Notes
Finished reading: Deep Blue (Survival Instincts, #0.5) by Adriana Anders 📚
💬 “I feel like I’m spending half my work time managing my mental and emotional ability to navigate a situation where I can’t confidently apply what I learn to what I’ll do next.” Kim Werker on Canada-to-US book tariffs feels applicable to a lot of us right now.
🔖 Read Should You Ditch Fixing Your Weaknesses And Lean Into Your Strengths? by Nicole Aherling (The Good Trade).
My top 3 strengths are either Input, Learner, Communication or Love, Curiosity, Creativity. Either way, I’ve built a life where these strengths lead the way. 💗
Thank you @cygnoir@social.lol for pointing the way to this beautiful thread about the power of connections we make online. 📚💬 “She strode the earth clad in the invisible armor of their virtual companionship.” ― Lev Grossman, The Magician King
Finished reading: Between the Devil and Desire by Lorraine Heath 📚
Much like I sometimes try to find Paramount+ on my phone by looking for the Star Trek app, just now I tried to find the Poirot app (which is, in fact, Britbox).
Please enjoy this extremely Kimberly blackout poem by Austin Kleon.
Me: Masquerade NYC posted a time, an intersection, and a passcode! But we can’t participate because we don’t live in New York. Spouse: I’m sorry. Me: It’s okay. I’m not gonna move to New York just to play in a Phantom of the Opera Alternate Reality Game. *heroically doesn’t search for an AirBnB*
Finished reading: In Bed With the Devil by Lorraine Heath 📚
Lorraine Heath is great at her job.
Am I Nostalgic for the 90s Because They Were Legitimately Great or Only Because I’m Middle-Aged?: The Kimberly Hirsh Story
Finished reading: Born In Ice by Nora Roberts 📚
This one made me a little weepy.
Ravynn K. Stringfield writes about the love evident in the rigor of Haniq Abdurraqib’s book, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest and what she writes is beautiful.
Finished reading: Oathbound by Tracy Deonn 📚
Ugh so good, Tracy Deonn is so wonderful and I hate that I have to wait a long time for the next book in the Legendborn Cycle and I also know writers need time to do their work. Probably will do a full series re-read ahead of the next.
Finished reading: Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat by Javaka Steptoe 📚
A gorgeous picture book biography.
I think one of the reasons I loved the early web is that you could exist on it purely as words. As a person whose body has often felt like a hindrance, it felt like magic to be able to communicate in the way that most made sense to me.
📚💬 " ChatGPT has access to every poem ever written, at least in theory, but it can’t feel anything when it generates a poem from a prompt. Is this still poetry?" John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI
🔖 Here’s a project IMLS supported that you won’t see in partisan social media posts about where that 0.003% of the federal budget went: Libraries’ Roles in Disaster Preparedness and Recovery by Denise Lyons (Library Journal)
📚💬 “It’s a near certainty that generative AI can have some positive effects on human writing, but for that to be true, we must hold fast to what makes writing meaningful to humans.” John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI
📚💬 “What do we make of a technology that is simultaneously undeniably powerful, has access to all the information in the world, and can produce outputs at a speed unmatchable by humans, but at the same time is also untethered from reality?” John Warner, More Than Words
📚💬 “The things ChatGPT is ‘smarter’ at… are relatively limited as compared to our human capacities for experience, reflection, analysis, and creativity…” John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI
📚💬 “It’s not that ChatGPT makes stuff up. It has no capacity for discerning something true from something not true. Truth is irrelevant to its operations.” John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI
📚💬 “Large language models do not ‘write.’ They generate syntax.” John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI
📚💬 “Removing thinking from writing renders an act not writing.” John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI
📚💬 “…ChatGPT cannot write. Generating syntax is not the same thing as writing. Writing is an embodied act of thinking and feeling. Writing is communicating with intention.” John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI