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fursasaida · 8 months

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Hi! Just wanted to ask. How can I give my students assignments that are chat-gpt proof? Or that they won't just copy the answer without at least doing some editing?

Hi! So, I don't think anything is ChatGPT-proof. You fundamentally cannot stop people from using it to take a shortcut. You can't even stop them from copying the answer without editing it. However, I think you can work with this reality. So, you can do three things:

Don't be a cop about it.

If you make your objective "stop the children from using the thing to cheat," you are focusing on the wrong thing. You will be constantly scrutinizing every submission with suspicion, you will be accusing people of cheating--and some of them will not have cheated, and they will remember this forever--and you will be aiming at enforcement (which is trying to hold back the sea) instead of on inviting and supporting learning whenever and wherever possible. (I'll come back to this under item 2.)

Regarding why enforcement is holding back the sea: It is fundamentally rational for them to do this. We, who "love learning" (i.e. are good at what our academic system sees as learning, for various reasons have built our lives around that, happen to enjoy these activities), see everything they might cheat themselves of by doing it, because we know what we got out of doing this type of work. Many students, however--especially at the kind of school I teach at--are there to get the piece of paper that might, if they're lucky, allow them access to a relatively livable and stable income. The things that are wrong with this fact are structural and nothing to do with students' failings as people, or (tfuh) laziness, or whatever. We cannot make this not true (we can certainly try to push against it in certain ways, but that only goes so far). More pragmatically, chatgpt and similar are going to keep getting better, and detecting them is going to get harder, and your relationships with your students will be further and further damaged as you are forced to hound them more, suspect them more, falsely accuse more people, while also looking like an idiot because plenty of them will get away with it. A productive classroom requires trust. The trust goes both ways. Being a cop about this will destroy it in both directions.

So the first thing you have to do is really, truly accept that some of them are going to use it and you are not always going to know when they do. And when I say accept this, I mean you actually need to be ok with it. I find it helps to remember that the fact that a bot can produce writing to a standard that makes teachers worry means we have been teaching people to be shitty writers. I don't know that so much is lost if we devalue the 5-paragraph SAT essay and its brethren.

So the reason my policy is to say it's ok to use chatgpt or similar as long as you tell me so and give me some thinking about what you got from using it is that a) I am dropping the charade that we don't all know what's going on and thereby making it (pedagogical term) chill; b) I am modeling/suggesting that if you use it, it's a good idea to be critical about what it tells you (which I desperately want everyone to know in general, not just my students in a classroom); c) I am providing an invitation to learn from using chatgpt, rather than avoid learning by using it. Plenty of them won't take me up on that. That's fine (see item 3 below).

So ok, we have at least established the goal of coming at it from acceptance. Then what do you do at that point?

Think about what is unique to your class and your students and build assignments around that.

Assignments, of course, don't have to be simply "what did Author mean by Term" or "list the significant thingies." A prof I used to TA under gave students the option of interviewing a family member or friend about their experiences with public housing in the week we taught public housing. Someone I know who teaches a college biology class has an illustration-based assignment to draw in the artsier students who are in her class against their will. I used to have an extra-credit question that asked them to pick anything in the city that they thought might be some kind of clue about the past in that place, do some research about it, and tell me what they found out and how. (And that's how I learned how Canal St. got its name! Learning something you didn't know from a student's work is one of the greatest feelings there is.) One prompt I intend to use in this class will be something to the effect of, "Do you own anything--a t-shirt, a mug, a phone case--that has the outline of your city, state, or country on it? Why? How did you get it, and what does having this item with this symbol on it mean to you? Whether you personally have one or not, why do you think so many people own items like this?" (This is for political geography week, if anyone's wondering.)

These are all things that target students' personal interests and capabilities, the environments they live in, and their relationships within their communities. Chatgpt can fake that stuff, but not very well. My advisor intends to use prompts that refer directly to things he said in class or conversations that were had in class, rather than to a given reading, in hopes that that will also make it harder for chatgpt to fake well because it won't have the context. The more your class is designed around the specific institution you teach at and student body you serve, the easier that is to do. (Obviously, how possible that is is going to vary based on what you're teaching. When I taught Urban Studies using the city we all lived in as the example all through the semester, it was so easy to make everything very tailored to the students I had in that class that semester. That's not the same--or it doesn't work the same way--if you're teaching Shakespeare. But I know someone who performs monologues from the plays in class and has his students direct him and give him notes as a way of drawing them into the speech and its niceties of meaning. Chatgpt is never going to know what stage directions were given in that room. There are possibilities.) This is all, I guess, a long way of saying that you'll have a better time constructing assignments chatgpt will be bad at if you view your class as a particular situation, occurring only once (these people, this year), which is a situation that has the purpose of encouraging thought--rather than as an information-transfer mechanism. Of course information transfer happens, but that is not what I and my students are doing together here.

Now, they absolutely can plug this type of prompt into chatgpt. I've tried it myself. I asked it to give me a personal essay about the political geography prompt and a critical personal essay about the same thing. (I recommend doing this with your own prospective assignments! See what they'd get and whether it's something you'd grade highly. If it is, then change either the goal of the assignment or at least the prompt.) Both of them were decent if you are grading the miserable 5-paragraph essay. Both of them were garbage if you are looking for evidence of a person turning their attention for the first time to something they have taken for granted all their lives. Chatgpt has neither personality nor experiences, so it makes incredibly vague, general statements in the first person that are dull as dishwater and simply do not engage with what the prompt is really asking for. I already graded on "tell me what you think of this/how this relates to your life" in addition to "did you understand the reading," because what I care about is whether they're thinking. So students absolutely can and will plug that prompt into chatgpt and simply c/p the output. They just won't get high marks for it.

If they're fine with not getting high marks, then okay. For a lot of them this is an elective they're taking essentially at random to get that piece of paper; I'm not gonna knock the hustle, and (see item 1) I couldn't stop them if I wanted to. What I can do is try to make class time engaging, build relationships with them that make them feel good about telling me their thoughts, and present them with a variety of assignments that create opportunities for different strengths, points of interest, and ways into the material, in hopes of hooking as many different people in as many different ways as I can.

This brings me back to what I said about inviting learning. Because I have never yet in my life taught a course that was for people majoring in the subject, I long ago accepted that I cannot get everyone to engage with every concept, subject, or idea (or even most of them). All I can do is invite them to get interested in the thing at hand in every class, in every assignment, in every choice of reading, in every question I ask them. How frequently each person accepts these invitations (and which ones) is going to vary hugely. But I also accept that people often need to be invited more than once, and even if they don't want to go through the door I'm holding open for them right now, the fact that they were invited this time might make it more likely for them to go through it the next time it comes up, or the time after that. I'll never know what will come of all of these invitations, and that's great, actually. I don't want to make them care about everything I care about, or know everything I know. All I want is to offer them new ways to be curious.

Therefore: if they use chatgpt to refuse an invitation this week, fine. That would probably have happened anyway in a lot of cases even without chatgpt. But, just as before, I can snag some of those people's attention on one part of this module in class tomorrow. Some of them I'll get next time with a different type of assignment. Some of them I'll hook for a moment with a joke. I don't take the times that doesn't happen as failures. But the times that it does are all wins that are not diminished by the times it doesn't.

Actually try to think of ways to use chatgpt to promote learning.

I DREAM of the day I'm teaching something where it makes sense to have students edit an AI-written text. Editing is an incredible way to get better at writing. I could generate one in class and we could do it all together. I could give them a prompt, ask them to feed it into chatgpt, and ask them to turn in both what they got and some notes on how they think it could be better. I could give them a pretty traditional "In Text, Author says Thing. What did Author mean by that?" prompt, have them get an answer from chatgpt, and then ask them to fact-check it. Etc. All of these get them thinking about written communication and, incidentally, demonstrate the tool's limitations.

I'm sure there are and will be tons of much more creative ideas for how to incorporate chatgpt rather than fight it. (Once upon a time, the idea of letting students use calculators in math class was also scandalous to many teachers.) I have some geography-specific ideas for how to use image generation as well. When it comes specifically to teaching, I think it's a waste of time for us to be handwringing instead of applying ourselves to this question. I am well aware of the political and ethical problems with chatgpt, and that's something to discuss with, probably, more advanced students in a seminar setting. But we won't (per item 1) get very far simply insisting that Thing Bad and Thing Stupid. So how do we use it to invite learning? That's the question I'm interested in.

Finally, because tangential to your question: I think there's nothing wrong with bringing back more in-class writing and even oral exams (along with take-home assignments that appeal to strengths and interests other than expository writing as mentioned above). These assessments play to different strengths than written take-homes. For some students, that means they'll be harder or scarier; by the same token, for other students they'll be easier and more confidence-building. (Plus, "being able to think on your feet" is also a very good ~real-world skill~ to teach.) In the spirit of trying to offer as many ways in as possible, I think that kind of diversification in assignments is a perfectly good idea.

#teaching #chatgpt #posting this on my first teaching day of the semester!#this is probably a lot longer than what you asked for but it is the answer i know how to give. hope something in it helps!

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drdemonprince · 14 days

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don’t know if this is relevant to your ask box, but I thought you might find it interesting.

I’m a 20 yr old trans man who’s just started an ongoing thing with a new Dom, who is over twice my age. I’m currently finishing up my second year at uni, and he’s, you guessed it, also the, uh…. academic sort.

He’s a busy guy so obviously we can only meet up every once and a while, but we text almost every day. From the beginning he was always curious about my school endeavours, but recently it’s become more of a thing.

He won’t let us meet until certain assignments are done. He’s flexible and understanding, like any good dom, but holy shit this man had me at a cafe for ten hours on 40mg of vyvanse writing my final essay like my life depended on it. I didn’t even know who I was, motivated by the pure need to please and, quite frankly, desperate desire to be absolutely taken and used. This man has “cured” my ADHD (not really, but damn well is he fucking helping it).

I think the point I’m getting at here it that I can’t believe it took the motivation of my D/s relationship to get me to get shit done. Like, I’m done DAYS before the deadline for things I usually would have left last minute. I’ve been honest with my struggles with motivation and difficulties taking care of myself, and he is genuinely invested in my well-being so I know it all comes from a place of care and respect.

At the moment I’m working on my final short film for a class, and he told me to make a list of all the foley sounds I thought would help drive the narrative (he knows I love making lists, it’s also the autism), and as probably one of the best rewards for my good behaviour, he shared with me a collection of audio files (he dabbles in audio mixing) that were relevant to the list I shared. Can you believe this??!!

All these studentxprof fics are getting it wrong. Sometimes nothing comes between a teacher’s genuinely investment in student learning (if they enjoy what they do, like he does) and that is absolutely true in this case. Absolutely unbelievable this is my life right now. Would love to hear your thoughts on this!

This sounds so fucking sweet and HOT anon! I'm so glad you're having an exciting time with an older dom who cares about you and helps you meet your goals! And the phrasing of this guy making you write for hours on vyvanse is especially titilating...making it sound like an intox scene omg drool

ADHDers are generally very socially motivated, which is not rare for human beings at all. It makes sense that having the external structure that an outside observe can provide and the sense that your actions actually matter to other people and that people care about you would help facilitate you focusing on shit and getting organized! Not to mention how much fuckin easier it is to perform any kind of household task or bit of drudgery once it becomes sexual service. Shit gives boring regular life a charge of excitement, and the abdication of power gives you the discipline to actually follow through, because you're not the only one on the hook for everything and that's less scary!

I have nothing much more to say other than this rules and I hope you keep having a fun time!

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max1461 · 5 months

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Ok, I have a lot of people who read my blog and are (rightly) very skeptical of generative syntax. For my linguistics mutuals this is usually for somewhat subtler reasons, but for my non-ling-readers the reasoning is generally something like "well, it seems like a bunch of bullshit".

This is a very good instinct! I personally think that most of what gets published in generative syntax is a bunch of bullshit. There are very deep problems in the field, which basically everyone who is not a Chomskyan is in agreement on. But I do think people should understand, if they want to critique generative syntax well, what motivated the whole thing, what Chomsky was trying to explain, and why it's a genuine puzzle. Without that I think you're swinging blind.

I'm assume that anyone reading this will have at least some passing familiarity with the basic concepts of linguistics, but I'll try not to assume too much.

Right, so, one of the basic goals of linguistics, the thing you have to do before positing any deeper theory of the mind or linguistic cognition, is to be able to write down descriptions of existing natural languages. This descriptive task is where modern linguistics got its start. You want to look at a language, collect a bunch of data from speakers, and answer structural questions like "how can the words in this language be ordered? How can the sounds in an individual word be ordered? How do smaller pieces of words (morphemes) combine to make bigger words? Etc.". That first question, "how can the words in this language be ordered?" is the domain of descriptive syntax. Theoretical syntax (which really starts with Chomsky) attempts to find broader principles which govern the order of words in all languages, syntactic universals. Furthermore, the hope is generally that finding such principles will tell us something about the way language is generated and processed in the brain.

The first thing I want to talk about is, basically, what was already understood when Chomsky came onto the scene. I'll use modern terminology and notion (and bring a modern, computational lens to the question), but I'll describe the basic state of understanding at the very beginning of the generative project.

Let's get back to that original question, "how can the words in this language be ordered?". For the specific language we are trying to describe, let's take English. We know that some orderings of words produce valid English sentences: "the dog went to the store and bought a meteorite". We know that other orderings of words do not produce valid English sentences: "him the went dog store meteorite have bought". We would like to write down some rules or principles that characterize which sentences will be valid and which will not.

The first thing we can do is abstract away from individual words and start thinking about syntactic categories. We notice that certain words seem to be able to be swapped out for each other without affecting the validity of a sentence: if I can say "the dog went to the store", I can also say "they man went to the store". If I can say "I saw the dog", then I can say "I saw the man". Of course these sentences don't mean the same thing, but the point is that if one of these sentences with "dog" is valid, the corresponding sentence with "man" is also valid. We say that "man" and "dog" have the same syntactic distribution in English. The set of all words with a given syntactic distribution is called a syntactic category. In this case, "man" and "dog" are both nouns.

In school grammar, you might have learned that a noun is a "person, place, or thing". But in syntax, we want to understand a noun as a class of words with a particular syntactic distribution.

In fact, simple categories like "noun" and "verb" are too broad; in order to describe English grammar we need more precise categories than this. But we will keep running with these for now. If we want to be precise, we can think of "noun" and "verb" as classes of categories having similar-but-not-identical distributions. We're already at an important empirical observation—every language appears to have noun-like categories and verb-like categories, and this is interesting. But we won't dwell on this.

So we can view a sentence as a sequence of categories. "The dog went to the store" might as well be "D N V P D N" for all the syntactician cares. Here I'm using standard abbreviations for these categories: D is "determiner", N is "noun", P is "preposition", and V is "verb". I'll also use A for "adjective" later. But at this point we can abstract again. Look, there are two pieces of the above sentence that have the same shape: "the dog" and "the store" are both D N. Hmm. Let's look at another sentence. "The red dog goes to the store". Now here, the sentence starts with something shaped D A N, in place of that first D N. What about this: "the big red dog goes to the store". Now it starts D A A N. And we could have said "the dog goes to the big red store", D N V P D A A N. So it starts to look like anywhere a D N can go, a D A N can go, or a D A A N, or D [any number of As] N. These are sequences of words that have the same syntactic distribution as each other, and thus can be freely swapped out for one another. If we can describe the internal structure they have, and the positions they're allowed to go in, we can describe the syntax of the whole language.

Thus, the idea of describing syntax with trees. Sentences consist of parts nested inside other parts. These parts are called constituents or phrases. Each phrase has a particular syntactic distribution, just like individual words do. We can test what the constituents of a sentence are by trying to swap them out for one another (and for other things, like pronouns) and seeing if it works. Then we can diagram a sentence in terms of the way the constituents bracket: [[the dog] [went [to [the store]]]]. And we can represent that as a syntax tree, like this

I won't explain the concept of "headedness" right now, but the basic idea is that in some constituents, certain words play a special role, and these words are called "heads". A constituent whose head is a noun is called a noun phrase (NP), one whose head is a verb is called a verb phrase (VP), and so on. That's what the labels in the tree mean. The labels on the leaves of the tree refer to syntactic categories of individual words, and the ones up inside the tree are phrase types. The important thing is that each phrase is a subtree, and each phrase type has a specific syntactic distribution. Additionally, any individual word can be seen as a one-word phrase.

What we are building right now is called a phrase-structure grammar. If we want to describe the sentences of a language this way, we specify some abstract symbols for phrase types (NP, VP, N, V, etc.), and some rules that say what shape these phrase types can have. We know from the examples above that a DP can have shape D N (as in "the dog"), D A N (as in "the big dog"), etc. We could write this rule as DP -> D A* N. The "*" after A means "any number of As". Actually, that notation is not quite what a linguist would use, but I'm using "*" because I think it will be familiar to a lot of people already from computer science.

A phrase-structure grammar is a list of syntactic rules like this, that describe the valid shapes of different phrases. Once you do that, you need only specify what the different vocabulary items of the language are and what syntactic categories they're part of, and you've fully described the syntax.

But, wait... does that actually work? Can this system actually describe all of natural language syntax?

No!

Enter Chomsky. The term "phrase-structure grammar" was not around at the time, but diagramming sentences as trees in roughly the way shown above was not new. Chomsky wondered "is this sufficient"? In trying to answer that question, he came up with the Chomsky hierarchy. The Chomsky hierarchy is a hierarchy of different types of "formal language" (sets of sequences of symbols, like our sequences D N V P D N etc.). The hierarchy is ordered by what kind of computation apparatus you need in order to describe the given language type. Phrase-structure grammars like we constructed above are, mathematically, only able to describe languages at the "context-free" level in the Chomsky hierarchy. Are natural languages context-free languages, under Chomsky's definition? They are not.

Consider, for instance, English question words: who, what, when, where, how. Words of this type are known as wh-words, because most of them start with "wh" in English. Yes, that is as Anglocentric as it sounds. Anyway, where can they go?

Well, they usually go at the beginning of a sentence. "What did you see?", "How are you doing". Notice that in these sentences, there is something that looks like a constituent with a gap. We know already that English transitive verb phrases (VPs) have the shape V DP, where V is a verb and DP is a determiner phrase, described above. So verb phrases will be things like "saw the man" or "ate the rice". But in "what did you see", the transitive verb see doesn't have a DP after it. In fact, if you try to put the usual DP after it, then the sentence with what becomes ungrammatical: *"what did you see the dog".

(By the way, putting a "*" before a sentence is what linguists use to indicate that speakers judge it ungrammatical. Another helpful bit of notation: "?" before a sentence means speakers aren't sure if it's grammatical or disagree, the sentence is of dubious grammaticality.)

So, ok, you can put a DP after a transitive verb, unless the sentence starts with what, then you can't. Is that it? Well, not quite, but let's run with that for now. Check this out: the above rule still works no matter how far away the wh-word is from the DP gap:

"What did you see?"

*"What did you see the dog?"

"What did you tell me the man saw?"

*"What did you tell me the man saw the dog?"

"What did you tell me the man told you he saw?"

*"What did you tell me the man told you he saw the dog?"

This situation is called a long distance dependency, and it is impossible to describe them with the kind of context-free phrase-structure grammar we came up with above. Thus, context-free phrase-structure grammars are insufficient for describing natural language syntax.

So what do we do about it? Well, it's certainly the case that phrase-structure-grammar gets close to describing what we want. Lots of sentences can be diagrammed as context-free syntax trees just fine. And thinking about language in terms of constituency is very useful in a bunch of other contexts that I haven't mentioned here; phrases are the bread-and-butter of linguistic description. Chomsky's solution was to take a good old context-free phrase-structure grammar and augment it with a mechanism called movement, turning it into a context-sensitive grammar (a higher position on the Chomsky hierarchy, capable of describing long distance dependencies like that above).

There are a lot of different forms of movement, and proposals for what its limits should be, but the basic idea is that movement allows you to take something from one node in the tree and move it to another node, under some set of conditions. Generally the node it moves to should be empty; you sort of have to imagine trees like the one I drew above as having valid nodes at every possible location specified by the phrase-structure grammar, even if most of them don't have words in them. The ones without words are the empty nodes. Every syntactic theory with movement is based on some phrase-structure grammar, which determines what trees exist in the language. Movement is then allowed to apply to this set of trees generated by the PSG, shifting constituents from one node to another. In most theories, movement is only allowed to be upward (that is, things can only move to strictly higher positions in the tree). Other limitations may be put in place as well: heads may only move to other head positions, complements may only move to spec positions, movement cannot progress across certain barriers in the tree, etc. It all gets very technical.

The ideal generative theory is a PSG and a set of conditions on movement that allow linguists to describe all and only the possible syntactic structures of natural human language. This is where the term "generative" comes from: a grammar (of a specific language, in a specific theory) generates possible sentences, and a theory generates possible grammars. A bad grammar either overgenerates (predicts ungrammatical sentences) or undergenerates (fails to predict grammatical sentences). This makes it an insufficient description of the language. On a meta-level, a bad syntactic theory either overgenerates (predicts impossible grammars) or undergenerates (fails to predict possible grammars).

Anyway, back to movement. Why is it an appealing mechanism? Well, it unites a bunch of related phenomena under one description. First of all, let's notice something else about those long distance dependencies in English. There are a bunch of them: "what did he see", "where did he go", "how does he feel", etc. In all of them, the syntactic category of the gap corresponds to the question word you use.

"What did he see?" ↔︎ "He saw the dog" (DP)

"Where did he go?" ↔︎ "He went to the park" (PP)

"How did he feel?" ↔︎ "He felt good" (AP)

We might like to say that certain types of phrase are allowed in the highlighted positions in the sentences on the right, and this includes the corresponding wh-words. Then, the wh-word moves out of that position and up to the front of the sentence. This allows us to describe what sorts of wh-words pair with what sorts of constituents without having to "say the same thing twice" in the grammar. Many natural generalizations present themselves by simply specifying what is allowed to go in the position where movement starts, and then specifying where things can move to.

Here's another compelling reason to posit movement: sometimes, things don't move. Above, I said that it was a simplification to say that wh-word always show up at the front of the sentence. For example, when multiple interrogatives are present in a single sentence, only one of them can be fronted. If I say "Stacy went to the store and bought apples", and later you forget what I told you and want to ask about the details, you might say:

"Tell me again, who went to the store and bought what?"

Here, who has is in its fronted position but what is not (linguists call this wh-in-situ). Where does the in situ wh-word appear? It appears in exactly the position of the gap that must be present when it is fronted! This makes it very tempting to say that it "started there" and moved. This even provides a natural explanation for why it fails to move in the above sentence: if we suppose that words can only move to empty positions, then the position it would like to move to is blocked by the other wh-word who, and so it must stay were it is. This is fairly parsimonious.

Positing other limits on movement explains other phenomena. There are certain syntactic positions out of which wh-words can't move. Such positions are called islands. In English, wh-words are not just used for questions but also for introducing certain subordinate clauses, for instance "I know what the man saw". What if you try to move a wh-word out of a subordinate clause itself introduced with a wh-word? For example, suppose someone says "I know what Jim saw", and you later forget they were talking about Jim. You might like to ask who they were talking about. But you cannot say:

*"Who do you know what saw?"

This is an island. The most standard analysis of such islands follows from positing that movement must be local: items must always move to the closest valid syntactic landing site before they can move anywhere else. Our wh-word who would like to make it to the very front of the sentence. But that position is structurally identical to the one in the subordinate clause in which what already sits. This follows from the basic phrase-structure grammar: subordinate clauses are merely sentences-within-sentences. So, locally, the "front of the sentence" for who is the front of that subordinate clause. But what is already there! So it can't move, it can't get out.

Locality conditions and movement blocking explain a fair number of really weird, really arcane phenomena in natural language syntax, which is enough to make movement seem to me at the very least a compelling idea.

There are a bunch of other island effects that are difficult to even really talk about without the vocabulary introduced by generative syntax, at least, like subject islands:

"That John went home is likely"

*"Who is that went home likely?"

And left-branch islands:

"Susan likes Fred's hat"

*"Whose does Susan like hat?"

Which appear to be constraints on movement out of subtrees of specific shapes.

I don't consider these to be evidence for movement, but they are easy to phrase using movement, and they are essentially impossible to phrase without reference to tree structure and long distance dependency.

So, this is what the Chomskyans are seeing. There is a lot to be understood about natural language that you cannot even start asking about without looking in a pretty fine-toothed way at trees, natural language sentences, and the kind of rulesets that can generate them. I don't think there is a way to address these concerns without at least meeting generativism where it's at on some level, unless you are entirely disinterested in describing this aspect of natural language.

Where do I think generativism has failed? Well, I said that all these phenomena make movement a compelling idea, but that's a far cry from the generativists having a good scientific theory. And, in fact, I think that they don't. I think formal syntax research is marred by a thousand problems big and small that make it difficult to progress on turning their compelling ideas into good scientific theories, and I think Chomsky's personal approach to the research program has had a large hand in making things the way they are. But that's all a topic for another time. What I wanted to convey here is just... why, why are we talking about this? Why are these ideas important to think about to begin with? And I hope, even to the generativism-skeptical, that I've demonstrated that somewhat.

#linguistics

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transmutationisms · 1 year

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i think a lot of attempts to compare male homoeroticism with the (comparatively lacking) female equivalent are kind of missing the point of what succession is saying about masculinity. it's not a coincidence that the most overt displays of homoeroticism are explicitly power-bound social relations: tom and his assistant, roman and his personal trainer, kendall and lawrence. all of these are relationships that involve physical violence and/or sexually violent language; the commentary is on how the exclusion of women from the upper echelons of corporate power, along with the valorisation of sexual dominance and bodily strength, create the conditions for an expression of m/m sexuality that is continuous with capitalist and patriarchal violence and exploitation. roman and mencken is essentially an allegorical scene demonstrating the appeal of fascism to capitalism using roman's eroticisation of masculinity and the father-dictator figure, which fits with this general commentary on masculinity and sexuality as well.

women on succession don't have the same type of relationship to masculinity, where they either identify with it and perform it, or eroticise it and find it seductive. shiv, for example, sees this type of posturing as juvenile and overcompensatory, and though she speaks the language verbally, especially with her family, this is more out of necessity than because she genuinely feels kendall's need to swing around his metaphorical cock. she expresses that rhea 'fucked her,' but this scene isn't really meant to be erotic because shiv also doesn't have roman's tendency to eroticise 'getting fucked'. instead, shiv sees it as humiliating and instinctively identifies herself as one of the people who deserves to be 'doing the fucking'. it's true that business and fucking are one and the same on this show, but i think if you're not specifically considering how masculinity plays into this, you're missing a huge dimension of how 'business-fucking' works and how shiv and other women relate to the concept (and, often, how they don't relate to it) and are excluded from it.

that said, the obvious point of comparison here is shiv's attempted threesome with the yacht employee. this is both metonymic of the sexual exploitation of dancers, sex workers, migrant workers, and so forth that has landed waystar 'in hot water,' and also indicative of shiv's access to the f/f analogue of, eg, the relationship between roman and the personal trainer. again, homosexual desire and sexual expression can exist in this world as articulations of class and racial violence; with shiv and the threesome, we don't see the same relation to patriarchy and masculinity, but we are meant to understand shiv's interest in this relationship as existing within these same broader power structures. to me this attempted threesome is a pretty critical window into the show's view of sexuality generally, and specifically the way in which lesbian sexuality can be continuous with structural violence just as much as gay male sexuality; or rather, it is the violence that provides the necessary precondition for homosexual relations, which would otherwise be homophobia'd out of existence on a more simplistic understanding of patriarchy, gender, and capitalist demands for cishetero family units and reproduction.

also, obviously, the fact that there are simply fewer women means fewer opportunities to explore female homoeroticism seriously, and although the writers' room is split pretty evenly between cis men and cis women, i would say overall the writing of female characters is weaker in certain ways.

#he doesn't even trust water

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makapatag · 3 months

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ruminating on the leftism that guides much of my thinking. i'm avoiding the very common pitfall of simply applying theory (written by people benefiting from colonialism a few hundred years ago) to living conditions here in the neocolony of america and looking for ways to actually apply historical dialectic into here--it takes a lot of self awareness because as with all things the majority left position in the philippines is based off of joma sison's MLM-ness and the struggle for a national democracy, which has now kind of devolved into a ultranationalist jerk off between colonial intelligentsia and constant protesting and rallying. whenever they are challenged by the state, the main response is that "everything they've been doing is completely legal" and that nothing they've done is wrong. of course, paradoxically, as Mark Fisher writes in capitalist realism, much of this ends up just reifying capitalist reals and borders, and neatly squares away activism into yet another portion of capitalist life. activism (now also commonly romanticized by so many of those in the middle class to the petty bourgeois) is now subsumed into capitalism.

of course, from my point of view, doing something is better than doing nothing. i've participated in the movements of the national democratic mass organizations of the PH (anakbayan, etc.) (and still do, though my capacity has become limited and i'm focusing on supporting the communities closest to me for the time being) but they're increasingly becoming a sort of ideological stepping stone and for the most part i believe they have been completely subsumed into capitalist ideology.

i think the philippines is largely mostly just capitalist now, even with some modes of tenancy in the countryside seeming feudal, it operates entirely within a capitalist mode of view and application.

i don't subscribe to the sort of unilinear evolution of societies espoused by some soviet theorists (the classless -> slave -> feudal -> capitalist -> communist thing)--a lot of classical leftist and marxist theories can be pretty easily seen as sort of eurocentric. that's no bash, that's just the work of limited perspective. future marxists like fanon expand the marxist perspective greatly, though they seem to be largely ignored by the white bourgeois in my experience

i think ph leftism should be a lot more aware of local ideas on society, and use that to sort of influence and shape their leftism. a lot of leftists sort of scoff at "precolonial studies" as sort of cute at best and absolutely ethnocentric backwardism at worst (many ph leftists know jack shit about precolonial ph and/or seasia in general due to the education system of the philippines and the america-centric culture of the metropoles)

if we apply historical materialist dialectic all the way back to pre-hispanic times we get a treasure trove of societies to contrast and synthesize upon. a shared culture and binding connections with the rest of asia. the ideal state is of course international consciousnesses and solidarity--one that doesn't fall into the trap of capitalist reification through nationalism and the enforcement of the cacophony of signifiers that only serves to reinforce capitalist structures (jingles, voting, art that just regurgitates old socialist aesthetic, revolutionary art that doesn't really say anything because these artists lack proper class consciousness and/or perspective [many ph left artists come from the metropoles after all and/or have been subsumed into nationalist agenda through education systems and the need to belong in communities, art ph being one particularly egregious example that reinforces nationalist signifiers while becoming ignorant of the signified).

all in all the philippine left is completely defeated, as a movement. many leftists adopt anarchist tendencies, joyful militancies, try to live outside of the confines of communism through communes or living in the mountains. if we are to have any chance of challenging capitalism the ph left must interrogate its own biases, interrogate nationalism, review its literature, and then look inward, look to fellow tribes and societies, avoid the interventionist failures of soviet societies, and actually fight for a world that won't just degrade into more wage-labor slavery

"that's idealistic!" if you're shooting for the moon you land on the stars. the direction of the movement is more important than the speed. i fully believe ideological recourse is needed in the ph left--some might even say if there is a ph left still. i wouldn't mind abolishing the idea altogether--the left is still a eurocentric categorization after all. perhaps its time for a new revolution that interrogates current structures, even within so-called progressive organizations, with violent indignation, and finds a way to upend capitalism through a firm grasp in pre-capitalist structures and international ties

#waksthoughts #might get redtagged kapag sa fb ko pinost so #or baka awayin ako ng mga kaibigan kong tibak wahaha #also i hate the socialist aesthetic #that all red thing they keep doing #but that's just me as a seasaner probably

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anarcho-physicist · 10 months

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My favorite weird phase of matter (and also some intro-y stuff that you can skip if you want to look at the pretty pictures)

[Fig. 1 (a) from Mur, M., Kos, Ž., Ravnik, M. et al. Continuous generation of topological defects in a passively driven nematic liquid crystal. Nat Commun 13, 6855 (2022).]

Hi again! In my previous posts, I described what the term soft matter means to a physicist, and how physicists really understand phases of matter mostly in terms of symmetries. In the future, I'm similarly planning to write more long form, in-depth explanations of specific concepts/topics in soft matter physics.

I'd really like to be able to dive into the math behind everything, but I also want to keep things as understandable and enjoyable as possible to those with little to no math background. So I'll try my best to explain every bit of every equation I show, and I think forcing myself to do so will help me understand them better.

I might also post some things other than long-form essays. One idea I've been thinking of doing is to post a daily/weekly/whateverly arXiv update, where I pick one or a few soft matter physics preprints that have been uploaded recently, and write short, informal summaries of their findings. I think that might be a good way to keep myself and anyone who's interested informed on the state of the field. I also intend to do shorter posts on specific papers or results I think are really cool. My research and academic responsibilities keep me very busy, so I'll likely make shorter posts when I don't have the time or energy to write longer, deeper explanations.

Another idea I've been toying around with is potentially using this account as something like a radically open research notebook/journal, where I immediately write up and publicly post each little research milestone I've made for the day/week/whatever. My paycheck comes mostly from government grants, the research I do is publicly funded. I think the public ought to be aware of exactly what they're funding, and particularly, I think the members of the public who are interested in what we do should be able to engage with researchers, to learn about the current state of the field. I also think this ability to engage with current research should be accessible to all members of the public, not just those wealthy enough to be able to spend a lot of time around universities. On the other hand, there are some ethical and logistical considerations when it comes to sharing unpublished research, and I'd at the very least need to get approval from all of my collaborators, so if I end up doing something like this, it wouldn't be for a while.

Anyways, for now, I'd just like to show you some really cool experimental realizations of a gorgeously weird phase of matter that is very dear to my heart (and my CV):

Active Nematic Liquid Crystals

[Video taken by the Dogic Lab]

These two-dimensional, spontaneously flowing "line fluids" host topological defects (the little comet-shaped and triangle-shaped dark spots). These are quasiparticles with fascinating dynamics, and some really beautiful mathematics behind their structure. To quote my PI who was quoting some other physicist I can't remember:

Materials are like people; it's the defects that make them interesting.

The term liquid crystal refers to a general class of materials with symmetries and properties in-between those of a crystal and those of a simple liquid. Nematics are a particular type of liquid crystal, one with full translational symmetry, but S^1 / Z_2 -broken rotational symmetry. Active nematics are nematics that also break time-reversal symmetry, and thus energy conservation (I'll explain how this is possible in an energy-conserving universe sometime soon; the short answer is "coarse-graining").

Here's what happens if you put an active nematic on a sphere:

[Dogic Lab again -- they're great they do a lot of really cool stuff]

Fun fact: These defects attract and repel each other just like charged particles (via Gauss's law), except they aren't electrically charged, they're topologically charged. Rather than electromagnetic fields, the medium of interaction here is the elastic free energy associated with curves in the line field. The comet-shaped defects have a +1/2 topological charge, while the triangular ones have a -1/2 charge. If you bring two defects close enough together, they'll effectively "add" their charges up. This means oppositely-charged defects can annihilate each other into the uniform/vacuum state, and that a sufficiently perturbed vacuum can pair-produce oppositely charged defects. That eye-catching picture at the top of this post is a cross-polarized image of that pair-production process in an externally-driven passive nematic. The two arrows point to two individual defects.

In an active nematic, things get even more interesting; the +1/2 defects become effectively self-propelled, while the -1/2 defects do not. At least, not if the activity is spatiotemporally constant (this is a hint to a really cool upcoming paper I'll hopefully be publishing before the end of this summer). This results in all sorts of weird nonequilibrium behavior, like the chaotic state displayed in the first animation, or the oscillatory swirling of the four +1/2 defects on the vesicle depicted in the second.

Why do we only see four +1/2 defects, and no -1/2s on the sphere? For two reasons: 1) The sphere is fairly small relative to the active length scale, which is roughly the average separation distance between defects. This is governed by the balance of active and elastic stresses. And 2) The hairy ball theorem necessitates a net topological charge on the sphere of +2 = 4 x +1/2.

All of the nematics I've shown you so far have been synthetic, but nematics (and even active nematics) show up in nature too. One really good example: look at your hands. I mean, really look at them. Do you see any familiar little triangle shapes? Maybe some little whorly comets? Fingerprints are a frozen nematic texture! But the defects in your fingerprints aren't very interesting, because they don't move (I hope). What else is there?

This brings us to my favorite experimental discovery ever made. Hydra are microscopic freshwater creatures that regrow their limbs. It turns out, the hydra's supracellular actin fibres, which play a major role in this morphogenesis, order like an active nematic. They have topological defects, which appear to correlate with sites of new organ growth. You can see them in the hydra itself:

[Fig. 1 (a-f) from Maroudas-Sacks, Y., Garion, L., Shani-Zerbib, L. et al. Topological defects in the nematic order of actin fibres as organization centres of Hydra morphogenesis. Nat. Phys. 17, 251–259 (2021).]

It's literally algebraic topology come to life.

#soft matter #physics #science #196 #mathematics #biology #topology #academia

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bsdndprplplld · 1 year

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tips for studying math

I thought I could share what I learned about studying math so far. it will be very subjective with no scientific sources, pure personal experience, hence one shouldn't expect all of this to work, I merely hope to give some ideas

1. note taking

some time ago I stopped caring about making my notes pretty and it was a great decision – they are supposed to be useful. moreover, I try to write as little as possible. this way my notes contain only crucial information and I might actually use them later because finding things becomes much easier. there is no point in writing down everything, a lot of the time it suffices to know where to find things in the textbook later. also, I noticed that taking notes doesn't actually help me remember, I use it to process information that I'm reading, and if I write down too many details it becomes very chaotic. when I'm trying to process as much as possible in the spot while reading I'm better at structuring the information. so my suggestion would be to stop caring about the aesthetics and try to write down only what is the most important (such as definitions, statements of theorems, useful facts)

2. active learning

do not write down the proof as is, instead write down general steps and then try to fill in the details. it would be perfect to prove everything from scratch, but that's rarely realistic, especially when the exam is in a few days. breaking the proof down into steps and describing the general idea of each step naturally raises questions such as "why is this part important, what is the goal of this calculation, how to describe this reasoning in one sentence, what are we actually doing here". sometimes it's possible to give the proof purely in words, that's also a good idea. it's also much more engaging and creative than passively writing things down. another thing that makes learning more active is trying to come up with examples for the definitions

3. exercises

many textbooks give exercises between definitions and theorem, doing them right away is generally a good idea, that's another way to make studying more active. I also like to take a look at the exercises at the end of the chapter (if that's the case) once in a while to see which ones I could do with what I already learned and try to do them. sometimes it's really hard to solve problems freshly after studying the theory and that's what worked out examples are for, it helps. mamy textbooks offer solutions of exercises, I like to compare the "official" ones with mine. it's obviously better than reading the solution before solving the problem on my own, but when I'm stuck for a long time I check if my idea for the solution at least makes sense. if it's similar to the solution from the book then I know I should just keep going

4. textbooks and other sources

finding the right book is so important. I don't even want to think about all the time I wasted trying to work with a book that just wasn't it. when I need a textbook for something I google "best textbooks for [topic]" and usually there is already a discussion on MSE where people recommend sources and explain why they think that source is a good one, which also gives the idea of how it's written and what to expect. a lot of professors share their lecture/class notes online, which contain user-friendly explenations, examples, exercises chosen by experienced teachers to do in their class, sometimes you can even find exercises with solutions. using the internet is such an important skill

5. studying for exams

do not study the material in a linear order, instead do it by layers. skim everything to get the general idea of which topics need the most work, which can be skipped, then study by priority. other than that it's usually better to know the sketch of every proof than to know a half of them in great detail and the rest not at all. it's similar when it comes to practice problems, do not spend half of your time on easy stuff that could easily be skipped, it's better to practice a bit of everything than to be an expert in half of the topics and unable to solve easy problems from the rest. if the past papers are available they can be a good tool to take a "mock exam" after studying for some time, it gives an opoortunity to see, again, which topics need the most work

6. examples and counterexamples

there are those theorems with statements that take up half of the page because there are just so many assumptions. finding counterexamples for each assumption usually helps with that. when I have a lot of definitions to learn, thinking of examples for them makes everything more specific therefore easier to remember

7. motivation

and by that I mean motivation of concepts. learning something new is much easier if it's motivated with an interesting example, a question, or application. it's easier to learn something when I know that it will be useful later, it's worth it to try to make things more interesting

8. studying for exams vs studying longterm

oftentimes it is the case that the exam itself requires learning some specific types of problems, which do not really matter in the long run. of course, preparing for exams is important, but keep in mind that what really matters is learning things that will be useful in the future especially when they are relevant to the field of choice. just because "this will not be on the test" doesn't always mean it can be skipped

ok I think that's all I have for now. I hope someone will find these helpful and feel free to share yours

#mathblr #studyblr #math #study tips

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lesfir · 10 days

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The charming Dark Side

In the supplement to "Triumph of Evil", I'd like to take the time to the issue - which evil? Astarion, as well as Lord Astarion evil\dark side is complex.

Unattractive evil absolutely breaks Astarion as a character, in the Evil Ascension Ending too, he needs to remain attractive and complex. It's his core, as an Ascended Astarion too, is himself - Astarion, and one of his integral paths as an Astarion character. I need a certain baseline for statements like that, too.

Evil is not cardboard. except for tales cartoons, teaching the virtues Evil is complex. "Has some little good in it" where I'm greedy and want more Is a great line of reasoning in Astarion's story.

Astarion is an fun character for the theme of evil and good. Astarion's own reasoning is extremely materialistic, selfish, and an "evil" picture of the world. Which however in Faerun has its own meaning. It also stays in balance. Astarion is more likely to act as an unsuspecting actor of a global idea that contains complex moral themes than to say such things himself. For example, we might find thoughts that rise above the story in the words of the archetype character "the wise man", Wise Old Turtle -like. Astarion either does not do this arbitrarily or he mocks morality, uses it to accomplish a goal. Or he can't find the words:

CinematicNodeContext: Can't quite find the words to convey "even evil people can be a little bit good" so just mimes weighing scales with his hands NodeContext: "And even good or evil people can be a little bit complicated."

In my opinion this idea from act 2 already overlaps with the ending. Evil power as a tool, evil man, even a little bit of good and something complicated. It also generally intersects with Astarion's story.

Complex Evil has its own morality, motivations, reasons and sense, depending on the context of the story. But it remains "evil" for some reason. Here we are already getting to a debatable, personal topic and who understands evil and gray morality in what way. To me, grayness is different from evil: Realizing it's immoral and still willing to do it. The lack of regret\guilt. The desire to continue. The inner satisfaction, fun of doing evil or all together. Hello Astarion very much hello, Lord Astarion Maybe in the very topic being reasoned over, the story will be something gray, yet the character will be evil within the story. We can add here DnD - in which greed and selfishness are classed as evil. Greed is one of the "deadliest human sins", as well as pride, speaking of other structures of the definition of "evil".

This point of the complexity of dark themes in Astarion's character, was mentioned by Astarion author Stephen Rooney. Stephen Rooney | Idle Insights | Idle Champions | D&D 18:32

Lauren: What was like one or two of the core things that were the most important about his character that needed to be represented? When you were helping us bring your baby into our game what were like the couple things you're like - he has to have this in order to still be him.

Stephen Rooney: When you meet Astarion the first thing that he does in the game is pull a knife on you. He has a certain appreciation for violence I guess, a bit of a murdery streak so… I think it's important to have that… and also… he's a vampire, he's all about blood and he's all about darker sides of humanity. So it's important that that's that's represented in the game. But the same time he’s really fun to write, to have in your party. And it was it's very important for me that that is also represented those kind of the two sides. It's gonna stop you but we'll we'll have a smile on his face and see does it.

Lauren: The fun thing about that duality of like all right he's a vampire he's all about blood but also he's kind of this sarcastic fun character. I like that he is not your cliche brooding dark always kind of emo vampire like he's got in a weird way a lot of fun personality to him and like he's a rogue but he's dressed in like fancy clothes and very he's very charismatic and personable. Were you was that how you were you was that just how you crafted Astarion from a gameplay and character perspective or were you thinking of like let’s make sure he’s not Dracula let’s make sure he’s not super cliché vampires.

Stephen Rooney: (… about cliché vampires) The main thing with Astarion character I think was just trying to get a sense of fun into… He could… It would be very very easy to write a character that was very unlikable in Astarion and we absolutely didn't want to do that. He's a bit terrible consistently throughout the game, he's awful in a whole lot of ways. But at the same time he needs to be charming and he needs to be someone that you actually want to have around. Because you’re gonna be with this guy for hours and hours – it’s a long track through this game so… You gotta make sure he’s engaging, he’s fun. Lauren: He that nice line of like… He’s doing the terrible things but he’s so fun to be around and maybe he’s got a point about the terrible things he’s doing and, you know, maybe he's gonna sway the player over to his side of seeing things a little bit.

Stephen Rooney: Hopefully, I mean, that would be the gold standard if I hit that even most of the time, I’m extremely happy.

___

There are two sides to Astarion's character that are very important to have together - he is a bloodthirsty vampire, "he's all about the darker sides of humanity", and he is fun. It's easy to write Astarion as a very unlikable character, but that's something its author absolutely didn't want. Astarion needs to be charming, interesting, fun, yet keep two sides.

I mean that's why Lord Astarion - being the most dangerous on the meadow - is sulking that he wasn't the one throwing the party, arrogantly looking at the nails "wow they're still alive, good for them", throws away the goblet drinks wine from the bottle, and flies back and forth as tiny furry bat. Astarion's evil is seductive and alluring, instead of only black vacuum. It takes nuance and a lot of detail, balance, as well as the important thing - devilish charm and charisma. More like space viewed from a monitor, constellations and nebulae. If you truly get there, you'll freeze to death in a second, but it's very beautiful from afar. It's the kind of evil he has throughout story. Such evil stays with Astarion in Ascension, more openly and at the apogee. True, it's different for each individual. A friend of mine said: "why do you need that vampire bastard? I'm gonna kill him" хD Alluring of Astarion's evil and especially of Lord Astarion works very differently or doesn't work at all.

#astarion #ascended astarion #lord astarion #bg3 #baldur's gate 3 #bg3 astarion #astarion ancunin #baldurs gate 3 #Bg3 Evil Path

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compacflt · 1 year

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my apologies if this is too simple or juvenile or personal a question but HOW did you become such a proficient writer? and do you have any tips or pointers to keep in mind? i know you must do a lot of reading and a lot of writing, but your skill is just incredible to me. your prose!! your cadence!! when we get around to talking about it is genuinely one of the best things i've ever read and i'd eat it if i could!!!

this ask was so sweet thank you!! rly made my day when i needed a boost. Hope you don’t mind i took a couple days to think about it cause no one’s ever asked me for writing advice before

idk how i became a “proficient” writer bc I really don’t write that much. something about my fic gave me brainworms and i went into overdrive but that’s…not my usual MO. which is why it’s weird for me too. admittedly i am studying english/creative writing as my second major at uni, but i haven’t learned anything in any of my classes you couldn’t learn by just reading and writing on your own. honestly i should’ve stuck with my IR major instead, i find structured cw classes a complete waste of time. but here are some little tips i thought of that would’ve helped ME:

This is more a “do as I say not as I do” because I’m really bad at habits like this, but keep a diary. You can write about the big events (went to the store, did homework, got laid etc.) but that’s boring—focus on the details (watched someone at west side market throw a glass bottle of olives at a rat, broke a pen and permanently stained my dorm desk and won’t get my deposit back which pissed me off because I move out in a week, this guy’s breath smelled like lemon pledge and it made me wonder if he drank window cleaner before kissing me etc.). Real life is really interesting! How can you write about interesting real life in an interesting way? It’s a good way to practice. You don’t have to do a big reflection at the end of the day or anything. It’s okay to jot down something you saw & then immediately forget about it. It’s the act of figuring out how to translate life into words that’s important

If you type, learn how to type FAST. This is just my experience, but I think typing faster makes your cadence, clause length, dialogue, IDEAS flow better/more naturally. We think in words/sentences, not letters.

This is a super lame tip that’ll make you roll your eyes, but read poetry. Poetry is all about how words/ideas/images sound and interact with each other. Don’t get hung up on one poet—im not really recommending any for precisely this reason—read poetry you love (for me, Ada Limón, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, ghazals etc) AND read poetry you hate (for me, Rupi Kaur, Emily Dickinson, Whitman, etc)! Read all genres you can get your hands on. (I think there are like “great poetry anthologies” you can find for free online if u don’t know where to start. Also you can’t go wrong with subscribing to/reading a variety magazine like the NYer. It’s pretentious but it exposes you to all kinds of weird topics, ways of writing about them, etc.) Figure out how certain combinations of words and punctuations make you FEEL, and why, and why the writer chose (or not) to make you feel that way. Figure out which literary sounds you like and which ones you don’t. For me, i figured out that I REALLY like alliteration, comma splices, zeugmas, the rule of three, and

“he’s [verb]ing again… yeah compacflt’s characters are [verb]ing again… big shocker”

If you have an idea for a piece, figure out what it is you really want to get out of it—to say something? to experiment with a different style? to see your fav characters do something? to have fun?—and then figure out how, on a technical level, you should write to match that goal (this is where the poetry training comes in handy). If you’re just writing to have fun, don’t listen to any writing advice (incl. mine), because most of it is bullshit and over-generalized and will make you feel bad about yourself. Just take the advice that you think will work for what YOURE trying to write.

But if you’re writing to explore some political idea, then you should think about HOW to best write about that idea. What would be a convincing story/allegory/scene to engage with this idea vs. not convincing. I talk on this blog all the time about how disappointed I am that my very-adult-grown-up attempt to deal with the dynamic of “immovable internalized homophobia vs unstoppable falling in love anyway” is rendered a little childish/immature by some pretty unconvincing plot points like the characters buying a house together—I really should have considered how that plot point would interact with the characterizations I’d built already (hint: poorly). You can think of writing as kind of a military structure if that helps—you have strategy on the overarching campaign (plot/character growth/allegory/theme) level, the battle (scene that advances the above) level, and the tactical (sentence-level construction/syntax/wording) level. They all have to work together. If a scene is failing to properly engage with the idea you’re trying to convey, you’re losing a battle that will weaken the overarching campaign. Same thing if you choose a weird word in a sentence/write in a style or tone that’s weirdly out of place with your idea—it makes your engagement with the theme/idea less convincing. just try to be purposeful and consider your strategy on all levels of your work as you’re writing it!! At the very least it’ll make editing easier lol.

But then again when I read my own writing from just a couple months ago I cringe out of my skin, so like—just also accept that it’s a process and we’re all just making it up as we go along. Be proud of being embarrassed of your old work, because it means you’re growing. Own that shit. When I finished writing WWGATTAI i thought it was the best thing I’d ever written, and maybe it was. But since the day I finished working on it, it’s the worst thing I’ve written since then. That’s a great feeling. Not to be like writing grindset obviously bc it’s supposed to be fun—but if what you want is to get better at writing, the strategy is to WRITE a whole bunch of shit, and then own your embarrassment about how much you’ve grown since you started. And know you’re still always growing and learning. there should never be any “goals” where skills are concerned 👍🏽

#fake it till u make it #the good part about fiction is all you’re really doing is makin shit up #no rules!!!#fiction is just trying to sell a lie right #so it’s all on a sliding scale of convincability (at least that’s how i judge fiction)#and figuring out how to convince people of your lie is where the art is #anyway.#not top gun #asks #writing tips #idk how to tag this #also i love ao3 because trying to get published traditionally genuinely made me hate writing/MY writing #i have indeed had the cliche 100+ form rejection letters experience #unfortunately writing is also one of those things where you can see it as a competition so easily #(admittedly a small part of why i don’t read other TG fics—i don’t wanna read people doing it better than me😭)#BUT you tailor your experience to have a healthy life. it’s not a competition if you don’t make it one. put yourself first

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mareenavee · 1 year

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Do you think there’d be obese people in the Fourth Era? Where?

Hi! Thanks for the ask. We don't see this much in game. In general, body type diversity is rather rare or sparse in this medium, as much as we'd like to see different takes.

I also want to preface this by saying this has no reflection on how things are in real life, or what I believe about modern living or people in general. Everyone has value and deserves to be heard no matter outward appearances.

Being a larger individual myself irl, I tend to avoid descriptors like 'obese' in my writing. Just tired of hearing the turn of phrase honestly. There's other ways to convey the image, other words to choose, and also no harm in letting readers decide how to envision a specific character.

This is a simple and not very well researched answer, I understand, but just a bit of what I thought of off the top of my head regarding the question.

I think Fourth Era Tamriel is in a bit of a state of decay, to be honest. There've been wars and disasters for a couple centuries by the events of Skyrim. The Empire's influence is stretched a bit too thin, and they've lost provinces to The Aldmeri Dominion and to general unrest, among other things. In Skyrim, we see the state of things. Decay seems to be a running theme for the story, from my eyes, and the Dragonborn is supposed to maybe bring a bit of hope back to the narrative, but it's unclear really if they are successful on that front or not. I kind of lean into this in my fic. Things are difficult everywhere. It's possible to earn money, but most of the higher paying work is dangerous and physically taxing.

I think because of the Civil War specifically, food supplies are not as plentiful as they might have been otherwise. I think it's difficult for the working class individuals to afford as much security as they'd normally have been able to, as I'd assume prices are kind of high, if the danger of getting goods from point a to point b is almost insurmountable. People have to work more to afford the same amount of supplies and security. There's more things on the roads that need to be fought. I don't think there's "plenty" of food for everyone, especially if things sort of still function very capitalistically in most holds. We see beggars in game in most cities.

Not by virtue of beauty standards or trying, I think many if not most people would have to move/work too much on too little food to have a larger body structure. I think, just like in many real world societies in the past, the more money and power and resources a person has, the more rest they can afford and the more likely they'd be to have extra weight on their frames.

There's a lot of factors to this but the short answer probably is yes, I'm sure there are. And where? Probably more likely in the keeps, castles, manors and estates of the very rich across most provinces who can afford to rest and worry very little about food supplies.

I'd be grateful if someone with irl history background could hop in on this question and equate a few things to Tamriel for me. (:

#AskMareena #Skyrim #tesblr #Morrowind #Oblivion #Elder Scrolls #ESO

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bakerstmel · 5 months

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Fall Favorite Fic Festival, Entry 5

Remember, winter doesn't officially begin until December 21, she said pedantically.

I've delayed writing this entry because I was trying to define the reason (or reasons) why I love this fic so damn much. I read this fic at least twice a year, usually sometime in February and then again in the fall. It's a sports fic, and while I am not in general a sports person, I do love me some baseball. But the sport isn't the reason I love this fic, and I think I may have figured it out. Stick with me.

I started the link at Chapter 2, because Chapter 1 is a guide to baseball for the uninitiated. Some of it is out of date now, because MLB in its STUPIDITY has messed around with the rules this year because GOD FORBID people have to wait longer than a minute for anything to fucking happen on a sports field, and of course only HITS matter, but it is still fun to read. You don't need it to appreciate the fic, though.

Whilst I was processing this fic, I spent some time thinking about sports fics in general, and that led me to reread a couple of other favorites. One was A Study in Winning, by Jupiter_Ash. I really like that fic as well, even though I know next to nothing about tennis. I like the drama of the story, I like Sherlock faking his nationality just because, and I enjoy John being a petty little bitch to Moriarty there at the end. I feel like there for a while everyone had read or was reading that fic. Another one I went back to was Of Ice and Men, by SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John, which is an OT3 set during the Winter Olympics. That one has John in the Paralympics, which gives the relationships an entirely new dimension. There are other good sports fics - throw your favorite in the comments, if you like. I'm mostly limiting my scope in these musings to Sherlock, as I've said before, but I'll read anything if it's good. Links to these two fics are below.

One of the ways in which sports fics have an advantage is that they have a built in structure. There's a match, or a tournament, or a season, and the relationship drama plays out against that backdrop. Writing classes always talk about the "ticking clock" approach to narrative tension, and almost every sport has some type of literal ticking clock. The Bang and the Clatter plays out over a full baseball season, including Spring Training and the postseason. That's basically a year minus the main American holidays, and EarlGreyTea does a really good job of letting the story play out at an appropriate pace. That's very impressive considering that she was posting this as a WIP over the course of an actual season.

(I need to take a minute to talk about my issues with EGT, and by "issues" I mean "soul churning jealousy." EGT is ridiculously prolific. If you go back into the fandom annals and look at the timing of some of her biggest fics, she was posting what became major reference points for the fandom in tandem, writing multiple fics at the same damn time, while, you know, teaching law or moving cross country. She is the best example I know of the importance of writing regularly. Of course, she's incredibly gifted, highly skilled at plotting, characterization, pacing, and just words. She has a fabulous imagination. Her dialogue rings true, and it's fun. But she can turn really good stuff out relatively quickly because she's limber AF. She writes. Anyone who comes to Word Sprints on Sundays or just hangs with me writing knows I'm not fast. I'm lucky to break 100 words in 15 minutes. Part of that is that I edit as I go, but it's also that I don't write as often as I would like to, so it takes me some time to warm up. I would like to be more like EGT, which probably sounds kind of creepy. I hope she doesn't see this. Anyway, she's written many of my top 20, and she actually finishes her stuff. So, yeah. Issues.)

So here is where I ended up: this is a good AU that takes advantage of the time crunch of the sport in which it is set, but that is not why I read it 2+ times per year. I read it because this is one of my favorite John and Sherlock relationships ever. It feels so in character for the way we see them in the show (at least through S2; this was written in 2013). We see them meet, we feel their attraction, we feel Sherlock's very authentic confusion. We feel their fear at being caught out, at first by each other and then by the world. They earn their angst. The way to my heart is good characterization, and this has that. Alongside the battery, the OCs (especially Sherlock and John's families) are complex and have issues of their own. Moriarty doesn't show up until the All Star Workout, which is halfway through the season for those of you who don't know, but it works because by that point, John and Sherlock have things to lose. Lestrade is the best effing choice for a beleaguered, exasperated baseball manager there ever was. Mycroft saves the day AND fucks it up, which I wish we'd seen more of in those days.

Also, John and Sherlock never get too far away from each other, and when they're separated, it's usually for narrative reasons. I like that in a fic, I've come to realize. I like to watch the characters' interplay. It's hard for Sherlock to keep secrets from John when they work together, commute together, and live together, and John is no fool. Their office isn't 221b Baker Street, it's a stadium in Austin, TX, where shit plays out in front of 30k people. John loves baseball. Sherlock loves John. They fight, they fall in love, they eat Chinese food, and they play baseball. And best of all, they are themselves together.

If you read the parts that EGT wrote after the big story, there's a mention of Sherlock pulling together a pick up game in London made of American ex-pats for John's sake, and I'll tell you what. That really pulls this fic together for me. This Sherlock would do that for this John, and we end up a little on the outside looking in, and it's just charming as fuck.

In conclusion, read this even if you don't know baseball, if you want great characterization, a chance to be reminded of how beautiful John and Sherlock were together back in the golden age. Pay attention to the ticking clocks in your favorite fics; intentional or not, there's almost always some time pressure ginning up the conflict. If you're a writer, the best way to get better is to write more. Feels like bullshit, but it's true. And finally, fuck MLB forever for going the completely wrong way on the DH. Pitchers in both leagues should have to/get to hit, and more to the point, DHs should have to fucking do something when their teams are out in the field. I will die on this mound.

(Also, if I'm being honest, Bull Durham is probably my favorite movie, so maybe I'm more of a baseball fan than I'm letting on. I do generally love baseball in popular media. But I still think it's the characterization.)

#fall favorite fic festival #FFFF5 #The Bang and the Clatter #EarlGreyTea68 #A Study in Winning #Jupiter_Ash #Of Ice and Men #sincewhendoyoucallme john

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anneapocalypse · 3 months

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Thoughts Before Endwalker

As I'm about to start Endwalker, I thought it was high time I actually write up some closing thoughts on Shadowbringers, and since I really haven't done this for any of the other expansions, this has turned into a general "thoughts so far" kind of post! And also long. This is not any kind of an essay, just a big long thoughts dump. Spoilers for everything through the end of the Shadowbringers patches.

And I trust I don't have to say this to my own followers at least, but just for the record: please do not tell me anything about Endwalker here, even if you think it's minor, even if you want to hint at something I'll like. I know very little and I'm looking forward to watching it all unfold.

How it started!

It's been a year and change since I started playing this game in the fall of 2022. I didn't actually expect to play very far (I only picked it up in the first place because I was helping a friend set it up! I swore I would never play an MMO! I hated multiplayer games!) and I certainly didn't ever expect to get as deep into it as I have! ARR is very handholdy for new players, which was exactly what I needed to enjoy playing and keep playing. I love the story and the characters and the world and while I do enjoy the solo aspects of the game very much, I've also ended up really actively enjoying playing with other people! I enjoy dungeons. I enjoy raids. I run roulettes more or less every day. Free Company life hasn't always been smooth sailing (long story I won't get into here), but it's also brought me a lot of fun times and some new friends, as well as seeing me step into an active leadership role and not hate it. Who am I? 😂 I don't know! It's not that I've never tried to step out of my comfort zone before when it comes to games and hobbies, it's just that most of those experiences haven't been good and I've ultimately walked away from them. I don't know why this has been different, but it has. It's challenged me to tackle and let go of a lot of old insecurities, which I'm glad for (and grateful to friends who've been patient with me along the way). It's also just been a really good time, and continues to be.

How it's gone! (ARR through Stormblood)

So here I am, in 2024, about to start the last current expansion! Shadowbringers is easily my favorite expansion thus far, but I have really enjoyed the whole ride.

I enjoyed all of ARR, because while I don't think it has the strongest writing and certainly not the strongest characterization, it's really more a very long introduction to the world and its major players and conflicts, and while slow-moving, it does serve that function, and for someone brand-new to MMOs like me, slow was okay. It gave me time to get my bearings and learn the game.

I did really love Heavensward. It hits on several aspects of Fantasy Politics that I enjoy (generations-long war, class politics, structural reform), and postwar Ishgard, while maybe still a little rosy, still doesn't shy away from the growing pains of social change. Also the dragons were cool. I loved Haurchefant a lot, and was heartbroken by his death even as I knew it was coming; I also wouldn't change it. I think his death was meaningful and the natural culmination of his character. A Knight lives to serve. I think Haurchefant was always going to go out sacrificing himself for someone else. If it hadn't been the Vault, it would have been somewhere else. He was a delight and I miss him dearly, but it was a good narrative beat and one I wouldn't change.

Ysayle, on the other hand, I really don't think needed to die. She undergoes a fascinating character arc in Heavensward which I think the writing really drops the ball on at the end. Ideally, I think Ysayle coming to terms with her missteps while continuing to fight for what she believes in would be fantastic. She could have been a meaningful figure in Ishgard's reforms, and she would have made a great Scion. Her death also simply isn't treated with the same reverence as Haurchefant's, and I think that's sad. Heavensward has a bit of a Women Problem, in that it really doesn't give us a lot of female characters who are central to the plot, in contrast to a lot of great and memorable male characters. And the one who is most central dies with a lot less fanfare than WoL BFF Haurchefant. (And I'm not knocking Haurchefant, whom I love dearly, or Aymeric or Estinien! The imbalance is just very noticeable and I wish it wasn't so.)

Stormblood tends to get a bad rap among FFXIV's expansions. It's so common to hear people say it's their least favorite, it wasn't as good as Heavensward, etc. It came up recently in a server I'm in, where a newer player said they were having a bit of content fatigue after Heavensward, and having heard that Stormblood wasn't very good, they were considering buying a story skip. Other responses were, not outright negative, but mostly lukewarm, and I felt like I was the only one who really came out for Stormblood's story. First of all, I don't agree that it's not as good as Heavensward! I grant you that not everyone is as enamored of Fantasy Politics as I am, but as mentioned above, Heavensward is also very political, so I don't really think that's the big difference. Stormblood is maybe a bit grittier in its depiction of war, and that's something I like about it; it's really about the horrors of imperialism and the cost of resistance, and it doesn't pull its punches on that.

Ironically where it does pull its punches is with character deaths, heroes and villains alike. It does feel a little like someone thought they might have hit us too hard in Heavensward, given that we haven't had a lot of major character deaths stick since. I'm not complaining about Gosetsu's return, as I liked him very much and was very happy he lived. I will grumble a little about Zenos, though I'll go easy because I know a lot of people like him. 😛 He just doesn't do much for me. Yotsuyu was a great villain, and I was really dubious when they brought her back, but was pleasantly surprised with how her story ended, to the point that I'm willing to eat a lot of what I said about memory loss as a plot device. They did well with it, and her ultimate death did feel appropriate. Yotsuyu was never going to have a redemption arc, because she didn't want to be redeemed.

It was very refreshing in Stormblood to have more female characters taking essential roles in the plot. Colorism issues aside, I do really like Lyse as a character, and I also loved seeing Yugiri and Alisaie taking prominent roles, especially Alisaie who really hadn't gotten to be in the main plot much before. Rolling around with the three of them was a blast. Raubahn is also a favorite of mine, so seeing him play a major role in Ala Mhigo's liberation and get some character development was excellent. I'm happy that he's stayed involved with the Resistance in the time since.

I also just think Stormblood's new areas are absolutely beautiful. Kugane and the Azim Steppe are particular faves, but I just think they did a great job with the environments and I loved exploring them, including the underwater bits! Eorzea and Ishgard are so European-inspired, and I really enjoyed seeing Asian cultural influences in a fantasy setting. It is after all a Japanese game!

Just this week I finished the reconstruction of the Doman Enclave. As a player who's joined the game more recently, it's always bittersweet to learn about game elements that were temporal and are now lost to time, like the evolution of Mor Dhona during the ARR patches, or the Ishgardian Restoration in the Firmament. I can go hang out in the Firmament and craft and do fêtes and custom deliveries, but I'll never get to see the Firmament being built. It was done when I got there, which for me was after completing 3.3, very soon after completing the main story of Heavensward. The Doman Enclave goes in the other direction. It is a solo experience by necessity, but it's an experience that every new player can have: making their donations every week and watching the Enclave grow. Such things are always a trade-off for an MMO, but between the two, I would definitely choose the one that doesn't lock new players out of the experience.

And to give one last shout-out to Stormblood, I think it's pretty essential setup for what's happening when Shadowbringers begins. It's not just that the Scions are dropping like flies, it's that this is happening on the brink of a full-scale Garlean invasion. Said invasion is also critical to the bad future that G'raha is ultimately trying to prevent. The state and history of Garlemald is inextricably tied to the Ascians who are tied up in all of this. Stormblood is arguably more important to the events of Shadowbringers than Heavensward is, though Heavensward is also not unimportant, both with the continued presence of Estinien (reluctantly so if we believe him 😉), and with the involvement of Tiamat in the Shadowbringers patches. It's all connected!

How it's going! (Shadowbringers)

Urianger is, unsurprisingly, a big part of why I love Shadowbringers so much, as he gets some wonderful character development there and actually gets to be in the plot! But it's not only him—I like how character-driven Shadowbringers is overall, how much the major characters are driving the story and not merely reacting to events. ARR was largely driven by the world itself; the expansions are where the story starts to become character-driven. The driving forces of Heavensward's are much bigger than the main characters, but Haurchefant and Ysayle and Aymeric and Estinien bring a personal face to the conflict and a reason for us to be invested in it. Stormblood's emotional core is Lyse, Yugiri, Gosetsu, and their collective drive to liberate their homelands from Garlean occupation.

Shadowbringers, to me, really brought all of that home. It's not only character-driven but it brings a much more personal touch, I think, to the Scions themselves, with the major players being characters we've known since ARR but now get to know in a deeper way. I've always liked Y'shtola as a character but never felt I really connected with her, and Shadowbringers changed that, even as her story in Shadowbringers is in many ways about her isolation from the others, her (sometimes justified) mistrust and the way she closes herself off even to the people closest to her. Yet there is a deep caring beneath Y'shtola's prickliness as well, which we see in her leadership of the Night's Blessed, the new family she is willing to risk her life for. She's complex and difficult, sometimes angry and stubborn, and we all know I love that in a fictional woman. I really gained a deeper appreciation for her as a character here.

I've said my piece on Minfilia already, so I'll try not to repeat myself too much. I will say that Thancred is the main character I have the hardest time with in Shadowbringers. I appreciated the additional character development given to him at first, but as the story made Minfilia's death more and more all about him to the exclusion of everyone else, the more I started to kind of resent it. It really gets under my skin how he treats Ryne for like, the entire time until Minfilia Prime's final departure. The narrative kind of treats it like oh, he just has a hard time expressing how he really feels! and honestly I don't fully agree with that framing. I think Thancred's cold and harsh attitude toward Ryne does reflect how he really feels at that time—namely, he's angry and lonely and upset for valid reasons, but he's taking them out on a teenager who's fully dependent on him for her survival, to the point that she admits she thinks he hates her. His legitimate pain doesn't justify that to me, and it really kinda chaps my ass how everyone just agrees that he's the one with the most claim to call Ryne family, when Urianger was far kinder, gentler, and more comforting to Ryne than Thancred ever was. And Urianger was in pain too. He also regrets what happened to Minfilia, and his part in it. He was carrying a terrible secret that he couldn't tell his closest friends, which put one of those friends' life in danger. He just owned his feelings, instead of taking them out on a scared kid. I know my bias is obvious, and I swear I don't hate Thancred 😛 but I really didn't like his behavior here and I wasn't really satisfied with the way the narrative handled it.

Probably my least favorite part of Shadowbringers was Vauthry. I just do not like "fat" as shorthand for "evil" and I think there could have been better ways to design him that didn't fall back on that trope. Even Dulia-Chai, a very lovable character in the end whomst we stan, does fall into some fatphobic tropes, and it's unfortunate that in a game without much body diversity (not to single out FFXIV, that's a problem for games generally), we only got fat character models as signifiers for "rich person" (yeah, I get that "fat cat" is the joke, it's just not a good joke) and "repulsive, evil abomination." No love!

On a lighter note, the return of G'raha Tia as the Crystal Exarch was simply wonderful. G'raha was very cute and fun during the Crystal Tower story but his presence was quite short-lived, so we didn't fully get to know him then. I think it's pretty easy to guess that it's him under the hood; he has a distinctive voice and lip shape and also the tower is right there. So the question becomes why he is hiding his identity, what his true motives are, and that's all intriguing! The fact that his plan hinges on his pretending to be the villain at the end and he utterly fails at convincing anyone is… deeply charming. But one of the things I love most about him is the kindness he extends to the people of Norvrandt. Even though his primary mission is the salvation of the Source, he gets attached to these people, offers up the resources of the Crystal Tower freely to improve their lives, helps build a home and sanctuary, fights for the First and becomes deeply invested in their survival as well. He has a huge heart, and I love him. I'm delighted that he gets to return and join the Scions at the end, and it's already been a lot of fun to have him along on the patch quests.

And of course, Urianger my love. 💜 He really shines in this story and every scene with him was a delight, even when I was climbing the walls needing to know what he was hiding. He gets so much good character development in Shadowbringers I could go on for hours about it, but I did especially love the Echo scene where you see G'raha asking him to lie—and you see how much he doesn't want to do it. Urianger's really been on a long arc ever since Moenbryda's death, and I don't think that arc is over yet, but my biggest worry for him as the cracks started to form in his story was that we'd find he hadn't changed, and was lying here for the same reasons he did in the Heavensward patches, and as easily. And that's not the case at all. He hated doing it before, and he really doesn't want to do it again, but G'raha's reasoning is just too strong for him to refuse. I brought it up recently but I think Shadowbringers reveals an Urianger who despite his long isolation really doesn't want to be alone, and does want his friends' understanding and approval and their trust. The look he gives the Warrior of Light if they say they trust him, and then the way he submits himself to their judgment when things go wrong while begging to be allowed to help fix things… god. I love him. And I'll stop there for now, since I'm sure I'll have a lot more to say about him in the future. ;)

Emet-Selch is a fascinating villain, certainly the most interesting Ascian we've seen so far, and the one who finally turns what have been fairly two-dimensional powerful bad guys into a truly motivated and complex faction. My favorite villains are always the ones who believe they're the hero, and there are a lot of parallels between Emet-Selch and Solas from Dragon Age: Inquisition which will be obvious to anyone who's played both games. FFXIV being a more linear story afford the player a lot less choice in how they respond to their villains true motives and history, but there's definitely still an expectation that we will sympathize somewhat with Emet-Selch, and recognize the tragedy of what happened to his people.

Ardbert's ghost, too, was a welcome addition to the story. Between his presence and the role quests (which were 100% worth doing in their entirety), I felt like we finally got to actually know the Warriors of Darkness against which we briefly clashed back in the Heavensward patches, and I really felt the pathos of their story, all they fought for and lost, but also their friendship and how they cared for one another.

Shadowbringers is beautiful in so many ways. The design of the Crystarium is gorgeous. Il Mheg is probably my favorite location in the game so far. Eulmore is a fascinating dark mirror of Limsa Lominsa. The way the game takes the idea of "a world being swallowed by light" and interprets that visually is so stunning. The sky over Lakeland arrests you immediately upon arrival, and the crystallization of the Flood of Light where it was halted at the edged of Amh Araeng is a chilling reminder of how much the First has already lost. The music has also been a highlight for me! I really adore the Shadowbringers music, and it has prompted me to go about collecting orchestrion rolls more deliberately than I had before.

The more I sit and write about how much I loved this expansion, the more I think of, so while I could definitely go on, I think I'll wrap it up there. 🙂

Onward to Endwalker. I'm not making any predictions this time, because I have done my absolute damnedest to stay unspoiled for this one and I know very little about what's coming other than what the locations are, what's been revealed in the Shadowbringers patches, and that it's the end of the big story arc we've been on since ARR. I'm extremely excited.

#afk by the aetheryte #arr spoilers #hw spoilers #sb spoilers #shb spoilers #there is some #ffxiv critical #in here #and some #thancred critical #in particular #i swear it's not hate #just some stuff that sticks in my craw #but mostly this is positive!#onward we go #anne plays ffxiv

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officialgleamstar · 9 months

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I am INCREDIBLY interested in your idea of the omegaverse. Is it the usual "Alphas RAHHHH‼️‼️‼️ Betas NAHHHH‼️‼️"? How extreme do these things get? (Also the part about Carol and Darryl literally had me laughing so hard for some reason???)

the darryl and carol part was supposed to be deeply funny but also sad just like every phone call between them in early season one. like you're laughing but also hiring them a marriage counselor as you're laughing

anyways. cracks open my Omegaverse Bible (a personal google doc of omegaverse thoughts and headcanons that i made in august 2022 because i was being neurodivergent about a fic i mostly wrote and never finished)

i dont always follow this guideline in my writing, but its what i use as a baseline and what i used on my last post LOL so i'll answer using that. to answer your question accurately but very vaguely: i write omegaverse as if non-alpha/omega pairings replace today's homosexuality. it depends where you live on if it's okay or not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ to literally copy paste from my notes:

Male/male and female/female relationships are seen as normal, but like in real life, a lot of emphasis is placed on relationships that can produce children. Alpha/alpha and omega/omega relationships are seen as oddities and are often discriminated against. Alpha/beta and beta/omega relationships are starting to be seen as more common, but are treated better when the coupling can produce a child and are still not treated as well as an alpha/omega or a beta/beta couple. Within beta/beta couples, male/female relationships are also treated better than male/male or female/female couplings.

as for what i am now realizing is what you probably meant, the class structure between different secondary sexes: i don't go as extreme as some people do, but there is like, Fantasy Misogyny going on, yeah. alphas are seen as primary providers, are generally the breadwinners in a family, and “more capable”. betas are seen as level-headed mediators, so they are also expected to go out and have important careers, though they're often passed over in favor of alphas (despite being seen as more reasonable than alphas are). omegas are seen as care-givers and are usually pressured to stay at home and take care of the house and any children a family might have. there's a lot of stuff with pack dynamics as well (group living is a lot more common than it is in real life), but i need to get ready for work soon so i can't fully go into that LOL. but yeah, there is Fantasy Misogyny where alphas are seen as more capable than betas and omegas, but i don't really go as hard into that part of things, and betas aren't seen as useless in the general public.

i actually write betas in... i think a sort of uncommon way? i like the idea that betas aren't a "nothing" instinct-wise, but instead, they tend to adapt to fit a missing role in a dynamic (unless they're with another beta, in which case... yes they have nothing instincts-wise LOL). so if they're partnered with an omega, they tend to exhibit more alpha-like instincts. if they're partnered with an alpha, the opposite is true. these instincts aren't as strong as they would be for a true alpha or omega, but they are present. i do keep the common idea that betas have a weaker scent and sense of smell than alphas and omegas though, i think that's neat to play with. however, they have stronger calming pheromones than either of the other secondary sexes

#buns comics #ask #omegaverse #the neurodivergency is showing. okay i have work in 30 minutes i need to go wash my water bottle and lint roll my clothes

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invaders-forever · 5 months

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Toro's Powers/Inhuman Part 2

alright, last post (here) talked about the powers themselves and how they work with Toro as a character. So what about his relationships, and his place in the team/teams? (another long one) also, his backstory a little bit bc i just want to talk about toro. this isn't english class, i don't need structure lol (much heavier on headcanons)

Let's start with the obvious. Jim. Jim could probably give less of a fuck what toro "is", because he is Toro and he is Jim's son and that's enough. the new powers, i can see that creating some internal angst for jim at first bc toro having the same powers as him kinda reassured him of his own humanity and their similar powers were the first building block in their relationship. but once jim escapes the evil anxiety spiral and remembers Toro isn't going anywhere, he's incredibly supportive. (we see a glimpse of this in canon, where he supports Toro's choice in going to Atalian. the new powers still catch him off guard sometimes, but he's also secretly glad bc it means Toro isn't constantly comparing himself to Jim anymore, and it boosts Toro's self-confidence. (srsly, re-reading this stuff now that i'm not an angsty middle schooler, my boy needs several hugs and therapy. he makes blatantly suicidal comments both in the Torch and Invaders Now, not to mention several times in earlier comics where he makes self-deprecating comments comparing himself to Jim.)

Next up, Nora and Fred Raymond. Betcha didn't see that one coming! Obviously learning you're an entirely different species is going to re-contextualize some shit about your parents, but not necessarily in the way you'd expect. See, Toro's parents were both brilliant chemists (or otherwise chemistry adjacent scientists. the details of how the fuck horton cells work is sketchy at best). Toro never got to know them well, both because of a number of things they were keeping from him and how young he was when they died. Toro himself says he never knew much about his mother when she's brought up in The Torch, and a part of his motivation is specifically to find out more about his parents. Because his new powers are heavily reliant on chemistry, he'll probably be doing a lot of research in that area, which in a way brings him a little closer to his parents.

Iron Cross (the Clare Grueller incarnation) is a character Toro literally would not have met without being an inhuman. Sadly we don't get to see much of them interacting besides mutually telling inhuman eugenics guy to fuck off and/or fight them (a great basis for a friendship if you ask me) Here we enter head canon territory. I personally think it would be really cool if Toro and Clare continued to have a relationship, bonding over inhuman stuff/invaders bagage/generally wanting to make the world a better place without ending up in the news. Maybe Toro helps Clare cope with the implications of becoming one with her suit (he's got a lot of experience with cyborgs androids and the like) and maybe she builds him a computer to integrate into his suit that helps him identify unfamiliar chemicals on the fly, or that can show him how to make specific chemicals (like the human-atlantean switch stuff).

Namor. Oh boy. Um, Namor is complicated. As a mutant he's kind of expected to have some thoughts on the inhuman business, and while it seems like he does in the invaders part of the hydra supreme mess, this isn't necessarily the case. (I'm totally writing a fic on this scene later, but he's faking it to try to get toro to leave/distance himself from toro so he can act like he doesn't care) meanwhile, when it's first revealed Namor's actually pretty chill abt it. So may or may not be a factor, more likely to be a problem if Toro's working with/for/ int the interest of other Inhumans, or trying to mediate between Namor and Blackbolt or something.

Anyway, Namor knows what it's like to be something different than you thought, and even something that doesn't really exist outside of you (toro is inhuman, but he's also a hortanesc cyberg a-la-spitfire, and maybe still a mutant- i'll get back to that later) I think much like Jim Namor is very caught off guard by the new powers. Underneath everything, I think he's still tempted to see toro as a little kid, a painfully vulnerable surface dweller who took a bullet to the chest in berlin (bucky's whole 'that could never be you in there so you don't understand' speech really hit a nerve i think) Oh, and Namor also WATCHED TORO DIE after toro PURPOSEFULLY PUT HIMSELF IN DANGER TO SAVE NAMOR. so yeah, no matter how powerful toro gets, no matter how smartly he uses his power, i think namor has a really hard time seeing toro as anything other than vulnerable. Which brings us to the real hard pill to swallow-

Toro can kick Namor's ass now. At least, if he has the drop. Toro can dehydrate him. Toro can manifest vibranium or other super strong metals that can actually leave a mark on Namor. This is a factor with all the invaders, in that toro has all sorts of new tools at his disposal that can make them miserable, but Namor's the one he's (historically) most likely to come to blows with.

And one final point with Namor (godsdamn, you'd think this post was about him) as i mentioned he sees Toro as vulnerable, perhaps more so than even Jim. And this is important. This is good. Toro needs people looking out for and protecting him, even if he's a lot more powerful now.

Alright moving right along hey look it's Bucky. So, unsurprisingly, powers were never that big in bucky and toro's relationship. And power escalation hit them both, only in different ways, so the power imbalance really feels like it's in Bucky's favour if anyone's at this point. The only real effect I can see this having is if Toro gets sucked into some inhuman/Kree/space thingy that involves Bucky as the Man on the Wall (is that even a thing anymore? I feel like I haven't heard about it in a while but i haven't really kept up with Captain America comics lately) Anyways it could be interesting to see these too in that context. See them have a moral debate. How do they handle conflicting duty. How much chaos can they get into on an enemy starship? the possibilities are very fun

Steve. okay, i could write a whole post about Steve and Toro's relationship and how they're foils/reflections of each other. But that's not what we're here for. There are two major points that define Toro and Steve in this context (and tbh most of their on screen interaction give me more marvel pls) 1. Toro's in humanification and 2. Hydra Cap. Starting off with the safer option, Steve was the first person Toro interacted with as an inhuman. Steve was there when Toro first came out of the cocoon, he's the one who explained everything to Toro and probably the one who got to here unadulterated fears/emotions about it. and given toro's history of being used as a lab rat/weapon/both, i'm betting some things came out. maybe some things other people don't know, which puts Steve very suddenly in a position to become Toro's confident. Someone he can trust and lean on with the stuff he'll never mention around the others. Which makes point 2 hurt even harder.

Even though hydra steve and real steve are different people, even though the steve we have now has tried very hard to make up for his evil clone's actions (oversimplification but whatever). It was still steve's face, and steve's voice, and the damage was still done. Toro, who had confided his deepest darkest fears in Steve, got to hear someone who was for all intents and purposes Steve say publicly that inhumans were so dangerous that they absolutely had to be locked away, with no nuance, no consideration. OUCH.

Toro's also in a tricky spot here, bc thanks to our dear friends Mad Thinker and nebulus soviet scientists (probably dept X) Toro knows first hand what it's like to be forced by forces out of your control to be something or someone else. He knows what it's like to come back from that and face the consequences for actions that both were and weren't his. He feels for Steve, but that doesn't mean he can just let it go.

As far as Steve goes, i think it's just really, really awkward now. He's very clearly still trying to heal the damage as recently as Invaders (2019). He's painfully aware that Toro is an inhuman and was thus very personally wronged by Hydra Steve, even if he isn't aware how far down that broken trust goes. He's spent years mending bridges with friend foe and stranger a like. But toro never mentions it, it's just floating there between them.

Toro was one of the first "mutant" super heroes. I know there are plenty of theories out there about what extent he expired/was related to magneto, prof X, and all the mutant stuff going down in the 60s. Him actually being an inhuman is definitely going to shake things up there, and it complicates the whole Inhumans v. Mutants angle. Could be very interesting both on general and personal levels.

#toro raymond #thomas raymond #invaders #insomnia invaders thoughts #invaders 2019 #invaders 1975 #invaders now #the torch miniseries #jim hammond #namor the sub mariner #bucky barnes #steve rogers #nora and fred raymond #Clare Grueller/Iron Cross 2

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ethereal-engene · 2 years

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the road unknown | wooyoung

pairing: bf!wooyoung x self-insert/OC

genre: angst, slice-of-life, and fluff // warnings: mentions of breakdown, talks of self-doubt, overthinking, general feelings of being & feeling lost, and cursing

summary: One night, Wooyoung is greeted by your crying form and he takes it upon himself to figure out why & how he can help you feel better.

word count: ~2.3k

note: a comfort fic for me and for when the feelings of not knowing where you’re going in life gets the best of you. // inspired by ATEEZ’s song Turbulence + the emotional attachment I have to it.

this fic is unedited so uhm it might be considered “bad writing”

⊹ ੈ♡ — — — — — — — — — — — — — — ₊˚ ‧₊ ๑ ˎˊ˗

Most days, you’re simply existing and living life as is. It’s not as horrible as it sounds when you’re pre-occupied with studying, being a university student, and working your part-time job. Usually thinking about what you’re doing and what to do next (not in the long run type of way).

Somehow through the busy schedule you have and clear goals that you’d like to achieve, you find yourself some nights thinking a little too hardly. Questioning if what you’re doing at the moment will bring you to the place where you want to be & if you’re doing enough. Comparison is just so easy to do. Other people who are walking the same path as you career-wise are doing so much more than you.

If they’re not in the same career path as you, they’re out there having fun with new friends. These were friends that you thought were a lasting friendship as you’ve known some of them for a good majority of your life. However, it’s hard to say that you two weren’t friends and if we’re being honest here. None of us were making the extra effort to catch up with each other. At the same time, you knew that if you ever needed help or advice or someone to talk to, they’d be there.

You’ve accepted that fate. Settling with fact and looking on the bright side - at least you still had friends of some sorts. Besides you knew that you didn’t have to talk everyday with someone to be friends. Nonetheless it still hurts as you watch them post on social media showing off how much fun they’re having with others. Yes, social media is essentially to show off the highlights of one’s life not all the bad. But you can’t help but think about why you weren’t invited.

Maybe it brings you pain ten-fold when the person you called your best-friend ghosted you. Never knowing where it went wrong or if it simply never went wrong. It was a just a test of the time to see how long it would last until it inevitably led to nothingness. For the longest time, it didn’t bother you and seemingly grew to accept that people can grow apart. Along with the fact that they were a social butterfly and you weren’t.

That facade must have lasted a few good months until one night where you were alone, your true feelings and thoughts erupted. The truth was you missed them a lot and they were doing well without you. This friend was there for you when things got tough and supportive throughout the small victories. The last time you texted them served as a confirmation that things weren’t really the same between you two anymore. Longing for their love and sense of comfort, even if it was sometimes bad, was something you had to let go.

Great, you think to yourself. Just another area in my life that is going so well for me.

Nonetheless, you learned to move on from those thoughts and were brought back to what started it all - where the fuck were you at in life? With the long days blending into a blur, it’s hard to take notice of if your supposed progress is going anywhere. Was the effort you were putting in actually to get to the future that you’re working hard for? It sure didn’t feel like it. It didn’t help that you weren’t doing as well as you wanted on this class’s previous exams.

So this final was your last chance to not fail this class. Even though, you know the structure of this exam and how the questions are formatted, the content was a lot to say the least. In other words, the exam itself isn’t ever hard. It’s more of material since it’s much memorization & understanding it.

To add onto that, this class & the material isn’t just one that you can dispose off after the class. No. This information is shit you have to carry around if or when you become certified in your career. One could even say it’s critical that you know this. No one wants a hospital worker or healthcare worker who doesn’t know information about the body.

Sometimes you think the path that you’re walking on is not right for you. But you’ve already set your heart and mind to it. Can’t back out of now or else you’ll feel like an even bigger failure and a lost cause. Dealing with this is just enough.

Sighing to yourself and slowly but surely succumbing to the dark parts of your thoughts. Asking yourself the questions you’ve been pondering since the start of this.

Is what you’re doing now going to provide you the future that you’re aiming for? Can you truly achieve the dreams and goals you’ve set up for yourself thus far attainable? If you fail this exam, what good can you do if you want to succeed in this career? What am I truly doing in my life? And why does everything I work for seem like it’s bringing me back to square one? I don’t even fucking know what I do for work sometimes.

This road I’m walking just seems so lonely and dark. When will this road unknown feel known?

Before you know it, tears start rolling your face. How did it get this bad? You know that trying to stop them will be futile so you don’t try.

As the time passes by, you’re now full on sobbing and not being able to think straight. Stopping every once in a while to take a breather or to the best of your ability. Your face is buried into your arms and wetting wooyoung’s sweater that you’re wearing. Just when you think that the water works have turned off, it doesn’t take long for them to turn back on.

The worst of your thoughts have claimed you for the night. The overwhelming feelings & thoughts clashing leave you so gone that you don’t even hear Wooyoung when he shouts that he’s home.

Normally you’d kiss him home welcome or at the very least acknowledge it. But today, it’s neither. Feeling not too worried about it though, he walks in further to grab a quick snack for you & him to eat. As he’s sure that you need one anyway because of your study habits.

Before stepping into your room, he hears you bawling and it makes him stop in his tracks. He should have known something was wrong if you didn’t greet him at the door like always. You know how he wasn’t too worried seconds ago? That all vanished when his ears picked up on the sounds of your cries.

Pushing that aside, he tells himself that the longer that beats himself up for it, he’s simply losing time that could be spent helping you. Wooyoung has told you countless times that if you ever need someone, he’ll that someone always. Now was just another time that his words remained true.

Wooyoung knocked on the side of the doorway to see if that could grab your attention. To no avail, he silently walked over to you & embraced you into a hug. Only then did you realize that Woo was home. He held and hugged you tight. Whispering soft and sweet nothings.

Was it odd that it made you even more sad? The combatting of the no so good thoughts with love. The balance between the two brings a shift. It was hard to find and give yourself love when all you were doing was helping feed into hating yourself & the progress you’ve made so far.

You wondered how long you’ve been in this state (of mind). Sooner of later, his embrace brought you back to a less chaotic & destructive emotional state. It gave you the chance to finally catch your breath & for heart rate to return to its resting rate.

Wooyoung was glad to see the teardrops from your pretty little eyes come to a full stop. Using his hands to wipe away the ones still on your face, he’d give you a small forehead kiss. Only for him to rest his forehead against yours for a while.

Because it was already night time, the silence was filled with the sound of your’s & his breathing. A comforting silence until he asks you what was wrong. Hesitant to respond as you’re unsure if you can even string together words to describe what is wrong without your emotions taking over.

You try your best to anyway. “I feel like the life I’m living is amounting to nothing. My worries have caught up to me and chased in me into a corner. I can’t escape it.” Stating it as it’s a matter of fact. You take another breath before continuing.

“What if my hard work is all for nothing? If I don’t even know what I’m doing right now, how can I possibly know what to do in the future? I’m afraid of failing before I even get to do anything. This path of my life that I’m walking down is unfamiliar and I’m alone as I walk through it.”

A drawn out mhmm comes from Wooyoung. To show that he was listening and understands where you’re coming from. If he’s being honest, he wouldn’t have thought you felt this way, even though he knows most people go through this sort of feeling every once in a while. The way that you carried yourself was so full of certainty.

Even when you did show signs of weakness, you powered through it. He knew you’d get through this one too, it’d just take longer than the others. It sucked that your bad thoughts and feelings of despair got the best of you.

“My love, do you want my advice, words of encouragement, or just for me to continue holding you?” Asking you with a gentle tone.

“Is it okay if I get all 3? I have no idea what the fuck I need to hear right now but maybe it’ll help me.” He nodded and placed your head to rest on his shoulder. Wooyoung took a deep breath in and let it out.

“I got to hand it to you, my love. You are one hell of a strong person and understand where you’re coming from.” Chuckling a bit before he started again.

“Not to make this about me or anything but that was how I felt during my trainee days and even bits of the idol life that I live today. I was so unsure if all the practice I was putting in for this dream of mine was going to let me debut and be a successful idol. It hit me even harder when I decided to leave BigHit to be with Yeosang. It was fucking scary and it fed into that fear of the future amongst every trainee’s worries.”

Thinking about it, brought back some buried experiences from the dead and the next thing you knew, Wooyoung was sniffling. His eyes watered and some tears were shed as he remembered all of the uneasiness and challenges. All of the trouble it took him to grab a hold of his dreams and not letting go until it became a reality.

He has walked the road unknown too but just as he told Yeo, “The road you walk to the unknown is no longer alone! You have me by your side, for now and for as long as we live.” Tugging Yeo closer to him with a cheery tone and cheeky smile plastered on his face. Yes, he admits it a bit cheesy but he meant it. Wooyoung also admits that it was a way for him to mask the uncertainty that they would go through together.

Fake it till you make they say. Besides giving into that doubt would do no good. Of course, it’s okay to revel and live in it for a while but eventually you’ll have to get out of it before you fall so deeply.

A sense of deja vu washes over Wooyoung as he repeats the sentence to yet another person he deeply loved. And as the saying goes, he tells you just as he did to Yeo.

“The road you walk to the unknown is no longer alone. The road may be unknown but there are people like me that will walk with you until it becomes known. Don’t worry too much about the future, princess. You still have to time to see it through. Worst case scenario, you fail and have to restart. At least you can say that you tried your hardest and I think it counts for something even if it gave you an undesired outcome. I’m very proud of you for how come you’ve come, and even more so of how much further you can continue to go.”

Listening to Wooyoung when he’s being sweet and sentimental, it causes you to silently cry again. It wasn’t his intent at all. Now he’s rubbing your back. It’s the hearing someone is proud of you that gets the waterworks up and streaming.

Moments after, when you think you’re done crying, Wooyoung takes you the kitchen. Making sure that you hydrate since you’ve been at it for god knows how long. You take this time to hug him as a thanks for being there for you. Hearing that you’re not alone on this journey of life and your career, puts your heart and mind at ease.

You know that Wooyoung wasn’t planning on being welcomed home by finding you vulnerable. Out of all the things that he could have done like leave or ignore you, he chose to do his best to comfort you. This choice that he made would be something you’re forever grateful for.

The feeling of being lost will come and go. It isn’t fun to go through but they can serve as a reminder that finding your life’s purpose isn’t limited to one answer. The answer comes in many forms. As you change as a person throughout your life so will your values and that’s okay.

extra note: thank you for reading whatever this is <3 please do take care of yourself. and for anyone maybe wondering about me(??), I’m okay ahaha. sometimes all I or we need is a good cry and letting it out.

#k-radio!#kflixnet #klibrary #ficscafe #underworldnet #wooyoung x reader #wooyoung x OC #ateez wooyoung #jung wooyoung #ateez x reader #atz wooyoung #wooyoung imagine #wooyoung fic #wooyoung fluff #wooyoung angst

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