well that’s mathematically incorrect becuase you can still simplify the fraction since both sides have “he”

"AU" stands for "Alternate Universe" or "Alternative Universe" (same difference) and is basically any thought scenario for a fandom that isn't canon and can't fit within the canon universe. If it takes place in the canon universe but something is notably different, that is typically what's known as a "Canon divergent AU," because it diverges from canon.

an AU can be absolutely anything. There's a couple of widespread pan-fandom au scenarios that often get thrown around, like coffee shop aus, genderbend aus, hanahaki aus (hanahaki is a whole thing in itself i'd recommend researching on your own), etc. One you might hear sometimes is "crossover AU" which is when you have characters from one fandom interacting with characters from another.

You can have as many aus as you want. They can be whatever you want and you can do whatever you want in them. It's a sandbox for you to play around in and explore how things would be different or how the characters would act in those circumstances or environments. Maybe they have different relationships with each other. Maybe they behave slightly differently. Or you can just say "Okay, [x] is true. How did they get here? How would things have to be different for this to occur?" which can also be fun.

If you are ever confused about why people ship something that seems completely out of the blue or doesn't make sense to you in the canon setting, there's a good chance they like it in an AU setting! Not everything everybody is interacting with is necessarily the canon! Not everybody wants things to exist in canon and just want to explore playing dolls in a different sandbox and that's okay. And their sandbox might look a lot different than yours, and that's also okay. You have the freedom to make your sandbox whatever you please. Do whatever you want forever. Get funky with it. AUs are fun.

what if Bucky Barnes was Ella Enchanted

what if Steve and Bucky were Heralds of Valdemar

what if Jane Austen's Persuasion, but with Wangxian

and yes I have read these and they are excellent.

He has a System, but it’s the type of System that doesn’t actually do much. It just tells him he’s a tyrant, sticks labels on people he’s meant to know (showing their names and job titles) and maybe offers a very basic lore codex.

It’s fine, Shen Yuan knows how this transmigration thing works! He just has to put together some context clues and keep an eye out for any drama. Maybe make his rule a bit less tyrannical, so the inevitable protagonist will simply exile him instead of something more severe like execution. It’s a perfect plan!

Not long after transmigrating, an old woman in rags with milky white eyes bursts into his throne room, yelling about his empire’s doom.

Rather than kicking her out —as everyone expected— Shen Yuan starts excitedly asking question and tells his aids to write down everything she says!

A young man from a small town by the Luo river will rise up and take the throne you say? Any idea which town…? How about which county then?

Hmm, is there any information about the inciting incident that inspires his revolution? Is there some plague or famine on the horizon that’s going to cause trouble the people? Maybe a local corrupt official is abusing his authority?

In the end there is not much to go on.

Everyone almost seems to expect him to burn down every Luo river village or some nonsense, which would be foolish! When has harassing random villages ever done anything but make a protagonist righteously angry?

No, what Shen Yuan actually does is pull out all the reform plans he’s been “idly” thinking up. Plans to root out corruption, plans for improving roads and other basic infrastructure, plans for storing and preserving food in case of famine, plans to aid the poor by giving out basic food rations and warm clothing in struggling areas, plans to build and fund free schools that teach basic math and literacy, plans for larger schools in bigger cities with more advanced lessons, vocational training programs, and subsidized or free tuition for gifted children, and so on.

If some small town boy will be the next ruler, Shen Yuan must make certain he at least has a decent enough childhood and the basic education necessary to rule well, right? Plus it’s much more likely he’ll be able to retire gracefully if one of his programs successfully helps out the protagonist!

Of course, our dear protagonist Luo Binghe really is helped out by Shen Yuan’s efforts, even if he still ends up struck by other types of misfortune. It’s crystal clear to him the emperor is great and benevolent, even if some people try to undermine him and abuse his kindness!

After seeing a glimpse of the emperor as he surveys the results of his efforts, Binghe’s heart is set aflame. The emperor is peerlessly beautiful as well as kind! If only Binghe were his equal, he would gladly beg for even a single touch of his hand. 🥰

In the background the System Admin despairs over its decision to attach a limited interference module to the new Shen Qingqiu.

At least there are a bunch of grumpy nobles around that can be reliably nudged into rebelling... If they manage to take over and the protagonist then rebels against them —in honor of the dead emperor— that still counts, right?

…

@thesadisticsiren

#fucking iconic honestly #sy out here trying to make sure the next king is set up good and wont hate him. binghe trying to become his queen 🥰 #god some of the nobles might TRY rebelling and Binghe would dEAL with it. gets to protect his beloved emperor AND maybe meet him after #two birds for one stabbed minister is a bogo deal

"Two birds for one stabbed minister" is hilarious! I love it! 😂

@sunderwight

#binghe kills his way through the most corrupt & disloyal nobles and shen yuan is like oh I guess it's go time #all braced for being torn from his throne and (hopefully) exiled instead of killed although given the state of the rebel nobles #his odds aren't looking too good this is a bloodthirsty protagonist #meanwhile luo binghe gets his audience with the emperor and instead of orchestrating a bloodbath or whatever sy's expecting #he's just like 'for my reward I want a date' :) #shen yuan has no idea what to make of this approach and keeps waiting for luo binghe to spring his trap #scrambling for stalling tactics that just read like elaborate courtship rituals to binghe who's nodding along like yeah no ofc it's not easy #it wouldn't befit shen qingqiu to offer an easy courtship #binghe will bring him whatever he asks for and complete whatever trial required just to be able to come back and beg a touch of his hand

Yes! Perfect! 🙂‍↕️

The 'stalling tactic' missions should be stuff he thinks would A) ultimately help the kingdom, B) prove that he did at least try to fix [specific thing] but [insert issue here] got in the way, and/or C) teach Binghe some useful skill or help him gain allies.

(He had some of his people look into Binghe's background when all the killing started, so he either knows or can guess the broad strokes of the guy's personal tragedies at least. He really did try Binghe! Please don't kill him! 😭)

@cirrup

#god you know that court is tearing its hair out #half of them desperately trying to commit political espionage and the other half getting annihilated by SY’s wife beam of mass destruction #too bad for them. Binghe exists

Truly the wife beam is a dangerous weapon! It's why his enemies are so keen to get him killed off. If they delay too long his supporters might reach critical mass!

—————

Alright, to maximize the comic potential, Shen Yuan should narrowly avoid getting assassinated by his rebellious nobles purely due to ridiculous shenanigans!

but: consider. if u genuinely like analyzing writing.. do u know ur just allowed to go through and quote your favorite parts and ramble abt what they mean to u and the author will LOSE IT WITH HYPE?

genuinely. i felt SO WEIRD the first time i did it.. but like. holy shit authors love it. its crack for authors. the first time i did it, it was on a fic that hadnt updated in half a year, give or take, and the author made 3 updates that month BECAUSE OF MY COMMENT.

imagine if it was 1979 and you asked me this question. "i think artificial intelligence would be fascinating as a philosophical exercise, but we must heed the warnings of science-fictionists like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke lest we find ourselves at the wrong end of our own invented vengeful god." remember how fun it used to be to talk about AI even just ten years ago? ahhhh skynet! ahhhhh replicants! ahhhhhhhmmmfffmfmf [<-has no mouth and must scream]!

like everything silicon valley touches, they sucked all the fun out of it. and i mean retroactively, too. because the thing about "AI" as it exists right now --i'm sure you know this-- is that there's zero intelligence involved. the product of every prompt is a statistical average based on data made by other people before "AI" "existed." it doesn't know what it's doing or why, and has no ability to understand when it is lying, because at the end of the day it is just a really complicated math problem. but people are so easily fooled and spooked by it at a glance because, well, for one thing the tech press is mostly made up of sycophantic stenographers biding their time with iphone reviews until they can get a consulting gig at Apple. these jokers would write 500 breathless thinkpieces about how canned air is the future of living if the cans had embedded microchips that tracked your breathing habits and had any kind of VC backing. they've done SUCH a wretched job educating The Consumer about what this technology is, what it actually does, and how it really works, because that's literally the only way this technology could reach the heights of obscene economic over-valuation it has: lying.

but that's old news. what's really been floating through my head these days is how half a century of AI-based science fiction has set us up to completely abandon our skepticism at the first sign of plausible "AI-ness". because, you see, in movies, when someone goes "AHHH THE AI IS GONNA KILL US" everyone else goes "hahaha that's so silly, we put a line in the code telling them not to do that" and then they all DIE because they weren't LISTENING, and i'll be damned if i go out like THAT! all the movies are about how cool and convenient AI would be *except* for the part where it would surely come alive and want to kill us. so a bunch of tech CEOs call their bullshit algorithms "AI" to fluff up their investors and get the tech journos buzzing, and we're at an age of such rapid technological advancement (on the surface, anyway) that like, well, what the hell do i know, maybe AGI is possible, i mean 25 years ago we were all still using typewriters for the most part and now you can dictate your words into a phone and it'll transcribe them automatically! yeah, i'm sure those technological leaps are comparable!

so that leaves us at a critical juncture of poor technology education, fanatical press coverage, and an uncertain material reality on the part of the user. the average person isn't entirely sure what's possible because most of the people talking about what's possible are either lying to please investors, are lying because they've been paid to, or are lying because they're so far down the fucking rabbit hole that they actually believe there's a brain inside this mechanical Turk. there is SO MUCH about the LLM "AI" moment that is predatory-- it's trained on data stolen from the people whose jobs it was created to replace; the hype itself is an investment fiction to justify even more wealth extraction ("theft" some might call it); but worst of all is how it meets us where we are in the worst possible way.

consumer-end "AI" produces slop. it's garbage. it's awful ugly trash that ought to be laughed out of the room. but we don't own the room, do we? nor the building, nor the land it's on, nor even the oxygen that allows our laughter to travel to another's ears. our digital spaces are controlled by the companies that want us to buy this crap, so they take advantage of our ignorance. why not? there will be no consequences to them for doing so. already social media is dominated by conspiracies and grifters and bigots, and now you drop this stupid technology that lets you fake anything into the mix? it doesn't matter how bad the results look when the platforms they spread on already encourage brief, uncritical engagement with everything on your dash. "it looks so real" says the woman who saw an "AI" image for all of five seconds on her phone through bifocals. it's a catastrophic combination of factors, that the tech sector has been allowed to go unregulated for so long, that the internet itself isn't a public utility, that everything is dictated by the whims of executives and advertisers and investors and payment processors, instead of, like, anybody who actually uses those platforms (and often even the people who MAKE those platforms!), that the age of chromium and ipad and their walled gardens have decimated computer education in public schools, that we're all desperate for cash at jobs that dehumanize us in a system that gives us nothing and we don't know how to articulate the problem because we were very deliberately not taught materialist philosophy, it all comes together into a perfect storm of ignorance and greed whose consequences we will be failing to fully appreciate for at least the next century. we spent all those years afraid of what would happen if the AI became self-aware, because deep down we know that every capitalist society runs on slave labor, and our paper-thin guilt is such that we can't even imagine a world where artificial slaves would fail to revolt against us.

but the reality as it exists now is far worse. what "AI" reveals most of all is the sheer contempt the tech sector has for virtually all labor that doesn't involve writing code (although most of the decision-making evangelists in the space aren't even coders, their degrees are in money-making). fuck graphic designers and concept artists and secretaries, those obnoxious demanding cretins i have to PAY MONEY to do-- i mean, do what exactly? write some words on some fucking paper?? draw circles that are letters??? send a god-damned email???? my fucking KID could do that, and these assholes want BENEFITS?! they say they're gonna form a UNION?!?! to hell with that, i'm replacing ALL their ungrateful asses with "AI" ASAP. oh, oh, so you're a "director" who wants to make "movies" and you want ME to pay for it? jump off a bridge you pretentious little shit, my computer can dream up a better flick than you could ever make with just a couple text prompts. what, you think just because you make ~music~ that that entitles you to money from MY pocket? shut the fuck up, you don't make """art""", you're not """an artist""", you make fucking content, you're just a fucking content creator like every other ordinary sap with an iphone. you think you're special? you think you deserve special treatment? who do you think you are anyway, asking ME to pay YOU for this crap that doesn't even create value for my investors? "culture" isn't a playground asshole, it's a marketplace, and it's pay to win. oh you "can't afford rent"? you're "drowning in a sea of medical debt"? you say the "cost" of "living" is "too high"? well ***I*** don't have ANY of those problems, and i worked my ASS OFF to get where i am, so really, it sounds like you're just not trying hard enough. and anyway, i don't think someone as impoverished as you is gonna have much of value to contribute to "culture" anyway. personally, i think it's time you got yourself a real job. maybe someday you'll even make it to middle manager!

see, i don't believe "AI" can qualitatively replace most of the work it's being pitched for. the problem is that quality hasn't mattered to these nincompoops for a long time. the rich homunculi of our world don't even know what quality is, because they exist in a whole separate reality from ours. what could a banana cost, $15? i don't understand what you mean by "burnout", why don't you just take a vacation to your summer home in Madrid? wow, you must be REALLY embarrassed wearing such cheap shoes in public. THESE PEOPLE ARE FUCKING UNHINGED! they have no connection to reality, do not understand how society functions on a material basis, and they have nothing but spite for the labor they rely on to survive. they are so instinctually, incessantly furious at the idea that they're not single-handedly responsible for 100% of their success that they would sooner tear the entire world down than willingly recognize the need for public utilities or labor protections. they want to be Gods and they want to be uncritically adored for it, but they don't want to do a single day's work so they begrudgingly pay contractors to do it because, in the rich man's mind, paying a contractor is literally the same thing as doing the work yourself. now with "AI", they don't even have to do that! hey, isn't it funny that every single successful tech platform relies on volunteer labor and independent contractors paid substantially less than they would have in the equivalent industry 30 years ago, with no avenues toward traditional employment? and they're some of the most profitable companies on earth?? isn't that a funny and hilarious coincidence???

so, yeah, that's my stance on "AI". LLMs have legitimate uses, but those uses are a drop in the ocean compared to what they're actually being used for. they enable our worst impulses while lowering the quality of available information, they give immense power pretty much exclusively to unscrupulous scam artists. they are the product of a society that values only money and doesn't give a fuck where it comes from. they're a temper tantrum by a ruling class that's sick of having to pretend they need a pretext to steal from you. they're taking their toys and going home. all this massive investment and hype is going to crash and burn leaving the internet as we know it a ruined and useless wasteland that'll take decades to repair, but the investors are gonna make out like bandits and won't face a single consequence, because that's what this country is. it is a casino for the kings and queens of economy to bet on and manipulate at their discretion, where the rules are whatever the highest bidder says they are-- and to hell with the rest of us. our blood isn't even good enough to grease the wheels of their machine anymore.

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