People often forget that Zora Neale Hurston was a trailblazing cultural anthropologist whose ethnographies are, to this day, still some of the finest examples of the genre
10.12.2025 19:20
👍 61
🔁 10
💬 3
📌 3
People often forget that Zora Neale Hurston was a trailblazing cultural anthropologist whose ethnographies are, to this day, still some of the finest examples of the genre
is 'updating my priors' simply 'listening and learning' for men with a certain aura
very very exciting! Jones has been working tirelessly on water quality for years, which is a concern for so many iowans.
He also wrote this, for instance.
I'm not the opinion police. Good ideas can come from the right. But it's worth pausing to note that discourse in the humanities is doubling down on some tropes (kids today, culture in peril, back to basics etc) that 25 years ago would have read as conservative.
thread. I agree completely. I think a huge problem rn with aI is that it's renewing/intensifying/legitimating treating students adversarially. I think a good test for AI responses is how university employees would respond if they became policies to which were subjected by senior administration.
Our November piece is live! ✨ @mossheadlives.bsky.social writes about text-based roleplaying in fandom—and about using these existing characters to explore their gender identity.
Read the piece or listen to an audio version (and check out the gorgeous art by @thebeanbaguette.bsky.social):
But in any event, I recall @tedunderwood.com suggesting that LLM generated citations are more an extension of a well-underway tendency to just gesture toward articles without actually reading them, and I think that's true (and a useful way to approach the problem as not really caused by LLMs).
incredible cognitive dissonance as they come into fandom spaces where the discourse is on another planet
this is actually so interesting to me, on one hand yes people won't tag it if they get harassed for it. and on the other, I genuinely wonder if the extreme hostility is negatively polarizing people, esp younger fans. when ai is increasingly how high school papers are written, there must be...
I've certainly noticed the "ai generated content" tag a bit more frequently! and ancedotally in the original works category. someone should track the where's and when's of that tags use as ai gets more normalized
while ai content is slowly filtering into fan spaces, they are by and large incredibly hostile to it. i dont see this getting picked up any time soon, and probably only if we get to the point of such ai saturation on the internet that tech ceos' dreams come true and we all just get over any qualms
obligatory qualifier that this is a brief comment on a quarterly earnings call. I fully expect it not to happen at all.
im remembering the popularity of those websites that let you put your picture on a video of a dancing elf or a movie character. disney allowing people to use their IP for (in house) ai-generated content feels like it reaches a similar demographic/engagement level. not for fans, for the gen public
toy company CEOs: "at long last, we have created the Sinister Talking Doll Factory from the acclaimed movie 'Don't Create the Sinister Talking Doll Factory'"
futurism.com/artificial-i...
I can’t be the only one who just straight up isn’t interested in incorporating anything we learn from synthetic “social” science experiments conducted on LLM facsimiles of human text because I simply don’t think the epistemology of it has any bearing on the world, regardless of any similarity
Odd thought: the media itself is a hall-of-mirrors. Looking at an information-rotted fascist fantasist media environment doesn’t tell you anything about how informed people actually are; all it tells you is how rotted the media environment is—and these are not the same thing!
The focus on data as goods (cf privacy), or data as representation (cf bias) do not encompass the challenge of data as association. The modern Internet and data surveillance industry has rendered our freedom of association inoperable, by granting endless power for others to associate us.
The cold irony here that skills needed to use AI successfully are the ability to accurately describe an imsge or summarize a story, the ability to recognize mistakes, the ability to fact check, and critical thinking.
All things you can't learn by using AI.
#NoKings Iowa City
Oligarchy crossed out Below that is: Democracy!
BEING AN AMERICAN MEANS SAYING NO TO TYRANNY.
This is the Government that the Founding Fathers WARNED us about!
Inflatable critters Dinosaur, Penguin and Unicorn
NO KINGS
Dubuque, Iowa
some nice pictures of the turnout
organizers in Mt Vernon IA counted almost 450 people!
Clearly, the people behind No Kings have sway with a large portion of people. Think of how much more meaningful this would be If they included a demand with the march. Look how effective it was when people canceled their Disney subscriptions over Kimmel. There is power in withholding our currency.
a cardboard protest sign leaning against an SUV. written on it is the phrase "release the files" is large black letters. behind it a classic small town main street is visible
very funny to see signs like this in small town iowa of all places. people are MAD #nokings
More No Kings Rally in Mount Vernon, Iowa on Oct. 18, 2025.
mines pretty simple, highlight the pdf in blue, comment in yellow so that when they overlap it turns out green. I then know green sections are the most important! I then use zotero to give it as many tags as are useful based on themes, method, theory, topic, etc
I feel like (as with so many things with AI) this is techbros confusing the affordances of science fiction *media* with reality, when those affordances are often driven by the needs of the *media* rather than the SF.
I.E. they talk to the computer on Star Trek because typing is visually boring!
My thesis abstract 🔥 "Over the last ten years, Japanese animation series–or anime–fans have often been associated with digital right-wing communities of the alternative web. This is better observed in anime been called an aesthetic of the “alt-right” by its most powerful actors ...
discord servers are 100% the kind of places that set social norms and acceptability of speech in ways that impact the larger "public" culture in huge ways. i think it's useful to compare them to other semi-private spaces: locker rooms, living rooms, friend groups, scenes/subcultures