People often forget that Zora Neale Hurston was a trailblazing cultural anthropologist whose ethnographies are, to this day, still some of the finest examples of the genre

is 'updating my priors' simply 'listening and learning' for men with a certain aura

He also wrote this, for instance. I'm not the opinion police. Good ideas can come from the right. But it's worth pausing to note that discourse in the humanities is doubling down on some tropes (kids today, culture in peril, back to basics etc) that 25 years ago would have read as conservative.

thread. I agree completely. I think a huge problem rn with aI is that it's renewing/intensifying/legitimating treating students adversarially. I think a good test for AI responses is how university employees would respond if they became policies to which were subjected by senior administration.

Our November piece is live! ✨ @mossheadlives.bsky.social writes about text-based roleplaying in fandom—and about using these existing characters to explore their gender identity. Read the piece or listen to an audio version (and check out the gorgeous art by @thebeanbaguette.bsky.social):

But in any event, I recall @tedunderwood.com suggesting that LLM generated citations are more an extension of a well-underway tendency to just gesture toward articles without actually reading them, and I think that's true (and a useful way to approach the problem as not really caused by LLMs).

im remembering the popularity of those websites that let you put your picture on a video of a dancing elf or a movie character. disney allowing people to use their IP for (in house) ai-generated content feels like it reaches a similar demographic/engagement level. not for fans, for the gen public

toy company CEOs: "at long last, we have created the Sinister Talking Doll Factory from the acclaimed movie 'Don't Create the Sinister Talking Doll Factory'" futurism.com/artificial-i...

The cold irony here that skills needed to use AI successfully are the ability to accurately describe an imsge or summarize a story, the ability to recognize mistakes, the ability to fact check, and critical thinking. All things you can't learn by using AI.

#NoKings Iowa City

NO KINGS Dubuque, Iowa

Clearly, the people behind No Kings have sway with a large portion of people. Think of how much more meaningful this would be If they included a demand with the march. Look how effective it was when people canceled their Disney subscriptions over Kimmel. There is power in withholding our currency.

very funny to see signs like this in small town iowa of all places. people are MAD #nokings

More No Kings Rally in Mount Vernon, Iowa on Oct. 18, 2025.

I feel like (as with so many things with AI) this is techbros confusing the affordances of science fiction *media* with reality, when those affordances are often driven by the needs of the *media* rather than the SF. I.E. they talk to the computer on Star Trek because typing is visually boring!

My thesis abstract 🔥 "Over the last ten years, Japanese animation series–or anime–fans have often been associated with digital right-wing communities of the alternative web. This is better observed in anime been called an aesthetic of the “alt-right” by its most powerful actors ...

discord servers are 100% the kind of places that set social norms and acceptability of speech in ways that impact the larger "public" culture in huge ways. i think it's useful to compare them to other semi-private spaces: locker rooms, living rooms, friend groups, scenes/subcultures

This update got very long, but maybe that means there's a higher chance of it including something you'd be interested in reading? Most of the entries are to open-access publications, so they're free to view.

Don’t feel stupid if you fell for fake video. It can be really hard to tell these days. But we do have to try and be careful with what we share because there’s so much AI video out there. It’s just the world we live in now.

4PM Today (Friday, Sept 26): Protest at the Neil Smith Federal Building in downtown Des Moines in support of Dr Ian Roberts. Dr Roberts was detained by ICE in Des Moines and, apparently, driven to an ICE facility in Council Bluffs.

CFP: DLC+ Presents Current Keywords in Digital Literary Culture Mini-Conference: "Smut" and "Lore" #FanStudies docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

This gets to something that as a former stand-up I recognized but couldn’t name. A 31 year old professional content creator baiting 19 year old amateurs into the format of his choice isn’t debate, it’s crowd work. It’s debate-shaped crowd work farmed for content.

Charlie Kirk may have been good at showing up at college campuses and talking to anyone who would listen etc. But the org he headed built a database of professors to target with harassment campaigns in the hopes of drumming them out of academia. Is that practicing politics the right way?

NEW CFP ALERT! 📣 Check out the details of our upcoming special issue on Latin American Fandoms guest edited by Yazmín Carrizales and Libertad Garzón at the following link: buff.ly/9PupLIf ! Deadline is 1/1/2026!

"In Iowa, which by some measures has the most polluted water in the US, people who advocate for the environment are widely scorned as enemies of farming. "Outside the cities and universities, few dare criticize the state’s $50 billion agricultural industry..."

this is an interesting part of the anthropic copyright settlement! I'm glad training is recognized as fair use, even if the means they acquired the training data was illegal

it is truly shocking to me how all, literally all, of the replies and quotes of this skeet seem unaware of libgen, assuming that its just some database for Meta and Anthropic. libgen got me through my masters.

We've created impoverished ways of interacting with computers and now we're surprised that when you give people a "do anything" textbox that sorta works sometimes, they are using it a lot, sometimes very inappropriately!

Men read mpreg to figure out what women want challenge 2025.

Man looks at feminism and says “I can do this better” totally unironically

part of what makes this interesting is its relation to the "ai is making us dumber" arguments. in that the reddit OP clearly states in this thread he didn't get AI to write the book for him, just edit and add pictures. and just about everyone in the comments here are replying as if AI wrote it all

Like it or not, a lot of cis women use BL to explore their own gender and relationship to sex. I think that's good even if they never transition or aren't queer. There's this annoying hostility to fujoshi that imo is very conservative and reactionary. If you must read porn it can only be cishet

I fully believe that they were the English dept equivalent of Silicon Valley STEM dipshits. It’s what happens when you give big budgets to dorks that think they’re world changing geniuses.

But the parts pro-AI folks like about Alsup’s analysis are contingent on the premise that training is separate from acquisition. For example, Alsup buys the “human reading” analogy for training, but implicitly rebukes it on the acquisition side (because humans can’t freely acquire every book).

Alsup’s opinion is definitely not how I’d have approached the analysis (and a perfect example of why I’ve studiously avoided making predictions on this issue). But it strikes me as an interesting way to split the difference between the biggest overreaches of both the authors and the AI companies.

I think key here is training vs output. Is "reading" or "copying" in this case fair use? this ruling appears to say yes, which i agree with. training tech has enough similarity with otherwise uncontroversial research or consumer behavior (scraping, data analysis, "reading" and "influences")

you know it’s pride month when everyone online is watching 2 high agency males going at it

my point was they are cops, just cops, this is what cops are and have been

This point is not made enough. The US has an embarrassment of riches of great colleges and universities. There are strong institutions in every state. It’s as if those places don’t count.

CFP:Haunted Cities: Spaces, Spectres, and Urban Hauntologies call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/05/...

There is a false dichotomy drawn between "the ivory tower" and "the real world," and I'm here to report that in a post-industrial society, your real-world economy absolutely hinges on the university. University towns are factory towns. Universities drive economic activity, not the other way around.

(drafting a research proposal) no questions per se but here’s my research vibe