Author: Heather Flyte

2023.08.09 – media_log

media_log is a collection of media that I’ve consumed throughout the day – not in bite-size, headline-only, hot-take form as per social media, but actually reading the article and having a thought. Since taking the social media apps off my phone, I’m being more intentional with how I spend my attention.

Why Televising the Trump Trial Is a Bad Idea
I think it’s important that Nick Akerman compared it immediately to a Mafia trial. And I think he’s right. I think anybody that calls for this child to be televised it’s just looking for ratings, a cash cow, and not thinking about the integrity of the process.

A boy on the autism spectrum struggled with a haircut. His barber saved the day
I love this story! And I am also glad Ree was able to get a diagnosis for her son, Jackson. There’s a history of autism being ignored in Black children. I hope she also has the support she needs

Author Charlotte Ng @pronounced_ing on the Prosecraft situation:
“I hate to break it to anyone thinking of paying for this kind of service, but there’s a limit to what data can teach you about writing. It’s hard to make it in the writing world! But you get better at it by reading & writing & thinking more. Not by faux data analysis.”
I feel like one of the worst lessons being learned by new writers (and it comes from traditional and self-pub marketing) is that the way to write is by gaming the market. That may be the way to sell, but it ain’t the way to write.

The Supreme Court just handed gun groups a rare defeat
The only point of allowing this is for bud-bros who beat their families to be able to buy more guns. Fuck every maker of these killing kits.

Billy Porter says he had to sell his house because of the strikes, offers a “**** you” to Bob Iger Billy Porter has done the work and should be paid fairly. Exploitative, tabloid media makes you think all actors and artists are rich. They are mostly not.

One Froggy Evening – the birth of Michigan J. Frog via @TSting18

Hidden Brain podcast – You 2.0 How to Break Out of a Rut
Turns out that the middle of things is tough. But if you can set some markers and smaller goals, you can make it through.

5-4 podcast – Harisiades v. Shaughnessy
A case that reminds us that the rights in the U.S. Constitution also apply to non-citizen, legal residents…until they don’t.

2023.08.08 – media_log

Ridley Scott Regrets Not Directing Blade Runner Sequel
I love the Blade Runner 2049 we have and realize I’ve not watched Alien: Covenant yet. Also, AV Club saying 2049 is better than the original is just plain stupid. Different eras, subgenres, everything. Comparing apples and batteries.

The Prosecraft Controversy
Dunno, fren. If you want to know how many words are in a memoir, then look at memoirs, not 25,000 different books. I happened to be on “Twitter the X” when this started and it’s down to directly benefiting (lo its tilt or not) off of someone else’s work without their consent and compensation. Also, I don’t know why you would want to sound like another author outside of marketing purposes, I guess.

Conspiracy theories: how social media can help them spread and even spark violence introduces us to the author’s research in how conspiracy theories are spread. What I’m interested in is how I can work this idea into my class discussion of discourse communities. I think this is a good way to connect it to our later technology conversation.

America Already Has An AI Underclass
“In the coming era of AI, can the people doing the tech industry’s grunt work ever be seen and treated not as tireless machines but simply as what they are—human?”
“The program might write multiple recipes for chocolate cake, which a rater ranks and edits.” Does anyone make the cake?
“the machine-learning company Hugging Face” the fuck?
“there’s nothing flexible about precarity”
There’s nothing more I can say that these quotes don’t already convey.

I did not know they made a film based on this chapter from Dracula, but I’m going to try to get to see The Last Voyage of the Demeter before my exams start.

Zoom Returns to the Office
I think there’s a way to make an adjustment without requiring people to be in the office and that’s Zoom Communal spaces- like Zoom sessions with four to five people online working together occasionally chatting and helping each other stay on task. I don’t know why employees don’t do this or maybe they do co-working all the time and companies just need to justify the high rental rates they’re paying for office space.

Seven Books That Will Make You Put Down Your Phone
I will check some of these out now that I took social media off my phone.

The Loneliness Epidemic
A generation of kids who stayed home alone because their parents didn’t make enough money for child care is part of this. Also, Reagan, it’s always Reagan.

2023.08.07 – media_log

  • I guess government agents find it too hard to tell which border they’re patrolling and which brown people they’re killing. Land back. Native Americans Caught in Border Strife on Their Own Land.
  • “So we asked some of the best and brightest people who think about cities — economists…” Wait…what? The future of cities, according to the experts is interesting, if not predictable in its summations. People who have money will always want lawns until we stop valuing lawns. Also, a cashier should be able to live in the city in which he works. The Economic Innovation Group quoted in the article is led by the Napster guy, so, that’s there.
  • The Criterion Channel’s latest email said that Anatomy of a Murder is showing this month and I realized I’d never seen it. I also saw the title card and thought, “Those are some Saul Bass credits, I betcha.” So I went to check and found this page on Art of the Title dedicated to all the Bass credits. Jackpot, baby!
Who would you rather have in charge of publishing?
  • Simon and Schuster to be sold I’m not sure what’s more annoying: another publishing merger or the fact that they didn’t expand the KKR acronym at all. (It’s just some dudes’ names.)
  • Hao Qun: “The act of writing — of making sense of one’s experiences — is so bound up in the language a person speaks, along with all the little intricacies and inexplicable imagery within it.” This profile of Hao Qun and other writers working in the heavily censored Chinese literary world is informative and moving. The Art of Telling Forbidden Stories in China Yang Ying: “Literature is our last refuge.”
Did a boss write this study?

2023.08.06 – media_log

I was feeling a bit under the weather for the last few days, so there’s not as much here as I would like. I think I’ll find a median amount over time. The goal is to be consistent in posting and not meet some other daily requirement.

Also, I still hate WordPress block editing. It’s needlessly cumbersome.

2023.08.05 – media_log

2023.08.04 – media_log

I’ve stepped back from consuming social media lately and am starting to feel the effects. My attention is slightly better and I find I have more time during the day to do other things. Important things. I’ve always been a fan of social media, but I think if your main use of platforms is consumption and not creation, it alters the way you think. Not in what you think, but how you think.

So I’ve been trying an experiment. I removed all social media platforms from my phone and kept only my RSS feeds from a few sources and blogs and that’s it. While I can check Facebook or Instagram on my laptop, I make sure to keep it short: a quick drive-by for Happy Birthdays and “care” emojis, and then I’m out. Twitter had been my go-to app and now it’s gone, figuratively and literally.

Now every time I read an article or have an idea I want to share, I put it into my Obsidian daily note. Not only does this give me an archive of the media I’m consuming (and that’s good for when I suddenly find myself saying “I read something just recently…”) it makes me think a little bit more about what I’m reading. No more saving articles to read later, I take the time and if it inspires or enrages me, I write it down in a separate note and log it in my daily media_log.

It’s still new and fresh, so I’m in the ADHD honeymoon phase, but I also wanted to start sharing this on my site, because, I’m not doing anything else with it right now. Let me know if this is helpful.

Who? Me?

Listening to NPR’s Up First today and in the case of Trump speaking after his arrest and Alexei Navalny speaking from a Russian jail, both men said that “this isn’t happening to me, this is happening to you” in their public statements.

I’m certainly not comparing the two men, but I just found the timing of the similar statements interesting.

my task management app can’t cure my ennui

I would like all semester breaks to just be a break in the work, but not necessarily a break of being on campus. Perhaps I don’t want a faculty job, but something in support or admin so I no longer have to be in this holding pattern until I can be myself again.

I hate it here today, but I can’t say that because she always says she hates it here, too…first…worse. She’ll express a camaraderie that doesn’t exist. We hate different things. Or maybe we both just hate her. I don’t know, I’ve never been allowed an isolated feeling in my life. I’m always derivative.

I am having a low motivation day and am desperate for it not to turn into depression.

twenty more days

Twitter doesn’t deserve my hot takes anymore…

Twitter post by @011scenes: “there’s no stranger things without her sorry”

Well, yes and no. While 11 is the catalyst for much of the overall plot – the writers can’t seem to have the character do anything besides scowl, stretch out an arm, and grimace until her nose bleeds black.

Sure, Stranger Things doesn’t exist without her (narratively and well, literally, I suppose) but Stranger Things doesn’t know what to do with her either.

It wasn’t snow at all!

It’s been a while since I read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and I was reminded of it when I just watched A Trip to the Moon the 1902 silent film by Georges Méliès.

The wizard/scientists fall asleep on the surface of the moon (as you do) and are awakened by snow, created by what appears to be Saturn, a whole other crescent moon, and friends. My mind immediately connected this with the poppy field in Wizard and how they are awakened by snow flurries created by Glinda the good witch. Had any one made the connection before?

I started looking then thought, wait, am I remembering the film or the book. In the book, Scarecrow and Tinman get a sleeping Dorothy away from the poppies but leave Lion behind to “sleep forever” until some grateful mice heave-ho him into the grassy field, safe from his opium dreams.

OK then, moving on.