Woman of a certain rage. I want you to read more, think more, and use AI less. I read submissions for @MastersReview and pet every dog I can.
Kansas City
Joined May 2012
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Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???
Oh yes! I’ll happily sit and work my way through labyrinthine paragraphs on paper, probably because it’s so easy to mark my spot with my finger and look up to give my eyes a rest. On screen, though? No thank you. I can’t read Faulkner on a Kindle for that reason.
Do you find yourself closing out of long online paragraphs? I saw a three screen uninterrupted paragraph on a lit journal the other day and couldn’t bring myself to read it. (I was on a train, the screen was shaky.) wondered if I’m the only one like that anymore.
I would crawl naked on broken glass for a revise and resubmit at this point. Something, some little sign of hope and encouragement, anything besides the gut punch of “thank you for trusting us with your work but no.”
Yes, and they can’t understand most of us wouldn’t trade lives with them for anything. They’re the butts of our jokes.
And yes, it’s real.
xitter.cf/elonmusk/status/169074…
Could we please circle back to this exchange between Musk and Zuck, only make it actually happen? And for major stakes, like who gets composted first?
I don’t have anything ready to query yet, but wanted to wish you an uneventful surgery and speedy recovery, Tali.
Imagine waking up to find your loans, bad credit & mortgages had been wiped out by hackers. Can you imagine the spending surge (and economy boost) that would follow? 🤣
I wish more online lit journals understood this. Also that 18px text and 1.5em line height in a font with accessible contrast will dramatically improve how many readers and subscribers you get to the site, and how many pages they read!
Writing prose and writing to be read on the internet are two vastly different things. Websites (and social media marketers) focus on content architecture and design as part of the user experience.
That means, if you have an important point to make, you often put it on a line all by itself even if that is grammatically incorrect.
To do otherwise may overwhelm your reader before they even start reading, because people on the internet don’t encounter text only as information—it’s also an experience.
“Most style books will also caution you against using one-sentence paragraphs, and in general they are right, especially when the sentence in question is only a few words long. A friend says a one-sentence paragraph feels like a punch, and no one wants to get punched. Overused, it can be an annoying tic, a lazy writer’s attempt to compel us to pay attention or to inject energy and life into a narrative, of falsely inflating the importance of sentences that our eye might skip over entirely if they were placed, more quietly and modestly, inside a longer paragraph.” —Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer
It is, and I can’t believe governments aren’t taking that more seriously. If the people don’t believe what they see, and if they can’t trust their judgment, they have no incentive to contribute to or protect society.
