i hate it when people talk about eva stratt as this cold and unfeeling character because she's anything but. she was willing to make the hard decisions, she was willing to become the scapegoat, she was willing to betray and sacrifice for humanity. she was willing to do all of that knowing that she won't even get a thanks, uncertain if it was even going to work, but she tried regardless. yes, she did sacrifice grace but she also sacrificed herself. her only goal was to save humanity and she put everything on the line to achieve that. she had no personal stakes in this, she knew that by the time the beetles got back she would be old so she had to live those almost three decades under the dimming sun anyway, what's a few more years to her? she also didn't have children or a family to do this for. she attempted the impossible because her love for humanity was so great that she couldn't just sit back and watch as it gets destroyed.
I love that four different people on my feed scheduled this joyous person to reblog by 8am on June 1. I look forward to seeing this a dozen more times today.
I know a lot of people who have invested heavily in expensive gear so that they can consume their morning coffee the “right” way. This isn’t a new phenomenon. For hundreds of years, people have gone to great lengths to enjoy their stimulants properly.
There were elaborate tea chests (lockable because the tea inside was so valuable):
Kickstarting “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI”
My next book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, will be out in about a month – and (once again) Amazon's monopoly audiobook platform refuses to carry it, and so (once again) I'm pre-selling the audio, ebook and print edition in a Kickstarter campaign that proves that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them:
Reverse Centaur is a book about the realpolitik and the political economy of AI, written by a tech critic (me!) who is sick to the back teeth of hearing about AI. Central to the book's thesis:
The AI bubble is part of a lineage of pump-and-dump swindles created by monopolists who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow even after they've saturated their markets:
The workers who say that their jobs are worse and the things they produce are much worse as a result of AI are correct; but the workers who say their work is much better thanks to AI are also correct. This only seems like a riddle until you understand that the most important fact about any technology (including AI) isn't what it does, but who it does it for and who it does it to:
When a boss fires a worker and gives their jobs to an AI, it usually means that they don't care if that job is done well, which is why customer service jobs are being handed over to AI:
Bosses also love firing coders and replacing them with AI – first, because bosses are really angry about the decades when tech workers were in short supply and bosses had to pretend to like them, and second, because if you're selling AI as a way to replace workers, what better way to convince a potential customer than to fire the workers your own company depends upon? (All that said, the coders who are excited about their new AI coding tools have a point – when a worker is in charge of their work and thus when and how they use a tool, we should defer to their own experience):
Artists are also a favorite target of AI bosses, which is weird, because the wages of creative workers add up to a total that rounds to zero when compared with the unimaginably large sums AI companies will have to take in if they are to pay back the trillions they've spent to date (let alone the trillions more they're proposing to spend in the near term). All of this raises a foundational question: can AI "art" ever be good? (Spoiler: probably not):
Media companies say they have the answer to the AI art question: they'll create (or assert) a copyright that lets them control AI training. This is an incredibly transparent ruse: media companies are artists' class enemies, and if we get a new right to control AI training, our bosses will demand that we sign it away to them as part of their non-negotiable, one-sided standard contracts:
For creative workers, the answer to these new would-be tech bosses isn't asserting a new right that will be expropriated by the old media bosses who've been ripping us off forever. Our salvation lies in leaning into the US Copyright Office's interpretation that holds that AI-generated works can't be copyrighted, because copyright is only for human creations. That means that the only way our bosses can get a copyright over the things they want to sell is to pay us to make them:
Many of the seemingly urgent AI questions that people won't shut up about are distractions, because they assume that AI will lastingly infiltrate every part of our society. In reality, the AI companies are losing unimaginable amounts and have no path to profitability:
Despite AI's manifest unsuitability to do jobs that should exist, bosses keep firing people and replacing them with chatbots that do their jobs very badly. This allows bosses to indulge their solipsistic fantasy of a world without people, in which customers, workers and suppliers are statistical artifacts and bosses are unitary geniuses who simply imagine a product or service and then it is delivered, without any ego-shattering confrontations with people who know how to do things:
This is catastrophic, and not just for the parties involved today. The AI bubble will pop, and when it does, the chatbots that do these jobs (badly) will be switched off. Meanwhile, the workers those chatbots replaced will have retrained, retired, or become "discouraged." No one will be around to do those (necessary) jobs. AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our civilization and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:
The real existential AI threat isn't that we'll accidentally teach the word-guessing program so many words that it awakens and becomes a vengeful god. The real risk is that when the bubble bursts we'll indulge the ruling class's reflex to austerity, and that this will continue the decades of mass economic traumatization that makes people into easy marks for fascists:
But when the AI bubble pops, that won't be the end of AI – it will be the end of the bubble. When the AI bubble pops, we'll have mountains of GPUs at fire-sale prices, skilled workers liberated from the imperative to help their bosses promote their stock swindle, and open source models that will yield tremendous dividends to anyone who sets out to optimize them:
As you can see from the links above, I developed The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI in the same way that I developed Enshittification: in public, through a series of essays, which I periodically synthesized into major, widely shared speeches:
It's a method that's let me produce a string of international bestsellers, published by some of the largest publishers in the world. Nevertheless, Amazon refuses to carry my audiobooks:
That's because I have an iron-clad requirement that my work be sold in open formats, without the "digital rights management" that blocks you from moving the books you bought on Amazon to someone else's apps. Digital rights management (DRM) enjoys bizarre legal protections so that it's a felony for me to give you the tools you need to move the books I wrote out of an Amazon app and into a competitor's app:
What's more, these outrageous legal rights extend around the world, because the US Trade Representative spent decades bullying America's trading partners into passing laws that criminalize the act of fixing the defects in America's tech exports, which is why farmers can't fix their John Deere tractors, hospitals can't fix their Medtronic ventilators, and no one can sell you an app that stops Apple and Google from spying on your phone:
Amazon's Audible controls 90% (!) of the audiobook market, and they will not sell any book unless they can permanently lock it to their platform. That means that every time a writer sells you an audiobook on Audible, they create a "switching cost" that stops you from leaving Audible for a competitor. Not only is this fundamentally unjust, it's also terrible for creators: if our audiences can't leave Amazon, then we can't leave Amazon either, which means Amazon can (and does!) steal millions of dollars from writers without losing our business:
Which is where these Kickstarter campaigns come in. Whenever I sell a new book to a publisher, I arrange to make my own independent audiobook for it, which I sell everywhere except the platforms that have mandatory DRM: Audible, Apple and Audiobooks.com. There are some very good DRM-free audiobook stores, notably Libro.fm and Downpour.com (Google Play also sells audiobooks without DRM). But most people have never heard of these, so it wasn't until I started pre-selling my audiobooks on Kickstarter that I was able to make my stubborn refusal to sell out to Audible into a paying proposition. My agent tells me that if I'd sold out to Audible, I'd have paid off my mortgage and I'd be able to give my kid a full ride through a fancy US college. I don't make that kind of money from these Kickstarters, but they do very well nevertheless, and they're a critical part of my family's finances.
You can pre-order print copies of Reverse Centaur, as well as DRM-free ebooks and audiobooks (narrated by me!) for Reverse Centaur and Enshittification. Normally, I offer custom-signed copies of the print books, but Enshittification was so successful that I haven't stopped touring it and I'm in a new city every couple of days, so there's no way I can reliably get into a warehouse to sign the latest batch of orders. Instead, I'll be posting the contact details for every bookstore that's hosting me on my tours (US in June, UK in September) and you can order signed copies from them, which I'll personalize after my events there so they can ship them to you.
I've also decided to raise money for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), the nonprofit I've worked at for nearly 25 years. EFF is the oldest, best and most effective tech rights organization in the world, and its mission has only gotten more important over the years. EFF's outreach folks are offering a special membership package for backers of the Kickstarter, which includes an EFF hat and stickers, as well as an Enshittification pin and two Enshittification stickers:
It came out great (as always!), thanks to the terrific direction of Gabrielle De Cuir of Skyboat Media and editing from Wryneck Studios' John Taylor Williams. Gabrielle's directed all my audiobooks since 2017, and John's been mastering my podcasts since 2006 (!!), so we constitute a very well-oiled machine.
Working out my ideas in public allows me to produce my Pluralistic newsletter, and with it, a large volume of free, high-quality work that's licensed under a generous Creative Commons license that lets anyone reproduce, translate, redistribute and even sell my articles. If you've enjoyed that work, I hope you'll consider backing the campaign! Selling books is how I pay the bills and keep the lights on, and as ever, this is the only way you can get a major publisher's ebooks and audiobooks with no DRM and no "terms of service." These are truly ebooks and audiobooks that you own. You can sell them, give them away, or lend them out – so long as you don't violate copyright law, we're all cool:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
A few years ago, when I was living in the housing co-op and looking for a quick cookie recipe, I came across a blog post for something called “Norwegian Christmas butter squares.” I’d never found anything like it before: it created rich, buttery and chewy cookies, like a vastly superior version of the holiday sugar cookies I’d eaten growing up. About a year ago I went looking for the recipe again, and failed to find it. The blog had been taken down, and it sent me into momentary panic.
Luckily, I remembered enough to find it on the Wayback Machine, and quickly copied it into a file that I’ve saved ever since. I probably make these cookies about once a month, and they last about five days around my voracious husband - they’re fantastic with a cup of bitter coffee or tea. I’m skeptical that there is something distinctively Norwegian about these cookies, but they do seem like the perfect thing to eat on a cold day.
Norwegian Christmas Butter Squares
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 egg
1 cup sugar
2 cups flour
1 tsp vanilla
½ tsp salt
Turbinado/ Raw Sugar for dusting
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Chill a 9x13″ baking pan in the freezer. Do not grease the pan.
Using a mixer, blend the butter, egg, sugar, and salt together until it is creamy. Add the flour and vanilla and mix using your hands until the mixture holds together in large clumps. If it seems overly soft, add a little extra flour.
Using your hands, press the dough out onto the chilled and ungreased baking sheet until it is even and ¼ inch thick. Dust the top of the cookies evenly with raw sugar.
Bake at 400 degrees until the edges turn a golden brown, about 12-15 minutes. Remove from the oven. Let cool for about five minutes before cutting the cooked dough into squares. Remove the squares from the warm pan using a spatula.
It basically makes the platonic ideal of commercial sugar cookies, only in bar form. When I give them to people (which I do a lot, because this is one of those simple recipes where the results seem very impressive), I just tell them they’re sugar cookie bars.
The OP version of this has become my go-to cookie for basically all things and I have a whole cohort of friends and colleagues who would murder each other to get them. Haven’t tried any add ons yet, since the base recipe is SO GOOD.
I’ve reblogged this before and I’m reblogging it again because I’m about to make it again tomorrow and I wanted to add my own tale of just how amazingly delicious it. it was SO incredibly simple to bake and with an extra dusting of brown sugar on top and served warm and soft they gift you with the taste of the nectar of the gods when paired with a small glass of milk. this image is from when I first made them a couple years ago:
Needed to make a dessert in a hurry to bring to Thanksgiving, and this recipe worked excellently. I did not have the right kind of sugar for the topping, so instead I used a packet of lemonade powder, which gave it a nice citrusy zing.
Making these for myself as a reward for doing the no fun thing I’ve been putting off. Added half a lemon of lemon juice and a bit more flour. Let’s see how it turns out. >:3
a feel like the new generation of fanfic readers NEED to understand that clicking on a fic (interaction) does nothing. ao3 has no algorithm. your private discord discussions of fic do not reach the authors. if you do not actively engage with writers they will stop posting. this isn’t social media this is community.
This is - legitimately - my favourite delivery of Shakespeare I have EVER seen (and I have seen some good-ass productions yo, in the Globe Theatre itself even). Like seriously, even though the words are unchanged, he’s stripped away ALL of the archaic pretense and assumed grandeur of ~presenting the bard~ that makes even the most wildly talented of actors and innovative of productions inherently inaccessible to a modern audience. Like, they’re still great, they can still communicate the message and (some) of the nuance, but they’re still always a step removed from being identifiable to any viewer’s lived experience. They’re still always reciting 15th century poetry. But this guy? This guy is like, screw iambic pentameter, to hell with being precious about the material, HOW WOULD AN ACTUAL PERSON SAY THIS SHIT?
Like this. And it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful to hear a soliloquy I loved so much already, and have it come to life in a way it never, ever, did before. I feel like I grasp his motivations, his twists and turns, no longer on an academic level but on a visceral, instinctive one. Because he’s presenting his mental and emotional journey in a way that speaks honestly, like a real person.
So yeah, this shit post? I love it. Deeply and sincerely.
Michael's apartment was dark except for the low, flickering light of his TV that was almost painfully familiar.
Robby stood in the doorway much longer than he needed to, his bag strap cutting into his shoulder as he just… breathed it in. The smell of the place. The low murmur of some game coming from another room.
The fact that he was here at all.
It all felt comically familiar and yet so strange. Like he was coming back to a house that used to belong to a version of him that he had buried weeks ago.
He dropped his keys into the little bowl on the counter, noticing a different, awfully familiar pair already stuck in there. The sigh that started to leave him, got stuck right in the back of his throat as he slowly but surely followed the light down the hall.
Jack was in his bed.
Not on top of the covers, no; in them. On the left side… his side, the TV remote loose in his left hand like he'd fallen asleep while channel-hopping. His stump was sticking out from under the duvet the way it always did because the man ran hot and his scar was sensitive.
All of these years and he still couldn't keep both legs under the damn covers.
Michael leaned against the doorframe and just looked at him.
Honestly, he didn't know what he'd expected to come home to. Whitaker had texted him that he appreciated the offer to crash long-term but he decided to just pop in every now and then. So… an empty apartment, probably?
An empty apartment with that nice quality of silence a place gets when no one had been living in it.
Ultimately, Michael hadn't let himself think too hard about coming home at all for a long time. And then, when he finally started to- when he finally decided, somewhere in the middle of week seven, in a dirty motel with bad plumbing and an inexplicably good view, he had finally gotten that thought.
Jack.
Not the apartment. Not his own bed. Just Jack.
And here Jack was. In his bed. Wearing his hoodie… the grey one with the bleach stain, Michael hadn't worn outside for the longest time. Looking old and rumpled and completely unbothered by everything around him.
Something cracked open in Michael's chest. Slow and close to painless. Like ice thawing out in spring.
Maybe he'd made a sound, or maybe Jack had felt his presence - the way he usually did, always half-aware of everything despite the unbotheredness - because he stirred, blinking at the ceiling and then turned his head.
The disorientation on his face lasted only a second. A second that was enough for him to come completely undone. One second of Jack not knowing where he was, eyes unfocused, reaching back through the dark for his bearings.
When he found Robby in the doorway, though, something in his face just settled. Like a compass finding north. Like that was all he needed.
"Hey…" Jack said, his voice absolutely wrecked with sleep.
"Hey."
"You're back."
"Yeah."
Jack looked at him for a long moment and Michael recognized that look. It wasn't one to check him over, not one cataloguing any kind of damage but just… looking at him. The way one were to look at something they thought they might not ever see again.
"Good," he finally said. Like that was enough. Like it was everything that needed to be said.
"Good," Robby repeated, his own tone similar but not the same. "You're in my bed."
"Well, your couch sucks ass."
"I know."
"You should replace it."
"Yeah… I know."
Jack shifted and reached over to turn the TV off, turning the room dark almost instantly.
"You eat?"
"Not really. Not for a while."
"You sleep?"
Michael didn't even need to answer that one, knowing the silence would be enough to serve as a reply. Even if it was one that Jack didn't appreciate much.
"Mm." A pause. "Come to bed, Robby."
Pushing off the doorframe, he simply abandoned his bag in the hall. Michael didn't even bother to turn the light back on as he moved towards the bed. Instead of letting himself fall onto it though, he merely sat on the edge for a moment, elbows propped up on his knees, just breathing.
He could feel Jack waiting behind him, giving him both the space to process and the time to do so before Michael finally decided to lay down.
The darkness of the room was quiet. The city outside was doing its city thing, distant and indifferent, and Jack's breathing was already slowing back toward a light sleep. Or something performative that was supposed to act it.
Michael, though, was staring at the ceiling, feeling that specific weight of being horizontal in his own bed for the very first time in two months settle over him like something he hadn't yet earned.
"Jack."
"Yeah?"
A long pause followed. Long enough that even Michael believed he imagined himself speaking.
"I almost didn't."
Jack didn't answer him right away, didn't ask for clarification. Because he didn't need to.
The mattress shifted ever so slightly as Jack turned towards him in the dark. He didn't close the distance between them, but merely reoriented himself, facing him.
"I figured," Jack finally said.
Eventually, Jack's hand found his arm in the dark. Not grabbing or gripping, just landing there. It was heavy and warm and so still in the way Jack went still whenever he tried to get Michael to understand that something mattered.
Michael felt his throat close around a heavy lump in his throat even if he couldn't exactly name why it was there in the first place.
For a good while, they neither moved, nor spoke, until finally, Michael gave in.
It wasn't so much a decision, as it was a surrender. His body made the call way before his head could even begin arguing it. He turned into Jack's side, forehead dropping to his shoulder. Jack's arm came around him with no hesitation, no fumbling, like he'd been waiting for it. Like it was very simply the next thing.
His chin came to rest against the top of Michael's head.
"Glad you did," Jack murmured after a while; his voice low and rough and right against his ear. "Come back, I mean."
Michael closed his eyes.
"Yeah…" he replied into the worn grey cotton of his own hoodie. "Me too."
The German book cover industry has been my sworn enemy since I was 11 years old. But just to demonstrate I want you to see this example of Pterry's Snuff, UK edition and German edition
look! a fun book cover and a beautiful illustration on its own merits, by Paul Kidby who did most of the novels and official art in later years.
