tammylee | Reading

I'm informed this is a 1981 Ashford Traditional. I pounced on the secondhand listing as spinning wheels in working order (especially modern-ish wheels) are very scarce in my region, especially at a low price point. She's in incredibly good condition and spins beautifully! She's my first Saxony wheel, to go with the Ashford Traveller. I'm also told the bobbins ought to be inter-compatible (I have bobbins for both the larger and smaller flyers).

The pink-magenta is IxChel's North Ronaldsay blend (North Ronaldsay Sheep 40%, Blue Faced Leicester 30%, Silver infused Seaweed 10%, Mulberry Silk 10%, Cashmere 10%).

flemmings

Got my water meter reading yesterday. They said I could add a photo of it if I wanted to, which was dicey because I needed three hands to do it (one for the flashlight, one to hold the tablet, one to click the icon) and I only have two. But got something, then went to the city's website and entered my info and meter reading and attach photo, and it wouldn't attach. OK then, reenter info, click on send, it wouldn't send. Ohhhkay, here's a phone number for reporting, call, sit through five minutes of useless information, press button for enter reading, get told mailbox is full. So much for that.

To library today to print my blood draw form. Guy says I can do it from my phone. Log in to library's wifi, bring up the DL, press print, phone does not try to find a printer but sits and snickers at me. Fine. Go to a computer, wait for it to load Chrome, why are library computers so slooow, get Chrome, call up webmail's login, enter my info, Chrome says the password is wrong. Enter it again, still wrong. Check password on my phone, yes it's the same one, try again, wrong password, three tries and you're out, try again in fifteen minutes. Sit there glowering at computer, remember that I forwarded the email to my gmail account, call up gmail, login, there's my forwarded message, where's the link to the form? It should be at the bottom, where's the link? Could this be it? Yes!! Press print. Then go to printer, enter my library card number, enter my password, last digit doesn't enter but printer tries to print anyway. Can't. Go through it all again, enter password veeery carefully, printer prints my form. Success, I have slain the beast! but sheesh is this amount of faff necessary?

And now I must once again go down to the lab only this time in the rain, or snow if I leave it to later in the week. However, today my water meter reading went through no problem, so go me.

yhlee

WIP destined for 2-ply for a woven coverlet for Joe. :3 I'm currently waiting for an interesting 2-ply to dry (Navajo Churro Sheep 70%, Agave Cactus Fibres 20%, Cashmere 5%, Angora Bunny 5%).

Unrelated Qwerkywriter neepery:

keyboard, phone, cat

flemmings

Not civics or political science, for sure. "The horrors of socialism"? And Democrats voted for that? I'm not surprised. Even up here we have people who maintain that Carney is-- wait for it-- a communist. When in fact he's not even a Liberal: he's an old-fashioned Red Tory.

In minor matters, the fruit flies congregated about my traps but showed no inclination to fall in and drown. Come morning the upstairs trap was actually pretty full but there was still a cloud of the suckers in the kitchen. Have bought glue strips and hope they work.

At some point must go down to the basement and read my water meter. The city had them sending automatic reports until someone noticed that something like 80% of the meters were doing no such thing. So for the past however long they've been estimating usage. And now they want homeowners to read the meters for them. Got the notice last week and was all moan groan tremble in anticipation of a bill in the thousands of dollars. Reminded myself that in the old days they billed me less than the recent estimates, and I trust I have no leaking toilets that do boost the bills, and anyway it's something I must do, so...

flemmings

I'd scheduled a cab to take me down to my appointment at Service Ontario but today was the day those No park signs spraypainted onto the street for the last week came into effect as little bobcats ripped chunks out of the pavement and then filled them up again with asphalt. When I went to check 90 minutes before my due time, cars were able to pass, but there was no guarantee the bobcats wouldn't start on a new section. So I cancelled my cab and hoofed it over to Bathurst (shall be oh so happy when the Christie elevator becomes operational) and so down to College. Where my normal up elevator was out of service but I eventually located one in the labyrinthine and badly signposted MARS building. Up to the street and over to Bay and eventually located the totally unsignposted wheelchair entrance, and by dint of asking a security guard, the minisculely signposted elevator down.

I was early because of course I was, but they called me fifteen minutes after my appointed time and I was out ten minutes after. Found my MARS elevator no prob, empty subway train to St George, and announcements that train would bypass Spadina station because of a police investigation. Well, I wasn't going north, I was going west today, so down to the line 2 platform, black with the unlovely youth of TO and their backpacks and their hockey sticks and their shoving and jostling and loud whoops of glee. Ah well, knew I'd hit the student rush hour, shou ga nai. But the westbound train comes in, I get on, and then a stentorian loudspeaker says EASTBOUND TO KENNEDY, THIS TRAIN IS EASTBOUND TO KENNEDY. Bref, all westbound trains were turning back at St George because the investigation was at the line 2 Spadina station. So forced my way back through the crowd and tried to locate the elevator which was on the far side of the sea of humanity, both sides of the platform. And may I say, guys who stand on the platform edge looking down the tunnel in case the train might come earlier than announced, blissfully unaware of someone trying to pass them from behind, are asking to be shoved off said platform. Made it to the elevator along with many other disabled types with walkers, and mothers with tank strollers, and the elevator showed no signs of coming, and when it did it was full of tank strollers who decided no they didn't want to get off after all. One or two walkers made it on, also an unlovely youth who slid past me before I could move and stood there looking innocently over my head.

Got to the street eventually and then walked home. The one good thing being that Wieners was still open and I could buy fruit fly traps. Guy recommended fly paper but I've dealt with fly paper before and don't care to repeat the experience. So 8000 steps today and a temporary health card and the real thing if and when the post office agrees.

The odd thing being that both my health card and ID date from four years ago and I seem to remember going down to Bay St to get them, pandemic or no, but I have no record at all of doing so.

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!

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!

flemmings

Up as betimes as S. Pepys could wish (not really: he used to get up at 5 occasionally to be somewhere) and down to the lab where there were only two people waiting and the couple who came in with me: and where my requisition was expired by a scant ten days so, sorry, no can do. Eventually I'll get on to my doctor's secretary and have her email me a form and then get it printed at the library and then try again, but not today because I am peeved. And tomorrow I'm sleeping in till noon.

Finished Dogsbody, which I somehow never read, and a coupla Miles Burtons- Found Drowned and Legacy of Death-- which are bicycle and phone reading. DNFed The Place of Shells which was a bit too Japanese 'no there there' for me. Am currently reading Embers of the Hand, all about the Vikings-- though I wish I had Inventing the Renaissance handy so I could remind me of why the Greenland settlements failed. Also Masefield's The Midnight Folk because it's an ebook and I never read that either. Leonardo when I have nothing else going and/ or need to stop looking at screens.

Packed another bagful of leaves, from the side walkway this time. The walkway is a sea of leaves at this season, sometimes ankle-deep. And because they're all from my trees I feel compelled to remove some of them at least so J doesn't have to pay her gardener huge bucks to do it. Or rather, I feel compelled this year: it never bothered me in the past. But in the past I never registered that J had a basement tenant who had to wade through them to get to her entrance.

Downstairs tablet was playing silly buggers and annoying me to the point of thinking maybe I *will* splurge on a Chromebook. Then it suggested I clear my cache and cookies, which nothing prompts me to do when I'm optimising performance. But done now anyway. I might still investigate Chromebooks if I ever get down to the AGO but googling about suggests they only link to printers that are linked to the cloud which mine certainly isn't. The lack of a printer is starting to annoy me, but so is not being able to access my old files on my dead desktop.

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.

flemmings

My blood draw luck deserts me once again. Early to bed last night was awake in good time this morning, so did exercises and stretches for what help they could give me and trundled, unmedicated, down the street at shortly after ten. To find the waiting room not merely full but with a line down the hallway and posted wait times of over an hour. Which, even masked, am not willing to do because the waiting room was full of unmasked coughers. Better luck tomorrow. Came home, breakfasted, and doped me up on lovely ibuprofen and paracetamol and in consequence am feeling, if not no pain, at least less than yesterday.

Also got daybook for next year from Midoco, though the clerk had to point out that the daybooks were by the entrance, not round the corner with the notebooks where they usually are. So that's ticked off the list at least.

Also went to Paupers for their lunchtime hamburger, which is less meat than the dinner version and hence more digestible. Paupers is not playing Christmas music yet, bless them, and is playing 60s and 70s rock. Could do without Sinatra but otherwise just a bunch of golden oldies.

Continue to read Miles Burton on phone and tablet, quite entertaining. Except certain of the cover art is unmitigated spoilers and what *were* the editors thinking, passing a cover that actually shows the murderer and the murder method?

flemmings

I keep the thermostat at 18/65 at night, which means that the house is comfortable when it's on but then goes cold cold so cold in the intervals of off. And I always wake at an interval and don't want to get out of bed and that's why I didn't go for my blood draw this morning.

But still, home laundry got done yesterday, laundromat laundry done today, and between whiles I filled my rubber garbage can with leaves which I will decant into bags err some day. But I ached all day doing this and feel lousy now. Either something weather-related is moving in or I'm coming down with something. Can't tell from the sore throat and filled sinuses because that's just as likely to be allergies, and the sodden-through sweats today were down to my warm winter jacket which is certainly warm.

flemmings

Wild winds blow in cold and glorious sun, and incidentally swept my porch clean of the ironwood's leaves that fall on it. But I still have fruit flies in the house, and upstairs as well. An irksome mystery which might be explained by having bananas in the kitchen. They're now in the fridge where they will blacken, of course, but might put paid to the flies.

Except when I went up to Loblaws for milk and a turkey sandwich, there were the fruit flies still. Maybe they just breed in the leaves.

flemmings

Totally nothing day with monsoon rains and thunderstorms, following on a broken night of insomnia and hideous heartburn. Conclude I can no longer drink wine chiz curses. Also owies because I decided to see what doing without ibuprofen for a day was like and what it's like is crippledom.

OTOH find I have lost 2.5 pounds in the last fortnight which is not as much as I'd hoped but is still a win, being at an age when losing weight is difficult.

flemmings

The Christmas music has started. Carols at Loblaws, some soprano with too much vibrato; piano music at Arisu but the horrible modern standards, Last Christmas, All I Want For Christmas, yadda yadda. Must bring my earplugs with me wherever I go now, to block both music and happy happy conversations in my vicinity. At least the Americans don't start this until after the end of November, the one good side effect of having Thanksgiving when they do. Up here it's evidently 'anything within six weeks is fair game.'

Shouldn't buy pseudo-Bailey's when I have to go for a blood draw next week but screw it: I have pseudo-Bailey's and am drinking it. Should not drink period but equally should not take Ibuprofen for the owies so must drink. Alcohol causes cancer, ibuprofen causes strokes but guards against cancer, what you gonna do?

yhlee

This one's going to

helen_keeble. :)

yhlee

They're not kidding when they say this loom folds up easily (a few seconds) and can be wheeled WITH A PARTIALLY WOVEN WIP STILL ON THE LOOM, ditto unfolding and your project's ready again. (The wheels are extra, but worth it to me.)

Note that this loom is lightweight, my preference (~30 lbs) but that means it will "travel" if you treadle hard. Likewise, by default it's only two harnesses. I unironically love plainweave so this is fine for my use case but if you have more complex weaving in mind, maybe not so much. (You can buy a spendy attachment to convert it to four harnesses, but...)

folded loom

( Read more... )

I haven't yet tested it, but the design of the "ready-made warp" tabletop system is fiendishly clever. Frankly, warping is potentially so annoying that it was worth the cost. I am considering a Frankenstein's monster modification that MIGHT make warping easier as well but I haven't yet tested it.

tabletop warping system

yhlee

Possum blend from Ixchel, two-ply!

I still love the wallaby blend best, but this is great too.

handspun yarn

yhlee

https://www.scottedelman.com/wordpress/2025/11/12/a-dream-denied/

On August 12, 1971, my 16-year-old self mailed the first story I ever wrote off on its first submission. The publication I hoped would buy that story, my dream market, was The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

[...]

...earlier this week, after what by my count were 23 back and forth emails between me and the new owners of F&SF as I attempted to transform that initial boilerplate contract into something acceptable, I had no choice other than to walk away from my dream.

Let me explain why.

But before I do, I want to preface this by making it clear I have nothing but good things to say about editor Sheree Renée Thomas. Her words of praise as she accepted this story moved me greatly, and her perceptive comments and suggested tweaks ably demonstrated her strengths as an editor. It breaks my heart to disappoint her by pulling a story which was intended to appear in the next issue of F&SF. But, alas, I must.

Short version: Must Read Magazines offers garbage contracts. I'm not in contracts or law, but I started in sf/f short stories 20+ years ago and IMO Edelman correctly refused to sign.

Based on this account and others, I would not go near Must Read Magazines (or F&SF, Asimov's, Analog under their current ownership) with a 200-foot anaconda, let alone a 20-foot pole.

white_aster

I totally fell off the wagon with these. I have been reading, just...keep missing Wednesday somehow. (I had to think really hard about whether it was Wednesday again). Also I've been reading a lot of books that I just wasn't excited about (and some I DNFed or kind of wish I'd DNFed.) But I am brought back by the need to talk about this awesome book I read:

Finder by Suzanne Palmer

Palmer also wrote The Secret Life of Bots, which I loved. This Finder series I originally passed over because I thought "a space repo man named Fergus Ferguson tries to steal back a spaceship in an old mining colony made of hollowed-out asteroids and various large tin cans" was going to be more absurd than I usually enjoy. Oh boy, I could NOT have been more wrong. 5-star book, A+ characterization and wonderful worldbuilding, totally.

The more I thought about what was working in this book, the more I was really, really impressed with how (despite Fergus' terrible name) this book took its characters so seriously. Like...ALL the characters, from Fergus to the side characters to random folks Fergus met for a page or less. Everyone had understandable goals and motivations which changed realistically as the plot unfolded and they reacted to events as much as Fergus did. This led to very wonderfully ALIVE-feeling settings. The asteroid colony and Mars both felt filled with peoples' hopes and dreams and tragedies. Somehow this author made the politics of this collection of asteroids and tin cans feel messy and realistic and interesting.

I was also super impressed by how this author dealt with the really rather high amount of randomness in the plot. Fergus is a thief. He's doing a heist, scheming some schemes, and things go ass-up fairly early on. He's realistically forced many, many times to make a bad plan, just because it'll make SOMETHING change and then he can reassess. This could very easily have felt capricious and slapstick and unearned (a pet peeve of mine in some books), but it did NOT, because of the wonderful CHARACTERIZATION. Fergus spent the whole book understandably stressed about everything, convinced that he was going to get himself and everyone he cared about killed. He felt the GRAVITY of all this unplanned chaos, and passed that tension on to the reader, while moving forward anyway in the smartest way he could come up with (and he is SMART! It's a whole plot point that he several times amazes people with his knowledge because the first thing he does is READ THE ENTIRETY OF THE ASTEROID INTERNET so he knows what's what. A protagonist! Actually looking shit up rather than winging it! <3 <3!) Yes, he was lucky, and yes, he had some help from many quarters, but it somehow all made sense and held together without feeling random.

Also, the science felt like it held. There was a lot of dealing with zero- and low-G and crawling around on the outside of asteroids and habitats, and it felt realistic without being overwhelming. Which was just icing on the great characterization and smart-plot cake.

Also there was no extraneous romance, which is also a plus for me.

I immediately needed to track down everything in this series, after reading this.

A++, do recommend.

flemmings

Apparently the aurora borealis will be visible tonight in places where it's not raining, which is not here. At least the sidewalks were somewhat dryer than yesterday so all I had to do was wipe the wheels down at each stop, not poke into the housings with a screwdriver like yesterday.

Continue to throw out bits of the dead past for recycle. Am now into the bedroom boxes and their stash of APAs from the latter 90s, which left me feeling oogier than even the doujinshi do. There's a nightmare feel about aspects of those four years. I know it took me a good year to get over the reverse culture shock and the loose-endedness of not knowing what I was going to do next. Dépaysée is what the French call it and what I was, even if I was also in my own pays. So glad those days are over.

The one thing I can't throw out are the original Takamatsu / Jan episodes of Channel 5, which ran in Animage. Yes I have the tanks and yes I threw out the other eps but those, obscure as they are, I need to keep. Hoping vainly that some day I'll figure out what's happening, though Shibata Ami will never tell me.

As for reading, I reread House of Many Ways since DWJ doesn't stick in the memory, and also Enchanted Glass, which I thought was her short stories but isn't. Several Desmond Merrions on the tablet and phone. Heir to Murder, A Smell of Smoke, Murder M. D. Dipping into the Leonardo biography but All Those Painters! besides the fact that it dates to 1988 and the author's speculation about the character of Da Vinci's mentor Verrocchio, based on his portrait, are nullified by the fact that said portrait is now firmly identified as one of Perugino.

Started The Place of Shells which has that 'translated from the Japanese' feel to it, because it is. But it led me down a rabbit hole looking at Soseki's Ten Nights of Dream, of which there is a bilingual edition on Kobo if I find my Japanese copy too obscure, and I do, which then led me to look at a new translation of Mon/ The Gate with an introduction by Pico Iyer, which I read. Iyer says it's not what Soseki says but the things he doesn't that count, which means I will never read Mon, thank you, because I am not Japanese and can't pick up on stuff not-said when it's text. Iyer compares Soseki to Ishiguro, and I see what he means. He also compares him to Murakami and I disagree completely, at least where style is concerned. Murakami I find refreshingly straightforward. But he may have been talking about the haplessness of both authors' characters, which, well, maybe.

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Page generated Nov. 25th, 2025 10:18 am

Happy to Be Here *

* for a given value of 'here'

Reading

emotional support spinning

This living in the future sucks

emotional support spinning

Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools

My great big transit adventure pt 3

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

objectively silly use case but cute

(no subject)

the return of emotional support weaving

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It's the worst possible time of the year

emotional support spinning

Saori WX60

emotional support spinning

writers beware: Must Read Magazines (currently: F&SF, Analog, Asimov's)

What We Weading Wednesday

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January 2022

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