thomas hardy, jude the obscure

"it takes two or three generations to do what i tried to do in one." per the late poet bill knott, the failure is mine alone.

josh is there an accessible entryway? i'm partial to solo instruments and sonically timid…

What if we just went back to reading a bunch of books and thinking about them together, and that was the class? With syllabi no longer than three pages.

you are not authorized to access this page. you never were. freedom!!!!!!

me: darn it, i forgot the deadline and now it's too late to apply and yet again fail to receive an NEA individual artist grant

the NEA: hey that's okay! not a problem! after decades of funding thousands of writers including most of your friends and teachers we just got rid of those, hope that helps

Olivia Rodrigo – The Book of Love (Visualiser) – HELP(2) YouTube video by War Child UK

i was just thinking of you! because

Exhaustive Survey of Rickrolling in Academic Literature Rickrolling is an Internet cultural phenomenon born in the mid 2000s. Originally confined to Internet fora, it has spread to other channels and media. In this paper, we hypothesize that rickrolling ha...

April Fool‘s warrants reposting this

arxiv.org/abs/2204.06826

lol i have already redacted this bc i didn't realize that app was so fascistified—now on buttondown!

wow! i mean i didn't really expect them to use the cover i made on an etch-a-sketch while i was driving, but i'm so honored!!

(brb walking into the sea now)

"Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania."

-Dorothy Parker

MY BOI

A person at level 1 or below proficiency, is unable to do this. They cannot parse out extraneous, distracting, irrelevant information.

They cannot look at a website and identify which parts of the page they are looking at, are advertisements.

Level 2 proficiency is such as being able to look at a website and identify which parts are advertisements, if you want a concrete idea of what it means.

Think about all the libertarians you've encountered who will read a book and *entirely* miss the point of the book. Literally not perceiving that the book is describing a dystopia, or identify satire of real world events, or identify who is the villain.

54% of US adults read below 6th grade level.

Think about chuds constantly going "man I used to love this band but they turned woke by putting politics in their songs" and the band is literally Rage Against the Machine or Bruce Springsteen.

54% of US adults read below 6th grade level. 20%, below 5th grade level.

2024-2025 Literacy Statistics | National Literacy Institute Literacy Statisitics

Fun fact: 54% of US adults read below a 6th grade level.

You have to actively remember literally over half the US adult population is *unable to perceive subtext*

www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-li...

"this film is boring" oh yeah well you're boring and i'm trying to make you more interesting, you're welcome. also i love you desperately and need you to be alive and to think, not devolve into some horrific amalgam of posthuman corporate-controlled bot-fed advertising receptacle, lana turner get up

anti-AI “credo” I have a religious exemption from using all generative “A.I.” I am not a member of the Silicon Valley sect. Their beliefs and practices are an affront to my sensibilities. The tech is trained on stolen intellectual property. The output is riddled with mistakes, and it is incapable of comprehending the weight of its errors. It is not even an “it.” But sometimes, it is filtered and massaged by unaccountable human sweatshop workers and bad actors. I am not required to use “A.I.” any more than I am required to join Amway, buy black market rhino horn, or attend the Fyre Festival. As a human, I have a duty and right to limit my carbon and water footprint and protect my fellow human. As a union worker, I have a duty and right to oppose tech that is used to threaten workers or cheapen our product. As a tech consumer, I have a duty and right to oppose scams that lower the quality of our tools. As a scholar, I have a duty and right to oppose anti-intellectualism. As a taxpayer, I have a duty and right to oppose the misallocation of public funds and data. As a grown up, I have a duty and right to protect young people from predators. As a person with a conscience, I am appalled at the decadent disregard for user safety, the callous dismissal of responsibility for lives ruined and slaughtered. My religion is related to my identity, geography, and family, making it an irrelevant accident of birth. What matters is that I was born. I have an exemption from their digital rapture, their cultural austerity, their intellectual poverty. I practice wholesome hedonism and First Do No Harm. CS 12/9/2025

i included this in my syllabi this year

The website for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is completely scrubbed and gone! They didn't even leave a legacy statement.

i say this because of course i taught la jetée today (dir. chris marker, 1962) and of course several of them bitched about it

ofc i posted this and then spent the intervening hours thinking of all the other preexisting conditions causing the perfect storm including:
• shift in students' willingness/ability to tolerate exposure to cultural artifacts perceived as distressing
• higher ed now based on student-as-consumer model

Censorship Is Bigger in Texas Texas officials apparently think Texas students are stupid snowflakes who must be protected from hearing controversial ideas.

"In recent months, Texas universities have inflicted some of the worst repression of academic freedom we’ve ever witnessed at American colleges, with gag orders, speaker bans and arbitrary firings of dissenting faculty."

[laughs through strangled sobs, continues packing bags]

the perfect storm of how we broke higher ed in the exact kinds of ways that would leave undergrads vulnerable to billionaires who don't care about their minds and souls but just want to sell AI and LLMs no matter who gets trampled on the way. it's like climate catastrophe in that we probably couldn't have engineered all this more precisely if we'd tried.

not sure why i spent a half-hour making this except i can no longer assign writing as either pedagogy or assessment, and i don't know how to teach reading and thinking and watching films without it, so i'm watching the slow-motion trainwreck of a job i've had since 1998 and i'm kind of mad about it.

JFC MY HEART STOPPED MAZELLA 😅

i will be mentally replacing "lakes of wine and forests of meat" with this now in every single danmei translation i read, thank you

this is ghastly and unsurprising and everyone should read it

Call for Papers: Trans-Asian Transcultural Fandom Symposium

Description of the CfP

A list of potential topics for the symposium

Details of the organising committee, 500 word abstract + 100 word short bio to be emailed by 1 Feb 2026 to transasianfan@gmail.com

CfP: Trans-Asian Transcultural Fandom Symposium happening next May @ NUS, Singapore. More announcements to come, but we're hoping this will kickstart conversations and collaborations for scholars in the region working on transcultural fandom

#AcademicSky #FanStudies #TransculturalFandom #CfPs

The number of people acting shocked by this amazes me, frankly, since we've been predicting exactly this— and seeing AI slop taking over google searches — for years now.

Also we MUST stop using "hallucination," which frames this is an unfortunate quirky fluke. It is the program's intended behavior.