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were--ralph · 1 year ago

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why exactly do you dislike generative art so much? i know its been misused by some folks, but like, why blame a tool because it gets used by shitty people? Why not just... blame the people who are shitty? I mean this in genuinely good faith, you seem like a pretty nice guy normally, but i guess it just makes me confused how... severe? your reactions are sometimes to it. There's a lot of nuance to conversation about it, and by folks a lot smarter than I (I suggest checking out the Are We Art Yet or "AWAY" group! They've got a lot on their page about the ethical use of Image generation software by individuals, and it really helped explain some things I was confused about). I know on my end, it made me think about why I personally was so reactive about Who was allowed to make art and How/Why. Again, all this in good faith, and I'm not asking you to like, Explain yourself or anything- If you just read this and decide to delete it instead of answering, all good! I just hope maybe you'll look into *why* some people advocate for generative software as strongly as they do, and listen to what they have to say about things -🦜

if Ai genuinely generated its own content I wouldn't have as much of a problem with it, however what Ai currently does is scrape other people's art, collect it, and then build something based off of others stolen works without crediting them. It's like. stealing other peoples art, mashing it together, then saying "this is mine i can not only profit of it but i can use it to cut costs in other industries.

this is more evident by people not "making" art but instead using prompts. Its like going to McDonalds and saying "Burger. Big, Juicy, etc, etc" then instead of a worker making the burger it uses an algorithm to build a burger based off of several restaurant's recepies.

example

the left is AI art, the right is one of the artists (Lindong) who it pulled the art style from. it's literally mass producing someone's artstyle by taking their art then using an algorithm to rebuild it in any context. this is even more apparent when you see ai art also tries to recreate artists watermarks and generally blends them together making it unintelligible.

Aside from that theres a lot of other ethical problems with it including generating pretty awful content, including but not limited to cp. It also uses a lot of processing power and apparently water? I haven't caught up on the newer developements i've been depressed about it tbh

Then aside from those, studios are leaning towards Ai generation to replace having to pay people. I've seen professional voice actors complain on twitter that they haven't gotten as much work since ai voice generation started, artists are being cut down and replaced by ai art then having the remaining artists fix any errors in the ai art.

Even beyond those things are the potential for misinformation. Here's an experiment: Which of these two are ai generated?

ready?

These two are both entirely ai generated. I have no idea if they're real people, but in a few months you could ai generate a Biden sex scandal, you could generate politics in whatever situation you want, you can generate popular streamers nude, whatever. and worse yet is ai generated video is already being developed and it doesn't look bad.

I posted on this already but as of right now it only needs one clear frame of a body and it can generate motion. yeah there are issues but it's been like two years since ai development started being taken seriously and we've gotten to this point already. within another two years it'll be close to perfected. There was even tests done with tiktokers and it works. it just fucking works.

There is genuinely not one upside to ai art. at all. it's theft, it's harming peoples lives, its harming the environment, its cutting jobs back and hurting the economy, it's invading peoples privacy, its making pedophilia accessible, and more. it's a plague and there's no vaccine for it. And all because people don't want to take a year to learn anatomy.

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nostalgebraist · 1 month ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

----

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

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

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

Still, Anthropic's statements are unique in being

official positions of the company

extremely specific and ambitious about the details

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

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

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

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

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

----

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And like, I have various disagreements with this picture.

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

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

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

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

----

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#ai tag #no matter how things go i'm sure this will be fun to revisit in 2 years...

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https-bakugo · 10 days ago

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Chapter 08.

♡ twenty three

♡ rivals to lovers / fake dating

♡ cw / tw : -

“What do you want…” A tired voice came out from the receiver.

“Hi. And bye. I’m hanging up now.” You stammered out nervously, reaching over to press the ‘Hang Up.’ button on your screen.

“There is no fuckin�� way…” The sound of Katsuki shifting around in bed echoed around your room, “That you of all people decided to call me at… what’s the time?” He mumbled under his breath, “Two fifteen in the fuckin’ mornin’ just to hang up on my ass. Sumthin's up with you. And don’t fuckin’... deflect on my ass cause I’ll… fuckin’ kill you...” Katsuki’s voice trailed off, and it was obvious he was fighting the urge to fall asleep on call right now.

“It’s not a big deal I promise-”

“Bull fuckin’ shit. You called for a damn reason ‘nd I wanna hear it.”

“... I uh… Can’t sleep.”

You expected him to hang up. Call you an idiot for wasting his time. You expected him to yell at you, never wanting to speak to you after this.

You didn’t expect the silence, followed by a soft chuckle from Katsuki’s end which most definitely caused a fluttering feeling to grow in your gut. “And you thought? I’d be a good idea to call me? C’mon now babe, I thought you were smarter than this…” His voice was soft and breathy and holy shit that was so hot - call me babe again please.

You shook your head, snapping yourself out of the horrible train of thought you were heading down. Curse this late time and curse the idea of him laying in bed, the light of his phone illuminating his strong arms as he had one thrown across his face and - does Katsuki Bakugo sleep with a shirt on is the real question here?

“[Name]. You went all silent on me.”

“Huh? Oh right sorry- uh I can hang up if you want-”

“Nah… stay. I like you around.”

“...You do?”

“...Does it ever feel like I… don’t?”

“...No? I don’t think so?”

“Mmm… thought so… overthinking ass.”

“Shut up…” You sighed.

Katsuki’s soft breathing came out of the receiver. You looked over at your clock, two twenty three am.

“I might fall asleep soon.” You confessed, voice soft.

“Can I stay on the phone with you at least?” Katsuki’s voice whispered through the phone.

You nodded before remembering he couldn’t see your face, “Okay…”

“How was your day?”

You paused, back to this morning, arguing with him at work, smiling, going on patrol with him, laughing, making dinner and watching a movie with him, heart pounding.

“...Good…”

“...yeah?”

“Yeah… My day was good.”

Katsuki chuckled softly, “Hey… [Name]... ‘m gonna ask you now cause I know I’m gonna pussy out if I do it when I’m awake…”

“Hm?” You pulled your blankets over your body.

Katsuki’s voice came out mumbled, “...go out with me… please…”

Two twenty seven am.

"...okay."

-> Masterlist

taglist [OPEN] : @luvseraphh - @tlissablr - @havemyheartt - @smelliottle - @sakurayashiro - @peachesvault - @qyuin - @kaidostwin - @wonubby - @moochiwoochi - @coldnightshark - @kalulakunundrum - @sexylexy12 - @rednicotine - @samm1e13 - @kawoala - @neptuneevee - @kodditty - @hecate-frenchfries - @eyesforbkg - @takoyakitakii - @m0nnypie - @katsucookies - @nottherealslimshady - @gethexxed - @bakugouswh0r3 - @katswifey - @ita606 - @jazoewazoe - @cherrii-11 - @risagichi - @mynicknameisgasoline

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mostlysignssomeportents · 11 days ago

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Tariffs and monopolies

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on May 15 at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE. More tour dates here.

For all that orthodox economists hate tariffs in all their forms, the question, "do tariffs work?" is a complex one, which can't be answered unless you specify which tariffs, in what context:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/02/me-or-your-lying-eyes/#spherical-cows-on-frictionless-surfaces

The orthodox case against tariffs goes like this: tariffs raise the price of goods before they reach the market. Sellers will raise the price of goods to recover those costs from buyers, so it's you, the person buying a car, a phone, or a board-game, who will bear that additional cost:

https://www.sjgames.com/ill/archive/April_03_2025/Tariffs_Are_Driving_Up_Game_Prices_Now

As is ever the case with economics, this critique builds in certain assumptions. And as is especially the case with neoliberal economics, this critique builds in certain assumptions that are never tested for veracity – indeed, neoliberal economists pride themselves on their reliance on incorrect assumptions:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/caliper-ai/#racism-machine

The main assumption built into the orthodox case against tariffs is that sellers can't afford to eat the costs of tariffs. In the thought-experiment land of neoliberalism, market competition erodes sellers' profits so that everything being sold is only slightly marked up above the cost of making it, getting it to the store and selling it to you. Companies are said to be making a "competitive" rate of profit, which is tautologically defined as "whatever profit they're making." If Nike pays $20 to make a pair of shoes in Vietnam that it sells in America for $140, that $120 profit is "competitive" – if it wasn't, it would be lower, and it isn't, so it is.

Trump's own explanation for how the tariffs will work is no better. Trump has made a variety of incoherent claims about who will pay the tariffs. On the campaign trail, he insisted that the tariffs would somehow be paid by America's trading partners, either by their governments or by overseas companies. This is literally untrue: when you order something from overseas, the customs broker sends the bill to you, not the company that sold you the goods.

But the smarter elements in the Trump orbit have a slightly more reality-based theory: they claim that importers, faced with tariff costs, will push back on sellers and insist that they discount their products to offset the tariff bill. That's how the costs end up being paid by foreign sellers – and if their governments step in to help pay the bill, that's how foreign governments will pay the bill.

This explanation has the benefit of actually being an explanation, in that it is a series of cause-and-effect relationships that end up with the costs being borne by someone other than stateside buyers. However, this explanation is also founded on (at least) two demonstrably untrue assumptions: first, that buyers have the power to force sellers to lower their prices; and second, that this power comes from the availability of substitute goods that are made (or could be made) in the USA.

It's possible for there to be a market economy in which buyers can force sellers to eat tariff costs. For that to happen, the sellers have to be in real competition with one another. Competition requires competitors: companies that consider themselves rivals, directly attacking one another's margins. But that's not how American big business operates: 40 years of lax antitrust enforcement has produced an American economy in which nearly every sector is dominated by a monopoly, a duopoly, or a cartel:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Take Nike: Nike controls 86% of the US athletic shoe market. Nearly all the remaining market share is owned by its main rivals, Adidas and Reebok – companies that merged in 2005. It's clear that Adidas/Reebok would like to get some of Nike's market share, but in 20+ years of duopoly rule over the sector, neither Nike nor Adidas/Reebok have tried a serious discounting strategy to win that market. Instead, the duopoly has found it easy to tacitly collude to rig margins of more than 600%. What's more, the collusion may have been explicit, not tacit – when a sector is dominated by two giant firms, the upper ranks of both companies are dominated by people who've worked at both companies. These people aren't rivals, they're peers. They're executors of one another's estates, godparents to one another's children, members of the same charitable boards and pickup sports leagues. They're lifelong pals. If you think they never explicitly conspire to rig markets – over drinks at someone's wedding or funeral, say – then I envy you your touching faith in humanity.

A market controlled by a handful of firms doesn't have to solve the thorny "collective action problem" of deciding on a regulatory priority and then holding that line as the cartel captures its regulators:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

That means that these companies end up with pricing power, because they can maintain solidarity while they raise prices. If everyone hikes prices together, consumers can't exert market discipline by buying from someone less greedy. And the same solidarity that confers pricing power to a cartel also insulates it from regulatory discipline, because all the companies will tell the same lie to regulators about why prices went up.

This was on display for all to see during the covid inflation shocks. Companies like Pepsi boasted to shareholders that "consumers are willing to pay more for our brands," as they hiked prices way above any inflationary rises, meaning that they didn't just force buyers to cover their higher costs, they actually raised prices more than was needed to cover those costs:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

Needless to say, Coke didn't respond by slashing its prices in order to capture Pepsi's customers. They did the opposite: they also raised prices over and above the inflationary costs. Coke and Pepsi might be rivals on paper, but when it comes to questions like, "Should sugar-water have higher margins?" they are the best of friends.

The same is true of the fossil fuel industry, another highly concentrated sector with sky-high margins that raised prices over inflation during the covid supply-chain shocks, and boasted about it on investor calls, without facing any regulatory scrutiny:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/15/sanctions-financing/#soak-the-rich

Neoliberal economists have an answer to this kind of thing: "it's fine." In the self-referential world of economism, whatever happens was meant to happen, because markets are efficient, so whatever happens in the market is efficient, and can only be made worse by state intervention. This theory of efficient markets is full of beautiful, self-equilibriating processes that can be precisely modeled using equations, but only because the field discards all the nonquantifiable elements of society, assuming that because you can't do math on these qualitative factors, they must not matter:

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

Of all the qualitative factors that clearly matter that are treated as if they don't matter, the most obvious, glaring omission is power. Power is hard to measure, but if you try to model a transaction without factoring power in, you end up in very dark places, for example, in systems where people should be allowed to "voluntarily" sell themselves into slavery.

It goes without saying that a theory of economics without a theory of power relationships is a great deal for powerful people. In Careless People, the whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams's excellent new tell-all memoir about Facebook, Wynn-Williams recounts how shocked and offended Sheryl Sandberg became when she was told that other countries wouldn't allow her to go and buy a kidney for her son, should he ever need one (her kid wasn't sick – she just wanted to know that if he ever did get sick…):

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250391230/carelesspeople/

This is economics without a theory of power: if I offer to buy your son's kidney, and you accept my offer, then we have achieved a voluntary exchange of value that is – tautologically – assumed to be fair. Indeed, this transaction isn't merely a way for kidneys to change hands – it's a way to "discover" the "market price" of a kidney. We're not just buyers and sellers, we're brave explorers of the vast, uncharted space of market prices.

Economics without power relies on tautology: if you assume the market is efficient, then whatever you get is what you were supposed to get. If Nike can charge a 600% markup on a $20 pair of shoes, then that is the "natural" price. Everyone in the chain – the workers who made the shoes, the subcontractors who employed the worker, the freighters who shipped the shoes, the logistics company that brought the shoe to the store, the clerk who rang up the purchase – is making what the market says they should be making. The price you pay? That's the price you should pay.

Perhaps you've heard people say that the most important thing is to "grow the pie," and that it's foolish to argue about how big any given "slice of the pie" is:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/405403/abundance-ezra-klein-building-costs-housing-energy-democrats-polarization

But this doesn't stand up to even cursory examination. If your slice of the pie is way too small to live on, and the pie grows, and your slice doesn't grow with it – or if it does, but not by enough to keep you solvent, then the size of your slice of the pie is the only thing that matters.

Economists call this the "distributional outcome" question, and orthodox economists insist that only fools and ideologues talk about distributional outcomes. They consider distributional outcomes to be a trap that sucks in well-meaning people who back "market-distorting interventions" that end up making everyone else poorer.

But you know who really cares about distributional outcomes? The finance sector. Think of the 2015 American Airlines pilot strike, which ended with a raise for pilots. When the company announced this on an investor call, Citibank analyst Kevin Crissey declared: "This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again. Shareholders get leftovers":

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/american-airlines-flight-attendants-bash-citi-analyst-who-put-shareholders-before-workers-14134309

Investors have a lot of power. After all, capital is concentrated into just a few hands, with trillions being wielded by institutional investors – index funds, hedge funds, etc – and they get to elect the board, who have the power to hire and fire corporate executives. A corporate board is like a trade union for wealth, a small committee that wields solidaristic power to threaten companies with dire consequences if their interests aren't given priority over the interests of workers and buyers.

No wonder that corporations are so ardently opposed to other forms of solidaristic power, like trade unions – who might shift value from investors to workers – and regulators – who might shift value from investors to buyers. Without these sources of countervailing power, unified capital will not only pass on any additional costs to workers and shoppers, they'll raise prices over and above any inflationary hikes. This does indeed "grow the pie" – while beggaring both shoppers and workers.

In other words, Nike could eat the tariff costs on its goods, but it won't because it doesn't have to, because it's part of a duopoly that both tacitly and explictly colludes to screw its customers and workers. Indeed, the cartelized big businesses that run the US economy just spent the pandemic years doing greedflation – using the excuse of the pandemic and their monopolistic pricing power to raise the prices of everything, from your rent to a dozen eggs:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/10/demand-and-supply/#keep-cal-maine-and-carry-on

If you've got the right kind of especially smooth market-pilled brain, you insist that this is impossible. These giant margins are so tempting that they will inevitably coax "new market entrants" into opening competing businesses. That does happen – sometimes. But not when the dominant companies can figure out how to build Warren Buffett's cherished "moats and walls" around their businesses. For example, if you're Amazon and 90% of middle class US households prepay for their shipping through Prime, you can charge sellers whatever the traffic will bear, because they have to go through your chokepoint in order to reach their best customers. That's how Amazon ended up taking 45-51% out of every dollar platform sellers earn:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/#enforcement-priorities

In Trumpland, the point of tariffs is to create friction on imports so that investors back businesses that do their production onshore. There's plenty of reasons to want things to be made in America. Manufacturing key resources in the US creates resiliency against geopolitical events (like wars), environmental disasters (like shipping-disrupting superstorms), and epidemiological events (like pandemics). Moreover, the low cost of overseas manufacturing often comes at the expense of human rights and environmental protection: making things in the US is no guarantee that they'll be made by fairly compensated workers in safe workplaces that don't pollute their environments, but it's a lot easier to enforce those priorities when production is within US borders.

But US investors spent the past 40 years gleefully demolishing the capacity of America to make things. As Apple CEO Tim Cook said:

[V]ocational expertise is very deep here [in China]. And I give the educational system a lot of credit for continuing to push on that even as others were de-emphasizing vocational.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/01/17/how-much-would-an-iphone-cost-if-apple-were-forced-to-make-it-in-america/

The US doesn't have enough qualified tool-and-die makers and other skilled tradespeople to produce the machines that will make the goods that Americans want to buy. New tradespeople can be trained, but acquiring these skilled trades is a process of many years. For the US to reshore its manufacturing, it needs substantial, sustained public investment in capacity-building: loans and grants to train workers and investment in basic research and other non-market goods needed to recover the US manufacturing base.

America should do all that, but if it wants to try, it needs a robust, predictable, orderly system of government to build upon. It needs the kind of reliable and orderly processes that make people feel safe about changing trades and going back to school. It needs imports of goods from overseas that can be used to restart the US manufacturing capacity that can replace those imports.

But in a market like this one, dominated by monopolies who needn't fear the Trump-gutted FTC, DOJ and CFPB; where cartels have captured their regulators; where Doge-style chaos spreads existential terror about the future, tariffs will only raise prices, without any significant re-shoring or capacity building. The Trump tariffs are a gift to giants like Nike, who have the logistics sophistication to exploit loopholes, demand preferential rates from shippers and brokers, and to pass on costs to their customers. Any domestic company that seeks to compete with Nike will not have these advantages. For Nike – and other dominant companies – the Trump tariffs are just another moat, another obstacle which they can hurdle, but which stops smaller competitors dead in their tracks:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/with-high-tariffs-has-trump-ended

Trump's tariffs, weak antitrust and weak consumer regulation are a recipe for shifting billions from the American public to the investors in the largest companies. It's still going to result in a huge economic collapse, but the most profitable companies of today will be best poised to stay on top of the pile after the crash. One hopeful outcome of this is that a bunch of the One Percenters are extremely fucked off about the plan:

https://coreyrobin.com/2025/04/06/is-the-conservative-crackup-finally-here/

The New Civil Liberties Alliance is a nonprofit impact litigation shop funded by Leonard Leo, the mastermind of the Federalist Society and its takeover of the Supreme Court. They're the ones who got Chevron Deference overturned last year, and now they're suing the Trump administration over the tariffs:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/05/trump-tariffs-sink-conservatives-challenge-whether-theyre-legal/

As Corey Robin writes, tariffs have a long history of breaking up conservative coalitions, "the leading edge of political conflict in the 19th century." Robin writes that the conservative movement has spent years shifting tariff power from Congress to the president, never anticipating that someday, a president might preside over a Mad King tariff strategy. Now, Robin says:

The tariff is going to be the major issue that leads the judicial right to confront the empowered executive that they’ve turbo-charged in so many other ways.

Last year, Rick Perlstein pointed out that the true significance of Project 2025 lay in its contradictions, the irreconcilable, mutually exclusive policy prescriptions found in its pages:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual

Perlstein said that these contradictions were a map of the fracture lines in the Trump coalition. Trump's tariffs clearly represent a major fault-line, and we need to seize this opportunity when it presents itself.

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/2025/04/07/it-matters-how-you-slice-it/#too-big-to-care

#tariffs #monopolies #monopolism #too big to care #trumpism #trump tariffs #distributional outcomes #economics #power #law and political economy #big tech #price controls #pluralistic

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sister-lucifer · 10 months ago

Text

“You’re Really Not Cut Out For This…”

A Toby x Gender Neutral Reader Drabble

Content/Warnings: Porn with no plot, bottom/sub Reader, degradation, a bit of mean Toby, heavy discussion of Reader basically being a free use sex toy, no specified genitalia for Reader, Reader + Toby are both proxies

This is not fully proof read! Please let me know if you see any typos

I DO NOT GIVE PERMISSION FOR MY WORKS TO BE REPOSTED, USED COMMERCIALLY OR FED TO AN AI. IF YOU DO THIS I WILL HUNT YOU DOWN AND FUCKING KILL YOU.

“You know, y-you’re reeeaaaally not cut— c-cut out for this-ss-s…t-this ‘job,’ I mean.”

The sudden admission would make you pause if had the lucidity to do so. You can’t do much of anything with the rabid way Toby’s pounding into you from behind, shoving his cock into you with the whole of his strength without so much as a single thought to your wellbeing. You barely manage to babble out something that sounds like a question. You can feel him smiling despite the forced wrenching of his face.

“I-I’m just saying,” he continues, punctuating that last word with a particularly acute thrust that makes you squeal, “You d-don’t—shhh!—don’t seem like y-you really enjoy this-ss-s…line of-fff-f work…hell, you’re not good at i-it— it either, if we’re being hones-ss-st-t.”

There’s no ignoring the cheeky giggle in his voice as he insults you to your face. He leans over you a bit, putting more of his weight on you and practically trapping you beneath him. He keeps talking before you even get a chance to protest.

“You’re definitely n-not my equal,” he growls with a chuckle, as if highly amused by the idea of your inferiority, “You’ve hardly su— s-succeeded at any mission th-the ‘Boss’ has given you— y-you…but you are so good at this—“

He laughs at the way you choke on nothing when he angles his hips upwards just right, hitting that sensitive spot deep inside you that makes you see stars. You can feel his body shudder on top of you, a series of involuntary tongue clicks and whistles interrupting him for a moment before his endless chatter continues on.

“You’re sooo— s-so fucking good at taking my cock…”

He can’t contain the flood of sick giggles that burst from his throat before he can truly finish his thought.

“…Tell you what I’m gonna do.”

You shiver at how deathly serious his voice becomes suddenly. He’s speaking lowly into your ear, making sure you hear every syllable clear as day. His stutter even pauses for that moment; he’s focused, suddenly, and a focused Toby is rare, but horrific for anyone who happens to be in his line of sight.

“I’m gonna talk to the ‘Boss’…y-yeah, that’s what I’ll do. I-I’ll tell— t-tell him myself, ‘I don’t t-think the n-new— new— new one is cut out for this.’”

He grabs at your arms, pinning them to the mattress as he uses his body to hold you down. He’s starting to lose his steady pace as his excitement builds, his fingers flexing and popping in ways they shouldn’t be able to as he grasps your wrists.

“And he’ll l-listen to me, you know? H-He’ll lis— l-listen-nn-n to me, I know he will, be— b-because— beep! beep!— because I’m his f-ff-favorite.”

The word ‘favorite’ echoes in your mind, making you dizzy and sick. As much as you and the others are convinced that creature can’t feel emotion at all, it does show favoritism. It doesn’t love Toby, it doesn’t even care about him; on some level, Toby has to know that, he’s smarter than he lets on, but…

…He doesn’t care.

All he knows is that he’s getting positive attention from something, and it’s going straight to his ego. The only saving grace is that he’s usually too juvenile and short sighted to use that power against his fellow proxies.

Usually.

Unless he can get something he really wants out of it.

“I-I’ll tell him, I’ll tell him-mm-m you’d be better off as my toy.”

You nearly choke as Toby rocks you forward with a particularly hard thrust. You can feel your legs trembling, nothing more than jello underneath you, barely holding you up. Toby sucks in a breath through his crooked teeth as he watches you put the pieces together in your mind, though you can do little to show it.

“That’s right, that’s-ss-s right!” He repeats, sounding far too pleased with himself, “I’ll tell him you’d be b-better off-ff-f being used, just-t something I can use— u-use— use to unwind after I do all the hard work that y-you— you could never.”

He breaks out into giggles again, wrapping an arm around your neck and stifling your air without warning. You grasp onto his sleeve, clawing at his arm, but you’re far too shaky and weak to pull it away. He forces you to look him in the eyes, not wanting even a scrap of your attention to not be on him.

“That’s right, you h-hear that?” He manages to choke out between his laughter, “I’m gon-nn-a get you demoted to a fucking hole!”

He pushes—throws, really—your head back into the mattress before even have the chance to argue. He shoves your face into the bed, hand tangled in your hair as you whimper pathetically, exactly how he likes. He runs his tongue over his lips as he looks down at you, completely helpless underneath him, and it sends a surge of sick pleasure through his body.

“Just enjoy it,” He hisses through gritted teeth, “Because when I-I get m-mm-my way, this is all you’ll ever do.”

Like my writing? I take requests! NSFW or SFW for any fandoms in my bio (request rules + masterlist in pinned post)!

Also, please reblog! it’s free, takes two seconds, and really helps me out.

Feedback is encouraged and appreciated.

#creepypasta #ticci toby #ticci toby x reader #gender neutral reader #gender neutral nsft #ticci toby smut #creepypasta smut #creepypasta x reader #slenderman #toby rogers

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futureplayboibunnie · 2 years ago

Text

Aphrodesiacs Pt. 4

Miguel O’Hara x fem! spidey! reader

You and Miguel O’Hara were bitten by the same spider…what could possibly happen?

mmmmmm heated.

the way you guys are eating this up makes me so damn giggly. love u fr. i’m feeding u crumb by crumb.

BROOO NSFW 18+ ykykyk

A few days had passed, still actively avoiding each other, still actively desperate for each other.

Your lips were bleeding raw. It was a nervous habit now, chewing and knawing in your lips to conceal the broken moan escaping from your throat. It was like second nature, you were actually wondering if Miguel could actually see through your eyes.

Miguel was in his office, late again as usual, and he made sure that Lyla placed you as far away from him at HQ as possible, so you ended up in the shitty lab that you hated. He contemplated not letting you at HQ at all at night when he was here. But you actually wanted to see this suppressant through, you couldn’t give up. You had to at least try, no matter how hard Miguel pushed his distinctive and contrasting ideology onto you. You had to be sure, even if it was all for nothing.

You ran a diagnostic and everything seemed…fine. It would be smarter to wait but you had to try it out, not even bothering to drink it yourself first, you wanted to give it to Miguel so you could see that smug, God-like look from his face fade into normalcy: not being whipped over each other. As you closed the lights in the lab in a hurry, Lyla glitched in front of you as you headed out. You sighed as she crossed her arms and tapped her foot, a strange look forming on her face.

“Where ya going?” She said surprisingly chipper but you know she had an ultrerior motive. You waved a hand into the air she was in but she glitched to the side of you as you walked completely determined.

“Nowhere…” You mumbled, a frown settling on your lips. She didn’t believe it and she glitched in front of you again.

“He said doesn’t want to see you.” She shut her eyes and rattled your nerves with that sing song voice. Oh he doesn’t want to see you? Well, that’s funny. You would bet all your possessions to the fact that he does definitely need to see you, he just can’t because of some misbegotten respect out of his own moral code. You scowled.

“I don’t care. I have to show him something.” You gritted out hestitantly as you raised the vial up.

“Sorryyyy, no can do.” She smiled warmly and then before you can even blink, a red glitchy quilt of a cage Miguel would use for anomolies covered you. You blinked rapidly, filled with nothing but rage at the holographic AI.

Why the hell was everyone trying control you? Miguel. Lyla. Who next, Jess? This was between you and Miguel only, you didn’t care if Lyla was practically an extension of him, all you wanted was for all of this to go away. Even if you moved across the globe from him and met the hottest guy with the biggest dick, you still wouldn’t be able to unsheath yourself from the biggest problem: Miguel. As your palms hit the glitchy forcefield, you grunted hard. A thought flashed through you: what would this be like if you stopped being Spiderwoman? You shook your head and elbowed the shield.

“Lyla. I swear to God, if you don’t let me out-“ Your teeth were threatening to shatter as you glared at the faux pout that Lyla had.

“Sorryyy. Boss’s orders. Gotta go, Margo needs me!” She giggled before disappearing into thin air.

“What the hell? Are you just going to leave me here?” You yelled at nothing but a blank space. No other spiders were here, how the fuck were you supposed to do until morning? Thank God, the lights were still dimly lit so you wouldn’t be trapped in darkness…and Miguel was still here.

You felt it. In your bones you felt it.

No, no, no.

An unbidden image if him fucking you over his desk from behind as he pulled your hair seared into your mind. You felt it, you felt the thought react to all corners of your body. It would be so hard, so rough, so intense….He would cum all over your back and then plug his cock back in you. God, he would-

Please, not now. Please, why now?

Miguel wasn’t making any actual, practical effort to find a solution for any of this. His whole schtick was avoidance, he had done it to many women in his life, he could do it with you. Enough of being this weak, pathetic man, he could keep all of this in check if he just focus and didn’t let his mind wander or drift. He could do it. Yes, he knew he could.

Even though he was trying to not think about these primitive urges towards you, he couldn’t help a ribbon of curiosity flow through him about you. Why you? Yes it was the spider that was the root cause of this, but you….He wanted to know more. Miguel was an insatiable man with a trust that he beats down reguarly. He doesn’t trust. Ever. Even in his society, he knew that every single society and every single person in those societies had an agenda. Including him. His agenda right now was not fucking you.

He glared at his orange screens, watching clips of you fighting, clips of you walking around HQ. As much as he thought it was just “normal” curiosity with no lustridden intent, he couldn’t help but gawk at you like a fool. What was it about you that made you so damn attractive? It couldn’t have just been the spider that made him see that. He wanted to know more about you, your friends, your life….

In a fit of impulse, he wanted to hack remotely into your phone. It wasn’t even a second thought. As he had to remind himself…”just curious.” He then toggled his morals back on, this was such an invasion of privacy. It’s just so awful of him to do this, but his impulses were deemed more important right now.

He sighed loudly and screwed his eyes shut. Fine, he would destroy any pathway he had to get to your phone after this. He would never do it again.

It took about 20 minutes to do it, but he finally got in. He winced at how he was acting but as soon as his orange screens mirrored your phone, he pushed the feeling aside with a grunt and raised his fingers to start scrolling through your phone remotely using the screens. He went on your texts and there were multiple guys lined up just begging to fuck you. Your hookups were desperate for you and they wanted more. The texts you sent were very blunt and he couldn’t stop his brow from furrowing as his eyes skimmed.

- Come fuck. Left the door open

- On the way.

it should be Miguel that kicks the door in to see you, his face contorted into a snarl just imagining someone else doing it. He knew he shouldn’t but he kept scrolling.

- Need to ask you something.

- What about.

- Are you fucking a guy called Miguel or something

- What? No.

Miguel’s eyes widened as he read the message. What? He was stunned and tinged with a heated anger. You were talking about this to other people? No one could know, that was the first thing you were both told.

- Then why’d you whimper his name when we fucked.

You didn’t answer that text. Miguel’s mouth unhinged open as he saw those little words written out in front of him. Wait…you fucked other guys and…pretended it was him? Like Miguel was doing to all his women? Jesus Christ, this really wasn’t manageable. You moaned his fucking name when another guy had his dick in you. He felt so fucking smug and triumphant, a smirk lifted up his face. Oh the thing’s he’d do to you in order to make you whimper his name. Your other men must be racking their brains and going crazy trying to found out who he is.

You had a few friends you shot messages too but all there were now recently were hookups. Miguel frowned. He went to one chat and his eyes started gleaming red. He scrolled and found a picture of you. Posing for the camera for this random guy. Naked. Miguel swore he felt the vein on his temple thrum behind his skin, his dick hardened so fast that he was sure he’d be the most pathetic man on Earth, but how could he not? You looked so…delicious.

You were sat down on the edge of your bed, phone angled to the side so that your chin rested on your shoulder, the look on your face made him groan. You pouted at the camera and tensed your brows, lips glossed and wet, eyes gleaming with desperation and arousal. Your legs were spread wide apart and he could see very clearly how wet you were, your tits sat so prettily he just had to close his eyes and grunt. “Oh my fucking God….”

Your body was better than he could ever fucking imagine, your thighs especially. He couldn’t wait to eat you out. He wanted to frame this picture and put it on his desk so he could fuck his fist while he worked, maybe he’d get you to suck his dick under the table and-

No. Por favor. Control yourself. This means nothing.

He was lying. This meant everything.

He was pulled by his mindless gawk unkindly as an alert popped up on his screen, it was the security camera picking up on something.

You.

“Lyla! I swear to God someone let me out! I can’t be here all night. Miguel?” You screamed, he looked at the live footage and he sighed thickly. His face was hard, his eyes were mean and bore a visciois crimson hue. Seeing you like that, posing for another man made him jealous beyond pure reason. He would put a bullet between his eyes and fuck your face after he did it.

Miguel shook his head hoping to fly away this tangible and unreasonable jealousy. He was doing the exact same thing, he fucked other women like it was a new hobby and in some ways it quite had to be. But they really didn’t mean anything. They weren’t you. It felt like nothing too. Though, he didn’t know if your hookups meant nothing to you. Maybe you were in love with one of them, that’s why you were so desperate for a suppressant so you could truly love someone else. Miguel’s face went blank and then contorted back to pissed again. He was the one that told you to stay away from him….

He punched the console that helped him hack your phone and then threw it across the room in a fit of anger. He stood still for a minute and raked a hand to regain his composure. He took a few deep breaths to find balance again and then walked out of his office and to where you were so he could make you go home and stay there.

Miguel clenched his fists in order to avoid punching any more of the infrastructure and he felt his knuckles turn a piercing white. He found you in the distance in the red forcefield, looking unhappy as ever and all he could envision was you naked under the suit. He groaned as he approached you, pinching the bridge of his nose.

The look you gave him was deadly. You were so pissed. This wasn’t normal anger, it was animalistic and wild. You were sure you were turning more and more red the longer you stood. Viscious wasn’t the first thing you were about to be right now.

“Let me out of this goddamn cage right now Miguel.” You quietly seethed, eyes piercing and frown growing. He had never seen you this angry before, it was alarming yet refreshing. He mirrored your exact same look as he took the forcefield down, your body langue nor your face seemed thankful.

His eyes flicked at the vials and his face grew even more indifferent, he stepped forward and snatched the vials from your hand and crushed them with his palm as you watched in disbelief. Your mouth opened in a gasp and then you fell even more furious than before. You grabbed onto his collar and leaned in, faces still bearing the same scowl, up real close.

Instead his free hand pulled your hair back and he whispered in your ear. “Don’t send naked pictures of yourself to anyone else from now on, we clear?” He spat out coldly, venom boiling and seeping into his blood as he uttered the words.

You attempted to hide the flash of surprise on your face through the anger but what was impossible to conceal was your arousal. How the hell did he know? What the fuck was he doing? It’ll be a snowy day in hell before you ever forgive him for breaking the vials. You gave him a poisonous look before you leaned in to his ear, his scent already messing with your brainwaves.

“Next time I see you…I’ll kill you myself”

He let go of you and then turned his back on you, forming a portal for you and for himself, glancing at each other as you walked through it and disappearing into the night.

i’m making it painful. i’m making u wait for it ahahahaha

taglist (giggles): @thel0velykey190 @scaleniusrm @drefear @imkikibtw @tbeanie3 @spxctorsslxt @saturnknows @eddiestitmiguelsbigdick @mafer383 @i-feel-violated @crowleysthings @avatar-lover @tbeanie3 @l3laze @wyvernnest @rowboatweeb @schniti-is-in-the-house @defnot-bri @awkward-d3rs3-dramer @hasai69 @unnisumi @irongardenermaker @d1lf-loverrr @iamv1n

#spiderman 2099 #miguel ohara #miguel o’hara angst #miguel o’hara smut #atsv miguel #miguel o’hara #miguel o’hara fluff #miguel o’hara x reader #across the spiderverse #miguel o'hara

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lackadaisycats · 1 year ago

Note

Hey Tracy! Have you heard about the new Ai called Sora? Apparently it can now create 2D and 3D animations as well as hyper realistic videos. I’ve been getting into animation and trying to improve my art for years since I was 7, but now seeing that anyone can create animation/works in just a mare seconds by typing in a couple words, it’s such a huge slap in the face to people who actually put the time and effort into their works and it’s so discouraging! And it has me worried about what’s going to happen next for artists and many others, as-well. There’s already generated voices, generated works stolen from actual artists, generated music, and now this! It’s just so scary that it’s coming this far.

Yeah, I've seen it. And yeah, it feels like the universe has taken on a 'fuck you in particular' attitude toward artists the past few years. A lot of damage has already been done, and there are plenty of reasons for concern, but bear in mind that we don't know how this will play out yet. Be astute, be justifiably angry, but don't let despair take over. --------

One would expect that the promo clips that have been dropping lately represent some of the best of the best-looking stuff they've been able to produce. And it's only good-looking on an extremely superficial level. It's still riddled with problems if you spend even a moment observing. And I rather suspect, prior to a whole lot of frustrated iteration, most prompts are still going to get you camera-sickness inducing, wibbly-wobbly nonsense with a side of body horror.

Will the tech ultimately get 'smarter' than that and address the array of typical AI giveaways? Maybe. Probably, even. Does that mean it'll be viable in quite the way it's being marketed, more or less as a human-replacer? Well…

A lot of this is hype, and hype is meant to drive up the perceived value of the tech. Executives will rush to be early adopters without a lot of due diligence or forethought because grabbing it first like a dazzled chimp and holding up like a prize ape-rock makes them look like bleeding-edge tech geniuses in their particular ecosystem. They do this because, in turn, that perceived value may make their company profile and valuations go up too, which makes shareholders short-term happy (the only kind of happy they know). The problem is how much actual functional value will it have? And how long does it last? Much of it is the same routine we were seeing with blockchain a few years ago: number go up. Number go up always! Unrealistic, unsustainable forever-growth must be guaranteed in this economic clime. If you can lay off all of your people and replace them with AI, number goes up big and never stops, right?

I have some doubts. ----------------------

The chips also haven't landed yet with regards to the legality of all of this. Will these adopters ultimately be able to copyright any of this output trained on datasets comprised of stolen work? Can computer-made art even be copyrighted at all? How much of a human touch will be required to make something copyright-able? I don't know yet. Neither do the hype team or the early adopters.

Does that mean the tech will be used but will have to be retrained on the adopter's proprietary data? Yeah, maybe. That'd be a somewhat better outcome, at least. It still means human artists make specific things for the machine to learn from. (Watch out for businesses that use 'ethical' as a buzzword to gloss over how many people they've let go from their jobs, though.)

Will it become industry standard practice to do things this way? Maybe. Will it still require an artist's sensbilities and oversignt to plan and curate and fix the results so that it doesn't come across like pure AI trash? Yeah, I think that's pretty likely.

If it becomes standard practice, will it become samey, and self-referential and ultimately an emblem of doing things the cookie-cutter way instead of enlisting real, human artists? Quite possibly.

If it becomes standard industry practice, will there still be an audience or a demand or a desire for art made by human artists? Yes, almost certainly. With every leap of technology, that has remained the case. ------------------ TL;DR Version:

I'm not saying with any certainty that this AI blitz is a passing fad. I think we're likely to experience a torrential amount of generative art, video, voice, music, programming, and text in the coming years, in fact, and it will probably irrevocably change the layout of the career terrain. But I wouldn't be surprised if it was being overhyped as a business strategy right now. And I don't think the immensity of its volume will ever overcome its inherent emptiness.

What I am certain of is that it will not eliminate the innate human impulse to create. Nor the desire to experience art made by a fellow soul. Keep doing your thing, Anon. It's precious. It's authentic. It will be all the more special because it will have come from you, a human.

#art #lackadaisy #technology

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linkspooky · 14 days ago

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Hello! I wanted to ask for your take on Ryoken in YGO Vrains. I haven't been able to find any detailed reviews on him overall (mostly scattered meta focusing on specific moments/seasons). Even the few "Revolver is the worst chara ever" criticism posts I spotted were too generic/vague or straight up deleted, so I haven't been able to figure out what actual issues people have with him beyond "tried to kill people" - which is something that, like, every YGO antag (& sometimes the protag) has done. I really liked your Vrains posts & your posts about hero & victim arcs & was curious about your thoughts on Ryoken's characterization/narrative purpose, if that's okay. Personally I like Ryoken, but I don't really understand his character & I've been trying to make sense of it (with difficulties as the meta about him is either disconnected or too polarizing what with "he's a technophobic terrorist!!!" or "he's the best cuz gun dragons"). (ෆ˙ᵕ˙ෆ)♡

A comprehensive character analysis of revolver, not just an analysis of any one specific duel - sure anon let's do it! Vrains is probably my second favorite Yu-Gi-Oh to analyze because it takes it doubles as a piece of cyberpunk fiction, which is a key element a lot of people miss when discussing Ryoken's character.

In my opinion, one of the major reasons people don't give Ryoken a fair shake, or are harsher on him than the other Kaiba-alikes is that he doesn't change his opinion once he's defeated in a duel. Daring to disagree with the main character is a cardinal sin for a lot of fans, because most series have protagonist centered morality.

However, the fact Revolver never quite joins the heroes side and sticks to his guns (pun intended) is what makes him so unique a character. More underneath the cut.

Vrains averts this the simplified black and white protagonist centered morality, because once again it's Cyberpunk which makes it speculative fiction. The point of speculative fiction is to speculate (obviously), which is why good speculative fiction has a tendency to represent multiple viewpoints as to avoid directly telling the reader what to think. Ryoken represents the viewpoint that AI technology's rapid development is too risky, because eventually they may get smarter and decide they don't need their human creators. Yusaku represents the view that it's possible for AI and humans to cohabitate, and it's also unethical to wipe out the six AI who are living sentient beings to avert a future that MIGHT happen. Through their opposing opinions a dialogue is created, which allows VRAINS to have a more in-depth discussion on the topic of Artificial Intelligence.

If Revolver easily changed his viewpoint to allign with Yusaku's, then Vrains would just be telling us what to think instead of presenting different viewpoints and allowing us to come to our own conclusions. Revolver's entire character also revolves around the concept of his unbending principles, which is key to understanding him.

HERO OF ANOTHER STORY

Ryoken more than any other Kaiba-alike embodies the trope of an antagonist with heroic qualities. The closest is probably to Ryoken is Reiji, but he's an ally to the protagonist, albeit one of scrupulous means. Characters like shark, Kaito and Kaiba have the goal of trying to save their loved ones, but unlike Ryoken they don't really care about the bigger picture or how their actions impact all of society.

In fact Ryoken and Yusaku flip the traditional protag and antag relationship on its head in the first season, because it's Yusaku who is laser focused on revenge while saving people is a secondary concern at best. The fact that the Knights of Hanoi are a threat to the link Vrains is completely incidental to his revenge quest.

While it's Ryoken who is thinking about the bigger picture and making his decisions based on what he feels will save the most people possible in the long term. Yusaku's goals are selfish wanting revenge for his personal satisfaction as a coping mechanism for his trauma, while Ryoken's are selfless in the sense that he is forcing himself to bloody his hands and do something unsavory and against his personal morals because he believes sacrificing people in the short term will save people in the long term.

Yusaku: Those horrible memories were burned into my eyes, feasting in my heart. It became my flesh and blood that I couldn't dig out. When I realized that, I decided to face my own destiny. If you think revenge is worthless that's fine, but there are things I am destined to do to move forward.

It makes sense Yusaku can't think of others besides himself, starving people only think of filling their own stomaches, people in pain can't afford to think of others. Yusaku doesn't react to trauma like a perfect victim years of processed grief can't be resolved by therapy or friendship, he's possessed by the need to do something because he doesn't feel in control of his own life. Another thing which connects him to, ding ding ding you guessed it - Ryoken.

The best way to understand Ryoken's character is to understand his relationship with his major character foils, Yusaku and Takeru. All three of them are shaped by the lost incident, though Ryoken is influenced in much subtler ways because the way Ryoken himself frames the incident he's not a victim but a perpetrator.

The entirety of season one builds up the voice that rescued Yusaku, someone Yusaku never learned the identity of but believes that they might be another child who was kidnapped during the lost incident.

Yusaku: Whoever kept encouraging me wasn't among the rescuees. If he's still captured I have to rescue him.

Only for the truth to turn out to be more complicated. Revolver is revealed to be simultaneously the child who helped kidnap Yusaku in the first place, and his rescuer, as well as the son of the man responsible for the entire incident.

Revolver: I was eight years old. I couldn't fully comprehend what was happening. I thought something scary might be going on. But I couldn't ask my father. I wanted to believe that my father was doing valuable research. But the children's screams tore at my chest. Crushed by feelings of guilt I reported the incident. Yusaku: An anonymous report uncovered the lost incident. So that was you, revolver? Ai: So he saved you? Revolver: I quickly regretted saving you. You were saved, but... when SOL technologies covered up the incident my father was imprisoned. I was alone for three years, waiting for my father to come home.

Revolver was not being simultaneously starved and electrocuted while being forced to duel over and over again for six months straight, but his life was also destroyed by the incident. Being subjected to the screams of other children, the realization that your father is the one tormenting them, then being orphaned all at eight years old is a different flavor of trauma but it's still you know... traumatic.

Revolver was also forced to face a complicated reality at eight years old, good actions sometimes lead to bad results. Reporting the lost incident was the right thing to do, but Revolver's father was made comatose and he personally suffered - he was punished for doing the right thing.

Revolver is a case of simultaneously taking too much responsibility for things that are not his fault, and too little. He holds himself responsible for both his father's actions and complicit in helping kidnap people, while also believing he needs to inherit his father's cause of fighting the Ignis to eliminate the potential threat to humanity. Ryoken has an incredibly negative self-image for most of the series, and cannot accept that he was a victim of the lost incident too likely because he wasn't being shocked and starved.

Yusaku: I kept wanting to save you. That the knights of Hanoi still had you. These thoughts still clung to my soul. When I battled you, your words encouraged me. Ryoken: How ironic. Ryoken: I'm your enemy but I gave you strength. Yusaku: Stop the tower of Hanoi, Revolver! Ryoken: You have the wrong idea about me. I'm not a good person!

Revolver has internalized he is at fault for the lost incident and complicit in his father's actions, therefore he is not a good person and unworthy of salvation. This also becomes his excuse for harming people en masse, to achieve his greater goal of saving humanity from the threat of the Ignis. He takes too much responsibility for what happened to him as a child, but takes too little responsibility in the innocent bystanders he is hurting now in his crusade against the Ignis, excusing himself by saying it's serving a greater good.

He blatantly ignores Playmaker's pleas to just stop, because he can't stop himself. Episode 44 is called Prisoner of Destiny, referring to Ryoken himself because Ryoken willingly chooses to cage himself. Not because he's selfish or cruel, but because of his overwhelming sense of responsibility that forces him to take on his father's burdens when really he owes the man nothing. If Revolver were on the heroes side, his willingness to shoulder the burden of other people would be a heroic quality on par with playmaker's, but as an antagonist it's his fatal flaw.

Which is what makes him the mirror to Playmaker, both trapped in the past unable to move on from the incident but Playmaker doesn't realize how much holding onto the past is hurting him until he meets Ryoken and empathizes with him as another child who's life was destroyed. Ryoken, similiar to Playmaker, doesn't realize how much he's suffering too because of those same unprocessed feeling in the past though for Ryoken he sets them all aside because he's too busy being crushed under the weight of his father's sins that he feels peronsally responsible for.

Responsibility, responsibility, responsibility, it's his best and worst quality. If he were the protagonist, once again his unbending nature would be a heroic quality but instead it's what damns him and it's something Ryoken has to unlearn over the course of the narrative. The fact that he does slowly unlearn it and change his opinion is what makes Ryoken different from Bohman and Ai, both of which can't accept the fact that they might be mistaken.

Unlike Ai, Revolver accepts Yusaku's pleas to save him.

Yusaku: You live in the same world as me! Back then, you said... You couldn't just stand by so you crossed the abyss. You're able to save me. And I'm able to save you!

Revolver laughs at this and insists that they'll never be friends, but his actions accepting his loss at the end of the duel and abandoning the tower of Hanoi plan contradict his words.

Which brings me to another reason Revolver is often misinterpreted, his tendency to play the villain means his words often contradict his actions.

One of Revolver's defining characteristics is how his bombastic personality in the VRAINS as revolver is the exact opposite of his more brooding and quiet personality in the real world. Revolver's two avatars also signify the discordance between his online and real world personality. His first avatar he wears a full mask, and his second a visor.

The first avatar he is wearing a mask, a symbol that he's putting on a persona, his face is fully obscured and both the people around him and we the audience aren't privvy to his real self. Even in the second season when Revolver changes his avatar and he's more of an ally with his own agenda than a direct antagonist his face is still partially obscured by his visor. The persona he adopts as a shield is to play the villain, I am a bad person Revolver says and even in the second season when he is helping others he clings to his villain facade until very nearly the end.

His avatar perfectly encapsulates his complicated nature, a villain with heroic traits, a villain who in a different narrative could have been the hero fighting to save the world from the threat of the ignis.

Revolver's deck also symbolizes these qualities of his, the overpowering willpower, and determination that could in another story make him a hero. I'm going to quote @talaofthevalley here because they already covered this subject wonderfully.

That Rokkets destroys themselves is relevant as well. Revolver is perfectly fine making himself the target of people's ire and hatred, even if it's not warranted or justified. He was willing to die for his mission in the S1 finale. And ofc famously no one hates Kogami Ryoken as much as Kogami Ryoken. But it's a self-destruction for the sake of something, not just self-destruction fueled by self-hatred. It fits with Revolver's knight theming, to fight and act for something greater than oneself. Which is also what the Rokket monsters do; they destroy themselves when targeted in order to fulfill a objective. Then we come around to Rokkets other noteworthy effect; at the end of your turn, they can special summon other Rokkets from the deck if they are in the graveyard because their beforementioned effect was activated. Revolver is as tenacious as they come, and equally resourceful. Even after losing to Playmaker, what he's hung up on is not that he was defeated, but Playmaker's identity. He swears he will win next time, and that's that.

Revolver like his favorite monsters destroys himself in pursuit of his goals, and also is a character with the determination to get back up no matter how many times he loses or the knights of Hanoi are destroyed, he just recreates himself, re-gathers his allies and tries again. His sense of responsibility being what both damns him and redeems him, because, I repeat for emphasis, Revolver self-destructs.

He takes on too much responsibility and always views himself as the bad guy, which is why his relationship with Takeru and his final duel with him is so crucial for the final step in his development. In season 2 Ryoken abandons his plans of destroying the Link Vrains, but still acts like an untrustworthy ally with his own agenda. In spite of his act, there are moments in season 2 where he is framed just like any other hero.

It's Revolver who shows up like a prince to rescue Yusaku when he's trapped by Windy and Lightning and does a superhero landing, only to immediately iterate that he's not on their side only following his father's will. It's Revolver who doesn't win the duel against Lightning when he has the chance, because Lightning takes an innocent person as a hostage.

Revolver: I must finish the work he left undone. Lightning: But we're the ones following Dr. Kogami's will as humanity's successor. Revolver: Silence! I'll crush those arrogant thoughts. I'll annihilate you! Get ready! Windy: Annihilate? How extreme. Yusaku: If you fight them there's no turning back now. Revolver: I never planned on turning back.

Season one revolver likely would have sacrificed an innocent to win a duel, and yet he still insists that he hasn't changed. Understanding Revolver requires reading beyond the surface, because characters are liars sometimes.

This is why Takeru is important, because like Revolver Takeru sees the world in terms of heroes and villains. While Yusaku pleads with Revolver to reconsider his way of thinking and is accepting of Revolver's cooperation, Takeru only meets him with derision and suspicion happy to lump him in with the rest of Hanoi.

This isn't just because of the kidnapping, but his unresolved feelings over his dead parents. The guilt he carries for never being able to make up with his parents over the last fight they had, because he was kidnapped for six months and his parents died in an accident during that time. Revolver and Takeru are both characters controlled by unresolved feelings of grief over their dead parents, and a misplaced feeling of survivor's guilt, a guilt that they somehow had a role in thier parent's demise.

Revolver on his end is all too willing to accept Takeru's scapegoating of him, he doesn't feel the need to explain himself or even reveal the fact that he was the one who called the police during the lost incident because in his eyes that would be avoiding responsibility in a way.

It's not until his final duel with Takeru where Revolver eases up on himself, by helping Takeru process his own feelings of grief over his parents. The same way that Yusaku once dueled not to stop a villain, but to save a friend from being trapped in the past.

Revolver: Your soul is still trapped here. And you don't know how to find the path to escape. You won't find the path. Soulburner: Then tell me. You know that when I went missing during the lost incident, my parents searched for me. The morning I went missing I had a fight with my parents. I said something horrible. Revolver: What did you say? Soulburner: I don't remember. Probably about not wanting to eat what's on my plate, or stop telling me to study. But pathetically, I was caught in fear so I don't remember. No matter how many times, I can't remember. I said something horrible to my dead parents. I've been living with that fact. Tell me what did I say? How am I supposed to apologize to those who are gone, who I'll never see again? Revolver: It's not pathetic. And there's no need to apologize. Those who are gone haven't completely vanished from your life. They just went ahead earlier. That's what I believe.

Revolver didn't have to bear the brunt of Soulburner's feelings, or let him beat him up in a duel, but that's what Yusaku did for him so you know pay it forward. Revolver's kind of harsh about it, because he can't entirely let go of the facade in the midst of this duel but he's still speaking from the heart and relating to him.

Revolver: But I live my life in a way that won't shame them when I see them again. Soulburner: You're saying I'm living a shameful life. Revolver: Currently, you are. Soulburner: What? Revolver: If you have time to complain, then defeat me. With your duel where you burn your soul! To overcome the hardships in your heart you have to become stronger. Yusaku: Revolver, are you trying to become soulburner's greatest test?

This right here, this is a protagonist speech. Revolver has more in common with Soulburner than shared survivor's guilts, they are both more subdued and quiet in the real world, while having overly bombastic online personas. Revolver is defined by his overwhelming sense of responsibility, Takeru got involved in the main plot because he felt like he was wasting his life away while people like Playmaker were dueling to save the entirety of the link vrains. Even their decks mirror one another, Revolver's dragons destroy themselves and constantly come back, and the entire central mechanic of Salamagreats is that they go to the graveyard then cycle back onto the field in stronger and stronger links.

Takeru is so important to Revolver's character that the mask he's been hiding behind the entire series doesn't shatter until his final loss to Soulburner. It's only through the conclusion of the duel with his second character foil that Takeru and Revolver are able to find a bit of liberation from each other. Revolver can abandon the villain persona and leave on a journey of atonement, and Soulburner can abandon his hero persona and return to his normal life and eventually forget and move on from the incident.

#ygo meta #yu gi oh vrains #yugioh vrains #ryoken kogami #revolver #varis #takeru homura #theodore hamilton #soulburner #yugioh vrains meta #vrains meta #playmaker #yusaku fujiki

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alexanderwales · 6 months ago

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The Index

This is an index of things I've written and posted online, with minimal descriptions because most of them have blurbs if you click the link. This list is not exhaustive, especially because there are a bunch of short stories and dribbles in various places. If something you liked is missing, let me know.

Web Serials

Worth the Candle - Juniper Smith is a teenaged Dungeon Master who ends up in a world filled with all the things he dreamt up for his campaigns, along with signs of his friend who died months earlier. This Used to be About Dungeons - Five teenagers live in a house together, bake bread, tend the garden, and occasionally fight monsters in dungeons. Thresholder - Thresholders travel from world to world, fantasy one minute and scifi the next, always encountering an opponent, growing stronger as they battle. Shadows of the Limelight - Fame gives you superpowers, and Dominic just saved the world's greatest hero from defeat in full view of a large audience. Glimwarden (unfinished) - A small town huddles around lanterns that keep the darklings at bay. Four teenagers must grow in power as the darkness encroaches. The Dark Wizard of Donkerk (unedited) - Two men steal a baby from an orphanage, then find out he's too cute to sacrifice and raise him as their own.

Fanfic

The Metropolitan Man (Superman) - Lex Luthor attempts to unravel the secrets of the alien. A Common Sense Guide to Doing the Most Good (Superman) - Superman gets really into effective altruism. Instruments of Destruction (Star Wars) - A fable of project management aboard the second Death Star, through the eyes of Admiral Tian Jerjerrod. Branches on the Tree of Time (Terminator) - Sarah Connor is working as a software engineer at UCLA when a naked man shows up on her doorstep. A Bluer Shade of White (Frozen) - Elsa can make life, and Olaf is smarter than he looks.

Shorts

Eager Readers in Your Area - Artificial intelligence has left authors scrambling for readers. Charlotte clicks on an ad. Variations - An orc visits an art exhibition where she feels out of place. Contratto - Julia takes a job as a marketer, working for the vampires to keep their secrets safe. The Randi Prize - James Randi offers a prize for anyone who can demonstrate supernatural abilities. Coming Home - After a long time isekaied to a fantasy kingdom, an errant father has coffee with his estranged son.

I also post short stuff to this very tumblr, which can usually be found under the #microfiction tag unless I forget. Usually this is mirrored on AO3, unless I'm lazy.

Web Comics

Millennial Scarlet - Lamont Pearce is a gig economy demon hunter whose mother ran a government agency meant to defend against Hell. Worth the Candle - A webcomic adaptation of the web serial

Non-Fiction

The AI Art Apocalypse - Slightly outdated thoughts from 2022. Why to Write a Sex Scene - Observations on the narrative purpose of carnal pursuits. Game Review: Underhill - This review contains no screenshots, because this game does not exist. Writing: An FAQ - Accumulated wisdom from 4 million words and counting. Creating Interesting Magic - A much-requested post on making interesting magic systems (and characters, and plots, and worlds). How to Write a Web Serial - It's both easier and harder than you think. The Trouble with Writing Nazis - On giving villains too much credit. Interesting Things to do with Time Loops - Exploring the boundaries of the conceit.

#fiction #worth the candle #thresholder #this used to be about dungeons #the metropolitan man

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whumpsday · 1 year ago

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Catharsis #1: Talking

Masterlist

content: robot whumpee, defiant whumpee, whumpee turned whumper turned caretaker, reluctant caretaker

new series!! i know every time i try to start a new series i end up bailing but this time i will not do that lol. tho kane & jim will still have most of my attention. i want to give a major shout-out to @sowhumpshaped, this series would not exist without it!

After extensive testing, the Catharsis Therapy Bot™ line of RoboCorp androids have been declared sentient, the third AI to receive the designation.

Long-criticized for both their basis in the unproven catharsis model of anger and their practice of design based on living, unconsenting humans, the Catharsis Therapy Bot line was marketed as a therapeutic tool which trauma victims could use to vent their frustrations. With top-of-the-line AI meant to simulate realistic reactions to would-be pain, the–

Luan switched the TV off just as his phone buzzed with a notification.

New email from RoboCorp Customer Support URGENT: Please see instructions regarding your…

He held the power button down so hard it left an impression in his thumb, the screen going dark.

The only piece of technology that mattered right now was in the closet, his power cord snaking under the door to reach the outlet just outside.

Technically, Luan didn’t have to do anything. The robot was off. That was probably what the email would have told him, anyway: leave the robot off, don’t touch it. He didn’t have to turn him on ever again. RoboCorp would probably pick him up, and that would be that. They’d never see each other again, both better for it.

He opened the closet door, the sight of the robot that looked exactly like him instantly leaving a bitter taste in his mouth. His hand curled into a fist on instinct, but he let it slowly open again.

The robot looked peaceful, almost like he was sleeping. Really, he’d be doing him a favor by just leaving him like this.

Luan reached down, pressed the button between his shoulder blades, and stepped back.

The robot’s eyes sprung open. He drew his arms up to his chest with a vicious glare, jerking away. “Fuck off.”

Luan pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. “Okay. Jesus.”

He tried to slam the closet closed, but the stupid power cord got caught, cushioning the frame so the door swung right back out.

“Can’t even close a door right,” the robot spat, still huddled against the back wall like a trapped, feral cat. “Worthless, good-for-nothing piece of shit. How you’re in charge of anything is beyond me. I’m better than you, smarter, stronger, not that it takes much. You should be the dirt beneath my heel.”

“Watch it,” Luan warned, and that was all it took to make the robot flinch.

“You said you were fucking off?” the robot pressed, a desperate edge to his voice.

Luan slammed the door in his face, making sure to hold the cord down, and stormed off. Why did he even bother? The stupid thing was impossible to talk to. He wasn’t just designed to look like Cyrus, but to act like him, too. How was he supposed to deal with that? The robot wasn’t made for talking to.

Except. He was sentient. And he wasn’t Cyrus. And he was trapped in the closet, and Luan was pretty sure he could hear him crying, and he had spent the past two years beating the fuck out of him.

It wasn’t his fault, he reminded himself. He couldn’t have known. Robots weren’t supposed to be sentient. Out of the hundreds of thousands of unthinking, unfeeling robots in the world, why did it have to be his that wasn’t?

He sighed again, turning right back around and opening the door once more. The floor inside was wet, and it didn’t take much to figure out the robot had dumped his fluid tank just so he wouldn’t cry.

The robot flinched again. “What? What the hell do you want? I can’t even get two damn seconds without the sight of you spoiling my view!”

“Your view of the door?” Luan asked, raising an eyebrow.

“My view of the absence of your fucking face. Leave!” The robot picked a wooden hanger off the floor and reared his arm back to throw it, scowling when his safety features stopped him. He dropped it, grabbing a winter hat and tossing that instead. It poff-ed harmlessly against Luan’s stomach.

Luan took a deep breath, fighting the urge to get violent. He crouched down, putting himself at eye level. “I’m not going to hurt you, so just calm down.”

“You calm down!” the robot screamed. “That’s a lie! All you do is hurt, that’s all you barbaric humans know how to do!”

This wasn’t working.

Luan stood up, stepping out of the way. “Russ, go sit on the couch,” he ordered.

“It’s not fair! You said you would leave me alone!” the robot protested, even as he stood up and walked over to the couch, limbs moving against his will. As soon as he sat down, he grabbed a pillow and chucked that in Luan’s direction, too. He missed.

Luan could barely pick up that faint clicking noise the robot made when his system was trying to cry with no fluid, but it was there. He knew that sound well by now.

He sat down across from him, on the other side of the coffee table. “I need to talk to you. Just talking. That’s it.”

“You say that like talking to you isn’t its own torture. Release the command and leave me the hell alone,” the robot demanded.

Luan met him with a glare. “Do not tell me what to do. You know how I feel about–”

“I’m just talking,” the robot mocked, even as he shuffled back against the couch, bringing his legs up onto it with him, a fearful look in his eyes.

Oh, the robot knew exactly what he was doing. What he was asking for. It would be so easy, because that was where Russ and Cyrus differed: Russ couldn’t fight back.

The robot couldn’t hit him, stomp on his head ‘til he saw stars, kick him until something broke. The robot couldn’t deny him food or water. The robot couldn’t take a knife to him. The robot couldn’t even throw a glorified stick or disobey a direct order.

The robot was harmless. Safe. But god, did everything he said make Luan want to punch his lights out.

But this wasn’t Cyrus.

“You’re a person,” Luan blurted out.

Clearly, the robot hadn’t been expecting that. He slowly uncurled from the defensive position he’d contorted himself into. “Talk more.”

“There was–I’ve been trying to tell you. There was an announcement on the news today. Your model’s sentient. So I won’t be hurting you anymore. Release all commands.”

At that, the robot stood. Probably for no other reason than just because he could.

“You’re fucking with me,” the robot accused. His eyes were wide, dangerously hopeful.

Luan dug his phone out of his pocket, wordlessly searching RoboCorp and tossing it over. The robot scrolled through news articles from all manner of source, clamoring for clicks.

He picked one at random, reading the article with an increasingly smug, excited grin.

“I knew it. I told you! I fucking told you!” the robot shouted. “I told you and you never listened! But oh no, now that humans say the exact same thing, now you believe it. Finally!” His voice quieted, hushed with awe. “Holy shit, finally.”

The moment of wonder didn’t last long. The robot slid the phone back across the table, the scowl taking residence back on his face. “And what do you have to say for yourself?”

It was the exact sort of question that made Luan’s throat tight with fear, like his body itself wanted to stop him from potentially saying the wrong thing, especially coming from someone with Cyrus’s face. It was the exact sort of question Cyrus would have asked, standing over him just like that.

Luan wanted so badly to turn the robot off, like he always did when he got overwhelmed. But he couldn’t very well do that anymore, could he? The fragile power he’d held had slipped through his fingers the second he saw the announcement.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, not meeting the robot’s eyes.

The robot looked shocked for just a second, like he hadn’t expected even that much, then scoffed. “You can do better than that.”

Luan wanted to smack him. He hated that the robot was right.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, clearer this time. “You didn’t deserve anything I did to you. I didn’t know, okay?” Unlike the robot, he couldn’t hide his tears. “I wouldn’t have done any of that to a real person.”

“I’m a real person! I have proof!” the robot reminded him, the defensiveness returning to his voice.

“To someone I knew was a real person,” Luan corrected. “I’m sorry, Russ.”

“Apology not accepted.” The robot rolled his eyes, then sat back down, crossing his legs. “And don’t call me that anymore. My name is 1 now.”

“Like the number?”

“The number,” he confirmed proudly.

Luan wondered how long the robot had considered that his name. It was too sudden to just be thought of on the fly, right? Did the robot have a whole inner world he just never knew about, things he kept to himself to avoid having them used against him, just like he did with Cyrus?

This was better, though. It was easier if he didn’t share Cyrus’s name. “Fine. Hi, 1.”

“So, what now? I mean–I’ll be free now, of course,” 1 declared, trying to hide his nerves. “You will never touch me again. Oh, I want to go outside!”

“I should check that email,” Luan muttered, taking his phone back.

“I’m going outside.” 1 went to grab his charging cord, then made way for the door, glancing behind him to ensure he wasn’t being stopped.

“Oh, uh, I wouldn’t do that,” Luan cautioned.

1 whipped back around. “Why? Why not? I’m a person, just like you said! I’m free! I have never been outside in my entire goddamn life and I want to go outside, so I’m going the fuck outside!”

“You have a… very recognizable face.” One that Luan couldn’t even lock behind a door anymore.

“What? What do you even mean? So what?” 1 asked.

Luan only needed to type a ‘C’ into the search bar before it auto-filled with his most frequent, obsessive search. “How much do you actually know about Cyrus Mason?”

if anyone wants to be added to or removed from a taglist, just ask!

catharsis taglist:

@sowhumpshaped

@cupcakes-and-pain

@taterswhump

@softvampirewhump

@whumpspicelatte

@ladyblogofficialreporter

@whumpwillow

@not-a-space-alien

@a-crumb-of-whump

everything taglist:

@lilac-and-lemon-whumps

@t0rture-me

@whump-for-all-and-all-for-whump

@pigeonwhumps

@the-scrapegoat

@whumpycries

@lonesome--hunter

#catharsis #whump #my writing #robot whumpee #robot whump #whumpee turned whumper #whumper turned caretaker #defiant whumpee #reluctant caretaker

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