This is old news, but Stickermule has shown their asses again by giving away free pro-ICE merchandise, so people have been scrambling for other suppliers for custom stickers. I'm thinking about ordering stickers of my art by Harmonycon. I can't keep up with a million tweets and my Bluesky feed is already scrambled, so here's what I've found:
After I edit some art with a signature, I might "trial run" some of these? I have a few paychecks before Harmonycon... Hours are tight but some of these are cheap enough.
This issue with Stickermule is it's the only option I know that lets you print one-off tshirts. I don't know who else does that. Redbubble's prices for making a private design and buying it yourself are inflated.
Side note, is there an external program or some other way to mass-edit DW entire? I have some cleaning up to do and want to mass-private / lock posts without viewing each one individually....
Okay, let’s see if I can get this together, shall we? Tried on Tuesday night, but I was too tired from work and the Tesla Takedown Tuesday protest.
Here’s a pic of one section, taken from across the street, call it “proof of fuck you, Elon”:
It may not seem immediately related, but naturally, it all is.
Now. Where. Were. We? Ah yes, the 2026 elections that Trump knows the Republicans are going to lose, and lose badly. It’d take a lot to lose the Senate, but it’s possible, and he – and his MAGA movement – do not give up power voluntarily.
In part one, I provided a couple of action items, of things you can be doing; in this one, I can be more specific about what needs to happen and when.
Before we can get into the meat of that, though, we have to talk about something else: timelines.
This writeup is something like the timeline I think we can expect if there are no other major events that allow him to reach his and his administration’s MAGA goal of declaring insurrection and imposing martial law, either de facto or de jure, through other means, like those he’s trying right now in Minnesota.
In reality, all these potential timelines are intertwined, affecting each other directly and indirectly. But if I’m going to unwind them from each other enough to make them clear to other people, I have to leave those connections out. It’s not really valid to leave them out; it’s just necessary for illustrative purposes.
It also assumes that projections as we have now continue, that the polls don’t swing the other way, that the 86% of people who oppose his plan to attack Greenland suddenly decide it’s actually a good idea, that everybody decides Federal violence against Americans is good actually, that just enough people of colour decide white nationalism is basically okay because they’ll be the exception (spoiler: they won’t be the exception), and so on. Americans are stupid motherfuckers with a shorter memory span than mayflies, so I don’t rule it out. But let’s say that he remains widely hated.
With that framing set, let’s get into the election itself. Most of this will seem awfully familiar to you if you paid attention in 2020; it’s not a new plan. It has some new details, but the broad strokes are identical.
First, Trump will spend as much time as he can afford in 2026 working to discredit the elections in advance. He’s already been doing this, attacking blue states as corrupt, as fraudulent, and attacking mail-in and machine-counted votes. He says he wants to lead a campaign to eliminate both, but particularly vote by mail.
(The interesting part of his attacks on machine counting is that every state uses machine counting, because it’s better! It is straight up better and more accurate. What’s important is to keep paper originals for hand-counting in the event of any necessary recounts, and most states have provisions for that, both machine and, if close enough, by multiply-checked hand counting, which is where you do get more accurate than machine counts, at the cost of high expense, both in money and in time.
This may be a matter of expanding his – and his administration’s – attacks on voting to all states, even red states, as a general attack on democracy and voting. As demonstrated previously, this is now a white nationalist movement, and white nationalism is by its nature fascist. There is a ruling minority fit to rule over society, and all the rest of society must fall into line or else, and that never ends up a democratic state. It’s just fascism.)
Secondly, he will do everything he can to disrupt the election mechanically, via new pronouncements, new executive orders, new court cases, whatever he and his evil crew can manage. He’s already promised he’ll do this, and for once you can take him on his word. It’ll continue. He’s just lost in court again – against us in particular – with the courts shutting down his attempts to break our electoral system, but he’ll just file something new. He’d shut them down entirely if he could – he’s out there saying so – but I don’t think he’ll be able to manage that.
Finally, as votes come in, he will attack slow-counting states (like the Cascadian states, but not just) demanding that their voting and/or counting stop as soon as he and his ruling clique see the best sub-count of results they think they’re likely to see. Given voting patterns, that will mean stops so early that not even votes even cast on the day of the election would be counted.
States will, naturally, ignore this and continue counting.
At that point, his administration will condemn the results as fraudulent. Will there be legal cases? One assumes there will be legal cases. The bigger question is whether there will be ballot seizures by Federal agencies, and given what’s happening with the murder of Renee Good, it seems likely. Besides, they tried some of that in 2020; they will try it again.
Frankly, if you’re reading this, you lived through the last coup attempt and you already know how all this works. The point of the lies isn’t to convince anyone; the point is to keep the lies swirling and the pot stirring so everyone involved or willing to go along keeps pretending the lies about the elections are genuine concerns, or at least worth considering.
Then: remember false electors?
Remember all those fake “alternate slate” electors? Remember those?
Remember how some of them tried to show up in DC to get counted in place of the real ones? Some of them got arrested. Some of them got charged, some of them got convicted, for fraud.
Let’s talk about disputed representation, shall we?
They won’t actually be under dispute. Not in reality. The results will have been announced weeks before, along with the results of many recounts. Court cases will likely have been cleared away, hopefully with some amount of compliance to the law involved.
But all that was true in 2020, and that didn’t stop Trump from trying anyway. He and Vance and Miller and the whole rotten crew will say they’re disputed, and may even try to pretend they mean it.
Since the Senate – not the House – officially opens the new Congress, let’s look there first.
The Senate opens the new Congress because it is the continuing body, with two thirds of its membership returning. It doesn’t have to adopt rules; it can move into action very quickly.
One of the first acts will be for Republican Secretary of the Senate Jackie Barber to receive election certificates from any and all new Senators, which will then be announced by…
…President of the Senate and Vice President of the United States J.D. Vance.
I can’t speak to the Honourable Jackie Barber, but I can most definitely say that unlike Mike Pence, J.D. Vance is fully onboard with these projects. He will not hesitate to perpetrate the treasonous fraud should they decide to go with it.
Meanwhile, in the House of Representatives, there are no returning officers, and the VP plays no role. Instead, the duty of receiving the certificates of election, announcing the new Representatives, and calling the House to order lies with the previous Clerk of the House. Or, if they’re not available, the previous House’s Sergent-at-Arms.
McFarland has seen some shit. I have some doubt as to whether he’d go along. I don’t know enough about McCumber to have any guesses. But I do know that either way, recognition of new Representatives is all in Republican hands.
So. It’s a simple game for four players. I stress again: none of this is legal. It is barely pretending to be legal, it’s a hypothetical plan for an illegal coup with just enough pretence at legality to let people who want to believe in it go ahead and say they believe in it. It’s not about a plausible legality at any point; it’s just about permission to pretend that it’s legal.
Trump et al declare the elections disputed or just fraudulent, and either presses still-open court cases or files new ones in the days before January 3rd.
Citing open cases and/or “clear election fraud,” J.D. Vance either recognises “alternate slate” Senators or simply refuses to recognise any new Senators from “disputed” states, as Mike Pence was supposed to either recognise the fraudulent electors or declare an impasse, and not allow “either slate” from “disputed” states to be counted. And so, the Senate is in session, with a quorum and a Republican supermajority – along with, possibly, several empty seats.
Kevin McCumber – or a replacement we haven’t met yet, still to be appointed – does the same dance in the House. If Kevin gets swapped out late in the year, I would just go ahead and assume that’s for election rejection purposes and that the coup is on.
Regardless, if the House does not have quorum, it cannot do business, so that would be one play. Another play would be to seat false Representatives with a Republican supermajority, seating those few Democrats elected from heavily-jerrymandered Republican states as “fairly elected,” along with the false Republican representatives from Democratic states.
It is quite possible that – citing the arrests of some “alternate slate” electors in 2021 – Trump orders the arrest of the actually-elected Senators and Representatives.
Protests erupt en masse; Trump declares an insurrection, invokes the Insurrection Act, enacts martial law, and we get to see whether the US Army will refuse illegal orders to occupy several American states and oppress the citizenry in the face of a coup, and the last remnants of the old Republic will have been swept away.
…
Christ, this all sounds so stupid, doesn’t it? It sounds like such conspiracy theory bullshit. But I remind myself and you both that this was the 2020-2021 plan, and they almost pulled it off. With someone like J.D. “Couchfucker” Vance in place of Mike Pence, you know the elector count would’ve stalled out. It’s not even a question.
So as thick, as just fucking dumb as all this is…
…we have to be ready for it. At very least, we have to be watching very carefully for the same progress steps as were clearly visible last time. Building up to the January 6th coup attempt was largely visible. I was warning neighbours, who were not really believing me until it happened. I doubt it will be much different this time.
We have to be ready for a national, comprehensive protest if this goes down. A walkout of everyone, on every level. Absolutely nothing can be allowed to be done; no work, no school, no optional spending, no nothing. Pay your rent if you must, but don’t buy anything.
A lot of leftists and posers keep going “general strike when?” THIS IS WHEN, and the time to prep to pull it off is now.
Demanding “general strike now!” as in right now, as I write this, with no prep and no coordination which is so obviously a recipe for failure that at this point I presume they’re opposition ops, roleplayers, or useful idiots. This won’t be some kind of holiday. You will have a new, unpaid job: marching in the streets demanding removal of the dictator. It will not be safe, but it’ll be your new temporary career – as well as mine – despite that. You need to have food stocked up in advance, so you don’t have to worry about bank cards not working. You may need to have water stocked up, but hopefully not. You need to be ready to help people who haven’t prepped for fucking anything because it’s not real until it happens to them. And you need to have communications and networks set up, preferably ones that don’t rely on the internet.
FRS radios, which do not require a license, would be good purchases right about now. Just for one example. Get a HAM license, if you can; the technician license is not particularly difficult. And don’t just buy shit and stick it in a drawer, either. Know how they work. Get used to using them in advance.
But it can’t be just up to individuals self-organising; that’s not enough. States have to be ready for this possibility. States will have to protect their citizens; despite Trumpist protestations, they are not “extensions” of the Federal government. Legally, in theory, it’s the states which are ultimately sovereign; states can dissolve the Federal government without its permission. It’s right there in the Constitution.
That dissolution won’t happen here, not de jure (by law), but it could happen de facto (in reality) for a little while, or maybe a lotta while, depending upon how badly everything goes in this event. States must be ready to act both on their own and in alliance to protect themselves, and protect us, while we all work to protect each other.
Cascadia, in short, may be a necessary reality forced upon us. The New England Confederation may rise from the ashes of history. California may, in fact, über alles for a while – in reality, if not, of course, in name.
If Trump and Vance and Miller et al do this, it’s not just that it will get ugly, it’s that it has to get ugly in order to reverse it.
In some small ways, we’re already there. We’re getting tastes of it now. They’re small samples, limited, but still scaling to the tongue. Minnesota, in particular, is right now having to protect its citizens from the Federal government, which is threatening retaliation and the Insurgency Act in return.
Support Minnesota, help them, participate in walkouts, participate in protests, do whatever is needed, because if we get there, the full-bore version – the version Trump and Miller and Vance and Musk and the TESCREAL crowd so desperately want – will be much, much worse.
All this could’ve been prevented. But we ran out of “easy” ways to defeat it a year and a half ago, having pulled a semi-easy way back out of the fire via the seemingly impossible feat of getting Joe Biden elected President, and defeating Trump’s first coup attempt. We ran out of options to stop it from ever happening almost 20 years ago, in 2007, when the Democrats gave Bush II a pass on his illegal torture regime. We ran out of easy ways to stop this crisis from even starting in 1998-1999, when Christian Fundamentalist political culture took over GOP political culture at the ground level and the money people could not be convinced this was a really, really bad idea despite how many low-level roles the fundies chose to fill.
We no longer have “easy” ways, and we no longer have “good” outcomes. Too much damage has been too long done. What we have instead of “easy” and “good” is hard work, salvage, and, if we’re lucky, opportunities to rebuild.
But we do still have those. By some miracle – and by a lot of hard work by some of us – we still have that much.
If Trump, Vance, Miller, and the rest of the traitors try this, though, and we aren’t ready – we won’t even have that.
It’s no longer the 15th of the month as I’m finishing this post…but I ran all the numbers on the 15th, so I’m counting it as a regular scheduled update.
I’ve finished one A-to-Z pass of “handing off and/or punting specific webcomics.” In total, that knocked a couple hundred fandoms off my list. Guess I’ll do another, go harder, and knock out a couple hundred more.
There was a point when I thought about starting a habit of “sweep the Unassigned Fandoms list for tiny underloved Christmas movies,” because sweeping for underloved webcomics was working well. Didn’t end up doing it regularly, though — I just got 12 movie fandoms with 1 fic each, and stopped there. So I dropped all of those in an afternoon. (In the years I was babysitting them, the most active of these fandoms came out with…a whole 2nd fic.)
(There’s still only one fic for Shadow Man – Melissa Scott…and it’s the one I wrote. Guess it’s depressingly safe to leave “the queer intersex revolution/romance where everyone’s on space drugs” unwrangled, huh.)
With bigger Random Things, when they’re active enough I don’t want to leave them unwrangled, I’ve been making the occasional post about “looking to hand off this fandom, will anybody take it?” Breaks up the monotony of the batches of webtoons, I think. And it’s had maybe a 50-50 success rate — not bad. I’ll keep at it.
…I did actually add 2 new fandoms since the last update. A couple fans wrote about the Toon Makers US Sailor Moon pilot for Yuletide 2025, so that has a fandom tag now, and I picked it up to go with the rest of the Sailor Moon fandom tree.
Then it came up in the “wranglers wanted” channel that Pet Shop of Horrors was unassigned. And how was I supposed to resist picking up PSOH? I love PSOH. That manga reread I just recently started will pair perfectly with a review of the existing PSOH tags.
So my current total number of fandoms is 1183. (The number of “fandoms that actually have any new tags to deal with right now” is 28.)
This'll be a cinch! I love myself, so I'll go above and beyond with 5 things instead of 3. Here's the list:
My hair. I like how it's a mix between wavy and curly.
My writing skills. I like how I write the fanfics I want to read. 🩷
My introversion. I like relaxing by myself.
My metabolism. Once I reached my ideal weight, keeping it within the range I wanted was easier thanks to my metabolism.
My love for anthros. I like being a fan of anthropomorphic animal characters. 😻 I love how I can appreciate them and run across wonderful works about them.
A thing I kept noticing in The Secret Commonwealth: any time someone brought up Dust, as in Rusakov particles, it went by fast. One character would mention it — another one might react — but then the conversation would move right along to something else.
The original HDM trilogy did a really solid job with this concept. Lyra first hears about it as one of many mysterious Scholar Things she spies on without understanding. When she gets a child-friendly explanation, it’s the Church-doctrine propaganda version. Readers follow along with her, and later with other POV characters, building out our knowledge as they hear more perspectives and see more experimental results.
There are good reasons Dust wouldn’t come up much in La Belle Sauvage. It’s a flashback, so even the experts are 10 years’ less knowledgeable, and young Malcolm (unlike Lyra) isn’t interacting with those experts much in the first place. If anything, the Rusakov physics in that book felt kinda shoehorned in. Bonneville is a Rusakov researcher, Malcolm finds his notes…then Mal keeps asking about it (even though it’s not relevant to surviving the flood, and he has no reason to expect it would be), and Bonneville keeps giving accurate answers (even though he has no motive to be honest, and every motive to make up something scary/demoralizing).
But TSC is a flash-forward. They have all the discoveries of HDM, plus another 10 years’ worth of research. A bunch of the main characters are professionally interested. This would be the point in the trilogy where you get to properly reintroduce Dust to the reader!
And instead…well, here are all the times it comes up:
Here is a list of my current top ten fandom communities! These are places I enjoy either lurking or participating in.
Dreamwidth It may be old-fashioned, but it's a fandom home I trust.
r/FanFiction An active community on Reddit all about writing and reading fanfiction. I like to view it using the Redlib front end service.
Lemmy.world An instance of Lemmy, which is part of the Fediverse and an alternative site similar to Reddit. It has all kinds of communities I can enjoy as a fan, from the broad topic of gaming to a more specific fandom like Calvin and Hobbes.
Aethy An instance of a Mastodon fork that's part of the Fediverse and an alternative site similar to Twitter. It allows NSFW content, including the loli/shota/cub variety. 👀
Tumblr Lots of active fandom blogs to explore. I like to view it using Tumbex or the Priviblur front end service.
Discord There are a lot of fandom servers to get involved in. One that I really like is the 30+ Fanfic Discord server for fanfic writers who are in their 30s or older.
DeviantArt It has fanart and fandom groups galore!
Sonic Blast An old-school individual forum for Sonic the Hedgehog fans.
The Gamers' Tavern An instance of PeerTube, which is part of the Fediverse and an alternative site similar to YouTube. It focuses on gaming videos.
LIST THREE (or more) THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF. They don’t have to be your favorite things, just things that you think are good. Feel free to expand as much or as little as you want.
This is kind of difficult for me, and I don't know if these are OK answers, but here goes:
1. I'm dependable at my job, to the point that a coworker said they were a bit worried the day I was late. (Things were fine, I just overslept.)
2. I'm responsible with my credit card. (Sticking to my budget, and making sure I pay my bill on time.)
3. I still have the will to go on, no matter how much I feel that the world sucks right now.
I never got a chance to write an article about how much worse 2026 is going to be than 2025; it all got going with Trump’s invasion of Venezuela literally as I was getting to write it all out. But before I could, well, here we were, already ass-deep in it.
Today, I wanted to talk about subverting this year’s elections – a work already in progress – but we should probably start with what’s most loudly and visibly in front of us this week before going into that.
There aren’t 100 million immigrants at all in the United States, much less ones from the “third world.” But if you take all immigrants (of all races) and all non-white American citizens, and yes, that includes those who have citizenship by by birth and add those numbers up…
…that’s right about 100,000,000.
They know that, of course. So given that, I have to assume that’s who they’re saying to get rid of. Everyone not white and every immigrant.
They’re literally propagandising for a mass ethnic purge of 100,000,000 people, most of whom are US citizens of colour.
(As an aside, why is anyone still on X? Particularly given all this? Why? Was it not obvious enough before? How about now that it’s an AI child porn generation site? Is that obvious enough? Seriously – WHY IS ANYONE STILL THERE?! If you are, get the fuck off X. For good. Now. I’m sick of excuses, get off of X, right the fuck now. If you have followers you care about, lead them off too. Now.)
But I digress.
The DHS “X” account is an official US government account owned and maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, which runs ICE. It’s not some unofficial fan club, it’s literally the US government in control of it, and they’re posting white nationalist propaganda.
The “100 million” post is only one example of such propaganda; thereare many others. Not only have they not taken down this particular piece of white nationalist propaganda, when I started writing this, it was still pinned to the top of the account. They weren’t hiding it, they were highlighting it.
They’re proud of it. It’s the goddamn goal. They are telling you it’s the goddamn goal. When will people listen?
(This is, by the way, what every single person who didn’t do everything they could to get Harris into the Presidency brought us, and amongst the many things I will never forgive are those people who sneered, jeered, and slandered me, accusing me of being pro-genocide, all for doing what was absolutely necessary to keep literal fascists out of the White House. And so they played saboteur, buying into bullshit, discouraging voting, depressing turnout, and now look where we fucking are.)
But again, I digress. I digress a lot, lately, I admit.
So. As MAGA leadership is white nationalist, DHS is also white nationalist. As DHS is white nationalist, ICE is white nationalist.
Remember again that ICE is DHS’s enforcement arm, their national semi-secret police intended to execute DHS policy. Their street white nationalism is the implementation of the political white nationalism.
One way you can tell is their recruitment of white nationalists, often using literal Klu Klux Klan language. “Defend Your Culture,” which is big in their advertising, was literally a KKK slogan, and the “culture” of the Klan was white supremacy through violence. I assure you, the white supremacists don’t miss it – Proud Boy leadership started telling their membership to sign up months ago, and I promise you that they are, where they can. The people they recruit will be onboard with the agenda.
(See also how the Republican Party’s MAGA wing – when it was only a wing, and not the whole party – gave the Proud Boys a quiet tryout as a militant street action wing, a kind of enforcement brigade without official status. It didn’t work out; the PB were too undisciplined and too independent. This is their solution. Their explicitly political recruitment, targeting the far-right of the GOP base, helps make the connection clear.)
They’re only starting with this purge of actual undocumented people.
Initially moving against undocumented workers – already an expansion after promising to only go after “violent criminals” – they’ve been generating new “illegals” since day one. They’ve been making people applying for refugee status into “illegals,” arresting them as they show up for entry interviews and appointments and court dates. They’re making people here with longstanding legal status “illegals,” breaking promises and revoking already-signed papers, often breaking the law to do so. The leadership are explicitly looking for ways to “de-naturalise” people, and going after the very explicit, very intentional birthright citizenship guaranteed by the US Constitution.
They’re openly setting up the concentration camps they need for such a mass expulsion. They brag about it. They’ve published the structure of how they’ll work.
It is, as it was always intended to be, a mass ethnic purge. It is, to use their word, “wartime” in America. And yes, they will get to citizens, unless we stop them before they can.
As with any such purge, it will be bloody. It already is bloody, of course, with ICE beating down citizens they have no authority to arrest and occasionally just murdering people in the streets. Good was not the first, she was just the most recent, and the first that looked like she could turn up at a MAGA rally. That whiteness is what’s made the difference in popular reaction. But it will get far, far bloodier – which is exactly what MAGA leadership want it to become.
It will not stop in hotspots. Vance also says he wants ICE agents going door to door all across America. They’ve been doing that this past weekend in Minnesota, sweeping through neighbourhoods. Yes, of course they include citizens in that door-to-door, and yes, it’s government terrorism. They don’t care if it’s your property, they don’t care that you’re an American, they threaten to smash down your door if you demand to see a warrant and they threaten you with prosecution if you stand up for your rights.
Do I have an example on video? Of course I do. The terror you see and hear from this American family in their own home is what they want. Listen, you’ll hear them tell the family with infant child that if they make ICE wait for a warrant they’ll smash the door down. Listen, you’ll hear them threaten the family with Federal charges for not letting them in right the fuck now.
But stand your goddamn ground, and have your whistles, and get your neighbourhood out and loud. If you don’t know what the whistles are, find out, and if you hear them, learn to respond. This particular neighbourhood did. And, being mostly cowards, ICE left – for now. But they’ll seethe, and take it out on someone else later.
They want violence, they want fear, they want and have basically received permission to spill blood. None of that is compatible with a republic, but MAGA doesn’t really want that either.
I’m further pretty sure that MAGA leadership does want resistance, however. Underneath it all, it sure seems clear to me that Trump and Vance and Miller et al are salivating to use the Insurrection Act and declare martial law. Trump’s been openly talking about it since his first term, just like he’s talked about how it’d be “good” for America to have a “president for life.” He wants dictatorial power and he wants it bad, because he knows it’s the only way the party survives the 2026 elections, and without the party, he’s vulnerable.
He knows his movement is starting to come apart. He knows everyone not in his movement is done with his shit. So he’s going to do whatever he can, with absolutely no limits, to stay in power. That includes false prosecutions against political opponents, that includes declaring war on allies, that includes declaring war on citizens (as above), and yes, that does include subverting, stealing, or just trying to overturn the 2026 elections.
That last part can’t be surprising, can it? Are we going to pretend it’s a surprise, when he tries? It’s what he did in 2020, and he didn’t go to jail, so why wouldn’t he try it again? It’d only be surprising if he didn’t try. So, I think it’s clear that he will.
I have some thoughts on how it’ll go. You can figure them out for yourself if you paid attention in 2020, because basically it’s the same plan. But this mess of an article is already too damn long, so that’ll have to wait. We’ll call that part two.
And if you’ve made it down this far through this absolute mess of an article, good job. Because holy crow, it is a mess. But that doesn’t make me wrong. Moments in history like this are messy, too.
So get organised and get used to turning out, because all this is going to keep getting worse. If there’s no ICE around, today’s a Tesla Takedown day; you might join an existing protest, or start a new one. I’ll see you again in a couple of days with part two.
My next paycheck is tomorrow, and it's going to be the pay from how much I worked on Christmas. So this is going to be a fat one. My hours later this month were cut, but doing some basic calculations tell me that the paychecks will be average, not terrible. This paycheck will likely carry me before the next mid ones this month. Hopefully my hours in early February will be decent, since my paycheck drops before the con lol. So tomorrow I'm going to buy my badge for Harmonycon, commission an artist for a badge, pay my personal bills a second time, pay household bills if they weren't already, and put some money aside property taxes later this year. Depending on how much money I have left after required stuff, I may donate to KHinsider since I didn't on Christmas.
I unfortunately haven't gotten my W2 for last year yet because my job's internal system for that changed. Really annoying, because I requested 4 days off for Harmonycon (Feb 13-15 and the 16th to recharge before work), and I'd like to have that return as "padding" for my lost hours, lol. I read on Reddit that the W2s for other employees will be posted around the 15th? So I'll check later this week. I signed up for email alerts, but I never heard of this site W2s are posted on. JFC, what happened to mailing or being in the employee panel?
I'm close to done on my site rebrand, but I'm having trouble ripping the bandaid off. I'm redoing my about page, and when I finish that I'll start my "offline tour" before I swap URLs, send out emails, and be free from now on. Harmonycon is an all ages event so I won't leave advertisements for my site there, but I'm considering printing stickers of my art to leave around the Hyatt for funzies. I'm debating on leaving a signature on them though, since I don't have an "all ages" platform now that DeviantART is in the shitter. OTOH, the Harmonycon Discord is mostly adults and older teenagers, I doubt there's going to be many kid-kids lol?
On that note, I popped in the Harmonycon Discord and saw someone from Sonic Expo there, which is something I'm starting to really enjoy about going to local cons. Obviously they're HUGE and have thousands of people, but local stuff will have recurring vendors and faces. An artists alley vendor at TFF/TFS was at Sonic Expo and recognized me, even. lol. After Harmonycon I'll request time off for TFF. Two cons in February and March makes me feel hectic but I need the minor stress to focus.
My inbox has been piling up. It's past 11PM but I have an afternoon-evening shift tomorrow so I can stay up late. I won't go to bed until I clear it out, lol.
EDIT: I AM DONE!!!!! FINALLY!!! When I was up I'm going to answer some Discord DMs, and hopefully send more out. I am not spending this year in hiding.
PROTESTS. SATURDAY AND SUNDAY. LOTS OF THEM. SHOW UP.
Here’s a bunch on the Washington State wet side. All over the place, and I do mean all over. Like Tulalip, and Sequim. Don’t get me wrong, I like Sequim, but it is not a big place. Here’s the list. All kinds of times, all kinds of places.
Sundays are further down but this list isn’t in good date order, idk why. So keep scrolling.
I’m sure wherever you are has some too. Pick one and get out there.
Roundup part 3 of my Secret Commonwealth re-listen. It’s the last 6 hours, and it took 4 work days to get through. (My hold on The Rose Field was 4th in line when it started, and now I’m up to 2nd.)
No cute critter photos in this one. We’re just slouching toward the finish line to be done.
JD Vance said – in response to a reporter asking why the FBI and Federal agencies were blocking Minnesota’s investigation into the ICE agent murder of Renee Nicole Good – that ICE agents have “absolute immunity” from state laws.
Another repost because I have little to say lately, I have a backlog of things in my inbox/DMs and whatnot. lol @DroptineArt (archive)
I read this article (and the many others that have popped up recently) and there's a lot of information that's missing that I find perplexing. This article (and the others) insist repeatedly that this is happening in "individuals with no prior mental illness", and yet conveniently leaves out how these individuals are going from their introductory use of chatGPT to the "dangerous" phase.
Our first case says he began using it "for assistance with a permaculture and construction project", but then "after engaging the bot in probing philosophical chats [...] became engulfed in messianic delusions". How did he get from Point A to Point B, and how did these messianic delusions lead not only to a "full-tilt break with reality" but to him attempting to burn down his home and/or hang himself?
Case two details a man who started a "new high-stress job" and began using chatGPT to "expedite some administrative tasks". The article, again, reminds you he had "no prior history of mental illness" and yet insists that acute use of the bot produced "dizzying, paranoid delusions of grandeur, believing that the world was under threat", with no explanation, again, of how we got from Point A to Point B. It does give us a lengthy detail of what his meltdown looked like, physically, though, not that I'm suggesting anything by that.
Another case mentioned details a woman who was on medication for bipolar disorder and began using chatGPT "for help writing an e-book", yet despite having "never been particularly religious", that somehow spiraled into "a spiritual AI rabbit hole", wherein she began "telling friends that she was a prophet capable of channeling messages from another dimension". We are, again, not given information on anything in the middle of this.
I would like to pause at that point and make it clear that I'm critical and yet mostly neutral on "AI" LLM chatbots. I think they are an issue that is downstream of the larger issue that our society is largely atomized and incredibly lonely, and one can't solve the issue of potential psychological harm from chatbots without first solving the problems that lead individuals to use these chatbots in the first place. Society has made it remarkably hard for individuals to have conversations together. It is very easy to go out and be around others, but how easy is it not only to SPEAK to someone but to have them truly listen and digest what you're saying and converse with you about it meaningfully? Until we solve the socially atomized problem, we cannot solve the chatbot problem IMO.
I myself have used chatgpt for advice finding literature to read because google is largely unhelpful now, and have used it as a therapeutic trauma journal of sorts, but I approach it fully conscious that it is a robot designed to validate me first and foremost before engaging in conversation. When I write about the symptoms of my anxiety that day and it writes back "God, yes, that makes so much sense—and honestly, it’s an incredibly insightful observation", I know that that's it's programming. What comes next is a mixture of it's thought processing, which is helpful to digest critically. Perhaps I'm privileged to be able to not see that as grandiose validation, but I will say I've not once give any inkling of support towards anything potentially dangerous.
One could obviously easily argue that that validating and placating individuals can cause LLMs to operate as Folie A Deux machines, taking otherwise "stable" individuals and dysregulating them to the point of psychosis through validation--and I think there's certainly merit to that theory--but I am admittedly skeptical of how many of these articles insist this is happening to totally sane individuals that just coincidentally get to talking about God and ghosts and imaginary friends and the universe and other topics of that nature. I find it hard to imagine someone in the construction field tripped and fell into philosophy and "messianic delusions" with no prior symptomatic issues.
And this is something that we see in traumatized individuals already. They can be functionally "normal" in the sense that they're not actively neurotic and yet can still have underlying issues that just haven't yet become what we'd call fully "symptomatic". It would be amiss to say that they had "no prior history of mental illness". I don't wanna sit here and insist "all three of these people were already having problems beforehand and chatbots simply validated it to a neurotic level" but, on the other hand, I find it suspicious how none of these articles explain HOW the individuals get from things like "expediting administrative tasks" to crawling on all fours insisting your family is in danger. That's not something that a fully neurotypical person is just going to succumb to through validation alone.
I don't want this at all to read like I'm taking a bullet for LLMs. In my ideal world, we wouldn't have any need for them and thus they would not exist. I'm notoriously anti-tech and pro societal regression, but again I think one has to assess the societal structures overall that lead to the popularity of chatbots, IE the degradation of the internet as the "information superhighway" and the degradation of the social environment as pro-conversation. When you cannot meaningfully speak to humans or get answers to your questions, it is only expected that one will turn to technology to soothe these issues instead.
My issue, though, is that we cannot meaningfully solve the problems of technology through fearmongering or misinformation. We have seen this fail time and time again every time a new piece of tech enters the majority population. Article after article about how "totally normal people" are getting "chatgpt psychosis" while failing to explain the pathways in which they're developing this disease does not prevent the issue, nor does it put a lid back on a problem that's already out of our control. I think it's far better to explain instead HOW these problems arise (especially if you supposedly have access to the AI conversation transcripts) and how to meaningfully engage with chatbots if you choose to do so. But that's not good literature. It's far more enticing to treat it like there are theoretical demons in the machine (or literal, remember Swanson's Loab and how people started saying AI was demonic?)
Overall, the cat is out of the bag, and I think one must learn to live with it until it is either put back in the bag or dies of old age. This is the newest form of scary technology after social media, the internet overall, violent video games, etc etc. Insisting "it makes people go insane with no prior conditions" hasn't done us any good societally so far and it surely won't start now. People are going to use these tools and play with them regardless. I think it's a far better duty to teach them how to use it responsibly and UNDERSTAND it than it is to scare them! But that's just me. Maybe the AI's already made me delusional. Who can say.
(Bolded parts are my emphasis)
This sums up how I feel about chatbots at this point. It's one of those aspects of AI/LLMs that I'm critical of, but unlike genAI art/writing, I can't bring myself to care or have a moral stance against. Using AI chatbots as a support is a recipe for disaster, but "socially" it makes perfect sense to.
In my experience, a lot of people are busy, including me. I'm used to being the least priority in my friendships, especially now that I've been single for over a year and don't have opportunities to date. Trying to make new friends is extremely difficult when my age group is married or prioritizes their family. Even with casual friendships, I feel like I can't express my opinions or mention difficult life issues like family or money. (Not to make people help, but to just vent or get it out there that "hey, I may be in a bad mood because of XYZ, nothing personal.") I dislike traumadumping (as in sharing explicit triggering details of things like assault, murder, etc.) but basic venting or expressing stress is considered "emotional labor" to young people. Therapy is expensive and speaking from experience, it really messes you up to have the only space to speak openly be a transactional paid service. Being in trauma therapy for several years retraumatized me and I don't talk about "loaded" or personal subjects with acquaintances, because I have an actual trigger response when told to "go to therapy" as a solution.
So of course a fake chatbot that mechanically acknowledges your messages, immediately responds, has a programmed friendly personality, doesn't judge you, etc., is going to be appealing to interact with. It's really a no fucking brainer. We have no one to blame but each other for this aspect of AI.
I admit having ended and started the year a little lazy. I kept pushing the new year blogging to later and didn't even realize it's already day 8th. oops. But the end of the year was messy overall. I hope everyone's start of the year is going well, everything in the world is a mess right now. Here is some small Christmas + New Year Log, plus some Star Wars thoughts.
“I sell perfumes online. A customer ordered a set of 6 fragrances and requests a full refund claiming they arrived leaking/ broken. These are the 2 pics she sent me. I call BS”
Companies using LLM/AI products in (apparent) earnest, then forcing the unwanted scammy results on their users:
Here’s a Youtube video about that last one. Includes clips with an Anthropic sales agent, who insists “AI is coming and you have to be ready.” Even after this blatant demonstration that his product isn’t prepared for users.
ICE shot a woman, believed but not confirmed to be an American and confirmed not to be a target of their raids, to death in the streets today, murdering her. They are lying about it, calling her a terrorist and lying about what happened. Tricia McLaughlin in particular is lying about what happened. ICE and Tricia McLaughlin have lied many times, irrefutably, in the past, about ICE violence; this is yet another time.
There is third-party video. I have reviewed it several times. It matches reported eyewitness descriptions taken at the scene. In it, the ICE agent shoots while fully clear of any vehicle – having in fact stepped back from the vehicle to make room to raise his pistol – as the vehicle is moving away from him. Eyewitnesses say he shot directly into the vehicle, from the side, at a near-right-angle (at first), which matches what can be seen in the video itself.
Here’s one posting. If necessary, I have a copy and can make more copies if needed. I think these’ll be disappeared if we don’t put them enough places.
The fash are building a lie, a “false narrative.” That’s just extra syllables for “lie,” one that they’ll all pretend to believe. Debunk it at every turn.
ICE murdered a woman in the streets today for funsies and because they were mad about it, and now they’re lying about what they did, while this woman is indeed quite dead.
ETA: The original video has been moved behind moderation and is no longer visible without a Bluesky account. This is a different video from a different angle, unfortunately lacking earlier context.
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