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Aaron Helton

@aaronhelton.com
268 followers 488 following 1.6K posts

He/Him Library systems dev @ UN Library en/es TTRPGs, ♾️ DM Reader. Writer. Digital Humanist in training @ CUNY GC. William Blake stan. AI Hater. 📍Vienna, Austria www.aaronhelton.com and blog.hilltown.studio Likes/Reposts ≠ endorsements.

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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 12h
Yesterday, out of the three (non-Ikea) beds I tried to assemble, I have one complete. The problem comes down to tolerances: the nuts for these rail bolts are recessed a little too far, so there's not enough space between the bolt head and the side of the access hole for the clip to fit.
Photograph of a bed footboard. The end of the footboard shows the correct configuration of bolts and clips, where it's attached to the leg. The side rail won't attach because the nuts embedded in the foot are recessed too far to leave room for the clip to attach between the side of the access hole and the head of the bolt.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 28/07/2026
Hey look, somehow someone made three whole films out of The Hobbit. I bet we could get one film out of La Belle Dame sans Merci. The closest full length treatment was a 1921 film of the same name written by Irène Hillel-Erlanger and directed by Germaine Dulac.
Painting depicting a knight and a woman in a forest setting.

La Belle Dame sans Merci (1893). Oil on canvas, 112 x 81 cm (44 x 31.8 in). Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 28/07/2026
Every time I visit a new site these days and see the overly bubbly rounded corners, I know exactly where the design came from (hint: AI). It's worse than ugly, it's boring. Even Bluesky isn't this bad.
Partial screenshot of a website that exhibits the GenAI era's characteristic bubbly web interface.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 28/07/2026
Caveats before I continue: I can't avoid the US-centric aspects, but having read news from elsewhere, I can see the same sorts of discussions cropping up. I am sympathetic to the "local businesses" argument if for no other reason than it's depressing to visit "home" and see dead main streets.
Downtown Lockney, Texas. I've been here at different times of the year over the last decade, and it basically always looks like this. Nobody really wants to *move* here. The main industry is cotton. If you don't want to do that, what local business options are there? Not many.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 27/07/2026
Some years ago, I tried my hand at adapting @bradkerr.net 's adventure Demon Driven to the Maw to play as a Vaesen mystery, and I spent *way* too much time with late 1800s railroad timetables just so I could properly estimate travel from London to Aberdeen. Also history and folklore...
The opening description of a TTRPG next to a photo of a flier advertising express train service between London and Scotland.

> 
The Journey

Read the following and let each player play a scene to gain an Advantage.

Shortly after you agreed to answer Fiona’s call, Hawkins procured round trip train tickets from London to Glasgow, Glasgow to Aberdeen, and from Aberdeen to Edburgh. He has written ahead to let Fiona know to expect you, and to meet you in Edburgh. You must leave first thing in the morning to have a hope of arriving on time.

In the morning, you gather beneath the Euston Arch, the entrance to Euston Station and the terminus of the London and North Western Railway. Though summer is approaching, the London streets are characteristically glum. The sodden stillness seems to capture and hold ...
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 27/07/2026
The photography research includes having dug through digitized books looking for suitably time-consistent images of, among other things, Petzval lenses, which I then edited to make look like cyanotypes. This is one example.
A diagram of a Petzval lens from the mid-1800s, rendered to look like a cyanotype.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 26/07/2026
Well, here we go again. The daytime temperatures will be bad enough, but those nighttime temperatures will be brutal. Will do my best with just fans.
A screenshot showing the predicted temperatures in Vienna, Austria, over the next 9 days. It's another significant heat wave, with daytime temperatures rising above 100 degrees Fahrenheit later in the week and nighttime temperatures remaining in the mid 80s.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 16/07/2026
I'm convinced there are the bones of a publishable article in this, if I knew a venue. I think I would like to expand on both the labor economics and the consent landscapes around open movements. dhintro2025.commons.gc.cuny.edu/reflections-...
But labor isn’t the only consideration. There’s a question of what consent to open access means in the long term, and at least some of that also comes down to whether the uses to which the author agreed originally still hold if new uses arise. What are the conditions, for instance, under which authors can revoke consent to open access? Is such a thing possible? Suber offers us several models of permissiveness with respect to copyright, but is selectively waiving moral rights a one and done activity? Moral landscapes change, and context is key. I think both the scale and scope of use must also inform the discussion. This is especially important in cases where misbehaving bots constantly scrape and mine the contents of open access repositories, causing outages, degrading service, and in some cases inflating the costs associated with hosting and maintaining the repositories. Ben Zhao’s closing keynote speech at Open Repositories 2025, which I was fortunate to attend, addressed this.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 15/07/2026
Just this week I discovered there's (finally) an in-development Dolmenwood system module for Foundry VTT. Several times in the past couple of years I picked up the idea of making one myself, but even though I *do* program, I hadn't learned enough about Foundry development to make a go of it.
Screenshot of the Dolmenwood Foundry VTT system module in action. I've converted my OSE-based world and imported the bestiary I had meticulously hand-entered. This screenshot shows the monster sheet for the Bog Salamander, which has some errors.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 01/07/2026
New annoyance unlocked. Audio exposure limit warnings are apparently required here (no way to turn them off), and iOS happily warns me twice a day that I've exceeded my 7 day exposure limit. But the readings are wrong. I have my over-ear headphone wired in AUX->USB-C, and the volume at 20-25% max.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 12/06/2026
My face when you tell me you consulted “AI”.
A statue of an armored knight, zoomed in on the head and shoulders. The knight’s face is uncovered, with chain mail hanging from the helmet to under the chin. The expression is dark and disapproving, with the eyes shadowed beneath the helmet.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 07/06/2026
Well, okay, Vienna. Just be dramatic.
A mostly empty, grungy, and graffiti-adorned canal curves away in the distance. It is flanked by Viennese apartment blocks. A construction crane looms above a distant building. Clouds overhead give the scene an overly dramatic look.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 25/05/2026
Here come the mushrooms! Spotted this array walking through my neighborhood.
Several mushrooms sprouting on a rotting piece of wood next to a road. Queens Village, NY.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 16/05/2026
A 10 year old guitar? Probably worth less than what you paid for it. A 40 year old guitar? Might go the other way around! I'm (sadly) selling my Ovation Celebrity, the first guitar I bought with my own money. I spent $125 on it at a pawn shop in Borger, TX, 30 years ago this month.
The guitar in question. It's a dreadnought acoustic/electric body in natural finish with no cutaway, and the sound hole has an ornate surround. It's on a stand awaiting its fate.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 15/05/2026
A rare glimpse of the definitely not saintly dog behind this account. Last night I presented the project my partner and I have been working on for the last 4 months at @thegraduatecenter.bsky.social. I'm really proud of what we've made.
A man standing behind a podium on the right. The podium as a sign on it that says CUNY Graduate Center. On the left there's a screen displaying his slides. This is the intro slide for the Voces del Lunfardo project. It's in the colors of the Argentinan flag and has a logo bearing a stylized golden L and a silhouette of tango dancers on a field of red, all surrounded by a decorative golden border reminiscent of filete porteño.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 09/05/2026
Post your warning sign
A sign reading “Queer kids run this town. Nazi assholes fuck off!”

Spotted in Astoria, NY on 1 September 2017.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 27/04/2026
Another round of cleaning out my desk at work. In theory I can read this. I did write it, but Russian is hard to make and maintain progress learning.
A photograph of a page of handwritten Russian cursive text. I can barely decipher it because I insisted on learning cursive.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 20/04/2026
What do you know? The output file still needed to be filtered, but I was able to find another 1,600ish emails to cull. I set the threshold at > 100, but I can also try filtering by domain.
Screenshot showing the invocation and output of a command line program to filter unreplied senders with an input file and a threshold.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 20/04/2026
The first target was the obvious mailing list and stale notifications clutter, while deferring some decisions about what to keep otherwise. By Saturday night I had whittled it down some.
A screenshot showing my Google mail archive purge in progress: 64,193 messages, of which 7,587 remained unread.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 20/04/2026
Once in a while I get a truly wild idea that I can't let go of. Over the weekend, the latest wild idea was to do something about this deplorable situation. This is an account I've had open since 2008. Which is to say it's old enough to graduate high school if it were a person.
A screenshot depicting the size of my Google mail archive. At the time I had 92,794 messages, of which 13,452 remained unread.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 02/04/2026
I made this the other day, thinking I was being cheeky. Reality has other ideas, I guess.
A card that says "You ask your chatbot. I'll ask my tarot cards." It has an orange background with white text.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 12/03/2026
Have we considered trains in space?
A desktop wallpaper using imagery from the 1979 anime film Galaxy Express 999. It depicts a train leaving a planet and heading into space. The train is marked 999 in a red circle on the front. There are stars and another galaxy in the background over the planet's horizon.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 09/03/2026
It was worth spending a few minutes to distill these. Going through this process helps clarify my thinking. This is a summary of the current magic rituals I think I want in my game, as well as some touchpoints for the kind of gross magic I'm considering.
Summary of Wyrdwegas


Bind: Hold something or someone in place
Dead-spræc: Speak with dead
Freond: Improve the disposition of an animal, person, or spirit toward you
Gast-bind: Bind a spirit to carry out your commands
Scinn-were: Wear the prepared skin of a person or animal to convince others you are the person or animal whose skin you wear.
Swamm-ærende: Send and receive messages across vast mycelial networks
Swefn-hunta: Stalk someone in the dream world
Swefn-weard: Protect against stalking in the dream world
Sweord-han: Magically sharpen a blade
Tungan-spræc: Speak another language
Undead-rǣr: Animate a corpse to do your bidding
Undead-steor: Take command of an undead creature
Undead-unmac: Destroy or turn away an undead creature
Wyrd-wite: Gain an understanding of prevailing fates for more favorable outcomes
Wyrdweg-ondo: Counter a wyrdweg ritual or effect that is in progressWeird and Gross Magics of Weardcynn

And even here there are lines that cannot be crossed.

1. Parasites (federas/eteras) and diseases (seocnessa) as vectors of magic.
2. Toxins (atru) that open gateways to the sublime, serve as curatives, and offer protection.
3. Ritual scarification (dolgswaþu), tattooing (skin painting), and bloodletting as stores and channels of power.
4. Manipulation and/or consumption of spoor, offal, organs, blood, and body sheddings as tools of divination and empowerment. Includes playing around with the recently dead.
5. Skin changing.
6. Pickling, mummification, and other forms of preservation as stores of knowledge.
7. Manipulation and/or consumption of the long dead.
8. Burning, stewing, muddling, and compounding foul ingredients.
9. …
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 09/03/2026
Thought I'd be clever and search for Holzlöffel Wien in an attempt to find places that sell decent wooden spoons. This is the kind of thing that occupies my time while I'm waiting to put my move in motion. Anyway, enjoy some 14th-15th century wooden spoons from an archaeological site. Link in alt.
14th or 15th century wooden spoons found at Werdertorgasse 6, Vienna, Austria.

Link to the article in German: https://stadtarchaeologie.at/umweltfreundliches-essgeraet/
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 08/03/2026
Hmm.. I could definitely make use of the Speak with Dead list for my (languishing back burner) game's Dead-spræc wyrdweg. An unpublished version is below.
Dead-spræc

Manipulate mortal remains to answer your questions. You may ask three questions of any deceased mortal being who had speech and whose skull you can find and hold. Once your final question is answered the wyrdweg fades and the subject falls silent. A set of remains may not be questioned again for a year and a day. While the wyrdweg is in progress, you appear to be in a trance and cannot hear or see what is around you. To determine the disposition of the target, make a normal Reaction roll.

Ritual: Holding a skull in one hand, trace on its forehead with a flowering sprig of galbanum or similarly active herb the rune representing the divine spark of life, then place the herb where the being’s tongue is or once was.

Ritual Time: 1 Round

Wyrdweg Duration: Until the third question is answered.

Spend Points: To increase the odds of a favorable reaction. Each success contributes one point to the target’s Reaction roll.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 08/02/2026
Lol well that’s what I get for moving letters around and not paying attention to where they are. It was still going to net me only 12 points, and think that’s the best I could have done.
A NY Times Crossplay board with the word “onset” played vertically but missing the 2W square by one even though it would have reached had I paid attention to what I was doing.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 05/02/2026
Huh, now this is interesting. I hadn't really considered how symbol manipulation like language expands the field of object manipulation. But it makes sense. From L.S. Vygotsky's book Mind in Society:
Observations of children in an experimental situation similar to that of Köhler's apes show that the children not only act in attempting to achieve a goal but also speak. As a rule this speech arises spontaneously and continues almost without interruption throughout the experi-ment. It increases and is more persistent every time the situation becomes more complicated and the goal more difficult to attain. Attempts to block it (as the experiments of my collaborator R. E. Levina have shown) are either futile or lead the child to "freeze up."
Levina posed practical problems for four- and five-year-old children such as obtaining a piece of candy from a cupboard. The candy was placed out of reach so the child could not obtain it directly. As the child got more and more involved in trying to obtain the candy, "egocentric" speech began to manifest itself as part of her active striving. At first this speech consisted of a description and analysis of the situation, but it gradually took on a "planful" character, reflecting possible paths to solution of the problem. Finally, it was included as part of the solution.
For example, a four-and-a-half-year-old girl was asked to get candy from a cupboard with a stool and a stick as possible tools. Levina's description reads as follows: (Stands on a stool, quietly looking, feeling along a shelf with stick.) "On the stool." (Glances at experimenter. Puts stick in other hand.) "Is that really the candy?" (Hesitates.) "I can get it from that other stool, stand and get it." (Gets second stool.) "No, that doesn't get it. I could use the stick." (Takes stick, knocks at the candy.)
"It will move now." (Knocks candy.) "It moved, I couldn't get it with the stool, but the, but the stick worked."13
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 23/01/2026
Ew, gross. Like, I know we're a Microsoft shop now, but come on. Still, something tells me this innovation fund and training will not increase our capacity to *pay* for AI services. Oh, and as I've said before, using these products directly undermines the UN's climate goals.
**Microsoft

A couple of things I want to flag.  First, that yesterday Microsoft announced that it will support our UN80 reform efforts.  The measures include support for a proposed UN80 Innovation Fund, initiatives to improve the affordability of core digital tools across the UN system, expanded training to strengthen AI and digital readiness among the UN workforce, that would include me, and the convening of private sector partners to complement UN led reform efforts.

Through this initiative, Brad Smith, President of Microsoft, in his role as an SDG Advocate, is offering practical support to help equip the UN to respond effectively to today’s global challenges amid rising demands and constrained resources.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 20/01/2026
In case you think I'm kidding... Big Ed's Hamburgers in OKC has a family burger that's a bunch of meat and cheese on a 12" bun, sliced up pizza style. www.restaurantji.com/ok/oklahoma-...
A poster for Big Ed's Burgers. Above, it says "Oklahoma Original Since 1974". The title text of the poster says "Big Ed's is big on more than hamburgers". Below the title text is a photograph of Big Ed presenting his foot-wide family burger on a platter. The rest of the text reads:

Big Ed's is big on taste, value, variety, service, quality, families, kids, large helpings, fast friendly service, USDA Choice meats, convenient locations, call-in orders, cleanliness, freshness, tater-tots, grilled onions, fresh French fries, bacon burgers, polish sausage, chili dogs, chicken breasts, patti melts, hickory burgers, bushels of extras, BLTs, salads, child size servings, grilled cheese sandwiches, corn dogs and a large selection of cool soft drinks. Big Ed's is the big value in town. BIG ED'S IS BIG ON YOU!
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 06/01/2026
The updated map. There are things I would do differently if I made another one, but that's something I'll save for another module.
A point crawl location map for the Greater Muenster Hill Region. From the top, left to right: It includes Behemoth's Keep, Stilton Warren, Yarrow Marsh, The Cemetery, Muenster Hill, The Wyrdstone, Widowmaker Lane, Foxtower, Sassafras Grove, Churlwood, and Copperford Mines.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 22/12/2025
In other news I'm gonna use some of the Christmas break to update Dead I Am the Rat, my Mausritter adventure, based on my playthrough in October. I'd love to make more art for it, but that probably exceeds my available time. If I did, though, I thought up this nice little Mouscopalian church.
A digital painting of a mouse-scale church building consisting of an amanita mushroom (red cap, spots) joined with a morel (brown, conical cap, spongy) as its bell tower.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 22/12/2025
Not a tree as a person, but similar vibes. Original: bsky.app/profile/aaro...
A windmill sits next to a leafless tree in the Texas High Plains. A clear blue sky forms the background. A dirt track wends through dry grass beside the windmill and disappears in the distance. 

Feb 2017, between Plainview and Amarillo, TX.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 16/12/2025
I am disappointed to see that someone has unsealed the forbidden puzzle. They have forgotten the last time we unsealed it.
An opened box containing a 2000 piece Ravensburger puzzle depicting Rembrandt’s painting The Night Watch.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 13/12/2025
David Arora offers this explanation. It's an idiomatic redundancy to indicate lots of little people where a simple plural doesn't do the job. That's fascinating to me. I can't think right off of a similar construction in English that has this effect. PDF here: i.warosu.org/data/sci/img...
Xiao ren ren are widely known in Yunnan province, China, at least at the mid-elevations where Han Chinese and Yi people predominate. The phrase means “little men” or “little people” (xiao, little; ren, man or person, the redundancy being an idiom to indicate lots of men or people, which the standard plural form renmen does not necessarily connote). Xiao ren ren are typically glimpsed or experienced after dining on inadvertently undercooked, blue-staining boletes of uncertain identity. The people of Yunnan seem almost universally amused by the xiao ren ren rather than fearing them or revering them.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 29/11/2025
In very corporate TTRPG news, I found out Burger King commissioned a game in Italy called Burger King's Quest, based on the fantasy setting it created in the 70s as a response to McD's Playland. Compare with the Wendy's game Feast of Legends. burgerking.fandom.com/wiki/Burger_...
A photo showing the cover of Burger King's Quest, a tabletop roleplaying game released in Italy in November 2025.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 26/11/2025
Alright, here's my contribution to weird occult deer art. I had intended to develop this into a linocut, but as usual, I got distracted.
This is an image of a robed, shamanic figure wearing a deer skull whose horns form a triquetra. Above the figure's outstretched right hand floats a triskelion. It is drawn on grid paper.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 26/11/2025
Okay, just for fun, here's an overpowered Mausritter weapon. Hopefully it has enough ridiculous drawbacks.
Oversized lollipop. In the hands of a human child, it's a mere sweet treat. But in the hands of a strong mouse or rat, it's a powerful bludgeoning weapon.

Billy's Bonker

Damage: 3d6 (see Special, below)
Usage (5-6): [] [] []

Special:
Oversized: Takes up 6 inventory slots when not held with two hands
Edible: Can be used as rations; each ration removes a d6 damage die
Breakable: Each time a usage box is marked, reduce damage by a d6 damage die
Non-repairable: Can't be repaired
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 08/11/2025
And this is literal theft. All of these works are in the public domain.
Screenshot of the Routledge/Taylor & Francis eBook of The Collected Poems of Anna Seward, selling for a "discounted" $324, an $81 savings over the list price.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 08/11/2025
This bullshit keeps popping up in history just about everywhere you look. > Walter Scott never complied with Seward’s wish to see it published.
Seward’s last major work, not published until 2016, was Telemachus, an epic she was working on in 1798, when the first known mention of it appears in her letters; she never finished it. She drew on François Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699), and she regarded Telemachus as superior to anything she had ever produced. Walter Scott never complied with Seward’s wish to see it published.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 03/11/2025
— Michael Holquist, writing in the prologue (1984) to Bakhtin’s work, Rabelais and His World. Apropos of absolutely nothing.
Although widely appropriated in the West by folklorists, literary  critics, and intellectual historians, Bakhtin’s vision of carnival has  an importance greater than any of its particular applications in  any of these disciplines, for the book is finally about freedom, the  courage needed to establish it, the cunning required to maintain  it, and—above all—the horrific ease with which it can be lost.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 30/10/2025
You know what? I missed this shit. We really took for granted physical copies of The Onion back in the day. @theonion.com thanks to you I can look forward to my mail.
A photograph of a physical copy of The Onion.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 12/10/2025
Enclosure of the commons is the main fear, especially if legal fictions can (re)define what the commons are in the first place, or make choices about who can place things into or remove them from the commons. There's productive scholarship in this around Indigenous archives, for instance.
With the bulk of Indigenous cultural heritage material within institutions either legally owned by non-Indigenous peoples and institutions through copyright law, or existing in the public domain (a fictional legal space made by copyright law), we made an early decision to focus on the development of the TK Labels as an educational and social intervention. The TK Labels act as markers—or tags—that identify different relationships to cultural heritage and provide a flexible option for conveying important information about cultural heritage materials—their proper use, guidelines for action, or responsible stewardship and reuse. The TK Labels can be used to include information that might be considered missing (for instance, the name of community from where it derives), what conditions of use are deemed appropriate (for instance, if the material has gendered or has initiate restrictions associated with
it), whether correct protocols for vetting materials have been followed (for instance, many tribes now have tribal policies and agreements for conducting research on tribal lands), and importantly, how to contact the relevant family, clan, or community to arrange appropriate permissions.

Excerpt from "Toward slow archives" by Kimberly Christen and Jane Anderson.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 10/10/2025
"Now that everyone has their Consciousness Transference Device in place, we're all going to drink this artificially flavored vaguely fruity beverage and take a nap. When we wake up, we'll all be uploaded to the Cloud."
Rick Moranis wearing an apparatus consisting of a pasta strainer, some wires, and a "chin strap".
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 05/10/2025
Morning activity: scanning through this book by @bvlsingler.bsky.social which I found while looking for scholarly sources tracing the origin of the "count the fingers count the knuckles" means of determining if something is fey. I'd love to know if there are earlier instances of this!
Screenshot from Beth Singler's book Religion and Artificial Intelligence (2025). It reads:

Other liminal entities do not fall so easily into the angelic/demonic dichotomy and are more open to interpretation regarding both their motives and their nature. For instance, in a 24 December 2022 post on X/Twitter alternative Mastodon, the fae - ambiguous and liminal fairy lords and ladies - are presented as a model for the difficulties of dealing with deepfakes and Al-generated art, which we discussed in Chapter 4:

'It's funny how recognising Al art nowadays is just the same old rules as recognising the fae in old tales.

Count the fingers, count the knuckles, count the teeth, check the shadows ... ... and under NO circumstances should you make deals with their kind.'
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 04/10/2025
As I'm reading and annotating for my MA in Digital Humanities classes, I'm really appreciating Obsidian's features. Here I have a Base, where I can see how many authors I'm missing from the stuff I'm annotating. The Web Clipper gets some info, but of course not always accurately.
A screenshot of an open Obsidian vault. The left sidebar shows folders and files, and the right sidebar shows a graph view of all the notes. The center pane shows an Obsidian Base, which is like a database that you can use to explore, filter, and organize notes.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 29/09/2025
Aaron Tay: aarontay.substack.com/p/why-embedd...
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 29/09/2025
Hugh Rundle: www.hughrundle.net/did-you-mean/
Screenshot of text reading: 

Google thinks people look up information in order to find "the most likely answer". The company has to think like this, because the key purpose of Google's search tool is to sell audiences to advertisers via automated, hundred-millisecond-long auctions for the purpose of one-shot advertising. Everything else we observe about how it works stems from this key fact about their business. Endless listicles and slop generated by both humans and machines is the inevitable result. And since the purpose of the site is simply to display ads, why not make it "more efficient" by providing an "answer" immediately?
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 28/09/2025
Obsidian + Obsidian Web Clipper + the Note Annotations plugin = 😚👌
A screenshot of some annotated text in Obsidian. The annotation includes a highlight and a comment that's visible in the right margin.

The visible main text reads:

15

The history of digital humanities is marked by many laudable efforts to create tools with GUIs that allow scholars to create digital scholarship in the humanities without having to develop much symbolic computational literacy. However, these tools are inextricably linked to the dominance of English as a lingua franca for programming and markup languages, with downstream implications for those working with languages other than English — namely the emphasis on Anglophone scholarship in digital humanities and the comparative underdevelopment of multilingual digital humanities, particularly languages in scripts other than Latin and those read from right to left [] [] []. In addition, we have increasingly come to

The highlighted text is the sentence beginning with "However", and the comment in the margin reads:

A continual problem even in organizations that strive for a baseline of multilingualism.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 22/09/2025
This is my first deck, The William Blake Tarot of the Creative Imagination. I love this deck, but so far I haven't been able to make it work for what I want to do. That doesn't mean I have abandoned either the deck or the tarot mechanics I am examining.
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Aaron Helton @aaronhelton.com · 22/09/2025
Just bought my second deck, the classic on easy mode so I don't have to flip through a book. Bought it to go with HMtW and also to do a class presentation about a playable object. My first deck was a gift from @hewhocutsdown.bsky.social (one tradition holds that your first deck should be a gift)
A three card tarot spread leveraging (and situated next to) a Rider-Waite deck. This spread shows an inverted V of Pentacles, an inverted X of Wands, and The Devil. The cards have all the various attributes and meanings written on them. This is the first deck I bought myself, and the second deck I own.
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