Oisín

I was so happy my copies arrived from @Downingfield, I... Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, my second collection just landed in my house. Critically praised, a Scotsman book of the year, pick up a copy and bring me back to life! amazon.co.uk/dp/0645231819/ #poetry #writing #ireland

@JB_StoneTruth @BenBrindise @Pureinkpoetry Better word play. Slam is 90% stand-up without the jokes.

@cpk @bernardtjoy Also great shout. The Londo G'Kar arc is top tier

That one reminded me a bit of "Deathwalker", an episode of Babylon 5, with a similar theme, though B5 was much less optimistic about humanity self-correcting when faced with such an opportunity. "Yᴏᴜ ᴀʀᴇ ɴᴏᴛ ʀᴇᴀᴅʏ ꜰᴏʀ ɪᴍᴍᴏʀᴛᴀʟɪᴛʏ."

Trekkies can correct me, but it must be a very common opinion that one of the main ways Star Trek so cleverly solved the problem of portraying a utopian future, that being the inevitable sense of paralysis and stultification in such a morally excellent society, was by evincing an imperialistic ethos of discovery whereby barbarous worlds as foil could be encountered and placed under the microscope of the Federation's higher moral standards. Whether in Earth's past or in distant zones of the universe, the utopian society acts as universal critic but what interests me is that it is these other, lesser societies that are the only escape such a utopian science fiction can have from stalling under the weight of its own perfection.

@AndrewRawson11 @PadraigBelton @whippletom This was vaguely my reading of the article too. She was so structured in her approach

@PadraigBelton @whippletom She drove him to drink. He said thanks for the lift.

Brutally awful Guardian blind date lady this week

@MrEwanMorrison The writing is horrid. It's tepid. It can not rise nor roar.

There is a monotonous flatness to AI generated text. Also, it's like "the writer" has only one task - to embellish.

@cpk @bernardtjoy Aye.

@Breen @bernardtjoy And also the third TNG movie (more like a two-part TV episode than a film but...similar theme.)

@suilleabhain4 Indeed. Pass a law. Remove leasehold. Oh we shafted a bunch of pricks...

This nonsense should have ended with our great grandparents' generation, not burdened onto us well over a century later. x.com/i/status/20350…

@kazuma_man You should be up at the session in the crane

Galway Carroll’s Barのパブセッションに参加して飲んで、その後もMary Mullens Barで飲んで盛り上がった！

@dieworkwear I don't know who any of these oddities are, but somehow I find this one worse.

Just realized they crammed Knowles's set with a bunch of urban masculinity cliches, and then made Walsh's set the rustic counterpart. So instead of "Batman aesthetics," he has the fish, stone fireplace, and canoe-shaped-shelf with tiny old books. An example of gender performance

the aesthetics are incredible. cigars and crystal decanter with japanese whisky. black dress shirt, tight suit, two-toned double monks, and tie bar. arne jacobsen egg chair teamed with a studio backdrop with a car inexplicably inside the room. a 12 yr old's idea of masculinity

@MinooFramroze This, plus my own country's history, plus the greeks and arabs, minus the orange twit, and with fuck the Normans, is pretty much my own upbringing

We should start by teaching British children myth & legend - Egyptian, classical, Celtic, Arthurian, Norse - then teach them national narrative history from Julius Caesar to William of Orange, and only then let the bright enthusiastic ones at thematic source analysis

@ScottLaudati Aaardvark

@RMFrancis Yup

Yep

@NatureUnedited @JulianD86666247 I want to hug them all

These adorable great horned owls were recorded in Arizona, nesting in a saguaro cactus. They were moments away from falling asleep, all bundled up together

@brecht_dp Teehee

@Breen I couldn't have said it better (and AI definitely not 😂)

More people seem to be worried about a novel being AI-assisted, than about Hachette publishing absolute crap in the first place.

@brecht_dp No, person with several million, a family pile in the upper east side of Manhattan and several houses, you are not oppressed. You do not get to dictate ethics. Your entire attitude is poison. ;)

@brecht_dp They're all at it. High end lit has largely been emperor's new clothes for decades, overseen by a coterie of wealthy idiots readapting critical theory to place themselves as victims in order to reintroduce Victorian style didacticism.

@bernardtjoy I agree. Your post also reminds of Foucault's essay from, I think, the 80s, about the decontextualisation of the centre, but that 'centrehood' is a non local usable but permanent relational property of an object, yet not, in fact, due to relationality, contained in the object

Art is made for many social, political, commercial and financial reasons that go beyond the artwork as artwork. So, an artwork is an artwork and it is a driver of change, and a securer of power, and a commodity. However, if there is not at least one artist at the centre of the project interested if not exclusively then mostly in human experience and their craft and technique then the artwork cannot be made to any degree of high quality, cannot fulfil its primary role.

@SketchesbyBoze This one is pretty hilarious.

You can be pretty confident that someone doesn’t read when they say “raped over at Kohl’s” rather than “raked over the coals.” As literacy declines, we are seeing new & unparalleled malapropisms.

@bernardtjoy @matthiasellis 100% Christ, as a poet, I'm half convinced no one, who lauds each year's new sensation, ever read it. I encounter spectacular work, then I see what's promoted by the organizations, and I have no idea what's happening. An aside: why/how is blue tick going? Worth holding nose?

I think one of the massive issues with film culture today is that dedicated audiences will consciously choose to accept films that do not hang together as a complete work. So it is possible for a fan to say "sure it doesn't stand alone, but it sets the table for part two" or "yes, the film has no strong characterisation, but just look at the aesthetics" or "I know the pacing is rubbish but listen to that soundtrack!" I read this as something to do with the atomisation of the formerly much more consolidated ways we used to think about art and entertainment, and the consolidated ways too that artworks and entertainment came to us and were distributed and received. Seems to me, films of the past were under much more pressure to stand on their own merits, to be coherent at first viewing and without much of the conceptual crutches of in-built fandoms and the weight of hundreds of billions of dollars concerns and all their industry synergies. Many more films of the past had to pull together all the threads of the filmmaker's art. They did this with at least the primary intention of creating an atmosphere in the moment that was capable of moving a viewer as an individual and what's more doing so on a pre-reflective level, before that viewer has begun to make excuses for the film they wanted to love and to fill in blanks that the filmmakers ought to have filled in themselves.

@jadedwriter_ Aye, agree. It's a huge shame. Unwritten rules were great in many ways.

@Breen Unfortunately this level of thought and consideration can not be counted upon as being the standard.

Tough one. And why I stopped soliciting years ago. Of course it’s insulting to have a solicited piece rejected, but at the same time, solicited writers assume the solicitor will publish whatever they send and often don’t send their strongest work. Bad practice in general, IMO.