Sam Ulmschneider

I can never decide if Kiley is an opportunist with no moral compass, if he’s one of those mid-level party types who would go back to being respectable-but-wrong Romney-Kasich types if they didn’t have to win primaries and political capital by being MAGA, or if he’s just been converted to MAGA fully.

it's interesting bc 4e was both short lived and seems to have had little or no strong legacy of people who loved its mechanics or setting and defend it/try to revive it. OSR revivalists are everywhere, Pathfinder tries to be 3.75, 5e and 5.5 represent a space all their own, but 4e has little impact.

3.5 was an awkward bridging moment many ways. Technologically, culturally, generationally. What is interesting to me is how little interest there is in reviving the various mechanics and assumptions of 4e, which (from a very outsider view here, I'm no serious hobbyist) seems to be totally abandoned.

Horkheimer and Adorno and a class on aesthetic philosophy generally were, bar none, the most useful works I ever studied in grad school for my day to day gloss on the world around me. This one single stupid video could power those classes for like, three or four semesters.

I teach AP Government and AP US history and classes beyond to magnet high school kids, I’d love a piece that goes beyond the simple but stops short of the head-level/3-hours-readjng-i-cant-assign level.

I've been thinking a lot about this the last few says. When I first started teaching AP, the standards never felt like they were exerting a downwards pressure, to teach only the specifics they demanded and no more. They have increasingly felt that way since about 2019 or 2020.

Yeah, oversight hearings would be good, though I’d almost prefer a commission. Hearings tend to turn vituperative and opportunistic, and by their rules would also give the Republicans a whack at Garland too for their own benefit.

Languages are yet another thing Star Wars just kinda handwaves, yes? Languages spoken/can be spoken at any given time or which can be physically produced (or not) by a character just depend on what the plot needs at any given moment w not much reason given?

Can’t wait for the Strait Of Hormuz Budget Amendment to go right down beside the Gulf Of Tonkin resolution in “bad ideas named after bodies of water”

Strongly disagree about Garland, the timing was bad strategy on his part and had bad results, his judgement should be questioned in the future etc. but that’s far, far from criminal liability. An amendment would be way better (and more solid, make more sense) than a court ruling re: pardons.

Aw thanks! What makes any class great in the end of course is the energetic participation of the students, like your daughter and her coterie of friends and fellow travelers.

This honestly has me pretty down in the dumps. I worked very very hard to craft a creatively complex, rigorous course w academic monographs, film, field trips, music, un-tests, etc, and last year's students loved it...but everything now steers students towards LMS-powered middle-brow-beaten sludge.

A vast amount of the modern educational project seems to be eliminating any pretense a teacher may have about the importance of detailed, complex subject knowledge, of a passionate engagement with their subject, or of nurturing a nuanced and human treatment of their students.

there are many worse and more serious problems in the world, hell there are many many worse and more serious problems in the field of education. But this is the particular problem which is increasingly relevant to ME, so I tend to over-emphasize it, I guess. The ultimate first-world-problem.

Pretty convinced that not enough students are going to take my college-level History of American Popular Culture next year for the school to actually offer it. Instead it's a monotonous march of students taking AP Psychology, AP Economics, on and on down the cursed, stultifying college board line.

We bombed them. To do what? So we can bomb them. To do what? To facilitate strikes. To do what? To enable kinetic operations. To do what? To shape the battlefield. To do what? So we can bomb them.

As usual, people other than Tate have the interesting insights. We live in a world of McLuhan without really understanding McLuhan's categorization of media mediums, and in a post-Postman world where his unwillingness to engage new technologies left his critiques of them woefully under-distributed.

I never think I'm a particularly verbose person until I have to deal with character limits on Bsky or elsewhere, and then I see how often my endless tweaking pushes me into grammatical errors and oddities as I try to stuff my points into the required space.

Two simultaneous panicked reactions to the unipolar moment, neither one 'better' or 'worse' but both with really interesting and enduring lessons to learn on like, three different levels.

Deleted and edited for a grammar error - same basic concept! They are not as good as the Kim Stanley Robinson books about Mars but they are more...comprehensive? Bova's books encompass a whole bunch of humankind-wide changes in a roundabout way which makes them flexible to adapt.

Top 3 fantastical desires of shit-to-see-adapted include:

Weber's early Honorverse stuff (far & away #1) (because duh)

Turtledove's Days of Infamy (so constrained! Makes adaptation easier!)

Bova's Mars series, sweep and multigenerational grandeur that it'd be unusual and interesting to adapt.

sure I guess but my list of authors to heap cash on starts with Turtledove. You could have gonzo sci fi or you could have grim 'could it happen here' in his works. A series on the realistic Japanese occupation of Hawaii as he depicts it or the bugfuck-weird 'alien lizards in WW2' both are gold!

Me too! It'll happen someday. Maybe it'll happen after Weber is dead, bless the man, so his complicated and weird personal politics and approach to collaboration have less to do with the actual implementation of such a thing than they otherwise would.

and that's why those films are actually pretty good, if also pretty limited by their periodicity! They show how people of real conviction and character can nonetheless change without compromising their virtuous characteristics, even when doing so is hard and requires introspection and external aid!

but Horatio develops in the novels, Jean-Luc and Kirk don't because they're based on a VERY surface level reading of Hornblower. Give me some Honor Harrington screen adaptations and we'll talk CS Forester in space, Star Trek is too many removes from those influences to really call them influences.

Iranian culture seems so amazing from afar in the few opportunities I've really had to interact w it in the contexts of cuisine, music etc. One of the many awful tragedies of the late 20th/early 21st centuries is the way geopolitical & economic patterns limited their participation in globalization.

its always really hard for me to process munitions and weapon systems expenditures even when they're reasonable for the complexity and technology involved because of my career in education. That radar set pays for my entire school for almost 20 years! Very hard to wrap my brain around it.

what your favorite most-arranged and most-used folk tunes and then your favorite least-arranged and least-used folks tunes? 'Maid of Culmore' and 'Rocky Road to Dublin' or 'High Germany' take it for most-used/arranged for me, 'Dominion of the Sword' and maybe 'Capernaum' for least-used/arranged.

the homogenizing elements of it bother the hell out of me. Machiavelli, Aristotle, de Toqueville, Marx, Mill, Marcuse - they're all worth reading not bc they're part of a 'unity of Western Civilization; or some shit but bc they're energetic participants in a cross-contextual debate about politics!

The intentions of this bill are very good and I think the outcomes may end up not being bad, but it is the kind of legislation we ought to be wary of. Legislative attempts to subject day-to-day language and discussions in classrooms to detailed control is a project likely to empower petty tyrants.