Unexpected / Azriel X Reader

My heart!

simon riley who is the one who rescues you when you're taken hostage by an enemy pmc, fighting through hell just to get you back.

simon riley who doesn't hesitate to take his mask off so as to not frighten you further. it doesn't matter that you've never seen his face, or that he's breaking down his barriers, all that matters is that you don't shake when you look at him.

simon riley who carries you out of there, safe in the warmth of his arms that hold you like he'll let you go again.

simon riley whose heart breaks because he recognises the haunted look in your beautiful eyes, and he knows he'd do anything to see them sparkle like they used to.

simon riley who slowly acclimates you to being touched again (it totally is just for you, he swears). soft brushes of his pinky against yours, a guiding hand on your back, picking a piece of fluff out of your hair.

simon riley who doesn't ask questions when you find comfort cuddling into his broad chest, because he knows mentioning it would only make you feel bad. he doesn't want to lose the way you only find peace cuddled up next to him.

simon riley who kisses your forehead but only when you're asleep, because he still has secrets to keep. he doesn't think you feel the same way, he just thinks you see a protector.

simon riley who cares even if he doesn't have the right words to tell you.

simon riley who loves you, and spends every day thankful he didnt lose you.

Now there is no step she can take in any direction. She weeps suddenly, stops suddenly, laughs. Sorry! I’m empty. I mean, tired. Today. Inside her chest everything is ablaze.

— Anne Carson, "Poor Houdini" (x)

IVE BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS

suddenly stuck by the image of a sleepy, bleary eyed gaz opening the door to his room in his underwear and a bonnet to a fully dressed and overly caffeinated soap babbling on about something

Yes!! I go on vacation the week around my birthday so I can have my special day where nothing and noone matters but me! Its the best birthdays I can remember (even if it is a bit lonely sometimes but I much prefer that over mandated family meetings or stressing about a party I have to plan). Do it! Do it scared bit do it! If you dont like it, dont do it next year but try it! Personally I usually also go place where I dont have wifi so I can detox from my way to high screentime too. Its amazing I could go on and on and on and on

Let me tell you, I've taken lots of vacations by myself, and I've also taken lots of vacations with other people, and by far vacationing solo is the easiest, most stress-free vacation you can imagine. There's some kind of societal stigma against this. Ignore this. Vacationing by yourself is amazing. There is zero negotiation or compromise. You do exactly what you want to do when you want to do it. You eat whatever you want to eat, whenever you want to eat it. You pursue whatever tourist attraction you want, or none at all. It is the purest release from all obligations and responsibilities. You don't need to worry about whether anyone else is walking faster than you or slower than you and you've lost them in a crowd, did they want to do something different, have you railroaded them into doing what you want to do?

And it's easier to buy solo tickets to things. It's easier to squeeze into crowded bars. Everything about it is just so incredibly relaxing. Don't let society talk you out of it. It's obviously good to socialize and have friends and family who you want to hang out with and see, etc., etc., and it's okay if traveling solo just doesn't appeal to you at all. I'm just saying, I was just on vacation with people, and I had a great time, but we were out to dinner at the hotel restaurant and at the table next to us was a woman by herself having a glass of wine and eating spinach and artichoke dip for dinner while she read a novel and I was just like, honestly, I know that kind of dinner and it's so great lol. If you've ever wondered what it's like to travel solo, it's like that: dip for dinner and a glass of wine and a book lol

Please, i'll even feed it (as if I dont already)

reblog the money pigeon for a financially stable future

AN II Not sure what this is, but I might expand on it at some point.

Reader who somehow is an impeccable judge of character. Reader who deescalates situations before others notice it's going off the rails. Reader who draws the attention of Price when they come to stand behind a child whose guardian took a menacing step towards them, face more threatening than he has ever seen it. Reader who, after months and years of working with Price, still surprises him with their instinctive ability to be at the right place at the right time. Reader whom he sees flinch for the first time when their family comes to tap them out for the holidays. Reader who comes back from the holidays quiet and jumpy. Reader who shrinks at harsh words. Reader who falls into blind panic when Soap pins them down during training. Reader who breaks his nose to struggle free. Reader who cant breathe. Price whose heart breaks when he realizes why reader is so good at predicting chaos.

well 🧍‍♀️ as a reminder this blog is NOT a safe space for trump supporters but it IS a safe place for women, queers, trans ppl, people of color, undocumented people, and any marginalized group.

Look at that; yet another reason to hare AI...Someone remind me why its everywhere again?

Generative AI Is Bad For Your Creative Brain

In the wake of early announcing that their blog will no longer be posting fanfiction, I wanted to offer a different perspective than the ones I’ve been seeing in the argument against the use of AI in fandom spaces. Often, I’m seeing the arguments that the use of generative AI or Large Language Models (LLMs) make creative expression more accessible. Certainly, putting a prompt into a chat box and refining the output as desired is faster than writing a 5000 word fanfiction or learning to draw digitally or traditionally. But I would argue that the use of chat bots and generative AI actually limits - and ultimately reduces - one’s ability to enjoy creativity.

Creativity, defined by the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus, is the ability to produce or use original and unusual ideas. By definition, the use of generative AI discourages the brain from engaging with thoughts creatively. ChatGPT, character bots, and other generative AI products have to be trained on already existing text. In order to produce something “usable,” LLMs analyzes patterns within text to organize information into what the computer has been trained to identify as “desirable” outputs. These outputs are not always accurate due to the fact that computers don’t “think” the way that human brains do. They don’t create. They take the most common and refined data points and combine them according to predetermined templates to assemble a product. In the case of chat bots that are fed writing samples from authors, the product is not original - it’s a mishmash of the writings that were fed into the system.

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) is a therapy modality developed by Marsha M. Linehan based on the understanding that growth comes when we accept that we are doing our best and we can work to better ourselves further. Within this modality, a few core concepts are explored, but for this argument I want to focus on Mindfulness and Emotion Regulation. Mindfulness, put simply, is awareness of the information our senses are telling us about the present moment. Emotion regulation is our ability to identify, understand, validate, and control our reaction to the emotions that result from changes in our environment. One of the skills taught within emotion regulation is Building Mastery - putting forth effort into an activity or skill in order to experience the pleasure that comes with seeing the fruits of your labor. These are by no means the only mechanisms of growth or skill development, however, I believe that mindfulness, emotion regulation, and building mastery are a large part of the core of creativity. When someone uses generative AI to imitate fanfiction, roleplay, fanart, etc., the core experience of creative expression is undermined.

Creating engages the body. As a writer who uses pen and paper as well as word processors while drafting, I had to learn how my body best engages with my process. The ideal pen and paper, the fact that I need glasses to work on my computer, the height of the table all factor into how I create. I don’t use audio recordings or transcriptions because that’s not a skill I’ve cultivated, but other authors use those tools as a way to assist their creative process. I can’t speak with any authority to the experience of visual artists, but my understanding is that the feedback and feel of their physical tools, the programs they use, and many other factors are not just part of how they learned their craft, they are essential to their art.

Generative AI invites users to bypass mindfully engaging with the physical act of creating. Part of becoming a person who creates from the vision in one’s head is the physical act of practicing. How did I learn to write? By sitting down and making myself write, over and over, word after word. I had to learn the rhythms of my body, and to listen when pain tells me to stop. I do not consider myself a visual artist - I have not put in the hours to learn to consistently combine line and color and form to show the world the idea in my head.

But I could.

Learning a new skill is possible. But one must be able to regulate one’s unpleasant emotions to be able to get there. The emotion that gets in the way of most people starting their creative journey is anxiety. Instead of a focus on “fear,” I like to define this emotion as “unpleasant anticipation.” In Atlas of the Heart, Brene Brown identifies anxiety as both a trait (a long term characteristic) and a state (a temporary condition). That is, we can be naturally predisposed to be impacted by anxiety, and experience unpleasant anticipation in response to an event. And the action drive associated with anxiety is to avoid the unpleasant stimulus.

Starting a new project, developing a new skill, and leaning into a creative endevor can inspire and cause people to react to anxiety. There is an unpleasant anticipation of things not turning out exactly correctly, of being judged negatively, of being unnoticed or even ignored. There is a lot less anxiety to be had in submitting a prompt to a machine than to look at a blank page and possibly make what could be a mistake. Unfortunately, the more something is avoided, the more anxiety is generated when it comes up again. Using generative AI doesn’t encourage starting a new project and learning a new skill - in fact, it makes the prospect more distressing to the mind, and encourages further avoidance of developing a personal creative process.

One of the best ways to reduce anxiety about a task, according to DBT, is for a person to do that task. Opposite action is a method of reducing the intensity of an emotion by going against its action urge. The action urge of anxiety is to avoid, and so opposite action encourages someone to approach the thing they are anxious about. This doesn’t mean that everyone who has anxiety about creating should make themselves write a 50k word fanfiction as their first project. But in order to reduce anxiety about dealing with a blank page, one must face and engage with a blank page. Even a single sentence fragment, two lines intersecting, an unintentional drop of ink means the page is no longer blank. If those are still difficult to approach a prompt, tutorial, or guided exercise can be used to reinforce the understanding that a blank page can be changed, slowly but surely by your own hand.

(As an aside, I would discourage the use of AI prompt generators - these often use prompts that were already created by a real person without credit. Prompt blogs and posts exist right here on tumblr, as well as imagines and headcannons that people often label “free to a good home.” These prompts can also often be specific to fandom, style, mood, etc., if you’re looking for something specific.)

In the current social media and content consumption culture, it’s easy to feel like the first attempt should be a perfect final product. But creating isn’t just about the final product. It’s about the process. Bo Burnam’s Inside is phenomenal, but I think the outtakes are just as important. We didn’t get That Funny Feeling and How the World Works and All Eyes on Me because Bo Burnham woke up and decided to write songs in the same day. We got them because he’s been been developing and honing his craft, as well as learning about himself as a person and artist, since he was a teenager. Building mastery in any skill takes time, and it’s often slow.

Slow is an important word, when it comes to creating. The fact that skill takes time to develop and a final piece of art takes time regardless of skill is it’s own source of anxiety. Compared to @sentientcave, who writes about 2k words per day, I’m very slow. And for all the time it takes me, my writing isn’t perfect - I find typos after posting and sometimes my phrasing is awkward. But my writing is better than it was, and my confidence is much higher. I can sit and write for longer and longer periods, my projects are more diverse, I’m sharing them with people, even before the final edits are done. And I only learned how to do this because I took the time to push through the discomfort of not being as fast or as skilled as I want to be in order to learn what works for me and what doesn’t.

Building mastery - getting better at a skill over time so that you can see your own progress - isn’t just about getting better. It’s about feeling better about your abilities. Confidence, excitement, and pride are important emotions to associate with our own actions. It teaches us that we are capable of making ourselves feel better by engaging with our creativity, a confidence that can be generalized to other activities.

Generative AI doesn’t encourage its users to try new things, to make mistakes, and to see what works. It doesn’t reward new accomplishments to encourage the building of new skills by connecting to old ones. The reward centers of the brain have nothing to respond to to associate with the action of the user. There is a short term input-reward pathway, but it’s only associated with using the AI prompter. It’s designed to encourage the user to come back over and over again, not develop the skill to think and create for themselves.

I don’t know that anyone will change their minds after reading this. It’s imperfect, and I’ve summarized concepts that can take months or years to learn. But I can say that I learned something from the process of writing it. I see some of the flaws, and I can see how my essay writing has changed over the years. This might have been faster to plug into AI as a prompt, but I can see how much more confidence I have in my own voice and opinions. And that’s not something chatGPT can ever replicate.