A day late, but posting a story of when we first got married to celebrate our anniversary:
The thing about having an autistic husband, is as much as I love him, he just is not capable of picking up on behaviors or facial expressions and knowing what they mean. He needs me to speak the words I’m feeling.
Early on, this was a problem. When I was exhausted after work and didn’t have the emotional energy to deal with anything, I needed some time alone.
I would say “I’m tired,” get up and leave a room.
He’d follow.
I would shut a door.
He would open it, and keep talking to me.
I had to actually speak the words, “I would like a little bit of space for a while.”
And then he would say, “Oh.” In a sad voice.
And then I’d feel like an asshole, because he always seemed so sad when I did that. I didn’t want to hurt him. I loved him, and I thought I was a bad wife for wanting time for myself. Things were not good.
One day, I came home, and on my desk was a card, laminated. It was simple, black text on white background, in 36-point font. It said:
I love you. Fuck off.
And he took my hands and said the reason he was sad wasn’t that I needed space— he needs his sometimes too, but I pick up the signals and leave him alone.
He felt bad that he couldn’t understand me, and I always looked so uncomfortable and guilty when I told him.
So now I have a card that I can hand to him, any time, and he will understand and go away for an hour and nobody feels guilty.
as a child i was always amazed by how fast adults could chop onions and then before you know it you’re chopping onions very fast and that’s it that’s life
There are little romance subplots all around me irl and I don’t have the time to turn any of them into novels
Today I went to my favorite Italian restaurant and was seated at the table nearest the kitchen. We noticed a change to the menu. The list of pastas had been replaced by just “pasta of the day.” We asked what the pasta of the day was. The waiter told us it was a mystery. So we ordered it, and when it came it was pasta with eggs and bacon, and I was so surprised and delighted by this unexpected whimsy that I started to clap. And then I noticed the chef watching me from the doorway and smiling. He had clearly come out wanting to see what people’s reactions would be.
I’m not saying I love the chef or that the chef loves me. I am saying that is a seed with which to grow a romance that I don’t have time to write.
Romance seedling of the day:
Tonight I went to a party and a woman asked me my name.
“Anna,” I said.
“This confirms my theory,” she said loudly, to the entire room. People stopped to listen. “ALL Anna’s are drop dead gorgeous!”
I felt v flattered. I asked for her name.
She flashed me a grin. “Anna.”
Irl, do I love her and does she love me? No. But this is the seed of another romance book I don’t have the time to write.
I was miserable. At a parade! All of my friends were drunk and misbehaving and smelled of rancid tequila. I felt alone and about a million years old. The sun was glaring daggers into my eyeballs.
And then! At this parade! A very large beautiful man I didn’t know! Saw me squinting! Said, “I’m can block the sun for you” and stepped in front of me. My sun-blindness cleared into a vision of his gentle smile.
He was a mathematics professor! Very sober, soft-spoken, kind. Did not insult my drunk friends but also stood carefully apart from them. The perfect balance.
Do I love him? No. But he’s a romantic hero in a book somewhere in the multiverse.
Yes! This was a post about getting into the writing mindset.
I wasn’t trying to share special memories or make a statement about the goodness of humanity (totally fine if that’s what you got from this!). But this is a tool any writer could add to their toolbox: finding tidbits from life not merely through neutral observation but by observing the world through the lens of your own writing philosophy.
I write romance books. The romance genre at its best gives every kind of person the opportunity to be the hero of their own story. For me, observing the world through my writing philosophy means acknowledging the heroism intrinsic in us all. Thinking: What if this person were the romantic hero? Why would someone fall in love with them? For folks writing different kinds of stories, the approach may differ, but it’ll still be creatively generative.
I slept in and just woke up, so here’s what I’ve been able to figure out while sipping coffee:
Twitter has officially rebranded to X just a day or two after the move was announced.
The official branding is that a tweet is now called “an X”, for which there are too many jokes to make.
The official account is still @twitter because someone else owns @X and they didn’t reclaim the username first.
The logo is 𝕏 which is the Unicode character Unicode U+1D54F so the logo cannot be copyrighted and it is highly likely that it cannot be protected as a trademark.
Outside the visual logo, the trademark for the use of the name “X” in social media is held by Meta/Facebook, while the trademark for “X” in finance/commerce is owned by Microsoft.
The rebranding has been stopped in Japan as the term “X Japan” is trademarked by the band X JAPAN.
Elon had workers taking down the “Twitter” name from the side of the building. He did not have any permits to do this. The building owner called the cops who stopped the crew midway through so the sign just says “er”.
He still plans to call his streaming and media hosting branch of the company as “Xvideo”. Nobody tell him.
This man wants you to give him control over all of your financial information.
Edit to add further developments:
Yes, this is all real. Check the notes and people have pictures. I understand the skepticism because it feels like a joke, but to the best of my knowledge, everything in the above is accurate.
Microsoft also owns the trademark on X for chatting and gaming because, y'know, X-box.
The logo came from a random podcaster who tweeted it at Musk.
The act of sending a tweet is now known as “Xeet”. They even added a guide for how to Xeet.
The branding change is inconsistent. Some icons have changed, some have not, and the words “tweet” and “Twitter” are still all over the place on the site.
TweetDeck is currently unaffected and I hope it’s because they forgot that it exists again. The complete negligence toward that tool and just leaving it the hell alone is the only thing that makes the site usable (and some of us are stuck on there for work).
This is likely because Musk was forced out of PayPal due to a failed credit line project and because he wanted to rename the site to “X-Paypal” and eventually just to “X”.
This became a big deal behind the scenes as Musk paid over $1 million for the domain X.com and wanted to rebrand the company that already had the brand awareness people were using it as a verb to “pay online” (as in “I’ll paypal you the money”)
X.com is not currently owned by Musk. It is held by a domain registrar (I believe GoDaddy but I’m not entirely sure). Meaning as long as he’s hung onto this idea of making X Corp a thing, he couldn’t be arsed to pay the $15/year domain renewal.
Bloomberg estimates the rebranding wiped between $4 to $20 billion from the valuation of Twitter due to the loss of brand awareness.
The company was already worth less than half of the $44 billion Musk paid for it in the first place, meaning this may end up a worse deal than when Yahoo bought Tumblr.
One estimation (though this is with a grain of salt) said that Twitter is three months from defaulting on its loans taken out to buy the site. Those loans were secured with Tesla stock. Meaning the bank will seize that stock and, since it won’t be enough to pay the debt (since it’s worth around 50-75% of what it was at the time of the loan), they can start seizing personal assets of Elon Musk including the Twitter company itself and his interest in SpaceX.
Sesame Street’s official accounts mocked the rebranding.
When Statler and Waldorf go after you for your life choices, you seriously need to sit down and have a rethink.
