Niamh Hollis-Locke

Childhood friend texted me and asked how I’m doing and I said, oh, y’know. Eyeing the path that leads up to the Iron Age fairy mound we warned never to go near as kids, and going up there to scream my full government name because anything is better than this.

And yes, this is the same fairy mound my dad once left me at by mistake because he thought my mother had me.

i know this isn't the reguar theme of this blog but i need to share it somewhere because today someone called my local fire department because they found

and not only was it a not-dead horse, they dug it up and it was

Image from the best pdf I ever saw, [Elliot 2025]:

They’ve been rebuilding the Tower of Babel, but this time they have a team of linguists on site. Every time God smites the builders and invents a dozen new languages, the linguists have a dozen decently sized translations in about a month and work can start up again.

To keep us on out toes, God gives the next group of builders an extra place of articulation called the flongus between the pharynx and the glottis, creating an entire new column of the IPA chart with sounds between sounds that are literally physiologically impossible for non-flongled people to replicate.

So, remember that study in Nature I mentioned, where people couldn’t tell human-written and AI-generated poetry apart, and indeed rated the AI poetry higher? I feel I didn’t adequately illustrate what the actual situation there was. Here are a few of the AI-generated poems used in that study, including the poets used in the prompts:

nothing funnier than the shock on someone's face when they try to be condescending to you about your autism & fail miserably. i was in a course and the instructor said something so extremely bigoted it was a genuine safety risk so i raised my hand and when he called on me i very calmly took him to task about it and then a few classmates backed me up and he backpedaled so all in all it worked out.

this doesn't just apply to autism tbh. the issue here is that so many people spend their entire lives desperately trying to adhere to the status quo, whatever it is in any given moment, and remain neutral, that they stand by while bigotry thrives in their company.