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Medical issues, an improv show, first festival ofthe summer, and some work on the Starship project.

Me

Some stuff from my diary on the fediverse

Medical

On the 10th of December 2024 at about 4pm in the afternoon I had a sudden shivering attack. The room wasn’t cold, but I was, so I took to bed and shivered on the electric blanket until I napped for a few hours.

Woke up groggy, and never got better. Feeling light headed and occasionally dizzy and half stoned all the time. Can’t handle booze or dope at all any more. Doing the job feels like trying to program drunk, concentration shot and short term memory failing.

Various doctors have ordered batteries of tests and put me on drugs to reduce my blood pressure but nothing that’s really helped.

They did an MRI this month. Apparently everything looks normal, which is good I guess, but still leaves symptoms unexplained.

There are worse fates than feeling half drunk all the time I suppose.

Given no visible brain damage, about the best suggestion anyone has is to stay off booze and drugs (which is easy, since I can’thandle them any more) and get back to meditation. If it’s damage so small the MRI can’t pick it up it’ll get better slowly probably. 🤷

Anyway, they gave me the MRI data upon request, so I spent one day this month importing it into Blender and making some visualization.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present: My apparently completely normal brain in an MRI selfie video.

Improv Show

Performed in an improv show in Shoreditch.

Good times.

Everyone seemed to think the show went well, and it featured repeated themes of fish taking over the entire world in a giant conspira-sea.

The venue downstairs at Shoreditch Balls is tight and dark and small but so were our audience. Thanks for coming everyone. 😆

Where does the group go from here? Dunno. Hard to find a venue for rehearsal in London really. Everywhere is either booked up or closed down. Makes you wonder why the closed down ones had to close given the apparent demand.

Fingers crossed we find somewhere 🤞

Small World

Went to Small World Festival. Mostly dry and occasionally sunny.

Small World has such a nice friendly hippy vibe, lots of deadlocks and goths and pirates and beautiful face paints.

Bands all energetic and talented and mostly have been playing here together for 20 years in one form or another. All of ’em doing it for the love of it. Pony doing a great job of organizing the team to put it together.

One dude seemed pretty new, making up synth songs with his repeats and beeps and rapping from audience suggestions. Failed to photograph him well though.

Medically necessitated more or less total sobriety at the moment, so different whole thing. Those I knew well there mostly working, so lots of time alone dancing soberly and reading. Wish I was better at talking to strangers.

Still good times.

Images in the montage include Miss B Have, playing the tuba and doing a walkabout off the stage into the audience,Duncan Disorderly having a moment of eye contact with his beautiful keyboardist whose name escapes me,Indigo Star singing backup for her friend’s Alex’s band whose name I don’t remember and Gyp Skazz are on stage giving respect to their guitar player who looks like an old Parker from Thunderbirds. He was nearly motionless other than his fingers.

Programming work

The Python library “YFinance” decided to force an upgrade. They did this by making the old version report a rate-limit error on every request. Confusing.

Would have been better if they reported a “old version not supported” error or something instead. So that wasted some time.

That upgrade had dependencies which have dependencies upon a newer version of Python, so needed a whole OS upgrade really.

Which failed. Bricking the Rasp PI it was running on.

Oh well, complete rebuild of the whole machine and software it runs from scratch then.

That took all day. At the end I notice that the touch-screen doesn’t touch. Needs drivers.

The drivers haven’t been upgraded in six years. They brick the machine again when trying to install them on Debian Trixie.

Luckily, I kept good notes and could rebuild it all again much faster with no mistakes and knowing what to do and all the required custom software changes already made and saved.

So now I spent a whole day on annoying upgrade work because a single Python library decided to break the old version, and my Rasp Pi has no touch-screen. Which isn’t ideal for a machine mostly operating as a fancy light switch for all the LED strips in the house.

This happens all the time in software. Millions of man hours wasted, so much hardware dumped because the drivers get abandoned.

In other news: Microsoft abandons Windows 10 any day now.Good luck to everyone faced with doing that lap on the upgrade treadmill.

I still have more work to do to bring up this RaspPi’s software to where it was, but it’ll have to wait, other things to do. At least it’s back to sending me the nightly finance report and controlling the LED strips. If without a touch screen now.

Also did some more work with the VR animation engine.

Seems to now be working that I can lay in the path thatthe character will walk, and then puppet their limbs as they walk it.

I did more work to standardize how all the slapdash episode structure is, so now there’s also a scripts page that actually lists all the scripts from all the episodes.

Including the latest version of the in-progress one. I’ve recorded some test timing audio tracks for the scenes there and started blocking them out.

That should inform some script edits when it’s finished.Make sure there’s enough dialogue to cover the distanceswalked and things like that.

Reform UK

I wish at least one political party would be like “No, Reform Are WRONG, we are going to get you back your right to freedom of movement that THEY TOOK AWAY”

Under us your kids WILL be able to go study in Europe, you WILL be able to go winter in Spain , you WILL be allowed to take a fruit picking holiday.

But no. They’re all pathetic chasers, all wanting the same racist bigots to vote for them. All meekly weakly saying people have “legitimate concerns” and promising to punishanyone who ain’t from around here.

Depressing is what it is.

Get me my freedom of movement back you weak losers!

STAND UP

I see Starmer is once again taking to the national stage to tell everyone that Reform are correct, that Reform have accurately described the source of the problems of British people.

Telling everyone that migrants are a problem, that migrants are causing trouble, that migrants need to be cracked down upon.

And then he somehow thinks this will make people more likely to vote Labour?

It’s basically a massive country wide national advertising campaign for Reform.

Well done Labour. When you lose it will be your own fault.

Gaza

Finally, with a hundred thousand dead, two thirds of the buildings bombed, all the hospitals and infrastructure destroyed, more than a million people on the verge of starvation, and Israel’s leadership even more openly bragging about their intent to ethnically cleanse the area, it’s gone on “too long”.

Well done Lammy and Starmer. You finally noticed eh?

So trade deal talks are off, and weapons export licenses are…

Well. We’ll see. “Always Under Review” they say.

And the main reason for the slight and tiny change in emphasis?

Mostly Trump. They are following Trump. They feel easier criticizing Israel’s genocide now Trump looks easier with it.

Musk Is Mad

😆 Missile Air Defense As a Service

MAD AS you like.

In some ways a government paying by a subscription for a missile defense service has been inevitable since Reagan started the mission to Privatize Literally Everything.

The government will own nothing, and be happy.

States must do only one thing: Pay money to rich people to get them to do the things.

The idea of Reagan’s Star Wars returning is pretty crazy in itself. That launching all those satellites would massively enrich the government’s biggest donor is mostly just pretty typical corruption.

But having the government pay to rent it out is just amazing.

🧑 💋

Hey, if Russia and China outbid America during thehour they were launching the missiles, that’s just the free market!

Never really even know if it works without being attacked, but the rich owners get to extract the wealth from it all the same.

Rentierism? In this economy?🤣

Releases

Wordcloud Tarot

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Did a reading on the 13th of May 2025, when Kier Starmer cameout against migration.

What on earth was he doing?

I did a five minute tarot reading to investigate and found that the immigration debate is a dreadful and dishonest attempt to hide the problems of failed government in an integrated and interconnected world.

Labour are cynically and indolently abdicating theirresponsibility to show the benefits of migration, so it falls to us to argue valorously and overcome their lies.

Watch the show with transcript on our website:

https://wordcloudtarot.com/readings/2025-05-13-starmersimmigrationabdication/

Reading

I read “Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It” by Christof Koch.

Interesting book which spends like 8 or 9 chapters detailing all the experiments which prove beyond much doubt that consciousness, and self awareness, is a thing done by a brain.

It describes how perception is a construction of a description,has a chapter called “computational mind”

And then spends the last two chapters describing why he thinks the mind can’t be computed, because drugs have made him think experience is some kind of magic associated with highly interconnected causal structures.

Apparently, he thinks, once things become interconnected enough they become able to cause things independently of the physics running those connections.

Which is crazy, obviously. There’s nothing causal in direct connections between neurons that isn’t equally causal in modelled connections between virtual neurons.

All his evidence in the book from neural MRI scans to the effects of psychedelic drugs and symptoms of strokes and disease point to the brain simulating a virtual reality which is the basis of perception.

That simulated world in which we live is full of colour and shape and sounds and emotions and millions of mental constructs that are built to be correlated by the senses with the outside world, but are not equal to the world itself. We live in a dream constructed to correlate with reality.

But then instead of taking the next step: That consciousness itself is a property of a simulated being inside that mental model of the universe, a property which the brain simulates and applies to the virtual self that’s doing the experiencing inside that model, he jumps towards some magic implying pan-psychism or that sufficiently interconnected networks become causally self-complete for some reason nobody can fathom.

Sure, colour and shape and emotions are all made upby the brain but experience can’t be! For some reason.

You see in truth dualism is false, in that there is no spirit realm in which ghosts animate the matter of the body somehow.

Yet also, dualism is true, in that there is a simulatedmental reality which we live in, computed by the brain in which all perception and experience are created, which is related-to but separate-from the unfolding complicated dance of energy that is the universe our bodies interact with.

People take some DMT trip, and the model of the universe emulated by their brain collapses and breaks. Their virtual simulated self inside theirmind has these experiences of being one with theuniverse or the experience of feeling dead yetconscious or whatever, and these hippies think that the broken down simulated experience is realand reflects how consciousness is more fundamentalthan the atoms that make up the neurons in their brain.

Instead of realizing it shows them that their experienced universe is a simulacrum, they think they get a more direct experience of reality somehow. A consciousness more purethan any mere base atom.

“Then I am myself the world” is a great title. Everything you ever experience is created and simulated in your brain like a dream, the whole universe is inside your head.Even the fact of experience itself.

But that isn’t the conclusion Koch reaches somehow, he just jumps from describing the evidence that this is so straight into ascribing super-causal magic consciousness to particular arrangements of atoms that integrated information theory suggest have high correlation, and thinks therefore consciousness is itself the entire universe.

Ah well, fun book. I like arguing in my head with authors that are wrong.

Watching

Doctor Who

Doctor Who continues! And ends!

Last four episodes then…

Story And The Engine

Nice gimmick with the shop window animating the stories as they’re told, and it liking the simple story of Belinda saving a single life.

Not really clear if the Barber here is a story writer or a story collector. He seems to want credit as though he wrote them but also to not have a name to credit them to, and to have weaved some kinda story collectingmachine. He surely can’t take credit for all human stories? It was a beautiful machine: a story tree that’s also a brain with a heart in it.

I find myself sympathetic with the aims of this barber anyway. Yes, do kill all the gods. Great plan! Lets do it.

I play this song from Julian Cope, Psychedelic Odin, in which he swears to undertake a holy task set by a group of River Nixes: Kill all the gods for us, oh do it well.

So I like a story teller killing gods, I don’t really want his plans thwarted! Join him Doctor! Kill all the gods!

Beautiful big space spider, weaving all the stories into it’s web. Not sure why it’s there though. Seems like just outer-space with no spider would have done,

Always like the callbacks with all the prior doctor’sfaces too. His story is truly one of the most epic.Only Coronation Street has him beat for length 😆

This whole season is great.

Interstellar Song Contest

So, we have a song-contest blighted by a genocidal unethical corporate sponsor, with the remnants of the wiped-out race threatening a revenge genocide of their own.

Unusually political with the allegory there then.

Great looking scene when the roof was blown open, thousands of people all being sucked off into space!

Looked great, but what a body count?! And the Doctor and his Tardis both sucked off too! He’s frozen.

“The Mavity Shell is still open.” Lol. Still doing that then.

Susan is here! His granddaughter. Just in visions though, not actually really there. She looks older now. Sixty years on. She’s like 80 years old now.

“Find me” she says. Not this season though I suspect.

I liked him using the Confetti Cannon to fly though space. Peter Davidson used a cricket ball to bounce off a space ship when he was stranded in outer space. And Peter never froze.

Also a great prat-fall after landing, pointing and gasping and then just toppling.

Silly muppets-aliens song was fab.

Anti-gambling fraud laws prevent calling for help. Brilliant.

Expected that hair to be hiding a set of horns, not that she’d have cut them off.

The Doctor has ice in his heart now, more angry than we’ve seen Nchuti’s Doctor. Trillions gonna die, Belinda dead, Tardis lost. Almost genocidal himself. Certainly vengeful. Timelord victorious.

Belinda is scared too: “If he’s angry, this wholeworld is going to shake”, but it ain’t a world is it? It’s a space station. Much easier to shake 😝

Explosion breaking through the Tardis doors near the end is quite a cliff hanger, but not even actually the end.

Because Mrs Flood is the Rani, finally! Every mystery character has had the fans hoping it’s the Rani for years.

Like it never being Lupus for the other Doctor: Doctor House.

Finally it is Lupus, I mean the Rani.

Not sure I like this bi-generation again though. It’s supposed to be rare, but now it feels like it’s every time. Still, at least it keeps Miss Flood there as Rani’s lackey.

Who actually was the Rani again?

She’s from the first McCoy episode: she tries to build a time control device by gathering geniuses from time and blowing up a planet. Pretends to be Mel,the Doctor’s companion at the time, to fool McCoy into helping. So interesting that her new regeneration looks a little like Belinda. 🤨🤔

I figured Mrs Flood was just Missy, the female Master. But then The Rani was always just a female version of The Master before Transsexual Regeneration was a thing anyway.

Wish World

A wish granting god baby, granting Conrad’s wishes in service of the Rani, turns London into a misogynist utopia and The Doctor into a good husband and insurance worker.

Hard to say why misogynists are so keen on the American 50s. Perhaps because it was before blacks had the vote and women could do banking.

And if anyone doubts this ridiculous tale, their table stops working and their family might call the doubt police, so they soon learn not to. All very oppressive and subversive.

Ruby manages to doubt anyway. And all the disabled people who simply never enter into Conrad’s mind. Nice touch that. Great scene in the tent city filled with the dispossessed. They don’t seem to have actually done anything so far but maybe they’ll get more useful in part two.

Conrad is on TV telling a story about a man named Doctor Who.

Giant dinosaur skeletons walk the city, stepping over sky scrapers, and a bone palace towers above the city. Because I guess Conrad wishes for it to be so in order to give the Rani somewhere to live.The palace is beautiful and Gothic.

But doubt is seeping in. Rogue is back, on the TV in hell, telling the Doctor that tables don’t work like that. So he investigates. Gets himself reported to the doubt police who take him and Belinda to the bone palace.

The Rani’s split from Miss Flood gives the pair of them a good chemistry. Queen and her maid of honour. Seems like Mrs Flood is likely to be the Rani’s downfall. She doesn’t like being told to make a sandwich.

A lot of exposition going on, but they at least put a hat on it: “Isn’t just exposition, I need you to doubt”

So that’s the reason for the strange wishes: To make the doctor have doubts so severe that the reality collapses, and Rani can rescue Omega. Omega is the dude in a Mask from the first 3 doctors episode, who gave the timelords time travel and got trapped in the underworld in the process. Timelords forgot him and never mounted a rescue, but presumably Rani is now hoping he’ll bring back Galifrey.

And with London collapsing into the underworld and the doctor falling from the sky, we get the episode break and have to wait until next week.

That’s not a cliff hanger, that an already-falling-from-the-cliff.

Poppy really is his daughter he’s shouting as he falls.

And you know what that means?

🤨🤔

Back in Space Babies, the worst episode of the Nchuti seasons, that space baby asked if he was her parents and he said he wished that he was their parents.

That wish has been granted somehow?

Is this space baby Susan’s mother? They have very different skin tones, but that doesn’t matter much in a regenerating species.

Never have found out much about The Doctor’s child. When he traveled with his granddaughter everyone assumed he’d met his own kid, the grandchild’s parent.

But that doesn’t have to be true for a time traveler. Maybe he met the granddaughter before he met his own kid, and maybe his own kid was just wished into his family line 60 years later (or billions of years in his timeline I guess).

Pretty fun episode but not sure it makes much sense. Why doesn’t the Rani just wish for Omega to be back instead of all this doubt and underworld bollocks?

reality war

Confusing episode. Let me clear it all up.

The world is sinking into the doubt needed to rescue Omega, remember, and The Doctor is falling with a balcony that’s separated from the building.

How does he get out of that?

Well, saved by a literal magic door that pops outof nowhere, leading back to the time hotel. 🤨

Anita, who he spent a year with once a couple of Christmases ago, has been popping around the Doctor’s entire long life, peeping on him with the Daleks and stuff. Trying to find him on the Earth’s last day. Today.

And now he’s rescued, today turns into a groundhog day.

Same day over and over again. 😆

There’s another woman that’s been stalking him through time lately, Mrs Flood. She was following him everywhere,but she had Xmas off she reckons, so didn’t see the TimeHotel bit. Thus the element of surprise in the deus ex machina rescue. 😀

The Doctor is broken free of the wish spell now anyway, popped his conditioning, and can use the time hotel’s door to recall Unit and break them all out of the wish too.

The Rani pops in to say hi and explain her plans. 😝

How did the Rani survive the end of the Timelords? She flipped her DNA to sidestep the genetic bomb apparently? Well that makes no sense, but nor does anything else so no time to ponder.

The end of the Time Lords made them all Barons… No, made them barren. There can be no more children of the time-lords.

She’s popping Omega back out of the underworld for his DNA because the timelords are all barren and she wants to recreate Galifrey.

But wait a minute: Poppy is the Doctor’s kid in wish world! So she should have Timelord DNA too! Maybe that could work?

No. The Rani is a nazi, don’t like the kid’s contaminated blood. She’s got human all over her DNA. Eww.

Rani pops off back to her Bone Palace, and makes the bone beasts attack.

The Doctor explains that the Giant dinosaur skeletons are beasts that pop in to clean up the world when there’s a reality flux, and the Rani has turned them on Unit HQ.

So the UNIT HQ turns into some kinda ship? Like the Crimson Permanent Insurance. Lol. It’s blasting lasersat the bone beasts and turning around, and has a steering wheel like pirate ship now. 🤣

During the battle, the Doctor pops out to take a ride on the sky-bike, looking like something from Flash Gordon, and crashes into the Bone Palace.

Too late though! Omega is pretty much here now. He’s a giant boney CGI zombie, become his own legend. Looks great but doesn’t really seem like Omega,who ought to be held together by pure will.

Omega eats the Rani! One of the Ranis anyway. Mrs Flood avoids being eaten. She pops off with the time bracelet. “So much for the Two Rani’s. It’s a goodnight from me!” as she disappears off into time.

Great gag. 😁

The Doctor just shoots Omega to get him back into his box. Pops a rifle off the wall. The Vindicator has apparently also got a built in laser as well as locator beacons. So that’s handy. The Doctor doesn’t use guns but some of his devices work like one. 🔫

So all is well! The day is saved and the wish is over and baby Poppy survives in a time box! 🍻

They’re going to take the space baby off to do space adventures. Ruby is jealous of seeing The Doctor and Belinda vibing like that, as they plan a life in space with the space baby. Aww. Poor Ruby. 😭

But then Poppy pops off! Disappears entirely, and everyone other than Ruby forgets. Ruby remembersbecause she’s disappeared from time herself inthe past they say.

Okay: to save his child and on Ruby’s word alone, the Doctor will sacrifice himself to turn reality one degree.

He goes off to commit suicide by Regeneration, butThirteen is here! She’s popped out of her timeline to stop him! Or maybe to help, with a motivational chat instead. Gives him a pep talk then pops back off again.

The Doctor zaps reality with his Tardis, dying but holding off on the actual regeneration for a few moments to go check on the kid.

The kid is safe! But isn’t his own kid any more. Poppy has popped all her Timelord DNA and is just all human now. Poppy’s pop isn’t the doc, it’s someone called Richie.

And Belinda has been so keen to get home all this time in order to get back to her Baby! Who isn’t a timelord, and definitely didn’t exist until she was wished into being.

This may not be the most ethical action The Doctor has ever taken: To bend the whole universe in order to recreate a baby that was accidentally wished into being out of nothing. Twisting time to give a child to a nurse who didn’t previously have a child, or even remember the wish. Then it’s not even the same child that disappeared, coz this one is all human. 🤷

But the doc is popping off to regenerate with Joy in the stars, and… Turns blonde: “oh. Hello?” 🤯

It’s Rose! Billie Piper is back? Fantastic!

Is Rose doing a David Tennant Impression there?

Billie playing the Doctor, doing a Tennant impression as Bad Wolf? Amazing. Can’t wait.

Series Ends

In summary then: Pop goes the timeline.

Madness. So many lose ends, so much barely making sense. Great epic adventure though.

So farewell then to Nchuti. He has been great, sad to see him go. Probably he left because who knows if there’ll even be a show next year. Actors can’t be refusing work to be on a series that might not even happen.

Except Billie I guess? Maybe she’s not otherwise busy.

No more episodes till maybe xmas 2026 they say?Or maybe some specials next year? Please god we don’t have to wait until spring 2027 to know what’s happening here?!

Meanwhile the fans are all like, “oh it says ‘and introducing’ instead of ‘as the doctor’”.

Heh. They want it to be a switcheroo of some kind and she’s not really The Doctor, but I want to see Billie’s Tennant impression for at least a three year stretch.

She’s likely just be staring in a couple of specials in the gap to a proper new season I’d expect. Probably regenerate again before there’s a full series. Excited to see her David Tenant impression though. 😆

Links

AI

A good essay on using AI in education. I guess all markshave to be in exam conditions with pen on paper in future?

In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments.

Some interesting visualizations and good explanationin this video about why training a neural network by gradient descent doesn’t get stuck in local minimaas you train.

We tend to find it hard to visualize a higher dimensional landscape, let alone one with billions of dimensions. What looks like a local minima when mapped into a 3d visualization of a 2d landscape has all sorts of escaperoutes in the higher dimensions.

It has a good visual on the way the landscape mapping can change as a result of changes to the other parameters, creating new “wormholes” as they change.

Great explainer video.

Trump And Musk Bust Up

Time sums up the word’s first global Forum Admin Spat in it’s full glory.

Immigration

A third of my friends are immigrants of one kind or another and they are all great. Wish I could deportall those who want to stop immigration. It enriches us.We are better because of immigrants. I am better becauseof immigrants. Here’s Ian Dunt:

Imagine how much poorer the world would be without British Asians in general. I’m not talking about the subcontinent. I’m not talking about Britain. I’m talking about British Asians themselves, as a distinct group, quite apart from their other loyalties or their other identities. Imagine how much more impoverished we would be, in food and music and literary life, in social habits and intellectual and political history. Imagine how poor we would be, the vast riches which would have been taken away from us.

How Does A Picture Blur Work

Great work from Capital Disillusion who rarelyactually does any debunking or disillusioningnow and just explains how video editing techniques work.

more

————That’s just the highlights this month,there’s more in my full public bookmarks from my link-bot on the fediverse or an RSS feed

Around the Fediverse

The fediverse is often full of drama with admins falling out with each other and defederations, and threats and tears.

Now, with the public spat between the Twitter admin and the TruthSocial admin, the rest of the world gets to enjoy a similar spectacle!

They can’t defederate of course, because Twitter neverbecame open enough and TruthSocial was already defederated by everyone as soon as it existed.

Only on Fedi can you get the full experience of a public spat and defederation, because only on Fedi can the admins really at-mention and directly reply and take the final dramatic action of a flouce-defederation.

Trump fans who are Twitter users can’t port their followers over to TruthSocial, and Turther Musk fans can’t just migrate their account to Twitter.

They’re stuck.

So you see Fedi really is the best when it comes to massive public spats between admins and this current admin-drama is only getting more attention because it’s between two of the worst people in the world.

What else is going on on Fedi this month? Lets look through my boosts…

Fediverse Onboarding

@dansup@mastodon.social made an instance choosing tool:

Introducing the newly redesigned Fediverse Onboarding feature 🥳 Now this is something we can share and use to help people find their way in this federated community ✨

https://fedidb.com/welcome

boosts greatly appreciated, I spent a lot of time on this, for the benefit of everyone ❤️

Fediverse Future

@sean@deadsuperhero.com has a blog about his vision for the Fedi:

https://deadsuperhero.com/my-dream-fediverse-platform/

This article is a follow-up to an older post of mine, Towards a Greater Federated Architecture, and also a response from the wonderfully-thought out piece by Ben Werdmuller, If I Started Fresh. The goal here is to take the lessons learned from a variety of systems to propose the Fediverse platform I have always wanted to build: Postmodern.

Science

@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz on Saturn’s Rings:

Did you see this? It’s an artist’s conception of how gravity from the tiny moon Daphnis creates ripples in Saturn’s rings - created by Kevin Gill of NASA.

This image was pretty popular here, and elsewhere on the web - but people often don’t come out and say from the start that it’s not a photo.

The actual photos are less beautiful but…

hey, they’re real! And the ripples look different

in the photos. Let’s take a look.(1/n)

Publishing

@lydiaconwell@todon.nl has a new sci fi book:

My latest #ScienceFiction #novel is available in #eBook format!! 💫 It’s about two women agents who are highly skilled fighting with blades. While they are undercover in enemy space, they find themselves in need of a new pilot. But they quickly attract attention from the oppressor enemy soldiers, which further threatens their mission.It is a novel inspired by Western settler #colonialism and the taking of #indigenous land.

https://books2read.com/u/bWa70q

#Books #Writing #SelfPublishing #Scifi #Resistance #IndieWriter #Cyborg #Espionage

Soundcloud Enshitifies

Soundcloud are going to train AI on all thedata that their user’s uploaded 🙄

@inpc@go.mxtthxw.art left soundcloud:

Deleted Soundclown. A little sad, not for the app but for seeing comments from long lost internet friends from forum days. Funny to think of those of communities that got wiped out by Facebacon. I was on Soundclown from back when it was invite only and it was mostly just electronic musicians sharing work to each other for feedback. Fun times…

As for them using user data to train AI. The damage is already done but I can at be one less account on the platform.

The only voice we have is no voice. If your only purpose for music is a metronome for other activities, well the future is custom built for you. Metronome too slow? There’s a dial for that, metronome too dark? There’s a dial for that. No need to ever see or hear from some moody musician cunt getting in the way when you’re in the gym or vibe coding. For just £9.99 you got every metronome you ever need.

Want to see a gig? Well Ed Sheeran’s still touring…

That’s it though, oh and it’s not the real Ed Sheeran, there’s a robot for that and a dial on your phone so you can tune your unique live experience.

Podcast criticism

@z428eu@loma.ml talks about an interview with Molly White:

This episode was recorded live at SXSW 2025.

Still a bit more than halfway through it, listening on, it’s safe to say I enjoy this one also because I agree with a lot of her points, but some things still leave me slightly unsettled. Maybe three issues for now: At first, “we are all content creators” with every piece of stuff we post anywhere on the ’net.

Really? There’s a reoccurring quote out there I end up with then and now which is more or less like “we tell stories to join the conversation”, and in many ways I can relate with this much more.

Innovation

@fabio@manganiello.social did a long post about innovation and bell labs :

Why Bell Labs worked so well, and could innovate so much, while today’s innovation, in spite of the huge private funding, goes in hype-and-fizzle cycles that leave relatively little behind, is a question I’ve been asking myself a lot in the past years.And I think that the author of this article has hit the nail on its head on most of the reasons - but he didn’t take the last step in identifying the root cause….

Short Film Production

@artificial3d@mastodon.art is doing a new blender short:

I’m directing another short film this year! Super excited!!

https://studio.blender.org/blog/announcing-singularity/

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