The Secret History of Canvas LMS, Corporate Raiders, & The Chatbot Bubble (Vandal Live at UVU) Listen now (112 mins) | with Christa Albrecht-Crane, Angie McKinnon Carter, and Chiler Moore

Absolutely required listening. What an account of institutional capture by @mattseybold.bsky.social

Researchers May Have Found the Antidote to Social Media Brain Rot: Experimental Film UCSB scientists discovered that watching just seven minutes can open your mind and enhance creativity.

fellow film profs, rejoice!

“among a totally random population, levels of creativity for the people watching the experimental films were immediately higher compared to those watching YouTube videos”
www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/dig...

One of my best honors students has/had been teaching there for a few years. It’s so sad.

Watching Lisa Bluder tell Molly Davis she wouldn’t play in the F4 was the worst thing I ever saw, until the shot of Hannah crying in mama Stuelke’s arms.

💀
timhwang.github.io/because-china/

Volume 79 Issue 2 | Film Quarterly | University of California Press

Free year-end reads from FQ's new issue!

Ramzi Fawaz on Andor

Andor interview with Janus Metz by Gerald Sim

Maggie Hennefeld on Smashing the Patriarchy in Bologna

Joseph Pearson on The Big Lift at 75

J. M. Tyree's Editor's Notebook

@ucpress.bsky.social

online.ucpress.edu/fq/issue/79/2

Oh wow, suddenly you have a desperate need for social and artistic skill sets? Amazing. Anyway, eat a cold loaf of Satan's ass cheese, fellas.

In the new FQ, now out, I interview Janus Metz, director of the fantastic eps 7-9 of Andor's second season. If you've seen it, you've probably binged every Tony Gilroy interview that YouTube has recommended, but there's still lots here that's new. 1/2
doi.org/10.1525/fq.2...
#starwars #andor

We always wonder if great stuff is made by people who are fully cognizant and intentional about it. What a delight to find out that they definitely were on this masterpiece. 2/2

In the new FQ, now out, I interview Janus Metz, director of the fantastic eps 7-9 of Andor's second season. If you've seen it, you've probably binged every Tony Gilroy interview that YouTube has recommended, but there's still lots here that's new. 1/2
doi.org/10.1525/fq.2...
#starwars #andor

This is something I struggle with as a journalist who writes a lot about AI. I have written whole articles about how AI is a misnomer! But I feel powerless in the tides of linguistic drift.

Has anyone else who writes about AI found ways to usefully (and regularly) distinguish types?

I wish, as an editorial practice, journalists would distinguish between scientific machine learning models and chatbots. Fk you Sam Altman.

Scientist Who Was Offline 'Living His Best Life' Stunned by Nobel Prize Win Fred Ramsdell was on vacation in the Montana wilderness when he and two colleagues received the honor for their breakthroughs in immunology.

I love this man.

Is the Media Studies Cabal in the Room With Us Right Now? I read The Stack in 2020 as a grad student in ANU's Applied Cybernetics program. I give it credit for directing my attention to the interaction between layers of digital and physical infrastructures. ...

Wrote more about Benjamin Bratton's paranoid imagination of a media studies cabal holding back AI progress in Europe. mail.cyberneticforests.com/is-the-media...

OpenAI employees are very excited about how well their new AI tool can create fake videos of people doing crimes and have definitely thought through all the implications of this

Ladies and Gentlemen...

Your newest Iowa WBB commit. McKenna Woliczko.

(no title) Visit the post for more.

A cool CFP for academics studying podcasting!
criesandwhispers2026.wordpress.com

Please submit! Conference CFP
CRIES AND WHISPERS: PODCASTING AND THE PROMISE OF DISRUPTION (Feb 20-21, 2026 at Florida Atlantic University)

Keynote: Jeremy Morris (UW-Madison)

Conference website and submission portal: criesandwhispers2026.wordpress.com

Please submit! Conference CFP
CRIES AND WHISPERS: PODCASTING AND THE PROMISE OF DISRUPTION (Feb 20-21, 2026 at Florida Atlantic University)

Keynote: Jeremy Morris (UW-Madison)

Conference website and submission portal: criesandwhispers2026.wordpress.com

Time to bring back and update Lineker’s quote: Football is a simple game. Twenty-two women chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win. #WEURO2025

Screaming…

“Elon Musk posts something and you want to post a funny response to that. You can literally ask Comet, ‘Hey, draft me a funny reply tweet to that,’ and it’ll automatically have it ready for you. You literally have to click the post button.” —Perplexity CEO about its AI-powered browser.

Currently trying to find out if threat is real or pure anti-reg SV smokescreen. HMU, will chat anytime anyplace. Interested in Eric Schmidt’s contribution to this framing post-Google.

Argument is animated by what @superwuster.bsky.social calls the China Argument. Chapter looks at how it’s embedded even in tech criticism from the left. eg. Coded Bias

Techno-Orientalism 2.0 - Rutgers University Press Building on the groundbreaking Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media, published by Rutgers University Press in 2015, ...

Excited to have “Techno-Orientalist Deflections: How Documentaries Frame China’s AI Threat” in this new volume. Humbled to be part of this crew of authors. 🧵

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools). Each completed thr...

Your Brain on ChatGPT: What Are We Really Trading for Convenience?

The study reveals that LLM users felt less ownership of their writing, had difficulty recalling what they wrote, and showed consistently lower cognitive and linguistic performance over four months.

#ChatGPT #LLM #Neuroscience

Could they have been restructuring workplace decibel levels though?

a man in a brown coat stands in front of a crowd ALT: a man in a brown coat stands in front of a crowd

40 minutes of him psychologically dealing with admiring the work of people who detest him. Literally this moment:

Not the most important thing today, but Douthat’s interview with Tony Gilroy about #andor is a lesson in how you should learn to recognize when you’ve been murdered.
RD: You’ve made a left wing work of art…
TG: I never think about it that way…
RD: But…
TG: Do you identify with the Empire?