Jessica

How many times, in how many contexts, in how many ways am I going to have to say that this is what "AI" does— what it fundamentally *is*— before it sinks in? That all Bullshit engines do is statistically correlate training data & inputs via their weights to produce outputs you are likely to accept…

You Must Read - Other Strangeness — merritt k You gotta

You Must Read www.otherstrangeness.com/2026/02/12/y...

I have spent my entire adult life being lectured by Republican politicians and conservative legal movement types about how important it is to preserve the sacred constitutional right to self-defense of *specifically this person* and then secret police murdered him in the street

Hilary Mantel—On Disability, Psychics, and Princess Diana Here, the bestselling author of WOLF HALL writes about everything from the Royal Family to the struggles of being chronically ill.

Few people have captured what it's like to live as a childless chronically ill woman, but Mantel does it beautifully.

bookriot.com/hilary-mante...

2026’s refresh rate is wild I go do some chores and like 14 major world events have happened

My Own Inner Elba Let me start by saying that the news is incredibly awful. I’m very aware of this, in the way you’re aware of, say, a ninety-seven degree day with one hundred...

i wrote about dissociation, reading as comfort, vice and self obliteration during times of horror, and also about reading exclusively about gay love for like. a year
buttondown.com/theswordandt...

stop giving guns to men who got all Cs in high school

read an Andrea Gibson poem so beautiful I may never recover

Dr Manhattan on Mars, looking at the stars and contemplating the cyclical nature of time.

didn’t reach my reading goal this year, but in my defense I had to read 3100 pages worth of textbook and also ball x pit exists

a collage of 15 different games included on the list, from silent hill f to elden ring nightreign

this was 2025, as told by 91 writers across the world

intothespine.com/2025/12/31/s...

A sign in a bookstore window says: Fuck social media Marry books Kill AI

From Ted Chiang's fb

Oddly, everything I need to know I learned from a restroom, not Roald Dahl

when you text your dad that you love him and he replies back “thanks”

Sad! At The Gynecologist

Those shoes really are super cute tho

It’s bad for your mental health to know stuff

What a great headline

you aren’t ‘making’ ‘art’ when you plug nonsense into AI and it spits out an ugly little picture fyi. that’s called ‘going on the computer’

have you considered lying down in the woods and giving up about it

“One thing that I try to make clear any time I talk about book bans is that it’s not about the books, it’s about deputizing bigots to do the ugly work of defunding all of our public institutions of learning,” Maggie Tokuda-Hall, a cofounder of Authors Against Book Bans, told me. “The current proliferation of AI that we see particularly in the library and education spaces would be possible at the speed and scale that is happening without the precedent of book bans leading into it. They are very comfortable bedfellows because once you have created a culture in which all expertise is denigrated and removed from the equation and considered nonessential, you create the circumstances in which AI can flourish.” Justin, a cohost of the podcast librarypunk, told me that the project of offloading cognitive capacity to AI continues apace: “Part of a fascist project to offload the work of thinking, especially the reflective kind of thinking that reading, study, and community engagement provide,” Justin said. “That kind of thinking cultivates empathy and challenges your assumptions. It's also something you have to practice. If we can offload that cognitive work, it's far too easy to become reflexive and hateful, while having a robot cheerleader telling you that you were right about everything all along.”

I talked to librarians, authors who have had their books banned, and groups that support them for this article. The glee with which schools, libraries, governments, and companies are replacing human workers and nuance with AI would not be possible w/o the successful war on schools and libraries

Hope over big money and small ideas

please, we are all 30 or 40 years old and we need to go to bed

I still managed to be surprised by the pure hatefulness of this administration. I shouldn’t be. And yet there seem to be new lows reached every day.

need suggestions of the best music/videos/audiobooks to listen to while falling asleep to drown out Thoughts™

spending my day coughing and sipping soup like a sickly victorian child, thanks covid

Work really hard and one day this can be you (followed by graffiti of a headstone that says “RIP worked really hard” on it

happy sunday, remember that you are completely expendable to your employer and that when you die they will forget you ever existed within weeks and easily replace you

thinking today about the guy I helped sign up for free GED classes while wearing a shirt with Trump’s face on it and the caption “daddy’s home,” and how the funding for those classes has now been completely cut thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill