#but ideas about a text do not exist in a market and there is no upper limit to the amount of interpretations that can exist

[cheesycatz]

WORMTON AU MASTERPOST

"Spamton G. Spamton is just a normal spam program making ends meet by tricking darkners into buying his garbage. At least, that's what he tells a blue addison he accidentally wins over, as well as their friends. He won't fall for their genuine words and pure compassion, though. A salesman and a manipulator are one and the same, and neither can trick the other.

…right?"

AKA: Spamton, but he represents a computer worm as a darkner. He's some sort of 15 foot long fluffy parasitic alien centipede worm creature, and the Sweepstakes worm represents what his species's parasitic hatchlings look like after they slowly consume and kill their host from the inside out. Spamton is the last of his species left after they were exterminated (representing a computer worm being downloaded onto a computer and eventually fought off). He wears a disguise to hide his worm status so that he may interact with the general public without being reported and killed by an antivirus. He doesn't meet the addisons until after the extermination of his species. Hope he doesn't form any emotional attachment that would be severed if they found out what he really was, haha

This AU exists mostly in the form or art and text posts, but I am currently working on a fanfic about Wormton and the addisons, which will start being posted to ao3 once I finish the entire rough draft.

Links below to all: lore, art, question answers, marketable plushies, and fic updates ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️

Lore (art included)

Initial lore post

- The basics. Describes the general characteristics, infection process and behavior of malworms (darkner version computer worms). Also describes the extinction of Spamton's species, his origins, and the setup for his interactions with the addisons.

More malworm biology

- More information on malworm culture/biology and Spamton's specific species (the BIGSHOT malworm). Woah, say that 10 times fast...uh, also more information on the extinction of Spamton's species.

Size comparison and more biology

- A sketch dump showing a size comparison between the addisons and masked/unmasked Spamton. Also features some general sketches of BIGSHOT malworms and some more information on their biology.

Spamton before he met the addisons

- A sketch page + text on some scenes from Spamton's life from before he met the addisons.

General info/designs of malworm genera

- Not much Spamton here. It's just a look at what the other types of malworms might look like.

Art (sometimes a smidgen of lore)

Spamton and the addisons (pre-reveal)

Annoying Mouse Room™ Infinite Food Hack

The Worm Nest

How Wormton's costume works

Pros of not having a spine

Late night worm posting

Q&A

My asks are open, so feel free to ask me any questions about my AU or art in general (within reason, obviously)! I like drawing responses when applicable, so feel free to give me a wormton drawing request and I might consider it.

Asks from Instagram about lore

Can malworm/wormton fanart be made? (Yes pretty please I would love fanart)

Plushies

Why did I make ten spamton worm plushies? I fear that number may increase

My Worm Collection

Spamton Plush Wormton Outfit

Fic Updates

Sometimes I post art and some thoughts about the Wormton AU fic I am working on. I won't be publicly posting it until I finish the rough draft of the entire story. I am maybe halfway? I'm doing my best, but I'm also dealing with life's responsibilities and making other art. I have no idea for a release date yet, but I don't plan on giving up.

Chapters 1-10 are in a first-draft state with no dialogue. Once the entire story has reached this point, I will finish each chapter one by one and post them as I do. As previously mentioned, chapters will be released on ao3 once finished. As of 04/22/24, it is: 102k words long

86k words update

100k words update

Thank you for enjoying my silly little AU, I love reading your tags

#spamton #deltarune #wormton au #cheesycatz text posts

[txttletale]

Your discussions on AI art have been really interesting and changed my mind on it quite a bit, so thank you for that! I don’t think I’m interested in using it, but I feel much less threatened by it in the same way. That being said, I was wondering, how you felt about AI generated creative writing: not, like AI writing in the context of garbage listicles or academic essays, but like, people who generate short stories and then submit them to contests. Do you think it’s the same sort of situation as AI art? Do you think there’s a difference in ChatGPT vs mid journey? Legitimate curiosity here! I don’t quite have an opinion on this in the same way, and I’ve seen v little from folks about creative writing in particular vs generated academic essays/articles

i think that ai generated writing is also indisputably writing but it is mostly really really fucking awful writing for the same reason that most ai art is not good art -- that the large training sets and low 'temperature' of commercially available/mass market models mean that anything produced will be the most generic version of itself. i also think that narrative writing is very very poorly suited to LLM generation because it generally requires very basic internal logic which LLMs are famously bad at (i imagine you'd have similar problems trying to create something visual like a comic that requires consistent character or location design rather than the singular images that AI art is mostly used for). i think it's going to be a very long time before we see anything good long-form from an LLM, especially because it's just not a priority for the people making them.

ultimately though i think you could absolutely do some really cool stuff with AI generated text if you had a tighter training set and let it get a bit wild with it. i've really enjoyed a lot of AI writing for being funny, especially when it was being done with tools like botnik that involve more human curation but still have the ability to completely blindside you with choices -- i unironically think the botnik collegehumour sketch is funnier than anything human-written on the channel. & i think that means it could reliably be used, with similar levels of curation, to make some stuff that feels alien, or unsettling, or etheral, or horrifying, because those are somewhat adjacent to the surreal humour i think it excels at. i could absolutely see it being used in workflows -- one of my friends told me recently, essentially, "if i'm stuck with writer's block, i ask chatgpt what should happen next, it gives me a horrible idea, and i immediately think 'that's shit, and i can do much better' and start writing again" -- which is both very funny but i think presents a great use case as a 'rubber duck'.

but yea i think that if there's anything good to be found in AI-written fiction or poetry it's not going to come from chatGPT specifically, it's going to come from some locally hosted GPT model trained on a curated set of influences -- and will have to either be kind of incoherent or heavily curated into coherence.

that said the submission of AI-written stories to short story mags & such fucking blows -- not because it's "not writing" but because it's just bad writing that's very very easy to produce (as in, 'just tell chatGPT 'write a short story'-easy) -- which ofc isn't bad in and of itself but means that the already existing phenomenon of people cynically submitting awful garbage to literary mags that doesn't even meet the submission guidelines has been magnified immensely and editors are finding it hard to keep up. i think part of believing that generative writing and art are legitimate mediums is also believing they are and should be treated as though they are separate mediums -- i don't think that there's no skill in these disciplines (like, if someone managed to make writing with chatGPT that wasnt unreadably bad, i would be very fucking impressed!) but they're deeply different skills to the traditional artforms and so imo should be in general judged, presented, published etc. separately.

#ask #ai art

[centrally-unplanned]

The Clarkesworld AI Spam issue is one of those stories that to me really highlights the limits of the tools that hype is obscuring. Clarkesworld is a well-established Sci-Fi publishing magazine that today had to suspend all of its submissions due to being overwhelmed by ChatGPT generated entries:

This inspired a lot of discourse around the idea of a ‘crisis of credibility’ on the internet, AI sweeping away the boundries of authenticity in a flood of forgeries. How can magazines even operate in this new environment, one might ask?

Which is weird because this environment isn’t new at all, as the editor, Neil Clarke, comments on in his blog post around the problem:

Since the early days of the pandemic, I’ve observed an increase in the number of spammy submissions to Clarkesworld. What I mean by that is that there’s an honest interest in being published, but not in having to do the actual work. Up until recently, these were almost entirely cases of  plagiarism, first by replacing the author’s name and then later by use of programs designed to “make it your own.”

The issue isn’t that spam exists, its the quantity:

This is undoubtably a gigantic spike, and 100% it is induced by ChatGPT.

But hold on - is ChatGPT actually *better* at this that previous spam tools? Niel doesn’t think so, even if he is worried about the future: 

I’m not going to detail how I know these stories are “AI” spam or outline any of the data I have collected from these submissions. There are some very obvious patterns and I have no intention of helping those people become less likely to be caught...

... What I can say is that the number of spam submissions resulting in bans has hit 38% this month. While rejecting and banning these submissions has been simple, it’s growing at a rate that will necessitate changes. To make matters worse, the technology is only going to get better, so detection will become more challenging.

And how expensive was the plagarism before to do anyway? It was copy-pasting text, automated word replacement programs, and done, that is trivial. Its a little harder than ChatGPT, sure, but you could make a thousand in a day no sweat, automated scripts randomizing names and jumbling nouns from a list. 

The success rate also seems to be zero! Neither plagarism nor ChatGPT generates any story worth a damn, these aren’t being accepted. Neil is quite confident he is catching 100% of them and I believe him on that, these tools cannot write good fiction of any length beyond a paragraph. 

So what is the ChatGPT’s advantage over previous, ‘dumber’ spam that justifies a 100-fold increase in spam usage? I am not seeing one, and I don’t think there is one besides marginally lower per-spam costs. Phrased another way, what was stopping someone from submitted 500 spam entries in one month in 2021? Nothing but interest in doing so.

Which is the rub of why this is happening - it isn’t because ChatGPT is good at this task, its because its the hype thing to do. Everyone is talking about it, everyone is trying it out, everyone is trying to find “delta” so they can ride the hype train. A bunch of people, some who may have even had axes to grind against Clarkesworld, have heard of this brand new fun tool and are flooding into the market to take advantage of it. But there might not be much to take advantage of; hype is fleeting, particularly in the face of no results as this effort is getting. As it fails, unless that axe really needs grinding above all else, spammers will move.

All of this to say that this story is, again, not a story about AI at all. AI is just the reason these already-bad parts of the system are being tested in the public eye.

#ai discourse

[hapalopus]

I finished Clan of the Cave Bear and I've concluded that, if you're mad about the misogyny in the book, you didn't read the book.

The book was written during the late 1970s and born out of the author's frustrations with having hit the glass ceiling in her male-dominated career. It was also written at a time where no-fault divorce had existed in the US for less than a decade and was still only a thing in very few states. You cannot understand the book without knowing this. The book is 100% affected by these circumstances - rampant misogyny on the job market and 'marriage' essentially being a one-way trip.

The book is also not historical fiction, as it's often claimed to be. It's fantasy. There are multiple scenes that include telepathy, precognition, and spiritual journeys, and the Clan's spirits are strongly implied to be real and able to affect the world in very physical ways. It's soft fantasy, but it fits in so much better into the fantasy genre than the historical fiction genre.

It's a fantastical novel about the meeting of two species with the same ancestor - the Clan species, who have strictly defined biological roles and function via hereditary memory and instinct, and the Other species, who have no biologically determined roles or hereditary memories, but who are able to imagine abstract concepts and break rules.

Ayla is an Other girl raised by Clan people. Clan people enjoy their strict social roles - to put it simply, men hunt and women gather -, but it's hinted at several times in the book that this is not a sustainable way of life, and that the Clan branch of the tree of life is a dead end. Near the end of the book it's outright stated that they will not survive the ice age. There is no need for subtext: The text condemns the idea of biological gender roles, word for word.

And the way Ayla rises up against these gender roles, and the way the Clan people respond to her, further underlines this.

Ayla tries to play the Clan's game. She holds her tongue like a good woman should. She never speaks to a man unless given permission. She gets into position when the men need release. All in a desperate bid to survive in their doomed society. And it nearly kills he to try and play the role of a Good Woman. It makes her so depressed she stops eating. You know what saves her? Breaking the rules and taking up a man's role, against the Clan's wishes. She takes up hunting, and her passion for the sport keeps her going. The Clan people curse her with death for her transgression, but she survives the Death Curse because of the 'manly' skills she taught herself.

The text states over and over again that gender roles and expectations are bad, and that rebelling against them is good.

The Clan is doomed, in large part, because they define men and women by these ridiculously strict gender roles - going down that evolutionary path (as revealed in Ayla's hunting ceremony, where they call upon the ancient forgotten female spirits that the Clan left behind in favor of exclusive following male spirits) was the cause of their downfall. The Clan has such strict gender roles that they don't even know what to do with a woman who breaks the roles and instead decide that she is simultaneously neither and both sexes at once:

"Woman" in Clan society is exclusively defined by the roles a person plays, but a woman of the Others does not have biologically defined gender roles and, as a result, is not wholly or exclusively a woman.

The satire of 70s USAmerican gender roles is right there and if you can't see it, you need to practice your literary analysis skills.

#clan of the cave bear #no proof reading

[bettsfic]

In reference to your recent ask. I know some writers, me included bare really scared to ingest media in the genres we are currently writing in, for fear of accidentally sounding like the stories we just consumed. Is studying different genres before drafting actually important, like you said books that have been doing well in the last ten years for that specific genre?

first, i think it's flawed logic to avoid reading your genre because you're afraid of copying someone else. unless you straight up take their words, the worst that will happen is that someone will be better than you or have a similar idea as you and you'll feel bad about it. but you need to know what's out there in order to make informed decisions in your own work, in the same way you have to do research to develop a thesis in an academic paper. just because a novel is creative writing doesn't mean you can write in a vacuum. all creativity exists in response to existing work; your work can only ever get better by reading what else is out there, because there's more stuff you can respond to. and if you do take from someone else, by the time your manuscript gets into the hand of agents and editors, anything you might have borrowed will have been distorted into something new or completely edited out.

but that's broadly speaking. while actively drafting something new, writing's relationship with reading is a complicated one. i think it's important to read in your genre between projects (at least), and once you have a full draft, that's when you might want to begin more in depth market research, because that will help you create your pitch. market research isn't reading for funsies, it's developing a familiarity with the greater industry of publishing. that means you may only read the first 25% of a book and then the last ten pages, and move on to the next thing. reading for research is a completely different skill than reading for fun. you take what you need and you move on. your genre, whatever it is, is smaller than it seems, and the more you know about it, the more real it becomes to you. eventually you'll walk into a book store, go to your genre's section, and one out of every twenty books is going to be by an author you've met, worked with, or befriended.

you may be interested in more than one genre, or writing cross-genre, and that's fine. actually, that narrows your work significantly. the world of literary or upmarket science fiction, for example, is far smaller than literary fiction and science fiction separately. it's also a much newer market. if you're writing some kind of experimental, highbrow post-apocalypse novel, your predecessors are the road, station eleven, and a handful of others.

it may seem overwhelming, but the key is to read what interests you and let it inspire your work. ideally what interests you is also what you write, but i know that's not always a 1:1 scenario. then when you're ready to start sending your work out, that's when it's most important to buckle down and see what else is out there, so you're not sending an MS out into the world thinking you've created something wholly original when your basic concept hit the bestseller list last year and that author already sold film rights. you need to be able to acknowledge that other text in your query or pitch and explain how your story is different.

#writing advice #publishing

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

[Text: Tell me, what do you think of people actually liking the character development in season 4-5 and the show's treatment of mental health? [Redacted] thinks that and she's the mother of a teenager]

Re liking the show: I generally assume that they have poor taste and/or media literacy.

Re the mental health rep: I generally assume that they're incredibly privileged and/or ignorant.

I'm posting this as an image and not an ask response specifically because I will not participate in fandom drama or shaming. This blog exists specifically so that people can actively choose to engage in my content and so that I can post critical thoughts without dragging their source into some petty fight. So I'm not going to talk about the named individual. Instead, I'll replace them with the show's head writer and talk about him in a similar context.*

He's pretty famously denied that Chloe suffered any abuse, ignoring her obvious neglect, which came from both parents, just in different forms. When you pair that with how the show handles people like Gabe and Jagged Stone, we see a clear pattern of the show ignoring the devastating effects that abandonment and neglect can have on a person, especially if they're a child.

Now you could look at that and say, "The head writer condones abuse! He's a monster!" But I prefer to go the more likely route and assume that he's a privileged middle-class cis white man who has never had to deal with those issues or support someone who has, so he has no idea how to handle them properly or that they even need to be properly handled. There's every chance that he's a loving, kind man and a fantastic father who just happens to not be very good at writing a complex topic that he clearly has no understanding of or desire to learn about. I apply similar logic to fans who share his opinions. Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence or ignorance.

And all of the above is assuming that we're talking about someone who thinks that the show is objectively good or that the mental health rep is good, which are big assumptions. It's fully possible to enjoy a piece of media that you know is objectively bad or even "problematic" in some way.

Personal confession time: is Loonatics Unleashed an objectively terrible show that you should never, ever watch? Absolutely. 100%. Are Rev Runner and Tech E. Coyote two of my favorite characters who will live rent free in my head until the day I die? Yep! I pulled up a YouTube highlight real as I was writing this and those dorks still make me smile even though the show is terrible on multiple levels and I know that I'm not alone in that sentiment. Those two clicked with a lot of people for some reason.

A piece of fiction need not be good for you to love it and you don't need to justify your love for a piece of fiction if you're not claiming that it's good. Similarly, people hating that piece of fiction or pointing out flaws in it is not a reflection on you in any way shape or form. You can even agree with their criticism and still love the piece of fiction. This approach to media - loving a thing in spite of its flaws - is normal and healthy and I'd really love to see it make a comeback in younger fandoms.

Like, I cannot emphasize this enough, most fandoms consider it perfectly normal to have lots of fans who are critical of the source or who have even lost interest in the source for one reason or another, but they still like some element of the source enough to want to create/consume fan content for it. These more critical fans arguably make some of the best fan content because looking at canon and saying "That's nice, let me show you how I'd do it" often leads to some of the most complex stories that you'll see in fandom spaces. Stories that can often blow canon out of the water for TV shows and movies since fanfic isn't limited by budgets or studio policies or marketability concerns. Fans who think that the source is perfect tend to just write fluff or romcom type fics, which is not a dig! I love bother of those genres! But woman does not live on fluff alone.

Obviously there's some complexity here because who decides if a show is bad? Saying "it's okay that you like a terrible thing" can certainly sound like an insult and prompt a feeling of needing to defend the thing, which is why I don't fight with fans who like the show. There's really no need to convince them that the thing they like is bad. Do I think it is? Yes. Does it matter if they disagree? No, not really. At worst, they create stories with similar issues and, well, they're not the only ones and fighting with them isn't going to stop them. You're much better off focusing on creating your own good media and trying to get that popular. Heck, even if you made the head writer see all of Miracuous' flaws, it wouldn't change anything. The show is already made.

So, yeah, I don't really assume anything bad about people who think that miraculous is good. I know lots of wonderful people who have terrible taste in media and I'm still friends with them. I just don't take recommendations from them.

It's important to remember that, when you're online in a fandom space, a person is condensed down to a very tiny snapshot of who they are and judging a person solely off of their thoughts regarding a poorly written kids show is a dangerous path to tread. Like, looking at this blog, you might assume that I spend all of my time thinking about miraculous and obsessing over its flaws, which is very much not the case. I actually have this blog specifically so that I don't obsess over miraculous' flaws because I've found that, when something is bothering me, writing it down or talking to someone about it is the best way to stop thinking about it. Even then, most of my posts are reblogs of stuff I come across while browsing my tumblr feed, which is not solely miraculous content. I mostly interact with the show by creating non-salty fanfic that I honestly enjoy writing and find to be a relaxing, positive outlet.

It's human nature to judge and it's totally normal to think that a person's an idiot because of something they post online, but be careful to not lean into those thoughts too hard. At the end of the day, Miraculous is just a stupid kids show that will fade from the popular consciousness a few years after it stops airing. If it and/or the fandom are negatively affecting your mental health, then it's okay to step away for a while or use the block button. It really is your best friend. I enjoy being critical about Miraculous specifically because it's not that important. While I do think that kids deserve better media, I don't think Miraculous is some terrible evil harming the youth. I'm not horrified when a kid watches it, it's just not a show that I'd encourage them to watch and, if the kids was close to me, we'd spend a lot of time talking about the bad things that the show showcases from time to time. There are lots of episodes that are fine and I can think of way worse kids shows. Shows that tell their horrifying morals really well, making a kid far more likely to pick up on them and internalize them.

*Note that I only feel comfortable talking about the head writer like this because he's a public figure with an active social media presence AND because I'm not @ing him. If he was a private person or if he was not a professional creator, then I would not talk about him like this and even in that context I try to avoid it whenever I can. You can think that he's a terrible writer, but he's still a human being and, as far as I'm aware, nothing he's done deserves people harassing him.

I absolutely understand how devastating it can be to see a story you love get ruined by the creative team. The first time that happened to me, the life lesson I came away with was, "I will no longer put my happiness in the hands of another creator. I will enjoy stories, but I will temper my expectations and remember that they're just another human being and it's completely possible that their vision for this seemingly awesome story may end up being terrible."

#ml writing salt #ml writing critical #ml fandom salt #fandom salt #ask response

[spicesweet]

good morning, girls! ˚₊‧꒰ა ☆ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚

today I woke up feeling pink as fuck. luckily for me, that's the color of 90% of my stuff and clothes, so I'm already in full Barbie mode. some days I just wake up feeling like a particular color, and days of pink are often my favorite ones!

I'm so excited about life too; everything feels like it's falling into place once again after all the changes I've been making, and this new routine feels less like a novelty that I might drop from at any moment and more like a familiar, steady ship across calm waters. I just need to polish my mindset around it, to stop framing and seeing myself as I used to, to completely remove the idea of incapability and of attachment to bad behaviors that I've always had of me.

I had a good test of my commitment to myself this week. I saw a scene at the market - a person, actually - and I desperately wanted to pick up the phone and send a message to an old friend, one of the ones I cut ties with this year after years of hurting. I stopped on my tracks, and I could literally sense it: this is a test. a test to see if new me is capable of stopping old me from taking over and making the same mistakes. I knew what would happen: if I text her, she'll drag me into her vortex of melancholy again; she'll use me as a therapist and ignore me as a friend again; she'll never ever care for anything I have to say or do that isn't related to her problems and her sadness; she'll make me feel disposable again. and so I put the phone back in my pocket.

I know it's a small gesture, but to me it felt like I passed. it immediately felt correct. the lesson was very clear: cutting ties with people who've repeatedly hurt me doesn't mean I'll magically forget about them, about all the times we've spent together, all the happy memories and all the affection I had for them. I'll always have moments where I'll go, oh, that person would've loved this, oh, that person would get this joke, but that doesn't mean I have to go back to sharing my life with these people.

this brief impulse I had of texting my old friend made me realize that the person I expected to pick up the phone no longer exists anyway; the friend I was seeking was the one I had in the past, before she started to hurt me. so I get to keep my good memories and let go of the rest: that's the price I'll pay for peace, I guess.

I picked up the book "Exercised" by Daniel E. Lieberman again yesterday and so far I'm really loving it. I can tell it's going to revolutionize my relationship with fitness. though it also makes me want to get running a lot.

yesterday I got all my plans done except painting my nails and listening to Beyoncé's new album, so today I'm gonna prioritize these two.

but first, coffee. and pilates. ༺♡༻

#spicelog #clean girl #it girl #girlblogging #this is a girlblog #dream girl #becoming that girl #that girl energy #wonyoungism #self confidence #self care #self improvement #self development #self love #girl journal #self growth #wl journey #wellness girl #health and wellness #pink pilates princess #it girl mentality #healthy lifestyle #dream life #level up journey #becoming her #healthy girl #healthy living #personal development #wl diary

[theresattrpgforthat]

THEME: Revolution

This week’s games have to do with rising up against oppression and tyranny! A very important note: while the tone and tenor of the following games vary in severity, it is a good idea to use safety tools for your table when running these kinds of games, as it is easy to fall into territory that can be uncomfortable to your players. I recommend you check out tools such as the X Card, by John Stavropoulos, and Lines & Veils, by Ron Edwards.

When the Guilds Pay in Copper, Crime Pays In Gold, by Andrew J. Young.

Ostentia is a city of wealth, magic, and incredible disparity. The city's alchemy guilds hold all the power, with squads of street-level enforcers and an army of mercenaries playing the guilds off each other. The common folk are hired by the guilds to serve in alchemy rituals, draining life from their bodies, paying them their purse of coppers, and sending them home until the next day.

What the city needs is a revolution, but the best you can do is retribution. And distribution. Thwart the guilds' exploitative plots and steal as much gold as you can. And when the job is done, go back to your family, friends, and familiar haunts. Spend your gold to improve your character and use downtime to help your community.

When the Guilds Pay in Copper, Crime Pays in Gold is a two-page tabletop RPG designed to be played with 2 or more players, one of whom should take on the role of a Story Guide to facilitate scene setup and NPC actions and dialogue.When the Guilds Pay in Copper, Crime Pays in Gold's system uses dice pool mechanics with d6s.

If you’re interested in Blades in the Dark but want less pre-defined setting, less rules, and more magic, you might want to check this game out. The players of this game are fighting back against guilds using underhanded methods, but the gold they manage to steal goes into community help, rather than a retirement plan. If you want to hit the bourgeoisie where it hurts without having to read too many rules, and if you want a lighter feel to your game, you might want to check this game out.

And You Shall Shatter Temples, by Anna Landin.

They may be gods, but you are done being faithful.It's time to burn their kingdom down.

Sing songs with the words they could not take from you. Raise the banner woven from the flags you stole back from them. Arm yourself with the swords you forged from their discarded bones.

And You Shall Shatter Temples is a game about rising up against an overwhelming power that is trying to crush you. All you have is what you carry with you, and those who rise up by your side. Together, you can turn the tide. Together, you can dethrone a god.

This is a GM-less game that uses playing cards and d6s to help determine what you do and where the story goes. The main premise is that there are gods, but you get to decide what kind of world they have ruined, and how you bring them to their knees. The game brings you through three stages, with each stage bringing you closer and closer to dethroning a god. The creator offers the text-only version for free, and encourages that you support real-world causes that fight oppression instead!

Hunting Billionaires for Sport, by Vex Chat-Blanc.

It's exactly 1 year since people first started hunting billionaires for sport. In that time the sport has grown at an extraordinary rate, giving rise to both the Extrajudicial Means Distribution Union and Nero.tv. Nations around the world have enacted a total ban on firearms and ammunition sales, as well as dedicated buyback schemes for existing guns. Science and arts have seen a simultaneous market boon, and their advances have integrated seamlessly into daily life. Welcome to 2023.

A game for 1 session runner and 2-5 hunters. It's easy to pick up, simple to explain, provides a quick reference sheet for those new to the rules. It contains interesting and variable character advancement, and a progressive and gentle introduction to more advanced rules. World-building, character background, collaborative action, and character retirement are all tied together mechanically.

If you want to see a game where Billionaires’ greed is what allows for the revenge of the masses, this is the game for you. The setting is incredibly tongue-in-cheek, and the characters are both powerful and competent. Character skills are classified as either Limelight (flashy) or Lowlight (concealed), and can be Active, Passive, or Reactive. You’ll also have Beats that drive your character forward and tie you into the fiction, as celebrities on a high-profile streaming service. If you like the idea of turning modern capitalism back onto itself, this might be the game for you!

Compromise / / Empire, by Swamphen.

The forces of the Empire, the forces of totalitarianism and exploitation, are invading. They have secured a foothold, and want complete control. Their soldiers trample the land, their spies and diplomats are in your places of power, time is limited.

You represent a faction. One of the factions who are working to resist the Empire. As a representative you must extend a hand and form whatever alliances you can with the other factions at play. Resisting the Empire will cost you, and your faction. Compromises must be made.

Compromise//Empire is a GMless roleplaying game for 2-3 players about forming temporary alliances and resisting empire. Each player takes the role of a faction forced into an unlikely alliance. You must represent your agenda while making compromises to fight against the forces of empire.

This is another game that allows you to decide exactly what kind of world you’d like to play in. Crises will arise over the course of the game, and you will attempt to find a solution that makes you and your allies happy. Success is not guaranteed in this game - you may find a way to work together, but your plans may also fall apart. If there is a setting or game you’d like to set-up for, this is an excellent option! 

Voidheart Symphony, by UFO Press.

here’s a wound in the world, a rot eating at hope and community and empathy. You’ve seen it in dark alleyways and gleaming boardrooms, gifting terrible power to those who will use it to hurt others. You’ve had enough. You’re going to dive through that wound into the nightmare castle on the other side. You’re going to find the avatar of the one bringing you misery, and strike them down.

But what’s next, once you’ve stolen their power and ruined their ambitions? Will you return to your daily grind? Cherish those who are close to you? Or revel in the power you have taken from the void? Because within that wound, the castle waits, and it is hungry.

Voidheart Symphony is a tabletop roleplaying game about mundane people diving into a demon-filled labyrinth to save the ones they love. Based on Apocalypse Worldand Rhapsody of Blood, it’ll fill your story with dramatic choices and dynamic action. Your rebels each have a core strength – they may be an Authority, a Provider, a Watcher. But your enemy is far too great for you to face alone. 

If you’re interested in the Persona series, this game is probably up your alley. Shadowy powers lurk behind everyday folks, and your rebellion may not ever make it to the front page. You are heroes behind the scenes, fighting for the freedom of folks who may never know to thank you. If you like the idea of being unsung heroes in the modern day, you should check this game out!

Spire: The City Must Fall, by Rowan, Rook & Decard.

Spire is a mile-high impossible city, older than anyone can remember. Two hundred years ago, the high elves – or aelfir, strange and beautiful masked creatures from the far north – took it from the dark elves by force. Now, they graciously allow dark elves, or drow, to live in the city if they perform four years of service to an aelfir lord once they come of age. Spire is crumbling from within and without; it is ancient, and has been built and rebuilt countless times, and at the centre of the mass there is a jagged, weeping hole in reality called the Heart. It is a nightmarish, dizzying place of perverse luxury and widespread destitution, where drow labourers toil in vast gardens and sweltering factories to produce treasures for their masters.

Spire is a roleplaying game about desperate revolutionary dark elves caught up in a secret war against the high elves, or aelfir, who rule the towering city of Spire. The world of Spire is a brutal one, and players can expect to see their characters suffer at the hands of their oppressors, or their rivals; bodily harm, psychological scarring and reprisals against their allies are commonplace. But for those willing to do what it takes, Spire is on the brink of full-scale rebellion, and you are poised to push it over the edge.

This game uses a D10 system that uses dice pools to determine success -  the highest number indicates whether or not you are successful, and how successful you are. The rebellion in this game is dark and vicious; the characters are pushed to do terrifying things in the name of death, vindication, and revenge. This is a fantasy game through and through, but make sure to bring some safety tools to the table, as a game of Spire can easily turn bloody and grim.

If you are interested in this setting but want a game about dungeon-delving instead, you can try Heart: The City Beneath, by the same company.

Previously advertised games that fit this theme:

Balikbayan: Cyberpunk Elementals escaping enslavement. Brinkwood: Brigands fighting against Vampires. Rising Tide: Eco-Justice pirates hitting Corporations at sea.

#game recommendations #eat the rich #dnd #tabletop games #indie ttrpgs #revolution

[kickingitwithkirk]

Snow Globes and Forgiveness

Summary: Even though Chucks no longer creating the narrative, it’s not a Winchester Christmas till something goes wrong.

Pairing: Dean Winchester x Sam Winchester

Word Count: 3194

Warnings: wincest, cursing, m/m kissing, frottage, my attempt at flangst

For: @thepromiscuousduck @spnfanficpond Secret Santa exchange 2023

A/N: set after 15.19 & in this AU 15.20 doesn’t happen

A/N II: Apologies to all other participants for taking so long. Between a last minute switch, couldn’t rewrite until after new year & had a rebound of a bad respiratory virus that’s keep me mostly offline last few weeks.

A/N III: once again, brevity doesn’t exist in my vocabulary

*no beta-all mistakes are mine

*divider by @firefly-graphics

*gif credit to creator

Sam Winchester has never been big on the holidays.

Let’s start with a specific Halloween party and his disastrous bobbing for apples incident involving a girl he liked. Then there was that one Thanksgiving he’d been invited to by another girl who turned out to have hands like an octopus and spent the whole dinner, as his brother so eloquently put it, playing footsie with brace-face, not three feet from her dad.

Not to mention, others celebrated, or not, Winchester style; his dad either missed it entirely or showed up with a bucket of extra crispy from the colonel and passed out on a couch. The best was that one Christmas before Dean went to hell a few months later.

But this year was going to be different.

They’d been adjusting to normality reasonably well. Okay, so Dean is the one adjusting better in some respects and said since it’s the brothers' first non-Chuck Christmas, they had to make it extra special. Sam knows this was Dean’s way of trying to make up for all the shitty holidays during their childhood. And knowing his brother, he’s envisioning emulating Mrs. Butters, the wood nymph they accidentally released in the bunker, Jam Packed holiday extravaganza she’d done those few weeks before leaving.

While Dean was getting the tree (Sam would’ve bet more likely grabbing the first one he saw before hitting the liquor store), he sent Sam to pick out ornaments. Sam was trying to make an effort and found himself standing in the middle of a smaller retail chain store's Christmas section, overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices and feeling like a freak for not knowing what to get outside lights and colorful balls.

“First Christmas together?”

Sam’s head swiveled around, “Umm, I’m sorry?” The person who spoke said, “You’ve got that whole I’ve got no freaking idea what I’m doing look, so I took a guess it’s your first Christmas with your girlfriend…wife?”

“Uh, no, no girlfriend or wife.”

“Ahh, boyfriend.” Sam was about to correct their assumption when they continued, “That can be trickery,” and gave him the once over. “I’m guessing he’s not into frills and bows. You should head to the Christmas Market two blocks south of here. There are always booths selling unique or vintage items for the Holiday. Probably find something more appealing than this mass-produced crap.”

After one more glance, Sam thanked them and texted Dean where to meet up with him later, then headed out of the storefront and strolled down the street. He soon hears jolly holiday music and smells enticing scents wafting before entering the colorfully illuminated European style Market and is hit with the sense he’d been here before.

Sam shook his head, feeling ridiculous. Of course, he’d never been here before, but something about this place kept nagging at his memories of familiarity when the irresistible scent of hot, minty chocolate beckoned. After indulging in a creamy, decadent drink decorated with a soft peppermint stick, he walked around, taking in the wares for sale.

At one booth, he found strands of original bubble lights and instantly knew they’d appeal to Dean and his oft-denied inner child; another yielded hand-strung garlands and got popcorn and cranberry ones with instructions on storing them for future use. Sometime later, Sam is laden with so many packages and bags that even his long arms are having trouble juggling them when he sees an elderly woman seated by a table with a simple stand of lights.

The hunter in him was always looking for anything unusual which fit the bill. Smiling politely at the woman when approaching, Sam studied the few antique-looking items and decided they seemed innocuous and relaxed. He spotted an old snow globe, picked it up, and sardonically smiled at how it looked diminutive in his large hand and began examining it.

Sam took time to appreciate its craftsmanship. Its base was silver with hand-worked engravings and an inscription in a language he didn’t recognize. Giving it a shake, Sam watched the artificial snow gently drift over a scene of a log cabin snugly ensconced among evergreens and bare-limbed trees. He got that feeling again. Impulsively, he asked how much he was surprised not to have to haggle over the price.

Carefully taking the globe in her gnarled hands, the woman told Sam that it was crafted in the country of her birth but didn’t specify where. She carefully inserted it into an equally old wooden box, telling him it was explicitly constructed to house the globe to keep it safe during its travels. Sam hears rumbling and glances around, spotting an old pickup parking not far off, and turns back to find the woman has disappeared.

Frowning, he placed the box in a bag, gathered up the rest of his purchases, walked to the waiting vehicle, deposited the items in the crowded truck bed, and then climbed in noticed Dean peering through the cab's back window, “Couldn’t find any more stuff, Sam?” “Couldn’t find a bigger tree, Dean?” His brother says nothing while backing the truck up, “Good thing I got all that to decorate it with then.”

Dean grunted as he set his end into the tree stand and, catching his breath, huffed out, “This would’ve been the time to use some of those witchy tricks, Sam.”

“Or maybe a good time to start working out more and cut back on the burgers and pie?” Sam shot back. “Wadda you talking about?” Dean snapped defensively, “I’m in great shape!” Sam gives him bitchface and says, “Keep telling yourself that Dean.“

Squatting down to affix the supports to the tree, Sam continues. ”You got winded just carrying this down the stairs. We have to face it: neither of us is getting any younger. We had this conversation not long after dealing with Chuck. Yes, we’ll enjoy the everyday things we couldn’t before. But if we’re doing something or on a hunt and get seriously injured, Cas isn’t here to help. And you know Jack is hands-off, so we’ve ….”

“Whatever, Sam.” Dean interrupted, unsuccessfully tamping down his that hurt but not gonna acknowledge it look. “I’m going to take my out-of-shape self and get the rest of the stuff from the car. Unless you’re worried I might, I don’t know, fall and break a hip.”

“Dean, that’s not what I,” but his brother just left, and Sam sighed, knowing he’d put his foot in it again, trying not to express his true feelings. Since they got their freedom from the manipulations of heaven, hell, and all the other things that went bump in the night, the feelings he’d buried and thought were over had come back.

Before he said yes to Lucifer, Dean acknowledged Sam was an adult, and he needed to stop being overprotective. But there is a part, deep down, in both Winchesters that is psychotically, irrationally, erotically codependent. That part in Sam is one hundred percent positive that if Dean found out, he’d be so disgusted by what a perverted freak he indeed was forcing Dean would cut him out of his life forever.

The bunker's door banged shut, and at the bottom of the stairs, Sam paused on the last tread, watching the scene playing out before him in the war room.

“Oh, come on,” Dean grumbles at an ornament, refusing to stay on a branch of the mostly decorated tree. He lets it go, and it begins coming off again. “That’s it, I’m getting my gun.”

Sam couldn’t keep the amusement out of his voice. “Maybe I should’ve gotten some floaters and air fresheners instead?” He can see Dean mulling over that memory, “They were great.” Peering over at his brother, he asks, “Where did you disappear to? Thought you were going to help.”

Sam held up a grocery bag, “A peace offering? I know you aren’t going to change your habits, but I'm hoping we can compromise, at least when we’re not hunting. It’s 90% lean beef, and the pie,” Dean's whole face lit up, “Is made with almond flour and natural sourced sugar.”

Trading the wayward ornament for the bag, Dean states, “You deal with this,” Sam shakes his head when he hears, “Meatman coming to town” and sets about finishing the tree.

After cleaning up, the brothers sit in the library, drinking beer and watching an old Christmas movie playing on a laptop, when Dean casually inquires, “So what’s with the box?” Sam frowned before realizing he meant and remembered leaving the item sitting by the displayed swords. “It’s ahh, well,” Sam stammers as he retrieves the box, sets it on the table, and lifts the wooden lid. Dean raised an eyebrow at the contents, “Something you need to tell me, Samantha?” he snarks, removing the snow globe.

“I’m not sure why, but I'm drawn to it.” Dean frowned at his brothers' words and took a closer look. “What’s the saying?” He asked, pointing to an inscription on the base. “Not sure. I think it's a form of an older Germanic dialect. I was going to translate it later.”

Since nothing is screaming cursed object, Dean shakes it, making the snow swirl before setting it on the table, picking up his beer, and resuming watching the movie. He could feel Sam suspiciously eyeballing him asks, “What, Sam?” But Sam simply sighed, knowing his brother wouldn’t let it go. And sure enough…

“Did Santa ask if you were a good boy this year?”

Sam glances around trying to figure out where he’s at since a moment ago he was in the laundry and now starting at his decades younger self reclining against a headboard reading he hears his, their, name and watches himself huff in displeasure and getting up proceeds to trip over his own feet.

Following himself down a wood-paneled hallway, they enter a shabbily furnished living room, and spots his brother watching his younger self standing by a wood-burning kitchen stove. “Dean?” Turning, green eyes boggle, seeing Sam standing next to his own younger visage.

“What the hell you’d do, Sam?” Dean’s gravelly voice snapped and got Sam’s back up. “What makes you think I had anything to do with this?!” Dean looks at their younger doppelgängers arguing about something when young Sam stomps to a rickety kitchen table, plopping down on an equally rickety chair, crossing his arms, and glaring at its sacred top.

“Man, I forgot how bad your emoing could get,” Dean offhandedly commented, returning his attention to his brother, eyes hooded. “You were working in the library, so it's not hard to deduce you deciphered some curse cause now,” chucking his thumb toward the window, “We’re in the damn snow globe!”

Sam shot off bitchface #37, “It’s not a curse! I determined the words are an idiom. Слова не воробьи, как только они улетели, их уже не поймать.”

“Can you put that in English for those who don’t speak geek?”

“Words are not sparrows; once they have flown they cannot be recaptured.”

Dean got his running it over in my brain expression, “Yeah, I got nothing.” Sam concurred, “It didn’t make sense to me at first. But then I found a maker's mark hidden in the engravings. The records said they were a tradesman and spiritual alchemist.”

“What do idiot words have to do with Nicolas Flamel?” Sam's lips pursed, “Idiom Dean. And you know who Nicholas Flamel was?”

“Yeah, college boy, he created the philosopher's stone, turning metal into gold and some immortality elixir.” Sam waited. “He was in that Harry Potter movie, alright? What does that have to do with why we were here?”

“Okay, hear me out. Spiritual alchemy believers follow various paths to achieve the same goal, believing that, like metal, one’s soul can be transformed through stages of purification.” Sam began explaining the stages, and by the third, Dean heard enough.

“You're saying all the crap we’ve dealt with from heaven to hell has done some kinda colonic on our souls.” Sam began to speak, “Shut up, I’m on a role here. And if we take that idiom literally, one or both of us said something wrong and the idiom-alchy-snow globe Ghost of Christmas Past us to complete this whatever stage with an apology?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“Great! Let’s figure out where here is, get to apologizing and the hell outta this glass ball.” Spying a discarded newspaper Dean tries picking up found he isn’t corporal. “Seriously?” Tipping his head sideways, he says, “Okay, December 22, 1999. We’re in Michigan..or Wisconsin?”

“Dean, what if it's something so bad there’s no way we can ask for forgiveness?”

That response made Dean's eyes narrow. “Sam, you need to tell me something?” His brother shook his head, but every warning signal in Dean was blaring like the bunker klaxon. He’d bet his entire collection of Busty Asian Beauties that Sam knew why that damn snow globe sent them here, but he was keeping it to himself for reasons.

Dean decided to hold his cards and play ignorant for a while longer. “Dude, what haven’t we done and forgiven each other for?”

Turning his attention to their younger selves made Dean feel a sense of nostalgia, missing how less complicated their lives seemed, even with the daily dose of Sam Winchester teen angst, which he always made up for.

Like now, offering to buy hot chocolate and giant pretzels triggered a memory, and the next moment, Dean was among a crowd wandering through the lighted tunnel entrance, following the loop by the salute to the armed forces towards the live reindeer exhibit.

“I remember this!” Dean exclaimed, “Dad left us in Somerset, Wisconsin, and were you all pissy ‘cause I kept giving you crap about this place’s name- Sam’s Christmas Village.”

“What else do you remember, Dean?”

They make a pit stop at the concessions, and while Sam is paying, Dean pulls out his flask, adding a double dollop to Sam’s. The kid needed to loosen up, then exchanged the cup for a pretzel with a smirk.

“This was the first time we got drunk together. Man, you were hilarious! Kept bugging me to go sledding,” Deans said, “And you fell off halfway down and laid there trying to catch snowflakes on your tongue.” Surrounded by softly falling snow tinted in hues of blues, greens, and reds, the brothers experience a memory trace of what happened that night.

Laughter fills the air as Dean staggers over, flopping on his back next to Sam, smiling at him when Sam’s expression changes and Sam leans over, his eyes' kaleidoscope colors disappearing into thin rings around dilated dark pupils as his fingertips caress the smooth, cinnamon-freckled skin and plush lips he was aching for when Dean pulled him tightly against him, noticing an unmistakable hard bulge pressing into his upper thigh as Sam instinctively started rocking his hips, seeking friction for his growing hard-on.

Dean feels his cock straining inside his jeans, slides one arm around Sam’s waist, another reaching behind him to cradle the back of his skull, angles his mouth up so he can drive his tongue into Sam’s mouth, feeling him suck on it with a sharp pull that shoots straight to his cock when wolf whistles from sledders passing by startled them caused Dean to bolt upright and dump Sam onto his butt.

Abruptly getting up, Dean grabbed the ropes of both sleds and dragged them downhill, leaving his brother perplexed. Scrambling to his feet, Sam rushes after, inquiring what happened, but Dean only responds that they need to head out before the roads ice over too much. The silent intensity of the drive back is broken only by music playing through the Impala’s speakers. Sam initially thinks Dean is concentrating on the road due to his intoxication. But Dean’s chewing his bottom lip signals he’s upset, and the knot in Sam’s stomach tells him to stay quiet.

Shutting the cabin door, Sam opens his mouth to speak, but Dean beats him to it, saying he overstepped boundaries that shouldn’t have been and won’t let it happen again. In a panic, Sam blurts out how his strange feelings for years were crystal clear.

“I love you, Dean, and want us to be together…like together together.” Dean shakes his head, “It’s the whiskey making you talk nonsense.” Sam’s stubborn streak surfaces, infuriating Dean, who shoves him back against the door and shouts in his face.

“Stop acting like a freak and go sleep it off!”

Sam feels like an ice pick is entering the base of his skull, and his stomach twists, knowing he’s the reason the person he cares most about in the entire world; he cares about more than himself is reacting like this, watching Dean disappear down the hallway, slamming his bedroom door shut. He fucked up royally, and suddenly his life was a mess when it seemed all was about to align an hour ago, making Sam wants to scream, to throw up.

Moving on autopilot, Sam shuts his room door, grabs his duffel, and haphazardly throws his belongings into it. Then, opening the window, he slips out and trudges back to town, heading for the bus station. By the time he arrives, his feet are so numb he shuffles across the linoleum flooring to the counter, setting most of his hoarded money down asked for the furthest distinction it’ll take him.

A short time later, the bus pulls out onto the main highway heading west as Sam leans against his window, wondering how everything outside seems so normal when his world has imploded. Dean turns his attention from the younger visage before him to the mature man beside him.

“This is why you ran away to Flagstaff.”

“You were right about me being a freak all along.”

Dean shakes his head, “No, Sam, it was my fault. I tried so hard to keep what I felt hidden, but that night..,” Sam's burst of laughter made Dean bark, “You think that’s funny?”

Eyes that never settled their color, hardened by the decades of horrors they’d lived through, were now gazing at him with unworldliness a thirteen-year-old Dean, after confirming everything in their dad’s journal was true, helplessly watched flame out like dying embers.

“No, Dean. The snow globe brought us back for the dissolution stage, dissolving false beliefs. We’ve been at cross purposes all these years for the same reason, each of us thinking we are the problem and the only way out is to no longer deny our feelings.”

Lifting his hand, Sam hesitated to let his fingertips explore the older, but still, so much loved, freckled skin again when Dean shifted, reaching his still-strong hand to cradle the back of his brother’s skull, angling his mouth up and breathed out against his lips.

“Sammy, we’re good.”

SPN TAGS: @donnaintx @lyarr24 @flamencodiva @lassie-bird @nancymcl @spnbaby-67 @leigh70

Sam/Jared: @idreamofplaid

Dean/Jensen: @thoughts-and-funnies @stoneyggirl2 @akshi8278 @beabutterfly987 @smoothdogsgirl

#spnfanficpond #secret santa exchange #2023 #dean winchester x sam winchester #wincest #spn au #dean winchester #sam winchester #supernatural #jensen ackles #jared padalecki

[yangsgirlfriend69]

I made it onto the Indie Bestseller list by posting on TikTok. Don’t do what I did.

IDK how to use tumblr but here are some thoughts

Maybe I should wait to write this, to have a little distance from publishing my book. When I see authors who are at the same place I am — a week and a day out from publication — their captions often sing the praises of their publishers. They’ll mention how grateful they are that all their hard work paid off, that the years of writing and editing and blood, sweat, tears, or whatever other bodily fluids they put into their manuscript were worth it for the moment the book came out.

For me, it wasn’t.

#

The writing process for How to Excavate a Heart was liberating. I came up with the idea while driving to a Long Island Panera (where all good ideas are formed), and started outlining it while eating their dubiously-sourced mac-and-cheese.

I then proceeded to, as I texted verbatim to at least three close friends, “fart out the novel.” I wrote it in about six weeks while on a train trip visiting family and friends, and I cherished every moment of the process.

That was in late 2019/early 2020, and it was the last time my feelings about the book were purely positive.

How to Excavate a Heart (HTEAH) sold in the late summer of 2020, to be published in Fall 2022. I was more focused on my debut novel, Almost Flying, that was slated to come out in the summer of 2021. Which it did, though if you didn’t know it existed you certainly wouldn’t be alone. It earned a Stonewall Honor from the American Library Association, and I think the week that happened it crested to a new high of 20 copies nation-wide or something depressing like that.

Needless to say, I was frustrated by what I saw as lack of support from my publisher, and was determined to not let the same fate befall HTEAH. I was already fairly active on TikTok after originating the Laura Dern Sitting Challenge (my one true claim to fame), but I had heard that TikTok was generally not a fruitful platform for authors, or that, even if authors were popular, it didn’t translate to book sales.

So of course my first thought was, “Why don’t I push this boulder uphill and see what happens?”

So I posted my first TikTok about HTEAH in February of 2022. It flopped in an expected way, but I continued to post about it consistently, and, over time, amassed a small following. The HTEAH hashtag grew (almost all the videos on it were are still are my own), and I was thrilled that people were hearing about my book.

At the time of writing this, the hashtag has over two million views, and I can directly trace over 1,000 individual sales/preorders of my book to TikTok and TikTok alone.

Here’s the price I paid: My girlfriend has watched my mental health slowly deteriorate over this time. She’s seen me quit writing to focus on promoting this book, for the small chance that, I don’t know, someone might care. And now some people do! Hooray.

I spent nine months promoting a book to get it to the sales that it might’ve gotten if my publisher had supported it. Or maybe not — I have no way of knowing. All I know is that if I hadn’t posted about the book on TikTok, you wouldn’t be reading this. It wouldn’t have gotten on the Indie Bestseller list. It wouldn’t have made the Indie Next list. It wouldn’t be a book box pick.

And I wouldn’t be so burnt out I can barely get up from the couch. I wouldn’t be depressed from staring at my phone all day.

Maybe if I hadn’t done all this, I’d be able to write again, to turn in work on time. To live each day without the fear that I’m not doing enough because if I don’t post a TikTok my book will sell horribly like my last one and then that’s it, I’ll be a failed author before my 25th birthday.

What a healthy mindset, huh?

So sure, if you post consistently on TikTok for nine months before your book comes out, enough people will buy your book that you might make it onto a list. But please, I beg of you, don’t. If your publisher doesn’t support you enough to give you marketing, don’t do it yourself. You cannot be an entire team. You cannot be your own publicist.

I am one person. And now I’m done.

Anyway, you can buy my book at excavateyourheart.com and you cannot find me on social media anymore (except maybe tumblr apparently). Stream Loneliest Time by CRJ.

#sorry everyone

[swordsonnet]

there are so many crucial aspects of disability justice that are ignored in online spaces because they are seen as "cringy" or just don't fit the image of the acceptable disabled person who can function well in abled society with some simple accommodations and never does anything too weird. and it leads to selective, surface-level activism that hurts the vast majority of people it claims to advocate for.

sure, you reblog autism memes or posts about hitting ableists with your cane, but how do you react to people who need 24/7 care? who will never be able to work? who can't read complex texts, or read at all? who can't leave the house? who need things explained to them in simple language? who don't have any friends? who struggle with personal hygiene or household chores? who don't get jokes or sarcasm? who consume mainly or only media targeted at children? who act "weird" in public? who walk slowly? who have highly restricted interests? who write or speak in unconventional ways? who are incontinent?

for almost all of these things, i've seen posts with hundreds and thousands of notes, written and shared by people who claim to care about social justice, mocking others for those traits. no, they don't explicitly mention disability, and when you dare to bring up ableism to them, the common refrain is "well duh, i wasn't talking about disabled people!"

but that's the thing, isn't it? it's never about us. we are shown, time and time again, that we don't belong in the exclusive category of humanity, that people would rather not think about us, because we're just too complicated, too much work. well it's just tumblr posts, you might say. don't be so sensitive. but the thing about oppression is that it's never just something. the attitude expressed in these posts is indicative of a larger, much more dangerous problem, one that has infiltrated every corner of society.

beyond a certain degree of impairment, we are seen as less than human. we are forgotten, left aside, at best an afterthought. and that carelessness shows in the social welfare system, the medical system, the job market, every aspect of society we need to survive and that so often fail us.

and beyond that, it's just fucking tiring. it's tiring to be ashamed of things you can't control, because people keep treating them as personal failings. it's tiring to be reminded over and over that people weren't thinking about you, that they're never thinking about you, that you're selfish for even imagining that they might. it's tiring to know that once you stray too far from the norm, you will be denied your humanity, not just by bigoted politicians, but by the people claiming to be on your side.

i'm not saying that all of the things i listed above are unique to disability. but they are part of many disabled people's lived reality, and to deny that is to be ignorant to that reality. if you are willing to accept that oppression is insidious and can manifest in much more subtle ways than outright hatred, that microaggressions exist, that even the most well-meaning people can perpetuate bigoted ideas, then you need to accept that that also goes for ableism.

and neither am i saying that you're a bad person if you did ever make fun of those things. we all have our toxic beliefs to unlearn. but we need to actively choose to unlearn them, and we can't do that if we deny the many ways these beliefs manifest.

here's the thing: bigotry is easy. it wouldn't be this pervasive if it wasn't so seductive. it's easy to find a convenient target to let your anger out on; it's easy to convince yourself that your petty annoyances are actually righteous truths; it's easy to believe that you're infallible and it must be the others who are wrong.

but if you want to be an ally to disabled people, you need to examine the unconscious ableist beliefs you hold, those knee-jerk reactions to mock anything considered socially unacceptable, and actively work on dismantling them. you need to listen to disabled people's experiences (a wide range of them), work through the initial discomfort you may feel, and think about what you can do to improve disabled lives - even if it's just to change the way you're thinking.

(and this doesn't just apply to abled people - being marginalised yourself doesn't make you magically immune from holding bigoted beliefs, so being disabled doesn't mean you can't be ableist. i've seen way too many disabled people on here throwing other disabled people under the bus for being too "weird" or not having the same abilities as they do.)

if you want to support disabled people, you need to support all of us, not just the ones you find palatable.

#idk if this even makes sense but i'm posting it now so it doesn't end up buried in my drafts #disability #ableism #disability justice

[secretmellowblog]

Anyone who thinks AI is going to “revolutionize/democratize copyright law” is a fucking idiot and just as stupid as all those people who thought NFTs would revolutionize copyright. Because no, it will not? It won’t? That’s now how any of this works? You are just lying? It’s the same argument people always made about Nfts— “currently it looks like it’s just a scummy way for Silicon Valley types and big companies to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else, but in our distant libertarian cyber future it will somehow revolutionize/democratize the concept of ownership in some nebulous poorly defined way we haven’t figured out the logistics of yet!”

The thing is. In my opinion the biggest problem with current copyright law isn’t that it allows people to have any kind of rights over the work, or that people having some kind of rights over their work is inherently always bad. The much greater problem with current copyright law is that it is massively skewed in favor of corporations, and benefits them to an insane degree while giving very little to the people who actually create the work. The people who actually make your favorite movies and comics and games usually don’t have any rights whatsoever over their creations, and instead massive companies have complete control over them.

And that’s the whole problem with the unevenness of current copyright law. if I as an individual violate Disney’s copyright by stealing a single image owned by them, or create derivative work/fanfic based on their stuff, they can sue me. But if a big corporation steals my entire life’s work and everything I’ve ever made to shove in a algorithm and create infinite derivative copies, I can do nothing. Theft on a small scale is a crime— but theft on a massive scale is business.

OpenAI is not some leftist project about taking power away from corporations by revolutionizing ownership. it is itself a giant corporation determined to get as much value for its investors as possible. It needs to be regulated. And laws protecting individual working class artists from a massive corporation determined to use their stolen labor to make them obsolete are necessary, actually!

This is not creating a world free of copyright; it’s creating a world where only individuals are bound by whatever rules exists, and whatever pretense used to exist that we had any rights over our work whatsoever is gone, because now only corporations can own things. AI can generate an image but it cannot generate a movie, which is one of the only “products” that can’t be “generated”, so only big companies with the budgets to make larger projects will be able to generate things that can be owned.

I thought we all agreed that the idea that a libertarian world where “~we don’t need laws and regulations let the free market decide and somehow everything will work itself out-“ was utterly stupid, and there needed to be limits on corporate power?

I find it literally insane that people think it’s somehow progressive to cheer on a massive corporation attempting to get infinite power, and that working class artists who are already overworked and underpaid are ~not real leftists- for pointing out it’s wrong to cheer on corporations getting to play by their own separate rules (rules that WE are bound to but they are not), even when their technology relies on the exploited labor of the people they’re going to drive deeper into poverty.

The leftism leaves people’s bodies when you tell them that they don’t actually need a machine whose data was trained by underpaid impoverished workers in Kenya making less than $2 an hour to write free shitty fanfic for them… and that the machine doesn’t create things “withojt labor,” it creates things by finding corporates loopholes to current laws that allows them to avoid paying the people for their labor. Everything you generate with image/text generators is things that are generated by the all the free labor of the artists they didn’t pay, and all the poor people in developing countries that they exploited. It doesn’t create things without labor, it creates things by obfuscating where the labor came from.

#it’s actually very progressive and leftist to root for a massive megacorporation to use people’s stolen labor #it’s actually a daring artistic statement to create auto generated glurge using exploited Kenyan labor

[eightyonekilograms]

Cringe as anti-vigilante social technology

(this a beta edition thought and may contain many bugs)

So @tanadrin made that poll a couple days ago about "which emotion would you choose to erase? fear/shame/anger", and like the plurality of voters I immediately picked shame. It's obvious, right? In my circles there's widespread acceptance of ideas like "kill the cringe that exists within you", "cringe only exists for normies to enforce conformity", etc.

But the speed with which I picked that option made me suspicious, and made me think I need to try and at least steelman the case for shame as useful. If I tried as hard as I could, what is the best defense of shame as a social technology I can mount? I mean, I know what its purpose is as far as enforcing social norms, that doesn't need any explanation, and I'm not on principle opposed to having social norms that people enforce. But as a general believer in modern atomized social liberalism, I'm generally in favor of replacing vague, unaccountable social forces with laws or market mechanisms in most cases, unless this isn't possible. What, in that view, is the cause for shame, or rather, what does shame do that is difficult or impossible to accomplish any other way?

There may be multiple answers here, possibly better than the one I've come up with, and if you know of one please share. But the answer that came to my mind is that this: people have an innate urge to dispense vigilante justice, and that shame (and more specifically, cringe) is the only successful weapon I have seen against this tendency. The others don't work, because vigilantism exists in the first place because people think society is failing to enforce some necessary rule, and so most attempts to rein in this tendency that are dispensed by society only harden the vigilantist resolve instead.

Consider this post I made a while back, about how most attempts to satirize or deconstruct the Badass Vigilante archetype fail, because they still portray the vigilante as cool and sexy, so no matter what an obvious psychopath they are, the audience goes either "whoa, awesome!", or "they may be bad, but they are Doing What is Necessary and their exclusion from society only demonstrates how corrupt and far gone that society is". So far as I can tell, the only way to successfully convey a message that Badass Vigilantism is not something we should encourage or aspire to, is to do what e.g. Lego Batman does, that is, portray the vigilante as a cringey loser whose Dark and Serious Brooding is something to be laughed at.

Another example: there is a general sense that we are in the middle of a Vibe Shift (1, 2 - subscription only, full text here, password is zn9XzYFMYu) that the kind of Culture War progressive anti-liberalist bombthrowing we associate with e.g. mid-2010's Jezebel (or for that matter, mid-2010's Tumblr) has peaked, and while it is not going to disappear entirely anytime soon, we are now on the downswing. And while I would like to believe that this is happening because everyone involved had a long session of introspection where they went "huh, this was its own form of vigilante justice that accomplished very little of substance re: dismantling systems of oppression, while causing extensive misery to people who in no way deserved it", the reality is most people don't think like that. The internal sensation of the people involved is probably a sense of "wow, I can't believe I was ever into that" embarrassment, and indeed, society's memetic immune response supports this theory: we have created pejoratives like "terminally online" to label this behavior as cringe, and that has probably done way more than all the well-meaning essays in the world with appeals to our better natures and the high ideals of liberalism. I wish it wasn't the case! But it probably is.

And again, it's hard to see how it could have been anything else: all the arguments I've seen since like 2012 as to why it was a bad thing to form SJ mobs were just easily handwaved away with "I don't have to listen to you because you're part of the Patriarchy/System/whatever, and so my vigilantism is justified and correct", cringe appears to be only weapon (apart from maybe just exhaustion) that successfully penetrated this defense.

To me this is the strongest case for cringe: I don't see what else can deflate the sense of righteous anger that fuels vigilantism and mob justice. So if we want to continue to discourage those things, for the time being it will have to stay.

[nostalgebraist]

IMO, generative ML models are overhyped right now.

(Generative ML models are things like GPT, PaLM, DALLE-2, Imagen, etc. -- the models that make what people call “AI generated” content.)

I find myself almost wanting to “short” them, in the financial sense.  Maybe I should?  Like, on prediction markets, or just in personal bets.

----

These models tend to have a large “impressiveness-to-usefulness gap.”

Remember the GPT-2 staged release?  OpenAI claimed they were worried about people using it to automatically generate disinformation, and things like that.  And other people worried about this too.

But when it finally did get released, even the scary full GPT-2 just . . . wasn’t very useful for anything?

It was really cool, and did get used for lots of internet art-and/or-comedy projects.

But those are exceptions that prove the rule, because they always hinge on “hey, look at this thing that an ‘AI’ made!”  If you stop caring whether the text was machine-generated or not, and just ask whether it works on its own for some practical purpose -- then the magic disappears.

Likewise for GPT-3.  For the amount of buzz it got when it came out, it’s pretty striking how little effect it’s had on the world in the two years since then.  There are a bunch of GPT-3 startups, but unless you use one of their relatively niche products (you probably don’t), none of the text you read in your everyday life was written by GPT-3.  Except the stuff where the point is that it was written by GPT-3.

(And even some of those startups are doing the “hey, an AI made this!” approach, like AI Dungeon.  In OpenAI’s 2021 blog post about GPT-3 apps, one of the two examples they chose to highlight was Fable Studio, a company making AI for VR characters -- an application where “wow, this AI is so advanced!” can do a lot of the work.

...and where is Fable Studio now?  They’ve, uh, pivoted to NFTs.  Specifically AI for NFTs, and more specifically a behavioral, non-linguistic kind of AI inspired by The Sims.   “GPT-3 is frustratingly useless” is a core part of their pitch for the new project.)

And now people are freaking out about the idea that DALLE-2 will replace human artists, and it just feels like the same story again.

The pictures are pretty.  They’re technically competent by human standards,  as GPT-3 output often is.  Yet they’re rarely actually good by human standards: I haven’t seen a single one that would make me click “follow” if it had been posted by a human artist on tumblr.

And as with GPT-3, it’s virtually impossible to tell the system what to create in the fine-grained way you would expect when collaborating with another human.  Mostly, it just makes a competent version of whatever thing it randomly happens to end up making.

----

Most of the impressiveness-to-usefulness gap is about that last point.  Collaboration is crucial in creative work, and these models can only collaborate with us in a very primitive way.

You can’t impose a house style on them.  You can’t tell them “this is a good start, now here’s what I want in the next draft.”  (Although you kinda can with GPT-3 now, but that raises the meta version of the issue -- can you rely on it to respond to your feedback in a predictable way?)

You can’t ask them to make 500 different video game objects that all look the way the objects in your game are supposed to look.  They can only make 500 objects that look convincingly like they’re from some video game.

If models like DALLE-2 could be told “this is a great art style, now hold it fixed,” and then told to generate many pictures in the same style, then IMO they would be much closer to doing the work of human artists.

But it’s hard to do this kind of thing with generative models without spoiling their magic.

The models get their magic by learning from immense amounts of data, mostly scraped from the internet.  What they are good at is imitating the structure of information that already exists ubiquitously on the internet.

When we “tell them to do things,” what we’re really doing is filling in a piece of some kind of information-structure that can be found all over the internet.  When you prompt DALLE-2 or Imagen, you’re saying something like “make a picture that would have this alt-text,” or “make a picture that would have this caption on Instagram.”

The reason you get such coarse-grained control is because real stuff-on-the-internet is only coarsely predictable from its constituent pieces.

And what’s on the internet is simply what it is.  You can’t just go out and tell millions of Instagrammers to write captions that are more informative in some specific way.  If people are making the data with you in mind, the data isn’t big enough to be relevant.

So with something like varying the style and content independently, there are 2 basic approaches:

- Reify “style” as some specific thing about the image that can be computed automatically, as in the style transfer literature.  This works reliably, but loses the magic: you can control “style” very precisely, but at the cost of using a limited, hardcoded notion of “style” that can’t make itself less limited by learning from massive data.

- Use the model’s innate conditioning mechanism, adding “in the style of Salvidor Dali” or whatever to your prompt.  This gets you a much more nuanced, impressive concept of “style” that gets only more so with more data . . . except that you can’t put anything in that wasn’t in the data to begin with.  You get the information-structures that the Instagrammers (et. al.) gave you, and you get only that, and no more.

I think some narrow versions of the problem will get resolved over time, like the one that is the topic of the Scott-Vitor bet.

But the “Instagram bound,” so to speak, seems like a fundamental limit.  We might overcome it, but only by doing something fundamentally different from anything you’ve seen yet.

#ai tag

[bettsfic]

Can’t seem to write without considering what I would want my author career to be like or what readers are looking for and I feel like to a certain extent this crippled creativity. I’m in no way saying there things should never be considered but sometimes, especially in the beginning it can feel like too much. Thoughts?

it is definitely too much. i used to feel it too. but once i started getting some wins, once i started really listening to the kind things people were telling me over the criticisms, i started to take myself more seriously. and then once i was on the other side of the mentor/mentee divide, when i realized i had been lifted up by writers who believed in me and my work and that i could lift others by believing in them and theirs, i started to see myself as one link in a long chain. and when you're part of a chain, nobody can move faster than you or slower than you; you all move together.

it's natural to consider your audience when writing. it's also natural to consider your market. every artist in history has experienced to some degree this same anxiety. it's the anxiety of creating something that you want to be see welcomed into the world. that fear abates but it never goes away entirely, so you've got to build up defenses against it. mine was 1 part hope, 1 part blind (possibly unearned) faith in myself, and 7 parts spite. hope, faith, and spite can take you a long way. "i hope this will happen," then "i have faith this will happen," then "fuck you, this is going to happen."

an audience isn't something that already exists. you're not a performer walking on stage for a theater of people waiting for you. you're a busker, or a mime, or one of those human statue guys. you're on the street trying to grab the attention of people who don't want to acknowledge you. you're saying, "hey, look at me, i've got something worth seeing," and you wave it around in front of them until they're finally forced to look at you. you're not just a creator of your work, you're also a salesman of it. success is all about the footwork.

and lastly, although novels are made from inspiration and skill, author careers are made of boring administrative tasks. sending your work out, receiving rejections, tracking rejections, finding more places to send your work out, replying to emails, applying for funding, querying agents, filling boxes of text labeled "please describe your current project" but only give you 250 characters to do so. the sooner you separate the ideas of "careers" and "audience," i think the happier you'll be. stories take creativity; careers take tenacity. writing is about words; publishing is about numbers. if you can't have hope for your work, or faith in yourself, or a simmering pool of spite, you can always rely on organizational tedium. you never have to learn how to Be A Writer. you only have to learn how to attach a PDF to a form and hit "submit."

#writing advice #the writing life

[dulcewrites]

adding more to the idea of modern!fmo reader and aemond: aemond is jealous af of the relationship his gf got with his brother and her boy bff (ser quinton my sweet lil meow meow) while simultaneously being the one that’s actually cheating😃

Ok now I’m just gonna do headcanons for modern!fmo bc I’m bored and love the idea (sorry this is long 😭)

-reader and Aemond meet through their moms rather through reader befriending Helaena (let’s say Alicent and reader’s mom are Pilates babes and go to the same studio)

-reader’s mom gushes about how her daughter goes to [insert rich people school], and Alicent is like shut up! one of my boys goes there (meanwhile reader’s mom knows this bc she religiously stalks Alicent’s Facebook)

- Aemond is a English major, with a minor in marketing, reader is studying biochemistry with a focus on plants/plant reproduction.

- they meet at a party Alicent throws for helaena getting her masters or something like that

- the first year of their relationship actually goes well. It’s basically the honeymoon phase, and both their moms think they are geniuses for making this happen

- in this universe, reader knows alys exist from the jump. And she’s like “oh your bestie is a pretty older woman yay 😃😃😃”

-reader is certain something is going on, but Aemond gaslights and lies to her. It isn’t until she finds some ummm.. intimate garments that she knows she does not wear. She’s almost positive alys left them on purpose. This is break up number one

-Aegon and reader become close after aemond, ever the coward, sends his brother to get back some of his stuff. They bond over liking the same obscure rock band

- funnily enough, quinton and reader meet through Helaena in this universe. The entomology major (hel) and the geology major (quinton) work closely at their school

-Aemond and reader get back together at a Christmas party. Aemond promises he’s not even in contact with alys anymore (another lie).

-quinton can’t stand Aemond. Thinks he’s so pretentious with the hair and the poetry (yes he writes it for reader). Aemond thinks quinton is just kind of stupid lmao

-Aegon is the one to tell reader that he def is still fooling around with alys again. Second break up

-this causes a bit of tension between Aegon and aemond.

-reader is certain she is done with Aemond. Then she finds out she’s pregnant :/. She honestly goes back and forth between keeping the baby

-eventually she breaks down and tells him bc she’s scared. Aemond, despite reader’s wishes, tells his mom. He’s scared too :(. Alicent, our queen, is like I’ll take you to the clinic if you want 🤷🏽‍♀️. She loves her kids but she had Aegon young and gets it’s not for everyone

-in the end, reader decides to keep the baby. Daella Targaryen is born 9 months later. Aemond and reader have a very beautiful, expensive sort of shotgun wedding. They have it when daella is a little over a year

-quinton, very drunk, confesses his love for reader in a voicemail she gets during her bachelorette party. Things get awkward for them after that :(

- things are actually kind of good considering the circumstances. They’re young but they also have way more resources than people in their peer group. By this point, reader is working part time at a laboratory trying to cure different illness through plants. Aemond works for his dad’s company

-eventually Aemond convinces reader to stay home with daella. Hints at maybe wanting another baby

- everything is fine, till reader finds texts. She’s not one to snoop but she sees heart emojis and is like “since when does my husband use emojis”. Texts going to and from a “A ❤️”.

-she starts to wonder if all those work trips are actually for work.

-reader takes daella while Aemond is away one weekend. They visit Aegon or uncle egg to daella. Aegon, a practicing defense attorney, is like “babe I can get you a good family divorce lawyer. We will milk him for everything.” 😭😭

- reader hires a p.I immediately, gets all the proof she needs. Pictures, calls, emails. This has started back up since daella was born.

-things get really messy when their half sister, Rhaenyra wants to do a merger deal with another company and their family one. As viserys declines in health, there becomes a struggle for power between Aemond and nyra

-Aemond begs reader to hold off on the divorce till they handle things. She agrees but they start to live in different houses. She plays the waiting game… but through all this craziness she realizes she hasn’t had her period

-alaric targaryen is born, and reader struggles with ppd. She feels a bit trapped. Her parents are telling her to stick through it and give Aemond another chance

-in the end, they end up separating for some time. They coparent, and things are pretty tense. Reader tells Aemond that alys is not allowed to be anywhere her kids or she will go back to get sole custody.

-one of the weekends they are doing a swap, Aemond breaks down and tells her that alys cheated on him. He actually apologizes and for a moment reader thinks that door is still open

-BUT.. she gets an text from a number she doesn’t recognize

Hey it’s quinton. Long time no talk. I was thinking we could get coffee the next time you are in town x

#this is was so long winded I’m sorry soemdkemfm #fool me once asks #fmo headcanons