LinkLog #5

Now

Screaming, throwing up at the approach of winter (good excited, not bad anxious)

Midterm season (October)

I haven't really slept in my bed in 3 weeks! Lots of house/pet sitting and traveling!

Media

Still reading The Night Sky

Read

Katabasis by RF Kuang

Interesting Times by Terry Pratchett

The Soft Machine by William S Burroughs

Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars by Kai Cheng Thom

Watched

There Will Be Blood (2007)

One Battle After Another (2025)

Kpop Demon Hunters (2025)

Weapons (2025)

Parasite (2019)

The Pacifier (2005)

Practical Magic (1998)

American Psycho (2000)

Research

Finished Art and The Creative Unconscious

I've been putting off writing this blog because I thought had to go through and get more quotes / analysis. I'm skipping that in favor of actually posting something in October.

Can people please stop writing on substack ffs

Articles:

against the paved web (or, why we can't have nice things)

a ux-informed look at the next generation of persuasive technology, how ‘artificial serendipity’ disguises data exploitation, and what desire paths & queer activism reveal about this

The Eclectic Reader | Published in Journal of Cultural Analytics

By James English, J. D. Porter. Using Goodreads data, this study explores the overlooked eclecticism of readers, revealing both patterns of cultural hierarchy and the conceptual limits of eclecticism itself.

strategies of consumption and presentation are shaped in part by the affordances of the site itself

social media sites enforce particular cultural systems (ie goodreads algo prioritizing romance/scifi)

There is no definitive set of genre categories and no definitive way to determine which works belong in which category. Different people treat different features as decisive, or employ entirely different taxonomies, depending on their situations, desires, and governing horizons of expectation. As John Frow remarks, genre is “a dynamic process rather than a set of stable rules.”

also interesting as spotify inventing genres.

The Invention of Close Reading

By transforming quotations into evidence, close reading served as way to turn postwar criticism into a specialized knowledge. But what if we treated it more as an art form?

For Guillory, the syllabus was a distraction from the true problem: an unequal access to higher education, which reproduces class hierarchies. Professors can teach Frantz Fanon and Fred Moten all they want, but it won’t make much difference if their students continue to come from the upper class and go on to become consultants and hedge fund managers, however fluent they might now be in decolonial theory and the undercommons.

Our misapprehension about the simplicity of reading offers an opportunity for literary scholars to make a case for ourselves: Because reading is actually difficult, we need experts to teach and specialize in it.

The Internet Has Borders

Clouds, cables and country codes: why digital infrastructure is anything but neutral – and what it means to build a website in a fractured world.

Tools:

The homebrewserver.club principles

Teaching tools I use right now

We’re staring down the barrel of an extremely bleak future, and yet I’m still teaching every week and doing the best I can. It’s sometimes hard to focus on my classes, but sometimes it’s a relief; I do believe that what we do matters and I would like to keep doing it for as long as I can maintain the integrity of my teaching.

animal crossing letter generator sparking typeface epiphanies

The styles that defined Sailor Moon personal shrines and Cardcaptor Sakura LJ icon edits and so forth reached me before Animal Crossing (I was dropped out of college before meeting the latter) and are probably most formative in my sense of what letterforms are unpresuming-appealing, cute-appealing, etc. But I think when it comes to roundedness in letters that’s all AC!

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Documenting the Now develops open source tools and community-centered practices that support the ethical collection, use, and preservation of publicly available content shared on web and social media.