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[Wodehouse Tweets @inimitablepgw]

It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can't help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet.

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@shane_nullable @goblinodds It's really funny how a movie considered well below-average at the time is a more fun and functional blockbuster script than most major action movie in the past 10 years.

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@patrick_oshag Are there any good sci-fi works about AI-managed pastoral societies where everyone leads a Shire life instead, dimly aware of the machinery sustaining them?

The Time Traveler notwithstanding I suppose. But that's less outright pastoral and more lounge-y.

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@LinkofSunshine "The [hipster] efforts were indeed a kind of cargo-cult cultural revival that imitated the forms of the premodern world but couldn’t capture its essence." - Dave Green's recent essay on the phenomenon.

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@abcdentminded This is literally the basis for 90% of the internet's understanding of eroticism in all directions. Baudillard called it.

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So much of this could be solved, for better or for worse, by putting data centers in the sickest-looking cyberpunk architecture possible.

[jasmine sun @jasminewsun]

I went to DC to talk to people across the political spectrum (& see some data centers) and concluded that we are *really* not ready for how much people hate AI

new scene report on my week with the AI populists: https://t.co/WRmfolVllS

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@mattleeanderson Fair enough.

Greene begins his novel, "A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which, to look ahead" if that's closer to what you're looking for.

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@KayleeCrimson @h3xum_ @SketchesbyBoze He explicitly wrote a book about the dangers of dehumanized technocracy and unquestioned scientific/technical progress. And another one about a possessed mechanical mind scheming against humanity. He probably wouldn't have been opposed to all AI but he'd be cautious.

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@h3xum_ @KayleeCrimson @SketchesbyBoze I'm not sure how any honest prompt could make That Hideous Strength or The Abolition of Man fall in line with this reading. OP's quote is not a very good example but it is not misrepresentative of Lewis as a whole, for better or for worse.

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@PLeithart Baudillard certainly called it. I think it'd be useful to combine him, Lewis, Mulvey, Berry, Neil Postman, Debord, and maybe the faintest whiffs of Deleuze and Paglia into a unified theory on the internet's disastrous corrosion on eroticism and sexuality.

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@xenocryptsite All I wanted was "depict a small country Black Gospel chapel as equally deadly ground to vampires as an ornate Catholic one" and from all I've heard they couldn't even get that down!

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@MattOsterndorf The original is an extremely short book, too, iirc barely an hour's read!

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@orthonormalist @not_our_guy There's always been some debate over the extent and centrality, with EO accepting but downplaying it & many 20th century theologians trying to outright disown it... But between overt NT verses and early church fathers like St. Athanasius writing against this exact rejection, yes.

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@BenjaminCrew1 The pre-Revolution period, too. Reading Franklin's autobiography portrays even the individual cities as complex webs of upstart ideological factions that would make most worldbuilders drool.

[Henrik Karlsson @phokarlsson]

A thought as I read Shiner's The Invention of Art.

Shiner argues that art, until after the French revolution, had this very deep connection down into everyday life—into function, into ritual, make houses beautiful, celebrating kings, etc. And there was something like a Christopher Alexander form-context fit driving it: these very rich techniques and traditions developed because they were bound to the functional and ritual needs of people. The forms were shaped by the constraints, and the constraints made the forms intelligent.

Then around the French Revolution, art got cut off from that grounding. Interesting aside is that the first museums seem to have been started because there were some people who were against burning all the royal art from the beforetimes, but they also didn’t want to keep it around since it was so powerful in its context—so they put it in a contextless building where the art lost its force. And then people started painting for museums! Art started to evolve more freely when cut of from a meaningful context, it evolved in a more self-referential way. And for perhaps the first hundred years, that was actually a fairly fruitful period—a lot of new ideas blooming, Impressionism and the rest—because the work was still connected back down to the tradition it came from. The accumulated skill and perception was still there, still shaping things.

But as time went on, it lost more and more of that connection to the underlying thing, the work of producing effects in people in their lifeworlds. Art became more of an internal status game without a reference back down to the functional needs of people. And so it got more and more abstract and weird and insular.

It's a bit like Mr. Universe. The first competitions featured pretty good-looking, well-trained guys. But then it becomes this self-referential loop—bodybuilders judged by bodybuilders, each generation pushing further from what anyone outside the loop would recognize as impressive—and it leads to these pretty horrible outcomes that don't excite anyone except the people who are inside the loop, inside the competitive status games.

[Andrew Hammel @AndrewHammel1]

I have always admired the resourcefulness of slum dwellers who build makeshift but sturdy homes out of random scraps of lumber, metal, and astroturf.

Oops, my bad: This is an apartment house in Munich and a finalist for the 2026 German Architecture Museum Prize.

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@shakoistsLog This might be the difference between humans and angels, actually. I don't even think that's a heterodox assumption to consider.

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@PrinceVogel Too bad we have meticulously-honed vices to occupy every waking moment of all but the most dedicated minds now.

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@chuckriver85 @DrJordanBCooper If you are interested in what the actual Luther thought (vs the stereotype), start with his continued criticism of the Anabaptists, who were doing exactly that. He was deeply pro-continuity and felt Rome of his day had departed too far from both scripture and also church fathers.