Poll: Sense of geopolitical awareness [pols, US, war]
Sep. 29th, 2025 02:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sidereaHey, quick temperature check. I've been reading a lot of media I don't expect my readership to read, and now I'm a little disoriented to who knows what.
Poll #33668 Geopolitics awareness check
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 85
What country do you currently live in?
What is your age?
12-19
0 (0.0%)
20-29
5 (6.0%)
30-39
12 (14.3%)
40-49
22 (26.2%)
50-59
28 (33.3%)
60-69
11 (13.1%)
70-79
6 (7.1%)
80+
0 (0.0%)
To the best of your knowledge, if the US were to go to war tomorrow, against what country would it most likely be?
Towards a Trust Architecture, Part 0: Introduction
Sep. 28th, 2025 01:25 pmjducoeurTable of Contents
- Part 0: Introduction (you're reading it)
- Lots more to come!
Introduction
I started outlining this series months ago, while I was on sabbatical, but never got around to starting the actual words. I've got a new job now (at OnePass, a refreshingly sensible company providing actually-useful services, which is sadly not the norm at the moment) -- work is extremely busy, but I do need to think about things other than that and politics sometimes, so let's get this going!
All year, I've been mulling the problem of Trust Architectures: how do we share information about "trust" online. As I'll discuss under Use Cases (next time), I think it's getting to be Steam Engine Time to take it seriously. Between the AI Slopocalypse spewing nonsense all over the Web, and the social networks succumbing to Advanced Enshittification, it's getting ever-harder to understand who to trust.
This isn't even remotely a new problem, mind -- it was a pretty old topic when we explored adding this sort of thing to Trenza way back in 2001. But it's rarely been taken really seriously, and most of the better attempts have wound up buried inside proprietary walled gardens that don't necessarily have the human user's best interests at heart.
There appears to be a lot of relatively recent literature on the topic, some of it possibly even good (I'm cautiously intrigued by the OpenRank project). But much of it is obsessively focused on Blockchain, which I'm rather skeptical about (I still consider it to be 90% a solution in search of problems), and most appears to have a lot of assumptions baked in.
So let's step back, and tease this apart. I'm going to intentionally go in a bit naively, so as not to be too biased by everyone else's assumptions, and explore the topic from first principles, winding up with a very high-level sketch of how things might work. Once I have straight what I think are the interesting use cases, requirements, and architectural parameters, we can take a properly critical look at what's already out there.
I expect this to take at least 6-7 installments, likely more like 10 before I'm done -- it's a big, chewy problem with a lot of facets. As I add parts, I'll add them to the Table of Contents at the top of the Dreamwidth version of this post. I'll likely edit some of these posts as we go and folks point out additional nuances; I'll try to be good about crediting folks who point stuff out, so call me on it if you feel like you haven't been acknowledged properly.
This is not fully-baked yet: I'm going to be thinking out loud. That's why this is "towards" -- I'm seeking to make progress here, and we'll see where it winds up. It's possible that we'll find that the One True Trust Architecture already exists, and we should be lobbying for everyone to adopt it. It's also entirely possible that we'll conclude that the problem is insoluble in principle, and give up. (Hopefully not.) The goal is to come to a better shared understanding of the topic, and ideally some actionable ideas about how to deal with the problem.
I hope you'll join in. While I'm going to do a lot of talking over the next couple of months, it's going to be a lot more productive if you chime in with your thoughts and ideas to add to that.
I'm intentionally posting this on Dreamwidth because despite (or maybe because of) its antiquity and old-fashioned UX, it's still the best place for posting and discussing complex, long-form topics, free from the AIs and enshittification consuming most other places.
So I'm planning to post primarily to Dreamwidth, mirror to Medium and LinkedIn since some of the technical crowd mainly knows me there, and link from Mastodon and Bluesky. (But not Facebook, which I've mostly given up on, or Xitter, which I've entirely abandoned.) On platforms that have tagging, I'll be using #TrustArch as the tag for this series.
Comments are welcome at all of those places -- I'm curious to see where I get good conversations -- but the authoritative copy of these posts will be Dreamwidth, and that's the copy that will get edited and updated as this evolves.
That said, a couple of ground rules. I don't want to see comments saying that if it's not 100% perfect, it's not worth trying. (I'm reasonably certain that it's impossible to make this perfect, but I'm moderately confident we could create something helpful.) And I'll be downright scornful of naive claims that we should just leave this for AI to deal with -- while I think it's likely to get quite powerful over the next decade, I'm not at all sanguine that it's going to be trustworthy to that degree any time in the foreseeable future.
But aside from that sort of thing, I'd love to get some serious conversation going. So come along, share your thoughts, and let's tease apart this important problem!
Things I've cooked!
Sep. 28th, 2025 12:31 pmwolfpurplemoonThe server where my main mastodon account is hosted is closing down in a few months, so I'm looking through my posts to see if there's anything I want to preserve, and this post about food I've cooked has been moved from a previous closed server to my main account so I should probably bring it here for prosperity (as I always use my DW account to keep posts from other blogs/social sites that have closed or I left over the years, RIP LJ and Imzy đź’” though they are all private now)
a pizza made with a tortilla wrap base, there are two wraps with tomato pasta sauce in between, then more sauce on top then any pizza toppings on top of that before 10-15 mins in the oven! (mine is topped with cheese, mushrooms, tomatoes and herbs)
(from https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/spaghetti-puttanesca-red-beans-spinach )
A plate of spaghetti mixed with beans, tomatoes and basil. I made a few changes from the recipe linked in the post, olive oil instead of rapeseed, no chilli, extra garlic and my spaghetti isn't wholemeal
A plate of sweetcorn fritters topped with beans and tomatoes and 2 fried eggs Changes I made from the linked recipe: accidentally failed to buy a red pepper so missed that out, again olive oil instead of rapeseed, I used a tin of black eyed beans and one of red kidney beans that I already had instead of black beans and I fried the eggs cos I have no idea how to poach
A plate with a pile of sticky rice with a slice of lemon on top main change from the linked recipe was that I cooked the rice in my instant pot, I love that device, it makes amazing rice!
a dish of various vegetables and lentils with dressing on top and large croutons on the side. This was from a Hello Fresh box, I still make the caesar dressing regularly cos it's so good!
a round garlic bread with a pile of tomatoey rice and vegetables I made this entirely in my instant pot (apart from the garlic bread lol) and added garlic and used Italian Herbs rather than just Rosemary
White plate with a pile of rice, beans and other veg next to the open tin of jackfruit I used I randomly picked up a tin of jackfruit without any idea what to do with it, then a few weeks later found it in the cupboard and searched online and came up with the linked recipe, changes were doing it in the instant pot of course and not adding chilli cos I can't do chilli
A plate of rice mixed with peas and quorn pieces alongside a handful of salad with a squiggle of mayo on top. This recipe I came up with due the ingredients I had around, I cooked the rice in the instant pot, then mixed a teaspoonful of marmite with hot water and added that, peas and quorn to the rice and put the instant pot onto the saute programme and then once it was all warmed through I served it with some salad leaves with lime juice and mayo on!
Half a red pepper that fills half the plate, filled with the rice mixture and topped with finely grated cheese A tasty stuffed pepper dish I made from the biggest red pepper I'd ever seen (did online shopping so didn't see it till it arrived) I cooked rice, mushrooms, cherry tomatoes and stock in my instant pot and cooked half the pepper in the oven for a few minutes Then when the rice and mushrooms were done I filled the pepper half with them and cooked in the oven for 10 mins or so I put finely grated cheese on top before eating which melted nicely
A white bowl filled with tomato soup It was made in my InstantPot, just some chopped onion, a tin of tomatoes, a stock cube and some herbs cooked on the sauté mode for 15 mins, and then a splash of oat milk before serving!
A plate of salad, avocado and cheese topped with roasted peppers, cauliflower and a creamy sauce
A slice of cheesecake next to a loaf tin filled with cheesecake. The filling is a creamy brown colour and the base is quite thin and crisp looking My changes from the linked recipe were using cadbury's buttons and I made the base out of some flapjack bites I needed to use up, and I had to hand whip the cream!
Food I've Cooked, All Veggie!
1. Tortilla Wraps Pizza
a pizza made with a tortilla wrap base, there are two wraps with tomato pasta sauce in between, then more sauce on top then any pizza toppings on top of that before 10-15 mins in the oven! (mine is topped with cheese, mushrooms, tomatoes and herbs)
2. Spaghetti Puttanesca
(from https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/spaghetti-puttanesca-red-beans-spinach )
A plate of spaghetti mixed with beans, tomatoes and basil. I made a few changes from the recipe linked in the post, olive oil instead of rapeseed, no chilli, extra garlic and my spaghetti isn't wholemeal
3. Sweetcorn fritters with eggs & black bean salsa
(from https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/sweetcorn-fritters-eggs-black-bean-salsa )A plate of sweetcorn fritters topped with beans and tomatoes and 2 fried eggs Changes I made from the linked recipe: accidentally failed to buy a red pepper so missed that out, again olive oil instead of rapeseed, I used a tin of black eyed beans and one of red kidney beans that I already had instead of black beans and I fried the eggs cos I have no idea how to poach
4. Lemon Rice
(from https://www.thekitchn.com/recipe-silky-lemon-rice-242509 )A plate with a pile of sticky rice with a slice of lemon on top main change from the linked recipe was that I cooked the rice in my instant pot, I love that device, it makes amazing rice!
5. Caesar Salad
(from: https://www.hellofresh.co.uk/recipes/super-green-lentil-caesar-salad-5cf92f954e84a7001055320f )a dish of various vegetables and lentils with dressing on top and large croutons on the side. This was from a Hello Fresh box, I still make the caesar dressing regularly cos it's so good!
6. Mushroom Rice
(from: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/mushroom-rice-one-pot )a round garlic bread with a pile of tomatoey rice and vegetables I made this entirely in my instant pot (apart from the garlic bread lol) and added garlic and used Italian Herbs rather than just Rosemary
7. Jackfruit Rice and Beans
(from: https://www.abelandcole.co.uk/recipes/jamaican-jerk-jackfruit-beans-with-rice )White plate with a pile of rice, beans and other veg next to the open tin of jackfruit I used I randomly picked up a tin of jackfruit without any idea what to do with it, then a few weeks later found it in the cupboard and searched online and came up with the linked recipe, changes were doing it in the instant pot of course and not adding chilli cos I can't do chilli
8. Rice, Quorn and Peas with Marmite Stock
A plate of rice mixed with peas and quorn pieces alongside a handful of salad with a squiggle of mayo on top. This recipe I came up with due the ingredients I had around, I cooked the rice in the instant pot, then mixed a teaspoonful of marmite with hot water and added that, peas and quorn to the rice and put the instant pot onto the saute programme and then once it was all warmed through I served it with some salad leaves with lime juice and mayo on!
9. Stuffed Red Pepper
Half a red pepper that fills half the plate, filled with the rice mixture and topped with finely grated cheese A tasty stuffed pepper dish I made from the biggest red pepper I'd ever seen (did online shopping so didn't see it till it arrived) I cooked rice, mushrooms, cherry tomatoes and stock in my instant pot and cooked half the pepper in the oven for a few minutes Then when the rice and mushrooms were done I filled the pepper half with them and cooked in the oven for 10 mins or so I put finely grated cheese on top before eating which melted nicely
10. Simple Tomato Soup
A white bowl filled with tomato soup It was made in my InstantPot, just some chopped onion, a tin of tomatoes, a stock cube and some herbs cooked on the sauté mode for 15 mins, and then a splash of oat milk before serving!
11. Chipotle Grilled Cauli Salad
(from: https://www.simplycook.com/recipes/chipotle-grilled-cauli-salad-for-2-veg )A plate of salad, avocado and cheese topped with roasted peppers, cauliflower and a creamy sauce
12. Chocolate Cheesecake
(from: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/chocolate-cheesecake )A slice of cheesecake next to a loaf tin filled with cheesecake. The filling is a creamy brown colour and the base is quite thin and crisp looking My changes from the linked recipe were using cadbury's buttons and I made the base out of some flapjack bites I needed to use up, and I had to hand whip the cream!
Two Q [writing, DW]
Sep. 26th, 2025 07:17 pmsiderea1)
Is there a term for the part of a large non-fiction writing project that comes after the research – when you have a huge pile of sources and quotes and whatnot – and before the actual "writing" part, the part that involves making sure you have all the citations correct for the sources, maybe going over the sources to highlight what passages you will quote verbatim, organizing them (historically by putting things on 3x5 cards and moving them around on a surface), and generally wrangling all the materials you are going to use into shape to be used?
I think this is often just thought of as part of "research", but when I'm doing a resource-dense project, it's not at all negligible. It takes a huge amount of time, and is exceptionally hard on my body. I'd like, if nothing else, to complain about it, and not having a word for it makes that hard.
2)
I don't suppose there's some, perhaps undocumented, way to use Dreamwidth's post-via-email feature with manually set dates? So you email in a journal entry to a specific date in the past? This doesn't appear among the options for post headers in the docs.
I am working on a large geopolitics project where I am trying to construct a two-year long timeline, and it dawns on me one of the easiest ways to do that might be to set up a personal comm on DW and literally post each timeline-entry as a comm entry. But maybe not if I have to go through the web interface, because that would be kind of miserable; I work via email.
Is there a term for the part of a large non-fiction writing project that comes after the research – when you have a huge pile of sources and quotes and whatnot – and before the actual "writing" part, the part that involves making sure you have all the citations correct for the sources, maybe going over the sources to highlight what passages you will quote verbatim, organizing them (historically by putting things on 3x5 cards and moving them around on a surface), and generally wrangling all the materials you are going to use into shape to be used?
I think this is often just thought of as part of "research", but when I'm doing a resource-dense project, it's not at all negligible. It takes a huge amount of time, and is exceptionally hard on my body. I'd like, if nothing else, to complain about it, and not having a word for it makes that hard.
2)
I don't suppose there's some, perhaps undocumented, way to use Dreamwidth's post-via-email feature with manually set dates? So you email in a journal entry to a specific date in the past? This doesn't appear among the options for post headers in the docs.
I am working on a large geopolitics project where I am trying to construct a two-year long timeline, and it dawns on me one of the easiest ways to do that might be to set up a personal comm on DW and literally post each timeline-entry as a comm entry. But maybe not if I have to go through the web interface, because that would be kind of miserable; I work via email.
Garden
Sep. 25th, 2025 10:12 amgreenstormWe've had the first frost, not last night but the night before. Here are garden notes.
Tomatoes:
Cherries: champagne cherry, green grape, green doctors, rons carbon copy, sungold select (almost a saladette, a bit variable), copper cherry, Hawaiian red currant, sunpeach, coyote, snow white cherry, pink princess get planted again of cherries.
Coyote and kiss the sky and one rozovaya bella were crossed and one of the two crossed kiss the sky plants sported into a saladette (!!!). The crossed coyote had that flavour. Growing these all out except maybe the roz bella.
Mission mountain grex second year the orange fluted gave me four orange fluted plants, nice and productive, and the yellow antho pear gave me variable breadth yellow antho pears.
Mission mountain grex first year I got an antho grape that didn't ripen, a beautiful stripe saladette that ripened decently, and a beautiful antho blush thing that I'm going to try again. Oh, and a micro I'll grow out this winter maybe.
Miracle cheriette project very satisfactory, great flavor, 2 larger and 3 cherries to continue -- one black, one large grape, and another grape with interesting calix shape. Those are the early ripening and prolific.
Otherwise utnyok, cesu agrais, sareaev 0-33, sugary pounder, rozovaya bella, black sea man, katja, jory, maya and sion, jd cooper are the slicers to do again, offhand.
Zesty fir and uluru mikado trial decent, though the uluru mikado weren't well watered and thus got a bit of blossom end rot -- they were in with the brassica greens I let go to seed and then dry down. Zesty fir plants are very well behaved and decently early.
Zesty carbon f1 grew a huge plant with huge tomatoes. Can't wait to see the f2.
I haven't got into the greenhouse yet but I know there are rozovaya bella and I believe JD Coopers ripe in there, as well as less-good-tasting Amy's Apricot and better-tasting snow white cherry. Also a bunch of other things but I'll write that up when I get in there.
Woody perennials: I hit up the garden center several weeks ago, I think on Avallu's ok-to-go-outside check, on their fall sale day. I had been flirting with a discounted quercus macrocarpa all summer and picked it up since the sale + discount made it worthwhile. So now I have two bigger macrocarpas in the front yard, as well as some tiny ones. I've also ordered some acorns, which-- I'm going to need to be doing a lot more from seed now, even big things, for financial reasons.
Also into the front yard were four "mystery" romance cherries (discounted because the tags had fallen off and then again on the sale" on top of the one from way back that already was there, and the three labeled ones (cupid, juliette, and I forget the third but it has a clay label) from this spring.
Then a sumac "Tiger eyes", a quercus gambelii, a lonicera Goldflame, a morden concord and a valiant grape, and there will be a named hazel variety. This is all part of screening the front yard as the aspens are gone, so I can hang out there. My house sits on a curve in the road and on a bit of a rise, so my front yard is a bit of a stage for anyone driving along that long curve. And lately a lot of people have been driving my and slowing down significantly as they go past my house. I used to think it was because of the pigs, but the pigs aren't visible from there anymore, so I think it's just because they can kinda see through the vegetation. I'd like that to stop.
I also have a bunch of black currants I haven't planted yet, and a row I want to plant something tall in to screen the winter garden but not screen it enough to shade the garden, maybe something 8' tall or so.
Oh! This spring I also planted most of a ring of swamp white oaks in the back upper field, the one that is basically a stream during snowmelt and dries up by June-somethingish. These oaks should be ok with that, and give me a nice big ring. I paced out the ring instead of measuring it, and it's on a slope, so it'll be interesting to see how it goes. They got mulched and not watered much, nearly all survived regardless.
Josh and I got a bunch of apple and seabuckthorn seeds on the trip up with Avallu and those will be started for next year. Seabuckthorn seems to do easily from seed.
Perennials: This is the year I started planting perennial flowers that aren't roses. I haunted that sale and got a bunch of $5 and $3 plants, daylilies and salvia and some verbascum and russian sage and ecinacea and whatnot. I have ordered some peonies, some common (inexpensive) cultuvars and a bag of root fragments that are unlabelled, they'll take a long time to bloom but I have more time than money (I hope).
I also found a lead on inexpensive daffodil bulbs and am putting a bunch of them in, underplanting with a bunch of smaller bulbs as you might expect. Basically any new bed that goes in will have bulbs in it if I can do anything about it (which means fall planted, mostly, since I am unlikely to go back and put bulbs into existing beds).
Weeds: the aspen suckers are nuts this year, which is unsurprising. They take about two years to get 8-10' tall or so and over an inch thick, so there are a couple clumps I missed last year that feel like real trees now and need different equipment to cut down. If I cut them twice a year I can use the really robust hedge shears. It's all really hard on the hands, like I lose the ability to hold cups after for awhile. I've been trying to track down proper ratcheting pruners but it seems like they're out of fashion.
The invasive thistle is everywhere. If I deep mulch yearly it's easy to pull out once a year, also hard on my hands but keeps it from going to seed. Thing is, I need to cut the aspens before I deep mulch, so there's this whole particular sequence that needs to happen and it kind of needs to happen everywhere at once? normally I do cardboard then compost then mulch, but when mom was here last spring she took out most of the gardboard and I've been using the rest to build beds, so grass has cme up to complicate the aspen/thistle removal. I'm definitely getting into a sense for what yearly maintenance will look like. The south slope bed is my oldest one, and honestly I haven't had many longlasting beds I got to handle in a non-professional capacity, so it's interesting to play around with it. The soil is improving steadily, which is good and also maybe why the weeds are so intense. If I can get 6-8" of mulch on everything and the aspen suckers cut down by mid-april I'll e in good shape.
The scentless chamomile which took over the untilled spots in the winter garden dyes fabric well and lastingly, which is nice. I'd still rather have edible chamomile, but this stuff pulls out easily in spring. I'm ok with it. Clover seems to outcompete it too.
My feral gai lan did some good seeding this year, I'm collecting a lot of the seeds and going to move them up from the winter field to the apple field. The back field is lots of clover and grass where the oaks didn't go in. The clover is self-seeding now, which is excellent, but the grass is a bit of a challenge.
I'm losing typing coordination so I'll set this asde for now. But. Good gardening year, looking forward to nxt.
Oh, two kinds of sunflowers did super well. And I need to write about herbs.
Tomatoes:
Cherries: champagne cherry, green grape, green doctors, rons carbon copy, sungold select (almost a saladette, a bit variable), copper cherry, Hawaiian red currant, sunpeach, coyote, snow white cherry, pink princess get planted again of cherries.
Coyote and kiss the sky and one rozovaya bella were crossed and one of the two crossed kiss the sky plants sported into a saladette (!!!). The crossed coyote had that flavour. Growing these all out except maybe the roz bella.
Mission mountain grex second year the orange fluted gave me four orange fluted plants, nice and productive, and the yellow antho pear gave me variable breadth yellow antho pears.
Mission mountain grex first year I got an antho grape that didn't ripen, a beautiful stripe saladette that ripened decently, and a beautiful antho blush thing that I'm going to try again. Oh, and a micro I'll grow out this winter maybe.
Miracle cheriette project very satisfactory, great flavor, 2 larger and 3 cherries to continue -- one black, one large grape, and another grape with interesting calix shape. Those are the early ripening and prolific.
Otherwise utnyok, cesu agrais, sareaev 0-33, sugary pounder, rozovaya bella, black sea man, katja, jory, maya and sion, jd cooper are the slicers to do again, offhand.
Zesty fir and uluru mikado trial decent, though the uluru mikado weren't well watered and thus got a bit of blossom end rot -- they were in with the brassica greens I let go to seed and then dry down. Zesty fir plants are very well behaved and decently early.
Zesty carbon f1 grew a huge plant with huge tomatoes. Can't wait to see the f2.
I haven't got into the greenhouse yet but I know there are rozovaya bella and I believe JD Coopers ripe in there, as well as less-good-tasting Amy's Apricot and better-tasting snow white cherry. Also a bunch of other things but I'll write that up when I get in there.
Woody perennials: I hit up the garden center several weeks ago, I think on Avallu's ok-to-go-outside check, on their fall sale day. I had been flirting with a discounted quercus macrocarpa all summer and picked it up since the sale + discount made it worthwhile. So now I have two bigger macrocarpas in the front yard, as well as some tiny ones. I've also ordered some acorns, which-- I'm going to need to be doing a lot more from seed now, even big things, for financial reasons.
Also into the front yard were four "mystery" romance cherries (discounted because the tags had fallen off and then again on the sale" on top of the one from way back that already was there, and the three labeled ones (cupid, juliette, and I forget the third but it has a clay label) from this spring.
Then a sumac "Tiger eyes", a quercus gambelii, a lonicera Goldflame, a morden concord and a valiant grape, and there will be a named hazel variety. This is all part of screening the front yard as the aspens are gone, so I can hang out there. My house sits on a curve in the road and on a bit of a rise, so my front yard is a bit of a stage for anyone driving along that long curve. And lately a lot of people have been driving my and slowing down significantly as they go past my house. I used to think it was because of the pigs, but the pigs aren't visible from there anymore, so I think it's just because they can kinda see through the vegetation. I'd like that to stop.
I also have a bunch of black currants I haven't planted yet, and a row I want to plant something tall in to screen the winter garden but not screen it enough to shade the garden, maybe something 8' tall or so.
Oh! This spring I also planted most of a ring of swamp white oaks in the back upper field, the one that is basically a stream during snowmelt and dries up by June-somethingish. These oaks should be ok with that, and give me a nice big ring. I paced out the ring instead of measuring it, and it's on a slope, so it'll be interesting to see how it goes. They got mulched and not watered much, nearly all survived regardless.
Josh and I got a bunch of apple and seabuckthorn seeds on the trip up with Avallu and those will be started for next year. Seabuckthorn seems to do easily from seed.
Perennials: This is the year I started planting perennial flowers that aren't roses. I haunted that sale and got a bunch of $5 and $3 plants, daylilies and salvia and some verbascum and russian sage and ecinacea and whatnot. I have ordered some peonies, some common (inexpensive) cultuvars and a bag of root fragments that are unlabelled, they'll take a long time to bloom but I have more time than money (I hope).
I also found a lead on inexpensive daffodil bulbs and am putting a bunch of them in, underplanting with a bunch of smaller bulbs as you might expect. Basically any new bed that goes in will have bulbs in it if I can do anything about it (which means fall planted, mostly, since I am unlikely to go back and put bulbs into existing beds).
Weeds: the aspen suckers are nuts this year, which is unsurprising. They take about two years to get 8-10' tall or so and over an inch thick, so there are a couple clumps I missed last year that feel like real trees now and need different equipment to cut down. If I cut them twice a year I can use the really robust hedge shears. It's all really hard on the hands, like I lose the ability to hold cups after for awhile. I've been trying to track down proper ratcheting pruners but it seems like they're out of fashion.
The invasive thistle is everywhere. If I deep mulch yearly it's easy to pull out once a year, also hard on my hands but keeps it from going to seed. Thing is, I need to cut the aspens before I deep mulch, so there's this whole particular sequence that needs to happen and it kind of needs to happen everywhere at once? normally I do cardboard then compost then mulch, but when mom was here last spring she took out most of the gardboard and I've been using the rest to build beds, so grass has cme up to complicate the aspen/thistle removal. I'm definitely getting into a sense for what yearly maintenance will look like. The south slope bed is my oldest one, and honestly I haven't had many longlasting beds I got to handle in a non-professional capacity, so it's interesting to play around with it. The soil is improving steadily, which is good and also maybe why the weeds are so intense. If I can get 6-8" of mulch on everything and the aspen suckers cut down by mid-april I'll e in good shape.
The scentless chamomile which took over the untilled spots in the winter garden dyes fabric well and lastingly, which is nice. I'd still rather have edible chamomile, but this stuff pulls out easily in spring. I'm ok with it. Clover seems to outcompete it too.
My feral gai lan did some good seeding this year, I'm collecting a lot of the seeds and going to move them up from the winter field to the apple field. The back field is lots of clover and grass where the oaks didn't go in. The clover is self-seeding now, which is excellent, but the grass is a bit of a challenge.
I'm losing typing coordination so I'll set this asde for now. But. Good gardening year, looking forward to nxt.
Oh, two kinds of sunflowers did super well. And I need to write about herbs.
Saint Death's Daughter
Sep. 25th, 2025 08:43 amasakiyumeWhat a breathtaking book Saint Death’s Daughter is. Truly magnificent in all respects: its exciting, imaginative story, its absorbing, immersive worldbuilding, its soaring writing, and its sharp, compassionate observations about human nature. I loved it completely.
It’s been a long time since I walked into a book and lost myself so entirely in it, so much so that I wanted to bring pieces of it back with me into this world. Can we have sothaĂn meditations, please? Can we have these twelve gods? … But just certain select pieces! Because the other thing about the world of Saint Death’s Daughter is that it’s cheerfully vicious and merciless—not always and everywhere by any means—but plenty enough. Take the fact that our protagonist, Miscellaneous (Lanie) Stones, comes from a family of assassins and torturers. And there are similar people in high places throughout the story. But the folks Lanie’s drawn to are nothing like that at all. We’re more than our family history, and we can make different choices—that’s the grounding hum that vibrates through the story. Lanie sets herself to make amends for the harm her family’s done: tries, fails, and tries again, all while growing into a powerful necromancer with a deep devotion to DoĂ©denna, Saint Death.
( There's so much! This is just scratching the surface )
So those are some of my reasons for loving Saint Death’s Daughter. It’s doing so much that it’s impossible to cover it all in a review. Lanie eventually learns to speak with more than one voice at once, with a surface voice and a deeper one (kind of like throat singing, where you sing more than one note at the same time, only Lanie’s deeper voice isn’t audible in the usual way of things). The novel is like this too: it’s speaking in a surface voice and in many other voices as well. It’s broadcasting on many frequencies; you can hear many, many things.
It’s been a long time since I walked into a book and lost myself so entirely in it, so much so that I wanted to bring pieces of it back with me into this world. Can we have sothaĂn meditations, please? Can we have these twelve gods? … But just certain select pieces! Because the other thing about the world of Saint Death’s Daughter is that it’s cheerfully vicious and merciless—not always and everywhere by any means—but plenty enough. Take the fact that our protagonist, Miscellaneous (Lanie) Stones, comes from a family of assassins and torturers. And there are similar people in high places throughout the story. But the folks Lanie’s drawn to are nothing like that at all. We’re more than our family history, and we can make different choices—that’s the grounding hum that vibrates through the story. Lanie sets herself to make amends for the harm her family’s done: tries, fails, and tries again, all while growing into a powerful necromancer with a deep devotion to DoĂ©denna, Saint Death.
( There's so much! This is just scratching the surface )
So those are some of my reasons for loving Saint Death’s Daughter. It’s doing so much that it’s impossible to cover it all in a review. Lanie eventually learns to speak with more than one voice at once, with a surface voice and a deeper one (kind of like throat singing, where you sing more than one note at the same time, only Lanie’s deeper voice isn’t audible in the usual way of things). The novel is like this too: it’s speaking in a surface voice and in many other voices as well. It’s broadcasting on many frequencies; you can hear many, many things.
Investigating a forged PDF
Sep. 24th, 2025 12:24 pmmjg59I had to rent a house for a couple of months recently, which is long enough in California that it pushes you into proper tenant protection law. As landlords tend to do, they failed to return my security deposit within the 21 days required by law, having already failed to provide the required notification that I was entitled to an inspection before moving out. Cue some tedious argumentation with the letting agency, and eventually me threatening to take them to small claims court.
This post is not about that.
Now, under Californian law, the onus is on the landlord to hold and return the security deposit - the agency has no role in this. The only reason I was talking to them is that my lease didn't mention the name or address of the landlord (another legal violation, but the outcome is just that you get to serve the landlord via the agency). So it was a bit surprising when I received an email from the owner of the agency informing me that they did not hold the deposit and so were not liable - I already knew this.
The odd bit about this, though, is that they sent me another copy of the contract, asserting that it made it clear that the landlord held the deposit. I read it, and instead found a clause reading
Ok, fair enough, there's an addendum that says the landlord has it (I've removed the landlord's name, it's present in the original).
Except. I had no recollection of that addendum. I went back to the copy of the contract I had and discovered:
Huh! But obviously I could just have edited that to remove it (there's no obvious reason for me to, but whatever), and then it'd be my word against theirs. However, I'd been sent the document via RightSignature, an online document signing platform, and they'd added a certification page that looked like this:
Interestingly, the certificate page was identical in both documents, including the checksums, despite the content being different. So, how do I show which one is legitimate? You'd think given this certificate page this would be trivial, but RightSignature provides no documented mechanism whatsoever for anyone to verify any of the fields in the certificate, which is annoying but let's see what we can do anyway.
First up, let's look at the PDF metadata. pdftk has a dump_data command that dumps the metadata in the document, including the creation date and the modification date. My file had both set to identical timestamps in June, both listed in UTC, corresponding to the time I'd signed the document. The file containing the addendum? The same creation time, but a modification time of this Monday, shortly before it was sent to me. This time, the modification timestamp was in Pacific Daylight Time, the timezone currently observed in California. In addition, the data included two ID fields, ID0 and ID1. In my document both were identical, in the one with the addendum ID0 matched mine but ID1 was different.
These ID tags are intended to be some form of representation (such as a hash) of the document. ID0 is set when the document is created and should not be modified afterwards - ID1 initially identical to ID0, but changes when the document is modified. This is intended to allow tooling to identify whether two documents are modified versions of the same document. The identical ID0 indicated that the document with the addendum was originally identical to mine, and the different ID1 that it had been modified.
Well, ok, that seems like a pretty strong demonstration. I had the "I have a very particular set of skills" conversation with the agency and pointed these facts out, that they were an extremely strong indication that my copy was authentic and their one wasn't, and they responded that the document was "re-sealed" every time it was downloaded from RightSignature and that would explain the modifications. This doesn't seem plausible, but it's an argument. Let's go further.
My next move was pdfalyzer, which allows you to pull a PDF apart into its component pieces. This revealed that the documents were identical, other than page 3, the one with the addendum. This page included tags entitled "touchUp_TextEdit", evidence that the page had been modified using Acrobat. But in itself, that doesn't prove anything - obviously it had been edited at some point to insert the landlord's name, it doesn't prove whether it happened before or after the signing.
But in the process of editing, Acrobat appeared to have renamed all the font references on that page into a different format. Every other page had a consistent naming scheme for the fonts, and they matched the scheme in the page 3 I had. Again, that doesn't tell us whether the renaming happened before or after the signing. Or does it?
You see, when I completed my signing, RightSignature inserted my name into the document, and did so using a font that wasn't otherwise present in the document (Courier, in this case). That font was named identically throughout the document, except on page 3, where it was named in the same manner as every other font that Acrobat had renamed. Given the font wasn't present in the document until after I'd signed it, this is proof that the page was edited after signing.
But eh this is all very convoluted. Surely there's an easier way? Thankfully yes, although I hate it. RightSignature had sent me a link to view my signed copy of the document. When I went there it presented it to me as the original PDF with my signature overlaid on top. Hitting F12 gave me the network tab, and I could see a reference to a base.pdf. Downloading that gave me the original PDF, pre-signature. Running sha256sum on it gave me an identical hash to the "Original checksum" field. Needless to say, it did not contain the addendum.
Why do this? The only explanation I can come up with (and I am obviously guessing here, I may be incorrect!) is that International Executive Rentals realised that they'd sent me a contract which could mean that they were liable for the return of my deposit, even though they'd already given it to my landlord, and after realising this added the addendum, sent it to me, and assumed that I just wouldn't notice (or that, if I did, I wouldn't be able to prove anything). In the process they went from an extremely unlikely possibility of having civil liability for a few thousand dollars (even if they were holding the deposit it's still the landlord's legal duty to return it, as far as I can tell) to doing something that looks extremely like forgery.
There's a hilarious followup. After this happened, the agency offered to do a screenshare with me showing them logging into RightSignature and showing the signed file with the addendum, and then proceeded to do so. One minor problem - the "Send for signature" button was still there, just below a field saying "Uploaded: 09/22/25". I asked them to search for my name, and it popped up two hits - one marked draft, one marked completed. The one marked completed? Didn't contain the addendum.
This post is not about that.
Now, under Californian law, the onus is on the landlord to hold and return the security deposit - the agency has no role in this. The only reason I was talking to them is that my lease didn't mention the name or address of the landlord (another legal violation, but the outcome is just that you get to serve the landlord via the agency). So it was a bit surprising when I received an email from the owner of the agency informing me that they did not hold the deposit and so were not liable - I already knew this.
The odd bit about this, though, is that they sent me another copy of the contract, asserting that it made it clear that the landlord held the deposit. I read it, and instead found a clause reading
SECURITY: The security deposit will secure the performance of Tenant’s obligations. IER may, but will not be obligated to, apply all portions of said deposit on account of Tenant’s obligations. Any balance remaining upon termination will be returned to Tenant. Tenant will not have the right to apply the security deposit in payment of the last month’s rent. Security deposit held at IER Trust Account., where IER is International Executive Rentals, the agency in question. Why send me a contract that says you hold the money while you're telling me you don't? And then I read further down and found this:
Ok, fair enough, there's an addendum that says the landlord has it (I've removed the landlord's name, it's present in the original).
Except. I had no recollection of that addendum. I went back to the copy of the contract I had and discovered:
Huh! But obviously I could just have edited that to remove it (there's no obvious reason for me to, but whatever), and then it'd be my word against theirs. However, I'd been sent the document via RightSignature, an online document signing platform, and they'd added a certification page that looked like this:
Interestingly, the certificate page was identical in both documents, including the checksums, despite the content being different. So, how do I show which one is legitimate? You'd think given this certificate page this would be trivial, but RightSignature provides no documented mechanism whatsoever for anyone to verify any of the fields in the certificate, which is annoying but let's see what we can do anyway.
First up, let's look at the PDF metadata. pdftk has a dump_data command that dumps the metadata in the document, including the creation date and the modification date. My file had both set to identical timestamps in June, both listed in UTC, corresponding to the time I'd signed the document. The file containing the addendum? The same creation time, but a modification time of this Monday, shortly before it was sent to me. This time, the modification timestamp was in Pacific Daylight Time, the timezone currently observed in California. In addition, the data included two ID fields, ID0 and ID1. In my document both were identical, in the one with the addendum ID0 matched mine but ID1 was different.
These ID tags are intended to be some form of representation (such as a hash) of the document. ID0 is set when the document is created and should not be modified afterwards - ID1 initially identical to ID0, but changes when the document is modified. This is intended to allow tooling to identify whether two documents are modified versions of the same document. The identical ID0 indicated that the document with the addendum was originally identical to mine, and the different ID1 that it had been modified.
Well, ok, that seems like a pretty strong demonstration. I had the "I have a very particular set of skills" conversation with the agency and pointed these facts out, that they were an extremely strong indication that my copy was authentic and their one wasn't, and they responded that the document was "re-sealed" every time it was downloaded from RightSignature and that would explain the modifications. This doesn't seem plausible, but it's an argument. Let's go further.
My next move was pdfalyzer, which allows you to pull a PDF apart into its component pieces. This revealed that the documents were identical, other than page 3, the one with the addendum. This page included tags entitled "touchUp_TextEdit", evidence that the page had been modified using Acrobat. But in itself, that doesn't prove anything - obviously it had been edited at some point to insert the landlord's name, it doesn't prove whether it happened before or after the signing.
But in the process of editing, Acrobat appeared to have renamed all the font references on that page into a different format. Every other page had a consistent naming scheme for the fonts, and they matched the scheme in the page 3 I had. Again, that doesn't tell us whether the renaming happened before or after the signing. Or does it?
You see, when I completed my signing, RightSignature inserted my name into the document, and did so using a font that wasn't otherwise present in the document (Courier, in this case). That font was named identically throughout the document, except on page 3, where it was named in the same manner as every other font that Acrobat had renamed. Given the font wasn't present in the document until after I'd signed it, this is proof that the page was edited after signing.
But eh this is all very convoluted. Surely there's an easier way? Thankfully yes, although I hate it. RightSignature had sent me a link to view my signed copy of the document. When I went there it presented it to me as the original PDF with my signature overlaid on top. Hitting F12 gave me the network tab, and I could see a reference to a base.pdf. Downloading that gave me the original PDF, pre-signature. Running sha256sum on it gave me an identical hash to the "Original checksum" field. Needless to say, it did not contain the addendum.
Why do this? The only explanation I can come up with (and I am obviously guessing here, I may be incorrect!) is that International Executive Rentals realised that they'd sent me a contract which could mean that they were liable for the return of my deposit, even though they'd already given it to my landlord, and after realising this added the addendum, sent it to me, and assumed that I just wouldn't notice (or that, if I did, I wouldn't be able to prove anything). In the process they went from an extremely unlikely possibility of having civil liability for a few thousand dollars (even if they were holding the deposit it's still the landlord's legal duty to return it, as far as I can tell) to doing something that looks extremely like forgery.
There's a hilarious followup. After this happened, the agency offered to do a screenshare with me showing them logging into RightSignature and showing the signed file with the addendum, and then proceeded to do so. One minor problem - the "Send for signature" button was still there, just below a field saying "Uploaded: 09/22/25". I asked them to search for my name, and it popped up two hits - one marked draft, one marked completed. The one marked completed? Didn't contain the addendum.
Health and jobs
Sep. 21st, 2025 10:44 ammtbcMy weight remains much higher than it should be, indeed much higher than it was when I lived in Eastern Tennessee, but I am grateful that it at least seems to be remaining stable. In time, as I improve my diet and exercise, it may thus drift back downward. Also, on a health note, we just got our influenza vaccinations, paid for by the family medical coverage from my employer, Addepar. Somebody from Spire Global reached out to me to see if I'd like to work on a project there but, while I'd love to be working locally in Rust on space systems, they pay less and don't appear from the outside to be as pleasant a place to work at this time. With Addepar, at least I am getting to learn a little of complex financial instruments which is differently interesting.
My work is sometimes entertaining in further overloading the acronyms in my head. Recent examples include:
*I was born into 1970s Britain, the Troubles were in the news
†for instance, how much stock someone owns today should be what they owned yesterday plus buys less sells, we check that's so
My work is sometimes entertaining in further overloading the acronyms in my head. Recent examples include:
| acronym | what I first thought | what it meant |
|---|---|---|
| AMA | against medical advice | ask me anything |
| PTSD | post-traumatic stress disorder | position time-series data |
| UVF | Ulster Volunteer Force* | unit verification failure† |
†for instance, how much stock someone owns today should be what they owned yesterday plus buys less sells, we check that's so
The cost of family immigration to the UK
Sep. 21st, 2025 10:07 ammtbcI had mentioned our family visa fees. To give a clearer idea of how much the process costs to bring a family member to settle here in the UK, the full route from initial application to citizenship costs well over £8k in fees and well over £5k for NHS access during that period. That's per person, so tripled for R. and two kids. We get a bit of a discount because R.'s youngest is under eighteen but we're still looking on the order of £40k in total, and that's without legal fees which, if we were using a solicitor's team for the process, would probably increase it by half again. Of course, it doesn't cost the government anything like that much to process the applications, the equivalent process in the US is very much cheaper. Still, it strikes me that ability to pay the fees at all should be sufficient evidence of ability to support ourselves without resorting to public funds.
(no subject)
Sep. 20th, 2025 08:04 pmgreenstormThe last two days I rested, and spent some time gathering tomatoes from the garden before frost, to ripen indoors.
Today I visited with my high school art teacher who was driving through, and I taught pottery and more specifically handbuilding with slab templates.
Then I came home, passed out for three hours, and have now read two Li-Young Lee poems. His work keeps getting better. It isn't possible.
I was having trouble moving yesterday, just too much has happened in the last month, and to be honest today I couldn't remember where my blinkers and windshield wipers were half the time n the same truck I've been driving for years. My wrists were too weak to hold mugs easily the last two days. But I made it home. I slept in a ring of cats. And for a week I will rest, garden, and exist within the space of equinox.
Soon it may be time for another space of poetry, time to clean the chimney for winter fires, and time eventually to take up pottery at home again.
My art teacher wanted to reassure me that she thinks I've made a good life and she admires it and that I shouldn't feel bad about it. I told her that I don't think I'm supposed to like my life much -- I was supposed to be smart and do university well and high powered jobs -- but that I like myself and I like the life I've made. I told her the way she ran her class, letting me do what I wanted and being supportive, may have saved my life during that time. She showed me pictures of her 12 cats and we talked about my 5.
It's not that I don't like people. It's that I'm person-selective, like Avallu is, and didn't know it because I used to select so effortlessly.
The pottery studio was so full today, we have a new sculpture member and then there was the class (only 5 of the 6 came back, the 6th may have had some lung issues down there) and Rose dropped by some of the work she'd made at home and every surface was covered with people making such an array of objects with such a diversity of approaches that I could almost believe that humanity really is a diversity instead of an unbreachable duality, and that it was going to be ok.
( Read more... )
Today I visited with my high school art teacher who was driving through, and I taught pottery and more specifically handbuilding with slab templates.
Then I came home, passed out for three hours, and have now read two Li-Young Lee poems. His work keeps getting better. It isn't possible.
I was having trouble moving yesterday, just too much has happened in the last month, and to be honest today I couldn't remember where my blinkers and windshield wipers were half the time n the same truck I've been driving for years. My wrists were too weak to hold mugs easily the last two days. But I made it home. I slept in a ring of cats. And for a week I will rest, garden, and exist within the space of equinox.
Soon it may be time for another space of poetry, time to clean the chimney for winter fires, and time eventually to take up pottery at home again.
My art teacher wanted to reassure me that she thinks I've made a good life and she admires it and that I shouldn't feel bad about it. I told her that I don't think I'm supposed to like my life much -- I was supposed to be smart and do university well and high powered jobs -- but that I like myself and I like the life I've made. I told her the way she ran her class, letting me do what I wanted and being supportive, may have saved my life during that time. She showed me pictures of her 12 cats and we talked about my 5.
It's not that I don't like people. It's that I'm person-selective, like Avallu is, and didn't know it because I used to select so effortlessly.
The pottery studio was so full today, we have a new sculpture member and then there was the class (only 5 of the 6 came back, the 6th may have had some lung issues down there) and Rose dropped by some of the work she'd made at home and every surface was covered with people making such an array of objects with such a diversity of approaches that I could almost believe that humanity really is a diversity instead of an unbreachable duality, and that it was going to be ok.
( Read more... )