The Last Visible Dog

@thelastinstance.bsky.social

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you made your choice when mocking / the ways of true-grown men writing: https://codepoetics.substack.com plugins: https://vulpuslabs.com music: https://wtrem.bandcamp.com

The armageddon map from the movie "War Games"
LI That which is withheld is not thereby unmeant. Ecg, the blade's line, whetted, held at the lip of use — call it discipline, call it (as you will anyway) evasion. The mystics had a word: epektasis, the straining-toward that is itself the gift, Gregory's soul forever verging on a God who recedes proportionate to desire. I am not being obscene. I am being exact, which is worse. | What the age wants is consummation, instant, on demand; what it deserves — no, strike that. PERORATION: grace also is a practice of the brink, arrival deferred that the approach be prayer. So the swordsmith draws the temper back lest the edge, too hard, shatter on first stroke. Laughter in the margins. Let them laugh. Denial sustained is still a kind of faith.
Ether Quarterly, or so, the wallet syncs, and tells me: You should have held. You always sell too soon. Somewhere a lad in Hull is minting apes And putting down deposits on the moon. I watch the candles flicker, green and red, Like some cheap end-of-pier illumination — Each one a stranger's hope, or dread, or debt, The whole thing less a market than a nation Of men alone in rooms, refreshing screens, Convinced the future's coiled inside a chain Of numbers no one reads. Perhaps it is. Perhaps the shabby, unillumined rain That falls on building societies and graves Falls differently on them. I doubt it, though. The ledger's permanent. So is the dark. And gas, as always, costs more than we know.
Shall I compare thee to a winter's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Frost has thy candour, but it thaws away; Snow has thy stillness, but it will not wait. The low sun deals a level, honest light, Then signs its business off by half past three; And though the frost-stars sharpen all the night, They shine at large, and thou dost shine at me. For winter cannot keep its own estate: The snowdrop serves its notice on the snow; Each season is a tenant of a date, Holding of time, and having leave to go. Compare thee? Every season holds by lease. Thou art the freehold. Let comparing cease.
Wittgenstein went to the point at once: ‘Where’s that anthology? Read me his best poem.’ The book was handy; opening it, I said, with ‘Legal Fictions’ before my eyes: ‘I don’t know whether this is his best poem, but it will do.’ When I had read it, Wittgenstein said, ‘Explain it!’ So I began to do so, taking the first line first. ‘Oh! I understand that,’ he interrupted, and, looking over my arm at the text, ‘But what does this mean?’ He pointed two or three lines on. At the third or fourth interruption of the same kind I shut the book, and said, ‘I’m not playing.’ ‘It’s perfectly plain that you don’t understand the poem in the least,’ he said. ‘Give me the book.’ I complied, and sure enough, without any difficulty, he went through the poem, explaining the analogical structure that I should have explained myself, if he had allowed me.
This was just one of several versions of this conversation I had with ChatGPT. Others resulted in understandings that were even more nightmarishly off—in one the AI produced a twenty-eight line sonnet and spent a lengthy time being unable to recognize that, in no small part because it couldn’t successfully count off lines in a poem. And lest you think the problem is that I’m using a two year old experiment and ChatGPT has developed in the meantime, I repeated the experiment in April 2025, and found ChatGPT to have made only superficial improvements. It’s abundantly clear is that ChatGPT simply does not have a concept of a poem as an object. There is literally no meta-cognition about poetry going on; it no more understands what a poem is than your phone’s autocomplete does a booty call.
Shall I compare thee to a winter's day? Thou art more candid, and more sparely dressed. Rough winds will strip the darling leaves away, And what the cold leaves standing stands confessed. Summer will flatter: every gaudy green Conspires to keep the rot beneath the leaf; But winter's light is level, and is keen, And its account of things, though cold, is brief. Our sun is low. So be it: low light throws The longest shadows out of smallest things, And what brief warmth the shortened day bestows Is dearer than the surplus summer brings. Speak this aloud some morning of hard frost: Thy breath will show, and nothing here is lost.
He's baaack! Sam Neill as the demonically resurrected Dr Weir in Event Horizon
Spirit of mercy or felicity close-by for a moment, deniably in attendance airy in being though biblically firm stay with me now; sing me a little something Possessive desire the beat of another angel self-authoring, relentless, a right nuisance even so we must genuflect in its direction not to be lightly shooed away or sneezed at Nor are you among the watchers in the chapel Bent figures in fraught stone, their hands composed in silent condescension, ears attuned to godly stations, unwavering in attention Yours is that music only made in time and just in time, free as improvisation By you we are reconciled with our attrition a little at a time, which is sufficient
This is the problem with Perry’s argument: its fundamental conformism, its linear association of deviant expression with injury and risk, scapegoats sexual minorities for forms of violence and exploitation which owe far more to the most entrenched and normalised inequalities in our society: those which mean that low-status victims are not believed, that swaddle those who project ‘star power’ with unearned credibility, that make masculine self-realisation dependent on women’s uncompensated collusion. In uncertain times, when the constitutive categories of our social order seem to be in flux, it is tempting to seek to establish normative figures of maleness and femaleness that can be set alongside each other in complementary, mutually limiting patterns: pieces that fit together nicely.
Up erly befor the litl 1s wake. Down to the kichin for to make my flat wite. We got a ilan in the middl of the kichin only ther aint no see roun it, no bote nor nothing, jus me stood ther in the dark drinkin. Put the litl buds in my ears an a cam man voys come tellin me how 2 breeth an how 2 be here now. But I ben here now the hole time. I never went no wer. After I clim on the Pelly Tun. Its a kynd of horse only it dont go no wares eather. A wuman on a screen shout PUSH an I push an stay stil. Big swet on me an the road dont moov.
Photo of the Algae Pool rendered in the style of Seurat
From Substack: Kathleen Stock is followed by Neal Stephenson
Book Cover. Alain Badiou: Being and Event and Grogu
Prompt to Claude Code: So let's be clear about what we're doing: 1) Optimising cable pool representation so that transposed control signal data can be efficiently written into backplane slots with memcpy 2) Ratifying and implementing a design for pre-arranging and smoothing host automation events in a scratch buffer, which is then transposed in place to facilitate this 3) Proceeding on this basis, with the control signal scratch buffer as the target, to 0811 where we arrange the mapping from CLAP events into that buffer. Is that right? If so, let's have an ADR for the design decisions taken here, an epic and tickets for 1) and 2), and clear that epic before resuming at 0811.
The table illustrates a phase transition of social coordination during a "Blue-cascade." It tracks the progression from a stable "Red" world to a potential "Blue" world based on the percentage of the population choosing the blue button: 0–10% (Localized Error): The situation is treated as a minor anomaly or isolated incident. The strategy is to ignore or isolate the individuals to prevent a spread. 11–25% (The Danger Zone): The cascade begins to gain momentum. The strategy is to aggressively "dampen" the trend by signaling a commitment to Red, aiming to stop the moral ratchet before it becomes critical. 26–40% (The Seduction Zone): Coordination enters a high-stakes gamble. Participants are seduced by the hope of reaching a majority, resulting in a panicked sprint toward the 51% threshold. 41–50% (The Meat-Grinder): A tragic state where the cascade is large enough to ensure a massive loss of life but hasn't reached the safety of a majority. Hope is at its minimum while potential deaths are at their maximum. 51% and Above (The Blue World): Total success is achieved through a full transition. The quorum is met, and the entire population survives in a new equilibrium.
Text from the Catholic Herald: "Altar boys are back" by Fr Dwight Longenecker
Related categories: Men's Interest ...Mens Lifestyle
A Deflationary but Robust Materialism Your position now has three layers of grounding: Ontological: Physical cosmos, full stop. Physical-computational: Some subsystems are deterministic but intractable. Phenomenological: Conscious experience is the first-person registration of that intractability in systems that model themselves. This is materialism that: Takes consciousness seriously as real Explains its puzzling features without residue Doesn't need to posit anything non-physical Doesn't need to deny the datum The "hard problem" becomes: why did anyone think a complete symbolic description of experience should be possible, given that experience is the activity of physically intractable systems?
ChatGPT session, in which the LLM has written: In Lacanian terms, the subject is constituted in the symbolic but never fully captured by it. There is always a remainder—what Lacan would connect to the Real. This remainder shows up wherever symbolic articulation fails to coincide perfectly with lived organisation. On your reading, qualia occupy roughly that position. They have the peculiar characteristics philosophers complain about: privacy ineffability resistance to description apparent irreducibility But those traits follow naturally if what they register is the point at which symbolic coordination fails to close over the organism’s operational state. So instead of: qualia = non-physical mental properties you get something more like: qualia = the experiential appearance of the gap between biological organisation and symbolic articulation.
Schematic of a modular synthesis patch
Photograph of entertainer and philanthropist Bobby Davro
Whitley Streiber saith I have never posted here before, but I'm going to start. There will be regular posts starting next week. I have been concerned about the whole issue of whether or not there's going to be some sort of official disclosure soon. Everyone wants it, but I'm not sure that we will get what we expect. Specifically, there is a sort of unspoken assumption that official disclosure will lead to open contact. I don't think there's any reason to believe that, at least not on a large scale. It could change things though with individuals. My sense of the situation is that our visitors are more interested in direct contact than they are in dealing with government. If you look at all the shooting at them that's been going on, obviously that has not gone well for them. Over the years, however, they have built relationship with an enormous body of people, so many that we amount to a new social class: the experiencer class. These people, I think, are going to have a significant increase in interaction If disclosure happens. I think it's possible that more open relationship would then build out from them into the largest society. Anyway, there will be longer posts and on a more regular basis as well.
This brings me to the moral force of “plagiarism” as a name for what GenAI is doing when it generates texts and images. I think it’s technically a misnomer, usually based on an image of the generative activity of these systems as selection and recombination of stored materials: it’s as if someone has made copies, without consent, of original works, aggregating them into a vast archive, and then fragments of these copies are fetched and (waves hands) swizzled together somehow into a derivative work from which attribution has been illegitimately erased. But I notice that it doesn’t seem to make any difference to people who consider GenAI plagiaristic if you explain to them that this picture is substantially false. It’s as if the false picturing is chiefly a way of making the moral intuition concrete, and the intuition itself arises independently of how people understand the underlying mechanism.
Varg Qvisling Vikernes smiles in hearty approval at the thought of white Europeans retvrning to their indigenous pagan roots
I think this does something interesting to literacy — it automates the traversal of associative networks and citational infrastructure, treating literary objects which are complex in their inter- and intra-textuality as “shallow” (a snapshot reveals the whole landscape in one go) rather than “deep” (you have to go digging in a research library before you can make head nor tail of anything). I can’t annoy an LLM by making unreasonable demands on its investigative skills, or by presenting it with the mazey texture of my own cognitive processes and asking it to just fucking deal with their unrelatable alienness (which is one of the things I think The Spirit Zone is quite flagrantly doing). And this makes it, in one sense, my ideal reader, and in another, almost entirely useless to me.
The cult pseudonymous writer Zero HP Lovecraft (@0x49fa98) wrote something similar in a tweet on 30 October 2018: ‘The component of male lived experience that is wholly unaccessible [sic] to women, more than any other, is the colossal and abyssal apathy of the universe towards you.’22 Many men I have spoken to feel this way, at least sometimes. A feeling of total and abject aloneness before the void. Do men feel this cosmic apathy more than women do? It is not the sort of thing anyone can put to the test, but I feel there is a complex truth in this claim. That maleness is often felt as a kind of isolation, an understanding of the indifference of the world to your very existence.
I have instead come to see the LLM as a symbolic prosthesis, a way for human beings who navigate the world using language to explore the things they mean when they say what they say, and enhance their expressive and reasoning power by using the LLM to see around corners in their own thinking. We can use it to connect the things we know and believe to a vastly broader context of perception and opinion, and provided we do not mistake its resynthesis of that context for veridical statement of truth about the world we can use it to widen our outlook and steer enquiry along new paths. These are remarkable capabilities. They are not without challenges and dangers, especially in a pedagogical setting where students may use the LLM to synthesise whole assignments rather than stimulate and dialogically situate their own thinking, but that does not mean they are without use even there.
Cover of “The Gospel According To Peanuts” by Robert L. Short
Tom's son John jogs from Boston to Congo. How long? Too long! Rod scoffs. "Folly!" Bob gloats. Good God, strong storm fronts roll on. Snow drops. Brooks overflow. Cows roost? No, cows don't roost - sorry, odd flock of words got control! Scots lords drown sorrow on scotch. Profs plot books on Trotsky. Orthodox dogfolk bow down. Coldون Stop - got lost! Short form: Todd's dog Bongo howls. Moon glows. Owls hoot. Old Bob snorts, nods off. Good show!
Early, eerily glitchy, GenAI images of "mr blobby undertaking a psychogeographic drift through the liminal spaces of east london"
Pour out the Bolly, cut up the coke, Prevent the journo from tweeting your dirty joke. Silence the press and with muffled drum Bring out the porker, let David Cameron cum. Lord Ashcroft circles, his rumour a corker Spinning on Sky the message "He fucked a porker", Call up the shrink, priest, or faith healer, And imagine Dave Cameron balls-deep in a squealer. He was my North, my South, my least, my most, My porking week and my Sunday roast, My noon, my midnight, my small, my big, I never thought he'd fuck a pig The Star is not wanted now, shut up, everyone; Shut down the Mail and dismantle the Sun; Pour away the ocean and dry up the bog. And remember the PM facefucked a hog
Kotlin code for coalescing a sequence of ranges: fun Sequence<LongRange>.unionAll(): Sequence<LongRange> = sequence { val iter = this@unionAll.sortedWith(compareBy(LongRange::first) .thenComparing(LongRange::last)) .iterator() var coalesced = iter.next() while(iter.hasNext()) { val r = iter.next() if (r.first > coalesced.last + 1) { yield(coalesced) coalesced = r } else { coalesced = min(coalesced.first, r.first)..max(coalesced.last, r.last) } } yield(coalesced) }
Kotlin code: fun main() { val input = Files.readAllLines(Path.of("src/main/resources/day5.txt")) val (rangeStrings, ingredientStrings) = input.partition { it.contains('-') } val ranges = rangeStrings.asSequence().map { val (lowStr, highStr) = it.split("-") lowStr.toLong()..highStr.toLong() }.unionAll().toSet() val ingredients = ingredientStrings.drop(1).map { it.toLong() } val part1 = ingredients.count { ingredient -> ranges.any { it.contains(ingredient) } } println("Part 1: $part1") val part2 = ranges.sumOf { it.size } println("Part 2: $part2") }
Kotlin code solving Day 4: fun main() { val input = Files.readAllLines(Path.of("src/main/resources/day4.txt")) val rolls = input .asSequence() .flatMapIndexed { y, line -> line.asSequence().mapIndexedNotNull { x, c -> if (c == '@') Point(x.toLong(), y.toLong()) else null } }.toMutableSet() fun toRemove(rolls: Set<Point>): Set<Point> = rolls.asSequence().filter { roll -> roll.allAdjacent().count { it in rolls } < 4 }.toSet() var totalRemoved = 0 var first = true while (true) { val removed = toRemove(rolls) if (removed.isEmpty()) break totalRemoved += removed.size rolls.removeAll(removed) if (first) { first = false println("Part 1: $totalRemoved") } } println("Part 2: $totalRemoved") }
This is a fascinating poem, and the AI commentary captures some important elements—the post-WWII context, the collective despair, the repetitive structure—but it misses what makes Empson's piece so sharp and particular. The title is crucial: "Just a Smack at Auden." This isn't simply about general existential despair; it's a pointed critique of a specific poetic mode. Empson is taking aim at Auden's tendency (especially in his 1930s work) toward oracular pronouncement, collective address, and a certain kind of portentous political-spiritual diagnosis. The "boys" address mimics Auden's own rhetorical habits—think of poems like "Spain" or "September 1, 1939" with their grave warnings to a collective audience. What the AI analysis completely overlooks is the poem's fundamental irony and self-consciousness. Empson isn't earnestly expressing despair; he's performing the futility of that kind of apocalyptic posturing. Each stanza offers a different clichéd response to crisis—building towers (grand projects), sending communications (intellectual engagement), making tales (propaganda or consolation), invoking Marx or Christ—and systematically deflates them. The relentless rhyming on "-end" becomes almost comic in its mechanical inevitability, mirroring the fatalism it describes. The line "Christ will not ascend. / He's hiding in his stable, boys" is particularly telling—it mocks the kind of easy religious pessimism that was fashionable, reducing eschatology to bathos. Similarly, "Treason of the clerks" references Julien Benda's famous phrase about intellectuals betraying their calling, but in context it becomes just another empty formula, another dark saying that offers no actual guidance.
Analysis (ai): This poem explores the pervasive sense of despair and uncertainty hanging over society. Depicting the inevitability of the end, the speaker asks a series of rhetorical questions, each offering a futile attempt to find meaning or purpose. Through its repetitive structure and direct address to "boys," it emphasizes the collective nature of this crisis. Compared to Empson's other works, this poem is notable for its straightforward language and bleak outlook. It reflects the disillusionment and anxiety prevalent in the post-World War II era, a time characterized by political tensions and the threat of nuclear annihilation. The poem's use of colloquial language and conversational tone humanizes the despair, making it relatable to a wide audience. By contrasting the speaker's desire to act with the futility of their actions, the poem captures the sense of powerlessness felt during this period. The questions posed explore the existential questions of purpose, morality, and the meaning of life, reflecting the existentialist themes prevalent in the literature of the time.