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mittensmorgul · 1 year

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There’s another post going around about this, but tumblr won’t let me reblog it but...

When I read a story written by a human being, I’m not just reading it because I want to read a coffee shop AU with a specific plot description. I’m reading it because it’s making a connection to another human storyteller and seeing a piece of them carved into the words. Storytelling is a human act of sharing joy, angst, tension, resolution, satisfaction. It’s an act of love.

Writing and reading a story isn’t just an act of creation and consumption. I hate that commercialism and AI are reducing it to that sort of transaction. Like oh, you need words on this subject and that’s the end of it. Like what we really needed was just a vending machine we can push buttons on to get a fix, as if the human creating the story wasn’t a factor. That the author’s life experience and views and feelings haven’t infused the words with their own unique touches.

I’ve read hundreds of coffee shop AU’s over the years (and thousands of fics in general). I’ve seen many similar tropes reused across stories, and just like an AI would, I’ve learned things about writing them that I will always carry with me. But unlike an AI, a human author is not just the sum total of coffee shop AU’s we’ve consumed. Even if we used the same prompt, the same sets of tropes, the same characters. I will always choose the human-crafted story over the computer generated one.

Because again, I’m not just looking for a very specific fix via a series of words. I’m looking for a human connection through story.

Unlike an AI, I have BEEN to a coffee shop. I’ve had experiences in coffee shops. I’ve had funny little meet-cutes with people. I’ve accidentally spilled coffee on myself and knocked heads with someone as we both rushed to wipe it up. I know what it FEELS like. The machine doesn’t.

I’ve also read millions of things that aren’t fanfic, or coffee shop AU’s. I’ve experienced things OTHER than going to coffee shops and having meet-cutes. And I know what all those things feel like when processed through my personal human lens of experience, which is different from every other personal human lens of experience.

All the machine can do is spit out what it THINKS a human experience is, and I honestly don’t care about that at all. Fic is not a “product” to be “generated.” It’s an art form that connects us to other people who share the same love of a thing that we do.

People who, even when all writing the same characters in the same setting to the exact same prompt, will all add something or have a viewpoint about something or bring a completely different personality and life experience to the story that no one else on the planet could. That’s what I’m actually reading.

#ai shit #adventures in fanfic #i detest this commodification of art being accelerated by ai tech #as if art was nothing more than a consumer product #i want to engage with art made by people who were driven by a passion to make something and share it with us #not working to an algorithm to generate specific 'content' (and can we agree that reducing art to 'content' is part of the problem here)#and this whole concept of 'death of the author' that has been warped so far beyond what it actually means >.>#it just... makes me incredibly sad to see so many people arguing FOR the use of ai in the arts #like way to miss the whole entire point of what the arts even are #but this reminds me of the fic writer challenge i did one summer...#same prompt same set of tropes and every week a dozen completely different stories from a dozen different authors #because we all took our own unique spin on the subject because that's what PEOPLE do...#i just lament what will happen to that vast well of creativity and humanity that will be lost if everything just gets replaced #by a machine that just keeps spitting out the 'content' it believes the 'consumer' wants... it's just... depressing af

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abronzeagegod · 9 months

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ETS WIP Chapter 7: Wormy Aftermath

[first]|[more]

Aeth was in the hospital for three days.

Their injuries were minor and could have been cleaned, bandaged, and released the same day, however the help they received had lots of unintended side effects.

The blessing of a war demon left Aeth feeling extremely aggressive and refusing help, especially when confined to their hospital bed.

The chaos blessing also had it's own side effects, which were like being in a very strange altered state, which was a mellow but deeply weird high.

Those two things combined possibly saved Aeth and Mala's lives, but at the same time, now that they were out of danger, made for an extremely difficult patient.

It was the combination of all these things, as well as Lyta's extreme concern over her friend, that the doctors allowed Lyta to stay with Aeth the entire time. This decision was also made easier by Lyta lying and saying that Aeth was her fiance.

The doctors didn't question it, and honestly with Lyta in the room, Aeth was much more manageable.

Aeth was going to be fine, they just needed to keep her for observation because these combinations of blessings and realm hopping almost never happen so the medical professionals couldn't be sure that something really terrible was waiting right around the corner and out of sight.

The second day in the hospital was easier, but also worse.

The blessings on Aeth receded late in the night, leaving them with the worst kind of hangover. All of the good feelings and painkillers were gone, and everything that had been held off by the blessings came crashing down on Aeth as hard as reality.

Lyta was still there, helping Aeth, keeping them calm and together. Without her Aeth would have had a much harder time with their blessing hangover.

Finally, on the third day Aeth was given the all clear to leave. Their wounds had been tended to, the blessings and their hangovers had gone, and everything was back to normal, or as normal as could be expected after such an adventure.

Before Aeth could leave, however, a member of the Exterminators and a representative of the police force came to interview them about the incident.

The Exterminator was a rail thin person with a dark, wild tangle of hair that they didn't seem to care about taming or doing anything with. The police officer as a short, older man that chain smoked with wild abandon.

"Walk us through what happened, exactly," the police officer asked Aeth.

Aeth explained what happened.

"Now, this computer, could you describe it?"

"Newer model, it looked like it was a higher end gaming computer, I might be able to get a specific model number for you if you give me some time," Aeth explained.

"What color?" the Exterminator asked.

"Green and black, I think."

"Hmm."

"What?" Aeth asked.

"We have been unable to recover the computer," the Exterminator said. "Everything has been contained and we're sorting through the rubble so to speak. Can't find the computer."

"Couldn't it have been pulled into a hell or the abyss?"

"Could have," the Exterminator said with a shrug, "but so far it seems that once we closed all the rifts everything was shunted back to it's original plane of existence. We found everything, including remains of the drug makers, but not the computer."

Aeth shifted uncomfortably. "I don't know what happened to the computer, it was there, but once the demons came I stopped paying attention to it."

The officer nodded. "No, don't concern yourself with that. Can you just tell us what you did with the computer before everything went bad?"

Aeth recounted their memories of the events before everything went bad.

"There was a blue screen of death," they started but were cut off by the police officer.

"What's that?"

"When a computer encounters something that stops some critical function from running. A virus rewrites or changes some core code, or there's a catastrophic failure in the drivers that run the computer. Basically there's something fundamental in the running of the computer that has broken, possibly irreparably."

"So this wouldn't be caused by, say, a video game being broken?" the cop asked.

"No, no, this is something that is extremely relevant to the running of the computer. Something that the computer can't work without."

"I see, please, continue."

"The guy that showed me in, Mala, he went to the computer and touched it to show me how it wasn't working."

"Do you know what he touched?" the Exterminator asked.

"No, he just slapped some keys. That seemed to trigger, something, whatever happened with the rifts. I pushed him out of the way to try and do some quick coding. Accessing the BIOS or trying to hard stop any remaining processes. But I think I only got in a single line of code, maybe not even that far before things went really bad."

The Exterminator nodded.

The cop saw that and then also nodded. "Thank you very much for your time. We won't bother you any further today. Take our cards, and if you have any more information please give us a call. Recover as best as you can. I do feel compelled to let you know that I'm positive you will be called to testify in this case. As there will likely be a trial, with something this disastrous there's always a trial."

Aeth frowned, they were eager to put all of this behind them, but that was something that was seemingly unavoidable.

"Oh, and if you see any computers like the one you were called to fix, give us a call, maybe it'll turn up somewhere strange."

<run-script-character-POV-change-3>

The computer had a very interesting life and travels.

It shouldn't have had gone to as many interesting places as it did, as it was just a YouthMatrix gaming computer, built in the city Karm Enphom overseas. It was built out of various parts manufactured all over the globe, but was assembled in Karm Enphom.

It was assembled largely by Forse des Rockel, a minimum wage employee that had worked with YouthMatrix for a little over a year.

From the assembly of the computer in Karm Enphom, where it existed as a whole entity for only thirty six hours before it was packed up and shipped out.

The computer was packed into a large container, put on to a boat, and shipped across the sea.

For thirteen days the computer remained locked in a container with 49 other computers built in the same manufacturing warehouse as the ship made it's way across the water. It was finally unloaded after it made the long trip across the sea and the dangerous bay outside the city.

The computer was unloaded where it was transferred to the distribution center for the online retailer that sold a lot of YouthMatrix products. The computer sat in the distribution center for several months while the other computers that came with it across the sea were sold and sent out to customers across the country.

Eventually, the time had come for the computer, where it was bought on super sale, and delivered within the same city it was sitting in.

The computer was delivered to the house in the Clutches where it was bought as a present, and then it was used pretty consistently for several months before the family that owned it went on a lengthy summer vacation in the tropical beaches of Pollepemu, where all of the very rich like to vacation.

While they were on the red sand beaches of the exclusive resort, they rented out their mansion to a website that offered houses and apartments to travelers. And enterprising drug dealers.

A quartet of drug dealers rented the house for the entirety of the family's vacation. They planned on using the 9,000 square feet mansion to manufacture enough illegal drugs that they could sell for the next several months, and, in their minds, avoid detection by changing their manufacturing locations.

The drug dealers used the computer to plan out their dangerous and less than ideal excursions into the abyss. The drug dealers were very smart and planned on mining some resources to put into their illegal drugs by going into the abyss. But they weren't completely stupid, they weren't going to go into the pure chaos and impenetrable of the abyss. They were going to summon, bind, and use a devil to do it for them.

The computer was tasked with mapping parts of the abyss where they might find the items they needed. The abyss was a complicated and plane made of pure chaos and horror, so the best way to try and map it was by the brute force of a computer.

Such a thing was possible with a computer system. But only the most advanced, super-cooled, advanced machine learning systems in the world. And even then they would need to have some advanced warlocks and magic users to keep the computers from being corrupted, consumed, or even just exploding.

This computer was made at a time when the most graphically intensive game was Blue Code 2. By the time the these drug dealers were using this computer the most graphically intensive game was Blue Code 3: The Thing Blue Line. Which despite being only a single number increment, was a vastly different level of graphics. The quest for photo-realism had consumed a lot of graphical fidelity and processing power. So what the drug dealers were asking of the poor slightly outdated computer was too much to handle.

The stress of the ask had started to run the computer ragged, and in an attempt to escape the torment of doing overly stressful and intensive work, the computer simply gave up.

Which resulted in a call to tech support.

During the tribulations and attacks that happened within the house, the computer fell through a small hole into the Abyss.

From the assembly in one country, to the ship, to the warehouse, to the mansion, this computer had gone many places over the course of its life.

It's final resting place was one of the infinite layers of the chaos made manifest in the abyss.

The Exterminators were extremely thorough and precise in their combating both the abyss and hell. They left no rift open, no door ajar.

The computer had no hope of returning to it's home plane.

It's final resting place was the abyss, surrounded by void-worms, parasites of stars, and Xilgliv the Unending Hunger.

The abyss was very thoroughly sealed behind gates and seals as old as the world itself, forged in the blood of gods and galaxies. Escaping the abyss, even for a few brief moments was nothing short of a miracle, a once in a lifetime chance that could not be squandered.

Yet, there was a computer, a computer that against all odds, was still connected to the world beyond the abyss. And for all the magic and all the walls that kept Xilgliv and it's ilk locked in their chaos realm, it was not supposed to stop something from returning and connecting to it's home plane.

The computer was a window, a gateway, albeit a small one, for the abyss to connect to the world beyond.

i have a kofi where you can support me and read these chapters early

#eldritch tech support #this is where we start getting into the character spaces and the bits between the set pieces #the connective tissue that needs to be there to get from point A to point C #it's just that they are necessary and i don't like them and i know they need to be edited very badly #BUT i can't go back and edit them because if i do then i will be doing that for weeks instead of finishing the story #i think i'm about 3-4 weeks away from finishing this and i just need to get through the Big Bits

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