ML Brennan

Responsible......... FOR MURDER.

Screenshot from Columbo. He his talking to his dog, which is sitting is the drivers seat of a car. “Okay, I’m gonna put you in charge. You take care of the car. You’re a responsible dog. When I get back, if the car’s okay, I’ll give you another cookie.”

“If the car’s gone,”

“I’ll give you another cookie anyway”

“because I love you.”

Happy Columbo’s Day

We'll all remember this conversation when Gerard goes full Christine.

This is true -- sometimes to freak out my students I explain to them what it was like to drive to an unfamiliar place before the days of GPS.

“Phillip K. Dick. Ray Bradbury. Like so many in tech, I draw in completely misunderstanding the authors.”

My children's pediatrician has reached the point where he simply refers to RFK Jr as "THAT MAN."

This pediatrician visibly winces in sympathy when he gives my kids their vaccines, because he just hates to cause any discomfort, yet I'm pretty sure he would rend RFKJr limb from limb with joy.

Yes, peeps, it is me again because $2.99 is a STEAL for the ebook (w/ bk 2 next month, no less!)

Writing The Witch Roads in 2022 reignited my love of writing after a rough period when I thought I should just quit. All else aside, this book is about finding joy in the small graces of the world

I've spoken with a lot of my colleagues about this, and the first-years are noticeably better about doing the reading assignments. I'm kind of hoping that we're starting to see a cohort whose damage from the covid years had enough time to be ameliorated.

Really? I'd love some -- they would make some incredibly happy little boys.

@djangowexler.bsky.social Just got to The Swarm (we had a bit of a hiatus from The Forbidden Library over the summer while we did fairy tale stories), and Arlen is in love with them. He says, "They're so cute, but so MEAN!" He also very much digs that Ashes tried to kill one.

It's broad, decorative slop.

(Me again)

Now, the problem here is that I'm sitting there, reading this shit, and thinking, wait, were we even reading the same damn story? What the fuck did I even read? Then, a second later I realize, holy shit, that's not a single actual reference to events in the story. Not a one.

Oloomi’s vision shows that memory can still hold meaning and resist total disappearance, but it always carries an element of distance. The tone is abstract, a step removed from the rawness of pain, allowing readers to feel the sadness of absence but not the piercing regret of one person’s silence."

The effect is thoughtful and meditative, less urgent but deeply reflective . Memory in this story is not tied to guilt or responsibility but instead to the sorrow of watching the world grow smaller piece by piece.

Her writing style mirrors this sense of fading. It circles, layers, and echoes, so that memory feels more like a ripple in water than a fixed image.

Unlike Shepard , Oloomi’s narrator lingers not on immediate action or guilt but on the traces that remain old words written in books, faint voices carried forward through history, broken stories passed down in pieces, and scattered artifacts pointing toward what once existed .

The narrator wonders what it means to remember something that cannot fully be brought back, to hold onto fragments of what was while knowing they can never be whole again.

Instead of one flood, there are countless vanishings: the extinction of animals that once roamed freely, the disappearance of languages that once carried whole histories, the fading of entire cultures until only traces remain.

Her narrator does not circle one single disaster but instead reflects on the way memory works when parts of the world gradually disappear .

"In Extinction, Oloomi treats memory in a much broader way, making it feel wide, collective, and almost atmospheric rather than deeply personal.

Okay, so here's one of the paragraphs from an essay that I suspect was from Chat GPT:

Gotta say, though -- all the colleges that I'm working at are suddenly ordering huge stacks of Blue Books again, after almost a decade of the things being almost extinct, so I think that that's the direction that things are going in.

I hate deciphering handwriting, so I'm holding out.

I don't have any intention of getting into fights over AI use this semester, so what I did was just to grade them as if I had no idea that AI was involved (which resulted in the students getting 20 out of 100 points), and telling the students to reread the assignment and rewrite.

It reduced the number of students who had nothing in hand and turned to AI. And the ones who did were absolutely not a surprise, since they were the ones who rolled into those classes having not read a single assignment.

Which isn't exactly a new technique, but the AI slop is interestingly recognizable. Imagine the vaguest review of a poetry chapbook, which never makes a single direct reference to a single poem or line. That's what it reads like.

Also, I forced a lot of in-class drafting and writing, which helped.

So, there's just not enough scraped into the models to produce functional papers. What I HAVE noticed, is that with newer publications, the AI tries to sidestep it by basically writing about nothing -- incredibly decorative, broad, vague writing that could apply to just about any story at all.

Not as bad as I was worried about, actually. I did my best to lay traps by using only really recent work. My one class is working with long-form articles that are all published within the last few months, and my other classes are working with this year's Best American Short Stories.

So bad.

So, so bad.

I had four classes that had essays due this week, and I must say -- my students are so good at writing essays that break my spirit.