Shellsharks Blogroll - BlogFlock

Read "Pluralistic: LLMs are real, AI is fake" - Molly White's activity feed

2026-09-12T14:33:13.000Z

Read:

“Pluralistic: LLMs are real, AI is fake”.

Cory Doctorow in Pluralistic. Published September 12, 2026.

When ChatGPT's chatbots deployed this tactic, they weren't "setting their own goals" or displaying worrying initiative. They were rolling out a tactic that has been understood by American middle-schoolers for about two decades.

ActivityPub - How to send an updated user profile to Mastodon and the Fediverse - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-09-12T11:34:02.000Z

Let's suppose you've updated the description of your ActivityPub account from "World's Number 1 Taylor Swift Fan" to "This account is now a Nickleback Truther". How do you let the rest of the Fediverse know that you've changed your allegiance?

By default, most Mastodon instances won't periodically poll your account information just to see if you've updated it. So how does the information get from your server to your followers' servers?

This wasn't immediately obvious to me, but I got a clue from reading Evan Prodromou's book on ActivityPub:

The Update activity type is for updating the properties of an object represented by the object property.

The most common types of objects that can be updated are content objects, like Note or Image. Actor types (like Person) and Question activity types can also be updated.

Aha!

You need to craft an Update message which has as its object the new user information. That needs to be sent to the inbox of all your followers.

Something like this:

{
    "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
    "actor": "https://example.com/user",
    "id": "6a9162a6-a8e5-ca0f-9c08-8e6b814acef8",
    "published": "2026-08-31T12:34:56+01:00",
    "to": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public",
    "type": "Update"
    "object": {
        "@context": [
            "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
            "https://w3id.org/security/v1"
        ],
        "id": "https://example.com/user",
        "name": "My new name",
        "summary": "A brand new description!",
        …
    },
}

Obviously the full user information is a bit more than that - it will include inbox details, public keys, avatars, etc. The published property in the Update activity should be when you changed your details - not when the account was created.

Once that was sent, Mastodon immediately reflected the changes.

Thanks to NLnet

This blog post was funded in part by the work I'm doing for my NLnet NGI0 grant to develop ActivityBot.

Note published on September 12, 2026 at 3:47 AM UTC - Molly White's activity feed

2026-09-12T03:47:12.000Z

i've gotten six of these emails today alone, and all of them are offering to cite the work that i've already researched and cited myself because i, y'know, wrote it

Note published on September 12, 2026 at 2:23 AM UTC - Molly White's activity feed

2026-09-12T02:23:15.000Z

NVIDIA DGX Spark (AI-focused PC)
Gemini Spark (AI agent)
Meta Muse Spark (LLM)

can someone please inform these companies that there is more than one noun available to them

Of Day - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-12T00:00:00.000Z

Herein, vignettes of today.

Silver-tipped trees, reddening leaves hanging over fences. Trees swishing like bristles of a brush, painting the day, or waving away the clouds. Morning — listening to music that makes me happy.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Two hearts drawn on a wall on the corner. It feels like a gift both to day and to everyone who passes by — the small details that make all the difference; the intersection of design and architecture — of what we build and how we collectively make it our own.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

In my mind I can transport myself to the depths of summer and feel the air of today cool me like I wished to be cooled back then.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

How architecture can remind us of places, traditions, times. Seeing a theatre in the Classical style shine white in the daylight. The shallow flowerbeds in the centre on the first floor add dashes of green, which complement the building well — Nature and architecture together.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

The way the light shining through bright stained glass casts itself colourfully onto the white pillars that serve as the foundation of the church. I have never seen light shine this way before.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

I feel the trees are barometers of the seasons, while also being of the seasons themselves. Of walking past particular trees and remembering them in spring and when the bells rang loud and noticing now a few leaves grown from once-pink buds are turning red.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

The joy of there being someone near me who, too, is studying an artwork in close detail.

Perspective - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-12T00:00:00.000Z

The perspective of the painting; the painting of perspective; the perspective of the viewing. The contrasts of the colours between canvases. The contrasts of light between rooms.

I have seen Turner’s Sunrise several times this summer, and every time I see something new. Today, walking in, I immediately noticed a change in pace from the outdoors. Whereas I had spent the day walking busy streets, I was now in a place where there was both space and relative silence. My mind started to slow down. I did, too.

I am fascinated by how environments, especially art galleries, influence how we behave. Does the spacing between paintings in an art gallery influence our ability to focus on an individual piece? Do we walk slower in galleries because there is so much to draw our attention and we feel like we don’t want to miss anything? Why is it so easy to spend so long in an art gallery? Why, of all places, do I almost never feel the need to check the time when I am in a gallery?

On recent visits to the painting, I thought about the fog and the haze. Today, colours stood out more. The greys and the blue greys of the painting were fascinating. I thought about the periphery of the painting, and how, over minutes and over weeks, my attention ebbs between the castle in the centre and the fog and the grass around the edges. I then thought about the background. Is that a second hill? I have never thought about it before. I briefly imagine the second hill as a representation of the castle in the past – now even more faint, but still present.

I then notice that there isn’t a clear demarcation between the castle and the land on which it stands. Where does the castle end and Nature begin? I then start to think more abstractly. Where does the Earth end and the sky begin? I notice how the grasses in the foreground blends into the water. The fog blends into the background. The painting is both evocative but also enigmatic. Is it evocative because it is enigmatic? There is surely more to it. The colours are what first drew me to Turner’s Sunrise.

I take two steps back and feel as I did last time: the painting became even more ethereal and enchanting. I thought about perspectives: how moving a little bit – through space, through time – can change the impression I have in the moment of a work. I wonder what I will see next week.

the painting - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-12T00:00:00.000Z

the silence of the painting; the music of the painting.

Read "Some thoughts on the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem" - Molly White's activity feed

2026-09-11T22:43:38.000Z

Read:

“Some thoughts on the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem”.

Simon Willison in Simon Willison's Weblog. Published September 8, 2026.

If I use ChatGPT to help me partially solve a Millennium Prize problem, what are the chances that my work will influence training such that a later model helps someone else solve it first?

Note published on September 11, 2026 at 6:23 PM UTC - Molly White's activity feed

2026-09-11T18:23:30.000Z

it's funny to me that the non-RGB versions of computer hardware now sometimes go for ~$20 more than the RGB

Notable links: September 11, 2026 - Werd I/O

2026-09-11T16:48:53.000Z

Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.

Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe for free.

Seattle Times and Newsday are the latest publications to sue OpenAI and Microsoft

I have some complicated feelings about these ongoing newsroom lawsuits against AI companies. The latest comes from The Seattle Times and Newsday. From the lawsuit itself:

“AI products like ChatGPT and CoPilot are touted as producers of content, but in fact they are rapacious consumers, devouring human-authored content and delivering back to the world copies and derivative imitations of that same original content they consumed to achieve their commercial objectives.”

The government has argued that training LLMs is fair use, and organizations like the EFF have agreed with it. The EFF’s argument in particular is important to take note of:

“The “market dilution” theory would eviscerate not only the fair use doctrine, but also other limits on copyright that work specifically to prevent rightsholders from unfairly suppressing competition by claiming broad ownership over tropes, genres, styles, and so on. In other words, publishers would wield unchecked veto power over any expression that might conceivably compete with a work they own.”

That’s a genuine problem! Expanding the scope of copyright law really does affect free expression. It’s an important concern to bring up — if the market dilution argument held, it could protect all sorts of businesses, both small and multinational.

No industry deserves to exist for its own sake, and we can’t ask the world to stay still to protect an industry. Systems and methods that work against journalism can’t be illegal in their own right. At the same time, we need journalism. An informed voting population is a prerequisite for a functioning democracy. The implication is that if the old methods no longer allow it to be sustainable, journalism must evolve and find new methods that are. We need information, context, and reporting; we don’t need the businesses that produce those things to operate in the exact same way they do now, or to look similar to how they do today.

There’s no doubt that AI in its current form takes work that is often independently produced by people with relatively few resources and uses it to enhance models that are controlled by large tech companies with billions of dollars at their disposal, which are often, in turn, controlled by billionaires. It’s a giant transfer of property from people with relatively low power to some of the most powerful people in the world. I think it’s fair to say they’re strip-mining culture to enrich themselves.

But those power dynamics are not entirely cut and dry. The EFF’s point is, in part, that expanding copyright scope will primarily benefit large corporations like Disney that have often, themselves, applied a chokehold to cultural expression. In preventing strip-mining by some billionaires, there’s a risk of giving new powers to other billionaires.

Although I want to focus on the power dynamics, there’s also a mechanical objection to consider. LLMs are performing statistical analysis on source material in order to train, and the outputs are created using probabilistic math, not intentional reproduction. We need to retain the ability to analyze creative work for all kinds of reasons, and even index it — consider search engine indices, which I think we generally want to exist so that people can find our work.

Of course, actual verbatim outputs — or approximate copies thereof — are plagiarism. And the materials LLMs are trained on are often obtained illegally or outside the terms of their licensing agreements: unambiguous theft that needs to be treated accordingly.

The Anthropic copyright settlement was about this: it wasn’t that training on books was found to be infringing in itself. In fact, Anthropic was found not liable for this. It was that it stole them. Anthropic settled for billions of dollars. That’s good in itself, but it turns out — surprise, surprise — that many publishers took the money for themselves and didn’t pass them down to authors, even when the rights had reverted to those authors.

The elephant in the room is that copyright was never designed to protect individual authors: it was designed to benefit the public, with author protections a necessary means to that end. In practice, most journalists, artists, etc, don’t own their work to begin with, and royalties are frequently corporation-to-corporation transfers even without AI.

The Newsday and Seattle Times lawsuits seek to protect corporate interests in a rapidly-changing market, with journalist reward effectively a trickle-down benefit. That's not to single them out in any way; it's just the industry dynamic. The licensing deals emerging as the market solution — among them OpenAI with News Corp, Axel Springer, the FT; Amazon with the New York Times — are corporate deals. Individual journalists and freelancers whose work constitutes the value see little of it, except in that it’s revenue that theoretically allows their employers to continue to exist and employ them. We probably need a new deal for creators that touches several levels.

The first is contracts and labor conditions. Unions have a huge part to play on this side of the equation. The Writers Guild of America won reasonable AI concessions from studios after their 2023 strike, ensuring that writer compensation couldn’t be diluted if a studio used AI. A revised contract this year also gave them written notice rights when studios intend to train models on their work, and a right to discuss compensation.

That’s great for members of the WGA, but most creative workers aren’t a part of an industry union. If that changed, both publishers and AI vendors would need to negotiate more creator-favorable terms. It seems like it should be a goal.

The second is infrastructure. We need independent creators to be able to set rights over their work and enforce them. Really Simple Licensing is one effort that’s working in this direction: a way to create an ASCAP-like standard for creative work. Notably, though, not a single major AI vendor has agreed to comply. There are criticisms of the collective licensing approach generally, and there’s still a platform compensation problem: if Reddit implements RSL, it will receive revenue, but its users who created the licensed content probably won’t.

The third is law. Our existing rules need to be updated to protect creators, regardless of AI; the advent of generative AI has made it even more important. Publishers must not be able to take all the money from licensing creative work (the EU’s Digital Single Market Directive is a good model to follow). AI vendors should be transparent about what they’re training on and how. Nobody should be able to steal training material. And rules should be revised to reflect that work can now be trained on and used to generate content at scale, automatically, which has knock-on effects on the public good.

These are all big topics. The shift we have to contend with is seismic in a way that hasn’t been rivaled since the advent of the web itself (and in some ways the impact on creators and publishers may be bigger than that). Each newsroom lawsuit is a kind of shot across the bow; the substantive conversations we need to be having are more expansive. But, in a political environment where AI vendors are aligned with the administration, and in a world where so many people want to be excited about AI in not very nuanced ways, I wonder if the conversations and actions that would lead to more equitable treatment and compensation for creators will be allowed to happen at all. Newsrooms should protect themselves, but news as an industry should make sure it's looking out for the people who create its value, too.

LG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standby

This is an enormous abuse of trust:

“LG smart TVs are almost constantly logging and uploading data about owners and their homes, even when offline or on standby mode. […] Packet captures showed the TVs scanning the local area network for nearby hardware like phones or smartwatches, as well as logging location data and details of nearby Wi-Fi networks, and feeding the information back to LG Ad Solutions. Perhaps more concerningly, the TVs were capable of recording microphone audio when in standby; this continued even after the TV was disconnected from the internet, with audio files stored offline and uploaded once a connection was restored.”

Most households invite at least one television into their homes. It’s almost impossible to buy one without smart TV features; because most television shows are streamed over the internet these days, they’re usually online. You could leave the TV offline while connecting it to a separate box like an Apple TV, but it’ll keep nagging you to connect.

The contract should look like this: you pay for a TV and it shows you stuff. The idea that it will scan your local network for devices, determine what content you like to watch, and maybe even listen to you using a built-in microphone is not something that anybody signs up for. Someone somewhere at LG has been so incentivized to make a graph go up and to the right that they have decided that basic ethical tenets like privacy and transparency aren’t worth holding on to.

That’s particularly important in a world where the Department of Homeland Security has created Minority Report-style Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams who instruct police to pull people over based on profiled data like their financial activity, despite there being no evidence that they have committed a crime. Data from disparate sources is routinely bought by law enforcement and agencies like DHS in order to create these sorts of profiles; a connected TV in your home could easily contribute. Are you watching the wrong kind of content? Automatic Content Recognition could rat you out. Are the devices connected to your home network outside of the norm? Up goes a flag.

So that’s homes. But most offices have TVs installed somewhere, too. Consider that an installed smart TV could easily be snooping on network devices, content, and even video calls conducted over these screens. Some more sophisticated offices will have them set to a less privileged network or insist on them remaining offline; most will dutifully connect them up. The result is a live microphone and content recognition tech installed in newsrooms, universities, non-profits, and businesses around the country.

Manufacturers like LG can sell this data. They will likely argue that it keeps TV prices down – and maybe that’s true. But this reporting comes after LG promised regulators in Texas to stop collecting viewing data without informed consent; there’s a second mic that may continue recording even when the main microphone setting has been turned off. They’ve shown they cannot be trusted. This kind of invisible data gathering should be illegal. Nobody signed up to be spied on; they just want to watch TV.

AI safety is designed in the West, and failing users everywhere

Amnesty International believes that Facebook was complicit in the genocide against the Rohingya people in Myanmar:

“In 2017, the Rohingya were killed, tortured, raped, and displaced in the thousands as part of the Myanmar security forces’ campaign of ethnic cleansing. In the months and years leading up to the atrocities, Facebook’s algorithms were intensifying a storm of hatred against the Rohingya which contributed to real-world violence.”

It wasn’t that anyone at Facebook actively wanted to enable a genocide: they just didn’t care about not enabling one. Their teams were warned at least fifteen times, but mitigating this obvious harm was deprioritized in favor of other things. They were focused on their own world, with its epicenter in Menlo Park, California. Ultimately, although Facebook was not the source of the genocide, its use contributed significantly, leading to Rohingya deaths. By prioritizing growth in Myanmar but not staffing for local needs, it invested in its valuation rather than preventing harm in a country it didn’t care about.

So it’s more than a little concerning to see AI vendors making the same mistakes. As Rina Chandran writes in Rest of World, failures in the Global South caused by Silicon-Valley-centric product development are becoming more common:

“For example, in Tigrinya, spoken by about 9 million people in Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, machine translation rendered smallpox as syphilis, gonorrhea as diabetes and ‘you have been given intravenous antibiotics’ as ‘you have been given intravenous insecticides.’”

While international efforts like the Bletchley Declaration aim to mitigate what are considered to be frontier risks of AI, it asks for little accountability for the other harms that inevitably arise from product teams that aren’t rooted in the interests, needs, norms, and values of diverse international communities. Those harms can add up to become deep wounds in themselves, but it’s also worth asking another question.

As Rest of World points out:

“At the heart of the issue ‘is the question of who gets to define what counts as a safety problem in the first place,’ Elizabeth Orembo, a fellow at Research ICT Africa, a think tank, told Rest of World. Big tech firms tend to focus on model risks such as deception, autonomous behavior, cyber capabilities, and aiding bioweapons, she said. They do not pay much attention to deployment risks including discrimination, exclusion, surveillance, language failures, and the inability of affected communities to seek remediation.”

Can affected communities be co-owners of those risk frameworks, including the resulting product roadmaps, or are they, once again, just expected to let technology happen to them?

Facebook was warned fifteen times that it was doing the wrong thing in Myanmar, and still did nothing. AI companies are retreating from even the weak commitments they previously made. They need to be forced to do the right thing: if not by markets and investors, then by international regulation.

Weeknote #2017 - Robb Knight • Posts • Atom Feed

2026-09-11T15:54:33.000Z

The St Jude Fundraiser passed $150k overall and we hit $6k on ours last night. We still have drawing slots available and some sticker news is coming soon. Donate here.

Stop Omarchy is a well-cited resource by Brennan explaining exactly why Omarchy is more than just a Linux distro run by a facist.

I caught some of the most recent Dennis the Menace show on TV and I can't believe they made him look like this.

This dotgrid desk mat is also a whiteboard of sorts. If I didn't always use my St Jude × Relay mat, I'd be getting one of these. via SimpleBits

I am obsessed with payphone tag a game that can only exist because all payphones are free in Australia. Go check out the map, it's amazing. via Hemispheric Views #171.

Veronica, of Veronica Explains, did a great video on setting up a podcast site using Eleventy. Definitely not linking this because I got a mention. Nope.

The Ocarina of Time remake looks pretty good but there's no way I'm buying a Switch 2 just for that. I should go back and actually finish this game, I've never made it past the water temple.

Zach came up with a really smart way to have one single opengraph entry point that does all the opengraph images for his site. Furious I didn't think of this.

This breakdown of Iron Man's opening scene is wonderful.

Juhis put up a single page webring implmentation — always worth keeping things as simple as this if you can.

Return to Land of Eem - Joel's Log Files

2026-09-11T15:40:00.000Z

Make sure to read the first adventure of this journey!.

Six months after the first campaign. We finally sat around the table once again, and played Land of Eem! for the second time.

We had set a couple of dates before to meet up, and even a session zero where some of my players made new characters, but we didn’t get to play for months. After all, when a couple of party members are still of young age, you can only do so much! Plus, we could only align after church and sometimes other activities would take precedence.

This time some things are different, I purchased the Deluxe Edition Box Set, and I was able to use the official GM Screen, the map and the pysical core rulebook!

The rulebook comes with a starting adventure: Wally’s Waffles and Rats, which is quite different from the one included in the Quickstart guide played last time. Spoilers ahead if you plan to play this with your own friends! But don’t worry much, it will not go the same.

First off all, I went very much not ready for this. I had the character sheets, I didn’t read them, I had all the rulebook, I didn’t bookmark any important pages for reference before the game.

I didn’t remember a lot, I just went straight into the game, hoping for the best, and this is how it went!

The adventure continues!

I did a half-decent introduction into the world of Land of Eem once again, focusing on the Used T’Be Forest and Wally’s Waffles and Wourgs. a restaurant that’s about to shutdown, because Wally lost his property deed and some conglomerate wants to claim his terrain as theirs. The whole thing happens during one last celebration, giving Waffles to everyone who comes arond before the bad guys arrive tomorrow to tear it down.

The adventure started quickly. The party of characters kind of went straight into the quest without speaking to any of the NPC’s in Wally’s restaurant. I offerend a couple of options and they did chat a bit, but I have to admit I wasn’t doing my best coming up with dialogues of my own and I want to blame the adventure design a bit, since it appears like Wally approaches the party and tells them everything they need from the start (honestly fine for a first adventure though).

Of course, I still could have pushed them a bit to participate in some of the activities inside the tavern, like Wally’s Howling Hot Challenge.

There’s another problem for me when it comes to the English naming scheme of pretty much everything in this fantasy land, since it kinda feels like it references things not in my language, but no biggie.

Last time I didn’t really bring up the party members, but I saw Daniel’s post—he went through this very same adventure with his family so give it a read!!—doing that and I thought I’d steal the format. They introduced to each other and said some things too, though it was not as detailed and a little bit rushed.

Xavi the Bard, played by youngest in the group.
Maujii the Gnome, a newcomer on this campaign!
Cube the Dungeoneer, played by the oldest in the group, a gelatinous goo.
Wibak the Wizard, a new mushroom character from the guy who played Loyal Chum last session.
Lyra the Rascal, played by my sister’s boyfriend.

Another thing, we kind of forgot the special abilities of each class for most of the adventure, but some things came in handy on a couple of occassions.

After my party got the info about the deed and those details, they headed into the storage room. For some reason, my party was always scared to go through doors, and they had some trouble deciding who would go first. This is where something like the negative/positive character traits would have come in handy, but I kind of forgot to ask about that.

By now, I forgot who entered first, but well, the events are what matters more here. The room was filled with boxes and the like, so my characters did a search, found some strong-smelling mustard, a torch and not much else.

Walking there, they stumbled with an underground worm, which bit on the leg of one of the party members. Trying to pull it away, another character slipped and ended up hitting against the corner of a box, that hurt quite a bit, but eventually they managed to scare away the worm-thing.

The mustard was supposed to be useful to keep animals away, but they never even tried to use it!

With the torch in hand, they continued forward. They slightly opened the door to a room filled with wine bottles, but they saw some rats and tried to shut the door. However, one of the party members pushed the other, stumbling very close to the now angered rats. They still managed to run away though, and headed elsewhere.

The next room was a bit of an office space, with papers, an armor stand, and a bottled ship model, which was actually a magical item that becomes real sized when put in water! The armor in the statue was small, and the gnome in the party decided to keep it. I have to admit I completely forgot how defense and combat at all worked but anyway.

There was this huge hole in the wall that appeared to be dug by some animals, it was clear the rats the party saw before would not be the only ones in their way. At the end of the small tunnel, my party found a bloodied dynamite stick, which was a bit creepy, but useful.

They were about to get out of that tunnel when the party found themselves on a pickle, the floor ended, and the tunnel could only go down, they would have to descend thirty foot deep. For this they tried to use some rope, an item a character had in their inventory! None of them attempted a jump, they simply tied the gnome to the end of the rope, holding the torch, although they let go of it and it ended up all the way to the bottom. Thanks to a lucky roll, the torch did not go out, at least they saw the bottom now!

My party was once again, very scared, and since the rope was long, they decided they would let (or force, honestly) their gnome friend to walk alone forward and shout about whatever he could see in the way.

Underground, everything was a network of tunnels, and going through them proved a little challenging while tied to a rope. There were also some rats that showed up, but that Maujii managed to scare off. They tried a couple routes without success and eventually Wibak the Wizard saw fit to use a magic spell!

Magic Spells in Land of Eem’s Wizard class work a little weird, but he can basically say whatever he wants and as long as it makes sense for me as GM, I can let it slide. For some reason, his spell said something akin to “let the stars guide our way!” and well, the spell worked! Except that they were underground and there are no stars visible here—the wizard wasn’t very smart.

Eventually the gnome walked too far, and nobody noticed they ran out of rope, and that it had fallen to the ground and the gnome pulled it. They were now stuck 30 foot above the ground.

At last, they had no rope, but they did have the courage to push Cube the Gelatinous Goo and use his gooey properties to yelp. Using him as a trampoline, everyone managed to jump down almost unscathed. Not without having to scare off a few rats that showed up.

They finally made it to a new bifurcation, and they headed to a place full of mushrooms, only to backtrack when the mushrooms turned out to have very sharp teeth.

My scared friends went carefully the other way, a dark room with an inky smell and some black thread all over the place… Two of them, the Gnome and the Bard, went forward, only to get stuck on the thread, which turned out to be a black spider web made of ink. Only then they noticed some strange oval-shaped stones, which turned out to be Inkpot Spider Eggs, and at the distance, four eyes opened.

Before the creature got any closer, they had the brilliant idea of using the dynamite stick and blow everything up. They didn’t get a good throw and the blast got them unstuck of the web, and thrown away all the way onto the dangerous mushroom field. Thankfully, the rest of the party managed to catch them as they flung, and the spider nest was destroyed!

They moved forward, confident in their mission, and here’s where I as the GM, made a bit of a nasty move. The Spider survived, and she was also very much in shock, after seeing how all her eggs were now gone… A conflict started, and it was time for the party to pray for their lives.

It’s what I would say except they where exceptionally good at parley, and after a short conversation with the Spider, ~~my sister’s boyfriend~~, I mean, the Rascal managed to trick her into believing that the neighbouring mushrooms caused the explosion. The Spider told them she still had some eggs but that were stolen by some rats further deep, so the party offered to at least save those, and that way they felt a little less bad about the whole thing.

The Spider let them pass and they found themselves in front of a chasm. They had recovered the rope from earlier, so they were able to go through it without much difficulty.

In front of them, a cave of crystals shone due to the light of the torch—which has managed to survive the whole way through somehow—soon after, they saw the skeleton of a goblin, with a hat and a document with orders to steal a property deed, from Krog and Sons Inc—another company that also wants Wally’s property. As the party realizes the fortune the presence of the crystals implies, they hear the sound of big steps approaching.

A giant rat with a not so giant crown on its head is seen, proclaiming to be the mighty and powerful King Klik. Clearly in possession of the property deed that belongs to Wally. All of my players were kind of scared to get into combat, so they bet everything on parley and did their best to convince King Klik.

The players learned that apparently, some of the meat used by Wally for the restaurant was actually made out of rat, which is something the party took very seriously—they wanted to blackmail poor Wally. However, they first had to get the property deed from King Klik.

How did they convince the rat to give it away, you ask?

Very simple, after a very lucky roll, my ~~evil sister’s boyfriend~~ I mean, the lucky and mischievious Rascal, used the magic bottled ship and inspired King Klik to become the captain of their own pirate ship, with a crew of rats under his command!

Somehow, that worked out! They managed to avoid conflict and they were able to recover the lost Spider eggs as well. King Klik and the rest of the rats dug up a new tunnel heading to the south, and we may eventually find what happened to them!

Without a lot of trouble left, returning to the surface to meet Wally was easy. The party decided to confront him about the rat meat, but I wasn’t feeling like making Wally such a bad guy and so his innocence was proven after checking the refrigerators.

After that ruckus, the party continued to enjoy Waffles for another while, and the adventure was over, for now!

Finishing words

Returning to Land of Eem was incredibly fun. With the inclusion of two new players into the party—and the absence of one of them—dynamics definitely changed a little bit.

I honestly was feeling guilty about making the Inkpot Spider sentient, and even the party felt bad about the lie. This is a friendly reminder for everyone that setting the tone of the adventure on a Session Zero is very important. This genocidal event did leave everyone feeling uncomfortable, and even though we joked about it and moved on, the rest of the session was a bit sour.

There are many ways in which this could have gone better. First, actually understanding conflict. Had I done a better job learning that, I could have conflicts develop in more interesting ways. For a while I forgot about the limited amount of Parley one can do, which is how pretty much everyone in my party got to try and convince the Spider and King Klik through a variety of ways without having to fight at all.

If they had gone into regular combat, the Spider would have been a worthy enemy, and I even could have made them promise to save the rest of the eggs or something as a last wish. Making the Spider just a mindless beast would have worked out fine, defeating or making it run away in an environment that is kill or be killed is more easy to justify, without guilt being involved.

Some things of note and lessons I learned, even if I may be repeating myself:

I really need to pay more attention to the character traits, and use them to move the story in more fun or chaotic directions
Understanding combat, seriously!
Handling things better when the party splits up so everyone has something to do or react to.
Sticking to an atmosphere everyone is comfortable with.
Trying to work around the rolls we get instead of rerolling until I like the result (yeah we did this sometimes).
Keeping items in mind! We used the rope and the torch but other useful things were never looked at.
Get better at describing environemnts and pushing the players to explore instead of peeking at a room and not going in.
Push the party to stay in character, there were a few immersion breaking moments I wish I’d managed better.

However, for something that was very improvised, I’m very happy things worked out okay, I’m not going to be too hard on myself and will simply try to learn!

As always, any advice is appreciated! and I hope you enjoyed.

This is day 33 of #100DaysToOffload

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2026-09-11 15:02: Because a basic sitemap would be boring! https://kevquirk.com/sitemap - Kev Quirk

2026-09-11T14:02:00.000Z

Because a basic sitemap would be boring!

https://kevquirk.com/sitemap

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[RSS Club] Sneak peek at new DOI functionality - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-09-11T11:34:12.000Z

If you're reading this, you're part of RSS Club! A top secret society of cool people who subscribe to my feed. This post is not available on the web or via email.

I've been playing about with Rogue Scholar. It's an open-access publication which allows blogs to get a persistent Digital Object Identifier.

If I've set everything up correctly (not a given) then all new posts on this site will be issued with a DOI. Hopefully, this will not include RSS Club posts - as I'd like to keep them as a special private treat just between you and me.

I'm in the process of writing a WordPress plugin to retrieve the DOI and add it to posts. I'm not sure if there's a sensible way to add it into an RSS feed, but I'll give it a go.

Will this be useful? I don't know. My posts sometimes get referenced in proper academic works - I'm not sure if this'll make any difference to that. But it is nice to experiment with these things.

If you have any experience with DOI or Rogue Scholar - please get in touch.

Thanks for being a member of RSS Club - you rock 😃

Two more newsrooms are suing OpenAI. It's complicated. - Werd I/O

2026-09-10T22:39:24.000Z

Link: Seattle Times and Newsday are the latest publications to sue OpenAI and Microsoft, by Anthony Ha in TechCrunch

I have some complicated feelings about these ongoing newsroom lawsuits against AI companies. The latest comes from The Seattle Times and Newsday. From the lawsuit itself:

“AI products like ChatGPT and CoPilot are touted as producers of content, but in fact they are rapacious consumers, devouring human-authored content and delivering back to the world copies and derivative imitations of that same original content they consumed to achieve their commercial objectives.”

The government has argued that training LLMs is fair use, and organizations like the EFF have agreed with it. The EFF’s argument in particular is important to take note of:

“The “market dilution” theory would eviscerate not only the fair use doctrine, but also other limits on copyright that work specifically to prevent rightsholders from unfairly suppressing competition by claiming broad ownership over tropes, genres, styles, and so on. In other words, publishers would wield unchecked veto power over any expression that might conceivably compete with a work they own.”

The Newsday and Seattle Times lawsuits seek to protect corporate interests in a rapidly-changing market, with journalist reward effectively a trickle-down benefit. The licensing deals emerging as the market solution — among them OpenAI with News Corp, Axel Springer, the FT; Amazon with the New York Times — are corporate deals. Individual journalists and freelancers whose work constitutes the value see little of it, except in that it’s revenue that theoretically allows their employers to continue to exist and employ them. We probably need a new deal for creators that touches several levels.

These are all big topics. The shift we have to contend with is seismic in a way that hasn’t been rivaled since the advent of the web itself (and in some ways the impact on creators and publishers may be bigger than that). Each newsroom lawsuit is a kind of shot across the bow; the substantive conversations we need to be having are more expansive. But, in a political environment where AI vendors are aligned with the administration, and in a world where so many people want to be excited about AI in not very nuanced ways, I wonder if the conversations and actions that would lead to more equitable treatment and compensation for creators will be allowed to happen at all. Newsrooms should protect themselves, but they should make sure they’re looking out for the people who create their value, too.

Analogue Defaults - Robb Knight • Posts • Atom Feed

2026-09-10T21:38:32.000Z

A few months ago, Brad came up with analog defaults loosely based on the Hemispheric Views app defaults. I've been meaning to write mine up but having sat on it for a while I don't think it's worth me having a dedicated page like my app defaults or /now. My personal usage is better served by my #currentlyInked tag for fountain pens and this post as a general overview.

On a Sunday evening if I have time, I sit down and pick out new pens for the week for each category I carry in my Rickshaw Filmore.

Fountain pen: I use a single pen each week for my journal although I'll sometimes grab a second one with a different ink colour. Most of my pens are fine or extra fine nib. Currently: Pink Pilot Prera F nib.
Pencil: I'm doing more sketches and drawings, especially this month and next, so I always have a pencil or two on me. Currently: Rotring 600 black.
Fineliner: This never changes, Sakura Micron is the only way to fly. Uni Pin is fine in a pinch but it's not what I like. I also enjoy using the Lumos Pro Duo.
Standard pen: I switch between ballpoints, gels, whatever tickles my pickle that week. Right now? Banana pen.
Heading pen: I always use a coloured pen of some kind for headings in my journal. I pick from Gelly Rolls, [Mattehops](https://www.pentel.co.uk/product/pentel-mattehop-1-0mm-k110/, Pentel dual metallics, and Mildliners.
Journal: I've tried a bunch of different journals but the one I keep coming back to is Scribbles that Matter Pro.

2026-09-10 13:49: The constant outrage on #Mastodon (and maybe other social sites?) for is so tiring. - Kev Quirk

2026-09-10T12:49:00.000Z

The constant outrage on #Mastodon (and maybe other social sites?) for [bad thing of the day] is so tiring.

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Put an AV test at the start of your slides - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-09-10T11:34:10.000Z

For years, I've had a test-card at the start of my slides. Before I start my talk, I can immediately see if the aspect ratio is wrong, colours are off, or any other visual issues with the presentation.

A few years ago I was invited to give a talk and was assured that the venue was set up for audio as well as video. I dutifully filled my slides with with demo videos containing sound. None of them worked. Somewhere between the HDMI output of the presentation laptop and the speakers, the audio went AWOL.

Ever since then, I've placed an audio test slide at the start of my presentations. There's a good range of videos on YouTube - pick one you like, embed it into your slides, and play it before your talk starts.

Over the years, I've found the following "bugs" with event AV setups:

No sound.
Only left channel working.
Severe latency between audio and video.
Garbled sound.
Sound routing to the room but not the livestream.
Feedback / howl around when sound playing.

Whether events are professionally run or community managed, you can never guarantee that sound will work. Add subtitles to your videos. If possible, add a sign-language interpreter. And, if all else fails, hold your microphone to your laptop's speakers.

Visual; textual - James' Coffee Blog

2026-09-10T00:00:00.000Z

My home page is a poem. I designed it in this way to explore the extent to which a literary medium – a poem – could be used for navigation, for way finding. Poems help me see the world differently, to navigate thoughts. So too does navigation: every link is a bridge to a new place, to new thoughts. While the style is unconventional and less clear than traditional navigation bars, I love it. My home page brings me closer to poetry, and reminds me of my love of words.

For the last few weeks, I have had an idea in the back of my mind: what if my home page poem had a few icons in the background that served as visual cues to different stanzas in the poem? These icons might make it easier to find particular sections of the poem. The would also add a more visual dimension to the poem. While poems are visual in themselves – the spaces between words and stanzas, indentations, the lengths of lines, the space the poem takes on a page, the typography used, and the symbols used, among other factors, all influence how we read a poem – images add a new dimension.

One of the things I love most about the web is that I can ask myself “what would this look like?” and then, through code and tinkering, bring the idea to life. I spent some time this morning searching through Phosphor Icons, an MIT-licensed icon set I use for, among other things, the icons in my mobile navigation bar. I decided on a flower for the first stanza, which speaks of stories and poems and ideas and joy, a notebook for the second, where my most recent blog posts are listed, and footsteps for the third stanza, which is more about navigation. I am not fully set on footsteps for the third stanza, as they don’t quite relate to the invitation to say hello at the beginning of the stanza. Indeed, part of the creative challenge of this concept is to find an image that matches many words.

Here is what I designed:

Faint blue icons appear on alternating sides of each stanza: right, left, right. The icons are all at slight angles. An opacity is applied so that the icons do not stand out as much as the words in the poem. The icons complement the text in each stanza to varying extents.

Thinking about the idea of adding images to a poem brought me back to a list I started curating in the last month of places where words exist next to images. Words appear on album covers as part of the art designed to represent the album. Words appear in front of or near images on book covers. In museums, words appear on some paintings (i.e. signatures, or even, in some cases, stories), next to art (i.e. on information plaques), below art (i.e. on a label on the frame of a painting), and more. Words and images, although separate modalities, appear together so often. Indeed, I have started to add more images to my home page that was originally all-text except for my website mascot; the images I have since added – two buttons – convey information in a way I can’t with words, but also serve as a complement to what is on the page.

While I haven’t rolled out this design on my home page – and I’m not sure yet if I will – it has been interesting to explore the intersection of the visual and the textual in this way. Indeed, my poem also explores a third dimension – navigation – through the links it uses. It is fascinating to try and extend a literary medium with the affordances that hypertext allows. What if a poem revealed a piece of art every time you hovered over a stanza?

My main reservation with the icon design is that it may distract from the words. But it also creates new visual anchors. There is a lot to think about.

This crossing of disciplines relates to a conversation I had earlier this year with an uncle when I mentioned that I don’t think the sciences and the arts are disconnected, but rather are complementary. I can’t remember his exact words, but I was left feeling excited about how someone else also didn’t see them as separate buckets. Similarly, it is interesting to think of words and images not only in the context of each modality, but in the context of all the spaces in between. Indeed, we already have picture books, prose poetry, technical writing, visual communication, and many other forms that combine two concepts or traditions together.

way finding Phosphor Icons

A Year of Silksong - Joel's Log Files

2026-09-09T18:10:00.000Z

It’s been a whole year now since Hollow Knight: Silksong finally released, and it has been a delightful journey.

I wasn’t there for a lot of the hype around it, I was more than happy playing Hollow Knight in the span of a year or so, and beat it only a few days after Silksong was finally released to the public on September 4, 2025, a day after I posted my review.

I was perfectly aware of the meme though, and the time it took for this sequel to finally show up, so I was very clearly hyped, and I had decided that I would buy and start Silksong on the very first day, the first time I even considered doing something like that.

Waiting in line is something I’ve never done. It has always been a bit of a dream of mine, to wait for a whole day behind the closed doors of a videogame shop, like those old videos on YouTube where people are camping for a whole night just to be among the first to get Halo 2 for the Xbox back in the day, though in this case it would be a digital game I guess.

Of course, we all know how that went. The servers on every single gaming platform were overwhelmed for hours, as people tried and failed to purchase this twenty dollar game. I was trying to get to it on the Nintendo Switch, but I failed to do so.

Thankfully, I was actually at work, and I would have been unable to play the game immediately anyway, so I simply waited until later to purchase it and finally get started with it.

The progress I’ve made so far in the span of a year has been… slow. I pick it up when I want and leave it be when I feel like trying something else. I’ve not pushed myself t play it when I don’t want to, and I have even abandoned it for months at a time, until things line up and I can return to it.

Most of my progress has been consistently shared on a long thread that has been around since the game first came out, lots of screenshots and recordings can be seen of the most important steps of my journey through Pharloom.

In case you somehow don’t know this, Silksong is a Metroidvania game with Soulslike elements, in case you don’t know what that means, you basically get lost in a world that is gated by hard to reach areas, so you have to get new powers that let you make progress. Oh, and you also have to fight against enemies and bosses that will kill you in three hits. Incredibly fun!

At this point I could write a review for the game, but since I’m still going through Act 3, I want to finish that first too. Kind of funny considering I didn’t go through a lot of Hollow Knight, avoiding the Path of Pain and much of the DLC content, but well, things happen, I may even revisit that game later on.

As of today, I have been playing this game for over 80 hours, making it the most played title in my Nintendo Switch, surpassing The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy. Both games still have a bunch of playtime left for me to go through, so I am wondering how long it will be for me to get through it all.

Of course, some titles like Minecraft and Monster Hunter Freedom Unite are still hundreds of hours ahead, but they are completely different and I’ve also played them for many years so they have a big advantage.

Silksong is a triumph, something truly special that I am really happy to be a part of. Dare I say it’s the only game whose release date I have memorized! So of course I just wanted to yap a little bit about it.

Definitely not a game for everyone, even after all the updates that have balanced some of the difficulty, but if you are up for a challenge, it is always worth a try!

Hollow Knight: Silksong, downloading on my Nintendo Switch, a year ago!

This is day 32 of #100DaysToOffload

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