Larry (he/him)

❤️❤️❤️ one of the many reasons I miss you!

Donna Reed as the frumpy "spinster" librarian in the alternative scenario in which George Bailey hadn't existed in It's A Wonderful Life

it's that time of year once again when we count our blessings and remember how much worse others' lives might have been without our presence 📚

BANANAS and also so impressive with the practical effects and being shot on like... what, home video equipment? (I had a migraine hit so I really had a 4D hell experience there at the end lmao)

Left to right: Teorema (4 stars), The Burning Moon (3 stars), Star Time (2.5 stars), and Samurai Cop (2 stars)

The tail end of a genre marathon and a Rest in Performance screening for Terence Stamp. The end of the year has me slowing down on movie watching! #LetterboxdFriday #LastFourWatched

Left to right: Teorema (4 stars), The Burning Moon (3 stars), Star Time (2.5 stars), and Samurai Cop (2 stars)

The tail end of a genre marathon and a Rest in Performance screening for Terence Stamp. The end of the year has me slowing down on movie watching! #LetterboxdFriday #LastFourWatched

Yeah but I'm stressed EVERY TIME Helen!

Good news, I did the video recording that was the big task I needed to do most today. I also converted the other big tasks into smaller tasks, so all around winning. Notably I've had the kind of week were it's 3pm on a Thursday and I've already done 40 hrs, so truthfully only capitalism is winning.

Ok I'm back down to nine. Nine is doable. Nine is manageable.

I got to see it at the Denver Film Festival and it was Beautiful!!

Maybe today is the day we also have a conversation about the word “genre” and how a lot of horror is better than the stuff that gets counted as “real cinema” and a lot of SFF writing is higher quality literature than some of the shit publishers call “literary fiction”

Stop being snobby shits

is there a *mr* information?

Chase Williams & @ChaseWilliams_• 1d New York City Mayor Eric Adams is on Capitol Hill today. X He tells me about Zohran Mamdani announcing he's moving into Gracie Mansion: "Beware of the ghost. I told [Zohran] about it. So the ghost is there. It's a friendly ghost, as long as you're doing right by the city. If you don't become right by the city, he turns into a poltergeist."

Eric Adams is an incredibly strange man

📚📜

My problem this morning is that I only have big tasks to do but I don't really have dedicated big task time today. Also I'm in full on waiting mode because I have an event to run at 5:00 and I'm (as always) stressed about whether anyone will come. None of this is conducive to productivity.

This is one reason I get frustrated when outsiders denigrate research, as if it's somehow totally unrelated to teaching. And maybe for some people it is. But that's just not what I see, for myself or for my colleagues.

Physical media is actually more longlasting for posterity than digital media in so many ways. You have books written a thousand years ago carefully preserved in Timbuktu. An article published online may vanish so no one has any record of your work anymore.

NY Subway Stations as Fluevog shoes:

Anyway it's one of those eatin' lunch at 10:45 days because that's when I've got time to do it. Really looking forward to AAUP tonight because there'll be dinner.

What Happens When Gen Z Encounters Catullus’s Filthiest Poem? In this moment of especially rabid book banning, my high school senior has been translating Catullus in her Advanced Track (AT) Latin class. Catullus’s poems disappeared from the Western canon for …

This crossed my inbox as I was going through my book emails this morning and I found it really interesting and relevant to a conversation I was just having with a few friends (some inside academia, some beyond): lithub.com/what-happens-when-gen-z-encounters-catulluss-filthiest-poem

On the one hand, the fact that I always struggle with coming up with a good example topic for Intro to Visual Culture mimics the student experience so being able to show that I struggle too with research is probably more realistic.

On the other hand why can't it just be easy???

Me on Friday: wow! only 5 emails in my work inbox! I sure am going into the December on top of everything and with a manageable workload!

Me today, 10:08 AM, watching my email climb up to 41 and not stop: GAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

EVERY TIME YOU COMPLAIN WE ADD MORE GENDERS

Public Service Announcement.

Somewhere, I've picked up a tic of referring to people as "my love(s)" which is fine when you're getting on a 3.5 hour call with your two besties and conferencing them in together, but possibly marginally less fine when you're emailing your 40 DH Center affiliate faculty about Journal Club 📚📜

libraries are for everyone and i mean *everyone* 📚

Casting Notice for the Unaired CW Pilot Young Hamlet SYNOPSIS High school is no picnic for anyone, but especially if you’re one of Shakespeare’s most iconic leading men. Hamlet might be the big man on...

"Hamlet might be the big man on campus, but that doesn’t mean he’s got it all figured out. This drama puts a much-needed spin on a classic by imagining a world where Hamlet is young and hot."

💯
public libraries can play a role in popular resistance to the reduction of culture to bitstreams, but it’s important to remember that public libraries have a mandate to develop their collections, and that means regular weeding. this is why resource sharing (i.e. ILL) is essential. 📚

What happens when ChatGPT cites to a real case but misstates what the case stands for? That doesn't fly for Judge Behm in Michigan. The court says that while a litigant could make the same error based on faulty reasoning, LLMs can't, because they can't reason.

And while a litigant might get away with similar overstatements because they could, perhaps, reason their way to showing how a case's stated holding might extend to novel situations, an LLM does not reason in the way a litigant must. To put it in a slightly different way, LLMs do not perform the metacognitive processes that are necessary to comply with Rule 11. When an LLM overstates a holding of a case, it is just piecing together a plausible-looking sentence

h/t @robertfreundlaw.bsky.social

holy shit, an accurate legal critique of LLMs. LLMs don't reason because they're just stitching together plausible-looking sentences indifferent to the content

Today: www.instagram.com/p/DRJYB0pjbfr/
12 hours. 7 movies. All day at the Sie. So goddamn hype.

(I think this will clock in at my longest cultural event, but if someone remembers the run time on "All Our Tragic" that miiight just win. Not sure.)

A child asking a mall Santa, "Homoousios or Homoiousios?" ML Santa: "What?" Child: " You're not the real Saint Nicholas."

Happy Saint Nicholas Day!

Mutually Assured Enshittification Oh, the techbro and the provost can be friends

I wrote this a couple of months ago, and I stand by it.
open.substack.com/pub/sausages...