humanist + humorist

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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Erin Reads: Pet Shop of Horrors, Collector’s Edition (volume 2, chapters 9-10)

2026-03-10T00:17:17Z

Continued liveblog as I read Seven Seas’ new print edition of PSOH, and sometimes make comparisons to 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.

When rounding up this post, I expected it to be shorter than the last one…then I actually checked the word count, and it’s almost exactly the same. Commented about fewer panels, but I carried on for longer, so it balanced out.

( This is directly after the “meditation at the museum of extinct animals” chapter, and it showcases a nice shift in their relationship if this is when D starts dropping pointed comments about “humans, like you, Detective, but not like me, hint hint.” )

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Recs for nice things + Cat News

2026-03-07T01:20:57Z

Some recs:

Preorders are open for this comics anthology by Iranian cartoonists. Already got mine.

A long and thorough Megatokyo breakdown from an ex-fan. (“I think I hate it better than anyone else.”) The criticisms are well-founded and well-explained, so even though I have some nostalgic fondness for Megatokyo and I’m not on board with every criticism, I liked reading it anyway.

The Skyjacks podcast, an original fantasy actual-play series, was on my “to try” list for a while. Recently, I opened the RSS feed, scrolled to the bottom, downloaded the first few episodes…and was confused to realize that it was (a) picking up from an existing story and (b) set in the Star Wars universe?

Yeah, the same group of players did an extensive Star Wars fangame first, spinning off from a short Star Wars adventure in a different feed, then moved on to their own series and kept adding that to the same feed. It’s a good jumping-on point, though. I’m 11 episodes in and not stopping.

Got caught up with Sporadic Phantoms, which was the last new podcast I mentioned starting. It continues to be very good. There’s a big pivot in season 2, but I think they handled it well. And…the season isn’t finished, so now I’m on a cliffhanger. Fingers crossed they stick the landing.

Also watched season 2 of the Ranma 1/2 reboot. It had a lot more of the madcap Jenga-tower-of-connected-gags pacing that I was missing while watching s1, where the personalities are wildly pinballing off each other and if you look away for 30 seconds you’ll miss something great. My “they couldn’t fully do this in s1 because they were too busy establishing the characters” theory is panning out.

And I did end up rewatching Cosmic Princess Kaguya. Turns out it absolutely rewards a second watch. There’s one character who knows about The Reveal from the start, and the amount of “oh that’s what you meant, I see what you did there” is amazing.

Cat news: Vet checkup for Fiddlesticks the other day.

When she had dental problems last May, they said she was down from 7-ish pounds to 6-ish, and theorized “maybe she’s eating less because it hurts her teeth.” But the current visit said she’s 7-ish pounds…and said that she was already back to 7-ish pounds last July (the visit where she had the bad teeth out).

Wonder if their scale in May was just having problems.

She developed these two Mystery Bumps since the last visit — you can’t really see them, they’re pea-sized at most and have normal fur growing over them, it’s just something you can feel when petting her. Official vet analysis on those is “probably just cysts, could develop problems in the future, but as long as she isn’t messing with them, we won’t mess with them.”

And she’s not messing with them! Doesn’t seem to notice them at all.

Good job not having cancer, kitty.

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AO3 downtime info + reflection post

2026-03-05T07:10:15Z

Update: The official postmortem of the AO3 downtime in early March 2026 from AO3_Systems is out. Give it a look, find out how accurate my guesses were.

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As a lot of y’all probably noticed, AO3 had some extended downtime this past weekend.

They upgraded their database software on Saturday. The first crash happened with Sunday-evening traffic. AD&T (the committee of OTW volunteers who manage the AO3 software) painstakingly nursed the servers back onto their feet. Then they crashed again under Monday-evening traffic. (I’m describing this in US time zones, because it correlated with “the spike when USians get out of school/work and start opening fic en masse.”)

Official AO3 social-media posts haven’t named the software. I assumed because it’s a third-party vendor, and they (very reasonably!) don’t want the place getting deluged with angry emails from AO3’s wankiest users. But at this point, there’s other public confirmation that it’s MariaDB.

AO3’s public Jira board had two new tickets created while they were dealing with the downtime. There’s a helpful breakdown of the tech implications by siropsalot on Bluesky. In short:

“Audits cleanup job” – AO3 has been storing certain logs in a single giant table that updates forever and never gets archived or cleared, which is fine if you’re a small or low-traffic project, but bad if you’re one of the top 100 highest-traffic sites on the internet. (This is part of a long pattern of AO3 being, ah, poorly-designed for the scale of traffic it gets.) This ticket is to create a regular clearing-up process.

“Patch Devise to prevent excessive audits” – One specific user has a buggy older browser, which generated over 2 million entries in the giant table just for them. This ticket is to patch against that specific edge case.

(Denise was pretty alarmed by the first one, because the proposed fix might delete data the OTW is legally required to keep. That’s a tangent, this is mostly a post about the tech problems, I’m just throwing it in because it seems worth knowing.)

MariaDB also has a public Jira board. Which documents this bug in the version of the software that AO3 just upgraded to: ““Local temporary space limit reached” on not so rare occasions.”

AD&T brought the site back up on Tuesday. It’s been safely up ever since. My understanding is, it stayed up after tech support from MariaDB helped them troubleshoot and implement a workaround for that issue.

Disclaimer that I am not a programmer! Someone more technical might come along and correct me on this! AD&T is working on an official postmortem — hopefully after they catch up on some well-deserved sleep — which will be way more illuminating than anything I can figure out in the meantime.

But my impression right now is that “AO3 software has problems with huge poorly-managed piles of data” ran headlong into “MariaDB upgrade has problems with not allocating certain operations enough space,” and it went about as well as a 12′ truck trying to drive under the 11’8″ bridge.

(Except in this case it’s a more normal bridge, where safely-loaded trucks usually pass under it with no problem, while AO3 is…I guess a truck with an extra 5 feet of clearance, caused by a wobbly pile of stuff held on top of it with a precarious set of bungee cords?) (It’s not a perfect analogy, okay. But you get the point.)

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HmmAI is at the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence [and other LLM links]

2026-03-02T15:38:25Z

Have you heard about the “feed this document to an LLM, it’ll generate a podcast episode discussing it” gimmick?

Somebody fed it a document that’s just the phrase “poopoo peepee” over and over. And then took the discussion of that document, and fed it back into the LLM to discuss that. And then did it again. That link is to a 10-episode playlist. (…They’re only between 6 and 15 minutes long, so it’s not as much content as you’d think.)

It’s as stupid as it sounds — which makes it the perfect demonstration of “how LLMs will take anything, even the dumbest nonsense, and generate a response that has the vibe of something meaningful.” The recursion reveals even more levels of this. I swear every single video has included some version of “it reminds me of the absurdity of Dadaism”…and none of them acknowledge “the video we’re analyzing said it reminded them of Dadaism”…and they’re always repeating the same 2 basic facts about Dadaism.

(Bonus: the software always pronounces it “Day-day-ism” or “Daddy-ism”.) (Bonus 2: At least one of the videos inserts a fake ad break.)

There’s some hallucination, too. The TTS voices start referring to things like “funny sound effects” and “dramatic zooms”, which do not exist at all in the video they’re “analyzing.” One video says “Do we even really know what the original document said anymore?” (Yes. Yes, we do.) There are at least three variations of “it makes me think of apophenia, have you ever heard of that?” / “No, what does it mean?” when they’re supposedly “discussing” a video where apophenia was brought up and defined.

This is almost as good as the Chatbot Chess Championships 2026. (Which had a lot fewer random nonsense moves than the last one…but in one of the videos GothamChess mentions that he’s been “reminding the bots where their pieces are.” Boo.)

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The rest of this is just a roundup of bots faceplanting in non-chess fields:

“I decided to do an experiment/torture myself with the default image model you get when you open Gemini. The prompt: “create a grid showing the flags of european countries in alphabetical order. there should be labels below them stating their name. the one for Liechtenstein should have a note below it saying “doubly-landlocked”.”“

“What really happened was that someone who is fully equipped to know better was surprised when her AI agent — a class of software that does not work reliably and cannot work reliably — messed up. […] This is not a misfortune befalling some random person — this is the director of AI alignment at Meta.”

“Amazon is absolutely clear who’s to blame for all this — this 13-hour outage caused by their own bot turning something off and on again is officially user error!“

“Press Start Gaming is almost certainly a tool for making money off of ads and sponsored posts, and posts like the Phantasy Star Fukkokuban misinformation exist mostly to give the site more juice of looking like a real website. If someone goes out and buys a copy of Fukkokuban expecting a new and improved Phantasy Star with better graphics and new sidequests, what do they care? The article wasn’t really meant to provide information.”

“It finally became clear to me and the COYOTE team that we’d been bamboozled. Someone had fabricated an identity and put our call for pitches into a large language model like ChatGPT, just to make a fake story that we’d feasibly pay for. When I started asking too many questions, that someone evaporated.“

“Even entire passwords repeat: In the above 50 attempts, there are actually only 30 unique passwords. The most common password was G7$kL9#mQ2&xP4!w, which repeated 18 times, giving this specific password a 36% probability in our test set.”

The Onion: “HmmAI is at the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence, responding to prompts about recipe ideas, ancient history, or even advanced nuclear physics with the word ‘huh’ in just a fraction of a second.”

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Erin Reads: The Rose Field, Part 3b (chapters 31-36)

2026-02-27T00:01:03Z

Final post of reactions to The Rose Field. Spoilers throughout. Previous HDM-related posts on DW; see also The Reaction Posts of Dust on AO3.

Illustrated with TV-series screencaps again. Also, I decided to be self-indulgent and throw some of my own fanart in there.

I have a large but poorly-organized heap of “ideas about How To Fix These Books.” Might round those up and make a post about them at some point? TBD. For the main liveblog of the trilogy itself — this wraps it up.

( 80% of the way through the book is a little late to reveal their whole quest is fake. So where is this going? )

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Erin Reads: The Rose Field, Part 3a (chapters 23-30)

2026-02-20T20:56:56Z

Start of Part 3. As of this point, I had 40% of the audiobook left to go, and 1 week until it returned. So these next 2 posts will cover the final 2/5 of the book.

Light spoilers for the whole book in my annotations; comments are a free-for-all. Previous HDM-related posts on DW; see also The Reaction Posts of Dust on AO3.

Didn’t bother putting screencaps in this one. Too much of it was either “new elements introduced in the sequel trilogy” or “things that didn’t get visually adapted in the TV series.”

Onward.

( Tiny Gryphon is good-guy-coded, so her idea of “who needs to die” is presumably correct and unproblematic in every way )

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Erin Reads: The Rose Field, Part 2b (chapters 16-22)

2026-02-16T18:23:01Z

Liveblog roundup from the rest of Part Two.

Light spoilers for the whole book in my annotations. Go wild in the comments.

Previous HDM-related posts here. To start from the earliest Book of Dust reactions, see The Reaction Posts of Dust on AO3.

It’s getting harder to find relevant HDM TV moments to screencap for some of these parts. Sometimes I just went “eh, this is very loosely relevant, and Pan is cute, so I’ll go with it.”

( Hasn’t heard of alkahest, but he’s a bookish guy, so he does the very obvious thing of Picking Up A Dictionary. )

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Fandom-dropping process, mid-February report

2026-02-15T17:30:40Z

Down to 1135 fandoms total. (As of this posting, there are 24 total with any tags that need wrangling.)

So, dropped about 50 over the past month. Including almost all the random little fandoms that aren’t “part of a tag tree I’m actively keeping” or “webcomics.”

The update I’m considering to the Fake News fandom tree would, if approved, shrink my fandom count by 2. But my next requested additions to the Madoka Magica tree, if approved, could grow it by up to 4 again.

Haven’t started the planned “another full A-to-Z pass through all the webcomic fandoms.” For the past month-ish, I’ve been using a lower-key strategy of “inviting other wranglers to take whichever half-dozen tiny webcomics got new tags this week.” On the theory that, if the comics are popular enough to have new-fic-writing fans, they’re more likely to have fellow-wrangler fans.

It’s worked for a few! Biggest win: a couple of non-English-language comics, which I was able to pass to a wrangler who’s a native speaker of the language.

I’ve also recently been involved in an effort to solicit wranglers for some of the currently-untouched “Religion & Lore” fandoms. So my giveaway posts are spaced-out between recruiting posts for fandoms that aren’t on my list in the first place. (Some of them are very small, only 1-2 works total, it would take no extra effort to just pick them up for babysitting myself…but that would really offset my fandom-dropping progress.)

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Looking at updating the Fake News/Pundit RPF fandom tags on AO3…

2026-02-14T00:52:39Z

I know there’s not a ton of people left who actively care about this fandom. But of the ones who do, I’m guessing at least a few of you still follow my blog(s).

So here’s a quick writeup! Let’s find out if anyone has feedback.

For people who weren’t in this fandom (or have forgotten the details by now), I’ll start with some backstory.

( A little unwieldy, a little awkward. It kinda counted on taggers having pre-existing knowledge of “which terms the LiveJournal-based fandom uses in which specific ways.” But for a long time, it worked! )

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