reddit, how do I make my firstborn stop playing with the fans, the ornaments, and the makeup when he is supposed to be a warlord. I fear I shall raise a poet.
getting a note on a super old post
my dad likes to call the stretches of time where you’re not creating “dreaming periods” and says that they’re meant to allow you to absorb all of the beauty, life, and inspiration from the things around you so that when you’re able to create again, you will have fanned your spark back into a flame. sometimes its hard to see those moments as anything but stagnation, but he always says that they’re natural and healthy and needed—things that should be embraced rather than feared.
started watching this japanese show where they take in requests and they try to help out with whatever the request is. and in this one the guy says that when he was in middle school, he always heard the girl across the street playing her piano, and although he only met her in person a few times, listening to her play her usual song was a great comfort to him growing up, especially getting to hear her slowly get better at playing.
the guy now was an adult and taking a break from college, and began to feel really lost in life, and he kept thinking back to when he was in middle school and hearing her play the piano every day. so his request was to hear her play it again. and he and the show's crew literally go back to his old place, and miraculously the girl still lives in that same house across the street, and even more miraculously the people who currently live where he used to allow him to go back to his old room where he used to listen to her play. and they all agree to recreate his middle school memory for him.
the girl comes home from her part-time job and she plays the piano, although she tells them it's been 4 years since she's ever played and is worried she won't sound good, and the guy sits by the window, and he just listens. and like. just imagining reliving that moment when you were younger, listening to a near-stranger play a song across the street every day, feeling a little less lost because of it, and returning to that as an adult when you need it most and everyone being kind enough to let you savor it again even just for a moment... i wanted to start bawling i wont lie. this is the song she played. im going to go lie down about the humanity of it all
really hate to do it but i'm locking all my works for the foreseeable future. the capitalistic, callous scraping of free, lovingly human-made art for the purpose of training generative ai is indescribably immoral, and goes against all i stand for as a writer who writes for the sake of it.
what i make is mine. i did that. and no cheap, synthesized, blended-up and watered-down pathetic pale mimicry can ever come close to what i can and have achieved.
i really, really hate to do this. a reader once commented and told me that my work was the reason they went and applied for an ao3 account. that exchange of respect and appreciation could not have happened if my works were locked from the start. i am fortunate to have felt this love for my work, and am sorry that i now have to sequester it.
what generative ai spits out is not art. there is no passion in the slop it regurgitates, no intentionality behind word choice or frustration with tense. no love imbued from hours spent hunched over a desk editing, no joy derived from having driven your friends crazy with the snippets you strategically dropped to deal the most emotional damage.
fuck generative ai and its profit-driven, uncaring, fuck-you practices. every new post about the violation of artists purely for their efforts to make art accessible sickens me. the industry needs to be better, and the individuals behind each model need to be better; every non-consensually scraped training set you weigh is worth a million artists' souls.
also, fuck anyone who says to stop writing a certain way because the llm "style" of writing is to use em-dashes and other such "tells" – the models do that because REAL LIFE HUMAN WRITERS do that. i will continue to use the goddamn punctuation. it was created to be used. don't be afraid to use it.
stop i NEED that pic of the boy who took his cat to prom and she has a lil dress and is looking up at him with 100% love and tenderness……..
think if there was an mcsr hunger games in real life benex would win and hed be like 'lets go guys :D' after beating ninjabrain to death with a stick
He tried his best
“Hozier is a lesbian” “Hozier is a man written by a woman” “Hozier is like if a man was raised by lesbian mothers” “Hozier is like if a man was a woman” quick give me one reason why a man can’t be soft and gentle and poetic and in love without sounding like a terf or a misogynist