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.
If there is not a National Day of Mourning for Dolly Parton, we will have failed as a country. May she rest in peace and rise in glory.
Merlin’s Cave (1735)
Amy X. Wang on using Wispr Flow (as dictated to Wispr Flow):
We’ve been talking a lot about the so-called end of literacy, but the real problem isn’t that people don’t read — it’s that they do read and spend all day ferociously consuming words, but those words aren’t really written, not in the way that any writer would consider them written, because the words they’re reading are more like speaking….
I just got a notification from Wispr Flow congratulating me that I have written enough words with the software in just these few minutes here that I have “written 12 wedding vows.” Which, I mean, is kind of my point. Can you imagine if wedding vows were off-the-cuff speaking? Could we stop, soon, with the apps and programs that want to replace every facet of human thought with something more efficient, like there’s no value at all in … reflection? At this point I’m ready never to speak aloud ever again.
Paul McCartney, early-to-mid 1980s:
One thing I’ll never forget at EMI was the “pop” / “classical” switch on the right-hand-side of the console! And the control knobs were great big RAF things, that was the state of the technology then. We used to like them though, and actually they were much better than the fiddly little things these days because then if you put treble on you actually heard treble come on. Now you put treble on and it’s nothing. I really do think those valve machines were more fun to work with. A lot of people think that, I know Geoff Emerick does, and I still keep some valve equipment myself because it gives you a record-y type sound. That’s why a lot of people won’t go to digital. Analogue is warmer, and you can defeat the machine. For example, one trick of our’s — ‘Ob-la-Di’ is one of the songs I did this on — was to over-record an acoustic guitar, so you’d swing the needle into the red and it’d be there, hard, every time you’d played it. The engineer would say “No, no, no, this is not allowed, we have to keep it just before the red or a little into the red!” and we’d be firm and say “No”. And the acoustic would come back like an electric, it wouldn’t distort too much, it would just mess around with that original sound. It’d make it hot. You’d defeated the machine, you’d actually screwed it up a bit. They’re harder than ever to defeat now. They’ve thought of all that. If you’re going to work in the red now there’s a little computer that comes in and says “Limit!”, stops it and brings it back. They’re all so clever these days and you can’t actually screw up.