I have been using my arms more than ever before. I mean, I have been moving them around a lot.
I’m not certain why. It could be a sign of the early onset of some regrettable thing. Arm’s Disease, maybe. Limb Syndrome.
What I mean is that when I stand from a seated position, I will often, as of last month, wave my arms upon achieving standing status.
I don’t do it for balance. There’s no reason for it at all.
If I am walking in a direction, I sometimes point in that direction with my whole arm as I begin moving.
So far I have done this strictly at home. But it’s only a matter of time before I grow so unselfconscious about it that I start doing it at work. I am likely to hit someone with one or both of my arms and get fired for it. So we all have that to look forward to.
Also, I have designed the world’s first word processor for men. We will get to that in a minute.
First, I want to say that I was following closely the reveal of the Guardian’s list of the best 100 novels of all time.
It’s not that I find the list interesting. It is not interesting. I really don’t know why I was paying such close attention to it.
The list is color-coded in a way that I find visually appealing, but also bewildering. What do the different colors mean? Do they not mean anything? Where might I find that information, if I sought it out? I don’t know.
For five days, the Guardian was releasing the list twenty novels at a time. That was a way to make it seem suspenseful when it was only another dumb list of books.
Still. There were so many books on the list I hadn’t read before. Some I had never heard of.
I don’t feel like I need to read all novels. But I should have read more of them by now than I have, so I’m working on catching up. Since the release of the list, I have read a Muriel Spark novel—I had neglected those—a Graham Greene novel, and Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo.
I will continue reading more books from the list that I never read before.
There’s something embarrassing about not having read a novel that lots of people agree is a great novel. I’m not sure most people feel that way about it.
A lot of people are using artificial intelligence for everything. I have recently caught on to this unsettling reality. Many people are using chatbots for the unlikeliest of things.
Like, if you get an email from someone, chances are a chatbot wrote it, or at least helped write it. If someone sends you a meeting agenda, they probably asked a chatbot to make it for them. If you have a conversation with someone at work, they may have consulted a chatbot as to what they should discuss with you. And I am not kidding about that. I know I have had at least one conversation that was prepared for in advance by the other party asking ChatGPT what they ought to say when I was in the room.
People are outsourcing everything to artificial intelligence, and it’s probably safe to say that at least a third of the country is on autopilot, or what amounts to it. Maybe more than that, maybe less, but it’s a lot of people. Many of them are not actually ever doing anything, because now they have perfect assistants who can do for them the few things they were up to all day before the advent of artificial intelligence.
Now, okay. I will confess: I have used AI recently for one thing. I had the chatbot Claude create for me the world’s first word processor for men.
I have a pattern. When I learn that AI can do a thing I didn’t know about before, I think, why not experiment with it? Maybe there is something to this innovation. When I learned a chatbot could make pictures, I had one make me some pictures. When I learned that one could make songs, I made some songs. But I find that, every time I engage with AI, it feels something like what eating a lot of junk food feels like. It’s fun for a little while, but it leaves me with a tummy ache, except in this case the ache is not in my big, old tummy but in my small brain. So I stop using the AI thing. It’s not like I needed to have the things I used AI to make, and I am mortified by how AI is being used by so many people for so many things.
Take the recent, glaring example of the major literary prize that was given to a short story that was, without a doubt—based on what I have seen—written by a chatbot.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, brace yourself for this passage from the story:
They called her Zoongie. Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it. She had the kind of walking that made benches become men. Hair tumbling wild, a dress that caught and released light, laughter with iron under it. Eyes that skimmed and did not land, as if what she wanted was elsewhere and she had to pass through men to get there. She wore the island’s mixed bloodlines like a crown – African in the hips, Spanish in the cheekbone, East Indian in the hair when the rain kinked it, Carib in the way her gaze could bless and warn at once.
That last sentence in particular is an abomination. And in case you’re not familiar with what it looks like when a chatbot approximates literary fiction, let me assure you: that is what it looks like. I have seen quite a lot of it before.
The only way I can make sense of this horrible short story winning an award, granted by one of the most esteemed literary institutions in the world, is to imagine that the judge(s) of the prize must have used AI to do the judging for them, and they didn’t read any of the stories they were meant to consider. Either they were lazy or they were intimidated by the prospect of judging a literary prize. So they had a chatbot do it, and the chatbot chose the story that was written by a chatbot.
I am currently sending a short story collection out to contests, so that it may someday be published. I have had to face the reality that some of the people at the presses I’m sending it to are making their busy lives easier by uploading to a chatbot all of the manuscripts they’re responsible for reading, and letting the chatbot decide which few of those manuscripts should be handed to the contest judge, so they may decide which one should win. And then, what are the chances the busy judge isn’t asking a chatbot to choose the winners, thereby getting out of having to read all of that stuff? Why not do that? No one will ever know. A winner gets chosen, they collect their fee, and they get to spend the time they would spend reading manuscripts reading something else, like maybe some novels they’ve overlooked from the Guardian’s 100 best novels list.
I got so invested in that Guardian list that on the day before they released the top twenty novels of all time I wrote down all of the ones I felt certain would be on the list. I was right about more than half of them. It wasn’t hard; they were obvious choices. I wrote the titles I expected to see on a notecard, and there they were the next day. Wuthering Heights. Beloved. Ulysses. In Search of Lost Time. Anna Karenina. Jane Eyre. War and Peace. Pride and Prejudice. Madame Bovary. Moby-Dick. Tristram Shandy.
I didn’t expect 1984 to be in the top twenty. And I thought I would see Gravity’s Rainbow in the top twenty, but Thomas Pynchon is absent from the list of 100 novels. It skews British, which makes sense; The Guardian is a UK newspaper.
Am I a hypocrite, for decrying the widespread use of AI, and using the chatbot Claude to generate the world’s first word processor for men?
Yes. I am. It sucks and feels bad.
But listen. This is what the world needs. Something is wrong with men. One of their most obvious problems is that they don’t have a word processor that was made specifically for them.
Thanks to me, it now exists, and I am making it available to everyone for free.
Let me walk you through it.
It’s called the ManWriter. It started out not as a word processor for men, but rather as a simplified word processing program. A couple of months ago, I read an article on the website Techdirt where Mike Masnick, who has a career in software design, or whatever, said he’d been using Chatbot Claude to casually generate new software. It satisfied, to some extent, his longing for the freedom of the early days of the publicly available internet.
I’ll quote at some length his account of how that change took place, how we started with the halcyon internet days, when life was good and you could breathe and the trees breathed with you, and then we ended up in the dystopia of horrors we find ourselves in now:
You could just build stuff. You could look at what others were doing and play around with it. Copy the source, make adjustments, try things, and have something new. There were, certainly, limitations of the technology, but it was incredibly easy for anyone to pick up. Yes, you had to “learn” HTML, but you could pick up enough basics in an afternoon to build a decent looking website.
But then two things happened, and it’s worth separating them because they’re different problems with different causes.
First, the technical barrier went up. CSS and Javascript opened up incredible possibilities to make websites beautiful and interactive, but they also meant it was a lot more difficult to just view source, copy, and mess around. The gap between “basic functional website” and “actually looks good” widened into a chasm that required real expertise to cross. Plenty of dedicated people learned these skills, but the casual tinkerer — the person who’d spend an afternoon copying Derek’s frames to make sliding doors — increasingly couldn’t keep up.
But the technical complexity alone didn’t kill amateur web building. The centralization did. While there was an interim period where people set up their own blogs, it quickly moved to walled “social media gardens” where some giant tech company decided what your page looked like. Why bother learning CSS when you could just dump text in a Facebook box and reach more people? The incentive to build your own thing evaporated, replaced by the convenience of posting to someone else’s platform under someone else’s (hopefully benign) rules.
These two problems reinforced each other. The harder it got to build your own thing, the more attractive the walled gardens became. The more people moved to walled gardens, the less reason there was to learn to build.
He argues that AI entities, or whatever they’re called, like Claude Code, have returned to us the broad range of possibilities that we enjoyed in 1998.
That was why I had Claude create the ManWriter. I thought, maybe this guy Mike Masnick is right. I should give it a shot.
What new software would I want to exist? I wondered. I mean, what do I like to do with computers?
I type documents on them.
I use Microsoft Word for that. And do I like it? No. Why not? I don’t know.
What could a better wordmaking program look like? Well, it could be called something other than “Word.”
It’s a really stupid name for a program. Word. What if Spotify were called “Song?” What if Anheuser-Busch renamed itself “Beer?”
Also, if I made my own word processor, it could be simpler than Word.
Word has all of those features I never use. Just look:
I never touch that stuff, and the features I do use come in handy a few times a year at most.
And so I asked Claude to create for me a stripped-down word processor that did nothing other than be a window in which to type words. From that baseline, I asked Claude to add a couple of features, but I wanted to keep it minimal.
Every time a man opens the program, several things happen.
First, the word processor opens in a new window.
Second, in a smaller window, the man is prompted. He is asked how many words he seeks to write. If he has no such goal, he clicks the “Write” button. If he does have such a goal, he enters the desired word count in the space provided. If he has done this, then when he writes using the ManWriter a bar appears at the top of the window that fills up the nearer he approaches his goal.
Third, in that same window, in which he is asked how many words he wants to write in that session, he is treated to a random inspirational statement, selected from a list of I think twenty of them that I wrote.
This is what I mean; I’ll give a few examples:
The man is also prompted to send money to my Venmo account.
Once that’s over with, the man using the ManWriter is free to write.
The ManWriter itself looks like is:
It’s a black window on which white words appear when you type them. That’s all it is!
I mean, it can open .docx documents. It can save them, and once every minute it will autosave a man’s progress.
As one of those screenshots indicates, if you press ctrl+D, ye shall enter a mode in which the delete and backspace keys are deactivated. You can’t erase anything you’ve made, you can’t correct yourself, you can’t have second thoughts about a sentence you wrote. You can only plunge forward, moving further into the document. Press ctrl+D again and that mode switches off.
The thing is, men like things to be straightforward. We don’t want to have features in our word processors. We don’t need to add equations to the things we write, or select a new font. Bold letters and italics are too complicated for us. We don’t understand them.
Just in case someone has read this far, and in case it’s not clear: I don’t really mean any of that. The ManWriter isn’t just for men, it’s for everyone, and there’s an alternate word processor just like it that I also made, called the ChurnWriter. It doesn’t have all this man business in it.
Why is it called the ChurnWriter? I don’t know.
Maybe when I named it I was thinking of the novel Churn, by my friend Chloe Chun Seim.
But I have been using the ManWriter, and I have liked using it. It’s just nice sometimes to use a new thing for writing.
I have sometimes broken away from computers altogether and written with a typewriter; it’s nice to have a simplified writing experience, working with a thing that makes words appear when you press certain keys and does nothing else.
The great thing about a typewriter is that it will never tell you what time it is, will not tell you when you have an email, will not shut itself down for half an hour to install updates despite what you were just in the middle of, and won’t make you feel inadequate the way a computer can when you use it to see what’s up on Instagram.
There’s something refreshing about a simplified typing experience. That’s what the ManWriter and ChurnWriter are all about. They won’t correct mistakes for you, or draw a wavy red line under words before you’re finished typing them. Make a mistake and it will not be corrected instantly. It takes me back to such years as 1997, 1996, and 1994.
Do you know what else is cool? Going to see Alien at the movie theater.
They were showing a triple feature at the independent theater near us: Alien, Alien: Romulus, and Aliens. I took my older daughter. It was the middle of the day.
They showed the films in the order in which they’re listed above. I didn't know that, going into it. I thought they would show the movies in the order they were made, but no. Alien: Romulus takes place between Alien and Aliens, and so that one came second.
I thought that was a bad idea, because Alien: Romulus isn't very good. I actually liked it well enough when I watched it at home last year, but when you see it right after watching Alien its faults are undeniable. Alien moves slowly at the beginning, and it's important for it do that. A lot of characterization is done in the first forty-five minutes, or however long it takes for that fat, old alien to start licking people to death.
The same is true of Aliens. There's a lot of talking, a lot of displays of personalities, before that scene where Vasquez shouts, "Let's rock."
I guess when they made the Romulus movie, they wanted to cut to the chase, and as a result, whenever someone dies, it doesn't feel like it matters very much.
We didn't stay for much of Romulus. Seeing Alien in a theater was enough for me, and I realized when we got to its dinner scene that I hadn't warned my daughter about what was going to happen. She went into it completely unprepared. And I would have felt bad about that, as it is a really jarring and difficult scene, had I not been so envious of her. Moriah got to have the ideal experience of seeing Alien for the first time: watching it in a theater, without any spoilers. It must have been what it was like to see that movie when it first came out—whereas, by the time I first saw Alien, the chestburster scene had been spoofed at the end of Spaceballs, and other jokes had been made about it on television. It was just a thing everyone knew about already.
It’s an absolutely harrowing scene, by the way. I hadn’t watched it in a long time. The crew of the Nostromo are eating. John Hurt is chowing down, and everyone’s glad to see him do it because that alien’s not stuck to his face anymore. And then he starts gagging, and the others keep talking; it’s one of those awful moments when everything is going wrong but the people who are there for it don’t realize yet how bad it’s about to be. You can see from the look on John Hurt’s face that he has an inkling of what’s happening to him, which is horrifying in itself, before he convulses and drops onto the table.
It goes on for what feels like a long time. By the time his chest explodes, and the creature sticks its head out of there, it’s almost a relief.
Finally: I liked watching this interview between Jamieson Webster and Adam Phillips. They’re both people who talk the way I would like to talk: allowing silence into the conversation; pausing before speaking, presumably to collect their thoughts; giving themselves time to fully process what’s been said before following up with their own words.
I, in contrast, am constantly vomiting a stream of poorly constructed sentences from my horrible face.
I am envious of people who are capable of feeling and projecting calm. I so wish I were not the Nervous Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.