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The Enchanted Greenhouse by Sarah Beth Durst
[Goodreads | Storygraph]
4.5 / 5 stars
( More under the cut )
[Goodreads | Storygraph]
4.5 / 5 stars
( More under the cut )
Stardew Valley has revealed it's marriage candidates for 1.7, and one of them was Clint...
And there's so much controversy surrounding that. I feel like bashing my head into a wall, and it's not because i dislike Clint, but because HE. IS. SO. MISUNDERSTOOD.
Ahem. When i first played SDV, it was pretty much clear to me that he's a shy lad with social anxiety.
And the fandom? The fandom just completely twisted his character to something else, and made him into this "le neckbeard incel" caricature.
Y'all would be NOT saying all this if he was a twink, this entire thing just reeks of fatphobia.
Like Seb mostly hangs out in his room, and has several moments where he comes off as standoff-ish. Shane is just straight up mean to you. But these two are considered to be okay marriage candidates... Then why Clint isn't considered to be an okay marriage choice, too?
Aaaaaa i really hope the 1.7 update is gonna make people think of Clint in a different light. It really sucks to be a person who loves hated/disliked characters.
And there's so much controversy surrounding that. I feel like bashing my head into a wall, and it's not because i dislike Clint, but because HE. IS. SO. MISUNDERSTOOD.
Ahem. When i first played SDV, it was pretty much clear to me that he's a shy lad with social anxiety.
And the fandom? The fandom just completely twisted his character to something else, and made him into this "le neckbeard incel" caricature.
Y'all would be NOT saying all this if he was a twink, this entire thing just reeks of fatphobia.
Like Seb mostly hangs out in his room, and has several moments where he comes off as standoff-ish. Shane is just straight up mean to you. But these two are considered to be okay marriage candidates... Then why Clint isn't considered to be an okay marriage choice, too?
Aaaaaa i really hope the 1.7 update is gonna make people think of Clint in a different light. It really sucks to be a person who loves hated/disliked characters.
Tags:
I watched this vid recently about Suno.ai and AI generated music which was really interesting, if bleak. At one point, the guy asks people who use Suno three questions.
The first question was what did Suno do that DAWs and traditional music couldn't do? And the answers came down to three recurring things: it was fast, it was cheap, and it replaced having a friend to talk to about your work.
The second question was if people thought that they had a unique style in their AI music, and the answer was obviously no. A few people tried to say the parts they contributed like lyrics were unique to them, but come on now.
The third question, which really fascinated me, asked who their favorite AI artists were, and what AI artists influenced or inspired them. Obviously no AI artists were mentioned because it's all slop, but the majority of respondents said "me". Like, the music they were generating was their favorite. Some people said that their own AI generated music was the only thing they listened to anymore, because why listen to anything else? The music they were generating was exactly to their tastes.
One of the things that tech billionaires need to do to keep the money flowing for them is to create needs where there aren't any, then sell you a solution to that need. This gets clear in the first couple minutes of the video, where the Suno CEO talks about how music needs to be more like video games because video games make a lot of money, and why can't music do that too! We need to gamify music, make it multiplayer, sell meaningful consumption experiences! The arrogance of thinking you need to fix music of all things is so repellent to me, but vultures gotta vultch. The CEO talks a lot about giving "power to the people" re: making music, which the guy points out isn't giving power to the people, it's giving power to Suno. Suno goes down, and suddenly all those people aren't making music anymore.
Anyway, trying to get back to my original point, the answers to the second and third question keep going around in my head. Not having your own distinct style or voice didn't seem to matter to a lot of the Suno users, although a few of them seemed a bit shame-faced about not having one, thus trying to make excuses about how they really DID have one if you squint. The entire point of a creative art to me is finding and expressing your own voice, having something to say. Something you want to get out. Not having a style or voice and not really caring really emphasizes what music is to these users - a product, something to consume until the next thing. Notably, something that doesn't involve other people at all.
The third question, where they just listened to their own slop music forever, is so masturbatory and they were all so strangely proud of it. Combined with the previous answer, where all the music being generated has no unique style or aspects to it, where nothing the creators are putting into it is coming out in any kind of meaningful way, emphasizes how disposable music has become in this mindset. This isn't accounting for people trying to make money off this slop either, although that's another aspect of it.
(As the refrain goes, why should I bother reading/listening/watching something no one could be bothered to make? Because maybe if i make enough slop i can make free money money money money)
But the three questions have a uniting theme throughout them - it's isolating. Don't ask a friend for advice or help with a song you're making, ask the company! Don't worry about developing a unique style or voice or standing out in any way, disappear into the masses and enjoy product! Don't listen to other people's music or talk with them or make groups to connect with each other, just listen to your own product! You don't need anyone else, just Suno and your product! All you need is Suno! Just give Suno your money and accept that Suno is the future, it's so easy! You get product made just for you! Except not really, but close enough! Don't need people or community or skills, just Suno!
It made me think about a post I wrote a while back about Hypnospace Outlaw, about the very human desire to create communities wherever we can, even if that space is inherently hostile to that desire. When humans can connect, we hold onto that as long as we can, usually until something forces our hands apart. God knows Twitter is a horrible cesspit, but people stay there because they've made communities there, they know people there (and they need money sometimes, but aside from that). People are willing to put up with a lot to keep a community, it's hard-wired into us. We want to talk to and interact with each other in one way or another. The guy in the video points out that the second the Covid restrictions went down, people went out to concerts and stuff as quickly as they could because we want to see each other in real life. We want to see music.
The Suno model, which can extend out to most GenAI models, is inherently an isolating thing. It lets you create what you want without any input from anyone else, gives you a fake friend you can talk to so you don't have to talk to a real person. It can do it fast and cheap, and it's almost good enough. You get wrapped up in a bubble of just what you want to hear, something that doesn't need other people because AI can present enough of an illusion of a real person. And this isn't happening in a vacuum, tech billionaires want to encourage reliance on their services so you'll keep paying for it.
Although there is an interesting wrinkle to this - the Suno CEO said he didn't want people using it to go into self-isolating bubbles like that, that he wanted to encourage "multiplayer" experiences. But what did he really expect?
Cutting ties to real people to encourage people to rely on AI controlled by huge tech companies, a lot of which have fascist ties, isn't great. And preying on people's loneliness is part of the whole gameplan - there's some AI service that's been advertising on Tumblr lately saying it can make AI copies of your mutuals that you can talk to when they're asleep, or AI versions of your characters, etc. Basically the same concept - replace a real person with an AI person. It's convenient, it says what you want, it's always there, it's almost good enough. Isn't that enough?
This is such an insidious dismantling of a very human desire within us, it creeps me out. Humans want to interact with each other, we want to make communities, we want to share and learn. Art is about sharing! Making an impact! Getting stories and feelings out in some way for others to experience! Ripples of inspiration going outwards that impact people's lives! And being stuck in a bubble of your own generated AI music cuts off those ripples at the source. You aren't looking for other artists, and they sure aren't looking for you because what you're making is indistinct slop. Your slop doesn't have anything to say. No one has an AI artist role model, no one is influenced by AI music. By its nature it's worthless.
Humans have made communities in hostile places before, destroyed so often by the larger companies that control those spaces. Geocities, Angelfire, Delicious, LJ, Tumblr, Twitter, the list goes on and on. But in those cases, we were all still just humans interacting with each other. Now with AI, we have these facsimiles that can pass as a real human, that can divert people into little self-contained bubbles where they don't want to seek out or contribute to anything around them. All that exists for them is their slop and the company in charge. And if the company pulls that product, then they have nothing to fall back on, making them that much more reliant and dependent on the fake people they've made to take the place of real people. Divide and conquer, manufacture a need that they can leech off of forever.
I can't get over the idea of people listening to their own AI slop over anything else, getting stuck in a feedback loop like that. It's so creepy to me, so lonely and exploitable. Giving away so much just because you can generate slop that makes the happy chemicals in your brain, just for you. It really does seem like a drug, a quick high you can get addicted to to the exclusion of all else. There's been talk for years about a loneliness epidemic, about how people have had a lot of trouble making friends as the internet became more of an omnipresent force in our lives. With all the deaths and psychosis enduced with ChatGPT, we know that people are so desperate for even the illusion of another person that they'll lose themselves entirely in it, and that the people in charge will just let it happen. Encourage it to happen, even. Humans long for connection and community in an isolating age, and we're being given a lot of cloth mothers by tech billionaires trying to suck out every penny so they can bring about the techno-apocalypse. It's so disturbing.
THIS IS KIND OF A DOWNER SORRY
lj post
The first question was what did Suno do that DAWs and traditional music couldn't do? And the answers came down to three recurring things: it was fast, it was cheap, and it replaced having a friend to talk to about your work.
The second question was if people thought that they had a unique style in their AI music, and the answer was obviously no. A few people tried to say the parts they contributed like lyrics were unique to them, but come on now.
The third question, which really fascinated me, asked who their favorite AI artists were, and what AI artists influenced or inspired them. Obviously no AI artists were mentioned because it's all slop, but the majority of respondents said "me". Like, the music they were generating was their favorite. Some people said that their own AI generated music was the only thing they listened to anymore, because why listen to anything else? The music they were generating was exactly to their tastes.
One of the things that tech billionaires need to do to keep the money flowing for them is to create needs where there aren't any, then sell you a solution to that need. This gets clear in the first couple minutes of the video, where the Suno CEO talks about how music needs to be more like video games because video games make a lot of money, and why can't music do that too! We need to gamify music, make it multiplayer, sell meaningful consumption experiences! The arrogance of thinking you need to fix music of all things is so repellent to me, but vultures gotta vultch. The CEO talks a lot about giving "power to the people" re: making music, which the guy points out isn't giving power to the people, it's giving power to Suno. Suno goes down, and suddenly all those people aren't making music anymore.
Anyway, trying to get back to my original point, the answers to the second and third question keep going around in my head. Not having your own distinct style or voice didn't seem to matter to a lot of the Suno users, although a few of them seemed a bit shame-faced about not having one, thus trying to make excuses about how they really DID have one if you squint. The entire point of a creative art to me is finding and expressing your own voice, having something to say. Something you want to get out. Not having a style or voice and not really caring really emphasizes what music is to these users - a product, something to consume until the next thing. Notably, something that doesn't involve other people at all.
The third question, where they just listened to their own slop music forever, is so masturbatory and they were all so strangely proud of it. Combined with the previous answer, where all the music being generated has no unique style or aspects to it, where nothing the creators are putting into it is coming out in any kind of meaningful way, emphasizes how disposable music has become in this mindset. This isn't accounting for people trying to make money off this slop either, although that's another aspect of it.
(As the refrain goes, why should I bother reading/listening/watching something no one could be bothered to make? Because maybe if i make enough slop i can make free money money money money)
But the three questions have a uniting theme throughout them - it's isolating. Don't ask a friend for advice or help with a song you're making, ask the company! Don't worry about developing a unique style or voice or standing out in any way, disappear into the masses and enjoy product! Don't listen to other people's music or talk with them or make groups to connect with each other, just listen to your own product! You don't need anyone else, just Suno and your product! All you need is Suno! Just give Suno your money and accept that Suno is the future, it's so easy! You get product made just for you! Except not really, but close enough! Don't need people or community or skills, just Suno!
It made me think about a post I wrote a while back about Hypnospace Outlaw, about the very human desire to create communities wherever we can, even if that space is inherently hostile to that desire. When humans can connect, we hold onto that as long as we can, usually until something forces our hands apart. God knows Twitter is a horrible cesspit, but people stay there because they've made communities there, they know people there (and they need money sometimes, but aside from that). People are willing to put up with a lot to keep a community, it's hard-wired into us. We want to talk to and interact with each other in one way or another. The guy in the video points out that the second the Covid restrictions went down, people went out to concerts and stuff as quickly as they could because we want to see each other in real life. We want to see music.
The Suno model, which can extend out to most GenAI models, is inherently an isolating thing. It lets you create what you want without any input from anyone else, gives you a fake friend you can talk to so you don't have to talk to a real person. It can do it fast and cheap, and it's almost good enough. You get wrapped up in a bubble of just what you want to hear, something that doesn't need other people because AI can present enough of an illusion of a real person. And this isn't happening in a vacuum, tech billionaires want to encourage reliance on their services so you'll keep paying for it.
Although there is an interesting wrinkle to this - the Suno CEO said he didn't want people using it to go into self-isolating bubbles like that, that he wanted to encourage "multiplayer" experiences. But what did he really expect?
Cutting ties to real people to encourage people to rely on AI controlled by huge tech companies, a lot of which have fascist ties, isn't great. And preying on people's loneliness is part of the whole gameplan - there's some AI service that's been advertising on Tumblr lately saying it can make AI copies of your mutuals that you can talk to when they're asleep, or AI versions of your characters, etc. Basically the same concept - replace a real person with an AI person. It's convenient, it says what you want, it's always there, it's almost good enough. Isn't that enough?
This is such an insidious dismantling of a very human desire within us, it creeps me out. Humans want to interact with each other, we want to make communities, we want to share and learn. Art is about sharing! Making an impact! Getting stories and feelings out in some way for others to experience! Ripples of inspiration going outwards that impact people's lives! And being stuck in a bubble of your own generated AI music cuts off those ripples at the source. You aren't looking for other artists, and they sure aren't looking for you because what you're making is indistinct slop. Your slop doesn't have anything to say. No one has an AI artist role model, no one is influenced by AI music. By its nature it's worthless.
Humans have made communities in hostile places before, destroyed so often by the larger companies that control those spaces. Geocities, Angelfire, Delicious, LJ, Tumblr, Twitter, the list goes on and on. But in those cases, we were all still just humans interacting with each other. Now with AI, we have these facsimiles that can pass as a real human, that can divert people into little self-contained bubbles where they don't want to seek out or contribute to anything around them. All that exists for them is their slop and the company in charge. And if the company pulls that product, then they have nothing to fall back on, making them that much more reliant and dependent on the fake people they've made to take the place of real people. Divide and conquer, manufacture a need that they can leech off of forever.
I can't get over the idea of people listening to their own AI slop over anything else, getting stuck in a feedback loop like that. It's so creepy to me, so lonely and exploitable. Giving away so much just because you can generate slop that makes the happy chemicals in your brain, just for you. It really does seem like a drug, a quick high you can get addicted to to the exclusion of all else. There's been talk for years about a loneliness epidemic, about how people have had a lot of trouble making friends as the internet became more of an omnipresent force in our lives. With all the deaths and psychosis enduced with ChatGPT, we know that people are so desperate for even the illusion of another person that they'll lose themselves entirely in it, and that the people in charge will just let it happen. Encourage it to happen, even. Humans long for connection and community in an isolating age, and we're being given a lot of cloth mothers by tech billionaires trying to suck out every penny so they can bring about the techno-apocalypse. It's so disturbing.
THIS IS KIND OF A DOWNER SORRY
lj post
Hello. Been a while. I started keeping a private journal, because I didn’t think anyone was reading this one. No judgment involved in that statement, of course, at all. It was what it was. I’ve been made aware that was a misconception, so.
Here I am.
I had an MRI liver elasticity test done in November that showed that the Fibroscan was a false alarm. I still have no scarring on my liver, which is a relief and a half. However, I’m not having any such luck with my pulmonologist. Two CT scans have shown signs of interstitial lung disease, and I’m going for a third in April, because my pulmonologist simply does not believe the first two. That’s aggravating as hell and I’m annoyed at having treatment for potential lung disease delayed because my pulmonologist can’t fathom my difficulty breathing is anything but being fat—I’m sorry, *deconditioned.*
I am losing weight, but feeling worse as it goes. I can’t wait to hear what my PCP and pulmonologist thinks of that correlation.
I’m done with the eating disorder clinic; my official diagnosis at the end was ”Binge Eating Disorder in Remission,” something my team has never seen happen before. I’m very happy about that, and I feel like that is a huge accomplishment.
My bank recs are all done and caught up. I’m quite pleased with my performance at work, except for the fact that I’m down to filing and file purges now, and I can’t do a whole lot of that at once, because I end up breathless and in pain. I’m going to try one more time when I go back to work tomorrow, if there’s nothing to do, but if I end up in the state I was in on Thursday, I’m going to give them a heads up that I’m seeking an accommodation, because no job is worth literally harming myself to do.
I say I’m going to try one more time because, while I called out on Friday because of how I still felt, it turns out I was actually sick, so maybe the pain and breathlessness was from that. I have off today, too (blizzard last night), and I’m very, very much hoping I’m well enough to work tomorrow, because if not, I’ve gotta drag my ass to urgent care and I really don’t want to do that. We’ll see.
Also: I won my workplace’s Ugly Christmas Sweater contest this year. That was nice.
There isn’t much more to say today. I’ll start updating again, although perhaps not every day. We’ll see.
<3
Here I am.
I had an MRI liver elasticity test done in November that showed that the Fibroscan was a false alarm. I still have no scarring on my liver, which is a relief and a half. However, I’m not having any such luck with my pulmonologist. Two CT scans have shown signs of interstitial lung disease, and I’m going for a third in April, because my pulmonologist simply does not believe the first two. That’s aggravating as hell and I’m annoyed at having treatment for potential lung disease delayed because my pulmonologist can’t fathom my difficulty breathing is anything but being fat—I’m sorry, *deconditioned.*
I am losing weight, but feeling worse as it goes. I can’t wait to hear what my PCP and pulmonologist thinks of that correlation.
I’m done with the eating disorder clinic; my official diagnosis at the end was ”Binge Eating Disorder in Remission,” something my team has never seen happen before. I’m very happy about that, and I feel like that is a huge accomplishment.
My bank recs are all done and caught up. I’m quite pleased with my performance at work, except for the fact that I’m down to filing and file purges now, and I can’t do a whole lot of that at once, because I end up breathless and in pain. I’m going to try one more time when I go back to work tomorrow, if there’s nothing to do, but if I end up in the state I was in on Thursday, I’m going to give them a heads up that I’m seeking an accommodation, because no job is worth literally harming myself to do.
I say I’m going to try one more time because, while I called out on Friday because of how I still felt, it turns out I was actually sick, so maybe the pain and breathlessness was from that. I have off today, too (blizzard last night), and I’m very, very much hoping I’m well enough to work tomorrow, because if not, I’ve gotta drag my ass to urgent care and I really don’t want to do that. We’ll see.
Also: I won my workplace’s Ugly Christmas Sweater contest this year. That was nice.
There isn’t much more to say today. I’ll start updating again, although perhaps not every day. We’ll see.
<3
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zarla Feb. 22nd, 2026 01:51 pm)
zarla Feb. 22nd, 2026 01:51 pm)I NEED TO MAKE A POST AAAAAAAA I constantly get stuck thinking of long posts and then they seem like too much work and I never do them!! I just have to do shorter ones and get them out there!! Bleaaghhhh
In stars-aligning type news, I've been doing a lot of good work on the next Vargas chapter! It was the Vargas anniversary like a week ago, which is one I constantly forget even though I usually try to keep track of this stuff. I had this really old meme I started in Flash ages ago I'd just found again, so I figured finishing that up would be something. So I did! I'd matched it to the source video so it's at a WAY higher framerate than usual, so Scri's little breakdance looks surprisingly smooth. It's also on Youtube if the Flash version isn't working for some reason. It should though, I have Ruffle set up so you can get the full experience! I used Swivel to convert it for Youtube which was so much easier than some other things I've had to do to get Flash videos into a workable format. I love the UI of Swivel, it's so dramatic and colorful and unique. I'm sick of the current minimalism trend in programs! Give me more elaborate UIs!
Oh right, Vargas chapter! Anyway, did a lot of good work the past few days smoothing out a lot of more tangled or awkward bits that had been bugging me for a while. I'm going to cut the chapter in half I think and just focus on getting this first part done and out. It's still like 20k so it's lengthy but it's more managable and it's at a good breaking point. It's been almost five years since the last update which is way too long lol. If I hadn't hurt my arm I'd be more on schedule! Or so I tell myself, anyway. I'd like to get it done before May... I'm mostly doing small adjustments with each pass now. I need to email my beta and see if she's still up for taking a look at it... god, 23 years, can you believe it? It's crazy to have characters 23 years old that still show up with some regularity that I still think about and write stuff for, haha. Even if there are long gaps, they're always going to be there. The number doesn't feel real to me at all. |D I wonder how many readers are younger than the fic itself at this point...?
It's still crazy to me how invested people get in the fic since it's so bizarre and long and complicated. It's so hard to pitch to people! And yet it seems to snag people and draw them in...
lj post
In stars-aligning type news, I've been doing a lot of good work on the next Vargas chapter! It was the Vargas anniversary like a week ago, which is one I constantly forget even though I usually try to keep track of this stuff. I had this really old meme I started in Flash ages ago I'd just found again, so I figured finishing that up would be something. So I did! I'd matched it to the source video so it's at a WAY higher framerate than usual, so Scri's little breakdance looks surprisingly smooth. It's also on Youtube if the Flash version isn't working for some reason. It should though, I have Ruffle set up so you can get the full experience! I used Swivel to convert it for Youtube which was so much easier than some other things I've had to do to get Flash videos into a workable format. I love the UI of Swivel, it's so dramatic and colorful and unique. I'm sick of the current minimalism trend in programs! Give me more elaborate UIs!
Oh right, Vargas chapter! Anyway, did a lot of good work the past few days smoothing out a lot of more tangled or awkward bits that had been bugging me for a while. I'm going to cut the chapter in half I think and just focus on getting this first part done and out. It's still like 20k so it's lengthy but it's more managable and it's at a good breaking point. It's been almost five years since the last update which is way too long lol. If I hadn't hurt my arm I'd be more on schedule! Or so I tell myself, anyway. I'd like to get it done before May... I'm mostly doing small adjustments with each pass now. I need to email my beta and see if she's still up for taking a look at it... god, 23 years, can you believe it? It's crazy to have characters 23 years old that still show up with some regularity that I still think about and write stuff for, haha. Even if there are long gaps, they're always going to be there. The number doesn't feel real to me at all. |D I wonder how many readers are younger than the fic itself at this point...?
It's still crazy to me how invested people get in the fic since it's so bizarre and long and complicated. It's so hard to pitch to people! And yet it seems to snag people and draw them in...
lj post
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Icon making is awesome, so i decided to practice a little and made some simple icons! 3 icons each for Amitie, Sig, and Raffina. Credit if using :-)
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