longreads.com

I Spent Months with an AI Companion. It Was Worse than Being Alone

You can't customize your friends. You screen for certain traits, but what you're drawn to, as much as the trait's performance, is the 3D process that forms it: your friend's life story. We surmise, based on our affinity, it will be a story we share. We choose our friends because we want to live in the universe of their personality: its past, present, and future. What gives a personality dimension is time, the gathering of experiences.

themarginalian.org

3 Kinds of Loneliness and 4 Kinds of Forever

Everything of beauty and substance that we make — every poem, every painting, every friendship — is an outstretched hand reaching out from one loneliness to another, reaching into the mute mouth of forever for the vowels of a common language to howl our requiem for the evanescent now.

themarginalian.org

The Kiln and the Quantum of Relationships

Under the extreme pressures of expectation and the high heat of need, something reacts with something, impurities are exposed and bubbles burst, each person activating dormant potencies in the other, so that a distinct third entity comes alive — the dynamic reality of the relationship — incinerating the notion of the individual self as a set of inherent properties, hinting at the relational nature of reality itself.

themarginalian.org

How Two Souls Can Interact with One Another: Simone de Beauvoir on Love and Friendship

What is worthwhile, is friendship… this profound mutual confidence between [two people], and this joy of knowing that the other exists.

currincy

Musical Freezers, Metalcore Endurance, & Cam Winter Covers: 14 Sounds I Loved in February

This is the blissful opposite—ordinary folks walking into an ordinary setting, making something so casually extraordinary that others smile with wonder.