Network

Entry tags:

.fanfic

DAY 12 - FIC - NARUTO - UZUMAKI KUSHINA

Day 12 - Her Sanctuary

Title: Inside a Spiral
Fandom: Naruto
Characters: Kushina Uzumaki/Namikaze Minato
Rating: Gen
Summary: If someone were to tell the young Kushina who recently arrived at Konohagakure, that her son would be named after food — one of her favorites, to be fair — and after a book from a sketchy writer at best, that someone best grit their teeth because a punch was soon to follow. Or: Kushina dealing with Kyuubi being difficult and Minato is there for her.

Story in ao3

This was a story written last year that fit today's theme.

Friday, February 13 - Tender Moments

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

(no subject)

I am not really following Olympic hockey, even though is cool that certain people get to play with each other, etc. It's a good time to take a break. But, things are going well for the Kraken right now. They are spending the break in a play-off spot. We've have some big goals from Kraken and over in Italy, but one of them... was against a Kraken goalie.

All the pictures of Oskar Fisker Molgaard's big goal that the Kraken PR people are posting are angled/edited to not show who it has he got the puck past. So far, Molgaard is the only player to get one past Grubauer.

I'm not currently planning on watching any games. I might if Germany actually gets into medal contention. My one hope for the Olympics is that Binnington does well because people are way too shitty to him and take things he says and does in the worst possible light. I don't care how Canada does overall, but I hope he does well. (Canada is very good at producing top hockey players, but weirdly they don't produce top goalies. So goaltending is a weak point for team Canada and people are freaking out over Canada having Binnington even on the team. But like, the overall state of Canada's goalie production is not his fault. People need to chill about Binnington)

Current Music: Sigrid - Basic

Entry tags:

Oh right, it's Friday!

Fanart Friday ahoy :D

Absolute Wonder Woman
absolute wonder woman by asianfisherman @ bluesky. Our favorite lady and her favorite Pegasus. LOVE the profile of Diana here, the tousled hair, the palette. Perfection.

Absolute Wonder Woman by ohvalkyrie @ bluesky. Unusually angled profile, lovely coloring.

A3 commission by getcampbell @ bluesky. Moody black and white ink drawing.

Really loving Absolute Wonder Woman right now by camartstuff @ bluesky. Full bodied hairporn goddess.

horse girls by crowwkui @ bsky. Diana and Kara, super cute!

Princesses of the Underworld by dylanmacri @ bsky. Hades crossover, very adorable, much muscle.

I still don't know how to spot if certain bsky posts are locked when you don't have an account... sorry if some don't load for you.

Entry tags:

micropost

Life with two kids: No memory to speak of

It's amazing that my mood depends so much on what my children remember to bring home from school.

(Yesterday, down two bus passes and a backpack, misery.
Today, all of their belongings, relief!)

Como travar sessões do Claude com uma frase

Posted by David Gerard

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/13/como-travar-sessoes-do-claude-com-uma-frase/

https://pivot-to-ai.com/?p=7172

Today’s Pivot to AI translation to Portuguese in Rodrigo Ghedin’s Manual do Usuário is of The Anthropic test refusal string: kill a Claude session dead. [Manual do Usuário]

Rodrigo put the test refusal string on Manual do Usuário and Claude can no longer read the site. Job done! [Bluesky]

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/13/como-travar-sessoes-do-claude-com-uma-frase/

https://pivot-to-ai.com/?p=7172

Stilgherrian: The 9pm S-Bend of Technology with David Gerard

Posted by David Gerard

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/13/stilgherrian-the-9pm-s-bend-of-technology-with-david-gerard/

https://pivot-to-ai.com/?p=7144

The following episode contains strong language. Artificial intelligence. Stupidity. Yes, a lot of stupidity. And a small number of Nazis.

I went on Australian tech journalist Stilgherrian’s podcast series, The 9pm Edict, and it’s just gone up! The pod is 57 minutes. [Show notes; download, MP3]

We talk about the SpaceX /xAI hookup and Grok’s bikini pics, investor money for AI running out, Moltbook, how AI makes you worse at learning, AI as gambling addiction, how AI fans can’t tell good from bad, “artificial intelligence” as a marketing term, the forthcoming Great Depression 2, AI being at the top of its technological S-curve, billionaires getting into group chats with literal neo-Nazis,the VC whose chatbot deleted his wife’s photos (and is also e/acc,another form of neo-fascist), how AI agents don’t actually work, Anthropic’s AI vending machine, and attempted chatbot scams.

The show notes are extensive.

David previously appeared on Stil’s podcast in 2021 and 2022 talking about cryptocurrency nonsense while that bubble was in full swing, and in 2024 for Pivot to AI!

Content warning: contains Australian levels of salty language.

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/13/stilgherrian-the-9pm-s-bend-of-technology-with-david-gerard/

https://pivot-to-ai.com/?p=7144

SaaSpocalypse: investors overspend badly on software companies and blame AI

Posted by David Gerard

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/12/saaspocalypse-investors-overspend-badly-on-software-companies-and-blame-ai/

https://pivot-to-ai.com/?p=7134

Today’s word is “SaaSpocalypse”. A pile of overvalued enterprise software companies’ stock price number went down, and they’re blaming AI.

The mini-bubble in software-as-a-service was always going to pop . The trigger was that stock traders were deluded into thinking your boss yelling at Claude Code could replace Salesforce. Yeah, really.

In January, Anthropic launched Claude Cowork. It’s an AI agent designed to be your workplace assistant! Anthropic called Cowork a “research preview,” which means even they didn’t think it worked yet. [Anthropic]

Then on 2 February, Anthropic released a pile of Cowork “skills” for legal offices. These claimed to do all sorts of legal jobs, like contract review. This is the AI stuff that doesn’t work already, and law firms are having to hire more lawyers to clean up after the bots. [Artificial Lawyer; GitHub]

But. this single software release of a research preview was enough to panic investors in companies making software for lawyers. On 3 February, a whole bunch of legal software companies dropped 4% to 12%. The rout spread to non-legal SaaS companies. [Proactive Investors]

A lot of analysts saw the crash coming — they’ve considered the SaaS companies were overvalued for a while. But AI pulled the trigger: [Bloomberg, archive]

“We call it the ‘SaaSpocalypse,’ an apocalypse for software-as-a-service stocks,” said Jeffrey Favuzza, who works on the equity trading desk at Jefferies. “Trading is very much ‘get me out’ style selling.”

Private equity especially got into SaaS big time. In economics, “rentiers” are considered a parasitical drain on a working economy. Because they are. But being the rent-seeking middleman also makes a ton of money!

So SaaS companies were highly regarded, and they got very overvalued. And now private equity is cutting its software exposure as fast as possible.

The traders seem to hold the notion that AI can just replace your enterprise software spend. An AI assistant at your desk, or Claude Code writing your business software for you!

Neither of these is even slightly possible. But tell the traders that. They’ve been hearing nothing but “AI, AI, AI is coming!” for the past three years:

“The draconian view is that software will be the next print media or department stores, in terms of their prospects,” said Favuzza at Jefferies.

There’s just one problem — for all the continuously blasting hype, AI agents don’t work. They literally don’t work. They can’t work. You can tell a chatbot agent what to do, and it’ll try to do it! And it’s a hallucinating chatbot, so it’ll mess up after a time.

The vendors want to sell you on the vision, and teach you to make excuses for the bot that can’t work. Next model, bro, it’ll be amazing. This is the future! Though it sure isn’t the present.

That doesn’t matter, though. Because Anthropic sold a big promise — that agents and coding bots could get you out from under the thumb of enterprise software. Which every customer of it hates. And that includes the traders and analysts.

Renting a company the machinery their business runs on pulls in an absolute bundle! And the vendors don’t even have to make the software any good. So they … just don’t. It’s buggy, it sucks, and the users hate it. And they don’t have a choice.

So there’s a lot of resentment. Anthropic’s selling into that market.

But the promise is not possible. You can’t vibe code enterprise software if you have any requirement for accuracy or compliance.

And I do mean vibe coding. This isn’t about experienced software developers using a chatbot as an autocomplete. This is telling managers anyone can vibe code an app. They’ll think it’s 95% done when the web page looks nearly right. Then they’ll hand it off to their remaining software developer to build the actual functionality.

But the resentment at the sewage-tier quality of enterprise software is vast. The customers want nothing more than to make these parasites go away.

Unfortunately, the robot is not in fact up to the job. And the bridge troll business model is odious, but it’s also a pretty solid cash flow. The software stocks are already recovering a bit. [NYT, archive]

The monthly fee model supports a lot of software products that would otherwise not get support. But mostly it’s the part of modern life where you get nickel and dimed all day every day, and in this case it’s for rotten software that doesn’t even work well.

Everyone wants to be the bridge troll and invest in the bridge troll. But making your customers hate you this much is not a stable situation.

Video — Podcast

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/12/saaspocalypse-investors-overspend-badly-on-software-companies-and-blame-ai/

https://pivot-to-ai.com/?p=7134

Entry tags:

Drabblethon: The Midnight Bell in Summer - Ernest Ralph Gorse

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

shit

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

Entry tags:

You know who would be setting things on fire over this?

I was reading this (and the various other reports about pro-natalist pontificating and getting women - the right sort, obvs - to BREED): Reform by-election candidate calls for ‘young girls’ to be given ‘biological reality’ check:

Mr Goodwin – who is standing for Reform UK in the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election – argued: “We need to explain and educate to young children, the next generation, the severity of this crisis.
“We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life, and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

And I was thinking, you know who would be spitting tacks and riding in with all her guns blazing on this -

- no other than Dr Marie Stopes, who was so not about woman as mere breeding vessels. And was a) the daughter of an older mother and b) an older mother herself by the time she actually progenated.

Okay, she had views of the day (particularly when it came to daughter-in-laws, sigh), but she was also very much about women's choice, women pursuing careers, women not spending their entire lives in child-bearing, fewer but healthier babies through contraception and spacing, etc etc etc.

In many ways, yes, she was a monster, but a monster I would happily reanimate from the waves off Portland Bill where her ashes were scattered and send after these guys.

Entry tags:

Drabblethon: Night comes. And comes. And comes. (Knock-Knock – Ice-Pick Lodge)

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Entry tags:

queen mab + her electric sheep

obviously a higher-end pharmacy

Had a dream I was in a drugstore and Bad Bunny was sitting up in the balcony and he threw a bottle of aspirin at me and I ran across the store and scaled the wall to get up in his face about it.

Tamil Brahmi, Prakrit, and Sanskrit inscriptions found in ancient Egyptian tombs

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72796&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=tamil-brahmi-prakrit-and-sanskrit-inscriptions-found-in-ancient-egyptian-tombs

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72796

Among numerous articles and press releases on this sensational discovery, here are the first three that I encountered, all dating to February 11-12, 2026:

Tamil Brahmi inscriptions found in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings shed light on ancient trade links – The Hindu

Researchers find 2,000-year-old Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions on Egyptian tombs | Chennai News – The Times of India

Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions found in Egypt’s Valley of Kings – Deccan Herald

Quoting from the first:

A path-breaking finding has shed new light on trade links between ancient Tamilagam, other parts of India and the Roman Empire. Two researchers have identified close to 30 inscriptions in Tamil Brahmi, Prakrit and Sanskrit at tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. These inscriptions are said to belong to the period between the 1^st and 3^rd Centuries C.E.

These inscriptions were identified during a study carried out in 2024 and 2025 by Charlotte Schmid, Professor at the French School of Asian Studies (EFEO) in Paris and Ingo Strauch, Professor at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. The team documented them across six tombs in the Theban Necropolis. They followed the footsteps of French scholar Jules Baillet, who surveyed the Valley of the Kings in 1926 and published more than 2,000 Greek graffiti marks.

Presenting their findings in a paper titled ‘From the Valley of the Kings to India: Indian Inscriptions in Egypt’ at the ongoing International Conference on Tamil Epigraphy, the scholars said the individuals who made these inscriptions came from the north-western, western and southern regions of the Indian subcontinent, with those from the latter forming the majority.

Visitors had left brief inscriptions and graffiti by carving their names on the walls of corridors and rooms, marking their presence in the tombs, the researchers said, adding that these sets of inscriptions appear inside the tombs alongside larger bodies of graffiti in other languages, primarily Greek. Within such settings, the Indian visitors seem to have followed an existing practice of leaving their names inside the tombs, they said.

The name Cikai Koṟraṉ appears repeatedly. It was inscribed eight times across five tombs. The name was found near entrances and high on interior walls among other graffiti marks. In one tomb, it appears at a height of about four metres at the entrance, Mr. Strauch said.

“The name Cikai Koṟṟaṉ is revealing, as its first element may be connected to the Sanskrit śikhā, meaning tuft or crown. While this is not a common personal name, the second element, koṟṟaṉ, is more distinctly Tamil. It carries strong warlike associations, as it derives from a root, koṟṟam, meaning victory and slaying. This root is echoed in the Chera warrior goddess Koṟṟavai and the term koṟṟavaṉ, meaning king,” Ms. Schmid said.

The name koṟṟaṉ also came up in other finds in Egypt. It appears in Koṟṟapumāṉ, written on a sherd discovered at Berenike, a Red Sea port city, in 1995. The name also occurs in the Sangam corpus, where the Chera king Piṭtāṅkoṟṟaṉ, praised in the Purananooru, is sometimes directly addressed as koṟṟaṉ, the scholars pointed out, adding that these parallel attestations in inscriptions from Pugalur, the ancient Chera capital, dated back to the 2nd or 3rd century C.E.

The researchers also discuss other names in Tamil Brahmi that occur in these tombs.

K. Rajan, academic and research adviser, Tamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology, said the findings are significant as they shed light on the trade links between ancient Tamilagam from the Malabar Coast and the Roman Empire. He said that earlier work in Egypt had focused on the Red Sea port city of Berenike, where excavations were conducted for several years and attention has now moved to the Nile river valley.

This is one more batch of data that puts the nix on the conventional notion that people thousands of years ago were not moving around long distances and engaging in mercantile, cultural, and linguistic exchange.

Selected readings

[Sample bibliography for one large, Neolithic site in Shenmu County, Shaanxi, China — located in the northern part of the Loess Plateau, on the southern edge of the Ordos Desert about 4,000 years ago.]

"Shimao, graphic arts, and long distance connections, part 2" (12/27/23)
"Shimao, graphic arts, and long distance connections" (8/16/22)
"The importance of archeology for historical linguistics, part 2" (5/11/20) — offers an introduction to the Shimao site
Li Jaang, Zhouyong Sun, Jing Shao, and Min Li, "When peripheries were centres: a preliminary study of the Shimao-centred polity in the loess highland, China", Antiquity, 92.364 (August 22, 2018), 1008-1022.
"King Carved In Stone Found at 4,200-Year-Old Chinese Pyramid Palace", by Sahir Pandey, Ancient Origins (8/11/22)
"Neolithic City of Shimao", by Jason Urbanus, Archaeology (January/February 2021)
"Siba culture" — Wikipedia
Victor H. Mair, with contributions by E. Bruce Brooks, "Was There a Xià Dynasty?", Sino-Platonic Papers, 238 (May, 2013), 1-39

[Thanks to Geoff Wade]

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72796&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=tamil-brahmi-prakrit-and-sanskrit-inscriptions-found-in-ancient-egyptian-tombs

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72796

Entry tags:

Star Wars: Legacy of Vader #12

( Scans under the cut... )

Entry tags:

Friday open thread: rewatching

It's cold, it's rainy, and a flock of wood pigeons has descended on the back garden. Let's do this week's open thread.

Today's open thread concept came to me when I was thinking about how frequently I reread books (there are certain books within my line of sight right now that I'm pretty sure I have probably reread several hundred times), and how rarely in comparison I rewatch films or TV shows. I definitely rewatched stuff a lot more when I was a teenager — this was the 1990s, when video rental shops were still a thing, and my friends and I used to have sleepovers almost every weekend, where we'd borrow three or four movies and fall asleep in someone's living room while watching them. We had a rotating series of favourites that we'd watch again and again — the first Matrix film and The Fifth Element were firm favourites, as were a bunch of the classic 1990s slasher films, plus the usual suspects among 1990s teen romantic comedies, The Craft, etc. My sister and I also used to rent and watch the same films over and over again.

But other than a couple of Buffy and Angel rewatches at various points in the past twenty years, and Matthias and I occasionally rewatching previously viewed films as part of our New Year's Eve themed movie nights (e.g. all three LotR films), rewatching is definitely less common for me than rereading. I assume this is because it's much more of a timesuck — in general I read much more quickly than I can watch a film or a TV show, and I have more control over how much I read in a single sitting, whereas viewing is dictated by the lenghth of the film or the TV episode.

What about you? Do you return to longform audiovisual media for repeat viewings? Has this changed over time? Is this different to your approach to rereading books?

Entry tags:

Fic: A Well Oiled Machine (Sukeban Deka II)

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Oh man, it's a local HONK and I'll miss it

I dearly hope it is actually worth it.
The whole phone thing has been impossible and I screwed up moving phones and maybe what's wrong is I used the wrong google account comma but I don't have my apps back and I don't know if my message history and I can't get into facebook unless I can get into an authenticator on my old phone , and at this point I can barely get into the old phone at all.

And then i'm probably going to lose a nearly two years streak on finch.

Anyway comma

FYI for people in DC - a fun last minute music/activist event tonight at Lamont Plaza in Mt Pleasant, 5:45 - 8 pm.

The Minneapolis band Brass Solidarity is in town as part of a larger delegation from MN demanding the end of ICE in their communities (and all communities). The DC Activist Street Band has invited them to come out and play together, in support of our neighbors from city to city and state to state.

Brass Solidarity is an incredible group and expect this will be a great time. Some video of them from IG: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DTeWR5CDETW/?

I'm so very tired period
And I'm so tired of my leg being a problem and I went and did a massage this yesterday and it was good for a little bit, but same problem with waking up with it, middle of the night. And i'm worried about sharing a bed for the next several nights.

Entry tags:

.fanfic

Day 13: Fic - Sukeban Deka II - Saki/Oyko/Yukino

Title: A Well Oiled Machine
Fandom: Sukeban Deka II
Pairing/Characters: Saki/Oyko/Yukino
Rating: T
Word count: 100
Content Notes: Wound Care, Teamwork
Author's note: For the

tokushippingweek teamwork prompt!
Summary: Saki loved her girls more than anything.
Also on Ao3 or read below the cut:

( Read more... )

Entry tags:

3SF cont.

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )