Chad Orzel

I am gonna double down on this a little: the reaction of many senior academics to fairly banal LLM takes like ‘they’re useful tools’ is extremely unbecoming, & would, if I was your graduate student or junior colleague, actively make me feel like I had to either lie to you or de facto hobble myself

The Simple Art of Wizardry Re-reading a couple of authors who would likely be appalled to be put together

This week in Doomscroll Avoidance, I re-read Raymond Chandler and Ursula LeGuin, who would likely both be appalled by that combination: open.substack.com/pub/chadorze...

Lots of people incredulous about Bam Adebayo passing Kobe Bryant, but honestly, that kind of random shit is what makes sports great. I'm here for David Tyree's helmet catch and Domingo German's perfect game and all the other legendary moments from guys who aren't legends.

I read Lattimore in college and whoever did the circa-1970 Harvard Classics edition my parents had in the basement when I was in middle school. I read a few pages of Wilson and found it very offputting.

Fagles, which was recommended by a classicist on the Bird Site who is reliably interesting.

It starts out sort of interesting about when the poem was composed and whether it was just oral or written down but it just keeps GOING and GOING and oh, my God, get to the singing Muse, already.

Picked up an ebook of THE ODYSSEY to re-read it before the Nolan movie comes out, and it may take until June to get through this scholarly preface...

The only AI character I’ll ever accept

Comic. [Person with shoulder-length hair talking to a second person. She is gesturing at a dinosaur skeleton with a machine mounted on its back.] PERSON 1: Although Bazookasaurus’s distinctive structure was long assumed to be a weapon, vascularization studies show that it was very fragile and could only have been used for display.

Bazookasaurus

xkcd.com/3216/

The worst part about coming home furious over dumb shit at work is that the dog can tell that I'm mad, but doesn't know why, so he gets all skittish, and I feel like a garbage human.

thomas jefferson: also an obviously problematic dude who nevertheless has left a legacy of incredible bangers

Murders in the Rue Morgue was a parody, I have found the post and the website about it!

The site linked is here
wdl.mcdaniel.edu

And it's really rather good fun, some eyebleedingly bad prose, of course

John Lennon doing that stupid walk

Walking away from Omelas like

I've lived in the Northeast US basically my entire life so I know this is just Fake Spring and setting us up to get like a foot of snow in two weeks, but it still feels great to come home on a nice day and open all the windows in the house.

getting serious replies to my Travis Kelce jokes so here are the facts of the case:

has Kelce's play dropped off: yes

is Kelce good enough to keep playing in the NFL: also yes

should Kelce keep playing football after the world's wealthiest, most popular musician wrote a song about his penis: no

A really crank galaxy brain idea I have is to give Congress direct control over its own CIA-type agency so it’s not infinitely beholden to the executive for expertise on natsec stuff.

Might get ‘yelled at for saying it’ because before the GI Bill college was the domain of the wealthy who could afford to study humanities

I'm in the lobby bar of a Boston area hotel and they're playing dance covers of 70s and 80s songs, and it's making me want to murder somebody.

new version of the leo pointing meme just dropped for when you recognize a thing but you hate it

We've noticed a significant uptick in corpse outlines at places believed to haunted. It's hard to tell if these ghost-markers are warning or warding. They often seem to memorialise the dead as appeasement. – Sophie Morley of Woden College's Graffiti Research and Formalisation Team (GRAFT), 1981

This is the hardest "fuck, marry, kill" I've seen in a while.

The good news: We've found a data-storage medium that can outlast clay tablets!
The bad news: Future humans will need a microscope and a good working knowledge of optical physics to read whatever we write there.

I suppose it's not *that* much more difficult than deciphering cuneiform... 🧪⚛️

a man wearing glasses and a white shirt says " i think i misspoke when i said " no problem " ALT: a man wearing glasses and a white shirt says " i think i misspoke when i said " no problem "

Sadly limited selection of .gifs from the film, so we'll go with this one:

A van has pulled up next to my parked car. It has a large "Quantum Plumbing" logo on the side, with the slogan "phenomenal service!" below, and a cartoon of a strange gnomish bearded man with white pair and pointed ears holding a wrench in one hand and a glowing atom in the other.

I don't want to know what calls for quantum plumbing, but I guess I'm glad it's available if someone needs it.

Hail Hydra.

Why did they train a man who was deaf in one ear to be a radio operator, you ask? Well, Joseph Heller would like a word...

Should also note that my paternal grandfather was in the Army in WWII as well, trained as a radio operator, but when it became clear he was never going to be sent to Europe (as he was deaf in one ear), he asked to be discharged to care for his family.

According to my grandmother, my grandfather was on a transport ship headed from Europe to the Pacific theater when Japan surrendered and they were redirected to New York. They got married in September of 1945.

Paternal: Foreman in a shoe factory.
Maternal: WWII vet (something involving photo processing for the Army in Italy), worked for a printer in NYC after the war.

Bluesky Map Interactive map of 3.4 million Bluesky users, visualised by their follower pattern.

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself!

bluesky-map.theo.io

I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail