#i thought i posted this a while ago but it was actually posted as a draft

[remxedmoon]

help help help the bugs are multiplying how do i get them out this is urgent

HI SO I WAS SUPPOSED TO POST THIS. A WHILE AGO. but yknow how it is with spaghetti. iii might’ve procrastinated by Drawing and also playing the game again. oops. anyways!! i’m super happy with how these turned out, i think they look way better than my first attempt at a lineup at least. who would’ve thought that actually drawing the characters more than once helps your art look Good

also, since eugene doesn’t have a non-house color palette, i went ahead and made my own as an alt! and also also, guess who made another google drive! i’m not doing another redraw project or anything, but i wanted to have all my sticker designs in one place for easy use!! just like all of my other fanart, you can do whatever with these!! go nuts!!!

[xbuu]

Jack of Hearts game! Chishiya x Fem! Reader

You've been stressed in the last few rounds of the Jack of Hearts game, so Chishiya decides it's time to help you relax.

Content: Fluffy smut, teasing, slight exhibitionist kink, jacket stays on during sex.

Word count: ~1.4k

a/n: i have a ton of fics to post already (3) but I'm scared of posting them all at the same time in case i run out of inspiration and don't post anything for a while so I'm really spacing them out. also got my first ask a few days ago so I'm working on it anon!!

"Are you sure they won't hear?" You bite your lip, hesitantly wrapping your hands around his neck while your right leg bounces nervously.

"Sure." But his answer doesn't do much to calm your nerves. You know he'd take you anywhere, regardless of who could hear. His arms wrap around your waist and lift you on top of the dusty plastic table. It'd do, at least until you got out of the game.

A small, dark storage closet wasn't the most romantic spot, but he had grabbed your hand after the tenth round was over and guided you to the furthest away room he could find.

It's been a few long hours, and with the remaining contestants all having another person they could trust, the game had proven hard to break. He'd just have to break you, in the meantime.

His hands fly to your shorts, unbuttoning and unzipping and throwing them away in a blink of your eyes. Your hands fly to his pants, but you're considerably slower than usual, your mind still wrapped around the details of the game, the players, the rules, how to—

"Don't think." He stops you with a call of your name. "Let me worry about that. For now, I want your attention on me." He slips off his pants himself with that awfully sexy smirk. Oh.

You give him an uncertain, anxious smile, and you cup his face and lean in to get lost on his lips. He's a great kisser. An amazing kisser. And as his tongue sneaks into your mouth you forget everything about the game.

He doesn't let you dwell on anything for too long. He's already pushing into you, unzipping your skimpy shorts and pushing your panties to the side, while your tongue remains wrapped around his. You're so used to his cock it feels like getting home whenever he pushes inside of you.

The moans you produce are swallowed by him until you weakly push him away, gulping in a breath and throwing your head back. He lets his head get pushed back, though he doesn't pull his strong grip of your hips away, pushing slowly to help you get used to his cock. He isn't the girthiest, but he's long.

"I'll have to make this quick, won't I?" You're too busy getting dicked down by him to actually reply, but you mentally answer, your thoughts trying to pull you away from him. He pulls you back to him when he sheathes inside of you and his tip grazes the spongy spot inside of you.

"Chishiya!" You yell, completely out of your control, and he covers your mouth as you dig your nails in the back of his jacket just lightly, in warning of what's to come.

"We can't have you screaming out for everyone to know what we're up to. Remember the couple just before the game?" He whispers, right in your ear, causing you to shiver. Of course you remember, Chishiya had pointed them out to you, and it made your cheeks flush red even if it wasn't your moans that were ringing through the cells. They definitely are now, though.

The words (that he definitely purred out like a cat) make you bend into his body, hide your face in his shoulder and replace his hand on your mouth with his neck. He hasn't even started thrusting yet and he has you at his mercy.

"Are you hiding from me?" He laughs, so unbelievably irritating, especially when he has you in this position. You open your mouth to retort, but he grabs your hips and pulls out only to thrust back in.

"Chishiya!" It's halfway between a word and a moan, but he doesn't really mind how loud it is, lifting your knees up to the height of his shoulders, only to fasten the rhythm until it causes you to slump on top of him.

"You're not going to talk back to me?" He hums, and swallows a groan that you definitely noticed from resting your head so close to his neck.

"I—" You muffle another moan on the softness of his white jacket. "Stop teasing." You demand, as if it would change his incorregible behavior.

"But I love how flustered you get." He laughs, a small noise on the back of his throat, and you can feel the vibration as you wrap your arms around his neck and bury your face in order to muffle an impending moan.

"Stay quiet." He reminds, but he doesn't stop his thrusts or his soft breaths on your neck, doesn't offer a hand on covering your mouth again since muffling your moans on his shoulder doesn't seem to work.

"C-Can't." You admit, through bitten back moans and soft whines that had the potential to be screams.

"You can." He pushes. He always adores pushing your limits, seeing how many you can take of his fingers, or how many orgasms until you beg him to stop, or in this case, how long until you are forced to scream out from the pleasure.

You kick at him from your very limited position he holds you up in. His hands under your knees, bringing them up to your chest to really be able to break you in half. He doesn't stop his thrusts, though, laughing lowly through your kicks and squirms and muffled whines.

It's not long until you feel that familiar feeling in the bottom of your tummy, a warmth that threatens to make you scream so loud that everyone in the building will know what you're up to (if they didn't, already). Chishiya can feel how you're tightening up around him, unfortunately, and he will never miss the chance to make you flustered.

"Are you close?" He whispers, and if you were able to look at his face you'd witness his signature smirk on his face.

"No." You reply, maybe a beat too fast, but you forget how well he knows you, how well he has studied your body, how well he has memorized the pulses of your pussy and the twitches of your stomach. He doesn't reply, he lets you think he believed your lie, only adjusting your body slightly in reply.

You keep muffling your sounds and digging your nails on his back for the next minute, though it feels like a long, agonizing hour has passed when he finally gets rougher, quicker, even if only by a split second. It's just what you need to get over the edge.

That is, until Chishiya lets go of your left knee, running his hand down your stomach and your heat until his finger grazes your soft, aching clit.

Just the soft touch makes your hips fly from the table to his, moaning with disinterest over who hears. He laughs, low and teasing, and pushes your head into the nape of his neck, but you can't hear anything over the blood rushing to your ears and your heavy pants as you reach your climax and cover his dick in slick white.

He doesn't stop the thrusts into you, and his breaths turn labored and heavy. He's close, you know by the way he seems tempted to bury his face on your neck too, by the way he almost curls into you, by the way that he has stopped laughing and resorted to panting into your ear.

"Are you close?" You bite back, now your turn to pull him close to you by wrapping your legs around his waist. He grunts back, so low you barely hear it.

It's not every day Chishiya seems so fixated on your body, almost like he also has something in his mind he wants to lose inside of you, so you know you'll take full advantage of it. You cup his face with one hand, bringing him close to you as you face his ear.

A breathy, pornographic moan of his name next to his ear is all he needs, and with no warning, he cums deep inside of you, staying still with a final thrust of his hips.

He stays inside of you for a couple of seconds, wrapping his arms around you. Only after both of your breaths have evened out and you stop shivering he cuts through the silence. "You know you have nothing to be scared of, right? Not while I'm here. I'll find the Jack."

"Mhm." He pulls back just enough to look into your eyes, his eyebrows level, but the corner of his lip twitches up just barely, you're sure you caught it.

[rinseveryday]

wdyt when early in the series, some demons called Rin "Young Prince" or something like that? I thought it was strangely endearing and creepy.

I LOVE IT (warning, long post ehe)

The gap between Rin being Just a Dude tm in high school and his secret identity as the Prince of Gehenna ouhhh I ate that up so bad. I don't know why only this ghoul called him "Young Prince." Maybe it only knew Rin's identity because Mephisto told Neuhaus who told his familiars, and, like Lewin says later, Rin actually exudes an aura of Human Teenage Boyness. Even Kuro, who basically spends all his time with Rin and knows exactly what's going on (supposedly), never acknowledges Rin as any sort of demonic royalty. That also could be because he's a cat...

Oh what did I think about it, oh anon you weren't here two years ago when I was so sick in the head about it that I basically manifested Demon King Rin into appearance.

So the story is, I tweeted "man I miss when demons would call Rin "my prince" and then I made my own fantasy AU where he's a secret crown prince that they found in a church after Father Fujimoto died because Father Fujimoto was two-timing as Rin's dad and also Mephisto's puppet king so now Rin wears a samurai mask because i thought it was cool he needs to hide from assassin attacks while he figures out life as royalty (barbie prince and pauper style >:D)

I drew a different design than what's posted below but it was ugly so I did fanart of the tiny itty bitty Rin design that had just dropped in chapter 139 to feed myself instead because there hadn't been any mention of Rin's princely status since chapter 5 and I WAS STARVING. There's so many fics and art of slice of life aoex and it's all well and good but I'm literally withering here with me and my couple of friends who want to see Rin really take on the title of Prince

yeah um yeah anyways just look at the timestamps and tell me I'm not a psychic for seeing all these details in this pixelated af screenie. Okay rant over *kisses rin on his mask*

Bonus: Rin being a true King by saving Izumo from embarrassment

[adhdo5]

I was prompted to post these a bit ago bc of my madness posting abt the Xiyao laundry audioextra upload someone posted like last week and I think there is really a lot there in the Xiyao laundry thing in general (hashtag release the Yunping tapes) and not all of it is smth I see ~talked abt as much as I think it deserves SO . Collected thoughts on Xiyao laundry

OK so like Yeah they're cute. I absolutely get why people's primary reaction to this is that it's cute and I think this is not even wrong. The politics of uselessness r complicated and I Will be returning to this but a legitimate angle of this is that LXC, who has spent his life largely defined by the fact that he pretty much excels at everything expected of him, has nothing expected of him and gets to be incompetent at something he ~feels obligated to do and have that not actually be a fail state, still get offered the same kindness regardless of his ability to be exceedingly capable/responsible etc.; meanwhile MY, who historically has had pretty much no one ever gaf about whether he's struggling or overworked or generally about him as a person (and the audiodrama extra version even has a bit where MY's coworkers are shit talking him including talking abt how he's probably not even actually doing any work), has someone earnestly caring about that, if ineffectually, and materially recognizing his workload as important and effortful and trying to help him with it. That is I think legitimately kind of sweet! Especially if one interprets the "he didn't even know who I was" line as true and as in the audiodrama extra this is set b4 MY figures it out! They appreciate each other in ways they don't usually get to be appreciated and it's nontransactional in this way and ;x;

HOWEVER. #Nuance. There's Other Angles.

I've talked abt this before inc on my blog but I do kind of never get tired of thinking abt it: there's a reason LXC is incapable of doing laundry and it's not just inexperience it's that he is physically incapable of the task bc of his cultivator strength!!!!! And the disparity of cultivation level is explicitly a class thing w/ JGY wrt 3zun especially!!! No matter his intention Zewu-jun CANNOT SULLY HIS HANDS WITH THE TASK bangs my head against a wall. It's such an innocuous detail yet it captures how from even this early on in their relationship and in this context it's not ignorable how much LXC is in fact a nobleman where JGY is not and this is a literal physical difference and it's in his very flesh and it has explicitly destructive results. See again vampire AU posting

And going off that it's notable how this does in fact also end up creating more work and while MY doesn't begrudge that in the moment and it's pettier here and arguably inextricable with the first point (LXC is not only incapable here he's actively bad at something, he actively makes smth worse and he's forgiven for it and that's genuinely kind of nice) it's it's also worth noting more grimly given how their relationship ends. It's not just destructive it's destructive to MY specifically

And on the notes of "inextricable from first point but also tragic" – it's sweet tht LXC gets no external consequences for this (yet lol) but is that really something he can Accept. It is an arguably underexamined element of Sunshot Xiyao how fucking miserable LXC is; he might be in an environment where this isn't fucking him up but he did bring his complexes here and you don't suddenly know how to accept that kind of grace yknow – and, and this is tangentially related to the stuff I was posting earlier today, this is one of the first of several kinds of vulnerability that LXC's almost only able to experience with MY/JGY. Considering how much that's arguably a running theme for them and considering where that leads that's also quite Foreshadowing Dismal!!

This is an audio drama exclusive but the way in the audiodrama extra ver that MY realizes who LXC is here and then ~lies about it is also crunchy as helllllll

AND between the coworkers thing in the audiodrama extra and the added scenes in the donghua and this and the notion in general (which comes from MXTX's post) that it's important they do the laundry themselves bc the robes would give LXC away it's a highlight of how genuinely precarious this is for MY which is another thing that both makes it more sweet and more. Despair.

It's just so lovely how it is both indicative of how genuinely good they are to and for each other, the ways in which they're meaningfully and significantly compassionate and helpful to one another, and also of the ways in which their situation here is precarious and high-stress and dangerous as fuck, AND also the ways in which they hurt each other so so bad, and how all of those things are largely different facets of the same qualities and the same significances. And That's My Post. Stream Apple Pie by the Scary Jokes

[quitealotofsodapop]

I decided to just post as is legit could not think past thay part.

It was late when the knock came. Wukong frowned as he looked up from the movie he was watching, some action film based on Erlang of all beings he was only a quarter invested in and was more simply using ot for background noise while he laid on his beat up old couch. It was well past midnight and he definitely wasn't expecting any company. Cautious, he groaned as he stood up, tail flicking as the knock came again, much more loud and aggressive this time.

"Alright, alright! It's well past midnight, you better have a the hell of a good reason for banging on... my.... door." Wukong grumbled loud enough for his impatient guest to hear, all but tearing the door off his hinges in his frustration as he aired his grievances, only to trail off into shocked silence when he sees exactly who his unwanted visitor was.

Wukong blinked twice at the sight of the figure shadowing his doorstep, not quite believing his eyes. He pinched himself and even flashed his Eyes of Truth to ensure it wasn't a dream or illusion. The dark furred monkey with a red butterfly eye marking did not disappear from sight or suddenly transform into something else. In fact, his already sharp grin became even more pointed and wide once he noticed Wukong had opened the door.

Wukong slammed the door shut, pressing his back against the wood as his heart began to race, knowing that the barrier of wood between him and the other monkey would do absolutely nothing to keep him out. How the hell- why is Macaque there!? What did he want!? Even as the thought crossed the former king's mind he knew the answer. Macaque was there for him!

Thinking quickly, he locked the door, activating the barrier spell he'd preset on the door years ago, and began turning every light he could on as he locked it and then fled to his bedroom, closing the blinds and trying to prevent as many shadows as possible. It was a foolishness endeavor, this house lighting was a few dim bulbs, one for each room, and the one above the front door always flickered. At most it'd buy him a precious few seconds... at worst it'd be a waste of time and those precious seconds used to turn the lights in could have been put to better use getting as far from the door as possible or escaping. Either way, Wukong knew one thing. He did not want to know what the shadow monkey wanted with him!

In his haste he slammed to hard against the corner of that hallway that led to his room, knocking a picture from the wall with a crash as at the frame shattered. He didn't have time to pick it up, choosing instead to run through the broken glass and ignore the sting and the bloody footprints left behind as noticed the shadows at the entrance begin to darken, trying to to think about the content kf the photo and how MK's graduation photo would now probably be ruined and covered in blood. A sharp sting to Wukong's power reserves told him that the barrier had easily been torn through, and now Macaque was in his home. It was a weak little thing, meant moreso to keep mortal thieves out than to prevent anyone with any real power from entering, Wukong hadn't thought he'd need something stronger.

After all, a simple mechanic would have no need for a guardian level barrier spell on his door.

'Then again,' Wukong had a hysterical thought as he all but burst down his bedroom door and flew across the room, rummaging under his bed for his bolt bag, 'Most simple mechanics aren't actually demon gods in disguise!'

Cursing as he wiggled under the bed, regretting that he kept it so far into the corner that he had to practically shove his entire body under the small space to reach it, he could sense the area around him getting cooler and his ears flicked back and forth as a reverberating laugh began to bounce off the walls around him. He's out of time!

His heart was bearing so fast he could hear it in his own ears, and so he knew his unwelcome guest could hear it, as he resched as far as he could and just barely managed to snag a claw on the beat up old bag's strap. He smiled at that, a small flame of hope beginning to burn in his chest only to be swiftly snuffed out as he felt something grab his leg. With the yelp, he was pulled from under the bed, stars exploding from behind his eyes as the harsh tug caused him to bang his head on the wooden frame as he was exposed and made vulnerable before his pursuer. Dazed, he could feel himself being turned over onto his back as something dark and heavy grabbed at his wrists and pinned them adjacent to his head, the straddling his stomach as he leaned over him, face inches from his own.

"Hey there, You're Majesty!~" Macaque's dark, silky voice purred out, his breath against Wukong's ear as he finally blinked the spots away and took in his position. "You are not an easy person to find, you know that!?"

In another life, Wukong might have felt agitated and annoyed by Macaque's tone, might have mocked him and pointed out that that had been the whole point of taking on a new identity. He might have fought back or slammed him against the wall, demand he leave his home and go skulk off somewhere else. Shown him the power of the Great Sage Equal to Heaven as he chased him away from this very realm. But this isn't that life. Wukong isn't that person anymore, he hasn't been for many, many years.

He didn't ever want to be that person anymore.

"No matter, I found you in the end." The Macaque continued, realizing the king wasn't going to speak, "Bit of a dump, huh? What sort of place you running here, Wukong!? This is far from your usual grandeur and wealth. If you hadn't been so bold and attention seeking during New Years I might never have found you!"

That's because Wukong isn't a king anymore. He gave up his crown centuries ago, and now he is a simple mechanic living in the upper apartment of his garage. He turned his head, not able to find the words to explain to him that this is his own way of protecting everyone. That the Monkey King is no more, that what happened on New Years had been a fluke, a that the Spider Queen had forced his hand. Sun Wukong was, as far as Wukong himself was concerned, supposed to be dead and buried. It was safer for everyone that way, where the monster in China's history is forgotten and faded into nothing more than myth and legend where he can't hurt anyone ever again.

"Well!? Aren't you going to say anything!?" Macaque demanded, growing frustrated at Wukong's perceived disinterest in him, his hands releasing the golden monkey's wrist, grabbing at the front of his filthy tank top instead to slam him against the ground. The metallic taste of blood hit his tongue as one of his sharp fangs nicked the inside of his mouth. Wukong reflexively squeezing his eyes shut as the wind escaped his lungs and his head banged once more against a solid surface, this time the slightly softer thin carpet of his floor. "Where's your silver tongue, now!? No excuse? No comeback!? What the hell is wrong with you!?"

Miscommunication, thy name is Shadowpeach.

Wukong is convinced that Macaque is there to try and kill him. And why shouldn't he?!

Ignores even his own injury from trying to run just to put more distance between them.

And Macaque is angry. Not just because of their fight and his death. But mainly because Wukong seems So... Not Wukong! This isn't the prideful King he knew and fell for all those centuries ago! Where is he?!

Wukong is trying to stop himself from saying that his mate is "As beautiful as the day I lost you." between desperate pleas that Macaque just stop and leave him to his mortal existence.

Eventually the shadow monkey gives up, and seeing Wukong "like an idiot" ran through broken glass; decides to start grooming and tending to him. Wukong is so puzzled and tired that he just rolls with it.

Wukong awakes to a bandaged foot, the smell of breakfast, and a super protective jealous not-ex-anymore husband in his kitchen cleaning up the shop like it's their new nest.

[canmom]

analogistically

or, the adventure of canmom on lysergic acid diethylamide

Epistemic status: jam session

Two months ago I dropped acid for the first time, which surely explains a lot about recent posting trends on canmom dot tumblr dot edu. It was exactly as extraordinary as you would hope your first time on psychedelics would be. Among other things, LSD kind of acts like an intense reverb filter on your thoughts, boosting the intensity of sensory perceptions in various ways (for e.g. touch, music, colour, edges) and putting your capacity to form associations into overdrive. I did a lot of classic 'on drugs things' like staring very intensely at my hands or a piece of flatbread trying to map my perception into some kind of visual effects filters I might be able to recreate later... my best description is something akin to motion extraction as the primary effect, causing all sorts of little surface details to pop out very vividly as I moved an object.

This, however, is not a trip report; just an attempt to explain some ideas and connections that were formulated while on acid, in a state where my eyes were full of interesting fractals and I couldn't remember the world 'analogously'.

Here's some music to start us off - one of the first things that I listened to during the trip and something which probably informed the very geometric path I went down...

This is a music track that can be interpreted simultaneously as music and, when used to control an oscilloscope trace, as imagery. The whole function that generates it fits on a floppy. The beat of this music basically stayed with me throughout the whole trip, and for a while afterwards.

One of the curious experiences I had during the trip was what the (sadly no longer actively updated) psychonaut wiki calls perceived exposure to the inner mechanics of consciousness. Although it's not listed as a common effect of LSD, and said to be associated with a higher degree of visual effects than I reached, the description does resonate:

Perceived exposure to inner mechanics of consciousness can be described the experience of being exposed to an array of complex, autonomously-generated, cognitive sensations and conceptual thoughts which contain detailed sets of innately readable information. The information within these sensations is felt to convey the organization, structure, architecture, framework and inner mechanics of the underlying programming behind all conscious and subconscious psychological processes. Those who undergo this effect commonly interpret the experience as suddenly having perceivable access to the inner workings of either the universe, reality, or consciousness itself. (...) These specific pieces of information are often felt and understood to be a profound unveiling of an undeniable truth at the time. Afterward, they are usually realized to be ineffable due to the limitations of human language and cognition, or simply nonsensical, and delusional due to the impairment caused by of other accompanying cognitive effects.

Here, it felt like a kind of separating out of processes within my brain: a separation of sensory processing, conceptual thinking, and the word stream operating with a slight delay between them.

I imagined these different elements of me kind of floating in some kind of space, that each one possessed its own space of meaning, and that thoughts were being mapped between the different parts. I imagined that they were all working in concert to make 'Bryn' happen, so much so that I didn't perceive the different parts most of the time, and that they seemed happy with this arrangement. I also hit on a very striking metaphor of thoughts as oscillations and the resonant modes of the brain.

Afterwards, I wondered how much of this was driven simply by inputs - elaboration on stuff I'd been learning about recently, which we'll get into in a bit. I find it hard to be confident that what I perceived was actual 'direct' introspection, rather than a narrative conjured on the fly by my brain when prompted to generate a 'look inside'.

However, even if it was not the direct observation of some kind of 'brain telescope', it certainly gave me a lot of rich connections to think about. So the purpose of this post is to flesh out and record what came to me very intuitively at the time. Although my direct memory has faded a bit, my brain is still oscillating intently (upcoming metaphor) with thoughts inspired by what I explored there.

We're mostly talking about human brains here, but I will be talking about AI stuff as well, largely as a provocative counterexample.

Prior to the trip I had recently watched 3Blue1Brown's video on how LLMs encode meaning with high-dimensional vector embeddings and the 'attention' mechanism:

To try and summarise briefly, the meaning of a token inside an LLM (and various other types of machine learning system) is an incredibly high-dimensional vector of associations. By combining information from elsewhere in its inputs, the LLM is able to alter its encoding to take into account which specific nuances of a word are relevant here, its grammatical role in a sentence, etc.

How exactly a concept is encoded is essentially entirely relative: a vector can be said to encode a concept because it activates other nodes in the network that correspond to that concept (insofar as, by the time that it percolates through the LLM into its final output, it generates tokens that a human will associate with that concept). It can also come in degrees, rather than being purely binary. The correspondence of individual nodes with concepts can be identified using techniques like sparse autoencoder dictionary learning, which let you find neurons strongly connected to a certain concept which can be 'pinned' to force the LLM to behave in a certain way. And they can also be in a 'superposition' of corresponding to multiple concepts that would be relevant to humans.

Crucially, the 'space' of concepts that a given LLM understands is entirely specific to that model. You can't tale a vector inside Claude and directly convert it into a vector that works for DeepSeek. You have to figure out a mapping between the two spaces.

So let's talk about spaces, and then we'll talk about language.

Spaces & thought-oscillations

Perhaps not surprising as creatures who spend our lives navigating 3D environments, one of the most versatile recurring metaphors in maths and physics is an abstract space.

In physics: you have regular physical space where particles might live; you have phase space, the high-dimensional space of all parameter values and velocities accessible to a system; you have Hilbert space, which is the infinite-dimensional space of all states of the quantum wavefunction; you have Minkowski spacetime of special relativity and various curved spacetime manifolds of general relativity which can be parameterised in multiple ways; you have frequency space accessed by a Fourier transform... Other fields have their own spaces; biology has its own phase space describing populations for example.

In my current field of computer graphics, spaces abound just as much. In rasterisation, you define your verticex positions in object space, then map them to world space, and project them into clip space before the projective-geometry perspective divide finally maps them into screen space (where various further algorithms can take place). But we are far from done! We must also keep track of the UV space over the surface of an object, and the tangent space defining directions along the surface for certain kinds of anisotropic effect. A lot of graphics calculations involve mapping points in one space into another space. It's linear algebra all the way down, baby. Even more abstract spaces like all the different colour spaces are there.

One interesting area where spaces come up is the study of oscillations. For many oscillating structures, from something simple like a string on a violin to something complicated like a building, you can decompose the motion into a combination of pure, sinusoidal vibrations known as normal modes. You do this by turning the system's equations of motion into a matrix and finding its eigenvalues and eigenvectors. Remarkably, these form a basis, meaning that you can break down the system into a sum of eigenvectors, evolve them independently, and then add it back up.

Now, let's return to machine learning, and its feature spaces. In an LLM, the feature-encoding vectors evolve in discrete steps passing through layers of the LLM. High-dimensional vector spaces also show up in neuroscience, for example when using electrode arrays to monitor the activity of neurons.

However, inside a brain, the whole system is temporal in nature, and you have all kinds of feedback effects, which means you could imagine these 'feature vectors' not as static things but as oscillations.

I imagined a thought as something like a spiky little blob oscillating with various overlapping modes. Well, I'm a 3D artist, let me make a picture of that for you. Let's make it a demo even. Let's go to Switzerland and spend a weekend trying to make a visual representation of something I saw on LSD. That's a cool thing to do.

This is a superposition of spherical harmonics, all given different frequencies. The (infinite) set of spherical harmonics forms an orthnormal basis for functions on a sphere, so if you took each component of one of those ultra high dimensional vectors as the coefficient of a spherical harmonic, you would get a unique bumpy shape.

Funnily enough, I was inspired by code that was written for displaying data from MRI imaging, although that is pretty much entirely a coincidence because there it represents something quite different, the diffusion of water molecules.

With this metaphor in hand, we can imagine recurring patterns of thought (ranging from comfortable turns of phrase to traumatic flashbacks) as something like the resonant modes of a system. They are easily excited by random impulses, and slow to die out. Conversely, other types of thought might be heavily damped. Much like a violin bow provides a whole bunch of noisy excitations which ultimately end up exciting a string's resonant modes, the noisy sensory input would get distilled down into oscillations.

The idea of considering the movement of neurons through some kind of phase space is not so outlandish. In fact, recent research has been investigating the topology of 'subspaces' explored by neurons in the brains of mice, as discussed in this video (yes I've been watching a lot of Arsem's videos lately...)

However, the exact meaning of any of these hypothetical 'modes' is entirely contextual. We might be able to say 'this mode is stimulated when you receive sensory input with the colour red' for any given brain, or even section of one brain.

But to map the oscillations in one space into another space, we need to have some kind of common interface. Perhaps for adjacent regions of the brain, we could go 'directly', with one functional unit of neurons wired up to excite corresponding oscillations in another.

But what about brains that are only connected by whatever you can pass through the physical world inbetween them? Sound, images, etc.? How can you create a correspondence there?

Language

Writing has been described as a kind of telepathy: we encode our internal world into a series of symbols (either as images or sound), which are then decoded to generate a thought in someone else's brain - one that is notionally equivalent.

But what is the nature of that equivalence? It isn't that it will make the exact same pattern of neuron firing in your brain that it did in mine. After all, you have a completely different neural network that has learned different inputs. So there is some kind of mapping from one space to another: the pattern of activity in my brain and the pattern of activity in your brain are related in some way.

We all know that the meaning of sounds in language is pretty much arbitrary. It's built by associations: you have learned that the symbol-sequence 'red' corresponds to this colour's internal representation [assuming your monitor is not calibrated in a really weird way].

And insofar as we have broadly similar sensory and bodily experiences, it is possible to build up this mapping of associations between words, sensations, and whatever other internal representation exists in our brains. It's also a feedback process, spawning all sorts of social constructs by giving them names and acting as if they exist.

However, language does more for us than this.

A moment of introspection: I personally experience an ongoing verbal 'stream of consciousness' most of the time. How this manifests more concretely is that words come to me rapidly from 'somewhere inside'; if I am speaking, I might consider briefly whether they are the 'right' words before saying them.

Internally, I might consider a thought that occurs to me and decide that I do not agree with it, or just think about a sentence I have thought as a kind of 'object', as if I am perceiving it from a different vantage point. It seems to be impossible to consider a thought 'as I am thinking it'; only after it has entered into memory can I 'observe' it.

When I was on LSD, I perceived a kind of 'separating out' of the 'inner', nonverbal process of thought and the linguistic stream. There would be a delay in which the linguistic stream would be waiting for input, and would have to kind of 'spin its wheels' and fill space as it waited for something concrete to encode. This separation was quite delightful, since I am not used to perceiving it in such a way. Other times when I was on LSD I had a vague sense of multiple thought streams occurring in parallel, of switching tracks to bring one or another into salience (something covered here on the psychonaut wiki). I'm not entirely sure if these 'seemed verbal'.

This suggests to me some kind of feedback cycle, of thoughts bouncing between the 'language space' and the broader 'conceptual space' of the rest of the brain. Speculatively: my brain might encode something into language in order to store it while it thinks about something else, for certain more 'sequential' forms of thought, or to activate resonances with linguistically-encoded things. By bouncing thoughts in and out of 'language-space' it might be able to perform different kinds of thinking/computation.

Expanding the space

One of the more intense images that occurred to me while I was jamming with all these ideas of spaces and oscillations was the thought of how new ideas get encoded into the space as I encounter new things and learn. I had recently made two friends, and I had the idea of new dimensions appearing: first a direction that was associated with my friends as a pair, and a secondary dimension that encoded the differences between them.

Each of these 'dimensions' would be associated with other concepts by the dynamics of the neural network.

Visually, I imagined a line extending out from (something that represented the space), and then dividing into another line. I think this is kind of what is meant when the psychonaut wiki speaks of 'intrinsically understandable' geometric representations: I knew exactly what this line was supposed to mean, but it would hardly be clear if I drew you a picture.

Exactly what that 'adding of dimensions' would mean on a physical level I can't tell you. I don't think it's like my brain was literally growing an extra neuron that would specifically be stimulated by thoughts of my friends, like the now-famous 'golden gate bridge' neuron in Claude. Internally, it all presumably exists in some nebulous state of superposition with all sorts of other ideas. Maybe you could extract a vector associated with that concept by some kind of statistical bullshit if you had somehow access to the states of all the neurons, but we don't. Do we?

...well, I thought we don't. Actually we pretty much do have access to individual neurons in mice. We can do all sorts of crazy shit like make their brains transparent and attach glowing proteins to specific neurons that are activated when a specific memory is stimulated. That is fucking insane. We are literally living in an age. Here's Arsem again:

The idea of 'engrams' as the physical correspondents to memory is nearly a century old, but now we can actually physically observe them.

So, you develop a new concept-association, and a certain subset of neurons get tagged to that concept and excited when it comes up. We mentioned these 'subspaces' up above: presumably that is what could be said to grow an extra dimension. If I have a conceptual dimension that is 'associated with my friend M.', presumably there is a set of neurons that correspond to her, and another set of neurons linking them to various concepts that I associate with her, my memories of what she looks like, etc. etc.

I get a strong sense that the more things that I encounter, the larger my internal 'space' of concepts becomes. But these feature dimensions don't seem to be 'independent'. I suppose what I'm approaching obliquely and fuzzily here is the idea of covariance, and the covariance matrix seen in techniques like principal component analysis. Or something to do with the subspaces mentioned above.

The role of prediction and roleplaying

The thing language models optimise for is to generate something that is contextually appropriate and consistent. This results in a curious behaviour akin to 'roleplaying', where the model will respond as if it's 'in character', according to a premise set up in a prompt.

I previously talked about the 'free energy' model in neuroscience, in which the brain is constantly attempting to predict the next sensory input. There, the main point was in the creation of art: that a lot of the interest we have in artworks comes from its delicate balance of predictability/unpredictability.

However, I think the brain is also predicting something even more significant: itself!

Viewed in another light, an LLM generates a variety of contextually plausible tokens that it might continue along, and then it selects one. The form of its selection is to pick one at random. However, what if it was not random? What if there is some process that views the prediction output and goes 'yes, that one?'

When I am talking, ideas of things to say will come into my head. I will have just a moment to decide whether to let them come out my mouth or not. Or, I will think a thought in my internal 'stream of consciousness', and then conclude that 'yes, that is good' or 'no, this appals me, I won't say this'. We could say that the process that is generating the stream of language is attempting to predict whether I will find it agreeable, or interesting, or relevant or some such thing.

In other words, I am continually engaged in an elaborate performance of 'Bryn'.

On LSD, I had the curious sense of how all these functional elements I was dimly sensing within my brain were acting in concert to produce 'Bryn'. I had the strange and honestly very comforting sense that they were all happy to play a role in generating this persona. I don't know how much credence to lend to this idea.

When I enter a new social context where the rules are unfamiliar (such as a kink scene, c.f. everything is roleplaying except roleplaying which is improv), I become temporarily compromised in my ability to perform the contextually appropriate character. I need to get a sense of the dynamics of this new space - in other words, my brain must develop its prediction-model. It is, in other words, very much like learning to play a new game. (I'll read you eventually, Wittgenstein.)

Depending on context, depending on which set of dynamics you are attempting to predict, different memories will become more or less able to be drawn up through the associative links. Feedbacks are possible; hence 'flashbacks', emotional and literal, where the memory becomes so furiously excited that it shuts out everything else for a while. But this also shapes what sort of person the brain predicts you will be (and thus gives you the option to be) in a given moment.

Compression

Prediction, game-playing, and performance are all facets of this constant process of updating my internal representations - in other words, adjusting the resonances and dynamics of those neuron-interaction spaces. The brain 'wants' - generally tends - to simplify and abstract. In other words, it wants to compress - to discern underlying patterns so it can store its information and generate predictions more efficiently.

So it will try to relate unfamiliar new things to familiar types, and then, where necessary (e.g. because of an extended interaction with a person or a thing), flesh them out with additional details - which is to say building out a subspace for that thing to vary within.

When I was first transitioning my gender, I had a pathetic tendency to view all these interesting new women I was meeting as instances of the same type. It made me embarassing; I was viewing people as a category, not as individuals. Now many many years later, probably the subspace for thinking about all the different trans women I know is one of the larger ones in here. Perhaps other information has been forgotten (dissolved into noise) to make room for it.

The more time I spend with someone, the more specific associations I can build with them.

The more I can get a sense of the dynamics of their inner meaning-spaces.

Initiate feedback loop

So we encode high-dimensional oscillating thoughts into a stream of language-associations in order to excite analogous thoughts in the brain of another person. But of course, that person will have their own associations. Different memories and ideas will be excited by that word. I can only dimly predict how my words will be perceived.

But communication is not hopeless. Because we can ask for clarification. We can pass messages back and forth. Clarify the shapes of each of our thoughts.

The specific ideas I use for introspection, whether or not I'm under the influence of a powerful substance like LSD, are all influenced by the history and the models my brain has built. I like physical science metaphors, obviously. I am a creature who can't help but think in the language of dynamical systems, feedback loops, networks of interacting elements, fluids (hehehe), component parts, parallel processes, games, and of course abstract spaces...

Perhaps it is a worldview that is proper to this moment in the story of the superorganism!

This post represents the most complete effort I've made so far to encode the 'working model' I have of the shape of thinking into language. But the things I am talking about are very abstract, and the direct experiences I refer to are only really available to me - I can only hope that my words excite something analogous in your mysterious meaning-space.

Listen to me banging on about oscillations though. Might as well go full hippie and call it vibes. You can take the girl out of Glastonbury, but...

Postscript

The other image I had while I was on that LSD trip was of each brain existing somewhere in a void: each a constellation of connected parts, which only occasionally get so lucky as to brush up against another such structure and glimpse another mind. Each one trying desperately to roleplay itself in the face of chaotic input and its own inscrutable behaviour. As many people do when they take this stuff, I felt a sort of empathy for everyone, even - especially - the people who had annoyed or troubled me. A glow that lingered long after.

I do not think I am anywhere near done with this quest to understand what the hell I am, or what any of us are for that matter. It's impossible, isn't it? To somehow find a model of the universe and all within it so elegant that it can fit inside here and so rich it captures all that complexity. Authors to read, conversations to have (hii), sensory and emotional experiences to flesh out the spaces.

But before all that... or running through all that... is of course, well, other people. You lot. Endlessly mysterious creatures who continue to fill this hungry, vibrating brain with strange oscillations. Have you considered yourself as the nucleus of the fractal patterns evolving within the ~800,000,000,000,000,000,000 human neurons, and all that we accumulate around us? I don't know, is that a silly metaphor? Do you like it?

"The net is vast and infinite".

That's all we've got for tonight, folks. We've been canmom - love you all, thanks for listening!

[midnight-in-town]

hello! i have been following for many years now and love your kuroshitsuji thoughts and theories. i’m curious specifically about something you’ve talked a bit about before: o!ciel’s potential to accept himself for who he is, shed his brother’s identity, and grow as a character. while i think this is possible (and would be my ideal ending for his character, whether he gets revenge or not), i’m not sure how he would even start to consider that change with Sebastian by his side. so 1. how likely do you think it is that o!ciel would be able to make that change while still under Sebastian’s influence and 2. do you think the story would ever separate o!ciel and Sebastian for a long enough time for substantial character growth to happen? thanks and happy early Valentine’s Day!

Hi Anon ! Sorry for the delay :) Thank you for the kind words !

So, as I discussed previously, I actually think our!Ciel from 4 years ago (when RC died) is different from our!Ciel we've been following since the start of the series.

As in, while the primary choice to "become Ciel Phantomhive" was born out of survivor's guilt [X][X], four years later "Ciel Phantomhive" has become an identity that represents who our!Ciel is more than who real!Ciel used to be/is as a bizarre doll.

That's why he said, in ch147 :

So personally, I stand firm on the idea that "Ciel Phantomhive" is our!Ciel's identity by now, meaning he doesn't still follow the idea that he should be the Earl his brother was supposed to be.

That being said.

While our!Ciel may have slowly molded the identity "Earl Ciel Phantomhive" to his image and not to real!Ciel's image, our!Ciel is still a character who is full of guilt, about many people in his life, as ch95 showed :

Mostly, his inner self interprets that the guilt he feels (about Ann, about his brother and about Joker and Doll) is linked to the choice he made to bind his soul to Seb and to become "Earl Ciel Phantomhive", four years ago -> this is why I think he has some development to undergo about the contract and his bond to Seb and why a possible conflict may arise between them. [X][X]

Now, to specifically answer your questions :

"1. how likely do you think it is that o!ciel would be able to make that change while still under Sebastian’s influence"

First of all, you are right to say that Seb exerts some kind of influence on our!Ciel. To quote this post, "Kuroshitsuji wouldn’t be as compelling and enjoyable as a story if our!Ciel’s lack of self-worth and faith wasn’t supported by Seb acting as a catalystic abyss." Because, ultimately, Seb has no reason to want our!Ciel to reflect on wanting (or believing he's worth) a future and to try breaking the contract, which is why the Undertaker quickly became such a threat :

That being said, Seb's influence may yet be counterbalanced by other characters who have a more positive influence on our!Ciel and, tbh, that's what I'm betting on, once Ciel will stop isolating himself.

For now, Seb mostly encourages our!Ciel's isolation. This was made very clear by Bravat (who works for UT)...

...and it's a fact that was even picked up by Soma, who mentioned to Agni that "our!Ciel is terrified of being happy" :

Because being happy would mean, to our!Ciel, thinking back on the contract, on why he made that choice four years ago...

and on all the people he believes he doomed by making it (his brother, Ann, Joker, Doll, as hinted by ch95).

However, there is still hope : until recently, Kuroshitsuji was mostly told from our!Ciel and Seb's perspective, yet the massive Blue Sect & Blue revenge arcs changed this. We had Edward's POV, UT's & real!Ciel's, Sieglinde's briefly and Soma's. We also had the servants' independent investigation mini arcs, which all revealed what strongly binds them to our!Ciel, their master. Multiple POVs may help us realize better how the people close to our!Ciel actually perceive him, like with Soma in ch126.

In other words, our!Ciel being a kind and good person is why so many people care for him to this day, but like Soma said, he can't acknowledge it yet, or it'll make him think back on the contract to Seb dooming his future and a chance at happiness. So it's why I believe the narrative calls for our!Ciel to be challenged on that view, specifically because revenge is not presented to be a good goal to have, thematically speaking.

How and when Ciel will have this opportunity for development, I do not know, but a part of me hopes it will involve having Frances as his mentor. To quote this post, "I’d say Frances will probably take on a more active role in the plot when, to quote Seb in ch14, “[our!Ciel] will overconfidently believe that he cannot lose and that it will be necessary for him to carry himself with humility while striving for his goal”. Because by then, “an adult who will be firm with him is what he’ll need”."

While Frances as his mentor may mostly be what will allow our!Ciel to win against the combo RC + UT, it may also be what will allow our!Ciel to be closer to people who want better for him than Seb does, liberating him from all that guilt he feels.

"2. do you think the story would ever separate o!ciel and Sebastian for a long enough time for substantial character growth to happen?"

I already more or less answered just above, but I don't think Seb and Ciel need to separate for this growth to happen, or at least to be triggered. Taking the example of the Green Witch arc, despite what some readers may otherwise believe, there is a gap that exists between them...

...and Seb arrogantly believing he's stronger than mere humans, thus that he always has the upper hand anyways, may be the tiny crack that will ultimately allow some development for our!Ciel. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

TL;DR our!Ciel is a kind character who suffers from a lot of inner guilt, something that Seb won't try to solve, because it makes things easier for the contract, thus for his meal.

Other characters who want Ciel's happiness however (the Midfords, the servants, Soma, Sieglinde) may help him address that guilt and that could ultimately trigger a conflict between Seb and our!Ciel about the contract.

Sorry for rambling, I hope I managed to answer your questions. ^_^ Thank you again for the kind words, I wish you a great day, Anon ! :)

[lucentaire]

Usually---and she suspected that it came with the territory of being friends with Laxus---Carena liked storms. However, usually she was watching storms from the safety of her warm home. She already liked them a lot less when they got in the way of her work. Now that a storm was brewing while she was injured and had places to be, she could not claim to be a fan. It was gnawing on her, the knowledge that this storm was not on her side. And warm clothing would only mitigate the unpleasantness that awaited her, it would not be able to fully protect her from it.

But while she was hardly looking forward to the journey home (because it would be a rough one), she was looking forward to the comforts awaiting her at home---a nice bubble bath might be out of the question unless Porlyusica just made the wound go away, but a recent shopping spree had ended with a comfortable set of cosy lounge wear. A part of her shuddered---apparently, adulthood meant getting excited about the promise of slipping into comfortable clothing and being tucked under warm blankets with a good book. Maybe, she pondered, maybe she would leverage her injury and ask to borrow some of Laxus' more relaxing records . . . and the record player that was usually in the dining room.

Lost in thoughts of whether or not she would have to play up the pain she was in (probably not, her side was aching quite a bit) to convince her dearest friends and roommates to nurse her back to health, she missed the sound of Gray's returning footsteps, just like she missed the return of his very adorable dog. Consequently, she almost flinched when the winter gear was draped over her. Ah. The omnipresent pompoms revealed the scarf to be Lisanna Couture---unless Gray knew someone else who would gift him a handcrafted scarf---and Carena could not help but smile a little bit. It was a bit of a reminder, she needed to actually post the package she had assembled for Lisanna a while ago.

Flicking a strand of her hair over her scarf-covered shoulder, she turned her head to glance at Gray for a moment, feeling almost tempted to pout a little at him before suppressing that weird impulse. "Really makes me wonder what kind of oversized bug you think I am," she mused as he drifted away, not unlike a snowflake in a breeze, to feed Muddy. "Actually---don't answer that. My pride is as bruised as my side."

Eating another few spoons of her breakfast, she pondered his offer. It would be the responsible thing to accept it, she knew that much. Flying long distances while either in pain or right after taking pain killers are not exactly a wise decision due to the risk of getting disoriented, but getting caught in a storm was even unwiser. She was not overly concerned over letting her quest givers know that the situation had been handled---she was not strapped for cash---but she really needed to get back to Magnolia. She could not risk getting stuck in the mountains, especially not due to a storm as storms were notoriously unpredictable.

Tugging on the pompomed end of the scarf, she sighed. "Actually," she started as her feet tapped against the floor. "Is Winterweed directly opposite my destination, geographically? I'd like to be in the air for the shortest time possible so I'd appreciate it a lot if you could show me the best spot from where to start my flight. I probably also should, I don't know, let you know what my estimated time of arrival in Fireweed would be. Just in case that I end up crashing. Hasn't happened yet, but there's always a first time for inconvenient things to happen. I forgot if I already asked, but is your MCL currently intact?"

A slight frown persisted on his face as he continued to stare out the window, his mind on the approaching weather. His expression melted away into a slight smile as he observed Muddy rolling around in the snow. Although the dog would come back in cold and damp (which was never fun to deal with), it was certainly better than when she would come in covered in her namesake.

He turned his attention back to his guest, dipping his head in acknowledgement as she accepted his offer of warmer clothes. A measure of relief eased his shoulders, knowing that she was wise enough to see the necessity and not foolishly deny it. He’d known people (and yes…sometimes ‘people’ had in fact been simply himself), that had stubbornly insisted that they would be fine without the extra layers, too confident in themselves and in their estimation of their travel. It didn’t tend to end well.

Still, was it any surprise that Evergreen was sensible enough to take the help? Of course not. She was certainly better at it than he was, and he could appreciate that it might be hard for her in any case. He knew that if the situation was reversed and he had (somehow) accepted help, his pride would be grating on him. The last thing he would want would be for someone to make a big deal out of his situation or make excuses for him. With that in mind, he said nothing else on the matter and instead simply took a large draught of his smoothie before setting down the glass on the countertop.

“I’ll get you some warm stuff now,” he said, beginning to move past Evergreen, deciding he might as well do the task in the moment.

As he headed into his bedroom, it occurred to him that there was a chance his guest might think he was eager to get her on her way. Following that thought, it also occurred to him that he was in fact, not eager to send her on her way. It was…strange to consider, that he found himself reluctant for her to leave when he was normally quite content on his own, but it really shouldn’t be strange. She was, after all, easy to be around and they were…friends? Yeah, friends.

He pushed the thoughts from his mind and set his attention on the chest of drawers in his room. Giving thought to his prediction of the weather, chilled air and a chance of snow later, he decided a hoodie would be a nice, cozy option for her. He would grab a spare coat for her later too, when it was time for her to leave.

Opening the largest drawer, he surveyed the options for a moment, then pulled out one of his favourite hoodies. Dark brown, soft, subtly lined with fleece for extra warmth, the item would no doubt swamp Evergreen’s figure, but that was precisely why he chose it (and perhaps also because the colour would complement her better than some of the other options).

He plucked it from its haphazard place with its confines, then draped it over his arm as he closed the drawer and opened a different one. With remarkably less consideration than his previous choice, he withdrew a set of sky blue, knitted winterwear – a scarf, gloves, and beanie.

This set, like the four others of varying colours within the drawer, had been knitted and gifted to him by Lisanna. She’d gotten rather into the hobby lately and had insisted on forcing generously sharing her creations with him. He recalled she’d been quite pleased with this particular set, as she’d implemented a white cloud pattern and had also gotten the hang of making pompoms (the ends of the scarf and top of the beanie bore evidence of her newfound love for the decorative element). He was sure Lisanna wouldn’t mind him lending the items to someone in need, especially to one of her own friends.

Goods in hand, he exited the room to return to Evergreen. Since she was occupied with her breakfast, he gently tossed the hoodie and gloves to rest over the back of the nearby armchair for when she was ready for them. Seeing her with her bowl of cereal, and thinking back to her comment of not having to climb on the counter to get it, he wondered if her roommates did put the cereal boxes out of her reach on purpose, just to get a reaction from her.

The image of her chipmunk cheek pout came to mind, and he had a feeling that if that was the face she’d make at such an act, he could see why her friends would be tempted to provoke it. Ever since he’d seen it himself, some time ago now, the expression occasionally popped into his mind and made him wonder how to bring it about again. The urge to do something to tease a reaction from her tickled the back of his mind like the whisper of a little devil on his shoulder. It had been a long while since he’d last felt such a thing, and in fact, he’d almost forgotten what it was like to feel it at all. In truth (although it was little known), once he was comfortable with a person and sure of their reactions, he was the type to delight in being a nuisance to them from time to time.

Mentally shaking himself, he stepped through the kitchen to open the back door and allow Muddy her re-entry, closing it again once she scampered through. The icy touch of the breeze slipped inside and once more made him aware that his guest was likely cold, even with the door firmly shut again. Driven by an impulse he didn’t want to look to closely at, he moved closer to Evergreen and draped the scarf he still held around her shoulders. Then, he unfolded the beanie and settled it on her head, gently tugging it into place.

A smile flashed briefly across his face at the way the floppy pointed end of the hat draped down over her forehead. He readjusted it to hang at the back and then gave a small but mischievous flick to the pompom.

“There,” he said, “snug as a little bug now.” His gaze, warmed with amusement, referenced her tshirt with a quick glance before he shifted away and got busy setting out food for his eager canine.

While Muddy happily dug into her morning meal, Gray straightened up and considered what Evergreen had said about her flying back to the village. It made sense for her to try travel as quickly as she could, not just to try fast forward Freed’s inevitable questioning, but to get ahead of any bad weather. He sighed, not envying her journey or return home.

Even knowing she could likely fly from his house and not need to pass along the roads to find the way, skipping Winterweed, and head directly to its sister village where her reward awaited her, he found himself offering, “Muddy and I can walk with you back to the Winterweed if you want.”

[hansoeii]

one day they might be brave enough

[gerrykeay]

im not putting this post into words. beams into your mind The Parallels

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[xxplastic-cubexx]

graph

bonus:

[astraios-art]

Happy (Vincent) Valentine's day... Ha haha

[broareweabouttoviberightnow]

Dallas' head snaps back, and he stumbles with the force of an unexpected hand on his shoulder. For the briefest moment, he goes entirely limp, lets his fist hang in the air and doesn't try to scramble back to the boy on the steady retreat in front of him.

Darry's got him. And if he'd thought it through for even a second longer that would have scared the shit out of him. But then the fingers are tearin' into his jacket and forcin' him backward and he finally whips his head around and realizes the reality: two very pissed cops have got him.

And he immediately starts fightin' again. He writhes in their grip and the kid he'd been whalin' on is suddenly skitterin' back with renewed fear. Dallas bares his teeth once and figures he's made his point.

The next ten minutes are a blur.

His heart is poundin' in his ears and he can feel his pulse as it rattles under the cuffs the cops slapped on him the second they could get his wrists within a foot of each other and his head is achin' and he realizes for the first time he tastes blood but he can't focus on anythin' because all he can think is Fuck, Darry is never gonna forgive me for this.

He says it all the time. When he rolls in an hour late and thinks Darry's gonna kick my ass. Or when he lets Pony have just a little too much of his beer and the kid's gigglin' fit to wake the dead when Dallas 'n him sneak back in. Or when he hauls off and picks stupid fuckin' fights for no reason.

But this time he means it.

He groans and drops his head to his hands in the little holdin' cell they have him waitin' in until they process him. Last night's argument flashes vaguely in stills through his mind. He wasn't comfortable with people... carin'. He just didn't know what to do with it.

You can't tell me what to do, Darrel. Dallas flew up from the kitchen table and paced wildly away from Darry. Pony watched him with wary eyes. Soda bit his lip and looked at Dallas like he was tryin' to tell him a hundred things Dally didn't know how to understand.

Yes, I can. I won't have you actin' a fool and gettin' yourself hurt. Darry frowned and he's got these lines in his forehead Two jokes he never had before Dallas moved in. Dallas can't stand to see them.

You're not my brother. And you're not my dad. I ain't never had no one tellin' me what to do in my whole life and I'm not about to let you start. He'd slammed the screen door and gone straight to Tim's, started a fight, wound up at Buck's 'n drank til he vomited, woke up this mornin', and started another.

Darry was goin' to throw him to the fuckin' curb and never talk to him again. And Dallas deserved it. He wasn't one of the Curtis boys. No matter how hard he wanted to be.

"Name?" A cop had reappeared in his cell and he kicked himself for missin' it.

"Curtis." Dallas opened his mouth. Shut it. Opened it again. "Fuck. No, sorry." Since when the fuck did he apologize to cops! "It's Winston. Dallas Winston."

The man just stared at him, Curtis already written across the top of the paper in big, bold letters. "Are you sober, kid?"

"Yes, I'm fuckin' sober! My name's not Curtis. How the fuck do you not know me?" To his horror, he feels hot tears in the back of his throat. He's just some no-good juvenile delinquent every bastard officer in this town knows by name except this one apparently because all he is is trouble. And Darry hated him.

"Sure, kid." The man shuffles his papers together. "Officer Matthews has already called your- big brother is it? He's on his way."

"He's not my brother!" And now he's actually cryin' which is bullshit! Who cares! Who cares that Darry is gonna look at him just like his father did. Like he was a burden he'd do anythin' to get rid of. Like the worst thing Dallas ever did was simply show up in his life one day. Dallas is used to this. He's not someone who stays. He was meant to be left. He's a violent dog. He only knows how to bite.

"Dallas?" Darry's voice makes him jump. He doesn't pull his hands away from where they're pressed so hard into his eyes that he sees stars. He can't bear to look up and see what he already knows he will—not hatred, but cold, cold indifference.

"Out." Darry isn't talkin' to him, Dallas can tell he's turned around by the way his voice bounces back to him off the cement walls. He flinches anyway. "Please." He adds like an afterthought and Dallas hears the door open and close.

"I'm goin' to touch you, ok?" Dallas doesn't say anythin', just makes a low noise in the back of his throat. He feels Darry gently tip his head back, eyes still squeezed shut. He feels him softly check the area on his jaw he knows will bruise tomorrow and run experimental fingers along his ribs for breaks. Dally hisses once and Darry immediately pulls back.

"Oh, Dallas." And suddenly Dallas is fuckin' cryin' again. Darry sounds so tired and worn down and old. Did Dallas do that? Did Dallas make him like that? And the sob that catches in his throat makes him choke.

But then he's pressed against Darry's chest and his hands are strong on Dalla's back and in his hair and Dallas doesn't even fight it. Just lets himself be held and doesn't even mind he feels as small as Ponyboy.

"Come on, Dallas Curtis. Let's go home."

[sholmeser]

im sorry but the immediate cut from the soldiers cradling each other to otacon’s hand on snake’s knee is crazy work

[odd-chips]

Here's a big post of some of my doodles of [Cap'n and crew] that I haven't posted yet! Couple are comics, couple are shitposts, you know how it goes.

(Also have some extra character tidbits beneath the cut!)

Cap'n (she/they) has become a Spongebob-adjacent "married to the job" type with sprinklings of "they are not immune to rose-tinted Company propaganda". Cartoonishly loyal to work, she's more upset about lying to the boss about her condition over actually becoming a monster on work time (though she isn't particularly a fan of being a monster, either).

Skeets (she/her) was already implied to be pretty optimistic and curious, but I've doubled down on this. She's constantly curious about entities and the state of her co-workers, asking questions and absorbing new information. She's also extremely lucky when it comes to encountering entities.

Mav (she/him), as implied by her nearly leaving Cap'n behind in the first comic, has become a "I won't hesitate, bitch" bitch. Split second decisions aren't an issue for her, she WILL shoot first and ask questions later. (She also now has a gambling addiction, haha. LOVES betting credits on things)

Kid (he/him) is now Irish. I will not elaborate. He's kind of literally the same otherwise. He's also in major inherited debt because of a Company-caused clerical error, but don't worry about it.

Uh. That's about it, I suppose!

[quinn-pop]

(semi future au) magolor needs to start asking questions before taking jobs