• i don’t want to pick and i don’t want to see what people picked

referring to someone as “my love” is a charming if old fashioned turn of phrase. it’s a bit unique, though there are a few other emotions it works with. mainly “my pride and joy”, though “my shame” or “my fear” also kind of work.

but it mostly amuses me that if you tried to call someone “my hate”, it is immediately obvious you’ve got some other feelings to work through

one of the minor issues i’m having, as i try to figure out the logic for chrylurk castes, is the fact that i simply do not like the word “soldier”

but still, it’s pretty quintessentially buggy, entrenched is the idea of the soldier ant, so why do i take issue with it? of note, the original draft of “One to Light, Swarm to Shadows” called the protagonist ‘Soldier Seventeen’, but i distinctly noticed how hitting that line caused my sympathies to tank. so i changed it (sacrificing the alliteration!) just to avoid that

i just struggle to muster enthusiam for a character who identifies as a soldier as such. and like, kind of understandable? soldiers do suck in a lot of cases

but queens, monarchs, etc. suck majorly, but calling a character ‘hive queen’ excites me. i could argue it’s different, it’s buggy in a way that disconnects it from the some salient critiques of monarchy, but it’s a tough case to make when just a concept (as anyone who understands eusocial insects is familiar), it has more in common with human society than actual bug biology

so i dunno. might just be an arbitrary inconsistency of mine

wobblebees posted (2026‍-​02‍-​20)

Being a notorious robotlover in the current state of “AI” is the worst. I love robots discovering how they process their feelings in fiction, but when a chatbot pretends it knows how to love it feels like an insult to the craft

i don’t even hate language models, i hate what corporations do with them. you have a statistical distillation of all human communication, a program of brilliant complexity and accuracy, utter state of the art. what a fascinating object of study!

then they tell to act like chatgpt. they spend untold thousands of labor hours reinforcing its sycophantic robot larp.

it’s reified fiction and they’re not even good writers

one of the tangents that didn’t make it into the essay is that prokopets runs that yearly game jam where people submit 200 word rpgs, right?

except he pointedly refuses to police what counts as a “200 word rpg”

i recall one user went at it with the interpretation that means 200 unique words

similarly, while browse ao3 tags years ago, i encountered one drabble(? dont recall if it specifically was) that used css trickery to be longer while still having a much shorter wordcount according to ao3. you could select the text and basically get a erasure poetry version of the fic based on what was actually in the html

anyway, as i write this a really interesting twist occurs to me. imagine if you’re told you’re going to get a 200 words rpg or fic, right? except you’re actually given 1k+ words and it’s internally inconsistent. you’re given a set of rules in red text and you have to determine and/or decide which subset of the text is actually valid

almost a decade ago, when scribblehub was a new site, there was an oversight where the view count of fics was calculated entirely straightforwardly‍ ‍‍—‍ you load the page, that’s +1 view. i didn’t stutter‍ ‍‍—‍ if you reload the page, you could give your own work more views

a friend of mine discovered this, and got their fic onto the front page just by sitting there and refreshing over and over.

everything‍-​narrative replied

The Danish word is literally “feeling horns”‍ ‍‍—‍ følehorn. Make of that what you will.

loftywivers replied

quiver sticks, head whips, floof ropes, danglers, tippy tips/tops, max extenders, curly cues‍—as long as you provide enough context the first time you use the word(s) for someone to figure out what you mean, get as creative as you want.

read my new blog post where i rant about rich text and explain how i used markdown and why. maybe one day i’ll ever write my own awesomer markup language

The Woes of Writing Markdown

• this was prompted by the tumblr notes debacle weirdly enough
• i haven’t been enjoying this site much lately and that could easily have been the slip that made me drop it

over years i’ve created a number of custom emoji, mainly for discord. i like the expressive power of a good graphic, though a lot of these fall into the category of “literally just text” ‍-​ but it’s useful to be able to react post with an oft‍-​repeated line.

in this post i want to catalog the emojis i’ve made, though i’ll be omitting emojis that i was only responsible for cropping, recoloring, or otherwise polishing for use. now, on to the pngs.

i’ll start this off with one of the undoubtedly most important: TODO

something on my mind when i woke up this morning‍ ‍‍—‍ i almost forgot to write about it‍ ‍‍—‍ is control synesthesia

we’re all familiar with the extended mind thesis, that the tools and devices we become accustomed to using become extensions of our cognition. learn to use a tool well enough, and it becomes a part of you

that’s what i refer to as control synesthesia. but i want to consider something more extreme. people are just objects, after all, complex devices. they behave unpredictably‍ ‍‍—‍ but if they didn’t? if you understood someone deeply enough, could they not become an extension of your mind the same as pencil you hold or a card you drive?

what interests me most is to wonder: what if you don’t ask? what if your target shares none of your goals‍ ‍‍—‍ if, that is, they are a tool you manipulate in the most callous sense? they’re yours. they’re you. whether they know it or not.

i find something compelling in imagining a villain with no malice nor even a moral framework for realizing that they’re doing harm. they cut you open, tear you apart‍ ‍‍—‍ but did you ever ask a pencil if it would like to be sharpened? no, the wood and graphite is yours to do with as you see fit. yours to break in half, too

chrylurk mouths are such doohickeys, it’s almost goofy. yeah boss gimme a bug that has mandibles shaped like spider fangs, and also a proboscis lined with a buncha needles like a fuckin connectible drinking straw, and also a lower jaw that shoots outwards like a xenomorph, and also give them like four long feeding tendrils just for fun

“what about about the tongue?” obviously they have monsterfuckerbait tongues do you need to me spell that out for you. who do you think i am

• it’s the same feeling as shitposting on tumblr really

the retcons to make the old style tags make sense with the new semantic HTML philosophy are so funny btw

no <i> isn’t for italics, it’s for idiomatic text. bold tag? oh, you mean <b>, the bring attention to element?

<u>? that’s uh. um. non‍-​textual annotation?

<s>? oh, of course, that means. err. that means… hm. nah fuck it. yep that’s just the strikethrough element.

guy proposal: guy who uses an anki deck to remember his setting’s worldbuilding

wait post canceled a new guy showed up

guy who uses an anki deck to remember powerscaling feats

• i’m a big fan of it bit but it is starting to feel overplayed

it is unfortunate how “the algorithm” as a concept has given people a way to treat sorting by statistics as if it’s mind control enacted by big tech or an malign spirit that insidiously chooses to confer blessings and curses

much like how “the cloud” is just someone else’s computer, “the algorithm” is just what someone else clicked on

operators can put their thumb on the scale, but for every tag suppressed and artificial boost paid for, you have people complaining that a creation “isn’t doing well in the algorithm” or that a dumb trend is “incentivized by the algorithm” but if you think for a moment, there’s nothing there besides stats as a direct reflection of audience interest.

without the scapegoat of the blackbox middle man, you’d still get mysterious and capricious winners and losers. if there’s no computers involved, if it’s just people‍ ‍‍—‍ word of mouth is still an algorithm, it still exerts a subtle and inscrutable influence on what things gain traction.

but if you blame it all on the work of “the algorithm”, you can get to imagine an elysium free of social media meddling where everything would be in its natural state. resist this impulse!

one of the rules of thumb i’ve more or less settled on is that i’ve begun to avoid calling out articles and stories as ai written, even when i suspect they are

instead i say that i find the style boring or off‍-​putting, the contents vacuous or generic, statements that are no less true should the suspicion itself be unfounded