friendmeat

weeklies #44 - culpability blast-radius

2026-05-09T00:00:00Z

what i'm reading

what to do when you and your patient are fucking the same person

This advice column from Parapraxis covers a situation we've all been in: we're a therapist in a fuck-triangle with our client. Apparently the best solution is to actually just don't do anything.

what i'm listening to

This has got me white-girl dancing in my kitchen.

what i'm watching

The Sopranos On Transference

The dramatic depiction of transference in The Sopranos got me thinking about what I think my therapist thinks about me. The version of me in the mind of the version of my therapist in my mind. Basically I just hope he thinks I'm normal and honest. Which I'm not.

what i'm working on

undisclosed fiction-writing project

I'm 7k words into the first draft of a fiction project. It's a concentration of effort that's totally new to me, and the knowledge that the bulk of this draft is going to have to be cut and rewritten is anxiety-inducing. Up until college I was a single-draft, no copy editing essay writer. Then I started printing my papers, editing by hand, then re-typing the whole thing. It's a humiliating process. But now I write a blog, so there's no shred of dignity for me to cling to.

something i liked

a funeral

I was hype as fuck to go to a funeral this week. It's an excuse to call out of work, dress up and eat free food. I want to become a funeral crasher.

something i hated

peer or tool?

ChatGPT was used for copy-editing support and locating a few references.

Buried in the Acknowledgements section of an academic article I read^[1] is the above disclosure, leaving a very bitter aftertaste to an otherwise commendable work that celebrates the messy and human. I can't stop thinking about it.

There's a tension here: the narrow scope of the author's ChatGPT usage, i.e. for "copy-editing support and locating a few references," made, downplays its role to just a tool, but it follows a list of human mentors and peers in the Acknowledgements section. If the the use was so simple, why not also disclose the use of Microsoft Word's built-in spell checker, or the use of Google Scholar, or of a particular brand of laptop?

How can a glorified spell-check-cum-search-engine require both elevation and elision; both acknowledgement among human peers and reduction to "copy-editing support" and "[just] a few references". Is it a tool? or is it a research assistant?

Culpability Blast-radius

The disclosure above is made necessary because of the degree to which LLMs can fuck with your intentions. The framing of LLMs as "intelligence" instead of a tool or, more accurately, a roulette wheel, opens their users up to liability.

This comment in a thread about browser-integrated AI pretty starkly lays the dilemma of liability with LLMs^[2]:

...[I]f a user of a website clicks "summarize" on a comment of an article, such that Google's Generative AI Prohibited Uses Policy is violated, who is Google going to go after?

The user - because they clicked "summarize", which initiated the action that violated the policy, on their machine.

The author of the comment - because they wrote the content that violated the policy.

The owner of the website - because they created the facility to feed the violating comment to the user's UA's LLM.

An LLM can violate the policy, but it can't be held responsible. Instead, culpability is a blast-radius for the nearest flesh-and blood

However, the Trump administration tried to invert this argument in the lawsuit against DOGE's unconstitutional cuts to humanities grants:

[The judge] rejected the government’s argument that there was no constitutional problem because any viewpoint classification was ChatGPT’s doing, and not the government’s. [Emphasis mine]

who's to blame?

We're going to see the fallout for LLM-generated fuck-ups distributed on class lines: the overworked interns that turn to ChatGPT to write their error-filled deliverables get fired, while the CEO that skims the AI summaries of everyone's emails while he golfs gets another bonus.

The customer service agents that can't do anything lose their (shitty) jobs to AI that does less and lies confidently. Everyone's service requests go straight into the trash: life gets worse, stock price goes up.

The government and its podcaster bottom-feeders pump out industrial levels of AI slopoganda. Your grandma can't tell what's real; she gets convinced to panic-buy survival buckets of food; her bank account is subsequently emptied by AI Jim Bakker.

Teens and tweens generate deepfake nudes of their classmates; the kids get punished instead of the trillion-dollar companies pushing nudify apps to the front page of their app stores.

Confusion and exaggeration about the agency of LLMs benefits the trillionaires profiting from unfettered data-center build-outs and mass lay-offs. Delusional hype around 'AGI' justify unprecedented venture capital spending for little to no results. In exchange, we get an unprecedented consent-manufacturing apparatus, a highly centralized internet under direct government-crony control, and the death of personal computing to make way for a total SaaS-based rentier tech economy.

a picture:

my wall spaghetti

You want to touch my wall spaghetti so bad it makes you look stupid.

Kahn, Ummni, "The Uh-Oh Test: when bad erotics excite you", Porn Studies, 1-13, https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2026.2634656 ↩︎
For context, this is in regards to a proposal from Google for a standardized implementation of built-in LLMs in browsers which would require implementors to agree to Google's AI Policy. ↩︎

weeklies #43 - i deserved it

2026-05-02T00:00:00Z

what i'm reading

"Everybody Wants to be a Fascist" - Felix Guattari

There would no longer be mass, centrally ordered movements which would set more or less serialized individuals in motion on a local scale. Rather, it would be the connection of a multiplicity of molecular desires which would catalyze challenges on a large scale.... In such a situation there is no longer an ideal unity which represents and mediates multiple interests, but rather, there is a univocal multiplicity of desires whose process secretes its own systems of tracking and regulation.

I love and hate reading D&G, because the concepts and stakes feel so relevant, but also what the fuck are they ever talking about. When, for example, I tried to explain to my book club why I thought Forest Euphoria was cryptodeleuzian (though it would've been more correct of me to say cryptodeleuzoguattarian), it just made me feel like an idiot. Reading secondary sources on them feels more elucidating (e.g. Brian Massumi's A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia), but always comes with the risk of being at the whim of someone else's misinterpretation. It doesn't help that D&G just seems inescapable, and everything I read has to reckon with them at some point.

I feel like the above quote about "micropolitics" can be applied to the rapid response networks in Minneapolis. The networks were decentralized-- organized on a neighborhood level via group chats-- but "univocal", sharing tactics and whistles.

what i'm listening to

The Kills - "Cheap and Cheerful"

The SebasTian remix of this was in a y2k dj set I listened to and it sounded so fucking familiar. Maybe it's just so close to the platonic ideal of a banger that it was already prefigured in my shard of the collective unconscious.

what i'm watching

Hugh Grant

I've accidentally double-dipped on Hugh Grant: first in In The Lair of the White Worm (1988) and then in Maurice (1987).

White Worm

I added White Worm during my Ken Russel phase. I missed the opportunity to see it in a theater in St. Louis, only finally watching it at home. Amanda Donohoe is hypnotizing as Lady Sylvia. I love a freaky bitch with tits. Not much to say about Hugh Grant. He's there.

Maurice

Maurice was this month's book club pick, very appropriate for the early modern mood I'm in. I'd watched the film adaptation before, which helped me follow the events described in antiquated prose, but I forgot the details.

Hugh Grant plays a kind of dewey-eyed Draco Malfoy-type foil to Rupert Graves' smooth-brained Golden Retriever. The movie tried to make Grant's character a little more sympathetic by writing in a public indecency side-plot to justify his anxiety around the relationship with Maurice. By keeping a lot of unnecessary details from the book, the film seems to gesture towards the literary interiority that's necessarily lost in the translation to the screen, so it seems like an odd choice they'd give extra time to the character that loses the least in the translation. Even so, it injects an extra bit of yearning.

Also, we simply do not know how to film movies anymore. Maurice was filmed on a 1.5 million pound budget and it looks better than any moving from the past decade with a hundred times that.

what i'm working on

cut-up poems

I wrote a script that takes words from random files in my notes folder to make cut-up poems a la William S. Burroughs. It still needs some tuning. Here's a couple I liked:

 IMMEDIATE MY 1 RUBBING
IN 4  SLEEP
FREUD  TO A DITCHING AND FILE

WE AT A TO OF CORN INTERACTIVE
TO LEG
TO RESOURCE A MIGHT

something i liked

the onion v. infowars

The news that The Onion was trying to buy Infowars was a ray of sunlight in the post-election malaise of January 2024. After no news for a year, Onion CEO Ben Collins went on the podcast circuit to hype up potential movement on the acquisition-- unfortunately, it's been paused by the courts again.

It's frustrating, to say the least, that the Republican establishment and Russian operatives can pour infinite funds into an endless stream of right-wing shitposters and influencers, but a milquetoast parody company can't legally acquire the assets of a media outlet that shot itself in the foot. "Free market" my ass.

something i hated

i deserved it

Someone took $20 out of my wallet that I left unattended in my coat pocket at the gym. And I deserved it.

a picture:

I popped open a cheap point-and-shoot I got at a yard sale for $5 after getting recommended r/circuitbending

weeklies #42 - Intellectual property in the garden of forking paths

2026-04-25T00:00:00Z

what i'm reading

"I got possessed by a MCU yaoi demon and everything I thought I knew about storytelling was existentially destroyed" by @headspace-hotel

"Transformative media" is endlessly fascinating to me and the author of this post explains the intrigue pretty well.

Constitutional Vagaries

The sentence known as the "Intellectual Property Clause" of the U.S. Constitution (Article 1, Section 8 Clause 8) states:

The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries

As Walterscheid^[1] discusses, patents and copyright were absent in the Articles of Confederation, but existed in British common law for centuries (p. 10). The Continental Congress advised the nascent states to come up with their own copyright laws, justifying:

[N]othing is more properly a man's own than the fruit of his study, and that the protection and security of literary property would greatly tend to encourage genius, to promote useful discoveries and to the general extension of arts and commerce. (qtd. Waltersheid p. 20.)

"Promote... useful Arts" and "encourage genius" are some vague concepts. Waltersheid wonders why the Framer couldn't have granted Congress management of patents and copyright under other clauses in Article 1 regulating commerce (p. 26-27).

Storytelling vs. Copyright

Commerce is a relevant part of the copyright story. In a commodity-based economy, authors can make their bread selling books. Therefore, copyright protects the livelihood of authors. But it becomes ridiculous once commerce makes contact with storytelling. @headspace-hotel puts it well in their post:

Everything in "original fiction" is wildly derivative, but for bizarre legal and cultural reasons, we are forced to obscure or conceal the derivative nature of it.

One situation that shows how poorly storytelling and copyright get along is QUILL INK BOOKS LIMITED v. ABCD GRAPHICS AND DESIGN, the lawsuit where one party tried to copyright Omegaverse tropes^[2], which are ostensibly the part of an open-source cultural product developed by dozens or hundreds of authors writing in a commercially marginalized niche.

Consider comic books. Particular characters are reiterated by many custodians into contradictory stories. Rightsholders can churn out hundreds of iterations of the same character, but an "unofficial" take like The People's Joker (2022, dir. Vera Drew) flies in the face of so-called 'intellectual property', facing barriers to distribution^[3]. Meanwhile, the MCU canonizes its comic-book iteration with multiverse tropes.

A recent Weird Studies episode discussed Jorge Luis Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths". The narrator describes a labyrinthine book:

The book is a shapeless mass of contradictory rough drafts. I examined it once upon a time: the hero dies in the third chapter, while in the fourth he is alive.^[4]

The book in "Garden" is by a single author, but the description gels perfectly with @headspace-hotel's observation of storytelling:

An idea-space can have multiple mutually exclusive, contradictory stories in it that are all valuable to tell, and the cultural and legal obligation to tell THE single true and exclusive version of a story, to own it and lay claim to it, extinguishes this incredibly vital aspect of the aliveness of storytelling.

I don't know shit about the MCU but I struggle to conceive of the entertainment-industrial complex adequately engaging with the layered, interconnected nature of fanfic.

New-Media Autofiction

When rubbernecking in the Timothe Chalamet/Armie Hammer RPF tag on tumblr, I found some people making facsimiles Instagram screenshots where, through strategic cropping, the faces of the subjects were obscured and the reader/viewer is given space the fantasize about who may be with the imagined Chalamet in this post-- perhaps themself?

I found this to be a novel form a fanfic, a "New-Media Autofiction". Is it a little weird? Yeah. But fanfic is desire: the desire for fantasy, for narrative completion, character depth, unexplored eroticism, or self-recognition. On one hand, capitalism exploits the storytelling tradition and our human connection with stories and characters (fictional and real) in particular to drive consumption; on the other hand, 'intellectual property' gate-keeps who may benefit from such connections.

what i'm listening to

maia arson crimew dj set

baltic coffee shop at 8am vibes

what i'm watching

The Sopranos

gabagool

what i'm playing

FaceMiner

Evil cookie clicker.

what i'm working on

table of contents custom element

I'm working on a rip off of those nice Tables of Contents some websites have that show which section you're in, and have a nice smooth-scrolling effect when you click a heading.

something i liked

Amish Granola

I bought some granola from the Amish and it's good as hell. Mixing it with some berries and yogurt for breakfast.

After encountering an Amish-run eatery that serves all the same artery-clogging fare as those in my home state, I've developed a conspiracy theory that the Amish endgame is to pump out bacon-bit donuts until the infidels keel over from heart disease, therefore instituting the God's kingdom on Earth.

something i hated

samba permissions

I'm running Nextcloud on a server and trying to get it to serve files from a Samba share. There's some esoteric permissions issues between the remote Samba share and the Docker container that's making this a nightmare.

a picture:

Reminder note for myself not to leave my sub in the staff fridge.

Walterscheid, Edward C., "To Promote the Progress of Science and Useful Arts: The Background and Origin of the Intellectual Property Clause of the United States Constitution", Journal of Intellectual Property Law, vol. 2, no. 1, Fall 1994 ↩︎
Alter, Alexandra. "A Feud in Wolf-Kink Erotica Raises a Deep Legal Question", 23 May 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20210226003148/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/23/business/omegaverse-erotica-copyright.html ↩︎
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Joker#Release ↩︎
Borges, Jorge Luis, "The Garden of Forking Paths". 1941, translated 1948. https://archive.org/stream/TheGardenOfForkingPathsJorgeLuisBorges1941/The-Garden-of-Forking-Paths-Jorge-Luis-Borges-1941_djvu.txt ↩︎

weeklies #41 - sufficiently punished

2026-04-18T00:00:00Z

what i'm reading

Apocalyptic Fever: End-Time Prophecies in Modern America and Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

Forest Euphoria makes me want to go camping. I'm envious of naturalists and biologists who can go out into the world and whip out the binomial nomenclature of plants and animals. The world is more colorful and alive when you can acknowledge the different forms of life all around you.

In contrast, learning about dispensational premillennialism from Apocalyptic Fever makes the West's unwavering death-march into climate collapse make sense. If the de facto evangelical Christian leadership of the world believe that the apocalypse is coming, and they're getting gracefully raptured before the deadliest events of history prepare the way for a thousand years of Utopia, no wonder they don't give a shit about anything or anyone.

The AI 'effective altruism' cult shares a lot with premillennialism: at some indeterminate point, the arrival of an omnipotent and wrathful God ushers in Utopia for the elect and eradication for the non-believers (Roko's Basilisk). The 'infinite benefit' to future generations of AGI thus justifies crimes the elect's crimes against everyone else, whether it's Silicon Valley's collaboration with the fascist war machine and surveillance state, Sam Bankman-Fried's ponzi scheme, the Zizians' literal murders, or Sam Altman in general.

what i'm listening to

"Geezer" - Kevin Abstract

I suddenly remembered Brockhampton existed and decided to catch up with Kevin Abstract again. Confusingly, Geezer is Kevin Abstract's new band, which features on his new solo album, but the song "Geezer" is not a Geezer song. But it's all the shows up when you try to look up the song.

I called this "Sublimecore" to my Brockhampton scholar friend, who corrected me to explain it's "Sugar-ray-core".

what i'm watching

King of the Hill

The gag in the Boggle tournament episode (S01E09) where Bobby and Luanne panic because they left a water ring on the coffee table.

what i'm working on

I occasionally have to make videos from my coworker's PointPoints. I'm 500 lines deep into a Python script to make this quicker.

something i liked

strawberry poppy seed salad

at my restaurant job, I used to make gallons of poppy seed dressing by boiling apple cider vinegar with pounds of sugar. it took forever, and if it overcooked it would harden into cement. it's way easier to just use white vinegar and vegetable oil. what the fuck was that all about

something i hated

the consequences of not backing up your shit

I run every single one of my self-hosted services from a single Docker compose file. Then I extracted another compose file right on top of it, irrevocably destroying it. I spent hours re-writing it again by hand.

I learned nothing from the experience and ended up destroying the compose file again. Sufficiently punished, I'm now working on setting up borg and borgmatic on all my devices.

a picture:

Tried to turn a null modem serial cable into a straight-through, but the OEM's documentation got the pinout completely wrong, so I had to cut the whole thing and test each pin. Whatever.

erudite baby

2026-04-05T00:00:00Z

Erudite baby only falls asleep to lullabies in blank verse.

Erudite baby throws tantrum when letter blocks didn't come with umlauts.

Erudite baby prefers choco milk "on the rocks"

Erudite baby only mesmerized by mobiles in the style of Alexander Calder

Erudite baby's first words: Simone de Beauvoir