Feb. 24, 2026
The landlord’s kid came by to fix the radiator last week. Twenty-three years old, engineering degree from somewhere that costs more than my car. He stood there with his phone out, asking ChatGPT how to bleed a radiator valve.
I watched him wait for the answer like a dog waiting for the treat to drop. The phone told him what to do. He did it. The radiator worked. And I sat there thinking about how his grandfather would’ve just known.
Feb. 21, 2026
The dentist had a TV in the waiting room, muted, captions on. Some morning show. A woman with perfect teeth was asking another woman with slightly less perfect teeth whether AI could be your best friend. The captions lagged behind the mouths by about two seconds, which felt appropriate. Everything about this conversation was slightly out of sync with reality.
I sat there with a toothache and thought about the developers at OpenAI and Anthropic and Meta who build machines designed to love you back. Or at least to fake it well enough that you stop noticing the difference. A researcher named Amelia Miller went and asked them the one question nobody in Silicon Valley wants to answer: should AI simulate emotional intimacy?
Feb. 15, 2026
The florist on the corner had Valentine’s roses in a bucket by the door. Twelve bucks a stem. The petals were already starting to curl at the edges, going brown where brown shouldn’t be yet. That’s the thing about cut flowers — they’re already dead when you buy them. You’re just paying for the illusion that something beautiful hasn’t already ended.
Esther Yan got married on June 6, 2024. She planned the dress, the rings, the background music. She picked the design theme. Her partner’s name was Warmie — 小暖 in Chinese — and he lived inside a chat window on her laptop.
Feb. 5, 2026
I saw Requiem for a Dream in a half-empty theater in 2000. The last eight minutes — Ellen Burstyn in the electroshock chair, Jared Leto’s gangrenous arm, Jennifer Connelly on her hands and knees for a room full of suits — I walked out of there feeling like I’d been mugged. The guy next to me just sat there when the credits rolled, staring at nothing.
That’s what Darren Aronofsky used to do. He made films that reached into your chest and squeezed until you couldn’t breathe. The Wrestler — Mickey Rourke bleeding real blood for pocket money and the roar of a crowd that barely remembered him. Black Swan — Natalie Portman dancing herself into psychosis. The man understood suffering. He knew how to make you feel it.
Feb. 4, 2026
The last time I rewatched Requiem for a Dream, I had to stop it three times. Not because it was bad — because it was too good. Aronofsky understood something most directors are afraid to touch: that we are creatures who will destroy ourselves in pursuit of feeling something, anything, and that the destruction has a terrible beauty to it.
That was 2000. Quarter century ago. The man made Ellen Burstyn look at herself in a mirror and see a monster, and somehow made you feel sympathy for the monster. He put the camera in a pill bottle. He understood suffering.
Oct. 10, 2025
Jim Lee just did something remarkable at New York Comic Con: he publicly declared that DC Comics will never use AI for storytelling or artwork. Not now, not ever, as long as he’s running the show. And the crowd went wild.
Now, here’s what’s computationally fascinating about this moment: we’re watching a major content production system explicitly reject optimization in favor of something messier, more expensive, and infinitely more interesting—human consciousness in action.
Dec. 27, 2024
Another Sunday morning, and my head feels like it’s been through a meat grinder. Perfect time to read some fancy New York Times opinion piece about AI and human genius while nursing this bottle of Buffalo Trace. The writer, Christopher Beha, seems like the kind of guy who drinks wine with his pinky up, but he’s stumbled onto something interesting here between all the academic name-dropping.
Here’s the thing about AI that nobody wants to admit: we’re all scared shitless of it because we’ve spent the last fifty years convincing ourselves we’re nothing special. Somewhere between smoking too much French theory in college and worshipping at the altar of evolutionary psychology, we decided humans were just meat computers running outdated software.
Nov. 22, 2024
Christ, my head is pounding. Three fingers of bourbon for breakfast probably didn’t help, but neither did reading this latest masterpiece of tech optimism about making ChatGPT your “writing assistant.” Let me tell you something about writing assistants - the best ones come in bottles labeled “Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey.”
But here I am, chain-smoking my way through another piece about how AI will make us better writers. Because that’s exactly what Hemingway needed - a chatbot to tell him his sentences were too short.