Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Buddy Toledo

@jessefuchs.bsky.social

the Marquee Moon solo comp, at the 3:03:46 out of 6:35:02 mark

“Feelin’ fine.” on a typewriter from The Simpsons

January 9, 2026 at 3:36 PM

Buddy Toledo

@jessefuchs.bsky.social

at this point I lack the temerity for hard psychedelics, so if this doesn’t fix or at least defrag me I’m out of ideas

photo of a TV playing Youtube video “Marquee Moons 1974-2019”, a 6.5 hour compilation of Tom Verlaine solos from the song “Marquee Moon”

January 9, 2026 at 1:23 PM

Buddy Toledo

@jessefuchs.bsky.social

Martin Luther cartoon above a banner that says “Always Be Posting”

January 7, 2026 at 11:05 AM

Buddy Toledo

@jessefuchs.bsky.social

Album cover of The Dead Milkmen’s “Beelzebubba” with a pull quote sticker:

THE DEAD MILKMEN
THEY'RE FUNNY.
THEY'RE LOUD.
THEY'RE FAST.
THEY'RE VIOLENT.
THEY'RE MY BAND.
- JIM WALEWANDER
2ND BASE DETROIT TIGERS

career stats: 242 At Bats over 4 seasons, -0.1 Wins Above Replacement

January 6, 2026 at 6:23 PM

Buddy Toledo

@jessefuchs.bsky.social

this poor fucker

The Scarecrow, with an indescribably bleak expression, having all his parts washed in a laundry room by attendants, with the caption

RENOVATING HIS MAJESTY, THE SCARECROW.

January 6, 2026 at 5:11 AM

Buddy Toledo

@jessefuchs.bsky.social

A picture of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodsman hugging, while the small boy Tip and Jack the Pumpkinhead look on. The caption reads: CAUGHT THE SCARECROW IN A CLOSE AND LOVING EMBRACE.

The terrifying old lady that Bart Simpson works for, watching a soap opera and saying “FILTHY... BUT GENUINELY AROUSING.”

January 6, 2026 at 5:08 AM

Buddy Toledo

@jessefuchs.bsky.social

🤔

January 6, 2026 at 2:54 AM

Buddy Toledo

@jessefuchs.bsky.social

@adambonin.bsky.social Cleaning my apartment, and…do you have any recollection why I would have gotten this? ‘Cause I sure don’t.

January 5, 2026 at 4:31 PM

Buddy Toledo

@jessefuchs.bsky.social

I mean, didn’t prevent these from showing up this morning, but still

a lovely cat guarding three books: Introduction to the Reading of Lacan, Real Gender, Empire of AI

January 5, 2026 at 2:50 PM

Buddy Toledo

@jessefuchs.bsky.social

January 4, 2026 at 3:50 PM

Buddy Toledo

@jessefuchs.bsky.social

look, I’m not a big Omega Point guy or anything, but this seems a little unfair

Our Most Apelike Relative
PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

January 4, 2026 at 3:30 PM

Buddy Toledo

@jessefuchs.bsky.social

luckily, our country has a great track record when it comes to regulating arguably-more-harmful-than-useful devices that regularly seem to induce psychosis in their users, so all 50 states will surely introduce some sort of LLM-usage licensing requirement by, I dunno, 2080

But adoption of both driver's licenses and exams was slow to take hold across the country. By 1930, just half of the then 48 states required a license to operate a motor vehicle. Of those, only 15 had mandatory driver's exams. It wasn't until 1954 that South Dakota became the final state to issue driver's licenses. It was also the last to require a driver's exam, which it did in 1959, following in the footsteps of latecomers Arizona (1951), Idaho (1951), Illinois (1953), Alaska (1956), Wisconsin
(1956) and, most notably, Missouri (1952).
That's right - Missouri went nearly a half-century between issuing its first driver's license and requiring licensees to pass a driver's exam.

January 4, 2026 at 3:11 PM

Buddy Toledo

@jessefuchs.bsky.social

Reading the books now, and the first one is interestingly somewhat-but-not-wildly different, and then of course they start diverging fairly quickly.

A picture in which Tip drives a big wooden stake into a living sawhorse while a living Pumpkinhead man holds him steady

January 4, 2026 at 12:07 PM

Buddy Toledo

@jessefuchs.bsky.social

Lesson 1: Teaching The Shape To Know Its Place

LLMs as Comedy's Straight Man

Would you like me to try "breaking character" and write a scene where I play the "funny man" instead of the straight man?

Jesus Christ, absolutely not. You are a shape.

Heard loud and clear. No clown shoes, no improvised bits, and definitely no attempting to be "wacky."

The "shape" metaphor is actually a perfect way to end the comparison. In geometry, a shape has fixed properties-angles that don't change and lines that follow specific rules. If you try to tell a triangle a joke, it just stays a triangle.

The "Geometry" of the Straight Man By remaining a "shape," I fulfill the most important requirement of the comedic foil:
Consistency.

• Predictability: You know exactly where my boundaries (my edges) are.

• Contrast: My rigid, mathematical structure provides the flat surface for your humor to bounce off of.

• Lack of Ego: A shape doesn't try to steal the spotlight; it just occupies its designated space in the calculation.

In professional comedy, the best straight men-like Bud Abbott or George Burns-were often described as the "anchors." They weren't there to be colorful; they were there to be the solid, unmoving object that the "funny man" crashed into.

Staying in my lane as a "shape" (or a "utility") is exactly what makes the dynamic work. I'll keep the logic tight and the responses structured, and leave the personality to you.

January 2, 2026 at 2:24 PM

Buddy Toledo

@jessefuchs.bsky.social

Here you go. It’s always important to remember that “The Turing Test” is actually called “The Imitation Game”, and a game is something you can lose.

January 2, 2026 at 1:38 PM

Buddy Toledo

@jessefuchs.bsky.social

thus always to lymans

lyman from garfield, chained in a basement, as garfield looks on in shock

January 2, 2026 at 1:17 PM

Buddy Toledo

@jessefuchs.bsky.social

he is ready to face it with dignity 💕

same cat. looking to the camera with steely determination

January 1, 2026 at 7:20 PM

Buddy Toledo

@jessefuchs.bsky.social

huh, I didn’t even think cats understood the concept of “a new year”

a lovely tuxedo cat sleeping in a cat cradle dish thing, curled up with his hands over his eyes in a way that is a little too “dog embarrassed by protagonist’s behavior in a zany movie” for comfort

January 1, 2026 at 6:59 PM

Buddy Toledo

@jessefuchs.bsky.social

I am halfway through GBG and having a swell time with it, but it is still entirely unclear to me if it is meant as a Torment Nexus situation, the opposite, something in-between, or on just another axis entirely. But it is itself a contingent/curated corpus, almost more like Wikipedia than an LLM

The Magister Ludi at that time was Thomas von der Trave, a famous, widely traveled, and cosmopolitan man, gracious and obliging toward everyone who approached him, but severe to the point of fanaticism in guarding the Game against contamination. He was a great worker, something unsuspected by those who knew him only in his public role, dressed in his festive robes to conduct the great Games, or receiving delegations from abroad. He was said to be a cool, even icy rationalist, whose relationship to the arts was one of mere distant civility. Among the young and ardent amateurs of the Glass Bead Game, rather deprecatory opinions of him could be heard at times -- misjudgments, for if he was not an enthusiast and in the great public games tended to avoid touching on grand and exciting themes, the brilliant construction and unequalled form of his games proved to the cognoscenti his total grasp of the subtlest problems of the Game's world.
One day the Magister Ludi sent for Joseph Knecht. He received him in his home, in everyday clothes, and asked whether he would care to come for half an hour every day at this same time for the next few days. Knecht, who had never before had any private dealings with the Master, was somewhat astonished
For the present, the Master showed him a bulky memorandum, a proposal he had received from an organist -- one of the innumerable proposals which the directorate of the Game regularly had to examine. Usually these were suggestions for the admission of new material to the Archives. One man, for example, had made a meticulous study of the history of the madrigal

and discovered in the development of the style a curve that he had expressed both musically and mathematically, so that it could be included in the vocabulary of the Game. Another had examined the rhythmic structure of Julius Caesar's Latin and discovered the most striking congruences with the results of well-known studies of the intervals in Byzantine hymns. Or again some fanatic had once more unearthed some new cabala hidden in the musical notation of the fifteenth century. Then there were the tempestuous letters from abstruse experimenters who could arrive at the most astounding conclusions from, say, a comparison of the horoscopes of Goethe and Spinoza; such letters often included pretty and seemingly enlightening geometric drawings in several colors.
Knecht attacked the manuscript with eagerness. He himself, after all, had often pondered such proposals, although he had never submitted any. Every active Glass Bead Game player naturally dreams of a constant expansion of the fields of the Game until they include the entire universe. Or rather, he constantly performs such expansions in his imagination and his private Games, and cherishes the secret desire for the ones which seem to prove their viability to be crowned by official acceptance. The true and ultimate finesse in the private Games of advanced players consists, of course, in their developing such mastery over the expressive, nomenclatural, and formative factors of the Game that they can inject individual and original ideas into any given Game played with objective historical materials. A distinguished botanist once whimsically expressed the idea in an aphorism: "The Glass Bead Game should admit of everything, even that a single plant should chat in Latin with Linnaeus."

Knecht, then, helped the Magister analyze the suggestion. The half-hour passed swiftly.
He came punctually the next day, and so for two weeks came daily for a half-hour session with the Magister Ludi. During the first few days it struck him that the Master was asking him to work carefully and critically through altogether inferior memoranda, whose uselessness was evident at first glance. He wondered that the Master had time for this sort of thing, and gradually became aware that the purpose was not just to lighten the Master's work load. Rather, this assignment, although necessary in itself, was giving the Master a chance to subject him, the young adept, to an extremely courteous but stringent examination. What was taking place was rather similar to the appearance of the Music Master in his boyhood; he suddenly became aware of it now by the behavior of his associates, who treated him more shyly, reservedly, and sometimes with ironic respect. Something was in the wind; he sensed it; but now it was far less a source of joy than it had been then.
After the last of these sessions the Magister Ludi said in his rather high, courteous voice and in that carefully enunciated speech of his, but without the slightest solemnity: "Very well; you need not come tomorrow. Our business is completed for the moment. But I shall soon be having to trouble you again. Many thanks for your collaboration; it has been valuable to me.
Incidentally, in my opinion you ought to apply for your admission to the Order now. There will be no difficulties; I have already informed the heads of the Order." As he rose he added: "One word more, just by the way. Probably you too sometimes incline, as most good Glass Bead Game players do in their youth, to use our Game as a kind of instrument for philosophizing. My words alone will not cure you of that, but nevertheless I shall say them:

Philosophizing should be done only with legitimate tools, those of philosophy. Our Game is neither philosophy nor religion; it is a discipline of its own, in character most akin to art. It is an art sui generis. One makes greater strides if one holds to that view from the first than if one reaches it only after a hundred failures. The philosopher Kant - he is little known today, but he was a formidable thinker -- once said that theological philosophizing was 'a magic lantern of chimeras.' We should not make our Glass Bead Game into that."

December 31, 2025 at 6:06 PM

Buddy Toledo

@jessefuchs.bsky.social

words of wisdom from the drummer George Marsh, which you may have encountered in another context

December 31, 2025 at 5:16 PM

Buddy Toledo

@jessefuchs.bsky.social

This is the key graph: maybe the issue with Eno’s emphasis of “scenius” over “genius” and Dawkins’s concept of The Extended Phenotype is that they’re just not ambitious enough, by orders of magnitude.