Well, here I am.

Except that House of Leaves is actually about a documentary about a man trying to explore the inside of his new home, which proves impossible to document properly, due to its non-Euclidean dimensions.

Except that House of Leaves is actually about an academic paper, which itself is about an alleged documentary about an alleged non-Euclidean home, but none of this can be verified.

Except that House of Leaves is just, like, this fucking stack of papers I found in this old dead guy’s apartment, and, like, I don’t even know if its his or what because like both his eyes were gone and he didn’t have any degrees or anything. I tried asking my friend from the tattoo shop about it but she was fixing up this thumper tattoo right above a girl’s pussy the whole time we were talking; like Thumper from Bambi, and I’m not gonna lie man I was pretty distracted and I just couldn’t [XXXXS XXXX XXXX. XXXX XXXX XXX X XXX XX XXXXXXX XXXXXX XX XXXX XX XXXXXX XXXX XXX]^*

———

* Editor’s Note: House of Leaves is a metatextual examination of the ability for a minor inconsistency in measurement, which might have been ignored by a normal person, to cause an all-consuming obsession spiral in the sort of person who is academically trained, obsessed with documentation, or overtly pedantic, and-

“Johnny, please, I’m your Mother; I know I have a lot to apologize for but I can’t, not unless you return my letters; are you even getting my letters? I send one every week you know, but I think that nurse keeps them from you, keeps you from getting my letters, because I know, I know my sweet Johnny would never leave his poor old mother rotting away by herself in this horrible drafty ward if he was getting his mother’s letters, would you, sweet boy? I know she’s stealing my letters from you, she’s always touching my things, even though they haven’t moved I know she’s touching them I know she keeps you from me I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know [there’s a limit to what you can know. Some folks bump up against that limit and bounce right off and keep swimming, and some folks, well. Some folks SPLAT]I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know [they just gotta keep digging away at it. Even when it’s not that deep, they just… grab a shovel and keep digging. Lord knows what motivates them. A kind of Madness I suppose. Some folks find GOD in that madness. Not much of a believer myself]I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know I know

I know

I know

I know

I know

I know

I know you’ll visit me for Mother’s Day, won’t you?

🧿

The above is a video shared by smrchildsadness on Twitter, showing a person participating in a pride parade exchanging a pride flag with a person standing on his (am using his pronoun based on the TikToks/Tweets of what happened) doorway who had a Portuguese flag. There are sounds of cheers and crying and the two people hug each other as they exchange the flags. The man at the doorway then waved kisses to the crowd within the pride parade.

The Tweet says: "NO YOU DONT UNDERSTAND HE WAS WAVING THE PORTUGUESE FLAG BECAUSE HE DIDN'T HAVE A PRIDE FLAG AND THEY TRADED FLAGS AND HE'S SO EMOTIONAL TO GET HIS OWN PRIDE FLAG I'M EMOTIONALLY RUINED"

For context, apparently they were worried that maybe he's a nationalist because he was waving the Portuguese flag and some nationalists opposing the pride march were waving that flag. But upon interacting with him, it turns out he didn't have have a pride flag and he wanted to wave *a* flag in support of the pride march. So they had an exchange and now he has his own pride flag 😭🥹.

The image above is a Tweet by kunwara_ladkaa that says "I'm crying so much right now (Image taken by Manuel Fernando Araújo/Lusa)". The image shows the same man from the pride parade crying as he hugs his new pride flag.

The above image is a Tweet by dudz_zZzz that says "ainda não parei de pensar nele," which according to Google translate from Portuguese to English is "I still haven't stopped thinking about him." The image is a drawing of the person from the pride parade, crying as he hugs his new pride flag.

Me: so do you like, like-like me

Lunatic: How did you get this ring on my finger. Why won't it come off. What the hell are you

There is a study. Duke University, published 2023. Researchers showed participants a set of paintings and labeled them either “human-created” or “AI-created.” The twist: every single painting in the set was AI-generated. Same images. Different labels. Different ratings — across liking, beauty, profundity, and perceived worth — every time, in favor of the “human” ones. The effect wasn’t visual. It was entirely top-down: the label rewired the experience of the object itself.

This is not a niche academic finding. This is a description of how aesthetic judgment actually works for most people, most of the time. You don’t encounter a work in a vacuum. You encounter it with a story attached. The story is part of the work.

Which makes the following cases interesting.

2023. Miles Astray, photographer. He submitted a real photograph of a flamingo — taken on film, no AI involved — to a photography competition’s AI-generated category. To make a point. The image won both jury and public vote. Contest organizers disqualified it when Astray revealed it was real. The photo was too good to be human, apparently. Until it was.

2023. Suzi Dougherty, Sydney. She shot a photograph of her son mid-stride in a Gucci exhibition, mannequins in the background. Entered a local photo contest. Disqualified for being AI-generated. The judge said the image felt “too perfect to be true”. It was a phone photo taken in ten minutes. The mannequins read as uncanny. The son was just photogenic.

2025. The Velvet Sundown. AI folk rock band. Over a million Spotify streams before anyone publicly questioned the source. People added the music to playlists. Then someone noticed the promo photos looked off. Not the music — the photos. The music still sounded the same after the reveal. Only people’s relationship to it changed.

Three cases. Three different directions of the same error. Human work flagged as AI. AI work enjoyed as human. The detector isn’t running on aesthetics — it’s running on suspicion, context, and whatever story arrived first.

The post from Tumblr says AI is always noticeable. Saturation gives it away. Movement gives it away. It’s just so easy to spot.

nature is healing

"Being proposed to is all very nice and all that sort of thing, but it isn't at all a happy thing when you have to see a poor fellow, whom you know loves you honestly, going away and looking all broken-hearted, and to know that, no matter what he may say at the moment, you are passing quite out of his life."