Switching to final exams next year; at least I won’t have to read endless variations of the same bot-ified idea.

my favorite kind of end-of-term grading: grading while sick 🤒

Greetings from Gooseland UBC

the absurdity of teaching Perfect Days right now, wondering if shadows get darker when they overlap. actually, the absurdity of teaching anything right now

(202) 224-3121 is the capitol switchboard for connecting to any senate or house office; even if you've never called; even though the lot of them are useless. no abominable war crimes, no war, no.

Why are the cinematic takes on humanities academia so absurdly bad? Name one that’s decent please.

do potato-picking farm trips for the glory of the socialist fatherland count or is that too niche?

Pufuleți! The battle cry of all Romanians worldwide.

Dürrenmatt’s Visit but the shoes are Florsheim

Oh but let’s spend more time thinking critically about AI

This is going to be a banger. Preorder @ceciliarikap.bsky.social www.versobooks.com/products/325...

fungus aesthetics: hair ice creations, courtesy of Exidiopsis effusa this morning

My course syllabi now contain a link to this document, "why Professor Holliday Doesn't Use Generative AI". Feel free to share/repurpose or just check out the links for your own reference. It won't stop some of them, but I want students to know why. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

kids, I beg you *please* stop reading those g00gle AI "overviews"

“The Secret Agent Network,” a series programmed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, is on from January 7 through 13 @filmlinc.bsky.social ! www.criterion.com/current/post...

Very excited.

Orange mosscaps

Not sure how to put this but I almost miss the ‘hey, couldn’t come to class, what did I miss’ student emails. At least you felt interpellated. The AI generated apologies with 3 paragraphs of nauseating prose feel like staring into the void.

a very Vancouver sort of evening

Today! Register&join us for a talk by @loriemerson.net on alternative and forgotten networks and the futures they might hold. cenes.ubc.ca/events/event...

Woke up to that upenn hack email thing. Isn’t it ironic.

Haven’t these numbers suffered enough?

Lots of people read my newsletter every week when I link to it from here, but don't subscribe. I would be delighted if you would subscribe: the numbers keep me motivated. It's free, but you can pitch in some change if you want. Money, after all, is also motivating. Thanks! mail.cyberneticforests.com

i love playing the AI-overview-quote-guessing game. Enjoying the assertiveness here "this phrase is almost certainly a quote or a strong opinion about xyz" Nope.

Torn between going as “experience designer” or “judgment coach” this Halloween 🤔

Stumbled on this acct on insta: what is this casserole of pseudo-linguistic Romanianist nonsense? I can assure you that “Balkan and Dacian” 🤪 do not in fact “come alive in harmony” when I speak.

Striking that Lindt bunny/ Dieter Roth Karnickel pose

#litcrit pals, a really interesting question about the history of discipline from a graduate student here, a question that has me totally stumped: "which journal in literary criticism was the first to implement modern peer review?" (I think he might mean blind review) Thank you for your suggestions!

“one and three benches” Not quite a Joseph Kosuth, but look at the mossy patches underneath this bench, pretending to be a second shadow.

Tell me what you're teaching this/next week.

A couple of years ago, I found toddler Benjamin's hussar outfit in an 1890s toy catalogue (16.50 marks, pricey!) Still best online find ever...

Admin workflow, simplified.

If there was truly any conviction for the public interest, members of the AI Strategy Task Force would resign in protest for the configuration of their group.

The world is literally burning and I’ve asked my students to read Derrida. 😑

Hier geht's zur Petition der Studierenden bsky.app/profile/bild...

skies this evening

Oh, the memories

on this note: has anyone else received emails at their uni address from said producing company inviting us to teach the film?

Monday 8 am walking to class vs. Monday 5 pm, leaving campus

Goose x crow crossing

what a time to be teaching Benjamin’s Thesis IX and picturing ‘piles of debris growing skyward’

“The standards are clear, and we must act accordingly”

And in infinitely happier news on Tucholsky’s legacy in Germany today, best to focus all attention on these excellent writers instead: bsky.app/profile/leil...

"Laleh Khalili reflects on the hidden stories behind late capitalism, from seafarers abandoned on debt-ridden container ships to the nefarious reach of consultancy firms and the cronyism that drives record-breaking profits."

In many respects, «artificial intelligence» is less a model of the human mind than a technical implementation of neoliberal market theory: a simulation of supposedly superhuman rationality optimized for efficient problem solving, which leads to mostly irrational and ultimately destructive results 1/

UBC Queer and Trans German Studies is hosting Andrea Rottmann (FU Berlin) as the next Tobin Distinguished Lecture in Queer and Trans German Studies! The event will take place in person at UBC as well as online. We would be grateful if you could pass the announcement on to your networks.

teachers! excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone. take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE against-a-i.com

inner monologue every one of the days

For international cat day, here are a few lovely bunnies which my photo app identifies as kittens. Love them all. 🐱🐰🐈🐇