omnia_mutantur | Reading

Events, dear friends, have been piling up faster than I can write about them—personal tragedies, global horrors, and work conspiring to keep me at a pace where I have not yet emerged from under the weight of one massive project before I'm saddled with the next. Needless to say things are happening but I get approximately 15 minutes of laptop time a day if the subway cooperates and it's largely spent answering emails.

Anyway, on with the podcasts. This week's episode is from a new-to-me podcast, A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein. I heard him on Bad Hasbara and he was very funny and insightful, and his actual podcast doesn't disappoint. My favourite episode so far has been "She Had Elon's Baby. Then, Leopards Ate Her Face," featuring Ashley St. Clair and Juniper.

I didn't know the name off the top of my head but Ashley was one of those far-right grifters/pick-me girls who is very traditionally pretty and thus assumed that there was no need for feminism. She wrote an extremely transphobic children's book that I had actually heard of because it was on one of Queen Coke Francis's video essays*. The title of the episode is not precisely accurate, in that the leopards in question started gnawing Ashley's face before she gave birth, as she had started to turn away from her transphobic stance when she was pregnant with her second child.

You have questions. I also had questions. One of the reasons this particular episode is so good is that Matt handles everything as responsibly as anyone can. He has Juniper (the trans podcaster/editor who, among other accomplishments, popularized "goblin mode"), who was the one who engaged with Ashley as she made her turn away from the dark side. Neither one of them softball the conversation, laying the harms that Ashley did out very clearly, and questioning whether she has actually changed or whether this is another grift (for the record, neither of them conclude that it's a grift).

It's a hard listen because obviously it is. Trans people are being targeted for genocide around the world and especially in the US, and Ashley was one of its instigators. It asks hard questions: Can people change? Is the community that they harmed obligated to believe and accept those changes? What does it mean to make amends and reparations, or to build trust? What can we do to deradicalize people (note: Ashley's redemption arc seems to have started with queer and trans folks engaging her online, which I'm legitimately surprised at)?

Anyway it brought me a little bit of desperately needed hope so maybe it will help you too.

* Check her out if you do YouTube video essays. She's a drag queen who mainly covers culture war stuff and she's hilarious.

which_chick

Dad's house has daffodils about 1" above the ground. My house gets less sun and is a little behind his, so no daffs at my place yet.

( In other news... )

keplers_angels

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

erinptah

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.)

sabotabby

It feels very strange and unpleasant to be making my regular book post under the circumstances. Nevertheless.

Just finished: A Drop Of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett. This was so much fun, and I'm hooked on the series. It's mostly a lighthearted absolutely nightmare fuel cosmic horror murder mystery, but as the afterword says, it's also kind of a commentary on fantasy's obsession with kings and nobles and what this means for our present political circumstances. Which is to say. Kings. Not a great idea. I disagree with Bennett re: what ASOIaF was trying to do but the book is a great example of how you can smuggle interesting politics in a rip-roaring narrative.

Currently reading: Lullabies For Little Criminals by Heather O'Neill. I love everything she writes and meant to read her most well-known work ages ago but it ended up near the bottom of my physical TBR stack and I'm only now getting to it. This is the story of Baby, a little girl in Montreal whose father is a possibly-schizophrenic heroin addict. Does that sound depressing? Because it is. It's also very much a dark comedy, like it's genuinely fucking hilarious the more searingly awful Baby's life gets. Sometimes I just want fiction to fuck me up, and this does.

which_chick

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation claims it is getting complaints that at least one US military commanding officer has told troops that the current efforts in Iran are "a biblically sanctioned conflict intended to bring about Armageddon and the return of Jesus Christ." This alleged "news" is getting some traction.

( What the actual fuck...? That can't be right. )

southernmedicine

Once again, time just drifts on by. Sometimes I feel a little numb over it, but perhaps that is better than feeling anxious?

Blair finally found something that worked for her: it's a very cool procedure called battlefield acupuncture. Five tiny needles into five specific points in each ear. For almost a week, no migraines. Unfortunately, they had to come out after four days, and after just one migraine-free day following their removal, she's back to suffering. We're hoping that her doctor will authorize botox. Don't know if it'll work either, but it's a very common solution.

Personally, I have very little to report. I've been either working or taking care of our dog and our apartment. All the chaotic holidays are done with; nothing to decorate for, no holidays or anything left to prepare for. We're going to a con in early May but beyond that, it's just business as usual.

I did feel inspired to write, but I don't feel like I have the creative mental energy for it. Maybe I'm just struggling to get into the writing headspace, and should look for a small challenge/exchange to join to see if I can boot myself up.

I should do my taxes. Ugh.

Current Mood: okay

which_chick

I am pleased to announce that I have 11 squares completed. (In the photo, one brown square looks slightly misshapen. Do not be alarmed, it is not actually wrong --it has not been blocked. Blocking will fix the issue.)

( See the squares? )

erinptah

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.)

–

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.”

which_chick

There are ten squares done. Nine squares are blocked. The 11th square is in progress. I have a full bobbin of brown and a full bobbin of white (it's been a spinning week) and I need another bobbin of white (ugh but less ugh than it has been so... winning?) in order to make up more 2w1b yarn.

( So about that yarn supply... )

kat_lair

***

Title: Sleep Snare
Author:

kat_lair
Fandom: Wheel of Time (books & TV)
Pairing: Egwene al'Vere/Lanfear | Cyndane
Tags: Lucid Dreaming, Non-Consensual Touching, Non-Consensual Somnophilia, Painplay, Power Dynamics, Forced Orgasm, Humiliation, these tags make this sound way more explicit than it actually is
Rating: E because...
Warning: Rape/Non-Con
Word count: 1,138

Summary: She falls asleep like a stone dropped into a river, straight through the silt at the bottom and onto the other side. She opens her eyes in Tel’aran’rhiod, and there’s a moment between realising where she is and who has her that she could reach for control, but by the time the shape above her solidifies into Lanfear’s smiling face, it’s too late.

Author notes: Response to

elasticella's prompt of 'Egwene/Lanfear, somnophilia/nightmare sex/painplay/etc.' over at

fiachairecht's Bring Her Bleeding Heart to Me { a dark femslash commentfic meme for femslash february }. This is unbetaed so if you spot a typo/mistake, please let me know.

Sleep Snare on AO3

( Sleep Snare )

***

sabotabby

I have things that I should write about in more detail but I'm having about three weeks of bonkerscrazytimeclownshoes, so have a brief recommendation for Tech Won't Save Us's episode "What’s Driving the Push For Humanoid Robots ft. James Vincent."

Now that I know lots more about robots than I used to, I can tell you that humanoid is maybe the worst shape for a robot. If you don't believe me, watch some videos from the Consumer Electronics Show. They fall down all the time. Sometimes, as with Elon Musk's robots, they are just guys in suits and not robots at all. Humanoid is a bad shape for a human (this observation brought to you by how much my back is currently killing me) so why not make a robot that is shaped like basically anything else?

(I mean you know the answer is slavery, right? It's always slavery.)

Anyway this episode is weirdly fun to listen to because we're talking about something that is basically impossible and can't replace people, vs. AI which is basically impossible but will replace people because of all the middle managers who've had frontal lobotomies.

keplers_angels

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

erinptah

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? )

which_chick

Summary update (no pix)

Need 14 brown squares (6 knitted, 1 in progress)
Need 14 mostly-brown squares (2 knitted)
Need 14 mostly-white squares (1 knitted)

Total of 9 squares, which is slightly better than 1/5 done? Yay. Progress. Of the squares, 7 have been blocked, 2 still need to be blocked.

Today was not a spinning day. No spinning happened. Scarf still in timeout.

( I lied, here is a picture of some of the blocked squares... )

sabotabby

Just finished: Nothing.

Currently reading: A Drop Of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett. This continues to be really fun. I wish there was more Ana, but her more distant presence in this is balanced by just how weird and gross the worldbuilding is. All magic in this world is drawn from the blood of leviathans, giant eldritch horrors that live in the sea and during the wet season, come on shore to try to kill everyone, and the murder plot revolves much more around the technicalities of this than the first book did. I'm here for weird body horror and squishy stuff so this works for me.

I am a wee bit confused over Din's motivations; he wants to join the Legion, which is the division of the military that blows up leviathans, rather than investigating crimes with Ana, which is a fairly major switch from the first book. But he can't do it because he's deep in debt to an insurer who covered his now-dead father's medical bills, and the job is so dangerous that the insurer would never be able to collect. Which, do not get me wrong, is a cool motivation! But it does seem like a break from the way his character is initially presented, and so far the only reason for the switch seems to be that he hooked up with a soldier at the end of the first book.

Anyway I just got to the part where he goes inside the Shroud, which is a giant cyst in the water where they extract leviathan blood, inhabited by augurs, who are altered to be incredibly good at working with vast amounts of data but go insane after three years and can only communicate by tapping. It's super cool.

southernmedicine

I'm pretty worried about Blair.

She gets migraines from time to time; bad enough, and frequently enough, that she has a prescription medication for migraine medicine. Lately, though, she has been getting them almost every day, and that is... not good, and not normal. She's completely taken out by the migraine and then completely taken out in a different way by the medicine she has to take to treat it.

She's going to try to work with her doctor to figure out what's happening and what to do about it, and in the meantime, she's going to take a week-long leave of absence from school and work. What I'm worried most about is the knowledge that she has (has had, for a few years now) a small brain tumor. So far as they know it's benign and she's been on prolactin to shrink it (which is working). Still.

Worried.

On a completely different note, does anyone here use the Finch app? Let me know if you do, so we can be friends!

Current Mood: worried

kat_lair

***

Title: every lover's got a little dagger
Author:

kat_lair
Fandom: Wheel of Time (books)
Pairing: Aviendha/Elayne Trakand
Tags: Ficlet, Does This Count As Sibling Incest? Do I Care? Maybe and No, Cross-cultural
Rating: T
Word count: 913

Summary: “Your first-sister grows impatient.”

Author notes: Response to

ourswordsmeandeath's prompt of every lover's got a little dagger in their hand (from 'Love from the Other Side') over at

likealighthouse's Fall Out Boy Femslash February Ficathon. Takes place in Book Nine after Elayne and Aviendha become first-sisters, which is one of my favourite scenes in the whole series. My notes in the book margin say 'I love this and hate that it was about a man' *g* This is unbetaed so if you spot a typo/mistake, please do let me know.

every lover's got a little dagger on AO3

( every lover's got a little dagger )

***

which_chick

I had a busy evening of afghan work. Lookit!

( Even busy evenings generate a relatively small amount of work product... )

summerstorm

I woke up enjoying the sunshine, and then my mom told me not to use up too much hot water and I like, inwardly spiraled? I'm still recovering from the irritability/frustration/sadness. I put music on largely to make myself cry, which worked when combined with me avoiding isolation by telling people how I was feeling. But the music is still on and I'm on my laptop and that's kind of a red flag for how I'm feeling at any point in time to be honest. I don't usually listen to music. I'm trying to do it more, because I used to at least shower with music until my sister, many years ago, decided I couldn't do that anymore, but I still only tend to listen while I update my planner.

I... took two hours to do things just with notebooks. And then I got on my laptop and I still haven't turned it off. I'm touch-starved, I've known for a long time, but I think I am also appreciation-starved. It rears its ugly head when I decide to speak back to my sister and my sister takes it poorly and starts insulting me. I don't know. I wanna be told I'm pretty. I wanna be told I'm funny, and that I did a cool thing in a game if I did one, and that I'm good at, I don't know, whatever anyone sees me being good at, other than persevering.

Anyway. Haven't seen last week's The Pitt yet, but I have been playing Dragon Age: Veilguard like my life depends on it. I'm just really into it and it's taken over my brain a little bit. I'm trying to enjoy it instead of feel guilty for the stuff I'm not doing. I'm keeping up with chores and talking to people, so it's not that bad.

( Veilguard babble. )

Current Music: Beautiful Mess by Olivia Ellen Lloyd

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omnia_mutantur

August 2025

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Page Summary

sabotabby - podcast friday
which_chick - It is starting to look a wee bit like spring...
keplers_angels - it's alright...
erinptah - AO3 downtime info + reflection post
sabotabby - Reading Wednesday
which_chick - Well, that's not disturbing AT ALL...
southernmedicine - (no subject)
which_chick - Accountability picture!
erinptah - HmmAI is at the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence [and other LLM links]
which_chick - Afghan update
kat_lair - WoT Fic: Sleep Snare
sabotabby - podcast friday
keplers_angels - Convalescence
erinptah - Erin Reads: The Rose Field, Part 3b (chapters 31-36)
which_chick - Tiny Afghan Accountability update
sabotabby - Reading Wednesday
southernmedicine - (no subject)
kat_lair - WoT Ficlet: every lover's got a little dagger
which_chick - Afghan, you know how it goes. There are pix!
summerstorm - I've got my reasons to complain

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Page generated Mar. 6th, 2026 06:39 pm

merely tenacity

honey on the tip of the tongue knowing moon

Reading

podcast friday

It is starting to look a wee bit like spring...

it's alright...

AO3 downtime info + reflection post

Reading Wednesday

Well, that's not disturbing AT ALL...

(no subject)

Accountability picture!

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

Afghan update

WoT Fic: Sleep Snare

podcast friday

Convalescence

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

Tiny Afghan Accountability update

Reading Wednesday

(no subject)

WoT Ficlet: every lover's got a little dagger

Afghan, you know how it goes. There are pix!

I've got my reasons to complain

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August 2025

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