Today I learned that the Japanese holiday 敬老の日 (respect for the aged day) falls exactly on my birthday in 2026.

Made dak jjim (Korean braised chicken) for dinner.

In a manner akin to when my brain would instinctively switch to Japanese whenever I needed to speak in French when I was living in Montreal, for some reason, whenever I hear the phrase 唔好意思 (mh hou yi si) in Cantonese, my brain wants to interpret it as the French "moi ici."

Drunk (with power).

Speaks to the ill-advised decision of my university to set up a new program on such a narrow focus as AI art ("machine creativity") specifically when you could easily have had more flexibility with a broader technology media and culture type program and not be so tied to passing academic fads.

A persistent annoyance I have with the implementation of Canvas in my university is that it appears that they have the option/functionality to have custom preferred names disabled.

Exhausted from chasing the robot vacuum around the apartment.

It would appear that there is something interesting happening outside the window.

Conspiracy to steal my spot on the couch.

The "Oversights" special issue of SFFTV is currently open access! www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/toc/sfftv/16...

Take a look at the first trailer for the Anime "THE GHOST IN THE SHELL" confirmed for July 2026 Moko-chan directing at Studio Science SARU.

Oh dear.

I promised ducks, quacking: well! @chloroformtea.bsky.social (not a duck) provides Thursday's essay on knowing genre when you see it. "We need a more expansive approach to any attempt at definition today. The genre can and plainly does sit alongside other genres which operate on different axes."

Am I the only one who finds it mildly funny that the browser tab for my university's staff administrative intranet is labeled "HOTLINKS for STAFF"?

Wondering whether I should do a last minute switch out of Blood: the Last Vampire for Jin-roh: the Wolf Brigade for my week on live-action vs. animated postwar historical allegories and the origins of anime as a cultural formation?

"Cyborg 009" NEW ANIME "Cyborg 009 Nemesis" Officially Announced! More details will be revealed at a late date! Shotaro Ishinomori's classic Sci-Fi Action Manga is celebrating its 61th Anniversary. Image © Akita Shoten, Shotaro Ishinomori, Ishimori Pro (Anime Title Visual)

"Land of the Lustrous - Houseki no Kuni" by Haruko Ichikawa won the prestigious Seiun Sci-Fi Literature Award in the Manga Category! The series has already won the 45th Japanese SF Award earlier this year.

Provisional syllabi for my Spring 2026 teaching, an undergrad course on Japanese animation and a postgrad seminar on film and media theory: huma.hkust.edu.hk/sites/defaul... huma.hkust.edu.hk/sites/defaul...

This pan-cooked satay recipe is certainly unorthodox, but somehow, it mostly works.

First trailer for "Patlabor EZY" new anime series directed by Yutaka Izubuchi at JC Staff studio (feat. Akemi Takada & Kenji Kawai). 8 episodes, also coming as 3 feature films starting in May. ezy.patlabor.tokyo

Naptime.

Out and about in central again.

Can't decide between Bigelow's Strange Days, Cuaron's Children of Men, or Assayas' Boarding Gate for my week on cinematic/post-cinematic affect and bodies in my film/media theory grad seminar.

Mecha fans! Mamoru Oshii directs a new Armored Trooper Votoms anime at Sunrise and Production I․G!

Made some Korean fire chicken. Unfortunately, I didn't quite have as much cheese as I needed.

Cloud of cat hair with Enterprise-A to scale.

The never-ending feline occupation of my home office.

She seemed to be plotting something last night.

Went to a Filipino restaurant for anniversary dinner.

Every time I vaguely wonder whether leaving my old job a few years ago was the right move to make, events conspire to reinforce the conviction that yes, yes it was.

I think our zoomer cats may be a bit too addicted to screen time

Trapped in this situation wherein the current colder weather is triggering cortisol release that raises my fasting blood sugar levels, but cranking up the heat gives me a headache, which also raises my fasting blood sugar.

We need to make the Children of Men timeline a reality so I can stop getting jumpscared by reading about people born in 2007. Such a thing should not be possible.

Kaiju cat snuck inside my model kit display cabinet to fight my PLA Type 055s.

It's going to be one of those days today, I guess.

New year cats.

Hazy first sunrise of the year.

With all the shared folders for course reading PDFs and media files I keep having to set up, I should probably just invest in a permanent NAS solution instead of relying on the usual cloud storage options.

Atop her perch.

I have not been shy on my coverage of transit issues in Toronto. With the disastrous opening of the Finch West LRT in early December, I have some thoughts from Hong Kong using my historical experiences with Toronto in this longform post.

Something slightly disconcerting about revising a previously written journal article into something that will become a chapter in a future monograph.

Waiting for breakfast.

Despite the mixed reviews it's been getting, I feel like I may end up watching Blossoms Shanghai just for how it looks like it's been lit and shot properly (at least if the trailers are any indication) unlike so much of the visually ugly muck on television these days.

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

Professional societies keep beclowning themselves buying into a lie about what an LLM "summary" is. They are inherently counterfeit: not an epistemic product of the ideas in the source, but summary-shaped text linguistically based on *other* works (in the training corpus) that use related language.

We need to go back to teaching Barbara Herrnstein-Smith's narrative versions essay, which makes the point that summaries are not a distilled basic story but are just another version of a narrative, subject to the same forces and motivations that shape the telling of any narrative.

This is one of the reasons I remain horrified by seeing @historians.org suggest "ways to use gAI" that included this:

First teaser for "Look Back" live-action film by Hirokazu Kore-eda. www.youtube.com/watch?v=djXq...

This smug cat just discovered the heated pad.