Carmilla is much better than Dracula

My dad passed away and I miss him so much.

CAE 57 is now out, with the best things I read last month. This month's great pieces include: - @thelocal.to on a freelancer not being what she seemed - @rosalindadams.bsky.social on the godmother of weed in NY - @defaultfriend.bsky.social on how trad culture was never counterculture & more!

“The otherworld rewards skilled navigators and destroys the careless: Treasures turn to leaves; fairy wives eventually disappear back home; hubris causes travelers to be lost forever, or worse, to wither and die.” @defaultfriend.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2025/11/28/o...

“Seeing the internet as a fairyland — an otherworld with its own logic — isn’t about mystifying technology. It’s about seeing it sharply, as the strange and powerful environment it really is,” Katya Ungerman writes.

"With the internet, we cross a threshold into an otherworld. A.I. is like a creature from the otherworld who crosses into ours." I love this piece by @defaultfriend.bsky.social about the need for myth to survive the digital age.

Hello from Australia @defaultfriend.bsky.social (video in reply)

"Finally, Featured Author @defaultfriend.bsky.social makes the case that unlike the “trad” movement, the next real counterculture will refuse spectacle." Among this week's Fairer Disputations highlights. www.gq.com/story/trad-m...

Tune it : )

And we're LIVE! Psychedelia and Mormons. The theme is THE GREAT TRIP. open.substack.com/live-stream/...

😈❤️‍🔥🔥❤️‍🔥😈 ❤️🥵😍🥵❤️ 🔥😍😏😍🔥 ❤️🥵😍🥵❤️ 😈❤️‍🔥🔥❤️‍🔥😈

15ish minutes

Tonight at 7:30 CT. Streaming on X, Twitch, and default.blog

Reading this now, highly recommend so far… more thoughts when I finish!

This week's call-in show is a true homage to Bell: GHOST TO GHOST! default.blog/p/ghost-to-g...

18,000 people tuned in…

It's in 30... default.blog

Today, for paid subscribers, I explore whether the fact that we talk to our computers, listen to posts, and send endless voice memos matters in the conversation about the end of print culture. default.blog/p/from-post-...

Today, I wrote about taboos. default.blog/p/what-is-ta...

everything i've posted here is off the record

Today, I wrote about taboos. default.blog/p/what-is-ta...

Worth the read from @defaultfriend.bsky.social.

'The internet changes our sense of who we’re speaking to and how our words land. Until we confront that shift directly, we will keep circling the same argument about whether people “really mean it."' @defaultfriend.bsky.social for @politico.com www.politico.com/news/magazin...

New record traffic on Pre-History of an Encounter!

Today, I continue my techno-mystical adventure by diving head first out of my depth. What if LLMs are djinn? default.blog/p/llms-as-dj...

I expanded on the idea that the Internet is an otherworld and proposed some rules for how to navigate it: thespectator.com/topic/what-f...

Social media is not a substitute for news. I don't want to find out information from a Nextdoor push notification. thespectator.com/topic/life-c...

𝘋𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨, a letter recounting Substacks’s Stacked Debate: The Digital Sexual Revolution, hosted by @defaultfriend.bsky.social Written by Brianna Perry and illustrated by Blaise Larmee.

A very good point

I wrote about eugenics, looksmaxxing, and @wired.com's latest Looksmaxxing piece. default.blog/p/looksmaxxi...

TIL Victorian anti-masturbation beliefs is partially responsible for the invention and popularization of sex magick

;(

Come say hi at Pretty Good Fest!

Emotionally manipulative criticisms of social media are products not analysis. Like I'm sorry, the medium won if you're creating "digestible" clips of you crying about how Zoomers don't have community anymore because phone bad.

Hadn't seen this "Cartography of Generative AI" before. From Estampa, a collective of programmers, filmmakers and researchers working in the fields of audiovisual media and digital environments: cartography-of-generative-ai.net

Ask me anything on this thread about e-culture no matter how creepy, obscure, TMI, or out there. default.blog/p/ask-me-any...

tbh the success of the "let's shit on social media" cottage industry is a strong signal those pundits are looking backwards and not at the present

We're live. open.substack.com/live-stream/...

So excited for this one

Went deep on the first AI streaming music fraud case. Mike Smith, the defendant, had more ties to the industry than you'd think. He worked with Snoop Dogg and RZA. And his former business partner suspects he'd been up to sneaky stuff for a while: www.wired.com/story/ai-bot...

Tonight...

This is an excellent takedown of a lot of popular "phone bad" sentiment, which sits at the intersection of moral panic and nostalgia for the precise time in your life you were a carefree young person.

People on twitter keep dming me about puppygirls. I’ll write about the new paper! If you are or know a puppygirl who can chime in, please dm. Bedtime now though

Happy Bisexual Awareness Week. Have a fanfiction where Milo Yiannopoulos tries to take down Nick Fuentes in a devious plot involving two of Nick's most famous ex-boyfriends, Jaden McNeil and Patrick Casey archiveofourown.org/works/71224056

I contributed to this!

Should unlikable people be able to survive in society? Should they be able to thrive? It's rare for dreamers of better socities to confront those questions, but I think they are the ones that matter the most.

Pew Research Center has done many surveys about libraries. A consistent surprise to me is about 1 in 5 US adults have NEVER visited a public library. Here's a 2016 look at the never library crowd https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/09/09/a-portrait-of-those-who-have-never-been-to-libraries/

This is what I mean! Folks, I don’t bite! I’m happy to talk to anyone. Just drop me a line.

If you want to understand Internet-native nihilism, I recommend default.blog and this piece I did late last year: www.tabletmag.com/feature/adam...

"The internet is a parallel dimension layered over our reality. It’s a place where thoughts take on form, distortions masquerade as truths, and some people return damaged from staying too long. It’s not just a metaphor; it’s a way to understand why online life feels haunted".