Leaked image of new Apple EV.

new blog post incoming

I may have found Pennywise (cat universe).

In every academic book there is a secret second book hiding in the footnotes. Sometimes it is the first draft that had migrated there to escape the revisions. Sometimes it is the author's tortured secret rebuttal of their own claims, and sometimes it is the incipient form of the their next book.

My favorite footnote story is how John Hodgson basically proved that the Hadrian’s wall was HADRIAN’s wall in a 173 page footnote. It was an important point that needed to be made, but wasn’t actually what his book was about, so he put it in a footnote, lol

My hypothesis: LMS increases cognitive load, at least sometimes overrides pedagogical theory to drive assignment types, and does not save time or increase learning. It is honestly bonkers to me that this is not a bigger conversation k-12 or higher education.

So Canvas is not many Canva? I'll keep this out of certain mutuals direct mentions, I understand these are giving old college trying times, and don't want to directly insert my inanity into the discourse.

For anyone with this issue, I worked through the Getty-Dubay handwriting book a few summers ago and it made a dramatic improvement in how quickly, clearly, and comfortably I could handwrite.

FWIW, I’ve got an archive of self-created, self-hosted, open-source, non-extractive, non-surveillant class websites going back 22 years! wordsinspace.net/classes/

Maybe allowing third-party platforms to become load bearing infrastructure for K-16 education was a bad idea? (See @ezekieldixonroman.bsky.social and I on “platform governance“ in education: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/...)

Canvas is down during finals week. Final exam for my big class was due tonight... This is a reminder to my future self to download my class list from Canvas next time so I can actually email my students when something like this happens! And at this point make regular offline gradebook backups too!

gotta love when a whole education system makes itself vulnerable by making a large number of institutions dependent on a proprietary lms whose continuity or reliability they have no control over *chef's kiss* now let's do it again, but bigger, with ai

Like Beethoven invented *new kinds of musical notation* bc he wanted to be very fucking clear about how it was meant to be played And we already have syntax for describing very precisely what we want computers to do, called "code"

Bluesky isn’t about popularity, it’s about gathering all 17 William Morris lovers together in a single online location!

“Writing is hard.” Thrilled to share that this simple idea led to a new paper in Political Analysis! Where most text methods focus on content, I test if expression is also effortful action. I find simple measures like character counts reveal attitudes and predict voting. cup.org/4cUmoXi 1/

I hate it when adults say the stuff they learned at school was useless because "I've never needed to know this" partly because there is inherent good in knowing things even if they're not "useful" to your current circumstances, but also because I need my co-workers to do algebra for their jobs.

FWIW, I don’t think the major problem in my field, or related ones, is that people need to move faster & produce more. I read a lot of papers as part of the job, and I’m increasingly convinced we’d benefit from fewer papers and better ones, not more mediocre work produced ever more “efficiently.”

Adulthood is just cycling between "If I don't say yes to every opportunity, no new opportunities will ever be offered to me" and "Oh no, I have said yes to too many things" over and over until you die.

do y'all know about Postcrossing? y'all should know about Postcrossing? www.postcrossing.com

Back when I worked at Twitter there was a Python script one team wrote that called a Python script another team wrote that called a Ruby script another team wrote that wrapped the Hadoop CLI and I think about that all the time

As soon as you start down this road, the volume of output - not just code and logic, which they describe, but results and conclusions - immediately surpasses the human capacity to read and assess it. And the people running such a process are still driven by our current institutional incentives. /2

I dumped some feelings in a blog post about teaching DH right now. mackenziekbrooks.info/update/2026/...

Anyways. While the isolation argument does technically connect with inconvienences and consumerism, by not acknowledging that modern tech even *is* highly inconvienent compared to tech you just...own. And can fix. And it more or less works? The actual argument gets weakened.

Anyways, all this rambling to say...I think the author means well. But is missing the forest for the trees. It's not nostalgia for more inconvienent times. It's desperately wanting to be free from scams, tricks, and advertisements.

I'm tired of software as a service, of never really owning anything, of needing to be online all the time, of being at the mercy of distant servers and subscriptions, and of video games that die when their servers do even when they're fully single-player. And I'm not alone.

I would really like to see a "declouding" movement where consumers demand any software that doesn't strictly need to be in the cloud, be downloadable to run locally on their own hardware. The way that things used to be.

Seconded. There’s a place for the cloud for data, e.g. your device has limited capacity and are travelling, or as a backup, but I’d rather primarily use local external storage. I’d prefer software to be local, to buy & own it, not subscribe to a service model. Also it means I can work offline.

I'm at the point of the semester where my to do lists are becoming fractal...

The longer I spend in digital humanities, the more I am obsessively drawn to analog technologies and convinced we must actively and intently teach them or the digital world loses its color, texture, and depth.

Why do we even bother with endnotes--this is my personal pet peeve as a historian, I need to read the spicy, sassy, whiny footnotes immediately

Bluesky seems to be occasionally truncating my search text in the last few days. This has led to some surprising search results!

Really not happy finding out that some textbooks now are only available as ebooks. I need to pull out my spray bottle and spritz the publishers with a strong NO.

BUT I do sometimes chuckle at *their* disciplinary confidence in *documentation* if my career in DH/academia has taught me anything, it’s that we could literally wallpaper the lab with instructions, checklists, best practices, & warnings—& (at least) half the patrons would miss/ignore every word

Programming sucks - this essay is fantastic! www.stilldrinking.org/programming-...

A slide from my upcoming PyTexas talk about vibe coding and AI. PyTexas is in beautiful Austin this year, April 17 to 19. www.pytexas.org/2026/

I may be slightly obsessed with pickled vegetables!

A telling point. We've always had to put our trust in some software we don't necessarily understand, hoping it was created in good faith by skilled people. But now we are expected to put trust in an opaque guessing machine, or code created by that opaque guessing machine.

The facades on the buildings built over a hundred years ago are amazing to me because so much art was involved in the architectural designs. It would have been fun to be in the construction business back then. #architecture #art #buildings #barcelona #photography #streetphotography

Paused MAD MEN while Ted Chaough’s partner was in the hospital and the HBO Max interstitial ad made it look like his dying wish was for a Whopper.

I suspect it’s probably related to why reading in a physical book results in better retention: there is a physical/spacial aspect to information storage. Where something was located on a page, where on a page we wrote something. We are embodied creatures, not brains in an abstract environment.

Happy #WorldWaterDay! Fetch yourself a big glass of the good stuff and take a look at the watery wonder which is Hamonshu (1903), a Japanese book of wave and ripple designs: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/hamonshu-a-japanese-book-of-wave-and-ripple-designs-1903

reading [good] documentation and trying to get into the head of someone (or some people) who made a library or designed a language is interesting. figuring out how they did something - and why - is rewarding. learning out their way of thinking about a problem can be applied to my problems is great.

oh look at that www.pew.org/en/research-...

Good news!

As we head into another wildfire season: "We find that the observed increase in extreme fire weather bears a clear externally forced signal, detectable at 99% confidence above natural variability and attributable to human-induced climate change." www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....

In all the foofaraw surrounding AI, many people seem to have forgotten that product development is not all about coding, and that coding is maybe 10% of the actual work. 1/7

it's one of my core frames. context is how we make meaning, and the whole pitch of LLMs is that you don't need an embodied context to make sense of the world

I learned about a brilliant project yesterday to support British Sign Language (BSL) users, creating new signs for scientific terms in chemistry, oceanography, data science & more. And they're fabulously descriptive. Do have a look and share! www.ssc.education.ed.ac.uk/BSL/index.ht...

This is a fantastic interactive essay about clothes sizes for women (and how they so often poorly fit adults - hello mid-size gap!). Finding professional clothes as a roughly average sized woman is a terrible experience. pudding.cool/2026/02/wome...