The stories are true. None of my students remember or recognize any references to Suzumiya Haruhi.

The cat's face when she woke up to me shaving off the bits of matted fur on her back.

And with structures of fan cultures increasingly becoming hypernormalized, increasingly animating the structural logic of collective organization in general, understanding what one is critiquing seems even more urgent.

So perhaps, the proper object of critique here should not be the toxicity per se, but the fetishization of a certain idea of the democratic itself that allows for its coming into being in the first place.

To wit, while all of radical democratizing potential once ascribed to fan culture is true, toxicity is nonetheless an immanent possibility within this model of de-hierarchized democracy, in the same way that fascism is not outside but emerges from within the structures of liberalism.

There's a disjunctive synthesis of all the old debates in fan culture studies (e.g., "fandom is beautiful" vs. "fandom is toxic") that I feel remains underacknowledged in so much discourse.

Made 辣子鸡

That said, I may coming around to a weak version of this idea in certain aspects, what with the notion of lost decades Japan being retroactively recognized as a prefiguration/premediation of the dynamics of the (post?)pandemic present that I've been thinking about recently.

These two facets come together as a teleological account of postmodernity as a radical break with the modern combined with the idea of Japan as having incompletely modernized and has therefore been always already postmodern.

I mostly take issue with his vaguely nationalist politics (e.g., his account of the postwar origins of otaku culture kind of aligning with Japanese right wing historical revisionism) and the underlying historical narrative of his work being sort of uncritically end-of-history-esque.

Hate to credit Azuma Hiroki for anything, but he was definitely on to something with that whole database consumption thing, what with the comingling of AI modes of knowledge production, platform economies, and fan culture dynamics of social organization.

Even the cats are monitoring the situation now.

When they're not stealing my chairs, they're sitting on my clothes.

I.e., what if assignments were, in part, evaluated on the basis of whether or not they sound like bad AI writing, sidestepping the question of definitively determining whether something is AI generated or not?

What if I revised my standard assignment rubric to have 50% of the weight be something like "avoids overdone rhetorical crutches" and as examples just list the usual AI writing tics?

University administrators not relying on hyperquantified external "tier" rankings of publishers and journals without knowing the specific terrain of the subfield challenge (impossible).

The return of ReceptioGate to the news is a useful moment to think about the role AI is having in creating truth for a lot of internet users. I posted this update - the clear plagiarism verdict against Rossi - on another platform… /1

I'm never getting this chair back, am I?

Even the damned low stakes 1-page reading response assignments are getting written by AI now. It's probably time to get rid of those and do an overhaul of my assessment methods from the ground up.

Apparently, there's an American military base in the Middle East called "Prince Sultan" and when I first heard the name, it reminded me of "Avenue Road" in Toronto.

Events are co-sponsored by HKU School of Modern Languages and Cultures, CUHK Department of Japanese Studies, and HKUST Division of Humanities.

We have a few academic talks with Stevie Suan (Hosei University) on transnationality, place, and color in Japanese animation happening in HK next week: first a guest lecture in my anime class at HKUST on Monday (3/30), followed by a public lecture at HKU on Wednesday (4/1).

Stalking something on the balcony.

Sleepy cat guards my laptop.

Attn #kidlit @irscl.bsky.social folks. I am in the beginning stages of a book proposal for @bloomsburyacademic.bsky.social series Literatures & World Literature www.bloomsbury.com/ca/series/li...

Proposed title: Children's Literature as World Literature. Looking for input! Respond if interested.

Apparently, if you're at just the right angle, you can catch a glimpse of the spectral reflection of my kitchen counter floating outside the window.

A couple of times during my class lecture yesterday, I wanted to call something the "apotheosis" of certain ideas, but realized I had never actually said the word out loud before and wasn't completely sure about how to pronounce it. Substituted crystallization and platonic ideal instead.

This box of paracetamol was sitting innocently on the coffee table, yet for some reason, whenever I would catch a glimpse of it in the corner of my eye, my brain automatically coded it as looking like a box of cigarettes.

To my infinite annoyance, i have discovered that running the browser plug-in that automatically removes all AI slop from Google search also, somehow, breaks all Google Books functionality.

Something about teaching you don't really realize until you're in too deep is just how much storage space all the powerpoint slides you make for every course will end up occupying, especially if you teach any film and media courses and embed all the video clips into the slides.