This stuff has seeped into the soil like a crude oil spill. There is so much viral hyperbole about what these things are capable of that is often followed by a sobering and less sexy reality. What I mourn is the loss of trust, the alienation of people with institutional knowledge and the chaotic disruption of real communities by strangers walking in like a toddler with a Glock.

How the carceral system makes it almost too easy to empathize with an otherwise deeply unrelatable subject in Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's riveting meta-doc.

If you haven't watched You Can See Everything, don't read this, but if you have, I loved this.

Behind the high school students spearheading the movement, the larger battalions are beginning to grow restless. The fatal error of Macronism: because it corrupts everything, everything can work towards its overthrow.

I want to agree with this. I want to believe that this may Be something.

Without the seemingly irrational "smashing and looting riots" triggered by hunger among tens of thousands of ordinary people tearing open the breach ahead, the bourgeois representatives in parliament wouldn't even have been able to pass a single piece of paper. This chaotic, spontaneous riot forced the entire French society onto the irreversible path of the Great Revolution.

I have been observing the chaos in France from my American standpoint with some cautious optimism. I appreciated this piece putting it in a historical context.

It should not be a controversial statement to demand horror be horrifying, but because we live in a capitalist society that prioritizes comfort and sanitization over all else, that refuses to engage with material reality if it isn’t assuaging our delicate egos and imperialist sensibilities, we find discomfort immoral. It made me feel bad and therefore it is bad. The thing that made me feel bad should not do that but I want to be a part of it. I want the prestige, the money, to sit at the cool kid’s table and enjoy the infrastructure they built while I was mocking them.

I think the version that is out there of her is largely a version that people are putting together from the pieces they have. The first time I met her, I was like, “This is not how I thought she would be.”

I recently watched the superb YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING (2026) (letterboxd review here) and this is a wonderful companion piece. It's been said before and will be said again but there is really no one out here doing it like Nathan Fielder. A singular entity in the entertainment space. I think the only thing that approaches his body of work is like, Tim Heidecker/Gregg Turkington's On Cinema escapades.

A review of Nix/NixOS after using it on all my machines for three years. I'll cover what works, what doesn't, and why it's the first OS that's stuck with me.

I am so curious about NixOS. I have been doing okay with Ubuntu recently on my laptop but I simply love the smell of a new distro

I do not trust that all these big tech companies will remain solvent. They are currently making a multi-trillion-dollar infrastructural investment so that software devs don't have to write regex anymore, and so that regular people don't have to learn how to use excel formulae.

Laura is right

By analysing the dynamics that underlie HRT shortages, we can better understand the involvement of companies that control the pharmaceutical industry and offer a response that supports everyone’s right to have their healthcare needs met.

Good post about the intersection of healthcare and gender care.

State ownership of pharmaceutical production is ultimately necessary for it to be coordinated with the other aspects of healthcare. By establishing a program that progressively works towards separating the production and distribution of pharmaceuticals from profits and strengthening the power workers can have on these processes, a universal and guaranteed healthcare system can be developed in which pharmaceutical production is not owned by corporations, but by a workers’ party.

The classic pattern of new technology adoption is something like an S-curve: it starts out serving niche uses for users who need its particular combination of attributes, but as the technology gets more capable and less expensive, it gets adopted more broadly, until it reaches some particular peak. When a technology gets replaced, in turn, it tends to follow this pattern in reverse, getting removed from more and more uses but continuing to be used by users who value its particular combination of attributes.

As a big fan of the warm amber glow of early plasma screens (much like CRD, who made a good companion video for this article if you are like me), this was a fun read.

Today, IF is probably the best-preserved cross-section of video game history we have. Every game, from Zork through Infocom's latter-day output, through every game made with Inform from the 90s until today, is playable and runs on any machine you could name; there are almost as many ports of the z-machine as there are ports of Doom.

A fantastic historiography of interactive fiction from its inception to today, written by Bruno.

IF has long had an arms-length relationship to video games at large. It is a genre and a surrounding community that is insistently noncommercial, relentlessly critical-minded, insular (and at times, though not so much today, exclusionary). It's more like a (large, unruly, eccentric) extended family than anything that could be described as a "fandom."

Of course, as would be expected from the title and from... recent history, this also touches on the increasing and disgusting practice of the use of generative AI in interactive fiction. Not only does this feel creatively insulting, it feels particularly galling in a small, bespoke scene like intfic.

AI sells the promise that you don't even have to imagine something; that your vague impulses, half-formed ideas, or just the result of a delusional conversation with a machine can become productized for an audience of none. The effect has been immediately toxic to all sorts of institutions that take submissions from all comers—from literary magazines like Clarkesworld to open-source code hosting service Codeberg.

The good news is that people will always want to create things, and will always create the best things. Better things than AI will, and ever could.

US Marxist-Leninists have sought to manage the contradiction — between the goals of Marxism and the petit-bourgeois fear of workers power — not by confronting it, but by adopting a tailist strategy. [...] No revolution has ever succeeded in this way, but this strategy has the benefit of keeping the masses (and their troublesome contradictions) at a safe distance.

Peace in Ukraine can only happen if Ukraine and Russia agreed to coexist without war under the UN system. That does not mean a state of friendship between the two countries. It is impossible to imagine that any time soon and it would take a generation to restore any normality in relations.[...] Rather, it would mean an agreement by both sides to settle future disputes through dialogue and diplomacy — a situation that has not pertained in Ukraine since 2015.

Park Jee-hoon highlights various issues that caused and escalated the Ukraine crisis, including NATO expansion, neo-Nazism, and mistreatment of Russians and Russian speakers living in Ukraine.

A very exhaustive detailing of the current situation in Ukraine and how it relates to the material concerns both of Russia and Ukraine. It's a thorny subject in the broader West to talk about Ukraine without being completely engulfed in pro-Ukraine angled propaganda, so I found this a breath of fresh air.

I found myself in a conversation with a friend recently about the nature of Russian far-right agitation and how that relates to the broader Rightist upturn globally these days, and it is complex how the anticommunism of the United States (and the post-Soviet Russian state) has contributed to the building-up of right-wing forces within modern Russia. But that doesn't change the material realities at play here -- NATO/the EU threatens Russia militarily on the regular, and Ukraine's swing toward those powers (as part of a broader right-wing upswell in the region) makes it a very fragile situation for Russia's survival as a state.

I found this a very moving and rough watch, from a now-former cast member at Wizarding World at Universal's Hollywood theme park. It's the sort of thing that is hard to watch because it is a genuinely bad thing that she did, and also the machinery that pushed her into it (precarity, healthcare, financial, abuse, etc) are, in a sense, "bigger" than just JKR's insane shittiness.

The answer to this is simple: say what you mean. This will take, to some degree, courage. It may even take, I hesitate to say, some sacrifice. When I suggest this course of action to people, they inevitably say, “But it will cost me audience!” or “But what if I lose followers!” or “What if they demonetize me!” Okay, what if they do? What if they do.

Anil Dash is on the money with this one. God, I cannot stand "unalive" and "grape" and all these fucking childish neologisms and I will call you out on using them if I see you using them! Talk like a fucking adult!

And a reminder: Substack is not an email newsletter, and a Spotify show is not a podcast — they’ll be unaliving your distribution any day now.

And he's also right about this!!

It’s midnight and Natalie knows where her girlfriend is but she isn’t ready to admit it.

Beautiful violent horror short fiction about transness and dystopia.

A Simple Site, offering (relatively) Slow Servers hosted on Secondhand Systems in Spokane, Washington, with (hopefully) Satisfactory Service.

Low power VPSes for cheap, with a focus on privacy.

If a person commits serious harm at twenty, accepts responsibility for it, experiences consequences, spends ten years attempting to become someone who will never inflict that harm again, and reaches thirty only to discover that nothing done during those intervening years possesses any moral weight whatsoever, then “rehabilitation” has become a word describing a process whose successful completion we have defined as ontologically impossible – asymptotic, even.

As far as I'm concerned this is the definitive writing on The Jacob Geller situation and also as close as you're gonna get to a stance on it from me. I am very frustrated and disappointed both by the actions and history revealed (obviously) but also by the unbelievably cruel and simplistic response on the social media spheres about this. A simple-minded focus on punishment with no clear end other than punishment.

Sexual assault deserves moral condemnation, full stop. It does not follow that every behavior performed under the banner of condemning sexual assault is therefore morally admirable.

Looking at my software peers in 2026 I see fatigued faces, I see frustration, and I see a lot of people looking for a way out of an industry that seems poised on the brink of collapse. LLMs are being pushed on us at every turn, most people seem at best frustrated by them, and ultimately they seem to appeal most to people who see the production of software as a purely mechanical means to an end.

Agreed.