I've been doing some garden crafts lately, so I thought it would be fun to gather project links that might inspire other folks...
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i'm dug out from the storm, by which i mean my car is dug out from the storm. :D i did it yesterday because i worked from home because the u was closed for the second day in a row. also it was sunny and perfect weather for shoveling. and it wasn't as awful as expected! and work was extremely slow because did i mention the u was closed? monday morning i woke up and couldn't see out of any of my windows because they were so covered with snow. so i opened said windows and knocked the snow off the screens so i could see and didn't feel like i was living in a cave. and then there was nothing TO see because the snow started sunday night and kept going until early monday night and holy cow was it windy.
it was so bad that for the first time since it was founded 153 years ago the boston globe didn't actually print the paper. at least one dunkin donuts was closed which is kind of like a waffle house being closed. one of the admins f got 30" where she lives and two admins lost power (one just for monday and one monday morning through tuesday morning) and fall river - lizzie borden's home town and down near rhode island - got 41". holy yikes. (boston proper got 17" but i think out by me we got closer to 12". providence broke a record with like three feet.)
have some pics of the snow, mostly new york with a couple connecticut and one east boston. sharing mostly for the person in the red jacket filming themselves lying in the snow. also i just really like photos of snowy places. they look so cold.
have some more. the ones from cambridge, ma, are all harvard square.
and more that aren't all nyc.
enjoy some quick videos from nyc especially slide 8. nail techs are a different breed.
and then it snowed this morning on the way to work. :DDD
questions from the olympics. oh, you thought we were done with the olympics around here? surprise.
i hate you, jack hughes - a canadian hockey fan put an autographed jack hughes rookie card on ebay for $1m cad. someone was very, very upset by the outcome of the men's hockey, weren't they. (if that link is borked the listing is here. the seller has since taken it down.)
and finally because i finally finished a book! the wednesday reading meme! which i apparently haven't done in almost a year. >.<
What I just finished reading:
a master of djinn by p djèlí clark which i originally bought to read on the cruise back in july. (i have sadly become a very slow reader.) the worldbuilding is fantastic and i liked a lot of the secondary characters altho it took half the book before i really connected with the main character. clark really likes short choppy sentences and sentence fragments, and he's likewise a big fan of speaking verbs that aren't "said". like, there's a scene with the main character and her partner at a meeting and in six different lines of dialogue from six different characters there are six different speaking verbs. (and some of them are the kinds of verbs that generally have like a target - "hi, how are you," character a greeted. "everything's fine, don't worry," character b reassured. that kind of thing. it's a stylistic choice but it makes me nuts.) i was invested in the story and i liked the various twists and turns - it starts with a mass murder which the main character has to investigate - but some of the actual writing i didn't love. but it's set in a steampunky alternate history cairo and there are djinn and all of that was fabulous.
What I am reading now:
blood, sweat & chrome: the wild and true story of mad max: fury road by kyle buchanan which i have been reading a lot longer than a master of djinn. it's an oral history of the making of the movie and i like a good look behind the scenes so i'm enjoying it.
What I'm going to read next:
probably yarrow by charles de lint. i found it at a very small library.
it was so bad that for the first time since it was founded 153 years ago the boston globe didn't actually print the paper. at least one dunkin donuts was closed which is kind of like a waffle house being closed. one of the admins f got 30" where she lives and two admins lost power (one just for monday and one monday morning through tuesday morning) and fall river - lizzie borden's home town and down near rhode island - got 41". holy yikes. (boston proper got 17" but i think out by me we got closer to 12". providence broke a record with like three feet.)
have some pics of the snow, mostly new york with a couple connecticut and one east boston. sharing mostly for the person in the red jacket filming themselves lying in the snow. also i just really like photos of snowy places. they look so cold.
have some more. the ones from cambridge, ma, are all harvard square.
and more that aren't all nyc.
enjoy some quick videos from nyc especially slide 8. nail techs are a different breed.
and then it snowed this morning on the way to work. :DDD
questions from the olympics. oh, you thought we were done with the olympics around here? surprise.
i hate you, jack hughes - a canadian hockey fan put an autographed jack hughes rookie card on ebay for $1m cad. someone was very, very upset by the outcome of the men's hockey, weren't they. (if that link is borked the listing is here. the seller has since taken it down.)
and finally because i finally finished a book! the wednesday reading meme! which i apparently haven't done in almost a year. >.<
What I just finished reading:
a master of djinn by p djèlí clark which i originally bought to read on the cruise back in july. (i have sadly become a very slow reader.) the worldbuilding is fantastic and i liked a lot of the secondary characters altho it took half the book before i really connected with the main character. clark really likes short choppy sentences and sentence fragments, and he's likewise a big fan of speaking verbs that aren't "said". like, there's a scene with the main character and her partner at a meeting and in six different lines of dialogue from six different characters there are six different speaking verbs. (and some of them are the kinds of verbs that generally have like a target - "hi, how are you," character a greeted. "everything's fine, don't worry," character b reassured. that kind of thing. it's a stylistic choice but it makes me nuts.) i was invested in the story and i liked the various twists and turns - it starts with a mass murder which the main character has to investigate - but some of the actual writing i didn't love. but it's set in a steampunky alternate history cairo and there are djinn and all of that was fabulous.
What I am reading now:
blood, sweat & chrome: the wild and true story of mad max: fury road by kyle buchanan which i have been reading a lot longer than a master of djinn. it's an oral history of the making of the movie and i like a good look behind the scenes so i'm enjoying it.
What I'm going to read next:
probably yarrow by charles de lint. i found it at a very small library.
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languagelog_feed Feb. 26th, 2026 03:09 am)
languagelog_feed Feb. 26th, 2026 03:09 am)"It cannot read the human heart" by Yan Ge (b/1984), London Review of Books Blog (2/20/26)
Yan Ge
Since November 2024, a book influencer on RedNote has been publishing posts featuring side-by-side excerpts from works by different authors that contained similar, and in many cases identical, sentences and paragraphs. Among those whose sentences, similes, descriptions, scenes and plotlines appeared to have been copied and pasted were Eileen Chang, Hsien-yung Pai, William Faulkner, Orhan Pamuk, Annie Proulx and Gabriel García Márquez. The perpetrators of the apparent plagiarism were a number of contemporary Chinese authors.
‘Why are so many writers “borrowing” from others’ work?’ my friend asked. ‘Is this some kind of open secret in the literary world?’
I had no answer. In more than twenty years as a writer, I have previously encountered only a couple of incidents of outright literary theft (as opposed to quotation or allusion). Both times, I was baffled by it. Plagiarism, it seems to me, is a humiliating admission of artistic failure.
Digging deeper into the causes for the widespread plagiarism that she was encountering, Yan discovered one potential reason for the rapid rise in these corrupt practice cases:
The discovery was made possible by AI-powered plagiarism-checking applications, but some people have suggested that the plagiarism itself may have been fostered by the use of large language models. Given the data that AI models are trained on, wasn’t it possible – inevitable, even – that any writer who used AI for prompting or editing would end up copying, inadvertently, the work of others? The trouble is that much of the apparent plagiarism was published in the early 2000s or the 1990s. So unless someone invents a time machine, the theory doesn’t hold.
Moreover, says Yan,
If plagiarism is defined as having sentences flagged as identical by a checker, then so be it. But the software can only scan texts mechanically; it cannot read the human heart … This so-called reader who exposed the identical texts, you are not a reader in any real sense. You just used the software, being too lazy to read anything yourself … You are merely a reader who is not illiterate.
There is yet one more outré hypothesis about what may have served to promote plagiarism:
Other online analysts noted that a number of the authors involved had attended creative writing MFA programmes, which have been a feature of Chinese universities for the last fifteen years or so. ‘So this is how they teach writing in the universities,’ people speculated. ‘They simply get the students to memorise the classics and graft the masters’ sentences into their imitations.’ The opinion echoed a long-running scepticism towards the institutionalisation – or, as some would have it, the industrialisation – of writing.
In the final analysis, after consulting with another friend, Yan came to the conclusion that the plagiarizers were doing it for money. Creative writing, especially for state-funded journals, is so highly lucrative that, if you steadily churn out one or two stories a month for them, before long you will be in the top five per cent income bracket.
Yan has been writing in English in addition to Mandarin and Sichuanese. Her first English book is a 2023 short story collection Elsewhere: stories. Reviewer Chelsea Leu wrote
Yan Ge’s English debut is preoccupied with language, its failures, and its relationship to human emotions and the raw reality – the 'food' – of life. … These stories map out the distance between the head and the gut – the way language can fail to convey the deepest, most visceral facts of life."
Reviewer Sindya Bhanoo wrote that the stories "explore the power of language across the Chinese diaspora to either bring people together or push them apart."
If there's not a dramatic turnaround soon, these practices will take all of the fun out of writing — and reading.
Selected readings
- "Tik Tok and Red Book" (1/19/25)
- "AI plagiarism" (1/4/24)
- "John McIntyre on varieties of plagiarism" (3/30/13)
[h.t. John Rohsenow and thanks to Jing Hu]]
This is your weekly read-in-progress post~
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1. I had a nice WFH day today. One meeting scheduled for late morning, but it was a web meeting anyway, so why go in to the office just for that? Tomorrow I'll be working from home, too, because I have my tattoo touch-up appointment mid-morning and while I'm sure the bandage situation won't be as dire as the first go-round, I still don't want to have to worry about suddenly needing to change it while I'm at work.
2. The other day Carla took a walk down a street we don't usually go down and discovered a litte cafe we'd never known existed, so today we walked over there for lunch and shared a delicious prosciutto and pear sandwich. It was so good! It also had caramelized onions on it, which didn't sit well for me, unsurprisingly, but I would do it again. They also have various drinks, including a date-based smoothie called a majoon, so I got one of those and it was also super delicious.
3. Molly has also been enjoying the new lounger.
2. The other day Carla took a walk down a street we don't usually go down and discovered a litte cafe we'd never known existed, so today we walked over there for lunch and shared a delicious prosciutto and pear sandwich. It was so good! It also had caramelized onions on it, which didn't sit well for me, unsurprisingly, but I would do it again. They also have various drinks, including a date-based smoothie called a majoon, so I got one of those and it was also super delicious.
3. Molly has also been enjoying the new lounger.
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(otw_news_feed Feb. 26th, 2026 02:05 am)
otw_news_feed Feb. 26th, 2026 02:05 am)We released several batches of bug fixes and code updates in December, focusing on error handling, improvements to the posting and browsing of works, and largely invisible code optimization. Many thanks to our coders, code reviewers, and testers!
Credits
- Coders: anna; Bilka; Brian Austin; Danaël / Rever; Edgar San Martin, Jr.; marcus8448; warlockmel; WelpThatWorked; Zooms; ömer faruk
- Code reviewers: Bilka, Brian Austin, ceithir, lydia-theda, marcus8448, Sarken
- Testers: Brian Austin, calamario, Deniz, Dre, Lute, megidola, slavalamp, Teyris, Bilka, therealmorticia, marcus8448, Yuca, pk2317
Details
0.9.447
On December 3, we made some improvements to how we index information for admin user search.
- [AO3-7216] – Updates to the admin-facing user search feature were getting stuck due to their size, so we’ve reduced the amount of data we index.
- [AO3-7217] – We originally put updates for our admin-facing user search feature in the same queue as updates to user-facing search features (like work search). This meant that slowdowns in updating user search would also slow down updates to work search, so we’ve moved the admin search updates to a separate queue to prevent that.
0.9.449
On December 11, we deployed a batch of miscellaneous bug fixes and improvements. (We skipped version 0.9.448.)
- [AO3-7151] – Some buttons would become unreadable on hover and focus in the Low Vision Default skin, so we made sure all buttons have the correct border and text color to make them readable again.
- [AO3-7186] – In rare cases, trying to create a skin with the same title as an existing skin would throw an error 500 instead of telling you what’s wrong. Now you should always get the proper error message.
- [AO3-6851] – We removed a column from the challenge assignments table that is no longer used after some code changes.
- [AO3-7218] – We updated one of the utilities we use to deploy AO3 to its testing environment.
- [AO3-5871] – Renamed an ambiguously named method in the Works model code.
- [AO3-6738] – We improved the performance of the page that lists pseuds for a creator.
- [AO3-7084] – In several places, we disallow embedded images and will instead turn the
<img>HTML into a plain link. We have now updated our help text to reflect this practice where it applies. - [AO3-7152] – In work downloads (such as epub or HTML files), links would use the
httpprotocol instead ofhttps. We now make sure that all links start withhttps. - [AO3-7209] – We optimized our code to prepare the help text pop-ups for translated versions once language options become available on the Archive.
0.9.450
We deployed another batch of improvements on December 15, including some small fixes to the work form in particular.
- [AO3-6797] – Trying to post a work with invalid comment permissions (which can sometimes happen due to browser translation tools affecting parts of the Archive code) would throw an error 500. Now a proper error message is displayed in that case.
- [AO3-7177] – Trying to add a new first chapter before the part that was already posted, without previewing first, would result in two second chapters. Now, when you add a new chapter and assign the first position to it, the database will actually respect your artistic process.
- [AO3-7228] – Optimized the code used to put together work headers.
- [AO3-7044] – Migrated the tagging table (not to be confused with the tags table) to the BIGINT format, to allow for a BIG integer number of records to be added in the future.
- [AO3-7049] – Restricted the ability to manage users invite requests to Policy and Abuse volunteers (and superadmins).
0.9.451
December 18 saw another release of a few fixes and updates. The Open Challenges page will now show all challenges that currently accept sign-ups, even if they aren’t allowing new works to be added yet.
- [AO3-4666] – The Open Challenges page wasn’t including closed collections, even if the gift exchange or prompt meme in question was open to sign-ups. This has been fixed!
- [AO3-7224] – Some places in the AO3 code relied on an old feature in Ruby, our programming language of choice. They were not made better by doing that, so we stopped in order to make ourselves ready for new Ruby versions.
- [AO3-7203] – The mailer preview for a deleted work notification now allows for a work ID to be specified for the preview.
- [AO3-7232] – Some elements of our Terms of Service were missing the proper CSS list styles. Now everything that should be a lowercase alphabetical list, is.
- [AO3-7230] – Before upgrading Ruby on Rails, the framework that powers AO3, we took a snapshot of the current database structure for historical purposes.
- [AO3-7233], [AO3-7234] – Updated a couple of dependencies.
0.9.452
On December 29, another small batch of fixes went out to ring in the new year!
- [AO3-6944] – There’s no option to sort a list of prompts by prompter if the list includes anonymous prompts. However, if you tried to do it manually by editing the URL, or refreshed a tab you had open from before anonymous prompts were added, it would cause an error 500. Now it just reverts to the default sort order.
- [AO3-7184] – If someone tried to access the related works page of a non-existent user (due to a misspelled link, for example), they would be redirected to the user search. Since the desired page does not exist, we now properly serve an error 404, like others for pages that don’t exist.
- [AO3-7245] – We made the help text explaining the locale preference translatable, matching the code changes included in release 0.9.449.
- [AO3-7225], [AO3-7235] – Updated a couple of dependencies.
Last time, Eliza Hellbound tried to drag the world into Hell. Heavy died fighting her.
( Read more... )
Today's prompt word was "cascade" but what I ended up thinking about was apocalypse-revelation.
Have something portentous!
( what level of apocalypse are you on? )
Have something portentous!
( what level of apocalypse are you on? )
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I seem to be on a kick of books about cults, with horror novels Herculine by Grace Byron (a trans woman with religious trauma is pulled back into the orbit of an ex-girlfriend who started a cult) and It's Not A Cult by Joey Batey (reviewed here), and also Mike Rinder's A Billion Years: My Escape From a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology (what it says on the tin).
In War and Peace, I've hit the first scene that made it into Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812— Pierre challenged Dolokhov to a duel (technically over a minor affront at a club dinner! actually over rumors of Dolokhov having an affair with Pierre's wife!) and, to everyone's surprise, managed both to hit Dolokhov and to avoid being hit— and recalled how many of the lyrics are just verbatim lines from the book. At the same time, Andrei (presumed dead after the battle of Austerlitz) returned home just in time for his wife, Lise, to die in childbirth. :( One thing I've started to notice is that everything in this book seems to happen in pairs: Pierre's and Andrei's marriages ended, albeit in very different ways, in almost back-to-back chapters; as discussed in my last post, Nikolai and Andrei had foil-like experiences of meeting their heroes at Austerlitz; Kuragin successfully maneuvers his daughter Helene into a marriage to Pierre and then immediately fails to marry off his son Anatole to Mary Bolkonskaya...?
In War and Peace, I've hit the first scene that made it into Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812— Pierre challenged Dolokhov to a duel (technically over a minor affront at a club dinner! actually over rumors of Dolokhov having an affair with Pierre's wife!) and, to everyone's surprise, managed both to hit Dolokhov and to avoid being hit— and recalled how many of the lyrics are just verbatim lines from the book. At the same time, Andrei (presumed dead after the battle of Austerlitz) returned home just in time for his wife, Lise, to die in childbirth. :( One thing I've started to notice is that everything in this book seems to happen in pairs: Pierre's and Andrei's marriages ended, albeit in very different ways, in almost back-to-back chapters; as discussed in my last post, Nikolai and Andrei had foil-like experiences of meeting their heroes at Austerlitz; Kuragin successfully maneuvers his daughter Helene into a marriage to Pierre and then immediately fails to marry off his son Anatole to Mary Bolkonskaya...?
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Creakily snoring cat is the best cat.
Got my crown done today, for a mere $250 thanks to the NDP's championing of dental insurance for indigents. My left jaw aches; this is a state of affairs that will likely persist until morning. It's nice to not have a bit of a hole where a tooth should be, though. (I had a temporary crown. It came off a month ago and the dentist said "eh, probably not worth putting it back on again.")
Things in boxes, empty shelves. There's more of the last lousy ten percent of stuff I can pack but it's running into the problem of deciding -what- to pack. That in turn would be easier if I had a better sense of what the apartment will look like without bookcases, which I won't get until after the movers come. Oh well. I can always take later boxes over to the storage unit myself.
Soon I'll get to see what life is like with Less Stuff, at least for a little while.
My great-great-great- (+/- one great) -grandfather or uncle Joseph G. Taylor had a violin that was discovered among my grandmother's things when she died in 2014. Turns out to be a fairly decent instrument: not amazing quality but certainly a few steps above my cello. ("Wilhelm Duerer fecit anno 1900.") Her kids got it refurbished and then had no idea what to do with it, so my dad gave it to me as the only person in the family who plays a stringed instrument at all. It's mostly sat in its case for years; for awhile I loaned it to someone who wanted to learn to play violin, and I'm not sure whether it got any use there or not.
I took it out yesterday just to see what it was like. It's tiny. Tuning is obnoxious; I'd forgotten how much I hate wooden pegs. (I'm spoiled by the amazing mechanical pegs on my viola.) Notes aren't where my fingers think they ought to be, and everything is cramped. I'd expected all that. What I hadn't expected was for it to feel like cheating. I'm accustomed to a certain amount of resistance in bowing, I expect from the thicker/larger strings on the viola (and more so on the cello, though that's a whole different thing). On the violin the bow just ... glides. Faster notes and slurs come so much easier and more clearly, string crossings are trivial. Hmpf.
Other than that... I'm still here. Mr Tuppert has stopped creaking but is still sprawled on his heating pad with his chin on his front paws, and that's pretty cute. Life goes on.
Got my crown done today, for a mere $250 thanks to the NDP's championing of dental insurance for indigents. My left jaw aches; this is a state of affairs that will likely persist until morning. It's nice to not have a bit of a hole where a tooth should be, though. (I had a temporary crown. It came off a month ago and the dentist said "eh, probably not worth putting it back on again.")
Things in boxes, empty shelves. There's more of the last lousy ten percent of stuff I can pack but it's running into the problem of deciding -what- to pack. That in turn would be easier if I had a better sense of what the apartment will look like without bookcases, which I won't get until after the movers come. Oh well. I can always take later boxes over to the storage unit myself.
Soon I'll get to see what life is like with Less Stuff, at least for a little while.
My great-great-great- (+/- one great) -grandfather or uncle Joseph G. Taylor had a violin that was discovered among my grandmother's things when she died in 2014. Turns out to be a fairly decent instrument: not amazing quality but certainly a few steps above my cello. ("Wilhelm Duerer fecit anno 1900.") Her kids got it refurbished and then had no idea what to do with it, so my dad gave it to me as the only person in the family who plays a stringed instrument at all. It's mostly sat in its case for years; for awhile I loaned it to someone who wanted to learn to play violin, and I'm not sure whether it got any use there or not.
I took it out yesterday just to see what it was like. It's tiny. Tuning is obnoxious; I'd forgotten how much I hate wooden pegs. (I'm spoiled by the amazing mechanical pegs on my viola.) Notes aren't where my fingers think they ought to be, and everything is cramped. I'd expected all that. What I hadn't expected was for it to feel like cheating. I'm accustomed to a certain amount of resistance in bowing, I expect from the thicker/larger strings on the viola (and more so on the cello, though that's a whole different thing). On the violin the bow just ... glides. Faster notes and slurs come so much easier and more clearly, string crossings are trivial. Hmpf.
Other than that... I'm still here. Mr Tuppert has stopped creaking but is still sprawled on his heating pad with his chin on his front paws, and that's pretty cute. Life goes on.
books
The Tyrant Philosophers #1: City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky. 2022. Incredibly hard to tell the characters apart. Hard to get into. Not sure if I'm going to give book 2 a try.
The Vampire Lestat
The new trailer is out! So much to look forward to!
yarning
Missed yarn group again. Made a new Rockstar Lestat, so slowly. Sold 2 bunnies, a catnip kiss, and a catnip heart where I had to order the yarn to make it in a hurry yesterday. And sold a made to order bunny that I'm working on now. Still haven't started the Easter carrots order. No progress on the bunny for the new kitten academy momcat, who gave birth last night. New commissions on 2 more kickbunnies for down the line.
healthcrap
Still feeling super crummy. Tongue hurts. No energy. Migraine yesterday. Vertigo is slightly better.
Mercury Retrograde
Mercury stations retrograde today (in Pisces) and stations direct March 20. Plus there's an eclipse in Mercury-ruled Virgo in a few days. That's a lot of communications trouble coming our way.
#resist
+ March 28: #50501 No Kings Protest #3
I hope you're all doing well! <333
The Tyrant Philosophers #1: City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky. 2022. Incredibly hard to tell the characters apart. Hard to get into. Not sure if I'm going to give book 2 a try.
The Vampire Lestat
The new trailer is out! So much to look forward to!
yarning
Missed yarn group again. Made a new Rockstar Lestat, so slowly. Sold 2 bunnies, a catnip kiss, and a catnip heart where I had to order the yarn to make it in a hurry yesterday. And sold a made to order bunny that I'm working on now. Still haven't started the Easter carrots order. No progress on the bunny for the new kitten academy momcat, who gave birth last night. New commissions on 2 more kickbunnies for down the line.
healthcrap
Still feeling super crummy. Tongue hurts. No energy. Migraine yesterday. Vertigo is slightly better.
Mercury Retrograde
Mercury stations retrograde today (in Pisces) and stations direct March 20. Plus there's an eclipse in Mercury-ruled Virgo in a few days. That's a lot of communications trouble coming our way.
#resist
+ March 28: #50501 No Kings Protest #3
I hope you're all doing well! <333
- Made it to the plot! Brought home more salad than we actually wanted to eat this evening! Mostly lamb's lettuce but some bonus baby beetroot and spinach leaves :)
- Also, the broad beans are starting to emerge (well, the ones that didn't get partly dug up and then abandoned on the surface unmunched, anyway; those have now been reinterred).
- In the course of Making An Effort to Close More Tabs I rediscovered Standard Ebooks, and downloaded a bunch of things I'd apparently been interested in for Some Time: Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style manual, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to create a new edition that takes advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.
- I spent some of the evening doing minor crafts with supplies A acquired, to make replacement cherries for a children's board game, using red wooden beans and green cotton string. I am mildly concerned that the Child might disapprove of the string being green rather than red, but We Shall See...
- Cleeeeeeeeeen hair.
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1) Squidgeworld will be doing video hosting! So if you have videos you need hosting and, like us, hate Youtube, you'll be able to host your videos on Squidge Images.
Various services are currently down for maintenance but there's more info about that at the link.
2) This post was about how people offer gaming opinions via social media but I think the larger lesson applies to everything, and says a lot about how forceful peer pressure (even of unknown peers!) seems to be:
"The feedback they provide is not about the game, it’s about an opinion they believe to be correct based on the crowd."
"When you share an opinion or give feedback, you are telling a story about yourself. People want to share a story that they like, and that makes them feel skilled, or knowledgeable. They do not write the honest objective truth about themselves into these things. They write the version that they wish they were. We know this because we’ve surveyed a lot of players over the years and then compared their answers with their actual behavior data, and the two rarely have anything in common."
"if there’s ever a conflict between what people say and what they do, believe their actions. People say things that aren’t true all the time, but the way they use buttons that say Play Now and Uninstall tell their ultimate truth."
3) Interesting thoughts in this course introduction on Global Cinema by Henry Jenkins. A few of them here: ( Read more... )
4) I found a way to make AI tell you lies – and I'm not the only one. "People have used hacks and loopholes to abuse search engines for decades. Google has sophisticated protections in place, and the company says the accuracy of AI Overviews is on par with other search features it introduced years ago. But experts say AI tools have undone a lot of the tech industry's work to keep people safe. These AI tricks are so basic they're reminiscent of the early 2000s, before Google had even introduced a web spam team, Ray says. "We're in a bit of a Renaissance for spammers."
Not only is AI easier to fool, but experts worry that users are more likely to fall for it...Even when AI tools provide source, people are far less likely to check it out than they were with old-school search results. For example, a recent study found people are 58% less likely to click on a link when an AI Overview shows up at the top of Google Search."
5) This post speculates about the impact AI will have on economies and frames it as a look "back" to our time period. The whole thing is available to read for free, in part because this analyst group sees this potential economic and social catastrophe happening within the next few years.
"It should have been clear all along that a single GPU cluster in North Dakota generating the output previously attributed to 10,000 white-collar workers in midtown Manhattan is more economic pandemic than economic panacea. The velocity of money flatlined. The human-centric consumer economy, 70% of GDP at the time, withered. We probably could have figured this out sooner if we just asked how much money machines spend on discretionary goods. (Hint: it’s zero.)"
The key to a collapse is the disruption in the historical model of companies that have become outmoded (or undercut) by new technology: ( Read more... )
I disagree with the report in two respects. The first is the speed of the timeline. AI does not work well and there is already public disaffection with the experiences they've had. I don't think it will be adopted as widely as predicted as quickly, because its problems will become apparent as early adopters start pulling back. Should improvements develop quickly though, I could see this playing out, but probably not within the next decade.
I also think they fail to address the power demands of all this accelerated computing, and how that will affect individuals (skyrocketing utility bills are already here) and the likelihood that the grid will collapse from the excessive demand. I didn't watch the State of the Union address, but did hear NPR discussion of it this morning. I found it striking that Trump addressed this issue at all. That tells me that there's way bigger pushback on the rapid development of data centers than has been reported.
Our only hope seems to be that AI will be so incompetent in the near term at solving problems within their customers' businesses and operations that it all collapses before it can spread that widely. And that might kneecap the tech industry enough that they slow down and stop breaking things. That leads me to another rather interesting post about how slowly very disruptive tech develops compared to its hype. Though I'd really recommend it as a read, the post is long so I'm only going to pull out one item from it, which you may have heard about in the news: ( Read more... )
Various services are currently down for maintenance but there's more info about that at the link.
2) This post was about how people offer gaming opinions via social media but I think the larger lesson applies to everything, and says a lot about how forceful peer pressure (even of unknown peers!) seems to be:
"The feedback they provide is not about the game, it’s about an opinion they believe to be correct based on the crowd."
"When you share an opinion or give feedback, you are telling a story about yourself. People want to share a story that they like, and that makes them feel skilled, or knowledgeable. They do not write the honest objective truth about themselves into these things. They write the version that they wish they were. We know this because we’ve surveyed a lot of players over the years and then compared their answers with their actual behavior data, and the two rarely have anything in common."
"if there’s ever a conflict between what people say and what they do, believe their actions. People say things that aren’t true all the time, but the way they use buttons that say Play Now and Uninstall tell their ultimate truth."
3) Interesting thoughts in this course introduction on Global Cinema by Henry Jenkins. A few of them here: ( Read more... )
4) I found a way to make AI tell you lies – and I'm not the only one. "People have used hacks and loopholes to abuse search engines for decades. Google has sophisticated protections in place, and the company says the accuracy of AI Overviews is on par with other search features it introduced years ago. But experts say AI tools have undone a lot of the tech industry's work to keep people safe. These AI tricks are so basic they're reminiscent of the early 2000s, before Google had even introduced a web spam team, Ray says. "We're in a bit of a Renaissance for spammers."
Not only is AI easier to fool, but experts worry that users are more likely to fall for it...Even when AI tools provide source, people are far less likely to check it out than they were with old-school search results. For example, a recent study found people are 58% less likely to click on a link when an AI Overview shows up at the top of Google Search."
5) This post speculates about the impact AI will have on economies and frames it as a look "back" to our time period. The whole thing is available to read for free, in part because this analyst group sees this potential economic and social catastrophe happening within the next few years.
"It should have been clear all along that a single GPU cluster in North Dakota generating the output previously attributed to 10,000 white-collar workers in midtown Manhattan is more economic pandemic than economic panacea. The velocity of money flatlined. The human-centric consumer economy, 70% of GDP at the time, withered. We probably could have figured this out sooner if we just asked how much money machines spend on discretionary goods. (Hint: it’s zero.)"
The key to a collapse is the disruption in the historical model of companies that have become outmoded (or undercut) by new technology: ( Read more... )
I disagree with the report in two respects. The first is the speed of the timeline. AI does not work well and there is already public disaffection with the experiences they've had. I don't think it will be adopted as widely as predicted as quickly, because its problems will become apparent as early adopters start pulling back. Should improvements develop quickly though, I could see this playing out, but probably not within the next decade.
I also think they fail to address the power demands of all this accelerated computing, and how that will affect individuals (skyrocketing utility bills are already here) and the likelihood that the grid will collapse from the excessive demand. I didn't watch the State of the Union address, but did hear NPR discussion of it this morning. I found it striking that Trump addressed this issue at all. That tells me that there's way bigger pushback on the rapid development of data centers than has been reported.
Our only hope seems to be that AI will be so incompetent in the near term at solving problems within their customers' businesses and operations that it all collapses before it can spread that widely. And that might kneecap the tech industry enough that they slow down and stop breaking things. That leads me to another rather interesting post about how slowly very disruptive tech develops compared to its hype. Though I'd really recommend it as a read, the post is long so I'm only going to pull out one item from it, which you may have heard about in the news: ( Read more... )
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Our flock of twelve ducks now number thirteen and occasionally fourteen. Duck #13 is the neighbours' sole surviving duck after the others were taken by a fox (probably). He was keeping them outside. Ours are in a polytunnel inside an enclosure, but I think a determined fox could still get inside. Augh, I hope they survive the winter. Duck #13 is white and looks a lot like our Elsa, but smaller and with a more orange beak; we call her Lill-Elsa (Little Elsa). She has seamlessly merged with the flock.
The occasional #14 is a female wild mallard who seems to be considering the advantages of domestication: free food, water, and shelter! But she comes and goes. One might think our ducks would correspondingly be hearing the call of the wild from her, but no. They like their comforts now. The snow is thawing and I thought I'd make them happy by breaking up the ice in the small pond for them, but when I herded them outside to see it, they just stood there and looked at me like I was committing animal abuse, and hurried back to the polytunnel as soon as I got out of the way. Sigh.
As for me, I am too busy and am looking forward to things calming down a little soon. At least I hope they will.
The occasional #14 is a female wild mallard who seems to be considering the advantages of domestication: free food, water, and shelter! But she comes and goes. One might think our ducks would correspondingly be hearing the call of the wild from her, but no. They like their comforts now. The snow is thawing and I thought I'd make them happy by breaking up the ice in the small pond for them, but when I herded them outside to see it, they just stood there and looked at me like I was committing animal abuse, and hurried back to the polytunnel as soon as I got out of the way. Sigh.
As for me, I am too busy and am looking forward to things calming down a little soon. At least I hope they will.
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(![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
verushka70 Feb. 25th, 2026 03:44 pm)
verushka70 Feb. 25th, 2026 03:44 pm)I simply can't stop smiling at the fact that Turner Classic Movies aired the film Gaslight during Trump's State of the Union address last night. Click yesterday at the TCM Schedule online; you'll see it.
Seriously: every time I thought of this today, it made me smile. Peak trolling, indeed - I'd call it epic trolling! Makes me want to hug the programmers at TCM!
Plus it is such a great noir film, one of Ingrid Bergman's best roles, for which she won her first Oscar (though my favorite role of hers will always be Casablanca). Charles Boyer and Joseph Cotton are great in it as well. A young Angela Lansbury is in it, too.
Seriously: every time I thought of this today, it made me smile. Peak trolling, indeed - I'd call it epic trolling! Makes me want to hug the programmers at TCM!
Plus it is such a great noir film, one of Ingrid Bergman's best roles, for which she won her first Oscar (though my favorite role of hers will always be Casablanca). Charles Boyer and Joseph Cotton are great in it as well. A young Angela Lansbury is in it, too.
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(atlas_obscura_places_feed Feb. 25th, 2026 04:00 pm)
atlas_obscura_places_feed Feb. 25th, 2026 04:00 pm)
Morlaix is a medieval market town in Brittany. The Old Quarter has many half-timbered buildings overhanging the narrow cobbled streets. The last thing you expect to see in such a quaint medieval town is modern street art.
Huge, beautiful murals have been painted on the sides of ramshackle old buildings and modern blocks of flats. Some overlook ancient thoroughfares and others busy car-parks.
The art has been created by a number of artists and tours are available to see them all, however on any walk around the town centre you will discover unexpected colourful surprises.
Stepping out of the house for a short walk around the neighborhood, I discovered that a friend had sent me a surprise gift in the mail and that between their post office and my doorstep it had been stolen. I received a gutted envelope slit down the side containing brown paper from which the gift had been shaken out. The stiff paper of the accompanying note had wedged hard enough into the envelope that after some stricken searching it was still in there; the handmade buttons and the picture were not. I assume the thief was looking for checks or more conventionally defined valuables, but it seems unspeakably cruel to let the envelope continue on its way and arrive to tell me what kindness I had been robbed of. I still have the note. The kindness itself did travel the distance. But I still want the thief to fall in front of a freight express.
(cosmolinguist Feb. 25th, 2026 09:26 pm)
cosmolinguist Feb. 25th, 2026 09:26 pm)I've accrued a simply horrifying number of open tabs, and I'm finally able to whittle them down a bit.
I'm finally able to read a few of those I've accumulated about Minneapolis/ICE. Here's my favorite one so far:
I feel more from Minnesota than I’ve ever felt. is a great quote -- even from four thousand miles away I feel more from Minnesota than I ever have, but this goes on:
But now I know as I’m walking down the street that I have hundreds of people who will swarm to help me if needed, and that I will swarm to help them.... It’s like building a muscle of solidarity across race, across class. It’s something the Left talks about a lot, but I’ve never experienced it like this. And it’s truly ordinary people — it’s not majority organizers or activists. It’s people who’ve never organized a day in their lives but know something wrong is happening and want to do something.
And on dealing with the fear:
it starts really small, and then the small things become more risky, and you don’t want to give them up... So now the people delivering groceries — which, again, is a very low-risk thing — have been trained to know that in case ICE grabs them, they should never write the list of addresses down digitally. You write it on a physical piece of paper, and if ICE grabs you, you eat the piece of paper. ...[D]elivering groceries shouldn’t be high-risk. It violates people’s sense of dignity and basic rights, and that’s what creates courage.
The whole thing is so good, it's well worth a read.
I didn't finish anything over the past seven days, due to a combination of late days at work, a bunch of after-work obligations, and heroic attempts to complete the crosswords in two collections I own with an eye to sending them to the recycling center once I do.
What I Finished Reading This Week
Nothing.
What I Am Currently Reading
Of Dice and Men – David Ewalt
I've got one chapter to go before I finish.
A Fate Inked in Blood – Danielle Jensen
I read another 50 pages this week.
When the Tides Held the Moon - Vanessa Vida Kelley
This novel's premise is intriguing, but boy does Vida Kelley love their adjectives.
What I’m Reading Next
I acquired no new books this week.
これで以上です。
What I Finished Reading This Week
Nothing.
What I Am Currently Reading
Of Dice and Men – David Ewalt
I've got one chapter to go before I finish.
A Fate Inked in Blood – Danielle Jensen
I read another 50 pages this week.
When the Tides Held the Moon - Vanessa Vida Kelley
This novel's premise is intriguing, but boy does Vida Kelley love their adjectives.
What I’m Reading Next
I acquired no new books this week.
これで以上です。
Tags:
Watching as many adaptations of 'Wuthering Heights' as I can get my hands on, professional tennis, or updates on the baby monkey at the Japanese zoo that's having trouble making friends.
How are you?
How are you?
Browsing starts on February 27th, so get ready! :D
This year, I'm not offering anything in the regular auction. I'm still posting my fic from last year and though that's almost finished, I want to concentrate on my backburner-WIPs again. Also, don't feel like offering beta or special expertise, since that one had winners vanish on me two times in a row, which is simply annoying.
So, this year it's only the Crafts Bazaar where I'm offering something:
I've still got two pending fanbindings from last year (didn't get a finished fic to work with), so I didn't want to overdo it for FTH this year. Also, I'm really not motivated to do a random fandom again right now, so that's why I'm exclusively offering for The Untamed/MDZS. I'm sure there will be many fanbinders offering books this year again - it's super popular and basically prints money for the event XD - so there should be enough chances for people to get a book. I might be swayed to offer something to the second highest bidder as well, but that will highly depend on my mood. XD
Are any of you participating as well?
This year, I'm not offering anything in the regular auction. I'm still posting my fic from last year and though that's almost finished, I want to concentrate on my backburner-WIPs again. Also, don't feel like offering beta or special expertise, since that one had winners vanish on me two times in a row, which is simply annoying.
So, this year it's only the Crafts Bazaar where I'm offering something:
- one fanbinding of a The Untamed/MDZS fanfiction
- hand-knitted loop scarves
I've still got two pending fanbindings from last year (didn't get a finished fic to work with), so I didn't want to overdo it for FTH this year. Also, I'm really not motivated to do a random fandom again right now, so that's why I'm exclusively offering for The Untamed/MDZS. I'm sure there will be many fanbinders offering books this year again - it's super popular and basically prints money for the event XD - so there should be enough chances for people to get a book. I might be swayed to offer something to the second highest bidder as well, but that will highly depend on my mood. XD
Are any of you participating as well?
I've been in full avoidance mode, but one teeny clip dropped and I figured I'd be safe to watch...
( clip below )
Also: Confirmed to be dropping THIS JUNE.
The announcement pic was pretty, I'll pop it in the comments.
( clip below )
Also: Confirmed to be dropping THIS JUNE.
The announcement pic was pretty, I'll pop it in the comments.
Tags:
What I Just Finished Reading
Nothing, unless you count rereading Avengers: Endless Wartime for the 616 server book club. Am I counting that? I guess so. Fuck it. It's really bad.
What I'm Reading Now
Comics Wednesday!
( Iron Man #2, Sorcerer Supreme #3, Ultimates #21, Wiccan Witches Road #3 )
What I'm Reading Next
I am hoping at some point to have enough brain energy to make it through a real book. I am also hoping to have enough brain energy to write some kind of update about my brain. Neither of these things have happened yet, but I now have enough energy to occasionally reblog things on Tumblr.
Nothing, unless you count rereading Avengers: Endless Wartime for the 616 server book club. Am I counting that? I guess so. Fuck it. It's really bad.
What I'm Reading Now
Comics Wednesday!
( Iron Man #2, Sorcerer Supreme #3, Ultimates #21, Wiccan Witches Road #3 )
What I'm Reading Next
I am hoping at some point to have enough brain energy to make it through a real book. I am also hoping to have enough brain energy to write some kind of update about my brain. Neither of these things have happened yet, but I now have enough energy to occasionally reblog things on Tumblr.
.