I am coming to realize that my behaviors as a young child resembled that of cats in ways too numerous to call coincidence.

It is not simply that I was aloof, or even that I hated the idea of needing to work with other people for anything. It is that I would routinely hide in closets, hide under tables, crawl under beds, make little caverns out of the fold-out foam seat portions of the cheap couches and hide in those, hide under blankets -- wherever I could fit, I would sit, because the enclosed space comforted me. (Said to be a classic autistic thing, to seek to cut off excessive stimulation -- I didn't know that's what I was doing, but it did make me feel better.)

And even after growing out of that phase (literally, I couldn't fit anymore), I would still seek dark places to stalk through -- I still do. I feel much better being unseen, un-noticed, un-judged -- I hate it when people can immediately

We live in a glade, my mother and I. We live in a house that sits in a forest. And we live with my father. My mother and I are quiet people, except when we laugh. Then we are loud, and we go on and on. My father’s a talker. He has no sense of humor. He goes on and on but says very little.

My mother and I, we have our own language. We speak in code. Lines from old movies, Marx Brothers routines. We quote them and laugh. My father stares like a dog at a

Dead Internet Theory proposes that the overwhelming majority of the content you encounter on the Internet is not the product of living human minds, but something else entirely. Under this theory, the rare human browser is like a rat trapped in a maze built by unseen intelligences, manipulated by impostors and algorithms for their own opaque purposes. That lukewarm product review, the pointed