trans-regulatory element

People weren’t searching for “Elias Thorne” until late 2025. Searches for the name really spiked in early 2026, while the related query “lighthouse keeper” also started trending upward in the last few years. He tested a few chatbots, including Grok, Deepseek, and Gemini, with the prompt “tell me a story,” and the chatbots frequently started with similar stories about lighthouses, clockmakers, or explorers. …

Elias has since escaped chatbot containment. May noticed Elias Thorne popping up on Amazon as an author of alt-medicine cancer handbooks, a 2026 YouTube-algorithm guide, a book on Greek mythology, and a psychological thriller novella. …

When I searched Elias Thorne on Amazon, I found Elias as the protagonist in fantasy books and producing music, too: he’s “a brilliant but cynical archaeologist with a knack for unearthing what powerful institutions want to keep hidden” in one fantasy series, or a musical artist making ambient listening albums of birds and nature sounds. Fittingly, one Elias Thorne with an AI-generated author photo is also churning out AI grift books.

even the most nothingburger uneducational math class will give some kind of real-world concrete example of a concept, even if only on the level of "Johnny has five apples. Sally takes away two. How many apples does Johnny have?" And will probably give a name for the general concept (subtraction). Imagine if anything we had done in middle school PE had been motivated to any degree. Like, "if you do a lot of this exercise it will be easier to lift boxes".

When I was a teenager, I found this collection of essays on LGBTQ+ body image and I was struck by... okay, as I remember it, the women* tended to write about how getting away from the straight male gaze and learning to appreciate other women's bodies helped them heal from eating disorders and insecurities, while the men* tended to write about how the gay community GAVE them eating disorders 🙃

*cis, perisex, white, able-bodied. Trans and intersex writers were placed in a separate section to write about their experiences crossing gender boundaries, while writers of color and disabled writers were another section and iirc mostly wrote about how Y'all Fucking Suck.

I haven't actually READ this book in like a decade, but I think you might be interested in Part 11: "The Uniform Doesn't Fit". Abstract:

Theory and journalism are on the same expressway here: both treat flesh as if it were plastic. But theorists say You can play with this, while gay media and the images they recycle say THIS, this is the body for you (to rent or buy or lay-by). It's mass produced in fixed molds. It's fashionable. It's sexy. It sells things. It's a Crash Test Dummy. It is designed to test and to survive the collisions between different ways of looking at body image and body concept. It is designed to be almost, always almost, within your reach, if only you spend a little more, work a little harder. Now let's really stretch the metaphor: I want to explore the runaway sales success among the gay niche of one generic-brand mold or template for this dummy; some of the preconditions, means, and processes of its production; its marketing strategies; some structural flaws; some repackaging techniques; and above all, the stress fractures that develop as the product ages.

It seems like you have the good fortune (?) that the body being sold does nothing for you erotically, so you feel confused, annoyed, and isolated rather than trapped pursuing an impossible ideal. Being a perpetually-alienated eccentric can have a protective effect sometimes!