metaphor literacy is low even among committed readers but it’s starting to become more of a concern for me as people are flagging “incomprehensible metaphors” as tells for AI. the problem being that in many of those cases the metaphors aren’t incomprehensible at all!

Just yelling at the TV "JUST LET PEOPLE GO HOME STOP IT" is a sure sign of WC fatigue

My heart simply cannot take extra minutes of soccer

THE much-noted NYC air is giving everything a 10s-style sepia Instagram filter look, so going to the bodega feels mighty CINEMATIC.

Been using AI for what it is best at : organizing / soldering together the ridiculous book collections of 2 recently married lit nerds along 8 IKEA Billy bookshelves. FWIW the chatbot said Mythologies was a gateway drug to theory which is probs true. Also this: lareviewofbooks.org/article/sign...

Empire of Signs | Los Angeles Review of Books

Exploring the links between the history of semiotics and the creation of LLMs.

lareviewofbooks.org

The public libraries of NYC are a treasure and one of the city’s greatest public goods. They must be supported bc if they die, nobody will ever have the political will and clout to recreate them.

Melissa Gira Grant@melissagiragrant.com · 3w ago

nyc giving out free KN95s at these public libraries (for the wildfire smoke on its way, but like, let’s do this all the time) www.nyc.gov/site/em/abou...

You need to be in an office to ask Claude to spend tokens to do your job for you.

People using books as a way of figuring out who would be a good romantic partner is just the plot of Northanger Abbey

Preprint of essay forthcoming f/ special issue of MFS on Cultural AI edited w/ @aarthivadde.bsky.social that I think is great & articulates a key question for lit studies + AI research: LLMs are built on vast fiction corpora but are terrible at generating good fiction. Why? arxiv.org/abs/2603.13545

The AI Fiction Paradox

AI development has a fiction dependency problem: models are built on massive corpora of modern fiction and desperately need more of it, yet they struggle to generate it. I term this the AI-Fiction Par...

arxiv.org

Was not prepared for how deeply affecting I would find this

Chris Bratt@chrisbratt.bsky.social · 2mo ago

People Make Games traveled to Michigan to meet Jerry Gretzinger, an 84-year-old man, who's spent most of his life working away on a single, giant map to an imaginary world. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is8N...

networksofny2026.bigcartel.com/product/netw... hi, did you like my book Networks of New York when it came out in 2016? you might like the updated 2026 edition which I'll be releasing in September and you can pre-order now

Networks of New York, 2026 Edition (PRE-ORDER)

SHIPPING SEPTEMBER 2026! Networks of New York is a book by me, Ingrid Burrington. It helps readers identify indicators of physical internet and telecommunications infrastructure in New York City. Usin...

networksofny2026.bigcartel.com

my pilates instructor adopted a new chihuahua on Friday. This is motivation to keep going to pilates to see if she sneaks them in her gym bag or something.

I'm serving negroni sbagliatos at my wedding it's very serious

it's important that you know : in this house, the House of the Dragon show is called GIRL GAME and i now talk about liking dragon shows, a vibe shift

Perhaps binging several episodes of The Audacity the night before WWDC is coloring my perspective a smidge

Watching tech from the outside-in right now is gloriously reaffirming. Everyone seems slightly unhinged, like we've all watched a lot of tech satire sitcoms and started mouthing the words verbatim

I'm on a career sabbatical of sorts after some reorg'in a few months back, which organically with a lot of professional contacts reaching out to just say hi. I like this kind of "staying with the network" so much better than any weird alternative (even this semi-cursed platform, weird).

i literally just wanted to own a two bedroom home in a walkable neighborhood where i can have three cats and a dog and wear nice outfits to go feed pigeons and now society is about to collapse

All I wanted to do was play Diablo for most of the day but I spent the 2nd half of the day setting up and recalibrating a new Ai assistant I'm doing "job sabbatical" all wrong

People think of The Gothic as a literary concept, architectural descriptor, style of dress, or music genre-- when in fact it is the tacit knowledge that the ghost of an unpublished poet hangs out on everyone's back to whisper in our ears all the verse no one else would listen to, all day, forever.

Here at Metro’s annual gathering re: our collective NYC digital culture repository. Illuminating to hear abt orgs that licensed some of their popular material with commercial rsch services (EBSCO) w/ the hope of making some 💰; turns out they made a pittance, and now their stuff is paywalled 🙁

There’s no quick fix to the shift in media diets and the attendant problems from eschewing sustained focus in favor of short form video slop. Helping children, students, and adults return to focused reading requires a culture oriented towards allowing people quiet contemplation and privacy.

I changed music services to one less algo-juice-pulp-extracor-y (qobuzz) and just caught myself trying to figure out what I should play on the way home so it could understand my preferences more. I think the machines won a long time ago.

AI reveals the larger problem that work to live requires a bunch of meaningless jobs in our increasingly automated society. We could be post scarcity, but that’s not allowed by the rich, so we have to have millions of email jobs to pretend we are still in thriving capitalism.

Aram Zucker-Scharff@chronotope.aramzs.xyz · 6mo ago

This thread now available as an easy to share post aramzs.xyz/microblogs/e...

The upside OTD is: at least I can choose which emoji is my "great idea" emoji (fire, heart fire) in Google MEET now, praise be

Replying 'nice' back to the kids baiting me with their '6-7' until we ouroboros ourselves into the nihilistic bliss of the meme semantic void

alright alright cicadas we know you're having a wild orgy but must you keep going on about it

Hello lovely bluets. The biannual #UpdatedProfileName is 'textual healing'

old school: Is it long covid or is it perimenopause (Blumhouse, 2021-24) new school: is it heatstroke or is it perimenopause (A24, 2025)