Mark Sample

Moby Dick @mobydickatsea.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 16:47 UTC

as the swift monster drags you deeper and deeper into the frantic shoal, you bid adieu to circumspect life

1 replies 8 reposts 33 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 20:30 UTC

AITK is a fantastic set of Google Colab notebooks for getting non-computer science undergrads working with the basics of machine learning and neural networks, designed by 3 SLAC professors. Gonna use this in my "Critical AI Studies" course next spring.

0 replies 7 reposts 20 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 11:45 UTC

You don’t hate air travel. You hate capitalism.

0 replies 1 reposts 8 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 30, 2024 at 21:30 UTC

Free, lightweight, browser-based After Effects-eque tool. Privacy-friendly: all the work stays in your browser (i.e. nothing uploaded anywhere).

0 replies 1 reposts 4 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 30, 2024 at 02:06 UTC

semicolon should be spelled semi;colon

0 replies 0 reposts 11 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 02:41 UTC

Pretty sure for my own sanity I need to ignore all social media for the foreseeable future. And for the unforeseeable future as well.

0 replies 0 reposts 14 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 28, 2024 at 16:16 UTC

Everything sucks, so I’m playing “Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds” on the PS2 in my office.

1 replies 1 reposts 12 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 27, 2024 at 15:00 UTC

Updated new work: my game "Weird Texts from an Unknown Number" now has a few more endings. I call this kind of interactive fiction—based on real experiences—"interactive autofiction"...

0 replies 0 reposts 3 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 25, 2024 at 13:32 UTC

*All the Storyspaces*

One of the many cool things I learned at #narrascope is Colin Post’s project to acquire and read *every one* of the dozens of hypertext novels published by Eastgate in the 80s and 90s—works that are totally inaccessible on modern operating systems.

0 replies 1 reposts 1 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 24, 2024 at 02:36 UTC

GOAT

0 replies 1 reposts 11 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 23, 2024 at 17:31 UTC

Yep, I backed it on Kickstarter way back in the day!

0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 22, 2024 at 19:00 UTC

From Ars Technica, a fun romp through fifty or so years of interactive fiction history, which—surprise!—is not history at all, but alive and thriving (as I write from the 2024 Narrascope conference).

1 replies 4 reposts 26 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 19, 2024 at 19:01 UTC

A nod to my dearly departed _lostbuoy_ bot, long ago banned from X. But which still can be found in the @eliterature.bsky.social archive: collection.eliterature.org/3/works/stat...

0 replies 0 reposts 3 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 19, 2024 at 13:13 UTC

Thank you--it's great to hear you find the bot inspirational!

0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 19, 2024 at 02:30 UTC

Another creepy, understated game by litrouke, showing once again that Twine doesn't necessarily mean a bunch of branching decisions. A retelling of the Bluebeard tale to boot.

0 replies 1 reposts 1 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 18, 2024 at 11:38 UTC

ghost in the machine

0 replies 1 reposts 3 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 14, 2024 at 01:00 UTC

Just because you’re an elite private school with billions of dollars doesn’t mean you have a backbone. (Maybe *because* you’re an elite private school with billions of dollars you don’t have a backbone.)

0 replies 3 reposts 15 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 13, 2024 at 17:48 UTC

My most revealing pet peeve is that I am deeply annoyed when people refer to the 19th century cannibal Alferd Packer as ALFRED Packer.

0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 13, 2024 at 17:16 UTC

But the AI wouldn't have even cared about the choice of one single word, which would have just been drowned out in the statistical average of all language, ever!

1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 13, 2024 at 13:58 UTC

Also automated some of my digital garden: * each day's bookmarks, along with my notes on the bookmark, feed into a Daily Note in Obsidian * made a bot that posts selected bookmarks, along with my commentary, here to Bluesky and to my link blog (basically, links I want to share with others) 2/2

0 replies 0 reposts 5 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 13, 2024 at 13:55 UTC

Lately I've been caring for my digital garden: * restored my RSS reader (FreshRSS on the web, Reeder on mobile) * culled dozen of dead feeds * added RSS feeds to email "newsletters" from Ghost, Buttondown, etc.—anything to free up my email inbox * tidied up my Pinboard 1/2

1 replies 0 reposts 6 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 13, 2024 at 00:23 UTC

Yeah, it’s great

0 replies 0 reposts 2 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 13, 2024 at 00:00 UTC

A manifesto for the liberal arts, which, at their root, prepare you for the things you can't prepare for. What does the future hold? "You don’t know. Your teacher doesn’t know. Your school doesn’t know. Your future employer doesn’t know. Nobody knows. Not really."

1 replies 23 reposts 44 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 12, 2024 at 22:27 UTC

two storylines intersect in the alt text here

0 replies 2 reposts 3 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 12, 2024 at 02:30 UTC

In 1998 Panasonic published a game to teach writing to kids (because of course they did)...but a bug in the game would occasionally lead to it reading a list of obscenities aloud in a synthesized voice. 🤖💦

0 replies 0 reposts 5 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 12, 2024 at 00:00 UTC

Companion piece to Jentery's "Before You Make a Thing," this is not just an incredible list of prototyping techniques, it also makes an argument for prototyping as a critical methodology for understanding the world.

0 replies 1 reposts 1 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 11, 2024 at 23:44 UTC

I don't buy that we're living in a vast simulation. More likely, it's a vast emulation, some opensource WebAssembly port of reality running on Chrome MMXIV.

1 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 11, 2024 at 23:33 UTC

say mission critical like you mean it

0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 11, 2024 at 22:33 UTC

If you think getting people to read your stuff is hard, try getting people to read your stuff when you're essentially writing with invisible ink.

0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 11, 2024 at 18:15 UTC

Building link cards with the API seems overly...complicated. But it does work. Then you can delete the link from the body of the post.

0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 11, 2024 at 17:04 UTC

I *think* that if you add the link as a link card it doesn’t count toward the character limit.

1 replies 0 reposts 3 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 11, 2024 at 16:59 UTC

gop celebrating as if they believe firearms shouldn’t be handed out to any troubled rando who wants a gun

0 replies 0 reposts 5 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 11, 2024 at 16:30 UTC

Companion piece to Jentery's "Before You Make a Thing," this is not just an incredible list of prototyping techniques, it also makes an argument for prototyping as a critical methodology for understanding the world.

1 replies 2 reposts 6 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 11, 2024 at 16:18 UTC

No doubt! I talk about spirit photography in my Death in the Digital Age class in the context of, whenever there's a new technology, people try to talk to the dead with it.

1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 11, 2024 at 15:31 UTC

In the 1920s Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of that most rational of detectives, Sherlock Holmes, published "The Coming of the Fairies"—about the incontrovertible photographic evidence of the existence of fae folk.

2 replies 1 reposts 3 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 11, 2024 at 14:42 UTC

Seriously. A colleague in my department teaches a course called "Technology and Wisdom" and I'm going to suggest including this in the class!

1 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 11, 2024 at 13:53 UTC

i.e. why do documents that look poorly scanned, with back edges, imperfections, and creases, appear to be more "authentic"?

1 replies 0 reposts 7 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 11, 2024 at 13:30 UTC

Web app to make pristine PDFs look like poorly scanned/photocopied documents. Besides being fun, it's a good tool to think through epistemological questions about authenticity, authority, and knowledge 🏛️📚🔍

2 replies 13 reposts 37 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 11, 2024 at 12:37 UTC

Minor correction: it's 14 programs on the firing line, not 16.

0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 11, 2024 at 12:35 UTC

I looked at the "People" page of First Tryon Advisors, the consulting firm that recommended 16 programs for the chopping block at UNC-Asheville. I can't quite place my finger on what they have in common, all 26 of them. 🤔

1 replies 1 reposts 9 likes