kossai | Reading

soc_puppet posting in

There's a new

dw_dev post up about Dreamwidth's stance on "AI", for anyone who wants to know.

The reason I'm posting about it over here is because it clarifies something relevant to this community. Namely, any art that Dreamwidth uses officially, such as for mood themes, must be made by a human. You can still use AI to make a mood theme for yourself, but it will never be an official, site-supported Dreamwidth mood theme that anyone can use for free.

I'm also going to say that AI generated mood themes aren't eligible for the free Dreamwidth points offer through this community. I feel that AI generated mood themes defeat the spirit of this community and its goals of fostering creativity, innovation, and curiosity about the inner workings of Dreamwidth itself.

On a related note, an update to the requirements for a site-supported mood theme page is coming up, er, eventually. We do have a potential size limit for site-supported mood theme images, though: No more than 60 kb per image, and no more than 150 pixels wide by 100 pixels tall. The "preferred size" limit is also anticipated to go up to 50x50 pixels, up from the 30x30 listed.

I think that should be it for now; I hope everyone is having a good time with this community, whether you're participating or just following along, and I'll be back with more moods tomorrow!

lb_lee

Rogan: we grabbed Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder Harry Hay from the library because Hay said some things that caught my eye in the 1987 anthology Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning in his piece “A Separate People Whose Time Has Come”:

( Read more... )

Crossposts: https://lb-lee.insanejournal.com/18581.html

lb_lee

Sneak: we have 301 entries on

pluralstories now! I’m really happy and proud of that! I feel like it’s becoming a nice mix of us finding older books, readers submitting the new stuff we don’t hear about and some really neat surprises! It’s especially the “weird” submissions I feel most excited about!

When I started the project three and a half years ago, I didn’t know how it would go. I’m very pleased with it!

... I also want to make a user poll to see how people use the catalog, but that’ll have to wait until we’re less sick.

Current Mood: accomplished
Crossposts: https://lb-lee.insanejournal.com/18094.html

frameacloud posting in

otherkinnews

This is your community, and Otherkin News has always been meant for many voices. Don’t assume that regular posters here are the only ones meant to write for it. This space is for you to share about current events too! If you find a scoop, you’re welcome to go ahead and write about it here for yourself. Our moderators check to make sure that submissions are on topic. If it’s your first post here or your submission doesn’t get approved on the same day, notify a mod by email to make sure they see it soon.

During the past few years, moral panics about therians have been spreading all over the world. We’re seeing urban legends of that kind in the US, last year in former Soviet nations, and this year in Latin America. Especially if you’re fluent in relevant languages, I encourage you to please post to here with your own article, a round-up of news links (cite your sources properly!), or your own clearly-marked opinion piece.

lb_lee

We’re sick again. :( Third time since Day of the Dead. This is getting really old, guys.

Current Mood: annoyed
Crossposts: https://lb-lee.insanejournal.com/17713.html

who_is_page

Vended at a zine fair this weekend and somehow no one noticed I had not slept in 2 days or that I skipped dinner-breakfast-lunch into it to get everything done. Got that golden retriever charisma in me babyyyyy

Also we were legit the only people with long-form fiction stuff? If you can even call 1000~ word microfiction "long form," but other people at the fair were. That made me sad when I finally got to scope things out. There was one fiction/nonfiction anthology I found at a table and that was it, nobody else was really doing it. :( A lot of tables barely had any zines or had mostly really professional stuff that wouldn't really count as a typical punk zine and I was like... I think some of the vendors are treating this like an art fair instead which is a lil strange.... The person we were next to had a publishing company that sold all the way up to the Midwest, which was REALLY cool, but iirc none of it was their own work; it was the work of artists in the publishing house. I wasn't sure the artists were necessarily even local to our state? Which ain't a bad thing, but I feel like I went into it expecting a lot more nearby artists at my skill level of "creating everything by hand at home" than there actually were. It was intimidating and made me feel kind of out of place and outclassed! But I've never let that stop me.

We did get to see some familiar faces that made our day, and I watched an older middle schooler buy and read my horror story Unfair about a mirror demon right at the table and yell in delight at everything that happened, which felt AMAZING. I think I gotta write more horror with kids in mind (so basically, just regular horror with less cursing :P), cuz that was so fun. Someone compared that same story to House of Leaves for the way I did the mirror script, which was swag as fuck. A LOT of people were totally overjoyed and screamed when they picked that zine up from our table and realized what I'd done with formatting, and it was one of the top sellers. Think we did like 10 copies? 15? And everyone wanted to trade for it or Territorial.

Territorial was, predictably, the best seller. Everyone loves cave diving horror, and everyone loves Florida horror. One person was REALLY excited about the lighthouse horror story I'm working on set at a FL lighthouse, I wish I had finished it in time for the fair. Moon Flower barely sold at all, which sucked, but people were enthusiastic to trade for it when they heard my pitch. I think I didn't go hard enough on the cover, because it's genuinely one of the best-edited pieces and is a ton of fun. Daily Dragonsbane did good, but not as good as last time; I think it held at around 9-ish copies sold. RUN DOG RUN did surprising numbers considering it's a therian story that's partially in Esperanto, while Dragon On The Court didn't sell even once iirc, despite it being a short comedy story entirely in English. They both sold for $1 so it wasn't even the price point: it's just my weakest seller. Aw well. You live and you learn.

Sometimes people would stand there and just read through an entire zine and I'd internally be like. Hey man. C'mon now. It's literally only 8 or 16 pages long and a few bucks. Please pay me if you're gonna read the whole entire thing. But I've been told that's normal for the event... Alas. Seeing everyone's reactions in real time was still a lot of fun, and people gushing over my work was really genuinely wonderful, even if they didn't buy anything. I'm just happy people like what I make! I got a surprising number of questions about my process and my writing programs that I didn't expect, but it was really lovely to share resources.

Either way. It really was a total blast. I got a T-shirt and some incredible zines about eels and cicadas, among other goodies. Wahoo! I crashed really hard right after the fair so I'm going to eat some leftover wedding cake and go back to bed now. <3 I have work later today

lb_lee

Rogan: I have apparently become the kind of person who not only reads bibliographies of my own free will, but has done so enough to develop taste and critical feelings about them.

( Please imagine me swirling fancy wine in a goblet as you read this. )

Crossposts: https://lb-lee.insanejournal.com/17226.html

bedes

When I discuss queer topics in fandom spaces geared towards older folks, like Dreamwidth, a lot of people express that they would like to use my neopronouns, but they don't know how. So, I made this small run-down, for people who would like to learn. I will be using she/her or he/him as a base example for all of these.

Please keep in mind that, if you use any of these incorrectly, I won't be upset! I appreciate the effort itself deeply. And, if you prefer to use more well-known pronouns for me, you can use alternating he/she.

Fae/faer
Replace "she" with "fae". Replace "her" with "faer". Replace "hers" with "faers". Replace "herself" with "faerself".
"She is very passionate. I met her recently. Is that her computer? She told me that it was hers. She prefers to do things by herself."
"Fae is very passionate. I met faer recently. Is that faer computer? Fae told me that it was faers. Fae prefers to do things by faerself."

That set is the most unique in its usage, because it is the only set that I use that is not "nounself" (a neopronoun set which centers around using a noun). All of the rest of my pronouns follow an extremely similar format to each other.

( Continue? )

bedes

Current Mood: artistic

lb_lee

This is the winner of the comics/art poll this month! Please enjoy this goofiness... and for added bonus, I'll add the sketch as well!

This was a silly 2016 cooldown sketch from back when I did livestreams. (I have been saying for years that I'd like to start doing them again, but sorry y'all, our art program just doesn't work on Linux. We haven't been able to do digital art on this comp reliably since we got it in Thanksgiving.)

( Biff is not a Pokemon... OR IS HE??? )

Crossposts: https://lb-lee.insanejournal.com/16999.html

hungryghosts

(Crossposted from Reddit.)

Asian-American here. (Happy Lunar New Year!) I think I responded to one of your other threads a while back, about Buddhism.

I've been wanting to write about how our individual experience of being Asian-American has affected our plurality, but it's a surprisingly difficult topic - I think in large part because being Asian in the US has long been about invisibility, to the point that we've become habituated to ignoring our own Asianness. And Asian-American experiences are so diverse (especially when it comes to colorism, fluency, and citizen status - our experiences, being pale East Asian, US-born, and fluent in English are quite different from the experiences of a darker-skinned immigrant still learning English) that it feels fraught to write about our own experiences, out of concern that they'd be taken as Representation Of All Asian-American Experiences. But I do definitely think it has affected us, even if we can't name every way it has yet.

Off of the top of my head, our parents (who are immigrants) always had a strongly pragmatic cast to how they approached the world. Extremely resourceful folks, saw objects for what they could do rather than what they were "supposed" to do and could jury-rig anything to their needs. They didn't believe in letting their feelings get in the way of doing what needed to be done (or so they liked to claim) and what needed to be done was defined by what concrete value it brought to the family, not some kind of abstract morality divorced from reality. (Or so they liked to claim.) They thought constantly in collective - what was good for the family, not just our nuclear unit but the extended group, the way people's actions reflected on said family, etc.

Make no mistake: our parents sucked in a lot of ways that left scars. But they did teach us a lot of things, some good, some that can't be neatly classified as good or bad. When I look, I can see traces of it running everywhere through our plurality. Our willingness to jury-rig and modify parts of our own functioning. Our focus on concrete advice on living plural. The relative ease with which we accept ideas like "people in systems can be both individuals and parts of a whole - singlets, too, are individuals who are parts of their communities." On a more fraught level: a tendency to stifle our feelings and efface ourselves for the good of the group. Being perhaps a little too comfortable with being unseen. Difficulty distinguishing looking okay from being okay. Generational trauma that manifests, among other ways, as a fear of scarcity and a complicated relationship with food. A need to Achieve Something and Be Successful. Things that kept us outwardly functional, even through incredibly trying circumstances, while also eroding our deeper well-being.

And also, for us, US-born to immigrant parents who were our main connection to our culture, who we are purposefully no longer in contact with - there is a perpetual sense of... not simply loss, but having been severed from a greater whole. When we cut away what was killing us, a lot of good went with it too. Something that was always with us, unnoticed in the background, until it was gone. Even those of us who don't quite see themselves as Asian can sense its absence. We look after each other, try to create our own little culture with its own little traditions within, but it can't ever be a replacement.

Oh, and of course, there's the topic of race and internal identity. Sure have a lot of feelings (and frustrations) about the ways people handle that subject, considering none of us Look Asian internally and a number of us don't even feel personally connected to Asian identity. But I won't get into it here. Not on the new year. Inauspicious, you see.

lb_lee

(Alternate title: the Devil Went Down to Georgia... and Regretted It)

While talking with our roommates about the fiddle as the Devil’s Instrument, we got to thinking about the comparative Satanism of other instruments, ranked by how well you could make a Devil dueling song out of it.

The fiddle, yes. The banjo, of course. The harmonica would also be a good contender.

But then we got silly. The tuba would just end like that Spike Jones record where they try to play Flight of the Bumblebee on the trombone. The Devil’s Tympani? The Devil’s Theremin??? (Well, the theremin would likely work out fine.) Warring bassoons? (As a former school bassoonist, we are of course obligated to declare that bassoons can totally war, it’ll just look undignified as the thumbs fly.)

But then we knew. The Devil’s Horn. The instrument that regardless of playing ability instantly sends all listeners to hell:

THE VUVUZELA.

All other contenders go home.

Crossposts: https://lb-lee.insanejournal.com/16849.html

gillman

This fish got accepted into graduate school! I got a teaching apprenticeship, even! So no tuition and a stipend! I haven't heard back from my other schools yet, so I can't make any final decisions, but unless they're going to pay me more, I've got my decision made!

It's a weight off my shoulders, and it's strange. For a while, I wasn't sure I'd live long enough to see my high school graduation. And now I'm on my way to a masters degree! Woah!

This fish will be a technical writer, and I'm very excited about it! I'm having a good night with my partner tonight. Tomorrow, we leave for New Orleans for the weekend with a few friends. I love NOLA, I love the drive. I can't wait to see all of the swamps and bayous we pass.

Current Mood: hopeful

hungryghosts

Interesting thing discovered last night - apparently there's a website for Norwegian plural systems now? I can't read Norwegian and don't know the creator, so I don't have opinions on the content, but I think this is a neat thing to exist and I thought I'd share it here in case any plural folks on this site are from Norway.

https://plural.no/

The creator's post on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/system.grdnsys.no/post/3mdvtkpuz7225

lb_lee

Some smartphone door-to-door salesmen were going around my neighborhood a few days ago, but they made the terrible mistake of getting me at the door, and I easily banished them with the words, "I don't have a smartphone."

Later that day, as I was hauling my laundry for washing, I encountered the salesman again, along with their colleague, both of whom looked to be young, in their early twenties. The one who hadn't encountered me complimented my "necklace," which I said, "Oh, it's a compass!"

"What, really? Can I see?"

"Yup!"

I opened the compass, dazzling both young sellers. They very well may have never seen a compass before in real life.

"Can you really use that?"

"Yup! I use it with maps so I don't get lost!"

"Like, on paper? YOU CAN READ A PAPER MAP???"

At which point the one who'd encountered me said, "They don't have a smartphone either!"

"REALLY?!"

With a flourish, I whipped out my dumbphone and flipped it open. The two salespeople watched as though I had done a magic trick, utterly enchanted, staring at me like I was some kind of Amish wizard. I should've bowed.

So now we and the salespeople are on good terms. ...they probably won't try to sell to us again.

Current Mood: amused
Crossposts: https://lb-lee.insanejournal.com/16394.html

soc_puppet posting in

moodthemeinayear

Welcome aboard for Part 2 of Mood Theme in a Year! I hope you had a good break, because we're about to break into some new moods 👍

Starting now, the Maximum and Medium Tracks diverge from the Minimum track; in Part 3, Medium and Minimum will be unified again, but Maximum will be striking out on its own for the rest of the year. Pretty exciting!

This week's Minimum moods are: Angry, Awake, Confused

This week's Medium and Maximum moods are: Stressed, Excited, Optimistic

And what a combination of moods we have to start out with here! Pretty neat that you can be Stressed, Excited, and Optimistic all at the same time. Or maybe I mean "exhausting" rather than neat 😅 Still, they're new moods to work with, and it can be fun to compare and contrast. If you're sticking around on the Maximum Track, it'll be good practice for when we get into runs of similar moods. How do Excited and Optimistic differ? How would you differentiate the two moods? How about Excited versus Stressed? Those both have the potential to be pretty high energy moods, even if they're on different ends of whether you're happy about something. Stressed and Optimistic? It doesn't really seem like they have a lot in common on the surface, but if you've been working really hard on something you still feel good about succeeding, you might just feel both of those at the same time.

What do you think? Are you ready to jump in on this week's moods, or do you wish the break had lasted a little longer? Do you expect to have any trouble with any of them, or need some inspiration? Let's talk about it!

lb_lee

Rogan: I’ve gotten obsessed with a 130-year-old novel and its 90-year-old movie, and much like Dracula 2020, I’m gonna make it all y’all’s problem now!

( I hope y’all like Gary Cooper and great-grandma-aged SPOILERS! )

Crossposts: https://lb-lee.insanejournal.com/16213.html

emotional_support_demon posting in

moodthemeinayear

PREVIEW:

Happy	Mischievous	Predatory	Awake	Morose

Artistic	Crushed	Working	Touched	Cold

» Full Preview ( UNDER HERE )

→ 132 unique moods, from the videos for "Because I Liked A Boy," "Nonsense," "Fast Times," "Feather," "Santa Doesn't Know You Like I Do," "Espresso," "Please Please Please," "Taste," "Please Please Please" feat. Dolly Parton, "Manchild," and "Tears." It is a little "Manchild"-heavy, but that video has about three million scenes in it, so it was gold for emotions.
→ All caps courtsey of sabrina-carpenter.com
→ 100x68px
→ Credit is appreciated if used.

DOWNLOAD HERE

gillman

Just a nice moment I had today that I want to preserve here for whenever I'm feeling down.

Came out of my class around 3:15 and ran into a professor of mine. She's the one who was a day late with my letter of recommendation, but who is also on the board to accept grad students. I had her for a very intense writing class in fall of '24 and it's where I produced my best work. She introduced me to technical writing. She's made a very large impact on my life despite only ever having a singular class with her.

Anyway, I come out of my class and she says hi to me, asks me about my Barcelona sweatshirt and we exchange stories about European travels. She begins telling me about wild stories from her research, and eventually we get into what her research is. For everyone's sake, I will just summarize it and say that it is a household item from the Victorian era that, despite it's popularity in the early 19th century, is rather unknown now. I asked her a lot of questions because it sounded very interesting.

When the conversation ended, she told me that I had the "best kind of brain", one that "will never be bored". She told me that she was very excited for me to go to grad school and that I absolutely will be going. She had to leave right after that, but it really did make me smile. I have been feeling very dumb recently. I am always so fatigued and tired. Rarely is there a day that I can actually get into academic reading anymore. There has been a sharp decline in me since I took her class. I think I do too much with people, I don't think I lay in bed and rest enough. I don't know. But it's been bugging me, and to have someone like her who I admire reassure me (when she didn't even know I was struggling to begin with) really made my day so much better.

I am unsure of where I will go to grad school. I have good online options, but I also have applied to my current university and am not opposed to staying here. This is a small town, though. I'm scared I will continue to feel very trapped. I don't know. I have such good relationships with so many of my professors, and I am not sure if going to online school would allow me to create more. Part of me wants to stay here, to meet more professors and to continue my relationships with them.

I've also been worried about what my partner would think. We'd been thinking about moving in together again in the city, where we'd both be (assuming I did online school). I didn't want to let them down or to dangle the idea of long-distance over them, and pulling out as a roommate would be shitty. Of course, there is the threat of not getting into online school at all, so we haven't made any plans, but the idea is still there. I very briefly mentioned it to them and they told me to make the decision for me. I hadn't even brought the topic of us up. And while there would be issues we'd have to overcome if we did long distance, it makes me feel a lot better that their first instinct was to encourage me to do what was best for myself.

I have very wonderful friends and people in my life. I am very often overwhelmed by it.

I'm sitting in the chapel on campus now. There is someone napping two rows in front of me and someone playing the piano and singing. Someone else looks to be praying further up. I like it in here. I don't come and sit here very often, but I always like it when I do. I have a poetry reading tonight that I'll be going to. My arms hurt from yesterdays workout, but it's the good kind of hurt. I've done pretty poorly in a class this semester. I've never had this sort of issue and I don't know how to go about fixing it, but I'm trying. I hope it doesn't mess up my graduation status. If I can get the credit I think I'd survive. Here's to hoping.

Current Mood: loved

jaekaplan_feed

Posted by jkap

https://jkap.io/token-anxiety-or-a-slot-machine-by-any-other-name/

I realize it's gauche to blog about some shit you saw on bluesky but yesterday I saw a post that encapsulated so much of what has been bumming me out about the rise of coding agents over the last year. this dread had been slowly rising from seeing blogs about using claude code from your phone while getting ready for work, while commuting, while waiting to pick your kids up from school, but it's come to a head.

Token Anxiety
i think i mostly echo this for myself. with so much that can be done, i often feel like i should be doing something, always

[image or embed]
— Tim Kellogg (@timkellogg.me) February 15, 2026 at 6:44 AM

now obviously the opinions of founder-brained SF social bubble weirdos should be immediately discounted; they are the spiders georg of this industry. but at the same time they are playing into the dreams of management, the worker that never stops working, that's always online, that's infinitely Productive, always shipping, always wants to get back to work. I imagine this archetype exists in other industries but my experience is limited to tech so I will stick to that.

my fear is that this will become the norm. anecdotal evidence¹ tells me that more and more companies are adopting AI for their engineers to use, encouraging (and in some cases requiring) its use in an effort to boost productivity, despite no actual evidence pointing to these improvements² and Anthropic-funded research indicating that AI usage reduces skill retention³.

so where does this lead us? we know that some US tech companies are starting to embrace the "996" schedule popularized in China's tech industry. enforced usage of coding agents makes that push even easier—is it really work if all you're doing is telling the computer what to do and then reviewing it to make sure it didn't do anything wrong and also babysitting it all hours of the day?⁴

many have already observed that coding agents, which require constant attention and often generate low-quality code with (by design) random results, are a slot machine. they are loot boxes. they are gambling. you are constantly pulling the lever and hoping you get the SSR SaaS Passive Income product. you will not get this, but maybe you will. just one more prompt, one more pull, one more revision, one more go at being Absolutely Right⁵.

if you suffer from token anxiety, you have a gambling addiction. I'm sorry that it's not being formally treated as such, but you can take some solace in the fact that novel forms of gambling often take time to be recognized⁶.

now we can put our thinking caps on and follow a pretty easy chain of events. coding agents can trigger our gambling instincts with slot machine-like behavior; tech companies are pushing engineers to work more and encouraging or enforcing the use of coding agents to get there; gambling is addictive; heavy users of coding agents self-report symptoms of gambling addiction.

you see where this is going, right? by enforcing the use of inherently addictive technology in the workplace, employers are (whether intentionally or not) making their workers addicted to work. this seems bad!

one has to wonder how common this will become. will this become the norm? obviously there will be companies with a shred of ethics and empathy for their workers that choose to buck this trend, but if they become the minority there will be fewer and fewer jobs for those who value having free time. we've already reached a point where trying to get a job in this industry requires a gradual erosion of ethics and standards, how much worse does that get?

all I know is that if we keep down this road, I'm gonna bail out to get HVAC certified and make youtube videos about fucked up commercial systems. I can't do this shit forever.

addendum: recommended reading/viewing that I couldn't figure out how to directly talk about

if you have something quantitative hmu so I can read and link it↩
Becker, J., Rush, N., Barnes, E., & Rein, D. (2025). Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089 ↩
Shen, J. H., & Tamkin, A. (2026). How AI Impacts Skill Formation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20245 ↩
if your answer isn't "yes, obviously" I'm gonna assume you're an engineering manager that takes pride in making your reports' lives miserable.↩
you could argue that by building a slot machine OpenAI and Anthropic have managed to run wildly unprofitable casinos, a remarkable feat normally reserved for the sort of fascist dipshit that gets to be president↩
I will not apologize for linking a piece my wife wrote.↩

https://jkap.io/token-anxiety-or-a-slot-machine-by-any-other-name/

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dancing in the faerie ring

we know how to set you free

Reading

Mood Themes and AI

The Importance of History

Pluralstories Hits 300!

Reminder that this is a community-run blog

Oh Come ON!

Zine Fair

The Fine Art of Bibliography

Using My Neos: A Quick & Dirty Guide

Trans "Ego Renegade Boy" Len Icons (Vocaloid)

Comic: Barred from Pokemon Forever

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The Devil’s Instrument

Stress Be Damned!

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Amish Wizard

Part 2, Week 1

Peter Ibbetson, 1891 vs. 1935

Full Mood Theme: Sabrina Carpenter

Nice Moments

"token anxiety"; or, a slot machine by any other name

addendum: recommended reading/viewing that I couldn't figure out how to directly talk about

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