Fedivision is an annual song contest held around the same time as Eurovision on the Fediverse. I entered an instrumental in 2022 but this year I wanted to actually write a song with lyrics and vocals. I've tried songwriting many times over the years but have always gotten too shy …

Books

• Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir
• The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
• Boswell's Life of Johnson
• In Search of Lost Time: The Way By Swann's, Marcel Proust, tr Lydia Davis
• The Chronicles of Amber, Roger Zelazny
• Letters from Amherst, Samuel R Delany

I read …

Last year was a really big one for me - I changed jobs and institutions just before the end of 2022, and was lucky enough to become a group lead in the new team in May. It's been challenging but really exciting, I feel like I'm getting a lot more out …

One of the nice things about the influx of Twitter users to Mastodon has been peoples' reaction when they find out that most of my bots are on the Fediverse, too. Even though they are still posting on Twitter, I've updated bots.mikelynch.org so that the front-page links go …

I didn't have as much time as I usually do for National Novel Generating Month, but I think the less time I spend on it, the better the results. I started out with a plan to do a complex, procedurally-generated parody of Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili but only got as far …

Thinking about yesterday's post and whether it really went anywhere, and whether the same criticism I levelled at the waffly IT blog post might be levelled at my own writing here, which doesn't need to come up to any real standards of coherence or clarity. That's what editors are for …

Setting aside the question of whether LaMDA is sentient, or whether the Turing Test is valid, or whether general AI is possible or likely—there are a lot very strongly held opinions on the matter out there if you want to go looking for them—I've been thinking about what …

I used to do a Bloomsday blog post every year until last year, which was the first time I forgot to commemorate the day in any way for as long as I could remember, and I almost forgot this year as well. Maybe the pandemic shook something loose. It's not …

After skipping it last year (I did NaNoWriMo instead) I decided that I missed doing National Novel Generating Month and thought I'd do something relatively simple, based on Tom Phillips' A Humument, which I recently read for the first time. Phillips' project was created by drawing over the pages of …

A fun quality of Mastodon - a social communication platform I hang out on a bit too much - is that individual instantiations can fork its basic form and add odd twists which suit just that community. Oulipo.social notoriously bans that fifth Latin glyph which is most common in many linguistic …