Tobias Wilson-Bates

@phdhurtbrain.bsky.social

11803 Followers 4185 Following

Time Machines. Temporality. Ecology. Robots. Education. Associate Professor of 19th century British Literature.

David Lynch refusing to explain things
Drawing of Don Quixote charging at a giant fan (a windmill)
Beast reading a book and thinking about how much he loves science
Microsoft force feeding Copilot work slip into its documents
The torture machine from The Princess Bride that drains away years of your life
They hated him because he told them the truth meme but it’s about Mr Collins
Christopher Walken saying “I’ve got a fever and the only cure is more Alan Armadale”
William Morris designed forty-one wallpapers and five ceiling papers, working from 1862 with Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company and from 1875 with Morris & Company as sole owner. "Marigold" stes large single blossoms amid leafy meanders over a ground of smaller flowers. The forms demonstrate close observation of native flowers and the monochrome pattern was offered in blue (as seen here), dark red, or light brown. A belief in beauty, imagination, and order shaped Morris's work and the popularity of his designs helped to raise British production standards in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The cream area at the top of this sheet reveals the edges of the wooden blocks used to print the design.
Frog Hume wearing a bright red outfit of the sort a frog would pick out while pretending to be a human
The most Norwegian death metal font imaginable
Rockwell drawing of guy standing up to talk at a public meeting
Marshmallow experimenting with another sleep angle in his box
Marshmallow the cat expressing Fibonacci’s perfect ratio in his box nap
Edgar Allen Poe wearing sunglasses like a boss
Album cover for Chapman’s stunning self titled album
My family cat (Marshmallow) considering the deepest problems in his field of study
Penguin Classics Cover: Charles Dickens Our Mutual Friend; or, it's actually cool and ethical to lie to your spouse, right guys??
Superman being snuck up on meme but it’s unmarked Messi sneaking up
A grey dusty withered evening in London city has not a hopeful aspect. The closed warehouses and offices have an air of death about them, and the national dread of colour has an air of mourning. The towers and steeples of the many house-encompassed churches, dark and dingy as the sky that seems descending on them, are no relief to the general gloom; a sun-dial on a church-wall has the look, in its useless black shade, of having failed in its business enterprise and stopped payment for ever; melancholy waifs and strays of housekeepers and porters sweep melancholy waifs and strays of papers and pins into the kennels, and other more melancholy waifs and strays explore them, searching and stooping and poking for anything to sell. The set of humanity outward from the City is as a set of prisoners departing from gaol, and dismal Newgate seems quite as fit a stronghold for the mighty Lord Mayor as his own state-dwelling.
Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid checked out absolutely everywhere in every possible format
All the movie posters of silhouette of hero standing in center looking at the city
Split image with the same number of people either on a bus all together or all in separate cars and the number of cars necessary stretch off into the distance
Patrick Swayze from Donnie Darko
"Somehow, Palpatine returned" meme but it says "somehow, Mark Twain returned"
Gabriel Garcia Marquez sticking out his tongue
Hegel
Thicc Satan
Skinner "it's the children who are out of touch" meme but about eye sight
The tattered zombie remnant of Google “search” desperately fighting to make “saturfish” happen
The False Mirror is a surrealist oil on canvas painting by René Magritte, from 1929. It depicts a human eye framing a cloudy, blue sky. In the depiction of the eye in the painting, the clouds take the place normally occupied by the iris. The painting's original French title is Le faux miroir.
Koyaanisqatsi: life out of balance
Fisherman at Sea depicts a moonlit view of fishermen on rough seas near the Isle of Wight, and is a work of marine art. The small boat contains a flickering lamp. Overhead the sky is dark and clouded. There is wide sea, and threatening rocks in the background. The cold light of the Moon at night contrasts with the warmer glow of the fishermen's lantern. The chalk formations on the left of the work were traditionally thought to be the Needles on the western tip of the island; however, this has been contested, with some scholars suggesting that the chalk cliffs are instead the ones at the nearby Freshwater Bay.
Lucy and the football
Get in, loser meme but it says “we’re doing the key to all mythologies”
Most People rejected His message. Crowd: Shut up! They hated Jesus because He told them Middlemarch
The Wheat Field is an 1816 landscape painting by the British artist John Constable. It depicts a scene in his native Suffolk. The view across a wheat field depicts a cluster of farm workers who are seen harvesting the crop. Today it is in the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts having been gifted to the collection in 2007.
The Machines are Praying, and Nobody Wants to Talk About It. Image is a short haired robot woman in some kind of weird sexy sci fi bra top thing for some reason
Painting of rain clouds that look like huge smudged brush strokes fill a canvas above a thin strip of sea
Moby-Dick: the commendable fifteenth best novel of all time
Cover of Isaac Asimov’s “I, Robot”
Darth Vader altering his bargain with Lando but now he’s Charles Dickens
Hangin with my guy Darth Sidious
Kang and Kodos, the aliens from the Simpsons
The cover of Moby Duck
Wiliam Morris May Day Certainly May Day is above all days of the year fitting for the protest of the disinherited against the system of robbery that shuts the door betwixt them and a decent life; the day when the promise of the year reproaches the waste inseparable from the society of inequality, the waste which produces our artificial poverty of civilization, so much bitterer for those that suffer under it than the natural poverty of the rudest barbarism. For it is undoubtedly true that full-blown capitalism makes the richest country in the world as poor as, nay poorer than, the poorest, for the life of by far the greater part of its people.
OpenAI Codex system prompt includes explicit directive to “never talk about goblins” Directions also include system instructions to act like “you have a vivid inner life.
Freedom will not come Today, this year Nor ever Through compromise and fear. I have as much right As the other fellow has To stand On my two feet And own the land.
for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Meme saying “America can, should, must, and will blow up the moon”
No sooner had he mentioned the coffin with the crown upon it, than his friend's cat, who seemed to have been lying asleep before the fire, leaped up, crying out, 'Then I am king of the cats;' and then scrambled up the chimney, and was never seen more." THE END
A dog rolling over. Impossible even in this position to know how many nipples lurk beneath its fur...
‘Is it life? We can’t tell’: Nasa’s Curiosity rover finds organic molecules on Mars Scientists think they are looking at chemical building blocks of life preserved for 3.5bn years
Koala rage
The Labor Department wants to teach you to use AI more. Here’s what we found The short course provides solid basics for using AI. But it also misidentifies AI products, links out to bad advice and raises ethical concerns about the products it promotes
In his blog post, Altman wrote, without apparent irony, that the prospect of controlling artificial general intelligence was like the “ring of power” from “The Lord of the Rings”: it “makes people do crazy things.”
William Morris intensifying