Wow well I made a ton of mistakes and there's no edit button. Oh well. You get what I am trying to say, despite a quote that is pasted in wrong and a numbered list that goes nowhere. 🙃

“No, sweetheart,” I said, brushing a stray tear from her cheek. “Monster is never leaving. Not while I’m here.” She searched my face like she was checking for lies, then threw her thin arms around my neck so hard it almost hurt."

"But Monster isn't scary. He's the only person who doesn't look at us like we're already dead." I knelt down so I was eye-level with the little girl (her name tag read “Lily”). Her lip trembled, and the sight of those huge tears on such a tiny, brave face cracked something open inside me.

""Are you going to make Monster leave?" Her eyes filled with tears. "The last director tried to ban him because parents said he looked scary." My heart stopped. "What?" "She said his tattoos frightened people. That men who look like that shouldn't be around children." The girl started crying.

likes, comments, and shares. And of course life imitates "art", so we find content creators on all kinds of social media also aping this kind of stuff. What an incredibly weird content ouroboros. "A little girl tugged my sleeve. She was maybe six, bald from chemo. Text excerpt:

cancer ward. I'll include the image and text sample below. The image is so obviously fake, and the story so full of details that are a bit off, it rings false right away. But it still "feels good", what a charming thought or idea. "Don't judge a book by its cover". These stories rake in thousands of

feel-good hook and it's never subtle. The war veteran with no money who finds purpose. The humans-having-touching-encounters-with-animals genre. The lonely or mentally ill person finding friendship. Always PG, always kind of pure. One of the latest was about a biker guy who entertains the kids in a

We perform for ourselves.

I would love to know more!

speak of that separately. But for now it feels like communication is a kind of ruin, we talk to everyone and no one. We try to reach each other but we don't care, it's just impressions and likes and views. We perform for the (rear-view) mirror.

What a strange idea. Just come and say something. "What's on your mind?" I think as Twitter used to say. It's random. People still want to squabble about stupid things with people they don't know. For some reason this has me thinking of the tearjerker AI stories that now clog Facebook. Maybe I will

It became ridiculous and of course they had to add a "jump to recipe" button because it was ridiculous. Anyway, live by the tech, die by the tech

This is also a group of content creators who were very eager to game the algorithm when it suited -- e.g. making enormously long stories before recipes to keep people on the page longer and raise their search engine results.

www.vanityfair.com/style/story/...

Otherwise all our enterprise is a creature of the fates and all our imagination and invention and care will not be enough to save us." Cormac McCarthy's inscription on The Passenger, given to Augusta Britt archive.vanityfair.com/article/2005...