Life with two kids: No memory to speak of
Feb. 13th, 2026 05:21 pm(Yesterday, down two bus passes and a backpack, misery.
Today, all of their belongings, relief!)
I was reading this (and the various other reports about pro-natalist pontificating and getting women - the right sort, obvs - to BREED): Reform by-election candidate calls for ‘young girls’ to be given ‘biological reality’ check:
Mr Goodwin – who is standing for Reform UK in the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election – argued: “We need to explain and educate to young children, the next generation, the severity of this crisis.
“We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life, and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”
- no other than Dr Marie Stopes, who was so not about woman as mere breeding vessels. And was a) the daughter of an older mother and b) an older mother herself by the time she actually progenated.
Okay, she had views of the day (particularly when it came to daughter-in-laws, sigh), but she was also very much about women's choice, women pursuing careers, women not spending their entire lives in child-bearing, fewer but healthier babies through contraception and spacing, etc etc etc.
In many ways, yes, she was a monster, but a monster I would happily reanimate from the waves off Portland Bill where her ashes were scattered and send after these guys.
The other night on the Olympic broadcast[^1], US figure skater Amber Glenn said in an interview that she is a huge fan of Magic: the Gathering and also that she is queer. So of course I had to make a custom Magic card of her!

[^1] For those of you in the US who are streaming on Peacock, it was during the women's free skate section of the team competition.
"Hate brings views": Confessions of a London fake news TikToker:
London is being used as the backdrop for inaccurate viral videos that reach enormous audiences around the world by playing into the worst stereotypes about the capital.
Last summer, the man says, he found himself sitting in his car, analysing trends on TikTok. His day job was conducting viewings for an estate agency but he was trying to come up with an idea for a viral video account that could be run as a money-making side-hustle.
“I was thinking of unique videos I can do for people,” he says on the tape.
That’s when he had a brainwave: “Hate brings views.”
At that time protests outside asylum hotels were spreading across the country. The man says he noticed “far-right people” were among the most engaged on TikTok. They were easy to rile up: “They hate such videos of illegal migrants. I was like, why not?”
....
The TikToker appears to have no concept of the potential real-world impact of his uploads, instead considering everything in terms of view counts and pieces of content.
He had originally found he could make money through posting videos on TikTok but 'TikTok immediately deleted his account because he was just stealing other people’s videos and reposting them'.
There seems to be just a total disconnect going on in the guy's mind (or he's just ethically vacuous) and generally he does not appear the sharpest blade in the drawer:
Despite fostering online hatred, the man recorded.... insists he doesn’t personally share the views expressed on his TikTok account. Instead, he suggests his fake anti-migrant house tour videos were just a way to game the algorithm, build an audience, and hopefully make money.
baffled. He can’t understand how London Centric traced his anonymous hate-filled London TikTok account back to his employer by geolocating the wheelie bins in his videos.
“I thought no one’s gonna notice that,” he says. “Why would someone?”
New York is contemplating a bill that adds surveillance to 3D printers:
New York’s 20262027 executive budget bill (S.9005 / A.10005) includes language that should alarm every maker, educator, and small manufacturer in the state. Buried in Part C is a provision requiring all 3D printers sold or delivered in New York to include “blocking technology.” This is defined as software or firmware that scans every print file through a “firearms blueprint detection algorithm” and refuses to print anything it flags as a potential firearm or firearm component.
I get the policy goals here, but the solution just won’t work. It’s the same problem as DRM: trying to prevent general-purpose computers from doing specific things. Cory Doctorow wrote about it in 2018 and—more generally—spoke about it in 2011.
This morning I got to call one of the candidates we interviewed yesterday and offer her the work placement. That felt nice.
But also weird. I've never done anything like this before! I am in a very technical sense her line manager, in that her actual manager, my manager, is now on leave for the next week and a half and he asked me to take care of this. Which meant not just the fun phone call but doing paperwork, and that meant having to write down my own name and contact details where it said "Manager."
Wild.
The less said about the rest of the work day the better, but the rest of the day was good. I went for a nice long walk in the warm(ish) drizzle with Teddy, who drank from so many muddy puddles that he had a big dirty circle on his snout. Like the dog equivalent of a kid with a milk mustache. The air smelled amazing, the plants and the soil are starting to wake up.
Then
angelofthenorth invited us over for cheesy toad in the hole, which is a genius idea and I think I might have to make it in future. It was great to see her, and Mr Smith.
And since we'd all planned to go to the gym, she and I walked there while D drove V home and then came back to join me (Miriam having gone swimming). The gym is so much more fun with him there.
What I read
Finished Cakes and Ale, which is partly that early C20th litfic convention of a first-person narrator who just happens be around to hear a lot about the actual protags and the plot or at critical moments of same, but actually complicates it with Ashenden knowing that Rosie is not actually dead as everyone else supposes. Not sure the ending really worked.
I then, having got into an Edwardian/Georgian novelist rhythm, went 'ah! time for some Arnold Bennett! the one about the hotel', except I picked up The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902), which is 1900s thriller hijinx mode with European royalty shenanigans, false identities, etc etc (though I was wondering whether it might adapt into a screwball comedy movie?), and wasn't actually the one I'd read many years ago that I was thinking of.
Which was Imperial Palace (1930), which struck me as, although lacking the highspeed thriller plot element, remarkably like D Francis in its fascination for infrastructure (in this case, running a luxury hotel in London) and competence porn. The running-the-hotel bits and the trials posed for the new supervising housekeeper are, perhaps, at least these days, more interesting than the bits involving Hotel Manager and Rich Man's Daughter Gracie. To give her (and actually, Bennett as author) her due, she is not, whereas she would be in a lot of novels by his contemporaries, an unmitigated bitch (Aldous Huxley's Lucy Tantamount) or a tragic bitch (Michael Arlen's Iris Storm), she has some good points and was a competent racing driver, but she is still annoyingly entitled and egocentric.
I took a break from this because I suddenly had a whim to re-read Mary Renault, The King Must Die (1958) for the first time in absolute yonks. You know, Mary, the sexism and misogyny is not entirely just being Accurate for Period, is it, hmmmm? There is some great stuff in there, but.
On the go
Imperial Palace is very long, and still on the go.
Up next
I think I am up for some Agatha Christie, seriously.
Having zero interest in football, I never would have tried a comedy series based around an American football coach working for an English soccer team...
But 'Replyhazy' suggested I try it while I have Apple TV, and I absolutely love it! It's funny, it's warm-hearted and it has some great characters.
It may not be realistic, but most of the characters are really thoughtful about their relationships - men actually listen to what their girlfriends are telling them and act maturely.
Friendships are built that really have meaning. Villains are relatively few, but they make up for it by being delightfully over the top. Anthony Head, as the football club owner's ex-husband, does a wonderful job as a charming, womanising scumbag!
I think my favourite character is actually Trent Crimm, the newspaper reporter. acted by James Lance. He starts as a minor character, only in some episodes, and is a full-time regular by the end of series 3.
But there are lots of great characters who you grow to love and appreciate.
I even enjoyed watching the football....
I just noticed that the ebook version of Rewriring Democracy is on sale for $5 on Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Google Play, Kobo, and presumably everywhere else in the US. I have no idea how long this will last.
Also, Amazon has a coupon that brings the hardcover price down to $20. You’ll see the discount at checkout.
Interesting research: “CHAI: Command Hijacking Against Embodied AI.”
Abstract: Embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to handle edge cases in robotic vehicle systems where data is scarce by using common-sense reasoning grounded in perception and action to generalize beyond training distributions and adapt to novel real-world situations. These capabilities, however, also create new security risks. In this paper, we introduce CHAI (Command Hijacking against embodied AI), a new class of prompt-based attacks that exploit the multimodal language interpretation abilities of Large Visual-Language Models (LVLMs). CHAI embeds deceptive natural language instructions, such as misleading signs, in visual input, systematically searches the token space, builds a dictionary of prompts, and guides an attacker model to generate Visual Attack Prompts. We evaluate CHAI on four LVLM agents; drone emergency landing, autonomous driving, and aerial object tracking, and on a real robotic vehicle. Our experiments show that CHAI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art attacks. By exploiting the semantic and multimodal reasoning strengths of next-generation embodied AI systems, CHAI underscores the urgent need for defenses that extend beyond traditional adversarial robustness.
News article.
I helped conduct five interviews this morning (which as my manager who's doing them with me pointed out is always weirdly draining -- there's something about having all these potential futures appear before you, where the decision you make affects people's lives so differently, depending on what you choose...even here when it's only for a ten-week placement like this).
I had a really demanding meeting this afternoon that I had not been able to prepare for at all. It went okay but oof. Coulda been better!
Then we went to go collect groceries, and V's shoes which have been repaired.
Then I had counseling. Today we talked about what we ended up calling different "circles" of my life: work, Minneapolis, local stuff (by-election mostly), household, community care, self-care... Normally when one circle has felt like too much there's been a nicer one I can shift my focus to, but lately it feels like they've all been shitty. It helped to talk about this even if it wasn't anything I don't think about regularly.
I walked into my bedroom where I do counseling (it's on the phone) and my first thought was oh yeah, I meant to change the bedding yesterday and then I didn't...I should do that. And it was mostly done by the time she called! And I did the rest right after.
And on only the second time I went back upstairs after that I remembered to take the laundry down with me! And the washing machine was free so I chucked it right in. This is all like warp-speed, by my usual standards.
I didn't even have time to walk Teddy today. But we did get fancy takeout (yay, vegetable tempura!) re-scheduled from me fucking up the plan last night, and watched some TV and I managed to stay mostly awake until 9pm. That's good enough.