Ran Prieur

May 13.

2026-05-13T13:10:56Z

May 13. I don't want to post doom all the time but there's so much of it. Four Reddit threads:

What's a "future technology" that already exists but people still don't realize how scary it is? "My car literally tattled on me to my insurance company for 'hard braking'. I was avoiding a deer. Thanks for the rate increase though."

What's a modern problem that sounds completely fake when you explain it to someone from 100 years ago? "I'm having trouble paying for my cat anti-depressants."

What is the worst career to be in right now and why? "I'm a journalist and my industry is dying. Ten years ago we had a bustling newspaper office with 20 employees. Today there are three of us. They just sold the office and closed the building. We got bought out by a larger company and we have limited hours to cover everything we need to cover. And it's happening all over."

And from the Spirituality subreddit, I feel that my days on Earth are dwindling. "Not because you think you're literally about to die, but because of how disconnected you feel from life itself?"

May 9.

2026-05-09T21:30:07Z

May 9. Some happy links. Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons

An archive of a NY Times piece, America the Undammed: "More miles of the country's rivers were reconnected last year thanks to dam removals than at any other time in history."

From the Guardian, How nature thrives in bomb craters: "At the bottom of these explosions, which go three to eight metres deep, there will always be water in the end, even in very dry periods. It is like establishing a small wetland."

And a Reddit comment transcribing a fun story full of orphaned negatives: "She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way. I wanted desperately to meet her, but I knew I'd have to make bones about it since I was travelling cognito."

May 7.

2026-05-07T19:10:51Z

May 7. I've just posted two Goodreads reviews: a three star review of the 4.22 average Arborescence, a well-conceived book about people turning into trees, but I didn't like the droopy vibe. And a five star review of the 2.95 average The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year, a wonderfully written dark domestic comedy.

May 5.

2026-05-05T17:50:46Z

May 5. Quick thought on fakery. For years everyone has been saying that when AI images can't be told from real images, there will be lots of fake photos and videos that people take as real. I haven't seen this happen yet in any important way. Making convincing fake imagery is hard, and people who really want to tell the difference will always stay one step ahead.

Anyway, fake images are not necessary. The best tool for deception, now and forever, is words. If you want to fool people, just tell them what they want to hear, with total indifference to reality, and they will come running to join your cult. And now, when those people see real photos and videos that disprove the words, they can just say, "Those must be AI fakes."

Paradoxically, our power over images has made all images weaker, and fake words stronger.

May 4.

2026-05-04T16:40:00Z

May 4. Doug comments on the quote at the top of this page by Vachel Lindsay:

This is a man who literally walked across America trading poems for bread, and meant every word of it. The War Bulletins were self-published pamphlets he printed and distributed by hand. Pre-internet zine culture, evangelical pamphleteer energy, total outsider operation.

What makes this passage cut deeper than most anti-civ writing is that it's not against anything. It's not burning the iron streets -- it's abandoning them as unworthy of your death. That's a different move. The nihilist says tear it down. Lindsay says it doesn't deserve your attention long enough to tear it down. Walk away. Die somewhere beautiful.

"Ragged with the beggar's pride." The pride isn't despite the raggedness. It is the raggedness. Proof of motion. Proof you didn't trade your hours for upholstery. "Seeing the angels" isn't metaphor-decoration. Lindsay means it. The highroad opens perception that the iron street chemically suppresses. The commerce-made manners aren't just bad aesthetics -- they're a perceptual closing. You literally can't see certain things from inside a managed life.

And four doom threads from Reddit, starting with a tangent from Friday's post: US birth rates just hit another record low, what do you think is the leading cause of this?

Anyone else in US noticed food quality degrading recently and if so what product in what way?

What's a recession indicator that you’ve noticed lately in your everyday life?

What is an industry that is currently on fire (in a bad way) behind the scenes, but the general public hasn't noticed yet?

May 1.

2026-05-01T13:10:26Z

May 1. For Mayday, a new video of a good political song: Meatraffle - The Wickerman. Usually I prompt the images line by line, but this time I mainly just generated a ton of wickermen. I decided to go square instead of landscape because wickermen are taller than they are wide. Another thing I noticed about this song was that the rhythm didn't vary at all. Sometimes it takes me hours to do the timing, but they must have used some kind of digital metronome because every measure is 4.00 seconds.

Today is Bandcamp Friday. You might want to give a listen to the album Bad Vibes OST by Sexfaces, a D.C. punk band that I went and saw last weekend. It was strange, the entire crowd was old. There were no Gen Z in the whole place. I hope Gen A restarts the cycle of listening to noisier music than their parents. If you like non-noisy music, I want to give another plug to Melissa Kassab.

On a tangent, I saw somewhere that Gen Z is having less sex than any generation in history, and probably also prehistory. It reminds me of the mouse utopia experiment, where mice were given unlimited food in limited space and lost interest in procreating. Modern society is doing something similar, where all measures of quality of life are being ignored except for not dying. "What do you mean you don't want to bring children into this world? The world is better than it's ever been as measured by the number of cures for cancer." If I saw a giant mushroom cloud on the horizon I would probably be relieved that I no longer have to do two factor authentication.