Mark Sample

Getting dark indeed

that’s hilarious!

Times New Resistance - a free font that looks like Times Roman, except it autocorrects certain phrases. Type "Trump" and it autocorrects to "Donald Trump is a felon." About three dozen other corrections in there as well. Perfect for installing on your MAGA uncle's laptop.

I made a thing. It is good. You can't see it yet.

a man wearing glasses is making a funny face and looking at the camera . Alt: a man wearing glasses is making a funny face and looking at the camera .

reading all the dismissals of AI slop while also reading dan brown's latest novel

I'm pivoting to text

You'd think books would be the one thing the owner of Amazon would see the value of.

Wait, never mind. We're talking about Bezos.

Remember: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

The venerable annual Interactive Fiction Competition @ifcomp.org just announced its rules on generative AI for the 2026 competition. Essentially no player-facing text or assets may be created with AI. https://blog.ifcomp.org/post/807273791356010496/ifcomp-2026-generative-ai-policy-update

The most I’ve ever seen here since I moved down in 2002!

You don't want to hear the names of 5 classes I took as an undergrad. Depressingly boring. Which is why, I guess, the courses I teach now have names like "Death in the Digital Age," "Monsters," or "Hacking, Remixing, and Design."

Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art To create a novel or a painting, an artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence.

For Aesthetics, there's this Ted Chiang piece. Definitely provoked a good class discussion. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

What do you love when you fall for AI? Inside the surprisingly meaningful, unexpectedly heartbreaking, and deeply confusing reality of AI relationships.

More on the journalistic side of things, but I've used these two pieces when teaching about AI & intimacy:

www.theverge.com/c/24300623/a...

www.nytimes.com/2025/01/15/t...

Ironically, "Freedom Government" is probably how they see themselves right now. Anyway, glad to see the article out!

I've never tried that but should investigate...

And oh, while Infocom is on my mind...don't forget you can follow @youarecarrying.bsky.social to see random room descriptions from all the infocom games. And reply 'i' to the bot to see your inventory

i

Zarf's Visible Zorker was so cool, glad to see he's giving ALL the Infocom games the same treatment. Support his new Patreon if you can for this non-trivial media archaeological work!

The world is falling apart, but 2026 is the year I finally get my use of Obsidian to stick.

Stop supporting ed tech or predatory platforms like academia dot edu. Start supporting community-led initiatives like Knowledge Commons (Humanities Commons), built by academics *for* academics.

Just changed that setting

Happy to have some moral clarity at the head of my union these days.

Join AAUP. Your dues pay for these legal victories we keep wrapping up and these trainings that have taught a thousand new organizers how to do the work.

The answer is No

hcommons.social hcommons.social is a microblogging network supporting scholars and practitioners across the humanities and around the world.

Hi friends. I haven’t been around here much and intend to be around here even less going foreward. Mastodon is far from perfect, but if you’re looking for a scholar-run space that promises not to blue-check fascists, we’d love to see you at hcommons.social.

If GRRM finishes The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring, awesome! Great! If not, A Song of Ice and Fire joins the crowded ranks of other heralded unfinished works. Again, that's life! (And death!) ((And life!))

Either way, fans, don't be jerks. The world does not exist to fulfill your demands.

If you've read A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, & etc. and enjoyed them, awesome! Great! Hopefully you paid for them or legitimately borrowed them from a library. Your exchange between yourself and GRRM is complete. Maybe there'll be future exchanges, maybe there won't. That's life!

My modest and unoriginal contribution to whatever GRRM discourse has been stirred up the past few days is this: creators don't owe their fans jack.

Oh, yeah, this is it. King wrote an entire novel about the pathology of fans demanding their favorite writer cater to their readerly whims. It was called Misery.

Then the post used the analogy of Stephen King's The Green Mile, which was released serially. Once King published the first 4 volumes, he was obligated to his readers to publish the final 2.

Hold on, I think Stephen King has something to say about this topic. Lemme see...

Saw someone here arguing that George R.R. Martin owes it to his fans to finish his Song of Ice and Fire series.

Once you start something, the post argued, you just can't leave fans hanging. 🧵