dukeofriven

[dukeofriven]

Yeah, I knew it got mentioned in canon…

Carmela being at it again, I mean.

The first mention of what she was up to is here, in How Lovely Are Thy Branches:

And while we’re speaking of grenfelzing… want chocolate? Genuine chocolate as eaten by the legendarily wealthy and powerful denizens of the fabulous faraway world known as Earth? Well, who doesn’t! But why bother making the long, perilous journey to that dangerous part of space and daring the wrath of Earth’s ruthless and terrible space fleet? Save yourself a trip. Shop at the Crossings!

So she and Nita are indeed right there, on the retail side of the largest worldgating facility on this side of the Galaxy, riding some shopping scooters around, when this business comes up:

[Nita] sighed and glanced down at the scooter’s display, which was now showing some amusing promotional material. After a moment she raised her eyebrows at the slug line of one feature. “NASA’s going to be glad to hear we’ve got a ruthless and terrible space fleet.” Carmela snickered. “So will Richard Branson, when he gets the memo,” she said. “And frankly, I know which of them’s going to do better marketing.” Nita snorted. “Yeah, but Mela, you know as well as I do it’s not true! Is putting something like this out there smart?” “Why not? If everybody thinks Earth has a big aggressive space fleet, no one’ll bother turning up on our doorstep with one, will they.” There was something to be said for that line of reasoning, but Nita still had misgivings: some of the more assertive species she knew of might take it as a challenge. “And anyway, who put that in here?” “I’m sure I have no idea,” Carmela said, airily waving a hand. Nita began to sweat a little, because she knew from experience what it meant when Carmela started handwaving. “Are you trying to tell me that— What did you get Sker’ret to let you do?!” For it couldn’t escape anyone’s notice who knew the present Master of the Crossings that there was just about nothing he wouldn’t do for Carmela. Installing a worldgate in her closet had merely been a small sign of things to come. “Who, me? Nothing! …Much. I mean, the small print was such a nuisance to start with…” She glanced over at what Nita was still reading. Nita squinted to read the block of tiny, tiny print at the bottom of the promotional feature, again displayed in English to ease the handling of some of the more obscure Rirhait idioms. “…Wait. ‘Earth’, ‘Mysterious Earth’ and ‘Mother Earth The Legendary Home Of Humankind’ are licensed trademarks of Gaia Protectorate CRLLC, terms and conditions apply, planetary descriptions may change from time to time without notice at management’s discretion—” And then in the tiniest print possible, “—battle fleet not included’??” “Legalese,” Carmela said, craning her neck to see ahead of them. “It’s not like the disclaimers actually have any force in law, really, once you’ve—” “I can’t believe this,” Nita said. “‘CRLLC?’ Did you incorporate the entire planet Earth somewhere?!” “Here, actually,” Carmela said. “The corporate tax rate here is reeeeeeeeallly low. Especially if you’ve saved the place from alien invasion. At which point it drops to zero. …If not lower.” Nita’s mouth fell open. “And why are you looking so shocked? You cosigned the incorporation documents when we were here last.” Being reduced to speechlessness around Carmela was hardly a new experience for Nita, but this particular incidence was setting new records for the underlying implications...

And then they run into some friends ("Is that my shrub?!"), and this whole line of business gets derailed. But anyway, yeah, there it is, and in canon. :)

[dukeofriven]

I mean let's be honest, we need the show about the sentient robot that was supposed to be sentient but isn't. At all. In any way. Or ever can be. Because the company is full of shit and hoping like hell that your tendency to anthropomorphize will help paper over the cracks of their total failure to deliver. It, of course, is an entirely fictional programme.

also while i have robots on the brain. ive always thought its a little silly when media pulls "this robot wasnt built to be sentient but it glitched and now its a real boy!" but i do think itd be fun to do a variation like "this robot was built to be sentient but the ethics board were like 'hey i don't think we're allowed to sell things with thoughts and feelings' so the devs last minute commented out half of the code before launch day and now oops some of the bots have figured out how to access that part of their code again" . both slightly more plausable AND a lot funnier to imagine the absolute scandal it'd cause in the tech world.

[dukeofriven]

Trapped by indecision because asphyxiation has obviously been called a form of self-harm but on the flip side oxygen is toxic.

Self-harming by strictly avoiding any behaviour which has earnestly been described by at least one post on this site as self-harming.

[dukeofriven]

In the ask box

I'm posting this with the asker's name obscured, as I don't want to run the risk of embarrassing them, or of provoking others to some kind of backlash.

Numbered? Okay. Here are reasons number 1 through 186 for you, made available by putting my name into this master list of Meta--scraped works and pulling up the titles of those works of mine that over time made their way into LibGen without my permission, and which (after they were scraped from there) were then used to train AI at Meta.

That is pretty much my entire literary output for the last fifty years, scraped illegally from LibGen into Meta's LLM-training database. Those include numerous works from my own tiny online bookstore, the income from which is sometimes all that's kept @petermorwood and me alive.

It's often my great pleasure to donate ebooks (and regular print ones) to libraries on request. But to have work taken and posted online without permission strikes me as... not very nice. Donation of one's work to online sources should be a choice the individual artist makes. And I was never given the chance to make that choice. Others decided they were entitled to make it for me.

Anyway, I think Meta's actions should have consequences: as should other thefts of copyrighted material by Big Tech. That's what the class action lawsuits against Meta and Anthropic are about.

I hope the above data will be helpful in assisting you in your assessment of my possible state of misinformation, or my moral decrepitude.

And if you feel that my being angry about what Meta and Anthropic and their ilk have done with my work (and my dead husband's, and that of tens of thousands of our colleagues) makes me evil...

Well, that's a take. May others' assessment of your moral state be kinder.

[dukeofriven]

A popular water bottle is being recalled in both Canada and the U.S. after reports of injuries suffered from the bottle exploding. Health Canada announced a joint recall Wednesday with the U.S. Consumer and Product Safety Commission (USCPSC) and i-Drink Products Inc. for Drinkmate’s 1L carbonation bottles, which could potentially explode from extra pressure while being used, resulting in injuries and lacerations to users and bystanders.

This recall article was posted August 14th, 2025.

Continue reading

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[dukeofriven]

Yeah, this is a good time to stop news-scrolling and go read some fanfic

And what a giveaway line: “Product-market fit is people believing that it works.” ...Jeez, guys, showing your hands much??

Your customer inevitably dies and has no legal recourse. And you get to keep their money. It's perfect! Not least because the whole thing rests on the idea that sometime in the far future, scientists (or even more greedy venture capitalists?) will wake your perfectly-preserved brain up.

...And if they don't? What, are your relatives going to sue them from the past? Bwahahaha.

And are you sure that your mind's definitely associated with that organ? People in some venues are still arguing about that.

And who owns the contents of your brain? Can't wait for the first court case... a couple hundred thousand years from now, maybe. If ever.

There are, like, about a hundred possible SF/horror novels flowing from this concept. If not more. ...It's a good thing I'm busy this week. 😏

[dukeofriven]

The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.

[dukeofriven]

This dude is personally running down drug dealers across his pastures in his 2021 Ford F150 and leaving their tire-scarred bodies for the carrion.

[dukeofriven]

I am aware. I have seen it. Probably not even unique to her game.

from variety’s interview with brennan lee mulligan

[dukeofriven]

"Trans people were invented by doctors in the 1950s"

[dukeofriven]

Reblog if you've found friendship because of your fandoms.

[dukeofriven]

It speaks to how totally dominant d20 as a system has become that an idea of a d6 only system is treated as a joke or punchline instead of, y'know, still the standard system for the vast majority of games that use dice.

from variety’s interview with brennan lee mulligan

[dukeofriven]

Argh, this shit drive me nuts — the thing nobody ever remembers is

Not to send an ask that has been doubtless sent many times earlier today, but well,

See, the thing about that is

[dukeofriven]

Time was I could not like a sad book because I found it boring or just painfully dreary but no, now I got to complain its actively malicious. Time was I could go "this writer has confused trauma dumping with crafting a compelling narrative like they're a queer person crafting their first TTRPG character's backstory" but no, now I got to worry above evil book coders. Ah shit, do I got to worry about evil book coders' coding errors? In an era of proliferating AI, do I got to worry about evil book coding coding errors by evil coded book coders by evil coders? "Aw man, you here about Steve? Amnesia, he lost everything!" "Oh no! What happened?" "He read Pounded—in the Grief—By My Own—Grief by Chat_TingAI and during the scene where the protagonist's Haunting Sense Of Inadequacy Brought On By The Death Of His Entire Family In Childhood fails to hide its omega status from his alpha Crippling Sense Of Social Isolation Brought On By His Non-Heteronormative Sexual Identity During His Teen-Aged Years, Chat_TingAI misplaced a semi-colon, introduced a serious of cascading errors in the registry of Steve's amygdala, and gave his brain a segmentation fault. He doesn't know who he is any more. Whoever Steve was... is gone. All because of a sad story."

2026 booktok discourse: sad books are a cognitohazard (they make you sad)

[dukeofriven]

My mother used to work for a veterinary pathologist, and one of their primary forms of work was processing x-rays for what they termed 'dietary indiscretions' among cats and dogs. Of these Labrador Retrievers were the worst offenders—the usual tennis balls, chew toys, food bowls, jewelry, office supplies etc, but the most notable was one bright lad who took it into his head to swallow a barbecue skewer whole, and cost his loving parents ten grand for very delicate surgery. In addition I've known cats with extreme and expensive tastes: one cat that was always getting its stomach pumped once chewed and ate the burner controls off the stove.

So I posted a pic of my dog yesterday, and real OG's will know that my dog is a freakin' sock-eater/foreign-body-consumer. For those of you who have never owned a dog, foreign-body-eating is not great behavior. Dangerous behavior, in fact. Medically expensive behavior, even. So I worked my ass off to train her out of it, and for the last 2.5 years, we have not had... An Incident.

Until like two weeks ago. For reference, this is my idiot daughter. She has a great many brain-cells and uses them exclusively for crime (poodles have the intelligence of toddlers).

I had a guy over for a date, and my dog has historically always been a jealous bucket of fried chicken. My roommate can't sit beside her boyfriend on the couch without her wanting to snuggle in-between them. If I pet another dog for too long, she whines and scoots her butt right up under my hand. So you can imagine that when I brought a boy over, she was understandably distraught.

"You provide affection for the outsider, but not for me, my liege!? - My dog, probably.

So she made the logical choice to go into my room,

open the drawer of my dresser (which she has never done before),

pull out one of my shirts (which she has never done before!!!),

chew the sleeve off of my shirt, (WHICH SHE HAS NEVER DONE BEFORE),

and then TRY TO SWALLOW THE CUT-OFF-SLEEVE (WHICH SHE HAS NEVER DONE BEFORE????)

Oh, and I should mention that she was able to do all of this in less than 3 minutes. Seeing as she's a notorious criminal, I have what my friends call "mom sense"; I know if this dog is up to bullshit from across the house even if it's perfectly silent (especially if it's perfectly silent). When I tell you I looked at this guy, said, "You know what? Hold on a sec," then proceeded to walk into my room just as the sleeve was sliding down little-miss-dumbass's throat, I was freakin' floored. She was swallowing it like a goddamn python.

She really said "If I have to deal with this shit I'm leaving this mortal coil". Anyway that's how my well-honed sense of "Is My Dog About To Do Something Expensive" saved me $3000-$5000. :)

["But Artsekey, how could your dog chew such a straight line through two layers of fabric in under 2-3 mi--" Her teeth are scissors. Her teeth are scissors. I have listened to her cut a straight-line through "tough chewer" toys. Sounds like scissors.]

[dukeofriven]

homestuck if it was written by vivziepop

[dukeofriven]

Seen at an area thrift store yesterday. The (larger) clown nose is 3D, if it weren't evident.

He watches you while you sleep, I just know it.

Adding this photo to my "decor for people who hate their kids" collection

@shiftythrifting