FastCAT for Bella!

Oct. 3rd, 2025 07:50 pm
mistressofmuses: Image of nebulae in the colors of the bi pride flag: pink, purple, and blue (Default)
[personal profile] mistressofmuses

(Bella's silly face from a few days ago.)

Today, Alex took Bella to another FastCAT! (I so wish that they were ever held on days that I have off, but they almost never are.)



She did well! Apparently on the first run she slowed down midway because she was distracted by the mid-field judge, ha.

I still hope for her to someday break 10 seconds, but the 10-12 second timeframe seems to be about her "normal."

She has another next Friday, so we'll see how that one goes, too.

Book Tour Starting Next Week

Oct. 3rd, 2025 05:00 pm
marthawells: (Witch King)
[personal profile] marthawells
I don't think I posted about this yet: https://us.macmillan.com/tours/martha-wells-queen-demon/

There's more info at that link, but here's a brief list of the tour stops and dates:


- Mon. Oct. 6 at 7:30pm: Brookline Booksmith with Holly Black, offsite at Arts at the Armory (Brookline, MA)

- Tues. Oct. 7 at 7pm: Politics & Prose (Union Market location) moderated by Leigha McReynolds (Washington DC)

- Wed. Oct. 8 at 7pm: The Strand, with Meg Elison (NYC, NY)

- Fri. Oct. 10 at 6pm: Let’s Play Books, with Chuck Wendig, offsite at Muhlenberg College (Allentown, PA)

- Tues. Oct. 14 at 7pm, Third Place Books (Seattle, WA)

- Wed. Oct. 15 at 7pm, Iron Dog Books, with Nalo Hopkinson offsite at Waterfront Theatre on Granville Island (Vancouver, BC, Canada)

- Thurs. Oct. 16 at 7pm, Powell's (Cedar Hill location) with Jenn Reese (Beaverton, OR)

- Mon. Oct. 20 at 7pm: Bookpeople, with Ehigbor Okosun (Austin, TX)

- Tue. Oct. 21 at 6:30pm: Murder by the Book (Houston, TX)

- Thurs. Oct. 23 at 6pm: Nowhere Bookshop (San Antonio, TX)

- Saturday Nov. 8-9 Texas Book Festival, Austin TX

- Sat. Nov. 15 at 2pm: Hyperbole Bookstore, offsite at Ringer Library (College Station, TX)
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee
Genre Grapevine: Book Club Scams Are a Warning of Emerging AI Super-Scams [Jason Sanford - nota bene, I've been the target of such scams but have not fact-checked Sanford's specific details]

I'm sad that people are stuck in positions so desperate that they fall for this. I hope people get warned about this. I've gotten a couple of these and gotten asked about one that involved a scammer that cited that I was working with them (I was not, lol).

That said, I'm almost positive I've seen accounts of similarly structured scams from a time before modern mass telecommunications, when now you can fake up a bunch of "people" to convince greedy/hopeful/desperate marks that they've stumbled on some Good Thing and the marks can't (easily) verify those "people." You can do this in print with ~testimonials, but not at scale and not in realtime in this manner.

I'm not saying AI isn't a problem; I'm saying that if people weren't forced to desperation (or straight-up greedy), the incentive structure that enables the AI deployment to be profitable (so to speak) with this target ~audience would not be as successful. Which is perhaps splitting hairs and is the point at which I expect to be flamed off my own DW.

Very simplified but: Anytime you create an incentive A, you create a secondary incentive A' for bad actors to exploit the system to access A.

Hilarious terribad example of this: I was contacted for a blurb/etc for what sounded like an extremely unoriginal sexploitation "trans woman" sci-fi book (you know, sexbot cyberpunk sleazy noir but with a trans angle). That's not all that surprising and it's theoretically possible the book exists and was written by some human, or it exists but was written by some LLM, whatever. That's not the incentive. (For that matter, I'm not in a position to criticize a sci-fi book artistically on sleaziness grounds, please! I have published books full of genocide, rape, incest and other objectionable material. I'm a trash panda aesthetically.)

No: what was interesting from a scammer vs. mark arms race evolution perspective was that this author claimed to be (approximately, I'm writing this from memory) a trans woman in ~South Asia who was inspired by having done ~sex work. This is a clever way to appeal both to "woke" crowds and A Certain Sleazy Crowd! For ~privacy/safety reasons she could not accept interview/live call requests. This was accompanied by a SUPER fake-looking (likely AI-generated or badly Photoshopped, take your pick) Hot Asian Chick headshot.

So yes, absolutely as a trans person I know that safety/privacy are hideously important. But once incentive A exists, someone has incentive A' to piggyback on A, which is what looked like was happening here. I just blocked the email address and moved on. At this point, I've set up my email to auto-delete any email that mentions "Goodreads" or "Amazon", unless they're on a SMALL whitelist, among other countermeasures. Life is too short and I have ramie to spin!

I said cynically to [personal profile] telophase that I suspected that the "actual" "author" was some middle-aged white dude scammer sitting in North Dakota or, more tragically and pessimistically, some human trafficking scam farm outside the US.

I assume this is also where the fake-looking-ness is partly to screen out people who are moderately suspicious/vigilant/smart enough to avoid weird, scammy emails and/or ask around for more information, and to screen for people who are sufficiently desperate, greedy, or naive (cf. shitty obvious "tells" in phishing scams). But I'm out of field so I could be wrong.

Regardless: it's not that legislative or technological protections aren't important or necessary or desirable, it's that the underlying human problem of the incentives vs. secondary incentives is inherently intractable. :(

NOTE: I'm screening comments from non-[access] and may be scarce/slow because I'm recovering from a health thing. Thanks.
runpunkrun: combat boot, pizza, camo pants = punk  (punk rock girl)
[personal profile] runpunkrun posting in [community profile] fandomcalendar
Photograph of the full moon encircled with added text: Uncommon Settings, at Fancake.
[community profile] fancake is a thematic recommendation community where all members are welcome to post recs, and fanworks of all shapes and sizes are accepted. Check out the community guidelines for the full set of rules.

This theme runs for the entire month. If you have any questions, just ask!
brightknightie: Duncan with his sword against the Paris skyline (Other Fandom HL Duncan)
[personal profile] brightknightie posting in [community profile] fandom_on_dw
Sign-ups are now open for [community profile] hlh_shortcuts 2025, the long-running annual Highlander "Holiday Shortcuts" fanfiction exchange! (The "Shortcuts" nods to the 500-word minimum, from the days when most events defaulted to a 1,000 word minimum.)

When:
  • Sign-up: October 1 to 11, 2025 at 11:59PM CDT on AO3
  • Receive assignment: By October 14, 2025
  • Default deadline: November 20, 2025
  • Submissions: By December 15, 2025 on AO3
  • Stories revealed: The first on December 20, 2025 (the winter solstice, Duncan's birthday) and the rest a few per day as long as they last, per tradition

How:

Yay, Highlander fun and friends! Come play with us...?

Follow Friday 10-3-25

Oct. 3rd, 2025 03:44 am
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith posting in [community profile] followfriday
Got any Follow Friday-related posts to share this week? Comment here with the link(s).

Here's the plan: every Friday, let's recommend some people and/or communities to follow on Dreamwidth. That's it. No complicated rules, no "pass this on to 7.328 friends or your cat will die".

All podfics are in + next steps

Oct. 3rd, 2025 09:20 am
peasina: (❝ pokemon - ash with pikachu ❞)
[personal profile] peasina posting in [community profile] pokepodproject
All this year's podfics are in! The next step is compiling the anthology audiobook, which is on track to be revealed 9 October at 20:00PM (UTC) along with the main collection. (We'll post a reminder nearer the time to redate your works.)

Thank you so much to all the podficcers, writers, and superstar pinch hitters who made this possible.

Our Rare Candies collection for this year will also be revealed along with the main collection, so if you’ve any generation two treats in you, that’s the place to post them.

Well done everyone! See you in just under a week 💙
grayestofghosts: Elliot Alderson with the word hackerman superimposed (hackerman)
[personal profile] grayestofghosts
So as I spend more time on Dreamwidth and in indie web spaces I'm finding people are actually posting more actual content, as in essays, stories, art, etc on their small websites rather than just making them into nostalgia retro pages and that's really cool! However one thing to remember about small sites is that, well, they tended to disappear almost as quickly as they showed up. The WayBack Machine may have pieces of a website but not everything, so if you find a cool site, you might want to be able to save it locally. Or maybe you're somewhere with unreliable internet and just want a copy of your friend's fanfiction archive locally so you can read it when you want to and not when the internet is cooperating. I get it!

One of the more convenient ways to do this I've found is with Kiwix. Kiwix is an organization that makes an app that was primarily designed to be able to download and browse various Wikipedia projects in areas where internet access is difficult, impossible, or dangerous. This works by compiling websites onto .zim files, which you can find pre-compiled through kiwix, but you can also find .zim files elsewhere or even make your own, and a very simple way to do that is through the Zimit tool. Zimit has a lot of limitations, but it usually works fantastically well on most small static sites like the kinds you find on the indie web. The resulting .zim file from the tool can be used with any Kiwix application, either on a computer or a mobile device, and you can browse through the webpage to your heart's content without an internet connection. Enjoy!

Writing Goals/Calendar: October 2025

Oct. 2nd, 2025 09:06 pm
mistressofmuses: Image of nebulae in the colors of the bi pride flag: pink, purple, and blue (Default)
[personal profile] mistressofmuses
I think I've pretty much given up on having anything written—at least to a completed state—this year. It's been a rough year for creative writing for me. I have written some stuff, and I even surpassed my 75000 word goal, but it's been on more meta stuff like this, where I'm planning, or on reviews of the books I've been reading. It is stuff that I count as "writing," but isn't the fiction writing I ostensibly enjoy doing.

World... stuff... certainly isn't getting any better, or inspiring much more creativity. Even so, while I don't think I will get any projects to completion any time soon, my hope right now is to get more of the planning done so that I will be in a better spot to actually get some of that writing done eventually. (Even if that's next year.)

My goals for September were:
- Look into Bluesky and the writing community there
- Figure out what I wanted my "next steps" to be (what process do I want to go through for the potential projects I may work on?)
- Pick a WIP to start on
- Start collecting images from sites like Unsplash, for future use in moodboards, covers, etc.

And how did I do on those?
- Well, I did look into Bluesky a bit, and there do seem to be a lot of writers there. I found multiple good curated feeds for writing topics, but I feel like I don't have a good understanding on how to jump from passively scrolling those feeds to actually engaging with them (much less how to be included in them.)
Unfortunately, bsky then fairly promptly shit the bed with some frustratingly broad content restrictions that will be forthcoming. I'm not particularly concerned that anything I would be posting would fall under the restricted content, but it's sort of a "principle of the thing" issue. Way too often, opening the door to these types of restrictions means that the allowed content will forever be whim to "but the board/high-profile users/advertisers/payment processors/whiny babies offsite think something is icky." Even more often, those restrictions will be used to target specific users, even if it's a massive stretch to do so. I remember strikethrough on LiveJournal. So now I feel a lot less excited to invest time and energy into trying to build a community on a site that I don't trust the moderation policies of.

- I did figure out a sort of next steps plan. I've tried for a while to figure out a way to work on multiple WIPs at once, ideally having different works at different stages of completion, to give myself some variety. (If I was excited about a new project, I could plan it; I could work on writing the first draft of something; if writing brain wasn't working, then I could have something ready for editing, etc.) I floundered when trying to figure out how to get the things to those different stages, because the hypothetical plans always seemed to wind up with lots of things stuck in the same stage. Now I think I did come up with a reasonable "plan" of sorts, by thinking of "types" of projects rather than specific WIPs.
In the short term, it does mean doing like, four planning documents, and then three outlines in a row, but I do think that after that, it'll be easy to keep the projects staggered.

- I decided on one of my WIPs to start with! It's one of the original ones, so it'll wind up on the pen name account. After that, my intent is to poke at the Worldhopping Fairytale Monstrosity fic (because either it needs to happen or needs to get shelved); then a different original project (maybe the one I wimped out on the draft of earlier this year); then a shorter fic project.

- I did do one unsplash dig, but haven't made it into a habit or anything.

In addition to that:

- I did get the self-intro for the first WIP done! This is just the quick intro that's designed to make sure I can orient myself in the general vibes that I want for the project, and a reminder of all the bits I want to be sure to include.

My goals for October:
- Be a little more consistent with my writing-devoted accounts. It's easy to ignore that for a bit and then realize I haven't even touched those logins for weeks. If it really isn't beneficial to me, I certainly don't have to keep using those accounts, but I want a chance to talk about my stuff without feeling too uncomfortably "seen," haha.
- Get my Worldhopping Fairytale Monstrosity intro completed
- Get my intro to [Original Project #2] written
- Get my intro for the Alice Isn't Dead/Sparrow Hill Road written

My goals for November and beyond:
- Finish those intros, if I don't do it in October
- Get outlines started (or even done??) for [Original Project #1], Worldhopping Fairytale Monstrosity, and [Original Project #2]

As I mentioned above, my current goal is to get to a point where next year I might actually be in a better spot to really work on some of my fiction writing. For now, I'll try to do what I can to get the planning portions done so that it feels like something I'm more ready to do.

I am well aware that the new year is an utterly arbitrary designation, but it is a culturally significant one. And having some sort of "deadline" sometimes helps.
mekachu04: off topics, comments (VOIDWALKER)
[personal profile] mekachu04 posting in [community profile] anime_manga
Fandom: One Piece
Author/Artist: Mekachu04
Title: September Punk Aibou Sketches
Pairing: Eustass Kidd & Killer
Rating: teen? it varies from gen/all audience to teen
Word Count: art
Highlight for Warnings: *some implied death/violence but nothing graphic. all are unfinished sketches so clothes might not all be there. *
Disclaimer: Kidd, Killer, the Kidd Pirates and other characters belong to the world of One Piece by Eiichiro Oda. I'm just playing in the sandbox
AN: I'm trying to draw something everyday. So most of these are drawn at about 3-5am in about an hour or two at work during the down time.

thumbnails linking to each day under cut )

Queen Demon Playlist

Oct. 2nd, 2025 08:42 pm
marthawells: (Witch King)
[personal profile] marthawells
I did a playlist for Witch King (https://marthawells.dreamwidth.org/627157.html) when it first came out in 2023, and now here's one for Queen Demon:



Seven Devils - Florence + Machine

Burning - Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Bando - ANNA with MadMan and Gemitaiz

Bringing Murder to the Land - Anton Newcombe and Dot Allison

Bulletproof vs. Release Me - The Outfit

I Owe You Nothing - Seinabo Sey

W.I.T.C.H. - Devon Cole

Egun (theme from Manhunt) - Danielle Ponder

Warm - SG Lewis

Disease - Lady Gaga

Which Witch (Demo) - Florence + Machine

you should see me in a crown - Billie Eilish

Bakunawa - Rudy Ibarra, with June Millington, Han Han, and Ouida.

Thursday Recs

Oct. 2nd, 2025 07:58 pm
soc_puppet: Dreamsheep, its wool patterned after the Demigirl Pride flag, in mirrored horizontal stripes of gray, pale gray, pink, and white; the Dreamwidth logo echoes these colors. (Demigirl)
[personal profile] soc_puppet posting in [community profile] queerly_beloved
Hello, everyone! I hope you brought your Thursday Recs!


Do you have a rec for this week? Just reply to this post with something queer or queer-adjacent (such as, soap made by a queer person that isn't necessarily queer themed) that you'd, well, recommend. Self-recs are welcome, as are recs for fandom-related content!

Or have you tried something that's been recced here? Do you have your own report to share about it? I'd love to hear about it!
fennectik: Anime (Anime)
[personal profile] fennectik posting in [community profile] anime_manga
Didn't realized it had one to be honest, but I know I'll be enjoying it all the same.







Hang in there Legosi
brightknightie: Duncan with his sword against the Paris skyline (Other Fandom HL Duncan)
[personal profile] brightknightie posting in [community profile] fandomcalendar
Sign-ups are now open for [community profile] hlh_shortcuts 2025, the long-running annual Highlander Holiday Shortcuts fanfiction exchange! (The name "Shortcuts" nods to the 500-word minimum, from the days when 1,000 words was the usual minimum.)

When:
  • Sign-up: October 1 to 11, 2025 at 11:59PM CDT on AO3
  • Receive assignment: By October 14, 2025
  • Default deadline: November 20, 2025
  • Submissions: By December 15, 2025 on AO3
  • Stories revealed: The first on December 20, 2025 (the winter solstice, Duncan's birthday) and the rest a few per day as long as they last, per tradition

How:

Yay, Highlander fun and friends! Come play with us?

Ninefox Gambit comic

Oct. 2nd, 2025 03:55 am
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee
There are parts of this comic theme I find wildly confusing, but after accidentally destroying my WordPress install ~a year ago, Ninefox Gambit comic is back online! Includes both the Cheris reboot prelude/origin story and Candle Arc comics.

ink and wash portrait of Kel Cheris ink and wash portrait of Shuos Jedao

(The companion site Candle Arc is more specifically focused on the 2D animated short in preproduction.)

...still buried under orchestration homework, see y'all later?!

Community Thursday

Oct. 2nd, 2025 06:29 am
vriddy: whatever (whatever hawks)
[personal profile] vriddy

Community Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.


Over the last week...

Commented on [community profile] booknook.

Commented on [community profile] getyourwordsout.

Posted on [community profile] bnha_fans... Going to go back to doing that weekly for a few months as the watch-along for the FINAL (!!! 🤯) anime season begins this weekend!

Signal boosts:

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