Alyx/Atlas

I saw something like this earlier:

“Gasps echo. Chairs scrape the floor. It’s not sudden—it’s slow. Methodical. Practiced.

She watches. It’s unlike anything she’s seen before.”

Nobody. Wants. To. Read. This.

It makes me nauseous. Seriously. Who the hell wants to read words one at a time with a million periods in between?

You don’t even explain anything. What does it mean for chairs to scrape the floor methodically? Slow, practiced, purposeful—these are just adjectives. They need context. Like, something of substance to give them meaning. It’s like a condiment with nothing to put it on.

No offense to those of you that drink salad dressing from the bottle. I know you’re out there.

Anyway, I don’t care how someone or something moved if you don’t tell me why. Why is it significant that the stupid fucking chairs moved like that? Tell me. That’s the whole point of the story. It isn’t just ‘things happen! Look at me jingling keys!’

For god’s sake, move on from your stupid chairs and their stupid scraping. I’m so serious. Move on. Nothing irritates me more than spending too much time on a moment that would take two seconds in real life for the sole purpose of being profound about it.

The pacing of your words affects how readers experience the story. If you want your audience to feel the shock of whatever lore-bomb you just dropped, you have to give them an opportunity to process it, which means you need to keep telling the story. Lingering there extends the moment. It never lets your readers breathe. You don’t want that.

I have to care, too. More importantly, you have to make me care. I need to connect to your story, your characters, in a way only human brains can. That’s the hard part. That’s the fun part.

There’s endless nuance like this that simply cannot be feigned. Writing is an art form, for god’s sake. People don’t make art just to look at it.

That’s why you still feel empty after generating your word salad inferior to the Wattpad ramblings of a teenager in 2012. The product isn’t the point. You have robbed yourself of the catharsis of making something. Something that would not—could not—exist without you.

It doesn’t matter a microscopic, teeny-weeny bit that “your” writing is beautiful and profound if the story sucks. A machine can’t tell a story because it doesn’t have experiences. It has a hodge-podge of scraped literature that it has been trained to emulate. That’s like using a hammer to frost a cake. You’re not going to get something good. You’re going to get the shitty product of using a tool that fundamentally lacks the ability to do the damn thing correctly.

The AI does not understand the hero’s journey or figurative language or subversion of expectations or the reason we tell stories in the goddamn first place.

We tell stories to connect with each other. As people. We make up some bullshit and translate it into whatever language and share it with the people we care about because there are things that can only be communicated through storytelling.

People hate this AI prose garbage because it’s not a human voice they’re reading. It lacks intention. The words need to be given meaning by a person with a life and experiences and pain and all that stuff a machine could never have or hope to replicate. If I can't get lost in the stream of consciousness of another human, as is my god-given right, I am not interested.

What’s the point of creation without the creation?

If you’re telling a story by relying on a machine, you’re not telling a story.

all i have to do is be around a person for a couple hours and i can pretty accurately make their character’s dialogue plausible. a few years and you get me finishing their sentences before they can think about what they were going to say. it’s my own superpower i guess.

going bowling with hax was an experience but to tell you the truth it didn’t change anything about his character bc all he did was reinforce what i already knew about him lol. (which is that he’s a lovely dude who is absolutely winning the idgaf war)

it’s awesome to hear from the hackingnoises enjoyers that i did him justice. i kept having to stop myself and go “would he say that? maybe he would say it but in a different way.”

uhh tl;dr understanding people is the why & how of my reasons for writing. i’ve made other posts about this and finding a middle ground between character and person. i write to understand. so i put a lot of effort into communicating that.

not in the story, no. couri doesn’t drink and i don’t think he’d like me writing him drunk lol. it was just a silly doodle. i could ask him but i don’t drink (much) either so i wouldn’t even know how to write that :,D

hello!! welcome to my glorified piece of scratch paper. i love asks & i love talking about my fics :D thank you for asking!!

i’m not quite sure what you mean, but the recurring theme between fein and couri in my work is something like this:

best friends that also despise each other and delight in getting on each other’s nerves. they also hold a kind of immense respect for one another that is frustratingly unique to their relationship and cannot be replicated with any other person in their lives, so they’re always cosmically drawn to each other because fate has a twisted sense of humor and thinks it’s hilarious to give them problems they need the other to help them solve.

they make each other worse and then, gradually, they make each other better.

Meta-phore — Chapter One: A Decision

“You died?” Rocky screeched. The computer translated it with much less urgency than Rocky’s native language. “Grace died? But Grace right here. Humans only die once. Grace said that.”

“Rocky!” Grace’s voice echoed in the small atmosphere. “Rock, calm down. I didn’t mean it literally. It’s a meta-phore.”

hax can’t even be serious when revealing his career-ending secret to a stranger