china_shop: Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan crouched down, stroking a black cat, on a gree background. (Guardian - meet cute)
The Gauche in the Machine ([personal profile] china_shop) wrote in [community profile] sid_guardian2025-09-11 05:48 pm
Entry tags:

Poll: Inspired by the Slo-Mo Rewatch discussion... (drama)

Poll #33601 Caught out
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 5


In episode 1, when Zhao Yunlan first spots Shen Wei, why does he recoil inside, grimacing? (check all that apply)

View Answers

Shen Wei is staring so intensely
3 (60.0%)

Shen Wei looks extraordinarily respectable
1 (20.0%)

Shen Wei looks like the kind of person who might judge one harshly
1 (20.0%)

Zhao Yunlan was dangling an employee out the window
3 (60.0%)

Zhao Yunlan dropped an employee out the window
5 (100.0%)

Zhao Yunlan has issues with authority figures
1 (20.0%)

the SID is supposed to be a covert organisation, and they're causing a scene
2 (40.0%)

other
2 (40.0%)

Shen Wei has a landline in his apartment. What is his policy with regard to phone phishing?

View Answers

he never answers; he has the Dixing power of call screening
0 (0.0%)

smiting the phishers through the phonelines, for the public good
0 (0.0%)

polite bewilderment
0 (0.0%)

fake polite bewilderment and amenability, to the point where *they* hang up on *him*
2 (40.0%)

gently but inexorably bringing the conversation around to the subject of bears
4 (80.0%)

other
0 (0.0%)

torachan: tavros from homestuck dressed as pupa pan (pupa pan)
Travis ([personal profile] torachan) wrote2025-09-10 09:55 pm
Entry tags:

Daily Happiness

1. Most of the stuff is gone from the curb. Hoping someone will decide to take the chair, too.

2. Last night before bed, I took a bunch of stuffing out of my new pillow (filled up a gallon size ziploc bag) and that seemed much more comfortable/similar feel to when I first unboxed it and before it fully expanded. The fully expanded size was definitely too full for me. The filling seems to redistribute very well once some is removed, and doesn't leave it feeling lumpy. If I need to adjust further, I can, but for now this seems about right.

3. Ollie is so big...

mecurtin: face of tuxedo tabby cat Purrcy looking smugly happy (purrcy face)
mecurtin ([personal profile] mecurtin) wrote2025-09-11 12:09 am
Entry tags:

Self-satisfaction

When Purrcy is very happy to be next to a human he sits upright on his butt like a little guy, spreads his legs, & prepares to lick his belly & otherwise have a good time. He is extremely vulgar & the envy of all human males, I'm informed.

Purrcy the tuxedo tabby is sitting up like a human with a kind of dopey expressing on his face. Trust me, I've chosen the camera angle carefully.
drabblewriter: (Epic - Troy Saga)
Katie ([personal profile] drabblewriter) wrote in [community profile] 100words2025-09-10 10:05 pm
Entry tags:

[Prompt #459: Dice] Greek Myth: Lucky Shot

Title: Lucky Shot
Fandom: Greek Myth
Characters/Ship: Apollo, Achilles, Cassandra
Rating: G

Read more... )
yhlee: a fox with the label FOX YOU! (fox you!)
yhlee ([personal profile] yhlee) wrote2025-09-10 09:38 pm

Ex Tenebris TTRPG on Kickstarter! (I'm writing a scenario for this)

Ex Tenebris: a gothic space opera TTRPG [Kickstarter, already funded!].

Beyond the dark emptiness of space, beyond dreaming, lies the Tenebrium. Only you can unearth its mysteries, defeat the twisted horrors that lurk there, and keep humanity from becoming prey.

In Ex Tenebris, you play a ragtag team of investigators, protecting the Republic of Stars from terrifying supernatural threats. You will face sorcerers and cults, dark technology from lost civilisations and the slobbering terrors lurking in the nightmare realm of the Tenebrium.

Ex Tenebris is a complete TTRPG containing all the rules, setting and scenarios that you need to embark on adventures amongst the stars.

[...]

Ex Tenebris takes inspiration from the grotesque imagery of the Aliens movies, the existential dread of Event Horizon, the mysticism of Dune, the dark gothic setting of Warhammer 40,000, and the weird science/magic fusion of Ninefox Gambit.


- Josh Fox, lead designer & writer
- Becky Annison, writer
- Juan Ochoa, illustrator
- Nathan D. Paoletta, layout and graphic design
- Andriy Lukin, logo design
- Jog Brogzin, cartographer
- Chirag Asnani, writer
- Sarah Doom, writer
- Eleanor Hingley, writer
- Kieron Gillen, writer
- Yoon Ha Lee, writer (howdy!)
- Tejas Oza, writer
- Galen Pejeau, writer
greghousesgf: (Boingboing)
greghousesgf ([personal profile] greghousesgf) wrote2025-09-10 04:59 pm

(no subject)

I had a wonderful afternoon, I had veggie pizza and wine with a couple of friends for lunch while we listened to live bluegrass, then we went shopping for fancy cheese and baked goodies and other things and then we got cupcakes at my favorite cupcake place.
Pivot to AI ([syndicated profile] pivot_to_ai_feed) wrote2025-09-10 08:13 pm

Inception Point — AI spam podcasts with no listeners

Posted by David Gerard

Inception Point AI is a podcast network that officially launched yesterday. CEO Jeanine Wright worked at podcast network Wondery until May 2024.

What does Inception Point do? It generates AI spam podcasts! 3,000 podcast episodes a week, with iHeart Media ads on them. [Hollywood Reporter]

Wright thinks the podcasts are great:

I think that people who are still referring to all AI-generated content as AI slop are probably lazy luddites. Because there’s a lot of really good stuff out there.

Inception Point claims “10 million downloads since September 2023” — if you want to believe that number. That works out to 64 listens per podcast. They’re getting pennies at best.

If you look at the front page of Quiet Please, you’ll see precisely what this is — it’s the podcast equivalent of the flood of AI spam  books on Amazon. These sell only when someone is tricked into buying them. [Quiet Please]

The podcasts sound like bored robots reading bad text. The cover images are all AI generated.

Wright brags about Inception Point’s AI personalities:

We believe that in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI, and we are the company that’s bringing those people to life.

Inception Point’s spam podcasts don’t actually make any money:

The startup is currently bootstrapped, and employees are not yet salaried, but the company will soon seek outside funding.

This plan cannot make money unless AI slop podcasts become genuinely popular, which will never happen. Then Wright will be onto the next thing. Quantum podcasts, maybe.

Organization for Transformative Works ([syndicated profile] otw_news_feed) wrote2025-09-10 11:01 pm

AO3 Releases 0.9.420 – 0.9.426: Change Log

Posted by callmeri

Over the past month, we rolled out behind-the-scenes upgrades and quality-of-life improvements across the site, including the addition of username links and chapter numbers to kudos and comment emails, respectively. We also made some major privacy and security enhancements, such as removing the email, birthday, and location fields from profiles and checking new passwords against known data breaches.

Special thanks and welcome to first-time contributors anna, Liz Watkins, Riya K, and theamandawang!

Credits

  • Coders: Abhinav Gupta, anna, Amy Lee, Bilka, Brian Austin, Ceithir, Connie Feng, Domenic Denicola, EchoEkhi, Hamham6, kitbur, Liz Watkins, marcus8448, Riya K, sarken, Scott, slavalamp, talvalin, theamandawang, weeklies
  • Code reviewers: Bilka, Brian Austin, Ceithir, HamHam6, james_, lydia-theda, marcus8448, redsummernight, sarken, Scott, weeklies
  • Testers: Allonautilus, ana, Anh P, Aster, Bilka, Brian Austin, calamario, choux, Dre, Keladry, Lute, lydia-theda, Pent, redsummernight, Runt, Sanity, sarken, Teyris, therealmorticia, weeklies, wichard

Details

0.9.420

On July 15, we massively improved the user search used by admins.

  • [AO3-6565] – We’ve improved the user search feature available to admins by moving it to Elasticsearch and adding the ability to search by past email addresses and usernames.
  • [AO3-7042] – Instead of redirecting to the main Collections page, we now give a 404 error if you try to access the collections page for a nonexistent user, work, or collection.
  • [AO3-7004] – We’ve added a database index to make it faster for database admins to search for comments using a specific guest name.

0.9.421

Following some email-related changes in our July 24 deploy, embedded images are now always stripped from comment emails, and usernames in kudos emails now link to the users’ dashboards.

  • [AO3-3154] – When you receive a kudos notification email, the names of users who have left kudos now link to the users’ dashboards.
  • [AO3-6060] – Even though they no longer had access to tag comment pages, former tag wranglers would still receive email and inbox notifications of replies to their old tag comments. This was both annoying and confusing, so we’ve stopped it from happening.
  • [AO3-6746] – If you changed your username or pseud name and you had some chapters that you co-created with another user, the chapter bylines would not always get updated with your new name. We’ve changed this so the cache is refreshed more reliably.
  • [AO3-6929] – The list of gift exchange sign-ups visible to collection maintainers now includes the pseud and username of signed-up users, instead of just their pseud.
  • [AO3-7011] – Using the Tab key to navigate in desktop Safari used to select hidden inputs, causing the focus indicator to temporarily disappear. We’ve fixed it so only visible links and inputs receive focus.
  • [AO3-7032] – If you tried to add your email to the invitation queue when it was already part of the queue, you would see two copies of the same error message. Now it only shows the error once.
  • [AO3-7065] – We fixed some intermittent failures in the automated tests for the bookmark importing tool used by Open Doors.
  • [AO3-7052] – We did a schema dump to capture what the current data structure looks like before we upgrade to Rails 7.2.
  • [AO3-7053], [AO3-7054], [AO3-7067], [AO3-7068] – We updated a whole bunch of gems and GitHub actions: reviewdog/action-rubocop, awalsh128/cache-apt-pkgs-action, nokogiri, and thor.
  • [AO3-5352] – We prepared the preface of work downloads that are attached to work deletion emails for translation.
  • [AO3-7001] – As an anti-abuse measure, we now strip embedded images from comment notification emails even when image embeds are enabled on the site itself.

0.9.422 & 0.9.423

On July 28, we made a number of small improvements all around the site. There were some issues while deploying these changes, so we did another release to fix it all up on the same day.

  • [AO3-5609] – We stopped sending subscription notifications for works hidden by admins, since hidden works are inaccessible to other users.
  • [AO3-7006] – When a comment contains an HTML list, the list numbers or bullet points no longer overlap with the commenter’s icon.
  • [AO3-7024] – You’ll no longer get an incorrect success message if you mark items in your inbox as read without selecting any comments.
  • [AO3-5476] – We cleaned up some unused code in the works controller.
  • [AO3-7064] – We updated the gems we use for automated testing.
  • [AO3-7072] – We updated the unicode gem to solve some issues with developing the AO3 software on Macs with Apple Silicon chips.
  • [AO3-5346] – Collection maintainers get an email notification when matches in a gift exchange have finished generating. We’ve improved the text of this email and prepared it for translation.
  • [AO3-6484] – We made a small change to the code that generates the HTML class names we use for hiding work blurbs by muted users. We were hoping this tweak would improve performance, but unfortunately it had no effect, so we’ll have to try again.
  • [AO3-6997] – If an Open Doors archivist tries to leave kudos while logged in to an archivist account, they’ll get an error message telling them to log in with their personal account instead.
  • [AO3-7015] – Work blurbs now contain an invisible code comment with the work’s update date, to make it easier for developers of third-party tools to automate downloads from index pages like tags, bookmarks, and search result listings.
  • [AO3-7021] – To make it easier to filter or search using work languages, we’ve added the language codes on the Languages page.
  • [AO3-7057] – We now provide any applicable error messages when an admin attempts to send an invitation directly to an email and something goes wrong.

0.9.424

On August 5, we deployed another batch of miscellaneous fixes.

  • [AO3-5025] – The Tag Wrangling committee can now use the Rich Text editor to edit the Wrangling Guidelines pages.
  • [AO3-7076] – We fixed some unwanted shadows that Chrome was adding to radio buttons and checkboxes.
  • [AO3-7088] – We fixed some flaky automated tests related to importing works from LiveJournal.
  • [AO3-7074] – We removed some unused CSS from our default site skin.
  • [AO3-6580] – We updated the account creation confirmation page’s title from “Create Registration” to “Account Created” so that it’s clearer you’ve successfully made an account.
  • [AO3-6818] – When an admin bans an email from being used for guest comments, that email is now also banned from requesting invitations.
  • [AO3-7026] – When we run a spam check on edited comments by new users, we now tell the spam checker that it’s an edit.
  • [AO3-7046] – We migrated the subscriptions table so it can hold more rows and we won’t run out of room in the future.

0.9.425

On August 19, we deployed an important change to account security that checks new AO3 passwords to see if they’ve been part of a known data breach. We also began allowing CSS variables in site skins.

  • [AO3-7073] – To better protect users’ privacy, we’ve removed the preferences and fields to display emails, birthdays, and locations on user profiles.
  • [AO3-7091] – We stopped using fixtures in our integration tests.
  • [AO3-7098] – We updated cache-apt-pkgs-action again.
  • [AO3-7099] – We bumped the version of actions/checkout – a utility that helps run automated tests on our code – from version 4 to version 5.
  • [AO3-3071] – Comment emails now include the chapter number, so you don’t have to follow the comment link to know where exactly it was left.
  • [AO3-7087] – To improve account security, we updated our password change process to prevent users from choosing passwords that are known to be compromised on other sites. (If you missed our post back on World Password Day, we also have some tips for keeping your AO3 account secure!)
  • [AO3-7090] – We changed links in emails to be HTTPS instead of HTTP.
  • [AO3-7093] – We added an automated test to make sure the fixtures used for seeding development databases result in valid records.
  • [AO3-7094] – We now allow limited use of CSS custom properties in site skins! You can find more information in the skins help text.

0.9.426

We upgraded to Rails 7.2 on August 26.

  • [AO3-7058] – We updated our version of Rails from 7.1 to 7.2.
  • [AO3-7095] – We added more example admin and user accounts with a greater variety of roles to our basic development dataset, which will make it easier for coders to work on things that require specific access levels.
lb_lee: A colored pencil drawing of Raige's freckled hand holding a hot pink paperback entitled the Princess and Her Monster (book)
lb_lee ([personal profile] lb_lee) wrote2025-09-10 06:35 pm

Thorn, Frostflower, and Phyllis Ann Karr

Rogan: While shelf-checking at the sci-fi library, I found Phyllis Ann Karr's Frostflower books: Frostflower and Thorn, and Frostflower and Windbourne.

I had encountered the characters before, in a short story, "Night of the Short Knives," in the Crossing Press anthology The Women Who Walk Through Fire: Women's Fantasy & Science Fiction vol. 2. In the back of that anthology (which the sci-fi library also has), I found the following author's note:

"I met Thorn and Frostflower at a summer writing workshop led by George R. R. Martin in Dubuque, Iowa. Not that they are based on anyone I ever met in 'real life.' Since long before I knew any theory about the Astral Plane, I have believed that characters are real entities who allow writers to use them. Thus, my fiction is a cooperative effort between the characters and myself; but Frostflower and Thorn answered a call for Sword and Sorcery figures in particular." (p. 273)

That note was written in 1990; her first Frostflower title came out in 1980. She's still writing other books today.

case: (Default)
Case ([personal profile] case) wrote in [community profile] fandomsecrets2025-09-10 05:56 pm

[ SECRET POST #6823 ]


⌈ Secret Post #6823 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.


More! )


Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 25 secrets from Secret Submission Post #974.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
yhlee ([personal profile] yhlee) wrote2025-09-10 04:49 pm

alpaca adventures, cont'd



Test spin of small experimental alpaca floof batch.

For lagniappe, the completed smol woven object made from my handspun that's headed to [personal profile] eller, mostly wool/silk/angelina blends (both colorways). :3

smallhobbit: (ferret)
smallhobbit ([personal profile] smallhobbit) wrote in [community profile] 100words2025-09-10 10:04 pm
Entry tags:

Sherlock Holmes (ACD) - The Ferret's Luck

Title: The Ferret's Luck
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (ACD) AU
Rating: G

conuly: (Default)
conuly ([personal profile] conuly) wrote in [community profile] agonyaunt2025-09-10 04:02 pm

(no subject)

Dear Annie: I met my husband three years ago, about eight months after he lost his first wife of 20 years. Their marriage was often toxic, and she was very abusive toward him. After she passed, he was ready to move on.

Right away, I knew something wasn't right with my husband. In his mid-50s, he was having short-term memory issues, falling frequently and struggling with his mental health. After seeing his health care provider and enrolling in the Veterans Affairs health care system, we discovered he had suffered multiple traumatic brain injuries during his time in the Army. That diagnosis led to him becoming a 100% service-connected disabled veteran and allowed him to receive the care he needed for a better quality of life.

His family, however, waged a war against me for helping him, accusing me of manipulating and "brainwashing" him. My husband has distanced himself from them, and we're no longer on speaking terms. My husband has a lot of anger toward them as he suffered for decades without their help or support.

His parents, who live in another state, are elderly and in poor health. I fear that if he doesn't reconcile with them before they pass, he will resent me. I love my husband with all my heart, and this has been a hard road. I just want the very best for him, unconditionally. Any advice? -- Wife on the Defensive


Read more... )
conuly: (Default)
conuly ([personal profile] conuly) wrote in [community profile] agonyaunt2025-09-10 03:58 pm

(no subject)

DEAR ABBY: My daughter, "Violet," lives about two hours away. She and her mother (my wife) do not get along. Violet was always a rebellious, independent wild child, as well as the source of a lot of family problems. Violet and I also were estranged until we recently reconciled.

Yesterday, she sent me an email inviting me to lunch to celebrate my birthday. When I told my wife about the invitation, she responded, "Do what you want" in a tone and with a facial expression which said: "Go ahead, but if you do, you'll be sorry."

I have tried to reconcile these two women I love without success. My wife tells me she loves Violet but doesn't like her, although she would like to have a better relationship with her. Violet tells me she blames her mother for her PTSD (her unofficial diagnosis) and wants nothing to do with her.

So do I go to lunch with my daughter and incur the wrath of my wife for what she would consider a betrayal, or do I decline the invitation from my daughter and risk alienating her again? -- IN THE MIDDLE IN NEW JERSEY


Read more... )