in 2021 i (virtually 😔) presented at the Visual Depictions of the American West conference and just received notice that another participant has released a call for papers for a collection titled Beyond the American Western: Picturing the Far West in Global Comics! spread the word!!

Every single person--from the bag check through TSA to the two people I ordered food from--were all lovely people at LAX. An excellent airport experience.

I’m a fan of the cold weather, but I would be lying if I didn’t concede how nice it is to walk around LA in the winter.

Fun! A phishing attempt on Bluesky. This place really has the juice.

The hill I am prepared to die on is that the Fall semester needs a week-long fall break around week 8. The first extended break coming at Thanksgiving is too long, and the students burn out in week 10. The last week of semester being right after the long break isn’t ideal, either.

On Saturday, I was meant to provide the turkey for Friendsgiving, so I started an 18-hr brine on a 15-lb bird Friday night. Then my son spiked a fever, so we had to pull out. But there was no freezing a brined turkey, so I made it for my wife and I.

“And then Jesus said to the gathered crowd, ‘When I was a young man, my father took me into the city to see a marching band. He said, ‘Son, when you grow up, would you be the savior of the broken, the beaten, and the damned.’ to him I said, ‘Though you’re dead and gone, believe me, your memory…”

Well…it was not to be. Immediately after I finalized my prep sheet for frying the turkey, my son vomited. Turkey is already brined, so I’ll just roast it for today. Try frying again at another time.

The turkey is brining. I’ve done a displacement test to ensure the right amount of oil was purchased. I built Alton Brown’s turkey derrick. I have a fire blanket on standby. I’m going to try frying a turkey for the first time tomorrow. Hopefully, there will be no need for the fire department.

This, especially the "suffering is the rejection of reality," is the "Job your love" of academic discourse.

It's like the Hotdog Car meme, but everyone in the room is in hotdog suits and the car ran over a bunch of students.

Something seems to have snapped in my students in the last week. Attendance plummeted; engagement is way down. Even the most-prepared students are limping into class with nothing prepared for discussion. Across all my sections and all my classes. It’s like everyone collectively broke.

I can’t believe that John Oliver talked about GWAR frontman Blothar’s love of Public Radio without mentioning their Tiny Desk appearance.

You know…I kind of liked Milwaukee. The food scene was solid. The city was walker friendly and loads of public art. I should try to get out to the North Chicago Suburbs more often.

For those learning about the devastating loss of Alice Wong or those newly discovering this fierce disability activist, you can get to know her through her own words here, (via @emilybeitiks.bsky.social) disabilityvisibilityproject.com/author/alwon...

I was at a panel at the #MMLA25 about prison populations and conspiracy theories. The thesis was that being aware of how people in prison can be conspiracy minded can improve your approach to educational programs.

“One of the things that really gives me joy is the fact that there are so many amazing, brilliant, creative disabled people out there. But part of my rage — and it’s a very real rage — is that most people don’t really know about them.” Obit:

💔 Alice Wong’s last words: “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” We can never thank Alice enough for fighting all the good fights and especially all the hard fights. We all learned so much from your brilliance, your courage, and your indefatigable leadership. We will never forget you.

No one asked, but the donut was a Pear Brown Butter filled donut. And I will be on a quest to find a donut as beautiful as that one for the rest of my life.

#MMLA25 Day 2! Got an amazing donut from Donut Monster and now I’m at the Religion and Literature session.

#MMLA25 I got a late start as I needed to check into my hotel and find lunch. But we are here for Panel 4.1: Posthumanist Hope: Robots and Animals.

I'm no graphic designer, but I would think you'd want the serif on D to align with the tail on R to maintain the symmetry of the plaque.

These reflections on Ken Bain’s influence so closely mirror my own pedagogical development, I worry that I might have somehow plagiarized my lived experience. Bain’s WtBCTD was seminal to my development as an instructor. The book is a classic and should be read by anyone interested in higher ed.

If I wanted to prove to Joyce Carol Oates that I have, in fact, read some books, I definitely would make sure I linked to the right book. And maybe got the plot right.

Big Second Semester Senior vibes here. Durbin is on his way out and doesn’t feel it’s his obligation to answer for any of his choices. M

Happy Circulatory System Walking Through the Kitchen Day for all those who celebrate. Maybe terrorize your workplace kitchen today like a brainless mass of walking veins and arteries trying to reshape itself into a man.

I guess you can say this site has “made it” since I was just followed by an account that promised to grow my followers by some insanely high percentage.

Being a Dad means I don’t get to games in a time fashion. SHOVEL KNIGHT by @yachtclubgames.bsky.social came out in 2014, I think I got it around 2019, and just now started playing it. It’s great. I can see why everyone loved it 11 years ago. And as a game so deliberately retro, it ages well.

For the third of our four days on Swallow Me Whole by @natepowell.bsky.social, I brought in Margaret Fink, the director of our Disability Cultural Center to talk about Mad Studies and the communities of Psychiatric Survivors (people who survived terrible treatment for mental health conditions).

ATTN: SUBMISSIONS FOR THE NEXT @ironcircuscomics.bsky.social ANTHOLOGY OPEN DECEMBER 1ST. EVERYTHING IS FINE. NOTHING IS WRONG. WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EURASIA. Start planning your submission to LIE MACHINE now!! ironcircus.com/lie-machine/

heads up to anyone who holds trans kids near: amy harmon from the nyt is searching for and having a hard time finding people to interview to find out exactly what trans kids are doing when their care is limited or cut off, and for purposes of community safety, please shut the fuck up around her.

I was just talking to some students about death and dying in media, and then this book by Hiromi Goto and Ann Xu (@epershannd.bsky.social) was on sale at my local library.

I know it's tangential to the whole thing, but does anyone else find it odd that there is not statistically significant amount of people with no opinion? *Everyone* asked has had an opinion in some way. That seems unusual to me, but I am not an expert in polling questions.

Job alert: the University of Illinois Library is hiring a Humanities Librarian to serve as liaison to African-American Studies and English Literatures. I’m sure someone here would be a great fit for this job—& we’ve got a pretty phenomenal community here Please share!

The conventions concerning author order in academic research are complicated, but these Italians working LLM research have, I think, nailed the best way:

After years of watching the Silver Sneakers at the gym, my buddy and I finally worked up the nerve to start playing pickleball. We got destroyed. These retirees couldn’t run to escape the building if it was on fire, but mopped the floor with us.

The President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, PPFP, has been a jewel in the crown for faculty development and recruitment at the University of California for years and the results have been an expanded faculty with almost 100% tenure rates — unprecedented success.

Happy Halloween! For the kids: a variety of candies both chocolate and fruity; for the adults, charcuterie s’mores (smoked cream cheese, various spiced hams, and crackers).

Birds but they get spookier each time. 🎃👻 Enter if you dare...🚪

Hey #ComicScholars and #AcademicSky more broadly. Julia Round (@hypnojoo.bsky.social) is working on what looks to be an interesting and important scholarly companion book on international comics:

Why is John McWhorter running interference for people who mispronounce Mamdani's name? Is there a linguistic explanation for how words can be mispronounced over time and eventually take on new spellings because of that? There is, and he correctly notes it. But those words are not a person's name.

There is some significant cognitive dissonance as the annual ethics training reminds me no one is allowed to pay for my lunch if they might have business with the University, while at the same time, the news reminds me the President is looking to have the DOJ pay him $230mil for doing it's job.

I've been reading Pinker's THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994), and I find the book to be both illuminating and deeply frustrating. He makes important claims about language that seem really progressive, like arguing all dialects are languages to themselves, equally nuanced and complicated.

I'm sorry...did he say it was his "responsibility" as governor to make sure sports are fair? California must be some sort of utopia if the top politician FOR THE WHOLE STATE has time to figure out how to make sports fair.

What's nice is that we didn't have to wait long for real-world examples of how AI video generators are going to make parsing out reality hard. All those people who claimed AI skeptics were pearl-clutching over the potential for this exact situation to manifest can go fuck themselves.

I’ve long admired Steven Pinker without having read his stuff, but the more I read him the less Imposter Syndrome I have. How can someone be so confidently wrong for 400 pages? Just astounding.

Just got off the phone with an organization that's works with lecturers to take their research to the public, and it looks like I'll be at a bar in River North (Chicago) to talk about language and rhetoric. I'll post more when dates are hammered out.

When my Mom was diagnosed with cancer last year and underwent radiation treatment, I spent a lot of time watching Star Trek (the original cast) as she drifted in and out of sleep. She turned me on to Star Trek as a kid (and sci-fi more generally).

I’m watching THE SOUND OF METAL, and the use of sound is amazing. Just brilliant.

Did no one read David Eggers THE CIRCLE (2013) and especially its sequel THE EVERY (2021). Eggers sci-fi vision for the near future is up there with William Gibson’s for Most Likely to be Misunderstood by Uninformed Tech Bros.