Inside the Little Plastic Castle

Ugh I’ve got a chest cold which could mean endless coughing. The good news is I have a recliner for sleeping mostly upright, and copious amounts of guaifenesin-pills-and-water, and the right sort of social network.

• When I woke up early, I commanded Siri #4 to narrate amaruuk’s sweet Rosie & Johnlock series Paternity

• Got a phone call from kestrell

• Hopped on here, and tozka linked me to an excellent concert from Cathy Fink, Marcie Marxer and Chao Tian, hosted by the Smithsonian. Fink & Marxer were role models when I was a "movement musician" between 1976-1981, and I love how closely Chinese yangqin (hammered dulcimer) and Appalachian banjo music can intertwine

• Today’s prettygoodword was the wonderful campanulate

• minoanmiss shared strategies for smuggling the good bacteria past TSA

My public library’s Kanopy subscription provided two profound films, both under nine minutes:

• CODA is an animated short from 2015. This Irish masterpiece follows a lost soul’s encounter with death. Pro captions, no audio description, no gore. Watch on YouTube or ( stream here )

• Bacon & God’s Wrath meditates on loss of faith when Razie Brownstone, at age 92, tries bacon for the first time. CONTAINS: Very lifelike animated dead pig’s head, racist autocomplete results, emesis mentioned. Watch on YouTube without captions or ( stream here )

Skyview skyview.social lets you view and share Bluesky threads without needing an account. It offers a tree view, as well as an unrolled (all replies) and embed (haven’t tested it). Plus bots to save all of those; claims to track nothing.

I’d offer an example but even the briefest time on Bsky today has crashed my news wall like woe.

Excellent tool for managing time zone information https://dateful.com

The link you create a link automagically translates an event’s time to the user’s current time zone and day. When you create a free account, you can edit those links.

For example, a Media & Disability Communication Online Con

• 12 February 2025, 6PM to 9PM AEDT (UTC +11)
  In my timezone

Seen on electric signboard on US Highway 12/18 E just south of Madison, 23 November 2024

Make it to deer camp safely buckle up

resonant revises John Henry for the modern day:

The Ballad of John Henry's CEO

You can't fight fate, gotta automate,
Keep the cost of production down, lord, lord,
The cost of production down.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/62395177

First published in 2012, still relevant as fuck.

I’ve always known that the most stressful equipment failure is when something breaks on my powerchair.

Previously, I would have put computing equipment in second place, but today I learned a new contender: when my tea kettle won’t turn on! Thankfully MyGuy recognized I was in anxious mode, and the store had a replacement, and all is well.

Well, all is .... I have tea.

Listening to a new performer handling a well-known tune is my favorite introduction to their style and philosophy. Of course there’s a website for that: Second Hand Songs. Here’s their data on the lovely tune "Blues Run the Game," which you may have learned from Simon & Garfunkel if you’re a boomer.

https://secondhandsongs.com/work/4015

( one version and 134 other interesting takes )

beatrice_otter points out that the Harassment Policy statement in the revised Terms of Service draft does nothing to protect fans from harassing "gift fics." Very useful discussion at that post!

pudding.cool hosts remarkable visualizations of a wide, wide range of data. As their front page boasts:

The Pudding is a digital publication that explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays makes cool shit on the internet. You might have seen our story on women’s pockets, but we’ve also made stuff about mapping famous people and celebrity name spelling.

The point of the site is making aesthetically pleasing data visualization, and the design withstands being zoomed up to 175%. I can’t speak to its accessibility otherwise. What’s revved me up this time is

Who gets shipped and why?

Extensive data visualization of relationship patterns in fanfic on the AO3. They quote thinkers I’ve enjoyed in the past — Kristina Busse and Joanna Russ among many — and as a treat, they host a random relationship generator at the top of the page.

( 125 word snippet )

https://pudding.cool/2024/10/fanfic

The OED Cares About Fannish Language

The Oxford English Dictionary was an early fandom for me — our family squabbled over who got the magnifying glass when the Compact OED arrived in 1971. (It squeezed 20 volumes into two by making the print tiny — essentially a paper microfiche.) So I was charmed by Dr Catherine Sangster’s article "Looking back at Geek Dictionary Corner"

( 125 word sample )

https://nineworlds.co.uk

And there’s more…

Seminar: The influence of pop culture on mainstream language

Thursday, November 21, 2024
1700 UTC (11:00 a.m. central US & Canada)

Join editors Dr Catherine Sangster and Fiona McPherson, and guest speakers Prof Dr Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer and Dr Fraser Dallachy for a discussion on the language of science fiction, fantasy, gaming, and other specific fandoms:

• How and why language that develops in these communities is adopted more widely
• How does the OED monitor these developments, and decide what should (or should not) be recorded
• Interesting examples
• The influence of World Englishes varieties and other languages
• Q&A time – bring your questions to the panellists or send them in advance to oed.uk@oup.com

Sign up to watch live https://events.oup.com/oup-academic-marketing/OED-pop-culture.

Will probably show up on OxfordLanguages’s YouTube channel.

I just listened to a This American Life episode (audio or transcript) where David Kestenbaum, an experienced science journalist, kvelled about how awesome Chat GPT is, how they are truly approaching AGI—artificial general intelligence. His turning point was that the large language model was trained on text, and wrote its own graphic-generating program when prompted to show an image. And that's pretty cool, but ...

I asked ChatGPT-4o some super-basic questions about my family history, all documented in US Census data. The results were stunningly bad.

My maternal grandfather's cousin was Richard Neutra, who was a well-known modern architect. ChatGPT-4o insisted that everyone in my family was related to him--that my maternal grandmother was really married to him. It would show accurate 1940 Census data—-my maternal grandmother with her actual name and and then say, but no, my grandmother was actually married to famous person and my mother was his daughter.

It answered an identical census question incorrectly and then correctly in immediate succession.

As erinptah has been diligently documenting, "AI" is simply not there yet, although this hasn't prevented everybody and their dog claiming it as the absolute new hotness.

( Verbatim Q&A inside )

I acknowledge that I have no technical qualifications to assess the relevance of these hallucinated answers to the overall reliability of "AI". I welcome new knowledge!

erinptah collates amusing and horrifying examples of large language models ("AI") spewing nonsense after they steal the hard work of artists like herself:

https://erinptah.dreamwidth.org/tag/artificial+unintelligence

ysabetwordsmith posted eighteen subtle and beautiful eclipse shots at the "share your photos" community common_nature https://common-nature.dreamwidth.org/253608.html

jenroses’s Fork Theory is a most excellent complement to spoon theory

http://jenrose.com/fork-theory/

You know the phrase, “Stick a fork in me, I’m done,” right?

Well, Fork Theory is that one has a Fork Limit, that is, you can probably cope okay with one fork stuck in you, maybe two or three, but at some point you will lose your shit if one more fork happens.

A fork could range from being hungry or having to pee to getting a new bill or a new diagnosis of illness. There are lots of different sizes of forks, and volume vs. quantity means that the fork limit is not absolute. I might be able to deal with 20 tiny little escargot fork annoyances, such as a hangnail or slightly suboptimal pants, but not even one “you poked my trigger on purpose because you think it’s fun to see me melt down” pitchfork.

Finally, this pro-captioned video summarizes the findings from an Hungarian research paper published last month in Cell. It supports that dogs make mental representations of human words.

stream on YouTube or … ( stream here )

Boros, Magyari et al. (2024) Neural evidence for referential understanding of object words in dogs https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2024.02.029

...is an appropriate holiday entry, I reckon.

Hello world! I’ve been noodling along, counting down the days until the Winter Solstice and the return of more light, doing a whole lot of nothing.

Happily, a pal turned me on to Elle Cordova, a musician, filker, rapper, and very funny person (formerly known as Reina Del Cid).

No transcript, but beautifully open-captioned:

( Seasons Greetings from our little multinational empire )

Much more at:

tiktok.com/@elle.cordova

youtube.com/@ElleCordova

youtube.com/@SundayMorningsHQ

and damn

geeky aside about user heads

I'm finally used to Dreamwidth's @-sign userheads, and the socials go and change their URLs so that including the @ generates a 404, thusly: ElleCordova

warm is the second-best[1] place to be as we see sasha_feather's lap, wrapped in a purple fleece throw, displaying the laptop lid covered in 26 excellent stickers ( Read more... )

My favorite is "No thanks I’m an indoor gay." I contributed the stylized pickle person who’s thinking "Kind of a big dill."

note 1: Best place to be is, of course, the internet.

I’m giving myself comment amnesty, because it’s the only way forward.

I enjoyed several pontoon rides towards the end of summer, in my birthday-month.

The locks on the Yahara River which connects Mendota (the big lake we visited in 2020) and Monona are under repair, so the pontoon rides were much smoother.

Photographic proof: Madison's low skyline is dark against the final orange sunset glow, dividing calm gray lake and cloudless blue sky:

( within the cut )