Yesterday I had the great pleasure of inviting chef Tanorria Askew @tanorriastable to speak to my American Food class about her appearance on Master Chef, her work as a chef, cookbook author, media personality, and entrepreneur. Follow her @tanorriastable.bsky.social Thanks Flute Mama!

Just a few photos from our Ukrainian Village Voices performance at the UN last night!

Another Christmas Folklore post is on the blog (link in bio) This media query asked about the tradition of the Christmas Spider. Read more for this Ukrainian/Polish tradition. ciderwithmaria.com/2024/11/29/t...

Don't miss out on our free lunchtime lecture next Tuesday & hear about the Phonogrammarchiv, one of the world's first #sound #archives. Hear audio samples & learn about early recording techniques, phonographic field research & its Historical Collections! www.sal.org.uk/event/vienna...

The greatest promise of the current #genAI hype cycle - intellectual labor saving - is clearly false. Experimenting with it can quickly turn into hours of ‘tweaking’ and refining. It’s a time suck. I wonder if it’s addictive. Not to mention of course that many models are *built on* theft.

and I would add, ethical on the grounds that the tools may be poisoning data for the future. It’s not hard to imagine a situation in the near future where some catalogues have been useless because so diluted by AI hallucination

I don’t think fwiw that it’s impossible to have a conversation about what these tools are already good at (such as transcription, record linkage, process automation), but that conversation has to begin with: is this ethical (in terms of IP, the environment, human exploitation by these companies)

“Christmas Mushrooms? A Visual Motif?” Is a quick and dirty dive into some folklore musings on this topic. Definitely incomplete and needing some better references. So please help me improve it! ciderwithmaria.com/2024/11/25/c...

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