David Ellison

@davidellison.bsky.social

215 Followers 530 Following

Interested in: books, language, music and sound, computational linguistics & NLP, my cat đź“ŤSeattle

Nadine Hurley, from Twin Peaks. She’s sitting on the floor with her drape runner and a bag of cotton balls
FT article teaser reads “Grindcore is the new hustle culture”
As a result, our perceptions of the future now wrench back and forth between two, seemingly polar visions. On the one hand, techno-hucksters seduce us with hyperboles about data superhighways, global networks, expert systems, and virtual realities. They assure us that we are on the threshold of an Information Millennium that will guarantee even the humblest optically-wired hut access to an infinite “digital sea” of imagineered pleasures. On the other hand, we are confronted daily with the four horsemen of an incipient global apocalypse. The first is called Unemployment, as third world megacities (which now plausibly include Los Angeles and Moscow as well as Jakarta and Mexico D.F.) overflow with bitter postindustrial underclasses, nearly half a billion strong, who have become redundant, as either consumers or producers, to the world market. The second is Plague, as the world AIDS epidemic reveals biological pathways open for the invasion of other nightmare ailments, from penicillin-resistant TB to Ebola fever. The third is Tribalism, as multiethnic states, undermined by multinational capital, shatter into deadly shards of ethnic and religious hatred. The fourth horseman, of course, is Ecocide, as the exploitation of nature is accelerated to keep pace with falling terms of trade and rising international debt.
A shelf full of many books written by Gene Wolfe
The cover of Russell Hoban’s novel “Riddley Walker,” showing a puppet against a white background. A cat looks at the camera from behind the book.
A black cat with very long white whiskers and green eyes looks toward the camera
A memorial clay paw print from a cat, with text reading “Sylvia”
Two books side by side: “Titus Groan” by Mervyn Peake, and “The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act” by Fredric Jameson
A gray tabby cat relaxing on a couch
A gray and brown tabby cat asleep on the back of a sofa. Her paws are folded and she looks so cozy
A listing for a ten-minute conference talk titled "Why Nabokov would use Org-Mode if he were writing today"
Ambient musicians Loscil and Lawrence English performing in front of a deep orange screen
A brown tabby cat lying on a blanket by a window, in a sunbeam
The cover of Stuart Dempster’s album “Underground Overlays from the Cistern Chapel”