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• Post #4452365

  Once were/ now no more #Vancouver

• Post #4152552

  #skills matter. Support your local poet/chef/ballet dancer/tailor/bike mechanic/teacher/painter/other human #noAI

• Post #2621924

  today I learned that the last of the 3 Maine coon cats I lived with in the 1990s - the mid-2010s has died. His name was Doug. He weighed 20 lbs, a big goofy dude. When I had to clear out of home in a hurry a decade ago and the only places I could find didn’t take cats, he and his sister went to board with friends, who gave them a loving life and, after a couple of years, adopted them. Doug died in March, age 15 3/4, of old age. Sleep well, Mr Doug.

• Post #2505921

  RE: https://mstdn.social/@MaryAustinBooks/116568826549097034 This is the literal reason why late eighteenth-century Britain created the #canal system (which by the 1820s was twice as extensive as Britain’s coastline and carried everything from heavy goods—coal, roof leads, printed books and reams of paper—to excursion and business passengers.) #transportation

• Post #2389999

  RE: https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/116536746091357625 In 2023 I spent 30 hrs/wk on top of regular working hours for 13 weeks (i.e. sleeping 2-3 hours/night for 3 months) building a fully online version of the flagship history course for the media studies program. My version mixes theory/history reading and a commonplace book, an ecologies/networks online exhibition project, and hands-on analogue/digital book arts projects and a process notebook. No textbook exists, so I wrote one. It’s al...

• Post #2382871

  Gut Shabbes, #Mazeldon.

• Post #2382870

  And another #flosstodon. On old Main Street concrete on the way to this week’s risograph workshop. Halcyon? Cerulean? Bright blue?

• Post #2382867

  So this is good. Out of Victoria. The cedar taste is exquisite. Brewer’s 10-year-old child does the cedar harvesting. #craftbeer

• Post #2382866

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@Linkletter/116548077928048880 I would however be grateful if my complete online course design in Canvas, which took about 500 hours to build and includes a full textbook, were not lost forever.

• Post #2382865

  the ball under the heat pump #bordercollie #dogsofmastodon

• Post #2105606

  Shabbat Shalom #Mazeldon

• Post #2105605

  derby-derby-der #LesserKnownDerbiesAndPrizes #HashtagGames

• Post #2105602

  giving this talk to the Annual Jane Austen Day held by the Jane Austen Society, Vancouver Region, on the 16th: on confinement, the oceanic world, and settler mobilities. The Vancouver iteration of this group includes lots of academics and retired academics in other disciplines. They were the first audience for my work on Austen, Atlantic chattel slavery, and the history of paper. They are a skeptical and engaged delight. #publicscholarship

• Post #2105601

  I have been stalking this book for 3 years. I finally found it and it arrived today from Boulder. These aren’t photos but litho’d sketches on glossy stock. Photos of Vancouver (including Hastings Mill) and Victoria harbours circa late 1870s among numerous other super detailed images. #localhistory

• Post #1590389

  RE: https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/116450850556202127 Important consent issues. This technology is being imposed on my #highered classrooms, where 9 on this list is especially salient, but I am deemed to have consented by staying in my employment, and students by remaining enrolled. The same is true in MD offices in Canada: to turn down the AI scribe is to refuse care (in my latest case for a torn cruciate ligament; this being Canada, it’ll be a year+ before I know which ligament,...

• Post #1092438

  Smokers outside public housing #flosstodon

• Post #1092436

  A #Flosstodon by a mossy stone/ Half-hidden from the eye. (Seen and photographed by my daughter on her way home from ballet class this evening.)

• Post #1092435

  Shabbat shalom for the first Friday night following Passover. (I forgot I was making a key until I had already divided the dough into six, hence the weird shape of the ring.) #Shabbat

• Post #1092433

  Somebody hit and runned my (secondhand but still newish to me) Prius in the East End of Vancouver sometime between Wednesday and this morning (I don’t drive all that much.) Damage is fairly minor—lots of deep horizontal scratches from some kind of side swipe—but my car loan requires me to have it fixed. Can anyone in #Vancouver recommend a body shop? Thanks.

• Post #891774

  How am I only now learning of Jurgen #Habermas’s passing? I can’t properly account for his importance to my own intellectual development. I can trace his impact on my PhD supervisor’s scholarship more clearly than anyone’s save for maybe Adorno, Gramsci, and Raymond Williams. His account of how the culture industry grew out of “a culture-debating public” (or its self-image) was prescient and, taken together with the work of his many creative interlocutors, offers crucial hints toward a way back.

• Post #866959

  so my uni just subscribed to a universal in-class audio record system that will also provide all students with AI transcriptions. I’m so gobsmacked I don’t even know how to think about this. In rare classes (150+) where I lecture, I post all slides, mostly quotes, images, key points & questions, in advance—morning of. All other classes are workshop-based. Just what is this going to record, and why should I believe promises about how it will be used? It’s Palantir for classrooms. #highere...

• Post #793837

  What students saw at my office today #plushtodon #letterpress

• Post #637664

  Two nights of Lou Reed and Velvet Underground covers and tribute songs (“Songs for Drella”-ish) at the Princeton, the 5th edition of an annual affair I didn’t know about till this week (because the Princeton is not my local), organized by the brilliant and unstoppable Tim Chan (currently of Pill Squad.) Mark your calendars for 2027, #Vancouver. #punkrock #punkrockhistory

• Post #637663

  Reading student comments on Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1937) brings me to Hegseth, the US, and its current war. Above all, Benjamin feared the erasure of the traces of the human hand and eye in cultural production (he meant the camera), because this would enable, in dialectic tandem, the production of mechanized humans and the aestheticization of politics. How he would have hated and feared this digital #spectacle of #war and the #AI memes that propagate it.

• Post #637662

  RE: https://mastodon.online/@dcdeejay/116200516890574513 Seems more accurate to say the US is at war with #Canada, pairing sophomoric genAI violence with imperial trade tactics. But yeah, this, more or less.

• Post #637661

  the one thing missing from this reporting “on the ground” of text-based clasrooms now that unis are actively encouraging undergrads to use ChatGPT in coursework, throwing professors under the bus: the clear fact that use of these tools doesn’t enable students to do the work of humanities study, but only to produce simulacra of the work, performances of thought without thought. In process-oriented disciplines, it’s the end of the line: not “replaced,” but killed. https://www.theguardian.com/techn...

• Post #637659

  Feeling this one today. #ThroughAGlassDarkly #windows #IAmVeryOld #PleaseBeGentle

• Post #637657

  the mayor of #Vancouver told a lie about opposition city councillor Sean Orr to Mandarin-language media, prompting an ally to repeat the lie on a Mandarin-language social channel, cynically creating division around an issue (social housing) that hurts poor people most. Orr—a dishwasher by profession—is suing the millionaire mayor for defamation. Please consider donating to the People’s GoFundMe to show the lying, pro-police, anti-poor mayor that actions have consequences. https://gofund.me/704f9...

• Post #637656

  I was thinking about the flosser a student photographed for me last week (because my ancient phone had no battery) and then forgot to text me, walking along imagining a networked map of Vancouver flossers and then, in front of me, there it was: a #flosstodon bearing the marks of vehicle traffic, on the pathway behind the wing with the large lecture halls.

• Post #446580

  @gotofritz I just mean that it seems like you understand language as, ideally, an unobstructed and invisible channel for communication between a writer’s mind and a reader’s. I understand language as a thick, tensile, moving substance between communicators, and between a thinker and their ideas. So I value “clear” less than you do. My thinking is informed by metaphor theory & the media theory of Raymond Williams (esp in Keywords) and John Guillory (“Genesis of the Media Concept.”)