I'm going to hate-read a parenting book about screentime, so help me gravity*
* @isaacs.bsky.social and i started a religion and our deity is gravity so i have to switch all the standard invocations** now
** luckily "omg" still works just fine
You can also now contact me securely (via ProtonMail) at emily@emilylaskin.com as well as me@emilylaskin.com and you@emilylaskin.com, just in case you get confused about who's who.
I've discovered how to get email at my website domain name and obviously made a bunch of aliases. Write to chat@emilylaskin.com if you want to get signed up for a newsletter I might never send.
I left the field but I used to know a lot of shit.
Oh I'll bite! My quals were:
1. Russian literature 17th-20th century
2. English literature Chaucer - the present
3. Persian epic poetry
4. History and literature of inter-imperial and Soviet Central Asia
5. History of empire + natural sciences
Bringing a totally regular amount of world-historical heroism to choosing a preschool etc., all totally fine over here.
Sometimes when I'm really overwhelmed by life circumstances I reread the scene in Stalingrad where Novikov turns his tank corps around to head into besieged Stalingrad and *~*saves the day*~* and then I weep and think about how to be good in the face of bullshit.
I have been doing an experiment with Claude though where I make it poke holes in everything I say and I think it’s actually a decent substitute for an editor* in this era of zero institutional support for wordcels.
*at least for experienced writers who have been edited by a good human editor ever
I totally agree that “what made it” isn’t the interesting question, but I actually think there’s a place for artisanal handcrafted slop. Humans make a lot of shit with no value other than it’s weird, or no utility other than it’s funny, and I think that’s fine.
I'm racking up undesirability over here 💅
I keep wanting to read new academic books recently and I'm distressed and confused by this desire
Yeah I watched the lunar eclipse live on TikTok wby
Stuff seems like… really bad rn?
THEY HAD THE “NO TAKE ONLY THROW” DOG MEME SIX THOUSAND YEARS AGO
i built an entire x86 CPU emulator in CSS (no javascript)
you can write programs in C, compile them to x86 machine code with GCC, and run them inside CSS
lyra.horse/x86css/
“No ethical consumption under capitalism” but it’s the imperative mood: thou shalt not consume anything with any kind of ethical framework. Chaos reigns.
Anyway follow me on Twitter I’m really funny over there
My toxic trait is that I think “no ethical consumption under capitalism” applies to musk/the website formerly known as Twitter, and I’m back on there because it remains the home of Discourse (much of which is unbelievably stupid rn but waygd).
ra ra Raspoutine
icon of Quebec cuisine
New blog post, in which I am a mild edgelord contrarian about an old NYT lifestyle article for absolutely no reason. emilylaskin.com/2026/02/opti...
Amazing how much life shit I can get done when I have to* write a blog post
*entirely voluntary task
Shower thought: it's weird that the last time society got extremely into the possibility of non-reason-based meaning-making (Freud's discovery of the subconscious and early C20 obsessions with the occult) was also an era of massive technological leaps + deadly political instability.
Assematics? Mathemassics
Archetype becomes UI poetry becomes compiler ??? Mad libs ass content
\You know, maybe we would be in a really different place rn if people had entered this kind of ecstatic rapture about late stage capitalism and its identity-pilled henchmen gutting the humanities. We went down quibbling with power. We should've gone ungovernably off the rails.
I left literary studies, I don't think it's the only thing there is, but "how do stories mean things" is, while not a solved problem, a very deeply probed one.
And instead of text or art objects as referents, they use their own convos with LLMs, as if, because a machine made it, that text has some meaning other than what we give it, or is operating in meaning-space in some totally new way. Why would this be?
The accelerationist AGI-is-nigh true believers are reinventing the most immaterial, convoluted, navel gazing aspects of lit theory and narratology from first principles, without any notion that people actually thought about this stuff before. Like, many many people, for literal thousands of years.
