iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Pleased to be cited in this @brisunipress.bsky.social Science Communication book: doi.org/10.51952/978... . An interdisciplinary first for me! But: it shouldn't be hard to cite someone's name correctly. Not even "Sell, Aran Ward" this time; my first name has just disappeared.

Screenshot of my name cited as "Sell, W." where it should be "Ward Sell, A."

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

For example: Paddington Bear famously does NOT just hope problems go away. He deploys well-judged and efficacious Hard Stares.

Badenoch: "Andy Burnham says that we all just need to hope. Again. Hope is not a strategy. And since the last thing this country needs is a Paddington Bear prime minister hoping that the problems will just go away while Putin attacks our allies, while our economy flat lines."

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

en passant, something that fascinates me about the Vonnegut quote is: one of the things he does while out buying an envelope is "see some great looking babes," but the internet cosiness industry has de-hornified this to "great looking babies" in the most commonly circulated version.

A Facebook post by a page called "Classic throwback," with a picture of Kurt Vonnegut looking genial, accompanied by his famous quote (below) about going out to buy an envelope, but with the word "babes" changed to "babies"

The full quote, per Goodreads, is: "(talking about when he tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope) Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.”"

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

For easy viewing, as the link hasn't loaded a preview image:

The sales page for the upcoming Syracuse University Press book, "Streams of Damaged Consciousness: The Postcrash Irish Novel" by Aran Ward Sell

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

The absolute joy of Speakeing is that you get to use his illustrations on the Powerpoint slides, immediately rendering them the best Powerpoint slides I will ever make.

A gorgeously eerie grey-and-white sketch of a dead mouse, by the author and illustrator Mervyn Peake.

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

Recently read one of yours for the first time and it is🤌🤌🤌

"White Cat, Black Dog" by Kelly Link, propped on a crowded bookshelf.

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Find it remarkable how unlikely my 2199 clones are to vote Green, a party of government in Scotland as recently as 2024.

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

Bennett here says that Waiting for Godot "would carry more credence if one of the characters cut short the runic wisdom and made a bolt for the bushes." Not the best choice of target; this does, explicitly, happen in Waiting for Godot.

Waiting for Godot script extract:

ESTRAGON:
An Englishman having drunk a little more than usual proceeds to a brothel. The bawd asks him if he wants a fair one, a dark one or a red-haired one. Go on.

VLADIMIR:
STOP IT!

Exit Vladimir hurriedly. Estragon gets up and follows him as far as the limit of the stage. Gestures of Estragon like those of a spectator encouraging a pugilist.

Enter Vladimir. He brushes past Estragon, crosses the stage with bowed head.

Estragon takes a step towards him, halts.

ESTRAGON:
(gently.) You wanted to speak to me? (Silence. Estragon takes a step forward.)

You had something to say to me? (Silence. Another step forward.) Didi...

VLADIMIR:
(without turning). I've nothing to say to you.

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

Oh I see we're no longer using "AGI" to mean "the technological singularity resulting in eternal abundance for all and the end of human misery," and instead it means "email triage widgets" now.

Financial Times screenshot: "In particular, Suleyman said Microsoft’s goal is to capture more of the enterprise market by working on “professional grade AGI” [artificial general intelligence], meaning powerful AI tools that can complete daily tasks for knowledge workers."

Source: https://www.ft.com/content/f1ec830c-2f08-4b1a-b70f-7330f260753c

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

I prodded some of this a *bit* in this piece on Irish environmental fiction (which, handily for this thread, also cites @danhartland.bsky.social ): www.tandfonline.com/eprint/84TGH...

One perhaps obvious caveat, but one that can get lost amid breathless evocations of particular texts' experimentalism, is that such ‘experimental’ books are not, fundamentally, unbooklike. Indeed, in their deviations in form and comprehensibility, and their consistency with a vaunted modernist tradition, they are fulfilling exactly what one would expect of artefacts bought and sold as ‘experimental literature’. Similarly, it must be borne in mind when thrilling either at the experimentalism of Denton or that of his modernist forebears such as Joyce or Stein, or at the weirdness of celebrated ‘Weird Fiction’ texts such as those of China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer or H. P. Lovecraft, that we may be thrilled as much by these texts” congruence to our expectation that they will disorient us, as by that disorientation itself.

Fisher does analyse the “pulp modernist Lovecraft” as a key writer of weirdness, and in doing so quotes extensively both from Lovecraft’s “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” and from China Miéville’s own work on Lovecraft. However, he does so from a position outside, and strangely ignorant towards, the “Weird Fiction” traditions in which both participate. Lovecraft’s essays are often treated as a foundational manifesto for “Weird Fiction” as a subgenre of speculative writing, particularly his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927), in which he writes that “The one test of the really weird is simply this – whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers.” This definition, with its emphasis on dread, is not incompatible with Fisher’s emphasis on wrongness, but nor is it identical.

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

Annihilation / Authority / Acceptance / Absolution ( @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social )

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

Rise of the War for the Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.

Guardian headline reads: Mountain gorillas are back. But what happens if they run out of room?

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

Deleted Academia.Edu. Shame, the concept had its merits. Work still listed on ORCiD at: orcid.org/0000-0001-59...

Delete Account reason given as: "I do not agree with the Academia terms of service or consent to having "AI podcasts" made of my work."

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

Nice of Eberi Eze to provide me with some writing feedback 🙏

Eze in an interview saying "No man, when you use words sometimes, you can ruin something you know."

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 09/08/2025

Good question, people. It's actually pronounced "detritus."

Google screenshot: "People also ask ... "Is it pronounced detritus or detritus?""

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

I know "Google AI summaries are bad" is old news now... but what an *extraordinary* response to the search term "Moby Dick" (this bizarre splatter is returned whether the search term is capitalised or not, but not if I remember to include the hyphen)

"AI Overview" for the search term "moby dick" reads: ""MOBIDIC" can refer to several things, most notably a Wikipedia article on the MOBIDIC computer and the novel Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. There's also a mobile solution for reducing natural gas loss called MoBiDic, and a guitar chords app called MobiDic Chords."

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

9% of parents, completely unhinged, tearing their hair out in the streets at the rise of the velocipede. Bewailing in anguish the plague of penny farthings which has corrupted their sweet progeny beyond recognition.

A survey where parents are asked: “When I think about my child’s experience growing up, I wish ___ had never been invented.” Results go from 72% for "Mature Online Content" down to 9% for "Bicycles"

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

That's a wrap on this semester's course at Notre Dame @notredame.bsky.social @artslettersnd.bsky.social , "Energy and the Environment in Fiction". Fab students and a cracking pile of books (not pictured, our new media texts: the Mad Max movies, There Will Be Blood, and Final Fantasy VII)

A pile of books; News From Nowhere by William Morris, Oil! by Upton Sinclair, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, The Drowned World by J G Ballard, Dune by Frank Herbert, The Tolkien Reader, The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K LeGuin, When the Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, The Nutmeg's Curse and Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh, Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer and The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing.

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

Into the last 2 weeks of "Energy and the Environment in Fiction" @notredame.bsky.social. We'll be thinking about ecosystems, terroir, & human/nonhuman agency in @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Psyched to hear what students make of these brain-knotting, brain-unknotting books

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and a Teach at ND mug

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

Manifested it, you're welcome everyone. (Do I need to teach during every CL game now? I don't have a class scheduled next Weds but I could just burst into a classroom and start talking about books)

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 19/03/2025

Teaching these beauties on my "Energy and the Environment in Fiction" course this week.

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 23/02/2025

Finally got around to this cold-burning, bright-shining, single-sitting fable. Susanna Clarke is a wonder. (Northern Indiana, in the background: not a lot of woods, but a surfeit of midwinter)

The Wood at Midwinter, by Susanna Clarke, photographed in front of a window through which a snowy parking lot is visible

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

How I think I look when teaching / how I actually look (I have not developed sufficient theory of mind to suspect that there are significant differences between my perceptions and reality. Also I wanted to post these pictures of a squirrel I met)

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

Upton Sinclair, writing a whole century ago, on the commercialisation of "the thing called 'college spirit'" Apropos of nothing, you understand.

At first it seemed all right. You knew that S. P. U. was a glorious college, and had splendid teams, and won victories that resounded up and down the coast. And presently there was a stadium, and a vast business of athletics, that resulted in infinite applause and free advertising for your alma mater. Of this you were proud, the whole student body was made one by it—the thing called “college spirit.” Bunny, a trackrunner, had had his share of cheering; and here was a “game” he could play with all his heart!

But now he was a senior, and on the inside of things, just as with the oil-game, and with strikes, and with political campaigns. And what did he find? Why, simply that all the football and track and other athletic glory that had come to Southern Pacific had been stolen, and “Young Pete” O’Reilly was the thief! The oil king’s son had put up a fund of fifty thousand dollars every year, for the purpose of turning the game of college athletics into a swindle! The fund was administered by a secret committee of alumni and students, and used for the purpose of going out into the market and buying athletes, to come and enroll themselves under false pretenses and win victories for S. P. U. Husky young truck-drivers and lumbermen and ranch-hands and longshoremen, who could not speak correct English, but could batter down “interference” and crash through to a goal! And the pious Methodists who constituted the faculty were conniving at the procedure, to the extent of permitting these young huskies to pass farcical examinations—well knowing that any professor who presumed to flunk a promising quarterback would soon be looking for some other university to presume in. Was not “Young Pete” showing what he thought of professors, by paying a football coach three times the salary of the best?

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

Opened up PowerPoint today to find it pushing a "CoPilot" update on me. Wearily, I tested it, using the "Condense" tool. It garbled both the text and formatting, and the changes were *immune to Ctrl+Z and Edit-Undo* Congrats Microsoft, you broke your own software ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ #EdTech #AIslop

"CoPilot" options in PowerPoint: auto-rewrite, condense and make professional

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

Incredible Bond-villain energy from Ed Miliband, here.

Quite from a Guardian article: Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, said the investment meant that Britain was “now within grasping distance of unlocking the power of the sun and providing families with secure, clean, unlimited energy”.

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

An(other) neat example of "ai" summaries creating disinformation: 1 - Liverpool v Man Utd is *not* postponed 2 - The Sun and Echo nonetheless run clickbait "postponement decision finalised" headlines 3 - Automated summary translates this as "Liverpool vs Man Utd postponed due to extreme weather"

Screenshot of the search result described in the post

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

Came back to the UK over Christmas specifically to get the most British notification of all time

A Bank of Scotland notification that reads: You spent £20.38 at PASTY SHOP.

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

Truly incredible work from Dave Stewart's Wikipedia bio. The lack of a citation after "pirates" is especially 🤌

Early life:

Stewart was born in 1952 in Sunderland, England, son of John ("Jack") and Sadie Stewart.[6] Distantly related both to the Dukes of Northumberland and to pirates, Stewart was from a middle-class, "well-off family", with accountant parents

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

Well that's a wrap on Intro to Irish Lit at @notredame.bsky.social . Fab students and I had a great time designing and teaching my first self-created course. Here's hoping it gets another outing somewhere!

A pile of books by: Yeats, Joyce x3, Beckett x2, McBride, Rooney, Keegan, Okorie, Denton

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

Onto the last text of Intro to Modern and Contemporary Irish Literature, and it's this well-thumbed beauty -- a book I've carried from Scotland to America to Ireland and back to America this year, via one journal article and three conference talks.

Cover of "The Earlie King and the Kid in Yellow" by Danny Denton

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Still a few weeks' teaching to go this semester, but next term's course is already shaping up nicely too...

Books, mostly novels, with a focus on Energy and the Environment are lines up on an office bookshelf, along with printouts of academic articles. They are: News From Nowhere, Oil!, Silent Spring, Dune, The Road, Gun Island, Annihilation, The Word for World is Forest, The Mushroom at the End of the World, a Tolkein "reader" and severely works by Amitav Ghosh

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Overheard one of the tiny dystopian food delivery robots that haunt Notre Dame, which was stationary outside a door, loudly say "thank you" to absolutely nobody, using its crackly speaker, and then purposefully trundle ten feet into the middle of the walkway, where it rested, its duties spent.

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

This is the course! Getting towards the end (of the *very long* Notre Dame semester 😶) now. It's been a blast.

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Aran Ward Sell @aranws.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Today's text on Intro to Modern & Contemporary Irish Lit: the title story of This Hostel Life by Melatu Uche Okorie. Students were aghast at the conditions of Direct Provision centres that Okorie describes. We compared the ending to "Small Things Like These" - when do we do the right thing?

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