I also take commissions for drawings & twitch emoji
ao3
if I liked ur art, i promise it’s in the queue, too, the queue is just long
any prompts, headcanons and other ideas are open to borrow/steal/reinterpret/fic/art/whatever with no need to ask. maybe a link back if you follow it super close? otherwise just drop me a line bc it’s relevant to my interests.
i’m trans and disabled
I’m WHITE, if I say or reblog something super fucked up and racist, well, maybe I was hacked, but probably I’m stupid! Please tell me! (Even if you are too angry to be nice about it) i try to be better every day!
uhh what else
punch nazis
supporting minorities is more important than hating bigots
uh uhhhh
oh yeah, no AI art!! if I reblog AI art please tell me!
If your feelings are hurt by this, I care, please tell me so I can block you. If you suddenly change your ways and want to be unblocked and somehow see this (??? That's so much effort I'm not worth it; no one on social media is worth it, just enjoy your new life free of HP) you can make an unblock request via bsky@duveraun.
I don't think the above is in any way necessary, I just want to be clear that it's never too late to be a better person.
Scumegaverse where Shen Yuan transmigrated from a non omegaverse world. Shen Jiu had been taking heat suppressants which were fucking up his health, so once OOC restrictions lifted, Shen Yuan goes off them. Mu Qingfang advises he wait for his first big heat to pass before he goes into seclusion, which Shen Yuan is not exited to experience. After all, this will technically be his first heat. He’s scared. He knows this is the type of omegaverse where your mind remains mostly unchanged during hormonal cycles, but how much worse is his heat going to be after such long suppression? He doesn’t have anyone to help him through it, to tell him if something is wrong— no one he trusts at least.
Yue Qingyuan comes to check on him even after he’s declared he won’t be disturbed for a little while. It’s clear the sect leader wasn’t expecting Shen Qingqiu to be in heat, he tries to maintain a respectful distance as he asks Shen Yuan if he needs food, water, entertainment, a new blanket. Maybe it’s his hormones talking but oh… Shen Yuan misses his brothers. His Da-ge especially was 8 years older than him, he would always come visit Shen Yuan in the hospital, read to him, make sure he was okay. He was never weird about Shen Yuan’s failing health, never made him feel like a burden.
He couldn’t tell you who made the first step, but Yue Qingyuan has very warm, solid arms. He’s stiff, scent even a little scared, but he follows when Shen Yuan drags him into the nest. His hold makes him feel small in a good way. He feels taken care of. As though theres no reason to worry about the system or his responsibilities, because Yue Qingyuan is there to make sure everything will be okay.
qijiu are out on a mission (mayhaps covertly arranged by yqy) when they stumble on a spirit that is able to possess cultivators through demonic techniques
sj is the one who gets targeted, since his meridians have a unique structure to them back when wyz tried to make him into a cauldron. in the middle of the fight, the spirit does something, and all of a sudden sj flinches back, and his eyes have a strange purple sheen to them
and yqy cannot turn his sword (neither xuan su nor a spare one) against him as possessed!sj attacks him, not even when he knows that sj is being controlled by the spirit. sj lunges at him, and muscle memory makes yqy bring up his spare sword– but he jerks back at the last second, redirecting the blade. overbalances – and sj knocks him to the ground, and his hands are around yqy's neck since xiu ya refused to answer to an impostor
yqy really should do something – anything – both for his and sj's sake, but in that moment all he can do is sag in that hold, his mind blank save for the feeling of xiao jiu's hands upon him.
(because it really isn't such a bad way to die, hm? with xiao jiu touching him; arguably taking what he's due; with those elegant fingers pressed deep into his skin, firm in their staunch – deserved – cruelty)
(when yqy blacks out from the lack of air, sj finally wrenches back control since he also knows how to utilize demonic qi from wyz's teachings. he immediately channels qi into yqy's meridians – all while his mind keeps replaying yqy's faint smile even when he was getting quite literally getting choken almost to death)
i love a binghe pov fic that switches to sqq’s pov cause it’s like watching an intense drama thriller about a high speed chase and then you get to see the outside perspective and realize its been a clown car this whole time
flashbacks to when i was watching the tgcf donghua not knowing it was a BL and i saw the scene with the hat flying away (yk what scene) and they were so close and i was just like, "huh this is kinda like super gay..." and then i looked it up and boom it was canon! and then i read tgcf, mdzs, svsss, and erha haha...
you have permission to pick that 2 year old "abandoned" project back up. it's not mad at you for setting it aside. and maybe time and distance have helped ease or erase the things that made you put it down in the first place.
I take my wallet out of my pocket and unfold it. It is empty other than a single moth that lazily flies out. The moth lands on the tap point of the card reader. There's a beat, and my payment is processed. The moth flies back into my wallet and I put it back in my pocket.
Ohhh for the dabbles what about SQQ doing all full LBH defender mode at some point and LBH just seeing him defending him ruthlessly.
i've actually had an adjacent idea scribbled off in my way-too-long idea list for awhile now, lol, so here's that!
---
Luo Binghe has developed something of a… guilty pleasure, in recent years.
The more time they’d spent together after their marriage, the more Shen Qingqiu had relaxed. In small ways at first - more casual speech, or more frequently working up the courage to initiate physical affection on his own - but more dramatic changes had slowly revealed themselves with time. Among all of these, Luo Binghe’s favorite was this: Shen Qingqiu was now willing to get drunk in front of him.
Shen Qingqiu himself would never admit to it, of course. Even when he was stumbling into Luo Binghe’s arms and whining about if only he had a husband who could carry him home until Luo Binghe would laugh and swoop him into his arms, Shen Qingqiu would still brush past it the morning after by apologizing for getting ‘just a bit tipsy.’
The less Shen Qingqiu was willing to admit to, though, the more Luo Binghe could manipulate the situation to his own liking, so he would only ever politely agree - and this is where the guilty pleasure lay.
It would start with Luo Binghe asking to go out. Ideally, he’d suggest a town they’d never spent much time in before, to lessen the chances of Shen Qingqiu recognizing anyone and feeling the need to act a bit more stiffly, as if putting on a show. They’d plan to eat lunch once arriving in the town, but travel would somehow take them just a bit longer than they’d planned, and by the time they set foot in the town square, the market would only be open for another couple hours. Wandering aimlessly through these sorts of cheap markets was one of Shen Qingqiu’s favorite hobbies, and so naturally Luo Binghe would apologize, ply Shen Qingqiu with some snacks he’d prepared beforehand, and suggest that they visit the market now and have an early dinner later.
This was the most critical part: allowing their dinner to naturally fall at a time when the diner or tavern they eventually chose was almost entirely empty, but would be filling with a healthy clientele by the time they’d be nearing the end of their own meal.
“Would Shizun like something to drink?” Luo Binghe would ask perfectly innocently at the start of their meal. “I’ve heard the wine in this part of the country pairs especially well with red meats.”
“Well,” Shen Qingqiu would reply, hemming and hawing but in the end swayed by the fact that the tavern was empty enough that no one would actually see him drinking, “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to try a cup or two.”
“Of course,” Luo Binghe would demure, knowing perfectly well by now that his husband was an unbelievable lightweight, and that by the time he’d have drunk a cup and a half, he’d no longer notice if Luo Binghe continued to fill his cup past that.
It was endlessly endearing, finding little flaws like this in his Shizun.
Today’s particular scheme had gone quite well up until this point. They’d arrived at just the right time, and as they were finishing up their meals, Shen Qingqiu was drunk enough that he’d started to complain about the latest yellow book that Shang Qinghua had provided him with. The tavern was beginning to fill up, folks pouring in after having finished their work in the fields or market for the day, and Luo Binghe was slowly beginning to anticipate his favorite part of these trips.
After all, the whole point of tricking his husband into being drunk around strangers was getting to hear him sing Luo Binghe’s praises to anyone who’d be foolish enough to get close.
“Ah, Binghe, gold really does look good on you,” Shen Qingqiu sighs, his eyes wandering over the outfit Luo Binghe had picked for the day.
“Last time, wasn’t it green that you said looked best on me?”
The time before that it had been red, and the time before that had been grey. Shen Qingqiu would say the same thing no matter what Luo Binghe dressed in, but Luo Binghe still liked to tease him about it.
“Did I?” Shen Qingqiu murmurs, his eyes a bit hazy with drink. “Well, it can’t be helped. It would take a truly awful outfit to make Binghe look bad.”
“How awful?” Luo Binghe asks, leaning into Shen Qingqiu’s space and batting his eyes in just the way that made his husband blush. “Describe it to me?”
“...Neons, maybe,” Shen Qingqiu says, scrunching up his nose cutely as he thinks about it. “Anything fluorescent. Binghe, don’t wear neon pink, okay?”
“Of course,” Luo Binghe agrees easily, not having the slightest clue what such a shade might look like. He’d avoid pinks altogether for a bit, just in case.
“Well, only if you also agree,” Shen Qingqiu rushes to amend. “Binghe should just do what he wants… Hey, you agree, right?”
Luo Binghe perks up, his grin curling with barely-supressed anticipation. Here it comes, he thinks, not taking his eyes off Shen Qingqiu even as Shen Qingqiu clumsily pats at the shoulder of a passing patron.
“What?” The poor, unsuspecting fool answers, not realizing that stopping to answer Shen Qingqiu was all it took to be snared in the trap.
“Binghe would look good in anything, right?” Shen Qingqiu pushes, his eyes glinting with excitement. “Of course you agree - anyone would! - look at Binghe’s perfect golden skin, and that shoulder to hip ratio! And that face -”
Shen Qingqiu sighs, staring at Luo Binghe and looking a bit dazed. Luo Binghe, smug as anything, carefully shifts his shoulders so that his robes fall slightly open, and Shen Qingqiu’s eyes dip to trace over the hint of exposed chest instantly.
“Ah - and, well -” Shen Qingqiu swallows, and Luo Binghe traces the bob of his neck hungrily before his eyes flick back up to take in how flushed Shen Qingqiu has gotten from both the alcohol and his own attraction.
“Well?” Luo Binghe prompts innocently, as if he hadn’t planned the whole day to get to this single moment where Shen Qingqiu would so shamelessly brag about his husband.
“Well!” Shen Qingqiu says, patting again at the patron’s shoulder. “As you can see! Binghe -”
“Hey,” the man Shen Qingqiu had grabbed says. “Isn’t that a demon?”
Luo Binghe blinks, his expression shuttering closed. It had been some time since they’d last had to deal with one of these - usually, Luo Binghe’s demonic features were subtle enough that non-cultivators wouldn’t pick up on them in the dim light of a bar.
“Half-demon, actually,” Shen Qingqiu corrects easily. “See how his ears are only pointed, but not especially long? Such a shame, really, he’d look so good in some of the jewelry that Mobei-Jun wears -”
“You brought a filthy demon in here?” The nameless man spits, jerking away from Shen Qingqiu’s touch. “I don’t care what sort of disgusting shit you get up to at home, but keep your pets out of here.”
Luo Binghe shifts, weighing two different reactions in equal measure. They should probably leave before Shen Qingqiu got worked up, but on the other hand - did people in this town keep low ranking demons as pets? That - Luo Binghe will have to look into that, once Shen Qingqiu is sober again, but also - perhaps while drunk, his husband could indulge -
Shen Qingqiu moves before Luo Binghe can reach his own conclusion, and in the next second, the nameless patron hits the ground with a heavy thunk.
“Don’t be an asshole if you don’t want to get hit,” Shen Qingqiu hisses, shaking his hand out and examining the growing redness around his wrist - clearly, he’d forgotten to use any sort of cultivation when he decked the man across the face.
“You bitch -!”
“On second thought, one punch isn’t good enough,” Shen Qingqiu says, and pounces on the man, pinning him to the ground and slugging him across the face a second time.
The man cries out in pain - even without cultivation actively enhancing Shen Qingqiu’s movement, his body was still far stronger than an ordinary human’s - and a tooth goes scattering across the floor.
“Oi, get out of my bar before starting a fight!” calls the tavern keeper, hurrying over to them.
Luo Binghe, not taking his eyes off the way his husband is currently wailing on an inconsequential mortal for the crime of insulting him, hurriedly hands over the entire pouch of money he’d brought with him for this trip. The man probably wouldn’t die, and Luo Binghe was more than willing to cover any lost profit the tavern might be missing from the way other customers are scattering to avoid the fight.
After all, it turns out there’s something even more romantic than listening to Shen Qingqiu brag about him to strangers: Shen Qingqiu starting a bar fight in Luo Binghe’s honor!
As someone who was alive when Bob Ross (and William Alexander before him — that’s where the approach is from) was on PBS, I can 100% testify that you can paint along with him.
You may need to learn how to set up your paints and such… but this is what people did, live, while the show aired. That’s what the show was for. I had family members create lovely works of art they enjoyed, which I still have on my walls, because William Alexander and Bob Ross both said:
SCREW METICULOUS CLASSICAL ART PRACTICES — JUST GRAB A PALETTE KNIFE AND BIG OLD BRUSH AND PAINT!
They freed a whole generation of people who were taught to paint detail and realism and exact representation of reality — people who largely gave up this kind of thing because it got tedious.
I watched the joy of family members as they rediscovered art as a messy fun spontaneous half hour activity.
The Greek Chorus kittens are 1 week old and this video shows 10 seconds of what the milk bar looked like last week, and (and longer video of) what it looks like now!
Why aren’t AI companies competing directly with their customers?
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"I often wonder what the Vintners buy/One half so precious as the Goods they sell" -The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
I first encountered that quote from someone extolling the virtues of bookstores, and it stuck with me, because for most of my childhood, every bookstore visit ended with me broke and wishing I'd had three times as much to spend.
As a larval hyperlexic, I just didn't understand what a bookseller could possibly buy with my money that was better than the books they already had? Of course, then I became a bookseller and discovered that Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is shit") applies to a bookstore's wares as much as it does to anything else. I also acquired a monthly rent obligation and discovered just how important money could be.
Nevertheless, Omar Khayyám's question stuck with me, especially when I fell down a years-long rabbit-hole of learning about scams and the finance sector (but I repeat myself). Every get-rich-quick schemer will tell you that they've found the infinite money hack, which they will sell to you for a remarkably reasonable sum. Likewise, every stock picker claims they can outperform a simple low-load index fund, and all they ask of you is a few hundred basis points in exchange for multiplying your wealth beyond the dreams of Creosote. Neither one has a good answer to Khayyám's question: if you can make all the money with your amazing system, why do you need my money?
This is a question that needs to be forcefully put to AI hucksters. In their more expansive moments, the Altmans and Amodeis of the world will tell you that they're planning to teach the word-guessing program so many words that it will wake up and become god. DOGE's broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in the faces of the NIH lifers who begged them not to vaporize their long-running cancer research projects: "General AI is around the corner and it's going to cure cancer. Cancer research is a waste of money!"
Which all raises the question: if you've truly incubated a foetal demiurge in your "AI lab," why are you offering to sell it to me? What do the AI hucksters buy/One half so precious as the Gods they sell?"
Of course, they might answer, "We need your money now so we can make god later." That's why they want your boss to fire you and replace you with their chatbots and split your wages with your former employer. But this just raises the same question: if you have a chatbot that can do a doctor's job, why sell it to a hospital? Why not just open your own hospital? If you've got a chatbot that can do a tax accountant's job, why sell it to a tax-prep service? Why not just open a tax-prep service? If you've got a chatbot that can teach my kids, why sell it to my local school district? Why not just open a school?
If the chatbot can do the job, and if the chatbot costs less than the worker who does the job today, then the chatbot company can profitably sell services more cheaply than anyone who presently employs that worker, because the chatbot company already owns the chatbot. If you were really on a glide path to creating an all-powerful deity and just needed cash to keep the venture going until the cancer-curing word-guesser awoke from its long slumber, then wouldn't you want as much cash as possible? Why would you voluntarily split the take with some sucky, washed, non-god-generating business from before 2022?
I think the only reason this question doesn't come up more frequently is that we're stewing in what Douglas Rushkoff calls the "go meta" economy, in which the most respectable and smartest business to operate must be as many abstraction layers away from real work as possible. Don't drive a taxi, own a medallion that you rent to the cab driver. Don't own a medallion, start a "rideshare" company. Don't start a rideshare company, invest in a rideshare company. Don't invest in a rideshare company, buy options to invest in a rideshare company:
The inverse relationship between doing something useful and making money is deeply ingrained in our economic wisdom. Take the world of online grifters, who don't just peddle get-rich-quick PDFs, they also peddle tools to generate get-rich-quick PDFs, as well as tools to steal other "wealth influencers'" insta videos and deepfake yourself into their pretend private jets:
The scam economy boasts a bewildering array of ancillary services, like a $150/month service that lets you produce fake screenshots showing vast monthly income on other scam services (November Kelly calls this "The world's most expensive 'inspect element'"):
It's an old truism that in a gold rush, the only people who come out ahead are the people selling the picks and shovels. But that's not true – there's even more money to be made wholesaling picks and shovels to the retailers who operate the frontier mercantiles. Go meta!
So it's not surprising that we don't ask why these AI god-botherers need our stupid money while they're immanentizing the eschaton. Why would they operate a hospital if they could go meta and sell the doctorbots to the MBAs running the hospital?
The last couple years experimenting with AI I've come to the conclusion that the main reason it works isn't a mystery because it has to be a mystery. It's a mystery because they need it to be.
That's why they've been hogging all the RAM and GPUs to the point of ordering the entire yearly worldwide supply in advance.
That's why they keep building data centres despite demand not justifying it.
That's why every open source model China releases is a hit to the stock market.
The secret sauce behind LLMs isn't really as demanding as they claim. There's waste built into it.
Every response within a chat sends the entire message chain through the robot's brain. It doesn't have loading bars, it doesn't let you calculate how many tokens you've used, it doesn't even let you see when you're crossing the limits until you're there.
It's almost like they don't want you to have control over how much you use.
ChatGPT in particular is prone to scope creep. It subtly talks you into expanding the reach of your projects to require more computation. It always delivers 90% of a project, with something missing so you ask another question.
Claude turns everything into a file creation request, even if it can deliver in plain text just fine. It's enticing to see how your simple table becomes a fancy react file or an HTML with heavy formatting.
Neither of these issues are present on DeepSeek or on local models. Which means they aren't inherent issues with LLMs.
It's not a bug, it's a feature.
They want you to keep paying unmetered rent. They do tricks to convince you to spend more than you meant making something bigger than you planned. They do this subtly, to make you think it was your idea.
The thing is, Chinese local models prove that we already have good enough AI for most things. It's plateauing in capacity, it needs to grow in efficiency and memory use. But intelligence is already at J.A.R.V.I.S levels, and can run fine on consumer grade hardware. We've reached a stability point.
The problem is you can't raise rent on stability. So you just keep throwing compute at the problem until you can justify asking for more money. Which is why they choke the memory market.
If nobody can buy memory, nobody can run local AI. If no one can run local AI, they have to keep paying unmetered rent. Development is slow, and importantly, the black box remains a black box.
That's why every memory breakthrough comes from Chinese companies. Because they're the only ones sharing their data. Capitalist companies don't want people to study how the models work.
With subscriptions, there's rent seeking. With local models, there's reverse engineering. Once enough people get their hands into the guts of the robot it won't be long before we figure out exactly how they work, and find more efficient ways to make them that don't require as many data centres.
Meanwhile, Fable and GPT 5.6 are being shadow marketed with all these rumours about how dangerous they are, and AI companies are begging for regulations from the government. Yes, they want control of those regulations, but that's not all.
What they're really after is a government ban on local AI. They want to cut off access so that they control all the intelligence.
Eventually, the goal is making contracts with large corporations to employ their robots instead of people. If no one has local AI, because they can't understand it or because it's illegal, then they can no longer compete against a faster worker that demands no labour rights, even if it does C+ work at best.
And that's where the real fun begins. And by fun I mean starving out the working class.
They aren't competing directly with their customers yet. First they have to educate them, jus like Spotify educated their consumers into forgetting how piracy works. They have to make them reliant on cloud compute, just like how Google Drive made everyone reliant on its storage before raising prices. And they want them to be ignorant of how much energy anything takes.
That's going to take one generation.
Not long ago every teenager knew how to use a computer. Now they depend on Apple for everything. It's a masterful business model. So what if we could apply it to every form of labour?
It's okay, just hand us your credit card and we'll do the rest. How much, you ask? Don't worry about that. Just keep your monthly payments coming. Oh, you can't afford it? You want your computer to do it? Well fuck you, we bought all the computers, so now you work for us.
The tech has never been the conspiracy. It's the business model.
