Notices by Lili Saintcrow (lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com), page 7

"The more detainees, the more money they make. It stands to reason that these companies have no incentive to release people quickly."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/canadian-detained-us-immigration-jasmine-mooney

"...Zuckerberg’s company is trying to muzzle yet another whistleblower — one who happens to have written a book full of alleged anecdotes about him and fellow Facebook executives that aren’t just embarrassing but also politically damning."
https://www.vox.com/technology/403954/facebook-whistleblower-book-zuckerberg-sandberg

It’s difficult to convey the breathtaking speed with which we decided, en masse, to punish the director who had attempted to force the script on us. We considered it a killing insult to be *scripted* after he’d made such a point of discouraging our active, authentic enjoyment.

The audience had responded to our authentic enjoyment of pieces we’d spent serious time refining. The enthusiasm was infectious.

The director mistook the window-dressing (our coordinated movements, a little play-acting during solos) as the reason for the response.

Anyway, we ruined the next competitions by being as soulless as possible. The following semester we all chose not to join the advanced choir again. We told other girls not to bother.

For the rest of our school careers, that director couldn’t get another advanced group together.

Decades ago I was in a small “advanced” choir. It was a point of fierce pride that we had to be selected and show proficiency to get in. We considered ourselves hardworking, relatively skilled.

One day, during practice, we started messing around.

We enjoyed a couple of songs we were practicing, and began spontaneously moving to the music. This was frowned upon in specific competitions, so our director tried to discourage it.

Unfortunately for the director, these weren’t competition pieces but regular parent-concert stuff. We understood the difference, and were unmanageable in the way only teen girls can manage.

Well, those concerts were a hit. The director was praised not only by parents but by other district choir directors, whereupon he made a second critical error.

He arrived at the next practice with a script.

He informed “his” choir that we would do “approved” moves with the next competition pieces.

Adult Lili understands he maybe meant well. Teen Lili was having none of it.

Now, I was defiant by dint of attempting to survive a brutal home life. The interesting thing here is that *every girl in the choir, no matter her background*, made the same decision near-instantaneously.

To wit: “Like hell we will.”

“AI” and fascism are both intrinsically incapable of authenticity, which is one of the main reasons why they will always (eventually) lose.

I learned this decades ago in a choir. Let me tell you the story…

Happy Ides of March, everyone.

"But to their eternal discredit, many universities have so far been rolling out the red carpet for the fascist tendencies and policies that Trump and his acolytes proudly promote, obeying even before he took office."
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/mahmoud-khalil-columbia-trump-universities/

Fresh fiction every week, access to the current serial... or both! The support helps bring more Lili books into the world, and every tier includes access to my private Discord, where we have a lot of fun. (And I often personally answer reader questions...)
https://www.patreon.com/c/lilithsaintcrow

"On 30th November 841, the day after William’s birthday, Dhuoda sat at a writing desk and picked up a pen, thus beginning her famous work, the Liber Manualis."
https://justhistoryposts.com/2025/02/24/historical-objects-duchess-dhuoda-and-the-liber-manualis/

It's the last day of Smashwords' Read An Ebook Week, and many of my titles are heavily discounted. You can find them here. https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/Lilith_Saintcrow

"Only then, I think, was it possible to conceive of humanity as a point on a line that could keep extending, to imagine something that would be more than human without being supernatural."
https://lithub.com/ted-chiang-on-superintelligence-and-its-discontents-in-j-d-beresfords-innovative-work-of-early-20th-century-science-fiction/

"The term "Crypto Strategic Reserve" is a non sequitur since there are no plausible circumstances in which the United States government holding large amounts of cryptocurrencies would be of any strategic benefit."
https://popular.info/p/strategic-corruption-reserve

Instead of the biweekly D&D game, I'm covered with powdered sugar and doing administrative tasks.

*sigh*