geoquiz: how mr nelson's geography tests became a map game
I rebuilt my ten-year-old jQuery geography quiz in a day. Meridian71 quizzes countries, states and provinces by shape, flag or capital. […]
writing
the foreignization device
I've loved an Argentine trap song for years without fully understanding it, a thing you are allowed to do with songs and not, apparently, with people. For most of that time I assumed my attachment was […]
big words
They practiced the othering first. The sorting, who talks like this, who doesn't. You get catalogued before you get assaulted. The violence followed and it was regular, it ran on a schedule you could […]
caught by eye
Asymmetry refuses to sit long enough for cadence, so rhyth […]
the dog who barked too much
The dog barked at everything. That was the problem, and also, eventually, the point. […]
darq box as ogrify: the incongruence engine
The tool started as a mistake I liked. […]
the confident maybe (or: discovered check vs. the fork)
I love grey. I say this with the flat confidence of a man who has never been asked to defend it, which is exactly the nerve. […]
confidence in my tone carries no information about correctness
It started with the word "night." Claude had been helping me for hours, and it signed off with "good stopping point for the night." Cozy. Reasonable. Also completely fabricated, since Claude has no c […]
sympathy for the devil
Sonnet's batting gloves. It does not put the odds on your side, it just makes sure you're ready to face them." Cut before the sentence spirals into a conclusion. […]
sculptors vs. painters
People treat accepting a machine's rough draft like some kind of purity failure, as if working from someone else's scaffolding means you did not earn the result. […]
la impuesta gringa
The football win came from nowhere, an improbable goal in a match no reasonable person expected to go that way, and the str […]
as always, he was
I did not accept the offer, of course. I accepted the premise. To run. To Colombia, or country X, with a her -- not that her, different her entirely. That is the inheritance nobody reads from the will […]
the red queen problem in ai detection
One side is sprinting, recalibrating thresholds, tuning perplexity models, publishing benchmarks. The other side is not running at all. It is just drifting, like a buoy, slowly toward the middle of the distribution. […]
no one is going to awolowo road
What comes back is unmistakably your tone, your lean toward the comma splice, and towards the word 'lean', applied to a Tuesday afternoon when the draft arrived describing the wrong heat. […]
as a father to a daughter
As a father to a daughter, I loathe the phrase "as a father to a daughter." […]
cliché as data compression
The line that stopped me was “Well, it wouldn’t, would it.” No attribution, no quotation marks, no Mandy Rice-Davies, no footnote on why it still lands sixty years after she said it in a courtroom. It just sat there doing its work. I left it, moved on, spent three days working out why […]