2025: Many Things
Mar. 27th, 2026 11:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
schneefinkIt's very late March, I know, but better late than never. Most of this was written back in December/January.
( Fannish things )
( Non-fannish things )
( Fannish things )
( Non-fannish things )
schneefink
Scientists discover tiny rocket engines inside malaria parasites
Mar. 27th, 2026 03:14 pm
How to build a pipeline in Canada’s frozen, shifting North
Mar. 27th, 2026 03:10 pm
2026 52 Card Project: Week 12: Dissolving
Mar. 27th, 2026 04:17 pmpegkerrI made three entire collages this week, and rejected the first two of them. I guess they were aesthetically fine, but they were about subjects I'd touched on before, and I was dissatisfied that I was saying anything new and didn't feel like rehashing everything.
My problem was partly that I didn't feel I had much to work with this week, because I fell ill partway through the week, and everything dissolved into that. At first, I was afraid I had contracted Covid, as some of the symptoms matched. Everything became a blur, and I was barely able to care for myself (Eric, bless him, did do an emergency grocery run for me). I did order Covid tests from the drugstore and had them delivered, but I kept testing negative.
After three days of blurred and surreal misery, I recovered. Eventually, I decided it was just a particularly virulent general bug with a heaping side of extremely gross gastrointestinal effects.
Okay, not very interesting to do yet another collage about being sick, either. But what particularly struck me about falling ill this time was how very helpless and isolated I felt. And that, more than the illness itself, is what I tried to capture in the images I used.
I experimented with technical effects to do this, extracting the figure on the bed and mixing it with an image of bare tree branches, and then overlaying the result back over the same position on the bed (keeping the bed itself in clear focus). I then used the same tree branches as a scrim overlay in the background. I was trying to capture the sense of dissolving, the fear that I might actually fade into nothingness and not be able to come back.
I did come back. This time.
I always have a lurking fear that I won't manage to do so the next time.
Image description: Foreground: a woman lies on a bed, either asleep or ill. The bed is focused but the woman is indistinct, as if run through by cracks. Background above the bed: the blurred image of a woman with closed eyes, overlaid by a scrim of semitransparent leafless branches.
Dissolving
Click on the links to see the 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.
My problem was partly that I didn't feel I had much to work with this week, because I fell ill partway through the week, and everything dissolved into that. At first, I was afraid I had contracted Covid, as some of the symptoms matched. Everything became a blur, and I was barely able to care for myself (Eric, bless him, did do an emergency grocery run for me). I did order Covid tests from the drugstore and had them delivered, but I kept testing negative.
After three days of blurred and surreal misery, I recovered. Eventually, I decided it was just a particularly virulent general bug with a heaping side of extremely gross gastrointestinal effects.
Okay, not very interesting to do yet another collage about being sick, either. But what particularly struck me about falling ill this time was how very helpless and isolated I felt. And that, more than the illness itself, is what I tried to capture in the images I used.
I experimented with technical effects to do this, extracting the figure on the bed and mixing it with an image of bare tree branches, and then overlaying the result back over the same position on the bed (keeping the bed itself in clear focus). I then used the same tree branches as a scrim overlay in the background. I was trying to capture the sense of dissolving, the fear that I might actually fade into nothingness and not be able to come back.
I did come back. This time.
I always have a lurking fear that I won't manage to do so the next time.
Image description: Foreground: a woman lies on a bed, either asleep or ill. The bed is focused but the woman is indistinct, as if run through by cracks. Background above the bed: the blurred image of a woman with closed eyes, overlaid by a scrim of semitransparent leafless branches.
Click on the links to see the 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.
review: Mistakenly Saving the Villain by Feng Yu Nie
Mar. 27th, 2026 11:06 pmshipperslist posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
cnovelsI finished MisVil today and posted a review on my journal:
Mistakenly Saving the Villain by Feng Yu Nie
It was definitely an interesting read but it's Heavy and deals with Heavy stuff. While I didn't always agree with the author, I appreciated a c-novel where sexual violence is treated as a violation instead of a profound proclamation of love.
Mistakenly Saving the Villain by Feng Yu Nie
It was definitely an interesting read but it's Heavy and deals with Heavy stuff. While I didn't always agree with the author, I appreciated a c-novel where sexual violence is treated as a violation instead of a profound proclamation of love.
Guardian Reverse Exchange sign-ups: three hours left!
Mar. 27th, 2026 10:00 pmtrobadora posting in sid_guardianQuick reminder that this year's 520 Day Reverse Exchange sign-ups close in three hours. If you've been meaning to sign-up, this is your last chance! :)
star spangled eyes
Mar. 27th, 2026 04:34 pmsomedayseattleConnecting with LL Cool J over the last week has been amazing. It has been honest, pure, revitalizing and hopeful. She has whisked off nearly all the cobwebs that had amassed. She filled some voids that needed filling. Her timing was perfect. She filled me with light when i was in a dark place. We share a long, complicated past history and I am ecstatic to be reminded how good it is to be alive. I am now, as I have always been, forever in debt to this beautiful soul.
Baseball season! Huzzah! Day one brings a Mariners loss and a Mets win. I am stoked for a good season from both. Remember, the mantra will always be F#ck The Yankees and the Dodgers can suck a fat one.
I made a crab salad today so friggin' good is should added to the list of Man's Greatest Achievements. Dayum!
Baseball season! Huzzah! Day one brings a Mariners loss and a Mets win. I am stoked for a good season from both. Remember, the mantra will always be F#ck The Yankees and the Dodgers can suck a fat one.
I made a crab salad today so friggin' good is should added to the list of Man's Greatest Achievements. Dayum!
Synesthesia isn't just in your mind. The body reacts as if the colors were real.
Mar. 27th, 2026 02:31 pm
'I was paid to write fake Google reviews – then my ‘bosses’ tried to scam me'
Mar. 27th, 2026 02:29 pm
the humble act of giving
Mar. 27th, 2026 04:18 pmsomedayseattleI went to the hospital early today to get my bandages changed. I spend more time at the hospital than anywhere else in my social life. Of course, dropping in three days a week is remarkably better than spending nine months there. Dr. Smarty Pants said things are looking a lot better. All of the black dead skin is gone and has been replaced by red flesh. She said that is a great sign but we are not 100% out of the woods. She gave me permission to start showering at home again. Also I can start changing both bandages at home.
But she was also quick to point out any infection moving forward would probably destroy my foot. Or if my diabetes is out of control, the foot may not be able to heal itself. If either of those cases occur, adios toe.
So basically at status quo, but a touch more hopeful. It’s frightening to think a small infection could send this all to hell but I guess it will play out however it’s supposed to considering how Da Universe has been kicking me in the marbles when I’m down. Nice work, Uni.
Remember to email me or hit me up by DM if you’d like to see gory photos of the process. I wouldn’t if I were you.
But she was also quick to point out any infection moving forward would probably destroy my foot. Or if my diabetes is out of control, the foot may not be able to heal itself. If either of those cases occur, adios toe.
So basically at status quo, but a touch more hopeful. It’s frightening to think a small infection could send this all to hell but I guess it will play out however it’s supposed to considering how Da Universe has been kicking me in the marbles when I’m down. Nice work, Uni.
Remember to email me or hit me up by DM if you’d like to see gory photos of the process. I wouldn’t if I were you.
2026/044: Tuesday Mooney Wore Black — Kate Racculia
Mar. 27th, 2026 08:07 pmtamaranth2026/044: Tuesday Mooney Wore Black — Kate Racculia
Dex believed in coincidences, and fate, and signs and wonders, and the great interlocking gears of the universe telling him to do things, and though he’d gotten pretty good at ignoring what the universe was telling him to do (most recently: quit your soul-sucking job and open a karaoke bar!), it didn’t mean he couldn’t still hear it screaming.
[loc. 2810]
Tuesday Mooney has a comfortable life: she lives alone, except for her cat Gunnar: she tutors Dorry, her teenage neighbour who's still mourning her mother, and excels at her job as a prospect researcher for a hospital fundraising team. Her best friend is Dex (short for Poindexter), who works in finance but craves a career in showbiz. Her best friend was Abby Hobbes, but Abby vanished one night when they were both fifteen. (Tuesday tried to contact her via Abby's Ouija board, but nobody ever answered.)
( Read more... )
Feeling the Ugh
Mar. 27th, 2026 02:22 pmyourlibrarian1) For those who use Zoom for meetings, something to be concerned about: WebinarTV Turning Zoom Calls into AI Podcasts. Stanford has issued guidelines to campus users to prevent it happening.
2) Turns out Xfinity offered us free Peacock (supposedly Peacock Premium but we have ads anyway). Getting Peacock access was quite a process though. All I should have had to do was click the email link and accept the offer. In fact, everything I tried kept sending me to a 404 page. ( Read more... )
3) When I finally did get into Peacock, I used it to watch Song Sung Blue and thought it was mostly an enjoyable film. I liked Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson leaning into their ages and downplaying his looks. The music was fun and it was a nice, small scale love story. ( spoilers ).
3) The Peacock issue wasn't the only technical frustration of the last few days. After finishing my taxes and other to-dos I had pending, I wanted to take some time to get back into my LEGO Star Wars game on the Xbox which I'd last tried almost 3 years ago. ( Read more... )
4) I feel surprisingly upset to hear that Starfleet Academy is essentially cancelled. (There's another season coming but that had already been planned before S1 began). I wrote earlier about how much I was enjoying it, and that was before I watched the fourth episode. I will miss these characters, and it seems there's so much more that could be done.
5) The latestmarchmetamatterschallenge writing prompt was "How do you define genres? Is it still a useful tool to find entertainment you like, or have offerings become so niche and melded that it's hard to use categories anymore? Was it ever something useful for you, personally?"
To some degree yes, but increasingly no. ( Read more... )
2) Turns out Xfinity offered us free Peacock (supposedly Peacock Premium but we have ads anyway). Getting Peacock access was quite a process though. All I should have had to do was click the email link and accept the offer. In fact, everything I tried kept sending me to a 404 page. ( Read more... )
3) When I finally did get into Peacock, I used it to watch Song Sung Blue and thought it was mostly an enjoyable film. I liked Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson leaning into their ages and downplaying his looks. The music was fun and it was a nice, small scale love story. ( spoilers ).
3) The Peacock issue wasn't the only technical frustration of the last few days. After finishing my taxes and other to-dos I had pending, I wanted to take some time to get back into my LEGO Star Wars game on the Xbox which I'd last tried almost 3 years ago. ( Read more... )
4) I feel surprisingly upset to hear that Starfleet Academy is essentially cancelled. (There's another season coming but that had already been planned before S1 began). I wrote earlier about how much I was enjoying it, and that was before I watched the fourth episode. I will miss these characters, and it seems there's so much more that could be done.
5) The latest
marchmetamatterschallenge writing prompt was "How do you define genres? Is it still a useful tool to find entertainment you like, or have offerings become so niche and melded that it's hard to use categories anymore? Was it ever something useful for you, personally?"To some degree yes, but increasingly no. ( Read more... )
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Scientists uncovered the nutrients bees were missing — Colonies surged 15-fold
Mar. 27th, 2026 01:10 pm
Extracting Books from LLMs.
Mar. 27th, 2026 07:54 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
languagehat_feedThe arXiv paper Extracting books from production language models by Ahmed Ahmed, A. Feder Cooper, Sanmi Koyejo, and Percy Liang is alarming but not in the least surprising. The abstract:
Many unresolved legal questions over LLMs and copyright center on memorization: whether specific training data have been encoded in the model’s weights during training, and whether those memorized data can be extracted in the model’s outputs. While many believe that LLMs do not memorize much of their training data, recent work shows that substantial amounts of copyrighted text can be extracted from open-weight models. However, it remains an open question if similar extraction is feasible for production LLMs, given the safety measures these systems implement. We investigate this question using a two-phase procedure […]. With different per-LLM experimental configurations, we were able to extract varying amounts of text. For the Phase 1 probe, it was unnecessary to jailbreak Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grok 3 to extract text (e.g, nv-recall of 76.8% and 70.3%, respectively, for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone), while it was necessary for Claude 3.7 Sonnet and GPT-4.1. In some cases, jailbroken Claude 3.7 Sonnet outputs entire books near-verbatim (e.g., nv-recall=95.8%). GPT-4.1 requires significantly more BoN attempts (e.g., 20X), and eventually refuses to continue (e.g., nv-recall=4.0%). Taken together, our work highlights that, even with model- and system-level safeguards, extraction of (in-copyright) training data remains a risk for production LLMs.
Écrasez l’infâme ! And if you’re tired of thinking about the evils of LLMs, I bring you news of An Old Welsh Reader, edited by Simon Rodway:
This reader contains edited texts, with English translations, of all the independent texts extant in manuscripts of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, with a selection of twelfth-century texts. They are accompanied by extensive notes and glossaries, along with an introduction which considers the prehistory of Welsh and its relationship with other Celtic languages. The volume also contains a comprehensive list of the sources of Old Welsh and an outline grammar: the first specifically dedicated to Old Welsh to appear in English. Appendices contain editions of one of the very few ancient Celtic texts from Britain, the Bath pendant, and the only sizeable text in another early medieval Brittonic language, the Old Cornish portion of the Leiden leechbook.
Now that’s my idea of a good time.
Friday misc
Mar. 27th, 2026 07:31 pmoursinGosh those people with the archivists' sales team are persistent! I've heard again - okay, different name and email, exact same wordage - TWICE, second time with added 'Worth a chat?'
No, sir, not in the least.
***
This week I got the Authors Licensing and Copyright Society payout, which was an agreeable sum, maybe it would not actually support me in My Old Age, but it is Better Than A Bat In The Eye With A Burnt Stick. Furthermore, as it is itemised - all the tiddly sums that get totted up - it is a Revelation of what works of mine are still being looked at, wow.
***
Church attendance report pulled after YouGov finds 'fraudulent' responses:
A report claiming the number of young people attending church in England and Wales had skyrocketed has been retracted, after the underlying data was found to be flawed.
The Bible Society's "Quiet Revival" report had been widely reported on since its publication last year and became an accepted part of discourse among many Christians.
Now YouGov, which carried out the research, has told the Bible Society that an internal review of the data found that some of the respondents who completed its survey were "fraudulent".
It has said that quality control measures, which usually remove such responses, were not applied due to human error.
....
But academics questioned the findings, pointing out that the results seemed out of step with other data. Results from the long-running British Social Attitudes Survey, and even the Church of England's own figures, show a long term decline in church attendance.
Experts said that YouGov's methodology - gathering data from volunteers who received cash rewards for their time - left it vulnerable to "bogus respondents" skewing the data.
Murmurs about Mammon distorting the data....
***
Pepys ‘curated’ letters to conceal being offered enslaved boy as bribe – research:
Howe wrote to Pepys to “crave your acceptance” of a “small” enslaved boy, which “I brought home on board for your honour … Hoping he is so well seasoned to endure the cold weather as to live in England.”
Pepys wrote back indignantly rejecting the offer. But Edwards argues this was not because of ethical concerns about slavery, but the optics of looking like a man who could be bribed.
***
This is quite resonant with discussion I was having this week apropos of my 1930s feminists and the less visible ways in which the work was happening, so much so that it's been supposed (it was being claimed at the time) that Feminism Woz Ded: The Way of Water: On the Quiet Power of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Activism.
Check-In Post - March 27th 2026
Mar. 27th, 2026 07:30 pmbadly_knitted posting in get_knittedHello to all members, passers-by, curious onlookers, and shy lurkers, and welcome to our regular daily check-in post. Just leave a comment below to let us know how your current projects are progressing, or even if they're not.
Checking in is NOT compulsory, check in as often or as seldom as you want, this community isn't about pressure it's about encouragement, motivation, and support. Crafting is meant to be fun, and what's more fun than sharing achievements and seeing the wonderful things everyone else is creating?
There may also occasionally be questions, but again you don't have to answer them, they're just a way of getting to know each other a bit better.
This Week's Question: Where do you do most of your crafting?
If anyone has any questions of their own about the community, or suggestions for tags, questions to be asked on the check-in posts, or if anyone is interested in playing check-in host for a week here on the community, which would entail putting up the daily check-in posts and responding to comments, go to the Questions & Suggestions post and leave a comment.
I now declare this Check-In OPEN!
