Last week, a MetaFilter member posted a link to what appeared to be a new website for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig’s decade-long project to make a “dictionary of made-up words for emotions that we all feel but don’t have the words to express.”

The polished site includes everything you’d expect from a publisher’s promotional book site: an author biography, press mentions, and links to buy the book on Amazon.

Strangely, it also includes the entire text of the book, from its opening 800-word foreword to a complete archive of all 311 neologisms, with their accompanying definitions, etymology, and short essays, all penned by Koenig.

The book’s original photo-collage illustrations made by Koenig and several other artists are conspicuously missing. Instead, each word has an AI-generated image made with DALL-E 2, riddled with the errors and artifacts typical of that model.

A banner at the top of the homepage encourages visitors to “Generate your own words using AI – give your sorrows a voice!” The Submit A Sorrow feature lets you describe a feeling, and then uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 to generate the new word, etymology, and definition, which go into a gallery of “User-Generated Sorrows” with AI generated art.

MetaFilter members were immediately suspicious, and so was I. My wife Ami and I made a card game in 2022, Lost for Words, partly inspired by Koenig’s project. We own a copy of the book, and I’d followed it online for years. The embrace of AI seemed out of character.

Then I noticed the new site was a different domain than the original Tumblr homepage entirely:

The original: dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com
The reboot: thedictionaryofobscuresorrows.com

What’s going on here?

A Little History

John Koenig launched The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows on Tumblr in 2009, expanding it to a series of popular video essays in 2013.

If you know any word from the project, it’s probably “sonder,” which spread far beyond its origin, making its way into common parlance and eventually to Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster.

sonder
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

Other words coined by Koenig have found a life outside his project. You may have encountered “anemoia” (a feeling of nostalgia for a time or place you’ve never known), “vellichor” (the strange wistfulness of used bookstores), or maybe “monachopsis” (the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place).

But “sonder” is the breakaway success. I’d wager most people who have heard the word have no idea it was coined by a guy on Tumblr in 2012.

There’s an R&B band named Sonder, a failed Airbnb rival, and countless businesses ranging from consultancies and VC firms to coffeehouses and dispensaries. There’s a bar named Sonder two miles from me right now.

That success landed Koenig a book deal with Simon & Schuster, and the book became a New York Times bestseller on its release in November 2021.

Two years later, around August 2023, the new Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows website launched, but curiously, with no reference to it from the official Tumblr page or social media.

A Slick Impostor

The mission of Koenig’s project, in his own words, is to “shine a light on the fundamental strangeness of being a human being.”

So it felt strange that he would now be encouraging people to generate new words and definitions with LLMs, a contentious technology that has been trained on so much human writing, but can’t know what it’s like to be human.

I reached out to John Koenig directly to ask if he was involved with the website. He emailed back an hour later:

Yeah man, I had nothing to do with it. Don’t know what to think or do about that, as the site is pretty slick. Nicer than my own, really.

It wasn’t hard to find who was responsible since they list themselves in the “Site Credits” in the footer of every page: Qontour (formerly Prompt Digital), a web design and marketing agency based in San Francisco.

The only hint that the site isn’t authorized is this page in their portfolio, where they talk about how “Qontour built the interactive digital platform – designing the site in Webflow, generating an AI-powered image library, and launching a feature that lets visitors submit their own sorrows and add new definitions to the dictionary.”

On that page, they refer to themselves as “fans” of the book: “The site gives fans (like us) one place to find everything – videos, reviews, interviews, and purchase links – instead of searching across a dozen platforms.‍”

The problem, of course, is that being a fan doesn’t give them the right to repurpose any of the material for their site.

Copyright and Confusion

In the footer of Qontour’s unauthorized site, they added a copyright notice acknowledging that they don’t own any of the rights to the material on the site, while also licensing all the user-submitted words into the public domain with a CC Zero license.

Dictionary Content © John Koenig – All rights reserved.
User-Generated Content open licensed – CC Zero.

This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how copyright works. Qontour did not have the right to publish the entirety of Koenig’s book to showcase their web design skills.

They also submitted their site to Webflow’s directory to advertise their design business. “This endeavor showcased our expertise in website design, AI-generated content, and extensive content integration.”

Below the button to “Hire Qontour,” a small link to “Copyright Info” misrepresents their work:

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by Qontour is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. All Rights Reserved. In other words, it’s someone else’s work so you can’t copy it or edit it for any reason, but you can share it with others.

Needless to say, you can’t relicense content you don’t own.

Complicating their claims of it being a fan tribute, Qontour also used their own Amazon affiliate code throughout the site, created under their previous name Prompt Digital, giving them a cut of all book sales.

Those commissions may have been meaningful over the last few years, since the unofficial site is now the top search result for virtually every query related to the book, including the book’s title, the words coined in the book, and even John Koenig’s name. In every Google search I’ve tried, the unofficial site ranks higher than the official site, the publisher’s site, or Wikipedia.

This is made worse by the rapid shift from traditional web search to conversational AI search, which is easy to manipulate, hides sources, and collapses context into simple answers.

ChatGPT and Gemini both link to the bootleg as the official website, and both claim that John Koenig is the one that created it.

This creates legitimate confusion over its authorship, and arguably, damages the reputation of the project and book with its enthusiastic embrace of AI. The person who originally posted the site to MetaFilter thought it was the official site, and the commenters in the thread then, reasonably, questioned whether the book itself was written by AI.

I asked Koenig if his publisher was planning to issue a cease-and-desist takedown to the site, but didn’t receive a response.

After emailing him, I realized that Simon & Schuster did make moves last year to limit its reach. They filed two DMCA takedowns (1, 2) with Google last July, asking them to remove two pages from the bootleg site from their results. It had no effect.

AI and Consent

It’s one thing for a fan to share or remix copyrighted material out of love for the source material, with no commercial motive. (“No copyright intended!”) It’s another for a marketing agency to take an entire living author’s book, replace its art with AI slop, add an AI word generator, monetize the traffic, promote it in their portfolio, and then outrank the official site everywhere.

This is a more flagrant form of plagiarism than you typically see these days, where human-authored works are laundered with an AI model into something that’s different enough from its sources to avoid legal issues.

But it’s not surprising to see it coming from an agency that has leaned into generative AI so heavily. As they proudly explain, “Every page on this site was written in Claude” using an “author persona” that they call “Q.”

What’s missing here is consent, which feels like the original sin of AI. As I’ve written about many times before, generative AI models are all trained on a massive corpus of human-authored works without attribution, consent, or compensation, extracting value from creators while centralizing power among a tiny handful of massive tech companies.

On a much smaller scale, Qontour could have reached out to John Koenig for permission to republish his work, collaborating with him on a new, improved website for the book. He might have asked them to limit it to just the words published on his Tumblr, asked for them not to build AI features, or maybe just said no to the whole thing, which would be his right.

The Last Word

What happened to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows may have been more brazen, but it isn’t an isolated case.

It’s part of a broad trend happening across the web, where people are using AI to repackage, optimize, and replace the authoritative sources it was trained on for profit.

Nearly every day, I get emailed a newly-launched, obviously-vibecoded website filled with AI-generated content that was designed to siphon attention away from human creators: bloggers, authors, journalists, artists, musicians, and anyone else who slowly, painstakingly makes things for a living. I’m not even sure anymore that the emails I’m receiving are sent by a human.

The feeling of seeing something you love ingested and repurposed by a machine designed to replace the person who made it seems like a uniquely modern sorrow.

Maybe there should be a word for it.

---

You can purchase John Koenig’s The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows at Powell’s Books, directly from his publisher, or your local indie bookstore. If you have to use Amazon, you can buy it using the author’s own affiliate code so he gets the largest cut of the sale.

(This blog essay is overdue because I'm still waiting for new prescription glasses and writing while cross-eyed with text zoomed to 250% is tedious. They should be here later this week. Meanwhile ...)

Back in January 2022 I wrote an essay revisiting my predictions for 2017. My review of 2017's stab in the dark began, "it spanned three blog posts and ended happily in a nuclear barbecue to put us all out of our misery: start here, continue with this, and finale: and the Rabid Nazi Raccoons shall inherit the Earth."

I'll actually stand by those 2017 predictions, which were weirdly not that far off the mark although Queen Elizabeth II outlasted my prediction by several years.

But my 2022 predictions?

Oh boy.

Look, for an amateur futurologist writing in January of 2022 it was arguably forgivable to miss the US electorate being so boneheadedly stupid that they'd re-elect the most corrupt president in their nation's history, at the head of a Gish gallop of barkingly ignorant and destructive cranks and conspiracy theorists determined to tear down the republic and destroy its vital institutions, all in the name of returning the social order (per the Project 2025 plan) to the 50s--the 1850s, that is, not the 1950s. With 20/20 hindsight, what I missed was the now-obvious wave of media ownership consolidation, including corporate social media such as X, Meta, and Google, in the hands of a narrow class of billionaire oligarchs. I also missed the complacent incompetence of the Biden administration with respect to organizing their succession plans--it was obvious that by 2024 he'd be vulnerable to campaign ratfucking on grounds of his age, and his anointed successor was guilty of being (a) too female and (b) non-white, rendering her unacceptable to a large chunk of the voters.

But, even if you forgive my failure to recognize the catastrophic collapse of the US as a credible hegemonic superpower over the past 3-4 years, I can only hang my head in shame over my failure to anticipate the Ukraine war, which broke out six weeks after that blog essay. Let alone to anticipate a revolution in military affairs as profound as that brought about of the first world war.

Similiarly, I have no excuse for not recognizing that an Israel with politics dominated by Benjamin Netanyahu would go Full Nazi sooner rather than later, as the genocide in Gaza and the program to build a Greater Israel in Lebanon demonstrate. I mean, I grew up going to synagogue and have visited Israel more than once! I should have seen the signs, they were all there as far back as the 1980s. Mea culpa. (And fuck those guys.)

While I correctly recognized the EV transport revolution, I missed the concurrent solar power and grid-scale battery revolution, now very visibly in train and arguably more important than the arrival of cheap electric cars and cheaper e-bikes. I didn't notice the global supply chain crisis of 2021-2023, even then gathering pace, although it didn't impact consumer prices for a few more months.

Possibly my worst miss is that I completely discounted the profound social impact of LLMs (or so-called "AI"), not simply as a massive technology sector investment bubble and happy hunting ground for snake oil salesmen and grifters, but as a corrosive influence on population-level critical thinking. I should have seen it coming--I read Joseph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason back in the 1980s--but I didn't recognize just how unable to see past the ELIZA illusion most people would prove to be.

Nor did I expect the transhumanists, extropians, and the rest of the hairball of beliefs now congealing into the syncretistic techno-religion of TESCREAL to have seized control of trillions of dollars of private equity and not only be arguing about the Singularity but to be squabbling over who gets to run it (with a side-order of racism and eugenics on top, because every flavour of crank batshittery is so much better with a side-order of fascism and concentration camps).

So I'm sticking a flag in the ground here and admitting: I am officially a shit futurologist.

Back in 2022, and before that, in 2017 and even in 2007, I espoused a general rule of thumb about predicting the future, that:

Looking 10 years ahead, about 70% of the people, buildings, cars, and culture is already here today. Another 20-25% is not present yet but is predictable -- buildings under construction, software and hardware and drugs in development, children today who will be adults in a decade. And finally, there's about a 5-10% element that comes from the "who ordered that" dimension

2022 forced me to update the ratio to:

20% of 10-year-hence developments utterly unpredictable, leaving us with 55-60% in the "here today" and 20-25% in the "not here yet, but clearly on the horizon" baskets

Anyway, it's now 2026, and I officially give up.

The Stross Ratio for predicting events ten years hence is now 60/10/30. That is: 60% of the people, buildings, and culture are here today. 10% is predictably on the drawing boards, and a whopping 30% is utterly unpredictable.

Airborne Hantavirus pandemic or global Measles pandemic, who the fuck knows what we're going to get--given that the US FDA is run by a crank who doesn't believe in the germ theory of disease and seems to be trying to spike vaccine development globally?

A shutdown of global semiconductor fabrication caused by a worldwide helium shortage, and a global fertilizer shortage causing famine and food price spikes, due to a senile sundowning autocrat starting a war with Iran without any clear exit strategy?

Who ordered any of this?

I'm reasonably confident that the Russian invasion of Ukraine will be over by this time in 2030--quite likely by this time in 2027, due to the collapse of the Russian domestic economy. I'm also reasonably confident that the US war on Iran will be over by this time in 2030, if only because Trump will most likely be dead or in palliative care (possibly following his removal in a soft coup via Article 25 of the US constitution, due to his very obvious current illness and decline). (Note that Trump's insistence on "running for a third term" is very probably a serious sign that the electoral process in the USA is no longer fully functional, under the aegis of the supreme court he appointed, as long as he survives. His successor may not be able to sustain his ability to ignore the law: if they can, then, well, the US Republic is over: it had a good run, from 1776 to 2026.) The AI bubble will have burst long before May 2027--the semiconductor pinch caused by the aforementioned helium supply crisis will cripple Nvidia's ability to manufacture chipsets for data centers, and the US DCs are all being built to run on diesel/kerosene burning gas turbine power plants anyway, the price of which has skyrocketed due to the gulf war.

I expect us to be well into Great Depression 2.0 by this time in 2030.

There will be some grounds for hope. The global energy transition to renewables will, by that point, be a done deal. It also means China will have replaced the USA as the global energy superpower--not because they dominate the transport routes for energy but because they manufacture 80% of the planet's EVs and PV panels and batteries. But that's a tenuous hold on superpowerdom. If the Chinese government throws its weight around in the 21st century the way the USA did in the 20th, it will rapidly find first-tier rivals building up their own manufacturing capability: meanwhile, PV/battery is inherently easier to distribute that large, centralized grid based power supplies, and the dronification of warfare means (at least in the near term) that rapid mechanized wars of maneuver are a non-starter: the "fog of war" is on the way out, replaced by highly precise targeting of advancing assets and the robotization of the front line.

In space, I'm pretty sure we will see a Kessler Syndrome event if the idiotic rush towards putting data centers in orbit goes anywhere. But I think it's not going to happen--SpaceX is inextricably tied to the current tech bubble, and when it pops Elon Musk is going to wish he had a bunker to hide in.

The main casualty of this decade is the ideological credibility of capitalism as a social organizational principle.

Enshittification, also known as platform decay, per wiki, is "a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to both users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders." Systematic capture of the US government and the global system of trade by capitalists has resulted in the creation of a framework optimized for enshittification all round, and the result is the enshittification of everything--all the infrastructure of the capitalist world is decaying and on fire as the post-privatization owners loot it.

This is the Marx-predicted crisis of capitalism, and it's been in progress since the collapse of the USSR in 1991 removed the main ideological standard-bearer for opposition. It accelerated in 2008 with the global financial crisis, and again in 2020 when the pandemic provided top cover for the hyaenas to go on a looting spree. They've stripped the corpse of actually-existing social democracies everywhere to the bone, and now they're cannibalizing their own body politic. Disaster capitalism has finally come home to roost, and it won't end until the global financial system collapses. Meanwhile, the generation born in the 21st century has no time for their shit. We are moving into a political state weirdly reminiscent of the period between 1905 and the 1930s. If we're lucky we're going to get New Deal 2.0 and a brisk round of socialism: if we're unlucky, it's going to be guillotine time all over again.

PS: do not expect to see me visiting the USA any time soon. Millions of people applying for a US visa are now required to make all of their social media accounts publicly visible -- or risk having their applications delayed or denied outright. The directive, which covers more than a dozen nonimmigrant visa categories, has been rolling out in phases since June 2025 and expanded significantly as of 30 March 2026. This policy is impossible to implement without feeding all those social media profiles to an LLM in search of a verdict, and they'll obviously be screening applicants for ideological compatibility. And if it's rolling out to visa applicants now, the automated program will inevitably be applied to I-94W (visa waiver) travelers shortly thereafter. My social media profile is that of a pro-LGBT pro-Green hard left troublemaker, so ... nope, not going there: I am absolutely not interested in touring the concentration camps of El Salvador!

Sociologists have long argued that human relationships are sustained less by intensity and more by regularity. Simply encountering the same people repeatedly builds closeness over time. Youth offers this naturally. Adulthood dismantles it completely. Especially in urban life.

– From the article The quiet grief of adult friendship

This is one of the many reasons why we are building CreativeMornings/Clubs.

It’s Star Wars day, and while I haven’t time for my Let Me Show You How Star Wars Actually Operates Via PBTA Moves, let’s try something else. There’s a lot you can learn about how to make your characters better by actually watching Star Wars.

I spent a few years writing Star Wars comics for Disney, which led to me studying them intently with adult eyes. The film which grew with rewatching was actually A New Hope – just this fairy tale, and a deeply strangely structured one. For all it being Patient Zero of The Heroes Journey in Hollywood, its lead doesn’t turn up until twenty minutes into it. That doesn’t turn up in the How To Write a Screenplay guides.A tight look at New Hope reveals stuff people forget (and whose absence is why some later stuff doesn’t land) but also a whole bunch which can make you make your writing (and playing) better.

This is transferable to games, as much of what makes Star Wars work is in the cast’s acting, not the dialogue per se. Not what they say, but how they say it. We have all these lines that have become part of pop culture, quoted until they’re worn thin. Actually look at Star Wars, and see these are performed with fear in the heart and sweat in the eyes. Folks look panicked. They are committed to it, absolutely. This is a long way from the action-as-videogame-cutscene that’s trapped the genre’s heart in Carbonite.

Anyone can make jokes about Storm Troopers’ accuracy. Easy. What you should notice is that there’s no point in the movie where the characters don’t run away the second they’re outnumbered, or treat the threat with the upmost sincerity. It’s not until Jedi we discover what happens if they stand and fight, and can ‘t run away – and the answer is “They get captured.”

And then there’s Han Solo.

Han Solo is the archetypal Han Solo in fiction. Generations of role-players have tried to play knock offs. Generations have shat the bed, as in their Love of the Effect of Han Solo On The Screen have failed to grasp how the magic trick worked.

It’s not just Han, of course. It could be Wolverine. Or any cynical loner who refuses to play by the rules, is clearly cooler than anyone else in the story, and really doesn’t want to be involved.

You know the sort.

What we’re talking about here is one of the classic gaming complaints of those in the trad space. As in, someone grinding the game to a halt with a “my character wouldn’t be involved in this adventure.”

Now, I’ve found myself reading D&D Reddit, and… oh, let’s embed the post.

I've taken to reading D&D reddit, and the best comparison I have to my feelings is when queer folks just blink in confusion at the vagaries and weirdness of hetreo culture. You guys are doing WHAT!? Really? Why?

— Kieron Gillen (@kierongillen.bsky.social) 2026-05-03T20:32:57.885Z

There’s a whole lot of stuff, and a mixture of good advice, terrible advice, and a whole world of clashing play styles.

But, were I to paraphrase the hardline advice that pops up when someone asks what to do about a player whose character doesn’t want to go on the adventure, it’s something like…

Just let the party go ahead, and tell the reluctant player that their character has gone off and done their own thing and is now out the game. If you want to carry on playing, roll up a character who wants to be involved in the game.

At which point I am gritting my teeth and trying to avoid barging in the walls of the Internet like the Kool guy going on about This Is Why Buy In is important.

But even that’s not helpful if someone wants to play Han Solo, because Han Solo – almost by definition! – doesn’t want to go on this mission, really. Are we really saying that you can’t pick this clearly popular archetype? After all, Han Solo has to be dragged backwards through the movie to be involved, and everyone loves him.

This is the moment everyone is thinking of.

But the important thing to remember is…

Now, if you are looking with naïve eyes, you may think “this means that it’s the party’s job to convince the reticent character they want to be part of this game.”

This would be missing the key fact that Han Solo is a fucking idiot.

Imagine if Star Wars was an actual TTRPG. A classic Han Solo-esque player would have told Luke to sling their hook. It’s clearly a threadbare suggestion, and incredibly risky, and it all hangs on the say-so of this fucking farm boy they just picked up who’s already lost their old dude.

But the player of Han Solo in the film? Oh no. They’re all in. This half-arsed suggestion is all he needs. What they’ve done is used their character trait to create a scene which lets another player shine, and then buy into their answer completely. Rather than using it as a blockage, they’ve used it as a springboard. Rather than worrying about being cool, they have let the other player be cool. Which makes them cooler.

The fundamental mistake that a wannabe Han Solo player makes is thinking that it’s other players’ job to convince them they should play – when it’s in fact, by choosing to play an awkward character, it’s your job to work out why you remain in the game and go along with what’s happening.

It’s interesting that we’re used to thinking about Player Skill intersecting with the character class in terms of efficiently using the skills the class is based around… but we’re less likely to think about the character type in the same way. I think they’re actually identical.

If you’re playing a Han Solo finding ways to stay in the party is your problem in exactly the same way that working out how to throw a fireball and not kill your entire party is your problem as a wizard. If you didn’t want it to be your problem, you shouldn’t have picked the fucking class.

We love Han Solo for many reasons – but above all, we love Han Solo because he remains in the movie, on screen, and doesn’t leave at the forty minute mark, never to be seen again.

Because the one thing Han Solo never was, is boring.

On Mastodon, Hendrik Weimer posted 5 most boosted Fediverse posts of 2025. The numbers look kind of low, but the author explains the methodology below.

At any rate, two of the 5 posts have to do with our trust in software.

Number 1 from Max Leibman:

No, I do not want to install your app.
No, I do not want that app to run on startup.
No, I do not want that app shortcut on my desktop.
No, I do not want to subscribe to your newsletter.
No, I do not want your site to send me notifications.
No, I do not want to tell you about my recent experience.
No, I do not want to sign up for an account.
No, I do not want to sign up using a different service and let the two of you know about each other.
No, I do not want to sign in for a more personalized experience.
No, I do not want to allow you to read my contacts.
No, I do not want you to scan my content.
No, I do not want you to track me.
No, I do not want to click “Later” or “Not now” when what I mean is NO.

Number 5 from JA Westenberg:

RSS never tracked you.
Email never throttled you.
Blogs never begged for dopamine.
The old web wasn’t perfect.
But it was yours.