A few months back, Elon Musk, the right-wing owner of Twitter and Grok, his pet Generative AI project, posted something I wrote on his Twitter feed, with the caption "This is the quality of humor we want from Grok."

He even had it pinned to his profile for a short while.


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Image: prill

I am in London as I write this, sitting in a lover’s flat overlooking the London city skyline. I was here when I learned the news of the 2024 Presidential election-that hate won over love, bigotry over compassion, spite over benevolence.

I understand the sick despair many of us feel in the pit of our stomach right now. Dark times ( Read more... )

Trigger warning: Stalking, graphic death and rape threats, doxxing, threats of swatting, impersonation

I’ve been putting off writing this for a while now, because it involves dredging deep into some incredibly ugly stuff.

Most of you know that I’ve been stalked for years by a stalker (or stalkers) who has created fake social media profiles in my ( Read more... )

This is an essay about cultural appropriation, except that it’s not really an essay about cultural appropriation.

This is actually about the way genuine, complex problems in complex societies get reduced to nattering virtue-signaling nonsense that become used as blunt instruments to ensure conformity and serve as tribalistic us-vs-them markers, in ( Read more... )

So let’s talk about Dungeons & Dragons.

Dungeons & Dragons is famous for basically three things: creating an entire cottage industry of weird foaming-at-the-mouth Evangelical cries of satanic doom that will sweep over the land, covering it in darkness forever and ever; giving socially awkward high school students of a certain era something to do ( Read more... )

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[Content note: Kinky sex, consent play, consensual non-consent]

I am, as regular readers know, a big fan of various types of “consent play” in sex. A lot of people who hear “consent play” think “rape role-play” or “consensual non-consent” or “resistance play,” and don’t get me wrong, all of those things are fun, and a regular part ( Read more... )

[Note: this essay started out as an answer on Quora.]

I’m about to say something a lot of my fellow liberals might find upsetting:

Some people who complain about “woke ideology” are actually kinda sorta right, though for entirely the wrong reasons.

Before you pick up the torches and pitchforks, hear me out.

No, the conservatives who whine and cry ( Read more... )

[Note: This entry originally started out as an answer on Quora.]

So apparently there’s a dude named Russell Brand. I will admit, Gentle Readers, that I don’t know who he is, except that apparently he does standup comedy and such, and apparently his YouTube videos have been demonetized after he was accused of sexual assault.

Now, I will freely ( Read more... )

[Note: This essay originally started out as an answer on Quora.]

If, God help you, you ever read incel or “men going their own way” forums, which I have done, you frequently find a complaint-

Well, hang on, wait. You frequently find many complaints, because that’s pretty much all the incels and MGTOW folks do: whine and complain. One of those ( Read more... )

This essay started out as an an answer on Quora. A Quora user asked me to answer a question on a private space, then didn’t much care for the answer, so it was never published. Fortunately, I saved a copy, so I’ve posted it on my own Quora space and also here as well.

Question: What’s an unpopular opinion you hold?

Answer: I spend a lot of time on ( Read more... )