vermiculated trunk

However, I actually think that personifications of American cities is much more interesting, especially if you combine it with some of the other ideas I've had where founding a town requires a blood-soaked pact with forces beyond your ken. I love the idea that Chicago might have existed, but wasn't a city until 1893 when they finally forced found a woman willing to wear a burning crown. Or that in 1846, Solomon Juneau carefully negotiated the sacrifice of the Juneautown, Kilbourntown, and Walker's Point goddesses, and by spilling their blood on the Milwaukee bridge he created a Milwaukee goddess---though she woke up the next morning and went to work at a bottling plant, same as always. New York already had its Knickerbocker (not Herman Knickerbocker, but one of his sons) and Pennsylvania had William Penn (not related to Penn at all, just a member of the congregation who looked right) but after a few decades of not aging, not growing, the personifications might tentatively reach out to one another, ask, are you a thing like me? Did you know? Have you guessed?

In this sideways world, there are plenty of towns that have never contemplated sacrifice, and would never. I mean, sure, Cincinnati has had a goddess for a couple hundred years (she worked in a pork processing plant, now she's a VP for Procter & Gamble) but it's a waste of resources to sacrifice someone for Kenton County, Kentucky. How far does your ritual sacrifice extend? If you slaughter someone in Minneapolis, can you grandfather in St. Paul? And how do you replace him or her, when your city has moved beyond that---Birmingham, Alabama, has moved beyond steel, such that their Vulcan should be wearing a suit; even Chicago is a little bit embarrassed by the stocky HR manager who represents us; other Midwestern cities have fumed since the start, etc.

Pro Tip - Never drop the word wedding while planning if you don’t need to. Most things can be for “an event you’re planning.” This obviously doesn’t include things like the venue, DJ (who needs specific wedding songs), and the wedding dress company if you’re going that route versus just buying a dress.

For my wedding I got “discounted” cupcakes, flowers, decor, bridesmaids dresses, groomsman attire, and invitations. I did this by either searching for things that aren’t marketed for weddings or not telling the companies I was working with it was for a wedding. Because honestly, most of the time they don’t need to know why you’re ordering.

These companies target people planning their weddings and markup everything the second “wedding” is said. And it’s said often because people assume the services change exponentially for weddings. They absolutely do not. 

The best example are the cupcakes I had for my wedding. I used a designer cupcake store in town instead of spending $1000 on a wedding cake. If you place a large order of cupcakes with a cake tree for display - it costs about $150 for 100 (which is what I did). When you order their “wedding” package - the price raised to a $700 base for 100 cupcakes. The only other perk includes a “tasting.” Forget that. Our tasting was buying a few cupcakes in flavors we thought we’d like and picked three. It cost maybe $20. 

What these companies do is scummy and targets people who don’t have information about the event industry.

Tiger found caged in abandoned home gets second chance at wildlife sanctuary: ‘He seems to be so happy’

The estimated 350-pound tiger was transported to the facility, an affiliate of the Humane Society of the United States, on Wednesday afternoon, and is settling in well, Almrud said. There, he will have the chance to roam in enclosures of up to three acres.

Almrud, who estimates him to be about 2 years old, described the moment he first walked onto the grass at the sanctuary as remarkable.

“It was just amazing to see him walk out on grass and to see him explore and have that freedom of movement,” she said. “It was just such a reward and fulfilling to us.”

Now, he spends his days rolling around the grass in glee, Almrud said.

“He comes right up to the fence every time a staff member is present,” she said. “He seems very amenable to our presence.”

The tiger is eating well – a combination of chicken, humanely raised non-processed beef and whole prey complete with organs and bones. It appears that he was being fed chicken, which is what owners of exotic cats often feed them, but chicken alone does not provide the complete nutrition they need to thrive, Almrud said.

In addition, caregivers are tasked with keeping the tiger mentally stimulated by creating “pretend hunting” games and rotating him through different areas so he has access to new smells and environments to explore.

“He seems to happy and content,” Almrud said. “Our staff is just falling in love with him.”

His name is Loki now! In June he celebrated his 7th birthday at the sanctuary where he lives and thrives. Here’s a few pics of the boy:

He escaped his cage

Yes

YES

The tiger is out

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

Summer Rain - Hasui Kawase

@reminiscentrevelry So I asked my mom about the book, and it did in fact take place in south-central Virginia.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/13/go-meta-meta/#meta-meta-meta

"I often wonder what the Vintners buy/One half so precious as the Goods they sell" -The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

I first encountered that quote from someone extolling the virtues of bookstores, and it stuck with me, because for most of my childhood, every bookstore visit ended with me broke and wishing I'd had three times as much to spend.

As a larval hyperlexic, I just didn't understand what a bookseller could possibly buy with my money that was better than the books they already had? Of course, then I became a bookseller and discovered that Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is shit") applies to a bookstore's wares as much as it does to anything else. I also acquired a monthly rent obligation and discovered just how important money could be.

Nevertheless, Omar Khayyám's question stuck with me, especially when I fell down a years-long rabbit-hole of learning about scams and the finance sector (but I repeat myself). Every get-rich-quick schemer will tell you that they've found the infinite money hack, which they will sell to you for a remarkably reasonable sum. Likewise, every stock picker claims they can outperform a simple low-load index fund, and all they ask of you is a few hundred basis points in exchange for multiplying your wealth beyond the dreams of Creosote. Neither one has a good answer to Khayyám's question: if you can make all the money with your amazing system, why do you need my money?

This is a question that needs to be forcefully put to AI hucksters. In their more expansive moments, the Altmans and Amodeis of the world will tell you that they're planning to teach the word-guessing program so many words that it will wake up and become god. DOGE's broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in the faces of the NIH lifers who begged them not to vaporize their long-running cancer research projects: "General AI is around the corner and it's going to cure cancer. Cancer research is a waste of money!"

Which all raises the question: if you've truly incubated a foetal demiurge in your "AI lab," why are you offering to sell it to me? What do the AI hucksters buy/One half so precious as the Gods they sell?"

The last couple years experimenting with AI I've come to the conclusion that the main reason it works isn't a mystery because it has to be a mystery. It's a mystery because they need it to be.

That's why they've been hogging all the RAM and GPUs to the point of ordering the entire yearly worldwide supply in advance.

That's why they keep building data centres despite demand not justifying it.

That's why every open source model China releases is a hit to the stock market.

The secret sauce behind LLMs isn't really as demanding as they claim. There's waste built into it.

Every response within a chat sends the entire message chain through the robot's brain. It doesn't have loading bars, it doesn't let you calculate how many tokens you've used, it doesn't even let you see when you're crossing the limits until you're there.

It's almost like they don't want you to have control over how much you use.

ChatGPT in particular is prone to scope creep. It subtly talks you into expanding the reach of your projects to require more computation. It always delivers 90% of a project, with something missing so you ask another question.

Claude turns everything into a file creation request, even if it can deliver in plain text just fine. It's enticing to see how your simple table becomes a fancy react file or an HTML with heavy formatting.

Neither of these issues are present on DeepSeek or on local models. Which means they aren't inherent issues with LLMs.

It's not a bug, it's a feature.

They want you to keep paying unmetered rent. They do tricks to convince you to spend more than you meant making something bigger than you planned. They do this subtly, to make you think it was your idea.

The thing is, Chinese local models prove that we already have good enough AI for most things. It's plateauing in capacity, it needs to grow in efficiency and memory use. But intelligence is already at J.A.R.V.I.S levels, and can run fine on consumer grade hardware. We've reached a stability point.

The problem is you can't raise rent on stability. So you just keep throwing compute at the problem until you can justify asking for more money. Which is why they choke the memory market.

If nobody can buy memory, nobody can run local AI. If no one can run local AI, they have to keep paying unmetered rent. Development is slow, and importantly, the black box remains a black box.

That's why every memory breakthrough comes from Chinese companies. Because they're the only ones sharing their data. Capitalist companies don't want people to study how the models work.

With subscriptions, there's rent seeking. With local models, there's reverse engineering. Once enough people get their hands into the guts of the robot it won't be long before we figure out exactly how they work, and find more efficient ways to make them that don't require as many data centres.

Meanwhile, Fable and GPT 5.6 are being shadow marketed with all these rumours about how dangerous they are, and AI companies are begging for regulations from the government. Yes, they want control of those regulations, but that's not all.

What they're really after is a government ban on local AI. They want to cut off access so that they control all the intelligence.

Eventually, the goal is making contracts with large corporations to employ their robots instead of people. If no one has local AI, because they can't understand it or because it's illegal, then they can no longer compete against a faster worker that demands no labour rights, even if it does C+ work at best.

And that's where the real fun begins. And by fun I mean starving out the working class.

They aren't competing directly with their customers yet. First they have to educate them, jus like Spotify educated their consumers into forgetting how piracy works. They have to make them reliant on cloud compute, just like how Google Drive made everyone reliant on its storage before raising prices. And they want them to be ignorant of how much energy anything takes.

That's going to take one generation.

Not long ago every teenager knew how to use a computer. Now they depend on Apple for everything. It's a masterful business model. So what if we could apply it to every form of labour?

It's okay, just hand us your credit card and we'll do the rest. How much, you ask? Don't worry about that. Just keep your monthly payments coming. Oh, you can't afford it? You want your computer to do it? Well fuck you, we bought all the computers, so now you work for us.

I might translate this article later today. This one was the most complete one, even in Italian news it's not talked about that much.

It harms your lungs and it’s especially bad for children (and pets!) or anyone with health problems. There are all kinds of chemicals in that smoke. It’s not only trees that are burning. The heat already makes it harder to breath. This makes it worse.

If any of you are experiencing it, feel free to tell about it in the comments. 💚

Switch to bar soap. Why? it's less drying. Doesn't have to be fancy. Dove will do.

Wash hands after getting home from being out as well as before eating, before cooking, after bathroom, and all other normal times. Why? You just got back from touching a bunch of germ-covered surfaces. Washing hands as soon as you get in will keep them spreading through your house. It's also pretty refreshing tbh.

You only need to wash your face with soap once a day. You can splash your face as often as you like with plain water though. Why? The skin on your face is very thin and dries out easily. Soap, even bar soap, dries out that delicate skin if you use it more than once every 24 hours. Yes even if you're a teen with acne.

Consider using cold cream to clean your face rather than soap and water. Why? Cold cream is gentler and moisturises while it cleans. There's a reason it's been in use for over a century! And if you DO wear makeup, it removes even the heaviest makeups like greasepaint easily bc of the chemistry rule of Like Dissolves Like!

Please do not use soap on your genitals. Just use clean water. Why? Your genitals are not skin, they are mucous membranes. This means they are far, far more delicate than your skin, and can get injured way easier--and that they are self-cleaning! It also means that yeast and other infections can take root much easier if you pave the way by killing all the microbes that keep the yeast at bay. There is yeast on your skin, so it is always trying to get over that barrier and into your mucous membranes, because yeast likes where it is dark and moist and warm, and there is nowhere darker or moister or warmer than your genitals! If you want to clean the hairs and warm water isn't cutting it, use a conditioner without sulfates, like mane'n'tail original formula, because no matter how careful you are some of whatever you use to clean your hair is going to get on your genitals, and a conditioner without sulfates isn't going to do damage like any kind of soap would. And DON'T DOUCHE. EVER. NOT EVEN WITH PLAIN WATER. Your plumbing is self-cleaning! It is self-cleaning! The idea of douching is beauty industry propaganda too.

It would probably be a good idea to stop using antiperspirants, especially the traditional kind with aluminum in them. Why? Because they work by stopping you from perspiring by physically plugging up the sweat pores, sometimes for days at a time. This is not good, you have sweat pores for a reason. Sweating is how your body cools off. I know this is a controversial thing to say because so many of us were raised with the idea that sweat is disgusting and we should stop it by any means. This is one of the earliest beauty industry propagandas though. Sweating keeps us from overheating as easily and helps us cool down. We don't have to get in the water to cool off, like some other mammals do; we bring the water with us!

You don't need antibacterial or sanitizing soap unless you professionally work in food or medicine, or you have it prescribed to you.