#ai on nearly all of them
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#what's wrong with some of ya'll?#i mean... i do know what's wrong (insecurity) but still...#these ai generators have been fed writings by authors who didn't consent#there is no ethical way to use ai#also. it's like entirely antithetical to the point of fandom.#like... i was going to binge read this person's fics. got about three paragraphs into the first one and went... huh 🤔#ai on nearly all of them#do i say something to them (not mean)? or is that just gonna start shit?
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i finally deleted twitter! it sucks that i’ve lost that little corner of the fandom, but it didn’t make sense to maintain once it was in musk’s hands, so this was long overdue. i will always credit the skam fandom that i found over there back in 2017 for shaping me as a writer, as well as for inspiring me to travel. i know it was considered a toxic place for the fandom even back then, but it was a platform i grew up with and could communicate on, which meant i connected with some very lovely people. i was devastated when my original account was suspended back in like, 2021? because i had lost a lot of early writing and some friends who had moved on to other fandoms at that point. but i tried to take screenshots of what i had left. a lot of my links to twitter won’t work now, either, but that’s what you get when you depend on someone else as an archival tool.
anyway, a couple of years ago i was thinking about even’s notebook and that became these tweets below the cut. my shorter ideas might end up here now, or on bluesky.
#where’s that community meme where she’s like i can excuse racism but not animal abuse or something#apparently i could tolerate musk’s fascism but i drew the line at AI#and it wasn’t even a line because it’s already too late#if you’re on twitter now#you’re feeding your work into generative AI training#and i don’t want to do that with my own thoughts or even screenshots of what julie created#but it’s super hard to delete an internet presence because it feels like that’s all that’s left of me#if i’m not on the internet then do i even exist#probably why i have so many rules for what i post#my way of controlling my existence in a world that is spinning out#anyway rip to all the fics that started as twitter threads#i wouldn’t have anything if i couldn’t scratch them out over there first#tumblr and bluesky and ao3 are mostly it now#i do have an instagram but meta is nearly as bad#ugh just email me#oof and i have to delete links in bios too#um i guess this is kerrywrites
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examining a seemingly normal image only to slowly realize the clear signs of AI generated art.... i know what you are... you cannot hide your true nature from me... go back where you came from... out of my sight with haste, wretched and vile husk
#BEGONE!!! *wizard beam blast leaving a black smoking crater in the middle of the tumblr dashboard*#I think another downside to everyone doing everything on phone apps on shitty tiny screens nowadays is the inability to really see details#of an image and thus its easier to share BLATANTLY fake things like.. even 'good' ai art has pretty obvious tells at this point#but especially MOST of it is not even 'good' and will have details that are clearly off or lines that dont make sense/uneven (like the imag#of a house interior and in the corner there's a cabinet and it has handles as if it has doors that open but there#are no actual doors visible. or both handles are slightly different shapes. So much stuff that looks 'normal' at first glance#but then you can clearly tell it's just added details with no intention or thought behind it. a pattern that starts and then just abruptly#doesn't go anywhere. etc. etc. )#the same thing with how YEARS ago when I followed more fashion type blogs on tumblr and 'colored hair' was a cool ''''New Thing''' instead#of being the norm now basically. and people would share photos of like ombre hair designs and stuff that were CLEARLY photoshop like#you could LITERally see the coloring outside of the lines. blurs of color that extend past the hair line to the rest of the image#or etc. But people would just share them regardless and comment like 'omg i wish I could do this to my hair!' or 'hair goallzzzz!! i#wonder what salon they went to !!' which would make me want to scream and correct them everytime ( i did not lol)#hhhhhhggh... literally view the image on anything close to a full sized screen and You Will SEe#I don't know why it's such a pet peeve of mine. I think just as always I'm obsessed with the reality and truth of things. most of the thing#that annoy me most about people are situations in which people are misinterpreting/misunderstanding how something works or having a misconc#eption about somehting thats easily provable as false or etc. etc. Even if it's harmless for some random woman on facebook to believe that#this AI generated image of a cat shaped coffee machine is actually a real product she could buy somewhere ... I still urgently#wish I could be like 'IT IS ALL AN ILLUSION. YOU SEE???? ITS NOT REALL!!!!! AAAAA' hjhjnj#Like those AI shoes that went around for a while with 1000000s of comments like 'omg LOVE these where can i get them!?' and it's like YOU#CANT!!! YOU CANT GET THEM!!! THEY DONT EXIST!!! THE EYELETS DONT EVEN LINE UP THE SHOES DONT EVEN#MATCH THE PATTERNS ARE GIBBERISH!! HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE THEY ARE NOT REAL!??!!' *sobbing in the rain like in some drama movie*#Sorry I'm a pedantic hater who loves truth and accuracy of interpretation and collecting information lol#I think moreso the lacking of context? Like for example I find the enneagram interesting but I nearly ALWAYS preface any talking about it#with ''and I know this is not scientifically accurate it's just an interesting system humans invented to classify ourselve and our traits#and I find it sociologically fascinating the same way I find religion fascinating'. If someone presented personality typing information wit#out that sort of context or was purporting that enneagram types are like 100% solid scientific truth and people should be classified by the#unquestionaingly in daily life or something then.. yeah fuck that. If these images had like disclaimers BIG in the image description somewh#re like 'this is not a real thing it's just an AI generated image I made up' then fine. I still largely disagree with the ethics behind AI#art but at least it's informed. It's the fact that people just post images w/o context or beleive a falsehood about it.. then its aAAAAAA
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aaghh I hate health anxiety ocd (or whatever you call it), it's literally doing nothing other than contributing to make my health worse
... wait actually, does anyone have like, tips/advice for that kind of thing? I really think I need some help with this one
#i (ai)#ocd#vent cw#I also have like severe decision paralysis + procrastination issues so that's great#like. being so scared that i have to choose for something to eat that is nutritious&healthy AND affordable AND eatable#that i delay my eating by many hours every other day (+ combined with many other reasons like general awful schedule)#is not in fact the amazing health plan my instincts apparently think it is for some baffling reason. fucking hell#I consistently have all sorts of digestive system issues and I'm plenty underweight. tbh my adhd meds prob also dont help with this part#....on that note I have severe anxiety with spending money (which I have very little of) too. lmao. just great#during the lockdown years my contamination ocd spiked very badly and it still hadn't fully recovered now#and it was/is really godawful harmful for my physical and mental health alike. like this was worse before but even now it really screws wit#my hydration habits. also its always my top consideration/anxiety to think about 'god would the toilet hygiene be bad'#whenever theres any option for me to go anywhere. so I avoided nearly every possible activity/event/social event I could avoid#that require leaving home for half a day or more. and I freak out badly whenever anyone comes to our home to visit for fear of contaminatio#some family friends used to send kids over to our place for dinner montly-ish & that was always my worst anxiety source for the month#I always dreaded the night terribly and it was awful experience. urgh.#gdi I wish I had less types of ocds like why am I cursed with so many annoying things at once lmao#...anyway ugh. i hate how my parents is about me getting sick/ill/any sort of pains etc. always jump to blame me at once#now I don't even want to tell them about it but I have to and they'll often force me to do chores as usual and/or never stop talking about#how it's so totally my fault for having awful schedules and bad habits etc that I'm sick & that I'm making excuses or whatever the fuck#that i'm an adult its my responsibility etc etc#anyway sorry and thank you if you've read this far lmao
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#auuuughhghghg I am thinking about. The Hustle™#I understand why people gravitate toward stickers and pins and charms and zines and such#I've been mildly successful with commissions in the past but right now I'm really in the headspace of like#I can NOT be giving that much time to other people just for the added income. I'll never finish a single personal project that way :/#I would much rather dedicate a chunk of time to designing something and making it available#and just letting people have it whenever they want. and maybe the most ongoing work I need to do is weekly post office trips :|#I am serious about re-launching my enamel pins next year but I have to remake all the templates 😭#bc the original AI files are all on my old nearly-dead imac...#but also stickers. low manufacture cost low resale so maybe they move faster?#also toying with the idea of selling some of my cross stitch patterns 🤔 NOT the pomegranates.#that's probably not gonna have super wide appeal but like. I made them for myself anyway might as well let other people have em for a few $#all this because my dad may not be able to help me cover therapy costs next year :||| so that extra $500 a month has to come from SOMEWHERE#I hate capitalism I hate having to exist!! exhausting!!!!!!
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maybe its bc i tend to play on easy/vanilla (if the option is there) but man pokemon fangame/hacks ai are just as dumb as normal pokemon game ai
guy sure did use roar with his grandbull to drag out scoop who i still have mirror shot on (bc i have like nothing else to fight fairy type with and you'd think i'd change someone out bc of how many fairy type trainers pop up with the second set of baddies and YET)
like way to go buddy this is going to hurt you even more than if you just let pyroar stay out
#i had some other funny moments like this recently but i forgot them all#julie plays video games#normally fan games tend to boast trainer ai that is way better than the games these days but im a baby i like the easy way :)#not that i havent played games with harder ai im just here to have fun most of the time#i say that as if i havent nearly wiped several times#including actually wiping like 3 times to the alolan sandslash boss#i COULD build a better team but u know me i wont
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i will not forgive nirvana initiative for making 'half to whole' so catchy and fun and simultaneously so dogshit
#aitsf#aitsf nirvana initiative#ai the somniun files nirvana initiative#the lyrics.....#the word rhythm???#the PERFORMANCE????#im not even talking about the visuals although that could be an entire jar of fuckery on its own#purely audio#how is it possible that out of the entire song theres like 3 lines actually in pitch#how is it possible that nearly all of th VAs sound like they were shoved in the recording booth and had 3 chances to get it right#'oh sorry i stumbled can we do it again' nah it fine keep it like that#theres only a handful of them who sound like they have actual singing experience#and one of them is lien#AND IT STILL SOUNDED LIKE THE VA WAS COMPLETELY CAUGHT OFF-GUARD BY THE RHYME#'take this glass slipper :) bemypritses'#ryuuki sounds like he's singing to himself in a school toilet stall#iris's last word is just straight-up in another voice??? who the fuck said that#i hate that its so peppy and the background is so good i want it on my playlist and then seethe when it actually comes on#i will say i like the twins harmonizing#also the second half of the song is slightly better only bc theres a loud male voice in the bg thats actually in pitch that wasnt there b4#and some other small stuff bc i am not a true hater at my core and can appreciate the work theyre trying to do if theyre not singers#....that being said..................................cmon now.#at least the lyrics.#mine
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no mamessssssssssssssssss- I swear I am cursed- because the characters I love always either die or turn evil (or both... usually both)- and now the update accounts are saying Zulu/The AI is actually evil/has bad intentions for the server- I REFUSE to believe it he is just a baby :(((((((
#this is the fastest it has happened djsadsada-#YOU KNOW WHAT- Good for him! Nearly all of them were so mean to him so I think he can be a bit evil... as a little treat!#(also I know canon will probably prove me wrong once we learn more soon but-)#(for now I am headcanoning that q!Luzu has always been an ai/humanoid robot because I fucking love robots!!!)#(and this 'Zulu' is some outside program that has overridden his own)#(and is slowly figuring out how to control it)#(I dunno if that's what they'll end up doing- but really... I just think it's be cool and I wanna make AI!Luzu designs jijiji-!)
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I love all of these goofy product photos where the water bottle is extremely obviously just photoshopped onto a stock image of someone pretending to hold something or whatever.. very convincing..
#the last one where the water bottle is like nearly the size of the woman's entire leg ghbjbjhh#ALSO I know.. gross.. nasty.. amazon.. I was only looking there because I was trying to find an exact replica of an old water bottle#I bought like 6 years ago in a store and I just wanted another one of those and it seemed like the only place the old manufacturer#still sold was through amazon but.. alas.. I think they just don't make them anymore. so I have abandoned my hunt#I didn't actually buy anything. but I did get distracted clicking through product images for a few of them#it's bizarre how like............... idk.. WHY is this done??? Isn't this offputting to basically ANY potential customer?? or do people#not look at every photo/read the entire page/all product information before buying??#all of these are from like front page ''top sellers'' or whatever like........... how does this not hurt the brand????#If the company can't even bother to take a single photo of a real life person using their real life product then... that to me#is kind of red flaggy..?? even if you're an indie start up small business with hardly any funds.. still#A real photo of the product you are selling in a real actual non-photo shopped environment does not seem that inacessible#Maybe it's because everyone does everything on phones now?? So it's harder to see the pictures when they're smaller?#Kind of the same thing with ai art and also hair color photoshops lol.. On my full comptuer screen it is SOOO easy to spot ai art#like IMMEDIATELy from the little tells and ways certain details morph into each other etc. I dont even mean obvious dalle mini stuff but#like the Fancy High Quality Photorealistic AI art is still pretty blatant 98% of the time if you know what to look for. But I still catch#people sharing it a lot like 'omg where can I buy this pair of shoes!! :O <3' .. erm you cannot.. that is the most balatantly fake looking#pair of shoes I have seen in my life hhjbj.. the heels are both different heights. there's a different number of straps on each one. etc.#AND that phase back before colored hair was Mainstream and people would post photos like 'omg going to bring this to the salon!! dream hair#and it's like.. you can LITERALLY see the parts where it's 'colored outside of the lines' and is so clearly just a person with blond hair#that someone drew over with a tint brush or something not even very neatly. etc. etc. ANYWAY.. Maybe with phones it's harder to tell these#things?? To me so much of it is instantly recognizable and it's suprising to me that people either don't notice or don't care and will#interact with it anyway by buying the product or acting like some ai art fake furniture is real or etc. etc. ..hewwoo#Aslo sidenote - I think I've become soo cynical and tired of constantly being advertised to that I literally cannot shop without getting#exhausted. I do not see how marketing is anything but obnoxious and transparent. Every item description having stuff like ''Our company is#commited to bringing you the highest quality water products! we set out with a mission to bring high quality products to people all over#the world and we believe in spreading health and happiness and'' just like SHUT THE HELL UP!! youre a fucking company#you don't ''beleive'' in anything you are here to sell a product. stop trying to talk like you're my bff who cares deeply about my health#or something just tell me the materials and product specifications of your stupid fucking water bottle and move on. Idont need to hear your#whole bullshit spiel about what ~your company stands for~ that is SO much MORE offputting. you make me want to buy the item LESS..#longing for the type of ads from my 1800s magazines that are just like 'this product is good. please buy it. okay thank you much. bye'
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nearly oc-tober time again - time for some prompts for 2024
F.A.Q
do i have to draw?
not at all! you are free to participate with any medium that suits you... writing, artwork, free bases and templates, simple text posts, in-character-as-your-oc roleplay, whatever! (just no stealing or AI)
do i have to make new content?
nope! re-uploading old stuff that fits the prompts is allowed (and encouraged) ... old art that didn't get the appreciation it needed always deserves a chance to be shared again, it's a fun throwback!
do i have to post every day?
nope! only 10 days are mandatory (the ones in red with a star symbol) and everything else (yellow) is 100% optional! if you're busy or tired, please skip as many as you want
can i start early?
you can prep your posts in advance if you need to ... but please wait until the right day in october to share them!
can i re-upload your prompt list to another site?
i would prefer if you dont - i have accounts on most sites, so just reblog/retweet/share from me!
event tag?
#bweirdOCtober
have fun!
image desc/text version ↓under the cut↓ or on bweird.art/october
prompts:
WEEK 1: OC INTRODUCTIONS
⭐ 1: FAV OC
what makes them your fav?
2: NEW OC
how recently did you make them?
3: OLD OC
how long ago did you make them?
⭐ 4: UNDER-APPRECIATED OC
an oc you feel like you don't talk about enough, or you haven't fleshed out as much as you would like
5: RE-DESIGNED OC
an oc who has changed a lot (what changed about them?) or, if you haven't redesigned an oc: is there anything you might want to change about an existing oc?
WEEK 2: BUILDING BACKSTORY
⭐ 6: PAST
where is your oc from? what did they look like as a child?
7: LIKES
what do they like (and why?)
8: DISLIKES
what don't they like (and why?)
⭐ 9: RELATIONSHIPS
doesn't have to be romantic! can any kind of relationship (frienship, family, rivalry etc)
10: PERSONALITY
what are your oc's main personality traits
11: SYMBOLISM/THEMES
what represents your oc? is there a specific colour you associate them with, or a specific animal?
12: FUTURE
what will your oc look like in the future? do they have any plans or goals?
WEEK 3: FUN + GAMES
⭐13: MEMES
do any memes remind you of your oc? are there memes your oc would find funny? maybe you want to redraw your oc as one?
14: WHO/WHAT INSPIRED YOUR OC
are there existing characters that your oc looks like? was your oc based on yourself? is your oc originally from a specific fandom?
15: MUSIC
share a character playlist, write a songfic, post lyrics that remind you of them, etc
⭐16: EYES CLOSED or NON DOMINANT HAND
draw a picture of your oc with your eyes closed or with your non domminant hand, write or type a paragraph about them without your eyes closed, etc ... have fun, and don't worry about it looking "bad" -it's meant to!!
17: DnD ALIGNMENT CHART
put all your ocs into a DnD alignment chart, or any other similar chart if you prefer
i've compiled a few templates on my site, but you can find more easily if you google "oc alignment chart"
⭐18: SWAP
swap something between your ocs - their role in the story, hairstyles, personalities, fashion taste, species ... whatever you want! how would this difference change them?
19: PALETTE CHALLENGES
draw your ocs with as many of these colour palettes as you want (or just skip if you don't draw/don't like doing these!)
hex codes for the colours:
palette 1 - #3C1E81 #6D1EA2 #B059E8 #FE0876 #FE5284 #FE7C96 #E0CFE3 #FFD5C3
palette 2 - #352823 #673F28 #AB541C #BA8233 #897128 #A68B2F #F7BF6A #DAC3A4
palette 3 - #A42E25 #D7412B #E47C29 #F7A233 #FCC02D #FCE4A6 #486548 #FEFDE8
palette 4 - #2F4769 #39597E #53779C #94D1E7 #AADDE7 #D48DB7 #D498B5 #D2BABA
WEEK 4: COMMUNITY
20-26: A WHOLE WEEK OF SOCIAL STUFF
if you don't have the time/energy to do every day this week, ⭐ day 23 is the only one marked as mandatory! you can skip the rest!
some ideas for what you could do: talk about a friend's oc you like, make gift art/writing of them, collabs, trades, reblog/appreciate ocs in the event tag, make interactions between your ocs and other people's
WEEK 5: HALLOWEEN
⭐27: FEARS
is your oc scared of anything? do they have any phobias? are they startled easily? would any of your ocs try to scare ppl on purpose?
28: MONSTER
what would your oc be if they were a monster (eg: werewolf, vampire, eldritch beast.. whatever) or, do you have an oc who is already a monster?
29: PUMPKIN CARVING
your ocs carving pumpkins, a drawing of a pumpkin carved to look like your oc ... or even carve it in real life!
30: GHOST
this can be literally a ghost, or a concept that haunts your oc! up to you!
⭐ 31: COSTUMES
what are your ocs wearing for halloween?
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Pushing aside the fact that I am, quite possibly, a Kendrick fan—disregarding my biases, I think Drake needs to stop. Push Ups was a good diss. Surface level, vapid, but it possessed that mean, petty spirit that carries a diss track all the way. Even bringing up accusations that are, realistically speaking, unlikely still works because a diss is supposed to show just how much you hate a person and how cleverly you can bring it.
Taylor Made was weird. I get that it was a strategy. Drop the main diss first and then drop this one to really prod at Kendrick. Using Pac and Snoop AI voices sucks though. Distilling Kendrick as Taylor's underling also doesn't work because Kendrick only collaborated with her once (twice when they remade Bad Blood) and that's it. Meanwhile Drake is out here always looking for new, up and coming artists to pounce on their trends or cling to established artists. Then it got taken down, because of course it would have been. You used 2Pac's voice. Did you really think his estate, his family, wouldn't do anything?
So he bought Pac's ring and used his voice without permission. More and more we see just how much of a vulture Drake is.
And then Euphoria drops.
Your first diss was met with solid reactions. Your second got taken down. Kendrick drops on a random hot Tuesday, and in a matter of hours surpasses your numbers that took weeks to accumulate. Kendrick did that. Euphoria was also harsh, clever, and sounded so good that people kept replaying it over and over again. Once more, Kendrick schools you.
A few insiders then say that Drake will drop that night. Right after. But he then allegedly gets cold feet. A few hours later from when Drake was supposedly ready to drop but backs out, Kendrick drops 6:16 in LA.
In your previous disses, you begged Kendrick to drop something with quintuple entendres. Euphoria did that. But he took it a step further by naming his second diss 6:16 in LA.
June 16: Father's day. Referencing the fact that Drake has been proven to be a deadbeat father.
June 16, 1971: Tupac's Birthday. Kendrick idolizes him. Drake steals from him.
June 16, 2019: First episode of Euphoria drops. A show Drake is listed as a producer on. A show about underage girls entering a life of sex, substance abuse, and more. Things that Drake has been accused of repeatedly in the past.
June 16, 2011: in June 2, 2011, Kendrick posted on his twitter that there will be a concert at Toronto on 6/16. Allegedly this is where Drake and Kendrick first met.
6:16 AM: The time of release for this track.
6:16: Multiple possible Bible verses, given Kendrick's Christian background.
Other claims felt like reaches though, so I'll stick to that.
The final two lines of 6:16 also reference the Michael Jackson, R. Kelly, and their song "You Are Not Alone". Drake, who has always claimed he is Michael Jackson or at the very least his equal/successor, is now tied to him in a way he does not want. Because we know all of the dirt that came out after MJ's death. We all know what R. Kelly was sent to prison for. And we all know what Drake has been accused of multiple times.
Kendrick also alludes to the fact that you have a leak in your circle, Drake.
So Drake drops Family Matters. A scathing 7 minute song that makes fun of the GKMC van. Saying that Kendrick's daughter isn't his. Saying that his wife cheats on him with security. Saying that he beats his wife.
Now, these are enormous accusations levied. But Kendrick has responded before, years ago, that the DV accusations were false. He has also always been open about his faults. Adultery. Sex addiction. Insecurity. God complex. Kendrick, for better or worse, has always laid out nearly every aspect of his younger life on his songs. This also helped by the fact that in both Euphoria and 6:16, Kendrick says that Drake has spent millions on finding dirt on him but came up with nothing. Again, these accusations can still be proven true and if so, Kendrick needs to be held accountable for them.
But if not? Then Drake just adds another to the pile of "He's a liar and a master manipulator."
Drake also posts a Parody on his Insta that gains little to no attention because 30 minutes after dropping Family Matters and supposedly going on his victory lap, Kendrick drops meet the grahams.
Another thing. 6:16's cover was a glove. That meant nothing to us, the audience. meet the grahams makes it make sense by zooming out of the glove and showing off a shirt and drugs that Drake supposedly uses. Drake has not had any receipts with his accusations against Kendrick. Kendrick puts Drake's supposed prescription, his full name, on a bottle of Ozempic. Kendrick, for now, seems to make good on his threat. OvO, Drake's company, is full of leaks. And they're leaking it straight to Kendrick Lamar.
Nearly 24 hours later, Kendrick drops Not Like Us.
Euphoria was a general character dissection and assassination of Drake: Insecure about his identity as a biracial man. Culture Vulture. Blaccent user. Code switcher. Fake abs. Womanizer. Misogynist. Using black features just to feel black enough. A deadbeat dad that knows nothing of raising a child. And even revokes Drake's ability to use the N-Word (I have no stake in that I am Asian so I will keep my brown mouth shut for that).
6:16 in LA was an ominous threat that slowly reveals that Kendrick has insider information on Drake. That he is ready to leak so much more should Drake continue.
meet the grahams is a brutal open letter to Drake, his parents, and even to Adonis, Drake's son. Saying that Kendrick could be a better mentor to Adonis. Saying that Drake abandoned you and that's not your fault. Don't be like your father—whatever anyone says, for better or worse, you are a black man and don't code switch just to make yourself feel better. He says that Drake failed his mother for what he did to women. Saying that Drake's father is the cause of his gambling issues. Drake is a body shamer. Leaving the mother of his children to rot. And of course, the reveal that Drake has a secret daughter, the same way Pusha T revealed Drake has a son. Adonis.
And of course, now. Not Like Us. Where Kendrick goes all in on one topic that he has alluded to in every diss track before. Drake is a groomer. A pedophile.
I am sick. I should not be tuning into this beef. But my fever can go ahead and end me, I need to know how this ends.
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Considering Donnie in the Seperated AU literally had NO friends for the first several years of his life (no his dad does NOT count!!) it prompted Donnie to start developing Shelldon way earlier on out of the desire to have a friend. Even after meeting and befriending April, he still spends most of his days being quite lonely considering she'd be busy with school and stuff. Shelldon was a way to combat that loneliness. But considering the fact that Donnie wouldn't have had nearly as much experience with tech when starting on Shelldon's development, he started out as a very rudimentary AI only able to produce a few simple responses. (Donnie having basically no stanards for what social interactions should be like was not at all bothered by this lol) Over the years however, as Donnie's skillset grew Shelldon would become more and more complex, so at the time where the main story takes place Shelldon Hamato is for all intents and purposes a real person and not just a mere machine.
Also I drew him with his Metalhead-inspired design cuz uhhhh cuz I wanna
Also uuuhh have some extra turtle tot doodles cuz omg they're so fucking cute I can't stop drawing them hhhhhhhhh
#Tiz Sep AU#tizel art#my art#digital art#illustration#tmnt#rottmnt#teenage mutant ninja turtles#rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles#rottmnt fanart#rottmnt au#rottmnt separated au#donatello#rottmnt donnie#donnie#rottmnt shelldon#rottmnt april#rottmnt draxum#rottmnt splinter#turtle tots#rottmnt turtle tots#turtle tot donnie
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In 1960, SAG and WGA struck to force management to adapt to the new technology of television. Without that strike and the agreement it birthed, residual use payments would not exist.
My parents stole nearly all of my salary from my entire childhood. My Star Trek residuals were all I had, and they kept me afloat for two decades while I rebuilt my life. I have healthcare and a pension because of my union. The AMPTP billionaires want to take all that security away so they can give CEOs even more grotesque wealth at the expense of the people who make our industry run.
To give some sense of what is at stake: There are actors who star in massively successful, profitable, critically acclaimed shows that are all on streaming services. You see them all the time. They are famous, A-list celebrities. Nearly all of those actors don't earn enough to qualify for health insurance, because the studios forced them to accept a buyout for all their residuals (decade of reuse, at the least) that is less than I earned for one week on TNG. And I was the lowest paid cast member in 1988. They want to do this while studio profits and CEO compensation are at historic highs.
I mean, if not now, when? And I haven't even touched on AI and working conditions.
We must fight for the future of our industry in the face of changing technology, the same way our elders did in 1960. So today, my Spacemom and I went to the place where it started for us, way back when, to do just that.
I see all your support. It means so much. Thank you.
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What kind of bubble is AI?
My latest column for Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes:
https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/
Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices.
Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It, too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.
Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar.
AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an "AI" startup, many of which are not even using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That's amazing, considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is.
So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left behind, or will it go away altogether? To be sure, there's a legion of technologists who are learning Tensorflow and Pytorch. These nominally open source tools are bound, respectively, to Google and Facebook's AI environments:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means
But if those environments go away, those programming skills become a lot less useful. Live, large-scale Big Tech AI projects are shockingly expensive to run. Some of their costs are fixed – collecting, labeling and processing training data – but the running costs for each query are prodigious. There's a massive primary energy bill for the servers, a nearly as large energy bill for the chillers, and a titanic wage bill for the specialized technical staff involved.
Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? AI applications can be plotted on a 2X2 grid whose axes are "value" (how much customers will pay for them) and "risk tolerance" (how perfect the product needs to be).
Charging teenaged D&D players $10 month for an image generator that creates epic illustrations of their characters fighting monsters is low value and very risk tolerant (teenagers aren't overly worried about six-fingered swordspeople with three pupils in each eye). Charging scammy spamfarms $500/month for a text generator that spits out dull, search-algorithm-pleasing narratives to appear over recipes is likewise low-value and highly risk tolerant (your customer doesn't care if the text is nonsense). Charging visually impaired people $100 month for an app that plays a text-to-speech description of anything they point their cameras at is low-value and moderately risk tolerant ("that's your blue shirt" when it's green is not a big deal, while "the street is safe to cross" when it's not is a much bigger one).
Morganstanley doesn't talk about the trillions the AI industry will be worth some day because of these applications. These are just spinoffs from the main event, a collection of extremely high-value applications. Think of self-driving cars or radiology bots that analyze chest x-rays and characterize masses as cancerous or noncancerous.
These are high value – but only if they are also risk-tolerant. The pitch for self-driving cars is "fire most drivers and replace them with 'humans in the loop' who intervene at critical junctures." That's the risk-tolerant version of self-driving cars, and it's a failure. More than $100b has been incinerated chasing self-driving cars, and cars are nowhere near driving themselves:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money
Quite the reverse, in fact. Cruise was just forced to quit the field after one of their cars maimed a woman – a pedestrian who had not opted into being part of a high-risk AI experiment – and dragged her body 20 feet through the streets of San Francisco. Afterwards, it emerged that Cruise had replaced the single low-waged driver who would normally be paid to operate a taxi with 1.5 high-waged skilled technicians who remotely oversaw each of its vehicles:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html
The self-driving pitch isn't that your car will correct your own human errors (like an alarm that sounds when you activate your turn signal while someone is in your blind-spot). Self-driving isn't about using automation to augment human skill – it's about replacing humans. There's no business case for spending hundreds of billions on better safety systems for cars (there's a human case for it, though!). The only way the price-tag justifies itself is if paid drivers can be fired and replaced with software that costs less than their wages.
What about radiologists? Radiologists certainly make mistakes from time to time, and if there's a computer vision system that makes different mistakes than the sort that humans make, they could be a cheap way of generating second opinions that trigger re-examination by a human radiologist. But no AI investor thinks their return will come from selling hospitals that reduce the number of X-rays each radiologist processes every day, as a second-opinion-generating system would. Rather, the value of AI radiologists comes from firing most of your human radiologists and replacing them with software whose judgments are cursorily double-checked by a human whose "automation blindness" will turn them into an OK-button-mashing automaton:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop
The profit-generating pitch for high-value AI applications lies in creating "reverse centaurs": humans who serve as appendages for automation that operates at a speed and scale that is unrelated to the capacity or needs of the worker:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/
But unless these high-value applications are intrinsically risk-tolerant, they are poor candidates for automation. Cruise was able to nonconsensually enlist the population of San Francisco in an experimental murderbot development program thanks to the vast sums of money sloshing around the industry. Some of this money funds the inevitabilist narrative that self-driving cars are coming, it's only a matter of when, not if, and so SF had better get in the autonomous vehicle or get run over by the forces of history.
Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise. The odds are stacked against the long-term survival of high-value, risk-intolerant AI applications.
The problem for AI is that while there are a lot of risk-tolerant applications, they're almost all low-value; while nearly all the high-value applications are risk-intolerant. Once AI has to be profitable – once investors withdraw their subsidies from money-losing ventures – the risk-tolerant applications need to be sufficient to run those tremendously expensive servers in those brutally expensive data-centers tended by exceptionally expensive technical workers.
If they aren't, then the business case for running those servers goes away, and so do the servers – and so do all those risk-tolerant, low-value applications. It doesn't matter if helping blind people make sense of their surroundings is socially beneficial. It doesn't matter if teenaged gamers love their epic character art. It doesn't even matter how horny scammers are for generating AI nonsense SEO websites:
https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509
These applications are all riding on the coattails of the big AI models that are being built and operated at a loss in order to be profitable. If they remain unprofitable long enough, the private sector will no longer pay to operate them.
Now, there are smaller models, models that stand alone and run on commodity hardware. These would persist even after the AI bubble bursts, because most of their costs are setup costs that have already been borne by the well-funded companies who created them. These models are limited, of course, though the communities that have formed around them have pushed those limits in surprising ways, far beyond their original manufacturers' beliefs about their capacity. These communities will continue to push those limits for as long as they find the models useful.
These standalone, "toy" models are derived from the big models, though. When the AI bubble bursts and the private sector no longer subsidizes mass-scale model creation, it will cease to spin out more sophisticated models that run on commodity hardware (it's possible that Federated learning and other techniques for spreading out the work of making large-scale models will fill the gap).
So what kind of bubble is the AI bubble? What will we salvage from its wreckage? Perhaps the communities who've invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques.
But there will also be a lot of unsalvageable wreckage. As big AI models get integrated into the processes of the productive economy, AI becomes a source of systemic risk. The only thing worse than having an automated process that is rendered dangerous or erratic based on AI integration is to have that process fail entirely because the AI suddenly disappeared, a collapse that is too precipitous for former AI customers to engineer a soft landing for their systems.
This is a blind spot in our policymakers debates about AI. The smart policymakers are asking questions about fairness, algorithmic bias, and fraud. The foolish policymakers are ensnared in fantasies about "AI safety," AKA "Will the chatbot become a superintelligence that turns the whole human race into paperclips?"
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space
But no one is asking, "What will we do if" – when – "the AI bubble pops and most of this stuff disappears overnight?"
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop
Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
--
tom_bullock (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tombullock/25173469495/
CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
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decided to crack open my skull and pour the contents of my brain onto the keyboard. thought the denizens of tumblr might enjoy it. bon appetite
Mech Pilot Care guide
You never expect it, do you. Even as you see the flashes of pulse-decay fire in the sky, illuminating a scene of violence on the cosmic scale. Planetary defense satellites forming Monolithic structures in the sky, their purpose now revealed as they scatter constellations of destruction across the night horizon, drowning out the stars and replacing them with ones born of death. The oxygen in a ship catching fire and burning away in an instant, a flash of light that marks the death of its crew of hundreds. Even if you take your telescope to watch this spectacle, this war in a place without screams, you still feel profoundly disconnected from it. Even as you see a pilot cleave through a drone hive with a fusion blade, the molten metal glistening in the light of the explosions around it, scattering without gravity to the corners of the universe, even as two mechs dance across the sky, their reactors pouring into the engines enough energy to power the house atop which you sit for ten thousand years, flying in a 3.5 dimensional dance with only one word to the song that can reach across the vacuum: “I Will Kill You.” you don’t feel even the slightest glimpse of what goes on inside their minds. You don’t feel the neurological feedback tearing across the brain-computer interface, filling her mind with more simultaneous pain and elation that an unmodified human could ever experience. You don’t feel it as the pneumatic lance punctures through steel and nanocarbon polymer, the mech AI sending floods of a sensation you could never truly know through the skull and into every corner of the body carried on enhanced nerves for every layer of armor punctured, tearing into the enemy chassis with a desire beyond anything the flesh can provide. Let the stars kill each other. After all, I am safe on earth. No, you don’t expect it when the star is hit with a sub-relativistic projectile, piercing through both engines in an instant. You don’t expect it to fall. You never would have expected it to land, the impact nearly vaporizing the soil and setting trees aflame, on the hill beyond your house, and you would never have expected, beneath the layers of cooling slag, for the life-support indicator light to still be visible.
All the fire extinguishers in your house, your old plasma cutter that you haven’t used in years, and whatever medical supplies you think they might still be able to benefit from. All that on a hoverbike, speeding at 120 kilometers per hour through the valley and up onto the hill, still illuminated by the battle above, unsurprisingly unchanged by this new development. 200 meters. 100 meters. You don’t know how much time you’ve got. It wasn’t exactly covered in school, how long a pilot can survive in an overheating frame. You’ve heard rumors, of course, of what these things that used to be human have become. That they don’t eat and barely need air. That they don’t feel any desire beyond what instructions are pumped directly into their brains. Not so much of a person as much as an attack dog. It’s understandably a bit concerning, as if they are alive, then it’s not guaranteed that you will be. Three fire extinguishers later, the surface of the mech is mostly solid, and the cutter slices through the exterior plating. With a satisfying crunch, the cockpit is forced open, revealing the pilot, and confirming a few of the rumors, while refuting others. Pilots, it seems, are not quite emotionless. In fact, there seems to be genuine fear on its face when it sees you, followed by… a sort of grim certainty as it opens its mouth, moves its jaw into a strange position, and you only have half a second to react before it would have bitten down with all its force on the tooth that seemed to be made of a different material then all the rest.
Your thumb is definitely bleeding, and is caught between a metamaterial-based dental implant, and one containing a military-grade neurotoxin. You’re not sure exactly why you did it. The pilot looks at you for a second, before the tubes that attach to its arms like puppet strings run out of stimulants, and it passes out after who knows how long without sleep. This battle has been going on for weeks already. Has it been fighting that long? Its various frame-tethered implants disconnect easily, the unconscious pilot draped over your shoulder twitching slightly with each one you remove. It’s a much longer ride back to the house. Avoiding having the pilot fall off the bike is the top priority, and the injured thumb stings in the fast-moving air.
An internet search doesn’t lead to many helpful sources to the question of “there is a mech pilot on my couch, what do I do?” a few articles about how easy targets retired pilots are for the “doll sellers,” a few military recruitment ads, and a couple near-incomprehensible legal documents full of words like “proprietary technology” or “instant termination.” However, there is one link, a few rows down from the top-- “Mech Pilot Care Guide.” It’s a detailed list, arranged in numbered steps. The website has no other links on it, just the step-by-step instructions: a quick read reveals that this isn’t going to be easy, but looking at the unconscious pilot, unabsorbed chemicals dripping from the ports in its arms and head onto the mildly bloodstained towel, you come to the conclusion that there’s no other option.
Step one: the first 24 hours.
The first thing you should know is that pilots aren’t used to sleeping. They’re used to being put under for transport and storage, but after the neural augmentations and years of week-long battles sustained by stimulants that would fry the brain of anyone that still has an intact one, they’ve more or less forgotten what real sleep is. If they see you asleep, they’ll think you’re dead, so don’t try to let them stay in your room yet. Once you’ve removed the neurotoxin from the tooth (it breaks easily with a bit of applied pressure, but be careful not to let any fall into their mouth or onto your skin.), start by moving them into a chair (preferably a recliner or gaming chair, as the mech seat is about halfway in between), and putting a heavy blanket over them. Don’t worry, they don’t need as much air as normal humans do, and can handle high temperatures up to a point. This is an environment similar to the one they’re used to. It’ll stay like this for about 12 hours-- barely breathing, trembling slightly underneath the blanket. Feel free to check if it’s alive every few hours, not that you could help it if it wasn’t. It won’t freak out when it wakes up. In fact, it doesn’t seem like they can. Turn down the lights and remove the blanket from its face. It’ll stare blankly at you, trying to evaluate the situation with a brain that’s not connected to a computer that’s bigger than they are anymore. Coming to terms, if you could call it that, with the fact that it isn’t dead. Don’t expect it to start reacting to things for a while yet, give it a couple hours.
It’s been a bit, and its eyes are starting to focus on you. The next thing you should know is this: pilots only have two groups into which they can categorize non-pilots: handler and enemy. You need to work on making sure you’re in the right one. Move slowly, standing up and walking toward them, making sure they can see where you’re going to step. Place both hands on their shoulders, then slide one under their arm and carefully pick them up. Don’t be startled by how light they are, or how they still shake slightly as they realize their arms don’t have anything connected to them. Most importantly, don’t break. Don’t reflect on how something can be done to a person so that this is all that’s left. Just focus on rotating them as if you’re inspecting all the brain-computer interface ports, while holding them at half an arm’s length. Set them back down, wrap the blanket around them, then lean in close and say “status report.” they won’t say anything, as they usually upload the data via interface, but what’s important is that now they recognise you as their handler. Their entire mind will be focused on the fact that they exist now to do what you want. Now it’s up to you to prove them wrong.
Step two: the first week.
They’re shaking so hard that you’ve had to move them from the chair back to the couch, sweating heavily as they pant like the dog they’ve been trained to think they are. This was to be expected, really. Pilots are constantly being filled with a mix of stimulants, painkillers, and who knows what else, and you’ve just cut them off completely. You’ve woken up several times in the night and rushed to check if they’re still breathing, debating whether you should try to tell them that they’re going to be okay. The guide says they’re not ready for that yet, whatever that means. They’re still wearing the suit you found them in, made from nanofiber mesh and apparently recycling nutrients and water before re-infusing them intravenously. It’s been three days since you tore them out of the lump of metal atop the hill outside. Long enough that the suit’s battery, apparently, has run out. You lift them gently from the couch and carry them to the bathroom. The shower’s been on for the past hour or so, meaning the temperature should be high enough. You set them on their chair, which you’ve rolled there from the living room and covered with a towel. Removing the suit normally isn’t done except in between missions, and it’s only done to exchange it for a new one. Without the proper tools, you’ve opted for a pair of scissors. Cutting through the suit takes a bit of time, but you manage to cut a sizable line from the neck down to the front to the bottom of the torso. The pilot recoils slightly from the cold metal against their skin, but you manage to peel off the suit without incident, The Temperature of which was roughly the same as the steam filling the room, and you’ve done your best to minimize air currents. They’ve got a bit more shape to them than you expected of someone who’s been so heavily modified. Perhaps what little fat storage it provides helps on longer missions, or perhaps this is for the purposes of marketing. Just another recruitment ad that appeals to baser instincts. Either way, it doesn’t matter. Using a cloth with the least noticeable texture possible, you wash off as much sweat and dead skin as you can, avoiding the various interface and IV ports, as you’re not yet sure that they’re waterproof. Embarrassment is the enemy of efficiency, so you’re slightly glad that their eyes never completely focus on you. They shift their weight slightly, however. Despite the difficulty moving with their current symptoms, they lean in the direction opposite the places you wash once you're done, allowing you to more easily access the places you haven’t got to yet. An act of trust that you have a suspicion they weren't “programmed” to do. As they dry out, you prepare for the difficult part. You take the blanket that previously wrapped around their suit, and gently touch a corner of it to their shoulder. Pilots are used to an amount of sensory information that would overload any normal human in an instant, but most rarely experience textures against their skin. After about half an hour, they’re used to it enough that you’re able to replace what’s left of the suit with it, and after another you’re able to wrap them in it again. You carry them back to the couch, and place a few of your old shirts next to their hand. They pick one and touch it with one finger before recoiling slightly. Eventually, they’ll be used to at least one of them enough that they can wear it. It’s slow progress, but it’s progress.
Step 3: food
It goes without saying that it’s usually been at least a year since they’ve eaten anything. The augmentations scooped out much of their knowledge on how to survive as a human, assuming that they would die before ever needing to be one again. Start them off with just flavors. Give them a chance to pick favorites by giving them a wide selection and firmly telling them to try all of them. Avoid anything solid for the first month or so, both because they can’t digest it and because they associate chewing with their self-destruct mechanism. Trying to and surviving might make them think the “mission’s fully compromised” and attempt to improvise. They’ll typically pick out favorites quickly with their enhanced senses, so once they’ve sampled everything, tell them to pick one. Remember it, not in order to use it as a reward or anything, but them still being able to have a “favorite” anything is something you should keep in mind for later.
Use a similar method anytime they become able to handle the next level of solidity. Don’t be alarmed if one of their favorite foods is the meat that’s most similar to humans (such as pork.) they’re not going to eat you, they just will have already formed an association between that flavor and the moment they went from being a weapon to living in your house. Don’t worry about your thumb getting infected, by the way. Pilots barely have a microbiome.
Step 4: entertainment:
Roll them over to your computer and give them access to your game library. No, really. They need enrichment, and there’s only one activity that they’re able to enjoy at the moment. A simulation of it will make the shift from weapon to guest easier. Start them off with an FPS with a story. Don’t go multiplayer, as your account may get banned for being suspected of using aimbots. Watch as they progress the story. The military left pilots with just enough of a personality to allow them to improvise, and that should be enough for them to make decisions on this level. They won’t do much character customization, but keep an eye on which starting character body shape they pick. No pilot would consciously think they have enough of a “Self” to still have a gender, but keep track of the ones they pick in the games. As for the one you’ve found, it appears that she’s got a player-character preference. You even saw her nudge one of the appearance sliders before clicking “start game.” Whether this means that a pilot doesn’t think of themselves as “it” or that it means there’s still enough of their mind left for them to know there’s more to themselves than the body they have, it’s a handy bit of information to know. Some pilots might have had this decision influenced by their handlers having referred to them as “she” in the way it refers to boats, but still, on some level they always know that “it” meant that they’re a weapon.
Step 6: outside:
There’s a profound difference between experiencing the world through information fed directly into your brain and standing up for the first time, wandering around the room and investigating with hands not made of a half-ton of metal. She’s not used to feeling the air on her skin as she stands in front of the window, visual data coming from two eyes instead of seven cameras. It’ll take a while to get used to it again. New old data, reminiscent of a time before she’s been trained not to remember. It’ll take a while until she’s walking like a human and not a mech, as the muscles used are different, and the ones to hold herself upright haven’t been used in a while. She’s going to fall down at least once. Be sure you’re standing next to her when it happens, as pilots that fall aren’t trained to think they can get back up. It’s worth it, though, when she opens the door herself and strides into the yard, still wobbly but standing. Be careful not to let her look into the sun, partially because it looks nearly identical to the barrel of a pulse-decay blaster milliseconds before it fires. She would get hurt trying to dodge it. It will be somewhat confusing for her, standing on a hill as she once did, but not contained within a 12-meter metal chassis. A feeling of being small and alone without the voices of the computer. This means it’s time for step seven.
Step 7:
All this time, and any idea that she’s still a person has, for her, been subconscious. Any thought of humanity is stopped when it slams into the wall of her handlers and mech AIs reminding her for years before now that she is a weapon. She’ll still ask for your permission before doing just about anything, and that’s just the rare times that she’ll do something you don’t tell her to. Even after you’ve moved her into your room, she’ll still try to sleep on the floor. She still thinks that beds are only for humans. Kneel next to her as she curls into a ball on the ground, assuming that’s what she’s supposed to do. Expect her to try to move down to the foot of the bed after you set her down on it. Gently move her back up until her head’s on the pillow. Sit on the edge of the bed, and hold out your hand to her. After a bit, she’ll take it, wrapping both hands around it and tracing her fingers along the scar on your thumb. Lie down next to her, an arm’s length apart. Place your other hand on her forearm, then slide it up her arm to her shoulder. Don’t move too quickly, and don’t surprise her. Whisper softly but audibly every movement you’re going to make in advance. Move in a bit closer, until you’re wrapped in her arms. Mech pilots aren’t used to this. They aren't used to feeling someone next to them. Not above them, but next to them, getting exactly as much out of this as they are. Even after several months, many won’t admit they deserve it. You wouldn’t waste time lying next to a gun. So why do they feel so strongly that they don’t want you to leave? Why do they hold on tighter? They often feel they’re doing something wrong. Overstepping a boundary. There’s a rift between what they want and what they’re told they can want that nearly tears their mind in half, and it hurts. No normal human will ever know how much it hurts them to think they’ve broken some instruction, that they feel things they aren’t allowed to. Nobody said it was easy, learning how to become human again. Tell her it’s okay. That she’s allowed to feel this way. She still won’t know why. It’s time to tell her. The guide can’t tell you what to say, only that you have to say it. It has to come from you. You have to be the one that tells her what she is underneath all the modifications. It’s time, say it.
“Do you feel that? Do you feel your heart start to beat faster as it presses up against mine? Do you feel your own breath against your skin after it reflects off my shoulder? Do you feel your muscles start to tighten as I slide my hand across them, then relax because you know it means that you are safe? It’s because you’re alive. Because despite everything, you’re still alive. Still someone left after all the changes, all the augmentations. And I know you’re someone because you are someone that likes food a bit spicier than most would prefer. Someone that closes her eyes and gets lost in music whenever it’s playing. Someone that added that one piece of customization to her character, even though they would wear a helmet for most of the game and nobody would know it was there but you. Maybe you aren’t the same person you were before. Maybe they did take some things from you that nothing can give back. But you’re still someone. Someone that people can still care about, and I know because I do.”
You can feel her tears drip down onto your neck as she pulls you closer. She tries to say something, but you can’t understand what. You tell her it’s okay. That it’s not easy, and that she doesn’t have to pretend that it is. Not for you, and not for anyone anymore. She doesn’t have to be useful anymore. No need to keep it together. All that matters is that she’s alive.
There’s another battle going on in the night sky outside. The same flashes of light you saw the night you stopped living alone, even if the other person couldn’t admit that they were one yet. She still flinches at the brighter bursts of pulse-decay fire, still stretches out her hand on reflex to prime a pneumatic lance that isn’t there. But she knows it’s not her, it’s just a ghost of the weapon that died when it hit the ground. You can feel her relax as she realizes this, moving her hand back to dry her face before reaching out towards yours. You hadn’t noticed the tears on your own face. You place your hand on hers as she wipes the corner of your eye. Outside and above, the war continues on a cosmic scale, so far apart from where you both are now that you barely notice it. Let the stars kill each other. After all, the one before you has already fallen, and she doesn’t have to return to the sky. Together, you are safe on earth.
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FRENCH BOYS! ☆ RAFAYEL QI.
summary. when your paintings were featured in the same gallery walk as rafayel’s, he can’t help but commission you with an oddly cheeky request — ❛ paint me like one of your french boys. ❜
warnings. fem!reader. nsfw, mdni, artist!reader, body appreciation, reader paints rafayel in the nude, terms of endearment, oral sex (male receiving), tit sucking, p in v, cowgirl, unprotected but he pulls out, mentions of a ‘next time’
wc. 3.6k
note. i’m a raf girlie and this is me paying my dues to every single rafayel fan out there. i hope you give this a chance even if you aren’t a raf fan bc i’m honestly rly proud of this! see you at the bottom < 3 < 3 < 3
click here for portrait inspo! it’s ai which is very unfortunate but i couldn’t find any good inspo pics :(
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀ ✧ masterlist | request
❛ Paint me like one of your French boys. ❜
You feel like you’ve read the line enough to have it engraved into your skull by now. You were still having trouble assessing whether or not the words were actually printed on the page or if you’d somehow misread them a million times over.
After all, who in their right mind would add that at the end of a memo for an art commission? Rafayel Qi, you learned. That’s exactly who.
Rafayel has heard of you in passing, of your astounding professionalism and the unique ways in which you depict your subjects. He didn’t know you personally though. In fact, he’s only ever seen you at the art exhibitions that your promoters put on for you.
And even then, you never truly gave him the time of day. Why should you? In the grand scheme of things, he’s a stranger.
Rafayel has never been the biggest fan of the unknown, which was why it surprised him that he was such a big fan of yours.
Call him crazy, but he wanted to get to know you. He’d even reached out to your studio a few times on the basis of collaborating on an art piece together, but when he was met with the generic excuse of your busy schedule preventing you from meeting with him, he was left to resort to the extreme.
He was quite familiar with the art style that you possess. He thought that your knack for figure painting made you interesting, made you admirable. Paying homage to the Renaissance period was a lost art in and of itself, and you managed to do so with nearly every single piece you created.
Now, here’s why he would absolutely understand if you called him crazy…
He would even understand if you called him self-concerned, if you called him vain—if you called him anything your heart desires, because all adjectives of the like are spectacular words to describe him… especially after he sent you that forsaken commission.
A commission that piqued your interest enough for you to accept, but a forsaken commission nonetheless. He knew that it made him look like an arrogant fool, because all things considered, who commissions a nude portrait of themself?
He tried not to dwell on it, because that was exactly how he ended up here, in your presence. Sure, he was posing nude in front of the most beautiful woman he’d ever laid eyes on, but at least you were here…
“Soooo… how’s it going?” he asks, desperately trying to fill the silence between you two that only the sound of your paintbrush scraping against the canvas interrupted.
You peek your head out from behind the canvas, catching another glimpse of him sitting on the grand throne that he had custom made just for this moment.
(He was paying good money for this, alright? If he was going to have a painting of his naked body lying around, he wanted it to depict him in his godliest form.)
“Pretty good,” you shortly answer, sweeping your tongue over your bottom lip as you paint the shadow of a particularly sharp line on his abdomen. Seriously, he was absolutely jacked. At least you had that to keep you from growing bored.
Rafayel smiles as you keep your answers to his questions brief. That’s about the third ‘pretty good’ he’s gotten out of you in the last hour, and don’t even get him started on the sheer number of ‘alright’s you’ve given him.
So, he presses on.
“Not much of a talker, are ya?” he asks, absentmindedly tilting his head to the side as he speaks, only for you to quickly lean around the canvas to look at him. “Uh oh. Am I in trouble?” he asks with just about the cheekiest grin you’ve ever seen.
You sigh. “Yes. You should really stop talking.”
Rafayel raises an eyebrow at you, his smirk still tugging on his lips. “Should I? Here I was, thinking that you were enjoying this dazzling conversation of ours.”
That earns an eye roll from you, which is about the most expression he’s gotten out of you thus far. “You’re too expressive when you speak, Rafayel. You’re a horrible subject.”
He huffs at that, knitting his eyebrows together. “Am not. You mean to tell me that this body of mine makes for a horrible subject? Tsk tsk.”
“That body of yours?” you echo with a small breath of laughter. “Please. Am I supposed to be fawning?”
Rafayel gives you a sulky expression. “Puh-lease,” he mimics you, “I have abs, okay? I’m not saying you have to do anything with that information, but if you were to fawn, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“You think quite highly of yourself,” you say, tucking behind the canvas as you stroke the paintbrush over the area that you were currently working on.
He rolls his eyes at that. “Jeez, woman. Sue a guy for being confident.”
When he’s met with your silence and the sound of your paintbrush splashing in a nearby cup of misty water, he sighs. “I’m just joking with you. I’ll—”
“Even when I give you the silent treatment,” you lean out from behind the canvas to look at him, “you still won’t stop your yapping.”
Rafayel furrows his brows, cocking his head to the side as he gives you a deadpan expression. “Lady, please. I was about to tell you that I was going to shut up from now on, but come to think of it, I don’t wanna.”
You found it ironic that your own inability to shut up is what led you to this position. You bite your tongue, shifting to sit behind the canvas again, but his voice is what reminds you that he’s still there.
“Anywho,” he continues. “You’re a hard woman to track down. What made you accept my commission?”
“Good pay,” you deadpan, though a smile curves on your lips. “And the final line of the memo you sent me.”
Rafayel is doing his best to keep his stoic demeanor, but once he finds out that his risky behavior has paid off, he’s internally celebrating. Very much so.
“Tell me,” you continue, peeking at him. “Are you even French?”
He shakes his head, the soft strands of blue hair that hang just above his eyes moving just the same. “No,” he admits. “But my tiny fib got you here, didn’t it?”
You press your lips into a line as his movement ruins the stillness of his pose, but you try not to scold him for it. “Sure it did,” you answer. “Some nerve you have.”
“The nerve,” he echoes through a soft chuckle.
However, the nerves that he’s truly concerned about right now are the ones in his cock that are very quickly waking up. He does his best to not shift around in his seat, but once you disappear behind the canvas again, he does just that.
He really hadn’t thought this through. How embarrassing. Not only is he erect, but he’s erect from purely talking to you. What a mess he is.
The bright side is that there’s a thin layer of silk fabric draped over the lower half of his body, but with the rapid swelling of his erection, he’s realizing that it’ll do very little to help him out.
“Uh…” he clears his throat. His ears are as red as a fire truck, he’s sure of it. “Can we take a quick break?”
You don’t look at him from behind the canvas as you answer. “I’d prefer it if you gave me a bit longer. I’m almost done with this section, I don’t want to disturb the pose just yet.”
He curses himself for hiring such a professional. “Alright,” he murmurs.
You continue working for a few seconds before you speak up this time. “What made you seek me out, Raf? I mean, you’re a pretty good painter yourself.”
Raf. He didn’t think that he’d done enough to earn that level of familiarity to get you to give him a nickname, but he’ll gladly take what he can get.
“I dunno,” he lies. “I guess I just wanted to be the muse for once,” he adds. That time, however, he was being truthful.
He’s always wanted to be the subject, the one in front of the easel, the one who is paid attention to. Call him an attention whore if you must, because he’ll gladly claim that title.
Especially if it’s attention coming from you. He’ll pull out all of the stops to get it, just like he has today.
“That’s almost poetic,” you joke.
“Almost?” he repeats. “Alright, you’ve really hurt my feelings now.”
You shortly hum. “If that’ll get you to stop talking and sit still then I’m glad.”
He huffs quietly, sitting still and silent for a grand total of two minutes. He tried to keep it up, but the silence was gnawing at him.
“What are you currently working on?” he eventually asks.
To answer his question, you’d have to blatantly say that you’re painting his crotch… so instead, you stand up to turn the easel around entirely.
Rafayel takes a moment to gaze at the canvas, his eyes blown wide in wonder. You really were talented, and you’ve managed to make him look absolutely unreal in a way that he believes only you can.
His eyes settle on the section you painted last, judging by how most of the wet paint conjugated in that area. He swallows the growing lump in his throat, studying the way you even painted the faint outline of his length beneath the silk cloth.
“You’re finished with it?” he asks, raising his eyes to meet yours. “That part, I mean.”
You nod, turning the easel around to face you again. “Yeah,” you answer.
Rafayel clears his throat as he glances down at his crotch, which was sporting a full erection beneath the silky fabric. That had changed since you began to paint him, which wasn’t exactly your fault, but he curses his horny brain for what he says next.
“You got it a little wrong,” he tells you.
Your eyebrows raise as you drop your gaze down to the part of the canvas he’s currently correcting. “What? No, I…” you say as you peek at him from behind the canvas.
He shifts a bit under your gaze, watching quite intensely as you eye compare your painting to how he looks right now.
“Hm. I guess I did get it a little wrong, yeah,” you murmur, more so to yourself than to him.
Rafayel nearly smiles at your tone of indifference. “I hear that visual learning is the most efficient,” he suggests, cocking a brow at you. “Gets you well acquainted with the… material.”
“And by visual learning do you mean physical learning?” you counter.
…So yeah, physical learning definitely sounded more appealing to the both of you, which is exactly how you wound up kneeling in front of him with his cock in your mouth.
Your tongue flattens on the underside of his shaft as you sink lower, prompting him to collect a bit of your hair in one of his hands. “Gods, woman, are you trying to kill me?” he huffs, a sly grin on his face as he keeps his eyes closed.
Unsurprisingly, he can’t bear the thought of seeing your beautiful face be made of a mess of. He knows he shouldn’t feel this way, that he’s the reason you’re in this position, but he still does.
His large hand on the back of your head guides your movements as you suck him off, his head tilted back as you use your tongue on him. His stomach muscles are taut, and you’re finding yourself fawning over him after all, because his abs truly are that magnificent.
“Holy shiiiiit,” he pants, finally cracking his eyes open to look down at you. He really shouldn’t have done that, because now he feels like he’s about to cum in your mouth. “Fuck, ‘m sorry, pretty,” he stammers, closing his eyes again. “Can’t… can’t help it. Feels too good.”
You don’t think he has anything to be sorry about, and if anything, you should be assuring him of the opposite. It was one thing to stare at him from afar, but it was another to look at him from this angle—with his eyes screwed shut while his forehead glistens with sweat especially.
He almost feels embarrassed for how loud he’s moaning, his thick thigh tensing as you rest your hand on it to brace yourself. You’re making him feel like a virgin with the way you take him in, the sensation of your tongue making him feel fuzzy.
“Just like—shit—just like that, cutie, yeah,” he babbles, hardly sure of what he’s saying anymore. All he knows is that if he opens his eyes and sees your gorgeous mouth stuffed with his cock, he’s going to cum.
You pat his hand on the back of your head as a means of getting him to guide your movements to his liking, noticing the way he so clearly hesitates with you. You can’t blame him. He doesn’t know you well enough to know that you actually like this sort of thing.
But with the way your mouth feels around his cock, he’s in absolutely no rush to deny you or himself this wish. He pushes your head a bit faster now, listening to the lewd sounds of your spit sloshing around with every thrust he gives you.
“Too fucking good,” he rasps through a moan. He’s almost too lost in you, his lips permanently parting as he lets his vocal cords roll out the most filthy words you’ve ever heard. “Mm-hmm, use that—fuck—pretty mouth of yours, gorgeous.”
As if the sight of him reacting so visually to your mouth wasn’t enough, the words he gives you are more than enough to have your heat pooling between your thighs. You’re both a mess here.
He flings his head back, his eyes shutting even tighter as your nose brushes against the tufts of dark blue hair at the base of his cock. It was safe to say that the curtains certainly matched the drapes…
You gag as he pushes you a bit too far on his length, his eyes snapping open almost immediately. “Oh, honey, ‘m sorry,” he huffs out, releasing your hair to let you off of him.
You shake your head as you cough, pulling your mouth off of him for a brief moment. A thick string of saliva still connects your bottom lip to the base of his shaft, and that alone has his cock twitching right in front of you.
“You’re so pretty,” he breathes as he shakes his head, almost dumbfounded by the sight in front of him. He may be out of breath, but he’s still very in tune with his abundant attraction for you. “Come up here, gimme a kiss.”
Rafayel is pulling you and you’re complying, and his lips are slotting against yours within seconds. He holds your jaw in his hand, his other moving to the small of your back to pull you closer until you’re kneeling between his spread thighs.
The kiss is sloppy, the saliva on your face immediately transferring onto his skin, though he doesn’t seem to mind. Not one bit. Instead, he’s slipping his tongue into your mouth, gathering more of your taste on his tongue.
“Don’t think I’m well acquainted enough,” you murmur against his lips, planting your hands on the back of the throne while you shift to straddle his lap. “Do you?”
He shakes his head without thinking. “Nuh-uh. Think you need a little more,” he replies, running his hands along your thighs until they slip beneath your dress.
One of his hands cup your mound while the other rests on your hip, and he nearly moans at the feeling of the sopping wet fabric clothing the needy area between your legs.
“This all for me?” he asks with a lopsided grin, his eyes hooded as he looks at you. You nod your head, a soft whine leaving you as he pulls the fabric to the side, running two fingers along your slick pussy. “Mm, I wanna taste her.”
You shake your head, your hand reaching to stroke his throbbing cock, brushing your thumb along the tip as a spurt of pre-cum leaks from it. Denying head isn’t exactly your go-to, but you can’t help it. You want to feel him inside of you.
He follows your hand down to his shaft before he raises his eyes to meet yours again, giving you the sweetest smile imaginable. “Alright, silly girl. Pussy’s all mine next time though, promise?”
“Promise,” you whisper with a smile.
Rafayel seems pleased with that, so he gives your thighs a light squeeze as he shifts to stand up, only for you to gently nudge him back down.
He raises a brow at you, a smirk quickly growing on his face. “Oh? Pretty baby wants to ride me, is that it?”
His pet names for you nearly make you buckle, and you’re not sure how considering you’re already sitting down, but it almost happened, you’re positive.
“Yeah,” you answer, slowly rubbing the head of his cock along your folds. “Look me in the eyes this time?” you tease.
He’s too drunk on the feeling of your pussy teasing his tip to realize that you’re joking with him. “Huh? Oh right, yeah, cutie, whatever you want.”
If you thought he was whiny there, it was no match for the man he became once the head of his cock pushed into your hole.
“Holy shit, woman, you really are trying to kill me,” he moans, resting his head back. “I was only joking before.”
You chuckle as you slowly lower yourself on his length, feeling the way his girth stretches you out, earning a whine from your lips in return. He smiles at you, cupping your cheek with his hand.
“You feel so good, pretty,” he whispers, his other hand resting on your hip as you begin to bounce on his cock. Up and down, up and down. “Shiiiiit, baby. Fuck me like that, yeah, just like that.”
A smile stretches across your lips as you watch his expression go from one of eagerness to one of absolute bliss, his eyes half-lidded as he watches you.
“Gods,” he breathes as his cock slides between your walls. “Pussy’s so tight—fuck,” he gasps out as he grips onto your hips, slowing your movements. “Gonna want more if you keep doing me like that.”
And by more, he means he’s going to start fucking up into you. He really didn’t want to, not with how pretty you looked riding him on your own, tits bouncing in his face and all.
You whine as he slows you down, and you come to a complete stop for a moment as you sit in his lap, cockwarming him. “Is that not the point?”
Rafayel raises a brow at you, a lazy grin on his lips. “Pfft. Alright, woman, you asked for it.”
You really did ask for it, though when he grasped onto your hips to make you slightly hover over him, you’re quickly realizing that his words were anything but empty.
His cock rams into you before you can even register that he’s moving beneath you, his thrusts hard and fast. You moan nearly every time the tip of his shaft reaches the back of your walls. Without much thought, you lean forward, resting your head on his shoulder as he continues to fuck into you.
“Ah-ah,” he playfully scolds, leaning forward to nip at the neckline of your dress. “Pull ‘em out for me, cutie.”
You do it without hesitation, shrugging the straps of your dress off your shoulders just enough for your tits to be revealed to him. He moans at the sight, leaning in to press a kiss on your perked nipple.
“Such pretty tits, honey,” he murmurs against your skin as he sucks your nipple into his mouth, the pace of his cock pushing into you not letting up whatsoever.
It’s your turn to moan embarrassingly loud now, your eyes squeezing shut as you feel heat pool in your lower stomach. He’s far too preoccupied with sucking on your tits to notice, but once he does, he nips at the sensitive skin of your breast.
“I thought we were looking each other in the eyes this time,” he says, leaning up to press a kiss on your cheek. And when you open your eyes, he smiles. “Thaaat’s more like it, pretty.”
You return the smile, but not for long. Another moan rips through you, your forehead moving to rest on his, though you keep your eyes open.
“I… ‘m gonna cum,” you choke out, earning a chaste kiss from him.
He nods. “Let me have it, baby. Need you.”
And it’s not like you had a choice in the matter. You’re shaking in his lap as your orgasm washes over you, another airy moan leaving your swollen lips as you find your release on his cock.
“So perfect, so beautiful,” he coos, leaning forward to kiss you again, slowing the pace of his hips down as he fucks you through your high. “Mhm, so sweet for me too.”
A soft whine leaves his lips as he pulls out of you. You watch as his hand strokes along his cock, a guttural sound leaving his mouth as he paints his own stomach with thick, white ropes of cum.
He pants as he keeps his eyes on yours, leaning forward to press another kiss to your cheek. You lean into his touch while your other hand threads into his hair.
“Well, won’t you look at that. Guess you’re your own muse after all,” you joke, giving him a suggestive wink. “Y’know, since you painted your own—”
“Mhm, I got the joke, gorgeous,” he deadpans, leaning in to press a kiss on your lips. “You’re just hilarious, aren’t you?”
“…Yeah, I think I’m pretty funny.”
note. helloooooo! i really enjoyed writing this lol, i like the lightheartedness of it all. i might write a pt2 for the hell of it buuuuut i hope you enjoyed reading <3 all interactions are greatly appreciated :)))
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