TITAA #60.5: Blueskies after Dimension X
Migrating to 🦋 - Depth & Motion - Dark Folk - Liminality - Scythe of Birds - Geoff
I would have written about the surrealism exhibit at the Centre Pompidou (outstanding, ends in January), but this is already epic in length with a month’s worth of “weird & esoteric” news. Instead, I am posting a little bit above the paywall on how to set yourself up on Bluesky if you want. It’s my fav of the new sites and doesn’t make me want to shower after use.
TOC:
Intro open article: Bluesky Migration Tips
AI Art Tool News (Including Programming Tool News)
Weird & Esoteric (General, Science, Folklore & Archaeology, Art, AI/Programming)
NLP & Datascience (more SAEs)
FYI: I am co-running an interdisciplinary workshop on creative narrative and natural language processing on December 7 in Copenhagen. We have a couple of spots still open for attendees or short talks.
Bluesky Migration Tips
The surge of data and AI people to Bluesky in the past week has been very satisfying. Various things make it a good place to be already: it supports video now, has lists and tools that let you set up feeds of your own (with regexs or whatever you want), and importantly it doesn’t penalize link sharing—my main use of social media, discouraged everywhere else except Mastodon. There are a few things still missing or in dev, like proper bookmarks, but there are also workarounds. (Feel free to email me.)
“Starter Packs” of people by topic are a huge help in getting yourself set up with people to read who post about stuff you care about. Feeds too have existed for a while, of course, which you can always browse and add to your home page as tabs. Here’s a searchable directory of Starter Packs organized in topical lists. (For instance, a “Creative Coding” one. Be logged in on Bluesky in the same browser where you open them, or on the same platform; you want to be opening them in the app for the “follow” buttons to work.) Some are incredibly specific (I lol-ed):
There are more tools listed here including tools to look for your X follows on the better site.
Hashtags work there, and the #emnlp2024 was especially good for me. Here’s a #30DayMapChallenge one:
Finally: "Thanks to Openvibe, there’s life after Twitter" - article on cross-posters especially Openvibe, for posting at the same time to Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, all of which are growing. So far I prefer Bluesky over the other two, and I’ve given them all a good shot. You can find me here.
Onto the lovely new demos, links, weird art & archaeology & science, fun game articles, narrative research and agent sims, and a fantastic poem.