The unsupported use case of Bix Frankonis’ disordered, surplus, mediocre midlife in St. Johns, Oregon—now with climate crisis, rising fascism, increasing disability, eventual poverty, and inevitable death.
Read the current manifesto. (And the followup.)
Rules: no fear, no hate, no thoughtless bullshit, and no nazis.
The first thing that struck me about this research on gender was the person who supplied her gender as “meh”, because I once toyed with listing my pronouns as “meh/meh” but I was afraid people would misconstrue it as a pointed, wrongheaded criticism of providing your pronouns.
It’s 2003 and you’re coming up on the end of your first full year of “stand-alone journalism”, doing independent reporting and commentary on Portland entirely by blog. You’re visiting an independent bookstore run out of a church in South Portland, where friends of yours work. It has a particular focus on Western Americana, and while wandering those particular stacks you spot a plain, unassuming spine: green cloth, gold embossed lettering: “THE FINGER” and “OCT. 9, 1942 - JAN 3, 1944”.
The question of celebrating aside (it’s the primary discourse on Bluesky right now, as both Jay and the service’s safety team warn against “glorifying violence or harm”), you certainly don’t need to give a single fucking shit that Charlie Kirk is dead.
We’ve done this a least twice in the last few months over on Bluesky, and it seems the part of the blogosphere within my six degrees of separation is taking its turn: what do we do about things getting flagged as having been written by large language models just because of the use of the em dash?
Leon (not a content marketer) dropped me a line to mention he’d had some thoughts about my public conniption over content marketers editing—or wholesale changing, it seems, in some cases—old posts on the websites they manage through one blogging CMS or another.