Ryan Williamson

"Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it." —Lloyd Alexander

*There are notable exceptions. You know who you are, and I see you, love you, and appreciate the support you’ve shown. I’m never logging into this hellsite again, so I won’t be checking notifications or DMs. I sincerely hope to see you around—I’m not hard to find.

This will be my final post on X. Recent algorithmic updates have completely killed reach, and the man who owns this platform created a tool that produces child pornography at a staggering scale—which he defends as “free speech.” The latter alone is reason enough to leave, but it’s not the biggest factor in me going. I’m going because the only engagement I get on things that truly matter to me is active hostility—or silence, which is somehow more insidious—and tells me everything I need to know about who all of you really are and what you actually value.* As it turns out I have principles and you have… red hats. So I’m out of here. I’m not rage quitting. Not flouncing off in defeat. Just… walking away. I don’t even care enough to toss a match behind me.

This is the most white privileged thing I’ve ever heard, and I hate the term “white privilege.” Yeah, having federal agents demand to see your papers totally isn’t fascist at all and only a criminal would have any problem with it. Jesus wept.

That ICE is scooping up Native Americans in their sweeps for “illegal immigrants” is darkly ironic in the worse way possible.

@ArizonaSpartan And they call that slop. SMH.

@rywilwrite this one’s entertaining.

@ThePanic16 I was angry. I apologize. I don’t know what to say except this: theannex.blog/2026/01/31/whe…

@rywilwrite “Tyranny” is overused and I find this argument boring and lacking any substance. Trump’s a lot of things; tyrant ain’t one of them.

A couple weeks ago if you’d said “Trump invokes the Insurrection Act and we find out what happens when 1,500 arctic-trained paratroopers from the 11th Airborne deploy against American citizens” I wouldn’t have taken that bet. fortune.com/2026/01/18/arm…

@veynre I was burned at the stake months ago. I’m just a pile of ashes screaming in the wind.

@rywilwrite I hate to say this is refreshing. My cats on twooviedoovie have been minimal this week. I've never blocked anyone btw. I want to see everything...and choose silently, because if you make it public someone somewhere will assuredly burn you on a stake.

It’s been one hell of a week and you’ve been good sports. You deserve legs that go all the way up.

I’m grieving. Going through the stages. This week was anger. The grief isn’t because “everyone I know is a Nazi.” They aren’t. That’s the problem. That’s what makes it worse. The grief is watching history repeat itself in real time while good men celebrate. Seeing what was coming, trying to warn people, and now watching its arrival in force as those I once respected, revered even, continue to cheer. That’s the grief. That’s what Arendt meant about the banality of evil. Not that evil is boring, but that it doesn’t require villains. Just people who’ve decided looking away is easier than looking. That the tribe matters more than the principle. That the cognitive dissonance is someone else’s problem. “Deport them all” only refers to “illegal immigrants”—until it doesn’t. Until American citizens are living in fear, carrying their passports when they go outside while their homes are invaded and they’re dragged out handcuffed in the snow because “you don’t have the same accent I do.” We’re already there. It already happened. It’s not theoretical anymore. Minnesota is the very definition of tyranny. “I find this argument boring and lacking substance,” my friend says. “Trump’s a lot of things, but he’s not a tyrant.” My friend isn’t a Nazi. He’s a good guy. He considers himself a rugged individualist. A patriot. He’d help his immigrant neighbors. He’d give you the shirt off his back. And he’ll keep finding each individual argument boring and lacking substance, right up until the moment it’s undeniable, even to him, until the people he’d help are gone, and then he’ll say it happened so fast, no one could have known. We knew. I knew. I told him. He found it boring. The grief isn’t “my friends are monsters” but “my friends are human, and this is what humans do, and it’s not enough, and it’s never been enough, and that’s the whole story of how these things happen.” The true horror of the holocaust wasn’t the gestapo and gas chambers, it was normal people, good men and women, going along because to do otherwise would make them uncomfortable. Cause social friction. Cast them out of the tribe. It was the ambivalence. Arendt watched the Eichmann trial expecting to see a monster and saw a bureaucrat. A man who didn’t think. Who followed procedures. Who would have been perfectly fine in a perfectly fine system. The horror wasn’t what he was. The horror was what he wasn’t. The grief is watching good men I know and respected choose comfort over conscience, one small accommodation at a time, and knowing exactly where that road goes because I’ve read the history. The machinery of atrocity runs on ordinary people doing ordinary things—filing paperwork, following procedures, retweeting without thinking, finding the arguments that would require them to act “boring and lacking substance.” My friend isn’t a fascist. He’s a good guy who just doesn’t want to think too hard about what he’s supporting because thinking too hard would cost him something. His sense of himself. His community. His peace of mind. So he doesn’t think. He finds it boring. He moves on. And that’s enough. That’s all it takes. That’s always been all it takes. Anger is clean. At least it has somewhere to go. The part that comes after is much harder.

If what’s happening in Minnesota isn’t tyranny, what would be? What’s the threshold? Tanks in the streets? Mass graves? At what point does the word become appropriate to use?

@DavidArnhem Caused a kerfuffle.

@rywilwrite Can’t trust it now. Money and careers are on the line, so … 😬

My satirical paper on AI titty physics accidentally became evidence in an argument about the collapse of scientific epistemology. I just wanted to make people scroll past 8,000 words to see uncanny valley beach videos. Instead I apparently illustrated why we might not be able to trust scientific literature in ten years.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Maybe five.

@JBudzien I thought it was implicit.

@rywilwrite Perverse gawker? That is not on my card.

Incidentally, I’m fully cognizant no one reads my essays or actually gives a shit. I know everyone thinks I’m smoking crack and went off the deep end months ago. My pieces certainly won’t persuade anyone, and I’m under no illusions I’m crafting some “great body of documentation history will look back on.” Jesus, I’m just a fucking highly literate zero who looked around and said, “Dude, this is really fucked up. Can you believe this shit? We’re driving off a cliff!” And everyone replied, “STFU and get back on your meds, retard.” And then told me to go stand in the corner in shame. But I’m constitutionally incapable of shutting the fuck up, and so persist in nailing mad (yet meticulously sourced) scribblings in the public square that get immediately pasted over with tawdry pinups of legs that go all the way up. But the alternative is what? Shove them in a drawer? Writing is how I process all this shit that doesn’t make sense. Publishing them is just… because I can and so why the fuck not? I’d rather speak up and be thought an idiot than remain silent and remove all doubt. Or however that stupid expression goes. And yeah, blathering about it here is just masturbation in public to a vanishingly small audience of perverse gawkers and tourists. I’m fully aware of that too. It’s a bad habit and I’ll probably go blind. I already have hairy palms and it doesn’t even feel good anymore. Yet here we are. You, me, and the other twelve people who scrolled past this post and are too lazy to bother unfollowing.

@JBudzien @NoahRayWrites Perverts.

@NoahRayWrites @rywilwrite Don't say it so loud or everyone will want one.

@JBudzien Interesting. What’s your take on that?

@rywilwrite arXiv has changed their policies on being able to participate. They do not call out AI specifically. However, they are going back to newcomers needing endorsements by verified researchers. blog.arxiv.org/2026/01/21/att…

@JBudzien @wanderingscottw Sweet. I don’t have ADHD. I’m just an autodidact.

@wanderingscottw @rywilwrite Because the mindset is still teaching math in school instead of doing math as normal life. I hate the term "lifelong learning" as a metric. I love to hang with autodidacts who are eager to share this week's interest.

@JBudzien @wanderingscottw Amen, sister.

@rywilwrite @wanderingscottw I'm with you, broski. I am much more worried about people who took "training for a certificate" than the folks who have firearms as a normal, unremarkable part of life. Respect for the responsibility is different than having a certificate.

@JBudzien @DavidArnhem @wanderingscottw This is the way. What both of you said. Carry on.

@DavidArnhem @rywilwrite @wanderingscottw You have far more confidence in schooling translating to normal life than I do. Growing up in a rural area in which hunting was normal, hunter's ed at age 12 was held in the school building, but it was a community effort reinforcing norms. Gun safety itself was just normal.

@JBudzien @wanderingscottw Absolutely, So while I highly encourage firearms training I’m skeptical of legislatively mandated “training.”

@rywilwrite @wanderingscottw It goes back to the distinction between explicit lessons that one can apply in a specific context to specific prompts and having ingrained knowledge that is just part of one's life. "Education is what remains when we have forgotten school".

@wanderingscottw @JBudzien Training sounds lovely in legislation but the reality is in practice it often manifests as a boring afternoon topped by a rubber stamp.

@JBudzien @rywilwrite Legal carry or not does not preclude ignoring what you're taught unfortunately. As much as there are likely hill and swamp (rural) folk who have far more common sense than any fancy schooled and educated. Still comes down to the person involved at the time. S'all I need to say.