Whitney Gegg-Harrison (she/they)

I use Gemini when I'm bored — and it's better than doomscrolling It became my ultimate distraction

WHAT IF YOU JUST READ A FUCKING BOOK

and continually point out that the reason the trolley is shut down is because people have been tied to tracks, and that there is absolutely no reason people should be tied to trolley tracks; people tied to tracks is not a natural state of affairs for people or tracks

I doubt that I’m enough of a known-entity for them to have appropriated me (I don’t think they’re interested in rando NTT writing profs!), but yeah, if they have, I’d like to know.

I would very much like tech companies to meaningfully learn the word “consent”

"BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that we affirm the rights of students and teachers to refuse to sign up for, prompt, or otherwise use generative AI in the writing classroom."

College writing teachers have spoken, y'all.

The CCCC resolution affirming students' and teachers' right to refuse generative AI in the writing classroom passed by an overwhelming majority at the #4C26 Annual Business Meeting this past Friday, March 6.

Link to the full resolution below.

wardie whirlwind I'm recombobulating after a whirlwind trip (Thursday - Saturday) to Cleveland to present at CCCC 2026 — between post-conference/travel exhaustion (more on that later) and the time-change, I'm feeling rather scrambled and useless, but the good news is that it is Spring Break at my university, so while I do have things I need to get done, I don't have to be quite as "on" as I usually do during the week.

New post on my #knitting blog: a whirlwind trip to Cleveland with a Wardie-in-progress for company.

Modeling Language with Plaster 💡Nerd Rating 3.75/5: This post is about a late-19th-century debate in academic mathematics, but it's plainly written and relevant to LLMs. What is a model, anyway? Doing math used to involve touch....

LLMs produce something language-like, a "languagicity" that takes on the shape and feel of language and even many of its functions, but lack the social context that makes some forms of language feel "real." mail.cyberneticforests.com/modeling-lan...

Indeed! I did manage to eat the pizza, though :)

(Ha, giggling at my inadvertent ambiguity: I’m trying to eat the pizza, not the house!)

I AM HOME!!! @awatts.bsky.social brought me a smoothie to drink in the car and had homemade pizza waiting for me at the house, which I am attempting to eat while also grappling with the nausea that set in partway through the day (motion sickness, alas!).

Desperate for food and for just…not being on a bus, a light rail train car, or a bus or light rail station, which is where I’ve been for 7+ hours at this point. (Masked, too…holy moly I’ve spent so many hours in a mask these last few days!)

Hopefully only one more hour to go.

Finally heading out on the final leg of this trip…this bus was 45 minutes late, and it took everything in me to stay calm and not burst into tears as we waited without any info in a dismal bus station. I just wanna be home!!

As we’ve all been saying - it’s a feature, not a bug, of the way these things are built

Challenge for people who believe Claude *is* conscious and use it anyway: Explain how you’re not a slaver.

Talk this morning went great! Several people reached out afterward to follow up, and I might be getting another (compensated!) invited Zoom talk out of it, too. Maybe one of these days I’ll actually believe I’m as good at giving talks as people say I am.

On the bus to Buffalo, where I’ll switch busses to get home. Lucky me, I got pouring rain for the 1/4 mile trek through a series of parking lots between the light rail station and the bus station in BOTH directions this trip (being somewhat sodden is even less enjoyable on a bus, it turns out!).

Oooh, exactly what I need: something to look forward to!!

(I love everything Becky Chambers has written!!)

A photo of my lap; you can see the bottom hem of a magenta sweater, and I have a bright green in-progress version of the same sweater on my lap. My skirt has a print that is made up of magenta, pink, purple, orange, and turquoise. A 4Cs badge is also partially visible.

It’s a nothing-but-Wardie sort of conference! And I realized that ALL of my colorful Wardies (the magenta one I have on today AND the turquoise one I finished not so long ago AND this green one I’m knitting) actually go well with this skirt!!

Ok, I haven’t really looked at the internet much today (because traveling/conferencing). How many new crises await me? Any good news?

A selfie taken from a low angle; I’m wearing a black & neon printed mask and turquoise handknit cardigan, holding up a bright green piece of knitting. I look tired.

On my second Greyhound bus of the day (this one’s nicer than the first), on my way to CCCC ‘26, knitting a Wardie cardigan while wearing a Wardie cardigan.

There’s another horrific video circulating on the timeline and this is my regular gentle and loving reminder to *turn off autoplay* on your videos so you can give consent to see these things.

When someone says „Scientists do not want you to know“ you can dismiss everything from there on. Scientists want you to know. They are desperate that you know. They can’t shut up about what they found out and want you to know.

But I've seen plenty of people like me get jumped on for selectively responding to news when they mostly post about the minutiae of their lives and like...how can anyone do anything BUT selectively respond? I think it's good if life has room for the minutiae, not just mainlining news feeds.

I feel this every time I write a new knitting blog post (I post weekly); it feels weird NOT to mention some of the news about the world from the previous 7 days, and sometimes I do, but I'd never get to the actual knitting/crafting if I tried to do that every single week.

This is not just cursed, its monstrous. The digital resurrection of a historian who died in January of this year, all so Grammarly can get some more clicks and engagement from students and/or scholars and/or others.

It feels so wrong on so many levels, these ghosts enslaved to AI forever

Jamelle Bouie clearly and quite publicly works very hard to be informed and even-handed and anyone talking about him as if he’s not doing either of those things should shut the fuck up and definitely be widely ignored

I think it is funny how qualifications and clean records without red flags matter way more for someone interviewing to work as say, a bartender than a white man trying to get hired to be a senator.

hello, march. Later this week, I'll be taking a Greyhound Bus (for the first time!) to Cleveland for the CCCC '26 conference, where I'll be leading a standing group meeting (for the Linguistics, Language, and Writing group) and presenting as part of a panel tied to a different standing group (the Cognition & Writing group) because that's what happens when you're a weirdly interdisciplinary person like me.

New post on my #knitting blog: welcoming March with a color that isn't red, black, or white.

I am angry to a degree that I can't express in words about how Trump is messily dismantling our hard-won global progress on nuclear non-proliferation.

world-altering decisions are being made by a cabal of gambling addicts hell bent on self enrichment no matter the cost to humanity, we should look into that.