Copy-editor, writer, lapsed biologist from the west of Ireland, living in the midlands. Also @stronglang
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2026-09-16T18:54:24Z Event JSON
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Last Notes npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey This tiny thing (the size of my small finger) pushed its cross little face up through the gravel, so I put it in friendlier soil npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey Making my way through this amazing collection. The stories take so many shapes, it feels like all of life is in here npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey @nprofile…0mcy #Fediverse but it's the #XFiles npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey Met this lovely White Ermine (Spilosoma lubricipeda) in the shade out the back npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey Raymond Chandler’s cannibalized stories. On the blog: npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey Your latest Substack? Yeah, I wrote about it on my WordPress – I'll Proton Mail you the link so you can read it in your Opera on the Android of your Samsung npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey Why there’s no European Google, and why that's a good thing. Great stuff by @nprofile…m0rx npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey It seems like a small thing, but I tend to notice what pronouns people use when they refer to animals. Here's a new blog post about it: npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey "would potentially be beneficial in improving X" → "may improve X" npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey @nprofile…7mac So true. And so interesting, cognitively, how habituated we become to digital spaces and how sensitive to their disruption npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey @nprofile…g4fh Easily one of my favourite nature books in years. I read it some time ago but think about it still npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey "The difference between animals and fungi is simple: animals put food in their bodies, whereas fungi put their bodies in the food." npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey from Woman's Way, 1970 npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey "Do they expect students not to be anarchists?" he said. "What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up!" npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey Moss and lichen sharing space on a beech tree in Mayo, Ireland npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey "The AI industry’s most important product at this moment is not a chatbot or a video generator; it’s the story the AI industry is telling about itself" npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey Catherine Connolly, who I used to meet cycling around Galway, was inaugurated as the 10th president of Ireland today. She's already making the right people uncomfortable npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey Tom Gauld continues to document my life npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey The trees and the light on the hill this morning npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey Reading nonfiction, you'd be forgiven for thinking sometimes that humans are a single-gender species. Generic "he"/"man" etc. as the default has declined but is still frustratingly common npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey "Scallops are neither male nor female. They can be both, or they can switch: male to female, female to male, according to the seasons and their biological needs. Scallop gender is as fluid as the ocean that they live within." npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey Spent a few days weeding and scything around hazel and apple trees on a friend's farm in County Clare. The weather wasn't always this good, but working outdoors made a pleasant change regardless npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey "Because I'm from Glasgow the swearing came very naturally. Sometimes a 'fucking' in the middle of a sentence can propel it forward with a new energy. But often I would swear because I couldn't remember my lines." npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey EU citizens' initiative to ban conversion practices targeting LGBTQ+ people needs to reach: npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey Dangling modifier in the Irish Times Weekend Quiz. As a usage dictionary notes, "It's the funny ones that cause trouble." https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2013/06/06/a-hovering-dangling-modifier/ npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey @nprofile…ka48 makes the case for @nprofile…2wc8 at SXSW npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey Testimonials on my website from people whose writing I've copy-edited or proofread: https://stancarey.com/testimonials/ npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey "Every" was originally a compound of two words in Old English: æfre (ever) + ælc (each), the former added for emphasis. You'll find "euerich" and the like in Chaucer. npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey She was what now? 👀 npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey "As long as people kept worrying that the machines were taking over, they wouldn't notice what was really happening. Which was that the programmers were taking over." npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey Roundup of some of the most enshittified things in the digital world, including "smart" TVs, PDFs, and Google (repeatedly): npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey A thing about language that a lot of people don't know is that you can dislike a usage intensely – a pronunciation, a piece of grammar, etc. – without presuming to reject it on behalf of all people, in all places, for all time npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey AWKNESS sounds like a millennial coinage, but it's a word centuries old meaning "wrongness, irrationality, perversity, untowardness, awkwardness, ineptitude". npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey "It is not enough to make exploitative systems more 'inclusive'. Do we want to get on the top deck or do we want to destroy the goddamn ship?" —Emma Dabiri, What White People Can Do Next npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey Evil is unspectacular and always human, npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey Monsters in old maps: https://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2013/08/map-monsters.html npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey "Storytelling…sustains your life so that you never succumb to the terrible despair of someone who cannot see beyond today's happenings." —Anaïs Nin, A Woman Speaks npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey @nprofile…9nd3 I was listening to a podcast yesterday about naturalism and the weird, and this clip is right there on the fringes, perfectly earthly but impossible to wrap one's head around npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey Still startling, this footage of/by Katia and Maurice Krafft, from Werner Herzog's film Into the Inferno (2016). Sublime, in the contradictory senses of that word: npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey There are many theories about the origins of language. I like Jane Wagner's: "I personally think we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain." npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey Traditional Irish ways to admire someone's profanity: npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey Pebble alphabet by Belgian typographer and designer Clotilde Olyff npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey "By learning to read weird fictions on a literal level it may be possible to see how weird (the fiction of) reality already is." npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey Fun facts about the word "ourself": npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey The en dash is your friend: home–school arrangements¹ are not the same as home-school arrangements² npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey '"Would you rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear?" is just another way of asking, "Are you afraid of men?" It's the same question I've been fielding for the entirety of my life as a solo female traveler.' npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey If you like rare words, "imberb" is a fun one. Borrowed from French "imberbe", it means beardless. npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey Manmade → handmade (or hand-built, manufactured, synthetic, etc.) npub14gycvsg5ea34lyv7d9xfemj5s48t6n9e7pjw5v86le98csurcawq7svurz Stan Carey @npub1yyx…qa5g @npub1hyk…3p33 Using a similar sleight of rhetoric as the promise of decentralization, when it's only ever lip-service to distract from another power grab
