I loved this story, “RE: Thesis defense issue – kalirush 🐍” —and only later learned that it was a riff on an old McSweeney’s piece that, yeah, is fun but suffers from the baked-in McSweeney’s problem (i.e., that it “approaches humor with a lab coat and tweezers.”)
Anyway, this amateur fan-fic riff is better, because it is actually funny, not just theoretically funny and basically funny shaped.
[the image above is an XKCD comic]
Hear the groundbreaking “Computer Speech” record from Bell Telephone Laboratories, which features synthesized speech created by one of the earliest computer speech synthesis systems. Directed by D.H. VanLenten, this record represents a significant milestone in the development of speech synthesis technology. … You’ll also discover how punched cards were used to provide the computer with detailed instructions on how to manipulate the various formants to produce different sounds [and] explore the fascinating technique called formant synthesis, which involves simulating the resonances of the human vocal tract, and the IBM 704 computer used to generate the speech sounds.
Incidentally, this record predates Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey by four years, and came out at least a year before he began considering the project in earnest. We know that his work in 2001 was influenced by educational materials from the time; hard to believe this wasn’t one of them.
Anyway, just for the record: this “talking computer” was exactly as intelligent as ChatGPT or any current AI, and considerably less so than a parrot—and inspired the same blue-sky certainty in the media. Hell, here’s an article about computers talking and reliably taking natural-language instruction within the next decade!!! (It was written in 1959.):
“Has my radical hysterectomy made me less radical?”
From Lewis Carroll’s Symbolic Logic (1896):
POSIT: IF you are a famous children’s author AND you are British THEN you are an antisemite.
(cf. Roald Dahl, J.K. Rowling, this asshat, probably Rudyard Kipling, etc.)
As an aside, the fact that Carroll (who came from a family of high-church Anglicans and took holy orders) wrote #21 tends to give credence to #20: All W.A.S.Ps are unfriendly.
“What It Feels Like To Die” by Warren Benedetto
I’m usually against drabble[1]; I’m not against this. Go read it now.
[1] short version: the constraint is uninterestingly arbitrary, and very few authors are up to the limitation; much as “five-minute horror film” almost always translates to “one dumb jump scare,” “drabble” almost always translates to “squandered half-an-idea.”
I often bounce from a fiction Podcast because I’m a “monster-of-the-week” guy (in the X-Files sense of “Monster-of-the-week” vs “Mythology”), and far too many “serial drama”-style podcasts 1) fall in love with their Mythology arc and 2) the writers (in my humble) just cannot sustain those long, heavy arcs. Listening becomes a chore and strain; I have enough chores, and if I wanted homework I’d go to grad school.
Thus far, Mayfair Watchers Society is delivering the thing I desperately wanted: a monster-a-week, no cast of 1000s to keep track of over years-long lightly scripted arcs. You can pick it up anywhere; Autopsy happened to have been the episode where I resoundingly felt “This is for me!“
Also, love the art!
Enjoy!
Mayfair Watchers Society: “The Autopsy” (Season 1, Ep. 3)
I generically hate TED Talks (because they are, on average, garbage), but I’m sharing this because:
I just love every damned bleep, bloop, reverberant clang, and lady robot sigh in this thing.🤖
“The idea of using the short grunts and groans came to me when I watched people playing the game, the way that people expressed their frustrations or their involvement with the game.”
Suzanne Ciani
My novelette “This Place is Best Shunned” made the 2022 Locus Recommended Reading List/Ballot. (Story is free-to-read online, linked from the list.)
Voting on the Locus Award is open to all. Ballot deadline is April 15, and you may come back and add to or change your votes anytime until then.
