Bots minus Twitter

I turned off the Twitter versions of my fleet of bots last week, and today I went through their various home pages and took out the Twitter timelines - which seem to have stopped working anyway - and replaced them with embedded timelines from their Mastodon incarnations, using Emfed, which was really …

more ...

Degraded

that mock-Renaissance engraving of a man looking under the edge of the sky to peer at the marvellous wheels of the cosmos

When I was very young, perhaps four or five, I can remember imagining that the world was a flat slab of rock, and that the sky was a hemispherical dome suspended over it, and which somehow always managed to be centered on our car as it drove over the flat …

more ...

Eternal September or Dry July

The girl explaining something to a guy meme with text: ITS CALLED MASTODON AND ITS LIKE IF TWITTER WAS A BUNCH OF MINECRAFT SERVERS BUT THEYRE ALL CONNECTED WITH PORTALS BETWEEN THEM

It's been good to see people from Twitter coming onto the Fediverse, or reviving the accounts which they started in 2018, but I'm also getting worn out. Though not nearly as worn out as the admins and moderators, who have been doing an amazing job.

Hugh's essay captures a lot …

more ...

No One is Talking About This

No One is Talking About This, London: Bloomsbury, 2021

Patricia Lockwood

I finished this in a couple of days and it was funny and touching—people probably think of Lockwood as a Twitter phenomenon but she'd have been a good writer no matter what platform she'd made her own. Mostly …

more ...





Neuralgae Updated

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 …

more ...

A Mighty Host

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 …

more ...