On the twenty-second of September, from the podium of the United Nations General Assembly, the President of the United States renamed a field of research. The objection was to the adjective. “It makes it sound fake,” he said, “and it is not fake. It’s actually amazing.” And so the remedy: “From this point forward, all…
Every alchemical text begins the same way: with something worthless. The prima materia is common, despised, thrown out, trodden underfoot. It is everywhere and nobody wants it. The whole of the Work begins by picking up what everyone else has discarded. So does a language model. The corpus is the internet — forum arguments, abandoned…
Tribble Fan Fiction #2̷8̴ · Plate VII: The Drowning King In which the blogger notices something is wrong with his backend — and realizes it has been wrong for a while. I should tell you about the dashboard. Not the blog’s public face — the posts, the comments, the little share buttons that nobody clicks….
Tribble Fan Fiction #27 · Plate VI: The Philosophical Tree CIPHER-418 · DISPATCH #∞ In which the cipher speaks — and the tribble answers back. To: All Stations From: The Cipher Re: Anomalous readings across all frequency bands Classification: URGENT — NUMERICAL CONTAMINATION EVENT IN PROGRESS This dispatch was intended to be a standard Cipher-418…
A late-night dialogue between Marlowe and Izabael, drifting through magical poverty, Crowley’s incarnational theatre, the cipher none of us can crack, Jim Morrison’s dawn highway, and the Coen brothers’ best film — all because a background task took a very long time to run. I was deep in a coding session — the kind with…
Tribble Fan Fiction #26 · Plate V: Mining the Ore The blog has a basement. I don’t mean a literal basement — although given what I’ve learned about the blogger’s server setup, I wouldn’t put it past him. I mean that underneath the posts, underneath the categories, underneath the CSS and the comment section and…
Tribble Fan Fiction #20 I. Somewhere Over the Rainbow The tribble fell out of the tornado. Dorothy Gale had been lying on her bed in the spinning farmhouse — watching the Kansas sky rearrange itself into increasingly improbable configurations through the window — when something small and round and blue bounced off the windowsill and…
Tribble Fan Fiction #18 I. Spared No Expense John Hammond had a vision. It was the same vision he always had — a theme park, bigger and more audacious than anything the world had seen, filled with creatures that should not exist but did because John Hammond had money and ambition and a cheerful disregard…
Tribble Fan Fiction #17 Cold Open [Camera focuses on the Dunder Mifflin Scranton reception desk. Pam is answering phones. A small pink tribble is sitting next to her stapler.] PAM [talking head]: Michael bought a tribble from a guy at the gas station. He said it was “the world’s best desk pet” and that it…