darq box as ogrify: the incongruence engine
The tool started as a mistake I liked. […]
writing
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. […]
baladas para un alien
And then I made the mistake. I looked one of the lines up. "Liquor no es helado." For a long time that phrase was pure mystery, a sentence that meant nothing and everything. […]
our man in lagos
I am not going to explain it. Explaining it would make it sound like an epiphany, and it was no thunderclap, it was a slowing. The traffic was not moving and I stopped wanting it to move. […]
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. […]
hr-approved
Delivered casually over the lip of a glass of pinot noir, fittingly known as the Iron Fist in the Velvet Glove. […]
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 […]
long road from hollister
The Hollister logo was emblazoned across the chest of a guy sitting on a rock in the middle of the end of a dirt road. It took us 4 hours by 4x4 to find the one (in)voluntary toll road. The toll gate was really his rock, in the middle of a deer […]
un-editor
White never even agreed with Strunk and White. White used passive voice. He began sentences with conjunctions. Pronouns floated. Sentences ended on a preposition if that's where they wanted to end. The proscriptions in Elements of Style are aspirational, they describe how […]