Monday, June 1, 2026

Less than zero, and vomited text

The phrase "less than zero" entered the sync stream with my post "The Jolly Switzer" (April 29). Searching my blog for the name Bret (as in Bret Harte, author of "The Jolly Switzer") had led me to Bret Easton Ellis and his novel Less Than Zero. Just the day before, Vox Day had published a post also titled "Less Than Zero" (April 28). Then a couple of days later, as recorded in "Sub-zero, red and blue specs, Ides of March, Diego" (May 1), I had occasion to look up the 2002 movie Ice Age and found a posted dominated by the tagline "Sub-zero heroes."

Last night I read Laeth's latest installment of aphorisms, ".diminished discords (xvi)" (May 31). I highly recommend it as even more than usually insightful, but for the purposes of this post, what I'm interested in is this:

is there a good reason to be against machine vomited text but for machine vomited images or sounds? doesn't make sense to me.

The reference is to the productions of Fake Intelligence software, but what is relevant here is the precise wording I have bolded.

Today I finished reading Remarkably Bright Creatures. On p. 277, one of the human characters says that he "gives fewer than zero shits about" someone. On the same page, just three paragraphs later, we find this description of an overly long message:

The whole screen is filled with word vomit when he changes his mind and backspaces the characters. It's too much for a text message.


Note added: This idea of vomited text reminded me of a passage from Spenser's Faerie Queene. I was going to quote it, but my conscience objected. If you're going to read Spenser, you have to read it all, starting at the beginning. Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring. The slow, rhythmic, and, yes, boring stanzas create the necessary twilight atmosphere in which weird and wonderful things can happen. Even his most vivid and astonishing lines lose their color in isolation and simply must be experienced in their natural habitat. Quoting a stanza or two of Spenser is like playing a three-second clip of the "best part" of a symphony. So if you want to know what I'm referring to, start at the beginning, and read until you get to it. It's in the first canto.

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