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?
"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."
"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
"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.
A game guide for a retro game that never existed.
"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
"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.
"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
"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
"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)
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
"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!)
That time i made three paintings titled 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡ℎ 𝑜𝑓 𝐺𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑙 𝑊𝑜𝑙𝑓𝑒, 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑊𝑜𝑙𝑓 𝑜𝑓 𝐺𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑙 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡ℎ, & 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐺𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑙 𝑜𝑓 𝑊𝑜𝑙𝑓 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡ℎ.
"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.
"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."
"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 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.
Hallucination is the new black.
"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.
"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
"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) ☆
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."
I miss when "grow" was intransitive.
"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.
Fun German political parade floats.
"Ramadan a damar"
flintknapping
at the gnarled flerd
stray hairs shade
the harg builder
derelict
unprojects lurk
whose leap word
awaits heeding
my own dust
on files argues
no harg here
hovers but time's
Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians.
"Popular culture’s designed by a highly-trained popular culture elite"
- Momus, The Philosophy of Momus via @jacobwren.bsky.social
"when you see the discourse of the day unfolding but you can't figure out the source so it's like dark matter that can only be observed by its effect on its surroundings" —@tomtomorrow.bsky.social
"harvest moon
over Gold Mountain Diner --
a migrant and I
eat and chat around the edges
of our lost dreams"
—Chen-ou Liu
Onions in Moonlight: TSA Members' Anthology, 2025 via @evecastle.bsky.social
"P.S.
I close my eyes and see
a seagull in the desert,
high, against unbearably blue sky.
There is hope in the past.
I am writing to you
all the time, I am writing
with both hands,
day and night."
—Franz Wright via @zeeshanpathan.bsky.social
"My favourite fact about Iceland is that we have many, many crime writers but only one forensic pathologist, and he was so busy answering all of their questions that he decided to have a small seminar for writers to get some peace.
It immediately sold out so he had another one that also sold out." —@hildur.bsky.social
Ken Paxton and the First Amendment.
They raided the jailed children to steal their letters.
"RFK looks like a Joseph Beuys sculpture of Ted Kennedy." —@stardaddy.bsky.social
L'Arc de Triomphe, Winter Morning, Early 20th Century.
"great reptile skytrain"
pale saffron the lean-to
train is crossing shadowed
fadge some likely rescue
snowcapped & face Rushmore
pale saffron the lean-to
Nothing going on in that sloppy rubble but the trümmerfrauen.
"Is Haidilao discriminating against doll owners?"
"Charybdis & Charybdis"
polychrome nightmare
retrieving a word
unthought of for decades
a slender parting
the maze grows denser with echoes
A hillside near Gaucin, Andalucia.
The definition of "person" has changed so many times in my lifetime it's not funny.
"I felt a little sick watching AI Christmas commercials too, but I'm sick of hearing every single thing produced using AI dismissed as 'AI slop,' as if anything that uses AI at all is just as bad as that video of Trump dumping on protesters from his little poopy-jet." (Mefi thread) --Also: "This is Star Trek tech that fell in our laps at just about the worst possible moment, when our leaders are lunatics who are building concentration camps for brown people."
"Umm Erak Palimpsest" is the name of my next band.
"NINETEEN SIXTY-NINE (Aelindrome in 1969)
Near the moodless heavens.
Landless, hear the Moon.
1969691 =
[N]1[ear the moo]9[dless h]6[eavens.
Lan]9[dless, h]6[ear the Moo]9[n]1."
—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
