Brandon Walsh

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

Probably not based on a true story

Volunteering with @ach.bsky.social @dhnow.bsky.social orgs is a way to pick up cross functional communication collaboration organizational administrative skills

forever barnacle-ing the @plach.bsky.social and @emgrumbach.bsky.social model of value driven kindness🙂‍↕️

While not universally true, it is generally true that the tighter the control on production & distribution you place on an intellectual work, the less likely it will survive into posterity.

If you want something to last, make it good, make lots of it, and make it easy for others to make more of it.

Out of toddler stomach bug quarantine and back on infant overnights. Last night’s movies were the Seventh Seal (for when I wasn’t tired) and Mickey 17 (for when I needed help staying awake).

Grayson don’t do it.

I’ve run a workshop before that only one person attended. Easy for it to feel like a failure, to me as much as anyone else. But that person used what they learned to do an independent study with me, and that work became their MA thesis. Wish we could celebrate these small transformative experiences.

There’s a lot of talk (rightly so) today about courses in high demand being marginalized/downplayed/cancelled, that the humanities in particular are very “cheap” & high ROI comparatively.

I do want remind us that justifying “what matters” via revenue generation is what got us here in the 1st place.

Love a train so much. The northeastern line has a special place in my heart but this is next level.

Toddler this morning screamed, “WHAT HAPPENED TO MY JAZZ MUSIC?” So we are either doing something very right or very wrong.

Where is this train line??? In love with the side view car.

3D lets you move around and get angles on things that you might otherwise miss. But it also lets you sort of chase your own tail and follow red herrings. Point and click is more alien but also more like examining a painting that won’t move from under your gaze.

Interesting to play MYST and be given a choice between real time 3D or the original click to move through pre-rendered environments. Hard to tell which one makes it harder as a puzzle game.

Revisiting MYST as an adult is a fun exercise in discovering the sum total of my intellectual gain in three decades is exactly zero.

Peer Review Feedback The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO)'s ad hoc peer review committee is tasked with making recommendations for ADHO's annual conference peer review protocol. The committee seeks inpu...

Calling all #DigitalHumanities folks, esp in the U.S. I'm repping @ach.bsky.social on an ADHO ad hoc committee that's looking into recommending a standard peer review protocol for future DH conferences. Please take a few moments to complete this anonymous survey, even if you're not a member of ACH

Memorial for Fobazi Ettarh

“Keep laughing” he yells as I shrivel up and perish.

Oh no I have trained the toddler to love my toad screams and now my voice can’t handle the consequences.

Recovered from a stomach bug but still quarantining in the basement from our newborn. So I've got nothing better to do than pitch.

Also two roombas that just want to run away together but are trapped on opposite sides of stairs.

Bold to reach for the novel when I was thinking short story.

Want projects led by women, non-binary folks and people of colour rightly recognised as #DH?

Then consider nominating them for one of the DH Awards 2025. Nominations closing soon.

dhawards.org/dhawards2025/nominations/

(Or direct to form if lack of SSL puts you off forms.gle/zRbPaw8hoBEo...)

Man accidentally gains control of 7,000 robot vacuums Sammy Azdoufal just wanted to steer his DJI Romo with a gaming controller.

The only AI future I want.

Not now toddler, I need to shitpost about AI.

I'm often suspicious of games that feel like they might have been pitched as genre X meets genre Y, but it's a lovely combination of soulslike and deck builder.

Rolled credits on Death Howl, a deeply beautiful fable that was, to me, just the right amount of frustratingly difficult.

Based on reviews I might be in the minority on that last point.

Me: “Maybe I should stop using back pain as a critical lens”

The aging gaming readership: “Never stop”

Academia.edu - Find Research Papers, Topics, Researchers Academia.edu is the platform to share, find, and explore 50 Million research papers. Join us to accelerate your research needs & academic interests.

FYI, Academia.edu has changed its terms of service to give an irrevocable worldwide license for anything uploaded to its site to be used for generative AI. I do not consent to this and have pulled all my papers.

Mine was The Shining, but a close friend wins with The Passion of the Christ.

What’s the worst date movie you’ve experienced?