#ocean playground

[orcagere]

[deadboystims]

✦ ┊ luffy (one piece) stimboard with a marine theme, stuffed animals, and playing for anon!

sources : 1 , 2 , 3 ┊ 4 , 5 , 6 ┊ 7 , 8 , 9

[natalillii]

[chaotic-orphan]

So I've been reading Intoxicating Fear for a while now and (Oskit shippers don't come after me) I don't see Kit and Ambrose being together. I get Ambrose but can be somewhat gentle with Kit, but I just don't think I've really seen it till now. I don't think their vibes or morals line up. I could see Jude and Ambrose together, as like a power couple of sorts, but I think don't Kit and Ambrose would be well together. (I'm sorry if this is repetitive and no one asked for my opinion on the matter. I love your work so much,

HAH HAAAAAAGGHH!!! YES!!!! WOOOOO!!!! THANK YOU ANON!!!!!! *sending kisses and bouquets of roses and popping champagne* I ABSOLUTELY ASKED FOR YOUR OPINION ON THE MATTER!!!! HAHAAAHHH! I’M NOT THE ONLY ONE!!! Now, Oskit shippers also don’t come for me, but I agree!!! Wholly and completely.

I agree that Ambrose can be gentle, and that their morals or vibes join up at all! My reasoning against them as a couple is simply because Kit would never, ever forgive Ambrose for what he did to him, what he took from him. Kit didn’t have a good life growing up, and then he found Mentor and his calling in the Hero academy — so when Mentor took him in and gave him a home and a life and love, Kit slowly, very slowly, let his guard down and started to believe the stories and movies about life being good, and then— Omen attacks and Kit is left alone again after taking the risk of hoping for a better life for himself.

It also doesn’t sit well with me because who has the power in their relationship? Ambrose, always, always Ambrose. So even if Ambrose made advances would Kit be too afraid to say no? And that makes it too like situations that happen in real life for me

Jude and Ambrose however? They are on the same kind of power balance (both in power and status and how they hold themselves) which would be a-okay to write, but because Kit is Ambrose’s second victim *ever* [and also just his victim] it is far too personal for Kit to ever get passed that and love Ambrose —— unless, Ambrose compelled him, and then it kind of goes into the Jessica Jones realm

Having said that, Oskit shippers, I get it, I love a good unbalanced power dynamic myself where love blooms — hell power imbalances in general (esp in whump, WOOF) — and I also love that you see something in the story that I never intended, and felt strongly enough about it to bring it to my attention!!! It has been a very fun and fucking hilarious experience, and I really like the coffee shop AU idea so it probably will happen, just not in canon 😉

But ANON, may the gods smile on you today for sharing your thoughts and opinions on the matter, I thought I was fighting against the army of Oskit shippers by myself, but now we can go back to back and fend them off with spears XD

[usarinnpa]

Had to trudge through the Izmi main tag for a moment (I couldn't remember where the numbers were in kai's url i keep thinking it's mo3-ru) and briefly experiencd the mental strain that Kai Moeru goes throiugh every day. Woew

[brinaarcadia]

DIONYSUS PARK

[christineshanshanhou]

between a rock and an ocean | 09.08.24

[oliviahathawayphotography]

A beach that has changed very little since the 1950's, though the colorful children's play equipment is gone now.

Redbubble / Instagram / Online portfolio

[enobariasteeth]

maybe this will teach rich people to stop fucking around with the ocean

[spaceraes]

you know i can understand anxiety about sharks given the way people talk about them in the media but literally all you have to do like ALL you have to do to avoid a shark bite is to pay attention to the world around you and practice basic water safety. if you’re that afraid of sharks, don’t go in the ocean. they live there. sharks are an important part of the ocean ecosystem and they are more integral to it than you are. shark experts and marine scientists will talk about this again and again, about how to proceed when you see a shark in the water, about how to engage with the ocean and it’s many many MANY creatures, but people still act like it’s the scariest thing in the world to see a wild animal in the wild.

[spearxwind]

ive been meaning to ask you this for forever BUT what were your primary inspirations for Challenger Deep?

Oh man there's so many!! Pretty much every piece of media that involves the ocean that I've enjoyed in the past several years. I just grabbed a bunch of inspiration of things I enjoyed and applied them to the ocean

The big ones are all games: Sunless Sea, Monster Hunter (world specifically), In Other Waters, and Subnautica. The whole angle about ocean exploration in a world utterly unknown is genuinely so fascinating to me.

The ocean as a vast unknowable force as opposed to 100% charted and explored and explained with it's magic ripped from it. But within the unknowable there are ecosystems and things that CAN be understood for survival and above all else must be respected rather than encroached on. That is the vibe I am going for

[angusmacrath]

[bookandcover]

In October, I went with my friend who works at the New York Public Library to see Richard Powers speak about his new book Playground. I didn’t, yet, have any context for this novel and I went into that author talk blind. I’d read The Overstory, but ultimately my experience with this novel far surpassed my earlier Richard Powers read. This transcendence was, I think, both the product of Playground’s particularities and of me as a reader. Playground feels, structurally, like the work of a more mature author: tightly crafted, complex yet essential in structure, broad without being unnecessarily rangy. I, too, was designed for this book, with my strange (inexplicable to myself) fixation with the ocean, the questions I circle around as an educator in the age of AI, and the complexities of how fields in STEM and the Humanities may rise to the forefront to save humanity from ourselves. 

The author talk at the NYPL compelled me to read this novel. I was immensely taken with several comments Powers shared and these have lingered with me as I read this book. First, I was struck by Powers’s framing of his own literary project: He steps beyond the human to look more clearly at humans. He supposes that the best way to perceive humans, for what we truly are, would be from a non-human point of view. In Playground, this POV is both ocean and artificial intelligence—two forms of complex intelligence for which our current understanding may constitute only the surface (calm, non-descriptive of the invisible raging depths). Another poignant comment was Powers’s recognition that, while those of us in the Humanities may recoil from the excessive record-keeping of the tech world, isn’t the project of STEM and the Humanities fundamentally the same? To record, to make meaning, to preserve, to make immortal—to capture the essence of another beyond the bounds of passing time. I was put in mind of Ted Chiang’s short story “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling,” where advancing technology allows a perfect record of our entire lives, available to revisit at any juncture. What in this change, this advancement, this transformation terrifies us? Is this not akin to Shakespeare’s preservation of the passions of the heart in verse? STEM and the Humanities both seek the eternal and seeing these quests played out in Playground’s two key figures—Todd and Rafi—illuminated and unpacked these disciplines shared end goal from different angles. 

In his NYPL talk, Powers also spoke of the love story (his words) between Todd Keane and Rafi Young—their intellectual and competitive spirits that locked them together from a young age. This, too, as a plot arc immediately drew my attention. Powers spoke of protagonist (debatably anti-hero) Todd’s asexuality, which is not stated with this exact term in the novel (but Powers used this identity indicator in his talk) and, with this context, I felt Todd’s identity infusion every page of his story. Todd loves Rafi, as he loves no one else. In a different way, he loves Ina. With neither of them does he seem to experience normative attraction; his life-long passion and fixation is with play and the development of spaces like his tech platform Playground. Todd and Rafi’s love story is very much the type that draws me: in many ways, their love is only suggested through the lines of intensity and fixation, an enduring understanding of each other that surpasses most human connections. Late in the novel, when Rafi writes to Todd to demand monetary compensation for his creative contributions to the ideas that launched Playground, Todd’s response is the most compelling indicator of his love. For a man consumed by strategy, his response to Rafi’s email is in no-way strategic (something for which his lawyer later berates him) and is glaring evidence of his emotional override of all “regularly scheduled programming,” in the case of Rafi Young. Rafi, it’s worth noting, is playing the game. But perhaps the game is the very thing through which he connects with and perceives Todd. Rafi thinks the lawsuit is a game; but, Todd is not playing. 

The development of Rafi and Todd’s friendship constitutes the compelling middle section of this book. United at a quality Chicago private high school, the boys are seemingly opposites: Todd is a privileged yet neglected rich white kid from the suburbs; Rafi is a Black boy growing up with little, pushed by both family members and teachers with a troubling fixation on Black exceptionalism. Rafi is granted a scholarship to attend Saint Ignatius—a scholarship in the Keane family name. From wildly different contexts, these boys share something that cuts across other boundaries and borders: a love for play. In facing off against each in chess and later the complex game Go, their animosity is transmuted into respect, the reckoning of two equal minds. In play, in strategy, in debate, in intellectualism—pitted against each other only as a broader joyful collaboration—these two see each other. Their intense friendship, which takes twists and turns through college, graduate school, and their professional life, is never quite what it once was during their bright high school years. 

Beyond Rafi and Todd, the big “hook” of this novel for me—the thing into which I sunk my teeth, the emotional space I lived inside—was Evie Beaulieu’s love of diving. From her first test of the aqualung to the stunning descriptions of the underwater world throughout her sections of the story, I resonated with her character, with her longing for the sea. I want to know the ocean like she knows it. I felt the strangeness, the mystery, the unseen stories—all of it, that the ocean still has to offer. I loved the overlapping sense of the ocean as playground and the tech world as playground. School, too, was playground, as Rafi and Todd did it. The mind wants to play and animals share this spark in common with humanity. One of my favorite memories is of snorkeling off Kicker Rock in The Galapagos when I was startled by a shape suddenly hurdling upward at me from the depths. At the last moment, the sea lion peeled off course. I spluttered backward, inhaling water at the surface. The sea lion was looking at me, head out of the water too and, at my dramatic reaction, gave what was unmistakably a chuckle at my expense. I hadn’t known we were playing. But, it was so special to witness and be a part of this animal’s sense of humor and creativity, and I’ll long feel Evie Beaulieu’s intrinsic need for this magic. 

The third strand of this novel is the narrative thread of life on the pacific island of Makatea, a once-colonized community faced with the probability of outsider interference once again. Late in the novel, the Makatea plot line is revealed to be the generated product of Profunda (Todd’s developed AI) which is feeding the story back to Todd, it seems, as an act of wish fulfillment. Much of the Makatea plot line is revealed to be disconnected from reality—Evie and Rafi both exist on the island past their real dates of death—and the narrative structure of the Makatea plot allows for the exploration and tying up of the central themes of the novel: the relationship between exploitation and consumption, the stability/instability of friendships, the complexity of power dynamics and the impossibility of understanding another in an unequal landscape, the role of art and technology in cataloguing and making meaning of our disparate experiences. 

The choice to end the novel with Profunda’s diagnosed “ending” to the story throws our understanding of endings themselves into new relief. How ought this long match to end? Profound asks, and answers its own question. The ending we get is not the “true” one, so much as it is the “right” one and that is the narrative impulse of AI. While Profunda’s design of the Makatea narrative contextualizes the narrative itself (and I’m still struggling with how this story being AI-generated undercuts its meaning for me: Does it make the narrative less worthy? Perhaps, instead, different, revealing of something different about humanity?), there is much in the Makatea plot line that was thought-provoking, independent of Profunda and Todd Keane. I was most taken with the scene of the islanders' vote, as they deliberated whether or not to let the sea-steading project make its foothold on their island. The scene of the vote itself is lengthy, cycling through the frameworks of value and the modes of decision-making all humans might bring to complex choices. Through these islanders’s actions, we see so many diverse ways of making a choice—and how deeply any choice is tied to our sense of self. The Makatea plot line allows readers to get to know each of the characters and to see our understanding of them played out within the complexity of this singular, pivotal event. 

I have been thinking a lot about AI lately and how casually we humans welcome any innovations. It is so easy to accept the new—unaware of what it might entail, curious and excited—and to let the new transform us. Surely this is a strength of humanity. We are adaptable. But, lately, I have been more afraid of this capacity for acceptance. We welcome innovation after innovation, seduced by potential, inconsiderate of consequences. I find this fixation in myself interesting, as I have often known myself to be someone curious and charmed by the new, confident in my ability to trust people over the tools themselves and to see the potential in creative innovation. Am I just getting old? Is this what aging looks like? Or is there something different about AI, specifically? Like meeting an immortal being that has read everything ever written, that knows everything science knows…surely such an encounter would not be a casual one, but one that reshapes us forever? Or is AI just a tool at our disposal, becoming whatever we make of it—a mixture of helpful and harmful, connective and divisive—like the internet, or cellphones, or cosmetic surgery. 

I don’t have easy answers to these questions, but I feel more at peace about them because of this novel, because writers are asking the complex questions too. Writers like Richard Powers are expanding my thinking and challenging my assumptions: How might AI be the perfect tool for the human losing themselves to dementia (just like Twitter might be an apt fit for the writer struggling through writers’ block, the perfect and immediate mirror for the self)? Do we face an AI with the awe/terror with which we face a Great White Shark or a Humpback Whale? Should we? Something that might be deeply human is the recognition that it’s okay for us to exist with these questions, rather than immediately answer them. The process of wondering looks a lot, to me, like play.

[lilianeruyters]

Richard Powers || Playground

Longlist I love Richard Powers. I probably read all of his novels and he has yet to disappoint me. Playground definitely adds to my appreciation of the man and his talent. Playground also confirms Powers to be a firm advocate of our natural world. In Overstory he opened my eyes to the beauty of trees and their underlying system. In Playground he opens my eyes once more, by describing life in our…

[panhelleniios]

finally finished reworking herc's bio to encompass more of his history but forgive me for how brief some of it is....... im still..... reading his old adventures,

[kirbys-lilplayground]

The one thing in my life that brings me genuine peace....