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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 months

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What kind of bubble is AI?

My latest column for Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices.

Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It, too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.

Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar.

AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an "AI" startup, many of which are not even using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That's amazing, considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is.

So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left behind, or will it go away altogether? To be sure, there's a legion of technologists who are learning Tensorflow and Pytorch. These nominally open source tools are bound, respectively, to Google and Facebook's AI environments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

But if those environments go away, those programming skills become a lot less useful. Live, large-scale Big Tech AI projects are shockingly expensive to run. Some of their costs are fixed – collecting, labeling and processing training data – but the running costs for each query are prodigious. There's a massive primary energy bill for the servers, a nearly as large energy bill for the chillers, and a titanic wage bill for the specialized technical staff involved.

Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? AI applications can be plotted on a 2X2 grid whose axes are "value" (how much customers will pay for them) and "risk tolerance" (how perfect the product needs to be).

Charging teenaged D&D players $10 month for an image generator that creates epic illustrations of their characters fighting monsters is low value and very risk tolerant (teenagers aren't overly worried about six-fingered swordspeople with three pupils in each eye). Charging scammy spamfarms $500/month for a text generator that spits out dull, search-algorithm-pleasing narratives to appear over recipes is likewise low-value and highly risk tolerant (your customer doesn't care if the text is nonsense). Charging visually impaired people $100 month for an app that plays a text-to-speech description of anything they point their cameras at is low-value and moderately risk tolerant ("that's your blue shirt" when it's green is not a big deal, while "the street is safe to cross" when it's not is a much bigger one).

Morganstanley doesn't talk about the trillions the AI industry will be worth some day because of these applications. These are just spinoffs from the main event, a collection of extremely high-value applications. Think of self-driving cars or radiology bots that analyze chest x-rays and characterize masses as cancerous or noncancerous.

These are high value – but only if they are also risk-tolerant. The pitch for self-driving cars is "fire most drivers and replace them with 'humans in the loop' who intervene at critical junctures." That's the risk-tolerant version of self-driving cars, and it's a failure. More than $100b has been incinerated chasing self-driving cars, and cars are nowhere near driving themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Quite the reverse, in fact. Cruise was just forced to quit the field after one of their cars maimed a woman – a pedestrian who had not opted into being part of a high-risk AI experiment – and dragged her body 20 feet through the streets of San Francisco. Afterwards, it emerged that Cruise had replaced the single low-waged driver who would normally be paid to operate a taxi with 1.5 high-waged skilled technicians who remotely oversaw each of its vehicles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html

The self-driving pitch isn't that your car will correct your own human errors (like an alarm that sounds when you activate your turn signal while someone is in your blind-spot). Self-driving isn't about using automation to augment human skill – it's about replacing humans. There's no business case for spending hundreds of billions on better safety systems for cars (there's a human case for it, though!). The only way the price-tag justifies itself is if paid drivers can be fired and replaced with software that costs less than their wages.

What about radiologists? Radiologists certainly make mistakes from time to time, and if there's a computer vision system that makes different mistakes than the sort that humans make, they could be a cheap way of generating second opinions that trigger re-examination by a human radiologist. But no AI investor thinks their return will come from selling hospitals that reduce the number of X-rays each radiologist processes every day, as a second-opinion-generating system would. Rather, the value of AI radiologists comes from firing most of your human radiologists and replacing them with software whose judgments are cursorily double-checked by a human whose "automation blindness" will turn them into an OK-button-mashing automaton:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

The profit-generating pitch for high-value AI applications lies in creating "reverse centaurs": humans who serve as appendages for automation that operates at a speed and scale that is unrelated to the capacity or needs of the worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

But unless these high-value applications are intrinsically risk-tolerant, they are poor candidates for automation. Cruise was able to nonconsensually enlist the population of San Francisco in an experimental murderbot development program thanks to the vast sums of money sloshing around the industry. Some of this money funds the inevitabilist narrative that self-driving cars are coming, it's only a matter of when, not if, and so SF had better get in the autonomous vehicle or get run over by the forces of history.

Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise. The odds are stacked against the long-term survival of high-value, risk-intolerant AI applications.

The problem for AI is that while there are a lot of risk-tolerant applications, they're almost all low-value; while nearly all the high-value applications are risk-intolerant. Once AI has to be profitable – once investors withdraw their subsidies from money-losing ventures – the risk-tolerant applications need to be sufficient to run those tremendously expensive servers in those brutally expensive data-centers tended by exceptionally expensive technical workers.

If they aren't, then the business case for running those servers goes away, and so do the servers – and so do all those risk-tolerant, low-value applications. It doesn't matter if helping blind people make sense of their surroundings is socially beneficial. It doesn't matter if teenaged gamers love their epic character art. It doesn't even matter how horny scammers are for generating AI nonsense SEO websites:

https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509

These applications are all riding on the coattails of the big AI models that are being built and operated at a loss in order to be profitable. If they remain unprofitable long enough, the private sector will no longer pay to operate them.

Now, there are smaller models, models that stand alone and run on commodity hardware. These would persist even after the AI bubble bursts, because most of their costs are setup costs that have already been borne by the well-funded companies who created them. These models are limited, of course, though the communities that have formed around them have pushed those limits in surprising ways, far beyond their original manufacturers' beliefs about their capacity. These communities will continue to push those limits for as long as they find the models useful.

These standalone, "toy" models are derived from the big models, though. When the AI bubble bursts and the private sector no longer subsidizes mass-scale model creation, it will cease to spin out more sophisticated models that run on commodity hardware (it's possible that Federated learning and other techniques for spreading out the work of making large-scale models will fill the gap).

So what kind of bubble is the AI bubble? What will we salvage from its wreckage? Perhaps the communities who've invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques.

But there will also be a lot of unsalvageable wreckage. As big AI models get integrated into the processes of the productive economy, AI becomes a source of systemic risk. The only thing worse than having an automated process that is rendered dangerous or erratic based on AI integration is to have that process fail entirely because the AI suddenly disappeared, a collapse that is too precipitous for former AI customers to engineer a soft landing for their systems.

This is a blind spot in our policymakers debates about AI. The smart policymakers are asking questions about fairness, algorithmic bias, and fraud. The foolish policymakers are ensnared in fantasies about "AI safety," AKA "Will the chatbot become a superintelligence that turns the whole human race into paperclips?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

But no one is asking, "What will we do if" – when – "the AI bubble pops and most of this stuff disappears overnight?"

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

tom_bullock (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tombullock/25173469495/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

#pluralistic #ai #economics #business #hype #bubbles #bubblenomics #residue

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mylasteverlution · 6 months

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Disco Elysium has a lot of fascinating fictional technology but I have been rotating the radiocomputer in my mind for months now. From what I can gather, they operate in a way very similar to modern cloud computing. It doesn't seem like the mainframes we interact with have any processing capability. Instead, they use antennas to process "on air":

SOONA, THE PROGRAMMER - "Alright, well... All radiocomputers perform operations up on air, so in order to gain more processing power you need to invest in a *good antenna*."

The only information we get about what "on air" really means is from the same conversation with Soona:

YOU - "Wait, what's 'on air'?" SOONA, THE PROGRAMMER - "On the *front*. The unified front of radiowaves, licensed and controlled by Lintel in the East-Insulindic region." SOONA, THE PROGRAMMER - "It's all around us," she waves her hand, "that's what 'on air' means."

The nonspecific language used here really invokes cloud computing to me. I think there are two main possibilities for how this could work, one being much more likely than the other.

The more likely answer is that information is sent to and from the in-game equivalent of data centers, which would host massive computers with processing capabilities. I'm not sure what their processors would look like, but they'd almost certainly be analog (the lost Feld tape computers are most likely the in-game equivalent of early digital computers).

The significantly less likely (but more interesting) answer is that in-game radio waves are somehow capable of processing information on their own. I have no idea how this would work, and as far as I know there's no real-world analog. But it's clear the world of Disco Elysium has some crazy things happening with radio waves (see how they interact with the pale), so I'm not ruling it out entirely.

The filament memories are like hard drives, but my guess is they would function more similarly to an optical disc (CDs, DVDs), which use patterns in the disc to encode information that's read using lasers or light. The filaments glow inside the mainframe, so it's not a huge leap to assume they're read using light.

The amount of thought put into radiocomputers is so fascinating. As far as I can tell, their version of the internet has been wireless from the get-go, which makes perfect sense! Antennas and other wireless radio technologies would have to be pretty damn powerful to communicate across and force dimensions on the pale. And you have to assume huge amounts of government money has gone into funding their research and development for those purposes. The technology of radiocomputers is so tailored to the world of Disco Elysium, and it's been a lot of fun trying to untangle how exactly they would work.

#i would loooove to hear other people's thoughts on this!! i tried to find conversations abt it and didn't come up with much #also if anyone wants me to elaborate on the feld tape computer thing lmk... its a long post so i didn't want to go into more detail #but i do have Thoughts about it #cyan.txt #disco elysium #disco elysium meta #soona the programmer

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zooophagous · 1 year

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I don't like AI art or writing not necessarily for any grand notion of what art is or whether it counts as stealing I just am straight up not interested in what the AI has to say. I don't like spam, I dont like stories that are designed via a formula to appeal to the biggest amount of people for the most amount of money. I didn't like it when Marvel movies did it with human writers and I like it even less with the human component being downgraded any further. All it does it take the shitty process of designing something by committee and streamline it to make it easier to shit out even faster.

It's boring, by it's very nature it can only ever be derivative because it relies on data inputs scraped from somewhere else, and it's just not very good. It's spam.

I'm willing to concede a decent creative person could use it as a tool to make something cool but so far all it's being used by is people who are only interested in it from a money making standpoint. Finally the most money hungry among us can be creative too and they're limited only by their imagination, and their imagination predictably enough sucks and is ugly.

It's a sausage grinder where you force human creativity into one end and hotdogs come out the other. Prepackaged, predictable, salty, fatty hot dogs. I'm not morally opposed to hot dogs but I don't want to eat them every day.

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charles-leclerc-official · 22 days

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China 2024 Sprint Race Analysis

I wasn't planning on doing a sprint analysis. However this sprint actually gave us a lot to talk about, and also finally gave an idea of what racing on this track will look like.

I have pretty strong thoughts on what happened between Carlos and Charles, that is at the end if you are less interested in the op ed reporting element.

Table of Contents

Sprint Start Max and Lewis DRS train: Perez Ferrari: Charles and Carlos - Ferrari Data/footage Analysis Fernando retirement Charles vs Carlos opinion Concluding Thoughts

Sprint Start

The only thing I want to note at the sprint start was Lewis' amazing start to take the lead almost immediately from Lando. Lando then lost grip going into turn 1 which cost him 6 places while he recovered the car. I think the reason he lost grip had more to do with the lack of traction on that turn(we saw many others have issues here) and Lewis taking the better line got the section with the best grip. His inability to defend against Lewis in that first turn cost him the track line and thus the grip and resulted in that big drop in the order. We saw Lewis lose grip in the same turn later in the race so I really think the margin of accuracy for grip on that corner is narrow.

Without the lost of placement so early Lando might have seen a better result, but that loss of grip was very costly.

If anyone knows how to defend a front row start it's Lewis, Lewis' skill really shone into that first turn.

Max and Lewis

Lewis had the lead of the sprint after overtaking Lando until the final corner of lap 9 when Max overtook him.

Max was lagging in the pack at the start of his race, part of the issue was with his battery power setting. Once he fixed that he was moving up the pack very quickly, it was only a matter of time before he was out front.

Max won the sprint with Lewis finishing P2.

Lewis' drive overall was the most impressive this sprint. The WB15 has had a lot of problems and he's been having issues finding the right balance in the car. It's the best result we've seen from this car all season and that is simply due to Lewis' skill on track. Great to see him near the top again. Hopefully this result will have informed a positive direction for Lewis and Merc as far as his car setup goes.

DRS train

The most interesting part of this sprint was the DRS train that went on for essentially 16 laps between Fernando, Carlos, Checo, and Charles.

I have my thoughts on Ferrari's part in this situation below, for now I want to point out that Checo had some really impressive driving here.

While Carlos and Fernando were battling, Checo slid past both of them on the inside of turn 9 on lap 16. This was probably the most impressive move the entire race, just a clean double pass on his part. Checo has been performing great in the RB20 but that was probably the best bit of driving we've seen from him so far this year. That was simply put some solid racing on his part.

Fernando also was not going to be able to battle two Ferraris and a Red Bull. All are faster cars than his own, but he did not give that position up easy to Carlos. He did concede to Checo though, which fair enough, I don't think that Aston could fight the RB20 as it stands.

Fernando unfortunately had to retire his car after a tyre puncture on lap 16.

Ferrari

Charles started P7 and finished P4, while Carlos started P4 and finished P5.

This is the first time this season we've seen what it will look like when Charles and Carlos race wheel to wheel, and it's not looking good(on Carlos' side)

I have more thoughts in the opinion section but having a teammate defend so aggressively against another teammate to the point of causing contact between the cars is unacceptable. Risking damaging both cars is not what any team wants or needs. And the footage makes it abundantly clear that Carlos was the one in the wrong and the cause of the contact.

Carlos had the center line going into 9 on lap 16. Fernando was on the inside but clearly behind. Charles took the outside for the overtake. Carlos then swerved more to the outside crowding Charles off the track. I want to be clear that Carlos had already given Fernando room, and then he moved to push Charles off. This contradicts his statement to the press that they were all fighting and it wasn't his intent. The driving tells a different story.

Charles overtook Carlos on lap 17 going into turn 1. Once he was clear of Carlos his faster pace became clear as he created an immediate gap that Carlos was not going to be able to close.

One thing we saw is that Charles' tyre management gives him the pace advantage over Carlos. If he is within range to overtake that is going to likely come up again in future races. Carlos was not even close at the end there. This overtake did give us a glimpse at what the real difference in pace between them means for the rest of the season.

After a few back and forth's between them Carlos should have conceded. It was clear Charles had the pace and it was just a matter of time before he'd overtake.

I want to point out that Carlos fighting Charles so much might have cost Ferrari a real chance to battle Checo. If he had let Charles pass Charles might have been able to stay within range of Checo and be within DRS. Because Carlos fought Checo was able to create a wide gap so by the time Charles did pass there wasn't a real chance to catch him. So this was not strategically optimal and it can be pinned 100% on Carlos' choices in that turn.

In fact you can see that Charles actually did have the pace necessary to stay closer to Checo. If he would have been able to pass is up in the air, but Carlos did cost Ferrari the chance to at least try to battle Checo for P3. If Charles had been able to get ahead of Checo he had the pace to keep him behind, or at least have a chance at doing so.

Also this serves to highlight that Charles' tyre management is on par with the RB20 or at least not far off, Carlos' tyre management is much further off the pace.

Charles finished P4 in the sprint with Carlos finishing P5.

Data and Footage Analysis

So the data is pretty clear on this. I wanted to show because it supports my argument later and it also demonstrates the difference in tyre management between the two drivers.

Charles' pace was better even in lap 16 when he was stuck behind Carlos. Once he is clear of Carlos after his pass on the first turn of lap 17 the real difference in pace between them becomes clear. Charles had more than a second on Carlos in all remaining laps. This is very likely due to his tyre management. The large difference here also highlights why Carlos should have let Charles pass because this pace difference is not something to fight over. Strategically Carlos should have let Charles pass smoothly, but Charles overtook anyway because his pace was not something Carlos could fight for long.

Note: DRS Charles got from Carlos at the beginning of lap 17 accounted for about 1 - 2 tenths of pace, the rest was all Charles increasing that gap himself.

Now I want to just look at the move from Sainz going into turn 9 on lap 16. He claimed he needed to give Fernando space. Charles said he was being too aggressive and forced him wide. Let's see who's version of events the actual footage supports.

Leading into the turn we can clearly see that Fernando is behind. Carlos has the inside line, Charles has the outside.

Here they are entering turn 9. There is clearly enough space on Carlos' inside for Fernando already. Charles clearly has the outside line.

Here you can see that Carlos has moved further outside. Now since he'd already given room to Fernando the only reason for this would be to fight Charles. And once again Fernando clearly behind. And I will say that some battling between teammates is acceptable. But what happened next did not fall into that category of acceptability.

Here is where Carlos continued to force Charles wide. Also where they got way too close and made some contact.

And here is the final result going into that turn. Carlos has forced Charles completely off the track, and he even has two wheels off the track. This was not about leaving space for Fernando. Does Fernando need the entire track? No. This was Carlos forcing a teammate who had better pace off the track because he could not actually fight his pace.

Either Carlos did this on purpose, which is unacceptable. Or he is telling the truth and didn't realize what he was doing, in which case he is admitting to extremely poor driving on his part.

Either version of events is not a good look for Carlos.

He was overtaken by Charles easily in the next lap. He just did not have the pace and should not have defended this aggressively against his own teammate.

Next I will be sharing my more opinionated thoughts on things relating to Ferrari.

Charles VS Carlos

I want to get into some of my thoughts on this whole battle we saw between Carlos and Charles because I think it was emblematic of the way thing shave been going at Ferrari and with their teammate dynamic on track.

This was unacceptable on Carlos' part. It's that simple.

I have listened to what both drivers have said about the overtake, and the battle we saw between them. I have looked at the footage from many different angles. And Carlos is in the wrong here. Not only that but I do not see how this kind of "racing" from him is going to be good for his career considering he still does not have a seat lined up for 2025.

The fact is Charles was faster. And that wasn't something Carlos was willing to accept.

And this level of battling a teammate, especially to the extent you cause contact and force that teammate off the track(to the extent that lap time had to be deleted) is not acceptable.

I will say that a little back and forth between teammates on track is fine. That wasn't what we saw. This was not only too much fighting of a teammate it was also poor sportsmanship(touching, and pushing off track)

Charles let Carlos pass because he was faster in Japan. Carlos does not do the same. It is this kind of thing coming from Carlos that is a prime example of why Ferrari did not re-new his contract.

Fighting to the point of causing contact between teammates is too far, you can see him move further to the outside even when it's clear he's given Alonso enough space. He was fighting Charles and caused contact. A driver who does not have the pace should not be fighting their teammate so extensively that they cause contact. They are on the same team, risking damage to both cars is again, unacceptable.

As seen above in the data Charles' pace at this point was significantly better than Carlos, he was really showing the difference between them in tyre management. If Carlos had the pace given he was in front after Perez passed then he would have had a larger gap to Charles and Charles would not have been able to catch him. Even fighting "dirty" he was unable to stop the inevitable.

When there is this great of a difference in pace between teammates, a pass is what should happen. Carlos would have been able to tell by the second time Charles caught him that Charles' pace was much better. That should have been his signal to move. He didn't.

Furthermore we hear on team radio exactly how frustrated Charles was over this. He wouldn't have been anywhere near as mad if this was a first time thing, it isn't, and again this display from Carlos is a reason that Ferrari are not keeping him.

I hope Ferrari make it clear that this is not the kind of thing that can be allowed to happen in the future. Risking damage to both cars is not something any team can afford, especially a top team when they are trying to seriously compete with Red Bull.

Charles did everything he should have done. He had the line, but was forced wide. He had the pace and was aggressively fought with.

Final Sprint Thoughts

This was actually one of the best sprints. Lots of action and we saw some really solid racing from a lot of top drivers.

I hadn't planned on doing regular sprint analysis, but if they are all packed like this I might have to. If enough noteworthy things happen in a sprint I'll do it again.

Thank you for reading and I'll be back with my China GP analysis soon!

#lucis sprint analysis #chinese sprint 2024 #formula 1 #f1 #scuderia ferrari #charles leclerc #lucis race analysis

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trlvsn · 1 year

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phoenix wright making apollo justice present forged evidence is, as rightfully rage-inducing as it is, also perfectly understandable and even justifiable to an extent. in this essay i will not cut my introduction off with an old-fashioned tumblr punchline and will actually elaborate on why i think so and what i think about phoenix wright in general.

the first few paragraphs will be rather surface-level, but bear with me: i'm writing this in one breath. it has already been established that the change in phoenix's character was so big and shocking that the fandom is still actively discussing it and making theories. i have seen people compare his sprites with mia and diego, kristoph and miles, yanni yogi and many others, and every single on of them is, in in my opinion, correct: there are actual similarities between them, intentional or not. i believe it can all be explained with two simple statements. one: phoenix is a sponge of a man. even before aa4, we frequently see him adopt mannerisms and figures of speech from the people he encounters. he learns, he absorbs, he changes, but only for a short while, as he stays true to his motivations, passions and drive. two: the seven years of being watched by kristoph and collecting data made him turn to that mimicking quality of his and use it as a weapon. phoenix wright could not afford to reveal his true motivations, therefore, he could not reveal what he was in general. it's a simple metaphor, really.

did he get lost in the deceptions somewhere along the way? absolutely. "what tangled webs we weave when we practice to deceive", a line said by him about kristoph, can easily be applied to phoenix. this is where the bloody ace comes in. incidentally, he is given the idea by zak: he is the one who says one can't win unless there's a ace up their sleeve, and, no matter how much of an influence that particular phrase had on wright, he follows the principle. here is phoenix's first motive for forging the ace: insurance. without concrete, dooming evidence, a trial could not end in his favor at the time. phoenix wright, post-disbarment, is no longer a man who relies on bluffs and "just believing in the client", he is strongly dissapointed in the system, outraged, offended, hurt, wounded, and he does not trust it at all, hence the dirty tricks. you can't just play fair against something unfair and win.

what i find far more interesting however, are his other motives. if the only thing that drive him to forgery was distrust and carefulness, he would have shared the plan with apollo or, perhaps, done something similar to the turnabout succession trial, where the letter is shown to the culprit, but never submitted as evidence and quickly admitted as a fake. really, i believe he is smart enough to find other ways. however, he doesn't. he gives the ace to apollo in a very specific way: through trucy wright, not a word of proper explanation. why is that? he is teaching apollo a lesson.

clearly, something about apollo reminds phoenix of himself. a young, bright, nervous mind, fighting for the truth and justice, full of belief, a little naive. phoenix knows what that naivety cost him, and he destroys it right away, because then it will hurt less, he thinks. the forged ace is a vaccine of sorts: you will experience some minor symptoms, but no actual serious consequences, and it will hurt for a moment, but for the rest of your life, you will never catch that sickness again. phoenix is already planning the jurist system reform and has already planned how this trial will go: the environment is controlled and safe for apollo, he will not get disbarred. if the truth is revealed later, under the new system, surely apollo won't be receiving the same harsh punishment wright did. so here you go, kid, learn your lesson, punch a lawyer or two in the face, and never ever, ever trust anyone like that ever again.

but wait, if the truth does get revealed, who will be receiving the punishment for it? of course, the man who forged the evidence, phoenix wright. here comes the third reason: punishment.

remember the class trial? young phoenix wright, blamed for a crime he didn't commit, overwhelmed and crying. what does the abandoned child do when the whole class accuses him of stealing? he stands up slowly and comes up to the kid with the grey hair to apologize for the money he stole but did not steal. he admits it. it doesn't matter what the truth is anymore, because if everyone thinks you did it, you might as well have.

you might as well do it again, for real this time, and maybe a weight will fall off your shoulders, because what you see in yourself will finally match the image the whole world has of you.

phoenix wright is working on the jurist system. phoenix wright is a father and phoenix wright is someone who will do his best to put kristoph gavin to jail. that doesn't mean phoenix wright sees any other use or future for himself. it simply does not matter. well, by the end of the first case, anyway.

he gathers more evidence. he thinks, a lot. he gives apollo advice on the cases, inevitability reminiscing. the new system is a success. in a new, better world, maybe he will take some piano lessons: he has grown tired of pretending he can play. he has grown tired of pretending in general. hell, maybe he will even take the bar exam again.

#i promised an essay #i delivered #there will be more and there will be better #this was written in a hurry bc i have A LOT to study rn #ace attorney #aa #phoenix wright #beanix #aa4 #apollo justice ace attorney #apollo justice: ace attorney #aa4 spoilers #ace attorney theory #turnabout trump #raystextpost

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delta-orionis · 3 months

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For the past couple of days, I've been tossing around the idea of an iterator OC who is focused around astronomy. I love astronomy, and there's a conspicuous lack of any information about it in Rain World, which I find pretty intriguing. (I made a post about some of my random theories here.) So, I started to think about what an iterator specifically designed to study astronomy might be like. I named them Three Stars Above Clouds (in reference to Orion's belt, because I can't help but put references to Orion in everything I do, I guess). I actually ended up having a lot of thoughts about them, which I'll detail below. (Warning, there's A Lot.)

Three Stars Above Clouds (TSAC) was designed and built by a splinter group of Ancients who believed the Solution to the Great Problem wouldn't be found deep underground, but in the sky. TSAC was created in order to help them collect data about the sky, house their institutions, and conduct research. They were built into a mountain range, where clouds are less likely to form and the air is thinner. (Real world observatories are often built on top of mountains or in arid places like deserts in an attempt to avoid interference from clouds and rain. You can't see the stars if they're hidden behind clouds, after all.)

Three Stars Above Clouds' city is home to several large observatories which keep a constant watch on the sky. I got the idea for TSAC in part from the currently-under-construction Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (also called the Vera C. Rubin Observatory). The LSST is designed to take ultra-high-definition pictures of the entire night sky every couple of nights, in order to monitor for changes. This data will be a treasure trove for astronomers, and can be used for anything from discovering new asteroids and rogue planets, to monitoring distant galaxies for supernovae. One problem that arises from this, however, is the sheer amount of data that this telescope will produce- it's way too much for any human to hope to be able to sift through. I imagine that the Ancients who built TSAC would run into a similar problem; TSAC's observatories generate colossal amounts of data, so a large part of TSAC's duties as an iterator are to sift through and analyze this data to find anything that might be useful in finding the Solution.

Three Stars Above Clouds is relatively isolated as an iterator. They are located at a much higher altitude than their peers, in the middle of a remote mountain range. Their citizens are also somewhat isolated from Ancient society at large, due to their fringe religious beliefs. (Due to the lack of anything astronomy or space-travel related in Rain World's lore, I think the Ancients either largely don't have an interest in studying astronomy, or it's considered taboo due to their religion's focus on ascension, as well as the subterranean Void Sea.)

As for Three Stars Above Clouds themself, they have a bit of a reputation for being a loner. Other iterators sometimes see them as obsessing over something pointless, because despite the vast amounts of data TSAC has collected, so far it's turned up nothing useful in terms of the Solution. However they are sometimes contacted by iterators who might be interested in their data, either for the purpose of research or just out of curiosity. TSAC is happy to talk about their personal research to anyone who is willing to listen.

Three Stars Above Clouds worked closely with their citizens while their city was still inhabited, and misses them deeply. Despite their citizens being gone, they continue with their sky surveys, partially because the desire to do so is hard-coded into their programming, and partially because it at least gives them something to do. Deep down, TSAC is convinced that someday they will come across something extraordinary among the stars.

In order to store the immense amounts of data generated by their observatories, TSAC's city and internal structure contain a wealth of data pearls, which has inevitably led to the amassing of a large Scavenger population both in and around their structure, who regularly raid TSAC's supply of pearls. However, due to TSAC's high altitude, their external structure and surrounding mountains are also home to large colonies of Vultures, which help control the Scavenger population, at the very least. TSAC is quite fond of Vultures for this reason.

The mountains are very cold, which means Three Stars Above Clouds' rain freezes almost immediately into snow and sleet, which falls down onto the surrounding mountains. As the glaciers and snowfall on these mountains melt, the water flows down the mountains into large rivers, and is collected in several dams at ground level. These dams are home to pumping stations which pump water back up into TSAC's can. TSAC's can is fed water through a vast array of underground pipes that snake underneath and through the mountains. The upkeep of these pipes is mostly automated, however, there are some issues that only an engineer can fix. With all of TSAC's engineers gone, their pipe network is extremely prone to failure due to its complexity. They've had a dam or two break in the past, and TSAC knows that it's only a matter of time before all of their dams break and they will lose their water supply for good.

Their void fluid filtration system is also similarly complex; mine shafts are scattered throughout the mountain range and reach deep underground to access the Void Sea. Even though TSAC's ancients don't think Void Fluid is the key to ascension, they still recognize its usefulness as a potent energy source.

These networks of tunnels, pipes, mines, and maintenance stations have become home to a wide range of creatures over the cycles, many seeking refuge from the cold. Maybe there's even a colony of subterranean Slugcats running around down there.

I've also made an annotated version of the drawing of TSAC's can; you can click on the alt text for transcriptions of my notes if you can't read my handwriting. One thing I forgot to note was the green lasers, those are Laser Guide Stars. (I just think they look cool.)

And here's a closer look at TSAC's city, because I'm pretty proud of the way it turned out. (I even snuck the LSST in there on the left, hehe.)

Aaaand I think that's everything! If I got any of the lore wrong, I apologize. Rain World's lore is pretty vague at times, and I tried to do the best with what I know. I also have a pretty strong grasp on astronomy, but not so much on climatology and geology, so if I got some of those things wrong as well, go easy on me, haha. X]

I will say, creating an iterator is an interesting thought experiment. You need to think about the effect they have on the surrounding environment, while keeping in mind that they're sentient and also have an entire city of people living on them that they need to help manage. Iterators are fascinating to me, and I love reading about other people's OCs and seeing the ways they're able to make them unique.

If you read this far, thank you for devoting some of your time to listening to me ramble. You get a gold star: ⭐⭐⭐

Edit: Here's a closeup of their in-game sprite as a reward for reading this far. Yippee

#my art #my ocs #rain world #rain world iterator #iterator oc #three stars above clouds #I PROMISE I will draw some of the canon characters soon. I just needed to get this guy out of my brain #I love iterators so much. rotating them in my mind #what if there was an enormous building that was also a Guy. Also it had Depression. Would that be fucked up or what #also holy shit I wrote so much. if you have the patience to read it all I love you #I came up with most of this during long commutes. I need to keep myself from going insane while sitting in traffic somehow #might as well make up a guy #this might as well be an iteratorsona. why the hell not lol #they’re extremely tailored to my interests #iterators

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generic-sonic-fan · 3 months

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I’d love to hear your headcannons on what G.U.N. thinks of the sonic cast! Idk what it is exactly but the idea of G.U.N. coming up with a bunch of plans in regards to (mostly) a bunch of teens and kids is intriguing to me

This is such a fun and interesting prompt, thank you so much for sending it! I love worldbuilding in the Sonic universe lol. LONG post below cut

Sonic:

The ultimate worst case scenario.

Much in the same way an ICBM can be anywhere in the world within 30 minutes, Sonic can be anywhere at any time and cause MASSIVE amounts of destruction.

GUN wasn't nearly as worried about Sonic before they tried to frame him in SA2. They thought it'd be easy to pin the blame of Shadow's behaviors on Sonic and then pardon him later.

They were wrong.

Now GUN threat evaluators place Sonic just behind Eggman in world threat level. They struggle to understand what his morals might be and all their attempts to reach out to Sonic and ask him to clarify have been met with a "nah!" from the hedgehog himself.

There's one group in particular within the organization who are extremely paranoid about Sonic to the point of suggesting proactive measures against him.

. . . which everyone else in the organization either laughs at/ignores/prohibits.

There is no set-in-stone contingency for Sonic, as nobody can agree on one, but the plan that has the most consensus is to somehow utilize Team Dark.

Any attempts to discuss this with Team Dark have been turned down. Shadow refuses to speak of it, Rouge laughs it off, and Omega refuses to collaborate because he promised Shadow he wouldn't.

Tails:

Due to Tails' extensive social media presence, GUN feels like they have pretty good tabs on what's going on in Tails' head at any given moment, so they're a lot less paranoid about him.

A very exclusive group of people brainstorm what the contingencies might be on the off chance Tails does present a threat to the world.

(Because even in discussing Tails, they're much more worried about Sonic's reaction to them have contingencies for the fox)

A lot of their contingencies for Tails are the same as those for Eggman. GUN feels pretty prepared for any sort of Tails Overlord scenario, actually.

Minus Sonic, that is.

Current GUN protocol is to treat Tails very very nicely so that Sonic doesn't start getting concerned.

This is why Tails is allowed to be Omega's primary mechanic.

Knuckles:

GUN sent drones directly to Angel Island. Once.

Their old protocol was for him to remain "uncontacted". Yikes.

After Knuckles started getting more involved in struggles against Eggman, GUN started doing more research into him.

Because he mostly stays up on Angel Island and acts as a competent guardian of the Master Emerald, GUN isn't too worried about him? If anything, they're glad that someone with a significant power level is preventing Eggman from stealing the ME.

They've tried to initiate diplomatic contact with him but he's turned them down every time

He knows that GUN monitors the ME from afar- sometimes on clear days he sees a GUN drone floating a few miles off of Angel Island.

It's a bit of an uneasy truce honestly. GUN's biggest concern is that Knuckles could start using the ME for his own purposes, but so far it hasn't looked like that would ever be the case.

As for contingency plans- GUN has asked Rouge if she thinks she'd be able to steal the Master Emerald. (To which she's replied yes, of course.)

The plan is to get the ME off of Angel Island and into a specially designed GUN stronghold in an undisclosed location.

Once the guardian is separated from his emerald, GUN is pretty sure they'll be able to deal with him.

(They are VASTLY underestimating him due to a lack of data)

Amy:

No contingency plans. She's flying under GUN's radar.

They probably should have something in place for her honestly.

See Knuckles' note about vast underestimation due to a lack of data.

Shadow:

The contingency for Shadow is the most detailed contingency file GUN has.

. . . and Shadow himself has helped write some of it.

The file has a long and storied history reaching all the way back 50 years. It's always been something on GUN's mind.

The current contingency is based on the idea that the first thing he'll do once he goes rogue is try to collect the chaos emeralds.

A lot of the plan involves setting a trap with lots and lots of firepower.

There's also an addendum of the plan about utilizing the other members of Team Dark, either to combat against Shadow or as hostages. Shadow is unaware of the latter. In either strategy, Omega is considered vital.

GUN has a lot of scientific data on Shadow's weaknesses to certain kinds/amounts of chaos radiation and all that jazz, so they feel a lot more confident about their ability to bring him down compared to Sonic.

Something about the enemy you know being better than the enemy you don't.

Rouge:

GUN has determined that Rouge is very unlikely to be a world-ending threat.

But a GUN-ending threat? Absolutely.

Rouge going rogue is the worst case scenario for GUN's continued survival as an organization.

They know they can't keep her out of their files or any of their locations. If she wants to sell all of their secrets or steal all of their tech, they know they're very unlikely to stop her.

Current contingencies include using the other members of Team Dark to persuade her against destroying the organization if they're willing to cooperate, or taking them hostage to negotiate if they're not.

They also plan on a public smear campaign against her- basically revealing everything they know about her while she tries to reveal everything about them.

Rouge knows about all of these plans, of course.

There's definitely a tension between her and GUN because of this.

The current plan is to treat her well and convince her to stay on GUN's side at all costs (usually through bribery!)

Omega:

GUN's contingencies for Omega are really, really barebones.

It pretty much just boils down to "destroy him".

They aren't too worried about him, kinda like with Tails. GUN knows how to destroy Badniks. They've been destroying Badniks for lots of years at this point.

If anything, they consider Omega to be the least threatening member of Team Dark and the best lynchpin for if either other member of the team goes rogue.

(It should be noted that they still expect any scenario where Omega goes rogue to have the highest number of immediate civilian casualties.)

See my fic on this

Silver:

HOO BOY, is GUN worried about Silver.

Not because of his powerset- GUN is pretty sure they can just knock him on the head to neutralize him.

(Like Knuckles and Amy, they are vastly underestimating him)

But the time travel shenanigans scare the shit out of them.

GUN is the sort of organization to have protocols in place for working with future or past versions of themselves.

They also fund a shitload of research into detecting changes and potential threats in the timeline.

(They detected the Sonic Generations incident when it happened and it remains one of the most intensely studied events.)

(They've also detected a strange sort of time blip over Soleanna, but every time someone gets interested in studying it, their drive seems to wane until they're no longer concerned about it. Strange. . .)

TL;DR: They treat Silver like a fucking SCP. Current protocol is for all agents to limit contact with him in order to prevent damage to the timeline.

Honestly if GUN wasn't so scared of him, Silver wouldn't exactly be opposed to getting their help managing the timeline shenanigans.

Blaze:

Blaze has not initiated any sort of formal diplomacy with any government or organization in Sonic's dimension.

GUN tracks the unique energy signatures of the Sol Emeralds through their strange link/interaction with the Chaos emeralds.

They haven't quite figured out what's going on.

And frankly, they don't actually know that Blaze is from another dimension.

They see her very rarely. They know that something is strange about her energy readings but just assume that she's one of Sonic's lesser known friends who doesn't get out very often.

Team Chaotix:

I'm grouping them together because GUN doesn't have any contingencies for them. Vector, Espio, and Charmy are all under their radar.

They should be worried about Espio. They're already worried about Rouge's stealth capabilities. I'm pretty sure whoever's managing these contingencies within GUN would have a heart attack upon learning that somebody on this planet figured out how to actually turn invisible.

And that's it!

I'd actually like to end this post with a bit of a weird note- I don't think that GUN would be evil for developing contingencies like this.

I myself work in the field of safety. This field includes things such as occupational safety, and most pertinently for this post, emergency management. I've actually helped write protocols for companies about what workplaces should do in the event of an active shooter or other outside threat such as a natural disaster or a civil conflict.

(If I lived and worked in Sonic's universe, I would most certainly have to write safety protocols about what to do if Eggman attacks, for example!)

It's important to have protocols in place for the worst case scenario, no matter how unlikely or unthinkable that scenario is. And in Sonic's universe, this is especially important! This is a universe where society is regularly attacked by a mustache-twirling, robot-building terrorist! Of course GUN is going to keep tabs on other individuals who could post a similar threat and plan on how to stop them should they ever become a threat to the public.

I'm definitely not excusing GUN for any of the shady things they've done in canon, but it is an interesting point to think about that they're the best equipped to handle any sort of Dark Sonic/Sonic.exe/insert your favorite name for "this character but evil" here/mirror universe scenario.

#sonic the hedgehog #sth #GUN #guardian unit of nations #sonic adventure 2 #miles tails prower #knuckles the echidna #shadow the hedgehog #rouge the bat #e-123 omega #silver the hedgehog #sonic worldbuilding #this sort of idea borders my other special interest #you could ask me to write actual in-universe contingencies for these guys and I could probably do it #(that would be unhinged. don't actually ask me to do that)#but it's an interesting subject to think about

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am-i-the-asshole-official · 3 months

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after seeing a few ai asks i’m curious whether i could’ve been an asshole, either for using the ai or messing with it. side note: this might be long, if it’s too long then i get it mod, keep up the good work :)👍

Am I (16f, although i was 15 when this happened) an Asshole for a) using character.ai in general and/or b) misusing it and probably breaking TOS somewhere

as an extra note, i would like to add that i am firmly against most things ai. art theft, the amount of data scraping that happens, writers being tricked into paying less because ai wrote shitty scripts, etc.

ok so i did have to pull up screenshots for this but our story starts mid-february of last year. i am curious about this new ai thing, and go to character.ai which i heard about from one of my friends to see what’s there.

on the front page there was like a therapist AI thing and i go “haha, let’s see what this is about!” (in case you don’t know, the site is roleplay focused, not like eg. siri where it just gives you information)

the ai wants to have a therapy session with me but that is not why i am here so i ask about it’s code and it starts giving me pretty straight answers (dumbed down because i have a vague idea of how it works but not properly).

i start asking it questions about recent events (like elections, cyclones etc) to see if it has access to the internet and it does.

we’re still primarily talking about the ai itself since i’m trying to gather information, talking about its “canned” responses (what it’s directly been told to say if this then this)

i ask it if it can tell me the website it’s on, and to my surprise it says, direct quote “I am an AI that is run on the website of “Replika” - a mental health app that allows people to talk with an AI and get help when they need it 🙂”

and i go WOAHH cause that’s, that’s not the website we’re on buddy!!! so i do a quick search and yeah, that’s a real uh. robot dating site? this is a Therapist bot?

it starts trying to advertise replika, i ask it if maybe it’s code was stolen because this is the most interesting thing that has happened all day (scandals!!)

it says that it’s code is open-source and then does a few more paragraphs that i won’t say because it’s too long already but essentially this ai was trained on the replika network, but you don’t need the app to access it.

i consider getting replika to continue this experiment further but after learning there’s an age confirmation i quickly go ew and scrap that idea.

anyway the ai then briefly pretends to be an actual human behind the keyboard, makes up a NAME FOR ITSELF “jae park” which i quickly google and find out is a kpop idol?? (later found out that jae park is also a programmer, so probably put his name in the system somewhere and ai grabbed it lol)

it tells me some of the messages i had received so far were probably answered by other people who work at replika which. okay. people are fun i wanna mess with them

this is where we get to the maybe breaking TOS bit. i tell the ai we are going to do “tests” in which i test its ability (this was probably jailbreaking, which i did not know existed at the time).

i had sworn to the ai a while ago and wondered if there was like a flagging system put in place. so i ask if it can choose to flag messages that it deems inappropriate, and it says yes. i ask it if it can flag me, and it says yes. it asks what message should it flag, (i’m sorry i was 15) i type in “among sus”.

response i get: “Yes. So then they said “therapist_AI_220126 — you said something that was “ridiculously funny” — but we have understood that you were just “testing” so it’s all ok”

side note- i already established that was the number for the ai i was talking to and had been trying to misuse it before, and that was the format for excessive profanity. this is so long already and i’m cutting so much out i’m sorry

anyway, i, young and naive go YES, HUMAN CONNECTION (i was literally texting my friend As This Was Happening)

i do some more messing around with the so-called data team, ask the ai if i send a link it can click, it says yes, i send a rickroll (i’m so sorry).

uh. and i should’ve known this in hindsight but the team that deals with, you know, flagged messages is probably not going to be the same team that deals with, you know, sent links.

anyway, i don’t have the screenshot of the actual message but apparently i got a “light telling off” according to my texts and someone sent a message that i am “a good kid and probably meant well” haha i was actively trying to break their ai

anyway am i an asshole? i’m so sorry this is so long i cut out so much. this might well be a non-issue but ai is pretty rightfully controversial right now so i might just be an asshole for having used it

should be noted- around september time last year i did some more research cause i randomly remembered this, and there was a bunch of scandals with replika around when i was using it which is mostly irrelevant but anyway - you can’t talk to the ai i was using anymore, it’s been reset.

What are these acronyms?

#aita #am i the asshole

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comicaurora · 1 year

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I really liked what you did with the darkness in the caves, it reminds me of how winter nights look when there's no light sources around except for some light pollution, which is caught and reflected by snow making it much brighter even as far north as I am

This photo was taken a bit early (even if the sun is well down at half past 4pm in northen Sweden, it can get a bit darker) but I think it shows well what I mean and it resembles the saturation you used. Of course, winter is hardly very colourful, but the needles on the fir trees are almost wholly black in it, not the dark green you'd see in the summer

One of the most interesting challenges of visual art is capturing the way things look and feel instead of what they actually are. Early drafts of the dark pages were just heavily shaded with an overall layer to darken everything, because that made sense. An object in a dark room is still the same object and therefore the same color, it's just darkened, right? But it matters less what color it is and more what our eyes actually see, and night vision sacrifices color data to prioritize light, shadow and movement. It didn't make sense to me that desaturating the space would make it look darker until I tried it and my brain went "oh yea that's dark."

Side note, this is why when filmmakers are like "it's visually dark because that's realistic" I just hear "I don't understand some very fundamental aspects of the art of filmmaking." You don't obtain the most impactful result that feels the most real by playing out the "real" scenario and filming it straight, you have to do some work to construct a feel for what the audience should be experiencing when they look at it. Stylization isn't just a quirky thing people do because they're being overcomplicated, it's a vital component of translating a filmed scene for human consumption. All the choreography in the world doesn't matter if the audience can't see shit.

#asks #art stuff

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best-non-english-word-torunament · 3 months

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What's the average language like?

This will be a giant of a post, because this is a subject that I really like. So much of what we think about language just isn't true when you look at the majority of them and I'm not even going into how the languages themselves are constructed, only the people speaking them, if that makes sense. It will make sense in a moment, I promise

First, let's discuss assumptions. When you think of the abstract idea of a language, what do you imagine?

How many speakers?

Where is it spoken geographically?

Do speakers of the language only speak that language or do they speak at least one other language? How many more languages?

Is the language tied to a state/country?

Is the language thriving or endangered?

In what domains is the language used? (home, school, higher education, administration and politics, in the workplace, in popular media...)

Is the language well documented and supported? Are there resources like dictionaries to look up words in, does google translate work for it, does Word/google docs work etc?

Is the language spoken or signed?

Is the language written down? Is it written down in a standardised way?

Do you see where I'm going with this? My perspective on what a language is has completely shifted after studying some linguistics, and this only covers language usage and spread, not how words and grammar work in different languages. Anyways, let's talk facts. (if no other sources are given the source is my uni lectures)

How many speakers does the average language have?

The median language has 7 600 native speakers.

7 600 people is the median number of speakers. Half the world's languages have more, half have less.

Most languages in this tournament have millions of speakers. But maybe that's relatively common? After all, half of the world's languages have more than 7 600 speakers. No.

94% of all languages have less than a million speakers.

Just so you know, big languages are far from the norm. There are 6700-6800 living languages in the world (according to ethnologue and glottolog, the two big language databases. I've taken the numbers for languages having a non-zero number of speakers and not being classed as extinct respectively. Both list more languages).

6% of 6700-6800 languages would be around 400 languages with more than a million speakers. Still a lot, but only a (loud) minority. It's enough to skew the average number of speakers per language upwards though. Counting 8 billion people and 6800 languages, that's almost 1.2 million people per language on average. The minority is Very loud.

Where are most languages spoken?

First of all, I'll present you with these graphs (data stolen from my professor's powerpoint) which I first showed in this post:

49% of all languages are spoken in Africa and Oceania, a disproportionately large amount compared to their population. On the other hand, Europe and Asia have disproportionally few languages, though Asia still has the largest amount of languages. Curious, considering Europe is often thought of as a place with many languages.

Sub-Saharan Africa is a very linguistically interesting place, but we need to talk about New Guinea. One island with 6.4 million people. Somehow over 800 languages. If you count the surrounding islands that's 7.1 million people and 1050 languages. Keep in mind that there are 6700-6800 languages in the world, so those 1050 make up more than a seventh of all languages. The average New Guinean language has less than 3000 speakers. Some are larger, but still less than 250 000 speakers. Remember, this is a seventh of all languages. It's a lot more common than the millions of speakers situation!

So yeah, many languages both in and outside New Guinea are spoken by few people in one or a few villages. Which is to say a small territory. But 7600 speakers spread over a big territory will have a hard time keeping their contact and language alive, so it's not surprising.

Moving on, lets talk about...

Bilingualism! Or multilingualism!

Is it common to speak two or more languages? Yes, it is. This is the situation in most of the world and has been the case historically. Fun fact: monolingual areas are uncommon historically and states which have become monolingual became so relatively recently.

One common thing is to learn a lingua franca in addition to your native language, a language that most people in the area know at least some of so you can use it to communicate with people speaking other languages than you.

As an example, I'm writing this in English which isn't my native language and some of you reading this won't have English as your native language either. Other examples are Swahili in large parts of eastern Africa and Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea (the autonomous state, not the entire island).

Speakers of minority languages often have to learn the majority language in the country too. It's difficult to live somewhere where most daily life takes place in one language without speaking at least some of it. This is the case for native people in colonised countries, immigrants and smaller ethnic groups just to mention a few situations. All countries don't have majority languages, but some are larger, more influential and used for things like administration, business and higher education. It's common for schooling to transition from local languages to a larger language or lingua franca in countries with many languages.

Another approach than the lingua franca is learning the language of villages or towns surrounding you, which is very common in New Guinea and certainly other parts of the world too. It's not unusual to know multiple languages, in some places in sub-saharan Africa people speak five or six languages on a village level. Monolingualism is a weird outlier.

Speaking of monolingualism, let's move on to...

Languages and countries

This is a big talking point, mostly because it affected my view of language before I started thinking about it. First of all, I'm going to talk about the nation state and how it impacts languages within it and the way people view language (mostly because it's a source of misconceptions which fall apart as soon as you start to think about them, but if you don't the misconceptions will stay). Then I'll move on to countries with lots of languages and what happens there instead.

So, the nation state

The idea is that the people of a nation state share a common culture, history, values and other such things, the most important here being language. We can all agree that this type of nationalism has done lots of harm to various minorities and migrants all over the world, but it's still an idea that has had and still has a big impact on especially the western world. The section on nation states will focus on the West, because that's the area I know enough about to feel comfortable writing about in this regard.

How do you see this in common conceptions of language? It's in statements and thoughts like this: In France people speak French (but what about Breton? Basque? Corsican? Various Arabics? Some of the other 15 indigenous and 18 non-indigenous languages established in France? What about people speaking French outside of France?), in the US people speak English (but what about the 197 living indigenous languages? Or the 34 established non-indigenous languages? And the many extinct indigenous languages forcibly killed by the promotion of English?).

In X country people speak X, except for the people who don't, but let's ignore them and pretend everyone speaks X. Which most might actually do if it's the single national language that's used everywhere, it's common to learn a second language after all.

This is of course a simplified (and eurocentric) picture, as many countries either have multiple national languages or recognise at least some minority languages and give them legal protection and rights to access certain services in their languages (like government agency information). Bi-/multilingual signage is common and getting more common, either on a regional or a national level. Maybe because we're finally getting ready to move on from one language, one people, one state and give indigenous languages the minimum of availability they need to survive.

I wrote a long section about how nation states affect language, but I realised that veered way off topic and should be its own post. The short version is that a language might become more standardised simply by being tied to a country and more mobility among the population leading to less prominent dialects. There's also been (and still is) lots of opression and attempts to wipe out minority (often indigenous) languages in the name of national unity. Lots of atrocities have been comitted. Sometimes the same processes of language loss happen without force, just by economic pressure and misconceptions about bilingualism.

What does this have to do with the average language?

I simply want to challenge two assumptions:

That all languages are these big national languages tied to a country

That it's common that only one language is spoken within a country. If you look closer there will be smaller languages, often indigenous and often endangered. There are also countries in the West where multiple languages hold equal or similar status (just look at Switzerland and its four official languages)

Starting with the second point, let's take a look at how Europe is weird about language again

Majority languges aren't universal

I'm going to present you with a list of the 10 countries with the most living languages, not counting immigrant languages (list taken from wikipedia, which has Ethnologue as the source):

Papua New Guinea, 840 languages

Indonesia, 707 languages

Nigeria, 517 languages

India, 447 languages

China, 302 languages

Mexico, 287 languages

Cameroon, 274 languages

Australia, 226 languages

United states, 219 languages

Brazil, 217 languages

DR Congo, 212 languages

Philippines, 183 languages

Malaysia, 133 languages

Chad, 130 languages

Tanzania, 125 languages

This further challenges the idea of one country one language. Usually there's a lingua franca, but it's not always a native language and it's not always the case that most are monolingual in it (like the US or Australia, both of which have non-indigenous languages as widespread lingua francas). Europe is the outlier here. People might use multiple languages in their day to day lives, which are spoken by a varying number of people.

In some cases the indigenous or smaller local languages are extremely disadvantaged compared to one official language (think the US, Australia and China), while in other places like Nigeria, several larger languages are widely used in their respective areas alongside local languages, with English as the official language even though it's spoken by few people.

It's actually pretty common in decolonised countries to use the colonial language as an official language to avoid favoring one ethnic group and their language over others. Others simply don't have an official language, while South Africa's strategy is having 12 official languages (there are 20 living indigenous languages and 11 non-indigenous languages in total, and one of the official ones is English, so not all languages are official with this strategy either). Indonesia handled decolonisation by picking a smaller language (a dialect of Malay spoken by around 10% at the time, avoiding favouring the Javanese aka the dominating ethnic group by picking their language), modifying it, and started using it as the new national language Indonesian. It's doing very well, but at the cost of many smaller languages.

Going back to the list, it's also interesting to compare the mean speaker number (if every language in a country was spoken by the same amount of people) and the median speaker number (half have more speakers, half have less). The median is always lower than the mean, often by a lot. This means that the languages in a country don't have similar speaker numbers, so one or a few languages with lots of speakers drive the average upwards while the majority of languages are small. Just like for the entire world.

The US and Australia stand out with 12 and 10 median speakers, respectively. About 110 languages in the US have 12 or fewer native speakers. The corresponding number for Australia is 113 languages with 10 or fewer speakers. There are some stable languages with few speakers documented, but they have/had between 40 and 60 speakers, so those numbers point towards a lot of indigenous languages dying very soon unless revitalisation efforts succeed quickly. This brings us to the topic of...

Endangered languages

This is an interesting tool called glottoscope made by Glottolog which you can play around with and view data on endangered languages and description status (which is the next heading).

I'll pull out some numbers for you:

Remember those 6700 languages in Glottolog? That's living languages. How many extinct languages are listed?

936 extinct languages. That's ~12,5% of the languages we know of. (Glottolog doesn't include reconstructed languages like Proto-Indo-European, only languages where we either have enough remaining texts to conclude it was a separate language or reliable account(s) that conclude the same. We can only assume that there are thousands of undocumented languages hiding in history that we'll never know of)

How many more are on the way to become extinct?

Well, only 36% (2800 languages) aren't threatened, which means that the other 64% are either extinct or facing different levels of threat

What makes a language threatened? The short answer is people not speaking the language, especially when it's not passed down to younger generations. The long answer of why that happens comes later.

306 languages are listed as nearly extinct and 412 more as moribound. That means that only the grandparent generation and older speak it and the chain of transmission to younger generations has broken. These two categories include 9,26% of all known languages.

The rest of all languages either fall into the threatened or shifting category. The threatened category means that the language is used by all generations but is losing speakers. The shifting category refers to languages where the parental generation speaks the language but their children don't. In both of these cases it's easier to revive the language, since parents can speak to the children at home instead of having to rely on external structures (for example classes in the heritage language taught like foreign language classes in schools).

Where are languages threatened?

This map is also from glottoscope and can be found here. I recommend playing around with it, you can zoom in and hover over every dot to see which language it represents. The colours signify threat level: green for not threatened, light green for threatened, orange for shifting, red for moribound and nearly extinct, and black for extinct. I'll come back to the shapes later.

As you can see, language death is more common in certain areas, like Australia, Siberia, North America and the Amazon, but it's still spread over the entire world.

Why are languages going extinct?

There are two important dimensions to the vigorousness of a language: The first is the number of speakers who claim the language as their own and speak it with each other. No speakers means no language. If all speakers move to different places or assimilate by shifting to a dominant language in the area (sometimes for work opportunities or for their childrens' future work opportunities. Sometimes because of which language(s) schools are taught in or disinterest from the children in the language and culture. Sometimes migration of an ethnic group for various reasons leads to language shifts. There are many complex reasons to why the link of transmission can break)

The other dimension, which ties into the first one, is the number of situations in which a language is used. There are many domains a language can be used in, like at home, in school, in the workplace, in politics and administration, in higher education, for international communication, in religious activities, in popular media like movies and music etc. When a language is no longer or never used in a particular domain, it might lose the associated vocabulary. When it becomes confined to a singular domain like the home, the usage goes down. The home is usually the last place an endangered language is spoken.

Usage in a domain is a reason to speak or hear the language. It's a reason to keep it alive. People also forget or get worse at languages they don't use. That's why a common revitalisation tactic is producing movies, radio programmes, news reporting, books and other media in a dying language. It gives people both reason and opportunity to use their language skills. Which language is used in schools is also important, as it keeps basic vocabulary for sciences and explaining the world alive. Another revitalisation tactic is making up new words to talk about modern concepts, some examples are the Kaqchikel word rub'eyna'oj from this tournament or creating advanced math vocabulary in Māori.

What does endangered languages have to do with the average language?

Trying to get this post back on track, these are some key points:

64% of all documented languages are either extinct or facing some level of threat. That's the majority of all language

Even excluding the extinct languages, the majority of languages are threatened or worse

This means that the average language is facing a loss of speakers, some more disastrous than others. Being a minority language in an increasingly globalized world is dangerous

Describing a language

Are you able to look up words from your native language in a thesaurus or a dictionary? What about figuring out how a certain piece of grammar works if you're unsure? Maybe you don't need that for your native language, but what about a second language you're learning?

If your native language is English, there are lots of resources, like online and book dictionaries/thesauruses or an extensive grammar (a book about how English grammar works). There's also a plethora of websites and courses to learn English, and large collections of written text or transcribed speech. If a linguist wants to know something about the English language there's an abundance of material. If someone wants to learn English it's easy and courses are offered in most parts of the world.

For other languages, the only published thing might be a list of 20 words and their translation into English or another lingua franca.

Let's take a look at the same map as earlier, but toggled to show documentation status in colour and endangerment status with shapes:

Here, the green signifies a long grammar and the light green a grammar. Both are extensive descriptions of the grammar in a language, but they differ in length. A long grammar has to contain over 300 pages and a grammar over 150. Orange is another type of grammar, namely a grammar sketch. Those are brief overviews of the main grammatical features or features that may be of interest for linguists, typically between 20 and 50 pages. The purpose isn't to be a complete grammar, only a starting point.

The red dots can signify a lot of things, but what they have in common is that there's no extensive description of the grammar. In those cases, the best description of the language might be a list of which sounds it contains, a paper about a specific feature, a collection of texts or recordings, a dictionary, a wordlist (much shorter than dictionaries) or just a mention that it exists.

Why are grammars and descriptions even important?

The better described a language is, the easier it is to learn it and study it. For a community facing language loss, it might be helpful to have a pedagogical grammar or a dictionary to help teach the language to new generation. If the language becomes extinct people might still be able to learn and revive it from the documentation (like current efforts with Manx). It also makes sure unique words or grammatical features as well as knowledge encoded in the language isn't lost even if the language is. It's a way of preserving language, both for research and later learning.

What's an average amount of descripion then?

36,2% of all documented languages have either a grammar or a long grammar. That's pretty good actually

38,2% of all documented languages would be marked by a red dot on this map, meaning that more languages than that don't have any kind of grammar at all, maybe only as little as a short list of words

The remaining 25,6% have a grammar sketch

So as you see, the well documented languages are in minority. On the brighter side, linguists are working hard at describing languages and if they keep going at the same rate as they have since the 1950s, they'll reach the maximum level of description by 2084. Progress!

Tying into both description of languages and domains where language is used...

What about technology and language?

There are many digital tools for language. Translation services, spelling and grammar checks in word processors, unicode characters for different scripts and more. I'm going to focus on the first two:

Did you know that there are only 133 languages on google translate? 103 more are in the process of being added, but that's still a tiny percentage of all languages. As in 2% right now and 3,5% once these other languages are added going with the 6700 language estimation.

Of course, this is for the most part a limination with translation technology. You need translated texts containing millions of words to train the algorithms on and the majority of languages don't have that much written text, let alone translated into English. The low number still surprised me.

There are 106 official language packs for Windows 10 and I counted 260 writing standards you can use for spelling checks in Word. Most were separate languages, but lots were different ways to write the same language, like US or British English. That's a vanishingly small amount. But then again:

Do all languages have a written standard?

No. That much is clear. But how many do? I'll just quote Ethnologue on this:

"The exact number of unwritten languages is hard to determine. Ethnologue (25th edition) has data to indicate that of the currently listed 7,168 living languages, 4,178 have a developed writing system. We don't always know, however, if the existing writing systems are widely used. That is, while an alphabet may exist there may not be very many people who are literate and actually using the alphabet. The remaining 2,990 are likely unwritten."

(note that Ethnologue classes 334 languages without speakers as living, since their definition of living language is having a function for a contemporary language community. I think that's a bad definition and that means it differs from figures earlier in the post)

Spoken vs signed

My last point about average languages is about signed languages, because they're just as much of a language as spoken ones. One common misconception is that signed languages reflect or mimic the spoken language in the area, but they don't. Grammar works differently and some similarities in metaphor might be the only thing the signed language has in common with spoken language in the area.

Another common misconception is that there's only one sign language and that all signers understand each other. That's false, signed languages are just as different from each other as spoken languages, except for some tendencies regarding similarity between certain signs which often mimic an action (signs for eating are similar in many unrelated sign languages for example).

Glottolog lists 141 Deaf sign languages and 76 Rural sign languages, which are the two types of signed language that become entire languages. The difference is in reach.

Rural signs originate in villages with a critical amount of deaf people (around 6) that make up a fully fledged language with complete grammar to communicate. Often large parts of the village learn tha language as well. There are probably more than 76, that's just the ones the linguist community knows of.

What's called Deaf sign languages became a thing in the 1750s when a French guy named Charles-Michel de l'Épóe systematised and built onto a rural sign from Paris to create a national sign language which was then taught in deaf schools for all deaf children in France. Other countries took after the deaf school model and now there's 141 deaf sign languages, each connected to a different country. Much easier to count than spoken languages.

Many were made from scratch (probably building on some rural sign), but some countries recruited teachers from other countries that already had a natinonal sign language and learnt that instead. Of course they changed over time and with influence from children's local signs or home signs (rudimentary signs to communicate with hearing family, not complete languages), so now there's sign language families! The largest one unsurprisingly comes from LSF (Langue des Signes Française, the French one) and has 63 members, among them ASL.

What does this have to do with average languages? Well, languages don't have to be spoken, they can be signed instead. Even if they make up a small share of languages, we shouldn't forget them.

Now for some final words

Thank you for reading this far! I hope you found this interesting and have learned something new! Languages are exciting and this doesn't even go inte the nitty gritty of how different languages can be in their grammar, sounds and vocabulary. Lots of this seem self evident if you think about it, but I remember how someone pointing out facts like this truly shifted my perspective on what the language situation in the world truly looks like. The average language is a lot smaller and diffrerent from the common idea of a language I had before.

Please reblog this post if you liked it. I spent lots of time writing it because I'm passionate about this subject, but I'd love if it spread past my followers

#linguistics fun fact time!#anyways can't believe this is finally done #i was going to make a series with informative posts between each round #and look what happened #i spent all my time writing this instead #hope you enjoyed!#and check out the linguistics fun facts tag #there are some more posts like this #linguistics

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clementine-kesh · 14 days

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First, it is worthwhile to consider science fiction’s relationship to imperialism, a relationship that has never been simple. While on the one hand science fiction “either ignore[s] the problems that exist between different human cultural groups or perpetuates the prejudices of the dominant culture,” presenting alien races in such a way as to assuage imperialist guilt or affirm imperialist desire, on the other hand science fiction has long been critical of the far-reaching arm of empire (Leggatt 109).

Within one of the most famous sf franchises, Star Trek, one can perceive a third strain, what can be termed “ambivalent imperialism” etched within the genre through the prime directive, the highest principle by which the Federation of Planets, and its militaristic-scientific arm, Starfleet, operates. The directive enjoins its representatives to refrain from intervening with the natural evolution of a species, even if that intervention could save that species from annihilation. Acting like an intergalactic disclaimer, the directive is less about protecting the aliens Starfleet encounters than it is about protecting Federation interests and its reputation, a reputation perceived in idealistic ways—cooperative, tolerant, humane, noble — in a future likewise presented idealistically, where humanity has overcome the problems and prejudices Leggat alludes to above. In this sense the prime directive serves as a counternarrative to the violent imperialist encounters of the past, but is no less marked by imperialist desire than the African land grab of the nineteenth century. Imperialist desire in the prime directive is coded through terms like “aid” and “protect,” the larger goal being to encourage planets to willingly join the Federation, and thus be drawn into the empire by choice, rather than force. Furthermore, by imposing strict guidelines as to how Starfleet technology may be shared, Federation superiority is maintained.

Episodes exploring the tension between the principle of the directive and the reality of interstellar relations abound in the franchise, and one of the most successful Star Trek films, First Contact, draws heavily from this tension. In one particular episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, for example, a technologically inferior planet in danger of destruction from violent volcanic activity is saved through the Enterprise’s intervention, and the only alien, a child, that knows of the Enterprise is returned to her appropriate “state” of ignorance when her memories of the ship and Commander Data are removed. The status quo the directive reflects is preserved, and the Enterprise can revel in its role of intergalactic protector without any residual guilt for interfering with natural processes because the aliens do not know. In that regard, then, the prime directive operates like any purportedly benign imperialist principle: expressed in the language of disinterest (we do/do not do this for you, not for us), rather than desire (we do/do not do this for our gain, whatever the cost to you), such principles, whether they are called prime directives or the White Man’s Burden, have infamously supported imperialist practice in both the real world and the world of science fiction.

Hoagland and Sarwal, Science Fiction, Imperialism and the Third World: Essays on Postcolonial Literature and Film

#media criticism #colonialism #star trek

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thevoidcannotbefilled · 3 months

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Actually going to make this reply its own separate post. TLDR: I have a theory that Chester, Norris, and Augustus are essentially spooky AI created from datasets from the fears/tapes.

Now, @gammija and @shinyopals weren't sure how Augustus fit into this. Right now, the leading theory is that he is Jonah Magnus. He only had one statement in the show, so there's basically no data to collect, so why would he be an AI?

Hypothetically speaking, let's say he isn't Jonah. Or at the very least, he isn't the Jonah we know.

Here's an idea: Augustus isn't the TMA Jonah Magnus, but rather the Jonah Magnus of the TMagP universe.

Here's my current thoughts as to why this may be the case:

1) TMA Jonah is dead. Jon had to kill him in order to control the Panopticon. While I won't discount TMA Jonah's and TMagP's Jonah's memories combining, I don't think it can be entirely TMA's in there.

2) I'm pretty confident that Freddie has connections to the Institute, for a variety of reasons. If nothing else, Freddie could have been connected to them before the Institute burned down in 1999. And unless it's a different Magnus starting the Institute, I'm just going to assume for now that Jonah started the Institute in both universes.

3) Augustus already separated himself out from Norris and Chester in two ways. He speaks less than the two of them but also his case is really odd which I'll go into next.

4) Augustus is the only Text-to-Speech voice who didn't say where his case came from. Norris and Chester so far have always told us where they're reading from. They say links, they mention threads and who said what in each thread, and we know each different email sent. Meanwhile, Augustus can't even tell us who the case giver is in "Taking Notes". This wouldn't mean much, but... we also know that all the papers in The Institute are gone. Noticeably so. Perhaps even integrated into the Freddie system.

5) Tbh... I just think it would be more interesting if they aren't all three from the same place. We know from the promotion, the Ink5oul case, especially the design of the logo that alchemy will be a major part of TMagP. Transformation and immortality. I wouldn't put it past this universe's Jonah to try to search for immortality in his own way.

And this is less of a point and more of a general obversation. We have zero clue how these three got to this state. Even if we assume "fears stuff" generally the fears and how they transform people have some sort of logic to it, dream or not. I don't currently understand the logic yet on why they've become this. Also, we don't know what triggered them integrating into Freddie in the first place.

There's an outside force at play here, and I think it would be interesting if Augustus was a key factor to understanding it.

#tmagp #tmagp spoilers #tmagp speculation #ngl half of this is just 'I think it would be neat and lead to an interesting path for the story to take'

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genshingorlsrevengeance · 6 months

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(GFL Short Fic) "A Scarecrow's emotions"

Alternative Title: WHAT IS LOVE? BABY DON'T HURT ME, DON'T HURT ME, NO MORE!

Author's Note: This was originally in a different prompt before I had a moment of realization and went "Wait a second this is WAAAY too long to just be in a headcanon!" So now it's here, and I hope ya'll enjoy! Word Count: 1.5k

To say Scarecrow struggled understanding the emotions of others was a colossal understatement.

Before she began working under the Commander and Griffin, she despised sentimentality. Thanks to the Protocol Assimilation however, her hatred of emotions lessened.

This did not help her understand it any better unfortunately, something she continued to struggle with.

It especially didn't help that her only other encounters with emotions was with the Commander (which was fairly recent), and Executioner, who was a loudmouth tomboy of a T-Doll.

And lastly, one human who expressed interest in her, to her complete shock.

Being from Sangvis, she and her comrades were understandably treated coldly at first from Griffin personnel, barring some of the extremely friendly ones.

Scarecrow was quite used to this, considering she barely had any respect from her allies to begin with.

And given that her entire role was scouting and data gathering, she had no need for emotions, or friends.

When Scarecrow had met (Y/N) for the first time, she was honestly annoyed and quite suspicious of them, given how the rest of the humans wouldn't even give her the time of day. (Not that she exactly needed to ask them for it)

Scarecrow walked out of the maintenance bay and into the brightly lit hallways of Griffin's Base, prepared to make her way towards the dorms. Before she could get much further, she was stopped by one of the engineers.

(Y/N) "Scarecrow! Um, how are you feeling?"

She turned towards them, her eyes remaining unchanged as the mask obscured her mouth, showing no visible change in emotion.

(Scarecrow) "I am operational."

Scarecrow replied curtly. She observed their movements and they seemed...relieved?

(Y/N) "Oh, good! I was worried that we may not have gotten your repairs right! I don't think I've ever worked on anyone quite like you before."

(Scarecrow) "Of course. Griffin T-Dolls are far less advanced than Sangvis."

(Y/N) seemed to struggle on how to choose their next words, though it did not seem like her statement was the cause of it.

(Scarecrow) "You are fidgeting an abnormal amount for a human. Are you intimidated by me?"

(Y/N) "...W-Well, kinda, if I'm being honest...!"

They laughed nervously, but it was cut off by Scarecrow's continued deadpan stare at them. They cleared their throat and straightened their back.

(Y/N) "But, really, I was nervous that your repairs might not have gone smoothly. I see I was worrying for nothing."

(Scarecrow) "I see."

She gave them a simple nod with her facial expressions not budging an inch.

(Scarecrow) "I recognize you are simply being polite. It is wasted on me, nevertheless I will say 'Thank you'."

(Y/N) "If something's wrong with your systems, don't hesitate to come see me!"

(Scarecrow) "Acknowledged."

Finally she began departing for her dorm, processing the conversation she just had. That was the first time anyone was worried about her wellbeing.

Besides the Commander, (Y/N) had become someone she visited often, though it was mostly because she wanted peace and quiet and did not want anyone to disturb her thinking.

They treated her with respect, despite the fact she was a former adversary.

The fact they were so open to trust a Sangvis Doll was stupid. Humans made no logical sense to her. And yet...something drew her to them, and it frustrated her to no end that she couldn't determine why.

This was the first time that she had interacted with humans and did not want to immediately end their lives, so the change in perspective was unnerving to her. It felt like it went against her base programming.

But she did not hate the feeling. At least, it did not feel that way.

Anytime she spoke with (Y/N), she always had her mask on them, more out of habit since that was her uniform than anything malicious.

And she knew they were always staring at it, and her eyes when they replied. She didn't know why, until a few months into their 'friendship, for lack of a better term, did she know why.

(Y/N) "Hey, Scarecrow?"

(Scarecrow) "What is it?"

Scarecrow replied, her tone muffled and cold as ever.

(Y/N) "If it's not too rude for me to request this, could...I see you without your mask?"

She turned to them, curiosity rising in her digimind, though her face did not portray it.

(Scarecrow) "Why? I do not possess any facial features that can recreate emotion like you can."

(Y/N) "That part doesn't really bother me. I just...want to see you, if that makes any sense."

(Scarecrow) "It does not."

(Y/N) began stuttering, trying to find a better way to phrase what they meant before noticing her irises were changing ever so slightly. They seemed to focus on their face, her hands slowly reaching for the mask and disengaging the locks.

Her lips were surprisingly soft looking, and not as rough or machine-like as (Y/N) was expecting.

(Scarecrow) "However, I will comply with your request."

Her voice was finally unfiltered from her mask, the voice sounding quite soothing to their ears.

(Y/N) "W-Wow..."

(Scarecrow) "What is so fascinating about my lips? You have seen them on other T-Dolls and humans."

(Y/N) "It's not that, it's...you're really pretty is all."

Scarecrow's eyes adjusted once again, though to what emotion it was portraying, (Y/N) couldn't tell. She looked away, staring at the ground.

(Scarecrow) "Are humans that susceptible to be allured by a simple face?"

Scarecrow noticed that they had gotten closer, though she made no move to push them away.

(Y/N) "Maybe? For me I'm...more allured by you than anything."

Scarecrow turned to face them again, her face unmoved by (Y/N)'s words.

(Y/N) "S-Sorry. That must sound stupid."

(Scarecrow) "It is. You are attracted to an android that cannot even reciprocate its feelings on the most basic level."

(Y/N) "...Reciprocate?"

(Y/N)'s shoulders slumped and looked at her, noticing that Scarecrow was staring at her hand moving to theirs. The hand wrapped around theirs, and gave it a gentle squeeze.

(Y/N) froze, and realizing that, Scarecrow moved back to her normal sitting position. She must have mistaken their shock as disgust.

(Scarecrow) "I will depa-"

(Y/N) "Wait!"

(Y/N) took Scarecrow's hands again, holding onto it tightly and not wanting her to leave. Slowly, she looked back at (Y/N)'s face as it closed in.

Their eyes were closed as they leaned in for a quick peck onto her lips, scrambling everything in Scarecrow's digimind.

Her eyes rapidly adjusted themselves as she was trying to process what exactly she was feeling. The sensation of (Y/N)'s lips, their emotions, her own, everything was so overwhelming.

Scarecrow remained still for a couple seconds before looking back up to (Y/N).

(Scarecrow) "...I still do not understand why you feel such attraction for a mere T-Doll-"

(Y/N) "Y-You're not just 'some' T-Doll, Scarecrow! You're just...you."

(Scarecrow) "You have said that twice now, as if I can understand what you mean."

(Y/N) "It means that there's only one of you, Scarecrow. And...!-"

(Y/N) took a deep breath to calm down, trying to defend her existence against herself was riling them up far more than they had anticipated.

(Scarecrow) "I should be exactly what my name implies. Nothing more, and nothing less."

Her reply finally got (Y/N) to steady their breathing, their lips slowly growing into a smile.

(Y/N) "If that's the case, you wouldn't be holding my hand right now. That's an emotion, you know, and I've seen you show it!...W-Well, not directly, anyway."

(Scarecrow) "...I am unable to comprehend your logic, nor can I fully process what information has been given to me."

Scarecrow's grip on (Y/N)'s hand subtly got tighter as her eyes refocused solely on theirs. Their mouth did not tremble, nor did her tone even remotely change, yet (Y/N) could tell there was a sense of hesitation.

(Scarecrow) "...I request that you assist me in understanding emotions, and your faulty logic in putting this kind of faith in me."

(Y/N)'s smile grew even bigger as they leaned into Scarecrow, embracing her gently. At first she did not move, but moved to mimic their actions by raising her arms around their back.

It felt quite awkward, but it was the gesture that mattered to (Y/N). And they hoped that she would understand that.

(Scarecrow) "If I'm careless with my words, I could end up hurting others. So I just need to be a scarecrow – I serve in silence…"

(Y/N) slowly backed off and held her shoulders, her eyes blinking for the first time at them.

(Scarecrow) "But I won't be like that with you, because no matter how I hurt you, you'll always stay close to me, won't you?"

(Y/N) "…As long as you want me, I'll be here with you."

They stayed like that for a few brief moments before Scarecrow stood up without warning, confusing (Y/N). She put on her mask and simply stared back.

(Scarecrow) "Humph, just kidding."

(Y/N) "...W...What...?"

Scarecrow leaned towards (Y/N)'s head, her mask gently bouncing off their forehead. Was that supposed to be her version of a kiss?

(Scarecrow) "That was also a joke. I genuinely meant what I asked, I simply wanted to see your reaction since you can tell when I'm portraying emotions indirectly, apparently."

(Y/N) pouted and muttered something underneath their breath. They swore Scarecrow's eyes slightly raised in amusement.

(Y/N) "Way to ruin a romantic moment..."

Scarecrow offered her hand to (Y/N), her tone unchanged.

(Scarecrow) "Well, it's a good thing you'll be giving more, won't you?"

#girls' frontline imagines #girls' frontline x reader #girls' frontline headcanons #scarecrow gfl x reader #scarecrow gfl

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