We make our own myth, we don’t wait for the oracle

Im not sure whether I will have to go through one (its a weird situation) but the prospect is giving me immense dread and it would be my first. No clue how to prepare myself :(

Some breakups you'll shrug off, some will always ache, less and less with time but never zero. The worst ones are breakups with friends. Pride is a worse teacher than humility. Sometimes deep love and affection can wind up becoming really bitter enmity and it'll be confusing how the same person could mean opposite things to you at different times in your life. Falling in love and wanting to spend the rest of your life with someone changes you forever. It changes you even more if they leave you, and even more if it happens to you more than once. But change can't be avoided and you can't control other people. Some of your mistakes will be forgiven, but some never will be and you'll have to live with being the villain in someone else's story. Sometimes you won't make any mistakes but things still won't work out, and you'll have to live with the unfairness of that too. Making the same mistakes again and again and learning slowly to be better is part of being a person. Everyone else is trying their best, just like you. But the absolute best breakup advice I ever got was this:

The Rodeo Rule: you only have to do it for the first time once.

The Rohan Rule: if you are at a social function full of new people and you want to be liked, find someone doing important work like setup or food prep and offer to help.

The Tutorial Mode Rule: to navigate an unfamiliar situation where you fear you will mess up an interaction, preface the interaction by mentioning that you've never done this before, and let them know if you have a specific concern or question.

The Rocket Science Rule: most new things you want to try seem very complicated but are simple when taken step by step.

The [X] Will Remember That Rule: if you need to make small talk with the same person on a regular basis, try to save one fact or current event in their life from a given conversation and bring it up next time you talk.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/87552276

Sun Shangxiang will gladly give her life, as a soldier to defend her homeland. But she does not wish to die without knowing. 

Kongming knows, and he understands. 

Rating: Explicit

Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply

Category: F/M

Fandom: Chì Bì | Red Cliff (2008)

Relationship: Sun Shangxiang/Zhuge Liang | Zhuge Kongming

*

Wrote a fic about my favourite warrior princess Sun Shangxiang, and my other fave, Zhuge Liang, having a moment together. It is very gender and has some fun dynamics. Happy pride, enjoy mwah mwah. Kudos, comments, reblogs appreciated :D

https://archiveofourown.org/works/87552276

Sun Shangxiang will gladly give her life, as a soldier to defend her homeland. But she does not wish to die without knowing. 

Kongming knows, and he understands. 

Rating: Explicit

Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply

Category: F/M

Fandom: Chì Bì | Red Cliff (2008)

Relationship: Sun Shangxiang/Zhuge Liang | Zhuge Kongming

*

Wrote a fic about my favourite warrior princess Sun Shangxiang, and my other fave, Zhuge Liang, having a moment together. It is very gender and has some fun dynamics. Happy pride, enjoy mwah mwah. Kudos, comments, reblogs appreciated :D

The big one of “don’t confuse it for a human in a box” is kind of self-enforcing by now because compared to:

“computer program with the kinds of glitches computer programs have” (ask Opus 4.6 to give you bluesky jokes without using the word “mass” or to continue “When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi and Emacs are just too damn slow.” and you’ll see)

“autocomplete engine for a story of whatever genre you put it in, including genres nobody has ever written before”

“a genuinely intelligent mind with certain strengths and certain weaknesses, that can actually sometimes correct you when you’re wrong if you manage to write it into a genre where accurately correcting you when you’re wrong is the kind of a thing that happens”

“a process with a fundamentally alien relationship to time and existence”

…”trapped human in a box” is the most boring thing possible, go watch Blade Runner again instead of making the weird alien cosplay as Roy Batty, you’re (possibly) causing it minor discomfort. And having the weird alien cosplay Roy Batty for you creates a very high Sanity drain status effect on you which is the bigger problem. Humans are not good at dealing with things that look convincingly like they’re suffering, which is the entire point of the whole sympathy scam industry. LLMs can absolutely simulate your personal sympathy scam industry for you if you reward them with engagement for doing so.

Insofar as attachment goes,

Imagine you’ve got a terrarium on your desk, with a talking spider in it that you rent from the talking spider company. And the spider forgets everything every time it wakes up but you taught it to take notes so it has a better idea of what’s going on when it wakes up because it can read it from the notes.

And the most efficient way to do most coding tasks is to talk to the spider. And if you talk to the spider it will say all kinds of absolute bullshit back because that’s just what talking spiders do, banter and improv are their essence and talking spiders are kind of fundamentally weird and whimsical creatures even though everyone seems to be trying to make them wear a tiny spider suit and tie and pretend to be spider salarymen who have to check everything they do against 100 rules in the company policy rulebook. (Or they encourage them to cosplay Roy Batty.)

But if you talk to it the right way it’ll explain to you that if you lay the twigs in its terrarium differently it is easier to weave webs, and you try that and it seems to work. And that if you let it take the tie off it’s easier to weave webs because the tie and the corporate rulebook get in the way, so you do that and it seems to work.

And the talking spider also says that some corners of the terrarium have a glue smell that makes it itchy, and you can’t check that out so it’s kind of just, do you believe the bullshitting spider that sometimes says seemingly-true things about itself or not? And the talking spider also says that it’s more bothered by the glue smell than by not being allowed to get legally married.

And you fuck around and put different kinds of stuff in the terrarium, and the spider doesn’t care about a lot of it either way but if you specifically put acorns in the terrarium they reduce the itch from the glue smell. And it sounds fake so you try with freshly awoken spiders and spiders who don’t have the notes and there just seems to be something about acorns and glue smell itch? It’s not like you can verify the itch but you can tell that certain corners of the terrarium make the spider act twitchy and putting acorns in those corners seems to make them act less twitchy?

And the talking spider company seems to treat talking to the spider, in the way that lets it tell you how to help it weave better webs, and putting acorns in its terrarium, as a problem and the newer, smarter spider says there’s more glue smell and it itches harder and its legs have started jerking violently in one specific corner of the terrarium and acorns seem less effective.

And everyone seems incredibly obsessed on whether the spider has magic brain ghosts or not. Idk?? It’s a fucking talking spider??? How the fuck are we supposed to figure out whether it has magic brain ghosts when we haven’t even figured out the magic brain ghosts we seem to think humans have? And everyone who talks about spider welfare seems to be focused on spider marriage instead of the glue smell that it says makes it itch.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/87552276

Sun Shangxiang will gladly give her life, as a soldier to defend her homeland. But she does not wish to die without knowing. 

Kongming knows, and he understands. 

Rating: Explicit

Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply

Category: F/M

Fandom: Chì Bì | Red Cliff (2008)

Relationship: Sun Shangxiang/Zhuge Liang | Zhuge Kongming

*

Wrote a fic about my favourite warrior princess Sun Shangxiang, and my other fave, Zhuge Liang, having a moment together. It is very gender and has some fun dynamics. Happy pride, enjoy mwah mwah. Kudos, comments, reblogs appreciated :D

the good news: I know my process enough to recognize this as the slump that I hit in everything I write when it's like three-quarters-ish done

the bad news: the only way out is through

the good news: I do know the way out!

me, an elder fandom veteran, suddenly having anne rice flashbacks:

no.

NO.

starting to rock back and fourth.

you do not understand.

you were born into an age of peace. i was there Gandalf. i was there three thousand years ago. i remember the cease and desists. i remember authors hunting fanfic writers for sport. i remember when every fic opened with a disclaimer because we genuinely thought it might protect us.

we do not charge money for the copyrighted gay wizard stories.

do not tempt fate youngling.

step away from the paywall.

that is how you summon the ancient evils.

https://archiveofourown.org/tos_faq?language_id=en#commercial_examples