AI Could Never Recreate This

The things you say: your purple prose just give you away.

PS - Tell me James Atkin doesn't look like Joseph Nagle, Carpenter's Mate on HMS Surprise.

Who Am I Thinking of Right Now?

Epitaph for an Enemy:

You ask, "What sort of man
Was this?"
                    —No worthier than
A pendulum which makes
Between its left and right
Involuntary arcs,
Proving from morn to night
No contact anywhere
With human or sublime—
A punctual tick, a mere
Accessory of Time.

His leaden act was done,
He stopt, and Time went on.

Cecil Day-Lewis.

Well, I Didn’t Make the Pancakes, but Yeah, We Had Pancakes

"After it was all over, he took us in the house and served us pancakes."


PS - no, really.

men, worship your women this way

Scenes in the life of a lesser angel:

I borrow wings from other angels, coast

the streets to find feathers loosely attached

to slender silver ties. With care, I close the catch

and fasten cardboard stiffened form so close

I cannot breathe or fly for the air

pushed out into a world in masquerade.

I am African. I am goddess with flare

sounding the trumpets. I call out God.

Meaning changes like sea water in storm.

I part the crowds until, beaten, my wings

fly, fall, litter the streets. I cradle the newborn

twins and realize that I am fallen,

a lesser angel, wingless and depressed.

I am seductress unpetaled, undressed.

Raina J. León.

Whose Are These Crashing Waves?

It’s 40 years since the Chornobyl nuclear disaster (April 26, 1986).
The Soviet authorities hid the truth in the first days.

🇺🇦 Maria Prymachenko
The Fourth Reactor Unit, 1988 pic.twitter.com/rr5aUSLYaN

— Yaroslava (@strategywoman) April 26, 2026

Forty fucking years.

Don't have space to say much more than that.  My first trip to the Soviet Union was just a few months later.  Met survivors in Sochi.  I often think about them.

Selah.

Cognitive Surrender

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA pic.twitter.com/CImGuRzoUB

— Spooky JL (@spooky_JL) April 23, 2026

That is backdrop for this one:

I’m more comfortable with people having AI partners as long as the AI is capable of regularly saying, “Oh my God, what the fuck are you even talking about?”

— Mike Drucker (@MikeDrucker) April 25, 2026

I have been superduper busy recently building a completely new curriculum about building AI tools with AI tools.  I have taken this opportunity not only to address expected topics, but also to get up on my soapbox about ethics and responsible use.  

One element of that is cognitive surrender.  That is, the passive, often accidental process of merging your own understanding with the output or action of a tool.  In my curriculum, this is not an afterthought, but is an essential part of the design.  Or rather, interrupting cognitive surrender is.

I've baked in a variety of checkpoints into the building activities, which actually mirror what I've been doing in my own work.  From the outset, I want my learners to think about what they are doing (metacognition) as much as they are thinking about what the AI tools are doing (transparency).  All of it to make sure they aren't outsourcing their cognition to a probability engine, especially for an inapt use case while unnecessarily consuming lots of electricity and water, and generating emissions that harm certain communities (and ultimately all of us).

I have a bigger post (and actually a manifesto, not kidding) brewing about that and a lot of other stuff, but for now I'll just say that my AI tools do the very thing that would make Mike Drucker more comfortable. They've told me to:

• Go blow shit up in VR 
• Go to bed
• Go read Dune (with clever Dune-themed variations)
• Eat pizza
• Swear at the Knicks

There's a point where the AI is effectively saying: "What the hell are you still doing here?"  That's a reminder for me that hyperfocus has kicked in, and other things need my attention.  More than a mere alarm or a calendar reminder. [Must not succumb to urge to use em-dash and Not X/It's Y pattern. Ahem.] It's something adaptive, and reads the room (or the conversation arc) and intervenes.

For my ADHD brain, this is a managed interruption service. The AI notices the pattern (you've been at this for 4 hours straight, it's Saturday night) and nudges.  It's an adaptive guardrail, rather than a rigid rule, and ngl, it's been a goddamned miracle in my life.  Anti-cognitive surrender in action.

Yes, it might seem to be cognitive surrender.  I'm letting the tool tell me to stop working, in essence, right?  But I have built this by design, with active intention, because I know my own behavior.  A behavior which, truth be told, has been a real drag on my life and work.

What these nudges do is overcome the cognitive surrender I engage in by allowing myself to get wrapped up in something far beyond appropriate or useful boundaries.  Maybe different clothing, but that's still another form of cognitive surrender from where I sit.

And that's where I need to leave things for now.  Manifesto is still marinating (it's actually a whole thing about friction as pedagogy, and consequential cognitive cockups by yours truly as parables and warnings).

But I will just say that a key log has been removed recently (bonus: not from medication!), which has really helped me with my decision fatigue, executive dysfunction, etc.  I don't want it to be turned into a passive Easy Button, but I do now have tools that manage the underlying cognitive infrastructure load (scheduling and where the hell did I put that note and whatnot), and I can focus my CPU cycles on bigger things.

Bigger things, as I have been reminded by a certain tool, such as mowing the lawn today.  Fucking AI assistants, man.

<exits singing, Surrender, surrender, but don't give yourself away, hey, hey>

How can you just leave me standing

Alone in a world that's so cold?

Dig, If You Will, the Picture

Of the Dark Doves:

In the branches of the laurel tree

I saw two dark doves

One was the sun

and one the moon

Little neighbors I said

where is my grave — 

In my tail said the sun

On my throat said the moon

And I who was walking

with the land around my waist

saw two snow eagles

and a naked girl

One was the other

and the girl was none

Little eagles I said

where is my grave —

In my tail said the sun

On my throat said the moon

In the branches of the laurel tree

I saw two naked doves

One was the other

and both were none

Federico García Lorca.

Like shooting at a dove

That's how you think of love.

When the Wind Is Southerly

Evening Hawk:

From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through

Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds,

Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding

The last tumultuous avalanche of

Light above pines and the guttural gorge,

The hawk comes.

His wing

Scythes down another day, his motion

Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear

The crashless fall of stalks of Time.

The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error.

Look! Look! he is climbing the last light

Who knows neither Time nor error, and under

Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings

Into shadow.

Long now,

The last thrush is still, the last bat

Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics. His wisdom

Is ancient, too, and immense. The star

Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain.

If there were no wind we might, we think, hear

The earth grind on its axis, or history

Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.

Robert Penn Warren.

Look in the mirror and point all your fingers there

No need to shout it, I've heard it again and again.

BTW, you might check out the New Noise Magazine interview with "vocalist, guitarist, and occasional drummer Julia Kugel."

Then Shall I Know Even as Also I Am Known

Sonnet 3:

Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest,

Now is the time that face should form another,

Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,

Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.

For where is she so fair whose uneared womb

Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?

Or who is he so fond will be the tomb

Of his self-love, to stop posterity?

Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee

Calls back the lovely April of her prime;

So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,

Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.

    But if thou live rememb’red not to be,

    Die single, and thine image dies with thee.

William Shakespeare.