Author: PGR
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an entire industry to cater to your whimsical myopia
Ron Horning has been on what I suspect was a much needed holiday, but—delightfully, but perhaps also tragically?—Horning clearly didn’t get much of a holiday from being Horning. But then, of who among us could it ever be said that &c &c? Anyway, the first half of Horning’s latest reminded me of thoughts I had…
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18JUL23 / accessions
The accessions department is off visiting a monastery today, so the following report has been prepared in advance. Errors and omissions &c &c. Classic goth seems to be having its, ah, moment in the sun right now. The Cathi Unsworth has some good reviews, and promises to be rather better edited than John Robb’s recent…
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being a nerd has always meant being a machine for liking things
Via yer man Jay Springett, a gloriously excoriating piece of writing by Sam Kriss. After quoting a Warhol interview snippet which ends with Andy agreeing with the interviewer that Pop Art is all about “liking things”, and that liking things is being like a machine, “because you do the same thing every time. You do…
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Coming to terms with learning to listen: Adam Soto’s This Weightless World
On New Year’s Day 2012, the SETI people finally receive an incontrovertibly extraterrestrial signal, which they announce in a hastily convened web-broadcast which, true to the time, much of the world does its best to watch despite the bandwidth issues. As one might expect, the enormity of this interjection into the rolling drama of human…
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if we can honestly acknowledge the conditions, then maybe we can do something better
A couple of days back, a listserv that I’m signed up to delivered the first example of a thing I’d heard whsipers of from others: an invitation to a seminar aimed at teaching academics how to use the new crop of LLMs to make the writing of grant applications more “efficient”. This caused me to…