Post Draft

I don't have the energy to work with an editor.

Category: words

  • Katie MacKinnon at Man Met on Deep Time Archives

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    Brian
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    Finally had a chance to sit down and listen to Dr. Katie MacKinnon‘s talk at Manchester Metropolitan’s Digital Society Research Group (DISC) from last month. From an intro slide, “DEEP TIME DATA ARCHIVES”: After I finished screaming about a company offering Disaster Recovery as a Service held on SpaceX satellites orbiting the moon, I decided…

  • An Addendum

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    Brian
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    I have a lot of feelings about studying generative ai and LLMs. How in order to understand how they work you have to use them, repeatedly and intentionally, and therefore repeatedly and intentionally perpetrate their harms. I don’t know what those are in the ostensible vacuum of the laboratory. Aside from their environmental costs, which…

  • Statistically Speaking

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    Brian
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    In a Discord, someone linked this substack post by Gabriele de Seta, Project Leader of ALGOFOLK at the University of Bergen. It’s about Butterflies, which is like “what if you had a bunch of chatbots talking to you and each other” aka 90% of what advertising and algorithmic social media electricity is spent on. De…

  • The Prisoner’s Viewer’s Dilemma

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    Brian
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    Watching the show The Prisoner (for a second time) along with the podcast The Prisoner’s Dilemma (for the first time). The podcast is using the ITV broadcast order, which doesn’t match the order of the A&E DVD set I have. So before I watch every episode, I am reminded of this alternate order. One that…

  • Snowuary 2025 – Mafia II

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    Brian
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    (Autumn, from the Ranged Touch Discord, encouraged people to play snowy games in January and February and write about them. I used this opportunity to motivate my return to Mafia II, a game whose snowy beginnings have stuck with me for nearly 15 years). Second Snowuary 2025 post, on Silent Hill: Shattered Memories What I…

  • Nina Simone’s Gum (by Warren Ellis (the musician))

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    Brian
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    I do not normally go for books (or other media) that narrativize the creative process because their stories seldom feel familiar. But Ellis’s description of the mutual care of collaboration is lovely. https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571365630-nina-simones-gum (Ignore the blurbs from the shitheads)

  • An essay for a collection on bleakness that was never assembled.

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    Brian
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    (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 2015.) All along the derelict valleys…“The DNR Waltz”Wooden Wand I’m not really sure how I got on the realtor’s direct-mailing list. I mean, I know what demographic tick boxes probably got me on their mailing list (33, mostly white, male, Master’s Degree, employed in a white-collar job at a local university, straight, single,…

  • Lorelei and the Laser Eyes

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    Brian
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    This essay discusses lots of parts of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, from its beginning to its end and from what is on the screen to what is in the mind. It becomes clear pretty early on in Lorelei and the Laser Eyes that you might not be Lorelei, and that this might not be…