You all know how much I love micro.blog, but one thing drives me a little nuts: When I post something that has an error, immediately see the error and correct it, and then have to wait … and wait … and wait for the corrected version to go live. And it seems that every time that happens I get messages from people telling me I made a mistake and I want to shout “I ALREADY FIXED IT DAMMIT.”
PSA: The body of water formerly known as Lake Waco will hereafter be known as Lake Ayjay. I have also renamed the Brazos River as the Ayjay River, and the Bosque River as the Other Ayjay River. I will not be taking questions at this time.
Just learned about Freston Tower from a friend who stayed there.
“Pencil Magazine is a themed print publication featuring work created entirely with graphite pencil and paper.”
I’ve been locked out of my Baylor accounts — I changed my password and now neither the new one nor the old one works — and I’m trying to decide whether that’s a bad or a good thing.
Dickovers, baggravation and botiquette: 18 new words to describe our tech hellscape:
How much time do you think we have collectively spent, as a species, convincing robots that we are not robots? By now, we must have wasted several millennia ensuring we have clicked all the various parts of a bicycle on a captcha grid of someone’s front garden, or sliding a jigsaw puzzle precisely into a pixellated hole, or clicking a box that says “I am not a robot” as if the internet has suddenly discovered the honour system. Listen, if we ever want to pretend to be robots, let’s do it the old-fashioned way, by covering ourselves in tinfoil and beep-booping our way into an enemy moon-lair.
The corrected and slightly improved paperback version of my critical edition of Auden’s The Shield of Achilles is now available. I really do think it’s his masterpiece and highly recommend it to you. Back when the first edition came out I wrote a brief essay on it for the PUP website.