I enjoy attending indie comix and zine festivals and throwing money around everywhere and bringing home bulging sacks of weird little books that then sit in a growing pile of things I have not read. This is in some ways a worse situation than the traditional and time-honored pursuit of buying ordinary books and not reading them, because at least those look handsome on a bookshelf, spine-out. What to do with my hoard of stapled-and-folded treasures, which turn invisibly anonymous when squeezed...| Fogknife
On treating AI chatbots as the reflective surface of something vast and dark.| Fogknife
Last month, I wrote:| Fogknife
Make your subject-matter experts feel more invested in your work by giving them assertions to correct, long before your first draft.| Fogknife
Last month I asserted that I would not stand idly by and let harm come to my neighbors through the actions of the federal government. I am therefore compelled to demand that my neighbor Mahmoud Khalil be released from jail, where he sits accused of no crimes, and returned to his family in New York. The state can press charges against him from there, if they wish. I am motivated not just from a sense of basic fairness, but from concern for the ongoing health of the American Constitution, and a...| Fogknife
Janet Mills, the governor of my family’s home state of Maine, and governor Kathy Hochul, who leads my adopted home state of New York, are both showing resolve in the face of Trump’s attempts to meddle with state laws through extralegal coercion. I feel grimly proud of this personally resonant parallel, and I join both governors in standing up to a federal government that wasted no time in implementing a stance of bullying gangsterism to rule the nation.| Fogknife
The first part of this post contains no puzzle or story spoilers for “Type Help”, but does discuss the story’s genres and mood. I include a warning before mentioning deeper spoilers.| Fogknife
The band of semi-anonymous young software engineers doing Elon Musk’s bidding in Washington are soldiers recruited into a murderous stike team that is directly and violently assaulting the federal government of the United States. They must be stopped, immediately.| Fogknife
I will not stand aside and let my neighbors come to harm from a corrupted government.| Fogknife
Ten years ago this week I launched this blog, though it would take a bit longer to earn its title. I posted to it more or less weekly for the next seven years, until I became a full-time writer for Google and had to slow down. Three years after that, and five months after I left Google, I find that my taste for regular and frequent Fogknife posts hasn’t fully returned. I don’t see this as a problem.| Fogknife