Kittens and Hellfire

Descent: De Selby (Part 1); De Selby (Part 2)

First (Limbo, the unbaptised but virtuous): First Time

Second (Lust): Francesca; I, Carrion (Icarian)

Third (Gluttony): Eat Your Young

Fourth (Avarice and Prodigality): Damage Gets Done

Fifth (Wrath and Sullenness): Who We Are

Sixth (Heresy): Son Of Nyx; All Things End

Seventh (Violence): To Someone From A Warm Climate (Uiscefhuaraithe); Butchered Tongue

Eighth (Fraud): Anything But; Abstract (Psychopomp)

Ninth (Treachery): Unknown / Nth

i have been talkin on this alot during my book tour but wanted to put words here for any buckaroos trottin around the internet.

questions chuck gets asked in signings or Q AND A sessions have WIDE VARIETY in their way, but theme that comes up over and over is: 'i wish i was a creator but i cannot find success in this way' or 'i wish i was a creator but my mind is blocked'

bud, you ARE a creator. we are all HERE TO CREATE it is our natural state of being. we cannot help but create.

buds might say: 'but i have not painted in months i have no inspiration left'

as far as chuck is concerned this is missing the incredible vastness of what CREATION is and what ART is. the art of a painting is not just about oil on canvas. it does not end at the border or the frame. the ART and the CREATION is so much more than that and sometimes we can numb ourselves to this way. the months spent pining for inspiration are just as important as the brush you pick. what you had for breakfast that day is just as important as the colors and hues. every misstep or big win along the way IS THE ARTWORK.

your art is not just your painting, it is the mixed media piece called your life. you are creating thoughts and ideas and dreams. in a physical sense you are creating heartbeats and breaths and even words vibrating through the air saying 'i cant think of anything to paint'

BUD THESE ARE ALL VALID PIECES and together they make something incredible and unique and POWERFUL. how deeply moving it is to exist here on this timeline, adding yourself to the even LARGER piece that we are all constructing together as we push back against the empty spaces and fill the cosmic void with our love.

so do not be discouraged by writers block or a blank canvas. a canvas is never actually blank and you are writing with every moment that you trot through.

i cannot speak for YOU, but whenever i let the artwork of this timeline flow around me, the more my specific pieces like writing or drawing come into focus.

Source

Video of Tama

^Nitama majestic, and below with Yontama

Yontama.

The shrine of Tama Daimyōjin (Great gracious deity Tama), next to the Kishi station where she worked.

And they are announcing the winner of the “up and coming god” award, and of course, Yato thinks it’s him.

But no-

So a free tool called GLAZE has been developed that allows artists to cloak their artwork so it can't be mimicked by AI art tools.

basically, the kind of art theft that GLAZE is made to prevent is people using AI text-to-image generators to imitate an artist's art style. they can feed a relatively small number of artpieces into the generator, and it can spit out work that looks like it was produced by the artist in question:

GLAZE is intended to disrupt this process by preventing the text-to-image generator from recognizing the art style that's used. the way it predicts how much it can modify a photo before AI can no longer recognize it is.... hard to understand if you don't have a background in this stuff, it's a bunch of fancy code basically. but the VERY simple explanation is this: it takes the art and creates a different version of it, which is in a completely different style. below you can see:

on the left you have the original art. the third column, titled "GLAZE target style", are the altered versions - as you can see, they have been intentionally turned into different art styles. Ortiz's art style is realistic, but GLAZE turned it into a Gogh-style oil painting. it will then, basically, blend this altered version with the original image (called 'perturbation'). by doing this, the AI will read the image as a Gogh-style painting instead of a realistic portrait, so it will just produce Gogh-style paintings - completely ruining the mimicker's efforts.

"invisible to the human eye" varies depending on the person and ALSO on the settings used. you can add more perturbation and it will be more obvious that the art was altered, at least to the artist themselves. here's some examples, with increasing levels of perturbation:

these changes are still very small to us, but perceptible to text-to-image generators, which rely on these very small differences to fine-tune the reproduced artwork.

the reason “hola mi nombre es juan. oh my god I didn’t realize I was speaking spanish.” is ridiculous is because it’s exceedingly rare anyones going to accidentally switch languages. in everything everywhere all at once, they speak chinglish to each other. they never accidentally speak mandarin to deirdre in the IRS office for example because that would be ridiculous.

So as a preface: Cantonese and Mandarin are two dialects of Chinese but they are fairly different grammatically, and while many people in Hong Kong and Guangdong (Canton) region speak both, understanding one dialect if you only speak the other is more or less impossible. Native speakers of one often treat the other as a second language.

so in the prime universe, Evelyn speaks Cantonese and only Cantonese with prime!Gong Gong, who is never seen speaking any other languages aside from Cantonese. He barely understands Joy's broken Mandarin and only offers a berating response to her in Canto. Waymond and Evelyn's Chinglish is a mix of Mandarin and English together, but they mainly speak English with Joy, and she can barely understand her mother tongue.

between prime!Gong Gong and prime!Waymond, Waymond is only ever talked at. Gong Gong speaks to him in Cantonese (which he presumably understands) but he only replies back in Mandarin once. There is very little direct communication between them without Evelyn.

so you have a major language barrier between Joy and her grandfather and minor language barrier between Waymond and Gong Gong - they have the means to communicate and could understand eachother, but it takes tremendous effort to do so.

and Evelyn has to navigate all three worlds, between her daughter, her father, and her husband, and be the bridge between them, as the balance and the tether and their touchstone. Which is such a brilliant metaphor for generational disconnect here and how Evelyn really is in the centre of all that chaos —

but it doesn’t stop there.

most crucially, Mandarin and Cantonese are used for the emotional and private dialogues between Evelyn, Waymond and Gong Gong. In all their flashbacks, in the kung fu/movie star universe, and also when Evelyn and Waymond talk about their domestic life in the IRS building - their divorce, their marriage, their daughter - conversations about the matters of the family are in Chinese.

Which leads us to: the Alphaverse!Wangs all speak English with each other and exclusively in English. Alphaverse!Waymond calls Alphaverse!Gong Gong “sir”, Alphaverse!Gong Gong tells prime!Evelyn to kill Joy in English. The only time Evelyn talks to alpha!Gong Gong in Cantonese is when she confronts him about letting her go.

English is depersonalised in the movie — it’s used practically and for exposition and to communicate quickly, while Chinese usage is infinitely personal. (Really, the first clue that we get that Waymond is...different is when he speaks to Evelyn in English with no Chinese at all).

And the most ironic thing about it all: the universe where the Wangs all understand and communicate perfectly is also where the family is most broken - Alphaverse!Waymond thinks that his own daughter is no longer capable of mercy or worthy of saving. Alphaverse!Gong Gong thinks he has to kill Joy in every universe.