Jack Avalt Handler

Jack of all trades, master of none. Doing odd jobs and giving random activities the old college try. If you want to see what I'm working on, Become a Patron! Jack makes Art

[jackoftradesmakesstuff]

The most recent stuff from @mari-lair and the Isolated Stargazer AU gave me a vision so clear and profound I broke my traditional ten years of silence

Original here

[jackoftradesmakesstuff]

What I should have been doing tonight: Sleeping What I did instead: Using the ISAT dialogue maker to introduce my SI OC when I haven't even thought of anything else related to them.

Under the cut because it's a lot of gifs

[jackoftradesmakesstuff]

"I should draw my OC's sprites before I do a dialogue maker where they talk," I said, proceeding to not draw them. Done a lot of brainstorming on their design, though! Here's what the party is doing during Siffrin's Loop call.

Under the cut again because, again, it's a big pile of gifs because I like it that way.

[starrygatorr]

characters who are actually two characters are so important to me. d.i.d. doppelgängers. possession. twins. clones. au versions of the same person. sometimes a guy is two guys and that is so so so important to me

[jackoboltrades]

[pixxyofice]

Optional party member ocs are so funny to me. They just can be skipped because the player didn't trip over the recruitment requirements. Surely this won't be used for angst fuel

[inthetags]

Write in the tags your biggest "fun police" take (aka: something you hate that is totally inconsequential and that everyone else seems to enjoy)

[jackoftradesmakesstuff]

What I should have been doing tonight: Sleeping What I did instead: Using the ISAT dialogue maker to introduce my SI OC when I haven't even thought of anything else related to them.

Under the cut because it's a lot of gifs

[jackoboltrades]

I had an epiphany today.

In Oblivion I play Moist VonLipwig from Discworld.

For some context, lately I find it really hard to get into RPGs unless I'm, you know, playing a character. For example, I have trouble playing Skyrim normally because I'm familiar enough with it to know the Optimal Build, so I make characters with limits and restrictions to make it interesting.

Enter Oblivion. I've bounced off of it and Morrowind (though I recently discovered why I kept having trouble in Morrowind mechanically so I'll go back to that at a later date) for a few years because I know Oblivion gets a huge difficulty spike if you don't level properly. I got the urge recently, so I bit the bullet and looked up a guide and made a character based on that guide. The guide basically says to build your starting class for the skills you DON'T use, or are hard to level. Mercantilism, speechcraft, security, that kind of thing.

So my starting character is a smooth talking merchant with sticky fingers who finally got caught and sent to jail (which funny enough is actually Moist's introduction in Discworld). Then he was tasked with improving society somewhat by the emperor (also Moist's canon event) so he adopts this grand, heroic facade and doubles down any time it's in question. But, of course, he's not above some sly-handed double dealing if it'll give him a leg up. Classic Moist!

In the weeks since this flimsy, sleazy merchant has been questing around Cyrodiil, he's fully embraced heroic heavy armor, picked up the sword and board, and is constantly at a full sprint, practically skipping (because I'm jumping all the time), and cycling minor practice spells on anyone he can get his hands on for training. He's the epitome of 'Fake It Till You Make It' and eventually he’ll bluff his way to leadership of every major faction in the capital. 

I decided he accidentally gets himself crowned Emperor post-game because he essentially has total control over the political landscape at that point. The coronation completely blind-sides him because he’s been planning his grand escape to Elsweyr with the royal jewels (but not the treasury! Need to be able to pay the little people and support the infrastructure, after all) all the way until the crown’s lowered onto his head.

I haven’t thought about his relationship to Martin yet because I haven’t gotten that far. I’m still early game, and I bee-lined it straight for the Mage’s Guild so I could start mixing spells finally.

[demilypyro]

Half asleep and my brain was like coming up with this supervillain concept who's a hot girl and she wants to turn everyone on earth into hot girls with her hot girl raygun because she's vain or whatever but I think my brain short-circuited because I couldn't reason why that would be a bad thing

[jackoboltrades]

[blurryf4ce]

reblog this and in the tags, write the band that comes to mind first when you think back to being 13 years old

[incorrectskyrimquotes]

Gotta love how Skyrimblr has made the logical shift from rabidly Imperial to rabidly Thalmor. The tag as far down as I scroll is a good majority of "Here's my Thalmor OC," "Here's the popular Thalmor companions," "Here's my ThalmorX[Insert Character Here] ship," "Aren't they cute and quirky going about their Thalmor business I'm just in it for the fashion don't worry about it." As the most sane TESblr blog I follow, I wanted to ask: Have you noticed if this is an actual trend happening or is my tag search just freaking borked?

i dont go into the tes tag that often tbh im normally just in character tags at most

[jackoboltrades]

That’s probably the best way to go about it. I like the lore discussions in the general tag but I guess that’s prone to getting flooded out with the latest zeitgeist.

[autistic-echo]

when you find out mercers emptied the guild safe and stolen everything brynjolf says “by the eight” but later if you talk to him in irkngthand he says “by talos, mercer has a lot to answer for” which is probably just an inconsistency but also i feel like it could imply he’s excluding one of the other divines from the eight

[jackoboltrades]

@incorrectskyrimquotes​ You’re valid and that makes sense.

However.

The man lives in the same town as Haelga “The Bunkhouse” Far-Shield.

Whatever Brynjolf believes Dibella is, it’s for sure not divine.

[54prowl]

⚠️ this blog does not support works created by AI software ⚠️

[lurkinglurkerwholurks]

ICYMI, there was fear that companies were scraping public AO3 fics to train their AI without the consent of AO3 or its users. That fear has been confirmed.

AO3 has written about what they’re doing (and what they’re not able to do), and they recommend restricting your work to AO3 registered users only. [Instructions here]

This gross misuse of the archive by techbros is why I’ve locked down my fics for the foreseeable future. I recommend the rest of you do the same.

[reshirement]

@lordoftherazzles made a quick guide for ao3 authors to lock all their works at once for registered users only here!

[odamakilock]

Someone recently messaged me worried I’d deleted all my fic - it’s all still there, it’s just locked to A03 because of this and other skimming instances.

[shieldshockfanfic]

Please note that many fanfic authors are locking their stories so that they are only accessible to registered Ao3 users.

They’re still there at Ao3. The authors have made this choice to protect their work from misuse/AI scanning.

[orlissa]

Hi,

It’s you friendly neighbor fanfic author here. In the light of this apparent new trend of people feeding unfinished fics to AI to get an “ending,” and some people even talking about “blanket permissions,” let me just say this:

I EXPLICITLY FORBID ANYONE TO FEED MY FICS TO AI. DUDE, THAT IS ABOUT THE LEAST RESPECTFUL THING YOU CAN DO. IF YOU DO IT, SHALL YOU BE EXCOMMUNICATED FROM YOUR FANDOM AND WALK ON LEGOS BAREFOOT TILL THE END OF DAYS.

That is my anti-permission.

Thank you for your attention.

[lexosaurus]

I know the OP is saying this in a bit of a lighthearted way to be nice but I’m not that nice and I’m frankly really appalled at what I’ve been seeing so I’m going to explain why you shouldn’t do that.

AI CANNOT create on its own. It’s not that smart. Anyone who’s ever build any sort of language AI can tell you with 100% certainty it’s not that smart. It can “learn” and it can “create” sentences, but it needs to be fed a language to do so.

So it will only ever “create” based on what it’s fed. This is absolutely crucial.

There are ethical ways to do this. I did this in my undergrad with my class, taking .txt files of old classic books and feeding them to our programs for words. That way our programs were only ever “creating” from works that did not break copyright laws.

But feeding an AI someone else’s fanfic? Yeah, now you’ve given the language model SOMEONE ELSE’S WORK to learn off of WITHOUT THEIR PERMISSION.

It doesn’t matter that it’s a fanfic and technically, the author does not own the characters/setting. They created the story, they engaged in creative exercise, so that fanfic is theirs. YOU do not have the right, legally, to take THEIR work and do what you want with it, much less feed it to an AI who will take their work and now use it to further its language learning.

Especially since AIs like Chat GPT have a payment model. Now someone else is making money off of a fanfic author’s work, and YOU directly contributed to that.

So if you do that? Fuck you. Sincerely.

[demilypyro]

Happy Birthday! Here's to another year of being the most consistently interesting and fun streamer on tumblr!

That seems like kind of a sweeping statement. Surely there's other streamers on this webbed site

[jackoboltrades]

Sure there are other streamers on tumblr... But you’re the best of them!

[demilypyro]

Why would you ship Zelda with Ganondorf when Urbosa is right there

[reallycoolsoup]

Why would you ship Ganondorf with Zelda when Twink is right there

[thymesignature]

You mean you don't just

?

[demilypyro]

Put Sidon in there somewhere

[kyriathanatos]

urbosa is for zelda, sidon is for link, i can’t really see sidon doing anything with zelda or urbosa doing anything with link tbh

ganon definitely goes with link and zelda though for sure

[fefeman]

The rules of the triforce and geometry implies the existence of an "Anti-Ganondorf", connected to Urbosa, Zelda, Link and Sidon at the same time.

[jackoboltrades]

In the spirit of representation I move that the proposed Anti-Ganondorf, who connects to all the other heroes, is Revali. He is a commoner who achieved greatness through effort and training, as opposed to Ganondorf who was born royalty and stole the Triforce of Power / gifted power by Demise. He also has a whole journal dedicated to how Zelda won't notice him AND how he can’t help but think constantly about Link, after all. His ranged combat abilities would complement Urbosa’s melee expertise while allowing growing pains where they figure out how to avoid zapping him with lightning, and his sour attitude and pride would contrast interestingly with Sidon’s friendly nature and willingness to ask for help.

Alternatively, if we’re not limiting ourselves to just the BoTW characters, Midna could be the Anti-Ganondorf. The queen of an exiled people who, instead of seeking power and revenge, made their place of exile into a beloved home and sought the happiness of her people above all else. She has previously established chemistry with both Zelda and Link, of course, and her royal dedication would give her parallels to Urbosa while her ancient nature would complement Sidon’s Zora longevity.

[demilypyro]

Gus, please tell me more about dinosaurs

[jackoboltrades]