Winter #RanchoGordo #BeanClub shipment is here! The crimson popcorn is the best I have ever had, and the black eyed peas have me looking forward to 2026. But I will be devouring those black garbanzos tonight. Every time I go to a friend's apartment, he makes […] [Original post on c18.masto.host]

At this point, it seems all too quaint to call AI a bubble; it's a black hole. It's all you're allowed to think or talk about, when you're allowed to think or talk at all. Students whose entire lives will be poorer and sadder because of AI have learned to praise it instinctively, imagine […]

Last night on #caturday I was on my way to DARE to Karaoke on the Lower East Side, and I was fondly reminiscing, walking down the block where @mxtiffanyleigh and I had our first date 9 years ago, when I was surprised by this tiny airplane-eared bodega cat, keeping a watchful eye on her store.

I am on an academic committee that for some reason tomorrow is discussing the ChatGPT Atlas Browser: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT_Atlas Several objections will be raised! Some of my concerns are to do with critical reasoning, natural resources, user lock-in, the extraction of training […]

Island of Hornbills: amazing documentary about hornbills in (Indonesian) Borneo. I really like that they got a local birder to host this video. https://youtu.be/oiqbak_FKeQ #tootsea #indonesia #borneo #kalimantan #Birds #birding

Enjoyed this Techcrunch piece about the new show Pluribus from the creator of Breaking Bad. Fun fact, the star of the new show Rhea Seehorn and I used to study for a statistics class together at GMU. I had such a secret crush back then (okay maybe still a little). "If you watched all the way to […]

This piece is as good as people say it is. Read it to appreciate that writing isn't just about content, but style. AI can't do this. https://lithub.com/maybe-dont-talk-to-the-new-york-times-about-zohran-mamdani/

Pica is getting what she deserves for her many crimes today. #picathecat #caturday #catsofmastodon

BREAKING: A federal jury in Brooklyn awarded our clients — 674 immigrants unlawfully jailed by the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office — $112 million. Could not be more proud to work at @latinojustice.bsky.social and to partner with the talent of Winston & Strawn.

Tomorrow night is the third DARE to Karaoke at Francis Kite Club on the LES in NYC with @mxtiffanyleigh It's going to be extremely fun! Tickets are cheaper if you get them online: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/dare-to-karaoke-tickets-1820254242439

We went to see Don Giovanni at the Met last night with some good friends. I don't often see the good old perennial favorites at the Met, so it was neat to see how they pared down their usually lavish stagecraft to let the singing and plot do their work. In a cute twist, the totally bare gray […]

Maybe you live in NYC and need a new job? https://www.transition2025.com/apply

Oh my God, we have quote toots. What a world. I'm so out of practice!

If billionaires aren't taxed more and don't spend their money here, but do most of their polluting here, why would we want to live anywhere near them? I am a billionaire NIMBY. If you like them so much, you take them into your neighborhoods and find out what they're like.

Does this mean we will never again be subjected to grayscale baritone racist sneering TV ads that run back to back to back? Because they don't work? They are a waste of money and now we all know what fools they are?

An immmmmmersive play about Frankenstein!

The guy who got famous betting against the housing market in 2007 just before that bubble burst - played by Christian Bale jn “The Big Short” - just wagered $1 billion on the collapse of the AI boom. www.wsj.com/livecoverage...

Job alert: the University of Illinois Library is hiring a Humanities Librarian to serve as liaison to African-American Studies and English Literatures. I’m sure someone here would be a great fit for this job—& we’ve got a pretty phenomenal community here Please share!

The moon is looking good tonight.

We went to a concert tonight--big show, big crowd, in a big theater, standing close with little room, and there was (1) a person who sat on the floor to watch TikToks if they played songs she didn't know, (2) three big groups of friends full-on yelling gossip at each other through the whole […]

Boardgame design has come a long way. We have games about birds, space, insects, abstract shapes, steampunk technology, scientific history, music, ecological preservation, and then there is this garbage. Still. Every year. Award-winning. Games about settler […] [Original post on c18.masto.host]

Wrote a letter on paper in an envelope for reporting the electioneering violations at my polling site yesterday, and pleading with them to find a location that is not 2 miles uphill from the subway through a private neighborhood with no sidewalks, at a site that is locked to the public, with […]

Tita Chico sends along this exciting CFP: “Embodied Knowledge Practices in the Early Modern World” Conference at the University of Amsterdam, 15 June 2026 How do material conditions shape how and what we know about the natural world? In this conference, we propose to bring together scholars […]

Kind of expensive, so if you are interested in reading What Has Been (1801), a feminist Minerva Press gothic edited by Elizabeth Neiman and I about a woman who attempts to survive as a writer, ask your library to order it […]

Voting early on Halloween in the Bronx means you get cool stickers. It also gave me the occasion to report illegal electioneering at the poll site. (These Cuomo obsessives are out of control.)

Richard II at Astor Place Theater will make you wish you had a half dozen slutty flatterers in the guest house

Using woke as a pejorative term? Absolutely get fucked, Impossible Foods CEO - not buying your products. Impossible Foods CEO Says The Plant-Based Sector Became Too 'Woke And Partisan' https://plantbasednews.org/news/alternative-protein/impossible-foods-plant-based-too-woke/

Did the Dodgers organists just play the opening notes of the Twin Peaks theme song??

Mamdani keeps pointing out that all of Cuomo's Super PAC donors have spent way way more on his losing, racist campaign than they would ever face in taxes, fighting policies designed to fix literally all of the problems poor and rich alike complain about here. The poor do not enjoy fearing or […]

Two fish hiding inside the bell of a jellyfish What an incredible photo https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/marine-animals/fish-inside-jellyfish-mexico #fish #marine #Jellyfish #ocean

so at a Halloween themed DARE TO KARAOKE a few weeks ago, I racked up so many tickets -- enough to get two gift passes for Nitehawk -- by singing 'Rock and Roll Suicide' with vampiric wax lips clamped between my teeth.

Hi beloved c18.masto.host friends! It's time for our annual user drive to support use during 2026, when more of our colleagues may be moving over from other social media. I want to encourage new members while discouraging spam and AI accounts. Please invite people, and remind them to introduce […]

Two girls enjoying a #caturday night in

This whole season of The Lowdown, I have been waiting for a cameo by my high school pal Ryan RedCorn, who suddenly popped up as menacing handgame dude in ep. 6!

Me when my 12:00pm and 12:30pm appointments show up at the same time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3numFTraeo

This local news story about a baby found in the 34th St subway station is interesting in itself (baby is fine, investigation underway), but please please join me in enjoying reporters call her "that baby" half a dozen times. (Since we saw this last night, we keep referring to one of our cats as […]

I have always hated LMS software, since I was an undergrad in 1997 and they were foisting the brand-new Blackboard on us. LMSs suck the way all institutional software sucks; no one who buys it ever uses it, so improvements are always too little, too late, and too clunky. But now my students are […]

When Indiana U's cowardly administrators shut down the student newspaper and fired its advisor, students from (big rival) Purdue published an edition with the disappeared material and distributed it on the IU campus. Heartening resistance to gutless bullies […]

Red Bull's reading schedule is up! (Red Bull is a NYC theater that specializes in 17th-century comedy, though they do other things too. Revelation Readings are lightly staged/costumed readings of new adaptations, new plays, and 17th-c plays no one ever does, with glitzy casts of jaw-dropping […]

At #nokings #nyc today, we saw thousands and thousands of people, lots of older protestors, many very good dogs, plenty of clever and corny signs, and many different approaches to fighting fascism--and, miraculously, only one Trump troll (cry more, wahhhh!), one 9/11 truther (doing a Mickey […]

Do you ever dream a smell? Every so often I have extremely intense olfactory dreams, and if I wake up from them there is no smell that could have inspired it.

My favorite neighborhood celebrity is Marie Laveau, the black cat that just chills outside the occult bookshop

Big shout out to the person in my building repping a 21-year-old British web animation for Halloween. I see you and I hear you.

I'm really excited to eventually see this film, "Shifting Baselines", that I'm in! It looks SO COOL from the trailer, and there's a big picture of me on IMDB for it, haha weird. (But honestly, it's pretty hard to tell it's me because it was -25C or so when […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Guess how many more Starlinks are in orbit since last time I gave this talk 5 weeks ago? Fucking 240 more Starlinks. Nearly 10,000 Starlinks have been launched, 8,626 are in orbit today. https://planet4589.org/space/con/conlist.html

I love when you're having dinner with new friends and a few cocktails in and someone brings up Pee-Wee Herman and you just fall utterly to pieces.

Does no one film on the dead platform at Hoyt-Schermerhorn anymore? It's filthy like no one has stepped there in a while. (The extraneous third platform at Hoyt-Schermerhorn used to be used in movies, dressed up like other subway stations, because it is never in use.)

So excited to hear Omari Weekes give this talk at Pratt Institute, hosted by Dalia Davoudi. Profs Weeks and Davoudi were both part of a cohort of extraordinary students mentored by Rebekah Sheldon (now at Indiana) when she was a grad student teaching at Queens […] [Original post on c18.masto.host]