My book is now available for pre-order!

All the best analytical writing on the comics I'm working on is on personal blogs.

It's my birthday. Pre-order my book! bookshop.org/p/books/audi...

Can a 2yo survive on an all-dinonugget diet? Let’s find out!

MLA 2027 CFP for 3 panels sponsored by the Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum: I. Migration in Children's and YA Graphic Narratives II. Heated Rivalries: Sports, Games, and Graphic Narrative III. The Hernandez Brothers, Page-by-Page

Researching comics in the 90s is taking me down some unexpected rabbit holes.

Also, am coming to find "not X but Y"—a formula I personally have long enjoyed—slightly nauseating.

I used to hate awkward, confused undergraduate prose, but now I cherish it—and gobble it up with glee. For this gift, I would like to say thank you to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. That half a trillion or so spent towards building data centers was totally 100% worth it!

There seems to be a lot of scholarship of tokenism as a social phenomenon (e.g., tokenism in the workplace), but I am finding surprisingly little theorization of tokenism as an aesthetic problem. Maybe I am missing something obvious. Suggestions welcome!

After much dawdling, finally getting serious about finishing my book on creator-owned comics. Gonna try to write or revise 1–2 pp. a day till I'm finished, with a ~70k word target. Gotta get this albatross off my neck. 2 pages done today, many more to go.

Another turn on the Genre Turn (and a review of Jeremy Rosen’s excellent Genre Bending). www.chronicle.com/article/is-l...

Not to be unkind but this seems eh perhaps uh unpromising?

Thought-provoking essay on what sounds like a thought-provoking book (that I will read over spring break)

Go Jeremy!

Another turn on the Genre Turn (and a review of Jeremy Rosen’s excellent Genre Bending). www.chronicle.com/article/is-l...

Anecdote-capture is a real problem for academic writing. You start with a vivid illustrative story or example and seven pages later it’s taken over the chapter you’re writing!

Seems like we're going to be frozen in place all week.

Friendship, Social Skills, & School Life. This one is an insta-buy.

There are no Snow Days anymore—just Asynchronous Learning Days.

Watching _F1 The Movie_, I am moved to ask what is the greatest #sponcon of all time?

Super-curious to see how Greenland 3 turns out. 😭

Lukewarm Take: Eddington is super-weird. Its core problem is it doesn't really believe in politics, in the sense of believing that people have real commitments or interests. Which is why it can't sustain its focus on the mayoral election, which would've made for a much more interesting film.

Mickey 17 is better slapstick than sci-fi.

Looking for the best analyses of the right-wing "NPC meme" for something I'm writing. All suggestions welcome.

So vampires in Sinners are kind of, like, the joined in Pluribus, but they’re just using a way less successful strategy for taking over the world?

Soon to be renamed the Slop Pile.

Uh ok.

Next, The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021): Utterly beautiful—Bruno Delbonnel steals the show w/ the monochrome look of the film. Its commitment to mythic gravitas comes at the expense of emotionally intimacy. Is it deranged to read it as a veiled reflection on Joel’s hiatus from making movies with Ethan?

What are the best novels set in college towns? Not Campus Novels but College Town Novels.

New book going to press: *Character Networks in Contemporary U.S. Fiction.* It’s about social networks as context for—and formal element of—the novel. For contemporary lit, novel/narrative theory, DH, lit and sociology, network analysis crowds. Here’s what it’s about: (1/n)

Finally going through the backlog of movies I've been meaning to see. So: "One Battle After Another" is: - incredible - a big, big mess - very much harmed by the change of temporal setting (compared to Vineland), which puts the French 75 in... the mid-aughts, right after 9/11?

Godzilla Minus One is, it turns out, terrific.

Comics studies folks—the submission window for the Comics Studies Society prizes is now open! See below for prize categories and submission details here: comicsstudies.org/prizes/

The hand cramps are a feature not a bug! We must protect our students from RSI.

The real innovation will be when AI is good enough to instantly fabricate not only the citation but the whole underlying invented text itself.

Writing about James, but finding myself much more interested in The Trees.

New frontiers in viewpoint diversity.

Have figured out how to save the major. We just rename ourselves, "Artificial Intelligence (and English)."

Who wants to join the board of my new venture, The Journal of Human Narratives Studies?

Teaching my 2yo to make coffee in the morning. Still working out the kinks.

Will ChatGPT be, eh, joining the dialogue? Gotta include all the stakeholders, after all.

Can you spend most of a workday entering custom metadata in dozens of idiosyncratic and subtly different LOR forms? Let's find out!

The plot of every "Pluribus" episode seems to be figuring out how to spend $15 million in under 50 minutes.

Thanks, ChatGPT—you’re making me blush.

Really struggling with Sunk Anecdote Fallacy in this chapter.

Tenebræ LeSpark is a truly great Pynchon name.

Every social media platform is deranged in its own way, but might Substack have won the derangement games?

Look, the goal was always just to let federal workers enjoy a 40-day paid (?) vacation. Did you think there was some other plan?

Academic trade books with no index?! Why? 😭