If I'm wrong, tell me why I'm wrong and you're right.. Network.
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james_davis_nicoll at 08:50am on 15/03/2026 under because my tears are delicious to you, review
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seasonalremix's due date for works came by yesterday and everyone got things in on time! It's delightful! I'm excited for the remixes to be revealed next week so everyone can see them!hafnia wrote me a 15k story as a celebration of two years of friendship. <3 Unsurprisingly, I adore it (it was written for me! by someone who knows me very well! with like zero input from me other than "idk, you could write me wingfic?", a thing that she was like "well YEAH OBVIOUSLY" about, so it's like no input at all xD) (she's going to be like YOU HAD INPUT and yeah I guess but it was all "yeah that sounds good <3" and "yesssss :3" and the like) and I would like more people to read it.Mouse orbits the atrium. The priest watches from their vestibule, but Mouse knows when their attention turns away, the priest satisfied that Mouse knows the rites and is comfortable performing them alone. There is ease in them, a kind of dance as they make their bows and sign their wishes—words being too easily overheard—to the symbols of the moon’s many phases. The entryway is the closed eye; opposite it is the open one. The walls between are lined with other doors framed with idols, most of which would open into full shrines to the god’s aspects.
They halt at the moon’s open eye, which here—in a city of contracts and arguments of truth—is considered the primary aspect of the Lord of the Moon. Mouse doesn’t know if they believe that. The closed eye is the one they turn too most often, but right now…
“Your eye is upon me,” they murmur, and hear it ripple through the open chamber and up the tower to the god’s ears. “May it continue to bring me good fortune.”
To say anything else here, where the priest listens as well as the god, would be too much. Mouse bows again, then continues their unhurried honoring of every phase of Jiraci Mooneye. They are all one, in the end, and Mouse cannot say for certain which showed him House Ilizana’s sigil and thus the path to a new life.
When they return to the entryway, the closed eye of the god inset in onyx above it, the priest says, “Walk in the moon’s light, sibling mine.”
“I’d rather walk in the moon’s shadow,” Mouse says, and for a moment they think the priest will scold them.
Instead, the priest laughs. “Perhaps one day I will see you wearing his eyelid as a cloak,” they say. “May he watch over you until you find your path.”
Mouse turns to face the priest, unsettled, but their eyes are closed and a smile peaceful on their face as if they’ve been dozing the whole time.
There is nothing to be done but to make their final prayers—May your shadow be warm and welcoming, may those who wish ill upon me overlook my presence, may my footsteps be quiet and my eyes open to the night’s mysteries—before they exit to rejoin Rhei in the city’s streets.
jazzyjj at 06:58am on 15/03/2026 under just oine thing![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
jwz_blog_feed at 10:33am on 15/03/2026Back in the heady days of macOS 14, you could customize the default reset-to environment of the "guest" user (Safari bookmarks, items on Dock, etc.) by copying stuff into "/System/Library/User Template/English.lproj/". And of course macOS 26 seems to have completely fucked this. How do you accomplish this now?
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conuly at 07:43am on 13/03/2026post_secret_feed at 12:06am on 15/03/2026The post PostSecret Ted Talk appeared first on PostSecret.
post_secret_feed at 12:01am on 15/03/2026
The post Annual TED Radio Hour – PostSecret appeared first on PostSecret.
I had the pleasure today of spending two and a half hours in a Zoom conversation with Nick Land, post-postmodernist philosopher and occultist, the man who bridges the gap between Situationism and sorcery. Land, for those who haven't followed him, was the leading figure in CCRU, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, which started out as an academic project at Warwick University, England, and promptly went zooming out into the far reaches, pursuing a splintered vision of reality which out-Cyberpunked the Cyberpunk movement in science fiction while simultaneously blending in great dollops of post-Marxist political economy, avant-garde philosophy, weird fiction, and occultism. These days Land's writings are extremely popular among Silicon Valley tech bros and the more abstruse end of the Chaos magic scene. 
It would be hard to find two serious occult thinkers these days whose ideas have less in common than Land and me. Fortunately both of us have the massively unfashionable habit of being able to disagree without being a jerk about it, so we had a fine lively discussion that covered a great deal of ground, and we'll be doing another podcast conversation as soon as it's mutually convenient. Kudos to James Ellis of the Hermitix podcast, who got the ball rolling, and Michael Downs and Bryce Nance of The Dangerous Maybe podcast for making it happen. You can take it in on Youtube here. 
delighted
galorechallenge is a returning Crossover Fic Challenge from LiveJournal where you would find a crossover, grab a prompt & start writing! NO CLAIMING NESSARY! Post your story to the community (or at least link to it) once you're done. Feel free to grab more than one prompt, and more than one crossover! There are no limits on how much you can write per round. Check out the rules for more information. 
excitedthe_siobhan at 09:05pm on 14/03/2026 under a time and place, the gin palace, the plague yearsjwz_blog_feed at 10:12pm on 14/03/2026
Age Verification Lobbying: Dark Money, Model Legislation & Institutional Capture:
How corporate lobbying, think tank infrastructure, competing model legislation, and obscured funding networks are shaping age verification policy across 45 states and Congress.
This investigation documents a national lobbying operation spanning corporate spending, think tank infrastructure, dark money networks, and competing model legislation templates. Meta spent a record $26.3 million on federal lobbying in 2025, deployed 86+ lobbyists across 45 states, and covertly funded a group called the Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA) to advocate for the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA). But the operation extends beyond Meta. [...]
This investigation traced funding flows across five confirmed channels, analyzed $2.0 billion in dark money grants, searched 59,736 DAF recipients, parsed LD-2 filings, and mapped campaign contributions across four states to document the operation.
jwz_blog_feed at 09:48pm on 14/03/2026
"Getting laid off without warning from my copywriting job has done wonders for my work-life-bloodthirsty mob balance," reports Taylor Grayden, 35, of Vancouver. "Back when I had a job I never would've had the free time to organize an unruly rabble and march towards the beach house of (Open AI CEO) Sam Altman. But now I'm getting so much more violent retribution accomplished in a day." [...]
"I felt so lost after I was let go at my analytics firm so my whole department could be replaced by Claude AI," explains Sarah Brightwell, 42, of Kingston, ON. "But then I started learning how to use AI as a tool -- specifically for planning a multi-week siege of the sprawling compound of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei."
"Granted, the attack plans Claude spit out were full of hallucinations, but it got the ball rolling for me to organize my fellow unemployed humans and get marching," Brightwell adds, tightening the bolts on her homemade trebuchet. "After all, AI can't throw a molotov cocktail!" [...]
"Sure, we probably could have avoided this if we'd accompanied our artificial intelligence products with any kind of workable universal basic income system," explains Altman from one of his currently-burning $12.8 million San Francisco homes. "But I'd still rather die with all this money."
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rhino_neil at 10:24pm on 14/03/2026lethargic_man at 11:22pm on 14/03/2026 under berlinI went to Sheer Hell the other day. But it's not what you might expect.
On a map from around 1850, to the southwest of the then village of Tempelhof (now deeply embedded in Berlin), one sees a pond labelled „die blanke Hölle“, or sheer Hell.
( View piccy )
Wondering what could lie behind that name, I asked ChatGPT (though as it turned out, I could have just gone to Wikipedia).
Turns out the pond was originally called Hel-Pfuhl or Hels-Pfuhl, referring to the Germanic goddess of the underworld.
According to legend, the pond formed an entrance to the underworld, the realm of the dead. On its wooded shores stood an altar of Hel, which a priest tended to. Twice a year Hel sent a black bull to the priest to plough the fields. The priest's successor, though, a Christian monk, ceased the offerings to Hel. The following spring, when the bull appeared, it did not plough the fields but devoured the monk.
Until the twentieth century the rumour remained in the unsettled and rugged area that the lake would claim victims every year. These rumours had a grain of truth to them, as several people did indeed drown in the apparently harmless waters.
To my surprise, given that the majority of fishponds on the map (frequently labelled Karpfen Pf[uhl] as you can see here) no longer exist, it turns out that „die blanke Hölle“ not only does still exist, but I've even been there! It's now called „Blanke Helle“ on Google Maps, reverting to the older vowel in the name, and is in the middle of Alboinplatz.* (There's no reference to its name at the actual site, though.)
( View piccy )
The reason it still exists is probably due to its geology. It is, I learned, a kettle hole (Toteisloch). Apparently, when bits of glacier break off, they are called dead ice. As the glacier flows past, dead ice can get surrounded with and eventually covered in sediment. This happened here during the Ice Ages, but when the ice subsequently melted, the ground over it subsided, leaving a pit which got filled with rainwater to form the pond.
Commemorating the legend concerning the site, sculptor Paul Mersmann the Elder was commissioned in 1931 to create a monument depicting the bull. By the time it was finished in 1934, the Nazis were in power; they didn't like it and threatened to tear it down. The dislike, however, was mutual: according to the sculptor's son there is, inside the bull, a capsule denouncing Hitler signed by various artists and sculptors.
( View piccy )
* Hardcore Tolkien fans may recognise the name of the king of the Lombards who brought them to (i.e. conquered) Lombardy, and a cognate of Old English Ælfwine (the English sailor who learned the stories that later became The Silmarillion on sailing to Tol Eressëa in The Book of Lost Tales), or in modern English, Alvin,† meaning "elf-friend", and therefore a reincarnation (?) of Elendil in the sadly abortive work The Lost Road.
† Has anyone reading this ever come across that name other than in the name of Alvin Stardust?
jwz_blog_feed at 07:41pm on 14/03/2026jwz_blog_feed at 06:32pm on 14/03/2026
The reality is reassuringly mundane. Antimatter emitters are readily available at supermarkets in the form of bananas, which emit antiparticles through the radioactive decay of potassium. Sadly, they have limited value for understanding the universe. The device on Cern's truck will carry about 1,000 antimatter particles, weighing about a billionth of a trillionth of a gram. Should the containment fail, and the antimatter make contact with normal matter, the resulting pulse of energy would be so feeble, the load doesn't even warrant a radioactive label.
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