Tales from the Feed, 2026-2

January 2026

People allegedly liked my Cohost compilation posts at the time and I think it's good to share sometimes. Though since this isn't Cohost anymore, I'm slow at looking at my RSS feed (these ain't even all from my RSS feed), and I hate looking at bsky, there's probably just going to be way fewer/smaller posts on these. Oh well.

Please comment with anything else you think was good, I am going to naturally miss a ton of stuff that simply doesn't reach me

We all might turn to waste, once our lives end and some of us might end up in a cardboard box on a shelve somewhere in a few hundred years. The sad reality of life is that it ends eventually. But life itself is not defined by the waste you leave in your wake. It is the stories we tell each other. The evenings we spend talking in the kitchen, while preparing dinner. It's the kitchen cabinets with the strangely crooked doors. It's the Moments where we, together, imagine a world that isn't ruled by the Kings of Garbage.

In the game, we all have a phrase we are responsible for reminding the other players of throughout play. Mine was "All Wizards Are Men", and I was in charge of enforcing the masculinity of the wizards we were playing - reminding other players to play their characters with masculinity, that we are part of a patriarchy, and that what being a man in the patriarchy means is that you need to maintain your position within it, and that violence is a tool for maintaining your position. I would say that the game is not especially interested in the ways that masculinity can be a positive force.

Whenever I have my smartphone with me, I feel the urge. I feel the urge to pull it out, check it. Maybe someone sent me a message? Maybe I'm slightly bored right now, and want a distraction. Surely it won't hurt to just pull it out for a few moments? These thoughts were always there, always tugging at me. It's like The One Ring from Lord of the Rings, in that way. While it's with me, there's always some part of my brain that wants to pull it out, check in on it, use it.

But the rise of LLM slop threatens that harmony: we cannot extend our good faith and time into critiquing these games when there's so many of them. There's too much low quality crap and these LLM users don't care about this exercise; they just want to be treated the same like other artists who spent years honing their craft. They don't care about us, they care about them and only them.

And I don't mean good taste/bad taste. I mean you can't tell what it tastes like on your tongue anymore, you just know what the ingredients are and you know how to talk about the ingredients. And you can make a convincing, clear argument about what's happening. You can describe something that is happening. And it's not wrong, but it isn't driven by the thing that I think marked my criticism in the mid-2010s, which was, first step, How does it hit your tongue? What is it doing to me? How am I engaged in that way?

Everyone was talking about it. Everyone was buying Switches about it. We were all stuck at home, unable to visit each other, isolated, and struggling to adapt to our suddenly altered world, so we did what we'd been doing our whole lives. We escaped. We left our cluttered, suddenly-so-silent lives and escaped to a small island in the middle of an unspecified ocean that we were going to help noted entreprenuer Tom Nook develop into an escape for the people tired of their lives in cities and so on. We built our little camps, we got into debt to have a nicer house, and we visited each other.

Links are not poison. Links are literally the internet. The internet is links. If we lose that, we lose a little more control, a little more freedom, and everything gets a little more closed off.

It was strange to be presented with this depiction of oneself that was so confident and yet so wrong. I am not a paranormal investigator, nor do I make it my business to expose frauds. I've never been visited by the ghost of an artist, and I've never been moved by any paranormal experience to make a documentary about it. But the guy who emailed me, at least, was satisfied that this was me. For him, the ChatGPT record was enough.

PDA advertises itself as the "most" interactive dinner theater production. I ended up getting asked to participate in the show two separate times. The first time was silly, but not un-fun. I, my husband, and a third audience member had to run up to the edge of the stage and play a little game to compete against the other teams. (We lost.) The second time I was asked to participate, it was some kind of... gender-segregated march?

many have already observed that coding agents, which require constant attention and often generate low-quality code with (by design) random results, are a slot machine. they are loot boxes. they are gambling. you are constantly pulling the lever and hoping you get the SSR SaaS Passive Income product. you will not get this, but maybe you will. just one more prompt, one more pull, one more revision, one more go at being Absolutely Right.

I Think I Miss Sequels

When sequels come out (even for films and books), you can ignore the ones you hate and just stick to the original. With video games, the original is actually patched and changed forever by the creators. It's a different relationship to the art, one where you're nudged away from re-visiting how it used to be. The developers' process of iterations aren't chunked out into separate games, but all mixed together into the same game.

Because we all settle for the good-enough, the good-enough matters more than the excellent. This effect intensifies in any commercial, mass-audience field. In such fields, we must assume an easy majority of the audience lack taste and have no eye for craft. I say this without contempt: again, in most spheres I sit firmly in the part of the audience that lacks taste and has no eye for craft.

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