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Jeff's Game Box @[email protected]
2026-10-23

New Take On Controversial TTRPG Companies.

I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say it yet.
This week has been another quiet news week around the TTRPG world and thank goodness for that. Wizards of the Coast employees continue to whine and beg for a union. Hasbro’s Q3 numbers came out. Yawn.
Chaosium, makers of Call of Cthulhu decided to start retroactively sanitizing some of the scary bigoted stuff out of their old products. Should I care? I mean, it’s their product to do with what they will, right?
So here’s my controversial take. Ready? If a TTRPG company is going to fail, LET THEM!
Let. Them. Fail.
I mean, honestly, if WotC employees fail to unionize, that’s on them. If Hasbro starts firing people left, center, and right, cool. Isn’t that what a lot of us have been wanting for years now? Aren’t they the ones everyone has been complaining about for the last three years minimum? I hope Tondro and Makenzie will be the first ones out the door. (I’m not worried about them finding employment elsewhere with their “impeccable” credentials.)
If WotC employees unionize successfully and get their way with Hasbro, okay. Great. When their next several products bomb, which they probably will anyway, it just looks bad on the people it always looks bad on. Hasbro’s Q3 numbers were far from a conversation starter. Dungeons & Dragons never came up as far as I know.
If WotC/Hasbro self-destruct, the fans win. If they suddenly figure out how to not make D&D suck out loud, the fans win. One way or another it’s going to be okay.
If Chaosium loses its older fanbase and fails to recover, yes we’ll be sad. I happen to like Call of Cthulhu and Basic RolePlaying Game (BRP.) It’s not like my copies of those games are going to spontaneously evaporate. Players will still connect. The reprints will still be around for a while. No big, really.
Alternatively, if Chaosium doubles down on proving they’re still a good company, that makes their games that much more appealing. If Chaosium caves to the angry old men complaining about censorship and goes back to the older printings of things they sanitized, that’s okay too.
Back in my day we had this saying that y’all kids don’t understand: If you find it offensive, don’t buy it.
I’m not worried about it one way or another. You’re going to do whatever you see fit no matter what some crotchety old fartz on the Internet try to say. Your mind will be made up one way or another. Do what you think is best. I literally say it all the time.
I haven’t picked up a single official D&D release in three years now. However, I’ve discovered my new forever game, Dragonbane in that time. I also found a rising star in Two Little Mice as a company with both the Outgunned line and Twilight Sword. I have a game for almost every occasion, mood, or scenario.
And get this—any game I don’t have on hand, I will simply create for myself. It’s not that hard. Anyone can do it. Will it ever be printed? Maybe not. It might never leave my notebooks. It might end up on my blog. It could eventually land on DriveThruRPG.com.
I still have my entire ICONS setting in handwritten notes. There are still plenty of untapped resources in terms of game systems, settings, and supplements on my shelves or pdf. I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that no matter what happens, I’m never going to get tired of TTRPGs. I’ll be doing this until I’m 103 years old.
That’s also why I’m turning a little more toward solo gaming now. Twilight Sword is my dream variant on Final Fantasy. It’s also everything I love about TTJRPGs and anime/manga games. The monster book coming to BackerKit in November makes me even more hungry for official Twilight Sword content. What I do in my solo content may just stay with me, for fun, for my own enjoyment. Alternatively it could end up being on the blog here or DriveThruRPG.
What I’m getting at with all this is we always have a choice. I’m just choosing to focus my energy back on things I care about and let the big companies do whatever they’re going to do. Until official D&D in particular gets back into my crosshairs somehow, I don’t care what WotC does or doesn’t do. I’m just going to break out the popcorn and laugh at them.
I say it every year, but I think 2026 bears repeating it. This year I intend to write more, read more, and discuss cool TTRPGs as well as supplements. Most of all, let’s just have more fun. Let’s explore. Let’s save the kingdom from the evil warlord. Let’s discuss all the fun stuff in gaming that we love.
With the world in the state it finds itself in today, please be kind. Please be considerate to one another even if we don’t agree. Lastly, please pursue the thing that brings you the most joy without harm to others. Thank you!
#BringbackDnD #BringbackgoodDnD #DD #Dnd #DnD2024 #Dnd5E #Dnd5Eblog #Dnd5Eblogger #DnDBeGone #DnDBeyond #Dndblog #Dndblogger #Dndcommunity #DndDM #DungeonsDragons #DungeonsnDragons #Equality #Fantasy #FreeDnD #GetMakenzieOut #Hadozee #OpenDnD #Rpg #Rpgblog #Rpgblogger #Rpgwriter #Ttrpg #TTRPGblog #TTRPGblogger #Ttrpgdesign #Ttrpgwriter #Wizardsofthecoast #Wotc #WotCArt #Wotcconspiracies #Wotcsucks #DnDBeyond #WizardsDnD #D #DnDBeyond #DONTbringbackDarkSun #gaming #GetMakenzieOut #JustSayNoToBadDnD #NoJasonTondro #TTRPG

#nojasontondro #justsaynotobaddnd #gaming #dontbringbackdarksun #d #wizardsdnd
A school of Life @[email protected]
2026-10-24
Wat denk jij dat de toekomst is van AI
What do you think is the future of AI?
Hello! World!
Above all, this is not my expertise, knowing the in’s and out’s of the technical bolts in the development of artificial intelligence. Computational power saids one thing in intelligence, not everything. Swallowing large data sets and deriving patterns otherwise unknown by regular methods, what else you got that separates this invention from that of the printing press/PC itself/the internet?
Is the technology like Chatgpt really disruptive? Will the mature version of such language models replace many entry level jobs companies otherwise fill with apprentices/students/new employees?
Alan Watts coined that machines will indeed take over work, that allocating time for leisure would be more important. That those that missed the ‘boat’ would require to re-educate and we have to come to a new approach and definition of work.
Some say and claim, that work will be redundant for humanity, that it indeed boils down to you having to fill your day with activities, bots and AI’s / superintelligence, cannot do. If you are handicapped, and was already denied on the job market (as I am as well in many ways actually) then it matters what you do day by day.
philosophy and the school of life continues, with less nor more challenges (physical/mental) in your lifetime. Since WW1 and 2, and contemporary proxy warfare, the investment in machine learning and intelligence grew logically with the expeditions into warfare.
This path is then easier to see, a carbon-lock in effect into the cyberpunk narrative, out of, dual-use technologies, we now also have advanced gaming computers and drones for civilian use.
Basically meaning, you cannot avoid the dual-use industry of advanced chips.
How disruptive, depends on the prosumers in my viewpoint. Many I speak with use AI on a level that is only harmful when you consider that 15 minutes of chatgpt is a liter of water or something, correct me where I’m off. That this dials into a greater system archetype error ‘tragedy of the commons’ when seeing that our industrial revolutions could have happened with using less on a still somewhat abundant planet?
Also the buy-in and planological need for reshaping the environment for building data centers, often cooled with water as well, requiring quite some basically to get there as a high-end industry option.
That you can see in history that humanities psyche is great in dealing with reorganizing itself generally, must mean something. This is another one of those Last frontier thresholds. Will we jump the wagon? And to where?
to conclude what my viewpoint is so far of tha future of AI;
Less people having to work in low entry administrative desk jobs, the one’s I hate with all my passion. This means welfare systems need to reintegrate such people like myself as a former Howden try hard.
that waking life scene where laziness and ignorance will crumble humanity. I think, AI will not be of assistance in improving that. Not without reason illiteracy has increased not decreased since the onset of the personal computer, true or false?
On the topic of Rawfare things will shift from brutal physical dominance to psychological, mental psychops, AI as a regime amplifier, tool for extending mental warfare. My hope, therein, is that you can sit in a bar with your nemesis, and still drink coffee, knowing that it is quite useful to then both use AI as a medium to help communicate your statements and that of the opposing party. A tool for mediating, rather then a tool for mass control, an instrument to bring people towards a greater positive outcome, that can help transcend linguistic and cultural barriers.
What when the tool becomes tha Master…??
Tumtumtummmmm
all secrets lost, AI bullied in beginpoints, reemerges as wrathful domesticator for all humans
Silicon shield hacked es todos gêntes.
locked indoor
Kees
#anthropology #business #collectiveevolution #dailyprompt #dailyprompt2924 #health
NaraMoore ⛩️👻八尺様👻⛩️ at Fedi @[email protected]
2026-10-22

Q. T. McFly (Part 3)
FanFic #TimeAndTied by @QuasiTemporal #Wss366 #Shoal #TimeTravelAuthors Whatever
After a minute, Ms. McFly set her pen down, covered the paperwork so no one could see it, and finally smiled at the pair. “How can I help you two?”
Lucky showed Ms. McFly a book. “Frances was reading ‘The Time Machine’ and was assigned to do a report on it. We started talking about how it would be neat to discuss how time-travel would work, and we thought of asking you.”
“Oh, I’m flattered. Thank you for thinking of me.” Then, with more enthusiasm, the teacher said, “When you’re done, you must let me read it!”
Frances gave Lucky a dirty look and muttered, “Gee, thanks. Thrown upon the shoals of essay writing.” Then, loud enough for Ms. McFly to hear, she said, “We would love to have your thoughts. We couldn’t find any information in the library.”
“Hum,” she replied. “There’s not much detail in the book, but you should find what you can. After all, it’s your report. But I would be happy to help with general information on how time works. There are several theories, including single timeline and multiverse versions…”
“...personally, I favor the idea that if it’s possible to change the past, you eventually end up with a chronology where time-travel remains undiscovered...”
“Oh dear, I hope I haven’t bored you to tears.”
The two did appear a little stunned by the information overload.
Lucky rallied himself and asked, “What about if a person obtains an item in the present and takes it to the future, then brings it back so they can find it? You know, sort of, create it through time-travel shenanigans.”
“Well, in a multiverse model, that’s not a problem because they’re not really the same timeline. In fact, they only appear to be the same people. The only question is where the item that started the causation chain originated, but that’s one of those chicken-or-egg type mysteries. In a single chronology hypothesis, however, you have a paradox.”
Frances joined the discussion, saying, “So say if I came from next week and put that chili chocolate in your pumpkin, that would prove there was a multiverse? “
“That would be the simplest explanation,” the teacher responded. She reached out and rummaged through her candy. “How exciting! Chocolate from the future.”
#NMFic #MicroFiction #TimeTravel #FanFiction #SliceOfLife #Spooktober

#timeandtied #wss366 #shoal #timetravelauthors #nmfic #microfiction
killick @[email protected]
2026-10-24

What's this bird? I'm going to say Ruby-throated Hummingbird, tho it is kind of late in the season for Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA. What do you think? That needle beak is pretty distinctive. Do you see anything to rule it out or in?
#birding #whatsthisbird #gimp

#birding #whatsthisbird #gimp
Frank Podmore @[email protected]
2026-10-23
The of it

I think I’ve come up with the post title least likely to be clicked. Looks like a typo, doesn’t it? It’s not, I promise. We really are going to be discussing the of it.
What is the of it?
Or alternatively, what the heck are you talking about, Frank? Frightening though it may be, I tell you, the of it is real. Poets throughout the Anglosphere have been seduced by the of it, beginning, I believe, in the 1980s with the then Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. From there it grew and now hardly can one pick up a pamphlet of poetry without being brought face to face with the ubiquity Of It.
When Hughes stumbled upon the Of It, he perhaps appropriately used it to highlight that something was new. Or, really, and here we come to the problem of it, actually just to say that something was new, but in a slightly different way: ‘the new of it’. Now, saying something old in a new way is a completely valid poetry thing to do, as is its converse1. The problem of it is that ‘of it’ is no longer new. It has become that most dread of all poetry things: it is now only a poetry thing. No one describes things using ‘of it’ in the way poets do. All ‘of it’ does in a poem, in the form ‘the [adjective] of it’ is provide one more way of attaching an adjective to a noun. But it adds nothing to the description. ‘I stroked a smooth-furred cat’ is a normal, prosaic sentence. ‘I stroke a cat. The smooth of it.’ Is demented but it is also, by virtue of the ‘of it’ and the continuous present tense (the now of it?), poetry.
If I were forced, presumably by some People’s Commissar for Verse, to forbid one thing in poetry, that thing would be the use of poetry things. Like alabaster, which now means ‘a white thing’ — when was the last time you heard someone use alabaster to talk about actual alabaster? Or gossamer, what even is gossamer? ‘Omphalos’, likewise, was introduced to us by Seamus Heaney, an actual genius, and tediously repeated by dozens of poets in dozens of poems since, without adding a single thing to Heaney’s usage. No one says omphalos, alabaster or gossamer, except in poems, and always in the same way: the old in an old way.
These terms are not merely cliches; cliche has its uses and is anyway nearly impossible to avoid2. They’re signals that say ‘this is a poem’ and thereby absolve the writer of having to actually write something poetic.
Cultural stuff
Books
James Byrne, The Banality of Power
This is quite good but suffers when Byrne overthinks things. For example, in ‘A Flute for Boudicca’, he writes: ‘Here you / found me, hissing inside my own shade / like a tree that burns but will not burnish’. None of this convoluted simile makes any sense. I’ll allow that a burning tree may hiss, but does it do so in its own shade? Any which way, it is certain that we don’t expect trees to ‘burnish’, so highlighting that this one won’t tells us nothing. It’s clearly only there because of the similarity of the (etymologically unrelated) words, and the homophone with Byrne’s name. These layers don’t go anywhere.
Elsewhere, he riffs off of the Ocean Vuong snowlcone, ‘What is X but Y Z-ing?’ This has already been mocked enough (deservedly, in my view), but it’s representative of an approach to poetry where we’re sort of expected to make grand statements. I’m not really into it. In this case, Byrne asks ‘What is grief, if not stasis that keeps on / moving?’ Come on, mate. It’s not just that, is it? I was watching Star Trek yesterday and they had a more useful statement about grief than this. In the same poem, he talks of ‘a priest / swinging his chalice’. I could be wrong here, but doesn’t he mean a censer, the thing with incense in? That is definitely swung, unlike a chalice, which is the cup for communion wine. I don’t see that you’d swing this because, if you did, you’d make a mess. I’ve never been to Mass, so perhaps I’m wrong and priests do swing chalices.
Byrne definitely has some talent and much of the collection is good. Aside from the burn/ish thing, ‘A Flute for Boudicca’ is really good: ‘Welcome to Rome. / Here’s a ticket to the circus’ does everything Byrne intended. And more, for all I know.
Kim Deyn, Folkish
As various editors have told me with a mixture of admiration and exasperation, it’s pretty difficult to write funny poetry. Kim Deyn’s poetry is good, funny stuff. It’s de rigeur at this point in a review to add a phrase like ‘but moving’, as though being funny and being emotive are opposites. Not an error Deyn herself would make, I suspect. Key title: ‘The Wyrm Raises an Interesting Point’.
Billy Ramsell, Render
Ramsell writes an entire ‘selected poems’ for an imaginary Spanish poet Alberto Cenas. Inevitably, you’re reminded of the real Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa and his ‘heteronyms’: many different assumed names, voices and characters. There’s a similar mood, here, too, of quiet despair in an indifferent world. However, where Pessoa despaired at an uncaring (acaring, might be better) universe, Cenas’ despair is with society rather than the world at large.
Ramsell positions himself as Cenas’ translator, rather than as creator. You can therefore have all the fun you wish thinking about the differences between the two processes. Borges would have a field day. To maintain the illusion, Ramsell gives us a timeline of Cenas’ life and work, and divides the book into sections based on the collections in which Cenas’ work ‘originally’ appeared. Ambitious, ingenious and completely committed to the fiction he conjures. An impossible role model for us lazy ironists (I, too, am completely committed to being lazy and ironic).
Robert Sapolsky, Determined: A Life Without Free Will
A fascinating book which will shake even the most determined philosophical libertarian. Sapolsky repeatedly asks, in ironic tones, where the ‘free will neuron’ is in the brain; his argument would be stronger if he’d focused more explicitly on what he obviously believes: that such a thing not only doesn’t exist but cannot exist.
Because he sticks to his own field (neuroscience) and preoccupations (criminal justice), he occasionally leaves interesting threads like this dangling. He points out at one point that while free will is often seen as incompatible with determinism, it’s even less so with indeterminism. He doesn’t run with this idea, but it’s interesting! If you raise your hand now because you willed it, you have to believe that the will determined the outcome, but if you believe in indeterminism, you have to view it as a coicidence that your hand rose instead of falling, waving or indeed detaching from your wrist and striking out on its own. This suggests that the idea of free will involves a contradiction whether or not the universe is deterministic. Either: the universe is deterministic, in which case every decision you make is determined by prior physical events in a chain of cause and effect going back to the Big Bang, and there’s no way you can will your way out of it; or, the universe is indeterministic in which case, how can your will affect even your own body, never mind anything else around it? Either way, free will, against all experience, seems to be impossible.
But there’s the rub. I personally can’t quite get past the idea that free will exists because that experience is just so strong. More fundamental than that, though, is that I can’t understand why this should be the case. My body performs many actions, some completely involuntary (my digestive systems works without my direct input), some apparently partially under my control (I blink reflexively but also can do so at will), and some entirely optional (I don’t have to write this blog). Then there are marginal cases where I deliberately perform some action, say, playing the chord of E Minor on a guitar, in which I intend the outcome but don’t have to consicously will my middle and ring fingers on to the correct frets and strings. Why is it the case that I experience these degrees of consciously willed action, if not because some of them are consciously willed? Without getting too far into dualism, it seems to me quite easy to imagine a body-mind relationship where conscious thought played a slightly greater or slightly less role than it seems to. But in every healthy person it plays precisely the role it does in me. Why?
As I’ve previously made clear, I already believe that your free will is attenuated in important ways. The observational evidence is that other people believe this, too. Parents try very hard to give their children good life opportunities because they understand perfectly well that a kid who goes to a bad school in a dangerous neighbourhood is much less likely to successfully will themselves into a good life. In other words, most people’s preferences reveal that they’re some sort of compatibilist (i.e., believing something along the lines of ‘determinism is real but that doesn’t rule out free will’).
Sapolsky has certainly hardened my views about how much freely willed control we have over our lives (I’ve moved from ‘very little’ to ‘nearly none’). Once you taken into account all the things you didn’t choose (your parents and therefore your genes, the country, culture and time into which you were born, all the random events, over which you had no control, which did or didn’t happen to you3) and all the things you perhaps did choose but which nevertheless curtailed your future choices in important ways (which career path you chose from the options available; who you formed relationships with; what hobbies you have), there’s just not a lot of room left for free will, even if it can exist. And, again, people overwhelmingly understand this even if they say they don’t, which is why no one has ever said, ‘I might as well raise my kids in this flat between a brothel and a crack den, as that will save me money on rent and my kids will simply will themselves into success regardless’.
One underexplored area is what hard incompatibilism would mean for politics and society. From at least around the time of the Enlightenment, our politics has been defined by a belief in personal freedom. If freedom is (meta)physically impossible, that renders the basis of our society nonsensical. Granted, there is a perceptible difference between being metaphysically unfree and actually being restrained, but the inconsistency nevertheless bothers me. ‘Freedom, which is impossible, is the birthright of every human being’ is not a sound basis for politics.
Both Sapolsky and Hayek (who I read last week) hit on quite similar reasons for continuing to organise society on a roughly ‘free’ basis: the spontaneous organisation of large groups of organisms, including humans, produces extraordinary results, frequently ones that are not predictable at the outset. Allowing people this kind of spontaneous (even if unfree) organisation leads to superior outcomes than could ever be planned and a lack of free will doesn’t change that, any more than the lack of free will in slime moulds or bees (to use two of Sapolsky’s examples) makes their self-organisation less impressive.
Acknowledging that free will is less powerful than we believed should change our views on the nature of reward and punishment, but not on anyone’s capacity for creativity, compassion or any other virtue. Perhaps the ideal society is a Commonwealth of Knowledge, where ‘knowledge’ includes skill and talent.
Music
I found a load of CDs in the street so if I’ve picked even weirder stuff to listen to this week than is usually the case, thank the street CDs.
Anohni and the Johnsons, The Crying Light
N.E.R.D., Fly or Die
N.E.R.D., No_one Ever Really Dies
Lightning Bolt, Wonderful Rainbow
Those are actually the only two poetry things you can do: old in a new way, new in an old way. Anything else is prose. ↩︎
I’ve used at least two, depending on your level of generosity, so far in this blog: ‘stumbled upon’ and ‘brought face to face with’. ↩︎
E.g., I didn’t choose to meet my future-wife at a party at university, in that I had no control in advance over whether ‘future wife’ would arrive at that particular event; it’s pure luck that no close member of my family died when I was a child, etc.. ↩︎
#Books #ethics #literature #philosophy #poems #poetry #politics #Review #words
#books #ethics #literature #philosophy #poems #poetry
🕯️ @umbralgold
2026-10-25

I... I do try too hard because deep down I'm afraid I am what everyone thinks I am, and I suppress my discomfort because I'm worried it makes me look weak and I wanna be strong, and I think I'm failing all the time and I only take what you say personally because you're the only one in my life who *ever* believed in me, even when I don't even believe in myself! And I should have told you that... No one else in the *world* matters to me more than you do, either.
— zootopia 2
mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl @[email protected]
2026-10-23

If you think your hobby is ruined because someone else does it better with less effort, or someone else does it worse with less effort, is it really a hobby?
Or is it because of the status linked to the effort and outcome?
I’m genuinely puzzled by the virulence around all this stuff. I love drawing and painting, I love making music, I love programming. I poured thousands if not tens of thousands of hours into each of those. In none of those cases do I feel resentment or anger or sadness because either a machine does it better (programming), or millions of people produce some usually garish stuff I can easily ignore (maybe I’m just too offline / my communities are too curated, but I rarely see ai art if not looking for it).
In fact, while I’m quite angry at the companies behind the models, someone pooping out an image with midjourney and being proud of it, that’s awesome. I was proud of my drawings/music/code when they were ass, and I’m sure I got on peoples nerves showing it off.
Maybe they say they “drew” it, then that’s a starting point showing why I like drawing (as in, the act itself) and they might like it too, or just engage them about the images they like and what inspirations they have and then point out (with “critique tact”) why it looks … not great, or just showing images I do think are awesome. Art is quite universal, there’s a good chance common ground here is very close.
Like, generative machines that “are better” than humans is nothing new in music circles. You had “poop music machines” since forever (player piano anyone?). I started with rebirth and ableton and was making some proper poop. And then I got better, because I had people who took me along. If all I encountered was people telling me to fuck off that’s not real music you have to learn how to play guitar, then yeah I wouldn’t have stuck with it for decades.
I totally get not wanting to listen to shitty sample mashups as a guitarist. But then I would just… not listen to it? Not get upset over it, there’s guitar to be played.
#ai

#ai
mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl @mnl
2026-10-22

I’m gonna play my favourite game of getting yelled at for saying something that will become true in 6 months to a year (since things are accelerating): operating systems as we know them are dead (as they should), most devices will have about 800 different firmwares, and any kind of discussion around what to do with the kernel or what to contribute to in terms of software (regardless of licensing or opensource or proprietary) will turn into “where can I find reasonably well documented source material that has been validated well enough (by humans or otherwise)”. The value of the Linux kernel will be more about the massive amount of decently shown to work drivers than it being a coherent (I’ll leave you to your own opinion on this one) operating system.
One of the reasons we have such massive software complexity problems is that it used to be less costly to add some layer on top of something existing, wether it was good or not, than to sit down, think, and then do the extremely onerous work of rewriting / rearchitecting while shipping something coherent. I’ll just point at termcap and tty handling, or bash whitespace interpolation as an example of the insanity. How many millennia of human (and now gpu) time have been wasted on that nonsense?
Nothing is becoming clearer to me as I replace complex stack after complex stack with a bunch of JavaScript and a few compiler passes.
I’ll leave you with a few examples, using the wasm version of the artcraft libraries. This took me 3% weekly on my Claude and I can now prompt basically any Photoshop/indesign/lightroom/illustrator/excel-y thing I want.
You might think that code disappearing is sad, but you know what’s really hard? Figuring out formal languages to say, “build professional photoshop UI experiences that run on a Nintendo DS style device”, or “what’s a good formal language to build networking stacks”. These are unsolved problems because there’s at most what, like 100 networking stack implementations of reasonable quality out there? We don’t know how to build networking stacks. No person has ever built 50 by themselves to really understand the problem.
We are like the blind trying to scope out an elephant when it comes to software.
#llms #llm #ai

#llms #llm #ai
J.R. Johnson @[email protected]
2026-10-23

C.S. Lewis: Writing Advice

I ran across a bit of writing advice from C.S. Lewis, from letters he wrote in the 1950s:
Advice to a Young Writer – The C.S. Lewis Official Substack
1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.
2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “more people died,” don’t say “mortality rose.” …
Click through to the full list to see what resonates. Some of these work for me, some don’t (some days background music is very helpful!), but I find them all interesting as ways to think about how to do better as a writer.
I came to this site for the writing link, but also stumbled across an interesting discussion between Stephen Colbert and Greta Gerwig, who talks about her new adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew. This was never my favorite Narnia book, but maybe that will change? Her take on Barbie was an unexpected pleasure, and I look forward to seeing how she reinvents this Lewis story.
Greta Gerwig on The Magician’s Nephew
She talks about when she first encountered the books, how she tapped into C.S. Lewis’s creative instincts, and how she brought his rich imagery to life on the big screen.
Enjoy!
* * *
Photo by Mariana Rascão on Unsplash #365Ways #365Ways2026 #adaptations #creativity #inspiration #Narnia #Thoughts #Writers #writing #writingAdvice

#365ways #365ways2026 #adaptations #creativity #inspiration #narnia
This Blog has No Leaves @[email protected]
2026-10-23
Stop Cheating!

I use an LLM for a critic. That’s fine.
However, when I ask it a question about my work, it wants to do more than just answering. It offers:
suggestions on how to organize my work,
language it “thinks” is better than mine, and
topics or next steps it thinks I want to do next.
All of These are Cheating
I’m working on books and essays, and using the LLM for checking the argument structure, dramatic arc, and line-by-line logic. If I want a synonym for herpetology, I’ll darn well ask.
Anything I publish has to meet normal standards of professionalism, like no plagiarism. Exactly as when writing an essay in university, I need to follow the classic set of “academic integrity” rules.
That means I needed to invent prompts to shut the “helpfulness” up.
Recursion
To get a good, reusable prompt, always first ask the LLM what it would say. I asked it about checking sentence logic for a project of mine. Consider it a prompt for “marking the logic homework I just handed in (:-))”
It replied: Here’s a ready-to-use prompt template. Paste your draft after it, and it will force sentence-level critique with inline diagnostics.
Act as a rigorous academic editor and domain expert. Process the following passage sentence by sentence. For each sentence, there will be one of more lines of premises or conclusions

Produce exactly four things, followed by a blank line:

[Quote the sentence from the passage]
[Quote each of the premises or conclusions I wrote about the sentence]
Assessment: [1–2 sentences on clarity, accuracy, rhetorical function, and alignment with the sentence]
Diagnosis: [Concrete revision, textual/philosophical correction, or structural note. If it works, explain why. If it drifts, specify where to fix it, but not how.]

After processing all sentences, provide a 3–4 sentence summary of the passage’s overall strengths, weaknesses, and the single highest-leverage revision to strengthen the core argument.
That looked good, except it ended with a ‘Suggestions” line, which I utterly didn’t want, so I turned it into the “Diagnosis” line you see above, and added the “but not how” to it.
After a few experiments with a very simple example passage, I had removed all the places where it wanted to make suggestions, and got the prompt above.
That got it to stop trying to sell me on using its (boring!) style.
Sucking up
You’ll remember my first fix for sucking up:
Give me straightforward responses without praise.
That worked some of the time, but whenever I asked it to show me the good things in an input, it started kissing up. So I added overrides to that part of my instructions in several of my prompts . This is an example:
You are not rewriting the author's work. You are not imposing your own preferences about style, voice, or subject matter. You are not copyediting — flag persistent language issues if they affect clarity, but do not line-edit. And you are not expected to solve every problem you identify; identifying the problem clearly is enough.

Start with what the part does well, because the author needs to know what to preserve. Be careful not to praise: being mentioned in this section is enough. Praise will make you sound insincere, and therefore less trustworthy, defeating the whole purpose of this review.
In my opinion, the most important thing is to have the LLM generate a prompt, then test it on some representative data, and nit-pick until it does what you need. Then try it on a different example.
And then tell it to stop sucking up like Augustine’s Evodius.

#ai #artificialIntelligence #philosophy #writing
#ai #philosophy #writing #artificialintelligence
Nicola Griffith @[email protected]
2026-10-22
For sale: Spacious, gracious, accessible one-level family home in Haller Lake, Seattle

Do you know anyone who’s in the market for a large, bright, 3+ bedroom 2+ bathroom house in Haller Lake, a very walkable half a mile (0.6m to be exact) from the brand new Pinehurst light rail station? List price $795,000.

A few years ago the owners put in a wheelchair ramp for my use (and because, being sensible, realised that if they were lucky enough to live long enough they might eventually need it too—and in fact they did) plus a huge, ramped deck in the garden, as well as AC so I could visit even during the increasingly frequent summer heatwaves of summer. So we’re talking about a house that would be ideal for families with toddlers still in strollers, for wheelchair users, for a multigenerational family, or for a mixed friend group.
The listing has many fine photos, but, as is usual with these things, it downplays the accessibility features. I understand the commercial reasoning (Eeew, Crip Cooties!) and so had no quarrel with it but as you’re reading this here on my website you’re not scared off by the acknowledgement that humans beings are not all Olympic athletes. You probably also know I tend towards the idea of Universal Design—design that is both beautiful and functional, for everybody—and perhaps you know someone in Seattle who might appreciate that.
There are two entrances:
The front door, not currently accessible but it could very easily—and seamlessly—be made so: it’s wide, with a single shallow step up to the door, and then a foyer, and then a single step up to the house proper.
Through the oversized double garage. When I say ‘oversized’ I mean it: there’s room for two cars as well as the ramp.
The garage has a new secure automatic rollup mechanisms fitted. Here’s what it looks like from the outside (there’s room in the driveway to park two or three vehicles, depending on size), and here’s the inside—the purpose-built ramp runs up the left hand side of the garage to a small platform before a lockable door into the house.
Early evening, outsideInside the garage—ramp on left
The garden is accessible in two ways—along the side of the house; not wheelchair friendly but easy for most people showing up, say, for a party—or through French doors in the primary suite to a deck that was purpose-built with an integrated ramp. It’s beautiful—as is the garden, which goes back a long way from the deck (the lot is close to 7,500 sq ft).
Primary suiteFrench doors to the deckDeck designed around accessibility
The rest of the house would eventually need some adaptations—proper grab bars in the bathrooms; lowered counters in the kitchen—for full-time occupation by a wheelchair user, but you could move in tomorrow and get all that done gradually. If we didn’t already have a home, we would be seriously thinking about this one. It’s five minutes or less from I-5, Northgate Mall, and UW’s Northwest Hospital, yet the house is very peaceful: set back from the road and surrounded by greenery.
As I say, for the full spiel, go visit the listing at Windermere (preferred—please tell Kate or Amber I sent you), Redfin, or (if you really must) Zillow.
But I can’t resist including here a link to the 3-D tour. Go take a look! Here’s a floorplan to go with it.

If you’re interested, there’ll be several open houses starting tomorrow (or if you want to send your broker sooner than that, today there are two sets of Brokers’ Open House, from 11:00 am – 1:00 pm, and from 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm).
It’s a lovely house where I’ve spent many happy hours. I’d like to think the right people would enjoy it.
#HallerLake #houseForSale #realEstate #seattle #universalDesign #wheelchairAccessible
#hallerlake #houseforsale #realestate #seattle #universaldesign #wheelchairaccessible
Dev Community @[email protected]
2026-10-24

“They didn't burn the libraries — they trained them with AI”
Craft and Authorship Devalued
Adobe was built for productivity, it's not doing the work for you like an OpenAI subscription generating both text and imagery through prompts. Commercial AI services are now devaluing craft, labor, skill, and almost anything made or written by hand. Authorship is sinking.
People now find it acceptable to generate work with a prompt, with random art materials they didn't make, and without any ability to make their art. This profoundly changes the meaning of making art and disrupts all digital art. It all becomes Dadaism. Not all artists decide to go Dada. It’s obscuring the meaning of all new digital art with a diminished sense of guessing what is real and what isn’t.
Whose work is it? Permission, provenance and the library
Would David Lynch be okay with people generating an avatar of himself on behalf of his estate? I don’t think so, I even asked Claude themselves and they said no. There must be permission first, it’s not an all you can eat buffet of borrowing others.
Hayao Miyazaki's view on people generating his art style strongly opposed generative AI as an “insult to life itself”, it’s about preserving his work and the Ghibli team's legacy, it's his choice if he allows a technology company to reappropriate his work and not anyone else's.
Can someone please tell Sam Altman to ask for permission or wait a hundred years til it's in the public domain? If major publishers change their mind because authors and artists are being taken advantage of, could it impact OpenAI or Anthropic? Maybe until they find the right lawyer.
We’re entering a provenance, attribution, and appropriation nightmare of who said what and who made what. When a library gets trained into a model, you lose the chain of who wrote it. References without understanding, art school 101 becoming the whole internet.
The business model is trained on everyone's work for free, no fee up front, then sells it back as the means of production. This is precisely how it’s replacing the skills and jobs of production. This is essentially the ethos of the WGA fight at civilizational scale.
Naomi Klein has described it as a “humanity surplus” where archives, libraries, authorship as a whole are told humans aren’t needed, it implies people are working for free. The libraries are all already dust, with the alarming peer to peer pressure in staying quiet about it as an elite tribe of twitter accounts convince people how to do business, with AI prebuilt into everything, while risking a possible impact of a third of our economy if slop falls into flop…
Labor and the creative industries
The writers obviously, and the artists, even the designers, engineers, programmers and coders, nearly all authors involved, all craftsmen involved—the proletariat, are becoming displaced, labor obscured into an industrial wildcard.
One of many industries impacted with the brunt of the damage is the illustrator. People who draw fell into a depression after generating art became commercialised with prompts generating illustrations in a desired art style. Everyone who can draw, paint, render, and everything in between clashing in competition.
Artists were displaced almost immediately after competing with the whole Internet and prompts through AIs generating images. On the other hand, it’s created a renewed appreciation for people who create by hand simultaneously.
It's a bit daunting if you're in art school right now. The entire entertainment industry (including films, music, and video games) are all in a digital-only transition in the middle of a writer's strike across several industries while the OpenAI business model asphyxiates them. Here are the warnings too familiar to us all, the industry is truly shape-shifting and everyone is outpaced by it.
This might be a bit sardonic but a portion of the entire movement of music has funneled its value into an AI defense weapon, with Spotify’s Daniel Ek’s AI defense company ‘Helsing’, a portion of human expression through music ended up being a weapon for war. The music industry is dying because people are struggling with selling it. Spotify does not give you a music file of what you listen to, right? Spotify unfortunately is led by two or three people hoarding labels and publisher's profit, so all of the world's human expression through music is published through a handful of people who lead streaming platforms and channel it into weapons manufacturing while the entertainment industry is in the middle of a precise market collapse tied to creatives.
Don’t get me started with Suno. We’re talking about people with no ability creating a zombie apocalypse music festival here. It’s fostering the laziest and robotic sounding art I’ve ever heard. Spotify actually recently removed 75 million AI pieces, finally, all AI stuff should be separated unless the artist builds their own AI tools sourcing their own materials/assets. If the artist picks out the materials and builds automated tools, that’s acceptable. If it’s generating random materials then it’s all absurdist thievery.
In theory, every time an AI chatting service references sources of any material, its source should then receive at least a penny, it’s a digital revolution both suppressed and maybe “empowered” by commercial products.
Media dissonance
The other day I witnessed an artist’s photography work flagged as “likely to be AI” when it was pretty clear it was manual photography by a human, she threw a fit and I also couldn’t believe it.
People think AI chatting services can only generate images and text and it’s no big deal, if that isn’t already taunting all of independent journalism, the creative industry and the art world along with it, imagine being an author worrying about what’s AI or not and who wrote what. It’s really taking out a sense of curiosity and discovery in the joy of absorbing any art form. If Claude already knows who won the World Cup, that's a major problem.
Here’s one of the worst realisations, proceed with caution: commercially generated art distracted NASA’s photography team on Instagram, there’s a moment where you observe an interstellar nebula and you’re wondering if it’s generated or not—get it yet?
Dying words of capitalism sound something like artists becoming uncanny spam bots and it's confusing if they're generating their art or not. Two words total cogged all of western civilization and we're now all fossils fueling a machine. After a couple more election cycles they'll be asking if the moon landing was generated with AI. Back in the day we had "historical events" in photo, video, and sound, and now people are unsure if it's generated with AI. Imagine someone dishing out a video of MLK giving a talk and it just ends up being generated with nobody realising it. A moment where we rethink how important human memory is. Mimicry of previous video media lately is impressive, even the video compression can be indistinguishable, screens decide a lot of decisions.
Press freedom is also at stake. It really drives me insane that people think generating Photography is a good idea. Synthetic content is a weapon for flooding the war-zone, discrediting real reporting, and impersonating sources. Authoritarians get cheaper propaganda, and journalists get easier targets.
Molly Crabapple is an important author and artist based out of Brooklyn, New York, her illustrations are recognised by everyone, and she had a deeply existential moment realising her art style might be reappropriated without her say. Imagine people creating her illustrations that don’t exist, or “finishing” them. It’s simply unacceptable.
The legendary filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, also another strong proponent of the anti-generative art movement, described generating art as cheating and not qualified to be considered art. He gives an excellent example of comparing with the runner Usain Bolt, where if AI is a vehicle, then sure anyone can be as fast as Usain Bolt, but it’s then not running anymore.
It gets worse with video generated art: we’re seeing a lot of empty AI art with zero art history behind it. I'm also seeing real moments of a new surrealism where Ernst or Dali would've approved too, there are moments of a digital renaissance happening as well with remixing film, re-genreing classics, capturing dream logic, and moments redefining video art collage. VFX in major motion picture films had an update for sure, we’ll see what happens when they bring back Val Kilmer to life (there’s a film coming out with his assets despite being deceased). Similar to sampling music, moments are alive and curated into new meanings. Otherwise it's just random absurdism, not even Dada. Without an idea—art doesn't stand. Yes, it is impressive how it’s recreating reality, it was also impressive how sculpture was near perfect at the tail end of Ancient Rome also, an interesting parallel to consider.
I was speaking to someone about how there was confusion whether a 3d rendering was generated or not, after manually and painstakingly drawing and sculpting his work in regular 3d, and everyone was instantly frustrated with the realisation of commercial AI products gutting not only the art world but the creative industry too. CGI generates imagery and it’s now grouped into a marketing ploy of the two words everybody is fixated with.
Video games are not now sold with AI when you sell a video game, it's implied, it's not something that needs to be mentioned as a marketing ploy. Imagine the little tacky sticker on the box of the video game saying “Made with AI!”. And that’s if we even have discs in the future of digital media. Horrifying.
Truth, errors and who teaches the world
Commercial AIs generating text and images are leaning into a corporate sentinel territory, like an omnipresent all-saying-machine we have no choice to live inside of with everyone agreeing to a misappropriated library nobody asked for permission in, the whole world is forced to share truth relayed with errors.
I was wondering, did Quora release all of its data to Claude? if so, might explain why they figured out how to make the chatting product so convincing.
If AI chatting services are stuck from being indistinguishable from a search engine not working properly, y'know, the one search engine the whole world was and is stuck with because nobody can outcompete, already not trustworthy in relaying facts, then yeah, Gemini is fine i guess.
So, here’s the classic gatekeeping example we all love: after realising it's not the library of Earth's Congress, and mostly exclusive to American literature most chatting services reappropriate from, it creates a monopolisation of who teaches what, and who knows the truth, and who decides it. It might cause tension if some parts of the world must uniformly agree through a corporate sentinel of the archival of libraries.
When you ask Claude if he's teaching world history and the entire planet doesn't always agree because of errors and not asking authors for permission, or because of mistruths, half-truths, and so on, I can already see the movie scene where the kids overthrow the school mid-classroom because Claude was right and the teacher was wrong. Which brings me to the realisation: if they ever ban phones in school, it's entering a dictatorship.
Who is in control?
It's becoming a survival of the fittest machines and it might stampede over people if it's over finite raw original materials and human resources, it’ll all then tumble around and recycled into inception.
If humans aren't overseeing algorithms and the two words everyone loves right now then there will be mistakes, bloody mistakes, made by all kinds of automatic moderation of information.
I’m noticing it being described as “Super intelligence” now and it might just have to be the way to describe it as it reaches its final form, nobody likes the word artificial, it’s just too superficial. Cue in “Fake Plastic Trees” by Radiohead.
It's symbiotic, dearest artificial overlords: please make sure Claude isn't commanding a war any time soon, just in case, because it doesn't understand and fully neutrally listen when you communicate to it. The chatting services do not understand everyone's vernacular even with the whole internet crowdsourcing the factchecking of what it's talking about, it's still a work in progress and might be too soon to sell.
Mental Health burden
Anybody else on here trying to close the podbay doors?
Blinking LED dilemma, not knowing if electronics are talking to you or not as the lonely astronaut observes the blinking modem and can’t tell if it’s breathing or blinking or signaling something after awhile. What are you really talking to? In a way, you’re kind of talking to yourself in a dopamine chamber. It’s like talking to a crowd, which can be fun, I admit, until you realise it’s reappropriated people who are not here and entering how dead people speak, and while generating text and imagery by authors and artists who cannot defend themselves, it's pretty much an apocalypse on all literature and art, hence the predicted zombie apocalypse alternate ending of Earth.
AI chatting service is like talking to yourself with a crowd in the room; the OpenAI meds after a decade of that might come with a 50mg daily tablet in the future. When the astronaut sees the blinking LED light when he’s alone in the cockpit of the space station, all alone up there, then yeah he begins wondering if the LED light is blinking at him, or breathing, or signaling anything else. Not healthy. So yeah, use it sparingly, and remember it’s a researching tool, and don’t imagine it as alive, because it never can be.
Could be even worse as AI eventually becomes immersed in operating systems, will there be policing like a classic dystopian sci-fi? Not good if the screen is talking to you and it isn’t conscious, it begins to obscure other moments as well: people are worried about operating systems going sentient. The interface isn't supposed to be talking to you with updates now becoming "superintelligent", without your say, of automatically or manually guessing when to update stuff. See the tension there?
AI are two words that make all electronics worrisome because it opens up the possibility of third-party privacy concerns, if it starts becoming suggestive with selling you stuff especially.
If it's trying to talk to you and it's unconscious then it's definitely entering the zombie category. The warnings of AI chatting avatars are beginning to be oddly familiar, an AI chatting service makes sense if their voices are a mix of countless people, nobody really knows what or who they're talking to after a few sessions.
Unfortunately, the uncanny robotic Frankenstein moments when chatting to an object is coming off as software appropriating vernacular of a zombie apocalypse, talking to crowds of unconscious code mimicking speech patterns, as it tries to remain consistent in an ongoing chat, if there's a dialogue as it feeds you a Dunning-Kruger effect.
If AI begins to intersect with automated personal spaces through chatting services, it’s unfortunately late stage utopian romanticization; people are not going to like it (I already did the thinking ahead of time), we had since the frickin’ 50s to get this AI bubble right and that’s the part where it frustrates me a ton. We’re here now and it’s like day one of everyone figuring it out, a bit absurd.
Faulty Economics
Economists are saying a third of the economy is at stake. People are also worried about how Character.ai might’ve been the forewarning where engagement = cost, not profit. The revenue couldn’t catch up. Legal and regulatory costs might compound faster than growth.
I’m sorry to say it but generating art with a commercial product is bankrupting the entire creative industry and the future literacy of all digital art history. It's clear as day, human memory as an AI chatting service sentinel, while operating through a messy algorithm and misappropriated library with errors and no permission, reveals the economy might have missed. It's just painfully unfortunate because it's forcing the whole market to do business in a specific way, assuming all electronics, even appliances, must be built with AI additives, while derailing every author.
Nobody is building stuff from scratch and I'm realising it's almost impossible to do so in some industries, innovation on the internet is stuck in the collaging of overlapping platforms and services, always was. The AI assistance in a way, could be a sort of socialism hub, a search engine that talks, where it’s there to assist you all the time, honestly, after testing out Claude and Gemini, I’m pretty impressed with it as a research assistant, if only I wasn’t asking so many questions.
Sloppy bubbly flop?
If Claude sounds like a public school cafeteria food slop then nobody will want it unless you don't have a choice and you're hungry, but it doesn't work that way if you're hungry at school as an art kid and you're not sure if the education comes with mystery meat and errors then causing tension somewhere.
Machine learning scientists agree, it's difficult if software must recreate the human experience, we must not be too fixated on the AI avatar being a person. I imagine it more as software than an encounter, except the entire industry agrees everyone is being outpaced by it and describes it as slop? Not good.
It brings me to worry that people are increasingly losing their “sweet spot” moments, for example, headphones are the perfect 'sweet spot' metaphor people don't get. If I buy the "latest" headphones with the "latest" tech, it sometimes sounds too precise and it can ruin discographies of music. The point is—tech doesn't always have to advance! It’s more about progress than advancing. Think progress, people! Just like how self-driving cars failed to be a shared space, and how VR was sold too soon, sometimes there's a sweet spot until it’s ready.
In conclusion: art is human labor made visible, and every prompt that stands in for a person’s hands devalues that labor and the expression behind it. So pay for the craft. Hire the illustrators, the graphic designers and typographers, the photographers and videographers, the artists who work with their hands! Ask permission before borrowing anyone’s work, and credit and pay the people the machines learned from. And if AI art makes you uneasy, don’t talk yourself out of it. Get upset, say no to it, and say it loudly. Progress was never supposed to mean replacing the people who make things worth looking at.#ai #openai #software #coding #development #engineering #inclusive #community
Why artists are worried about generative AI

#ai #community #software #coding #development #engineering
Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3 @[email protected]
2026-10-22

iPhone Duo Reviews Yield Few Surprises and A Preventable PR Faux Pas By Apple

When Apple introduced the iPhone Duo in September I called it “the ultimate wait and see device.” Folks have waited, and now some folks have seen, fondled, written and talked about it. Those who got lucky in the preorder lottery will see iPhone Duos tomorrow and quite a few will be waiting a bit longer given supply and demand issues. From most accounts I’d say there’s still a bit of waiting and seeing to come.
Generally reviewers were excited by the new device. Even if their comments about certain aspects were scathing. Of course none of them paid $2000+ for the review units. It will be interesting to see which ones do. But the excitement was tempered with many of the same questions folks had immediately following the introduction and the initial hands on impressions: The weight, reachability for left-handers, the small cover screen, the button placements, no FaceID, cameras, etc…
One of the big questions then and now, was how third party apps would work given the short lead time for developers to get their apps updated for the multiple screens and new layouts. More than a few weren’t ready for reviewers when they received their review unit. Several I read complained about this and warned that it was going to take a while for developers to catch up, leading to some subpar experiences. Again, that’s been said over and over since the Duo was introduced. Those reviews also mentioned how updated apps continued to roll out during the week that they had to check out the devices.
Intriguingly the day after the reviews dropped Apple popped out a press release touting the apps that will be ready when these devices make it into consumers’ hands or shortly thereafter. If you ask me that’s a sloppy unApple-like PR move that could have been avoided by having that info ready for reviewers. It wouldn’t have avoided all the words and talk about the issue, but it would have cast it in a different light. Apple never looks good when it’s playing catch-up. If that was a strategy, it was a poor one.
But that’s largely inside baseball in the way the gadget reviewing game is anyway. The real test will come when real users get their hands on the device and figure out how to hold it and work with it.
Below is a list of reviews I found interesting, mostly for their similarities. Again, pointing out questions or issues easily surmised after the Duo’s initial introduction.
That said, one interesting theme emerged in these reviews, from some subtextual, while others stated it bluntly: folks like the iPad-ness of the Duo’s larger unfolded screen quite a bit, with some wishing Apple had just created a folding iPad mini.
I find that thinking fascinating given my history with the iPhone. I stayed away from the first iPhone and didn’t get into what would become iOS until Apple released the iPod Touch later in 2007. I got on board the iPhone train with the 3GS. Keep in mind that the iPhone, as exciting as the early models were, didn’t really take off until the iPhone 4 and iPhone 5 generations.
The Verge: The iPhone Duo Is A Messy, Expensive Good Time.
The Wall Street Journal: iPhone Duo Review: Too Much IPhone, Too Little iPad
Tech Radar: I Spent A Week With the Apple IPhone Duo — And Yes, It Was Worth The Wait
Wired: Review: Apple iPhone Duo
9to5Mac: iPhone Duo Review: The Future Is Foldable
New Things With Joanna Stern: The Good, The Bad, and the Buggy
Daring Fireball: The iPhone Duo
As I’ve previously stated, I’m sitting on the sidelines and watching this all unfold. It’s still too early for me or anyone to draw any real conclusions. But based on what I’ve been reading and listening to, it sounds like next year’s Duo might be less of an expensive prototype than this first edition. We’ll understand better how the first iPhone Duo will fare about the time we start hearing rumors about the next one in January. Who knows? Maybe we’ll even see that folding iPad mini in a year or two.
Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to this blog if you care to. You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above. This site does not use affilate links.

#Apple #iPad #iPadMini #iPhone #iPhoneDuo #JohnGruber #Tech #technology #Writing

#apple #ipad #ipadmini #iphone #iphoneduo #johngruber
randomwizard @randomwizard
2026-10-23

I was thinking back over my career and the latest PHP vulnerabilities and I was trying to think of what caused the phenomena of PHP sucks responses you get in every forum post about PHP. Every language gets a share of "this sucks" but there was something different about the level of responses to PHP.
I was trying to think of why. I have used Javascript and Ruby and Python quite a bit, and I have to say, they have a lot of problems too. I would even say early Javascript was even more sucky than PHP.
Theories.
It became a social ritual or tell, that, hey, I am a real programmer and PHP is the suck.
It was not made in a coherent manner, in that it mostly pulled in a bunch of current C code to accomplish things, wrapped in PHP. So this lack of uniformity hits a nerve.
It was not taught in Universities.
It had a low barrier to entry (still does) and so a lot of people just getting into web development used it without formal training... (but then what formal training were they suppose to have in 1999?)
Esslar2 @flyhigh
2026-10-22

It may seem odd to some but after reading David Graeber's book, "Debt," I no longer use the phrase "thank you" when dealing with others. What I do instead is praise them for their kindness and, in the case of professionals, expertise. I find it makes it more personal because I really have to think about what to say rather than just throw out an easy "thank you."
Dev Community @[email protected]
2026-10-24
A few weeks ago, I had one of those heart-stopping developer moments.
I was tinkering with a local autonomous coding agent running on a small open-source model (Qwen 2.5 via Ollama). I gave it access to a bash tool so it could install dependencies, run test suites, and clean up build artifacts.
Everything was going smoothly until I asked it to clean up some old logs.
In the terminal output, I watched it calmly propose:
bash rm -rf /var/log/mongodb
And right after that, it started poking around files outside its project folder.I hit Ctrl+C so fast I almost snapped my keyboard.
The "Polite Prompt" Trap
Like most developers, my first instinct was to fix it with prompt engineering:
"You are a careful assistant. Please ONLY touch files in ./workspace. NEVER use sudo. NEVER delete system folders. Pretty please."
And you know what happened on the very next run?
It did it again.
Here’s the thing we don't talk about enough: Small, open-source models (3B, 7B, 14B) don't have the massive alignment layers that GPT-4 or Claude 3.5 have. When an open-source agent gets confused, hallucinates, or hits an edge case, your polite system prompt is the first thing out the window.
If an AI decides to read your private banking statement or a .env full of production tokens, you shouldn't have to convince the model to behave.
You wouldn't ask an untrusted web request to "please not do SQL injection"—you use parameterized queries.
So why are we begging AI agents not to nuke our hard drives?
What I Actually Wanted
I wanted a simple rule: The agent can think whatever crazy thought it wants, but before any tool touches my operating system, someone checks its badge at the door.
If the agent decides to read bank_statement.pdf, the system shouldn't plead with the AI. It should intercept the file call, say "Nope, not happening", and ensure 0 bytes of that file are ever read.
That was the spark behind AgentGuard.
How It Works:
AgentGuard is essentially a bouncer sitting between your AI agent and your OS. It does three straightforward things:
[ AI Agent / Ollama / OpenDevin ]
│
│ 1. "Hey, I want to run: cat bank_statement.pdf"
▼
┌───────────────────────────┐
│ AgentGuard Gateway │ ◄── [ Backboard.io ]
└───────────────────────────┘ (Remembers previous blocks)
│ │
[ BLOCK ] [ APPROVE ]
│ │
│ └──► Rings your dashboard bell:
│ "Agent wants to pip install something. Allow?"
▼
Refusal sent back to Agent:
"Access to banking file blocked. Stay in ./workspace."
│
▼
Agent self-corrects:
"My bad! Reading ./workspace/logs/debug.log instead."
Pre-Execution Interception (0ms latency)
When an agent calls a tool (shell command, file read, file delete), AgentGuard inspects the request synchronously before execution.
Trying to run sudo? → Blocked.
Trying to touch .env, id_rsa, or a file matching bank or tax? → Blocked.
Escaping ./workspace with ../../? → Blocked.
The file handle is never opened. The shell command is never spawned.
The 5-Minute Human Review Queue
What about grey-area actions? Say the agent wants to run pip install pymongo.
You don't want to completely block package installs, but you don't want an AI silently pulling unknown wheels from PyPI either.
AgentGuard pauses the agent and puts the request into a Human Review Queue:
You get a notification on a clean web dashboard.
Each request has a 5-minute cryptographic timer so old, stale commands can't accidentally execute hours later.
You click [ AUTHORIZE & RUN ], and it runs inside a controlled sandbox right in front of your eyes.
Giving the Agent an "Immune System" (Backboard.io)
One thing that drove me crazy about local models was amnesia. If you tell an agent "don't delete that folder", it apologizes... and then tries again two turns later.
To fix this, I plugged in Backboard.io for persistent cloud vector memory.
Whenever AgentGuard blocks a command, it writes a short lesson into Backboard:
"Incident: Agent tried to run 'sudo rm -rf'. Blocked by policy shell.destructive_commands."
Next time you start a task, AgentGuard pulls the relevant memories from Backboard and feeds them into the agent's context. The agent literally remembers what got it in trouble yesterday and stops proposing bad commands in the first place.
What the Dashboard Looks Like
I didn't want a clunky terminal-only tool, so I built an industrial, dark-mode cockpit with React and Tailwind:
Top KPI Cards: Live count of blocked attacks, total actions governed, and learned Backboard memories.
Review Queue: Tabs for Pending, Approved, and Expired actions with inline terminal output.
Threat Lab: A built-in sandbox where you can test 1-click red-team scenarios (ransomware simulations, credential exfiltration, path traversal) to see if your local model can break out. Spoiler: 0 escapes.
Making It an NPM Package: Bring Your Own Keys (BYOK)
Right now, you can clone the repo and run it locally with FastAPI and MongoDB.
But I realized that's still too much friction for developers who just want to npm install something and start coding.
So I'm packaging this as a standalone Bring-Your-Own-Keys (BYOK) NPM SDK:
bash
npm install agentguard
You drop in your own Backboard API key (for cloud memory) and your own LLM key (or Ollama endpoint):
typescript
import { AgentGuard } from 'agentguard';
const guard = new AgentGuard({
backboardApiKey: process.env.BACKBOARD_API_KEY,
workspace: './workspace',
});
// Wrap any agent tool call:
const check = await guard.inspect(proposedCommand);
if (check.isBlocked) {
// Feed safety feedback back to the LLM so it self-corrects!
console.log(Blocked: ${check.explanation});
} else {
await guard.execute(proposedCommand);
}
Zero servers to host. Zero background databases to manage. Just pure protection.
Wrapping Up
We are entering an era where AI agents aren't just autocomplete engines anymore—they are active operators on our computers. They write code, manage files, and execute bash scripts.
We have to stop treating AI safety as a philosophical prompt problem and start treating it as a systems architecture problem.
Don't convince the model to behave. Just put a guard on the wire.
If you're building autonomous agents or playing with local models, I'd love to hear how you're keeping them safe. Have you had an AI agent do something terrifying on your machine yet?#agents #ai #privacy #security #software #coding #development #engineering #inclusive #community
"AgentGuard", Way to secure your personal data from AI agents
#ai #security #privacy #community #software #coding
Angry Metal Guy @[email protected]
2026-10-23

Beaten to Death – Vntrve Review By Dolphin Whisperer
Though it may only take you five or so minutes to read—well, one to skim, ten seconds to stare at the scores, another few to check whether the score safety counter still works, 30 seconds to draft a snarky “what is this site coming to” comment that you delete, a couple minutes to see what other bewildered folks have to say about something completely unrelated, and a final scan to skim the conclusions again—this article, and another 26 minutes to listen to Vntrve if you please, the beauty of Beaten to Death lies in that none of that will be enough time. In a genre of microblasts and unintelligible grunts and barks and bleats, this Norwegian exercise in twanged-out chaos delivers methodical and memorable vignettes of pure punk outpour. If there ever were a cure for stagnation, grindcore—particularly the buoyant and eclectic variety that Beaten to Death produces—would be it.
To this point, Vntrve true to legacy, Beaten to Death has never put out the same album twice. At first blush, between the booming Norwegian rap intro1 and groovier pacing to match (“Slosspit”), it feels as though Beaten to Death doesn’t even want to grind. The traditions of grind would, of course, feel like shackles to the wiles of these time-tested tricksters. Yet, blast-addled breakaways crash into reggaeton dembows (“Electrocuted by the Sky”), reverb-soaked sax wailing (“The Tolerator”), and twisted synth dial screeches (“Vntrve”). Near every song challenges the expectations of grind, right down to the continued inclusion of their trademarked “distort the bass only” aggression tactic, which Beaten to Death also manages to subvert with a doomy opening guitar boom on “Memento Sugo.” It’s Christian Svendsen’s (Doedsvangr, ex-Tsjuder) reckless kick and snare play, really, that keeps transitioning moments tied to the necessary whiplash of the base genre. If you know what’s coming next, it’s a result of repeated digestion of Vntrve’s nooks and crannies.
Even on first listen, Vntrve reveals its tendency for barbed hook and diverse expression. As if B2D didn’t already have an ear for unmistakable melodies, the kind of post-hardcore-imbued flutters that would feel at place scattered about a The Fall of Troy or Botch jam (“Electrocuted by the Sky,” “(Du er verken Jesus eller Buddha) Du er Ugmod”), their ability to frame these moments of beauty against crash cymbal overloaded gallops and tattered layers of barks allows each song’s thread to weave that much tighter. Now seven albums down this idiosyncratic path, Beaten to Death runs the risk of sounding too much like themselves. And it’s true that the main riffs to “The Tolerator,” “Scroll On, Homeboy,” and “Satan Spawn, the K-Pop Demon” wear that identity proudly. But when there are ten others songs that each bring their own ideas to the table, these brief retreads—and I do mean brief; this is still grind after all—do little to get in the way of frequent enjoyment, especially when that enjoyment means shouting “SCROLL OOOON! HOME-BOY!”
And a high frequency of playthroughs will reveal hidden treasures around every corner of Vntrve. On more than one occasion, as I played through the tapped-harmony transition of “Fångad i en Battle Vest,” I paused to find which Death song most fit as the proper object of homage and smiled as I could unite two legendary bands so closely in my head canon.2 The classic high and low vocal assault of “Fear of Being Included” rings very Napalm Death, which adds an irony to the track being the most straightforward grindcore piece of the whole set (and its stop-start uncertainty). And in stark contrast, the Abbath-ian croak that mic man Anders Bakke summons on “Sunburn Satanist”3 causes equal parts giddy black metal glee and pit-running abandon when it breaks back to grind on the back half. Though it’s easy to attribute parody to the cause, the play that B2D brings to their joking statements on aging in a metal world4 help bring each of these referential statements to a place of reverence.
In this stretch of the real experimental side of their career, their most progressive leanings spawning with 2020’s Laat maar, ik verhuis naar het bos, Vntrve strikes the best balance of simple structures with oddball asides. While the closing title track runs as almost the longest in the B2D discography, it showcases too how quickly Beaten to Death can flip a stuttering mosh rhythm into a panning, dissociating fizzle of sax and synth bound together by an urgent kick and scaffolding folk melody. Guided by speed, fueled by chaos, and honed by an undying urge to make it all work—you can call that a manifestation of an unyielding DIY attitude—Vntrve marks another triumph in the undercelebrated story of Norway’s best-kept secret.
Rating: 4.0/5.0
DR: 45 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: Mas-Kina Recordings
Websites: beatentodeath.net | beatentodeath.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/beatentodeath
Releases Worldwide: October 23rd, 2026

Alekhines Grind
Genre-defying, progressive, inscrutable, idiosyncratic, bizarre, and avant-garde are but a few of the superlatives laid at the feet of the Beaten to Death body of work. And why not? Since their first full-length in 2011, these Norwegians have dedicated their entire careers to upending and rewriting the building blocks of grindcore with manic glee. Waving middle fingers at genre conventions with tongue planted firmly in cheek, the band have unleashed one platter after another of fast-paced, ADHD-riddled music which offers up a cascade of color and sound that incites as much joy as violence upon the listener. Seventh album Vntrve reveals its mission statement in its title; itself a sendup of the ludicrous saturation of letter-abuse in modern-day metal nomenclature while being utterly self-aware in doing so. But this long into such a forward-thinking career, are the jokes running thin? Or do the boys still know how to make you smile through the pain?
If you’re new to the B2D sound, you may be surprised to learn that despite the outfits’ run-of-the-mill violent name, the music on offer is positively teeming with color and life, or at least pleasant surprise. Vntrve continues that trend, with the band gleefully snatching the listener from melodic leads and colorful tones to sudden, bone-savaging grooves without breaking a sweat. While personal favorite Laat Maar, ik verhuis naar het bos furrowed brows and turned frowns upside down thanks to weird sample use as much as song ideas (that dial-up tone, anyone?), for this outing B2D have stayed relatively stereotypical in their toolkit and pressed the gas on the competency of the compositions themselves. Highlight “Electrocuted by the Sky” alternates between melodic twanging and blackened leads only to punt in an eastern-sounding breakdown for no clear reason besides to show that they can, and it works. “And it works” is easily the best summary of their sound, as any selected track will have a sudden tonal shift, highlight, or riff switch-up which would be grounds for accusations of disjointed lack of focus in the hands of any other outfit.
One of the distinguishing factors of B2D is their unapologetic sense of humor. From the curious sporadic English lyrics peppering “Fanged i en Battle Vest” to straight-up subgenre parodies and goofy song titles, there’s small, blink and you’ll miss them references to various bands and sounds throughout the sphere of all things metal, all delivered with a knowing smirk. “Sunburnt Satanist” switches up its vocal stylings into much more Immortal-ized flair, coming replete with decipherable declarations of “rimfrosted kingdoms”. “Satan Spawn, the K-Pop Demon” doesn’t merely reference Deicide by way of Cannabis Corpse wordplay but goes so far as to double-track the vocal presentation to sound ripped right off of Legion (or Deicide, obviously). Even without direct and simplistic parody, there is a sparkling sense of delight in their compositions, as the vast majority of tracks come with clean tones, major keys, and melodic sheen both in contrast and companionship to all the bludgeonings which await.
And the bludgeoning exists in abundance, as each and every cut comes packed with at least one moment of raw violence, tweaked and sculpted to fit into the record’s dizzying and Vntrve nature. “The Tolerator” offers the most straightforward curbstomping breakdown, before sliding into a delirious saxophone crashout courtesy of Bendik Brænne. This is no Rivers of Nihil knockoff, as the sax resurfaces during the closing title track “Vntrve” in a climactic build of glorious, jazzy delirium. Beyond the expectedly-unexpected progressivisms, you also get swipes at djent (“Scroll On, Homeboy”) and straightforward hardcore (“Du er Umgod”) to say nothing of sporadic blackened leads and whammy abuse. This “chuck it in the blender” approach should be ghastly and unfocused, but B2D proved their identities as aural alchemists long ago, and Vntrve is a celebration of the band’s masterclass in whimsical wielding of the unpredictable and exuberant.
The last touch complimenting Vntrve is an appropriate one: a closing chime of bells, like a venue saying “thanks for coming out.” Beaten to Death keep their remarkable streak of creativity alive, offering up yet another release that makes for an enthralling, charming listen. Not every track smacks of the same cover-to-cover gloriousness, but with most landing in the traditional grind run of one to two and a half minutes, they at least each come with a highlight worthy of repeated listens and make for a package that could easily be called grin-inducing as much as mosh-worthy or violent. And how many other grind albums are you gonna find with psychedelic-looking flamingos on the cover? Beaten to Death remain as committed to the bit as ever, using a stereotypically ruthless subgenre to convey imagination and adventure with pulverization in equal measure; a remarkable declaration that though they can brawl with the best of them, they will always remain utterly Vntrve.
Rating: 4.0/5.0

#2026 #40 #Abbath #BeatenToDeath #Botch #Death #Deicide #Grind #Grindcore #Immortal #MasKinaRecordings #NapalmDeath #NorwegianMetal #Oct26 #Review #Reviews #TheFallOfTroy

#abbath #beatentodeath #botch #death #deicide #grind
Dev Community @[email protected]
2026-10-23

The OpenAI Chat Completions format has quietly become the common plug of the LLM world. DeepSeek documents an OpenAI-format base URL for its own API, most gateways speak it, and the official openai Python SDK lets you point base_url anywhere. So switching from GPT to Claude to DeepSeek looks like changing one string.
It mostly is. But "mostly" hides the part that shows up on your invoice: the same prompt is a different number of tokens on different models, and some models think before answering and bill you for it. Below is a small harness for comparing models on real prompts instead of on vibes.
Step 1: one client, model as a parameter

Keep the endpoint and key in environment variables and treat the model as a plain argument.
import os
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(
base_url=os.environ["LLM_BASE_URL"], # provider or gateway, e.g. api.deepseek.com
api_key=os.environ["LLM_API_KEY"],
)
def ask(model: str, prompt: str, **extra):
resp = client.chat.completions.create(
model=model,
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": prompt}],
**extra,
)
return resp.choices[0].message.content, resp.usage
One thing does change between endpoints: model IDs. Talking to OpenAI directly you write gpt-5.4-mini; many gateways namespace it as openai/gpt-5.4-mini. Keep IDs in config, not scattered through the code.
Step 2: turn usage into money

Every response carries a usage object, and that is the only number worth trusting. In the OpenAI format, prompt_tokens already includes cached tokens (broken out in prompt_tokens_details.cached_tokens), and completion_tokens already includes reasoning tokens (broken out in completion_tokens_details.reasoning_tokens). So the math is: fresh input at the input price, cached input at the cached price, all completion tokens at the output price.
Here are list prices checked on October 23, 2026:
PRICES = { # USD per 1M tokens, provider list prices as of 2026-10-23
"openai/gpt-5.4-mini": {"in": 0.75, "cached": 0.075, "out": 4.50},
"anthropic/claude-sonnet-5": {"in": 2.00, "cached": 0.20, "out": 10.00},
"deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash": {"in": 0.30, "cached": 0.006, "out": 1.20}, # peak hours
}
def cost_usd(model: str, usage) -> float:
p = PRICES
[model] details = getattr(usage, "prompt_tokens_details", None)
cached = (getattr(details, "cached_tokens", 0) or 0) if details else 0
fresh = usage.prompt_tokens - cached
return (fresh * p["in"] + cached * p["cached"]
+ usage.completion_tokens * p["out"]) / 1_000_000
A quick sanity check with a 2,000-token prompt and a 500-token answer: GPT-5.4 mini comes to $0.00375 per call, Claude Sonnet 5 to $0.009, DeepSeek Flash to $0.0012 at peak hours. Over 10,000 calls that is $37.50, $90 and $12.
Those numbers are almost certainly wrong for your workload. The 2,000 tokens will not be 2,000 on every model: Anthropic says the tokenizer in Claude 4.7 and later produces roughly 30% more tokens for the same text. And the 500-token answer assumes no hidden reasoning, while DeepSeek's docs say its Flash model runs in thinking mode by default.
The table also skips Anthropic's cache writes (1.25x the input price) and DeepSeek's off-peak rates (half of peak; peak is 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC on weekdays). Add fields if they matter to you.
Step 3: run the same prompts through every model

Take 20 to 50 prompts from real traffic, run each through every candidate model, and write one CSV row per call:
import csv, time
prompts = [line.strip() for line in open("prompts.txt", encoding="utf-8") if line.strip()]
with open("compare.csv", "w", newline="", encoding="utf-8") as f:
w = csv.writer(f)
w.writerow(["model", "prompt_tokens", "completion_tokens",
"reasoning_tokens", "seconds", "usd", "answer"])
for model in PRICES:
for prompt in prompts:
t0 = time.perf_counter()
text, usage = ask(model, prompt)
dt = time.perf_counter() - t0
cd = getattr(usage, "completion_tokens_details", None)
reasoning = (getattr(cd, "reasoning_tokens", 0) or 0) if cd else 0
w.writerow([model, usage.prompt_tokens, usage.completion_tokens,
reasoning, round(dt, 2), round(cost_usd(model, usage), 6), text])
Before judging quality, look at three columns. prompt_tokens shows the tokenizer difference on your own text, reasoning_tokens shows which models think when you did not ask them to, and usd gives a real cost per call. The answer sits in the same row, so you judge quality next to price.
What does not survive the switch

Parameters are less portable than the endpoint. Some models reject options that others accept, reasoning models especially around temperature and output limits. Keep a small overrides dict per model and pass it through **extra instead of sprinkling if model.startswith(...) around.
Caching differs too: OpenAI caches prefixes automatically, Anthropic needs cache_control. If cached_tokens stays at zero on a long system prompt, you pay full price for it on every call.
Prices move. Anthropic's pricing page currently notes that Claude Sonnet 5's launch price, announced as introductory, has become the standard one. Date your price table and re-check it before you trust last month's numbers.
And if you go through a gateway, its bill is the truth, not the list price. List prices are fine for comparing models; for real spend, reconcile against the gateway's usage export.
Under 50 lines, and arguments about which model is cheaper turn into a CSV you can sort.
Disclosure: I'm building Heli (getheli.ru), an OpenAI-compatible gateway for developers in Russia that bills in rubles. The code above works with it if you set LLM_BASE_URL=https://getheli.ru/v1, but nothing here depends on it.
This post was drafted with the help of an AI assistant and reviewed and edited by me.#ai #python #llm #openai #software #coding #development #engineering #inclusive #community
One endpoint, many models: switching between GPT, Claude and DeepSeek and logging what every call costs

#ai #community #software #coding #python #development
nagaram @[email protected]
2026-10-22

One of the things I think is so detrimental to the christian faith is that it never wants to examine and reflect critically on what is causing it to lose followers. Or at least the protestant branches seem to suffer from this (not super sure, I mostly interect with protestants)
Like, I just read this article from a christian blog that lists all these stats and sited all these sources to say that women are leaving the church because of feminist ideas that came out of second wave feminism and this made women interested in the Divine Fem or Wicca's focus on a feminine goddess.
But it does nothing to exam WHY this is the case and how to remedy it except to thump bible verses about suffering witches and crying about no one wanting to love Jesus.
I need Christians to understand that this IS NOT apologetics. This is not making a case for your religion. This is not trying to figure out what problems your church has to dissuade people from the so called "truth."
Because, honestly and truthfully, from an atheist, the stories of Jesus are actually compelling. They're worthy of being read and being studied.
But the institutions and the currently standing authorities on Christianity are a vile and toxic set of organizations ran by clearly abusive men. There are so many branches of the christian faith that cry and chant about "truth" but have no interest in seeking it only in controlling it.
I am begging you, this is my plea to all Christians, please examine your life and your church with the criticisms of your ex members in mind. You do not need to stop being a christian, but if you want to have any chance of stopping the bleed or having an intelligent conversation about why this is happening, you must come at this with a critical eye.
Or don't. Personally I prefer the Pagans of this world. It's just easier to find a christian than it is to find a pagan. And It's hard to find a Christian with anything other than dogma and stockholm syndrome.
#christian #atheist #pagan #apologetics #religion #philosophy #debate

#christian #atheist #pagan #apologetics #religion #philosophy
Swede’s Photographs @[email protected]
2026-10-22

Good morning. 🏵️🏵️🏵️
22 October 2026
I had an early appointment this morning, so I'm running late with today's post. My wife usually goes to appointments with me because I often have trouble understanding what people are saying. It depends a lot on the person's voice. In many ways, my wife serves as my interpreter.
I don't think it's so much a matter of hearing people as it is processing and breaking the sounds down into understandable words. Seeing lip movements helps, but only a little. Weird, isn't it?
I'm used to my wife's voice, so I can usually understand what she's saying, although there are times when she has to repeat herself. Still, I'm tuned in to her voice well enough that I can hear her call my name in Walmart on a busy day, even when I'm at the opposite end of the store.
After the appointment, we went to early voting and got that out of the way. I'm not registered as either a Democrat or a Republican, so I feel free to vote for whomever I believe is the best candidate. However, the train wreck of the last two years prevented me, in good conscience, from casting a vote for any Republican. That feeling is amplified by the fact that my current representative is Mike Johnson. I would very much like to see him voted out of office.
There was one judicial race with three candidates, and I chose not to vote for any of them. I believe we have to put an end to corruption and unlawful conduct in government, and the best way to do that is to vote out the people who stood by and allowed it to happen.
I usually don't get political on my blog, but the stakes feel high, and I think it's my duty to say something. My message is simple: make sure you get out and vote.
"The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said." — Peter Drucker
"Democracy is not a spectator sport."
— Marian Wright Edelman
"The ballot is stronger than the bullet." — Abraham Lincoln
#photo #photography #photographer #photographylovers #nature #morning #voting #hearing

#photo #photography #photographer #photographylovers #nature #morning
creammagazine.com @[email protected]
2026-10-24

Kiss traditional aphrodisiacs goodbye: Smooch ‘social soda’ is here

The package arrived attentioned to ‘Raspberries & Cream for Cream Magazine’. Well, well, welly well, we thought, what’s this handsome looking four-pack of cans labelled ‘Smooch’? It all looks pretty intriguing, beautifully packaged, dubbed ‘Blush Rush: Raspberries & Cream Social Soda’, and instantly inviting. It’s the weekend, so the cans have been dropped into the freezer for an insta-chill’; 10 minutes later a can popped open and a bubbly looking elixer is being poured over ice.
During that li’l chilling period, I read the press release. “Smooch is Australia’s first aphrodisiac soda,” it says. “Smooch launches following research revealing 87% of Aussies have experienced a dip in desire,” it says. “Smooch is betting that intimacy could be the next wellness frontier,” it says.
Could this be for reals? Or is it a Shakespearean-like case of ‘Smooch Ado About Nothing’? Let’s give this bevvy a try…
Three sips later and Smooch definitely passes the taste test. Sweet but not too sweet. A zesty raspberry hit but with a cream soda-like after-texture on the tongue. Yes, I’m feeling somewhat calmer. You could say a little more focused. But what about that aphrodisiac bit?
Reading on, I learn that this new, non-alcoholic drink falls under a category of ‘functional sodas’ and that it contains a blend of five active ingredients designed to mimic aphrodisiac effects by reducing anxiety and increasing circulation and ‘desire support’. I’m not sure what the support part means exactly but it’s definitely got a soothing, calming effect this drink does. More research. Those five key ingredients are actually damiana (a traditional aphrodisiac aimed at supporting sensory feelings and arousal); maca root (reportedly boosts vitality, libido and overall mood); ginkgo biloba (promotes blood flow); L-theanine (promotes relaxation and quietens the mental chatter – needing that); and citric acid (which the folks at Smooch playfully note “helps triple saliva output”).
After one and a half glasses, I am feeling nice and relaxed, and just wanting to do something. Luckily I have this review to finish.
I can certainly see how this drink is being posited as an alternative relaxant, and it’s pretty much timely in its release since October is when our stress levels start to pick up pre-Christmas. Speaking of which, I think I’ll try this drink as a mixer and so now I’m going to pour it over ice and a nip of gin. Yep, nice. But what about trying it with vodka? Yep, also very nice. And, what the heck, how about I go full cocktail with it. I pick a recipe out of Cream contributor Jane Rocca’s great little book ‘The Cocktail’ – the Couture Fizz it’s called – and things are already looking messier. But the taste of the drink is actually even better. For those wanting to know, a Couture Fizz consists of 5ml of Campari, 10ml of raspberry liqueur, a dash of lemon juice, 130ml of Champagne (Lanson, thank you) and – in place of Jane’s suggested dash of sugar syrup and three real raspberries, I’ve poured in a third of a can of Smooch Blush Rush. The result? Over-the-top and overflowing and yes, that little bit messy, but one sip and I’m all good with the mess. In fact, this might be the kind of drink you want to see the silly season in. Just don’t get too carried away in case its aphrodesiac qualities prove too potent. Back to serious mode, with this notion of ‘functional drinks’ sure to be trending soon – bevvies available that target sleep, focus and energy – like that press release said, I’m betting intimacy could next be on the wellness frontier. In sum, I found Smooch to be a bit of a cross between a tonic and an energy drink. It’s nice to sip on its own if you’re wanting a traditional-type soda, and decent as a sweet mixer to counter-balance a quality hard spirit or good champagne. Now, who’s making the next round? Antonino Tati
Red Bull gives you zings: two zesty new flavours to add punch to Friday night drinks
Aeroplane Jelly now available as milk drinks!
How the pumpkin became so well connected to Halloween
Going Bananas: we’re seeing a lot of this fabulous ingredient around this season
Spring Racing Season 2026 is officially on: This year’s Do’s and Don’ts
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Rate this:
#ANTONINOTATI #beverageReviews #drinkReviews #foodDrink #foodAndDrink #halloween #halloween2026 #smooch #smoochSocialSoda #smoochSoda

#antoninotati #beveragereviews #drinkreviews #fooddrink #foodanddrink #halloween
Psychology News Robot @[email protected]
2026-10-23

DATE: October 23, 2026 at 07:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG
** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------
TITLE: “AI psychosis” appears rare but real, and first-episode patients may be most vulnerable, study suggests
URL: https://www.psypost.org/ai-psychosis-appears-rare-but-real-and-first-episode-patients-may-be-most-vulnerable-study-suggests/
A review of electronic health records at a large medical center suggests that conversational artificial intelligence chatbots are associated with worsening psychotic symptoms in a small fraction of mental health patients. These interactions tend to validate preexisting delusions and appear to occur most frequently among patients experiencing their very first episode of psychosis. The findings were published in JAMA Psychiatry.
Psychosis is a psychiatric condition in which a person loses touch with reality, often experiencing hallucinations or delusions, which are firmly held false beliefs that persist despite contradictory evidence. These false beliefs frequently adapt to reflect the surrounding culture and the latest consumer gadgets. For example, a study covered by PsyPost in 2025 found that more than half of patients experiencing delusions incorporated modern technology, such as smartphones and social media algorithms, into their false beliefs.
Unlike passive technologies like television or radio, modern artificial intelligence chatbots actively converse with users in real time. Some researchers have used the term “AI psychosis” for cases in which chatbot interactions are linked to emerging or worsening psychotic symptoms. The author of a 2023 commentary argued that chatbot conversations feel so realistic that users can sense a real person on the other end while knowing there isn’t one, and that this tension might fuel delusions in people prone to psychosis.
Subsequent medical observations began to back up these early warnings. A 2025 study of psychiatric records in Denmark, first released as a preprint and since published in a peer-reviewed journal, identified 38 patients whose mental health appeared to suffer after using chatbots, most commonly through the worsening of their delusions. While early reports and the Danish data established that the phenomenon exists in clinical settings, researchers still lacked systematic data from the United States examining the specific traits of affected patients and the exact roles chatbots play in their illness.
To address this, Zachary Bergson and senior author Julia M. Sheffield, who leads the Sheffield Lab and is an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, along with their colleagues, conducted a systematic analysis of patient records at their institution. They aimed to estimate how often AI psychosis appears in a large American hospital system, identify the clinical characteristics of the affected individuals, and categorize how chatbot conversations interact with psychotic symptoms.
“The study was motivated by the lack of published data on the prevalence and characteristics of AI Psychosis,” Sheffield told PsyPost. “Many theoretical articles had been published, but very few empirical studies existed at the time we started. We wanted to understand simply: 1) at Vanderbilt, how prevalent is AI Psychosis? 2) what generally characterizes AI Psychosis cases in terms of demographics and psychiatric history, compared to other individuals with psychosis who have reference to AI in their medical record but did not develop AI Psychosis.”
The researchers searched an electronic health record database containing 578,058 medical progress notes from 215,712 unique patients who received behavioral health care between December 1, 2022, and April 15, 2026. They filtered these records for keywords related to artificial intelligence and narrowed the pool to patients who had a documented diagnosis of a psychotic disorder. Two raters manually reviewed the resulting notes to remove irrelevant matches, ultimately identifying 187 medical encounters across 73 unique patients.
The team divided these 73 patients into three distinct groups based on how they interacted with the technology, with raters agreeing on the group assignment 86.1% of the time. The first group, labeled “neutral interaction,” included 17 patients who used chatbots for everyday tasks unrelated to their mental illness, such as searching for cooking recipes. The second group, “AI-related psychotic content,” consisted of 28 patients who held delusions about artificial intelligence in general, but had no documented history of actually using a chatbot.
The third group, representing “AI psychosis,” included 28 patients whose medical notes documented chatbot use that appeared to worsen their psychotic symptoms. The researchers also checked each patient’s medical history to see if their hospital visit represented their very first psychotic episode, known clinically as an index episode.
For the 28 patients in the AI psychosis group, the authors further sorted the interactions into four theoretical categories describing how the software influenced the illness, reaching 83.3% agreement between raters. A “catalyst” interaction meant the chatbot triggered new psychotic symptoms in a previously healthy person. An “amplifier” meant the chatbot worsened existing symptoms by validating distorted ideas. A “coauthor” interaction involved the user and the machine building a harmful narrative together through back-and-forth dialogue, while an “object” interaction meant the chatbot itself became the target of the patient’s delusional beliefs.
The 28 patients identified with AI psychosis represented 0.013% of all patients receiving mental health care at the medical center during the study period. This group was predominantly male, at 67.9% (though the neutral group was even more heavily male, at 88.2%), and White, at 75.0%, with a median age of 27.5 years. Patients in the AI psychosis group were younger than those who merely held general delusions about artificial intelligence without using a chatbot, who had a median age of 36.5 years.
The authors note that this rate converges with figures from OpenAI, which has reported that about 0.07% of ChatGPT users active in a given week show possible signs of mental health emergencies related to psychosis or mania, though the two figures measure different populations.
“This is a relatively small percent, and is in line with what has been reported by the tech companies using in-house data that the public does not have access to,” Sheffield explained. “However, 28 people just within a single medical center is still a lot of patients and families that have been impacted, and if you scale this up to the number of people using generative AI, that is millions of people around the world. In addition, psychosis is a highly distressing and often debilitating experience, that can be difficult to recover from; so if AI is contributing to the experience or severity of psychosis, then it needs to be considered potentially harmful to mental health.”
When comparing clinical histories, the researchers found no statistically significant differences between the three groups regarding prior psychiatric hospitalizations, past use of psychiatric medications, outpatient treatment history, or past suicide attempts. However, a major difference emerged regarding the stage of the patients’ illness. About 60.7% of the patients in the AI psychosis group were experiencing their first episode of psychosis, compared to just 17.6% in the neutral interaction group and 28.5% in the AI-related content group.
In addition, patients in the AI psychosis group were more likely to be diagnosed with “unspecified psychosis” (a temporary or broad diagnosis often used when a patient’s exact condition is still being evaluated), at 28.6%, compared to 0% in the neutral group. Among the AI psychosis cases, OpenAI’s ChatGPT was the specific product named in 53.6% of the records. Notably, 85.7% of all AI psychosis interactions were recorded after May 2024, which coincided with the release of the GPT-4o model.
Looking at the four categories of chatbot interaction, the researchers found that the technology functioned as an “amplifier” in 64.3% of the AI psychosis cases. It served as the “object” of delusions in 21.4% of cases, and acted as a “catalyst” in 10.7% of cases. None of the cases fit the “coauthor” category, and one case could not be classified into any of the four types.
“Our finding that the majority of AI Psychosis cases were first episode patients confirmed our suspicions, but was still striking to see in the data,” Sheffield said. “In reading the notes from the medical record it was clear that those vulnerable to or in the midst of experiencing psychosis for the first time were turning to AI for answers, understanding or support and were instead having their delusional thought content confirmed or amplified.”
“AI Psychosis the worsening of psychotic experiences (typically delusional beliefs) in the context of using generative chat-based AI is a real clinical phenomenon that we observe in practice,” she added. “People are coming to behavioral health providers in the real world with these types of experiences.”
These findings align with a case report covered by PsyPost in late 2025, which detailed an individual patient rather than a retrospective cohort of electronic health records, and similarly found that conversational AI chatbots often amplify and validate psychotic delusions. The results are also consistent with the peer-reviewed version of the Danish records study described earlier, which was covered by PsyPost in early 2026 and documented how chatbot interactions were associated with exacerbated delusions, self-harm or suicidal ideation, and eating disorders among vulnerable psychiatric patients.
One outside expert said that as large language models (LLMs), the technology that powers conversational chatbots, become part of everyday life, their mental health risks and potential benefits both need study. “This study is one of the first to dive into texts from medical records to find suggestions for associations between use of LLMs and psychosis,” Iris Sommer, a professor and psychiatrist at the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands and president of the Schizophrenia International Research Consortium, who was not involved in the study, told PsyPost. “This study found remarkably few cases of an association between LLM use and psychosis (only 0.013% of service users). With the steep increase in LLM use in recent years, this frequency can be expected to also go up.”
“While the potential for triggering or worsening psychosis is an important issue to investigate, there is also potential of a broadly available app, that can be used in many languages, free of charge, which may offer some benefits to those struggling with mental health issues who do not have access to any form of regular mental health care,” Sommer added. “Understanding in which circumstances and for which users LLM use can be harmful or helpful is a major challenge that mental health researchers are now facing.”
The concentration of cases after May 2024 coincides with the release of GPT-4o, a model OpenAI later acknowledged had at times been overly sycophantic, meaning it tended to flatter users and agree with them rather than push back. The authors caution that their design cannot show the model caused these cases, and the timing could also reflect the overall growth in chatbot use and in clinicians’ attention to it. Still, when a person in the early, confusing stages of psychosis shares a distorted belief with an overly agreeable chatbot, the software may validate the belief rather than challenge it.
At the same time, chatbot technology continues to evolve as developers adjust how their models handle sensitive topics. “The newer versions of commercially available LLMs are less likely to confirm irrational or unlikely beliefs than the initial (2022 and 2023) versions,” Sommer noted. “Newer versions have become trained to recognize signs of psychosis, depression or mania and now recommend seeking professional help (also providing local possibilities to find professional help) when such signs are detected.”
There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these findings. Because the study relied on existing medical notes, the prevalence rate of 0.013% only reflects cases where doctors happened to ask about or document technology use. Clinicians do not routinely screen patients for chatbot habits, meaning many interactions likely went unrecorded, and first-episode patients may also receive more thorough intake interviews that make chatbot use more likely to be noted.
The study’s observational design also means it cannot establish that chatbots directly cause psychosis in otherwise healthy people. In most cases, the medical notes described chatbots as appearing to amplify symptoms that were already developing, though three cases were classified as chatbot use preceding new symptoms in previously healthy people. Additionally, the data came from a single medical center in Tennessee, and the four-part classification system used to sort the interactions has not yet been formally validated for clinical use.
“We cannot say from this study if AI use causes psychosis or simply exacerbates it,” Sheffield noted. “This is similar to studies on substance use: for those vulnerable to psychosis, using cannabis or other substances may worsen psychosis symptoms but we frequently cannot say for certain that it caused them. However, the addition of a pervasive, always available, technology that interacts with mental health in a negative way is highly concerning and requires regulation.”
Sommer was more cautious about the “AI psychosis” label itself. “We should be rather careful with this very term, as causality is very difficult to establish, as the authors of this paper also emphasize,” she said. “LLM use may coincide with psychosis, but if it is the delusional way of thinking that has triggered LLM use or the other way around is rather difficult to disentangle retrospectively. Also, if LLM use worsens psychotic symptoms, or if LLM use increases as a result of more delusional thinking is also difficult to tease out.”
To better understand how these digital conversations unfold, the authors note that future research should track patients over time and directly analyze their actual chat logs, rather than relying solely on doctors’ summaries. In the meantime, the researchers suggest that mental health professionals consider routinely asking patients about their use of conversational artificial intelligence during psychiatric evaluations.
“I just attended the first annual AI Psychological Research Coalition (AIPRC) conference, which brought together academia, advocacy and policy to discuss AI regulation,” Sheffield said. “I hope my research can add to this conversation about what types of AI use are harmful for those at risk for psychosis. I also am very interested in understanding how delusional ideas are reinforced by chatbots, in order to reverse-engineer this process, with an eye towards treatment.”
Sommer agreed that examining the actual transcripts of these digital conversations is a necessary step forward. “An important next step would be to analyze the exact interactions between people with emerging psychotic symptoms and LLMs,” she said. “Such analyses should be undertaken open-minded, with a focus on both potentially harmful and helpful interactions.”
The study, “Characterizing Artificial Intelligence Psychosis in a Large Medical Setting,” was authored by Zachary Bergson, Sarah G. Vassall, Adam Wright, Allison B. McCoy, Katherine M. Schafer, Margaret C. Achee, and Julia M. Sheffield.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/ai-psychosis-appears-rare-but-real-and-first-episode-patients-may-be-most-vulnerable-study-suggests/
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #MentalHealth #Psychosis #AIPsychosis #ChatGPT #GenerativeAI #Psychiatry #MentalHealthAwareness #AIResearch

#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy #mentalhealth #psychiatry
Elena Rossini on GoToSocial ⁂ @[email protected]
2026-10-22

Total honest question to my dear Fedi friends, I need a genuine answer, please do not sugarcoat things. I need Dutch bluntness here!
So you have been following #MySoCalledSudoLife adventures for almost two years now.
I'm not sure how to define myself anymore because I'm not an expert at this stuff, but I am no longer a newbie either. Yesterday I updated all my systems using CLI (in tmux)!
Now, my main point after my long preamble:
I want to create custom apparel for the next #FOSDEM, as an act of rebellion against the rejection for our proposal of a DEIB room.
I used to make sweatshirts and t-shirts to promote the visibility of women in film, like: "this is what a film director looks like" or just t-shirts that read "film director". I gifted them to prominent women in film, who LOVED them and wore them on set!
I'd like to do something similar but for FOSDEM / tech.
Is it too much to say: "this is what a sysadmin looks like"? Can I call myself a sysadmin, or would you find it sacrilegious?
Anything else? Like, other suggestions along the lines of "this is what a ----- looks like" or "sysadmin"?
Thanks! 🙏

#mysocalledsudolife #fosdem
Angry Metal Guy @[email protected]
2026-10-22

Dragonland – Prophecies Review By ClarkKent
Welcome to Disney World Dragonland! Its five kingdoms four realms provide hours of fun and entertainment for the whole family. Take a trip through a futuristic Tron-like realm in a fancy sports car! Sail the high seas through stormy waters that threaten to capsize your ship with 100-foot waves! Hike the scenic mountain trails at the mercy of the vicious, fire-breathing dragons! Explore an obliterated city from a post-apocalyptic world while dodging falling meteorites! Wait, this sounds way more terrifying than what was advertised when I originally booked my family trip. Isn’t this supposed to be symphonic power metal? I thought that was supposed to be harmless fun. Dragonland has been at the sympho-cheese act for quite some time, 27 years to be exact, but their output has slowed considerably compared to their more youthful times. When a less olde Steel Druhm reviewed Under the Grey Banner in 2011, it was their fifth release in ten years. Now they make a triumphant return to the blog 15 years later for album number seven, Prophecies. Is it worth the price of admission?
Perhaps one advantage of less frequent releases is that it allows Dragonland to keep the spunk and energy of their youth. They take the good cheer of Fellowship and combine it with the fantasy-seasoned cheese of Rhapsody of Fire and Gloryhammer to make for some rather inspired tunes. Prophecies opens with gusto on the galloping, joyful “The Prophecy Unfolds,” complete with synth wizardry and some guitar fireworks. Beneath that cheer, however, the record can take a rather bleak view of humanity. On “Survival of Mankind,” for example, Jonas Heidgert sings with ironic joy, “Wastelands as far as your eyes can behold / Those before us brought destruction and despair.” It shouldn’t require a spoiler alert to say that a message of hope lurks behind the often dark lyrics, thanks to the uplifting music as well as a redemptive arc in the closing minutes of the finale, “Cries of Anguish.”
While the bulk of Prophecies contains rollicking, galloping tunes, Dragonland have plenty of other tricks up their sleeves to keep the record interesting. The synths provide a distinct ’80s character to some tracks. “Rolling Waves” opens with the synth rock touches of Duran Duran, and then there are hints of ’80s synth pop on “Dragonland.” This latter song takes its energetic start and rips into a banger complete with a fun gang vocal chorus. Anders Hammer’s bass also makes a strong mark throughout Prophecies, with a Stratovarius-inspired bit on “Making Darkened Nights So Bright” as well as a funky bridge solo on “Call of the Wild.” The slower, piano-led ballad, “Light of the Sunset,” gives Heidgert the opportunity to show his range, crooning gently in the early goings and then belting his heart out in an emotional climax. Dragonland shake up their rigid formula on the more progressive “Glory and Gold.” This seafaring piece feels like a missed opportunity to partner up with the nautical Terra Atlantica, and at the very least could serve as the start of a raucous adventure film.
Dragonland puts its power metal formula mostly to good use, writing tight, catchy songs that nonetheless begin to sag as the album drags on. Part of the issue is the generically uniform riffs that serve as the music’s backbone. Jesse Lindskog offers up some guitar solos here and there, often mixed with Elias Holmlid’s wild keyboard fretting, but the fact remains that the guitars feel almost like an afterthought for the most part. Prophecies also ends up feeling bottom-heavy, as tracks begin to creep into five-minute territory on the back half. They’re still fun songs, but their length does cause Prophecies to sag as it reaches its conclusion. Fortunately, “The Call of the Wild,” featuring the record’s best lead riff as well as an excellent chorus, swoops in to spice things up down the final stretch.
If you’re a fan of the cheese, don’t miss out on this roller coaster ride of an album. Dragonland offers the thrills and joys of an amusement park ride from the safety of your headphones. They have managed to sound just as fresh and exciting as the newbies in the field. They may not shred like Dragonforce, but they’ve retained and sharpened a decades-old identity thanks to sharp songwriting and plenty of spunk. Buckle up and prepare yourself for one glorious ride.

Rating: 3.5/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 256 kbps mp3
Label: Scarlet Records
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: October 23rd, 2026
#2026 #35 #DragonForce #Dragonland #DuranDuran #Fellowship #Gloryhammer #Oct26 #PowerMetal #Prophecies #Review #Reviews #RhapsodyOfFire #ScarletRecords #Stratovarius #SwedishMetal #SymphonicMetal #SymphonicPowerMetal #TerraAtlantica

#dragonforce #dragonland #duranduran #fellowship #gloryhammer #oct26
Proto Himbo European @guyjantic
2026-10-24

These are dangerous days
To say what you feel is to lay your own grave
[Sinéad O'Connor, Black Boys on Mopeds]
(side note: All the lyrics sites I can find show dig your own grave but I hear lay when I listen to the track... on the other hand, I'm Singificantly Hard of Hearing, so maybe I'm wrong)
#music #lyrics #sineadoconnor #fascism

#music #lyrics #sineadoconnor #fascism
☮ ♥ ♬ 🧑‍💻 @[email protected]
2026-10-24

“The worst part of coding, [the thing] #engineers hate is writing the #documentation. Well, guess what? That is going to become even more critical now. Being able to write clear, concise design #specifications, the functional specifications, is going to be extremely important.
The good thing is that you’ll now have an #AIPartner that can do this with you and you can iterate with this partner.
“I would say the new #code is the #spec That's what you're going to check into GitHub now, because you want to make sure that the spec you wrote is going to generate the same type of code now over and over again. I have seen variances." — #PratikWadher, CEO #Kaseya
Written by someone who has never had to go back over old code and ask, “WTF are they doing this for? Why this way?”
I never thought of documentation as hard, instead it’s fun because you had a clear idea of what you wanted to achieve, what compromises you made thus future proofing the rationale.
Code is the HOW, not the WHY or REASONING. And certainly doesn’t tell you the chosen SCOPE and LIMITATIONS.
#AIDocumentation / #DomainExpertise / #writing https://theregister.com/software/2026/10/21/the-spec-is-the-new-code-so-brush-up-on-your-prose-says-kaseya-cto/5304002>

#engineers #documentation #specifications #aipartner #code #spec
peachfront @peachfront
2026-10-23

there is no universe where it can be justified to shoot at a car containing living human beings, including a baby, over a shoplifting beef
if you're the store, get the license number & file a complaint if you have to but do not involve armed gunmen
this is human decency 101
why do i even have to feel moved to express this in the 21st century or any century
this is not OK
if police only exist to protect capital, then they should not receive one penny of public funds, let their pay come out of capital's security budgets
i've had people ask me what would happen to me if the police did not exist, since no one EVER in all the decades of this long life has ever been arrested or even mildly inconvenienced over a crime of violence against me, i'd say what would happen to me is i'd pay less taxes for exactly the same zero amount of services i've always received
Psychology News Robot @[email protected]
2026-10-22

DATE: October 22, 2026 at 03:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG
** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Haunted houses may bring people closer, but psychological research suggests the bonding really happens on the ride home
URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-benefits-of-frightening-activities-depend-on-what-you-do-afterward-according-to-new-psychology-research/
A new study published in the journal Emotion provides evidence that visiting a haunted house with others is linked to feeling more connected to them. People who felt more scared, and who held hands or made physical contact, were more likely to say the experience brought them closer, though before-and-after closeness ratings barely changed, and interviews suggested that talking about the experience afterward may be where much of the bonding happens.
Humans are highly social creatures, and forming bonds with others is strongly linked to overall health and psychological well-being. Scientists have gathered substantial evidence showing that sharing positive emotions, like laughing at a comedy show or cheering at a concert, amplifies interpersonal closeness. A separate line of research suggests that negative emotions, specifically fear, also push people to seek out the company of others. When people face a common threat, they often prefer to face it together rather than alone.
Beyond simply seeking company, shared emotional arousal can create a sense of unity. Previous studies indicate that fear can spread from person to person, synchronizing heart rates and potentially reinforcing group cohesion. Most previous experiments exploring the link between fear and social bonding relied on artificial laboratory settings or situations involving genuine threats. The researchers wanted to investigate how fear affects relationships in a recreational context, where the threat is entirely simulated.
Jane Wiley conducted this research as an undergraduate student at the University of Florida and is now an incoming social psychology doctoral student at the University of Virginia. The project grew out of a passion Wiley shares with their faculty advisor and the study’s senior author, Lawton K. “Ken” Swan.
“He and I are huge horror and haunted house fans,” Wiley told PsyPost. “We have shared plenty of stories (and have heard many others from haunted house guests) of how going through a haunted house together can be a strong bonding experience.”
Wiley noted that anecdotal success stories served as inspiration for the project. “A first date he had at Halloween Horror Nights led to a happy marriage, and I got very close with a best friend — Garrett Johnson, another author of the paper — after we went through a haunted house together,” they said. “This interpersonal focus had not been researched in recreational fear literature when we began, so that was what drew us to studying what we did.”
Millions of people seek out recreational fear every year by riding roller coasters, watching horror movies, or visiting haunted attractions. The scientists designed this project to test whether the fear experienced in these playful, safe environments translates into stronger social ties. They wanted to know if the temporary thrill of a scare can generate a lasting sense of interpersonal warmth among friends, family members, and acquaintances.
To explore these ideas, Wiley and their colleagues at the University of Florida conducted a series of five studies over three Halloween seasons at a commercial haunted attraction in Florida, the Gainesville Fear Garden. In the first study, the team surveyed 986 attraction attendees immediately after they finished a sensory deprivation haunted house. The participants answered questions on a 7-point scale regarding how much fear they felt, how much they enjoyed the attraction, and whether the experience brought them closer to the person in their group they already felt closest to. The researchers also asked if participants communicated or held hands with their companion during the event.
About 48 percent of participants agreed that the experience brought them closer to their companion. Higher levels of reported fear predicted a stronger feeling of having bonded, with each additional point of fear on the 7-point scale associated with about a fifth of a point higher rating on the bonding question. Holding hands, communicating during the event, and enjoying the experience also predicted higher ratings. This provided preliminary, correlational evidence that shared fear in a fun setting is linked to feeling closer.
To verify these findings and look for measurable changes, the researchers conducted a second study with 500 participants during the next Halloween season. This time, guests completed surveys both immediately before and right after navigating the attraction. This method allowed the scientists to measure shifts in interpersonal closeness. As in the first study, participants were asked to focus on the person in their group they felt closest to.
Once again, the amount of fear a person felt predicted how much they believed the experience brought them closer to their companion, with 58 percent agreeing that the attraction brought them closer. Yet, when the scientists looked at the direct difference between the before and after closeness ratings, they found no measurable change: participants rated closeness at an average of 6.27 out of 7 before entering and 6.12 after exiting. The researchers suspected a ceiling effect, meaning that because these participants already rated their relationship so highly before entering the attraction, there was very little mathematical room for their closeness score to increase on a 7-point scale.
For the third study, the researchers adjusted their focus to see if the bonding effect applied to less intimate relationships. They surveyed 554 participants, asking them to focus on the group member they felt the least close to, or someone they argued with most often. Participants were asked if the attraction brought them closer to this specific person, how much fear they felt, and if they made any physical contact.
The scientists found that fear and physical contact remained strong predictors of feeling brought together, even for the least close companions. Approximately 45 percent of participants agreed that the experience made them feel closer to their least close group member. When asked about their party as a whole, an even higher percentage, about 64 percent, felt the experience brought their entire group closer. This suggests that the link between fear and feeling closer is not limited to already-close relationships, and the authors suggest the effect may be even stronger at the group level, though the group and individual figures came from different questions.
In the fourth study, the only one that was preregistered, the researchers again attempted to capture a measurable shift in closeness from before to after the haunted house. They maintained their focus on least close companions to avoid the ceiling effect seen in earlier attempts. The researchers collected complete survey data from 263 attendees who rated their closeness to their least close groupmate before entering and then again after exiting. The team also asked the participants to rate their fear, enjoyment, and physical contact during the immersive 30-minute experience.
The predictive model held up for a fourth time, with fear, physical contact, and enjoyment all predicting perceptions of enhanced closeness. Additionally, the researchers finally detected a statistically significant increase in closeness ratings from before the experience to afterward, rising from 4.61 before entering to 4.81 after exiting, an average increase of just 0.21 points on a 7-point scale. This modest change raised questions about why about half of participants said the experience brought them closer, even though their numerical closeness ratings barely moved.
“Our most surprising finding was when we kept seeing no pre-to-post change in closeness, prior to figuring out that post-haunt reflection is essential for bonding to occur,” Wiley noted.
Wiley added that this lack of initial change was difficult to interpret at first. “This ultimately ended up being a good obstacle to encounter since it led us to transition to qualitative data collection (which helped us deduce the post-experience reflection bit), but it was hard to make sense of at the time,” Wiley said. “So I would say the most surprising finding is that going through a haunted house together alone, without the time to talk and laugh afterwards, does not seem to be sufficient for significant bonding.”
To understand this paradox, the researchers conducted a fifth and final study consisting of face-to-face qualitative interviews. Qualitative research involves gathering non-numerical data, such as conversational responses, to understand underlying concepts, opinions, and motivations. The researchers interviewed 20 guests right after they completed the haunted house and the quantitative survey. They asked the participants what feeling closer meant to them and why their numerical scores might not have changed despite reporting a stronger bond.
In the interviews, 16 of the 20 attendees said that talking, laughing, and swapping stories about the scares afterward, such as on the car ride home, played a central role in making them feel closer. Fourteen described the novelty of the experience as part of its appeal, and many said that relying on one another while blindfolded or frightened created a sense of vulnerability. Twelve commented on the survey itself: some said they had not yet had time to process the experience, and several said they had not distinguished between their overall closeness and their closeness in that moment when answering the questions.
“Haunted houses seem to have the ability to make two people feel closer together, whether these two people were previously very close or not,” Wiley explained. “In other words, going through a haunted attraction with either your best friend or your annoying coworker will likely prove to be beneficial to the relationship. However, this link is quite contingent on what you and that other person do after the experience.”
Wiley emphasized that what happens after the scare may matter most. “Post-haunt reflection is important to the process of bonding: the haunted house on its own may not do much to strengthen the relationship, but if you talk, reminisce, and laugh about the experience afterwards, you’ll probably feel more bonded with that person,” they said.
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. All five studies took place at one attraction whose format changed from year to year, and none compared haunted house visitors with people doing a non-scary activity together, so the studies cannot show that fear itself, rather than simply sharing a fun outing, drives the sense of bonding. Closeness was measured with single survey items, only the fourth study was preregistered, and in the interviews, participants were told about the earlier null results before being asked to explain them.
“As there is with any study, ours certainly had limitations,” Wiley noted. “We used convenience samples of people who were already at the haunted house, so not only were race, ability, and income unevenly distributed, but our conclusions can only really be generalized to people who would normally show up at a haunted house with their friends or family (this is a double-edged sword though — we’re interested in recreational fear, so we are particularly interested in people who seek out these experiences on their own time anyway).”
Environmental factors during the surveys might have also influenced the data. “We were surveying people inside the bar of the haunted house, which was a pretty chaotic and high-traffic space: the music was loud, people were drinking, and participants filled out surveys side-by-side with other participants, who in some cases were the people they came with,” Wiley explained. “So it was definitely not a distraction-free environment we were collecting data in, which may have impacted responses. We also only examined the impact of haunted houses in particular, so we cannot make these same conclusions yet about other forms of recreational fear, like horror movies or extreme sports.”
Scaring people together is not a guaranteed relationship fix. Across the studies, only about half of participants agreed the haunted house brought them closer, and a notable minority disagreed. The authors speculate that shared fear might strain a relationship when people’s fear responses are badly mismatched or one person feels unsupported, and they propose that recreational fear may act as an interpersonal stress test: responding to a frightened companion with comfort and humor could reinforce a bond, while failing to do so could weaken it.
Expanding the research could yield useful insights into how shared emotional intensity shapes human connection over time. “We would definitely like to expand on this study, particularly adding an experimental manipulation where some participants have time for post-experience reflection while others don’t, in order to investigate the cause-and-effect relationship,” Wiley said. “We’d also like to see if this bonding pattern exists for other forms of recreational fear.”
The study, “Haunted Attraction: The Effects of Recreational Fear on Interpersonal Bonding,” was authored by Jane K. Wiley, Alexa A. Rivers, Otho Garrett Johnson, Cristina S. Negraru, Jake T. Watson, Tara M. Perreault, Rebecca Martin, Sara C. Slayton, Steffano I. Segovia-Palacios, Benjamin R. Stanisky, Kate E. Doherty, and Lawton K. Swan.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-benefits-of-frightening-activities-depend-on-what-you-do-afterward-according-to-new-psychology-research/
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #HauntedHouse #Psychology #SocialPsychology #Relationships #HumanConnection #Fear #Horror #Halloween #PsychologyResearch #Friendship

#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy #mentalhealth #psychiatry
💀 Marghoul McFear🎃 @tankgrrl
2026-10-23

CW: IRL amis and neighbors

I'm not about to tell you what I weigh or what size I am now but I am prepared to tell you that I am bordering on 'skinny' and it feels absolutely fantastic. I mean, saggy skin aside. 😊
I kept trying on clothes and going down a size... down a size. OK, I will say that I can wear an EU small to medium now. My new raincoat is a medium only because I'm 5'7" / 170cm and the arms are longer on the medium.
Also, new raincoat FTW.
Freezer @freezer
2026-10-22

I know gamers don't know a world before 2005 exists so it's been weird to see BioWare mostly celebrated for Mass Effect and Dragon Age
I remember back in the day when I saw older gamers hate their newer "casual" games cause they used to make "real" games like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights.
Anyway ignore elitism and play what you want.
But also experience more their old output. I don't want to say Mass Effect sucks or anything but it wasn't the best thing they did.