reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 05/10/2026[the first time Raymond Carver put down the pen for his short story just as his deeply flawed character experiences the crest of a sure-to-be ephemeral personal growth epicycle] yooooo... 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 02/10/2026short-form video isn't an attention span nuke because of context switching. the mechanism is this: platform rewards time spent, regardless of quality creators make clickbait, unfulfilled promise of future payoff viewers adapt by distrusting commitment in general causal proof is X, a year ago 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 26/09/2026the profession of critic needs a term limit. It's one of the few where quality peaks around the 10th year and then falls steadily. You can't enjoy the 3000th novel or 5000th movie. It's too many and their inevitable bitterness is justified. 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 25/09/2026looking at the NYT 100 TV shows vs books >2000. I've watched at least a season of 17 of the shows, but feel like I wasted my time with about 14 of them. Contrast with the book list where the ratio flips. 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 22/09/2026at long last we have created the man who can live on bread alone from the classic dystopian bible verse 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 21/09/2026can't tell if i'm becoming more sensitive or if the internet is becoming more psychically disturbing 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 20/09/2026"what that means" .. honestly i had no idea why means can't be conjugated to 3rd p. singular 001
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 17/09/2026tender is the night is valis but without having to spell it out 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 14/09/2026the divided house can stand, as a treat 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 10/09/2026what happened to the millions of magazine readers of gnostic political unveiling narratives (DFW, Joan Didion, Taibbi, HsT, Vidal)? Did the internalize the "fake news" narrative then and change their mind? or was their a downmarket compositional change of the magazine-reading class 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 09/09/2026After the OpenAI incident, I reread That Alien Message by Yudkowsky from 2008. He is a truly terrible writer, which I was I haven't read or listened to him for ten years, but the text itself did permanently change my perspective. He deserves credit for presaging ">10% chance of annihilation" 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 01/09/2026people who would never eat a microwave dinner yet ingest their worldview from a digital trough 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 31/08/2026the 3 fingers german guy was seeded into memespace to get users to tag training data for violations of common sense 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 28/08/2026"patriots in control" is such a great, succinct phrase which can describe situations throughout human history. Is there really no precedent? entryists / fifth column / "one of us" feel lacking in some way. 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 26/08/2026the snake is a natural cartoon animal in that, when it eats a big thing, its body contorts to the shape of that thing. le petit prince speaks on this 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 25/08/2026it's a crime how bad the top three microtweeting platforms are. The court ruling forbidding export of the social graph or building a trillian for social media doomed the medium 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 12/08/2026__ 2: __ Boogaloo is dispositive. i've never heard a funny person say it or found a person who said it to be funny 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 12/08/2026Odyssey discourse suffered from the same problem as the movie itself: a cerebral yet headless morass replacing any concerns of the body. How can you adapt this book without a single bath? without a closeup of a thickly woven robe? without a sincerely celebrated feast? without a postponed dawn? 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 07/08/2026We truly live in an age of abundance. What a panoply of social media options we have! There's the one that is 60% generation ragebait 40% gender ragebait. Then the one that's 70% gender ragebait 30% ethnic ragebait. And if you are sick of that, you can go to the economic-poltical ragebait platform. 010
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 01/08/2026history forgets him, but certainly there was a guy telling everyone that bread is the oven's killer app 010
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 29/07/2026aspiring man of letters complains of being trapped in "Elo hell". Believes his witticisms fall on blind eyes, but of course epistolic Elo is holistic-- what about listening? Weaving together the relationship fabric? Forging a new language? Where is the fuel of all good letters? a well-lived life? 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 21/07/2026if you went to your annual town fair and a kid walked up to every adult saying "what's on your mind?" would you be able to come up with a japanese RPG NPC fastball? Mine might be "Overgrown brush has been choking off the trails lately. But you can still get around if know know what you're doing." 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 19/07/2026guy who is indifferent to drinks. stops at a convenience store and grabs whatever is closest: orange juice, dr. pepper, monster, "i just needed some liquid" 001
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 17/07/2026funny how common it is in american lit for a sensitive character to enter a diner, pick up on a weird dynamic between regulars and the waitress, and have it ruin their mood for like 50 pages 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 15/07/2026ok, reading further. it turns out that, even though it sold millions, no one has ever read this book: paid critics, gearheads, hippies, philosophers. Everyone (correctly) skims through the 100pp of amateur plato. It is nabokov/gogol, but selects for the wrong audience. same as Games People Play. 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 15/07/2026the attack on wojacks "guys playing with their dolls" instantly killed them in the developed world. But the criticism applies to a much broader swath of text-based posts which are harder to instantly pattern-match to the criticism 010
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 14/07/2026no one wants to admit the obvious truth: the skills of colonizing translate 1:1 with being a good football coach/scout. the test of this theory will be whether america becomes a soccer powerhouse only upon taking its pieces off the global chessboard 010
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 13/07/2026reading Zen+Art of Motorcycle Maintenance now. It's ok, but it pairs two traits which I really hate combined: an all-knowing philosophical voice and highly particular, of-its-time advice. 1950's-70s were notorious for this c.f. Kerouac, Vonnegut. Thoreau who inspired them was fine. Aurelius grates. 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 08/07/2026"plant" to mean spy or astroturfed artist a waste of the word. plant should refer to the innumerable people who bend towards the sun of social media attention metrics. Plant solves the fruitless malicious vs stupid dichotomy. Just a plant planting. better than clunky "audience capture" 010
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 06/07/2026i really hate that there are so many humiliation rituals. more humiliation should come from one-off spontaneous events 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 04/07/2026had completely forgotten the govt shut down for a month last november. there is too much news 010
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 30/06/2026i only let myself get so into soccer. it is self-harm to give oneself to a sport with that system of tie-breaking 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 27/06/2026current pope is a guardian columnist 020
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 27/06/2026so funny the french "sous les toits" controversy. A garret-dwelling army of Raskolnikovs demand The Right Thing be Done 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 25/06/2026- credibility of internet numbers (imo) - real: - somewhat real: - fudged: github stars borderline fraud: youtube views, movie ratings legit fraud: vertical video metrics, x likes, streamer metrics, spotify plays monopoly money: any popular reddit sub, facebook engagement, netflix viewership 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 21/06/2026there is a "dog that didn't bark" tell in Thiel and his ilk lamenting for decades the (potential) centralizing power of AI, but never lauding the leveling power of drones 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 21/06/2026is there a more poetic geopolitical term than iron curtain? 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 20/06/2026ai sends its inferents to the groupchats most surprising, original, with ideas and language hard to predict. Those places where it barely passes the turing test is called the front, ever expanding and snuffing out pockets of resistance. ai just wants to learn. the internet just wants to die. 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 18/06/2026many people are confusing fashion and taste. taste is closer to beauty. not solely a positional good. a good in itself. if more people develop taste the world gets and stays more pleasing. things don't go "out of taste" 010
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 17/06/2026i enjoy Ulysses content and the book itself, but if I hadn't read it, I think I would find the references obnoxious and suggestive of there being no "there" there. 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 15/06/20262x2 | talks mostly about: controversial (C) or safe (S) topics honestly (H) or deceptively (D) _ _ = what you get called, archetype (reward) SH = rube, yeoman (inner peace) CH = blunt, artist (elite prestige) SD = annoying, sophist (pays well) CD = edgy, podcaster (gets attention) 010
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 11/06/2026if an american wrote waugh's decline and fall, the hapless teacher would have simply developed hap, expanding and modernizing the human trafficking operation they stumbled into 010
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 07/06/2026you can stop wandering when things stay perpetually good, which is to say never 011
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 05/06/2026RL:DF - Freud, it came to me in a dream RL:OF - let's not wage war, just saw a dead hawk RL:AF - in so behaving, i can feel warming the heat of future hell RL:CF - in so having behaved, this shows me as the kind of person who already will have been selected for heaven 010
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 02/06/2026must great art change you? Could a piece of great art be simply beautiful and pleasing, but not life-changing? 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 01/06/2026the optimal amount of flattery by ai will be variable, cyclic, epicyclic. one day you will ask it a question and it will output stfu meatbag 010
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 01/06/2026is there anyone besides Virginie Efira who can portray the mundane yet deeply deranged archetype we see so often in life? Would seem like someone in Mike White's orbit should be able to, and yet.. 000
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 30/05/2026Of those who cannot see the world as it is, some create a vibrant fantasy of whimsey, absurdity, and playfulness. Others enter a low-energy haze of resentment. Thermodynamically, you don't go from the latter to the former, but many artists meander into the latter: gogol, bulgakov, george saunders 010
reply-token.bsky.social @reply-token.bsky.social · 30/05/2026rookie sheepdog here, you're gonna want to keep them near the cliff. keeps them on their toes. if one falls off iit will chasten the others 010
