Franklin Veaux's Journal

A couple weeks ago, I ended up on an unexpected last-minute trip to Dublin, Ireland (my client literally emailed me on Thursday evening to say “hey, can you be at the airport on Sunday?”). On the way back from Dublin, I spent a week or so in London visiting Eunice, my lovely co-author.

Our novel London Under Veil, about a young British infosec worker in Shoreditch who ends up drawn into a secret underground war between an ancient guild of spellcasting sex workers and a society of Tory rage mages, is (rather unexpectedly) turning out to be the most popular thing we’ve written so far.

Whilst I was in London, we spent a couple of days visiting some of the important places in the novel. All of the locations in the novel except the headquarters of the Guild are real; we wanted the novel to be as grounded as we possibly could.

We had a blast touring and taking photos of the key places in London where the story unfolds.

The first key location, where May takes refuge from the people trying to kidnap her, learns that magic is real, and finds herself drawn into the Guild of the Women of Saint Thais Under Royal Charter of Her Majesty Catherine Parr, Queen Consort of England and Ireland, founded in anno Domini nostri Jesu Christi 1544, is the Lalit, a tiny luxury hotel and restaurant:

We had high tea in the dining room, the very place where May meets Serene, the leader of the Guild and a powerful spellcaster.

The table on the right hand side of the photo, on the balcony, is where May has her first introduction to Serene.

“So, okay, just so we’re clear.” May folded her arms. “You’re telling me you can cast magic spells. Something like that.”

Serene smiled benevolently. “Something like that.”

“And the people who were after me? Can they…cast magic too?”

“They can, though they use a different system. A different way of seeing the world. A different programming language, if you like.”

“And you expect me to believe this, just by a sleight of hand trick with ID badges and some tea.” Even as she said it, May thought of the metal badge, hard and smooth beneath her fingers, a visceral memory that still lingered in her fingertips.

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re crazy. I think you’re trying to manipulate me. I think you’re trying to trick me for—for—for reasons of your own. I think you’ve arranged to drag me here so you can mess with my mind. You…you put something in the tea.”

“You haven’t had any of your tea.”

“Even so, this can’t be real!”

“All of those are sane, rational, and reasonable responses,” Serene said. “Offered a choice between accepting that which is by its very nature impossible, and accepting that someone is trying to fool you, the smart money is on someone trying to fool you every time. Normally I would suggest you go home and sleep on it, get adjusted to it a little, then come back with your questions, but this situation is not normal.”

“Because people are trying to grab me.”

“Because people are trying to grab you.” Serene sipped daintily at her tea.

“You seem quite blasé about all this.”

“Would you like to finish your tea before we go?”

“I’m fine.”

“I expect you’re not, but you are doing well considering. And you have a healthy degree of suspicion that will serve you in what is to come, I think. Still, time for us to be going.”

The Lalit is gorgeous, and we ended up staying there until well into the night.

Next up, the Barbican, that sprawling marvel of Brutalist architecture. Not many people know this, but the pools in the Barbican are part of a sophisticated magical warding system.

Toward the end of the novel, the Guild seeks shelter at the Barbican:

May finally broke the silence as they neared their destination, the sprawling Brutalist retro-dystopian complex of the Barbican, with its pools and gardens giving rise to slablike concrete buildings like strange plants. “I keep thinking nothing else can surprise me, and I keep being wrong. I suppose you’re going to tell me the Guild owns a flat here?”

“Several,” Janet said.

“Of course you do. We do. Whatever.”

“Why wouldn’t we? On hindsight, perhaps we shouldn’t have abandoned it for our new headquarters. It seemed a sound decision at the time, but this is a far more defensible position, magically and practically speaking. The pools—”

“Forget I asked,” May said.

She helped Janet slide the stretcher from the back of the van. Spencer’s tail whipped back and forth, back and forth. Serene’s expression didn’t change as the wheels hit the pavement. “Where are we taking her?”

“The flat to the left,” Janet said.

May guided the stretcher through the door into a posh, beautifully-furnished flat with large windows overlooking the reflecting pool in the plaza. “Nice digs,” she said.

“It’s maintained by a small corporation owned by a holding company that’s a subsidiary of a concern operated by the Crown,” Janet said.

“Seriously? I kinda thought, with the Tories being all Them—”

“The Adversary’s takeover of the Tories is a recent development, historically speaking. Our special relationship with the Crown has endured for longer than any of us have been alive. I see no reason that won’t continue for as long as the Guild exists.” She looked down at Serene’s placid face. “Which I fear might not be much longer. We need to prepare a response.”

The Shard doesn’t occur in the story directly, but there is a version of the Shard in the weird surreal magical alternate London, and it tears a hole in the sky.

Which, honestly, it kinda looks like it’s trying to do anyway.

When her stomach quit spinning, May walked to the edge of the roof and looked around. London spread out below her…not her London, but a bizarre, fantasy London, a storybook London from one of those stories spun of equal parts wonder and dread.

The buildings sprawled in classic London chaos, dark and forbidding, an urban canyon of twisting passages, all alike. A bit south of her, along the Thames, the grand clock tower rose hundreds of metres from the Tower of Westminster, its glossy obsidian sides black and brooding, tipped by a yellow crystalline spire that blazed with incandescence. Beyond it, the Shard thrust upward from the ground, transparent as glass, its peak piercing the heavens, creating a jagged rip in the bowl of the sky through which the stars gleamed like hard pinholes in the black velvet of night. She turned her gaze across the bridge, to where the London Eye spun madly, a glowing blur of red atop a tall monolith of grey steel and white concrete. What she had taken as boats floating along the river were actually scribbles, charcoal impressions of boats hastily sketched by the hand of an impatient artist, each identical, each with a gleaming lantern in its prow. Static fuzz rippled just beneath the water, as if the river itself were a television signal badly degraded.

The story’s climactic showdown takes place in the Guildhall, which is a stronghold of magic if ever there was one. The door they enter through is on the right, behind the group of people standing there.

“Ah. Right. Just so I’m clear, it’s us, the people in this room right now, breaking into the Guildhall, which is also not coincidentally the stronghold of a fantastically powerful band of, and I say this with some reservation, evil spellcasting wizards, without any idea what we’re walking into.”

“That’s about the long and short of it, yeah,” Claire said.

“I might feel better if I knew exactly how you plan to keep the Adversary’s prying eyes off us.”

“No way,” Claire said. “That’s a terrible idea, from an opsec perspective. Compartmentalization of information. If you’re caught, you can’t compromise the rest of us.”

“You don’t know, do you?”

“There is a certain…improvisational element to the plan, I will grant.” She turned to Zoe. “All-Girl Nude Beach 2014?”

“Got it in my pocket,” Zoe said.

“I’m sorry, what?” Lillian said.

Zoe pulled a small thumb drive from her pocket and handed it to Lillian. The thing, badly scuffed and scratched, had a strip of masking tape stuck to it with “All-Girl Nude Beach 2014” scribbled on it in felt-tip pen. “I don’t get it,” Lillian said.

“Loaded with all the best malware money can buy,” Zoe said. “When it falls out of my pocket in front of some mark, I guarantee he’ll race to his office just as fast as he can to plug it into his computer.”

“And then?”

Claire grinned. “And then we root his system. Hasn’t failed yet.”

We also spent quite a lot of time at the British Library, in the member’s room since Eunice is a member (because of course she is).

Some libraries have rare books rooms. The British Library has four immense walls of rare books, visible through the charming round porthole by these cozy chairs.

I have a number of...um, fairly ambitious projects I’m working on right now that I’ve hit roadblocks on. Since the Internet is a marvel of modern technological accomplishment that allows instantaneous access to not only the entirety of human knowledge but also domain experts in every conceivable field of human endeavor, I’m throwing out a request for ideas and suggestions here.

Project 1: The Alien Pod

I have, through a strange set of circumstances, come into possession of an old “bod pod,” a medical scanner designed, I’m told, to measure BMI. It doesn’t work—it’s just the pod without the computer software and such to drive it—and my goal is to turn it into a gigantic alien egg, like the kind in the Alien movies, but large enough to hold a person.

So the plan is to cover this thing with silicone, to make it look like one of the eggs from the Alien movie (which were basically garbage bags and chicken wire covered with silicone). The effect I’m looking for is something like this:

My thought is to cover the pod with silicone (probably condensation-cure rather than the medical-grade platinum-cure silicone I ise for sex toys, whcih is more than $200 a gallon).

Why silicone and not paper-mâché? The pod weighs more than 400 pounds, so it’s very difficult to transport, and the egg needs to be strong enough to survive handling and moving in a truck. My goal is to use it for a photo shoot, with a model halfway out of it, being dragged back in by tentacles.

The problem is that silicone won't stick to the surface, like, at all. Not even a little bit.

The pod is a stainless steel shell overlaid with fiberglass and with some sort of textured polymer layer on top. Up close it looks like this:

My first thought is to epoxy a whole bunch of short pins to the pod, to give the silicone something to grip. Many years ago, I remember seeing a product that would be perfect for this: small steel pins, about a centimeter or less long, with a ball on one end and a flat base on the other, kind of like so:

They're quite small, and a whole bunch of them sticking out of the pod like spines on a porcupine would give the silicone something to hang on to mechanically. Trouble is, I don’t know what they’re called or what they’re used for (I vaguely recall that they’re used in aviation, maybe?), so I don't know how to search for them.

Alternately, any small, cheap, epoxy-able pin or whatever I can glue to the pod might work. I’m also open to other suggestions. Keep in mind it has to stand up to rough handling—this bloody thing is almost unimaginably heavy and hard to maneuver!

Project 2: Machining Molds

I’ve started making alien xenomorph hiphugger strapons and alien xenomorph facehugger gags for sale.

Right now, I’m 3D printing the molds, a 6-part mold for the hiphugger and a 7-part (yes, seriously) mold for the facehugger.

I’d hoped to get maybe ten castings from each mold. In fact, I’m getting 2-3 before the mold is ruined and I have to print a new one. The facehugger mold takes two weeks(!) to print on my 3D printer. Obviously this isn't sustainable.

I’ve been planning for a while to move to machined wood or aluminum molds, and I have a 4-axis desktop CNC machine:

I’ve been teaching myself CNC milling, but the learning curve is a cliff; I’m getting reasonably good at 2D and 2.5D machining, but man, the molds are complex.

Here’s a 3D model of one part of the hiphugger mold. This is what I’m looking to machine, either in aluminum or even in wood:

As you can see, it’s a complex shape with aggressive undercuts.

I have not been able to make a CNC program to carve this. (One person online looked at this mold and was like “um, yeah, you’ll need four years of trade school plus at least four years of apprenticeship to even think about machining something like that.”)

So, hey, I have the machine but not the skill, why not hire someone to design the CNC program, right? I’ve talked to a few folks online who are like “yeah, pay me and I’ll do the program for you,” then when they see that part they’re like “oh hell no. Hell. No.”

If anyone reading this knows a skilled CNC machinist who can create a program to mill this part, and parts like it, on my machine (a Makera Carvera with a 4th-axis module), send them my way! This is a paying gig.

In the meantime, I’m also exploring ways to treat the 3D printed molds with resin or epoxy or something to make them more durable. Right now I’m only making one facehugger and one hiphugger per month, and even at that slow rate of production, the process I’m using is unsustainable. 

So yeah. I have an eclectic set of friends out there with some highly unusual skills, so I’m hoping that some of you might have insights or ideas to offer.

A few months back, Elon Musk, the right-wing owner of Twitter and Grok, his pet Generative AI project, posted something I wrote on his Twitter feed, with the caption "This is the quality of humor we want from Grok."

He even had it pinned to his profile for a short while.

I wrote this over on Quora in March of 2024. On the one hand, it’s interesting to know that Elon Musk reads my stuff. On the other, do you notice anything funny about the screenshot of his Tweet?

Yup, no credit.

The Tweet went viral, and has since been posted all over Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, and TikTok...all without attribution.

Right now, as I write this, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has a market cap of $157,000,000,000, making it more valuable than companies like AT&T, Lowe’s, and Siemens.

It is not a profitable company; in fact, it’s burning cash at a prodigious rate. Unlike other companies, though, which burned cash early on to achieve economies of scale, OpenAI’s costs scale directly with size, which is not at all normal for tech companies. At its current rate of growth, in four years its datacenters will consume more electricity than some entire nations.

But I’m not here to talk about whether AI is the next Apple or the next Pets dot com. Instead, let’s talk about what generative AI is, and how it represents the greatest wealth transfer of the last fifty years.

AI is not intelligent. Generative AI does not know anything. Many people imagine that it’s a huge database of all the world’s facts, and when you ask ChatGPT something, it looks up the answer in that immense library of knowledge.

No.

Generative AI is actually more like an immense, staggeringly complex autocomplete. It ingests trillions of words, and it learns “when you see these words, the most likely next words are those words.” It doesn’t understand anything; in a very real sense, it doesn’t even “understand” what words are.

As the people over at MarkTechPost discovered, many LLM models struggle to answer basic arithmetic questions.

AIs make shit up. They have no knowledge and understand nothing; when presented with text input, they produce text output that follows the basic pattern of the input plus all the text they’ve seen before. That’s it. They will cheerfully produce output that looks plausible but is absolutely wrong—and the more sophisticated they are, the more likely they are to produce incorrect output. 

If you want to understand Generative AI, you must, you absolutely must understand that it is not programmed with knowledge or facts. It takes in staggering quantities of text from all over and then it “learns” that these words are correlated with those words, so when it sees these words, it should spit out something that looks like those words.

It doesn’t produce information, it produces information-shaped spaces.

To produce those information-shaped spaces, it must be trained on absolutely staggering quantities of words. Hundreds of billions at least; trillions, preferably. This is another absolutely key thing to understand: the software itself is simple and pretty much valueless. Only the training gives it value. You can download the software for free.

So where does this training data come from?

You guessed it: the Internet.

OpenAI and the other AI companies sucked in trillions of words from hundreds of millions of sites. If you’ve ever posted anything on the Internet—an Amazon review, a blog, a Reddit post, anything—what you wrote was used to train AI.

AI companies are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. All that worth, every single penny of it, comes from unpaid work by people who provided content to the AI companies without their knowledge or consent and without compensation.

This is probably the single largest wealth transfer in modern history, and it went up, not down.

There are a few dirty secrets lurking within the data centers of AI companies. One is the staggering energy requirements. Training ChatGPT 4 required 7.2 gigawatt-hours of electricity, which is about the same amount that 6,307,200 homes use in an entire year. (I laugh at conservatives who whine “eLeCtRiC cArS aRe TeRrIbLe WhErE wIlL aLl ThE eLeCtRiCiTy CoMe FrOm” while fellating Elon Musk over how awesome AI is. Training ChatGPT 4 required enough power to charge a Tesla 144,000 times. Each single ChatGPT query consumes a measurable amount of power—about 2.9 watt-hours of electricity.

Image: Jason Mavrommatis

All the large LLMs were trained on copyrighted data, in violation of copyright. Every now and then they spit out recognizable chunks of the copyrighted data they were trained on; pieces of New York Times articles, Web essays, Reddit posts. OpenAI has, last time I checked, something like 47 major and hundreds of smaller copyright lawsuits pending against it, all of which it is fighting. (It might be more by now; there are so many it’s hard to keep up.)

That, I think, is the defining computer science ethical problem of our time: To what extent is it okay to build value and make money from other people’s work without their knowledge or consent?

Elon Musk recognizes the value in what I write. He recognizes that it has both artistic and financial value. He posts my content as an aspirational goal. He doesn’t credit me, even as he praises my work.

That’s a problem.

Those who create things of value are rarely recognized for the value they create, if the things they create can’t immediately be liquidated for cash. That’s not new. What’s new is the scale to which other people’s creativity is commoditized and turned into wealth by those who had nothing whatsoever to do with the work, and are merely profiting from the labor of others without consent.

OpenAI says it would be “impossible” to train their models without using other people’s copyrighted work for free. 

“Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression – including blogposts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents – it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials. [...]

Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today’s citizens.”

It also claims their use of other people’s work is “fair use,” even while they admit that chatbots sometimes spit out verbatim chunks of recognizable work.  This is a highly dubious claim—while fair use doesn’t have a precise legal definition (the doctrine of fair use exists as an affirmative defense in court to charges of copyright infringement), one of the key components of fair use has always been commercialization of other people’s work...and with a market cap of $157,000,000,000, it’s pretty tough to argue that OpenAI is not commercializing other people’s work. It charges $20/month for full access to ChatGPT.

So at the end of the day, what we have is this: a company founded by people who are neither writers nor artists, producing hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth from the uncompensated, copyrighted work of writers and artists whilst cheerfully admitting that could not produce any value if they had to pay for their training data.

And it’s not just copyrighted data.

OpenAI Dall-e cheerfully spit this image out when I typed “Scrooge McDuck stealing money from starving artist.”

Here’s the thing:

Scrooge McDuck is trademarked. Trademark law is not the same as copyright law. Trademarks are more like patents than copyrights; in the US, trademarks are administered by the Patent and Trademark Office, not the copyright office.

In no way, shape, or form is this “fair use.”

Generative AI recognizes trademarked characters. You can ask it for renderings of Godzilla or Mickey Mouse or Spider-Man or Scrooge McDuck and it’ll cheerfully spit them out. The fact that Dall-e recognizes Scrooge and Spider-man and Godzilla demonstrates without a shadow of a doubt it was trained on trademarked properties.

So far, all the lawsuits aimed at AI infringement have been directed at the companies making AI models, but there’s no reason it has to be that way. You “write” a book with AI or you create a cover for your self-published work with AI and it turns out there’s a trademark or copyright violation in it? You can be sued. That hasn’t happened yet, but it will.

(Side note: The books I publish use covers commissioned from actual artists. Morally, ethically, and legally, this is the right thing to do.)

Why do I call OpenAI and its kin a socialist wealth transfer? Because they treat products of value as a community property. Karl Marx argued that socialism is the transition between capitalism and communism, a system where nothing is privately owned and everything belongs to the public, and that’s exactly how OpenAI and its kin see creative works: owned by nobody, belonging to the public, free to use. It’s just that “free to use” means “a vehicle for concentrating wealth.”

From creators according to their ability, to OpenAI according to its greed.

It seems to me that what we need as a society is a long, serious conversation about what it means to create value, and who should share in that value. It also seems to me this is exactly the conversation the United States is fundamentally incapable of having.

Given the turmoil and bonkers insanity over at Twitter¹ these days, I’ve created Yet Another Social Media Profile, this one over at Bluesky.

If you’re on the Blue Butterfly Site, you can find me here.

I also have a Linktree! Here’s the QR code:

[1] If he can deadname his daughter, I can deadname his social media hatesite.

Somehow, between a lot of other projects we’re working on and this last-minute trip to Europe, the fact that Eunice and I have released another book sort of fell through the cracks.

So hey, we released another book!

Presenting, the fourth novel in the Passionate Pantheon series, Unyielding Devotion. Sexy far-future post-scarcity science fiction theocratic body horror philosophical erotica, for your reading pleasure!

I’m particularly proud of this book. It’s probably the most philosophical of the Passionate Pantheon novels, but still has a ton of sex so kinky the kinks don’t even have names.

It follows a group of people who meet at a party hosted by Jakalva, a power broker in the City who worships none of the AI gods but nevertheless is still one of the City’s most influential citizens, and explores how their experiences at the party change the course of their lives.

You can read it as really really kinky porn, and it works, but it’s also sort of a sustained meditation on unconventional choices, growth, and relationships.

Sex! Zero-gravity gladiator matches! Skydiving from the tops of buildings! More sex!

Here’s an excerpt:

Jakalva leaned back. “My, my. A person comes to our City seeking to atone for her wrongdoing, and instead is selected to punish others for theirs. You have an interesting story indeed.”

Kaytin looked down. “I don’t feel interesting.”

The music stopped. A melodic chime filled the air. Jakalva touched Kaytin’s arm. “A moment, please.” She rose. “Friends, the entertainment is about to start. I invite those of you who wish to watch to be seated.” With the music gone, the drone above Kaytin flitted away.

Two doors in the far wall slid open to admit a tall, muscular man and an equally tall, strong-looking woman. He had bronze skin and brown hair that fell around his shoulders, and looked out at the world through piercing aquamarine eyes with cross-shaped pupils. She had shoulder-length hair of brilliant purple that matched her purple eyes, pale skin, and a warm face that smiled easily. They met in front of the cage. She offered her hand. “Hi! I’m Lanissae. I don’t think we’ve met.”

“Royat.” He shook her hand. “This is only my second party. I came here for the first time last month. I agreed to serve as entertainment at this party, so here I am.”

“Royat.” She inclined her head. “It’s lovely to meet you! This is my fifth time as a cage entertainer. Do you know what to do?”

“I think so. Jakalva explained it to me.”

“Good.” A door in the round cage folded upward. Lanissae stripped, then stepped nude into the cage. Royat undressed somewhat more awkwardly and followed her. A drone flitted down to whisk away their clothes. The cage door folded back down. The woman who had given Jakalva and Kaytin their vials approached the cage, moaning with each step. Her tray now held only four vials, two bright red and two deep turquoise.

“What’s happening?” Kaytin asked Chasoi, who stared at Lanissae and Royat with bright, hungry eyes.

“They’ll each take two Blessings,” Chasoi said. “The first one ensures their bodies will remain physically aroused no matter what happens to them. And the second, well, that’s the magic.”

“The magic? What does that mean?”

“One of them,” Jakalva said, “will become desperately horny beyond all reason. Are you familiar with the Blessing of Fire?”

“Yes,” Kaytin said.

“It’s like that, but more violent. It removes inhibition and obliterates self-control. The other does just the opposite, causing intense aversion, repulsion even, to the idea of sex. The cage makes sure neither of them can escape.”

“Oh.” Kaytin blinked. “So whoever gets the first vial will…”

“Yes. But that’s only half of it.”

“Half of it how?”

“That’s the beauty,” Chasoi breathed. “The moment either of them has an orgasm, they switch. Whoever was needy becomes averse. Whoever was averse becomes wild beyond control. They stay in the cage until they collapse from exhaustion.” Her eyes glittered.

This is not a novel for the faint of heart. You’ll find some pretty radical kinks between its covers.

Check it out! It’s available on Amazon US, UK, and Canada.

Image: prill

I am in London as I write this, sitting in a lover’s flat overlooking the London city skyline. I was here when I learned the news of the 2024 Presidential election—that hate won over love, bigotry over compassion, spite over benevolence.

I understand the sick despair many of us feel in the pit of our stomach right now. Dark times hover on the horizon. I don't believe the people who voted so resoundingly against the better angels of our nature realize yet what they’ve done. Some of them likely never will, and for those who do, it will be too late.

I’m not here to analyze what happened, or rail against the stubborn streak of vicious, ugly racist misogyny that has long been part of the American spirit. Others are already doing that, some of them quite eloquently, and I do believe there's value in understanding what happened, but that is not the most important thing right now.

It’s vital to understand going forward, though I think the answer is grubber, more sordid, and more banal than we might otherwise hope: there has always been this vicious streak of mean-spirited, ugly anti-intellectualism embedded deep in the American national character, that has been with us from the start. It has never changed, and it likely never will in our lifetimes. We are simultaneously the land of can-do optimism and sleazy, seedy execration. These are the two faces of the American civic character, and this week, the ignorance won.

But I want to remind everyone reading this that there is hope. Like the dawning of the sun after a night of terror, this too shall pass.

Image: Jessica Ruscello and mixformdesign

I do not wish to trivialize what is to come. Many people will suffer. My trans and nonbinary friends are terrified right now. Two nights ago, a great many decent Americans discovered just how badly their country hates them, just how deep the ugly river of xenophobia flows through the American psyche.

There will be suffering. There will be blood. There will be ugliness, and violence, and hopelessness, and despair. I do not want to minimize any of the grotesqueries we all see on the horizon.

I will, instead, invite us all to take a deep breath, and remember that the course of history is neither straight nor smooth, but it does tend, in the long term, toward peace and justice.

We have been here before. We have, as a nation, been worse before. We were built on the foundation of slavery and we have never truly stepped away from it. Yet we have made progress, and we will again. It might not seem like it now, but this is a setback, not the end of all things.

I would especially like to remind those of us who feel most betrayed by our fellow citizens, those who voted against their own interests purely out of spite and desire to hurt, not to do the oppressor’s work for him.

I still remember the first time this country elevated this vicious, narcissistic, racist, sexist, conman, this tumor on the American psyche, to the highest office the first time. I remember how the shockwaves echoed through my own personal life, how a person I once loved became a bitter, angry, sullen echo of herself, how she told me directly that she was abrasive and prickly to me simply because, in her words, she felt overwhelmed with hopelessness and despair, and I was the only safe place for her to dump that poisonous emotional sewage.

Image: grandfailure

I learned only a few days ago from a person in my life I love dearly that there’s a name for this. It’s called “lateral violence.” Those who feel oppressed, who feel ground down by an enemy far too dangerous and powerful to fight, release their anger and fear and frustration on one another, tearing into each other with a viciousness that it is not safe to direct outward.

Many of us will do that over the coming year. I would like to invite us all not to do the oppressors’ work for them, not to become a participant in our own subjugation.

This has always been a peculiar and pernicious weakness of those of us on the progressive side, this tendency to turn on our own. Tim Minchin expressed this beautifully:

It cannot, it cannot be okay if the intention of progressives—which I assume it is—is progress forward into a future of more empathy and understanding for more people, it cannot be that the primary mechanism by which we’re going to make that progress is the suppression of empathy and understanding for anyone who doesn’t align with our beliefs. It cannot be that unmitigated expression of furious outrage will somehow alchemize into a future of peace and love.

I understand the impulse toward despair and the anger that it brings. I understand that anger, lacking a safe outlet, is all too easily directed at those around us who are like us, those we think have failed the cause, have not done enough to fight oppression (or perhaps have not fought it in the “right” way).

I understand, too, where this leads.

We cannot do this. We must not do this. The story is not over. The storm will end. We must not, in our rage and hopelessness, turn on one another.

Now, more than ever, if we are to survive what is to come, we must, we absolutely must, support each other. That is the way we get through this. Not by adopting the tools and mindset of our enemy, not by doing our enemy’s work for him, not by tearing each other down because we don’t know where else to direct our feelings, but by holding each other, supporting each other, loving each other. Love does not triumph over hate by becoming hate.

The the arc of the moral universe is long, as MLK Jr said, but it bends toward justice.. This path is never as straight nor as swift as we would like, and sometimes for every three steps forward there is one backward.

It’s okay to feel rage, despair, all those other things. I feel them too. We have a choice: we can use them to lift each other up or tear each other down.

I don’t believe in New Years resolutions. But I have, today, this moment, made a resolution for the next four years.

My resolution is that I will do everything in my power to act with greater kindness, greater compassion, greater benevolence and empathy and grace. I will not allow those who despise these things to destroy them in me. I will not do the oppressor’s work for him. I will not be complicit in my own eradication.

JRR Tolkien believed—indeed, this is one of the central moral lessons of his works—that good triumphs over evil not because good is stronger than evil, but because good works with itself while evil works against itself. We do not defeat bullies by becoming bullies ourselves. That, I think, is our blueprint forward.

I’ve posted this image on my blog before. It is vital to remember it now.

If you own a website that uses stock images or even images you’ve taken yourself, beware a scam floating around that tries to trick you into putting links to another site on your pages.

I recently received a phony “DMCA Copyright Infringement Notice” run by a scammer attempting to get backlinks to a site called KnowYourSins, a sex site run by two people named Samuel Davis (@Samueld_KYS on Twitter) and Olivia Moore (@Olivia_kys on Twitter).

The letter claims to come from a law firm called “Commonwealth Legal Services” in Phoenix, Arizona. Here’s a screenshot:

So, the first thing to know about this email is it’s very unusual for a DMCA complaint, which is almost always a takedown request, not a request for a backlink. 

The second thing to notice is there’s a standard format for DMCA takedowns, and they must, by law, include:

• Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and e-mail address.
• A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized.
• A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder.

The image itself comes from Unsplash, specifically this one, and it was taken by Eric Lucatero, who has no connection with KnowYourSins dot com.

Huh.

Commonwealth Legal Services

I looked at the website of the supposed “law firm” that sent it, justicesolutionshub.info. Now, the fact that it uses a .info top-level domain immediately set off warning bells in my head as well.

“Zoe Baker” signs this email “Trademark Attorney,” yet the page on justicesolutionshub.info lists “her” as a “business legal consultant.”

Huh.

On top of that, notice anything funny about all these headshots? Look closely.

Yup, they're all generated by AI—specifically, they all come from This Person Does Not Exist.

How can you tell?

AI deepfake faces generated by This Person Does Not Exist always have eyes in exactly the same place exactly the same size and exactly the same distance apart. It’s a limitation of the adversarial GAN software that creates the fake faces.

You can see it if you stack the faces on top of each other and make them translucent in Photoshop.

I looked up “Commonwealth Legal Services” on Google. It turns out there are a bunch of different websites at different URLs all using the same exact web design with the same copy and the same pictures: justicesolutionshub.info, cwsolutions.biz, elitejusticeadvisors.biz (currently offline), and more.

The front page of justicesolutionshub.info shows a photo of a building. The office building is a stock photo rendering that you can put any logo in front of.

This is an Adobe Photos stock photo rendering created by digital artist “Esin.” A surprising number of phony fly-by-night bogus “companies” use this stock image as their corporate headquarters on their About or Contact pages.

Things really take a turn for the surreal if you put the address of “Commonwealth Legal Services,” 3909 N. 16th Street, Fourth Floor, Phoenix, AZ 85016 into Google Street View. This one weird trick produced results you aren’t going to believe:

Note the conspicuous absence of a fourth floor. As of the time of writing this, the building is currently listed for sale.

Okay, so we have a fake DMCA takedown request from a phony law office attempting to blackmail me into putting a backlink to Know Your Sins from my site.

Know Your Sins

So, what is Know Your Sins?

It's a more or less generic BDSM information site with precious little in the way of in-depth information, using largely AI-generated content and stock photos.

I can see a couple of possibilities:

1. Know Your Sins is scamming in a desperate bid to attract backlinks and improve their search engine ranking.
2. Know Your Sins is a victim; they hired a dodgy “we can boost your search engine ranking” scammer, not knowing that he was engaging in fraud.

I emailed the contact address at Know Your Sins, hello (at) knowyoursins (dot) com, to try to get some insight. So far, as of the time of writing this, I have not received a reply. I will update this blog post if they get back in touch with me.

I’ve also been in touch with several webmasters who have received identical DMCA complaints, at least one of whom was accused of pirating a photo he took, all with demands to link back to Know Your Sins.

The Know Your Sins domain registration is hidden by Privacy protect. I’ve filed a formal complaint with them, since they claim they’ll rescind the privacy protection on sites that engage in spamming or fraud. (I urge anyone who’s received one of these scam emails to do the same using the “report abuse” form here.) If they reply, I’ll post the results.

Isn’t there a penalty for false DMCA takedown requests?

No. Perhaps surprisingly, there isn’t.

There are penalties for impersonating a lawyer, and for fraud. The emails are definitely fraud, and I do not for even half a second believe the person sending them is a lawyer, so there may be avenues of legal action there. I suspect, given that others are reporting these emails but they don’t always demand a link to Know Your Sins (some of them demand links to other sites), that what’s most likely happening is a scammer is selling his services to desperate website owners who want more Google linkbacks but don’t care too much if they’re totally on the up and up.

The lesson here

Genuine DMCA takedown requests must follow a certain specific legal format (including a statement that under penalty of perjury, the person sending the request has a good-faith belief that the claimed infringement is genuine), and don’t ask for linkbacks.

If you get a “DMCA warning” or “DMCA takedown” that asks you to link to another site, you’re being scammed.

If you’ve received one of these fake takedown requests, I’d love to hear from you! I’m in the process of trying to strip the Privacy Protection from the knowyoursins domain registration, and the more examples I have, the better. Please feel free to email me at franklin (at) franklinveaux (dot) com.

It all started when I accidentally clicked on Facebook Marketplace.

I was trying to click on my notifications. On the iOS app, the Marketplace button is next to the Notifications button, and, well...

As God is my witness, I do not know why Facebook Marketplace thought I would be interested in a gigantic human-sized pod. I mean, it was absolutely 100% right, but how did it know?

And so it came to pass that I, after much back and forth with the seller (who owns a clinic that was moving, and didn't have space for it any more) and some absolutely heroic efforts from my friend Stan to move the damn thing, came into possession of a Bod Pod, a medical scanner originally, I gather, designed to calculate body mass.

Of course, when I saw that listing on Facebook on that fateful day, my mind immediately, as it is wont to do, went to images of the alien eggs from the Alien movies.

What if, thought I, I could cover this Bod Pod in silicone, making an alien egg large enough for a person? And what if, I continued as my brain inevitably rode this train to the last station, I could make a whole bunch of gigantic silicone tentacles—say, just for the sake of argument, nine and a hald feet long or so—that might explode from the pod, dripping with slime, trying to drag a Helpless Victim™ into the egg-thing? And what if, I continued on, having at this point reached the last station, crashed through the wall, and sailed on into the Beyond Space where anything is possible, I did a photo shoot, in which this poor Helpless Victim™ was molested by tentacles from this giant alien pod?

Now, of course, getting from pod to giant alien egg with tentacles is a Project, one I have only just barely embarked upon.

The first step to a pod with tentacles is, of course, the pod. The second step is the tentacles, and so it was, Gentle Reader, that I set about designing a Giant Tentacle in a 3D modeling program.

From this Giant Tentacle, I created a mold that could be printed in 15-inch segments, which is the maximum print size on my 3D printer, with an overall length of over 9 feet.

Of course, I didn't really quite imagine how long a 9-foot mold is, so it turned out that once the mold was complete—something that took days of printing—I didn’t have enough space for it without rearranging furniture.

Seriously, nine-feet-plus of mold is more mold than you think it is.

It's also a lot harder to cast silicone in an open-face mold this size than I expected it to be. Like, a lot harder. In this much space, silicone doesn’t behave the way you’d expect it to. It’s kind of like lava—it doesn’t flow to fill the entire mold. (It doesn’t help that my vacuum chamber also isn’t big enough to degas this much silicone all at once, either.)

So I had to make the pour in a bunch of steps, which created all sorts of weird problems. I’d planned to have the suckers lighter than the rest, with bands of color through the tentacles. That...didn’t work. The coloring pigment actually migrated up through the silicone, something it doesn’t do in a smaller mold.

The mold is just a liiiiitle teensy bit more than half the diameter of the tentacle, so it just barely starts to pinch inward at the top. This is so that I could cast half the tentacle, remove it from the mold, fill it with silicone again, then put the half I’d already cast on top, and that slight bit of pinch would grab the bit I’d already cast.

The result worked out pretty well, though it uses a lot of silicone—I made two tentacles, and together they’re about $100 worth of body-safe platinum-cure silicone alone, not including the cost of printing the mold.

When I flew to Springfield to see my Talespinner, I brought the tentacles (of course), which caused some degree of consternation at TSA (of course). We trialled the tentacles as a means of violation of Helpless Victims™, at which they excelled, but we (by which I mean she and her other lover, as I looked on) also gave them a try as an impact toy, at which they also excelled.

In fact, this may be the thuddiest impact toy ever conceived by man, more thuddy even than the Dread Koosh Flogger, a flogger made (as the name suggests) from Koosh balls.

I'm considering making an impact tentacle toy that’s basically a short length of this tentacle with a handle on the end.

When I returned from Springfield, armed with more information to allow the Great Tentacle Pod Project to move forward, I unpacked my suitcase and tossed the tentacles over the pod, lacking a better place to put them (and nine-foot tentacles are both heavier and take up more storage space than you may realize).

It struck me yesterday that visitors to my home, upon walking into my living room and seeing this, might be subject to some discomfiture.

Imagine the scene: It's late at night. A Beautiful Young Woman has just had a fight with her Wretched Boyfriend at a nightclub, and is walking home through the bad part of town, an industrial park fallen on hard times, now the home of shuttered businesses and derelict warehouses.

A meteor streaks across the sky, growing larger and larger, until it crashes through the roof of an abandoned warehouse, now crumbling into ruin. Curious, the Beautiful Young Woman investigates, but soon finds herself in trouble when the alien drones spring from the dark recesses of the abandoned warehouse and drag her before the Alien Queen, which has hauled itself from the still-smoking spacecraft. The Alien Queen sprouts a mass of wet, slimy tentacles that violate the helpless Beautiful Young Woman in ways far too shocking to describe in this blog entry, lest you, Gentle Reader, pass out from the vapors, giving her ecstasy beyond anything she has ever known before until at last, delirious, she is overcome and loses her senses.

She wakes some time later, driven by a gnawing hunger more powerful than anything she's ever known before, an insatiable sexual need that drives her from the warehouse in search of prey. For you see, she is now host to an Alien Parasite, a creature that fills her with need, driving her to mate with all who cross her path, spreading the alien seed as she does. The parasite lives deep within her ladybits, granting unspeakable ecstasy to all with whom she copulates but denying her pleasure herself, as she roves the town in a frenzy of frantic, unnatural lust.

From this fantasy, spun by my Talespinner and me in a late-night sexting session, came our newest foray into weird sex toys from a realm beyond imagination: Project Ladybug.

“What if,” thought I, “I could actually make an alien that lived within her ladybits?” Picture something like a soft silicone fleshlight masturbator, designed to be worn vaginally, with a sinister alien opening and tentacles that wrap around her legs, holding it in place. It would grant great pleasure to those who have sex with the Beautiful Young Woman™ so afflicted, whilst denying her of any pleasure herself, so as to keep the fires of her lust unslaked.

This is Project Ladybug, and it comes after the first successful test of the nine-foot tentacle project.

So it was that when I was in Springfield two weeks ago visiting my Talespinner that we set about turning Project Ladybug into reality.

The idea was a sex toy exactly custom-fit to her internal anatomy, that would keep her nicely filled when the Alien Parasite was within her, so the first step was making a cast of her inside bits.

I thought this would be fairly easy. Slip in a female condom, fill her with dental alginate to the point she was properly full, wait for it to set, then remove it, make a 3D scan of it, and use that as the basis for the stroker. 3D print a model of the stroker, cast it in super-soft silicone...what could be simpler, right?

Ah, if only.

I ordered some alginate and, because alginate soon crumbles and is not very durable, some casting material to make a mold of the alginate, so that if it didn't survive the trip home, I could cast her internal bits in silicone and 3D scan that.

Armed with casting materials and a female condom, we set about the first bit, which quickly proved more difficult than we anticipated.

You'd think it would be easy. Lie your model on her back, slip in the female condom, fill with alginate, wait a couple minutes, and Bob's your uncle.

In practice, the first two efforts met with failure, because the alginate (a) sets way too fast (even if you get medium-set material) and (b) comes gushing back out, and (c) the entrance to the typical hoo-ha is soft and pliable enough that the casting won't stay centered.

However, my Talespinner came up with the idea of using a canning funnel to...um, provide structural stability at the vaginal entrance, and I used cold water to mix the third batch of alginate to slow setting...

...which meant she had time to play on her phone whilst it set...

...et voilà!

At this point, we had a (quite fragile) alginate representation of her internal anatomy. It was difficult and expensive enough to make, and the flight home fraught enough (I’d broken my suitcase on a previous trip to a convention, and so had flown out to see her with only a duffel bag), that I was paranoid, so I used a 3D scan program on my phone to make a quick, dirty 3D scan of the cast in case it was damaged on the trip home.

I shan’t bore you with the details of exactly what a PITA that turned out to be, except to say that it needed a place with (a) bright light that (b) I could move around in three dimensions (c) with a background that wouldn’t confuse the phone, so I ended up hanging her ladycast by a string from the ceiling fan in the middle of the living room with a sheet wrapped around, which is just as ridiculous and surreal as it sounds.

Anyway, emergency backup 3D scan made, it was time to make a cast, in the event the alginate didn’t survive the trip home.

I cast it right up to the midline, let the material set, sprayed it with mold release agent, then did a second pour to cast it full.

That created an entirely new problem.

Enter the TSA

I flew back to Portland with the cast, and a nine-foot-long silicone tentacle, and a four-foot-long silicone tentacle, in my carry-on luggage.

These things created no small measure of consternation at security.

The finished cast looked like this:

The X-ray looked...bizarre. (I really, really wish TSA would let me take pictures of the X-ray screens when I travel, I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.)

They pulled my bag, as you would expect. They asked me many questions about the solid lump of heavy cement in my bag, as you’d expect. They swabbed it for explosives, as you’d expect.

Then they shut down the security checkpoint and called every single TSA agent over to examine the block of cement, which I did not expect.

They swabbed it for explosives again, using a different technique, one I didn’t even know they had.

They called a supervisor.

The supervisor comes over, glances at the X-ray, says “oh, I know what that is,” and waves me through.

As God is my witness, I really, really want to know what he thought it was. Because I can think of only two possibilities:

1. He had no idea what it was, but he thought he did, in which case I will confess I am super curious about what he believed it was; or
2. He knew exactly what it was, in which case he seems the sort of person I should get to know.

Upon arriving home, I faced yet another problem:

The mold release agent I put between the layers of the cast didn’t work.

Now I have a solid lump of cement with Kitty’s kitty trapped within, and freeing it is proving a nightmare. Half an hour of hard work with a hacksaw succeeded only in getting this far:

It may yet come to pass that I reconstruct Kitty’s kitty in a 3D program from the phone-generated scan and the photos I took. (I took a ton of photos, with a measuring tape for scale.)

In any event, Project Ladybug is proceeding apace, and at some point in the not to distant future I plan to have a monstrous alien parasite custom-fit to my Talespinner’s ladybits (for you see, the name Ladybug came from an autocorrect fail of “ladybits”) that will attach itself to her, driving her to a frenzy of unspeakable, insatiable alien lust.

Because if you’re going to make freaky sex toys, I think it’s time to move beyond “fantasy penises of supernatural creatures.”

Image: Chris Chow

Looking for insight for an upcoming novel.

Okay, so. It’s thousands of years in the future. A global calamity has caused civilization to collapse. The population cratered to less than a billion people. Modern technological infrastructure was wiped out: power generation, mining, logistics, everything.

Eventually humanity recovered, up to a point. Right now, in the real world, all the world’s near-surface deposits of metals, oil, and most minerals are depleted; a society that lost modern infrastructure would no longer be able to mine iron, find or use oil and other petrochemicals, coal, and so on.

Metals in the fictional society still exist, though in limited quantities. They have to be “mined” from landfills, and the capacity to smelt steel without coal or oil is highly limited. Fortunately, landfills are largely anaerobic environments, so metals would still exist in unoxidized states, but can you imagine trying to smelt anything useable from, say, a stainless steel oven or a car frame without coal or oil?

No oil means limited plastics. Firearms exist, but without modern machining they’re quite crude compared to modern firearms. Computers? No. Electrical power in large quantities? No.

Thing is, the knowledge to make these things still exists; it isn’t lost. Many books and so forth survive (though not, obviously, computer records). People would know how electricity works, how to smelt high-quality steel, and so on; it’s just that without ores, without coal, without oil except for plant oils, it’s difficult to do on a large scale.

So: Horses and carts are the predominant non-pedestrian travel. Simple firearms exist but not in mass-produced, industrial quantities. It’s a weird society: technologically backward but with full knowledge of what has been lost.

My question relates specifically to military doctrine and combat tactics.

Horse-mounted calvary and foot soldiers, armed with swords and mmmmaybe simple cartridge firearms brings to mind, say, Revolutionary War or Civil War tactics...but in this world, the knowledge of modern combined arms tactics, military doctrine, and small-unit tactics still exists, it wasn’t lost, only the technological infrastructure was lost.

So, what would military units look like? What would military tactics and strategy look like? Definitely not Civil War, but not modern either. How would industrial military techniques and doctrine adopt to that level of technological infrastructure?

I’d love to hear your ideas!