I just don't have any desire to use #AI, for anything. It does not interest me at all.

. . .

None of the #AI tools available to me are anything I have use for. It's all solutions I don't want for problems I don't have.

. . .

PS, to my fellow writers and artists of all stripes: It is a uniquely demoralizing time to be working right now, I know. But please don't stop. Do it for love, or do it for spite, whatever gets you through the day. But do not stop. They don't get to win.

– Becky Chambers, I Do Not Like These Robots https://www.otherscribbles.com/aizine

#NoAI #writing #zine

#ScribesAndMakers Oct. 13 – Schadenfreude?

Here's one I read just tonight: The death of Forrest Carter, the segregationist and KKK fan who cosplayed as a Cherokee to write the fake memoir The Education of Little Tree:

¶It was at his son’s home in Potosi, south of Abilene, that Carter died mysteriously. Listed as the cause of death on the certificate was ‘aspiration of food and clotted blood’ due to “history of fist fight.” The ambulance driver told one of Carter’s friends that Carter had had a drunken fight with his son, fell, and most likely choked on his own vomit.

– Dana Rubin, The Real Education of Little Tree https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/the-real-education-of-little-tree/

This is now my wishlist for dedicated bigots, that they drown in their own vomit in the home of a supposed loved one, unhelped and uncared-for. :blobcat_giggle:

The legend of the Legio IX Hispana: Lost in the dense fog of Northern Britain and destroyed by local tribes... and lost forever...
Actual research: We got nuttin' 🤷‍♀️ prolly fukking killt by Judean rebels

(Elmedin Salihagic, Did Ancient Armies Actually Get Lost on Campaign? https://www.thecollector.com/ancient-armies-lost-campaign/ )

#romanEmpire #ancientRome #history #military #judea

It is just never safe to be trans, no matter how you slice it. It is never safe to be any kind of gender-marginalized person within a patriarchy, and it never will be. That is why it’s imperative for cis feminists to reckon with transmasculinity: People are being exposed to sexist oppression, but left out of the circle of feminist [solidarity] and concern. You “affirm” our genders by not giving a shit about us, which is not affirming, but, pretty explicitly, PUNISHING somebody for being transgender.

– Jude Doyle, TERFs, Trans Mascs, and Two Steve Feminism (discussion of anti-transmasculine transphobia) https://jude-doyle.ghost.io/terfs-trans-mascs-and-two-steve-feminism/

#transphobia #feminism

In this context, the antebellum American slavery debates are not best understood as debates about slavery and much less about enslavement. These were debates about abolition. Their fundamental concern was whether or not abolition was possible and desirable. Their basic structure drew upon . . . the characteristic American narrative—the one about the path from slavery to freedom.

– John Samuel Harpham in interview with Alec Israeli

The source of the slave trade was #Africa, where English observers fixed upon the sources of enslavement. Nevertheless, this could not fail to direct attention to the fact that most of the Africans had never been enslaved and even those who were enslaved had been free. . . . In this sense, in early-modern discourse, Africa was identified not only with enslavement but with freedom.

Over time, however, . . . the central site of English discourse moved westward across the Atlantic. . . . What the planters needed was the reason that Africans could never become free. The unfitness of the Africans for freedom was an idea first presented to meet the conceptual demands of American slavery. . . . Whether in America or in Africa, Anglo-American authors maintained, the peoples of Africa were best suited to be slaves.

– John Samuel Harpham in interview with Alec Israeli

In my account, the new-ness of New World slavery is the fulcrum. It astonished many observers at the time. Whatever its ancient models and common precedents, this form of enslavement seemed to exceed them all. Its rise soon forced a shift in discourse across the English Atlantic world. . . . Some authors in the metropole mounted a novel attack upon what seemed to be the novel conditions of New World slavery. These authors maintained that no ancient model, no venerable tradition of ideas, could be enlisted in its defense. In turn, a small number of authors who aimed to defend the institution reached for new claims as well. Their efforts would shape the modern world, as this was the context—or one critical context—for the invention of the idea we call race.

– John Samuel Harpham in interview with Alec Israeli

Perhaps what prompted this need for explanation [of slavery] was the sheer novelty of the Atlantic slave system: its scale, its market integration, its world-making capabilities, and its incredible violence. This new form of enslavement exceeded inherited notions of what #slavery WAS.

– Alec Israeli interviewing John Samuel Harpham about Harpham's The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery https://www.jhiblog.org/2026/10/07/harpham-freedom-slavery-early-modern/

#history #HistoryOfIdeas #interview

#ScribesAndMakers Oct. 7 – Create a four line rhyming poem that includes the word 'goose'.

The goose in wedge shape flying becomes a voyager
Each on other's wing uplifted to a soar
The vast and blue yet rings with cries for yonder shore
'Til skein is winded in to hope of rest deferred.

#poetry #alexandrine

Now belatedly kicking myself, 13 years later, for not waiting three (3) days to post the final chapter on the second anniversary of the first lmao. I don't think I even looked at dates at that point, though, I was Extremely Excited to have finished the story and was ready to be done with it.

Yes, it did take me 16 years to complete a 30K-word fic. For extra hilarity, it took me two years (almost to the day) to write and fully post a 160K-word Avatar: The Last Airbender fanfic xDDD

#ScribesAndMakers Oct 5 – Excluding unfinished work, what's the longest it's taken you to complete a project?

When scraping, non-attribution, and plagiarism by machine-learning (ML) models are at issue, the question is not only one of copyright and other intellectual property but of the personal/moral rights of creators as well. If a scraper takes a mathematician's work, and a model trained on this data uses it in a proof without citing the mathematician, the person's moral right to attribution is implicated in addition to copyright. If a human did this we would call it plagiarism or at the very least a poor citation practice, and I don't think anyone other than the most disingenuous and ruthless of AI boosters is willing to die on the hill that it's fine for ML models to output results that would be improper if a human had created it.

To distinguish: Copyright is the exclusive intellectual property right, usually limited in time, to copy, distribute, adapt, display, etc. a creative work as a specific expression of ideas.

Moral rights are the related but separate rights of copyright holders to recognition for, anonymity in, and integrity of their works. They are separate from intellectual property rights, and attach to the person's inherent dignity and integrity — so much so that in jurisdictions such as Japan, China, and Korea the term was translated as 著作人格權, "personhood/personal dignity rights in creativity."

It seems that one defense of non-consensual scraping and lack of attribution by quote-unquote #AI systems depends on the conflation of copyright and moral rights. Some variation of "copyright should be abolished" might be used to handwave concerns about scraping and lack of credit, and even if we were to grant this position for the sake of argument (which comes with a host of problems of its own, as I will discuss), in many cases it is moral rights rather than — or in addition to — copyright that are at stake when scraping and attribution issues come up.

Therefore, those who cite objections to copyright, or intellectual property in general, as a partial defense for scraping and machine training should consider if they are as willing to say "moral rights should be abolished." They are entitled to their conclusion either way, but they should justify it separately from an anti-copyright stance because copyright and moral rights are not the same thing. 🧵

#copyright #MoralRights #IntellectualProperty

Is quantum physics the "why choose" of physics?

#ShowerThoughts

Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) brought the most widely distributed Arabic philosophy on the topic, building on Greek writings but synthesized in different ways. This stream built on humoral theory, which held that an individual’s sexual expression resulted from their balance of qualities (hot, cold, wet, dry). Although this balance generally resulted in distinct categories of male and female (with their associated behavioral and social features), it also allowed for intermediate forms.

– Heather Rose Jones, Historic Classification of Sexual Ambiguity (discussing Chapter 4, The Shape of Sex) https://alpennia.com/blog/historic-classification-sexual-ambiguity (intersex-phobia and sexism discussed)

#Christian theology of late antiquity promoted the idea of “primal androgyny,” that is, that human beings were created as androgynous beings (Adam before the separation of Eve) and that this non-binary state was the ideal state for humanity.

This concept fell from popularity around the 12-13th centuries, as androgyny became conflated with dual-bodied hermaphroditism and thus with monstrosity.

– Heather Rose Jones, Angelic Androgyny (discussing Chapter 1 of Leah DeVun, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance) https://alpennia.com/blog/angelic-androgyny

#intersex #religion #HistoryOfIdeas #NonBinary

Me at 4 years old: Ran terrified from a hepatitis vaccine before I was apprehended and immunized
My son at 10: Fled home at the sight of the clinic he was being taken to for a flu shot

Every parent's curse — may you have a child just like you! — has come true for me :blobcat_sad_cry: We're going to be trying again at a different doctor's office tomorrow, a children's clinic I took him to last week where he seemed to accept the idea of a shot, though it didn't happen that day because free shots weren't available until after the holidays.

Once the rebels succeeded in breaking Texas away from Mexico and establishing an independent republic, slavery took off as an institution. . . .

As more [enslaved people] came into the Republic of Texas, more escaped to Mexico. Matamoros in the 1840s had a large and flourishing colony of [formerly enslaved people] from Texas and the United States. Though exact numbers do not exist, as many [enslaved people] may have escaped to Mexico as escaped through the more famous underground railway to Canada. The Mexican government, for its part, encouraged the [formerly enslaved] runaways, often with offers of land as well as freedom.

– James W. Russell, Slavery and the Myth of the Alamo