Nick Montfort

Jesus walks into a restaurant for the last supper.

He asks the host, “could we have a table for 26?”

She looks at the group for a moment. “But ... there are only 13 of you?”

“Yes — we’re all going to sit on one side of the table.”

Christian Bök’s Xenotext — the extremeophile bacterium organism itself, not simply the two-volume book of poetry that includes what is encoded into this organism’s DNA sequence and what is encoded into the protein it expresses — has just been accessioned into the Library and Archives of Canada

https://www.canada.ca/en/library-archives/corporate/updates/2026/christian-bok.html

If you happen to be interested in searching for information on “explosive ordnance disposal” this isn’t a good day to be typing that first word into an autocompleting search engine

If you are or were excited about a movie release this weekend, you may want to play my most recent (although not very recent) interactive fiction

https://nickm.com/if/amazing_quest/index.html

This (the fourth thunderword as it appears in the book) has to be a mistake:

Bladyughfoulmoeck-lenburgwhurawhorascortastrumpapornanennykocksapastippata-ppatupperstrippuckputtanach

I appreciate the tip to the pata(physics), but how can you hyphenate a word so that “pp” ends up at the beginning of a line?

Wouldn’t that part be hyphenated -tip-pa-tap-pat- ?

In exactly one month —

Galinsky’s POETRY IN NEW YORK, Thursday August 13, 8-9:30pm, featuring — ME

10 poets, 5 minutes each, a free event

Book Club Bar, 197 E 3rd St by Ave B

Every time I hear the phrase artificial intelligence I reach for my blockchain.

Perhaps the irony is that the Pope, many rabbis, and Jorge Luis Borges all actually know several of the same languages despite that famous building collapse in Genesis

https://www.techpolicy.press/the-pope-found-babel-in-ai-heres-what-rabbis-saw/

My book The Truelist, generated by a stand-along one-page Python program, is available now for 20% off #poetry

https://asterismbooks.com/product/the-truelist-nick-montfort

On July 16, in a 10:30am-11:30am session, I will be speaking at the online ELO Conference:

https://stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2026/

My short talk is “Narrative Nubs: Systematic Sketches of Story Systems.” I’ll present a major project we are undertaking at @cdn@fediscience.org and my lab/studio The Trope Tank, at MIT.

The conference is free and just requires ELO membership, which is not costly and supports the ELO’s great work.

Wizard-Vicuna-Uncensored 30B (running locally of course) really threw in the towel there at the end when I tried to use few-shot learning to get it to syllabify the second thunderword:

Per•ko•dhu•skur•unb•arg•gru•au•yag•o•ka•ro•la•yor•grom•grem•mit•ghund•hurth•rumath•u•na•rad•i•did•illifaititillibumullunukkunun

Person on phone, on train: “Oh, did the time change? Did we gain an hour or lose an hour? Wow.”

My mind, swirling in thoughts from the previous century: How did you manage to get onto this train without knowing that?

The hook of “Bad to the Bone” by George Thorogood and the Destroyers clearly includes the beginning of Joyce’s first thunderword...

bababad-

BORDER CONTROL

What do you do?

I’m an academic.

An academic? What’s that? What do you do?

I’m a professor. I teach, research, write, and attend a lot of committee meetings.

#poem #freeverse

“Chatbots based on large language models (LLMs) are proving to be surprisingly effective at covert persuasion through continuous optimization of personalized interaction. The dialogic, adaptive, mimetic structure of these language models is capable of imitating human feelings and thus simulating a relationship. ... Chatbots ... can become hidden architects of our emotional states and so invade and occupy our sphere of intimacy.”

—Pope Leo XIV

https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/messages/communications/documents/20260124-messaggio-comunicazioni-sociali.html

THE GREY #POEM

Thirteen ways of looking
At a blackbird
But a bitch ain’t one

I'm one of five who has each written briefly on this topic for LARB

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/artificial-intelligence-literary-future-chatgpt-large-language-model

Daniel Temkin’s book Forty-Four Esolangs, coming from the MIT Press on Sep 23 in the Hardcopy series, is reviewed & @rottytooth@mastodon.social himself is interviewed in IEEE Spectrum

https://spectrum.ieee.org/esoteric-programming-languages-daniel-temkin

Deadline to apply is March 11! Come to this self-directed September residency at Banff w/ me, @LYB@mstdn.party & Kalen Iwamoto

https://www.banffcentre.ca/programs/literary-arts/computational-writing-2026

◯🖌️

A pond and a frog
Are one
A pond and a sound and a frog
Are nothing

I’m finding it diffiuclt to find technical fauts in Tron: Ares. I have to pick such nits as, why isn’t Julian Dillinger using tab completion?

I was just connecting with someone from Austin who has a 512 number.

I lived in San Antonio and had a 512 number.

“In 1992, the western part of [the 512] territory, including San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley, became area code 210, making 512 the last of Texas' original four area codes to be split.”

We didn’t cross the border — THE BORDER CROSSED US

This event on Thursday August 21 in the #Brooklyn part of #NYC will include the world premiere of my & Figurt’s very unusual short film START ME UP

https://nickm.com/collab/figurt_montfort/start_me_up/

There were missed opportunities. When Dillinger hsa brought himself into his company’s rebooted “CPU.”

1. Looking out onto the red cyberscape, there should be an actual LAKE OF FIRE

2. The identity disk that he retrieves should have nine concentric circles