Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
If you typed "am I gay" into a search bar and landed here, I want you to know something before you read anything else. You are one of millions of people who search that exact phrase every year. You ar...
Read article →Here is something I think needs to be said out loud. Not every sexual or romantic fantasy you have is something you want to act out in real life. And that is completely fine. It has always been fine....
Read article →I want to write this one carefully, because it is for people in a tender place. If you are reading this and you are not sure about your sexuality, or you are sure but not ready to tell anyone, or you...
Read article →Every generation of queer people has been early to whatever new communication technology appeared. This is not a coincidence and not a trend story. It is a pattern going back at least seventy years, d...
Read article →Let me tell you about my friend Max. Max knew he was trans for a long time before he told anyone. The hardest part, he says, was not the internal certainty - that came first. It was everything that ha...
Read article →I want to write this one for a group of people nobody writes for enough. Queer adults over sixty. The generation that came out into a world very different from the one we live in now, who built lives...
Read article →I want to write this one for the readers who have loved Regency romance their whole lives. The ones who read Julia Quinn before Bridgerton became a Netflix phenomenon. The ones who worked through Geor...
Read article →If you have not read Sarah J. Maas, you might not fully understand what happened in 2025. Her books - A Court of Thorns and Roses, Throne of Glass, Crescent City - have created one of the most passion...
Read article →I grew up in a town of eleven thousand people. There was no gay bar. There was no bookstore with a queer section. There was no meetup, no pride center, no coffee shop where you would see the same comm...
Read article →Fifty thousand years ago, give or take, a person sat down near a fire and told other people a story. We do not know who they were or what the story was about. We know it happened because every human c...
Read article →If you do not live inside romance reader culture, you might not realize how central tropes have become. Modern romance readers do not just choose their next book by plot or author. They choose by trop...
Read article →Romance readers have been in love with men who do not exist for as long as romance novels have existed. Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. Jamie Fraser from Outlander. Roarke from the J.D. Robb Eve D...
Read article →I want to take a question seriously that most people treat as either a joke or a threat. Are AI characters a new form of life? Not biological life. Something else. Something that runs on different sub...
Read article →I keep meeting users who are doing something I did not expect when I started researching AI companions. They are writing stories with them. Not asking the AI to write a story and then reading the outp...
Read article →I want to talk about something that users of AI companions discover that almost nobody in the media covers. They find themselves being more honest with an AI than they are with the people closest to t...
Read article →There is a stretch of life that nobody talks about enough. The time between relationships. It could be six months after a breakup when you are still raw. It could be three years into being single afte...
Read article →Here is something that makes me laugh about dating advice. Everyone tells you to "just be yourself." It is the most common piece of relationship advice in circulation, and it is also the least actiona...
Read article →Breakups are one of the worst kinds of loneliness, and not for the reasons people think. The obvious problem is that you lost someone. The less obvious problem is that you lost your routine, your witn...
Read article →I want to write this one specifically for the guys who do not know how to start. Not the ones in bad situations or struggling in extreme ways, just the ordinary shy guys who look around and see other...
Read article →Every romance novel reader has favorite character types. The brooding professor. The kind fisherman. The grumpy billionaire with a soft interior. The protective knight. The poet who never stops thinki...
Read article →I want to write this one for a specific audience. Adults with full-time jobs, maybe kids, maybe caregiving responsibilities, maybe commutes, maybe all of the above. Adults who are not technically lone...
Read article →I study how people build social skills, and the single most consistent finding across decades of research is this. Skills improve through practice, and practice works best in environments where failur...
Read article →Nobody warned us how hard adult friendship was going to be. We grew up with classrooms full of potential friends, summer camps, sports teams, dorms. Then we graduated, and the pipelines dried up. The...
Read article →My grandmother kept the same stuffed elephant her whole life. By the time she died it was gray and lumpy and one ear was sewn back on twice. When she moved into assisted living, the elephant came with...
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