A #poem for #transpride in Plymouth today #lgbtq #lgbt Back in Devon and Cornwall for ten gigs from Monday www.robinince.com

Research measuring the effects of AI in education has a major quality control problem that should disqualify most of it from being considered in policy discussions or applied in teaching practice. Quick new post from me codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2026/06/26/t...

*Steps to mic; taps mic* Ahem Fuck end notes. Footnotes are better. *slams mic into the group; leaves to rapturous applause*

Listen, Fox News producers, if you are going to have someone on who says “look at these images coming out of New York…” you might not want to juxtapose his grim warnings about socialism with three pictures of smiling happy people. If you are going to engage in agitprop, do it well.

Someone exhume Edmund Burke and reanimate his corpse to cover the World Cup

In 2004, Scrubs, in their third season, had a whole episode about how full body scans were a grift meant to terrify patients into more expensive treatments they don’t need for the profit of greedy hospitals. Good thing AI, which has never* been associated with grifts, is getting in on the game.

My exact reaction while reading this piece:

I’ve been watching MARGOT’S GOT MONEY TROUBLE and as much as I like Nicole Kidman in this show, her accent is all over the place. Which somehow makes her more charming?

RIP Mark Rothko. You would have loved how the hydrogen peroxide bleach is only turning the Reflecting Pool blue around the perimeter

If there were to be a silver lining to the GenAI problem, it would be that many of the most ardent users eventually say something so intensely cringe-worthy and embarrassing that I no longer have to worry about respecting that person.

ChatGPT is to DH tools what Wario is to Mario. If you really don't know from Mario, and aren't paying that close attention, maybe you could confuse the two. But it requires missing all the ways in which everything about Wario is wrong, from the subtle (mustache angle) to the extreme (evil goals).

This is an old clip, I think, but likely still true. Nonetheless, there were no fewer than three autistic kids on the soccer team I coached, so he can (always) piss off.

Olives. And mayonnaise. But mostly olives.

Today's article on sentiment analysis is already off to a better start, and one of the key differences between this and other sentiment analysis articles is that one of the two researchers studies communications. This is an important distinction about what is being measured.

I am begging data scientists who are interested in applying Big Data research methods to literature to include someone from the English Department on your team. I was reading the below article on story shapes, and it was all data scientists.

Few things in life are more satisfying that getting the pangram as your first word in Spelling Bee.

In both SHRINKING and THE FOUR SEASONS, Vernée Watson was cast as a mother of a main character with ailing health who resists moving in with her adult child, which is a very niche typecasting.

In HBO’s SILICON VALLEY, Russ Hanneman uses a bluetooth speaker system and an app on his phone to create an automated baby sitter app that he came use to absolve him of responsibility. The show wants us to think he’s a douche for using it. And now here we are.

Zombie Faulkner close behind clutching a complete manuscript THE SOUND AND THE FURY 2: OOPS, ALL QUINTEN edition.

I went to see if I could snag cheap seats to the Jimmy Eat World show tomorrow and I feel like this guy isn’t trying too hard to sell his seats.

Some pictures for my fifth talk as part of my summer residency for Lectures on Tap. It was a fun time and there were a lot of great questions.

I'm in the early stages of a potential new project, and these new stages of a research project are so intoxicating. My mind is going a million miles a minute, and I'm trying to harness the hurricane of ideas with what feels like a paper kite. Why would anyone want to offload this to AI?

I agree that the AI writers and publishers pushing AI don’t respect the readers, but what I worry is that AI writing doesn’t need to be good; it just needs to be good enough. Churning out 50+ books a year is a monkey/typewriter situation: one might be good enough to cover the rest.

Imagine being in that audience and hearing the President admit he supports this initiative to shut up his advisors.

I’m sorry, Baseball Gods, for so brazenly taunting the Giants.

I don’t know man. I kinda feel like the Nazi tattoo was enough. I didn’t need to hear anything else. I’m annoyed that there are still people that need more evidence of someone being disqualified for office when, again, there was a Nazi tattoo. Can we now finally all agree that this dude sucks now?

Midway through my summer residency with Lectures on Tap, and they have asked if I want to extend it through November. I certainly did not have "Give 10 bar lectures" on my 2026 bingo card, but here we are. If anyone is interested in coming to a talk to see what it's like, let me know.

Not to be all Chicagoan on him, but the Sears Tower is taller than the Empire State Building.

Some of people have never read THE CIRCLE by Dave Eggars and it shows.

Hilariously bad map. Looks like one of the projection maps from that movie 2012 where they predicted what the coast line would look like after Yosemite exploded but they still held the World Cup.

Spare a thought for all the UChicago folks working on their AI policies for their syllabuses.

What’s hilarious to me is that Bilal, as he was writing this post, discovered in real-time the value of writing. He moved from “AI will do the writing” to “Actually, writing is thinking, so we’ll still need to do that for ourselves” in the span of four sentences.

I love running across my UIC English department colleagues out in the wild! Especially when It’s a great essay, too!

I love you, Japan. Never change.

Pray for my search algorithms as I hunt down the origin of the Facts Don't Care About Your Feelings meme.

Counterpoint: Universities shouldn’t want to be “economic powerhouses,” whatever that might be.

It’s going to be a good night.

On the one hand, admitting (as this dude does) that Claude can do your job better than you fills me with so much second-hand embarrassment. On the other, his conclusions, while hardly revolutionary, are correct. Make the humanities more human is a good rallying call.

The Targaryens are the Skywalkers of Westeros in that I feel we’ve milked that family for all its narrative potential. It’s a big island full of interesting people; it would be nice if there could be a few stories about one of them.

I was thinking about my confusion and NICK AND NORAH’S INFINITE PLAYLIST came to mind. That book was such a time capsule of pre-smartphone engagement as these teens looked for secret clues in arcane websites, that modernizing it would suck a lot of that context out.

After yesterday’s complicated and nuanced legal discussion about the Patagonia law suit against climate activist and drag queen Pattie Gonia, it’s nice to have a straight-forward case of dystopian legal malfeasance.

Awesome

The Cubs won yesterday and I found my Cubs hat I misplaced right around the time the losing streak started. Probably a coincidence. Or, I’m magic.

Huh…Riot Fest has both The Sex Pistols (without Johnny Rotten) and Public Image LTD (with Johnny Rotten).

We joined the neighborhood pool, and my daughter just wears her swim-suit cover-up all day now. Fully committed to only going to the pool.

Think I've got to side with Patagonia here.

What I find so confusing about this practice of modernization is that it assumes a book is meant to be timeless, or “evergreen” as they say. Books come from a time and place, and that context is important to the text.

I for one love the idea that to get a man to eat you must bounce and dangle his chicken nuggets in front of him like he’s a cute widdle kitten

It would be interesting to repeat this survey at a school that is even more dependent on contingent faculty than Yale, like a community college. R1s still have more T and TT profs than contingent and part time. Community Colleges are almost entirely contingent faculty.