Love this autumnal/equinoctial framing

Personal hobbyhorse, but thinking about AI in publishing is really making me want criticism to go harder on discussing the actual style & substance of books. If we just talk about plot & vibes, we're leaving the door totally open, & missing out on the good stuff besides. "It's just words on a page."

Ils étaient mi-cerf mi-escargot, et re mi-cerf derrière

⚠️ Border wall contractors plan to remove thousands of sacred saguaros (ha:ṣañ) on sovereign O'odham land starting Monday — Indigenous People's Day. Tadai Me:i Camp calls supporters to join in prayer and protest on the Tohono O’odham Nation.

"bully crumples after being hit at all" is such an interesting story, i wonder if there are any analogous ones that are already popular that would make doing something like this everywhere seem intuitive

Please help our favorite brick-and-mortar indie bookstore in all the land own the property it lives on!

Somebody has to do it to protect the rest of us. And that's me

A positive feedback loop, for a change, in which we claw back more of our capacity for independent thought. Pie in the sky I know

My hope here is that the cognitive tax is of the same order as that which we've already been paying increasingly over time to enshittification, and that maybe in the acuity of AI's harm lies enough external motivation to push us past using our brains to overcome AI into doing so in other ways

It's me

Does the extruded narrative product numb us, smooth our brains into mush, even if we're engaging with it specifically and only to identify and reject its inherent awfulness? Or is it possible to get better at appreciating art by better learning how to distinguish it from crap?

So now I want a study, like eg that one about test scores for Chinese high school kids using AI, only this one is on the long-term change in the cognitive abilities of first readers using no AI at all to identify art and reject slop

And if banning genAI from the arts doesn't happen anytime soon, then the solution is to use our human brains

Me: Let me pause in this recitation of The Hound of the Baskervilles to lecture briefly on the terminology for varieties of hat in Victorian England. My kid: Dad just read the story

yeah, same

Shop quoted me $780 to replace a busted tail light on my Bolt EV, so I bought a used one for $80 and installed it myself! I believe I am now owed one Traditional Masculinity Membership Card, gimme please