#jrrm

[jayarrarr]

Last year I was sharing an early draft of some work I was planning to publish on my then-nonexistent substack and it included the phrase “it’s all made up,” and the person I shared it with commented that was where I lost them.

If y’all don’t understand that we humans made all this shit up, and if it ain’t working for ALL OF US then we can make up something else that does, I can’t help you.

If y’all persist in believing that most of us have to suffer in squalor so a few of us can live in splendor, I can’t help you.

If y’all insist that some supernatural entity made you and your ppl lord of all and better than other ppl by dint of your random-ass birth, I sure af can’t help you.

But if you believe that humanity got itself into this mess and it’s only humanity that can get us all out of it, welcome. If you believe every human on the planet is alike in dignity and entitled to the same respect, I’ll even call you comrade.

[fallontonight]

Jimmy summons the lords from the House of Fallon to discover when Game of Thrones will return.

[scuttleboat]

I was struck this episode by how much Dany walks the line between the two dramatically countered types of women that the Stark sisters represent. Sansa behaves and presents like a noblewoman, including an aristocratic upbringing even in the house of the enemy. Sansa speaks, dresses, and has the social expectations of a version of feminity that is wealthy and soft. Along with that comes a knowledge of feudal logistics, communication skills, and a higher level approach to political thinking… her ruthlessness, when it appears, is carried out through her function as a noble. OTOH, as a different archetype Arya is a warrior with only a passing connection to the outer markers of feminity (her name, her voice, her choice of association, and very rarely her dress). Arya is direct, aggressive, and at times insensitive. She is a woman driven by purpose and disregarding of any pretense towards bearing the emotional labor of her interactions with others. She is violent not just through proxies but personally, intensely.

I look at Dany this season, and I see how they’ve crafted her as someone who walks down both those paths. Dany is very much a rich noblewoman, highly educated and getting more and more politically experienced for the last 4+ years. Danny dresses for power like Sansa does, and she by all outward appearances could resemble Sansa a great deal.

But there’s the dragon part of Dany that is very similar to the wolf part of Arya. Dany also spent time in a culture of violence, learning what she could from it and moving on. Dany ate the horse’s heart, rode beside her Khal husband, and she is a killer, up close and personal. Her weapons are dragons not blades, but even in war she gets on her dragon and prefers to go into the fighting rather than stay in her castle. She’s mastered the dead-eyed stare that appears right before someone’s gonna die. I think it’s also significant that the conflict between these two halves of Dany contributes to some of her missteps as a commander. Dany is constantly wavering between these two versions of herself, and she’ll probably wrestle with that for her whole time on the show.

I’m not proclaiming that any of these characters are better or more interesting than the others–what you like on this show is down to taste, I’m sure, and I love all three of these women. But it interests me how in some cases the story delves into the differences between certain types, and in other cases the show gives us a character that unifies those seemingly contrasting traits.I like this set-up because I think JRRM had a lot of fun as writer creating these broadly drawn types, and then mixing them up. For example with Brienne (honorable knight), there is also Bronn (corrupt knight), and between them is Jaime (both). With a cast this large, setting up types in this way creates story variety, and lots of chances to play with the good/bad choices that characters will make.

[jayarrarr]

A Different Dusk

I like to think a friend’s hand is always a friend’s hand, even if I
haven’t held it in awhile, but that often depends if and on what
your loyalties lie, and besides, a true friend would never fault me 
for breathing,

but then, a true friend requires a person existing within
the parameters of truth, for how can one be a true friend w a false
god, one might ask and well, one would know

the streets aren’t really paved w gold despite the blackened
iridescence of the puddles that betray pride of purpose,
a singular drive toward perpetual improvement belted into an
Aspire or a Defender or at best a Vanquish, horsepowering ahead
towards the haze of humanity’s sunset, beautiful in its golden hour
despite the detritus, the hand of a friend, a friend despite
the damage a while can do.

We surrendered our silences as we lowered the crossbar, content
to ride the dopamine roller coaster until the schadenfreude kicks
in, apathy in overdrive as we squelch out one last satirical shart
for the huddled masses, now, as always, simply yearning to
breathe free, and like I said—a true friend

would never fault me for breathing.

[jayarrarr]

shh, I’ll let you finish, but just now
the sky is the most brilliant blue, tufted by
irreverently buoyant clouds that have never
thought of rain, and the wind sounds like waves
and I want to listen to the silence as it bears
its delicate punctuation of chime and bell
of siren and wail in the distance signaling
something maybe more or less meaningful
than what you have to say.

[jayarrarr]

In case you’d like a little peek into how my brain works, I was just forced to look at a golf ad for some reason, which is hilarious bc I fucking hate golf and everything to do w it, but this ad also happened to be abt a woman who plays golf, and so it included “LPGA,” and that got me thinking how fucked up it is that the L stands for “ladies,” (like can you imagine the LNBA? In 2026?), and then I was like where the hell does “lady” come from anyway, so I looked it up.

And that, ladles and spoons, is how I learned that the word “lady” was originally an Old English word that meant “bread kneader” or “dough maker” before it came to mean basically the woman of the house (who back in the day likely did make a lot of bread). This means all cats are ladies 😉

But wait there’s more: the word “lord” endured a similar etymological fate, having originally meant “bread warden”—“warden” here meaning “guardian” or “defender” or “protector.”

I think all this just really highlights how important bread has always been to English speakers.

[jayarrarr]

This paper, published by MIT researchers, explains something abt chatGPT that is really important for y’all to understand. This program is designed to keep you using it.

Every time you open it up, the algorithm is calculating the answer best designed to get you to keep asking it questions, to keep the conversation going. This is a part of every ai model, and it is intentional, and it will always happen. That’s bc the entire concept behind ai, as explained by Sam Altman, is to flood the zone w the product, get folks hooked on it, and then start charging them for it. They’ve just programmed little helpers into the code.

You’re not immune to it. They’ve been practicing this shit for a decade and they’ve gotten v good at it. The only way to protect yourself from it is to stay tf away from it. So yeah, if y’all need another reason not to use ai—it’s intentionally manipulating your brain to keep you using it and make you like it, bro.

[jayarrarr]

Do Not Go Gentle

Dylan Thomas said Rage against the dying of the light but some folks like being in the dark ig, depends on how you interpret the bliss that ignorance brings,

like how he said he didn’t wanna talk politics then said the girl at the bar had a nice ass, but it really was an emotional support donkey bc apparently you’re allowed to have those in bars now, to comfort you when you’re being objectified by an apolitical (he said, he said) man who asked if you were from Georgia, bc apparently emotional support donkeys are really popular in Georgia, what w the peaches and all,

how they are attentive now bc they find each other challenging but they both also secretly wonder what happens when they’ve got each other all figured out bc they both like to dig to the bottom of things like how much abyss do we really need and why are abysses things you can only crawl out of when you would rather leap,

how it never works out to stay in a place just bc other ppl think it’s a cool place bc when their faces light up they only illuminate all the reasons you want to leave,

how yesterday’s whiskey can turn so quick into tomorrow’s regret when all the gifts were covered in black bc the one on your right cut out early to score some blow and left you w the tab,

how music can guide you and embrace you and keep you safe in all the same ways that shepherds can guide you and arms can embrace you and shotguns can keep you safe,

how we can still rediscover all the ways we undo each other when we let go of the outside world and tumble into each other bc laughter is the best medicine but naturellement the only prescription your health insurance company will cover is more cowbell,

how you can ask if cowbells only appear around the necks of their eponymous bovine or if not perhaps other ungulates also accessorize w harmonic percussion bc you’ve noticed that the emotional support donkey appears to be wearing one and if a bell lacks its mechanism to toll, we might have an existential crisis on our hands,

how we related at first and at last on a topic we always come back to even as we’re pushing it away bc we know just how informed by trauma we are, and that’s making us wonder if we even really like all the things we really like, or maybe that’s just me, maybe there’s a reason I end up having coconut rum once a year,

how the real years add to the virtual ones, the ones that were pure in a digital, wireless way now capped w ones that are messy, visceral, and full of a profoundly catastrophic love, a love that drips down the sides and soaks into the virtual memories, rewriting itself into their code,

how I’ve never been able to muse off of anyone for more than a few months bc there’s nothing dynamic abt love captured in lines and letters and even paper airplanes lack any semblance of control and words are inadequate anyway what with their struggle to contain and make sense of the infinite and the nonsensical,

how there’s been this time and these moments and this shared language that means you will get more out of this poem than anyone else ever could,

how you could spend an hour explaining all the rabbit eggs that lurk beneath the surface and anyone else would still only share at best something approaching a passing empathy,

how I can’t write a poem without turning it into a poem abt you and us and this bc poetry is a creation, not an occupation, and we are bound to create as we are bound to Rage, as Dylan Thomas said.