Stephanie Leary
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sleary.bsky.social
Stephanie Leary
@sleary.bsky.social
1.4K followers 490 following 1.4K posts
Front End Developer doing UI and accessibility work on open source library software. Previously: MLIS @ UW iSchool; tag wrangling; wrote some tech books a while back. Pretty young for an Old Internet Person.
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sleary.bsky.social
It’s still less evil than the pseudo-Van Gogh Exploding Tardis puzzle, which is the most fiendishly difficult I’ve ever done. Once you get the more distinctive colors in place, you’re left with hundreds of tiny pieces with blue and gold paint strokes.
The Doctor Who Exploding TARDIS 1000-piece puzzle, based on the lost Vincent Van Gogh painting from "The Pandorica Opens." The broken TARDIS in the center is surrounded by fiery swirls in the dark blue sky, in the style of Starry Night. An extraordinarily difficult puzzle, since everything is gold and blue, and most of the image is swirls of abstract color.
November 30, 2025 at 5:11 PM
sleary.bsky.social
This puzzle was EVIL. Several of the planets and the astronaut are single pieces. Most of the larger planets have an embedded star-shaped piece. The shapes around all those are bonkers. We love it.
The completed Zero Gravity 1000-piece puzzle by Galison. It’s a collage of colorful planet illustrations in varying styles and sizes on a black background with a suited astronaut drifting at the center. 10/10, will puzzle again.
November 30, 2025 at 3:22 PM
sleary.bsky.social
This is so good!
complicity: Aha, those sanctimonious New Englanders were just as tied to slavery as the Southerners! But complicity seems too easy. Isn't everyone, in one way or another, complicit in systems of exploitation that sometimes they choose not to see, and that sometimes they can't see? What's interesting then, is not complicity or non-complicity. I suggest we take complicity as a given and then look for the ways in which it is lived at a given moment by specific historical actors. I hope that readers come to see that our own moment doesn't give us a cut-and-dry option regarding complicity in structures of economic and ecological exploitation. We should start with the premise that it may be very difficult to find ourselves with clean hands under the configuration of the world that we presently inhabit—and then figure out what we want to do about it.
November 22, 2025 at 2:44 PM
sleary.bsky.social
@alexandrarowland.bsky.social likes it a whole lot. reactormag.com/you-should-r...
Basically, it’s Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor (fealty, ethics, loyalty, the joy of serving a worthy and honorable lord), meets The West Wing (liberal politics, conversations in hallways, the long slow process of making the world better by increments, and the quote: “Do you have a best friend? Is he smarter than you? Do you trust him with your life? That’s your chief of staff.”), meets Moana (leaving home to follow the call of a powerful dream, returning home to bring back the dream and the fruits of your labor to your people; community and family; a solo journey across the sea mirrors an internal journey of personal identity). It is my favorite book in the entire world, hands down.
November 13, 2025 at 11:25 PM
sleary.bsky.social
It’s been a rough week, so here’s a book rec to soothe the civic-minded soul: The Hands of the Emperor, by Victoria Goddard.

www.victoriagoddard.ca/products/the...
Cover art: a stylized sun with a face on a plain black background
November 13, 2025 at 11:25 PM
sleary.bsky.social
Q: Anything you don't like about it? A: I can't really see the front out of the windshield because it's so long. Q: What's the craziest experience you've had in the car? A: In June of this year, I wanted to put the truck through its paces. The Rubicon is a very famous, 22-mile, off-road trail, and it usually takes two to three days. We decided to try to be the first EV truck and Cybertruck to cross the Rubicon. We built out the truck, I think we spent about $50,000 kitting out the car, and then we went. So three days into the trip, we were only five miles into the trail. It was way more difficult than I could have ever imagined.
October 16, 2025 at 5:28 PM
sleary.bsky.social
Men is too headache.
September 5, 2025 at 10:39 PM
sleary.bsky.social
“Some things are just too important to simulate. Maybe one of them is each other.”
This is not merely a matter of improving the chatbots' programming so that they more believably imitate humans, or provide more responsible outputs when presented with poisoned cognition in their users. There is a simple and tragic category error at the core of the Al chatbot push-at the core of so incredibly much of 21st-century American life, really-that only gets more alarming and more obviously deadly to all of us the further the psychotic tech industry projects it out among us. It is the idea that things like connection, friendship, intimacy, and care are essentially sensory arrangements, things an individual feels, and therefore things that can be reproduced by anything that provides something like the right sensations. This misapprehension holds that a person who is socially isolated is merely experiencing a set of sensations called "social isolation," and so also holds that this can be resolved by interacting with a mindless computer program that produces in the isolated person the impression that they are connecting to another being. This is deeply poisonous. More to the point, it is also just wrong! Incorrect!
August 27, 2025 at 10:51 PM
sleary.bsky.social
The number of Medium articles that were clearly written by code camp students fulfilling an assignment… 🫣
A published Medium article with identifying specifics redacted. It includes a Visual Breakdown subheading followed by a prompt: “If this were visualized in a Medium article: …” and then two placeholder descriptions for before and after screenshots that were never inserted. Hope that person got their certificate and will be working with you soon!
August 14, 2025 at 5:28 PM
sleary.bsky.social
BFF picked up an old saddle stapler at the thrift store yesterday. It looks like this one.

Me: You could murder someone with that!

Her: That’s what I said! Youngest son was unimpressed.

Me: That’s what you need to publish a really high-quality Star Trek fanzine.

Her: *nods reverently*
A vintage Swingline saddle stapler. It is gray and angular and industrial and looks like Agent Peggy Carter could kill a man with it. This is the stapler you need to bind your subversive pamphlets without crunching the pages. Hot.
August 13, 2025 at 1:44 PM
sleary.bsky.social
Tumblr drakensberg-blog: The reading comprehension and overall common sense on this website is piss poor. poupon: how dare you say we piss on the poor
July 10, 2025 at 3:54 AM
sleary.bsky.social
Murderbot with a speech bubble that encompasses the quoted post
June 28, 2025 at 11:04 PM
sleary.bsky.social
@smashingmagazine.com Hey, could you fix your sidenote text color in dark mode? #666 is no bueno. #ccc maybe?
Screenshot of an aside in Smashing's "Fostering An Accessibility Culture" article, showing medium-gray text on the dark gray background in dark mode.
May 28, 2025 at 7:33 PM
sleary.bsky.social
Listen, capitalism is a hellscape

but if I cannot purchase a small Murderbot bobblehead for my dashboard, we have fought in vain

IT WAS ALL FOR NAUGHT
The Murderbot figurine from the opening credits lands on its back in the dirt after apparently falling from somewhere in space
May 16, 2025 at 2:53 AM
sleary.bsky.social
“Why shouldn’t our chatbot mine kids’ profile data to sext with them more realistically” should be a career-ending, company-annihilating question.
Zuckerberg's concerns about overly restricting bots went beyond fantasy scenarios. Last fall, he chastised Meta's managers for not adequately heeding his instructions to quickly build out their capacity for humanlike interaction. At the time, Meta allowed users to build custom chatbot companions, but he wanted to know why the bots couldn't mine a user's profile data for conversational purposes. Why couldn't bots proactively message their creators or hop on a video call, just like human friends? And why did Meta's bots need such strict conversational guardrails? "I missed out on Snapchat and TikTok, I won't miss on this," Zuckerberg fumed, according to employees familiar with his remarks.
April 27, 2025 at 9:16 PM
sleary.bsky.social
BUT HER—

*drowns in rage lava*
Unlike the chat in which The Atlantic was mistakenly included, the newly revealed one was created by Mr. Hegseth. It included his wife and about a dozen other people from his personal and professional inner circle in January, before his confirmation as defense secretary, and was named "Defense | Team Huddle," the people familiar with the chat said. He used his private phone, rather than his government one, to access the Signal chat. The continued inclusion following Mr. Hegseth's confirmation of his wife, brother and personal lawyer, none of whom had any apparent reason to be briefed on operational details of a military operation as it was getting underway, is sure to raise further questions about his adherence to security protocols.
April 20, 2025 at 9:16 PM
sleary.bsky.social
I Will Fucking Dropkick You If You Use That Spreadsheet ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-...

“You don't have to live like this. … Just put the spreadsheet down and we can work with databases. Do you remember databases, and possibly happiness?”

(via @copystar.bsky.social’s excellent newsletter)
A sane engineer would come to you, palms upturned, arms wide, and preach the virtues of Excel in a conciliatory tone. "It really empowers non-technical staff"', they would say. "The democratization of data is an important element to the modern workplace, and it is an incredible testament to Excel's flexibility that it has enabled so many people to leverage the power of computing." But that is a mere sane engineer, the first to die in the revolution, and when you have seen enough of what happens when you yield to this blatant cowardice, you move beyond mere sanity, into righteous logic so cold that it burns like fire. I tell you now, if you suggest that we put that spreadsheet anywhere near any process, no force on this planet will save you from me. This Is Gatekeeping Yes. I have put this gate here and I am keeping it for a reason. The last time I stopped keeping this gate, I wrote a Python script that took a spreadsheet as an input, ran regular expressions in it against a database, spat out ten more spreadsheets, then used those to power a generic PowerBI template which had to have all ten spreadsheet targets repointed by hand. This became one of the most requested services my team performed for several months. Someone should have fucking stopped me, and I must pay for my crimes by keeping this gate forever. I swear to you, there is nothing good past this gate. Turn away. Turn away. I beg you, turn away. Beyond this lies naught but trying to work out why all the numbers are wrong, only to realize that Excel thought those IDs were integers and dropped all the leading zeroes. This death is a kindness.
April 19, 2025 at 5:22 PM
sleary.bsky.social
Tumblr post from drakensberg-blog: The reading comprehension and overall common sense on this website is piss poor. Reply from poupon: how dare you say we piss on the poor
March 27, 2025 at 2:31 PM
sleary.bsky.social
Someone requested the Senator version of the pattern as well.
Cross stitch pattern and DMC thread colors for bilberries (for treason) with cursive writing: My Senator is a craven quisling
March 14, 2025 at 8:47 PM
sleary.bsky.social
I cross stitched this 8 years ago. Still relevant.
Small cross stitch of bilberries (for treason) with cursive writing: My Congressman is a craven quisling
March 14, 2025 at 8:44 PM
sleary.bsky.social
Few, if any, were more high-profile than Morris, who steadily involved himself in state and national politics after founding Gateway in 2000. In 2017, Morris was tapped by Gov. Greg Abbott to help support the so-called "Bathroom Bill" that sought to ban transgender people from using their preferred bathroom — in part by arguing that it would allow children to be sexually abused.
March 13, 2025 at 4:09 AM
sleary.bsky.social
Unregulated human experimentation and nuclear accidents side by side. What could go wrong?
According to interviews and presentations viewed by WIRED, the goal of these cities would be to have places where anti-aging clinical trials, nuclear reactor startups, and building construction can proceed without having to get prior approval from agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
March 8, 2025 at 2:56 PM
sleary.bsky.social
OK, so it’s been a while since I cleaned out the garage.
A black iPod Classic 5th Gen, with the click wheel and everything. This sucker is 20 years old. Vintage. (lolsob)
March 1, 2025 at 6:04 PM
sleary.bsky.social
🤯
Her suggested cuts were funds going to groups like Global Refuge, a faith-based organization that provides safety and support services to immigrants, migrant refugees and asylum-seekers around the world. Two weeks later, Musk declared at 3:14 a.m. on a Sunday that DOGE was “rapidly shutting down” supposedly “illegal payments” to Global Refuge. A newly-launched corresponding website DataRepublican.com lets users search for charities and nonprofit officers. A false claim that Jeffrey Epstein was paid by USAID appears to have started with people using the website and mixing up the notorious sex offender with another Jeffrey Epstein.
February 26, 2025 at 6:21 PM
sleary.bsky.social
Sometimes I envy my son’s sense of time scales. Listening to a song in the car: “Oh, that one’s OLD.”

It was MGMT’s Kids.

… and he’s right; that song came out 18 years ago. 💀
Google info pane reading Released: 2007
February 22, 2025 at 5:15 PM