Every year I realize around New Year’s that I need to change my life, but I balk at it because that’s what you’re expected to try to do (and fail)

counterpoint: there's plenty of evidence that pre-AI screen time did in fact have a negative impact on literacy

It turns out this was a bad week to resize a ring. 🫠

In my work? "Extremism," unless used by people who do the work and know what the word does and does not mean. Even then I try to find ways around it.

How is everyone tonight?

Morning.

This is what academic fame looks like to anyone outside of a university.

I think studying the art of war can help immensely in business. Imagine you are a musketeer in Prince Maurice’s firing system. When you get up there with your slide deck, you need to fire and march to the back of the formation to reload for the next volley. Now, your coworker is a pikeman, and he is

watching a Vivek Chibber interview and thinking about how for some people materialism is just idealism in plainspoken language. we just need one more proletarian slogan to convince rational individuals that social democracy is in their best interests, they say.

how many times have we seen a revolution in an entire field in the humanities based on a new reading of an old theorist that treats aspects of their work that used to be left out of summaries entirely as their primary contribution?

at the metaphysical shop a customer standing in front of the Baphomet statues started coughing a lot with no mask or anything, and I guess that is one of the more Satanic things you can do in an enclosed public space like that

AI people are like, "I think we need to be nuanced about the amount of feces that is allowed in your meal. You can't just say NO feces in cooking."

attaching an Apple tag to my glasses

looking at the books at the metaphysical shop, a surprising number of authors have “PhD” after their names

I think what is so distressing is that things that felt eternal like seasons and artistic inspiration are suddenly endangered by technology

if you’re an academic who uses AI to crank out research, you should have to give up your position to one of the more worthy candidates who didn’t get a TT job

And please also, AGAIN, never forget that they are inherently unethical to use because no one gave permission for their research or writing to be used in it. It is all stolen, and if you're using the plagiarism machine, please keep that in mind.

new horror movie premise dropped

reading Moll Flanders. this is a Daniel Defoe appreciation post.

I've been getting interested in military reenactment stuff and yikes some of those guys have bad politics

any time now

the problem with machine that spits out answers is that when you do research to find a fact, you're also learning about the entire context around it as well as the conversations scholars have about it. all that "wasted" time is developing an actual understanding of how the fact fits into the world.

finally someone is raising awareness about (checks note) not having the inclination or disposition required to be a micro-celebrity

The DNC do owe you anything—they’re in hock to the donor class though

there are some people who seem to be guaranteed a career in media and politics matter how many times they mess up or how bad they are at what they do.

oh great, LinkedIn Wrapped. something I definitely asked for.

if you are responsible for a war that kills a million people the last paragraph in your obit should start with something like "he came to love planting trees after being sent to the hinterlands."

you see the alien get closer and closer on the tracker until she leaves a pizza on your doorstep

we're experiencing notification inflation. every app wants to ping you a million times now even when you're not interacting with anyone on it.

American entrepreneurs: we're breaking ground on a gazillion data centers for a chatbot that makes you psychotic — let's build things! meanwhile, in China:

thoroughly recommend this brilliant book by @jordanscarroll.bsky.social it’s a short read (and the link has the online text) with good stuff on fascism and myth, whiteness and sci-fi, fascism and time, etc 🗃️ manifold.umn.edu/projects/spe...

teachers two days before a break

a bookshop recently advertised Speculative Whiteness as a stocking stuffer. it's true that it is quite small. it's also a quick read for someone who wants to round out this year's reading challenge.

The U.S. is giving dying mall vibes. I can't explain it, but you know I'm right.

this is your regular reminder that the "male loneliness epidemic" is about social isolation rather than men's lack of romantic connections and, in fact, our culture's obsession with the monogamous couple form is probably one reason men feel disconnected from a larger community

call me old fashioned but I think books and movies should tell us things that we do not already know

if you are interested in comics and obscenity, I have an essay on Black Hole by Charles Burns in this volume

Today is International Day to End Violence against Sex Workers. Let's come together to remember those lost this year and continue to fight for empowerment, visibility, and rights for all sax workers.

if you believe that, you're living in a marshmallow world

all these scientific fields publishing AI-generated nonsense, yet nobody is treating it like the Sokal Hoax

I started writing on my novel, but ended up watching videos of musket fire to hear what it sounds like.

y'all ever think about how darth vader is, like, forty. he's just forty. "there is no hope for me, my son." buddy you're only forty! in space!

I don't think we've reckoned with the moral injury involved in demanding that people vote for a candidate complicit in genocide who then loses anyway even though most everyone on the left voted for her.

I feel a real despair about our present moment because it seems like they're destroying both the subjective conditions for liberation (the capacity to think and connect with others) and the objective conditions for liberation (the ecosystem).

eliminating antisemitism... by getting more racist

I have Impostor Bowser syndrome.

so the population gets technologically-assisted cognitive decline through social media and AI brainrot, and the people who make those products get to say it's dysgenics, it's idiocracy