Gedankōans - a Twitter sequence from a few years ago which I finally got around to publishing as a collection.

I've got two short articles in MATERIALITY: FAKE, now online at Pinknantucket Press:

An uncanny valley in reverse is a brief illustrated attempt to explain the computational underpinning of deepdreams for a lay audience.

Vermiculation, on the use of fake rustic textures in classical architecture and its colonial domestic descendants …

If you don’t like the state (read: if you don’t like paying taxes or welfare) its backing of money will seem monstrous to you. Returing to a real physical substance as a store of value is politically infeasible because we know what the banking system was like in …

Being and Time New York: Harper & Row, 1962

Martin Heidegger (tr John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson)

I did that thing again, where my mood disorder kicks in and I read an interminably long and difficult work of philosophy. In my defence, if I’d read Being and Time when I …

I made a subdomain for my Twitter bots, with a page of info and credits about each of them: bots.mikelynch.org

I made a new bot, @GLOSSATORY, by training a recurrent neural network on a very long list of word definitions from WordNet. The results are quite weird and entertaining if you like this sort of thing:

Tweets by @glossatory

MWHALE IN THE WHALE AND BERED OF THE WHALE IN THE WHALE.

"The whale seemed the ship had been the side of the stranger of the ship would be seen the artain in the sea, and the whale was the ship was a sudden and sounding and head of the …

I've updated the algorithm behind neuralgae. It's still the same basic principle: render a deepdraw image based on some random categories, feed the results back through the classifier, and then repeat with the new categories. But the draw part of the cycle now uses the weights from the classification stage …

In 2013 I wrote and published an eighty-one-verse poem in Spenserian stanzas on FSVO. It started as an affectionate parody of the works of writers like Erasmus Darwin, who in the eighteenth century enthusiastically boosted the natural sciences in poems which are now long unread. It grew into something a …

As an exercise in Haskell, I wrote a monad which threads random-number generation state through a context-free grammar, allowing the creation of arbitrary yet valid sentences. This was kind of clever.

Then I used it to generate a series of descriptions of bands of warriors along the lines of Homer's …