footnote garden

extremely true fish facts. not a surprise if you are on this website. generally i don't care about canon but this one is really good.

discussion of how social spaces online can be cultivated, constructed. deeply influential to anything i have run, organized, or moderated on the internet and offline.

essay about vocal cloning and its ethics, trans voice, ai/automation. in general, pipkin is a massive influence on everything i do and their work tends to share a lot of throughlines with my interests. thank you everest pipkin.

digital walk. starts at the top of every hour. bring a friend. it’s worth it.

a talk about curation of datasets and specificity and selection. the discussion of curation & care has stuck with me for a long time.

no real surprise to games researchers, of course. sours a little in the year 2025, but really—optimization and realism are far from opulence. let’s talk about small, joyful systems that are loud, opinionated, and don’t care if they show the seams of where computational systems break down.

difficult and opaque read but worth it—if you’re struggling, try chapter 7, which is a long interview. discussion of black study and the university, but also a refusal of and antagonism to colonial logics, a promise to abolish what is now and a dreaming of disruption and destruction toward a new world.

We are the general antagonism to politics looming outside every attempt to politicise, every imposition of self-governance, every sovereign decision and its degraded miniature, every emergent state and home sweet home. We are disruption and consent to disruption. We preserve upheaval. Sent to fulfill by abolishing, to renew by unsettling, to open the enclosure whose immeasurable venality is inversely proportionate to its actual area, we got politics surrounded. We cannot represent ourselves. We can’t be represented.

hell yeah.

really, really lovely text about teaching in conversation with blackness and feminism, freire’s radical pedagogy/pedagogy of the oppressed, thinking through embodiment in the classroom, thinks abotu the mind-body split of academia where we are valued for our minds and not our physical bodies.

I came to theory because I was hurting—the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.

talks about stylishness as an expression of freedom with language, and the notion that language is more than just its content, especially for black writers in the wake of enslavement.

kara wittman was my undergrad thesis’ first reader and ran the center for speaking, writing, and the image at pomona college. she is an absolutely brilliant mentor and teacher of writing and i frequently think about how so many of my current colleagues have never even heard of her. this is an essay about the demand for “clarity” in student writing and what it reveals about our values as readers.

The premise here is that complex thinking deserves complex articulation. We, too, think that careful and precise adherence to and representation of the complexities of thought is important. The works of Judith Butler or Fred Moten, for instance, include writing that is not completely self-evident, not completely clear because, as Moten explains, “the point is the blur itself” (2017, 244).

discussion of how to give feedback on student writing; strong critique of grading and presents alternatives. has this lovely part about liking student writing and taking the side of the student before you start critiquing.

relatively easy intro text to crip theory in relation to feminist and queer theory texts. really nice discussion of accessibility and ecology in chapter 11 that i like, but really what i grab from this is the idea of crip time that kafer sets up in contrast to queer time from lee edelman.

crip theory discussions of disability, madness, our body/minds as they reach for cure and health.

Crowns break and curve. Trunks split into three, four, five; grow bent around and through each other. They would never have been the king’s trees.

fragmented essay tracing the story of philomela, sexual assault as it threads through ovid’s metamorphoses, and the author’s own experience of sexual violence. especially with attention to voice and language and madness.

okay so imagine if a program was a stream

also this talk, Bending the Curve: A Personal Tutor at Your Fingertips, Esteban Kuber. rust is one of my favorite programming languages and one of the only reasons i started doing computer science again, in part because of the care it directs toward error messages, and the way its type system restricts the bugs you can construct.