Stories Are Ubiquitous and in the Moment

  I use a tool from Matthew Dicks’ book, Storyworthy, that helps me realize something.  It is a realization tool, something that takes the quotidien world and makes it into a special something, something ‘storyworthy’.  And it turns out that almost everything is storyworthy.  Why? Dicks has an answer. Here’s the thing about that story: We experience moments like this all the time. This one may…

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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-media-max-width="560"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Colonel Douglas Macgregor: We&#39;ve Destroyed Ukraine<br><br>Russia is enormously powerful. Why? They have an abundance of resources that they can draw upon.<br>They have a population that loves the country. They&#39;re Russians.<br>They believe in themselves. They believe in their religion. They… <a href="https://t.co/2MflVMax1u">pic.twitter.com/2MflVMax1u</a></p>&mdash; Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil (@ivan_8848) <a href="https://twitter.com/ivan_8848/status/1774752029656727722?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 1, 2024</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

The Internet Is a Sargasso of Digital Garbage

I have been reading Caulfield and Wineburg’s book Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and to Make Decisions about What to Believe Online. The book makes me feel a bit more optimistic about online BS detection…until I ran across Bruce Sterling’s tumblr post. The sheer sketchy ease of the disinformation in that post is appalling. Plus, if the post was created by a chatbot, then we are…

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We Mayn't Know

We Mayn’t Know   We may not know that we know, may not see what we see yet we get the gist somehow. we may not be aware of our inner landscape, to map what we walk, but maybe we have an impression like moveable type in a weak register printed with weak ink. Maybe we note something, the visible wave of a fin below the surface. Poets can catch “it” by inventing stories on the spot that swamp the…

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Using AI to Aggregate Reviews and Hypothes.is to Engage with Them...or not

[Please note: there is AI generated text and an image in this post.  It is well-marked.  All other text is mine.]   I have been skimming Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg’s new book Verified a la Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book. Here is my raw skim using that method. I prompted Exa AI (AKA Metaphor) to aggregate some reviews of the book.  These are skims in their own ways and are copied…

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Stupefying...Oddly Beautiful...Like Castor Beans

A message I sent to my kids: Not wanting to mar the day, but I think you might want to know that Joe Mattingly and David Ashby have both died. Joe went to Louisville a few days ago to stay with his brother and I suppose he knew he was done and needed to die with his family. Like most friends, it was a complex relationship. I think it is safe to say that Joe was a piece of work. I do regret that…

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Blood Weld: Strap, Set, Strike, Draw

My words are blood, hissing incarnidine upon the page, a hot splattering weld of self and sorrow upon the page, a calligraphy of joy & pain upon the page, a click of a blister beetle burning my skin upon the page. Writing is more violent than I might like. It is more like welding than I would like: Strap on the dark vision. Set the metal plates in place. Strike a spark. Draw the bead. Write.  

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Lift Your Spyglass and Look

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Garbage Mostly?

This is the story of how content is now mostly garbage and some of what that might mean. Yesterday while doing my morning “check-in” I was reading Jeremy Caplan’s newsletter Wonder Tools (highly recommended) where he was heaping praise on an app called “Oasis”.  His effusive praise was no hyperbole.  I have never seen a tool so diversely useful.  If you want to take a conversation with yourself…

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Ben Sollee Channels Sam Cooke

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QcFMAiVx6A%5B/embedyt%5D   Can music change the world?  Sollee’s call to optimism and activism.  Speaks to my Kentucky hillsandhollars-billy sensabilities.  Be hopeful and give over part of your day to my Kentucky native son and learn to listen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoF691k1lEs%5B/embedyt%5D  

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BE ASTONISHED! I WAS.

I know this is a clickbaity, but I think more readers need to be aware of Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic Linkdump.  With the glut of available linkdumps in the ether-sphere, why amplify this one? First, Doctorow’s links are generated by a deep and long standing  well of info he calls the memex.  It is a 20+ year store of Doctorow’s digital feldgangs.  Here he tells the tale of the Memex Method–how…

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Finally...Hypothes.is Gets Annotation Export

I love annotation tools. I love the adjacencies they permit. I love the possibilities they engender if we take the opportunity to live in them.  They let me hide in the hedgerows and margins of the text.  Safe and singing. One of the tools that I have always asked for and not gotten has been a way to easily export annotations.  Happily that feature has arrived.  I don’t know how long it has been…

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The Parable of the Empty Creel

Raw material in growing of poetry: The Parable of the Empty Creel Why is the fishing bad today? Did you not know this could happen? I thought as much. Did you throw back seed fish? These are the ones that will feed you next year. Did you prepare your intent to maybe come back empty? You know, sometimes when you fish for answers you catch questions. And, by the way, what was your bait? What…

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Lessons from the Potato, the Heron, the Hazel Nut, and the White-tailed Longtail

“A team of researchers analyzed data going back decades about the tropicbird population and sightings of it, and found that since the 1950s the average date of the first observation of a white-tailed longtail is now 20 to 25 days earlier, a one-day shift every three years. That means the birds are now arriving in Bermuda in February, not March.” I planted potatoes for the first time ever BEFORE…

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Observe | Note | Exalt: Even Weeds

One way to begin understanding complex systems is by describing them in detail: mapping out their parts, their multiple interactions, and how they change through time. Complex systems are often complicated—that is, they have many moving parts that can be hard to identify and define. But the overriding feature of complex systems is that they cannot be managed from the top down. Complex systems…

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The Four Texts of Analysis

I was rooting through some Hypothes.is annotations that had surfaced in my Readwise feed and discovered this from Joe Dillon’s 2016 blog post.. This was my way towards analyzing text, image, and text with image. I use a model for analysis that goes like this: What is the “text”? What is the context? What is the subtext? I initially used this model to teach 8th graders about how to analyze…

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