i, write

“The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male. You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster. I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?”

what really fucks me up about watching the truman show in 2025 is how it's not fictional. truman is fictional, but the truman show isn't.

Just watched Adam Conover (of Adam Ruins Everything) make such a solid point that I think we should spread far and wide. Yes, having AI write your emails is lazy, sure, but people love being lazy. We need to really emphasize that sending AI emails (or using AI responses on social media, or publishing AI flyers, or or or) is rude.

Im listening to a podcast ep about AI usage and the guest is saying he completely understands why people refuse to use it out of fear because he shares the same fears, and it's just so weird to me that it's never ever acknowledged that some people don't use it not because they're afraid but because it just holds no appeal. There are things I'm sure learning models are very useful for but none of them have anything to do with me. Yes I'm a bit of a ludite but I completely failed to resist the lure of the phone, or social media, I've never used chatgpt because I have just never wanted to. I feel like the entire debate is instantly reframed once you acknowledge that it's not a necessary service that people either work to resist or avoid out of fear. For most people it's just an online tool, and for me and I know for lots of others too it's just not that important.