Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa
@benjaminschultzfig.bsky.social
Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Seattle University. Author of The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life available from UC Press here: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520342347/the-celluloid-specimen
Also, sorry for linkdump, but in case it’s helpful, here’s the annotation assignment I’ve been giving. (There’s also a “solo annotation” assignment on the same website.) It’s become one of my fav assignments. miriamposner.com/classes/dh15...
Group annotation project – Data from the Margins
miriamposner.com
I really want to do this, but I'm concerned about accessibility. Obviously you can make exceptions for students with accommodation letters, but I've heard worries that this singles those students out. How do others navigate these issues?
Jonathan W. Gray@elmcitytree.blacksky.app · 2d agoRequire students to take notes in a notebook unless they have a specific accommodation. Tell them that the notebook will be part of their final grade, that the 2nd to last day of class will be notebook review with students getting btwn 5-20 points added to their grade based on it.
I really want to do this, but I'm concerned about accessibility. Obviously you can make exceptions for students with accommodation letters, but I've heard worries that this singles those students out. How do others navigate these issues?
Jonathan W. Gray@elmcitytree.blacksky.app · 2d agoRequire students to take notes in a notebook unless they have a specific accommodation. Tell them that the notebook will be part of their final grade, that the 2nd to last day of class will be notebook review with students getting btwn 5-20 points added to their grade based on it.
Heads up Angelenos!! A very young, and simply sensational, Anna May Wong.
UCLA Film & Television Archive@uclaftvarchive.bsky.social · yesterday“The Toll of the Sea” (1922) Sat. Aug. 15, 7:30 pm at LACMA Free, RSVP required Join LACMA for a screening of this two-color Technicolor silent film starring Anna May Wong, preserved & co-presented by the Archive. Intro by Archive Head of Preservation Jillian Borders: www.lacma.org/event/film-t...
New York City’s business elites are long accustomed to direct access to City Hall, where even Democratic mayors felt the need to court the city’s wealthiest and most influential corporate leaders. That access is getting shredded by Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Mamdani Is Shunning New York Business Leaders Who Are Used to Calling the Shots
The mayor fired corporate leaders from a city fund’s advisory board in the latest sign that he is changing the way such power brokers access City Hall.
on.wsj.com
Thinking about the student who came to my office at the end of last semester and said "Thank you for making us use notebooks in this class. I'm so glad I discovered notebooks. Notebooks are powerful."
Jonathan W. Gray@elmcitytree.blacksky.app · 2d agoRequire students to take notes in a notebook unless they have a specific accommodation. Tell them that the notebook will be part of their final grade, that the 2nd to last day of class will be notebook review with students getting btwn 5-20 points added to their grade based on it.
In Benjamin's account, the angel of history looks backwards and is pushed into the future as the past reverberates into the present. But what to we call the pull of the future itself and it's effects on the present? The gravity of forces yet to come?
Dave Vetter@davidrvetter.bsky.social · 2d ago"It's as if we have to mourn the future."
In my current manuscript, I argue that the increase of instances where animal welfare (couched in the language of animal rights, preserving biodiversity, ecological conservation, etc.) are valued over human rights is a sign of ecofascism's ascendancy. This is just one example of many.
worm@rfksbrainworm.bsky.social · 2d agothe onion ass headline
"History is like a trillion-piece jigsaw puzzle and if you use computers to do it you get an A+ and you become The Knower Of Historical Truth and I don't understand why it took historians so long to figure this out. What were you all doing all this time?"
Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1.bsky.social · yesterday"History involves sorting and organizing hundreds of thousands of facts" I remain astounded by how loud and wrong people are about what history actually is.
"History is like a trillion-piece jigsaw puzzle and if you use computers to do it you get an A+ and you become The Knower Of Historical Truth and I don't understand why it took historians so long to figure this out. What were you all doing all this time?"
Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1.bsky.social · yesterday"History involves sorting and organizing hundreds of thousands of facts" I remain astounded by how loud and wrong people are about what history actually is.
My department at UC Berkeley is hiring a TT Assistant Professor in "Critical/Experimental Film and Video Production." It's a wonderful and dynamic department and one of the fastest growing programs on campus. Applications are due September 30th, please share widely! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05434
Assistant Professor - Critical/Experimental Film and Video Production - Department of Film & Media
University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!
aprecruit.berkeley.edu
Applications are due by end-of-day ET this Friday, August 7! Please join us — and please share!
Shannon Mattern@shannonmattern.bsky.social · last mo.Metro NY Library Council's Cross-Reference Coalition — an experimental school connecting librarians, archivists, grad students, artists, designers — is accepting applications for our fall class exploring PUBLIC STUDY: alternative/radical/progressive schools, lrng communities... crc.metro.org/apply/
Unboxing my editor copies of NEVER WHISTLE AT NIGHT, PART II: BACK FOR BLOOD. Preorder now—trade paperback, large print paperback, audiobook, and/or ebook—to guarantee a day-one Indigenous Horror experience. NWAN2.com
"We've got those... what're they called? Zoopraxiscope? Are, are they, lobsterscopes? No, no it's a stereophoroskop! Wait, no, an electrotachyscope. A craboscope? A theatograph? A zinematograph? An anarithmoscope? An X-ograph? C'mon, someone help me out here! Is it a katoptikum?"
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2d agoTrump: "We have photographs or tapes -- like moving cameras, right? -- where people are on the side cutting it with a box knife."
Today, August 4, 2026, is the setting of Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” about a fully automated house continuing on after the family who lived there and the world around it died in a nuclear blast.
"We've got those... what're they called? Zoopraxiscope? Are, are they, lobsterscopes? No, no it's a stereophoroskop! Wait, no, an electrotachyscope. A craboscope? A theatograph? A zinematograph? An anarithmoscope? An X-ograph? C'mon, someone help me out here! Is it a katoptikum?"
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2d agoTrump: "We have photographs or tapes -- like moving cameras, right? -- where people are on the side cutting it with a box knife."
JULIE DASH directed Wanda Sykes’s new special. JULIE DASH.
Excited to be part of this collection! Guess which filmmaker I wrote about?!? www.routledge.com/Screening-Wo...
Screening Women Filmmakers
Screening Women Filmmakers is an essential collection of 58 essays, each focusing on a single film directed by a woman-identified filmmaker, inclusively defined, from the earliest days of filmmaking (...
routledge.com
I genuinely don't know if higher-ed will survive this administration.
The New Republic@newrepublic.com · 2d agoPresident Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans. Degrees for social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, and music will be hit the hardest. trib.al/aaAEu6v
As someone who's always wished academia was more like other types of work (as a grad student, I set my study hours as 9 to 5, M through F), I'd happily trade the entire star system in for good union jobs with solid pensions.
Rebecca Colesworthy@rcolesworthy.bsky.social · 2d agoactually no I wouldn’t. we generally agree that if there was a star system it’s now gone for structural reasons—for better (solidarity! unions! collectives!) and worse (no material support). I balked when a UP editor was described as a starmaker in the NYer b/c I don’t think that’s how it works.
In Benjamin's account, the angel of history looks backwards and is pushed into the future as the past reverberates into the present. But what to we call the pull of the future itself and it's effects on the present? The gravity of forces yet to come?
Dave Vetter@davidrvetter.bsky.social · 2d ago"It's as if we have to mourn the future."
I made a similar joke yesterday, but I guarantee someone at Neon really wants to call this BACKROADS. It's gonna get some comparisons to BACKROOMS, though it premiered over a year ago on the festival circuit, predating the current trends. Cool As fuck vibes driven cosmic horror. Highly recommended.
Bloody Disgusting@bloody-disgusting.com · 6d agoNEW POSTER - On August 21, IT ENDS. Only in theaters from NEON. Four friends post-college plans are derailed when a wrong turn traps them on a never-ending backroad.
New science fiction franchise that's just a school of Arts & Sciences that is fully staffed
In my current manuscript, I argue that the increase of instances where animal welfare (couched in the language of animal rights, preserving biodiversity, ecological conservation, etc.) are valued over human rights is a sign of ecofascism's ascendancy. This is just one example of many.
worm@rfksbrainworm.bsky.social · 2d agothe onion ass headline
