![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
g_uava) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
fictional_fans2025-07-20 09:33 am
fan_writers comm - for meta about writing
fan_writers geek out about writing! Some posts shared in the comm:juniperphoenix) wrote in fanart_recs2025-07-19 06:17 pmoursin) wrote2025-07-19 03:47 pmThe Case of the Missing Romani American History:
The history of Romani Americans is missing. Although the experiences of other marginalized and immigrant American groups are now well-represented in mainstream historical scholarship, Romani Americans remain absent from American history. This absence has detrimental effects to Romani Americans who are placed outside historical time. It also harms scholars whose work could benefit from the placement of Romani people in the histories they tell.
A ‘new Canterbury Tale’: George Smythe, Frederick Romilly and England’s ‘last political duel’:
In the early hours of 20 May 1852, six weeks before polling in that summer’s general election, two MPs travelled from London to woodland outside Weybridge in a bid to settle a quarrel provoked by the unravelling of electioneering arrangements in the double-member constituency of Canterbury. Frederick Romilly, the borough’s sitting Liberal MP, had issued a challenge to his Canterbury colleague George Smythe, whose political allegiances fluctuated and who had notoriously been embroiled in four previous prospective duels. The pair, accompanied by their seconds, who were also politicians, exchanged shots before departing unscathed. None of the participants faced prosecution but neither Smythe nor Romilly was re-elected.
***
Do not foxes have the right to enjoy the facilities of the public library system? London library forced to briefly close after fox 'made itself comfortable' inside - this was a London library, rather than the London Library.
***
Two entries in the People B Weird category:
Sylvanian Families' legal battle over TikTok drama:
Sylvanian Families has become embroiled in a legal battle with a TikTok creator who makes comedic videos of the children's toys in dark and debauched storylines. The fluffy creatures, launched in 1985, have become a childhood classic. But the Sylvanian Drama TikTok account sees them acting out adult sketches involving drink, drugs, cheating, violence and even murder.
And
I'm 16 and live entirely like it's the 1940s (I bet he's not eating as though rationing is still in force, what?):
"I liked the clothing, how they dressed, and the style," Lincoln explained. "Just the elegance of how everyone was and acted... with the time of the war, everyone had to come together, everyone had to fight, and everyone had to survive together.
"Most people back then said it was scary, but it was quite fun to live then, and they could go out, help each other and apparently there's not that much stuff today that is similar to what that wartime experience was."
Lincoln said he loved the music of the time, including Henry Hall, Jack Payne and Ambrose & His Orchestra.
The teenager's wardrobe was also entirely made up of clothes from the era, which he said he preferred to modern-day clothes.
He even cycles on a 1939 bike when out and about researching and finding items for his collection.
quixotic) wrote in dwrp_icons2025-07-19 05:02 pmmalagraphic
malagraphicerinptah) wrote2025-07-19 01:32 amNew scam going around DeviantArt. It opens when you get DM’d the line “Pardon me, may I have a moment of your time? I have a concern I’d like to share.”
The scammers are doing these from real people’s hacked accounts, so if you get suspicious and look at the user’s profile, everything about it suggests “genuine non-bot person.” I got suspicious and googled a whole sentence of their text, and found the above post about other scammers using the same script. Stay alert out there.
—
This post is from 2018, but I was looking for the link again recently, so I’m bringing it back. Concrete examples of ways you can change an image that don’t affect what a human brain perceives in them, but wildly messes with what a computer algorithm detects in them. (I’m pretty sure “AI poisoning” art algorithms, like Glaze and Nightshade, are doing a variation of this.)
“Builder.ai, once touted as a revolutionary AI startup backed by Microsoft, has collapsed into insolvency after revelations that its flagship no-code development platform was powered not by artificial intelligence—but by 700 human engineers in India.“
“We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower.” (Narrator: Nobody was surprised.)
“”Tasks that seemed straightforward often took days rather than hours, with [LLM “coding” bot] Devin getting stuck in technical dead-ends or producing overly complex, unusable solutions,” the researchers explain in their report. “Even more concerning was Devin’s tendency to press forward with tasks that weren’t actually possible.”“
It’s worth watching the full “actual coder exposes the scam what Devin actually did” Youtube video linked in the previous article. (The speaker says he’s pro-AI! He’s just exhausted by all the fake hype!) Among other things, Devin gets access to a Github codebase, writes a completely new file that duplicates (badly) the functions of a file the project already had, fixes at least some of the bugs it just created in the redundant new file, and then submits this as “fulfilling the task to review the project for bugs.”
Reddit post: ChatGPT, you have the file and not a cactus?
mrkinch) wrote2025-07-18 06:33 pmmific) wrote in fanart_recs2025-07-19 01:21 pmjuniperphoenix) wrote in fanart_recs2025-07-18 07:59 pmkaberett) wrote2025-07-18 11:41 pm(I have also made two extremely questionable loaves of bread -- the soda bread I managed to leave out half the flour, which meant it was... not quite inedibly salty, but... definitely Really Quite; the sourdough was just too high a hydration and Wanted To Be A Puddle -- and sent a couple of e-mails I was avoiding. And ordered a Small Treat.)
petra) wrote2025-07-18 05:01 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
scalziwhatever_feed) wrote2025-07-18 05:41 pm
And, well, yes! It is! The full review (here, warning, mild spoilers) also says that it is “tightly plotted” and otherwise praises the writing for catching up reader on the events of the series while still keeping things moving in the book’s here and now. And, again: Yes! I will take all that. Also, and I say this with just about every novel, it’s nice when the first trade review is a positive one. It means I can relax a little.
More news on The Shattering Peace soon. We are two months out from the release! Things are beginning to pick up momentum.
— JS
lightreads) wrote2025-07-18 01:34 pmoursin) wrote2025-07-18 04:41 pmI don't know if anyone else has clocked this, which sounds like another of those vexatious cases brought by Christian homophobes, about the rainbow pedestrian - or as I was wont to call them in my youth, 'zebra' - crossings. The logic is, shall we say, convoluted.
Camden resident Blessing Olubanjo has told the local authority to get rid of the three blue, pink and white-painted pedestrian crossings... or else she would begin judicial review proceedings. She complained that the markings, installed in 2021 during Transgender Awareness Week, infringed her rights as a Christian and constituted “unlawful political messaging”. In a letter to the Town Hall, she said: “As a Christian and a taxpayer, I should not be made to feel excluded or marginalised by political symbols in public spaces.” Ms Olubanjo has been supported by Christian Legal Society, which has cited a section in the Local Government Act 1986 prohibiting councils from publishing material that appears to promote a political party or controversial viewpoint, and the crossings were a form of ‘publication’.
But where is this that she is protesting?
Why, in the very heart of Bloomsbury, and not just Any Old Bit of Bloomsbury ('living in squares, loving in triangles') but Marchmont Street.
Where we may find the iconic Gay's the Word bookshop as featured in the movie Pride (inaccurately described there as being in Soho) and a blue plaque for Kenneth Williams, and close by one for Boulton and Park.
Anyway Camden Council '“entirely rejects” her argument, and [said] that the borough has “no place for hate”' and the views of local people taken by The Local Democracy Reporting Service were very much on the side of leaving the crossings be.
scalziwhatever_feed) wrote2025-07-18 02:56 pm
Human characters have never been essential to tell a good story. Author Caspar Geon breaks the mold of featuring boring ol’ humans in his newest novel The Immeasurable Heaven. Come along as he takes you through worlds, nay, universes, of his imagination.
CASPAR GEON:
I’ve read that if you go outside and cover a portion of the sky with your outstretched thumb, you’ll be obscuring approximately fifteen million galaxies. There was a clear sky the other night so I went out and did just that, and it’s mind-boggling. That’s fifteen million distant islands, each home to hundreds of billions of stars. And all of that just a drop in a colossal ocean.
This was the starting point for The Immeasurable Heaven: the conviction that there’s so much going on out there independent of everything we know or understand, so much that we’ll never have a hope of glimpsing, and my preoccupation with leaving all earthly issues behind to experience a tiny portion of it in some way. Pure escapism. Escapism with a capital, er, E. Fairly standard behaviour for someone who was put back a year in Primary school for ignoring his work and staring out of the window all the time.
When I finished the final book in my space opera trilogy the Amaranthine Spectrum in 2018 (which had neither earned out, nor, as far as I can tell, earned much at all) the onus was on writing something less ambitious and more commercial. Simple, right? In the Amaranthine books I’d already compiled three biggish novels about the far future of humanity and the strange plethora of mammalian forms that it would eventually become; now I had to get serious.
Elderly relatives who’d made the mistake of trying my books would counsel me earnestly to write something with more human characters and relatable storylines, and I would nod my head, go home and do precisely the opposite, feeling that wicked thrill as I struck out on an adventure with zero human characters at all, set three billion years ago in a distant ring of connected galaxies. I was still writing it five years later.
I wanted to find out what a settled galaxy would look and feel like after hundreds of millions of years of unbroken civilisation, what its inhabitants would have become, and how they would lead their lives. In that process I came up with the Throlken, omniscient machine intelligences that have set up home in the hearts of every star and ruled for a third of an aeon, forbidding violence of any kind. I met Whirazomar, a linguist forced to journey in the cramped, filthy confines of a sentient passenger spore with a hundred rowdy passengers, and Draebol, a hapless explorer of the lower dimensions. And I found the voice at the centre of it all, a prisoner sent far away for a very long time, its mind now utterly rotten.
What I’d somehow assumed would be an equivalent amount of worldbuilding to the last three novels had ballooned into a stack of notebooks heavy enough to knock me unconscious if they toppled over. Spending time in the galaxy of Yokkun’s Depth and its seven linked neighbours had become an obsession as I wrote about reality-hopping sorcerers, walking parasite cities, coral and pollen spaceships, interdimensional multiplayer games and ice moon ocean battles. The book also delved deeper into the concept of mortality than anything I’d ever written, since death is presumably a constant that most sentient beings will at some point in their existence have to contemplate, and to this eternal question there might – somewhere – lie answers.
This went hand in hand with the nature of reality itself, which, when experienced elsewhen and elsewhere, is at its core a malleable notion quantified in countless different ways, especially once you throw a variety of sensory organs and methods of perception into the mix. Who can say which is the correct reality, the one true way of seeing? And what then is death, if reality itself cannot be firmly defined? ‘The Immeasurable Heaven’ (actually the English translation of the lovely Hawaiian name for our own galaxy cluster, Laniakea) was a title I couldn’t resist.
Anyway, despite the constant risk of disappearing into my own belly button and popping out of existence entirely, my number one priority was to have as much fun as I could writing, especially since it seemed to me that this wasn’t going to be a book any traditional publisher would want to take a risk on. The fact that one eventually did still surprises me, even a week from publication.
And so, to reference the book’s afterword, I hope you’ll join me on my leisurely trip across this immeasurable heaven, for there are many more tales to tell.
The Immeasurable Heaven: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|Waterstones
petra) wrote2025-07-18 11:08 ammarcelo and mary!liv) wrote2025-07-18 12:55 pmredbird and her partners this week, which was an unexpected and wonderful bonus. Among many chill, non-urgent summer plans I am hoping to be a bit more present here.isis) wrote2025-07-17 07:02 pmsovay, it's very different from Elder Race but if these themes appeal I think you'll like it.runpunkrun's take that there are way too many words devoted to them walking around on this mission which turns out to be not really relevant, compared to the actual point of the story. Still, it's nice to have a bit about Murderbot from not Murderbot's POV.
