Digital Clay

I've spotted a huge decline over the last two years. What's upsetting is how so many of our current third years have declined since their first year. I did a seminar with them the other day, on the topic of the environmental impacts of different diets. One guy told me confidently that there would be no additional agricultural lands if we all went vegetarian.

"Cool," I said. "What's your source for that?"

"I'm sure I read it," he said.

"Fair," said I, "go and look it up. Find an academic source, let's assess it to see if it's robust."

The first thing he did was go to Google, and then read the AI summary.

"That's not a source," I said. "Find me a source."

Five minutes later, he happily tells me that a Guardian article says so, and mentions the World Economic Forum.

"Okay," I said. "Neither of those are academic sources, and the WEF is secondary anyway. Go to Google Scholar, and find a journal article."

Ten minutes later, he tells me he can only find articles that say it's a very complex issue in spite of pop cultural received wisdom, and we don't actually know.

A THIRD YEAR. This man has a dissertation due in THREE MONTHS. This is a skill we taught him in first year, and it's all dribbled out of his ears in the quest for easy summaries from an autocomplete algorithm. And I dearly wish I could say he's an exception, but Jesus Christ, that would be a lie.

I'm currently writing a lecture for the second years for their research methods module, and I normally wouldn't need to do this. But I'm having to re-introduce them to the basic concepts of how to actually analyse findings rather than lazily take whatever they seem to say at face value. I'm trying to find a good paper that had Surprising findings, because I want to show them a research question and a set of results and then get them to speculate and research on why they found something so different, but that's a difficult thing to search for.

I was supposed to be going out and doing fun things like bouldering tonight, but it's pouring with rain, so instead I'm staying in and looking at Blake's 7 screengrabs.

Screengrabs from here (they prefer their images copied, not linked) and record of what Servalan wears when from here.

As seen in Seek-Locate-Destroy.

We begin the list with what is - delightfully, amazingly - a relatively understated costume by Servalan standards. I guess it's the shorter sleeves over longer sleeves (a consistent Blake's 7 design choice, I guess that's just what fashion is like in the Grim Future) that gives the sense that this might be Dress Down Friday in the offices of the Federation. Almost dowdy in comparison with what's to come. Let's keep our powder dry for now. 5/10.

As seen in Project Avalon.

What amazes me about this costume is how silly it looks in screengrab form - seriously, take a moment to really look at Servalan's tiny head emerging turtle-like from the enormous quantity of furs - and yet, in motion, Jacqueline Pearce completely pulls it off. It's ridiculous, of course it is, but not for one moment do you doubt that this is the kind of thing that Servalan would choose to wear and feel comfortable in. It also gets an extra point or two for how the opening of the coat is tailored to the collar of the dress she wears underneath. 6/10.

As seen in Project Avalon and Deliverance.

There's a fun process that happens when you look at lots of Servalan's costumes (bearing in mind that I've preloaded all the images!) where you start to look at something like this and think, yeah, that looks normal enough, I could wear something like that to the office. And then you step back and go, no the fuck I couldn't, and you admire everyone involved in the process that brought us here. Love the beading and ruching, love the way that big collar actually looks quite comfortable, love the way that Jacqueline Pearce is lounging in it. 9/10.

As seen in Orac.

Trousers? On Servalan? Not sure how I feel about that, and I get the impression nor is she. On anyone else the coordination of white gloves and shiny white knee-high boots would be noteworthy, on Servalan it's just a Tuesday. Bit bland to be honest. 4/10.

As seen in Weapon.

There's an image limit to deal with, so I'm sacrificing at least one further fluffy overcoat thing in order to show more photos of this magnificent costume, and I make no apologies for that. Look at this swan-queen spun-sugar exposed-midriff confection of delight. Just when you think you've absorbed it all you notice the fishnet sleeves and the floor-length cape. Maybe it would be worth submitting to just a little bit of remorselessly evil oppression for the opportunity to float around all day dressed like this. 100/10.

As seen in Pressure Point.

It takes quite an outfit for you not to really notice the Sexy Stormtrooper vibe of the Mutoids in the background. And so Servalan is delivering quite an outfit here. What a jacket, what a hat. Ladies Day at Ascot never looked so good. 9/10.

As also seen in Pressure Point.

This is one of those beaded lizards that we all made when we were eight, right? I feel like I should like this: it's flattering, it's a bit weird, it's a nice dress with 25cm or more of a sparkly gecko giving it jazz hands across Servalan's chest, but somehow it's just not coming together for me. Maybe it's the lack of a massive collar. 5/10.

As seen in Trial and Voice from the Past.

No. Absolutely not. The nadir of Servalan outfits, from the weird double-breasted bodice, which I can only describe as military meets straitjacket, to the terrible combination of off-grey stockings and shiny silver shoes. Even Jacqueline Pearce is struggling to make this look good. 0/10.

As seen in Gambit.

From the nadir to very nearly the zenith. This is only one of two times that Servalan wears an outfit that isn't black or white and wow, does she make it count. The red! The glitter! The big frill thing that looks like the kind of adaptation a lizard might use to warn off predators! Also, not to get too pervy, but I think this has to get extra points for whatever machinations are preventing her boobs from making a bid from freedom from the astonishingly low neckline. 12/10.

As seen in The Keeper.

It's another big fluffy robe! But a different one from the previous big fluffy robe! I like to think she might be hiding snacks under there. 7/10.

As seen in Star One and Aftermath.

This is... a normal dress. Could be an understated bridal gown, plausibly a cocktail dress, but I could imagine both having this in my wardrobe and actually wearing it, and I'm not sure how I feel about that. It's just not what Servalan's costumes are for, you know? Obviously she looks great but where's the pizzazz, where's the oomph, where's the collar that could take someone's eye out? 6/10.

As seen in Aftermath and Powerplay.

This is technically Dayna's dress, but Servalan wears it for two whole episodes, so it counts. Which is a pity because it's just so drab. It shouldn't be! It has a funky triangle neckline, only one sleeve, and a ribbon arm wrap on the sleeveless side like she's heading off to a festival with hippies. Unfortunately the colour scheme brings to mind nothing so much as a faded bus seat and the smock-like cut is deeply unflattering. 2/10.

As seen in Volcano.

Things I like about this: for once Servalan gets to cover both shoulders, her arms and her cleavage. Jacqueline Pearce must have been so warm! It looks comfortable and practical. And dull, but I suppose it must be a lot of pressure on a Supreme Commander to look fabulous all the time. 4/10.

As seen in The Harvest of Kairos.

Fun fact, of all of Servalan's outfits this is actually the closest to something that I used to have in my wardrobe. Mine was navy blue on one side and stripey on the other, and the stripey side emerged into a similar enormous... sleeve... thing?? I never wore it to my day job, but you know, perhaps I should have done. These are the kinds of things that Servalan inspires us towards. 8/10.

As seen in Children of Auron.

And just like that, Servalan changes her colour scheme. Black, of course, looks just as good on her as white did, and I can't decide which I like better. What makes this outfit is the detailing: the collar, the little decorative slashes like a Tudor nobleman would use to show off his undershirt. 6/10.

As seen in Rumours of Death.

I just spent ages scrolling through red carpet photos to try to find the celebrity who I swear recently wore almost this exact outfit. And I can't find them. But never mind! This ticks so many boxes for me: it looks everso pretty, it seems wearable, and the floofy sleeve feels like it reflects plausible fashion trends of the Blake's 7 universe. 9/10.

As seen in Moloch.

Whereas this is not working for me. This is, thank goodness, Servalan's only foray into full-on 80s shoulders (unlike poor Avon, whose costumes suffered from this for the whole of series D) and I do not like it. The wide shoulders, made to look wider by the silver detailing, just serve to make the rest of her look small. And no one should make Servalan look small. 3/10.

As seen in Death-Watch.

Just a normal LBD, innit. 5/10.

As also seen in Death-Watch.

This is the same dress underneath with a semitransparent beaded cardi over the top. It should be fun and vaguely goth, but instead it reminds me of nothing so much as the kind of thing you throw on when you're worried you're showing too much skin for a funeral. Amazing how it makes her look about 10 years older too. I miss the days of the massive collars. 2/10.

As seen in Terminal.

For someone who is confidently writing a series of posts about costume design choices, I know exceptionally little about costume, and as a result I don't actually know what this is made of. Is it leather? Some kind of matt-looking PVC? It's a solid costume choice, anyway; I'm starting to think that the mark of a good Servalan outfit is how much difficulty I have with the image description. In this instance, I have no idea what the thing on her shoulder is and I love it. I also love that this is the 80s and therefore she's allowed to be on TV with a normal human belly. 8/10.

As seen in Traitor.

MAGNIFICENT SHOWSTOPPING ICONIC. She looks like a sexy raven and she's having such a great time. The way the points of her eyeliner match the points of her hair! This is the kind of thing that drives people to cosplay. I don't think I would get a buzzcut and dye my hair solely to get this look just right, but I'm also not ruling it out. 20/10

As seen in Animals.

It's so disappointing when you get an outfit spot on and then it's in the wash, and all you can manage from what's available in your wardrobe is an half-hearted replica. That seems to be what's happened to Servalan here. Sorry, Supreme Commander, but sexy raven lightning doesn't strike twice. 6/10.

As seen in Assassin.

Later on she wears a sort of lacy cardi over it, but I have an image limit and I'd only be repeating what I said for Death-Watch, so we're going to skip that one.

This is another normal dress. It's a perfectly fine normal dress; it's hard to see from the photo, but I like the fabric belt, and those are undeniably good earrings. Still, it's not exactly strange enough for a Servalan costume, and I feel for Jacqueline Pearce having to do this whole episode without a bra. 7/10

As seen in Games.

Just as I am running out of ideas for commentary, I feel like the Blake's 7 costume designers were running out of ideas for outfits. This feels like it has a bunch of disparate ideas thrown at it - polka dots! fluff! peephole thing! - but the vibe is of a reality TV show fashion challenge where they have a box of stuff and 20 mins to turn it into a dress. 4/10.

As seen in Sand.

This is a floor-length dress, but it's best in close-ups: it's the detail that matters. It looks pretty, comfortable, and quite soft. It's a nice costume, but is it really a Servalan costume? It doesn't scream command like some of the others on this list. 5/10.

As seen in Orbit.

Cringetober 2025 Day 1: Overpowered

“What do you mean?” he asked. “But there’s a full stop as part of the question mark!”

She nodded gravely. “I know!” she said. “A lot of people find this confusing. But the speech tag belongs to the line of dialogue, it’s still part of the sentence, so it’s wrong to capitalise it.”

there were a lot of reasons for the shift, most of them can be blamed on Reagan and Thatcher (like everything else). it was pushed through to school curriculums and popular culture as a "de-snobbification" of english education where everyone's regional and ethnic accents would be normalized and accepted, what actually happened is that language gaps between rich and poor kids was crowbarred farther apart as you could no longer learn to talk, write, or read fancy in a free public school, leaving only the wealthy kids who got tutors and private schools and educated parents with a formal English education able to choose to code switch or to struggle considerably less in college when professors usually start expecting you to know grammar and etymology already and don't think it's their job to fix your high school teacher's fuckups. (it is, but that's a different post)

this is why almost everyone on YouTube is speaking only approximate English (see the #youtube grammar tag) a lot of the time and one of the big reasons people with average hearing and reading and processing function have started needing subtitles a lot more in the past ten years, when they didn't before

this gets brought up on Tumblr a lot, see prior discourse about cursive not being taught anymore (not actually a good thing, prevents you from reading anything handwritten before 1990, bad for handwriting ergonomics especially for hypermobile people [see: why do so many hypermobile and autistic people get into fountain pens]) and the new yorker article about "vibes based literacy".

I've just completed a run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, performing my debut comedy hour. On other social media, I'm talking about my accolades - my brilliant reviews, the award I won, being featured in national newspapers.

But I don't think that's what Tumblr's for.

When I joined Tumblr in 2012, I'd been doing standup comedy as a hobby for less than a year. I'd performed maybe 20 gigs, if that. Only one of them was paid, and that was a kind local comedian who wanted to support a new act.

Now I'm a full-time comedian, and all my other social media platforms have to put self-promotion first. But Tumblr is still Tumblr.

I'm not just saying this because of Gaiman, but I've never thought Tumblr's a good place to try being a celebrity. You can't show off how many followers you have, you can only get verification ticks as a prank against Musk, and we bully people who boost their posts to aid their careers.

I like it here, because we're just talking openly and shamelessly about our lives. Our celebrities aren't entertainers, they're nerds who love frogs or whatever.

So while I reinvent myself as a celebrity everywhere else, here I'll do something different: I'm going to try and explain how I feel, as a Tumblr goblin whose been mistaken by the mainstream press for a comedian worthy of success.

The world is too interconnected to allow one part of it to go down. When Puerto Rico got slammed by hurricanes and the US did fuck all about it, we had a nationwide shortage of bagged IV fluids. I was working in hospitals through that. Things we normally do as part of routine medical care, like giving the puking kid with the migraine IV Zofran and Reglan, got a whole lot harder. I was working inpatient during COVID, when there were sudden shortages of pain and anxiety medications we relied on, like opioids and benzodiazepines. There was a nationwide shortage of lidocaine last year and we had to save it for biopsies of suspect cancers. Surgery requires not only a surgeon but an entire team of people and complex equipment to safely sterilize tools, most of which are now based around laparoscopic surgery that requires camera tools instead of the old-school open surgeries. You could not even say “but the surgeons can still operate” because no. They can’t. Not safely. Not with ether instead of succinate and fentanyl. I could deliver your baby after the apocalypse, but who’s staffing the blood banks when you have a post-partum hemorrhage and I don’t have three trained nurses with a kit of specialty meds to slow the bleeding? I still remember the time during the worst of COVID when I couldn’t fly a patient from our rural hospital to an urban hospital that could have done the operation he needed, because the hospitals were completely full. I had to buy time with heavy-duty IV antibiotics (the one and only time I’ve been allowed to use a -penem) while he lay there in agony for 12 hours until a bed came open and we could transfer him. If we couldn’t treat the pain and keep the infection from killing him long enough to operate, he would have died then and there, in front of us, while we stood there helplessly.

So how many kids are you OK with watching die from a ruptured appendix? That’s what comes in to the ED at two in the morning and within half an hour if you’re lucky has an ultrasound proving the diagnosis and a surgeon getting scrubbed in. If there isn’t ultrasound, ultrasound techs, pain medication, anesthesiologists, ventilation machine for when you’re under, light-up scopes with blades to allow for intubation bc then there’s direct visualization of the vocal cords, paralytic medications to keep you still, medications to keep you asleep, monitoring machines that read your blood pressure ans CO2 levels and pulse oximetry while you’re under, computer scheduling for OR time, post-op recovery nurses, gurneys, autoclaves, specialized small metal tools for the surgery—if there are interruptions in training or production of any of these and a whole lot more, anyone could die of a surgical problem, but it hurts worse when it’s a kid. Watch breast cancer come back into vogue, as we lose mammograms. You ever treated a woman who’s ignored breast cancer so long it’s now a fungating mass? Go Google what that looks like. Two cases have walked into my office and they are both dead now. One was schizophrenic. Without modern global supply chains, we don’t have lorazepam or morphine for humane death, let alone psych meds. How many people would deteriorate? Get specific. Which friends would you be willing to watch die? Which of their kids are expendable?

What kind of violent revolution are you planning where you are able to look a patient in the eye and tell them, “Your death is necessary to my vision,” and not understand that you are the villain?

You get to decide whether you want to end your own life for this glorious future. You do not get to decide to end my life or my patients’ lives or anyone else’s. You are not God and you do not get to make plans as if you are, as if you have the One Correct Vision and the rest of us just need to fall in line and follow the prophet. Fuck you. You think the Black kid whose treatment team I was on while he writhed in pain on a hospital bed because he had a kidney transplant and it was rejecting wouldn’t tell you to go fuck yourself about your violent revolution? Our society is no longer able to tolerate large-scale disruptions. We have built too much and we would lose too much. We are too big to fail, and although it’s easy to see that as a bad thing, what I keep seeing, over and over, is that transplant team. How the nephrologist and the resident and the nurses and techs and pharmacists and therapists were working together to keep that kid alive. The scientists who did the research, relying on impossibly complex systems that have taken hundreds of years to build. Collaboration is how we survive.

We cannot allow the vulnerable to die and call that progress. We cannot turn the lights out on any hospitals, because the people in the ICU on ventilators will stop breathing and die within minutes. Would you want that to happen if it’s your mother in that ICU? Would you tell your mother the answer to that? What if it was your child? What about your favorite sibling? How many of other people’s families are you willing to sacrifice for the sake of something that stands a virtually 100% chance of going up in flames immediately, when we look at prior attempts at creating a new government out of war and chaos? The massive impacts of even “small” shortages on patients is not theoretical and has killed patients since I’ve been an attending, starting three years ago.

You do not own the right to anyone else’s life.

Source

It would have been simple for AO3 to 'lose' a million or so bookmarks to buy some time. They're just bookmarks, who cares? It's not like anyone's paying for this.

First: this particular type of data migration (moving from INT to BIG INT) has happened twice in AO3's past already (for history, and for kudos) and it was the same each time - a large table with hundreds of millions of items being moved is time-consuming and you need to be cautious doing it, and it WILL require a few hours of downtime to be safe. It is not "fixing a bug". It is moving the content of all bookmarks on the site. It will have to happen again for other types of data in the future, because AO3 just keeps growing.

Second: They can't know exactly how long a migration like that will take, so they make their best estimate. They can't test it before-hand on the test archive and have it reproduce exactly what will happen on the live archive, because the live archive has so much more data. Estimating "how long will it take to move 700 million items" is a matter of experience and luck. (Yes, 700 million is more the actual number of bookmarks involved, I know people keep citing the 2 billion number but each bookmark is assigned an ID number, and bookmark numbers iterate by 3. The highest ID number available under the old system was the slightly over 2.1 billion number, so the actual total is about 1/3 that. It's still a lot.)

Third: In general, AO3 tries not to have downtime, and it does very well. My observation is that the process in this case was usually like "Ok, let's start doing this and see how it goes. *waits to see if things start to get painfully slow and a lot of errors start happening* Ok, there are lots of errors happening and the site is getting slow to use, let's block all bot traffic and see if that helps. *that helps for a while and then things start to pile up again* Ok, let's try flipping the site into maintenance mode (i.e. take it down) just for a minute or two and see if that lets it catch up. *that helps for a bit and then things start to get slow and not catch up with just a few minutes of downtime* Ok, we do need to actually take it down and just let the process run until it finishes. " My point is that they first try various options that, if they work, will not require taking the site down all the way, before resorting to downtime. If they left it up, the process would take a lot longer, and people would experience a lot more problems while using the site. Taking it down is safer and more efficient in that kind of case.

Fourth: The same people doing the work need to communicate it to the people who do the tweets/tumblr posts/status updates. So not just doing complicated database stuff, but also telling communications "hey we are about to do X and Y and it will take approximately Z hours". (Fortunately we have mostly moved on from the times when it was literally the SAME people trying to do both things, and have dedicated communications folks to help.) Sometimes when they are trying to do a lot of things at once, the technical volunteers might not communicate as quickly or clearly as would be ideal, or a comms person might not immediately be available to make a post, so a status update is a bit later than we prefer, but we try to always communicate to users before doing something big like taking the site down. In a normal situation with planned downtime, the ideal is to make a post a couple of days before, then an hour before, and then at the time the downtime happens, and then when it's done. Sometimes there isn't time for as much advance warning, when something is either unexpected or doesn't go as planned.

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

I am so sorry to have to tell you all about this. None of you, I suspect, will ever have any idea how sorry.

I am in utter shock and terrible pain to have to inform everyone that our friend, my dear husband and creative partner of nearly forty years, Peter Morwood, passed away suddenly early this morning after a brief illness that as late as yesterday (when his doctor saw him) had seemed to be on the mend.

I'm not in any position to say much more about this situation now, as you'll understand my current mental state is not up to the task. (I keep expecting to wake up from a bad dream, but it shows no sign of breaking.) I will let people know more about this in coming days.

There will be a postmortem shortly to determine the exact cause of his death. I'll share what details of this are appropriate as they become clear.

Meanwhile in the short term I'm very much going to need assistance with the expenses that in the days that follow will inevitably surround what's happened. For those people who want to assist, please feel free to use the Ko-Fi account here, and simply tag the associated messages, etc, "P expenses".

My love will wait for me, I know, however long it takes. He's never minded waiting. (the saddest smile) My job now is to make sure he's not forgotten while I go on.

Meanwhile, can I just say to all of of you: I thank you all ahead of time for all the support and fondness for Peter that I know so many of you will express. He'd blush over it, I know. (He always did.) Please forgive me for being unable to do much in the way of answering messages, just now, in the wake of having to get to grips with this sudden and awful change in my world.

But also let me say, so urgently: Hug your loved ones now, while you can. Eventually a day will come when, expected or not, your opportunities end.

Thanks, friends.

--DD