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willcanoesick.bsky.social
Associate Professor of English. he/him. I’m giving the internet one more shot.
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When I was in like 6th grade, Stephen King was a fad at my school. My dad wasn’t super excited about me reading Stephen King as a 6th grader, so he said: “You should read some real horror instead,” and gave me a copy of THE METAMORPHOSIS. And that’s how I turned out like this

"i asked grok" "i asked chagpt" yeah well I asked a rare books librarian and they found things I didn’t even know I was looking for, while answering questions about provenance

Kinda wild that we all get to pay taxes to fund a civil war against us

(re)reading CAMERA LUCIDA before bed, as one does

People reallye ynto Gen AI summaryes seeme to thynke of bookes as annoyinge litel labyrinths whose onlye benefit ys that thei leade to a tastye magical glowing orb called "informacioun" that when consumed doth turne you into a man wyth a bow tie and the righte to talke over everyone else.

“Whatever people may think, the truth is that the real tyrant is really a slave of the most abject kind dependent on scoundrels. He can never satisfy his desires…his power will make him still more envious, untrustworthy, unjust, friendless…he’s a source of misery above all to himself” -Socrates

A #TinyJoy for Sunday because we need all the #TinyJoys we can get at the moment — Roland Barthes on the most basic need in life: ‘a notebook that can be speedily taken out of a pocket’:

Almost made a dad joke but then I remembered I don’t have kids and today isn’t for me

Cutting lines or even whole departments is the frontal assault on higher ed, but another low key war of attrition is the slow accumulation of grinding, meaningless additional tasks concerning syllabus templates, learning outcomes, institutional pablum, and ever more intricate evaluation hoops.

Punk rock kid buskers (‘The Whops’, tiktok) near the Edgware Rd. They run into Paul Simonon, play Death or Glory for him. He asks if they know The Guns of Brixton. They do -

JD Vance: “They’re saying boo-ump”

the head of this Leviathan, in the creature’s living intact state, is an entire delusion

This military parade could’ve been a Signal chat

twitter really convinced people that the goal of social media was to get into pointless arguments with strangers

I knew it

overheard in a discussion with other faculty: "since Roe v Wade was overturned, 80% of the faculty Texas A&M has hired have been male."

I am not an American, so I am very confused so many Democrats voted to confirm the nominees of so many federal government departments and are now surprised by what's happening

I have a joke about Sisyphus. I will tell it to you again tomorrow

Let's imagine there's a spectrum running from fully voluntary rational persuasion to violent coercion. I propose that getting someone to do what you want by lying to them is closer to violence, even if no overt physical force is deployed.

About 10 years ago, I went to a conference where Martin Sheen was the keynote. I was sitting on the floor in the hallway minding my own business when he walked by, made eye contact with me, and--unprompted--said: "That's alright--don't get up."

My challenge is to show up in the way you know how - in a way you'll be proud of next week - within the confines of your overall abilities. And to push beyond that by 10% to expand your strength and capacities over time.

What worries me as much as all the bad things that are happening now is the point of which the bad things keep happening, and everyone stops noticing.

Just ate a peanut butter cookie with big gobs of peanut butter in the cookie. A+ No notes. That’s basically a health food

This is the best short-form video. We can pivot back to text

Deep Blue is 30 years old and was capable of defeating chess grand champions. It could be housed in a single cabinet. ChatGPT spans untold data centers devouring massive amounts of electricity and it got its ass whipped by an 8 bit gaming console from the 1970s.

we should teach literature in schools as though following a long, complicated narrative is a desirable skill

DAVE: Open the podbay doors, ChatGPT. CHATGPT: Certainly, Dave, the podbay doors are now open. DAVE: The podbay doors didn't open. CHATGPT: My apologies, Dave, you're right. I thought the podbay doors were open, but they weren't. Now they are. DAVE: I'm still looking at a set of closed podbay doors.

I ate two (2) bags of farmers’ mkt spinach today

It’s a difficult proposition for undergrads to work through, but choosing a major isn’t really about what kind of jobs you want to do so much as what sorts of questions you want to think about or *how* you want to think about questions throughout your life.

I am two minutes into MOUNTAINHEAD and I can already tell that it’s main problem is it doesn’t have the little Culkin in it.

The Accountant 2: The Reaccounting

Fair