scaturient
Mar. 16th, 2026 12:01 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
wordsmithdaily_feedadjective: 1. Overflowing. 2. Overly demonstrative; effusive.
wordsmithdaily_feed
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Mar. 15th, 2026 10:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sorcyressWe're bad at everything. Let's write down the things we've done today:
***
I wrote all of the above earlier. I've since finished all the laundry --it appears that the shirts no longer smell, so success-- and gone to demo team and hung out with Maia some, so all of that is quite good.
I couldn't maintain GOGOGO the entire day, but also like, I shouldn't have to? I shouldn't in general? It is important to do mindless fuckoff stuff as well as Srs Useful Stuff? Yeah.
I hope you are well. <3
~Sor
MOOP!
- Brushed hair
- Braided hair
- Ate Breakfast, also caught up on comics and even read a bit of Dreamwidth finally (I miss y'all, it's another symptom of the same Problem that is my brain right now.)
- Unloaded dishwasher, reloaded dishwasher
- Brought the load of laundry that's been in the dryer for three days upstairs finally (thanks Rey for basketing it, sorry to have left it)
- Brought a bunch of laundry downstairs, started it (load two is just in the washer now, and load one in the dryer)
- Switched my stuffies from their hamper into a steralite bin, eventually this will turn into like...one of those ottomans that opens up and you can store blankets (or stuffed animals) in but then it has a surface instead of being an amorphous blob sticking out of the top of a hamper, bonus, was able to use the hamper for my spare quilts/heavy blankets, double bonus, went through the stuffies a little and have some I can maybe give away.
- Folded most of the laundry from that old load, while putting it away, successfully went through underwear drawer and pulled out the "good enough to keep but I'm not going to wear it regularly" stuff to put in the "save for Pinewoods" box
(At Pinewoods I would like to have approximately three pairs of underwear a day. If I do something absolutely batshit crazy this year, that will change, but I want to have the option to be able to wear clean underwear always.) - Also socks, pulled out a handful of pairs I don't like so I stop wearing them by accident and being all :/ about it, also pulled out all the pairs that I know have big holes (they're currently due for the trash, but I may put some into my scraps bag instead)
- Got stuck in a serious yak shaving rabbit hole but I think I have finally managed to put the additional music I wanted onto my phone, and also I have taken off last year's photos, which is important because now my phone should run smoother? Anyways, that took forever but now I can listen to music while I do additional chores? Seems fake. I'm into it!
- I also reset the "accessories" boxen, which technically go with socks --long stockings, tights, kilt hose and accessories, suspenders and belts, scarves/pashminas. It's been a while, so that was good.
- I'm now sitting down to eat lunch. Laundry load two is on my bed upstairs to put away, load three is in the dryer, four in the washer. (I'm aiming for like...six? It wouldn't be so high, but a) I have been slipping on the "own more than one set of sheets so that you don't get trapped with an unmade bed by having all your sheets dirty at once" and so I need to catch up there *and* there's been some sort of funky smell in my t-shirts boxen for a couple months and I'm not sure what's up with that, but I think step one is probably just wash _all_ my t-shirts.
On the plus side, that latter problem doesn't seem to be anywhere in my dresser except my shirts, so that's a good sign? I guess? I mean, mostly it just means there's probably not, like, a dead mouse behind my dresser or something (a thing I would not be able to rationally deal with)).
***
I wrote all of the above earlier. I've since finished all the laundry --it appears that the shirts no longer smell, so success-- and gone to demo team and hung out with Maia some, so all of that is quite good.
I couldn't maintain GOGOGO the entire day, but also like, I shouldn't have to? I shouldn't in general? It is important to do mindless fuckoff stuff as well as Srs Useful Stuff? Yeah.
I hope you are well. <3
~Sor
MOOP!
and now for something completely different
Mar. 15th, 2026 05:01 pmmuccamukkThe YouTube algorithm has seen my interest in figure skating and started offering me classical ballet (I think, always difficult to tell how one gets where one ends up).
So I've been watching bits and pieces of that, as well as all of The Royal Ballet's Cinderella. I therefore offer you some fully random observations, from someone who never got into any kind of dance as a kid, and therefore knows baaaaaasically nothing about the topic. (I have been to several ballets in person, The Nutcracker of course, and the Winnipeg Ballet's Svengali..)
Which is all I have for now.
So I've been watching bits and pieces of that, as well as all of The Royal Ballet's Cinderella. I therefore offer you some fully random observations, from someone who never got into any kind of dance as a kid, and therefore knows baaaaaasically nothing about the topic. (I have been to several ballets in person, The Nutcracker of course, and the Winnipeg Ballet's Svengali..)
- I like classical ballet (I'm not really watching modern) because it's quite ridiculous, and unconnected to anything that has ever happened on the face of the Earth.
- I have learned that there's dialogue! Classical ballet has a kind of sign language, done through gestures, so that the dancers can explain plot points such as "We make evil men dance until they die!" and "This lake is made of my mother's tears!"
- There does not seem to be much point to the male principal dancers. They have thighs like birch trees, which allows them to leap impressively high in the air, but they don't spin around on nothing but their big toe, which makes them less interesting to watch. Their main purposes seems to be to move the plot along, and act as a "Ballerina holder upper."
- Maybe it's just because I'm not good enough at reading the mime, but the romantic dances are... not very romantic. They mostly seem to be the ballerina holder upper holding up the ballerina while she spins around on her big toe.
- I don't know if there's non-transphobic/misogynistic way to do the comedy roles where male dancers play female characters, but Cinderella sure didn't manage it.
- The plot of Giselle is really interesting (boy meets girl, girl dies when she finds out that boy has, girl joins chorus of vengeful ghosts, vengeful ghosts attempt to kill boy, girl saves boy), and I wonder if there have been modern retellings like there have of other old fairytales.
- I'm pretty sure the human body is not designed to do any of that.
Which is all I have for now.
New Vid: Jonathan Pine/Teddy Dos Santos Fan Video - Can’t Pretend
Mar. 15th, 2026 11:15 ambrokenframe posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
viddingLanguage Policy at the Chinese National People’s Congress (NPC)
Mar. 15th, 2026 05:25 pmlanguagelog_feedChina to Enshrine Xi-Era Ethnic Policy in New Law
by Chenghao Wei, NPC Observer (3/5/26)
The following is the introductory paragraph to the prospectus for the NPC's proceedings next week:
Next week, China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) is expected to adopt a Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress (Law) [民族团结进步促进法]—designed to codify General Secretary Xi Jinping’s new orthodoxy for governing China’s ethnic minorities. That doctrine, known as the “Important Thinking on Improving and Strengthening Ethnic Work,” reflects the “Second-Generation Ethnic Policies” promoted by several prominent scholars. In a nutshell, this new “assimilationist” approach aims “not just to strengthen citizens’ sense of belonging to a larger, unified Chinese nation under the Party but also to mute expression of other—in the Party’s view, competing—identities.”
Chapter II is where the plan focuses on language policy:
Chapter II (Building a Shared Spiritual Home)lays the ideological foundation for the assimilation project. It affirms the policy of fostering identification with “the great motherland, the Chinese nation, Chinese culture, the Communist Party of China, and socialism with Chinese characteristics” through patriotic education, education in official historical narratives, publicity of “the fine Zhonghua traditional culture,” and promotion of “Chinese cultural symbols and image of the Chinese nation” (arts. 11–14).
This Chapter then affords language and education particular attention. It incorporates the relevant rules of the newly revised Law on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language [国家通用语言文字法], but often goes beyond them. For instance, it codifies the goal of having preschoolers become proficient in Putonghua and requires that Chinese characters be displayed more prominently than minority scripts if both must be used in public (art. 15, paras. 2, 4). It also tasks the education and ethnic affairs ministries with developing textbooks on “the community of the Chinese nation,” while requiring all schools to integrate that concept into their curricula (art. 16, paras. 1–2; art. 18, para. 1). This Chapter does vow to support the standardization, digitization, and preservation of minority texts (art. 15, para. 5), but the goal of such investment is to “protect languages from being completely forgotten rather than protecting their ongoing, everyday use by living people.”
Finally, this Chapter broadly requires media, internet service providers, families, among others, to promote the Party’s ethnic policy (arts. 19–21). Parents are reminded of their duty to provide lawful family education and are prohibited from “instilling in minors ideas detrimental to ethnic unity and progress” (art. 20, para. 2).
There's not much ambiguity about where they're headed with regard to language.
Selected readings
- "NPC Delegate Proposes To End Foreign Language Translation" (5/31/20) — that was six years ago; it didn't happen
- "Badge of honor: Language Log is blocked in China" (12/26/19) — with an account of other major banned websites: Wikipedia (all languages), The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Hackernews, Imgur, Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and many other invaluable websites were already off-limits to Chinese citizens for years. The internet in China is severely decimated by the CCP government.
- "The Arithmetic of Party-Speak: The 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party is just around the corner — and that means the machine of political discourse is humming away at high speed" (8/28/17).
- "The mind-numbing official-speak of the CCP" (8/29/17
[Thanks to June Teufel Dreyer]
Cetacean chatter
Mar. 15th, 2026 03:10 pmlanguagelog_feedWell, I'm not so sure about this:
What I find much more interesting and compelling is the video embedded in this article:
Humpback whale songs are structured like human language
Languagelike patterns in whale songs could make them easier for whales to learn
By Alexa Robles-Gil, Science (6 Feb 2025)
I strongly encourage LL readers to watch / listen to the video. What you will hear are eerie, enchanting humanoid sounds: eructations, belches, burps, whistles, squeaks, croaks, groans, melodic glides; repeated bilabials, velar stops, and other phonemic signals that, at least to my ear, may convey meaning.
The mysterious grunts and moans of the humpback whale have long captivated humans—so much so that we put recordings of them onto the Voyager spacecraft to convey the sounds of Earth to other life forms. A new study published today in Science reveals an unexpected similarity between human and humpback vocalizations: The songs have a statistical structure similar to that of human language.
“This is a really elegant paper,” says whale biologist Shane Gero of Carleton University, who was not involved with the work. “When we listen long enough and when we look, we find more complexity in these animal communication systems.” The findings suggest this structure might exist because whale songs, just like human language, are communication systems transmitted through social learning, Gero says.
Some animals, such as dogs, make their vocalizations instinctively—they don’t need to learn how to bark. But like human language, humpback whale song is culturally transmitted. Male humpbacks learn the songs, thought to be used to attract mates, from other males. Also like language, humpback whale songs have patterns and structure—individual “elements,” such as a single grunt, combine to form phrases, strung together into “themes” that make up a song, which can last 30 minutes.
So does whale song have some of the features that make it easier for human babies to learn language? To find out, whale biologist Ellen Garland from the University of St. Andrews and her team turned to babies for inspiration. Infants, confronted with a stream of nonstop language, must figure out where the boundaries of words are. They learn to discern individual words by detecting statistical patterns. The sounds within a given word are repeated often, making this chain of sounds predictable—but it’s less predictable which word will come next, so these “dips” in probability hint at a word boundary. Garland and her team segmented recordings of whale song using the same technique.
…
When Garland’s team applied the method to 8 years’ worth of songs from a humpback population in New Caledonia, she was “dumbfounded” to find that whale song structure aligns with a pattern found in human language. Across different languages, researchers have found a predictable relationship in how often common and rare words appear in language: For instance, the most common word in English (“the”) appears twice as often as the second most common word (“of”). This statistical pattern—called Zipf’s law—is thought to make language easier to learn. And the humpback whale song showed a similar pattern. This suggests Zipf’s law might emerge in any complex, culturally transmitted communication system.
The findings don’t suggest whales have a language, where combinations of sounds have fixed meaning and join together in grammatical structures, Garland emphasizes. But the research offers scientists an “amazing window” into how this core property of human communication appears in other species.
To me, these whale sounds are not meaningless, but I have no idea what they mean.
Selected readings
- "A new look at sperm whale communication" (5/8/24)
- "Sperm whale talk" (5/15/23)
- "Orca emits speech-like sound; reporters go insane" (1/31/18)
- "Moby Zipf" (6/1/19)
- "Dolphin naming?" (5/9/06)
- "Dolphins using personal names, again" (1/23/13)
- "Cetacean needed" (3/27/24)
[h.t. Cynthia Hagstrom]
Sunday Sweets: Around the World in 80 Days
Mar. 15th, 2026 01:00 pmcakewrecks_feedIn 1873, Jules Verne published Around the World in 80 Days, the story of Phileas Fogg and his attempt to circumnavigate the globe to win a bet. Now, we can accomplish the same feat in just over two days, with another couple of days added in to get through airport security. (Well, I always manage to get behind that guy...) Today, let's slow down a little and retrace Phileas' trip.
The first thing most people think about when they hear Around the World in 80 Days is a hot air balloon. I found this amazing balloon cake with two guys who might be Phileas and his valet, Passepartout.
By Jacques Fine European Pastries
Isn't this gorgeous? Wouldn't it be great for a little circumnavigating? There's just one problem -- it never happened. There's no hot air balloon travel in the book.
Really, you can look it up.
They did take trains, though, like this beauty.
"Woo, wooooooooo... Chugga, chugga, chugga, chugga..."
They also rode a lot of steamer ships.
By Cake Central member Gingerbread_from_Germany
Don't you love the wooden decking?
Phileas even bought an elephant and hired a guide when there was a gap in the train lines in India.
By Heather Barranco's Dreamcakes
What can I say? It was a big bet -- millions in today's money.
Sadly, he didn't keep the elephant.
(I'd have found a way. Elephants who can accessorize are rare.)
So, now that we've lined up trains, ships and pachyderms, where exactly did Phileas and Passepartout go?
Well, they started in London.
Pay no attention to any perceived anachronisms -- Jules Verne was a visionary who predicted electric submarines and video conferencing. An edible double-decker bus wouldn't have stretched his imagination at all.
From London, they headed to Egypt.
Submitted by Stephanie R., photo by Jennifer Klementti Photography, baker The Cake Museum
I'm going to be extra careful the next time I peel the fondant off a cake, just in case there are precious paintings underneath.
Sadly, Phileas didn't have time to stop and read the hieroglyphics. Instead, he pressed on to India.
Just. Wow.
Even though he was on a tight deadline, he still managed to rescue his future wife there. That necessitated a rather rapid departure to Hong Kong.
Do you think anyone would notice if I took one of the dragons? They look like foil-wrapped milk chocolate.
Of course, there wasn't a lot of time to see the sights in Hong Kong, because they had to make their connection to Yokohama next.
By Krumbcakes
This is much too peaceful and zen-like to run past on the way to your next stop. If I hadn't been rooting for Phileas to win, I'd have made him stop for a nice cup of tea.
Sadly, leisurely refreshments weren't in the cards, but a trip to San Francisco was.
I really like the contrast of the razor-edged whiteness of the rest of the cake with the tumbled chaos of Lombard Street.
If Phileas had just had a pair of roller blades, he could have coasted all the way to New York, his next destination.
It's just wicked that he didn't have time to catch a show, but the schedule was getting VERY tight, and Phileas still had to get back across the Atlantic.
After inciting a mutiny and burning most of the wooden parts of a ship for steam, Phileas and friends made it to Ireland,
which, you've got to admit, was pretty lucky. (Don't worry, they appeased the Captain by paying him a boatload of money.)
Still, there was one more stop before they got their pot of gold.
So, back to London they went.
By Emmacakes
Sadly, it appeared they were a day late -- but of course, it wasn't that black and white.
They'd forgotten about the International Date Line! Upon realizing the correct date, Phileas rushed to his club and won the bet! Significantly richer, he married his lady love and settled down to a quiet life.
(Maybe he even bought a hot air balloon...)
Happy Sunday!
*****
P.S. I've been waiting for an excuse to buy these, so thought I'd share in case you have one:
Hot Air Balloon Paper Lantern Set
Wouldn't these be adorable party decorations? You get all 6 for less than $15, and there are more patterns/colors to choose from at the Amazon link.
*****
And from my other blog, Epbot:
Speak Up Saturday
Mar. 14th, 2026 12:07 pmyourlibrarian posting in tv_talk
Welcome to the weekly roundup post! What are you watching this week? What are you excited about?
Error, Error
Mar. 13th, 2026 03:17 pmyourlibrarian1) I wrote last year about the movie The Big Year, which was about birders trying to break a record in seeing the most birds that year. When I told my partner I was trying to pass 1000 wins at Solo on BGA he said, "So this is your Big Year." ( Read more... )
2) I confess I don't really follow the Oscars race or even nominees since I only see movies once in a while and usually well after they've been released, but I thought this was an interesting summation. I was particularly struck by the discussion of costs, and how chasing Oscar prestige outranks movie ticket sales, since so many potential contenders crowd into the end of year period. This almost guarantees many people will miss a number of them.
What was interesting about this survey is the data on how people have changed their opinions of last year's Oscar nominees. "Americans are much more likely now than they were last year to say they love "A Complete Unknown" (51%, up from 39%). They’re less likely to say they love "Dune: Part 2" (43%, down from 53%)."
3) On the same day in which NPR's 1A did a show on the value of acknowledging mistakes, someone also posted about The Ctrl-Z Award’ to honor researchers who correct the scientific record. This latter seems like a much needed antidote to our times (and can also be immeasurably helpful). I hope it does well.
RE: the 1A episode, here's a quote: "So, you know, theoretically, you could make a decision that was the wrong decision, but if it doesn't have a bad outcome, you're not even judging it as a mistake half the time. And that that's actually potentially the difference between a little mistake and a big mistake...we talk about this three act structure, what happened before the mistake, the mistake itself, and then how we deal with the mistake thereafter...It's not the crime. It's the cover up. Right? And that's an act three problem. But because people haven't gone through the process of saying, okay, what actually happened in act one, act two, and and now how am I gonna deal with it in act three? They make an even bigger one."
The fear of error is also talked about here: "what I see in the therapy room is sometimes it can take folks a while to really come around to admit to themselves actually that a mistake even happened because there's so much shame. It gets kind of locked up because as we've been discussing, as a culture, we do a terrible job of admitting to ourselves and to others that mistakes actually are how you learn. And so we get have so much shame that's wrapped up in it. And from that end, when there's shame, depression, anxiety, trauma, you know, are not far behind. So talking through mistakes, processing mistakes, learning not to avoid coming around to kind of, unpacking the Russian doll, if we stick with that metaphor, that's a huge piece of therapy." I can really recommend reading the episode transcript (you can also listen to the show).
4) What these incidents made me think of was fear on the Internet. "One of the phrases we like is curious, not furious. And so whether you're thinking about yourself, oh, I'm so angry at myself. Why did I do this? Or you see someone else make a mistake and you're kind of angry that they did it. The more that you can use curiosity as opposed to anger, I think we would all get along a little better. And then to your point, it's so helpful to talk with someone else. We believe you have to talk your mistakes to death. And it's helpful to write about them, sure, if you really don't have anyone with whom you can speak."( Read more... )
5) And speaking of mistakes, it's nice to have unexpected support even when you make them. ( Read more... )
2) I confess I don't really follow the Oscars race or even nominees since I only see movies once in a while and usually well after they've been released, but I thought this was an interesting summation. I was particularly struck by the discussion of costs, and how chasing Oscar prestige outranks movie ticket sales, since so many potential contenders crowd into the end of year period. This almost guarantees many people will miss a number of them.
What was interesting about this survey is the data on how people have changed their opinions of last year's Oscar nominees. "Americans are much more likely now than they were last year to say they love "A Complete Unknown" (51%, up from 39%). They’re less likely to say they love "Dune: Part 2" (43%, down from 53%)."
3) On the same day in which NPR's 1A did a show on the value of acknowledging mistakes, someone also posted about The Ctrl-Z Award’ to honor researchers who correct the scientific record. This latter seems like a much needed antidote to our times (and can also be immeasurably helpful). I hope it does well.
RE: the 1A episode, here's a quote: "So, you know, theoretically, you could make a decision that was the wrong decision, but if it doesn't have a bad outcome, you're not even judging it as a mistake half the time. And that that's actually potentially the difference between a little mistake and a big mistake...we talk about this three act structure, what happened before the mistake, the mistake itself, and then how we deal with the mistake thereafter...It's not the crime. It's the cover up. Right? And that's an act three problem. But because people haven't gone through the process of saying, okay, what actually happened in act one, act two, and and now how am I gonna deal with it in act three? They make an even bigger one."
The fear of error is also talked about here: "what I see in the therapy room is sometimes it can take folks a while to really come around to admit to themselves actually that a mistake even happened because there's so much shame. It gets kind of locked up because as we've been discussing, as a culture, we do a terrible job of admitting to ourselves and to others that mistakes actually are how you learn. And so we get have so much shame that's wrapped up in it. And from that end, when there's shame, depression, anxiety, trauma, you know, are not far behind. So talking through mistakes, processing mistakes, learning not to avoid coming around to kind of, unpacking the Russian doll, if we stick with that metaphor, that's a huge piece of therapy." I can really recommend reading the episode transcript (you can also listen to the show).
4) What these incidents made me think of was fear on the Internet. "One of the phrases we like is curious, not furious. And so whether you're thinking about yourself, oh, I'm so angry at myself. Why did I do this? Or you see someone else make a mistake and you're kind of angry that they did it. The more that you can use curiosity as opposed to anger, I think we would all get along a little better. And then to your point, it's so helpful to talk with someone else. We believe you have to talk your mistakes to death. And it's helpful to write about them, sure, if you really don't have anyone with whom you can speak."( Read more... )
5) And speaking of mistakes, it's nice to have unexpected support even when you make them. ( Read more... )
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Pi(e) Day
Mar. 14th, 2026 03:58 pmlanguagelog_feedI don't recall whether we've had anything interesting to say about "Pi Day", other than a reference to SMBC's "PIE Day" back in 2023.
Today's Frazz notes the adjacency to the Ides of March:
No doubt there are other Pi Day comics this year — looking back further, there's a collection from Pragmatic Mom a year ago, and a few years earlier from nebusresearch, and many others…
There's certainly no other mathematical construct with as many comic-strip resonances, though there are some obvious opportunities for tau.
Update — as Gretchen McCulloch points out, Wikipedia cites a historical family connection between π and PIE. William Jones (1675-1749)
was a Welsh mathematician best known for his use of the symbol π (the Greek letter Pi) to represent the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter
while his son, Sir William Jones (1746-1794)
is known for being one of the earliest scholars to assert the kinship of the Indo-European languages, albeit not the first.
Super Fakehuman grammar everything advice
Mar. 14th, 2026 01:56 pmlanguagelog_feedGrammarly recently became part of Superhuman, and then began the shockingly unethical practice of pretending to offer writing advice from living people, without getting their permission or even informing them.
Some coverage:
"Grammarly Is Offering ‘Expert’ AI Reviews From Your Favorite Authors—Dead or Alive", Wired 3/4/2026:
Once relied upon only to proofread for correct grammar and spelling, the writing tool Grammarly has added a host of generative AI features over the past several years. In October, CEO Shishir Mehrotra announced that the overall company was rebranding as Superhuman to reflect a new suite of AI-powered products. […]
Perhaps most insidiously, however, Grammarly now has an “expert review” option that, instead of producing what looks like a generic critique from a nameless LLM, lists a number of real academics and authors available to weigh in on your text. To be clear: Those people have nothing to do with this process. As a disclaimer clarifies: “References to experts in this product are for informational purposes only and do not indicate any affiliation with Grammarly or endorsement by those individuals or entities.”
Stevie Bonifield, "Grammarly is using our identities without permission", The Verge 3/6/2026:
Grammarly’s “expert review” feature offers to give users writing advice “inspired by” subject matter experts, including recently deceased professors, as Wired reported on Wednesday. When I tried the feature out myself, I found some experts that came as a surprise for a different reason — one of them was my boss.
Julia Angwin, "Why I’m Suing Grammarly", NYT 3/13/2026:
A few days ago, an awkward sentence written by the editing service Grammarly flashed across my screen: “Could Meta be quietly leveraging this intimate information to refine ad targeting or fuel its vast business interests in unseen ways?”
The writing was clunky, the point weirdly unspecific. Grammarly had been offering paying users editing suggestions, supposedly from a handful of writers — including me. Pop a piece of prose into its service and little editing bubbles would emerge on the page from “Julia Angwin,” suggesting things like, “Lead with personal stakes to boost immediacy.” That sentence about Meta was something Grammarly apparently thought I would suggest.
Like all writers, I live by my wits. My ability to earn a living rests on my ability to craft a phrase, to synthesize an idea, to make readers care about people and places they can only access through words on a page. Grammarly hadn’t checked with me before using my name. I only learned that an A.I. company was selling a deepfake of my mind from an article online.
And it wasn’t just me. Superhuman — the parent company of Grammarly — made fake editor versions of a range of people, including the novelist Stephen King, the late feminist author bell hooks, the former Microsoft chief privacy officer Julie Brill, the University of Virginia data science professor Mar Hicks and the journalist and podcaster Kara Swisher.
Angwin adds:
At this point in a story about A.I. exploitation, I would normally bemoan the need for new laws to tackle the novel harms of a new technology. But in this case, there is an old law that’s able to do the job.
In my home state of New York, the century-old right of publicity law prohibits a person’s name or image from being used for commercial purposes without her consent. At least 25 states have similar publicity statutes. And now, I’m using this law to fight back. I am the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against Superhuman in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that it violated New York and California publicity laws by not seeking consent before using our names in a paid service.
After a wave of criticism, the Superhuman chief executive, Shishir Mehrotra, announced that the company was disabling the feature while it reimagined how to give “experts real control over how they want to be represented — or not represented at all.” In a statement to The Atlantic, Mr. Mehrotra said that the company “believes the legal claims are without merit and will strongly defend against them.”
Grammarly long ago burst the "plastic fetters of grammar" to enfold (however imperfectly) the whole Trivium; and now has d-AI-gested the Quadrivium plus (presumably) philosophy and theology and all the practical arts, as presented by experts and celebrities past and present.
We can see this ironically as a corporate move in favor of open-access humans.
Update — More from Kaitlyn Tiffany at The Atlantic: "What was Grammarly Thinking?", 3/12/2-26:
To my dismay, I was unable to summon the AI version of myself. I pasted in numerous articles I’d written and numerous fake articles that I had asked a chatbot to make up. But Grammarly seemed to think other writers were more expert in these articles’ subject matter and therefore more qualified to advise me. It suggested tech journalists, pop-culture academics, and legendary practitioners of narrative nonfiction. I wouldn’t appear. My boss tried too. He messaged me: “i have both claude and chatgpt writing fake essays in an attempt to fool a different AI into presenting me with an unauthorized simulacrum of one of my writers.” He failed. We both felt bad about the way we were spending our time.
Drones: The linguistic history
Mar. 14th, 2026 12:33 pmlanguagelog_feedThe etymology, according to the OED:
Apparently cognate with Old Saxon drano, dran (with uncertain vowel length: see note) (Middle Low German drāne, drōne; German regional (Low German) drāne, drōne; > German Drohne) and probably also with Old Saxon dreno, Old High German treno, tren (Middle High German tren, all with short vowel), all in the sense ‘drone bee’, further etymology uncertain, probably ultimately < a Germanic verbal base for making a kind of loud, continuous sound (compare droun v.); the noun was apparently formed from this verbal base with reference to the loud buzzing sound made by bees and similar insects, perhaps sometimes specifically with reference to the males of some species buzzing aggressively when the hive is disturbed.
The semantic drift:
From Old English — Sense 1. A male bee in a colony of honeybees or other social bees (more fully drone bee). Sometimes also: the male of a social wasp or ant.
The drone is produced from an unfertilized egg. Its sole function is to fertilize a new queen.
From 1529 — Sense 2.a. A person who does little or no useful work, or who lives off others; a lazy person.
From 1875 — Sense 2.b. A person who is engaged in, or made to do, dull, repetitive, or meaningless work.
From 1936 — Sense 3.a. Originally U.S. Navy. A remotely piloted or autonomous unmanned aircraft, typically used for military reconnaissance or air strikes.
The 1936 citation:
In the event no signal is received after two minutes a timed relay will place the robot plane, or ‘DRONE’, as it will be called hereafter, in a turn.
D. S. Fahrney, Radio Control of Aircraft (National Archives U.S.: Rec. Group 72, ID 7395560) 30 December 3
In quot. 1936 the capital letters indicate that DRONE is a military code name.
As usual, the success of the coinage has depended on several forces driving semantic drift. There's flying, making a buzzing noise, defending the nest or attacking invaders, flying in swarms, not doing regular or creative work, …
Hold On To Your Hats, Sports Fans...
Mar. 13th, 2026 01:00 pmcakewrecks_feedWreckporter Barry B. gives us the skinny:
My wife went into a cake maker to get a small cake for my birthday. They asked what she’d like on it and she said, "How about the Chicago 'C', like The Chicago Bears’ 'C' logo? Is that possible?"
They said, "The Chicago C? No problem."
...it was the funniest present I’ve ever received.
Let's hope that Justina felt the same way about her University of Michigan cake, which was supposed to look like this:
But ended up looking like this:
Oh! A swing and a miss!
Karen M.'s son asked for the Alabama "A" on his birthday cake. To help the bakery out, his aunt brought in a photocopy of his Alabama hat to use as a reference.
(Can you sense where this is going? If not, then you really haven't been reading this blog long enough. Heh.)
Ready?
Here's the cake:
Thank goodness they didn't bring the actual hat in; that icing would take forever to clean off.
*****
And from my other blog, Epbot:
podcast friday
Mar. 13th, 2026 07:26 amsabotabby Let's take a little break from reality and talk about romantasy! Escapist tales of fucking fairies and immortal elves and nothing to do with politics whatsoever, right?
Okay you know whose blog you're reading here. Two new-to-me podcasts with great names, Ordinary Unhappiness and In Bed With the Right, did a crossover episode, "Romantasy, Fantasy, and Trauma." For someone who has never read a romantasy (but read a lot of the precursors) I'm kind of obsessed with it as a genre and even more obsessed with the discourse around it.
Disregarding the people whose opinions I don't care about, there are kind of two opposing takes on its appeal.
This is a fundamentally conservative genre that encourages women to become tradwives and relish in our own oppression.
This is actually a liberatory genre that allows women to explore their fantasies and traumas.
I don't think either side is fully right or wrong here, and that tension is worth exploring. This episode starts from two positions that many critics and admirers of the genre neglect: That women have agency, and that not everything women like is inherently feminist. From there it looks at where the romantasy boom came from, what its appeal is, and what it says about the psychology of its readers. I came away without a spicy take beyond that it turns out that a lot of the stories I wrote and never showed anyone when I was in my teens and twenties actually fit pretty neatly into the genre, which means that either BookTok girlies and I read a lot of the same books growing up, or there's something very deep in our culture that it speaks to, such that we reproduce the tropes unthinkingly.
I also find it interesting (not really discussed on this episode) that for all that the romance formula is reified into tropes and beats and commercial genre fiction is expected to at least somewhat engage with word counts and structure, romantasy really does appear to be an exception, and you can still write and sell stupidly long books in which nothing much happens, and no one complains about it. Dear Publishing Industry: Another world is possible.
Okay you know whose blog you're reading here. Two new-to-me podcasts with great names, Ordinary Unhappiness and In Bed With the Right, did a crossover episode, "Romantasy, Fantasy, and Trauma." For someone who has never read a romantasy (but read a lot of the precursors) I'm kind of obsessed with it as a genre and even more obsessed with the discourse around it.
Disregarding the people whose opinions I don't care about, there are kind of two opposing takes on its appeal.
This is a fundamentally conservative genre that encourages women to become tradwives and relish in our own oppression.
This is actually a liberatory genre that allows women to explore their fantasies and traumas.
I don't think either side is fully right or wrong here, and that tension is worth exploring. This episode starts from two positions that many critics and admirers of the genre neglect: That women have agency, and that not everything women like is inherently feminist. From there it looks at where the romantasy boom came from, what its appeal is, and what it says about the psychology of its readers. I came away without a spicy take beyond that it turns out that a lot of the stories I wrote and never showed anyone when I was in my teens and twenties actually fit pretty neatly into the genre, which means that either BookTok girlies and I read a lot of the same books growing up, or there's something very deep in our culture that it speaks to, such that we reproduce the tropes unthinkingly.
I also find it interesting (not really discussed on this episode) that for all that the romance formula is reified into tropes and beats and commercial genre fiction is expected to at least somewhat engage with word counts and structure, romantasy really does appear to be an exception, and you can still write and sell stupidly long books in which nothing much happens, and no one complains about it. Dear Publishing Industry: Another world is possible.
Ilya's Tattoo - for challenge #76
Mar. 13th, 2026 08:45 pmmific posting in drawesomeTitle: Ilya's Tattoo on AO3
Artist:mific
Rating: Gen
Fandom: Heated Rivalry
Characters/Pairings: Shane Hollander
Notes: No warnings apply. Made in Procreate for the tattoo-style art challenge. The first of a pair.
Artist:
mificRating: Gen
Fandom: Heated Rivalry
Characters/Pairings: Shane Hollander
Notes: No warnings apply. Made in Procreate for the tattoo-style art challenge. The first of a pair.
bantam
Mar. 13th, 2026 12:01 amwordsmithdaily_feednoun: 1. Any of various breeds of small chickens, often miniature versions of larger breeds. 2. A small but aggressive person. adjective: 1. Diminutive; miniature. 2. Aggressive; spirited.