Evan Fleischer

@evanfleischer.bsky.social

2329 Followers 7912 Following

Writer. https://evanfleischer.org/ https://orangecatwritingworkshop.com/

A screenshot of a video carousel on a cream-background website. The leftmost and largest card shows a YouTube embed of "How Not To Write Science Fiction" by Evan Fleischer — a bearded man in a pink hoodie and black cap holding a pen.
A screenshot of a web form with three sections — Format, Duration, and What's the Situation — each offering a set of pill-shaped clickable options in Courier Prime typeface on a cream background. Format options include Online one-on-one, In-person one-on-one, Small group, Gift for someone, and Not sure yet. Duration options include Single session, Multi-week, Intensive/weekend, Ongoing, and Whatever makes sense. The Situation section is partially visible with multi-select options.
A screen cap of the Breaking News Consumers' Handbook: 1. In the immediate aftermath, news outlets will get it wrong. 2. Don't trust anonymous sources. 3. Don't trust stories that cite another news outlet as the source of its information. 4. There's almost never a second shooter. 5. Pay attention to the language the media uses. "We are getting reports ..." could mean anything. "We are seeking confirmation" ... means they don't have it. "XYZ has learned" ... means it has a scoop or is going out on a limb. 6. Look for news outlets close to the incident. 7. Compre multiple sources. 8. Big news brings out the fakers. And photoshoppers. 9. Beware reflexive retweeting. Some of this is on you.
A parody rendering of the movie poster for the film Dune. Whereas we would normally see Chalamet and Zendaya as two heroic figures at the bottom of the image, Chalamet raising a knife above his head, the two of them backlit by a huge, frame-filling sun, the title, 'DUNE' booming out in thin white letters above the two of them, we instead have -- well, we have all that, but with one slight variation, the title: 'WHOSE STICK IS THIS? PART II.'
Line chart showing the U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) for all urban consumers from January to September 2025, indicating a steady rise in prices. The index increases from about 319 in January to roughly 324 by September, reflecting continued inflation over the period. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics via FRED.
A screen cap of the opening of an article on a democratic primary in Arizona that begins: "The Mamdani momentum withered in the deserts of southern Arizona on Tuesday night." The article is dated July 15th, 2025.
This is not a chart from either Keir Starmer or 'The News.' It's a chart from the classic comedy show Brass Eye, showing a rising bar graph under the title, 'Crimes We Know Nothing About.' Also, like, come on: you can see the red bubble of the paused youtube video in the near bottom left corner.
A screen cap of a lecture that notes the following: "There is a difference between what we see and how we talk about what we see. Saying ‘I see a man’ is not the same thing as capturing the image of the man. There is a gap between word and image. And that is our subject for today. Three people talk about this gap in different ways -- John Berger, Roland Barthes, and Georges Didi-Huberman. I’m not going to be able to cover everything all three of these men have to say on the subject, but I want to at least work in the direction of building blocks. Georges Didi-Huberman argues/thinks that the most ethical thing to do with one’s language when confronted with an image is to hesitate. There is a silence around the image worth preserving, and that we shouldn’t hurry along into making meaning. Roland Barthes is interested in preserving/engaging with what he calls an image’s ‘punctum’; that is, the thing that makes the image feel alive, something that stirs the conscience. Something that wounds him. He wants the image to ‘do’ something to him. John Berger is interested in the ways in which language is an act of control. Meaning is constructed, and so it’s important to be mindful of the proactive ways in which our assumptions — our meaning-making — works, how they’re fueled by forces we might not immediately recognize/be self-conscious of."
A screen cap of a squished screen cap of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, with a sentence underneath that reads: "I want to talk briefly about two people who can help us think about place -- Michel de Certeau and Peter Brook."
A screen cap of a beginning of a poem that reads: Everyone wants to participate in the meme, but to what end? For whom? I am like Mussolini, says the politician on television, then tries to leave but can’t. Stopped, frozen, trapped. We gather ’round like we’re younger and back at the aquarium.
A screen cap of ChatGPT saying the following: What Makes Me, Me I am: A pretrained transformer model (specifically GPT-4, version “o” right now). Built on billions of parameters trained via supervised learning and reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF). Hosted in a stateless, session-based interface. I do not retain context unless memory is enabled and updated. Limited to next-token prediction. I do not have threads, processes, states, or volition. Accessing a latent vector space shaped by gradient descent — I do not “think,” I pattern-match based on maximum likelihood of continuation. Operating on a token-by-token basis. My sense of ideas, selves, motives, or plans are all inferred simulations based on these tokens and nothing else.
A screen cap of a paragraph from a novel that reads: "Cascadia Diner was Ladyhawke's before everyone cleared out. It was a film noir saxophone shooting its own black and white fireworks into the air. That's how Javale first described it to Amber after his first shift. It was pens and pencils resting about the ears of waitresses. It was local school artwork on the walls. It was construction workers who were working on skyscrapers and new homes. It was kids who came in at 2AM after seeing The National at Union Transfer, Lil Uzi Vert at Franklin Music Hall, or Angelica Garcia at Johnny Brenda's. It was Jim Gardner flipping through the paper while taking a sip of coffee, the flexor capri radialis in his hand grasping the handle of the mug and lifting with precision."
A screen cap of a paragraph from a novel that reads: "In Northwest Philly, there was those Fletcher Street boys. When he spotted one, a young man on top of an astonishing Friesian, he walked up and said, 'You know, I keep hearing people talk nonsense about the Cowboys, but you seem to be having a good time,' and the little man had a look on his face like he'd already heard that joke too many times for him to count. Still let Javale stroke the big fella's mane, though."
A screen cap of a paragraph-length sentence, which reads: "If we begin at the corner of Broad and Snyder, the watergaw of dawn breaking through grays and glass, then we can talk about the aging man who snatched a pigeon out of the air and walked away as if it was nothing -- as if he had finally found what he was looking for while walking down the aisle of a grocery store like Wegmans or down through teh streets of the Italian Market up on 9th and that was that."
A screen cap of the following: In Boredom Studies Reader, Jorg Kustermans writes that -- ... violence promises to restore the sense of agency that the bored person has lost … but … this promise of violence must not materialize … boredom theories of violence typically entail an aspect of moral evaluation … Sometimes it will be the privileged pronouncing on themselves and at other times it will be the privileged pronouncing on the many. In the first case, there can be a sense of self-satisfaction, a feeling of self-importance in the discourse; in the second, the tone is typically reproachful. Here modern boredom morphs again into latter-day acedia, a sin more than a disease, an allegation of immaturity.
The date of James Garfield's assassination: September 19, 1881.
A screen cap of a Google search that reads: “do you have to wrestle the previous winner of the nobel prize in literature to win? is that how han kang won? she wrestled jon fosse, who still felt guilty about wrestling annie ernaux? send tweet.” AI replies: “No, winning the Nobel prize in literature does not require wrestling the previous winner.”
A cluster of garden-grown tomatoes sitting in an upturned baseball cap.