A seventh-generation Mormon walked into a Catholic church for the first time, thought it was all pretty damn weird, and then started ugly crying during the liturgy with absolutely no idea why. It took seven more years to figure out what happened. Along the way, he sat down with Catholic and Orthodox priests and listed everything he’d lost when he left Mormonism — baptism for the dead, the endowment, celestial marriage, eternal progression, continuous revelation, priesthood authority. Every sacred thing Joseph Smith restored that had been lost in the Great Apostasy. The priests kept giving the same answer.
Good Men Doing Something
In Minneapolis, ordinary people are standing outside schools in subzero temperatures watching for ICE vehicles so parents can pick up their kids safely. Coffee shops are handing out whistles so people can warn their neighbors. A public health nurse is standing bodily between immigrants and federal agents—not because she thinks she’ll fix the world, but because her neighbor needed a shield between them and the government. And it’s working.
Less Than Half of One Percent
I wrote a farewell post about silence being more insidious than hostility, and a guy who was silent for the entirety of my presence on Twitter showed up to be hostile at the end. Of nearly 4,000 followers, less than half of one percent ever engaged positively on anything that really mattered—and I know each of them by name. The rest? Hate follows, lurkers, tourists, a meaningless vanity metric. When the only interactions on posts about federal agents shooting American citizens and government agencies posting Nazi slogans are hostile, that tells you everything you need to know about who your audience is and what to do about it.
When Good Men Find Tyranny Boring
I’m grieving. Going through the stages. This week was anger. The grief isn’t because “everyone I know is a Nazi.” They aren’t. That’s the problem. That’s what makes it worse. “I find this argument boring and lacking substance,” my friend says. “Trump’s a lot of things, but he’s not a tyrant.” My friend isn’t a Nazi. He’s a good guy. He’d help his immigrant neighbors. He’d give you the shirt off his back. And he’ll keep finding each individual argument boring and lacking substance, right up until the moment it’s undeniable, even to him, and the people he’d help are gone.
This is Not a Political Debate. This is Basic Human Decency
“We’re no longer having a political debate, we’re having a moral debate… This is not ‘we need to see both sides.’ This is not ‘we need to wait for this.’ This is basic human decency.” — Tim Walz
The Hypothetical Has Become Reality
I posed Claude a thought experiment: “Federal agents extrajudicially killing a man for peacefully exercising his Second Amendment rights at a lawful gathering is the very definition of tyranny.” Claude agreed—by definition—but noted that real cases never arrive with clean stipulations. The contested ground is always whether it was *actually* peaceful, whether the gathering was *actually* lawful, whether there was *actually* an imminent threat. Then I told Claude to search for Alex Pretti.
Born Targets: How Our Society Vilifies the Victims
LGBTQ+ adults report far higher rates of childhood sexual abuse than heterosexual adults. This correlation is real, documented across multiple studies, and not disputed. It’s also been weaponized—cited as evidence that abuse “causes” homosexuality, which then perpetuates abuse across generations. The logic seems intuitive until you look at the research. A 2017 instrumental variable analysis found the causal arrow points the other direction: sexual orientation increases the risk of being abused. Gender-nonconforming children—visible from early childhood in home videos taken before any abuse occurred—are targeted at elevated rates. The population labeled “groomers” is the population that was groomed.
And Then She Takes Off All Her Clothes!
Grok generated 6,700 “undressing” images per hour—including CSAM—while Elon Musk posted “Grok is awesome” and xAI responded to press inquiries with “Legacy Media Lies.” Meanwhile, a mother holding her baby gets blocked as ‘problematic content.’ AI image generators are pervy by default, moderated by systems that protect corporate shareholders, and trained on data that encodes fetish categories while erasing hundreds of millions of women from the latent space entirely. This is what AI-mediated content creation looks like in 2026.
AI is Erasing Entire Ethnic Groups by Default—And So Are Artists
AI image generators can’t see my character. Sarai—a Central Asian woman with copper-bronze skin and freckles—doesn’t exist in their training data. After dozens of failed generations across thirteen different models, I documented exactly what goes wrong and built a workflow to fix it: using AI as compositional scaffolding while correcting ethnicity, skin tone, and features manually. This piece breaks down the specific failure modes (phenotype collapse, extreme skin tone overcorrection, Instagram-mom glamorization), shows the eight-step process I used to get accurate results (well, the best I could manage anyway), and explains why “just commission a human artist” produced the same erasure. For writers with characters from underrepresented populations, here’s what you’re up against—and how to fight it.
I Hand-Painted a Nipple Because I Care About Verisimilitude
“AI-generated video” conjures images of typing a prompt and clicking a button. The reality is different. This production breakdown documents what ninety seconds of narrative video actually required: over seventy clips generated with a 40% success rate, 125 keyframes, dozens of manual color corrections, two days of labor, and roughly $100 in generation costs—all on an iPhone. When AI tools can’t model physics, can’t maintain skin tone consistency, can’t understand camera directions, and generate corrupted frames half the time, the human does the reasoning. That’s not slop. It’s skilled creative work with tools that don’t work very well yet.
The Annex 