Notices by Allison Parrish (aparrish@mastodon.social), page 15

open source licenses, as texts that advocate for their own propagation ("The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software"), is a kind of chain letter and maybe by extension could be considered a kind of himmelsbrief, a "letter from heaven," granting protection to those who possess them (and, per the upthread link, "divine punishment for disbelief of their claims")

uhhhhhh is there a guide on how to use lists on mastodon (in particular the web app)? it took me like ten minutes of poking around to figure out how to even make one (there isn't just an option on a user profile to "add to list," you have to go through the "getting started" tab thing). mostly I just want to know (a) if my lists and their content are visible to the public and (b) if other users are notified and/or can find out that I added them to a list

I teach a class at NYU called Reading and Writing Electronic Text that is half introduction to Python, half introduction to computational poetry. the syllabus is here: http://rwet.decontextualize.com/ and the tutorial/lecture notes are here: https://github.com/aparrish/rwet I've taught the class many times before, but this year I'm revising all the notes and porting everything to Python 3/Jupyter Notebook. I've also made entirely new tutorials on dictionaries, RNNs and keyword extraction. just wanted to share!

my task for today was to write a description for an interactive typography course and instead i spent the better part of the afternoon reading (or trying to read) a belle époque french experimental phonology book whoops

@emsenn and in any case "recommending we revert to the Internet as it was before Facebook" is a strawman—I don't know of anyone who is advocating for that? in any case, before facebook there were plenty of easy-to-use centralized platforms that didn't share all of facebook's problems (livejournal, friendster, myspace). imo recommending people use something other than facebook is more like advocating for public transit instead of cars than it is like advocating for restricting suffrage.

@emsenn facebook is a system for taking advantage of the technically illiterate, not empowering them. using facebook is also *tremendously* technically sophisticated—understanding it and gaining mastery over it is not easy (there are whole books and classes for learning how to use it)—and I would argue that "accessibility" per se is not among facebook's goals for their product.

Showing off project for NaNoGenMo 2017, "The Average Novel"

Grabbed a bunch of Project Gutenberg text and blurred them together

There's a way of vectorizing words into numbers, coded by their meaning. So @aparrish averaged all those

It's really very repetitive

"and and and and and and and and the the the hill like and and and"

@aparrish is actually reading this aloud to us

"Hafnium ace high the epilogue" and that is the novel

#wordhack