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This scene, so small, always brings me so much joy!!

Fucker shoos daozhang away. That ungrateful bastard. Probably was saved from the local totally not caused by xue yang zombie infestation more times than he can count.

Awww, daozhang is bummed out! He was holding out his hand, trusting the kindness of strangers. I love how Xue Yang is basically following him around here, one step behind, watching over him. 

And he was going away, too! Angry pout and all, but I doubt he’d be so compliant the first time something like this happened. Remember how he treated that cart in the extra flashback? He probably had much more outspoken reactions the first time he (or xxc) were shooed off like smelly street rats. I bet daozhang scolded him for it, and now he’s learned to be less hot-headed. 

But his “patience” lasts all about three seconds XD  MOtherfucker, you dare treat Xiao Xingchen like that?? He’s MY enemy! Only I get to be mean to him!

IT’S POTATO STABBIN’ TIME!

My lovely murder gremlin has learned some neat skills in silent threatening. Can’t be loud, not with daozhang within hearing range. 

And he calls him BY NAME! If at this point Xiao Xingchen doesn’t recognize him, his voice, his mannerisms, it’s all on him. Or he doesn’t WANT to recognize him because he’s found he’s so happy with this life…

Here. Have a potato. I stabbed it through, I’m a good hunter, I can provide food for our family, aren’t I good? (Xue Yang’s inner cat shining through) 

Give HIM the tatoes, motherfucker. 

Look at him, he’s so happy!! What a reliable husband you found, Xiao Xingchen. What a beautiful person. Always so helpful. 

Aw, yeah! Just another day of being Evil™ making my enemy the happiest man east of the Yangtze river.

#great scene analysis #xue yang #xiao xingchen

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you know what, fuck you *unkills your character*

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#every time

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If anyone wants to know why every tech company in the world right now is clamoring for AI like drowned rats scrabbling to board a ship, I decided to make a post to explain what's happening.

(Disclaimer to start: I'm a software engineer who's been employed full time since 2018. I am not a historian nor an overconfident Youtube essayist, so this post is my working knowledge of what I see around me and the logical bridges between pieces.)

Okay anyway. The explanation starts further back than what's going on now. I'm gonna start with the year 2000. The Dot Com Bubble just spectacularly burst. The model of "we get the users first, we learn how to profit off them later" went out in a no-money-having bang (remember this, it will be relevant later). A lot of money was lost. A lot of people ended up out of a job. A lot of startup companies went under. Investors left with a sour taste in their mouth and, in general, investment in the internet stayed pretty cooled for that decade. This was, in my opinion, very good for the internet as it was an era not suffocating under the grip of mega-corporation oligarchs and was, instead, filled with Club Penguin and I Can Haz Cheezburger websites.

Then around the 2010-2012 years, a few things happened. Interest rates got low, and then lower. Facebook got huge. The iPhone took off. And suddenly there was a huge new potential market of internet users and phone-havers, and the cheap money was available to start backing new tech startup companies trying to hop on this opportunity. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon either started in this time, or hit their ramp-up in these years by shifting focus to the internet and apps.

Now, every start-up tech company dreaming of being the next big thing has one thing in common: they need to start off by getting themselves massively in debt. Because before you can turn a profit you need to first spend money on employees and spend money on equipment and spend money on data centers and spend money on advertising and spend money on scale and and and

But also, everyone wants to be on the ship for The Next Big Thing that takes off to the moon.

So there is a mutual interest between new tech companies, and venture capitalists who are willing to invest $$$ into said new tech companies. Because if the venture capitalists can identify a prize pig and get in early, that money could come back to them 100-fold or 1,000-fold. In fact it hardly matters if they invest in 10 or 20 total bust projects along the way to find that unicorn.

But also, becoming profitable takes time. And that might mean being in debt for a long long time before that rocket ship takes off to make everyone onboard a gazzilionaire.

But luckily, for tech startup bros and venture capitalists, being in debt in the 2010's was cheap, and it only got cheaper between 2010 and 2020. If people could secure loans for ~3% or 4% annual interest, well then a $100,000 loan only really costs $3,000 of interest a year to keep afloat. And if inflation is higher than that or at least similar, you're still beating the system.

So from 2010 through early 2022, times were good for tech companies. Startups could take off with massive growth, showing massive potential for something, and venture capitalists would throw infinite money at them in the hopes of pegging just one winner who will take off. And supporting the struggling investments or the long-haulers remained pretty cheap to keep funding.

You hear constantly about "Such and such app has 10-bazillion users gained over the last 10 years and has never once been profitable", yet the thing keeps chugging along because the investors backing it aren't stressed about the immediate future, and are still banking on that "eventually" when it learns how to really monetize its users and turn that profit.

The pandemic in 2020 took a magnifying-glass-in-the-sun effect to this, as EVERYTHING was forcibly turned online which pumped a ton of money and workers into tech investment. Simultaneously, money got really REALLY cheap, bottoming out with historic lows for interest rates.

Then the tide changed with the massive inflation that struck late 2021. Because this all-gas no-brakes state of things was also contributing to off-the-rails inflation (along with your standard-fare greedflation and price gouging, given the extremely convenient excuses of pandemic hardships and supply chain issues). The federal reserve whipped out interest rate hikes to try to curb this huge inflation, which is like a fire extinguisher dousing and suffocating your really-cool, actively-on-fire party where everyone else is burning but you're in the pool. And then they did this more, and then more. And the financial climate followed suit. And suddenly money was not cheap anymore, and new loans became expensive, because loans that used to compound at 2% a year are now compounding at 7 or 8% which, in the language of compounding, is a HUGE difference. A $100,000 loan at a 2% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, accrues to $121,899. A $100,000 loan at an 8% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, more than doubles to $215,892.

Now it is scary and risky to throw money at "could eventually be profitable" tech companies. Now investors are watching companies burn through their current funding and, when the companies come back asking for more, investors are tightening their coin purses instead. The bill is coming due. The free money is drying up and companies are under compounding pressure to produce a profit for their waiting investors who are now done waiting.

You get enshittification. You get quality going down and price going up. You get "now that you're a captive audience here, we're forcing ads or we're forcing subscriptions on you." Don't get me wrong, the plan was ALWAYS to monetize the users. It's just that it's come earlier than expected, with way more feet-to-the-fire than these companies were expecting. ESPECIALLY with Wall Street as the other factor in funding (public) companies, where Wall Street exhibits roughly the same temperament as a baby screaming crying upset that it's soiled its own diaper (maybe that's too mean a comparison to babies), and now companies are being put through the wringer for anything LESS than infinite growth that Wall Street demands of them.

Internal to the tech industry, you get MASSIVE wide-spread layoffs. You get an industry that used to be easy to land multiple job offers shriveling up and leaving recent graduates in a desperately awful situation where no company is hiring and the market is flooded with laid-off workers trying to get back on their feet.

Because those coin-purse-clutching investors DO love virtue-signaling efforts from companies that say "See! We're not being frivolous with your money! We only spend on the essentials." And this is true even for MASSIVE, PROFITABLE companies, because those companies' value is based on the Rich Person Feeling Graph (their stock) rather than the literal profit money. A company making a genuine gazillion dollars a year still tears through layoffs and freezes hiring and removes the free batteries from the printer room (totally not speaking from experience, surely) because the investors LOVE when you cut costs and take away employee perks. The "beer on tap, ping pong table in the common area" era of tech is drying up. And we're still unionless.

Never mind that last part.

And then in early 2023, AI (more specifically, Chat-GPT which is OpenAI's Large Language Model creation) tears its way into the tech scene with a meteor's amount of momentum. Here's Microsoft's prize pig, which it invested heavily in and is galivanting around the pig-show with, to the desperate jealousy and rapture of every other tech company and investor wishing it had that pig. And for the first time since the interest rate hikes, investors have dollar signs in their eyes, both venture capital and Wall Street alike. They're willing to restart the hose of money (even with the new risk) because this feels big enough for them to take the risk.

Now all these companies, who were in varying stages of sweating as their bill came due, or wringing their hands as their stock prices tanked, see a single glorious gold-plated rocket up out of here, the likes of which haven't been seen since the free money days. It's their ticket to buy time, and buy investors, and say "see THIS is what will wring money forth, finally, we promise, just let us show you."

To be clear, AI is NOT profitable yet. It's a money-sink. Perhaps a money-black-hole. But everyone in the space is so wowed by it that there is a wide-spread and powerful conviction that it will become profitable and earn its keep. (Let's be real, half of that profit "potential" is the promise of automating away jobs of pesky employees who peskily cost money.) It's a tech-space industrial revolution that will automate away skilled jobs, and getting in on the ground floor is the absolute best thing you can do to get your pie slice's worth.

It's the thing that will win investors back. It's the thing that will get the investment money coming in again (or, get it second-hand if the company can be the PROVIDER of something needed for AI, which other companies with venture-back will pay handsomely for). It's the thing companies are terrified of missing out on, lest it leave them utterly irrelevant in a future where not having AI-integration is like not having a mobile phone app for your company or not having a website.

So I guess to reiterate on my earlier point:

Drowned rats. Swimming to the one ship in sight.

[kasasagi-eye]

“In my experience, what every true artist wants, really wants, is to be paid.”

— Terry Pratchett  -  “Soul Music” (via grimfairytales)

#lol #also #T_T

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Every time i purchase a moderately expensive item the Karl Marx on my shoulder is like "For shame... you purchase yet another pair of jeans when you have 5 already at home, you despicable commodity fetishist? In my time, a man with five outfits would consider himself blessed beyond measure, and yet you want for more, while there are children starving in the world??" to which the second Karl Marx on my other shoulder says "Objection! Those 5 pairs of jeans all wildly uncomfortable or have holes in the ass, due to the decline of clothing quality driven by the fast fashion industry, unfortunately making this purchase a necessity... Plus, by purchasing a slightly more expensive pair of jeans from an independent brand, seeking quality over 'brand recognition', they are deliberately trying to avoid engaging in conspicuous consumption!" to which the third Karl Marx clinging to my back like that beetle from Doctor Who says "Remember, my friend; the less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt — your capital. Buy the jeans," to which I say "I don't know if any of you have actually read Karl Marx"

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Reblog and put your rare pair in the tags/comments! I want to see the depths people will go to create, for the most random two characters in the most obscure media.

#suyu #mei changsu/xiao jinghuan #nif #currently 72 works in this ship tag #out of these I wrote 2 and 3 were written as gifts for me ^^

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Xue Yang winds up at Song Lan's monastery shortly post finger crushing!

oooh this is an interesting one! I am sort of torn between this happening at a point where it's on purpose and xue yang is still close enough post-crushening to have some belief that somebody (in this case, a temple full of daoshi) will help him or if I want it to be long enough after that he's turned pretty well bitter on the idea of help from other people being a thing that exists, at least for him.

and since I can't make up my mind about it I'll have it "teetering on the edge between the two, maybe slanting a little toward the latter but desperate enough to try seeking out help from these people anyway"

(or it could be he ends up there because somebody brings him there, but I think I'm setting that one aside for this particular ask.)

song lan gets to experience the traumatic experience of proximity to a horrifying aftermath of a very nasty crush injury at a young age! this is probably formative - it's interesting to me thinking about the effects this might/could have on song lan, actually - while I don't think he's ever as rosy-viewed of the wider world as xiao xingchen is, I think being up-close witness to xue yang's specific story and its aftermath would render him a little more cynical than he is in canon.

I definitely like the idea of song lan growing up protective of his shidi as a result of, again, personally witnessing the gruesome aftermath of xue yang's trauma. xue yang enjoys this but also is merciless about needling song lan in general, because it's fun, but also that is his uptight shixiong and nobody else gets to mess with him.

I think being in a nurturing and protective environment that provides him with guard rails, expectations, and a life where his utility/livelihood isn't tied to violence goes a long way toward at least tempering xue yang's worst impulses. the impulses will still be there but having fewer reasons to act on them/forming better habits because of the expectations in place and the rewards of abiding by those expectations would make a substantial difference in the way xue yang moves through the world. it changes the calculus on how he sees other people/what he expects from them - even if the betrayal/hatred of chang ci'an is still very much there, it's tempered by the fact that he found someone to look after him.

when song lan decides to leave baixue xue yang goes with him, and please imagine the two of them as the weirdest pair of wandering cultivators solving peoples' problems that most people have or will ever meet.

when song lan encounters xiao xingchen they are still going to connect with each other on a profound level and xue yang is not going to be happy about it. very jealous, very possessive, immediately decides that xiao xingchen is stupid and annoying and not to be trusted.

send me a potential AU and I’ll tell you five fun facts that would happen in a story

#xue yang #song lan #headcanons #in love with this one

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I really think Rasputin lucked out, in that being remembered by history as some species of giant unkillable sex wizard is something most of us can only fruitlessly aspire to.

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critically jacking off to this problematic fic in a scholarly manner

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As a general rule, if you're having food cravings, you should probably pay attention to that, because it's usually a sign that your body needs something. Like, if you've just finished a workout and are suddenly desperately craving fries? Maybe you're low on salt, you did just sweat a whole bunch. Period cravings for junk food? Your body's under some stress and working hard, you need energy, and foods with a lot of fat and/or sugar are an easy way to get that.

Back in the early 1900's when exploring Antarctica was all the rage, y'know what was a major part of everyones daily rations? Butter. Just butter. The men out on the sledging teams would have cravings to eat entire sticks of butter with nothing else, so that was included in their rations. And that happened because under those extreme circumstances, their bodies desperately needed as many calories as possible, so their diet consisted mainly of butter, chocolate, and animal fat. Eating entire sticks of butter was the healthiest possible diet for them.

That's an extreme example of course, but my point is, there's no such thing as inherently Good or Bad food. Anything that's edible can be healthy under the right circumstances, just like anything can be an unhealthy choice under the wrong circumstances. Your body knows what it needs. Listen to it. Unless you're actively going through a serious medical situation, you do not need a tightly restricted diet. Diet culture is a scam, body fat is natural and healthy, food is good for you, and calories are the fuel your body needs to power its continued survival.

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Levels of understanding other slavic languages

oh we also have X and it means the same!

that looks like X but misspelled

that's just the archaic variant of X

this sounds a lot like Y from another slavic language I know which means X in mine so this almost 100% also means X

this word is completely different but I can kinda tell the meaning from the morphology

what

okay right now I'm gonna have to dissect the entirety of this language's history to figure out how the FUCK did y'all get to the point of calling X that and not something more normal

I wanted to ask for X and accidentally called someone a whore

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bela lugosi's dead and me also i feel not so good