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otw_news_feedFor International Fanworks Day (IFD) 2026, we once again came together from all corners of the fandom cosmos, and celebrated an Alternate Universe-themed IFD! First, we ran our annual Feedback Fest, where we asked you all to recommend to each other fanworks around your favorite AUs. Fanlore hosted their annual IFD editing event from February 14-20, and we signal boosted several community events along with our own. Some of these are still on-going, so make sure to check out the post!
We also hosted chatrooms and games on our once-a-year IFD Discord server for 30 hours. Thanks to everyone who came by! You can check out the fruits of our collective labor–several fandom-themed poems, song lyrics, and stories–by visiting our collected IFD works on AO3.
We’d like to thank everyone who participated in our IFD activities and events, and give a huge shoutout to our OTW volunteers who modded chats and games! We hope to see you all again for IFD 2027!
in_the_pipeline_feed
This weekend brought news that the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned in prison by the compound epibatidine. That is not (to put it delicately) the first thing one would have expected, so I wanted to give a little background on this compound first.
It’s a toxin isolated from a frog species found in Ecuador and Peru (and a few of its relatives), and like all poison frogs it is a very festive-looking creature indeed. That is of course a warning to potential predators, as with many brightly colored species around the world, a little evolutionary message to any hungry onlooker that they can afford to be so bright and prominent for a very good reason that you should have had a chance to learn by now. Many such frogs are used by native groups in the New World jungles as arrow-poison sources, although this particular species doesn’t seem to be.
It has a simple structure with one rather unusual feature, that 2-chloropyridine group. You do see halogenated natural products, but more often from marine organisms where chlorine and bromine are more easily available. An even weirder-looking related alkaloid with the same group in it (phantasmidine) is also found at lower concentrations in the frogs. Unfortunately, the biosynthesis of these compounds has not yet really been worked out (to my knowledge). It is known, as with most other poison dart frogs, that if you raise them in captivity they do not produce the toxin: there is something in their natural diet or environment that allows for it that is not found under terrarium conditions. Even under jungle conditions, sometimes one population of frogs will have the toxin while another in a different location does not.
It is very likely that the frogs do not have the ability to produce the compound on their own, but instead acquire it from their diet of local insects, etc. and then sequester the epibatidine in their skin. This has been documented with both birds and frogs with another such case, batrachotoxin - that one is chemically distinct from epibatidine and is found in a different genus of frogs, but it’s likely a similar underlying story. Not knowing the exact species that produce these compounds has made studying the chemical pathways behind them rather difficult!
And as with all such compounds, an immediate question is how the creatures that produce or sequester them manage to avoid poisoning themselves. Epibatidine works as a ligand for both the muscarinic and nicotinic receptors - it’s an agonist, substituting for the natural ligand acetylcholine, and in general messing with the cholinergic system is going to lead to some strong effects. If you strongly block such signaling, you have replicated the mode of action of nerve gas, and if you strongly enhance it (as in this case) you can get a range of effects including analgesia and muscle paralysis. That latter one is especially unwelcome in the respiratory and cardiovascular system, clearly, and there is no antidote. The compound’s pharmacologic window between interesting pain relief qualities and seizures-n’-death is unfortunately quite narrow.
People have tried to widen it, most notably Abbott (AbbVie) in the 1990s. They did a lot of work in this area looking for a nonopioid pain compound and took a chemical cousin of epibatidine (ABT-594, tebanicline) into human trials. They had definitely gotten rid of the “death” side effect by that point, as the FDA tends to insist on, but the window between analgesia and the remaining side effects was still too small. These included nausea, vomiting, impaired coordination, and apparently rather weird dreams as well. People were dropping out of the treatment group in the Phase II with alarming frequency, and the compound was abandoned. There are still a number of possible opportunities in the selective-nicotinergic-agonist area, but realizing selective cholinergic agonists is a problem that stretches back many decades and no general solutions have been found.
OK, back to the present day. The presence of the compound in Navalny’s body seems to be beyond dispute. He died two years ago in a “special regime” prison in Siberia, and his body was returned to his mother. Numerous toxicological examinations have confirmed the epibatidine, which does not undergo much metabolism in the human body. That along with its unusual structure make it very easy to identify. I am in agreement with those who believe that this was a deliberate choice by Vladimir Putin’s regime. After all, they had tried to kill Navalny in 2020 with what was obviously a Russian-manufactured nerve agent, and that was after previous chemical attacks in 2017 and 2019. The use of a tropical frog poison in Siberia is to me a grim joke and a statement that this was obviously an unnatural death that was carried out by people with obvious knowledge of human poisons. You don’t need the frogs: epibatidine itself is not that hard to synthesize in the lab by a variety of published routes. It can be made in quantity by any competent organic chemist who knows enough to take the proper precautions, and Russia as a country has a great many skilled organic chemists.
The Russian military and security services have been experts in poisoning people with exotic materials for a long, long time. They know exactly what they are doing from a chemical point of view, even if some of their assassins have not been particularly competent or well-informed themselves. Some have speculated that the authorities wanted to try out the epibatidine route to see how well it worked, but let’s be realistic: they could have done that on all sorts of other Siberian prison inmates without anyone ever hearing about it. I don’t think that the Russian state services have many review-board problems when it comes to running human trials.
No, this was murder, obvious murder, and it was set up to be an obvious murder. Vladimir Putin is a corrupt, lawless poisoner, and he has had no qualms about demonstrating this over and over. He’ll order it done again the next time the opportunity presents itself.
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fanfhttps://dotat.at/@/2026-02-16-async.html
I'm writing a simulation, or rather, I'm procrastinating, and this blog post is the result of me going off on a side-track from the main quest.
The simulation involves a bunch of tasks that go through a series of
steps with delays in between, and each step can affect some shared
state. I want it to run in fake virtual time so that the delays are
just administrative updates to variables without any real
sleep()ing, and I want to ensure that the mutations happen in the
right order.
I thought about doing this by representing each task as an enum
State with a big match state to handle each step. But then I
thought, isn't async supposed to be able to write the enum State and
match state for me? And then I wondered how much the simulation
would be overwhelmed by boilerplate if I wrote it using async.
Rather than digging around for a crate that solves my problem, I thought I would use this as an opportunity to learn a little about lower-level async Rust.
Turns out, if I strip away as much as possible, the boilerplate can fit on one side of a sheet of paper if it is printed at a normal font size. Not too bad!
But I have questions...
melannenI had a dream for the third time this week about watching the 1980s live-action Batman show with my sister so I figured it was worth a DW post :P
If you don't know the 1980s live-action Batman that I apparently watch in my dreams here's a quick overview:
- It was a weekly one-hour show that ran for about three seasons. It predates the age of season-long arcs but it had more than the usual number of 2- and 3- part episodes and some character growth even.
- It's clearly intentionally following up on the legacy of the 1960s show because it revels in the fundamental absurdity and plays for comedy, but it was also determined to not get pigeonholed as a kids' show - it has non-cartoon violence and solid emotional arcs.
- For example instead of all the silly Bat-Gadgets, they had Wayne Enterprises (TM) machines. There's a running bit where Tim always makes sure he has access to a Wayne Enterprises (TM) Automatic Soup Dispenser (TM) and nobody can tell if he's just really into soup or if he's modding it to dispense other things.
- Oh yeah, despite being called Batman, it's actually mostly about Tim and Dick. Bruce shows up in every episode for at least a few minutes but is rarely the focus. (Yes, I know the 1980s is early for comics!Tim - I assume the comics character was based on the show character? - and there's no Jay in this continuity, which lets it be a little more lighthearted about their relationships with Bruce.)
- Tim became Robin after Dick "retired" and Bruce finally noticed how neglected the neighbor boy actually was. In the show he's mostly traveling around playing poor little rich boy and Robinning with a rotating guest cast of Teen Titans (nearly every episode is in a different city - they must have had a huge travel/sets budget.)
- Dick is 100% a civilian these days he swears. He's technically in college but never appears to attend. He's always showing up to "hang out" with his little bro, or following Kory to a show, and then having to secretly superhero it up without a costume or name. The show is constantly teasing that this is the episode he'll finally become Nightwing and never follows up.
- When Bruce shows up it's usually not as Bruce, or even Batman, but as his even more useless cousin "Kenneth Wayne", who only shows up in the tabloids when he's done something so ridiculous Bruce has to send Alfred to bail him out, and therefor has an excuse to be places Bruce can't possibly be. He has absolutely 0 natural authority over the boys, who treat him as an embarrassingly untrustworthy uncle, and enjoys the hell out of this.
- Dick is dating Koriand'r, but they insist they're not girlfriend and boyfriend because "Tamaraneans don't have boys and girls, she's just my Kory and I'm her Dick". This is never explored beyond that at all. (Also Kory looks a lot less human and more like Ron Perlman's Beast* (except as a hot not-girl, of course.)
- Tim spends every episode excited and/or worried about the main plot interfering with or facilitating a possible or planned date with a girl. The girls are never named or shown onscreen. Dick teases him about this.
The episode we watched last night involved Tim and Dick renting out an old mansion/party house in Philadelphia that was haunted by a very lazy demon shaped like a yellow cartoon rabbit, a very large monitor lizard who was wanted by the Mob, a bunch of people having to shelter overnight in a Victorian-themed cafe in the zoo, and every single character having to dress up as Matches Malone in the same bad wig at the same time. Also the Three Stooges guest-starred. I hope I get to watch more later, I don't think there's an official DVD release.
*did I only have this dream because I did that "name all the animals" game right before bed and was thinking about Golden Lion Tamarins??
rachelmanija
Excellent dark fantasy about three women trapped in a medieval castle under siege. It reminded me a bit of Tanith Lee - it's very lush and decadent in parts - and a bit of The Everlasting. Fantastic female characters with really interesting relationships. The language is not strictly medieval-accurate but a lot of the characters' mindsets are, which is fun.
All I knew going in was that it was medieval, female-centric, and involved cannibalism. This gave me a completely wrong impression, which was that it was a sort of female-centric medieval Lord of the Flies in which everyone turns on each other under pressure and starts killing and eating each other. This is very nearly the opposite of what it's actually about, though there is some survival-oriented eating of the already-dead.
The three main characters are Phosyne, an ex-nun and mad alchemist with some very unusual pets that even she has no idea what they are; Ser Voyne, a female knight whose rigid loyalty gets tested to hell and back; and Treila, a noblewoman fallen on hard times and desperate to escape. The three of them have deliciously complicated relationships with each other, fully of shifting boundaries, loyalties, trust, sexuality, and love.
At the start, everyone is absolutely desperate. They've been trapped in the castle under siege for six months, the last food will run out in two weeks, and help does not seem to be on the way. Treila is catching rats and plotting her escape via a secret tunnel, but some mysterious connection to Ser Voyne is keeping her from making a break for it. Phosyne has previously enacted a "miracle" to purify the water, and the king is pressuring her to miraculously produce food; unfortunately, she has no idea how she did the first miracle, let alone how to conjure food out of nothing. Ser Voyne, who wants to charge out and fight, has been assigned to stand over Phosyne and make her do a miracle.
And then everything changes.
The setting is a somewhat alternate medieval Europe; it's hard to tell exactly how alternate because we're very tightly in the POV of the three main characters, and we only know what they're directly observing or thinking about. The religion we see focuses on the Constant Lady and her saints. She might be some version of the Virgin Mary, but though the language around her is Christian-derived, there doesn't seem to be a Jesus analogue. The nuns (no priests are ever mentioned) keep bees and give a kind of Communion with honey. Some of them are alchemists and engineers. There is a female knight who is treated differently than the male knights by the king and there's only one of her, but it's not clear whether this is specific to their relationship or whether women are usually not allowed to be knights or whether they are allowed but it's unusual.
This level of uncertainty about the background doesn't feel like the author didn't bother to think it out, but rather adds to the overall themes of the book, which heavily focus on how different people experience/perceive things differently. It also adds to the claustrophobic feeling: everyone is trapped in a very small space and additionally limited by what they can perceive. The magic in the book does have some level of rules, but is generally not well understood or beyond human comprehension. There's a pervasive sense of living in a world that isn't or cannot be understood, but which can only be survived by achieving some level of comprehension.
And that's all you should know before you start. The actual premise doesn't happen until about a fourth of the way into the book, and while it's spoiled in all descriptions I didn't know it and really enjoyed finding out.
Spoilers for the premise. ( Read more... )
Spoilers for later in the book: ( Read more... )
Probably the last third could have been trimmed a bit, but overall this book is fantastic. I was impressed enough that I bought all of Starling's other books for my shop. I previously only had The Luminous Dead, which I'm reading now.
Content notes: Cannibalism. Physical injury/mutilation. Mind control. A dubcon kiss. Extremely vivid descriptions of the physical sensations of hunger and starvation. Phosyne's pets do NOT die!
Feel free to put spoilers for the whole book in comments.
witchpoetdreamer
( Read more... )
scalziwhatever_feed
The intentions behind one’s actions speaks louder than words ever could. Author Darby McDevitt leads us on a journey through the exploration of intention, desires, and consequences in the Big Idea for his newest novel, The Halter. Take the path he has laid out for you, if you so desire.
DARBY MCDEVITT:
Many years ago I worked for a video game company in Seattle that shoveled out products at a rate of four to six games per year. Most of these were middling titles, commissioned by publishers to fill a narrow market gap and slapped together in six to nine months by teams of a dozen or two crunch-weary developers. We worked hard and fast, with passion and determination, but the end results never quite equaled the ambitions we had.
A common joke around the office, told at the end of every draining development cycle, went like this: “Sure, the game isn’t fun, but the design documents are amazing.” The idea of offering consumers our unrealized blueprints in lieu of a polished game was ridiculous, of course, but it came from a place of real desperation. We wanted our players to know that, despite the poor quality of the final product, we really tried.
The novelist Iris Murdoch has a saying that I repeat often as a mantra, always to guard against future disappointment: “Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.” Here again is the notion of a Platonic ideal at war with its hazy shadow. How familiar all this is. Experience tells us that people falling short of their ideals is the natural course of life. We never live up to the best of our intentions.
In my new novel, The Halter, I compare this process of “intension erosion” to the more upbeat phenomenon of Desire Lines – footpaths worn over grassy lawns out of an unconscious need for efficiency. Desire lines appear wherever the original constraints of an intentionally designed geographic space don’t conform with the immediate needs of the men and women walking through it. In video games we use a related term – Min-Maxing – the act of looking for ways to put in a minimum amount of effort for maximum benefit. In both cases, the original, ideal use of a space or system is superseded by a desire for efficiency.
In The Halter, these same principles take hold on a grand scale inside an idealized “surrogate reality” metaverse called The Forum, where artists, scientists, and thinkers from all disciplines are invited to probe the deepest and most difficult aspects of human behavior and society. One Forum designer creates a so-called theater to explore the tricky business of language acquisition by sequestering one-hundred virtual babies together with no adult interaction. Another theater offers visitors a perfect digital copy of themselves as a companion, as a therapeutic approach to self-discovery. A third lets visitors don the guise of any other individual on earth so they may literally fulfill the empathetic idiom of “walking a mile in another man’s shoes.”
Noble intentions, arguably – yet in every case, after repeated exposure to actual human users, each theater devolves into something less than the sum of its parts. A prurient playground, or an amusing distraction, or a mindless entertainment. Shortcuts are taken, efficiencies are found, novel-uses imposed. The empathy theater is transformed into a celebrity-fueled bacchanalia; the digital doppelganger becomes a personal punching bag. The baby creche, a zoo. Each and every time, execution falls short of intention. Each theater crumbles, becoming a wreck of its original, perfect idea … and audiences are riveted.
The phenomena described here are common enough that several terms encompass them, each one differentiated for the situation at hand. Desire paths were my first exposure to the concept. The CIA calls it Blowback, when the side effects of a covert operation lead to disastrous results. Unintended Consequences and Knock-On Effects are cozier names, both of which can yield positive or negative results. And a Perverse Incentive is the related idea that the design of a system may be such that it encourages behavior contrary to its intended purpose. Taken together we begin to see the shape of the iceberg that wrecks so many perfect ideas.
I wrote The Halter to explore the highs and lows of these effects, and to shed light from a safe distance on the invisible forces that push and pull constantly at our behavior, often without our knowledge or consent. At one point in the middle of the novel, a collection of idealistic designers, most of whom have given years of their lives to the Forum designing and testing theaters of varying utility, commiserate on what they feel has been a collective failure. Their beloved theaters, they fret, have been co-opted and corrupted by The Forum visitors who have no incentive to behave or play along – they simply show up and engage in the simplest and most efficient way possible. How sad. How crushing. If only these morose designers could share their original design documents….
Their folly, in my view, was to treat their original intentions as merely a point of inspiration and not a goal to be achieved. Their error was to abandon their work in the face of a careless, sleepwalking opposition. The heroic path forward requires vigilance, not surrender, and if an outcome is unexpected, unwarranted, or undesirable, it may be more productive to tweak the inputs than blame the user.
We mustn’t fret that our perfect idea is laying at the bottom of the sea, five fathoms deep. We mustn’t fetishize our design documents – be it a holy book, an artwork, a game, a manifesto, or the U.S. Constitution – because design documents are merely static pleas for unrealized future intentions. They can always be corrupted, upended, misinterpreted. Have faith and patience. The hopeful paths are yet unmade, lying in wait for a thousand shuffling feet to score the way forward.
The Halter: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
cakewrecks_feedTranscript of the actual conversation of the Loud Girl talking on her phone in the next booth last night at dinner...
"So, like, I was at work today, and my boss Bob comes up to me, y'know, and he's all like,
"Did you finish that project I gave you last week?"
"And I, like, totally forgot about it, so I'm thinking, like,
But I don't say that. I'm all
And he's just, y'know, looking at me, so I say
And he just stands there, so I go
And he rolls his eyes and looks at me, and he says,
I know.
And I say, what, like you never missed a deadline? Oh, I know, that's cuz
right, Bob?
And I'm getting, like, totally pissed that he thinks he can treat me like that, so I'm just all,
and I walked out.
Yeah, I know! Good for me!
Now I'm like
I didn't want to be a lawyer anyway."
Really, like, epic thanks to Sheryl L., Ellen B., Lexi R., Katherine B., Sam B., Allison W., Amy O., Bruce T., Julia R., and Laura D. I love you guys. You really get me.
*****
And from my other blog, Epbot:
oursinHave only just discovered that there is a new (came out in November) biography of Decca Mitford: Carla Kaplan, Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford.
Via a review in the latest Literary Review which is, alas, not fully online, sounds less than whelmed, and gives the impression that it may be a tad po-faced.
Yes, about Jessica Mitford, that great tease.
Can't find any other unpaywalled online reviews of any great credibility - there are some on GoodReads but they all sound to be from people who Nevererdofer previously.
So before I, that already have several of her own biographical works and essays, collections of letters etc upon my shelves, also the previous biography, spend moolah and time on this, I wonder if anyone has already read it and has opinions?
(Have just had thought that as far as I recall, Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd did on at least one occasion encounter Unity Mitford, while undercover in Germany: but not, I think, Decca &/or Esmond, anywhere in his exploits.)
lucy_roman posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
fan_flashworksAuthor:
lucy_romanRating: Teen and up
Summary: Bodie is feeling a bit hot
Pairing: Bodie/Doyle
Word Count: 600
( Feverish )
bruce_schneier_feedHere are three papers describing different side-channel attacks against LLMs.
“Remote Timing Attacks on Efficient Language Model Inference“:
Abstract: Scaling up language models has significantly increased their capabilities. But larger models are slower models, and so there is now an extensive body of work (e.g., speculative sampling or parallel decoding) that improves the (average case) efficiency of language model generation. But these techniques introduce data-dependent timing characteristics. We show it is possible to exploit these timing differences to mount a timing attack. By monitoring the (encrypted) network traffic between a victim user and a remote language model, we can learn information about the content of messages by noting when responses are faster or slower. With complete black-box access, on open source systems we show how it is possible to learn the topic of a user’s conversation (e.g., medical advice vs. coding assistance) with 90%+ precision, and on production systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude we can distinguish between specific messages or infer the user’s language. We further show that an active adversary can leverage a boosting attack to recover PII placed in messages (e.g., phone numbers or credit card numbers) for open source systems. We conclude with potential defenses and directions for future work.
“When Speculation Spills Secrets: Side Channels via Speculative Decoding in LLMs“:
Abstract: Deployed large language models (LLMs) often rely on speculative decoding, a technique that generates and verifies multiple candidate tokens in parallel, to improve throughput and latency. In this work, we reveal a new side-channel whereby input-dependent patterns of correct and incorrect speculations can be inferred by monitoring per-iteration token counts or packet sizes. In evaluations using research prototypes and production-grade vLLM serving frameworks, we show that an adversary monitoring these patterns can fingerprint user queries (from a set of 50 prompts) with over 75% accuracy across four speculative-decoding schemes at temperature 0.3: REST (100%), LADE (91.6%), BiLD (95.2%), and EAGLE (77.6%). Even at temperature 1.0, accuracy remains far above the 2% random baseline—REST (99.6%), LADE (61.2%), BiLD (63.6%), and EAGLE (24%). We also show the capability of the attacker to leak confidential datastore contents used for prediction at rates exceeding 25 tokens/sec. To defend against these, we propose and evaluate a suite of mitigations, including packet padding and iteration-wise token aggregation.
“Whisper Leak: a side-channel attack on Large Language Models“:
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in sensitive domains including healthcare, legal services, and confidential communications, where privacy is paramount. This paper introduces Whisper Leak, a side-channel attack that infers user prompt topics from encrypted LLM traffic by analyzing packet size and timing patterns in streaming responses. Despite TLS encryption protecting content, these metadata patterns leak sufficient information to enable topic classification. We demonstrate the attack across 28 popular LLMs from major providers, achieving near-perfect classification (often >98% AUPRC) and high precision even at extreme class imbalance (10,000:1 noise-to-target ratio). For many models, we achieve 100% precision in identifying sensitive topics like “money laundering” while recovering 5-20% of target conversations. This industry-wide vulnerability poses significant risks for users under network surveillance by ISPs, governments, or local adversaries. We evaluate three mitigation strategies – random padding, token batching, and packet injection – finding that while each reduces attack effectiveness, none provides complete protection. Through responsible disclosure, we have collaborated with providers to implement initial countermeasures. Our findings underscore the need for LLM providers to address metadata leakage as AI systems handle increasingly sensitive information.
icon_uk posting in scans_dailyTalk about non-comics stuff, thread derail, and just generally chat among yourselves.
The intent of these posts is to chat and have some fun and, sure, vent a little as required. Reasoned debate is fine, as always, but if you have to ask if something is going over the line, think carefully before posting please.
Normal board rules about conduct and behaviour still apply, of course.
It's been suggested that, if discussing spoilers for recent media events, it might be advisable to consider using the rot13 method to prevent other members seeing spoilers in passing.
The world situation is the world situation. If you're following the news, you know it as much as I do, if you're not, then there are better sources than scans_daily. But please, no doomscrolling, for your own sake.
Today marks the Chinese New Year, so Happy New Year of the Fire Horse!
It's also Shrove Tuesday, or Pancake Day if you prefer, so enjoy!
Toy Fair 2026 took place in New York, with nostalgia being mined to a level I don't think I've never seen before. Licences getting figures include the 1977 Battlestar Galactica, the original Duck Tales and even the 80's Tigersharks cartoon (Think Thundercats, but more watery).
Credit to Hasbro though, for announcing their 40th Anniversary celebration of The Transformers: The Movie by announcing their apology tour! :)
Sentai's first successor: "Gavan Infinity", a new take on Space Sheriff Gavan has debuted and... he's very shiny, isn't he?
Legendary screen actor Robert Duvall passed at 95 and better known for his TV work actor James Van Der Beek passed at 48, and I overlooked mentioning Catherine O'Hara's passing a couple of weeks back, but she more than earned an honourable mention.
I'd completely missed that there were a couple of trailers out for "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" Season 2: The first, and the final
Also, as I type this the news is coming in that Jesse Jackson, one of the original Civil Rights champions of the 60's has passed away at the age of 84.
But not to end on a down note, the first kākāpō chick in four years hatched on Valentines Day, the first of hopefully many to arrive this year to help bolster a critically endangered species. (Kākāpō only breed ever 2 to 4 years, and there are only 236 left, so it's a long slog for the poor things)