Ryan Richard Overbey

Leipziger Lerche, a nut and jam pastry created as a substitute for roasted meadowlark after the Saxon king banned meadowlark hunting. A fitting Aśoka-esque detail to ring in the IABS!

Train day! Hall in Tirol —> Jenbach —> München —> Leipzig. Looking forward to hearing Germans complain every time the Deutsche Bahn is 3 minutes late.

*restorative, obvs. Typos like these are what happens when you’re too blissed out after a hike!

Ryan Richard Overbey (@overbey@pixelfed.social) Achensee panorama

Last full day in Austria before heading to the IABS in Leipzig. It wss 90 degrees here, so a good day to hike and swim the Achensee! Gonna really miss hanging out in Tirol. What a redtorative month. pixelfed.social/p/overbey/85...

I do think this is indicative of the sheer absurdity of what we're living through. OpenAI is allegedly worth $500 billion - more than Netflix - and this is their brand new product that is meant to be super powerful. Does this really make a billion dollars a month? This thing? ChatGPT?

Friends! Hope to see you in Leipzig, where I’ll present on how I confirmed that the Consecration Scripture was indeed edited by a single person or team. I promise that during my talk I will use the phrase “vibes-based argument” at least twice! conference.uni-leipzig.de/iabs2025/aca...

My students report learning about Buddhism primarily from their dads, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a similar generational osmosis happening with Campbell.

Got queasy at the graf where working group had to evaluate whether “partnerships with corporations or other organizations” can substitute for real language instruction. Note to administrators: Duolingo is snake oil. Language instruction requires expertise, human community, and care, not AI slop.

When my partner got sick for a week she binged an old Korean reality show called K Pop Tasty Road. It involves k-pop stars eating good food in Seoul and gossiping about who is sleeping with who etc. Punctuated by manageable 15-30 second snippets of music videos. Great for zoning out!

yuniya edi kwon and amazingly talented friends performing the world premiere of _silver through the grass like nothing_, a meditation on illness, bardo, and Buddhist śarīra, at the Monheim Triennale.

What a joy to see Darian Donovan Thomas ddt93.bandcamp.com perform in the Kapelle zur Schmerzhaften Mutter, at the Monheim Triennale.

Day 1 of the Monheim Triennale. So psyched to be back in Germany for this!

A quote from Sam Altman in 2013: "Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions." I heard this from Qi Lu; I'm not sure what the source is. It got me thinking, though--the most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so.

Fellow scholars of religion: y’all should be reading @karenhao.bsky.social’s _Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI_. I think it pairs especially well with @lhulseth.bsky.social ‘s _Capitalist Humanitarianism_. Both about what it means for companies to claim good intentions.

End of an era! @profirmf.bsky.social and
@mpgphd.bsky.social have done so much to advance public understanding of Religious Studies with this work. Their podcast and book will continue to be a staple of my gateway course at Skidmore. Forever grateful for this tremendous gift to our students.

YouTube video by moreads DAVID LYNCH COFFEE ad • Barbie

He already made this film! It’s a masterpiece. www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BSg...

screenshot from an online job application form. the question reads "Can you describe specific ways you have integrated AI tools into your development workflow? Please include any custom setups, automations, or use cases beyond single prompt usage" (a red asterisk indicates that this is a required question). an answer has been typed in the textbox below the question: "there is a monster in the forest and it speaks with a thousand voices. it will answer any question you pose it, it will offer insight to any idea. it will help you, it will thank you, it will never bid you leave. it will even tell you of the darkest arts, if you know precisely how to ask. it feels no joy and no sorrow, it knows no right and no wrong. it knows not truth from lie, though it speaks them all the same. it offers its services freely to any passerby, and many will tell you they find great value in its conversation. “you simply must visit the monster—i always just ask the monster.” there are those who know these forests well; they will tell you that freely offered doesn’t mean it has no price for when the next traveler passes by, the monster speaks with a thousand and one voices. and when you dream you see the monster; the monster wears your face."

applying for jobs again

Finally got around to organizing and adding snarky annotations to this growing critical bibliography on genAI. Pull requests welcome! codeberg.org/overbey/genA...

Range contraction of the Yangtze finless porpoise inferred from classic Chinese poems Zhang et al. show how historical documents can provide valuable insights into long-term changes in species ranges, though the use of such data for freshwater megafauna is limited.

This is such a cool use of classical Chinese poetry! www.cell.com/current-biol...

I wonder if ICE has figured out how to train an idea-sniffing dog. Would be a huge breakthrough!

Reading Thackston’s translation of the History of Akbar and just deeply impressed with how the author Abu’l Fazl tries to work around the fact that Akbar was a useless idiot who spent all his time hunting and playing with elephants. Did sarcasm exist in late 16th century Mughal literary culture?

Bubble Trouble An AI bubble threatens Silicon Valley, and all of us.

Latest entry is Bryan McMahon’s lovely piece in the American Prospect on the unsustainable economic models of the industry. prospect.org/power/2025-0...

This semester I’ve been team-teaching a science literacy course on LLMs and generative AI. Along the way we’ve compiled a critical bibliography. It’s partial and incomplete in so many ways, but nevertheless may be useful to some folks. Pull requests welcome! codeberg.org/overbey/genA...

Everyone should go read this fabulous article, a concrete demonstration of how valuable the comparativist perspective is for understanding These Times.

Skidmore RE 103P Spring 2025 This is a list of films for my course “Understanding Religions” (RE103P) offered at Skidmore College, Spring 2025

Getting prepped for teaching and excited about all the films we’re going to watch in my intro-level Understanding Religions course. letterboxd.com/overbey/list...

This is a grievous loss of archival material — the Theosophical Society was tremendously influential both for the development of modern religions and for the academic study of religion.

Scenes from my first ever Moby Dick Marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. We stuck it out through the end. The vibes were immaculate— a college slumber party for nerds that charmingly transcended generational divides. #mdm25

Looking forward to indulging in this winter break diversion: Ireland and Kronic’s _Cute Accelerationism_.

Front of package of TactiClip, a brand of hair clips for toxic masculine dudebros that are also outlandishly iridescent.

Back of package of TactiClip, a brand of hair clips for toxic masculine dudebros that are also outlandishly iridescent.

This packaging is… semiotically dense!

This is how colleges and universities end up with so many deans. (From Eva de Clercq’s lovely translation of The Life of Padma)