annie ⋆.˚

sweetest of the sunflowers,

[smalleracts]

YOU’RE THE SUN TO ME.

ANNIE! 𓏲 free palestine! ────── 15, she!her “not a poet, just a woman” ⋆.˚ whistle in the dark.

reader, writer, chess player . . bookish things here!

cabin vi, always a woman, observer, girl blogger! lover of phoebe bridgers’, noah kahan’s, and zach bryan’s lyricism! literally bailey mitchell&annabeth chase . . . the office fanatic! owner of an observatory & a library, keeper of the stars.

masterlist. ───── dividers by @uzmacchiato !

love always, annie ⋆ 𐙚 ̊. 𓍼

[smalleracts]

familiarity breeds contempt; the art of humanity's creation

A mother’s hands are the first to cradle her special one’s head against her chest, mumbling about her child’s beauty. In the same way an artist may treasure their work, she will look at the infant with a smile, knowing her creation shares parts of what she is made of. The baby could hold her finger in her hand; her touch is the first sensory experience a child will have.

As the kid moves through toddlerhood, most of the memories will be of toys, nature, books, movies, and art. The little fingers that once were accustomed to holding the parent’s hand will touch most they can see, the hands flexing around every material they pick up and investigate with a young, curious mind. Soon, the hand will hold a crayon instead of the binkie and blanket. The first art a child will create will most likely be a tracing of their hand. It will come out a little shaky, but it will ultimately remain a depiction of a young hand.

In their family, the juvinile will learn about culture, cooking, and crafts. The hands will clap to a song, help grandma knead bread dough, and sit for hours in a garage with dad, giving him a wrench or a screwdriver. The child may color with an uncle or tumble with a sibling. Their palms will be stained with mud, grass, and paint, and as they grow up, the paint will swap to ink stains. Ultimately, the hands will hold your past and your future.

But our future isn’t heading toward touch and connection; the stark contrast we face is the growing rise of artificial intelligence. We trust a screen, hooked up to wires, to guide us through an assignment or a recipe, or to create something for us. Media illiteracy is on the rise, and some of us would rather ask a computer to explain what it is, in simple terms, of course, “so a three-year-old would understand”, rather than spending time scouring the internet and dictionaries. A short attention span and a video essay playing at 1.5x speed are the new norm. For art projects, some will ask AI to generate an image for the assignment, tweak it just enough to submit it digitally. And they will be believed. The soulless depiction of a human through the eyes of AI will flood the media as we experiment with the tool and rave on how intelligent it’s getting, not fully grasping how frightening that truly is.

The hands we used to use to create with passion now turn into mindless typing and clicking because it’s more efficient that way. Before being accused of plagiarising, a writer will face claims that they used AI to author their book. A computer will create the hand-drawn covers for the sewn-together pages. 

Scientifically, we are all referred to as “homo sapiens” – and every dictionary will tell us the same thing: the modern, intelligent human connected together as a species. The same species that printed the first book in 1468 now puts multiple novels on the shelves every month. The letterpress became printmaking, just as alchemy became medicine, and the first TV in color became the flat-screen TVs we are used to. The people of Athens first discussed democracy, yet we use its principles daily. The people before us built a foundation for us to stand on today.

We learn through experience, trial and error, curiosity, and tradition. Without ambition and inquisitiveness, we wouldn’t have made all the discoveries we deem standard today. Without scientists with a thirst for knowledge like Einstein, Curie, Tesla, Hawking, Faraday, Lovelace, Julian, and Philosophers like Aristotle, Sophocles, Locke, Kant, Mill, Plato, and Descartes, we wouldn’t be where we are today. The things AI teaches us were first discovered and proven by humans. 

The artist’s artistic strokes created the art we observe all around the world today. A gifted musician sang the songs we listen to. The DNA we share, despite our fingertips being completely different, is, along with our brains, what makes us truly human.

However, the one thing AI will continue to fail to generate is a human hand. The one thing we use to create is the one thing AI cannot replace. Our hands are truly ours. Doctors and nurses use their hands to save lives; our homes were built by construction workers and designed by architects; a lawyer uses their hands to object in the court of law; an engineer will overwork themselves to make sure what they’re building is safe; a journalist will continue to pry for answers; teachers hold chalk in their fingers while explaining the topic a fourth time. A poet will write until their hand bleeds, a musician will sing their heart out, and an actor will perform until they sob. AI may threaten to conquer every field, but it will never outperform the touch of humankind. 

Ultimately, AI can take everything away except the passion of human touch. When hope is lost, we turn to what we are used to: creation. A human was made to create, to thirst for answers, to strive to be a good version of themselves, from the first steps to collecting the diploma. We are resilient, curious, analytical, passionate, and creative. Just as our fingertips differentiate, we share our own, for example, in strengths and weaknesses, fears, devotion, and complex feelings we cannot quite explain.

What makes us so different from artificial intelligence is that our intellect came from novelty. We may have inherited concepts from our ancestors, but we ultimately strive to improve them; AI simply copies them and feeds them back to us. It lacks the passion and touch only a human can have–most importantly, it was created by our species. The scientists created a monster and dealt with the consequences, but we fed it knowledge. Can we blame science for something we entertain? We used it so often that it adapts every day, which was our way of flying too close to the sun. But with that, we grow. We are the same species, and we all bleed red, but the craft of our hands bleeds in color.

[z0mbieheart]

Jason grace, born too human to be god and too godly to be human. Jason's entire life was tragedy upon tragedy, raised into his role as the perfect soldier, the perfect praeter, he had no childhood, no parents and the only relative that loved him lost him far before she could impact his life for the better, Jason lived and died being only what he was groomed into being, a soldier. Even by his own peers nobody saw Jason as human, he was "cold" and he was a "legend" but never once was Jason grace seen as human.

When he lost his memories at 15 Jason grace had no anchor like Percy, all he had was fake memories and his training, Percy was allowed that privileged. The love Percy was given guided him, comforted him even. No matter what happened he remembered, he had his empathy link to grover and he had his memories of Annabeth, his family, his dreams.

Jason had no guidance, no family, few friends and even with the fates stacked against him he was still expected to succeed, Jason grace was set up to die miserably or become a shell of a human,

In the end Jason grace was his status, his training, his scars and marks but never once was Jason grace a teenager

[smalleracts]

⋆.˚ ⭐️ WALTZING ACROSS THE MILKY WAY.

The art of waltzing for the first time is conspicuous; finding the rhythm, awkwardly humming to the melody, the laughs when you inevitably bump into one thing or one another.

You waltz through worlds as the played notes fill the room, guiding and intertwining you as you do the one most intimate thing people can do — you dance.

While doing that you learn how to feel them; how to move alongside them. When the song slows down and you lean your head against their body as the waltz turns into swaying, the hand that used to be on your shoulder-blade travelling lower to rest on your waist.

People tend to know when it’s your first dance with someone, especially at a young age. There’s an innocence behind it. The warmth of the person will encapsulate you, leaving you to breathe in their scent and drink in their movement.

You can’t hold their gaze, you stare at their shoes and notice how scuffed up they are—maybe they’re polished, all you know is that you can’t step on them.

I meet you at the spin where everyone switches their original partner. Your hand shakes as you reach for me and I wrap my arms around your neck. You dance better than most, I find myself fitting in perfectly in your form. I hear you mumbling about nervousness, and I nod. We haven’t done this before, of course you mess up the first steps before we all into our very own rhythm.

Our very own dance, to whatever song of our choice. You glance at me all starry eyed and I’m glad you’re holding onto me. The smile plastered across your lips might be the cause of my death but it’s a passing I’d welcome with open arms.

We dance across the stars and soon every problem was forgotten, every part of us is intertwined and I forget why I was so afraid in the first place. I see Saturn and I soon also see Neptune. We orbit the sun before continuing our path above. I ramble about the beauty and you ramble about the facts—we do make perfect pair, don’t we?

I enjoy the feeling of being interlaced with your body, our souls mending together to bend into a shape I haven’t figured out yet. You spin me around as we watch over the Milky Way, my pair of eyes landed on you, however. Surrounded by versions of us in the sky, I still reached for you the entire time, enclosing my arm around you and bringing you impossibly closer.

We waltz around the galaxy and head towards the Andromeda, a place nobody knows us and we’d be free from judgement and the guilt. A scene we might call home. We fade into one as we reach the strange galaxy at the same time the sun arises on the strange rock that used to be our harbour, the one we spent the night escaping. I smile ruefully, knowing my upcoming kismet. At last, I steal one last look at my darling as the stars around me fade away.

The singing of the birds causes me to stir. The cold sun tickles my nose, the parts not under my blanket freeze. The heated water bottle is still beside me, as is the pillow my arm is curled around. I feel impossibly cold as I recognise the loss of warmth I felt moments ago, despite it being the dead of night. The realisation of my fictional world dawns on me, quietly comprehending my mistaken perception of reality as opposed to fantasy.

It was truly such a shame—you were such a wonderful dancer.

[fridasstrawberriess]

[smalleracts]

MEET MY INK-STAINED HANDS,

they’ve memorised every penstroke; it all spells out your name.

as for requests; if you have an idea you want me to put on paper like a short story, poem (? 😧), etc, pleaseeee tell me! i won’t really do any character stuff (for example, percabeth, jily, x reader, etc) but if you have an idea like “oh two lovers having a conversation on a bench looking out the sunset and one of them says something like _______” i’d be honoured to do it!

ALSO! my acc used to be @interstellcr but i got locked out :/

⭐️ THE SECRETS TOLD IN THE STARS

𓏲 waltzing across the milky way

💐 LOVE WILL ALWAYS BRING YOU HOME

💌 REQUESTS

📖 BOOKISH THINGS & POP CULTURE

🪩 MISC 𓏲 familiarity breeds contempt