Rynling R&D

Dear Candy Hearts Writer,

Thank you so much for volunteering to write a story for me! I’m the sort of nerd who’s interested in lore and worldbuilding, but I have a major soft spot for stories that focus on friendship and romance. I also enjoy relationships in which the characters don’t particularly like each other but have an interesting dynamic together. Situationships? Why not!

I admire and appreciate stories of all lengths. If you’re here to write a short vignette, that would make me very happy. But longer stories are welcome too, of course! Whatever you create, I’m excited to see what you do with these characters and their relationships.

I am totally okay with:

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I’d prefer not to see:

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Fandom-Specific Interests

Breath of the Wild + Tears of the Kingdom

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Echoes of Wisdom

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Hollow Knight: Silksong

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Elden Ring

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Thank you again for volunteering your time and talent. I know you’ll create something marvelous, and I’m sending lots of encouragement and sweet candy energy your way.

Dear writer,

Thank you so much for offering to write a story for me for Yuletide. I appreciate you!

I love atmospheric storytelling and worldbuilding, and what I want more than anything is the opportunity to spend more time in the fictional worlds that have captivated me. I’m equally delighted by slice-of-life, romance, and horror, and I also adore nonfiction meta essays and narrative concept sketches. Please feel free to dig as deep (or as lightly) into canonical lore and speculative theories as you like. I love all characters equally, and I’m happy to watch you follow your faves as your story guides you.

I know that what you create will be wonderful, and I’m looking forward to reading your work.

Some fandom-specific interests:

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I’m totally okay with:

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I’d prefer not to see:

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Dear artist,

Thank you so much for offering to doodle something for me! My interests are a bit of a mixed bag in that I love cute characters, as well as attractive and stylish characters, but I’m also a fan of dark and gothic designs. I appreciate environmental art and concept art, and I can’t get enough of plants, wildlife, lush green spaces, and ruins covered in moss.

Whether you draw a character, a creature, or a place, I’m sure you’ll create something fantastic.

I am totally okay with:

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I’d prefer not to see:

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If you’d like to get a sense of my taste, I post my drawings as Rynling on Tumblr and reblog art as Pocketseizure, but I appreciate many different styles of visual art, as well as artists of all skill levels.

Thank you again for volunteering to share your artwork. I hope you have a marvelous time, and I can’t wait to see what you create. <3

Just for shits and giggles (and also inspired by the brilliant fanwork of a friend), I decided to write a few quick stories about Tenna, the villain (sort of) of the recently released Chapter 3 of Deltarune. I thought the idea of shipping him with Spamton, the villain (definitely) of Chapter 2 was funny for a hot second before actually becoming intrigued by the dynamic. What if they were both awful and made each other worse, that sort of thing.

The problem I had initially was how to write Tenna, who we only ever see speaking to an audience. How would his voice translate to a more intimate situation? To get a sense of fandom tastes, I pulled up fic for the ship on AO3 as sorted by the number of bookmarks, which I hoped would filter out most of the slop.

But alas. There is. A whole lot of slop. Very clearly written by GenAI. And people love it. Apparently.

I don't understand this at all. These stories all follow the same beats and use the same vocabulary, and the characters don't speak in their distinctive voices. There's no attempt to engage with the story or lore of the original game, and there's no specificity at all. Why would so many people bookmark fic like this?

Meanwhile, my university has been aggressively integrating GenAI into its software licenses and digital infrastructure, which has been causing huge problems for everyone. To give an example, many incoming students from East Asia or with East Asian heritage can't upload their photos to their university profiles because the software flags them for using AI-generated images. Because all Asians look fake to the algorithm I guess?? At the same time, the East Asian language teachers have been asking the university to pay for licenses for region-specific GenAI tools that might potentially make huge advances in language learning, but the university (which has more money than God) has been ignoring them. Because why would a university want to use GenAI for actual education and pedagogical innovation amirite.

TLDR: This is dystopian and I hate it.

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These are the three lessons I should have learned:

(1) Upsetting content is none of your business.
(2) Very few people “accidentally” post bigotry.
(3) Some people are just unhinged and unpleasant.

In conclusion, the Block button is your friend. 💖

Quillbot AI Detector
https://quillbot.com/ai-content-detector

I've found that AI detectors tend to be hit or miss, but this one seems to work well. What I especially appreciate about the way it works is that it's able to detect text that was generated by AI and then altered, either by hand or by another AI program.

I learned about this through discourse in the Dragon Age fandom, by the way. Apparently, you can now enter a short prompt into Gemini with the name of a character or ship, and the AI can match this keyword not only with the fandom, but also with its specific writing tropes.

If you're curious about the wank, people have been arguing about whether it's possible to write a 400k-word novel in a month. What this ridiculous argument underlines is the fact that there is a substantial (and passionate) audience for novels written by AI. This is dystopian, and I hate it.

Here's an unannotated list of what the QAnon and Proship DNI movements have in common:

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These are all aspects of cult mentality, but I think the ways they manifest in these two loosely defined groups are specific to 2015-2025 internet culture. Annotation is necessary, but I wanted to go ahead and get the basics down.

I saw (this post) on Tumblr...

stories of people suffering for a long time and then healing in their 30s or 40s or 60s or something are the most important thing in the world and thinking about them is like wrapping my heart in a warm sheet

...and damn if it didn't resonate with me. I wasn't "suffering" in my teens and twenties as much as I was "desperately poor," and it's only when I was around 27 or 28 that I actually managed to achieve enough financial stability not to have to spend every spare moment working garbage jobs for pitiful amounts of money. It was only once I had that freedom that I was able to write and draw and play video games.

Ten years later, I realize that you're not actually that old in your late twenties, but there were a lot of people on Tumblr who were surprisingly mean to me at the time. Some of it was the general antifandom nonsense in the water during the 2010s, but some of it was personal, like accusations that I specifically was a sad and gross person for being on Tumblr at thirty years old. And that's a shame. The expectation that "adults" will spend all their time working (or caring for children) is horrible and depressing; and also, there's so much joy and creative energy that comes with the stability and perspective and accumulated experiences that are gained with age.

If I had to guess, I think that's probably why I write so many stories about people finding the courage to start the second act of their lives. They're good stories, and we need more of them.

Before I get into the case studies, this is a bit of contextualization. There's more to say, of course, but I think ten short paragraphs (about six to seven minutes of presentation time) is enough. Also, if you think I'm overemphasizing the impact of Homestuck, allow me to offer the alternative possibility that the Gen X crowd who studies live-action television fandom doesn't emphasize its impact enough. Okay, here goes:

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I need there to be an 18+ Final Fantasy server on Discord for writers and artists.

Not so anyone can do anything lewd. Rather, it would be nice to have a chill place to drop in and hang out and talk about video games where people can say "fuck" and discuss the plot of games that came out more than ten years ago without having to worry about spoilers.

There are two really good servers for Zelda artists (Zelda Creators and Linktober), but they're both purposely designed to be accommodating to children (under the age of thirteen). This is cool, but it's also not the type of space where I feel super comfortable.

Unfortunately I am terminally offline. I only check Discord once every three or four days, and then only for maybe five to ten minutes at a time. I can't create or maintain a server on Discord myself. The only way to be a part of a Final Fantasy community like this is to apply to zines and hope I get accepted.

So I guess my resolution for 2024 is to build a Final Fantasy portfolio and apply to Final Fantasy zines. My dream is for there to be a Final Fantasy VI zine one day, so that's what I'm going to focus on creating the perfect portfolio for. By this I mean that I am giving myself permission to write all the bizarre niche FFVI fic I always wanted to. I never wrote these stories because there is no audience, but that's okay; the audience is me.