Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 27/09/2026The perfect email signoff has been staring us in the face this whole time: simply combine the old standbys "Best" and "Take care": "Best take care" Vaguely intimidating but with plausible deniability. 0688
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 26/09/2026When you chat with ChatGPT you're chatting with a sociopath. 073
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 26/09/2026"All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless." 131
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 26/09/2026Thinking about how much the sociopathic Patrick Bateman in *American Psycho* maps onto ChatGPT: "there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman," he explains, "some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory...I simply am not there...Myself is fabricated, an aberration." 153
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 24/09/2026You hear about faculty who are demoralized, exhausted, and ready to quit. All true! But what you don't hear is that for many of us, the time we spend with students is the best part of our day and it's what keeps us going. I for one am uplifted by my students. 2839
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 20/09/2026“The Flea” hits even harder when you find out the original was printed with the long S, something Donne was surely playing with. 5328
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 16/09/2026woke up thinking about the time bigfoot came onto the 6 million dollar man and i was confused (still am?) whether bigfoot was a robot or an alien 060
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 16/09/2026And because nearly every other library in the country follows its designations, the change will trickle down everywhere 140
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 16/09/2026This is how entropy disguised as bureaucracy works. Following the Board on Geographic Names, which in turn was instructed by Executive Order 14422, the Library of Congress has renamed its "Lake Ontario" subject heading to "Lake America."authorities.loc.govAuthorities SearchAuthorities Search 292
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 11/09/2026"Small Reveal" is of course a play on reveal.js and the idea of a "big reveal." Other names I brainstormed but which didn't make the cut: Revealicity, Revelry, Slow Reveal, and Reveal-a-Go-Go. 000
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 11/09/2026The local version works great too, so you don't even need to host it! 010
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 11/09/2026Full code and installation steps: github.com/samplerealit...github.comGitHub - samplereality/small-revealContribute to samplereality/small-reveal development by creating an account on GitHub. 220
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 11/09/2026Heck, you don't even have to host Small Reveal anywhere. You can run it locally if you want. There are no accounts, no cloud storage. It's small and lightweight, just a few HTML/JS/CSS files. (The demo is running on a shared Reclaim Hosting server, easy-peasy.) 120
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 11/09/2026You can still toggle between markdown and a GUI if you want. And use a Github gist to sync projects between computers. I've been eating my own dog food for several months now and I have to say, it's pretty neat. 111
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 11/09/2026I love reveal.js for its portability and ease of embedding websites into a slide deck. But I don't always want to work in markdown. So I made Small Reveal, a lightweight, browser-based WYSIWYG editor for reveal.js. Demo: slides.samplereality.comslides.samplereality.comSmall RevealBuild reveal.js presentations in your browser. No build step, no backend, no account — your decks live in your own browser storage. 2369
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 11/09/2026Work with me! The English Department at Davidson College is hiring a tenure line in Creative Nonfiction. The department is a thriving faculty and student community of critics and writers and weirdos like me.fa-exci-saasfaprod1.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.comAssistant Professor of EnglishThe Department of English at Davidson College invites applications for a full-time tenure-track position in Creative Nonfiction and the Literature of the Sciences at the Assistant Professor level, beg... 11913
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 11/09/2026Whoa, looking forward to seeing what's next for you! 020
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 08/09/2026A dog that likes eating paper is a solution to at least one of these conditions. (speaking from experience) 011
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 08/09/2026The Altman quote here—”some things are going to go very wrong with cybersecurity unless some people act quite urgently”—is classic abuser rhetoric, washing one‘s hands of any blame. Not much different from “this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/08/u... 0143
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 06/09/2026The future is now americanatlas.worldamericanatlas.worldThe Atlas of America — Making Names Great Again.The official atlas of the U.S. Board on American Names. Every place name on Earth, reviewed and brought into compliance. Current as of this morning. 040
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 04/09/2026There's that dialect quiz going around. Really, there are only two questions you need to ask to pin me down: what do you call carbonated soft drinks (pop) and did your parents say "warsh" instead of "wash." 440
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 01/09/2026The Atlas of America shows that things could always be worse. americanatlas.worldamericanatlas.worldThe Atlas of America — Making Names Great Again.The official atlas of the U.S. Board on American Names. Every place name on Earth, reviewed and brought into compliance. Current as of this morning. 062
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 31/08/2026Introducing The Atlas of America americanatlas.worldamericanatlas.worldThe Atlas of America — Making Names Great Again.The official atlas of the U.S. Board on American Names. Every place name on Earth, reviewed and brought into compliance. Current as of this morning. 0103
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 07/08/2026Not a short story, but the movie "Sleep Dealer" is amazing (and horrifying). 110
Reposted by Mark SampleUFO Sighting Bot @ufoskies.bsky.social · 05/08/2026I saw a UFO land at an undercover CIA airfield in the Arizona desert. 02010
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 02/08/2026Did some maintenance and updates on my old Sestetle project, which creates 6-line poems that could have been a Wordle board. sestetle.fugitivetexts.netsestetle.fugitivetexts.netSestetle 060
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 02/08/2026Sestetle #2077 BASIC TENET BASIC TENET NEVER ENTER sestetle.fugitivetexts.net 000
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 01/08/2026Ridicule as praxis might work when you're ridiculing people you'd never want on your side ever. Like Nazis. But why ridicule people who you hope to bring over to your side? 050
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 01/08/2026I love the term "folk forensics"—and indeed, many cloying tells of AI use—like lists of threes, words deemed statistically likely to be LLM output, and em dashes—are mere superficialities. Not only that, they distract us from the underlying logic of textual production in the 21st century. 2183
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 31/07/2026Little known fact about @mobydickatsea.bsky.social is that I started it on Twitter back in 2010 or whenever basically to catch @robdelaney.bsky.social's attention. 010
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 31/07/2026Tomorrow is the final day to register your intention of entering this year's @ifcomp.org. Which I think I'm doing? 030
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 29/07/2026I've complained in the past about how poorly designed and maintained Google Books is. But, credit where credit is due: at least Google Books has a full run of the Weekly World News.books.google.comWeekly World NewsRooted in the creative success of over 30 years of supermarket tabloid publishing, the Weekly World News has been the world's only reliable news source since 1979. The online hub www.weeklyworldnews... 060
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 29/07/2026If you have to preface your online comment with "Not to be a dick, but..." you are indeed being a dick and nobody owes it to you to read any further than that. 160
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 28/07/2026Typical Microsoft to bleed money into jamming Copilot into every conceivable Office orifice while continuing its multi-year delay of AppleScript integration with Outlook 030
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 28/07/2026"Trouble at the Henhouse" (1996) has some perfect tracks, but also at least two clunkers. 000
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 28/07/2026I would also accept "Day for Night" (1994) or "Phantom Power" (1998) as correct answers. 100
Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 28/07/2026That "perfect album from the 90s" thing that was viral a few days ago? There is only one answer. 130