Matthew Phillion

I swear this is a Northeast suburb thing - the area is so progressive that garbage people will get really good at masking the worst of their opinions and then the mask will slip at a random get-together and it's like a jump scare and then you gotta stop talking to them ever again.

You'd think that by now every horrible thing that has happened would reveal if anyone you've known a long time has a really deeply held and kinda evil belief, but still, in 2025, something happens and someone I thought was a decent human will be like "yeah I don't think food is a human right"

What we lose when we surrender care to algorithms | Eric Reinhart A dangerous faith in AI is sweeping American healthcare – with consequences for the basis of society itself

“The problem is that when it is installed in a health sector that prizes efficiency, surveillance and profit extraction, AI becomes not a tool for care and community but simply another instrument for commodifying human life.”

Morning.

I remember falling in love with Rumours (and Fleetwood Mac in general) when I was like 15 or 16 and feeling like I was from another planet. This was 30+ years ago. Yeah, every generation loves Rumours. It's a perfect work of art.

I do also laugh that right before I bought this I saw a cottage near where I used to live in Galway for sale for $50k USD and joke that I wish I'd bought that instead, but that's too deep a dive into the life unlived.

(I won't pay this house off for another 17 years unless I get that big development deal for the Indestructibles I dream of, but I don't think any financial windfall would justify giving up a mortgage that doesn't risk my partner not being able to stay in the house if I die early.)

I got very lucky with timing, an unsustainably large amount of extra writing work at the same time the housing market was at its last reasonable state, and I sometimes joke that I will die in this house, but I'm not really joking. They truly do not want anyone to ever own a home again.

Ah, I see I'm now getting sponsored ads by people trying to get authors to opt out of the Anthropic lawsuit to "get even more money." I knew they were out there but holy shit man, a sponsored social media ad? Are they using the same marketing as HIMS?

Has someone truly lived unless they have a ridiculous black and white acting headshot from their early 20s?

And I thought I was cynical THEN.

Post you from a different era.
Late 90s. Headshot from... I think a performance of Into the Woods? I guess in a Dylan McKay era or something. I was usually more grunge than this back then but most photos of me before then were lost in a house fire.

The words "FIX YOUR HEARTS OR DIE" placed over David Lynch's face (a still from TWIN PEAKS THE RETURN).

I feel like we have the opportunity to turn David Lynch's quote into this moment's "Keep Calm and Carry On" and it's a far better rallying cry too.

(I know I'm in a bad mood when my archaic Boston accent comes out in text with a "nah dude/yah kid")

I really don't feel like sharing a clickbait article but really, it's never a serious take if someone asks "are we making too much [art]?" Nah dude, that's the thing about art, you just keep making it cos it brings you joy and none of us are so unique that nobody else likes what you're creating.

Click bait headline aside. The simple answer is: no. And the more complicated answer is: also no. AP as an art form is at an early stage, and for those of us toying with form/presentation in this bonkers medium, I’d welcome thousands more.

Make weird things and tell stories.

Cached US Kindle giveaway: 10 copies of The Uplift War (The Uplift Saga Book 3) by @davidbrinks.bsky.social, which I *have* and *have read* and *have enjoyed*, and in fact have given out before. This is my favorite of the Uplift books!

#KindleBookGiveaway

I'm supposed to lead a talk for writers about protecting their work with AI in January and I literally can't even write the pitch paragraph because some New Awful Nightmare Shit happens every day with it.

Remember when Spider-Man 2 for PS5 came out and people realized the NPCs on the street all had dialogue with each other that you could eavesdrop on and then players in. A. SPIDER-MAN. Game. Took time out of swinging above the city just to follow people around on the street and listen to them? 🤔

This Outer Worlds 2 clip was posted on Reddit with the note: "This tiny moment is my favorite in the entire game, a guard NPC is singing the radio songs to himself."

I worked on that mission so heard that clip 100x and it was never not funny to me. Thanks Andrew Kishino for the great performance!

And the man who masterminded those cuts is set to become the world's first trillionaire.

"World's first potential trillionaire has killed 600,000 people, including 400,000 children" is the only headline that anyone should ever read about Elon Musk

Uninstall Grammarly NOW. They've partnered with an AI company and actively scrape your writing to train its models.

Cached US Kindle giveaway: 6 copies of Feedback (Newsflesh Novels Book 4) by Mira Grant, whom most people know by her alter-ego @seananmcguire.bsky.social. I think we really want this book to sell a lot of copies.

#KindleBookGiveaway

They LITERALLY campaigned on making children go hungry as a political statement and they can't figure out why they lost.

There had to be some kind of emergency kill switch, yeah? The red one was cracking me up because it was fighting the way I, and I'm TERRIBLE at video games, usually look when trying to play a fighting game on the Playstation. Just throwing punches and knees at empty air til I fall over.

Part of me wonders if these are, like those bartender robots, being remote controlled instead of actually acting autonomously. There were those housekeeping robots that turned out to just be human-controlled to a while back. I worry about the exploitation potential. And I’d love robots to be cool.

I fully expected Blue to punch a spectator in the mouth.

Watching this, particularly when red face-plants, and imagining people wondering why their Amazon packages start to arrive smashed to bits as the company finds any way they can to not pay humans a living wage and decides to use something like these instead.

Critical Lit: Curse of Strahd 09 - Crypt Walk | Critical Lit

Curse of Strahd Deep Dive Episode 9: Crypt Walk. Castle Ravenloft Final Level: Exit here for Entombed Enemies, Plot Devices, Bat Guano, and Bridal Returns. Trust me, you don't want to talk to customer service.
critical-lit.simplecast.com/episodes/cri...