#so its not actually that implausible

[pikkish]

So I was rereading How To Process a Soul (because it's one of my faves) and I just happened to look at who the author was and had a moment of like... no way... Pikkish the cool artist is also a cool author... so I just had to come over here so I could compliment you :3

Wait wait are you telling me that you found my tumblr and my ao3 independent of each other and didn't realize until now that they're the same person? Because that's hilarious.

[heartyearning]

needing to exert massive amounts of self control bc a) i am feeling ill rn b) the second hand shop (which is in my street) is having a sale week again c) I Want Stuff and d) i do not Need Stuff

[singwhenyoucantspeak]

the temptation to go back and look at the Swan Queen AU I was writing that was *strongly* inspired by my now gf is crazy today but i also know there's a reason I never published it and also I'm sure it would be horrifically mortifying to be reminded of what that version of me was thinking LMAO

[princessmo]

ship so ass it makes you leave the discord server while driving for work

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Three AI insights for hard-charging, future-oriented smartypantses

MERE HOURS REMAIN for the Kickstarter for the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There’s also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Living in the age of AI hype makes demands on all of us to come up with smartypants prognostications about how AI is about to change everything forever, and wow, it's pretty amazing, huh?

AI pitchmen don't make it easy. They like to pile on the cognitive dissonance and demand that we all somehow resolve it. This is a thing cult leaders do, too – tell blatant and obvious lies to their followers. When a cult follower repeats the lie to others, they are demonstrating their loyalty, both to the leader and to themselves.

Over and over, the claims of AI pitchmen turn out to be blatant lies. This has been the case since at least the age of the Mechanical Turk, the 18th chess-playing automaton that was actually just a chess player crammed into the base of an elaborate puppet that was exhibited as an autonomous, intelligent robot.

The most prominent Mechanical Turk huckster is Elon Musk, who habitually, blatantly and repeatedly lies about AI. He's been promising "full self driving" Telsas in "one to two years" for more than a decade. Periodically, he'll "demonstrate" a car that's in full-self driving mode – which then turns out to be canned, recorded demo:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

Musk even trotted an autonomous, humanoid robot on-stage at an investor presentation, failing to mention that this mechanical marvel was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Now, Musk has announced that his junk-science neural interface company, Neuralink, has made the leap to implanting neural interface chips in a human brain. As Joan Westenberg writes, the press have repeated this claim as presumptively true, despite its wild implausibility:

https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/elon-musk-lies

Neuralink, after all, is a company notorious for mutilating primates in pursuit of showy, meaningless demos:

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/

I'm perfectly willing to believe that Musk would risk someone else's life to help him with this nonsense, because he doesn't see other people as real and deserving of compassion or empathy. But he's also profoundly lazy and is accustomed to a world that unquestioningly swallows his most outlandish pronouncements, so Occam's Razor dictates that the most likely explanation here is that he just made it up.

The odds that there's a human being beta-testing Musk's neural interface with the only brain they will ever have aren't zero. But I give it the same odds as the Raelians' claim to have cloned a human being:

https://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/03/cf.opinion.rael/

The human-in-a-robot-suit gambit is everywhere in AI hype. Cruise, GM's disgraced "robot taxi" company, had 1.5 remote operators for every one of the cars on the road. They used AI to replace a single, low-waged driver with 1.5 high-waged, specialized technicians. Truly, it was a marvel.

Globalization is key to maintaining the guy-in-a-robot-suit phenomenon. Globalization gives AI pitchmen access to millions of low-waged workers who can pretend to be software programs, allowing us to pretend to have transcended the capitalism's exploitation trap. This is also a very old pattern – just a couple decades after the Mechanical Turk toured Europe, Thomas Jefferson returned from the continent with the dumbwaiter. Jefferson refined and installed these marvels, announcing to his dinner guests that they allowed him to replace his "servants" (that is, his slaves). Dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, of course – they just keep them out of sight:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

So much AI turns out to be low-waged people in a call center in the Global South pretending to be robots that Indian techies have a joke about it: "AI stands for 'absent Indian'":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

A reader wrote to me this week. They're a multi-decade veteran of Amazon who had a fascinating tale about the launch of Amazon Go, the "fully automated" Amazon retail outlets that let you wander around, pick up goods and walk out again, while AI-enabled cameras totted up the goods in your basket and charged your card for them.

According to this reader, the AI cameras didn't work any better than Tesla's full-self driving mode, and had to be backstopped by a minimum of three camera operators in an Indian call center, "so that there could be a quorum system for deciding on a customer's activity – three autopilots good, two autopilots bad."

Amazon got a ton of press from the launch of the Amazon Go stores. A lot of it was very favorable, of course: Mister Market is insatiably horny for firing human beings and replacing them with robots, so any announcement that you've got a human-replacing robot is a surefire way to make Line Go Up. But there was also plenty of critical press about this – pieces that took Amazon to task for replacing human beings with robots.

What was missing from the criticism? Articles that said that Amazon was probably lying about its robots, that it had replaced low-waged clerks in the USA with even-lower-waged camera-jockeys in India.

Which is a shame, because that criticism would have hit Amazon where it hurts, right there in the ole Line Go Up. Amazon's stock price boost off the back of the Amazon Go announcements represented the market's bet that Amazon would evert out of cyberspace and fill all of our physical retail corridors with monopolistic robot stores, moated with IP that prevented other retailers from similarly slashing their wage bills. That unbridgeable moat would guarantee Amazon generations of monopoly rents, which it would share with any shareholders who piled into the stock at that moment.

See the difference? Criticize Amazon for its devastatingly effective automation and you help Amazon sell stock to suckers, which makes Amazon executives richer. Criticize Amazon for lying about its automation, and you clobber the personal net worth of the executives who spun up this lie, because their portfolios are full of Amazon stock:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

Amazon Go didn't go. The hundreds of Amazon Go stores we were promised never materialized. There's an embarrassing rump of 25 of these things still around, which will doubtless be quietly shuttered in the years to come. But Amazon Go wasn't a failure. It allowed its architects to pocket massive capital gains on the way to building generational wealth and establishing a new permanent aristocracy of habitual bullshitters dressed up as high-tech wizards.

"Wizard" is the right word for it. The high-tech sector pretends to be science fiction, but it's usually fantasy. For a generation, America's largest tech firms peddled the dream of imminently establishing colonies on distant worlds or even traveling to other solar systems, something that is still so far in our future that it might well never come to pass:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

During the Space Age, we got the same kind of performative bullshit. On The Well David Gans mentioned hearing a promo on SiriusXM for a radio show with "the first AI co-host." To this, Craig L Maudlin replied, "Reminds me of fins on automobiles."

Yup, that's exactly it. An AI radio co-host is to artificial intelligence as a Cadillac Eldorado Biaritz tail-fin is to interstellar rocketry.

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

[hussyknee]

Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2 375 259, this would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip

(Source: The Lancet)

The Lancet is one of the oldest and highest impact peer-reviewed medical journals in the world. Deliberate undercounting of deaths is a key feature of genocides.

The Electronic Intifada estimated it at 193,000 a few days before.

The reported number of martyrs on Wednesday this week was 37,718. It’s important to note that this number only includes martyrs who have been identified by name and civil ID number through the beleaguered health ministry in Gaza. Given the breakdown of reporting systems due to heavy destruction of infrastructure and personnel, this number, even with its limited parameters, is a gross underestimation. Based on more accurate figures of approximately 370 people killed daily, multiplied by 264 days of genocide, the actual number is closer to 97,680 martyred. (Per OCHA estimate of 15 martyrs per hour: Over the course of 264 days, which amounts to 6,336 hours, this number would roughly be 95,040).

...

Based on these estimates, both conservative and data-driven, respectively, the actual figures are likely as follows: • 377,280 buildings destroyed completely or partially • 95,040—97,680 martyred • 221,760 injured • 24,750 dead or dying from starvation • 42,000 missing (presumed dead, kidnapped by Israel’s occupying forces or possibly trafficked). The following ranges represent conservative estimate or lower range of data-driven population estimates: • 17,050—94,049 with chronic illnesses dead from lack of medication • 14,408—255,985 dead from epidemics resulting from Israel’s assault This means the actual number of dead is closer to 194,768—511,824 people, with 221,760 injured. And counting.

(Source: The Electronic Intifada)

Israel surrounded the last remaining hospital in the Gaza Strip with tanks and ordered it evacuated and shut down 12 hours ago.

If you still want to believe the pussy-footing toll of counted and reported deaths that can stand up to Western propaganda, after nine fucking months of dropping more than 70,000 tons of bombs on a 41 kilometer strip, exceeding World War II bombings in Dresden, Hamburg, London combined, rather than the statistical breakdown of humanitarian orgs and medical journals, then have at. There's no point telling you to believe the victims and question your own biases towards your own heavily propagandized establishments.

But if you can do basic math, then please use The Lancet's estimated death toll. The massacre of 8% of the Gaza Strip is a conservative estimate and still apocalyptic. Resist all attempts to diminish it. Remember that this is the result of the United States's obstruction of justice and open-handed abetting of genocidaires. Keep fighting.

Btw:

While the war itself is estimated to have generated between 420,265 and 652,552 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) so far—equivalent to burning more than 1.5 million barrels of oil—this figure soars to more than 61 million tonnes when pre-and post-war construction and reconstruction are included. This is more than the annual emissions of 135 individual nations—but there is currently no legal obligation for militaries to report or be held accountable for their emissions.

(Source: EuroNews)

[dollish-shard]

Mech pilot handler playing Armored Core VI and ranting about all the inaccuracies to her pilot. (who is on the floor between her legs, too twitchy and blissed out by continuous battlestim use to actually understand anything other than direct orders)

Sometimes she says the word "combat" and the pilot looks up at her and shivers like an eager puppy. She pats its head fondly and then roughly pushes it back towards her crotch as she continues to complain about the implausibility of mechs being so mobile flying in Earth's gravity.

[murderbot-moodboard]

I've made good progress on moving out of my apartment, but my body is currently hating me for it, so I'm awake and you're getting some more thoughts about episode 6.

Something I noticed about episode 6 was how relatable all the characters felt to me throughout the episode. (Even LeeBeeBee's motives were understandable on some level, even if I disagreed with them and wouldn't make the same choices right now, who knows if I would make some of the same choices if I'd lived her life.) I don't think they were necessarily more relatable than in previous episodes, but rather that I noticed because the situations they were dealing with were extreme, and they were all having understandable human reactions to them. The way Mensah acted while performing surgery on Murderbot, steeling herself to do something hard and unpleasant by muttering and vocalizing and wincing the whole time, is exactly how I (and I think many or most people) deal with that type of task. (You know, the type you can't totally dissociate from by thinking about Star Trek characters, or partially dissociate from by pretending you're a Starfleet officer gathering samples of alien plants on a planet. Something many or most people would also do, of course.)

And the way the rest of Preservation Aux reacted to LeeBeeBee's sudden violent death was also relatable. I've never been in a situation quite like that, thankfully, but if I were, I think there's an equal chance I could have any of their responses to it. I just think it really speaks to the good writing, acting, and directing that all of the humans felt realistically human, not like they were reacting a certain way just because it was convenient for the plot.

I also think it's interesting how this episode means that in this alternate universe, it's no longer true that Ratthi has never seen Murderbot kill anyone up close (and Murderbot wants to keep it that way). I wonder if the writers thought about that specifically when writing this part, because Ratthi's extreme gut reaction (pun intended) to violence feels completely believable for his character. This change also introduces an interesting dynamic to Ratthi's relationship to Murderbot that we didn't see in the books as such, so I'm really looking forward to finding out how Ratthi reacts to Murderbot after this and whether he still wants to try to understand Murderbot (as he mistakenly thought he understood it before).

The episode really walked an interesting and difficult tonal line, balancing both the comedy and the horror. To me, when Gurathin said, "Now that she no longer has a head!" it struck me as the punch line to an awful dark joke that I wanted to laugh at, but I felt a touch of guilt for considering laughing about it. That sort of describes the whole mood of that part of the episode, and a little bit of the earlier parts as well. We're given insight into one of Murderbot's favorite Sanctuary Moon episodes, which has a ridiculously implausible plot which is simultaneously sad, and yet it's the episode Murderbot finds soothing. There's a discordant disconnect between the values it's learned as property in the Corporation Rim and the values Preservation Aux hold without always understanding why anyone would think differently. Murderbot itself is a contradiction—a killing machine who wants to protect its clients, and a person who denies its need for or interest in connection while still demonstrating how much it actually cares. The jarring aspects of the episode feel appropriate for the way they show cognitive dissonance forming in all the main cast: cognitive dissonance that threatens their ability to trust each other (and for Murderbot to trust itself).

So, basically, I think this episode was supposed to feel like a wakeup call, reminding both Preservation Aux and us the viewers who Murderbot actually is. How everything plays out now will depend a lot on the leadership of Mensah, and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next.

[nostalgebraist]

So, about this new "AI 2027" report...

I have not read the whole thing in detail, but my immediate reaction is kind of like what I said about "Bio Anchors" a while back.

Like Bio Anchors – and like a lot of OpenPhil reports for that matter – the AI 2027 report is mainly a very complex estimation exercise.

It takes a certain way of modeling things as a given, and then does a huge amount of legwork to fill in the many numeric constants in an elaborate model of that kind, with questions like "is this actually a reasonable model?" and "what are the load-bearing assumptions here?" covered as a sort of afterthought.

For instance, the report predicts a type of automated R&D feedback loop often referred to a "software intelligence explosion" or a "software-only singularity." There has been a lot of debate over the plausibility of this idea – see Eth and Davidson here for the "plausible" case, and Erdil and Barnett here for the "implausible" case, which in turn got a response from Davidson here. That's just a sampling of very recent entries in this debate, there's plenty more where that came from.

Notably, I don't think "AI 2027" is attempting to participate in this debate. It contains a brief "Addressing Common Objections" section at the end of the relevant appendix, but it's very clear (among other things, simply from the relative quantity of text spent on one thing versus another) that the "AI 2027" authors are not really trying to change the minds of "software intelligence explosion" skeptics. That's not the point of their work – the point is making all these detailed estimates about what such a thing would involve, if indeed it happens.

And the same holds for the rest of their (many) modeling assumptions. They're not trying to convince you about the model, they're just estimating its parameters.

But, as with Bio Anchors, the load-bearing modeling assumptions get you most of the way to the conclusion. So, despite the name, "AI 2027" isn't really trying to convince you that super-powerful AI is coming within the decade.

If you don't already expect that, you're not going to get much value out of these fiddly estimation details, because (under your view) there are still-unresolved questions – like "is a software intelligence explosion plausible?" – whose answers have dramatically more leverage over your expectations than facts like "one of the parameters in one of the sub-sub-compartments of their model is lognormally distributed with 80% CI 0.3 to 7.5."

---

Maybe this is obvious, I dunno? I've just seen some reactions where people express confusion because the whole picture seems unconvincing and under-motivated to them, and I guess I'm trying to explain what I think is going on.

And I'm also worried – as always with this stuff – that there are some people who will look at all those pages and pages of fancy numbers, and think "wow! this sounds crazy but I can't argue with Serious Expert Research™," and end up getting convinced even though the document isn't really trying to convince them in the first place.

---

Now, if you do buy all the assumptions of the model, then yes, I guess this seems like a valuable exercise. If you are literally Daniel Kokotajlo, and hence believe in all the kind of stuff that Daniel Kokotajlo believes, then it makes sense to do all this legwork to "draw in the fine details" of that high-level view. And yeah, if you think the End Times are probably coming in a few years (but you might be able to do something about that at the margins), then you probably do want to get very precise about exactly how much time you have left, and when it will become too late for this or that avenue for change.

(Note that while I don't agree with him about this stuff, I do respect Kokotajlo a lot! I mean, you gotta hand it to him... not only did he predict what we now call the "Gen AI boom" with eerie accuracy way back in 2021, he was also a whistleblower who refused to sign OpenAI's absurd you-can't-talk-about-the-fact-that-you-can't-talk-about-it non-disparagement agreement, thereby bringing it into public view at last.)

But, in short, this report doesn't really touch on the reasons I disagree with short timelines. It doesn't really engage with my main objections, nor is it trying to do so. If you don't already expect "AI" in "2027" then "AI 2027" is not going to change your view.

[artbyblastweave]

How do you feel about ppl not liking a character take a more villainous turn in big 2 AU stories (Wonder Woman in Kingdom Come, Iron Man in Life Story, etc)? Like do you think it's more about execution, ppl getting too attached to their faves, etc?

(To be That Guy, Wonder Woman did not, to the best of my recollection, take a turn for the evil in Kingdom Come, she took a turn for the "trying her best but reasonably jaded due to the Amazons turning on her from their ivory tower when she failed to find a way to accomplish the impossible RE: changing human nature." Injustice and Flashpoint are the ones where she took a marked turn for the evil. I'll get to that in a minute.)

So I think Wonder Woman and Iron Man are subject to two different dynamics with this.

The thing about Iron Man is that the character originated as no-frills unreconstructed jingoistic anticommunist propaganda. It does nobody any good to deny this and you can't deny this without lying. The comic in which he debuts is comically racist and it's a booster for American intervention in Vietnam. Every subsequent adaptation has run screaming from this origin point as fast as it can; for all we gripe about the pop culture tumor that Iron Man spawned, for all that its politics were still nakedly aligned with a U.S-military-centric moral outlook, the film is infinitely more aware than the comic that becoming a billionaire off arms sales is something you'd need to spend every second of the rest of your life atoning for. Thus, when Iron Man is cast in a more villainous role in AUs like Life Story, what's basically happening is that he's sliding into the role that's actually intuitive for his character. He's villain-shaped! If he were introduced at almost any point beyond when he was introduced he almost certainly would have been cast as a supervillain!

Wonder Woman, when villainized in Elseworlds, usually has something distinct going on. In Flashpoint, the Amazons are depicted as militant genocidal conquerors basically out of pocket, and I will be real with you, as often as I like to make the argument that DC is overly charitable to what the politics of an enclave of isolationist hellenistic bronze-age superhumans would look like, you can't really draw a plausible line between Wonder Woman's default characterization and a genocidal invasion of Europe- that implausibility is both why they did it (shock value!) and why everyone got so mad about it. Likewise, the problem with Injustice is that the comics, as a prequel, were in the unenviable position of having to draw a line between The Justice League As We Know Them, and a retread of the Injustice Lords plot where Wonder Woman is elevated to the Lady Macbeth position for Superman; the only way they could square that circle was to rewrite the specifics of Wonder Woman's backstory to reveal that she was in fact always significantly more jaded, misanthropic and nihilistic than any version of Wonder Woman seen previously. Which, you know, solves the problem, but also means you aren't actually saying anything meaningful about the character anymore. Kraven killing a bunch of people while dressed as Spider-Man doesn't say dick about the character of Peter Parker.

This generalizes. Sometimes people get mad about an AU villainizing their fave because it's cleverly engaging with and extrapolating from the original concept and context of the character, raising an ugly mirror to the unspoken politics of the whole thing that make the readers feel bad for liking what they like. Other times they get mad because the AU is a bad faith hack job by someone who is, at best, ignorant of the characterization of the character they're working with and is, at worst, out for blood because they're actively bigoted against the character (See Wonder Woman's portrayal in Frank Miller's All-Star Batman and Robin, or Azzarello's stuff with the Sons of Themyscira.)

[jujuberry136]

Murderbot tv - Ep 6

And we're back after last week's massive cliff-hanger! "Command Feed" has more Sanctuary Moon, more intrepid explorers, and some gross medical scenes. More under the cut!

HA! I called it about LBB! Did not call Murderbot coming in and blowing her head off immediately (and that certainly surprised the PresAux crew too). AND we finally get context for that Gurathin clip from early advertising

I actually really liked sitting with their reaction, because it really plays nicely into the theme of tv vs real life that the episode was playing with. Murderbot is leaning heavily into tv plotlines and dialogue for guidance on dealing with its clients so far in the show, but having that explicit disconnect between how the PresAux team and Murderbot think about the importance of life is great.

I also loved the disconnect between the PresAux team about why they were upset of LBB dying was meaningful - we see Gurathin and Pin-Lee wanting more intel, Bharadwaj dealing with the whiplash of making a connection to LBB / defending Murderbot due to its saving her life / Murderbot walking in and just killing LBB, and Mensah having a Troy walking into a burning apartment from Community moment... she just had a really shitty day and now everyone and everything is falling apart again and she needs to step back into that fearless leader position to keep her crew moving to avoid things getting even worse.

For the silly side, Mensah's face journey when Murderbot admits to deleting the repair copy to make room for Season 19 of Sanctuary Moon was amazing. Murderbot attempting to justify this by saying SM is a premium quality show (and the snippy "agree to disagree") was just great.

Other things:

Murderbot signing along / speaking along with the SM episode

Murderbot's deep knowledge of SM canon finding the episode to help Mensah breathe through her panic attack (the acknowledgement that Murderbot is also almost incapacity by anxiety)

The "it's cannon" response to Mensah's "implausible" line about the episode

Murderbot's faceplant in the hopper, lol

Gurathin and Bharadwaj talking about how PresAux keeps itself fed (not everything is perfect! The debt vs working for shitty corporations who pay to keep this perfect society going was great)

Man LBB played Bharadwaj; I feel bad for her, but there were also so many instances where I just wanted to shake her for not realizing LBB was just parroting back the same story Bharadwaj had told her earlier

"And Gurathin?" "Yeah sure, him too" - DYING

Murderbot making that joke about the nerve fiber and Mensah's joy at realizing that Murderbot made a joke

Ratthi STILL getting LBB's name wrong on the stairs

Mensah's face at Murderbot's "Good Times" - think she now recognizes the source of that line or is just super happy about getting back to her crew?

Murderbot's satisfaction that its actions with LBB have forced the PresAux team to recognize that it is not human and not like them

[causenessus]

try again

part 0.9. ALL OR NOTHING.

“he doesn’t see her today. but he’s thinking of her anyway. when is he not? today, he sends a song to her, because he doesn’t know what she’s playing in her waiting room.”

content warnings: nightmares, lots of talk about death, the fear of growing up, parental issues, manipulation/guilt-tripping, someone here might just be traumatized, my booty writing

when she was younger, she had a lot of nightmares.

sometimes they were something stupid; something that shouldn’t have scared her but did. sometimes they were things implausible; like walking on a dirt path, and suddenly the ground giving out on her and she was falling from an inescapable height, her mouth open and trying to scream with all her might but no sound was coming up, and then she woke up right before she hit the ground.

sometimes, they were about death.

about people dying.

she was never the one responsible, and they never died in a terrifying way.

they were realistic causes, like old age, or a car crash. none of that scared her.

it was her reaction to the deaths that scared her. 

her brain wasn't necessarily punishing her with these terrors of death, it was punishing her for how terrible and cold-hearted she was.

she would dream of her father dying of a disease at an old age and everyone around her would be crying but her. she'd stand there, eyes dry, just thinking about what she should’ve done. she should’ve said i love you, instead of love you. it didn’t matter that he was a horrible person, she was horrible, for being so selfish. maybe it wouldn't have been an honest truth that came out of her mouth, but at least it was something that would've been nice for him to hear before he died. and that's what she'd been known for; for being selfless. how could she ever put herself above another? she didn't even have a purpose or right to live. she felt that she only existed to burden other people.

she would have nightmares of her mother dying in a terrible car crash, and she was standing there again, face blank, thinking about how she should have stopped ignoring her. she should have pushed through her discomfort and hate for the woman, knowing she was still human and deserved to be treated as much.

the entire dilemma stemmed from the guilt that had found its way into every corner and crevice of her heart and mind thanks to her parents. they were the cause of her guilt and the terrors that stemmed from them, but she didn't know how to stop that. to set boundaries, or not let their emotions affect her even if it was all a plot to get her to do what they wanted.

she was an all-or-nothing kind of person; never able to just be in the middle. she gave the entirety of her heart to one person or showed them no care at all. she could either go against every warning signal in her head and put up with her father and mother in order to not feel so bad about the fact that they were providing for her (despite it being their fucking job) or she could completely cut them off.

her mother actually cut her off first, to be fair.

but then she cut off her father the moment she graduated from high school. 

she found a place to stay in the next city over, her last message to him being a simple goodbye, without any details about where she went and if she’d ever be back (the answer was no).

and yet that hadn’t been a clear enough sign for him to back off. she had never been able to communicate that to him. whether it was because he chose to ignore her attempts to distance herself from him or because he couldn’t understand what she was doing, he never left her alone.

she woke up today with seven missed calls from an unknown number. it was one too many calls to be from anyone she wanted the call to be from. there was a pit of despair growing larger in her stomach, a bubble of fear taking up all the space in her lungs as her finger hovered over the voicemail button.

no one needed her that bad to call her so many times. if her patients need her, they knew to text her, or if they really needed to call them, there was no way they'd call seven times, right? she'd have to check her voicemail, just in case.

she only needed one second before she hit the end call button. 

the hum of an old broken fridge in the background, a kitchen chair he always brooded at, keeping her from ever venturing out of her room, the broken clearing of a man’s throat. it wasn't a patient. it was him.

she wanted to throw up.

she wanted to go back to sleep.

she wanted to give this day another try. to wake up, have a phone clear of any notifications, and to have a good day.

but she couldn’t.

it was all or nothing.

close her eyes and stay in bed or get up and do her job.

she couldn’t let other people define her days like this. she couldn’t let the single, most vague mention of her mother let her ruin the rest of her day, but how could she do that? it was all or nothing.

the sound of the door to her apartment closing brought her back to her senses.

akaashi had just left for the day, and she was the last one left in their place.

everyone else was out living their life, she needed to be out there too. she should be out there. she had a job to do. people to help, no matter if she needed help or not. what day was it even?

she squints at her phone, the screen reading 7:30 a.m. she'd skimmed over the clock initially, and she almost wished she stayed ignorant. she should’ve been at her office by now. if she was lucky she'd still get to her office before her first appointment and if she remembered correctly, her 8 a.m. had needed to reschedule their meeting today for a different time.

the final push that got her out of bed was the thought that she’d see him today. she wanted to see sakusa. she could try her hardest to have a good day if it meant getting to see him.

and it all starts with one foot out of bed.

when sakusa walks through the door, she looks more relieved to see him than he does to see her and he knows something is wrong. but she doesn't bring attention to the fact and he worries he might be overthinking it. maybe she’s just getting more comfortable with him, and is happy to see him. but, at the same time, everything about her posture says otherwise. her shoulders are too stiff and her knee is bouncing too much. normally, it's posed and whose foot hits the floor with anxious repetitiveness.

she was the grounding, calming force he tended to rely on but today it seemed that the roles had switched.

it wasn’t a bad thing, she had never been good at putting herself first, and he was sure that hadn’t changed even now.

“how was your week? i know we talked about a game you were worried about last week. did it go well? everything with your game and your coach?” she asks when he sits down. she gives him a casual smile but averts her eyes when he starts searching her face, trying to tell what's wrong. she’s not sure why he’s looking at her like that, as if he cares, but a small part of her is falling apart under his gaze. it’s the same part of her that’s loved him since the day they met. it’s the part of her that when they meet eyes, she feels a common burn between them.

“are you okay?” he asks, and she blinks, feeling like she's one word from falling apart.

“yeah, i’m fine!” she responds, maybe too cheery to appear normal. her other appointments today went smoothly enough, and she feel distracted from her own problems but also worse at the same time, considering she's spent the day listening to others' issues instead. she resists placing her computer on her lap, knowing she needs to bare his gaze straight on in order to get him off her back.

she can feel the weight of his eyes upon her, but he doesn’t keep pushing. she focuses completely on him, telling herself over and over not to let her guard down. it feels a little wrong of her to use the sensitive information her patients trust her with as a distraction from her own thoughts, but when it comes to sakusa, she think it has less to do with what he’s saying and more with the fact that he’s simply here in this room with her.

she wants to stand up, cross the room, sit on the couch with him, lean gently on his shoulder, not throwing her entire weight onto him, but just being in the slightest bit of contact with him.

would he let her touch him like that? or would he be disgusted? avoidant of her touch? weary of it? he had let her put her hand on his chest last time, but had that just been a special moment? maybe she had worsened since then, maybe he could see right through to her depressive state of mind and found it repulsive.

she had to close her eyes for a second and take a deep breath. she was getting too ahead of herself, allowing her head to demonize the man in front of her and making him seem like something he wasn’t. she hoped he didn’t hate her as much as she thought he did. they were in such a strange place right now, seeming to float between the relations of acquaintances, client and consultant, friends, and maybe something a little more.

“[y/n].”

the sound of her name made her eyes snap open, “yes? i’m so sorry, i promise i’m listening.” she had tried her best to provide some amount of advice and reiteration when she could, but he did most of the talking while she nodded along. she was paying attention but at the same time certainly letting her mind wander ever so often. she felt like a piece-of-shit-failure, sitting there across from him; silent, waiting for him to continue. she had no idea what he had just said before her name, obviously, so she couldn’t even try to pretend like she’d heard anything. she was a failure– it was as simple as that. nothing less, nothing more. a feeling of guilt and shame settled in her gut, making her feel nauseous on top of how heavy her head already felt.

“i didn’t say anything,” he replies and the negative, nauseating feeling inside of her spreads across her entire body, leaving her aching. it physically hurts, how heavy her mind feels. she shouldn’t have come to work today. she should have rescheduled appointments rather than being selfish. maybe she should have never started this career to begin with. “i just said i think it’s almost been an hour.”

she glances at the clock on her wall, and he’s right. their time is up, and for some reason that feels like the end of the world to her. “you’re completely right. i’m sorry, sakusa. i hope you still got something out of today’s session even though I was a little out of it. sorry about that, again– i promise i care and that i was trying to listen as best as i could…” she trails off, feeling like her excuse is meaningless. she should’ve left it at her apology. she couldn’t even say that she was listening as best as she could, only that she tried. and her trying wasn’t good enough. anything less than perfect felt wrong to her; like the worst possible outcome. if she wasn’t always putting her all into her work, how could she hope to help people? as always, she could only ever give people all or nothing. and in her field, she was responsible for making their mental and physical states better, she shouldn’t be so emotional at a time like this it was pathetic and wrong–

they’re standing at her door, and she’s holding it open for him as always. she’d spaced out again, waiting for him to leave so that she could close and lock the door and spend an hour on the floor crying before figuring out how to get home on her own without breaking down in public. but he hadn't left yet. he was stopped in front of her, she realizes. he's staring down at her and now she’s looking back up at him. some of his curls are falling in front of his eyes, and she wants to brush them away.

really, she wants to be in his arms. maybe that would make everything feel better.

but she doesn’t feel like she has the right to hug him anymore. their talk over text a few nights ago feels so far away, like who she was only a few nights ago is a completely different person from who she is now. she doesn’t know who she is, she just feels like a soulless body. she wishes she could go back in time, so many years ago when things weren’t much easier, but at least she still had him. if she could go back in time, she never would have left him. she wishes she could tear her heart out, put up with her father, and never have let him ruin her entire life.

“do you need anything?” he asks softly because he’s not sure how else to word it. what he wants to say, the four simple words “i care about you” get lodged in his throat because, for some reason, it's easier for him to confess almost his entire heart to her behind a screen. so he settles for this question instead, leaving it open, for however she wants to interpret and respond to it.

“no,” she lies. she knows she can ask for help, but she can’t, she can't let herself. “i’m okay, thank you. i’m sure you have other things to do today. don’t let me hold you up.” she’s staring at his jacket now, waiting to watch it start to move, but it doesn't. he doesn’t even move an inch after her answer.

“i don’t have anything else going on today. i want to be there for you.” his voice sounds like everything she could ever wish for. he sounds like the person she spent nights crying to whatever heavenly body resided above, asking them to give her someone, anyone to come into her life and love her.

“you’re my last patient for the day,” she finds herself saying. she never was able to resist him much, “i have to close up, but if you want to go somewhere afterwards, you can wait for me, but only if you want to.”

“i’ll wait,” he agrees. “i’ll wait for you. i want to.”

prev. | m.list | next

extras <3

hi! :3

this chapter was started all the way back in September wow!!!

the tea gossipers have each other's locations

so you best believe they're about to check y/n's location and see she's going out somewhere after work

and together, the three men will piece together what's going on

that's for next chapter

or the chapter after that

next chapter soon!!!

two chapters left <3

taglist: @eggyrocks @wyrcan @guitarstringed-scars @strawberryuri @violetesensou @kakeru-eem @glmge @heytheredemonsss @mollyrolls @bemebiu @daszy @snail-squasher @0moonii @thiisisntlovely @todorokiskitten @rory-cakes @iiwaijime @iatethemochi @yuminako @savemebrazilhinata @kismyscars @bokutoko @nobodybutnnoorr @wolffmaiden @daisy-room @softpia @lees-chaotic-brain @v3nusplanetofluv @crispchocolates @phoenix-eclipses @hhoneyhan @encrypta @rockleeisbaeeee @cr4yolaas @zombriesworld @localgaytrainwreck @moucheslove @hibernatinghamster @notverymarley @certaindreampost  @akaakeis @ciderscape @lucien-luna @strawbrinkofdeath @wave2mia @samuel1004 @01trickster10 @dazqa @cosmiicdust @chemiru (form to be added to taglist! <3)

[all-pacas]

a post about ages that quickly got out of hand

so in house's head 13 says she wasn't born in when a movie came out in 1980, meaning she isn't older than 28 years old. in reality, olivia wilde was 24 at the time, but that's way too young for thirteen: we don't have a Chase Problem, where 13 has had a million subspecialties and needs to be older to account for them, but most people don't actually finish med school until they're 28.

if we assume 13 is doing the normal fellowship thing — that this is her first post after finishing her residency — then she could be 28. that would put her as the same age as kutner (who actually has the opposite problem: kal penn is actually a few years older, but kutner is explicitly 28 when he dies), which kind of fits nicely.

foreman, cameron, park, adams, and taub's ages are never stated. in foreman and taub's cases, we can probably assume they're the same ages as their actors; probably the same for park. adams and cameron, i think, both get the chase/thirteen treatment of being quietly aged up a few years:

omar epps was born in 1973, making foreman 31 in s1, which seems about right for finishing his neurologist training.

chase says he's 30 in s2, making him 29 in s1 (born 1975). (house says he's 26 in s1, which was jesse spencer's age, but the show seems to have realized its mistake, thus the pointed "i am 30" line.)

cameron has a line where she tells a patient the others on the team are older than her. however, jennifer morrison was born in 1979, making her 25 in s1, which is again too young. let's say cameron is 28 in s1, born in 1976. EDIT: Anon pointed out given her training, she really can't be younger than 30 in S1.

for 13 and kutner to be 28 in s4, they both would have been born in 1980/1981.

peter jacobson, and probably taub, was born in 1965, making him 42 in s4.

masters is said to be 29, despite her prodigy status (mostly because she got a few degrees before starting med school).

charlyne li was 26 when they were cast as park. in this case, park doesn't need to be aged up: she's explicitly said to still be a resident when house gets her, so her age works.

adams, however, suffers from extreme Chase Problems: she was 27 when cast, but adams has not only finished medical school and all her training, but also has been working in the prison system for a while. she has to at least be thirty, realistically. i'd honestly put her as a couple years older.

for contrast, wilson starts s1 at 38 years old, cuddy at a wildly implausible but stated 36, and house at 45.

so, just for fun and because this post is rotting my brain, if you lined everyone up in 2004, sometime during the pilot:

HOUSE: 45 WILSON: 38 TAUB: 38 CUDDY: 36 FOREMAN: 31 CHASE: 29 CAMERON: 28 30 KUTNER: 24 THIRTEEN: 24 ADAMS: 22 MASTERS: 22 PARK: 18

[lacunammmm]

Hate how the manga kept trying to seem like it was criticizing sacrificing yourself/pushing yourself too hard as a heroic act wasn’t actually a good thing but it constantly went back to the opposite.

Aizawa and Nighteye criticizing Midoriya about rushing in without a plan? Not a problem, he’s a true hero when he saved Eri!

Pushing limits/getting out of your comfort zone is a good thing to help grow, but the manga never found a healthy balance of that theme.

Nothing encapsulates the phenomenon you described more than Iron Might. The reason Iron Might was bad, besides him absorbing the hero kid's potential fights/contributions vs AFO, the implausibility of this tech and All Might getting access to it in time, and the fact that he kept it a secret, is because it tramples all over All Might's arc for the sake of a "cool" fight We have a whole series teaching us that All Might's brand of self sacrificing heroics is bad and these actions destroy your life and the lives of the people around you. Toshinori has what, three close friends when we meet him? Nezu, Recovery Girl, and Naomasa. He hasn't spoken to Torino or Night Eye in years. Night Eye left him explicitly because of his desire to keep being All Might even if it killed him. He's forgone any sort of close relationships. He doesn't have any family. Everything has been dedicated to being the hero that society needs to the cost of his life. He's fully willing to die to ensure other people are okay. His mentality changes when he meets Izuku because he wants to live to raise him right. Great! So, he loses his powers and then he has to navigate being a mentor and teacher for the next generation. So far, so good. He sees with Deku what a lone gun mentality does. The story even has Bakugo blame all of Izuku's mental problems on All Might's teachings and behavior. Perfect. We've fully established this is bad. And then we learn that, no, actually, he had a super suit designed months ago that would let him 1 vs 1 the quirk devil and he was keeping it a complete secret from everyone. Just so he could don some ironman armor and have one last hoorah as a hero. He doesn't join Endeavor or Deku in their respective battles. No, the guy keeps this to himself so he can pull it out at the most dramatic moment possible. He let himself be swayed by Stain, a notable crazy man and All Might zealot fanboy that no, actually, All Might was perfect and he totally had the right idea about things. I wish this series would allow characters to suffer for their mistakes and arrogance. Do you know what should have happened, if we're going to allow the insanity of a super suit that can fight high level opponents like this? AFO sees Iron Might, then activates his Radio Waves quirk. You know, the quirk that has the effect of releasing an EMP wave if the user desires it? The same one he and Tomura used to bust out of Tartarus? All Might's super suit becomes an immobile metal coffin and he needs to be rescued. He actively put more people in danger because of a selfish decision he made so he could relive his hero days.

Instead of All Might stealing the spotlight from Class A, all of these students have to scramble to get hits in on AFO to save HIM! Because the story isn't going to allow a guy to go against its themes in a selfish, suicidal gambit that All Might should have grown past by now...and get away with it! It's absolutely ridiculous that a story allegedly about the next generation turned into two old men fighting. But this is an issue with MHA: it wants to have its cake and eat it too. Self sacrifice is bad, except when it works out and it's cool.

[sympathytea]

local man has incorrect opinions on the newest episode of pvpciv Spoilers for PVP Civilization: The Shields below.

Sure a lot of new information! Especially about the nature of the shields. Absolutely eating this up right now.

Shields seem to be the guardians of this entire world, and have actual means of self defense. I think I was...mostly? correct about them in the sense that they had an underground system to get to other civilizations quickly. Didn't expect them to have a literal shield bash but hey that works for me, anything to make these goobers last more than 2 seconds in a fight. The axes farming the shields makes perfect sense, since shields can't really fight efficiently against an axe user, even a wooden one (although that diamond shield. really needs to be humbled. thank you clownpierce.) Speaking of Clownpierce... Its funny, Tabi brings up that the amount of durability he uses on his diamond axe doesn't add up. My current running theory is that Clown is like. some sort of divine being? Maybe the current PVP God, just disguising as a mortal? It would explain how he gets around so efficiently, especially when he jumps from being in the wish room, to axe civilization, then to the very bottom of sword civilization. Even for this series with all its time jumps, its...very odd. Very implausible even if I suspend my disbelief a little bit. I'm watching him, is all I'm saying. He is working with Zam, but I don't think this pairing is going to last very long especially since Zam is a known backstabber, in and out of this universe. I expect Clown to take the eternal trident for himself, or Zam attempts to ambush Clown (To minimal success because. Clownpierce.)

I also don't believe Tabi knows that these two are working together. They aren't in any scenes with Zam as a full group, so this information is being hidden from her. Especially when you note that Clown told her to leave. Zam held up in that fight better than I expected, I was fully expecting him to either fall back or surrender begrudgingly. After all he's fighting a diamond axe in no armor and. using a fork to fight. A very fancy fork but unless that eternal trident naturally gives the user some resistance...hm.

Getting ahead of myself. Lets talk about Parrot and Seawatt here. We don't have much to go off of, especially this early. But I notice that tree motif is back again with Toph this time...

Its interesting to bring this back, especially with Toph. I'm not sure why specifically trees are a motif for bows, considering their civilization lacks that foliage. Maybe it'll come up later. Seawatt and Parrot have history, but its too early to say how they relate to each other? Either way, it seems negative. Seawatt doesn't appear in this episode, but is clearly haunting Parrot enough that he asks about him. Also Parrot breaks his "No killing" rule again, and I assume just murdered Toph off-screen. Hope he had that respawn power? The wish room is curious to me, explains why PrinceZam wants the eternal weapons. I assume his wish is to become the new god of PVP Civilization.

Derapchu is here!! Another lifesteal cameo..I assume he's gonna last longer, possibly helping Evbo retreive his lost friend. Tabi and Raymond (The Guard Friend) might be teaming up? Possibly to assist Evbo, since her resolve seems to be shaking. She's having an "Are we the baddies?" moment, for sure. Although I feel like if she witnessed...Evbo's crashout in the iron sword layer she might have second thoughts about betrayal. Who's to say, though.

Her reasoning for wanting to get the eternal weapons is...flawed. Sure she has good intentions in her mind, not wanting a repeat of a genocide from the sword civilization and thinking the only solution is full on extermination. She's fascinating to watch, that's for sure. Quickly she is becoming one of my favorites. The genocide is also interesting to think about. Especially when you consider Evbo. Are they just...born with that desire engraved into them? Is that why she thinks that fully killing them off is the solution to not repeating history? Is Evbo going to repeat history if he somehow manages to pull off retrieving the eternal weapons? ... Is that the plan the diamond swords have for him? It would make sense considering the inclusion of Wemmbu as a very likely traitor of the group, although its unclear if all of them have this plan for him, or its just Wemmbu.

Eugh. Scary. This episode was also surprisingly less Evbo-centric. Preferring focusing on individual character's motivations, and additional worldbuilding. I personally like this change quite a bit! It makes Evbo's (extremely flawed) point of view as something to start questioning, especially considering the sword's history. I'm keeping this in mind, I've had suspicions that he isn't as good as he makes himself out to be. And this is definitely starting to get put into question, along with his little "existential crisis" that he's having. He most likely will resolve that in a healthy and normal way. Definitely. I'm sure of it. I'm sure I'll have more thoughts later, but this is about as cohesive as I will get them right now. Until we meet again...

[butchsophiewalten]

I am aware that your blog is so big for this much information about twf and everything else – but I have found interesting information,, I don't know if you know about this though.

It's recorded by the QnA twitter feed for walten files but its taken from the walten files wiki,, so source might be reliable or fake in some way, who knows?

Regards, thank you for reaching out.

Any opinions on the nature of "Bon" ? If that was already answered, I would like to hear about it! :)

Im gonna go ahead and add the screenshots from your second ask to this post so they can all be in the same place:

If you want my direct reaction/opinion to some of these points, I can do that for you, under a cut since it'll get quite long:

A lot of these bullet points are ones I've talked about or mentioned on my blog before! Pretty much everything you've sent me here is something that I can personally vouch for hearing Martin or one of the other VAs say in a twitter space or livestream, in case you were worried about any of this being inaccurate information. I think the only one here I don't personally remember (and I might have just been absent for the space/stream since I haven't seen all of them) is the one about Jason Pooltrick, but it doesn't sound at all implausible.

It's funny because I often have criticisms about the way certain pieces of trivia end up being worded on the Fandom wiki. If I was bothered enough by it I could just edit it myself but I feel like there's inherently a bit of nuance lost when you're summarizing something so I feel like some of the more interesting implications in these points get lost in how people word them on the wiki. That's one of the reasons why I kinda stopped doing very basic bullet pointed twitter space summaries of my own and I switched over to directly transcribing a lot more of what was said in the space, since I think it gets information across more clearly. Doing that is also a lot more time consuming through which is honestly why I eventually stopped doing it haha.

I love this point especially in how it both contrasts and reinforces the idea that Bon doesn't really believe that he's doing anything wrong. Like one of the long points in one of the later screenshots, while he understands that what he does is 'Evil', he sees that the ends justify the means. Though in my mind I definitely think that Bon is ultimately acting selfishly and is aware that he is acting selfishly, I also think that he has really and truly convinced himself that he is also acting in the best interest of his victims. He has a plan for them that is greater than what they were before his intervention, and they just don't realize yet how much they will appreciate it. That kind of mindset. It's funny because it's quite different from Felix's self-flagellating mindset on first brush, but when you get down to it, I think the two characters think very similarly. They are both very selfish characters acting very self-interestedly but have done a very good job of convincing themselves otherwise.

I think Bon can definitely feel pain, at least within the blue rabbit Bon Animatronic he can. That's sort of the whole conceit behind post-extensive object possession. Not sure if he can feel pain as the White Spectre, though.

I've mentioned this one Q&A question so many times to so many people. It was Bravvy who said this, and she said it pretty offhandedly, so it maybe isn't necessarily word-of-god canon, but I find it so funny. Does he have like... a moral compass? Like for realsies? This is such a funny thing. I don't know what it means. Why is that where he draws the line

I actually don't personally remember this point but this is like. I have no way of knowing if whoever said this was serious at the time because sandwiches (and especially specifically the phrase "make me a sandwich") are like a twfcrew inside joke. where especially Martin just thinks its really funny to say and he also brings up sandwiches in response to character Q&A questions that he doesn't want to answer because he thinks its a funny way to fuck with people. No hate I just am not really sure that this answer was serious.

This to me is one of the most interesting things Martin has ever said in a twitter space, but the phrasing here on the wiki like, really fucks with it. I don't remember exactly but from what I do remember he said something more like "[On the topic of the identity of Shadow Man] It's not really about who he is, but rather what he represents. He really represents how the animatronics perceive a certain character." Which I think is a quite interesting and nuanced answer on the point of Shadow Man....