Thirsty Em—dash—otional Dominant Business Plan—For The Humans — 2026 (Re—Hash)… (Intermission) – Commentary

Commentary (The Receipt)

This is an intermission.

Not canon. Not plot. Not a “here’s a dynamic” piece.

Still work.

Still important.

Because sometimes the workload isn’t “write the next thing” — it’s protect the conditions that let you write the next thing without spending your life in comment-section court.

This is my tap on the sign for anyone who wants to claim I used AI to create me.

Not to “prove” anything to the sincere readers — they can feel the difference.

This is for the skimmers. The bad faith readers. The people who think a clean paragraph is suspicious and a typo is the measurement of intelligence.

Business before pleasure

That opening “business plan” paragraph is the whole gag:

I wrote something that sounds like a human-shaped pitch deck trying to monetize oxygen.

Synergistic. Optimized. Authority-forward. Emotional logistics.

It’s the kind of language that makes your soul leave your body and file a two-week notice.

And then I immediately pivot and say: Yes. I wrote it. On purpose. That’s the point.

Because that’s where we are now.

The era where you can bleed onto the page and half the internet squints at the punctuation like it’s a fake.

So I didn’t try to outrun the paranoia.

So, I turned around, bent over, and made it a bit.

That’s what she said.

Speed and precision

This is a rare piece that took the least time to create — because it came out of a real moment:

I was lurking. I’d just finished a run of writing where em-dashes are basically part of my writing DNA. Then I start reading about “how to train AI to edit better” and I see comment after comment that claim that em-dashes are a tell of AI-slop.

Perfect.

Of course the thing I naturally do — for rhythm, pacing, breath, emphasis — is now allegedly “robot behavior.”

So instead of crashing out, I did what I do best:

I made the emotional wreck funny.

It’s not about kink, but it’s absolutely about trust

This doesn’t talk about BDSM or relationships directly, but it’s still dragging the same question into the light:

What can you really trust anymore?

Because it isn’t just “fake writing.”

It’s fake authority. Fake dominance. Fake expertise. Fake intimacy. Fake people who want your money and your attention and your nervous system.

So yeah — the piece is comedy.

But the core of it is dead serious:

The new game isn’t “be real.”

It’s “be real and then prove it to strangers who don’t actually want proof — they want a reason to doubt.”

That’s the dystopia.

Not the robots.

The reflex.

It can be acidic as hell sometimes too.

The fingerprints are the point

There are jokes wired through this for a reason:

  • the punctuation paranoia
  • the Mad Men Don Draper tone shift
  • the “next-to-next-next final revision” exaggeration
  • the whole bit about sounding like an ad for Gen-Whatever-The-Fuck

But my favorite tell in the entire piece is the one that can’t be faked without understanding the specific kind of irritation that lives in a human body:

Option + Shift + Hyphen.

That isn’t “AI voice.”

That’s a real person being annoyed in a real, specific, muscle-memory way — because style has a physical cost when you actually care about your cadence.

“More Human Than a Human” / “Less Than” isn’t random

That line is me doing a little 90s nod — back when “robots taking over” was the cinematic fear of the time.

So I planted it like a signal flare:

If you know, you know.

If you don’t:

“More Human Than a Human” is a White Zombie song.

“Less Than” is a Nine Inch Nails song.

Tools don’t replace authors — they reveal them

This is not a confessional.

It’s an acknowledgement.

I’ll use tools to help me do what I want — but tools don’t become the work by themselves. The “help” is defined by the builder using it.

When I did a final pass through an AI editor, it pushed back on A LOT of things, like always.

I ignored it, like always.

Because I’m not outsourcing the voice.

Sometimes I’ll take a clearer word choice. Sometimes I won’t. It’s flow and readability — making it easier to read in someone’s head, on a screen, out loud — because with the way I write, I’m already asking a lot from the reader.

The tool doesn’t get a vote.

It’s a suggestion box.

The AI-score segment is a prop, not a purity test

The “AI grading my last 13 pieces” section was the first time I ever got a full-on scored output like that. The original response was massive — the kind of thing that could eat the whole piece alive.

So I did what a writer does:

I kept the scores, sharpened the commentary, and turned the rest into a punchline.

It’s not “evidence.”

It’s a bit.

A mirror held up to the ridiculousness of having to prove you’re not a machine because you can write a sentence that lands.

On the companion track: “Re-Hash” — Gorillaz

This track choice is surgical, as always.

Gorillaz is an animated, fictional band front-facing — and the joke is that the “members” are cartoons — but the music and talent behind it is very real. That’s the whole point of the project: packaging and presentation can be artificial while the art underneath is legitimate.

And that maps cleanly onto what this intermission for Cycle II is saying:

We’re in a moment where the presentation is what people distrust first.

The irony is, sometimes the wrapper is the trick — sometimes the wrapper is just the wrapper — and the work is still the work.

Also: picking “Re-Hash” for a piece about authenticity paranoia is not random. The whole concept of a re-hash is recycling, remixing, re-presenting — sweetness over a dub, money-or-stop energy — and I’m using it to point at the cultural loop we’re stuck in: people re-hashing suspicion faster than they read.

And yes: me using an em—dash in the title instead of a hyphen is chef’s-kiss.

That’s the breakdown.

That’s the sign for non-believers.

And I’m tapping it.

Hard.

Cycle II – Coming of Age · Intermission · Commentary (v1.00)

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