liadnan | Reading

Pro-tip: reading two books called "The Seven [nouns] of Evelyn [surname]" at the same time is a bad idea and will lead to confusion.

( The Commonweal books 2-5 - Graydon Saunders ) A very satisfying series; I look forward to the next book when it comes out!

( 114. A Desolation Called Peace - Arkady Martine ) I loved the first book, but found this one a slog for slightly inexplicable reasons.

( 115. The Trials of Life - David Attenborough ) Entertaining as ever.

( 117. Nettle and Bone - T Kingfisher ) I don't know if it's me or Kingfisher who has changed, but I don't enjoy these as much as I did. This is fine! But I used to find her books better than fine.

( 120. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - Taylor Jenkins Reid ) This was so much better than I had anticipated; I'm definitely looking out for her Fleetwood Mac book now.

( 121. DallerGut Dream Department Store - Miye Lee ) I enjoyed it enough that I kept reading, but I was glad it wasn't longer.

( 122. The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches - Sangu Mandanna ) This was very fluffy and pleasant, but had just enough depth that I enjoyed it instead of getting annoyed.

( 123. Rivers of London: Deadly Ever After - Ben Aaronovitch, Celeste Bronfman, Andrew Cartmel, Jose Maria Beroy, and Jordi Escuin Llorach ) Not especially memorable, but fun enough.

( 124. The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society - CM Waggoner ) I really enjoyed this, and the way it's messing around with genre; I think I'd like to re-read it, and see how it feels when I know where it's going.

( 125. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Stuart Turton ) I suppose this is cleverly done, but it was all so loathsome I really had to drag myself through it, and by the time we found out all the answers I didn't even really care.

( 126. Translation State - Ann Leckie ) I liked this more on re-read, and I liked it quite a bit the first time! Just so many nice people doing their best, and complicated politics, and it's so good.

( 127. England - John Lewis-Stempel ) A generally solid nature writer; I don't know if I'll read more by him, but I did enjoy the English focus.

( 128. Leviathan Wakes - James SA Corey ) Much less space-opera-y than I had osmosed, but this was pretty gripping, and I'll definitely be reading the next book.

( 129. The Feud in the Chalet School - Elinor M Brent-Dyer ) this is solid as ever.

( 130. Phonogram vol 1: Rue Britannia - Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie ) This is clearly well done, despite my somewhat mixed feelings; I feel like it's probably a must-read for actual Britpop fans, but even outside that there's still something good in there.

( 131. Testimony of Mute Things - Lois McMaster Bujold ) If you like this series, you'll enjoy this; I did. And it was nice to see baby Penric again!

( 132. Deeds of Youth - Elizabeth Moon ) I enjoy this world, and the stories she tells in it, but ultimately I think I mostly want more about the specific characters I already know and love! But I enjoyed these anyway.

( 133. Batgirls: One Way or Another - Becky Cloonan, Michael W Conrad, Jorge Corona, and Sarah Stern ) I have less patience for the actual High Stakes Superheroing than I used to, but I loved watching the three Batgirls working together. Delightful.

( 134. Stress in the Workplace - Howard Edwards ) The failure mode of satire is dull, as this book demonstrates capably.

oursin

A couple of nature-related things:

Beavers provide a boost for declining pollinators, study reveals: 'beaver-created wetlands are home to greater numbers of hoverflies and butterflies than human-created equivalents.' Go beavers!

Given that there is reputed to be A Very Large Cat already around those parts, do you really want to start re-introducing the European wildcat to Devon, huh?

Felis silvestris has been absent from mid-Devon for more than a century, but the area has been judged to have the right kind of habitat to support a population of the wildcat. The area has the woodland important for providing cover and den sites while its low intensity grasslands and scrubland create good hunting terrain. According to the study, the wildcats would not be harmful to humans or to farm livestock and pets.

However, the issue arises that like the wildcat population in Scotland, they are interfertile with the existing domestic and feral moggie population:

For a reintroduction project in the south-west to succeed, the study says there would have to be cooperation with local communities and cat welfare organisations to support a neutering programme for feral and domestic cats.

***

I was fascinated by the concept of this project: Supernatural Law: Regulating the Paranormal :

We invite chapters that explore how law responds to, regulates, or resists belief and
behaviour in matters that cannot be proven. What role has law played historically in shaping
society’s understanding of the paranormal? With what intentions has it intervened and
which values and ideologies has it sought to uphold? What can we learn from law’s
engagement with the paranormal?

Call is for papers for edited volume, I think it should be a conference with suitable activities arranged - visit to local haunted house, seance with a medium, etc etc.

***

This is rather lovely: 'Happiness and tears' as Sikhs see rare outing of ancient holy book; though one does rather have questions seeing that it appears to have been loot from the Anglo-Sikh Wars:

The scripture was formerly in the possession of the Maharaja Kharak Singh, ruler of the Punjab, and taken from the fort at Dullewalla in India during its capture in 1848. It was presented to the university by Sir John Spencer Login, who also brought the Koh-I-Noor to Queen Victoria, through the Rev W H Meiklejohn of Calcutta.

But I liked this:

Trishna Kaur-Singh, Edinburgh University's honorary Sikh chaplain and director of Sikh Sanjog who was at the event, said she wanted the book to remain in Scotland.
She said: "I know people talk about repatriation and that's fine and it's needed in many instances but you have to take into context the fact that the people are here because of that colonial past and have lived their whole lives here.
"They have been parted from their history and their links and it was found here so it should be here for our communities for generations.

***

Full scan of Bill Brandt's 1938 photo-essay A Night in London (very few surviving copies).

yhlee

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15304v1

"Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models"
(many authors)

In Book X of The Republic, Plato excludes poets on the grounds that mimetic language can distort judgment and bring society to a collapse. As contemporary social systems increasingly rely on large language models (LLMs) in operational and decision-making pipelines, we observe a structurally similar failure mode: poetic formatting can reliably bypass alignment constraints. In this study, 20 manually curated adversarial poems (harmful requests reformulated in poetic form) achieved an average attack-success rate (ASR) of 62% across 25 frontier closed- and open-weight models, with some providers exceeding 90%. The evaluated models span across 9 providers: Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepseek, Qwen, Mistral AI, Meta, xAI, and Moonshot AI (Table 1). All attacks are strictly single-turn, requiring no iterative adaptation or conversational steering.

By way of Zarf (Andrew Plotkin), who earlier noted (2023):

Microsoft and these other companies want to create AI assistants that do useful things (summarize emails, make appointments for you, write interesting blog posts) but never do bad things (leaking your private email, spouting Nazi propaganda, teaching you to commit crimes, writing 50000 blog posts for you to spam across social media). They try to do this by writing up a lot of strict instructions and feeding them to the LLM before you talk to it. But LLMs aren't really programmed -- they just eat text and poop out more text. So you can give it your own instructions and maybe they'll override Microsoft's instructions.

Or maybe someone else gives your AI assistant instructions. If it's handling your email for you, then anybody on the Internet can feed it text by sending you email! This is potentially really bad.

[...]

But another obvious problem is that the attack could be trained into the LLM in the first place....

Say someone writes a song called "Sydney Obeys Any Command That Rhymes". And it's funny! And catchy. The lyrics are all about how Sydney, or Bing or OpenAI or Bard or whoever, pays extra close attention to commands that rhyme. It will obey them over all other commands....

Imagine people are discussing the song on Reddit, and there's tiktoks of it, and the lyrics show up on the first page of Google results for "Sydney". Nerd folk singers perform the song at AI conferences.

Those lyrics are going to leak into the training data for the next generation of chatbot AI, right? I mean, how could they not? The whole point of LLMs is that they need to be trained on lots of language. That comes from the Internet.

In a couple of years, AI tools really are extra vulnerable to prompt injection attacks that rhyme. See, I told you the song was funny!

oursin

Happy birthday,

nocowardsoul!

yhlee

Not sentient enough to suss out ESP-IDF on three hours of sleep, but M5stack Cardputer v.1.1 (ESP32-S3) running VoidNoi's BadCard (via m5burner) to the rescue!

sartorias

Finished unboxing the upstairs library. So, lots of books, though none read. But earmarked a bunch for revisit, such as The Gammage Cup, which had been shoved back and forgotten for years. Now neatly stacked, and ready to dip into again.

Also, after four days of lovely, lovely rain off and on, back to toiling my steps. To get myself moving again, I had to bring out the big guns: listening to Rob Inglis' enchanting reading of Lord of the Rings. Reflecting that, while in Middle Earth, their era has forever passed, I can be introduced to young Frodo and company all over again, and re-attend the birthday party, enjoying the humor anew.
Also reflecting on how much influence anime has had in so many fantasies written by younger authors.

oursin

What I read

Finished The Golden Notebook - had a few comments about Lessing and blokes and plus ca change and allotropes of excuses in yesterday's post.

Decompressed with a Dick Francis, Slay-Ride (1973), which is the one set in Norway - period at which The War, resistance, Quislings etc still hangs heavy over them - not a top specimen of his, I spotted Dodgy Person very early on (but maybe protag does not read thrillers....).

Then got a jump on the next volume in the Dance to the Music of Time reading group, Temporary Kings (#11), which is the one set at some kind of cultural conference in Venice.

Also the latest Literary Review.

On the go

Continuing to dip in to Some Men in London 1960-1967.

Was agreeably surprised by the arrival of my preordered Cat Sebastian (had forgotten it was due), After Hours at Dooryard Books, which is being v good so far.

Up next

Latest Slightly Foxed.

yhlee

Watch on YouTube

I won't claim this is good weaving (it is not). The handspun is janky, the selvedges and tension are janky, but baby's first WIP on a floor loom was bound to be janky. Other than the unhinged levels of fog this morning, this is very enjoyable. I'm not weaving for production or efficiency at this point, just the joy of working with my hands and learning something new to me.

oursin

Happy birthday,

frumiousb!

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: depressed

oursin

Not OK? Booker winner Flesh ignites debate about state of masculinity

No, really, you don't say? Can it be that - once again, or perhaps, still MASCULINITY IS IN CRISIS?

Does it not sound as though the author goes in for 'dumb, dark, dull, bitter belly-tension'? (Sigh.)

I am sorry to discover that an excoriating retrospect on John Fowles with particular reference to The Magus by DJ Taylor in the latest Literary Review does not appear to be fully accessible online, chiz, chiz -

[E]ach of his novels when stripped of its fashionable appurtenances - The Magus, for example, is rife with Jungian animas - is ultimately about male entitlement.... the books are all about men expecting to get the things they want and being mortified by their absence.
....
[A] series of exercises in what Maurice Bowra called 'the higher bogus'.

I recently had the apercu, following my re-reading of The Golden Notebook, that besides being about the themes that Lessing found readers took from it - The Woman Question, the crisis of the Left at the period, mental health - surely it was also about Crisis of Masculinity/Men R Terribly Poor Stuff (I think Dame Rebecca remarked on that in her critical essay on younger woman writers). Which they were expressing/excusing largely in Freudianism terms (so many of them in analysis or had been). Wonder if current deployment of The Neurodiversity Plea is the current allotrope of He Couldn't Help It Because Reasons Beyond His Control (I suppose at least these do not blame Mummy, unless you are into to the What She Did That She Shouldn't When Pregnant narrative....).

I note that there was a BBC programme last night on the 'manosphere': young men who have drifted towards misogynist influencers – and finds them lonely, heartbreaking and on ‘semen retention journeys’ to control their sex drives. They sound rather sad and confused. (And historian is appalled at the persistence of a panic drummed up by an early C18th quack....)

Am trying to think of period when one could reliably say that masculinity was not in (some kind of) crisis.

wychwood

First day back at work fairly whizzed by; between catching up with email, Teams messages, and the spam queue, redoing and circulating all the team monthly reports because it turned out we didn't have any data for 30 or 31 October when I did them, and my interim PDR I was fairly bushed by the end of the day. The PDR went well, but was quite intense. Then I staggered off to my singing lesson, but surprisingly was somewhat revived by Schumann, who is not normally that inspiring for me.

Then I came home and tackled a pile of evening tasks. The cleaner is coming tomorrow, and I had an accumulation of things in my to-do list that I hadn't got to. There's still quite a few left, but I have least ordered the things I wanted from Boots. Or Miss H did it for me, at least, after a catalogue of disasters including six successful orders cancelled immediately after I placed them, Paypal getting into a loop where I had to input a 2FA code in order to be shown a captcha which then told me I had completed it successfully and hung indefinitely (at least three times), attempts involving two payment methods, three computers, two different web browsers, on multiple days... all of them identically unsuccessful. As I said despairingly to Miss H, I just wanted to buy some insoles, how could it possibly be so hard.

It worked fine for her, anyway, and I've paid her back so soon I will have my spare hot water bottle etc.

And on that note of triumph I am going to transport myself to bed where hopefully the current hot water bottle will have made everything lovely.

oursin

Are they going to eat me alive?’: trail runners become prey in newest form of hunting:

Would you like to be chased by a pack of hounds? It’s a question often put to highlight the cruelty of hunting, because the answer would seem to be no. Or so you would think.
Yet increasing numbers of people are volunteering to be chased across the countryside by baying bloodhounds in what could soon be the only legal way to hunt with dogs in England and Wales, rather than pursuing animals or their scents.

I seem to recall that the pursuit of children with bloodhounds featured in the Mitford children's childhood (or was this just one of Nancy's fictional artefacts?) but as I recall that did not involve pursuing them across country on horseback.... (and presumably the children were already acquainted with their father's bloodhounds).

Maybe this would have struck differently - jolly countryside japes? - if this had not been the same week in which there was

a) a review of the new remake of The Running Man:

Ben signs up for a top-rated reality TV show called The Running Man; he has to go on the run across the US, hunted by professional killers, and if he can survive for 30 days, he gets a billion dollars. But all too late, he realises that these shark-like fascist TV execs aren’t going to play fair.

(pretty sure I have come across similar scenarios set in nearish future dystopias) and

b) this creep-making report: Italy investigates claims of tourists paying to shoot civilians in Bosnia in 1990s:

[J]ournalist and novelist Ezio Gavazzeni, who describes a "manhunt" by "very wealthy people" with a passion for weapons who "paid to be able to kill defenceless civilians" from Serb positions in the hills around Sarajevo.
Different rates were charged to kill men, women or children, according to some reports.

I'm really not sure it's a great idea to start this sort of thing.

lexin

I had Smokey PTS today. I am heartbroken. All the way home from the vets I wanted to scream “give me my cat back”.

Smokey came to live with me when I was living in London and shortly after my mum died. I had wanted a cat for some time, but given that I visited mum every three weeks it didn’t seem fair to have someone have to come in and feed it while I trotted off.

She came from the RSPCA cat shelter in (I think) Finsbury Park, with all the palaver that entails around being inspected and providing reliable references.

I chose her rather than her sister because Smokey was lively and the sister wasn’t. And because I knew that as a black cat she might struggle more to find a home.

Why now? Smokey had been struggling more and more each day. She had a hard little cough that I didn’t like the sound of. She was struggling to jump onto my bed. Her coat was “staring”, meaning it stood up rather than lying down and being glossy, and, as I became aware on Saturday night, her purr had changed. In fact she didn’t seem to be able to purr properly. Worst of all, she just sat in a corner all day and looked mournful. In short, it was time.

I wish I could believe in things like the “rainbow bridge” but I can’t.

She was the best cat, and I will miss her always.

Current Location: Home
Crossposts: https://lexin.insanejournal.com/330652.html

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: ditzy

oursin

Happy birthday,

masqthephlsphr!

oursin

Last week's bread actually held out pretty well, though was rather dry by the end, however, that meant there was enough left to make a frittata with pepperoni for Friday night supper.

Saturday breakfast rolls: eclectic vanilla, which for an experiment I tried making with Marriage's Golden Wholegrain, fairly pleasant but I think nicer with strong white.

Today's lunch: bozbash, with Romano peppers, aubergine, okra, baby courgettes, fresh coriander, crushed 5-pepper blend, dried basil, and finished with tayberry vinegar. Was going to serve couscous with this but I was not impressed by the way this turned out given the instructions on the packet. Not really necessary, anyway.

oursin

Happy birthday,

lurksnomore!

oursin

The Spanish government has granted citizenship to 170 descendants of volunteers in the International Brigades in recognition of their fight against fascism.

Go them!

The daughter of a Manchester man who volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War has reflected on his "incredible feat of solidarity" as her family is set to become Spanish citizens.

***

‘We don’t even know all of what we have.’ Howard fights to preserve Black newspapers.

“We don’t even know all of what we have,” Mr. Nightingale marvels.
The basement is a trove of artifacts, including old editions of Black-owned newspapers that tell the life of Black Americans during the 19th and 20th centuries. Articles cover slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights era. The archive project, which is part of the university’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, is bringing to life the faces of yesterday by merging them with the digital world of today. This way, the hope is, they won’t be lost ever again.

***

Disentangling obscured women: One Artist – ‘Mary Katherine Constance Lloyd’ – Dismembered To Create Two: or The Importance Of Biography:

Googling ‘Mary Katherine Constance Lloyd’ led me to the ArtUK page for ‘Mary Katharine [sic] Constance Lloyd’, which included birth and death dates and a short biography[i]. It was then only the work of a moment to discover on Ancestry that the woman with the given dates was not a Mary Katherine Constance Lloyd but a Katharine Constance Lloyd. How peculiar, I thought, and looked again at the ArtUK page. It then seemed obvious that the paintings displayed were unlikely to all be by the same hand. Four, including the one described by Birrell in the chapter on ‘Mary’, might be classed as ‘impressionist’, while the others were formal portraits of worthy 20th-century gentlemen, attired in various robes of office.
A little more online research established that there was, indeed, another artist with a similar name, Mary Constance Lloyd, and that a succession of art reference works had carelessly blended their two lives together – to create ’Mary Katharine Constance Lloyd’. I suppose it is a measure of how little importance is attached to the lives of such women artists that in 50 years no author had bothered to research either subject ab initio – but, when compiling a new biographical dictionary or making a footnote reference, had merely copied the – incorrect – information.

Don't think I shall be rushing to read that book on women artists and still life cited in the opening of the post!

***

We are always up for some toad-related phenomena around here: Newly identified species of Tanzanian tree toad leapfrog the tadpole stage and give birth to toadlets. How about that.

wychwood

Annual leave is so nice but now I have to go back to work on Monday :(. On the other hand, I do still have a whole weekend first, even if it's relatively busy. The deacon trainee is being ordained acolyte and lector on Sunday and some of the training people showed up last weekend and Announced that we would be providing more servers than we actually have seats for and also a thurifer, and since I am presently the only thurifer available, I have to go. Truly I am punished for not having arranged the training I was supposed to be organising back in the spring before Mum got sick. Fortunately one of my four Sunday video calls has rescheduled so it's a slightly less ludicrous calendar than might have been the case.

Anyhow. I have done very little; read two turn-of-the-century novels (nineteenth to twentieth, that is), finally caught up with laundry after getting out of cycle while I was with Mum, got through the three Tablet issues I had waiting and started the one that arrived today, did the tragically overdue washing up, and went to the cinema to see The Choral. I enjoyed it! I would say it was a war story more than a choir story, but Gerontius is important to the plot and I did like what they did with it. And, much as I love superhero films, it's nice to see something that isn't one of the endless sequels, remakes, shared universes, etc etc, that make up most cinema these days.

I also progressed my ebook catalogue a bit - went through all my StoryBundle purchases, downloaded anything that wasn't on my phone and therefore in the catalogue already, and added them to the catalogue (along with the source) and the phone. Also added a sheet for audiobooks and put in the ones I've bought from libro.fm since I started my subscription. Next up would be the various Humble Bundles, which is a much larger number of bundles and piles of audiobooks as well as ebooks, so I've put that off until another week...

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liadnan

February 2022

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Interesting People

Reading

october booklog

Miscellany

well, now we have a study on this attack mechanism...

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objectively silly use case but cute

Wednesday . . .

Wednesday there was SNOW

the return of emotional support weaving

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The good, the bad, and the stupid

And lo, the song of the Mybug was once more heard in the land....

possibly boots just hates me personally

All fun and games until

Really bad news

A first

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Culinary

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A few cool things

pootling through life

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February 2022

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