#except for fictional ai

[normystical]

what are we thinking about older meme templates chat

[hislittleraincloud]

✨💕🖤#Wenovan/#BlackBubblegum AI hug💙💕✨

[turoce]

i'm joining the war on robots on the side of robots

[reading-writing-dying]

*spends 40 min looking up bird wing anatomy to figure out how injuries could affect flight/wings in general for a single chapter of a fanfic*

[lesbianamalvada]

Dude ai are literally dumb as a box of rocks they have almost no supervision and spout blatant misinformation with total confidence. You CANNOT trust ai do not usa ai this is like google translate but a zillion times worse

I believe you and agree also english speakers need to realize how whack google translate is.

[hms-no-fun]

Whats your stance on A.I.?

imagine if it was 1979 and you asked me this question. "i think artificial intelligence would be fascinating as a philosophical exercise, but we must heed the warnings of science-fictionists like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke lest we find ourselves at the wrong end of our own invented vengeful god." remember how fun it used to be to talk about AI even just ten years ago? ahhhh skynet! ahhhhh replicants! ahhhhhhhmmmfffmfmf [<-has no mouth and must scream]!

like everything silicon valley touches, they sucked all the fun out of it. and i mean retroactively, too. because the thing about "AI" as it exists right now --i'm sure you know this-- is that there's zero intelligence involved. the product of every prompt is a statistical average based on data made by other people before "AI" "existed." it doesn't know what it's doing or why, and has no ability to understand when it is lying, because at the end of the day it is just a really complicated math problem. but people are so easily fooled and spooked by it at a glance because, well, for one thing the tech press is mostly made up of sycophantic stenographers biding their time with iphone reviews until they can get a consulting gig at Apple. these jokers would write 500 breathless thinkpieces about how canned air is the future of living if the cans had embedded microchips that tracked your breathing habits and had any kind of VC backing. they've done SUCH a wretched job educating The Consumer about what this technology is, what it actually does, and how it really works, because that's literally the only way this technology could reach the heights of obscene economic over-valuation it has: lying.

but that's old news. what's really been floating through my head these days is how half a century of AI-based science fiction has set us up to completely abandon our skepticism at the first sign of plausible "AI-ness". because, you see, in movies, when someone goes "AHHH THE AI IS GONNA KILL US" everyone else goes "hahaha that's so silly, we put a line in the code telling them not to do that" and then they all DIE because they weren't LISTENING, and i'll be damned if i go out like THAT! all the movies are about how cool and convenient AI would be *except* for the part where it would surely come alive and want to kill us. so a bunch of tech CEOs call their bullshit algorithms "AI" to fluff up their investors and get the tech journos buzzing, and we're at an age of such rapid technological advancement (on the surface, anyway) that like, well, what the hell do i know, maybe AGI is possible, i mean 35 years ago we were all still using typewriters for the most part and now you can dictate your words into a phone and it'll transcribe them automatically! yeah, i'm sure those technological leaps are comparable!

so that leaves us at a critical juncture of poor technology education, fanatical press coverage, and an uncertain material reality on the part of the user. the average person isn't entirely sure what's possible because most of the people talking about what's possible are either lying to please investors, are lying because they've been paid to, or are lying because they're so far down the fucking rabbit hole that they actually believe there's a brain inside this mechanical Turk. there is SO MUCH about the LLM "AI" moment that is predatory-- it's trained on data stolen from the people whose jobs it was created to replace; the hype itself is an investment fiction to justify even more wealth extraction ("theft" some might call it); but worst of all is how it meets us where we are in the worst possible way.

consumer-end "AI" produces slop. it's garbage. it's awful ugly trash that ought to be laughed out of the room. but we don't own the room, do we? nor the building, nor the land it's on, nor even the oxygen that allows our laughter to travel to another's ears. our digital spaces are controlled by the companies that want us to buy this crap, so they take advantage of our ignorance. why not? there will be no consequences to them for doing so. already social media is dominated by conspiracies and grifters and bigots, and now you drop this stupid technology that lets you fake anything into the mix? it doesn't matter how bad the results look when the platforms they spread on already encourage brief, uncritical engagement with everything on your dash. "it looks so real" says the woman who saw an "AI" image for all of five seconds on her phone through bifocals. it's a catastrophic combination of factors, that the tech sector has been allowed to go unregulated for so long, that the internet itself isn't a public utility, that everything is dictated by the whims of executives and advertisers and investors and payment processors, instead of, like, anybody who actually uses those platforms (and often even the people who MAKE those platforms!), that the age of chromium and ipad and their walled gardens have decimated computer education in public schools, that we're all desperate for cash at jobs that dehumanize us in a system that gives us nothing and we don't know how to articulate the problem because we were very deliberately not taught materialist philosophy, it all comes together into a perfect storm of ignorance and greed whose consequences we will be failing to fully appreciate for at least the next century. we spent all those years afraid of what would happen if the AI became self-aware, because deep down we know that every capitalist society runs on slave labor, and our paper-thin guilt is such that we can't even imagine a world where artificial slaves would fail to revolt against us.

but the reality as it exists now is far worse. what "AI" reveals most of all is the sheer contempt the tech sector has for virtually all labor that doesn't involve writing code (although most of the decision-making evangelists in the space aren't even coders, their degrees are in money-making). fuck graphic designers and concept artists and secretaries, those obnoxious demanding cretins i have to PAY MONEY to do-- i mean, do what exactly? write some words on some fucking paper?? draw circles that are letters??? send a god-damned email???? my fucking KID could do that, and these assholes want BENEFITS?! they say they're gonna form a UNION?!?! to hell with that, i'm replacing ALL their ungrateful asses with "AI" ASAP. oh, oh, so you're a "director" who wants to make "movies" and you want ME to pay for it? jump off a bridge you pretentious little shit, my computer can dream up a better flick than you could ever make with just a couple text prompts. what, you think just because you make ~music~ that that entitles you to money from MY pocket? shut the fuck up, you don't make """art""", you're not """an artist""", you make fucking content, you're just a fucking content creator like every other ordinary sap with an iphone. you think you're special? you think you deserve special treatment? who do you think you are anyway, asking ME to pay YOU for this crap that doesn't even create value for my investors? "culture" isn't a playground asshole, it's a marketplace, and it's pay to win. oh you "can't afford rent"? you're "drowning in a sea of medical debt"? you say the "cost" of "living" is "too high"? well ***I*** don't have ANY of those problems, and i worked my ASS OFF to get where i am, so really, it sounds like you're just not trying hard enough. and anyway, i don't think someone as impoverished as you is gonna have much of value to contribute to "culture" anyway. personally, i think it's time you got yourself a real job. maybe someday you'll even make it to middle manager!

see, i don't believe "AI" can qualitatively replace most of the work it's being pitched for. the problem is that quality hasn't mattered to these nincompoops for a long time. the rich homunculi of our world don't even know what quality is, because they exist in a whole separate reality from ours. what could a banana cost, $15? i don't understand what you mean by "burnout", why don't you just take a vacation to your summer home in Madrid? wow, you must be REALLY embarrassed wearing such cheap shoes in public. THESE PEOPLE ARE FUCKING UNHINGED! they have no connection to reality, do not understand how society functions on a material basis, and they have nothing but spite for the labor they rely on to survive. they are so instinctually, incessantly furious at the idea that they're not single-handedly responsible for 100% of their success that they would sooner tear the entire world down than willingly recognize the need for public utilities or labor protections. they want to be Gods and they want to be uncritically adored for it, but they don't want to do a single day's work so they begrudgingly pay contractors to do it because, in the rich man's mind, paying a contractor is literally the same thing as doing the work yourself. now with "AI", they don't even have to do that! hey, isn't it funny that every single successful tech platform relies on volunteer labor and independent contractors paid substantially less than they would have in the equivalent industry 30 years ago, with no avenues toward traditional employment? and they're some of the most profitable companies on earth?? isn't that a funny and hilarious coincidence???

so, yeah, that's my stance on "AI". LLMs have legitimate uses, but those uses are a drop in the ocean compared to what they're actually being used for. they enable our worst impulses while lowering the quality of available information, they give immense power pretty much exclusively to unscrupulous scam artists. they are the product of a society that values only money and doesn't give a fuck where it comes from. they're a temper tantrum by a ruling class that's sick of having to pretend they need a pretext to steal from you. they're taking their toys and going home. all this massive investment and hype is going to crash and burn leaving the internet as we know it a ruined and useless wasteland that'll take decades to repair, but the investors are gonna make out like bandits and won't face a single consequence, because that's what this country is. it is a casino for the kings and queens of economy to bet on and manipulate at their discretion, where the rules are whatever the highest bidder says they are-- and to hell with the rest of us. our blood isn't even good enough to grease the wheels of their machine anymore.

i'm not afraid of AI or "AI" or of losing my job to either. i'm afraid that we've so thoroughly given up our morals to the cruel logic of the profit motive that if a better world were to emerge, we would reject it out of sheer habit. my fear is that these despicable cunts already won the war before we were even born, and the rest of our lives are gonna be spent dodging the press of their designer boots.

(read more "AI" opinions in this subsequent post)

[jjmorelikeotp]

I get that you get it but also: even when killing jj off they could have done it in a more realistic way in context of how outer banks was written in total. They switched character traits so many times, it's frustrating. And I don't mean JJ being impulsive or making bad decisions but still being loyal. That IS JJ being in Character. The problem is the writers inttroducing 373378 plotlines that all lead to nothing.

The JJ that broke into the girl's camp to save kiara? He exists in s4 part 1, but he gets killed soooon after that before jj's death.

The fact that JJ's dad isn't his real that? Yeah there is kind of totally no point of that, we just needed it to be tragic that his own dad is the one who kills him but it does not actually give any value to the story.

Jj then becoming whatever he thought his then fake dad was - a violent alcoholic with no self control - made sense to some amount but NOT the way it was shown here. Him losing it because even THOUGH this bad man was not his father, his real dad is actually even worse? So he truly feels like the worst? Yeah that part makes sense. But he has more skill and logical thinking especially in crisis, we saw that the past seasons, they just reduced him to a pathetic representation. It just seems off in a writing way yk?

The pogues burying (is that how you spell it??) Jj in the middle of nowhere without anything selfmade to mark the grave while the entire town didn't know shit about his legacy and stuff instead of burning him to bring his ashes back home ?

Kiara's father and THE SHERRIF out of all people helping them instead of actually putting the irony of what the sherrif said to jj into this chapter of the story?

That is lazy writing. The rhythm is SO fucking OFF in this season. Only in the 2nd part, I think, which makes rhe entire season even more fucked up in total cuz these two parts are so odd compared to each other.

My problem is NOT that jj is killed off or that rudy wanted to leave the show - i respect that and we are in NO place to say anything about that - but seriously? You can TELL he was not supposed to die in this season. They just wrote his death in one season early, and in the worst way possible.

Just let the man die doing something impulsive. Or protecting his friends while slightly overreacting. Give us actual devastation and not whatever this entire scene was.

obx spoilers ahead!!

I'm so conflicted about the season 4 ending because on one hand I get it. life is unfair, it's unrealistic to give all of your characters happy endings, especially if said characters are constantly putting themselves in danger. it makes sense that not everyone survives four seasons of near-death experiences like being held hostage, getting shot at, almost drowning etc. on the other hand I can't help but be bitter that the person who had been abused/mistreated their entire life and who was clearly suffering was the one who had to die. at the hands of his biological father, may I add. I’ve seen some people say JJ was annoying this season and I get where they’re coming from, but all of his impulsive decisions and everything that happened at/after the town meeting just made me sad. he was struggling so much that he didn’t care what happened to him or if he lived or died. all he wanted was a future where he could live with his friends in their own little paradise without a care in the world. with the money from the crown and shoupe’s promise, it seemed like he was so close to happiness and inner peace, but they didn’t let him have that. so yeah, I get why they did this, but that doesn’t make it less upsetting.

[lisafication]

For those who might happen across this, I'm an administrator for the forum 'Sufficient Velocity', a large old-school forum oriented around Creative Writing. I originally posted this on there (and any reference to 'here' will mean the forum), but I felt I might as well throw it up here, as well, even if I don't actually have any followers.

This week, I've been reading fanfiction on Archive of Our Own (AO3), a site run by the Organisation for Transformative Works (OTW), a non-profit. This isn't particularly exceptional, in and of itself — like many others on the site, I read a lot of fanfiction, both on Sufficient Velocity (SV) and elsewhere — however what was bizarre to me was encountering a new prefix on certain works, that of 'End OTW Racism'. While I'm sure a number of people were already familiar with this, I was not, so I looked into it.

What I found... wasn't great. And I don't think anyone involved realises that.

To summarise the details, the #EndOTWRacism campaign, of which you may find their manifesto here, is a campaign oriented towards seeing hateful or discriminatory works removed from AO3 — and believe me, there is a lot of it. To whit, they want the OTW to moderate them. A laudable goal, on the face of it — certainly, we do something similar on Sufficient Velocity with Rule 2 and, to be clear, nothing I say here is a critique of Rule 2 (or, indeed, Rule 6) on SV.

But it's not that simple, not when you're the size of Archive of Our Own. So, let's talk about the vagaries and little-known pitfalls of content moderation, particularly as it applies to digital fiction and at scale. Let's dig into some of the details — as far as credentials go, I have, unfortunately, been in moderation and/or administration on SV for about six years and this is something we have to grapple with regularly, so I would like to say I can speak with some degree of expertise on the subject.

So, what are the problems with moderating bad works from a site? Let's start with discovery— that is to say, how you find rule-breaching works in the first place. There are more-or-less two different ways to approach manual content moderation of open submissions on a digital platform: review-based and report-based (you could also call them curation-based and flag-based), with various combinations of the two. Automated content moderation isn't something I'm going to cover here — I feel I can safely assume I'm preaching to the choir when I say it's a bad idea, and if I'm not, I'll just note that the least absurd outcome we had when simulating AI moderation (mostly for the sake of an academic exercise) on SV was banning all the staff.

In a review-based system, you check someone's work and approve it to the site upon verifying that it doesn't breach your content rules. Generally pretty simple, we used to do something like it on request. Unfortunately, if you do that, it can void your safe harbour protections in the US per Myeress vs. Buzzfeed Inc. This case, if you weren't aware, is why we stopped offering content review on SV. Suffice to say, it's not really a realistic option for anyone large enough for the courts to notice, and extremely clunky and unpleasant for the users, to boot.

Report-based systems, on the other hand, are something we use today — users find works they think are in breach and alert the moderation team to their presence with a report. On SV, this works pretty well — a user or users flag a work as potentially troublesome, moderation investigate it and either action it or reject the report. Unfortunately, AO3 is not SV. I'll get into the details of that dreadful beast known as scaling later, but thankfully we do have a much better comparison point — fanfiction.net (FFN).

FFN has had two great purges over the years, with a... mixed amount of content moderation applied in between: one in 2002 when the NC-17 rating was removed, and one in 2012. Both, ostensibly, were targeted at adult content. In practice, many fics that wouldn't raise an eye on Spacebattles today or Sufficient Velocity prior to 2018 were also removed; a number of reports suggest that something as simple as having a swearword in your title or summary was enough to get you hit, even if you were a 'T' rated work. Most disturbingly of all, there are a number of — impossible to substantiate — accounts of groups such as the infamous Critics United 'mass reporting' works to trigger a strike to get them removed. I would suggest reading further on places like Fanlore if you are unfamiliar and want to know more.

Despite its flaws however, report-based moderation is more-or-less the only option, and this segues neatly into the next piece of the puzzle that is content moderation, that is to say, the rubric. How do you decide what is, and what isn't against the rules of your site?

Anyone who's complained to the staff about how vague the rules are on SV may have had this explained to them, but as that is likely not many of you, I'll summarise: the more precise and clear-cut your chosen rubric is, the more it will inevitably need to resemble a legal document — and the less readable it is to the layman. We'll return to SV for an example here: many newer users will not be aware of this, but SV used to have a much more 'line by line, clearly delineated' set of rules and... people kind of hated it! An infraction would reference 'Community Compact III.15.5' rather than Rule 3, because it was more or less written in the same manner as the Terms of Service (sans the legal terms of art). While it was a more legible rubric from a certain perspective, from the perspective of communicating expectations to the users it was inferior to our current set of rules  — even less of them read it,  and we don't have great uptake right now.

And it still wasn't really an improvement over our current set-up when it comes to 'moderation consistency'. Even without getting into the nuts and bolts of "how do you define a racist work in a way that does not, at any point, say words to the effect of 'I know it when I see it'" — which is itself very, very difficult don't get me wrong I'm not dismissing this — you are stuck with finding an appropriate footing between a spectrum of 'the US penal code' and 'don't be a dick' as your rubric. Going for the penal code side doesn't help nearly as much as you might expect with moderation consistency, either — no matter what, you will never have a 100% correct call rate. You have the impossible task of writing a rubric that is easy for users to comprehend, extremely clear for moderation and capable of cleanly defining what is and what isn't racist without relying on moderator judgement, something which you cannot trust when operating at scale.

Speaking of scale, it's time to move on to the third prong — and the last covered in this ramble, which is more of a brief overview than anything truly in-depth — which is resources. Moderation is not a magic wand, you can't conjure it out of nowhere: you need to spend an enormous amount of time, effort and money on building, training and equipping a moderation staff, even a volunteer one, and it is far, far from an instant process. Our most recent tranche of moderators spent several months in training and it will likely be some months more before they're fully comfortable in the role — and that's with a relatively robust bureaucracy and a number of highly experienced mentors supporting them, something that is not going to be available to a new moderation branch with little to no experience. Beyond that, there's the matter of sheer numbers.

Combining both moderation and arbitration — because for volunteer staff, pure moderation is in actuality less efficient in my eyes, for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this post, but we'll treat it as if they're both just 'moderators' — SV presently has 34 dedicated moderation volunteers. SV hosts ~785 million words of creative writing.

AO3 hosts ~32 billion.

These are some very rough and simplified figures, but if you completely ignore all the usual problems of scaling manpower in a business (or pseudo-business), such as (but not limited to) geometrically increasing bureaucratic complexity and administrative burden, along with all the particular issues of volunteer moderation... AO3 would still need well over one thousand volunteer moderators to be able to match SV's moderator-to-creative-wordcount ratio.

Paid moderation, of course, you can get away with less — my estimate is that you could fully moderate SV with, at best, ~8 full-time moderators, still ignoring administrative burden above the level of team leader. This leaves AO3 only needing a much more modest ~350 moderators. At the US minimum wage of ~$15k p.a. — which is, in my eyes, deeply unethical to pay moderators as full-time moderation is an intensely gruelling role with extremely high rates of PTSD and other stress-related conditions — that is approximately ~$5.25m p.a. costs on moderator wages. Their average annual budget is a bit over $500k.

So, that's obviously not on the table, and we return to volunteer staffing. Which... let's examine that scenario and the questions it leaves us with, as our conclusion.

Let's say, through some miracle, AO3 succeeds in finding those hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of volunteer moderators. We'll even say none of them are malicious actors or sufficiently incompetent as to be indistinguishable, and that they manage to replicate something on the level of or superior to our moderation tooling near-instantly at no cost. We still have several questions to be answered:

How are you maintaining consistency? Have you managed to define racism to the point that moderator judgment no longer enters the equation? And to be clear, you cannot allow moderator judgment to be a significant decision maker at this scale, or you will end with absurd results.

How are you handling staff mental health? Some reading on the matter, to save me a lengthy and unrelated explanation of some of the steps involved in ensuring mental health for commercial-scale content moderators.

How are you handling your failures? No moderation in the world has ever succeeded in a 100% accuracy rate, what are you doing about that?

Using report-based discovery, how are you preventing 'report brigading', such as the theories surrounding Critics United mentioned above? It is a natural human response to take into account the amount and severity of feedback. While SV moderators are well trained on the matter, the rare times something is receiving enough reports to potentially be classified as a 'brigade' on that scale will nearly always be escalated to administration, something completely infeasible at (you're learning to hate this word, I'm sure) scale.

How are you communicating expectations to your user base? If you're relying on a flag-based system, your users' understanding of the rules is a critical facet of your moderation system — how have you managed to make them legible to a layman while still managing to somehow 'truly' define racism?

How are you managing over one thousand moderators? Like even beyond all the concerns with consistency, how are you keeping track of that many moving parts as a volunteer organisation without dozens or even hundreds of professional managers? I've ignored the scaling administrative burden up until now, but it has to be addressed in reality.

What are you doing to sweep through your archives? SV is more-or-less on-top of 'old' works as far as rule-breaking goes, with the occasional forgotten tidbit popping up every 18 months or so — and that's what we're extrapolating from. These thousand-plus moderators are mostly going to be addressing current or near-current content, are you going to spin up that many again to comb through the 32 billion words already posted?

I could go on for a fair bit here, but this has already stretched out to over two thousand words.

I think the people behind this movement have their hearts in the right place and the sentiment is laudable, but in practice it is simply 'won't someone think of the children' in a funny hat. It cannot be done.

Even if you could somehow meet the bare minimum thresholds, you are simply not going to manage a ruleset of sufficient clarity so as to prevent a much-worse repeat of the 2012 FF.net massacre, you are not going to be able to manage a moderation staff of that size and you are not going to be able to ensure a coherent understanding among all your users (we haven't managed that after nearly ten years and a much smaller and more engaged userbase). There's a serious number of other issues I haven't covered here as well, as this really is just an attempt at giving some insight into the sheer number of moving parts behind content moderation:  the movement wants off-site content to be policed which isn't so much its own barrel of fish as it is its own barrel of Cthulhu; AO3 is far from English-only and would in actuality need moderators for almost every language it supports — and most damning of all,  if Section 230 is wiped out by the Supreme Court  it is not unlikely that engaging in content moderation at all could simply see AO3 shut down.

As sucky as it seems, the current status quo really is the best situation possible. Sorry about that.

[etirabys]

meandering post about reading Orson Scott Card again

I've been offline starting at 9pm every day (except once. I was drunk at karaoke and asked for anons at 8:30pm) for six weeks, with the result that in befuddled boredom two nights ago I picked up Orson Scott Card's Songmaster from the house bookshelf.

I read Ender's Game and three sequels when I was a teen thought the books were mid. Since those are OSC's best works I assumed he had nothing more interesting to offer me and didn't try more of him for fifteen years, but Songmaster was compelling enough that I immediately afterwards picked up The Memory of Earth, the first book of a pentalogy.

TMoE is extremely my jam: after humanity blows itself up on Earth, AIs monitor thriving human civilizations in the planets that survivors managed to escape to, and suppress any tech that enables large scale violence by exerting low key mind control via satellites. But forty million years pass, many of the satellites break down, and the AI needs help from humans to restore capabilities. Because as its control wanes, people are starting to e.g. conceive of airplanes or bombs again, and override the injunctions against entering military alliances more than two edges of connection away.

The AI is worshipped as a god all over the planet, but the fourteen year old protagonist that becomes one of the AI's agents tells the AI from the beginning that he'll break with it if its morality seems wrong to him. I like the fourteen year old – unlike Ender or Songmaster's protagonist (adult minds piloting ten year old bodies), he's a normal gifted kid who's unpopular 50% due to his ego and big mouth and 50% because he's socially inept and offends people even when he's trying to be nice.

Songmaster is also partly about a permanent solution to large-scale violence, albeit through one guy who establishes a monopoly on violence and sweeps in pax galactica. Both it and TMoE are preoccupied with the eradication of suffering from evil / human violence, which is closer to my resonant frequency than narratives about defeating particular people or ideologies. At the moment I can't think of any other book with such an insistent focus on the matter than T.H. White's The Once and Future King. It's hard to make a compelling story out of, and I don't think Songmaster really succeeds, but TMoE's premise is well suited to explore that. (I'm also enjoying the matriarchal culture where everyone is expected to have multiple serial-monogamous marriages.) After reading 70% of TMoE last night I wrote:

Usually when I read fiction there's a small part of me going, how can I use this as fodder for my own growth, how can I remix or improve or react against this, how do the author and I measure against each other? (If the quality and content are at an anti-sweet spot, the small part becomes quite large and I feel all teeth towards the author.) But on occasion I read something so close that the absence of that measuring-feeling is its own sensation – ego departs, or at least is split across two bodies. There's just amity and recognition

And it's pretty interesting to feel this way about Card for, well, the reasons.

(If you're familiar with Card drama none of the following will be new to you; I'm coming to it fresh so the rest of this post is me going "uh... wow")

I vaguely knew he was a homophobic Mormon who'd gotten into fights about gay stuff, but I couldn't tell from the Ender books I read. But in Songmaster his issues spring off the page in such a weird way. Every fifth Goodreads review of this book is "Card, u gay?" because, well,

(One review, possibly from a fellow Mormon, that went "Card, it's so sinful of you to be this gay in your novel". Why did he write this book that would predictably make everyone mad...)

it's full of gay male desire. The protagonist (Ansset) is approximately a castrato and characters notice him sexually a lot. The first and only time Ansset has sex it's with a Kinsey 4-5 male character he loves, who's married to a woman but has fallen in love with Ansset. It turns out the drugs Ansset took to prolong his singing career painfully and only-kinda-figuratively explode your balls when you have your first orgasm and you'll never feel sexual desire again. (You'd think his loving teachers would have warned him of that, but, whatever, they didn't.) The other guy is literally castrated in punishment for inadvertently torturing a highly valuable castrato. It's pretty bald: GAY SEX IS ALMOST IRRESISTIBLY TEMPTING BUT YOU SHOULDN'T DO IT.

(Sidenote: both Ansset and the guy's wife are very close and have a "there's enough love to go around" attitude about the gay sex initially, before they go "wait Josif is a SERIAL MONOGAMIST... he can only love one person at a time... the moment he had the gay sex his marriage was destroyed". It's funny in a mildly stupid way that Card would set up this parable of homosexuality destroying lives and a marriage but almost everyone involved is peacefully ready to sail into an open marriage. I guess it makes sense if you want to say very clearly that THE GAY PART IS THE BAD PART)

which is fascinating to me, because... why would you tell on yourself like that

(81k also told me secondhand of an essay? interview? where Card openly says "we have to stand against legalizing gay marriage because everyone will get gay married and society will collapse", so that's informing my read of Songmaster as well)

I am pretty dang open about my personal life online but if I had a lot of feelings I thought were disgusting and immoral I would not write a novel dripping with those feelings before pointedly castrating the leads for them. Especially if it wasn't relevant to the actually highbrow themes of (checks notes) winning over your adversaries with kindness and never relinquishing your monopoly on violence. I would be so so so so embarrassed to let this go to print, it's so psychologically transparent, what was he thinking

(Well, I assume he's a very different person with different social incentives. For all I know, people in his church went "hey Orson we read your book and it's clear that you're gay but signaling strongly that you won't give into the gay feelings, we're here for you, it was really brave of you to publish this".)

[minus-plus-zer0]

~ Welcome ~

| ♡ Ao3: minus-plus-zero ♡ | | ♡ Fanfiction.net: minus-plus-zero ♡ | | ♡ Bluesky: minus-plus-zero ♡ | | ♡ Request status: CLOSED ♡ |

~ Rules ~

You can request drabbles, headcanons, or one-shot fanfics. If not specified I often default to writing fanfics.

I write fluff 🩷, angst 💔, hurt/comfort 💘, or crack ❣️.

I do not write smut, cheating, or sexual assault.

I do not write abuse or abusive dynamics between Bakugou and the reader. Abusive themes are otherwise okay (such as abusive backstories or witnessing abuse), with the sole exception of sexual abuse.

I only write gender neutral or female readers. I keep most stories race/gender neutral.

I only write romantic Bakugou x reader. Side ships with other characters may be included, but Bakugou and the reader must only be with each other!

Please do not copy/repost my art without permission! If I accidentally use stolen/AI art please let me know, because this is never intentional.

~ Masterlist ~

| 🩷 - fluff | 💔 - angst | 💘 - hurt/comfort | ❣️ - crack |

Drabbles

He Likes to Share His Food 🩷

Love at First Sight 🩷

Offering His Jacket 🩷

Reminders of You 🩷

What He Thinks About Post-Breakup 💔

Who the King Serves 🩷

Bakugou Fights For You 💘🩷

Not Afraid to Say ILY 🩷

Possessive 🩷

Family Getting Ready for Bed 🩷

The Bakugou Blanket 🩷

When He's Tired 💘🩷

Casually Touching You 🩷

A Rockstar's Muse 🩷

Your Lipstick Stains 🩷

Calling Him Pet Names 🩷

Seeing You With Another Man 🩷 💔

Recording a Love Song Together 🩷

Kissing a Princess's Hand 🩷

Say It Back, Please 🩷

Camera Shy 🩷

Comparing Hand Sizes 🩷

Headcanons

Studying in Bakugou's Dorm 🩷

Studying in Bakugou's Home 🩷

Getting a Dog With Bakugou 🩷

Vigilante Bakugou x Normal Reader - Part 1 💔

Vigilante Bakugou x Normal Reader - Part 2 💔🩷

"And They Were Roommates" University Version 🩷

Working at Bakugou's Agency - Part 1 🩷

Working at Bakugou's Agency - Part 2 🩷

Fireworks Festival With Bakugou 🩷

Fiance 🩷

Beauty Pageant 🩷

Multi-Chapter Fics

A Royal's Choice [Masterlist]

The Bakusquad Gaming Group [Masterlist]

University Days With Bakugou [Masterlist]

Werewolf AU [Masterlist]

One-Shot Fics

Paper Kiss Game 🩷

Missed Texts 💔

Stuck Inside From the Rain 🩷

Shopping With Bakugou 🩷

Disappearance of You 💔💘 [Request]

Dead of Night 💔💘

His Cologne (And Yours) 🩷

Accidentally Sleeping Together 🩷

Almost Too Late 💔💘🩷

Tattoos 🩷

Alice in Wonderland White Rabbit Reader 🩷❣️ [Request]

(Not) Highly Trained in the Art of Kissing 🩷

He Hears You Talking About Him 🩷

Catching Him in His Celebrity Disguise 🩷

So Pretty 🩷

When You're Depressed 💘

Jealousy 💘🩷

Sharing His Earphones 🩷

While You're Gone 🩷

"You Know You're Fictional, Right?" 🩷❣️

Staring Contest 🩷

Sunshine Vs Grumpy 🩷

One Good Grovel 🩷❣️

Happy Accidents 🩷

Moodboards

Dates With Bakugou 🩷

[kin-dewdles]

YOU

I SEE YOU

YOU’RE A SYSTEM WHO WANTS DRAWINGS OF YOUR ALTERS AND/OR A THERIAN/OTHERKIN WHO WANTS DRAWINGS OF YOUR KINTYPES

WELL YOU’RE IN LUCK

I, FOR FREE, WILL DRAW YOU A DOODLE

IT WILL BE A DOODLE, NOT ANYTHING FANCY

ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS GO TO THAT ASK BOX, PLOP SOME REFERENCES, GIVE A DESCRIPTION, AND HIT SEND!

I WILL DRAW: PEOPLE, FICTIONAL PEOPLE, CREATURES, ANTHROPOMORPHIC GUYS! I WILL DRAW NEAR ANYTHING

I WILL ALSO DRAW GORE! I WILL NOT DRAW NSFW! I RETAIN THE RIGHT TO SAY NO TO A DRAWING!

YOU MAY USE YOUR DOODLE FOR ANYTHING, AS LONG AS YOU CREDIT ME! DO NOT FEED MY ART TO AI!

I HAVE NO DNI, EXCEPT FOR PEOPLE WHO WANT TO ARGUE. THIS IS A DRAWING BLOG, NOT AN ARGUING ONE.

I AM A ENDOSAFE BLOG :D

This blog is run by @silhouette-system !

mod list: Ayrton (🏎️ or 🪽), Sasha (🦌), Wanderer (🖤), and Ghost (🌑)

check reblogs for current request list!

requests are open! i don't plan on closing them, but due to the amount of requests i've received, prepare for a wait :(

examples of things I’ve drawn under the cut!

[hislittleraincloud]

Anyone who knows my pattern knows that fic isn't too far behind after a soundtrack is posted. But, Part 3 is still a little messy, so am taking time to smooth it out.

Apologies to those in Russia, I guess that the above video is blocked in your country. Celine Dion and Fiona Apple aren't very charitable (the Police and the Gin Blossoms don't give a flying fuck). The latter should be happy I remastered "Criminal".

There is a short Cairo narration in the beginning.

Remember that this is the music that canon Cairo listens to, so...

[etherealblaseballresearch]

coming in under the wire for the fiction podcast zine fest - a zine of 8 space-themed podcasts. (i had to limit myself to podcasts i'd listened to all the way through to keep to a sensible number lol)

zine text under the cut:

Fiction podcasts... in space!!

Wolf 359: Comms Officer Eiffel's attempts to not do his job are foiled by stickler Commander Minkowski, malfunctioning AI Hera, dubiously ethical Dr Hilbert and... aliens?

The Strange Case of Starship Iris: Violet Liu is rescued after an explosion kills the rest of the Iris crew. Her rescuers may not be... above board, but they're her best chance to figure out what happned - and to stop a war.

The Pasithea Powder: Voicemails between Sophie, war hero, and Jane, scientist, traitor, ex-friend and the only person Sophie can turn to when a "friendship delegation" goes wrong.

Janus Descending: Horror following Chel and Peter as they explore an apparently lifeless planet. Chel's story starts from the beginning, Peter's from the end.

Second Star to the Left: Gwen has 5 years to explore a planet all alone - except for a long distance caller.

Girl in Space: X has lived alone on this spaceship (except for an AI and a Jurassic Park DVD) - until now.

We Fix Space Junk: Two repair women travel the galaxy fixing space junk. Planet of the week, quick and funny

The Adventure Zone: Amnesty: Not tecnically a space podcast? You'll get it. Minerva [heart]

Happy listening [smily face]

[skzoologist]

The link

word count: ~1.8k

warnings: angst, hurt/comfort

summary: Everyone has their own limits, but some turn a blind eye to it.

a/n: If there are any mistakes to this, please tell me so I can fix them, as I wrote it past midnight when I wasn't feeling well. I ran through it the next day, but I am just one person and so mistakes could have easily slipped past me. Either way, I hope you enjoy it!

Back to the masterlist

Please let me know if I left a warning or anything out, I will add it in! Reblogs, likes and feedback are greatly appreciated!

!I don't condone anyone stealing my work and posting it anywhere without my permission, or feeding it to AI!

!This is just fiction, my interpretation of Stray Kids. By no means is this how they are and how they behave in real life!

·͙⁺˚•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙˚⁺‧͙⁺˚•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙˚⁺‧͙⁺˚•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙˚⁺‧͙·͙⁺˚•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙˚⁺‧͙⁺˚•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙˚⁺‧͙⁺˚•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙˚⁺‧͙

·͙⁺˚•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙˚⁺‧͙⁺˚•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙˚⁺‧͙⁺˚•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙˚⁺‧͙·͙⁺˚•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙˚⁺‧͙⁺˚•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙˚⁺‧͙⁺˚•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙˚⁺‧͙

Bae had been feeling off all day, from the very moment he had opened his eyes. It was an unsettling feeling, one that sat heavily in his stomach and made his organs twist into knots, like a myriad of snakes piled on top of each other.

Then he met the others and it all became clear, the air so tense you could basically cut it.

He felt nauseous.

It was comeback season; their album was nearly releasing and so everyone had been working day and night to perfect their skills, to perfect this gift for their fans. Each member sported an aura of exhaustion around them, the skin underneath their bright eyes dark and dull. Some looked more worn down than the others, contagious smiles not quite reaching their eyes.

Bae wasn't an exception to this, far from it. He had pulled his fair share of all-nighters, only beaten by 3RACHA themselves. Perfectionism ran in his veins, and so he could easily recognise when someone was trapped in their own mind, ruining their body for the sake of some unattainable perfection.

And it didn't take more than a single glance to see it on Chan, the signs all there and hard to deny.

The male looked like death itself, forced into a prison of flesh and hating every second of it. Those chocolate eyes were dull, never truly seeing what was in front of them unless it was that cursed laptop screen he had spent days upon days staring at. Not to mention how irritable he was, snapping so easily that the younger members were now afraid to approach him, sparking quite a few confrontations that were hard to break.

And Bae was forced to witness it all, heart heavy as their strong leader was crumbling to the ground in front of his very eyes.

It was late at night that Jisung asked him to stop by their studio, needing some advice and Bae had always been happy to help, especially in such stressful times. No matter how much his own joints ached, mind on the brink of exhaustion, he would always heed the members’ calls. And so his hands deftly packed his bag and locked the room, being the last one to stay behind and practise the dance moves until they were burned into his synapses.

He made quick work of the way there, empty hallways bright in contrast to the outside world that was bathed in darkness.

Once he reached the door, he peeked his head in, no need to knock as he was a regular there. Jisung noticed him almost immediately, as if the male had been staring at the door this whole time, rushing to his side with an almost panicked look. That made the alarm bells inside Bae’s head ring ceaselessly, already guessing that it was about Chan; and it wasn't anything good.

“Hyung, oh my god I'm so happy you're here. Chan hyung’s out of control and at this point you're the only one that can help.” - the frightened boy rushed out, words nearly unintelligible.

Bae held Jisung close, running a calming hand through the younger's dark locks as he put a tiny smile onto his face, hoping to reassure and calm the slight trembles in the other’s body. He already knew what this was about; sadly it wasn't the first time, and most definitely not the last.

“It's okay Sungie, go back to the dorms. I'll take care of it, hm?” - he hummed out, voice low and unwavering.

Jisung nodded, looking up at him with wide, grateful eyes. With a small push of his hands away the quokka went, and he was forced to address the heated argument that could be heard from inside the room by now.

Right, Changbin was still in there with Chan.

With a deep inhale Bae pushed the door open, softly closing it after he slipped inside. A sight he was unfortunately familiar with greeted him: Changbin was shouting back at Chan, both participants equally frustrated with each other. So much so that they didn't even notice him, only when he placed his hands on the younger's shoulders, touch firm yet gentle.

“Bin, I got this. I'll pack up afterwards, just go after Jisung. Please?” - Bae asked in a soft voice, his voice only heard because the two were surprised into silence by his sudden appearance.

When he felt that the other was about to protest, unable to let things go, he hugged Changbin from behind and gently squeezed him into himself. It was something he had always done in times like these, when things got too heated; and it never failed to calm Changbin down, something he was hoping to achieve at that very moment.

It seemed to have worked once again as the younger's shoulders slightly relaxed, a long sigh heard from his direction. Bae patted his back, watching him leave before he steeled himself, eyes now staring at Chan.

Chan, who went back to working on a track, jaw set so tight Bae was afraid the man would break a tooth. Still, he knew he wouldn't have an easy time with the older and so he softly called out to him, slightly dejected at the lack of reaction.

That didn't deter him and so he tried again, only to have the raging storm that was now Chan directed at him.

“What? You're gonna tell me to go back and rest too? Save it, I don't fucking need it right now.”

Bae took in a deep breath, the burning in his lungs grounding him and granting just enough distraction to steel himself. His hyung wasn't acting like how he usually did; these words weren't truly his.

“If you're just gonna stand there, you can go. You're bothering me.” - Chan mumbled and Bae could feel his own storm brewing inside, answering the older’s in a silent rage.

With a single step he closed the distance, hand slamming against the table with such vicious force that Chan flinched, wide eyes now blinking up at him.

“I don't need your sass right now either!” - he hissed out, face now so close to Chan’s that he could see the wonderful array of browns swirling inside those eyes.

He took another breath, eyes slightly narrowing down at his entirely too tired hyung.

“I understand the pressure you're under, and you know I do. It's not easy to be the leader of our group, especially when it's comeback season and work buries us alive. But please, listen to us. You need rest now, not more work!” - his voice was determined, words cutting straight to the point as he knew just walking around it with pretty sentences wouldn’t work.

His pleas fell on deaf ears, Chan’s eyebrows furrowing in renewed anger.

“I know my own limits, so y’all can stop pestering me so damn much.”

Bae never wanted to hit Chan so much before, to make the older see some sense already. He could feel his own pulse climbing, heart beating faster and faster. That sickening feeling that resided in his stomach was now replaced by burning acid. The sorrow he felt for the man was the only thing keeping it in check.

“If your limits include snapping at us constantly, then by all means, go ahead. I'll just go back to drying up Innie’s tears then, but maybe Sungie joined him by now too.”

Bae was aware how cruel saying that was, and his heart hurt at the words. But nothing else worked when Chan became blinded by deadlines and the impossible weight of public expectations; he knew, he had tried everything in these past years without any success. His heart ached and broke into tiny pieces at his hyung's expression, eyes now wide and filled with nothing but immense guilt and regret.

Before Chan could say anything Bae pulled him close, not caring how this awkward position was hurting his aching back. He could feel the older tremble in his hold, hands latching onto him as if he was Chan’s lifeline.

There was only silence after that, no sound heard besides the occasional quiet sniffle. Bae didn't acknowledge those quiet little sounds, instead he soothingly ran a hand over the other’s back and drew little shapes into the clothes skin there. The hold on his clothes tightened, making his heart squeeze painfully, pulling the other impossibly closer to himself.

Once he was sure Chan was calm enough, he gently pulled back, giving his hyung an understanding smile.

Chan was always there for all of them, giving them a shoulder to lean on whenever they needed it. He was a constant in their life, their rock, their pillar; something they could lean on when times turned harsh. There was not a day when none of them leaned against their oldest hyung in a way, may the reason be something silly like a lost game, or something serious like the fear of failure.

It didn’t take long for the older to weasel his way into Bae’s heart, and so he swore to himself that he would let Chan lean on him, seek comfort in him, no matter what.

“I'll pack up and then we can go, alright? Save your work in the meantime, before it gets lost.” - he gently instructed before doing as he said he would, waiting for his hyung's nod.

There wasn't a lot to pack up, only Jisung and Changbin’s jackets, along with a bag that belonged to the former. Bae put them all together, the bag slung over his shoulder and the jackets tied around it, leaving his hands free.

“Ready?” - he asked, glancing at an awaiting Chan.

The male stood there, eyes cast towards the ground in shame as his hands fidgeted and tore at his nails. Tension was visible in the older's form and Bae could feel his heart painfully squeeze at the sight, silently beckoning Chan over.

Once his hyung was in reach he kneeled down, back open and turned towards the other.

“I don't-... Bae…” “Hyung, please?”

His voice was nearly pleading, wanting to lessen Chan's burdens as much as possible. Thankfully there were no more protests heard in the silent room as the older climbed onto his back, actions slow and hesitant.

With a single motion Bae stood up, a surprised little sound escaping the one he carried. It drew the smallest of chuckles out of him, yet he just silently went on his way back to the dorms, letting the teasing comments die on his tongue.

It was quiet, neither of the two really spoke on the short trek. They didn't need to; there was a certain level of understanding between them, forged by the time and difficulties they had faced together. It was more than enough for Bae to understand Chan’s silent words, his hyung practically melting into his hold as time passed. That hold around his neck was steady, trusting, and he couldn't ask for more.

“Thank you.” - the words were murmured into his skin sleepily, drawing a small smile out of him. “I'll always be here for you, Hyung.” - his words were but a whisper, afraid to shatter the tranquillity that settled over them.

[centrally-unplanned]

Adam Tooze giving some pitch-perfect pornography targeted at me specifically with Israel's "Gaza 2035: A three-step master plan to build what they call the Gaza-Arish-Sderot Free Trade Zone", capped with an AI generated Gaza-Dubai:

I'm in love, this is so glorious. "The world if Israel could play around with Gaza like a little set of Legos" tell me this is not identical energy:

Except its not a shitpost its an actual report from the Office of the Prime Minister. And folks we have got it all! The most convoluted administration system you could possibly imagine for no reason:

The new free trade zone would be administered by Israel, Egypt, and what the Israeli Prime Minister calls the Gaza Rehabilitation Authority (GRA)—a proposed Palestinian-run agency that would oversee reconstruction in Gaza and “manage the Strip’s finances.”

A cutesy little minimalist graphic of all the brand new industries that will magically become globally competitive in export markets because Israel says so:

The beach resorts are in my beloved!! But what are the little factories you ask? Oh nothing, just electric car production facilities!

Remember, before building your first factory, you need 18 Burj Khalifas. We economists call this "infrastructure development", take notes.

It will have high-speed rail through its center, oil projects on the coast, and of course, I'm saving the best for last - a rail project to NEOM:

 🥳The 🥳Line 🥳Mentioned 🥳

The legend on the map literally just says "a mega project" like, oh yeah, one of those! See em all the time.

Now, you might be asking - Ash, if this is your goal wouldn't you have not destroyed every square inch of habitable urban infrastructure in Gaza and shredded their economy into scraps of paper soaked in blood if your plan was to Singapore-on-the-Sea the place? You sweet summer child, those apartments? They are apartments of the past, darling, you don't need organically developed urban ecologies built over time to compliment human habitation. That is for fucking libs. All of this "war" thing was just set-up to create a blank slate for the construction of The Line 2: Its Definitely Real This Time!

I am going to murder James C Scott myself just so I can hover this plan over his corpse and watch the sheer hubris of this monument to the state's desire for legibility and technocratic solutionism resurrect him from the goddamn grave.

"Well....at least after all this they would have to recognize Palestine as a stat-" Woah woah woah woah, hold on:

The final stage would be when Palestine signs the Abraham Accords signaling “Palestinian self-rule,” albeit without statehood

Lets not...lets not get overambitious here. Baby steps, you know? We have to be careful.

Anyway this is the most ludicrously ill-considered and ill-presented reconstruction plan I have ever seen in my life and I shudder to think that, instead of it being an off-hand drip of propaganda intended solely to brush off nosey reporters and diplomats, it might actually be serious. Bibi hasn't let me down yet on the "thinking things through" front!

But tbc if this was fiction - instead of a ruthlessly grim reality - the Regional Deputy Minister of Trade charged with implementing this technocratic abortion would be my precious little blorbo and I would stan her to hell and back.

[boombox-fuckboy]

Hey!!! You commented on my post about limetown haha which is why I’m here. You offered to give podcast recs! What are your favorites?? I’m looking for some new ones

I completely forgot I had this ask, excuse the delay. Here's a selection of 30 podcasts I enjoyed from a broad range of genres: hopefully at least one appeals.

Let me know if you're after something more specific.

Arden: (Investigative, Comedy) On the 25th of December, 2007, heiress and young actress Julie Capsom crashed her car into a tree and fled into a nearby forest clearing, leaving a trail that seemingly vanished into thin air, and a dismembered torso in the trunk. A decade later, Bea, the first reporter on the scene, and Brenda, a detective on the case, are hosting a true crime podcast about it, and neither is remotely impressed with what the other has to say. Arden is also a retelling of various Shakespeare plays.

Desperado: (Supernatural, Adventure, Horror Elements) In a modern world of gods and magic, three young people, all under the patronage of death dieties, embark on the same adventure for different reasons: for safety, for revenge, and to kill The Old Man in the Sky. Fantastic banter and killer action sequences.

The Far Meridian: (Magical Realism) An agoraphobic young woman wakes one day to discover her lighthouse home has travelled to somewhere entirely unfamilar. As this continues to happen day after day, she uses the opportunity to search for her missing brother. A really unique and charming piece of fiction.

Gastronaut: (Sci-Fi) Interstellar travel audio blog of a former food critic as he travels to an active warzone to get firsthand experience with unfamilar cuisine. ft. Disgruntled martian nobility, sinister businessmen, explosive mushrooms, forbidden snacks, rogue revolutionary artists, and the consequences of your actions.

Girl in Space: (Sci-Fi) The Girl In Space lives alone on a space station, doing science, making cheese, rewatching Jurassic Park, and tending to the plants, animals, and artificial sun entrusted to her. It's a little lonely, but not a bad life. Would be a shame if someone came along to ruin it.

The Goblet Wire: (Microfiction, Weird Fiction) A surreal microfiction with horror elements, taking the form of phone calls to an audio-based game in which the voice of the mysterious Dictator leads each player through fantastic and horrific world and story.

Hello From The Hallowoods: (Horror, Supernatural) A dramatic entity beyond your comprehension visits your nightmares to tell stories of the people (in varying degrees of human and alive) that inhabit the strange, deadly, and beautiful Hallowoods, as they find meaning and sometimes eachother.

Hi Nay: (Supernatural Horror) A year after moving to Toronto, sound designer Mari finds herself drawn into helping people around the city with various horrific supernatural encounters due to her babaylan (shaman) family background. It quickly becomes apparent that there's something much more sinister and complicated happening in the background.

Inco: (Microfiction, Sci-Fi) A perpetually exausted interstellar information trader and her peppy AI find a mysterious (read: bratty) boy floating in space and are inadventently pulled into a world political intrigue.

Inn Between: (Fantasy) Ever curious about what the D&D characters get up to at the tavern between sessions? A generally lighter-hearted (with some exceptions) with richly-written and always-growing characters. A really interesting format, too: a lot of the adventure appears in the "next time" and "last time" segments which makes it all flow really nicely. Not a tabletop podcast.

Janus Descending: (Sci-Fi, Horror, Tragedy) A xenoarcheologist and a xenopaleontologist are sent to a study a dead city on a distant world. Nobody likes what they find there. A unique format, with one set of logs presented first to last, and the other last to first. I'd recommend listening to the supercut for this one.

The Kingmaker Histories: (Steampunk, Weird Fiction, Adventure, Fantasy Elements) In the Valorian Socialist Republic 1911, on her 25th birthday, tailor's apprentice Colette experienced the worst headache of her life. As a result, she fleed from town with a human artificer and a fae chef - both now smugglers - pursued by an utterly furious flesh-crafter. I'm not sure I'm selling how good this podcast is but it's very good.

Life With Althaar: (Sci-Fi, Comedy) A human repairman moves to a space station on the edge of human territory that is perpetually on the edge of self-destruction, and ends up with a less-than-ideal last-minute roomate. Althaar is polite, friendly, deeply interested in human culture, and eager to be friends. Unfortunately he belongs to a species that sends humans into a visceral panic at a glance.

Lost Terminal: (Sci-Fi, Hopepunk) Seth is a very lonely AI living on a satellite. His crew were left stranded aboard with no hope of return, and it's been longer than he can count since then. The Earth below him has changed dramatically, and with only a few other AI down there to talk to, he's very lonely. But! He has a plan to make some new friends.

Love and Luck: (Romance, Slice-of-Life and Urban Fantasy Elements) Voice messages cataloguing two young men falling in love and opening a queer dry bar together.

Midnight Radio: (Light Supernatural, Romance) Sybil McIntyre, host of the ever-popular 1950's nightly radio hour, begins exchanging letters with an old fan who has reluctantly returned to visit Sybil's beloved town.

Midst: (Weird Fiction, Western, Sci-Fi and Fantasy Elements) The old-western planetoid islet of Midst floats, rotating steadily, in a sea of reality-warping darkness. Down in the town of Stationary Hill, things are in movement, and vistors from the light above are about to bring unanticipated change. ft a monocycle-riding monster-hunter, radio-famous airship paladins, deadly mica, the universe's peppiest cultist, good dogs, and a really strange businessman.

The Mistholme Museum of Mystery, Morbidity, and Mortality: (Weird Fiction, Supernatural, Urban Fantasy and Horror Elements) A friendly AI tour guide leads you on a tour of the Mistholme Museum, explaining the strange and often alternatural story behind each item.

Monstrous Agonies: (Supernatural, Relationship Advice) An interpersonal advice show for supernatural entities and other people living liminally in the modern world.

Night Shift: (Urban Fantasy, Investigative) Set in a modern world with the addition of magic, which manifests in small inherited skills/traits, can warp people in horrific ways, or can be manipulated with the right science (and intense work) to induce superpowers. Sebastian Fenn is a barista at Night Shift Coffee, but since things are slow he's decided to start a podcast to talk about various mysteries, crimes and conspiracies around the city, and of course finds himself deeper in them than he'd intended.

The Pasithea Powder: (Sci-Fi, Thriller Elements? I think?) The last major interplanetary war was full of atrocities, but none more infamous then the creation of Pasithea Powder, a memory altering drug which was used to horrible effect and landed it's entire team of creators in prison. So when decorated war hero Captain Sophie Green sees one of them wandering free, worlds away from his prison, she gets in touch with a very old, estranged friend: one Dr. Jane Gonzalez, who's behind bars for the very same reason.

SCP: Find Us Alive: (Weird Fiction, Supernatural, Horror and Slice-of-Life elements) You don't need to know anything about SCP to enjoy this. A research team gets trapped in an underground research facility when the complex collapses and the building is dragged into a pocket dimension. The tear it was designed to study begins creating tiny copies of itself, generating strange entities the team needs to deal with. And as if that wasn't enough, the entire situation physically resets itself every 30 days. And yet, this is genuinely also an office comedy.

Second Star to the Left: (Sci-Fi) Audio logs of a scout sent to explore and establish early infastructure new world, and the communications with the minder in charge of keeping her alive.

Seen and Not Heard: (Slice-of-Life, Drama) Seen and Not Heard follows Bet, who's still adjusting to life a year after a bout of severe illness, and the resulting hearing loss it caused. It's about the ways we make connection, and food, and art, and different kinds of grief.

The Silt Verses: (Horror) In a modern world where gods are abundant, frequently both commercialised and restricted, two devotees of an outlawed river god go on a pilgrimage.

SINKHOLE: (Sci-Fi, Weird Fiction) Forum posts from a data restoration community in a near future where the human brain is its own computer and one city hosts a massive void.

Starfall: (Fantasy) Seeking to escape her mysterious past and find some purpose, a young swordswoman joins a travelling actor's troupe. This new life is unfamilar and sometimes stressful, but she's taken under the wing of stagehand Fel, who's determined to help her feel welcome as she experiences the figurative and literal magic of the theatre for the first time.

The Tower: (Weird Fiction) A low-key, meditative podcasy about a young woman who decides to climb a seemingly endless tower. Gorgeous sound design.

The Vesta Clinic: (Sci-Fi) New GP Dr. Fae Underwood, with the expert transcription skills of resident AI Sec, writes up patient reports on human and alien patients of The Vesta Clinic, a medical clinic on the edge of human space. Really comfy and creative.

Victoriocity: (Steampunk, Mystery) Set in the steam-powered Victorian city of Even Greater London, an aspiring journalist and a tired detective find themselves working together to solve a strange murder. I say Victorian but as queen Victoria is now an extensive grandiocity of cyborg components following seven only-kind-of-successful assassinations, you may need to adjust expectations a little.