piss leak update: the contractors have set the industrial dehumidifiers to a quieter setting, so i may get a decent night’s sleep tonight

this extends to clichés that ai hasn’t yet picked up on, like the ubiquitous “always already” of continental philosophy journals. a cliché isn’t bad because large language models have picked up on its overuse; it’s bad because it’s overused (and often smothers more apt phrases) in the first place.

this is true for other sophomoric writing habits: constructions like “not X, but Y,” and the “magic three” are taught because they’re useful for churning out essay questions in standardized tests. if you have a quiver full of clichés, then you can fire a dozen of them at an arbitrary prompt and produce a passable response. but the real world isn’t a blue book test! if i had to read a real essay written like an SAT answer, i’d put it down in disgust.

i say this as a former em dash overuser: the em dash was overused all the way back in the 2010s. before it was a hallmark of ai writing, it was a hallmark of mass market quirk chungus prose. it’s useful in settings where throughput is paramount, because it can replace almost any other punctuation mark and not seem wrong. but this is a form of thoughtlessness, as my english professors often pointed out. once i was made to learn grammar, i relied on the em dash much less.

can’t even jack off, the lube evaporates too fast

piss leak update: my kitchen and bathroom are both sealed off in plastic. i have to unzip a zipper to enter either. there are industrial dehumidifiers in most of my rooms, all whirring along just loudly enough to make it hard to think. everything will be like this for at least a week

piss leak update: there isn’t a leak anymore, but the walls are still flooded with piss. a water damage remediation company will have to cut open the walls and extract the piss, then cut down the rest of the walls and replace them with new walls