The frivolous "ends" of formal schooling, as John Milton perceived in a pamphlet of 1644 addressed to Samuel Hartlib: • Divinity • Law • State Affairs • dolce far niente #outcomes

I really like the color and textures of this photo! #278 taken 7:12 pm #photography #art #abstract #abalone

@ayjay.bsky.social ——————— Enjoyed your "biography" of Book of Common Prayer Looking forward to your "biography" of Paradise Lost ——————— oopsie alert to @princetonupress.bsky.social

“A Texas Still Life in Black and White” Near Comanche, TX #Scape #ClassicMono

"whether caving is not endemic to every facet of the academic ecosystem" ... PS : this is not caving as in spelunking #dorkakademia

Happenstance know-nothing reading of Fake Accounts / Lauren Oyler – 2021 ——— Expecting jaded first-person narrator to go subversive and to one-up gauzy Felix after his preclusionary pop-off ——— Surprised to watch narrator spiral off into trad & agentless oyly ponder of self-subjection ——— #booksky

I've been testing the accuracy of LLMs in transcribing printed and handwritten historical texts stored as images. I put together a corpus of 400 pages from the Library of Congress. Current leader is GPT4.1-mini, which at 11 cents per 1K pages, is also the cheapest option. github.com/nealcaren/In...

Once upon a time it was somebody's home. #ArtYear #Artshow #Photography #iphonephotography #PhotographersUnited #PhotographersofBluesky #home #BlueSkyArtShow #NewMexico #GhostTown

"What we need now is a history of collapse for the 99 per cent" —————————— aeon.co/essays/the-g...

My review of Why Religion Went Obsolete (2025) ————————————————— www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

Fun to see my experiential recollection of the November 2024 turn to Bluesky quantified ————— doi.org/10.1016/j.jo...

New this morning, a Comment I contributed to Nature Computational Science on the interaction between large language models and the humanities. 🧪 🤖 #MLSky rdcu.be/etk07 The link above will be open-access for a month — plus, I'll reply to this post with a link to a permanently open preprint. +

Pungent page on persuasion from Richard Russo way back in 1997 #booksky

"And since the only things that might be helpful are the things that cannot be said, I am without a strategy for the present circumstance." William Henry Devereaux Jr (as his creative writing seminar goes off the rails) Chapter 9 of Straight Man / Richard Russo - 1997 #collegenovel #booksky

In the dialectic of the academy the supplicant purchaser is seen to entwine with the supplicant purveyor at the vanishing point of symbiotic stasis

Ever more strongly suspecting how spring 2025 will go down in my personal history as the moment where I regularly consider what various AIs have to say about new questions arising for this librarian towards the end of a lifetime spent inside the question business www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

… many artists say they are particularly concerned about AI’s ability to mimic certain styles, which artists have honed for years … I howned mymesis to the paint of seaming so scharp that I came to byleave I was sum original scissors-pasty romantiac #whartz www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-ne...

… I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit … On Writing / Stephen King (born in 1947) #booksky

… The ‘easy’ way to go in academia today is to focus on simple(r) things – do what everyone can do, follow the steps of the ones who came before you, do some little, simplistic research that can be considered ‘just good enough’ to be ‘scientific’. … aeon.co/essays/what-...

If you have a taste for the ridiculous sublime of anti-statist satire hang out with Wang astrapublishinghouse.com/product/gold... #booksky

Shadow Ticket 384 pages 7 Oct 2025 lithub.com/thomas-pynch...

L'origine du mal (2022) ... a Ripleyesque poser worms her toxic way into a fractured sort-of family that dwells in an isolated picturesque villa ... and sometimes she looks a lot like ... Donna Tartt ... #filmsky #moviesky #cinema 🎬

How angels fly in the 21st century === aeon.co/essays/why-p...

Cat's Eye Nebula

Funny how « oneiric » is so not a « dreamy » word === Έλληνες ≠ βάρβαροι

Going forward my eye is going to be peeled for Gorton aresluna.org/the-hardest-...

If I had a pet pig I'd name it «Generis» so I could call it by name ... Sooey! Generis

"Jane Austen's Bookshelf" spotlights eight women writers, largely lost to history, who influenced the English novelist.

What tortures a snowman? Deficiency of tin Turns a snowman into an owman #happeningnow

Web site now up for new reference book ——————————————————— Catalogue of Donna Tartt Phenomena 999+ Sources Discovered & Described ——————————————————— Release projected for later 2025 medium.com/@tartt-abc/t... #booksky #writingcommunity #selfpub #indie

Isn't sublime always supernatural? Something wizened this way comes ...

Biggest laugh of the year so far www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Cannily within the confines David Lynch did things his own way === www.theguardian.com/film/2025/ja...

Just set a DNF record maybe Creation Lake / Rachel Kushner ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Looking forward to the anarchists Can't get past the Neanderthals ————————— Such bad writing ————————— p11 big ¶ on advantages of "the room I'd chosen" p16 "I chose my room for its strategic view"

While I do not follow this parsing in the details it does give me a useful feel for the architectonics hackernoon.com/a-peek-into-...

Some have noted the commotion under the coffin (or bier in more correct terms 😉) This is the funeral of a fox - except the fox is still alive and fleeing his own funeral with a chicken in his jaws!

A handful of non-random books do not a library make === [ word misuse alert ] === Can you take a selfie without help? === www.thenation.com/article/soci...

My only visitor today was this character. They flew in to perch on a stanchion rail for a short rest, and I got a quick snapshot before it flew away.

febrile projector inspiration of the moment ... um ... create a bot system call it – KUDZU™ – aieee ! or: be enslaved by another's wherefore? I will not reason & compare

Any Yewessir whose teens & twenties got wrecked by the protracted Vietnam War knows who the Establishment & the System are ——————————————————————— www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

A skim through 286 posts of Luigi Mangione up on TwiX < @PepMangione > === Long string at the old end all on 14 Apr 2016 "Random Tweet" w 5/6-digit no === Then 8 June 2021 Bertrand Russell quotation "Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric"

File under: Competing Extras Offstage Rites d'hiver Opposite of getaway Camera osculum

‪ Human extraction of essay epitome follows: === AI synthesises sources into a flat monotone. ChatGPT describes its voice as trained to answer in a neutral and clear tone. The point of the platform is to sound like no one. === aeon.co/essays/when-...

My end of the month newsletter post covers the surrealism exhibit at Centre Pompidou (especially automatic and occult bits), and then the creative AI roundup of links, articles, and the kitchen sink. Plus an unloved poem. open.substack.com/pub/arnicas/...

graffiti on tree === along Kingsway in Vancouver BC === not painted by me