I

watched the fifth element this weekend and i keep coming back to the fact that the most perfect supreme being in the universe doesn’t touch up her roots… much to think about

New YouTube video up! With apologies to @kjhealy.co youtu.be/KY4v594UoCo

There's a reason we use a word for 'illusion' to describe certain jobs—there's a difference between what you see and what's there. & To @scalzi.com's point, in this sense every job has a glamour—though they're not all prettier than the jobs they glamorize.

In general we need to see more things as ends unto themselves and fewer things as mere means to ends.

New video this morning! Taking bets on whether next week I can get back to posting on Mondays like I'd planned to youtu.be/CAIVJRFcc6E

Not only is this "Atomic" bullshit from ASU precisely and exactly the wrong way to go about using "AI" to develop course materials, it is in fact a culmination of many of my nightmare scenarios.

Oh this bill sounds amazing. Please spread the word and call your reps to tell them to VOTE YES for HR 4678 💜 this would be a huge anti-censorship win.

New video! youtu.be/Wc8P6R4NwBA

I learned of this today. I generated a class about digital media studies. Myself and 3 of my colleagues had 30 second to 2 minute clips taken from the video lectures from our online classes. The clips are interspersed with text that appears to be generated by ChatGPT (stupid emoji and all).

"All right chat, thanks for showing up. Got some amazing content for you today" I say from the lectern as the funeral director gives me the dirtiest look ever seen on this earth

Hey I made another video youtu.be/Vh2RH1wtq7k?...

Gender should literally just be a common thing that people *should* examine in order to have a fullness of life, even if nothing massively changes. It should be as common as developing a fashion style or a music taste. Deconstruction of societal imprint, no matter how “far” you go, is freedom.

This is a valid point: whenever you see this sort of high-pressure sales tactic turned on a technology, you can be CERTAIN that it's a fake—actually useful new tech sells itself! And don't underestimate the effectiveness of FOMO as a tool in the hands of a con artist.

I made a video essay for an independent study. It has been a Process. I have a headache. youtu.be/nNbvhyVP8Sg

That money could’ve ended homelessness in the US, or established UBI for every American, student loan erasure, or supercharged every creative industry in existence to pay artists better, instead of, yknow, blowing it on dead malls full of Elegy of Emptiness statues for rich people I hate it here

meta-discursive comment: the incentives of social media where making an incorrect naive prediction is seen as much more embarrassing than making an incorrect cynical one are very bad.

STOP CALLING IT AN IMMIGRATION CRACKDOWN! TAKING CITIZENSHIP FROM EXTREMELY VETTED NATURALIZED CITIZENS IS NOT A CRACKDOWN! IT'S BETRAYAL.

A famous guy I was a fan of sent an email during the pandemic just being like "hey I like your show, great job" and it meant a ton to me. So ever since I've tried to reach out whenever I really like something and just tell the people who made it "I really like this, thanks for making it!"

I’m not Becoming The Joker, Britain is Becoming Gotham

It's weird to not only have lived through an information revolution but also now living through its undoing, all within less than a generation.

evergreen

This week, I withdrew from a speaking engagement at a public university because they sent me a list of prohibited “words & concepts.” I will not humor this censorship. It does a disservice to the stories I’m discussing & the audience, who deserve unfettered access to information & conversation.

My forthcoming book on K-pop fandom looks at how parasocial relationships in K-pop today can be viewed as asymmetrical relationships -- never entirely one-way, but in many cases, two-way, asymmetric-yet-mutual attachments 💞

Looks like LLMs are *very* vulnerable to attack via poetic allusion: "curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates (ASR), with some providers exceeding 90% ..." https://arxiv.org/html/2511.15304v1

reading slaughterhouse 5 for the first time and i was absolutely knocked senseless by this passage, which is so true and relevant that it feels like it was pulled from a history book

Hi Olivia, we usually never publish in anything other than Dutch (well, Flemish, as is mentioned in the comments). But... we did just create an English version of the piece! You can read (and share it) here: apache.be/2025/10/24/b...

From Kenneth Burke's "Rhetoric of Hitler's 'Battle'" (1941) "The yearning for unity is so great that people are always willing to meet you halfway if you will give it to them by fiat, by flat statement, regardless of the facts."

early 21st century americans were so modest that they would regularly censor their own feet in video and artistic depictions, and it was considered improper to expose your feet in public — dismissed with cries of "put those grippers away"

The Pornhub productivity suite took me out.

Fan Studies question: does anyone know the exact origin of the term "headcanon"? I know it comes from fic around 2007, but can't find anything more specific than that.

Sold a bunch of shares of ownership in my immortal soul recently, getting them packed up to ship now

The AI bubble is JK Rowling's fault

actually our AI programs are like people so its racist to say you don't like them. anyway would you like to buy one

shit what if i am cringe but also not free

The Overton window isn't real. It just seems like it is because the one-dimensional left/right political spectrum also isn't real. We imagine ideas as more or less extreme *based on* how viable they seem as political agendas then assume that there's something intrinsically similar about them

Who else thinks about the fact that algorithmically customized recommendation feeds create a pressure to self-censor your own media consumption to prevent your recommendations from becoming unflattering?

Didn’t know this! Do you know how many years I pined for jstor access! Yes I am a giant nerd who pines for academe leave me alone with my papers and books

If there’s one legitimate criticism of postmodernism it’s people who wear “this is my costume!” t-shirts on Halloween

Using humor as a distancing mechanism to deal w stress but it is very funny to me that in order to make the country appear "Strong" the Rs are blowing up our performative freedom of expression, which has been the cornerstone of our state propaganda for a century

Related: I think most condition and disease names are about what it messes up or how it creates a dysfunction or deficit, so it's funny to me that we use "nearsighted" and "farsighted". Like we don't say "every bone except your tibia is doing great" but we DO say "you can see close stuff"

I see the New Republic is using AI.

this is, hands down, the best video I've seen on men's influencer content and it's not close either

Hemophilia is kind of a mean name for a disease. "Hey check it out this guy *loves* bleeding." It's got "stop hitting yourself" energy

what a humiliating way for don jr. to find out his dad sends birthday cards.

📣 NEW -- In The Economist, discussing the privacy perils of AI agents and what AI companies and operating systems need to do--NOW--to protect Signal and much else! www.economist.com/by-invitatio...

Gotta read 9 giant books for an independent study this semester & thinking of the way I'm reading as an any% speedrun. "Oh I didn't understand that paragraph? Guess that's not one of the things I'm taking away from the text this time through"

Forced “unity” is brittle. It is not so much unity as it is one group imposing its will upon others. That is a source of division, not unity. True togetherness takes effort, understanding, compromise, and time. Brute force is pushing, and pushing inevitably gets pushed back. Basic social physics.

good morning, i wrote a manifesto about a new direction for game design / play possumcreek.medium.com/the-expressi...