Accomplishments in video game life

Jul. 23rd, 2025 08:45 pm
sorcyress: Drawing of me as a pirate, standing in front of the Boston Citgo sign (Default)
[personal profile] sorcyress
Here's the Stardew footnote! Does Dreamwidth have Spoiler Tagging? like, maybe, but I'm just going to put it under a cut instead. Spoilers are below but also please try not to give me additional spoilers very much, I am trying mostly to figure things out on my own! )

There's probably more things I could say, but that feels good for now. I am enjoying this video game!

~Sor
MOOP!

Accomplishments in real life

Jul. 23rd, 2025 08:45 pm
sorcyress: Drawing of me as a pirate, standing in front of the Boston Citgo sign (Default)
[personal profile] sorcyress
I am on a train to Providence!

Yes, my summer is _extremely_ flitting about from place to place and partner to partner. I am okay with this, mostly, although I do really wish I had a bunch of time to just...rest and do nothing? I think that's the short span of time between "home from Maryland" and "pre-the-thing".

(don't worry about the thing. I can't remember whether I've mentioned it explicitly on socials, and it is a good thing, but I'm superstitious and it's a complicated good thing. I'll tell y'all in late August.)

Despite the fact that I desperately would like to do Absolutely Nothing With My Life Except Play Stardew Valley1, I did actually write myself a short list of normal goals and stretch goals for "what needs to happen before I go to Providence" and then I made progress on literally _all_ of them, including the stretchy ones! Here are some things I did today:

*Finshed unpacking from Pinewoods

*Packed for Providence

*Did partial packing for Maryland, by which I mean, made a pile of stuff on my floor. But it has probably enough clothes and a few other things I'll need? I don't think I will need a particularly large amount of stuff in MD, although I should a) remember to tell people I'll be in MD and want to hang and b) bring extra packing space because part of the point is helping mom clean out/sort all my grandparents' old stuff and some of it I might want to claim.

*Vacuumed the downstairs. It was a subpar vacuuming job, but I got a noticeable quantity of cat hair off the floor/furniture, so I'm counting it as a win. (I swept the kitchen yesterday).

*Cleaned the toilet and rinsed out the sink. I didn't like...bother to actually spray the sink with cleaner like I should've. I am a master of "half-assing a job is greater than no-assing a job" is what I'm saying.

*Brought my bike to the bike shop. It has been a while! It has also been a while since I've ridden my bike, being as I got a flat in like November and went "welp, that's it for the season" and just dumped my bike in the garage until the weather got warmer and then couldn't get the tyre off the rim. So. It will be some work. I will not get it back in time for the weekend, but they are okay with me leaving it in the shop until I return from Maryland.

*Went to the pharmacy and got a thing and didn't get another thing but know what date I can theoretically get the other thing (Friday).

So that's lots of good tasks, and then I rode on a train and played three days of Stardew and wrote most of the above (and the next post). Now I'm at Tuesday's house and we have eaten snax and watched good stuff with the initials BB2. I am happy to be snuggling with my sweetie!

Not sure what my next plans are. Fuck around. More stardew. Maybe some photo organizing or other digital projects. Sleep. Is good. Happy summer.

~Sor

MOOP!

1: You know how sometimes you start to write a footnote and it becomes a whole _thing_? I'm just gonna make a separate post about Stardew.

2: We started Blues Brothers a couple weeks ago and then couldn't finish it because it turns out to be really fucking hard to get seats together on the train when you're not boarding at a terminus, so we finished that, and then watched S1E5 of Black Books, which is the one with Bernard getting locked out (a masterpiece, honestly).

Blood Siblings

Jul. 22nd, 2025 08:06 pm
dray: (Default)
[personal profile] dray posting in [community profile] everwood
Characters: Brandili, Owen
When: Before the Duke’s visit
Wordcount: 986
Summary: Brandili makes a pact with a very reluctant magister
Notes: CW: for alluded rape and unwanted pregnancy

Read more... )

<< Back | Table of Contents | Next >>

Myth And Meaning.

Jul. 22nd, 2025 09:45 pm
numb3r_5ev3n: Dragon pendant I got at a renfaire. (Default)
[personal profile] numb3r_5ev3n
This post is mostly in response to this video.

When Post Modernism and the remnants of the the Enlightenment declared the cultural myths of our collective past anathema or meaningless, those of good faith abandoned it all, and left it lying on the battlefield; obsessed with clinging only to what was verifiably true or verifiably real in "real reality."

"We've left myth and superstition behind," they congratulated each other, with relieved smiles that were also maybe a touch too smug and self-satisfied.

But they left myth and meaning on the battlefield for Gmork to seize. For Fascists to pick up and use. And the Nothing grows stronger.

We should have learned this lesson 80 years ago, but we ignored it. We let it slip through our fingers. And now it's begging us to listen, to pay attention, and to understand.

Now, the reactionary creeps imagine themselves to be the defenders and gatekeepers of myth, and they've exploited the mythic image of the Golden King in order to seize control of the world. But *myth* is all the reactionary creeps have. People of good faith at least have Verifiable Truth, which is something that the reactionary creeps will never have. So they fight for myth and symbolism as if it's the only thing worth fighting for - because it represents the totality of their reality and experience.

But now, women and girls, and young people of color, or people with their gender in transition, are finally seeing themselves represented in our modern myths as protagonists, as more than secondary characters, or villains, or cautionary tales, or comic relief, or prizes to be won. And the reactionary creeps wail and shriek in weepy, snotty, indignant outrage that they're being robbed, because myth is literally all they have.

They could just shrug, and return to their own gallery of pleasing, ego-soothing Heroic/Solar-Phallic myth-images; because despite their wails, they are still represented in a pandering majority. But they can't let anyone else be seen or heard or represented, because myth is literally all they have.

The winning move is not to leave myth behind. For people of good faith need to take it back, to reclaim it. Because when we take it from reactionary creeps, they won't have anything left but the hollow reality of their own empty souls, their own barren constructs; voids containing nothing but cheap, cracked mirrors designed to reflect their own warped self-images back at them. Only then will they *have* to face reality for what it actually is.

RIP Ozzy Osbourne.

Jul. 22nd, 2025 09:33 pm
numb3r_5ev3n: Dragon pendant I got at a renfaire. (Default)
[personal profile] numb3r_5ev3n
Purveyor of wicked tunes, you were the cool stepfather of all teenage rebels when I was growing up. And everyone who remained a teenage rebel in their hearts. RIP, sweet Prince Of Darkness, and thank you for the music.
dray: (Default)
[personal profile] dray posting in [community profile] everwood
Characters: Akadine, Brandili
When: Shortly prior to Brandili’s wedding to the duke
Wordcount: 656
Summary: Akadine claims another princess for her hoard
Notes: CW for sex and cunnilingus.

Read more... )

Table of Contents | Next >>

(no subject)

Jul. 22nd, 2025 10:01 pm
sorcyress: Drawing of me as a pirate, standing in front of the Boston Citgo sign (Default)
[personal profile] sorcyress
I am having a lovely evening with Austin!

We ate dinner outside in the nice weather, and then we began a cooking adventure, and we watched an episode of Leverage while the shortbread cooled (it was the Ho Ho Ho Job, which is...a little uneven (Parker being THAT enthusiastic only kinda rings true to characterization; Chaos is a complicated part of the plotline) but ultimately a stupid fun episode, as opposed to a clever fun episode. I like both, and Leverage does both well!).

Now I am doing words and Austin is making caramel to put on the shortbread.

I have lots of things I should write about here, but I am somehow out of the habit. I would like to start that again, and especially to start reading here again. (I have picked up a little bit of Tumblr again, and that feels marvelous --it appears to be in order, and doesn't insert people I don't follow now that I figured out what settings to turn off. And saving images is just...easy, unlike Facebook. So that's grand!)

I hope you're well, and I will write more soon.

~Sor

MOOP!

Just Create - Monitor Edition

Jul. 19th, 2025 03:40 pm
silvercat17: close up of Lion-o's face with sparkles (liono)
[personal profile] silvercat17 posting in [community profile] justcreate
What are you working on? What have you finished? What do you need encouragement on?

Are there any cool events or challenges happening that you want to hype?

What do you just want to talk about?

What have you been watching or reading?

Chores and other not-fun things count!

Remember to encourage other commenters and we have a discord where we can do work-alongs and chat, linked in the sticky
erinptah: Vintage screensaver (computing)
[personal profile] erinptah

New scam going around DeviantArt. It opens when you get DM’d the line “Pardon me, may I have a moment of your time? I have a concern I’d like to share.”

The scammers are doing these from real people’s hacked accounts, so if you get suspicious and look at the user’s profile, everything about it suggests “genuine non-bot person.” I got suspicious and googled a whole sentence of their text, and found the above post about other scammers using the same script. Stay alert out there.

This post is from 2018, but I was looking for the link again recently, so I’m bringing it back. Concrete examples of ways you can change an image that don’t affect what a human brain perceives in them, but wildly messes with what a computer algorithm detects in them. (I’m pretty sure “AI poisoning” art algorithms, like Glaze and Nightshade, are doing a variation of this.)

“Builder.ai, once touted as a revolutionary AI startup backed by Microsoft, has collapsed into insolvency after revelations that its flagship no-code development platform was powered not by artificial intelligence—but by 700 human engineers in India.

“We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower.” (Narrator: Nobody was surprised.)

“”Tasks that seemed straightforward often took days rather than hours, with [LLM “coding” bot] Devin getting stuck in technical dead-ends or producing overly complex, unusable solutions,” the researchers explain in their report. “Even more concerning was Devin’s tendency to press forward with tasks that weren’t actually possible.”

It’s worth watching the full “actual coder exposes the scam what Devin actually did” Youtube video linked in the previous article. (The speaker says he’s pro-AI! He’s just exhausted by all the fake hype!) Among other things, Devin gets access to a Github codebase, writes a completely new file that duplicates (badly) the functions of a file the project already had, fixes at least some of the bugs it just created in the redundant new file, and then submits this as “fulfilling the task to review the project for bugs.”

Reddit post: ChatGPT, you have the file and not a cactus?


nevanna: (Default)
[personal profile] nevanna
In recognition of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first X-Men movie, I talked about the aspects of the setting that appealed to me and informed my creation of original characters.

In the podcast episode that I reference in my post, Jay Edidin and Miles Stokes agree that looking back on a movie that we experienced as teenagers allows us to be grateful that we're not teenagers anymore. (They're a couple of years older than I am.) I agree, but sometimes I'm convinced that this movie - and other parts of the X-Men franchise - have shaped me in ways that wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't discovered them as an awkward, highly emotional fifteen-year-old who had issues with authority and self-control.

By the way, X-Men: Evolution also turns twenty-five this year, and I'll be making at least one separate post about that in November.
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