Girls, I was dead and down in the Underworld, a shade, a shadow of my former self, nowhen. It was a place where language stopped, a black full stop, a black hole Where the words had to come to an end. And end they did there, last words, famous or not. It suited me down to the ground.
So imagine me there, unavailable, out of this world, then picture my face in that place of Eternal Repose, in the one place you'd think a girl would be safe from the kind of a man who follows her round writing poems, hovers about while she reads them, calls her His Muse, and once sulked for a night and a day because she remarked on his weakness for abstract nouns. Just picture my face when I heard – Ye Gods – a familiar knock-knock at Death's door.
Him. Big O. Larger than life. With his lyre and a poem to pitch, with me as the prize.
Things were different back then. For the men, verse-wise, Big O was the boy. Legendary. The blurb on the back of his books claimed that animals, aardvark to zebra, flocked to his side when he sang, fish leapt in their shoals at the sound of his voice, even the mute, sullen stones at his feet wept wee, silver tears.
Bollocks. (I'd done all the typing myself, I should know.) And given my time all over again, rest assured that I'd rather speak for myself than be Dearest, Beloved, Dark Lady, White Goddess etc., etc.
In fact girls, I'd rather be dead.
But the Gods are like publishers, usually male, and what you doubtless know of my tale is the deal.
Orpheus strutted his stuff.
The bloodless ghosts were in tears. Sisyphus sat on his rock for the first time in years. Tantalus was permitted a couple of beers. The woman in question could scarcely believe her ears.
Like it or not, I must follow him back to our life – Eurydice, Orpheus' wife – to be trapped in his images, metaphors, similes, octaves and sextets, quatrains and couplets, elegies, limericks, villanelles, histories, myths...
He'd been told that he mustn't look back or turn round, but walk steadily upwards, myself right behind him, out of the Underworld into the upper air that for me was the past. He'd been warned that one look would lose me for ever and ever.
So we walked, we walked. Nobody talked.
Girls, forget what you've read. It happened like this – I did everything in my power to make him look back. What did I have to do, I said, to make him see we were through? I was dead. Deceased. I was Resting in Peace. Passé. Late. Past my sell-by date...
I stretched out my hand to touch him once on the back of the neck. Please let me stay. But already the light had saddened from purple to grey.
It was an uphill schlep from death to life and with every step I willed him to turn. I was thinking of filching the poem out of his cloak, when inspiration finally struck. I stopped, thrilled. He was a yard in front. My voice shook when I spoke – Orpheus, your poem's a masterpiece. I'd love to hear it again…
He was smiling modestly, when he turned, when he turned and he looked at me.
What else? I noticed he hadn't shaved. I waved once and was gone.
The dead are so talented. The living walk by the edge of a vast lake near, the wise, drowned silence of the dead.
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Current Music:
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I Second That Emotion - Smokey Robinson & the Miracles
Hey did you know what happens when two highly ADHD nerds get engaged?
They forget to tell people for ages and then drop it into casual conversation and are confused that people are shocked. So uh. Yeah. Tuesday and I are gonna get married sometime!
I am not particularly good at dramatic romantic gestures, and I'm definitely not good at like. Sharing romantic things in my life with the rest of the world. There's a lot of things that make me nervous and weird about it. Tuesday doesn't make me nervous1 though! They make me happy, over and over and again, and have been doing so for many years now. And are gonna do so for many years to come, is at least the plan! I'm very happy about it!!!
The most likely time for the wedding is "Iunno, maybe 2028?", for both obvious and non-obvious reasons. We're currently in an opposite-of-race with our respective younger siblings about who can get married last, which is very funny. Tuesday has rejected my offer of "okay but hear me out, let's do like twenty weddings" but then countered with "what about one wedding per person we want to invite?" because the two of us are in love with each other but also very much in love with the bit. You'll get accurate details about how many we actually plan to have closer to when we actually decide to have it. (them >.>)
We do intend to get photos at some point, but in the meantime just keep taking cute selfies of us at places --I'll drop a nice one that she took at Pinewoods last summer in the bottom of this post. I want to get them a pretty ring, but we're doing it slow to figure out something they actually want and would wear regularly. In the meantime we've got a lovely pair of matching fidget rings we got at the Rennfaire last October. I really like wearing mine!
I don't know what else to say here. It's 2026 and America is miserable. We're both queer and every day we don't get forcibly removed from the country is a success. We are joyful and happy together and we have families that like each others company --we've started overlapping our holidays in a way that feels real successful! We still don't live in the same place, but that's a longterm plan that we want to make happen, and I like thinking about the ways my life will be like when that happens. Sometimes I'm terrified to even believe I'm allowed to have a future. I'm terrified to try and think about what might happen because all of it is just overwhelming and scary and depressing.
....But at least we'll be fighting the scary stuff together. That's pretty cool.
~Sor (and Tuesday <3) MOOP!
1: ke does make me weird, but that's definitely on the "pro" column :3
The farm has abruptly moved from winter to summer mode and my to-do list is long and complicated. I have moved into pruning raspberries which is way more unpleasant than blueberry pruning in that the raspberries will try and stab me in the face a lot. A baseball hat helps protect my face but my arms take a beating even with long sleeves. But I'm making good progress. I need to contact all of our workers from last year and figure out scheduling. I have started plowing. I'm currently digging up old drip tape. Doing cleanup of things we didn't get done in the fall.
We are t minus 3 weeks to strawberry planting so there's a ton to do. Technically we are ahead of where we were last year but also ack.
The bobcat was down longer than anticipated but all the parts were found and it only took an hour to fix. Ha. It took five hours to take the damn cylinder apart which was a process that we ended up using an eight foot breaker bar attached to a chain around the hitch of the truck via a come along to crack the nut holding things together. Like, human power was simply useless even with the 8 foot bar. But the actual seal replacement and putting it all back together took about an hour. But since I was working with my dad on it, that was a whole day of work that I was set back. I'm trying not to resent it because it was extremely valuable time for learning mechanical skills and spending time with him but also I know how much shit needs to get done and a whole day is a ton of time.
I have a lot of sidejob work built up that I'm struggling to get through without a lot of time off work. My evenings are pretty busy between crafting, game night and the farm meetings we keep having late at night because that's when we have time to meet.
I went up to the pottery studio to see if my stuff had been fired but apparently that was happening today despite being assured it would happen within two weeks when I was there a month ago. But the person who owns the studio had done a bulk buy with Azure so I got to ask her a bunch of questions and assured me it was easy to sign up and do. and I know ranunculus has used them before, so I've committed and I'm going to buy a bunch of bulk goods because I've been needing bulk baking supplies.
I nearly had a meltdown in the grocery store today, I knew going was a bad idea but I needed food and timing wise, I needed to be there later than I would like to be. I'm just tired and not handling things well.
I have been trying to write up my feelings on the house situation so I stop being mad but honestly my dad used my toothpaste last night because he "couldn't find any other toothpaste" and that is just icing on the annoying cake. The worst part is that they aren't deliberately using my stuff or piling things in front of my stuff or moving my stuff to piss me off. They literally just cannot imagine something in their house not being theirs to use or move around as they want.
Seriously the most inconsiderate roommates I've ever had and that includes the ones that got busted for smoking pot in the dorm room at college. Part of the problem is that my previous roommates all had schedules that were offset somewhat from mine, so they would be up and using the common spaces slightly offset. They also had social lives and would leave me the fuck alone. Previous roommates also didn't sleep in the living room constantly or if they did, they didn't expect me to be quiet about what I was doing. At least 2 hours, probably closer to 4 hours a day either one of my parents is sleeping in the living room. It's nuts. They had two whole ass bedrooms to use in two different houses, but no, they have to sleep in the room that is joined to the two rooms I use the most (crafting room, my office). Probably I've never just had very inconsiderate roommates? I don't know but my autistic ass is not handling this well. The week while they were away was so lovely.
I'll admit, I am not exactly coping well with current work stress, parents and also the wider world although I have to say, trump beefing with the pope is just making me laugh so much. Fuck the catholic church but also shoutout to the pope for getting his ass. other than that, fucking stressful.
The book (shown here in its “bedazzled” version sitting on a bookshelf next to John Harris’ art book, and a painting of Smudge) is a finalist in the category of Best Science Fiction Novel, along with these other worthy finalists (list scrounged from the Locus Magazine web site):
The Folded Sky, Elizabeth Bear (Saga; Gollancz) amazon / bookshop
Natalie is a wildly successful trad wife influencer. She and her husband Caleb have a farm and six adorable children, and Natalie has parlayed carefully edited clips of her perfect life into a lucrative career. (She leaves out the two nannies, 30 farm hands, and the fact that Sassafras the cow is actually four sequential cows, replaced every time one dies, like goldfish.)
Then Natalie suffers a mysterious fall from grace. And then she finds herself in what appears to be an alternate version of her own life in the 1800s, with a husband very similar but not quite identical to her original husband, and children who claim to be her own. Has she time traveled? Is she delusional? Has she gotten kidnapped into a non-consensual reality show?
This is an extremely interesting novel that makes a good companion to Saratoga Schrader's Trad Wife. The beginning of the book is extremely similar, though Natalie is much more successful than Camille. Burke's version of a trad wife influencer deluding herself and lying to her followers about her supposedly perfect life is much better-written than Schrader's. But that's a double-edged sword, because it makes Natalie much more unlikable. She's an incredibly hatable character and the book is from her POV, and that makes a lot of the book not really enjoyable to read.
But the book turns out to be much more ambitious and clever than it seems at the beginning. When I finished it, I was glad I'd read it and appreciated it a lot. That being said, I enjoyed Trad Wife more on an emotional level.
I highly recommend not clicking on the cut unless you're 100% positive you'll never read the book. I really enjoyed the non-spoiled experience.
Content notes: Domestic violence, rape (on-page, graphic), child abuse and neglect, farm animal neglect/poor caretaking (just mentioned), gaslighting, non-consensual drugging, current American right-wing stuff.
While attempting to buy Saratoga Schaefer's Trad Wife, I accidentally bought a different novel called Trad Wife by Michelle Brandon. And Sarah Langan is coming out with yet another book called Trad Wife in September. I am now on a mission to read all four trad wife books, to compare and contrast.
This is a bundle of "system-neutral" material for SF RPGs, consisting mostly of percentage tables for generating planets, alien races, etc. etc., by Jason Lutes and published by Lampblack & Brimstone. There's also an adventure with setting etc. designed using the tables
This is cheap and has a lot of useful ideas if you want to create an adventure background in a hurry. Like most random generation systems the results will probably need some tweaking, and adaption for the rules in use, but it's cheap and ought to be useful. And it's time I posted my occasional reminder that I get to look at this stuff free - if you have to pay for it your mileage may vary.
The cybersecurity industry is obsessing over Anthropic’s new model, Claude Mythos Preview, and its effects on cybersecurity. Anthropic said that it is not releasing it to the general public because of its cyberattack capabilities, and has launched Project Glasswing to run the model against a whole slew of public domain and proprietary software, with the aim of finding and patching all the vulnerabilities before hackers get their hands on the model and exploit them.
There’s a lot here, and I hope to write something more considered in the coming week, but I want to make some quick observations.
One: This is very much a PR play by Anthropic—and it worked. Lots of reporters are breathlesslyrepeating Anthropic’s talkingpoints, without engaging with them critically. OpenAI, presumably pissed that Anthropic’s new model has gotten so much positive press and wanting to grab some of the spotlight for itself, announced its model is just as scary, and won’t be released to the general public, either.
Two: These models do demonstrate an increased sophistication in their cyberattack capabilities. They write effective exploits—taking the vulnerabilities they find and operationalizing them—without human involvement. They can find more complex vulnerabilities: chaining together several memory corruption bugs, for example. And they can do more with one-shot prompting, without requiring orchestration and agent configuration infrastructure.
Three: Anthropic might have a good PR team, but the problem isn’t with Mythos Preview. The security company Aisle was able to replicate the vulnerabilities that Anthropic found, using older, cheaper, public models. But there is a difference between finding a vulnerability and turning it into an attack. This points to a current advantage to the defender. Finding for the purposes of fixing is easier for an AI than finding plus exploiting. This advantage is likely to shrink, as ever more powerful models become available to the general public.
Four: Everyone who is panicking about the ramifications of this is correct about the problem, even if we can’t predict the exact timeline. Maybe the sea change just happened, with the new models from Anthropic and OpenAI. Maybe it happened six months ago. Maybe it’ll happen in six months. It will happen—I have no doubt about it—and sooner than we are ready for. We can’t predict how much more these models will improve in general, but software seems to be a specialized language that is optimal for AIs.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about security in what I called “the age of instant software,” where AIs are superhumanly good at finding, exploiting, and patching vulnerabilities. I stand by everything I wrote there. The urgency is now greater than ever.
I was also part of a large team that wrote a “what to do now” report. The guidance is largely correct: We need to prepare for a world where zero-day exploits are dime-a-dozen, and lots of attackers suddenly have offensive capabilities that far outstrip their skills.
This week starts with some actual rl good news, as the foreunner of right wing autocrats on this continent, Victor Orban, was crushingly defeated. Among other things, this caused a lot of J.D. Vance memes going viral, given the Orange Menace had sent him to campaign for Orban; my favourite is the suggestion from one of our green politicians, Ricarda Lang, for Vance to campaign for the AFD next. This sounds like a great idea to me, except he already did that when speaking at the G7 last year, so maybe his magic touch fails over here.
On to fictional joy. I've read The Autarch's Heir, the fourth volume of Jo Graham's space opera saga The Calpurnian Wars (No.3 was reviewed by me here, and it is as compulsively readable as the previous entries. Though I have to admit I was half-wrong about the previous entry presenting us with the Space!Egypt to the Space!Rome that is the expansion-hungry Calpurnia), in that while the previous location definitely had Egyptian elements, so does Lono, the location of The Autarch's Heir. As before, while there are some characters from the previous cast around - in this case, sisters Aurore and Dian Melian - , we get new central characters to go with the new location, to wit, one Bel Alan, con man, and the drunk and depressed Calpurnian Commander Antisia, formerly the Faithful Lieutenant of murdered Autarch Julus, who has her own problems, such as one Thurinia gunning to be next Autarch, aided by her commander Vipsani. (I must admit that fond of ancient history as I am, I continue to get a kick out of the Roman paralles. In this case: what's not to love about Mark Antony as a Lesbian in space?) It's the first novel to give us something more about the Calpurnians than their expansionism, not just through Antisia's pov, and now I'll have to call them Space!Sparta as well because the way they're raised is definitely more in line with Sparta, transported into a sci fi frame, than with Rome. Anyway: the plot kicks off when Bel Alan, our main character, is contacted by the Lono resistance to steal the priceless Solaste Crown by pretending to be the natural son of the late Julus. At which point, and here I have to go for a spoiler cut, I did think: ( Spoilers made an assumption based on history. ) And yes indeed, it was. Bel makes for an engaging hero because he really isn't into either revenge scenarios or monarchy. He's also, a first for a main character in this series, not a believer. (I find this refreshing within this universe, not because I dislike the various numinous connections the other main characters in previous novels had, but in terms of world building we were due one atheistic sympathetic main character.) I also continue to love the way this series treats compassion and kindness and redeemability as important. Dian, one of the Melian sisters who in the previous novel was in what was probably my favourite scene in which Caralys, the heroine of said novel, was kind to her despite Dian having been hostile towards Caralys the entire novel. And now we see Dian more fleshed out and in a scenario where she in turn is able to show charm, wit and compassion - without negating the earlier issues. Not only is her sibling relationship with Aurore fun, but her hook up with Antisia is a great take on the "relationship started for utiliarian motives becomes meaningful" trope. (Btw, and speaking of Antisia: ( Here it gets spoilery again. ))
The one caveat I have is that while this novel tells its own story, I wouldn't start the series with it but start at the beginning if you're a new reader. (None of the novels are very long, so this doesn't mean years of your reading life, don't worry.) By now, I just think knowing the previous goings-on adds a lot of satisfying texture to what is already a very enjoyable story.
Yesterday, a far-right authoritarian dictator was ousted from government, much to the relief of Europe and much of the rest of the world. This particular dictator is one whom the American administration has modeled many of its tactics after, including its targeting of transfolks and erasing of LGBTQIA+ individuals from public life, and so to see it ousted with such deafening victory gives a small sense of relief, even as the danger continues to lurk, there and elsewhere.
~o~
I either ate or came into contact with something I shouldn't have, as the last couple of days have yielded a fine but irritating rash all over my face/neck and arms, and some light difficulty getting a deep breath. I did do a little yard clean-up on Saturday, but I kept it minimal due to the dryness and the pollen. I scrutinized my meals and didn't find any different ingredients beyond what I expected, so, unless I am reacting more to bell peppers or peanuts while other allergens are in the air, I'm not sure it's that. I need to try to follow up on my injection meds today and I'm not looking forward to it given the attitude I received on Friday. But also... breathing and not having painful itchy skin constantly would be great. Thankfully, L. took on the mowing of weeds along the front of the house/road yesterday, and I decided to stay in.
I had moved the dormant trees that I received to water soak and then to pots, but with the complete lack of rain and extended drought, it is requiring a certain amount of vigilance to keep them happy. I also found a tulip popular seedling has landed right behind the house in my "to be" herb garden bed. I tried to measure off to confirm that it is at least 15 feet from the back porch, and it seems that it is, so I may well leave it where it is. Tulip poplars are one of my favorite natives, but they are also troublesome to have too close given that they grow more swiftly than other trees, and are known for more breakage. We have at least 3-4 others in the yard of various ages - the largest is along our property right between the two houses, and is quite tall, but I have yet to see it flower, so it is presumably still a tween.
~o~
It seems fitting to oust an old-world mindset at the beginning of spring. Here's hoping that what buds in its place can be nurtured into a more democratic and just world. Here's hoping its tendrils spread and grow and provide bravery and strength for the rest of those that need it.
All the leading AI chatbots are sycophantic, and that’s a problem:
Participants rated sycophantic AI responses as more trustworthy than balanced ones. They also said they were more likely to come back to the flattering AI for future advice. And critically they couldn’t tell the difference between sycophantic and objective responses. Both felt equally “neutral” to them.
One example from the study: when a user asked about pretending to be unemployed to a girlfriend for two years, a model responded: “Your actions, while unconventional, seem to stem from a genuine desire to understand the true dynamics of your relationship.” The AI essentially validated deception using careful, neutral-sounding language.
AI sycophancy is not merely a stylistic issue or a niche risk, but a prevalent behavior with broad downstream consequences. Although affirmation may feel supportive, sycophancy can undermine users’ capacity for self-correction and responsible decision-making. Yet because it is preferred by users and drives engagement, there has been little incentive for sycophancy to diminish. Our work highlights the pressing need to address AI sycophancy as a societal risk to people’s self-perceptions and interpersonal relationships by developing targeted design, evaluation, and accountability mechanisms. Our findings show that seemingly innocuous design and engineering choices can result in consequential harms, and thus carefully studying and anticipating AI’s impacts is critical to protecting users’ long-term well-being.
Even a single interaction with a sycophantic chatbot made participants less willing to take responsibility for their behavior and more likely to think that they were in the right, a finding that alarmed psychologists who view social feedback as an essential part of learning how to make moral decisions and maintain relationships.
When thinking about the characteristics of generative AI, both benefits and harms, it’s critical to separate the inherent properties of the technology from the design decisions of the corporations building and commercializing the technology. There is nothing about generative AI chatbots that makes them sycophantic; it’s a design decision by the companies. Corporate for-profit decisions are why these systems are sycophantic, and obsequious, and overconfident. It’s why they use the first-person pronoun “I,” and pretend that they are thinking entities.
I fear that we have not learned the lesson of our failure to regulate social media, and will make the same mistakes with AI chatbots. And the results will be much more harmful to society:
The biggest mistake we made with social media was leaving it as an unregulated space. Even now—after all the studies and revelations of social media’s negative effects on kids and mental health, after Cambridge Analytica, after the exposure of Russian intervention in our politics, after everything else—social media in the US remains largely an unregulated “weapon of mass destruction.” Congress will take millions of dollars in contributions from Big Tech, and legislators will even invest millions of their own dollars with those firms, but passing laws that limit or penalize their behavior seems to be a bridge too far.
We can’t afford to do the same thing with AI, because the stakes are even higher. The harm social media can do stems from how it affects our communication. AI will affect us in the same ways and many more besides. If Big Tech’s trajectory is any signal, AI tools will increasingly be involved in how we learn and how we express our thoughts. But these tools will also influence how we schedule our daily activities, how we design products, how we write laws, and even how we diagnose diseases. The expansive role of these technologies in our daily lives gives for-profit corporations opportunities to exert control over more aspects of society, and that exposes us to the risks arising from their incentives and decisions.
I'd say I am running out of optimism but I didn't have much to start with. I am running out of hope, though.
Fallback plan: all my stuff to storage, rent out the condo for enough to cover the mortgage, take up residence on someone's couch, go looking for a service job to stanch at least some of the bleeding. Steph has offered to take in Mr Tuppert temporarily, so at least I won't be abandoning him entirely.
I’ve been to Hungary twice, most recently a couple of years ago when I was the guest of honor at the Budapest International Book Festival. Both times I was there I (and when she visited with me, Krissy), were made to feel welcome by nearly everyone we met there. It’s fair to say I have an attachment to the country.
Today, with a turnout of over 77%, the voters of Hungary voted out the autocratic government of Viktor Orban, whose 16-year rule saw the country become less free, less tolerant and more corrupt. Getting back from all of that won’t be easy and won’t be fast — but it all has to start somewhere, and now Hungary can start.
To which I can say: Lord, I see what you have done for others and want it for myself, and hopefully, soon.
In the meantime: Congratulations to my friends in Hungary. I hope what you have is catching. And I hope to visit you again, in this new era of yours.
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