gradientdescent

@gradientdescnt.bsky.social

419 Followers 355 Following

Author Jack Stein / artist / gardening nerd between March and August 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ Art tagged #embroidery Art & writing NSFW / be 18+ please

Photo of a ranking of the user’s baldur’s gate 3 companions in the following order from most to least favorite:
lae’zel
astarion
shadowheart
karlach
halsin
wyll
jaheira
minsc
minthara
gale

"Hey, sorry if I got a bit goofy last night. Yesterday? Uh. Whatever."
"Technically 'yesterday' but only by about thirty-five minutes." "Right. Well. I don't remember exactly but I have this vague feeling I might
have gone on about [space movie starl's role in [horny space movie to an. Um.
Unprofessional level of detail."
"You explained his interpersonal relationships with another actor by the
name of [space brad pitt] at great length."
"Yeahhh. Sorry about that."
"Seven times, consecutively."
"Kinda thought I might be repeating myself." "And then vociferously compelled me to consult your personal data storage device for photographs of the individuals in question to, I quote, 'take a look at that chingus and tell me he's not hung like a [fantasy space horse_ in [fantasy
space horse heat]'."
"Shit."
"I had to spend half an hour looking up the meaning of those words just to
determine whether the answer was 'yes' or 'no'."
"I am so sorry."
"You should be. Your taste in films is horrendous."
"Now look, it's not fair to judge a man by his porn stash."
"You literally insisted on it."
"Next time I'm out of my gourd on drugs, you got my permission to ignore
anything I say."
"Mmmhmm."
..."
"To answer the question, by the way, now that your mental state is such that
you can remember what I say: I've seen bigger."
"Oh my god."

Photo of a long haired grey cat with a real derpy looking expression on her face

It was hardly HER fault if Lash decided to let some tramp undress him right in front of her field of vision. She was just sitting there with her eye holes pointed towards the bedroom. For a couple
hours a night. About five to six nights a week. But since all that WAS happening, most definitely without any intent or forethought on her part, she was hardly gonna look away, now was she? After all, it might not hurt to take some notes for future reference. If nothing else it might avoid a repeat of The (Not Everybody Has A) Cloaca Incident. And after what was clearly playing out as a middling-at-best sexual encounter, Lash might be ready to look for a little more satisfying attention from an experienced gal who REALLY
knew her way around a guy's hemipenes.

Photo of a can of criminally overpriced Blue Moon beer sitting on the pull-out tray in a passenger train seat

Photo of an urban garden. The focus is of a bright yellow sunflower. In the midground is a coral trumpet vine consuming a house. In the background, out of focus, is a house trimmed with bright turquoise paint.

Photo of an embroidered image of an Egon Schiele drawing of a man with his hands draped around his head. It’s mostly black outlines with just a touch of pinkish thread highlighting parts of his body

Photo of a grey long-haired cat with a delicate salmon-pink nose rubbing her cheek up against a laptop screen on which is open a Scrivener project with many, many chapters labeled “Second Draft”

The host constructed increasingly elaborate rules to permit them to continue
doing what they were going to do anyway regardless.
They must never speak during the act. Any verbal communication might
suggest this was a social activity and not merely a medical service.
They would not engage in penetration. This was superfluous to the goal of giving Davis a medically-indicated orgasm, and as such was clearly an
inappropriate amount of intimacy. They could only touch Davis at night. This rule was arbitrary, but it felt important to impose an arbitrary limit to demonstrate to themselves their
commitment to setting a rule and sticking to it. They should never involve their own erogenous zones in the process. This was one of the earliest and most important rules. It was also the one that went
through the most stages of re-negotiation.

Photo of the Scrivener session tracker UI displaying a draft with 19,725 words and a session word count of 1,530

A screenshot from Wikipedia reading:

Overpressure protection [edit] In shell-and-tube heat exchangers there is a potential for a tube to rupture and for high pressure (HP) fluid to enter and over-pressurise the low pressure (LP) side of the heat exchanger.8. The usual configuration of exchangers is for the HP fluid to
be in the tubes and for LP water, cooling or heating media to be on the shell side. There is a risk that a tube rupture could compromise the integrity of the shell and the release flammable gas or liquid, with a risk to people and financial loss. The shell of an exchanger must be protected against over-pressure by rupture discs or relief valves. The opening time of protection devices has been found to be critical for exchanger protection. 9! Such devices are fitted directly on the shell of the
exchanger and discharge into a relief system.

Photo of a long haired grey cat sitting on a yellow sofa with her hind legs splayed wide open at the camera as she licks her butthole

Photo of a long haired grey cat sitting atop a small table, giving the stink eye to the camera

Photo of a white person’s hand with four bright orange cherry tomatoes in the palm against an out of focus background of an urban garden

Photograph of a bumblebee dusted with pollen and absolutely gorging itself upon a sunflower bloom.

Photo of a house in an urban environment. The house has grey siding with brilliant (perhaps gaudy) turquoise blue trim. The yard is quite small, only about 6 ft from the sidewalk to the porch, but packed absolutely to bursting with flowers and garden vegetables and a massive overgrown trumpet vine that’s just about to eat up half the porch.

Photo of a brilliant scarlet gladiolus flower in full bloom

It was a rookie mistake. Naw, not even that-rookies still had the fear of god in 'em and always followed the ops procedure like it came down from heaven on precision-machined slabs. When he detached the fuel tube without bleeding the line first, it was just plain stupid. The only advantage he had over a rookie was that when thanks to the pressure discharge the tube blew out of his hands, sparked on the steel piping, and ignited the methane vapors, he understood at a very precise and detailed academic level exactly what he'd done wrong. For about a tenth of a second, anyway. After that, he gained a kind of visceral understanding of the reason why you always release the pressure on a line before opening it up that most engineers only dream of having. In, y'know,
their worst nightmares.

Photo of three fused glass coasters atop a wooden work surface. The first one is reminiscent of a quilt square made in red, cream, and greens. The other two are more abstract but evoke an eye looking off to the side. They’re made in white, black, and amber/purple glass. One is the negative of the other.

Photo of a box of curios including a worn Star Trek Next Generation insignia, a round pin depicting a star of david with a lesbian symbol hand-drawn inside, and a triangular badge commemorating participation in the 1993 march on washington for lesbian, gay and bi equal rights and liberation

Photo taken from a low angle of a firefly perched on a yellow fence, with a fading evening sky out of focus in the background

Photo looking up at the sky, where a scruffy tabby cat perches atop a yellow fence, looking down at the camera

Photo of an embroidery displayed on the hoop atop a bookshelf. The embroidered image is of a panel from Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, showing a centipede in a tight coil; one end of the centipede is a man’s face, eyes bulging in horror as a chitinous tail spirals out of his mouth. The books on the shelf are a collection of Junji Ito’s works.

Photo of a peach colored gladiolus flower

Digital art of a green-skinned man type thing in great distress as a huge eyeball protrudes out of his gaping mouth. His actual eyes are bugged out with blood dribbling down his cheeks.

Photo of a long haired grey cat sitting very comfortably atop a yellow sofa

Photo of the most bright, garish hawaiian shirt you’ve ever seen. It’s blue. It’s red. It’s got rainbows and palm trees and women in bikinis.

Photo of a deep magenta gladiolus flower in bloom

A mason jar full of garnet-red beet slices in brine.

Photo of five pint jars in a half-circle on a kitchen counter. They are all full of sliced beets. Two of them are full of pickling brine; the other three have yet to be filled.

Photo of a wet beet, sliced open to show the blood-red insides

Photo of a reed woven basket overflowing with freshly harvested beets with the tops still on

Photo of three post-it notes upon which have been drawn exaggerated, grotesque faces in vibrant green and yellow colors

Photo of a hand-drawn button pinned to a leopard print t-shirt. The button shows a close up image of an eye looking off up and to the right. The iris is a rainbow.

Photo of yellow sunflowers with absolutely massive heads

Photo of a pair of urban houses with tiny front yard patches and a brick sidewalk running in front of them. A number of 8-10 ft tall sunflower plants are growing straight up through the newly-leveled bricks.

Standing Male Nude With Red Loincloth, Egon Schiele 1914

Photo of a strip of canvas fabric laid out on a table. Embroidered on it is the image in black and white of one of Egon Schiele’s drawings of a shirtless man contorting his arms around his head. He’s wearing a bright red wrap around his legs, which in this embroidery is depicted using a patch of mottled red fabric appliqued to the canvas.

Photo of a weedy back yard. It’s surrounded by a wooden fence, the door painted bright yellow. A pineapple lawn ornament is visible in front of a large planting of goldenrod.

Photo of a very, very small mantis perched upside-down on a blade of grass

The plant drapes in lush curtains, sprawled greedily from the root to blanket the trellis, the fence, the approach to the porch. Massive leaves the size of dinner plates form a dense canopy that whisper soft promises of relief from the wet, heavy heat that already settles over the garden even before the sun fully crests the mountains. Nestled throughout the rustling mass of vines and leaves,
white flowers more delicate than the finest chiffon wink open. They're delicate, ruffled, tissue-thin blossoms that bruise at the gentlest touch. Some of them crown a glossy bulb at their base which, on the long, patient timescale of plants, swells and engorges. Others are only a swirl of petals, a delicate chasm of translucent lace. It's a deep, silky well that begs to be tasted. Bury your face in me, it whispers. Take me on your tongue. Burrow into me as deep as you can. Swallow me. Ravage me. Ruin me. Only promise that
when you go, you'll leave with my come on your thighs.

Photograph of a fennel blossom. It’s a starburst/firework looking collection of smaller clusters of tiny yellow flowers. The background of the photo, out of focus, shows a hand bending the flower stalk to the camera and an urban neighborhood street.

Screenshot of a scrivener project. A red arrow points from the word count (6669) to the project title (“Smut One-Offs”) with “LOLOLOL” written above it. The text shown in the workspace reads:

Rigging a power cable for the tablet kept Davis occupied for a good three or four days. He rediscovered a long-neglected pleasure: tinkering with shit. Taking it apart. Reverse-engineering its function using just his brain and a multimeter.
The tablet wasn’t the only thing he had to reverse-engineer. What he found on deck five wasn’t just a soldering station. It was a fully kitted-out workshop, but one equipped exclusively with alien tools. Pretty easy to suss out the function of the various cutters, welders, and fabricators. What interested him more, though, were their interfaces.
Everything in the workshop was too high to reach easily, and all the manual controls felt heavy and stiff and took way more effort than they should to move. Davis rotated a cutting tool over and over, trying to puzzle out the shape of the hand that the grip was made to fit. He studied the manual controls for the 3-d laser sculptor and considered how tall the user must be to reach all four levers plus the two floor pedals.
Some of the machines had an input device not dissimilar to a keyboard, but two-tiered like a pipe organ and labeled with symbols he’d never seen before in his life. The keys didn’t simply depress, but articulated a full 360 degrees each, and at first he couldn’t imagine the dexterity it would take to type on this thing until he remembered the sensation like snakes writhing up and down his wet slit, and then he could imagine it quite clearly in fact.
He wished he knew jack shit about linguistics. Some clever xenosociologist probably could have written a thesis on the culture from that keyboard alone. Davis could only draw more direct conclusions.
Average height three meters, minimum.
Four of something not quite like hands.
Base physical strength well above his.

Photo of a bright yellow sunflower against an urban backdrop of houses and power lines and a soft blue sky

"You do see what I mean, don't you, Ariadne darling?"
"Oh, I see what you mean," said Mrs. Oliver gloomily. "But the main thing is for you to feel really happy about it."
Nobody but a really determined self-deceiver could have
thought that Mrs. Oliver looked happy.
Robin continued blithely:
"What I feel is, here's that wonderful young man, parachuted
down-"
Mrs. Oliver interrupted:
"He's sixty."
"Oh no!"
"He is."
"I don't see him like that. Thirty-five-not a day older."
"But I've been writing books about him for thirty years, and he
was at least thirty-five in the first one." "But, darling, if he's sixty, you can't have the tension between him and the girl—what's her name? Ingrid. I mean, it would make
him just a nasty old man!"
"It certainly would."
"So you see, he must be thirty-five," said Robin triumphantly.
"Then he can't be Sven Hjerson. Just make him a Norwegian
young man who's in the Resistance Movement." "But darling Ariadne, the whole point of the play is Sven Hjer- son. You've got an enormous public who simply adore Sven Hjer-
son, and who'll flock to see Sven Hjerson. He's box office, darling!" "But people who read my books know what he's like! You can't invent an entirely new young man in the Norwegian Resistance
Movement and just call him Sven Hjerson." "Ariadne darling, I did explain all that. It's not a book, darling, it's a play. And we've just got to have glamour! And if we get
this tension, this antagonism between Sven Hjerson and this—

Excerpt from an article reading:

These multi-millionaire midwits have been "doing Al" because everybody else is doing it, burning millions of dollars to turn their code into slop (see: Zillow) or have their engineers compete to see who can spend the most money (see: Meta and multiple other companies). In one case, a company spent $500 million on Anthropic's models in a month because it didn't set up spend controls. In Uber's case, it burned through its entire annual token budget in a single quarter, which led to its COO saying it was harder to justify spending money_on Al tokens because it couldn't show a link between that spend and a meaningful increase in usefu! features on Uber. Now Uber has capped its employee spend at $1,500 a month per user, with I-Mobile temporarily following at
$2,000 a month per user with the intent to move to a tiered system. Over at Brex, engineers are limited to $500 a week in tokens, with
non-engineers getting an astonishingly-low $5 a week.

It became a regular ritual, one they never acknowledged out loud when the lights were on. But every few days, the med bay went dark, the door slid open, he covered his eyes and his heart quickened at the touch of foreign appendages gliding across his skin.
They touched him patiently, thoroughly, snaking across his flesh as if they were mapping his nerves one twitch of his cock at a time. They touched him like this was the only place in the galaxy they wanted to be, like they would stay there between his legs forever if they could, like they savored every shiver and moan they coaxed out of him like a hard-earned prize.
Every night they let some tiny new part of themselves slip out. A little bit more of their body brushed against his. Bit by bit, he expanded the picture of them in his mind built only on touch.
Their paw or their hand or maybe their claw splayed open his thighs.
Their tongue or their finger or maybe their tentacle parted his cheeks and
lapped at his hole.
Their arms or their claspers or maybe their pedipalps closed around his
waist.
He writhed into them blindly night after night, gasping and shuddering and
coming over and over at the hands of a lover so alien he couldn't begin to envision their form.

Photograph of a cat making a very intense “I’M POOPING” face while squatting in a small patch of urban vegetable garden

Photograph of a big ol bumble bee sitting on a plantain flower amidst some grass and red clover

Photo of 4 balls of really nice Juniper Moon cotton yarn in a colorway that blends from red to yellow to blue.

Photo of a tabletop miniature of a green-skinned, 4-armed man with a teal mohawk. He’s wearing sleeveless silver armor with glossy pink gems on the knee caps. Two of his hands are extended and holding little swirls of purple energy. A circle of pink and purple crystals radiates from the ground around his feet.

Someone was caring for him. Whenever he called out, that voice answered, warm and soothing. Whoever it was, he never saw them. He wasn't inclined to move any more than absolutely necessary, so he didn't even try to catch a glimpse. But talking with them helped pass the time and distracted him from thinking too hard about the situation. Not that he could think too hard about anything even if he wanted to.
"What's your name?"
"You keep asking that, and I'm going to keep telling you something
different every time until you remember."
"Hey now, I'm at a disadvantage here, what with all the... whatever...
drugs... you know."
"The closest molecular analog in your pharmacology database is called
'morphine'."
"Yes. Morphine. That. Not my fault I can't think straight, see?"
"Are you asking me to lower your dose?"
"Now hold on there sugar, that's not what I said."
'''Sugar' is definitely not my name."
"I'm trying my best, okay?"

Photo of a D&D miniature. It’s a humanoid with breasts and hooks for hands appearing to hover above the ground. Six octopus-like tentacles extend from the back. On the base, several skulls are scattered and a green crystalline structure arises from the dirt.

Photo of a back yard garden full of natural plantings that are going bananas in big clusters of green. One, the coreopsis, is in bloom with yellow and red flowers. A house, trimmed with blue paint and a curtain of virginia creeper, is in the background. In the foreground is a bright pink flamingo lawn ornament.

Photo of a book showing a picture of a group of oblong-winged katydids in a circle. They are a variety of neon colors - green, pink, orange, and yellow - that were this not a real picture in a real book published by the National Geographic, would almost certainly have the viewer questioning if it was fake.

It was a rookie mistake. Naw, not even that-rookies still had the fear of god in 'em and always followed the ops procedure like it came down from heaven on titanium slabs. When [Our Guy] detached the fuel tube without bleeding the line first, it was just plain stupid. The only advantage he had over a rookie was that when thanks to the pressure discharge the tube blew out of his hands, sparked on the steel piping, and ignited the methane vapors, he understood at a very precise and detailed academic level exactly what he'd done wrong. For about a tenth of a second, anyway. After that, he gained a kind of visceral understanding of the reason why you always release the pressure on a line before opening it up that most engineers only dream having. In, y'know, their worst nightmares.

“They’ll never respect you.”

Another figure steps into the ring. It’s like looking right into a mirror.

“You can’t keep winning forever.”

A third Lash appears and intones somberly:

“You’ll always be—“

Lash Prime cuts him off. “Guys, GUYS. You have gotta quit with all this negative self-talk.”

Lashes Alpha, Beta, and Gamma blink.

“Look at you gorgeous sons of bitches. The world doesn’t know how lucky it is to have you in it. You’re hot shit.”

Lash Beta looks down at his hands. Tentatively curls his fingers into a fist and flexes. Then breaks out into a huge grin. “You’re right, you glorious bastard. We are.”

Lash Alpha peeks down his shorts. “Shit. Look at that hog. We’re a motherfucking beast!”

Photo of a cup of coffee sitting in the grass with a bunch of ants swarming around inside. Whoops.

Photo of a small, lush green fenced-in yard. A camp chair is placed among the greenery.

Photo of a poppy pod tightly closed