I did not set out to write about children’s cinema; i set out to survive August.

I’ve been babysitting my little cousins—six and eight years old—for most of the summer, and I like it, mostly. On the days the heatwave allows, our mornings are spent running around the playground; on the others, we read, sometimes side by side, sometimes out loud. But after nap time, I let them watch a whole film, beginning to end.

It’s almost certainly too much screen time for their age, and their parents kind of mind, but my own happiest memories are exactly this: the films my parents wouldn’t have allowed, consumed in one unbroken sitting. I’m just trying to give them the childhood I got!1

Now, I’m fully aware that having opinions about children’s media from the comfortable position aunt who supervises for a few hours is a little bit, well, precarious. But the parents do trust me with the remote, even if they wished I broke it up in 30 minute chunks.2 Anyways last Wednesday I put on Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron – my favorite film in the world when I was their age.3

the horse

If you didn’t grow up with it: Spirit is a 2002 DreamWorks film about wild mustangs in the American West. Spirit lives peacefully on the Great Plains before he’s captured by railroad expansionists. They try to tame him brutally to get him to haul a locomotive up a hill, but Spirit rebels and derails it instead. Adventures ensue, including a huge canyon leap, a waterfall drop and a love story with a lovely mare named Rain.

Watching Spirit, l’étalon des plaines4 on a much smaller sofa at eight years old, I felt something go off in my chest and immediately demanded horse-riding lessons.5

I hadn’t seen the movie in maybe twenty years. The little cousins were skeptical for the first ten minutes—animals that don’t talk are a hard sell in the post-Zootopia economy—but then they went dead still during the escape sequence.

Spirit is still so strongly in me two decades later, and I felt so strange watching them get roped into my old favorite. It made me realize that whatever I put on the TV will still be in their heads in 2046, when they reach my age6. I’m smuggling the foundations of their future adult heads – and I’m sure it’ll take a much stronger hold than what their parents show them, if only because they get to experience the full thing from start to finish.7

We had an interesting talk about animal cruelty and why anyone would ever want to inflict that much pain on another being, and finished the afternoon with a re-read of The Little Prince to compare Little Creek’s actions with the Prince’s when taming his fox friend.

the philosopher (sorry, but i read things when i’m anxious)

Things == philosophy, mostly, which might be marginally worse than computer science papers.8

Down a Google Scholar rabbit hole, I found Martha Nussbaum. She argues that a child doesn’t reason their way into morality; they feel their way in, mostly through stories. You don’t hand a small person a textbook definition of cruelty, instead you give them a character to identify with and let their empathy do the work. It sounds incredibly intuitive once you hear it: we’ve always been teaching morals and ethics with stories, whether they be folk tales or the Bible.

As children grow older, the moral and social aspects of these literary scenarios become increasingly complex and full of distinctions, so that they gradually learn how to ascribe to others, and recognize in themselves, not only hope and fear, happiness and distress – attitudes that are ubiquitous, and comprehensible without extensive experience – but also more complex traits such as courage, self-restraint, dignity, perseverance, and fairness. These notions might be defined for the child in an abstract way; but to grasp their full meaning in one’s own self-development and in social interactions with others requires learning their dynamics in narrative settings.

For some reason, I never fully realized that movies aren’t just entertainment but also a moral education. Sure, I know to avoid the old racist cartoon, or to explain that you should definitely ask someone before kissing them, but the subtlety of this argument hadn’t hit me when it comes to depictions of nature and climate.

Stories can then begin to confront children more plainly with the uneven fortunes of life, convincing them emotionally of their urgency and importance. [...]
Rousseau writes of his imaginary pupil. "Unsettle and frighten his imagination with the perils by which every human being is constantly surrounded. Let him see around him all these abysses, and, hearing you describe them, hold on to you for fear of falling into them."

But of course, stories (be they movies or novels) build the vital muscles of empathy and compassion by embodying them. So therein comes the question: what stories should we be telling of the Earth? Should we show them the landscapes of our youth, when you couldn’t drive 20km without covering your windshield in bugs? Should we represent it as it is now, suffering and extinction included?

I want my cousins to be good-hearted citizens, who will better society through their daily actions and their vote once they’re old enough. I know it’s probably too late to save most of what’s left, but we can still try and do our best. For that, I need them to recognize the world and all living beings as not necessarily equals but at least sentient and deserving of dignity and as good a life as possible.

When a child and a parent begin to tell stories together, the child is acquiring essential moral capacities. [...] They learn to attribute life, emotion, and thought to a form whose insides are hidden. As time goes on, they do this in an increasingly sophisticated way, learning to hear and tell stories about animals and humans. These stories interact with their own attempts to explain the world and their own actions in it.

This is already quite difficult to do when it comes to fellow humans (there’s promise though, I have to remember they’re still very young and a bit dumb). As Martha Nussbaum puts it: to have compassion you need to believe you could be them.

Compassion requires one thing more: a sense of one’s own vulnerability to misfortune. To respond with compassion, I must be willing to entertain the thought that this suffering person might be me. And this I will be un- likely to do if I am convinced that I am above the ordinary lot and no ill can befall me.

But how do you show that an animal is also “someone else”, even if it might not have a name or a language?9

What does it feel like to be a horse?

I think Spirit is an interesting example in two ways.

First, the movie is basically silent. You hear the settlers yell orders here and there, and Little Creek tries to talk a bit here and then, but Spirit doesn’t have language. And yet, through expressive animation and sound design, we understand the horses’ emotions perfectly. This is a completely different way of life, and yet it’s somehow legible on the screen. We understand the herd dynamics, we see Spirit fall in love with a mare, we feel the pain and fear when he escapes with Little Creek.

Compassion involves the recognition that another person, in some ways similar to oneself, has suffered some significant pain or mis- fortune in a way for which that person is not, or not fully, to blame. As many moral traditions emphasize [...] it requires estimating the significance of the misfortune as accurately as one can – usually in agreement with the sufferer, but sometimes in ways that depart from that person’s own judgment.

Second, while Spirit mostly makes choices that are “a human in a horse skin”, like trying to save himself, making friends with other horses, refusing to be beaten, … He also makes some that aren’t so straightforward.

I remember that I struggled a lot with how harsh Spirit was with Little Creek, the Lakota man he escapes with. Little Creek is perfectly nice to Spirit, gives him shelter, apples, water – everything a horse needs. But when Little Creek goes to brush his mane, Spirit rears. And when he tries to ride Spirit again, Spirit throws him to the ground. It doesn’t matter that they escaped torture and jail together, Spirit is a wild animal and behaves as such.

Compassion involves the recognition that another person, in some ways similar to oneself, has suffered some significant pain or mis- fortune in a way for which that person is not, or not fully, to blame. As many moral traditions emphasize [...] it requires estimating the significance of the misfortune as accurately as one can – usually in agreement with the sufferer, but sometimes in ways that depart from that person’s own judgment.

As an adult, with somewhat-functioning empathy levels, I understand why Spirit behaves that way, and the message behind it; but as a kid I couldn’t wrap my head around it. The movie definitely helped me understand there were alien perspectives in this world, things that I couldn’t really understand and predict, and that it was ok to let them be.

Right now, that collective muscle is atrophying. Animal populations are plummeting, yet much of the world still treats nature as a backdrop, a resource, or somebody else’s problem. When I take over my cousin’s education on Wednesdays, the most powerful tool I have to reinforce this isn’t a lecture on extinction [7], but a story that puts them in the shoes of a non-human heart for an afternoon.

Noble savages in a noble land

Martha Nussbaum’s argument is about novels and literature. She makes a distinction between the tragedies of old, which concern themselves with tragic heroes, demi gods, and high-level morals; and the contemporary novels (and movies, I’d argue) who deal in ordinary people living ordinary lives.

In reading a realist novel with active participation, readers do all that tragic spectators do – and something more. They embrace the ordinary. They care not only about kings and children of kings, but about David Copperfield, painfully working in a factory, or walking the twenty-six miles from London to Canterbury without food. Such concrete realities of a life of poverty are brought home to them with a textured vividness unavailable in tragic poetry.

Of course, when the matter is “normal people”, the stories necessarily carry the stereotypes and blind spots of their authors. Everyone agreed you shouldn’t kill your dad, not everyone thinks all people are equal.

When we read a novel with close attention, we frequently will be led by the text to have sympathy with characters of many different kinds; but frequently, too, the text will cultivate sympathy unevenly, directing our attention to some types of human beings and not to others. Literary works are not free of the prejudices and blind spots that are endemic to most of the political life.

Which is exactly why Spirit was a risky choice, and I knew it as I pressed play. I love that film, but I dimly remembered my grandmother once sat me down to explain the actual Lakota history the movie left out.

To be completely honest, I was frightened of what twenty years might have done to it. I dreaded finding it cruder and more casually racist than the version I’d kept in my head (cough harry potter cough). You don’t get to pre-screen your own childhood; I was going to find out at the same time my cousins did.

Not that I mind teaching about colonization – I knew I’d need to pause the movie to deconstruct caricatures here and there. As far as 2002 representation goes, Spirit easily clears the bar many tripped over: the Lakota are brave, respectful, and the film doesn’t shy away from the brutality of the colonizers.

However, it leans heavily on the well-meaning “ecological Indian” trope. The Lakota, the horses, and the landscape all share the exact same flawless virtue. Nature isn’t a real place anymore but a moral position: wildness (good) vs. machines and the railroad (bad).

And what does that position look like? Eden. The plains are endlessly green, untouched by drought, starvation, or cruel winters.10 It’s an innocent paradise where the only threat is colonizers, and the only solution is their departure.

Ultimately, that is the film’s most dated concept: the idea that nature is a perfectly stable entity just waiting to be left alone. Because sadly, that is not the reality of the natural world I have to hand down to my cousins today.

To simplify – because that’s how the children saw it – Spirit says be a wild thing and don’t let them break you. It’s a wonderful story, but I’m not sure it’s the one kids need today. Paul Watson was a rebel in his time, but nowadays, we don’t need climate change activists to harpoon whaling ships (or do we? Idk, i didn’t think about this enough, maybe Greta is onto something). What I’m trying to say is that my little cousins aren’t gearing up to become eco-terrorists (affectionate, I like Greta), and are much more likely to get into education, medicine or journalism.

Nature Isn’t Innocent Anymore

That morning had been one of the truly hot ones. The kind where the kids starfish-spread on the tile floor while begging for ice-cream.11 They asked why it was so hot, and because I remember how bad it felt to be talked down to, we ended up going the whole way around the planet. I drew El Niño and the melting of the Arctic badly on the back of an envelope. We talked about jet streams, warming oceans, and eventually climate change and its human origin.

Then 4pm rolled around, and I put on a movie about a perfect green world, where nature is fruitful and only becomes dangerous when humans disturb it, like that time Spirit has to swim in harsh currents and fall off a waterfall to escape his captors.

I didn’t clock the whiplash until the horses were already on screen: inside is Spirit shivering in the shave, outside is the debilitating heatwave.

Here is the appeal of Spirit: there is a villain with a face and a locomotive, and good guys to root for. When Spirit wrecks the train, the wrong is righted and the plains go back to being a paradise. It’s a beautiful rescue fantasy! It works because the threat is entirely external. Leap the canyon, blow up the train, win.

But there is no train to derail in my cousins’ reality. The nature they’re inheriting is a shifting, struggling, deeply interdependent ecosystem, and their every action is making it worse. That ice-cream probably travelled a few hundred if not thousand kilometers, and our clothes might be second hand, but they’re still releasing microplastics every wash. Not to mention the inordinate amount of water I wasted drawing a cold bath as a pool substitute. There is no single villain to blame, no machine to wreck – there is just an ever so slightly hotter year, followed by an even hotter one.

Children feel betrayed by the future we’re giving them

I had assumed the question was whether to let any of this (*waves hands*) into the room at all, whether a film ought to be allowed to worry them about climate change. But the room isn’t a neutral ground anymore: when Caroline Hickman’s team surveyed ten thousand young people across ten countries in 2021, France among them, most kids were frightened already — 3 out of 4 said the future itself scares them. When asked to describe their emotions, they felt betrayed.

So the fear and anger made a nest in this house before I even picked up the remote. Which turns my question inside out. It isn’t “should I show flawed movies about climate change and nature?” It’s: given that they’re already thinking about climate disasters in an incomplete way (as kids are ought to do), what do the movies do with it once it’s on the screen? Pretend it isn’t there? (no thank you) Show it as realistically as the evening news? (maybe not?) Soothe it? Is soothing even the kind thing to do, if the child has already held their parents’ and teachers’ reassurances up against the weather and seen that they don’t match?

I genuinely don’t know yet. And I’m not being coy for storytelling purposes (although I won’t tell you if the cousins are real, or how many of them I have. Stranger Danger and all).

Now that I’ve re-watched Spirit, and that a new heatwave is coming, I’m very interested to see what kinds of movies are in the (air-conditioned) cinema for children their age, with representations of nature. I want to know what rehearsals they run on the topic of climate change, and whether any of them has worked out how to tell a child a truth that won’t scare them to death, but also won’t neuter them into useless capitalism-followers.

So that’s the series: one somewhat-recent-film a week for the next three or four.12 I thankfully live in Paris so I have access to re-runs, and I can already tell you we’ll watch, in order, Arco, Flow and Hoppers. I didn’t pick them as a syllabus, or on purpose for this series of posts, but why waste such a good opportunity?13 Maybe I’ll reach the end of the summer and decide the films are fine and I’ve been overthinking, which would be extremely in character.

In the meantime — I’ve shown you my horse. What’s yours? The film you soaked up at eight, before you had enough of a brain to really argue with or for it? I’d love to know! I’m especially curious whether yours had any weather in it…

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Stuff I read for this post:

• Caroline Hickman (2020), Urgent and immediate danger for IAI (oped)

• Caroline Hickman (2020) We need to (find a way to) talk about … Eco-anxiety, Journal of Social Work Practice (actual study)

• Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity (1997). All quotes in this post are from chapter 314

If you want to read more:

• did an eco-critical reading of The Hunger Games which I loved (behind a paywall sorry, but her stuff is worth it!)

• And hopefully I’ll remember to link the rest of my posts on this topic here!

Picture credits:

• Stillshots from the movie Spirit, collages by me

• Other dividers are stamps I inked and scanned on the computer (can you feel the analog vibes or did I waste three hours?)

See you next week,

I loved The Tainted Cup. It’s one of those books I finished and immediately wanted to press on people — a locked-room murder in a world where the magic is all fungal and a bit disgusting, solved by a blindfolded detective who’s cleverer than everyone else and narrated by her assistant, who can’t forget anything he smells. I took a while to buy the sequel, A Drop of Corruption because of finances more than anything else (well, also the fact that there was no cliffhanger, i like that). A Trade of Blood (book 3) comes out later in August, and I finally sat down fully expecting to love it just as much. I kinda did, for what it’s worth.

The thing that complicated it for me was the author’s note. Bennett ends the first book with this author’s note on autocracy:

It’s not always that a fantasy author comes right out and names the real, current, political thing they’re fighting against in the back of the book, and given when I happened to be reading it (2026), it felt even more pointed than at publication time (2024) (Bennett is a USA author) (if you need more context than that, i can’t help you, sorry)..

And then I kept turning it over, and I started to feel like the sequel might not quite be doing what the note says it is. This is the part I’ve found hard to write, because I don’t think Bennett is secretly an autocrat-loving asshole, and I don’t think the book is bad. But the more I sat with it, the more it seemed to me that A Drop of Corruption spends a lot of its four hundred pages making autocracy look pretty good. It keeps setting up kings to knock down and then not quite doing so.

I’m not the only one who came away a bit itchy about the politics. A couple of reviewers noticed it too: this post was spurred from reading Evie Bee Reads’ listing of the colonial references. I also recommend Jen K’s review for Cannonball who had the same lurch I did when it turned out the empire was the lesser evil.

I had some other thoughts to add to that. Starting, I suppose, with the detective.

starting with Ana

The odd thing about these books is that Din narrates them but Ana is the one you’re supposed to be admiring. He does the actual legwork, the trudging through random places, the getting hurt, the actual clue-gathering — while she sits behind her blindfold and turns out to be right. Not right after a couple of wrong guesses, which is how I tend to think of most fictional detectives, but right pretty much from the get go. She solves the murder, obviously, but she also solves Din – more or less. She helps him understand his doubts and all the things he can’t work out for himself about his life. Whenever something needs figuring out, whether it’s the case or the person, it’s Ana who does.

I didn’t really notice this was bothering me until the end, when the book has its grand reveal: that Ana is the product of an Imperial programme to recreate the lost (superior) race of the Khanum. So it’s not just that she’s gifted or autistic, or whatever it is that Columbo has.

The person I’m being invited to admire more than anyone else in the book is admirable, partly, because she’s a step closer to a vanished race of superior people, who also happen to have built the Empire. She’s clever and trustworthy partly because of her blood. For a book whose author’s note is trying to tell me bloodlines shouldn’t decide who’s in charge, I found it a little strange that its cleverest, most reliable character is basically a demonstration that sometimes they do.

To be fair, Bennett clearly sees this coming, because he gives Ana a speech about more or less exactly. It’s a good speech, and I don’t doubt he means it, I just don’t think a speech quite undoes the whole story quietly showing me that her gifts are real, her judgement is sound, and things generally go better when she’s the one who knows best.

Which might not matter much if it were only Ana. But it isn’t only Ana.

the Yarrowdale problem

The engine of A Drop of Corruption is an annexation. Yarrowdale’s a small independent kingdom at the edge of the Empire, and over the course of the book the Empire is slowly absorbing it, using a treaty signed a century ago. Nobody in Yarrowdale is being asked whether they want this. Which, again, seemed to me like a good setup for an anti-empire book. Here’s an empire doing the empire thing!

Except I kept being handed reasons the annexation might be, on balance, alright. Yarrowdale turns out to be a fairly grim little feudal place; and the Empire shows up with all the good things: medicine, infrastructure, the biological marvels, the seawalls that stop everyone getting eaten by the mean monsters. It’s framed almost as a rescue, or at least a favour.

They were backward and we brought progress is a thing colonizing powers have always said about themselves, and I don’t think it stops being that just because there’s a real threat involved – “modern” medicine certainly saved a lot of people irl, but slavery and genocide killed a fuck ton more.

Bennett tries to say in his author letter that he changed the kingdom of Yarrow into a high fantasy realm, after seeing this pitfall, but to me he didn’t go far enough. It’d be one thing if I got a replica of Rivendell with thriving arts and magnificent architecture, with educated people; but Yarrowdale is still described as a backwater swamp with rotting castles and dirty people lining the streets who tend to worship outsiders as gods.

Now, a genuinely rotten monarchy still doesn’t hand a bigger power the right to walk in and take it over, but maybe the point would have been better made otherwise. The book is very good at distrusting that story when the Yarrowdale king is the one telling it. I’m less sure it noticed it was telling a version of it about the Empire.

Making the monarchy look nicer wouldn’t really make the book less pro-empire, as far as I can tell (can you be anti-empire and pro-monarchy? Seriously asking. As a French person, I default to guillotining everyone). A gorgeous High Fantasy kingdom being folded into a sensible modern bureaucracy still lands, for me, as “the pretty old thing gave way to the practical new thing,” which is more or less the annexation’s own pitch. There’s a late suggestion that the Empire means to withdraw eventually but it comes so late, and so quietly, that I didn’t feel it shift much.

Which brings me to the villains, and what felt like the biggest missed opportunity.

the villains

In the note1, Bennett says he wanted to weave the (inexistent to me) High Fantasy autocracy imagery through the crimes, which is a nice plan — villains are a decent way to make a point about a thing! You attach the thing to the people doing harm and the reader recoils from both. But for that to work the villains have to actually be the thing, and Bennett’s autocrats aren’t doing that much crime and oppression.

Take the obvious one, the King of Yarrowdale. For a little while he’s the perfect suspect — an actual hereditary monarch, hanging onto power, clearly the sort of man the book wants to be against. And then he gets killed off fairly quickly by the real culprit, because in a mystery the obvious answer can’t be the right one. By the time he dies, though, we’ve learned he’s old, half-senile (if not entirely), and definitely not up to much deceit anymore.

His one genuinely dodgy act is a scheme from years back to evict the Empire – great! Except that’s not a crime we can hold against him if we want to write an anti-empire book! So his big crime is muddy, and old, and mostly by the end he’s a frail old man who got murdered. Sounds more like a victim than a real big-bad-monarch.

Then there’s the actual villain, the pale so-called king out in the swamps — except of course, he’s a usurper. He’s not a rightful king, which means the unease we’re meant to feel about him grabbing at a crown he “shouldn’t” have sort of relies on there being a crown someone should have, by birth. On top of which, the book makes him a little sympathetic by showing that monarchy is partly what wrecked him in the first place.

So the Pale King standing in for “autocracy” in the swamps is more like someone autocracy chewed up, who now wants his turn at it. He even says something to Ana along these lines (”you disdain kings, but I know what you are!“) — and, honestly, he’s got a point. He’s clocked more or less the same thing I did: for all the anti-king talk, the story keeps bowing to a certain kind of superior person. It gives me a bit of pause that the sharpest line about the hero’s blind spot comes out of the villain’s mouth.

Finally, there’s Commander-Prificto Thelenai, a character who gets some queen-ish language draped over her – but she’s not an autocrat either. Without spoiling you the ending, she’s an imperial official who bends and breaks the rules – for the greater good though, and the book lets her be right about it. So even the character meant to nod at bureaucratic overreach ends up quietly suggesting that a capable person willing to get her hands dirty gets things done for the greater good — which, again, isn’t quite the moral I think was intended.

I don’t want to over-reach, but there did seem to be a pattern. Everyone meant to carry the anti-autocracy weight either isn’t really an autocrat, or is too sad to properly convict, or actually saves millions of people while only hurting a select few who volunteered.

Which brings me, finally, to the top of the whole thing — the one autocrat the book can’t turn into a victim, because he’s doing rather well.

the man on the coins

Everything so far, in fairness, is the kind of thing A Drop Of Corruption added, maybe mistakenly (it’s a good pun though, it added a drop of autocracy is good to an anti-autocracy book). But the whole world, from the first book onwards, is built around a good emperor – so this anti-autocracy project was doomed from the start.

The books more or less makes its case for the Emperor. The seawalls, the literal thing keeping everyone from being eaten, are his. “You are the Empire” is the motto they tell the people. It can be genuinely stirring; it also happens to be the move I associate with real strongmen — I’m not above you, I am you, I’m the nation.

There’s an effort to take the edge off this with a bit of a democracy story: the emperor, we’re told, gave his people their institutions — handed down a senate, out of his own good nature. But the senate doesn’t seem to have all that much actual power, and I found “the all-powerful immortal ruler kindly decided to share a bit of it“ a hard sell as a democratic origin story. It reminded me more of the emergency-powers thing, where the strongman will absolutely give it all back once the crisis is over, except somehow the crisis never resolves itself. Rulers voluntarily handing back real power isn’t something I can think of many examples of. Building the world on the idea that this one did, and that it was rather lovely of him, sat a bit oddly with me for a book that wants me not to trust rulers.

And final straw for this Emperor: he’s good at it. He’s the last of the Khanum — the same better blood that makes Ana the cleverest person in the room — and by the book’s own account he’s run things capably for four hundred years. So the world ends up containing a living example of the exact thing the note is asking me not to believe: that one genetically superior person really can be uniquely suited to ruling, and really can pull it off, for a very long time. The note says autocrats are, when it comes down to it, only men, subject to the same mortal rules as all of us. And this book sort of replies: yes, but have you met this one.

The book seems to feel the tension, because it reaches for a couple of fixes near the end — a suggestion the emperor’s stepped back from power these days and a hint his past wasn’t spotless. But they felt like small touches to retcon a big structural problem. I don’t think you can spend a series making a benevolent immortal genius-king the reason your world is still standing, and then quietly turn the wheel towards “anyway, down with kings.” By that point it’s a bit baked in.

anyway, my rant is over

I do want to be fair to Bennett here, partly because I think what happened is genuinely hard to avoid, and it’s bigger than his book. That Pratchett line he quotes, about the blank spot in our heads marked kings, what a good idea — the joke of it, the reason it’s funny, is that Pratchett was talking about himself too. And so am I, and so is Bennett. Fantasy runs on kings and chosen ones and special blood; it’s a huge amount of the furniture, and it’s there because some part of us likes it, however much the more sensible part knows better. The two are more or less always pulling against each other, we’re the ones who keep filling in that blank spot, book after book.

So I don’t really want to land on “Bennett failed,” which feels both unkind and not quite my place — I’m not going to sit here and tell him how he ought to have built the thing when I can’t even finish a short story to save my life. And I should be honest that I’m not sure I’d have clocked most of this on a first read if it weren’t for that author’s note. I remembered how sharp it felt from the first book – so much so that I re-read it – and then I think I spent A Drop Of Corruption half-waiting for the story to be as brave as The Tainted Cup’s afterword. If the note hadn’t promised me quite so much, I’d probably have just enjoyed a very good murder mystery and thought no more about it. So maybe the disappointment is mostly the size of the promise.

But the thing I’ve actually taken from it, as someone who reads a lot of this and would very much like to write it well, is smaller and a bit more uncomfortable: it’s really quite hard to put kings and queens and special people in a story and not, somewhere along the way, end up on their side a little. A good afterword doesn’t do it on its own. Whatever you put in the speeches, the argument sort of lives in the other stuff — in who turns out to be right, who gets rescued when it counts, whose blood matters, who’s still standing when the water comes up. You can mean the exact opposite with your whole heart and still, if you’re not watching all of that, hand someone a world that quietly goes kings — what a good idea. Bennett meant it as a warning. I came away reading it, a bit uneasily, as the reverse. And the fact that someone this thoughtful and this deliberately anti-king could still end up here isn’t really a mark against him. If anything it’s the most convincing case for the note’s own point. That’s just how strong the pull is.

I’ll still be first in the queue for A Trade of Blood in August, some blank spots you don’t get to opt out of. But if it turns out to just be another detective story without at least trying to change course on the anti-autocracy things, then I think I’ll stop the series there, sorry Robert.

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Read you next time,

Did you have the same anticipatory expectations as I did? Please don’t spoil A Trade of Blood in the comments, I haven’t read it yet, but do tell me if it gets better on that front!

Also, do you recommend his earlier series, Foundryside? Or will I be disappointed too? I loved his world building so I kinda want to give it a try!

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Do you have 10 more minutes to read another essay? Here are a few recommendations:

If you want to unsubscribe (sorry to see you go!), there’s a link for this at the bottom! If you’re only interested in essays and not at all in short stories round up (which will become a regular column), go here and only leave the “essays” section checked!

I’m trying to learn how to write short fiction, and so I’ve decided to read at least 5 short stories per week, to understand what I like and what I don’t, what I want to write and what I really don’t want to do.

Here’s a little rundown of what I read, whether I enjoyed them, if I recommend them or not, and the craft lessons I learned from it. None of this is intended to reflect badly on the authors and their craft, it’s really just me extracting why I didn’t enjoy some aspects of stories, in order for me not to repeat them in my own work. It’s a lot easier to see those things in other people’s stories than in your own – but I promise I’m not trying to be mean!

If you want to read the stories, I included a link, and I’d advise you read the story before my review. I’m making sure not to spoil in the “pitch” section, but I will spoil in the next section if a certain element caught my attention.

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Today we have a mix of speculative fiction from Clarkesworld 232 (January 2026), two from the New Yorker: a story with speculative elements (did I tell you I like speculative fiction?), and one “normal” literary story.

The Stars You Can’t See By Looking Directly by Samantha Murray, Clarkesworld 232 (Jan 2026)

Pitch: it’s the end of the world, the babies are coming out weird. The protagonist struggled with infertility, but finally managed to get pregnant – but she did so after the “snowfall” that contaminated it all, so her baby will be “strange”. On the other end of the table, her sister in law who also struggled with infertility, got pregnant before and so her baby will be “normal”.

I loved this story! The vibes were excellent from start to end, in that dream-like, somewhat detached and eerie state that I love. I wish I’d written it.

Some elements that stood out to me:

1. The very simple temporal structure of Before / After / Before. We don’t go back and forth a thousand times because our name isn’t Chistopher Nolan, we only move twice through time, which is already a lot for a short story. I have, let’s say, tendencies, to want MORE and to flash back and forward between a thousand scenes, forgetting I’m in a short story and not a novel. And even in a novel, if you’re not careful, you get a Tenet instead of an Inception.

2. My first favorite part was the contrast between the two women. The jealousy and love, which seem so contradictory, but what are we if not contradictory? – it just touched me deeply. I don’t know what exactly in the prose or in the construction of the story made it work, but I really want to learn how to do that, how to make those kinds of feelings so strong for the reader.

3. My second favorite was the husband’s descent into conspiracy theory. This was so well-written it was striking and nearly made me cry for our protagonist. It felt vivid, extraordinary, but also plausible at the same time. There was an awareness of what it means to become a conspiracy theorist that made it all seem obvious, when it could have sounded contrived or weird. Idk either why it works so well but that’s what i want to be doing.

Don’t judge me too hard, I’m still at the very baby steps of learning how to write fiction (when I barely manage to write the Substack essay) and I’ve decided to write in English which isn’t my first language either. In this moment I somewhat regret not going to college for literature or English, but then I remember the only reason I’m able to write this so freely is thanks to my computer science job, so there’s that.

Still, I desperately need an English or American literature course at some point so that I can get some fundamentals down!

“The Readers” by Ben Lerner, The New Yorker (June 29th)

Pitch: this is a letter, addressed by the main character to their therapist. They are a writer, and one of the main concerns is whether or not the therapist has read their work, and what would happen if they did or didn’t, liked or didn’t like, and what that means for their therapy.

The letter format is a very interesting one, and I haven’t tried it yet. Especially the letter to a therapist which means you can easily have a modern character express deep feelings without sounding contrived. We just don’t write letters like that to friends and parents anymore! So the format works super well in my opinion for fantasy with a medieval or renaissance feel, or with this trick of addressing it to a therapist.

Another craft lesson: this was a killer first paragraph! I wasn’t feeling like reading when I picked this one up, and it wasn’t so much a choice as the first New Yorker on the unread pile. I have a fraught relationship with the New Yorker’s fiction choices: some (like this) I love, but others bore me to death, or I just don’t see the point. All this to say, I didn’t open this – I read it on paper, it’s my no-screen newspaper of the year – without really wanting to be swept. And yet I was!

Down We Go Gently by M.L. Clarke, Clarkesworld 232 (Jan 2026)

Pitch: a young boy’s first time on a planet, as he accompanies his father to make some trades for their spaceship.

I didn’t love this as much as I wanted to. The start was excellent, I loved how the author contrasted the chaos of the merchant street with the calm, organized spaceship. This first “discovery” section was wonderful, and I liked the leitmotif of the boy getting disoriented by gravity and by the infinite horizon.

However, I feel like this story didn’t really have a point – well it did, and I see what the author wanted to do, but there just wasn’t enough meat to it for me to like it. There’s a very subtle comparison between the ship, named Goliath, and the father – a giant with clay feet.

I enjoyed this element, but I feel like the author opened a thousand other loops and didn’t close them – but I really want to know!

For example, near the end, sex workers come talk to the boy while his father is in the bar. They hint that their ship’s name isn’t just related to “strength”, like the boy’s been told, there’s another story to it – but that story isn’t told, there’s just a tiny hint of it at the start (that they scavenged on smaller ships to maintain theirs). I nearly missed it, and I think it would have gone completely over my head if I wasn’t reading so closely to learn from it.

This speaks to one of my biggest struggles when writing fiction: i don’t want to handhold the reader through everything, i want to trust them to put all the clues together, but I’m very afraid I’ll go too far in the other direction and end up like this, where i set up my mystery well, but didn’t give enough payoff to the reader by fear of being unsubtle.

Another tidbit: it’s excellent to start the story with something obvious that the character doesn’t understand and the readers think they do; only to immediately turn it on its head and have it be different from what the reader expected. Here we get a boy saying he doesn’t understand “merchant streets”, which isn’t that hard to get, but then we realize the mechanics of merchant streets are different when you come from a spaceship.

“Mutter”, by Esther Yi, The New Yorker (June 22nd)

Pitch: A daughter welcomes her mother for a visit, and accompanies her to visit the zoo she works at.

I really loved this! This is one of the few New Yorker stories that appealed to me on their own, thanks to the gorgeous color pencil art. Click on the story’s link to see it full size, it’s really well done and intriguing.

And, well, I wasn’t disappointed. The first 2 paragraphs are an excellent way to introduce a story: give expectations to the reader, then subvert them, twice in a row! I snorted and decided I loved this author.

I’m taking off half a star because there were a few tangents into philosophical stuff that weren’t even tangentially related to the story, and I found this part boring and not really integrated into the story. But this was really only 3 paragraphs and then the story sprang back into itself, to my delight. This is a good reminder for me not to waffle on about stuff – if you let me free, my brain will take you into all the somewhat related corners of my mind, and I have a love-hate relationship with that, both irl and in fiction.

Apart from that little excerpt, I adored the visit to the zoo. You could feel the feelings of the daughter so well, how much she loves the animals and how beautiful they are. I aspire to write descriptions like those.

Then, the story took a turn I didn’t see coming – we went out of the zoo, for the mother to (spoiler alert) reveal she has Alzheimer’s. I found the moment very touching, and her way of explaining it was perfect: she won’t let her daughter be her caretaker, because she doesn’t want to burden her. She makes a lovely comment about becoming one of the animals her daughter watches over: something a bit alien, a bit strange, but still somewhat loving towards its friends, even if sometimes the wild part of her brought by the disease will make her attack. The mother aspires to stay something her daughter loves, and that’s incompatible with witnessing her slow degenerescence.

That’s all for me for today! I hope you enjoyed my little run-downs (I don’t think they’ can quite be called reviews in all honesty) and that I either made you want to read the stories, or at least gave you a good time :)

Leave me a comment below if you read any of those stories (sorry I think the New Yorker ones are still under paywall, but Clarkesworld is free to read!) and whether you agree with me or not. I’m also happy to take suggestions! Those 2 magazines are the ones I’m subscribed to, but I definitely want to branch out as I go along this journey :)

Read you soon,

By the way, if you read on your email client, you can hit “reply”. I always wondered who would be able to see, and if I was emailing the entire mailing list, but rest assured only I will receive the answer (and won’t share it, pinky promise!). So if you want to tell me something, anything (except insults ty) privately, email or DMs on the app is the way to do!

Tis the year 2026, and as with any January, resolutions abound. Everyone it seems is making “personal curriculums” and “study plans” for the year ahead, and I’ve felt the same push to open my brand new notebooks and start shouting a bibliography from the top of the stairs. But why? I know I won’t stick to any of it (adhd iykyk), that it will bring me nothing but despair that I’ve abandoned my great plans, and that I’ll have only my half-written notebook pages to dry my tears. AND YET, I’m still absolutely brainwashed that it would solve all my life problems!

At first I thought this was just the usual list effect: if you write it all down, in order, with tiny steps, the world feels so much more manageable. In times of uncertainty, order is calming, and when the problems are the economy and the politics – things you don’t really have power over – discipline of the self is the only variable you get to control. Writing the list itself feels good because you’re thinking of your ideal self (hello new year resolutions!), and we love nothing more than a dream!

Writing and then following a curriculum is a way for us, former good grades kids, to be doing all the things we’ve always wanted to do but had to forgo in order to build a life for ourselves. I’d love to be in academia, and I deeply considered a phd, but even in computer science it wouldn’t pay the bills (neither during nor after graduation). Building a study plan is quite close to the real academic lifestyle of researching whatever you want (minus the awful bureaucracy of trying to get paid of course), and that’s deeply satisfying to my starved brain.

However, I was a bit confused initially as to why this whole thing was taking the shape of the curriculum. We already have the framework of “resolutions” for making better versions of ourselves, and the whole “researching medieval representations of beauty” thing used to be an item on that list, usually stored under “i want to dive deeper into my hobbies”.

My personal theory is that, as we’ve gone deeper into the shitshow irl, we needed the return to the classroom setting, as a throwback to a (fantasized) childhood when all we had to do was be good and study. In reality, you had so many more problems than just studying for the test, but you’re forgotten how bad friendship and baby steps for independence were, so the only memory left is relatively easy to deal with – and studying is something we were so good at!

No more bills or worrying about financial futures, we’re now 14 years old again, except this time we’re so aware of how good we had it and are excited to crack open those books and problem sets! What, of course our curriculums have assignments and essays to write, how else would you learn?

You know what else didn’t exist when we were 14? Tiktok. And as any tiktoker worth their salt will say, your curriculum will only work if you’ve set a narrow, focused, and precise topic to explore. Such a breath of fresh air, to have only one thing to look over, with a set reading list. It’s not just good for anxiety, it’s also excellent to help with overstimulation and that choice paradox of there being way too much “content”, everywhere, all the time.

I’m not making my own curriculum, because i think it’s a very stupid idea to self-direct your studies for a topic you don’t master (but that’s “all or nothing” bit of my brain talking, you can totally diy it without actual risks), but i’m following other people’s! I’m reading Paradise Lost with Carson from GlutenbergBible, and I’m studying – well, will start studying once the book arrives at the bookshop – philosophy about technology from Jared Henderson.

I’m already feeling such relief, by just printing out the accompanying substack essays, setting my phone to charge on the other side of the room, and just reading along! That’s where the curriculum shines too: instead of that one big goal, you’re getting bite sized pieces fed to you, with a sense of completion at each step!

More than that, there’s pedagogy involved (another perk of stealing said curriculum)! It’s not just small tasks to do in order, some very smart people put them together so that they’re the right difficulty, and build up upon each other. It solves what we call in computer science the “tutorial hell”: you keep following along some youtube tutorials, one after the other, feeling like you’ve learned a bit each time. But for real you didn’t learn a thing! The various tidbits you pulled from the algorithm didn’t reinforce each other, didn’t slowly amp up the difficulty, maybe they even gave you contradicting information! The curriculum made by your favorite substackers solves all of this – or at least they promise too, we’re only 4 days into January after all.

That’s the main reason why i don’t recommend making your own curriculum – unless it’s your phd thesis theme, but that’s like, entirely the point of the job soo… If you steal it, it’s been conceived for you, and gently brought to life. Sure you can pick up any book and read it! But depending on your skill level and topic, you might not get a lot out of that. I certainly won’t learn shit from reading Heidegger on my own – I’d give up after 2 pages, and wouldn’t pick up on the nuance of the ideas.

I also think there’s 4 pros to following an online curriculum set by whomever:

1. The parasocial relationship makes you a tiny bit less likely to give up (because you wouldn’t want to disappoint your favorite online person, now would you?!)

2. The live element of weekly/monthly posts helps keep you motivated and forces you to actually take those bit sized pieces. I’m ever so slightly worried about my tech philosophy one, because i’ll be one week late due to freaking icy roads slowing down deliveries, and if i let the bite sized pieces stack up, suddenly we’re back to having a full on book to read.

3. You get to ask questions. I have a burner account already set up (anxiety iykyk), but honestly it’s the internet, so you can just say you didn’t understand shit, can they please dumb it down a bit more?

4. They’re normal, <40 years old people! I can’t say how important that is: while the older generations understand that tiktok is frying our brains, I have yet to see them truly get it inside. Young content creators on the other hand, not only get it, but are trained to write for us. The old university professors, for all their great qualities, aren’t optimizing for declining attention spans – they have other shit to do! But the substackers must, if only because that’s how they’re getting paid. Their posts are, to be frank, understandable even at nighttime before bed, when my brain is at its worst. They’re helpful, candid, making jokes and bolding just the right words to keep me focused.

Now, the hour is a bit late, and I’ve realized my question on “why curriculums” has not only found a few answers, but also devolved into praise of the not-at-all-personal curriculums, so I’ll leave you here.

I hope you found some interest in this less formal and less edited version of my newsletter! (my personal resolution for 2026 if you can believe it) If you did, I’ll gladly let you add “subscribe to Rose’s Technofable” to your curriculum’s list of tasks, and will give an official A+ to all who ask.

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Good night,

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Before we start, a note on ratings: they’re half emotion, half enjoyment, half depth and half perceived skill. This means the funny movie without a single original thought filmed on a potato will still get a 10 even if it’s obviously shit. Or the weird art movie I didn’t get, but found interesting after I read a few reviews that explained it, with great care taken to the aesthetic of it all, is also a 10.

In general:

• More than 9: i fully recommend

• More than 7: you should go if it sounds like your stuff

• More than 5: good enough

• Less than 5: don’t waste your time

Author movies (except French)

One Battle After Another. My favorite part of the movie was the car chase scene, i’d never really cared about a car chase before. Or maybe high DiCaprio trying to remember the password? What I didn’t love was the fetishisation of Black women throughout the movie ( said it all here). 7/10 imdb

The Long Walk. I was touched by the portrayal of boyhood, and what the conversation between the boys told us of them ( said it best here). However I found that the movie was somewhat hypocritical in that it wallowed a bit too much in that violence it pretends to decry. Still, a striking movie! 8/10 imdb

Bugonia. Idk if it’s because it’s still so fresh, but i think it’s my favorite movie of the year. This post by explains so well the themes, and why i adored it, and this one by explains all the criticism i have (but i still love it despite those flaws). 10/10 imdb

September 5. About the 1972 Olympics, following an American sports broadcasting team while they try to adapt to the first live coverage of a terrorist attack. Well executed, with tension to keep us awake, and a good handling on the topic: what do you show in this situation. I went away having been entertained and made to think, so that’s a plus! 7/10 imdb

The Room Next Door. My favorite quiet movie this year. In between all the dinos and fascists and whatnots, this was a welcome gentle story (but very sad). The portrayal of both women was amazing in its nuance and care, and I cried all my tears. 9/10 imdb

Resurrection. Didn’t love, didn’t hate. I definitely liked it better after reading a few reviews to understand the references, but i was still bored most of the way. I dearly wish we’d followed the woman’s character, the actress was perfect and I so wanted to be mesmerised! But instead we went around a bunch of disconnected stories, and mostly filmed the (very well done) decors – I lacked human connection most of all! 6/10 imdb

The Brutalist. Part one is my favorite movie of the year in terms of plot. I loved seeing the emigration and arrival into this new American society. The second part was full misery porn and shock for shock value. Doesn’t help that I now severely dislike Adam Brody for his behavior. 3/10 (or 7/10 if you stop at the intermission) imdb

Conclave. My favorite movie of the year when it comes to pure visuals. Came out in 2024, but they always let us catch up on some stuff in January, so I took that opportunity and didn’t regret it! The scenography and the costumes were superb. A bit less convinced by the plot, especially the ending, which was a bit too out of left field to be believable, and didn’t really add anything but shock value to the themes. 8/10 imdb

Eagles of the Republic. This was excellent! It was ever so slightly redundant with the other movies in the Cairo trilogy, but it was still amazing. The writing, the humor when you don’t expect it, the beautiful filming, the great acting… No notes. (the pharmacy scene was my favorite) 9/10 imdb

Maria. The Maria Callas biopic! I think Angelina Jolie did a good job, but I hated the decision to make her sing. I get that La Callas lost her voice by the end, but it was atrocious to hear in the cinema. I liked the rest, I think, especially in how it was filmed. The soft colors and dreamy setting made it all real and not at the same time. 7/10 imdb

A Complete Unknown. Continuing on the biopic trend, here’s Bob Dylan! I liked it better in that it didn’t try to explain too much, and just showed what an asshole he was, while still being a brilliant artist. I can’t stand his voice though, and Chalamet (whom I can’t stand either anymore!) replicated a bit too well. 7/10 imdb

After all that, I didn’t see the Bruce Springsteen movie or the Queen one, because I was too saturated with biopics. I hope the trend dies off soon, so that we can go back to having original plots and characters.

Good Boy. I wrote a fuller review here, but the gist of it is that it was relatively well executed for its non-existent budget, and that I had a horrible time because I hate horror movies. It’ll teach me! Lots of good visual ideas to show a haunted house through the pov of a dog, and so I give it points for imagination! 6/10 imdb

French movies

I’ve been trying to go see more French movies in 2025, because we’re doing great things and I want to support that! So here are a bunch. I’ll try to add the English name if it’s out in the USA/UK so you can check them out.

Roughly from favorite to least:

La femme la plus riche du monde.(The Richest Woman in the World). A (dark) comedy, freely inspired from the Bettencourt scandal1. Deliciously scandalous, excellent performances, truculent dialogues,... There’s a little “eat the rich” edge to it that makes it satisfying. 9/10 imdb

Un ours dans le Jura. (How to make a killing). Wtf is that translated title? A Bear in the Jura mountains is so much better and much more evocative of the plot: after a fatal car crash, Christmas tree farmers Michel and Cathy find 2 millions euros and cover up the scene by pretending a bear ate the victims. Police investigation and cash laundering ensue. Another excellent dark comedy!2 9/10 imdb

L’inconnu de la grande arche. (The Great Arch) Funny that the english title removed the “unknown man” part of the title! This is an historical movie about the conception and buidling of the great arch of La Défense, the big modern (for the 80s) business center right outside of Paris, by a random Danish architecture professor. It was a very nice story, with just enough drama and good acting! You can see the lack of budget a bit – those dudes have 1 (one) jacket each lol, but it didn’t impede my enjoyment. Much better than The Brutalist imo3. 8/10 imdb

Vie Privée. (A private life). Jodie Foster, in a French role! And a good one, that was a lot of fun to watch. She’s a psychiatrist who investigates the death of one of her patients, whom she becomes convinced was murdered. Half murder mystery, half comedy, half family drama, … The pacing was good, I liked the muted colors in the film, and the plot was just drunk enough for me to forget about real life! 7/10 imdb

Chien 51. (Dog 51). Our big expensive action movie of the year! We the French have been so bad at finding money for those, so this makes me hopeful we’ll manage to make more in the future. This specific one is forgettable, with a basic rogue AI plot. But the matte painting on the backgrounds made for a believable half-destroyed Paris, so I’ll forgive it. You don’t necessarily need to get out of your way to see though, it’s very beauf as we say. 5.5/10 imdb

Les enfants vont bien. (Out of Love). You might know (and love) Camille Cottin from Call my agent,4 and she doesn’t disappoint here. It’s a pure French movie about family ties, with a lot of blank stares that mean everything and whispered dialogues, but I like the genre. Her sister disappears (voluntarily) and leaves her 2 children to take care of. The children were good, which is rare enough to mention, and the whole thing was emotional, even if I found it tried a bit too much to make us cry. 6.5/10 imdb

Dossier 137. (Case 137) Léa Drucker has to be one of my favorite living French actresses, but this movie was disappointing. It follows her as an officer in the “police of the police”, investigating alleged police brutality incidents during the yellow jacket protests. Sadly the director chose to stay “neutral” and gave no nuance or depth to any of the characters: Léa is bland, the policemen are brutes, the victim’s family members are poor, kind, sad people… Nothing new under the sun; could have been a documentary – but that’s not what I expect from a fiction movie. 6.5/10 imdb

Animal Totem. (I don’t think that came out anywhere but in France). WTF was that? Not in a Bugonia kind of way, just in a weird French movie kind of way? I think I liked it, but i’m not sure yet. There’s a business dude, with a suitcase handcuffed to the hand, going on foot from the Roissy airport to the La Défense business district. On foot. And he sees animals? This was an ecological fable (idk how to translate that, maybe tale?), and about capitalism too. 6.5/10 imdb

La condition. (untranslated too) A period movie about violent husbands, patriarchy, and sorority. Nowhere as good as Portrait of a Lady on Fire, but Swann Arnaud was a convincing villain, and the friendship between the woman and the maid was kind. I wish we’d actually explored the theme of keeping up appearances more: the maid is pregnant because she was raped by the husband, and they make a deal to keep it as the couple’s child, so that the rich woman can be more integrated into society. 6/10 imdb

Kaamelott 2 part 1. This one is personal: if you’re not French, you probably don’t know the untranslatable tv series of the same name: a reinvention of the Arturian legend, except they’re all dumbasses and Arthur can’t deal with it. Originally amazing short jokes (3 minutes long), then developed into an actual story (with 30 min long episodes of unequal quality), it’s now coming to the cinema.

The first movie was mediocre, but it had been so long we wanted to see what was next (can you see the parallels with anyone else?). Except movie 2 part 15 is even worse. The director plots (weirdly), writes dialogues (badly) and develops characters (unnaturally), and the audience is bored as fuck of seeing the same story over and over again. Contrarily to Avatar, I’ll still go see the next movie just in case. 1/10 (it’s not as upsetting as Avatar 3, but close!) imdb

Final words

So here was my retrospective of movies! Once again, please tell me below which ones I need to catch up on. I’m already booked for The Secret Agent in January!

If you want to see my opinion of big budget entertainment as well as animated movies, i wrote about that in part one.

And if you’re more interested in books, I also put together a reading wrap up:

Now I’ll take a break from posting over the holidays (unless I spend all my time putting together a big rant about Avatar 3, you never know), so I wish you and your families a good time, and I’ll see you next year <3

Thanks for sticking with me in 2025!

Love,

In Predator:Badlands, our main character is Dek – a Predator™, the runt of the litter, malformed and sickly. His father tries to kill him as per their customs, but his brother saves him and sacrifices himself to get Dek sent to a very deadly planet, Genna. Once there, Dek meets Thia (Elle Fanning), a synth (an android from the Alien™ franchise) and a cute merchandising-friendly alien (not ™). Together, they start hunting the biggest predator (not ™) of the planet, so that Dek can go home with a trophy and earn his place as a warrior in his father’s Predator™ clan.

So here we have it: the first Predator movie told from the Predator’s perspective. I was so excited!1

Before I get into the parts I didn’t like, let’s take a moment for the few things that worked – I don’t want you to think I’m a baseless hater. As an entertainment device, it was quite good! The first half of the movie is a xenobiologist fever dream! Someone definitely had a blast designing planet Genna – imagine if the plants from Little Shop of Horrors had babies with the creatures from Annihilation, then gave them all rabies. There’s a scene where Dek steps on what looks like moss, only for it to release spores that attract flying predators, which in turn lure out a camouflaged beast that makes the original Predator look cuddly. Everything on this planet has evolved to murder everything else, and the film revels in showing us exactly how. This is what Pandora should have been2 – not just beautiful, but genuinely alien and terrifying.

After the Discovery channel documentary, the second half goes back to the very well trodden path of an action movie. There’s a training montage, lots of fighting,3 a big boss, a sacrifice…it’s predictable, but has the good taste of ending rather quickly so as to not bore us out. The relationship between Dek and Thia keeps things moving along, with enough light banter to be fun without being cringe. Overall, solid high-budget action movie!

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🤡 What’s wrong with my face?!?

4The original Predator films worked because the creature was alien. Not just in the literal sense, but in the way it moved, hunted, and thought. It was genuinely other – a walking, clicking nightmare that followed its own incomprehensible logic. You couldn’t reason with it, nor understand it, and that’s what made it terrifying.

Badlands tosses all that out the window and gives us Dek: a Predator who walks, talks, and emotes like a sad human in a rubber suit.

Let’s start with the prosthetics: the original Predator design was iconic as the perfect balance of humanoid and strange, with mandibles that clicked and a face mostly hidden behind. Dek’s prosthetic on the other hand is half-decent, at best. I get that he’s supposed to be a weakling, so maybe some of the mandibules had to go, but he still looks like a severe letdown. I get it: from the producers’ point of view, having a non-human in the main role is a risk! What if the audience leaves the theater when there’s not a single human face in the first 30 minutes? But I don’t think an ultra-humanized face, complete with the worry and sad contemplative boy features, is the way to go. We’re not dumb, we know we signed up for a scifi-fantasy5, we saw the freaking trailer!6

This humanization also extends to the bodysuit: Dek moves like a person. He walks upright with human gait patterns. He gestures with human body language. He even runs with that infamous Tom Cruise trick. There’s no mystery in his movement, no sense that this is a being with different musculature, different instincts, different anything. The original Predator moved like a predator – all economy and threat. Dek moves like an actor trying not to trip over his own feet.

Second: the language. The clicking, the guttural sounds – those were part of what made the Predator feel mysterious. At least half of the problem was that you couldn’t communicate with them in any way! But in Badlands, Dek speaks full sentences in his native tongue, which is then helpfully translated for us via subtitles. Now, credit where it’s due: at least they committed to him speaking Yautja7 throughout instead of giving him a magic universal translator. But here’s the problem: the language sounds like human language. It’s got the same cadence, the same emotional inflections, the same pauses for dramatic effect. It could’ve been Old Norse or Klingon and I wouldn’t have known the difference. There’s no sense that this is how an entirely different species would communicate.

This is the fundamental problem with Dek’s characterization: he’s just a human wearing Predator skin. The original Predator saga was about confronting the unknowable, the dangerous, the other – something that operated on completely different rules and saw us as prey rather than equals. That mystery, that otherness, that horror? It’s been sanded away. We’re not exploring what it means to encounter a truly different form of intelligence; we’re watching a guy with daddy issues who happens to have mandibles.

😤 I will avenge my brother!

This sanding away of the alien-ness doesn’t stop at the physical attributes8. Dek’s inner life is entirely human too – his motivations, his fears, his emotional arc could all be lifted straight from any number of coming-of-age stories. How to train your dragon, Thor:Ragnarok, Avatar9. Hell, even Billy Eliott fits the bill10 – can you get any more modern-world-problems than this?

There is a dire problem when in your movie introduction, 2 out of the 3 aliens are behaving like drunk Vikings. No, a Predator – a solitary alien that works alone and puts violence and war above all – can’t be sacrificing himself to save his brother. That’s just not it!

Whether or not we agree with alien morality isn’t the point. The question is: how does their culture actually work? Show me the mechanics before asking me to judge them. Instead, this movie promises to reveal an alien civilization while actively hiding it from us.

Dek’s motivations?

1. Revenge for his brother

2. Proving himself to his father

3. Earning his place in the clan.

These aren’t alien concerns – they’re the backbone of every hero’s journey ever written. “I must prove my worth to my disapproving father” arc is a well-worn trope (and this movie doesn’t even offer a fresh exploration of it).

And let’s talk about that father for a second: he’s presented as your standard antagonist dad, but that’s exactly wrong. This isn’t some abusive human patriarch – he’s a Yautja elder operating within his planet’s cultural, spiritual, and moral codes. He shouldn’t be an antagonist at all. The original Predators didn’t have human problems. They didn’t angst about daddy issues or yearn for acceptance. They hunted, collected trophies, killed all kinds of random creatures (including humans) with a cold face. They followed their own incomprehensible code of honor. We could project motivations onto them – pride, perhaps, or a warrior’s code – but we were always guessing. They were other.

The thing is, you don’t even need the brother’s sacrifice to launch this story. Want a more interesting version? Make Dek someone completely embedded in Yautja culture – someone who doesn’t question their values or codes at all. He’s judged as weak, a failed Yautja, and condemned to ritual death. And here’s the kicker: he accepts it. Think of it as a kind of seppuku, but administered by another. Honor demands it, and he’s ready. But then something interrupts the ritual – an attack, a malfunction, whatever – and he’s catapulted off-world, crash-landing on this hostile planet. His only wish is to get back home, to finish the ritual and restore honor to his clan. Now you’ve got your reluctant hero without the tired revenge plot, and we’ve actually learned something about how their society works.

Dek’s character could have had (should have had) a deeper, more strongly held, relationship to violence. He starts out bitter and isolated, sure, but through the power of friendship™ with Thia and the cute alien sidekick, he learns to open up. Problem is: we don’t really see much of that. There’s an interesting scene at the start when Thia convinces him to keep her along, because she’s “a tool he can use” – he wouldn’t hear the usual “let’s collab we can be useful to each other” speech. But this was the only scene that touched upon the Predator’s specific way of life. Everything else – the gearing up ritual, preparing weapons, the training montage, eating food over the fire, … It’s all human in nature!

Dek is just a guy who happens to have mandibles. His struggles are our struggles. His emotional journey is our emotional journey. The film takes an alien and makes him relatable by stripping away everything that made him alien in the first place.

I know where this comes from: the producers looked at the Predator and thought: “Do you really think Martha, 45, who’s taking her little boy, is going to stay the entire length?” “Nah, I don’t think she’ll ever take that kid to another Predator movie…” And that was it. The greed for captive audiences makes for dumbed down, useless movies. But still, I’m sad (and upset I spent 10 bucks for it!)

Have you watched any Predator movies? What do you think? Don’t get me started on how Alien:Earth did the exact same thing but worse with the alien, but please tell me below which is your favorite of the Predator saga!

Here goes: Indy is a dog, who’s (un-named?) owner is sick of some kind of pulmonary illness that makes him vomit liters of blood every so often. Dude isn’t happy his loving sister keeps telling him to get his ass to the hospital, and so he leaves his city apartment to hole himself up in his late grandpa’s home in the butthole of nowhere. Of course grandaddy died in it, of a similar lung problem, and so did his dog, and everyone thinks the house is haunted. Detractors will say it’s genetic but Indy (the dog) starts seeing things, the owner gets sicker, apparitions appear galore, dude dies, Indy is scared, the sister comes to pick him up (the dog, not the man – well his dead body will fit in the truck i guess).

For all you animal lovers out there: Indy survives the movie. He faces some scary moments—getting caught in a fox trap and being pushed off the bed one time, but he makes it through unscathed (although maybe a bit scared, and also totally sad his owner died).

So, what did I think? Well, I was scared shitless from seeing it in a dark room, on a huge screen, with super high sound volume; but even that’s not enough to brave the social anxiety of making everyone move out of the way in the middle of a super tense movie so I stayed put, put my fingers over my eyes and kinda peeped out once in a while.

Still, now that I’ve had a full week to think about it, I think I quite enjoyed it! It’s not the best movie in the world, I’ll get to that later, but I think it used its special moat in an interesting way!

What scares a dog?

The movie is fully from Indy’s pov. The camera follows him around and never leaves him. This leads to some really nice (non-scary) scenes when he’s in the car, door closed, while his owner is taking a call outside, and we barely get enough sound to understand the content of the conversation.

Something I found very interesting is how little they show the faces of people in the movie. I didn’t watch it again to verify (got traumatized enough on the first pass), but I’m pretty sure we only see the owner’s face once or twice, in the full 1h15 of the movie.

This allows us to focus strictly on Indy, and his emotions, without being parasited by his owner’s. On that note, it’s so interesting how easy it is to read those dog emotions and empathize with them. This isn’t even a dog “actor”, trained for the cinema! And yet, with the camera work and the atmosphere, I suspended my disbelief immediately and only saw the “puppet string” of the treat-on-a-stick for the first few scenes.

So, what does it mean to be a dog in a haunted house? Being a dog and seeing hallucinations isn’t as scary as being a human, in a way. I loved how the movie both adds tension and made me afraid, while also presenting the dog as mostly confused during the whole thing. Dogs don’t understand ghosts, at least not as we do.

The film weaponizes our need to project understanding onto Indy’s behavior. Every time he stared into an empty corner, I found myself constructing explanations, seeing patterns that might not exist. We think we can read dogs, but Good Boy keeps reminding us that we’re interpreting an alien experience of reality. The film’s genius lies in this disconnect: we’re watching a horror movie where the protagonist and audience aren’t even experiencing the same threats.

Indy isn’t that bothered about seeing the mud monster, unless it tries to touch him. The times Indy got scared are the times when he sniffed something out and followed the scent into the basement, where a combination of smell and sound gave him the scaries. Since the camera won’t let go of him, we see several long minutes of him staring out the window, to the still forest where our human senses can’t make anything out.

What’s a dog to do? Bark?

What can Indy do against the monster? He’s not a fearless German Shepherd, far from it. It’s established quite early on that he’s rather of a wimp, always sniffing stuff and whining. Indy does his job, and tries to do it well: regular patrol around the house, thorough investigations of weird scents, some little barking when things get really bad.

But in real life, what is there to do when your owner is dying, when you’re just a dog with no way of calling an ambulance or alerting a neighbor? Indy certainly knows his owner is dying, that his short tamper is just him in pain, that of course he doesn’t mean it when he yells at Indy to get off the bed. Still, Indy never stops trying, but in the end, all the whining and pawing and licking of faces won’t make his best friend less sick, or provide any comfort.

One of the most heartbreaking scenes for me was watching Indy navigate that impossible choice of love vs fear. He doesn’t have access to the story beats like we do – he can’t think “if i just hold out until morning, help will come! He lives in an eternal present, in which his owner sometimes loves him, and sometimes chains him to the doghouse outside. It’s ostensibly an act of mercy, to protect Indy from witnessing his last hours, but for Indy it’s abandonment. He can smell the monster coming but he’s left alone with this danger he can smell but not see.

When he finally manages to get free of the chain, and to run away from the monster, Indy doesn’t flee to the neighbor’s house as I had predicted, he actually comes back inside, into the bedroom, to check on his owner. By this point, the monster has killed him though, and so Indy finds his way into the basement, curls up next to the emaciated skeleton of his predecessor (grandpa’s dog, who presumably faced this same situation decades ago), and waits.

I’ve seen a few reviews say that it’s sad because Indy doesn’t understand death, but i don’t think that’s true: Indy very much understands death and disease, and that his owner is doomed to die that night. The monster isn’t there to show his confusion, he’s here to show how scary and disturbing that truth is, even when you are able to understand it.

Endnotes

I don’t know if the movie will be available to you where you are, but in France it’ll be on Shadowz, so you can watch it at home on Halloween. I really recommend it, just not stuck in the big dark room with strong sound volume like i was lol.

Have you seen it? If not, what other movie would you recommend i watch (from the safety of my home)?

See you next time,

But one thing that keeps coming back, and that i keep being stumped by, is around the idea of writing stuff around books, for an american audience (because that’s 90% of you according to my stats), when i’m not only not american, but also not a native english speaker.

I had yet another experience of it this week: i wrote this little note about classics, which garnered some attention

And then came 2 of my worst nightmares – well, not actually, no one bullied me and i’m very thankful for that! I thought they were representative enough of all the things i fear when i speak about books on here.

Can you give me an example please?

Yes, sure! Let me think for a sec and find you an example of a book considered part of the classics, that’s easy to read, doesn’t require you to look at the footnotes, is enjoyable, is relatively short, doesn’t have weird references to things people would need to look up…

Oh wait, it also has to be in English! Because when you’re debating (that’s a big word, people were just nicely talking to me), you need to convince people, and the best way to do that is to find examples that resonate with them.

You know, The Princess of Clèves that we all read when we were 12 years old – no you don’t, because it’s a French classic, about the French nobility, in the kingdom of France, part of the national French curriculum.

Argh, let’s try again! A little play, funny, with lots of quiproquo, easy commentary on social classes that still so relevant today you don’t need any explanation to understand why that dude is being mocked and that this bit is sarcasm… Molière! The playwright of King Louis XIV of France, who founded the Comédie Française, and who is as widely studied as Shakespeare, in France!

Now you get the point, I won’t bore you with more random French books we teach kids (although do tell me if you’d like a list, i can totally build one of those classics guides i was putting down!).

The thing is, my classics aren’t yours, and i can’t come up with easy classics to read from my own experience at school. The English language classics i read as a child were all difficult, because i was learning the god-damned language they were written in! I’m sure if i picked up The Treasure Island today, it’d be a breeze, but the (extremely) abbreviated version i read at 13 was the hardest book in the entire world!

That’s also why i feel so strongly about those misguided guides of the classics: they are written by people who have usually never suffered to read them, and so they are often missing the mark in terms of how difficult they are to read. There is a difference in language, in how stories were told, in themes, pacing, vocabulary, … that makes it hard to get into a lot of classic books if you aren’t initiated. And when your guide is for beginners, the only thing i see is a random 15 years old wanting to be smart picking War and Peace up just to try and dying of boredom and never wanting to pick a book up again.1

I misspoke

Second nightmare of any socially anxious autistic overachiever non-native english speaker: i was misunderstood * gasp *

Ô rage ! ô désespoir !2

As soon as i dare to say anything nearly close to an opinion in a tongue i only halfway master, i get that awful though: what if they misinterpret what i wanted to say and think i’m a horrible horrible person who wants to kill all the puppies? WHAT WILL I DO THEN???

It’s all good and dandy when i get my usual 100 views on a long form essay (which means no one read past the third paragraph, and i’m generous), but when it’s 4 lines, on Notes, that goes “viral” (it’s 600 likes, but still that’s a lot for me!), then i reach my limit and i start to wonder if i really want to do this and seriously consider closing it all down.

In the case at hand, people though i was talking about prefaces, introduction and footnotes. I wasn’t, i was talking about the “How to get started reading the classics” listicles you can find on substack. And then i spent my afternoon of fame and glory trying to write that down in a tactful manner to explain to my kind commenters that, no, i’m not an anti-intellectualist who wants to ban footnotes and that yes, i do read classics on Kindle specifically so that i can pull up the definition of random words i don’t know (bonus point if their meaning has changed so completely since the time of writing).

Of course that’s all a “me” problem, and i need to focus on self-confidence, growing a thicker skin and all the stuff. But still, i write on substack to be adulated and grow into a thought-mother, not to be taken so off course!

Context, what context?

On that note, we really just don’t have the same context. I keep seeing post among post about the idea of the “western canon”, but on substack, the “western canon” is american + some british bits they learned at school, those 3 russian 80000pages novels, and that one French book that makes you sound cool (Proust, Flaubert, Monte-Christo – choose one).

And i’m not illiterate! I’ve read some Hemmingway, some Shakespeare, some Steinbeck. But did i really read Grapes of Wrath? No, i don’t think ok. Oh yes actually i did! It was called Les Raisins de la Colère on the front jacket though. Does it still count?

To go back to my point about classics guides: Grapes isn’t one i’d recommend to a French audience, because it’s so tied to the problems of its time, and we don’t really study the Great Depression as it happened in the USA. Does that mean French people shouldn’t read it? Of course not! It just means a French person vaguely wanting to “read classic books” shouldn’t start with learning all about that time in history in another country – it would be more enjoyable for them to pick up a French equivalent, idk, maybe Marcel Pagnol or Colette. They’ll find themselves more at home in a description of French rural life, with the French preoccupations of the time, with a political climate they learned about in history class!

And on the opposite side of “easy classics”, the harder ones are also that much harder to read when you don’t have the same cultural background. I feel like i can’t write about Shakespeare, because i didn’t study him in Literature class, i think that we necessarily have a very different experience of Proust when you picked it up voluntarily as an adult, whereas i read him in 3 weeks, wrote 4 dissertations on various passages, and was grilled for 1 hour by my teacher on a linear commentary of [insert passage] for a grade, all that at age 16.

It goes further than the mere cultural difference and the language barrier, studying in class is a different way of approaching the books, that puts you in a different mindset and lets you come away with different lessons. I saw [blogger] say the part she remembers the most about Du côté de chez Swann3 is [insert part], but what i remember most is [how it’s placed in the literary context].4

My favorite character in LOTR is Bilbon!

And now comes the death blow to writing about english language books on the internet, when you read them in your native language: which translation did you pick?

Because i can guarantee that my first experience of The Lord of the Ring was severely impaired by the frankly weird translation choices – like adding a “N” at the end of Bilbo, for some reason?

I mentioned earlier not always knowing if i’ve read a book or not, because i know it so much from its translated title (and Grapes of Wrath is literally a literal translation so it’s on the easier side!). The other side of the coin is the endless Wikipedia > change language > English searches i did all afternoon to get translated names of all my examples!5

I also got a very nice DM from someone wanting to read one of the recs, and asking which translation was best. But how am i to know that? The business of translations, how good/faithful/enjoyable they are, is obscure to me! I wouldn’t know where to find that information in the first place (please tell me if you do!).

And that’s for the great scenario in which the book was translated to English – because most of them aren’t! Especially in the scifi/fantasy/speculative worlds that i affectionate. So where do i find that quote to illustrate my point?

You known you should stop your little rant when you come back full circle: what if, when i find the translation of the quote i want, it’s actually saying the opposite of what i understood? What if i don’t find the same beauty to it, the same poetry, the same analogy? What if it was so mangled (and that’s very true for older works – they would say “improved for the benefit of the readers of the very special country of France”) that it doesn’t illustrate shit at all anymore?

I would say this is my third and most debilitating nightmare. being understood very well, while i confidently spit out a take from my confidently arrogantly arranged soapbox, that just happens to be completely false because i didn’t actually understand the book i was reading.6

End words

I’ve written all of this on my high horse, still kicking from all the adrenaline of having been seen by so many people. It’s not been edited much, but i thought it was important to say all that stuff, in a longer format that all the little notes i’ve been trailing around.

If you have any suggestions on how to get past some of those hurdles, i’m all ears. Otherwise, i’ll come back next week, maybe with a horror movie review? I haven’t done this in a while (i get too scared in the cinema) but i recently saw something really nice 👀

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See you next time,

6

Yay footnotes! For adding context and helping reduce this shit lol – i do hate having to go down to read them though, did you know on substack desktop you can just hover the number and it’ll pop up? And one mobile clicking it reveals the text, without scrolling and loosing your place either!

It feels a bit strange to write this with the results that i’ve had: most posts in this genre celebrate a great amount of growth, thousands of subscribers, and the likes.

This is not such a post, mainly because i haven’t found the attention i wanted. Now, this isn’t to say i hate you, my dear subscriber! I love every one of you dearly (do i?). I don’t think i know most of your names, but i’m still grateful you decided to press subscribe and stayed on here.

(I wish i could add an unsubscribe button right here, but i haven’t figured out how to, sorry)

Back to the point: not everyone gets lots of anything when they start a substack, and maybe this post can be useful if you want to compare stats. I don’t think i’ve seen stats transparency from any other small accounts – which doesn’t mean anything since they’d also be small and have little reach so i’m unlikely to find them (serpent, circle, you know the taste of the tail as well as i do!).

I’m also going to add some advice and lessons learned at the bottom if you’re interested! Now let’s get into it:

The state of the stats

As of this day, i have 109 subscribers (that’s 1 every 3 days, i count that as a win!) and 5.4K total views over the year, for a total of 19 posts (not including this one).

My 3 best performing posts were:

• The review of the writing course was circulated a bit among the students of said course, some of which had the same griefs as me, hence the big amount of comments

• The end of year review seems to have been liked! I’ll definitely re-write another one like it this year.

• The AI post was timely with the explosion of vibecoding and my credentials as an actual software engineer helped (also i used a clickbaity title). I don’t want to be an AI person though, so it’s not greatly useful to know.

Here are the opening rates and views of my last 3 posts:

This is much more in line with my usual stats: between 100 and 150 views, 1 or 2 comments (it shows up as 2 or 4 because i replied 👀), and a handful of likes.

I haven’t gotten a direct sub from a post for the past 12 posts. This coincides with the end of the writing course, so i guess it’s correlated. Most people found me through the forums there. In total, the dashboard shows me 45 people came directly from posts.

I have been getting some new subs through Notes mostly. I can’t find the exact number in the analytics, but i often see 2 notifications in the row: people like a Notes and then subscribe. I guess my shitposting over there has some benefits?!

How are your stats going if you’re in similar place than me? Let me know in the comments or in DMs (i’ll keep if private).

Leave a comment

Last graph for now: traffic sources

As you can see, people mostly come from the substack network (i think that means Notes). There’s quite a few “direct” things, but i think that’s just me typing the URL directly in icognito mode when i’m on my work laptop.

Apparently some people found me through Google (i’m pretty sure all the DuckDuckGo hits are also me on the work laptop lol). I’m not doing any kind of SEO or other optimizations for search engines because that’s the biggest joy-stealer possible and i can’t be bothered.

Where am i going?

Substack and writing are hobbies to me, i don’t do it for money and i have no intention of ever making a living from it. My software engineering job thankfully pays me well while giving me enough free times in the evenings to enjoy myself, so i’ll be keeping it.

Because of that, i find most of the advice on how to grow a substack inappropriate. I don’t have a pain point that i’m solving for people, nor do i want to create a lead magnet or add paywalls anywhere. More importantly, i don’t want to mislead people with marketing tactics or clickbait titles.

I did it once actually, with the vibecoding post, and i think it sums up my feelings well: i only did it because i have little respect for people who use AI to do all their work for them, especially in a specialized job like software engineering which is fraught with dangers. So clickbait seemed fine. But i wanted to write the post because i thought there needed to be more of this type of writing, to warn off young impressionable people from relying on AI for stuff like building payment systems – and again, clickbait helps attract attention to the psa, so i guess it’s morally good.

In general though, i don’t want to be known as an AI person, or as a software engineer, or as a marketing asshole who ragebaits you and tricks you round and round. I want to attract people like me, who click off immediately when the stupid title doesn’t match the inside, who seeks “intellectual enrichment” said a friend, that is to say content around culture that’s entertaining but also has substance.

I was told to be louder

All in all, the 3 bits of advice i’ve kept have been:

• Post more on Notes

• Be a good netizen and like/comment on essays you like

• Make my homepage nice

I also don’t want to be known as someone who posts dumb useless chatgpt notes, so i don’t (how brave of me! i hope you clapped). I try to either shitpost (which is hopefully funny) or say interesting stuff. That means i do struggle with posting 1 Note a day, but i don’t want to force it. I’ve been filling the gaps with pretty photos of my journals and it’ll have to do.

Being the good netizen is moderately easy. I leave likes wherever i get to the end (since i click off rather quick on shitty essays), but i find it hard to leave a comment. I’ve been forcing myself to find interesting and relevant stuff to say, but sometimes i just end up with a “nice post, i liked it” and i find that mediocre. I’ll focus on improving that in the future!

I made me all pretty

Makes me sad that “pretty homepage” is always at the bottom of the advice lists, but i understand why: nearly no-one visits there, and it’s probably better to focus on having clickbaity featured images. But i don’t wanna, and since none of the other advice applied, i spent the time making pretty stuff.

I’ve decided to add a tiny bit of consistency in terms of background color and to mix analog and digital. I handcut letters from magazines, glued them to printer paper, and scanned them with my printer.

Then i use my ipad and procreate to add pictures onto the pinkish background, paste my scanned letters and stamps, and make it all somewhat visually pleasing.

Also i spent hours detouring the letters i use as dividers – it’s completely useless for most of you who read on the app or in email since the background is white, but if you come on my homepage, it looks pretty in transparency.

What else have I learned?

1. Would have probably grown faster if i had been focused on writing trendy pieces and put out one per week.

2. Things would be so much easier if i didn’t have morals and a strong sense of wanting to do things right. It’s not even perfectionism (although i also suffer from that), it’s just that i don’t want to put out half-assed takes on trendy topics that i would personally not want to read

3. This doesn’t mean you can’t have success – it just means i can’t lol. There are plenty of talented and exigent people on this platform who put out great work every week and succeed from it.

4. I probably should focus on one topic (books) and mostly stick to that. That’s what i originally wanted to do, but then the writing course was making us write personal essays so i kept doing that.

5. This makes sense because people (me) want to know what they’re into before giving up their email (i don’t think i’d give myself a subscribe right now).

6. Also, my best posts are about books and they are the ones people liked the most (except the AI one, but we’ve already covered that this isn’t the direction i’m going to – i want a hobby, not a repeat of my job), so it makes sense!

7. For all that i complain about not getting much attention, i’m very happy whenever you like or comment (please keep doing that!), and i have a rather decent opening rate (more than 30%, sometimes even 40%), so i must be doing ok.

That’s it, really! I’m not going to waffle on for too much more, when i don’t really have any other lessons to share. I guess the last one is: of course you’re not going to be famous on substack in a year, only a few outliers do, as for all other social media.

I feel a bit meh at having only talked about how people don’t like me enough, sorry, but that’s really the entire reason why i’m posting on substack. I like writing, true, but the writing can stay in the drafts. If i’m putting it out on the internets, it’s because i want to be seen. It feel so immodest and arrogant to say it out loud, but i don’t want to lie or fabricate feelings! This is a stats transparency post, so let’s be real <3

Now, i’ll stop here for today! I hope i didn’t turn you off by begging for attention (please click the little like button right below 😉) and i’ll see you next time!

Love,

PS: looking at my list of ideas, i think the next ones are going to be about pseudonyms, notetaking apps, and what it’s like to write about books on the american internet when you’re not at all american

Give me your email here to get notified :))

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Want to read more from me? This is me at my funniest:

And this is the post i’m most proud of writing (unimportant spoilers of Severance season 2, she’s really a side side character with 5 minutes of screen time):

Or you can read said 2 best performing posts:

Today, I’ll share some reflections on the first three weeks of the program. I’m writing this as I’m doing the program in July, on the Saturday before reading week 4 (it’ll come out later because I’m a champ at procrastinating spellchecking and creating graphics). And boy, do I have things to say!

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For those unfamiliar, The Artist’s Way is a book by Julia Cameron, in which she presents a 12-week program for artists to reclaim their creativity and improve their mood with spirituality. Every week you read a new chapter, do writing exercises, and complete homework before starting all over again.

I appreciate the format: my autistic brain does very well with routine, habit building, and small bites of content with immediate application. But (because there’s a butt), I find that most of the advice given by Julia smells, baaaad, especially in a neurodivergent context.

God, are you there?

I’d heard chatter about the presence of god and religion in this book, but people caveated it because Julia says you don’t need god to read the book. In a way, that’s very true! She states directly in her intro that belief in her specific god isn’t required, and that it can be substituted by any other big force, or just glanced over.

I appreciate her efforts in being inclusive, but she fails in execution. It’s not that I don’t believe in her god, it’s that I don’t believe in any god at all, nor in any big hidden force, nor in any higher power of any kind!

And at that point, her argument fails on its face. Despite her efforts, her framework is still deeply rooted in belief in something. For Julia, creativity is spiritually significant. She systematically calls to that higher power to explain where inspiration comes from, to justify the origin of that force you’re nourishing yourself with, and where you’re getting your talent from. This is wonderful for her, and for all the people she helped, but since I don’t belive in shit, I just can’t access any of that advice!

For example, the conclusion of week 3 is about synchronicity. In theory, I agree with the basic idea (if you do stuff and meet people doing the same thing, you’re likely to talk to them and maybe get opportunities or stuff from that), but Julia’s description was calling on god and them answering prayers, and honestly that’s completely useless to me.

I don’t want any mystical in my creativity, thank you very much

I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t want that brand of mystical creativity in my life. The myth of the artist with muses and great inspiration is all good and dandy, but I don’t see how I could sustainably have that for myself and not be an exhausted, overwhelmed mess.

I don’t want to receive inspiration from god that needs to be received in all its glory and infinity and urgency. That’s just way too big for me. I want small, manageable, gentle creativity that I can fit into the little spaces of my life. I have a full-time job, can you see how impractical a creative fit at 10am would be?

The descriptions Julia gives of creativity also deeply resemble an autistic meltdown, and that’s just no fun at all. Or maybe just a special interest tunnel, but that’s hardly better because I come out the other way being just as tired and exhausted, and then I still need to do all the housework and go to work-that-pays-the-bills as well.

I just can’t have a mystical experience and go back to real life as if nothing happened! There needs to be some downtime, some recovery. Big emotions and tumultuous all-encompassing creative acts can’t happen in a vacuum. It takes a toll on the artist (I see why the greats are all insomniac addicts with a temper), and Julia ignores that. This romantic chaos that supposedly underlines creativity ignores all I need to be happy: order and routines, predictability in my schedule, and manageable sensory inputs.

One of my biggest pet peeves with The Artist’s Way so far is that Julia comes from a position of great privilege and doesn’t seem to know it. Setting aside the autism-specific stuff, we can look at morning pages: no matter how early I start writing them, I still have to log in for work at 9am, I can’t just stay there until my brain vomits 3 full pages! Julia sees the emotional burden that morning pages can provoke, but she glosses over the practical problems — and the program is full of them.

But I want magic in my life \*whines\*

But then we come to the actual tension in my life right now: I very much do desire a life filled with magic and romanticism and all that jazz! Now I can’t quit my job and start being an artist full-time, but I still want to feel special, for my life to be a story of its own.

I want romanticized walks along the Seine, coffees on a balcony, slow mornings with journal writing, and creative projects that feel meaningful without consuming my entire existence. I want the aesthetic of the artist's life — the notebooks, the inspiration boards, the dedicated creative space — scaled down to fit around my actual responsibilities.

I think my resistance to The Artist's Way goes deeper than just the god stuff, though. There's something about my relationship with this kind of romantization of thinking itself that makes Julia's mystical approach both appealing and impossible for me.

I know there's a causal relationship between my fixation on narrative and my ambivalence towards reality. I want events in my life to be meaningful, to be worthy maybe not on its own but against a broader unfurling story, to interact with other people in clear ways that build into something bigger. The idea that time could pass and nothing could come of it makes me uncomfortable. Sometimes days end without offering anything remarkable, things are boring and forgettable. I know life can't be exciting all the time. But also, why can't it be?

This is where Julia's mystical creativity becomes seductive. Her version promises that every creative moment is divinely inspired, that synchronicities will guide you, that your artist's dates will reveal profound truths. It's narrative on steroids—life as constant meaningful development! And I want that with all my heart, while my brain is firing up all its neurons to keep me safe from the inevitable meltdown that would come from constant stimulation.

But I don't think my perspective is unique. A lot of people live their lives, consciously or not, in pursuit of narrative, and are then either gratified or dissatisfied by the result. "Do it for the plot," we tell ourselves, you know?

Oh wait, everyone feels this way

I initially stopped this piece after that "not unique" paragraph, but I realize I can't in good conscience end there. I'm not unique (duh), and I'm so not unique that all the good French poets talked about it before me (with much better words!)

The French have this whole phrase for it — "le désenchantement du monde" — which basically means we lost the magic when the world got modern. Baudelaire1 was crying about it in the 1800s, watching factories sprout all over Paris, and trying to find beauty in the grime. And here I am, 200 years later, having the exact same crisis!

It's weirdly comforting and deeply annoying at the same time. Like, great, I'm part of a grand tradition of people who can't just accept that the world is moving on, the train of progress, blah blah blah. But also, if we've been dealing with this for centuries and still haven't figured it out, what hope do I have?

The worst part is, now that I’ve remembered my literature classes, I did open those French poetry books, and yes, I did find it validating and soothing. How cliché; my teacher was right: art will help you when you feel sad.

Some argue that our desperate search for meaning in creativity is part of the problem. They say that we should accept the mundane nature of creative work, embrace the ordinary, and find peace in the absence of cosmic significance (or find a god, but I’m not leaning that way for now).

I think they're missing the point. It's hard and monotonous to be alive: the yearning for magic isn't the problem — the problem is that it's mostly inaccessible to us in this world. Julia’s (and society’s) idea of creativity demands too much: divine inspiration that can't be scheduled, overwhelming spiritual experiences that leave you drained, synchronicities that require constant vigilance for signs.

So I have no conclusion and no advice, only to try for yourself and find little bits of magic and happiness where you can. Sorry, that feels a bit off, a strange way to end this little newsletter — honestly this entire last section feels a bit unfinished. But then so do my thoughts on this topic: this is very much top of mind for me right now, and I am nowhere near having understood enough to make a clear stand.

I feel a bit upset and shameful at sending this to you. I have better standards than that for the quality of writing I want to put out — but this feels like a seasonal feeling other might also go through so it felt thematic! If you have any tips or revelations of your own, please do share them below, I am very much in need :)

On that wonderfully depressing tone, have a nice week and see you next time,

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Or if you need a pick me up, a lighter, funnier, brighter bit that i wrote:

If you want to stay melancholic, that one will do:

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At first, you decide not to, because that’s what smart people do. But then you fail the captcha, so you try again on the next slide. This time it’s traffic lights. And you select the itsy-bitsy bit that sticks out of the main box…

And you fail again. Why? Are CAPTCHAs just badly designed? Am I just bad at them? Somehow my mom never gets stuck (and she’s not good with tech), so what’s the trick?

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, you squinted at distorted text

Before the motorcycles and traffic lights, there were squiggly letters.

By the early 2000s, the internet was shifting from a nerd playground to something more mainstream. Normal people were signing up for email accounts, leaving comments, joining forums. And with them came spam — lots of it. Bots flooded sign-up forms, scraped data, posted junk links, and overloaded forums with scams and nonsense. It wasn’t just annoying; it could bring down entire sites. Web services needed a way to separate humans from scripts — quickly.

The original CAPTCHA was simple: show users a warped mess of letters and numbers, and ask them to type it in. A digital eye test of sorts. It worked because bots couldn’t read – at this time, machine vision was all but a scifi dream. To bots, a distorted “g” might as well have been a Jackson Pollock.

These tests spread fast. Yahoo, Google, MSN, — everyone slapped CAPTCHAs onto their forms. The word CAPTCHA itself became the catch-all term1. It wasn’t user-friendly — even humans struggled to read the mess — but it worked well enough.

Your Civic Duty: Typing “Participated” into a Box

By 2007, the text-based CAPTCHA got a small upgrade. Instead of random squiggles, it started pulling real words from scanned books — fragments that OCR2 software couldn’t read. Ink smears, crooked printing, faded letters. Too messy for machines, but still legible to humans.

That was the premise of reCAPTCHA. It looked like a normal challenge, but behind the scenes, users were helping digitize old books and newspapers. One word in the test was already known — it was just checking if you were human. The other word was unknown. That was the real goal: get millions of people to transcribe it. In 2010, it’s estimated that 100 million CAPTCHAs were completed every single day.

Most users didn’t realize they only needed to get one word right — they just tried to do both. Which, of course, was exactly the point.

And naturally, the bots got better. Of course they did — we were the ones training them. Every time someone typed in a blurry word, it became another labeled datapoint for OCR. After years of this, machines started beating us at our own test. So text CAPTCHAs had to go. The future needed images.

How the “dog” caught the “car”

Once bots learned to read, we moved on — because nothing can stop progress, not even the bots we’re trying to stop. In the early 2010s, CAPTCHAs started showing image grids instead — blurry pictures of pets, food, storefronts, street signs. You’d be asked to click all the chimneys, or all the tennis balls.

This wasn’t just about keeping bots out anymore. The OCR trick had worked so well, big tech recycled the formula — this time to train computer vision. Early image CAPTCHAs like Asirra asked users to distinguish cats from dogs. It was simple, effective, and gave researchers a goldmine of labeled data. At launch, humans passed it 99% of the time. Bots had no chance. But that didn’t last: within a year, researchers had trained models that could solve it 10% of the time. But at scale, “barely good enough” is all you need to cause damage.

Since 2012, Google has leaned hard into visual grids: crosswalks, buses, fire hydrants. Not coincidentally, the same things their self-driving car project needed help with. Every click on a blurry stop sign becomes training data for a neural net behind the scenes.

So now, here we are – staring at a little square. A sliver of a traffic light poking in. Should you click it?

The arms race of getting all your data

By now, the image itself is a decoy — a user-friendly wrapper for what’s really going on. What determines whether you pass a CAPTCHA isn’t what you click, but how you click it. Mouse movement, hover time, typing rhythm. Google’s reCAPTCHA doesn’t just ask if you’re a human — it watches you act like one. And if your setup looks too clean, too fast, or too private… well, that’s suspicious.

This is why you can click the square with the tiny sliver of traffic light — or not — and still pass. There’s no correct answer. It’s not about accuracy; it’s about probability. You just have to act enough like a human, on a device that acts enough like everyone else’s.

And if that sounds a little shady... well, it is. Google’s reCAPTCHA v3 is entirely invisible — no checkbox, no challenge. It runs in the background, collecting behavioral signals and browser data, scoring how likely you are to be a bot.

This 2023 study found that all current CAPTCHA challenges not only cost users a lot of time, they discriminate based on education, and worse still, they are useless to combat bots.3 Modern spam systems run circles around them. For example, OpenAI’s ChatGPT can solve all variations of them, which is what allows for the “search the internet” capability. Funnily enough, they use CAPTCHAs themselves as anti-bot prevention.4 But the grid puzzles stick around not because they work as gatekeepers, but because they work beautifully as data funnels.

And you know what? That tiny square with the sliver of traffic light? Click it. Don’t click it. It doesn’t really matter. Just move your mouse like you mean it – and be a good little product they can harvest.

So… what now?

So, if you’ve been failing CAPTCHAs to the point of losing your mind — congrats. That probably means you’ve managed to make your browser just private enough to be suspicious. Honestly, I respect it. Keep going.

That said… I’ve eased up on my own adblockers. Not because I’ve stopped caring about privacy, but because, well, I need to get through forms without doing six rounds of traffic lights. I’m all for giving Big Tech the middle finger — but I’d also like to browse in peace.

So my work laptop? Wide open. No shields. No blockers. It’s not really mine anyway. I don’t do anything personal on there. It’s already compromised by design — might as well let the bots think I’m the most average, compliant human on earth. My personal laptop is still a bit more secure, but I don’t block all cookies as I used to, just enough so I can browse in peace (which is worse: endless captchas or 5 pop-ups?).

If this all feels a little more twisted than you expected… yeah. Same here.

Want to read more from me? Here are 3 pieces I think you’ll enjoy:

• How to not vibecode yourself in the foot, or some advice as a software engineer so that you don’t regret using AI to code

• There is no TV inside my mind, about my experience with aphantasia (i can’t see shit when i close my eyes)

• Dreaming up the threats of the future (on the French army’s payroll), about that time we the French paid scifi writers a fuck ton to imagine all the dangers we’ll face in the 2030s

Thank you for reading and see you next time! The next post will probably be about Severance (i know, shoring up after the storm) and more specifically the character of Gretchen. Putting that here in case you’re reading, so that you hold me accountable :)

edit: well I ended up switching the order of those posts, so you can read the Gretchen piece here <3

Thank you to everyone who helped me edit or encouraged me to write this post: , , , , .

Every other woman in the show is far removed from this kind of life. Cobel is a senior scientist with total institutional power. Natalie is pure C-suite. Helena is rich enough to live untethered. She uses severance to gain her father’s approval, Devon is cushioned too – floating from one emotional side quest to the next, supporting Mark, raising her baby with ample help. In a very real way, they’re severed too – from the stakes of normal life.

In the world of Severance, some workers at Lumon Inc undergo surgery to split into two selves – an "innie" who works, and an "outie" who lives a normal life. The “innie” and “outie” personas are separate: they don’t share memories or feelings, only some general knowledge – the perfect setup to avoid leaks on sensitive projects. Some secret tech makes the switch when workers go through the elevator. innieDylan does the job. outieDylan comes home with the paycheck. iDylan crunches numbers, oDylan greets his wife Gretchen. The work happens on screen, but outside his awareness – he won’t remember a second of it.

Gretchen’s work stays offscreen too, as usual for a background character. We don’t follow her to the emergency dispatch desk where she works night shifts, we don’t see the calls she takes or the weight they leave. Like oDylan, she vanishes into labor – and returns, hollowed, to a house full of needs.

In most television, this dynamic would play out differently. The man would be the protagonist, and we’d follow him through the drama of his job. His fatigue would feel earned. The woman would arrive in the last ten minutes of the episode to nag him about dinner, and we’d roll our eyes on his behalf.

But Severance doesn’t let us follow anyone, and that absence levels the field: when both jobs are invisible, we’re left to notice what happens after. Who picks up the load. Who sees what’s missing.

So this essay is about Gretchen – and what Severance quietly reveals about work, memory, and care. About the unpaid labor that becomes more visible when no one’s paid labor is shown. About how, in the absence of spectacle, we finally see the weight women carry just to keep things going.

Severance is a fantasy, but whose?

Severance is sold as salvation, a way to separate the burdens of work from the pleasures of home. For oDylan, it works exactly as intended. He disappears into the void for eight hours and comes back with full credit. No memory of the labor, but all the prestige of identity: provider, worker, good man. It’s the fantasy of compartmentalization, modernized and institutionalized – the guy who doesn’t do the job, doesn’t feel the stress, but still gets the story. oDylan forgets. Everyone else fills in the blanks.

Gretchen’s job also happens offscreen, but she doesn’t get to leave anything behind. Her work doesn’t end with her shift. Instead, she walks into another job – one with no clock-out, no compensation, no forgetting. Field day lunches, backpacks, bills, laundry, toys, mess. Emotional regulation. Logistics.

Severance splits Dylan in two. Gretchen has to contain both halves at once. Worker and caregiver. Waged and unwaged. She’s fully integrated, not because she chose wholeness, but because there was no other option.

This is what makes the premise so sharp. When both characters' jobs are invisible, when both vanish from the narrative while at work, the return home feels like level ground. But it isn’t.

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The Shift That Never Ends

Gretchen’s workday doesn’t end – it just relocates. She clocks out of one job and into another, swapping her headset for a grocery list. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild called this the "second shift": the unpaid, invisible labor women perform after their paid jobs end. Cooking, cleaning, parenting, emotional triage. Gretchen doesn’t get a rest shift, just a new costume.

It’s the usual fantasy: oDylan “provides” and she “nurtures.” He does the hard thing by walking into the Lumon office, while she... what? Does the exact same, actually – except she remembers it. And then doesn’t get to crash on the couch, because the cookies need baking, the pediatrician needs calling, the swimsuit needs to dry before Thursday and the lacrosse jersey before Friday. It’s not a softer life. It’s a longer one.

She shoulders the logistical spine of their family and the psychological scaffolding. She notices things before they become problems. She picks up slack before it hits the floor. She explains feelings to the children and to their father. And she does it all while her circadian rhythm is being ground into paste.1

This is what researchers call compassion fatigue. The erosion of empathy that happens when you spend too long caring for others without reciprocation or relief. It’s well-documented in emergency personnel, hospice workers, nurses. And mothers.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote about this decades ago in The Second Sex, calling it the myth of the "eternal feminine" – that women are made to be all things to all people. Infinitely nurturing, infinitely flexible, infinitely self-erasing. It’s not just mythology. It’s domestic policy.

And Severance doesn’t shout it – it whispers it. That’s what makes it brutal. The writers understood Gretchen so well that they didn’t need to spell her out. She doesn’t get a storyline. She gets a list of obligations – and that’s exactly the point.

So when she finally cracks – when she dares to feel something for the only version of her husband who actually sees her – she’s the one who ends up alone on the porch.

All you had to do was slice them

Let’s be clear: Gretchen isn’t cold. She’s exhausted.

She’s not nagging. She’s bracing.

Take the cookies, for example. In episode three, before heading to her night shift, Gretchen hands oDylan a tube of pre-made dough with the simplest of instructions: "All you have to do is slice them." It’s not a trap – it’s a gesture of trust. A small handoff, a low-stakes chance to help. But when she gets home, the dough’s untouched. The kitchen’s a mess. He’s on the couch. What should’ve been an easy win has quietly become a loss.

This is what burnout looks like. The version of her that used to explain, coax, try again? She’s still in there – but buried. You don’t stop reaching out because you don’t care. You stop because nothing changes.

People online love to say she should have listened more, supported more, been softer. But she tried. She talks to oDylan like someone trying to keep a dam from breaking – carefully, sparingly. The cookie dough wasn’t a test. It was a lifeline. A way to ask for help without setting herself up for heartbreak.

And still – he fails. Not just passively, but pointedly. In one scene, he makes himself a smoothie, then – mid-argument – dumps it into the sink. Leaves the blender half-full of sludge, unwashed, and walks away like it’s her problem. He creates not just a mess, but a message: I won’t be responsible for even this. It’s not just neglect anymore. It’s contempt.

So yes, she pulls back. She speaks less. She stops asking. That isn’t coldness – it’s a kind of armor. You can only be disappointed so many times before you start making smaller asks, then none at all.

Her burnout isn’t bitterness. It’s what builds up in the silence between the effort and the indifference. It’s what happens when you keep running the house, the relationship, the atmosphere – while your partner keeps proving he won’t meet you halfway.

oDylan’s pain is real; but Gretchen’s is quieter, heavier. Less legible. He gets to yell. He gets to storm off. She stays. She absorbs. She wipes down the counter.

Gretchen Is Grieving, Not Replacing

There’s a particular kind of heartbreak reserved for when someone you love is still physically present, still sharing your home, still leaving crumbs in the sink – but the version of them you fell in love with is long gone. That’s where Gretchen lives. Not in betrayal. In absence.

When she sees iDylan2, it’s not about lust or fantasy – it’s about memory. This is what oDylan used to be like: curious, open, admiring. There’s a flash of recognition, and then there’s the punch of loss. He sees her, asks questions, wants to be involved in the family. It's enough to wreck you, honestly. Not because she wants him instead – but because she wanted that from the man she already has. And didn’t get it.

That moment reframes both of them. iDylan isn’t just comic relief anymore – he’s lonely. Severed from context, denied even a name outside of work. He clings to Gretchen’s visits not because he’s in love with her, but because she reminds him of something warm, something human. oDylan floats above it all, disconnected. iDylan aches for entry.

But the grief belongs to Gretchen. Because she remembers it all. She’s the one who watched her partner recede day by day. She’s the one who reached out and got less back every time. What she feels for iDylan isn’t longing – it’s grief for what oDylan used to be. It’s that crushing realization that the connection she hoped would deepen over time has only faded. That the best parts of him now belong to someone who doesn’t get to live a full life. That she gave her love to someone who, in the end, wasn’t capable of returning it.

Gretchen is a plot device – but she’s an honest one. A mirror for Dylan, and for us. She represents exactly what we mean when we talk about women carrying the mental load, and the writing doesn’t flinch from it. Her grief is archetypal, but it never feels hollow. Every small detail – her quiet, her weariness, her restraint – lands because she’s written with care, and played with devastating precision. The show never gives her a monologue. Just a porch. Just silence. Just another moment she has to carry alone. And somehow, that says everything.

Would She Sever?

Sometimes I think about what it would look like if Gretchen got the chip – not that she’s been offered it, or does work that would justify it.

Would she take it?

Would she choose, finally, to forget the emergencies, the night shifts, the unpaid labor of keeping a life running? Would she hand off the stress to some inner-Gretchen who clocks in and clocks out, and come home to herself fresh, rested, whole?

Or would that feel like a loss too?

Because the thing is – and this is the cruel trick of emotional labor – the remembering is the care. The noticing. The context. The continuity. The love. Severance doesn’t just protect you from pain; it amputates your connection to meaning. It turns the dailiness of love into a blank shift on a timecard.

I think about this a lot. About the women I know who would take the chip in a heartbeat. And the ones who wouldn’t – not because they don’t want the relief, but because they know no one else will pick up the slack. Someone has to remember the milk. Someone has to know when it’s cookie day. Someone has to notice the mood shifts, keep the calendar straight, clean the blender. Someone has to absorb the weight.

Maybe that’s the quiet violence of severance: it offers a kind of freedom, but only to those whose absence wouldn’t collapse the entire structure. It’s easy to opt out when someone else is still opting in. For women – for mothers, for caretakers – the fantasy is harder to reach. Because their presence isn’t just a habit. It’s the glue.

I don’t know if Gretchen would sever. I think maybe she’d want to. She does need the break – but then would severance really help? Then her life would be perpetually coming home – to clean the blender, to slice the cookies, to keep the whole damn story moving – and I’m not sure that’s a more envious life than the one her innie would have.

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Did you enjoy season 2? I have a lot of criticism — but as I said, Gretchen wasn’t one of them. Let me know what you thought of the show and of this post in the comments. If you’re reading this as an email, feel free to hit reply (only I will see it, and I promise to answer back!).

If you’ve enjoyed this post, you might also like:

• There Is No TV Inside My Mind, or how i still love reading even though i can’t visualize anything when i close my eyes!

• Don’t Show Me Your Spider Aliens, about physical descriptions of alien in scifi

• Harry Potter became a cop; Percy Jackson fixed the system for more character analysis

Thank you to and for helping me edit this piece, and to for encouraging me to write it <3

AI is amazing — it unlocks things you never thought you could do. But it’s also a dangerous tool. So, BEWARE! Here’s how to vibecode1 without setting your laptop (or career) on fire — straight from someone in the trenches.

1. Don’t Use It for Important Stuff

I’m not here to yell at you or gatekeep software. AI coding tools are here, people will use them, and honestly, it’s great to see coding becoming more accessible.

That said, vibecoding is a loaded gun—and not a tiny one. There’s a reason software engineers spend years getting told “no, not like that” by more experienced peers. It’s easier to write bad code than good code, and AI can only help so much.

So here’s lesson one: don’t vibecode anything important. I know, I know: you want to build an app, launch a startup, make millions. But that’s 1) a gambler’s fantasy and 2) incredibly risky. If you’re dealing with money, private data, or anything sensitive, just don’t. Even experienced engineers mess this up, and when they do, it’s catastrophic.

2. Security Is Not a Vibe

I know, you’re tired of this warning already. But I’m repeating myself because you are not as safe online as you think. Even if you’re careful, you don’t have the knowledge to spot every trap.

Rule of thumb: If it touches money, double-check it. Then triple-check it. Then ask yourself if you even need it in the first place. Same for private data. And connecting to the internet.

But advice is boring—examples are scarier.

1. AI will happily serve you security vulnerabilities.
   A developer spun up a website using Copilot. It looked great, worked fine… until he checked the code and found zero protection against SQL injections. Had he launched it, hackers would have cracked it in under an hour. When he asked ChatGPT to fix it, it did – but he knew what to ask for. You, dear reader, don’t know what a SQL injection is2, why it’s bad3, or if ChatGPT actually fixed it4.

2. Vibecoding made this one guy’s project an all-you-can-steal buffet. He shared his AI-coded app, launched it on Twitter, and within hours:

• Users bypassed his subscription paywall (free pro features!)

• Bots maxed out his API keys (costing him $$$)

• Hackers corrupted his database (more $$$)

He thought he was unlucky, and that one bad guy found his stuff. He wasn’t. The internet is full of people who will steal your money the second you give them an opening. You are never safe, and there’s thousands of them.

If you don’t understand how you’re deploying your project, how your database authentication works, or who has access to what, you’re already compromised.

Senior AI “entrepreneurs” will tell you, “Oh, just ask ChatGPT to write secure code.” But AI is a professional liar – it hallucinates, bullshits, and will cheerfully assure you that your security holes are fine.

There’s a massive gap between “it works on my computer” and “it’s safe on the internet.” You cannot protect what you don’t understand, and AI is building things you don’t understand. Q.E.D.5

Now, if you’re following my advice, here are some tips to make the process go a bit smoother.

3. “It compiles” isn’t the same as “it works”

Compilation is the process of transforming the code you wrote in a programming language into another language, one that is closer to the machine and not really meant for humans to read. When code compiles, it simply means that the syntax is correct – the structure of the code follows the rules of the language, and the computer can process it.

However, just because code compiles does not mean that it works. Code that works is code that behaves as expected – it produces the correct results, does what you wanted it to, handles inputs properly, and doesn’t break under real-world conditions. AI-generated code will often compile just fine, but that does not mean it’ll work when time comes to ship it.

AI does not understand intent. It will generate something that follows your request literally, but it will not grasp the deeper logic of what you meant. Despite the name, AI coding tools do not “think” or “understand” – they just predict plausible-looking text. The illusion is deep, but you will find the bugs in the matrix, and it won’t quite do what you want.

To avoid this, it is important to be as precise as possible when describing what you want. Instead of just asking for code that performs a task, describe the expected behavior in detail. AI needs clear instructions, not assumptions.

4. Debugging Is 80% of the Work—And AI Makes It Harder

If you’re new to coding, just getting a few lines to compile might feel like a huge victory. But any software engineer will tell you: that’s only the first step. The real battle is making sure the code actually works, and that means debugging.

Debugging AI-generated code is even trickier because AI doesn’t write code the way a human would. A human gradually builds an understanding of their own code, adding comments, structuring it logically, and keeping track of decisions. AI on the other hand, generates code in disconnected chunks, often without a clear structure. This makes it much harder to figure out where things go wrong.

5. Write tests! AI is actually perfect for that

Testing your application manually is a pain. If you're building a website, you have to start the server, spin up the database, load the app, and then click around endlessly just to see if one tiny function works. Luckily, there's a better way: automated testing. Thankfully, this is a format where AI truly shines!

Tests are little bits of code that don’t run in production but can be executed on their own to verify that everything behaves as expected. There are two main types you’ll want to write: unit tests and end-to-end (e2e) tests.

Unit tests focus on small, isolated pieces of your code — usually individual functions. AI is absurdly good at generating them. The trick is to start by making sure the AI understands what the function is supposed to do. Before generating tests, prompt it with:

"Write a comment that documents the behavior of this function."

Once the AI summarizes it correctly, you can then ask:

"Generate unit tests for this function, covering all edge cases."

The AI will handle the tedious work of writing the tests; you just need to double-check that the expected results actually match reality. A good rule of thumb: if a function takes more than one sentence to explain, write a test for it.

End-to-end tests take a step back and look at your app as a whole, mimicking real user behavior. Instead of testing individual functions, they check the entire workflow. For example:

• Filling out a signup form, then

• Submitting the form, then

• Logging in with the newly created account, END
  

E2E tests don’t care about what happens inside the code at each step; they just make sure the feature works from start to finish.

Each type of test does something different, and they are both useful for a healthy app. Unit tests are great for pinpointing where something is broken. They make debugging manageable since you're only working with small chunks of code. But even if all your unit tests pass, the interactions between components can still fail—this is where E2E tests save you.

Testing is something most software engineers hate to do, because you have to be so precise to test all the edge cases, all the weird stuff, and it takes a lot of effort to make sure it’s written correctly. It one of the only steps where I truly see the value as a professional – so take advantage of it!

6. Learn What’s Under the Hood

Let’s say you’ve done everything by the book: you’ve used AI to write your code, you’ve written tests, and everything seems to be working fine. Then, one day, your app goes viral. A flood of users sign up, and suddenly… everything grinds to a halt.

Why? Because deep in your code, there’s a function that loops over an array (a list of things with certain properties) twice in a nested fashion6. When you were testing, the array had maybe 10 items. Now that thousands of users are sending data, that same function is choking on millions of entries. Your app isn’t just slow – it’s unusable.

This is the kind of issue that tests won’t catch. Your function still works perfectly… just at a scale too small to reveal the disaster waiting to happen. And it’s not just performance. Concurrency issues in databases7, memory leaks8 – these problems only show up under real-world conditions, and if you don’t know what to look for, they’ll blindside you.

AI can help, but you need to know what to ask. To avoid these pitfalls, you need to learn enough to ask the right questions. AI is great at answering things, but only if you feed it the right prompts.

These are just the first layer of questions. The real key is to keep asking "why?" Don’t stop at an AI-generated answer—make it name the concept, tool, or algorithm so you can look it up yourself. This is how you go from vibecoding to actually understanding what’s happening under the hood.

Last bit of advice: don’t ask coding AIs like Cursor – they’re not meant for it. Use a general AI like ChatGPT, but always double-check. AI is confident, but confidence isn’t the same as correctness

7. Read Every Line of Code, VERY Carefully

At this point, you’ve generated code, made sure it compiles, tested and debugged it until it behaves correctly, and asked AI what’s happening under the hood. Now it’s time for ⭐ code review ⭐, where you take a critical look at everything and make sure you haven’t made a catastrophic mistake.

The challenge? Reading is passive. Writing forces you to think through every step, but when AI does the writing, you lose the deep understanding that comes from struggling through it yourself. Software engineers deal with this all the time when reviewing each other’s code, but they have safeguards:

• Code review limits (e.g., “no more than 1,000 lines at a time”).

• Detailed explanations of what changed and why.

• Colleagues who (hopefully) aren’t trying to sneak nonsense past them.
  

Personally, I do the opposite of what I just described: I write the feature myself first, then ask AI to summarize it, suggest edge cases, and help me test it. If I let AI write the whole thing, I fall into passive mode and inevitably miss major problems.

I’m not saying this to gloat – it’s just that writing a clear prompt for AI often requires as much effort – if not more! – as writing the code itself. AI is most useful when it’s handling tedious autocomplete-style work, not when it’s taking wild guesses based on a vague request.

Since you don’t have the option of writing code from scratch, you have to be extra careful when reviewing AI’s output. Read every line. Think critically. Try to understand all the implications. If something looks weird, assume it’s wrong until proven otherwise.

8. Git Is Your Friend—Version Control Is a Must

Ever heard of version control? Think of it like Google Docs' version history, but for code (and way more powerful). The industry standard is git, and while it can get complicated, for a solo project you only need a few basic commands:

• commit – Saves your work as a snapshot. Think of it as a "checkpoint" in a video game. If your code is working (or at least kinda working), commit it.

• log – Shows a history of your commits. Useful when you realize, "Wait, when did everything break?"

• revert – rolls back a specific commit. This is your undo button—if you commit often, this will take you back to the last stable version. It’s easier than ctrl-z, because lines of code are often interdependent, so you need to change a bunch of files at once.

• push / pull – If you’re saving your code online (like on GitHub), these commands sync it with the cloud. Optional if you’re working locally, but a lifesaver if your laptop dies.

That’s all you really need for a basic project. No need to worry about other stuff you’ll find in tutorials like branches, merges, or rebases, unless you start collaborating with others.

But why do I need this? Well, one of AI’s worst habits is chaotic, unnecessary changes. Ask it to tweak one file, and suddenly it’s “helpfully” rewriting half your codebase. Now you're stuck trying to untangle the mess.

On top of that, software development is iterative, which means you often have to undo or redo things to make new stuff work. git makes all of this easy as cake! It also forces you to save a copy of your work in the cloud, so that when your macbook finally dies, you won’t cry too many tears (only $3,000, sorry).

And when Git inevitably confuses you (it confuses everyone), here’s a lifeline: Oh Shit, Git!?!

9. You will NOT become a software engineer by vibecoding

I know everyone is shilling their ai-training-become-rich-startup-money course right now, but don’t fall for that. Software engineering is a complex thing to master, and it takes time, effort, and education to get there. You can definitely get yourself to a decent level on your own, but it won’t be by vibecoding.

Don’t pretend, or you will be mocked. We (software engs) aren’t making fun of Melinda in sociology who’s using AI to code nice visualisations of her data! She’s using a tool to enhance her work, double checking the results with her professional knowledge and making sure it’s all safe and good. No, but we are laughing at 20 yo college student Kevin who thinks he’s better than everyone else because he coded a (broken, unsafe, unmaintainable) app over the week-end, checkmate old nerds.

If you’re serious about learning, then get yourself on a university e-course9 and follow those lectures. It will teach you all those fundamentals I was talking about. Then practice, a lot, and mostly on your own. Write your code first, and then ask the AI about it – either to double check, or when you’re stuck. But all in all, use your own brain and your own thinking capabilities to build those problem-solving muscles.

10. Ask for help before putting anything on the internet

If your app connects to the internet in any way, you need to have it audited by a professional. No exceptions. I know it’s expensive. I know they’ll tell you to change a ton of things. I know it’s hard to even find someone competent and trustworthy to do it. But skipping this step is like leaving your front door wide open and hoping no one walks in.

A proper security audit will save you money, lawsuits, and sheer existential dread down the line. If you can’t afford one, then—harsh truth—you can’t afford to launch an app either.

Now, there’s one tiny problem. Professionals don’t want to touch AI-generated spaghetti code. Why? Because it’s usually incomprehensible, poorly structured, and riddled with subtle issues that make it a nightmare to review. That means if you vibecode your app, expect to pay a premium to get it audited—if you can even find someone willing to do it.

That’s the price of vibecoding safely. Either invest in security now, or get ready to learn the hard way when a botnet makes your app its new home.

Vibecode with Joy (and a Little Caution)

Congratulations! You now have the power to create all sorts of things—little tools, silly automations, weird experiments that make your life easier or just make you laugh. Coding, even vibecoding, is magic. It turns ideas into reality. It’s fun. It’s powerful. And now, it’s within your reach.

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So go wild! Build things, break things, learn things. Enjoy the process. Just… maybe don’t put anything on the internet unless you’re absolutely sure it won’t get you hacked. Your local machine is a great playground. The web? That’s a battlefield.

Vibecode responsibly, and have fun!

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Any questions? Ask me below or by replying to this email (it’s private, only I can see anything). I’m happy to help <3

Thank you to and for telling me to write this, and to for the feedback!

Close your eyes, and you’d picture a middle-class Brit sipping tea, grumbling about the weather, and mispronouncing the word “aluminum.” My English is so British that it causes confusion, especially in a multinational workplace where accents are like name tags – something people expect to match your origins.

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Let’s get one thing straight: I’m French. Born in France, raised in France (in the dead middle of it, for what it’s worth1), and my daily bread consumption could2 put Parisian bakeries out of business. My ancestry? Pure French cliché. My father’s family has been sipping wine in Bourgogne for five generations, and my mother’s side is so Breton that crêpes are basically a family tradition.

At that moment, I have two options. I could give a short, boring explanation (“I learned English at school”), but that’s neither fun nor true. Or I could tell the long, absurdly detailed version—the one about an 11-year-old girl, her autistic special interest, a beauty guru, and the unstoppable gravitational pull of One Direction.

Naturally, I’m here to tell you the long version.

The linguistic bootcamp

Let me take you back to a freezing winter morning on a crowded school bus. I’m huddled in the back seat with my best friend, who’s clutching her precious iPod Nano like it contains state secrets. She hands me one earbud and presses play. Cue What Makes You Beautiful.

Within seconds, my life changes.

Who were these guys? Why did they sound so... magical? And most importantly, how could I get more of this in my life?

That bus ride was the beginning of what I can only describe as my personal linguistic enlightenment. By the time we got to school, I was a Directioner in the making. But being French meant I had some hurdles to clear. My middle-school English wasn’t good enough to decipher the slang-filled interviews or Tumblr memes. I needed to level up, fast.

So I did what any hyper-fixating autistic pre-teen would do: I threw myself into full immersion. Every One Direction interview, every YouTube vlog, every subtitled clip became part of my training regimen. Zoella’s videos were a godsend – not for makeup tips (i couldn’t care less about that), but for mastering that perfectly cozy British accent. I even practiced narrating my life as if I, too, were filming a haul video: “I just popped into town and picked up this super cute planner – it’s brilliant, don’t you think?”

Soon, my dedication paid off. By 13, I was tossing out words like “knackered” and “bloody hell” in chat rooms with the confidence of a Brighton-born girl. While my classmates wrestled with irregular verbs, I was perfecting the delicate art of pronouncing “scone” without offending anyone. And if you think I’m exaggerating, let me remind you: this was about Harry Styles. Dedication was the bare minimum.

I wasn’t just absorbing it all – I was contributing, too, making graphics for album releases, subtitling music videos, and even writing fanfiction. If there was a way to turn obsession into output, I found it. And my brain soaked it alllll up.

Looking back, I realize how lucky I was to hit my preteen years in the golden age of One Direction. Ten years earlier, I might’ve been obsessing over Prince William and killed my republican mom.3 Ten years later? I’d be trying to copy the accents of 5 Seconds of Summer, and sounding like I was auditioning for a Texan high school play (and there’s only so much “y’all” a French girl can handle).

The autism-proof icebreaker (or as close as it’ll get to it)

Small talk is a battlefield, and for an autistic person like me, it’s one I usually enter woefully underprepared. But thanks to my accent and its improbable backstory, I’ve accidentally armed myself with the perfect icebreaker – a story so polished it could be its own sitcom pilot. And once I tell it, the reactions are delightfully predictable.

The women love it. They laugh, nod knowingly, and often launch into their own nostalgic confessions. Spice Girls, NSYNC, Taylor Swift – it doesn’t matter what their teenage obsession was; we’ve all been in the trenches of fangirl fervor. In these moments, I get to watch their professional masks slip just a little4, as they gleefully recount nights spent perfecting dance routines or rewatching Twilight. It’s a strange but genuine bonding ritual, like sharing a secret handshake that only those with teenage posters on their walls would understand.

The men? Let’s just say it’s more of a mixed bag. Some smile politely but look like they’d rather talk about quarterly reports than hear about 2010s YouTube culture. Others frown like I’ve just spoken in Klingon. And a brave few attempt to fake familiarity:“Oh, Harry Styles? The guy in the dress?” Yes, Brad. That’s him. He also happens to be a Grammy-winning global icon, but sure, reduce him to one outfit (and judge me in the process).

There are always a few who can’t hide their disdain, like I’ve just admitted to worshipping the devil instead of Harry Styles. There’s an unspoken societal rule: if teenage girls like something, it must be mocked until it dies. If you’re a man yelling at a screen for hours over a goal, you’re passionate. If you’re a woman who spent hours learning Harry Styles’ songs, you’re obsessive. For years, I bought into the shame. I treated my One Direction phase like a dark secret, hidden away where no one could roll their eyes at it.

Nowadays, I’ve learnt to appreciate the little magic in it, and this technique has become the reliable cornerstone of my social life. Small talk doesn’t come naturally to me, but this? This is a script I’ve memorized, a perfect opener for every awkward introduction or dreaded networking event. It’s my fun fact, my “introduce yourself in one minute”, my secret weapon. Instead of scrambling for a witty comment or pretending I care about the weather, I get to hit play on my accent’s origin story and coast through the hardest part of the conversation.

It’s reassuring, really, to have something like this in my back pocket. A built-in conversation starter that lets me be approachable without trying too hard. In a way, my autistic masking removes their professional mask, and allows me to connect on an emotional level with people who would have stayed work acquaintances otherwise. Turns out, it’s so much easier to work with people who like you!

Merit Badges in Commitment

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about fangirling: it’s basically a bootcamp for life skills. Hunting down obscure concert footage? That’s just research. Coordinating group orders for fan merch? Logistics and project management. Making Tumblr edits? Graphic design. Writing fanfiction? Storytelling and emotional intelligence5. And don’t even get me started on how many accents I can now decipher thanks to years of watching interviews from around the world.

All those skills translate surprisingly well to the workplace. I can write, edit, organize, and decode cryptic Slack messages with terrifying efficiency.6 I’m as good as it gets at obscure internet searches and critical thinking (was that a leaked song lyric from the next album or just a fan-made lie?), and timezones have no secret for me7. Fandom was my training ground, and the workplace is just a less sparkly version of the same game.

And for me, fangirling wasn’t just passion—it was survival. As an autistic teenager, fandom gave me a way to belong. It let me channel my special interest into a community where my awkwardness didn’t matter. Nobody cared if I stumbled over my words or hyper-focused on tiny details; in fandom, that was the whole point. Obsession wasn’t just allowed—it was mandatory.

So what started as an innocent obsession with British YouTubers and Harry Styles interviews turned into a superpower I never anticipated: I have turned into a language chameleon. Years of listening to fangirls from every corner of the globe gave me an ear for accents and a fluency that transcends borders. I can walk into a meeting with colleagues from five different countries and understand everyone well enough to keep things running smoothly.

At my French office, this skill has made me indispensable. When our Indian project manager needs something coordinated, I’m the one they call. My ability to bridge linguistic and cultural gaps means I’m trusted with bigger responsibilities—not because I’m necessarily the best (I’m a new grad junior), but because I’m the easiest to work with. And in any workplace, that’s half the battle.

Linguistic camouflage

But my accent does more than smooth over international communication. It shapes how I’m perceived, and, let’s be honest, in a corporate world built on snap judgments, perception is everything. Unlike most French people, I don’t “sound French.” Americans have this unfortunate stereotype that we’re lazy, wine-drunk intellectuals who only work a 35-hour week and strike for sport.8 My vaguely British, upper-class accent bypasses all that. It lets me step into meetings without carrying the weight of those assumptions.

And then there’s the class factor. My RP accent – courtesy the countless other posh YouTubers who spent their entire allowances at Harrods – lends me an air of sophistication I didn’t exactly earn. People hear it and assume I come from wealth, private schools, and a network of well-heeled connections. The truth is more modest: my family is comfortably middle-class, full of teachers (and one doctor), left-wing and careful about consumption. I had plenty of cultural capital, sure, but it wasn’t exactly yachts and summer homes in the Hamptons.

Still, that accent has opened doors. It’s introduced me to people I never would’ve met otherwise and helped me land my job. For example, when I go to tech meetups in Paris, I’m assumed to be a British expat9, and then invited to various casual meetings. As I’ve said, I always share this story so that I don’t mislead people, but I find that the invitation is never rescinded. At one of those breakfasts, I met a recruiter who gave me my first internship – right after the end of lockdowns, in a world where companies weren’t taking any French interns10 — which set my CV up to land my mandatory end-of-studies internship, and subsequently my current job.

I’ve also been invited to casual ski trips, or English countryside vacations – my horse riding skills come from moving old gentle Cookie around to move Grandma’s cows to the next field, but it’s enough to pretend I’ve had a classical education. And more importantly, it’s expanded my social circle to a bunch of wealthy young people, on whom I can count on to give me referrals next time I want to switch jobs. The corporate world runs on connections, and having a voice that fits the mold — even when my bank account doesn’t—lets me blend in just enough to access those networks.11

It’s about being “just foreign enough”

But the beauty of my linguistic camouflage isn’t just in fitting in; it’s also in being just foreign enough. When I make mistakes—missing a social cue, misunderstanding a joke—I can blame it on being non-native. “Oh, sorry! Must be a cultural thing.” Nobody questions it, and nobody looks deeper. That little out I get from being “the French girl” helps mask my autism in ways I didn’t realize I needed. It gives me space to exist without having to explain every quirk or slip-up.

It’s exceptionally ironic to me that my teenage special interest12 ended up being such a boon for communicating. The stereotype of autistic people is that we struggle to communicate, that we’re trapped behind glass, forever one step behind in a conversation, missing all the social cues that are natural to others. A lot of us try to make up little scripts to work around our limitations, but they often come out stilted and ever so slightly out of place. I’m so lucky that I’ve been able to develop mine into a tool that works so well.

I’ve been at my job for a year now, and I’ve started to dread meeting French people. In French, I have no pre-programmed banter, no convenient self-deprecating jokes to smooth over the gaps. Worse, I have to mask13 twice as hard. My mistakes aren’t as easily forgiven—no one assumes I just didn’t know that social cue. There’s an expectation that I should already understand, that I should already be “normal.”14

In English, my misunderstanding of common phrases15 is cute; in French, it’s just wrong. And since I can’t use my accent as a conversational shortcut, I’m stuck floundering through the standard, unbearable process of social interaction without any of my usual cheat codes. It’s exhausting.

My own parents poke fun at my “weird English mouth,” and every time I slip up on a French word order, I get met with a smirk and a “tu perds ton français.16” But what am I supposed to do? Switch accents like a multilingual chameleon?

Maybe. Maybe that’s exactly what I’ll do. After all, if fandom taught me anything, it’s that reinvention is just a matter of practice.

Endnotes

French internet thing of the day: mdr is the equivalent of lol, except it literally means dying of laughter (mort.e de rire). Ironically, ptdr, which is one level up from mdr, only means exploding of laughter (pété.e de rire).

English internet thing of the day: the ptdr wikipedia page redirected me to the English pmsl for pissing myself laughing which i’d never heard of, but was apparently the equivalent at some point.

Did you have a similar experience with accents? Have you ever been the accent person in your office? Or, if autistic, what is your ice breaker story? Btw you can borrow mine if enough details apply ;)

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(you can also reply to this email to let me know what you think, only i can see replies, and i promise i respond to all!)

Finally, thank you to everyone who helped me with the idea and the editing <3 Tracy Durnell, , , ,

Image credits:
- all pictures (including from the collage) come from my little (big) fangirl folder from back in the day, probably originally from Tumblr users :))
- i made that collage at the top <3

I recently read this wonderful article by Lincoln Michel which was giving authors advice on how to “turn off the tv inside their minds” when writing fiction, to prevent the dreaded Show, don’t tell critique. It’s a really good post, full of great insights about the difference between writing a novel and filming a movie. But what struck me the most was in the comments…

Turns out, this concept of mind TV isn’t just a concept, it’s a reality – for most of you. But I can’t see anything inside my mind. Not an apple, not a horse, not a fully fledged character based on 3 sentences of description. Nothing.

I once heard a blind person explain what they could see (nothing) by asking: “what can you see with your elbow?”. The answer isn’t black, it’s not a blank space, it’s nothing! And while I’ve been blessed with mediocre eyes and a -6 prescription, nothing is exactly what I see inside my mind.

The inability to form mental images is called aphantasia. It’s not a disease, a disorder, or something that needs fixing – it’s just a different way of experiencing the world. About 3-5% of people are estimated to have it, though most don’t even realize they do until they stumble into a conversation about “visualizing” something and wonder why everyone is treating imagination like a Pixar studio in their heads. I have a rather “severe” form of it (if you can call it that), which means I can't picture anything at all in my mind.

You might think this lack of mental imagery would make me hate reading. After all, isn’t part of the magic of books being able to “see” the story unfold in your mind? For some people with aphantasia, that’s true – it can make it harder to connect with certain types of writing. But for me, it’s never been a problem when it comes to enjoying science-fiction or fantasy novels.

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Don’t make me feel like a failure

With all that said, I hate, hate, hate reading books set in our modern times. No matter how hard I try, how well it’s written, I always end up feeling bleh, like I’m missing half of it. And in a way, I am! Those books rely on the reader knowing and recalling the setting so much that, when my mind fails to represent the scene, I end up with a big black hole in the plot.

The romance author will tell you of a hot billionaire in a suit, in his high rise apartment, and you will fill in the blanks, but I can only conjure up some vague idea of “desirable”, not even an image, just a sketch of a feeling.

By comparison, fantasy worlds are inherently unimaginable – dragons and alien landscapes don’t come with real-world expectations! The author must describe all the important parts and set an atmosphere otherwise the reader can’t follow them – that world only exists inside their mind after all.

I also don’t feel the same problem with historical (or pseudo-historical) books – so long as the time period is remote enough that the writer has to spell it all out! To me, gowns and castles and armies of servants or rundown wagons and dying of the plague are equally as distant as dragons and spells, and so the magic occurs and I’m entertained.

But words are fickle, and can never truly render the world as the characters see it! A common criticism of fantasy is that people struggle to see all the details and don’t understand the need to reinvent the wheel, the cities, or even the horses. In my case however, it levels the playing field, and I stop feeling like a first grader fighting for every word on the page. I feel much more in sync with what the author wants to show everyone, instead of lagging behind in a 128px resolution.

Can you see my concepts?

Even better, science-fiction and “hard magic” fantasy tends to be full of concepts. I don’t care so much for the 6-packs bat-winged shadow daddy1, but i LOVE me a super-intelligent spider society that evolved into cities and formed their own versions of governments2!

Abstract concepts can be seen (that’s like, the definition of abstract), so once again I am on the same level as you, normal reader. Big ideas of warfare and time travel and magic wards don’t require any realistic imagery – although some of you must like them since they end up all over the pretty endpapers!

Big ideas are the bread and butter of my entertainment. I gravitate toward works that challenge my mind, that make me question how the world works or imagine how it could work under different conditions. Asimov’s Laws of Robotics3 aren’t just rules for machines; they’re a lens through which we can examine the very nature of ethics, consciousness, and free will. The way these laws intersect with human behavior, law, and morality sparks conversations that linger in my mind long after the book is closed.

That’s why I want to talk about this – not just to share my own love for sci-fi and fantasy, but to offer a new way of looking at them. If you’ve ever rolled your eyes at the made-up calendar system in a space opera or sighed at yet another unnecessarily complicated alien name, maybe the problem isn’t the book – it’s how you’re reading it. 4These details aren’t roadblocks; they’re part of the experiment, the invitation to think differently. When I read, I’m not picturing a spaceship—I’m considering what kind of society would build one like that, what values shaped it, what constraints defined its design. I want to show you that engaging with these stories doesn’t have to be about seeing the world they create—it can be about understanding the deeper laws and behaviors underpinning it. And once you start reading like that, you might just find yourself enjoying the parts you used to skim past.

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Just when I thought I had a handle on one bizarre brain quirk, I stumbled onto another. Not only do most people see vivid mental images, but they also have a constant voice in their heads—an inner narrator, speaking in full sentences, all the time. It may not be a surprise to you, but I always thought those discussions between the two inner wolves, or the demon/angel on the shoulder were completely invented for narrative purposes… Well, it’s not!

Reading first-person narratives always feels oddly alienating for me. The constant internal monologue that shapes the character’s thoughts and decisions just doesn’t align with my own experience of the world, so it results in this uncanny valley kind of feeling you get when something mimics real life, but not quite well enough to pass the sniff test. I don’t have that inner stream of dialogue that seems to fuel the character's perspective—there’s no constant running commentary in my head. Instead, life feels more like a series of discrete moments, more sensory and observational than thought-driven. So, when a book presents a character’s thoughts in such vivid detail, it can feel unsettling, almost like looking at a distorted reflection of how a mind should operate.

In contrast, multi-POV storytelling in genres like sci-fi and fantasy—think The Expanse or Game of Thrones—feels more aligned with my way of experiencing the world. These narratives often focus more on external action, shifting from one character’s perspective to another without getting bogged down in their internal dialogue. The emphasis is on events, ideas, and the way different characters interact with the world around them, which is far more reflective of my own experience. The third-person point of view in these stories creates a kind of distance, allowing me to observe a character’s actions and motivations without feeling like I’m supposed to be privy to their every thought.

The lack of a deep, consistent inner monologue in multi-POV storytelling helps bridge that gap between my experience and the characters, making their actions and decisions feel more accessible and less foreign. It’s like seeing the pieces of a puzzle come together, not by understanding the intricate, private thoughts of each character, but by observing their choices and the world they navigate.

This is also why I vibe so much with Philip K. Dick’s work5! His characters tend to speak in first-person, but they are always struggling with the nature of reality, their perception (cough drugs), or altered states of consciousness. Their inner monologues don’t come with that fake veneer of truthfulness I see in other works, where thoughts are neatly structured, conveniently introspective, and suspiciously well-articulated—like contestants narrating their personal drama in a bad reality TV show. Instead, PKD’s protagonists ramble, contradict themselves, spiral into paranoia, or get derailed by nonsensical distractions.

Their thoughts don’t sound like what I imagine a normal person thinking, but that’s exactly why they work for me. Because they’re disoriented, drugged up, or dealing with a reality that actively refuses to make sense, their inner monologues feel organic. I don’t have to suspend disbelief—I can just go along for the ride, because in a world where nothing is stable, why should their thoughts be?

Thought Experiments for the Visually Inclined

Alright, let’s do a quick experiment. Close your eyes and don’t picture the purple elephant. Is it just standing there? Is it doing something weird? Is it cartoon-style or hyper-realistic?

Now, if you actually saw something—congratulations, you are very fancy. If you didn’t, welcome to my world! Let me know below, I’d be honored to know I taught you something!

I’ve spent this whole piece telling you how my brain works differently, but here’s the thing: it’s not a limitation. It’s just a different way of experiencing stories. Whether you see a blockbuster play out in your head or just process words as words, we’re all engaging with the same ideas, just through different lenses. And maybe next time you’re frustrated about made-up sci-fi time units or spaceship names, I encourage you to try and switch gears – because to me, that’s the good stuff.

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Some housekeeping

I’m sorry i’ve been gone a while! I hit a little slump in February and didn’t feel like writing much. But now that the days are longer and brighter, all my motivation is coming back, so expect at least another post this month.

Don’t remember who i am? Hi! My name is Rose, and i write Technofable, where i talk about a bunch of things, including myself, books, scifi, me, myself and maybe i! More seriously, i don’t have a “niche” or specific topic (yet) to focus on, so i can only promise some interesting things and French humor. Hope you stick around <3

Finally, thank you to and for feedback on this piece!

If you’ve enjoyed this piece, you might also enjoy this one about internet lessons i was taught as a French pupil in the 2010s, and that one all about how i deal with my never-ending TBR (including substack!)

This is part 1 in my January goals series. If i was a pro, i’d promise to edit this intro to add the rest later, but the best way to actually see the next posts when they come out is to subscribe ;)

Contrarily to everyone on this app, i don’t have a deep desire to overhaul my entire book reading life for 2025. I’ve made some changes in the middle of 2024 that have been fruitful enough for me to keep them.

In terms of reading habits, i already listed my rules in my 2024 wrap-up:

1. Stay out of bookstagram, and instead pick up books i know i’ll love or that mom recommends (ie no romantasy with the shiny cover because guess what? I don’t like romance actually, so of course i’ll hate it

2. Focus on my preferred genres: hard-ish scifi and fantasy, because i know i’ll be in for a good ride!

3. Add some modern (or classic) French literature so that i don’t forget the language. It’s a vicious cycle because i can’t really talk about those books on here since my readers are mostly from the US, so i don’t prioritize them or stay up to date with what’s being released.

4. Make sure to read at least one (1) non-fiction book a month so that my brain doesn’t rot away in the corporate world.

But even then, i find myself stumped by the same problem: how does one make a (good) TBR1, and keep it sane? My bookshelves have been purged, but my Substack inbox hasn’t, and it has become a problem.

Does my inbox spark joy?

I’m paying for two Substack publications now, which feels like a major milestone in my adulting journey.2 Supporting indie writers? Check. Engaging in thoughtful content? Double-check. But let’s talk about the clutter problem because my Substack inbox is starting to look like my bookshelves before the 2024 purge3 – overwhelming and slightly terrifying.

Now, a wonderful lady gave us some good guidelines to solve the problem: hold the offender in front of your eyes and demand: “do you spark joy? What do you add to my life to justify staying in my house?”. That worked for physical books, but i simply can’t be bothered to go through the tens of thousands of bookmarks, tabs, and posts in my inbox. So we need a new solution (well i do, but you’re coming with me)!

December 31st was supposed to be D-Day. I planned to remove everything from my browser, close all my tabs, and start the year fresh. I’d save the links I genuinely want to revisit as a list with a few keywords, like the magpie-brain collector that I am. But the rest? Gone. I can’t keep letting my inbox become a digital landfill for things I’ll "totally get to later”. Didn’t end up happening on the 31st because i got way too impatient and decided that was the most genius idea ever – my browser has been clean of undue influence since Dec 23rd <3

Now, if you want to do the same as me, here are a few steps that don’t just tell you to unsub and be done with it.

Substack inbox: the cleaning manual

Step one: goodbye

The first step (i’m saying it anyways, in case you do need the step by step help): unsubscribing from newsletters I don’t read and don’t like at all. It’s tough because I hate the idea of anyone getting that "you’ve been unsubscribed" email. But tough love is necessary for a healthy inbox. If I’m not engaging with it and don’t have any emotional connection, it’s out.

Step two: don’t use Substack lol

Second rule: don’t read on the substack website, read in your emails. That way, you can create filters to add “tags” to various letters.

For example, i have a lot of mutuals from my writing course that write about stuff i don’t care about at all. I want to be subbed to them, i like to see the finished pieces when i edit them, but i don’t want to have them front and center in my inbox. So i have a “wop people” folder (should be renamed to “friends” one of those days) and their newsletters get triaged there automatically. It also helps me to read them soon after they go out and leave a comment if i like, instead of letting them die for weeks til i get to them!

Another example: there are quite a few newsletters that i don’t love, don’t always care about, but still want to see what they put out and maybe skim it. For them, i have a “ok newsletters” filter, which helps me set expectations! I know i’m not likely to be blown away, and i am prepared to just look.

On the other side of the spectrum, there’s the big “letters i love” folder. To get sent there, your publication needs to have 3 successive issues that i favorite in gmail. I know all the things on there are deeper reflections, great prose, and that they will require both a significant amount of brainpower, and a way to take notes.

Closely related is the “light letters” folder, with the smaller (as in not 4K words in each email) publications, often with a gentle look on life. In here are poems, comics, kind observations, little rants. I enjoy them immensely, and know that i can read them in the metro on my commute, and restack the bits i love.

And finally, the cornerstone of this whole pyramid: the “new letters” folder, ie where i send stuff by default. Maybe i stumbled across one of their posts and liked it, maybe they were recommended when i subbed to another, … No matter what, they start by going here. Once i’ve received a few issues from them, i decide which forever folder they belong in.

Step three: don’t save shit you won’t eat

The third piece is a system for saving shit. I’m the queen of hitting the little “save banner” thingy with a “i’ll read that later when i have all my wits about me!” attitude. But that’s a recipe for disasters (plural), so i need a set of rules.

Before saving:

1. You need to read the Title and the About page of the author. This saves me from keeping all the stuff from one (1) restacked quote that looks nice, except the full post isn’t about that as the title tells you, or the author turns out to be a trumpist and i don’t want that in my feed

2. Skim the post ie read all the headings. This prevents the really bad “this title is so so so cool i wish i came up with that!” compulsive hoarding. If the headings look nice, the topic seems interesting, and the thoughts are deep enough, i can keep it

3. If the Read Time is less than 5 minutes i have to read it on the spot. No saving little nuggets that i can just digest – when i talk of “saving” i mean putting it in my inbox. It’s perfectly allowed to read, enjoy and save because i maybe want to find it later (i won’t, but it’s completely hidden away in the archive tab so it doesn’t matter).

4. Finally, ask myself the usual questions: do i really care? Does the author look like they have something to say? Does their prose irk me? If it sparks joy, then keep <3

Step four: don’t use Substack (again)

Finally, i found that i need an archiving system of my own. Yes, Substack has an “Archive” tab, but it only loads 10 posts at a time, doesn’t have folders, does have awful search capabilities, and is just plainly impractical.

With this system, the inbox is only for stuff that need to be read before the end of the month. On the 1st, everything gets deleted again, which should (hopefully, pray for me) keep it sane and useful. But what happens to all the stuff that i don’t get to reading, or that i read but want to reference again soon?

Here comes my “second brain” as we used to call them. It’s just a bunch of notes, in (more or less) organized folders. I use Obsidian because i matches my values of open-source, local-first, completely private, … I even pay for the sync thing so that i can have my notes on my work computer and procrastinate on company time!

That’s where i keep notes of everything i read that ends up being relevant and noteworthy (duh). The one-month-deletion rule forces me to follow up on saved articles instead of letting them sit there like forgotten relics. Each of them gets a note title:

• The prefix (-Ar) for unread articles [promoted to (Ar) once i get to them]

• The name of the post

• The name of the author

• The date (if relevant to the topic)

Inside i keep the url, an internal link to my note about the author, quotes i liked, and my notes. Then i move it to folders: either thematically if it’s something i’ve been reading a lot about (eg Third Places, Friendship, Metaverse (don’t ask)), or just a big category (Books, Movies, Social, …)

It’s all very dumb and easy, which is why it works. Notion databases look cool, but irl i’m never doing that much effort. I feel a bit dumb for telling you about such a simple thing, so do reach out to me if it was any help (or if you have further questions! It’s not that deep but maybe i missed the interesting part).

If bookshelves should spark joy, so should my inbox. Here’s to a cleaner, more intentional start.

So how does it feel? Is my inbox glittering with joy?

Some findings:

1. it feels soooo good to be clean! I knew i was being stressed out by my Substack inbox, but i didn’t anticipate how right i was about it! I immediately felt so much lighter, and recovered my motivation to go read new authors and just have fun :))

2. the clutter will creep back in asap! It’s been 3 weeks since i emptied my inbox in Substack, and i’ve already filled it back up with all the shit i save. The rules have definitely helped mitigate the amount, but it’s still a bit too much. I know i can’t promise myself to do a weekly clean up, so it means i’ll have to be very vigilant to follow up on the big monthly one or else i’ll be back to square one.

3. it’s a lot of effort to organize everything, but at least 90% of the value i get from it, is the immediate dopamine hit when i put an article in its little proper folder with its little friends. That alone is worth it, especially now that i’m more familiar with my system: i’ve added some shortcuts to the various programs and it’s become a brainless task to create a new note and save it.

4. i don’t really look back on anything, EXCEPT i do once in a while and then it’s a lifesaver! The Alexandria meme i added a few sections above was but a dream in my memory, until i dug it up from the memes folder in a simple query… That alone justifies my efforts :)

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I had two more sections planned for this post, but i realize i’ve already yapped too much, so i’ll keep them safe and will make full-blown posts for each. Which would you like to see first? 1) my love-hate relationship with books bingos and challenges, or 2) my feelings about not having read any of the american/english classics (cause i want to be a lit girl you see, but i’m French so i have lotta catch up to do!)…

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Please leave a comment or reply to this email! I’d love to hear what you think of my new plan, and how YOU manage your Substack inbox!

If you’d like some further reading, may i redirect you to my love letter to Storygraph (ie why you should leave that derelict spaceship that is Goodreads and come colonize this new-ish website with me). Read you next time <3

Disclaimer: this had been only very lightly edited because i can’t be bothered during the holidays. Then why write it at all? , , , and all told me it was a good idea in my 2024 reading and writing wrap-up so i opened a word doc and 3 hours later tadam… 4,000 words for your pleasure! Felt like a waste not to share <3

Some Context Before the Complaints Begin

(Don’t worry, it’ll be quick!)

Write of Passage (WoP for friends and family) is (was, now defunct) a writing course that promises to teach you how to write online. It ran for five weeks and followed a cohort-based model, meaning you take the course live alongside other students. My cohort, which had several hundred participants, ran from October 7th to November 11th.

Some details on the structure:

• Weekly Live Sessions: there was one live session every week over Zoom, though i couldn’t attend them because they were held in the middle of the night in Paris. Instead, i joined the “watch parties”, which were impressively well-run. A team member played the recording from the previous night and paused at key moments to send us into breakout rooms for exercises. Very smooth; no comments. Well, one comment: Matt ran one such party in the middle of hurricane Milton and it barely stuttered once… i was (and still am) impressed! (and afraid at the things Americans do for work, but that’s not the point)

• Breakout Rooms: during live sessions (or watch parties), we were split into small groups of 3–4 for quick exercises. I’ll dive into what those exercises were like later, but for now, let’s say they were… fine.

• Writing Gyms: these were offered three times a day, every day of the week, and it was easy enough to find time to attend, even with my 9-to-5 job. Kudos to the team for scheduling sessions that worked for Europeans too! That said, for the price of admission, weekend options would’ve been nice. There was high attendance from entrepreneurs and self-employed consultants so i see why not, but i would have appreciated it. Still, I managed.

• Assignments: there were three total assignments (other reviews will say five, the course used to include one assignment per week, but my cohort got a trimmed-down version). Each assignment came with a prompt, some guidance tied loosely to the week’s topic, and feedback from a trained editor. I’ll talk more about these later.

And, of course, the price. The full price for one cohort was $4,000. If you wanted unlimited access to all cohorts, it was $8,000. Yes, that’s a lot of money. Luckily, i applied for a scholarship and ended up paying “just” $1,000 (€900). Stay ‘til the end to know if it was worth it ;) (call this my attempt at clickbait).

Now, we’re ready to dive into the course’s promises and why i think it fell short on so many of them.

Promise 1: We’ll teach you how to write

I was very excited for this promise! I was never really taught how to write essays in French school. We focused on the dissertation, which is very formal and looks a lot more like academic writing. English is my second language, so i was enthusiastic at the idea of polishing my quirks and learning all kinds of professional techniques.

One of my biggest hurdles with writing – that follows me even after the course — is my lack of confidence. I feel extremely self-conscious about my writing (especially any time i use forbidden words like very or extremely) and i know it needs a lot of work.!

That’s the plight of the critical reader you see, and why i will never publish a novel: i have read all the shitty fantasy there is, and all the bad medium essays. My biggest fear is to join the ranks of the disastrous writer, the one who bores and annoys and destroys the tongue they write in.

So here goes the criticism: David’s course had a middle-school level of advice. Each live session was 1h30 long, but it was all extremely superficial. We were told to make sure our ideas flow well into each other – in France it’s called using “logical connectors” (words like and, but, then, otherwise, meanwhile, in conclusion,...) and logic was a prerequisite to anything.

Another session told you to write with life (ie interesting, captivating, engaging prose) but left it at one example we read silently. I wanted them to show me several examples, contrast and compare, share guidelines for writing descriptions, or how to edit them. I wanted to know what practical steps i could take to add rhythm to my piece, how to know if it’s too much or too little,... anything really!

I had hoped we’d get some personal help during the sessions – if you’re handing out exercises, you’ll make sure to give everyone corrections, right? Well, not really. There isn’t enough teachers to make the rounds, so all the advice you’ll get in the breakout rooms is from other students. Some of them are great: they’ve been writing for a while, are native English speakers, have some decent notions of grammar. But others, like me, are severely lacking (thank you Google Docs autocorrect!) and can’t really help each other.

So sadly, the course never delivered on that aspect, and didn’t even share resources we could learn from (i’m hearing something about a Chicago Manual of Style that could help? Please comment or reply if you know/like it or any other!).

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Promise 2: We’ll help you find ideas

I was the prime target for this course: insecure in my writing style and absolutely convinced i didn’t have good ideas. Not to worry, the FAQ section promised me they would help me find some, and uncover my personal niche, one i could follow blindly and tap into for the rest of my life.

Well, once again, none of that happened. I’m lucky that i didn’t entirely believe it, and worked hard in September to prepare some decent stuff because otherwise i would have died in the draft phase.

Sure, the first assignment (well, number 0, it didn’t count in the total three) was to write 5 “sketches”, ie 5 paragraphs that each showed one idea you could write about. This doc was then to be posted for other students to comment on, such that you would get early feedback on your stuff and would then easily write something that had an audience built-in.

Being a dutiful straight A student, i posted my 5 sketches the day the forum opened. And i got a total of 2 comments, one who hadn’t read the post, and another who asked me whether Goodreads was like a Kindle or more like Readwise (the answer is neither, but also you could have googled it – oh wait no, you can’t call yourself a community leader if you don’t post shitty comments everywhere under the guise of “participating”).

The other way to get comments on your ideas was in the “Idea gyms”. You get paired up with another person, and then take turn for 20 minutes each to discuss an idea. The rules are as follows:

• Listen actively

• Ask follow-up questions to probe for more detail

• Say which parts of the idea resonate with you

• Don’t criticize your partner’s ideas

The first 3 are good general advice, but the fourth one? Of course i want you to criticize my shit! That’s the whole point of this! Tell me if it’s boring or cliché or plain up dumb. How else would i know?

The demographics of the student body (more on that later) didn’t help either: i often got paired with middle-aged men and no offense to you but none of you gave a shit about the description of aliens in scifi books, the compared morals or harry potter and percy jackson or endometriosis. And yet each of those essays got at least 100 reads and a few comments that enjoyed them. In return, i listened actively to ideas like “how crypto is a gift from god” or “that one simple trick to make sure angel investors want to fund your startup” and was bored af. To be clear, i don’t blame those students at all, we were just very incompatible for this kind of exercises.

I think my upset comes from the few reviews i read that mentioned “writing groups” or “pods” in which people were placed based on their topic, ideas and audience. It seemed to help a lot to make sure everyone got appropriate feedback on their work. But this idea was scrapped for my cohort. I’d have appreciated a “what changed from the last time we ran this” bit on the homepage, because a lot of things mentioned in the reviews online didn’t happen at all. I get it was a living, evolving course, but still, i feel chaffed.

Finally, i fully expected, without any reservation, that the assignment prompts would provide some guidance and some constraint or inspiration for ideas. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Assignment one was “Through your lense” ie take one of your sketches and expand on it – gee thanks, and what if your ideas were shit (you wouldn’t know anyways because no-one told you). Number 2 was “What’s missing?” as in what do you think is missing from the world. And number 3 was “Your rite of passage: write an essay you would have wanted to read 2 years ago”.

Generic, bland, uninspiring prompts that couldn’t move a fly if they wanted to. Thanks for the ideas!

Promise 3: We’ll teach you how to write online

I haven’t completely cracked the code on that one personally, so i’m going to struggle with you here for a moment to explain what i feel was missing. This isn’t a writing course for a book, for journalism, for an essay in print magazine. This is an online course for blogs or newsletters. The medium they recommend is substack. I expected at least one session explaining how and why writing for the internet is different, and strategies on how to adapt.

For example, i would have like a discussion on links. Hyperlinks are the bread and butter of the internet, and they are slowly disappearing, sure, but they remain an important part of blog writing.

Or something about writing for different screen formats and ratios! Something i write a wonderful paragraph, but when i render it on a phone screen it’s 300000 lines long and i know no-one will read that.

Maybe another talk voice and modalities of text. Very unsure of what i’m saying here, but it sounds to me you don’t write the same online than in a newspaper, no matter how casual its editors. There are many more ways to express yourself on here, you can break grammar rules, or swear, or invent words, or use memes, reference stuff, … It all depends on your audience of course, but it’s a fundamental thing!

There was also no mention made of illustrations, but featured images are paramount to a post finding its intended audience. Which leads me to the next promise:

Promise 4: We’ll teach you how to write online and get people to read you

We got some very reassuring words in the FAQ, telling us they would hold our hands and help us gain an audience. I was naive coming in, but not this naive: there is no way a course can help you gain subscribers – apart from the fact that we all would gather round and follow each other.

My results were on par with my expectations (and not at all on par with the promise): i currently have a tiny bit over 50 subscribers, some of which are peers from the course, some are strangers i met over on Notes.

The general teachings from the Live Sessions ran by David was as follows: publish you shit and tell social media about it, otherwise no one will see it. No shit Sherlock. But that was all – and it’s normal: there is no one-size-fits-all strategy to this kind of thing.

They organized a “Distribution-Palooza” session, where 4 speakers came to deliver a guest lecture. There was one called “unbundling”, which was about how to take the piece you’ve written and re-write it into tweets – the idea isn’t dumb in itself, but the execution was superficial and didn’t teach me shit. The one about titles was all about clickbaity techniques which i don’t want to follow and i think it’s a) unhealthy and b) inappropriate for the wholesome brand David curated. Same (but even worse) for the one about cold outreach.

The only lecture that i found somewhat useful was the one about “substack growth” were my editor told us all about how she grew her 20k publication, and now makes a living from it. Sadly, half the answer laid into the fact that she’d had a mailing list in the past with 1K active contacts which gave her a boost when she started + her background as a journalist which got her featured by Substack and given a place in their accelerator program.

There was one takeaway from it, which you can see repeated as-nauseam on Notes: use Notes. People will find your profile, follow and maybe subscribe. So yeah, if you see me spit some weird takes or museum photos over there, that’s what i’m trying to do (and it’s not working too bad – 50 subs in 60 days is pretty cool!).

But once more, the content of the course was superficial, and didn’t give me anything new. Sure, the website copy does tell you it’s possible to find everything online, but they follow up by saying their concentrated it all in one place (wrong) and that it would take decades to dig it up yourself (wrong, took 5 minutes).

Promise 4: You’ll meet amazing people

The message that i fell for the most: people who pay 4 fucking Ks to get into a writing course will be educated, serious, engaged and smart so you’ll have a good time and meet people who can become your peers.

The reality: it’s full of tech people with disposable income, “entrepreneurs” who want to write dry business shit and “creators” who want to produce LinkedIn AI slop. Don’t forget that David Perell is a Christian and talks about it quite a bit so you also end up with nauseating gender-roles affirming dudes who think marriage is the best thing ever and you should become a housewife. Oh, and they’re all men, of course – which means it was surprisingly hard to find female-centric advice: when your topic is endometriosis it becomes difficult to get useful feedback (no, “what is it?” doesn’t count, the audience already knows, also i explained it 2 paragraphs ago).

I was surprised to see a significant amount of messages on the forums of people who can’t read the tutorials, post things in the wrong section, can’t accept a calendar invite or are just so fucking oblivious they didn’t listen when David gave the deadlines for the assignments. Not the behavior i expected from adults who elected to join and paid their own money for it!

Part of the assignment was to read other people’s drafts and provide feedback on them (which i agree is a very valuable practice). So i dutifully did it and realized that even the people with a good enough topic (ie not “AI is 100% great no problem ever” or “How i built my business”) didn’t know how to write. The sessions i told you were middle school level? Well, they are absolutely needed there! Really bad grammar, people using ChatGPT without removing the extra part, sentences that made no sense, or were dry and uninteresting… Once again, i was disappointed. I expected peer emulation, light competitive spirit or something to build momentum (and i did find friends for that, but this is the complaining section so wait a minute).

All in all, this wasn’t the college nirvana i aspired to (my college experience was in compsci, so it was also full of dudes, except they were 20yo and therefore a lot dumber). At least i didn’t get hit on or harassed – but i read a few essays that told me their authors wouldn’t consider me very highly because of my gender.

Promise 5: A trained editor will line-edit your pieces

Well, that didn’t happen, point-blank. I submitted all my drafts on time, in the right space, with the right formatting and the right access permissions on the google doc. I was even early, showing up on Friday evenings, just a day after the watch party where the prompt was given, and much earlier than the recommendation of “before Monday”.

I was assigned someone who has a successful substack (>20k subscribers, full-time writer – i won’t name her because i don’t want to make it a feud), and who also was a freelance writer for big publications before. What i mean by this is that she has experience with editors and should have known what to do.

Instead, i got some feel-good messages on my draft, and very little in way of a critic and ways to improve. It’s not that my drafts were ready to go – i re-worked them significantly, and there was A LOT to do each time!

As examples, i’ve added a collage of the comments i received from my piece about escaping Goodreads gravity well. This was done on an early draft that i edited a lot to make it to this final form. You can see that all i got were inspiring, supporting messages. I barely got a single improvement point.

On my Harry vs Percy morals comparison, i got some light typos editing + a message about how it could be confusing if someone hasn’t read both books. Passing on the fact that the audience is clearly meant to be someone who has read both as a kid, i think this is extremely light!

I was told i’d get “line-editing”, which to me means going over each sentence and helping me make it better: is the grammar right (probably not, i’m a non-native mess), is it phrased properly, is there a way to make it more impactful, should you maybe use this synonym instead of that, are your arguments clear and structured, is the flow good, does it sound nice, …

I yearned for this kind of correction, and the appointed editor didn’t deliver. Once i fixed the few things she highlighted in the comments, i asked her for a second pass, focusing on the details, and she didn’t reply back. So much for that promise!

I also took a look at the other editors profiles. Some of them did a good job (i could see their feedbacks on other people’s drafts), but it strikes me that very few of them had any actual education in English, or editor experience prior to working for WoP. I’m sure it’s a great opportunity for them to launch their editing careers, but as a student who paid 4K, i expect trained editors, not former students who have a good enough handle on English.

Stuff i liked: new friends and feedback partners

With all the complaints i had earlier about people who are not my tribe, i did also meet some really nice people! I’ll tag a few people (but not being on the list doesn’t mean i didn’t like you, i just can’t find your name in the \@ dropdown): , , , , , , , <3

They showed me that good feedback is valuable, and that i enjoy exchanging it, when i get it back in the same quality. I now get people to read my draft, and go through several rounds of revisions before i publish and it’s helped me tremendously. On a normal day, i would never put out this kind of monstrosity; and my friends wouldn’t let me either (but it’s the holidays so i’m not bothering people, and instead here you go with all my ramblings).

First, i put out better stuff (no shit). Second, i’m much less anxious about press “publish” (i still die every time, but i’m a drama queen – i’m on substack after all) because someone has read it and deemed it not shit. I know i can trust their advice because they’ve told me when something wasn’t ready, and done so very clearly (but not mean). Anyways, i’ve found friends :))

I spent so much money i had to follow up lol

The main thing i gained from WoP wasn’t in any of the teachings. It’s just that i paid so much money for it that i forced myself to show up. Didn’t learn much in the sessions, but it was a wonderful forcing function for me to write shit down and hit publish on time.

I went above and beyond, and published 5 essays during those 5 weeks, and had a few in progress to be published after that. You can see that i took a 3 weeks break after the course because i was a bit tired, and i wanted the next piece to be really good (and not die by AI bros).

So, do i regret it?

No. I do think i overpaid at 900 euros (and i can’t imagine what it feels for the people who paid full price!), but it was more worth it than not. It gave me the initial push to publish, the momentum to keep going, and a few friends to make a nice community.

I did learn a very valuable lesson: if the course seems too good to be true, it probably is! I won’t fall for the same trap again, and i’ll be more thoughtful in the future…

What about you? Have you ever taken a course that didn’t fulfill its promises? Did you take Write Of Passage or considered doing so before it closed? Tell me all in the comments!

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Other than that, Happy Holidays if you celebrate any of them, and i’ll see you in the new year with a very original and thought-provoking piece about my goals for 2025 ;)

I’ll do a quick retrospective on my first 3 months here on substack (because the self-promo has to come first), then I’ll talk briefly about my favorite books and favorite substacks (and which ones i pay for).

This is a yearly wrap-up, which means it’s the dullest, most egocentric thing i’ll ever write. So to entice you to click and read the whole damned thing, i’ve included a section on how much money i spent on my various writing endeavours at the bottom…

On writing

I started this publication in the middle of October, because i was starting a writing course. I have lukewarm thoughts on it (see the money section below), but it worked wonderfully as a forcing function. In the two and a half months i’ve been here, 50 of you have decided to join and i thank you dearly. I wouldn’t have imagined i’d get so many eyes on my writing so soon, and it’s been a blast.

For those of you who joined recently, here is an exhaustive list of the stuff i’ve written so far (complete with a clickbaity comment so you read them, i am writing for fame after all!):

• Harry Potter became a cop, Percy Jackson fixed the system, or how when you look back into things, only one of our childhood heroes actually did anything to fix the system.

• Escaping Goodread’s Gravity Well, or why you should go meet me on the Storygraph instead, and an exploration of the forces that make Goodreads still stand even though it hasn’t been updated for 10000 years. Surprisingly, it’s my most read post!

• Don’t Show me your Spider Aliens, my least viewed post, which is a shame because i love it! It’s a plea for scifi writers to stop describing their aliens in terms of known animals, because that takes away all the alien-ness of them!

• I D.A.R.E you to put your name on the Internet, or a telling of that time when the French government sent the Army to scare us kids from putting any identifying info on the nascent web.

• I hate my doctor parents for not diagnosing me sooner, a more personal and emotional piece about my struggle with endometriosis and the pain that comes with it.

• AI is not a toy if you kill me with it, the obligatory anti-genAI piece of the day, in which i make the groundbreaking comment that LLM and image generators being used disproportionately to harm women, and how that danger is being minimized by pretending it’s just a toy.

• and my latest one: Dreaming up the threats of the future (on the French Army’s payroll), a book review of that novel i mentioned earlier, a collaboration between the army, university, and a bunch of French scifi writers to predict what could hurt France at the 2030 horizon. I promise i made it funny!

To be fully transparent in terms of stats, each post gets between 40 and 180 views (that one was an outlier, average is 110), and a few comments.

My favorite has been without question the endometriosis piece because it was so cathartic to read, and so lovely to hear about other women on that same subject.

Reading books

This year was my true comeback into reading. I graduated from my master’s degree in September and so i had my first taste of freedom in 5 years. I have read many good science-fiction and fantasy books, my genres of predilection; and i’ve made my first foray into non-fiction which i’d never read before (apart from books assigned in class).

I read a total of 49 fiction books (at the time of writing), and here are my favorites:

S tier (5/5):

• My absolute favorite book of the year was The Spear Cuts Through Water. It had everything from excellent plot, deep characters, emotional catharsis, superb prose and interesting narrative devices.

• Some Adrian Tchaikovsky books: Alien Clay and Ogres. Tchaikovsky was also a great disappointment this year, Service Model and Shroud were mediocre, and Elder Race was just plain bad.

• I finally got started on Malazan with Gardens of the Moon and i loved it! It’s a very dense read, and a long one at that, so i’ll slowly work my way through the series in the next few years.

• The Will of the Many was a very promising first book, and i’m excited for the sequel to come out in 2025!

• In terms of YA, i read The City Of Brass and the other 2 books in the Daevabad trilogy and they were great. Old school YA from before the romantasy craze, with sone nice world building, decent writing, and enjoyable characters.

A tier (4/5):

• The Ministry of Time was a funny and interesting read. Enjoyable until the end, and doesn’t fall into the time travel pitfalls you could expect.

• I started the Sun Eater series with Empire of Silence and i’m excited for the rest! It was very derivative and the pacing lacked a bit in the middle but it was fun. It’s a temporary rating, based on the assumption it’s setting up a great saga. If book 2 disappoints i will relegate it to B tier though.

• I read the first two books in the Green Bone Saga: Jade City and Jave War and i had a good time. Not necessarily in a rush to read the last one in the trilogy, but i recommend them for some nice Asian-inspired fantasy.

• Also got through A Psalm for the Wild-Built which was a nice reprieve from all the dark and bleary books i mentioned above. Hopepunk is indeed an excellent way to speak about the genre, and this one came at the right time for me.

I won’t bore you with the other books since i don’t recommend them. You can check out my storygraph if you want more details :) – and this post if you want to know why i like Storygraph so much better than Goodreads (and know why i still won’t delete my Goodreads account anyways).

The 1-star category was a bit too big for my liking, but i’m proud that they mostly come from the first half of the year. I made a commitment in July to stop following the trends, because i’m a picky mean Frenchwoman and i tend to hate them all (but also my magpie brain wants to collect all the pretty special editions…). I gave up on romantasy because i don’t like romance that much (how shocked are you that i rated most of those 1-star then?) and focused on hard-ish scifi and fantasy that suits my tastes better.

In terms of non-fiction, i read 3 books. I only started reading non-fiction in October after i graduated from college, in hope to not rot my brain away in the corporate world. I’ll focus more on that in the coming year!

My favorite of the 3 was Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, which is a great book about writing, that doesn’t take itself too seriously. I found it enabling in many aspects, and infuriating in others (probably should take the time to write a post about it now that i think of it…)

I have to mention Ces guerres qui nous attendent (in french), a book in collaboration with the French army. It was honestly really bad, but it gave me so much to spit about and complain so in the end it provided a lot of joy. Don’t recommend (it isn’t translated anyways, but you can read my post about it here).

Next year i want to focus more on the 3 following topics. Those books have been randomly taken from some “best of the genre” lists, but they have dubious origins, so i’ll welcome any recommendations for substitutions, additions, or removals (please be a good friend and tell me if one of them is really really bad!).

There’ll also be some books about the craft of writing, i am a professional Substack writer after all :))

Reading magazines and substacks

I finally got some adult money, which means i can support some great publications! But i am also still just a baby, so i’ll stay on my parents’ Le Monde subscription a bit longer (it costs 500€1 a year!!, i know it’s quality, but still).

I subscribe to Clarkesworld, a sci-fi magazine that publishes short stories and essays each month. I’m on the digital tier so i get the pdfs (honestly i have no space to store the actual prints anyways), and it only costs 5€ a month so if you can afford it, please give it a shot! You can easily cancel anytime with a few clicks. I don’t necessarily read the stories, but i do read all the essays and always learn something new! Check them out here.

On Substack, i need to start paying for people’s writing. I don’t have enough savings to support everyone at the same time, but i’ve made a commitment to choose one every 3 months and pay an annual sub for them – the average cost seems to be 70€ so it should be maintainable for me. I still can’t decide so let me know if you’ve supported any of the above (or any other!) and you recommend them!

Here’s a little list of my favorites right now:

• Obsidian Iceberg: i’ve been reading ’s thoughts about Obsidian since before i was aware of Substack, and i’ve always enjoyed it immensely. From her About page, her interests also include “questions about how non-industrial people live” and it is indeed an excellent way to put it (and a fascinating subject).

• in the women’s musings and thoughts about culture, what it’s like to live, …,2 i love Club Reticent by , Written by a Woman by , Digital Tinz by , Notes On by and Postcards by Elle by .

  • this is the section i want to choose from for my first upgrade of January, please share any thoughts and any other recs in the same genre!

• My favorite so far has been Personal Canon from . Systematically smart, unexpected and thought-provoking (on top of being well written). I want to be her when i grow up!

• In the culture section, i’ve enjoyed Culture Study by , The Etymology Nerd by (bite-sized word thoughts) and A Book Designer’s Notebook by (a fascinating view into his work).

• I think this section is the men’s equivalent of the “women’s vibes” one, and my patriarchal upbringing makes me want to call it “philosophy” even though the women are just as deep as they are. Anyways, i’m enjoying Escaping Flatland by and i’ve recently discovered Sacred Tension in which talks about religion and especially his experience in The Satanic Temple.

• the only one i pay for right now: Essay Architecture by for some interesting insights into essays and the craft of writing (more thoughts in the money section at the bottom, but the gist is i don’t regret it).

The Matter of Money

So, money! I can immediately tell you i haven’t made a cent from Substack, and i don’t really plan to (you can pay me if you want to, but all my work is out there for free).

I did however spend inordinate amounts of money on various stuff. I will not reveal how much i spend on books – they all go into my library and i loan them to friends and family, so it’s for the greater good after all!3

But in terms of writing, i made some questionable decisions:

1. I paid 900€ (1000 USD) on the last cohort of Write Of Passage. My experience was mediocre, but it allowed me to meet a few nice people, which i’m thankful for. One of them is my dear friend , who wrote about some of our qualms here. I don’t exactly regret the purchase, because it did force me to start publishing, but i’m relieved that i got a scholarship and only paid ¼ of the price (otherwise i’d be big mad). Would you be interested in a full review of the course? I can certainly expand on that if anyone is interested (although the company has now closed down so idk how helpful it would be)

2. I then made a much better decision and paid 285€ for Michael Dean’s Essay Club, his founding member plan on Substack. It’s a nicely managed writing group where some very kind people meet every week to exchange feedback and chat. My WoP friends are all there, and i’ve met new writers with interesting ideas and great editing minds. My ego is bruised but my essays are a lot better now.

3. Another compulsive buy was the iPad (1200€4 + some gadgets5). The Black Friday sale essentially got you a free pencil and i had been lusting after it for ages anyways so i splurged. Call it my Christmas gift to myself. I also bought 120€ of brushes which i totally didn’t need but they look cool af sooo… No ragrets. I plan on learning how to draw, and this is my forcing function for that. Plus i need some good illustrations for those posts instead of the usual Unsplash pics. I made everything in this post with Procreate! Hopefully you’ll soon see some better art if i find time6 over the holidays to practice and find a style i like.7

Endwords

And that’s about everything! Since this is an egotrip of a post, i’ll let you ask anything and everything8 in the comments. What do you want to know? I promise i won’t lie, but i don’t promise to answer (i am a mysterious anonymous writer after all!).

I’d also appreciate if you could take the time to tell me what you like or don’t like about my posts. I’m still a beginner so all advice is useful! You can either leave a comment on the app, send me a message (a private DM) or reply to this email (only i will see it). Do you hate my footnotes, do you love my snark, do you wish i was more this or less that?

Leave a comment

Other than that, i wish you a happy holiday season, lots of food, a high cholesterol and a bunch of love! See you next year <3

Now onto our regular programming…

What’s a soldier to do?

The year is 2020, and the French army is languishing at home in the midst of a pandemic. What is a soldier to do to protect their country when everything is closed down? No more patrolling national monuments, no more protecting football games,...

When suddenly, from the darkness of the night, the Ministry of Culture appears with a solution: you will help the anarcho-ecolo-anti-military science-fiction writers imagine the threats of the future!2 So here go our soldiers, dining and wining France’s best3 living sci-fi writers, giving them access to some slightly confidential documents and see what the gauchiasses4 would regurgitate.

And so our little troup got a name: Red Team Défense. Because you know, English is cool and we very much need the Hollywood blockbuster aura to sell this shit to Président Macron5, without scaring away the actual readers.6 But it was approved, given a budget, and even some academic supervision to avoid controversies7.

France Wants to Conquer Space (Again?)

The first scenario starts with an opening like it’s the 1960’s space race, except France is still in the game – well no, they’re (we’re, i am French after all) super salty they’ve lost, so now that the US is destitute (because most of it has become a desert) and Russia too (because it’s become a swamp – don’t ask too many questions, it’s climate change!), it’s time to fly babyyy!

The crown jewel of this galactic pipe dream? A space elevator. Yes, a literal cord stretching from Earth to orbit, dangling like a fucking tampon cord8, built using a fictional “silk-carbon” material that’s strong enough to hold the weight of French pride. Of course we invented the material, everyone else’s labs are under water while Paris PREVAILS!

And where do we build this engineering marvel? Kourou, French Guiana—because when you want to cement your place as a global superpower, obviously, you plant your flag in the equatorial rainforest 7,000 kilometers from Paris. You know, to remind everyone of colonialism, but futuristic.

The plan is simple: establish a commercial stronghold in space, mine asteroids for resources, and single-handedly fix Earth’s economy and climate. Oh, and let’s not forget the real mission—getting the Americans to finally take us seriously. Because nothing says “we’re back, baby!” like a $100 billion cable tethered to an unstable geopolitical hotspot.

Vive la Frugalité!

The book envisions this as the moment France leapfrogs over its global competitors, launching itself into a new golden age of commerce. Mining asteroids, you see, is the ultimate untapped market. Forget rare earth metals—what about rare space metals? The French economy will soar, corporate executives will toast with champagne (probably Champomy), and Paris will become the de facto capital of interplanetary capitalism.

But let’s pause for a moment. Do you know how expensive a space elevator is? Even fictionally? And this isn’t even accounting for maintenance, security, or the astronomical insurance premiums (assuming Lloyd’s of London doesn’t just laugh and hang up the phone). France’s economy is already juggling protests, inflation, and a collapsing pension system, but sure—let’s gamble it all on asteroid gold. Très raisonnable.

In the same vein, let’s talk about war equipment, because what’s a good sci-fi scenario without a little va-t-en-guerre energy? Apparently, the one thing we need more than a space elevator is a tank that can swim. And fly. This makes you wonder: did anyone think about the logistics? Like how much it costs to lift a multi-ton flying tank into orbit? Or how quickly that tank will be turned into orbital confetti during the first pirate attack? The book doesn’t say. And honestly, I doubt anyone thought to ask, because the focus here is less on practicality and more on flexing.

Space Is the New Versailles

France’s obsession with space isn’t just about science or exploration; it’s about legacy. The authors seem desperate to recapture a time when France was synonymous with progress and power—when the Concorde ruled the skies, French philosophers ruled the salons, and French wine ruled the dinner table. Space is the new frontier for reclaiming that lost glory.

But here’s the kicker: in this future, France doesn’t even try to do it with international allies. There’s no mention of collaborating with ESA or pooling resources with, say, Germany or Italy. No, this is a solo mission—because nothing screams “team player” like hoarding asteroids while your neighbors argue over farm subsidies (well by 2060 the Netherlands are trying not to drown, and the Germans are suffocating under coal fog, but still).

Now, don’t get me wrong: this is a work of fiction, and one bankrolled (and reviewed, and approved and declassified) by the French Army at that! I didn’t expect it to be good, insightful or anywhere close to realistic (or we’d have Middle-East and the USA painted all over it). But still, i was taken aback by how unabashedly chauvinistic it all was!

I hope the sheer absurdity of the execution – from swimming tanks to asteroid-mining fantasies – gave you a good laugh. After all, space might be infinite, but delusion? Delusion is very, very French.

The pirates attack the space elevator!

Now that i’ve got the introduction out of the way, let’s talk plot! What, did you think we would actually make it? No, after 30 pages of space elevator discussions and patting ourselves on the back for our future glory, the freaking pirates attack and destroy a) the last shuttle of materials for the elevator, b) the launching base of Kuru, and c) take hostage the entire team of scientists and governments officials. Vive la France!

Where do those pirates come from, you ask? Well, colonialism my dear (futurism, i said!). As climate changed and the waters went up, France retreated9 down on itself and left everyone to drown and die of thirst. Wait no, we sent “official recognition” for the new nations that rose from the ashes! Everyone knows a passport from Venezuela is the way out of a flooded coastal city!

So in the end, the space elevator is destroyed, the pirates expand into various oceans and seas (including the sodding Channel) and enforce new tolls all over the world. The story stops before it has to explain the consequences for France (if you don’t write it, it don’t exist!) but it does take the time to tell you that Elon Musk is not only still alive, but also still extremely rich and will save everyone thanks to his new neural-human-machine-interface microchip. This is a fictional book guys, you had one job :/

Endwords

Now this was scenario one of book one; there are still 4 in that same book, and another 2 seasons to go through. Would you like to hear more? Please tell me in the comments (or reply to this email) to let me know if i should make this a series!

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A few relevant links:

* The Red Team Défense official site : some of the documents are translated, and they did a good job making it look cool!

* My Notes about the various writers who are part of this team, if you want to explore their individual works

* If you want to hear more of the French Army shenanigans, i wrote a post about its techniques to scare younglings off the internet in the 2010s (i’m still traumatised enough that this is a pseudonym)

Thank you to for helping me edit this essay.

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So when I look at these men — the tech bros, the optimistic engineers, the ones who smile while saying "AI is going to change the world!" And all I can think is: Must be nice, huh? Must be nice to stand on top of the world, see “possibility” everywhere, and not feel the weight of what it’s doing to people like me.

They talk about how amazing it is that AI can generate anything. Anything. They say it like we’re on the edge of the greatest creative explosion humanity’s ever seen. But you know what “anything” means for women? It means discovering your professional headshot has been used to generate thousands of degrading variations. It means finding entire communities dedicated to "AI art" of girls and women from their communities. It means watching male colleagues excitedly discuss AI features in public while their browser tabs show Discord servers where they're using those same features to humiliate women.

Now don’t get me wrong: AI certainly didn’t start this. I’ve always been just a girl on the internet, long before the first generative tools (well not that long, i’m only 23). Since I was a teenager I’ve faced photomontages of my face on pornstars’ bodies, received endless death threats and aggressive sexual comments, and been forced to accept that my mere presence on a forum is enough to ignite an explosive mix of hatred and obsession.

But the scales have dramatically changed. They used to need dozens of hours, specialized software and some talent to make those pictures, they now only require 10 seconds and a free account. AI has made the process so much faster and more realistic. It looks real, it feels real – and with every new picture, my brain, my body reacts as if i’m truly here – and in a way i am there because the tech is just that good.

The internet was a space where I could control what I wanted to share about myself, where it was moderately safe to nerd out about my interests and share them with strangers. Now, AI has stolen even that. Remember the old advice: “Don’t send photos you wouldn’t want your mom to see”? It was already useless, but now, it’s a sick joke. You don’t have to send anything for your likeness to be out there, taken and twisted. A headshot selfie posted on social media when you were 12, a random picture of you in the street taking without your permission — it’s all fair game, fed to AI, slapped onto a body you recognize all too well because the tech is that good. Now it's what? Don't show your face? Don't dare to be a woman in tech? Don't exist online?

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I live in two worlds now. In one, I'm sitting in a bright conference room at a prestigious tech conference, watching the latest demo of an AI image generator. "Look what it can do!" he exclaims, generating masterful landscapes and whimsical characters. The room buzzes with possibility. In the other world – the one I inhabit as soon as the lights dim down– I'm frantically filing another DMCA takedown request because someone used that same technology to generate pornographic images of me and every other female speaker whose face was on the brochure.

While men are off tinkering, calling it “creativity,” we’re over here, backpedaling, forced to imagine all the ways they can twist our digital selves into some grotesque revenge fantasy just because we dared to exist.

Not me, you protest – “I’d never used it like that”, “that’s not what we built it for!” And you probably didn’t, but that doesn’t change the fact that your new shiny toy has generated porn from a photo of me at graduation. That I get DMed thousands of lines of “torture fanfic” in which I am the main character. It means revenge porn made of women who just wanted to exist in a digital world. Men who can’t seem to make peace with the fact that we’re just here, online, and now they have a machine to punish us, and it doesn’t need time to reload.

And let’s say I speak up. Who’s going to listen? The very people I’d be talking to are the ones who let this happen in the first place. They’re the ones grinning while telling me how “incredible” this all is. When I say, “This is what it’s doing to me,” I’m dismissed, and laughed at. At best there’s an awkward silence - “it sucks, i’m so sorry”. Maybe they’d get defensive, say it’s “not their fault.” They’d shrug and tell me that this is the price of living online – but how much are they paying? Cause it sure looks like they’ve been grandfathered in the unlimited free plan while i’m crumbling under the pink tax!

The same men who pride themselves on their logical thinking somehow can't – or won't – connect the dots between their enthusiastic adoption of AI tools and the explosion of AI-generated harassment we face.

I have recently graduated and start my first job as a software engineer. I’m very happy that i managed to find a good company and a great team that isn’t discriminating against me. But still AI hangs over my head, because i can’t bring myself to look excited every time the subject comes up at lunch. This industry is so saturated with the expectation that we should all be “bullish” on AI, that admitting doubt is like drawing a line on your own career.

It’s subtle, but it’s dangerous. Being called a “luddite” in my field could be career-ending. I know they’ll never put it in my performance review directly, but it’ll sit there, lingering in their minds: “She’s not forward-thinking.” “She’s resistant to change.” As if I’m just too scared or too slow to see the potential. I’m afraid that’s the thought they’ll have whenever I suggest that maybe, maybe there’s a cost to all this progress.

A cost that falls on me and other women like me, every single day. Because the people who aren’t on board with this unrelenting optimism don’t get the benefit of “just asking questions.” We’re supposed to be enthusiastic, or we risk being seen as the weakest link. And that’s how this toxic ideal spreads: it tells us we can either buy in or get out of the way. That we can either “get with the times” or “risk becoming obsolete.”

This isn't about being anti-progress. It's about demanding progress that doesn't treat women's safety as an afterthought. It's about acknowledging that if your technology is immediately used to terrorize half the population, maybe – just maybe – we need to rethink how we're approaching making new toys.

Sometimes I feel like a 19th-century textile worker watching the mechanical loom transform my world. I'm not naive – I know we can't stuff this genie back in its bottle. The harassment, the degrading photoshops, the violations – they existed before AI. But there was a barrier to entry then: time, skill, dedication. It was still violation, still trauma, but it wasn't this endless, automated flood. Now? Anyone with a grudge and a smartphone can generate hundreds of degrading images in minutes. The industrial revolution of harassment has arrived, and women are all caught in its machines.

This isn’t a revolution we control. It’s one pointed directly at us, like a weapon that someone else gets to wield, and it feels an awful lot like being back in the 1960s when we couldn’t enter bars and were therefore excluded from any space of conversation that mattered. I can’t be on Twitter anymore because i’ll get lynched, Reddit was never a safe space; Instagram is photo-based. Our little forums, with strong moderation and a majority of female users have dwindled down or been closed by puritans with fake morality arguments to protect the youth. Remember Tumblr? ffnet? Don’t try to tell me they were worse for girls than the surface of Twitter!

They love to say, “Well, just tell us what you want instead,” like it’s our job to make their tech safe. I’d love to see them live one week like this — they’re not the ones left scrubbing their digital selves off websites and out of Discord servers, always wondering how much of themselves is still out there. They can’t fathom it, and maybe they don’t even care to. For them, AI’s promise is a toy, a thrill. For us, it’s a shadow we’re forced to fight.

So yes, AI is “changing the world,” but not for the better. It’s changing our world in ways they’ll never know, or care to acknowledge. Their optimism feels like the cheapest betrayal, a cold reminder that they’ll never bear the consequences of the “future” they’re so eager to build. They don’t have to live with the nightmare scenarios we see, playing out in the background of every “exciting” AI advancement they celebrate. And that, that’s what makes it all so unbearable.

Next time AI comes up in the conversation, take a moment to look around your social circles. Notice who's laughing nervously. Notice who's quiet. Notice who's slowly disappearing from online spaces. Your experience of this technology isn't universal, and your excitement shouldn't come at the cost of our safety. You got a toy; I got the old targets on my back painted a brand new shade of red.

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