Rebecca Solnit:"[…]In education, the ultimate product is not your term paper or essay or grade point average; it’s your self. You are supposed to emerge more informed, more capable of critical thinking, more competent in your field of study. The students who begin by cheating their professors end by cheating themselves."
02/10/26
Today: Being frustrated with the entire edtech industry. Everything they sell is billed as making lives easier for everyone involved, yet it always seems to do the exact opposite. I got nothing else, just frustration.
Status: Grading and more grading.
Last Watched: The Olympics. My quadrennial watch of all the fun nordic sports the US isn’t very good in.
02/09/26
Three hours of commercials about AI, crypto, and sports betting last night in the middle of a boring game. I miss the time when Super Bowl ads were actually clever marketing and not just how many celebrities can they stick in an ad. Is anyone going to remember the Dunkin Donuts ad in two months? Meanwhile, how many people alive in the ’80s or ’90s remember Spuds Mackenzie or the Budweiser Frogs?
Today: Listened to a podcast on the bus discussing the writing and reading process and two things have lingered. One, so much of the process was outsourced to AI in terms of editing and amazingly fact checking. While there was discussion of reviewing the material, it’s really disheartening to see how many writers and media personalities are migrating towards AI usage. Secondly there was a comment about how no one pays to read things they dislike. Even though the movement back towards independent blogs and sites is heartening, the economics of subscriptions means people really are building castles with moats rather than islands all over the internet. Sometimes they put the moat down, but if you want into the castle all the time you have to pay. So at the end of the day, we’re not really solving the bubble problem.
Reading: I don’t know if I’ll really finish Martyr!, there’s parts that still grab me but a lot of it feels like a slog.
Listening: I saw Ghost on Saturday in Tulsa. It’s always funny to me to see how this is a band that has such an outlandish public persona (demonic pope!, nameless ghouls band!) and then plays the melodic heavy-ish rock and make dumb jokes during the show. The show was so threatening there were kids and friendship bracelets!
Last Watched: I can’t lie, the Super Bowl was boring but as someone who detests the Patriots, watching them get embarrassed for the entire game by a good Seattle defense was entertaining.
02/05/26
Saw some unnecessary road rage last night, everything is just fraying for the smallest things anymore.
Today:
Some random history links I’ve been adding into course materials:
- Jack London, Jack Johnson, and the Fight of the Century
- The Conspiracist Cotton Mather
- What’s Wrong with the American Revolution by Ken Burns
- Thoreau in Good Faith
Status: Decent sleep, but still feel like I’m dragging.
Reading: Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar. Slowly.
Listening: USA Women’s Hockey v. Czechia. I’m ambivalent about the Olympics this year for obvious reasons, but it’s still the Olympics, the two week orgy of sports nearly impossible to see any other time in the US.
Last Watched: We’re into the 5th season of Game of Thrones, I’ve increasingly liked it more than I thought. Again, not the highbrow TV a lot of people saw it as in my view, but an enjoyable watch nonetheless.
02/04/26
Today: It’s 39º outside and the high is only supposed to hit maybe 50º today. By the weekend and into next week we could be pushing into the 70s, only to probably drop with another cold spell or two. Increasingly by body rebels against the temperature swings you find in Oklahoma during ever season but summer, when the body rebels against the obnoxious omnipresent heat.
Status: I write all of these as daily notes in Obsidian. I click on the calendar and it creates a note for the day, filed away in a cascading folder system. It’s a wonderfully simple system and part of my resolution to more fully explore and utilize Obsidian and the other tools I’ve settled on. Except the calendar is presenting me with entries for later this month that go back to January, so not sure how long this reminds a blissfully peaceful system.
Reading: How Food Delivery is Reshaping Mealtime - I’m not going to begrudge anyone who chooses to use any of the delivery apps, each person has their own reasons and if you’re willing to deal with the added cost, hassle, and exploitation of workers, then I guess have at it. But 200 to 300 dollars a week in deliveries could be my eat out budget for multiple months.
Last Watched: Hairspray, the 2005 musical version, not the original John Waters movie. Musicials aren’t my thing overall, but it’s an infectious movie that really did a good job overall.
Listening:
After Hairspray I immediately had to come home and watch the Christopher Walken dance in Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice” music video. This came out at the perfect time when MTV not only still played music videos but I was watching them. This, more than any other music video, is the first image and sound that pops into my head when you say music video.
