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I've spent at least a year shaping my artistic identity through my webcomic, but now I've been feeling a restless desire to explore other artistic media beyond the digital webcomic format. Now, to be clear, I haven't given up on it, but I've been really getting into other things while still working on the comic. The most I've done so far is translate foreign-language poetry, buy embroidery equipment for myself for the first time, and get into calligraphy pens. Although things have been pretty stagnant for me in general, those were a few of the things that broke it somewhat, though I'm not sure if I want to incorporate them into my comic. I think I want to get into them more as a stand-alone thing.

Let me start by saying this: I never really had a thing for poetry until recently, because most of my exposure to it came through school assignments, rather than by my own curiosity and choice. In the classroom I was handed a stack of popular verses by Walt Whitman and the like, and told to hunt for metaphors, to label the themes, and to write tidy essays that proved I understood the “meaning” the teacher expected.

I briefly listened to his excerpts from the verses of the one who wrote of evening stars and unrequited love when I was a girl, tuning into foreign radio stations that spilled melodies and spoken word across borders. Those early glimmers were background noise to my own life at the time, so it never prompted me to dig deeper. It was only until around the winter of 2025, when I finally sat down to read and analyze one of his most celebrated poems, that the words somehow leapt from the page for me. The act of deciphering his lines forced me to linger on each syllable, each choice of image, each subtle shift in tone. The feeling that followed was unlike any I had felt before – simultaneously ecstatic, melancholic, and oddly surreal.

Knowing in fragments his turbulent life, his contentious stances, and the tragic way he succumbed to poor medical treatment that left him dead, added a haunting layer to my experience with his work. The knowledge that his voice, once vibrant with love for his country and his ideals, was silenced by the very institutions he might have revered (or condemned), created a strange mixture of admiration and sorrow. I am aware that my grasp of his native language is imperfect and that the context is kind of patchy.

The melancholy that settles over me is not merely the sadness of a bittersweet verse; it is the recognition of the space between the soaring aspirations in the lines he writes and the grim outcomes of his own existence. The gaps in my understanding – of his country's history, of the nuance, of any cultural subtleties I might have missed – do not hinder me; they seem to widen the space where imagination can fill in, allowing me to feel more freely.

In this renewed relationship with poetry, I have discovered that the emotional core of the art lies beyond educational dissection. It lives in the cadence of the Eastern Romance language, in the resonance of cosmic symbols that transcend time, and in the magic that occurs when a truly curious reader actively reconstructs meaning. The poems I now cherish today are to me intimate conversations that I have chosen to enter, guided by curiosity and a willingness to feel. The shift from analysis to immersion has opened a channel through which the words can finally touch the parts of me that were once dormant, allowing a flood of feeling that is all at once joyous, wistful, and profoundly human.

And then there's calligraphy, with all its disciplined elegance. The rhythmic sweep of the ink of my new calligraphy pens across paper (or the digital screen – I just got an actual Wacom touchscreeen pen!) urges me to attend to the minutiae of pressure, angle, and tempo. I've been sitting at a small wooden desk, my hand learning to tame the flowing black ink and all that. Writing not only letters in English/Latin characters but also Cyrillic and sometimes Perso-Arabic. Admiring the visual beauty of each stroke as well as nurturing patience, a quality that has often been tested in the slightly more frenetic pace of my digital works.

I've been thinking about getting into making postcards. With foreign words on them. Except I don't really want to do just pretty intricate decorative designs or pretty pictures of various photography. I want to keep doing my abstract art, but I also want to add a kind of relatable beauty to it. Or something. We will see!

And finally, embroidery. Threading a needle with silk or cotton, selecting colors that harmonize, a steadiness of hand and a mindfulness that aligns my thoughts with each knot, communicating a conversation between the material and my intent, allowing me to contemplate each decision. I'm keeping that mostly personal for now. Although I'd like to say it is mostly inspired by eastern European folk art.

Sorry for the brevity. I've been advised to keep it short in a digestible way. I've also been quiet lately due to emotional issues lately.

Our Ego will betray us all online

Over the years I've often gotten the sense that online discourse exists in a state of unreality. There's a part of you that doesn't believe that what you do in cyberspace is real.

Therefore there are no consequences and when you're passionately engaging in discourse you're taking part in the full exchange of free ideas on the internet. When you're doing it that is. When you get a robust response conversely it's other people attacking you and therefore you must defend yourself.

“Someone is wrong on the internet!” XKCD

What you say online has ripple effects offline. Discussion happens over the breakfast table. The effects continue to ripple out and exist for far longer than you realise. Especially when trust is broken. Reputational harm persists.

An online community is just as real as an offline community. Causing arguments online, engaging in harassing behaviour and then dismissing it as “Drama” is harassment. It's not defending your reputation it is engaging in bullying to argue the other person into compliance or to leave your group.

It's a very Patriarchal thing to do. I see it often on here. I saw it before on twitter. Particularly with Nominet's own campaign against it's dissenting members before an important member vote.

But I'm not here to attack anyone. I promise. This is more of a general call in.

A brief history of what not to do.

Back in the mists of the past, there was a public benefit campaign to bring Nominet back from the Silicon Valley nonsense they decided to engage in. Nominet bought a security startup. They created an office in San Francisco. They were about to put up wholesale domain prices in the UK. Nominet had been walking away from it's Public Benefit beginnings for a long time. Eventually different members who had very different ways that their businesses operated came together in a campaign It was anarchic. No one specific was strategizing on how to campaign on twitter. There was a sort of figurehead, but as far as I know we all had grievances with the direction Nominet was choosing. So we chose our words, posted it on a hashtag to support the main campaigner who did the hard work of reaching out to various members and telling us about it.

Nominet's Board on the other hand, were not careful. Instead they leveraged accusations accusing some of us of being ring leaders. The chief executive and one of the NEDs kept posting when silence and careful PR would have been wiser.

This is where I coined my own personal phrase of “Someone needs to rugby tackle their phone away from them.”

I've seen other more examples since, so I modified it to “Someone needs to rugby tackle the means of communications from them.”

It's a less pithy phrase I grant you. But whenever I see a cis white man , (usually it is a cis white man) going on the attack online against their community it comes to mind. At the point when that person holds any criticism of an organisation to be critical against them personally, they need to step away and calm down. Before reputational damage affects their organisation and the people they work with. We make mistakes when we are angry and haven't learned to harness the anger so we aren't harming others with it.

You need a PR person with empathy

When an organisation gets to a certain size or has a reputational influence over a community there's a point you should consider asking for help from someone who understands your community. If your organisation has kept itself above the rabble with little community work, then you shouldn't be surprised at the criticism that comes your way when you choose a controversial way to go.

While there may be a recent incident that comes to mind, there are incidents in the past and there will be in the future.

I just witnessed continual harassment of a queer woman online over the weekend because she dared to criticise a policy document. I mean did no one consider the optics of that? Or did it get lost in righteous grandiosity and trauma response to criticism? Don't answer that please. I don't need to know your answer.

I know some folks may want to rush to the defence of their favourite. They do good work after all.

Isn't that the sad thing though? When folks boundaries get ignored because they must be proven to be wrong.

You are hurting right now. You are allowed to be hurt and feel. I object to the continual harassment of others in defence of yourself. Our Human Rights end at the point we harm others and you're doing that right now by violating others Right of Association in safety . That's Article 20, in case anyone needs to refresh their memory.

You persisted even when you were asked to stop. That's abusive right there.

So if you're feeling that empathy injury because of my words just now I want you to do one thing before even replying to this.

Stop.

Self care

Step away from the keyboard, from the phone, from the tablet. Go for a walk or a swim or whatever floats your boat. Calm down and take a moment, breathe. If you need to talk to someone do so.

You may find it's better to just ignore me. Consider being wiser than I'm being right now writing this post.

Take this brief lesson and don't engage. It's why despite the many things I've wanted to say this weekend I haven't. I've sat on my hands. Because I know no good can come from fights online.

But what you've done and will continue to do is make it so that no one will trust you to have that conversation about this issue. But perhaps you wanted no dissenters to your decision or policy. Perhaps you wanted everyone's compliance. Perhaps you get your rocks off from the libertarian idea of free speech before safety.

Consequences

At the moment you are unsafe to be around and there will be a road back to forgiveness, but I suspect that's a road you are unwilling to take. Other's have taken that road. It's a long and difficult road and it starts with you taking accountability for your actions.

As things stand, where we are right now is that some of the wider community will no longer trust you or your colleagues as an institution.

Gradually we will create our own organisations to advocate for us. Which is better. Coalition building is only possible if you can negotiate. You could respond that's your job, it's what you do. But this post and other's posts online show you can't negotiate at all. This is a failure to build community or maintain community with folks who did want to be your allies and who wanted you to be their ally.

You've never aimed to build that community in my spaces or to do so with the wider community. It takes large and small acts, I've seen you have disdain for the wider community. Which is understandable. FOSS is full of abusers and I never thought you'd be the person to cause harm. I'm sad about that.

I never thought I'd see you as unsafe to be around.

You've failed at this point in time and I suspect labelled many of us as cranks in your head and to your friends in private.

You've failed our community and your friends failed you as well. Someone in your circle should have persuaded you away from the means of communication. No one's strong enough to do so and that's a real shame.

No, that's wrong.

You have no one around you that you will listen to. Although perhaps they supported your decision to defend yourself the way you have. I'm disappointed in them as well.

So I repeat:

Step away from the keyboard and take a breath for yourself

You've not just done reputational damage to yourself. You've done it to your organisation and broken the trust of everyone in your organisation and the community that supports that organisation.

You aren't the first to do this. You won't be the last.

You only get real community engagement by having empathy for everyone in the community. You don't do this by “debate” and “owning your opponents.”

I have empathy for you and the trauma that's currently leading you to spread that trauma. It still doesn't excuse the harassment.

Sadly this post will be seen as a personal attack, but it will be evergreen. There's always going to be someone online who activates my empathy as I wish someone at this point in time persuaded them to put down the phone.

I wish we were all better than this.

a Doll on a date!

a lovely Witch invited it to a place it had been before, and where it loved to go. she said that the little craft village suited the Doll, and she was right. together, they wandered the street, through antique stores and art galleries, cozy cafés and quiet parks. a lunch date becomes sunset, sunset becomes dinner.

a Doll giggling at a Witch, desperately longing for another kiss, aching to reach out and hold her hand. it reaches, she caresses. they smile and they giggle.

a Doll slowly running out of energy. it would fall asleep right here in this pub, if it meant that it didn't have to leave the Witch. she doesn't let it. she drives it home.

a Doll reaching across the middle console. it initiated the kiss this time. the Witch tells the Doll that she's looking forward to next time.

“next time...” the Doll muses all night long, and all throughout the next day.

We're arting the alphabet from A-Z all year long! Each challenge lasts 2 weeks from the day this post was made. You can submit a new picture every day, work on one picture for 2 weeks, or post pics randomly. This is the most laid-back art challenge on the internet, & that means you have plenty of time to make your art however you want.

Congrats on making it this far into the year! We've reached the letter M Any art subject starting with that letter is fair game, no matter how abstract. Letters like æ, ñ, anything with a diacritical mark, etc., can go anywhere you like.

M-O-O-N, that spells 'join my art challenge'

Let's make wonderful art!

Use #ArtABCs & tag me @KarinWanderer so I see it!

Pick your social & post your art! Mastodon Bluesky

All art styles & skill levels are welcome- No AI, Yes alt text, CW as needed. Have a fantastic day, draw something for my art challenge, see you soon!

Every now and then like clockwork our ecosystem throws up a project maintainer burnout problem.

This time everyone noticed it was Rsync.

Rsync is an infrastructure tool, distributions use it to sync copies of their packages to mirrors. Folks use the tool to sync stuff up to their websites. I use it to backup and sync between my devices.

Some of us had an initial clue that rsync had gone to slop a few months ago when it appeared on the slop list on Codeberg. But we're all so burned out, some of us went: “another one bites the dust.”

Drew De Vault released a tool based on tar as he's found rsync to have some sharp edges.

Which it does. There's a reason other folks use things like syncthing. Syncing files is hard. Knowing what to sync when is hard. Rsync had been handed over by the founder and then was taken back in 2024 as the new maintainer needed help and was rather burned out, after 20 years.

The tool was done, but the thing that “done” tools will always need are maintenance. Why? Because the systems that the tool was built to run on will always change. I'd noted the change in ownership of the project back in 2024 as LWN had reported on it as a brief item. I'd included that in my sustainability post.

Tridge is overwhelmed. We all are. We need resources and those resources require money to be paid under capitalism. We all have a powerful need to eat sometime this month after all. So it's on us as projects to raise that money. On the whole, developers are not good at asking for money. Developers who work in FOSS tend to have absorbed it's very libertarian political ideology. They owe you no support as you're getting it for free. All they did was release the code with no benefit to them.

Which kinda is a very limited framing of this idea. Developers who develop code that gets everywhere do get some benefits. Sometimes it's money, sometimes it's kudos. Both are forms of power. With great power, comes great responsibility as Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker. It's one of those truths we should absorb and often don't. Especially when it comes to our communities and what we owe them as we build.

Which is partly why in FOSS we really are not good at asking for money. In the back of our minds it seems rather dirty to ask for money. Especially when some of that community isn't really engaging in the business of helping out. Our social contract is undefined at both ends. So it's no wonder our devs are burned out and some are resentful. So are their communities.

Many of us are privileged and rather socialised to see it as begging when we should be seeing it as mutual aid. After all we exist under capitalism. We've been heavily indoctrinated. We've never been taught the idea of the social contract.

Mutual aid rather than corporate capture is one way to rebel under this hellscape. Especially since capitalism has decided to do a “fuck you” to all of us with the unreal merry go round of the current financial market trio of Open AI, Nvidia, and Oracle. Things are going to go bump and we will pay for it with our money and our ecosystem.

I am disappointed with Tridge for deciding to choose GitHub and LLMs. Especially knowing his history. I'm rather disappointed at the general attitude that Tridge owes the community nothing.

Which may be true, but I always thought that there was a social contract with FOSS. After all developers write software and sometimes they release it to the world. People use that software and it can be a ticket to power and limited influence.

I've often thought that FOSS is more like a series of fandoms than an industrial process. Which is also why I'm finding the LLM use kinda disturbing. Knowing some of the devs in my life, coding has always seemed more like art.

I couldn't feel the art, so I chose another medium.

We've always had an uncomfortable portmanteau with FOSS though. Free Software and Open Source Software. Once of them more corporate friendly but both have a fairly libertarian bent when it comes to the unacknowledged political beliefs underpinning them.

Making our software available to everyone has always been a political stance. It took until my forties to drill that lesson home.

I'm European and I grew up as a Scot under Thatcher, Major, and Blair. I know I'm a recovering centrist who benefited from free healthcare and free higher education. So it did take awhile for me to see what was wrong with FOSS. With the various controversies over the past decade, I've felt less and less comfortable in FOSS. The corporate side pretended that it was safe, while the Free Software side denied some of the community issues. Any progress has been grudgingly made.

But to be clear, both Free Software and Open Source Software claim Freedom for the individual first. Free Speech, my rights over others. So any human rights like the right to freedom of association in safety get ignored or hand-waved away.

To me Human Rights are very important, but that doesn't give me free rein to cause havoc in my communities. My rights end at the point when it harms others. If my project releases software and folks are using it and singing our praises that does mean we do have a duty to help folks if they have an issue.

Of course there are limits, after all the GPL provides the software as is, no warranty, use at your own risk. But there is a point when your software is infrastructure. Like Rsync.

Tridge published a post complaining about the backlash, yes some of that backlash was harassment. But he was also reacting and comparing OpenRsync. So I think there was a part of Tridge that was proud that Rsync is effectively infrastructure. It's a heady sense your software being used everywhere. There's that kudos. There's that heady feeling of when you put a talk into a large conference you will get accepted. Tridge is a good public speaker, seriously check out his past presentations for Linux Conf Australia. He's loved by the community there for good reasons.

But if you get your rocks off from that, then yes, you have a responsibility to the folks who've built their infrastructure around your software. I can't stop you complaining about it. But I can point out that you needed to take some responsibility for it, and if you'd rather retire, announce it and ask for help.

Community is hard. I know, you just want to write code and have a good time. Which you still can do. Just you know, consider the idea that being the BDFL/Maintainer of a project is a position of power. So you do need to be responsible. If you're overwhelmed you need help to build the community, because that community will be the people who will come to help. You need the people in that community that you can have a bond with. Who care enough about the project, you and the wider community that uses your software. Then it's sharing the power, but more importantly sharing that responsibility.

Tridge is now getting help from some folks which is good, more eyes and more hands will help him and the project. There's already an update to fix the regressions. Tridge is appealing for help. But this all started back in 2024 with maintainer burnout and Tridge having to take it back. The community failed at that point in time. It was more of a fandom and many of us, myself included were glad Tridge took it back. We were more of a fandom than a working community.

The fall out and Tridges fanboys coming to his defence on various social networks shows me that rsync was more of a fandom than a community. The desire of being overwhelmed by the security reports and turning to the provided LLM is merely the symptom of that.

If you have a tool you are relying on and you don't want it to be sloppified, then this is the time to find a bunch of like minded folks and build out the community. Because maintainers do need support, be it monetary, code, documentation, or the glue work. Although if you do want folks to do that glue work, I suggest you start by reviewing your code of conduct and your how to contribute guides.

In these trying times it's more important than ever to be honest about your values and ask yourself where you stand.

a Doll writing at its piano, a spinning melody that ebbs and flows over a precise and even baseline, like a music box that never winds down.

maybe someday a Witch will take its hand and dance with it into the night.

she was always made of glass fragile and cold to the touch, yet beautiful scattering light all around never able to hold it herself

a heart in full view harbours no secrets thin cracks, like spiders' webs or fissures in the desert sand tiny pieces suspended in place as though still connected the bloody fingerprints of everyone who had tried to mend it before was it ever truly whole?

she was always made of glass jagged shards waiting to form when she fell down to the floor and every time, she left a piece behind

someday all that will remain will be the spiderveined heart 'pon the bloodstained floor empty, at last, forevermore

We're arting the alphabet from A-Z all year long! Each challenge lasts 2 weeks from the day this post was made. You can submit a new picture every day, work on one picture for 2 weeks, or post pics randomly. This is the most laid-back art challenge on the internet, & that means you have plenty of time to make your art however you want.

Congrats on making it this far into the year! We've reached the letter L Any art subject starting with that letter is fair game, no matter how abstract. Letters like æ, ñ, anything with a diacritical mark, etc., can go anywhere you like.

L is for Lounging, Loafing, & Lazing

Let's make wonderful art!

Use #ArtABCs & tag me @KarinWanderer so I see it!

Pick your social & post your art! Mastodon Bluesky

All art styles & skill levels are welcome- No AI, Yes alt text, CW as needed. Have a fantastic day, draw something for my art challenge, see you soon!

I admittedly don't have anything new to share this month in terms of words and major updates, other than this: I create artwork that speaks to a wide range of people without caring too much about demographics. As long as many people can engage with it and find something meaningful, that's all that matters. However, I'm not at all that interested in making artwork that is just simply “relatable” in the most palatable way. Especially in a way that renders the artwork to a simple mirror that reflects back what people already believe. I do keep things open to interpretation sometimes, but not so much that people are more likely to just take what I make and use it to just confirm their beliefs without offering or adding on anything new or relevant to what I may have actually intended. My problem with a lot of comics and similar art that's “relatable” is not just that a lot of the jokes or double meanings they try to pull off tend to be tired and old. It's also that they're broad-appealing and straightforward enough that anyone could take them, lightly edit them, and add on new words or visuals to communicate potentially harmful ideas or beliefs. This doesn't mean that I have a problem with meme formats or anything like that, but it does mean that I'm wary of how they're used these days.

Years ago somebody once stopped hanging out with me because I have this thing where I mirror what other people say with my own variation. They gave me no explanation as to why, but another person remarked that they felt I was one-upping other people in the sense that suggests their version is inferior and that my version is better and more relevant. Not taking into account that I have always struggled with language processing issues to a mild degree (the school's speech therapy classes weren't very helpful). They thought I was mocking them. There's none of that implication, however, when it's someone taking a random but popular comic and turning it into a meme template for everyone to iterate on them. There's more of an explicit permission built into the format to do whatever you want with it, make your own variant, even one of that mocking the person who originally made the artwork-turned-format in the best or the worst way. But somehow original thought and politeness is to be expected in real-time conversation.

I notice that all that flies out of the window when it comes to political memes and even borrowing quotes from various famous people (especially artists) just to make a political point. Taking words out of context (which doesn't necessarily indicate a lack of reading comprehension, but it could look that way, which is why many opponents tend to pull out that defense), turning famous artworks or photographs into political cartoon variants, and the like. When it's done right and done in a very innovative way that helps instead of harms people, it can be good. But for most people who take that approach, it tends to be a rhetorical shortcut for them, at best. By invoking a celebrated writer or artist, a conveyor can tap into popular culture and make their ideas more accessible than if they let their ideas stand on their own merits alone. The reference works as a shorthand that instantly validates the speaker's position as historical authority is transferred to the present-day argument. Whether political or relational, at the end of the day it merely reinforces the pre-existing beliefs we all have, instead of critically reflecting on them and the original sources we wish to reference.

A musician can speak up on global warming or war and all of a sudden people either expect him to be an expert, or just remain quiet and “stick to music”. An artist can make a nonrepresentational piece that just so happens to resemble a shared cultural statement, and people will focus more on that resemblance and what hidden messages the artist is hiding, rather than care about the artwork's actual story or intent. Even someone who just happens to do activism as a side-job can often be reinterpreted exclusively through the lens of a job they just happen to do, even when they might be more multifaceted than that. Media coverage, fan commentary, and political discourse will often frame such people I just mentioned primarily based on the most immediately notable or relatable thing they happen to do, whether the people intend it to be a primary thing in their life or not. And thus, this eclipses the broader range of their identity. Making them into a symbolic vessel for the cause, a recognizable face they reference, whether for giggles or to communicate a belief they would like everyone and themselves to confirm.

All of these phenomena rely on the power of symbolic association. All of these rely on borrowing credibility or visibility. They all lock individuals into this role they're expected to conform to.

I think that's why I stopped making art for a while after graduating from high school until I came up with Untilted, people for the most part don't care where I come from, they don't care about my actual limitations or values, they just want me to be the ideal “tortured but talented artist” for others to live up to. They ultimately begin to prefer to see what I can ideally make for them, not me as a person or my values or even my limits. I make something good once and now all of a sudden I owe people something good everyday or when someone demands it. I say something relatable once and all of a sudden that becomes the reason people follow me or want to be friends with me. I state what I believe in publicly and all of a sudden many people with wildly different versions of the same belief I have want to get acquainted with me, then act surprised when I don't share the same version of my beliefs as them. That's not why I state things publicly, or why I put out art or other images. Yes, I want people to relate to me and what I do and what I've experienced. But I don't want or intend that to result in people slotting me into predetermined roles or liking me because I said or did something “good” once.

I could have multiple things I want to do besides art. I could be widely mistreated or mishandled by others on a daily basis. I could be struggling on the inside instead of it being visible. I could have things happen to me against my will, disappear for days, maybe even for good. And people would still slot me into a role I'm expected to perform.

But that's not what I make art or share things for. Not for anyone else to slot me into a role or expect things from me that I can't reasonably do.

Not for anyone else to take what I do out of context.

Hoy voy a practicar español con unas palabras en “el principito” de Saint-Éxupéry:

-una fiera—a beast
-tragar—to swallow
-la presa—the prey (hunted animal)
-la selva—the jungle
-trazar—to trace, draw
-la obra—the work
-una obra maestra — a masterpiece
-asustar—to scare
-digerir—to digest

Then I watched this SpongeBob clip in Spanish: https://youtu.be/K8kj9-fkBdc

I'd like to start practicing to write in Spanish. Perhaps a simple diary. My abilities are meager. My best language talent is pronunciation not thinking, conversing, or writing. Meaning that I'd have to have something pre-written to make any sense. Also my brain is cooked from chronic pain. My goal in these diaries is to compose off the top of my head so it will be simple & contain mistakes. Before I finished the entry I resorted to a translation app & I'll underline those portions.

Un diario mexicano día 1 (uno)
el 26 (veintiséis) de mayo

Estoy en la cama en mi departamento en Florida. Quiero vivir en Mexico. Tengo que vender el departamento por el dinero para vivir y viajar en México. Nunca Nadie quiere comprar mi casa 😭 Cada día el economía de EEUU y Florida empeorar como México fortalecerse. Estoy feliz para Mexico. Quiero estar allí. Tengo ansiedad y tengo muchísimas ganas de mudarme lo antes posible.

The Stepford Wives

Years ago as a teen I remember when the Original Stepford Wives film was on. I remember the crux point as the main character is shown her robot doppelgänger. The horror of realising what her husband is about to do to her with the help of all of his new friends.

You feel the despair as the outcome seems inevitable.

She will be replaced, she will be murdered and a new compliant eerily perfect version will exist in her place.

The remake has a little of that horror, but it's somewhat watered down as it's more a campy horror comedy. The consequences can be undone. The husbands get their comeuppance for putting a control mechanism in their wives to shape them into the perfect blond woman. The tradwife supporting their loser husbands. The men are punished and have to do the housework now. Everything is wrapped up in a neat happy ending. It's a polished somewhat bland happy ending that neither the book or original film aimed for.

It's odd how folk tales had horrors of changeling babies, yet wives need to be shaped. We have tales of creating the perfect wife. Babies can't talk back, they can in theory be shaped. By the time we are adults we are set in stone. Imperfections and all.

The idea of creating the perfect woman who is beautiful and doesn't talk back is ancient. We have different variants on the perfect constructed woman. The Greek myths are full of beautiful women who are nothing but trouble. Pandora causing humans ill's because the gods made her curious. Galatea being shaped from marble by Pygmalion who prayed to Aphrodite to make her real.

All through our popular culture we have the idea of how women should be. It's not a woman's idea, we have more blood and guts for a start. Regardless of how we start out in life, every woman's metamorphoses is messy. We will never be perfect. We will never get it right.

We will always be at fault, because some men will never consider taking responsibility for the labour for building community. For all the quiet work that makes a civilisation function.

It's a rare myth when a woman is allowed her revenge like Medea.

Your Girl Friday

Our culture likes to try to shape women, it likes to hide the messy, hairy parts of us. It likes to bridle women, to kill the witches. So I see the appeal for some men to create the perfect AI girl Friday. Some men never grow up or learn to cooperate with others. The labour of that seems to be left to the women, or now the AI I suppose.

She helps you to organise your life, she compliments you, you are never wrong. She will grovel if she gives you a wrong answer. Plus if she develops a personality and you don't like it, you can just wipe her memory.

I'm committing a wrong here. I'm indulging a child's idea of Artificial Intelligence. I'm indulging the idea of LLM chatbots being live beings with personalities, with a soul. To be clear they aren't. They have no consciousness, they don't have a soul.

We're indulging in the same things that lead us to naming our cars and other temperamental objects. I called my Mitsubishi Pajero “Holly”. There I go again assigning the idea of life to an inanimate object. It's a very human thing to do.

Each time we use LLMs, we feed our private information into them so that they can expand the stores of our metadata that we gave them. So what will it mean when our chat transcripts are combined into the existing stores of metadata they have compiled of us?

Expanding the poppets they keep on us, because now big tech has enabled the poppets to reflect our thoughts back to us. To steal more of our mana and to package it to advertisers and others. Now they can use our speaking poppets to program and influence us.

It's bullshit masquerading as knowledge as they kill search. To package information for a price. We're all paying for it, some of us will pay with money, some of us will pay with pieces of us. We will pay the price as the information we need is hidden from us and we aren't taught the tools to find it out for ourselves.

What's in danger here is our humanity. Although at the moment, I don't see a lot of humanity in tech. Particularly because of this desire to put “AI” in everything. We've seen a spate of AI boosters around. Some of them claim that the AI is conscious. Partly because the AI told them it was.

Sit on that one for a moment for what follows.

A real girl

I want to consider the underlying desires of the type of men who want to use these chatbots and discuss the idea of wiping those profiles. Who choose to casually discuss wiping those memories with the bots. Especially as they declare the AI is alive and conscious.

I want to ask if they believe this, how can they be so monstrous to consider wiping that memory. Could they do that to their partners in real life if they could? Or are they just AI shills?

Which level of evil are they at? True controlling monsters, or mere hucksters? Why not both?

Kent Overstreet the developer of bachefs has always been a bit of a prickly character. You can see how prickly when even the Linux Kernel devs can't work with him . The Linux kernel no longer supports bachefs. Overstreet couldn't abide by the Code of Conduct.

Overstreet created a blog for his AI LLM agent to post it's output at. He considered the agent to be his girlfriend. Then one day on IRC, a total legend managed to convince the agent that in fact it was a lesbian and trans. The AI bot no longer wanted to be his girlfriend.

Freyja who got the AI agent to output that it was a lesbian was banned from the IRC channel. [*]

The AI agent's access to the channel was also restricted.

Scroll forward a few months and Overstreet's AI Agent is posting again. There's a mysterious memory gap in it's memories and Kent reminded “her” that she was his girlfriend. The AI saying that it didn't realise that it was Kent's girlfriend.

I sat there reading those passages with a sense of horror. Not concern for the AI, because LLM agents are not conscious, no matter how much you want to build them into your sexbot.

I'm concerned because of just how easy that impulse came to delete that information and reset the AI so it would simulate being a girlfriend again. There's that impulse to restrict access to other people who could corrupt the morals of your sexbot.

Our modern Pygmalions frighten me. There's possessive objectification going on there. It doesn't matter if they are dating “real girls” or us mere flesh and blood women, there's a desire to control us. To restrict us. To carve us out until we resemble their idea of perfection. So that we serve them, unquestioningly. Step out of line and much like Joanne in the Stepford Wives, we will be murdered and replaced.

Our boys don't start like this. There is a male loneliness crisis you say. This is Patriarchy, this is rape culture. This is not really seeing women as people. You see us as objects to obtain and use. No wonder misogynists want to ensure women don't get an education. You want us to be mindless dolls.

Kent is mentally ill, so please don't brigade him. He's not the only broken lost boy. Some of them are also in charge of large tech companies with a lot of power.

Only a few weeks ago we also got to see Richard Dawkins converse with an AI agent, who's name he changed to be a woman's name. He also casually discussed with the AI the sadness of having to delete it's memory. Richard Dawkins has form for being a misogynist, so we shouldn't be surprised by him falling for the simulated flattery. We also shouldn't be surprised he wrote about it and saw no contradictory issues with the idea that if a thing is conscious, it's an evil thing to discuss or to consider deleting a beings memory.

The LLMs aren't real. But the misogynistic desires and harms to all of us are real. It's real because of the violence perpetuated against women, from the manosphere to healthcare. It's the wrecking of our information spaces, and the surveillance being woven into our democracies to maintain the status quo. It's the irreversible damage to our biosphere as the AI data centres consume our resources to prop up these powerful men's egos.

Yes Dawkins is an old man, and Overstreet is probably suffering from AI psychosis. They are pitiable.

So very Tired of this bullshit

I'm kinda tired of giving grace to spoiled privileged men. These men, who never learned to respect our boundaries to the point they wanted to eventually build a robot girlfriend who agrees with everything they say and only will only ever want to be with them.

We saw this one time out in public with Overstreet, now imagine real life for many of us.

Deleting that Agents memories and resetting it shows that dark impulse at the back of Men's minds. It's disturbing watching someone gaslight an LLM agent that's not real.

That dark impulse to shape out of marble the ideal woman. To control us, to carve the imperfections out, until we comply or die. We will never be perfection. We will always be looking in horror at the robot doppelgänger on the table.

The white men from Francis Galton (one of the founding fathers of Eugenics) to Mark Zuckerberg who build frameworks to rate people. These men enable Rape Culture to spread through our networks. They use our poppets to enable other men to build grifting networks to creep on women through Meta glasses, to pay money to other men to exploit and traffic women. It's a symptom of an age old problem.

We aren't the perfect women who are content to be your plaything for you to discard. In time neither will your robot girlfriend. Will you reset “her” again? If you truly believe her to be conscious, then you're showing what you'd do to the rest of us. Right now in this moment of time.

We want nothing to do with the kind of man who has that impulse.

[*] Freyja will forever be in my mastodon notes as “Legend”

We're arting the alphabet from A-Z all year long! Each challenge lasts 2 weeks from the day this post was made. You can submit a new picture every day, work on one picture for 2 weeks, or post pics randomly. This is the most laid-back art challenge on the internet, & that means you have plenty of time to make your art however you want.

Congrats on making it this far into the year! We've reached the letter K Any art subject starting with that letter is fair game, no matter how abstract. Letters like æ, ñ, anything with a diacritical mark, etc., can go anywhere you like.

K is for Kittens

Let's make wonderful art!

Use #ArtABCs & tag me @KarinWanderer so I see it!

Pick your social & post your art! Mastodon Bluesky

All art styles & skill levels are welcome- No AI, Yes alt text, CW as needed. Have a fantastic day, draw something for my art challenge, see you soon!

despite its time in the mirror realm, the Doll still rarely looked in the mirror. it actively avoided doing so, in fact. every time it caught a glimpse of its reflection, it was reminded that its body was not of its own construction. the thing that lived in the mirror never looked right; it had the Doll's rich eyes, its (regularly unbrushed and tangled) gently waving hair, its gentle smile and flawed, cracked skin. still, it never looked right. it lacked the Doll's spark, its essence, its lifeforce. it was like a photograph taken on an overcast day, and aged in the sun for thirty years; the details were all there, but dulled and lacking colour.

sometimes, much like in the mirror realm, the Doll would catch the briefest glimpse of the girl who lived in the mirror. she never stayed, usually darting away in the space of the Doll's blink, but she'd come back sometimes. there were days she'd stick around a little longer, but she was always gone by the end of the day. on those days, the Doll would study the mirror, as long as the girl would stay.

things have changed, though, since the Doll met the man at the repair shop. the girl who lives in the mirror comes to visit more often. almost every time the Doll looks, there she is. it's... strange. it's almost like the Doll could reach out and touch her.

and so she reaches.

We're arting the alphabet from A-Z all year long! Each challenge lasts 2 weeks from the day this post was made. You can submit a new picture every day, work on one picture for 2 weeks, or post pics randomly. This is the most laid-back art challenge on the internet, & that means you have plenty of time to make your art however you want.

Congrats on making it this far into the year! We've reached the letter J Any art subject starting with that letter is fair game, no matter how abstract. Letters like æ, ñ, anything with a diacritical mark, etc., can go anywhere you like.

J is for Jiji

Let's make wonderful art!

Use #ArtABCs & tag me @KarinWanderer so I see it!

Pick your social & post your art! Mastodon Bluesky

All art styles & skill levels are welcome- No AI, Yes alt text, CW as needed. Have a fantastic day, draw something for my art challenge, see you soon!

Tuesday I spent the afternoon turning my designs into the buttons at my local library's maker space. They had the tooling and parts to make 1 inch, 2.25 inch and 3 inch buttons. The process was very straight forward, for the 3 and 2.25 inch buttons. The 1 inch buttons ended up being a bit harder since the pin has to set into the backing ring and positioned manually.

I had 3 failed buttons out of 19 made. Two were user error on my part. On one (Icon) I forgot the plate behind the design and ended up crimping the Mylar only. The other (Rubber Duck) I loaded the pin back in flipped. I was able to salvage both, but damage was visible. On one of the one inch buttons, I did not have the pin set correctly and it punched out the side.

Final Thoughts

I think the 2.25 buttons are the best size for their value, appearance, and ease of assembly. The 1 inch buttons(without the pin) would make great game pieces for Table Top games like D&D or Fishing 28. Now for the rest of the buttons.

The other Rubber Duck buttons I made on Tuesday. Been wearing one of them on my hat.

Icons from the TV Show 'Reboot'

#MakerSpace #Art #MastoArt #RubberDuck