#erosed novelle

[maydayhall]

Apollo Would Approve, Right?(this is Apollo with out his colours and designs)

[voidry0]

Jove the God of Lighting

[lollipoptiger]

🌁Erosion🌁

On the edge of a degrading cityscape run by a company called Legacy, Everett nurtures one of the last independent farms in the country. All the neighboring farms around him are being bought and sold to the agricultural monopoly and his farm is next. When his time grows near and he can no longer make ends meet, he decides to rent out a room to a journalist who is looking for a new perspective. Now under the watchful eye of his attractive new tenant, Everett struggles to keep his homestead afloat while balancing the mystery and pull of his new connection.

My boys for my new BL/mlm novel... I’m dying to talk about them and share more ;v;

[rogueshadeaux]

Achievement Unlocked!

[21st-century-minutiae]

"S'up Dawg" is a very casual phrase in the English language meaning "hello." "S'up" is a shortening of "what is up" which is a rhetorical question used to say hello. "Dawg" is a vocative address, from the word "Dog." It implies a level of friendship and informality.

"Konichiha" (spelt with an "ha" at the end when written in English letters by japanese, but pronounced "wa" for linguistic reasons associated with the grammatical structure that is the topic particle "ha"), is a Japanese phrase that means "good day." In English transliteration it is usually written as Konichiwa. It is usually translated as the closest equivalent of "hello," thought, like "good day" it is seen as less appropriate in the early morning or evening. The equivalent phrases for good morning and good evening will be used instead at the appropriate times. The phrase literally translates to something like a sentence fragment drawing attention to "this day" (this is the grammatical role that "ha" particle that is pronounced "wa" assumes) without actually completing the sentence and leaving it implied.

A "Chihuahua" is a small breed of Mexican dog. Like in "Konichiha" the "hua" is pronounced more like a "wa" in English. The "Chiha" almost perfectly overlaps phonetically.

So, Konichihuahua is a mixture of the two, taking advantage of both spelling and phonics to make a nonsense word that is a pun. This is an example of a pun.

English speakers in the early twenty first century would likely be familiar with "S'up Dawg," "Konichiha" and "Chihuahua," despite all three being from different languages. This is in spite of native English speakers seldom being trilingual. The pun would be well understood by these people.

How do you say “S'up Dawg” in Japanese? 

Konichihuahua

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The real AI fight

Tonight (November 27), I'm appearing at the Toronto Metro Reference Library with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

On November 29, I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

Last week's spectacular OpenAI soap-opera hijacked the attention of millions of normal, productive people and nonsensually crammed them full of the fine details of the debate between "Effective Altruism" (doomers) and "Effective Accelerationism" (AKA e/acc), a genuinely absurd debate that was allegedly at the center of the drama.

Very broadly speaking: the Effective Altruists are doomers, who believe that Large Language Models (AKA "spicy autocomplete") will someday become so advanced that it could wake up and annihilate or enslave the human race. To prevent this, we need to employ "AI Safety" – measures that will turn superintelligence into a servant or a partner, nor an adversary.

Contrast this with the Effective Accelerationists, who also believe that LLMs will someday become superintelligences with the potential to annihilate or enslave humanity – but they nevertheless advocate for faster AI development, with fewer "safety" measures, in order to produce an "upward spiral" in the "techno-capital machine."

Once-and-future OpenAI CEO Altman is said to be an accelerationists who was forced out of the company by the Altruists, who were subsequently bested, ousted, and replaced by Larry fucking Summers. This, we're told, is the ideological battle over AI: should cautiously progress our LLMs into superintelligences with safety in mind, or go full speed ahead and trust to market forces to tame and harness the superintelligences to come?

This "AI debate" is pretty stupid, proceeding as it does from the foregone conclusion that adding compute power and data to the next-word-predictor program will eventually create a conscious being, which will then inevitably become a superbeing. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding faster and faster horses, we'll get a locomotive:

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

As Molly White writes, this isn't much of a debate. The "two sides" of this debate are as similar as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Yes, they're arrayed against each other in battle, so furious with each other that they're tearing their hair out. But for people who don't take any of this mystical nonsense about spontaneous consciousness arising from applied statistics seriously, these two sides are nearly indistinguishable, sharing as they do this extremely weird belief. The fact that they've split into warring factions on its particulars is less important than their unified belief in the certain coming of the paperclip-maximizing apocalypse:

https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/effective-obfuscation

White points out that there's another, much more distinct side in this AI debate – as different and distant from Dee and Dum as a Beamish Boy and a Jabberwork. This is the side of AI Ethics – the side that worries about "today’s issues of ghost labor, algorithmic bias, and erosion of the rights of artists and others." As White says, shifting the debate to existential risk from a future, hypothetical superintelligence "is incredibly convenient for the powerful individuals and companies who stand to profit from AI."

After all, both sides plan to make money selling AI tools to corporations, whose track record in deploying algorithmic "decision support" systems and other AI-based automation is pretty poor – like the claims-evaluation engine that Cigna uses to deny insurance claims:

https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health-insurance-rejection-claims

On a graph that plots the various positions on AI, the two groups of weirdos who disagree about how to create the inevitable superintelligence are effectively standing on the same spot, and the people who worry about the actual way that AI harms actual people right now are about a million miles away from that spot.

There's that old programmer joke, "There are 10 kinds of people, those who understand binary and those who don't." But of course, that joke could just as well be, "There are 10 kinds of people, those who understand ternary, those who understand binary, and those who don't understand either":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/11/the-ten-types-of-people/

What's more, the joke could be, "there are 10 kinds of people, those who understand hexadecenary, those who understand pentadecenary, those who understand tetradecenary [und so weiter] those who understand ternary, those who understand binary, and those who don't." That is to say, a "polarized" debate often has people who hold positions so far from the ones everyone is talking about that those belligerents' concerns are basically indistinguishable from one another.

The act of identifying these distant positions is a radical opening up of possibilities. Take the indigenous philosopher chief Red Jacket's response to the Christian missionaries who sought permission to proselytize to Red Jacket's people:

https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5790/

Red Jacket's whole rebuttal is a superb dunk, but it gets especially interesting where he points to the sectarian differences among Christians as evidence against the missionary's claim to having a single true faith, and in favor of the idea that his own people's traditional faith could be co-equal among Christian doctrines.

The split that White identifies isn't a split about whether AI tools can be useful. Plenty of us AI skeptics are happy to stipulate that there are good uses for AI. For example, I'm 100% in favor of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group using an LLM to classify and extract information from the Innocence Project New Orleans' wrongful conviction case files:

https://hrdag.org/tech-notes/large-language-models-IPNO.html

Automating "extracting officer information from documents – specifically, the officer's name and the role the officer played in the wrongful conviction" was a key step to freeing innocent people from prison, and an LLM allowed HRDAG – a tiny, cash-strapped, excellent nonprofit – to make a giant leap forward in a vital project. I'm a donor to HRDAG and you should donate to them too:

https://hrdag.networkforgood.com/

Good data-analysis is key to addressing many of our thorniest, most pressing problems. As Ben Goldacre recounts in his inaugural Oxford lecture, it is both possible and desirable to build ethical, privacy-preserving systems for analyzing the most sensitive personal data (NHS patient records) that yield scores of solid, ground-breaking medical and scientific insights:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-eaV8SWdjQ

The difference between this kind of work – HRDAG's exoneration work and Goldacre's medical research – and the approach that OpenAI and its competitors take boils down to how they treat humans. The former treats all humans as worthy of respect and consideration. The latter treats humans as instruments – for profit in the short term, and for creating a hypothetical superintelligence in the (very) long term.

As Terry Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax reminds us, this is the root of all sin: "sin is when you treat people like things":

https://brer-powerofbabel.blogspot.com/2009/02/granny-weatherwax-on-sin-favorite.html

So much of the criticism of AI misses this distinction – instead, this criticism starts by accepting the self-serving marketing claim of the "AI safety" crowd – that their software is on the verge of becoming self-aware, and is thus valuable, a good investment, and a good product to purchase. This is Lee Vinsel's "Criti-Hype": "taking press releases from startups and covering them with hellscapes":

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

Criti-hype and AI were made for each other. Emily M Bender is a tireless cataloger of criti-hypeists, like the newspaper reporters who breathlessly repeat " completely unsubstantiated claims (marketing)…sourced to Altman":

https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/111464030855880383

Bender, like White, is at pains to point out that the real debate isn't doomers vs accelerationists. That's just "billionaires throwing money at the hope of bringing about the speculative fiction stories they grew up reading – and philosophers and others feeling important by dressing these same silly ideas up in fancy words":

https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/111464024432217299

All of this is just a distraction from real and important scientific questions about how (and whether) to make automation tools that steer clear of Granny Weatherwax's sin of "treating people like things." Bender – a computational linguist – isn't a reactionary who hates automation for its own sake. On Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 – the excellent podcast she co-hosts with Alex Hanna – there is a machine-generated transcript:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417

There is a serious, meaty debate to be had about the costs and possibilities of different forms of automation. But the superintelligence true-believers and their criti-hyping critics keep dragging us away from these important questions and into fanciful and pointless discussions of whether and how to appease the godlike computers we will create when we disassemble the solar system and turn it into computronium.

The question of machine intelligence isn't intrinsically unserious. As a materialist, I believe that whatever makes me "me" is the result of the physics and chemistry of processes inside and around my body. My disbelief in the existence of a soul means that I'm prepared to think that it might be possible for something made by humans to replicate something like whatever process makes me "me."

Ironically, the AI doomers and accelerationists claim that they, too, are materialists – and that's why they're so consumed with the idea of machine superintelligence. But it's precisely because I'm a materialist that I understand these hypotheticals about self-aware software are less important and less urgent than the material lives of people today.

It's because I'm a materialist that my primary concerns about AI are things like the climate impact of AI data-centers and the human impact of biased, opaque, incompetent and unfit algorithmic systems – not science fiction-inspired, self-induced panics over the human race being enslaved by our robot overlords.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[fatehbaz]

The link between warfare and technological innovation has been well documented [...]. World War II was a particularly intense crucible of technological change, and the repurposing of military technologies and industries in the forging of a new post-war consumer [economy] is crucial [...]. Processes of technological bricolage turned the machines of war onto the natural world as global powers competed to cement their economic and imperial hegemony. In Great Britain’s post-war “groundnut scheme” in its East African territories (1946-51), this collision of nature, military hardware, and technical expertise was part of efforts to both produce more fats for the British diet and to demonstrate to the world (most importantly the United States) that, through a newly energized science-led developmentalism, British colonialism still had a “progressive” role to play in the postwar world.

The aim was to produce millions of tons of peanuts across Tanganyika using the latest methods of advanced scientific agriculture. The environmental conditions in the north, where the scheme was to begin, were known to be especially trying, not least the dry climate [...]. But faith in the power of mechanized agriculture was such that any natural limits were thought to be readily surmountable.

The groundnut scheme was to be, as its Director put it in an interview with the Tanganyika Standard, a “war” with nature, and an “economic Battle of Alamein” waged over some three million acres by an army of colonial technicians - many recruited from military ranks - and local laborers, for many of whom the scheme represented their first entry into the wage labor market.

But it wasn’t just the rhetoric of war that was repurposed.

Lancaster bombers were kitted out to survey and discover “new country” in East Africa for agricultural development. [...] [T]ractors and bulldozers from military surplus stores in Egypt proved unable to tackle the hard ground and tough vegetation, so the planners turned to a novel solution: repurposing surplus Sherman M4A2 tanks. The Vickers-Armstrong factory in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne set about rearranging key elements of the tanks’ construction [...]. The tractors, christened “Shervicks” for their hybrid origins, were [...] thought to be particularly suited to large-scale earth-moving and to the kind of heavy duty “bush clearing” that was required in Tanganyika.

Officials sought to dismiss concerns that large-scale bush clearing would have wider environmental consequences, using the well-worn colonial trope that any observed changes in local climate or erosion patterns were due to the “primitive” agricultural practices of the locals, not to the earth-moving practices of the colonists.  [...] As the plants continued to wilt in the sun, [...] [t]he stakes were high. As [J.R.] of the Colonial Development Corporation put it in a letter: “Our standing as an Imperial power in Africa is to a substantial extent bound up with the future of this scheme. To abandon it would be a humiliating blow to our prestige everywhere.” The only option left was to try and bend the weather itself to the scheme’s will, by seeding the clouds for rain. [...] “Balloon bombs” (photographic film canisters tethered to weather balloons) and a repurposed Royal Navy flare gun were used to target individual clouds [...]. The scheme itself has survived as a cautionary tale of governmental hubris, but it is instructive too as a case study of how technologies of war have been turned against other foes.

---

All text above by: Martin Mahony. “The Enemy is Nature: Military Machines and Technological Bricolage in Britain’s ‘Great Agricultural Experiment.’“ Environment and Society Portal, Arcadia (Spring 2021), no. 11. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. doi:10.5282/rcc/9191. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Images and their captions are shown unaltered as they originally appear in Mahony's article. Public Domain Mark 1.0 License for images: creativecommons dot org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/]

[7redmoon]

Mxtx really did open up their word file for their first ever novel (to publish) and said [insert meme] "I am going to write a novel that is so subtly mocking of the present situation of writers and readers community all the while making very bold statements about recent erosion of quality of freelance original works, how plot driven stories are preferred by the mass over good character driven stories, for the single reason that it's easier to comprehend and form opinions." and they wrote svsss.

From the day I started reading it first (even if I dropped it then) and now that I've almost finished the novel, I couldn't help but be marvelled by how fucking BADASS it is to have such a strong opening statement as their debut work. I think mxtx is truly deserving of most of the hype they get.

[dewedup]

would you be so kind as to provide us with a Mountain sick-fic bc I have the Flu and I'm projecting on my tall guy 😔🙏

please enjoy sick!Mount, pack dynamics, tour travel, and a concerned Zephyr 🖤🖤🖤

as per usual a huge and loving thank you to @jimothybarnes for betaing and making me feel like I wrote the next great novel 🥰

(i may or may not have started a part two of possessive mount breaking zeph's heat when he's feeling better, it ties into the ending of this one so if that's something anyone's interested in reading let me know!)

1.8k of fluff, comfort and cuteness below the cut or on AO3 HERE

It starts with a tickle in the back of his throat. Mountain finds himself clearing it periodically throughout the day, but never getting rid of the foreign feeling when he swallows. It’s a small thing though, something he can push to the back of his mind while he focuses on sound checks, travelling and performing- basically everything related to being on tour.

He wakes up a day or two later and feels exhausted. His bones ache, his brain is foggy, the cold grip of a headache approaching from the edge of his consciousness. The tickle has doubled down in its presence, now tender and sore with every breath, word, or swallow. He feels like getting hit by a vehicle on the highway they’re driving down would be swifter and less painful than the illness working its way through his immune system.

He’s like a zombie, sleepwalking through the motions. Luckily, it’s just a travel day, spent moving from their last location to the next venue. He’s stuck on the bus for the entirety of the day, tries to spend time out in the lounge area with everyone else. But Phantom is loud and overly excited, peering through the window in utter delight as he points out the unofficial eighth wonder of the world.

They’re driving past the Grand Canyon, which honestly isn’t that grand, Mountain’s seen bigger canyons in Hell. Being a ghoul of the earth means he’s very fluent in geographic abnormalities, erosion and rocks. Instead of giving Phantom a lesson in his rocky background, which Swiss seems to be anticipating, if the roll of his eyes as he looks at Mountain is any indication, Mountain simply pats Phantom on the shoulder. He mutters good ghoul under his breath, and retreats to the sleeping bunks.

His rest is pitiful, he’s hot and sweaty, then he’s kicking the blankets off only to be greeted with a chill that seeps into his bones, limbs shaking at the abrupt changes in temperature. He never succumbs to complete sleep, lingering in a half-state of lethargy and just feeling poorly.

It might be minutes, hours or days later, when he feels a cool hand press against his forehead. He’s hallucinating now, because it feels like the hand of his mate, the same one that’s still at home, a disgusting amount of distance between them. He knows it’s not real, their sweet scent of licorice and fresh linen doesn’t fill his nostrils. But then again, he’s pretty congested, hasn’t been able to smell anything in the last day and a half.

Mountain whines as the touch moves from his forehead, shifting down to his equally heated cheek and offering the tiniest bit of respite from the fever. He’s sweating again, wants to rip his own skin off to escape the burning inside of him, when a light breeze seemingly appears from nowhere. It dances across his body, giving him the first sense of relief since he laid down in his bunk.

“Pietra,” the demon caressing his face coos, and Mountain truly must have died and went to Hell, because there’s only one soul who calls him the Italian word for stone.

He squints open an eye, meeting the concerned face of his mate.

“Zeph?” Mountain’s voice wobbles, cracking on the singular word, as tears threaten to fall. Zephyr takes a second to assess their situation before climbing right into the bunk beside Mountain, pulling their mate close.

Mountain rests his head on Zephyr’s chest as he lets out a few pathetic sniffles, mainly just feeling sorry for himself.

“We’re at the hotel, love. The others went inside, they didn’t want to wake you. My flight landed early so I’ve been here for a bit, setting up our nest.”

Nest. That’s right, in Mountain’s deteriorated state he forgot Zephyr was scheduled to go into heat any day now. The Ministry opted long ago to pay for a flight for them if Mountain was away, rather than deal with an aggravated air ghoul who would take their frustrations out on the abbey and all who stumbled across their path.

If Mountain let out a few extra tears at the thought of his mate, already on edge from their own rising hormones, putting their needs aside to care for him, well, neither of them speak on it.

Eventually, Zephyr convinces Mountain to leave the safety of the bunk and retreat to their hotel room. It involves a lot of gentle encouragement and a few filthy promises for when he’s feeling better. Mountain can’t smell anything, so he misses the slight bite to Zeph’s scent, the telltale sign of the beginning of a heat that they push down forcibly with sheer willpower, knowing Mountain is in no shape to fulfill their needs at this moment.

They share a bath, slightly hotter than Zephyr would prefer, but the steam helps to clear Mountain’s congested airways and the warmth soothing the aching in his bones. It’s intimate in a nonsexual way, how Zephyr lathers up a washcloth and takes their time rinsing the sweat and sickness from Mountain’s skin.

Mountain’s soon dry and in his pyjamas, a steady hand at the small of his back guiding him to the bed in the centre of the hotel room. True to their word, Zephyr had created a fine nest, bringing blankets from their den at home to create a soft spot for them to connect with each other. Mountain falls into the pile, burrowing his way to the perfect spot and collapsing into the down pillows.

Zephyr seamlessly joins Mountain, wrapping their arms around him in a big spoon position. It is something Mountain usually takes up in their shared bed, but his need for comfort is apparent and Zephyr isn’t too put out by getting to hold their mate in their arms like this.

Mountain falls asleep to the soft hums vibrating from Zephyr’s chest, his own purrs mixing in at the same tempo, every single part of their being made for each other.

_________

Mountain wakes up, lying awkwardly on a couch too small for his big frame. He’s confused, disoriented, and doesn’t remember where he is for far longer than he’d like to admit.

His brain feels foggy, his eyes landing on a bottle of water left on the table in front of him, the condensation having dripped to the table, creating a small puddle of liquid around the container.

The bottle brings back the memory of Zephyr braiding his hair on this very couch, enthusiastically agreeing with Rain as the water ghoul tried to force some cold medication in Mountain’s mouth. He remembers putting up a good struggle, managing to knock Rain back a few steps before Dew intervened. With Zephyr yanking on his hair, tilting his head back and Dew lying on top of him, bodily restraining his movements, Rain was able to slide home a few of the abnormally large pills. Mountain fought valiantly, but Rain pulled a demonic move covering his mouth and pinching his nose until he was forced to swallow, begrudgingly and with a promise of murder in his eyes. 

Apparently, the cold medication was exactly what he needed. While he isn’t at one hundred percent, he feels the best he can remember feeling for the last week. His achy bones are no more, and he can even breathe through his nose a little, picking up the lingering scent of his mate all over his body.

A loud noise from out the hallway catches his attention, and Mountain realizes that he had the best nap of his life in the green room of the venue they were set to perform at tonight.

Except, no one else is hustling around in the usual pre-show panic.

The green room is usually filled with excitement and adrenaline, packed with bodies, as Swiss hogs the mirror to apply his black lipstick. But it’s empty, the remnants of the pre-show hurricane evident.

Mountain hears the opening rift of Kaisarion and bolts up from the couch, looking around wildly for his costume, but it’s nowhere to be found. He can’t believe they didn’t wake him up, what the actual fuck is going on. 

He gets to the side of the stage much quicker than he would have in the state he was mere hours ago, looking out from the wings as his band feeds the energy to the crowd before them.

His eyes shift over his pack, watching as they back up Papa who’s already pandering to the sea of people. A crash of cymbals pulls his attention to the back middle stage, to his drum set.

It’s like a punch to his gut, but in the best way possible, seeing who is undeniably his mate, in his costume, playing his kit.

Zephyr isn’t a small statured ghoul by any means, it’s just that Mountain’s well… Mountainous.

His costume fits his mate poorly, they’ve rolled the arms up, displaying the sleeves of delicate illustrations depicting the fall of Christ, ink woven in their skin that Mountain has spent countless hours admiring. The pant legs bunch up where they fall, too much extra material with nowhere else to go.

Mountain’s heart skips a beat when he realizes Zephyr is shoeless, exactly how he normally performs.

It shouldn’t surprise him that Zeph is a natural, they’ve spent long hours in the rehearsal room with Mountain, watching him work through tricky sections or just putting his own twist on Papa’s work. He’s filled with love, admiration, and just an all-around feeling of mine while watching his mate perform with his pack.

Mountain eventually just settles on the ground of the side stage, sitting cross-legged and just enjoying the show from his secret little viewpoint. He laughs along with the jokes Papa pulls out of his ass, his smile unshakeable as he watches Dew tease Rain from this angle. Swiss is chaotic, he usually only sees him leave his platform from the corner of his eye, unsure of what exactly the multi ghoul gets up to, but now he has his answers. He’s usually so focused on his own performance he doesn’t get the chance to just sit and watch the magic happen, and it is magical, the atmosphere they craft together and the beautiful music they create.

During Miasma, Zephyr opts out of a solo in favour of handing Dew and Phantom a drumstick each. Mountain grins wildly, watching lovingly as Zeph orchestrates with their free hands while keeping rhythm with the kick drum. They encourage Dew and Phantom to bang away at the snare and cymbals, Mountain cringing slightly at the force of some of the hits. A little wear and tear won’t tarnish the memory working its way into the deep recesses of his brain though, as the utter joy and happiness bubbles over into a delighted, trilling laugh when Zeph tosses him a smirk and secret little wave.

[moonstruck73]

The Conclusion : Revisited.

A/N : Hello! So, this is my first ever fic that has seen the light of internet, so please excuse my punctuation or grammatical errors (English is not my first language). I'd love constructive criticism. Tear it down to pieces, actually.

And also, most importantly, this fic is basically an adaptation and/or a literal translation of the very old Bengali novel ,"সমাপ্তি" by the honored Rabindranath Tagore. I pretty much just pasted Nanami's name on the hero, lol. (Y'all can that become a copyright issue?? I'm genuinely curious now)

So.. no summary because I'm terrible at it.

Just another Nanami fic where he is young, in an ancient period, late 1800s or early 1900s, probably. And reader is sorta underage at first? But afterwards, she's not (Their age gap isn't over seven or eight). No warnings because there isn't going to be any explicit stuff. Oh, and it's third person POV.

Chapter 1

The only son of Nanami household was returning home.

The youthful young man of twenty was currently perched on a boat as it passed the calm waves of the river, towards the remote little village where he lived with his mother, his only remaining kin.

After the small boat neared the riverbank, he attempted to climb off cautiously. However, just as he stepped on the muddy bank, his foot slipped unceremoniously, and before long, he found himself lying on his back in the sloppy mud.

This narrator would like to spare the young man of further misery by describing the details of his epic fall. But a certain person was rather entertained. And as it happened when humans were too entertained, in this case too, the sound of a sweet, high pitched laughter rang out across the calm waves, startling off the birds resting upon the nearby tree.

Extremely embarrassed, Kento regained his bearings and stood up at the speed of light, narrowly dodging another fall in the wake, and his warm honey eyes found the source of the bittersweet torture.

He recognized the menace who was now laughing hysterically on a pile of bricks. She was the infamous bandit, the uncrowned Empress of the children of this village. Her family had moved here after a river erosion claimed their previous residence three years ago. This teenager was the apple of her father's eyes, source of stress of her mother and other ladies of the village, and the wild butterfly in the affectionate eyes of the menfolk.

Her father was the clerk in a faraway boat station, rarely able to stay home. However, when he was indeed, home, he showered her with enough love to last her a lifetime. Even her mother, who huffed and puffed about her behavior usually, never had the heart to make her cry in his absence.

Our young hero had, of course, seen her before when he had come home on vacation, never actually giving her too much thought, in his typical way. Yet, her face had left somewhat of an impression on his mind. Not for beauty or such things, but.. perhaps, it was the clarity. The sheer transparency in her features made it seem as if the unruly feminine nature itself was playing upon it like a free, agile creature of wilderness. But, once one saw this lively face, it was indeed difficult to completely wipe it off memory.

Needless to say, no matter how sweet her laughter was, it was very distressing for poor Kento. He quickly took up his luggage and walked off towards home with a flushed face.

The stage was very alluring. Calm riverbank, faint murmur of leaves, scattered morning sun rays, the beckoning of youth; of course, the pile of bricks weren't as remarkable, but the person sitting atop gave a pleasant allure to even this dry, hard seat.

Alas, what else could be crueller of fate than to turn all poetry to farce at the very first step at such a scene?

A/N : Whew, chapter one done. Feel free to point out the typos and errors! I'll try to post as regularly as I can, but.. y'know, student stuff. It'll be updated if I live!

Chapter two can be found here - https://www.tumblr.com/moonstruck73/767234404708941824/the-conclusion-revisited?source=share

[picturesofthegoneworlds]

Preview for Intertwined - Chapter 16

Imogen’s head is still in Laudna’s lap.

Still, asleep now, brow unfurrowed - Laudna wasn’t prepared for it.

The birds that would usually rouse her continue their morning chorus, Imogen’s rest undisturbed by their melodic chatter

sometimes less melodious, more obnoxious squawks

Laudna scowls at the offender.

She daren’t move – thought she would find that easier, the gargoyle she can be

Perhaps she’s too inexperienced there - never had a home long enough to shield from the erosion of water

Raindrops in Imogen's eyelashes, Laudna dancing in the middle of the muddying path as her skirts fan around her, Imogen stepping forward with a bow and a presentation of her extended hand-

Her skirts wrinkle under Imogen as if they could be soft enough to be her pillow, yards of moth-eaten linen and fraying lace. The loose lilac curls that comprise Imogen's hair fall rather pleasingly over the sun-bleached black background-

She almost allows herself that - until she rationalises that it is just about the contrast - the backdrop of harsh angles of dark fabric cut by shadow-bone-landscape, the dismal soot mountains only emphasizing the beautiful oddity that is hair naturally coloured like wildflowers in a land surely infertile, inhospitable

freckles and dimples and peach fuzz

hands marked by lightning

odd and wondrous, definitely.

(with Imogen she serves to juxtapose, and she is ok with that.)

The daylight reaches to touch them through the canopy

If the golden hour is in the evening, then the morning must be bronze.

Imogen’s skin looks so soft

(Laudna knows it is).

“Y’don’t have to make it weird, you can touch it.”

That is what she said; dream-Imogen resting casually against the side of her family’s cart

Weird

Laudna’s not obliged, no - but she does like it.

Weird. Odd.

She was that before all of this

some-thing further than it now.

some    thing

some

thing

s

o

m

e

t

h

i

n

g

(the birds sing)

Imogen accepts weird, surely - sees herself as it too, maybe…

A pair of gloves. A set of ear cuffs.

Laudna isn’t oblivious (she’s too observational - though admittedly easily distracted).

daydreamer

(Imogen's freckles are at their most dense on the tip of her nose, the swell of her cheeks, and on her chin.)

If this were one of the books she read-

If the dream-

Well.

For a start; she wouldn’t be undead.

butcher’s cart a bouquet of limbs

strings on a marionette

Imogen's knee between her legs

awfully forward - must be taut - the strings that were pulled. Convincing - how Laudna’s own body was numb to herself exercising The Touch. Familiar - how Imogen’s insides were abyssal black.

A pair of gloves. A set of ear cuffs.

In that space they both bleed the same.

If The Dream were a book she would have kissed her. Maybe. Maybe Imogen would have asked.

But it isn’t.

It isn’t a book

(the birds sing)

Out of it.

Imogen’s head is in her lap.

They are out of it. Here.

(maybe Imogen is in it?)

(Hello? Would you like the room one-floor up on the west or adjoining the kitchens on the ground?)

Out of The Dream her laugh bubbled under her hands like the cauldron brought to boil

Like Laudna could be a flame

And her every little fair hair stood on end; frightened cat sheared to wear skin like its kill, a plucked pheasant hanging by nail from the rafters- the low rafters in the old dwarven woman’s house, abdominal muscles spasm under fingertip Imogen cursing under her breath at repaired crockery and maybe Laudna’s hands and the downpour that finally came after months of waiting the roof was fixed they danced in the mud and they stayed there so long Laudna could write about it could illustrate it too on all of the leaf mulch dried on racks and pressed into parchment and Laudna could ask her to stay there forever with her, despite time and how it moves-

But this isn’t a book.

Not a novel, not a dream.

She isn’t even a gargoyle

Redirecting the waters

Imogen had stretched the tarpaulin over their heads

Laudna moves with her, scene hanging - her backdrop, her shadow.

(the birds sing)

She is ok with that (so long as they stay together)

(you can read the previous chapters here)

[maydayhall]

I like the idea of Apollon and Artemis not hating each other especially how they treat each other in mythology it makes sense to me

[voidry0]

[burins]

I Know why every sff book I read lately has Pacing Disease (slow erosion of the actual time editors are able to spend with books, focus on authors marketing and becoming personalities rather than writing the damn book, I've been reading debut novels which are rarely anyone's best work, probably a bunch of other factors too I am not a novel writer) but oh I keep reading books where the pacing she is sooo sick. perhaps I need to go back and read some le guin or something. would welcome book recs where the pacing was good!

[rogueshadeaux]

I FINISHED MY FUCKING NOVEL

Which doesn’t mean too much, I know lol. Especially since I’m not gonna reveal my pen name here as I proceed down the Beta reader/Agent hunting hell hole rabbit hole. Did you know fanfiction is still a taboo subject in the traditional publishing community? It’s ridiculous.

But you know what it does mean?

I can dedicate all my time to inFAMOUS: Erosion!

I’m taking a two week break as a hard reset, and then entering the first draft edits. I’ll still have my insatiable itch to write, so now instead of splitting my time sporadically between two stories, all of my push to create goes to Erosion.

I’m hoping to finish it within the next two months, and once I do, Erosion will change to a weekly update system. That’s if I don’t decide to just dump the entire story on ao3. Idk, we’ll see.

For now, I’m gonna binge play inFAMOUS 1 and 2 since it’s been so long.

[frankendykes-monster]

“Matthew, I've lived in this city all my life, but somehow today I felt everything had changed. People were different. Not just Geoffrey, but everybody. Yesterday it all seemed normal. Today everything seemed the same, but it wasn't. It was a nightmare. It really became frightening.”

I’ve always loved that Invasion of the Body Snatchers begins with the infectious spores raining down on San Francisco.

After all, that was the city where flower power failed to take root at the end of the sixties, which fits with the movie’s larger themes. California is generally regarded as one of the liberal spaces in America, and yet its response to the cultural revolution was to unleash two novel forms of conservatism on the nation. (Matthew is just barely joking when he suggests that Geoffrey has possibly become “a Republican.”) One of the great ironies of California is that, despite its liberal reputation, it gave the nation both Reaganism and Trumpism. Philip Kaufman’s remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers was released just when Ronald Reagan was on the cusp of taking his Californian Republicanism national, exporting it like so many pods.

“Geoffrey.”

“What?”

“I'm reading.”

“OK! I'll put the earphones on. There, see? Happy?”

“Never mind. I'll go downstairs.”

Invasion of the Body Snatchers belongs to that genre of seventies horrors that are ultimately about the breakdown of society, the erosion of social norms. The idea that the individual is surrounded by aliens who operate according to an entirely different set of values and principles to the ones that have held society together.

It’s one of the common themes of the antecedents of what we now call (sigh) “elevated horror”, classic films like The Exorcist and The Shining. This horror is anchored in the idea that the bonds that hold us all together are illusory and unravelling in a world where we can’t count on the people closest to us to be who we presumed them to be. It’s at once an intimate fear, but one that extrapolates outwards quite organically.

After all, so much of the opening act of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is given to characters failing to notice really unsettling things in the background of the frame, implying that the invasion has actually been in progress for quite a long time before anybody noticed anything was wrong. It reminds me a lot of a more serious Shaun of the Dead. The grim joke being how disconnected we are from each other and the world we inhabit.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers does that thing that many great horrors do, skillfully building a sense of mounting dread and anxiety without foregrounding it. It’s something that is hard to do effectively, landing at just obvious enough to unsettle without veering into camp. Somehow, Robert Duvall playing a priest on a swing set surrounded by children captures that incongruity perfectly.

“He was weird not the way he usually is.”

“That can only be an improvement.”

Invasion of the Body Snatchers plays well as a metaphor for the end of the sixties, and the way in which so many members of that generation changed so suddenly once the new order of things revealed itself - like Jerry Rudin reinventing himself from “yippie” to “yuppie.” It seems fair to ask to what extent the people who did this “sold out.”

After all, Geoffrey seems to reinvent himself from a football-loving layabout to a suited gentleman who tidies his bedroom and attends late night business meetings. Geoffrey’s transformation plays in many ways as a commentary on the counterculture generation that settled down and cashed in, that stopped being the protestors and campaigners (or layabouts) that the establishment failed against, and began committing themselves to the very systems they’d rejected or opposed.

“Kibner wants people to fit the world. I want the world to fit people.”

Like The Exorcist and se7en, Invasion of the Body Snatchers suggests the irony that people have built environments that are inherently and fundamentally hostile to humanity. This is not a new concept; Emile Durkheim coined the term “anomie” to describe the particulars of this disconnect.

Cities are millions and millions of strangers living on top of one another in a tightly confined space. Packed in, tripping over each other. As cities became the hub of American life after the end of the Second World War, they came to be treated with suspicion and mistrust. Indeed, you arguably see that reflected in the way that pop culture valorises the fantasy of small town life; while that fantasy is frequently deconstructed, there’s no comparable stereotype of big city life.

“This has nothing to do with the man I live with.”

“It has everything to do with it. Don't you see? People step in and out of relationships because they don't want responsibility.”

Like many horrors of the period, like The Exorcist, Don’t Look Now, Rosemary’s Baby and The Shining, Invasion of the Body Snatchers taps into fears about the conventional heteronormative family unit.

There’s a palpable anxiety that runs through seventies horror about the dissolution of the conventional family unit, and the question of what happens when those bonds aren’t as solid as they once were. More than that, though, a lot of horror of the era raises the question of what happens if those same ties that are supposed to support us become toxic, corrosive and suffocating.

After all, it’s notable that the character blaming this shift of identity on the breakdown of the traditional family unit is Kibner, the self-help psychologist arguing for conformity and for ignoring any sense of unease or discomfort. He’s the guy churning out self-help books, who is revealed to have been replaced quite early in the process, and is played by Leonard Nimoy - himself best known for playing an alien whose defining psychological feature is his ability to repress his emotions.

“David, you're not listening to her.”

Indeed, the emphasis that Invasion of the Body Snatchers places on listening to women, and the ease with which the men around them ignore or belittle these concerns, has aged well. After all, it’s notable that the pod people weaponise emotion, and that Kibner frequently dismisses the heightened emotional reactions of the women who come to him as something close to hysteria. Part of how the pod people are able to get as far as they do is down to the extent to which they present themselves as rational and the people trying to expose them as hyper-emotional.

Kibner is skillfully able to send Katherine home with her husband while surrounded by people, able to talk over her and calm her down, and convince her that she needs to leave this public space with an alien impersonating her husband without anybody but Elizabeth even trying to stop him. It’s a deeply unsettling scene for reasons that have nothing to do with aliens or body snatchers, and everything to do with how society tends to react to women asking for help or protection or safety.

“Oh, of course! This is the same as, those rockets landed years ago, so those spacemen could mate with monkeys and create the human race. It's happening now!”

A subtle touch in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is that the movie gives the closest thing to exposition to Nancy.

Just when it looks like Nancy has explained what is happening, she then blurts out complete nonsense about how aliens mating with monkeys to create mankind. This suggests that all of her exposition is just insane nonsense, even if the dialogue leading up to that swerve had fit what the audience was seeing.

It’s a nice way of letting the film have its cake and eat it, delivering a possible account of what is happening while also suggesting that what is happening is fundamentally unknowable and the only explanation that people have is insane speculation. It is a healthy reminder that, ultimately, nobody knows anything. Somehow, that is more terrifying.

“You don't have to leave the city. Nothing changes. You can have the same life, the same clothes, the same car.”

There’s a beautiful irony in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake.

The original had been an anti-communist parable. The remake is a metaphor for conformity. That’s one of those great recurring motifs in American horror, for all that American society is built on the ideal of freedom and individualism, a lot of it is held together by the idea of conformity. It’s the idea that everybody needs to fit in, to be what is expected of them.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers understands this. Geoffrey the layabout becomes Geoffrey the go-getter. Jack the beat poet is subsumed by Kibner the conformist self-help guru. Most barbed of all, you have Amazing Grace playing as a siren call in the film’s final act, leading to false hope. It then gets a warped and distorted reprise in the final scenes, as if to reinforce the idea that this is still recognisably America. One Nation Under Pod.

Along those lines, it’s notable that the parasitic pod people aren’t absurdly, monstrously evil. Indeed, there’s a sense that they have no goal beyond self-perpetuation and so will settle into (more efficient, if hollow) versions of their hosts’ old lives. Perhaps the biggest difference between the pre- and post-conversion selves is that the pod people will just be boring dinner party guests.

“I love you, Matthew.”

I love that glorious seventies cynicism, where even love isn’t enough to fight back the end of the world, and keep the suffocating weight of conformity at bay.

Love doesn’t conquer all.

It gets conquered, quite ruthlessly.