Two years ago, I used my then-employer’s nascent LLM-powered chatbot to help me with a personal coding project. It failed, but in a very interesting way. This suggested the potential of generative AI as not a replacement for human work, but an intriguingly novel creative tool that can use unpredictability and even confabulation to help you see your own work from new angles, sparking new insights.

One year ago, I attended a show that shocked me out of a professional crisis, one that very much involved my uncertainty about the explosive growth of LLM-based technology. It spurred me to walk away from a lucrative job with a global tech corporation that had taken a hard turn into a company-wide generative AI embrace. This remains one of the most difficult and meaningful things I’ve ever done, and I have no regrets.

This summer finds me returned to my comfortably pre-FAANG role as a freelancer. And: I have come to use LLM-based technologies nearly every day. I’ve become a paying customer of Anthropic’s Claude. My main client, CodeRabbit, sells an AI code-review service.

To be sure, last year’s exit had far more to do with recognizing how my priorities had diverged from those of my employer, rather than a protest of generative AI specifically. And yet, my personal adoption of the technology feels rather more accelerated than we might have expected at the time, doesn’t it? A fresh examination seems due.

The chatbot as existentialist mirror

I borrow the title of this post from Chats with the Void, a webcomic by the pseudonymous Skullbird about finding personal growth through uncanny encounters with the reflective surface of non-existence. The comic is a long-time favorite of mine and I think of it often, including when I think of what it feels like when I’m having an eerily productive session with an AI chatbot, one that feels connective even though I’m well aware there’s no other mind at all there. Just my own, talking to itself, through this mannequin facilitator.

And that’s my thesis, really: the current state of LLM chatbots, when used with mindful care, help me refine my work by forcing me to organize my thoughts conversationally, and then chat about them with a pseudoexistent entity. For the most part, it reflects my thoughts back at me—but coated with a squirming fuzz of connection and suggestion, picked up after rolling my writing around a unimaginably vast map of stored semantic vectors, trained on sketchily sourced seas of recorded human thought. Reading the chatbot’s replies forces me to regard my own thoughts from new angles, and challenges me to defend my creative choices, or see some areas where I could improve the clarity or completeness of my writing.

When I work with Claude, I bury the poor bot in conversational context. Not only do I feed it all my work, but I’ll pile in any immediately relevant supporting documents, and then wrap the whole thing in a prompt that is often a multi-paragraph screen-filler, laying out the relationship between all this material, my motivations for doing all this work, and the precise sorts of feedback that I hope to get out of the AI. Here are a handful of examples—liberally paraphrased for length—of prompts that I’ve used to launch long conversatins with Claude in the last few months:

• Here is a list of assertions about a well-documented technology that I need to write an article about. Are all of these statements technically accurate? Does the whole collection represent the outline of a complete user-level understanding of the technology, or are there some key points missing?

• Here is a pitch letter I just wrote to a magazine seeking new submissions, but which I haven’t sent yet. Here is a copy of a page from the magazine’s website about their pitch process, and here’s some more information about this particular call for pitches. Does my letter meet fulfill everything that the magazine’s process asks for? How does the pitch itself read in terms of clarity, flow, and length?

• Here is a very long, boilerplate-filled contract that a new client just sent me. Here is a list of the working conditions that my client and I have already informally agreed on. Does this contract support these conditions? If so, show me how. If not, explain why. Beyond that, is there anything in this contract that I might come to regret, if I sign it? You already know what I do for a living and how I prefer working.

• Here is the GitHub repository for a static-site generator of my own design. Despite not having worked on it in many years. I did recently start using it to publish a podcast, and it works remarkably well. But it has a significant shortcoming when used for this purpose, and here’s a detailed description of that. What’s a modest modification that I could make to improve this?

• Here is a blog post that I wrote, as much for myself as for a public audience, examining my current relationship with rapidly developing LLM-based technology, and how I use AI chatbots like Claude in my day-to-day work. What do you understand the post’s thesis statement to be? Are there any modifications you would make to this draft in order to strengthen this thesis?

All of these have the general form of “Here’s a whole bunch of work I’ve already done. Observe as I salt them with meta-text about my motivations. Let’s crank this through your weights, paired with a question, and see what comes out.” And in every case, I found the output valuable, leading to a back-and-forth of challenges and counter-questions with an infinitely patient semi-entity that gives me sometimes surprising insights and perspectives into my own work, and often points at ways that I could refine it.

This isn’t my only use-case for generative AI, but I think it’s my strongest one. Not a miraculous servant, but a darkly magic mirror.

Unbounded slop versus cognitive middleware

In no case do I ask the chatbot to generate “slop”; there is no step, in my AI-enabled workflows, where I just let the machine operate unbounded, or where I intend its output to be seen by anyone other than myself. In every prompt, I set boundaries, observe the results, and think about what, if anything, they might prompt me to do in response. It is part of a closed system, with me on either end of its function. It is, to use a phrase I bandy about sometimes, cognitive middleware.

Part of why I enjoy the work at CodeRabbit involves the product’s compatibility with my AI philosophy. In that case, CodeRabbit isn’t meant to supplant human code reviewers; it’s something more like a self-powered toolbox that scouts ahead of the human reviewers of any “pull request”—a formal request-for-comment regarding a code modification—attaching a summary and map of its findings, perhaps with some suggestions attached. These are presented tidily and atomically in a single comment, which human developers can heed or ignore, to any degree, at leisure. I legitimately enjoy seeing the bot’s responses to my own documentation pull requests, and more than once it has made apt suggestions for improvements which I interpret and then manually apply. Middleware.

I have experimented with using chatbots much more extensively, giving their leash more slack, and the results haven’t felt as good. In the two years since my first “rubber-ducking” adventures, AI chatbots have become far more apt at prompt-driven software creation. I know this because I do have running, on a private server, a web application that I directed Claude to stack together for me. The result, after a few hours of work, is a complete Python-based application that does what I asked for, to the letter. But it falls short of my own sense of taste in a hundred ways—and I don’t actually know how it works. I don’t like it.

In a recent episode of The Talk Show, Craig Mod—who seems to use generative AI under the same constraints that I do—described how he used Claude to build a web application to fulfill a very specific desire that he had, and was very satisfied with the results. In his case, he spent a couple of weeks on it, working gradually, and staying cognizant of how all of its parts worked, and why. Claude’s job was to help him build and iterate very quickly, far more quickly than he could have done by himself, but never straying from a place where Mod knew how the app worked, and where he should focus his next ideas for improvements.

So why did Mod use a generative AI tool at all, then? Because he knew he’d never have bothered, otherwise! It was a fun project, scratching a personal itch, and there are enough high priority demands on his time that he knew he’d never seriously commit to a solo coding project of great complexity but mild importance and a tiny audience. This resonated with me, and matched my own motivations for that bleak experiment on my server. I want to try it again, with a more expansive and patient attitude.

And so that’s where the summer of 2025 finds me with AI. I have always described my stance towards modern generative AI as “cautious curiosity”, and that hasn’t changed. My characterization from 2023 of the technology as a rubber duckie which can talk back to you remains in place, as well. What has changed over the last year or two is my willingness to explore—mindfully, and with constraints—how this technology can work for me, and help me with the things that I want to do, and make. And there’s something there, even if there’s nothing at all there, and I intend to continue digging. Or, anyway, gazing.

Last month, I wrote:

The Constitution protects Mahmoud Khalil no less than it does me. And if it can’t protect him, then his mistreatment makes me—me personally, and everyone in America I know and love—all of us, it makes all of us suddenly unsafe. For the sake of their own stability and freedom, every American should know that Khalil’s fate is very much bound up in their own.

At the same time, the American government had deported—directly into a brutal El Salvador prison—hundreds of Venezuelan residents of the U.S., with no formal accusation of a crime, and no day in court. I had originally mentioned them in my post about Khalil, but I decided to keep my focus narrow, letting my wrongly imprisoned neighbor stand for the many unsubtle injustices of the new American carceral state. These also include the more recent broad-daylight snatching of Rümeysa Öztürk from the streets of Somerville, where I lived for 14 years, on similar flimsy grounds as Khalil’s detention.

And then it came to light that while none of the abducted men were captured and deported justly, one of them stood out as having the most grossly unjust case, by far: Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a legal resident of Maryland, who suffers in that El Salvador prison even as I write this because American authorities swept him up by accident. U.S. officials admitted as much—and then declined to bring him home anyway. The U.S. Supreme Court, last week, and in a shockingly rare unanimous decision, instructed the government to get a move on with it.

This afternoon, President Trump invited El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele to the White House. Bukele told the assembled press that he was powerless to release Abrego Garcia from his own country’s prison, while Trump grinned with clear approval.

Bobby Kogan, a senior director of the Center for American Progress, wrote this in response:

You do not have any rights if the government has the ability to send you to prison forever without a trial and there’s literally nothing you can do about it.

This is as fundamentally opposed as possible to what society should look like.

It is your duty as a citizen to oppose this government.

And I’m going to let that speak for me, and help mold my present stance and future actions in defiance of this government. If you live in the U.S., whether you’re a citizen or not, it’s important to me that you take the time to understand the gravity of what’s happening, and that you establish the connections and community and resources that you need in order to best resist it, on a years-long timescale.

A year of two into my technical writing career, I independently developed a research technique that I call the assertions document. It’s a sort of benign mind hack of the subject-matter experts (SMEs) that you’re working with on a given project.

An assertions document puts your initial understanding of the concepts you intend to write about in front of your SMEs as quickly as possible, and encourages them to actively help shape your project by getting them excited to correct you. This, in turn, improves both your understanding and your confidence in that understanding, leaving you in a better frame to start the actual writing.

The timing and shape of an assertions document

I write an assertions document after I finish my initial research into the technology that I need to write about, and before I have my first follow-up conversations with the SMEs about what I learned. In fact, the assertions document is meant to spur those initial conversations.

I aim to keep assertions documents conceptually simple, enough to let SMEs seeing one for the first time quickly understand how they’re meant to engage with it. My assertions documents all open with a paragraph like this one:

This assertions document is a way to help me understand the technology I’m writing about. I make several confident-sounding statements that describe my nearest understanding of various facets of this technology, and invite you to correct me, or name some points that I am missing. This document is not a content draft, plan, or outline, and it does not necessarily reflect the final shape that the delivered documentation will take.

And from there, as promised, I proceed to bash out a bunch of assertive statements that match my best understanding about the technology that my writing project must address, as I understand them in that moment, and before performing any SME interviews.

Engage SMEs by inviting strategic correction

Critically, while I try to be as correct and complete as I can based on my earliest research and planning, I don’t sweat the details. This means that inaccuracies or omissions are very likely to be present—and that’s exactly what I want to happen, because that gives SMEs something to object to, presented in a short, easy-to-read document.

And a SME with a chance to catch you in the earliest stages of your project and tell you exactly how you’re wrong, or what crucial facets of the project you’re overlooking, is a happy SME, one who feels like an early investor in the documentation. Later, when your first complete documentation drafts are ready for tech review, an invested SME is more likely to feel eager for the chance to see how well their conversations with you influenced the final work—rather than dreading the review as another unwelcome interruption of their own responsibilities.

I have found such success with assertions documents that I usually deploy them instead of scheduling open-ended initial interviews with SMEs, the ones where you sit down with an empty note-sheet and say “So… what is this? How does this work?” This style of interview suddenly puts all of the burden of organizing a lesson-plan just for you onto the poor SME, and often makes them wish they were back in front of their code editor instead of having to explain literally everything to you.

If, on the other hand, I instead slide them an assertions document and make it clear that I welcome correction, I find that SMEs light up. Time and again, I have iterated over an assertions document with SMEs who are genuinely excited to see that I’ve begun the conversation with even a rudimentary understanding of the work that they’ve dedicated their professional time and attention to, and who are very willing to help me rapidly correct and expand the document until it seems complete and correct to all experts reading it.

With that thoroughly critiqued and approved assertions document in hand, I can then begin work on drafting the actual documentation, confident that I do so with solid conceptual footing. The draft, once completed, still requires a thorough tech review as usual, but the preliminary agreement over assertions significantly reduces the chance that reviewers will encounter major flaws due to fundamental misunderstanding on my part, requiring extensive rewrites.

An example assertions document

Let’s say that I am assigned to document “Moocast”, an upcoming application my employer plans to launch soon. I have read its design specs and other internal engineering documentation, and had a chance to experiment a bit with the software first-hand. Time for some assertions! After starting a new document with the preamble that I shared earlier in this post, I start to bang out some statements based on my notes and impressions:

Moocast is an application for predicting the arrival of cows into a sphere centered on the user. It estimates time of arrival to within a ten-second window, and also reports the total volume of the arriving cows with 90% accuracy.

We offer Moocast as a free download for Linux and macOS. The application comes pre-installed on the Mootato™ detection hardware, which also automatically applies software updates as they become available.

Users primarily interact with Moocast through a command-line interface. Its most important flag is --radius, which defines the size of the detection sphere. The default radius is 100 meters.

Moocast works by detecting changes in the bovino fields along local ley lines. Customers do not need to deeply understand this in order to safely use Moocast. However, customers should understand the costs and limits associated with increasing the detection radius beyond the default.

Moocast works regardless of the gender or breed of cow.

And so on. If I end up writing a lot of assertions, then I might group them into several sections by header—”About Moocast”, “Operating Moocast”, et cetera—both for easier reading and as preliminary steps towards my own sense of information organization. Either way, my goal is to get into words the core points that I predict the documentation will need to get across, in the broadest strokes: No need for deep explanation, how-to steps, or detailed reference material.

And then I share this with my SMEs, and wait for their responses. They might say “The pickup geometry isn’t really a sphere, it’s more of a torus”, or “There’s been a delay: we detect only Taurus-derived breeds at launch, with support for Indicus planned for Q4”, or “I think our userbase prefers the term cattle over cows”.

I immediately apply this feedback to start iterating, editing the document and asking my SMEs to have another look. This continues until all parties agree that the assertions document contains only true statements, and isn’t overlooking any crucial core facts about the product. And that’s when I start working on my first real, documentation-shaped drafts.

Build up your own confidence before you start your first draft

I joke that assertion documents are a psychological hack on your SMEs, but in reality they’re a confidence-boosting hack on yourself.

It can feel quite daunting to write authoritatively about a technology that you don’t completely understand at first! Ultimately, the assertions document is a tool to convince me, the writer, that I myself understand the fundamentals of the thing I’m writing about. When the assertion phase of the project is complete, then the SMEs’ approval of the assertions document stands as proof of my own qualification to write the docs, something that might very well have felt absent when I started the project.

I hope that this post has inspired you to consider this technique the next time you find yourself facing down a documentation challenge that rattles your confidence. If you’re anything like me, then meeting the technology by asserting your best understanding of it—and then inviting the real experts to tweak those assertions until they’re actually true—can help lay the foundations for your best work as a technical writer.

Last month I asserted that I would not stand idly by and let harm come to my neighbors through the actions of the federal government. I am therefore compelled to demand that my neighbor Mahmoud Khalil be released from jail, where he sits accused of no crimes, and returned to his family in New York. The state can press charges against him from there, if they wish. I am motivated not just from a sense of basic fairness, but from concern for the ongoing health of the American Constitution, and all of the laws flow from it.

I don’t know Khalil personally; I didn’t even know his name before last week. But I do know that he is my neighbor, and my fellow New Yorker. Maybe he isn’t my fellow American citizen, but he is a legally established permanent resident of this country, giving him nearly all the same rights that I have, short of voting in elections. Those rights include the right not to be arrested at home, jailed, and then transported a thousand away from his family—all without being charged with any crime.

I probably don’t agree with many of Khalil’s political views, in either direction or amplitude, including the speech and actions at Columbia University that brought him to the attention of the second Trump administration. This has zero bearing on my conviction that the law as defined by the Constitution applies to him, and to any case brought against him. If the state thinks he committed a crime, then let the state say this out loud, and give him a chance to defend himself in court. This is literally a bedrock-level right of every citizen and resident of the United States. It’s right there in 250-year-old ink: fading, but I dare say that you can still make it out.

The Constitution protects Mahmoud Khalil no less than it does me. And if it can’t protect him, then his mistreatment makes me—me personally, and everyone in America I know and love—all of us, it makes all of us suddenly unsafe. For the sake of their own stability and freedom, every American should know that Khalil’s fate is very much bound up in their own.

Janet Mills, the governor of my family’s home state of Maine, and governor Kathy Hochul, who leads my adopted home state of New York, are both showing resolve in the face of Trump’s attempts to meddle with state laws through extralegal coercion. I feel grimly proud of this personally resonant parallel, and I join both governors in standing up to a federal government that wasted no time in implementing a stance of bullying gangsterism to rule the nation.

Mills rebuffed Trump literally to his face last month, telling him coolly that Maine would continue to follow its own laws rather than dance for presidential whims about the presence of transgender athletes in schools. Around the same time, after Trump announced that New York would end the Manhattan congestion pricing enforcement that it had begun only in January, Hochul published a statement saying, essentially: Sorry, who are you?

I happen to hold no strong opinion on one these issues, and very strong feelings about the other. I understand the popularity of both policies to be shaky with with the larger public, and I expect that the Trump administration hopes that this gives them more leverage to use these policies as cudgels, in order to make examples out of two uppity states. But the policies’ popularity, or even the policies’ content, barely matters here. If the federal government wants to challenge a state’s laws, there are well-defined legal routes to do that. When Hochul and Mills say “See you in court”, they mean it literally. Trying to strong-arm a state government into compliant submission through targeted federal harassment of the state’s institutions and citizens is not how America is supposed to work.

The governors’ resistance will cost both states dearly. Already, Maine is getting slammed with federal punishment from multiple directions. As ProPublica reports, there are now more federal agencies “investigating” and penalizing the state then there are transgender school athletes in the state. (That number being: two.) I woke up this morning to the disheartening news that my alma mater, the University of Maine, has lost millions in federal funding over this issue, which mirrors New York’s Columbia University getting similarly hit last week. These aren’t just attacks on the two states; they harm the whole nation, and even humanity as a whole, threatening to slow the advancement of science for years to come. The Trump administration doesn’t care, of course: it’s a price they’re enthusiastically willing to pay if they think it will make a perceived mouthy subordinate cry uncle.

I have hope that both governors—and most of their constituents—realize that giving into the president’s demands would not alleviate these pains, but merely embolden the bully into making ever-greater demands. There’s no avoiding the pain of the years ahead, but we can choose to hold fast to our virtues and principles, at every level, individual and state. The villains that have taken over the federal apparatus can and will continue to hurt us, but we can stand strong to limit the damage they can wreak. My governors give me strength in the example that they set.

The first part of this post contains no puzzle or story spoilers for “Type Help”, but does discuss the story’s genres and mood. I include a warning before mentioning deeper spoilers.

I spent Friday afternoon and evening playing Type Help by William Rous. It’s very good, perhaps great. It’s the first game that I’ve played in eight years that gripped me in the same sort of way that Universal Paperclips did, and it seems likely that this game will join that one in my personal all-timer list.

Type Help names its deduction-game inspirations, including Her Story and Return of the Obra Dinn, on its web page, and these connections become clear as soon as you begin play. The game also reminds me a bit of the TV series Severance in that its frame story posits the existence of a science-fictional technology whose realism is both questionable and unimportant, and furthermore relies on in-world coincidences so profound that the story repeatedly lampshades their unlikelihood. But, also like Severance, the space that this sets up is so much fun to explore that all these rough edges are easy to wave away.

I do have to agree with Zarf, in his own non-spoiler review of Type Help, that for such a strongly written work, the title is so terribly weak. Combined with the cover art, the packaging unfairly makes the game look like either an office farce or a 90s-tech nostalgia trip, and not a period mystery with a horror infusion.

But that horror element is sublime. Zarf writes about how the puzzle-solving experience of this game gradually picks up speed as you play, until you’re positively racing to the meet up with the final scene. To this I would add that the discovery of the horror—whose nature is never explicitly spelled out—moves at the pace of an oily liquid you didn’t realize you’ve been soaking in for hours until you discover it seeping through your notes, pulling its terrible stain inexorably upwards and across your spreadsheet cells as you realize the truth of the narrative layered behind the puzzles. I found the implications of the story far more disturbing than a certain related game’s openly gruesome scenes of sea monsters gobbling up unfortunate sailors, and I loved it.

This carries a key similarity to Universal Paperclips, as well. In both games, you might begin play by thinking “Oh, one of these, I love these!” And you would not be mistaken: just like Paperclips is, in fact, a very good “idle-clicker” game and remains one until the end, Type Help is a solid “Dinnlike” all the way through. But fidelity to the source genre does not stop either game from getting weird, carrying you into truly surprising, even upsetting territory far beyond their respective genres’ expectations—while never needing to stray far from their minimal hypertext user interfaces. And this, more than anything, makes them great.

Before I talk about one or two spoilery things, I must also say with all due humility that I did completely solve this one with no hints, including the elusive “last lousy point” that Zarf wrote about. Putting an LLP into your game is an old tradition in IF, and I did enjoy seeing the ornery old bastard show up again here. (That said, there is at least one easter egg beyond the LLP I needed to be told about, and there may be others still…)

Spoilers from this point on!

Honestly, I just want to gush about how the pocketwatch was a phenomenal prop. It manages to be an homage, a total red herring, and a key plot device all at the same time.

Most obviously, the watch is a direct reference to Return of the Obra Dinn. (Another game that I enjoyed very much.) I was waiting for a character to mention how they heard that it’s an old family heirloom that once belonged to a maritime insurance adjustor.

And while nobody goes that far, characters do talk about it, quite a bit. They fob it back and forth, hide it, steal it, hide it again, die while holding it, and subsequently loot it. Some characters start overtly fearing it as supernatural, which naturally leads the player to start suspecting it too, and to pay close attention to its movements. In my spreadsheet that tracked the characters’ locations during each time code, I added a little “⏱️” emoji to every cell corresponding to the watch’s shifting location and possessor.

And none of that matters, because the disaster that powers the story has nothing to do with the watch. And yet! Paying close attention to how the characters react to the watch, especially their increasingly confused reactions to it as time ticks rightward and the thunderclaps come faster and faster, can play a key role in helping the player to understand the true nature of the horror. While the first big, unmistakable reveal about the curse’s true nature happens during Helen’s confrontation with Eddie and subsequent demise, the watch provides an important “checksum” for understanding various other, finer details of it over the next few hours of play. In the end, I welcomed the watch’s utility to help solve the mystery, even though it absolutely tricked me and led me all a-ticktock down the wrong path first.

So, so good.

Anyway, the game should have been titled I’d Climb The Highest Mountain, right? Or some derivative of that. Let ‘em wonder until the end. Or even The Hangman, get a little Agatha Christie up in there! Seriously.

“Piano Rolls” by Kaptain Kobold is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 .

The band of semi-anonymous young software engineers doing Elon Musk’s bidding in Washington are soldiers recruited into a murderous stike team that is directly and violently assaulting the federal government of the United States. They must be stopped, immediately.

I do not speak in metaphor. These men could not be doing more damage to the country even if they were soldiers of the traditional variety, kicking office doors down and shooting anyone they find, Three Days of the Condor-style. They conduct their shock violence with software rather than bullets, which might be less bloody in the short term—but which promises to be truly catastrophic for not just national security but national identity.

Their code changes, deployed directly to production before the eyes of horrified civil servants, are even now ripping through the guts of the digital infrastructure of the United States, for extralegal purposes that we can only guess at—and with ultimate consequences that we can scarcely imagine.

Even in the very best case, which assumes that these young men are such superheroic engineers that they are injecting completely ironclad-secure and bug-free code into a stupefyingly complicated legacy system in one try and with no testing, they are modifying software that distributes trillions of dollars towards ends known only to themselves and Elon Musk.

Because that level of engineering perfection does not exist outside of the movies, the real situation is almost certainly much, much worse than that. We can surely expect sloppy security holes that subsequent malefactors can take advantage of. Or, perhaps, the whole system might simply break, resulting in the national cash-flow going in directions nobody intended, perhaps following the president’s lead with reservoir management and dumping itself straight into the ground.

I call upon American lawmakers and law enforcers to stop these men immediately, applying the same level of urgency they would to any other band of violent insurgents hewing their way through the national capital.

“Bombed buildings” by Hugo Sundström is licensed under CC BY 4.0 .

I stand and step forward in defense of my friends, family, and neighbors who are women, immigrants, civil servants, scientists, black, brown, queer, disabled, transgender, pregnant, childless, or have any other identity or condition or role now under direct threat by the United States government.

As an individual private citizen, I don’t always know what I can do to help, at any given moment. But I will never step aside and knowingly let harm befall my fellow Americans by the agents of a corrupted government who wants to harm them. That’s the bare minimum, and I state it here.

And I hold fast to my own identity as American, even though it confirms my citizenship of the nation that exercised its sacred democratic power to re-elect a frightened and angry old man who has allowed opportunistic oligarchs to run amok in his name. He can claim he does it it my name as well, but he’s wrong.

And I have nothing but the lowest contempt for the actions of a nation which, in its profound illness, has declared war on its closest allies for no reason beyond the would-be sovereign’s personal grudges, a war no less literal for being fought with economies rather than munitions, one that began with betrayals no less real than a treaty-breaking sneak attack. I don’t think there’s much I can do about this right now rather than stand up and shout no, for whatever good that does, so I do. No! No, no. No.

In the end I choose to express my Americanness the only way I know how, standing stubbornly true to myself even when everyone around me wants to pull me down and push my face into the mire of hopeless cynicism, even when I feel sick by it all, so sick that it feels like I can barely get to my feet, sometimes. I’ll do it anyway. See if I don’t.

Ten years ago this week I launched this blog, though it would take a bit longer to earn its title. I posted to it more or less weekly for the next seven years, until I became a full-time writer for Google and had to slow down. Three years after that, and five months after I left Google, I find that my taste for regular and frequent Fogknife posts hasn’t fully returned. I don’t see this as a problem.

I have resumed writing for myself more than ever, but most of it goes into private journal entries now. For the past couple of years I have been using Nota to create and organize my notes to myself, both personal and professional. Nota replaced dear VoodooPad, which I used daily from 2004 through 2022. VoodooPad was a revolutionary application for its time, but its design remains fixed in the pre-mobile era, with its own file format that makes cross-device syncing unwieldy. Nota instead uses plain old textfiles as its data store, making your work much more portable—and letting me apply the same Markdown-based formatting techniques that I first got familiar with for Fogknife’s sake.

Nota also includes several lovely journaling features that have nudged me into creating, updating, and interlinking near-daily textfiles about my life, and my projects, and the ups and downs of the many interpersonal relationships I’m so fortunate to have. Sometime last year I started to treat these journal entries as daily newsletters to myself, complete with titled sections and top-of-page summaries. This suits me very well; I enjoy building labeled threads of thought like this, day-by-day, and being able to easily retrace my thought-steps around a single topic, flipbooking back and forth in time.

The idea for Venthuffer developed rapidly in these daily notes, for one thing, as did the structures of all of its episodes. I’ve also used these notes as a base camp to explore new directions in both professional and art-project writing—which I look forward to announcing in this public blog, when they’re ready to share.

All of which is to say that I’ve been writing, just not necessarily here in Fogknife. This is fine! The ongoing Venthuffer project is enormously important to me, and so the other writing projects, even the ones that are work-for-hire. I’m happy with the best writing I did Google—there’s a reason it headlines my portfolio—but the truth is that I didn’t get to write nearly as much as I wanted to while I was there. This ten-year mark sees me taking control of my writing career in new ways, and my energy is focused on making something personally meaningful and satisfying from it. Something more to my taste, even when someone’s paying me for it.

So: more to come. Happy New Year!

I have always taken it as a definitional point of pride for Generation X that our childhood of the 1970s and 80s was the final one sentenced to live every day in fear of nuclear annihilation, which on some days seemed like a near certainty. We rejoiced as the Soviet Union fell just as we emerged into adulthood, like a graduation gift felt around the world: Congratulations, you made it. You have all outlived the thing trying to kill you and everyone you love. Fear no more! And since then, it has been the solemn burden of we Gen Xers to tell the generations after ours how lucky they have it, growing up without this terror.

But a thing I learned from Annie Jacobsen’s crushingly grim 2024 book Nuclear War is that my cohort can set this burden down. In the early 90s, the chances of nuclear conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union dropped to zero, sure, by dint of one of those nations ceasing to exist. But the thousands of nuclear weapons possessed by the Soviets did not vanish into fairy dust, and nor did the people who knew how they worked, nor the knowledge to produce more weapons like them. And so three decades later, to hear some experts tell it—the experts that Jacobsen interviews—we are closer to nuclear holocaust than ever before.

It seems plausible that our culture, kids included, simply cares less about nuclear war now. I don’t have any kids, so I’m not sure whether it is a common playground topic the way it was for my classmates. But with culture so fragmented into innumerable online shards, instead of bound together by a handful of shared television networks, I rather assume that young people today aren’t as obsessed with the topic as all of my friends and I were. So many other crises pull at modern kids’ attention all day long, and give them plenty of other reasons for nightmares.

Into this setting drops Nuclear War, and it wants to refresh the cultural focus around its title topic.

Jacobsen’s book carries the subtitle A Scenario, and it makes clear that it speculates one way that things could go down, if worse comes to worst. But the scenario is presented not as precognition but as framework to shock the reader into horror and hatred for nuclear weapons. I can envision its scenario presenting a terrible novelty for a younger reader, who had no idea that instantaneous, irrevocable, and extremely literal destruction of the world is one bad decision away, at every moment. And in the case of older readers like me, the book rattles us into dropping the misconceptions of safety that we’ve held all of our lives.

The most profound shock, delivered again and again through elapsed-time readouts in the title of each short chapter, is how fast everything happens. The total running time of the war in Jacobsen’s scenario, from North Korea firing a single ICBM at Washington to the US and Russia emptying out their full nuclear arsenals at one another, is barely over an hour. If you started a movie and set your phone to Do Not Disturb a minute before that first ICBM fired, human civilization would end before credits rolled. Which they wouldn’t, because an EMP burst probably wrecked your TV, especially if you were sitting literally anywhere in the continental United States. Also you’d probably be blind or dying of rapid-onset radiation sickness if you hadn’t already turned to ash, been impaled by glass, or crushed under rubble from any of the thousands of nuclear fireballs and pressure waves ravaging the entire northern hemisphere all at once. Or swept away by a flood from a dam that malfunctioned because of that same EMP burst. And so on.

It’s the speed that kills you, in nuclear war. Nobody has time to think about anything. Reagan famously lamented out loud how an American president would have only six minutes to decide how to respond to an incoming nuclear weapon, and that fact hasn’t changed today. Jacobsen’s scenario shows how, under this impossible timeline, the kinds of miscommunication found in any stressful situation can easily muddle even the most heroic attempts to avert a worst-case scenario. Once one person launches so much as a single weapon at a nuclear superpower for any reason at all—especially a nation with a hair-trigger “launch on warn” nuclear policy, such as the United States—every road leads to global annihilation, in the theory that this book adheres to.

Jacobsen uses the phrase “zeroed out” several times to summarize the effect of a general nuclear war, with ten thousand years of human progress reset in just a few minutes. The aftermath would not be a sexy Fallout land of high adventure where plucky survivors comb through the crumbling ruins of modern buildings seeking high-tech treasures. There’s nothing left. Every piece of standing human achievement from Stonehenge onwards is obliterated.

In the concluding chapter, Jabobsen spends time with contemporary archaeologists studying an intriguing site, an ancient earthwork containing manufactured objects and structures in a part of the world where nobody expected to find such things. But the objects are all shattered, their purposes frustratingly obscure. We can only guess as to the intentions of the people who made them. Jacobsen suggests that, 25,000 years after the last nuclear submarine launches its final MIRV and the earth has healed enough to support agriculture again, the distant descendants of modern humans—if there are any—would be lucky to find even this much trace of our own cultures.

I took a bunch of other notes about details I’ve had wrong my whole life: how ballistic missiles work in the first place, for instance, and why they’re essentially impossible to stop, once launched. (You can still try, in the same why that you can try to stop a bullet in flight by shooting it with another bullet. It has about the same chance of success.) But that’s not what the book’s about. I learned about Nuclear War from a Warren Ellis blog post, where he mentions that Denis Villeneuve has optioned the book for a film adaptation. “The book is a relentless horror and nobody will thank him for bringing that to cinematic life,” Ellis muses, and I don’t suppose I would either, but I’d watch it anyway.

This book hurt me, it shook me and slapped me across the face, and I needed the wake-up. So did my inner ten-year-old, with his memories, and his nightmares.

There’s a part where Jacobsen really twists the knife, having us watch as the animal residents of the Smithsonian Zoo—among the most innocent of all American immigrants—perish in confusion, pain, and flame in the first minutes of the conflict. If there is a movie made of this book, then I hope that scene is preserved, lingeringly. Let that be the image I carry with me from this experience. I don’t know yet how this book has changed the course of my life, and I can’t know if any of it ultimately matters. But let me press the image of those burning animals to my heart. Give me the scar.