The marketing consultant told the client that they have to post three times a day on LinkedIn. “It doesn’t matter if it’s good.”

The SEO consultant explained that the website had to be loaded with keywords, and that a big budget needed to be set aside to develop inbound links.

And the job seeker is instructed to make sure that the resume is AI-friendly and checks every possible box.

Feeding the algorithm works when you’re the only one doing it. It works when you seek to fit right into the middle of the lane. And it works if you’re willing to outfeed everyone else–at least until the algorithm changes.

But while someone is going to win that lottery, it’s probably not going to be you.

The alternative is to be uncomfortable. To create remarkable work and leave scale to others. To figure out how to show up in a way that is generous and distinctive, and to refuse the bait that others take when they decide that feeding the algorithm is their best option.

They call it ‘crowd control’ for a reason. If you’re in a crowd, it’s quite likely someone is trying to control you.

If you’re posting on social media or any platform with an algorithm, the real question is: do you work for the algorithm or are you committed to working for the people who want to go where you hope to take them?

APOD: 2024 September 1 – The Moon Dressed Like Saturn Why does Saturn appear so big? It doesn't -- what is pictured are foreground clouds on Earth crossing in front of the Moon. The Moon shows a slight crescent phase with most of its surface visible by reflected Earthlight, known as Da Vinci glow. The Sun directly illuminates the brightly lit lunar crescent from the bottom, which means that the Sun must be below the horizon and so the image was taken before sunrise. This double take-inducing picture was captured on 2019 December 24, two days before the Moon slid in front of the Sun to create a solar eclipse. In the foreground, lights from small Guatemalan towns are visible behind the huge volcano Pacaya.

Linguist Rob Watts of RobWords looked back into the ancient past to trace exactly when punctuation was put into regular use, noting that different grammatical marks came about at different times. The period, colon, and comma, for example, were employed to make sense of the endless run-on sentences of the Greeks.

The story  of our punctuation marks begins with a man called Aristophanes of Byzantium. In around the 2nd century BC,  he proposed a system to solve the problem of the unreadability of Greek writing…Aristophanes put forward a system where dots would be used to mark in sentences  where pauses of different lengths should occur. The middle one marked the  shortest break. The bottom one,  a little longer. And the top one, longer still. These were called comma, colon and periodos (period).

Punctuation was not very popular at that time and it flailed for severals centuries until religion came into play in the 6th Century.

Christian writers began to use punctuation again to help clarify their writings. They were much more keen on spreading their religion on paper than the pagan  polytheists who came before them. You see, they’d written this book called  the Bible, and it was like a bible to them and they wanted to leave minimal space for  ambiguity when spreading the word of God. Punctuation was a great way to do that. So they reverted back to something very similar to Aristophanes’ system.

Watts also explores the origins of the question mark, exclamation point, quotation marks, brackets, dash, hyphen, apostrophe and ellipsis.

Let’s explore this lot: ?!-“.’,(); …I trace the punctuation we use every day as far back as I can.

APOD: 2024 August 20 – Supermoon Beyond the Temple of Poseidon A supermoon occurred yesterday. And tonight's moon should also look impressive. Supermoons appear slightly larger and brighter than most full moons because they reach their full phase when slightly nearer to the Earth -- closer than 90 percent of all full moons. This supermoon was also a blue moon given the definition that it is the third of four full moons occurring during a single season. Blue moons are not usually blue, and a different definition holds that a blue moon is the second full moon that occurs during a single month. The featured image captured the blue supermoon right near its peak size yesterday as it was rising beyond the Temple of Poseidon in Greece. This supermoon is particularly unusual in that it is the first of four successive supermoons, the next three occurring in September, October, and November.

The fin-de-siècle interest in Japanese art is given a twist by four small books in which a group of Japanese artists illustrate well-known fables for a French readership. The books were commissioned circa 1890 by Pierre Barboutau, an art collector who specialised in Japanese arts and crafts. Barboutau’s volumes would have been intended to broaden the interest in Japanese art which had been fuelled a few years before by Le Japon Artistique, a magazine edited by a German art dealer with a business in Paris, Siegfried Bing. Le Japon Artistique was criticised for its inaccuracies by Japanese readers but it did feature colour reproductions of prints which otherwise might only be seen as monochrome reproductions. (Bing’s Paris shop, L’Art Nouveau, is also historically significant for giving a name to the predominant mode of fin-de-siècle design.)

Barboutau’s books take the French interest in Japonisme a stage further, allowing readers to experience familiar stories through Japanese eyes. Each book was printed in a limited run on Japanese paper. Of the four, I’m only familiar with the fables of La Fontaine where the emphasis on animal characters in rural settings means there are few explicitly Japanese details. Some of the landscapes are more Japanese than French, however, especially the drawing that includes a Fuji-like mountain in the background. There’s also a drawing of a group of foxes where the background details of a shrine and torii gate seem intended more for Japanese readers. Foxes in Japan are associated with the Shinto deity, Inari, to a degree that fox statues are a common site in Shinto shrines. None of this is mentioned in the book but if you’re aware of the significance it adds an additional layer to the cultural intersections.

All these books may be seen at Gallica, a valuable site whose interface is still woefully bad, especially on mobile devices. My advice, as always, is to download the PDFs.

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Choix de fables de La Fontaine, Tome 1 (1894)

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Choix de fables de La Fontaine, Tome 2 (1894)

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Fables choisies, Série 1, de Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian (no date)

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Fables choisies, Série 2, de Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian (no date)

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• ER Herman’s Fables
• Tenniel’s Fables
• John Bickham’s Fables and other short poems

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