Matthew's Journal

Reading Journal for March 6 2026

What I’ve Read
And Other Poison Devils by Twig (https://archiveofourown.org/works/77727411) This one requires a little explanation.
So, last October, AMC did a new show in the Anne Rice cinematic universe that they’ve been building with Interview with the Vampire and The Mayfair Witches called, in full, Anne Rice's Talamasca: The Secret Order. I don’t recommend it – the show is weirdly heterosexual for a Rice-inspired tale,  and for a spy story. They really do not delve deeply into the implication of having an untrained telepath as our main character. The show is so generic they literally named the main character Guy.

But! To you, dear reader, I am kinder than to myseI am a completionist and also a Bill Fichtner fan, so I watched Anne Rice's Talamasca: The Secret Order. It’s not great. It spends a great deal of time setting up Guy, and then all the payoff is for other characters who were introduced somewhat haphazardly.  However, the extremely specific Guy has some great slashy scenes with The Vampire Jasper – it’s classic handsy male actors making intense eye contact from four inches apart, and it appealed to enough people that there is a little fandom built up about it, myself included. THIS FIC is fantastic – it picks up a number of threads the show dropped and weaves them into a compelling personal narrative of a young vulnerable man who falls into the hands of a powerful older man and dedicates himself to his cause – and of course, unlike the canon, it’s well written and they fuck. Great work, Highly recommend as well Twig’s shorter work, The Hunter and the Gun (https://archiveofourown.org/works/75005866) which is closer to canon and also deeply fun.

The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik – The final book in the Scholomance series, about how the main character takes down magic capitalism from the inside. It’s wonderful payoff on the world building of the series, and good character work, and my god, Maw Mouths are just so much more horrible on the re-read than they are the first


What I’m Reading

Sword Heart by T Kingfisher - an excellent fantasy romance. What if Geralt of Rivia was assigned to protect a busty older woman with shitty relatives? 
Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die by Greer Stothers -Static

What I’ll Read Next
My Real Children Jo Walton
Sunshine Robin McKinley

Work in Progress
I finished my Sock Madness qualifier socks after the deadline, but with enough done to be a cheerleader. I think I'll call it a win!

⌈ Secret Post #7000 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


01.


( More! )

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #999.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

I guess the joint tour is going well. This is the most wholesome fucking shit I've ever seen.

Posted by Bruce Schneier

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/03/friday-squid-blogging-squid-in-byzantine-monk-cooking.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=71735

This is a very weird story about how squid stayed on the menu of Byzantine monks by falling between the cracks of dietary rules.

At Constantinople’s Monastery of Stoudios, the kitchen didn’t answer to appetite.

It answered to the “typikon”: a manual for ensuring that nothing unexpected happened at mealtimes. Meat: forbidden. Dairy: forbidden. Eggs: forbidden. Fish: feast-day only. Oil: regulated. But squid?

Squid had eight arms, no bones, and a gift for changing color. Nobody had bothered writing a regulation for that. This wasn’t a loophole born of legal creativity but an oversight rooted in taxonomic confusion. Medieval monks, confronted with a creature that was neither fish nor fowl, gave up and let it pass.

In a kitchen governed by prohibitions, the safest ingredient was the one that caused the least disturbance. Squid entered not with applause, but with a shrug.

Bonus stuffed squid recipe at the end.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/03/friday-squid-blogging-squid-in-byzantine-monk-cooking.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=71735

I need to talk about it!!

So I feel like in my first watch, I wasn't really getting all the nuance, and that's why it felt so repetitive and slow. For example, the scene in episode 6 where Gi-seok invites himself to drinks with Ji-ho and the oh-so-hapless Choi Hyun-soo. ( Spoilers. )

Today, I received in the snail mail, a single sheet of paper telling me my tax return had been filed electronically. WTF? Stamps aren't free or cheap. Email works a lot faster. Holy crap.

A long while back, they served fried okra on the dinner buffet and it was fabulous. I bought extra and froze it then heated it up in the air fryer. It was better than fabulous. I love fried okra but I hate cutting it, breading it and frying it. So, on a whim, I asked the food and bev people if I could buy a batch of fried okra. I didn't care when, I didn't care how much. They said 'sure' just let us know when you are ready. Then I went on Wegovy and I wanted to wait a bit to see how that would go.

Finally, last week, I emailed that I was ready. They said $15 for 3 lbs. I said great. And today they made it happen. 6 gynormous bags of fried okra. For $15!!!



I put 5 in the freezer and pulled out 3 handfuls to crisp up for lunch. 2 would have been plenty. But so yum.

What a happy camper am I???!!!!

It's feeling/looking/sounding like spring.

Spring cleaning? No. Quarterly rearranging of a room! Now that I live in a house with my spouse (and we both get the neurospicy genes that makes the brain go brr seeing rooms in a new layout), I got more than just my bedroom to play with! This time around? The living room. It's easily the least manageable of all the rooms we have (because of weird wall placements + how small it is). On top of that, we got those two, massive rococo style couches that makes for a more difficult arrangement (I say rococo because that's more the style we're intending this room to be, but it can fit any kind of opulent vintage style really. It's rococo going on baroque, it's whimsygoth meets studio ghibli, it's cottagecore meets dark academia. It's Alphonse Mucha. It's Bridgerton. You see the vision?).

One thing that this whole moving around does help with is that, since I'm doing all this, might as well do all the cleaning at the same time, you know? So it does become a bit of a spring cleaning regardless. It's just spring cleaning with a goal that is not just getting the cleaning done, and I think that makes up for the hours of sweeping and vacuuming and dusting and moping and throwing away the trash. All that not fun stuff to make way for the actual fun stuff afterwards.

I might draw a before and after of the layout when I'm done (and when I bother to get my drawing tablet from upstairs). But here's a picture of what the two sofas look like (it's the sofa and the loveseat in the middle and on the right, we don't have the single person chair and the table):

I had a half day of annual leave to use up, so decided to go mudlarking, see some art, and go to a cafe. As low tide was at 9:15, I got up at 6 to make sure I'd have an hour beforehand. I got to Blackfriars and then queued for coffee and drank it on my way to the foreshore.

BBC had reported 0.00 for low tide, PLA had said 0.2. PLA then reported the actual tide as 0.4, but this time I managed to just about sneak around behind the leg of Waterloo Bridge, for the first time since the really low tide last year. I found a salt shaker! I wanted to look longer but was scared due to firstly the boats causing waves and secondly as the tide had turned. But, two other mudlarks appeared after low tide and they both went there, less hesitant than I.

The first mudlark said there wasn’t so much to find these days, but it doesn’t stop them looking, and the second showed me a nice bottle they’d found.

It was another day when lots of bottles were about, but I tried to be more restrained and only picked up 2 R White's and two little bottles. Plus a broken R White’s, as it seemed like the Thames was attempting to make art as a golf ball had become wedged in the bottle.

I dug a jam jar out of the mud, thinking it was something more exciting, but then put it back.

Finds included:



A necklace made of shells, which I left on the foreshore.



Two buttons and a bead

A Branch GPO sherd. I am not sure which office this is referring to, having previously found GPO West.

A Mecca sherd. I am not sure what Mecca cafe this is from.

Aerated Bread Company sherds

Express Dairies sherds

A different style piece of glass of an R White’s



A London Underground shot glass.

A salt shaker, with lid that says Cerebos salt on it. https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Cerebos

A pink handcuff

A ceramic pot that says No 1 on the bottom

An interesting piece of pipe (sadly the other side is damaged) - possibly Masonic?

A piece of a small bottle - on the bottom it looks kind of like it could say “lner” but it might say something else.



A piece of a large bottle that says “ard”.

A piece of a torpedo bottle

A golfball stuck in a broken R Whites bottle.

A metal bowl that looks like one you can get from B&Q. https://www.diy.com/departments/urbnliving-4-stainless-steel-ice-cream-cups-170ml-dessert-bowls-sundae-dishes-pudding/5063536181075_BQ.prd



Two R White’s bottles



Two large bits of a plate that were near each other. I did try looking for the rest, but didn’t see it. I only really picked these up as I could see a tiny bit of a logo and was hoping to find the rest of it.

Plate with Leipsic pattern on by Joseph Clementson. (The back has this stamped on it.) This pattern was exhibited at the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in 1851.

Then after that I went to the Hayward Gallery and then to Nagare.

(You need a permit to search or mudlark on the Thames foreshore.)

Water bears on Mars: Tardiguardians of the Galaxy?

Tardigrades – also known as water bears – are tiny animals about 1 mm or less in size. They’re known for being able to survive in extreme environments.
Tardigrades can survive in simulated Martian regolith, researchers found … if you rinse it with water first.
Future astronauts could use tardigrades to help grow plants and survive in habitats on Mars.


Tardigrades are interesting little extremophiles. They can survive a wide array of harsh conditions, such as radiation and starvation. Some live in desolate conditions; others live in warm, green places hence their nickname "moss bears." This implies that they excel at colonizing harsh terrain, but they can also take advantage of better conditions. They're about as close to indestructible as life on Earth has gotten. So it makes sense to take them along for space exploration.

A couple of weeks ago I bought two potted plants, which have since come into full flower

Today is mostly sunny, unseasonably warm, and windy. It drizzled on and off yesterday and last night. Today the wind is drying things out some.

I fed the birds. I haven't seen any yet.

I put out water for the birds.

Lots of flowers are blooming -- the crocuses are open and I spotted a winter aconite.

EDIT 3/6/26 -- I took some pictures around the yard.

I saw a turkey vulture wheeling overhead. I've also seen a small flock of house finches and some sparrows at the hopper feeder.

EDIT 3/6/26 -- I transplanted volunteer snowdrops from the parking lot to the apricot tree.

EDIT 3/6/26 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 3/6/26 -- I tried using a pruning saw on one of the remaining saplings in the parking lot. I managed to make a small cut, but clearly this method is too inefficient to bring down a sapling. *sigh*

EDIT 3/6/26 -- I transplanted more snowdrops from the parking lot to the apricot tree.

The first Ginger Gold apple seedling has appeared in the milk jug, and indoors, one of the apple seeds has also sprouted. :D 3q3q3q!!! All my willow cuttings are leafed out. Last night the lower stems had tiny white dots; today they have distinct little root buds. Their speed is impressive.

The first peony shoots are appearing in the tulip bed and under the apricot tree.

EDIT 3/6/26 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 3/6/26 -- I started trimming brush along the north edge of the house.

I am done for the night.

A Friday evening on the foreshore and I found:

Express Dairies pottery sherds and glass

Two French pieces, to prepare me for an upcoming trip:
A piece of a small House of Worth perfume bottle. It says Worth on the side and Paris on the bottom.
A sherd that says “mouflet”, which apparently means kid.

Part of a Lewis & Burrows Chemist bottle. They formed in 1895 as an amalgamation of different pharmacies.

Part of a Boots Chemist bottle. The style matches Boots bottles from 1910s/1920s.

A coin! Except it is actually just the foil from a chocolate coin. So close.

Gray & Son

OXO mug sherd

Hotel Ware - possibly Grindley Hotel Ware. I remember I found a piece previously that said Grind on it, which was also probably Grindley.

Aerated Bread Company (ABC) sherds



(You need a permit to search or mudlark on the Thames foreshore.)

Last night I was puzzled as to why Backblaze wasn’t backing up Homura II. But it was late, and I decided to follow up in the morning.

This morning, no backup was occurring, and I forced a Backup Now. After a few minutes of wheels turning, everything stopped again. Backblaze reported 0 files to be backed up.

Backblaze Backup Status • March 6, 2026

But I could see that 7.6TB was selected for backup. Could it be that backup was done?

I began the process to request a data restore so I could see what was in the cloud. Amazingly, all 5+ TB of Homura II was there.

Backblaze Restore Files screen • March 6, 2026

I drilled down into the tree structure and confirmed that both folders from TWICE concerts in January 2026 were there.

It appears that Backblaze was smart enough to connect stored data from Homura (I) with the new Homura II drive. All my Lightroom data is backed up to the cloud – and I even know how to do a restore from that backup!

(They say you should always test your backup with a restore. Consider my backup tested.)

Previously
Well, That’s Not Good...
Home System 2026

Posted by Bruce Schneier

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/03/anthropic-and-the-pentagon.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=71742

OpenAI is in and Anthropic is out as a supplier of AI technology for the US defense department. This news caps a week of bluster by the highest officials in the US government towards some of the wealthiest titans of the big tech industry, and the overhanging specter of the existential risks posed by a new technology powerful enough that the Pentagon claims it is essential to national security. At issue is Anthropic’s insistence that the US Department of Defense (DoD) could not use its models to facilitate “mass surveillance” or “fully autonomous weapons,” provisions the defense secretary Pete Hegseth derided as “woke.”

It all came to a head on Friday evening when Donald Trump issued an order for federal government agencies to discontinue use of Anthropic models. Within hours, OpenAI had swooped in, potentially seizing hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts by striking an agreement with the administration to provide classified government systems with AI.

Despite the histrionics, this is probably the best outcome for Anthropic—and for the Pentagon. In our free-market economy, both are, and should be, free to sell and buy what they want with whom they want, subject to longstanding federal rules on contracting, acquisitions, and blacklisting. The only factor out of place here are the Pentagon’s vindictive threats.

AI models are increasingly commodified. The top-tier offerings have about the same performance, and there is little to differentiate one from the other. The latest models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, in particular, tend to leapfrog each other with minor hops forward in quality every few months. The best models from one provider tend to be preferred by users to the second, or third, or 10th best models at a rate of only about six times out of 10, a virtual tie.

In this sort of market, branding matters a lot. Anthropic and its CEO, Dario Amodei, are positioning themselves as the moral and trustworthy AI provider. That has market value for both consumers and enterprise clients. In taking Anthropic’s place in government contracting, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, vowed to somehow uphold the same safety principles Anthropic had just been pilloried for. How that is possible given the rhetoric of Hegseth and Trump is entirely unclear, but seems certain to further politicize OpenAI and its products in the minds of consumers and corporate buyers.

Posturing publicly against the Pentagon and as a hero to civil libertarians is quite possibly worth the cost of the lost contracts to Anthropic, and associating themselves with the same contracts could be a trap for OpenAI. The Pentagon, meanwhile, has plenty of options. Even if no big tech company was willing to supply it with AI, the department has already deployed dozens of open weight models—whose parameters are public and are often licensed permissively for government use.

We can admire Amodei’s stance, but, to be sure, it is primarily posturing. Anthropic knew what they were getting into when they agreed to a defense department partnership for $200m last year. And when they signed a partnership with the surveillance company Palantir in 2024.

Read Amodei’s statement about the issue. Or his January essay on AIs and risk, where he repeatedly uses the words “democracy” and “autocracy” while evading precisely how collaboration with US federal agencies should be viewed in this moment. Amodei has bought into the idea of using “AI to achieve robust military superiority” on behalf of the democracies of the world in response to the threats from autocracies. It’s a heady vision. But it is a vision that likewise supposes that the world’s nominal democracies are committed to a common vision of public wellbeing, peace-seeking and democratic control.

Regardless, the defense department can also reasonably demand that the AI products it purchases meet its needs. The Pentagon is not a normal customer; it buys products that kill people all the time. Tanks, artillery pieces, and hand grenades are not products with ethical guard rails. The Pentagon’s needs reasonably involve weapons of lethal force, and those weapons are continuing on a steady, if potentially catastrophic, path of increasing automation.

So, at the surface, this dispute is a normal market give and take. The Pentagon has unique requirements for the products it uses. Companies can decide whether or not to meet them, and at what price. And then the Pentagon can decide from whom to acquire those products. Sounds like a normal day at the procurement office.

But, of course, this is the Trump administration, so it doesn’t stop there. Hegseth has threatened Anthropic not just with loss of government contracts. The administration has, at least until the inevitable lawsuits force the courts to sort things out, designated the company as “a supply-chain risk to national security,” a designation previously only ever applied to foreign companies. This prevents not only government agencies, but also their own contractors and suppliers, from contracting with Anthropic.

The government has incompatibly also threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act, which could force Anthropic to remove contractual provisions the department had previously agreed to, or perhaps to fundamentally modify its AI models to remove in-built safety guardrails. The government’s demands, Anthropic’s response, and the legal context in which they are acting will undoubtedly all change over the coming weeks.

But, alarmingly, autonomous weapons systems are here to stay. Primitive pit traps evolved to mechanical bear traps. The world is still debating the ethical use of, and dealing with the legacy of, land mines. The US Phalanx CIWS is a 1980s-era shipboard anti-missile system with a fully autonomous, radar-guided cannon. Today’s military drones can search, identify and engage targets without direct human intervention. AI will be used for military purposes, just as every other technology our species has invented has.

The lesson here should not be that one company in our rapacious capitalist system is more moral than another, or that one corporate hero can stand in the way of government’s adopting AI as technologies of war, or surveillance, or repression. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a world where such barriers are permanent or even particularly sturdy.

Instead, the lesson is about the importance of democratic structures and the urgent need for their renovation in the US. If the defense department is demanding the use of AI for mass surveillance or autonomous warfare that we, the public, find unacceptable, that should tell us we need to pass new legal restrictions on those military activities. If we are uncomfortable with the force of government being applied to dictate how and when companies yield to unsafe applications of their products, we should strengthen the legal protections around government procurement.

The Pentagon should maximize its warfighting capabilities, subject to the law. And private companies like Anthropic should posture to gain consumer and buyer confidence. But we should not rest on our laurels, thinking that either is doing so in the public’s interest.

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/03/anthropic-and-the-pentagon.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=71742

I had to catch the bus home after work on Tuesday, instead of my regular train, but this longer, more frustrating journey was made somewhat enjoyable by the conversation two teenage boys were having behind me. They began the trip updating their respective mothers over the phone that they were going to be late home (with many repeated 'love you Mum! Yeah, love you Mum!' and so on), then pivoted to the epic online sleuthing they had undertaken when one of their friends claimed to have a new girlfriend but only provided photographic evidence of this ('It was so easy! All I had to do was reverse image-search the photo and it was obvious he'd just taken photos of a random girl on Instagram and Pinterest!'), then pivoted to the sort of inane philosophising that teenagers think is deep ('Religion is obviously just a tool for social control ... all wars in history were started because of religion — apart from economic wars'), and finally, having exhausted all other lines of conversation, started talking about how much they loved cheese and just naming different types of cheese ('Halloumi!' 'Gouda!' 'Do you know you can make your own mozzarella?' and so on).

I found the whole thing kind of endearing, and it certainly provided entertainment over the course of the 50-minute bus ride.

I never use headphones in public spaces as I like to stay alert, so I have overheard the most ridiculous things over the years, including:

A woman updating one of her friends about a family member who had just been released from prison

A guy spending the entire hour-long train ride from Cambridge to London instructing his letting agent on how to make a legal case for evicting a tenant from his property

A guy spending the entire Cambridge-London train ride talking through various complex financial market trades he was making

A young guy explaining to his girlfriend (I was sitting across from them on one of those sets of four seats around a table) that his afternoon had involved a) stealing a car, b) being chased by police as he attempted to steal said car, c) crashing the car in the police car chase and getting injured, d) the police attempting to take him to the emergency department at the hospital but refusing to go ('The car owner decided not to press charges, so I said to the police that if they weren't arresting me I didn't want to go with them to hospital') — all at absolute top volume such that the entire crowded carriage could hear every single word

I have also overheard so many specialist doctors call up their colleagues and convey huge amounts of sensitive patient information over the phone, in the reception area of our library, seemingly oblivious to the fact that a person sitting at a reception desk is actually a human being with functioning ears.

I find it absolutely excruciating to talk over the phone in public — anything more than arranging meeting times/places or letting someone know I'm running late and I'll basically immediately tell the person that I'll call them back when I'm at home — so it's always mind-boggling to me the amount of highly personal stuff that some people feel comfortable discussing at top volume in crowded public transport.

So, my question for this week's open thread: what is the strangest thing you've ever overheard on public transport?

I noticed this morning that my bone conducting headphones for swimming had the beginning of a life ending split where the mechanics' house begins. They still work but it looks like their future is not certain. So, while I swam, I dreamed of getting the next iteration which can be used on land and sea and has Bluetooth. I figured I'd gorilla tape these for insurance and then contemplate the upgrade.

But, first, when I got home I checked the company website to see what their support looks like. I bought them from Amazon so I went to get the date and order number. July 14, 2024. Oh! They have a 2 year warranty. Well, all right then. No upgrade for me. I filled out their form and got an email and now wait for instructions. Depending on their process I might still get that upgrade.

Also while swimming, I crafted a tactful email to the CPA that asked WHEN THE FUCK ARE YOU GOING TO FILE MY RETURN???? I've been logging onto my IRS account every day looking ... except, it turns out, I was looking in the wrong place. Before I sent that email, I found the right place and discovered that, in fact, they did file it and the IRS has it and all is cool. So whew. Also the IRS now, finally, has a 'send me an email when stuff happens' option. And one for refund info. Both are opt out but now I've opted in. So I wait.

I got a nice text from the vet last night asking me about Biggie since he had two vaccinations yesterday. His only issue now is attitude.

Of course the water fountain has now started fountaining again. The new one arrives today. I may just return it.

I need some yogurt. And salt and sugar. So, I'm thinking Safeway this morning.

And that's about it for plans. I think I'll go find the gorilla tape as an interim fix for the headphones and then get dressed.

Posted by Zach Weinersmith

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/curses

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Batman would've just reached for his utility belt.

Today's News:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/curses