If you haven't heard, the em dash has been getting a lot of attention lately…
Because it was trained on pirated work—including freely accessible online writing (like fanfic, academic texts)—ChatGPT picked up patterns and quirks native to human writing.
Including (sigh) the em dash.
There are other victims here (RIP tapestry and delve 🫠), but the appropriation of the em dash—a punctuation mark beloved by writers everywhere—feels especially personal.
A kind of low-grade panic is ensuing. Writers who once memed their own em dash overuse—the greatest punctuation mark ever to grace the control-freak’s lexicon, frankly—are suddenly backing away to avoid accusations.
No. More. We have centuries of dash-abusing writers behind us. We will not sit quietly while AI repurposes our beloved stilted aside—or the just-one-more clarification the sentence demands—or the dramatic pause your comma could never—etc.
You don’t write like AI—AI writes like you.
Defend the em dash.
(Feel free to download/share/stick it where it matters!)
Even from a distance, I can hear her
I try to listen, but her whispers make my ears hurt
He's not laughing hysterically because he was right about the exit being fake. He's losing it because he just revealed, to everyone, that given the opportunity, Jax would choose to stay in the circus forever - even if that meant dooming them all to be stuck as well.
And because it was just an adventure in the end?
He revealed it for nothing.
Jax didn’t want to leave the circus. He CHOSE to stay there. To him, the circus was safer than the real world, and the moment he chose it, it became clear just how unsafe it actually was.
Jax spent this whole show building up walls against everyone else, all while thinking of Caine as utterly predictable.
The show built it up as subtly as possible, but the reveal of Caine’s *profound* selfishness is what I think will REALLY push Jax over the edge.
Something that’s been bothering me about TADC Episode 7….
The trippy “abstraction” scene is probably one of Jax’s worst nightmares.
He’s always trying to hide himself, covering up his emotions, hiding behind a facade. But here? He’s naked. Literally laid bare for the world to see. One of his worst fears.
Another of his worst fears? He has some form of trypophobia. And all those trippy images…. definitely a little trypophobia-inducing. That can’t be comfortable.
idk where I’m going with this
just some things I needed to get out