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[personal profile] erinptah

Hemlock & Silver: Tried another book by T. Kingfisher. I liked it! The narrator is a poisons expert, who gets hired to find out if/how someone is making the king’s daughter sick. She’s very good at her job, thinking through all kinds of possibilities, and doing methodical tests — which serves her well when things start to get Weird and Magic.

There are a couple of frustrating times when she doesn’t figure something out (not even “this is a possibility I should investigate”) until a couple chapters after the reader has. Other than that, it’s really solid. I can only imagine how much background research on different toxins and venoms went into the writing. Sometimes this world has different names for things, or there’s a gap in their scientific knowledge, but you can deduce what’s going on from the practical description of causes and symptoms.

Also, it’s more Fantasy California than Fantasy Europe! Still a pretty traditional fairytale kingdom, but the plants and animals are all desert-dwellers, and there’s some Spanish influence going on.

The narrator, like the one from The House on the Cerulean Sea, is overweight, and it comes up periodically. I like the handling here so much better. She just reflects on it when she’s feeling self-conscious, or when it’s a meaningful factor in the action (e.g. if she’s incapacitated and needs to be carried somewhere). There’s no “pack of plucky orphans who regularly tease her for it without ever learning a Valuable Lesson that they’re being rude.”

It’s blurbed as “a re-imagining of Snow White,” but it only has a couple general tropes in common (mirrors, poison apples, a villain who’s a queen), not used in the same way. If the poison didn’t involve apples, and the princess wasn’t named Snow, I’m not even sure the connection would be obvious.

After getting my ebook purchases unlocked with Libation, I figured it was a good opportunity for some Murderbot re-listens. Specifically, I listened to Network Effect (the first novel) and System Collapse (the much-shorter second novel) back-to-back. Since that’s how the in-universe events happen, even though the book releases were years apart.

Spoilers follow! (I’ve kept some of it vague, but not everything.)

Cover art of Network Effect

Network Effect is still really good! “Murderbot gets stuck in a survival quest with a teenager” is an inspired character setup. MB having a breakdown when it thinks it’s lost ART, then a different kind of breakdown when ART is back but now MB knows what it did, is all excellent, hits just the right hurt/comfort notes. Everything about ART meeting some of MB’s humans for the first time is great.

The excerpts from helpme.file are still a wonderful buildup, even once you already know the impending reveal of who’s reading them, and why. The sudden switch to a new POV, for the first time in the series, also stays fun even after you’re expecting it. The rescue sequences are wonderful, and the end is very well-earned.

System Collapse is…a weird one.

Some good things: The repeated references to [redacted] are good at building suspense, and the eventual reveal of the events MB is redacting is very satisfying. (And believable!) The way MB and company win over the residents of Mystery Colony is admittedly a little cheesy, but in a way I think the series has earned by this point. The interaction with enemy SecUnits toward the end has a development that’s been a long time coming.

On to the weird things:

It’s only half the length of Network Effect. On a re-listen, the pacing gives me the distinct impression that Martha Wells meant to write something the same length as Network Effect, and then started to run out of steam and wished she was doing another novella instead. Before the team gets to the Mystery Colony, the scenes have a lot of detail and attention — MB will do things like “recount its growing worry and frustration with every step in the process of trying to find a hidden hatch.” Once they enter Mystery Colony, events start whipping by. There’s more summarizing. More jumping straight from “we decided to do X” to “X was done”, without anything about the process or the challenges of getting there.

I kept wondering whether this would flow better if the premise was “MB set off adventuring with ART’s crew, and this is their first mission on a new planet,” rather than “MB and ART suddenly get a secret new mission on the planet they were already at.”

It’s probably better for MB’s mental health that [redacted] happened while a bunch of its Preservation humans were still around, because it doesn’t trust any of ART’s humans enough to seek emotional support from them. And [redacted] would give ART’s crew a skewed almost-first-impression, while the PresAux crew has a more-informed perspective, having seen MB in action across a whole bunch of different missions in the past.

On the flip side, a lot of ART’s crew are still really thin as characters, and I would’ve liked to see a mission with all of them to build them up more. The PresAux characters who had big roles in Network Effect got a lot of good development there…and I’m not sure any of that was enhanced by what they did in System Collapse? It didn’t do much for ART’s humans either, even the ones who had big roles. Might have been better if it was the whole group, so we could see their existing personal dynamics and practiced teamwork.

Ratthi/Tarik only happens if Ratthi is still around, but on a re-listen, I’m not feeling much satisfaction about that either. It’s not that I’m mad about it, it doesn’t actively drag down any characters the way Ratthi’s TV-series romance did, it’s just…so barely-there. MB’s narration covers one (1) conversation that involves them being together. I assume it’s not the first sex-related conversation MB has witnessed over the course of these books, it’s just redacting/ignoring/deleting them as not relevant to its job. But this one didn’t end up being relevant either!

At some point, I expected that Ratthi saying “SecUnit, you don’t want to hear about this, it’s a sexual conversation” was a cover story. That at some point we’d get a reveal — Ratthi was talking about something he didn’t want MB to know, and he’s figured out that “we’re talking about sex” is the surest way to get MB not to surveil something. But nope. It just doesn’t come back at all.

So, yeah. It’s not a bad book (if it was, I wouldn’t have listened to it twice!), it’s just the one entry in the MB series where I keep noticing all the ways it could’ve been better.

Nona the Ninth is, like all the Locked Tomb books, a lot easier to follow when you know who everyone is.

I’m not letting myself write a whole essay on this one! Just to say, it’s funny, it’s dramatic, it’s heartwarming, it’s twisty, it’s weird (on purpose, and to great effect). I’m glad I re-listened. Whenever the fourth book gets an actual release date, I’ll be there with bells on. (And I fully expect to re-binge the whole series so far before I start.)

Picture Perfect, by Elaine Marie Alphin, is a middle-grade almost-murder-mystery I found out about from this pluralstories entry.

I feel like anything I say is going to come off like damning with faint praise, because…listen, it’s very much a middle-grade book. It’s fine! I enjoyed it for what it was. I don’t have any particular criticisms or complaints. It’s good at what it’s trying to do! And what it’s trying to do is…be a middle-grade book.

I’m glad I read it, specifically because I was interested in the narrator-with-DID angle. If that’s a topic you’re also particularly interested in, maybe give it a look. And if you’re looking for books to recommend to a tween reader in your life, this is a solid pick.


Multi fandom icons

Thursday, 18 September 2025 08:35
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[personal profile] mulhollands posting in [community profile] iconic

Sherlock (mostly of Moriarty), Fleabag, Andrew Scott in Hamlet, Andrew Scott, Winona Ryder, Gillian Anderson, Little Mermaid, Moonstruck, Alice in Wonderland.

here
erinptah: (daily show)
[personal profile] erinptah

So I was reading a post that was supposed to be about testing different LLMs at chess…and the author keeps saying things like “I asked it for the next move, and if the first 20 responses were all illegal, I chose a legal move at random.”

My dude (gender-neutral), this means the model cannot play chess.

Just imagine applying this logic to any other kind of tech. “If I run the vacuum cleaner over the same cat hair 20 times and it still doesn’t get sucked up, I pick up the cat hair by hand and keep going. And look, I end up with a clean carpet! This proves how well the vacuum works!”

I mentioned all this on Mastodon/Bluesky, and added that what I really wanted to see was a breakdown of the kind of illegal moves LLMs try to make. Someone replied with a rec for GothamChess on Youtube. (I’ve watched a bunch of his LLM game videos now, they’re exactly what I was looking for, more on those later.)

The thing is, though: I was out at the time, I couldn’t stop to watch videos, so I just googled the guy on my phone. When I leave a tab open, it’s a reminder to check this out once I get home.

…And one of the top search results was a Reddit post with the summary, quote, “American Internatiol Master Levy Rozman, AKA “GothamChess” has just been charged with one count of first-degree murder.”

Screenshot of Google results, one with this hallucinated summary: American Internatiol Master Levy Rozman, AKA "GothamChess" has just been charged with one count of first-degree murder.

I was, uh, pretty alarmed by this. I clicked through, hoping to find out more about what happened.

The actual Reddit conversation is all about what makes GothamChess’s Youtube channel engaging. No charges. Not even allegations. No mention of murder at all!

So…what gives? Is Reddit putting AI-hallucinated summaries in the metadata of its own posts, or is Google using AI-hallucinated summaries to replace what the site gives it? Which executive signed off on this?

Edit: The line is apparently the title of a completely different (and joking!) Reddit post. Thanks to Gwen for spotting it! It’s not linked in the post above, or in any of the comments — apparently Reddit was showing it as a “Related Post” for Gwen, and for me, it isn’t even doing that.

So it’s not completely hallucinated text…it’s just pulled from a completely inappropriate part of the page. And then put at almost the top of the Google search results. Without linking back to the context that would show it’s a joke. Either it’s a normal algorithm, but for some reason it was programmed to pull summary text from random parts of the page…or it’s still an LLM, having the “you should eat several small rocks per day” problem.

Wish I knew which it was. And I’m still curious which of the companies is falling on their face, here.

Overlooked Again

Tuesday, 16 September 2025 17:06
yourlibrarian: Stephen amuses Jon Stewart (OTH-StewartIsAmused-random_beauty88)
[personal profile] yourlibrarian
1) Some interesting posts at Henry Jenkins blog about the Peabody Awards process and disruption in the entertainment industry. "So, Peabody meets 3 times face-to-face. And it is an award that is decided across genres and platforms: television, radio, podcasting, and interactive, which is games and VR, etc. And across genre: entertainment, news, documentary, etc. But in particular, it's decided by a unanimous vote of a board of 18...who represent lots of different facets. There's critics, which include academics and TV critics, media executives, writers, and showrunners. ..which is different from a campaign for 26,000 voting members, in which you have no control of what they've watched and what they've not watched...Aziz Ansari was famous for coming to our show and saying, “You know, this is pretty cool. It's like you watch all of our shit, and you just decided it was good, and we didn't have to go to a bunch of weird-ass parties and stuff"

Two other factors: "It's not just celebrating entertainment. It's trying to talk about the ways that popular culture and entertainment can deeply shape who we are and want to be as a people, as empathetic citizens in the world" and "also...is it a story that matters? So, sometimes the craft can be brilliant, but it may not be a story that matters." Read more... )

2) A few more notes about Silent Witness as I move into S26. S23 seemed a really unusual season, enough so that I wondered about its production dates. Read more... )

3) Watched a documentary on the BeeGees which, like a lot of documentaries, goes very light on the time after their popularity peaked. (That was one thing the Billy Joel and Bon Jovi ones avoided). Read more... )

4) A Spy Among Friends was well written and interesting to watch but I kept constantly thinking about the 2003 Cambridge Spies which I saw last year and suspect it's much closer to the truth. Read more... )

5) Just a few comments about the Emmys, mostly in how unsurprising it was that Stephen Colbert finally won an Emmy for Best Show more because voters were jolted into a show of support. Yet John Oliver won yet again, twice. (Particular irony given the broadcast was on CBS).

Otherwise can't say it was entertaining and I wish a lot of stuff not involved in handing out awards had been cut. The tribute to Gilmore Girls seemed to really exemplify "too little, too late" since it and so many shows from the WB had been overlooked through sheer snobbery decades ago, when the attention would have done more good.

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rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
For anyone who may be Dark Souls-curious, here is a very long video essay of which I've only watched part (because I'm trying to limit spoilers) and of which I mainly want to rec part -- the first 30 mins or so, where the essayist discusses something that the mythology about the game’s supposed uber-difficulty tends to obscure, namely the gorgeous, generous array of different tools and options that it gives you for engaging with its difficulties, and how it tries to teach you to use them:



I think this is some of the stuff that prompted me to declaim “Dark Souls loves me and wants me to be happy.”

The game is difficult, it is intended to be difficult (and I still don't know if, for me, it will at some point be insuperably difficult), and progressing and learning through difficulty and failure is the core gameplay loop. As mentioned, it took me a total of seven hours to beat the most recent boss, the Capra Demon. I am currently camped out in the Depths, where I intermittently fall through holes and get cursed by basilisks. I recently got invaded for the first time, by a player who watched as I ran directly under a slime and got enveloped, facepalmed*, and then waited politely while I extricated myself before murdering me**.

And yet my major feeling at this particular moment is of being spoiled (in the pampered sense, not the knowledge sense): I have too many good weapons to try (my beloved halberd, now upgraded to +7, a Balder Side Sword -- a rare and coveted drop -- and a Black Knight Sword)! I'm having to actively try not to over-level! I have so many upgrade materials! I have the world's largest stockpile of charcoal pine resin (purchased on my endless boss runs back to the Capra Demon, so I'd spend any souls I was carrying and not distract myself with losing or trying to retrieve them) so I can make my weapons burst into flame any time I want! I have opened the latest incredibly-convenient shortcut! There's a handy new merchant just before the next boss! I am holding an armful of presents and Dark Souls keeps trying to pile more on top!

{*I went off immediately afterwards to Google "dark souls how to facepalm”, but it looks like you have to join the Forest Hunter covenant to learn that emote and I have other plans. Still tempted, though.}

{**I had expected to loathe being invaded — and had initially planned to play offline mainly to avoid that, but did not for reasons which need to be a different post — but in the event, it was brief, non-inconveniencing, and actually pretty funny.}

New Vid: Voice in My Throat (Sense8)

Sunday, 14 September 2025 14:54
tafadhali: (Default)
[personal profile] tafadhali posting in [community profile] vidding
Title: Voice in My Throat
Fandom: Sense8
Music: "Voice in My Throat" by Pearl & The Beard
Summary: 

I walk down the road and I'm alone again but | All these years I've travelled down a lonely pathway
You will be the voice in my throat | You have been the voice in my throat

Notes: Made for [personal profile] colls for [community profile] fandomtrumpshate 

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