humanist + humorist

Machine-Generated Garbage Hall of Shame: “What these bots are designed to do is essentially a matter of statistical programming, and presenting them as reliable sources of information can be misguided, foolish, exploitative, or even dangerous, as demonstrated by the examples on this list.”

Similarly, AI Hallucination Cases: “This database tracks legal decisions in cases where generative AI produced hallucinated content – typically fake citations, but also other types of arguments.”

Not to be confused with cases about AI hallucinations. “A solar firm in Minnesota is suing Google for defamation after the tech giant’s shoddy AI Overviews feature allegedly made up wild lies about the company — and significantly hurt its business as a result.”

“The unreliability and hallucinations themselves are the hook — the intermittent reward, to keep the user running prompts and hoping they’ll get a win this time. This is why you see previously normal techies start evangelising AI coding on LinkedIn or Hacker News like they saw a glimpse of God and they’ll keep paying for the chatbot tokens until they can just see a glimpse of Him again. And you have to as well. This is why they act like they joined a cult.”

“Executives and directors from around the world have called me to say that they can’t fund any projects if they don’t pretend there is AI in them. Non-profits have asked me if we could pretend to do AI because it’s the only way to fund infrastructure in the developing world. Readers keep emailing me to say that their contracts are getting cancelled because someone smooth-talked their CEO into believing that they don’t need developers.”

My website host, Siteground, has been trying to shove AI hype into their services lately. I can’t help wondering how many customers are actually asking for this, versus how many VCs and managers are insisting they’ve gotta be on the bandwagon. Especially given my fun new personal experience of bringing a problem to their customer-service LLM, where its very first response included a hallucination — advising me to change a nonexistent setting it just made up.

I’ve had a streak of bad luck with “books I read based on recs, with premises that sound like I should be into them” lately. Have a paragraph of grumbling for each of those, then I’ll get around to a nice rec.

Silver Under Nightfall, by Rin Chupeco – Social-outcast vampire-hunter Remy has a sexy gothic monster-fighting mad-science adventure, which involves ending up in a throuple with a hot vampire couple. Pretty sure I got this off a “canon poly” reclist somewhere? I didn’t make it to the poly. Reviews say it’s Castlevania fanfic with the serial numbers filed off; maybe that’s the problem, that it’s written for a reader who has a pre-existing investment in [the character that became] Remy, so it didn’t manage to get me interested in him.

Metal from Heaven, by August Clarke – In a magic-touched version of the industrial revolution, Marney survives a massacre of striking workers including the rest of her family, gets picked up by a group of train robbers, and eventually agrees to pose as an aristocrat and seduce the industrial baron’s daughter as part of a complicated fake-marriage revenge scheme. I dropped it around the time when just starting to discuss maybe setting up the still-a-child Marney for a role in this scheme…and I looked at the timestamp on the audiobook, and this was 4 hours in. (Also: Marney had gotten one scene where she did a bit of the pseudo-magic she has for worldbuilding reasons, and I still hadn’t gotten to the point where it came up again.)

The Gracekeepers, by Kirsty Logan – In a world mostly covered by water, North is a performer on a boat-based traveling circus (her best friend is her partner, a dancing bear), and Callanish handles burials on a tiny island where she lives alone. Pretty sure I got this one off a “canon f/f” reclist, and again, it was a long ways into the book when I realized the f/f couple hadn’t even met yet, and I wasn’t invested enough in either of them as individuals to keep slogging onward to see if I liked the romance.

The Archive Undying, by Emma Mieko Candon – Something something giant robots. I didn’t remember the plot of this one at all, just my general impression of “maybe I would have an easier time following this if I was more into giant robots as a trope.” Then I looked at the Goodreads reviews to refresh my memory…and, oh, they’re full of comments like “while Emma Mieko Candon may have known exactly what it was she was writing about, she neglected to make it clear enough in the text for the reader to get any sort of handle on the worldbuilding” and “There is a fine line between a book being confusing and it being nonsense with pretty writing.” So apparently it’s just Like That.

Dreamships, by Melissa Scott – In a 1990s idea of the future where “put on your VR headset and get high for a few hours” is how you do the equivalent of searching the internet, a space pilot/cyberpunk hacker gets hired to find a high-powered corporate’s missing-and-supposedly-dead brother. Picked this up because I wanted more Melissa Scott after reading Shadow Man. The main character here does her own version of “immersing you in the day-to-day life of her sci-fi job on an alien planet with weird future tech,” and I did like that part. But my attention still wandered before they got around to starting the spaceship mission.

Salvation Day, by Kali Wallace – Group of rebels try to break into a spaceship that was abandoned and condemned after a virus killed everyone on board. As I’m sure nobody could have predicted, this blows up in their face! I genuinely don’t remember anything about this one — it was for a book club that I didn’t make it to, so I might have just procrastinated long enough to miss the meeting, and then decided to let the checkout lapse. If you’ve read it and think I should give it another shot, let me know.

Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky – A fascist crackdown on Earth involves shipping off the undesirables, including our political-activist professor narrator, to work on exploring/mining/conquering alien planets. I still have this one checked out right now, so there’s a chance I’ll listen more? The whole “alien sci-fi version of trying to survive a fascist labor camp” premise is working really well. On the other hand, it’s like looking at a cool painting of an alien landscape. It’s really neat to look at, I’m glad I took the time to check it out, but I’m not feeling enthusiastic about staring at it for another 11 hours, you know?

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Will Save The Galaxy For Food by Yahtzee Croshaw – This is the good one!

Read it all, enjoyed it, went on to also plow through the sequel, Will Destroy The Galaxy For Cash. (There’s a third installment, Will Leave The Galaxy For Good, but right now it looks like it’s only available on Audible. Not even in print anywhere yet, there’s just an audiobook.)

It has a very “what if Discworld but for sci-fi” premise. There was a Golden Age of Star Piloting, where everyone was having Flash Gordon adventures, liberating alien species from supervillains with robot armies, falling in love with alien princesses, men were Real Men/women were Real Women/small blue furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were Real Small Blue Furry Creatures From Alpha Centauri — you get the picture. Then space-travel tech improved enough to make them obsolete, and now our hero is one of many ex-star-pilots who hang around the lunar spaceport, leveraging their personal tales of adventure to run petty scams on tourists.

Until our guy gets hired to pose as Jacques McKeown, basically Space Gilderoy Lockhart, a novelist who ripped off all the star pilots’ life stories for his bestselling novel series. All to impress one of McKeown’s biggest fans, the overenthusiastic teen son of a terrifying interplanetary crime lord. Shenanigans ensue. Half the cast are running some kind of scam/con, and most are constantly flailing to keep it from blowing up in their faces. The second book has our hero (getting roped into) reprising his Jacques McKeown role to appear at a fan convention, as a cover for a heist, with a crew that includes his former nemesis who’s now in an ex-supervillain support group.

It’s consistently low-key funny. It hits that classic Pratchett/Adams balance of “this is ridiculously absurd and over-the-top, but also, a perfectly on-point insight into how people work.” Star-pilot swearing is based on math terms. Along with the novelized version of the Golden Age of Star Pilots, we run into the theme-park version of the Golden Age, and then the cargo-cult version of the Golden Age. The plot regularly turns on our hero’s spaceship being rigged-up with some workaround born of a lot of knowledge, creativity, and motivation, but very little money. His blaster has a setting with the handmade label “Solve All Immediate Problems.”

My one “oof, too bad about that” feeling is that the cast is pretty skewed towards dudes. And more so in the second book than the first. The women do feel like real characters, they’re as unique and well-developed as the guys are, it’s just noticeable that there’s not as many. (No queer content, either, but there’s very little straight content and it’s mostly in the background, so I didn’t mind as much.)

It’s good, it’s funny, highly recommend that you check out the first two, and I’ll get my hands on the threequel eventually.

Video for all of them, too, that’s impressive!

I recognize a couple of the early ones (1937 was the Jeeves & Wooster theme song, and 1939 was Somewhere Over The Rainbow), but it’s not until 1960 that a switch flips and I go “oh, okay, I’m familiar with all of these.” (Doesn’t falter until the ’00s, when I start not knowing some of the rap/hip-hop songs, and then in the past 10 years I guess I’m just not listening to new music enough.)

The Beatles have the most winners, they’re in here 4 times. Fred Astaire has 2, Judy Garland has 2, Elvis has 2, Queen has 3, Eminem has 2…probably a couple other repeats I missed, there doesn’t seem to be a text list. Genuinely surprised Taylor Swift never shows up — her output as a whole has to be a bigger deal than a lot of the winners from the past 2 decades, they just had at least one breakout hit each.

“Link the most-recognizable song from the year you were born” could be a fun meme…except that if I link mine, you’ll think I’m kidding.

I've had new followers find their way onto DW since the last time I did this, so...if you want to be on the filter for my locked posts, drop a comment here and say so! (If you can see this post, you're already on it.)

It's nothing hugely dramatic or sensitive. These days it's mostly "family stuff I did recently" with a side of "grumbling about AO3." Most exciting it ever got was probably "the saga of how my housemate had a terrible time taking care of a new cat."

(Not this cat. This is just a general cuddly photo to thank you for reading.)

Just finished watching this season, and had a whole post’s worth of thoughts, because wow, an incredible mixed bag. Some of the biggest quality whiplash I’ve ever seen in a Marvel thing.

One of the strengths of “What Ifs” is the ability to throw together new groups of characters who didn’t get to interact in canon, right? To dig into whole new dynamics that wouldn’t have fit into the main storyline, to explore and have fun with them.

Well, some of those are amazing. Episode 2 features Agatha Harkness as a Golden Age of Hollywood actress, while Kingo was already a Bollywood star. They’re both sassy divas who love playing to a crowd, they egg each other on and fight via magical dance-off, every moment is gold. I laughed so hard.

On the other end of the spectrum, episode 6 features versions of Shang-Chi and Kate Bishop who were born into the 1872 Old West…and there’s just nothing to it?

If you like classic Westerns, it could work for you just based on the tropes, but for the characters…I don’t know why it’s these two and not anybody else. I don’t know why they’re buddies with each other. They don’t have interesting 1872 versions of their canon powers or specialties. (Why are you doing Old West Hawkeye if you’re not going to come up with Old West trick arrows??)

(Conspiracy theory: this was originally written to be about Shang-Chi and Katy Chen. Katy could’ve done generic archery when the plot called for it, and the dialogue could’ve gotten all kinds of material based the friendship dynamic. Then someone made the writers swap in Kate — maybe because she’s a more popular character? — even though nobody ever figured out “what fun dynamic they could have instead” or “why this other friendship would be compelling to watch”.)

The other great ones are episode 3 (the Red Guardian invites himself on a team-up accidental-friendship road trip with the Winter Soldier) and episode 4 (follow-up to the earlier Party Thor episode, Darcy and Howard the Duck are still married, and various Cosmic MCU characters are trying to kidnap their newborn egg).

Episode 1 is really half-and-half. The good part is a friendship between Bruce Banner and Sam Wilson, which actually has some thought put into it! Sam also leads a new Avengers team-up that’s almost completely “why are these people here, other than some executive wanted to put their names in the credits?” Moon Knight is in it, and I kinda wish they hadn’t bothered, that’s how bad it is!

Listen, the MCU characters who should have the most deeply-personal reaction to “Bruce desperately trying to avoid getting triggered into Hulking-out” are Marc Spector and Bucky Barnes. The writers put both of them in this episode. And then didn’t do anything with that. Why?

(I opened the episode to look for a screencap, saw Monica Rambeau, and realized I had 100% forgotten Monica was in this episode. That’s how much character-specific stuff she has to do.)

Episode 5 focuses on Riri Williams, so it might be better if Ironheart was released before this (as planned) and we all had more investment in Riri Williams? Then again, it might not. Episodes 7-8 involve a team-up of characters who mostly aren’t in the mainline MCU (one is Peggy Carter, but two are What If originals, and one’s from the X-Men). I feel like I don’t know enough about Storm to have strong feelings about whether she was wasted here or not. Any Storm fans want to weigh in?

…Basically, the only episodes I’d recommend watching are 2, 3, and 4. Maybe 1 if you especially like Sam and/or Bruce, maybe 7-8 if you like cross-universal team-ups and Watcher-related worldbuilding (or just want to see how Darcy and Howard's kid turned out).

(And, Marvel, if you’re giving Oscar Isaac a tiny role in the big Avengers team-up movies…please give him something better to do than this.)

I’m using the DW version of the original post as the masterpost, not gonna try to keep the WordPress mirror up-to-date. Off to add some new notes…

 

 

Related: an “oh, hey…” moment…

There’s a brief reference in Sybil Exposed to a diagnostic method that Sybil’s therapist reportedly used. As the author describes it:

After starting at the University of Kentucky in 1967/68, Dr. Connie Wilbur “showed residents how to test for [MPD]. She recommended that a patient be hypnotized, then encouraged to look into a mirror until someone different appeared. The patient was then asked if the person in the mirror had a name and an age. If the answer was yes, the diagnosis was multiple personality. Connie did not seem to realize what recent studies have shown: many people, even normal ones, will see different faces in a mirror within minutes of gazing.” (147-148)

(The book is from 2011, and apparently the paper that first named the “strange-face-in-the-mirror illusion” was from 2010. She meant really recent studies.)

It really sounds like both Jane Phillips and Christine Beauchamp could’ve been experiencing a version of this. They don’t describe a whole cinematic experience of seeing the figure in the mirror move and speak — they just describe looking at their face for a while, seeing it become someone else’s face, and connecting it to a separate presence. (Christine knew she was part of a system, so she was able to ID a specific headmate she already had some contact with. Jane was diagnosed years later, for other reasons, and only connected this in retrospect.)

So! Sybil’s doctor thinks that everyone who sees this illusion is multiple. And Sybil’s exposing author points out it’s an illusion everyone sees, inviting you to conclude that nobody is multiple.

But, look — compare this for a second to the mirror box illusion (video), the one used in mirror therapy for phantom limb pain. That works on everyone too! You can trick your brain into processing, say, “the mirror image of your right hand” as “actually your left hand” — and it still works whether or not you physically have a left hand.

Makes sense that everyone can optical-illusion their brain into processing “your face” as “somebody else’s face,” and it works whether you have other people in your head or not.

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Finally, real quick, a Moon Knight thing:

From the strange-face article above: “The author, Italian psychologist Giovanni Caputo, describes his set up which seems to reliably trigger the illusion: you need a room lit only by a dim lamp (he suggests a 25W bulb) that is placed behind the sitter, while the participant stares into a large mirror placed about 40 cm in front.”

The first time Steven perceives Marc acting differently from him in a reflective surface, the shot looks like this:

Hmm. Hmmmm.

(A second later Steven turns on a better light, and the mysterious not-him motion disappears. For now.)

The guide to AO3 tagging that I wrote in 2013, and last updated in 2017 was wildly out-of-date! Who could’ve guessed?

Just finished giving it a significant rewrite. Fixed a bunch of links. Updated some technical and policy references. Should hold us steady for a while.

(I put it in a series with the new AO3 upload of the Metatag Survey results, that’s what prompted the revisit.)

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Speaking of revisiting older works…

A few weeks ago, I got through a reread of the two main fics of Republic of Heaven Community Radio. When I was posting the last of it in 2015, it was right around the time I dropped the canon, for being deeply upsetting in ways that I finally realized weren’t going to get better. Spent a lot of time not revisiting even my own fic, because the reminders were too unpleasant. So…this is the first time in 10 years that I’ve actually reread it.

Book 1 holds up really well!

Book 2 has so many pacing issues. There are elements I introduced but never did anything interesting with, that should’ve either been expanded or dropped. Scenes that should’ve been explicit foreshadowing/buildup for other scenes later on. At least one conversation that happens after a fight, that I wish had written happening before the fight. A few moments that would’ve felt solidly, thematically linked if they all happened in the same chapter, but they’re spread out in a way that feels scattershot and disjointed instead.

If canon hadn’t been such a kick in the teeth, I would’ve done a rewrite of this years ago. I can see the outline of a better version, the way all the parts would’ve been reshaped into a stronger whole.

…Which still doesn’t mean I have the interest or motivation to actually do that whole rewriting project. Just feeling wistful about the alternate universe where I still had the drive to do it in 2017.

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In happier news, I just recently started a reread of The Dark Lords of Nerima. (Or rather, I’m having a TTS app read it to me. At work, mostly. Needed a change of pace from podcasts.)

It’s the first of 3 parts in a long, involved crossover, in which the Ranma 1/2 crew get involved in the Sailor-Senshi-versus-Dark-Kingdom conflict when they take in a fugitive youma, get mistaken for a powerful new enemy by both sides, and realize their safest move is to just…play along. Shenanigans ensue.

The writing of Rumiko-Takahashi-style comedy is sublime. I remembered it was good, but not how good it was, or that it was on-point from the start. At the same time, it puts so much thought and detail into making the Dark Kingdom an ancient, terrifying threat that everyone takes seriously. The plot-inciting youma is a well-drawn OC, who starts off just playing both sides and looking out for herself…but then, wouldn’t you know it, the Power of Friendship starts to get her.

So that’s going much better!

Highly recommended, even if you don’t know both series. It does a lovely job of (re)introducing all the characters and helping you keep track of them, even the massive Ranma ensemble, plus it fills out the ranks of the Dark Kingdom with other original youma who fit right in.

…also, hey, Netflix has the 2024 Ranma anime remake? This might be what pushes me to check it out.

Cool video: Using AO3’s data dump from a few years ago to build unreasonably-detailed maps of tags — characters, relationships, then freeforms — and how they relate to each other:
 

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Fandom synning annoyance of the day: Marvel wranglers decided to syn the “Captain America (Movies)” tag to a new “Captain America (Chris Evans Movies)” tag. (They also made a separate “Captain America (Anthony Mackie Movies)” tag.)

A lot of writers use specific movie titles as fandom tags. It makes sense to me if you want to syn things like “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” to a general Evans tag, and “Captain America: Brave New World” to a general Mackie tag.

But they’ve taken away the option for a “general Cap subset of the MCU” tag. If you previously used the general tag because you wanted to include the entire ongoing Captain America series, movies 1-4 and beyond, this goes “nope, that’s not what you meant, you were only writing about the first 3.” If you were following the general tag because you wanted to read about the whole series, you now have a feed that excludes fic about the Sam-centric movies. If you miss that this even happened, and don’t update your feeds, a lot of Sam fic will just never be shown to you.

…and yeah, I’m aware that I don’t, personally, write enough Cap fic of any kind for my opinion on this to matter to anyone! Which is why I’m not out campaigning for them to change it, just grumbling on my own blog about it.

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Wrangling annoyance of the day that we actually can blame on users: A bunch of wranglers did an audit on the tag “pinning” (currently not canonical, and not synned to anything).

Of the works it’s used on, 27.9% actually involve “pinning.” The other 72.1% are by writers who don’t know how to spell “pining.”

There are a lot of good reasons why we shouldn’t mass-email thousands of random AO3 users and say “hey, fix your spelling.” I get that. But sometimes I daydream about it anyway.

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Some actual progress with No Fandom freeforms is happening behind the scenes.

You might think we should be publicizing that more. It’s good! It’s progress! People should hear good news about wrangling sometimes!

But: if we make a celebratory post about “good news, we synned Tag X”, it’ll get a thousand responses going “wait, Tag X has existed since 2014, why are you so dysfunctional that nobody managed to syn it until 2024? Also, when are you going to get to the equally-obvious problems with tags Y, and Z, and–“

And, let’s be real, none of these complaints are unfair.

But: We have a process for synning things like Tag X now. This is one of many things where TW leadership has spent a decade holding out for the Perfect Process, and in the meantime we had No Process At All, which has built up a terrifyingly large backlog.

What if there’s an official public post about it…the post gets negative reinforcement…someone gets spooked, they pull the plug on the whole thing…and we go back to having No Process At All? That would be worse on every level. Nobody wants to risk that. We hates it, precious.

So, yeah. Positive things are happening somewhere. Wranglers are mostly not talking about it. For at least some of us, this is why.

"Can you guess if the word is an antidepressants drug or a Tolkien character?" (A couple of them are gimmes, but some are genuinely tough!)

Working out which Houses correspond to which planets in the Locked Tomb series.

Visual references that absolutely helped me track the action while reading the first two books: Necromancers and cavaliers from Gideon the Ninth, and a whole massive character-design lineup from Harrow the Ninth.

2020 interview with Tamsyn Muir: "I know lots of people don’t wish for their work to be used by fanfiction writers. I think that should be respected. I mean, I think their reasons are wrongheaded and that they totally misunderstand what is going on, but the fanfiction community is generally generous with people who say they don’t want stuff written about their property. I hope my fandom is writing long serious epics, and writing parody pieces that make me look stupid, and weird porn, and ships I never saw coming."

Long list of punny restaurant names, suggested by one of the writers for The Good Place.

"this video game i've been playing since i was a kid called Wizard101 updated and added a new world where the villain essentially pretends to be Khonshu, and they added a character called Loon Knight."

Somebody wrote to Dear Prudence, confessing to (in short) sending anon hate to the antis who attacked them for writing darkfic. Prudie's perfectly on-point response boils down to "you have to stop bullying these people, instead you should channel your spite into writing more darkfic."

"Through the use of comic book conventions, readers are guided through the decipherment of logographic writing from Central Mexico and, in the process, are shown how colonization has limited our contemporary understanding of ancient Indigenous people."

"I’ve wanted to try my had at drawing [Wally Wood's 22 panels that always work] all myself over the years, and decided to finally give it a crack with a twist: could I also tell a STORY using those exact panel layouts?"

"But why is the DeviantART stamp? Who was the originator of the DeviantART stamp, how did they become so popular? This question was posed on a forum I frequent, and I was unable to find any existing write-ups, so I sought to answer it myself."

Fun transcript of ChatGPT saying “whoops, no, I was mistaken” and then giving a different wrong answer, half a dozen times in a row.

That link is hosted on the company servers, so in case they go down, here’s a copy for posterity:

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