Tryan * non-binary (they/them) * autistic * old enough * Liaden Universe * Doctor Who * Star Trek * Good Omens * Nimona * Spy x Family * Murderbot * Dan and Phil * The Sandman * blog name by @cuubism
Welcome to Tryanâs meandering attempts at basic humanity.
Hello! Hi! I reblog mostly The Sandman (with a side of Fuckboi Dream), Dead Boy Detectives, Doctor Who, Star Trek, Good Omens (now a proud Asmiâs Maggot iykyk), Nimona, Simon Snow, Spy x Family and whatever the latest movie is, with a leavening of Weird Tumblr Shit because it is the hellsite. My sexy tag is #explicit rather than #nsft because itâs more about choosing what you see than about age. Curate your own experience. My side blog is @lucienne-my-beloved, featuring some of my favourite characters from The Sandman!
My blog name is a brilliant line from @cuubismâs Joy, used with permission. My profile pic is Razzle Dazzle Dragon by Doodle.
To find my favourite posts and my original work, search for my tag #tryana find it back. I write mostly short fluffy one-shots and Iâll let you know if itâs not that. Itâs nicely sorted on ao3, but if you want to stay here Iâll put a link to the first in each series (Okay, I'm not staying up to date on posting these on tumblr and linking them in series. Please see ao3.)
100th fic!
My ao3
My NaNoWriMo fic! Wander Witch
Commissions Masterlist
Dreamling there was only one bed fic, my most popular one so far, it won the contest!!!
Lucienne my beloved gets her own series
Walking with the Walkers: the adventures of Rose and Jed
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make a minimum of 20 posts a day, be annoying as fuck, repeat things you said a few weeks ago, destroy your followerâs dashboards, never kill yourself
This year I decided to make my professional growth commitment to one major area: focus.
I've struggled with focus for years, using apps to control my online access. I fall off the wagon sometimes and always feel terrible within days of internet overuse.
The last couple of years were so stressful I could hardly function. People tried to drag me into things, even sending me screen shots, as if I really need to read that article or see that fight.
To later find out that my private comments on some of these matters ended up getting posted on a blog almost wholesale made me absolutely livid.
'Aint nobody got time for that drama.
Some time ago I went hard core and used the nuclear option on many websites, blogs, and people.
My Rescue Time app shows I've been on Bluesky only about 3.5 hours total in 5 months. No Reddit use at all. My Facebook use is down to about 13 minutes per day.
X use, Tumblr, and Mastodon are a few hours each, max for the entire year. Almost no TikTok. I still indulge in Instagram, but that's on par with my Facebook use.
Some days I'm not on social media at all.
I am using FEDICA to post this instead of going directly to this site.
In the past, I would go full-on New Years Resolution with a huge list of things to improve upon. But the one thing that must be improved upon that makes everything work better is focus. I don't need to be reading a feed, I don't need to comment on controversy du jour. I need to get my art completed. I have so many commissions and incomplete jobs they are buzzing in my head like a hive. The Zeigarnik effect is real.
When I look back over the years at the time sink of social media and online drama, I lament every piece of art that didn't get made because I couldn't say no to someone, I got rooked by some activist or journalist, or I just plain got bored for a hot minute and procrastinated while pretending what I was doing was important.
I can't promise I won't stray in future, but I've made it really, really hard to do so. My Cold Turkey block timers are very difficult to disable and they run a year in advance.
If there's an emergency and I need access (I get the usual attempts to hijack my accounts,) I can pay a fee to shut down the block on a computer I don't normally use. But it costs money and that's enough to keep me on the straight and narrow.
Several people at Motor City Comic Con asked why they don't see me on social media so much anymore, but I suspect the algorithm has as much to do with that as me not posting as often.
My job is to make art.
I have enough going on in my life in analog space, and internet space steals from it. There's no point fighting rumor mills and online dramas. It's like battling smoke. People are going to believe what they believe.
The priority is the people I love, the work I do, my local community responsibilities.
That's it.
See you at GalaxyCon Nashville next week.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Over the weekend, I did an interview about my forthcoming book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (a book about being a better AI critic), and the interviewer said she was surprised that I wasn't an AI booster, based on my demographics and work history:
I could see where she was coming from. I encountered computers in the mid-seventies, as a small child. My first computer was a CARDIAC, a working, Turing-complete, mechanical computer made entirely of cardboard, that I spent endless hours with:
Then I graduated to a teletype terminal and acoustic coupler connected to a minicomputer at the University of Toronto. My mom, a kindergarten teacher, used to smuggle home 1,000' rolls of paper towel from the kids' bathroom. I'd get 1,000' feet of computing up one side, then another 1,000' down the other side, then I'd carefully re-roll the paper towel so she could put it back in the bathroom for the kids to dry their hands on.
After that, I got an Apple ][+ in 1979, and shortly thereafter acquired a modem, and that was it: I was hooked for life. I became an amateur programmer, then a professional programmer. I hosted forums on dial-up BBSes where I distributed software and offered support to strangers who wanted to connect their computers to the internet. I got a job as a gopher developer, then a web developer, then a CIO-for-hire, helping wire up small businesses and connect them to the net. Eventually, I co-founded a free/open source software startup, before transitioning to 25 years as a digital rights activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And for most of that time, I was energetically writing science fiction, eventually becoming associated with a school sometimes called "post-cyberpunk":
The force that energized all this work was a dialectical one, the contradiction that powered cyberpunk literature itself. For all that cyberpunk was undeniably enamored with the coolness and combustibility of new technology, it was also terrified of how technology could be a force for oppression, surveillance and control. As William Gibson says, "cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion."
Gibson's more famous quote, of course, is "the street finds its own use for things." In Gibson's novels (and in my own life in technology) all the most interesting things happen when users of technology (often without formal training or credentials) find ways to adapt the technology they use to suit their needs:
This is why I remain an ardent fan of Hypercard, Scratch and other meta-tools that are designed to allow non-programmers to write software that exactly conforms to their desires. Whatever the apps produced by these tools lack in sophistication and efficiency is more than offset by the fact that they give everyday people the power to directly control the tools they rely upon.
If "epistemic humility" means anything, it means acknowledging that no amount of "requirements gathering" can capture the needs of people totally unlike yourself as faithfully as those users can capture their own needs. Giving people the tools to produce their own software is always going to make tools â vernacular, idiosyncratic, homespun â that are more suited to their own hands and minds than anything a technologist working on their behalf could make.
The ancient dictum of "nothing about us without us" â born in 16th century Poland and taken up by the modern disability rights movement â asserts the right of people to control their own living conditions, and also the unique capacity of people to understand their own needs. You know what's even better than being consulted on the design of the technology you use? Having direct control over that technology!
This is why I was so suspicious of the iPad. The iPad's much-lauded "ease of use" was entirely about how easy it was to use an iPad to consume technology. But the iPad remains the single most user-innovation-hostile technology in modern history, a device designed to make it impossible to produce technology without permission from a remorseless multinational corporation. This is cyberpunk as a demand, not a warning:
The technology I've championed all my life is technology that gives more control to its users. One of my immutable precepts is that people who are different from me know things I can't know, and the only way I can get the benefit of their unique knowledge and perspective is if they are free to make and share things that matter to them. As Dan Gillmor said, back when he was inventing the study of citizen journalism, "My readers know more than I do":
And while I am broadly very skeptical of AI, and deeply alarmed by the proliferation of "vibe coded" software in production environments, vibe coding for personal projects is a useful and exciting addition to the lineage of tools that let computer users decide how their computers will work. For people making personal projects, vibe coding extends the power of shell scripting, cron jobs, Applescript, and other desktop automation tools to a wider audience.
One of the journalists I spoke to last week about my book described how he had vibe coded an app that showed him an alert every time a plane flew over his house, giving the tail number and other details of the flight. This is information that I have no need for, no interest in, and that I'm therefore excited to learn about, because its very existence affirms that the world is full of people who are delightfully, irreducibly, amazingly different from me, and moreover, that their unique needs can be directly met using their imaginations and their personal computers.
I recently sat down with my colleague Naomi Novik, a brilliant author who also co-founded Archive of Our Own. Naomi demoed her followup to AO3 for me: Wreccer, a system to help you find small groups of people with taste similar to your own, in order to facilitate media recommendations within that group â a kind of personal, relationship-driven alternative to massive, centralized, monolithic algorithmic recommendation systems:
https://github.com/wreccer
Naomi told me that Wreccer was being built using the same design ethos that the original Twitter embraced. When Twitter launched, it was an API first, and the official Twitter front end was built on that API â but anyone could build their own front end for Twitter that worked in the way they wanted it to. Now, the word "anyone" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because most people don't even know what an API is, and of the people who do, most of them were not capable of writing their own software front end for Twitter.
But Wreccer is being designed for the age of vibe coding, and the API will really allow anyone who uses the service to design their own interface to the system, one that elevates and centers the features they find useful and tucks away the ones they're not interested in. Your personal, custom front end could also bring in other data-sources â pulling in your Mastodon messages, for example, or even showing you an alert with the tail-number of any plane flying over your home.
This is the part of vibe coding that I'm quite excited about, but it's not the part the industry focuses on. Instead of hearing about how personal, homemade software utilities can be an end unto themselves, we hear about vibe coded projects as prototypes for commercial production code. We hear about clueless bosses vibe coding software products and services that run fine for one user on a siloed desktop computer, and then demanding to know why it takes 50 engineers a year to make the same thing work for millions of users on the public internet. We hear about people who vibe code and submit patches to free/open-source software projects with millions of users, overwhelming project maintainers with slop code that is riddled with security vulnerabilities.
Of course, there's an obvious reason why the industry wants to focus on the potential for vibe coded software to replace production code. The AI bubble has burned up $1.4t to date, while bringing in mere tens of billions of dollars per year, even as its unit economics grow steadily worse:
To keep the bubble inflated, AI hucksters must promise massive economic returns to the technology. They want investors to believe that vibe code is about to replace working programmers, who are skilled, high-waged, high-demand workers. Their pitch is that for every million dollars' worth of programmers that an AI salesman and a boss conspire to fire, half a million dollars will go to the AI company whose bots shit out that vibe code.
That's par for the course with the AI bubble, whose focus is entirely on how AI can centralize, control and homogenize our lives. Whereas early desktop publishing, web publishing and social media gave us a glorious higgledy-piggledy of chaotic, weird and transgressive hobbyist media and retina-searing designs, AI art and design are instantly recognizable at a thousand yards, and it all looks the same, boring, and washed:
AI companies have released open weight/open source models that can run on your own computer, but these are treated as side-shows and toys and demos. The real action, we're told, is in "frontier models," which is industry-speak for "a piece of software whose running costs exceed the GDP of most countries":
Perhaps this is why the dynamics of AI are so different from the early dynamics of the web. Early web users were workers, who demanded that their bosses allow them to use the web and so devolve more power to people doing their jobs. By contrast, today's most ardent AI boosters are bosses, who threaten workers who don't use AI enough in the course of their duties:
Where we do see idiosyncrasy emerging from AI usage, it's often terrible. AI can help you create a folie-a-un in which you and a chatbot team up to reinforce your delusions and drive you deeper into a world of dangerous mirage:
There's a (false) story that's told about people who championed the early internet: that we were blithely certain that technology could only be a force for good, and negligently disinterested in the possibility that technology could control, extract and harm. That's demonstrably untrue: recall cyberpunk's dualism of "the street finds its own use for things" and "cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion."
More true is to say that early internet champions were alive to the importance of the internet, and therefore both excited about the possibilities of the internet to deliver a world of connection, idiosyncrasy, love and solidarity; and about the danger of the internet as a dystopian system of surveillance and manipulation:
History isn't finished. Long after the AI bubble pops, there will be local models and people vibe coding homemade software that respond directly to their needs. The stuff we make on our own computers, for ourselves, is deplatformed from its inception. It's part of the life we can build in technology's "shadowy corners" that we used to just call "technology." The fact that this stuff is utterly unsuited to be production code makes it inherently unmonetizable. It's how the street finds its own use for things:
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Remember when Lil Nas X beautifully explored his sexuality, seduced and killed the devil to the banger of all time, and instead of cheering on this openly gay and proud Black artist for his artistry and fighting back against respectability politics, suddenly said respectability politics was all the Queerest Place on the Internet cared about? Hm. Wonder what happened there.
Anyway I miss him and hope he's doing better with his mental health đđž
Like say what you want about "bad queer representation", but this was the song that made me openly and happily accept that I was bisexual. To see him up there Black and beautiful, making music that I love, absolutely killing it? Yeah. You couldn't tell me shit. This man made me proud to be out. "This will make them think we're evil for being gay" hey newsflash dawg-
Shub, DJ Kookum and Handsome Tiger tell us what makes their mixes for National Indigenous History Month.
For nearly 20 years, June has marked National Indigenous History Month. What started as a grassroots letter campaign in Regina is now a country-wide celebration of First Nations, Inuit and MĂŠtis people.
And what better way to celebrate than a dance party? To honour the month, CBC Music radio show Reclaimed, hosted by Jarrett Martineau, asked a handful of Indigenous artists to create a DJ dance party to celebrate the vibrancy and diversity of Indigenous cultures across Turtle Island. Shub, DJ Kookum and Handsome Tiger have each created hour-long mixes that will showcase the sounds and artists they want highlighted during this special time.
âWe've gotten through so many years of not being able to show our culture and be proud of it, and I think now, especially these days, itâs very, very important to people to express their culture, whether it's through the arts, whether it's through food, whether it's through music, or storytelling," said Shub, when asked about the importance of celebrating this time of year.
Below, get to know the DJs behind these Indigenous History Month mixes, why they chose what they chose, and check back each week in June to listen to a new mix on demand.
If we're working on Spider-verse rules, then Spidergrace has to have a Canon Event--some tragedy in his life that will (supposedly) fuck up the timeline if it's prevented. What is it?
there's a few obvious things that we weren't given a lot of information on in phm canon- his parents and all living family members are dead. that one feels a bit like low hanging fruit though.
getting a bit closer to what we do get some context for- the UNESCO incident. While not necessarily a "tragedy" in the common sense, it does seem very odd for a usually very soft-spoken man to curse the life of a colleague. the UNESCO incident is the nail in the coffin for his academic career, but i think he had a really bad time leading up to that.
if we're sticking as close as possible to phm canon, it's the deaths of shapiro and dubois in the lab explosion. he couldn't have done anything to stop it, and it resulted in his call to action, which he refuses. vehemently. violently. stratt's speech to him before his sedation is the equivalent of "great power, great responsibility". i think stratt is always grace's call to action. rocky is his source of courage, but stratt is always the person who challenges him to do better in the first place.
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does your potential future spouse think it's reasonable for their mother to be involved in your family planning? or to make comments about your body? do you? how does your future spouse feel about girls and/or boys nights? situations involving exes? cancelling trips last minute? under what circumstances do they think it's reasonable to host somebody in your home and for how long? etc.
and the goal of doing this isn't to agree one-hundred percent on every single thing. it's to understand how you both view obligations, family, friends, finances, conflict, etc. and to make sure that even if you don't have the exact same perspective, you can understand where the other person is coming from without feeling like they're a crazy person. you have to be able to come to reasonable compromises and sometimes that involves one person fully caving, and sometimes it involves the other person fully caving, and sometimes it's both of you giving a little, but you need to understand what things you both are and aren't willing to compromise on because those types of situations are going to come up in a marriage.
also, since this has turned into actual advice: you should talk through why you think what you think, even when you agree, because you might not be agreeing for the same reasons.
hi mutuals, i won one william dollar in the lottery so im retiring forever and buying a frigate. her name is panacea. we're going sailing round the world like it's 1805 and youre all invited. drop in the tags what your role aboard ship is
Hello! Obviously you're chill with people drawing your pets but how do you feel about said art being for/used in a job application? I want to apply again to a company that does custom pet portrait paint by numbers for clients, ive applied before with an example piece of my brothers cat, and was told I was being filed as a top contender though didnt get it at the time, and theyre hiring again and would like to apply again with more examples, and I thought that doing something like a peacock would show capability outside the usual cats and dogs (I want to do another cat too though) and also just be really fun and different! Its completely hand drawn, no AI, tracing over an image and breaking it down by shape and color. I would share the result too. Thank you!
I am delighted any time actual artists want to use my peafowl photos for references to make peafowl art, for any reason, including making artwork they intend to sell.
Use of the actual photos themselves in artwork (collages, photo manipulation, etc) I would prefer to be asked about individually, but if you're drawing stuff and using my photos as references (and not using AI or feeding it to AI), you have my blessing! Part of the reason I take photos is so that there are more peafowl references for artist :)
If you don't already have a photo in mind, drop me a PM and see if I can take one in the pose you want, specifically for you!
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One of my biggest literary pet peeves is when historical or history-inspired fiction pretends that "courting" is a synonym for "dating". Usually it's just a one-to-one word swap--in a modern context, these characters would be dating, but this is olden times, so they call it courting instead. Sometimes they'll pretend there's a shade of difference, and that courting is a more serious exploration of marriage or something. But I read a lot of fiction that was actually written during these historical eras, and the word "courting" is never used like that.
Two people do not decide that they are "courting". One person decides to "court" someone else. It's an action, not a stage in the relationship. A man decides to court a woman because he wants to encourage her to have romantic interest in him. He's trying to win her favor. It's not an exclusive relationship--a woman could be courted by multiple men at once. She'll spend time getting to know the guy who's interested in her, but they won't officially define their relationship as one where they only show romantic interest in each other. If they reach a point where they want it to be exclusive, that's when you propose.
There's no middle ground--either you're getting to know each other, or you're committed to marrying each other. This idea of a period where you kind of commit to each other until you decide you definitely want to get married is a modern one, and it occurs in eras where they use the word "dating" to describe it. The closest equivalent I can think of are times and places where they'd talk about a couple "stepping out together", but they're still not calling it "courting". Words have meaning, and the word "courting" has never meant that, so stop using it that way!
the other mild historical disjoint i run into is when people talk about dating in the fifties like it automatically meant exclusivity. the whole reason we have the expression "going steady" is because the default was to or "go around with" or "go out with" multiple people. not in the sense of being in a stable polyamorous vee, but in the sense that archie is actively "seeing" both betty and veronica during the entire time the two girls are competing for his attention and they're both seeing other guys to make him jealous, and nobody involved considers this "cheating."
bizarrely, America has in many ways gotten more conservative about dating since World War II.
I ran into a truly wild cultural misunderstanding with my father some years ago, when I had to explain to him what âhookup cultureâ actually was, and that the thing he assumed it was was actually what we call âcruising cultureâ. His response was âhow is that different from dating?â and when I explained how it was different, he said, and please note that this a direct quote: âThatâs ridiculous! You canât expect a woman to stop fooling around with other guys for anything less than a marriage proposal. I mean, sheâs not a prostitute, you canât buy her.â Now obviously thereâs like⌠a lot to unpack there, but I think itâs pretty darn illustrative of a substantive cultural shift around the assumption of monogamy!
Also, following this, I asked my mom what her thoughts were on the matter, and she said that while she âwouldnât put it in those termsâ she broadly agreed, and thought that anyone expecting any sort of exclusivity when a marriage proposal wasnât at least on the very immanent horizon was ânuts, honestly.â I hesitantly asked if she was including relationships with premarital sexual activity in that, and her response was âOf course. I mean, gosh, you know your Aunt Terri used to have a guy for every day of the week before she finally settled down.â
And this was when I learned, to my shock, that the oft-repeated story of how âAunt Terri used to have a guy for every day of the weekâ didnât just mean âAunt Terri had a full dance cardâ but rather meant that Aunt Terri had a period of her life where she literally dated exactly seven guys at once, all of whom she was sleeping with (or, my mom was quick to disclaim, âwell, fooling around with, I donât know how far she actually went with any of them, but they were definitely all fooling around behind closed doorsâ), on a literal weekly rotation. Like, they had a schedule. A schedule that all seven of the guys knew.
America has gotten a lot more conservative about dating, actually.
Tryan's meandering attempts at basic humanity @tryan-a-bex - Tumblr Blog | Tumlook
