( via / via )

Snow update from Fifth Ave & Central Park.

"I'm hyggemaxxing" —@indyfromspace.bsky.social

To Novalis.

Lay Down.

( via / via )

"I asked myself what I could do here that would be less compliant, somehow less useful to machine, even if neither I nor you, reading this, are doing anything like throwing ourselves into the cogs of it."

Postoperative Care of Small Wounds.

"All this as the world burn and drowns, says every cut-rate Cassandra in statements that gain no traction.

Culture will not completely collapse, but at some point soon it might be made almost only by the very rich.

This situation produces the art of our time." —@jacobwren.bsky.social

Next slop masterpiece :/.

( via / via )

A Kind of Snowfall.

While some people are solving the world's problems, others can't seem to destroy it fast enough.

Riddle 2.

"IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (Anagrammed Lines)

It came from outer space —
a comet of imp creatures;
a curse of meteor impact —
to permute a cosmic fear,
to cap our mesmeric fate..."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

Scousenlish a-singen.

( me / via )

The shattered book floats.

"drop-down menu"

dread & greed & grilse-spring
grueling obtain raindance
pale ceruleran in realtime
run out the clock toxin
furious small insults
cement mixer lemur
pass on the right parson
repose in bitter witness
never-kate shift's leavebell

"If LARB did not invent the para-academic digital publication model, it was the first to master it."

"me, dead and at the gates of Hell: but why I am going to the ninth level, for betrayers? who have I betrayed?

a demon, poring over his book: it says here that you made Rodger get up off your lap after he was comfortable.

me: I didn’t know that counted.

a demon: it’s the main thing we look at." —@teganoneil5000.bsky.social

Another moon poem.

( via / via )

Arval Fast Bandwidth.

"into the meddle of the mudstorm" —Finnegans Wake

Wreckoes of the Adjuvants.

Love Canal connivance
now to reap a heaping—
bright-lit rooms carillon
the road not loaded
burgundy curve bardic
blurred sidestreet deleted
days of murder buzzing
mischance, eclipse rhapsode
veil between those vanished
reversal's song, jangled
we move in our dim ambits
erring & soon boondocks
flicker dazzled flimsy
who flow ever crowward
once cuold entail turmoil
& a told soft office
rolling device rulewheels
age of Alpha Centauri
the sky darkened scripture
skull place where a chase died
negative hued nimbus
deny a mimed crimescene
tintinnitis tested
tars tomorrow's parties

Paths that Cross.

( via / via )

Parapet of Oobleck.

"Best of Surgery Comics"

boulders balanced · that have borne the surge air
a million years · seem like to totter

the king's retinue · routinely tramples

i could never understand · one's reach, another's
same yet given · a fistful or nothing

towers of glass · at their base, beggary

have seen from those eyes · & now wheel
past with my song · turned up high

it was never the landscape

Understanding.

I said they're going to bring back leaded gas but that's not even a joke now.

Why you shouldn't outsource your wit to Grok.

( via / via )

Joy.

"It’s not just publishing. A similar stagnancy has settled in at the big movie studios and record labels. Nobody wants to take a risk—but (as I’ve learned through painful personal experience) that’s often the riskiest move of them all. Live by the formula, and you die by the formula."
- Ted Gioia via @jacobwren.bsky.social

What are the skills you find yourself still using the most from your bartending and serving days?

"Pleasure Trip To The West

My spring dreams are crazy and make no sense,
Climbing the mountain is not easy,
Misty willows by the Great Blue Gate,
Clouds above the Purple Temple dance easy peasy.
I brush away the ice’s light layer.
Carefully pour the rich wine. What a failure
I am, though I prepare a poem for you,
What a failure I am, as the night passes by."

—Li Shangyin via

Sober.

( via / via )

"There is a ton of work being done pursuing the grand goal of inverse design - name some desired properties, and have AI/ML formulate a material that fits those requirements and is actually synthesizable. ." Also: "This is certainly a worthy challenge, and it may well succeed in a lot of systems, but then we may have the added meta-challenge of trying to understand how our tools did that."

"TO ONE UNNAMED II

A misty rain comes blowing with a wind from the east,
And wheels faintly thunder beyond Hibiscus Pool.
...Round the golden-toad lock, incense is creeping;
The jade tiger tells, on its cord, of water being drawn
A great lady once, from behind a screen, favoured a poor youth;
A fairy queen brought a bridal mat once for the ease of a prince and then vanished.
...Must human hearts blossom in spring, like all other flowers?
And of even this bright flame of love, shall there be only ashes?"

—Li Shangyin via

Goat in Snow.

"Even for her it was getting not for-real, as the war-showers still lingering acidly in the old alleyways, curled into her and she too dug the spectrums of thought made visible, leaping up exclaiming from a lonely blanket to see herself sometimes surrounded by the wavering igneous racks of baleful colour: or at gentle moments able to watch bushes and elms erupt in crusty outline singed by the glow of cerebral sundowns, in which climbed and chuckled a fresh unbeaten generation of mammalphibians, toads with sprightly wings and birds of lead and new animals generally that with feral stealth stayed always out of focus." —Barefoot in the Head

"When I was on location in Germany, I asked people how they live with the history, how they carry it. And the answer was always the same: it’s a burden they bear to make sure it never happens again. They carry it so they don’t repeat it. It’s in the architecture. It’s in the memorials. It’s in the education system. It’s not something they got over. It’s something they committed to never looking away from."

( via / via )

"The number of 'violent deaths' in Gaza during the first 16 months of Israel’s genocidal war exceeded 75,000 - far higher than official figures at the time, according to a new paper published in The Lancet Global Health journal." (via antiwar.com)

"In a letter to his sister during winter in 1944, when Berlin was being bombed day and night, he describes a concert by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, with the audience and the musicians huddled in thick coats under a roof filled with holes from British and American bombshells.

Almost until the last stages of the war, when the Soviet Army conquered Berlin in a devastating battle that reduced the city to rubble, the cinemas were full, the dance revues were in full swing, the soccer competition went on, and people visited the zoo and sunbathed on the Wannsee opposite the infamous villa where the logistics of the Holocaust were worked out over glasses of brandy." —Ian Buruma via

If you stuck 6 toothpicks in a gloating potato.

“The Inlaid Zither
Li Shangyin (813-858)

Why should this inlaid zither have
just fifty silken strings?
Each string, each fret reminds me of
one year of my flowerings.
Young Zhuang woke from his dream confused:
was he a butterfly?
Lord Wang in spring gave his heart to
a cuckoo’s murmurings.

The bright moon on the azure sea
stirs tears in the pearl,
The warm sun on the Blue Stone Field
engenders smoke from jade:
How could these feelings, then, become
enduring memory,
Which, at the time, were full, themselves,
of disappointment’s shade?”

—tr Frederick Turner

A game guide for a retro game that never existed.

( via / via )

"If I could pick a superpower itd be the amazing ability to force people to understand the difference between an answer to a specific question and what is statistically probable to be an answer to a specific question."

"Portrait

Broad white cliffs that face the sea,
Feathered spray and glistening loam:
Broad white brow that bends to me,
Bright as the foam.

Elfin smile that, dimpling, plays
At hide and seek with her lips and eyes:
Thistle-down the light wind sprays
Among hovering butterflies,

While far below where sea-birds sweep,
Where the blue sea takes the sky to mate,
The surge is hushed and the smooth sands sleep
And the still depths wait."

—Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan

Street Light.

"LLMs can’t satisfy a desire for proof the way a ghost can’t satisfy a desire for proof." —Rishi Dastidar via

Why anyone would put an old Mattel poster there is anyones guess.

( via / via )

Inversnaid.

"This is the paradox of the reading life. One must be disciplined. One must also be distractible. A definition of a classic might be: the book that makes you say, why on earth did I not read this earlier? But you could not have read it earlier. You were not ready. You had not yet been distracted by precisely the right distraction." —@timesflow.bsky.social via

"Once a user verifies their identity with Persona, the software performs 269 distinct verification checks and scours the internet and government sources for potential matches, such as by matching your face to politically exposed persons (PEPs), and generating risk and similarity scores for each individual. IP addresses, browser fingerprints, device fingerprints, government ID numbers, phone numbers, names, faces, and even selfie backgrounds are analyzed and retained for up to three years." (via @bruces.bsky.social)

"Vale Atque Ave

I shall not hear the wailing and the chants,
I shall not see the smoke’s thin, acrid spire,
Nor hear the long, low throbbing of the drums,
Nor cast one blossom on your funeral pyre.
My feet will not read out the ancient dust
That stirs about Benares’ mystic shrine,
Nor, when your ashes flutter to their rest,
May there attend them any prayer of mine:

Yet shall I hail you in the setting sun,
In every changing glory of the air,
And find you ever in each blade and bloom
That grows on earth. Beauty is everywhere."

—Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan via

Godzilla vs Gigan.

( via / me )

"Volunteers deliver babies at home, in secret, off the books, because mothers fear that if they go to the hospital, they will be abducted."

"Rædwald's Return

'Perhaps the best known supernatural story about Sutton Hoo is Edith Pretty’s claim that she saw an armed warrior standing on top of Mound 1 long before the excavation took place'

After his reign and rule were done, Rædwald the king
Was buried in the bosom of a ship, long and broad.
His treasures and toys, quite a trove, went with him
In his hill on the heath; and here he waited.
Winters passed, some of weal, some of woe; the world changed.
For his distant descendants there dawned a new age
Of men whose minds would seek the majesty
Of fathers half-forgotten in a far-off past.
Then Rædwald rose from his mound. He reached out his spirit,
Called his companions, king’s thanes laid near him:
'Come look on the light of the world again, and let us be seen.'
“To be plundered and pillaged? To have pilfered
What’s left after looting long since
Of much of our gold – goods forever gone?'
'Our rust and our rotting rags?' replied the king.
'Come, cave-ins have crushed the craft-work of old;
winters have worn away what has not dissolved.
Decay of costly things cannot be cured.
But far-flung fame can again be found.
So mighty men’s spirits came out from the mounds
And were seen by the seekers of unworldly sooth.
So to delve in the dust modern diggers began,
and in that ground the great rich grave was found,
and Rædwald’s name was known again, and near and far
men marveled at his majesty. His memory lives.' "

—Karen M.P. Carlson in FGR

An experiment in language change. (Mefi thread)

"Just one common, everyday Greenhouse tornado could rip through that server-farm and scatter NVIDIA silicon all over the landscape. A hurricane flood would turn a Self-Programmed Machine God into mildew. What about Los Angeles wildfires?

How do you insure it?" —@bruces.bsky.social

me: behold, the kaiju wars of the late 21c

"For most of human history, there was no way to look up anything at all." (via Mefi)

( via / via )

Layered Print on Hahnemühle Laid Paper.

"FREE WILL (Palindrome)

I’m all I was.
It is as it is.
A will am I."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

Words are the Diminution of All Things.

"voice's claw-furrow"

rye bread garage bruised
brittle testament
enter cold caverns
of curs'd bumf versts-long
wake warily owl-lit
one cat crying
& if it can't be done
the eclipse held back
Tokyo kaiju-destroyed
because of a prophecy

washing dishes in the dark

Eastney beach, Portsmouth.

( via / via )

Stabat Mater.

"Plano ICE whistle"

flea arena failure
fleered by Baron Spider
stern mutable mourning
to make shades yield cadmium

windows of black warthog
word of toxic locksmith
phone fallen from pocket
unseen footsteps stilbpilled

i slept ropearound snake-proof
as stars grew thick reckoned
above Baja mayhem
borne upon rude moondust

Process shot from a drawing I exhibited last year ✍️.

Fun fact: i wrote M𝑦𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑠 F𝑟𝑜𝑚 F𝑜𝑟𝑔𝑜𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑛 W𝑜𝑟𝑙𝑑𝑠 by taking a 1000-page MS & copying out the sentences i liked, then typed them up, cut apart the slips, & collaged a new text on the floor with scotch tape. ( via )

Latest Wuthering with a glance at all the others. (thx Melanie!)

( via / via )

Displacement.

That time i made three paintings titled 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡ℎ 𝑜𝑓 𝐺𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑙 𝑊𝑜𝑙𝑓𝑒, 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑊𝑜𝑙𝑓 𝑜𝑓 𝐺𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑙 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡ℎ, & 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐺𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑙 𝑜𝑓 𝑊𝑜𝑙𝑓 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡ℎ.

Dilemma.

"Canaveral Carnival"

mid-air demon deadfall
diamond score on timesheet
the bright winter broadcast

brackish taste to basement

Photo collage of details taken from a variety of my embroideries.

( via / via )

Tetramorph.

"inner armchair"

bird beeping · a new rattle
unadorned building · of the haunt site
pale horizon · pull into drivethrough
the station set · to the night before

"He was perhaps most formed by a local woman named Jenny Wilson, who had 'the largest collection in the country of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, browies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery'." (N. B. "...the Caledonian antisyzygy...")

"The cult of Humanity, with its rites of Freedom and Equality, always struck me as a revival of those ancient cults in which gods were like animals or had animal heads."

Fernando Pessoa via @timesflow.bsky.social

"What, you fired everybody who understood software architecture? Good luck with that."

( via / via )

"I have long seen an almost eerie connection between The Wizard of Oz, a 1939 Best Picture nominee, and, oh yes, The Silence of the Lambs, the 1991 Best Picture winner."

"time to have a big glass of red wine and post a series of overly niche hot takes"
—@sarahjeong.bsky.social

Shining a Light on the Black Philosophical Tradition.

"patchouli"

bearing false witness
like raindrop flicker
the void gibbous
in this gorp cincture
sound of tires scraping
its dust high
in the motionless air

"The cafés of San Francisco are full of highly paid tech workers clattering away on their keyboards; if you peer at their screens to get a closer look, you’ll generally find them copying and pasting material from a ChatGPT window.

( me / via )

The almost wordless opening sequence is one of the masterpieces of cinema.

"estuary"

patchstep stitchpop
stark footwork
browse in the briar patch
mothship
velvety wings of wonder
dense flapjack
pouring honey in the dark
it's only funny in the dark
seconds
& peccance
snickers
& flickers
it's only funny in the dark

Anti-Trans National Legal Risk Assessment Map: Feb 2026.

Nobody should read anything less than 50 years old.

"Even doing everything correctly, there's a real possibility that everything I've built with years of effort could be taken away from me."

( via / me )

Lamps New-Lighted.

Hallucination is the new black.

Whirlwind.

"referendum"

precipice prank skidmarks
approved by ghost instinct
the night lawn is lantern'd
with lunatic oracles
caught in the tide cordon
cairn where an age perished

I'm struck by how a character's coolness is often tied to how good they are at video games.

( me / via )

"Unreplug.com was built by one person using AI in a few hours of spare time. One human, one laptop, a few API calls. The AI wrote every blog post. The AI generated every image. The AI designed the marketing strategy, the SEO, the social media plan, the cross-linking structure. The human provided direction, editing, and a credit card." (I knew i shouldn't have gotten rid of my CRC Handbook.)

"a plateful of aporeos"

doommaxxing & mimsy
commercial-framed harshing
all for the lulz evil

aorta-slice vortex
parade-crazy crawldark
crunk government skirmish

These are light pillars caused by city lights shining into freezing air.

"Who can forget No Doubt's big hit 'I'm Just a Holding Facility for a Fetus' "
—@dekkoparship2.bsky.social

Giving middle passage.

( via / via )

Self Portrait As Philosopher.

It wasn't just rhetoric, it was slop-rhetoric.

Baciagaloop.

"a toccata at Baciagaloopi's"

   column of headlights
& the gold tissue awning
   of cold virulence

strength for another go at
the Piper Piper impasses

Artists and Models.

( via / via )

Lessons of Sailor Moon.

"sex trafficking for dummies"

Fillmore air dark orange
eelgrass in the frass lots
my choices placed plot twists
unplayed prior byways
relent, Fillmore limbec
the long spinning songbook
apogee flerd flounder
with flexiloquent pillbug

falling bridge this brillig
abrupt hour prowling
dynamite load lugging
lewd desuetude cheat sheet
house with aura hostage
to heave beyond Tron lines
in this bleak sixth shipwreck
sharpened thorn of turnpike

the shaking void vision
avert naught but sawtooth
serial lurch search party
sample plague sans legwork
to scribble notes neighbor
by news rich in pitch dark
the amber ruse rustling
but wroth with singed mothwings

still we are perched stopwatch
to stuff we would shuffle
the weird play of wanhope
hardly the worst doorstamp
six months one would mutter
among beastly dungheaps
will see justice jumped at
adjust what is busted

Fillmore orange airspace
a fair case of snastethwart
the end of some umgang
arglebargle fireworks
two cents in the swerve feed

Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay.

Who i am when my back is straight.

The Rebel. (1961) ☆

( via / via )

Heart of America.

"Getting shown up in the arena of elite impunity by *the British monarchy* is an incredible 'America at 250!' achievement" —@davelevitan.bsky.social

Place of Slaughter.

"THE JOURNEY (Palindrome)

Dew.
A field in alpine dales.
I rise, laden.
I plan.
Idle, if awed."

—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social

Device.

( via /via )

From Yellowbacks to DAW. (20m video)

Macbethish brine morning
barracuda gulag
all the taillights tally

atoll of vole bombsights
belligerent lintel
flows through frozen oolong

heirloom of rid boxcars
raddleplex cathexis
you & i Macbethish

me & you bewildered

Whistle and I'll Come To You. (via feuilleton)

I'm seeing students using AI for their Literacy Narratives, which is the one thing you'd think they could tell for themselves.

"Poets are haunted by two ideas, neither of which can help them."

( via / via )

The Kiss.

I miss when "grow" was intransitive.

"Clyde Tombaugh confirmed visually after searching the specific area predicted by Elizabeth Williams' complex mathematical models."

"Wednesday's ashes cover Thursday's fire"

what we make of mustered
guesswork amidst tide's edge
those small smoke traces
smack certified roughshod
remnants of the joined road
revocable duckwalk
is doomsday though cherished
dance alone its moly

The BTK serial killer already had a press sec.