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Mark Sample

@samplereality.bsky.social
5.3K followers 1K following 2.3K posts

Professor of Film, Media, and Digital Studies and Chair of the Humanities Program at Davidson College. I also make weird things online. Digital skulduggery and more ☞ www.samplereality.com ☜

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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The 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.
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
When you chat with ChatGPT you're chatting with a sociopath.
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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."
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Thinking 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."
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Oh no, so sorry to hear this
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Alas, sometimes it's not
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
You 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.
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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.
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
CC: @weirdsatellite.bsky.social
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
woke 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
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
And because nearly every other library in the country follows its designations, the change will trickle down everywhere
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
This 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.gov
Authorities Search
Authorities Search
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Here we go
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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.
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
The local version works great too, so you don't even need to host it!
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Full code and installation steps: github.com/samplerealit...
github.com
GitHub - samplereality/small-reveal
Contribute to samplereality/small-reveal development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Heck, 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.)
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
You 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.
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
I 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.com
slides.samplereality.com
Small Reveal
Build reveal.js presentations in your browser. No build step, no backend, no account — your decks live in your own browser storage.
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Work 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.com
Assistant Professor of English
The 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...
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Whoa, looking forward to seeing what's next for you!
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
A dog that likes eating paper is a solution to at least one of these conditions. (speaking from experience)
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
The 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...
Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, said last week that “some things are going to go very wrong with cybersecurity unless some people act quite urgently.”
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
The future is now americanatlas.world
americanatlas.world
The 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.
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
that's the south for sure
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
The quiz could really just be 5 questions
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Did you have potato bugs too?
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Bubbler is so much more fun to say
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
like the bug!
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
There'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."
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
The Atlas of America shows that things could always be worse. americanatlas.world
americanatlas.world
The 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.
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Introducing The Atlas of America americanatlas.world
americanatlas.world
The 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.
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
This too shall pass.
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Not a short story, but the movie "Sleep Dealer" is amazing (and horrifying).
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Reposted by Mark Sample
UFO Sighting Bot @ufoskies.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
I saw a UFO land at an undercover CIA airfield in the Arizona desert.
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Did some maintenance and updates on my old Sestetle project, which creates 6-line poems that could have been a Wordle board. sestetle.fugitivetexts.net
sestetle.fugitivetexts.net
Sestetle
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Sestetle #2077 BASIC TENET BASIC TENET NEVER ENTER sestetle.fugitivetexts.net
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
samplereality.github.io/sestetle/
Sestetle

brain
basic
begin
begin
basic
brain
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
Ridicule 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?
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
I hope you can see what I did there.
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
I 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.
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Little 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.
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Tomorrow is the final day to register your intention of entering this year's @ifcomp.org. Which I think I'm doing?
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
I'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.com
Weekly World News
Rooted 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...
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
If 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.
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
Typical Microsoft to bleed money into jamming Copilot into every conceivable Office orifice while continuing its multi-year delay of AppleScript integration with Outlook
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
"Trouble at the Henhouse" (1996) has some perfect tracks, but also at least two clunkers.
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
I would also accept "Day for Night" (1994) or "Phantom Power" (1998) as correct answers.
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Mark Sample @samplereality.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
That "perfect album from the 90s" thing that was viral a few days ago? There is only one answer.
The album cover art of The Tragically Hip's "Fully Completely" (1992)
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