Chris (they/them)

Being self-motivated makes me pretty resistant to external influences, but not fully immune. If people are negative enough, it can kill my drive to do things and I've been struggling against one such case of this recently, with my guild in Final Fantasy 14.

broken-words.com/2025/11/18/i...

I wrote this a week ago and while there's been a lot of big news since then, it really hasn't... accomplished anything yet. Nothing has changed and while it still might, I don't really expect the Senate Democrats to be the one driving it. They'd miss their holidays.

broken-words.com/2025/11/17/t...

This is a longshot, but if you can get a good grip on it and it's just too worn to rotate out of how tightily its in there AND the thing you're working on is mobile, freezing it for a while could help. Cold enough to shrink a tiny bit but not cold enough to freeze any liquids.

From the head, yeah.

Coring it should work, and I'd recommend starting a little smaller than you'd think you should go for safety.

If you're lucky and you can wedge the bit in there, you might be able to use that to loosen the screw without having to core the whole thing, too.

I am waiting "in line" for the opening of the queue to purchase Final Fantasy 14 Fan Fest tickets and I haven't felt this immediately anxious in a long time. I keep nervously sipping my coffee, regretting that choice, and then forgetting not to do that in less than five seconds.

I do not enjoy feeling like a font of endless negativity or complaining, but I'm also struggling to find a positive outlook these days. I mean, I wrote this a week ago and I'm already so much more exhausted and worn out than when I wrote it. It never lets up...

broken-words.com/2025/11/14/i...

Happy birthday!

I'm definitely not struggling to enjoy things as much as I did just a week ago. I'm also definitely not feeling my soul crumble as even my escapes fall vicitim to the "AI" bullshit cycle.

Maybe computers were a bad idea... Making anything "smart" sure was.

broken-words.com/2025/11/13/t...

Reminder: If you use generative AI for *any of your writing tasks* you are a Slopper not a writer and should be ashamed of yourself. The end.

In attempt to diversify my game time and to overcome my desire to backseat-drive a Let's Play I'm watching because inventory management is my passion, I've started playing Outward with a friend of mine and I'm really enjoying the inventory/backpack system.

broken-words.com/2025/11/12/f...

Should An ‘ARC Raiders’ Review Score Be Tanked Because The Game Uses AI? ARC Raiders had its Metascore knocked down by a new review that gave it an extremely low score due to its use of AI. Is that fair?

Yes, it should be. Call this behavior out and don’t support it. I was all in on this one until I learned this and now I won’t buy it.

I’ve seen a few folks go for the “if you simply must watch that new Harry Potter show just pirate it” and sorry. No. Just no. Just don’t watch it. At all. Ever. Break free of it. It’s time. You’ll be ok. I promise. I know it mattered to you as a kid. Find new things, it’s healthier. Just move on.

After a couple weeks of hard work, all that's left on my latest Giant Project in Final Fantasy 14 is the finishing touches, which means I'm turning my attention toward the next major patch in a month and preparing to start crafting as soon as it drops.

broken-words.com/2025/11/11/s...

I Want You to Understand Chicago Politics Chicago 2025-11-08 I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time. Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his employees were kidnapped that morning. A week later it happens again. An email arrives. Agents with guns have chased a teacher into the school where she works. They did not have a warrant. They dragged her away, ignoring her and her colleagues’ pleas to show proof of her documentation. That evening I stand a few feet from the parents of Rayito de Sol and listen to them describe, with anguish, how good Ms. Diana was to their children. What it is like to have strangers with guns traumatize your kids. For a teacher to hide a three-year-old child for fear they might be killed. How their relatives will no longer leave the house. I hear the pain and fury in their voices, and I wonder who will be next. Understand what it is to pray in Chicago. On September 19th, Reverend David Black, lead pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was praying outside the ICE detention center in Broadview when a DHS agent shot him in the head with pepper balls. Pepper balls are never supposed to be fired at the head because they can seriously injure, or even kill. “We could hear them laughing as they were shooting us from the roof,” Black recalled. He is not the only member of the clergy ICE has assaulted. Methodist pastor Hannah Kardon was violently arrested on October 17th, and Baptist pastor Michael Woolf was shot with pepper balls on November 1st. Understand what it is to sleep in Chicago. On the night of September 30th, federal agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter to execute a raid on an apartment building on the South Sho…

Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer.

He is a computer safety researcher.

And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine.

In under 1600 words.

aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

History repeats itself on grand and minute scales. The Democrats fold for zero gains, I survive a day on no sleep, and I find myself breaking just a little bit more every time I find myself feeling gratitude for how my past as built me to survive the present.

broken-words.com/2025/11/10/s...

lol, I was wondering

Extremely disappointing that @kotakudotcom.bsky.social would put out a MASSIVE, glowing review of Arc Raiders and not include a single mention of the game's use of AI voices for in-game callouts and emotes instead of actual human actors

ESPECIALLY given how Anti-AI they present themselves as

Excellent. Cool. Guess I know what I'm doing this weekend. Thanks!

As some who was in their 20s in the 2010s and just got punched in the heart, how well does this video represent the game? I've seen a lot of people talking about the game lately but not much about it beyond everyone liking it. Does this nail the vibe? Vibe adjacent?

I've been struggling with everything going on lately so I took some time off last week and spent a morning laboriously preparing a nice meal that I then proceeded to eat all weekend. It was nice. I wish I could do this every week.

broken-words.com/2025/11/07/t...

For some reason the media is not mentioning that the reason GTA6 is being delayed is they fired 40 staff over threats of unionization and now the rest of their staff are revolting

This story is infinitely more important than GTA getting delayed. Don't let me catch you moaning about waiting longer for a video game if you're not mad about why it happened.

sorry guys i accidentally deleted the spreadsheet with the first drafts of homophobic potato chip brands and it turns out it was somehow load bearing to the entire driving system and the only guy who knows how to fix it got fired in the union busting so

If you're wondering how this will go Square Enix handed off their mobile Octopath game to NetEase who immediately started using ChatGPT to translate everything resulting in text like this. When players complained they started asking fans to fix their translations in exchange for in-game currency

The future being pushed by both AI boosters and educational censors is one where access to information is tightly controlled. Children will not be allowed to read certain books or learn certain narratives. “Research” will be performed only through one of a select few artificial intelligence tools owned by AI giants which are uniformly aligned behind the Trump administration and which have gone to the ends of the earth to prevent their black box machines from spitting out “woke” answers lest they catch the ire of the administration. School boards and library boards, forced to comply with increasingly restrictive laws, funding cuts, and the threat of being defunded entirely, leap at the chance to be considered forward looking by embracing AI tools, or apply for grants from government groups like the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), which is increasingly giving out grants specifically to AI projects.

Once you start thinking of AI as a war on humanity, on human thought, on human inquiry, on human labor, on nuance and critical thinking, it slots in pretty seamlessly with the right wing ideological project, oligarchical political projects, big tech's political projects, etc

I just want to be able to go one day without being confronted with some way that so-called "AI" shit isn't actively ruining something in my life. It feels like such a small ask but it's still more than I can seem to ever hope to get at this point...

broken-words.com/2025/11/06/a...

I can't wait to see all of my mutuals that play Fortnite regularly to not touch the game for the entirety of the season in solidarity of all of their trans homies! It's so nice knowing so many people that aren't just allies when it's convenient for them! 🙂💖

Hint. Fucking. Hint.

All I know is that they had zero Palestinian or Muslim Americans at the DNC, but DID have Christian Zionists, cops, Republicans, and the Cheney family.

After a solid couple of weeks of effort (including time after this was written), I've finished most of the work involved in my Final Fantasy 14 crafting projects except for clicking the buttons to make the stuff and it's all going so much better than I expected.

broken-words.com/2025/11/05/a...