Action Item: Become soil and/or ash
Assigned To: Body
Status: In Progress
Deadline: TBA

Split This Rock’s red logo at the top. Below, with each word on one line and in a different color of the rainbow, text reads “Trans Day of Visibility Special Collection.” To the right, a heart with blue, pink, and white: the colors of the trans pride flag. At the bottom, bold black text reads “Coming April 2026.”

To honor Transgender Day of Visibility, an annual day celebrating the incandescence of the trans community, Split This Rock is pleased to announce a special collection in The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database. The collection will be released in April. Read the full letter: bit.ly/4rYRXn9

Kagan writing that "the State has suppressed one side of a debate" elides that the "debate" is as manufactured as the one about vaccines and autism. freedom of speech requires us to accept treatments that contravene science/reality?

Kagan elides here that the "debate" is as manufactured as the one about vaccines and autism. freedom of speech requires us to accept treatments that contravene established science/reality?

Kagan writing that "the State has suppressed one side of a debate" here elides that the "debate" is as manufactured as the one about vaccines and autism. freedom of speech requires us to accept treatments that contravene truth/reality?

ignoring that talk therapy is not just "talk" (speech) but also "therapy" (treatment)

It's Trans Day of Visibility today. If you're trans and are raising money for something (I don't care what it is), reply to this thread and I will boost you.

If you are a cis person, take a look and find someone to support if you can.

Everyone give this a share after.

An open letter to Grammarly and other plagiarists, thieves and slop merchants To everyone at Grammarly, I am writing a book right now, a really challenging endeavor that no doubt someone in Silicon Valley will think it’s fine to steal the day it’s published. I’ve been a profes...

I finally lost my shit about so-called AIs, LLMs, enshittification & everything fucking evil that @officialgrammarly.bsky.social is doing. I'm fucking furious, and not just about what 1 company has done. An open letter to Grammarly & the rest of the LLM hype machine www.moryan.com/an-open-lett...

We urgently need to address the fact that queer media has been decimated over the last year. Them has been sold. NBC Out dissolved. INTO shuttered. At a time when they are needed most, most queer and trans journalists have no platform or income.

every shot-on-video, made-with-a-camcorder horror movie that's just some teenage friend group fucking around in the woods with some fake blood and a monster mask contains more artistic merit, human joy and creative light than anything AI has ever made or will ever, ever make

I can't trust politicians who are anti-trans. Not because I'm "only searching for perfection" which is what centrists will be accusing me of for the rest of my life, it's because if you're not pro-trans you'll be garbage on lots of other issues too. Being anti-trans NEVER exists in a vacuum.

January 2017 by Derrick Austin You are the safest child in the world, I say to plastic Jesus in the nativity. My Facebook timeline is a villanelle of suffering: the boy from Aleppo whose dust-skin is the color of water pouring, still, from faucets in Flint. Drunk, recovering from last year, my eyes are wet moonflowers. Christmastide is over. No carolers approach the well-lit houses. No one knocks on a stranger's door. And who would admit them?

An early January poem from Tenderness, nearly a decade old

they didn’t leak it to make the shooter look innocent, but to make the victim look guilty. not guilty of a crime. guilty of having a visibly queer wife. guilty of liberalism. guilty of opposing the regime. they don’t seek to exonerate themselves, only to demonstrate who deserves to die.

Oh and btw 2026 is for art, for craft, for direction, for growth, and for creation. With these, we nourish ourselves

Whether you loved City Paper or loathed it (and those of us who worked there often did some of each) this is a goddamn shame. But the fact that Pittsburgh's alt-weekly survived so long is a testament to its community, and to its staff and contributors over the years, including those let go today.

One of my new favorite prose poems has entered the chat

Hedgie Choi, from her debut collection Salvage (2025)

JAMES MERRILL CHRISTMAS TREE From loes torn hamin Had been fed, looked after, kept still, Meant, I knew— of course I knew - That it would be only a matter of weeks, That there was nothing more to do. Warmly they took me in, made much of me, The point from the start was to keep my spirits up. I could assent to that. For honestly, It did help to be wound in jewels, to send Their colors flashing forth from vents in the deep Fragrant sables that cloaked me head to foot. Over me then they wove a spell of shining — Purple and silver chains, eavesdripping tinsel, Amulets, milagros: software of silver, A heart, a little girl, a Model T Two staring eyes. Then angels, trumpets, BUD and BEA (The children's names) in clownlike capitals, Somewhere a music box whose tiny song Played and replayed I ended before long By loving. And in shadow behind me, a primitive IV To keep the show going. Yes, yes, what lay ahead Was clear: the stripping, the cold street, my chemicals Plowed back into the Earth for lives to come — No doubt a blessing, a harvest, but one that doesn't bear, Now or ever, dwelling upon. To have grown so thin. Needles and bone. The little boy's hands meeting About my spine. The mother's voice: Holding up wonderfully! No dread. No bitterness. The end beginning. Today's Dusk room aglow For the last time With candlelight. Faces love-lit, Gifts underfoot. Still to be so poised, so Receptive. Still to recall, to praise.

James Merril’s poem “Christmas Tree,” written while he was dying of AIDS. 1995.

Thanks for sharing this document, @rweingarten.bsky.social.

I read it, and I believe it's inexcusably inadequate and will not prepare teachers or schools to confront the very real dangers of the "A.i." products pushed by your partners, including OpenAI.

A few thoughts for your consideration...

it's a cheap joke, and it doesn't even work

these comparisons of Erika Kirk with Tammy Faye Messner do TFM deep injustice. yes, an affinity for glitter and makeup. but TFM was complex and compassionate, words that do not in any way describe EK.

Headline: ProPublica management wants 100% discretion over when and how to use AI Supplementary text: The organization rejected our proposal that ensures staff will not be replaced by AI and requires labeling AI-generated content

1/ At bargaining yesterday, @propublica.org management said that they should have 100% discretion to replace workers with AI and would not commit to labeling future AI-generated content.

Amazon Is the World's Biggest Online Book Marketplace. It's Filled With AI Knockoffs Authors say Amazon's knockoff book problem is leaving them frustrated — and making the internet worse in the process.

Amazon is making money off AI copies of books - and putting the onus on authors to prove they’ve been plagiarised.

Honestly, just stop buying books from Amazon. Get them from an actual bookshop or order them from a reputable book supplier like bookshop.org

www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

This entire grift relies on convincing people that they don't know how to do the things they have always known how to do, and ironically, if it works, we will, in a very short amount of time, forget how to do all the things we have always known how to do.

If Netflix can make everything gay, I'll finally subscribe.

tech bro: i have made Artificial General Intelligence

programmer: you fucked up a perfectly good calculator is what you did. look at it. it's got anxiety

You say blob. I say rat king.

Only 364 days til Halloween

the truth is that this isn't a theocracy and jesus isn't my fucking king

Real pictures from the protests are inspirational. AI slop is not.

This morning outside the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh!