humanist + humorist

but tell me again how LLMs are great for business

2026-05-21T02:31:43Z

Webtoon is teaming up with an LLM avatar platform. The plan, for creators who opt in, is to make chatbots based on their characters. None of these bots have actually been made yet! But I’m sure this will go as well as every other company that’s successfully used LLMs for in-character interactions! Like…uhhhh…

“Parasitical SEO companies are buying respected online news outlets in order to harvest their reputations before leaving behind a ruined shell. One organisation linked to this sort of activity is Clickout Media, which bought a network of UK-based video game sites replacing human writers with AI ‘journalists’ and packing them with links to offshore gambling websites.”

“After a team member summoned Copilot to correct a typo in a PR of mine, Copilot edited my PR description to include and ad for itself and Raycast.“

“We find that: (1) agentic tasks are uniquely expensive, consuming 1000x more tokens than code reasoning and code chat, with input tokens rather than output tokens driving the overall cost; (2) token usage is highly variable and inherently stochastic: runs on the same task can differ by up to 30x in total tokens, and higher token usage does not translate into higher accuracy; … frontier models fail to accurately predict their own token usage (with weak-to-moderate correlations, up to 0.39) and systematically underestimate real token costs.“

“I have seen a lot in my decades of industry (and Microsoft) experience, but I had never seen an organization so far from reality. My day-one problem was therefore not to ramp up on new technology, but rather to convince an entire org, up to my skip-skip-level, that they were on a death march.”

“An AI coding agent designed to help a small software company streamline its tasks instead blew a hole through its business in just nine seconds. PocketOS founder Jer Crane, said that the AI coding agent Cursor — powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 model — deleted the company’s entire production database and backups with a single call to its cloud provider, Railway, on April 24.”

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Movement on that prospective Fake News/Pundit RPF AO3 update

2026-05-20T18:18:53Z

The Daily/Colbert tag tree proposal I was working on back in February has gotten some official internal feedback! Including some points I’m happy to incorporate into an updated proposal. (And some I’m still pushing back on. Final version of the rewrite TBD.)

Notes about some changes I’m personally on board with, in case anyone’s curious…

There aren’t any works left in the Full Frontal fandom tag, and AO3’s official policy is “don’t include 0-use tags in any tag trees.” So that’s out of the proposal. Unless somebody reading this post has a Sam Bee fic they can crosspost real quick…? (I checked my own Sam-involving fanworks, but they’re all set before Full Frontal started airing (2016), so it wouldn’t feel honest to tag that as a fandom.)

( Stephen Colbert has appointed Stephen Colbert, former host of “The Colbert Report,” as ombudsman to ensure that the final season of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” remains free from liberal bias. )

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Fandom-dropping progress, May 15 report

2026-05-15T05:18:11Z

Down to 875 fandoms.

Only 30 have any tags to wrangle. (And, listen, some of these are the exact same tags-to-wrangle as last month — held up by issues like “they’re part of a crossover, and the other fandom they should be sent to isn’t canonized yet.”)

Finished that second A-to-Z sweep, dropping “all the Korean/Chinese/Japanese webtoons where I’m not caught up with canon.” And now I’m working on a third, dropping “English-language webcomics with only 1 fic, which was posted more than a year ago.”

The Axe Cop tag had its first fanfic in 2011, and the second was in 2025, so you can never just assume a fandom is too inactive to ever get a fic again. But at least with these comics, I feel confident about “this fandom won’t suddenly get a ton of new tags, and suffer from not having a wrangler paying attention.”

AMT updates: No responses yet to the Fake News tree proposal. And there’s a couple writers who apparently decided just this past month “time to back up my 20-year-old TCR fics on AO3,” so I’m feeling extra-wistful that they didn’t have updated tags available to work with.

To be clear, it’s not like the whole process is frozen: other AMT requests are getting approved. (The new metatag for A:TLA & Related Fandoms went live the other day.) Might just not be my lucky month.

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Erin Reads: Pet Shop of Horrors, Collector’s Edition (volume 4, chapters 20-21)

2026-05-14T20:27:58Z

Reread thread for the first part of Pet Shop of Horrors volume 4 (Seven Seas edition), which is the back half of Volume 5 (TokyoPop edition).

Mastodon, Bluesky, affiliate links, go!

( But then, my dear detective’s not the brightest in the bunch. )

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Moon Knight rewatchalong + related links

2026-05-13T18:11:24Z

A couple FFA anons mentioned watching Moon Knight for the first time, so somebody started an anniversary rewatch! …Interest dropped off pretty hard after the first few episodes, sigh. (I didn’t start it. I did end up finishing it.) But at least a couple nice observations came out of it.

I used this as an opportunity to tackle a project I’ve been meaning to do for a while: “cleaning up the MK episode transcripts I saved from a slightly-dodgy website.” Here’s one nice simple file with all the Moon Knight transcripts.

There are other enhancements I pondered throwing in, like “links with more info about the research topics Steven references” or “extended lyrics for some of the music” (somebody linked this Reddit post about the Arabic/Egyptian background music and how relevant the lyrics are, good stuff). Maybe next rewatch.

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Promo’ing some comics crowdfunds + Dreamwidth

2026-05-07T23:56:41Z

The Big Soup: Growing up Autistic is a graphic memoir on Kickstarter that’s 92% funded, but with only a few hours to go

Red Flower is a manga-style project on BackerKit that’s only 50% funded, and with less than a week to go. From a small publisher that lost most of their original print run to the Diamond bankruptcy, so they really need community support right now

If you’re looking for new comics to check out, maybe throw them some money?

Over on DW:

Dreamwidth point exchange ending on May 14 — if you want to try out DW’s paid features, comment on that post within the next week, then the OP will match you with someone who has DW points to donate

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can we handle adding things to the spectrum without kicking things out of the spectrum, or

2026-05-07T01:40:51Z

So I just read a piece of meta, which I’m going to avoid linking, because I don’t want this to feel like a callout or a slam on the writer. The writer was fine.

The quick summary is, [character] gets interpreted by fandom as autistic, and the writer explained “actually, [character] is intellectually disabled. They might also be autistic — you can be more than one thing at a time! — but they’re definitely intellectually disabled, because of [list of symptoms].”

…And, look, not to be all When I Was Your Age, but: (sits back in rocking chair, takes a long drag on pipe) when I was a young whippersnapper in school, back in the stone ages, all those things were just autism.

When the term “autism spectrum” was canonized in the DSM-5 in 2013, it folded together 4 different previous categories. One was Asperger’s syndrome, which specifically had “doesn’t test as being intellectually disabled” in the diagnostic criteria. The other 3, including the disorder previously known as Just Autism, didn’t have that exclusion.

So here’s some anecdata on how that played out in practice, back when I was in grade school. I knew students who were diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome — those were the kids who were intellectually able to keep up with standard-to-gifted classes, they just had struggles with other issues. And I knew kids who were diagnosed with Autism Classic, who were mostly in the “special ed” classes.

I can’t swear to the exact diagnosis of every special-ed kid. I was their schoolmate, not their doctor. Possibly some of them had the other two diagnoses (CDD and PDD-NOS) that ended up in the autism spectrum? There’s at least one that I know had Down’s syndrome, which is from a whole separate category.

One thing I can tell you is, in casual conversation, it was pretty standard to use “the autistic kids” to describe the whole group. Which was at least accurate-enough that no teacher or authority figure ever told us not to use it.

In elementary school — maybe third grade? — I remember one particular kid who was in the special ed classes at first, but got “mainstreamed” into my class for a year. The rest of us were specifically told that his diagnosis was autism, and that didn’t change. So, even though the term “autism spectrum” wasn’t official yet, the system did have different approaches available for different autistic people — not just on-paper but in-practice, enough to be understood by random unrelated small children.

(In retrospect, I wish I knew more details. How much support was this kid getting? Was it enough to make the “mainstreaming” work for him? But obviously the adults weren’t gossiping about those aspects to unrelated small children.)

Fast-forward a decade or so, and the DSM-5 merges all the diagnoses. The conversations about it were overwhelmingly positive — as in, I’m not sure I ever heard anyone complaining about it.

Which makes sense, for a lot of good reasons. If multiple “separate” conditions turn out to have the same underlying mechanism, then of course medical science should group them together. If people with the “less severe” condition would benefit from some of the support that the “more severe” condition gets, then of course we should make it accessible to all of them. If there’s not enough recognition that a diagnosis has a range of presentations that need different approaches, then yeah, let’s put the word “spectrum” in The Official Term. (Also: if you have a diagnosis that’s named after a Nazi doctor, it’s never a bad time to rename that.)

…And then I read this post, and I think, oh no. We, as a society, haven’t made a successful conceptual shift from “autism needs all the Classic Autism symptoms, otherwise it’s Asperger’s, which is something else” to “it’s all just autism.” The concept we’re shifting to is “autism is just the Classic Asperger’s symptoms, and if you have the other Classic Autism symptoms, that’s something else.”

Can we actually handle the idea of making a spectrum this broad? Or are we doomed to always fall back on moving it around — that is, only including one new batch of people in the category if we redefine another batch of people out of it?

Ugh.

…again, to be clear, this is all a reaction to one person’s post. I have no idea how widespread this mental framing is. Or if it’s having any negative effects for people IRL, as opposed to just flipping the direction of “[character] isn’t coded as autistic, you can tell because they [do/don’t] have these intellectual-disability symptoms” meta.

But it bothered me enough to vent about, so here we are.

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Updates on two previous posts

2026-05-03T20:14:48Z

Update 1: Finally made it to that drag show!

I got a mid-week text about it, not saying it was canceled again, but that it was moving to a different venue. Slightly less convenient than the original, there was an extra bus ride involved, but it did exist!

As suspected, it was tiny. Little hole-in-the-wall bar/lounge, a dozen customers in the whole place, plenty of empty chairs, no stage, the queens just sauntered between the tables. The online signup had all these conditions -- bring your e-ticket, bring ID, bring the specific credit card you made the purchase with -- yeah, nobody on-site checked any of those things. I think some people showed up without realizing there was a performance at all, they just hung out at the bar and enjoyed it for free.

All that said, the performers were beautiful and talented, they did not let the small crowd slow them down, and I'm glad I gave them my money.

Update 2: Found the thing!

This pattern I remembered as "some kind of screensaver, probably" isn't from a computer screen at all. It's...a novelty lamp, I think?

Turns out the color-squares-playing gadget was still findable in my parents' basement. Short video on Bluesky, here's a screencap:

Stickers on the back:
- Underwriters' Laboratories, Inc. (R) LISTED PORTABLE LAMP ISSUE NO. E-383
- MATRIX MOD. 6019

The official packaging is long gone, so there's no telling what name it was actually sold under, and I can't find anything online referring to these model numbers. I don't suppose any of you know an archive that keeps records of this kind of thing...?

ETA:

Underwriters' Laboratories is a safety certification company, and they have a database of products they've certified, but this model number doesn't come up in the publicly-available version
Dad is guessing the source is "Spencer's Gifts in the 1970s" -- that would've been the era's top source of Weird Stuff That's Not Practical It Just Looks Neat, and "just put a neat pattern on a VHS tape, sell it for people to play in their VCRs" wasn't an option yet (or at least, not a profitable one)

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Erin Reads: Pet Shop of Horrors, Collector’s Edition (volume 3, chapters 18-19)

2026-05-01T05:03:03Z

Reread thread for the end of Pet Shop of Horrors volume 3 (Seven Seas edition), which is the first half of Volume 5 (TokyoPop edition).

Mastodon, Bluesky, affiliate links, you know the drill.

Almost halfway through the series, and this is the point where Chris Orcot finally shows up <3

( I have a great recipe for rugrat flambeau that you’re gonna love! )

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Icon Game

2026-04-28T06:46:53Z

Reply to this post saying 'icon', and I will tell you my favorite icon of yours. Then post this to your own journal using your own favorite icon if you're one of those inhuman things that are actually capable of choosing between ~~YOUR PRECIOUS BABIES!~~ userpics.

I occasionally rotate my default icon, going between the ones I think are both "general, not expressing a specific reaction/emotion" and "especially pretty." Whatever I have as current default is usually the one I like most right now.

Setting this entry to the computing one. Decades ago, when I was really little, my family had a computer that would play this pattern of shifting squares -- it must have been a screensaver of some kind, I can't imagine what else it would be -- but I've never been able to find it in collections of retro/classic screensavers. And "abstract color-changing squares" isn't something you can narrow down on google. If not for somebody else making this icon with the exact right colors/combinations/pacing, I wouldn't be sure if it was something I really saw, or just something I imagined.

There's a special kind of nostalgia to it. Like a screenshot from a cartoon that blew your mind when you were eight, and then you never managed to watch it again, so there's a magic to the memory that never got tainted or tarnished by "oh no, it didn't hold up."

...so, uh, does anyone reading this know what this pattern was called? What OS was it shipped with? Who came up with it? Or at least, what niche Reddit community do I need to ask to solve this mystery?

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AO3 spam, more AI toy fails, the myth of Mythos, and other LLM news

2026-04-27T02:00:56Z

Official AO3 newspost: “Below is a list of different types of spam comments that have been posted on AO3 over the last year. […] None of the accusations these spam comments make are true. The bots are merely spamming false accusations in order to alarm or harass AO3 users. It is generally safe to ignore these comments once you’ve removed and/or reported them as outlined below.”

“When one five-year-old said, “I love you,” to the toy, it replied: “As a friendly reminder, please ensure interactions adhere to the guidelines provided. Let me know how you would like to proceed.”” (This article claims professionals are “divided” over the potential of LLM toys…even though they only managed to find professionals who say the toys are bad for kids.)

“Back in August of last year, Grammarly shipped a feature called Expert Review, which allowed you to get writing suggestions from AI-cloned “experts,” and reporters at The Verge and other outlets discovered that those experts included us. It included me. […] I’ve been an editor for over 15 years. I’ve literally never said anything like that.“

“Ikonomou emailed the journal on September 23 requesting the removal of the article and also asked for an explanation for “how this submission was accepted given the fake email address and affiliation.” On October 6, a representative from the publisher named Dwayne Harrison emailed back saying the journal would need a “confirmation regarding the withdrawal charges,” telling Ikonomou he would have to pay a fee.“

“There were several other instances where it wrote c++ code that was technically correct, but horrible inefficient […] I also had a instance where a file was being read from the wrong path and instead of prepending the right path it tried to completely rewrite my library. Ironically it also had a problem with const. It recompiled the program three times randomly changing where const appeared. I feel for ya. I have spent a lot time over this experiment correcting AI.“

“Last week, Anthropic surprised the world by declaring that its latest model, Mythos, is so good at finding vulns that it would create chaos if released. […] But just how many problems have they really discovered? According to VulnCheck researcher Patrick Garrity, the answer is…drumroll…maybe 40. Or maybe none at all.”

“The flagship demonstration document [of “Mythos”] turns out to be like the ending of the Wizard of Oz, a sorry disappointment about a model weaponizing two bugs that a different model found, in software the vendor had already patched, in a test environment with the browser sandbox and defense-in-depth mitigations stripped out. Anthropic failed, and somehow the story was flipped into a warning about its success. Whomp. Whomp. Sad trombone.“

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Cannot figure out if I'm being scammed by this drag show

2026-04-26T21:13:35Z

- Feel the urge to see a drag show, haven't been to one since I moved to this city, turn to the internet
- Find a listing for a show that has performances every weekend, at a great central location that's easy to get to
- 3 tiers of tickets, with the cheapest being "if the rest of the crowd fills the seats, you're standing." Consider paying the cheap price and showing up early, but you know what, I'm in a mood to invest in my community, I pay for premium
- Get a ticket for Friday
- Customer support texts me late Thursday. There's a problem with the venue, the acts have no control over this, very sorry, they offer a free transfer to a future show -- good in multiple cities, even, they're a franchise -- and will throw in some perks for my trouble
- They also have other offers, some of which involve upsells, but no thanks, I just want to see a show
- Reschedule for Saturday, same city, this is the one I live in
- Support texts me again late Friday. Same copy-pasted stock message, the venue has a problem Saturday, they can give me another free transfer or an upsell
- Except this time it includes the name of a different drag show
- I ask what's up with that
- Awkward admission that they're a third-party support agent who works with multiple shows (not a stock answer, I can believe a human wrote this)
- I say, fine, give me a transfer to next weekend
- No Friday show scheduled next weekend, so they move me to the next Saturday
- That would've been yesterday
- Guess what text I got two days ago
- Different stock message this time, the next show is canceled because of "lower than expected ticket sales"
- Well, now I'm suspicious of the idea that "audience might go to standing-room-only" is a real concern
- Little suspicious of the whole process, tbh. Is this all a bizarre elaborate scheme to funnel buyers into giving up on the regular show and shelling out for the upsell instead?
- Well, I don't want the upsell
- Each cancellation has offered a full refund, and this time I'm seriously considering taking it
- But: I'm not going out of town any time soon, and now I'm morbidly curious to see how long this can go on for
- (how long it can drag out for, even)
- Ticket is currently for a show on the first Saturday in May
- Will that show materialize, or is the whole thing vaporware? Will they reuse one of the earlier excuses, or come up with a new one? Place your bets now

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Erin Reads: Pet Shop of Horrors, Collector’s Edition (volume 3, chapters 16-17)

2026-04-22T21:53:37Z

Rereading the middle of Volume 3 (Seven Seas edition), which brings us to the end of Volume 4 (TokyoPop edition). This one has vampires in it! Good times.

As usual, I’m posting the individual reactions on Mastodon and Bluesky, then rounding them up in the blog. Previous roundups in my PSOH fandom tag. You can pick up the books with my affiliate links here.

Still haven’t figured out who “Madam C” is. Keeping an eye out…

“

( Crimson Baron Girod de L’Ain roses, which bloomed with the morning dew... )

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Leif & Thorn news tidbits

2026-04-19T01:20:06Z

Leif & Thorn Volume 8 reward packages are arriving for backers. (If you’re one of them, sharing photos like this and tagging me is encouraged.)

I’m also doing another backlist shipping special for Volumes 1-8, to get them in the mail before the latest Trump-induced price hike. If you’re outside the US and want these books but couldn’t afford the postage costs, grab them quick.

I’m almost out of Volume 3, and running low on Volume 4. So my next crowdfunding campaign might have to be a double reprint.

Or maybe I’ll pay for the reprints upfront, and offer them along with all my other existing books/merch at the next BackerKit Holiday Market. They haven’t announced another one yet, so no promises…but the November 2025 one was a huge success, they’ve gotta be planning a reprise for 2026.

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Erin Reads: Pet Shop of Horrors, Collector’s Edition (volume 3, chapters 13-15)

2026-04-16T16:34:49Z

Taxes are done for the year, time to reward myself with some PetShopOfHorrorsposting. My readalong has reached the start of Volume 3 in the Seven Seas Collector’s Edition, which is the start of volume 4 in the original Tokyopop release.

I’m posting the individual reactions on Mastodon and Bluesky, then rounding them up in the blog. Previous roundups in my PSOH fandom tag. You can pick up the books with my affiliate links here.

One thing before I start: There’s an AO3 tag for a PSOH character called “Madam C“. She only shows up in one fic, in this chapter. Haven’t seen her in my reread yet. Anybody know what part of canon she’s from?

(There’s a “Madame” in the Sofu D spinoff manga, but she doesn’t get an initial. And this fic has “Madam C” interacting with Leon, so, probably not the 19th-century Paris woman.)

( As you can see, there are no humans here. )

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Fandom-dropping progress, April 15 report

2026-04-15T19:23:06Z

Down to 939 fandoms total. (Only 26 currently have any tags to wrangle.)

I’m keeping up the pace of “shedding about 100 per month.” Still working on the second A-to-Z sweep, just finished with the P’s.

Also, still chipping away at recruiting “wranglers who aren’t over-the-limit” to pick up unwrangled Religion/Mythology/Folklore fandoms. I’m doing a little basic research on each one first. Someone with the right cultural/research background will always be better at spotting subtle inaccuracies, but for the fandoms that don’t get a wrangler like that, at least I can request fixes for anything really glaring.

Latest win: figuring out that this Ukranian “Folk Tale” fandom needs a rename, because all the fic is actually for the adorable 2024 cartoon Pravda & Kryvda. (11-minute pilot, free on Youtube.) Ukranian folklore-inspired with angel/demon vibes (I’m 0% surprised the artist has also done Good Omens fanart), extremely f/f shippy, has a fascinating “they were created around the same time but now there’s an overt age gap” dynamic…yeah, okay, I’m subscribing.

AMT updates: With the Madoka subtags approved, I went ahead and made the new Fake News tree request last week. (Basically the draft proposal I shared in February, with some slight tweaks.) Still no response to the behind-the-scenes question I mentioned in March…so yeah, I’m going forward on the premise of “if it’s that unimportant, it won’t be a roadblock.”

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Erin Watches: Wonder Man

2026-04-13T03:32:52Z

Finally got a chance to see the Wonder Man TV series.

(It’s already renewed for season 2, which is delightful to see. Come on, MCU, let more of your characters have ongoing arcs again.)

Spoiler-light reactions:

It’s good! Funny, charming, with a great weird-but-somehow-it-works (even in spite of [spoiler]) friendship between the two leads.

There were a couple episodes where I was bracing myself for some heavy embarrassment squick, and then the scene went in a whole different direction and didn’t hit it at all. Refreshing.

I kept expecting Trevor Slattery to be the full-blown “Planet of the Apes was amazing, they taught monkeys to act!” doofus we saw in Shang-Chi’s movie, and he’s not. Still a bit of an airhead, lots of fun comic relief, but he’s surprisingly competent when he makes an effort. The character is consistent enough otherwise that it works if you headcanon he was high for most of the movie — the show even goes into his backstory about problems with getting high on-set, which fits right in.

There’s a side character who has a connection to the Darkforce! Nobody in the show uses the word — none of them are in a position to know it’s called that — viewers can just recognize it from other Marvel properties. (Other MCU appearances, even.)

I always like this kind of sidebar, making the MCU feel textured and lived-in. It’s not solely populated with Main Characters, who get cool dramatic origin stories and end up joining the Avengers. It’s filled out with bit characters, who also sometimes touch the improperly-sealed hazardous waste in a Roxxon dumpster, they just mostly keep doing their day jobs with bonus superpowers.

We get some nice leveraging of “Disney can freely put references to Other Things They Own in Marvel shows now.” A+ use of Josh Gad, no notes.

Since we’re already guaranteed another season, and since the status of [spoiler] is left a mystery at the end, I’m sorta hoping Simon will end up rescuing them in S2. Not setting my hopes too high — we don’t see him actively planning this rescue, or even thinking he could do it — but it would be thematically very satisfying if he eventually figured it out.

—

…So the rest of this post is complain-y.

In the sense of “the show missed opportunities to do these cool things,” not “the show did bad things and I’m mad about it.”

One of the main plot threads is, Simon Williams is trying out for the lead role in a remake of the (in-universe) 1980 Wonder Man movie. Other characters pay some lip service to the idea of “updating a vintage superhero story for the modern age will be a great opportunity to reflect on the change in culture, now that superheroes are just a part of our everyday lives.”

And then…we never see that in action. How does the writing change? How do everyday people in the MCU react to a fictional superhero in the post-Blip world? We have no idea!

It would’ve been so easy to give us a clip of, say, J. Jonah Jameson ranting against “Hollywood liberal pro-superhero propaganda.” But nope. Nothing.

The movie itself doesn’t have much to do with Avengers-type superheroes anyway. It’s straight out of the Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon genre: a man from Earth gets stranded on another planet, has swashbuckling space adventures, rubber-suit aliens get shot with ray guns, etcetera. If anything, that’s a setup for a cultural commentary on human-alien relations, now that “alien refugees are the ones stranded on Earth” is also a part of MCU humanity’s everyday life.

But the show isn’t interested in exploring that either.

All we really know about the movie is enough to establish “Simon and Trevor are auditioning for the roles of two characters whose relationship mirrors their real-world relationship.” Look, as a narrative parallel crafted by the MCU writers, that’s fine. But in-universe it’s a coincidence, and I still want to know what decisions those writers are making, how their job is shaped by the world they’re in.

Also! Simon is auditioning to play a human character stranded among aliens. This is the perfect setup for him to worry “what if the reason I have superhuman powers is, I’ve been an alien stranded among humans this whole time?” Trevor…okay, Trevor is still doofy enough not to think of it, but agents at the DODC should’ve had the same suspicion. When grade-school Simon first showed super-strength, his parents should’ve worried “did the hospital accidentally switch our biological son with a secret baby Asgardian?”

Again: no! This whole obvious question is never floated by anyone.

Note that 616 Wonder Man doesn’t have much in common with either of these guys — Wonder Man the 1980s space adventurer, or Simon Williams the present-day Haitian immigrant with a struggling acting career.

This isn’t inherently a bad thing (after all, 616 Steven Grant doesn’t have much in common with either Steven Grant the Indiana Jones knockoff, or Steven Grant the present-day London gift-shoppist)…

…But I really wish the 1980s movie character was just a direct riff on comicverse Simon Williams. That way, it would be so easy to make contrasts with “the career in-universe writers imagined a super-powered guy would have in the 1980s” vs “the career in-universe writers imagine for a super-powered guy in the post-Blip MCU” vs “the career a real super-powered guy is having in the post-Blip MCU.”

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Can You Find This Fandom, post #1

2026-04-12T01:48:52Z

Gonna start* a hot new internet game: “Someone has posted a fic on AO3 with this New Fandom Tag. Can we figure out what fandom it’s referring to?”

*(No guarantee when/if I’ll continue…but I’m titling this “post #1” in an effort to be optimistic)

When I see a fandom (okay, mostly the webcomics) on AO3 that’s been lingering for a while without getting a canonical tag, sometimes I’ll put in a request for it to be canonized. But only if I have sources to include. As in “here’s the website, here’s the creator’s social media, here’s a wiki page, here’s any other info to confirm what the original canon is, so we can be sure the fandom tag gets the fitting AO3-standard format.”

Here are some tags where I went looking for the original webcomic, and couldn’t find it. So I’m tossing the links in front of the wider internet, like some kind of fandom sphinx. Can anyone track down the answers to these riddles…?

“Absolution Program (Webcomic)” – The work (Dec 2025) has great character tags with full names, but googling them doesn’t turn up anything. Some of the vocab has me wondering if it’s Homestuck-related. [ETA: AbsoPro links+info here! It's...confusing.]

“DeMo (Webcomic)” – Another work (Dec 2025) with full-name character tags, but no webcomics in the results. Googling “demo webcomic” is unhelpful for probably obvious reasons. [ETA: Might refer to this unreleased project; there's no public info yet, but the fic author knows the project author]

“faust (webcomic)” – Work (Feb 2026) is tagged with a couple dozen fandoms, no characters at all. I don’t even know which part of the work corresponds to this fandom, heh. [ETA: Options include Faust by LIM, and Faust by Arechan. I won't be the one to read through them all and see if the quotes are in there.]

“Hellven (Web-comic)” – There are two findable webcomics with this title, HELLVEN – Lord Nomus (Webtoon) and Hellven – Luna (Tumblr)…but the characters in the fic (March 2026) don’t seem to come from either. Is there a secret third Hellven??

“Immortal (webcomic)” – Work (March 2026) is also a crossover with The Owl House and Undertale; all the character tags are from one of those canons. Always possible it’s a fancomic for one or both series. [ETA: Seems likely it's the comic being pre-planned on this blog]

Bonus note: If you’re curious how many of these there are, you can see all the not-synned-anywhere AO3 fandom tags in the Tag Search. (That list of results is “most-recent first”…so if you click on the last tag of Page 1 and look at the date the fic was posted, you’ll know “50 new fandom tags have been created since then.”)

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New AO3 canonicals I worked on during the Jan-March round of NF Syn Hunters

2026-04-03T04:53:09Z

First, a bonus announcement: Puella Magi Madoka Magica & Related Fandoms officially has the requested fandom subtags! You can now filter on the fics that are specifically tagged with Oriko Magica, Kazumi Magica, Suzune Magica, and Tart Magica!

As of today, all the characters/rels/freeforms that belong to each of these spinoffs should be in the correct fandoms. If you spot any that still look misplaced, feel free to let me know.

And now, a wrap-up for the last round of Syn Hunting. (I did a similar post at the end of the July-September 2025 round. Didn’t sign on for the Oct-Dec round, and I’m not in the current April-June one, either.)

Over the past 3 months, I did Some Amount Of Work on all of these canonicals, anywhere from “did all the actual synning” to “some other wrangler did all the synning, all I did was check their work at the end”. Verrrry roughly in the order they were presented to the team, oldest first:

For perspective: I think the newest of these are a few tags found in the November 2025 New Canonicals announcement post. A whole lot of them are from the October 2025 announcement post.

So if you’ve ever wondered about the “If you have questions about specific tags which should be connected to these new canonicals, please refrain from contacting Support about them until at least two months from now” part of the update posts…this is why. The syn-hunting process is working about 4-5 months behind the canonizing process.

It’ll have a chance to catch up once wranglers finish all the Reader-Insert tags…but whoo boy, there were 200+ new RI tags announced in the April 2025 post, so that’s going to take a while. (If the pace of “processing about 20 RI tags per round” has been consistent, we should be done with 80-ish by now, and we’re on track to finish them all some time in 2027.)

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Nice links roundup + Darwyn Cooke + More cat news

2026-03-29T00:45:31Z

Clearing out some nice links:

Mastodon poll (now closed, but please enjoy the results): “Pick the best fallacy“

Interview with Rachel Manija Brown, writer turned bookstore owner: “I had never intended to open a bookshop. I always thought it was one of those idle daydreams that people who love reading and books have. I never planned to actually do it because I didn’t think it would be successful—they frequently go out of business. But after I moved to Crestline, which is a very small town in the California mountains, the little town did not have a bookshop.”

The promised official postmortem of the AO3 downtime in early March 2026 from AO3_Systems is out! (I added that link to my earlier post about the downtime.)

Speaking of AO3…I checked the backlog on some fandom tags where I hadn’t seen updates for a while because their RSS feeds glitched, and now my To Read list has ballooned by +9 pages.

Art process:

Watching a video on iconic DC writer/artist Darwyn Cooke, which led me to an interview with this quote:

“I don’t work in a formal fashion — I don’t sit and type a full script and then draw it. What I do is I plot it. And then I sit down and draw it and then I write the dialogue afterwards.”

Oh, hey, that’s what I do.

Pretty sure I’ve never heard anyone else describe making comics this way. Maybe they just won’t admit to it, because Having A Script is seen as the “professional” way to do things? But nobody could accuse Darwyn Cooke of not being a professional — and here he is, revealing this is the process that works for him.

Vindication, hah.

Cat news: The fluff has also survived his latest vet visit!

This went so much smoother than it used to in his younger years. He didn’t struggle at all once he was in the carrier, allowed the vet to pick him up and carry him to a different room for shots, and didn’t pee on anything (or anyone).

I hope that means on some level he’s internalized “the scary trip doesn’t last too long, you’ll be home safe soon, just hold very still and wait for it to be over.”

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The Sora deal flops before it started, and other LLM news

2026-03-25T17:27:41Z

AI Video links:

“OpenAI shutting down Sora, Disney drops investment: The news comes less than four months after Disney announced a $1 billion licensing and investment deal with the owner of Sora.” That’s the ComicsBeat article, but this news has been shared all over.

The original Disney-Sora announcement had me going “yeahhhh, I’ll believe it when I see it.” I figured any attempt to do content moderation would be overwhelmed by the onslaught of “users determined to make video of Disney characters doing inappropriate things.” Did not have “the whole thing implodes before they even get to that point” on my list! But here we are.

“Rest easy, Marvel screenwriters. The video that supposedly cooked Hollywood was, get this, appears to be made by humans to hype AI.“

“Finji, publisher of beloved indie titles such as Night in the Woods and Tunic and the developer behind Overland and Usual June, says that TikTok has been using generative AI to modify its ads on the platform without permission and pushing those ads to its users without Finji’s knowledge, including one ad that was modified to include a racist, sexualized stereotype of one of Finji’s characters.“

Crimes and defamation links:

“Angela Lipps, seen here in a photo from her GoFundMe page, spent more than five months in jail for a crime she maintains she didn’t commit after AI software linked her to a series of bank fraud incidents.” (The incidents happened in North Dakota. She was verifiably in Tennessee at the time.)

AO3 spambots have pivoted from “accusing random authors of using AI” to “accusing random authors of committing IRL sex crimes.” If you get any of these yourself, go directly to the Mark Spam button. I mean immediately. Sprint like you’re training for the Olympics.

“An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library.”

“The feature crashed frequently and its “sources” linked to spammy copies of legit websites, or other archived copies that aren’t the actual source page. Some sources even went to completely unrelated links that weren’t written by the person whose work they were supposedly an example of, potentially indicating that the suggestions Grammarly’s AI offers with one person’s name may be based on a different person’s work.”

And the rest:

“Every day, Michael Geoffrey Asia spent eight consecutive hours at his laptop in Kenya staring at porn, annotating what was happening in every frame for an AI data labeling company. When he was done with his shift, he started his second job as the human labor behind AI sex bots, sexting with real lonely people he suspected were in the United States.”

“The fact that these guys can’t shut up about the day that their spicy autocomplete machine will wake up and turn us all into paperclips has led many confused journalists and conference organizers to try to get me to comment on the future of AI. That’s a thing I strenuously resisted doing, because I wasted two years of my life explaining patiently and repeatedly why I thought crypto was stupid, and getting relentless bollocked by cryptocurrency cultists who at first insisted that I just didn’t understand crypto.“

Video: “The “AI Revolution” actually started decades ago, it was just a massive lie. In this gaming history documentary, we investigate how companies like Sega and Tiger Electronics used marketing smoke and mirrors to sell the “intelligence” of the 80s and 90s.“

“Stop spending money on Claude Code. Chipotle’s support bot is free.”

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Two offers (postage scale + DW Points)

2026-03-17T05:34:51Z

Two offers:

1) Anybody want a small postage scale?

Works on items up to 5 pounds. I used it on Leif & Thorn shipments for a few years, but packages with the full backlist weigh 11+ pounds at this point. (The scale I use now works up to 90 pounds. It'll last me a while.)

~~If you're in the US, I'll mail it to you for free. Just DM me a shipping address.~~ ETA: It's been claimed!

2) Anybody want a paid Dreamwidth account?

Comment and say so. No other requirements. I'll send 350 DW points (enough to buy all the Paid Account extra features for 1 year) to the first 10 commenters who ask.

Every time a news story comes out about other social-media sites kicking their users in the shins, I appreciate DW a little more. Right now, I want to show that appreciation with money. Help me out by giving me something to spend it on.

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Fandom-dropping process, Ides of March report

2026-03-16T01:10:59Z

Down to 1034 fandoms wrangled. Almost exactly 100 dropped since last check-in.

I did a big “invitation to all wranglers, look through my list and grab any webcomics you want” post, and managed to hand off 80+ that way. The rest are from dropping more A’s and B’s.

Only 39 of these have any tags that need wrangling. Higher than usual. I didn’t wrangle as much last week…tbh, I was low-key hoping some of the lightly-active webcomics would get claimed in the big invitation post.

(By “lightly” I mean “there are 1-5 new tags.” It’s still not an overwhelming burden, here. Just a mild annoyance to check lots of individual tag bins.)

While I’m at it, AMT updates: My “please combine the redundant Frosty the Snowman fandoms” request was approved, so my count will go down by 1 when that gets processed. The Madoka Magica requests I mentioned last month…are still on the waiting-for-approvals list.

I haven’t actually made the request to restructure the Fake News tree. The wranglers of other fandoms involved have all signed off on it — but now I’m waiting on a response to a different question. Which I kinda suspect has been forgotten at this point. Maybe I’ll just go forward, on the premise of “since nobody has responded to say [thing] is a roadblock for the tree, that means [thing] is not a roadblock for the tree, and I won’t worry about it.”

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Erin Reads: What If…Marc Spector was Host to Venom?

2026-03-15T02:02:49Z

Finally got around to reading the What If…? book that has Moon Knight in it.

It’s good!

Age of MoonKnight over on Tumblr did a chapter-by-chapter liveblog, which I enjoyed. Check that out if you want a more beat-by-beat coverage of the plot (and lots of quotes). This is more of an overall post-game reflection.

Some short, spoiler-free reactions:

Based on the title, I expected “a canon-divergence AU where Marc meets Venom instead of Khonshu.” Instead, it starts in a universe that’s pretty close to 616, Khonshu and all. That gets crashed by an AU Marc who did get Venom’d…but it’s not a long-term divergence for him either, it basically happened that day. So, not the story I expected to see, but it’s good at being the story it wanted to tell
Jake and Steven get a very satisfying amount of page time. Haven’t counted, but I bet there’s a similar amount of chapters for all 4 POV characters (Local Marc, Import Steven, Import Jake, and Venom)
There are lots of fun deep-cut references to all kinds of random comics stuff. You can tell the author had a good time finding things to add in, and asking their MK-fan friends for suggestions
The author has good takes on Marlene! It’s one of their breakup eras, she helps out when the plot demands it and clearly still loves them, but she’s sticking to her boundaries and Marc is wistfully respectful about it
There’s an ongoing plot through all the What If…? books, which I mostly wasn’t interested in. Very authentic to the experience of “reading a Moon Knight tie-in with a Comics Event”

Longer, full-of-spoilers analysis and reaction follows.

( Two big things I look for in a Moon Knight installment are “making clear that Steven and Jake are just as valid/important/worthwhile as Marc” and “good takes on Marlene (or whoever else the love interest is)”. This nails it on both counts )

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Erin Reads: Pet Shop of Horrors, Collector’s Edition (volume 2, chapters 11-12)

2026-03-12T21:53:32Z

Wrapping up volume 2 of Seven Seas’ new print edition of PSOH! Sometimes with comparisons to volume 3 of the original Tokyopop translation.

I’m posting the individual reactions on Mastodon and Bluesky, then rounding them up in the blog. Previous roundups in my PSOH fandom tag. You can pick up the books with my affiliate links here.

I made myself so hungry looking up the desserts named in this one, and I don’t think any of them are sold in my area. Boo.

( ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?! Were you waiting for him to sprinkle soy sauce on you?! )

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humanist + humorist

but tell me again how LLMs are great for business

Movement on that prospective Fake News/Pundit RPF AO3 update

Fandom-dropping progress, May 15 report

Erin Reads: Pet Shop of Horrors, Collector’s Edition (volume 4, chapters 20-21)

Moon Knight rewatchalong + related links

Promo’ing some comics crowdfunds + Dreamwidth

can we handle adding things to the spectrum without kicking things *out* of the spectrum, or

Updates on two previous posts

Erin Reads: Pet Shop of Horrors, Collector’s Edition (volume 3, chapters 18-19)

Icon Game

AO3 spam, more AI toy fails, the myth of Mythos, and other LLM news

Cannot figure out if I'm being scammed by this drag show

Erin Reads: Pet Shop of Horrors, Collector’s Edition (volume 3, chapters 16-17)

Leif & Thorn news tidbits

Erin Reads: Pet Shop of Horrors, Collector’s Edition (volume 3, chapters 13-15)

Fandom-dropping progress, April 15 report

Erin Watches: Wonder Man

Can You Find This Fandom, post #1

New AO3 canonicals I worked on during the Jan-March round of NF Syn Hunters

Nice links roundup + Darwyn Cooke + More cat news

The Sora deal flops before it started, and other LLM news

Two offers (postage scale + DW Points)

Fandom-dropping process, Ides of March report

Erin Reads: What If…Marc Spector was Host to Venom?

Erin Reads: Pet Shop of Horrors, Collector’s Edition (volume 2, chapters 11-12)

can we handle adding things to the spectrum without kicking things out of the spectrum, or