Xauri'EL Zwaan

History Teacher in 2097: "And then the head of state of the most economically, culturally, and geopolitically dominant nation on Earth posted an AI-generated video of himself dumping feces on the protesters from his official government jet"

Students: "Why do you guys always lie to us, there's […]

It may be true that good ways to increase your profit as a private enterprise include producing your goods more efficiently or increasing their quality so you can charge more, but those things take vision, effort, and expenditure on research. It's much easier and cheaper to just charge more for […]

I made an extremely dumb Pioneer deck built around artifact sacrifice that surprisingly enough actually does its thing. This isn't its final form, but here's what I've got so far:

3 Voltage Surge
4 Experimental Synthesizer
4 Weapons Manufacturing
4 Servo Schematic
4 Mephitic Draught
4 Lightless […]

Every once in a while I start getting huge slews of spam emails and I just think to myself "Hmm, the dark web must have put my email address on 50% off"

I sure hope all those people who were at the No Kings rallies don't think their job is over now

@jmjm NGL, I'm open to considering strange women lying in ponds distributing swords as a basis for a system of government right now

(want a free ebook? check out my pinned comments!)

Well, one day of Opportunity Knocks being on freebie and I already have more downloads of it than the entire rest of its lifetime as an indie release, including the other times I put it on freebie, so I must be doing something right, lol

They try hard enough already to beat the creative spark out of you and make everything bland and homogeneous. Don't let them convince you to give up your unique creativity to a machine, or to replace the creativity of others who could have created whatever slop you would have the machine spit […]

Using AI deprives you of the opportunity to have your own ideaa, and I ultimately just think that's sad. Typing "mickey mouse dressed like link from legend of zelda" into an artbot is not having an idea. The ideas are in the unique execution that only you could give that concept. Maybe there's a […]

The maddening thing is that facebook is where all my meatspace friends and family are, the people who theoretically are most likely to support and champion my work, and I have no idea how to get facebook to just show them my fucking posts. Even by paying them cash money! I would love to just […]

I hate facebook ad centre so much. There are a million settings that are not in any way self-explanatory and it is literally impossible to contact an actual person to just ask them a fucking question about what's going on. Why did my boosted post spend 0% of its budget and reach nobody? I just […]

To celebrate a reformat and the transition to Creative Commons as a rights management solution, my short ebook Opportunity Knocks is FREE for one week! Visit the link below and use coupon code 5NVYA to download! Tell your friends, tell your enemies, tell your cat! […]

When I slip up and refer to younger coworkers as "kids", I try to apologize and usually say "but in my defense, you are literally young enough to be my child"

"old" and "a child" are moving targets that increase in age as I do

I work with a lot of people in their early 20s and I really have to struggle not to refer to them as "kids". I try not to because I remember finding it very disrespectful when I was that age, but now I see the other side of it

At the cannabis store where I work, the official policy is that you ask for ID from "anyone who looks like they're under 30". At the age of 45, I find that "ID anyone who looks like a literal child" works as a pretty good benchmark for that

"But the rich don't just hoard that money, they invest it!" I see no good reason why we as a citizen body cannot democratically decide where to invest the vast majority of our society's resources, and no good reason why a few privileged assholes should be allowed to do that

Have you ever imagined what the world might be like if the US had just left Latin America alone. Like not just right now, not just in the 50s and 60s, I mean like forever

@Salty that's why Microsoft has to force-feed everyone the new OS, because if they weren't forced they would just keep using the one they already know. There are people who would still be using Windows 95 if they could

Just had a friend tell me about a discord D&D campaign he's in where other players (Including a professional writer and artist, no less!) are using AI to write their character backstories, and if that isn't just sad. You play an RPG to create and play a character with *your own* imagination. If […]

This new phone with its lack of a headphone jack continues to infuriate me. Managing the little usb/aux converter, putting it on and taking it off and making sure I have it when I leave the house, is intensely irritating. Beyond that, I've been having the first fraction of a second lopped off […]

(And though I love the idea of FLOSS and much as I hate to disappoint my fellow Mastadionians, you need to clear the usability bar before you will get any kind of mainstream uptake whatsoever. These companies have legions of people working hard every day to make the user experience as seamless […]

People: "If you use violence to defy the regime, it will only make them react violently"

Portland, OR: *defy the regime by wearing frog costumes and playing the clarinet*

The Regime: *reacts violently*

(this is not promotion of violence. Just sayin')

Hot take: the reason elderly boomers can't keep up with technology isn't just because they're cognitively declining. They can't keep up because technology today is objectively bad. It's overcomplicated, it does things without you asking it and doesn't do what you want when you want because […]

I know we Xennials have been furnishing an overabundance of "the new generation will never understand this" takes recently, but I feel the need to bear witness that there was a time period between the enshittification of every conceivable tech product and the necessity to understand coding to […]

The wacky thing about this is that I live in one of those northern places with really cold winters, and the weather is *markedly* different now than it was when I was younger. A lot of people around here say "the weather was always pretty crazy" but ... no. Not like this. We did not have […]

I for one welcome our new musical cyber-fungus overlords

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbP2DgDp890

I've got a new patron-only post up on Patreon! Want to influence the future of my release schedule? Pledges start at $1USD/month, which includes free copies of two short ebooks (with more to come!) […]

One of the things I genuinely loved about twitter was how well it trained you to be concise