#it's actually really hard to learn systematically

[italiantea]

my international school background is doing me no favors here my biology teacher was indian my geography teacher was scottish my business teacher was from turkey i have no idea how to pronounce things anymore. why are you asking me how to say cot. who the fuck uses a cot

[nostalgebraist]

Honestly I'm pretty tired of supporting nostalgebraist-autoresponder. Going to wind down the project some time before the end of this year.

Posting this mainly to get the idea out there, I guess.

This project has taken an immense amount of effort from me over the years, and still does, even when it's just in maintenance mode.

Today some mysterious system update (or something) made the model no longer fit on the GPU I normally use for it, despite all the same code and settings on my end.

This exact kind of thing happened once before this year, and I eventually figured it out, but I haven't figured this one out yet. This problem consumed several hours of what was meant to be a relaxing Sunday. Based on past experience, getting to the bottom of the issue would take many more hours.

My options in the short term are to

A. spend (even) more money per unit time, by renting a more powerful GPU to do the same damn thing I know the less powerful one can do (it was doing it this morning!), or

B. silently reduce the context window length by a large amount (and thus the "smartness" of the output, to some degree) to allow the model to fit on the old GPU.

Things like this happen all the time, behind the scenes.

I don't want to be doing this for another year, much less several years. I don't want to be doing it at all.

----

In 2019 and 2020, it was fun to make a GPT-2 autoresponder bot.

[EDIT: I've seen several people misread the previous line and infer that nostalgebraist-autoresponder is still using GPT-2. She isn't, and hasn't been for a long time. Her latest model is a finetuned LLaMA-13B.]

Hardly anyone else was doing anything like it. I wasn't the most qualified person in the world to do it, and I didn't do the best possible job, but who cares? I learned a lot, and the really competent tech bros of 2019 were off doing something else.

And it was fun to watch the bot "pretend to be me" while interacting (mostly) with my actual group of tumblr mutuals.

In 2023, everyone and their grandmother is making some kind of "gen AI" app. They are helped along by a dizzying array of tools, cranked out by hyper-competent tech bros with apparently infinite reserves of free time.

There are so many of these tools and demos. Every week it seems like there are a hundred more; it feels like every day I wake up and am expected to be familiar with a hundred more vaguely nostalgebraist-autoresponder-shaped things.

And every one of them is vastly better-engineered than my own hacky efforts. They build on each other, and reap the accelerating returns.

I've tended to do everything first, ahead of the curve, in my own way. This is what I like doing. Going out into unexplored wilderness, not really knowing what I'm doing, without any maps.

Later, hundreds of others with go to the same place. They'll make maps, and share them. They'll go there again and again, learning to make the expeditions systematically. They'll make an optimized industrial process of it. Meanwhile, I'll be locked in to my own cottage-industry mode of production.

Being the first to do something means you end up eventually being the worst.

----

I had a GPT chatbot in 2019, before GPT-3 existed. I don't think Huggingface Transformers existed, either. I used the primitive tools that were available at the time, and built on them in my own way. These days, it is almost trivial to do the things I did, much better, with standardized tools.

I had a denoising diffusion image generator in 2021, before DALLE-2 or Stable Diffusion or Huggingface Diffusers. I used the primitive tools that were available at the time, and built on them in my own way. These days, it is almost trivial to do the things I did, much better, with standardized tools.

Earlier this year, I was (probably) one the first people to finetune LLaMA. I manually strapped LoRA and 8-bit quantization onto the original codebase, figuring out everything the hard way. It was fun.

Just a few months later, and your grandmother is probably running LLaMA on her toaster as we speak. My homegrown methods look hopelessly antiquated. I think everyone's doing 4-bit quantization now?

(Are they? I can't keep track anymore -- the hyper-competent tech bros are too damn fast. A few months from now the thing will be probably be quantized to -1 bits, somehow. It'll be running in your phone's browser. And it'll be using RLHF, except no, it'll be using some successor to RLHF that everyone's hyping up at the time...)

"You have a GPT chatbot?" someone will ask me. "I assume you're using AutoLangGPTLayerPrompt?"

No, no, I'm not. I'm trying to debug obscure CUDA issues on a Sunday so my bot can carry on talking to a thousand strangers, every one of whom is asking it something like "PENIS PENIS PENIS."

Only I am capable of unplugging the blockage and giving the "PENIS PENIS PENIS" askers the responses they crave. ("Which is ... what, exactly?", one might justly wonder.) No one else would fully understand the nature of the bug. It is special to my own bizarre, antiquated, homegrown system.

I must have one of the longest-running GPT chatbots in existence, by now. Possibly the longest-running one?

I like doing new things. I like hacking through uncharted wilderness. The world of GPT chatbots has long since ceased to provide this kind of value to me.

I want to cede this ground to the LLaMA techbros and the prompt engineers. It is not my wilderness anymore.

I miss wilderness. Maybe I will find a new patch of it, in some new place, that no one cares about yet.

----

Even in 2023, there isn't really anything else out there quite like Frank. But there could be.

If you want to develop some sort of Frank-like thing, there has never been a better time than now. Everyone and their grandmother is doing it.

"But -- but how, exactly?"

Don't ask me. I don't know. This isn't my area anymore.

There has never been a better time to make a GPT chatbot -- for everyone except me, that is.

Ask the techbros, the prompt engineers, the grandmas running OpenChatGPT on their ironing boards. They are doing what I did, faster and easier and better, in their sleep. Ask them.

[olderthannetfic]

Now I'm wondering how countries like Japan and China teach literacy.

Since kanji / hanzi don't really have that much in the way of phonetic elements, they kinda have to teach them by memorization and I don't think they have many reading comprehension problems over there.

(Although both countries do have supplementary phonetic writing systems in the form of bopomofo and pinyin for China, and the kanas for Japan)

--

FAVORITE SOAPBOX TOPIC UNLOCKED!

RELEASE THE KRAKEN!

It's a little closer to teaching vocabulary than spelling, but the same kinds of principles apply: You teach the building blocks, like the traditional radicals, which aren't so different from teaching Latin and Greek roots in an English class for English speakers.

And, as a matter of fact, lots of those radicals do predict pronunciation, just not in every single case. They can also be clues to meaning, but again, not absolutely consistently. Many characters have a sound-cueing radical on one side and a meaning-cueing radical on the other. It's just that only some are still useful in the modern day, while others are more like the English word 'plumbing' where knowledge of Roman lead pipes explains why this word comes from the one for lead, but the root probably wouldn't help a kid learn the word in the first place.

One similarity to teaching phonics would be teaching students to tell very complicated and similar characters apart: you want to help a student spot all the little building blocks of the character and then spot the ones that are different, not just glance at the whole character and get a general overall vibe. If you do a whole look-based approach, too many characters are too easy to mistake for one another.

Remembering a bajillion Chinese characters is hard if you're trying to memorize them in a year and not all of elementary school, but I think people who don't read them underestimate how many component parts there are and how approachable they can be if you start by learning fundamentals, not just memorizing a few individual characters as though they have no relation to anything else.

They're actually pretty systematic, just in the way that English spelling is with its overlapping systems and historical artifacts, not in the way that highly regular Spanish spelling is.

Having taken a lot of Japanese classes, I will say that Japanese as a foreign language textbooks often do a piss poor job of this and totally do teach kanji in a sight words-y way... But my Mandarin class started with important foundational concepts that served me well in Japanese later even if I bombed out of Chinese class at the time.

Can you tell how irritated I am by all the foreign language learners who think characters are sooooo hard when, really, it's just their crappy textbook? Haha.

They're moderately hard in the way that learning a full adult spectrum of vocabulary is hard, but people do that for foreign languages all the time. The countries that use characters do tend to make sets that are smaller for certain kinds of applications, same as we have things like simple English wikipedia, but a literate adult will always know lots more, whether it's from their career in engineering or their predilection for historical romance novels.

Uh... anyway, the answer is "Bit by bit in elementary school, just like in any other country".

[eldritchamy]

I'm actually having a hard time finding HDG fics that DON'T leave me absolutely frothing at the cerebellum to read them again immediately after finishing them.

One of my favorite things about HDG fics so far is how every single one I've read has had such an incredibly different VIBE to it? I think the reason I got so hooked on it so fast is that the SETTING ITSELF, taken as a premise, is very INTERESTING and hits on a lot of really fun kinks, and has just this huge depth of lore and worldbuilding....

and all of that stuff is the SETUP, rather than the PAYOFF.

By which I mean the shared universe takes a really fun and hot concept and then allows for ALL KINDS of completely different stories to be told BASED ON that setup.

And since the setup FUCKIN. WORKS. for me, I get to just keep exploring all these totally unique TAKES on it in terms of plot and even GENRE, which is such a cool thing for a shared universe erotic fiction bdsm scifi setting to have made possible.

And it's SO COOL how DIFFERENT most of these stories have been from what you would expect from the setting.

You would think the setting would just be an excuse to write really kinky porn (and don't get me wrong, if the kinks are right for you MAN do they hit like a truck), but so many of the ones I've read so far have dealt with, AND BEEN INCREDIBLE SINCERE COMPLEX NUANCED PORTRAYALS OF, themes like trauma recovery, and facing the unknown, and facing your fears, and self discovery, and how important it is to have meaningful connections as you heal and recover from a broken world built on oppressive systems, and learning that a beautiful post scarcity world is possible and that we DESERVE it, and learning how to be CARED FOR instead of feeling abandoned by a world and a culture that have utterly and systematically failed us.

I'm so glad I found HDG stuff.

[gece-misin-nesin]

I hope it’s ok if I rant a little about MHA because your post about Endeavor walking free reminded me of how detrimental some of the messages MHA can be. (I’ll try not to write much, feel free to delete this tho!)

It is so frustrating how the story doesn’t linger enough on the weight killing people that have yet to commit a crime, people that are a threat to the status quo, holds.

Sometimes I legit feel insane because people will be saying things like, “He could be a threat, so of course they should kill him.” And then talk about Deku and class 1A “changing the world for the better,” when the series doesn’t care to unpack its systematic issues past individual issues + the series essentially maintained the system that failed so many—resorting to reforms and expanding programs doesn’t actually solve the problem imo.

And it’s so hard nowadays to even try to have a conversation that entails criticism of the story, when so many fans fall for the condescending righteousness the story feeds as a response just because it came from heroes. Even though the story itself presents reasons why we shouldn’t blindly trust heroes (Endeavor literally right there) 🤦

Like, the story presents characters being oppressed and the ultimate response to their plight is constantly, “Just be a better victim.” The whole situation with Touya and Endeavor + what Deku says to Touya, is absolutely insane to me.

It made me sick to see people saying, “This is what Touya always wanted.” This is what people are taking away from the story, when many people who grew up being abused and didn’t fit the “perfect victim” criteria will tell you how fucked up that ending was.

Anyway, sorry for ranting. It’s so hard to find people who understands criticism in the MHA fandom 😭 The story has a lot of good points and potential, Hori just couldn’t handle it properly.

I am ALWAYS happy to listen to bnha rants!! I devour the bnha critical tag like a wild beast lmaoo

As for your thoughts, 100% agree. I feel like a big part of the problem is that the story spends so much time setting up systematic issues and then just..drops them? Acts like they don't exist? And instead it redirects all blame and reason to indovidual problems, like Endeavor for example. Touya became a villain because of Endeavor..but the conditions under which he became a villain could have been massively prevented if the ranking system didn't exist and if so much value hadn't been placed on it. Or if the wealth and privilege that being a hero had brought to Endeavor hadn't let people turn a blind eye to his bullshit. Because are you really telling NO ONE had even an inclination that something was wrong in that household? Really?

This also applies to Tomura. In the beginning The Walk where he spent some amount of time on the streets without anyone helping him seemed very important to his backstory. He didn't become a villain just because his father was a pos, he becane a villain because the state of heroism led to a society that glorified heroes to such an extent that people didn't help a bloody kid on the street because a 'hero would'. But instead most of his memories Deku interferes w are about the Shimura household instead of the very important bystander syndrome. And THEN to top it all off, we learn the stupid 'AFO orchestrated Tomura's whole life' thing. I cannot find the right words to express just how much I loathe that.

Anyway, Touya and Tenko are just two examples. Overall, the story chooses to resolve individual problems (and how well even those are resolved is certainly debatable) and frame them as the leading causes of villainy when its mostly systemic issues that cause it and then act like there were no systemic issues in the first place. I mean, literally no one has a problem with the HPSC casually having private assassins to commit extrajudicial murder, so. Guess Nagant should have just been "optimistic" and waited for someone to, idk, topple the literal government.

[greyspirehollow]

Vesuvia weekly ; The courtiers' Guilty Pleasures !

Pairing : The courtiers x reader Fandom : The Arcana visual novel Warnings : none. Pure fluff.

Volta :

I like to believe she loves dancing, like ballet, and the opera ; she loves the pretty dresses and the music,, and will secretly try and get some costumes custom tailored for herself, which she'll keep preciously in her closet and put on when she's alone, to admire herself in the mirror and imagine being on stage, amidst the crowd of pretty dancing people and musicians.

I'm pretty sure she would love to be able to fight. Being short comes with a lot of disadvantages,, I'm pretty sure she would like placing a few punches or kicks just right in people sometimes. Maybe she's already asked Vulgora to train her in the past, too.

Loves going to Portia's cottage. Loves Pepi. The flowers. The leaves. It's all so pretty ! And Portia's so nice !

She'll get all flustered and stutter if you ever ask about those secret hobbies of hers, but she'd want to share too, and even get a little frustrated by her conflicting emotions.

Vulgora :

I think they like being calmer and softer when no one's around, and to be treated calmly and with kindness (I'm sure they like being hugged, but you will never for the life of them see them admit it).

They like to play chess with the Countess, even if they loose systematically.

I have a feeling they'd love to go hunting too, with or without a falcon/dogs, or someone else's company.

I think behind their very loud and impulsive facade, they're a rather secretive person, not used to open up about things other than the plainly obvious, and so their little hobbies would be hard to discover unless you look into them a little, or generally get interested in them.

Valdemar :

I think they can play the violin, and some forgotten old instruments. They like how they have to make their finders dance over the instruments to make music.

They're a pretty manual person I think, and can craft little things here and there when they're bored ; pretty sure they tried embroidery even. Very steady hands (heh.)

and fashion. No one can convince me otherwise ; they have a sense of fashion and just don't exploit it. They don't dress often, if ever, or openly comment on people's outfits. but they COULD. IF ONLY THEY DID ARGH-

Secretive person as well. But you'd have no way of discovering any of that if they didn't want you to.

Vlastomil :

Always loved the sound a harp makes. He'd kill to learn how to play it, but he's never dared to take that initiative. It's just such a beautiful instrument, so calming, and it looks really nice to have it lean against you...

I think he'd also enjoy taking walks in the forest, and go lay down in some fresh and humid dirt, listening to the little river nearby, the chirp of birds, the leaves in the wind, the rays of sunlight peeking through...

We know how much he loves his worms, but what if he liked other things as well? what about isopods? tiny lil things.

You may surprise him indulging once or twice, but he'll always stammer a half-made-up excuse and shift the topic of the conversation quickly

Valerius :

Cat person. Loves cats. Wants cats just so he can sit in a big chair and have one on his lap and pet it menacingly while he sips his wine. Will not admit it.

LOVES velvet. Would wear velvet every day of his life if he could ; but he feels it's maybe a little too much in certain scenarios, so avoids it. He does have a cape in the back of his closet, which he wears sometimes when the halls of the Palace are desert.

Actually like to let his hair down ; thinks it gives him a mysterious charm (which yeah, if he styled it a little better), and one time you caught him mindlessly twirling his fingers into his strands.

He's not necessarily secretive, it's just he's learned court etiquette a lot, and so has taken the habit of hiding and bottling his personality down. That part at least.

[ilikekidsshows]

I really don’t believe that Marinette and Adrien, should be together at this point in time. They’re clearly not ready for a relationship and it seems like them being together has only been a detriment to them. Marinette has a hard time thinking clearly when it involves Adrien in some capacity and it’s led to catastrophe every time. As for Adrien, he’s still defining himself by someone’s else expectations of him and we see how desperate he can be to have his feelings returned to the point he’s willing to sacrifice his wants and feelings every single time.

---

Adrien and Marinette are the worst kind of codependent, where they’ve been convinced only the other person can make them happy and that they only need the other person to be happy. Adrien’s entire support network was systematically torn down in season 4 and now he’s an orphan, whose caretaker was picked by Marinette. Adrien doesn’t even know how completely Marinette controls him and his life now. Marinette knows the truth about his father and makes the decisions on what to do about it. Marinette has decided that he will not know the truth about the wedding rings, meaning he can’t keep them, therefore himself, safe, making him reliant on Marinette for safety. Even as a superhero he now has to accept Marinette’s judgement call on everything, having to operate blindly because he is given none of the information.

Adrien’s most important character motivation has been his desire for agency from the start, but now the person who’s supposedly “perfect for him” is denying him agency and controlling almost every aspect of his life. Nothing about this relationship is good for Adrien, it’s not giving him a choice and it’s draining his emotional well-being to constantly have to cater to Marinette’s mountains of issues because she will only accept help from someone who’s dating her instead of going to a mental health professional. Adrien needs people who like him as he is with no expectations, not people who want to possess him and drain him emotionally.

Marinette is no better. Her judgement has always been at its weakest when Adrien is a concern, and, just as she acknowledges this, she gets rewarded with a relationship with Adrien without her having to change her behavior first. She never had to grow or learn anything before Adrien was suddenly in love with her and pursuing her and taking care of all of her insecurities in their relationship for her. He’s also so accepting of all of her faults that she puts no thought into her decisions concerning his wellbeing and autonomy. Even as Ladybug she’s constantly asking for Cat Noir’s support while offering nothing in return and she has repeatedly failed to treat him as a human being with wants and needs that matter.

Marinette can’t even tell her boyfriend she likes him, he just knows because he’s so perfect. This inability to communicate even the simplest, most necessary things to her loved ones in zero-stakes situations has been Marinette’s number one character flaw since the start of the series and the writing crew are too scared of changing the status quo to have her learn anything, even when her refusal to just talk to people is causing actual harm. Marinette’s inability to communicate is a flaw she should work through instead of being excused, coddled and rewarded for it.

[lakesbian]

can i have more briantaylor thoughts <3 i like them

i love that one of their first interactions is brian explaining his hyperfixation in beating your ass to taylor while absolutely stoked that she's invested in learning how to properly break every bone in someone's body, unlike all these OTHER lazy unprofessional jerks he works with, and then later she successfully takes a pointer from him on how to strangle someone and he calls her fucking. Good Girl. about it. while completely oblivious to the fact that he likes her. what the hell is wrong with him. down so bad he's in the earth's core. AND HE THINKS SHE COULD BE LIKE A SISTER TO HIM. BECAUSE THAT IS THE ONLY FRAME OF REFERENCE HE HAS FOR "GIRL I ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT/LIKE." it's kind of hard to adequately summarize how funny they are. even my Top Hit posts about it don't capture everything. his mental monologue about realizing he likes her involves talking about how she could never be a trophy wife because she's weird and looks like a bug. he's 100% mad that she's more competent him, because he's a misogynist, but he also gets so [said politely] agitated from watching her defeat people with the systematically brutal force of a million well-organized bugs that he probably needs to be given sedatives about it. he thinks it's cute and charming that she cleans her naked ass body off with a Swarm of Bugs after they fuck. you know he's had spiders on his dick and you know the worst part is that he didnt really mind and in fact kind of misses the girl who put them there. its just like. It's so indescribably fantastic that his character is defined by desperately LARPing being normal & positing himself to be the team's straight guy straight guy who exasperatedly puts up with all these loose cannons, and he is Pathologically Attracted to this girl who looks like an anthropomorphized daddy long legs and cant go 3 seconds without murdering a police director. absolutely life-ruinous taylor hebert event. i have to confess i need to perform more actual analysis about them as i reread but theyre just like. conceptually speaking. so funny.

[sharpth1ng]

"chatgpt writing is bad because you can tell when it's chatgpt writing because chatgpt writing is bad". in reality the competent kids are using chatgpt well and the incompetent kids are using chatgpt poorly... like with any other tool.

It's not just like other tools. Calculators and computers and other kinds of automation don't require you to steal the hard work of other people who deserve recognition and compensation. I dont know why I have to keep reminding people of this.

It also uses an exorbitant amount of energy and water during an environmental crisis and it's been linked to declining cognitive skills. The competent kids are becoming less competent by using it and they're fucked when we require in-class essays.

Specifically, it can enhance your writing output and confidence but it decreases creativity, originality, critical thinking, reading comprehension, and makes you prone to data bias. Remember, AI privileges the most common answers, which are often out of date and wrong when it comes to scientific and sociological data. This results in reproduction of racism and sexist ideas, because guess whats common on the internet? Racism and sexism!

Heres a source (its a meta-analysis, so it aggregates data from a collection of studies. This means it has better statistical power than any single study, which could have been biased in a number of ways. Meta analysis= more data points, more data points= higher accuracy).

This study also considers positives of AI by the way, as noted it can increase writing efficiency but the downsides and ethical issues don't make that worthwhile in my opinion. We can and should enhance writing and confidence in other ways.

Heres another source:

The issue here is that if you rely on AI consistently, certain skills start to atrophy. So what happens when you can't use it?

Im not completely against all AI, there is legitimate possibility for ethical usage when its trained on paid for data sets and used for specific purpose. Ive seen good evidence for use in medical fields, and for enhancing language learning in certain ways. If we can find a way to reduce the energy and water consumption then cool.

But when you write essays with chatgpt you're just robbing yourself an opportunity to exercise valuable cognitive muscles and you're also robbing millions of people of the fruit of their own intellectual and creative property. Also like, on a purely aesthetic level it has such boring prose, it makes you sound exactly like everyone else and I actually appreciate a distinctive voice in a piece of writing.

It also often fails to cite ideas that belong to other people, which can get you an academic violation for plagiarism even if your writing isn't identified as AI. And by the way, AI detection software is only going to keep getting better in tandem with AI.

All that said it really doesn't matter to me how good it gets at faking human or how good people get at using it, I'm never going to support it because again, it requires mass scale intellectual theft and (at least currently) it involves an unnecessary energy expenditure. Like it's really not that complicated.

At the end of the day I would much rather know that I did my work. I feel pride in my writing because I know I chose every word, and because integrity matters to me.

This is the last post I'm making about this. If you send me another ask I'll block you and delete it. This space is meant to be fun for me and I don't want to engage in more bullshit discourse here.

[starlingsyscourses]

Transcending comment section character limits. @indigochromatic

I think the fantasy/iatrogenic/sociocognitive model of DID is baaaasically the tulpamancy model but said in a mean way. Compare:

These stupid people imagine they have other people in their heads/imagine they are those other people. This is basically just their overactive imagination, like roleplaying.

These cool people construct new people out of imagination/learn to inhabit new identities. This is so like roleplaying that it sometimes happens by accident to people who roleplay too hard.

Those are basically the same thing. One is just saying it in a mean way and one is saying it in a respectful way. I think people in tulpa circles even claim that tulpas are "made of imagination" and this just doesn't make them unreal.

My understanding of why, according to tulpamancers, this doesn't make tulpas unreal is that:

Identity isn't about being physical. A corpse isn't the person that used to live there, right?

Identity isn't about memory, either

Identity is about your choices, your values, your habits, your personality, your body language, your hobbies, your friendships

Tulpas have their own choices, values, etc., so therefore tulpas are not their hosts.

But tulpas do sometimes switch in and use bodies, and (apparently) an fMRI study showed that something was really happening when tulpas do things, and in general they behave consistently (at least as consistently as other people) over time instead of just saying whatever would be most convenient for their host.

But this is basically all applicable to other systems: it's why some people in DID systems hold that they're separate people from their headmates. And this is... basically an argument that's not accepted by experts, in general. For the most part experts seem to hold to a definition of identity that is physical--to a greater degree than the general population, I think. (For instance, it's been described as a notable level of thought disorder to imagine that multiple people could coexist in one body--I think the person who described it this way is R. Loewenstein but I might remember wrong--even though the belief that there could be multiple people present in the same body at the same time or one after the other is a very common religious belief. Psychiatry hasn't impressed me with its ability to live up to its own standards with respect to religious pluralism.)

So: the way the fantasy/sociocognitive model differs from what tulpamancers say about their own experiences is just this specific point about philosophy of identity, which is a way that the fantasy/sociocognitive model doesn't disagree with the trauma model, and it's a way the trauma model is sometimes unsatisfying to people who otherwise believe in it and are aware of trauma in their body's past and find mental health care helpful. And I'd go farther and say this isn't even part of the models. it's part of how the people using them define the words "real person."

So I do think arguments saying that the trauma model makes more sense than the fantasy/sociocognitive model are basically all applicable to tulpa systems. I know less about what people who believe in non-tulpa endogenic systems believe causes their systems. (Not exactly for lack of trying. It seems like people say "we've always been this way" a lot, but that's entirely compatible with the TOSD and also not an answer in the first place. It's like asking what causes cystic fibrosis and being told "I was born with it." Sure. That's probably true but it's not much of an explanation, is it?)

And I think it's probably important that, even though tulpamancers have a highly systematic guide to becoming multiple, what actually happens is that a lot of people try it and get no results at all, while other people show up in their communities saying "I think I had a tulpa all along, ever since I was a child, and just never knew there was a word for it!" Like there's some reason why people are multiple that isn't contained in their guide. Maybe it's fantasy-proneness. Maybe it's the mysterious non-answer that leads some endogenics to be born that way. It's just... neither of those seems like a good answer.

[meichenxi]

Hanzi update (+accidental trauma talk)

tw illness, trauma, vomiting, weight loss, recovery. I didn't plan to write about this but because of what happened in the last year I can't really write about how I studied Chinese without talking about it. so. but it's mainly about hanzi lol

I've been learning how to write traditional characters with the vague idea that I'd go and study in Taiwan, and also that if I want to write Classical Chinese or Japanese they're far more useful - but the program I want to go to Taiwan for requires HSK7, which I DO not think I can achieve and have the results of before March. Who knows! Perhaps within me lies untold brilliance and dedication!!

...well, I wouldn't rely on it. (I am also busy with a job, a partner, studying an A-level course to begin tutoring it in September, and writing the second draft of my novel.)

And even if I ended up going to Taiwan with my absolutely fantastic HSK7, there's no way I could handwrite all of those words within a year. If I learn 10 characters a day, that's like 3650 characters in a year, but realistically that will never happen - and you still have to actually remember them.

I also know from my last experience where I learnt a stupid amount of characters very quickly (about 800 in two weeks) that I can technically do it, I have a very large swollen brain, but then the brain, being very large and very swollen, promptly burns out. And leaves me to not do any Chinese again for like two months. So basically - completely pointless, because after those two months of rest I had forgotten most of them anyway. I will not be doing that again.

This time around I have been slowly, very slowly, learning things on Skritter. I have about 400 characters so far. I'm not doing words but doing characters, which is a bit slower, but I figure it'll be more useful in the long run. After I have the first 1000, I'm planning to then systematically go through the HSK and TOCFL lists and check I know how to put characters together and which 'jing' is used in 'yijing' etc.

This approach is only really going to work because I know a lot of vocabulary and can read a lot of stuff already - otherwise I wouldn't recommend to anybody without that backbone of vocabulary to just learn random isolated characters, unless you're masochistic or much harder-core than I am.

As I have said in a lot of posts before, I had a very difficult experience in China last August and have basically taken an entire year off studying because in all honesty I just couldn't bring myself to face the language again. Every time I tried I had this crazy grief and nightmares and stress response. What I went through was so stressful that during those two months in China that I lost seven kilograms, as I couldn't eat much without vomiting it back up due to stress and fear, didn't sleep, and ended up having to leave for Thailand pretty severely malnutritioned - which then made me susceptible to illnesses there and I spent the next two months after with awful health, vomiting and weak and generally sick. Luckily I was with friends and I gained the weight again and my period and digestive system sorted itself out.

And I never expected that a language itself could carry trauma? Like. Nobody died, it wasn't like that, I wasn't abused or assaulted or anything but still...for just under a year, every time I spoke or heard or read Chinese I couldn't help thinking of those two months. Even now it's still hard. I'm finding my way back to it but, to be honest, I didn't expect how hard it would be. I thought I could just - move past it, because I'd already had so many great experiences in China and Taiwan and with Chinese, that they would cancel each other out or at least be aided by the huge amounts of love that the language has shown me. Alas, it was not the case.

Anyway. All of that to say - I have only managed to do about 400 characters in a year, because I essentially gave up studying completely.

Now I've just finished reviewing and re-remembering those 400 characters on Skritter, so I'm ready to start again! I don't know what's changed, I guess just time - I feel more positive, I feel curious and interested about the language again. I don't know. I'm not going to question it too deeply. But for these past two weeks, I've been having a lot of fun :)

I'll update everyone on my progress as I go! Next post - 500.

[wizardingworldlibrary]

Love Potion/Spells (2) Masterlist

part one

a memorable valentine's day (ao3) - blue_violets hermione/ron, sirius/remus, harry/ginny G, 3k

Summary: After fighting with Hermione at the Yule Ball two years ago, Ron wants to make the Valentine’s Day Dance perfect for her. Unfortunately, Fred & George accidentally added their own DNA to a batch of love potion sold at their shop in Hogsmeade. Everyone who unknowingly takes some of the potion falls in love with all the Weasleys. The evening of the dance, Ron, Bill and their siblings are ambushed by hordes of admirers.

Amortentia Tension (ao3) - Anonymous regulus/james G, 13k

Summary: Regulus, somehow, agrees to a bet with James Potter. He will drink a love potion (questionably acquired), and they'll see how long James can last with him being stupidly in love with him. It's only for a weekend—how hard can it be?

Bewitched (ao3) - StarlingFlight harry/ginny M, 90k

Summary: When Luna suggests, after Ginny suffers through the latest in a long line of comically bad dates, that the solution to all of her problems lies in brewing a love potion, she thinks it's all a big joke.

Obviously, magic isn't real. Luna's potion recipe is nothing more than a novelty, sold to tourists enamoured with the legends surrounding their historical hometown of Godric's Hollow.

Of course, Ginny really should've learned by now that her plans have a tendency to go awry. So it really shouldn't come as that much of a surprise to her when, the very next day, half the town seems to find her utterly...bewitching

The only person who appears to be immune to the enchantment she's accidentally cast, is the one person who she wishes saw her as something more than his best friend's little sister; typically, even the miracle of actual magic can't capture Harry Potter's interest, and now he's the only person who can help her fix this latest mess she's created...

Butterbeer Confessions (ao3) - EscapeInMyBookshelf theodore/ginny M, 2k

Summary: The British and Irish Quidditch league is having their annual Christmas party at the Malfoy Manor. Theodore Nott spikes a Butterbeer intending to give to Draco Malfoy but his crush Ginny Weasley drinks it instead.

Falling like a Snowflake (ao3) - GhostIsReading marcus/harry T, 2k

Summary: Marcus Flint gives Harry a box of chocolates unaware that they are laced with a potion.

Minty Water (ao3) - CandyCla scorpius/albus G, 3k

Summary: When Albus received a love potion from his Uncle Ron, he never intended to use it. He certainly never planned for his best friend to drink it, thinking it was just water. And he definitely hadn't anticipated that his best friend would act completely normally, unaffected by the love spell.

Muggle Matrimony (ao3) - Snitchesbecray hermione/ron G, 33k

Summary: Hermione and Ron are finally tying the knot—but, in true Hermione style, this wedding isn’t just about romance. Hermione is determined to make her big day a groundbreaking statement by holding a Muggle-friendly, magic-free ceremony in a Muggle church. Her goal? To show the Ministry that wizard and Muggle worlds can truly blend, all while setting herself up for a big promotion.

But transforming a wedding into a statement on systematic change proves to be a spellbinding challenge. With tensions running high, Ron feeling uneasy about getting married so young, Fleur ready to pop with a new Weasley any minute, and a certain ex eager to win Hermione back, this ceremony may need more than just a little magic to succeed. Will Hermione’s bold vision be the start of a new era—or will her magical wedding day dreams end in a spectacular disaster?

Potions and Paradoxes (ao3) - yourstruly_quin hermione/draco T, 3k

Summary: “Granger,” he said.

She looked up from her textbook. “What is it?”

“I think we made a mistake,” he said, words quick and clipped.

She set her quill down and scoffed. “Don’t be ridiculous, Malfoy. Everything is going perfect. Look at the potion— it’s textbook.”

He scowled, panic bubbling in his chest. “Then why does it smell like—“ he cut himself off abruptly.

“Why does it smell like what?” She frowned.

“Nothing,” he snapped. The scent continued to get stronger, wrapping around him and taunting him. Coffee, parchment, cinnamon. It was undeniably Granger.

take a sip of my secret potion (ao3) - neozeka draco/harry T, 981

Summary: Harry gets doused with a potion meant to make him fall in love with the first person he sees

naturally, it's Draco

The Black Dog (ao3) - amariss1 sirius/remus T, 57k

Summary: "Well, I think it's time to tell you all, me and Remus are together!"

Sirius Black was starting to have trouble breathing as the Order members and even his godson congratulated Tonks and Remus. The things that had changed in 14 years kept coming back to haunt him.

"But she's too young to know this song"

There’s A Thin Line Between Love and Obsession (ao3) - dittanyanddreams hermione/draco E, 7k

Summary: Draco has an unhealthy obsession with a certain mudblood witch, one that he has harboured secretly for longer than he would ever care to admit. But, what happens when obsessive thoughts lead to action?

to thine own self (ao3) - into_the_past pandora/lily N/R, 4k

Summary: Severus Snape will stop at nothing to gain Lily Evan's attention. (Love potion gone awry)

[luaspersona]

hey y’all, how have you been?

i know it’s been a while, and i know i promised a fic that was supposed to be posted earlier this month and that it’s been some time since i dropped a review. but a lot of stuff happened and i realized that i needed some time off. during that time, i reflected a lot and considered not returning, maybe only posting the seoul town road story and going offline for good. eventually tho, i understood how much i missed reading and how much i couldn’t really stop coming up with ideas and outlining some stories — i like this and for the most part, it makes me really happy.

but i wanted to talk a bit about the stuff that made me second-thought coming back. i wanted to be open about stuff that’s depressing and demotivating in this community, especially because i’ll change a lot of things about how i interact here.

this will be a long text, but it’s really important if you follow me. i wanna make it clear tho, before anything, that i’m speaking for myself here, and myself only.

⇢ the first thing i wanna say is that i’ll be generally less active. i used to think that in order to become a popular blog or whatever i had to be chronically online, posting all the time and all. after giving it some thought, i can't really tell if that's true or not, but the thing is: i don’t have the mental health for it. so i won't push myself. but also, if you write something and want me to read it, please send it to me! shamelessly and guiltlessly promote your work! i probably won’t see it on the feed, but i’m always open for recommendations, i just don't have the time to look for it anymore.

⇢ i’ll also go through my followers and block anyone who doesn’t have their age displayed or looks like a bot. no questions asked. this isn’t a blog for minors, and i wanna protect myself. understand how tumblr works if y’all wanna be here.

⇢ i will finish and post seoul town road soon. please be patient. 

⇢ lately, i’ve seen a lot of wonderful writers deactivate due to lack of interaction and support. i understand we’re here working, writing and sharing for free because we *chose to*, but it's hard to speak to the void. so please, don’t let this become a place where authors are talking to themselves while feeling unsafe due to plagiarism or hate. i understand the reasons why someone might be a silent reader, but... just don't make the authors you like feel alone, y'all (i can write some tips and general guides for reviewing and interacting with writing blogs if y’all are interested).

⇢ ok, so… i thought a lot about whether or not to talk about it. it was already super messy, even if i wasn’t online at the time and didn’t see it happening (i'm sorry if this is just repetition, and i bet y'all are sick of it). but ultimately, the main reason why i hesitated to come back was because of what happened to M, so i kinda need to vent about that.

M was one of the oldest blogs here, always open to chat and interact and doing god's work for our horny and sentimental souls (shape of your body is actually one of my favorite stories ever and made me realize a bunch of stuff about myself to the point where i quoted some of it to my therapist at the time), and y’all came for them in such a nasty, violent way, misgendering and attacking a person that, upon first being called out for writing something insensitive, was immediately open to discussion and hearing what y’all had to say (regardless if it really was insensitive or not, the discussion was more than welcomed by them).

what shocks me the most, is that y’all are supposedly from a fandom of a bunch of dudes who once wrote problematic stuff, but educated themselves after accepting criticism and changed. if y’all understand that our oppressions are systematic, y’all have to understand that everyone has stuff to learn and stuff to let go. i say that as a black woman, who once used to perpetrate racist shit because that was how i was raised and taught. i say that as a bi woman, who once used to perpetrate biphobic and queerphobic rhetoric because that was how i was raised and taught. i say that as a human being, who once used (and probably still do to some capacity) to perpetrate prejudice and problematic behavior because that was how i was raised and taught.

this is not to say we should forgive and forget whenever someone says stuff that’s wrong or suspicious, but sometimes people really don’t understand that what they’ve said is offensive or from a place of unfamiliarity (not sure if that's a real word), and if we gave the boys the benefit of the doubt and still supported them (and are now being rewarded with their care and attention) why can’t we do the same for ourselves? not to mention how transphobic most of y’all were, all while calling someone out for doing something you deemed problematic, like ??? fuck y’all tbh. seeing how they were treated, and learning about the tea blog made me physically sick. someone who has always been such a light in this community being dragged from one (debatable) mistake — which they acknowledged and apologized for — made me depressed af.

it all made this look like stan twitter, where every interaction feels like an attempt to expose someone and draw hate towards them. this makes me feel unsafe as hell. and i don’t know… this whole environment is not as it used to be. there were a bunch of nice projects i wanted to share, i was working on jade’s profile for a nice little thing i wanted to do to support the writing community, i was working on monthly recs, but… idk. i’m not saying i won’t do them, just saying it might take longer for me to feel comfortable here again.

⇢ i know i'm no one. i'm a little blog from the corner of our community, and i barely have enough followers for all of this to mean anything. but this is still my blog, and it's still a place that was supposed to feel good. and i want to have some control over it, even if no one cares necessarily.

anyway. i’m depressed, and i’m saying stuff i might regret, but. yeah. that’s it ig. i'll return slowly and i missed y'all, especially on discord, and i'm sorry for vanishing. i'll also be rb this for the next days to make sure that i reaches everyone i want it to reach.

[gold-rhine]

hello. i come for ask game. xinyan & anemo or, if you do not care for hard mode of character rarely talked about kaeya & dendro

anemo needs to have their life uprooted, either their core believes shattered or to lose something fundamental that makes them question their sense of self, to be the leaf on the wind, but learn to go with it instead of being thrown around. this is why death of loved one is a very popular anemo motive, as its an easy way to yank the ground from under character's feet. for a righteous, self-confident character like xinyan, that loss also needs to challenge their preconceptions. basically i think it needs to be heizou situation where he cast categorical judgment on his friend and then at his death was forced to re-evaluate his own view of justice. heizou would be pyro or electro if that friend didn't happen btw, depending on other circumstances.

for xinyan it could be idk, she had a conservative uncle who was against her rock and roll shit (and we know her family was not thrilled), she thought he's a jerk and fought him all the time, but then got into trouble with law by idk vandalizing public property with graffiti or smth, and it somehow tied her to even bigger crime that she didn't do, and instead of blaming her or chastising her like she thought he would, he uncle took the blame and went to prison himself to protect her. like he could just die protecting her from smth, but i'm trying to reduce anemo-related deaths asdghj

kaeya would work very well as dendro, he has a lot of corresponding tendencies - drive to collect and process new information, to systematize it and then use it to achieve his goals. his urge to get info from ppl and to put them in hard situations to see how they'll react mirrors alhaitham's ethos of collecting information through biased perspectives to understand these perspectives and challenge them against one another, alhaitham is just much more blunt. the main problem is that kaeya needs to not hate himself and not see this drive for learning things about ppl as inherently evil thing that makes him a manipulator. which is uuuuh, hard to do in his situation lol. idk, if his dad really didn't have an agenda for him and left him in sumeru with candace without any loaded statements about last hope of the khaenriah, so kaeya didn't feel like a spy and time bomb.

dendro kaeya i think would be either in akademiya, inventing psychology and tools to analyze ppl, or be an edgy writer who uses social experiments on ppl to get "true" plots for his books. maybe both actually lol

[maths-screaming]

Well That Sucks, Thanks for the Memories

(Bonus points if you can name the anime from whose blooper reel I got the title of this post. No really - it became a part of my personal meme lexicon in the early 2000s from an anime dub blooper reel, and for the life of me I cannot remember which anime it was. Now that we've gotten the depths of my sad nerdery out of the way, let us talk about how much I suck at math.)

Like everyone else in a US high school the last week before break, I did not do much actual work the last week before break. I handed out a lot of candy canes and shelved a few books. I made a to-do list of projects that are Next Year Me's Problem. And I Googled "dyscalculia."

This isn't the first time I've looked up "dyscalculia," but it was the first time I did so on a mission: to do anything at all other than throw my hands up and go "welp, brain broken, too bad no numbers for me."

So I started looking at books and articles on dyscalculia. I read about how to build adaptation skills in kids that have it and how adults can adapt to it too. I learned that not everyone with math anxiety has dyscalculia, but everyone with dyscalculia has math anxiety.

And I learned that, with or without a numbers learning disorder, the way I was taught arithmetic was probably the worst possible approach offered in the entire previous century.

Let me back up.

The current "gold standard" for teaching math to kids is the CPA approach. It stands for Concrete, Pictorial, Abstract - the sequence by which new ideas are introduced. (It's also called the CRA approach, for Concrete - Representational - Abstract.)

Teaching a kid how to count to 10? Hand them 10 of something. Have them move the pieces around, line them up, make groups. Eventually, add pictures of groups of things (apples, kites, washed-up baseball players). Later, add the number symbols we all know and love (in the US, 1, 2, 3, and the rest of the squad).

This is the cornerstone of the Singapore method, which consistently lands Singapore's students in the top math scorers worldwide - by a lot.

Above all, this method stresses, do not withdraw concrete and pictorial representations too soon. We're hard-wired as a species to like concrete counting methods. We have ten fingers, and we use them for more than picking our noses!

Flashback to my first grade classroom.

My first grade classroom had four or five abacuses - the kind with the rainbow beads on horizontal strings. Being a child whose favorite color was "rainbow," I loved these things. I would choose them over toys during playtime.

I was not allowed to use them for math lessons.

Why? Because the abacuses were reserved "for the slower kids" (my teacher's exact words). I was "very bright"; I "just needed to apply myself."

(As a multiply-neurodivergent adult who wasn't diagnosed with any of it until adulthood and as someone who works with high schoolers every day, let me just say: the phrase "you're smart, you just need to apply yourself" should be a one-way ticket to a full LD screening. #justeducatoropinions)

I had math anxiety by the end of first grade. Because "applying myself," whatever that meant, didn't bridge that gap between the concrete and the abstract. Numbers were weird alien symbols I could decode only occasionally. Sometimes they just wouldn't talk to me. I couldn't explain why. (I was six!)

Learning at age 42 that I was systematically deprived of the tools required to succeed in math from the age of 6 is doing a number on me. On that first day, I had to take a fast three laps around the high school track to calm down before my lunch break ended.

When I got back to my desk, I of course went looking for better textbook options.

I find the artwork the Maths - No Problem! series, part of the UK National Curriculum, weirdly soothing. It's cute and friendly. And the fact that every single lesson is modeled with little cubes reassures me that no one is going to make me rely solely on those devious little "digits" until I'm good and ready.

The series is also available for free on the Internet Archive. Since I'm not looking for the best books so much as something better than I had as a kid, I've decided to start here. With Book 1A.

Let's see what happens.

Further reading:

What is the Concrete Representationa Abstract (CRA) Approach and How to Use It In Your Elementary Math Classroom

What is Singapore Math?

Singapore Math (Wikipedia)

Maths - No Problem! Textbook 1A (Internet Archive)

[enteragoodnamehere]

OHO!! hmmm who is your favorite oc at the moment

hihihi!! its really really hard to pick just one so I'll say my favorite ocs all come from a story i'm working on right now that I don't really have a name for but my tag for it is #ouroboros furry story . The main characters are Alexi Windam (they/she/he, featured here and here) and Jazlyn "Jaz" Williams (she/her, here) (and also together w/ alexi here and here).

basic backstory story is that Jaz grew up in a cult that worshipped a deity called The Ouroboros, which is an eldritch, multi-dimensional, writhing mass of worm-snake-things that has the power to grant wishes, with the cult's built around necromancy and getting the Ouroboros to revive dead loved ones. Alexi is Jaz's childhood best friend/lover who was Not raised in the cult but is aware of it. When Jaz gets older, she decides to take revenge on the cult by systematically serial killing every member she can find. Eventually, this spirals out of control as she starts killing people who don't even know about The Ouroboros. She gets really paranoid that Alexi, who has been keeping her killing a secret but is increasingly worried by her behavior, is actually a part of the cult, and comes up with a plan to murder-suicide them both by killing Alexi and setting their apartment building on fire. This fails, and Jaz dies while Alexi lives, badly scarred both physically and mentally.

The actual story itself is Alexi, recovered from his physical injuries, moving into a new apartment and slowly learning to live without Jaz, to whom they gave pretty much everything to and were left with nothing in return. They make friends with the rest of the cast aka her neighbors (whom I'm not gonna talk about bc this is already and absurdly long post) and recover :] And at the same time the undead possessed corpse of Jaz piloted by the Ouroboros goes around killing people and they have to figure that out and stop it.

it's A Lot but its also my beautiful brain baby and I love it. Alexi is one of my favorite OCs ever and the rest of the cast is so great too I really need to actually sit down and draw them lol. also have this shitty doodle as compensation for the long ass post:

text transcript: jaz -> you don't wanna date me. i'm horrible. a monster. i'll never change. I will ruin you and your life. I will kill us both. Die. alexi (thought bubble) -> I can fix her... arrow pointing at an older alexi <- could not fix her