Mark Sample

TITAA #73: Animated Sprites After Eating Nano Banana Pro - MJ Style Creator - "Simple" Game Design - CW Benchmarks - Mgrep - Sprite Animation

Weekend post has animating sprites and Midjourney styles, web arty proc gen and fun ( @samplereality.bsky.social's great 1 Million Random Acts, for instance), game article links, some narrative AI papers (new creative writing bench, couple on style), infovis/ds. arnicas.substack.com/p/titaa-73-a...

every single report is found poetry

One of the many problems with LLMs is that they obscure just how much found text written by humans is out there in the wild, raw text veined with indelible traces of authentic human experience. Like these UFO sightings, as collected by ufologists. (Yes, I made a bot.)

Unfortunately

Trump's social media video garners pushback from Arabs and Muslims in U.S. and Gaza In a seemingly AI-generated video that the president posted on social media, images of destruction due to the war in Gaza are transformed into a glitzy resort called "TRUMP GAZA."

The Trump Gaza video www.npr.org/2025/02/26/n...

Meet the Millionaire Masters of Early Decision at Colleges

Schools filling more than two-thirds of their admissions slots through early decision? Fucking ridiculous. ED has got to go.

Ugh, wtf. I had never heard of this either. Sickening memeculture.

The 2026 Joseph P. Tabbi Fellowship for International Researchers in Electronic Literature | UiB

New fellowship opportunity at the University of Bergen in Norway for an early career scholar of electronic literature. Check it out!

This podcast could’ve been a listicle is the new This meeting could have been an email.

Randall Flagg????

"The real poverty line—the threshold where a family can afford housing, healthcare, childcare, and transportation without relying on means-tested benefits—isn’t $31,200.

It’s ~$140,000."

pre-thanksgiving verso splurge

What, no bamboo?

Oh, I don't know about the Atlas of Disappearing Places at all. Ordering it right now! I was inspired by works like The Deluge, The Light Pirate, and of course, Octavia Butler's stuff.

The Poetics and Power of Small Language Models In February 2024 I delivered the keynote address at the DHU8 symposium, the eighth annual digital humanities conference sponsored by seven of Utah's largest universities. Now, well over a year later, ...

Oh, I wrote 6000 words about this stuff samplereality.com/2025/07/18/t...

It's actually generated using the same contextless grammars that power the web version

Three stories in white boxes overlayed against a watercolor map of the Gulf of Mexico. Story 1: Huntsville, Texas Saturday, July 3, 2027 Blake speeds home, desperately hoping his daughter has already gotten out. But he can't even get within 15 miles of Huntsville. The fire is too close. He texts home, but the cell towers are down. Story 2: Conroe, Texas Friday, December 11, 2026 "It's a scorcher today," they say. Today? You mean this year. The paint on the sign leading to Montgomery County Fair Grounds bubbles in the torrid heat. Not a single bird flies in the silent sky. Story 3: Houston, Texas Saturday, October 21, 2028 The cyanobacteria bloom began off-shore, feeding on agricultural runoff in the warming waters. Within days, lifeless dolphins began washing ashore, salt, blood, and sulphur on the wind. Caiden hunched over in the heat, gagging on death.

Sample image from the book (and link to the interactive online version: notime.now)

No Time to Discourse (Novel) · Issue #15 · NaNoGenMo/2025 My NaNoGenMo '25 contribution reworks No Time to Discourse, my interactive web-based speculative atlas of climate disaster, transforming it into a stable print book. The online version uses context...

It's National Novel Generation Month. LLMs have drained much of the original creativity and impetus for NaNoGenMo, but I gave it a go this year anyway. I took "No Time to Discourse," my interactive web-based speculative atlas of climate disaster, and turned it into a ~400-page book.

oh, the bamboo was a *metaphor*

apparently there was some magic the gathering news tonight?

Now at least 3 of the sources for @youarecarrying.bsky.social will not put me in legal jeopardy!

Hey, I bet you didn't hear that Zork 1, 2, and 3 were open-sourced today!

…Oh, you have heard. Yeah. Way ahead of me. :)

Here's my comments, and some details that you might not have seen.

blog.zarfhome.com/2025/11/zork...

omg, a classic!

lol, made all the more ludicrous because like half of the cast is from the UK!

The head of a coyote in a wooded yard

Wait! One brief coyote sighting!

I keep hoping to catch glimpses of the coyotes that I know come around the back yard, but instead I got this little feller.

Someone recommended Task, and besides the fact that little bums me out more than Mark Ruffalo in sad sack mode, I'm having trouble with the plot holes so big you could drive a semi through them.

The Authoritarian Stack How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America — And Why Europe Is Next

Unsettling data viz and reporting on how billionaires with state-like powers are building a fully privatized "regime where corporate boards, not public law, set the rules."

i

ChatGPT Harm Reduction for Writing Assignments ChatGPT Harm Reduction for Writing Assignments Because this document has escaped containment, a couple points of explanation. I wrote this for myself and a few colleagues as we work out how to handle the issue of LLMs in an undergrad writing-intensive class. None of these strategies is perfect, ...

A Google Doc from Miriam Posner at UCLA with the pros and cons of different strategies for dealing with students using ChatGPT for writing