The Moon Is Beautiful Reblog If You Agree

Some women are conditioned to be fragile and weak, and to believe that it's a sin to outperform a man. Her feminism would involve allowing women to be strong.

Some women are expected to be strong at times when they can't. Her feminism would involve reassuring her that it's okay to not be strong.

Some neurodivergent people are raised to believe that they're too stupid to ever amount to anything. Their disability activism would involve reassuring them that they're capable.

Some neurodivergent people are raised to believe that they're smart and gifted, and are expected to live up to impossible standards. Their disability activism would involve allowing them to fail, make mistakes, be stupid, etc.

Some children are constantly reminded "you're the child, I'm the adult" in order to deny their autonomy. Their youth rights activism would involve treating them like an adult at times when they feel ready for it.

Some children are treated like adults in order to justify increased expectations or to downplay abuse against them. Their youth rights activism would involve allowing them to be a child.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to oppression. Each individual person's experience is different. Whatever trauma is caused by their oppression, the activism should focus on undoing it.

Look at that; yet another reason to hare AI...Someone remind me why its everywhere again?

Generative AI Is Bad For Your Creative Brain

In the wake of early announcing that their blog will no longer be posting fanfiction, I wanted to offer a different perspective than the ones I’ve been seeing in the argument against the use of AI in fandom spaces. Often, I’m seeing the arguments that the use of generative AI or Large Language Models (LLMs) make creative expression more accessible. Certainly, putting a prompt into a chat box and refining the output as desired is faster than writing a 5000 word fanfiction or learning to draw digitally or traditionally. But I would argue that the use of chat bots and generative AI actually limits - and ultimately reduces - one’s ability to enjoy creativity.

Creativity, defined by the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus, is the ability to produce or use original and unusual ideas. By definition, the use of generative AI discourages the brain from engaging with thoughts creatively. ChatGPT, character bots, and other generative AI products have to be trained on already existing text. In order to produce something “usable,” LLMs analyzes patterns within text to organize information into what the computer has been trained to identify as “desirable” outputs. These outputs are not always accurate due to the fact that computers don’t “think” the way that human brains do. They don’t create. They take the most common and refined data points and combine them according to predetermined templates to assemble a product. In the case of chat bots that are fed writing samples from authors, the product is not original - it’s a mishmash of the writings that were fed into the system.

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) is a therapy modality developed by Marsha M. Linehan based on the understanding that growth comes when we accept that we are doing our best and we can work to better ourselves further. Within this modality, a few core concepts are explored, but for this argument I want to focus on Mindfulness and Emotion Regulation. Mindfulness, put simply, is awareness of the information our senses are telling us about the present moment. Emotion regulation is our ability to identify, understand, validate, and control our reaction to the emotions that result from changes in our environment. One of the skills taught within emotion regulation is Building Mastery - putting forth effort into an activity or skill in order to experience the pleasure that comes with seeing the fruits of your labor. These are by no means the only mechanisms of growth or skill development, however, I believe that mindfulness, emotion regulation, and building mastery are a large part of the core of creativity. When someone uses generative AI to imitate fanfiction, roleplay, fanart, etc., the core experience of creative expression is undermined.

Creating engages the body. As a writer who uses pen and paper as well as word processors while drafting, I had to learn how my body best engages with my process. The ideal pen and paper, the fact that I need glasses to work on my computer, the height of the table all factor into how I create. I don’t use audio recordings or transcriptions because that’s not a skill I’ve cultivated, but other authors use those tools as a way to assist their creative process. I can’t speak with any authority to the experience of visual artists, but my understanding is that the feedback and feel of their physical tools, the programs they use, and many other factors are not just part of how they learned their craft, they are essential to their art.

Generative AI invites users to bypass mindfully engaging with the physical act of creating. Part of becoming a person who creates from the vision in one’s head is the physical act of practicing. How did I learn to write? By sitting down and making myself write, over and over, word after word. I had to learn the rhythms of my body, and to listen when pain tells me to stop. I do not consider myself a visual artist - I have not put in the hours to learn to consistently combine line and color and form to show the world the idea in my head.

But I could.

Learning a new skill is possible. But one must be able to regulate one’s unpleasant emotions to be able to get there. The emotion that gets in the way of most people starting their creative journey is anxiety. Instead of a focus on “fear,” I like to define this emotion as “unpleasant anticipation.” In Atlas of the Heart, Brene Brown identifies anxiety as both a trait (a long term characteristic) and a state (a temporary condition). That is, we can be naturally predisposed to be impacted by anxiety, and experience unpleasant anticipation in response to an event. And the action drive associated with anxiety is to avoid the unpleasant stimulus.

Starting a new project, developing a new skill, and leaning into a creative endevor can inspire and cause people to react to anxiety. There is an unpleasant anticipation of things not turning out exactly correctly, of being judged negatively, of being unnoticed or even ignored. There is a lot less anxiety to be had in submitting a prompt to a machine than to look at a blank page and possibly make what could be a mistake. Unfortunately, the more something is avoided, the more anxiety is generated when it comes up again. Using generative AI doesn’t encourage starting a new project and learning a new skill - in fact, it makes the prospect more distressing to the mind, and encourages further avoidance of developing a personal creative process.

One of the best ways to reduce anxiety about a task, according to DBT, is for a person to do that task. Opposite action is a method of reducing the intensity of an emotion by going against its action urge. The action urge of anxiety is to avoid, and so opposite action encourages someone to approach the thing they are anxious about. This doesn’t mean that everyone who has anxiety about creating should make themselves write a 50k word fanfiction as their first project. But in order to reduce anxiety about dealing with a blank page, one must face and engage with a blank page. Even a single sentence fragment, two lines intersecting, an unintentional drop of ink means the page is no longer blank. If those are still difficult to approach a prompt, tutorial, or guided exercise can be used to reinforce the understanding that a blank page can be changed, slowly but surely by your own hand.

(As an aside, I would discourage the use of AI prompt generators - these often use prompts that were already created by a real person without credit. Prompt blogs and posts exist right here on tumblr, as well as imagines and headcannons that people often label “free to a good home.” These prompts can also often be specific to fandom, style, mood, etc., if you’re looking for something specific.)

In the current social media and content consumption culture, it’s easy to feel like the first attempt should be a perfect final product. But creating isn’t just about the final product. It’s about the process. Bo Burnam’s Inside is phenomenal, but I think the outtakes are just as important. We didn’t get That Funny Feeling and How the World Works and All Eyes on Me because Bo Burnham woke up and decided to write songs in the same day. We got them because he’s been been developing and honing his craft, as well as learning about himself as a person and artist, since he was a teenager. Building mastery in any skill takes time, and it’s often slow.

Slow is an important word, when it comes to creating. The fact that skill takes time to develop and a final piece of art takes time regardless of skill is it’s own source of anxiety. Compared to @sentientcave, who writes about 2k words per day, I’m very slow. And for all the time it takes me, my writing isn’t perfect - I find typos after posting and sometimes my phrasing is awkward. But my writing is better than it was, and my confidence is much higher. I can sit and write for longer and longer periods, my projects are more diverse, I’m sharing them with people, even before the final edits are done. And I only learned how to do this because I took the time to push through the discomfort of not being as fast or as skilled as I want to be in order to learn what works for me and what doesn’t.

Building mastery - getting better at a skill over time so that you can see your own progress - isn’t just about getting better. It’s about feeling better about your abilities. Confidence, excitement, and pride are important emotions to associate with our own actions. It teaches us that we are capable of making ourselves feel better by engaging with our creativity, a confidence that can be generalized to other activities.

Generative AI doesn’t encourage its users to try new things, to make mistakes, and to see what works. It doesn’t reward new accomplishments to encourage the building of new skills by connecting to old ones. The reward centers of the brain have nothing to respond to to associate with the action of the user. There is a short term input-reward pathway, but it’s only associated with using the AI prompter. It’s designed to encourage the user to come back over and over again, not develop the skill to think and create for themselves.

I don’t know that anyone will change their minds after reading this. It’s imperfect, and I’ve summarized concepts that can take months or years to learn. But I can say that I learned something from the process of writing it. I see some of the flaws, and I can see how my essay writing has changed over the years. This might have been faster to plug into AI as a prompt, but I can see how much more confidence I have in my own voice and opinions. And that’s not something chatGPT can ever replicate.

February is right around the corner, which means it’s soon time for Funguary 2025! The drawing event where we draw a bunch of mushroom based characters during the month of February.

Rules are super simple, just draw art related to mushrooms! No need to complete all the prompts, just pick and choose from the ones you feel inspired by🍄

well 🧍‍♀️ as a reminder this blog is NOT a safe space for trump supporters but it IS a safe place for women, queers, trans ppl, people of color, undocumented people, and any marginalized group.

We all know what erectile dysfunction is but literally no one is ever taught what vaginismus is and it can cause people to feel extremely lost, broken, and cause people to take their own lives. Raise. Awareness.

Do Good: Get Fic

Hello! For reasons I go into more detail with here, I'm diving back into the fray of the COD:MWF fandom.

Civilian Asset and my Price marriage of convenience fic I never posted are both available for "patronage."

How it works:

I am not touching your money. I have a list of charities below, and you can donate as much or as little as you want. No minimum. We're all poor. I get it. If even $5 goes towards a good cause I'll feel I've done SOMETHING.

Make a donation to any of the charities listed below. Send me a censored screenshot of your confirmation page or confirmation email. Be sure to censor your name, address, financial information, email, etc. Let me see the date (if possible), the charity's name, and an amount (if possible).

Let me know which fic you'd like to see updated (Civilian Asset or the Price marriage of convenience fic). Let me know if you'd like to be listed as the chapter's "patron" or whether you'd rather remain anonymous.

Notes: I may not always wait for a patron once a story gets rolling, but I'll always bump the requested fic to the top of my to-write list after a donation. Please feel free to send an ask with questions.

The charities:

The Palestinian Children's Relief Fund

This organization sets up emergency medical centers, provides food for displaced families, has a special program to gather diapers and formula for infants, has an orphan sponsorship program, and even has a program specifically for pediatric Palestinian amputees.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society

This is essentially Palestine's branch of the broader Red Cross/Red Crescent umbrella org. This is a boots-on-ground group who have suffered casualties of their own while trying to rescue civilians. Highly reputable and working to save lives.

Doctors Without Borders

Although not as region-tailored, this organization has a long history of work in Palestine, which has helped them with access and understanding. I can't promise a donation with go directly to the Gaza crisis, but it's a current priority, and this international aid group is one of the best.

Individual Family GoFundMe

This fundraiser is to sustain a family split by the border closing and trying to survive both in the warzone and in a whole new country with minimal support. There are many of these going on, and I recommend investigated more, because many have been vetted by third parties. This one was personally vetted by a mutual friend who reached out when they heard about my plan. You can find out more by following the link.

Burglar in the house

Summary: The boys were trying to surprise you by coming home early from a deployment. They end up being surprised themself.

Authors note; I'm really rusty, if anyone can give me tips I'd appreciate it! (Shut the comment section if you have nothing usefull to say though <3)

Soap

-gets so offended

-secretly impressed

-milks it for attention

Soap nearly trips over the coffee table in his attempt to navigate the dark living room. He's trying to be quiet, trying not to wake you. The plan was to slip into bed without you noticing so he could be the first thing you see when you woke up early in the morning. Two days ago you had whined to him on the phone how you had to wake up at the crack of dawn to come pick him up from base. Lucky for you, the mission had ended just a bit early, giving him the opportunity to take a cab and surprise you.

His hand wraps around the handle of the bedroom door, blood pumping like he's on a mission. It's thanks to that adrenaline that he can avoid the gass bottle you swing at him as soon as the door is open. He can't react fast enough to keep from loosing his balance when you barrel into him, the momentum of your attack causing you to slip.

The air is knocked out of him first by the impact with the floor and then by you landing on his chest. He hits his elbow and curses when the funny bone in it starts singing.

"What the hell. Bonnie?" his eyes squint in the dark, hands warm against your waist.

"Johnny? What are you- I thought you were a burglar! What are you doing here?" you try to scramble off of him, conscious of your full weight on him. His grip tightens and you give up all too easily. Your hands tremble from the fright he'd given you.

"So you try to kill me? And I thought I meant something to you..."

"I wasn't trying to kill you, I thought-" you ramble on until you catch the way his lips quirk up with supressed laughter. His eyes glint with humor even in the little light coming in through the window. Slapping at his chest, you finally pull away and reach to switch on the light. And there he was, the man you missed for almost five weeks now, pinned under you and looking all smug after giving you the scare of your life. "It's the middle of the night, what are you doing sneaking around the house you idiot?"

Still straddeling your boyfriend on the ground, you try to stand, planning to return to your warm bed but he pulls you back down to him.

"You wouldn't leave me all alone on the floor now, would you bonnie?" he's giving you wounded eyes, lips pouty and unbelievably kissable. "See, I hit my elbow!" he lifts it next to his face. You squint at it, leaning close to assess the damage. Only he surges forward and steals a kiss from you, eyes twickeling in delight as you glare at him. In the end you can't stay mad at him when he looks at you like that, but you do insist on taking the smooching to bed.

Ghost

-so proud

-loves that you'd be able to defend yourself in case of an actual break-in

-thinks it's really hot

The house is too quiet when he kicks his boots off, low lights on, meaning you were still awake. You always had some kind of background noise running, silence setting you on edge like it did him. He had planned on surprising you by coming home for your two year anniversary. The mission had run a bit dry with the leads going nowhere and he had convinced Price to give him two days off to spend with you. The flowers he had bought for you now lay forgotten on the bench in the entryway, freeing his hands for a knife.

He's creeping through the house trying to find you when you dart out of the kitchen, roaring a battle cry, slashing at him. He sidesteps you, narrowly avoiding the second attack and disarming you on the third. Your bread knife and his combat knife clutter to the floor as he presses your back to his chest, arms caging you in. You struggle against him, spitting curses at what you think is an intruder. His blood is roaring with adrenaline and the relief of having you safe in his arms

"Bloody hell love, it's just me." he grunts in your ear as you kick at him, arms pinned to your side. You still in his grasp, vibrating with energy.

"Simon? But you aren't supposed to come back until-"

"Couldn't let you spend our aniversary alone. Didn't expect this greetig though." if you didn't know him as well as you did, you might take the rasp in his voice as annoyance. Luckily, you recognize it from many times spent entangled with each other. That and you can feel him poke your ass.

Gaz

-s h o c k e d

-thinks it's the funniest thing in the world

-will not let it go, teases you forever (lovingly)

The music is blasting when he comes home. He kind of expected you to come running, excited to see him after two month of absence. Then again he supposes you didn't hear the door fall shut over your own singing. He follows the sound to the kitchen, leaning against the doorframe to watch you sing and dance to your favourite music. You are busy whisking batter in a bowl, hips swaying. When he can finally tear his eyes from your ass, he sees your cookbook, the recipe for his favourite cake open.

The soft smile on his lips quickly fades when you decide to twirl with the bowl in your arms, loud singing turning into a startled screech as you spot the man in your kitchen. You hurl the whisk at him quicker than you can recognize him and it plaps harmlessly against his chest. You both stare at each other, deers caught in a headlight, music still blasting. Slowly, he looks down at the stain on his tshirt, meets your eyes again and you both just double over in laughter.

"So I make it the whole deployment without getting hit only to be attacked by my partner..!" Gaz is wheezing with laughter, pulling you into him. You jokingly hit his chest, shaking with your own amusement.

"Stop, you're getting it all over me!" you grin up at him, loosing yourself in the molten brown eyes you know so well.

"Only fair my little assassin." he plants kisses all over your face and you wrap your arms around his neck.

He will tell this story to the team and all of his friends and your friends. He'll bring it up at every family get together too, just to see you blush and squirm.

Price

-sort of reassured that you can defend yourself

-has to comfort you, you feel so guilty

-trains you in self-defense

When Price opens the door to the bedroom, he has no chance to duck away from the book that comes flying at his face. You have the bedside lamp raised over your head, ready to strike the intruder but recognize him in time. The hardcover book you had thrown at him as a distraction had hit his face, a corner digging into his cheek. He's still not quite sure of what happened when you let the lamp fall to the floor and rush at him.

"John! I'm sorry, I thought you were trying to rob me- You're bleeding, I'm so sorry, let's get you fixed-"

You're shaking as you turn his head this and that way, hands gentle against his cheeks. Tears are gathering in your eyes, guilt swallowing you whole. You're trying to drag him to the bathroom where the first aid kit is when he gently cups your face.

"I'm fine love, look at me." all you can see is the drop of blood from the wound you caused. You watch as it seeps into his beard.

"I didn't mean to hit you, but there's been so many break-ins recently and I heard someone creeping through the house and you aren't supposed to be home until-" he cuts you off with a gentle kiss, slightly chapped lips moving against you until you have to part for air. Foreheads pressed together, you marvel at each other.

"You're good. I'm good. Your book might have a few dog ears though." his eyes crinkle when you blink at him all dazed.

This.

Can you do something for me, please?

I want you to reblog this if you believe that two people can be very close and physically affectionate with one another, but still have a completely nonsexual, non-romantic relationship. 

Even if the two people in question are capable of being sexually or romantically attracted to one another. 

Because the friendship I share with someone I consider family in a way that transcends blood has been typecast as a romantic relationship ENTIRELY too many times, and I’m beginning to get sick of it.