You would think Amazon would want to take advantage of those of us who just saw The Rivals of Amziah King and wanted to check out Patterson’s first film The Vast of Night, but they took it down and it doesn’t seem to have ever been released on DVD. I really hate the streaming era.

If ya need a slice of something nice today, highly recommend this week’s Hyperfixed. It’s a reminder of the unique role serialized audio plays in people’s lives. Also a good entry point to get into the pod. open.spotify.com/episode/1sZZ...

ReTell All

Hyperfixed · Episode

open.spotify.com

I am so very much a secondary source person (I spent last night reading reddit takes about Dropout TV to observe patterns) and I’ve never seen it articulated this way. Great article! defector.com/humanists-ha...

Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong | Defector

For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, ...

defector.com

Ended up venting my frustration in a blog post that updates an article I wrote a decade ago about fat jokes in sitcoms in the absence of fat characters.

Invisible Fat Women + Pop Culture — Dr. Steph Brown

I’m a big fan of up-and-coming director Cooper Raiff’s first two films Shit House and Cha Cha Real Smooth . They’re both small films where the stakes are feelings and some might find a bit too “twe...

steph-brown.net

Steph Brown@stephbrown.bsky.social · last mo.

I hate when a TV show is nuanced and endlessly sympathetic to its characters and their flaws and then just casually tosses off a fat joke. Shows what characters writers don’t see as fully human.

Ended up venting my frustration in a blog post that updates an article I wrote a decade ago about fat jokes in sitcoms in the absence of fat characters.

Invisible Fat Women + Pop Culture — Dr. Steph Brown

I’m a big fan of up-and-coming director Cooper Raiff’s first two films Shit House and Cha Cha Real Smooth . They’re both small films where the stakes are feelings and some might find a bit too “twe...

steph-brown.net

Steph Brown@stephbrown.bsky.social · last mo.

I hate when a TV show is nuanced and endlessly sympathetic to its characters and their flaws and then just casually tosses off a fat joke. Shows what characters writers don’t see as fully human.

We're in the 2nd year of a horrible crime and yet no one will stop "Project Runway" for putting the eliminations at the beginning of an episode. People need to pay.

Very excited for this! www.phillyvoice.com/wildwood-sho...

FX picks up 'Wildwood,' a Jersey Shore comedy from creator of 'Derry Girls'

Irish screenwriter and playwright Lisa McGee's next project is a sitcom set in the summer of 2000.

phillyvoice.com

Mean film reviews are fun when most of the rest of the reviews are glowing! Gives us some fun discourse. With the collapse of film criticism and the rise of access entertainment journalism where everyone is nice all the time—I say we need *more* overtly critical reviews to keep us on our toes.

Omg. Omg omg omg. Emily Wilson (as in, the famed translator of Homer) just published her take on Nolan's Odyssey in @lrb.co.uk... and it is SWEET, JUICY HATERADE: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Hadestown isn’t my favorite musical, but the proshot was excellent - especially after the travesty that was the Merrily proshot. They made such smart decisions about shots, editing, and audience inclusion. Perfect mix of taking advantage of cinematic affordances without overshadowing the staging.

While my husband sees The Odyssey today, I’ll be attending the counter-programming Greek mythology for alt theater nerds (Hadestown proshot)

but SOME OF US weren’t READY for this conversation and no I am NOT still mad about it

Dan Hamamura@danhamamura.bsky.social · 4w ago

every day, it becomes clearer and clearer that the show/movie that best understands AI is Mrs. Davis

I started noticing this phrase when I taught at a tech-y/design camp for 5-8 graders around 2017 and now those kids are early 20s - so makes sense! (It still sounds weird to me though).

Matt Novak@paleofuture.bsky.social · 4w ago

The full article:

I really need more people to understand fiction about machines gaining sentience are meditations on HUMANITY and its various conditions, not speculation on future robot civilizations jfc

Aram Zucker-Scharff@chronotope.aramzs.xyz · last mo.

No. Very clearly no. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

I hate when a TV show is nuanced and endlessly sympathetic to its characters and their flaws and then just casually tosses off a fat joke. Shows what characters writers don’t see as fully human.

I’ve started to try to bring back my old blogging hobby and combine it with my new collage hobby. Here’s one I wrote as a way to work through my thinking on a journal article I’m writing about body positivity in the creator economy.

The Emotional Treachery of Digital Body Positivity — Dr. Steph Brown

Is it anti-feminist to express negative feelings toward your body? Is writing about your own low self-esteem detrimental to the cause of fat liberation? Too often, feminism is collapsed into a set ...

steph-brown.net

I’d like it to be known that I don’t want to see The Odyssey but for normal reasons (I hate road trip movies and cyclopses).

One of the many ways we've gotten in the wayback machine on conversations about fatness: straight size people think once again that they are the primary targets of anti-fatness. Those objections to the anti-fatness they feel comes wrapped up in profound anti-fatness against plus size people.

pointing out the hypocrisy of people who are lying about what they actually want will never get you anywhere. smugly owning them for the gaps in their logic. it's an exterminationist project, not a rhetorical one

My computer ate my journal article edits from yesterday (I swear I saved them!), so I’m going to stomp around for a few minutes and then try to redo them.

I’m in this book about civic engagement and media literacy that my colleagues at Wash Coll put together talking about my digital storytelling class/place-based stories. If you also don’t have access to a decently large library and want a chapter, hit me up! www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/1...

Media and Information Literacy as Civic Practice | Lessons from the Co

This edited volume offers a resource for instructors who are interested in developing innovative and effective teaching practices at the intersection of

taylorfrancis.com

Was in midtown Manhattan this weekend, and the AI menus, posters, tents, ads etc were everywhereeeeee.

404 Media@404media.co · last mo.

Welcome to the AI-generated poster hall of shame.

I know the state of audio funding is dire, but it’s still jarring to hear the kinds of ads podcasts are OK with running. I’d love to enjoy an NPR film review without an ad for a “diet that mimics fasting.”

Yes. This is so many issues. Another: DEI programs were often bandaids used to avoid doing structural change and they put a lot of the onus on marginalized folks in those orgs to do the work (see Sara Ahmed). When we have to fight the right, it makes it harder to improve or have nuanced convos.

Mother Jones@motherjones.com · last mo.

At a time when contraceptives could be banned, it can feel like there are only two camps: those who champion birth control and those who criticize it with hopes of making it go away. But there is a third camp: People scrutinizing birth control not to get rid of it, but to make it better.

I had this exact conversation. Then redownloaded Blue Sky for a short break of my social media break.

Schooley@schooley.bsky.social · last mo.

My wife woke me up with, “Lindsey Graham died.” Me in my groggy state, “Oh they finally announced it.” Her, “No, LINDSEY GRAHAM.” That woke me up.

Hi I’m Alex goldman and I host a podcast called @hyperfixedpod.bsky.social that is like long form documentary journalism. If you’ve ever listened to Reply All before it’s sorta like that cuz I used to host that too. I’m asking you if you like the show to please share with your friends.

I'll say this for AI: it makes me much happier as I read papers written by students with very undeveloped writing skills, and as I put together the comments that I hope they will be able to use to become stronger writers. I'm so, so happy you wrote this yourselves, students!

Came across a hallucinated article attributed to me once doing a peer review (along with a few others). 💀🫠

Laura Ansley@lmansley.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I was consulted recently by an editor of an interdisciplinary journal who was ready to retract a paper based on hallucinated citations. It’s a real research integrity problem, and it’s arriving in humanities and social sciences publishing. (It’s already been a problem in STEM.)

one small thing that’s making me happy this week are the remixes of Project Hail Mary and the Artemis II mission and the way they are referencing one another. It illustrates the interplay btw science and pop culture. The humanities and STEM are co-projects! www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8g8E1Kg/

Project - Artemis II #artemis #projecthailmary #edit #space

TikTok video by hornz.central

tiktok.com

If you missed our #SCMS26 workshop on writing in the media studies classroom - you can check out our handout complete with keywords, slides, and assignment shares! Thanks to everyone who came for a wonderful discussion (and sometimes vent session). docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Making Writing Matter in the Media Classroom

Making Writing Matter in the Media Studies Classroom SCMS 2026 Workshop leaders: Stephanie Brown, Washington College Peggy Davis, UCLA Lisa Wells Jacobson, Georgia Tech Laurel Westrup, UCLA Vocabula...

docs.google.com