My cats eyeing the Christmas Tree

My cats eyeing the Christmas Tree

One recent example of enshittification that I personally haven't seen remarked on much is that search results on Amazon bring up a bunch of adjacent products that don't meet the specification of your search.

I think if they really dump AI content onto Disney+ they'll find out real quick that NOBODY wants to see that shit. But it's so symbolic of the state of things that the name that once meant the very peak of hand drawn animation is now in league with the stock market scam anti-human garbage machine.

At my writing program's end of term meeting, one instructor shared an AI image they created for no reason and another suggested we use Claude to draft emails to our students. It was far more demoralizing than catching two students using AI.

My freshmen are writing about internet culture, and it's so funny to see these 18 and 19 year olds shake their heads and talk about how the next generation's memes are all brain rot.

I remember reading These Truths and thinking Lepore fell hard for the "intolerant left" narrative in the later chapters. For a book about the entire history of the U.S. she spent a lot of time on something that has turned out to be a mirage. But she just had it out for her uppity students!

The AI bubble may be about to bust. Peter Thiel has sold all of his Nvidia stock. We all need to say this very clearly: NO BAILOUTS FOR THEFT-TECH! Expropriate their asses instead. They stole from all of us and fully plan to burn the planet. They owe us - not the other way around. 1/3

Today is probably the safest it will ever be for me to publicly express one of my most unpopular opinions on literature: memoir will always be a lesser form of literature.

Even NPR has to follow up "Epstein killed himself" with the caveat "authorities say."

I received this email about Democrats caving to end the shutdown from one of the SNAP recipients I spoke to:

I brought up Sora with my students, and it was met immediately with collective groans. AI brings with it some frustration in the classroom, but overall I find most students are very skeptical of it.

Damn. Housing costs have been rough on everyone.

Yesterday I noticed that Google Alerts was now sending me AI summaries of news stories rather than links to news stories. Who do they think will write the original story when they train everyone to go straight to AI?

A friend apparently long believed the lyrics of "Rock and Roll All Nite" to be "rock and roll all night / and part of every day." And, honestly, that's much more sensible. I have to get my kid to school. I have a job.

The thing that makes Star Trek utopian isn’t the end of scarcity or the harmony between all peoples it’s also that the guy on the ship who gets laid the most plays the trombone at work and periodically does community theater

The AWS outage that has crippled Canvas is weird. But even weirder is that my university hasn't sent a single email about it. Students obviously understand what's happening through other avenues, but you would think they could get some poor soul to type up an email about what's disrupting our day.

This morning a student mentioned that some of her teachers have incorporated AI into the classroom, so I asked her how. I figured there's probably some interesting ways you could reasonably incorporate AI that might have some benefits. They were using AI to grade and having AI generate prompts.

My eight year old's No Kings sign. The cat is not only breaking a crown, but in my favorite detail, she has repurposed a crown for a food bowl. #NoKings

I'm watching the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (which is excellent), and they're calling him Dr. "Gee-kull." What is happening?

A striking thing about articles I’ve read claiming to “study the effects” of generative AI on student writing skills and consumption of information is that (1) they nearly always find the effects are negative and (2) most “conclusions” are still written assuming that we must use AI, for some reason.

Man, I sure would love to have Spider-Man's powers. Not sure about all that responsibility, though.

Hofstadter really nails this when he notes that conspiracy theorist set themselves up with an impossible task by inventing enemies who are absolutely evil and must be completely eradicated, but in a free society, you can't eradicate your political enemies. They will be perpetually aggravated.

I just discovered that Steve Guttenberg's memoir is titled The Guttenberg Bible. Well played, sir.

Post a horror movie everyone should see.

Hey, girl! It's safe to come back to the theaters for Star Wars. We've learned our lesson after The Rise of Skywalker. We're no longer interested in playing it safe. That's why we got visionary director Shawn Levy.

I love that Robert Redford's last movie was all about how cool and handsome Robert Redford is. And it totally worked because Robert Redford is just that cool and handsome.

In honor of sandwich guy getting out of his legal pickle, here is the original video synced with Freedom - George Michael 1990.

the actual communication problem democrats have is this: their most prominent national figures filter everything through focus grouped lines and are incapable of plain speech

For every major CEO, this isn't a hypothetical. They already debase themselves, but for preferential governmental treatment and the chance at a slightly higher profit margin.

The Confidence Man: His Masquerade (1857) by Herman Melville

exact same pattern as the iraq war where the dirty hippie anti-war protesters being retroactively completely vindicated just makes the elites despise them more.

At the grocery store the other day, I heard a few workers gathered around talking about the Epstein/Trump connection. I wonder if this will finally sink him, I thought. And then one of the employees says, "But you know Clinton, Biden, and Oprah are all on those lists too."

"The previous owner was director Joe Dante" Let's hope he does something worthwhile with this money, like fund the final movie in the Gremlins trilogy.

The past incident NYT's Mamdani crusade reminds me of the most is how Dick Cheney leaked intelligence that backed up Iraq's supposed WMDs to legitimize his case for war. In this instance, it's just Chris Rufo knowing how to play the paper of record.

Inspired by this post, I created my own AI-free statement for my syllabus with regards to my course as a whole. I think it's worth letting students know that it's possible to produce writing and other output without Ai doing it for you.

More research on the cognitive deficit of relying only on AI... you can't even remember the information you called up. That's how learning works! arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

Saturn Devouring His Son (c.1823) by Francisco Goya

me: in cheers frasier said his dad was dead but then when sam visited him in seattle he had to explain that he was lying because their relationship was strained but to me the weirder thing is he never mentioned niles to anyone at cheers the federal soldier being unlawfully quartered in my home: ok

Couldn't agree more with this. It's jaw-dropping to see the patty cake people are playing with him after what was a full constitutional assault that, oh by the way, is almost certainly going to lead to tens of thousands of people in the global south dying needlessly.

It really should now be best practices to enable track changes on all Word Docs or just to use Google Docs which automatically keeps your edit history.

In trying to look for a silver lining in all of this mess, it is kind of nice to know that the right hates the sciences as much as they hate the humanities.

If someone came up to me off the street and said that Pilates was invented by some German named Joseph Pilates, I would never believe them if not for the fact that I just read a student paper that included this fact.

I've heard a lot of people wonder why millennials were taught square dancing in middle school, but the bigger question is why we were taught the Hustle, a flash in the pan dance craze from before we were born.

Statement from detained student Rümeysa Öztürk dictated to her attorneys while jailed at the South Louisiana ICE facility: “Efforts to target me because of my op-ed in the Tufts Daily calling for the equal dignity and humanity of all people will not deter me” @theintercept.com

I've always thought that it's preferable to have a good economy over a bad economy, but I guess most voters don't agree.

I had no clue what an RPG was before playin FF7, so my mind was absolutely blown when I realized you were going to leave Midgar and there was an entire world out there to explore.