Matthewせいじ @matthewseiji@mastodon.social

Writing tip:

1. Write the bad version first
2. It's... still the bad version
3. Okay when does this become something other than the bad version

I used to be fine with the semicolon, I'd use it pretty frequently and would call bullshit on writers like Cormac McCarthy who said they hated it, but lately I'm taking it out and liking what removing it does, not because I don't think it has a purpose or shouldn't exist, but because it has a bad habit of calling attention to itself, and if you want that rolling unstoppable feeling that some stories have, semicolons (and em dashes too) have a way of interrupting flow

I feel like there will be a not insignificant number of people who will simply never set foot outside again even when it does become safe to do so

Odd feeling of cognitive dissonance today as I got a dose of one of the fastest-developed vaccines in history using a new mRNA technique and then was handed some free samples of a homeopathic remedy on the way out

https://thatkimparker.medium.com/most-artists-are-not-making-money-off-nfts-and-here-are-some-graphs-to-prove-it-c65718d4a1b8

Cookies? Cookies? Cookies? Cookies? Cookies? Cookies? Cookies? Cookies? Cookies? Cookies? (just doin a little web browsing today)

I typed nothing except a capital D in Gmail to start a new sentence and the auto-typing feature suggested "Does that make sense?"

I picked a fun, less-professional icon for Discord originally and now because of the way it's grown I'm in a bunch of professional situations with it and I don't feel like changing it

Exchanges must be enjoying the minting fees rolling in though

Have seen a few artists quietly list to "test the waters" and none of them has sold anything which makes me suspect there is a severe asymptotic dropoff after you remove the tiny handful of headline-makers

I thought “Why do basketball commentators say ‘from downtown’ for long shots... does that mean the baskets are the suburbs? That doesn’t make sense.” Then I learned Hunter S. Thompson wrote a whole unhinged screed about exactly that near the end of his life, so. I dunno

They’re retrofitting a huge metal water tower near here and the sound of the empty tower really carries. Every day at 9:30, noon and 3pm someone bangs out shave and a haircut, two bits on it, presumably to signal breaktime, in these metallic booms that ring out over the hillside.

I wrote about Eliza, its intellectual ancestor Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, the history of technology applied to mental health, and the contingent reality of virtual characters. https://logicmag.io/care/when-you-say-one-thing-but-mean-your-motherboard/

Get the latest edition of Logic magazine for a piece by me on the history and implications of AI therapy from Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1966 ELIZA to the present— as well as a copy of Eliza, the 2019 visual novel about these topics. https://logicmag.io/care/

Very happy to share that I am in the new issue of Logic magazine, discussing the real tech that inspired Eliza, therapy from computers that do not understand you, and Joseph Weizenbaum’s original ELIZA and its legacy https://logicmag.io/care/

Check this out [puts the game into Yasujiro Ozu mode which drops the camera to the floor and makes characters talk past each other in long unmoving shots]