“Did You See The Way That Little Girl Looked At Me? Kids. Little Kids. They Grow Up Believing That

Backstory

Things to keep in mind when building a character’s past/backstory:

Before plotting a character’s backstory- Ask yourself if it's relevant. Your story doesn't need unnecessary details that don't fuel the plot/character. Sometimes, a characters entire life story isn't what's best for the plot. 

You don't need to know it all at once- The process is nonlinear/messy. It's okay to go back and forth.

Start with core memories- Smaller details can be great but it's easier to remember the big picture when you start with the corner pieces.

Timeline- use these core parts/events for your character to build a timeline to better understand the character/story. 

Don't dump it all in one place- We don't need to know everything about a character in chapter one. Don't forget to put thought into how you present this information. Flashbacks, dialogue, and playing with transitions can make a memory more vivid.

So... on my other account (where I post all my writing stuff) I can't comment, get no views (I averaged 100) and it's like super weird? I'm relatively new to tumblr. Someone help, what's happening.

guys. please

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.

Amen.

one thing white people in fandom will do is protect their own even when that person is clearly in the wrong. which i why i don’t believe for a second that y’all want to be allies. some of y’all don’t want to put in the work to become a better person at all. someone brings up a certain topic and y’all wanna be dismissive about it or you’ll try to derail because it makes you uncomfortable. fuck off

chubby!reader going out to for drinks with your “friends”, watching the way men come and go from your table, flirting with your friends as they giggle and flippantly introduce you, saying you’re also single, before batting their lashes when the man’s attention falls back to them.

You’re debating on just hightailing it out of there while you still have some of your pride, snippets of the others conversations filtering in and out of your mind. “Do you see his arms?”

“Oh please look at those thighs, I bet he could lift a truck!”

“Face looks mighty comfortable.” and then an uproar of giggles as you sigh, lifting your eyes and you immediately zone in on the four men sitting opposite of you.

Oh it was time to leave, you couldn’t handle watching for adonis’s looking down at you

But as you’re collecting your things, muttering something to the girls about work early in the morning when they start whining “nooo where are you going!!”

when your waiter gently catches your elbow

“ma’am? your tab has been paid for and i have a honey bourbon shot here for you.”

The Machine Herald!

this isn’t just me right. plz

one thing i won’t be doing is having people believe a white person can experience racism

random headcanons i have about VALORANT agents

(this got out of hand but heres some hcs i have that i like are pretty cool (probs pt. 1))

depending on the day, phoenix, skye, astra, chamber, kj, raze, neon, and reyna are completely non-understandable with their accents combined with their slang (this makes it terrible for anyone trying to talk to them about something important that day, especially when kj, raze, and skye are all hanging out together)

kj speaks in german whenever she's super mad but has also started to speak it more frequently after she teaches skye, raze, yoru, and cypher some german words (mainly curses or insults) [i had a friend whose family was Italian and she knew some words from it so she would teach us some of them. they were mainly curse words but it was funny when she called someone a bitch in Italian to their face during class]

phoenix, yoru, and jett all try to learn each other’s native languages (excluding phoenix). it takes them a while but they can at least understand them when it’s being spoken and can talk in basic sentence

people who can cook: skye, astra, cypher, brimstone, jett, sage, neon, omen, and sova

people who will cook when necessary but it is babysitter level of cooking: breach, yoru, viper, killjoy, and reyna

people who aren’t allowed to touch the kitchen with a ten-foot pole: phoenix, raze, KAY/O, chamber

the warm-up crew is a group that trains together a surprising amount

brim, sage, and viper usually train together (brim occasionally with breach)

when yoru, jett, and phoenix can’t sleep or get up early they go train together or, when they’re still up, sit and talk with kj and raze in their labs/the living area/or any of their rooms

phoenix will give anyone a hug (unless they say otherwise), usually side hugs but he’s almost always touching someone (jett or yoru mainly) in some way

(he stands close to people so their arms touch, he gives everyone a hug or high five when they leave, he ruffles yoru’s hair when he walks by or when he wakes up in the morning, he cuddles with jett and yoru whenever they’re sitting down together, he dances around with astra and neon after they make dinner, he shoves kj’s beanie down her head when they’re both stressed and tired, he flips jett’s hood up whenever he runs past and she’s stressed or upset since it makes her laugh, he flicks cyphers hat when they’re heading out on a mission)

skye always makes sure kj and raze go to sleep when she knows they'll be up late

those two care a lot about each other but they both have the unhealthy habit of locking themselves in their labs and messing around with gadgets. they used to have an alarm clock in there that brim got them so they wouldn't be in there for years, but it was destroyed after it scared kj so bad she wrecked her and raze's projects they've been working on for days

because she doesn't want kj and raze's projects to be ruined, skye always goes in quietly, sitting at one of the work stations or on a couch (that appears after several visits from skye, phoenix, jett, and yoru) and not speaking until one of the 2 notices her. she convinces them that they'll get more done/have more time if they sleep now and don't pass out and sleep for 2 days

skye, astra, and yoru talk to each other a lot, more than you would think

astra and yoru first became friends after they talked about their powers, since they both deal with dimensional stuff, yoru and skye became friends because they would both hangout when phoenix, jett, kj, and raze were on missions, practicing their flash aims. yoru introduced the two after he became a lot closer with them

astra and skye are both environmentalists and talk about the better ways they could fight and how to make the base more sustainable, which leads them (and neon and sage, sometimes yoru) to create a garden full of different plants from many people's home countries.

the garden becomes a community effort

kj and raze use spare/partly broken parts to make a sprinkler system

neon, jett, and brim use their plane to go and pick up supplies, since the base isn't really supplied for gardening

astra and skye plan everything out, and with the help of kj and viper, create the perfect place for it to be, close to the kitchen but still with plenty of light

viper modifies her poison walls and orbs to spray out water, which she gives to kj & raze on their sprinkler making journey

phoenix and yoru don't have any powers that help them with the gardening aspect, but phoenix burns away and dying or unnecessary plants in the building area while yoru uses his teleport to move supplies over

they have all the agents make a list of what they want to be grown in the garden. there's a big, ever-changing list in the kitchen that cypher updates when he gets confirmation that they can grow it and someone wants it

the garden ends up being multiple sections, each with its own climate to provide the best-growing environment for certain plants [it ends up being kind of like biosphere 2 if any of you know what that is/has been there]

after they set the garden up, agents can sign up to make food for the Protocol

astra shows phoenix how to make food from her home country

skye and brim have a bbq off

kj and raze swap recipes and meals, when they make them just for themselves

reyna signs up with raze one day and the kitchen somehow doesn’t explode, but they do end up making some fire food

skye/astra will bring the agents who are training/working food that’s comforting but also healthy so they don’t pass out

sage, jett, and neon make food for lunar new year and everyone thinks it’s amazing

all the agents have groups that they’ll train with/hang out after training with (like in warm up)

jett, phoenix, and yoru always train together, no matter who else joins

kj and raze train together a lot too, but raze will also train with reyna sometimes

skye trains with yoru a lot, as well as kj and raze. she’s trained with neon more recently

sage and viper train together a lot, as well as brim. these three train with omen a lot too, and brim with breach

sova trains with anyone who’s in the training room (mostly) but likes to train with phoenix and jett a lot (yoru’s growing on him)

sports are a big thing at the base, especially after phoenix joins (brim kept everything strictly professional before he joined but phoenix wore him down)

brim, neon, phoenix, jett, raze, and KAY/O all like basketball

viper, astra, phoenix, yoru, raze, skye, and reyna all like soccer

brim, KAY/O, and (eventually) breach all like baseball (KAY/O and breach mainly watch it cause brims watching it)

kj watches sports with raze & skye, but not usually on her own

sage, sova, skye, cypher, and kj all like watching non conventional sports like gymnastic, archery, track, etc. (mostly during the olympics)

chamber and omen don’t really watch sports but if it’s on then they’ll watch it