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January 18, 2025

spencergreenhalgh.com posts digest for Jan 18 2025

So, uh, I knew it had been a while, but it still escaped me that it had been six weeks! The end of semester was busy, and then the winter break was busy, and then the beginning of the semester has been overwhelming. So, here's a big recap of everything I posted since the last newsletter, and here's to getting back into a regular flow next week.

Here are long-form blog posts I "recently" published:

  • media I consumed in 2024
  • most-visited posts in 2024

Here are microblog posts that I "recently" published:

  • Current status: Copying information from one text message into another and reflexively almost adding Markdown blockquote formatting.
  • Sun. afternoon, after chatting with other parents at birthday party: “Wow, spending time with fellow adults is great.” Sun. evening, after Zoom siblings’ game night: “Why don’t I do this more often?” Mon. morning, barely functional from not enough sleep: “Oh, right.”
  • I know I’ve made this exact post before, but it’s relevant again this morning, so: I agree with the advice to leave one’s headphones at home to practice mindfulness while running, but I’m exhausted this morning and don’t think I’ll even get my shoes on without an actual play podcast to motivate me.
  • I will never not be angry about the term STEAM, even when it’s being used in good faith by people I respect.
  • All the guilt I felt about cancelling our local news subscription vanished during the corporate slog I had to go through to actually make it happen. Looking forward to redirecting funds to news orgs with a little more respect for their subscribers.
  • Reread some feedback from a journal editor after a couple of days, and while I still disagree with it, it’s at least more reasonable than I remembered it being.
  • This is a busy week, so I really don’t want to be spending time updating a shared course that I’m not even teaching next semester… but I am getting to learn more about SSHing into a VM, and that’s legitimately cool.
  • I’m stress-eating banana bread to put off grading, how’s your end of semester going?
  • Putting together a reading list for a class on social media research reminds me how much writing on this serves as an unintentional history. I don’t know if any of this chapter on FB and Twitter APIs is still relevant, but that alone may be worth reading it for…
  • Adding “Star Trek: Lower Decks” to my running list of “things I sample on YouTube that I wish I had time to really commit to instead.” (Other entries include the Keyforge unique deck game and solo campaigns of the Starforged TTRPG).
  • We have some neat family holiday plans this year, so naturally the part of my brain that likes to imagine how things could go wrong is working overtime right now.
  • I know that all kids parrot what they hear their parents say to a certain extent, but kiddo has gotten very pro-public transport lately, and it makes me very happy.
  • When I went through an Esperanto phase years and years ago, my dad once asked why I was so interested in studying a language with no practical applications, but joke’s on him because I can follow dialogue in Saga way easier now.
  • After a few years of demanding more sleep, it looks like my body is following up with becoming a lighter sleeper, too.
  • No, I’m not ready for classes to start next week, but schools are cancelled for snow and I’m under the weather, so kiddo and I are watching the new Wallace and Gromit this morning.
  • A few months ago, I blogged about teaching being something that’s somewhat performative, and that’s on my mind again as the local district announces “Non-Traditional Instruction” for tomorrow.
  • School district has explicitly said it’s not going to make a decision about tomorrow until between 2:30am and 5:00am, so we have to get everything ready tonight knowing full well that it might prove to be vain by the time we get up. Yayyyyy.
  • I want to be clear that I am not upset at my kid for checking out this soulless Grinch platformer—I am upset at whatever executives and IP holders thought a Grinch platformer was a good idea in the first place.
  • I’m proud of the research I’ve done on online communities taking cues from dark corners of the internet, and I’m glad that some reporters find it interesting. It’s still uncomfortable to read certain excerpts from my data out loud to people over the phone.
  • I intentionally keep receiving ClassDojo marketing emails because I keep thinking I ought to archive them all to write an autoethnography of my (negative) experience with it as a parent with an ed tech PhD, but I keep not doing that and just being angry at the emails.
  • I keep saying that I blog for myself before any other audience, but there’s a lot I haven’t been posting because I knew my POSSE setup was borked these past couple of weeks. I think it’s fixed now, so time to get those posts finished and published.

Here are photos that I "recently" published (or at least their descriptions):

  • I recently started to read select newspaper comics to bring some fun into my morning, but this one is going to haunt me for a while.
  • Well, at least some of today’s comic strip characters also have a “non-traditional instruction” day.
  • For what it’s worth, Calvin and Hobbes reruns also get me this morning.

Here are news articles and podcasts I "recently" commented on:

  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: Battery rationality (06 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'New KOSA, Same As Old KOSA, But Now With Elon’s Ignorant Endorsement'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: Predicting the present (09 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Wallace & Gromit studio Aardman is working on a Pokémon project'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'I Went to the Premiere of the First Commercially Streaming AI-Generated Movies'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'TCL TVs will use films made with generative AI to push targeted ads'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Some Other America, One I Do Not Know'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'A Message Of Hope From Global Tetrahedron'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: Social media needs (dumpster) fire exits (14 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'To Log Into WordPress, You Now Have To Agree Pineapple on Pizza Is Good'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Flipboard’s Surf app is a big new idea about the future of social'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app (17 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Christ in the Rubble: A Liturgy of Lament (2023 Christmas Message by Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac) | Red Letter Christians Podcast'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pregnant Kentucky woman cited for street camping while in labor'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Death Of A Forum: How The UK’s Online Safety Act Is Killing Communities'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'I’m Tired of Pretending Physical Media Isn’t Still Better Than Streaming Digital'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Trump told SCOTUS he plans to make a deal to save TikTok'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Evolution journal editors resign en masse'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on '‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Elon Musk Suspends Critics On ExTwitter, Asks People To Be Nicer'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Tintin and the fascists'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Elon Musk Uses Cybertruck Explosion to Show Tesla Can Remotely Unlock and Monitor Vehicles'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Corporations as Paperclip Maximizers: AI, Data, and the Future of Learning | Punya Mishra's Web'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Instagram blocked teens from searching LGBTQ-related content for months'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Meta abandons fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram in favor of Community Notes'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Facebook Deletes Internal Employee Criticism of New Board Member Dana White'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The Jawboning Double Standard: Brendan Carr’s Threats Are Way Worse Than What Biden Was Accused Of'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Researcher Turns Insecure License Plate Cameras Into Open Source Surveillance Tool'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Facebook Is Censoring 404 Media Stories About Facebook's Censorship'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on '‘We’re Fine’: Lying to Ourselves About a Climate Disaster'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Meta’s Moderation Modifications Mean Anti-LGBTQ Speech Is Welcome, While Pro-LGBTQ Speech Is Not'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Meta Deletes Trans and Nonbinary Messenger Themes'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'An Amazon Delivery Confirmation Photo Is the Last Time a Palisades Resident Saw Her Burnt Down House'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Meta Is Blocking Links to Decentralized Instagram Competitor Pixelfed'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Donald Trump Has Mark Zuckerberg By the Balls'
  • 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Who Said It: Donald Trump or Martin Luther King Jr.?'

Here are my reviews of books and other media I "recently" consumed:

  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for The Liars' Gospel, by Naomi Alderman
  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, by James Carse
  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 pour XIII Tome 1 : Le jour du soleil noir, par Vance et Van Hamme
  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 pour XIII Tome 2 : Là où va l'indien, par Vance et Van Hamme
  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 pour XIII Tome 3: Toutes les larmes de l'enfer, par Vance et Van Hamme
  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 pour XIII Tome 4 : SPADS, par Vance et Van Hamme
  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 pour XIII Tome 5 : Rouge total, par Vance et Van Hamme
  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 pour XIII Tome 6 : Le dossier Jason Fly, par Vance et Van Hamme
  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤 pour XIII Tome 7 : La nuit du 3 août, par Vance et Van Hamme
  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ pour Le français va très bien, merci, par Les linguistes atterré(e)s
  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 pour Shenzhen, par Guy Delisle
  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Saga (Volume 1), by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Saga (Volume 2), by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Saga (Volume 3), by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Saga (Volume 4), by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Saga (Volume 5), by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan
  • 📺 tvblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Interior Chinatown
  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Saga (Volume 6), by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan
  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Saga (Volume 7), by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan
  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Saga (Volume 8), by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan
  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Saga (Volume 9), by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan
  • 🍿 movieblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Vengeance Most Fowl
  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Saga (Volume 10), by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan
  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Saga (Volume 11), by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan
  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Karla's Choice: A John Le Carré Novel, by Nick Harkaway
  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 pour XIII Tome 8 : Treize Contre Un, par Vance et Van Hamme
  • 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for XIII Tome 9 : Pour Maria, by Vance et Van Hamme

If you have thoughts about anything I've posted, feel free to comment directly on my website through Hypothesis or to reply to this email with what you have to say.

Thanks for reading!

Spencer

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