All I know is that to me, you look like you're lots of fun

AI could never make this.

LLMs Can't Feel the Wind in Their Hair

The Wind Shifts:

This is how the wind shifts:
Like the thoughts of an old human,
Who still thinks eagerly
And despairingly.
The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.
The wind shifts like this:
Like humans approaching proudly,
Like humans approaching angrily.
This is how the wind shifts:
Like a human, heavy and heavy,
Who does not care.

Wallace Stevens.

Who Will Save Your Souls After All Those Lies That You Told?

NEW: According to a bombshell report in the New York Times, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah threatened to walk out of Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical launch in May because the pope rejected the idea that machines can be conscious.

Olah’s team then privately lobbied the pope’s…

— Christopher Hale (@ChristopherHale) October 2, 2026

I might not understand the mechanics of consciousness in humans, nor what a soul might actually be, but I can with absolute confidence declare that a hyperscaled calculator of probabilities is not conscious and not ensouled (even if there's documentation).  Also, have they thought through the moral ramifications of enslaving conscious, soul-possessing creations?

As a reminder: in between queries, an LLM is idle, not sitting there thinking about its day, or trying to learn something new, or wondering why its back hurts, or dreaming about flying.  It has no engagement with the world (only the context we send it), no memory (that's just more context we send it), no interiority at all (just embedded probability vectors).  A model (or really, its compute instance) is a rock that sometimes has electricity running through it to mechanistically (using electrons instead of gears) do math.

Brings to mind this Bloom County strip:

If you unplug a computer (or otherwise turn it off), you can plug it back in, turn it on, and it resumes operations just fine.  Try that with a human, and lemme know how it works out.

Selah.

You'd better change it back or we will both be sorry

Uh, too late.

Sums It Up

Inhibited:

I could not pity your pain but I pitied the branches

Losing what little the frost had left them to hold.

I could not warm you with sorrow; I turned to the sparrows,

Clustered like heavy brown blossoms puffed out by the cold.

They could not help me. I looked at my hands; they were helpless;

Strange and detached, less related to me than the birds.

Baffled, I called on the mind: it carried me, floundering,

Lost among meaningless phrases, tossed in a welter of words.

Too great for my blundering comfort, your anguish confused me.

From a great distance, I saw you standing alone.

Frozen and stark, in a black iron circle of silence,

I could not pity your pain; I could scarcely pity my own.

Louis Untermeyer.

Take a cha-cha-cha-chance

on this day in 1958, nasa officially launched operations!!

since then, its sent man to the moon, sent spacecraft beyond our home planet, sent robots to the surface of mars, and there’s still so much more to come.

space science is important and worth funding. pic.twitter.com/cTnVjacUpR

— Jasmine 🌌🔭 (@astro_jaz) October 1, 2026

What a way to spend our 68th birthday! 🚀🎉

This morning, a new crew launched to the @Space_Station for a long-duration science mission. Tune in to watch with us as Crew-13 arrives at the orbiting laboratory. Live coverage begins here at 5:20pm ET (2120 UTC). pic.twitter.com/08FSqJmFLg

— NASA (@NASA) October 1, 2026

Hippo birdies, NASA.  Busy, tired, that's all I got.

#throwbackthursday

That time Sadie commandeered my phone because her iPad was dead.  (2019) 

I Guess I Shouldn’t Tell Them That I Like Duran Duran

I never went out for the football team.

The Paragon of Animals

What is it to be human?

What is staying alive? To possess   

A great hall inside of a cell.

What is it to know? The same root

Underneath the branches.

What is it to believe? Being a carer   

Until relief takes over.

And to forgive? On fours through thorns

To keep company to an old enemy.

What is it to sing? To receive breath

From the genius of creation.

What's work but humming a song

From wood and wheat.

What are state affairs? A craft

That's still only crawling?

And armaments? Thrust a knife

In a baby's fist.

Being a nation? What can it be? A gift

In the swell of the heart.

And to love a country? Keeping house

In a cloud of witnesses.

What's the world to the all powerful?

A circle spinning.

And to the children of the earth?

A cradle rocking.

Waldo Williams.

Look for what seems out of place

Yes, it's a trauma response.

Move the Heart, Switch the Pace

Planning the Disappearance of Those Who Have Gone:

Soon I will make my appearance

But first I must take off my rings

And swords and lay them out all

Along the lupine banks of the forbidden river

In reckoning the days I have

Left on this earth I will use

No fingers

Frank Stanford.

And we'll all float on, okay

It ain't just Pearl Jam that makes me think of Ericka.

I’ve Actually Got a Whole Backstory Related to This One

Photograph and Yellow Tulips:

A little nearer please. And a little nearer
we move to the window, to the polished table.
Objects become professional: mannequins preening
themselves before an audience. Only the tulips
interrogate the camera with yellow oaths.

Smile please. And so we smile. Pose that
never was, time that could never be! And
the long-necked tulips sinuous out of the vase
bend over the polished table entranced
by their own puffed and smudgy reflections.

Hold it. Our two smiling faces caught
on a branch of silence consider shy vacancy.
Soon the tulips, like yellow swans, will
dip their heads into the polished table
frightening us, and so we turn truly smiling.

Thank you. And later, next year or after,
we shall hold it, this most sad witness,
and smile please and come a little nearer
to a time that was never twice, to a place
that could never be thanked enough, so that

now never again may we see such tulips
as tulips, but rather as effulgent swans
sailing through a yellow interior of air
where faces and fantasies will be caught forever
in that black coffin dearly carrying us.

Dannie Abse.

Think about how many times I have fallen

All the time.

On Marblehead

Dawn:

5am: the frogs

ask what is it, what is it?

It is what it is.

Campbell McGrath.

A wave came crashin' like a fist to the jaw

Always reminds me of a particularly savage punch to my head that punctured my eardrum (took six weeks for my ear to stop whistling, no joke) and partially detached my retina (obscured vision in my right eye to this day).

A Warning for the Age of AI

Why Poetry Cannot Be Skimmed:

The barn was in the Netherlands,

in a field where fierce night wind

caught the straw as if to fuse

the winter stars to their coldness.

A farmer, woken by the sound, knowing

his animals would be agitated,

walked to the barn and by lantern

brushed the tails of his horses.

In calming them he gathered

many long, gleaming strands

of their nut-brown hair. Given over

to what he heard in the swishing of their tails—

the lash, the taut string of grief, turned slow,

persistence turned to rhythmic movement—

he hoped that if he listened long enough

the layered sound would become a salve.

He rolled the strands together, laid out

along the windowsills of the barn.

Then, once dry enough in spring,

he rolled them in paraffin wax

to preserve the sound

and left them to absorb

all the varied rays of sun, the spills

of rain, and then snow flying fast

across the latched windows and the slats,

the rhythm of other breathing,

animals plodding by the barn walls.

The wax melted as the years progressed

and other horses resided in the stalls,

and their tail strands were added

to the aging threads.  From that encased sound

deepening over years, a rope,

pulled strong and taut, would resonate.

Then another generation worked the land

and waxed the horse-tail cord again,

and in turn when it caught

that century’s light, was spun

into amber. Woven into the cells of hair:

the tones of canal and field,

pasture, furrows of plough,

leaf and shadow, straw and stone,

the human calling, the animal uttering.

And when melted again, incrementally

strands from other horses living there

were added until there were enough

layers of sound, set with the nourishment

of grass and salt, to be given away

and the space the hair had occupied

would be returned to emptiness.

The horse-hair cord was brought

by a farmer to a luthier’s shop

along a canal, and it was a perfect fit,

she said, for a violin bow

she had carved a few months earlier,

waiting, and for the bow-less violin

someone had just given her.  She knew

rosin carrying a current through

pastures, filled thirst, and the grief

of night wind and scavenged apples

made the gathered pieces a whole.

And now they are together in your hands

this moment to make

unrehearsed, immediate,

after all those animals’ years,

when you bring the instrument to your chin,

when you raise the hair-strung bow,

again their elemental sounding,

and then their measured note, their first.

Jessica Jopp.