I think the most terrifying part of any relationship is the ongoing awareness that you are going to have to trust someone when they appear to like or love you. There is no objective way to check your status with someone, no app that will say "they like you overall but are mad at you right now, specifically for x or y or a vague z thing that you didn't even clock when it was happening. But! if you send them a nice card and small gift, they will forget about it and return to base level affection"
instead, you have to just....keep having a relationship with that person, doing big and small things with or for them, and praying that you will both be brave and evolved enough to raise x/y/z as an issue if it genuinely is problem.
Mortifying ordeal of being known, down to your very gluons, and disliked.
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thinking about connor in prague saying "dad's theory was you got two fighting dogs, you send the weak one away, you punish the weak one." in relation to this episode, and the way the siblings view abuse inside their own family.
shiv and kendall and their belief that connor and roman are the weak dogs that got the brunt of logan's worst behavior, because abuse is reserved for the kids who can't behave - the ones who aren't smart and mature enough to make it in the world. abuse evokes pity, because abuse is what happens when you expect too much from people who obviously aren't capable of more.
and then they go forward in life, believing that they're just naturally more intelligent and more capable than connor and roman, as if being raised seeing what happens to you if you aren't a perfect child wasn't the entire point of the "punish the weak dog" mentality that logan instilled in them. the looming threat implied behind any praise they do receive that tacitly tells them "you're not like roman and connor" because everyone knows what happens to roman and connor.
the absolute height of the rich capitalist mindset. "we're succeeding because of our own merit, and other people fail because they don't have what it takes" when in reality they're succeeding because of arbitrary rules made up by someone who knows that infighting makes meaner dogs.
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stobin vegas wedding (steddie)
“I didn’t cheat on you,” is the first thing he says when Eddie picks up the phone.
Eddie pauses. “O…kay? That’s a weird thing to say to someone you didn’t cheat on.”
“I promise we did not sleep together.”
“Steve, you’re starting to worry me a little here. What did you do?”
He rubs the bridge of his nose. “I…may have drunk married a lesbian in Vegas.”
There’s a long silence. Steve’s palms start to sweat, sure he’s about to be broken up with. Then—
“Are you laughing?”
The lesbian’s name is Robin.
“Can I meet her?” Eddie asks. “I want to meet her. Give her the phone. She’s the Jolene to my Dolly, I have to talk to her.”
“She didn’t take your man,” Steve protested. “There is no man-stealing going on here. She’s just…a woman I married.”
“Wow,” Robin says, watching him with raised eyebrows. “Glad to know my role in your life has been reduced to wife. And so soon after we met?”
“Shut up, Jolene,” he hisses.
“Stephen! Don’t talk to your wife like that!” Eddie scolds. “C’mon, put her on.”
He sighs and gives Robin the phone.
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the rise of AI art isn't surprising to us. for our entire lives, the attitude towards our skills has always been - that's not a real thing. it has been consistently, repeatedly devalued.
people treat art - all forms of it - as if it could exist by accident, by rote. they don't understand how much art is in the world. someone designed your home. someone designed the sign inside of your local grocery store. when you quote a character or line from something in media, that's a line a real person wrote.
"i could do that." sure, but you didn't. there's this joke where a plumber comes over to a house and twists a single knob. charges the guy 10k. the guy, furious, asks how the hell the bill is so high. the plumber says - "turning the knob was a dollar. the knowledge is the rest of the money."
the trouble is that nobody believes artists have knowledge. that we actively study. that we work hard, beyond doing our scales and occasionally writing a poem. the trouble is that unless you are already framed in a museum or have a book on a shelf or some kind of product, you aren't really an artist. hell, because of where i post my work, i'll never be considered a poet.
the thing that makes you an artist is choice. the thing that makes all art is choice. AI art is the fetid belief that art is instead an equation. that it must answer a specific question. Even with machine learning, AI cannot make a choice the way we can - because the choices we make have always been personal, complicated. our skills cannot be confined to "prompt and execution." what we are "solving" isn't just a system of numbers - it is how we process our entire existence. it isn't just "2 and 2 is 4", it's staring hard at the numbers and making the four into an alligator. it's rearranging the letters to say ow and it is the ugly drawing we make in the margin.
at some point, you will be able to write something by feeding my work into a machine. it will be perfectly legible and even might sound like me. but a machine doesn't understand why i do these things. it can be taught preferences, habits, statistical probability. it doesn't know why certain vowels sound good to me. it doesn't know the private rules i keep. it doesn't know how to keep evolving.
"but i want something to exist that doesn't exist yet." great. i'm glad you feel creative. go ahead and pay a fucking artist for it.
this is all saying something we all already knew. the sad fucking truth: we have to die to remind you. only when we're gone do we suddenly finally fucking mean something to you. artists are not replicable. we each genuinely have a skill, talent, and process that makes us unique. and there's actual quiet power in everything we do.
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Prompt 181
“Hey. Hey Tuck. Tucker. Tuck look. Look.”
Tucker looked over the edge of the screen lazily, the half interested words on his tongue dying as he let out a wheeze of laughter. “Oh my Ancient Sands, dude, how did you manage that?”
Danny had, for the last near year, been trying to mix shapeshifting, thank you Amorpho, with duplication. Something he’d apparently succeeded in today, if the massive fuck-you hydra standing before him was any indication. The very pleased looking, well did it count as a hydra if it had wings too?
“You need to show Sam. Oh my Sands we need to show Val too. And Wes. You did it dude!” He floated up to look at Danny, who did a little twirl to show off. He shook his head, flecks of gold and sand falling from his hair as he laughed.
“Do you think,” Danny lost it in laughter as several other heads echoed his words, from whichever the main him was. “Holy ancients that’s great- do, do you think we can make a dragon club? Hydras are totally dragons right? Do you think we could pull a Tiamat?”
He landed on a head, taking a selfie to add to the groupchat labeled Preparations. “Dude, we should, but let me send this to the others first… But I am so down.”
They can, in fact apparently, pull a Tiamat- with a little help from Princess Dora, practice in front of Frostbite in case something goes wrong, and some advice from Pandora on controlling extra limbs.
Honestly, who is going to want to mess with Amity when there’s a giant dragon? And hey, maybe they can break the barrier now!
The heads for those wondering who I was thinking of for each lol And perhaps what they might all get
((1) Kwan, Pressurized Water) ((2) Wes, Sonic Blast) ((3) Sam, Poison Gas) ((4) Star, Plasma)
((5) Danny, Ice Breath) ((6) Paulina, Acid) ((7) Tucker, Electricity) ((8) Valerie, Fire Breath) ((9) Dash, Pressurized Wind)
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