If you're a fan of STRANGER THINGS, @blaisebalas.bsky.social's post is an excellent bit of #popculture and horror analysis. Go like, share, and subscribe! #horrorsky #strangerthings #horrormovies

Happy New Year! We're off to the Nth annual Ben Balas Memorial Crokinole tournament, but 2026 is just a few hours away here in the Frozen North. The sun decided to put on one more show for us in 2025, so thought I'd share this look at the ND sky with you all. #happynewyear

Weekend reading: Just finished @blacktopkid.bsky.social's BLACKTOP WASTELAND. This one doesn't let you go - I don't usually read straight through a book in a sitting or two, but I couldn't help it with this one. Definitely one of the best I've read this year. app.thestorygraph.com/books/9f10d1...

I didn't grow up with these as a holiday tradition, but I now think of @nancykanwisher.bsky.social every year when we get them from our stockings. The 1st time I got one I was gently tapping it on the table to no avail & Nancy showed me the proper technique of whacking the hell out of it. 🎄🍊🔨

Heck yeah! The Thin Man is fantastic.

Happy 21st December evening everyone. May the Great Veiled Bear pass over you house tonight and not present you with one of his cursed Christmas cookies.

I've been hooked recently on a solitaire game called Scoundrel that plays with a standard deck of cards and an optional D20. It's a dungeon crawl with weapons (diamonds), monsters (clubs and spades), and health potions (hearts). Finally won with the 10H last in the deck! <1/3>

I've been in a bit of a #chess playing slump for the past few weeks, but the end of the term seems to have given me some of my brain back! Pretty pleased with this blitz game today - I've been working on learning the Grand Prix and I feel like it's started going a little more smoothly of late.

Weekend reading: Miles Harvey's THE KING OF CONFIDENCE. This is one of those books that makes you wonder how this piece of US history isn't taught more widely - fascinating and strange (like the antebellum period in general) and very readable. 📚

Welcome Yule!

One of my favorite memories of college was being Omelette Man for Finals week breakfasts b/c I didn't have any exams. Cook on, Omelette Man!

It's Williams-Sonoma time, people! I was just saying to @erconwell.bsky.social this morning that it hadn't quite set in that #Christmas was coming, but now I've got that holiday spirit.

One more #ArtAdventCalendar post for your evening and it's another #StudioGhibli #snowflake design. Tonight, we switch to HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE and the fiery Calcifer! This one is especially for @k-a-baker.bsky.social who requested this guy a few snowflakes ago. ❄️✂️🔥🏰

A hallway conversation today about AI, my Neuropsych students, and upcoming movies led to a brief moment of confusion for one of my colleagues who thought we were talking about a Phineas Gage biopic starring Nic Cage. Here me out - whatever's in the trailer, it ends with CAGE. IS. GAGE.

Excellent piece about Ben Grimm (The Thing) being acknowledged as Jewish for the first time in Fantastic Four #56.

Took in WAKE UP DEAD MAN at the Fargo Theatre this afternoon. I quite liked the different tone of this one - KNIVES OUT and GLASS ONION are great fun, but I liked that this one embraced genuineness more than snark. I do feel Andrew Scott was under-utilized, however.

We are back in the #papercraft business! Thanks to the lovely @erconwell.bsky.social for making the run to get a new Cricut blade - tonight's #ArtAdventCalendar design is another #StudioGhibli #snowflake: Kiki and Jiji from KIKI'S DELIVERY SERVICE. ❄️✂️🧹🐈‍⬛

This Fall, I taught a 400-level comics course at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, under our Major Authors rubric, on the comics Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. I posted a recap of each week using #comicteaching. This thread contains all of those posts, as well as a link to our syllabus.

Alas, we had a busy evening & so for tonight's #ArtAdventCalendar I must give you a #snowflake from year's past. Part of tonight's schedule was a trip to the movies, so here's my @mst3kofficial.bsky.social Tom Servo and Crow designs from a few years ago. Enjoy, and stay tuned for new patterns soon!

Tonight was movie night at the Fargo Theatre and our feature was DIE HARD. Still probably the best action movie there is and watching with a crowd was great fun.

Link to my in-depth interview about snow removal: www.inforum.com/news/fargo/w...

For Day 9 of #ArtAdventCalendar I managed to eke out one more #StudioGhibli #snowflake out of my ailing Cricut - tonight it's another look at San from PRINCESS MONONOKE, this time in full-on attack mode and masked. I love this image and think it makes for a pretty dramatic design. ❄️✂️👹🗡️

I did a "Man on the Street" interview today with one of our local news stations about my snow-shoveling philosophy and in retrospect I both left a lot out and probably said too much. It's probably fine, right? Should I have given a fake name?

Tonight's #ArtAdventCalendar is a little bit of a disappointment: My #StudioGhibli #snowflake design is pretty cool, but my poor #Cricut finally hit its limit and needs a new blade. As a result, I've got the Forest Spirit from PRINCESS MONONOKE in graphic form, but no cut paper yet. ❄️🖊️🦌

It's Day 8 of #ArtAdventCalendar and I'm switching #StudioGhibli movies for my next #snowflake design. Tonight it's PRINCESS MONONOKE's San in all her wolf-girl glory. This was too much for paper - had to switch to vinyl. Any chance @cricutexplore.bsky.social wants to send me a bigger model? ❄️✂️🐺🩸

Heck yeah, Santabear. Look at the riz on this man! www.inforum.com/lifestyle/fa...

Our grad students have told me that I have "possum energy" and while I don't know exactly what they mean, I think this right here is in my wheelhouse.

Day 7 of #ArtAdventCalendar and I've got one more SPIRITED AWAY #StudioGhibli #snowflake for you. Tonight it's the Radish Spirit (Oshira-Sama) who was a special request from @erconwell.bsky.social. I decided the fans were a nice touch to give the design a little more detail. ❄️✂️🥕

The kiddo is on Bluesky! I've been posting her essays here on her behalf for a while but now you can get her amazing #HorrorMovie essays direct from the author herself. Follow, share, like and subscribe to her newsletter for some great #popculture writing.

For Day 6 of #ArtAdventCalendar, we're still hanging out with the SPIRITED AWAY characters for this season's #StudioGhibli #snowflakes. Tonight, it's the nefarious Yubaba! Sooo many little lines to do in her hair, but not too bad a design in the end. ❄️✂️🧙‍♀️

A new #HorrorMovie post from the kiddo over at So Desensitized! This time she's writing about TERRIFIER 3 in the larger context of #Christmas horror. Go check it out (and subscribe to her newsletter!) if you love movies and top-notch pop-culture writing! buttondown.com/blaisebalas/...

Day 5 of #ArtAdventCalendar and tonight's #StudioGhibli #snowflake is another design from SPIRITED AWAY: Kamaji, the spider-y keeper of the boiler! I feel like I could have tried to get that top set of legs a little more defined, so I might revisit this one later in the month. ❄️✂️🕷️🛁

I've been making #papercraft #snowflakes these past few days, but forgot to tag #ArtAdventCalendar! Here's a bit of catching up with my first #StudioGhibli designs from this season's series (feat. Totoro, Cat-bus, Porco Rosso, and No-face). Enjoy! ❄️✂️🎄

For tonight's #StudioGhibli #snowflake we're heading for SPIRITED AWAY and the iconic No-Face! That he ends up learning to knit is one of my favorite things about the movie, so I thought I'd go with that for this design. Lots of fun making the negative space work for this one. ❄️✂️🙂🚫 #papercraft

This looks fantastic.

Tonight's #papercraft #StudioGhibli snowflake is a personal favorite of mine: PORCO ROSSO! The pic is a little blurry, but I think I did him justice with this one. ❄️✂️🐷🛩️

A bit of an early #Christmas gift for the Balas Lab: Behold our brand-new 3D zoetrope! I'll need to play with the app to take video, but once it's up and running the little frogs you see here jump over one another and it's delightful. Just the thing for the #visionscience nerd in your life! 🧵 <1/3>

YES

The #StudioGhibli series of #papercraft snowflakes continues with one more design from MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO - The Catbus! My poor #cricut was fighting hard for this one, but I think the end result was worth it. Enjoy! ❄️✂️🐈‍⬛🚌

I've updated my shop with Neuro-inspired art, resembling pyramidal cells. Instead of making individual listings for each color, I've added color variations to a single listing. www.artatomic.io/product/abst... #SciArt #art #NeuroArt #Science #CreativeCoding #ArtForSale

Excellent essay and accompanying video from @jenshahade.bsky.social about the challenges of using machine learning to look for beautiful mating patterns in #chess puzzles! I quite like the connection to the "tells" of LLM-generated text in particular.

We're officially into the #Christmas season, so that means it's time for some overly elaborate #papercraft #snowflake designs! For this year I decided on a #StudioGhibli series, starting with: Totoro! <1/2>

Here's a gift article of a very interesting look at the problems with the mirror-test which has been held as the gatekeeper for which creatures possess theory of mind. Besides working with Elsie, it makes me think about SF creatures & if they would pass the test. www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

I just posted about having a fun @skypeascientist.bsky.social session the other day, but you guys they sent thank-you notes and they are amazing. ❤️

My personal favorite technique is to leave the turkey under a phone booth or trash can somewhere in the city for a while, then retrieve it during a street fight with destroying the necessary municipal property. Always makes me feel better.

I have a few talks coming up in the new year and I'm sorely tempted to either demand an actual overhead projector or to do away with slides altogether in favor of physical props and a document camera so I can show them to the whole room.

Great article in our local paper about the profound national panic over the "Turkey Trot" dance that emerged in ~1912. My favorite part is that SD voted to ban it, then tried to reverse the ban because they were embarassed that the words "Turkey Trot" and "Hoochie Koochie" were in state law.

It's been a little while, but I've finally got a new #chess blog post up over on lichess! This time I'm taking a look at a neat study examining holistic processing of #faces and chess positions in expert players. Enjoy! lichess.org/@/NDpatzer/b...

Ooo - tuning in to @mprnews.org now to hear a discussion of anthropomorphism and face pareidolia on 1A. www.mprnews.org #visionscience #facerecognition

The Power Fantasy is simply one of the best explorations of moral philosophy (aka normative ethics) in comics. Check out my ethics primer and introduction to the series: comicphilosophy.com/index.php/20... Kudos to @kierongillen.bsky.social and @casparw.bsky.social for this outstanding series!