I read a free, meticulously written collection of essays today about removing anthropocentric considerations from discussions of AI. It really was good. It also, in my opinion, felt like the exact same series of traps the broad swathe of post/anti-humanist analysis seems to fall into: what else is there?
Someone on Bluesky recently said that we really need a return to decency. I apologize to that forgotten person for not linking that thought here, but it got my gears turning about decency (what we probably should be cultivating) vs. empathy (what we keep saying we should be). And I
My presentation at the Games Workshop Research Day last weekend was on the Chapterhouse case. Very, very briefly: Games Workshop lost (most of) a lawsuit against a small manufacturer of conversion "bits" and miniatures for units without rules. They lost because they were triggerhappy with lawsuits at the
This is the first half of a two parter, the other being about what happens when your academic talk is drastically altered in real time when you're not watching your phone. I was invited to put something together for the Games Workshop Research Day, a now annual event
When I teach my Intro to Media Studies course, I have a taster week for cultural studies centering on identity, representation, and music. I structure the class to have regular screenings of something or other, and I pair this week with the BBC's 2022 documentary on the Hacienda
I'm 48. I'm Gen X and I'm allowed to say that finally, begrudgingly, we are indescribably lame. We whine. We clutch our pearls. We moan. I'm not speaking about the cultural output, which at its peak was and is some of the
This is almost certainly going to be the sort of post which my lefty friends (i.e. almost all of them) will consider wishy-washy but I feel like I'm going a little nuts. Everyone needs to shut up. I don't mean this in a chastising way
I realized this month that it's been 25 years since I started DJing. Possibly down to the month, but I can't quite be sure of that. I DJed in small goth/industrial (what my friends at I Die:You Die call "our thing") nights
One of my tertiary hobby horses is the way academic discourses filter down into broader public discourse as commonsense in winnowed form (and I'm going to somewhat ironically conclude this piece by doing just that). Psychiatric terms being used to pathologize perfectly ordinary unhappiness on social media is
I was going to post weekly, at least. But then I started teaching again, a bit last minute and entirely unexpectedly, and it was the first week of the new semester and I was behind and, well, I didn't post last week. I came to all of this,
I've had a nearly lifelong obsession with what I've locally taken to calling pop music's interstitial period. It's a small window starting in about 1988 and definitely ending with the 1991 release of Nirvana's Nevermind and NWA breaking up (followed
I finally watched Euphoria but I don't think I'm interested in it for the reasons a lot of people are. Two caveats precede this post. One, I am generally late on television pop culture "moments". That's why, in 2025, someone (me) is