Toshiro Mifune leaving the set of Yojimbo, in costume, in a MG convertible, SWORD ON THE DASHBOARD.

also sprach fritz

shoutout to the film student who lost her entire MIND over moonlight. just went batshit on canvas, i could not love her more. picked up every single thing jenkins was throwing down, typed out a whole-ass taylor swift song about it, bolded and ANNOTATED its relevant lyrics. girl thank u for my life

Will Asbestos Make Make Cotton Candy Obsolete?

There are instructors who will ask students for evidence of medical problems or family deaths, & there are instructors who would never do such a thing. Your response to the AI push probably correlates with which group you are in.

Nice work, @insidehighered.com This is a perfect headline & lede.

Rosamund Stanhope

new salinger novel discovered???

Opium Fogs (1963), Rosemary Tonks's second novel, is, if nothing else, full of loathing odes to London that aspire to Bleak House's “Michaelmas term lately over” opening: "The Metropolis was clad in mildew, alive with glittering ooze and great fever clouds." neglectedbooks.com/?... 1/2

Watercolour illustrations from Mary Gartside’s An Essay on a New Theory of Colours (1808). Hand-made and unique to each volume, the images have been deemed some of the earlier examples of abstraction in painting. More in the post on the site — publicdomainreview.org/collection/g...

"it takes two or three generations to do what i tried to do in one." per the late poet bill knott, the failure is mine alone.

What if we just went back to reading a bunch of books and thinking about them together, and that was the class? With syllabi no longer than three pages.

me: darn it, i forgot the deadline and now it's too late to apply and yet again fail to receive an NEA individual artist grant the NEA: hey that's okay! not a problem! after decades of funding thousands of writers including most of your friends and teachers we just got rid of those, hope that helps

April Fool‘s warrants reposting this arxiv.org/abs/2204.06826

wow! i mean i didn't really expect them to use the cover i made on an etch-a-sketch while i was driving, but i'm so honored!!

"Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, A medley of extemporanea; And love is a thing that can never go wrong; And I am Marie of Roumania." -Dorothy Parker

A person at level 1 or below proficiency, is unable to do this. They cannot parse out extraneous, distracting, irrelevant information. They cannot look at a website and identify which parts of the page they are looking at, are advertisements.

Level 2 proficiency is such as being able to look at a website and identify which parts are advertisements, if you want a concrete idea of what it means.

Think about all the libertarians you've encountered who will read a book and *entirely* miss the point of the book. Literally not perceiving that the book is describing a dystopia, or identify satire of real world events, or identify who is the villain. 54% of US adults read below 6th grade level.

Think about chuds constantly going "man I used to love this band but they turned woke by putting politics in their songs" and the band is literally Rage Against the Machine or Bruce Springsteen. 54% of US adults read below 6th grade level. 20%, below 5th grade level.

Fun fact: 54% of US adults read below a 6th grade level. You have to actively remember literally over half the US adult population is *unable to perceive subtext* www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-li...

i included this in my syllabi this year

The website for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is completely scrubbed and gone! They didn't even leave a legacy statement.

"In recent months, Texas universities have inflicted some of the worst repression of academic freedom we’ve ever witnessed at American colleges, with gag orders, speaker bans and arbitrary firings of dissenting faculty."

not sure why i spent a half-hour making this except i can no longer assign writing as either pedagogy or assessment, and i don't know how to teach reading and thinking and watching films without it, so i'm watching the slow-motion trainwreck of a job i've had since 1998 and i'm kind of mad about it.

this is ghastly and unsurprising and everyone should read it

CfP: Trans-Asian Transcultural Fandom Symposium happening next May @ NUS, Singapore. More announcements to come, but we're hoping this will kickstart conversations and collaborations for scholars in the region working on transcultural fandom #AcademicSky #FanStudies #TransculturalFandom #CfPs

The number of people acting shocked by this amazes me, frankly, since we've been predicting exactly this— and seeing AI slop taking over google searches — for years now. Also we MUST stop using "hallucination," which frames this is an unfortunate quirky fluke. It is the program's intended behavior.

Feeling the cliff unmorsel from our heels And knowing balance gone, we smile, and stay A little, whirling our arms like desperate wheels. [James Agee]

me: i will not apply for anything else! i have too much to do and it's just not— this: [appears] me: …after i apply for this, i will not apply for anything else

"I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

It’s Saturday night and I am editing PDFs (for reasons) and this section on assessment from a 1999 writing text jumped out at me, not least because of all the ~discourse~ on here about student writing

The air all around me knows not to hold anything for long. Bc it is this unison of breath, this unison of mind the big wind is after. From ‘Demonstration’, a new poem by @joriegraham.bsky.social www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

We must hurry if we are going to dance. Oh, we have time, I think. —till there’s no time left. That’s what time means. When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore. Then we will dance. Is this a waltz? It will serve. [Sir Tom Stoppard 1937–2025]

fork found in kitchen

whomst among us hasn't gone along with an idea that we don't necessarily agree with just because a hot person suggested it

I cosign every single word of this anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/h...

My first monograph, 'Between Novel and Network: Technology and Literary Form in Fiction and Fanfiction', will be published by @lsupress.bsky.social on 16 May 2026! It connects contemporary fiction, fanfiction and literary theory. See lsupress.org/978080718642... for more details.

Call for Papers: Reading Fanfiction/ Fanfiction Reading If you have a 3000-4000 literary close reading of a fanfiction story burning to get out, please be in touch! :D rb.gy/8hqqzb

New article ⬇️⬇️⬇️ Alfred W T Lo, Culture travellers: Theorizing transculturing through transcultural fandom in the GenAI age, Applied Linguistics, 2025. #FanStudies doi.org/10.1093/appl...

we need this man on here NOW #academicsky

Brain Rot, AI Slop, and the Enshittification of the Internet: A Symposium (Virtual) 5 December 2025, 10:30 - 16:15 www.aru.ac.uk/events/brain...

Join us for our first event of 25-26! A discussion of Fandom for Us, by Us by @alfredmartin.bsky.social, on Friday, Nov. 14 on Zoom. More info and registration: tinyurl.com/fandomforus

four by jean valentine [via sean singer]

Quentin Tarantino’s ‘KILL BILL’ movies will be released in theaters as one complete movie on December 5. • Will include a never-before-seen 7-minute animated sequence • Select presentations will be in 70mm and 35mm

if you're thinking about coming to do a #fanstudies PhD with me, here's your chance to learn more.