I love em dashes. Even on a superficial level, the sleek, suave em dash feels superior to the homogenous barrage of dots and commas that otherwise constitute the punctuation department of the English language. I quite enjoy its visual audacity. It takes up the most space of all the punctuation marks. In the cyberworld of excess, it draws the eye... See more
Now the books lying all over the house, books I have started and will probably never finish, are signs not of fickleness but of a robust indifference to societal norms. Now I am no malingerer, but rather a champion of the erotics of art.
I want to write when I've had a strange thought on a train, or when I'm working something out and writing it down is the only way to do it. Without it needing to be content.
A lot of people have given up taking a chance on other people: that they might want to listen, that they might want to talk. But they have also given up taking a chance on themselves: that they might be able to navigate a conversation with someone new, cope with knockbacks and steer a path through any misunderstandings.
Staring into the abyss means thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs, or in favor of breaking up with your partner. It’s common to procrastinate on thinking hard about these things because it might require you to acknowledge that you were very wrong about something in the... See more
Showing off your portfolio of bespoke Claude Code projects and looking at others’ portfolios is a new social activity that has already acquired the quality of campy tedium we associate with people in the 70s subjecting each other to slide shows of unremarkable vacations. Or people in the 80s and 90s inflicting VHS home videos on each other.