"Vibe Coding severs this constitutive relation. The Vibe Coder does not enter the Symbolic order, but submits to its statistical imitation. The model offers no Law, no withholding, no exteriority. It does not confront, it echoes. It does not interpellate the subject, only returns a semblance of dialogue without ever addressing you as subject. The Vibe Coder becomes neither full author nor full subject, but a medium through which predictive recombination speaks —spoken by the model as much as speaking through it. The Symbolic order is not engaged but simulated. What emerges is not understanding, but interpolation: machinic consensus dressed in familiar cultural forms."
"I started putting a dividing line between literary novels written before and after World War II. It seemed like the books from the before times were good at doing lots of things. They could world build and philosophize. They could be love story, adventure novel, and satire all in one. Books written after the war, however, could only do one thing at a time. Mostly that one thing was soul-searching or introspection. Serious postwar fiction, whether it was what I was being fed in school or read in the pages of The New Yorker, was about sad white people with relationship problems."
incredibly insightful review. "Their exact words, not just their paraphraseable meaning but their precise choices of phrasing, become full of comprehensible information about character, and this gives the characters themselves an unusual reality and presence. As in all good poetry, it is the language itself, and not just the plot and worldbuilding, that makes us care."
"I'm glad you're asking this. Jordan Ellenberg dropped me a note saying that I'd written a novel about wealth disguised as a novel about sex. I think that must be right."
"[W]e must keep all of our tools to hand, both the paranoid and the reparative. Otherwise, we run the risk of simply saying to these safety-pilled kids, 'Don’t worry. Language can’t hurt you. Calm down.'"
'[T]he structure of Twitter and the way it rewards a constant escalation of emotion makes it exceedingly difficult to just back down, to say, “I thought I was doing the right thing, but I hurt somebody very badly in the process.”'
"Goodnight Moon is an esoteric text whose colorful pages promise dangerous knowledge to those who know how to look" tongue in cheek but I think there's something to this
"Icons are not primitive or rudimentary attempts to duplicate the physical world; they are nuanced and complex attempts to embody the spiritual world."
"graphs the usage of words (whether in description or dialogue) over time, distinguishing that usage both by the gender of the fictional characters the terms are associated with, and by the gender of the authors who used them"
"Short form SF published over the last ten years that aggressively challenged form/language/expectation? Avant-garde-ish, wildly exuberant, austere to the point of impoverishment. Whatever crazy shit somehow slipped past the gatekeepers and caught you by surprise. Suggestions?"
"For years now, Bret Easton Ellis has been accused of being a racist and a misogynist, and I think these things are true; but like most things that are true of Bret Easton Ellis, they are also very boring."