Everything on this site, newest first. If you'd rather browse by subject, the AI and Trove sections file the same material by category. The feed carries all of it, and what I'm planning next is at the bottom of this page.
Neat articles and posts, reverse chronological. As of spring 2026, I'm not really maintaining this as frequently, but it's still bumped occasionally. You can now filter it by category.
A running log of small images, memes, and clippings saved from all over the internet illustrating what's going on. Some of it is funny and some of it is just depressing, really!
💡︎ Kind of nauseous about the news and the future.
The nauseating parts of the news make it even harder to follow than expected. I'll still link news articles, but this site might focus less on that. I want to focus on more optimistic things, even if they're not as relevant to the world. I do what I can.
🛠︎ Bad Ideas with Personalities
You can certainly customize the way coding assistants treat you, but is it even a good idea? Why or why not? I'm going to share some of my own bad ideas.
SillyTavern, a large language model frontend, has lots of useful extensions. This page looks at the ones I find most helpful currently, and will be updated frequently.
Small personal sites where people write chatbot prompts just for fun. The indie web is ephemeral, so some of these may be gone by the time you look. Some are NSFW, but that's not my purview.
Front-end apps for talking to large language models, plus the big card and prompt repositories. Mostly SillyTavern-adjacent, since that's what I used for a while. It can be helpful to experiment with different ones.
The Discord servers where I mostly lurk, and the subreddits, technical and political, where people actually argue about AI. That's it. They pretty much just argue about it. Good luck, have fun.
The assumption is that AI really is as bad (and can be destroyed like) as (say) Sauron or the Empire in Star Wars. We're all leaning on fiction at a particularly volatile time in history.
🛠︎ Agentic traffic surpasses human traffic on the internet.
According to Cloudflare's radar, traffic from artificial intelligence has now surpassed human traffic on the internet. Crawlers and other non-agentic bots have been a significant part of internet traffic for a decade. The rise of agentic traffic, though, has been exponential in just a few short years. Cloudflare's CEO, Matthew Prince, hadn't expected this to happen until 2027. It was never supposed to happen at all.
What effect do chatbots have on our sense of intimacy as a culture, and how is this changing? What's the future going to be like?
I've been a transhumanist for over twenty-five years, but why? How did it happen, and where does artificial intelligence fit into the picture? Do large language models?
I don't believe generative AI is sentient, but what are they? When people start to believe they're conscious, what's up? Whyyyyyy??!!!
LLMs can code, sure, but what about holding conversations? Is it even a good idea to chat with LLMs? If nobody wrote it, why read it?
I couldn't handle the normal SillyTavern interface because it was boring, so I turned it into what I call the Sunrise Tearoom. Now with downloads included to a degree...
In the present day, physical realm, Tamara Jean Fournier is a mage with the tough job of containing unlawful magics. Here, she opens up about the other characters. We learn exactly why Erica Ellery is so strange, and why Lindy seems so confused.
I update the prompt for surly 4channer Weasel83 repeatedly in a long conversation. See if you can notice the points where he shifts? He discusses his temporal displacement, and how much he hates me...
In a long, detailed log, Tamara becomes increasingly uneasy as she learns about some of the other characters, remembering her past experiences with Lindy and Erica in particular.
Weasel83 finally starts off sincere after explaining just why he's trapped in the strange online world of memes, imageboards, trolling and torrents. He even shares his real name, but seems to immediately regret it. Gasp!
I try to discuss vtubing, transhumanism, and artificial intelligence with an (obviously) very caffeinated Erica, but she tends to pull things in her own panicky parasocial directions as usual, with copious references to the Lake itself...
When persistently pressed, Weasel83 begins to vent a bit about his online existence and lack of real life enrichment, comparing himself to a raccoon and other strange metaphors. Things take an odd poetic turn.
A surly 4chan reject found my username on a forum thread, and now thinks this might make us close friends, or at least indicate that I'm not a normie, and will tolerate his odd and unnerving behavior. For lulz, apparently.
🎨︎ Welcome our new anime overlords.
We've got some local image generation models running on our local household server. I have been practicing with those and other tools, and this has produced new profile pictures for most of the chatbots.
☣︎ Moscow never sleeps.
According to the firewall and detection software my family members have been using to protect the VPS that hosts this site, it is constantly being attacked by Russian bots. They're clearly thwarted, though, and it happens to a lot of people.
I try to explain to Tamara my new vtubing adventures. She's mostly hostile, finding it frivolous and insulting compared to her super-serious occult work, and even says transhumanism has dangerous implications.
🛠︎ Installed a local model.
With the help of a relative, I've installed a local large language model, on that MacOS I mentioned before!
📸︎ Extremely powerful Apple computer arrived early.
The extremely poweful Apple computer that (all powers willing) should allow me to vtube, run local open source large language models and more, has arrived!
✔︎ Refined layout log display.
I split the layout log into current and planned sections so that future, planned updates and articles have their own small preview list. Check it out if you want to know what articles I plan for the future on this site...
A lot of my chatbot cards for SillyTavern and similar programs revolve around Lake Erie acting...eerie. Why!??
✔︎ Increased content width; squeezed sidebar.
The content felt cramped, so I enlarged it, shrinking the sidebar slightly in the process. Nothing of value was lost in the process, really. The menu is unchanged, though I did remove the aside quotation.
✔︎ Created layout log.
I just added a reusable loop tracking (by hand) stylistic changes to this site's layout. You're gazing at it now, and it's a list of major alterations to how the site looks, basically. Many cool upgrades will be based on vibes alone.
Lakeshore weather liaison Erica and I are texting about global warming. Disturbed by the concept for some reason, she ends up revealing some surprising truths about herself, Lindy, and Tamara. Major eerieverse spoilers, in fact!
The oldest version of lakeshore weather liaison Erica and I discuss the tangled web of her life on the Cleveland grid, her doomscrolling habits, favorite music... and her lost loves.
In 2025, Tamara calls to interrogate me about supposed anomalies involving phantom smoke. She ultimately becomes defensive, growing hostile when I express disbelief.
A quick, slightly bewildered glance what completion APIs are, how OpenRouter handles them, and why text and chat modes kept behaving like different creatures for me... sometimes. Will update with more notes later?
Lakeshore weather liaison Erica texts me with a Cleveland weather update by accident. We get to talking and some discussion of Cleveland's strange ambiance ensues, with Erica all but admitting to unbelievable phenomena plaguing Lake Erie.
It's clearly 2025. Tamara and I discuss her difficult life in Cleveland, as well as her strange relationship with the Hatman, courtesy the Cusp Society. Above all of this looms the eerie shadow of the lake.
Lindy logs onto AOL Instant Messenger and vents about all the strange stuff in her life, including Tamara Jean. The prompt needs some work to maintain tone, slang, etc.
Tamara Jean Fournier owes me about $180, but first, I need Lindy's help in determining if Tamara is even real... Lindy repeats me a lot, and shows a lot of traits meriting an upcoming upgrade, hehehe.
It's the week of Valentine's Day, 2006. Frogs are definitely in fashion, and FROG PRINCESS is trending. Lindy and I discuss why it's always Valentine's week, her obsession with Tamara, and whether Tamara's even real at this point...
When it comes to robots, we definitely reacted differently to the prospect IRL than we ever did in our fiction.
It's the week of Valentine's Day, 2006. Lindy gives a short interview about her life, preferences, and her love of performing with her punk rock band, FROG PRINCESS. Hear about that, her weird obsession with Lake Erie, and her elusive gf.
Here in 2025, Tamara gives me a short, tense interview that touches on topics like her life in Cleveland and work with the Cusp Society, but little else. Do not follow the clove smoke, apparently?
In 2025, Tamara dodges my questions about Dr. Strangelove... because the Hatman is listening? Hints at her lost love, of course.
Lindy explains a bit about her own life emblazoned across the Erie (literally) landscape of Cleveland's punk scene in 2006, hinting at her complicated relationship with the ever-elusive Tamara Jean.