#mind you

[pratchettquotes]

"Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad."

Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times

[bb8banner]

i want to know everything about tommy kinard. i wanna know how he takes his coffee, i wanna know what his favorite color is. i wanna know if our fanon is correct and he listens to dad rock. i wanna know if he secretly loves pop and he’s with the pop girly times. i wanna know how many beds and baths his house has, is it one story, two? i wanna know what parts of queer culture he resonates with. i wanna know the make and model of his truck. i want to know once and for all is he a cat or dog person. i wanna know IT ALL. please i kinda can’t stop thinking about him.

[copperbadge]

I’ve messed around with AI a little, because I like to understand a thing when I’m formulating opinions on it and I’ve found the best way to do that is to climb into the thing and start pushing buttons. I’ve been unimpressed with ChatGPT; its fiction chops are oddly saccharine, and of course you can’t trust the nonfiction it spits out because everything it says needs to be fact checked. It claims it can’t “lie”, only misinterpret data from the sets it was trained on; devs call the misinterpreted data “hallucination”.

Part of what I was testing was whether it could competently do my job, so that if my boss starts asking about it, I can give him a decent report. I asked it for biographies of a few wealthy people I’ve researched in the past, and it spat out some respectably generic information that was mostly correct. However, most of the people I research now are not like “so rich I’m famous for it” levels of wealthy, and harder generally for me to find information on, as I assumed it would be for ChatGPT. 

So I thought I’d see what it could do with someone more middle class, and asked it for a biography of Sam Starbuck. 

What it returned was like what you would get if you told me “Write a flattering biography of yourself and don’t worry that I’ll be fact-checking anything you say.” It was mostly true, but it hyped up my achievements as an author in ways that I would consider not entirely honest, and said I was also a professional editor and that I had led prestigious writing workshops in the past. That’s plain untrue, but I can see where it would be making that assumption, because my author bio sounds like a lot of other, more famous peoples’ author bios, and I would guess it just pulled in some of their verbiage for color. 

But the wildest part of the bio was that it named three of the novels I’ve written. Or rather, it named two novels I’ve written and one novel that I definitely have not. It said I was the author of a novel called “Like Clockwork”. Just in case I had written a fanfic titled “Like Clockwork” and forgotten about it, I checked AO3 and also asked ChatGPT for a plot summary of Sam Starbuck’s “Like Clockwork”. And sure enough it hallucinated a multi-paragraph summary of an entire novel I’ve never written, on AO3 or anywhere else. (It was not a good summary. Very Generic YA SF Thriller.) 

ChatGPT is very good at one thing: apologizing. When I pressed it about where it found the data it couldn’t say, when I asked why it had made up the plot summary it couldn’t tell me, when I asked if it could show me source links or data it drew on to create “Like Clockwork” it of course would not. But it always said it was sorry...

Anyway, my best theory from googling is that every year there are roughly nine million news stories about how Starbucks Coffee’s holiday cups are back “like clockwork”. 

I suppose I should be glad the novel’s title isn’t Unicorn Frappucino.

[wenitsiyoh]

and someday you will ache like i ache

[severinaprince]

Not to call out on main, but like be honest, how many of you (us) who stan Severus Snape have experienced some sort of Trauma™️ or even PTSD?

[collarteraldamage]

Lil Raf moment that made me smile 🐟

((semi related MC is so funny in this event I love these two))

🥪 - edited for resolution

[pedropcl]

9-1-1

S08E03: Final Approach | dir. Bradley Buecker

[nemo-in-wonderland]

I have NO idea how the game is going to be, and I am still learning about the lore by playing DA: Inquisition and whatnot.

BUT.

For now, allow me to share a first draft of what my character for Veilguard is going to be.

DARLING SPITFIRE RAVENNA CALANTE PAVAN.

I am still coming up with her backstory and whanot, but for now I wanted to share my attempt to draw her with Lucanis.

AND LEMME TELL YOU.

I have been TRAINING my whole life to draw him.

MY WHOLE LIFE.

I had less difficulties sketching him than Ravenna lololol

Well, I hope you will like this!

--Nemo

[sofieartz]

[ Fnaf Fanart ]

//Blood and Slight Gore

Well, would you look at that.

I'm back to my fnaf phase....

I drew this a couple months back, finally had the time to finish it, just in time for the anniversary!

[marsreds]

demons in sousou no frieren:

we do not understand human emotions, we do not feel them, to us it's all a game and even when we try it will inevitably lead to death, destruction and human suffering

also demons in sousou no frieren:

[dailysquiddo]

but what if she was a superhero-ish guy. what then. what would you do then

[animeandcatholicism]

My biggest hot take

Is that, personally I believe that people should try to avoid body modification unless it's absolutely necessary and to accept themselves as they are.

Ultimately, you don't "fix" yourself by getting cosmetic surgeries and pumping yourself full of hormones or to alter your physical condition in order to achieve some perceived ideal that will "solve" your insecurities. The truth is, you have to accept yourself warts and all and nothing will magically solve that.

The only thing that you can control is how you respond to your own insecurities and often the way you do that is by confronting the reasons for that. Stop going onto social media and looking at people's "perfect lives" or consuming content that tells you what you need in order to be "happy". Talk to your friends and family, join a book club, an in person rpg group,go camping, somewhere that exposes you to the real side of life with as little bs as possible. Heck examine architecture and see how even in its flawed state it's still beautiful.

Understand that despite your flaws, insecurities and misgivings, you too are beautiful.

[cardentist]

my read on how arcane played out is that they'd Originally planned on having (at least) 3 seasons, and were told by higher ups (likely on netflix's side) to cut it down to the two.

the fact that they were Immediately green lit for an anthology series focusing on individual characters as soon as season 2 was considered a success tells me that they Definitely had written out and intended for certain characters and plot lines to get more focus than they were given.

the vibe reads to me like a steven universe situation. where they'd tried to cram Everything they had down, because the series of events were Supposed to flow into each other naturally. which leads to some moments of absolutely brilliant pieces of television, and other parts feeling unsatisfying, or even unfinished.

the best case scenario for the anthology is just that it's Good. but my personal hope for it is that we can just kind of. slot its episodes into season 2 to make a more cohesive feeling narrative.