I also made two soundtrack albums during the month — an 80s style mad scientist album to go with Welcome to Wespirtech and an album that is all over the place and I love so much to go with Paw Prints Beyond the Moon.

So it’s been a busy month!

I don’t know what I think about blocklists, but I do know that my stance on AI is a specter that hangs over every interaction I have here — never knowing when someone might flip from nice to cruel. So I’m subscribing to your list.

I got added to a pro-AI blocklist early on here and was pretty devastated to see some of the people who I’d been quietly following for years elsewhere auto-block me here without my ever interacting with them at all. Some of those blocks still sting. It’s part of why I’ve never really settled here.

Yes, it's partly that there may be unanticipated upside. But I don't think we need to know how much. It's really that this falls under the broader category of artistic freedom / freedom of expression, and we have at this point a pretty well-established history of regretting it when we restrict that.

For the record, I would dissent on this.

There's a long history of anxiety around simulating humans. It's part of Plato's objection to writing, and it's why novel-reading has often been viewed as weakening young people's sense of reality.

But I don't think we really want laws against make-believe.

I’ve been making music basically full time for the last month. Though, I think I’m basically the only person listening to the half dozen albums I’ve made.

It’s super weird to me that not everyone is doing this… but then, most people don’t write novels either, so I just don’t get most people.

If you want to try it out, it's freely available here:

tracker.marylowd.com

It works on desktop and mobile. All you need to sign up/login is an email address to get the magic link.

This was partly to help @marylowd.bsky.social
track her words and partly an excuse to try out vibe coding.

I hate CSS and I don't know Javascript, so I couldn't have made this without AI. In a few hours, I had an initial prototype. Then I spent a few days iterating and creating version 2.

Oh geez, I forgot to include the title — it’s called “Excerpt from Purride and Purrejudice,” because of course it is.