This Week's Writing 6/9/23

Soulless AI art, transphobes are shit, my history of not dating, and more!

Eagle-eyed readers—like good dog Goose!—may have noticed that I got a custom domain. Whoo hoo! Now it’s everythingishorrible.net rather than noahberlatsky.substack.com. More professional! More memorable! Maybe won’t get deprioritized on twitter? Idk. We’ll see.

I don’t think it should change much; some of you may have had to resign in? If there’s any other problems, please let me know.

If You Read One Thing By Me This Week, Read

AI art is soulless remixing. That’s a good thing. (New Humanist)

Politics

The GOP’s anti-trans policies are genocidal. (Public Notice)

Talked to Aaron Rupar for his podcast about why Trumpism is in fact fascism. (Public Notice)

Licht and Meadows become the latest grifter assholes to tie themselves to Trump and get humiliated. (Independent)

When transphobes say they don’t think trans people exist, they mean that they shouldn’t exist. (EIH)

Kelly Cadigan and why it’s fine to leave the right for selfish reasons. (EIH)

Asad Haider’s Mistaken Identity and why identity politics is good actually. (EIH)

Ted Gioia praises self-publishing, and accidentally shows its downside potential to spread hate. (EIH)

Cultural Commentary

Some thoughts on masculinity and patriarchy from a straight guy who never dated. (Mashable)

Deborah Levy’s novel August Blue is a not queer novel that celebrates queer possibilities. (Observer.com)

Alt country duo the Texas Rubies comes home to Chicago. (Chicago Reader)

Shang-Chi fights heterosexual expectations. And loses. (EIH)

Spin Me Round has trouble finding its place. (EIH)

Star Trek TOS: Operation Annihilate and icky Cold War genociding. (EIH)

Poetry

Wrote a bunch of poems and a prose piece about Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk fighting for free speech without pronouns but with love. (download D.O.R. below.)

D

2.9MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Poem about spoons. (dadakuku)

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝘄 𝗝𝘂𝗺𝗽𝗲𝗱 𝗢𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗧𝗵𝗲

1. Wherever you go, whatever you do
there will be this spoon waiting for you.

2. They experimented not for experimentation’s sake
but for the sake of spoons. Great spoons.

A poem about forgetting poems. (Five Fleas)

Someday
Someday
I'll forget it,
This poem about this
poem. The tree shivers, alive.
It stops.

A somewhat ominous poem. (Five Fleas)

Soon
we can stop
moving.

Sage advice! (Five Fleas)

Poets!
Lower your standards
and you too can enter heaven.