or even by the end of this presidential administration, for that matter.

I can imagine it happening within my lifetime – which is wild and scary and marvelous. But in 1.5 years?!

The confusing thing is, I am very familiar with the kinds of arguments that "short timelines" people make, and I still find the Anthropic's timelines hard to fathom.

Above, I mentioned that Anthropic has shorter timelines than Daniel Kokotajlo, who "merely" expects the same sort of thing in 2029 or so. This probably seems like hairsplitting – from the perspective of your average person not in these circles, both of these predictions look basically identical, "absurdly good godlike sci-fi AI coming absurdly soon." What difference does an extra year or two make, right?

But it's salient to me, because I've been reading Kokotajlo for years now, and I feel like I basically get understand his case. And people, including me, tend to push back on him in the "no, that's too soon" direction. I've read many many blog posts and discussions over the years about this sort of thing, I feel like I should have a handle on what the short-timelines case is.

But even if you accept all the arguments evinced over the years by Daniel "Short Timelines" Kokotajlo, even if you grant all the premises he assumes and some people don't – that still doesn't get you all the way to the Anthropic timeline!

To give a very brief, very inadequate summary, the standard "short timelines argument" right now is like:

Over the next few years we will see a "growth spurt" in the amount of computing power ("compute") used for the largest LLM training runs. This factor of production has been largely stagnant since GPT-4 in 2023, for various reasons, but new clusters are getting built and the metaphorical car will get moving again soon. (See here)

By convention, each "GPT number" uses ~100x as much training compute as the last one. GPT-3 used ~100x as much as GPT-2, and GPT-4 used ~100x as much as GPT-3 (i.e. ~10,000x as much as GPT-2).

We are just now starting to see "~10x GPT-4 compute" models (like Grok 3 and GPT-4.5). In the next few years we will get to "~100x GPT-4 compute" models, and by 2030 will will reach ~10,000x GPT-4 compute.

If you think intuitively about "how much GPT-4 improved upon GPT-3 (100x less) or GPT-2 (10,000x less)," you can maybe convince yourself that these near-future models will be super-smart in ways that are difficult to precisely state/imagine from our vantage point. (GPT-4 was way smarter than GPT-2; it's hard to know what "projecting that forward" would mean, concretely, but it sure does sound like something pretty special)

Meanwhile, all kinds of (arguably) complementary research is going on, like allowing models to "think" for longer amounts of time, giving them GUI interfaces, etc.

All that being said, there's still a big intuitive gap between "ChatGPT, but it's much smarter under the hood" and anything like "powerful AI." But...

...the LLMs are getting good enough that they can write pretty good code, and they're getting better over time. And depending on how you interpret the evidence, you may be able to convince yourself that they're also swiftly getting better at other tasks involved in AI development, like "research engineering." So maybe you don't need to get all the way yourself, you just need to build an AI that's a good enough AI developer that it improves your AIs faster than you can, and then those AIs are even better developers, etc. etc. (People in this social cluster are really keen on the importance of exponential growth, which is generally a good trait to have but IMO it shades into "we need to kick off exponential growth and it'll somehow do the rest because it's all-powerful" in this case.)

And like, I have various disagreements with this picture.

For one thing, the "10x" models we're getting now don't seem especially impressive – there has been a lot of debate over this of course, but reportedly these models were disappointing to their own developers, who expected scaling to work wonders (using the kind of intuitive reasoning mentioned above) and got less than they hoped for.

And (in light of that) I think it's double-counting to talk about the wonders of scaling and then talk about reasoning, computer GUI use, etc. as complementary accelerating factors – those things are just table stakes at this point, the models are already maxing out the tasks you had defined previously, you've gotta give them something new to do or else they'll just sit there wasting GPUs when a smaller model would have sufficed.

And I think we're already at a point where nuances of UX and "character writing" and so forth are more of a limiting factor than intelligence. It's not a lack of "intelligence" that gives us superficially dazzling but vapid "eyeball kick" prose, or voice assistants that are deeply uncomfortable to actually talk to, or (I claim) "AI agents" that get stuck in loops and confuse themselves, or any of that.

We are still stuck in the "Helpful, Harmless, Honest Assistant" chatbot paradigm – no one has seriously broke with it since that Anthropic introduced it in a paper in 2021 – and now that paradigm is showing its limits. ("Reasoning" was strapped onto this paradigm in a simple and fairly awkward way, the new "reasoning" models are still chatbots like this, no one is actually doing anything else.) And instead of "okay, let's invent something better," the plan seems to be "let's just scale up these assistant chatbots and try to get them to self-improve, and they'll figure it out." I won't try to explain why in this post (IYI I kind of tried to here) but I really doubt these helpful/harmless guys can bootstrap their way into winning all the Nobel Prizes.

----

All that stuff I just said – that's where I differ from the usual "short timelines" people, from Kokotajlo and co.

But OK, let's say that for the sake of argument, I'm wrong and they're right. It still seems like a pretty tough squeeze to get to "powerful AI" on time, doesn't it?

In the OSTP submission, Anthropic presents their latest release as evidence of their authority to speak on the topic:

In February 2025, we released Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which is by many performance benchmarks the most powerful and capable commercially-available AI system in the world.

I've used Claude 3.7 Sonnet quite a bit. It is indeed really good, by the standards of these sorts of things!

But it is, of course, very very far from "powerful AI." So like, what is the fine-grained timeline even supposed to look like? When do the many, many milestones get crossed? If they're going to have "powerful AI" in early 2027, where exactly are they in mid-2026? At end-of-year 2025?

If I assume that absolutely everything goes splendidly well with no unexpected obstacles – and remember, we are talking about automating all human intellectual labor and all tasks done by humans on computers, but sure, whatever – then maybe we get the really impressive next-gen models later this year or early next year... and maybe they're suddenly good at all the stuff that has been tough for LLMs thus far (the "10x" models already released show little sign of this but sure, whatever)... and then we finally get into the self-improvement loop in earnest, and then... what?

They figure out to squeeze even more performance out of the GPUs? They think of really smart experiments to run on the cluster? Where are they going to get all the missing information about how to do every single job on earth, the tacit knowledge, the stuff that's not in any web scrape anywhere but locked up in human minds and inaccessible private data stores? Is an experiment designed by a helpful-chatbot AI going to finally crack the problem of giving chatbots the taste to "write extremely good novels," when that taste is precisely what "helpful-chatbot AIs" lack?

I guess the boring answer is that this is all just hype – tech CEO acts like tech CEO, news at 11. (But I don't feel like that can be the full story here, somehow.)

And the scary answer is that there's some secret Anthropic private info that makes this all more plausible. (But I doubt that too – cf. Brundage's claim that there are no more secrets like that now, the short-timelines cards are all on the table.)

It just does not make sense to me. And (as you can probably tell) I find it very frustrating that these guys are out there talking about how human thought will basically be obsolete in a few years, and pontificating about how to find new sources of meaning in life and stuff, without actually laying out an argument that their vision – which would be the common concern of all of us, if it were indeed on the horizon – is actually likely to occur on the timescale they propose.

It would be less frustrating if I were being asked to simply take it on faith, or explicitly on the basis of corporate secret knowledge. But no, the claim is not that, it's something more like "now, now, I know this must sound far-fetched to the layman, but if you really understand 'scaling laws' and 'exponential growth,' and you appreciate the way that pretraining will be scaled up soon, then it's simply obvious that –"

No! Fuck that! I've read the papers you're talking about, I know all the arguments you're handwaving-in-the-direction-of! It still doesn't add up!

[zylev-blog]

Tucker dug himself in quite a deep hole.

At first, it started because he was bored. He also wanted to test his skills in tech, since he was trained by Technus to use technology in a way nobody living could even do. He first did some simple probing, learning about the system that Batman used and learned how to keep his tracks hidden. He honestly thought breaking into the White House or NASA would be harder than breaking into Batman’s files, but it wasn’t. Everything was absurdly easy to get to. He could see the workarounds in the code just as easily as he could breathe.

Once he learned how to erase his tracks completely, he started with basic knowledge from Batman’s system. Over the course of a month, he read all the police reports, hero and villain reports, and the contingency plans that Batman had. Boy was Batman a paranoid man.

Then he delved deeper. He learned everything there was to know from over a decade of vigilante work. Then he used the Batcomputer (he had found out that it was actually called that from Nightwing himself. He had camera access, of course he was going to spy on the bats.) to hack into the Justice League system. He had to stop the manic chuckle that threatened to spill past his lips. He was just like the ghosts in a way that he loved to indulge his obsessions. And stalking vigilantes had become one of his.

Danny and Sam knew about what he was doing and never tried to stop him. The reason was simple: Tucker had warded against Amity Park so thickly, that not even magic users knew of the town’s existence. It wouldn’t show up on a map, or in books, or in history. Tucker might have used Clockwork for the last part, but the time ghost allowed him to hide Amity Park from the world. So there must have been a reason the ghost had allowed it.

After Tucker gained access to the Justice League files, he had become worried. There was a lot that they didn’t tell the public. The more he read, the more resentful he got. Failed alien invasions, kidnapping, mind control, cloning… the list went on and on.

If he didn’t know that the Justice League were the good guys… he might think they were the villains.

But they were the good guys, right?

He wasn’t so sure anymore.

It had been almost four months since he had first hacked Batman’s computer. From what he could tell after hacking Bruce Wayne’s cell phone, nobody knew that he was inside their systems. Nobody was that good of an actor. He would watch the Justice League briefings, watch their day to day, learn all the gossip, and then he would check Batman’s computer. It was a ritual he had started. A way to keep Amity Park safe should the Justice League turn against them or the world. He made his own contingency plans based off of Batman’s plans. The exception being that as a last resort, his plans would be fatal to anyone who struck against him. He just hoped that the day would never come.

Everything changed when Pariah Dark stole Amity Park. It had taken the Justice League almost two days to realize that there was a gigantic crater in Illinois. Nobody knew what had happened. When the city reappeared, the borders that had once protected it were also stripped away. The systems had been damaged in the fight, and in the teleportation process. There were so many that had died in the battle, so many more that were now homeless, or orphans. The city mourned for the dead—and the dead mourned their sacrifice. The evil King had been dethroned, but would Amity Park be the same? The world now knew it existed, and there was no ghost portal for him to run to Clockwork from. They were on their own.

As Tucker watched the Justice League try to help the citizens, he felt anger in the pit of his stomach. These people, these ‘heroes’, what would they learn about his people? Were they going to hurt them like they’ve hurt their own?

No. He was not going to let them hurt anyone from Amity Park.

He solicited all of the teenagers of Amity Park to help him rebuild the borders. Kick out the Justice League. His plan was met with some resistance, but they trusted Tucker. Within 24 hours, they had gotten the borders back online. The Justice League were then forced out of the town, and the town disappeared from existence once more.

Now if only he could get rid of the Justice League that tried to linger. Batman himself was proving difficult to get rid of. Especially since all of his bats kept trying to come out to play. Well Tucker had an ace up his sleeve too, and two could play that game.

[corasexigence]

Intox Play Primer

Vet for high risk play. If you don't have the utmost trust in someone, control what you're putting in your own body and know where it all came from.

Check for interactions. Yes, this means sharing complete information about whatever medications the person getting drugged is on. No, the interactions are not always intuitive. Yes, this includes things like alcohol. Ideally, ask your doctor about interactions with whatever you're about to play with- they're trained in spotting interactions, you're probably not. (ETA- @vekarin-striae mentioned that pharmacists are often cheaper, more specialized, and less invasive to talk to about drug interactions.)

If you've checked the interactions yourself, assume you might have missed something. Even if you've gotten your doctor to check, be aware they might have missed something. I once caught a potassium deficiency issue in someone's existing medication that their doctor prescribed them.

ROUND 1- Use it for its own sake before you play with it. Spend the time together and set yourself up for success: easy access to food, water, comfort media, and comfortable places to sit and lie down. Know how long it should last. Get someone who's used it before to tripsit if you can. Don't give yourself any tasks that involve new skills. Be ready to offer yourself or your partner a redirect from negative or anxious trains of thought.

Know what a good time on your drug physically looks and feels like. This is crucial, because things might go sideways in a way you're not expecting. Don't just be watching for specific signs of an overdose (though those are worth keeping in mind too)- if something seems wrong, get help. Seconds matter and you're probably not a professional.

Similarly: if the drug is at all sedative, or a downer, or long-lasting, and they're unconscious before it's out of their system, check for breathing and check for pulse. Also, your risk profile is your own, but I don't fuck around with hard sedatives- there's too fine a line between which body systems they shut down.

Start with a low-to-standard dose, and adjust doses for any relevant interactions (e.g. estradiol approximately halves liver tolerance [alcohol, weed, diphenhydramine]).

In order to avoid dependence issues, I wait a default of two weeks between recreational uses of any drug. (I only count caffeine here if I'm having more than two cups of tea in a day.)

ROUND 2- Play with it scripted and above board before you play with it in an explicitly cnc way. Your communication and mental state will have shifted, and you'll need to learn to accommodate that; make sure you try things out without added communication barriers first. Also, make sure to talk about how everything went afterwards when you're both sober!

If you're going to adjust doses, do it slowly and carefully. Most easily accessible recreational drugs can be incremented by half the standard dose. Some drugs are incredibly sensitive to fine adjustments; this is why Fentanyl, for example, is so dangerous and not recommended to use.

ROUND 3- Don't get comfortable. Try to have as peaceful and relaxed an experience as you want, and keep an eye on things as you play with different emotional states- but DEFINITELY continue to keep an eye on safety. It doesn't stop being a concern because you've done it once and everything went fine.

ETA- Mind how drugs affect things like pain tolerance! You might miss important signals from your body. Also, pay attention to overlap with your neurotype when planning and risk profiling. You might desire or achieve different effects depending on your own specific brain.

[sirfrogsworth]

Clinging to sanity

Summary of this post...

My brain is broken. My A/C is broken. My phone is broken. My computer is broken. My support system is broken. My financial stability is broken. My family is broken.

And the big finale...

Please give Froggie a Yelp review to repair his relationship with his estranged uncles.

Seriously, I need a whole bunch of you to say nice things about me in a convoluted plan to get back the money my brother stole from my dying father.

If you don't feel like reading all of my broken stuff and just want to read about giving me a good review as a person, you can skip to the bullet point list at the end.

Alright, here we go...

I sometimes get in these states where I feel like my sanity is compromised. My mental defenses are minimal and I lose the filter on my brain that tells me "this is a good idea" or "this is a bad idea."

This causes me to say embarrassing things. I overshare with strangers. I keep myself from falling asleep because I have some amazing idea. But when I wake up in the morning I can't believe I lost all of that sleep for such a ridiculous idea. I write weird posts that no one likes. Or I post about controversial subjects like A.I. and trans people and RFK Jr. that I *know* will result in contentious feedback.

And my insane brain says, "You can handle it! Besides, you are so factually correct about this, no one will dare question your meticulous research. IT'S ALL GOOD! SEND IT, YOLO!"

I have a rule. If I am not emotionally or mentally prepared to defend my point of view on a controversial subject, I should wait until I am ready to publish.

Insane Froggie Brain ignores this rule.

After I "send it" and the negative feedback starts to flow in (even though I was assured by my brain it wouldn't), I become afraid to look at messages and replies and reblogs. And a lot of times I need that sense of community. I need to talk to my cool little community so I don't feel lonely. But Insane Froggie Brain cuts me off from that. I give myself all of this anxiety that could have been avoided by just posting another time.

And because I have no emotional defenses, that anxiety is amplified. Mean comments hurt much more. I obsess over them and my OCD causes thought feedback loops where I cannot get something out of my brain. I once couldn't sleep for a weekend because someone said I was wrong about how light reflects off the moon. They were right and I was also right but they said I was "misleading." And that just lived in my brain for days. I kept trying to think of new ways to better explain my point of view. I used up energy I didn't really have to take pictures of a baseball in a dark closet.

It was silly. It didn't matter. It was just a small disagreement. But OCD doesn't do small. OCD makes everything BIG.

What I'm trying to say is...

People need their emotional defenses.

People need their filters.

It's weird because I still have full access to my logical brain. So sane thoughts get all mixed in with the less sane ones. Sometimes I am self aware and can shut down the less sane ideas. Other times I am oblivious. And I *hate* losing control of my brain in any way. It's one of the reasons I've never touched alcohol. Which is why I get very disturbed when this happens.

I remember one time I was positive I was going to move to Florida and start a pet photography business. I had an entire business plan worked out where I trained people how to take the photos so the business could run itself if I got sick. I made an entire PowerPoint presentation to show Katrina so she would be my business partner. I was looking up rent prices for office space. I was making equipment lists for camera gear. She was going on a trip so she told me I could talk to her about it when she returned. And I am so lucky she wasn't available at the time.

Maybe if I had a normal person's energy, I could make something like that work. But once I returned to sanity, I realized it was orders of magnitude more complicated than anything I was actually capable of doing. I am still planning to do pet photography, but I have to come up with a more reasonable plan that does not involve Insane Froggie Brain.

I think it is just my ambitious mind trying to escape. Chronic illness is often heartbreaking because you have to temper all of your ambitions. And it is especially devastating when you are a very ambitious person, as I am.

I want to have all of these big ideas. But I have to filter them through reality. And when that filter is broken, I just unleash big ideas on all my friends. I once even held an official video chat meeting and we took notes and made plans. And I feel so guilty I wasted 4 people's time like that. None of those ideas happened. They had no chance of happening with my energy levels. But my friends and collaborators still did the meeting and nodded along like everything was fine. I appreciate them humoring me.

I also overshare. I overshare normally, but when I get like this I OVER SHARE. You are probably going to witness it in this very post. But I tell everyone everything about what is going on. I tell strangers. I tell a dog walking by.

"Hey doggie, my testosterone is returning and I'm struggling with having a libido again. I know most people would not complain, but it is very disruptive to my day! I have other things I want to do!"

Right now I am just not confident in anything I think or do. I wrote a post about social constructs yesterday. That literally took me all day to write. I was endlessly tweaking it and I thought it was going to be viral and helpful and win the trans debate for everyone.

It currently has 49 notes.

I'm afraid I did not fix trans rights.

Sorry about that.

And my rant about Christopher Nolan using IMAX is doing pretty well. I nerded out about film grain for like 2 paragraphs and it is getting way more notes than a philosophical perspective on constructs.

I just have no idea what people are going to like and I used to be pretty good at judging that. It's like I'm throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks but instead of a wall I'm throwing it into the void. The spaghetti just disappears into infinite darkness.

I'm clearly still recovering from the big house clean with Katrina. And I am more tired than normal. But I am also very stressed about losing the house. I'm trying to figure it out, but I may only have until the end of June before I have to make some scary decisions.

And also, my air conditioner is not working. It has a leaky evaporator. Last year, I had it recharged and that lasted the entire summer. If the leak is leaking at the same rate, I could just do that again. It would be expensive, but replacing the evaporator is so costly, I'd be better off getting a heat pump installed. I'm a good candidate, it could save me money in the long run, but I am nowhere near in a position to make that happen.

Also, my phone is falling apart.

Literally. The only thing keeping it together is the phone case.

And this laptop, which I love, was not meant to be my main computer. I bought it when my dad was sick and I needed something upstairs to manage his prescriptions and bills and appointments. It wasn't meant to be an image editing machine. And, to their credit, Apple has made a crazy powerful little computer. I admit it, I love an Apple product. It can handle way more than expected. But my photo restorations can sometimes end up with 5 gigabyte files. I can't even save them as PSDs. I have to use this weird "PSB" format. It stands for "Photoshop Big." When I fill up the RAM, my computer uses the main SSD. And when I fill that up, I think I can hear the laptop crying and saying, "I wasn't meant for this! Please use fewer layers!"

But I need to finish restoring these photos because I have delayed their completion by about 5 months (got sick before I could finish). And also because I need to pay for the A/C recharge.

You might be thinking, "Didn't you fundraise to get the big fancy powerful computer of your dreams a few years ago? Why don't you use that?"

My big fancy computer has been broken almost since I got it.

It was right before my mom got really sick and there is a major hardware problem. I worked with tech support for over a month and we could not figure out what the issue was. The computer is mostly unusable. Like, "can't even web browse" unusable.

It honestly has caused me so much depression. Like deep, deep, crying-myself-to-sleep-for-weeks depression. I still cry about it. I know it is just a thing, but I am genuinely heartbroken about it.

Why haven't I fixed it? I'm a good computer fixer, right?

Once I had to take care of my parents, I just did not have any extra energy to deal with it. After a month of back-and-forth emails from the manufacturer, I finally told them, "I'm sorry, my parents are sick. I will email you when I have the energy to revisit this."

If you know my story and how I took care of my parents all alone because I have a neglectful brother, then you can probably guess that energy never came.

I am good at tech support. I have been an expert in computers since I was a teenager. I have taken apart and built computers more times than I can count. I have never had a problem this frustrating before. It works fine for a few hours, and then it just progressively slows down to being unusable. I narrowed the issue to either the SSD, the CPU, or the motherboard. All things that are not easy to replace. (The SSD is behind the damn GPU.)

In the 30s, the Royal Air Force used to have issues with their planes that baffled them. This is where the term "gremlin" came from. No matter what they did, no matter how many parts they replaced, they could not get the "gremlin" out of the plane. These were professional mechanics who just could not fix something and it drove them nuts.

I have a computer gremlin. I've never experienced anything like it in all of my years of fixing computers. I was working with professional tech support people. I was on reddit forums. And the only thing left to do was start swapping out parts. I'd work on it maybe an hour each day with whatever energy I had and it eventually was too much. I just could not deal with it. They told me to send it back, but I could not take care of my parents without any access to a computer. So I just rebooted it every time I used it.

At that point, my parents were requiring 24/7 care and I was so overwhelmed that I said, "fuck it" and ordered this laptop. I figured I'd fix the computer when I had time or energy. But that time and energy never came. And I certainly didn't have the energy to haul a 60 pound computer upstairs, box it up, and then take it to UPS. So I just kept putting it off and putting it off.

And I let the warranty expire.

When I realized I did that, I cried myself to sleep for another few weeks. This material object has caused me legitimate emotional trauma.

Any part replacements are now on me. And there isn't really any way of knowing which part is faulty. I figured I'd buy a cheap SSD and start there.

I feel so fucking guilty because people donated money for me to have that machine. I feel like I let them all down by not getting it fixed. When I finish my recovery, I'm hoping I can sort it out. But that could be many months from now.

Recovery has been such a dark, lonely place. Trying to restore my health a millimeter at a time is a grueling marathon of misery. I have been struggling to keep Insane Froggie Brain at bay this entire time.

I felt like I was stuck in a hole.

And like a superhero with the power of friendship and puns, Katrina pulled me out of the giant hole I was in. My house turned into a biohazard. She flew from Florida to essentially clean and organize everything. How do you even begin to thank someone for that?

But also, she shouldn't have had to do that. I have a perfectly functional brother. But he hasn't spoken to me for nearly a year now.

I have other family in town. But I missed so many family gatherings over the years, they don't really know me. None of them have called. I'd have to rebuild those relationships if I want them to be a part of my life again.

And I haven't talked about this yet because it has been too painful.

But... my support system fell apart.

My aunt had to move away to take care of her father-in-law. A year before my mom passed she took care of my grandma as her end-of-life caregiver. And people should only have to do that once. But she has to do it again, and unfortunately, we haven't been able to speak much.

We were very good at keeping in touch in real life. But she is of an older generation and has trouble maintaining relationships on a smartphone. I mean, I get it. Some people are just better at meatspace than cyberspace. That was actually one of the things I liked about our bond. Almost all of my friendships are online. Having someone who liked to visit me and talk to me in person was special.

But, for the time being, I lost that. And it feels a bit like temporarily losing another parent.

I am struggling to even start writing the words for this next part.

I had two best friends. Katrina and I are great. Our friendship is probably better than it has ever been.

But my other best friend of nearly 15 years ghosted me without explanation.

I haven't talked about it because it has been too hard. Any time I try to think about it I get upset. My eyes are filling up with tears as I type this.

I have been pretending like it isn't happening.

Which is not working great.

I've been trying to hire a therapist.

They all have months-long waiting lists.

My friend just stopped talking to me and I don't know why.

They went from driving across the country and holding my hand at my dad's funeral to just not being a part of my life.

I'm so scared I said something terrible or did something terrible. I keep going through all of my memories trying to figure out what I could have done. But we had the kind of friendship where we'd talk about that stuff. If I screw up, they would tell me. We'd work it out.

This person who was in my life nearly every week for over a decade is just not there anymore. I keep losing people and I can't make it stop. And I am really worried that I am leaning on Katrina too much. She went from being part of a multifaceted support system to my entire support system. That isn't fair to her.

She has been very understanding. And she knows I am going to rebuild a support system as soon as I am able. But I don't want to overwhelm her and lose her too.

Weaning off this medication and living with no testosterone has been so miserable and she has been the only one helping me through it.

I'm doing so well with my recovery. I think I can be off the meds in 3 months and hopefully my testosterone will be fully back in range. I'm already more productive than I have been in nearly 8 months.

But I have 1 month of financial runway left and I am not going to get well enough before then.

Everything happens all at once. Every single time. And usually terrible things happen in my life at the same time terrible things happen in Katrina's life. She had terrible mold that destroyed her health for months. Thankfully it did not turn her transphobic, but it sure fucked her health for a while. She made all of this progress getting fit and healthy and BAM, the universe says, "You are doing too well, you need a challenge!"

So, what is my plan?

I am a problem solver and I have some doozies to solve.

Right now I am going to appeal to the family patriarchs on my dad's side. On his literal deathbed, my dad asked his brothers to "take care of me" and I am going to attempt to call in that favor.

I am going to ask them to talk to my brother and hopefully mediate a solution regarding the stolen inheritance. I want them to convince my brother to do the right thing and return the money he took from my dad.

Sorry, the money he "legally inherited" due to his wife "reinterpreting my dad's wishes" in the will.

Before you ask, I have no options to fight this in court. A verbal promise is not enough to overturn a written will. And the cost of fighting would be more than the inheritance. Please don't suggest any legal advice. I've talked to good lawyers. And unless I want to sue for emotional distress, there aren't any legal options available.

The best option is to appeal to my brother personally and ask him to keep his promise to my dad.

The only reason I am in this mess is because my brother repeatedly promised to give me the money. He said he didn't want it on multiple occasions. So all of my plans involved the expectation of this money. I was going to fix up the basement apartment and seek a roommate.

But it took over a year to just get it out of probate. A year I could have used to come up with other solutions. But he waited until the last minute and made his lawyer tell me he was screwing me.

I'm sure my brother will argue my dad knew what he was signing. But I know that is impossible. Before my dad passed, we were in the hospital and I saw the will for the first time. I asked him if it reflected his wishes. And I asked him if he meant to include my brother's wife in the will.

His response was, "Are you fucking kidding me???"

Readers, does that sound like a man that knew what was in his will?

Dad was so upset that he was about to have them cut off his leg just so he could live a few more weeks and fix the will.

You have to give my dad credit, he goes pretty hardcore when it comes to protecting his family.

I couldn't let him go through an amputation to protect me from my brother's shenanigans.

But I am pretty screwed now.

That said, my uncles are pretty hardcore too. One is *very* intimidating. So I feel like my uncles talking to my brother might carry some weight.

But I have one problem...

I mean, aside from the myriad problems already described.

How about... I have one additional problem...

My uncles don't like me very much.

They think I am a basement-dwelling loser who is faking his illness and was taking advantage of his parents for two decades.

One uncle even accused me of stealing from my dad.

They are protective of their brother. They loved my dad. Which is a good thing! As long as I can convince them that their assumptions about me are invalid, I think their love for my dad will compel them to help me.

They just don't have the context. They don't know me. They live in far-off lands. And due to some unfortunate timing, one uncle saw me at one of the lowest points of my life. This was maybe 8 years ago? He didn't realize I was thrown into the deep end and very recently took on the role as full-time caregiver for two very sick people.

My awful strategy at the time was "if I don't take care of myself, I'll have more energy to take care of my parents." If you are a caregiver, this is a bad strategy. It seems obvious you have to do some self care to give care to others, but when you are just starting out, that seems impossible.

My uncle showed up unannounced and I wasn't showered, I hadn't brushed my teeth in a week, and my room had a fun layer of trash on the floor. The trash can was overflowing and I literally did not have the spare energy to change the bag.

To make matters worse, my mom's medications and constant pain had broken the filter in her brain that prevents her from saying mean things. She was on this crazy chemo-like infusion that was basically using poison to fight her psoriatic arthritis. Her aggressive, blunt remarks were not her fault. That wasn't who she was. But she could not stop herself from saying hurtful things.

The kindest woman alive was suddenly Don Rickles without the "just kidding" subtext. And my uncle didn't know this and I got into an argument with my mom.

I probably looked like a pampered brat loser who just lies in bed and plays video games all day while arguing with his saint of a mother.

I don't blame him. Without context, that's exactly what it looked like.

So I am writing my uncles a letter.

It is essentially a memoir of the caregiving I gave to my parents. I hope to publish it publicly at some point, but right now it is just a letter to them. If it were a typical hardcover book, it would be about 70 pages long.

I am telling them everything.

If nothing else, I just need them to know my dad's story. I need them to know he was well taken care of. That I did everything humanly possible to make his last year as comfortable as I could. I need them to know he was *never* alone.

Sadly, because they probably think I am an unreliable narrator, I am my own worst witness. So I am asking 3 people in my current support system to write testimony to verify everything in my memoir is accurate. I even have a doctor's note!

It is probably insane to put this much effort into convincing my uncles to like me. But I'm pretty sure Sane Froggie Brain is behind the wheel of this endeavor. Sometimes the craziest, most desperate idea is the only option left.

Basically I am using my writing skills to try and save my Froggie butt.

I don't mean to be braggadocious, but people perusing my prose persistently pontificate that I am proficient at penning pleasing passages.

People say I write good sometimes.

And I think this memoir letter thingie is the best thing I've ever written. So I am hopeful I will deflate these dubious assumptions and tug on my uncles' heartstrings.

But there is something you all can do to help me.

A friend on tumblr is helping me edit this memoir monstrosity. And she gave me her testimonial to add to my 3 witnesses.

"I have been following The Frogman for well over a decade on his website. It was years before I learned his name was Benjamin! We all just call him Froggy. He was (and still is) one of the funniest internet guys out there. He is incredibly skilled at putting together humorous GIFs and photo sets, and his comedic writing is second to none. He regularly goes viral. Along with that, he was open and vulnerable about the toll CFS takes on him. I can attest to many folks over the years telling him that he has helped them as they dealt with their own health issues. He is so knowledgeable about so much--his posts are famous for being long, detailed, and wildly informative. And most of all, entertaining. They are a joy to read. We also followed along on his heartbreaking journey with his parents. He shared so much of them with us over the years that they felt like people we knew. It was so clear, from his long absences, how much he was doing for them. Our hearts broke when he told us his parents were no longer with us. Froggy has fans, and so did his parents. Otis, too. We love and support him and will always wish him the best."

It made me cry.

But it also felt like getting a Yelp review on... my entire deal.

And it gave me an idea.

What if I had a bunch of these as optional testimony for my uncles?

I'm not going to force them to read what a bunch of internet strangers have to say. But it could be a compelling way to prove my website antics were a serious attempt to build a livelihood for myself. My uncles were successful businessmen and respect a strong work ethic and trying to make your own way.

I was too early for monetization options like Patreon, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch, but I ran a very successful comedy blog. If I had my 2013 success in the 2020s, I probably would've been able to retire and live off that for the rest of my life. I have several original GIFs that were downloaded tens of millions of times. Google said one of them was searched for over 100,000,000 times.

My blog was silly, but I took it seriously and I had sponsors and merch and an Otis plush.

They think what I did was like when you are at the family Christmas gathering and you ask your weird cousin what he's been up to and he says, "I run a blog about corgis from my parents' basement."

How do I relate the impact I had? They don't know what "Know Your Meme" is. They don't know what being on the front page of Reddit means. They don't know the amazing community I built. They don't know that I created one of the largest and most generous online support systems one could possibly have. I'm still alive and trying to make a life for myself because all of you continue to love and support me.

I was successful and I worked hard despite my disability.

I just had bad timing with the financial aspect of that success.

So, if you want to leave a Yelp review of The Frogman for my uncles, I'd appreciate it.

I came up with a list of things I need to prove to them. I'm just going to copy/paste the entire thing here. I'll strikethrough the ones you all probably can't speak to.

I am not a basement dwelling loser.

My website was more than a silly hobby.

I did not mooch off my parents for 20+ years.

I did not steal from my parents.

I am not the crazed, awkward mess [my uncle] witnessed.

I am disabled.

I cannot get a job.

I am a good person.

I am a likable person.

I was a good son.

I took good care of my parents.

My parents would not have been better off in a nursing home.

My parents would not have been better off moving closer to my brother.

My brother and his wife neglected and emotionally abused Mom & Dad.

My brother and his wife changed the will to benefit them against my mom & dad’s wishes.

My brother promised repeatedly the will was a mistake and I would receive the full amount.

I did not take care of my parents to “retain the house” or get money.

So, if you want to attempt to convince two elderly conservative Catholic men that my cat memes were lit, I would appreciate the help.

If you’ve been part of this community, and you’ve ever felt like I made you laugh, cry, or feel understood, a short 'review' of me as a person could mean the world.

Just remember your audience is...

Uncle #1: A stoic, but brilliant 80 year old who writes text messages like they are business emails. Complete with "Dear Ben" and "Regards, Your Uncle". He is still very sharp-minded and lucid. He thinks success is a high paying job, a house, and a family (my brother). He does not like weakness and consistently thought I should "be an adult and get a job." He is very loyal and respected my dad very much.

Uncle #2: A 60-something retired grandpa who thinks his constant dad jokes are genuinely funny. He is empathetic, but secretly judgmental. He will act like your best friend even if he doesn't care for you. He is an amazing grandpa. Very involved with his kids and their kids. He keeps every video of them getting a goal in sportsball on his phone. He will help you if you think you deserve to be helped. He is very close with Uncle #1.

So... kinda running the gamut there.

You can reblog this post or leave a reply or send a private message or email me at frogman54@gmail.com

I will be anonymizing your names for obvious reasons.

I fear my uncles might not understand why Tumblr user "PokemonAssBlaster69" is saying nice things about me.

Explaining "The Frogman" is hard enough.

Anyway, thank you in advance.

[dragonnarrative-writes]

Generative AI Is Bad For Your Creative Brain

In the wake of early announcing that their blog will no longer be posting fanfiction, I wanted to offer a different perspective than the ones I’ve been seeing in the argument against the use of AI in fandom spaces. Often, I’m seeing the arguments that the use of generative AI or Large Language Models (LLMs) make creative expression more accessible. Certainly, putting a prompt into a chat box and refining the output as desired is faster than writing a 5000 word fanfiction or learning to draw digitally or traditionally. But I would argue that the use of chat bots and generative AI actually limits - and ultimately reduces - one’s ability to enjoy creativity.

Creativity, defined by the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus, is the ability to produce or use original and unusual ideas. By definition, the use of generative AI discourages the brain from engaging with thoughts creatively. ChatGPT, character bots, and other generative AI products have to be trained on already existing text. In order to produce something “usable,” LLMs analyzes patterns within text to organize information into what the computer has been trained to identify as “desirable” outputs. These outputs are not always accurate due to the fact that computers don’t “think” the way that human brains do. They don’t create. They take the most common and refined data points and combine them according to predetermined templates to assemble a product. In the case of chat bots that are fed writing samples from authors, the product is not original - it’s a mishmash of the writings that were fed into the system.

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) is a therapy modality developed by Marsha M. Linehan based on the understanding that growth comes when we accept that we are doing our best and we can work to better ourselves further. Within this modality, a few core concepts are explored, but for this argument I want to focus on Mindfulness and Emotion Regulation. Mindfulness, put simply, is awareness of the information our senses are telling us about the present moment. Emotion regulation is our ability to identify, understand, validate, and control our reaction to the emotions that result from changes in our environment. One of the skills taught within emotion regulation is Building Mastery - putting forth effort into an activity or skill in order to experience the pleasure that comes with seeing the fruits of your labor. These are by no means the only mechanisms of growth or skill development, however, I believe that mindfulness, emotion regulation, and building mastery are a large part of the core of creativity. When someone uses generative AI to imitate fanfiction, roleplay, fanart, etc., the core experience of creative expression is undermined.

Creating engages the body. As a writer who uses pen and paper as well as word processors while drafting, I had to learn how my body best engages with my process. The ideal pen and paper, the fact that I need glasses to work on my computer, the height of the table all factor into how I create. I don’t use audio recordings or transcriptions because that’s not a skill I’ve cultivated, but other authors use those tools as a way to assist their creative process. I can’t speak with any authority to the experience of visual artists, but my understanding is that the feedback and feel of their physical tools, the programs they use, and many other factors are not just part of how they learned their craft, they are essential to their art.

Generative AI invites users to bypass mindfully engaging with the physical act of creating. Part of becoming a person who creates from the vision in one’s head is the physical act of practicing. How did I learn to write? By sitting down and making myself write, over and over, word after word. I had to learn the rhythms of my body, and to listen when pain tells me to stop. I do not consider myself a visual artist - I have not put in the hours to learn to consistently combine line and color and form to show the world the idea in my head.

But I could.

Learning a new skill is possible. But one must be able to regulate one’s unpleasant emotions to be able to get there. The emotion that gets in the way of most people starting their creative journey is anxiety. Instead of a focus on “fear,” I like to define this emotion as “unpleasant anticipation.” In Atlas of the Heart, Brene Brown identifies anxiety as both a trait (a long term characteristic) and a state (a temporary condition). That is, we can be naturally predisposed to be impacted by anxiety, and experience unpleasant anticipation in response to an event. And the action drive associated with anxiety is to avoid the unpleasant stimulus.

Starting a new project, developing a new skill, and leaning into a creative endevor can inspire and cause people to react to anxiety. There is an unpleasant anticipation of things not turning out exactly correctly, of being judged negatively, of being unnoticed or even ignored. There is a lot less anxiety to be had in submitting a prompt to a machine than to look at a blank page and possibly make what could be a mistake. Unfortunately, the more something is avoided, the more anxiety is generated when it comes up again. Using generative AI doesn’t encourage starting a new project and learning a new skill - in fact, it makes the prospect more distressing to the mind, and encourages further avoidance of developing a personal creative process.

One of the best ways to reduce anxiety about a task, according to DBT, is for a person to do that task. Opposite action is a method of reducing the intensity of an emotion by going against its action urge. The action urge of anxiety is to avoid, and so opposite action encourages someone to approach the thing they are anxious about. This doesn’t mean that everyone who has anxiety about creating should make themselves write a 50k word fanfiction as their first project. But in order to reduce anxiety about dealing with a blank page, one must face and engage with a blank page. Even a single sentence fragment, two lines intersecting, an unintentional drop of ink means the page is no longer blank. If those are still difficult to approach a prompt, tutorial, or guided exercise can be used to reinforce the understanding that a blank page can be changed, slowly but surely by your own hand.

(As an aside, I would discourage the use of AI prompt generators - these often use prompts that were already created by a real person without credit. Prompt blogs and posts exist right here on tumblr, as well as imagines and headcannons that people often label “free to a good home.” These prompts can also often be specific to fandom, style, mood, etc., if you’re looking for something specific.)

In the current social media and content consumption culture, it’s easy to feel like the first attempt should be a perfect final product. But creating isn’t just about the final product. It’s about the process. Bo Burnam’s Inside is phenomenal, but I think the outtakes are just as important. We didn’t get That Funny Feeling and How the World Works and All Eyes on Me because Bo Burnham woke up and decided to write songs in the same day. We got them because he’s been been developing and honing his craft, as well as learning about himself as a person and artist, since he was a teenager. Building mastery in any skill takes time, and it’s often slow.

Slow is an important word, when it comes to creating. The fact that skill takes time to develop and a final piece of art takes time regardless of skill is it’s own source of anxiety. Compared to @sentientcave, who writes about 2k words per day, I’m very slow. And for all the time it takes me, my writing isn’t perfect - I find typos after posting and sometimes my phrasing is awkward. But my writing is better than it was, and my confidence is much higher. I can sit and write for longer and longer periods, my projects are more diverse, I’m sharing them with people, even before the final edits are done. And I only learned how to do this because I took the time to push through the discomfort of not being as fast or as skilled as I want to be in order to learn what works for me and what doesn’t.

Building mastery - getting better at a skill over time so that you can see your own progress - isn’t just about getting better. It’s about feeling better about your abilities. Confidence, excitement, and pride are important emotions to associate with our own actions. It teaches us that we are capable of making ourselves feel better by engaging with our creativity, a confidence that can be generalized to other activities.

Generative AI doesn’t encourage its users to try new things, to make mistakes, and to see what works. It doesn’t reward new accomplishments to encourage the building of new skills by connecting to old ones. The reward centers of the brain have nothing to respond to to associate with the action of the user. There is a short term input-reward pathway, but it’s only associated with using the AI prompter. It’s designed to encourage the user to come back over and over again, not develop the skill to think and create for themselves.

I don’t know that anyone will change their minds after reading this. It’s imperfect, and I’ve summarized concepts that can take months or years to learn. But I can say that I learned something from the process of writing it. I see some of the flaws, and I can see how my essay writing has changed over the years. This might have been faster to plug into AI as a prompt, but I can see how much more confidence I have in my own voice and opinions. And that’s not something chatGPT can ever replicate.

[dandelionsresilience]

Dandelion News - November 1-7

Like these weekly compilations? Tip me at $kaybarr1735 or check out my Dandelion Doodles on Patreon!

1. Climate Initiatives Fare Well Across the Country Despite National Political Climate

“[California voters approved] a $10 billion bond measure to boost climate resilience across [the] state[…. Hawai’i] voters cast their ballots in favor of establishing the [climate] resiliency fund, with money for the project coming from existing property tax revenue.“

2. ‘You have to disguise your human form’: how sea eagles are being returned to Severn estuary after 150 years

“[… To avoid imprinting,] the handlers will wear long robes and feed the young eagles chopped rabbit and other meat with bird hand-puppets. […] Williams hopes that restoring eagles to the top of the food chain in the estuary will create a more balanced, thriving ecosystem.”

3. 10 states voted on pro-abortion referendums. 7 of them passed

“New York voters overwhelmingly approved the Equal Rights Amendment, adding [… among other characteristics] gender expression, pregnancy, and pregnancy outcomes to anti-discrimination laws. […] In deep-red Missouri and Montana, voters also enshrined abortions protections in their state constitutions.”

4. Giant rats could soon fight illegal wildlife trade by sniffing out elephant tusk and rhino horn

“”Our study shows that we can train African giant pouched rats to detect illegally trafficked wildlife, even when it has been concealed among other substances[.…] They can easily access tight spaces like cargo in packed shipping containers or be lifted up high to screen the ventilation systems of sealed containers,” Szott explained.”

5. Sarah McBride wins Delaware U.S. House seat, becoming the first out trans member of Congress

“McBride spearheaded Delaware’s legislation to ban the “gay and trans panic” defense as a state senator [… and] helped to pass paid family and medical leave, gun safety measures, and protections for reproductive rights.”

6. Critically endangered Sumatran elephant calf born in Indonesia

“Indonesian officials hailed the births and said they showed conservation efforts were essential to prevent the protected species from extinction. […] Sumatran elephants are on the brink of extinction with only about 2,400-2,800 left in the world, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature.”

7. Sin City is Going Green

“[Hotels there] have conserved 16 billion gallons of water since 2007, thanks to […] replacing grass with desert-friendly landscaping, installing water-efficient taps across all properties, and reusing water at aquariums and in the Bellagio Fountain.”

8. Gray squirrel control: Study shows promise for effective contraceptive delivery system

“[… T]he feeders have a very high level of species-specificity. […] The bait and monitoring system developed and tested in the study demonstrated that […] “spring was the only season tested where female squirrels were more likely to visit bait feeders than males. Spring coincides with a peak in squirrel breeding and is therefore a good time to deliver a contraceptive."”

9. Returning Grazing Land to Native Forests Would Yield Big Climate Benefits

“[… S]trategically regrowing forests on land where cattle currently graze […] while intensifying production elsewhere could drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions, with little hit to global protein production, a new study shows.”

10. Interior Department Strengthens Conservation of American Bison Through New Agreement with Canada and Mexico

“Approximately 31,000 bison are currently being stewarded by the United States, Canada and Mexico with the goal of conserving the species and their role in the function of native grassland systems, as well as their place in Indigenous culture.”

October 22-28 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)

[captainpikeachu]

So a post discussing new Thunderbolts promotional arts appeared earlier today in the John Walker tag trying to single out John as the odd man out of this Thunderbolts team, saying how everyone in the team deserves to grow and heal but John deserves to die and never be redeemed because he's not like the others.

I'm here to explain why what you see below is totally wrong and shows a fundamental misunderstanding of John and the Thunderbolts movie.

"this man willingly joined the military"

I don't know if the poster is American or not, but this claim ignores the very important context of how John joined the military and when he joined the military. You see, John is canonically stated to have gone to West Point for college, that is a military academy, which means that during high school when John was underage, he would already have been preparing for his application process, getting letters from his congressman or senator or even the president. The selection process is incredibly stringent. You don't decide to go to West Point and apply on a whim like you do regular colleges. Attending a military academy is a long term commitment because after you graduate, you are automatically put into active duty service as an officer, your contract is signed by you agreeing at 17/18 years old to go to this military college.

Some people may not understand, but America has a hugely active military recruitment system that targets children, especially kids from disadvantaged communities. Military recruiters are literally legally given access to high schools across the country, they're allowed personal contact information of kids, they get to show up at career fairs and other activities to actively recruit children to be soldiers and lie to them about all the good things they will do and the opportunities and benefits they will receive. And THIS IS NORMALIZED in American society. The exploitation of children and turning them into soldiers is NORMALIZED. Even celebrated.

So tell me, in an environment that already normalizes and praises the idea of being a soldier and protecting your country and giving yourself for true heroic service, is it that illogical and surprising that a young underage John would have bought into the idea of service as so many other young kids do? Not to mention we don't even know if his school had a mandatory JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps) program that funnels kids straight into military service. Or if the MCU follows John's comics history and his father and his older brother both have served. Either way, John lives in an environment and a country that idealizes soldiers to kids, actively recruits and exploits kids, and heavily showers them in heroic military propaganda. A propaganda that even Steve in the 40s buys into and is eager to serve, and Steve was already an adult in his 20s. Meanwhile John was a young teenager when 9/11 happened, when the country was actively rallying its citizens through lies and getting people to buy into a war to defend freedom and protect our loved ones. If people older than John bought into this, then why is it surprising that a teenager surrounded by all this rhetoric and propaganda would buy into it, thinking that he is doing a good thing to help?

Just because indoctrination is normalized by society doesn't mean it's any less harmful indoctrination. Just because John wasn't kidnapped or forced into being a weapon doesn't mean he wasn't turned into one by the military industrial complex as a teenager. And just because he willingly signed up for something that his at best 18 year old self wouldn't have ever properly been mature enough to fully comprehend, doesn't mean he was not abused by a violent system that doesn't care about him beyond using him as a tool. The same way that violent systems of control used and abused the other members of the Thunderbolts team.

We all understand abuse and exploitation and power imbalance when an 18 year old is dating a 35 year old. When abuse happens in that context, we don't say "well the 18 year old willingly got into that relationship so who cares", so why is this kind of dismissive tone taken with John? If a domestic abuse victim stays in a relationship because of complicated feelings, do we blame the victim? What's happening here with John is a form of victim blaming. A very easy kind of victim blaming because the illusion of choice makes some people, like the above poster, think that John asked for it. So John can't be like the others. Nevermind that John's experiences likely mirrors Alexei's yet this poster never seems to call out Alexei for anything.

Yes, John willingly joined the military, but pretending that there isn't a more nuanced context of why and how he joined is to be ignorant to exploitation and indoctrination beyond just the garden variety kidnapping and forced brainwashing, and the insidious nature of that kind of trauma and exploitation. And it also ignores that John's decision was likely made when he was underage and under the influence of a hugely active military recruitment and exploitation apparatus. The creatives behind the Falcon and the Winter Soldier even once stated that the military was John's only family, which implies that he was a vulnerable and lonely child looking for a home, and the military took advantage of that so that they would ensure John would be loyal and grateful to them. They groomed him to be their weapon, no matter how "willing" he made that decision as a teenager.

------------------------

"willingly decided to try to become Captain America"

This comment shows a lack of understanding of how the military works. John didn't ask to be Cap, he didn't even know what the government and military was doing until they showed up one day to give him a new job duty two weeks before they were gonna officially unveil him. There is no willing or unwilling in the military when you're a soldier, you follow your orders. Sure, you can disobey unlawful orders, but guess what, being the next Captain America is not an unlawful order. John didn't get to choose. The military made the decision and it was his job to obey. Because if he didn't obey, he would end up in court martial and in jail. There is no agency in this. You are not an individual, you are property of the US military to do as they wish. And if you don't obey, they will make your life and your loved ones' lives hell.

-------------------------

"willingly killed people in a way that everyone knows Steve never would have"

What people? John killed one person. One person in the heat of the moment in the middle of grieving his best friend who he just watched be killed right in front of his eyes. If anyone would have understood why John did what he did, it would actually be Steve. Yes John doesn't have Steve's restraint, but let's not act like Steve doesn't know the anger and rage that comes in those moments. And if Bucky had watched Sam be killed, he would have done what John did. In fact, most of the MCU would have done what John did. Tony did. Thor did. Wanda did. Peter Parker and Peter Quill did. Yelena did. Clint did. T'Challa did it twice even after learning the lesson of letting go of revenge. Are all those heroes irredeemable and deserve to die?

Hell, in a post that accuses John of not being like the other Thunderbolts, John does the same thing that Yelena and Ava have both done, wanting to hurt and kill and lash out in pain and revenge. Yelena was going to kill Clint for revenge. Ava literally did not care if her actions would have killed civilians if it got her what she wanted to fix herself, was even ready to threaten Scott's young daughter Cassie. Both of them were no longer under the control of their abusers at that point, yet what makes their chosen rage and lashing out okay and understanding but John's somehow the most evil thing a person has ever done? What makes his pain and loss any less than theirs? In fact, in the Thunderbolts trailer, we watch Yelena just gun down guards left and right, does it make her irredeemable for choosing to still do killing when she no longer has to? Why is all this hypocritical judgment only against John?

And if we even want to address the people John killed in war and how Steve would never, let's just remember that in the Winter Soldier movie, Steve specifically states to Fury that he and the others during the war did somethings that weren't so good, that made them not sleep so well at night, but they thought they were doing it for people to be free. Yes, freedom, the same thing that the US military has been peddling since its conception. So why is it okay when Steve does terrible things in war for freedom, but John is a monster for also doing the same?

John wasn't running about happily wanting to shoot every bad guy. He never had any intentions of hurting anyone, only arresting them, even though the Flag Smashers tried to kill him and Lemar from day one. Even after Karli blew up a building with innocent people still inside it, John wasn't going to kill them but only arrest them. He only killed one Flag Smasher in the heat of the moment because he just saw Lemar die. You know what T'Challa said to Natasha after losing his father and thinking that Bucky did it? He said he would kill Bucky himself, even though Natasha pointed out that there was due process and a task force would arrest Bucky.

Why is it that violent desire for revenge is understood when other MCU heroes/protagonists do it, but John is somehow uniquely evil and not-like-the-others because he lashed out in a very human way? Why is John not allowed his humanity?

----------------------------------------

I will be the first to say John is flawed, he is imperfect, he did make mistakes. But he is not this willful evil monster that this poster tries to paint him as. He is someone whom for essentially 20 years has been trained and groomed to be a perfect weapon for a violent and abusive system that he thought of as his only family. And when this system no longer had any uses for him, it threw him out like trash and left him to drown. This poster talks about other Thunderbolts members rebuilding themselves and their sense of identity, yet this is John's struggle too. Who is he if not a soldier?

The showrunner of TFATWS literally stated that John and Bucky were two sides of the same coin of a veteran's story, of what happens when you give everything for a cause that abandons you and doesn't care for you back. Even the writers of this show understood and deliberately wanted to link John and Bucky's mutual struggles as veterans. Yet this poster wants to exclude John, because the illusion of choice made his trauma and indoctrination and grooming less "real" than the others somehow. This isn't trauma olympics. John is a broken and abused and abandoned weapon, just like every member of the Thunderbolts team. And quite frankly I'm sick and tired of people ignoring this reality because their own hate of the character blinds them to nuance and context.

Death is not the only acceptable character arc for John. He can grow to be a better person and learn to stand up against the system that harmed him and many others. And they can and will redeem him, you know why? They already did. Because John already in TFATWS finale chose to walk away from easy revenge so he could save lives. He has already proven that he could be worthy of that shield and title even if he no longer has it. And the Thunderbolts movie is about ALL of this team learning to overcome their past trauma, of learning to love and accept each other, yes even John. He isn't the exception. He is a integral part of this new team and family. And if you think that Thunderbolts is just gonna be a movie that is designed to kick John out and otherize him, then you've missed the point of this story that the cast and director have stated many times in interviews already. Hopefully Thunderbolts will teach you some important lessons about bias and judgment.

The poster of the comments says that they need to still rewatch TFATWS, and I would say to that, yes, yes you do need to rewatch, preferably rewatch with your eyes, ears, brain, and heart open, because you have missed many important contexts and nuances in your desire to only see John as some unforgivable monster.

By the way, Alexei and John are literally characters sharing the same background, Alexei is just as willing of a participant, yet the fact that those comments never once judge Alexei for actively participating in child trafficking and letting the abuse of little girls keep happening, and somehow Alexei still isn't so irredeemable and could be counted among the others who should get to learn to heal and grow is certainly a choice.

Anyways, here is hoping that when Thunderbolts finally releases, people will learn a lesson about John and how wrong some of yall are.

[se-sissy-lina04]

Sissy’s masterlist

CT-Casa" – Life Among 1000 Brothers (and You in the Middle)

Headcanons: Nat-Borns in the Cloning Residential Complex

1. You get nicknames. Immediately.

Your real name? Forget it.

Fives calls you "Civvie."

Jesse goes with "Roomie Non-Clone"

Kix just calls you "Patient Zero" because you had to sneeze once.

After a week, everybody knows you and you? You are still trying to figure out who is who.

2. You start making a mind map on your wall:

Hardcase = loud, loves snacks and caboom

Kix = medical madman (can somehow teleport??)

Fives = Charm. Too much charm. Forbidden sexy

Cody = looks like the boss. IS HE THE BOSS???

Fox = Mr. No-Bullshit, caff-addicted, chronically tired

Wolffe = dark and broody, (softie)

3. You are the cultural connection to the "normal world."

You bring "weird food" – for example, sushi, vegan sandwiches, or spinach.

Hardcase asks if that's legal.

Waxer wants the recipe.

Kix asks if it has healing properties.

Fox... looks at it as if it could explode.

4. Your daily life is not normal.

Your coffee machine is missing? Fox "borrowed" it because of an emergency (he'll bring it back. With better coffee inside.)

You want to take a shower? Echo has "optimized" the hot water. Now you need an access card.

You're sitting on the balcony? Jesse rappels down from the roof, greets you, and asks if you've seen his cap.

5. You're in 3 group chats, whether you like it or not.

"Floor 3: Tactics & Tea" (It’s the 212th, though they mostly use it to gossip)

"Civil Anomalies: Observation & Protection" (set up by Fox, you have admin rights. No one knows why.)

"MealPlanOrg.exe" (because the 501st needs weekly schedules, otherwise there will be 40 servings of spaghetti on Tuesday)

6. The clones ALWAYS help you.

You’re carrying your groceries? Three clones jump up – carrying everything, building you a new shelf, and offering you a safety training.

Your lamp is broken? Wolffe has a toolkit with him.

You have a broken heart? Tup writes you a poem, Kix brings tea, Jesse offers a distraction mission ("We're catching Fox's cat. It got away.“ Fox doesn’t have a cat.)

7. You are the benchmark for fashion.

Once you wear a simple pair of jeans and a hoodie.

Suddenly, that's the look of the week.

Fives buys seven hoodies.

Dogma asks you what a "washing machine" is.

Thorn combines hoodie with cape.

You have no control anymore.

8. Your door is NEVER safe.

Fox has a master key.

Fives can outsmart it.

Cody just complained his way in.

Kix just magically materialised every time you say anything close to “ow”.

It’s really like this one episode of “friends”, where Monica goes: “Hello people, who do not live here.” But with a ton of clones.

You wake up, and someone is sitting on your sofa: "We're doing the night shift, but it's quieter here. Thank you, civilian."

9. You're slowly becoming an expert in clone psychology.

You can tell the difference between Cody's "please no questions" and Rex's "say something, I'm begging you."

You can tell by his voice whether Fives is tired or just planning a prank.

You have an emotional connection with Grizzer (the Guard's dog) – he likes you more than Jesse. Jesse is hurt.

10. You will become part of the system.

You give plant tips in the 212th Garden Club.

You sit on the Guard's fashion team (against your will, but Fox respects your color taste).

You are the "independent jury" for the Clone of the Month competition. (No one respects your choice, but they ask you again anyway.)

Wolffe lets you join their morning runs (he forced you to join them). You cheat every time. Boost and Sinker noticed, but you bribe them with cookies.

11. And at some point… you feel at home.

You have favorite clones (not that you would ever tell them. They’ll get cranky)

You get invitations to family dinners – from 200 people.

You get a clone name. (Abbreviation: Z-99. Nickname: "Zee.")

You even have a door sign: "Civilian, but adopted."

[babygurlaura]

REDESIGNING THE ACADEMY

STRUCTURE IN NARUTO

Honestly at times felt we should have seen more of Naruto academy days and think more could have been done showcasing how the ninja system works within Konoha which is a militarized system.

This is essentially apart of my naruto rewrite which creates a system for how ninjas are evaluated and taught within the academy. To start off we’ll start off with the entrance exam into the academy. We know from Shikamaru that you can decide whether or not you want to become a ninja. And also how a lot of ninjas who come from established clans are already taught basic and sometimes advance techniques. So with the idea of an entrance exam it’s meant to essentially evaluate the students ability and place them into the track course that’s fits their skill set.

Entrance Exam: Initial Placement Based on Ability

Purpose: Sort students into tiers or tracks based on their existing skill sets. This allows the narrative to reflect why clan children (like Sasuke, Neji, or Ino) are often more advanced due to family training.

Criteria: Intelligence (strategy, problem-solving), combat aptitude (sparring or basic taijutsu forms), chakra control, and maybe even psychological profiling (to match with senseis later).

Outcome: Students are placed into Track A (advanced), Track B (standard), or Track C (remedial) classes—or more tiers if needed.

Narrative Benefit: Shows Naruto’s underdog status isn’t just social—it’s systemic. He likely tested low due to a lack of home training or emotional instability, so he starts at the bottom tier.

Let’s now proceed with how these classes are leveled and the overall structure. There would be general classes such as history or math it makes sense in the grand scheme seeing the amount of propaganda that takes place within Konoha. But also these general courses would be utilized in strategy, mission planning and so on.

* side note Iruka would be placed as homeroom teacher who looks over all the students files and handles their evaluations *

now onto the tracks.

Shinobi Skill Tracks (Specialized Tiers)

Based on entrance exam results and ongoing evaluations, students are placed into Skill Tracks, each one tailored to their progress:

Track A (Advanced): Clan kids or prodigies like Sasuke, Shikamaru, Neji, Ino, etc.

Track B (Standard): Average students like Kiba, Hinata, and Choji.

Track C (Remedial/Development): Students like Naruto, who struggle with chakra control or combat due to a lack of prior training or trauma.

Track A: Advanced Track (Clan Prodigies & High Aptitude)

Track B: Standard Track (Average Performers with Growth Potential)

Track C: Developmental Track (Late Bloomers & Undertrained)

* side note Tenten was originally placed in track c but after further evaluation felt Track B was more suited for her but i have yet to make that adjustment cause i be working a lot *

One thing I plan on implementing into the academy would be practical mission simulations centered on team work, problem solving, leadership, stamina, and emotional maturity.

The format is basically three students, one from each track placed into a group with a professor often times Iruka to evaluate their teamwork skills mainly.

Always felt like these missions worked based for the academy as practical missions centered around teaching team work and so on.

Narrative Use:

Naruto repeatedly fails missions not because he’s uncooperative, but because others sabotage, ignore, or abandon him, reinforcing his isolation.

Iruka could witness this firsthand, shifting his attitude from skeptical to supportive.

Also for further clarification when it comes to the Track courses it’s a flexible system, students are able to “test into” specific Track A classes while still being officially enrolled in Track B or C. This allows for strength-based specialization and highlights individual talent rather than purely clan status.

How It Works:

Access Type | Requirement | Example Classes

Full Track A Enrollment

Consistently high evaluations across all areas

Sasuke, Neji, Shino, Ino

Partial Track A Access

High scores in specific subjects (written or practical)

Sakura (Genjutsu & Strategy), Shikamaru (Tactics)

Audit Access

Permission from the instructor + a qualifying project

Rock Lee (Taijutsu Theory), Hinata (Chakra Control)

======================================

Lastly how the students are evaluated and how they graduate.

For this purpose there are three evaluations, the first being one that’s done to permit you into the academy and see where your skill set lies. The second being the mid academy evaluation.

Mid-Academy Evaluation: Class Advancement or Early Graduation Eligibility

Purpose: Assess progress and see who is eligible to move up a class tier or skip ahead to graduation training.

Example: Itachi likely tested into Tier 1 from the start, and during his Mid-Evaluation, his Genjutsu proficiency and advanced battle sense flagged him as ready for early genin status.

This also adds stakes—students who don’t progress may be held back or even washed out of the Academy.

Pre-Graduation Evaluation: Readiness Check

This could be the equivalent of what Naruto kept failing—not the final “you pass or fail” moment, but an indicator of whether you're ready for the true graduation exam.

It would include:

Teamwork simulations

Mission mock-ups

Ninjutsu, Genjutsu, Taijutsu grading

Chakra nature, aptitude or potential

Graduation Exam: A Cumulative Test

Each class has a specific "Final Jutsu" (like Naruto’s class using Shadow Clones). It allows the exam to vary depending on the needs of the era, the teacher’s design, or even the village’s political state.

For Naruto’s class:

Passing would mean being able to safely and successfully use a multi-clone jutsu and complete a small mission simulation (like rescuing a “hostage” or retrieving a scroll).

Naruto fails this not just because he struggles with the technique, but because of chakra control and inconsistency, again reinforcing why the "failures" are more holistic than just one jutsu.

======================================

That’s all for my Ninja academy redesign I have made some example schedules for some of the Konoha 11 which shows how the tracks work and what classes they’d be place into. But i hope you liked my lil rambling and concept. This is honestly the most structured i’ve been with my post besides my Uzumaki OC.

[under-your-floorboards]

THIS IS A PSA:

I want to see more of Will expanding their reaches of medical practice at Camp Half Blood.

Not only are they understaffed, but the equipment is probably outdated, and their textbooks needed to be updated badly.

Will Solace talking to Chiron about starting a required medical training course 101 for non Apollo kids; quests without healers, random monster attacks, any kind of injury where a healer cannot get to them so they can know what to do themselves and self sustain until they fix it or help arrives.

Will Solace starting a network with pharmaceutical suppliers under the guise of being an on campus clinic for a private school. (Which it basically is) getting access to equipment, birth control, proper prescriptions for disorders and health problems that can’t be helped on Nectar alone, other kinds of over the counter medication, pain relievers and sedatives, gender affirming care, etc.

Will Solace emailing Pre-Med professors of esteemed institutions to get their input on practice regulations and follow up’s on articles he read, getting insight on the proper literature to look for to add to the infirmary shelves.

Will Solace working with the Demeter cabin to grow medicinal herbs because he doesn’t totally disregard the power of Ancient Greek physicians work (the bruise salves work really well)

Will Solace speaking with the nymphs and Coach or Grover about how to better help in case of any emergencies (we don’t want a repeat of Eurydice) cause other species require different healing methods.

Will Solace building the Infirmary from the ground up to actually be a productive system that helps demigods on their way in life, not just preventing their life from ending because he’s awesome like that and he sees the flaws in their current situation and strives to fix them.

[tanadrin]

Although human civilization on Qefre is a couple of thousand years old, it has developed along idiosyncratic lines due to the existence of a planet-wide teleporter network left behind by the long-departed terraformers. These teleporters are essentially stone rings a couple of meters across that can instantaneously exchange everything in a spherical bubble inside them with a similar bubble inside another teleporter (usually including a flat stone platform that provides a convenient surface to stand on). Although their capacity is limited--you can move a lot more people and certainly far more goods by train or ship than you can by teleporter, even if those conveyances go a lot slower--they allow far-flung cities to cheaply stay in close communication with one another.

The basic political unit of Qefre is not the state but the rashun, a kind of ritual-political association tasked with managing the eruni, the logistics management system that controls access to recovered ancient technology. The terraformers seemed to use the eruni as a kind of basic permissions system to distribute and manage responsibility for the planet-wide terraforming infrastructure and its supporting technology; the powerful nature of the eruni and the need to use them responsibly meant that the planet's human inhabitants quickly developed sophisticated social systems for protecting them against misuse, which inevitably became entangled with questions of political power and competing interests between social groups. Rashun became landholding organizations early in Qefre's history, and soon supplanted most early proto-states in regions of extensive human settlement.

In the modern era, rashun club together with local governments and private political associations into "circles" which undertake most low-level administrative functions; these small-scale circles are in turn grouped into larger planet-wide circles, of which there are about fifty; and these larger-scale circles in turn are grouped into ten loose associations, which collaborate to manage affairs of regional or global interest. Since circles can hold territory basically anywhere within the region of human settlement, there has in practice been a strong pressure toward institutionalizing various forms of collaborative and representative government at all levels in order to prevent an absolutely sclerotic degree of political deadlock strangling economic growth.

Not that this hasn't been an issue in the past; indeed, much of Qefre's history has been an endless series of petty local wars, some rising to the scale of planet-wide affrays, with the fragmented structure of territorial control only serving to increase the amount of chaos when violence did break out. Eventually the largest cities, including all the teleporter-networked ones, got so sick of this state of affairs that they ganged up to completely expel the rashun from their immediate territories, and implemented a "power-sharing" agreement that was really an early form of representative democracy, which came to have a profound influence on the internal administration of the rashun themselves.

When the Western Territories were opened up by the discovery of the teleporter at Ar-Amal, the independent cities and the rashun hammered out a set of agreements to prevent a destabilizing series of landgrabs in the surrounding region; but now that the Territories have a large native-born population, many have begun to grumble that they are simply living under a kind of shared fiefdom, quite different from the actual self-government that the cities in the east--or, indeed, the subjects of the modern, collaborative rashun--enjoy. There is a growing local home rule movement, which envisions something quite different from the governments of the east for itself: exclusive territorial sovereignty, with no role at all for the Delegations in its internal affairs. Opponents argue that this is preposterous: that not even the haughtiest of the eastern cities could get away with demanding complete political autarky. To which the Territorialist answer is that all the eastern cities are equals in political affairs, and their political affairs (and political interests) are irrevocably bound up with their neighbors, in a way that is very different from the subordinated and exploited Western Territories. It seems to be an intractable conflict, where neither side is willing to entertain any notion of compromise, nor is it clear what such a compromise would entail. How it will resolve ultimately is anyone's guess.

[timaeusresponds]

Everyday I think at length about Dirk all alone in the ocean by himself. Surviving. There’s a lack of conversation in the greater fandom about that part and so many people jump on Dirk for being a socially inept nightmare, but can you imagine??

Your entire life has been a fight to survive. Your entire life was predestined, and your predetermined destiny is marked with isolation and suffering. You have one friend on the same planet at the same time as you, she is so far away even your most expert transportation would die before reaching her(you’ve imagined dying, alone, drowning in the ocean for your hubris and desperation so many times). She is the only one who understands your situation, and even she has ‘people,’ or something like it.

You are fighting as far back as you remember, not just the environment but literal entities— the only other ‘living’ thing besides fish and birds. They are massive, loud, and they want to kill you, it is their only directive. You spend every day a little anxious they will come and you will have to defend yourself again. You cannot get sick, injured, tired, distracted— they will kill you if you do.

You spend time alone, cradled in the nest of your apartment on stilts, and it rocks in the storms in a way that makes you wonder what happens if severe structural damage takes place.

You do not have the comfort of constant access to food. You do not have the comfort of access to medicine. You do not have the comfort of people. You do not have the comfort of not just friends but strangers. You do not have family.

You talk across time with people who do not know and would not understand your circumstances.

Can you fucking imagine.

They’ve noted extreme geographic isolation can cause health problems, immune system issues, and that’s not touching the mental state. Dirk is in extreme survival settings that the comic never really pokes into, but it’s really not hard to imagine given what Dirk says and what we see? An isolated oceanic apartment, the Imperial Drones, he references fishing, it’s. Not hard to fill in the large blank spot of ‘guy alone in the ocean all by himself and two robots.’

And the two robots are not expressly alive, and he knows that. I’m sure he bonded with them, I’m sure he loved them, but they need to be maintained and they’re as much a weight as they are an aid. Yeah, having Sawtooth around has saved his life probably a huge number of times, but Sawtooth also requires repairs, resources, time, energy.

I’m not excusing everything Dirk did, I think his actions are bad and we see him harken with that fact, we see him face it when talking with Dave, we seem him make changes. But when talking about Dirk as this ‘all bad, monster’ we need to remember he spent his formative developmental years absolutely scraping out the ability to live and likely learned social interaction from movies and the internet. Yes, he needs to be the one to make those changes himself. Yes, he needs to learn how to talk to people. Yes, he is controlling and overbearing. Those are not ignored just because he suffered, but finding the origin to why is so important.

Control is probably the number one thing he had to worry about. What can he control in his situation. What can he change. He can’t control when the drones come, but he can prepare. He can train, he can build, he can prep first aid supplies, beef up Saw, he can cover his bases and make sure he’s not only ready but ready for failure. He can’t control the lack of reliable food, but he can try and prepare better. Cold storage, nets not rods, see if he can make the process mechanical so he doesn’t need to spend time physically out fishing. He can’t control getting sick, but if he keeps Sawtooth properly equipped, maybe makes extra bots, he can have defenses while out of commission— the extra food stores come in handy here, too. Control every aspect of his life that he can to survive, and it worked until the game, so he keeps using it. Control his friend’s entry, control their actions, control their feelings, because interpersonal relationships aren’t life or death but that’s all he knows at this point. It’s not good, but we can see how he got there.

Idk I just think the greater fandom likes to jump Dirk for being an unsociable, difficult, controlling person while ignoring everything pre-entry.