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Kathleen Weldon @kathleenweldon.bsky.social · 3h

I feel like I repeat myself a lot in my little personal art, and have thought it a fault, but watching Lynch/Oz and reading Murakami at the same time really put it in a different light for me.

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Kathleen Weldon @kathleenweldon.bsky.social · 3h

I just love Commendatore& Bird Chronicle. There's a LOT of repetition of motifs (hello, small people from another realm,! hello, giant hole!). I just watched Lynch/Oz, where similar repetition in Lynch is discussed as a way of digging ever deeper, and I like that.

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Kathleen Weldon @kathleenweldon.bsky.social · 3h

I've been working my way through Murakami - reading 1Q84 right now, actually. I like Killing Commendatore best, and Norwegian Wood least, but I have enjoyed every one of his books. In translation only, sadly, and I always wonder just how much I'm missing.

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Kathleen Weldon @kathleenweldon.bsky.social · 19h

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
Kurt Vonnegut

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Reposted by Kathleen Weldon

Keith W. Dickinson @keithwdickinson.bsky.social · 2d

Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

The Verge @theverge.com · May 26

Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry

Paul McCartne, Elton John and others signed an open letter.

buff.ly

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Kathleen Weldon @kathleenweldon.bsky.social · 2d

Shoot Out the Lights is the best example of this genre, and I will accept no counterargument.

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Kathleen Weldon @kathleenweldon.bsky.social · 3d

For some reason I read this assuming you were writing, not reading, and I was charmed by an author so frustrated by her characters refusing to be charming enough to support a romance novel. “For pity’s sake, what is wrong with you people? You need therapy, not a relationship!”

Kathleen Weldon @kathleenweldon.bsky.social · 3d

You don’t have to write about this.

Kathleen Weldon @kathleenweldon.bsky.social · 3d

AI assisted OCR is amazing. Also in some cases AI seems to be good at taking text organized in ways that are intuitive to humans but not normally machine parsable (like charts in columns separated by titles) and map output to normalized fields.
Useful in some circumstances. Not world- changing

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Kathleen Weldon @kathleenweldon.bsky.social · 3d

Look at the guy's hand on the trampoline and how it turns into two, appears to stretch into a tube, then turns back into a single hand.

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Kathleen Weldon @kathleenweldon.bsky.social · 4d

There's a label issue on those charts?

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Kathleen Weldon @kathleenweldon.bsky.social · 4d

I know people ask these questions to get over social desirability bias (I'm not sexist, but THEY are), but this is silly. Many are reading this as 4 in 10 won't vote for a woman for president (also implied by the headline). It's really that 4 in 10 know a sexist, and I'm stunned it isn't 100%.

Politico @politico.com · 4d

EXCLUSIVE: Americans remain wary of electing a female president, per a new poll.

Four in 10 Americans say they know someone who would not vote for a woman president.

Americans remain wary of electing a female president, new poll reveals

Four in 10 Americans say they know someone who would not vote for a woman president.

www.politico.com

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Kathleen Weldon @kathleenweldon.bsky.social · 5d

One of my favorite comedic scenes in literature

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Reposted by Kathleen Weldon

Nathan Kalman-Lamb @nkalamb.bsky.social · 6d

MSF staff are universally understood to be engaged in an essentially sacred form of work. For a state to nonetheless continuously murder them is a testament to a truly unthinkable degree of depravity.

msf.org/msf-denounce...

This morning, an attack carried out by Israeli forces killed Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) staff member, Omar Hayek, and seriously injured four others. The attack took place on a street where our teams were waiting to take a bus to the MSF field hospital in Deir al Balah, Gaza.

All staff were wearing MSF vests, clearly identifying them as medical humanitarian workers.
We express deep sorrow and outrage over the killing, which occurs less than two weeks after another MSF colleague, Hussein Alnajjar, was killed by the Israeli forces, in Deir Al Balah.

Our thoughts are with Omar’s family and colleagues at this tragic time. Omar, 42 years old, is the fourteenth MSF colleague to be killed in Gaza since 7 October 2023.

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Kathleen Weldon @kathleenweldon.bsky.social · 7d

54 next month!

Me and my honey at a wedding last weekend, enjoying the youthfulness that comes from not being hateful bastards

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Kathleen Weldon @kathleenweldon.bsky.social · 7d

As an adult I have been employed at a number of "elite" institutions, but these days I feel pride only in my alma mater, Wesleyan, which has not forgotten that values come first. I hope the big schools will humble themselves to take the lead from one of the little ones.
I'm not too optimistic.

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Kathleen Weldon @kathleenweldon.bsky.social · 7d

One of the fun things about inventorying files from old survey research companies is the random other stuff you find

Brochure. “So what’s this cable TV all about? It’s a GIANT TV antenna system shared by many people. More (channels) and Better (reception). Cartoon of shrugging man in front of hill with antenna.

Entry from shopping center directory, early 1970s, with map and store listing, including dueling cocktail lounges (Fin and Feather vs. Mascara)

Secret ballots A-D showing options of Nixon and Wallace vs Hubert Humphrey, Ted Kennedy, Ed Muskie, and George McGovern

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Reposted by Kathleen Weldon

The Transfeminine Review @thetransfemininereview.com · 8d

Read bad art. Write bad art. Critique bad art.

Here’s a statement that might be radical in 2025: ‘bad art’ is still art, not content or slop. “But what about AI?” What about it? It demands that we interrogate the definition of art itself, and therefore here is mine: art is a practice, not a product.

Art is not something we consume. Art is something we do.

Artificially-generated ‘art’ does not fall beyond the purview of our definition of art because it lacks aesthetic merit. It has nothing to do with aesthetics. AI ‘art’ is not art because it is not something that the ‘artist’ has done.

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Kathleen Weldon @kathleenweldon.bsky.social · 8d

And all music I would be very happy to never hear again

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Kathleen Weldon @kathleenweldon.bsky.social · 8d

Definitely not.
Seriously, I was excited to see it, since I had never seen the musical and rather liked the book, am a huge Baum fan, etc. It was excruciating.
Music written by the guy who did Godspell, which explains a LOT...

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Kathleen Weldon @kathleenweldon.bsky.social · 9d

out of curiosity, I checked the list of performers. I’m not as on top of the names in comedy as I once was, but boy - this is a list of people I would never, ever watch.

Joel S. @joelhs.bsky.social · 9d

The argument I'm seeing from some comedians performing in Saudi Arabia that "The US abuses human rights, too, and we perform there" is silly, because we would absolutely criticize those comedians if they took lots of money to perform for Trump and friends in exchange for agreeing not to mock him.

evilfred.bsky.social @evilfred.bsky.social · 9d

blocked screenshot

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Reposted by Kathleen Weldon

Ron Filipkowski @ronfilipkowski.bsky.social · 9d

The government of the United States, which is controlled by Donald Trump in the presidency, Republicans in the Senate, and Republicans in the House, will shut down in a few hours.

It is the first shutdown since the last time Trump was president and he shut down the government.

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Kathleen Weldon @kathleenweldon.bsky.social · 9d

Harvard Bookstore used to keep Kerouac and Bukowski behind the counter because they were stolen so often.

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Reposted by Kathleen Weldon

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 10d

Pritzker: "In any other country, if federal agents fired upon journalists & protesters when unprovoked what would we call it? If officials marched down streets harassing civilians & demanding their papers, what would we say? I don't think we'd have trouble calling it what it is: authoritarianism"

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Kathleen Weldon @kathleenweldon.bsky.social · 11d

I'm surprised how many other people don't drive here in Ithaca. It's very limiting. A train connection to Syracuse (instead of an inconvenient occasional bus) would be life-changing for me.

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