Baryon Posadas

Last two weeks of the semester take up the animated adaptations of the work of Project Itoh, with a particular focus on his staging of the passage from the cyborg to the zombie in treatments of posthumanist politics.

Snuck inside my closet again.

The Routledge Handbook of Fan Video and Digital Authorship This cutting-edge collection explores the histories, aesthetics, and cultural work of fan video across a wide variety of manifestations and genres. Editors Louisa Ellen Stein and Samantha Close have a...

New book ⬇️⬇️⬇️

The Routledge Handbook of Fan Video and Digital Authorship

Edited By Louisa Ellen Stein, Samantha Close

#FanStudies

www.routledge.com/The-Routledg...

Callisto the cat has decided that my mouse cursor is her new obsession.

躺平

Do people not check that the name on their salutation and the email address match before pressing send?

I keep repeatedly (three times now in the last week) receiving this one email from a prospective postgraduate student inquiring about the possibility of working with me. Except the topic is so wildly out of area. On top of that, it's addressed to an altogether different person.

Not sure what to make of it, but it certainly seems to me to be a rather different relationship to futurity than what was experienced under the so-called era of the end of history.

This time around though, rather than lagging behind, cultural discourse is seemingly anticipating events, perhaps even pre-mediating them, moving into narratives of decline and stagnation before the punctum of the crisis even actually happens.

In an odd way, it almost seems like an inverted version of the uneven development that marked the period of peak globalization and postmodernity, when cultural discourse lagged behind the rapid changes in political-economic structures.

This talk of 50-year mortgages in the US is vaguely reminiscent of 1980s bubble economy era Japan with its then infamous multi-generational mortgages. At the same time, the pervading cultural discourse remains one that echoes the later lost decades era.

The cats are being nosy neighbors.

Today's feline shenanigans.

Cat with trains.

Video: We Charted the Decline in International Students to the U.S. The Upshot reporter Aatish Bhatia walks through a chart he created showing the decline, by country, of international students arriving to the United States this year.

19% drop in international student registrations to the US. I wonder how this is impacting public university finances?
www.nytimes.com/video/upshot...

With all its Deleuze and Jameson name-drops, you would think there'd be more interest.

Approaching the tail end of the semester with the obligatory discussion of cyborg feminism and techno-orientalism. Ghost in the Shell is arguably one of the most academically overexposed anime titles. Practically everyone in anime studies has written something about it.

You can tell things are getting busier when my meals switch from braises and soups to stir-fries and rice bowl slop. Yesterday was oyakodon. Today is Pad krapow.

Accidentally walked in on a cat conspiracy.

You can tell that LLMs have been trained on some wildly orientalist writing because so much of the AI written assignments I get randomly talk about "mono no aware" despite the fact that it has literally never come up once in my discussions of Japanese science fiction.

I guess this suggests that either this discourse is wildly cynical/desperate, or the ostensibly NYC-based US media ecology is just that disconnected from the multicultural realities of its home city. Or both. Probably both.

This NYC mayoral auntie discourse seems especially weird in the context of a multicultural NYC where a practice of referring to all older relatives as uncle/auntie is probably more common than the media discourse appears to make it out to be.

ChatGPT is incredible (at being average) - Ethics and Information Technology In this article, we examine a peculiar issue apropos large language models (LLMs) and generative AI more broadly: the frequently overlooked phenomenon of output homogenization. It describes the tenden...

Relevant:
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Once you start recognizing the genAI writing voice and cadence, it becomes impossible to un-see it. Best description I can think of is it sounds like a TED talk script or a sales pitch. It's pervasive too, not just in student writing but in pretentious social media commentary.

Class prep supervisors.

I have forgotten just how painfully 1980s both the style and setting of Megazone 23 happens to be. It does make it a good point of departure for discussing the rise of cyberpunk and the turn towards the critical dystopia during the decade.

Relevant: defector.com/higher-eds-r...

Do university administrators get kickbacks from GenAI companies or something? Or is this weird uncritical embrace of not just the technology but also the official rhetoric just the usual university administrator groupthink?

If there's no disciplinary expectation that referenced work actually be discussed with some level of detail and specificity before they are cited, then it becomes easier to overlook if the referenced work is fully hallucinated or the precis does not much the actual content.

I'm referring here to the practice of dropping long lists of parenthetical citations without much further unpacking of their specific arguments, which sometimes suggest that only the abstracts were read in a broad literature review.