Maybe for you, it didn’t start on Twitter. Maybe was forums or the blogosphere or Reddit. Maybe it was Facebook with terrible people from high school or TikTok with people who hate you for liking a thing, or not liking it enough. But we built the machines around our weird amygdalas and then we went inside them and now the machine is no longer confined to a stack of software + policy + vibes; we carry it in ourselves. We haunt each new place we enter. We can feel this happening in our bodies, which is why touch grass is so accidentally real.

We shape our structures and afterward our structures shape us, but the we of the first clause and the us of the second are not the same.

Welcome to Elpis, a place of articles, interesting materials and links that I hope be useful for you. This magazine is in continuous development, slowly but surely, and our main goal is to inform and educate. We'll show that there is an alternate path to development, which is not limited to endless upgrades for the sake of the process itself, or to the accumulation of resources without a set goal. After all, you can be content with little, and achieve a lot.

The Beast is an alternate reality game developed by Microsoft to promote the 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Entry points to the game embedded into the film's promotion centered on the fictional Jeanine Salla and the death of her friend Evan Chan. In 2142, Jeanine learns that Evan was murdered and her investigation uncovers a network of murders of humans and artificial intelligences. The game launched on March 8, 2001, and continued running past its initially scheduled end date on June 29, the film's release date.

Players were led through a network of websites created by Warner Bros. registered to fake names, and further clues were given in subsequent promotional materials and events for the film. The game drew a large, tight-knit player base who created online groups dedicated to the game, most prominently the Yahoo! Group Cloudmakers. The Beast was described as "unprecedented even by Hollywood standards" and is considered among the most influential early alternate reality games.

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We proposed this project in the fall of 2023 based on our shared sense that the Fediverse’s history of resilience and expansion positions it as one of our best chances to allow more people to maintain strong social connections online while escaping the behavioral manipulation, pervasive surveillance, and capricious governance that characterizes large-scale centralized social platforms.

Initial research question: “What are the most effective governance and administration models/structures in place on medium-to-large sized Fediverse servers, and what infrastructural gaps (human and digital) persist?”

Our rationale at the project’s outset: “The Fediverse’s rapid expansion brings both opportunities and multifaceted risks. Our research seeks to identify current server administrators’ most promising models for mitigating those risks and outline the biggest and most important gaps in risk mitigation, with the aim of helping the broader Fediverse level up governance quickly, safely, and collaboratively.”

Since my original report about all this came out last week, I've interviewed people involved in running the 2025 Seattle Worldcon to pull together a clearer picture of what exactly happened. Based on these interviews, it appears the use of ChatGPT was indeed limited to the vetting of panelists. However, I also learned the use of ChatGPT was not initially approved by Worldcon leadership. Instead, a lower-level Worldcon volunteer decided on their own to use the generative AI program. This was done in the belief the program could complete a time-intensive project when there were not enough volunteers to complete the job manually.

From last year's debacle

Bookshelf Town is designed to be a pleasant place to document your reads and share them with your friends. Nothing more nothing less - just a cozy spot to visit.

A fun design but maybe not if you read more than like 50 books-- the book stacks get real uneven and you have to scroll forever

When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.

Could be useful for fandom things (online conventions?)-- if someone is private and doesn't want their stuff added to, like, fanlore with their name attached to it, then this rule could be a good starting point to make people more comfortable talking in a group setting.

Re:wild Your Campus is spearheading a nationwide movement for pesticide-free, climate resilient, regenerative campus grounds. Starting with these places of living and learning, we are creating a new way of living in sync with nature.

If you’re looking for refreshing non-alcoholic drinks for your Pagan ritual or circle, these 19th century recipes might be helpful, and they’re very easy to make. Getting the quantities right can be a bit tricky, so I’d recommend experimenting before serving them to other people.

Tumblr and WordPress.com are preparing to sell user data to Midjourney and OpenAI, according to a source with internal knowledge about the deals and internal documentation referring to the deals.

UGH also bottom of the article says Reddit is also selling user data to AI companies