2025 Headline of the Year nominee (November)

if you could choose between learning to live with your emotions or burning the whole world down in an attempt to avoid them which would you pick?

it is very easy to get hoodwinked by grifters that's all I'm saying

I think a lot about how dangerous this all is from the point of view of someone who once went into a ghost hunting experience for tourists ironically, with the goal of live-blogging it afterwards, and ended up crying in the Victoria BC Maritime Museum because the dowsing rods didn't summon my mom

also, by the way

a lot of us process our grief by making art

they're trying to replace that process with AI from both directions

it's also an act of generous creative imagination

sometimes when I really need my mom, and she's not here, I have to think about like, okay when she was being her best self, what might she say or do in this situation? it's a story we tell ourselves that gives comfort and meaning. no app can do that

it's not just that I find it chilling to imagine Sam Altman wearing my dead mom's face in order to sell me ads

it's that the way we ACTUALLY keep our lost loved ones alive requires a myriad of human skills these assholes perpetually devalue, like storytelling and deep emotional connection

your AI algorithm (or worse, the underpaid and horribly treated remote worker in India somewhere you are forcing to pretend to be your AI algorithm) doesn't know my dead mom. *I* know my dead mom. *I* know what she'd say to me. learning to give *yourself* that guidance is what wisdom looks like