Amber Sparks

😢

Sigh

It sure does!

The more I see people normalize AI use for shit like this, the more I feel like an alien among humans, or a human among aliens I guess. I feel so isolated, so disillusioned and sad - our species had this incredible opportunity to transcend, and we’re trading it away for help writing a grocery list

I’m just gonna say right now that when I die, if anyone uses AI to write my obituary I will fucking haunt them forever

Mario and Zelda are still the most popular Nintendo series, yep - and they’re *sort* of about saving the princesses but a lot of times the princesses are main characters too, and you have to save the kingdom from the great evil (usually Gannon and Bowser)

I'm shocked when a glitzy author quote turns out to be authentic.

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?...A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

Aseel smiling with a fluffy cat and looking healthy

Both Aseel and the cat looking much much thinner

Aseel has lost her account her but she wanted to share this picture of her with her cat a Lisa few weeks ago and this week. She is just looking to have enough money to be able to eat. Her family has a PayPal which is quicker ( tiny.cc/hbcuzz ) and a GoFundMe (gofund.me/54db81e4 )

If not there should be

I’m rooting for him to be the most beautiful butterfly so badly

I feel for him, I do, it’s like being the last kid to fall asleep at the slumber party but also throw in that the other kids will become goo as they sleep

Omg there’s ONE guy who just will not chrysalis up and he just keeps nosing all the other chrysalises like “hey friends, friends wake up, please come out, why am I all alone, I don’t want to be too” and it’s KILLING ME

!!!!

We’re raising caterpillars/butterflies again this summer and right now the caterpillars are all in their chrysalises and this is the part that existentially freaks me out the most because they are ALL TURNING TO GOO AND YET RETAINING THEIR MEMORIES JFC

Would you marry someone for their health insurance? : It's Been a Minute Many people feel that finding a lifelong partner can require a good bit of luck...but can the same be said for lifelong healthcare? Brittany is joined by Maris Kreizman, author of I Want to Burn This ...

There's an essay in I Want to Burn This Place Down called "I Found Love (and Health Insurance) Because I Got Lucky." I am so glad I got to talk to @bmluse.bsky.social about it! www.npr.org/2025/07/30/1...

60,000 Gazans have been killed. 18,500 were children. These are their names. Palestinian children have been killed at a rate of more than one per hour since the war began.

Palestinian children have been killed at a rate of more than one child per hour during Israel’s war in Gaza.

Read the full list of known names of children killed in the war: wapo.st/4o4Tc3k

Yes! Exactly yes the pressure to make people fix it comes from that clarity

I think this is why people were so mad at Ms Rachel - she made it so clear, so easy to understand: if you care about children, then you have to care about all children. A scary message for those whose entire aim is obfuscation

Treaties and shit are complicated. The aftereffects of colonialism and World War I, complicated. Mass murder of civilians, including a generation of children? Not complicated.

It’s insane that some people are still trying to attribute the mass starvation of an entire country to “it’s just complicated in the region.” That’s the refuge of cowards. Geopolitics is always complicated. Moral clarity in the face of genocide is - or should be - a simple ask

FOR JOHN CLARE Kind of empty in the way it sees everything, the earth gets to its feet and salutes the sky. More of a success at it this time than most others it is. The feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone's mind. Then there is no telling how many there are. They grace everything—bush and tree—to take the roisterer': mind off his caroling— so it's like a smooth switch back. To what was aired in their previous conniption fit. There is so much to be seen everywhere that it's like not getting used to it, only there is so much it never feels new, never any different. You are standing looking at that building and you cannot take it all in, certain details are already hazy and the mind boggles. What will it all be like in five years' time when you try to remember? Will there have been boards in between the grass part and the edge of the street? As long as that couple is stopping to look in that window over there we cannot go. We feel like they have to tell us we can, but they never look our way and they are already gone, gone far into the future-the night of time. If we could look at a photograph of it and say there they are, they never really stopped but there they are. There is so much to be said, and on the surface of it very little gets said.

There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like. Being immersed in the details of rock and field and slope— letting them come to you for once, and then meeting them halfway would be so much easier—if they took an ingenuous pride in being in one's blood. Alas, we perceive them if at all as those things that were meant to be put aside-costumes of the supporting actors or voice trilling at the end of a narrow enclosed street. You can do nothing with them. Not even offer to pay. It is possible that finally, like coming to the end of a long, barely perceptible rise, there is mutual cohesion and interaction. The whole scene is fixed in your mind, the music all present, as though you could see each note as well as hear it. I say this because

there is an uneasiness in things just now. Waiting for something to be over before you are forced to notice it. The pollarded trees scarcely bucking the wind—and yet it's keen, it makes you fall over. Clabbered sky. Seasons that pass with a rush. After all it's their time too-nothing says they aren't to make something of it. As for Jenny Wren, she cares, hopping about on her little twig like she was tryin' to tell us somethin', but that's just it, she couldn't even if she wanted to-dumb bird. But the others-and they in some way must know too-it would never occur to them to want to, even if they could take the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon. So their comment is: "No comment." Meanwhile the whole history of probabilities is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.

Happy birthday to John Ashbery, whose poetry opened a tiny weird window in me that I’ve never wanted to close again. This is “For John Clare,” my favorite of all of his poems.

I can’t even remember my best self

Haha yeah I have also looked into that and no. But I did have an amazing co-worker last book launch who MADE me a book cake and it was so good!

God yes - people used to have blogs just to find the five other people with their niche little interest! It was like making zines online, or trading tapes

Don’t know what you’re talking about, ten 4 good buddy

Noooooooooo

Sharon I bloody died Sharon. Sharon they sent me to bloody heaven. Where are the bloody flames Sharon. Sharon it’s all bloody choir music up here Sharon. Sharon for fucks sake all the white is bloody blinding me up here Sharon

She’s so pathetically desperate to be Jackie

Omg I love this so much

Oooh that sounds interesting