I am so tired of super hero movies, but they keep drawing me back in. I’m not going to be tempted until 2026 by Spider-Noir, at least.
This is apparently a limited television series, not a movie, built on the limited bits and pieces of Sony’s IP investment in Spider-Man.
I don’t understand these weird IP rules at all. Why not just start from scratch with a stylish movie about a completely independent spider-associated person? No one owns the rights to spiders, I hope.
Mary has gardening plans. She has taken over the sun room and filled it with seedlings.
We’re growing lots of milkweed, if you can’t tell.
Adam Conover notices that an awful lot of far-right weirdos and fanatics are addicted to group chats, and speculates that maybe the group chats themselves are responsible for the increasing insanity of our government. It’s clear that some people seem to be literally addicted to their phone chats — Mike Waltz was caught chatting under the table at a cabinet meeting, Pete Hegseth seems to have replaced alcohol with his phone, and Marc Andreesen has a reputation for non-stop chatting with multiple groups at all times.
It’s an interesting suggestion that group chats are wrecking the brains of all the participants, but it sounds a bit like the accusation that video games are damaging the youth. I am quite willing to consider an alternative, that all of these horrible people were fucked up in the head before they picked up an iPhone. Maybe certain kinds of personalities are simultaneously authoritarian and demanding a constant feed of approval and dominance?
The experiment is straightforward: enroll typical, normal people in one of these group chat thingies, and see if they turn into raging stupid assholes under their influence. I’d be a candidate, because I’m not involved in any of these real-time kinds of online conversations, and never have been. I’ve got a couple of email groups that are closed and confidential, but those tend to be low-key and focused on business. My biology discipline at the university has one — it’s all boring announcements and questions about classes and that sort of thing, there’s absolutely nothing particularly juicy about it, and if anyone tried to salt it with digressions and abuse they would be shut down with a face-to-face complaint.
I wonder if Facebook might have suffered from this phenomenon. It’s not quite real-time, but some people do have their strange little subgroups that they hover over, constantly refreshing, and they do get quite nasty and personal…and also some of them are annoyingly obsessed with their status. I left Facebook because of that ingrown stupidity having free reign.
Maybe the real problem is obsession with social dynamics, which is a real problem when the online tool’s purpose is to facilitate a real, practical project, like bombing Houthis or discussing classroom assignments.
No, don’t put me into your group chat. I might turn into a monster.
Today is the day, the last day of finals week. My students will soon be finishing up their final exam, as of precisely 12:00 noon today, and then I spring into action and grade everything, and then plug the last numbers into a spreadsheet to calculate the final letter grade, and then I submit them to the registrar. Done! All done! No more teaching obligations until January!
To cap it all off, tomorrow is commencement. I’ll be putting on the silly cap and gown and saying goodbye to the students (and immediately after rushing home for a podcast).
But today…one last push.
That is a lovely tree. It’s been posing in a scenic location near Hadrian’s Wall for 150 years.
Then a pair of idiots came along with a chainsaw and did this to it:
The two vandals have been found guilty. They did it for a “laugh” and to fetch a souvenir for one of the men’s newborn daughter — I don’t think she’ll be taking pride in that as she grows up fatherless.
In a bit of good news, saplings have sprung up from the stump and a new tree may arise.
Freethoughtblogs has given itself the goal of blowing your minds on Saturday.
I think I’ve got my final exam written — it’s an online exam, automatically graded, due on Friday, but I’ve posted it already. The students will have no excuses, they’ve got oodles of time, but I’m being absolutely rock-solid rigid on the due date. If they post it at 12:01 on Friday they get nothing, not one point.
I’m drawing a line here, finally, because the classes I thought were done (Yay! Relax!) suddenly received an influx of late submissions. “Here’s my lab report I forgot to turn in last March, can you grade it now and give me credit?” I’m such a pushover that yeah, OK, I’ll let it slide in, and so I’ve been grading old papers and catching up all over again. Now I’m behind where I thought I was.
There’s only one thing to do: run away. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, I’ve been sitting on my butt reading teeny-tiny print on my computer all morning, so I think I’ll flee the house and walk to a park and optimistically look around for spiders. Anything but thinking about these classes that I want done.
Bye!
I got up this morning and started punching new numbers into a spreadsheet. I go to work and pull up a couple more spreadsheets and start collating columns. I’m going to meet with students this afternoon and get more data that I can enter into more tables of numbers. Tomorrow, more numbers flow into my computer and I have to organize them, and then I have to to enter a bunch of formulas to normalize scores and adjust totals and double-check that nothing is missing, all so later this weekend I can punch a couple of keys and letter grades come tumbling out that I’ll then have to move into the crude, primitive tables that students can access to see if they’re likely to get into medical school or not.
This is the usual end-of-term rut: I have to stop thinking about science and genetics and pretend to put on the stupid green visor* and calculate numerical assessments. While I respect the profession, I am not an accountant and do not want to be one. I get to stop cosplaying an accountant on Monday, I think. Please end it soon.
*OK, maybe it’s not stupid, according to multiple sources.
The green visor, also known as the green eyeshade or the dealer’s visor, dates back to the late 19th century and the early 20th century. It was worn by accountants, telegraphers, copy editors, and other professionals who had to work with a lot of paperwork and numbers under harsh lighting conditions.
I’m sitting in a small room with bright fluorescent lights, looking at tables of numbers. Maybe I should get myself a green visor.
Today was the very last day of lecture. It wasn’t even me lecturing — the students were doing presentations on ethics and and genetics. They were all very good! One of the virtues of working at a liberal arts university is that our students are good at comprehending and presenting their ideas.
I’m not going to be lecturing at anyone until mid-January 2026! That does feel good.
I’m not quite done, though. I have one lab section left, in which I’m just going to go through and make suggestions for their final lab report. Tomorrow morning will be spent going through all the papers and records for my 3 courses, so I can get their final grades together. Friday is all about grading those lab reports, and Saturday is about assembling a final exam that will be graded electronically. Then, with any luck, my summer break and sabbatical begin on Cinco de Mayo, and the university can just fade away for a little while as I spend my days frolicking with spiders.
I can feel the end of the semester coming. It’s creeping this way, like the small spiders emerging in my garage, anticipating a fabulous summer and fall of freedom.
It’s not quite here yet, though. This week it’s all about giving advice on final lab reports that are due on Friday — my entire afternoon is going to be spent reading drafts and checking the math on genetics papers, so that their final submission will be perfect and will possibly save their grades (I write evil exams, I’m sorry to say, and the students look slightly traumatized and shocked right now.)
And then I find some writing advice on the internet, which might be just barely in time!
I anticipate that most of what I’ll be reading today will be in the passive voice. I might just recommend trying passive-aggressive voice, or conspiracy voice, or if they’re really daring, active voice.
