Eli Bishop

Thrilled to see my beloved crew the SF Neo-Futurists win Bay Guardian Best of the Bay poll for best theater company! We got it a few times before I joined, then not for a few years (which is fair - lotta strong competition). I'm so lucky & proud to be part of this work. 48hills.org/2026/10/best...

Nobody wants to hear descriptions of dreams, but I feel like maybe I should put this one on the record here just in case it turns out later to have been spookily prophetic. (The real reason is just that it cracks me up.) The SF Bay Area was being plagued by overgrowth of these odd sea creatures...

--like, what if someone leaked or hacked the shellfish radar? I said "sorry, I don't know what to tell you, talk to management I guess"... but meanwhile I needed something to do, so I started trying to look up what these creatures actually were. Then I kept trying to look it up. Trying and trying...

Nobody wants to hear descriptions of dreams, but I feel like maybe I should put this one on the record here just in case it turns out later to have been spookily prophetic. (The real reason is just that it cracks me up.) The SF Bay Area was being plagued by overgrowth of these odd sea creatures...

...it was surprisingly a *tech job* stress dream. My job apparently was car software, and they decided that a hot new feature would be a radar display to show drivers if there were any piles of these sea creatures nearby. I was assigned to work on this alongside another team. Went to meet them...

Nobody wants to hear descriptions of dreams, but I feel like maybe I should put this one on the record here just in case it turns out later to have been spookily prophetic. (The real reason is just that it cracks me up.) The SF Bay Area was being plagued by overgrowth of these odd sea creatures...

By the way, a group in Berkeley is having Jordan Lasker speak at their event next month (along with some other "race science" creeps), and the title of his talk, "Gathering Cognitive Ability Data from Medical Practices", seems pretty clearly aimed at whitewashing his specific abuses in this area.

The event (avalon.institute/exposition/) has a Silicon Valley AI-cultist angle too, and they're not really promoting it anywhere that I can see, so I'm guessing it's more of a "party for a few of our rich friends" type deal and not something that'll affect Lasker's reputation. Still depressing.

Not to single out this one commenter, but I think this is a good example of a common misconception about museums and... art in general, I guess. "Art that tells a story in and by itself" is ALL art. That story may be literal or not. But it's also just a starting point - there's never "a" (1) story.

Anyway, I'm super interested in seeing this collection, and I'm hoping that they'll rethink their approach and start making more use of the potential of their own medium. I don't mind that their definition of "narrative art" is so vague as to be useless, I just want to see them try something.

Not to single out this one commenter, but I think this is a good example of a common misconception about museums and... art in general, I guess. "Art that tells a story in and by itself" is ALL art. That story may be literal or not. But it's also just a starting point - there's never "a" (1) story.

...an experience that's very different from the one the illustrator expected a viewer to have, i.e. seeing the piece the way it was published, in the thing it was published in, at that time. Story isn't a magic substance you infuse into an object; it's a process, a thing you are actively telling.

Not to single out this one commenter, but I think this is a good example of a common misconception about museums and... art in general, I guess. "Art that tells a story in and by itself" is ALL art. That story may be literal or not. But it's also just a starting point - there's never "a" (1) story.

As I've told my friends ad nauseam, in the 90s I was a transcriptionist for various TV companies, which isn't very odd in itself, but some of the one-off clients were. I transcribed (for closed captioning, I guess?) some Dutch-made kung fu movies, Magical Mystery Tour, and several strip club shows.

And another assignment that wasn't unusual in terms of the client, but turned out to have memorable content that I guess I'm one of the few people who heard it: bsky.app/profile/erro...

As I've told my friends ad nauseam, in the 90s I was a transcriptionist for various TV companies, which isn't very odd in itself, but some of the one-off clients were. I transcribed (for closed captioning, I guess?) some Dutch-made kung fu movies, Magical Mystery Tour, and several strip club shows.

Hey @adapalmer.bsky.social, in case you've received an invite to speak at something called the "Avalon Conference", you may want to take a look at their grandiose list of invited speakers & note who is one of the 2 actual confirmed speakers in the "letters" category. Massive red flags all over this.

Hey @adapalmer.bsky.social, in case you've received an invite to speak at something called the "Avalon Conference", you may want to take a look at their grandiose list of invited speakers & note who is one of the 2 actual confirmed speakers in the "letters" category. Massive red flags all over this.

I don't want to contribute to any more "what did Trump *really* say about his actions around 9/11" threads but I do want to say: even if he did not actually say he was in the rubble, there's no reason to think his statements are anything other than lies and confabulation. Any effort to parse... (1/)

...it as "well maybe these individual facts are true but in the wrong context" is wrong, because carefully picking true facts and framing them in a misleading way is not what he does. What he does (*especially* on this subject) is lie wildly about everything, the less plausible the better. (2/)

I know these weren't the only people doing the thing, but I do hope this is a sign that it's not really a viable business model & that others will continue to go away. I get a little spike of rage every time I'm searching for something and land on one of these bullshit sites.

I don't know if anyone has any need for this information, but I just put up another one of my annotation webpages for a Thomas Disch horror novel, THE PRIEST (1994). I do this kind of stuff from time to time, unprompted, because I learn things that way. www.errorbar.net/nits/The_Pri...

I don't know if anyone has any need for this information, but I just put up another one of my annotation webpages for a Thomas Disch horror novel, THE PRIEST (1994). I do this kind of stuff from time to time, unprompted, because I learn things that way. www.errorbar.net/nits/The_Pri...

I guess I was reminded to get back to Disch's "Supernatural Minnesota" books because of the actual Minnesota being besieged by evil forces. The first three books are great; the fourth not so much, but I'll eventually do a page about it anyway.