Your item has been ordered! Your item has been packed! Your item has been shipped! Your item is on its way! Your item has been delivered! Your item is in your house! Your item is right behind you! Your item has tried to kill you! Your item has been destroyed! Your item will return in the sequel!

AI discourse has huge Battle of the Books/Spider and the Bee vibes.

Some quality dadding going on outside

What do you call being in denial about being in decline? Declinal? Denicline?

Is this actually new or just warmed-over #18thcentury sentimentalism www.wired.com/story/book-e...

Under my leadership as chair of the appeals committee, the committee did not meet a single time this year because no one appealed any thing; my thanks to the committee members for all the work they didn’t have to do

The AI-boosting commencement speakers forget to allow for the 99% of graduates who aren’t planning to get jobs helping the AI-boosting commencement speakers fuck over the 99% of graduates who aren’t planning to get jobs helping the AI-boosting commencement speakers

The terrible way things are now are closer to the historical norm. Corruption, disease, plutocracy—this is regression towards the mean of civilization. The so-called American century was a stolen season.

I do not care that you do not care for my bird photos. But the bird is insulted. #redbelliedwoodpecker

Oh you read all the top 100 novels, that’s so impressive you read the best ones, that’s so difficult, gimme the list of 100 worst and let’s see who’s up to a real challenge

Ran into a student who took my class thirteen years ago. “We read The Monk,” she said. “I still talk about that book.”

Trismegistus behind sun bars #Caturday

I am locked out of an account and it doesn’t agree with me about what my favorite movie is. Here’s a downy woodpecker from our yard. #birds #woodpeckerA

Course evals are in. This is the kind of comment that jeopardizes my carefully cultivated cynical affect.

I’m posting this red-bellied woodpecker I saw because I have nothing intelligent to say.

Sometimes I forget how academia is supposed to not work

I’m trying to collect English dept standards for T&P (assoc. to full) because we haven’t revised ours…ever? Not sure. But I’m on a subcommittee about it so here we are. If you’re willing to send your depts…please!

The United States of Weimarica

I will never understand why STEM and Humanities depts. snipe at each other when the business school is *right there.*

A twitter fight broke out in my yard.

Once, while I was still living in NYC, my mom came to visit for my birthday and got us tickets for a Broadway play. It was Medea. Never change, mom.

Students! If you rot your brain with AI, you will be stupid and angry and will never understand why. If you think for yourself, you will be smart and angry and sometimes understand why.

Students! Final grades are now available via Ouija board.

Between LLMs, WiFi outages, and Canvas hacks, we gotta start running colleges like Battlestar Galactica. Everything unnetworked; fuck the Cylons

Feel like when this presidency is finally over I’m gonna spend the rest of my life holding wedding-guests with my glittering eye and trying to explain what happened

Just rename cruise ships after pathogens and be done with it. All aboard the Syphilis of the Seas or the Royal Diphtheria or whatever.

Scorching hot take: humanities classes aren’t *necessarily* easier than STEM classes, but we are compelled to grade them like they are, so people point to grades as evidence that humanities classes *are* necessarily easier, but anyway the bigger issue is everyone’s getting worse at everything

Me: *summons Mephistopheles* Meph: what is thy bidding Me: grade these papers Meph: what Me: for real, grade them Meph: that’s it? Me: I really don’t want to Meph: seems like kind of a waste Me: eh Meph: i mean you could use AI Me: whoa whoa whoa I’m trying to *sell* my soul, not give it away

All I can think of today is Jabba the President down at Mar-a-Tatooine eating well-done space frogs and sending the Rancor to do Fox interviews

Slightly diminish a book Middle Manager of the Rings

Trismegistus is 16 this summer and so sleeps even more than he used to. This bed helps with arthritis. We don’t let him drive anymore. #caturday

Classes have ended. No students were harmed in the making of this semester.

Had to move a big rock in the yard out from which two snakes slithered at high speed and reader I tell you without exaggeration that my reaction would have made Indiana Jones proud of the way he would have handled it

Students! Demanding that I use AI in my job will maximize the efficiency with which I find new ways to be worse at my job.

Apparently I started some Discourse on here via what I thought was a fairly uncontroversial statement of Obvious Truth, and as a result I will in the future be posting even more recklessly

Jane Austen died 20 years before Victoria became queen, therefore NOT VICTORIAN NOT VICTORIAN NOT VICTORIAN I WILL FUCKING CUT YOU NOT VICTORIAN

Colleague told me yesterday that I was the funniest person on campus and I want to know where this goes on my CV

For #Caturday, a Not My Cat drinks from the basin of our rain chain after participating in my kibble-for-trust scheme. Negotiations are slow but show promise.

The rose-breasted grosbeaks have returned. This is an absolute if only temporary good.

Everything is terrible and getting worse and I hate AI and I’m miserable and because I’m stupid I come here to demand you leave me uplifting messages that I’ll see in the morning when I check my phone which I’ll do first thing because see above re: stupid

I’m not deranged in any of the most marketable ways

How far in advance of my having an expensive illness for which I am denied coverage should I declare myself an airline so I can avoid bankruptcy with a taxpayer bailout

Chainsaws have some useful applications and are here to stay. We should be teaching all our children how to use them responsibly.

Doc appt today. I let the students place bets on my blood pressure. Closest without going over gets a dollar. Am I doing polymarket right

Y’all are just angry because everything’s terrible

“The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome…” Catherine Morland’s thoughts on historiography hitting more true than usual these days. #Austen #Northanger

I first read this poem as an undergraduate and the second stanza just floored me. Right time right place right between the eyes.

I met a three day old goat this morning and it was great

Schrodinger’s Strait is both open AND closed.

Greenland sharks can live up to 500 years, so a Greenland shark born in the Jacobean era would probably still be alive when the journal article it submitted during the Interregnum finally appeared in print.