Heard. So much heard.

I read this as politically ravenous and now I'm just confused.

I forgot to fish them out when making a pureed recipe once.

It was... not good.

Although caveat, I don't use Office, I have no idea if it handles all of the little tentacles in that.

O&O ShutUp10++ (works on 11 too) did the trick for me. You've got to rerun it and check settings every time M$ pushes one of the updates that changes config, but I've turned off all their nonsense.

And Robert Holdstock's Lavondyss. The mythic dreamstate, strange-dangerous-weirdness, the raw primal poetry--Holdstock has probably been the deepest thread of influence in my own writing.

Diane Duane's So You Want to Be a Wizard (tossup whether this one, Deep Wizardry, or High Wizardry affected me more-- the first one I just loved, the second made me cry, the last one is in some part to blame for me being a programmer).

River is a little trash panda pain in my ass, and the fridge door is one of the few Kaylee hasn't figured out how to open. 😆

And what it's doing to societal consciousness of *reality*--I really have no words. When I go to search results and 90% of the images are bullshit genAI with hallucinated features, when I read crappy AI summaries with massive factual breakage--

It's somewhere beyond depressing.

What it's doing to the arts is obscene. It's hard enough for most humans to muster the incredible strength to share their art with others. Now random number generators trained on real, stolen work are flooding the zone with slop.

Subsequent developments have only entrenched my loathing. People who want us to be stupid and have no critical thinking and problem-solving skills are *loving* this idiocy.

It does not do civilization any good to help people to avoid learning, thinking, and communicating with other humans.

I have been thinking all week I should make challah. I should really make challah, but you do present the inevitable problem with fresh challah in the house.

(Alas, no actual Irish butter at present.)