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prokop_feed - I’ve talked a lot in the past about the virtues of one player/many GMs tabletop RPGs, but a taprokop_feed - (no subject)prokop_feed - Trying to safeword out with a Darmok alien and getting your wires crossed because you and your&helliprokop_feed - (“But how do you square this with Karkat showing up in the pilot trailer?”, you ask? Twoprokop_feed - i’m still thinking about that cowboy fic that used the stoplight system because one of the cowprokop_feed - Actually, I lied; I do have one opinion about the Homestuck cartoon: in the unlikely event that it&h![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fayanora - "Dying Georg"war_and_peas_feed - You scroll past these comics to escape stress, but on the other side, creators are drowning in it&hekarmicdragonfly - Cormorantrowyn - Monday, August 1: The DMV Sagadailyprompts_feed - One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.smbc_comics_feed - Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Fermipharyngula_feed - Bad apples identifiedmerriamwebster_feed - hideboundprokop_feed - Just eight more years until non-licensed fantasy tabletop RPGs can stop pretending that their&hellipwriteradvice_feed - The Poverty of Your Means of Expressionprokop_feed - I feel like Lovecraft’s “Cool Air” gets a bad rap as the iconic example of the autprokop_feed - Undyne/Alphys post-canon, Serious Route: confronting the fact that Undyne is Alphys’ sole anchprokop_feed - any thoughts about vivziepop’s “Homestuck”?pharyngula_feed - Multiple monarchs munching on milkweedbranchandrootprokop_feedI’ve talked a lot in the past about the virtues of one player/many GMs tabletop RPGs, but a tabletop RPG designed specifically to be played on stream where the streamer is the player and chat is the GM compels me in a way I have not heretofore encountered.
prokop_feedi’m still thinking about that cowboy fic that used the stoplight system because one of the cowboys had a prophetic dream about modern traffic control systems…and while i find this hilarious i think it would be even better to try and reverse engineer stoplight colors for kink, but for completely context-appropriate reasons.
like a caveman au
“when grug think color green…grug see big field of grass. and grug like to run in grass. grug goes! grug goes far.
when grug think yellow…grug see yellow grass. grug know that cold time is soon. grug slow down. grug prepare.
when grug think red…fire. big fire. red and burn. grug get hurt! grug stop. grug done.”
i would also like to see how that star trek species that communicates exclusively in elaborate literary references would do this
Trying to safeword out with a Darmok alien and getting your wires crossed because you and your partner have differing interpretations of the subtext of the cited folkloric episode.
prokop_feedActually, I lied; I do have one opinion about the Homestuck cartoon: in the unlikely event that it amounts to anything more than a pilot, I hope it sticks to the approximate pacing of its source material specifically so that we can recapitulate the stupid discourse about whether it’s worth watching the first couple of seasons before the trolls show up.
(“But how do you square this with Karkat showing up in the pilot trailer?”, you ask? Two possibilities: a. pilots are often structured to present a “vertical slice” of the what the planned series would contain, and appear in the finished product only in heavily modified form, if at all; or b. deceptive marketing.)
prokop_feedi’m still thinking about that cowboy fic that used the stoplight system because one of the cowboys had a prophetic dream about modern traffic control systems…and while i find this hilarious i think it would be even better to try and reverse engineer stoplight colors for kink, but for completely context-appropriate reasons.
like a caveman au
“when grug think color green…grug see big field of grass. and grug like to run in grass. grug goes! grug goes far.
when grug think yellow…grug see yellow grass. grug know that cold time is soon. grug slow down. grug prepare.
when grug think red…fire. big fire. red and burn. grug get hurt! grug stop. grug done.”
prokop_feedActually, I lied; I do have one opinion about the Homestuck cartoon: in the unlikely event that it amounts to anything more than a pilot, I hope it sticks to the approximate pacing of its source material specifically so that we can recapitulate the stupid discourse about whether it’s worth watching the first couple of seasons before the trolls show up.
fayanorawar_and_peas_feed
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karmicdragonfly
rowynI wanted to make this part of Monday's entry public because the DMV Saga was such a saga.
I fell asleep around 1 am, the night before, so that part was modestly successful.
I woke at 4 am, congested and coughing. I took some Sudafed right away because it was in reach. The coughing persisted, so at 4:30 I got up to take some generic NyQuil. I fell back asleep around 5, and woke again at 6:58. "1 more hour," I told myself, and dozed until 7:30. At that point, I gave up on sleep. Instead, I lay there feeling awful for several minutes until I could convince my body to get out of bed.
I checked on Mom; Dad was with her, staring at the bottle of nystatin powder. "There she is," Mom said. "I need my eye drops. Those are not eye drops."
"No, they are not." I fumbled at her night stand.
"It says ophthalmic on the label," Dad said.
I found the eye drops box. "These are eye drops." I gave them to Mom. I peered at the nystatin label, which says “not for ophthalmic use.”
After she used the drops, I reminded her about my 9AM DMV appointment. "So if you need anything else, I have to do it now." We took care of the things she needed. I blearily left the room to fix breakfast and went upstairs to eat around 8AM. I checked the drive to the DMV: 12 minutes per DuckDuckGo.
At 8:28AM, I went downstairs to get dressed and get ready to go. Once in the car, I put on a podcast and set the Google Maps app for the DMV. Drive time now: 14 minutes. Well, it was 8:40AM now, so still fine on time.
Traffic continued to get worse during the drive. It was a few minutes after 9 when I finally reached the DMV. I immediately realized I’d made the appointment at the wrong DMV. I’d intended to go to the same one where my parents got their licenses. But this was the “closer but a little worse” DMV that my brother M had not recommended. My entry when I got the appointment specified that I’d picked the “nice DMV”, so apparently I misclicked or grabbed the wrong address from my brother’s email on the topic. Too late to do anything about it now. I prowled through their parking lot for a place to park.
There were none.
I pulled out of the lot, slightly panicky. It was 9:05 now and I only had until 9:15 to check in. I drove down the road, looking for a legal place to park, then gave up and made a U-turn. I’d thought to park at the tire place across the street, but three cars were already parked on the grass along a “do not enter” drive. All right, I’ll just park illegally here with all the other illegally parked people. I got out of the car, grabbed my mask and my bag with the documents, and headed for the DMV building.
A long queue of people filled the walkway up to the DMV. There was a side staircase that went to the entrance that wasn’t jammed with people; I took that and walked inside. I walked past the people waiting in the first lobby and entered the second lobby, looking for a place to check-in for my appointment. Based on my experience with my parents, I understood people with appointments waited inside and had some kind of separate check-in process.
There were no employees to greet newcomers, and no signage for “check in here if you have an appointment,” or anything else.
A woman who looked like an employee brushed past me, and I turned to her in desperation. “Excuse me, do you work here? I have an appointment and I just want to check in.”
She opened her mouth to answer, and then her eyes lit at the word ‘appointment’. “Oh, you have an appointment? Here.” She led me to the unoccupied reception desk and pointed to where I should stand. I gave her my name and she crossed it off on a printout of appointments. “I need your old driver’s license or passport, birth certificate, and proof of insurance.”
I got out my driver’s license and documents folder. “...oh no, I left my phone in the car, it has my proof of insurance. I’ll be right back.”
Her face fell. “We can’t take digital documents.”
...
Well, that had been on the list of ‘things that could go wrong’ for a reason. It would have been nice if the website had said all documents needed to be physical, though.
She continued, “The only thing I can do is give you a fax number. If you can fax it to us...?” She handed me a slip of paper.
It’s the year 2025 and I don’t know why fax machines are still a thing, but there was presumably still a service that did something like email-to-fax. I could not give up this easily. “All right. I’ll look for an app. I’ll be right back!”
“Take your documents, please.”
I gathered them up and rushed back to my illegally-parked car, retrieved my phone, and searched for a send-pdf-as-fax app. The first one in the store was listed as free. I downloaded and installed it, and opened it as I re-entered the building.
The employee manning the reception desk had vanished again, leaving it empty. I stood before it as I selected the insurance pdf for the fax app and entered the number.
“Subscribe now for unlimited faxes from your phone!” the app offered. The cheapest plan was $15 per week.
I backed out to see if there was a cheaper option for Just One Fax.
There was not.
...
I suspected there was a cheaper way to do this via some other app or website, but I made the executive decision that Getting This Done Right Now was worth $15 and paid it.
App: “We’re sending your fax now. It may take a few minutes to transmit.”
I sat in one of the few empty chairs in the waiting area, near the empty reception desk.
After a few minutes, the app announced “fax complete!”
The employee still had not returned.
I waited anxiously. They knew I’d arrived during the appointment window. She’d crossed my name off the list. So I wouldn’t lose my appointment slot? Hopefully?
Every employee present projected auras of Extremely Busy With Specific Patron and/or Not A Patron-Facing Position. I turned to the person waiting nearest to me. “Is there some other way for me to finish checking in, do you happen to know?”
The other woman considered this. “She’ll be back.”
“Okay, thank you.”
They called off a number: D-401. I did not have a number, because I hadn’t finished checking in. There wasn’t a “take a number” machine or anything. You had to get the number from a person.
I waited anxiously, wondering if the fax app had actually worked. I couldn’t see where the fax machine was.
My phone rang: it was Brittany, the occupational therapist. I answered, thinking she was running late and I’d need to give her Mom’s number.
No, my mother was having medical issues and Brittany wanted to know if they should call EMS. I told them to do so as long as my mother didn’t object. Mom has not been consenting to medical treatment lately.
Brittany disconnected. I stared at my phone. It didn’t make sense for me to give up on my errand today; I needed a driver’s license and my current one would expire in September. It takes 90 days minimum to get a DMV appointment. I would be considerably less useful as a caregiver if I couldn’t drive Dad to appointments.
I continued to wait anxiously.
The receptionist returned, leading another patron. I hopped up from my seat. “Excuse me, sorry, I faxed the insurance, would you be able to see if it arrived?”
“Oh! Sure. One moment, sir,” she added to the other patron, and disappeared behind a cubicle divider. A minute later, she reemerged, carrying a piece of paper. Success! It was my proof-of-insurance!
She took all my other documents, paper-clipped them together, and returned them to me. “Check your phone. You’ll get a text with your number.”
I checked. “...it hasn’t showed up yet.”
“It hasn’t? I’ll write it down.” She handed me a slip with A-128 written on it.
I had a number!
I returned to my seat. The DMV announcer called “A-130.” I looked at the numbers displayed on the “next in line” monitor. D-304, B-152, B-201, A-125.
“Their numbering system is byzantine,” I said to the woman I’d spoken with earlier. “A-125 is fourth on the board so maybe I’ll come after that.”
“It’s so confusing. I got in line to get in here at 5AM.”
I winced. At least she’d made it to the last stage.
A little time passed. I called Brittany back. She was still with Mom. Mom had refused EMS. I asked Brittany to give Kim my number, since I hadn’t yet, so that Kim could call me if the situation worsened.
The receptionist showed four people into the waiting area. They waited behind ropes until she had time to process them. I heard snippets of an exchange between her and one of them: something like “you’ll get a text in 3-4 hours.”
“Okay, and I come back then?”
“Right.”
A little after that, a man and a woman entered the waiting room. The receptionist told them, “I’m sorry, we have no more slots for walk-ins today.”
The man gave her an incredulous look. “We’ve been to the webpage. There are no appointments. Anywhere in the state.”
“You have to go after midnight. Like between midnight and 12:30. That’s when the next appointments open in 90 days,” I said.
“This is crazy,” the woman with him said.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes it is.”
A-125 had moved down to the 5th position on the monitor. I remained mystified by their numbering system.
“A-128 to station 4,” the DMV announcer called. None of the numbers on the monitor had changed.
I leaped to my feet and hurried to station 4. The man took my papers, reviewed them, and had no issues with any. Whew. He had me remove my mask and glasses to take the photo for the license next, which got my hopes up that I didn’t need to do anything else. Nope: vision test was next.
“...I foolishly put on my reading glasses to come inside,” I said, which is true in the sense that ‘I have glasses that are technically better for a distance but the difference is so slight that I seldom bother to use anything but the ones that are best for my computer monitors.’ “My distance ones are in the car. Can I get them if I have trouble?”
He gave me a look. “This is a distance test. Reading glasses are not gonna cut it.”
“My prescription is really similar for both,” I explained. He had me do the test, and I had no issues with reading the text .
Identifying signs by shape alone was another story. “Stop sign,” I said, because that one was easy. “...why do I recognize nothing else by shape?”
He gave me hints: “If there was an X on the next one?”
“Okay, railroad crossing.”
“Children?”
“Oh, school crossing.”
“Gets no respect in your old state?”
I stared at the sideways elongated triangle, mystified. “...can you give me a hint?”
“I just did.”
“...”
“It’s a no-passing zone.”
“I’m not used to recognizing them just by shape.”
“That’s fine,” he said, then added in mock-stern tones, “No license for you,”
Despite the obviously unserious tone, I narrowly avoided panicking as he went through the remaining steps. The rest of it was just me signing documents and registering to vote, and him scanning my documents to their system. No written test, no driving test. Thank goodness.
The irony of needing to send my pdf to their fax machine so that they could scan the paper back to a pdf was not lost on me. It’s 2025 and we have better technology solutions than this, but there’s no political will to fix the broken parts of government bureaucracy.
And “you need to fax your pdf” was frankly the least broken part of their DMV system, which is obviously understaffed and probably doesn’t even have enough physical buildings for the level of work they need to process.
At last, he gave me a temporary paper license and told me the permanent one would arrive within two weeks. I thanked him and left, clutching my paper license.
I did it! I got my license renewed!
I still need to get the registration changed to the new state, but that could be a battle for another day. It didn’t look like this office did registrations, and I was pretty sure I’d need an inspection and probably some other paperwork that I didn’t have on me. (I later learned I was correct in presuming the DMV doesn’t do registrations in this state.)
In the DMV parking lot, I saw a car with no license plate lifted by a tow truck. My view of the lane where I’d left my car was partially blocked, but I couldn’t see any cars still along it. Oh no, maybe it was towed, I thought. And then, Eh, it was worth it to get the driver’s license over with. I can pay the towing fee and take a Lyft to pick it up.
But when I rounded the slope on the lane, I saw my car. It was still there! God had mercy upon me!
As I reached it, I realized that the lane was empty because the parking lot was also now half-empty. Since the DMV had run out of walk-in slots, all the walk-in people had left. The entire ordeal had taken about an hour, though it had been so nerve-wracking that it felt like much longer.
dailyprompts_feedOne may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
–Shakespeare, Hamlet
smbc_comics_feed
Hovertext:
The first thought that occurred after the Universe began to contemplate itself was 'this? is this all?'
Get your copy of A City on Mars signed in person in Charlottesville, VA on August 23rd!
pharyngula_feedIf you follow RetractionWatch, you know that there a lot of bad papers published in the scientific literature. But there you just see the steady drip, drip, drip of bad research getting exposed, a paper at a time. If you step back and look at the overall picture, you begin to see the source. A lot of it comes from paper mills and bad actors conspiring to allow their pals to publish trash.
(PubPeer is a site that allows post-publication peer review and catches many examples of bad science.)
Nature jumped on an analysis of the people behind swarms of retracted papers on PLoS One, and exposed some of the editors. The problem can be pinned on a surprisingly small number of researchers/editors.
Nearly one-third of all retracted papers at PLoS ONE can be traced back to just 45 researchers who served as editors at the journal, an analysis of its publication records has found.
The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on 4 August, found that 45 editors handled only 1.3% of all articles published by PLoS ONE from 2006 to 2023, but that the papers they accepted accounted for more than 30% of the 702 retractions that the journal issued by early 2024. Twenty-five of these editors also authored papers in PLoS ONE that were later retracted.
The PNAS authors did not disclose the names of any of the 45 editors. But, by independently analysing publicly available data from PLoS ONE and the Retraction Watch database, Nature’s news team has identified five of the editors who handled the highest number of papers that were subsequently retracted by the journal. Together, those editors accepted about 15% of PLoS ONE’s retracted papers up to 14 July.
Wow. These are people who betrayed the responsibilities of a professional scientist. They need to be exposed and rooted out…but they also reflect a systemic issue.
The study reveals how individuals can form coordinated networks and work under the guise of editorial duty to push large amounts of problematic research into the scientific literature, in some cases with links to paper mills — businesses that churn out fake papers and sell authorship slots.
Yeah, it’s all about money. And also about the use of publications for professional advancement.
So, about the individuals who are committing these perfidious activities…Nature identified many, but I’ll just single out one as an example.
In their analysis of PLoS ONE’s publication records, Richardson and his colleagues identified 19 researchers — based in 4 countries — who served as academic editors between 2020 and 2023, and repeatedly handled each other’s submissions. More than half of the papers they accepted were later retracted, with nearly identical notices citing concerns about authorship, peer review and competing interests.
Nature’s analysis identified 3 of those 19 editors. Shahid Farooq, a plant biologist at Harran University in Şanlıurfa, Turkey, topped the list of PLoS ONE editors ordered by the number of retracted papers that they handled. Between 2019 and 2023, Farooq was responsible for editing 79 articles, 52 of which were subsequently retracted. All of the retraction notices stated that the papers were “identified as one of a series of submissions” for which the journal had concerns about authorship, competing interests and peer review. Farooq also co-authored seven articles in PLoS ONE that were later retracted with identical retraction notices.
That’s a batting record that ought to discredit all of Farooq’s work, and ought to taint all of his coauthors and the researchers who had their work “reviewed” by him. Fortunately for all of us, he has lost all of his editorial duties.
Farooq says that PLoS ONE removed him from the editorial board in 2022, and that he subsequently resigned from his editorial positions in other journals, including Frontiers in Agronomy and BMC Plant Biology.
My editing experience has changed to not editing any paper for any publisher, as the publishers become innocent once any issues are raised on the published papers,he added.
That’s a remarkable excuse: he got caught, so it’s all the publishers’ fault.
Purging a few bad apples isn’t going to fix the issues, because the problem is only getting worse.
In the PNAS paper, Richardson and his colleagues compiled a list of 32,786 papers that they and other sleuths flagged for bearing hallmarks of paper-mill production, such as duplicated images, tortured phrases and whole copied sentences. Only 8,589 of these papers have been retracted. They report that the number of suspected paper-mill articles is doubling every 1.5 years — outpacing the number of retractions, which is doubling every 3.3 years.
Hey, you know, this is where AI could be really useful — I think a lot of these fraudsters are using AI to generate the AI-slop papers, but we could turn it around and use AI to detect the conspiratorial web of collaborating authors as well as the bad writing in these papers.
merriamwebster_feedMerriam-Webster's Word of the Day for August 10, 2025 is:
hidebound • \HYDE-bound\ • adjective
Someone or something described as hidebound is inflexible and unwilling to accept new or different ideas.
// Although somewhat stuffy and strict, the professor did not so completely adhere to hidebound academic tradition that he wouldn’t teach class outside on an especially lovely day.
Examples:
“He was exciting then, different from all the physicists I worked with in the way that he was so broadly educated and interested, not hidebound and literal, as my colleagues were.” — Joe Mungo Reed, Terrestrial History: A Novel, 2025
Did you know?
Hidebound has its origins in agriculture. The adjective, which appeared in English in the early 17th century, originally described cattle whose skin, due to illness or poor feeding, clung to the skeleton and could not be pinched, loosened, or worked with the fingers (the adjective followed an earlier noun form referring to this condition). Hidebound was applied to humans too, to describe people afflicted with tight skin. Figurative use quickly followed, first with a meaning of “stingy” or “miserly.” That sense has since fallen out of use, but a second figurative usage, describing people who are rigid or unyielding in their actions or beliefs, lives on in our language today.
prokop_feedJust eight more years until non-licensed fantasy tabletop RPGs can stop pretending that their hobbits aren’t hobbits.
writeradvice_feedWhen you sit down to write…you think, ah, yes, the entire world and all its strange nuances, and subtleties, and inexpressibilities are about to surge through my arm into the pencil I’m holding. And then you look down at what you’ve written and it’s something like, And so he walked to the grocery store…. That feeling of the richness of the world and the poverty of your means of expression is one of the inescapable features of writing fiction. One finds that one’s thought is much more conventionalized than one would have guessed.
DEBORAH EISENBERG
prokop_feedI feel like Lovecraft’s “Cool Air” gets a bad rap as the iconic example of the author’s weird anxieties informing his work, both because “my upstairs neighbour has a bizarre obsession with air conditioning and forcibly recruits me to help him install a series of increasingly powerful AC systems, to the point that portions of his apartment are literally freezing over, and in the end it turns out that he was undead and using AC to prevent his body from decaying” is a fairly solid premise for a Twilight Zone episode, and also because there are Lovecraft stories where the inciting anxiety is objectively much dumber.
prokop_feedUndyne/Alphys post-canon, Serious Route: confronting the fact that Undyne is Alphys’ sole anchor against suicidal ideation.
Undyne/Alphys post-canon, Silly Route: confronting the weird toxic yaoi thing Alphys has going with Mettaton.
Undyne/Alphys post-canon, True Route: somehow, both at once.
prokop_feedYou are not compelled to form any opinion about this matter before you, nor to disturb your peace of mind at all. Things in themselves have no power to extort a verdict from you.
— Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. (trans. Maxwell Staniforth, Penguin Books, 1964)
pharyngula_feedAt least the caterpillars are thriving.
