Chris Forster

A digital drawing of author Maia Kobabe, a white nonbinary person with short brown hair wearing a patterned blue shirt, who scowls while holding up a copy of eir book GENDER QUEER: A MEMOIR. Maia is saying: H.R. 7661 is a national book banning bill which seeks to remove any book that "involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism" from all public schools in the US. This would ban my books, and any other book with trans themes, from public schools. PLEASE call your House Reps and say: NO ON H.R. 7661!

H.R. 7661 is a national book banning bill which seeks to remove any book that "involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism" from all public schools in the US. This would ban all my books, & any other book with trans themes, from public schools. PLEASE call your House Reps & say: NO ON H.R. 7661!

The long-term concern here, to be clear, is not just about researchers, but about enclosure of the knowledge commons.

Schools are paying tech companies for tools that were trained on their own books—while tying their own hands to prevent internal development of similar tools. It's self-destructive.

It’s kind of funny that we burned through “awful” and “awesome” and now we have to use “awe-inspiring” if we want the original meaning.

A comic in black/white/blue. Lucy rolls her bike through an alley, by a crew building a fence. Narration: My neighbors hired a crew to rebuild their fence. Crew member: "Do you need us to move our stuff out of the way?" Lucy: "Oh! No, you're all good, thanks!" Lucy: "Have a good one!" Crew member: "You, too!"

Narration: I was teaching when my phone started lighting up with alerts from the rapid response network and neighbor chat. Lucy's back is to us as she shows a group of enthusiastic children something on a notebook. Behind her, her phone in her bag is buzzing. Narration: By the time the lesson was over, they were already gone. Lucy is reading messages on her phone. Messages: Alert: black SUV Sighting: be on alert for... Confirmed abductionL alley between ----- and ----. SUV plates... We tried to get them inside, but it was too... ...Contacting an I.R. lawyer. Heading to Broadview later today.

Lucy is riding her bike home. Narration: On the ride home, I kept thinking "If I'd been there, could I have warned them? Would my ICIRR* training have helped?" *Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. Get trained and know your rights at ICIRR.org. Narration: I'd taken the training after Halloween, when the violent ICE raids had locked down our schools and driven our neighbors indoors. (Image of a halloween bucket in the shape of a jack-o-lantern) Narration: Halloween is fun here-- The community filling the streets and opening our doors to one another. But this year's was tense, frightened and subdued. Haunted.

Lucy is standing in the alley, staring at the newly built fence. Narration: When I got home, it was all done. The other two guys who had gotten inside in time stayed and finished the build. The new fence is superimposed with the brief exchange from earlier in the comic ("Have a good one" You, too") Narration: I see it every day and think about how those guys built this in the spot where strangers in masks took their friend. Narration: How many other places in our communities are similarly haunted? (Drawings of sidewalks, buildings, streets and windows)

"Haunted"
#IceOut #IceOutComics

If you, like me, are horrified by the censoring of academics at my alma mater @tamu.bsky.social, please consider signing the petition to Defend Academic Freedom at Texas A&M University here: actionnetwork.org/petitions/de...
Let teachers teach. 🗃️

So, a quick note on Oakland Review of Books, or ORB: a handful of us are working to will it into existence, and--aside from a big boost to get started from our friends at @ebbooksellers.bsky.social--it's a self-funded operation whose goal is to exist and enable writing like this.

This thread here. Studying histories of human creativity convince me that modern copyright law is beyond broken & generally damaging for artistic expression

But I understand why that ideal feels inadequate as we watch trillion-dollar companies exploit it to steal from artists

For CRITICAL INQUIRY,
I reviewed @leifw.bsky.social’s very important LANGUAGE MACHINES. Also, unless someone tells me different, I’m going to lay claim to the first F bomb in CI’s history.

Public Domain Day 2026 | Duke University School of Law January 1, 2026 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1930 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1925! By Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle[1] CC BY 4.0 Please note that this site is only about US l...

Happy public domain day to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Hughes’ Not Without Laughter, the first four Nancy Drew novels, Betty Boop, and more! web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicd...

so we sucked on, chili dogs behind the Tastee Freeze, borne ceaselessly into life going on

Whose bird this is, I think I know
His falcon cannot hear him though;
He will not see the widening gyre
That set the blood-dimmed tide to flow.

That great rough beast must think it queer,
That Bethlehem is very near
In what strange desert did it wake
As centers fell apart this year?

but not very long

I worry that the inclusion of a probability score makes people think these tools are more reliable than they are. Even if you know the tools are unreliable, you might see “92%” and think: well, odds are pretty high. But if the entire methodology is faulty, then the probability is, too.

the proximate reason i post here — beyond the fact that i like a lot of you and enjoy reading your thoughts and jokes and observations — is that this is a non-algorithmic platform where people share lots of stuff and people read what is shared. that's still valuable even if it doesn't "influence!"

Folks, this is a massive (up to $5 mil) matching fund program for "Western civilization, American history and government, and civics." This is the govt siphoning your tax dollars off to those Centers for civics & W Civ being founded by conserv politicians and donors+

The 21st Century Resurgence of Eugenics YouTube video by The British Academy

1/ In a recent @britishacademy.bsky.social video @rebeccasear.bsky.social from @brunelpsy.bsky.social takes a clear-eyed look at the 21st‑century rise of eugenics - an ideology that should have been left behind, yet is now re‑emerging in a number of troubling ways ⚠️🧬 🧪

Watch the full talk here 🎥👇

And 10,000 steps to go before I sleep,
And 10,000 steps to go before I sleep.

this represents the hollowing out of an entire sector of public education; nothing will address this besides some kind of disqualification campaign for the universities and admin that engage in this now

If A Machine Tells You: 'l Shall Come Back To Finish Those Calculations For You', Then Goes Away And Does Not Return, Did It Break A Promise Or Did It Break Down? Report on Why? Competition-Problem No. 3 There were two entries to this competition. One, from Oxford, declared in verse Your alternatives offered are not An at all contradictory lot Nor are they contrary- \We urge you be wary: Your faithless machine just forgot! But does a machine really tell you anything?! Or, if a machine makes an utterance, is it an utterance or to be regarded as speech? If speech, is it supposed to be made directly by the machine or indirectly by its maker? If it is made indirectly by the maker (by pushing buttons, etc.) then it is not the speech (or utterance) of the machine bur the speech (not only utterance) of the maker. If so, he can't say the sentence in question( a) because he is not going anywhere, b) because if you promise yourself something, you can't use the second person ('l shall finish those calculations for you'), therefore the sentence should either be rephrased or abandoned as twice meaningless. Otherwise the problem depends on the relation between the above utterance and the Cogito. For only if the machine utters this proposition after declaring 'Sum ergo cogito' can it be meaningful speech. If the machine neglected first to establish its resemblance to the maker (see Gen. i.26 and other metaphysicians) then it is not an independent actor, ergo non cogitat et quod sequitur non loquitur either. These fundamentals established, the rest should be worked our by those concerned with moral technology. (Remark. If you are a philosopher, you had better nor mess about with machines any-how.)

This is from a satirical magazine written by Anthony Kenny and Julius Kovesi in Oxford, 1958-59. I have reviewed so many papers in the last 5 years that are basically just this.

a diagram generated by Nano Banana summarizing the first 11 propositions of Wittgenstein's Tractatus

ok these are pretty fun to make

ivory background the words Data Empire, a crown made of a graph in green, The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate, Roopika Risam

My final manuscript in! And now I give you..... COVER REVEAL (US cover, UK is sooooo different but it's not public yet)

This is the Tufts PhD student who seized by masked agents on the street and jailed for two months because she wrote an op-ed calling for the school to divest from Israel.

10+ years ago I amateurishly wrote XSLT to convert a single TEI file into www.harlemshadows.org. There are bug fixes (& improvements) that I have meant to do for ages . But I despair of getting Saxon running...

The end of Marianne Moore’s “A Grave,”

“and the ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of bellbuoys,
advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped things are bound to sink—
in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness.”

"Make Looney Tunes gay"

If the difference is granting prestige or credit, I see your point. But I guess I’m more focused on the documentary function of citation (ie how can I see exactly the text/evidence you’re discussing).

For many purposes, I like this guidance. A discussion of LLMs should cite model details; and the suggestion in footnote 1 to include a URL to the "chat" (output) itself seems right (and ChatGPT now does this).

By contrast, "Paris is the Capital of France" (ChatGPT), has little value.

Opinion | I’m an Immigration Lawyer. Trump Is Shattering My Clients’ Lives.

True and maybe even obvious-- but we need to keep saying things like this to protect our sanity.

"Inflicting collective punishment based on the heinous and isolated crimes of one person is not a rational, appropriate or moral policy response."

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/04/o...

… and Pokémon cards, and blind bags. I’m not kidding, kids entertainment has an alarming amount of pure gambling in it.