bottom line, MBAs should not run universities
“Senior Lecturer” (UVM English) in poetry, comics, writing, etc.; sometime drawer of comics, sometime writer of poems; trying to return to the world Some projects here: #DailyKrazyDetail #FourActorFactor #OrwellVsChatGPT #NearbyNature2025
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bottom line, MBAs should not run universities
“Blah,” said a voice from inside the house.
I wrote about the humility of expertise and the arrogance of ignorance, the profound laziness that attends believing that you can find knowledge by ignoring the accumulation of inherited human knowledge, and the ways lazy arrogance fuels narratives of fascism. www.the-reframe.com/your-ignoran...
I know, I know, but: The president of the US saying, literally, "we're going in" in reference to sending the military to an American city for no reason beyond terrorizing the local population should be the most immediately impeachable shit imaginable
New Mexico has issued a public health order that removes federal restrictions to COVID-19 vaccine access so that pharmacies in New Mexico can vaccinate people of all ages and risk profiles. Every state need to do this!
For me it was last week
Oh, I was so close.
I miss MST3k a whole bunch. We only got three new seasons from them via Netflix and Gizmoplex but forever thankful for that! Joel & Jonah, Crow & Tom Servo forever. Watercolor from 2013 (gotta make new one!)
That’s a good piece!
Just Say Yes July Bane Drug: Venom steroid Uses: Superhuman strength, endurance, agility, and enhanced healing Side effects: Addiction Created by Chuck Dixon, Doug Moench, and Graham Nolan (1993) #JulySayYes #ProjectDaare #DailyDrawing
made a myself a little diptych to catch up on posting
YESSSSS
August After the End The Fury Earth-238, The Crooked Earth Created by Alan Moore and Alan Davis (1982) #AugustAfter #ProjectDaare #DailyDrawing
You might be interested in the zine I wrote about Orwell and ChatGPT! It’s pinned to my profile, and the thread ends with instructions on how you can print copies for your students 😊
World's Goodest.
a kid like this can either bloom into an empathetic beautiful soul or can curdle into a bully bent on revenge
Any small increase in the billionaire class requires a massive increase of poor people. Yes, that means you, too 🤷♀️
*secondary educator Same
These are useful notes, though I watch so little TV these days that I suspect I’ll never catch up even on the must-see stuff (I’ve never seen Breaking Bad!)
Attn @balint.house.gov
I hope we'll see such orders signed by every official with the power to sign them. This isn't radical or even liberal; it's 101, it's like saying the king can't house his soldiers in people's homes.
In Which Nadine Amuses a Dragon and Makes Autumn Happen
I’m just wondering whether Bernie himself will get unwillingly roped into the shenanigans somehow
This is exactly how I feel about the English department right now. But without the actual field as well.
Do you recommend that I give it a try once I’ve subscribed to HBO again, or is it, y’know, definitely a CW show, and maybe not great?
I never saw the show! I don’t think I even knew about it
Possible causes of your problems. It’s a diagram that (sadly) still seems relevant in 2025, so reposting a year and a bit on.
True Stories (dir. David Byrne)
I feel this (though it was other subjects for me)
I described AI as a bullshit-making machine in the first day of all my classes this term and heard no objections.
When we eat hummus and crudités in my house I almost always say, “Excuse me, Mr. Culver. I’ve forgotten what these peppers represent.”
I watched it at least a dozen times on VHS when I was in high school and can still recite large chunks of it. It’s a beautiful movie. I made this meme. You can have it.
Yes, you’re right! Making Superman interesting is never about inventing a villain who can beat him up.
bsky.app/profile/calo...
I have something to say about the difference between American and European cities
(I like that as a solution, though I think Guy Gardner and Hawkgirl aren’t the superheroes I’d choose to conduct international diplomacy.) Anyway, Superman is at his best when he’s given a trolley problem and then refuses the trolley problem’s choices. www.the-reframe.com/there-is-no-...
But that’s a distraction, right? Really, Luthor forces Superman to choose between helping Metropolis and helping Jarhanpur. …which he solves by sending the Justice Gang overseas so he can fight the harder problem himself. You don’t need to be in two places at once if you have super friends.
Does Gunn get this? The ending of the movie focuses on a long and loud fistfight between Superman and Ultraman during which lots of things break and at least a few of Luther’s goons are badly hurt. I mean, it’s not like Snyder’s Zod fight, but it’s violent. That isn’t a great Superman climax.
If it’s done well, it’s a surprise for the audience but set up as a possibility by other elements earlier in the story. Superman is supposed to rewrite the dilemma. He maintains his square ethics by lateral-thinking his way out of the terms of the dilemma. And he teaches us we can also do that.
A tragic hero, faced with this dilemma, chooses and faces the consequences of that choice. It hurts. Superman isn’t a tragic hero. Faced with an either / or dilemma, he cheats. If that’s done poorly, it looks like spinning the world backwards to travel back in time and fix things.
Or, rather, make it SEEM like he can’t save everyone. This is the way Superman stories get tension: the audience accepts the dilemma Luthor offers. Superman seems to make a choice. Someone we care about is, apparently, doomed as a result of that choice. Lois falls so the school is can be saved.
The solution is, I think, to pick at that first “boring” quality: to put him into narrative straits that force him to make harder moral choices. Superman as a story is a fantasy of being able to save everyone. Make it so he can’t save everyone. Choose Lois or the Earthquake, etc.
I don’t think Kryptonite is the answer, at least not by itself. The solution isn’t to create a scenario where Superman can be hurt or might die, or to match him against a sparring partner strong enough to make him bleed. (Action movies want the punching; stories don’t need it)
Superman’s naysayers also think the stakes for an invulnerable man must be low: he can’t be hurt; he’s never at risk; therefore the story can’t feel urgent. This ignores the fact that superhero protagonists survive, by the nature of narrative and of corporate IP, even if they’re notionally mortal.
Lots of people say Superman (the character) is boring. I think they say this partly because they think his ethics or morality seems very simple: save lives; do good. (I think the difference with Batman here is mostly aesthetic, tbh.) This is probably only boring if the writers let it be.
I have a thing to say about Superman. It’s an idea I’ve had for a long time, and I’m realizing that I’m not sure whether James Gunn’s Superman movie gets this, though it gets SO MANY other things about Superman and how he should work. Spoilers ahead. But you’ve seen the movie now, right?
This is a good piece and written adroitly. “…the best advice I have to give is to ask: ‘in what way is this argument founded in the premise that some people matter and other people don't?’”
Does it count if the movie is one that the musical artist directed and co-wrote?
Attn @bullythelsb.bsky.social
Last night this site gave a pretty good demonstration of the power of thoughts and prayers.
Look, I know it’s disappointing, but we can be 100% certain it WILL happen one day.
You couldn't make The Life of Brian today because movies usually take several weeks to make. One day isn't nearly enough.
I feel like @levostregc.bsky.social might know a Pardoner with some fresh indulgences if that’s what you’re looking for
Beavers pause while chewing trees to listen for movements so that the tree doesn't fall on them.
I had virtually the same thought bsky.app/profile/dris...
But also: screw him for making Socialism (and sharing) as bad as bigotry and fascism
Ordering 18,000 waters also sounds a LOT like the AI experience tbh
Old Soviet joke for today: A man walks into a newsstand every day, looks around, and leaves. After a long time of this, the owner says “Can I help you find something?” “I’m looking for the obituaries.” “The obituaries are in the back of the newspaper, comrade.” “Not the one I’m looking for.”
Revised hope: he's defying medical advice and leaving his hospital bed to quash the rumors. It may happen on the golf course.
I’d be like, “Holy shit! I thought Gene Wilder died! How’d you get him for this?”
Wait, they aren’t going to let the Next Guy conduct international diplomatic talks, are they?
I mean, plenty of folks have been duped by a swagger-talking rich man recently, so I’m not sure what to expect from their base — I could believe anything from them at this point — but he just seems so awkward and flaccid all the time when he’s not little-lord-Aggrieved-and-Entitled
Anyway, it’s a very good movie (imho) though it will make you a little scared of chimpanzees … and clouds
Capitalism demands that a day-old bagel be sold in a plastic bag for half price, instead of letting it be enjoyed fresh for free the afternoon before
I think Nope is really good — and the point hinges on the fact that Muybridge’s jockey is black
(There’s actually a very solid woke take on this in Nope — have you seen it?)
My first one was “Punch the Clock,” which also really doesn’t sound *like* Elvis Costello, and I’m pretty fond of it too
Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these barbs
I’m just saying m.youtube.com/watch?v=pi_Y...
nobody has seen the president in three days [burping and rubbing my president shaped tummy] that’s crazy
Early Sesame Street was TRIPPY.
Worth remembering that any time I say “It’s happening!” I’m talking about the theatrical release of Beyond the Spider-Verse
I take so much hope from the fact that Vance is utterly uncharismatic No matter what happens otherwise, he’s going to be immensely unpopular (and therefore fairly easy for Congress to fight)
*dying Skeksis Emperor hiss*
I’m just saying that when it happens I’m jumping out of bed, running to my window, and tossing a coin to a boy to buy the biggest goose in town
Goodness, if the President has a serious health problem I certainly hope he follows the expert medical advice of his Secretary of Health and Human Services
The tradition is to draw the arrival in front of St Peter. How will cartoonists manage this one when it happens?
Circling. #Trump
I see and I hear and I speak no evil; I carry no malice within my breast; yet quite without wishing a man to the Devil one may be permitted to hope for the best. -“An Ethical Grook” by Piet Hein
Nothing gold can stay, one hopes.
Them: “Cities are all rotting hellscapes!” Cities:
Every Dem needs to run on abolishing ICE
‘I see dead people’ ‘WHY ARE YOU SAYING THAT? ‘WHY ARE YOU SAYING THAT?’
I went to the corner store for my mother all the time. youtu.be/MNghp9tPXjo
Y'all The ICE building in Portland is painting a line in front of their building But they don't even know how to spell government
Cuban explains why companies like Intel are happy to give fascists a cut. The wealthiest people in the country see it as a smaller sacrifice than what progressives are proposing in higher taxes.
You can’t be scared of the subway and expect people to vote for you as mayor of NYC.
Bizarre Al Yankovic
If you’d like to read my essay about George Orwell, writing by machines, and our current nihilism about meaning, I offer you the entire zine in this thread. I will finish the thread with instructions on how to print your own copies of the zine. #OrwellvsChatGPT
I want pictures
This is genocidal rhetoric calling people cockroaches. This is exactly the language used in the Rwandan genocide.
Well, @natedimeo.bsky.social made me weep listening to Walt Whitman this afternoon
There's a reason why sports teams don't chant "I believe that we will lose" before a game, a reason so obvious that I'm pretty sure it needs no explanation. Which is why it makes my head explode when people surrender in advance verbally, which they do all the time about politics.
Optics here that really scream, “We’re the good guys.”
The people dominating our political landscape, culture, and economy are just so stupid and full of shit it's almost impossible to describe
So I was reading the Wikipedia entry on the singer Roy Head and I stumbled on a couple of familiar names … Different guys, but familiar names en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Hea...
teachers! excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone. take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE against-a-i.com
What time is it?