h.b. flyte

Category: hblog

my blog about various things going on

  • hbflyte.com in 2025

    I know better than to announce promises, resolutions, or plans in the hopes of keeping me accountable. When I fail by my own definition, it’s just easy to walk away for many months and then come back like nothing ever happened. I ghost myself all the time.

  • I made the mistake of adding tech feeds to my RSS …

    As I’ve reinstated my tech RSS feeds, I find myself getting more and more suspicious about the proliferation of AI.

  • My commute is killing me, maybe

    I talk to myself. Not just muttering, but full on conversations with, well, no one. If you could listen in, it would sound like I was talking to someone, because I pause and react and laugh and the invisible person in my passenger seat.

  • The plight of the digital hoarder

    Reading Charlie Warzel’s latest article in The Atlantic brought up one of those situations that I’ve had in the back of my mind. You know the one that sometimes rears up and says “halloo” and you’re like, “Yes, that’s something I should do something about, or consider more thoughtfully,” right before you’re distracted with taxes…

  • What am I even doing anymore?

    I haven’t had an idea for a post in a while. I’ve been writing, not necessarily the things I’m supposed to be writing, but writing nonetheless. I have a year’s worth of short bits in my journal that have given me a new outlook on my life. I don’t change much, really. I think that…

  • Just say… wait?

    The fact that articles like this don’t refer to Nancy Reagan as an activist is how well conservatives have fooled everyone into thinking that what they do isn’t radical or activism. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/opinion/rosalynn-carter-first-lady-politics.html

  • Shouts from the top of the Ivory Tower

    Certainly, not all students wear these moral blinders. But the fact* that many students do, and that they are at some of the nation’s leading colleges and universities, should be a cause for profound concern across higher education. -Ezekiel J. Emanuel  “Hamas and the Moral Deficiencies of a Liberal Education – The New York Times“…

  • What if they tried talking to it?

  • Don’t talk about tech and NOT credit authors

    This short section of The Atlantic Daily has the following sentence: “The term metaverse was coined in a 1992 science-fiction novel titled Snow Crash. (The book also helped popularize the term avatar, to refer to digital selves.)” The book, not Neal Stephenson, the person who happened to author the book, but the book. If we…

  • Added to Wishlist

    It’s important to read player reviews before buying a video game.

  • Welp, I’m back

    Sorry about the break. I really did think I could write a blog post about each day of the written portion of my comprehensive exams. Friends, I could not. I had no idea how much energy that was going to take out of me, including the one-hour commute each way. The day I wrote 5000…

  • Comp Exams Day 1 – the OS update

    Thanks to the advocacy of previous graduate students, our school changed the structure of the English Ph.D. comprehensive exams from a 5-hour, in-person essay test to a take-home, multiday writing test. We still have questions that test the breadth and depth of our knowledge, but now we’ll be answering them in a way that more…

  • When the feed lines up

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Maybe it’s the better alternative?

    www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/12/14/fortnite-epic-games-lawsuit-addictive As someone who gets time-blindness playing a game, watching a film, reading a book or manga, these kids are escaping reality and I don’t think that’s quite the same as addiction. Games, especially those with micro-transactions, are built to keep the player playing and paying. Anybody been to Las Vegas? Though I can spend…

  • Name a thriller where a woman isn’t the one in peril…

    There’s got to be a few, right? I’m not saying there’s not, but anything? Sometimes research takes you in weird places. Honestly, I’m taking notes on Stephen Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds and in disagreeing with a scholar’s opinion — well, part of the opinion, or actually the way the opinion was stated, fine,…

  • Always write your notes as if they’ll be found

    While I was transcribing my notebook today, I came across this paragraph I wrote about the first chapter of Richard Miller’s Writing at the End of the World: Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club is discussed in detail and while I’m pleased we found the time to discuss a female writer, I’m saddened that her story…

  • In which I get in my own way, again

    Vague spoilers for Hunter X Hunter and Demon Slayer: Mugen Train, I think. I don’t know if I’ve talked about this before, but when watching Hunter X Hunter, and the Demon Slayer movie, I found myself puzzle by the deaths of certain characters and the emotional toll that it placed on the protagonist. I felt…