The news is out and so is the Call for Volume 5 of the Electronic Literature Collection. Thanks to an army of translators it's available in a bunch of languages 🎉 Questions: contact @zachwhalen.bsky.social @videlais.bsky.social Dani Spinosa or me @ elcvol5 [at] gmail [dot] com Please share widely!

I am thrilled to announce the opening of the Call for Submissions for Electronic Literature Volume 5. eliterature.github.io/elc5-info/ I am serving along with @zachwhalen.bsky.social, @elikaortega.bsky.social, and Dani Spinosa. This call launches with translations in 12+ languages!

This is a good one...

It's beginning to look a lot like figmas

I want to try using Blue Sky more consistently, so I will use this to report that I tried a "Picklerita Slush" from Sonic. I have mixed feelings.

I'm part of the august team tasked with editing the FIFTH volume of the Electronic Literature Collection (w/@videlais.bsky.social @zachwhalen.bsky.social and others not on Bsky). We're hoping to reach as far as possible beyond the historic contours of the ELO. Ping me or follow the link to the form.

Hello BlueSky, maybe you can help me with something. I'm trying to find examples of personal websites that are set up "link in bio" style but on a personal domain. Like what you get on a Link Tree page but self-hosted. Do you have a personal website like this, or do you know someone who does?

Binding Media. Hybrid Print-Digital Literature from across the Americas is officially out today from @stanfordpress.bsky.social! 🎉 If you’re interested in publishing, book history, cultural hybridity, media archaeology, and digital literature, you might like the book! A not so short thread 1/

The @eliterature.bsky.social #MLA26 session call focuses on "Open Source Humanities in the Age of AI" and using digital humanities and electronic literature as tools for building critical AI literacy outside of mainstream and edtech platforms. Call here: mla.confex.com/mla/2026/web...

I've now released the generation code, origin text, bonus materials, and 10,000 newly generated copies of Subcutanean, my queer horror novel where each copy is unique (as I promised back in 2020 that I'd do five years after release). Details and links here: subcutanean.textories.com/source-relea...

I really like the idea of Pixelfed, and I briefly got @crookedcosmos.bsky.social posting there. But now there's a bug in the API that prevents me from uploading images. The API has a lot of good features, in theory, but the documentation is spotty at best.

@samplereality.bsky.social In your talk the other day, you discussed running LlaVa on a laptop to generate alt text. Did you have to use Ollama (or something similar) for running LLMs locally?

Just 2 days left to submit to #ELO25, our in-person conference in Toronto and Waterloo. eliterature.org/2024/11/cfp-...

The panel. Photo credit: Kathi Inman Berens

It looks like my solar-powered raspberry pi kept running all night

I didn't post about it while there, but now that I'm heading out from #MLA25 (my flight is earlier than I realized), just want to say it was a great time! It was so good to learn things, connect with friends, and meet new people.

I am pleased to share that one of my favorite bots from that other place is now available on Blue Sky. It posts pixelsorted images of outer space, with a few upgrades for this version: - alt text has info and credits for the base image - it is running on a solar-powered Raspberry Pi

Maybe this was a "you just had to be there" situation, but I just had a pretty funny AI interaction. I asked Copilot to help me create a self-contained system to generate alt text for images. It suggested an image classifier for labeling, and then prompting GPT-2 to make alt text from those labels

Taper #13 : Superstitions (the Fall 2024 issue) is out! taper.badquar.to/13/ A gift for you all from author/programmers and editors, whether you celebrate Christmas, Chanukah, both or neither. The 29 works are wide-ranging engagements with language and computation, and all are free software.

With the release of the latest issue of Taper, I am please to share my contribution, "powers of belief," which among other things is an homage to Emmett Williams' "13 Variations". (Note: the poem is interactive, but clicking too quickly can crash your browser.) taper.badquar.to/13/powers_of...

@samplereality.bsky.social It looks like the film adaption of Station 51000 (@ _LostBuoy_) is going to be a 17,776 crossover! m.imdb.com/title/tt2137...

I just want to give a quick shout out to WikiEdu (@wikieducation.bsky.social) and thank them for assembling such a useful set of materials to help students learn how to contribute to Wikipedia! The training is well-scaffolded, and the dashboard tools made it easy for me to keep track of everything.

Yesterday, I was looking for things to delete so I could make some more room on my hard drive, and I discovered a 28GB Audicity file on my Desktop that I have no recollection of. This file: - has a single track that's over 22 hours long - is named "maybe.aup3" - was created on October 31, 2022

I am about half-way through The Silmarillion, and while I actually don't hate Rings of Power per se, I think the story of Luthien and Beren would have made a great mini series.

Twitter had tweets, Mastodon has toots (lol), X has x's (seriously -- I had to look it up), and Bluesky posts are supposed to be called "skeets." Really? Why not "bleats"?

Hello, new followers.

This is the best aurura picture I could get here in Virginia. I know mine isn't the greatest photo, but it is just really nice to see people from all over the world sharing their experience and looking up together.

Bop Spotter is a solar-powered project passively identifying music overheard in public. Its creator, Riley Walz, calls it cultural surveillance: "It's not about catching criminals; it's about catching vibes." walzr.com/bop-spotter

There is a website I am trying to find, but I can't remember the name/author. Maybe someone here can help? It was a of visualization of choose your own adventure style books highlighting the different choices and endings. It has a dark visual theme, with arcs connecting pages. Sound familiar?

ELO is delighted to announce the addition of three new Board Members: Lyle Skains, Shanmugapriya T, and Zach Whalen. Each will contribute an extensive set of skills, expertise, and creativity to the all-volunteer board. @zachwhalen.bsky.social eliterature.org/2024/09/elo-...

I'm a fan of casual foraging whenever I am in the woods but have avoided mushrooms as not worth the risk. My phone identified these beauties as the edible Eastern Cauliflower, so I took one home, cooked and ate it. It was good! (And no ill effecfs 12+ hours later.)

About a month ago, I coded a digital poem / tool, intending to submit to Taper. My idea worked, but I wasn't able to fit that idea into Taper's 2KB constraint. So instead, I am simply sharing it now for you to enjoy! I call it "The Menard-O-Tron": zachwhalen.net/pg/menard-o-...

I admire this tree's attitude ...

FYI "disk storage" can also mean "a place to store your extra disks".

CoPilot commercial: THEY say you can't ... ... MAKE your movie ... ... CODE your game ... ... COMPLETE your degree ... ... DESIGN your logo ... .. well WE don't think you can EITHER because our COMPUTER can do it FOR you.

Every time I see pictures of someone wearing the Apple Vision Pro, I am reminded of the Cinco Face Time Party Snoozer. www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg2U...

I can't explain why I had a two-year old file named "patrick_screams.txt" on my phone, but it's making me nostalgic for an earlier era of neural network text generators.

My panel at MLA is this Friday at 5:00. Join us for a promising conversation on electronic literature and how it contributes to our understanding of AI and creativity.

Hey! Check out the latest issue of Taper, "an online literary magazine for small computational pieces" that includes a digital poem by me called "beauty and grace": taper.badquar.to/11/

I'm not really a fan of chatGPT, but I asked it to describe my class in the style of Werner Herzog. It's not bad:

Here is the recent GOP Presidential Debate, minus the words: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsU1...

Did you know that there is a color named "AuroMetalSaurus" with a hex value #6E7F80, #677E7A, or #69857E depending on which website you look at? Did you also know it is VERY DIFFICULT to determine WHY there is a color named "AuroMetalSaurus"?

I just started the audiobook for Taylor Lorenz's Extremely Online. It seems good so far, but I can't stop thinking about the narrator pronouncing "ASCII" like "A-S-C 2".

One of the joys / challenges of working on a book on computational literature is that I find lots of super interesting things that don't quite fit but that I still want to tell people about. For example, Liam O'Gallagher's The Blue Planet Notebooks (1972): www.zachwhalen.net/posts/notes-...

Evidently, the forests of this island off the coast of Estonia are haunted by cute, two-dimensional sprites of some sort: www.google.com/maps/@58.386...

The new grease gun I just purchased is recommended for "steamboat"

In case anyone is curious, chatGPT is still struggling with ASCII art:

Earlier this week, I had an opportunity to spend time at the University of Delaware's Special Collections library. Here are a few snapshots of some favorite discoveries...

Back on September 1 and 2, I spent two days hiking in the Shenandoah backcountry, covering about 50 miles. I wrote about the experience in a blog post where I also manage to touch on hyponatremia, settler colonialism, and AI's imbrication with fascism. www.zachwhalen.net/posts/a-tria...