Yan Basque

@yanbasque.com

361 Followers 770 Following

Writer, artist and musician. Queer. Critic of technology. Grad student (Information Studies at McGill). (He/they) https://linktr.ee/yanbasque

Photo: a woman holding a part of Meta pervert glasses to her face Headline: The life-changing magic of wearing smartglasses | Letters Read more
AirPods display showing the left is 1% charged and the right is at 100%.
A tv screen showing the opening title card to Star Trek Voyager
The intent is not to ruin the days of my reply guys. The intent is to put their tiny heads on pikes as a warning to the others. And to signal to the younger women who follow me that the days of Smiling While Wrong Men Straighten Us Out on Shit We Know About are over. And that's deeply beneficial.
Bluesky user 1: “I regret my vote” Bluesky user 2: “you and me both”
The Caran d'Ache 849 next to the Uniball Zento Signature.
A beautiful Caran d'Ache 849 ballpoint pen in monochrome matte black finish.
A series of pens lined up against a black background. From left to right: Uni One P, Uni Zento Standard, Sarasa Grand, Pentel Sterling, Pentel Philography, OHTO CR01, OHTO GS02, Uni Jetstream Edge, Zebra G-750, Uni Jetstream Prime, rOtring 600, Zebra F-701.
Photo of my hand holding an elegant brushed aluminium pen in front of a journal with my handwriting on the page.
A red rOtring 600 pen.
My hand holding the cover of Janet Jackson's album The Velvet Rope in front of a turntable currently spinning the record.
A pile of books in French, including some by Descartes, Sartre, Nietzsche, Zola, Plato and Paul-Emile Borduas
Here are the highlights of our new AI Policy: Tidal will identify and tag AI-generated music in our app. Listeners will see an "AI" badge next to music we detect as wholly AI-generated. Tidal will not tolerate AI-generated music that impersonates an artist or group, or that facilitates fraudulent activity. We're implementing automatic tools to remove these releases immediately and on an ongoing basis. Tidal will not allow music that is 100% AI-generated to be monetized. No royalties will go to such releases, nor will AI-generated uploads be eligible for direct-to-fan sales. We will expand these policies to music that is substantially AI-generated when AI detection technology is sufficiently reliable to do so.
Cover of a small handmade zine. Black sharpie letters on pink background: “Fabulous Freedom. Yan Basque. FAccT 2026.”
Recent activity on Letterboxed, showing four movie posters: Silkwood (5 stars), First Reformed (5 stars), War of the Worlds (5 stars), West Side Story (1 star).
The Homosaurus logo: a cute dinosaur standing in front of a rainbow, above the word "HOMOSAURUS" in block pink letters. Text below the logo reads "An international LGBTQ+ linked data vocabulary"
Screenshot of Tom’s Guide website with ads covering up most do the page, making it impossible to read the article
A 2-and-a-half-star review of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial by a Letterboxd user named DKW_Skidoo. The review reads: "Better intergalactic relations forged with blatant product placement, deep state apologia and pederastic fantasy. Most things that sucked about 80s movies began here. The whole 'eternal inner child' fantasy of that period was really about preying on the alienated children of broken families and/or inattentive moms. This and 'Thriller' were the two faces of one psyop. If you were under 12 in 1982 and went crazy for either, I am sorry to say you were groomed. Remarkably dull and underbaked, for a film that was making its boss daddy a million dollars a day by 1983. Why does E.T. look like a 100 year-old double-amputee? Does his old-man dick finger ejaculate as well as throb?"
A circular diagram illustrating the six pillars of Canada's National AI Strategy surrounding the central theme “AI for All.” The six segments are: Pillar 1 (Protecting Canadians and Safeguarding Democracy) Pillar 2 (Empowering Canadians) Pillar 3 (Powering Shared Prosperity) Pillar 4 (Building the Canadian Sovereign AI Foundation) Pillar 5 (Scaling Canadian Champions) Pillar 6 (Building Trusted Partnerships and Global Alliances). One inner circle includes the words trust, opportunity and sovereignty. The other just says adoption adoption adoption.
Cropped screenshot of a Linkedin post: Simona Gandrabur Head of Mila Al Safety Studio Trust. Opportunity. Sovereignty. The Canadian Al Strategy moved me to my core - not just as a Canadian, as an Al professional - but as a human, a mother and a very recent grandmother.
Screenshot of Obsidian in which the scrollbars are all white instead of beige like the rest of the interface.
Yet rigidity is by no means an exclusively male trait. An aversion to eating, anorexia is the feminine version of autism, since not letting food into one's body is analogous to not letting others into one's self. Along similar lines, bulimia is the feminine equivalent of Don Juan-style bed-hopping, as both entail a promiscuous fusion with one's environment followed by an almost immediate expulsion of all foreign matter from one's self. Like autism and bed-hopping, both anorexia and bulimia are expressions of an obsession with maintaining a rigidly bounded self.
How do you want me to sound? Turn up your volume if you can't hear me. Two buttons labeled "melodic" and "deep"
Hand holding a B size blue notebook with the word “Campus” in big block letters on the cover. The brand is Kokuyo.
The Playboy Reader In Defense of the Pickup Artist Incel this, manosphere that-let's keep the lost art of actually trying. PLAYBOY AND MAGDALENE J. TAYLOR APR 30, 2026
5 pens. From left to right: Uni Jetstream Prime (black), Rotring 600 (red), Otho GS02 (mint green), Pentel EnerGel Philography (silver), Zebra Sarasa Grand (black).
Church, Anthropic to 'find the way for humanity' in Al age: What the partnership may include Pope Leo XIV's Al outreach with Anthropic signals a Vatican push for ethical Al, worker protection, child safety and global accountability. Written by Shaurya Agarwal May 25, 2026 22:58 IST
Screenshot of scene from DTF St. Louis episode 4. Close up of a small notepad held in someone’s hand with “AP” and “LC” written in large letters diagonally across the page.
Now, what could be better than a home cooked meal? How you want to eat it depends on how you feel You can eat all you want, and you don't get fat! Now, where else can you go for a meal like that?
The first is the labour market channel. When people with obesity lose weight and sustain that loss, they work more, work more productively, have lower disability rates. Tax revenues rise. Disability payments fall.
A black cat lying down on the rug staring right at the camera with her big yellow eyes.
Page from a book showing a picture of Masaccio’s depiction of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of eden. They are nude. Adam hands are covering his face while Eve attempts to hide her nudity. Their faces show anguish. An angel above them holding a sword point the way out.
We know of men who set themselves apart from others, by their amazing ability to achieve with their body things other men are absolutely incapable of. There are those who can move their ears, one at a time or both together. Others are able to move their hairline, shifting their scalp back and forth at will. Still others can vomit on command everything that they have devoured by slightly pressing on their belly, as if it were a bag. Some can imitate the cries of birds and beasts, as well as the voices of other men, so perfectly that no difference can be detected. And finally, there are those who can voluntarily emit from their anus a variety of sounds without any unpleasant odor, to the effect that they appear to be singing from that region.
The Doctor comes up with a scientific explanation for how Kes was healed. Janeway seemingly expresses doubt that it was science.
In 2020, ScreenRant ranked this episode as one of the top ten worst episodes of Star Trek: Voyager. Tor.com rated the episode 1 out of 10.
Six thumbnails under the heading “people and pets”. Two are humans, four are cats. One human’s face and name are obscured for privacy. The other human is me (a bearded white man labeled “Yan”.) The four cats are Scout, Friday, Scratchy and Spooky.
Index cards organized into various categories: spicy takes, future-oriented, bad vibes, ways of seeing or being, can’t or shouldn’t be touched, isms, makes me hungry or thirsty, creatures (real or imagined), places (real or imagined), brings me joy, and cool words.
Thumbnail is a picture of Ring camera on a door. Headline reads: "Woman passes doorbell cam - what she sees makes her want to flip some tables." Below the headline: "A homeowner's routine movement reveals something unsettling about everyday smart technology." Article is from newsweek.com
A diagram from my slide show. At the top left, three blue circles labeled 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Above them are the words: "Police raids" and "AIDS crisis." Below is a big box labeled "Archives" with the following text inside: "police records, court records, community records, news clippings, pornography, advertising, personal diaries" Three dashed arrows are pointing up from the Archives box to the three circles above. At the centre of the slide, under another blue circle labeled "2026", is a pink stick figure labeled "Me". Above the circle are the words: "Bain Colonial." A solid arrow points left from the stick figure's head to the Archives box. Another dashed arrow points to the upper right corner of the slide, where a final blue circle is labeled "the future" with the following text above it: "utopia???"
Cover slide of a powerpoint presentation. Pink background with large blue polka dots and white lines at funky angles. Title in big white letters over black bars reads: "The Blue Light of the Bathhouse" Finding Queer Utopia in Community Archives.
Your score: 13% Transhumanism: low Extropianism: low Singularitarianism: low Cosmism: low Rationalism: low Effective altruism: low Longtermism: low
Screenshot of reddit post on r/montreal, 11h ago. Title: Man, 30, stabbed at Montreal metro station Photo of a police car parked in front of a metro station. Link to ctvnews.ca Caption by the user who posted the article reads: "Enough is enough. Our metro is no longer safe. Drugs, public defecation, intimidation, and murder!? How has it become so lawless?" 233 upvotes. 132 comments.
A schematic from a research paper. On the left are two labels "Manuscripts" and "Peer review decision outcomes (accept/reject)," each followed by an arrow pointing to right. In the centre is a large box with illustrations of gears and the label "AI tool." This is followed by another big arrow pointing right to the label "Inferred decision rules. The caption reads: Fig. 2 Schematic illustration of the training approach. Manuscripts and peer review decision outcomes are inputs of the AI tool to infer decision rules.
My ideal, permanent solution would be some Obsidian plugin that would let me type a new prompt and, with the click of a button, add any prompt snippet to it. But, for the moment, I think any folder structure that’s intuitive to navigate and extract text from would be great.
Platform Unreleased Gems (December 2025): exclusive films available to rent on Letterboxd Video Store
Screenshot of my username (yanbasque) on reddit. A tag below states: "Top 1% Commenter"
In the previous section, I described an idealized version of the digital garden as a site of creative experimentation and discovery, where relationships between notes can exponentially flourish into new ideas. This vision is more aspiration than reality. There are certainly moments of elation when I discover or invent new and unexpected connections between ideas, but I also spend an inordinate amount of time agonizing over decisions about whether a note should be categorized as a "concept," a "theory," a "framework," or an "ideology," only to arrive at the conclusion that it ultimately does not matter. Maybe everything should just be a concept. Maybe there should not be a category at all!
I built a Chrome Extension called Al MindMap Semantic Sphere. It analyzes the article you are reading and projects a 3D semantic graph overlay. It categorizes relationships not just as parents/children, but as Causal, Temporal, Contextual, and Evidence-based. Active Reading: Instead of linear reading, you can explore branches of the argument visually.
But both Trump and Mamdani defeated the establishment in their own way, representing the hunger of voters on the right and left who want something different. If those sides could come together, well, that would be a sea change in how we organize our political economy. It's not going to happen now. But Trump and Mamdani just gave us a very modest hint of what that might one day look like.
A small zine titled “Girl Dick: self portraits” published by Gynoid Distribution
last four movies watched on letterboxd: Hedda (5 stars), Megan 2.0 (1 star), Deep Star Six (5 stars), Jurassic World Rebirth (1 star)
The cover of Rosalia's new album, Lux.
List of movies logged on letterboxed for October. Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II The Beast Within The First Power Seed of Chucky Whoever Slew Aunty Roo UHF
You are eligible for free flu vaccination. Flu vaccination is offered free of charge to the entire population. You are not eligible for free COVID-19 vaccination. COVID-19 vaccination is available for a fee.
A list of skills arranged in a four quadrant matrix. The horizontal axis goes from "low skill" to "high skill" and the vertical axis goes from "hate" to "love." In the bottom two quadrants are "project management, budgeting / administrative tasks," and "marketing." In the top two quadrants are research, organizing information, systems architecture, people management, analytical thinking, leadership, writing, communication, and community management.
My last two quote posts, showing the original posts have been deleted by the author.
A list of Janet Jackson albums from AllMusic.com, rated out of five stars. 1986's Control is 5 stars. 1989's Rhythm Nation 1814 is 4.5 stars. 1993's Janet is 4 stars. 1997's The Velvet Rope is 2.5 stars. The user ratings for all 4 albums are 4.5 stars.
Holding the cover of Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope in front of a record player
Brett Buttliere @brettbuttliere.bsk... • 3h she is citing her own work in the top 3 citations... most people would call that a conflict of interest and even malpractice