Have you experienced the Tetris Effect in any way?
Have you experienced the Tetris Effect in any way?
Yes
No
Remaining time: 4 days 5 hours
The Tetris effect occurs when someone dedicates substantial time, effort, and concentration to an activity and thereby alters their thoughts, dreams, and other experiences not directly linked to said activity.
in which Harrow's been found and the remaining quasar diamond has been stolen
rated T, cw for implied self harm
read on ao3
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Rayla doesn’t think much of the lock of hair missing from Callum’s head.
In fact, she hadn’t even been sure that it was missing until she tunnels her fingers through to his scalp—not an uncommon touch between them—and sees the way he shifts away so immediately. His head lifts from her lap, his hand flies to the back of his neck, his eyes cut away from hers—
“You chicken out from a haircut or what?
“Oh, did I?” he answers—huh? “I mean—oh, right. I am. I mean, I did. I cut it. It was, uh…sticking up kind of funny this morning and well…you know me! I got a little frustrated, and then…before I could even stop myself, snip!
He freezes in a theatrical shrug and maybe the least believable grin—grimace?—on his face that she’s ever seen.
“Uh…right—” She squints doubtfully, but…probably it’s just something—somehow—more embarrassing than that little story he’d just made up. “Snip.”
Rayla tugs him back down into her lap, prepared to refuse resistance that doesn’t come…and blends the jagged edges of the clump he’d cut in with the other locks at the crown of his head.
She swipes the white streak out of his eyes.
It’s been a lot on him lately, she knows—everything with Ezran about their dad. The stolen quasar diamond…
He’d tell her if it mattered.
She definitely notices, though, the bandage that appears over his hand the next time he returns back to their suite at the Lodge less than whole.
This time, though, Callum has an answer she believes.
He’s steady when she takes his palm and unwraps the strip of linen over the heel of his hand—steady while they both look at the clean red slice.
“I was sharpening my charcoal—down in the study earlier.” he explains as she ghosts a finger over it. He breathes in a hiss when she then passes a blotted towel of alcohol across the wound…but only just under his breath. He’ll live, she decides, dabbing at the cut, assured, at least, that it doesn’t need anything more than a bandage and a kiss. “Slipped.”
She believes it, too, for a good long ten minutes. Really, why would she doubt it? Sure, her dorky mage is a little less clumsy these days…but it’s not like she hasn’t seen similar scars littered over his hands, all by that same cause.
She’d have kept believing it, too…if not for the gloves.
He’d gone for a bath, she’d been picking up his clothes, and—
Shouldn’t his glove have a gash—and blood—too? Since when did he just…randomly take them off? They’d started as an art thing, keeping charcoal off his hands, he’d said once when she’d teased him—
Rayla knows she shouldn’t coax him into another lie. She should just outright ask him, but—
“Guess you’ll have to dig out a backup pair—huh?” she wonders when he comes back from the washroom, making it seem as though she’d just then been stacking his clothes up for him, like she hadn’t looked at the gloves closely. “Shame.” she sighs, eyeing his reaction.
To his credit, he doesn’t flinch as she picks them up—doesn’t take them out of her hands or anything.
He just…waits to tell his lie, until she sets them down again.
“Yeah, I’ll, uh…get those fixed too, though.”
“I have other things to be mended, too—there’s a basket over there.”
He adds them on top of her long-tattered cloak and an old orange pajama shirt neither of them wants to part with.
They’re not there in the morning.
Smart.
He’s learning, she thinks, biting her tongue.
It’s not anger, even, that’s churning in her gut—just worry, mostly. Why lie? She already knows he and Ez have been arguing, she already knows it’s all circled back around to them saving Runaan, and she already knows that none of this would be happening if they’d just caught Claudia that night when she’d made off with the remaining diamond—why make things more complicated, now with her?
He’s not smart enough to lock a door, though, apparently.
She hadn’t even been suspicious. She’d just rapped her knuckles once against the door to his study, looking for him for bed, easing it open like she has a hundred times before—
“Hey, Callum—”
—to find Callum shirtless, a knife—her knife, swiped from the place where her armor hangs behind their door—turned on himself, pointed at his hips.
“Rayla!” he jumps, dropping the blade and showing his hands. “What, uh—”
Every single nerve freezes, locking her body tight, and she goes painfully, eerily still—like one wrong move will spell disaster. What was he—
“It’s not what it looks like!”
She doesn’t know what’s worse—the lies, the stealing, the…hurting himself—or what she fears it all means.
“And what does it look like, Callum?” She tries to keep her voice measured, calm—but it pitches toward disbelief, toward panic, toward disgust. “You, trying to gut yourself in the middle of—”
It’s then that she sees the open book on his desk, and she’s only just fast enough to bolt all the way across to the table and snatch it from in front of him.
ydobwena
For breath: scrap of a Sky creature (a lock, a feather)
For bone: nail of a nobleman (an ounce exactly)
For blood: essence of an Ocean creature (a vial full)
For body: skin of the spellcaster (an inch or so will do)
Rayla doesn’t think: she snaps the book shut. It goes with her.
for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.
Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.
Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.
And so on.
The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.
But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.
If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.
But they wouldn't understand any of it.
That's ChatGPT.
And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.
But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.
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