I had to explain Rebecca Black's Friday and Downfall memes today, so I feel your pain. :'(

For the record, her initial list: The Last Jedi, Mask of the Phantasm, The Room. For those keeping track, The Room article is forthcoming.

My friend has a running joke where she lists her friend's favorite movies, with the bit being it's always the lesser known or controversial stuff they talk a weird amount about. This joke didn't really work for me because her list resembles my real one more than it should. The latest addition:

Frighteners is a fun one for me on a similar axis. I remember like 75% of it in vivid detail, and every time I think about that 75% I wonder why it's not the greatest movie ever made. Then I rewatch it and... Yep, adds up.

Overall, though, big fan! A direct link between Dead Alive and LOTR.

I'm in a little bit of a "defend legal scholarship as an artform" era (stay tuned, I've already done it once and have a couple of bangers in the works expanding on it), so I do want to push back on this. But also it is really bad, and its best characteristics are further proof of just how bad it is.

I think it's more eerie than weird myself, but very happy to see @edzitron.com join the Weird AI discourse! (Yes, I do cite him in this). scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/hlr/vol53/is...

As a long-time rat partisan, I encourage you to check on the date that this article was published. But also they are the best and every opportunity to celebrate that fact should be taken with gusto.

My love of this quote only partially stems from it giving me an excuse to shamelessly plug one of my less frequently shamelessly plugged works. mckinneylaw.iu.edu/practice/law...

This is more or less exactly what I would have guessed his very bad take is (and I say that as a fan of the books!). Obliviousness to subtext does not remove that subtext. Garth Marenghi's Darkplace understood this, gave us a banger quote, and truly is one of the greatest creative works of our time.

I respect the vision, but I feel like we need to define our terms and conflict a bit. Are we just excluding the boys because their victory is so certain unless they are excluded by weight class?

He's not the only one, but he's certainly not making a great case for the name or the Rule of Sams these days...

(Believe it or not I really do hate it when my stupidest and pettiest ideas become relevant)

(At base, I think James Cameron and TayTay doing Directors on Directors about each other actually makes a ton of sense and I go into every Cameron project asking if Taylor could have made it. The answer is yes more often than you might expect! They have similar instincts!)

OK, so this is kind of an involved joke with a lot of backstory, but I feel like there's something to the thought: Can you imagine the world where Taylor Swift's Wood is about Eywa the World Tree (of Avatar fame) and not Travis Kelce's dick? And is that world a better one?

Woof, the case for the probative value of "The Definitive Ranking of Legally Relevant Sams" gets stronger by the day. Yes, this makes it less likely I make it because it's too relevant to be fun, but that turn in itself is absurd.

(Hard to be worse than Alito but the competition is heating up!)

Alright, this semester's recs from students: Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and a South Park episode about going on a "privacy tour" (bonus points for using this as a way to explain an issue that came up in class). Best I've done is a partial defense of The Matrix Reloaded: I need to step up my game!

Wow, tragic for many reasons, but I might have an idea brewing for an article now if anyone is interested... (The idea is based on an unusually high number of silly essays, even by my standards, so, uh, stay tuned and maybe get cracking on your most dubious ideas?)

This is fantastic news, I was genuinely worried that this approach was dead. When you're comfortable sharing, I would love to hear details- who offered, what social media was most effective, etc.!

I'm trying something new this round, but I'm curious about results: I posted my piece out now to SSRN a while ago. The piece has been cited in a reputable law review, which I mention in my cover letter disclosure. Jury's still out on if this was good or not, but just for POM I'll wait in the future.

To be clear, I'm really proud that I'm also in SMU forum. The piece I got in there will almost certainly go in my promotion file. But 15 hours strikes me as a reasonable estimate for how long it took me to write Dissecting the Frog. scholar.smu.edu/smulrforum/v...

Interesting follow-up. It doesn't really address my issues with it, but I think there's interesting discourse to be had here.

Now, one thing that I did clock (not proud), is that there's a HUGE difference between SMU and SMU Forum. This reshapes the initial claim a bit IMO.

Thoughts on opening/preceding Internet Law with an in memoriam for Chuck Norris? On the one hand, he truly is an icon of the early internet era. On the other hand, that's probably a bad thing, he sucks, and it will mark me as old.

(Similar question: Best Norris movie to watch in dubious memory?)

Please do let me know how this goes/if you have ideas. I suspect that Touro's upcoming humor issue is going to wind up with several short-form pieces that aren't really what they're looking for but that I'll be unable to convince myself are bad, and I do think the market can help here if it exists.

(Whatever, while we're here, shameless self-promotion alert)

scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/hlr/vol53/is...

A great moment of my life happened last summer, when a colleague recognized that I was the author of The Law is Weirder Than AI based on a conversation that we were having (I did not mention the article and it was our first meeting). Do people who use AI to write experience that joy?

With that said, it never would have crossed my mind to ever approach an article writing project like he seems to consider normal with a person either, so I'm not going to be TOO rude about it, but this is a person who I fundamentally do not understand and frankly do not care to.

Despite the (frequently assumed) fact that nobody reads legal scholarship, I get great pleasure in writing. Learning to write it has connected me to my colleagues and made me a better teacher, librarian, friend, and person. I cannot figure out why offloading this work is even remotely desirable.

What a wonderful night with the IFS crew!

Me on Monday: "The words are flowing, I'm making cogent and well documented yet novel claims, my pop culture reference is concise and illustrative, is this... Good?"

Me on Friday: "Consider Tom Bobadil"

Law prof brainrot: Midterm is done, I have two weeks of minimal commitments and a colloquium + conference submission due in 2-3 weeks (one or both of which really ought to be a sabbatical project), and for the life of me all I can think about are ideas for this: thefacultylounge.org/2026/03/call....