A famous guy I was a fan of sent an email during the pandemic just being like "hey I like your show, great job" and it meant a ton to me. So ever since I've tried to reach out whenever I really like something and just tell the people who made it "I really like this, thanks for making it!"

I’m not Becoming The Joker, Britain is Becoming Gotham

It's weird to not only have lived through an information revolution but also now living through its undoing, all within less than a generation.

evergreen

This week, I withdrew from a speaking engagement at a public university because they sent me a list of prohibited “words & concepts.” I will not humor this censorship. It does a disservice to the stories I’m discussing & the audience, who deserve unfettered access to information & conversation.

My forthcoming book on K-pop fandom looks at how parasocial relationships in K-pop today can be viewed as asymmetrical relationships -- never entirely one-way, but in many cases, two-way, asymmetric-yet-mutual attachments 💞

Looks like LLMs are *very* vulnerable to attack via poetic allusion: "curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates (ASR), with some providers exceeding 90% ..." https://arxiv.org/html/2511.15304v1

reading slaughterhouse 5 for the first time and i was absolutely knocked senseless by this passage, which is so true and relevant that it feels like it was pulled from a history book

Hi Olivia, we usually never publish in anything other than Dutch (well, Flemish, as is mentioned in the comments). But... we did just create an English version of the piece! You can read (and share it) here: apache.be/2025/10/24/b...

From Kenneth Burke's "Rhetoric of Hitler's 'Battle'" (1941) "The yearning for unity is so great that people are always willing to meet you halfway if you will give it to them by fiat, by flat statement, regardless of the facts."

early 21st century americans were so modest that they would regularly censor their own feet in video and artistic depictions, and it was considered improper to expose your feet in public — dismissed with cries of "put those grippers away"

The Pornhub productivity suite took me out.

Fan Studies question: does anyone know the exact origin of the term "headcanon"? I know it comes from fic around 2007, but can't find anything more specific than that.

Sold a bunch of shares of ownership in my immortal soul recently, getting them packed up to ship now

The AI bubble is JK Rowling's fault

actually our AI programs are like people so its racist to say you don't like them. anyway would you like to buy one

shit what if i am cringe but also not free

The Overton window isn't real. It just seems like it is because the one-dimensional left/right political spectrum also isn't real. We imagine ideas as more or less extreme *based on* how viable they seem as political agendas then assume that there's something intrinsically similar about them

Who else thinks about the fact that algorithmically customized recommendation feeds create a pressure to self-censor your own media consumption to prevent your recommendations from becoming unflattering?

Didn’t know this! Do you know how many years I pined for jstor access! Yes I am a giant nerd who pines for academe leave me alone with my papers and books

If there’s one legitimate criticism of postmodernism it’s people who wear “this is my costume!” t-shirts on Halloween

Using humor as a distancing mechanism to deal w stress but it is very funny to me that in order to make the country appear "Strong" the Rs are blowing up our performative freedom of expression, which has been the cornerstone of our state propaganda for a century

Related: I think most condition and disease names are about what it messes up or how it creates a dysfunction or deficit, so it's funny to me that we use "nearsighted" and "farsighted". Like we don't say "every bone except your tibia is doing great" but we DO say "you can see close stuff"

I see the New Republic is using AI.

this is, hands down, the best video I've seen on men's influencer content and it's not close either

Hemophilia is kind of a mean name for a disease. "Hey check it out this guy *loves* bleeding." It's got "stop hitting yourself" energy

what a humiliating way for don jr. to find out his dad sends birthday cards.

📣 NEW -- In The Economist, discussing the privacy perils of AI agents and what AI companies and operating systems need to do--NOW--to protect Signal and much else! www.economist.com/by-invitatio...

Gotta read 9 giant books for an independent study this semester & thinking of the way I'm reading as an any% speedrun. "Oh I didn't understand that paragraph? Guess that's not one of the things I'm taking away from the text this time through"

Forced “unity” is brittle. It is not so much unity as it is one group imposing its will upon others. That is a source of division, not unity. True togetherness takes effort, understanding, compromise, and time. Brute force is pushing, and pushing inevitably gets pushed back. Basic social physics.

good morning, i wrote a manifesto about a new direction for game design / play possumcreek.medium.com/the-expressi...

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Heads up to any and all writers who are in my Bsky community!

" Peer Review Paranoia The system is built on trust between scholars. AI is undermining that." archive.is/Ql5au

Every person who says "of course there are some uses for LLMs" should be forced to immediately list what those uses are, taking into account that: a) they cannot be accurate and there is no way to make them accurate b) they have been repeatedly shown to make users dumber and worse at their jobs

The trans athlete thing is genuinely astonishing to a certain degree, because it's so nothing. It's about a tiny sliver of people whose impact on the sports they play in are negligible to nonexistent, and yet it is now the most successful intra-partisan wedge issue for no fucking reason

Notification in writing to Apple Inc. I have blocked all charges to my bank account originating from Apple and am disputing the past several months of charges, because I can't access my Apple account. This inability to access my account is also the reason this notice is being posted on Bluesky.

Sitcom beat: someone on the phone, mid conversation, rolls their eyes as, from the other room, a character yells at them, "This is a normal amount of wet for an orthodontist to be!"

Literally in bed playing mobile games and fantasizing about just not playing mobile games. Like "damn imagine what it'd be like to struggle with the experience of being alone with my thoughts instead of drowning it out with trivial exercises of meaningless cognition open menu start new game"

At some point, someone is going to offer you a trade: Get out of trouble, but give up your agency in the process. It's an incredibly dangerous trade but one most of us will make anyway. Let me explain: www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5Ky...

Okay. I just came back to this and you aren’t calling these efforts resegregation yet, you absolutely should be

"Saying that a writer writes objectively is like saying that a baker bakes sarcastically." —me, just now

Was trying to think of a metaphor for the pressure to cite a lot of scholars in your papers, so they'll be more likely to cite you back. Important context for this metaphor: I think excess citations create deep, debilitating problems for the quality of prose in a paper. Here's what I've got:

thinking about the concept of flâneurs in 19th century romantic/countercultural discussions and it literally means "guy who walks around." in 200 years people are gonna about the eccentric and bohemian "grass-touchers" who had some special and mysterious insight into the nature of society

This reminds me of @cstross.bsky.social characterization of our options as grey bureaucracy or grim meathook future

Literally the sales pitch for AI was you can just use natural language to talk to it instead of needing special skills to get good information. I realize they're just moving the goalposts because the technology doesn't work but they've moved them further away than what they're trying to replace.

My video about how LLMs are not search engines has led to many, MANY comments telling me that I should be using Perplexity. Some insisting that Perplexity does not hallucinate. Out of a list of 26 papers it just provided me (in "Research" mode) 4 were real. FOUR. 85% hallucination rate.

Can we stop saying "I like when my movies are realistic" and go back to saying "I like tragedies?"

You're not on the side of terrorizing trans people until we're eliminated from public life, right? Then let people be themselves, whether you get it or not, and stop blaming the victims for a problem that may well have come from too little radical energy in our activist ranks, not too much.