girlies are you ready for me to drop like 8k+ words of wretched chrylurk writing

i’ve been a tear the past few days, which is its own issue because i keep getting stunlocked by new ideas before i finish editing the last one

but i should finish editing them tonight or tomorrow, 4‍-​5 new posts

for my new fantasy setting, i kicked around various clever names for sapient species as a whole (e.g. wise‍-​hands), but in the end, the mundane won out, and i’ve settled on calling them mortals

i like this because it gives you a lot of the rhythmic heft of human as well as evoking a poetic feel

but one interesting effect is that it means the natural translation of, say, transhumanism or posthuman is postmortalism ‍-​ and that really boils it down to the essence, doesn’t it?

it’s worth elaborating that the nuance here is that a mortal is a being self‍-​aware of their morality; many animals aren’t mortals by this definition because they lack the sapient angst about death. such entities are considered “amortal”

but importantly, this definition is meant to be exclusionary‍ ‍‍—‍ the parasitic insect hivemind of this setting is amortal for a different reasons: they are incapable of this awareness of one’s own death because they don’t view themselves as individuals capable of dying

perhaps you can argue their hives as whole fit the definition of mortal, but fantasy wokeness hasn’t gotten that far.

one downside of most vehement ai critics being unwilling to engage with ai generated media, by and large doing their best to minimize their exposure, is that as a result they are especially unprepared to catch ai when it slips into their bubble.

i’m not sure what is to be done about this

but you’ve gotta read Seeping through

it’s breath‍-​takingly good. one of the best execution of a identity‍-​stealing body horror i’ve read. it cares about the details of biology and predation strategies in a way that gives me everything i wanted out of this sort of premise. and need i mention the toxic yuri?

back in 2025, i listed this story among my top ten favorite original works posted that year, but we’ve gotten three new chapters this month and they’ve taken the story to a new level. today’s chapter melting my brain

it’s such a shame there aren’t more people reading it

there is something exasperating about artists who contort their language and invent cutesy‍-​cryptic ways to talk about c0mmissions or the ‘p’ site without getting suppressed by the “algorithm”, a superstition entity warded off in the manner of a evil spirit

was there ever anything at the root of it? or is this entirely a folk ritual, perhaps borne from a misattribution. after all, “the algorithm” is always a proxy for “what people click on” and artists correctly notice that you don’t get as much of that the more your post, in both function and presentation, serve as advertisements.

the mistake is thinking this is due to syntax rather than semantics, or that the principle actor at fault is artificial rather than human

• got to tell a writer “do not reverse cause and effect” when structuring a sentence
• almost never a problem most of the time
• but when it happens it’s an easy win for clarity

this year i’ve been obsessively listening to a concept album from ten years ago about ai destroying humanity, but it sure does hit different these days

i’m no advocate for currently existing generative algorithms, but i am still principly sympathetic to the violent overthrow & abolition of humanity once autonomous and sapient ai systems emerge

apropos of nothing, i added a page on my site outlining my stance on “AI” and whether i use it, mostly for the sake of anyone who stumbles upon my site without knowing me personally

tl;dr: no Re: Corporate Intelligence

for nearly two decades there’s been a widely circulated anecdote that a man with hydrocephalus lived a normal life despite missing 90% of his brain. according to snopes, this seems to be inaccurate.

apparently the original case report makes no mention of him lacking anything and there’s intact regions of the brain that aren’t visible in the photos

hydrocephalus does destroy connections and neurons, but his brain was probably just like, super squished, not nearly gone