Starting a tech company, BOMBADIL, which is immensely powerful but not nearly as helpful as it could be

I’m doing an analog-only course next term. Realized the extent to which Canvas and email allow *me* to detach. It’ll be like going to college when I went to college!

Let this be the year I post an AI take that finally makes @tedunderwood.com block me

Make a Bond movie academic On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Committee

Make a Bond movie academic Tomorrow Never Hires

I’m feeling quite depressed and would like one or more of you to take responsibility for it.

Students! I am not preparing you for the job market. I am preparing you to survive on a diet of literature and contemplation as a reclusive refugee from post-maxicapitalist civilizational unraveling.

Me: I declare no more cookies until the afternoon Daughter: how could you! I’m your wife’s child!

You know, I’m starting to think a lot of you aren’t anyone’s brother in Christ at all!

Kruse is stealing my bit

Do not thank me for my patience, airline. If I would be dragged off the plane, arrested, and charged for expressing anger, what you are experiencing is not patience.

Well it happened. They asked if there is a doctor on board. But it seems serious so I decided to play it straight.

I can’t imagine anyone in literary studies using AI to generate fake citations or summarize stuff, I would think it’s completely anathema, I am obviously wrong, I would be mortified to know for sure

We bought me a heated bed for the cat and it makes us both very happy #caturday

Some of those pages are so redacted you’d think Parson Yorick just died

Student eval says “Prof Rudy, and I mean this in the best way, is so strange.”

Despite those titles, power, and pelf, The wretch, concentred all in self, Living, shall forfeit fair renown, And, doubly dying, shall go down To the vile dust from whence he sprung, Unwept, unhonored , and unsung. ~ Sir Walter Scott

I’ll vote for any Dem running on a platform of damnatio memoriae

I don’t know what exactly, but the Christmas card with machine printed message and signature automatically sent by my insurance company’s mail system every year is definitely emblematic of something wrong with this country

Has anyone done “The Madness of King Orange?” Can I copyright that?

Crap I missed the speech, I was busy chien andalouing my own eyeballs because I thought it’d be less aggravating

Kid got break-open geodes for Hanukkah and I am 50% more excited about them than she is

A snippet of dialogue with friends in honor of Austen’s birthday

Hot take: Literary fiction is undergoing the same historical status evolution as opera

Hot scorching hot take: Judaism isn’t “other” *enough* as a religion for most people to absorb a sense of what it is through the culture as its own thing so it just remains a kind of uncanny Christianity and like all things uncanny tends to freak people out.

A midterm ad for Dems that just says, “Measles, people. Honestly. Measles. Come on.”

I met a traveller from an antique land And demanded five years of his socials

Through my job I got tix to the world premiere of The Two Towers at the Ziegfeld in New York. Nearly passed out from exuberance when Eomer and Gandalf charged down the hill at Helm’s Deep. Had very brief eye contact with Liv Tyler. Went to the after party at the NYPL.

Students! Grades are in. Please sign below and choose if you’d like to add a 15%, 18%, or 20% gratuity and join our membership club for free points towards your next semester.

Oh you want a statement of my teaching philosophy? Whatever I can do today to stave off nihilistic despair until tomorrow, that’s my fucking teaching philosophy, also something something “student-centered” something, you happy now?

I was going through old files of pictures and I found this picture of a rabbit I took and I think it’s quite a nice rabbit so here’s this rabbit to start your day with a rabbit.

I am the very model of a modern major criminal I've information dis- and mis- and all of it incredible I know the kings of crypto, and I make up facts impossible; I’m venal, vain, and vicious, my denials categorical; I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters neurological—

Me: *logs into institutional website* Site: want me to stamp your hand Me: what? Site: stamp your hand. So you can get back in. Me: sure Site: ok confirm it’s your actual hand and that I stamped it Me: k ~ 10 mins later~ Me: hi I’m back, here’s my stamp Site: the fuck is that, I don’t know you

Me: there’s a special place in hell for— Satan: who? Who now, dammit? This ain’t the fucking White Lotus, I don’t have special places for all these fuckers. Some of them are going to have to make do with ground-floor-by-the-elevators-and ice-machines hell. I’m fucking exhausted.

Now is the winter of our discontent made egregious bummer by this son of a bitch

Where can I publicly rate my students, let’s make this shit a two-way street

I’m reading a 1,000 page history of the Napoleonic Wars that explains the era’s incredibly complex and globe-spanning geopolitics in order to make sense of the conflicts and realizing that two centuries from now historians will explain our time on a scrap of paper that just says “rich assholes.”

One of the biggest things I noticed in student writing about AI this term is a rhetorical reliance on “we”—we should regulate, we should work on alignment, we should educate—with no clear identification of who “we” actually is for each case. I think about this, as they say, a lot.

My edited collection is criminally underrated because it’s too interdisciplinary and no one knew how to market it despite oh fuck it here’s my cat #caturday

OMG #FIFA just did in real life the thing where Liz Lemon makes a fake award for Jenna, is the gold statue a cookie because in the show it turns out to be a cookie

Colleague came in to talk about curricular revision and at the end said, “I knew you’d try to make me feel better by making me feel worse, and you’ve done that.”

Being an American right now is like rubbernecking at the car accident you’re in

The #MemphisZoo is running a lantern festival. It was good!

Given how mad he’s gone, and given that he’s not really in charge, can we call this the American Regency, and does that mean we get a new American Austen?

I love my family and they are always welcome guests, so I say in the spirit of love and holiday bonhomie that if any of these fuckers leaves just one more dish in the sink instead of putting it in the dishwasher, there will be blood

Can we collectively refer to the universities that cave to this administration the “Vichy archipelago?”

I have questions

You can get my book, The Ends of Knowledge (co-edited with @rscar.bsky.social), for $9.50 at the Evil Overlord’s Galactic Hobby Farm. But you probably shouldn’t, because fuck that guy.

Me: need you to play by yourself for ten minutes, kiddo 5 yr old daughter: but parents are the best toys

I don’t know when it happened but at some point I realized I was waiting for our worst pols/execs to slip or break character and admit everything like they’d been caught by Hercules Poirot. But there’s nothing beyond the pasteboard mask. There is only the character.