I'm excited to have 3 poems featured in the 10th volume of Shipwreckt Books Lost Lake Folk Opera. This is the #WinterOfICE issue, themed #UnitedWeWrite Where are you submitting to this week? #WritingCommunity #WritersOfTwitter #AuthorsOnX shipwrecktbooks.press/about-…

I have a confession to make: As my 𝕏 account has grown recently, I've almost completely neglected working on my novel Why? Writing social media content is easier and has more instant gratification. Turns out I'm not immune to the dopamine train. This changes now.

We live in a strange dystopian future. Is this #VanityPublishing meets #ReputationManagement / #AIArbitration? hollywoodreporter.com/busine…

This Greek restaurant has no AC. It stays cool all summer on sea breezes alone, via fabric panels that scatter sunlight and move air around. Ancient Persians took the same principle so far they produced ice in 45°C (113°F) desert heat, without electricity. The Persian wind catcher, known as a badgir (literally "wind catcher" in Persian), is one of the oldest cooling systems on earth. Archaeologists found evidence at Tappeh Chackmaq, a site near Shahrood, Iran, dated to roughly 3,000 years ago. They work on simple physics: a tower rises above the roofline, catches prevailing winds through angled openings, and funnels cooled air down into rooms below. Yazd, Iran still has 700 of them. UNESCO added the city to its World Heritage list in 2017, calling it "a living testimony to intelligent use of limited available resources in the desert." The Egyptians had their own version, the malqaf, shown in 1300 BCE artwork near Luxor. Persians combined wind catchers with underground chambers to create the yakhchal, an ancient refrigerator. During cold desert nights, shallow pools of water froze solid. Badgirs then kept the chambers cold enough to store that ice through summer, in a desert regularly hitting 45°C. Inside, temperatures ran 15-20°C below the outdoor air, held there by thick insulating walls, steady airflow from the wind towers, and the cool ground beneath. This is how Persians made faloodeh, a frozen dessert, in a climate with no business producing frozen anything. Willis Carrier designed the first modern air conditioning system on July 17, 1902, at a printing plant in Brooklyn. AC spread fast. Passive cooling vanished from new construction. Air conditioning and fans now consume 20% of global building electricity. K-Studio, an Athens-based architecture firm, designed the Barbouni beach restaurant at Costa Navarino, Messinia. The fabric ceiling does two things at once: it breaks up direct sunlight before it heats the floor below, and its wave motion keeps air moving on top of basic convection (warm air rises, cooler outdoor air rushes in). K-Studio principal Dimitris Karampatakis: "We didn't want to have a static structure right in front of this dynamic landscape." Afternoon sea breezes at the Navarino coast arrive reliably each day, generated by land heating faster than the sea and drawing cooler air in from the water. The ceiling was designed around that daily rhythm. Wind towers drop indoor temperatures by up to 22°F (12°C) with zero electricity and no maintenance. Yazd's badgirs have been running continuously for 700 years. A Greek restaurant just did a simpler version, and 324,000 people acted like it was a new idea.

Rod Serling died on June 28, 1975, at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York, two days after open-heart surgery. He was only 50. A heart attack had shaken him in May, another crisis followed, then surgery tried to give him more time. It did not. The man who had warned America about fear, cruelty, war, prejudice, and the darkness inside ordinary people was gone far too soon. But Rod Serling had been carrying death long before that hospital room. He had met it as a young paratrooper in World War II, when he served with the 11th Airborne Division in the Philippines. He came home with a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, and memories that did not salute and leave. They stayed. They woke him. They followed him into scripts. They stood behind him whenever he wrote about a man trapped by terror, a town poisoned by hatred, or a soldier who already knew too much about dying. His daughter Anne later remembered the boy before the battlefield broke the illusion. “He was just barely 18 when he enlisted and sounded like a kid at summer camp in his letters to his parents.” That line hurts because it shows the distance between the boy who left home and the man who returned. Rod did not come back as a loud hero. He came back as a writer with a wound, and that wound learned how to speak. After the war, he studied at Antioch College and fought his way into radio and television. Rejection did not stop him. Hunger did not stop him. The industry’s cold little doors did not stop him. By the 1950s, he had become one of television’s brightest young voices with "Patterns" (1955) and "Requiem for a Heavyweight" (1956). Those dramas proved that television could hit the heart like theater and still reach a living room. Then came "The Twilight Zone" (1959), and suddenly America was watching morality dressed as mystery. Monsters appeared, but the real monster was often mankind. Aliens came down, but the ugliest danger was fear turning neighbors against neighbors. That was Serling’s genius. He did not lecture. He led people into a strange room, locked the door, then made them recognize themselves. He knew exactly what he wanted writing to do. “The writer’s role is to be a menacer of the public’s conscience. He must have a position, a point of view.” That was not a slogan for him. It was a duty. When sponsors and network executives feared controversy, he found another road. If they would not let him speak directly about racism, war, censorship, and injustice, he would put those truths on another planet, in another town, behind another face. He also understood that television could be more than noise. “I stay in television because I think it’s very possible to perform a function of providing adult, meaningful, exciting, challenging drama.” He believed the screen should not only distract people. It should disturb them in the right way, wake them up, and leave them thinking after the room went quiet. His war never fully ended. One of his haunting lines about combat said, “These are the faces of the young men who fight, as if some omniscient painter had mixed a tube of oils...” That was the artist and the soldier standing together. He could see beauty in language, but he never forgot the mud, fear, hunger, and sudden loss behind it. Serling went on to write, produce, narrate, teach, and shape American television with courage. He worked on "Planet of the Apes" (1968), later created "Night Gallery" (1969), won six Emmy Awards, and became a voice people could recognize before they even saw his face. Rod Serling did not simply create a classic show. He turned pain into warning, memory into art, and trauma into truth. The battlefield followed him, but his words still lead us home.

The French Resistance is the largest underappreciated element of the D-Day invasion. Those marvelous, brave, & slightly insane folks simply decided they'd had enough of Nazi occupation & went full-stop to end it.

I want a Kestrel tenant/guardian!

#DeadInternet AI content is poisoning AI content creation. I like the fire & pollution analogy. #AIDystopia

Talk about leaving your mark! What are you creating that will survive down through the centuries? #WritingCommunity #WritersOfTwitter #AuthorsOnX #WhatInspiresYou?

Western audiences are completely failing to grasp the monumental scale of the war in Ukraine due to a constant barrage of disinformation and competing international crises. The sheer volume of casualties (including civilian) has been systematically downplayed, leaving the true magnitude of the war nearly invisible outside of Ukraine itself. There is a pervasive belief among even pro-Ukrainian Europeans that this conflict is a somewhat ”clean” war with limited civilian casualties. This narrative flies in the face of reality, as the war has amassed approximately 2 million total casualties over the last four and a half years, with a breakdown of approximately two-thirds Russian and one-third Ukrainian. Despite Russia having more total casualties, Ukraine has dozens of times more civilian casualties than Russia. This crushing disparity tells you everything about the ruthless reality of Russia's campaign. A purely numerical comparison with the war in Gaza highlights the gap in Western perception. As of May 2026, more than two years of war in Gaza resulted in at least 75,811 reported deaths, both sides included. In stark contrast, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program reveals that the single three-month siege of Mariupol saw between 27,000 and 88,000 fatalities. Most of them were Ukrainian civilians. Even though Mariupol had a population five times smaller than Gaza, its death toll in just three months potentially surpassed Gaza's total over two years. On a bigger level, the approximately 2 million total casualties in Ukraine match the population of the entire Gaza Strip. This comparison is strictly statistical, used only because the public is highly aware of Gaza's bloodshed. The Kremlin has skillfully hidden its atrocities and suppressed civilian casualty data in occupied areas, but the West must look past the propaganda and recognize the historic scale of this devastation

In 1979, a doctor gave John Beal 4 months to live. He had 3 heart attacks on top of the wounds and the nightmares he'd brought back from Vietnam. There was a creek behind his house in South Seattle, and it was dying too. Hamm Creek ran yellow. It was buried in pipe in places, packed with garbage, and drained its filth into the Duwamish River. Nobody would have blamed him for doing nothing. He had almost no money, no science degree, and no authority over a creek the city had already paved over. He had every reason to sit on the porch and run out the clock. Instead, he started pulling the trash out by hand, worked to free parts of the creek from the pipes they'd been buried in, and replanted the banks one tree at a time. He and the volunteers who worked with him name every tree they put in, because he believed a tree with a name had a better chance. He didn't die that summer. He kept showing up for 27 years. Today that creek runs salmon, herons, osprey, beavers, and otters through a neighborhood boxed in by factories. John died in 2006, at 56. But the work didn't stop with him. The crews he'd pulled together kept showing up, and before he passed, his testimony helped inspire the creation of the Veterans Conservation Corps, which gives other veterans the same thing the creek gave him: a place to heal by restoring one. Hamm Creek is now one of only two salmon-spawning creeks left on the Duwamish, and volunteers are still in it today. The Duwamish Alive Coalition runs work parties on the creek and across the watershed every spring and fall, hauling out invasive plants and trash and putting native plants back, and they hand out a John Beal Environmental Stewardship Award every year to someone carrying it forward.

A single ragweed plant can release hundreds of millions, and in some cases billions, of pollen grains. The wrong plant takes the blame for it. When your eyes start itching in September, you look around and the thing you see blooming is goldenrod, tall and bright yellow on every roadside. So goldenrod gets cursed and torn out. But goldenrod is innocent. Its pollen is heavy, sticky, and built to ride on the bodies of insects, far too heavy to float into your nose. About the only way it reaches you is if you press your face into the flower. The real culprit is often growing right next to it, unseen. Ragweed blooms at the same time, but its flowers are small and green and easy to miss, and its pollen is light enough to travel for miles on the wind. Ragweed is one of the leading triggers of seasonal allergies in North America, especially in late summer and fall. Meanwhile goldenrod provides late-season nectar for bees and other pollinators heading into fall. Removing it does nothing for your allergies, but it does take away an important food source for wildlife.

This is how I feel about corporations trying to guilt me into "round-up" donations at checkout too. Companies asking me to fund their tax deductions rub me the wrong way.

Imagine an underwater Grand Canyon where corals have been growing since before the United States was founded. 🐠 Plunged in total darkness. Untouched. Protected. Until one signature changed everything. On February 6, 2026, that's exactly what happened. The Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument is bigger than Yellowstone. Its submarine canyons drop into depths we're still mapping. There are sea creatures here science hasn't even named yet. It’s underwater mountains — millions of years old, rise from the ocean floor, drawing sperm whales and endangered right whales from miles away. The cold-water corals living here? Some have been growing for over a thousand years. A trawl net destroys them in seconds. They don't grow back in our lifetimes. The monument was created in 2016 for one reason — to keep this ecosystem off limits from exactly this kind of destruction. It worked. Until February. One person. One signature. Zero public input. No congressional vote. No comment period. Just a proclamation — and a thousand-year-old ecosystem lost its protection overnight. Proclamation 11009 — "Unleashing American Commercial Fishing in the Atlantic"— erased the ban overnight. Trawl gear, dredges, otter nets. Now permitted inside monument boundaries. And here's the part that should make you angry — this administration tried this exact move in 2020. Conservation groups sued. They won. Biden restored protections. Now we're back here. How many more monuments have to lose their protections before Congress does something? 🐠 #DemsUnited

There's a story of a cursed castle waiting to be written here... #WritingCommunity #WhatInspiresYou? #WritersOfTwitter #AuthorsOnX

5/5 Russia has fired thousands of Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian cities since February 2022. Each one carried foreign electronics. Each one was assembled with components that passed through export control regimes designed to prevent exactly this. Ukraine's Ministry of Defence has now done the forensic work that regulators and intelligence agencies should have done years ago — dismantling the missiles, mapping the supply chains, identifying the manufacturers. The data exists. The names are known. Sanctions without enforcement are a press release. Enforcement requires the evidence Ukraine just handed over. Every Kalibr that hits a Ukrainian apartment building is also a sanctions compliance failure. That failure has manufacturers. It has managers. It has paper trails. Ukraine has all of them. Source: Ministry of Defence of Ukraine @DefenceU, June 2026 #Ukraine #UAF #Sanctions #StopRussianAggression #RussiaUkraineWar

The cheapest, most effective wildfire crew in California has four legs and eats the problem. Clearing flammable brush off a steep slope by hand is brutal, slow, expensive work. A herd of goats is none of those things. Hand clearance: - Around 28,000 dollars an acre - People with tools on dangerous slopes - Cuttings that then have to be hauled away A herd of goats: - Roughly 500 to 1,000 dollars an acre - Climbs slopes no crew wants to touch - Eats the brush to a firebreak and fertilises the ground on the way through - Reaches branches several feet up - Visibly thrilled to be at work Calling the goat a quaint throwback has it backwards. On this job the goat is the superior technology by a factor of about fifty, and it runs on the very scrub everyone else is paying to remove.

A TV writer with no philosophy degree read Aristotle, Kant, Bentham, and Scanlon back to back, built a sitcom around what he found, then explained in one book why the trolley problem is no longer a thought experiment and the people who need to understand this most are the ones building AI. His name is Michael Schur. He co-created Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. But The Good Place was the project that broke him open. On the surface it was a comedy about a woman who accidentally ends up in heaven. Underneath, it was a philosophy seminar. Every episode was built around a real ethical framework. He had to actually understand all of it to make any of it funny. After the show ended, he wrote the book anyway. He called it "How to Be Perfect." It begins with the most honest opening line in any philosophy book ever written: Should I punch my friend in the face for no reason? No. That is not a joke. That is his method. He starts with the obvious and builds toward the impossible. Here is the framework he built, and why the most dangerous people in tech right now are running exactly one of the four schools of thought without knowing any of the others exist. The first school is Virtue Ethics. Aristotle built it around 350 BCE. The question it asks is not "what should I do?" It asks "what kind of person should I be?" The idea: become genuinely good, and good actions will follow naturally. You build courage. You build honesty. You build practical wisdom. Then you trust the person you built. The second school is Deontology. Kant built it in the 18th century and it is the exact opposite. Kant did not care about the person. He cared about the rule. His version: act only in ways you would be comfortable turning into a universal law. If everyone lied whenever it was convenient, the concept of truth would dissolve. So you never lie. Even if the truth gets someone killed. The rule is absolute because the moment you make one exception, it stops being a rule. The third school is Utilitarianism. This is the one that should stop anyone building AI cold. Jeremy Bentham invented it in the late 1700s. The principle sounds beautiful: the right action is whichever one produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Pure math. Pure outcome. Intention means nothing. Only consequences count. Schur runs it through the trolley problem, the most famous thought experiment in philosophy. You are driving a runaway trolley. Five people are tied to the main track. You can pull a lever and redirect it to a side track where only one person is tied. Do nothing and five die. Pull the lever and you kill one to save five. A utilitarian says pull the lever. The math is obvious. Now the same problem with one change. You are on a bridge above the track. A large man is standing next to you. The physics are clear: if you push him off the bridge, his body stops the trolley. Five people live. He dies. The math is identical. Almost nobody will push the man. Even people who pulled the lever instantly in the first version refuse. The utilitarian has no answer for why these two situations feel different. The numbers are the same. The outcome is the same. The only thing that changed is whether you are using another human being as a tool. That gap between the math being correct and the action feeling monstrous is exactly where AI ethics collapses every single time. The fourth school is Contractualism, built by the philosopher T.M. Scanlon. It asks the question that Kant's rules and Bentham's math both miss. What principles could be justified to everyone affected? Not the majority. Not the person with the most power. Everyone. Including the one person who ends up on the shorter end of the calculation. Schur's conclusion is the part that people who live inside growth frameworks and optimization loops will resist the hardest. None of the four schools is correct on its own. Each one has a scenario where following it perfectly produces something most humans recognize as evil. Pure utilitarianism justifies harvesting one person's organs to save five dying patients. Pure deontology says you cannot lie to the murderer asking where your friend is hiding. Each system, taken to its logical extreme, becomes a machine that produces monsters while generating perfect internal justification for doing so. The way out is not picking the right framework and following it harder. The way out is using all four as lenses. Ask what Aristotle would do. Ask what Kant would allow. Do the utilitarian math. Then ask Scanlon's question: could you justify this to the person it hurts most? Where those four answers overlap, you are probably on solid ground. Where they pull in different directions, you are in territory that deserves far more than a two-hour board meeting. Schur also coined a term that has been stuck in my head since I finished the book. Moral Exhaustion. The feeling of living in an age where you can know, in real time, every ethical implication of every product you use, every company you work for, every piece of code you ship. The gap between what you know and what you can actually change becomes so large that the easiest response is to stop asking. He says that response is understandable. He also says that choosing not to ask is itself a moral choice, and the consequences of that choice scale in exact proportion to the power you hold. A person building a product one billion people will use is not operating at the scale where shrugging is a neutral act. The people who built the most consequential technologies of the last decade were not evil. Most were genuinely trying to do good. They ran the utilitarian math. They saw a billion users. They saw engagement numbers that looked like impact. They optimized for the greatest good for the greatest number and did not notice until much later that the people being turned into variables in the math were still people. Schur read 2,500 years of philosophy and the lesson he came out with fits in one sentence. You cannot use a single framework because every single framework, followed perfectly, eventually produces the wrong answer. The people who cause the most damage are not the ones who do not care about ethics. They are the ones who found one framework they liked, felt good about it, and stopped asking. The trolley problem is not a thought experiment anymore. It runs on servers. It gets optimized overnight. And the people making those decisions right now have never once asked what Scanlon would say.

What novel things will you do today to build new memory anchors?

This is really stupid, and it’s not getting enough attention. The Trump administration is pulling a working $368 million ocean monitoring system out of the water, equipment taxpayers already bought, built, and sank into the deep ocean. And they are doing it right when the oceans are behaving in ways that alarm the scientists who study them. Record-breaking temperatures. A system of Atlantic currents that may be lurching toward collapse. The response? Yank out the instruments and walk away. That is not budgeting. That is smashing the gauges while the engine is on fire and calling it efficiency. For what? The Trump administration dressed it up as a “nimbler approach” and “smart lifecycle management,” which is fancy nonsense for “we shut it off and hoped nobody would ask why.” There is no return-on-investment analysis. They cannot show taxpayers save a dime, because the gear is already paid for and the science it produces protects real money and real lives. The kicker: the same people killing the monitors want to mine the deep sea for minerals. So they are destroying the only tools that could measure what that mining does. That is not an accident. That is the point. You cannot see the damage if you break the instruments first. cnn.com/2026/06/03/climate/o…

This is my kind of persistence!