#but it's never been about AI. it's always been about having the idea and structure of what you need but the DAMN THING JUST WONT COME OUT

[clenastia]

me, like: "they should invent a thing that allows me to daydream the fic in my head like normal, but some program turns that daydream into a fic, because i can PICTURE the scenes and emotions but always struggle to WRITE them-"

*thinks logically about where any sort of brain-interface technology would lead*

......they should absolutely NOT invent such a thing, but by the GODS i will be mad about it until the day i die.

Having to write a difficult chapter is just me repeatedly going "urghrgh... they should invent a fic that writes itse-- *remembers AI* they should not invent a fic that writes itself"

[yourownutopia]

Shadowborn [Jin Woo x !Shadow !Fem Reader]

When the Shadow Monarch adds you to his ranks, he has no idea what he's in for. Not only are you uncontrollable, but you also harbor a secret that even the System keeps hidden from him. As he searches for a way to bring you under control, it becomes clear that your existence exposes a flaw in the perfect structure of the shadows—one that no one could have foreseen. Why don’t you yield to his will, and more importantly, why doesn’t the System want you to remember?

Song: Shadowborn - Hiroyuki Sawano

Calm before the storm It's me they all are coming for Be my shadowborn

We're back to take the pain My soul is indestructible I steal you from the grave So cursed to be a slave

»»———-»--•--«———-«« Information: The prologue is written in the third person. I’m honestly unsure whether I want to keep it that way or write the following chapters from different POVs. Feel free to let me know if you’d be interested in a second-person perspective as well. This idea has been stuck in my head ever since I saw a similar start to a roleplay on Character AI. I’ve had so many thoughts since then, and I hope I can integrate them meaningfully into the story! I’m known for starting ideas and never finishing them, but I really hope it’ll be different with this story. At the very least, I still have plenty of fuel in the tank and a lot of motivation to write! <3Ideas, story requests, and feedback are always welcome, so don’t hesitate to reach out 😊

Enjoy the prologue!

Note: I want to clarify that English is not my first language. I’m sorry if there are any mistakes or if I sometimes use incorrect words. Please feel free to send me corrections so I can continue improving my skills! 😊

[Prologue] “Arise.”

The Shadow Monarch’s voice reverberated through the room, deep and commanding, shattering the silence like fragile glass. Clear and resonant, his words echoed off the stone walls, lingering as though the air itself sought to hold onto them. The sound was low and powerful, vibrating faintly, giving the room a brief sense of life before the quiet crept back in.

A translucent window appeared in the air, the oppressive dark aura blanketing the ground retreating like mist. Once again, the extraction had failed. [Soul Extraction failed. 1/3 attempts remaining.]

Jin-Woo’s cold gaze flickered down to the lifeless figure lying on the ground. He exhaled deeply, raising his hand again.

“Is this truly where you wish to meet your end?” he asked, his eyes beginning to glow faintly. His voice was the only thing animating the desolate room. Vines crawled up the cracked stone walls, fractured beams of sunlight piercing through the shattered ceiling above. It looked like an abandoned boss chamber—ancient extinguished torches lined the walls, weapon gouges marred the hard stone—but there was no trace of life to be found. Not even the body before him radiated vitality.

So why couldn’t he extract her shadow?

Had it been too long since this monster’s death? Monsters decayed, yet her body showed no signs of rot. Only the deep lacerations across her skin, the missing heartbeat, and the faint, oppressive aura around her gave away the truth—she was dead.

“What a pitiful end,” he murmured. Jin-Woo didn’t expect a response, but something about her unnerved him enough to speak aloud, as though testing the air for answers.

“Arise,” he commanded once more, his hand tightening into a fist as though he could will her soul to obey.

The black smoke coiled around the lifeless body, intertwining with the tendrils rising from her chest. Slowly, the shadow took shape. Jin-Woo’s lips curled into a victorious smirk as the dark form solidified into the outline of a woman. Her glowing white eyes locked onto nothingness, the telltale mark of a newly risen shadow.

The system window popped up again, prompting for a name. Jin-Woo glanced at his latest recruit, who now knelt before him, one leg folded beneath her and the other bent upright. Her gaze remained forward, never meeting his.

“You belong to my Shadow Army now,” Jin-Woo declared, lowering his hand. “From this day on, you will serve me and obey my commands.”

He pondered briefly, then began typing a name into the prompt. Just as his finger hovered over the “Confirm” button, the window glitched, flickering erratically before closing. The chosen name replaced by another. [Y/N]

“No.”

The voice was so faint it barely registered. Jin-Woo paused, convinced he must have imagined it. Yet, before he could dismiss the notion, the shadows surrounding her physical body dissipated, retreating into the darkness along with the lifeless form on the ground.

“What?” His voice was sharp, his composure slipping for an instant as the word lingered in disbelief.

“No.” The second time was louder, firmer. The shadowy figure began to rise, her form shifting. The darkness coating her crumbled away, replaced by color. Her eyes, once glowing white, now gleamed a vibrant shade of [E/C], locked onto his in defiance. Her hair, [H/C], shimmered with an unnatural vitality, stark against the bleak surroundings.

Jin-Woo’s usually impassive expression flickered with subtle astonishment. A shadow capable of speech? Only Beru had ever displayed such an ability.

He cast his gaze toward the floating information above her:

Name: [Y/N] Level: ???

He couldn’t read her level. And she already had a name.

A tense silence filled the space, his dark aura intensifying until even Igris, his loyal Blood-Red Commander, shivered. Yet, [Y/N] stood unflinching, her jaw tight as she met Jin-Woo’s penetrating stare. Despite the icy dread running down her spine, an unyielding resolve kept her rooted. She refused to kneel.

“I refuse,” she ground out through clenched teeth, watching as the black-haired man’s glowing eyes narrowed into sharp slits. Her voice was thin but steady.

Before she could react, he had grabbed her chin and leaned down toward her; after all, he was a good head taller than she was. His grip was firm, not enough to hurt, but enough to convey his dominance. His hands were icy cold. Could shadows even feel such sensations? His face was mere inches from hers, and his piercing gaze sent a cold shiver crawling up her limbs.

[You are forbidden from harming your master.]

The window that briefly popped up caught her eye for a moment before her gaze returned to the Shadow Monarch’s icy stare.

“What was that?” he asked in a deep voice, as though his physical intimidation and the flicker in his glowing eyes could compel her to reconsider her defiance in light of what he was capable of.

“Say that again,” he growled, his tone icy and measured, daring her to reconsider. He was giving her one more chance to retract her initial refusal and do what—at least in his mind—was the only correct thing. [Y/N] stared at him for a moment. Her irritation over the situation gradually gave way to anger, which settled heavily in her chest. Who did he think he was? More importantly, who did he think she was? ... Who was she?

But there was no time to dwell on that thought, as the Shadow Monarch grew impatient. He made this clear with a brief but painful squeeze of his hand. But her defiance didn’t falter. “I. Refuse.” The words were deliberate, slow, and unwavering.

For the first time, Jin-Woo felt something beyond annoyance—curiosity laced with disbelief. Never had a shadow disobeyed him. His dominion was absolute. So why did she stand so boldly against him?

“You’re either very brave or very foolish,” he said, his voice low as his violet eyes flickered dangerously. “Do you even realize who I am?”

Her lips curled into a faint smirk. “When you’re dead, titles lose their meaning. Honestly, nothing really matters anymore.”

For a fraction of a second, Jin-Woo’s stoic mask slipped. Her words, blunt and logical, were disconcerting. Yet his pride demanded he reassert his authority.

“If you won’t obey me, I have no use for you,” he declared coldly. “I’ll kill you again a second time”

“Go ahead.” Her voice dropped to a whisper, her expression challenging. “I have nothing to lose.” Something in her tone—half daring, half resigned—made Jin-Woo hesitate. The tension between them crackled like static, thick enough to choke. Shadows coiled at his feet, thick as ink, creeping toward her like serpents. Yet, as they reached her, they paused, lingering for a moment as though recognizing her as one of their own before retreating.

Even Jin-Woo couldn’t deny what he had just witnessed. Releasing her chin, he let out a heavy sigh, his energy dissipating as the oppressive weight in the room lifted.

This was no ordinary shadow.

The shadows retreated as quickly as they had appeared, his eyes returning to their cool gray, and the immense energy he exuded vanished entirely.

He couldn’t simply let the chance of having a powerful shadow slip away, even if her lack of respect infuriated him to no end. The fact that he couldn’t determine her rank and that she didn’t yield to his will suggested she must be strong.

[Y/N] exhaled in relief; the whole ordeal hadn’t left her unscathed, but she was incredibly fortunate that the black-haired man hadn’t killed her on the spot. Despite her earlier words, she really didn’t want to die again.

His cold expression remained unchanged, but his gaze lingered on the [H/C]-haired woman, who stared back at him blankly.

Her appearance was human—different from his other shadows. She had color, glowing eyes, and if not for the name and lack of rank floating above her head, he wouldn’t have even guessed she was part of his army.

“Let me put it another way: as the one who revived you, you don’t have a choice but to follow my commands. So stop being so stubborn and just obey,” he said, his voice slicing through the silence as he crossed his arms over his chest.

Stubborn? Me? Does he even listen to himself? [Y/N] thought.

“Clearly, we’re both stubborn,” she stated , rubbing her chin, which still bore faint pressure marks from his firm grip.

She didn’t notice the faint flicker of concern in his eyes. Did he hurt her?

“If you’d stop being stubborn and accept that you can’t just go around resurrecting people and making them your slaves,” she retorted, earning another angry glare from the black-haired man. He at least seemed to accept that physical intimidation wasn’t going to work on her.

Jin-Woo turned slightly away from her and opened the window displaying the current number of his shadows.

“I revived you for a reason. You are now part of my army and will serve me. End of discussion.”

[Y/N] laughed humorlessly—a cynical laugh. He still didn’t get it.

She rolled her eyes, though there was that peculiar feeling in her chest—a strange connection that had been there since her resurrection. It felt more like a tether pulling at her core, drawing her toward him.

But she didn’t feel compelled to obey him—so why should she?

“Nope, as long as you act like an asshole, I’m not even going to consider it.”

The Shadow Monarch froze mid-movement, shooting her a deadly side-eye.

Did she just insult him?

His frustration grew with every passing second. No one had ever defied him like this, especially not someone he had revived.

“And why should I be nice to you? You’re the one defying me here. You’re the one refusing to obey me. What have you done to deserve my kindness when all you’ve shown me is disrespect?” he said.

[Y/N] responded without thinking, “You reap what you sow.”

Yes, he was an asshole, and she couldn’t stand him, but her reaction wasn’t exactly the best icebreaker either. Besides, they were both in a pretty crappy situation, and it wouldn’t get any better if they kept clashing.

Plus—what choice did she have? She had no idea who or what she was, where she was, or where she was supposed to go.

A resigned sigh escaped her lips, and her tense posture relaxed a little.

“Maybe... just maybe, we got off on the wrong foot,” she said, her voice softening slightly, almost innocent—though theatrically so.

The Shadow Monarch was once again surprised by her words. She had personality—and plenty of it, apparently.

He could insist that she was his shadow and that he was therefore superior to her, but what would be the point in the end? Perhaps it was time to swallow his pride and admit he might have been wrong.

Maybe he had simply spent too much time alone, consumed by his role as the Shadow Monarch, losing whatever social skills he once had.

His expression remained cool for a moment longer before his features softened slightly, and he scratched the back of his head. “That’s an understatement,” he muttered, reflecting on how he was almost the cause of her second death. [Y/N]’s eyes lit up slightly. Had she just detected a hint of humor in his voice?

His tone had lost some of its anger, which gave her a bit of relief.

“Okay. What am I even supposed to do, and where the hell are we anyway?” she asked, glancing around the room and taking it in. She knew she had seen this place before—clearly, it was where she had died—but it didn’t feel familiar. Jin-Woo, still a bit taken aback by her sudden cooperation, followed her gaze.

“We’re in a dungeon,” he said matter-of-factly. He really didn’t share more than he absolutely had to, did he? As for what she was supposed to do? Well, his shadows usually fought for him, but what about her? She had no weapon and didn’t seem magically inclined—at least he couldn’t sense any significant mana coming from her.

“Follow me. That’s enough for now,” he finally said, turning on his heel. His cloak lifted slightly with the abrupt movement before settling back down.

Jin-Woo didn’t look back, his footsteps silent on the cold stone floor. The young woman hesitated for a moment, but the invisible force seemed to nudge her forward, almost pushing her to follow him. She let out another frustrated sigh. “Okay,” she said, taking a few quick steps to catch up with him, though she stayed a few meters behind. “I’ll follow you,” she said after a brief pause. “But I won’t follow your orders blindly. If a command seems pointless to me, I’ll refuse,” she added—a compromise she could live with. Jin-Woo stopped abruptly, nearly causing her to bump into him. He paused, processing her words. For a moment, he hesitated. With a sigh, his expression softened slightly. “Fine. I’ll accept your compromise,” he said, reluctantly agreeing to her terms. “But if your reason for refusing seems pointless to me, don’t expect my mercy,” he added without glancing at her and continued walking. Though he was satisfied with this for now, there were limits—even for her.

What had he gotten himself into? ‧̍̊·̊‧̥°̩̥˚̩̩̥͙°̩̥‧̥·̊‧̍̊ ♡ °̩̥˚̩̩̥͙°̩̥ ·͙*̩̩͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩̥͙·̩̩̥͙*̩̩̥͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩͙‧͙ °̩̥˚̩̩̥͙°̩̥ ♡ ‧̍̊·̊‧̥°̩̥˚̩̩̥͙°̩̥‧̥·̊‧̍̊

[aihoshiino]

chapter 161 thoughts

Chapters Since The 143 Kiss Happened And Went Entirely Unacknowledged And Unaddressed Count: 18

Aqua Hoshigan Status: For the future

Never has an OnK chapter gone from It's Hoshinover to We Are Oshi no Back quite as hard and fast as this one. I have issues with this chapter in terms of what it implies about the story's overall structure and the fact that it sort of ruins 153-4 by association but this chapter's back half is so fucking good and the chapter itself works so well in isolation that much like 153-4, I kind of uhhh don't care about the structural issues because the story's heart is, for the most part, not just intact but beating harder and more passionately than it has in a long time.

To get what I don't like out of the way, the story seems to have settled on Super Evil Serial Killer Mastermind Kamiki as his final form characterization with some helpful Tsukuyomi exposition to just straightforwardly Tell Us things the manga probably should have spent some of the last 70something chapters Showing Us about Hikaru. The basic idea of Hikaru being some sort of serial killer so dedicated to upholding Ai's legacy that he kills women with the potential to surpass her was more or less always where I expected his character to land and this settling of his character does at least preserve what I think is the most important thing: that he genuinely loved Ai and his bent towards villainy only came after her death.

What I don't love as much is that this chapter seems to continue leaning into Uber God Manipulator Mastermind Kamiki like last chapter. I already talked at length about my issues with this framing in my previous chapter review so all I'll reiterate here is that the story's attempt to frame Hikaru as being equally or even more culpable for the actions of Nino and Ryosuke fall entirely flat to me, especially when the manga itself does such a pisspoor job of actually explaining how or why Kamiki was able to control and/or predict their actions to the extent that he supposedly did. And ESPECIALLY especially given that Nino and Ryosuke seem to have already been dangerously obsessed with Ai by the time they approached him.

In general, Hikaru's character is honestly just so inconsistent at this point that making any sense of his actions feels fruitless. If I really dig into what's going on, I can infer that maybe he fell into the same trap as Aqua by overcompensating for his trauma-induced helplessness by becoming overly controlling and guess that his fucked up trauma response to Ai's death combined with those terrible words Kindaichi gave him at Airi's funeral lead him down he road he's traveling now. I can even extrapolate that Aqua showing him the DVD message in 153-4 pushed Hikaru to this extreme and now that he has nothing to lose, he's lashing out at his children too - though, it should be noted, that the manga still hasn't actually established what Hikaru's culpability is in Nino's attempt on Ruby's life, outside of Aqua saying "well you didn't use your psychic powers to perfectly predict nino's actions so it's on you".

But like - this is all stuff I'm having to infer and extrapolate and guess, reverse engineering logic from our end point in an attempt to create a stable foundation for this characterization. The manga has done such a poor job of properly establishing Hikaru both as an antagonistic force and as a consistent character that I feel like I'm trying to assemble a coherent image from two different puzzle sets with all the fucking corner pieces missing and that's with Crow Girl looking into the camera and Explaining Him to me.

And listen, I am a bitch who LOVES to infer things. One of my absolute favourite pieces of fiction of all time ever is Umineko no Naku Koro Ni, a mystery story that literally does not contain any straightforwardly explicit, textual confirmation of the culprit's identity or motives because it believes so strongly that you, the reader, are smart enough and empathetic enough to put in the time and effort necessary to understand it regardless and it deeply, deeply values being able to give you that experience. But OnK feels less like it's intentionally encouraging me to think hard and enjoy the process of putting my head and my heart to work - it feels like it's leaving its homework unfinished and letting the reader do the actual hard work of sewing up the internal logic.

I probably won't talk much more about Kamiki this chapter cos I'd just be saying all this shit over and over but I really just am struggling to understand from a perspective of authorial intent what the vibe is even supposed to be. Like I mentioned in a previous ask, if this is where Kamiki's arc is reaching its conclusion then it means that the Movie Arc was essentially a whole-ass waste of time in and out of universe. Blech. Hate that.

Also, before I move on, I don't want to leave this just implied - making Kamiki explicitly a CSA victim and then ending his arc on Aqua (and implicitly the narrative) dismissing him as being too broken/corrupted to be saved is a really major misstep that I think represents a huge black mark on OnK's handling of CSA as a topic. The idea of an eternal defilement or an unfixable core wrongness in the self is already something real life CSA victims struggle with in the process of unpacking their trauma and having our likable and supposedly morally superior protagonist espouse this unchallenged in a work as prominent and relevant as Oshi no Ko is irresponsible bordering on dangerous. It's incredibly disappointing that after all the care Aka and Mengo seemingly took in handling this topic that it was whiffed so badly at the last second.

ANYWAY!!! Now all the beef's been dealt with, we can cleanse our palettes and move onto everything else I liked which was… basically everything else in this chapter!

Admittedly, Aqua's overall arc is still suffering from us being kicked out of his head from like 123 onwards for no real apparent reason and while 150 was a welcome refresher on where he's at in this part of the story, it still feels a bit like the story is prioritizing preserving the surprise factor of its twists over making these surprises feel earned. Compare it to volume 1 - you are basically told exactly what is going to happen to Ai, especially in the manga when Saitou and Gotanda outright say as much - but her death is still incredibly impactful and upsetting. I think this chapter is very effective, but could've been a lot moreso if we'd spent more time in Aqua's head leading up to it.

THAT SAID… If the intention of keeping us out of his head was to recontextualize Aqua's behaviour across the past ten or so chapters in this new light, I don't hate it as much as I might have. I initially took issue with what felt like the story off-screening and not addressing the resolution to Aqua's suicidal ideation so whipping back around to prove that it was still very much present puts some particular Aqua moments over this past volume into a very different light. As some people pointed out, Aqua missing Kana's pitch - literally dropping the ball in responding to her feelings - and his wide-eyed look of alarm in 151 seemed very ominous omens for the success of her confession and that beat of him covering his face when Kana approves of his dream… very incheresting knowing Aqua was still struggling with 'love or revenge' at this point.

Most interesting of all to reconsider is Aqua breaking down in tears in Miyako's arms in 155 when she addresses him as her son for the first time. At the time it read like catharsis but now I can't help but wonder if this was Aqua grieving for something he desperately wants but thinks is out of his reach.

i do have to say though. i get the general vibe of this plan and think it works fine as the apex of aqua's self-sacrificial protectiveness for the people he loves but how is being the daughter of a serial killer somehow any less scandalous for her career than being the sister of someone who killed one dude. does aqua think they just won't notice that kamiki happens to be their biodad or something. wasn't that the whole point of the movie. goofy ass plan.

What really saves this whole scenario is the emotions at play, though. This really does feel like Aqua at his most Aqua in a really long while and this chapter has so much love and respect for his life as Aqua and the bonds he has formed as a result. The dreams Aqua lays out are so agonizingly simple, too - he wants to pursue the career he finds rewarding. He wants to date the girl he likes. He wants to accept Miyako as his mom and Himekawa as his brother and to make things right with Akane after hurting and using her. He wants to see Ruby achieve her dream and be there to support her when she does.

But Aqua's always considered his dreams impossible, hasn't he?

I fully admit; I got spoiled with the full page spread of Aqua stabbing himself way in advance of the chapter and initially hated it as a twist. But with the full chapter as context and the sheer weight of Aqua's longing to just fucking live and find joy, it's not just effective but absolutely gutwrenching. It is the synthesis of Aqua's series-long battle to choose love or revenge and it resonates perfectly because it has never been one or the other for him - Aqua's revenge has always been rooted in the fact that he loves others so wholly and completely and hates himself so utterly that he thinks sacrificing himself to preserve their futures is the only path for him to take. It's the culmination and final release of the suicidal ideation Aqua has been dealing with since he was four years old and like Ai's tragedy before him, there's a horrible sense that maybe there really was no other way this could've gone.

Aqua being the character who actually takes the knife also firmly cements him as Ai's narrative echo in the text which has me barkin and howlin because it's what I've been saying all this time. Not just that, but so many of Aqua's expressions in this chapter pointedly and deliberately echo Ai's after she was stabbed. Not just that, but Aqua's achingly simple dreams echo Ai's own heartrendingly simple regrets - all the two of them ever wanted was to be happy with the people they love.

This also reframes the story's prior establishment of Ruby as paralleling Ai and seems to place the twins in the position of echoing not Ai in her entirety but Ruby as 'Ai of B-Komachi' and Aqua as 'Ai Hoshino'. This was actually something I outlined in one of my very first meta posts on the series, but I think making it more specific to 'Ruby as Ai the idol' and 'Aqua as Ai the human', this actually gives Ruby's arc in relation to Ai a bit of breathing room. Don't get me wrong, everything I've said about her post-BH writing being underbaked and inconsistent is still the case, especially when it comes to how confused the story is on whether Ruby is her own idol or New And Improved Ai 2.0 but giving it less ground to cover helps in terms of her writing no longer being spread quite as thin.

Speaking of Ruby, that beat of her seeming to react or sense something is up the moment Aqua takes the stab. 'Something happened to my loved one far away and I just Feel It' is a trope I'm always a sucker for and I really dig it here.

"The public don't care about the truth, so let's tell them a lie" is such a crazy hard sentiment to go out on too. Holy fuck.

There go our boys…!!! Quite a few people predicted they might go over the edge when Aqua showed up in his Mephisto fit (Mefitsto) and I'm interested to see if we get any parallels to the ED's imagery in the next few chapters. Overall, though, I'm really excited for where things are going - I don't think Aqua will die, but I do have some theories about what might happen. I can't think of a more traditional misogi purification experience than the middle of the ocean in late December, after all…

No break next week! Woohoo! While the delay of episode 12 means we won't be getting them on the same day, that is the same week S2 of the anime will be concluding and Aka does like lining up his bombshells with the anime. So who knows what we'll see.

seriously tho aqua. everyone already knows kamiki is you and ruby's biodad. HOW IS THIS ANY BETTER THAN HER BEING THE DAUGHTER OF A SERIAL KILLER AS IT ALREADY STANDS

[oxymorayuri]

𝐶𝘩𝑎𝑝𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝟷𝟿

𝑂𝑛𝑒 𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑝 𝑐𝑙𝑜𝑠𝑒𝑟

𝑇𝑟𝑎𝑓𝑎𝑙𝑔𝑎𝑟 𝐷. 𝑊𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟

𝐿𝑎𝑤 ✘ ♀ 𝑅𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑒𝑟

𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐈𝐒𝐓: nisir0

Story: The princess of Tanata

[Long Fic]

➽ masterlist

Spoiler: nope

Warnings: nope

slowburn with plot

Wordcount: 3535

Text in italics emphasizes the reader’s thoughts

Bold and italic text emphasizes Law's thoughts *~*

Tagging: @slytherinambitious - @norasincubi - @cottoncandyloverrrr - @one-piece-frvr7 - @hopelesslover06 - @chillerkiller - @sassyyassi

After waking up this morning, you decided against going back to the palace and made the decision to rather conquer the old ruins with Law, which you had talked about the night before.

Strangely enough, you are sure that you will uncover the secrets of this extremely well protected ruin... together with Law.

“Here, take my hand.” With a smile, you accept Law's help and let him pull you onto the stone wall. With the new view in front of you, you both see what kind of complicated structure was hiding behind this wall...

[A/N: Hello my little sweethearts, it's been a long time since I showed any examples of the surroundings. Of course I firmly believe in your imagination, but here is a small example of how I imagine the ruin and the labyrinth. The pictures are made with AI and AI didn't get the labyrinth quite right, but it's better than nothing :D]

“Apparently the labyrinth changes every five minutes.” Analyzes Law. Given the size of the labyrinth, it will be difficult to keep your orientation. Although you can see the end of the labyrinth from where you stand right now, this huge maze separates you from your actual destination...

"Well then, let's go into the maze!" And with that sentence, you jump down to the start, with Law close behind you.

Even if you have no problems solving the puzzles together, you will always find yourself back at the beginning of the labyrinth. No matter how the massive walls move, you can't make any real progress.

Law had the idea that every time your way leads to a dead end, you should place a sign on the wall before you continue, to monitor how far you have come.

Since the maze is constantly moving, the order of the puzzles you have to solve also changes, always sending you through unknown corridors that you have not yet discovered, until you come to an wall blocking your way completely.

To your dismay, you come to the conclusion that you never really get any further… Because the new paths, after a dead end, will always lead you back to the beginning...

On the wall you were standing on before, you look breathlessly at the constantly moving maze. You have tried to speed through the maze, but whenever you faced a new puzzle before you could move further, a new dead end was already waiting around the corner.

Law keeps watching the maze as you recover from the constant running.

"Judging from the layout, we don't seem to have enough time to get to the end. Maybe we need to wait for the right moment to enter the maze?"

At that very moment, the walls are aligned in a way where the signs you placed form a line.

"Do you mean a moment like this?" You look at him excitedly as if you've discovered a clue, hopefully one that will take you further.

Once again, between the massive walls of stone, you make your way past the puzzles until you reach the place where you were expecting a new puzzle, but instead there is just a dead end in front of you...

Exhausted, you sink to the floor. Despite your confidence at the beginning, you now fear that even with the help of Law you won't get to your destination.

You run your hands through your face in distress... none of this makes any sense!

"I don't understand…" you mutter to yourself as you lose all hope.

“WHY CAN'T WE GET THROUGH THIS DAMNED MAZE???!” you scream and your voice echoes into the distance.. Law, visibly confused too, looks at the wall blocking the way in front of you.

“…We're not supposed to get through the maze…” Law speaks as if he has finally understood the mazes concept. He looks around, examining the walls for clues, but apart from the traces of time, there is nothing to be seen.

“What do you mean?” You are exhausted and unable to go any further. All you want is for the puzzles to come to an end. Law turns to you, his hand on his chin and thinking hard.

"I bet that no matter how fast we go, no matter when we enter the maze, we'll never get through it…" - “Huh?! But that's the only way to the ancient ruin…" His words don't seem logical to you and with some struggle you get on to your feet.

Once again, Law places a sign on the wall and after it was time for the maze to move, you both were no longer surprised that the way lead you back to the beginning...

So you go back onto the stone wall, which gives you a perfect overview of the maze and check where your latest sign is.

"Look at the signs Princess-ya…" Your eyes follow the direction Law is pointing at. Right before your eyes, you see the same line created by your signs. But after a closer look, you notice something new.

"The signs we have drawn are now a complete row, that runs horizontally through the entire labyrinth…" You are surprised…

“Not only that... These were the dead ends we were facing, but that row never opens, instead another wall opened which only led us back to the start…" Your eyes watch skeptically as all the walls move except the ones you have marked.

"So you're telling me that we've only been moving in this half of the maze the whole time?" Your finger points to the area in front of the marked row and Law nods at you in agreement. You look at him as if you were going crazy and laugh slightly hysterically.

“If you look closely you will see that the second half isn't even moving…” With this new insight, however, only more questions arise…

“Maybe there's some mechanism that makes the second half of the maze move?” - "Maybe…" He replies. Together you rack your brains, as this appears to be another puzzle you have to solve.

"But looking at the signs, we've been already in front of every dead end and most likely walked every path, but I haven't noticed anything that could be a mechanism…" In fact, Law has a completely different idea and is strongly convinced that you both have to find a hidden path outside of the maze.

“I guess you're right, I didn't notice anything either…” Your eyes roam around. If the labyrinth isn't the path to take, which way should you go? Or maybe you need to create a new path?

"You know Law, all those puzzles had one thing in common... I always had to use my powers…” - “The flowers!” Law blurts out.

He freezes briefly and seems surprised by his own volume. Clearing his throat with reddened cheeks, he tries to distract you from how childishly he has been behaving, but instead of finding it childish, you find yourself liking the otherwise observant Law more and more.

Back at the puzzles, you try to figure out how you can use your powers. Even though the puzzles were quite different, in the end you always had to bring a flower, which was planted on the altar, to blossom.

“… Mhmmhm, okay…! The ruins usually block all devil fruit powers…” You talk to yourself and circle around.

For many years, an unknown force has surrounded the ruins, making it impossible for Devil Fruit users to use their abilities. The knowledge behind these walls is not to be gained through destruction or power. The only way to obtain the island's legacy is through knowledge itself.

Since most of the information is related to the Taimu taimu fruit, you can only use your abilities under certain circumstances, but you cannot use them freely.

“What a hassle. If I could use my powers freely, thousands of ideas would come to my mind, but no, of coooourse I can't use them...” You tousle your hair and have to stop yourself from wanting to pull your hair out in frustration.

Law is watching you, while you're going crazy during your monologue, trying to keep the corners of his mouth down but while you are at your wit's end, swearing at your ancestors, he can't suppress his grin. (You're both such dorks.)

Luckily for him, you're too busy to see that he's having a great time watching you.

“Wait a minute princess-ya… maybe there's some kind of device like the altars in the maze?” You stop in mid stride and look at him with wide eyes.

"Well of course!!!" you literally shout in his face and shake his shoulders. Law, who is obviously surprised by your sudden attack, doesn't flinch. He lets you have your moment and once again catches himself unable to take his eyes off your laughter.

“That's it! Clearly!” You jump around like a bouncy ball, looking for a mechanism that will allow you to create a path into the ruins. Law shakes his head at your behavior and joins the search.

And who would have thought it but the mechanism you were looking for the whole time, was on the same stone wall you were standing on. Together you remove the plants which are hiding a panel, picturing two hands with flowers and without hesitation you place your hands on top of it. Excited you look around to see what happens.

High above the maze, twining vines and blooming flowers grow into a beautiful bridge that starts at your feet and leads all the way to the ruins.

You leap into the air with joy... you have never managed to get through this damn maze and thanks to Law, you now know that this was never the right way anyway... After your little dance, you jump without thinking into Law's arms, who almost falls off the stone wall with you and hug him tightly.

"This is all thanks to you Law!" He awkwardly strokes your back while you thank him over and over again.

After a heartfelt embrace, you rest your forehead against his and close your eyes. Law, on the other hand, is completely unaware of what's going on and a soft pink blush appears on his cheeks.

What the hell is she doing?! Is all he can think of.

While he struggles with himself, trying not to touch you in inappropriate places, goosebumps spread across his back because your delicate hand rests on his neck.

For you, it's just a gesture between loved ones and a demonstration of the respect you have for Law, nothing unusual in your culture... but for him, It's beyond confusion...

“How can I thank you, Law?”

Thank him? He laughs a little nervously. For now, he would be very grateful if you would let go of him so his heart can calm down, but he cannot bring himself to say those words. Rejecting you doesn't feel right and as long as no one sees the two of you, it doesn't really bother him. He thinks.

“Ahhh, it's no big deal. Now let's finally go into this ruin.” He skillfully changes the subject and it works. You are very excited and quickly break away from him and sprint along the long bridge. With Law close behind you, you run along the long flower bridge while it continues to form and flourish in front of you.

You pause before stepping onto the last few stone steps leading to the ruin, your heart pounding with excitement. You carefully enter the sacred site of your ancestors, your heart beating faster, but not out of fear.

You are amazed and overwhelmed by the huge walls that neither time nor the weather has been able to tear down.

You carefully enter a kind of long corridor, your breathing is shallow, and the only sound to be heard is your footsteps echoing along the high stone walls. You can't see a thing in this dark place and you don't know where the path is leading, it's as if the darkness is drawing you in.

Without being able to avoid it, you step on a stone that sinks in a bit and you hear a strange mechanism moving in the walls. You cling to Law's arm in the darkness, feeling scared and insecure. You look around in the dark, but your eyes can't make out anything, nothing at all.

To your surprise, no trap is triggered, instead the long hallway is being lit up, bit by bit.

“Look, Princess-ya.” Law's gaze is fixed ahead and in the distance you can see the end of this hallway. You can make out some kind of hall. You look up at Law, who smiles at you reassuringly, which gives you courage and you nod at him. Together you stride down the hallway.

On the sides are numerous paintings describing stories and legends. With careful fingers, you brush along the wall, trying to understand the stories. Few inscriptions explain in bits and pieces, with each step further, what is protected in this ruin. There are stories you've never heard of, and one thing is repeated over and over again.

“The Eye of Chronos…” your voice barely a whisper. Law, who was just looking at another wall painting, turns to you because of your voice and steps to your side. Curiously, he looks at the mural over your shoulder. He can't read the symbols but he understands the painting.

In the middle is a person portrayed, left and right are doors with different worlds behind them. Both of you look at the picture in confusion. Even after all your guesses about the wall paintings, you are uncertain what to expect. While you memorize every picture on the walls in your mind, you slowly make your way to the end of the hallway.

With every step you take towards the bright room, your heartbeat quickens. You have to narrow your eyes as the oncoming light grows brighter. While you shield your eyes from the harsh light, Law puts his hand on your back and points forward.

“Princess-ya, look over there!” You cautiously peek through your fingers and when you finally see what lies before you behind all the light, your hand drops to your side.

So what could it be? A Poneglyph…

Without further hesitation, you run to the massive cube and decipher the symbols. You translate every single sentence while Law examines the stone with the same curiosity.

“Now I understand, Law…“ Your voice is a bit hesitant at first, but then it fills with clarity. You hastily go to another place where you read a certain line and put your finger on it.

“The Eyes of Chronos is not an object or some kind of device, as I first thought, it is an ability.” You catch sight of Law's face, somewhat taken aback. You are overwhelmed by what this stone wants to teach you here.

“An ability?“ He raises his eyebrow. That makes sense to him, but what exactly does it mean?

“What can the Eyes of Chronos do?” He whispers as if guarding a secret. You go around to the other side of the poneglyph and repeat its words:

“The eyes of Chronos see every place, at every time, and wherever they are…” Your voice echoes through the hall with intensity. Law doesn't understand everything yet, but he senses something. Then you turn to him, which takes his breath away for a brief moment. With a smile on your lips, you look at him full of knowledge.

“The writing says that those who are worthy can gain a special ability, and this huge block behind me is practically a description and instruction of that ability.” You point behind you with your thumb. You take a seat on the floor and lean against the cube.

Law raises his eyebrows, he knows by now that it is a special ability, but what it can do, remains unclear. He waits quietly for you to continue with your speech.

You hold your hand in front of your eyes and tilt your head back. You are actually getting a little emotional from what you have read. You take a deep breath before your lips can even start to tremble…

“With the eyes of Chronos, it is possible for me to see different places and to enter them as well. It is like opening a door in space and time and then… then you are just… there… at the place I visualize.” You are quite stunned.

“Does that mean you can travel anywhere, no matter how far?” He is noticeably shocked. That's an amazing ability. You nod at him while continuing to hide your face.

Law crouches down next to you and puts a hand on your knee. You were so brave and eager to learn just a short time ago, and now you seem so quiet?

“That's it, Law…” You can't avoid the tremor in your voice anymore, but there's a smile on your lips. Because you're happy.

“This is what I was looking for. I knew it wasn't just a stupid fairy tale!” You lower your hand and look into Law's eyes.

“My mother used to read me a fairy tale in which the hero could travel to different places… Stories about him being on an island, high in the clouds with real angels… Or a city under water with creatures that resemble humans but can live underwater like fish… There were countless places he went and as a child I always wished I could visit those places too.” While you dwell in your memories, Law's eyes widen. The places you are talking about are more than familiar to him…

“y/n-ya…“ He addresses you by name. Unused to hearing your name from someone who isn't a member of your family, you look up at him.

“These places, they really exist.” Your eyes widen in wonder. If places like this await you outside, even if they're only remotely as described in your books, then you have to see them!

“Law, with this ability, I'm one step closer to leaving this island!“ Your grin makes him feel a sudden tug in his chest. In his opinion, it would be better if you stayed protected. But why?... Surely because your abilities would be dangerous in the wrong hands.

“What do you mean, you're one step closer? What else?” He studies your sad face, isn't it enough just to keep coming back here for the ritual?

“I couldn't forgive myself if something happened to my people. I have to protect them, you know?” Your eyes gaze deeply into his. He knows exactly what it feels like, to make it your duty to protect your loved ones, remembering his crew and how often he left them behind to avoid getting them into trouble.

“I see. So you still have to find a way to keep your island safe...” He leans back and gets up. Perhaps he will be lucky and you won't find a way to leave the island, but who is he to entertain such thoughts?

“I'll definitely come up with something!” You jump up and clench your fist in victory.

“However, I first have to learn this ability…“ You walk around the cube and try to figure out how to control the Eyes of Chronos.

“Didn't it say that you have to prove yourself worthy?” Law asks, still standing in the same place and thinking. That's right, but you thought you were already worthy of the knowledge… after all, you made it into this ruin…

“Hey Law, come and lend me a hand.” With his help, you climb onto the cube and, as you had expected, there is a small altar here too. Once again, there are these moulds in which you can place your hands.

You move your hands carefully. What will happen if I am not worthy of such power?

As your hands touch the stone, you are overcome with an oppressive feeling. It's as if all your strength is being sucked out of you. Your entire life passes before your eyes, with both beautiful and memorable moments, as well as tragic ones.

Long forgotten and suppressed memories emerge before your eyes. For the first time, you see the moment when your parents died.. with your very own eyes.

All of a sudden, your eyes can see everything.

Exhausted, you break away from the stone as it seemed that it was over. Your ears are ringing and your vision is blurred, the only thing you can hear is your heartbeat. Suddenly, Law comes into your view. He grabs you by the shoulders, worried, but you can only see him as a blur...

After this state subsides and your breathing normalizes, Law quickly examines your body for signs of impending unconsciousness, but you seem to be fine again.

“Law, I think I passed the test...” You ignore how he examines your eyes, checks your pulse and body temperature. He puts his hands on his thighs and looks at your face with a concerned expression.

“You think so?” You nod weakly at him and get up. You're a bit shaky on your feet, so Law supports you and you raise a hand.

“Yes, I do… and now we'll find out.”

You swing your hand and a kind of shiny crack forms in the air. Bits and pieces of fragments come off, showing you more of what is behind it and what you can see resembles your room in the castle. Full of amazement, Law looks at this unusual phenomenon.

He walks behind the crack and looks around to see what is there, but even behind it, all he can see is your room. A little tired, you reach your hand out to him.

“Let's go home, Law…” He hurries back to you before you collapse into his arms. Exhausted, and together you walk through the crack and end up in your room…

Ohoho, it's getting exciting and I'm looking forward to write the next chapters. Get ready for innocent romance and upcoming danger...

Kiss kiss, your yuri

➽ Next chapter

[mahercbeaucoup]

TTRPG Design Lessons from Wildermyth

I've recently been spending a good deal of time thinking about solo RPGs and playing Rangers of Shadow Deep, a solo miniature game. My brain has been buzzing with ideas for solo game design, but I wanted to extend my research into video games, and so I found myself playing Wildermyth. This game has been on my radar for years, but I finally took the time to sit down with it. I enjoyed the game's first campaign, and I came away with some lessons for solo TTRPG design.

Procedural Stories

As your party of heroes wanders the world of Wildermyth, the player is treated to vignettes of the characters' encounters with their environment. These little stories build much of the player's connection to their band of heroes, especially the ones who join later and appear less often in the main plot.

Coming from the OSR world, a natural comparison arises to random encounters, especially during overland exploration. But whereas OSR encounters can follow any structure (and it is not uncommon for them to merely provide a moment of flavor), the Wildermyth vignettes always result in a meaningful change to the game state (as far as I can tell). A character may gain a new item, or change in some unexpected way, and the player will have a choice to make. Because a vignette always results in some sort of change, the game has a continuous feel of forward momentum.

In solo games, I struggle with developing side characters (or characterization at all, if the game is primarily skirmish-based). Looking at Wildermyth's approach, I can see the potential for a spark table to take one or two characters and create a little side-adventure for them, giving them a little color and differentiating them from the others.

Overworld Map

Wildermyth's map is broken down into regions, and each type of region contributes a different gameplay option. Some areas may have ruins you can reclaim, giving you increased resources or "Legacy Points" (a type of special currency), that you can use to grow and enhance your party. Some areas might allow you to build a bridge across a river, or tunnel through a mountain pass, into an adjacent territory. Villages provide recruitment opportunities, and new areas need to be scouted.

Crucially, every action requires time to complete, and the world is always moving on. Timers count down to the next bad event, armies march across the map and destroy settlements, and the deck of potential enemies is always growing stronger. Even when you acquire enough party members to split them up over multiple locations, it always feels like there is never enough time to get to everything you want to.

This system is simple, but it adds rich, opportunities for gameplay. I would love to experiment with this kind of campaign layer in an otherwise more traditional skirmish game. By adding simple concrete benefits to the control of a region, a huge amount of gameplay naturally emerges, even before diving deep into other sorts of quest hooks that will develop.

Enemy Behavior

When it comes to the tactical battles, the enemy AI seems to be very simplistic (as it is in most games of this type, and video games in general). But this isn't a knock against the battles, because the game's designers clearly understand that you can compensate for AI with varied enemies and scenario design.

I could very much picture running these enemies manually, each one operating by a different tactic that is simple enough to execute manually, while also appearing in enough unique combinations and situations to the player on their toes. One enemy might always charge to the farthest character it can reach, while another might draw characters toward it. These are just a few examples from Wildermyth, but they demonstrate how a few simple enemies can drastically change the tactical situation.

Interfusion

The mage class in Wildermyth has "Interfusion" as its primary ability. This lets the character manipulate the scatter terrain in the environment, with different types of terrain offering different tactical benefits.

I haven't seen this kind of approach to magic before, and I think it has good potential on the tabletop.

Putting it all together

After playing Wildermyth, I have a clearer picture of the game that is brewing in my mind: a cross between a skirmish game and an RPG (hardly a new idea), focused on a war band securing an area, and reacting to dynamic threats with varied enemies and approaches to AI. It's the smallest of seeds, but I have a vision for what it can grow into.

[duhragonball]

November Plannin'

All right, I've been thinking it over, and I think I'm gonna have to pull the plug on my NaNoWriMo account. The AI thing irks me, because to me the organization seems to think that it doesn't matter if you use Chat GPT or some other damn thing to reach the goal. And I do think it matters, because to me the whole point of the exercise is that those 50,000 words come from me, and me alone. The only software I need is Notepad.exe. I only downloaded iA Writer because it was like a Notepad.exe for my phone, and I got FocusWriter because it's like Notepad.exe with a wordcounter.

I've heard about the Nano community, and the writing groups, and the public meet-ups, and I'm not knocking any of that stuff, but I never had any interest in that. I just used the website to keep score, and I guess that's what bugs me, because by refusing to condemn AI, they're basically insinuating that the score doesn't matter. "It doesn't matter what you wrote." Someone told me that once and it still gets me kinda hot.

NaNoWriMo doesn't care if I write the words or not. All the org seems to care about is having participants who'll buy the merch and click on their sponsors, or whatever. They're gonna do this shady crap and they take the participants for granted. "What are you gonna do? Leave? You need us to reach your writing goals!"

That's the message I get from them. That's what made me reluctant to decide, because it is handy, and there's a certain anxiety that if I give up the structure the site offers, I might not reach my goal.

And that's the "creative monster" I need to slay this year. When I was in college, I took a semester of creative writing, and there was an assignment called "Killing the Creative Monster", and I interpreted it as a sense of not having enough time to write. Things kept happening, and the stuff I wanted to do seemed like it would take too long with no certainty that it would be worthwhile. That was in 1998. In 2024, the Creative Monster is the idea that I'm dependent on NanoWriMo to get me where I'm want to be.

So I'm gonna close down my account on the site. But I'm not doing it right away, because first I'm gonna save all the stats and stuff that belong to me. We'll start with the banner image I put up on my profile.

This is Zack Sabre Junior. This year, he won the G1 Climax tournament. He made a big deal about how his career wouldn't be complete until he won the G1. Not just any G1, but this year's tournament. I just put this picture in my profile because I was digging his tag team stuff with Taichi a few years ago, but suddenly I'm reminded of him winning the G1 this year. It was a big deal. He's the first guy to win that I actually wanted to win.

I've won NanoWriMo seven times from 2017 to 2023. But that doesn't matter. Unless I win Unaffiliated Autumnal Writing Challenge (UAWC) in 2024, I'll always feel a bit unsatisfied. That's what this one is about. No pep talks from some author I never heard of because I'm too busy watching anime to read. No funky word-count widget that always malfunctions around midnight. Just me and this computer, and a bunch of tekkers. That's how we're gonna do this one.

Good. I finally feel fired up about this one. I was beginning to get nervous. Let's figure out what I need to work on.

Luffa Annual 6. Ironically, this one actually takes priority over the main fic, becuase it's the Christmas Special, so it has a hard deadline. I was gonna work on it last week, but I kind of blew it off.

I don't know that the annuals are all that popular, but I enjoy making them, even if they are a huge pain in the butt to figure out. I'm glad this is the last one in the set, but I won't just slap it together and call it good.

Tellurium. This is a weird side-bet I'm making here. On my main blog, I used to do a series on the discovery of the chemical elements, and this was the next one on my list back in, uh... 2016. The tricky thing here is that the writing is just part of the job. There's research that goes into this stuff, and I don't want to get lose a days' worth of wordcount trying to wrap my head around molecular orbitals. Call me a glutton for punishment. It'd be relatively easy to just do 10-12 Luffa chapters and call it a month, because I've done that before. I feel like this year needs to be trickier. Also, I really, really want to get Te in the books. I don't think I like the chemical elements more than Luffa, but it is telling that I'm even having that conversation with myself right now.

Luffa 225-234. Of course I still plan to stick with what brung me to the dance. Kakarot is behind me but this fic isn't finished. The problem is that I only have a nebulous plan on where to go from here, and it's coming together a lot more gradually than I thought it would. I plotted a cool scene on my commute this afternoon, so that's a good sign, but I need to be realistic here. Last year went really well because I was writing the Luffa vs. Goku fight that I had been dreaming of for years. Motivation-wise, I've got nowhere to go but down. But I had similar problems in 2018-2020, and I prevailed then.

That Bulma project I was horsing around with. Last year, there was some crank on Twitter getting pissy at anyone who shipped Bulma with any non-canon partners, like there's a rule or something. That kind of inspired me to try to do some shorter works featuring Bulma hooking up with different characters. I didn't get very far last year, but I liked having a side-thing that I could jump into whenever I got stuck with the main work.

You know, thinking about it, I really need to use 2025 to work on some non-Luffa fanfic. In the early years, I worried that working on a longfic would eat up time that I could use for one-shots, and I slowly acclimated to just focusing one thing. But now that the Goku fight is done, the pressure is off to finish Luffa before I die. I mean, it's still not finished, but the Goku fight was a major milestone, and I didn't like the idea of never getting that done.

I mean, I still get kudos on that Caulikale fic I wrote in 2018, and the Gochi thing I did. People like that stuff, and I'm pretty good at making it. Maybe I should run a poll.

I dunno, that's probably enough for now. I should go back to bed. But I feel a lot better about November than I did a few days ago, that's for sure.

[ofmermaidstories]

I totally agree with you on not liking the current, "you must reblog or don't read it" mentality. While it's great to support fanfic writers if you're comfortable with it, there are a lot of reasons why someone may not feel comfortable reblogging a particular fic (for me personally my social anxiety sometimes gets the best of me and I simply cannot handle the idea of being perceived). I think the problem comes when people don't interact with fics and then start to ask for more content from the author (which I suspect is only a few people but it's enough to give some writers a really bad impression). I used to write for a very small fandom and even I had several experiences of people asking for part 2s or updates when the original fic had very little interaction and I was most definitely not a request blog. I've personally never written fanfiction to get comments but stuff like that made me feel used and I even had one interaction that toed the line of emotional blackmail and put me off writing for that fandom altogether so I can definitely see why some authors end up so jaded that they block anyone who doesn't interact positively (even if it's not something I really agree with). So yeah, I really don't think there's anything wrong with genuine lurkers but I fear sadly they've been given a bad name by the few people who do treat fanfic authors as content machines.

Anyway, I hope I haven't rambled too much and that you're having a good day Merms!

Oh yeah, absolutely!!! Like, true entitlement is such a problem that genuine lurkers are getting murked for; which is unfair because it makes a scapegoat out of them and doesn’t solve the real problem at all. And I say “true entitlement” because there’s a difference between a comment that’s like, “will there be a part 2? 🥺” and “part 2” LOL, which is my personal pet peeve, like—what happened to hi?? hello??? how are you??? 💀 I’m not a chat AI, you don’t get to input demands. 🤖📖🚫

Idk—I try not to be mean about even that, tho, because I suspect a lot of this behaviour is indicative of younger readers, but then it just circles back to the problem of like, how do we correct it on a community-wide scale? Because sure, entitlement like that might be coming from a younger reader, but it might just as easily be coming from an asshole LMAO. The only “quick” solution that I can see for it is directly addressing it when it happens. 🥺 And again I wanna emphasise that there’s a clear difference between a genuine enquiry and a throwaway demand!! Like, personally, I don’t mind people asking when I might update or whatnot, because I don’t hold myself to a schedule and my updates are haphazard. But if you’re a more structured and dependable writer (like andypants, for example!) then maybe it’s a different story idk idk. It’s literally case-by-case—which is how it should be, because we’re all individual people writing different things.

I’m sorry your other fandom experience was kinda soured for you though, Anon. 🥺 I would feel used too! I’ve actually come to really dislike writing generic, non-bigger-fic related drabbles because they’re always the pieces that attract the worst of the entitlement. 💀 I say that like it’s a plague of demands lmfao, it’s not, but it happens often enough that it’s noticeable—and I guess it’s just the nature of them being easily digestible without needing like 100k+ of backstory to get into it, but….. idk idk. It’s startling! 😦 And I think the only action we can take that’s even close to a solution is just gently addressing it whenever it pops up. 😔 Or blocking ig if that’s how u roll, LOL.

[superwoman-comics]

SUPERWOMAN: MAIDEN OF STEEL #1 COVER

Welcome to Earth-AC60! Part of the collection of universes called, Multiverse-DC3.

On Earth-AC60, the world will witness the rise of their universe's first superhero, Superwoman!

next

if you like what you see? check out my comic, Datacell #1! But before you buy, read Datacell's Origin at DATACELL HQ 

Name: Clarrie Kent/Kala Lar-El

Date of birth: June 30th,2001(earth time) Age: 22(as of 2023) Height: 6” 4”ft

Powers:

Base strength: She has been shown to be able to lift as much as 100tons. Enhanced human speed: she can run up to mach 5 without exerting herself. Telescopic Vision: The user can zoom their vision in on things, allowing them to see distant objects in magnified scale. They may be able to see vast distances, outside the atmosphere, solar-system or even galactic distances.

Invulnerability: The user is immune to any/all forms of physical damage/harm, unable to feel physical pain, is immune to bleeding or loss of limb. Death due to old age (as opposed to preemptive death) is seemingly the only cause of death to the user. Heat Vision: User is able to generate concentrated, immense amount of heat from their eyes, which can be used to burn, heat, melt, weld, etc., targets. Masters of this power may turn it into/gain Incineration (or vice versa) which is a very similar power.

Flight: User can fly or otherwise move through the air using various methods. Some possibilities include using one or more forms of energy, wings or similar structures, harnessing anti-gravitation, or even mimicking or becoming an animal that can fly. Users are generally able to Levitate, and Glide as well. Enhanced Jump: User can jump incredible distances and land safely, covering frighteningly tall heights and long distances. Usually comes with strong legs.

Ice Breath: The user is able to generate and manipulate ice/cold within them in a way that allows them to shape the exhaling of the effect. These shapes can include bursts, streams, spheres, even a mist of it from the mouth. Semi-Immortality: Users of this ability never age, and as a result, they stay young forever or at least never suffer the ravages of aging. Because of this, the user will always be at their physical prime. The user will also be immune to aging abilities, such as Age Acceleration or Reversal.

Weakness: She is as weak against magic attacks and spells as any human. She is vulnerable to all forms of incapacitating agents and vulnerable to electric/energy/ and mind control attacks. Whether it can kill him remains to be seen. If she encounters a new virus--depending on the the strength of the virus, she could die. Location: Metropolis

Team affiliations: The Daily Planet

Birth location: Smallville. Kansas

First Appearances: Superwoman #1

For years on Deviant Art, I've stumbled on other creators' versions of Superwoman and thought to myself, I want my own version. there's two things i like about this piece; one, the background was made on, Playground AI. I'm thinking of changing up my style--for the sake of experimentation. And two, I gave her my special Superman symbol that I created a few years ago. Once I put them together I looked at it for awhile and thought--Wow! This works. Though i have added some original ideas to Superwoman, she is based off of Superman. The stories are based off of various Superman stories over the years. I do not own superman, or any of the related characters. The Superman series was created by Jerry Seigel and Joe Shuster and is owned by DC Comics. This story is a work of fan-fiction and is for entertainment only. I am not making profit from this story. All rights of Superman belong to DC Comics.

[dataverse-comics]

Welcome to Earth-AC60! Part of the collection of universes called, Multiverse-DC3.

On Earth-AC60, the world will witness the rise of their universe's first superhero, Superwoman!

next

if you like what you see? check out my comic, Datacell #1! But before you buy, read Datacell's Origin at DATACELL HQ!

Name: Clarrie Kent/Kala Lar-El

Date of birth: June 30th,2001(earth time) Age: 22(as of 2023) Height: 6” 4”ft

Powers:

Base strength: She has been shown to be able to lift as much as 100tons. Enhanced human speed: she can run up to mach 5 without exerting herself. Telescopic Vision: The user can zoom their vision in on things, allowing them to see distant objects in magnified scale. They may be able to see vast distances, outside the atmosphere, solar-system or even galactic distances.

Invulnerability: The user is immune to any/all forms of physical damage/harm, unable to feel physical pain, is immune to bleeding or loss of limb. Death due to old age (as opposed to preemptive death) is seemingly the only cause of death to the user. Heat Vision: User is able to generate concentrated, immense amount of heat from their eyes, which can be used to burn, heat, melt, weld, etc., targets. Masters of this power may turn it into/gain Incineration (or vice versa) which is a very similar power.

Flight: User can fly or otherwise move through the air using various methods. Some possibilities include using one or more forms of energy, wings or similar structures, harnessing anti-gravitation, or even mimicking or becoming an animal that can fly. Users are generally able to Levitate, and Glide as well. Enhanced Jump: User can jump incredible distances and land safely, covering frighteningly tall heights and long distances. Usually comes with strong legs.

Ice Breath: The user is able to generate and manipulate ice/cold within them in a way that allows them to shape the exhaling of the effect. These shapes can include bursts, streams, spheres, even a mist of it from the mouth. Semi-Immortality: Users of this ability never age, and as a result, they stay young forever or at least never suffer the ravages of aging. Because of this, the user will always be at their physical prime. The user will also be immune to aging abilities, such as Age Acceleration or Reversal.

Weakness: She is as weak against magic attacks and spells as any human. She is vulnerable to all forms of incapacitating agents and vulnerable to electric/energy/ and mind control attacks. Whether it can kill him remains to be seen. If she encounters a new virus--depending on the the strength of the virus, she could die. Location: Metropolis

Team affiliations: The Daily Planet

Birth location: Smallville. Kansas

First Appearances: Superwoman #1

For years, I've stumbled on other creators' versions of Superwoman and thought to myself, I want my own version. there's two things i like about this piece; one, the background was made on, Playground AI. I'm thinking of changing up my style--for the sake of experimentation. And two, I gave her my special Superman symbol that I created a few years ago. Once I put them together I looked at it for awhile and thought--Wow! This works. Though i have added some original ideas to Superwoman, she is based off of Superman. The stories are based off of various Superman stories over the years. I do not own superman, or any of the related characters. The Superman series was created by Jerry Seigel and Joe Shuster and is owned by DC Comics. This story is a work of fan-fiction and is for entertainment only. I am not making profit from this story. All rights of Superman belong to DC Comics.

[likealittleheartbeat]

hey!

this is more of a personal ask so if you do not feel comfortable answering it, feel free to ignore.

what did u mean in your previous post about 'finding your lane finally'? what profession/outlet did u find for writing about your interests if i may ask?:) it just sounds interesting!

So I really have never enjoyed the career I’ve been in, and I’ve been considering grad school for a long time (even did a semester in a professional track counseling program that I did fine in but really did not enjoy). I read academic texts for fun, which no one else I’ve met does, so it seemed like the best path. But I have always struggled to feel confident in figuring out which field would really let me integrate all my interests that I could reasonably break into without having to do a whole bunch of extra work. I’ve considered studying Literature bcuz I love literary fiction, thematic analysis, structuralism, and literary hermeneutics; Film Studies bcuz I love a lot of tv and film but I’m not super into the more masculine parts of the canon nor as many technical aspects of the craft; Gender and Sexuality Studies to get at the focus on queer subjectivity and dynamics that are a core interest for me; History since I was a history major in undergrad and still really enjoy that type of research; Religious Studies so ai can dive into Buddhist and Reformed Christian religious ideas; even American Studies so I can touch on indigeneity, colonialism, and gender in American contexts, which is another special interest of mine.

But none of those fields felt like they’d let me obsess over the contemporary tv and movies that form the hub from which all those other interests spring. American studies felt close, but I really wanted to study media beyond its American context when applicable, and I really don’t care about a lot of political and legal mechanisms tbh unless the stuff I’m watching is engaging with them.

Today while reading a book of essays on the development and impacts of the Boys Love genre in Asia, I was looking at what each of the scholars studied in (I’ve done this a lot as I’ve been trying to figure out what to do) and one of them, whose writing and analysis was inspiring me, had studied Media Studies. A lightbulb turned on.

It’s wild because media studies was my sister’s major in undergrad, and I even edited and helped develop her essays throughout college and her final thesis. It had never occurred to me, though. I realized media studies would let me explore the development, content, conveyance, and reception of all the stuff that makes me feel the most fulfilled 🥰 And I could take it toward working in the tv industry or, probs more likely, a career in academia (which I know has plenty of it’s own issues and criticisms but it also seems like it might possibly be a great fit for me personally).

But yeah, that’s the realization I had today. Just feels good to have some clarity.

[nickgerlich]

Prairie Edifice

I always laugh when press conferences are held amid much fanfare, announcing business plans beyond comparison. Superlatives are the rule of the day as the speakers gush the salient attributes of their plan, which, invariably, is missing one key ingredient: Money.

Details, details. I suspect in the majority of cases, these media feeding frenzies are designed simply to test the waters, and see if they can attract the investors they so desperately need to make their dream come true.

I have a big problem with anyone announcing things half-baked, though. It’s too easy to send out press releases and host media events, without having even a fraction of the money in place to actually make it happen. But man, sometimes those announcements can get a lot of traction. Publicity is great when you can get it, even if it’s bad.

Like with the recently proposed skyscraper in Oklahoma City that would tower 1907 feet above the state’s capital, a full 134 stories. Why 1907 feet? Pure symbolism in measured dose: That’s the year that Oklahoma was admitted to statehood. It would be the tallest building in the US, and the fifth-tallest in the world.

Now I am not opposed to progress and all that, and am not against building new structures that stretch the imagination. But Oklahoma City? Good grief, we might be able to see this from Amarillo on a clear day. That’s a hell of a lot of building. Looking out of place just a bit, ya know?

The plan calls for a hotel, retail, offices, and residences, and with 134 stories, there would be plenty of room for all of that. Heck, the 50-story Devon Tower, currently the tallest building in Oklahoma, didn’t exactly fill up over night.

The sad part is, I doubt this will ever happen. I have grown to be skeptical of every big announcement like this. I have seen it happen too many times. In recent years, a developer from Houston announced big plans to renovate the 1926 Herring Hotel in Amarillo, something that is long overdue on this beautiful building. It would take at least $50 million to do so, though.

And then COVID hit, and the plans quietly went into the ether. The website for the project is dead, and I have my doubts I will ever see this gem restored in my lifetime.

As for the current monstrosity, social media reactions have been less than encouraging. Ranging from the usual litany of “why don’t they fix the potholes” to “this is bullshit,” I don’t think a whole lot of folks are buying it. I like the idea in concept, but it’s a lot like the AI-generated multi-level RVs I see on the socials and other such wild imaginations. They are just figments of creative minds and software.

Sure, there are four other buildings in the world taller than this one, and they actually exist. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why, other than “because we can.” They become badges of wealth, ostentatiousness writ large.

Then there are the folks who lob the very predictable F-5 tornado into the discussion. It is no secret that central Oklahoma is in the crosshairs of Mother Nature, smack dab in the middle of Tornado Alley. But no, a building like this would not fall into a twisted wreckage. It would just result in a massive pile of broken glass, just like I saw a few years ago in downtown OKC when the Devon Tower had a similar calamity strike it.

I like OKC a lot. And since I came here for a quick getaway, I saw fit to write a blog about it. OKC is not perfect by any stretch, and, just like all big cities, has experienced a homeless problem. I hate that. It turns my stomach when I see smoke coming from underpasses along I-40, where folks have set up encampments.

But it is a good place, a city with about 700,000 people, and a metro of 1.4 million. That’s no slouch, and I have found the 3.5-hour drive from Amarillo to be all too easy when I want to experience a little bigger city culture. There are some amazing restaurants here, not to mention shopping that we will never see in Amarillo. Heck, whenever I leave Amarillo for a bigger city, like OKC, I come prepared to hit Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. You know how it goes. What you can’t get is what you want, right?

But in terms of a skyscraper this tall, I have to wonder if the developer has other plans in mind, and is using this as mere subterfuge to get what he wants. It is pie-in-the-sky, and if I were a betting man, I would rather buy lottery tickets. This ain’t happening.

Dr “Tall And Taller” Gerlich

Audio Blog

[jenny-from-the-box]

The following passage needs to be posted.

Quick background: I went to the Brooklyn Museum summer 2023 to see the exhibit curated by Hannah Gadsby called “It’s Pablo-matic”. She selected works of Pablo Picasso’s juxtaposed with works by women who had been influenced by him for better or worse. The following was on the Brooklyn Museum’s website (additional reading) by Gadsby about a particular part of the exhibit that just showcased works by artists who are women, and I found it to be brilliant. So have fun.

“Guess what? There are no Picassos in this room. Now I'm not advocating a cancellation of PP, but I do think it's fun to fantasize about it, in the same way that it's fun and cathartic to imagine a world without cars or what life might be like if white people hadn't colonized the Earth with such destructive arrogance. But even if we could remove PP from our collective consciousness, why would we? Why would you want to remove somebody who was so clearly influential and continues to be influential? What good would it do to pretend PP never happened? Honestly, what a stupid, stupid, stupid idea. Canceling PP would be about as constructive as denying black women access to power structures. Like I said, a stupid, stupid, shortsighted idea. Why would you do that? Why would you pretend somebody does not exist? Having the white European male front, center, and wholly representative of the human condition has put the blinders on us all. To have a huge cultural blind spot is to lose the ability to truly understand ourselves and the world in which we exist. You may as well go to school in Florida. We should not be driven to course-correct out of guilt. “I feel bad that women and people of color and non-European perspectives have been diminished and erased for centuries upon centuries. Oops. Here's a little bone.” No. We should be striving to undo ourselves out of curiosity, and with more than a little bit of rage. We should all be shouting, what have we missed? What glorious enrichment have we been denied because we have been sold the thin edge of the wedge? PP is the granddaddy of the direct-from-artist's-studio-to-collector pipeline that is the hallmark of the modern art market ruse. The first we hear of many priceless PP's is after they're being sold at auction, decades after PP’s original creative ejaculation. Does a work of art such as that have any legitimate claims to having broader cultural relevance if it never exists in the world that it was created in? If we can say that it does, and we do, then surely we can go back and retroactively find important women artists. But we really struggle to do that. Why? Because PP takes up so much space. But I think it's worthwhile trying. I think it is an important quest to flood the zone with as many perspectives as we possibly can. I really do, because we are standing on the precipice of an AI revolution and AI cannot glean from what is not there. Algorithms are limited to what has been, not what could have been. The status quo always assumes that it is because it should be. But I don't agree. I believe that if we want to build a world where everybody who literally exists can also theoretically exist, we need to broaden our scope of what qualifies as worthwhile creative contributions. And if we don't make a real effort on that front now, if we don't try to unearth and champion voices and perspectives that are missing from our collective understanding of ourselves, we will be forever blind and we will be forever talking about fucking Picasso.”

Hannah Gadsby on Picasso /BK Museum

[despondent-beauty]

Yeah, like computers, AIs have certain niche uses, but they must be checked and verified and looked over. Like a computer, you need to micromanage it. Something as simple as summing a list of numbers on a computer can lead to an overflow error, for instance. (Where a number gets so large that it turns negative in memor.) You, as a human, need to be able to know how to add so you can very quickly see that a list of 1,000 positive numbers probably shouldn't equal 5 at the end.

Interpreted most favorably, this means that you, as a human, need to understand the output of the AI on a deeper level -- much deeper -- than the AI itself. The AI can move pixels and words around, but that doesn't make it right, beneficial, or pleasing. The AI doesn't know a good composition vs. a bad composition, nor does it understand narrative structure, proper subversion of tropes, and character depth. It might have a perfunctory understanding of those things, but what about the metaphorical overflow error?

Interpreted more reasonably, AI is a fuzzy logic machine, so its overflow errors are going to be subtle and fuzzy and frequent. Unlike addition, there's no literal mathematical formula for creating good art, analyzing historical documents and their relevancy to today, writing a story, etc. This means that their errors are contextual and can't be predicted. They're not even possible to detect as errors unless you're actually looking for them.

Who's going to notice that 'exotic magician' as a prompt exclusively creates people of color unless you're already looking for that, for instance? And that's not even talking about general composition and other actual skills/talents that go into the production of art or analysis. This is just one very real example that we've all heard of recently with image generators being teehee accidentally #raaaacist :)

Honestly, I actually use AI to get an idea of what I want characters to look like or to help refine general questions because I struggle to know what I even need to ask.

I once spent 20 minutes almost arguing with a TA because they couldn't understand a question that I had about the intersection of graph transformations and U substitution in calculus. They got irritated with me because their response didn't help me/answer my question, so I just kept trying to explain what I meant more, which made them think I was being difficult. Autistic issues, I guess.

So I do actually find it really helpful in refining my queries so that I can figure out what information I actually want/need to know. It can even be difficult to search for something online without knowing the precise vocabulary that you need to use to find resources.

Having said that, AI is, by definition, not creative. It's made to be as derivative as possible. It's just naturally going to be shit if you're looking for creativity. If you're looking to refine ideas and guide them to a certain outcome, then go for it. But the algorithm -- and it is just an algorithm -- is, by definition, created to adhere to its source data (in a general sense), meaning that it cannot be 'creative.'

So don't use it to brainstorm new ideas. 'I never would have thought of that' is so weird to me when the AI, even the most advanced models, spits out the same trite drivel that apparently passes for creativity no matter what I do. I already need to have my own creative inspiration to do anything interesting with AIs, else they just fall into extremely derivative and banal shit.

I've literally never had the AI say something directly interesting.

It's always been me getting inspired by something it said. I guess you could argue that that's still helpful, though it feels disingenuous to me because people talk about using AI to generate ideas, not using AI to inspire themselves to generate ideas.

Oh, and even if they did mean the latter, there are better sources for fertile soil for ideas. Like, fuck, you're farming in arid scrublands and thinking you're productive as a result. Go read some good literature and stare at the patterns in the drywall for 20 minutes. That'll do more for your creativity than 5 days with an AI.

Anyway, I'm gonna indulge and take a moment to bemoan AI stories and writing in general.

They're so bad! Why do people think they're good? Is it because the average national AND international literacy levels hover around those of a 6th grader? Is that why? Is it? Anything and anyone capable of writing a setting, rise in action, climax, and epilogue with characters that are moderately consistent is seen as good writing? Acceptable grammar and reasonable diction is suddenly the key indicator of a genius author or something?

Will increasing the education budget and focusing more on communication and literature -- areas that we are sorely lacking due to the misguided hyperfixation on STEM -- help in this area? I don't know. I wish I did. My hypothesis is that it will, but I don't expect the US to get its dumbassery in gear anytime soon, so it's irrelevant.

Pisses me the fuuuuuuuck off.

Bye.

Okay. It's time for an AI rant.

My nephew is 13 years old. Whenever he writes a paper for school, I check it over and fix all of his mistakes for him. He said to me, "Maybe I'll proofread your paper for you in exchange," meaning one of the scholarly articles I write for work. I said, "Cool," and gave him the file. And he said, "Well, this is full of errors! See, you always say you have a lot to correct on my stuff, and look at all the stuff you got wrong!" And I said, surprised, "What? Where?" Because I'm sure there are typos in the draft I sent him, but not, like, that many.

And then he pointed to the screen and said, "Look at all the blue and red lines you have."

And I said, "Yeah, but those are wrong. Like, those are blue and red lines I'm ignoring because the computer is wrong." And then I paused and added, "You know you can't proofread a paper by just looking at the red and blue lines, right?" And he gave me the blankest look, because that clearly is EXACTLY what he thinks. And it became even clearer suddenly why, whenever I correct something on his paper, his immediate reaction is, "It didn't have a blue or red line."

There's a very good reason for that: THAT'S BECAUSE THE COMPUTER ISN'T SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW THAT IT WAS WRONG.

I am so tired of being sold the idea that computers are better than humans and so we should just outsource everything to them, which is clearly the lesson my nephew is absorbing in U.S. middle school. COMPUTERS ARE NOT BETTER THAN HUMANS. Like, maybe they are better at humans at crawling through rubble to find people trapped inside. They are also better at preserving things in a searchable format. Things like that. Very limited circumstances.

I don't want to sound alarmist but everything I hear about people using generative AI freaks me out. It's not just that I'm freaked out by people being like, "I use it to write novels!" (Although I don't see how they do, I have tried to have it write fiction for me and the output was truly terrible.) But I recognize my bias around creative writing and so no one needs to credit my views on artificial writing. But! Other things are alarming, too! "I use it to brainstorm x, y, or z." But...why? Why not just...use your own brain...to...brain...storm? The computer doesn't even have a brain to brainstorm with! And you might be like, "But it comes up with things that my brain would never think of!" So would other people! You could also brainstorm with other people! Or even through Google to see what other people have thought before you (not AI). Please don't belittle the wonder of thinking.

I just feel like the marketing around generative AI boils down to "Wouldn't it be easier not to use your own brain to think about things?" Everyone. No. It would not be. Please just trust me on this. I'm not just an old person who is out of touch with technology or something. I promise. USE YOUR BRAINS. IT WILL BE OKAY.

[tricolor-sun]

I’ve noticed recently a strangely blasé take on ai art from people around me in recent months. Which I find both odd and unsettling.

I’m an artist and a sewist, I do both for commission and for my own enjoyment and I’m currently getting a PhD in Shakespearean and Victorian literature. I spend every bit of free time I have writing. I use this to preface the fact that I’ve looked into ai, and found that it’s a mass detriment to artists and art. Ai Art as it currently stands steals from artists, taking scraps of their work and building it into a proverbial Frankenstein’s monster from the sum of those stolen pieces. Ai writing platforms steal from open source fan writing sites, like Archive of Our Own, which hosts one of the largest groupings of fan works thus far and exists for free, for everyone. Ai ‘art’ is at its base intellectual property theft.

I’ve been in fan spaces both in person and online since I was 9 years old, and one thing that often gets brought up in defense of ai art is that artists copy each other all the time, that their are no original ideas. This is true, artists get inspiration from each other all the time, every idea has been told before, in the long course of history, and it will be told again, and again, without end, ad infinitum, because we will never run out of perspectives so long as people continue to live. Each person has their own view of the world, and therefore, their own way of telling a story, regardless of medium.

I myself take great inspiration from the painting ‘A Study of Lady Macbeth’ by Gustave Moreau. I love its dreamlike quality, its colors, its intentionality. I borrow structural elements, the scaffolding of storytelling, from Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson & Shirley Jackson when I write because they inspired me. I find myself writing in the meandering, vivid, style Thomas Wolf used in his novel “Look Homeward, Angel”. I find myself explaining things in the orating style my own father used to tell me fairytales as a young child. Every piece of art I’ve touched, from movies to comic books to paintings to linocuts to illuminated manuscripts to architecture to photography to music to poetry to cave paintings to fashion to literature and the spoken word, has become a part of me. Informing my tastes, helping me understand myself and my world. In creating art of any stripe, I break off a piece of my soul and make in Into something new.

Ai art is not a tool, not truly. It’s a thief. Its only purpose is to create something meaningless, cheap. Off the backs of the hard work of so, so, many people, who usually, in their day-to-day as creatives, aren’t paid what they’re worth for the art they create, if at all. Making art is a labor of love. It takes hours, days, months, years even, to create something you’re proud to call your own. Art is something that is built upon, that brings people together. It’s collaborative. Ai Art will never have the material impact of real art because it means nothing. Purely and simply.

I believe anybody can create art, can create something meaningful to them. But ai art is a stumbling block, it seems like an accessible line between people and art. That’s another argument I’ve seen. That it will allow people with disabilities better access to making art. Which I see as asinine, I’m disabled. I’m Autistic. I’ve spent periods of my life housebound or bed-bound. I’ve never had a fully well day in my life because I was born ill. Art is, was, and will always be my escape. Whether it be creating my own art, creating art for my friends, my community, enjoying other peoples art, it will always be something I love more than anything else in my life. It has been my one driving passions since I was old enough to form memories.

The wonderful thing about art is that it’s human. If one thing is human, it’s curiosity, and curiosity is the fore-bearer of storytelling, of wonder, of art itself.

[ariannes-gibberish]

Debugging An Essay

- a reflection paper.

On a Tuesday morning at school, our professor gave each one of us a paper and asked us to proofread it. As I read the paper, it felt like something was wrong, while it did have grammatical and punctuation errors that needed to be pointed out for the activity, there was something about it that was bugging me. As if despite the proper English and format, it felt like it wasn't really written from someone's mind and heart.

The proofreading activity was quite fun yet as someone who’s really not confident with their grammar, I couldn’t help but overthink every word if they’re right or wrong - especially if it was written in a style that I don’t like, especially its tone. But thankfully, I was able to get most of it right. The activity was an eye-opening experience to how I’ve been dependent on Grammarly when it comes to proofreading my own writing. While this tool has helped me work more efficiently, activities like these really make you realize that it is better to learn and improve your grammar on your own than rely on an AI tool to prevent situations like this where it feels you’re unable to finish a task without feeling helpless due to the absence of AI.

What was interesting about the activity was that it was actually made by an AI tool called “ChatGPT”, the answers were also made by it. When this was revealed to us students, it explained why the text itself felt off. While the AI did a good job at providing a structured and informative article, it also showed that it didn’t have the same authenticity and knowledge that a human possesses when writing an article on their own, it lacked the human touch and it felt too structured as if it was strictly following a template. It was quite amusing how the tool made mistakes that weren’t flagged as mistakes on its end, while we students managed to point them out. For instance, some of us pointed out how some parts of the article are redundant and I believe that the AI didn’t see this as an error since most of its data that is used to generate are probably from vast sources all over the internet.

As someone who has had fair use of ChatGPT, this tool really makes our tasks easier and it uses less time to finish them - this tool also helps when I’m having a difficult time brainstorming for ideas. But I’ve always noticed how limited the tool is in providing creative ideas, while it has given me a wide range of suggestions that might have not occurred to me before - it lacks depth. The ideas it generates aren’t fresh or innovative - it’s just patterns and data from pre-existing content, but I do have to admit that sometimes it has helped me get out of a mental block and has sparked inspiration at times when I need it the most.

Nonetheless, this activity proves that AI may be a helpful tool for generating content and assisting in finishing tasks but that’s just it, just a tool, and shouldn’t and should never be used as an alternative to humans. If there’s one thing that people keep forgetting is that AI doesn’t have our ability to think “outside the box” nor has perspectives that come from our lived experiences. Even if it provides the “perfect” output that we’re looking for, it doesn’t and will never have the “human touch” that makes our creations better, that an AI can never replicate. In the end, it is our humanity, insight, creativity, and lived experiences that breathe life into our work, that brings meaning to what we make.

While I understand the importance of working efficiently, we must take our time to learn how to create, make, craft, and write things on our own. It may take a while for us to be good at it but I believe that’s the beauty of it, to take our precious time honing our craft, to figure out how to make things on our own instead of relying on an AI tool for the results we need.

[scyllas13thtentacle]

A few musings on Pandora's Box and Mere Mortals

Without making any reference to any source material which I can't be bothered now to find, there are two variations of the ending of Pandora's Box which are seared into my mind from when I read them long ago, and which I still think about a lot, and they go something like this:

1: When Pandora opens her box, all the evil demons fly out that go and torment humanity, she tries to shut the box but it's too late and to no avail. The very last demon which is released from from the box is the demon of Hope. The narrative goes on to say that Hope is in fact the worst demon of them all, because it is precisely because we have Hope that we persist in our miserable lives, despite all evidence and impartial judgement indicating that nothing but suffering awaits our lives, to be punctuated by a pointless and final death at the end of it all.

2: As all the demons are flying out of the box, Pandora manages to shut the box before the very last and worst demon is released, and that demon is the demon of Foresight. Foresight is in fact the worst and most vicious demon of all, because if we could see exactly what is to come and what suffering and ills are to befall us, then we would never persist in our lives, we'd surely all just end things for good.

In one ending we have the presence of hope, in the other we have the lack of foresight. Both of these variations of the tale are pretty dark but notably very contrasting takes on the same theme of suffering, the future, human existence, and the persistence of life. The first seems a very pessimist view in line with Schopenhauer and modern existential anti-natalism (the view that humanity should stop reproducing and allow itself to die out because life and existence is existentially a raw deal, a deal that we ought to refuse), the second a cautiously optimistic view perhaps reminiscent of Camus.

I love that these two endings have two very different takes on the nature of hope. Is hope a curse that keeps us suffering in life? Or is the ability to still have hope a blessing that keeps us alive?

--

Mere Mortals, a ballet dance production that opened January 26th at the San Francisco Opera, was advertised to me as a stage narrative that combines the structure of the Pandora's box tale with commentary on today's computing and internet technology-- a very San Francisco story to be sure.

Pandora's Box is one of those very malleable tales, like Pinocchio or Dracula, which have a proliferation of retellings and variations to the point where the way that the retelling is shaped says a lot about the views of the teller and the attitudes of the milieu; and someone's preferred variation says a lot about their own worldview. The contrast between variations ends up saying as much as the text of the variations themselves. For me personally, the philosophical idea behind pessimism and anti-natalism that argues from a point of rationality that life is not worth living is a discourse that has always fascinated me, and so I of course framed my short meta-retelling of the versions of the tale in a way that emphasized that.

More broadly however, the story of Pandora's Box is of course often a narrative applied to discussions of technology. Every time some new technological innovation enters into public imagination there's always someone comparing it to Pandora's Box, whether it be social media, AI, crypto, "big data", nuclear power, industrialization, going all the way back to the steam engine I'm sure. Given that anything computing technology related coming out of silicon valley for the last 2 decades has been likened to a Pandora's Box by so many pundits that it's become a journalism cliche, I'm honestly surprised that Pandora's Box isn't something that's retold and reinterpreted more in art and literature in all mediums. And I hope Mere Mortals won't be the last of it's kind, because I certainly don't think the artistic and literary potential of exploring the spirit of the drama of technology in our contemporary world through the body of the drama of mythology has been exhausted yet.

AI technology certainly is a massive Pandora's Box, and if that box has any physical location it is the city of San Francisco where the ballet has very aptly chosen to premier, where many demons indeed have flown out. Social media, big data, user targeted advertising, farming for clicks and eyeballs-- computing technology in the hands of silicon valley has gone far beyond attempting to simply be useful to us and now attempts to addict us, control us.

And right in line with the motif of Foresight as a demon, as we speak large tech companies use the reams of data at their disposal to try to predict our behavior. They use their monopolistic online platforms to gather data from users-- their private communications, their public pronouncements, their social media engagement, their online behavior and patterns-- and then to put all that gathered data through increasingly sophisticated algorithms of statistical data science and machine learning neural networks (ie "AI", although as a former CS major this term annoys me because if you look at it historically, it's really just a grab-bag umbrella description for whatever computers are doing which happens to really impresses us at the current moment/decade) to try to essentially predict the future for their own fun and profit.

Modern well known "AI" large language model algorithms like chatgpt work by a similar MO. They are both quite opaque in their functionality using large amounts of data and statistical machine learning models, and critically they get that data by vacuuming up huge amounts of content across the Internet, originally created and posted by humans, to questionable legality and ethics.

And the end result of those violations is, hopefully, something beautiful.

In the original myth, Pandora is gifted the box from Zeus in an act of trickery, which was his attempt to punish, or perhaps to even the scales, of Prometheus stealing fire (representing technology) for the humans. Pandora's Box therefore even in the original form is inextricably linked to the idea of technology. According to official promotional material of Mere Mortals, Zeus and Prometheus are actually combined into a single characters within the dramaturgy (https://www.sfballet.org/discover/backstage/your-ultimate-guide-to-mere-mortals/), and this character seemed to me as almost sort of a tempter, manipulator figure, which I thought was a very interesting narrative decision. On the one hand it emphasizes the jointly manipulative aspects, and the capacity of both figures for malignant power hunger, but on the other hand the conflict behind the scenes between Zeus and Prometheus could have been an interesting avenue to explore in itself. If for example, Prometheus represents a drive for knowledge, clarity, and technological power at all costs, while Zeus represents the preservation of a patriarchal social order, the two figures clash but also align in many insidious ways depending on the situation.

I certainly tend to view technology more in the lens of being part of broader social conflicts. The tensions between different impulses, the destructiveness of AI technology-- the theft of human content, the greed, concentrations of power, the sacrifices that need to be made-- I think is ripe to be represented in the language of motion and human bodies. The theft of fire from the closely related myth of Prometheus is a great metaphor for this isn't it?

In Mere Mortals' rendition however, my feeling is that they went more the route of emphasizing the dark beauty and seductiveness of technology rather than out and out conflict and casualties with and within technology.

Which is not a critique of the performance, just a musing to illustrate the rich potential of this tale, and the different directions you could go when retelling it. I would be really interested in a different take by a different creator just so I can contrast it with Mere Mortals, unfortunately I don't know of any out there at the moment.

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I think before going further it would be useful to set some context, clarifications, and expectations. Mere Mortals is not a concrete narrative, with a plot and events. There is no dialogue or words, the characters (such as Pandora or Prometheus) are quite abstract and impressionistic rather than being actual characters from a story. At the most you can maybe say it's an implied or subtextual narrative. If you saw it and weren't able to identify which dancers took the role of which characters-- that is OK, you aren't stupid, even an astute viewer probably needs the pamphlet to guide one's interpretation to put any throughline of meaning to it.

During the performance I was asking myself, OK but so what is this show "saying" about AI though? And I think that is perhaps the wrong mentality for engaging with Mere Mortals, and perhaps this rule applies to the medium of dance in general which I'm certainly not really familiar with. I think it's better to approach this ballet as being more akin to the societal/macro level equivalent of us as a whole culture speaking to our therapist about our collective nightmares, except instead of using our words we use art and dance to express how feel. Contrary to the pop culture understanding of talk therapy, it's been explained to me by therapists that their job is generally not supposed to be about providing cutting hot takes and insights on your behavior and thought processes, but rather just to provide a safe calm space for you to say the things you typically don't get the opportunity to say, to give you a time and space to put words together, without judgement, and be actively heard.

Yes it is pitched in the marketing material and media buzz as being a commentary on tech but it is not necessarily creating a some sort of thesis on the matter, but rather I think would be better described as an attempt to distill the fears and hopes of the moment with technology and express it on stage in images, music, and the motion of the human body. Just with a neural network image generating AI, it makes no evaluation or commentary, it just takes in the input of the world and tries to output something beautiful.

The dramaturgy and the explanations from the promotional material on the website should be interpreted as being less about the "point" of the performance or the intent of some pointed the message to be conveyed, but rather more just to give a behind-the-scenes sneak-peak at the scaffold of inspiration that guided the creative process. Indeed, we certainly need a place and time to just expressing emotions without immediately needing to reflect. Are you also worried about the internet or AI being a Pandora's Box? Well then perhaps you'll find this sequence of sounds and motions, this masterfully crafted living experience, to be cathartic.

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So with that disclaimer against trying to overthink things too much, here are my overthought thoughts and critiques, which hopefully are useful/constructive. I only have two direct critiques of Mere Mortals.

Firstly, the demons released from the box were visually represented by a series of dramatic moving images of clouds, lightning, galaxies, nebulas, and so on, all images which were generated by Chatgpt.

And so yes, sure, that is very clever little gag: Pandora opens the box and what we see is literally images created by chatgpt! Unfortunately though I wasn't really impressed with chatgpt as an artist here. The end product I think is more or less a bunch of cleanly edited stock footage of the weather. In terms of just a technological demonstration, I didn't find that particularly impressive. We are quite far from the fin de siecle audiences impressed with early film footage of trains and horses, and besides I don't think this exactly pushed the boundaries of what audiences already have seen the likes of chatgpt or midjourney do.

Furthermore the images on the screens were pre-recorded by people prompt-engineering chatgpt, but if we were to go the route of making AI an active part of the show, then I'd be much more impressed if somehow chatgpt was generating those images on the fly, perhaps reacting to the choreography in real time using computer vision/image processing technology, perhaps even controlling the lighting and stage effects. Perhaps each performance would even be slightly different. As far as pure technological demonstration goes, that would indeed actually be something that would impress me. After all, the dancers need to train and deliver live on the spot, why shouldn't the AI? Why should chatgpt get to pre-record a finished, edited, and polished take when the dancers have to perform live? Seems unfair!

Secondly, from a narrative point of view, I think in most variations of the Pandora's Box story, Pandora hastily tries to shut the box after the evils fly out, and in most variations trapping the last demon inside. For me this is the definitive image of the story, the panic and pathos of a woman driven by curiosity, realizing too late what she's done, and belatedly trying to shut the box. Outside of the chatgpt's contribution, this is my biggest criticism: I want to see that technological "Ivan the Terrible murders his son" moment expressed through the body of the dancer representing Pandora.

Instead all we get is the moment at the climax of the dance where Pandora is just standing there watching chatgpt's weather report montage, which was a bit anti-climactic. I would've liked to see Pandora's reaction, does she welcome them or panic? Does she try to trap them back in, and how?

It also might have been neat to see the demons and evils represented by dancers, instead of just by chatgpt montages. Would be quite dramatic I'm sure seeing the dance of destruction and evil wreaked by these demons flying out of the box.

Lastly, to echo the sentiments from this review in the SF chronicle (https://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/sf-ballet-mere-mortals-review-18631663.php), the ending of Mere Mortals with everyone in sleek gold costumes representing a new and upgraded world was maybe a little bit too easy of a "frictionless redemption". They say art should "comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable", and here is an audience full of San Francisco tech acolytes who maybe have become a little too comfortable in their successes, so perhaps this would've been a good time to crank up the heat, no?

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Despite whatever critiques I might have, yes of course I enjoyed the show. Generally the reception I've seen has been very positive. The audience loved it, there was a standing ovation, San Francisco news media reporters loved it, even random people on tiktok loved it. It was a crowd pleaser, an absolute sensory delight of beauty and amazing skilled athletic dancers. I've heard even anecdotally that within the tech industry in SF, the employees of large corporations within the "FAANG" acronym have been abuzz about it-- which about that, it is completely unprecedented in my humble experience as someone who lives here for tech workers to be interested in ballet or modern dance at this level, so clearly whoever has been in charge of marketing at the SF Ballet probably deserves a raise (despite the promotional material being maybe a little misleading at how narrative-like the experience is supposed to be), but also of course speaking to the prescient timeliness and relevance of Mere Mortals' subject matter.

This is also probably one of the first large attempts to make "high art" out of AI, which despite the ethical concerns, labor/commercial concerns, and technological limitations I ultimately think can be a good thing. The current paradigm of AI using Large Language Models are not inherently not able to produce anything truly "original" (however that nebulous concept can be understood) since they only operate by distilling from art that already exists, which is a limitation but still can be a powerful tool. I am very interested in seeing people use AI to make art in an earnest manner, instead of just corporations using it to replace human artists and designers to churn out commercial garbage (which is a large part of the grievances behind the Writer's strike), and so even though I wasn't impressed with chatgpt's attempt this go-around and honestly I do think there's still a long ways to go before we'll see anything interesting, it's still something to keep an eye out for.