in the past there have been times when I feel like I've been blowing smoke up people's asses when I insist on the surprisingly long (pre-Internet, pre-digital computer) history of hype cycles around automatically-produced creative writing, but no longer, because now I know that someone in 1854 said that a book written by piece of furniture will DAZZLE YOU

these are all from the following paper:

Enns, Anthony. “The Undead Author: Spiritualism, Technology and Authorship.” The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult, edited by Tatiana Kontou, Routledge, 2016.

(which is also the source of the translation)

reported in Chevreul's _De la baguette divinatoire_ (1854): a chair that writes novels. A chair that writes novels, a chair... that writes novels. "JUANITA, a Novel, by a Chair, followed by a Proverb and some Select Pieces of the same Author... The literary productions of the Chair are merely the preface of a mystic book, which it will unroll, page by page, before the dazzled eyes of the believers..."

dear xkcd guy, how many telepaths would you need to transmit 4k video at 60fps

@apLundell I guarantee that there are many many people who believe both of those things

_W.S. Rowley's Occult Telegraphy_ sounds like a pretty great steampunk novel tbh

via https://books.google.com/books?id=ZO4aAQAAMAAJ&lpg=PA276&ots=wUZs73lzCt&dq=w.s.%20rowley's%20occult%20telegraph&pg=PA276#v=onepage&q&f=false

even more appropriate tbh if both had been "Oh God What Have I Done"

it would be so much more fitting if the two were swapped and Morse's first telegraphic message had been "just setting up my tlgrph" and Jack Dorsey's first tweet was "What Hath God Wrought"

@darius all I can think of when I read this article is BF Skinner saying https://twitter.com/dril/status/134787490526658561 I think the clickbait title is what makes it especially weird for me—afaik Stein wasn't "secretive" about her work with automatism and her published work using those kinds of techniques predates Tender Buttons—so the title comes of as an attempt to undermine, not elucidate. it's a really shallow and narrow engagement with both Stein's work and with creative uses of language in general

@a I think it's only persuasive to me for the moment, I am trying to figure out how to formulate it for non-me consumption

should have been titled "I didn't understand this amazing thing that a woman made, but here's why that means that I'm actually smarter than everyone else" by BF Skinner

my fav part is where he says that no one ever would have thought that Tender Buttons was good if Picasso didn't "champion" it

just finally finished B.F. Skinner's "Has Gertrude Stein A Secret?" which reads like the transcript of some guy's YouTube video complaining about how he doesn't like the new album from a musician that he USED to like (and had a crush on) but NOT ANYMORE http://www.bfskinner.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Has-Gurtrude-Stein-a-secret.pdf highly recommended, it's awful

just discovered on my computer some notes I took on _Spring and All_ in 2008 in which I make a persuasive argument that computer-generated prose is impossible (a contradiction in terms) and in fact all computer-generated text is (without exception by its very nature) poetry. thank you 2008 me! hoping now to extend this argument to say that all poetry is, by its very nature, computer-generated (in some sense at least)

cars were a bad invention for a number of very important reasons but mostly because they deprive so many people of long-distance bus and train rides, which are nice

getting pretty excited about all the nice long-distance bus and train rides in my near future 🚂​🚌​😎​

really feel like I should be able to put "did my taxes 2019" on my CV

@qdot closest thing I know about is https://zulipchat.com/

if i were to ever run for political office it would be on a platform of making it deeply illegal for anything to autoplay anywhere and i think this would solve more problems than on the surface it would appear to solve