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silveradeptLet's begin with a very important warning: if there's still content you want to archive on LiveJournal, yours or others, do it now. There are changes being implemented that move continually in the direction of severing parts of LJ from each other, and quite possibly nuking or jettisoning the English-language side of it entirely. The importer may not work quite as swiftly as it usually does due to an influx of import requests, but get yourself into the queue, or use some other archiving tool, post-haste, if there's still anything there that you want to capture and preserve.
A significant amount of material has entered the public domain in the United States on 1 January 02026, put it to good use! And for the more detailed deep dive, your friends at Duke University have you covered for the more detailed examination of what we're getting into the public domain.
Here's a fact for you: that the most consistent and largest donor of money for toys to a children's hospital in Oregon have been strippers, and this year, they broke their own record.
We managed to close the hole in the ozone layer, thanks to dedicated and international cooperation. It may not stay closed for long, because this world is what it is, but we at least managed to get it done.
Let go of the idea that gender is a single point, a destination, an immutable truth, and support those who question and who are on the journey to finding what they want from gender in that moment. Acknowledging that gender is mutable, and that for some, it is constantly in mutation, can help those who are questioning or on a discovery journey not feel like they have to be absolutely sure and correct and that once they set upon the journey, they are not allowed to deviate from it.
A promising prevention method against HIV would require a twice-yearly shot and widespread availability to be effective. The fact that we have, in two generations, gotten much closer to giving the finger to HIV than we thought possible is a grand testament to science. (And a condemnation of those chucklefucks who continue to try and impede distribution of such and aid to places where HIV prevention would be most effective.) And, beyond that, we keep finding people who have managed to clear the HIV virus entirely, so it's possible that not only will we be able to prevent new infections, we may be getting very close to giving the finger to HIV infections already present. Scouring the world of that virus will be a great triumph.
For those of us in the mindset of the new year, consider this: the things you have said, unintentionally, may be the things that others are carrying with them for years. As has been said, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. If you have people that trust you, even if you don't want to ask what it is you said that they've been carrying and that you didn't mean, the reassurance and the understanding that such things are mist and should be treated as such, and that you are sorry for the hurt you caused, will be good for them. If we shadows have offended, we are sorry, please let it be mended.
The Archive of Our Own posted an administrative post about the progress they feel they've made about making the Archive less welcoming to racism. I don't know how to parse this update, since it doesn't seem like a lot of concrete things were done on their end?
Rob Reiner, actor and director, died at 78 years of age, with his wife, in what is being investigated as a homicide. (And also, the administrator made a social media post disparaging the man in his death and fluffing his own ego while he did it, but that's only mentioned because if you look for things about the death, you'll probably find the post.)
Mass shootings are, regrettably, not just a U.S. thing - a shooter attacked an event on Australia's Bondi Beach on the first night of Hanukkah. A bystander and refugee, Ahmed al-Ahmed, wrestled one of the weapons out of the hands of one of the alleged shooters, and should be rightly praised for the act of heroism.
The way that people are portrayed in media, whether scripted or unscripted, and on social media, often encourages dehumanization and voyeurism, and distorting the whole person into a caricature that can be safely "canceled," with the satisfaction that comes along with participating in the moral outrage mob. A skilled manipulator can harness that energy into turning the mob on their favored target. (The question of what we do when someone is genuinely behaving in a way that requires moral action to remove them from causing further harm is not addressed, but I suspect at least some of the remedy for that would be to tamp down on all the outrage that doesn't rise to that level, and stop sharing and boosting things that are not true immorality into the timeline.)
The lure of being an intellectual in public is sometimes stronger than the moral force of not associating yourself with someone who is a known pederast, or other people who are known to be missing stairs or otherwise people of low moral fortitude. Because wealth warps people's priorities and thinking about other humans.
While there has been a lot of public backlash against feminism, and other concepts meant to suggest that the cisgender, white, heterosexual, man is not, in fact, the pinnacle of evolution and that other people are just as valuable, the people who have been promoting the backlash are finding themselves without all that many allies.
All of this feeds into the ways that people try to direct the empathy that humans have for the plight of the downtrodden into channels away from the actual downtrodden, often by claiming that they're not the real victims, or by having them substitute someone more palatable as the potential victim, rather than having empathy with the actual victim of cruelty. It's not subtle, not in the slightest, but it leverages existing pathways and channels dug by racism and plenty of other -isms to offer more familiar ways of using empathy, including ways where that empathy ends up being self-serving or for the self in situations where that's not warranted at all. It's not "misplaced" empathy as much as is it deliberately directed away from those who need it most in any given situation.
The government, unhappy that people are resisting their kidnapping squads and preventing them from doing kidnapping, are launching federal investigations into people and groups that are behind this resistance, because they are the kind of people who believe the power of the State is theirs to wield with impunity and that everyone who opposes them must be branded as a terrorist and dismissed from society.
Proving they're either ignorant of literary references, or that they think it's a good idea to emulate books like the Hunger Games, the administrator announced games, where one high school boy and one high school girl from each state will compete against each other for prizes. We know that this particular administrator wants to appear strong and powerful, and he doesn't have Riefenstahl to do it with, so he seems to be going for a more brutal route.
In their continued war against trans people, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has decided to target the manufacturers of breast binders with threats that they are subject to penalties for having marketed their products, now classed as "medical devices," to children. And that those now-considered-medical-devices haven't been properly registered with the FDA, as required. Since someone used the phrase "transgender ideology" in describing why they were going after binder manufacturers, it should be apparent that none of this is out of any genuine concern or worry, but instead as part of the larget program to make gender-affirming care impossible for anyone, and especially not for people who don't want to go through an improper puberty.
And because they are petty as well as cruel in the exercise of that power, the administration installed plaques underneath the portraits of presidents in the White House that fawned on the current administration and mocked Democratic presidents of the past. Because they think this is some kind of bold and strong move that makes them powerful, or at least strokes the ego of the person they all want to fawn over. Like changing the policy on coinage so that he can, like any good Roman emperor, have his face on the money, and to prevent coinage from being issued that correctly and accurately honors those who have been harmed racism and sexism. Or insisting that his face, instead of the image of nature that won the contest determined by law, will be on the pass that gets people into national parks.
And he will want plenty of ego-stroking, since his improperly-installed attorney in New Jersey had to resign her post, they had to release Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and have been legally blocked from detaining him again,
A few Republicans in the House of Representatives realized how doomed their careers would be if they allowed the health care premiums of their constituents to spike into unaffordability, so they joined up with a Democratic discharge petition to force a vote to extend the subsidies that keep premiums from being ruinous.
A jury chose to convict a judge of obstruction of a proceeding for apparently leading a person through a side door of the courtroom while the kidnapping squad demanded that person to kidnap. This does not bode well for how well the jury understands what it going on with the federal kidnapping squads. (An unnamed jury said it was difficult, but they ultimately followed the instructions given to them.)
The kidnapping squads chased construction workers in the Minnesota chill, trying to kidnap workers on a house frame, where they stayed and were able to wait out the agents thanks to the community rallying around them and dispersing the kidnappers. Elsewhere, Kidnappers were locked out of and then given an appropriate treatment when they attempted to enter a private business to do whatever business they intended to do. Said appropriate treatment include digitus impudicus and several swear words directed at the kidnappers.
Elsewhere in Minnesota, the kidnapping squads are deploying chemical weaponry against the population, especially those come out to resist and prevent them from kidnapping members of their community. These are the kinds of things that we would say were reasons to condemn other leaders for using, and possibly use as an excuse to overthrow their governments. It just means that the people here who don't want this are doing their best to prevent this government from continuing to do things that are immoral and almost certainly illegal.
Unfortunately, the effects of the kidnapping squads, and the clear cooperation that some police departments are giving them, has created environments where people are simply afraid to be anywhere the police might see them. And they're being left in situations where they cannot support themselves or others, as the person making the income is seized for kidnapping purposes. This suits the racists in charge, since they very much want to create a country with only white people in it, and will use whatever means they can to achieve this.
The rhetoric of this administration is also empowering people who intend to use more violent and intimidating tactics to get people to stop exposing them and reporting on them and their fascist tendencies. Because most of these kinds of groups believe that the KKK are correct, including their tactics, and therefore they're not above any other tactic to try and stay in the shadows and make people afraid of them.
There is a long and storied tradition of blaming mothers for anything that shows up in their children that might look like a blemish or some kind of birthmark, and that extends outward into the world that people inhabit when they confidently assert that Tylenol usage during pregnancy means children with autism.
In Texas, landowners are doing their best to deal with the consequences of old, improperly-plugged or blown-out oil wells, and they're dragging the appropriate government entity and the large companies themselves, kicking and screaming, into fixing the problems they are responsible for. Which is good, because the current administration refuses to believe in the power of offshore wind turbines and other cleaner, less polluting energy production means.
The seeking of profit from privatized utilities, and the continual refusal to produce better and cheaper sources of energy, means that the collapse is already underway, it's just showing up in rural places that people can pretend are already well-equipped to handle incoming and greater stresses. People that are supposedly Christians, or that profess such a faith, are very good at forgetting that their own holy book tells them that they are not to be like priests, Levites, and others who leave a man that has been robbed by the side of the road, but to take him to a local inn, and put up enough money for his care, and then fulfill the promise of having more if more is needed.
The show Heated Rivalry does a masterful job of telling story through sex scenes, but because that's the choice made, the audience dosn't work past their discomfort about being shown plot through sex to recognize how much of the plot they're being shown through sex. (I wonder how many of the people who are getting it from there are regular consumers of explicit fanfic fic and/or erotica, because they are already used to seeing plot unfold through sex.)
The radio shows of Art Bell, which were just the right spot of people with stories to tell and a host that would listen and encourage them to tell them fully. That the stories themselves seemed to be about faked moon landings, aliena nd ghost encounters, and working at Area 51 and the like made the show something more important for the form than the content, but the article-writer also points out that while the content of Art Bell's stories might have made for excellent podcasts, and gathered all kinds of listeners that way, the format constraints of AM radio, and the fact that Bell was unique in comparison to Limbaugh and Stern, and perhaps a better host than either of them, meant that he succeeded at exactly the right time and place.
Wild beavers returning to places they had been thought lost from, along with a resurgence in otters, the reintroduction of some storks to a place they have not been in centuries, the return of some burrowing owls who took a trans-Atlantic cruise by accident, significant amounts of seal pups brought into the world, a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/dec/22/2025-is-year-of-the-octopus-as-record-numbers-spotted-off-englands-south-coast">many, many octopuses in places they might not have been in so many numbers before, loons on the lakes in Maine, trying to keep porcupline populations in good standing in places where they are needed, pictures of the fascinating creatures known as slime molds, and Sir David Attenborough on the wildlife that exists and works with our human cities.
A surviving specimen of coinage from an era that there weren't many such artifacts from, and The UK National Trust hoping to purchase the land on which a large sculpture has been made, a giant with an erect penis.
In technology, with the ModRetro company announcing creations that will use products from a company that manufactures drones and other military components, that puts them off the list of companies to want to patronize.
Instead, consider the FPGA recreation of the Commodore 64, and how well it is done, and what it can run and do that the original may never have been able to. (And also, it has spots for SIDs and works with all kinds of other accessories meant to keep the original Commodores alive and working.) It's pricey, of course, but for people where that is the sweet spot of retro nostalgia, or wanting to preserve things, it's very good.
The found tape containing v4 of the UNIX operating system was successfully read and dumped to a digital file. The Internet Archive now has the raw waveforms and a digital tarball of the tape, for retrocomputing enthusiasts to happily delve into and see what was going on in this particular form of UNIX.
After revelations that generative programs were used in the design and parts of creation of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the Indie Game Awards rescinded al the awards they had given to the game as part of their voting and broadcast. Good. Art should be the domain of humans.
The surveillance company Flock left some of their cameras available to the public Internet, and so the 404 Media folks got to see just how much surveillance cameras are a part of their lives, and what kind of detail those cameras are capturing.
Waymo, a robotic taxi service, suspended their operations in San Francisco during a blackout, as the taxis rely upon the infrastructure that the power was powering to successfully be taxis. You can also probably drag PG&E for causing the problem.
Facebook is testing the idea of limiting the links an account can share unless they have paid the company a subscription fee. Controlling the flow of information unless you get paid is certainly one of the more novel rent-seeking behaviors. Although it's a condemnation that they can do it, and that they keep thinking of new ways to extract rents.
The CEO of Anthropic insisted on adding an image-creating chatbot to a Discord community, over the objections of the other members, and now the community has fled the space they had because they didn't want what was forced upon them. Oh, no, the consequences of someone's actions, and also, good for the community for proving that this techbro can't actually force their slop everywhere without consequences. Even if that means that community has to find somewhere else to re-convene.
For his part, Jeff Bezos's Amazon Kindle department is rolling out a new feature that will ingest every book someone opens on a Kindle, with the intent of providing a chatbot so that someone can "ask this book" about its contents. And no, you can't opt out of having the feature, or having your works ingested for the feature.
Because they all believe that we're going to just be crazy for all these LLMs and their slop, ChatGPT is going to roll out an adult chatbot so that you can have the very finest LLM extrusions stolen from real people's ability to make engaging and erotic content.
Even with relatively good controls about usage and how many families any one donor is allowed to create, it's still very possible for a sperm donor to father hundreds of children and more, some of whom may not know about their shared ancestry until some other reason appears.
Last for tonight, it turns out that humans are generally nicer, warmer, and more friendly than our media accounts would have us believe.
A story of a man who did not get to say thanks to an idol, but who did manage to convince a group of carolers to sing his most holiday-appropriate song at him, and then get blown away when they found out that he could, in fact, sing.
And, perhaps most importantly in these times where we think about the turning of the wheel of the year, sometimes the best good news that you can give to others is "yet here you stand." (And no, the rate of people choosing to complete suicide isn't higher in the winter months, so there are more people out there who are also choosing "yet here you stand" along with you.
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
A significant amount of material has entered the public domain in the United States on 1 January 02026, put it to good use! And for the more detailed deep dive, your friends at Duke University have you covered for the more detailed examination of what we're getting into the public domain.
Here's a fact for you: that the most consistent and largest donor of money for toys to a children's hospital in Oregon have been strippers, and this year, they broke their own record.
We managed to close the hole in the ozone layer, thanks to dedicated and international cooperation. It may not stay closed for long, because this world is what it is, but we at least managed to get it done.
Let go of the idea that gender is a single point, a destination, an immutable truth, and support those who question and who are on the journey to finding what they want from gender in that moment. Acknowledging that gender is mutable, and that for some, it is constantly in mutation, can help those who are questioning or on a discovery journey not feel like they have to be absolutely sure and correct and that once they set upon the journey, they are not allowed to deviate from it.
A promising prevention method against HIV would require a twice-yearly shot and widespread availability to be effective. The fact that we have, in two generations, gotten much closer to giving the finger to HIV than we thought possible is a grand testament to science. (And a condemnation of those chucklefucks who continue to try and impede distribution of such and aid to places where HIV prevention would be most effective.) And, beyond that, we keep finding people who have managed to clear the HIV virus entirely, so it's possible that not only will we be able to prevent new infections, we may be getting very close to giving the finger to HIV infections already present. Scouring the world of that virus will be a great triumph.
For those of us in the mindset of the new year, consider this: the things you have said, unintentionally, may be the things that others are carrying with them for years. As has been said, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. If you have people that trust you, even if you don't want to ask what it is you said that they've been carrying and that you didn't mean, the reassurance and the understanding that such things are mist and should be treated as such, and that you are sorry for the hurt you caused, will be good for them. If we shadows have offended, we are sorry, please let it be mended.
The Archive of Our Own posted an administrative post about the progress they feel they've made about making the Archive less welcoming to racism. I don't know how to parse this update, since it doesn't seem like a lot of concrete things were done on their end?
Rob Reiner, actor and director, died at 78 years of age, with his wife, in what is being investigated as a homicide. (And also, the administrator made a social media post disparaging the man in his death and fluffing his own ego while he did it, but that's only mentioned because if you look for things about the death, you'll probably find the post.)
Mass shootings are, regrettably, not just a U.S. thing - a shooter attacked an event on Australia's Bondi Beach on the first night of Hanukkah. A bystander and refugee, Ahmed al-Ahmed, wrestled one of the weapons out of the hands of one of the alleged shooters, and should be rightly praised for the act of heroism.
The way that people are portrayed in media, whether scripted or unscripted, and on social media, often encourages dehumanization and voyeurism, and distorting the whole person into a caricature that can be safely "canceled," with the satisfaction that comes along with participating in the moral outrage mob. A skilled manipulator can harness that energy into turning the mob on their favored target. (The question of what we do when someone is genuinely behaving in a way that requires moral action to remove them from causing further harm is not addressed, but I suspect at least some of the remedy for that would be to tamp down on all the outrage that doesn't rise to that level, and stop sharing and boosting things that are not true immorality into the timeline.)
The lure of being an intellectual in public is sometimes stronger than the moral force of not associating yourself with someone who is a known pederast, or other people who are known to be missing stairs or otherwise people of low moral fortitude. Because wealth warps people's priorities and thinking about other humans.
While there has been a lot of public backlash against feminism, and other concepts meant to suggest that the cisgender, white, heterosexual, man is not, in fact, the pinnacle of evolution and that other people are just as valuable, the people who have been promoting the backlash are finding themselves without all that many allies.
All of this feeds into the ways that people try to direct the empathy that humans have for the plight of the downtrodden into channels away from the actual downtrodden, often by claiming that they're not the real victims, or by having them substitute someone more palatable as the potential victim, rather than having empathy with the actual victim of cruelty. It's not subtle, not in the slightest, but it leverages existing pathways and channels dug by racism and plenty of other -isms to offer more familiar ways of using empathy, including ways where that empathy ends up being self-serving or for the self in situations where that's not warranted at all. It's not "misplaced" empathy as much as is it deliberately directed away from those who need it most in any given situation.
The government, unhappy that people are resisting their kidnapping squads and preventing them from doing kidnapping, are launching federal investigations into people and groups that are behind this resistance, because they are the kind of people who believe the power of the State is theirs to wield with impunity and that everyone who opposes them must be branded as a terrorist and dismissed from society.
Proving they're either ignorant of literary references, or that they think it's a good idea to emulate books like the Hunger Games, the administrator announced games, where one high school boy and one high school girl from each state will compete against each other for prizes. We know that this particular administrator wants to appear strong and powerful, and he doesn't have Riefenstahl to do it with, so he seems to be going for a more brutal route.
In their continued war against trans people, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has decided to target the manufacturers of breast binders with threats that they are subject to penalties for having marketed their products, now classed as "medical devices," to children. And that those now-considered-medical-devices haven't been properly registered with the FDA, as required. Since someone used the phrase "transgender ideology" in describing why they were going after binder manufacturers, it should be apparent that none of this is out of any genuine concern or worry, but instead as part of the larget program to make gender-affirming care impossible for anyone, and especially not for people who don't want to go through an improper puberty.
And because they are petty as well as cruel in the exercise of that power, the administration installed plaques underneath the portraits of presidents in the White House that fawned on the current administration and mocked Democratic presidents of the past. Because they think this is some kind of bold and strong move that makes them powerful, or at least strokes the ego of the person they all want to fawn over. Like changing the policy on coinage so that he can, like any good Roman emperor, have his face on the money, and to prevent coinage from being issued that correctly and accurately honors those who have been harmed racism and sexism. Or insisting that his face, instead of the image of nature that won the contest determined by law, will be on the pass that gets people into national parks.
And he will want plenty of ego-stroking, since his improperly-installed attorney in New Jersey had to resign her post, they had to release Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and have been legally blocked from detaining him again,
A few Republicans in the House of Representatives realized how doomed their careers would be if they allowed the health care premiums of their constituents to spike into unaffordability, so they joined up with a Democratic discharge petition to force a vote to extend the subsidies that keep premiums from being ruinous.
A jury chose to convict a judge of obstruction of a proceeding for apparently leading a person through a side door of the courtroom while the kidnapping squad demanded that person to kidnap. This does not bode well for how well the jury understands what it going on with the federal kidnapping squads. (An unnamed jury said it was difficult, but they ultimately followed the instructions given to them.)
The kidnapping squads chased construction workers in the Minnesota chill, trying to kidnap workers on a house frame, where they stayed and were able to wait out the agents thanks to the community rallying around them and dispersing the kidnappers. Elsewhere, Kidnappers were locked out of and then given an appropriate treatment when they attempted to enter a private business to do whatever business they intended to do. Said appropriate treatment include digitus impudicus and several swear words directed at the kidnappers.
Elsewhere in Minnesota, the kidnapping squads are deploying chemical weaponry against the population, especially those come out to resist and prevent them from kidnapping members of their community. These are the kinds of things that we would say were reasons to condemn other leaders for using, and possibly use as an excuse to overthrow their governments. It just means that the people here who don't want this are doing their best to prevent this government from continuing to do things that are immoral and almost certainly illegal.
Unfortunately, the effects of the kidnapping squads, and the clear cooperation that some police departments are giving them, has created environments where people are simply afraid to be anywhere the police might see them. And they're being left in situations where they cannot support themselves or others, as the person making the income is seized for kidnapping purposes. This suits the racists in charge, since they very much want to create a country with only white people in it, and will use whatever means they can to achieve this.
The rhetoric of this administration is also empowering people who intend to use more violent and intimidating tactics to get people to stop exposing them and reporting on them and their fascist tendencies. Because most of these kinds of groups believe that the KKK are correct, including their tactics, and therefore they're not above any other tactic to try and stay in the shadows and make people afraid of them.
There is a long and storied tradition of blaming mothers for anything that shows up in their children that might look like a blemish or some kind of birthmark, and that extends outward into the world that people inhabit when they confidently assert that Tylenol usage during pregnancy means children with autism.
In Texas, landowners are doing their best to deal with the consequences of old, improperly-plugged or blown-out oil wells, and they're dragging the appropriate government entity and the large companies themselves, kicking and screaming, into fixing the problems they are responsible for. Which is good, because the current administration refuses to believe in the power of offshore wind turbines and other cleaner, less polluting energy production means.
The seeking of profit from privatized utilities, and the continual refusal to produce better and cheaper sources of energy, means that the collapse is already underway, it's just showing up in rural places that people can pretend are already well-equipped to handle incoming and greater stresses. People that are supposedly Christians, or that profess such a faith, are very good at forgetting that their own holy book tells them that they are not to be like priests, Levites, and others who leave a man that has been robbed by the side of the road, but to take him to a local inn, and put up enough money for his care, and then fulfill the promise of having more if more is needed.
The show Heated Rivalry does a masterful job of telling story through sex scenes, but because that's the choice made, the audience dosn't work past their discomfort about being shown plot through sex to recognize how much of the plot they're being shown through sex. (I wonder how many of the people who are getting it from there are regular consumers of explicit fanfic fic and/or erotica, because they are already used to seeing plot unfold through sex.)
The radio shows of Art Bell, which were just the right spot of people with stories to tell and a host that would listen and encourage them to tell them fully. That the stories themselves seemed to be about faked moon landings, aliena nd ghost encounters, and working at Area 51 and the like made the show something more important for the form than the content, but the article-writer also points out that while the content of Art Bell's stories might have made for excellent podcasts, and gathered all kinds of listeners that way, the format constraints of AM radio, and the fact that Bell was unique in comparison to Limbaugh and Stern, and perhaps a better host than either of them, meant that he succeeded at exactly the right time and place.
Wild beavers returning to places they had been thought lost from, along with a resurgence in otters, the reintroduction of some storks to a place they have not been in centuries, the return of some burrowing owls who took a trans-Atlantic cruise by accident, significant amounts of seal pups brought into the world, a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/dec/22/2025-is-year-of-the-octopus-as-record-numbers-spotted-off-englands-south-coast">many, many octopuses in places they might not have been in so many numbers before, loons on the lakes in Maine, trying to keep porcupline populations in good standing in places where they are needed, pictures of the fascinating creatures known as slime molds, and Sir David Attenborough on the wildlife that exists and works with our human cities.
A surviving specimen of coinage from an era that there weren't many such artifacts from, and The UK National Trust hoping to purchase the land on which a large sculpture has been made, a giant with an erect penis.
In technology, with the ModRetro company announcing creations that will use products from a company that manufactures drones and other military components, that puts them off the list of companies to want to patronize.
Instead, consider the FPGA recreation of the Commodore 64, and how well it is done, and what it can run and do that the original may never have been able to. (And also, it has spots for SIDs and works with all kinds of other accessories meant to keep the original Commodores alive and working.) It's pricey, of course, but for people where that is the sweet spot of retro nostalgia, or wanting to preserve things, it's very good.
The found tape containing v4 of the UNIX operating system was successfully read and dumped to a digital file. The Internet Archive now has the raw waveforms and a digital tarball of the tape, for retrocomputing enthusiasts to happily delve into and see what was going on in this particular form of UNIX.
After revelations that generative programs were used in the design and parts of creation of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the Indie Game Awards rescinded al the awards they had given to the game as part of their voting and broadcast. Good. Art should be the domain of humans.
The surveillance company Flock left some of their cameras available to the public Internet, and so the 404 Media folks got to see just how much surveillance cameras are a part of their lives, and what kind of detail those cameras are capturing.
Waymo, a robotic taxi service, suspended their operations in San Francisco during a blackout, as the taxis rely upon the infrastructure that the power was powering to successfully be taxis. You can also probably drag PG&E for causing the problem.
Facebook is testing the idea of limiting the links an account can share unless they have paid the company a subscription fee. Controlling the flow of information unless you get paid is certainly one of the more novel rent-seeking behaviors. Although it's a condemnation that they can do it, and that they keep thinking of new ways to extract rents.
The CEO of Anthropic insisted on adding an image-creating chatbot to a Discord community, over the objections of the other members, and now the community has fled the space they had because they didn't want what was forced upon them. Oh, no, the consequences of someone's actions, and also, good for the community for proving that this techbro can't actually force their slop everywhere without consequences. Even if that means that community has to find somewhere else to re-convene.
For his part, Jeff Bezos's Amazon Kindle department is rolling out a new feature that will ingest every book someone opens on a Kindle, with the intent of providing a chatbot so that someone can "ask this book" about its contents. And no, you can't opt out of having the feature, or having your works ingested for the feature.
Because they all believe that we're going to just be crazy for all these LLMs and their slop, ChatGPT is going to roll out an adult chatbot so that you can have the very finest LLM extrusions stolen from real people's ability to make engaging and erotic content.
Even with relatively good controls about usage and how many families any one donor is allowed to create, it's still very possible for a sperm donor to father hundreds of children and more, some of whom may not know about their shared ancestry until some other reason appears.
Last for tonight, it turns out that humans are generally nicer, warmer, and more friendly than our media accounts would have us believe.
A story of a man who did not get to say thanks to an idol, but who did manage to convince a group of carolers to sing his most holiday-appropriate song at him, and then get blown away when they found out that he could, in fact, sing.
And, perhaps most importantly in these times where we think about the turning of the wheel of the year, sometimes the best good news that you can give to others is "yet here you stand." (And no, the rate of people choosing to complete suicide isn't higher in the winter months, so there are more people out there who are also choosing "yet here you stand" along with you.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
no subject
Date: 2026-01-03 06:05 pm (UTC)