hao.mortgage

Thalmautte's Rejection

2025-08-25T00:00:00Z

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.

Something new

2025-07-19T00:00:00Z

I had a child last week, which is to say that my wife had a child last week after incubating it for thirty-nine weeks. I watched and encouraged her and held her legs. I made grilled cheeses, I built a crib, and I went to Dyker Heights to buy a used Snoo¹. But, really, my wife did the hard work.

According to L.A. Paul’s Transformative Experience, having a child and becoming a vampire are “epistemically transformative” (you cannot know what it is like to have a child or to convert to a new religion or try a new career until you live them) and “personally transformative” (your preferences and identity will change after the experience).

Two years prior to watching a baby emerge from his wife,, N.Y. Hao started a Slack channel at work for parents in the NYC office. It started out as the seven people at the lunch table who were interested in the topic, and it stayed in the 10-30 range for a year. Then it crossed some kind of word-of-mouth event horizon and membership shot up to 100-200, absorbing more or less all the people who would be interested; now membership ticks up steadily as new employees find the channel or as existing employees convert into parents.

In a group of high-achieving 300 parents, one or two will have the ambition and agency to maintain a Google Doc comparing air quality monitors for new parents²; the Slack channel aggregates and encourages that kind of sharing. And, like any online community, 10% of the members of the channel post 90% of the content – but, I think, the idea of having an audience and an opportunity to post the content is what partially motivates the 10% of active contributors. Having done very little, I gained a lot. People wrote up advice about schools and Snoos and transitioning the teenagers to smartphones in response to questions. But most questions about children a little sensitive: parenting is contextual, and the context is usually where the parents live, how much spending power they have, and what their implicit values are. And so I got the sense — backed up by the few questions I myself ventured — that most answers happened in direct messages, away from the public channel. That is OK. I think one of the best takeaways from the Slack channel was the questions themselves. Learning to ask which questions is, I think, as hard as learning the answers to those questions. I commonly thought, I’m glad someone asked that question, as I never would have thought of it in the first place.

I also talked to a few parents in person. Antonio ballparked that it was about 60% as hard to have a second baby once you’ve had a first. Sonny told me the pregnancy was the last chance for either of us to routinely exercise. Ian told me to have the breast pump’s flanges sized before delivery happened; this was and is excellent advice, as we pumped with the wrong flanges for about a week until a good lactation consultant put us on the right path.³ Everybody seemed generally positive about the public schools in their neighborhood. I talked to a few people who grew up in NYC, but their memories were centered more around the teenage years. You can drink until 4am and then feed yourself with a bagel from a street cart before going home on the subway. (It is heartening to know that the people who did this, and barfed, are now directors of local museums and other kinds of well-paid professionals.)

So what did I know of labor and delivery? Most of the useful information I had came from the ACOG book. Whereas many preganancy and childbirth books try to put a fun spin on the process⁴, the ACOG book is no-nonsense, repeats itself as needed, and can be read quickly. In short, a good reference material. The book pairs well with the AAP book on what to do with the child once he’s out of the womb and in your arms. Neither book adequately covered the difficulties of feeding and lactation. For that, we went to a IBCLC-certified lactation consultant in our neighborhood; we should have gone earlier. Likely there’s a no-nonsense book on feeding out there as well, and we should have found one beforehand. The hospital tries to give you pamphlets and schedule quick 30-minute sessions with their IBCLCs, but it’s the day after birth and energy levels / memory retention capabilities are low.

Remembering Terry Pratchett

2015-03-13T00:00:00Z

If you don’t turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else’s story.

Terry Pratchett made me want to be a writer, and now he’s gone. Terry Pratchett imbued truth and thought into the wizards, witches, gods, and Death that exist just beyond our boring realm of reality. In his writing, he reflected his humanism in the plights of creatures much like ourselves. He seemd to love humans, and he taught me to love humans, and now he’s gone. It’s clumsy. Life is clumsy.

Spring

2012-02-29T00:00:00Z

I wake up first with a start, recoiling from the person I’m sleeping with. Where am I? What happened last night? Who is it this time? Slowly my surroundings fade in: our dorm, the tipped box of condoms obscuring the 8 AM alarm clock, clothes and dust on the floor (and everywhere else), a Swiffer in the corner in mint condition. Oh, I think with realization, this is all right.

I turn, slightly, to my side to face Add, who had been a stranger moments ago but is now just a gently sleeping boy. He looks different so close up. I’m trying to think of the word his face, all big and sleepy, reminds me of. Kinder, I think, but I brush the thought away and I brush the dirty-blonde hair out of his eyes. Now I can see what he is dreaming of. I should get dressed. I should study. I should tell him about the handful of flings I had in the semester we were apart. But I kiss his lips instead and he stirs. My insides pray for forgiveness; time grant me reprieve.

Something low in the evolutionary ladder swings his arm around me and unconsciously but firmly pulls me close until his nose and chest are touching mine. I smile but quietly turn around so that we are respectably spooning, so that I can fall asleep again without breathing in his carbon dioxide.

But the creature stirs now against my thigh, peeking and then insistent. All thoughts of sleep are displaced by one singular thought now. And I slide up gently on bed until my head touches the headboard, part my legs, and slide down care … carefully.

And we miss class.

Later, many naps later, Add is lower down in the bed resting his face against my breasts, and we are happy and quiet and bright with the sun of 10 AM, a gregarious and generous version of the 8 AM one. For some reason we are not cold and though this thought has not sunk in our consciousnesses yet, our spines are more fluid and our bodies more nebulous. Add lazily traces my skin, my flaws, all my invisible flaws I have shown to him and no one else. By now I know Add and how, given his playfulness, he must’ve been some sort of otter spirit in a past life, and I am waiting for it with wetness and anticipation and it happens. He glances up at me. Sweet boy, I think, I have no advice for you right now, and I shove his head back into my chest with more force than necessary. It ends in the right amount of time.

And then I unstupefy myself and reach out for him from my self-spun cocoon of happiness and warmth but he is not there. Reluctant, I open my eyes and he has put on pajamas and thrown open the window to let the air in.

“What are you doing?” I say, feeling the wind against my sex and sweat and shivering slightly.

He turns back and smiles. “Spring is here.”

“No, it isn’t,” I say, throwing the sheets to the ground and arranging myself for him. “No, it isn’t,” he agrees, disrobing and closing the windows fast enough to clear the courtyard of crows. Our spines melt against the spring.