AI as anti-archive

Stay winning

Just proofread the description of a festival book. The festival was celebrating the renovation of a building that got burnt down at the previous festival 😭

“STOP TRYING TO MAKE POST-INCUNABLE HAPPEN”

Page of Latin type, with one word in a fugly rounded Greek type and a blank spot with a Greek word supplied in pen.

this is one of my favorite examples—Aldus’s edition of Gaza’s Greek grammar. Only the big Aldine Greek existed then and it didn’t fit on the line in the Latin preface, so in one spot he used an ugly older Greek and in another he left it blank and wrote it in by hand himself in every copy!!

Post-incunable is one of my top most annoying book description words 😅 I’m curious what the earliest use of this is.

Thanks!! ❤️

It’s frustrating but does feel like an interesting area of kinship with early modern printers lol. Options are basically the same: leave it out, kludge, or pay $$$ to get a custom typeface.

I mean, we CAN just make a bigger ε but then it doesn’t fit right on the line. I’ve advised giving up.

An Italian guy named Trissino tried to add some new letters to the alphabet to demystify Italian pronunciation in the 16th century. He chose epsilon and omega. Problem is, capital epsilon is just E. So he just made a big epsilon. But we can’t figure out how to make this in Microsoft word lmao.

That was my first thought when I saw this 😭 they were a real deep cut fan

Archaic word of the day:

cockalorum - a self-important little man; bragging talk (First recorded in 1705; pseudo-Latin)

#englishlanguage #history #c18th

Sic Semper Tyrannis 😎

I still think about it all the time, even though I ‘moved on’ from those interests. How we can truly communicate is always relevant, which is sort of what it ended up being about.

Rhetorical strategies for discussing the ineffable in St Augustine’s writings

I don’t want to be peevish, but I am just not trying to spend my money supporting businesses or artists who don’t respect actual human work. Opera and theater have been especially important to me recently because it’s a way to escape the internet slop world. Getting in my email from them sucks.

I mean, the email did not need a custom image. It was an invite to a fundraising event. The mental gymnastics behind “I am being forced to use AI” are bonkers.

You’re artists, but you feel comfortable using the visual plagiarism machine? I really think that’s pretty lame.

I received a marketing email from a small opera company with an AI image. I asked them about it, and received a curt reply that they don’t have the budget for a marketing person and are “forced” to use AI. I really don’t understand this viewpoint. Just use a photo of your opera??? Come on.

This is how I feel about plants. For us myopics, they also don’t mind if you stick your face right up in there. Sometimes they smell good!

The noise that haunts my dreams!

These posts brought to you by some uncomfortable looking book yoga in the incoming NY catalogs…

Recently I was in a reading room consulting a modern reference that happened to be kept there. I set up the wedges to keep the opening angle small, as it was a thick, heavy volume. The attendant made me change them to the widest possible setting 🙃 it was sort of awful. But it’s their book!

Amazing that there is so much grumbling online about gloves & books, but I regularly see bindings abused through unsupported boards and painful opening angles. I don’t say anything because they aren’t my books! You can do what you want with your books. I try to keep the boards attached on mine.

It’s very funny that it includes the catalog of ships, potentially the most boring part of the entire poem

We must engage in full epistemological crisis before emerging (hopefully?) next week ready to sell books

I’m using a colleague’s computer to do something today and thus am experiencing copilot for the first time. NO I DO NOT WANT YOU TO RE-WRITE MY SENTENCE! WTF IS THIS?

👑

Am I using the word “gilt” too much? Can I make the joke “impressus interruptus”?

In the stage of fair prep where I’m asking questions like “are we sure this is yellow?” and pondering if anyone ever reads the bibliography section anyway (especially if cutting one or two gets the description to fit on one page…)