#just one of those things that needs to be playing on loop indefinitely. for science. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lunamanar · 7 years

Note

What are some of your headcanons on Squall and Rinoa's relationship and how it progresses post-game?

I’m glad you said “some” because the full answer is the biggest reason I write fiction for FFVIII in the first place (I’m just not good at finishing it, eheh). I can do “some,” though.

I suppose the first is simply, “they stay together.” I know, I know, then we can all pack up and go home, right? Nothing more to see, here.

In seriousness, though, I’ve written plenty of doomed romances. I do not see Squall and Rinoa as one of those. I’m not saying there not huge obstacles for them to overcome, or that there are no possible situations where they would break up or be forced apart, or that there aren’t valid interpretations of them who are simply incompatible. That would be unreasonable, and…I mean, just look at fanfiction.net. Of course they could, and of course there are. But If you’re looking for that sort of drama, you won’t find it in anything I write, and I don’t think it spoils anything to say so. But that’s forced me to tackle all of the “well how do they deal with ____?” questions (and really, that in mind, if you want interpersonal tension and drama, sometimes holding on is the hard option). Those questions in turn have led to a lot of worldbuilding and plot points, which then led to a lot of the other answers I’ve given over the last several days. So to say that the entirety of my headcanon revolves around them wouldn’t be too far off-base.

I’m a lot more focused on how they grow over time, as individuals and as a unit, how they overcome obstacles both inevitable and inserted in their path by Yours Truly, and how it all affects how they see the world, how they see other people, each other, and themselves. I really like getting into the gritty details of character development for my faves, and they’re some of my favorites of all time, so I love everything I can get from them, whether it feels amazing or hurts like hell. They give me a hearty helping of both, haha.

With that said, while the game presents a lot of options with Rinoa and Squall as an either/or experience, in most cases I re-envision the scenes so that most of the possible outcomes are true. For instance, my Rinoa initially has a very nice talk with Squall at the FH concert. She says her heartfelt piece, and feels good about it…and then Squall clams up. And Eyes on Me starts playing after the playful jig. That reminds her of her mother, who was quite an example of “we can’t predict the future…” Which saddens her, makes her feel very vulnerable all of a sudden, and when she realizes Squall hasn’t moved toward her or said a damn word for minutes…well, that’s when the other dialogue happens, she gets upset, and leaves.

I even, surprisingly enough, found a way to make most of the dialogue with everyone reuniting at FH work (whether you sent her to D-district or not, with my end result being that she does not go), so…keep in mind the precise version of the game I’m keeping in my head. It’s already a tiny bit edited, although I really don’t think it’s edited enough to be called AU. Just, my headcanons start inside canon, so it’s probably worth my pointing that out. (Self-plug: you can find a number of these on my DA, AO3 and FFN pages.)

Moving on…immediately post-game, my Squall is a damned mess. He barely survived Time Compression and it takes weeks for him to recover physically. Dealing with the mental trauma will take a great deal longer. He’s having flashbacks, waking nightmares, various sleep disturbances, freezing/staring episodes…the whole experience messed with his head but good. He wants to get back to work, but Dr. Kadowaki refuses to clear him. So, even though Rinoa has stayed with him for the whole thing, he’s pinned in the worst place he can think of being: tearing himself apart on the inside and unable to do anything about anything.

And Rinoa has her own…situation. Word is spreading that Garden is housing the successor to Adel’s powers (the whole…thing with Ultimecia is not actually that widely known outside of Esthar), and that successor is the daughter of General Caraway, once “involved” with terrorists from Timber. Galbadia doesn’t like this very much and is demanding answers. Although mostly harmless, Odine is being creepy wanting to “observe” her to see how she “handles” what seems must be an oroborousine feedback loop of Hyne’s powers. Meanwhile Dollet is heralding her as some kind of heroine due the version of the story that reached them: that she stopped Adel and broke the back of Galbadia’s army, causing it to cease its assault on their borders indefinitely. Even the people of Esthar, more knowledgeable than most, seem determined to refer to her as “their” sorceress, and are intensely intrigued by the fact she seems to benevolent. So she is at once a villain, a hero, a science project, and a somewhat holy figurehead she never asked to be. She’s barely had any time to learn how to use her powers, so she’s in a dangerously tenuous position with trauma of her own, even without a boyfriend suffering acute PTSD and maybe some other things, too.

The solution: turn it all off, pack it up, and take a vacation from everything.

Well, ‘vacation’ might be too idyllic a word, but essentially. Edea has decided she is going to rebuild her house, and repurpose it as both a place for her and Cid to retire, and as a sort of Bed & Breakfast, haha, as the only outpost in Centra, in the hopes that adventurous people will have a starting point to return, explore, and repopulate the fractured continent. The repairs on the main building are already complete, so it’s in livable condition, if only barely.

And, sympathetic to Rinoa’s situation, as well as the only person available to her who has the experience and desire to teach her, Edea agrees to take Rinoa with her, quietly, while Galbadia’s attention is still focused on Garden and Esthar. In turn, Rinoa asks Squall to come with her. He’s doing nothing but spinning his wheels at Garden, not even allowed to arm himself for the Training Center. There are only so many laps and pushups you can do in a day, he needs something to do, a plan of action to focus on. Squall is function-oriented, and denied the freedom to perform that function, he’ll run himself in circles until he starts losing screws and bolts.

And his new function, alone with Rinoa and Edea at the abandoned house of his childhood: help Rinoa become the best damn sorceress she can be. Be her “Knight,” her partner in coming to understand her magic skills, even perhaps her target, when it comes to it. Use all that strength he’s gained to make sure that by the time they rejoin Garden in six months, she’s ready for anything.

After some resistance, he agrees. It’s just six months, right? Xu and Quistis can take care of things for that long.

Turns out to be a long six months. This is where a lot of the domestic problems crop up–among the worst of which is that for some reason, Rinoa always takes the soap out of the shower with her and leaves it in weird places and seriously, what the hell, Rinoa?!–but it’s also where a lot of ground is covered between Squall and Rinoa, because there are no distractions, no one else for thousands of miles in any direction. Just the two of them, to hold each other up or crash and burn together.

Oh yeah, and there’s a ghost in the woods across the field. It doesn’t seem all that friendly, either. So there’s that.

But yeah, basically the thing that I think is most important for Rinoa and Squall’s relationship to work is for the both of them to–temporarily–disconnect, focus on themselves and each other. And I think it makes a lot of sense that they both do exactly that. So much has changed for them, so much damage has been done to them and their former lives, even if they weren’t involved with each other, it would be nearly impossible for them to just keep on doing what they’d been doing and recover in any meaningful way at the same time. I’ve seen a lot of fics where Rinoa goes insane because she doesn’t have the support she needs as a very new, very powerful sorceress, and others where Squall regresses and withdraws even worse than he had been while trying to fulfill the demands of being SeeD’s leader immediately after the events of the game. And I think that’s perfectly reasonable. I also think it’s reasonable to just put it all in a box and come back after they’ve done some figuring things out…and maybe having a little adventure on the side.

I’ve talked in other asks about how my sorceresses have the ability to tap into the life force of other people and even bind themselves permanently to a person for the purpose of augmenting their powers. Edea’s house is where Squall finds out that this is possible…not because Edea tells him, but because he finds it in a very old book that had survived the weathering of the house. It’s the sort of absolute purpose Squall romanticizes, and although Rinoa is afraid of the idea and Edea is flat-out against it, it’s something that holds his attention, an idea that allows him to concentrate and a perspective that helps him work through a lot of the lingering problems even Rinoa can’t seem to touch.

Even by the time they finally go back to Garden, they’re a ways off from anything like that, but the idea’s been put forth…

A lot of people have already seen the very end of that particular story, because as an Epilogue, it kind of stands on its own: Miles to Go, a comic I did with @skribleskrable a couple years back, caps things off and marks where they are by the time they come back to Garden: uncertain, still a little confused, but hopeful, and ready to face whatever happens next together.

There’s a lot that does happen, a ton of headcanons I could share, but I should probably stop rambling, as this has gone on for quite a bit. I’ve only glanced over so much of it…I hope some point soon here I’m going to have the time and the space I need to stop thinking about this stuff so much and actually get to writing it.

#ff8 #Anonymous #headcanons #squall and rinoa #squall leonhart #rinoa heartilly #sorcery #succession of witches #story: miles to go #ff8 world #asks

15 notes · View notes

ladystylestores · 4 years

Text

Facebook details the AI simulation tool it built to find bugs and vulnerabilities

Facebook today detailed Web-Enabled Simulation (WAS), an approach to building large-scale simulations of complex social networks. As previously reported, WES leverages AI techniques to train bots to simulate people’s behaviors on social media, which Facebook says it hopes to use to uncover bugs and vulnerabilities.

In person and online, people act and interact with one another in ways that can be challenging for traditional algorithms to model, according to Facebook. For example, people’s behavior evolves and adapts over time and is distinct from one geography to the next, making it difficult to anticipate the ways a person or community might respond to changes in their environments.

WES ostensibly solves this by automating interactions among thousands or even millions of user-like bots. Drawing on a combination of online and offline simulation to train bots with heuristics and supervised learning as well as reinforcement learning techniques, WES provides a spectrum of simulation characteristics that capture engineering concerns such as speed, scale, and realism. While the bots are deployed on Facebook’s hundreds of millions of lines of code, they’re isolated from real users so that they’re only able to interact with themselves (excepting “read-only” bots that have “privacy-preserving” access to the real Facebook). However, Facebook asserts this real-infrastructure simulation ensures the bots’ actions remain faithful to the effects people using the platform would witness.

WES bots are made to play out different scenarios, such as a hacker trying to access someone’s private photos. Each scenario may have only a few bots acting them out, but the system is designed to have thousands of different scenarios running in parallel.

“We need to train the bots to behave in some sense like real users,” Mark Harman, professor of computer science at University College London and a research scientist at Facebook, explained during a call with reporters. “We don’t have to have them model any particular use, so they just have to have the high-level statistical properties that that real users exhibit … But the simulation results we get a much closer much more faithful to the reality of what real users would do.”

Facebook notes that WES remains in the research stages and hasn’t been deployed in production. But in an experiment, scientists at the company used it to create WW, a simulation built atop Facebook’s production codebase. WW can generate bots that seek to buy items disallowed on Facebook’s platform (like guns or drugs); attempt to scam each other; and perform actions like conducting searches, visiting pages, and sending messages. Courtesy of a mechanical design component, WW can also run simulations to test whether bots are able to violate Facebook’s safeguards, helping to identify statistical patterns and product mechanisms that might make it harder to behave in ways that violate the company’s Community Standards.

“There’s parallels to the problem of evaluating games designed by AI, where you have to just accept that you can’t model human behaviour, and so to evaluate games you have to focus on the stuff you can measure like the likelihood of a draw or making sure a more skilled agent always beats a less skilled one,” Mike Cook, an AI researcher with a fellowship at Queen Mary University of London who wasn’t involved with Facebook’s work, told VentureBeat. “Having bots just roam a copy of the network and press buttons and try things is a great way to find bugs, and something that we’ve been doing (in one way or another) for years and years to test out software big and small.”

A Facebook analysis of the most impactful production bugs indicated that as much as 25% were social bugs, of which “at least” 10% could be discovered through WES. To spur research in this direction, the company recently launched a request for proposals inviting academic researchers and scientists to contribute new ideas to WES and WW. Facebook says it has received 85 submissions to date.

WES and WW build on Facebook’s Sapienz system, which automatically designs, runs, and reports the results of tens of thousands of test cases every day across the company’s mobile app codebases, as well as its SybilEdge fake account detector. Another of the company’s systems — deep entity classification (DEC) — identifies hundreds of millions of potentially fraudulent users via an AI framework.

But Facebook’s efforts to offload content moderation to AI and machine learning have been at best uneven. In May, Facebook’s automated system threatened to ban the organizers of a group working to hand-sew masks on the platform from commenting or posting, informing them that the group could be deleted altogether. It also marked legitimate news articles about the pandemic as spam.

Facebook attributed those missteps to bugs while acknowledging that AI isn’t the be-all and end-all. At the same time, in its most recent quarterly Community Standards report, it didn’t release — and says it couldn’t estimate — the accuracy of its hate speech detection systems. (Of the 9.6 million posts removed in the first quarter, Facebook said its software detected 88.8% before users reported them.)

There’s evidence that objectionable content regularly slips through Facebook’s filters. In January, Seattle University associate professor Caitlin Carlson published results from an experiment in which she and a colleague collected more than 300 posts that appeared to violate Facebook’s hate speech rules and reported them via the service’s tools. Only about half of the posts were ultimately removed.

“AI is not the answer to every single problem,” Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer told VentureBeat in a previous interview. “I think humans are going to be in the loop for the indefinite future. I think these problems are fundamentally human problems about life and communication, and so we want humans in control and making the final decisions, especially when the problems are nuanced. But what we can do with AI is, you know, take the common tasks, the billion scale tasks, the drudgery out.”

Source link

قالب وردپرس

from World Wide News https://ift.tt/30DtSaX

#World Wide News

0 notes