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Jul. 11th, 2025 07:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Me: But summer is almost over???
(But for real, people taking their summer vacations in August feels so wrong, like wishing someone Merry Christmas in February. Summer is over! Schools are starting! Except here they aren't. Also the sun has kept setting, so emotionally I've had a May that's three months long.)
Also I'm about to disappear into
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(no subject)
Jul. 10th, 2025 11:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I somehow have spent most of my life under the impression that I had already read The Pushcart War, until the plot was actually described to me, at which point it became clear that I'd either read some other Pushcart or some other War but these actual valiant war heroes were actually brand new to me.
The book is science fiction, of a sort, originally published in 1964 and set in 1976 -- Wikipedia tells me that every reprint has moved the date forward to make sure it stays in the future, which I think is very charming -- and purporting to be a work of history for young readers explaining the conflict between Large Truck Corporations and Pugnacious Pushcart Peddlers over the course of one New York City summer. It's a punchy, defiant little book about corporate interest, collective action, and civil disobedience; there's one chapter in particular in which the leaders of the truck companies meet to discuss their master plan of getting everything but trucks off the streets of New York entirely where the metaphor is Quite Dark and Usefully Unsubtle. Also contains charming illustrations! A good read at any time and I'm glad to have finally experienced it.
Incest bingo card
Jul. 11th, 2025 04:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
( Read more... )
today's window into another world
Jul. 10th, 2025 10:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
(I am continuing to think a lot about sensory systems; today I have mostly been discovering how many of the things I thought I half-remembered about nerves are wrong.)
FIC: The Royal Sanctuary: The altar (Tempestuous Tours)
Jul. 10th, 2025 03:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
There is much to look at in the sanctuary, but let us start with the altar. It recreates the altar where drugged captives were once placed before undergoing the Rite of Death, which represented their entry into a Living Death. It was at this stage that new slaves had iron masks locked securely onto their heads, which could not be removed except in the unlikely event that they survived long enough to be freed.
Here on the altar, if you wish, you may place a piece of the jackalfire tree, representing your wish that the evils of the past may be transformed by all of us in the present, bringing about rebirth.
[Translator's note: Yet again, Death Mask is the place to learn more about such matters.]
Things happening this week
Jul. 10th, 2025 07:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
For the first time in forever I have been making The Famous Aubergine Dip (the vegan version with Vegan Worcestershire Sauce, I discovered the bottle I had was use by ages ahead, yay). This required me acquiring aubergines from The Local Shops. There is now, on the corner where there used to be an estate agent (and various other things before that) a flower shop that also sells fruit and vegetables, and they had Really Beautiful, 'I'm ready for my close-up Mr deMille', Aubergines, it was almost a pity to chop them up and saute them.
A little while ago I mentioned being solicited to Give A Paper to a society to which I have spoken (and published in the journal of) heretofore. Blow me down, they have come back suggesting the topic I suggested - thrown together in a great hurry before dashing off to conference last week - is Of Such Significance pretty please could I give the keynote???
Have been asked to be on the advisory board for a funded research project.
A dance in the old dame yet, I guess.
and a lot of people tell me I look like 300 Ghibli characters smashed together
Jul. 10th, 2025 02:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

Saw my first “did using an LLM screw up your business? We can help you find someone to fix it” ad in the wild today. (It was a Fiverr commercial on Youtube.) Wonder how many more of those are coming.
—
From 2023: Novelist Alexander Wales blogged a bit about trying to get an LLM to generate a publishable novel. He made a good-faith effort, took a lot of different thoughtful approaches, and documented enough of it to be a good read. Part 1: “I’ve been trying my hand at writing with the assistance of ChatGPT and occasionally other tools. Mostly, it sucks…” Part 2: “I’m still trying to get an LLM to write me a novel, and experiencing the first major setbacks while working on chapter 2.” (There is no post 3.)
And from this January: “A dad just can’t seem to figure out why his six-year-old daughter wasn’t impressed by the AI toy he gave her for Christmas. […] He writes that he cannot understand why his daughter disabled the dinosaur plushie’s built-in AI voice — opting, instead, to play with it like a regular toy, and dressing it with clothes she made.“
LLMs are an interesting novelty the first time you play with them, but for people with actual creativity — whether it’s writers, artists, or Literally Any Child — you overrun their limits and get bored with them so fast.
(What really gets to me about the dinosaur one is the dad saying he “wasn’t able to really understand where’s the resistance.” Instead of approaching the problem as “let me analyze this toy to figure out why it hasn’t earned my kid’s interest,” he’s gone with “of course the toy is entitled to my kid’s interest, let me analyze her to figure out why she’s ‘resisting’.”)
—
From this week, a writer trying to get ChatGPT to quote/summarize some linked essays: “The lines you quote are not lines I wrote. They are not in the piece. What is going on here?”
Ending on a golden note from FFA: “Hi my name is Loquacious Techbro Midjourney ChatGPT Claude AI and I have long, beige, run on sentences (that’s how I got my name) with purple prose streaks and red flag tips that reach into the stratosphere and icy blue prompts that like using limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like 300 Ghibli characters smashed together(If you don’t know what that is get da hell out of here!).”
(no subject)
Jul. 9th, 2025 07:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Freedom and Necessity kicks off in 1849, with British gentleman James Cobham politely writing to his favorite cousin Richard to explain he has just learned that everybody thinks he is dead, he does not remember the last two months or indeed anything since the last party the two of them attended together, he is pretending to be a groom at the stables that found him, and would Richard mind telling him whether he thinks he ought to go on pretending to be dead and doing a little light investigation on his behalf into wtf is going on?
We soon learn that a.) James has been involved in something mysterious and political; b.) Richard thinks that James ought to be more worried about something differently mysterious and supernatural; c.) both Richard and James have a lot of extremely verbose opinions about the exciting new topic of Hegelian logic; and d.) James and Richard are both in respective Its Complicateds with two more cousins, Susan and Kitty, and at this point Susan and Kitty kick in with a correspondence of their own as Susan decides to exorcise her grief about the [fake] death of the cousin she Definitely Was Not In Love With by investigating why James kept disappearing for months at a time before he died.
By a few chapters in, I was describing it to
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Then I got a few more chapters in and learned more about WTF indeed was up with James and texted Kate like 'WAIT IS THIS A LYMONDALIKE?' to which she responded 'I thought it was obvious!' And I was still having a wonderful time, and continued doing so all through, but could not stop myself from bursting into laughter every time the narrative lovingly described James' pale and delicate-looking yet surprisingly athletic figure or his venomous light voice etc. etc. ( mid-book spoilers )
Anyway, if you've read a Lymond, you know that there's often One Worthy Man in a Lymond book who is genuinely wise and can penetrate Lymond's self-loathing to gently explain to him that he should use his many poisoned gifts for the better. Freedom and Necessity dares to ask the question: what if that man? were Dreamy Friedrich Engels. Which is, frankly, an amazing choice.
Now even as I write this, I know that
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And what about the radical politics, anyway? Brust and Bull have absolutely done their reading and research, and I very much enjoy and appreciate the point of view that they're writing from. I do think it's quite funny when Engels is like "James, your first duty is to your class," and James is like "well, I am a British aristocrat, so that's depressing," and Engels is like "you don't have to be! you can just decide to be of the proletariat! any day you can decide that! and then your first duty will be to the proletariat!" which like .... not that you can't decide to be in solidarity with the working class ..... but this is sort of a telling stance in an epistolary novel that does not actually center a single working-class POV. How pleasant to keep writing exclusively about verbose and erudite members of the British gentry who have conveniently chosen to be of the proletariat! James does of course have working-class comrades, and he respects them very much, and is tremendously angsty about their off-page deaths. So it goes.
On the other hand, at this present moment, I honestly found it quite comforting to be reading a political adventure novel set in 1849, in the crashing reactionary aftermath to the various revolutions of 1848. One of the major political themes of the book is concerned with how to keep on going through the low point -- how to keep on working and believing for the better future in the long term, even while knowing that unfortunately it hasn't come yet and given the givens probably won't for some time. Acknowledging the low point and the long game is a challenging thing for fiction to do, and I appreciate it a lot when I see it. I'd like to see more of it.
ao3 just imported FictionAlley
Jul. 10th, 2025 02:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Well, I say just; it was a few days ago. But I just spotted the announcement on the home page:
June 2025 Newsletter, Volume 201
Published: Sat 05 Jul 2025 07:52PM CEST Comments: 18
I'm obviously having kind of mixed feelings about it. But first and foremost, the fact that they're preserved!! that the stories I read back in ninth grade are most likely on ao3 now!!! makes me really happy, and more relieved than I expected. I've checked back in on FA a couple of times in recent years and it always worried me a little that the site wasn't up anymore -- with how huge it was, the loss of fanfics would be enormous. A part of me is also really curious to head over and see if I recognise anything. But although I personally don't feel that writing (not to mention reading!) fanfiction is the same as endorsement in monetary terms, I still don't really think I could read HP fic without kind of a bad taste in my mouth. It's a relief just to know that it's there!
today I have mostly been at the plot
Jul. 9th, 2025 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I had a first-thing physio appointment, so I dragged myself over to the hospital for that and then nestled down in my Surrounded By Green and... mostly read Murderbot, with occasional fruit harvest and weeding.
(I have also had lots of opportunities to practise self-compassion, both in re the number of things I did not manage to harvest before they went over and in terms of having realised within the last half hour or so that one of my pens has vanished from all of the bags it was nominally in; I hope that if I go and poke around the table etc tomorrow it will rematerialise...)
Wednesday is back on schedule
Jul. 9th, 2025 07:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
What I read
Finished Murder in the Trembling Lands and okay, you have a mystery based on something that happened during some very confusing battle events back in the past, and this is all taking place during the upheavals of carnival in New Orleans decades later, and people lying, giving their versions of past events based on gossip, rumour, speculation etc etc, and possibly this was not really one to be reading in fits and starts.
Zen Cho, Behind Frenemy Lines (2025). This was really good: it does what I consider a desideratum particularly in contemporary-set romance, it has a good deal of hinterland going on around the central couple and their travails. And is Zen Cho going to give us a political thriller anytime, hmmmm?
Natasha Brown, Universality (2025), which I picked up recently as a Kobo deal. I was fairly meh about this - kind of a 'The Way We Live Now' work, about class and the media and establishing narratives and the compromises people make, I found it clunky (after the preceding!) if short, though was a bit startled by the coincidental appearance of the mouse research I mentioned earlier this week being cited by an old uni friend of one of the characters, now veering alt-right.
On the go
Also a Kobo deal, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise (2024): in my days of reading fat family sagas set in T'North, this would have been the 'to clogs again' section of the narrative.... it's sort of vaguely compelling in its depressing way.
Up next
Have got various things which were Kobo deals lined up, not sure how far any of them appeal. Also new Literary Review, which has my letter in it. The new Sally Smith mystery not out for another week, boo.
[embodiment] some post-surgical notes
Jul. 8th, 2025 10:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Apparently I'm not writing up a detailed version of this, so in brief...