Used DuoLingo a couple of years ago and it was a bad way to learn a language; started again recently and it's like a real-time Black Mirror episode/maybe something devised by Roko's Basilisk. Theory: the defining trait of the internet is that it is where things get worse faster than anywhere else.

The "snapchatting you my war plans" thing takes me right back to that sweet, naive moment when we thought "grab 'em by the pussy" was going to rid us of this meddlesome priest. Let's not go back to hoping actions have consequences. It sucks too much when it turns out they don't, at all.

Hm. So. I have been giving this thing a shot, commenting some, posting some. The idea was to feel engaged with some communities I'm interested in (writers, shrinks, Texans...) It is not really doing that, the same way Twitter didn't. It just feels like talking while other people talk. I might bail!

Social media is/are doing an interesting job of tearing apart my understanding of my own interest in culture. Things that look like casual conversations I would have about actors or films look really fucking stupid when I see them as posts some bot is sharing with ten million people.

Now I have finished Lost and can go back to just being confused by actual life.

I don't retweet or whatever it's called here because it replicates the part of Twitter I found most gross and baffling, conversation as commodity and medium for instantly evaporating fame. If I made small talk IRL mostly by quoting people and shoving articles at people, who would want to talk to me?

There are certain books and movies where I can’t get past the title even if everyone loves them. Preistdaddy was one. Nightbitch is another. Maybe I just have some obscure phobia of compound words.

One of my happiest days as a Yid was discovering that "Elon" is not, as it had struck my ear, a Hebrew name.

Sometimes I hope I’ll drop dead at a Tex Mex place so friends and family will be able to say confidently “he was happy at the end” but I guess it would sort of suck for the staff and fellow diners.

People are posting about Xmas music and in my duties as The Jew Who Secretly Likes Christmas Music, I should remind the 1.5 people reading that you can fit the lyrics to Liz Phair's "Flower" to (I'm sorry!) the best Xmas song, Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas is You."

Basically impossible to see this headline and not picture Big Bird in a board room, maybe smoking, saying "fuck you, you fucking fuck. No deal."

I didn’t quite mean to see a minimalist reboot of an ALW musical of a film I love featuring member of a band called, yes, the Pussycat Dolls and yet there I was and above all else I want to know who could possibly imagine Norma Desmond uttering the words “we taught the world new ways to dream.”

Remembering at Smith/9th that you get a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty and also that one time at that view, a woman said to her grandkid in a Marge Simpson voice “she may be rusty, but she’s a great lady” and while I’m not much of a radical leftist, I have never hated my country in quite that way.

Indeed.

You know who probably hates his job? The conductor who gets dispatched to tell people “you are in the quiet car, where we maintain a library-like atmosphere.” I hope that guy knows that he is doing the lord’s work.

O nameless joy, the Quiet Car! O nameful joy, but just not very audibly so. Quiet car, I cannot hold thee close enough.

The great thing about The Maltese Falcon is it's so complicated it's essentially gibberish so you can leave it on and go make a cup of tea and you'll get back and everyone will still be fabulous and it will still be gibberish.

"Goodbye, Henrik. I have angered the gods." (exit line of a character in a dream just now in which I was lamenting my love life w/ my high school best friend. In a way, I blame the clam chowder from Central Market, which was delicious, but did not agree with me. Sleep of chowder produces monsters.)

I wonder if anyone's made a "starter pack" of Austin Writers (I found one of Kid Lit writers, which isn't me.) In All About Eve, when Eve says "champion to champion" Addison responds "you're stepping up in class" and I feel a bit like that when I call myself an Austin writer but I write. In Austin.

so I unsubscribed from NYT in order to hide from the news for a decade or two but still habitually click over to it and it for some reason shows me several headlines in Spanish and sometimes things strike me as funny in Spanish that wouldn't in English and I do not know why exactly

Not sure what I'm doing here. It wasn't the grand twitter exodus. I left twitter years ago because it was the worst. Probably adding: writers, people who talk about old movies, people who post pictures of their cats but not like ALL the time.

Ok, then! Excited to see my second publication since deciding to give it a go earlier this year--another little basically-memoir piece--in @librelit.bsky.social www.librelit.com/themagazine/...

A friend who isn't on here, Sarah Orman, wrote this terrific personal essay and I'm whatevering the....metaphorical...thing, the signal. www.bridge-chicago.org/magazine/how...

This issue of Screen Door Review (Literary Voices of the Queer South) contains my first published work, flash semi-memoir if we're inventing genres. I am thrilled/slightly nervous to have it out where the potentially bludgeonous gaze of strangers may fall crunchily upon it. www.screendoorreview.com

Once upon a time, or really several times, I was on Twitter, and hated everything about it.

I think I'm supposed to have one of these.