Cleverly Disguised

So, in terrible news, Trump's trying to pull some strings to pass this massive internet censorship bill, featuring all the kinds of internet censorship we're terrified of, including mandatory ID for accessing basically any website, specifically to crush state regulation of AI, because apparently this man will always see the moral bottom of the barrel and start digging.

OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.

So these LLM crawlers are hoovering up the output of other LLMs and folding that into their datasets. Slop eating slop. Which means they're getting dumber and more prone to hallucination than ever.

It's unclear exactly how putting Termina into the Coffin of Olbalad would transform her into a plowshare in the Cloak's original plan, since our local godkilling queen is on the loose and still very much wants to kill gods, but maybe that means it simply didn't work. Maybe because Termina is sentient and didn't agree, she could not be "transformed" from her original purpose/nature without her consent. If that's the case, I think that's fitting. It reinforces the sentience of the Panto masks and that the Cloak did not fully understand their nature.

Bringing this around to Bolaire: a plowshare is a powerful weapon whose purpose is transformed from destructive to creative/cultivative, and by doing so gains new power. And anyone can make plowshares. Shadia transformed the god-killing Pariah Blades into plowshares by painting them and making them harmless props in a momentously inspiring stage play. If Bolaire could truly accept the fact of his own personhood and agency - actually believe it - he would be materially transcending his original design as solely a god-killing weapon. Bam! Plowshare who also happens to also be a little guy. And in this unique event where a plowshare is also a person with thoughts and feelings, rather than an inert configuration of materials, it makes sense that what would transform is how he thinks/acts as opposed to how he is "used". Choosing to build a bridge to free dead souls is also creative rather than destructive. Making the choice to participate in that could make him a plowshare even if he's still figuring himself out internally.

As I write this, I was just hit over the head with the realization that Brennan is pointing at Bolaire to be the plowshare, too, in literal neon colors. Per Mara, the Coffin of Olbalad is "the paint" in the trinity of plowshares needed for the bridge-building ritual (a halfling Panto mask the second, a demonic anchor is the third). Mara and Thjazi originally put the pieces of Termina inside the coffin, intending her to be the plowshare. The magically painted Bolaire-and-Figment (technically created of a plowshare themselves!) traveled to the surface of the coffin and wanted to get in. Painted!Bolaire also rejoices and says he's not alone, prodding Bolaire to look at how he as a person fits into the world and community around him.