Them: You have to keep up with the latest trends to stay relevant! Me: I will wait, unmoving, unchanging, knowing I’ve been right the whole time.

Made a blog post! It has been awhile. rafinleybooks.com/2026/02/23/i...

Roses are redde Violettes are blue Sayinge that the adoption of a technologye ys inevitable Ys a way to trick you

I used to use detectors before realizing they are also basically LLMs and hallucinate answers just like any other LLM

Aagh, getting upset about these guys talking about Scots-Irish. So, ok—the Finleys. One showed Daniel Boone where to go. One hosted Jefferson. “Important” people with a list of achievements. THEY WERE FROM THE LOWLANDS, not members of a single “proud hearty clan.” That’s not what Scots-Irish means!

AI guys insisting on the inevitability of the tech are so irritating. every comparison they make is to something whose utility was immediately apparent. "it does things faster and we can fix its mistakes later and that'll be the job now" does not compare to "metronome that doesn't need winding"

Sometimes I get a little upset when I live in a collapsing dystopia for many years

sorry Pink Floyd, turns out that we needed education. a lot of it. all of the education, really

We have your backs. You're not alone.

It’s once again Girl Scout cookie season so it’s time for me remind everyone to please consider buying from NYC’s Girl Scout Troop 6000, which is entirely made up of girls living in NYC homeless shelters 🙏❤️

The talk to your friends app and the witness the horrors app being the same app is not great for the mental health is it

Gee, Universal Basic Income recoups more than it costs AND the recipients are happier and healthier. Hmmm. Where have I seen those results before? Oh yes, in every other goddam pilot study of UBI for more than a decade. Ireland joins Finland in at least making a start.

If BART stops running at 9, it will devastate my theater and make my commute impossible when I’m working on plays. Nightmare proposals.

Blueskyese and Xian share an obvious common root as both being Twitteric languages, the difference is that after the split Xian became a hybrid Twitteric/Channer-linkedin tongue, while Blueskyese changed less overall but did pick up some tumbleric and redditor loanwords

Finally managed to update my website a bit, mostly with the creation of pages to display my art and cards. I do intend to start posting more often, but [waves arms in a way that conveys chaos]. www.rafinleybooks.com

I think it's perfectly understandable that many people feel a deep sense of resentment and disenfranchisement for the time capitalism has stolen from them, but the answer is not to embrace capital's machine that pretends to show you an inner life you aren't having.

AI is not alive. It cannot translate human experiences. It cannot feel for you, and even if it could, it would only be that much clearer that its output is not something YOU made. It has no relation to you.

I dream of having enough stability in our culture that anyone who wants to can pursue the arts, but the meaning comes from that pursuit, from translating human experiences through skills acquired over time. Art is labor, but it isn't just some commodity that can be pulped and reconstituted.

What a dire timeline right now - even in romance. I'm going to write words about Harlequin killing the Historical line (a threat for the last decade) and now it's been announced that All About Romance, a 30-year old website is shutting down allaboutromance.com/its-been-a-g... #Romancelandia

The thing about saying that genAI will enable the marginalized to create art is that not only is it not true, literally just fucking look at art and music and writing, but it is saying that a handful of rich pedophiles should be allowed to control whether marginalized people can produce art.

You have to understand that these are fundamentally bad people with hatred in their hearts.

Hey let's go! Minneapolis organizers need dash cams so they can record and have a record of all of ICE's lies.

And how so many men are incapable of thinking of women as "people" at all. It's so weird and toxic.

And it’s not just those who think that, it’s also the effect—“lesser” things that a teacher might think, for example, to do with how girls & women are less likely to have successful writing careers, so he instead gave active, public support + an award to the boy who wrote almost as well as I did.

Our founders, though deeply flawed, understood that democracy requires an informed citizenry and a government accountable to it people. That’s why the press is the only profession protected by the Constitution. It’s also why autocrats and oligarchs seek to control and destroy it.

In less than a week the Kennedy Center has effectively closed and our local DC paper has been gutted, both by billionaires. I don’t think immigrants are our problem in this country.

HEY SO guess who has a story coming out in print this May in Disability in Dystopia? That's right, me! #CrippingDystopia

If Jeff Bezos could afford to spend $75 million on the Melania movie & $500 million for a yacht to sail off to his $55 million wedding to give his wife a $5 million ring, please don't tell me he needed to fire one-third of the Washington Post staff. Democracy dies in oligarchy.

I’ve most likely had a norovirus this week and good lord, the gurgling. The GURGLING.

Feels like every few months we lose another outlet covering books. It hurts authors, readers, publishers, journalists, everyone. And as social media gets worse and worse to do any kind of promo on, I wonder what the industry plan is. Ah, existential dread. Great.

If people laid off from The Post are wondering about maybe starting a Substack, last summer I wrote about why I wasn’t. www.pbump.net/o/the-power-...

I just got tear gassed along with thousands of union members, many of whom had their families with them. Federal agents at the ICE facility tear gassed children. We must abolish ICE, DHS, and we must have prosecutions. I expect to see enforcement of our city code prohibiting the use of tear gas.

Not to get political, but America is very pretty and has a lot of nice folks making cool things, and I think if we had a president who wasn’t actively trying to murder us, we could have a pretty good time

It’s pretty fucking wild that the DOJ is releasing files that include accusations that the President of the United States raped underage girls, to distract from the fact that the DOJ is covering up murders of US citizens by their own government.

My entire social existence is summed up in these two flags

Missed all the Gen X discourse yesterday, but those of us who are actually in the generation have explained this ad nauseam. We had the ultimate worst bullies and mean kids in our generation growing up, and they were never, EVER checked because adults didn't GAF. Also, Black Gen X is Democratic.

“Once you’ve mastered the craft, being a writer is just a matter of venturing out into the desolate, windswept nuclear winter that is the modern publishing landscape and having the courage to shout, ‘Does anyone have time to give this a quick read?’”

Living in the trump era makes me feel very connected to my ancestors, who lived as serfs under a succession of insane moron god kings

Yeah, this got me. Fortunately I became suspicious before the fraudulent charge went through, and I’ve since closed the card. But as a first time project creator, I didn’t know to be *entirely* suspicious instead of ashamed and quick to try to fix…a nonexistent problem.

Kat's a terrific editor. Whatever you're working on, she can help make it better.

Liam himself is five goddamned years old and should be at home with an adult he trusts right now no matter who his parents are. It would not matter if they were literal criminal masterminds, Liam Ramos is a baby and babies do not belong in prison.

brass solidarity band performing “stand by me” in the streets of whittier next to alex pretti’s memorial. the crowd started chanting “the people united will never be defeated” so they incorporated it into the song. i love minneapolis

Your periodic reminder to subscribe to the “things are terrible but…” feed. Helps to break up the timeline when things get particularly grim. bsky.app/profile/did:...

Signal will never message you like this. If you get a message like this, SOMEONE IS TRYING TO HACK YOUR SIGNAL. DO NOT GIVE THEM THAT CODE.

My friend Sara posted this about the superb care her father received from with Alex Pretti Absolutely heartbreaking

Free with purchase, while supplies last: whistles. On a key chain, so you’ll always have it with you. In case you suddenly need it. Perhaps you’ll be coaching youth sports. Or directing traffic. I’m sure there are other reasons. They’re pretty loud!

what are people stress eating?

It was literally founded on rebellion. Against tyranny. This isn’t hard.