Natasha Watts

I believe in you

New hobby:

Remaking article abstracts as movie trailers to expose hype and fearmongering.

Thank you to VoyageDenver for the feature about my new work conducting social media workshops for teenagers. If you work at a high school or library and would like me to come in and talk about the nuances of life online with the kids, don't hesitate to reach out. voyagedenver.com/interview/st...

You don't say!

i think we should bring dadaism back as a response to The Horrors. it made sense during world war one

Check out my conversation with @lawsonnuland.bsky.social about third spaces, digital culture, and Grand Theft Auto.

The next episode of Super Wall Jump is out! It's a banger!

Publishers Marketplace Deal Report for THE BONE BRIDES, by Marley Rose-Teter. Imprint: Page Street. Marley Rose-Teter's THE BONE BRIDES, pitched as Howl's Moving Castle by way of Guillermo del Toro, in which a girl must save her changeling girlfriend from a terrifying faerie realm before they both end up trapped in skins not their own, to Lauren Knowles at Page Street, for publication in fall 2026, by Hannah Andrade at Bradford Literary Agency (world English). The PM announcement is decorated with a border image showing a moody autumnal forest and some cute skeleton bunnies.

Well, the rabbit's out of the PM bag! I have a lot of thoughts on what it means at last to be fulfilling the dream I've nurtured since I was 7 years old, but for right now I'm afraid all I have for you is the mental image of me flapping in a circle while I shout, I'M GOING TO BE A PUBLISHED AUTHOR!!

You look at every culture that's ever existed and the running theme is everyone pretty much just wants to play/dance to music, make art, eat stewed meat wrapped in flat bread, and tell stories about the shapes we find in the stars. Somehow we turned that into wars and overtime and profit margins.

Pish posh! You would simply be much less....broadcasted

All the quibbling about each individual shooter every time it happens gets so tiresome. It is obviously a pattern, and it doesn't happen in any other similar country. It is systemic and cultural. And more than anything, it is the GUNS.

I think the word you're looking for is tooked

So glad we stole you from Florida way back when!

Obviously, the anthropological concept of ritual does not map perfectly onto mass shootings. They are not standardized. They are difficult to repeat. But they are increasingly routine in the United States. I fear our ability to combat their ritualistic power decreases every time nothing changes.

These aren't just lone wolves with mental health problems - their actions occur within a distinct social, political, and moral climate that did not exist 40 years ago. Importantly, their ritual cannot occur without the primary sacred object - the gun.

Shooters often associate with an online community that idolizes previous shooters, creates and circulates meaning (brainrot memes like those found on bullet casings), and reinforces values. They perform to one another, not to us. This is a rite of passage.

I've been thinking a lot this week about how mass shootings are almost becoming a ritual in America. There are symbolic objects like guns, memes, manifestos, livestreams. Importantly, the general population is not the intended audience.

It’s often hard to see how the quiet world of academic thought-making figures in the wider one, so dominated by the loud, self-righteous proclamations and vicious threats that characterize the moment. But having spent a lot of time this year reading new, beautiful books and…1/2

An ELSI for AI: Learning from genetics to govern algorithms In the United States, the summer of 2025 will be remembered as artificial intelligence’s (AI’s) cruel summer—a season when the unheeded risks and dangers of AI became undeniably clear. Recent months h...

🧵 The summer of 2025 has been AI's "cruel summer"—wrongful deaths, dangerous therapy chatbots, medical misinformation, facial recognition failures. These aren't isolated glitches but predictable harms from systems deployed without adequate oversight. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Oh no! Very sad to hear this.

This is the dream!

I looove Vulfpeck

Congratulations!

I've been back from living in London for about a month now. It's been mostly great to be home. But today I'm really missing it for some reason. I miss old buildings. I miss walking. I miss mediocre egg salad sandwich meal deals.

Big tech’s selective disclosure masks AI’s real climate impact Google claims to have disclosed new information proving its own efficiency. But it has hidden the bigger picture. Guess what: I’ve got the bigger picture for you right here in this big old po…

HEY friends: recently seen heaps of "disclosures" from AI companies of the energy cost per question you type into chatbots (most recently from Google)?

Presenting per-query 'efficiency' is part of big tech's efforts to hide its extremely real and happening-right-now climate impacts!

NEW POST -->>>

I'm thrilled to be getting more Jacquis on Dropout, too!

One of the great things about the more private, unisex stalls that are more common in Europe! Everyone is equally stressed 💕

My journey to the heart of the forgotten internet Slowly but surely, huge swaths of the internet are vanishing. But the artefacts of the early web are still out there, and they have lessons for the future.

Slowly but surely, huge swaths of the internet are vanishing. But the artefacts of the early web are still out there, and they have lessons for the future … BBC Future #AIslop

www.bbc.co.uk/future/artic...

this dc situation looks pretty horrible. i wish i had more to say except that autocracy is always mundane and petty and vicious and encourages you to look away and be safe. and you can live quite normally under it until you're a direct target