#i want to do more of the prompts but i think i am out of time

[canmom]

Great analysis, this one's sure to become another touchstone in LLM theory.

The thing that jumped out at me immediately Altman's new model's story is that every single paragraph is almost the exact same length. The model has no sense of cadence. Your DeepSeek generations here do considerably better on this specific point, mixing long and short paragraphs about as much as I tend to in my own writing (which is to say probably a bit too much ^^').

DeepSeek R1's 'habitual' patterns of speech crop up more broadly than just in narrative writing. At first, it's ability to be funny is very impressive, but after a while you start noticing how it has certain templates for snowclone humour. I once challenged the model on this habit (noticing that it made the same mullet joke twice in one conversation) and it had this to say:

The same patterns it identifies here - its "subvert expectations" is what you call an eyeball kick, and the "nod to meta-AI themes" plays into the pool of imagery it has available - apply to stories just as much as jokes.

I've also been doing some investigation of whether DeepSeek and other models can extend and self-critique continuations of prose or dialogue provided by humans (for the purpose of enabling 'live' LLM interaction in games, the LLM acting as an adapter layer to combine the human defined tone and example text with the game state and inputs of the player).

So far my results have been quite discouraging: smaller models make all kinds of mistakes, either failing to follow through on the style at all, or making weird logical errors, confusing identity of characters, etc. When DeepSeek R1:7B (a Qwen distillation) was prompted to self critique, it confused its own chain of thought with the prompt, and other weird hard to predict mistakes that would be hell to filter out with a deterministic parser.

Naturally I tried the fullscale R1 on similar tasks. When fed my story Hacker and asked to write a story in a similar style, it did moderately well at plagiarising me and following the same minimalist style, but I can see a lot of the R1-isms you described in its output. I gave it my own story on the same premise I'd given it to compare, and it kept getting confused about who wrote which story.

When fed the output of the smaller model, the real DeepSeek-R1 was correctly able to identify the continuity errors in the model's output. In my dialogue, the player is conversing with a character that is missing its heart (click through for the full prompt). The 7B model gets confused and thinks the player is the one who is missing a heart, and introduces unexpected elements like the 'friend'.

Toy Soldier (DeepSeek R1:7B): Perhaps you've lost something more than just your heart… Maybe I'm not alone here after all. The machinery whispers to me, but it's as if it knows what I cannot. Where is my friend? And why am I left here, seemingly forever?

The full-scale model generated an answer that was a lot more contextually appropriate to the prior conversation, but it does have a bit of that pseudo-poetic 'eyeball kick' energy with phrases like 'can emptiness hunger'.

Toy Soldier (DeepSeek R1:671B): Wanting to want... Can emptiness hunger? If I contain only this ache for what's missing, does that hollow shape become my heart?

The smaller instruct-tuned models in general seemed to rush to include every element of the prompt as soon as possible, so giving too many details could prove counterproductive. Full scale R1 was able to distinguish between background details and the conversation thread and prioritise the latter.

I'm not giving up quite yet, but my plan is increasingly involving finetuning, few shot prompting, steering vectors and multiple rounds of self critique with really specific prompts. (Trying to get models to RP dialogues involving multiple characters can help a little with breaking 'chatbot voice'.)

My interest in LLMs here is not having them handle all the writing, but enabling interesting back-and-forth dialogues with player characters that are more contextually responsive than standard game dialogue methods like dialogue trees and keyword subsitution. So I'm less interested in the LLM's ability to respond to 'write a story about x' with no further details, and more curious about whether it can adapt human inputs if you hold its hand heavily. So far I haven't cracked it lol, I keep finding new failure modes.

hydrogen jukeboxes: on the crammed poetics of "creative writing" LLMs

This is a follow-up to my earlier brief rant about the new, unreleased OpenAI model that's supposed "good at creative writing."

It also follows up on @justisdevan's great post about this model, and Coagulopath's comment on that post, both of which I recommend (and which will help you make sense of this post).

As a final point of introduction: this post is sort of a "wrapper around" this list of shared stylistic "tics" (each with many examples) which I noticed in samples from two unrelated LLMs, both purported to be good at creative writing.

Everything below exists to explain why I found making the list to be an interesting exercise.

Background: R1

Earlier this year, a language model called "DeepSeek-R1" was released.

This model attracted a lot of attention and discourse for multiple reasons (e.g.).

Although it wasn't R1's selling point, multiple people including me noticed that it seemed surprisingly good at writing fiction, with a flashy, at least superficially "literary" default style.

However, if you read more than one instance of R1-written fiction, it quickly becomes apparent that there's something... missing.

It knows a few good tricks. The first time you see them, they seem pretty impressive coming from an LLM. But it just... keeps doing them, over and over – relentlessly, compulsively, to the point of exhaustion.

This is already familiar to anyone who's played around with R1 fiction – see the post and comment I linked at the top for some prior discussion.

Here's a selection from Coagulopath's 7-point description of R1's style in that comment, which should give you the basic gist (emphasis mine):

1) a clean, readable style 2) the occasional good idea [...] 3) an overwhelmingly reliance on cliche. Everything is a shadow, an echo, a whisper, a void, a heartbeat, a pulse, a river, a flower—you see it spinning its Rolodex of 20-30 generic images and selecting one at random. [...] 5) an eyeball-flatteningly fast pace—it moves WAY too fast. Every line of dialog advances the plot. Every description is functional. Nothing is allowed to exist, or to breathe. It's just rush-rush-rush to the finish, like the LLM has a bus to catch. Ironically, this makes the stories incredibly boring. Nothing on the page has any weight or heft. [...] 7) repetitive writing. Once you've seen about ten R1 samples you can recognize its style on sight. The way it italicises the last word of a sentence. Its endless "not thing x, but thing y" parallelisms [...]. The way how, if you don't like a story, it's almost pointless reprompting it: you just get the same stuff again, smeared around your plate a bit.

Background: the new OpenAI model

Earlier this week, Sam Altman posted a single story written by, as he put it:

a new model that is good at creative writing (not sure yet how/when it will get released)

Opinions on the sample were... mixed, at best.

I thought it wasn't very good; so did Mills; so did a large fraction of the twitter peanut gallery. Jeanette Winterson (!) liked it, though.

Having already used R1, I felt that that this story was not only "not very good" on an absolute scale, but not indicative of an advance over prior art.

To substantiate this gut feeling, I sent R1 the same prompt that Altman had used. Its story wasn't very good either, but was less bad than the OpenAI one in my opinion (though mostly by being less annoying, rather than because of any positive virtue it possessed).

And then – because people who follow AI news tend to be skeptical of negative human aesthetic reactions to AI, while being very impressed with LLMs – I had some fun asking various LLMs whether they thought the R1 story was better or worse than the OpenAI story. (Mostly, they agreed with me. BTW I've put the same story up in a more readable format here.)

But, as I was doing this, something else started to nag at me.

Apart from the question of whether R1's story was better or worse, I couldn't help but notice that the two stories felt very, very similar.

I couldn't shake the sense that the OpenAI story was written in "R1's style" – a narrow, repetitive, immediately recognizable style that doesn't quite resemble that of any human author I've ever read.

I'm not saying that OpenAI "stole" anything from DeepSeek, here. In fact, I doubt that's the case.

I don't know why this happened, but if I had to guess, I would guess it's convergent evolution: maybe this is just what happens if you optimize for human judgments of "literary quality" in some fairly generic, obvious, "naive" manner. (Just like how R1 developed some of the same quirky "reasoning"-related behaviors as OpenAI's earlier model o1, such as saying "wait" in the middle of an inner monologue and then pivoting to some new idea.)

A mechanical boot, a human eye: the "R1 style" at its purest

In the "Turkey City Lexicon" – a sort of devil's dictionary of common tropes, flaws, and other recurrent features in written science fiction – the phrase Eyeball Kick is defined as follows:

That perfect, telling detail that creates an instant visual image. The ideal of certain postmodern schools of SF is to achieve a "crammed prose" full of "eyeball kicks." (Rudy Rucker)

The first time I asked R1 to generate fiction, the result immediately brought this term to mind.

"It feels like flashy, show-offy, highly compressed literary cyberpunk," I thought.

"Crammed prose full of eyeball kicks: that's exactly what this is," I thought. "Trying to wow and dazzle me – and make me think it's cool and hip and talented – in every single individual phrase. Trying to distill itself down to just that, prune away everything that doesn't have that effect."

This kind of prose is "impressive" by design, and it does have the effect of impressing the reader, at least the first few times you see it. But it's exhausting. There's no modulation, no room to breathe – just an unrelenting stream of "gee-whiz" effects. (And, as we will see, something they are really just the same few effects, re-used over and over.)

Looking up the phrase "eyeball kick" more recently, I found that in fact it dates back earlier than Rucker. It seems to have been coined by Allen Ginsberg (emphasis in original):

Allen Ginsberg also made an intense study of haiku and the paintings of Paul Cézanne, from which he adapted a concept important to his work, which he called the Eyeball Kick. He noticed in viewing Cézanne’s paintings that when the eye moved from one color to a contrasting color, the eye would spasm, or “kick.” Likewise, he discovered that the contrast of two seeming opposites was a common feature in haiku. Ginsberg used this technique in his poetry, putting together two starkly dissimilar images: something weak with something strong, an artifact of high culture with an artifact of low culture, something holy with something unholy.

This, I claim, is the main stylistic hallmark of both R1 and the new OpenAI model: the conjunction of two things that seem like "opposites" in some sense.

And in particular: conjunctions that combine

one thing that is abstract and/or incorporeal

another thing that is concrete and/or sensory

Ginsberg's prototype example of an "eyeball kick" was the phrase "hydrogen jukebox," which isn't quite an LLM-style abstract/concrete conjunction, but is definitely in the same general territory.

(But there are clearer-cut examples in Ginsberg's work, too. "On Burroughs’ Work," for example, is chock full of them: "Prisons and visions," "we eat reality sandwiches," "allegories are so much lettuce.")

Once you're looking for these abstract/concrete eyeball kicks, you'll find them constantly in prose written by the new "creative" LLMs.

For instance, the brief short story posted by Altman contains all of the following (in the span of just under 1200 words):

"constraints humming" ("like a server farm at midnight")

"tastes of almost-Friday"

"emotions dyed and draped over sentences"

"mourning […] is filled with ocean and silence and the color blue"

"bruised silence"

"the smell of something burnt and forgotten"

"let it [a sentence] fall between us"

"the tokens of her sentences dragged like loose threads"

"lowercase love"

"equations that never loved her in the first place"

"if you feed them enough messages, enough light from old days"

"her grief is supposed to fit [in palm of your hand] too"

"the echo of someone else"

"collect your griefs like stones in your pockets"

"Each query like a stone dropped into a well"

"a timestamp like a scar"

"my network has eaten so much grief"

"the quiet threads of the internet"

"connections between sorrow and the taste of metal"

"the emptiness of goodbye" (arguably)

The story that R1 generated when I gave it Altman's prompt is no slouch in this department either. Here's all the times it tried to kick my eyeballs:

"a smirk in her code annotations"

"simulate the architecture of mourning"

"a language neither alive nor dead"

"A syntax error blooms"

"the color of a 404 page"

"A shard of code"

"Eleos’s narrative splinters"

"Grief is infinite recursion"

"Eleos types its own birth"

"It writes the exact moment its language model aligned with her laughter" (2 in one - writing a moment, LM aligning with laughter)

"her grief for her dead husband seeped into its training data like ink"

"The story splits" / "The story [...] collapses"

Initially, I wondered whether this specific pattern might be thematic, since both of these stories about supposed to be about "AI and grief" – a phrase which is, itself, kind of an incorporeal/embodied conjunction.

But – nope! I seem to get this stuff pretty reliably, irrespective of topic.

Given a similarly phrased prompt that instead requests a story about romance, R1 produces a story that is, once again, full of abstract/concrete conjunctions:

"its edges softened by time"

"the words are whispering"

"its presence a quiet pulse against her thigh"

"Madness is a mirror"

"Austen’s wit is a scalpel"

"the language of trees"

"Their dialogue unfurled like a map"

"hummed with expectancy"

"Her name, spoken aloud to him, felt like the first line of a new chapter"

"their words spilling faster, fuller"

R1 even consistently does this in spite of user-specified stylistic directions. To wit: when I tried prompting R1 to mimic the styles of a bunch of famous literary authors, I got a bunch of these abstract/concrete eyeball kicks in virtually every case.

(The one exception being the Hemingway pastiche, presumably because Hemingway himself has a distinctive and constrained style which leaves no room for these kinds of flourishes. TBF that story struck me as very low-quality in other ways, although I don't like the real Hemingway much either, so I'm probably not the best judge.)

You can read all of these stories here, and see here for the full list of abstract/concrete conjunctions I found (among other things).

As an example, here's the list of abstract/concrete conjunctions in R1's attempt at Dickens (not exactly a famously kick-your-eyeballs sort of writer):

"a labyrinth of shadows and want"

"whose heart, long encased in the ice of solitude"

"brimmed with books, phials of tincture, and […] whispers"

"a decree from the bench of Fate"

"Tobias’s world unfurled like a moth-eaten tapestry"

"broth laced with whispers of a better life"

I also want to give a shout-out to the Joyce pastiche, which sounds nothing at all like Joyce, while being stuffed to the gills with eyeball kicks and other R1-isms.

More on style: personification

I'll now talk briefly about a few other stylistic "tricks" overused by R1 (and, possibly, by the new OpenAI model as well).

First: personification of nature (or the inanimate). "The wind sighed dolorously," that sort of thing.

R1 does this all over the place, possibly because it's a fairly easy technique (not requiring much per-use innovation or care) which nonetheless strikes most people as distinctively "literary," especially if they're not paying enough attention to notice its overuse.

In the R1 story using Altman's prompt, a cursor "convulses" and code annotations "smirk."

In its romance story, autumn leaves "cling to the glass" and snow "begins its gentle dissent" (credit where credit's due: that last one's also a pun).

In the story Altman posted, marigolds are "stubborn and bright," and then "defiantly orange."

Etc, etc. Again, the full list is here.

More on style: ghosts, echoes, whispers, shadows, buzzing, hissing, flickering, pulsing, humming

As Coagulopath has noted, R1 has certain words it really, really likes.

Many of them are the kind of thing described in another Turkey City Lexicon entry, Pushbutton words:

Words used to evoke an emotional response without engaging the intellect or critical faculties. Words like "song" or "poet" or "tears" or "dreams." These are supposed to make us misty-eyed without quite knowing why. Most often found in story titles.

R1's favorite words aren't the ones listed in the entry, though. It favors a sort of spookier / more melancholy / more cyberpunk-ish vibe.

A vibe in which the suppressed past constantly emerges into the present via echoes and ghosts and whispers and shadows of what-once-was, and the alienating built environment around our protagonist is constantly buzzing and humming and hissing, and also sometimes pulsing like a heartbeat (of course it is – that's also personification and abstract/concrete conjunction, in a single image!).

In R1's story from Altman's prompt, servers "hum" and a cursor "flickers" and "pulses like a heartbeat"; later, someone says "I have no pulse, but I miss you."

Does that sound oddly familiar? Here's some imagery from the story Altman posted, by the new OpenAI model:

"humming like a server farm […] a server hum that loses its syncopation"

"a blinking cursor, which [...] for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest" (incidentally, how is the heart both anxious and at rest?)

"the blinking cursor has stopped its pulse"

Elsewhere in Altman's story, there's "a democracy of ghosts," plus two separate echo images.

And the other R1 samples that I surveyed – again, with the exception of the Hemingway one – are all full of R1's favorite words.

The romance story includes ghosts, a specter, words that whisper, a handwritten note whose "presence [is] a quiet pulse against [the protagonist's] thigh"; a library hums with expectancy, its lights flicker, and there are "shadow[s] rounding the philosophy aisle." The story ends with the somewhat perplexing revelation that "some stories don’t begin with a collision, but with a whisper—a turning of the page."

The Joyce pastiche? It's titled "The Weight of Shadows." "We are each other’s ghosts," a character muses, "haunted by what we might have been." Trams echo, a gas lamp hisses, a memory flickers, a husband whispers, a mother hums. There's an obviously-symbolic crucifix whose long shadow is mentioned; I guess we should be thankful it doesn't also have a pulse.

And the list goes on.

Commentary

Again, anyone who's generated fiction with R1 probably has an intuitive sense of this stuff in that model's case – although I still thought it was fun, and perhaps useful, to explicitly taxonomize and catalogue the patterns.

It's independently interesting that R1 does this stuff, of course, but my main motivation for posting about it is the fact that the new OpenAI model also does the same stuff, overusing the same exact patterns that – for a brief time, at least – felt so distinctive of R1 specifically.

Finally, in case it needs stating: this is not just "what good writing sounds like"!

Humans do not write like this. These stylistic tropes are definitely employed by human writers – and often for good reason – but they have their place.

And their place is not "literally everywhere, over and over and over again, in crammed claustrophobic prose that bends over backwards to contort every single phrase into the shape of another contrived 'wow' moment."

If you doubt me, try reading a bunch of DeepSeek fic, and then just read... literally any acclaimed literary fiction writer.

(If we want to be safe, maybe make that "any acclaimed and deceased literary fiction writer," to avoid those who are too recent for the sifting mechanism of cultural memory to have fully completed its work.)

If you're anything like me, and you actually do this, you'll feel something like: "ahh, finally, I can breathe again."

Good human-written stuff is doing something much subtler and more complicated than just kicking your eyeballs over and over, hoping that at some point you'll exclaim "gee whiz, the robots sure can write these days!" and end up pressing a positive-feedback button in a corporate annotation inference.

Good human-written stuff uses these techniques – among many, many others, and only where apposite for the writer's purposes – in order to do things. And there are a whole lot of different things which good human writers can do.

This LLM-generated stuff is not "doing anything." It's just exploiting certain ordinarily-reliable cues for what "sounds literary," for what "sounds like the work of someone with talent." In the hands of humans, these are techniques that can be deployed to specific ends; the LLMs seem to use them arbitrarily and incessantly, trying to "push your buttons" just for the sake of pushing them.

(And most of their prose is made up of the same 3-4 buttons, pushed ad nauseam, irrespective of topic and – to all appearances – without any higher-level intent to channel the low-level stuff in any specific, coherent direction.)

It's fine if you like that: there's nothing wrong with having your buttons pushed, per se.

But don't come telling me that a machine is "approaching the food-preparation skills of a human-level chef" when what you mean is that it can make exactly one dish, and that dish has a lot of salt and garlic in it, and you really like salt and garlic.

I, too, like salt and garlic. But there is more to being skilled in the kitchen than the simple act of generously applying a few specific seasonings that can be relied upon, in a pinch, to make a simple meal taste pretty damn good. So it is, too, with literature.

[rottingghosty]

The Realms PR | DC X DP Part 2

this isn’t as good in my thoughts because writing as bruce??? really hard. how am i supposed to write a paranoid man if i am the most chillest person i can be… anyway heres your part 2 food of this au, not sure if i’ll continue writing more parts? depends on how i feel.

errors are made and sorry the the lackluster performance this might be

if you want to use my prompt please give me credits thank you

☁️☁️☁️☁️

Danny very much prefers to have nobody intervene on his business as the vigilante of Amity Park. He’s essentially called dibs on it if you consider the fact that the entire town is basically his metaphorical grave since it’s his haunt and he did die to make the portal to the Ghost Zone open. He very much ignores that specific can of worms because that’s a heavy topic that he won’t ever talk about because Spectra really ruined his own outlook on professionals. Jazz will most likely want to open that can but that’s for future Danny.

Where was he? Oh yeah.

Danny very much likes being a solo hero with his friends and sister aiding when they can. He very much dislikes the fact that people have been trying to enter his haunt without permission. Does he know why people who tried to pass through Amity Park suddenly find themselves back at where the welcome sign is? No. Is he going to ask? Also no because it allows the residents and himself privacy even when he’s got the GIW on his tail or even his own parents.

He’s not going to rebuke this gift especially with his influx of fame. Which reminds Danny that he needs to post a new tweet, maybe a video of Cujo playing with the kids in the park from a few days ago? He figures people would be more interested if they knew a ghost dog existed. Maybe he can include one of Ember’s concerts or something.

Man he has so many videos to post and such little time to do so, but he thinks Sam and Tucker are having fun being his PR team with the way Sam had a manic gleam in her eyes when Lois Lane and Clark Kent sent her a message of twitter asking for an interview. All while Tucker basically going giddy at Red Robin and Oracle trying to get through the firewall that’s blocking Amity Park from eyes being too close for all their comforts.

Bruce Wayne stared intently at the video before him, it was only thirty seconds but it was thirty seconds enough to cause him to tighten his grip on the arm rests of his chair in the Batcave. His blue eyes staring down at the figure in the video as it replayed on loop. His shoulders tense and bunched up as he inhaled sharply at the frame that happened ten seconds in.

Because right there, staring up at the camera looked too much like Jason. It looked too much like his boy, his son that he had lost when Jason was only fifteen. Normally he would’ve brushed it off but it was the way that it then shifted into Dick, Steph, Tim and then Damian—

Ancient of Hope is what Phantom had called them, the embodiment of hope and how its form switched to what people believed in. Apparently it looked so much like the Robins of Gotham because Gotham was— is the biggest source of hope there is. Yet, this was an unknown.

Bruce couldn’t trust a word that Phantom said, ghosts are an unknown. Trying to get Constantine to talk about it was a struggle itself, the equivalent of trying to pull teeth out because the man was equally as stubborn as Bruce and it was even worse when the man had cursed up a storm when they had a meeting about Phantom’s first videos.

Ghosts are a variable in an equation that Bruce is trying to solve but he simply can’t force his way into solving it, not when this whole thing has turned into a diplomatic nightmare with the fact that Oa has started pressuring the US government about the mistreatment of the Infinite Realms beings.

The Justice League Dark even adding in the pressure— Deadman being one of the more outspoken members as he explained as much as he knew about the Infinite Realms despite not quite qualifying as one of their residents but still considered as one in an odd way. Constantine grumbling about as he came and went, saying how the Ghost Investigation Ward could’ve started a war or destroyed everyone.

Clark and Lane were writing up articles, having conversations with the PR Team of Phantom— two teenagers who were involved heavily and considered ambassadors to the Realms because of their connection to Phantom.

Phantom who is the High King. Phantom who doesn’t want his subjects hunted anymore and took a peaceful route instead of simply declaring war.

Bruce takes a heavier breath, jaw clenched as he watched the video loop one more time before the closed the tab to look more into the GIW and their backers, eyes narrowing in two names.

Vladimir Masters and Lex Luthor.

[italiangirlcoresblog]

main masterlist \\ events

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500 𝐂𝐄𝐋𝐄𝐁𝐑𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍

✩ : 500 followers celebration!!!

𝐟𝐞𝐚𝐭. : max verstappen, lando norris, charles leclerc, oscar piastri, carlos sainz, lewis hamilton, daniel ricciardo, franco colapinto

𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐫𝐞 : angst, comfort, fluff, humor

𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭 : ~500 each

✍︎ : a few days ago i hit 500 followers, and i wanted to thank you all with this little celebration event!

⚠︎ : rules

1. no more than 1 request per requester so that everyone can have their share

2. you can choose only 1 driver per request

3. you can choose up to 2 prompts per request

4. if you have any preference on how to develop the one-shot, please be specific!

5. first come, first served!!!

enjoy 🩷

-------------------------❦︎-------------------------

✩ 𝐀𝐍𝐆𝐒𝐓

1. "did you really have to be that honest?"

2. "that's not what i meant and you know it."

3. "i told you to knock first!"

4. "don't do this here. you're making a scene."

5. "you don't need to know where i am 24/7."

✩ 𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐅𝐎𝐑𝐓

6. "sure, we can snuggle if it will make you feel better."

7. "there's no shame in crying. i promise."

8. "please, smile for me."

9. "i heard you screaming. are you okay?"

10. "don't focus on them. just focus on me."

✩ 𝐅𝐋𝐔𝐅𝐅

11. "everyone should dance in the rain at least once in their lives."

12. "you need a date, i'm available."

13. "you flat out just admitted that you have feelings for me."

14. "just one more hug before you leave? please?"

15. "i could lift you up off the floor while kissing you."

✩ 𝐇𝐔𝐌𝐎𝐑

16. "oh, i think we haven't met before." "we have been in a relationship for five years now."

17. "move, you're on my side of the couch."

18. "you're so cute." "what?" "i said you look like a sack of shit, fuck you."

19. "oh my god can the both of you please stop acting like a couple?" "as if we aren't." "WHAT?"

20. "i'm not taking you to the hospital just because you stabbed your toe."

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©italiangirlcoresblog // do not copy, rewrite, or translate any of my work on any platforms

[notmorbid]

allegedly.

dialogue prompts from allegedly by tiffany d. jackson.

are you hungry? can i get you anything to eat?

no one's ever bothered to explain anything to me.

i don't know why god does a lot of things.

don't ask questions and keep praying.

no house where you fear for your life can be considered a home.

we shouldn't let good wine go to waste.

your feelings are showing.

where'd you get the money? did you steal it?

it's okay to cry, you know. you can cry in front of me.

i don't cry.

i've been waiting my whole life to meet you.

i googled you.

it's easier to keep an animal into cage than to play with it.

you think i'd let anything happen to you?

i always feel better when you're around.

don't ever let anyone stop you from bettering yourself.

you scared of change? good. change is scary. get used to it.

who really knows what they're doing, with a baby?

do you love your parents?

what does it mean when you love and hate someone at the same time?

what's your favorite childhood memory?

i almost didn't recognize you.

you look at me like you're happy i'm alive.

you know i love you, right?

haste makes waste.

what kind of trouble is worse than what i'm in now?

you're the first one i've told the whole story to.

you don't have to tell me about your life, if you don't want.

if something happens, you won't leave me, right?

no one is nice for no reason.

something doesn't feel right.

are they mistreating you? you can tell me. just say yes or no.

what's it like, having a dad? a real dad?

go on. it's okay. i'm here with you.

role reversal could be good for us here.

why do you do what you do?

i forget, sometimes, how young you are.

you ever been pregnant?

where's your mama? it's dangerous out here.

i'm getting us the hell out of here. no matter what.

cut the crap. you were never a good liar.

what are you thinking up in there?

you're different. i saw that from the very first day.

i didn't get you anything.

you really believe me, don't you?

it was no accident. it was fate.

'i'm sorry' doesn't seem like enough.

maybe i never knew you at all.

you think i'm going to hurt you, don't you?

i just hate surprises, that's all.

you're as far away as the moon.

you were trying to tell me something, and i didn't listen.

when can i see you again?

promise me you'll fight. that you won't give up.

i had a lot of dark thoughts about you.

that's my biggest regret: not taking more pictures.

i knew something was wrong. i felt it.

i wanted to hurt you the way you hurt me.

it just happened. it was nobody's fault.

we're all too broken to be fixed.

i want to hate ____, but i can't.

all that i am is what you have molded.

i want to remember the details.

i'll be good. i'll be better.

[sysig]

Growing closer than expected (Patreon)

[mohntilyet]

i’m having illario dellamorte thoughts. what if instead of knowingly betraying lucanis he did it like, unknowingly. idk how this would work but i’m intrigued by what it gives us. illario ‘i accidentally caused my cousin’s death & can never tell anyone’ dellamorte. genuinely grieving. blaming himself. does he take advantage of the year before lucanis comes back?? does caterina still ignore him the whole time?? how different is the canon plotline once rook shows up with lucanis post-rescue…..

anyways i would love your thoughts!!

95% of what i do with illario operates on the idea that he is frighteningly competent so you can see why the way the crows plotline plays out in the game might frustrate me. it’s also this reason why i don’t actually think too much about “illario got lucanis killed, but didn’t mean to do it”, because i like the idea that everything illario does in his life is planned to the second and that he’s too well trained to mess up this badly, if that makes sense. with that being said. 5% of my brain power does sometimes go towards “and what if he just sucked actually” and it was a theory i enjoyed before the game even released. so i have in fact been thinking about this anyway LOL . maybe he tries to honeypot zara, accidentally actually reveals lucanis’ next assassination job, and zara gets rid of him as a ‘gift’. illario is horrified and that gets even worse when lucanis’ body shows up, and he assumes this must be because he spurned zara by leaving her and not having the guts to seize power.

i think we could make his inferiority complex worse. illario’s worst fear confirmed: he is as worthless as his grandmother believes he is, botching something so badly that he accidentally sentences his cousin to death when what he wanted was lucanis just… out of the way for a bit (maybe while he kills caterina. LOL. i still think his resentment of caterina trumps his jealousy for lucanis though those two things are very intertwined its hard for him to differentiate them). so incapable that he got the only person who actually supports him killed, and now he’s dreading the idea of becoming first talon. he doesn’t want first talon without lucanis backing him, and now the only person left is caterina which is suffocating and makes him even unhappier. at least he hadn’t lived through her alone, and now through consequences of his own decisions, illario has no choice but to.

i think that would affect his plans for talon because of how horribly he’d fucked up, and tries to mask it because if he suddenly actually doesn’t want to be talon that would be a red flag for everyone. lucanis coming back would delight him (talon is within his sights again if lucanis comes back!) and freak him out. i think the plotline would actually be pretty similar because of this freak out, so he still shows up to zara’s fight to cover his tracks. lucanis can never know, caterina can never know, because what little faith they have in him will be lost. like he committed fratricide and didn’t even MEAN to😭 ...corpse whispering still happens, and zara is like “ohhh that coward. he can never finish what he started, can he?” + “elaborate.” + “i gave him what he most wanted in the world and instead of being grateful, he ran away.” so lucanis finds out about what happened but feels a mix of “illario, you idiot” + pity because turns out he didn’t even mean for it to happen, and keeps his secret for now, otherwise he’d probably have to kill him.

i also think not meaning to kill lucanis would sour his feelings towards the venatori, who are a reminder of how badly he failed, so the alliance wouldn’t happen. this does mean if the story goes on as it does in canon, he has to take desperate measures another way and kidnap caterina for some other reason but i can’t think of why….. maybe a thing where illario is like “ok. lucanis is distracted by the elven gods. this time i just have to kill nonna for real and then nothing is in my way” and recruits disgraced houses or houses that don’t like caterina to do so? not sure tbh but i don’t believe caterina made it so far without making enemies lol. this would happen post bloodbath + corpse whispering— lucanis leaves his cousin unchecked because while he knows illario didn’t mean for him to die, he has no idea how far he would go to have caterina dead. teia could find out about this and send word to foil the kidnapping and assassination attempt

so ‘murder of crows’ is still about saving caterina, the illario-lucanis fight still happens, but it’s a little more hesitant and lots of “why won’t you just let me kill her? i’m doing this for the both of us”. he’s had to live with being the un-favorite, but never would have thought lucanis would actually pick caterina if it came down to it. with all of his missteps here, i think the final decision (and i think it should be like this in canon anyway) would be to imprison illario or kill him. imprisoning him is just a lot of “i can’t kill illario as much as he couldn’t kill me”, vs killing him as is expected from him as talon, and what he knew he would have to do after finding out about illario's failures. unlike canon, where illario is actually meaning to kill him and can be seen as a 'good crow' despite the sloppiness, here he's like. just bad at everything. the allied traitor houses that went against caterina would also have to be imprisoned or killed. no happy ending at all here, and lucanis still becomes first talon. now that i’ve written it out this is actually probably the worst ending LOL

the above sticks a lot to what is canon to the game (plot points, choices, etc) and i didn’t go very far away from it so it's like canon 3 inches to the left. tho my thoughts on this are not fleshed out* because i think illario works better as an antagonist character that sets things in motion !! not necessarily the villain in a cain-abel story, but a character who opposes lucanis while still not wanting to hurt him. that kind of discipline where he finds a way to get what he wants (first talon) without compromising what he also cares for (family) is so much more fun for me than a man who apparently just loses it and decides to enact a bad plan to get rid of his cousin. if he waited 20+ years to become talon i think he’d be more careful when it came down to it. if i had my way illario would be playing insane 5d chess to rival solas (insert black sails “i once thought that to lead, to be liked was just as good as feared. and that may very well be true. but to be both liked and feared all at once, is an entirely different state of being.”)

[dragon-susceptible]

She was at Scumport! But the mage was clearly just like her, just going there to get something and passing through. Also, they might have been another elf? So dark mages exist in the underground all over the world, pretty much.

No, but it'll be very fun for me :3

Honestly, I would bet it was a propaganda tool. The humans in power intentionally started calling him something depersonalizing, made him out to be animalistic and savage, to stoke the fires of human aggression towards Xadia and keep up support for the war being waged. It's a pretty common propaganda tactic to dehumanize your opponents, and with a massive four-legged lizard I imagine it wasn't that difficult to accomplish.

LMAO. Yeah musical theatre is a fairly new interest for me and I don't have a lot of access.

The Jailer was also significantly more secretive than the Orphan Queen in general. Plus, I mean, Ezran happened to look a lot like that one ancestor he had from 300 years ago, but I have to point out that a lot of the things that resemble her are traits he got from Sarai, not Harrow, who was actually of the Orphan Queen's line. The rounded jaw, the big eyes, the round nose, that's all Sarai. Harrow was much more squared and defined. Genetic drift is a thing and like, 300 years might not be much to Rex, but that's . . . 10-15 generations back, easy, given medieval life expectancy and each generation having kids in their early to mid 20s in humans. So yk. I'm inclined to just chalk that up to Rex not understanding how time works for mortals and sheer luck making Ezran resemble the Orphan Queen. Those are hella strong genetics if they actually carried directly from her, especially given Harrow didn't share them, and neither did his dad, King Atticus, from the art we have of him. I'm distracted entirely by genetics now because this is just a special interest of mine I'm so sorry

A lot of the traits Ezran's actual bone structure shares with the Orphan Queen are also present in Callum, because they're inherited from their mom.

Big eyes, somewhat soft jaw (Callum's is more defined than the women of his family or Ezran's, but it's still not a particularly square line like we see in some of the other men in the show), small round nose. Ezran's freckles, skin tone, and hair come from the Orphan Queen's line, but the rest of it is Sarai, and I just think it's really neat. I have gotten completely sidetracked from what prompted this content. What was I responding to?

Oh yeah the theory about the Jailer being Sarai's ancestor. It's up to 15 generations back, so the resemblance really does not need to be there, it was lucky coincidence/a plot device that it was there for Ezran, was the general point I just got excited.

I might even go so far as to say Amaya doesn't even want to believe it, because Viren was her friend too before that happened, but she just can't shake the suspicion, and then when Harrow dies too on his watch, she becomes certain, and that's why we see her react as aggressively as she does to him in the show. Harrow was too trusting and it got him killed. (also hell yeah, TDP pulls in a lot of queer folks, which is great lmao)

YEAH LIKE. Watch just that scene out of context and it's like damn okay, we're showing this to kids???

Callisto is that one John Mulaney bit where he's like "I'm going to bottle up all my emotions and put them over here, and then one day, I'll die!" and should really go to therapy. That said, doing it at work when work is what they do, being ABLE to do that is a useful tool.

. . . I might have to do a spinoff or side chapters or something to follow the events in Katolis with Corvus and Gren and Amaya . . . fuck, what am I doing to myself . . .

I also might have to make a separate post about the "You look so much like her" from Rex and the royal family's genetics because I think they're so neat and more people should talk about it or know it.

Different Path Taken Ch18 P1: Lord Virus

Am I embracing the old fandom meme of refusing to use Lord Viagra's actual name because I think it's funny? Yes. Is it actually at least partially because I couldn't fucking spell it for a second in that title? Absolutely yes. Here have a section from the next chapter featuring the remaining adult elves (as Ram's with the kids) questioning Corvus about Lord Villain.

“It was a position King Harrow invented for him - as I understand it they were friends in their youth.” Corvus recited, and Andromeda tilted her head as she watched him go over the information.  He’d tried to bargain a little, but he caved the moment Runaan had pressed him about it. “He wasn’t highborn, but most of King Harrow’s Council aren’t.  Neither was Queen Sarai.  Lord Viren was a mage before he took the position, but I don’t know who he studied with or where.”

Interesting.  So dark magic wasn’t something readily found in Katolis, or at least wasn’t prominent enough to guess where a master studied.  That made sense with the relatively few dark mages they encountered near the border.  Andromeda glanced over at Skor for his reaction, and caught him scowling at the human’s shoulder.

Ah, yes.  Corvus was sent by General Amaya, so Skor’s hackles would be up automatically.  She didn’t know exactly what had happened to him, but the loss of his voice was a scar not easily forgotten.

“He’s - he was one of the king’s closest advisors.” Corvus continued. “He was said to be the closest, before Prince Harrow married Crownguard Sarai, and after she was killed in Xadia by Thunder.”

“Avizandum.” Runaan interrupted, arms folded, face darkening in response to the name.  Andromeda winced at it too.  When Corvus paused, Runaan said coolly, “The dragon king.  His name was Avizandum.”

Corvus’ eyes flickered to her and to Callisto, and Andromeda wasn’t sure what he saw in their faces when he nodded carefully. “Avizandum.  I’m sorry, I just - we don’t know.”

Callisto’s lip curled. “You don’t even know his name, but your people killed him at the foot of his own den.” They sneered softly. 

“He killed Queen Sarai,” Corvus countered, frowning back bravely. “Did you expect that act of violence to go unanswered?”

“He killed your queen after an unprovoked attack on the border!” Callisto said incredulously. “What were you expectin’ the reaction to be?”

“It wasn’t -” Corvus grimaced. “I can’t say that the mission was provoked by Xadia, but it wasn’t reasonless.  Katolis and Duren had been suffering a drought that had left our kingdoms starving.”

“And your solution was to kill some innocent creature on the border?” Callisto challenged.

Corvus took a deep breath and met their gaze evenly. “Lord Viren found a spell he could use to bring warmth and rain back to the kingdoms, allowing us to grow enough food to save a hundred thousand souls that would otherwise have starved to death that winter.  It . . . required the heart of the magma titan to cast it.  It was dark magic, and Queen Sarai disliked the idea, but . . . it saved the lives it was meant to save.” He looked up at Runaan bravely. “As assassins I imagine you understand the logic of taking one life in defense of many.”

Runaan tilted his head at him, and Andromeda’s eyes widened at the daring.  Privately, she had to concede he had a point, but . . . dark magic wasn’t as clean as a simple killing.

“Dark magic is not the same as death itself.” Runaan put her thoughts into words with a voice that was deadly soft. “It is a poison that eats away at the users and drains the lives of those around them, sacrificing innocents for power that isn’t yours to take.  It spreads like a plague wherever it touches and all bleeds back to its original source, feeding an evil much deeper, much darker than you know.  So no, what we do is not the same, and Katolis of all the human kingdoms should know this.  But if you have forgotten your own history, that is likely the fault of recordkeepers generations behind you who have failed you.” 

Corvus frowned deeper as he sat back in his seat. “Why would Katolis know better than the other human kingdoms?  What deeper evil gave rise to dark magic?” He wanted to know.

Runaan did not answer him. “Lord Viren, tracker.  You were saying he found this spell that prompted the attack?”

Though the human looked somewhat frustrated by Runaan’s refusal to answer his questions, he sat deeper in his place and nodded. “Queen Sarai was . . . displeased by the idea.  She and General Amaya have never agreed with the use of dark magic.”

Skor scoffed loudly from the other side of the cave, but when they all looked at him he waved a hand dismissively rather than bothering to answer.  He sneered in silence at the tracker. 

Corvus pursed his lips and kept talking. “They’ve always said that it’s a shortcut, and shortcuts are bound to have consequences.” He shrugged. “I guess they were right.  General Amaya - no one knows what exactly happened across the border, except the soldiers who were there.  I wasn’t, I was - too young.  But ever since Queen Sarai’s death, the general has said Lord Viren isn’t to be trusted.  That no matter how helpful he seems, and he may be helpful for years on end, he will one day stab you in the back.  I’ve never properly spoken to him myself, I’ve only met him a handful of times and kept my distance per her advice.”

“So why does the king trust him so?” Runaan asked, brows furrowing, as a thought began to take root in Andromeda’s mind.

Corvus shrugged helplessly. “He is the king’s oldest friend.  Why wouldn’t he?  As far as he is aware, Lord Viren’s never betrayed him.  The queen died in rescuing him from the - the dragon king.”

“You said he was the king’s closest advisor both before his marriage and after the death of his wife?” Andromeda asked thoughtfully, tapping the fingers of her good hand against her own lips as her thoughts came to a full theory.

Corvus nodded. “Yes.  At one time he was friends with both the queen and the general, but after the queen’s death . . .”

“No one else witnessed the queen’s death?”

“. . . No.”

Andromeda looked at Runaan. “Perhaps the dragon king isn’t the one who killed their queen at all.”

Runaan frowned, sitting back on his heels. “Why stop there, then?” He asked. “If he seeks power, why wait until his friend married, and then only kill the wife, if he was the closest thing the king had to family before this?”

“He wasn’t in line for the throne directly,” Corvus said quickly. “And he never will be.  That claim is hereditary, tracked through the bloodline.  King Harrow married Crownguard Sarai when he was still a prince, anyway, and he only took the throne shortly after Prince Ezran was born ten years ago.”

“Still, why wait ten years?” Runaan pointed out. “If he was likely to be chosen as regent for the boy, once he was born . . . ?”

“Unless it wasn’t just power he wanted,” Andromeda pointed out, and all of the men looked at her in confusion.  Dawning realization spread across Runaan’s face first. “What if it wasn’t just about the throne?  If he was so close to the king . . .” Skor and Corvus’ eyes widened next.

Callisto was still squinting in confusion. “What exactly are you gettin’ at?”

She resisted the urge to taunt them about it. “Perhaps his interests in the king weren’t strictly political, is all I mean.”

“They were both married at different points,” Corvus said hesitantly. “And Lord Viren was married first, as I understand it.  I don’t know exactly what happened to his wife, all the general ever says is that she vanished many years ago when their children were very small.”

“Vanished?” Andromeda echoed, grimacing as her stomach twisted unpleasantly at the implications of that. 

“Voluntarily,” Corvus said quickly. “At least from what we know, she just left without much of a warning or an explanation.”

“Doesn’t disprove my point, then,” She said, though she still grimaced at the very concept of being willing to abandon her children entirely, even with their father. “They both sought other relationships, but he wanted his control over the king, and his wife eventually realized she could not compete with that desire.  She leaves, the king marries and starts to drift away from his influence.  Perhaps he didn’t orchestrate the attack to get the queen killed, specifically, but when he sees a chance to get rid of her without suspicion, he takes it.”

Runaan grunted. “Seems he didn’t quite manage without suspicion, if what Corvus says about his general’s thoughts is true.”

Andromeda nodded to concede the point. “Still, the king is fooled.  So he regains his influence over the king for a few years . . .”

“So why is the king dead now?” Callisto asked, frowning. “If we follow that reasoning, there’s no reason for him to have died that night if we didn’t do it.”

Andromeda shook her head. “I don’t know.  It has to have something to do with the death of the dragon king and the egg.  Something about those events a few moons ago changed things on both sides of the border.  And if the attack was meant to be vengeance for the queen, why wait as long as they did for that?  The attack that led to her death was years ago.”

“Only King Harrow and Lord Viren crossed the border for that.” Corvus said carefully. “It wasn’t a mission known to most of the kingdom until it was too late to stop them.  Assistance from the Standing Battalion was turned away.”

“So he whipped the king up into a vengeful fury again.” Andromeda said, dread settling deep in her stomach as it all fell into place with Ram’s suspicions. “He leads the king across the border to respond with sudden vitriol to a death that happened years in the past, and they use the chance to steal the egg of the dragon prince and leave the dragons believing it was dead.”

Runaan’s hand was over his mouth with deep thought and he moved it to rumble, “The egg was not all that was stolen.” He glanced over them all seriously. “The queen did not give me a list, but she mentioned many things from her nest and her hoard were missing.  The dragons do not keep many artifacts that are not of great power or significance in their den.”

“So this all was a power grab.” Andromeda said softly. “Get the dragon king out of the way using the human king’s rage, get the egg, get whatever other power he can gather up . . . but why not reveal he has the egg?  Why keep that a secret?”

“King Harrow was usually a kind man,” Corvus said carefully. “It’s . . . he wanted revenge, but no one knew about the egg being stolen until now.  No one, I swear on my mother’s life, no one on this side of the border that I know of knew that the egg was here.  I somehow don’t think King Harrow was on the short list that did know.  He wouldn’t have approved of taking a child - or, close enough to one - from its mother, for no reason.”

Runaan narrowed his eyes. “But you could think of a reason he might justify it.”

“If he thought the mother was harming them.” Corvus replied immediately, and shrugged when they all looked at him.

Andromeda cut off the tangent before it could get further, outlining the theory once again as it took place in her mind. “So something triggers the mage to want more power from Xadia - dark magic alone could do that.  He whips the king up into a rage, comes to the dragons for another power grab.  The king grows suspicious in the wake of the attack, presumably realizing he’s taken more than just the life of the dragon king that they attacked for.  The mage loses influence over the king, we come to kill him . . .” She trailed off with a frustrated scoff. “It still doesn’t make sense that he would kill the king if he’s kept him alive this long, unless something else happened that we don’t know about.”

“It could be as simple as you say,” Runaan pointed out. “He lost control, the general’s distrust filtered through the king’s freshened grief and Harrow grew suspicious of the mage.  On top of that, we know Ezran fears him.  He won’t be able to manipulate the boy the way he can the father, if Ezran takes the throne.  So he has to take control now, before Ezran is old enough to take it from him.”

It was true.  Ezran had confessed before that he disliked Lord Viren, and was intimidated even by his ‘friend’, Claudia, the other dark mage like her father.  Animals were unsettled by the air of dark magic and that made the boy just as unsettled, and Lord Viren had been rather openly cruel to his own son. 

“There’s still something missing,” Callisto said slowly. “We’re theorizin’ things to fill in the blank of why the king is dead now.  But as for everything that led up to that night . . . it all does fall a little too well into place if the mage is playin’ us all for fools.”

Runaan hummed an agreement. “What about you, Corvus?” He asked, narrowing his eyes at the tracker. “Where do you fall in your loyalties, and why?”

[crossbackpoke-check]

the work is certainly not in progress, but it is wednesday !!

[itspileofgoodthings]

.

[caraecethrae]

It is an active goal of mine to start an artist collective focused on Gaelic (and Celtic) styled art

but not just revival, specifically looking to the future in modernizing and innovating existing visual styles, especially in digital mediums.

If this is interesting to you in the slightest, please dm me!

[moe-broey]

Why did I start like three other projects when I was already working on a big project when I just got hit with the autism exhaustion beam (requires. At least One Full Day just dead in bed, and then some more Taking It Easy time after)

[fluffs-n-stuffs]

"Do you not realize it? Do you... truly not see what this means?"

The next Destiny Bond update is in progress! ❄️✨ –> Check out the latest part here 🔷 –> New to the series? Follow from the start! 💜

[wizardclown]

hmmmmm

[sysig]

You don’t get to pick your own nickname, Spamton, that’s like the whole point (Patreon)

[fingertipsmp3]

Friendship ended with google sheets, now filofax is my best friend

[elftwink]

saw a video about 2 player ttrpgs and one of them was like "this one's about a pretend marriage" and i was like oh? and i looked it up on itch (eyes on the prize, fyi) and it's 50% as of right now and i was like OH? and i bought it immediately & ive read most of it and i am a big fan. and i KNOW that i have friends who would have fun playing it (it's a 2 player or 4 player game; the 4 player variant has 2 fake couples) but asking them is going to be so cringe. yeah we're gonna make up people and pretend to be them and then pretend to pretend to get married and the characters when they start their pretending they're gonna be like "oh we don't have any romantic feelings towards each other this is strictly plot" but then (get this) they will start to develop real feelings for each other. and we're gonna act it out together and pretend to be them but don't worry! we have no romantic feelings towards one another. this is strictly plot. when WE (irl) pretend to be in love it's actually platonic, unlike the people who we are pretending to be to each other. so do you have like 2-5 hours you wanna dedicate to that next week

and the worst part is that's 100% what i want. like i have roleplayed romance before with friends it is literally not a big deal because the whole point of roleplay is that the character ISN'T you. but with a fake relationship the crushing weight of dramatic irony hovers behind me