hao.mortgage

Gosh I don’t really know what weblogging is for any more. When I was in high school, I threw everything I thought of into Blogger and Wordpress. As I got older, I think two things happened that made it less appealing to blog continuously: (1) Who wants to be in front of a computer after being in front of a computer all day; (2) It’s less fun to blog when your sense of taste matures and you realize everything you have to say, on first draft, is kind of trite.

The advent of LLMs has upset the balance a bit, though.

• It made it much easier to set up a blog engine that I don’t immediately hate: Telling an agent to construct an incremental build graph in Python¹ while I write Markdown in Emacs in parallel is a pleasant experience. Once it’s done, I tell it to set up browser-sync and Overmind and an fd | entr pipeline. Figure out the right flags to Pandoc and write a JavaScript module for rendering sidenotes while I edit and re-edit and slash and delete.

• Given that I am sufficiently picky, an LLM is a superior replacement for a framework. Here in 2025, I’d rather have Claude Code than Django or Hugo.

• Also, I want to get text onto the internet that the AI companies can train on. One day, I want to be able to ask an LLM offline what it thinks I should read next.

All that aside, I’m reading through Rejection and thought I’d jot down quick notes.

• If I were writing an essay for AP English, I would identify Thalamutte’s strength is unreliable narration. If I were his father, I would push him to write short stories with reliable narration

• I 100% agree with Nick Wiger’s quick review of this book as stories from the POV of people who are terminally online. I think he said this at the beginning of an August Doughboys episode. Wiger and Marino’s recommendations are what got me to read these stories

• “The Feminist” is available and widely discussed online but I found this one to be the hardest to read² and not representative of the anthology.

• Re: “Pics,” I think Thalamutte has wonderfully captured the “group thread”-speak dialogue. This ending is structurally identical to the last and weakened by the comparison.

My overall take is this: It is easy to write miserabilia and it is hard to write humanism. It is easy to mint a virgin man who was traumatically bullied in such a way (forced to drink piss and eat dogshit) that the methods of bullying become kink. That is the kind of palatable pop psychology that some readers gloss over: yes, that could never happen to me, but I understand how it could. Especially in the format of a short story, where economy is prized and the few character beats you are allotted have to be strong. But it is lazy. I refuse to suspend my belief and believe that someone in the universe has an existence so isolated and miserable. Maybe I am wrong. Being a new dad means acutely aware that you are wrong constantly. So I will fade my take: Given that someone out there lives like the way these characters do in the trilogy of miserable stories that prefix this collection³, I do not want to read about them. And I do not think short fiction that trafficks in the easy tragedy of trauamatic incels, which boils them in hot water as a plot engine, should be accorded the kind of viral attention that this collection garnered. This is the kind of attention drawn to short fiction these days — “Cat Fiction” energy. It is better than no attention, as American short fiction is some of the best literature you can read, but not by much. This is my grumpy take. I don’t mean to gatekeep. I just mean to explain why reading this felt like sliding razors under my nails.