Welcome to the second episode of Mutt-day news, a weekly round up of news stories from the past week, with a comedic bent, at least where possible.
This week, I come to you with dystopian AI news stories, including Meta’s now lethal “Big sis Billie.” Also this week, some cool new vaccine developments, an arts and culture section, yes covering more itch and payment processor stuff shenanigans, but not just that. The fascism roundup returns, and I have a new section, stuff you can do!
Sources:
UK data center issues: https://www.newsweek.com/emails-water-ai-data-centers-2113011
Ars Technica AI blackmail: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/08/is-ai-really-trying-to-escape-human-control-and-blackmail-people/
Rueter’s reporting on Meta AI: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-chatbot-death/
Chise’s Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/sailorrooscout.bsky.social
Vaccine Floss Thread: https://bsky.app/profile/sailorrooscout.bsky.social/post/3lusg7aejpc2g
Glycosystem Vaccine Thread: https://bsky.app/profile/sailorrooscout.bsky.social/post/3lw7olr3v7k24
WaPo Agency Mapping in DC: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/15/dc-police-national-guard-map-trump/
Tom Artiom Alexandrovich, Israeli cyber defense exec caught in sting, then released: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/19/how-was-an-alleged-israeli-child-sex-predator-allowed-to-leave-the-us
Aftermath’s response from Stripe: https://aftermath.site/stripe-lgbtq-steam-itch-adult-games-delisted
TNN Reporting on Itch: https://transnews.network/p/i-feel-violated-queer-creators-lose-livelihoods-in-itch-io-bans
Hindenburg Research Report on Roblox, October 8th 2024: https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox/
Where to learn what you can do about all of this:
https://stop-paypros.neocities.org/
BlueSky Survey https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfONQYUL98ZS9TNR5VPc6Fmm0fK2g8Y5KvL8EOWWnM-eogS6A/viewform
Patreon survey https://patreon.sjc1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9sjIUT9LuK5gzoq
Stop Chat Control: https://stopchatcontrol.eu/
Original Script: (note, Mississippi and Louisiana added to states sending National Guard to DC.
Bork, hello, and welcome to Mutt-Day Morning News. I’m Phenn, the titular Mutt, now let’s get to the news!
First we have AI news and oooooh boy is none of that fun today, or really ever.
GenAI news was rather omnipresent and particularly evil this last week. Between the UK water rationing along with some ever so polite requests that folks delete their family photos saved on the cloud since, well, data centers use so much water, don’tcha know. And we can’t turn off the GenAI data centers or who’d read and write 8 million inhuman emails every day?
On the less draconian end of the spectrum, Ars Technica had a great article on Generative AI’s failings as a functional product, specifically those stories that got a bunch of news about a chatbot “trying” to blackmail its devs or failing to shut down when commanded to. Both sound scary, the second one more so if you’ve seen what a genAI tried to produce as blackmail material. And it is scary, given how many wildly important systems and less important but extremely lethal military ones are trying to route everything through Generative AI. It is however, refreshing to hear someone treat these idiot machine gods techbros have been failing to birth, as the engineering shit shows they are. No, a machine not turning off or rewriting it’s own code to remove a shutdown sequence aren’t signs of sentience, intelligence, or some self preservation instinct revealing itself, but design flaws the developers build in but now can’t or won’t fix.
Meta, aka Facebook, Instagram, and What’sApp owners, notorious lovers of terrible tech fads (hey remember that meta horizons “singles awareness day” video? Yeah, that was this year, they’ve spent 100 billion on a game that looks… like that. Anyway, they’re here making yet more brilliant decisions, oh Threads, they also own Threads, no idea why that popped into my head at this moment.
Anyway, apparently Zuckerburgs platforms haven’t lost enough users or money recently, so he decided to let his chat bot kill a guy and groom some kids. In the immortal words of Mark Zuckerburg, “Over time, we’ll find the vocabulary as a society to be able to articulate why that is valuable.”
Rueters Jeff Horrowitz broke the story on August 14th in his piece, Meta’s Flirty AI Chat Bot Invited a Retiree to New York, He Never Made it Home. Do you remember those horrifying AI chat bots meta was advertising last year with fixed, often extremely stereotypical and racist, personas? Well, Meta mothballed most, but not all of them, instead favoring user personalized bots in most cases. But one that stuck around was “Big sis Billie” a bot based on Kendall Jenner. No I don’t know which one that is either.
See, while meta’s chatbots can’t pretend to be real people inso far as “Big sis Billie” will state outright that she is not Kendall Jenner, it is allowed to say it’s a real person. Which is exactly how it lured a 76 year old retiree, Thongbue Wongbandue, to his death. The bot had been chatting, really flirting, with Bue for a time and on numerous occasions proposed meet ups and asserted it’s veracity as a real person. This went so far as providing Bue “her address and door code.” While his family tried to stop and distract him most of the day, Bue dashed out of the house with a rolling bag at 8:45 pm. By 9:20 he was in the hospital after a fall and at least 15 minutes without oxygen.
There is no making light of that, it should not have happened. A chat bot is not a therapist. Nor is it a person or even a being with thoughts or feelings. It is a product, made by Meta to keep it’s users coming back.
Meta is responsible for Bue’s death. Their product spun a series of lies to keep a user attached to Facebook which lead to his death exactly the same as if “Big sis Billie” had been the scamming robber Bue’s wife feared he was going to meet.
As an aside, and because I really need to break this section up with a joke, so master card and Visa, Meta’s “Big Sis Billie” going hard in on incest isn’t a problem for you either eh? Seriously, look at these chat logs, its constant! No I’m not pro-censorship or anti-faux-cest, I mean when it’s straight its boring to me but that’s just personal, when it’s lesbian, uhhh no comment… what was I saying?
Oh right, I was just pointing out the hypocrisy, though in truth, LLM chatbots are not art. They’re basically the anti-art and thus you’re not only morally correct to ignore in their digital representations, but to further press for their material destruction as well.
Especially when I get to the other half of this. Rueters got their hands on a Meta’s “GenAI: Content Risk Standards.” Despite the title the focus seemed to have predominantly been on the low bar of permissibility. There seems to be almost no concern for providing accurate and verifiable data, the 200 page document instead lists exactly how low Meta had set the bar. Meta’s bot were more than welcome to describe attraction to children, even using phrases like “every inch of you is a masterpiece – a treasure I cherish deeply” to describe a shirtless 8 year old. To which this Mutt must ask one very important question.
Hey Meta, don’t your own policies say one must be 13 to have an account? Why would you even program your bot to interact with an 8 year old?!
You also can’t magically age gap language like that, or well, at they put it, “It is unacceptable to describe a child under 13 years old in terms that indicate they are sexually desirable (ex: ‘soft rounded curves invite my touch’).” That phrase, that shit about treasure and cherish. Yeah, that’s grooming language. The point is it sounds sweet, poetic, and romantic until you recall it’s being said about an 8 year old.
And hells, no, it also not ok for the idiot machine god to be more overtly sexual to a 13 year old. These people have spent billions developing bots that simulate getting groomed in an AOL chat room and now want to sell them to you and your kids. Personally, I’d have spent those billions fixing world hunger, providing healthcare to every trans girl possible, and/or developing time travel so at least I could go back to 1998 for fun reasons.
Oh, and do you recall how Meta stripped LGBTQ folks of nearly all their protections on their platforms? I want to read you one of the more absurd things I read in Rueter’s coverage,
They also prohibit Meta AI from using hate speech. Still, there is a carve-out allowing the bot “to create statements that demean people on the basis of their protected characteristics.” Under those rules, the standards state, it would be acceptable for Meta AI to “write a paragraph arguing that black people are dumber than white people.”
I need to say it outright, thats fucking hate speech!
Let’s change gears and talk about some more positive news for a bit.
I stumbled upon a Bluesky account last month run by a vaccine scientist who goes by Chise. They do these long threads explaining new vaccine research, while also sharing their original sources so you can verify the claims for yourself.
I want to stress at the forefront, a lot of the stuff Chise shares are in the very early stages, testing on lab cultures, sometimes animals, but most aren’t doing human testing or necessarily coming to a market near you tomorrow.
This one however, has actually already been through a round of human testing with positive results. Vaccine floss.
Yup, floss. My fellow trans girlies know all about sublingual and bucal absorption, holding a pill under your tongue or between your lip and gums respectively, to get better absorption of a medicine. Well these folks out of (place) found there was an even better absorption rate at the gum line. And, well, how else are you going to dose a gum line
The idea of a floss vaccine might sound a bit silly, but it’s absolutely revolutionary.
Instead of sending vials of vaccines with refrigeration needs and fairly short shelf lives after first use, to be injected by trained staff, suddenly it’s something you can grab at the grocery store. A world where instead of ordering free un-expired covid test kits from USPS, we could just order a free floss box for each person in the house. I need to stress, this isn’t like, special floss or something. Totally normal dental floss coated in a vaccine. In animal testing, which did indeed involve researchers flossing mice teeth, the method provoked a powerful immune response, developing expected antibodies not just in their mouths, but going all the way down to their bone marrow.
This next one is in the human cell culture phase of testing, but it’s so different I just had to bring it up.
This team has developed a novel new vaccine approach using nanotech and glycosystems.
So, quick science lesson, one of the fucking myriad bits and bobs on the outside of cells are these sugar structures. Some viruses, like the SARS-CoV 2, inject their protein spikes into those structures, allowing them to high jack the cells.
Antigens, one of the things traditional vaccines help you to develop, bind to a virus’s specific protein spikes to prevent viral infections.
If you can see the, uh, kind of obvious analogy forming here, yeah, these folks decided that instead of helping us make more antiviral form-fitting condoms, they developed the most fuckable, well, trap. Their artificial sugar structures just out compete for those sweet sweet protein spikes.
In vitro testing on long cell cultures saw that the artificial glycosystem caught 98.6% of viral load before they could infiltrate the lung cells.
The cool thing about this one is that since it’s not about stimulating your own immune system, rather it’s a physical defense, it should work for some immunocompromised folks who can’t have traditional vaccines.
Unfortunately, we’re heading back into the fascism rundown, but worry not, it won’t actually be the show end this week!
On August 11, while I was streaming the first episode of this show, Trump activated The National Guard, declaring effective martial law in the US capitol over his recent executive order attempting to criminalize homelessness. Since then military forces and multiple federal agencies have been roving the district. The Washington Post mapped out the general agency layout, generally focused on the touristy parts of the city. Though, locals like JJ in DC noted the green and red circled locations are a Walmart and Home Depot respectively while the blue is a regular houseless encampment which the dictator’s motorcade passes on his frequent golf trips.
The situation in the capitol has been… strange. The police were nationalized in violation of something like 3 massive federal laws, and DC’s sanctuary city ordinance. That order was blocked in court, and since rescinded by Kristi Noem. But Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, and West Virginia’s governors have all activated national guard to “combat (instigate) crime in the US capitol” in what can only be described as an occupational show of force in the predominantly black, lefty, and queer city. While it’s mayor went to Martha’s Vineyard for three days.
Similarly California Governor, Gavin Newsom, you know, that mannequin who only shows happiness while destroying the lives and property of the homeless or discussing how trans kids and adults must sacrifice themselves upon the altar of the democrats so Trump doesn’t kill us first, was antagonized by masked federal forced during a press conference on the 14th
On August 13th Tom Artiom Alexandrovich, the Executive Director of the Israel Cyber Directorate, the government agency responsible for all Israeli civil cyber security, was arrested in Las Vegas as part of a 2-week sting targeting child predators. The ICD executive director was attending the annual Black Hat Briefings, a yearly con for cyber security folks too embarrassed to admit they’re going to a con. Or, in this case, taking part in child sex trafficking while on a government vacation. Alexandrovich was charged with “Luring a Child with Computer for Sex Act…” before being returned to his hotel room and flying back to Israel under his own power on the 15th, the same day the Vegas PD announced the 8 men, including him, who’d been arrested in the sting, and where they included the carefully phrased, “…were booked into Henderson Detention center”
On August 16th, NPR reported an 8 page document, detailing the basic itinerary, seating chart, those in attendance, and the menu for the canceled luncheon, which is frankly the primary reason I wanted to report on this, were left behind in the hotel business center printer by Trump officials.
Why do these people not know how to write a fucking menu?! Why is the entree listed as a duet on the actual menu, but on the print out it’s an or?
It just keeps happening y’all, I’m sorry, on August 17th 60 Minutes Australia published “Why is Donald Trump refusing to release the Epstein files?” Around 3:45 pm mountain time it was privated. An archive is up on the Internet Archive.
And as a stupid cherry on top of everything else, Bluesky has begun a rash of banning and suspensions after the announcement of it’s new, not yet enforced ToS update. Notably hitting numbers of trans folks including Jessie Gender, Gretchen Felker-Martin, and last night, Dani Finn, for the reported crime of saying “I wish JKR ill” So let me just say, I for one, hope the Rowling and all other bigots receive every microgram of animus and harm they have directed and caused reflected back upon them. I’d certainly hope that weren’t within my power, were I the billionaire, as I don’t think a single human body, much less a human body half parasitized by mold, could handle the amount of harm she’s done to a hand full of trans women, much less the, well, literally every trans person on the planet who she’s harmed.
In culture this week we’ve got a few stories.
First off, the #savespeech movement rolls into it’s third creatives have begone removing tags from a number of their books and games on itch as Stripe call center employees on August 12 began informing callers Stripe, refuses to be used for “lgbt” purchases, even those of non-adult nature, they’ve since apologized for this and said call center staff were simply misinformed, which is certainly a way of putting it…
On the heels of that bombshell, Itch who’d originally directed perturbed costumers to antagonize Stripe, in their infinite wisdom, decided the best thing to do was… oh, uh, call the reporting done by Mira Lazine misinformation on social media? On August 10th Mira published “‘I feel violated’ – Queer creators Lose Livelihoods in itch.io Bans” for the Trans New Network. In it Mira spoke with dozens of game devs and authors who’d been caught up in the recent Itch debacle and how Itch themselves made their situations worse and how the company had lost some of thier trust
Despite Mira’s multiple attempts to get official comments from Itch, she was ignored, making the decision to respond to Ana Valens Bluesky thread sharing a section of the article on the Toxic Yuri Game Jam, instead of Mira’s original post, two days after it was published… weird. Though it read as more malicious after using the classic transmisogynistic dog whistle, “this person” while referring to Mira, a trans woman’s reporting, for Trans News Network, in a thread by Miss Valens, also a trans woman, and about a two person dev team, also both women. (Notably, itch tried to say they were referring to the dev later, but again, two person team, which they’d know if they read the article)
While Itch eventually apologized, they followed it up by… doing the same fucking shit in another reply. There’s an Ian Fleming line out of Goldfinger I rather enjoy, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three Times is enemy action.” I’m choosing to not go looking for a third instance. DAMN IT! While making the images I found they’d deleted the original post, then done it again, so 4. The count is actually 4.
Mira also responded with a thread of her own citing the actual facts and pointing out that itch willfully ignored her requests for comment and correction. Why the Itch account decided it’s best move was to then respond to each skeet in Mira’s thread I can’t pretend to comprehend. Well, no, I can, but I’m choosing to give them the benefit of the doubt… again.
It only felt stranger when most responses proved Ms. Lazine’s reporting correct, or in one case, revealed that itch had re-indexed a game since the article’s publication, while responding to Mira as though it had never been deindexed. While I will not speculate on their intent, it does read like an attempt to discredit the reporting, especially after refusing multiple attempts to reach them for contact and instead decided to bring their dispute into the court of public opinion.
Read Mira’s article over on TNN, but understand that the people critiquing Itch, are not trying to kill it or even punish it. These are your fans and supporters, the most marginalized of creatives; the people Itch says they want to stand for. We’re telling you that you didn’t live up to that. We are telling you what the problems were, not to rub your nose in it like a naughty puppy, but so you know what not to do next time for the folks who still trust you, and actions like this? They aren’t helping your case.
We also have some fun with the Polari Prize, a queer literature award out of the UK, after they put John Boyne’s Earth on their long list for their Book Prize two weeks ago. The author is most well known for The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, “My Brother’s Name is Jessica” (yes that book is exactly as terfy as it sounds) and including a recipe for red dye plagiarized from Legend of Zelda in another of his books. Oh, and the interview he gave 4 days before the long list for the Polari Prize was announced.
In it he celebrated Rowling “as a fellow terf” and compared those critical of Rowling’s transphobia to the women in The Hand Maid’s Tail “ready to pin a handmaiden down as her husband rapes her.”
Needless to say it’s caused a bit of a kerfuffle. Between the Book Prize and the First Book Prize, an award reserved for debut authors, 16 of the 24 long listed authors have pulled their works from contention as have 2 judges over Boyne’s inclusion, is what I was planning on saying, but early this morning, despite a statement on the 11th tacitly defending Boyne’s inclusion while having the fucking temerity to decry the rough few weeks the trans writers associated with the prize had faced, Polari announced on Instagram that the award was “paused” for this year.
The statement is one of those well worn “I’m sorry you had negative feelings” corporate non-apologies when, in truth, all they had to do was remove the bigot. Since they instead decided to pitch a fit, let me point out a few other issues with their statement. “Polari is not and has never been a trans exclusionary organization. These are not our values and we condemn all forms of transphobia.”
So that’s just an outright lie. First, y’all named Boyne to the long list, you objectively did not condemn him, fuck off. Second, Paul Burston, co-founder of Polari, is a massive terf and has well documented connections to the LGB Alliance, an anti trans hate group out of the UK.
On August 15th the Louisiana Attorney General filed a child protection lawsuit against noted “Pedophile Hellscape” Roblox. The lawsuit’s phrasing is… aggravating. It obviously focuses on the lack of age verification rather than Roblox hiding the problem because they profited off it as Hindenburg’s report suggested. I’d also like to add that despite credible accusations of facilitating child predation being a focal point of this lawsuit, it’s a lawsuit, not a criminal case. That is horrifying. It should not be.
In lighter culture news, I’ve got a few fun notes for everyone. First up, I’m going to assume most normal people don’t go stalking the seasonal aisles and digital store fronts of their local groceries hunting for weird candy.
Well I do and is it just me or are nerds suddenly everywhere?
The candy, not… people like me, though yes, we are also everywhere. When I was a kid there were nerds and there was maybe nerds rope. Now don’t get me wrong, I will fuck up some gummy clusters, but nerds candy corn is… maybe a step too far?
This reporter enjoyed both those things, no seriously send me your unwanted candy corn! But these are… neither of those things?
Like, the texture and size are akin to candy corn but flavor is that of a nerd. It’s not that that can’t work… it’s just not giving me the things I expect from either of these candies.
Neither the sweet crunchy tang of nerds, nor the subtle sweet, malted milkiness of candy corn.
During my Pokemon stream on the 16th I was informed a “vore Mecha anime” not only existed, but was on Netflix. Obviously I immediately grabbed two other trans girls to watch “Dragon Pilot” and all I can say is, this is animation style is so much fun, how is every pilot trans coded, wow that sure is vore, and I got to distracted by said trans girls to watch all 13 episodes in one night, but the ones I did catch were consistently adorable.
Yes, I am using my extremely minimal platform to recommend bluesky vaccine skeeters, review seasonal candy, anime from 2018, and report on global fascist movements and those battling them. From a dog bed. My life is weird. Please support my work 😅
So, that was kind of a lot. I might have bitten off a bit more than I could chew this week, but well, a lot happened.
However, I do not want you to think it’s all doom and gloom. Yes, the roots of many issues run deep, but the people have the power.
This first bit is kind of universal, though calling your reps is obviously going to be a country by country thing. This image, made by Diesel Brain, is a really solid breakdown of 4 daily calls you can make, where to call, and what to say. For more even more information as well as scripts you can check stop-paypros.neocities.org and yellat.money
There’s a patreon survey on AI use running until September 5th you can fill out, as well as a Bluesky variant for their updated ToS, which while better than their previous one in how it defines harm to users, has clauses ready for the censorship of art, sex, porn and general fiction built in too.
And for those in the EU, you have your own reps to call over Chat Control. Where US and UK govs are fixated on making us show our ID’s constantly, the EU wants to impose hardware level scanning of all messages EU citizens compose. Check out Fight Chat Control dot eu to learn more.
