#might add some art explaining what i mean later

[molluskzone-moving]

furry tattoos are always so fascinating to me because i love seeing all that you can do with them. most people just draw the tattoos like fur patterns that have been stickered onto the body without taking into account how that wouldnt really work on fur (which makes sense bc tattoos on skin look cool so it also looks cool to just stick that onto a furry) but i personally really love seeing variety in tattoo applications and thinking about how it would work in real life... what i do personally is that if im designing a world in which all the characters are anthros (there are many ways to do this but ill imagine its something pretty generic for simplicitys sake), i will have a few different kind of "tattoos" that are popular.

the first is literally just bleaching + dying the fur in fun patterns (or just dying it if the character is white or tan to begin with). this would probably be seen as similar to having brightly colored dyed hair in our world, but id imagine its slightly more "extreme" depending on the styles. this is obviously not permanent and it will either fade or shed out. this is one of the more realistic options, as its something we do with our pets in real life! maybe kids and teens too young to have proper tattoos would do this to their fur, along with adults whose jobs prevent them from permanent body modification.

the second is having tattoo parlors specialized for tattooing on naked animals such as sphinxes or xoloitzcuintli (which may or may not actually exist depending on how you build your world and justify domestic dog and cat breed existing but thats a different discussion)... i think they could also probably tattoo other animals if they first shave their fur completely off and only leave skin: maybe punks or people really into body mods keeps parts of or all of their fur shaved off specifically to show off the tattoos. the third option (which is my personal favorite, and also the most unrealistic) is a sort of fantasy tattooing where the tattoo gun is somehow able to inject dye into the fur root and permanently change the color of the fur as it grows in. while this really couldnt happen in real life i love justifying it as something that has somehow been invented in furry societies... id imagine the tattooing procedure would be pretty painful and expensive, but would look very cool. and since this procedure would change the fur colour completely, if the character has long fur they would need to keep the patch of fur where the tattoo is shaved down to keep the design clear (kind of like people who "paint" onto their buzzcuts with hair dye: the dye looks weird if their hair grows longer, even if the dye itself is still in the same design). id imagine there are some people who would keep their entire arms or legs shaved down to show off tattoos, and leave certain parts of their body fur long for aesthetics. im actually unsure as to how realistic this option is, as my "research" (aka googling "is it possible to tattoo a dog) did not yield any results (all the photos and website articles were about either people shaving and dying their dogs fur or saying "YOU SHOULDNT TATTOO A DOG ITS CRUELTY" which is true but also i just wanna know if its *possible*)

the fourth option is also a realistic option, as its something we do in real life: freeze branding on animals with dark fur! people do this to horses and cattle in order to identify them, and the freeze brand makes the hair that grows there permanently white. like the previous option, this one would also require the fur to be shaved or trimmed down to make the design more legible, especially if it was more detailed. id imagine this would be a cheaper and simpler option that the fantasy idea of permanently dying the hair at the root, but its very similar in that it would keep the hair that grows there permanently altered. i think this would be pretty popular due to it being cheaper and quicker than other options. also, if you regret the design you could just dye your fur regularly to make the brand not visible any more. one downside of this method that i could see is that maybe its seen as less special because artists might have a few different brand they use on multiple people: maybe some groups see it as a poser thing. custom designs may be possible, but it would either require the artists to have a few different pieces they would arrange in different positions, or for them to create a custom brand for a specific customer which i imagine would get pretty expensive. also, while i was researching freeze brands for this post i discovered that people have actually attempted freeze brands on all sorts of animals, including sea lions and scaled animals which is very interesting (though the brands last significantly longer on animals with fur compared to fish or animals that shed their skin)

[colleendoran]

The Secret Language of a Page of Chivalry: The Pre-Raphaelite Connection

Adapting Neil Gaiman’s Chivalry is a decades-long dream fulfilled. The story as text can be enjoyed on multiple levels, and so can the art. You look at the pages and see the pretty pictures, but the pictures also have meta-textual meaning. Knowing this secret language adds to the experience.

Some people pick up the references quickly, but I’ll share with you some more of what’s going on under the surface.

In Ye Olden Days of Art Making, most painters made pictures that contained visual narrative cues. Flowers in a picture might be heraldic signs that signaled political affiliations, or could indicate purity, anger, or love. Purple was the color of kings. A dog in a picture might represent faithfulness, and butterflies could represent the soul.

There are Pre-Raphaelite paintings with so many symbols and ideas in them that you need a deep working knowledge of Victorian and Edwardian social mores to understand what’s going on.

For example, Ford Madox Brown’s Work, a painting which took some 13 years to complete, was first exhibited in 1865 with a catalogue explaining all its symbols and elements. There is nothing in that picture that doesn’t mean something.

I brought some of that visual meta-textual sensibility to Chivalry, (and I’ve written about the symbolism and meanings in the work in other essays.)

I also brought into the work direct Pre-Raphaelite art references.

From 1868-1870, Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones created four paintings illuminating the tale of Pygmalion and Galatea, entitled Pygmalion and the Image, and wrote a poem with each line titling one painting:

The heart desires

The hand refrains

The godhead fires

The soul attains.

A perfect little poem for Chivalry, and I think of it often when some people present me with what I think is a very strange question: why didn’t Galaad just take the Holy Grail from Mrs. Whitaker?

It kind of breaks my heart that people would even ask that.

Burne-Jones painted two versions of this series of which this is the second.

In the first panel of this page, Sir Galaad kneeling before the Grail is derived from the figure of Pygmalion kneeling before Galatea: The Soul Attains.

Sir Galaad’s restraint even in the face of his greatest desire makes him worthy of his prize.

There are two Pre-Raphalite references in this page, the most obvious being in panel 2: it’s Sir John Everett Millais’s 1857 work A Dream of the Past: Sir Isumbras at the Ford.

The painting was very poorly received on first exhibition, compelling Millais to redo significant portions of it. It was caricatured and ridiculed, and then ended up becoming influential and popular, and isn’t that the way it goes.

That’s an art career in a nutshell, really.

The Sir Isumbras image also influenced John Tenniel’s illustrations for the Lewis Carroll Alice in Wonderland novels.

Sir Isumbras derives from a 13th century Medieval romance poem about a good knight whose pride causes him to fail in his Christian duty. He is presented with a series of difficult challenges before he can find happiness again, reunite with his family, and be forgiven his sins. The painting by Millais is based less explicitly on the poem than it is on a later parody of the poem. (It’s complicated.)

My using Sir Isumbras as the base for the shot of Galaad with the children is obvious here. In the Millais painting, Sir Isumbras carries a woodcutter’s children across the ford. In Chivalry, Sir Galaad carries the children of Mrs. Whitaker’s neighborhood down the street.

While Sir Isumbras spent many years learning humility and Christian duty, Galaad has a long quest to fulfill before he can achieve his goal. And on the way to that goal, he’s humble and nice to children, too.

That the Millais painting was such a huge influence on many a depiction of knighthood over the years made it a perfect reference point here, and the story behind both the painting and the poem give it further layers of meaning.

The next panel has a far less obvious reference, but the source is Arthur Hughes’s painting The Rescue.

Arthur Hughes is one of the lesser-known Pre-Raphaelites, but his art is widely seen and influential. He’s certainly been a big influence on me, as many of his paintings appear again and again in Arthuriana references, as he was a prolific King Arthur picture tale teller.

The Rescue (1907-1908) was originally part of a diptych which was separated and sold back in the 1920’s. His style was becoming unpopular by the time Hughes painted the work, and little is known about this work except that one panel was in the collection of Andrew Lloyd Webber at some point. Maybe still is. Dunno.

Anyway, the diptych depicts a little child kneeling in prayer menaced by a dragon in one panel, and in the next, safely trotting away with a knight on horseback. I like that this is a diptych, a kind of proto-comic art form common in medieval religious art, so this was perfect to use here.

Another reference to Arthur Hughes is in this double page splash from later in the book as Galaad on his quest encounters the Hesperides.

I didn’t set out to reference this Arthur Hughes piece at first, but it’s one of my favorite paintings. When I realized my sketches for this scene kept echoing the Hughes composition, I went with it. The Hughes painting of Galahad is one of the most famous depictions of the character, so it makes me happy to have this referenced in Chivalry.

Kindly ask for CHIVALRY, published by Dark Horse Comics in the USA and by Headline Books in the UK at your local comic shops or bookstore. Written by Neil Gaiman. Adaptation and art by me.

For further reading on this project, go HERE.

HERE.

And HERE.

Thank you to my Patreon patrons for sponsoring my work and this post.

Colleen Doran Illustrates Neil Gaiman will be a solo exhibit at the Society of Illustrators in New York City this spring. Watch this space for updates.

Have a wonderful holiday season.

[sunny-days-and-warm-mournings]

It is finally finished!! I am done and is so happy!!!

This is an AU exploring the concept of Sūn Wùkōng/Dàshèng as a Yaksha and Tu Di Gong, rather than being a Yaoguai Warlord during his later years reigning as the Monkey King.

This AU follows the beginning (with some changes here and there) up until Wùkōng's shenanigans with Ao Guang, then he went on a separate path from Wu Cheng'en's novel.

In this iteration our favourite Monkey explored the realms as he burned up time, but then he took a particular interest in the humans' ways of producing food. Since Dàshèng was so used to the grandeur and bounties of Huagoushan (being surrounded by such lush forests and mountains that never withered nor died) he sort of took pity on them before deciding to help them grow their crops much better.

But this is just the very much shortened summary of the beginning of this AU, and I have compiled some research and even more lore in my Google Documents just to expand on this idea more.

This— Westward To Tathāgatagarbha Lore Google Documents

This is the Google Document of my AU, which I highly recommend for you to read! It explains all the other details and such on this story! I did my best on making them but there would be still mistakes that I have yet to find, but it should be decent!!

This is a more casual look for Dàshèng/Wùkōng for this AU as well as some brief pointers! I made this before the portrait so some things might have changed.

(Don't mind him holding a cup of beer it's fine.)

Taken from the server (with some hints for the next half of the archives/docs) which instantly kickstarted this whole thing haahahjjjss, but it really was so fun talking about it to others! They gave me more inspiration that I can handle.

And what is Tathāgatagarbha you ask? (Brief)

In Buddhist philosophy, Buddha-nature is the potential for all sentient beings to become a Buddha or the fact that all beings already have a pure buddha-essence within. "Buddha-nature" is the common English translation for several related Mahayana Buddhist terms, most notably tathāgatagarbha and buddhadhātu, but also sugatagarbha, and buddhagarbha. Tathāgatagarbha can mean "the womb" or "embryo" (garbha) of the "thus-gone one" (tathāgata), and can also mean "containing a tathāgata". Buddhadhātu can mean "buddha-element," "buddha-realm" or "buddha-substrate"

The Chinese translated the term tathāgatagarbha as rúláizàng (如来藏), or "Tathāgata's (rúlái) storehouse" (zàng). According to Brown, "storehouse" may indicate both "that which enfolds or contains something", or "that which is itself enfolded, hidden or contained by another." The Tibetan translation is de bzhin gshegs pa'i snying po, which cannot be translated as "womb" (mngal or lhums), but as "embryonic essence", "kernel" or "heart".

The term tathagatagarbha first appears in the Tathāgatagarbha sūtras, which date to the 2nd and third centuries CE.

There will be more to this in the future when I'm finished researching more about it.

Also, speaking of people that inspire me, I'm calling my dear friends here who I think might like this: @digitalagepulao @kaijufluffs @sketching-shark @lavaflowe @sixteenthchapel @jttw-monkeybusiness and @hcdragoncat !!

Special thanks to Pardal and Grandpa Sun for getting me to write more of this too :D I had such great fun!

I have so much more to add to the docs and here but this is all for now :) and honestly this is one of the greatest projects I've started aside from the older ones. I'll come back again soon with more additions and art! And lore (And maybe some interactions with a few West Heaven occupants??)!!!

[ladykailitha]

The Eddie Munson Guide for Dating an Oblivious Jock Part 3

Sorry this is taking me longer than normal, I’ve had major cramps the last three days that have knocked me for a six.

Part 1 Part 2

*

Step Five: Flirting

“Shouldn’t you be doing that the whole time?” Max asked.

Eddie shook his head. “Not really. With the low self-esteem they’ll only get flustered and angry. And that’s the last thing you want. It’s why flirting with Steve in the Upside Down didn’t work. He was only confused and upset.”

Max nodded. “So how do you flirt?”

Flirting is an art that can be hard to learn because was works on one person might not work on the next. Pet names are a good place to start, compliments are always a win, but with that you have to be careful not to compliment something they’re insecure on.

“What do you mean?” Max asked.

“Say they think they’ve put on weight,” Eddie explained. “And you compliment their figure, depending on the person, their mood or who they’re around they might take offense to it.”

“So complimenting their looks is a no-no?” she asked.

Eddie shook his head. “Stick to things they can choose,” he said. “Like a new shirt that looks good on them, if they’ve gotten a new hair cut. Their shoes.”

She nodded. “I can work with that.”

Eddie walked into Family Video and stopped short. Steve was wearing a tight grey Henley and his hair was shorter on the sides then he usually kept it.

“Looking fine today, pretty boy,” Eddie said flouncing up to the counter where Steve was putting together member card applications for Keith to review later.

Steve blushed, running his hands nervously through his hair. “You think it looks okay?”

Eddie reached over and tugged a lock so that draped in front of Steve’s face dramatically. “You are totally rocking it.”

He straightened up. “Me and Will went to the barber yesterday because he wanted to try something new and well...”

Eddie softened. “And you didn’t want him to feel nervous about it so you got your hair cut, too.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re a good dude, Stevie,” Eddie said, wrapping his finger around the loose lock of hair.

Steve blush deepened and reached his ears. “You’ve never called me ‘Stevie’ before.”

“You like it?” Eddie asked, leaning further into his space.

Steve nodded. “It sounds sweet coming from you.”

“Holy hell!” Max exclaimed. “He’s totally had the hots for you.”

Eddie smiled at the memory. “Yeah, but he didn’t know it at the time. He had just realized he liked boys, too. It was still too new for him.”

“Must have been scary, too,” Max agreed.

In addition to compliments and pet names, once you’ve figured out what they like add a little touch to your flirting. Nothing overt. Don’t be grabbing his ass right off the bat. Save that for when you’ve finally bagged your jock and are dating them.

They were watching Thirteen Ghosts at Eddie’s and were sitting next to each other on the sofa.

“The special effects are a little goofy on this one,” Steve said. “It makes it hard to be scary.”

“Yeah,” Eddie agreed, leaning into his space. “But the story is good and you can see why it might have scared audiences at the time.”

Steve chuckled. “I guess.”

Eddie patted his knee. “I’m going to grab another beer, you want one?”

Steve smiled at him. “Sure.”

Eddie used his knee to stand up and he could feel Steve’s eyes follow him. He came back with two bottles and popped both their caps with his rings on his left hand.

Steve huffed out a laugh. “Handy that.”

Eddie grinned. “Says the man who’s strong enough to pop the caps without any aid.” He handed the bottle to him.

Steve blushed and took a sip. “Brawn over brain I guess.”

Eddie bumped his shoulder into Steve’s. “Hey, now. I thought we were past that bullshit talk of you not being smart.”

Steve ducked his head. “I know, I know. Interest not intelligence. But some times it’s hard when people still in high school are light years ahead of you.”

Eddie paused the movie and grabbed Steve’s hand. “Hey, sweetheart.” Steve looked up. “I get it. You’re talking to Mr Three-Time Super Senior here. But no one dogs on my intelligence.”

Steve frowned. “I never thought of that. I guess it is weird that it’s only me.”

“It’s why I’ve been training them out of it,” he said seriously. “It’s not fair that literally no one else gets that kind of treatment. Not even Argyle and Jon get called dumb.”

“Huh,” Steve said. “Yeah. Okay. I’m going to start calling them out on it, too.”

“You do that, babe,” Eddie said.

Steve’s smile was incandescent. “Thanks, Eds. You’re the best.”

“Only for you, Stevie.” Eddie murmured. “Only for you.”

“That was a lot of touching,” Max said. “Does it have to be that much?”

Eddie shook his head. “Just do feels natural. I like touching Steve arm when we greet each other and then giving it a squeeze. It signals I’m happy to see him without everyone else cottoning on to the fact I’m flirting.”

Max nodded. “What about hugs?” she asked.

“That’s the next step,” he said. “You’ve got to start small and build up to those kind of touches. Because the light touches are flirting. The bigger ones? That’s signaling intent.”

Step Six: Touch

Now that you’ve been flirting with your jock and initiating touches, they should be comfortable with the idea of touching and receiving your touch. So start to go a little bigger. Lingering touches, pressing on their lower back when you both walk to the door. Holding on to their hips as you squeeze past them in the kitchen. And of course the ultimate touch hugs.

“Wouldn’t the ultimate touch be sex?” Max asked.

Eddie blinked. “Says the girl that thought cuddling was gross.”

She blushed. “I mean, it’s all gross right now, but we are going to get to that point sometime in the future, right?”

He shrugged. “I guess. Everyone goes into sex at their own speed. Some never have sex or even want to. It’s whatever works for you.” She frowned, frustrated. “Look, sex is great. But trust me when I say rushing into it is a bad plan. Also doing it outside a committed relationship is fine, lots of people enjoy that. But sex with a partner is...for me anyway, better. You get time to explore your likes with theirs and meeting in the middle. But like I said it varies from person to person.”

Max sighed. It wasn’t the cut and dried answer she was looking for, but then again, nothing in life ever was.

“So hugging?”

“Yeah, hugging.”

Eddie showed up early for D&D like he always did, but instead of grabbing Steve’s arm like he had before, he hugged him. He expected it to be a quick thing, you know. Since he had surprised him and all.

It wasn’t.

The second Eddie went in for the hug, Steve’s arms were wrapped around him and pulling him in tight. They stayed like that for a few minutes before Steve took a step back, mumbling an apology.

Eddie gripped Steve’s arms and leaned back so he could try and see his expression. It was closed off and guarded.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he cooed. “You okay?”

Steve nodded. “I guess I needed a hug more than I thought.”

Eddie frowned at that. Steve was always giving hugs to Robin and the kids. Hell even the other adults got Stevie hugs, Jonathan, Argyle, and Nancy.

Oh.

Oh.

“You know you can hug me anytime you need it, don’t you, Stevie?” he murmured running his hands up and down Steve’s arm.

Steve looked up at him with such awe and wonder, that it made Eddie’s heart ache.

Steve surprised him a second time by immediately launching himself into Eddie’s arms for another hug.

Eddie let his hands wander. One cupped the back of Steve’s head, while the other slid down to the small of his back. He buried his head into the crook of Steve’s neck.

“Hey,” he whispered. “I can cancel D&D if you’re not up to hosting. Or even move it elsewhere.”

Steve let out a whine at the latter suggestion. “No, no. I want you here.”

“What the fuck?” Max practically roared. “Was he okay?”

“It came as a shock to me, too,” Eddie admitted. “I talked to him about it later and he told me that he wasn’t if he was allowed to hug me because of me being gay.”

“That makes no sense,” she said firmly.

“He didn’t know what the line was,” Eddie explained. “Because with girls you only hugged them if you were dating or really good friends. Argyle is a natural hugger and initiated the first hug so he knew that okay. Nancy and Jonathan were already at that level of affection.”

“But he didn’t know how to initiate it with you?” Max asked, a slow understanding dawning on her face.

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Once I hugged him, it was like a levy breaking. He amped up the affection to eleven.”

“Okay,” Eddie said. “I’ll be here.”

Once everything was set up and everyone had arrived, Eddie called them over. “Steve isn’t feeling good today, so we are going to be respectful little shits and try and keep the noise down to a dull roar, is that understood?”

Everyone nodded.

“Good.” He turned to Steve. “If you need anything let me know, otherwise you just rest, okay?”

And without asking if they were in combat they all took turns checking in on Steve, most of them found him asleep, passed out on the sofa. But when Mike peeked in, Steve was sitting up, but he his arms wrapped around his knees and staring off into space.

He immediately ran for Eddie. Eddie stood up and quietly walked to the front room. He knelt on the floor in front of Steve and began rubbing his calves. After a moment, Steve came out of his trance.

“There you are, sweetheart,” he murmured.

“Oh, are you guys done?” Steve asked, moving back so that he could place his feet on either side of Eddie.

“Just taking a break,” Eddie said with a shake of his head.

“Oh,” he said again. “Do you guys need anything? Snacks, drinks, lunch? I could make sandwiches.”

“We’re good, Stevie,” Eddie asked, his hands now on Steve’s knees. “I’m a little worried about you, though.”

Steve ducked his head. “It’s nice having people here. It’s nice having you here.”

“We could move our monster fest night over here if you’d prefer that?” Eddie asked.

Steve shook his head vigorously. “I like going over to your place. It’s homey.”

“Homey, huh?” Eddie teased gently.

“Warm, comforting...safe.”

Eddie surged up and grabbed Steve, pulling him into a hug. “Then you’re always welcome.”

Steve sighed into his embrace. “Sorry I’m so needy today.”

Eddie leaned back and cupped his cheek. “I want you to need me, Stevie. So if you get like this. Call, come over, send out of the cavalry to find me. I don’t care, just let me in.”

Steve nodded. “I promise.”

Eddie stood up. “I’ve got to get back. Why don’t you join us? Not in the campaign, just pull up a chair and watch.”

Steve’s face grew the most beautiful and heartfelt smile it cracked something in Eddie’s chest wide open.

He knew that he would never love someone as much he loved Steve. And with any luck (and with every indication) Steve felt the same.

“You know, all I’m hearing with this one is holy hell Steve needs all the hugs in the world,” Max cursed.

Eddie laughed. “Something like that. I think we forget, even you and I whose families and home life have been shit, that’s Steve’s was, too. An abusive and toxic father and a distant and neglectful mother. Even if he never hit Steve, emotional abuse is still abuse.”  

“I think I’m going to tell the rest of the party to start initiating hugs with Steve more often,” she said. “I think we forgot somewhere along the line that he’s been through the same hell we’ve been through only a way more active a participant.”

Eddie laughed. “I think he’d like that. A lot.”

Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

Tag List: @spectrum-spectre @estrellami-1 @zerokrox-blog @this-is-mycrisis @swimmingbirdrunningrock @gregre369 @goodolefashionedloverboi @chaoticlovingdreamer @maya-custodios-dionach @messrs-weasley @val-from-lawrence @plyerice27 @thedragonsaunt @chaoticlovingdreamer @sapphirecobalt-1 @a-little-unsteddie @i-must-potato @danili666 @carlyv @artiststarme @steddie-there @wonderland-girl143-blog @itsall-taken @thebrazilianatheist @rozzieroos @whalesharksart @mightbeasleep @theotalksalot @avacrebs @sassysleeplord @exhibit-no-restraint

[amerricanartwork]

I saw your lilypad art post, and I got curious: why do you enjoy lilypad? it's not a common RW ship, so I'd be interesting to hear what about it you enjoy!

Hear me out, guys... I must explain myself before I get onto the Lilypad essay.

I made that original comment because, at the time, I wanted to just get the aforementioned headcanons out as soon as possible. Understand, my reluctance wasn't because I didn't want to talk about Lilypad, but rather the exact opposite: I had so many feelings about it, yet had put so little effort into expressing them in a coherent, presentable format that I just knew it'd distract me for the next week or two if I let it rent too much space in my conscious thoughts. But now that little comment has left me with several people asking me to share those thoughts, and, both thankfully and unfortunately, I simply can't resist indulging in thoughts about the characters I love—!

Keep in mind, I haven’t finished Saint campaign yet, and even then I’ve found like less than half the broadcasts in Spearmaster campaign yet, so there’s likely some extra canon info I may be missing that could add to or change some of what I say here. I also apologize if some of what I write here seems really out-of-character. I try not to let my passion for my little headcanons and scenarios make me disregard the canon, but even so, I might slip and think up some weird things occasionally. Nonetheless, I feel like I’ve got enough of the picture to start confidently enjoying this ship, so I’ll talk about it anyway! 

As always, feel free to add to these ideas if you can! Without further delay, enjoy this 3381-word essay, with a few initial headcanons sprinkled in, on why I adore Lilypad!

Oh, and just in case, if you couldn’t already tell, major Hunter campaign spoilers below.

Quetzalli on Loving Lilypad

I’m gonna start this out with a preface: I can generally find the appeal in a lot of different ships and the art other fans make for them, but for me to ship something enough to actively draw it and make my own headcanons about it and such (outside of, perhaps, gifts for other people), it usually has to contain a variety of “ship tropes” that I personally fancy. Many of my most-favorite ship tropes tend to be the ones that aren’t just cute, but that carry narrative significance and seem poetic in some way, usually because they can facilitate character arcs in the involved characters. The more of these a ship has, or the more ship tropes I can portray it with without it seeming too out-of-character, and the more I like those specific tropes, the better. This principle is a major reason why I’ve gravitated towards Artimand as my main slugcat ship, but for now, I’m going to focus on which of these I see in Lilypad — in canon content, other fan-portrayals, and my personal headcanons — that, as opposed to other iterator ships, has currently won me over.

I’m gonna describe the main general things I like seeing in this ship. Some of them are more due to fandom portrayals than what’s in the canon, but they all play a big role in my current love for Lilypad. 

Synergy

I’ll begin with how I really appreciate just how much synergy Looks to the Moon and No Significant Harassment are shown to have, at least in fan content! I always like seeing pairings where the characters aren’t just romantic, but also work really well together as a team or even just as friends. After all, just because the characters may be romantically in love doesn’t mean they must only show it in explicitly romantic ways. To me, Lilypad strikes me as a relationship where Sig and Moon would make an amazing team in many aspects of their lives, whether it's collaborating on projects, sharing their interests, or trying to maintain order in the rest of their group. And their compliment is just really sweet to me, though I’ll get to that later.

A Shoulder to Lean On/The Lady

One of my favorite ship tropes is “character with a lot of weight on their shoulder who finally gets to lift it off and be ‘normal’ for once when around the other”. I’ve always found it sweet when characters like this, especially ones who are normally very selfless, finally get a chance to indulge and enjoy themselves for once! And once again, this is another thing I imagine in Artimand too, and you could project this onto Trafficlights given Suns’s implied high status, but I think it works especially with Lilypad, given Moon’s role as group senior means she objectively has a lot to manage all the time with no permanent escape from it. Even beyond the whole Five Pebbles rot drama, Moon probably had a lot on her plate just in terms of maintaining order between the rest of the group and setting a good example to the younger generations, especially as the group expanded over time, not to mention trying to find the solution herself. Combine this with how I picture her to be the kind of person who cares a lot about her image as a “proper” and  “dignified” leader, and someone who often sacrifices her own desires to promote the group’s welfare, I just find it really soft for her to have someone to lean on, metaphorically (and in a worm-off-the-string scenario, literally), and who better to go to than her best teammate, who knows the power of a good laugh and will stop at nothing to have fun with those he loves? Not to mention, since I headcanon Sig as slightly younger than Moon (2nd gen, specifically), I just find it rather cute in an ironic sense that the older, more serious Moon is soft around the younger, far more chaotic Sig, especially as Moon would go through the realization that she actually kinda likes this little troublemaker! 

This also comes back to something I mentioned in the tags of that beepsnort post, which is that one of my other favorite ship tropes is “guy who loves/is good at making people laugh x girl who has a REALLY weird/embarrassing laugh”, and that just works so well with Lilypad! It’s admittedly a very headcanon-based thing for me, but given how I’ve already explained my perception of Moon as very proper and serious, I imagine one of the best ways Sig takes the weight off her shoulders is by being the only person who can consistently make her laugh so hard! And with the beepsnort headcanon it’s even cuter, because of course Moon would be super embarrassed every time she even so much as gives a half-chuckle at one of his jokes, because Sig is relentless when it comes to getting the giggles out of her, and he won’t stop until she’s rolling and shaking on the floor of her chamber, her beepy-snorts filling the room! My GODDD I love this trope so much, and for beings who are inherently such workaholics, I think getting to genuinely relax and have fun for a bit, once she gets over the initial shock and embarrassment, would be something Moon would really come to value.

Inverses Attract/The Tramp

I’ve mentioned it in my last Artimand headcanons post, but one of my absolute all-time favorite ship tropes is the classic “opposites attract”, although I prefer the name “inverses attract”. As I like to portray it, the trope not only involves characters who are opposites personality-wise, but those being opposites of the same core aspect, and ultimately helping balance each other out by offering the other half of the equation to each other (hence the name “inverses”). The trope I just wrote about above is how Sig helps Moon to relax and have fun, but as I try to do with all ships, how does it work the other way too? Well, I really like to imagine Sig learning to be more openly serious and dedicated! Don’t get me wrong, Sig is a hard worker (it’s pretty much the nature of all iterators), but given he seems to pretty strongly reject the quest for the Triple Affirmative, I imagine the next problem would be in him finding a new purpose to strive for. And what better new purpose than in standing by and protecting the group senior he thinks he just might wanna be more than friends with?

It already works because Moon, of course, would work to keep Sig in check and make sure he doesn’t go too overboard with his shenanigans. But just imagine how inspired he’d grow over time seeing Moon work so hard to keep the group together and keep them striving for their purpose, even if he doesn’t agree with it. I imagine it’s why Sig’s methods are still rather controlled rather than purely chaotic, and there’s a reason to his rebellion. Thanks to Moon, rather than slaving away at a seemingly impossible solution until his mind collapses with his structure, he’ll use his talents to, at the very least, keep the local group together as long as possible, because even if they’ll all be gone one day, that doesn’t mean they have to go alone!

It’s why I’m also labeling these two tropes together as “the Lady and the Tramp”, yet another ship dynamic that gets me every time! It’s a specific instance of “inverses attract” where the noble, proper lady finds a taste of freedom and courage from the dangerously charming tramp, who from her finds a new sense of purpose and honor! And in my opinion, Lilypad is most definitely the best opportunity for this dynamic among Rain World ships!

The Fated Couple

Slow-burn couples seem to be pretty popular in many fandoms, but what about a really slow-burn? There’s something just so romantic to me about the idea that Moon and Sig, from the moment they met, have always just clicked so perfectly, and have been by each other’s side so constantly ever since, to the point it seems practically inevitable to everyone (except them of course) that they’ll eventually get together romantically. Of course, there are two main roadblocks to their romance being 1.) their whole objective and purpose for being created is kind-of fundamentally opposed to strong attachments like love (I mean, if Karma 3 is Companionship, wouldn’t romantic love be considered the worst example of that?), and 2.) even if they did reject this purpose, being massive immovable structures with the only humanoid part stuck deep inside a box, a budding romance seemingly couldn’t really go anywhere anyway. In fact, because of these roadblocks much of my Lilypad imaginings take place in the ever-popular “worm-off-the-string” scenario, especially since the next couple of reasons for why I like the ship play a lot into the themes I like to incorporate in this story concept. 

However, these issues towards such a romance are also what make it so sweet in the end! Just think of Moon, alone in her chamber, beginning to worry about how she’s actually kinda sorta, maybe, hypothetically, possibly, just a little bit starting to like the carefree and charismatic Gen 2 in the local group as even more than just a work partner and a dear friend, but oh no, that’s indulging in a Karmic Sin, and as group senior she can’t just throw away their purpose like that and set such a bad example to the rest! What’s she gonna do?? And then on the other side, Sig puzzling in his chamber, pining so hard for the group senior yet seemingly unable to confess, because, even disregarding Karma 3 and the fact that giant immobile calculators aren’t about to be snuggling any time soon, why would someone as perfect and powerful as her want someone like him, so dismissive of their core purpose and unorthodox in his methods? Is there even a point in having these feelings at all, when they might very well end up simply fading to dust along with the rest of his structure?

Maybe, they both think, it’d be better to just keep these feelings to themselves and quietly love from a distance. That is, until…

Moon’s Collapse and the Slag Reset Keys

The fourth reason is, of course, the most steeped in canon. It goes back a bit to the “shoulder to lean on” concept, but even aside from that, there is something just so romantic about this on both sides.

Firstly, from Moon’s perspective. There’s no doubt that the collapse must have been very traumatic for Looks to the Moon physically, but I like to think about just how much it’d affect her emotionally, too. I mean, being so painfully destroyed by your own brother, with seemingly nothing that can be done to stop it and no one to help you? And then consider how lonely it must have been in her final moments. The only comfort she does get is from Spearmaster’s visit, and even then she sends him off to go deliver her final words, which has still got to be really depressing. And finally, think about how betrayed she must have felt, trying so hard throughout her operation to help her citizens and the local group and be kind to everyone, only to have it be repaid like this, forced to collapse in on herself, being buried under her own body, unfathomable pain all around, and with not a soul to help her.

So then, think about just how shocking and heartwarming (literally, if you think about it) it must be when that lovable Gen 2, always so playful and carefree normally, is the one to give her a second chance and being her back when all hope seems lost, and using such a unique delivery method no less! I mean COME ON, Sig literally brought her back to life, how could one NOT fall in love with someone who did that for them? It links back to the “shoulder to lean on” idea, in that, for once, someone finally looked out for Moon and gave back to her for all the kindness she gave to the world. Think about this as the moment she truly realizes she’s in love with No Significant Harassment, and how tragic it’d be knowing now, it’s too late to say it. But, even so, if he’s willing to go this far to make sure she’s okay, then maybe, just maybe, there’s a chance her love at least wasn’t alone.

Now, my thoughts about this from No Significant Harassment’s side (which also kinda turned into a mini NSH appreciation paragraph that links back to the earlier Inverses Attract and Lady and the Tramp segment), I think it’s very poetic to see him going out of his way to take his messenger concept, originally used for no more than a trivial prank and at most a very experimental and unfinished alternative communication method, and turning it into a noble last-ditch effort to rescue the one he loves. It doesn’t just clearly show how much he cares for Moon that he worked to save her when no one else did (and if that’s because the odds of being able to do anything seemed very low to the rest of them, that makes it even more sweet) I think it shows off a lot of Sig’s character beyond just being a jokester. Like, I’d seen this kind of personality for Sig in the fandom content before, but this action and the other broadcasts are what first made me truly realize not just that it is based in canon, but that, more importantly he’s not just stupid or unfocused, he’s rebellious. He doesn’t joke around because he just doesn’t care, it’s because he’s independent, he’s got other places he wants to go and plans that don’t fit into what most of his peers are used to. He makes light of the world because he sees what others don’t, and it’s honestly pretty frickin’ funny how blind others can be most of the time (case-in-point: him making a slugcat from a messenger, which no one else thought to do because those creatures seemed too “dull” and “primitive” to ever be capable of such a thing). So think about how significant it must be when he’s openly taking something seriously. This is where that dynamic of the Tramp, and how Sig would benefit from this relationship is really highlighted. I just adore it when the easygoing, carefree character finally finds purpose in their lover, and springs into serious action like they never were before! And it makes sense too given what I said about them not getting together before: seeing Moon collapse would show him directly that even beings as durable as iterators don’t last forever, so if he’s got these feelings for Moon, he’s got to make a move while there’s still a chance! And what better way to show his love than to bring her back when all hope seems lost? Which brings me to the final aspects I’ll talk about here, first of which is…

True Love’s Kiss

Yes, you read that right. The real reason I love the slag reset keys as a plot element so much is not just because it shows Sig’s secret strength of character, not just because it finally gives reward to Moon’s kindness, but because it is a real fairytale come true! 

I know this sounds crazy and probably totally unrelated to Rain World, but think about it! You guys have probably seen Snow White and Sleeping Beauty before, or at least one of the two? Isn’t the whole trope that the beautiful princess, fairest maiden in the land, gets cursed through some means or another to die (or in Aurora’s case, fall into an indefinite sleep), which is only undone when the strong and brave prince, riding upon his noble steed, awakens the princess by giving her true love’s kiss? I already love both those movies on their own for various other reasons, but after my description, is this starting to sound familiar in another way?

I mean, with everything I’ve said about Moon in this post so far, there’s no doubt you could perceive her as the “fair princess”, who through unfortunate circumstances is put to a premature and indefinite death. And there’s no doubt Sig fills the role of the brave prince by working to save her with the slag reset keys, which in this metaphor are undoubtedly the “true love’s kiss” that ultimately conquers all, always longed for, and finally delivered! And hey, given Hunter is the one to carry the keys to Moon, a small yet courageous beast who stops at nothing to meet his goals, Sig even has his own “noble steed”! And even if Hunter is technically the one to actually deliver the green neuron, and the death the “princess” succumbs to wasn’t out of genuine malice towards her, I think the sentiment is still there and the parallel is close enough! 

But yes, as strange as it may sound, the fairytale parallel is the main reason Lilypad resonates with me so much! Those classic fairytale-esque romance tropes and that poetic storytelling found in Disney’s first feature-length animated films has always been dear to my heart, and is even more so now that I’m older and can truly appreciate the beauty of them. So now, even in my fandom experiences, ships that win my appreciation over all others are often those that manage to embody those classic romance tropes and themes as best as possible, and frankly, even Artimand loses ever-so-slightly to Lilypad in this regard! Or, as I also enjoy calling them, “Lifeline”, for reasons that are probably obvious now. 

And it’s even better when you consider…

Some Things Never Change

Another trope I’ve recently begun to love is the idea that some phenomena in the world never truly disappear, but simply manifest in different ways, sometimes unexpected ones. And given the whole Triple Affirmative quest and the Ancients’ mass ascension philosophy, this idea is something I especially love seeing in Rain World content. Even the canon events show this idea, but think about how wonderfully it would work with Lilypad beyond just the slag reset keys, especially taking up that “worm off the string” iterator AU concept some have explored in this fandom already.

Just think about how sweet it would be when Moon and Sig, operating primarily through their puppets now, get to finally hug and kiss and be with each other so directly now! Think of the way Sig would speak to Moon about how, even after her collapse, she's still somehow beautiful as ever, and Moon returning with how even all the trouble the group has faced hasn't put a dent in his charm! And it's even sweeter when you consider it’s against everything their creators stood for! Think of Moon, after everything she’s been through and how much she’s probably changed at this point, now willing to give some of these “worldly attachments” a chance, because you can never truly get rid of them, but she knows better than anyone that you won’t be around to experience them forever, so why not enjoy it while you’ve got the chance? And it’d make sense too, not just for her own benefit, but for Pebbles and the rest of the group’s sake too! She’s always strove to set a good example for them, and since their original quest has left them with nothing but pain and trauma, why not show them that maybe all these attachments aren’t so bad after all?

I just think it’d be really interesting to see Moon joining Sig in that rejection of the Triple Affirmative, and what better way to do that than by finally embracing that love they’ve felt for each other for so long? Because love never truly dies, it just appears in new people. And maybe they don’t have to spend their whole lives as grand iterators, the vast infinitely-advanced mechanical deities who embody perfection in almost every way. Maybe, even just for a bit, they can just be people, falling in love just as their creators did all over again!

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

And with that, I think I’m FINALLY done here. HOLY COW, this is easily my longest post yet, and I hope it doesn’t disappoint! Part of the reason it took so long was because I was trying to find the perfect way to express all these ideas without it just spilling out onto the page in some weird half-coherent mess. But eventually I just said “ah screw it, let’s just ramble about this ship and see where it goes!” and my god, did it go far! And I still managed to somewhat organize it, so yay!

But aside from that, thank you SO MUCH to everyone who asked for my thoughts on Lilypad, and everyone who made it to the bottom of this essay! I’ve never really gotten a chance to openly ramble about one of my favorite ships to the rest of the fandom like this, so seeing that some fans, even if it’s ultimately not a huge amount, actually wanted me to do it was such a welcome surprise!

I hope you all enjoyed the drawings and the art! I’ll be around in case someone wants me to write another ship essay or something! And who knows, it’s likely I’ll find more reasons I like Lilypad as time goes on and I see more fan-content and find the rest of those broadcasts! But at least this was a starting point! 

Expect more LIlypad content to come in the future, but until now, thanks again for the opportunity!

[yanderepuck]

Just a small little drabble~

I torture this boy enough so here's some fluff

You have been wearing long sleeves and long pants for the majority of your time at the mansion. But summer is coming and there is no way you're going to survive doing chores around the mansion that way. There's no ac!

So as it gets warmer your sleeves and pant legs go up. You know you can't dress like this when you go into town, but you might as well be comfortable at home.

But this made you realize that none of the residents have seen your tattoos. You really only have black line art of some small things. You have them on your arms, shoulders, a few on your legs. You thought nothing of it until one of the guys said something.

Some of them were confused as to what they were, others only knew of people in prisons getting tattoos. There were a lot of questions you had to answer. But once you explained none of them seemed to have an issue with them.

Vincent was very intrigued by them and kept asking to look at them. He would ask why you got each one and if it had meaning. Half the time it was just because a tattoo shop was doing a flash event and you went in and got something.

One day you fell asleep in the parlor after working and when you woke up one of your tattoos was colored in. You stared at it for a good while. Very confused. But the color washed off almost immediately when you bathed that night. And decided not to think more of it.

This happens a few more times when you fall asleep in random places. No one has said anything about doing it though. And it's a different one each time.

A few days later you are in the library reading a book fairly late. You feel yourself dozing off but you force your eyes open wanting to finish that chapter. No luck. You fall asleep. Only to wake up a few minutes later to a tickling feeling.

You groan softly and force your eyes open to see what is tickling you. It better not be King licking your finger again.

You look to your right and see Vincent kneeling next to your chair coloring in one of your tattoos.

You get a burst of life suddenly. "So it's you!"

Vincent jumps, thinking you were still asleep and then laughs softly. "You caught me."

You're guessing this is his version of a prank. It's so pure.

You let him finish coloring it in. "There! All done," he smiles and lets you look at it.

Holding up your arm, you smile to see your little line art colored in.

"You could have just asked me, you know," you chuckle and sit up.

"Yeah... But you always make a cute face when you first see it."

You hold your arm back out "You can color the rest if you want."

"Really?" He gets excited and starts to color in the others.

He reminds you of a little kid using a coloring book.

"When I first saw them I thought about how they would look colored in," he switches between colors to add details "It's like a fresh canvas everyday."

"I never thought of getting them filled in. But now you're making me consider it."

He finishes coloring all the ones on your arm. "Perfect," he smiles as he looks at his handiwork.

You move your arm around to be able to see it all "I love it," you rest your arm down carefully so you don't mess any of it up. "Now I know who to go to if I want some color."

~~

Tag list ~

@kissmetwicekissmedeadly @fang-and-feather @xalxtusxiao @namine-somebodies-nobody @ana-thedaydreamer @evil-quartett @ameyoruakiikemenseries @yrenesposts @p1nkpandomium @tele86 @damekathearasi @lokis-laugh @candied-boys @breadmercury @azulashengrottospiano @xenokiryu

[byghostface]

//long rambling

There is a vent in the last part (about pro ship:/+ wired shipping + block list) it's naturally negative so reading at your own risk.

So in the new Batman and Robin issue #7 Nika's sister making an appearance, got me thinking of other possibilities for sibling characters to come back.

Mostly I’m thinking about Respawn since he is Joshua Williamson's own character. And He made Respawn appeared in the last issue of Robin(2021), he also brought back Mara in that run too (just some appearance in the later issue).

And now Joshua Williamson is writing Batman and Robin, so naturally he can bring some characters back in this run. He had said in an interview that he might have figured out a way(try) to bring back Maya.

Throwback to 2022 of this old wip/art I made, is about what I think the emo teens of Lazarus squad dynamic would look like.

I imagine Nika and Respaw are irritated/tolerate with each other but would stay for Damian because Nika is Damian's girlfriend and they want to stick together. Meanwhile, Damian likes to include his half-brother in some fun activities (Respawn is acting reluctant bc of his own issues but he actually likes to have friends and feel include).

I haven’t finished this art bc I was going to add more wips (with other characters like Rose and Hawke) to make it a post. I didn't finish this art back then bc I was afraid Talia fans would be mad at me for drawing Respawn.

Trust me, I hate that Talia gets associated with Deathstroke like this, but I think Respawn is a confused/mistreated teen character and Damian (bless his heart and soul) still wants to be his brother regarding the whole mess. I will explain/talk more about my thoughts on Respawn as a character and his situations once I finish these drawings and get ready to post them.

Writing/typing words is harder than drawing for me personally. Drawing is like channeling my energy into a picture and forming an atmosphere and hopefully people will understand what thoughts and feelings I was trying to convey. Writing is using more brain powers to choose the correct and cohesive words, so people would not misunderstand what I'm talking about. Especially when English is not my first language, and even so I normally don't talk(write) much in my mother tongue either…(I'm not a quick thinker, it took me a longer time to think things through, writing literally exhausted me physically and mentally more than drawing.)

It doesn't mean I don't enjoy writing, it's just not my first choice to convey thoughts… but considering I can't draw everything I have in my mind and it takes even longer time to finish any art, I just need to write down things first from now on. Tumblr is the only place I can think of that has this longer text feature blog post and I'm more familiar with this platform format. So I will still be here posting my fan content.

.

(↓Vent, if you want to avoid being block by me then read down below.)

I must say I will forever hate respawn x flatline as ship, cus I know who started this ship and their reasons behind it—Don’t let the new character develop naturally as the story goes, let’s put them in made-up weird situations first so I can prop up my own ship!😍 And get both of the new characters out of the way, since no one would defend them so I can fanon the hell out of them by making them look bad all around!🤞 (What if I stone you first hand🪨🪨💥)

And I will continue to dislike/against any shipping Damian's sibling to Nika. I simply don't like the unnecessary sibling conflict just for romance tropes! So go away boooo I hate you‼️ Not to mention the ignoring of different age range multi-ship hide behind poly… that's straight up proshipping I hate you even more!!👎

Also for people who said Nika should be crush on Damian's mother instead of him… I hate you twisted proshipper rotten smooth brain‼️‼️ She dating a boy her age and has mutual connections with him, why would she crush on her boyfriend's mother instead?? Just because Nika is a big fan of Talia??? So you telling me young ppl can't idolize adults normally without being labeled as romantic nowadays huh??( Not saying you can't crush on adults, but why crush on your boyfriend's mom? ) Your weird ass mind is showing with this ass hc be fr. Again, why would you imagine that? You just wanted to push a fake narrative of Nika being wired so you could have an excuse to make Talia and Damian dislike her (which is not true), but in fact is YOU are the weird one projecting your twist thoughts/hate onto Nika‼️💥🪨🪨

I will start to block ppl who are shipping/liking respawn x flatline (+proshipper) and STILL interact with me, read the room!! My art is not for you weirdos‼️Go away BOOOO💥 🪨🪨🪨💥💥

Can't believe I need to type this all out cuz some of you weirdos will still do these things and think is okay to interact with me and my post/showing in my notifications BOOO👎🪨🪨💥🪳🪳🪳🩴🩴🩴

(sorry for venting about random weirdos/Nika haters again, and thanks for reading.)

[oh-koenig-my-koenig]

'Fit for a King' - WIP - “If you have had me on my back, we can also be on a first name basis” (König POV)

Fit for a King - Masterlist

König is talking to Ridgeback that he doesn’t want fem!sergeant Müller on the next – her first – mission with KorTac, Ridgeback is not having it, so he makes König talk to Müller about it, cue social anxiety meets superiority complex that comes with being this tall and buff, Müller puts him in his place and… what can I say? He’s turned on by that. And it gets them to talk with each other (finally). (2k words)

CW: NSFW, imagining explicit scenes, pervy!König

a/n: I'm still writing scenes whenever I think about them, so there still will be chronological skips and context missing in between, but I'll update the Masterlist in the order that they happen in (also gonna add some general info about the characters to the masterlist soon). This is a scene in his POV as I wanted to give the whole story a dual POV thing in general, I hope you like it! (two chapters are still in the pipeline for today or tomorrow, from Müller's POV again) ((also still working on a way to incorporate the german translations better))

“If you have had me on my back, we can also be on a first name basis”

(NSFW)

“I don’t want her on the mission.”

“She’s going. End of discussion.”

“Fine. But I’ll have to see if she can stand her ground first.”

“Meaning that you’ll actually talk to her?”

Ridgeback can’t see the scowl under my hood.

“Yeah.” What I mean is ‘fuck, no’.

He grins at me.

Ridgeback calls after her in the training room. “Müller, a second of your time?” – “Yes, sir.”, she says stepping away from the weights she was working with. “The Colonel is unsure about your… skills on the battlefield and I was wondering if you could maybe demonstrate something to change his mind.”, he explains. She pulls up her eyebrow and gives me the sideeye. “Didn’t he read my transcript?”, she asks. I don’t say anything, but Ridgeback looks at me, waiting for me to explain myself. I clear my throat. “Uh yeah, I read it, it’s just uh-“ She looks up at me and the words don’t come out my mouth. I feel the heat in my cheeks. “What if like a big guy comes up to you and like… attacks you?” Wow, so eloquent. “You know that I’m a sniper, right? Most of the time I’m not gonna be around any ‘big guys’ except for present company.” God damn it, why did I ever start this topic up? She’s going to make me put my shoe into my mouth or however that saying goes. “Uh yeah, correct, I’m just saying, what IF.” She looks at me like I might be a bit crazy. Maybe I am. She confuses the shit out of me.

Then she shrugs her shoulders. “Okay.” and struts over to the mattresses for combat training and martial arts. I follow her, waiting what she’ll do. “You also read that I’m trained in field combat and Krav Maga?”, she asks again. I totally did not. I laugh it off, not sure if I should take her seriously. She gets in position looking up at me in all her 5’8’’ cuteness. “You ready, big guy?”, she asks me, tauntingly. I cross my arms and shrug. Before I can register her moving, she has gripped me, one hand fisting the fabric of my shirt and the other one latching onto my wrist. Just a moment later I’m in the air.

She flips me. She tosses me over her own back with enough force to move a little Volkswagen. And she actually goddamn flips me. As my body gets slammed into the mattress, my back colliding with the floor, I can feel arousal lick up my spine, making me hard in an instant. “Ah, scheiße1.”, I mutter under my breath. All I want to do is pull her with me – or better even – her trying to hold me down as she gets on top of me. Scenarios flood my brain, smutty and perverted. How she would tie me down, strip me, tease me. Take her seat on my face, make me eat her out. I groan. I would feel her heat on my face, lap at her wetness, take everything she would give me. She would stroke me, edge me with her soft hands and nimble fingers while pressing her pussy into me, maybe she would even try to fit my length into her mouth. She would grind on my lips and tongue, she would let me give her the pleasure she seeks until she comes on my face and I drink up her arousal, her wetness staining my hood.

The imagination alone makes me leak at the tip. Ahja, du kleiner Perversling2. I scold myself in my brain. Has it really been that long since I had a woman? Like, biblically. I guess it has.

She stands over me, setting a foot on my chest, her boot digging into my pecs. “So, can I join you, Colonel?” I’m kind of glad that she didn’t call me by my name just now because I fear that I would have come a bit in my pants. At least a little bit. I raise my hands defensively: “Fine, fine, Müller.” I clear my throat. “You can handle yourself, as you demonstrated just now.” She laughs and the soft and sweet sound taunts me. “I can even handle more than just myself.”, she adds confidently and steps away from me, holding her hand out to help me up.

I resist the urge to pull her down and jump up on my feet again. Now I’m towering over her, a whole foot taller. Oh, to have her run from me as I chase after her, would be so sweet. Hör auf3, the voice in my head fights against the pervy thoughts. Something about her taps into something primal inside me.

Ridgeback’s short clap gets my attention. I almost forgot that he’s still here. “Well, I think this got resolved. See you tomorrow then.” Müller waves goodbye, and I lift my hand too, not able to tear my gaze away from her. She looks back at me and I wish I could’ve just talked normally to her instead of behaving like an ass. I sigh inwardly.

Killing people, turning them to pulp, is easier for me than talking to them. Really talking, not just barking orders. And she makes me feel like for the first time in forever that I wish it was the other way around.

"Would you spot me, Colonel?", she asks me then. I sigh, in- and outwardly this time. "Please, just... call me König.", I tell her. "People who had me on my back already can refer to me on a name basis.", I joke feeling the heat in my cheeks flare up again as I see the confusion on her face. Get a hold of yourself, Mensch4. "Also, I made myself look like a complete ass in front of you, you deserve to let the title slide.", I say further, not stuttering as much as before, and she nods slightly. "So, is that a yes or a no on the spotting, König?", she asks plainly. I swallow down how it makes me feel hearing her say my name in that cute accent of hers and return her nod.

She goes over to the weight rack and starts to fit plates onto a barbell. I help her by lifting the barbell from the ground to give her easier access. She’s satisfied with 50 kilos on each side and then goes to lift it up the squatting rack. Oh, she’s going to do squats. With 120 kilos. I’m so double fucked.

“You ready?” I nod and stand behind her holding out my arms. I’m a head taller than her, so I can look at myself in the mirror in front of us as she is not obstructing my view. My eyes are on her again though. She has wide black training pants on, but her hips don’t leave much to the imagination. Her torso is clad in a compression shirt, with a sports bra underneath. Everything is covered up, tightly packed to not be hindering while working out. Yet in my mind it looks like the sexiest thing anybody could ever wear. And that is before she starts to squat right in front of me. I curse under my breath and push away the pervy thoughts. Just be normal for once. She doesn’t need you lusting over her right now, after you just insulted her like that.

I follow her movements hovering my arms beside her, ready to take off the weight if it’s necessary. But she’s squatting the weight no problem. After a few reps she sets the barbell down on the rack again. “Okay, I think, we can add some more plates.”, she says already hefting another 20 up. “Goddamn, you’re squatting more than half the team here.”, I remark. “Really? I’m a bit rusty to be honest.” Rusty? Heilige Scheiße5. She continues: “I wanted to build up strength again because I’m gonna be more actually in the field, but I don’t wanna squat this kind of weight without somebody to spot me.” I nod behind her and she gets ready for the next set. There she is, squatting my body weight like it’s nothing. It’s so fucking attractive to me, I can’t help it.

“Wouldn’t some of the others help you? Spot you?”, I ask as we set down the weight again. My hands stay on the barbell for a moment longer until she meets my eyes in the mirror. “I mean, I talked to Aksel and Nikto a bit, you know, Scandinavians unite, but eh- I didn’t wanna bother them. I think this is the longest interaction I had with anybody in the base. They’re not really talking.”, she explains with a shrug. I hold back a groan. This might be at least partly my fault because of the way I treated her the first few days. “So, I didn’t really have the guts to ask somebody to help me.” She shrugs again, but I see a hint of sadness and apprehension behind them. “But with what you pulled today, I didn’t have those reservations.” She grins at me a little bit.

“I’m sorry.”, I say then, the words sticking to my tongue, not slipping out my mouth easily. It’s not like I don’t feel sorry, I really do. I’m just not one to apologise easily. “Don’t worry about it.”, she tells me. “You’re not the first superior to doubt my abilities.” I feel a pang in my chest. Yeah, yeah, I can be a bit of an asshole, but it’s just setting in now how the whole situation must make her feel. And I want to take it all back. “Yeah, I… I know how it must look like right now from your point. I’m sorry really. I was an asshole about my doubts and I went about it in the most jerk way.” She turns around, her hands on her waist as she looks up at me like ‘Are we really still talking about this?’. The sass.

“It’s okay, Col- König. I accept your apology.”, she reiterates. She must see the doubt in my eyes because she says, with emphasis: “Really.” – “Okay. Schwamm drüber6.”, I say and extend my hand. She takes it and shakes it. Even through the thin fabric of my gloves I can feel the warmth of her palm and it makes me wish I wasn’t wearing any to feel her skin on mine.

“I’d head to dinner now. You wanna join me?”, she asks. “I get it if you can’t, you know, rank and all.” I scoff. “Nobody is asking for our ranks when we’re knee-deep in mud next week, so forget all about that.” She grins at my answer and jogs to the hallway. I follow her with big strides. “I don’t even know why they made me Colonel.”, I tell her as we walk down to the mess hall. She giggles and the sound makes me feel all floaty. And I kick myself again – in my mind – for not just talking to her. Or maybe just ask her to train with me. Instead of making it seem like I’m out to get her. “Maybe your reputation? And of course, the unique set of skills.”, she suggests. “I have a reputation?”, I’m surprised. “Yeah, kinda.” We enter the mess hall and get in line for a plate of beef stew. “Like what?”, I want to know as I stand just a foot behind her. “I’d rather not say.”, she evades. “Also, I don’t think that that’s who you are.”

“What do you think I am then?”, I ask her as we sit down. Other people are already here and I see a few surprised faces, including Horangi’s. “Really really big.” She laughs and I chuckle with her. “That’s just because you’re so small.”, I counter. “Psh. It’s not about the size.” I can see a hint of mischief sparkling in her eyes as she says that. Was that innuendo? “It’s not?”, I tease her. She leans forward and whispers like we’re sharing a secret: “If I were you, I wouldn’t be so cocky about it. Even a mouse can fell a tree, if she only knows how to.” I laugh at her remark. “Touché.” – "Maybe that could be my callsign: Mouse.", she jokes. "I like that.", I say fully grinning behind my mask.

scheiße: shit

ahja, du kleiner Perversling: uh-huh, you little pervert

hör auf: stop it

mensch: literally 'human being', in this context more of an exesperated 'dude!'

heilige scheiße: holy shit

Schwamm drüber: literally 'sponge over it', meaning let's forget about it

[intercal]

here's your computer post ya freakin nerd

tl;dr hash algorithm art

left: sha512 empty string, using the nibbles (4 bytes) choosing a color from a 16-bit color palette right: sha384 empty string, using the openssh "randomart" algorithm choosing a color from a 16-bit color palette

technical stuff below the cut

problem

one of the common issues in computer science and systems administration is comparing hashes. but the problem arises when you, the human being, have to compare two hashes. hashes come in the form of a very long hexadecimal string. It might look something like this:

da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709 (sha1)

e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855 (sha256)

cf83e1357eefb8bdf1542850d66d8007d620e4050b5715dc83f4a921d36ce9ce47d0d13c5d85f2b0ff8318d2877eec2f63b931bd47417a81a538327af927da3e (sha512)

these strings of text can be very long, and expecting a human being to check the exact match of 128 characters in a row (in the worst case) is unreasonable. it is unlikely to happen, but you can also get very very very close hashes. I remember seeing a twitter post (can't find it for the life of me) that showed two hashes that were different, but a cursory glance at them made them look extremely similar, eg:

e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae9800998b934ca495991b7852b855

versus

e3b0c44298fc1c14d41d8cd89961b204e9800998ecf8427ea495991b7852b855

it's pretty hard to tell at a glance that these are different. they have the same start and end prefixes, and there are some parts in the middle that are the same. but they're different! that's important! that means you've hashed different data, but it looks the same!

proposed solution

generate some art.

openssh does this. when you generate an SSH key, they give you a "randomart" (which is one of the algorithms I used above) of the key. From the comments:

If you see the picture is different, the key is different. If the picture looks the same, you still know nothing.

(source)

which I would say imparts some wisdom already. all you can use this for is determining if a hash is different. you cannot use it to determine if they're the same. what I've done is added a new dimension for what determines something being "different": a color palette. if you take the two extremely similar hashes from the example and generate a piece of hash art using the nibble method, they look like these:

first on the left, second on the right. they look pretty similar, but then you add the element of a color palette and you get visibly different images.

this is not a perfect solution by any means. I completely made up the two example hashes, and actually ran into an issue where my program chose the same color palette for both of them - I had to tweak them. but I think it adds some more value to it.

methodology

this is just an explanation of how this all works. I'm going to avoid posting source code for now because it has my real name attached and I don't like that. maybe I'll strip my name and post it later.

image generation algorithms

there are two image generation algorithms that I have chosen: direct representation using each nibble of the hash, and the openssh "randomart" algorithm (linked at the bottom).

nibble algorithm

the "nibble" method takes each nibble (hex digit) of the hash, laying them out on a grid, and choosing the color that it should use on the selected palette. since all palettes are 16 colors, each value 0x0..0xf is represented. for example, taking the sha1 hash da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709, the first row of the image would start with palette indexes 0xd, 0xa, 0x3, 0x9, etc. if we are using the red palette, the first row would start with blocks of these colors: #dd0000, #aa0000, #330000, #990000, etc. it's a direct representation of the hash, and completely lossless. the main downside is explained above - if you have two extremely similar hashes, it will yield two extremely similar images.

randomart algorithm

this has been derived using the openssh randomart algorithm. when you generate an SSH key, you will get some kind of "randomart" that looks like this:

the algorithm is as follows:

start a pointer (called a "worm") in the center cell of a 0-valued matrix (in our case, the matrix is 9 rows by 17 columns).

look at the bottom two bits of the first byte of the hash.

if the bottom bit is 1, then move the worm right - otherwise, move it left. if it cannot move in this direction without exiting the matrix, then don't move left or right.

if the top bit is 1, the move the worm down - otherwise, move it up. if it cannot move in this direction without exiting the matrix, then don't move up or down.

wherever the worm lands, increment the value of that cell.

continue this through the value of the hash, two bits at a time.

this is your output matrix. assign colors (or ascii characters) as you see fit.

I think this is a neat way of doing it, provides a simple piece of art, and two different hashes will, usually, look different.

the main weaknesses that stand out to me: this is a lossy algorithm that could create ambiguities - there are sequences of bytes that could hypothetically produce the same image twice (I am too lazy to come up with these, so that is an exercise left to the reader). additionally, I have noticed that this algorithm tends to drive the worm into a corner, and creates lots of diagonal streaks on its journey. unless the worm hits a wall, it can only ever move diagonally, for better or worse. it looks okay, but I think we can do better.

overall, I think this is a good basis for a new image drawing algorithm, and I might play around with that in the future.

sizing the output image

the images are just a matrix, each cell treated as a pixel, and then I size it up to 32x32 pixel blocks. the number of rows and columns are determined by the art algorithm used, and maybe the hash type (depending on which algorithm is chosen).

for the randomart algorithm, I just use 9 rows by 17 columns - this is what they use in openssh, but I want to play with this because you get pretty boring/dark randomart for hashes with fewer bytes. md5 hashes usually just look like black rectangles with a few lighter blocks, not very useful.

for the nibble algorithm, I tried to make the art as square as possible. for example, sha1 hashes are 160 bits long, or 20 bytes, or 40 nibbles (each nibble = 1 block in the art). 40 nibbles can be sized as a 40x1, 20x2, 10x4, or 8x5 matrix. I opted for the 8x5 matrix, but I want to make this customizable in the future. here are the image sizes I choose for all the hashes I support:

md5 - 128 bits, 16 bytes, 32 nibbles - 8x4

sha1 - 160 bits, 20 bytes, 40 nibbles - 8x5

sha224 - 224 bits, 28 bytes, 56 nibbles - 8x7

sha256 - 256 bits, 32 bytes, 64 nibbles, 8x8

sha384 - 384 bits, 48 bytes, 96 nibbles, 12x8

sha512 - 512 bits, 64 bytes, 128 nibbles, 16x8

choosing the color palette

each palette is 16 colors. there are 8 base color palettes: red, green, blue, black, cyan, yellow, magenta, and white. red palette is #000000, #110000, #220000, ... #ee0000, #ff0000. blue is #000000, #001100, etc. Black and white are the only ones that I think may introduce some ambiguity - black goes from #000000, #111111, etc to #ffffff. white goes in the reverse order, #ffffff, #eeeeee, etc to #000000.

the color palette is chosen by taking the sum of all the bytes in the hash, mod 8. for example, the sha1 hash da39a3ee5e6b4b0d3255bfef95601890afd80709 is broken into the parts 0xda, 0x39, 0xa3, ... 0x07, 0x09. These are added together to get 0x92e, or 2350 in decimal. 2350 % 8 = 6, so we choose the 6th color palette (zero indexed) of RGBBCYMW, magenta.

more ideas

rotating or reflecting the image based on the input hash might yield useful results

adding more color palettes may ensure fewer "similar" images

doing something using a noise algorithm (perlin noise, simplex noise) to generate image matrices using the hash as the seed.

further reading and sources

Hash Visualization: a New Technique to Improve Real World Security (Perrig, Song, 1999)

openSSH randomart algorithm (fetched 2024-05-23, commit hash fc5dc092830de23767c6ef67baa18310a64ee533)

thanks for reading!

[nota1eks]

If/when they create a phm movie, what changes (if any) would you like to see them make to the story?

Jesus that’s a hard question…wow…! In a perfect world, they’d change nothing. It’d be a TV show with lots of room to portray everything. But we don’t live in a perfect world. I, therefore, want to keep as much of the original book as possible. My only immediate want is that it might be cool for them to use “they” for Rocky instead of “he”. Maybe some toning down of the Crazy Russians stereotyping, though if they do it right, that can be great. Nothing else comes to mind that I want changed -- it's a very good book.

But with that out of the way, let's talk about stuff that will very likely be cut. Because I think that's very interesting...

I think, as with Pathfinder getting fried and the dust storm in the Martian (2015) (wherein, both times, a huge plot event in the movie was gotten rid of for time purposes, with little impact on the overall plot, but a devastating-ish loss to the dedicated novel-enjoyers), some stuff will get cut out. Let's go one by one through the timeline of events:

The flashbacks will be there. Maybe not in flashback form (maybe they come before the rest like in the Martian...though those aren't flashbacks it's just backstory), but nonetheless there. Not everything will be there, though. Stratt barging in on Grace's class will be there; him doing the first experiments on astrophage will likely be there; meeting the crew will be there along with some of him training them so as to explain how he learned so much about being an astronaut; the explosion at Baikonur and the proceeding chaos will be there, trailer meetings included; but I think that'd be roughly it. They'll add some; they'll take away a lot. No Steve Hatch; no Lamai; probably very little Lokken (which is very sad); no frenchscientistwhosenameicantrememberimnotevenarealphm fanomllllll, either. They'll have their stories be explained via Grace talking to Rocky. Lots will be explained via Grace talking to Rocky.

Now, they'll have to have Grace waking up and seeing his dead crewmates. They'll have to have Ryan Gosling wandering about this spaceship scratching his head. That's a big part of the story. But I think after a certain point, after enough clues are gathered together, they'll infodump on us. It will be done well, of course, I mean just look at who's making the movie, but it wil lhaev to be like that. Maybe the nannybot will give him information. Maybe there will be a "Here to save Earth from imminent apocalypse? Click here ->" type of thing, but it won't be Grace turning to the camera and saying "Hey guys! I'm here at Tau Ceti to save Earth from astrophage! There's this weird ship out there. Keep you updated! Like and subscribe!"; nor will it be a voiceover. I had a Media Arts teacher in school and he told us that, more than anything, we were to avoid having to use voice-overs to explain out movies. At all costs. So I doubt they'll use that here -- maybe later, though. More talking-head with visuals than voiceover explaining the story.

Now. With Grace meeting Rocky there will either be nothing cut or everything cut: Maybe Rocky wil have a Magic Language Machine. Maybe Grace has a Magic Language Machine. Maybe they do everything how they did it in the book. Either way, it'll have to likely be one or the other. I'm very excited to see how they do Rocky's voice. An adaptation of the Audible Audiobook's version would be ideal, as I and many others think. There aren't many other good options... With the rest, I'm genuinely not sure. I can see them going both ways with this: cutting everything and rewriting it or keeping it pretty book-accurate. By any measure, they won't cut it all out. That'd be stupid.

With the in between between the Blip-A-Hail Mary disconnection and them arriving at Adrian, much will be cut out. It'll be rewritten. For better or for worse. Since it's just that theoretical, I'm not sure what changes I'd even want to see. Maybe some more back story on Rocky's crewmates? On Adrian (the eridian)? I mean Grace asking Rocky about Adrian would be a great opportunity to get some backstory in, btu the movie will already be so chock-full of it that I don't know if they'll be able to fit it in amongst everything else.

The Adrian Incident will likely still be very, very similar. It's the emotional peak of the movie. Rocky will nearly die. I will watch my friends weep, crying about how I should have warned them, and I will tell them they should have read the book. With Grace trying to save Rocky...eeh...it might be there; it might not. Flip of the dice with the landscape of the table being what the rest of the plot looks like, if that makes sense.

Now......The Great Taumeoba Escape. It's a lot like Pathfinder and the Dust Storm. It's just not all that relevant! SO MUCH is happening in the book at this point that -- I don't think -- they would be able to fit this in, even with a TV show with half a dozen hours to show the story in. I'd much rather lose this than lose backstory or silly goofy Rocky details.

The journey back, though, along with the breeding of Taumeoba was so boring it was cut out in the book. No way they'll have it in the movie. Probably even more will be cut out. Maybe one single Eureka! scene where Grace and Rocky drink vodka and wear crystals, respectively, but no more.

Now...The Great Taumeoba Escape 2: Radiation Exposure Boogaloo will NOT be cut out. Lest I stomp out of that movie theatre shouting insults at the directors etc. I kid, but not by a lot. They have to have this in order for Grace to turn around. I also bet they'll delay Grace learning he was a coward until here. It'd work so well there, yeah!? So he does his little thing, then turns around. From here, I think everything will be to-the-book. But let's talk about the ending.

Grace being a teacher is fundamental to the story. He can't not be, or the book/movie just won't work. Now, in The Martian (2015) they changed the ending. But that's not big, really. Mark becomes a recluse who gets looped back into being an astronaut training people who will then work on Artemis versus him being a teacher -- there's not that big of a plotline difference there. And we can pretend that in the interim he was a recluse. BUT IF THEY DON'T MAKE GRACE A TEACHER I SWEAR TO GOD--! calm. be calm. Anyways, him teaching again is a huge end for his character arc. And Rocky wil come in, no doubt, and tell Grace Earth's back to normal. Sending him back off to Earth just doesn't work, plot-wise or logic-wise.

Here's my last want: Earth. I want to see Earth back in shape. I want to see Stratt looking happy in her jail cell, etc.

Christ, I just wrote a lot. Um. I hope that answers your question...? And if it doesn't, feel free to ask me! I can -- and gladly will -- talk about this book all the livelong day!

[edennill]

@eri-pl

So, you asked me about my interpretation of Varda on Ao3, and I actually wanted to reply in an ask, but decided maybe it's better to have it here. At the same time, I'm afraid... I do have a fairly strong idea of her, but it's mostly focused on the early days of Arda, and maybe a little nebulous (and perhaps doesn't really add anything to what I've already said). Still:

One of the most specific headcanons that influence the way I see her is that, well, she was the fourth being in existence, thus had by necessity been fairly close with Melkor before he went bad, and consequently she has a very keen sense of betrayal later on. I think the few who came directly 'after' (...I have no idea what time before time even is, but never mind) were some of the Ainur who did not enter Eä, and so, the Valar who came next (probably Ulmo, Namo, Yavanna and Vairë, in some order) did not necessarily have this experience, and certainly not to such extent. This later period would have also been the time during which Melkor started really disappearing into "the Void where he once walked alone"... and from some point on he was hiding a lot of wrath and resentment whenever he returned among the others — so ultimately, I think a lot of the Ainur actually only came to really know him when he started disrupting the Music. Which. makes for a very different sort of disappointment than Varda's.

The second thing (and I'm sorry for always circling back to Morgoth here, though on the other hand you find him interesting so maybe you won't mind), is that well, canonically she's the person he fears the most. Now, she's not actually more powerful than Manwë, but her power is more... focused, I'd say, if you know what I mean (I don't entirely lolll). And since he usually hates in proportion to fearing, she often bears the burnt of his sabotage efforts in those early days, which again, leads to a lot of anger on her side.

...You might think it strange how much I focus on anger for someone who's among the morally purest characters in the Legendarium, and well, I'd call it righteous wrath in her case, but your mileage may vary. Certainly, it's not only (or even mostly) that she's disturbed by his wrongs towards her in particular, but she's not allowed to forget by the circumstances.

On the other hand, I don't particularly like the theory that she rejected him romantically, I think it's reading too much into a phrase that's very ambiguous and likely wasn't intended to mean this, given Tolkien's track record with similar phrasings.

But yes, she's this kind of dichotomy in which... on the one hand, she's beauty, she's art, she's gentle... but stars burn, and she can be sharp at other junctions. Sorry, I keep using words in some weird abstract sense, I might not be able to explain it better.

She would have — in time — forgiven Melkor if he had ever given her reason to think that he regretted his actions rather than the fact that he lost the war, which he never really did. There was nothing especially damning in whatever he said in hearing after his release, but none of it was reassuring either, and I think she believed the knowledge of his defeat would keep him from acting up, but nothing much more conclusive.

[rhey-007]

Drag Queen Lance x Fernando Headcanons + Art

(Onedrive fucked the quality TwT)

Just had this little idea for a Drag Queen Lance cause another season of Drag Race came out recently, I hope you'll like it :))

It's just something light, to get me going on to the next things I want to write, an exercise I may say.

Also it's the first time I write actual strollonso so it might be wonky + please tell me if I should add any # cause I sure missed something TwT

• Lance didn't tell Fernando about his second passion neither before nor after they started dating.

• He was worried Fernando wouldn't understand, laugh into his face and leave him.

• But Fernie wasn't like that.

• Lance wanted to tell him way further into their relationship,

• But when Alonso stayed over at his boyfriend's apartment he accidentally stumbled upon an expensive dress.

• At first he thought Chloe left it there, but it was way too big for the woman.

• So he started to question Stroll until he revealed the truth.

• "Why didn't you tell me... There's nothing to be ashamed of cariño"

• "It's just that- You're- Ugh... You're older, I was afraid you wouldn't understand because most people from your generation see it as something weird, not normal... And I wanted you to get to know me waaay better to make a good decision after I tell you... Does- Does that even makes sense?... "

• Fernando sighed hugging Lance tightly and placing a sweet kiss to his cheek.

• "Of course it does. But you had nothing to worry about. Sure, I don't understand but it doesn't mean I'm gonna leave you right away. I'll never leave you. Now, show your old man what it's all about"

• And with huge smiles plastered on both faces Lance proceeded to explain what drag was.

• Fernando was visibly very interested in what his lover was saying, even making notes on his phone to remember some terms.

• He really wanted Lance to show him at least some photos of him in drag, but figured it could be too early for the youngster and didn't insist.

• Instead, he waited for Lancy to do it himself. And he didn't have to wait long.

• After a few months, the Canadian send Fernie some photos from a recent drag brunch.

• "Wish you could be here 😘"

• Fernando saved that photo immediately then commented on how beautiful the man looked, consciously causing Lance to blush on the other side of the phone.

• And it kept going. Lance sent his lover sweet pics and Fernando sent back a paragraph of praises and love emojis, and over and over again.

• One day, the Spaniard was able to attend one of Stroll's performances.

• He was astonished by the show and the other drag queens, to whom Lance later introduced him, but most importantly he was amazed by Lance.

• With time, when Fernie's grey hair started to peak through his dark locks and beard, Lance started to request grey strands in the wigs he ordered.

• It was a way to not only show his lover that it was normal to have grey hair, but also to thank him for the big support on his passion.

• One of the things the "big support" was, was the Spaniard buying Lance expensive dresses, shoes and accessories along with other gifts.

• The Canadian felt a little stupid cause he could afford them himself, but eventually gave in as Fernie was too stubborn and insisted on spoiling his sugar.

• The older man just loved to spent his money on him, no matter the amount.

• After some time Lance was brave enough to announce it to his paddock coworkers and fellow drivers.

• To his surprise, everyone was okay with it, some even getting very excited by the information, begging to see his in action.

• And if someone wasn't, they soon became after Fernando's little threats Lance had no idea about.

• Even when Esteban, or anyone else, just joked about it fire appeared in Alonso's eyes, his brows furrowed deeply and then everyone knew it was time to drop the topic before he exploded.

• He couldn't let anyone to hurt his baby even a little bit.

And that's it as for right now!

Maybe I'll add something later, or maybe you have some ideas? Let me know :))

Thank you for reading! 💞

[comingdownwithme]

Hello!! You, your (amazing) artwork and your headcannons have single-handedly gotten me back into the Creepypasta fandom, I cannot describe the reaction I had to seeing your artwork but everything you draw just feels so good to look at? I’m not explaining this very well, but your art style is so pleasing to my eyes, there’s just something about the shading, the lines and the way you capture emotions/expressions it’s just; chef’s kiss (I had a question I promise lol)

What made you draw Toby and Jeff as a ship/what are some past/future headcannons that you have for them? Or just in general if you want to use this as an excuse to ramble about them go for it, anything you say about them I will listen!

Secondly, what is your general headcannon for the rest of the Creepypasta’s? Also it might be because I’ve been out of the loop for a few years but I didn’t really realise there were ex-proxies now, if it’s something you’ve come up with for your story that is insanely cool to read about (anything involving the like, political(?) state of the proxies is fascinating to me).

This has gone on longer than I thought it would, many apologies! I hope you’re having a good day!

I'm?? So honored that my art and headcanons have influenced you?? Skjdjd IM SO GLAD YOU LIKE MY ART AND MY CONTENT, REALLY MEANS A LOT TO ME AND ADDS A FEW MORE YEARS TO MY LIFE SPAN LMAO

As for what got me to drawing Ticcijeff, honestly? It started out as simply drawing the two characters I liked when I was a kid back at the archaic era of 2015 Youtube interacting, then it kinda... it snowballed from there– 😭

They both make me happy individually, so I figured bringing them both together would give me twice the serotonin (which did tbh) alongside the parallels of them both being reborn through fire, and my growing interest in these two were only enabled further by the few good Ticcijeff fanfics on AO3 lmao

As for headcanons? I'm just gonna,,, link some posts abt my dynamics for them and their lore and background so far because if I wrote all my thoughts abt them here we'd be here all day. (though there's absolutely more to come)

About their Childhood friendship

Another post about their childhood friendship! (Featuring the two's dynamic, Jeff's intrusive thoughts, and some additional background info on Jeff)

About Jeff and Toby meeting years later

What happened following the previous post

As for general headcanons for the creepypastas? Their world is a little bit more fucked than our own. Strict rules are set by authorities, there's a tight curfew in place for the safety of people, and death and missing persons cases have become common enough in recent times that it's become a morbid part of normal life.

Unbeknownst to the lay person though, the killers and criminals roaming the night aren't the worst one could encounter. There are incomprehensible- even malevolent horrors that defy the rules of the universe, that cross the boundaries of logic and reason, and even the dead won't stay dead for long in this world. In a twisted universe plagued by death and unknown creatures, even the scum of humanity have to carve a place out for themselves and survive.

Soooo uh, yeah, that's a gist of it lmao, but I'm gonna dump some specific headcanons too for the creeps, especially for each characters like I did here for the girls and here for Jack and Ben eventually!

Also, as someone who's been out of the loop for years (I just joined the fandom officially this year, the only social media site I had back in 2015 was YouTube 😭) I HAD??? NO IDEA EX PROXIES WERE A THING WHICH IS HELLA INTERESTING

I'm definitely gonna write down and flesh out the proxies and their relationship with the Slenderman, but thaaatssss for another time 👉👉

[velvet-games]

intro post

I'll probably add more to/change this later; I've just needed an intro post for a while, and this is what I could think of. you should probably remind me to update it if this section is still here after like six months lol.

name/pronouns/age/gay shit~

honestly you can call me whatever, but I probably won't know you're talking about me unless you use vel/velvet.

prefer they/it; any pronouns are fine.

I'm probably non-binary I guess.

I'm an adult.

I basically just identify as queer at this point, but I'm like,, vaguely aroace-spec probably? still figuring it out. I'm actually very happy to talk about it more specifically, but I might have to sit you down for an entire day to explain it lol.

what I do/post~

I mostly post fandom stuff, and my original posts include a lot of art + occasional meta. I'm starting write fic too, so that might be a more regular thing in the future :)

other accounts~

@/velvetygames -- explicit nsfw twitter/x account, not very active

@cornerbytes -- old dragon prince account that I will probably revisit when the new season comes out

@/velvet_games -- ao3 account

nsfw~

I post occasional nsfw here (never super explicit; that's saved for my twitter); it'll be tagged #nsft.

fandoms~

current fandom: hazbin hotel

previous fandoms:

hannibal (will always have a very special place in my heart)

arcane (will revisit when the new season comes out)

ofmd (literally so happy this exists; devastated it's not getting a new season)

the dragon prince (will probably revisit when the new season comes out)

good omens

lotr (I also read like 2/3 of the hobbit and will hopefully finish it this summer lmao)

things in media that make me go insane (in a good way)~

friendship

happy endings

cannibalism

(WELL-WRITTEN) romance (THAT RESPECTS THE CHARACTERS AS INDIVIDUALS AS WELL AS WHO THEY ARE IN RELATION TO OTHERS)

surrealism

good visuals (even if everything else is shit; extra points if it's animation)

angst

fake-hating

this one's weird but I love situations where a character is really helpless; I thought I liked whump because I can be borderline sadistic about it sometimes, but whump is really not necessary at all to this concept

religious stuff, mythology, angels specifically for some reason (especially when they're terrifying and/or fallen)

gay people

requests~

you are welcome to send in ideas through comments, DMs, asks, etc., but I can't guarantee I'll draw them. if I don't, it doesn't mean that I don't like your idea; I'm probably just busy or have too many brainworms about a specific thing to draw anything but what's on my mind.

notes~

I randomly get really anxious about feedback on stuff sometimes lol, but I promise I read every single comment/tag and cherish them very deeply <33

also, like/rb spamming is totally fine and welcomed! I know some people don't like it, so I just wanted to make it clear that it's completely cool with me.

mutuals~

for a really long time, this was my pinned post, and it's still true! definitely welcome any interactions from mutuals <3

I do have a problem with randomly ghosting people though; I've been much better with it recently, but please try not to take it personally if I don't respond to DMs quickly. I'm probably just being insane and in my head about it. I'm really sorry.

misc~

this is an account that is purposely removed from my irl stuff; I'm here to have fun and relax on my mostly fandom-oriented blog.

I don't block often since I mostly meet nice people on here, but I am very happy to block accounts that make my experience on this app shitty.

I try to tag triggers when appropriate, but please let me know if you need me to tag anything I haven't.

art for me is just a hobby I use for fun and self-expression, so while I really appreciate concrit, keep in mind that my goal is ultimately to make stuff that makes me happy.

I am also very protective of young artists that get made fun of for being beginners or making unconventional art; you should never assume why someone is making art, and you especially should not assume that they are focused on becoming more skilled or making things that are beautiful to you. if they're not hurting anyone and you're not their target audience, get the fuck out.

I am of the mindset that media is not real, but that your reaction/the things you learn are. liking cannibal media does not make you a cannibal, but seeing bigoted portrayals of minorities can feed your biases (doesn't necessarily mean you can't consume it; does mean its effect on you/others irl should factor into if/how you decide to interact with it).

I'm vaguely fucked in the head. just keep that in mind.

[a-star-that-burns-brightly]

Kotoko Yuzuriha and Love

Hello Milgram fandom ! So while I prepare my longer Kotoko theory post (the post about Pink-Shirt-Girl), I wanted to make a shorter post about something that has been on my mind for a while now, and I wanted to invite some discussion to it with this post !! Basically: Kotoko has a lot of references to love in her character. So many in fact that I really do feel like it might be relevant. Firstly, let's start with the most prominent example

Girl friend, what does this mean. From the probably hundreds of questions that were asked to Mikoto and Kotoko, this one was one of the twenty that were picked out. And considering how Mikoto's questions were used to foreshadow parts of his MV like the phone call with his mother, I feel like this could very well mean something important that will be explained later on Another thing that I feel is important to comment on is her cover songs, specifically her cover song in T2, Streaming Heart

(source: Vocaloid Wiki)

(source: Vocaloid Lyrics Wiki) Now to be completely fair, a large majority of Deco's library has to do with the theme of relationships, so it's not like Kotoko is necessarily special in that regard. But when you add in the fact that Streaming Heart could be connected to Monoprisoner, Mikoto's T1 cover, abd a few of the lyrics like > "You're a weakling, aren't ya?" (tfw useless weaklings won't shut up and let you protect them like how dare they /j) The choice feels very deliberate and I feel like it is meant to tell us more about Kotoko's character than we're made to believe. These next two points are a pretty big stretch, but I'm going to mention them anyway so I can gloat about being right if I end up being right /j So, Kotoko's birthday art.

I know. She is very beautiful. But more than that, the fruit associated with her cake is the Dragon Fruit, which on one hand is absolutely genius considering the first kanji in Kotoko's name means Japanese Harp (according to the milgram wiki) and that instrument, called a koto funnily enough, has connections to dragons and protection, which fit Kotoko very well (the urge to make a Milgram name meanings analysis post is rising) However, the Dragon Fruit also has connections to love

Now the most likely answer why the dragon fruit was chosen (especially since I could only really find this on one website) is the koto thing I mentioned earlier. But I did find this, so I thought I'd note it down And lastly, probably the biggest stretch of all:

Deep Cover's MV coming out on Mahiru's birthday...is probably a coincidence let's be real. But considering how much love has been foreshadowed for Kotoko's character, her MV coming out on the birthday of Mahiru fucking Shiina feels like something to note This post wasn't comprehensive at all and was mostly just a bunch of rambling about things I've noticed and thought about, but I would love to hear if anyone has any interpretations of what this could mean overall ! PS: I wrote half of this post dead fucking tired after an all nighter. if you see any typos, no you don't

[purinrinrin]

A guide to AI art for artists

When AI art first hit the web I was amazed by the technology. Then later, when it came out that these image generators were trained on images by living artists scraped from the public web with no consent or compensation, my opinion of it was soured. It took a lot of effort for me to push past that distaste in order to properly research the technology so that I could help myself and others to understand it. This is why I’m compiling all the information I’ve found here. I hope you find it helpful.

Terminology

To start off, there are a lot of different terms out there when it comes to AI nowadays so I’m going to try to define some of them so you can understand what people mean when they use them (and so you can tell when they’re full of shit).

AI

Artificial Intelligence. AI is a big buzzword right now in the tech sector and at times feels like it’s being thrown at anything and everything just to attract investors. Cambridge Dictionary defines it as:

the use or study of computer systems or machines that have some of the qualities that the human brain has, such as the ability to interpret and produce language in a way that seems human, recognize or create images, solve problems, and learn from data supplied to them

It’s kind of what it says on the tin - an artificial, that is, human-created system that has abilities similar to those of intelligent life forms. (I’d argue comparing the abilities of AI solely to those of humans does a disservice to the intelligence of many non-human animals but I digress.)

At the moment when you read things online or in the news, AI is likely being used to refer to machine learning which is a type of AI.

Algorithm

The word algorithm describes a process based on a set of instructions or rules used to find a solution to a problem. The term is used in maths as well as computing. For example, the process used to convert a temperature from Fahrenheit to Celsius is a kind of algorithm:

subtract 32

divide by 9

multiply by 5

These instructions must be performed in this specific order.

Nowadays on social media “the algorithm” is used to refer to a specific kind of algorithm - a recommendation algorithm - which is a kind of machine learning algorithm.

Machine Learning

Machine learning is a term used to refer to the the use of a computer algorithm to perform statistical analysis of data (and often large amounts of it) to produce outputs, whether these are images, text or other kinds of data. Social media recommendation algorithms collect data on the kind of content a user has looked at or interacted with before and uses this to predict what other content they might like.

I’ll explain it in very simple terms with an analogy. Consider a maths problem where you have to work out the next number in a sequence. If you have the sequence 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 you can predict that the next number would be 12 based on the preceding numbers each having a difference of 2. When you analyse the data (the sequence of numbers) you can identify a pattern (add 2 each time) then apply that pattern to work out the next number (add 2 to 10 to get 12).

In practice, the kind of analysis machine learning algorithms do is much more complex (social media posts aren’t numbers and don’t have simple relationships with each other like adding or subtracting) but the principle is the same. Work out the pattern in the data and you can then extrapolate from it.

The big downside to these algorithms is that since the rules behind their decision making are not explicitly programmed and are instead based on data it can be difficult to figure out why they produce the outputs they do, making them a kind of “black box” system. When machine learning algorithms are given more and more data, it becomes exponentially harder for humans to reason about their outputs.

Training Data and Models

Another term you’ll come across is “training” or talking about how an AI is “trained”. Training data refers to the data that is used to train the model. The process of training is the statistical analysis and pattern recognition I talked about above. It enables the algorithm to transform a dataset (collections of images and text) into a statistical model that works like a computer program to take inputs (a text prompt) to produce outputs (images).

As a general rule, the bigger the dataset used for training, the more accurate the outputs of the resulting trained model. Once a model is created, the format of the data is completely different to that of the training data. The model is also many orders of magnitude smaller than the original training data.

Text-to-image model AKA AI image generator, generative AI

Text-to-image model is the technical term for these AI image generators:

DALL-E (OpenAI)

Midjourney

Adobe Firefly

Google Imagen

Stable Diffusion (Stability AI)

The technology uses a type of machine learning called deep learning (I won’t go into this here. If you’d like to read more; good luck. It’s very technical). The term text-to-image is simple enough. Given a text prompt, the model will generate an image to match the description.

Stable Diffusion

Stable diffusion is different from other image generators in that its source code is publically available. Anyone with the right skills and hardware can run this. I don’t think I’d be incorrect in saying that this is the main reason why AI art has become so widespread online since stable diffusion’s release in 2022. For better or worse, open-sourcing this code has democratised AI image generation.

I won’t go deep into how stable diffusion actually works because I don’t really understand it myself but I will talk about the process of acquiring training data and training the models it uses to generate images.

What data is used?

I already talked about training data but what actually is it? And where does it come from? In order to answer this I’m going to take you down several rabbit holes.

LAION-5B

Taking stable diffusion as an example, it uses models trained on various datasets made available by German non-profit research group LAION (Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network). The biggest of these datasets is LAION-5B which is refined down to several smaller datasets (~2 billion images) based on language. They describe LAION-5B as “a dataset of 5,85 billion CLIP-filtered image-text pairs”. Okay. What does “CLIP-filtered image-text pairs” mean?

CLIP

OpenAI’s CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) is (you guessed it) another machine learning algorithm that has been trained to label images with the correct text. Given an image of a dog, it should label that image with the word “dog”. It does a little bit more than this as well. When an image is analysed with CLIP it can output a file called an embedding. This embedding contains a list of words or phrases and a confidence score from 0 to 1 based on how confident CLIP is that the text describes the image. An image of a park that happens to show a dog in the background would have a lower confidence score for the text “dog” than a close-up image of a dog. When you get to the section on prompting, it will become clear how this ends up working in image generators.

As I mentioned before, the more images you have in the training data, the better the model will work. The researchers at OpenAI make that clear in their paper on CLIP. They explain how previous research into computer vision didn’t produce very accurate results due to the small datasets used for training, and the datasets were so small because of the huge amount of manual labour involved in curating and labelling them. (The previous dataset they compare CLIP’s performance to, ImageNet, contains a mere 14 million images.) Their solution was to use data from the internet instead. It already exists, there’s a huge amount of it and it’s already labelled thanks to image alt text. The only thing they’d need to do is download it.

It’s not stated in the research paper exactly which dataset CLIP was trained on. All it says is that “CLIP learns from text–image pairs that are already publicly available on the internet.” Though according to LAION, CLIP was trained on an unreleased version of LAION-400M, an earlier text-image pair dataset.

Common Crawl

The data in LAION-5B itself comes from another large dataset made available by the non-profit Common Crawl which “contains raw web page data, metadata extracts, and text extracts” from the publicly accessible web. In order to pull out just the images, LAION scanned through the HTML (the code that makes up each web page) in the Common Crawl dataset to find the bits of the code that represent images (<img> tags) and pulled out the URL (the address where the image is hosted online and therefore downloadable from) and any associated alternative text, or “alt text”.

A tangent on the importance of image alt text

Alt text is often misused on the web. Its intended purpose is to describe images for visually impaired users or if the image is unable to be loaded. Let’s look at an example.

This image could have the alt text: “A still image from the film Back to the Future III depicting Doc Brown and Marty McFly. They are stood outside facing each other on a very bright sunny day. Doc Brown is trying to reassure a sceptical looking Marty by patting him on the shoulder. Marty is wearing a garish patterned fringed jacket, a red scarf and a white stetson hat. The DeLorean time machine can be seen behind them.” Good. This is descriptive.

But it could also have the alt text: “Christopher Lloyd and Michael J Fox in Back to the Future III” Okay but not very specific.

Or even: “Back to the Future III: A fantastic review by John Smith. Check out my blog!” Bad. This doesn’t describe the image. This text would be better used as a title for a web page.

Alt text can be extremely variable in detail and quality, or not exist at all, which I’m sure will already be apparent to anyone who regularly uses a screen reader to browse the web. This casts some doubt on the accuracy of CLIP analysis and the labelling of images in LAION datasets.

CLIP-filtered image-text pairs

So now, coming back to LAION-5B, we know that “CLIP-filtered image-text pairs” means two things. The images were analysed with CLIP and the embeddings created from this analysis were included in the dataset. Then these embeddings were used to check that the image caption matched what CLIP identified the image as. If there was no match, the image was dropped from the dataset.

But LAION datasets themselves do not contain any images

So how does this work? LAION states on their website:

LAION datasets are simply indexes to the internet, i.e. lists of URLs to the original images together with the ALT texts found linked to those images. While we downloaded and calculated CLIP embeddings of the pictures to compute similarity scores between pictures and texts, we subsequently discarded all the photos. Any researcher using the datasets must reconstruct the images data by downloading the subset they are interested in. For this purpose, we suggest the img2dataset tool.

In order to train a model for use with stable diffusion, you would need to go through a LAION dataset with img2dataset and download all the images. All 240 terabytes of them.

LAION have used this argument to wiggle out of a recent copyright lawsuit. The Batch reported in June 2023:

LAION may be insulated from claims of copyright violation because it doesn’t host its datasets directly. Instead it supplies web links to images rather than the images themselves. When a photographer who contributes to stock image libraries filed a cease-and-desist request that LAION delete his images from its datasets, LAION responded that it has nothing to delete. Its lawyers sent the photographer an invoice for €979 for filing an unjustified copyright claim.

Deduplication

In a dataset it’s usually not desirable to have duplicate entries of the same data, but how do you ensure this when the data you’re processing is as huge as the entire internet? Well… LAION admits you kinda don’t.

There is a certain degree of duplication because we used URL+text as deduplication criteria. The same image with the same caption may sit at different URLs, causing duplicates. The same image with other captions is not, however, considered duplicated.

Another reason why reposting art sucks

If you’ve been an artist online for a while you’ll know all about reposts and why so many artists hate them. From what I’ve seen in my time online, the number of times an artist’s work is reposted on different sites is proportional to their online reach or influence (social media followers, presence on multiple sites etc). The more well known an artist becomes, the more their art is shared and reposted without permission. It may also be reposted legitimately, say if an online news outlet ran a story on them and included examples of their art. Whether consensual or not, this all results in more copies of their art out there on the web and therefore, in the training data. As stated above, if the URL of the image is different (the same image reposted on a different website will have a different URL), to LAION it’s not considered duplicated.

Now it becomes clear how well known digital artists such as Sam Yang and Loish have their styles easily imitated with these models - their art is overrepresented in the training data.

How do I stop my art being used in training data?

Unfortunately for models that have already been trained on historic data from LAION/Common Crawl, there is no way to remove your art and no way to even find out if your art has been used in the training.

Unfortunately again, simply deleting your art from social media sites might not delete the actual image from their servers. It will still be accessible at the same URL as when you originally posted it. You can test this by making an image post on the social media site you want to test. When the image is posted, right click the image and select “open image in new tab”. This will show you the URL of the image in the address bar. Keep this tab open or otherwise keep a record of this URL. Then go back and delete the post. After the post is deleted, often you will still be able to view the image at the URL that you saved.

If you have your own website where you host your art you can delete your images, or update their URLs so that they are no longer accessible from the URLs that were previously in web crawl data.

HTTP Headers

On your own website you can also use the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header to prevent bots from crawling your website for training data. These values can be used:

X-Robots-Tag: noai

X-Robots-Tag: noimageai

X-Robots-Tag: noimageindex

The img2dataset tool is used to download images from datasets made available by LAION. The README states that by default img2dataset will respect the above headers and skip downloading from websites that use them. Although it must be noted this can be overridden, so if an unscrupulous actor wants to scrape your images without your consent, there is no technical reason they cannot do this.

Glaze

If you can’t prevent your images from being crawled, you can prevent all new art that you post from being useful in future models that are trained from scratch by using Glaze. Glaze is a software tool that you can run your art through to protect it from being copied by image generators. It does this by “poisoning” the data in the image that is read by machine learning code while keeping the art looking the same to human eyes.

Watermarks

This defence is a bit of a long shot but worth a try. You may be able to get your art filtered out of training data by adding an obvious watermark. One column included in the LAION dataset is pwatermark which is the probability that the image contains a watermark, calculated by a CLIP model trained on a small subset of clean and watermarked images. Images were then filtered out of subsequent datasets using a threshold for pwatermark of 0.8, which compared to the threshold for NSFW (0.3) and non-matching captions (also 0.3) is pretty high. This means that only images with the most obvious watermarks will be filtered out.

Prompt engineering and how to spot AI art

We’ve covered how AI image generators are trained so now let’s take all that and look at how they work in practice.

Artifacts

You’ve probably gotten annoyed by JPEG compression artifacts or seen other artists whine about them but what is an artifact? A visual artifact is often something unwanted that appears in an image due to technologies used to create it. JPEG compression artifacts appear as solid colour squares or rectangles where there should be a smooth transition from one colour to another. They can also look like fuzziness around high contrast areas of an image.

I’d describe common mistakes in AI image generations as artifacts - they are an unwanted side effect of the technology used to produce the image. Some of these are obvious and pretty easy to spot:

extra or missing fingers or otherwise malformed hands

distorted facial features

asymmetry in clothing design, buttons or zips in odd places

hair turning into clothing and vice versa

nonsense background details or clothing patterning

disconnected horizon line, floor or walls. This often happens when opposite sides are separated by an object in the foreground

Some other artifacts are not strange-looking, but become obvious tells for AI if you have some experience with prompting.

Keyword bleeding

Often if a colour is used in the text prompt, that colour will end up being present throughout the image. If it depicts a character and a background, both elements will contain the colour.

The reason for this should be obvious now that we know how the training data works. This image from LAION demonstrates it nicely:

This screenshot shows the search page for clip-retrieval which is a search tool that utilises an image-text pair dataset created using CLIP. You will see the search term that was entered is “blue cat” but the images in the results contain not just cats that are blue, but also images of cats that are not blue but there is blue elsewhere in the image eg a blue background, a cat with blue eyes, or a cat wearing a blue hat.

To go on a linguistics tangent for a second, part of the above effect could be due to English not having different adjective forms depending on the noun it’s referring to. For example in German when describing a noun the form of the adjective must match the gender of the noun it’s describing. In German, blue is blau, cat is Katze. “Blue cat” would be “blaue Katze”. Since Katze is feminine, the adjective blau must use the feminine ending e. The word for dog is masculine so blau takes the ending er, making it “blauer Hund”. You get the idea.

When a colour is not mentioned in a prompt, and no keyword in the prompt implies a specific colour or combination of colours, the generated images all come out looking very brown or monochrome overall.

Keyword bleeding can have strange effects depending on the prompt. When using adjectives to describe specific parts of the image in the prompt, both words may bleed into other parts of the image. When I tried including “pointed ears” in a prompt, all the images depicted a character with typical elf ears but the character often also had horns or even animal ears as well.

All this seems obvious when you consider the training data. A character with normal-looking ears wouldn’t usually be described with the word “ears” (unless it was a closeup image showing just the person’s ears) because it’s a normal feature for someone to have. But you probably would mention ears in an image description if the character had unusual ears like an elf or catgirl.

Correcting artifacts

AI artifacts can be corrected however, with a process called inpainting (also known as generative fill). This is done by taking a previously generated image, masking out the area to be replaced, then running the generation process again with the same or slightly modified prompt. It can also be used on non AI generated images. Google Pixel phones use a kind of generative fill to remove objects from photographs. Inpainting is a little more involved than just prompting as it requires editing of the input image and it’s not offered by most free online image generators. It’s what I expect Adobe Firefly will really excel at as it’s already integrated into image editing software (if they can iron out their copyright issues…)

Why AI kinda sucks

Since AI image generation is built on large scale statistical analysis, if you’re looking to generate something specific but uncommon you’re not going to have much luck. For example using “green skin” in a prompt will often generate a character with pale skin but there will be green in other parts of the image such as eye colour and clothing due to keyword bleeding.

No matter how specific you are the generator will never be able to create an image of your original character. You may be able to get something that has the same general vibe, but it will never be consistent between prompts and won’t be able to get fine details right.

There is a type of fine-tuning for stable diffusion models called LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) that can be used to generate images of a specific character, but of course to create this, you need preexisting images to use for the training data. This is fine if you want a model to shit out endless images of your favourite anime waifu but less than useless if you’re trying to use AI to create something truly original.

Some final thoughts

The more I play around with stable diffusion the more I realise that the people who use it to pretend to be a human artist with a distinctive style are using it in the most boring way possible. The most fun I’ve personally had with image generation is mixing and matching different “vibes” to churn out ideas I may not have considered for my own art. It can be a really useful tool for brainstorming. Maybe you have a few different things you’re inspired by (eg a clothing style or designer, a specific artist, an architectural style) but don’t know how to combine them. An image generator can do this with ease. I think it’s an excellent tool for artistic research and generating references.

All that being said, I strongly believe use of AI image generation for profit or social media clout is unethical until the use of copyrighted images in training data is ceased.

I understand how this situation has come about. Speaking specifically about LAION-5B the authors say (emphasis theirs):

Our recommendation is … to use the dataset for research purposes. … Providing our dataset openly, we however do not recommend using it for creating ready-to-go industrial products, as the basic research about general properties and safety of such large-scale models, which we would like to encourage with this release, is still in progress.

Use of copyrighted material for research falls under fair use. The problem comes from third parties making use of this research data for commerical purposes, which should be a violation of copyright. So far, litigation against AI companies has not made much progress in settling this.

I believe living artists whose work is used to train AI models must be fairly compensated and the law must be updated to enforce this in a way that protects independent artists (rather than building more armour for huge media companies).

The technology is still new and developing rapidly. Changes to legislation tend to be slow. But I have hope that a solution will be found.

References

“Adobe Firefly - Free Generative AI for Creatives.” Adobe. Accessed 28 Jan 2024.

https://www.adobe.com/uk/products/firefly.html

Andrew. "Stable Diffusion prompt: a definitive guide.” Stable Diffusion Art. 4 Jan 2024.

https://stable-diffusion-art.com/prompt-guide/#Anatomy_of_a_good_prompt

Andrew. “Beginner’s guide to inpainting (step-by-step examples).” Stable Diffusion Art. 24 September 2023.

https://stable-diffusion-art.com/inpainting_basics/

AUTOMATIC1111. “Stable Diffusion web UI. A browser interface based on Gradio library for Stable Diffusion.” Github. Accessed 15 Jan 2024

https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui

“LAION roars.” The Batch newsletter. 7 Jun 2023.

https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/the-story-of-laion-the-dataset-behind-stable-diffusion/

Beaumont, Romain. “Semantic search at billions scale.” Medium. 31 Mar, 2022

https://rom1504.medium.com/semantic-search-at-billions-scale-95f21695689a

Beaumont, Romain. “LAION-5B: A new era of open large-scale multi-modal datasets.” LAION website. 31 Mar, 2022

https://laion.ai/blog/laion-5b/

Beaumont, Romain. “Semantic search with embeddings: index anything.” Medium. 1 Dec, 2020

https://rom1504.medium.com/semantic-search-with-embeddings-index-anything-8fb18556443c

Beaumont, Romain. “img2dataset.” GitHub. Accessed 27 Jan 2024.

https://github.com/rom1504/img2dataset

Beaumont, Romain. “Preparing data for training.” GitHub. Accessed 27 Jan 2024.

https://github.com/rom1504/laion-prepro/blob/main/laion5B/usage_guide/preparing_data_for_training.md

“CLIP: Connecting text and images.” OpenAI. 5 Jan 2021.

https://openai.com/research/clip

“AI.” Cambridge Dictionary. Accessed 27 Jan 2024.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/ai?q=AI

“Common Crawl - Overview.” Common Crawl. Accessed 27 Jan 2024.

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