It’s also a brilliant exposition of how limited the conventional concept of a ‘joke’ is in anything comic. This material is dense with gags, rhythm, reversals, reveals - but just two ‘jokes’ in just under 10 minutes (which is itself yet another gag).

Never let the truth get in the way of a true story.

Surely what Blake understood was that Milton didn’t consciously choose to make Satan his hero. Putting Satan at the centre of the story required Milton to make him the hero, whether he wanted to or not. Sympathy with the devil was implicit from the inception.

… necessarily produces empathy and identification. A story requires us to understand a protagonist’s motivation - and understanding requires some degree of identification. In effect the whole power of story-telling comes from its ability to allow us to imagine ourselves in someone else’s shoes.

Niche but topical (in a somewhat limited way admittedly): The question of whether Blake and Shelley were correct to say Milton made Satan the hero of Paradise Lost is not the whole question. What they (surely) recognised was that creating a protagonist, just by the mechanics of storytelling…

I think we will see a lot of machine learning based tools distance themselves from “AI” as a label. Even now “AI” is starting to become a synonym for NLP based Generative AI.

Should also have said diabolical… Truly feels like we are following the unfolding of something that will be listened to for a very long time.

Deep into @andrewhickey.500songs.com ‘s latest episode and it’s starting to seem like if he’d been mad enough to do “A History of Rock and Roll in 1 Song” - this would be the one… This is cultural, historical, political, poetical, musical - and it’s mind-blowing.

Suspect this is a side effect of “AI” not really having any fixed or agreed meaning. It’s a promotional term. Whereas, for example, Machine Learning is definitely something that has been used in visual effects for years.

I guess my question is what is more what is the mindset? Eg There are some things I am wholley intolerant of. But that doesn’t make me think of myself as ‘intolerant’. Are we just describing tribal boundaries when we use these words? Is this a relative or an absolute scale?