This man has never lived in rural Offaly where we’d go 3 towns over, braving even Kilcormac, albeit with the windows rolled all the way up, for a mere glimpse of the most recent Final Destination film. Fool.

del Toro. Probably:

University College Cork will host a talk with Alan Butler, the inaugural Arts Council Digital Artist in Residence at UCC, on Tuesday 20 January at 2.00pm in the Digital Humanities Room, FSB 4.58. www.ucc.ie/en/cacsss/ne... @alanbutler.info @ucc.ie

Superyikes

I in fact did not have the Black and Tans US Tour on my 2026 bingo card.

The point at which I knew I was an absolute loser was the day I got emotional on seeing a Marconigram at Kylemore Abbey.

One drawback of doing research in sonification is the sheer amount of time I have to spend talking about Geiger Counters.

Adobe Creative Cloud is essentially ransomware

We are fast approaching the Jan 16th deadline for submissions to the 3rd Symposium on Digital Art in Ireland in collaboration with Sample Studios at @ucc.ie. The deadline closes this Friday at 5pm. www.ucc.ie/en/dah/news/... @uccresearch.bsky.social

Flock left at least 60 of its people-tracking cameras live streaming and exposed to the open internet. The exposure was initially discovered by YouTuber and technologist @bennjordan.bsky.social. We talk about it. Listen now: youtu.be/tSd0nXolnIs?...

I don't talk technology here as microblogging about tech is like building sand castles one grain of sand at a time. But in 2026 I'm far more interested the coming 6G spec (in 2030??) than with "AI". Whether "AI" is a corporate fad or a new layer of infrastructure comes down to the 6G spec.

I went to fish out that collab album between members of the Coup and RATM from a few years back only to discover that a few years back is actually from 17 years ago....

Bugonia has done nothing to dispel my suspicion that Yorgos peaked at Dogtooth.

Now streamable here www.mixcloud.com/eistcork/for...

Just a reminder that the closing date for submissions to the 3d Symposium on Digital Art in Ireland with Sample-Studios and University College Cork is January 12th 2026: sample-studios.com/call-for-pap...

Who up forgetting they auld acquaintance

another robot highlight for 2025: man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls

Sure. But it’s the 1978 Austin City Limits live version that’s canonical: youtu.be/EznGGYQ-Tv8?...

Isaac Asimov’s “Handbook of Robotics” imagined simple rules for machine morality. But reality is a maze of contradictions, biases, and blind spots.

How is entirety of Spotify only 300TB? The bitrates here must be absolutely abysmal.

www.404media.co/why-i-quit-s... Excellent inspiration for your New Year's resolutions

In the 1960s, a group of New Jersey teenagers helped make computing personal... (An excerpt from my new book in IEEE Spectrum) spectrum.ieee.org/teenage-hack... #HistSci #computing #History 🗃️

Blade Runner is a Christmas film, change my mind.

This sounds great! Particularly delighted with the degree to which space science, and NASA in particular, have embraced sonification as a research tool as well as an outreach vehicle over the last 15 years.

Well the good news is I've hit my word count for this current article. The bad news is that I'm only about 60% done writing it.

are you disgruntled by the current safety evaluation landscape? curious about what conceptual clarity, methodological soundness and rigour in AI evaluation might look like? if so, consider coming to dublin and doing a phd with me apply here: aial.ie/hiring/phd-a...

Doesn’t help that a lot of ML pioneers are also pushing slop-brained, hyper-fascist singulatariansim though

Just got asked for my student card while buying breakfast. Nice. Those hair-plugs were worth the investment.

Somebody scraped & shared every song on Spotify, with metadata — a boon for research into music and algorithms, but also, inevitably, what the training data is going to be for every AI music company in 2026. annas-archive.li/blog/backing...

Just found my contact information being sold on some AI platform that automates the process of applying for PhDs and postdocs. Against my will obviously. And if you're reading this there's a good chance you're on there too: www.applykite.com/professors/s...

This paper is now out in the proceedings of the 6th IEEE Internet of Sounds Symposium. It presents a prototype system for soil moisture monitoring to support more sustainable water management practices, through sonification: doi.org/10.1109/IS264627.2025.11284675

Michael C. Rockefeller got shipwrecked in 1963, washed up on an island, and was promptly eaten by cannibals.

'the heart is sick with hoping and hoping before books reach Ireland' Maria Edgeworth in 1816 Publication day for @universitypress.cambridge.org Irish Romanticism was yesterday but no sign of any books in Cork yet! www.cambridge.org/core/books/i...

The call for the 2026 Internet of Sounds symposium is live and we’re inviting work for the 1st IEEE International Workshop on Sonification for the IoS. Please do get involved: internetofsounds2026.ieee-internetofsounds.org/satellite-ev... #sonification #internetofsounds #IoS #enginnering

Very nice!

Very excited to welcome Alan Butler (@alanbutler.info) as the first Arts Council Digital Artist in Residence here at Digital Humanities in @ucc.ie and delighted that he has chosen to share some of his practice with us: www.ucc.ie/en/dah/news/... @uccresearch.bsky.social

Unexpected side effect of the LLM proliferation is that my expectations of people have gone through the roof. If something looks like it could have been done by AI, a piece of writing, music etc., even if it was made a person, I still now tend to loose all interest very quickly.

I'm just realising, as I attempt to share out the call for our upcoming Book and Symposium on Digital Art in Ireland (w/Sample Studios) that notable exceptions aside (Beta, Concept Null etc.). We're seriously lacking the mechanisms to discuss and share digital art in Ireland. But here's the links:

ActionScript 😢

I’m busy unfortunately but someone else should apply for this.

Hi all. We’ve got two calls open. A new book on Irish Digital Art edited by, McCarthy, Yip & myself: www.blackwaterpublishing.com/digital-art-... And calls for the 3rd Symposium on Digital Art in Ireland: www.ucc.ie/en/dah/news/... #irishart #newmedia #mediaart #opencall #digitalart

Two calls for people working in and/or researching #digitalart. Book on Irish digital art edited by @stephenroddy.bsky.social, McCarthy & Yip: www.blackwaterpublishing.com/digital-art-... 3rd Symposium on Digital Art in Ireland: www.ucc.ie/en/dah/news/... #irishart #newmedia #mediaart #AIart #AI

Pre-print of our @leonardoisast.bsky.social paper on the sonification of synthetic virology data with colleagues at the Molecular Virology Diagnostic and Research Laboratory @ucc.ie and @apcmicrobiomeirel.bsky.social is up on MUSE: muse.jhu.edu/article/9763... @uccresearch.bsky.social

I am once again listening to Sea Power Disco Elysium Soundtrack on a Sunday evening.

Thinking of adding an additional hobby, alongside buying books, of reading books.

If anyone is interested 'Sonic Pasts: acoustical heritage and historical soundscapes' is available through @routledgebooks.bsky.social at a discounted price #Soundscapes #Acoustics #Heritage www.routledge.com/Sonic-Pasts-...

Thanks for listening. Hope you had a nice rest. We'll be back on December 24th with a sleighful of drone. Tonight's lullabies:

!!!

At Richard Dawson tonight and it was nice to be reminded that the electric guitar is in fact: electric.

"Thing X is actually thing Y" papers are the worst. Particularly egregious where Y is a makey-uppy fantasy idea (e.g. a time machine etc.). Bonus points when X = Y purely on the basis of semantics, and brain-winner of the year award if thinking of X as Y changes absolutely nothing in the world.